The Journey back from the Corporation to the Body
In the rigid walls of limited dualism, hierarchical ableism, and the body’s objectification in modernity, we’ve lost sight of the sacred nature of the matter that forms and shapes us. From the shapeshifting body, in constant pulsating convulsion, we have moved on to the rigid private commodification of bodies.
The corporeal has lost its soul, its immanent rhythm of life and death. It has consumed its ground. Body also as matter, of person or fact, from “body of knowledge” to “body of water.” The origin of corpus 'body, dead body, animal body', linked to corporare “to incorporate, make or mold into a body,” is thought to come from *kwrep-, a Proto-Indo-European root meaning “body, form, appearance,” probably a verbal root meaning “to appear.”
Flesh, core, corpse, substance.
As Viveiros de Castro says in Metafísicas Canibais, “the Amerindian conception would suppose (...) a unity of spirit and a diversity of bodies.” Assuming a 'continuum' of bodies connected in context, unlike Western modernity's isolated and crystallized bodies. Viveiros de Castro says that modern cosmologies are based on the oneness of nature, guaranteed by the objective universality of bodies and strict impermeable categories.
This brings me to the concept of Corporation, produced in this necrocapitalist context (a socio-economic concept formalized by Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee, defined as a contemporary form of organizational accumulation that involves the dispossession and subjugation of life to the power of death). In the mid-15th century, corporacioun meant “people united in a body for some purpose.” Also 'a whole composed of united parts, a structure, system, community, corporation, body politic, a guild'.
Corporate Capitalism (an economic and political system where private individuals for profit control property, business, and industry) is the private market of bodies characterized by mega-corporations monopolization. Gigantic collective bodies, hierarchical, bureaucratic, and inherently extractivist - based on the violent and constant enslavement of bodies.
Remember that in Latin corporatus, the past participle of corporare means “to make or mold a body, to provide a body” and “to make a corpse, to kill.” Modern corporate practice is based on the premise of the systematic and violent subjugation of bodies, be they water, animal, or human. Place-bodies are also broken and abused.
The multiple bodies that make up a corporation are deluded by techno-bureaucracy into abstraction and exile from the consequences and responsibilities of its devouring and insatiable impact. Colossal technocratic bodies, whose greed extinguishes everything in its path, in a devastation with no time for regeneration. In a pattern, which is thought to be inevitable and infinite, of perpetuating the slavery that subjugates life in favor of capital, which systematically dismembers and extinguishes all bodies.
May we have the bravery to make the journey back from the corporation to the 'continuum' of bodies, from massification to place, from abstraction to presence, from arrogance to responsibility. May we satiate the body, this body of flesh and blood. This tender and vulnerable body, the one that surrenders and belongs.
All etymology from here.
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