Back to the Future of the Body [1 ed.] 9781443846301, 9781847181626

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Back to the Future of the Body

Back to the Future of the Body

Edited by

Dominic Janes

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING

Back to the Future of the Body, edited by Dominic Janes This book first published 2007 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2007 by Dominic Janes and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN 1-84718-162-7; ISBN 13: 9781847181626

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ............................................................................................ vii Chapter One .........................................................................................................1 Back to the Future of the Body Dominic Janes Chapter Two.......................................................................................................17 The Body as Machine: Descartes, Sherlock Holmes and Robots Pierre Cassou-Noguès Chapter Three.....................................................................................................27 The Beard and Victorian Ideas of Masculinity Jacob Middleton Chapter Four ......................................................................................................41 The History of the Future: The Changing Role of the Future in the Construction of the Gendered Body Merav Amir Chapter Five.......................................................................................................71 A Constantly Shifting Identity: The Problematic Nature of the Albino Body Charlotte Baker Chapter Six.........................................................................................................84 Displaced Bodies: The Dance Avant-Garde in the Weimer Republic and its Strategies of Deconstruction and Montage Susanne Foellmer Chapter Seven ..................................................................................................114 Extended Bodies: How do we Think and Feel about the Body in the Twenty First Century? Ornella Corazza

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Table of Contents

Chapter Eight ...................................................................................................123 Writing in “White Ink”: Reconfiguring the Body of the Wet Nurse Edith Frampton Chapter Nine ....................................................................................................140 Being Jude Law, Being John Malkovich: The Body in the Body Naomi Segal Chapter Ten......................................................................................................157 Can we Harm the Dead? Understanding Embodied Harm after Alder Hey Floris Tomasini Chapter Eleven.................................................................................................171 The Raw and the Vital: Medical Technologies and Aristotle’s PsuchƝ Fiona K. O’Neill Chapter Twelve ................................................................................................190 Eternal Bodies: The Miira, the Self-Mummified Ascetics of Japan Tullio Lobetti Chapter Thirteen ..............................................................................................216 Abjection and Agency: Prison Tatoos Kevin McCarron Chapter Fourteen..............................................................................................231 Meaningful Bodies: Feminism, Gender, and Materiality Shelley Budgeon Chapter Fifteen.................................................................................................250 Bloomer Scandals: Uncovering the Political Body Hagar Kotef Contributors .....................................................................................................271

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1-1 William Blake, Albion Rose 6-1 Gert, Nervosität 6-2 Gert, Verkehr 6-3 Gert, Verkehr 6-4 Gert, Pause 6-5 Gert, Tod 6-6 Gert’s signature 12-1 Tetsumonkai 12-2 De Certeau’s scheme of the body 12-3 Sacred space

CHAPTER ONE BACK TO THE FUTURE OF THE BODY DOMINIC JANES

In an engraving from around 1794, William Blake presents an image of the body as youthful, male, beautiful, racially white and enflamed in celestial radiance (fig. 1.1). This is the figure he called “Albion” and the print, in its various versions is known as “Glad Day”, “Albion Rose” and “The Dance of Albion”. The first uncoloured state of the engraving, dating from 1780, is accompanied by the following verse: “Albion rose from where he laboured at the mill with slaves - giving himself to the nations he danc’d the dance of eternal death”. Historicist readings suggest that we have, in the early version, an image of the revolutionary hero about to sacrifice himself for freedom. With the terrors of the French revolution, “Albion” develops as an allegory of the British people and its struggle for moral transcendence (Butlin, 1981: 27). Blake’s work gains much of its power by combining neo-classicism with esoteric and gothic themes. His nudes have been seen as exhibiting alternating desires to celebrate, evade and transform the body, such that much scholarship has read his work as representing unease with the material realm (Howard, 1982). However, we do not need to see Blake as gradually abandoning the dreams of a glorious revolution on earth for a purely inner space of revelation. What Blake wanted was a perfect revolution; a perfect transformation in which the body was not let down by the mind and will, nor the mind and will by the body. As Engelstein argues: Repudiating an understanding of nature as predetermined and unalterable, Blake points to the potential for the birth of a radically different human body, ‘the Human Form Divine”… Blake’s emphasis on the power of imagination to effect change is by no means, however, a rejection of the material world. Instead, Blake undermines mind/body as well as subject/object dualisms in an attempt to create an interactive and flexible body which is no less material than its “natural” counterpart, but is no longer subject to its materiality (2000: 62).

