Michael Marder (University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU, Vitoria-Gasteiz) 'To Reimagine a Body Starting from Its Joints'

Abstract: In vertebrates, the articulations of the bones are called just that: in Romance languages, articolazione, articulations, articulaciones, articulações; in English, joints. These anatomical wonders are slotted between the osseous structures, joining them together and disjoining them, introducing a degree of indeterminacy into an ostensibly closed system and rendering it mobile. They immanently de-systemize the system and let it work as the system that it is. So, what if we regarded the body from the perspective of its joints, the essentially intermediate anatomical elements? The view from the joints outwards is actually consistent with the current scientific perspective, according to which “joints […] are crucial components of the human frame. Indeed, they play such a pivotal role in musculoskeletal anatomy that, rather than thinking of the human skeleton as an assembly of bones, you should look upon it as a system of joints connected by lengths of levers.”[1] To be sure, joints do not make up a system of their own, but, in light of the recommendation to shift perspectives, what if we encountered the body (mine, yours, ours, theirs…) not by mentally drawing its silhouettes or its internal framework from bone to bone, but, rather, by starting from and ending at that which is between these dense, rigid, calcium-laced units? And what if we did so, also, with respect to the bodies of thought, of language, of a political assemblage, of a work, not forgetting, of course, works of art? Perhaps then fragmentation and totalization would not be the only options ingrained in the bodily imaginary. Instead, the totality would internally undo itself and isolated fragments would band together to form fleeting and flexible wholes.