I’m Not Human At All

Body is a strange thing. We cannot exist without it. Yet, it not only guarantees our place in the world, it in some important ways defines us. At the most basic level, Body at once enables and limits the possible experience in the world. It determines what is possible for us in the world as we can possibly know it. Yet, Body, along with Mind, remains one of our most intimate strangers. The bodily functions that sustain life process are nearly completely self-regulated. It is true that we can influence some of its processes by imposing our will, at times to a great effect. Consider Kafka’s hunger artist; he publicly fasts for a certain temporal duration to pay expenses so that he can go on living. He is able to deny his physical needs during fasting, yet when it is done, he must submit himself to its life process that is external to his will. Despite the absence of desire, he was, as it were, forced to consume food. In a sense, this is also the case during fasting; whilst he does subjugate his body to his will for a limited temporal duration by refusing to nourish his body, he cannot stop his body from feeling hunger. His body, despite his discipline, demands nourishment; there is no escaping from the wanting of Body. Nonetheless, he imposes his will to the point where he comes close to perishing for his vocation, that is, making living by flirting with death. Then comes a day when he finally decides: this ‘dilemma’ must be resolved once and for all. He launches his last performance, in which he would fast indefinitely. Naturally, he dies from hunger when he achieves his goal. In his last breath, he confides to one of the observers that he became a hunger artist because he could not find anything he wanted to eat.

Does this mean his will finally triumphed over his body? It does, yet not in the way you might think: contrary to the impression, Kafka’s story has nothing to do with a mythical notion of mind-over-matter. When his body discontinues its life process, his personhood, along with his thoughts and will, ceases to exist. Hence, the story shows: objectively there is no ‘dilemma’ in the relation between Mind and Body in the first place, despite the fact that they are often at odds against one another in our personal experience. And thus, the hunger artist’s triumph is the demonstration of a truth: we are one with this impenetrable and inseparable stranger whom we call Body. We are all familiar with the frustration imposed upon our will by often peculiar physical limitations. Yet, Body is not an adversary; it is the most intimate stranger with whom we can ever acquaint. Body remains alien to us, not because it does not accommodate our will, but because it evades our capacity to put into words. We can only describe the physical process, yet our language always comes short of capturing the sense of Body, that is, what it is to physically exist and function ceaselessly, and how this mode of existence relate to our mental activities. As Wittgenstein noted, if there is anything that can be thought clearly, it must be articulated clearly. Yet, our physical process, such as the process of multiplication of cells, escapes our awareness, thereby it remains inaccessible to our thoughts. Body is a rather incredible phenomenon: everyone has a body, and it is inseparable from each one of us, yet it still defies our comprehension. In this sense, Body is impossibly dark. Kafka’s ending of the story of a hunger artist is thus quite apt. Unlike Gogol’s civil servant, the Geist of the famished man does not haunt the cage wherein he perished; after the box is cleaned up, an animal takes his place. Whilst a hunger artist fascinates the audience with his strange will to confront his most intimate stranger, an animal represents the strangeness of Body in its purest form. It is a pure sentience, that is, an alien body untouched by language. Hence, Kafka makes an important point: Body is not controversial; the trouble is the manner in which we attempt to make sense of it. In this light, 'I' may be only the shadow of 'my' Body.