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Fig. 1.1, William Blake, Albion Rose, copyright, the Trustees of the British Museum

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Kenneth Dutton has located the dream of the “perfectible body” deep in the classical Greek roots of western culture (Dutton, 1995). The result of the intervening Christianity was not so much as to destroy that dream, but to displace its realisation into the future Otherworld of Heaven. Blake’s engraving can, therefore, be read merely as being an artefact of the complexities of the reception of earlier religious beliefs and political ideologies. Albion’s body, in this view, is now a body of the past, the value which is only as historical evidence. But to privilege such a reading would be, I think, to deny the significance of Blake’s message. He was attempting to use his imagination to create a form of body that was not simply limited, transient, contingent and the sign of something else that is more important. A certain impatience with the material as mere flotsam on the sea of power and knowledge can be detected in some recent writing on the body. Canning describes how despite there being a “veritable flood” of work on the body, “many, even most of these studies merely invoke the body or allow the ‘body’ to serve as a more fashionable surrogate for sexuality, reproduction, or gender without referring to anything specifically identifiable as body, bodily or embodied” (Canning, 1999). Turner, addressing the same issue in relation to the body and religion, suggests that one way forward may be to focus on lived experience (Turner, 1997: 15-16). This volume represents an attempt to address some of Canning’s concerns through Turner’s means and, thereby, to get “back to the future of the body”. This is not simply an exercise in digging corpses out of the historical archive. The question is, rather, what can past lived and thought experiences of the body tell us about what the body can be(come)? Moreover, the body is not to be thought of as merely an “object” or simply a “sign”, but as an active participant in the shaping of cultural formations. As has been commented on the significance of space in the cultural history of prostitution: far from playing a passive backdrop to social and sexual relations, [space] plays an active role in the constitution of those relations, with the particularities of sites of sex work, whether on-street or off-street, reflecting and reproducing broader moral and social orders in a complex and sometimes contradictory manner (Hubbard, 1999: 31).

The material world of spaces and thing is, therefore, not simply a place for the operation of power. Power, rather, has its material forms. What can past experiences, therefore, tell us about the potential for bodily empowerment?

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The Context This volume consists of a set of case studies, representing a range of theoretical and methodological approaches. The origins of this collection lie in the work of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities which has been involved in presenting a series of international workshops and conferences on the theme of the cultural life of the body. The rationale for these events was that, in concepts as diverse as the cyborg, the questioning of mind/body dualism, the contemporary image of the suicide bomber and the patenting of human genes, we can identify ways in which the future of the human body has become ambiguous. The aim of these international workshops and conferences was to explore interdisciplinary answers to the question “does the body have a future?” The first of these events, “Bodies Past”, asked what the past history of the body could tell us about that question. It is from this seminar, held on 11th-12th November 2005, that the current volume derives. The thematic agenda of that seminar was as follows: x Property in the body and in the human genome: it is widely feared that we no longer possess a property in our own bodies. Instead, it has been argued, what we are witnessing is nothing less than a new 'Gold Rush', in which the territory is the human body. x The body and the person: are we our bodies, or are our bodies merely our tools? If we are embodied individuals what limitations does that place on our rights over our bodies? This question surfaces in all sorts of public policy issues from trafficking and prostitution to genetics. x Gendered bodies: to the extent that all human tissue is now the object of markets, it can be said that we are losing the distinction between men and women as subjects with rights over their own bodies. Similarly, gender reassignment, transvestism and other phenomena suggest that the distinction between gender and sex is breaking down. What can we now say about the supposedly immutable categories of male and female bodies? x Bodies, regulation and censorship: what are the limits of censorship over the body in literature, film and the visual arts more generally? Are there any restrictions on what people may see or do with their bodies? How do different countries view such rights, and what is the effect of globalisation on regulation by national jurisdictions? x Future bodies, cyborgs and humans: what does science fiction as metaphor tell us about our desires to control and shape our bodies? The use of the cyborg metaphor in feminist theorists such as Donna Haraway and in such writers as David Mitchell raises disturbing questions about the extent to which we can recognise human agency and emotions in non-human bodies. x The body and the body politic: to what extent is the individual body subsumed in the body politic? For example, in France, individual bodies can be

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said in many important senses to belong to the national patrimoine and not in fact to the individual. What rights does the state possess over the bodies of its citizens and those of other States in peace and war?

