Ian Macartney

Ian Macartney works with words, sounds, images and other people. He can be found online at ianmacartney.scot, but for how much longer?" His TikTok handle is @e7519.6a0c85.088182.

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ECZCHEMATICS

The unconsciousness seems to me to be structured like a body

Didier Anzieu

, it’s textured, its text-ure. Your body goes unlegislated, illegible

, lichenification. Metonymic for something else, non-, ossified

, you excavate, plunder the skin, the surface, dig deeper. It’s resourceless, futile. No

dark wealth but a poverty of moisture. You are like a stone, a waking fossil

, eternal present. Writing does not solve this. You are unsure it is a conundrum, per

se, cipher with the unlock, positions of possibility. Writing its own itching, without

completion

, so infinity

, compromise – slapping. The use of knuckles. A harsh rub. The body punishes,

Protestant down to the gnarled barbed genome

, yes, you’re writing about eczema. Eczema exists in the present-tense – it’s a tense

presence

, ambient, a universe of hurt in a speck of pink

, so subjectivity

, so an existential condition

, not hope but minimisation

, I am skin that walks. Thrown out by heat, I wear this skin for a lifetime. […] We often

disagree1

, the ever-discomfort which rears a screaming – mewing? – body, ever-attuned,

activated. Allergy-as. It teaches, through touch, a stark chasm between perception

and interiority. Oh-it-is-a-bit-pink-today synonymous with a pain, crimson, like the skin

has been burned

, you cannot focus on a point for there are many points

, scattered over islands of inflammation. Your self, self-information, inflamed, the body

in overdrive, hyperactive even when dormant

, especially when dormant

, the itch is the itch to be understood by one’s love-object […] the physical systems

revives old frustrations in the primal form of the “language” of the skin2

, a crust behind the ear. A neck, as gnarled as a quarry face. Hands and fingers,

perpetually cut. Inside of arms. Lower back. Actually, scratch that – upper back too. A

coin shape against the right ankle, like some volcanic crater. Thighs, knees

, each area, the peak of their inflammation, nomadic

, eczema travels across your body – to settle dormant in exchange for another place,

activated

, your map of neurons rewired monthly. You switch between emollients every eight

weeks because your body grows used to whatever is commonly used

, fights back

, modulates to keep scratching

, yes, you negotiate with your own body

, no, actually, negotiation is too generous. It implies agreement, as if this didn’t come

down to motor neurones. Eczema commands from the spine, not thought

, scratch as negation, then? The body, in eczema, becomes a second agent to a

consciousness, the body-in-control. All adherences to the body, the rhetoric of ‘vibrant

materialism’ etcetera3, do not take into account something this simple

, this sucks

, the experimental writer Rosie Šnajdr once spoke to you about the ‘itchiness’ of

writing. It goes on and on, its deferral

, it is deferral, after all

, eczema asks for more from words, more than language on language’s terms. Inquiry,

excavation

, eczema opens up to the infinite vastitude of language not working. In eczema is the

situation of words, indescribable, futile

, again, an existential condition

, you rub against clothes, knuckles. When you really leave it be, make the effort, you

start to spasm. You turn animal, honed again and again and again to a nub that doesn’t

exist

, skin re-members […] the body’s memory of our lives […] a fantasmatic surface, a

canvas for what we wish were true – or for what we cannot acknowledge to be true4

, yours is a body made open in eczema. To infections, mainly

, your skin begins its own series of affects – the skin is ”angry”, it is “calm”, it is a

petulant child, it is a rogue pet

, you bleed. Ambiently. Red specks occur in the night, upon waking

, unknown controls. The impulse and function of self-hurt without your wanting

, this is why you cannot handle body horror. Once, during your first year of university,

you scratched your arm so bad you felt a gloss, the wetness of plasma, turning on the

light for a jumpscare

, dozens of popped blisters, like crimson eyes, staring back from the underside of your

arm

, you wept on the phone to your mother as she sung you a lullaby

, not the fictive exaggerations, then, the Cronenbergian flourishes, but the mundane

reality, the horror-ified body, distant from body horror for it is that true

, connected to the world, of course. Stephanie LeMenager speaks of petroculture

as subterranean5, oil both underground in its source and how it operates societally. It

lubricates the Global North, the contemporary world, out of sight

, but for you, this is all surface, tubs upon tubs of greasy emollient layered above the

damaged damaging skin, in searing sight

, it gets everywhere

, you become a flammable hazard

, how much of these oil products have you received from the government? How much

does this cost, taxed for a condition not your choice

, it is this slick web of social relations which renders you lonesome

, just you and the body

, you-ness with the body

, you’re writing but are you getting anywhere

, you worry flatmates assume clumps of greasy emollient are semen. But in eczema

there is not a libidinal release of fluid but the application of fluid, an excess which

becomes part of the whole

, the surface wanting to be itself, undisciplined, against subterranean senses towards

desire

, you doubt it is all as psychoanalytic as implied – the motor neurones at play

, the body acted upon like a mind

, for the brain, in eczema, is excavated too

, the fear/anticipation of rose openings, worse bleeding

, you think of the Book of Job. You think of this as punishment – for your queerness,

maybe

, purgatorial, your body, flare-ups in transit

, there is a taxonomy of itches, but it feels inexpressible. A schematic, then, becomes

excised. Hence eczchematics. Hotness, when responding to an allergen: dust, pollen,

cat hair, dog hair, your thirty-six other triggers

, dryness, in the aftermath

, scars the most pain, not the reaction proper

, when you use emollient, at this stage of the cycle, flakes of dead skin clump together

like porridge under your nails

, petroleum cream never seeps through to relief. It surrenders to ceaseless surface