Body may be the strangest thing with which we have to live, yet our representation of Body is just as peculiar. Whilst our idea of Body is defined by linguistic concepts made available to us by the use of language, given the impenetrability of Body to our understanding, there is no surprise that our primary form of relation to Body remains primitive. Since we cannot make sense of our own Body, we resort to the most obvious and laziest mode of representation, that is, the objectification of other bodies. In principle, there is nothing particularly strange about the objectification of Body in itself. When something becomes ‘observable’, we make a distinction between the subject and the object, for such a distinction is constitutive to the very notion of ‘observation’: in order for an observation to take place, there must be an observer and the object of observation. As Niels Bohr stressed time and again, without presupposing the subject-object distinction, the very notion of observation and observable facts become nonsensical. That being acknowledged, there is another aspect to our difficult relation with Body: it is trouble regarding our Forms of Life, which are built upon respective linguistic practices that define corresponding social norms about how we perceive and determine someone’s physical attributes. This problem is closely linked with, and inseparable from, the question of identity, that is, the concept of selfhood made possible within a tension existing between self-identification and being identified, which determines our aesthetic and political attitude toward the 'Self' and the ‘Other’. For example, our obsession with the 'ideal body' has serious implications, for it is a conceptual device to discriminate based on an arbitrary standard of correctness, which is at once a representation of a certain aesthetic, functional and political ideal. Yet, it is useful to remind ourselves that the problem regarding our relation to Body is not limited to the question of identity and desirability; whilst we tend to focus on the sexualisation of the human body, once we grasp the historical development that led us to the current predicament, we have a better understanding of the context in which our problematic relation with Body should be understood. It is indeed critical to hold this historic perspective at the present moment, wherein the concept of the human body and humanity itself is forced to go under a fundamental revision due to ongoing technological advancements.

It is important to note that Body has not always been considered intimate to us. For Early Modern philosophers, Body meant more than the mere human body; it literally meant all physical existence. For Descartes, Body is an entity that is distinct from Mind. Body is merely a physical and mechanical existence, an entity that is separate from Mind, which is a rational substance that survives the destruction of Body. While humankind, as a synthesis of Mind and Body, is subjected to a metaphysical problem known as the Mind-Body problem, which demands the explanation as to how these two substances conjoin and relate to one another in order to form a unique existence like us, Descartes’ definition of Body poses another problem; it unintentionally introduces a distinctly instrumentalist view of the material world. As the development of his philosophy coincided with a shift from Christian feudalism to capitalism in Europe, a simplified form of Cartesianism struck the chord: the material world became the source of the commodity for us to exploit. Although Descartes’ Mind-Body dualism all-too-easily agreed with a popular world-view that has never lost its appeal since its inception, it is useful to remind ourselves that his is not the only philosophical concept of Mind and Body from the Early Modern period. For Spinoza, there is only one existence, deus sive natura, that is, God or Nature. ‘God’ has infinite modes of existence, yet, for humankind, there appear to be only two that are conceivable: Mind and Body. The most important point of Spinoza’s contention against Descartes is: Mind and Body are not the features of reality itself. Since there can be only one Being, there is no duality for what he calls substance, that is, the only existing entity which is self-caused. Whilst what Spinoza exactly meant by his metaphysics is still a subject of debate (that is, whether he was a materialist or a pantheist, a question which might be completely missing the point, but I digress), it is important to note that, unlike with Cartesianism, a kind of crude materialism which is dominant since Industrial Revolution is impossible in this framework. That being acknowledged, Spinoza is not the only philosopher who disagreed with Descartes’ concept of Body; Kant initiated a decisive shift away from the metaphysical notion of Body. For Kant, since we have no access to immediate reality, there is no legitimate way in which we can speak of the notion of substance such as Cartesian Mind and Body or Spinoza’s deus sive natura. Since our knowledge about the world must be either a posteriori or synthetic a priori, the concepts invented by pure speculation of reason independent of observable phenomena must be nonsensical. Thus, we have no access to Body in itself; we only have the representation of bodies in space and time. Still, the metaphysical disagreement aside, all of these philosophers also sought to establish one system of ethics or another to guide us through the paradigm shift from the religious world-view to the modern secular world-view.

