The Body Without An Image

The body is subtended by a super-abstract quasi-corporeal space that has no content or qualities proper to it. It is nevertheless a full space. It has two dimensions: gesture/trajectory and rhythm. Better, potential gesture/trajectory and potential rhythm: lines on an invisible map and notes on a silent score. Actual gestures/trajectories and rhythms arise from that space, or come to it -- in any case embody it. The relation of potential gesture/trajectory and potential rhythm to actual gesture/trajectory and rhythm is one of repetition: sub- and/or supra-sensible processual lines translated into perceptible motions. Quasi-corporeal space, or the body without an image, is the potential between: between the perceptible motions of two or more bodies, or between successive motions of the same body. It can be thought of as the kinetic wake of a body, or as an emanation, as long as it is remembered that the wake does not subside nor the emanation dissipate. They hover, insensibly, poised for another go.[23]

A particular body's qualities are defined by which and how many potential gestures/trajectories it incarnates. Its body image is their visual residue. A body image is less a static outline of the body in a typifying posture than a cumulative afterimage of its successive displacements. It is essentially kinetic (the body-as-mothion, rather than the body-as-object).

A body's discourse is its vocal residue. That discourse is under no obligation to obey rules of logical cohesion. It is composed more as a musical composition whose phrasal variation responds to contextual cues than as a rational discourse ordered by a logos.

Symbolic associations and ideational contents arise at the mobile intersection of a body's visual and vocal residues, or its imagings and discourse. Just as there is nothing in principle requiring cohesion of image or discourse, there is no a priori logic to their coupling. This does not mean that there can be no regularity in a given body's symbolizations and ideations. It means that where there is regularity, it is extrinsically determined (determined in interrelation with other bodies, in a collective give-and-take with the quasi-corporeal space subtending them all). A body has the potential of producing an infinitely varied play of meaning. But in practice, it is always circumscribed, In State societies, the body of the leader plays a major role in the limitation of corporeal potential (otherwise known as "ideology").

The body of the leader undergoes a process of infinitization, as if stricken by a compulsion to become coextensive with quasi-corporeal space. It accumulates social prestige, not because of any inherent qualities it may have or the superiority of its symbolizations and ideations, but simply because it has access to technical means of extending kinetic geography far beyond the limits of the skin. Its opportunities for leaving afterimages are more numerous and varied than those of particular bodies. Its surfaces stretch forever and loop back on themselves. Its heights are higher, its permutations more numerous. It can see itself as "one" would see it, occupying every pronoun position simultaneously. It can stand on every pedestal and don every flag. It is exemplary.[24] It is fractured. It inhabits most fully the collective gap. The name it emblazons across the social landscape sums up the in-between of all bodies.

To the extent that the exemplary body of the leader succeeds in infinitizing itself, it ceases to be entirely human. Its vocal and visual residues detach themselves by degrees from the particualr mass of human flesh they nevertheless continue to image. They take on a life of their own, entering self-propagating circuits of social circulation that exceed the individual (orally transmitted memory, portraits, statues, written history, documentary film and video, archives, birthplace museums, coinage and stamps ...). The name of the leader ceases to be personal. What it fundamentally designates is less "the man" (for the exemplary body is almost always at least nominally masculine) than the social dynamics supporting the circuits of circulation his image has entered. Tracing when and where the image circulates, by which institutions or individuals, in what direction, to what end, yields a nonvisual map of bodily potential, a complex flow chart of collective desire. The propagation depends on particular bodies becoming hosts for the image, and embodiments of at least certain of the dynamics it lives by. The infinitization of the image is a contagion of processual lines emanating from the exemplary body and subsumed by its name.

Just as the prestige of the statue or flag can rub off on the exemplary body, some of its accumulated prestige can rub off on a particualr body that makes its kinetic geography coincide with a quadrant of the leader's virtual space. The body of the leader raises its permutational potential to the highest power only in order to limit that of others. It uses its prestige-value to garner an apparent monopoly on infinity. A particular body pales in comparison with the glitter of the riveting political polestar. What can a poor body do but share the glory of the leader by actualizing in its own neighborbood a restricted set of the leader's glorious permutations? The particular body is reduced to imaging a selected set of gestures/trajectories and sounding a selected set of rhythms authorized by the body of the leader, and in coupling them forms a 'private', personalized world of symbolizations and ideations in unity with the national destiny. This is not identification per se. Identification is when the symbolizations and ideations are given regular enough patterns that the body can consistently and relatively unambiguously locate its "I" in them. The base selection of symbolizations and ideationsof which identification is the regularization is more a line of continual variations than a subject position. It is a function of a technology of attention [Crary 1989; 1990:18, 85, 96], not a structure of subjectivity. It is made by remote control: because the image and words associated with the body of the leader have been made to be everywhere, and to be on average alluring ("prestigious"), some will inevitably be picked up, then patterned into socially affirmed self-positionings. Positioned subjectivity is the result of a pre-subjective technological seduction that is also an induction into a curtailed region of potential. If subjectivity has a structure, it is that of a collectively contracted bad habit.