The issues raised in this line up of topics help to make clear why the “the future of the body” is currently a “hot topic”. More than that, the urge to look in a dynamic fashion to the future of the body is a major cause of contemporary anxiety. We live with intense fears of what the body might become as the result of genetic engineering, radiation or any branch of ideological fundamentalism. Darwin was able to displace his own analogous anxieties into an extraordinarily extended scenario: “believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such longcontinued slow progress” [as the sun cools in its death pangs] (Darwin, 1887: 92, discussed by Gruber, 1980: 110). Our worries are more immediate. It is easy to look back to past bodies as receptacles of innocent, if naïve hopes: for we live with the eugenic nightmares of the mid-twentieth century. In the 1920s the publisher Kogan Page, attempting to “revive the pamphlet” as their advertising put it, produced a range of small volumes on the theme of “To-Day and To-Morrow”. The subjects of these ranged across the realms of morality, science, war, society, language, art and sport. We find Robert Graves writing on the future of swearing, Bertrand Russell on the future of science, and Rebecca West on the future of the sexes. The volume on the future of the body was written by Ronald Campbell Macfie (1867-1931), physician and poet. He gave the reader his version of the eugenicist prediction of the superman, or, as he called this figure, “the Metanthropos”. Macfie’s agenda is made perfectly clear. He states that “man’s control over his own evolution is perhaps the most interesting and most important in all biology” (Macfie, 1928: 51). This is vital because of deterioration in the breeding stock such that modern woman is often “as little capable of bearing fine children as suckling them” (80). Meanwhile, there are men who “take more interest in the lie of their hair and in the cut of their clothes than in virile exercise of mind, who no longer have the masculine love of fresh healthy eugenic women and the masculine loathing of paint and powder. We find an increasing tendency to sexual perversities” (81). The answer is to be rid of “the camouflage of artificial conditions of all sorts, from titles to dollars, to rouge and powder” (86). Marriage based on “normal sexual attraction” will do the rest. In 2000 he predicts that people, free from sexual perversion, will “dress wisely, and eat and drink wisely, and exercise wisely” (90). Moreover, he is optimistic that we might be able to alter genes, and that this could be the “subject of legislation among the Metanthropoi of 5000 AD” (89). Eventually, he concludes, “it will be possible, in time, to breed almost numberless varieties

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of the highly moral, the highly intellectual, and there seems some likelihood that the Metanthropoi of the future will be divided into nations akin in mental and moral outlook” (95). Moreover, we will all come to look alike physically, “approaching the most beautiful and efficient possible” (95-6). Is that Blake’s glad day? And, if so, were not his dreams our nightmares? For Albion is not Black, Albion is not Female, Albion’s rosy cheeks are emphatically the result of nature rather than artifice: is Albion, after all, just a symbol of delusion and racist, misogyny? However, Blake’s men and women are not all alike. He depicted human bodies with “multiple histories of development and a variety, if not an infinity of possible futures” (Engelstein, 2000: 70). The body has been a tool of fascist power and could be again. Perhaps we can learn from past visions and strategies of bodily selfempowerment? Perhaps we need to do so? The Fabian socialist doctor, M. D. Eder wrote in George Bernard Shaw’s magazine The New Age, “let us be rid of the Superman. He is a bore” (Eder, 1908). We cannot afford to be flippant. Genomic research means that Macfie’s world of 5000 AD is going to happen, in some shape or form, during the twenty-first century. What better time to look back at the excitement and dangers of bodily potential?

The Papers The purpose of this latter section of my introduction is twofold: firstly, it provides short summaries of the papers, and secondly, it aims to explore the way in which themes develop from paper to paper and to, thereby, make sense of their ordering. I want to emphasise that the rationale I have outlined for reading the current volume represents my own personal views and should not be regarded as representing those of the individual authors. I have simply been outlining one vision of the possible significance of collecting work of the kind found here. The research agendas of the contributors come from a diverse range of theoretical and methodological perspectives yet they all, in their different ways, explore and celebrate the cultural understandings of bodies past. They also, implicitly or explicitly, invite thought on the potential for the physical and cultural construction of bodies future. Cassou-Noguès engages with Descartes the philosopher who is frequently referenced as the celebrated exponent of mind/body duality. This paper highlights the fact that the cultural afterlife of Descartes has involved a degree of intellectual mutation. For Descartes thought that the body was a “machine”, yet his understanding of a machine was very different from ours. His differentiator between a human and a machine was the presence or absence of language, whereas for us, it is, Cassou-Noguès, argues, the presence or absence of emotion. Descartes’ position, when understood in its historical context in the

