One of the key features to understand the outcomes of the sensorimotor paradox proposition, as to the situation of the body in social and moral conduct, is that we constantly and compulsively have to justify to ourselves our being still. We could be bursting in the moment and open space for interaction with the impulse to enact what we see – especially being kept on hold for so long. But we don’t do that, for we have been taught not to, respectfully of what is considered convenient to whatever society we came to live in. That is where we desperately need a relation in order to situate our still body, obedient to the social rules through moral teaching, to justify that we do so.

With our inspection of the workings of trauma and Darian Leader’s work on the question of pain (La jouissance, vraiment ?, 2020), we stressed the fact that every experience – even the slightest sensory situation of contact – was subject to a reorganisation of what is actually available and possible in the world for the person. Further more, this potential space opens to interpretation as soon as it comes to involve someone else’s gaze – and even our own as someone else’s. But something that we haven’t adressed yet is that we have to live with ourselves then, with some body of ours entered the realm of strangers, and that is something quite different again than elaborating long-term meaning. What happens with the day-to-day insecurity of having to maintain the structure and the frame for constant self-interpretation through the possibility of the other’s gaze is relying on the very personal sense of one’s own body being highly subject and vulnerable to aggressions. Why should we trust the possibility that we would not be hurt ?

The learning of strategies to prevent oneself from being hurt shows lines that are common to main social structures and some that are more specific to local experiences and to the singularity of the person. The distribution of moral violence would depend on the variety and diversity of the spaces into which we project possibilities. However, the liberty to move freely, should it not be hurtful to anyone, is more often submitted to moral scrutiny. The conformity to social norms, as to what is proper a form for a human being in society, is mostly taught out of fear of rejection and sanction, more than out of a dialogue and the teachings of consent and mutual self-determination. The efficiency of morals relies on the uniformity of its application, rather than the observation and expression of local idiosyncraties.

Then, as much as we feel compelled to justify our being here as a trustworthy member of the group, we also finally owe ourselves to justify our own obedience to the collective gaze, especially where it comprises various forms of brutality – most of them systemic and non-expressed to the social and political conversation in any other way than being what is ‘normal’ or performed as such (Judith Butler, Gender trouble, 1990). We, in fact, tend to be well aware of a form of captivity, to which we have to consent if not willing to be the figure of the outcast. Where we are can be the place of the socially right or the socially wrong – or the invisible at the intersection of political structures of oppression (Kimberlé Crenshaw, « Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics », 1989). But still, a body kept still, its possibilities to enact put on hold to imagination, is an impatient body, that we have to reason out. We have to set ourselves back to the relational structures of obedience and speech readiness against the very near possibility to burst out of stillness into the image that we extracted from a perceptive contradiction.

As seen with Francisco Varela’s work (The Embodied Mind, 1991), sensory perception is co-dependent on the modalities of sensorimotor interaction. We see a world that we could enact from. The modalities of our perception are tied up to the way our body constantly produces and creates a world where it is « functional ». We perceive what we actively act towards and reciprocally, what we sense is acting to us to another kind of world already. Each contact to our senses is sort of a meeting that we commit to. As we saw, the fact that a sensorimotor paradox – the activity of our hands through the development of bipedal stance and the sensorimotor contradiction of seeing the hand that can’t reach itself – could have produced an image without the possibility to enact it would be key to the birth of imagination. Moreover, we have to situate ourselves to it, and that is what we called the workings of trauma. Then, when we enter the symbolic structures of language, of social and moral debt and of interpretation, we have to keep our own body available for that kind of consistent work and keep ourselves ready and aware of its necessity. We have to keep on being human on these social and intimate terms. That is a harsh kind of self-training, never perfected because always highly dependent on the evaluation of others, its moral prescription and the perspective of the sanction.

So we have to tell our body to wait until the spaces come where it would be safe. Until then, we try our best to keep it together – our vigilance to the way that it is perceived by others, the pursuit of our own way to go through, the preservation of intimate spaces for relief. The relational duty we have to others is then also relying on that relational duty to our own body that concentrates the whole of our experience. The question of impulse, that we discussed in The Vulvic Network section, is thus fundamentally less pertaining to a sexual endeavour than to the very necessity to keep this sensorimotor contradiction from any possible enaction. We now hope to bring that matter to the conversation, in order to shed some clarity on the perspective of any enduring cure.

Photo credit : « Butterfly », La Fille Renne ❤