The Body as a Diagram of Forces (with Diagrams!)

In a famous line from D'Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form, Thompson refers to the body as a 'diagram of forces'. This is a particularly evocative phrase, but one whose meaning is best displayed pictorially:



On the right is a thigh bone (femur) while on the right is a crane head - the lines indicate 'stress contours', or vectors of tension and compression. Thompson relays the story of how one day, an colleague of his, an engineer, happened to walk past the drawing of the femur, pinned to the wall of an anatomists's board, and, with the shock of recognition exclaimed: 'that's my crane!'. Like the crane, the bone's morphology (form and shape) exhibited nothing less than the play of forces which shaped it, and moreover, which made the bone perfectly suited to it's task of load-bearing. It's with examples like this in mind, along with numerous others, which lead Thompson to claim that the body is nothing other than a 'diagram of forces'.

Philosophically, I think is an incredibly powerful and interesting way of thinking about bodies, insofar as it takes the focus away from bodies as, well, static lumps of meat and bone, and instead frames the body as a dynamic outcome of environment and action, placing it into a milieu which works upon it over time, dynamising and temporalizing the body as less a thing than a process, always ongoing. To make the point even clearer, and to speak of whole bodies rather than just parts, one might take the striking example of ink drops in water:




It is mere coincidence that the ink drops look so much like the forms of jellyfish? While this latter example is more speculative than the first, one can at least see in them the same principles at work in the crane and the bone: the coupling of form and movement, process and embodiment. But more than just in natural terms, one can even see this play out in what is probably one of my favourite works of art, Umberto Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, which I had the pleasure of seeing in the flesh a couple of years back:



Boccioni was an Italian Futurist, who, like all Futurists, was concerned above all with speed and flux, principles which largely informed their approach to art. What's so cool about the sculpture is that it aims less at capturing a 'body' than a stride, a form-of-motion, motion given form, and not simply a body that so-happens to move. Movement is primary, even as the depiction itself is static (statuesque?!). The title of the piece - Unique Forms of Continuity in Space - also emphasises this, the continuity of body with space. In any case, what all the above illustrate are ways of thinking the body as a 'diagram of forces'. Like Boccioni's sculpture, diagrams are interesting because they always 'point elsewhere'; they capture, in static form, dynamics: one sees in diagrams movement(s), lines of force, directions, orientations. And bodies are always best, I think, thought of in exactly those terms.