There are varieties of bodies without an image. Those emanating from a chief of State involve a movement to infinity in the course of which the leader inevitably loses his humanity in an apparatus of propagation. The apparatus may be a bureaucratic machine propagating the leader's vocal residues in the form of decrees and regulations (the First Emperor); a mass media machine propagaating the leader's audio-visual residue in the form of screen and print images (Reagan); a military machine propagating a becoming-imperceptible of the leader's residues in the form of enemy deaths (Bush); or any number of others (think of Hitler and radio, Mao and loudspeakers).

What the apparatus propagates is more fundamentally the body without an image emanating from the body of the leader than the bodily residue of the leader itself. The apparatus is a vehicle for processual lines belonging to the body without an image.

When these lines are embodied in immediately recognizable vocal and/or visual residue extracted from the exemplary body of the leader as part of a process of social induction subsumed by the leader's name, the body without an image at work could be dubbed heteronymic. The proper name or title attached to the body of the leader ("Reagan," "First Emperor," but also "Lenin," "Fuhrer," "Great Helmsman," and many more) is an "other name," a heteronym, for the particular bodies possessed by it, who come to coincide with its virtual geography, who repeat its motions. the proper names attached to inducted particular bodies are pseudonyms for the leader. More precisely, they are pseudonyms for the process subsumed by the leader's name, for the real subject of the propagation and induction, the body without an image. The name of the leader itself is less the true name of the body without an image than its favorite pseudonym.[25]

The heteronym does not only name the possession of the particular body by the body of the leader. It also names the dispossession of the body of the leader in the very process of possession. For the price of its proliferation is a growing difference to itself: each time a body is inducted into the leader's virtual kinetic geography, it alters, however slightly, the processual lines it repeats. Each repitition of the leader's motions is a reinvention of them. The more the body of the leader and its associated body without an image proliferates, the more they vary. The process of infinitization is the collective invention of an infinite range of variation. What the drive to unity animating the process of propagation achieves is less oneness than a contrlled contagion of divergence. There are magnitudes of infinity: social induction is normalizing (habit-forming, positioning, subjectifying) to the extent that it restricts quasi-corporeal potential to the lowest possible order of infinity given the circumstances. When we said that the name of the leader subsumed "all possible inter-geographies of bodies in motion" and that it "summed up the in-between of all bodies," the "all" was inclusive only of this lower order of normalized infinity.

The difference of the body of the leader from itself is palpable. Anyone who has had a close encounter with a chief of State will attest to the profound impression of emptiness accompanying the presence of preeminent flesh. The great man seems shrivelled, shrunken, a husk of a human. That emptiness is the perception of the distinction between the virtuality of the body without an image and the actuality of its embodiments. The potential enveloped in the body without an image belongs to no actual body or image, even the leader's. It is enacted in the passage from one body or image to the next.

The exemplary body is simultaneously empty and full, present and absent: it is present in the emptiness of its propagated permutations, absent in the fullness of the superabstract dimension of quasi-corporeality from which those permutations arise. The presence/absence of the body of the leader -- the palpable distinction between the quasi-corporeal potential that the body of the leader sums up and the limitative actualization of that potential--can itself be given a direct image. So can the serialized passage to infinity of the body of the leader in propagating series of reinventive actualizations. Under certain circumstance, both can be expressed in a single master image. A prime example is "Reagan's" video relay at a Republican Convention, which simultaneously multiplied him to infinity and disappeared him. Most heteronymic images of the difference of the body of the leader to itself are less ambitious, focusing on either the absence or the presence, and containing the elided dimension and the infinite movement implicitly or as an aftereffect. A heteronymic body without an image requires that an iconic connection to the exemplary body be retained in all of its actualizations. Thus the absence dimension of the leader's difference to himself tends to be literalized as death or bodily fragmentation: assassination, amputation, castration. These "negative" images are in fact indirect expressions of the body of the leader's ontogenetic fullness: they imply the cut that enables reconnection, and thus the inventive seriality of the body without an image. The presence dimension is captured in images of excess, all of which claim to embody the "spirit" of the nation. These "positive" images imply absence as the intangibility of the "soul". If "absence" is ontogenetic fullness, and "presence" is an emptiness of potential, and each implies the other, then absence can easily slide into presence, "positivity" into "negativity." The terms are inadequate, because it is always a question of both, simultaneously as well as successively. What is important is the slash between presence/absence, fullness/emptiness, positve/negative. The slash marks the enabling cut as such. It stands for the movement to infinity. It expresses activity--the reciprocity of two dimensions of being that always make it a becoming, a process. Binary pairs of this kind are best interpreted as markers of a motor imbalance. Walking is controlled falling: "negativity" (the body off-balance on the verge of falling) and "positivity"(the foot catching the fall) as inseperable moments in an active process (walking). The two moments, falling/catching the fall, disconnection/reconnection, are inseperable dimensions of the same process. They are functional complements that are formally distinct but inseperable in fact: they are co-functives, rather than logical opposites or dialectical contradictions. The body of the leader is best understood through a political physics rather than any metaphysics, Hegelian, Lacanian, or otherwise.

