LIKE A ROLLING STONE

When the objectification of the human body (face included) was made by medical sciences, that process divided it between a surface, defined by the epidermis (visible symptoms of some “inner” problem or disease) and an interior, an inside matter made out of organs, functioning or disfunctioning in a (more or less) unknown way.

It installed a dichotomy between appearance (surface, form, area of the sight) and reality (in this case, the very systems of the body as a lived matter) (depth, content, area of opacity).
Anatomy, and in recent times technical systems of observation like echography, helped to explore the enigma of the human body, making each one of us an element to be “included” under the modern hygienic law of medical scrutiny and surveillance, and at the same time compelling us to a constant self surveillance (we are also that alien, the body, that needs to be scrutinized regularly).
We are in a certain way compelled to feel guilty of our own diseases, because, if the symptoms are detected at a precocious moment, we may eventually stop the degradation process or even be cured; this corresponds to the interiorize, to make medical order subjective. The modern subject is the “locus” of responsibility – having embodied rules of all kinds, he is the knot of a net of surveillance and objectification never seen in history before.
No surprise, then, that many are kept outside that extremely demanding system: it is a sort of “Darwinist machine” of exclusion; no surprise, too, that depression and anxiety are the very companions of us, those inside the system and keeping it alive everyday by our continuous action.
Probably no former regime of history was like this; in a certain way, we have gone far ahead of many fiction novels about “the future” and its totalitarian, opressive system/way of life. Indeed “oppression” in not coming from outside, it is ideologically implanted in individuals, in their habitus, in their beliefs, in their very imagination of individual freedom. It is a process of complete overlapping between intimacy and order.
The body exposed to medicine, to scientific vision and scrutiny, is a naked body, a body that has temporality lost its intimacy. Obviously, nakedness may be a sort of cloth, and intimacy has more to do with sentiment then with physical appearance. But I do not have occasion to develop this here.Especially after an hospital surgery we may feel that our body is an alien, exposed to the look of others, even students, who observe us (?) as a matter of knowledge, as a case study to illustrate their manuals. Nakedness, intimacy, and eroticism suffered a deep transformation in modern times, in many (but all inter connected) ways. As I said, it is impossible to develop all those themes in this context.
The same exhibition of self, this time transformed into a mind, is operated by psychiatry (the branch of medicine concerned with what is beyond materialized body, the mind), psychology, psychoanalysis.
Each one needs to decide by himself/herself if, in addition, he/she has or not a metaphysical third reality, called the soul, and if this one will survive as promised to individual death, in a sort or non-place called heaven. That is the territory of belief, the black-hole that escapes objectification. It is in fact its complement. People need to believe that they are free to chose their most intimate feelings and options, in order that they “feel free” at the very moment where the reproduction of the ideology occurs. People are constantly nurturing their own alienation as their most sacred individual tabernacle.
Turning back to the “physical”, “material” body, the result of the medical identification process, we all know that between surface and organs contained by the skin there are holes, entrances, passages between inside and outside, some of them connected with the senses and with the eroticized body in particular.
Eroticism is, in a certain way, the popular culture (and religion...) of modern, secular times, the democracy of pleasure for all; we do not need to spend much time and effort to acquire the means of production of that promised pleasure, as long as we have a healthy body/mind (being “normal”).The problem is that “healthy” eroticism, the one publicly recommended (itself in fact the upper surface of an iceberg, as we all know, by modern art and performance, for instance) implies a certain kind of mind, not only “free from prejudices” but, moreover, available to that kind of experience.
Parallel to romantic love (the deep motivation for projecting a couple life, trying to keep living with another person) modernity invented a fantastic paraphernalia of erotic attractions, entertainments, and stimulations having ultimately as a goal the sexual fulfillment of the individual (considered by psycho-sciences as almost an obligation, or pre-condition, for a healthy mind).
That environment is fed continuously by the market. Normality it includes, in its complex package, a “box” for the individual pleasure, taken as obligation and right, and doctors advice each individual of the norms (individually adapted) to reach that fulfillment.
In fact, individualization goes along with, and complements, the process of universalization of the body. A physical disease obeys to universal rules (biology, natural layer); instead, a psychological disease, although following a general nomenclature, is under the scope of individual peculiar combinatory of universal modules, because it is the product of a biography, an individual experience, i.e., as a mode of “culture” as a lived, particular, specific embodiment of the rules defining (defined for) the human being.
By “discovering” deep substractum beneath the conscious, in a certain way psychoanalysys disturbed, but ultimately reinforced, the modern medical system, in the sense that it provided ways to cure the secular soul (something more complex then just the mind) by more intimate means that those of the psychologist or of the psychiatrist. It corresponds to the subjective, romantic, anti-Jacobin face of modernity, the other side of its coin. Freeing desire (libido) from its “hidden” former places, psychoanalysis served also to objectify the complexities of the human soul.
It mainly allowed a shared experience between analyst and analysed (transfer) which was eradicated from objective, scientific medicine and psychology.
The separation between object (ill, suffering person) and subject (the analyst) is more complex, because it involves long run interaction of two souls, the deep introduction of the mind of the observer into the mind of the observed (and vice-versa). It is a sort of erotic experience, socially approved and encouraged, in the sense that it explicitly involves shared emotion of the complete subject, body and soul mixed. Obviously, in Portugal at least, this “treatment is entirely dependent on the economic capacity of the analysed. The invoice (document of the money paid for) of a psychiatric treatment is useful for getting back some benefits from the public health system; but similar documents given to the pacient by a psychologist or a psychiatrist are not...