Whilst both Spinoza and Kant exerted great influences on philosophy, especially in the German-speaking world, the modern world at large embraced the crudely distorted version of the Cartesian concept of Body as ‘machine’. Whilst Descartes’ metaphysics was meant to benefit the advancement of natural science without the restriction of theology and traditional metaphysics while resisting reductive materialism by placing the utmost importance upon Mind, thereby preserving an aspect of the Medieval Synthesis of Aristotelian metaphysics and Christian theology articulated by Aquinas, it did not take long before we began to embrace materialism in its crudest form and to fetishise Body without ‘soul’. Whilst our drive to subjugate the material world has become self-perpetuating through the technological advancement and the insatiable demand of an ever more complex financial system which has been, at times desperately, seeking to sustain itself, the negative (if not catastrophic) implications of the objectification of the 'physical' world becomes all the more sinister when we objectify the bodies of animated beings. Even when we don’t understand how it is to be a lion, and while such a creature does not have agency, it is quite plain that it is a sentient being who oscillates between hopes and fears just as we do. This is precisely the reason why Descartes’ remarks about the ‘noise’ of distressed animals strikes a wrong chord. And, as Kant feared, commodifying other animated beings is only a step away from commodifying another human being. That being acknowledged, objectification of the human body, naturally, has a much longer history than that of modern philosophy. As Bohr noted, the subject-object distinction is constitutive to the notion of observation, and human bodies are observable objects. The phenomenon has only become the subject of philosophical scrutiny, partly in response to the emergence of an extreme form of instrumentalism through the rapid and radical industrialisation of the world, wherein humankind has been stripped of agency and reduced to the assigned functions. Once our agency is denied of recognition, we are no longer considered humans, thereby reduced to mere bodies. Hence, sexual objectification of the human body, an acute problem today, must be grasped within a wider historical context: as Kant noted earlier, the problem arises from our refusal to treat another human being as ends, and once we begin to see another being as mere means to satisfy one’s interest, one can no longer be ethical, or sufficiently human. And thus, sexual objectification of the human body must be understood as a philosophical problem, not a mere political one.

That being so, humankind is making its way toward an uncharted territory in the past decades. The particular challenge regarding the objectification of the human body today is related to recent technological advancements. The problem is two-fold. On the one hand, there is a dramatic increase in the exposure to the idealised images of the human body. Whilst the idealisation of human bodies is as old as human existence itself, with the arrival of the digital age, the images of the 'ideal' human body are omnipresent: they are not only accessible through advertisement and show business, but also through social media which pushes everyone to behave like a celebrity. The implications are serious, as the desirability of someone’s physical appearance affects someone’s real-life prospects such as career opportunities and financial security as shown in this article, despite the impossibility of determining the universal physical beauty as noted here. Moreover, as Denise Papas Meechan ably demonstrates in her short film, Freckles (2016), the idealisation of the human body, a female one in particular, has a destructive effect on mental health. Whilst it is possible for us to use social media as a means to create and maintain a meaningful community, as each platform is designed for us to expose our idealised images by default, it is nearly impossible for us to remain insular to the effect of the representations of idealised bodies.

On the other hand, there is another technological advancement that challenges our traditional view of what makes us human, namely the advancement in AI and robotics. The possibility for us to create an intelligent being who looks and acts like a human yet exceeds our capability, both intellectually and physically, has been anticipated for quite some time. It is a dream of the modern industrial era, wherein humankind has been seeking to assume the role of the ‘creator’. Whilst the realisation of such an ambition to the point wherein our creation supplants humankind still appears a little way off, many significant steps have been taken toward this direction. For example, Alphabet’s AI project, Deep Mind, appears to demonstrate a process of genuine learning and thinking by AI, as opposed to mere processing and synthesis of data which defines the strength of traditional chess engines. Whilst a fully developed cyborg à la Motoko Kusanagi (Ghost in the Shell), that is, a synthesis of the cybernetically enhanced human mind with sophisticated robotic body, seems difficult to realise at this point in time, given the recent advances in robotics, androids as represented in the films such as Ex Machina began to appear realisable in near future. And, as Alex Garland’s film demonstrated, given our entrenched misogyny, the predicament of the popular adoption of such a technology is abysmal, as already seen in a disturbing event reported here. Whilst misogyny has been a constant disgrace of human history, creating and commodifying purpose-built androids to engage with barbaric behaviours toward an objectified and idealised female body has serious implications. Not only such a robot reinforces misogyny, it enhances it by offering a legally protected way to engage with extreme violence against intelligent beings with idealised female physical form. As I argued in the article on Ex Machina, if there is someone who appears and acts like a human, we must regard that person as such and respect the said person’s agency, and disregarding someone’s agency and sexually objectifying another human being amount to necrophilia. The ones who can afford such robots might act like Patrick Bateman (American Psycho), knowing that they cannot be legally implicated in any way, while the ones who cannot are likely to act out their frustrations, sexual or otherwise, toward women in their communities.

