26/04/2026
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Like Clayface
A while ago, I watched the teaser-trailer for DC Comics' new movie, 'Clayface'.
I am looking forward to watching this one, mainly because it feels like a horror movie. I love horror movies - perhaps not the jump-scare films and their exhausted investments in exorcised ghosts and haunted toys. I like films that help me question the proper dimensions of the body as have been taught to me by our sciences. I like movies that force me to ask, like Spinoza: "what can the body do?"
In order to understand the mysteries and powers and dimensions of the material body, we seemed to have looked in the "wrong" place: at 'the body itself'. Now, mind you, I do not mean to suggest that we ought not to look at 'the body itself' - at the ear to understand the percussive exuberance of the tympanic membrane; at the fascia to speculate about the pashmina of webbed tissue that embraces every muscle, nerve, organ, and bone in a protective wetsuit; at the brain to be floored by the wild implications of a corpus callosotomy - but that 'looking' does not neatly precede the confounded production of the body as a stable, settled thing that can be measured, organized, thought, harmed, claimed, named, and located. Looking is corrosive. The 'looking-at' 'the body itself' is a political act, not an innocent natural act. It is sedimented with history and rich in logics that render the body knowable.
Perhaps, what feels pressing to me then is that the body - despite the taxonomical precision that produces it as object - resists full disclosure. One cannot call it to step forward under the bright, clinical lights of transparency. Indeed, the calling forward is an act of obscuration.
To see the body clearly is to shroud it. This was perhaps the reason why Spinoza posed his crippling question: what can a body do? That question tears through morphology, reminding us that every christening of the body is already meddling with its speculative undecidability and, as such, to "see" the body one must look to the side of it, to the ecstatic para of 'the body itself', to a poetics of the body as Gregor-Samsa-rian, burdened with the or****ic desire to become bug-like.
To see the body, one must think with crabs, their crustacean choreographies, and how we already walk sideways; one must consider the unaccomplished nobility of armpits and human pheromones; one must greet the demodex communities that secrete our cheeks; one must be reminded that only a poetics of a pustular variety, only an autistic looking-away-at, only a melting-shifting-mercurial-flowing vocation in excess of the taxon can hold the body in its mysterious fluency.
I am presently writing up what I call "para-morphology" to investigate the body as movement, as streaming, instead of as a neat object. Para-morphology suggests that the body is beside itself, and that to meet the body clearly is to lose something precious - something that bodies do well: they slip away.
Like Clayface.
Bayo Akomolafe