The very extension of reason and modern hygienics forced the emergence of a multitude of escapes, going from that psycho-interactive action to the reification and sacralization of sex and its ecstasy (orgasm), from eroticism to romantic love. It created the idea of deviance, of perversion – to be more or less far from the rule, from the “doxa” of the healthy individual. The healthy individual is the model: the one who gets a “perfect equilibrium” (?) between body and soul, being in preference the element of a married heterosexual couple. Certainly, we know that things are changing very fast in these aspects. But that one was the ideology through which people of my generation were formatted.
In fact, all those principles, taken at the individual level (the individual, another invention of modernity, is the owner of his/her own option in terms of “way of life”, as a right and as an obligation) created infinite modes of specificity.
The specificity of each one is just the result of a particular combinatory of universal modules, or is there something - some residue - that remains outside analysis? Objectively, advertisement and in general the marked machinery is always fabricating new subjectivities in order to create new needs and the corresponding commodities to meet them. As consumers and also as consumed (not only by the sight of orders, as social actors, but by a variety of situations, including selling our labor force), we are permanently in search of fulfillment, inside an eroticized environment where daily powers are in constant negotiation in every niche of human action. From home to work, and from them both to public space.
Certainly this helps us strategically to understand the so-called “past societies”, in the sense that conceptually they are as present as ourselves: a construction of our own modern mind. As long as archaeology itself discovered to be itself an invention of modernity, it is included, as everything else, in the general episteme of ours. Therefore, in order to be thought, archaeology needs itself to be objectified from outside as a “field of study” as any other else. That ideally implies for the observer (the reflexive archaeologist) a meta-position and the establishment of connection to all other fields, in every direction. That implies a politics. Every field of activity does it, producing continuously an enormous amount of discourses of legitimization of that field. Why should archaeology top be an exception, confined to a mere technology of “recovering the past”?
Obscene and non-obscene, erotic and non-erotic, pornographic and non-pornographic are pairs of concepts which are included in the same liquidity of all concepts and dichotomies today. For something to be considered as obscene/pornographic/erotic, or not, is very relative; it depends on the attitude of the observer, and on moral considerations which are considered as each one (his/her) own field of individual decision.
Semiologically, it is at the point of reception (of interpretation by each one of us) that something acquires its connotation: reality presents itself with a phantasmatic “neutrality” in a certain way. A commodity is a commodity as any other else, as soon as there are producers and consumers – a market - for it. It is translatable into money, the ultimate value (in financial but also in “metaphysical” terms).
This coalescence of extremes is not new, because in fact in traditional religious trances we know very well that orgies and all kinds of excesses were produced: that was - and still is - at the very core of traditional and popular religious experience. So, even a sophisticated piece as the sculpture representing the religious ecstasy of Santa Teresa by the baroque Italian artist Bernini may be considered erotic or even pornographic, depending on the way we look at it. In fact, it has been retaken by modern “artists” in order to produce audacious pieces of work. But this should not mistake us: pornography, photography, archaeology – as for instance literature as a separate field – are all productions of the modernity, mainly of the XIX century onwards. And pornography – sex industry in general – is today one of the greatest powers in the world, together with war industry, drugs, construction works, football, etc. In these industries the hard face of capitalism makes itself clear, in its ferocious exploitation of people and its absolute indifference to “human feelings”.
What is the point here at stake? What I want to stress is a very simple idea. The body’s face and the soils’ face, and the ways we look at them are not simply metaphors of each other, i.e., superficial bi-univocal analogies.
Human’s face – symbolized in the fashion model, and traditionally in “women” – and soil’s surface are in fact homologous, in the sense that they are experience as objectual signs (“material culture”) of an inner important meaning (“non material culture”, or, if we want, “culture” in general) that they occult and reveal at the same time. In the case of the face, it is the identity, the personality of the person, and its biography inscribed in the visual discourse of a face in movement.
Or, we know that that “hidden meaning”, as a circumscribed entity, is a myth, an idealized label that we put on other’s face.
In a similar way, the idea of “extracting meaning” about a supposed past going underneath the surface of the soil, from the visible superficial remains, is also a chimera, a fantasy. In fact we uncover relatively small portions of features which not only are deceivingly too scarce to answer the questions we normally ask in advance, but in general raise new questions.
So the process is not to unveil the past, as to undress a person is not to unveil her/him, but just to change the state of the visible reality we call “material”. Where we had a surface, we have now holes or exposed surfaces underneath – we have just multiplied the secret of things; where we had a face, we have now a multiplicity of faces, a vanishing face in all its secrecy, in all its movement to another state, to another appearance.
To sum it up, in archaeology as in daily life, or in a psychological study, if we are lucid, we are face-to-face to the mystery of the world. We accumulate observations, notes, records. We elaborate discourses, we connect formerly non connected ideas. We propose explanations.
And after all this we should not feel nostalgic for the fact that we do not find a definitive truth. Who wants a definitive truth? Is is as much useless as last days papers, to remember an old song of the Rolling Stones. We want to act together in the present. To find people, not only faces, no only images; to make things in the soil, not just to look at it or to experience it walking, talking, or whatever. “Going into the deep of thinks” means just be active, feel happy, raise questions, propose guesses, elaborate interpretations, discard views, in a word – to dialogue each other inside a real and active, engaged world of relationships.

text copyright voj 2007