The body of the leader inevitably loses itself to an apparatus, most completely at the height of political success. The apparatus of choice for present-day heteronymic leaders is the mass media, as "Reagan" so spectacularly demonstrated. The mass media apparatus allows infinite proliferation and variation of vocal and visual residue with a minimum loss of iconic connection to the body of the leader. The distinction between the quasi-corporeality and corporeality of the leader is expressed in the content of media-disseminated images, as well as in the disconnection/reconnection constitutive of the images as such (editing). The body of the heteronymic leader disappears into the apparatus.

The mass media, however, is not the only apparatus of choice. A body without an image may take, as its primary motor vehicle, an apparatus whose basic reason for being is nonvisual and nonauditory: the Bush-thing's missile. In this case, the quasi-corporeality/corporeality distinction is expressed in a split between the apparatus and the name and body of the leader, which rather than disappearing into the apparatus become imperceptible by standing aside from it. Paradoxically, it is the apparatus which becomes the repository for the leader's excess, the most effective, or even only effective, incarnation of his "soul". Because "negativity" is concentrated on the side of the exemplary name and body, "positivity" on the side of the impersonal apparatus, the kind of body without an image governing the process may be called apparatic.

The distinction between heteronymic and apparatic bodies without an image should be handled the same as any binary pair: as co-functives. Neither can work without the other. The Bush-thing's missile was a materialization of a command-function. The command-function was implemented by soldiers and accepted by the electorate because it was seen as legitimate. It was legitimated by a heteronymic body without and image: "Reagan," what remained of him in Bush. Although the flight of the missile is the most graphic incarnation of the command-function, an entire military apparatus stands behind its launch and is as much a part of the Bush-thing as the missile itself. Heteronymic bodies without an image like "Reagan" need just such "Bush-things"--army, police, national guard, prisons, asylums, reform schools-- in order to make bodies receptive to induction, and to discipline bodies who refuse it. Command and legitimation are functional complements, inseperable dimensions of the same process. That process is what in political discourse is called sovereignty.

Both heteronymic and apparatic bodies without an image are at work at any given historical moment, but to varying degrees of perfection--in other words more or less successfully carried to their respective passages to infinity. Heteronymic movements to infinity are always in tension, simultaneously explosive and implosive. The explosive phase is projective. "Qin Shi Huangdi": an accelerating cascade of increasingly minute, manically reproduced organic divisions projected from the emperor's divinized body onto the surface of the territory (geometric projection: overcoding of the territory). "Reagan": a proliferation of serialized screen images cabling their way from his all-too-human disintegrating body into every corner of social space (geometric progression: serialized social induction[26]). The explosion is accompanied by an implosion, which consists of a redoubling or fragmenting disappearance at the center. Apparatic movements to infinity, on the other hand, are not necessarily explosive-implosive. The Bush-thing's was, however. Its "Reagan" remnants of unity required it to be. The explosive phase was projectile: the arc to the target followed by a blast of unthinkable force. How can a literal explosion unify? By contracting singleness of intent as tightly as possible into its materiality. This was the implosive phase, strictly consubstantial with the explosive. The Bush-thing's movement to infinity was punctual. Its only seriality was the repetition of its punctuality: instant replays of that singular movement contracting mind into body into satellite-transmitted image and sending all three on a bee-line flight to obliteration. Projective and projectile movements to infinity complement one another (wishy-washy legitimation of the Gulf War by the other face of Bush acting in his role as "Reagan" remains, backed up by more convincingly Reaganoid proxies such as Schwartzkopf) and prolong one another (the televised blast: the two Bushes were Time magazine's men of the year 1990; Ted Turner of CNN was man of the year for 1991).