, that’s how you emerge: always as a response. Eczema does not allow you to start,

to originate

, tightness, this text-ure. You stretch a neck and worry about pulling a muscle. You

fantasise about scratching, flattening the shape of my human form. To make it canvas

for it is easier to scratch against internal contours, the bone and muscle that are not

skin, which get forgotten in this exchange, altered, the scaffolding which allows

(diminishes) the return of scratching

, open the so-called body and spread out all its surfaces […] go on, expose the small

intestines’ alleged interior, the jejunum, the ileum, the duodenum, or else, at the other

end, undo the mouth at its corners, pull out the tongue at its most distant roots and

split it, spread out the bats’ wings of the palate and its damp basements, open the

trachea and make it the skeleton of a boat under construction […] this is not all6

, you are cautious to make something radical out of this condition, to have the skin

recover into itself, but you have to ask

, does eczema pluralise skin

, you check your reflection in passing parked car windows, to see how you look

, skin repeated many times in your own seeing

, the skin felt, the skin seen

, the body an avatar of inflammation

, by setting up these eczchematics you do not resolve the issue, but articulate it, put it

in a context

, eczema persists whether you think about this essay or not

, writing a non-exit

, you are repeating itself

, scratch scratch scratch

, there is hearsay and mystery attached, of course. This is a folkloric condition

, there is always an antidote to propose: manuka honey, green tea, herbal oil

, the approach can never be clinical, medical, scientific. It has to be the way of the

writer, i.e. superstitious, mystical

, hellish

, the knowledge of experience, even if wrong, will constitute so many other thoughts

and assumptions and affects it cannot be dismissed

, there are layers conjured based on this irrationality. The eczchematicised skin is not

a scientific site

, it cannot be cited

, the filaggrin gene encodes structural proteins in the stratum corneum and stratum

granulosum that help bind the keratinocytes together which maintain the intact skin

barrier and the hydrated stratum corneum. Filaggrin gene impairment leads to dry and

fissured skin which increases penetration of allergens into the skin […] lichenified with

excoriations, papules and nodules7

, within eczchematics what is up for interrogation is the self – the bodymind, then the

body-scratch

, you are not a part of this process. You facilitate, but the other you that is part of ‘you’

cannot control this

, it’s a victim

, the miracle of jouissance – the hyperbole endpoint of desire, if not a form of desire

per se8

, which is to say, it’s tragic

, actually, no, it's ugly feelings, to borrow Sianne Ngai’s term. Eczema does not cohere

into epic, it is not a tragic condition

, the eczchematic epic would be very tedious: endless loops, repetition twofold

, the act-then-response not complete in the act, so predicated before the act

, the predatorial prey of eczchematic time

, minor and generally unprestigious feelings are deliberately favoured over grander

passions like anger and fear […] as well as over potentially ennobling or morally

beatific states like sympathy, melancholia and shame […] explicitly amoral and

noncathartic, offering no satisfaction of virtue, however oblique, nor any therapeutic

or purifying release […] moods like irritation and anxiety, for instance, are defined by

a flatness or ongoingness entirely opposed to the “suddenness” on which Aristotle’s

aesthetic of fear depends […] a remarkable capacity for duration9

, your fingernails have Aristotelian demands for the body. They want catharsis

, it’s not delusion on the nail’s part, but necessity

, they died a long time ago, they are keratin, they cannot be scratched the way

something once-soft, like your skin, can

, a solution never conjured. Your body cannot ask for that. It is givenness upon what

it gives itself, constantly

, the subconscious. Not neurones but this – then a sensation

, infinity in the irresolution. Negative dialectics

, a restless form of thinking which does not proceed from, or expect to arrive at a

transcendental or transcendent ground or principle10

, the mirror stage11 constantly repeated. The painful body coming across the adequate body

, beyond the possibility of relief, in eczchematics, for even in relief is the horizon of its

opposite. It refuses the clarifications of biological truth, answers, a process for solution

denied

, skin constituting its own breakage

, how wicked an organ skin is, so deeply alert to the other12

, you see how this gets annoying

, your skin is a comma – ongoingness. It is the irritant that detects the irritant. It wants

to get rid of itself, to stop feeling, to tell itself what must be destroyed

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1 Maria Fusco, “ECZEMA!” in Critique: Stakes of Form, p. 227

2 Didier Anzieu trans. Naomi Segal, The Skin Ego, p. 30

3 Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things

4 Jay Prosser, “Skin Memories” in Thinking Through the Skin, p. 52

5 Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century

6 Jean-Francois Lyotard, “Libidinal Economy” in The Lyotard Reader and Guide, p. 49

8 Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings, p. 332

9 Ibid., p. 7

10 “Negative dialectic”, Oxford Reference

11 Jacques Lacan trans. Bruce Fink, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function” in Écrits

12 Alice Hill-Woods, “Weeks or days later” in Hothouse, p. 17

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