Given the histrionics of the human body, what Marie Limkilde accomplished with the official music video of I'm Not Human At All (Sleep Party People) must be considered a minor miracle. In just under four minutes, the Dane manages to express the strangeness of the human body and our relation to it without the burden of existential angst or contempt against Body. Whilst this stark recognition of the strangeness of Body is also one of the central features of Kafka’s writings, Limkilde expresses it with a noticeably warmer, gentler, and affirming tone without obscuring its opaqueness. Whilst the original song expresses the bewilderment and melancholy regarding our strange relation to our physical existence, and thus it is affectively closer to Kafka, what Limkilde inspires is a wonderment about the strange life-form that is us. Limkilde's noticeably affirmative attitude toward Body is particularly important, for the body represented here is that of a young female body. In this short film, Limkilde presents a young woman's body in an unfamiliar mode of being. Instead of sexually objectifying this woman, Limkilde shows the closed-ups of the wondrous, beautiful yet strange parts of a living organism to invoke a state of id at the most primitive stage. Fittingly, this body is enclosed within a translucent space filled with fluid, an obvious reference to a human foetus who is undoubtedly a person, yet not an agent. By representing this long-forgotten state with the body of a fully grown woman, however, Limkilde breaks from the histrionics of the female body. Through the close-up images of an eye, skin, limb, hands and feet, this body is shown to be sensual yet non-sexual, alive yet alien, undoubtedly 'human' yet linguistically impenetrable: we can describe what they are, yet our language cannot capture the sense of this body, an entity existing as a pure id immersed in a pre-linguistic state of being. This body, thus, defies the meaning; it is neither a self-serving machine that merely survives nor an object of desire, be it industrial or sexual.

In this sense, Limkilde's I'm Not Human At All is a true expression of disinterestedness. Through Limkilde's eyes, we learn how to appreciate the alien beauty of an existence without considering our self-interests. In this, I'm Not Human At All represents the full potential of cinematic art: at its best, a film breaks down the barrier between an observer and an observable event. Unlike Winding Refn's masterpiece, Only God Forgives, it is the director's gaze rather than the protagonist's subjectivity that becomes ours in this short movie. And what a gaze it is. As we see a Body through the eyes of a disinterested director, we discover the beautiful strangeness of Body. By seeing a young woman's body disinterestedly, Limkilde transfigures, as it were, not only the object of observation but also the observers. Given the histrionics of the female body, the fact that she managed to find a way for us to see this body disinterestedly is a singular achievement in and of itself. Whilst Limkilde is not the first to attempt the deconstruction of the linguistic concept of the female body, again, her attitude toward that body is preciously rare. The body in Limkilde's short film is presented as a life form that defies linguistic conceptualisation. In this sense, the Dane also breaks from the body politics of the 20th-century feminist art. For instance, Cindy Sherman has brilliantly deconstructed the socially imposed norms upon the female body by a series of meta-self-portrait. Through a role-playing, Sherman has exposed the violent force behind the everyday conformity of the 'female' body. In particular, Sherman has consistently demonstrated her understanding that the objectification of the female body is necrophilia. This is the reason why her work is singularly recognisable: despite the dizzying variety of the roles she engages, she always presents herself as a corpse. The concept of self-portrait of a living corpse lies at the heart of Sherman's strategy: through a series of performative self-portraits, Sherman herself is completely absent from the view. And this absence marks the death of 'her' agency by the patriarch. This view from nowhere imposed by Sherman does have a great predecessor: Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf. Both women expose us to the Geist of a society courtesy of the complete absence of the person whose perspective the audience adepts.

