All human experience is incarnate, that is to say: of the body. The body, as material thing in the world, is the dimensionality of our being. The body is a process and both subject and object. The body is living matter related to space, time, and viewer. The body is dispersed, multiple, and particularized. The body is contradictory, partial, and strategic. The body is abstracted and documentary. The body is the most proximate feature of the social self, a necessary feature of social location, while at the same time an aspect of personal alienation; not merely the source, but also always the estrangement from the “I” who claims it.

A performed body is never completely legible or fixed in its effects—it becomes meaningful through its encounter with the interpreter or viewer. A performed body makes us increasingly aware of our own state of simultaneous intersubjectivity and interobjectivity, the latter being a structure of engagement with the materiality of things, in which we recognize what it subjectively feels like to be objectively embodied. The body unites us directly to things—a thing among things, and an object among objects.