THE DESTRUCTIVE BEHAVIOUR

 

 

A thought about self-harm visualises an image of radical violence towards one’s body. But it isn’t always an extreme activity, one can do it in almost without noticing. The central characteristics of such behaviour in any case is the deliberate violence, “where the victim and perpetrator are one” (Pickard, 2015).

 

Considering Sigmund Freud’s division of human instinct, there’s a polarity in each individual: loving (unifying, sexual) and aggressive (destructive). He explains these two as a sense of drive towards something: the drive towards love for objects require a supplement drive to possess (Freud, 1940). Freud’s speculation continues with a note that in every organism there is a destructive force in which it has the end purpose to become an inanimate material. He also notes that the self-destructive behaviour is a natural lust embedded in humans. 

 

In “The Plague of Fantasies” Slavoj Žižek positions disfigurement under the act of violence (Žižek, 1997). While humans are fantasising about their bodily matter, in which the physical form is constantly re-designed into something else from the biological choice, I couldn’t agree, but propose this as a function of the creative mind of humans - the intuitive need to solve a “problem” for a better cause. In this case, the bodies of our own. 

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THE ARTIFICIAL BODY

 

 

The experimental notion towards body augmentation and different fashions have been a central part of cultural definitions and evolvement throughout history. The body has been considered historically as the base for cultural variety. Nowadays, it most certainly hasn’t disappeared, but keeps on thriving towards the ideal human physical condition. During the past decade (and ongoingly in the current one), the body has reached a phenomenal position, in which body-positivity opened an exploration of the physical component of humanity and established the human-material as a conceptual source for design and art investigations. 

 

Clothes are the closest artificial objects that visualise the imaginary character of the Self. They displays each person’s vision of a desired bodily figure. 

 

In the context of performing arts, the fictional character is gaining a physical existence through the costume - it enlivens the character emerging from an intangible source before invading the actor for its own agency. 

The same concept applies on a character walking the streets - the fantasy each person has created of oneself. Costume is a body that can be taken off (Monks, 2010).

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Clothes allow people to enhance or disable their own bodies, yet by this, it re-designs the biological appearance or bodily matter through the aid of artificial. So there must be a longing, a hidden desire for a new anatomical structure, a fantasy enlivened by the re-constructive function of what people can wear. 

 

This furthers my exploration by asking: if the garment is re-building the body’s physical and material structure, is there another body situated in between the wearer and the clothes? If the human’s biological form is changed due to synthetic material, could it be, that the fantasy embedded between the carrier and the garment is actually made out of imaginary flesh and skin, a fictional anatomical body? If objects and man-made material are embodying people’s characters, I wonder, if the imagination visualises the true nature of these things as an interpretation of the human itself? 

 

 

            “Flesh and idea are intertwined when the body reflects on itself in the 

                         simultaneous act of perception and communication as seeing the seen and seeing seeing” 

(Heinrich, 2012).