Limkilde's approach also differs from Francesca Woodman's. The haunting pictures by the Denver native photographer probes the ambivalence and the contradiction existing within modern female sexuality through a series of black and white self-portraits. Like Sherman's, Woodman's work is performative: she appears in nearly all the pictures she took. Yet, Woodman's approach is diametrically opposite of Sherman's: Woodman's work is not aimed at probing the violence of societal norms. In this sense, Woodman is not interested in diagnostics itself. Her work probes the living experience of that violence and the possible transfiguration of that experience through art. Whilst Sherman is an extremely intelligent actor, Woodman is always herself despite the many transformations she undergoes: whether a phantom, an angel or an unsettlingly vulnerable naked woman, she is frighteningly present and completely exposed. By transfiguring her trauma, Woodman exposes the ambiguous and conflicting state of her id. She expresses angst, abjection, exultation, tenderness, and lust in her desiring. It is important to note that her desiring is at once intimate and alien to herself. Like Kafka's hunger artist, Woodman shows us the impenetrable opaqueness of our 'selves'. Is it she who is wanting, or is it her body dictating her needs? What exactly is she, or her body, desiring? Woodman has no answer to these questions, for she has no use for them. What she is concerned is to express the opaqueness of her desiring through the darkness of her body. Her art is one of the most intimate yet self-alienated. Whilst her gaze is uncomfortably direct, the more intensely she looks, the more ambiguous the act of looking becomes. In her darkly pictures, we see an artist's uncompromising will to go further than the limit of language. I cannot imagine a better word to describe this intensely personal experience of alienation than the term coined by Georg Trakl: Abgeschiedenheit, or 'Departedness'. This is a particularly fitting way to understand Woodman's intimate alienation, for, like in the work of the Austrian poet, her work achieves an extraordinary feat of giving us a glimpse of what may lie beyond the limit of language. By unleashing the strangeness, they encounter both in the world and in themselves, Trakl and Woodman unearth the impenetrability of existence, the impossibility of Dasein through their darkly fascinating imageries.

Due to the directness by which this intimate alienation is expressed, Limkilde can be considered a close kin to Francesca Woodman. Neither of them has any interest in explaining away the opaqueness of Body and our desiring. Yet, despite the shared understanding of the intimate nature of alienation involving our own body, especially of young female ones, the affections induced by the work of these two women are opposite in their respective tones. Whilst the strangeness of Body and desiring casts an ominous shadow in Woodman's ghastly pictures, Limkilde's film is full of tenderness toward the alien subject despite the bold display of the wondrous unfamiliarity and opaqueness of our most intimate companion. The difference between these two artists reflects the stark disparities between the Forms of Life from which they have emerged. Whilst Woodman lived and ended her life in the United States at the beginning of the 1980s as a young woman, Limkilde hails from Denmark, a Nordic nation known for gender equality. The different attitudes toward sex and gender of their respective Forms of Life cannot be discounted; whilst Woodman internalised the patriarchal angst and the abjection toward female sexuality, Limkilde's film does not show a trace of such internalisation. Woodman needed to transfigure herself to express herself and her trauma of female sexuality and the sexualisation of bodies in America, as if she could only speak her truth in dreams. By expressing her personal experience of the self-alienation, Woodman becomes a part of the lineage which includes Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Diane Arbus and many others. Whilst America is known to punish her finest and the brightest, the subjects and the characteristics of these female artists cast a stern judgment: this is a ruthlessly cruel Form of Life for women. Whilst America is by no means alone in this regard, the voices, and the images that form a broad picture of ongoing struggles for life experienced by women in this nation cannot be overlooked. They are undoubtedly powerful in what they do, yet they are also bound by the subject of their expression. It is as if the lofty vocation of philosophical abstraction, which does not recognise anything personal, is possible only for the select few who know no burden of identity, for theirs has been long recognised as the gold standard. Whilst Limkilde's Denmark is not devoid of sexism in any way, the loving and affirmative tone with which she represents a female body in I'm Not Human At All must give us hope, however faint it may be. If more of us make it to that place, then some of us can finally turn our collective gaze toward other bodies with affectionate disinterestedness. Until then, we hold Limkilde's film as evidence of the inseparatedness of ethics and aesthetics.