The Body Skinned: Rethinking performative presence

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Notes

¹The French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu aligns the development of a sense of self through the existence of the skin, in particular through the skin contact that a child has in early childhood. The first skin contact of the infant with the one who strokes, cuddles and feeds him/her is integral for the development of the self in later life. Hence, there is often talk of the ‘peaumoi’ or the skin-self (Anzieu 1995); the skin as a border between self and not-self. While at the beginning of the infant's development there is a symbiotic relationship with the carer, in which the skins of both infant and carer merge together, the infant soon distances itself from others, and the process of individuation commences. This takes place during what the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan titles the ‘mirror stage’ (Lacan 1977). This implies that, while the skin takes on ‘a function of individuation for the self, which transmits the feeling to the self that it is a single being’ (in Connor 2004: 49), it also gives rise to the reflexivity of thought.

²The Greek physician and anatomist Galen (c. 129–c. 200), although emphasising the importance of the human anatomy, instructed his students in his work De anatomiciis administrationibus on dissecting a body and, as Connor (2004) convincingly argues, he did so by paying no attention to the skin.

³Vesalius’ seminal publication of 1543, entitled De humanis corporis fabrica Libri septem (On the fabric of the human body in seven book; for an online English translation, see: http://vesalius.northwestern.edu) was one of the first textbooks of human anatomy to describe in great detail the organs and the structure of the human body. It included incredibly detailed illustrations of human dissections.

⁴Listening attitudes in network environments are elaborated in Schroeder (2009).

⁵The Sonic Arts Research Center in Belfast has a dedicated network music group that frequently performs with dispersed ensembles – and often with some new performers for each performance – from all over the world.