Embodiment is a popular word. It's over used, even I find myself cringing when I use it, which I do (A LOT).
I typically walk away from things that become popular but in this case, I feel more inclined to dig deeper into the discourse.
Discourse analysis is an approach of examining bodies of knowledge and the power they have to influence culture and social behaviour. I was trained in discourse analysis in graduate school and am now more fully incorporating into my work.
Here is an important quote that begins our analysis: "One of the preconditions for capitalist development was the process that Michael Foucault defined as the disciplining of the body." - Silvia Federici, The Caliban and the Witch.
Now Michael Foucault essentially created critical discourse analysis and I was always drawn to Michael Foucault's writing in university. I understand why more fully now as he was one of few that positioned the body within a wider social, cultural, political and economic context. This was important for me at the time because I knew that I was very disconnected and estranged from my body but really didn't understand why.
Strange, how I only recognize now-after 5 years of healing my relationship to my body that it was a French philosopher who helped initiate me into the work that I am doing now, nearly a decade before I came across "embodiment" discourse.
Back to the subject...what Foucault and Federici brought light to decades before the popularization of 'embodiment' was the beliefs, ideas, and practices that transformed innate bodily powers from receiving and expressing information from the unseen and the earth, from the divine and from the ancestors, into the powers of labour that could be extracted for capitalist accumulation.
Separating body and nature so that the machine of capitalism could instruct the body in every facet of life, was an essential part of the process. "Corporeal reality" became less about communion, connection, and confluence with the divine, the elements, ancestors, ect. but about submission to the demands of capitalist work conditions.
This is as much of our ancestral inheritance as the resistance and rebellion that women and peasants expressed in response to the violent disciplining of their bodies (witch burnings, hunts, and trails were apart of this).
Even as I write this, I recognize that it is very academic and hard to relate to. And yet, the surface level dialogue about embodiment in the mainstream, is also become un-relatable. In my own work, as a thinker and artist and in the work that I do with clients, I want to go into the depths of how we have been conditioned to submit and to disavow our instinctual, intuitive, and sacred nature.
Those who become fixated on embodiment are as Josh Schrei says in his recent podcast (The Emerald Podcast), are seeing and feeling things that are wanting, needing to be expressed in order to wake culture up.
So if the way we embody our somatic perception is de-animated through the capitalist, colonial mechanisms we have inherited, what is our embodiment work really doing?
