Reading
this
essay was so exciting for me, not so much from an educational
standpoint which is where the article is coming from, but for its
outline of the cultural background of embodiment. Duncum
says our view of the body has strayed so far from embodiment that
the attention of our disembodied culture can be caught with the
coarser aspects of the body, popular during a period
referred to by the
Russian social philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin
as "carnival."
During the Middle Ages, the peasantry rebelled
against the more
puritanical upper class by"...subvert(ing)
and revil(ing) everything lofty and officially revered.
The body is understood in terms of corpulent excess . emphasizing openings and
orifices as, for example, in the actions of yawning, belching, defecating or
copulating; disproportionate, exorbitant, and obscene; lower body parts - belly
and bowels, buttocks, legs, and genitals - are afforded priority over upper
parts, especially the head. . carnival celebrated all that was lowly and irrational,
earthy, fleshy, and extreme..."
Clearly, we're talking about serious embodiment.
Duncum goes on to discuss all the forces that have driven
us away from our bodies -
".western philosophy can
be seen in large measure as a struggle not only between reason/mind
and desire/body, but of mind over body, rationality over desire..."
- Plato "
distrusted the senses
",
Christianity viewed the body as
a "prisoner to the soul", Kant
"associated the senses... with coarse feelings,
whereas the mind only entertains finer feelings'. Then there was capitalism
and consumer culture.
Duncum says, Consumer
culture requires the manufacture not so much of goods, but of
a desire for goods that is played out in a profusion of ever-new
commodities. What capitalism now requires of those of us who
live in developed economies is a consumer body, one that is controlled
and uncontrolled, able to live in a crowded space and simultaneously
pursue pleasure. The consumer body is desiring, hedonistic and
self-centered, and also able to exercise control in pursuit of
its own pleasures.
Duncum's point is that we're being
fed bodily excess by corporations, in a calculated bid for
our pocketbooks, via our neglected bodies:
In this context the re-emergence
into mediated mainstream culture of the carnivalesque body
makes sense. Cultural forms like TV wrestling, violent video
games and highly sexualized video clips can, therefore, be
understood as the re-emergence of carnival in all its extremes
of bodily indulgence. 
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