"Legitimate" means "render propagatable". Heteronymic bodies without an image make command-functions propagatable by incorporating their processual traits into the body without an image. Historically, legitimation necessitated at least a pretense of ideational consistency and correspondence: consistency in the leader's words, consistency in his actions, and correspondence between his words and actions. At the limit consistency and correspondence was demanded of all words and actions in the realm: the First Emperor's unification of words (one word, one meaning one function). The ideational consistency and correspondence were reinforced by an analogous consistency and correspondence in the symbolic homology between the body of the leader and the body politic. The ideational system of self-cohesiveness was the flesh filling out the symbolic skeleton of homology, the substance giving content to form, the brain directing the brawn, the presence of the celestial spirit in the earthly body. The relation between the ideational and symbolic systems could be expressed in any number of binary pairs providing an opportunity to express an animated unity. "Reagan's " most innovative move was to free legitimation from the constraints of ideational consistency and correspondence. These were forgotten. Along with them went symbolic consistency. Great emphasis, by contrast, was placed on symbolic correspondence: the bare bones homology between the body of the leader and the body politic. That homology, however, was weakened by the lack of consistency and the possibility of at least a minority of particular bodies opting out of it -- they were almost incited to opt out by the absurdity of the leader's body imaging. With "Reagan," legitimation is voided of its content, retaining only the motions and an empty skeleton: a movement to infinity traversing a substanceless homology. The homology, though vestigial, is still clearly important. Its importance is that it invites particular bodies to restore the substance, to refill content, and this makes them active participants in their own social induction. The result is that particular bodies have freedom of choice in their mode of subjectification in relation to the exemplary body: to be structured by its lack (Lacanian Oedipus), to identify with its plenitude (Freudian Oedipus), to rebel against it and define oneself as a counter-plenitude (negative Freudian Oedipus), to adopt a posture of complicitous cynicism (the self-detached fascination characteristic of Baudrillardian postmodernity), and so on. Although the homology is important, the movement to infinity is more important. It has come close to the point of superseding consistency and correspondence, replacing them with simple smoothness: the fluid movement to infinity of the body of the leader now has legitimating capabilities in and of itself. It was possible to choose "none of the above" from the list of subjectifying relations to the body of the leader and still be a Reaganite. This is reflected in popularity poll results which throughout the Reagan reign showed a majority of voters disagreeing with him on virtually every major domestic issue, but an even bigger majority "approving" of his "overall performance." In the mass media, this phenomenon was commonly explained as a shameful overemphasis of leadership "style" over "substance", "form" over "content". It is more accurately regarded as evidence that the American political system is on the verge of patenting a political invention of vast implications: contentless legitimation. The electorate was taken in by the Reagan act -- not in the sense of being deceived, but rather in the sense of being inducted, swept up in the infinitization of his movements. The full ramifications of the brave new world of legitimation --Bush's "New World Order?"-- will only be known when and if politics leaves the vestigial homology behind entirely, allowing the movement to infinity to come fully into its own.

This is precisely what the missile face of the Bush-thing does, although too explosively to constitute a sustainable politics. Its materialization of a command-function is only one such movement animating contemporary society. There are many other kinds of apparatuses than projectile ones. They are all Bush-things in the sense that they materialize "human" functions.[27] But command is by no means the only function at issue: police, army, mental hospitals (embody command); the mass media, surveillance systems, sensing and imaging systems of all kindss (embody perception); computers, bureaucracy, law (embody judgement); industrial robots (embody dexterity); marketing research, polling (embody desire). Materialized command-functions are by nature one-way and hierarchical: up to down, top to bottom. The others are circular to varying degrees. They are either designed to allow for feedback (in an electoral system, this is true even of the bureaucracy and law), or they are feedback loops (marketing research, polls). They incorporate action-reaction cycles as self-corrective mechanisms, mimicking the relationship of a living organism to its environment. Computerization incorporates self-regulatory feedback cycles to be integrated into virtually every apparatus, even the most seemingly single-minded (the hardware of war). Command-function apparatuses are instances of what Foucault called negative power: their primary reason for being is to prohibit or destroy. Their importance should not be underestimated -- they are far from going extinct. If anything, they are multiplying and intensifying. But they are taking their place in a social field increaasingly occupied by apparatuses wielding "productive" power. For our purposes, "inductive" would be a better word than "productive". Quasi-animate self-regulatory apparatuses induct bodies more gently, but in a way more forcefully. Few people are moved to acts of violent rebellion against marketing research. Yet no one can avoid contributing to it, and having their life's path shaped by it. Quasi-animate, or autonomic, apparatuses are more effective in the long run, since they are by nature more politically creative than one-way command-function apparatuses (they tend to let their targets live, sometimes move -- even change). But it is interlinkages between all these apparatuses which yield the most potential. The television relay from the Bush-thing's missile is only one example of many such couplings. Relays from one apparatus to another increase the permutational potential of the movements animating the social field to an incalculably higher power. They raise the propagations of the body without an image to a higher order of infinity. The future of the apparatic body without an image lies in ever more numerous and complex interlinkages between actual apparatuses embodying the full range of materializable ex-human functions. When and if apparatuses embodying command, perception, judgement, dexterity, desire and more, become fully intergrated, so that any movement arising in the social field can move smoothly to and through any function -- then the heteronymic body without an image will be obsolete. The necessity of social dynamics retaining an iconic connection to an exemplary human body would gave been bypassed. The hallowed homology would have crumbled into dust, freeing legitimation from the skeletal remains of content. Ideational and symbolic consistency and correspondence would lose their political function. Command would gear into autonomic regulation. Sovereignty would be no more. The world would have entered the post-human age invoked by Foucoult.

