Ubiquitous Body

Definition

The ubiquitous body names the third of Ann C. Colley's three models of the body–interior relation, read from Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses (1885), written during the years of his worst ill health: a mode in which it is "the moat of sickness encircling the child's body that structures the spaces of home and creates the sense of the ubiquitous body" (p. 71). Confinement is the model's engine — the sick child, "exiled" from other children, passes days in the night nursery of 17 Heriot Row — and its product is expansion: "In a sense, each verse is a room shaped by the sick body's desire to escape from itself" (p. 71). The interiors do not isolate; through the child's substitutions the rooms become vehicles — "The bedroom chairs stuffed with pillows become ships; a basket in the sun turns into a pirate's boat; the counterpane assumes its own topography of hills, dales and plains and the sheets merge into seas. These interiors liberate the sick body from itself" (p. 72).

The model's second, collective dimension is what makes the body "ubiquitous": the confined child "identifies with other children and, in that way, becomes part of a ubiquitous body so that he can for a while be less alone, excluded and strange" — an "unseen, unconscious, yet animated intertextuality of being" in which "the potentially lonely and isolated 'I' of the poems' interiors frequently joins the more inclusive 'We'" (p. 72). The sick child senses unseen others who share "a common physical rhythm" (all "dine at five"; others sleep and wake in an inverted pattern) — parallelism, not sight, as the ground of belonging. The result is the essay's culminating claim about interiority: the interior "does not exist for its own sake but, instead, for the desire of reaching something or going somewhere" (p. 73).

Key Thinkers

• Ann C. Colley — names the model: sickness as the shaper of interior space, the transformation of furniture into escape-vessels, the "I" that joins the "We."
• (Discussed, not yet paged — see log: Robert Louis Stevenson, whose A Child's Garden of Verses is the model's text; biographer David Daiches, whose account supplies the "terrible long nights" and John Singer Sargent's 1885 portrait of Stevenson's "lank and almost transparent body.")
• Johan Huizinga — the play-theoretical family: the model's engine is "play and fantasy," by which "the child alters the rooms of home" (see play); a confinement-driven counterpart to Huizinga's free play.

Related Concepts

• Aesthetic Body and Invisible Body — the model's companions in Colley's triad: where Pater's body receives and Ruskin's watches, Stevenson's escapes — the interior shaped by desire to be elsewhere.
• Interiority — the model yields Colley's thesis that "an interior does not exist for its own sake but, instead, for the desire of reaching something or going somewhere" (p. 73) — interiority defined by reach, not repose.
• Play — the mechanism: substitution (chair→ship, sheet→sea, counterpane→topography) as the child's transfiguration of the room; play as the sick body's "vessels of escape."
• Intimate Immensity — the model's spatial paradox at nursery scale: from the smallest room, "a hundred miles or more" — the confined interior carrying the child "to Babylon, Malabar, Africa and Providence"; immensity generated from the bed.
• Plurality — the collectivity is felt, not political: an "unseen, unconscious, yet animated intertextuality of being," parallel bodily rhythms rather than Arendtian speech and action — solidarity as bodily rhythm rather than speech (compare Arendt's condition of action).
• Memory — like Ruskin's invisibility, the ubiquitous body is recovered through nostalgia: the adult Stevenson "re-enters the rooms that recall the fevers."
• Uncanny — the model's shadow: the sick body as "almost always a silent, threatening presence among the verses' lines" — the frail body as the room's unquiet double.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Bodies and Mirrors (Colley 1999/2006) — the source that names the model: "the moat of sickness encircling the child's body that structures the spaces of home" (p. 71); "each verse is a room shaped by the sick body's desire to escape from itself" (p. 71); "vessels of escape… These interiors liberate the sick body from itself" (p. 72); "the more inclusive 'We'" (p. 72); the reaching interior (p. 73).

Open Questions

• The ubiquitous body is built from parallel rhythms (bedtimes, meals) rather than encounter — is this a genuine collectivity or a solipsism with imaginary members? Colley stresses it is "unseen" and "unconscious": does the model describe community or its consoling image?
• Sickness structures the space here, but the pattern generalizes: what other confined or constrained bodies re-shape their interiors by desire (the prisoner, the invalid, the child grounded)? Is the ubiquitous body a theory of transformed interiors under constraint?
• Colley's claim that the interior exists "for the desire of reaching something or going somewhere" inverts the dwelling tradition's being-at-home (see dwelling, interiority): is dwelling thereby redefined as projected movement — and can architecture program reach rather than containment?
• How does the "restorative 'we'" of childhood solidarity relate to the wiki's political collectives (Plurality, the commons) — is the ubiquitous body a childhood form that politics later realizes or loses?