intention or initiative. They ‘flow’ time through the minute particulars of body
movements that both have effects and yield experiences. They are ‘performed
dreams’ (Schechner 1993), ‘virtual actualizations’ of time which allow conscious-
ness to become acute without necessarily being directed by drawing on the non-
cognitive.
Nature as background
What I want to argue next is that these contemplative and mystical developments
which, taken as a whole, are widespread in modern Western societies, constitute
a background within which nature is apprehended and which provides quite
particular experiences of what nature is. They form, if you like, an ‘embodied
unconscious’, a set of basic exfoliations of the body through which nature is
constructed, planes of affect attuned to particular body parts (and senses) and
corresponding elements of nature (from trees and grass, to river and sky) (Massumi
1997 b), ‘the sense and recognisability of things...do not lie in conceptual
categories in which we mentally place them but in their positions and orientations
which our postures address’ (Lingis 1998: 59).
Following on from this point, I want to argue, very tentatively, that these
immersive practices are producing a new form of vitalism (Watson 1998a, 1998b),
a stance to feelinglife (in the doubled sense of both a grasp of life, and emotional
attunement to it) which explain many of the strong, sometimes even fanatical,
investments that are placed on the ‘natural’. The very ways in which, through these
practices of contemplation and mysticism, embodiment is reproduced in the West,
have produced an increasing bias towards framing life as a moving force, as push.
In other words, the forms of embodiment I have set out in this article constitute
a biopolitical domain arising out of a heightened awareness of particular forms of
embodiment which, in turn, allow certain forms of signification to be grasped
‘instinctively’.
This biopolitical domain has been strengthened by three developments. The
first of these is the turning of certain body practices into privileged kinaesthetic
spaces, and the privileged kinaesthetic spaces into body practices. I am thinking
here especially of walking, which since the nineteenth century, precisely in
association with greater mobility (Wallace 1993), has produced a new experience
of nature. This is not walking as travel, but walking for itself. As walking becomes
a natural practice to be indulged in for its own sake, so, against the background
I have outlined, it can become a means to contact the Earth, to be at one with
‘nature’, even to be deemed therapeutic. It becomes a means of gathering stillness,
without having to stay still, a means of contemplation and mystical communion
to be found within the body. Lingis captures what I take to be a culturally
particular investment particularly well:
when we go out for a walk, our look is not continually interested, surveying
the environment for landmarks and objectives. Even when we are on our wayStill life in nearly present time 67