Until then, the body of the leader is still very much with us. And, in spite of fluidity, it has a base gender: masculine. By "base gender" is meant: the gender the body most often returns to, just as batters in the sport figuring most prominently in American political discourse -- baseball -- always get another chance to come to the plate again, if not in this inning then the next, if not in the next inning then at least in the next game. Masculinity is the body of the leader's home base. This, in concert with institutional mechanisms at work on other levels, skews the ability of particular bodies to share equally in its glory. Bodies gendered feminine rarely come to bat. They tend to be placed on the "absence" side of the body, equated with the body without an image as "matrix" of existence, symbolically translated into the mother-womb. This means that they tend to be written out of the series of actual permutations composing the substance of unity (or written into the substance of unity as a version of originary lack). As a consequence, they are relagated on average to lower prestige value and a smaller share of the social product whose distribution is indexed to it.

There is an apparent dissymetry in the two dimensions of quasi-corporeality. The rhythm of the voice often takes precedence over gesture-trajectory. The actualizations propagated in the movement to infinity of the body of the leader can be patterned to some extent by the repetition of phrases. Privileged symbolizations and ideations form by dint of verbal redundancy. These are coupled with stereotyped gestures-trajectories, exerting a powerful impact on the selections made by particular bodies. An amazing level of conformity is observed, in spite of the formal possibility of open-ended permutation. Particular bodies tend to regularize their audio-visual actualizations into cliched subjectivities and life paths.

Call the co-functioning of these two constraints on the actualization of particular bodies' quasi-corporeal potential despotism.

"Reagan" is by no means despotic in the same way as the unifier of China. But if despotism can be defined as the social privileging of masculinity in collective symbolization, and the political preeminence of an at least nominally masculine voice in collective ideation, then despotic he is. Despotic, but not in the same way: neo-despotism. Ditto for the two-faced Bush-thing.

The apparatic body without an image, actualized in one of its forms on one Bush face, creates conditions under which the two defining constraints of despotism may come undone. Is autonomic dehumanization the only humanly possible way out of despotism and its State avatars? Is killing the patient the only cure?

Or is the "patient" a symptom of the illness? Lord Shang held that the personified body was not autonomous, only an organ of the State. "Reagan's" ventriloquism led to the conclusion that supposedly self-legislating subjectivity was epiphenomenal, an end-effect, more like a milestone retrospectively punctuating the passage of a fundamentally impersonal movement across the social field than an originating structure. Do individual "humans" reproduce despotism, the State, State apparatuses, in spite of themselves, in perpetual affront to an essential autonomy they never quite get the hang of? Or do despotism, the State, State-related apparatuses produce individuated "humans" in order to reproduce themselves? Is "human" autonomy merely a metamorphic phase in the reproductive cycle of inhuman autonomic processed? Kafka would certainly say so: that even in the case of the most "human" of apparatuses -- law, bureaucracy -- humans are part of a machine, rather than the machine being a servant of humanity. Perhaps the only novelty of the Bush-thing's integration of the "human" into autonomic cycles is that the cycles are unabashedly machinic: quasi-animate as opposed to pseudo-organic. Choose your possessor: heteronym or apparatus, body of the despot or integrated machine circuit. State subjection or post-sovereign servitude. We know where heteronymic "humanity" has gotten us: the mass slaughter of the twentieth century, the Holocaust being the most devastating but by no means only example. It gives one pause -- if this is indeed the choice, the answer might not be self-evident. It gave Kafka paws -- perhaps, like him, we can find a metamorphic cure for our "human" illness that fills neither the despotic nor the apparatic prescription.

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