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aftermath of centuries of Christian culture, is perfectly reasonable. For what is the mark of humanity, but the Word? Animals, not having words (and for Christians, souls), yet having emotions are, thus, essentially machines. Whereas, on the evidence of modern (i.e. Victorian and more recent) science-fiction, people have more recently had no problem with the idea of machines (robots) using language. Speech is understood as something that can be manufactured since it does not come from some transcendent source. Most interestingly, Descartes emphasises that words do not have to be rational. He defends the human state of lunatics. His privileging of the Word is such that we do not need to even understand it, nor does it need to be capable of being understood by humans, in order to differentiate the human from the machine. Most recently, however, the cyborg has problematised the very notion of a division between man and machine, hence locking Descartes into a specific cultural context of the production of what have thus become bodies of the past. If the first paper problematises the boundary between human and machine, the second highlights the elaborate cultural constructions of mankind related to the division between the male body and the female body. Middleton tells us about Victorian facial hair and the cultural construction of masculinity in Victorian England. Widespread, if contested, modes of thought superimposed a gender division on that between mind and body, such that the rational mind was gendered male and the dependent body as female. Yet this left men’s bodies as strangely vulnerable, both as a pale adjunct to the supposedly powerful male intellect and, secondly, as uncannily feminised by their very embodiment. The nineteenth century saw something of a crisis of masculinity for reasons that have been extensively studied elsewhere. To give just two important cultural phenomena, the industrial revolution separated many careers from mechanical effort, and so left middle-class men as unmanned in comparison with their lower-class equivalents. Meanwhile, radical thinking was beginning to advocate the notion of rights – and even equal rights – for women. And it was here that biology was hauled in to rescue the male body from the danger of resemblance to women. Men started glorying in prominent, and sometime elaborate or even fantastical and perhaps fanatical displays of facial hair. Middleton, however, nuances this story by showing that male opinion was divided over the virtues of growing versus shaving. A key issue was that if power was based on rationality, and the body was an inferior concern, then a concern for facial hair represented a concern for that which was inferior, such that a well-tended and luxuriant beard could, in fact, be effeminate (remembering that the then construction of effeminacy was as an indicator not of womanliness, nor of homosexuality, but of weakness and debilitation). Amir’s contribution discusses the way in which time has been employed in the twentieth century in the construction of the female body as constrained by

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supposedly natural and inevitable limitations. Amir refers to “intertwining contingent and specific social arrangements with what are perceived to be objective biological facts” (44). In other words it is accepted that women on average cease to be fertile at an earlier age than men, as a result of the menopause, however, this has been misused as a justification and explanation for female disempowerment. The key phrase, “the biological clock is ticking”, is meant to conjure up the sense that a woman’s body is time-limited in the way a man’s is not. It is only fully functional for a limited period, and that functionality must needs involve reproduction. The discourse of the biological clock coincided with increasing demands for women to take a full and equal place in the workforce. However, it could be countered that nature prevents any such assumption of equality. Furthermore, this image suggests not simply a mechanistic universe, but also woman as mechanism responding to intractable laws. The body and its frailties are here projected as a limiting factor on human potential. To be fully female a woman must be intensely embodied, but to be intensely in a female body is to partially disqualified from the demands of highflying careers. Medical science, of course, in the shape of IVF treatments, is able to interfere, to some degree, in these processes. Such science, if considered to be gendered “male” might be seen as coming to aid woman in her temporal bodily frailty. The desire for scrutiny and control of the female body can be seen from the production of a set of male, potential, nightmare scenarios; that of massive lower-class reproduction heedless of the economic circumstances (as with single mothers), or else of middle-class abstinence from pregnancy through the pursuit of careers. Amir refers to the eugenic possibilities underlying such circumstances in that social conditioning and scientific intervention are available so as to construct the ideal “life path” for women and subject them to the operations of male power. It is not only gender relations that can be abused by systems of power. I would argue that racism focussed on skin colour and face shape is the result of sets of contingent social constructions. It is not, therefore, a permanent structuring element in human society. Thus, the body, in its external signs, can be the victim of its times. There can be medical conditions, such as albinism, that assume great cultural and personal significance because of transient cultural attitudes. Baker’s paper examines the cultural role of albinos in postcolonial African contexts. Why should it be culturally significant that there should be a small number of people with Black African physiognomy but with a lack of skin (and eye) pigment? This does not make them white, in racial terms, but it means that they becoming walking embodiments of the dilemmas of life in societies that have become deeply sensitised to racialised forms of thinking and acting. The albino body, in such circumstances, becomes powerfully uncanny, and

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threatening to the comfortable binaries of black and white, dominated and dominant. In this sense it might be argued that the albino body is potentially empowered as a means by which to challenge racist assumptions. However, it is also deeply problematic for the counter-production of African pride and selfassertion. The oppressor, it signals, also lives within. However, there is even more to it that that. As Baker points out, the albino was also constructed in precolonial societies and, as such, has long been provided with an aura of the “mythical and the mystical” (81). The challenge here would appear to be whether the albino body can be returned to a lost position in African societies, perhaps by connection with the transcendental such that this body be recovered from its colonial reconfigurations. Or is the albino body trapped in postcolonial time, in which it refers both to the uncanny return of the ancestors and also of the colonial oppressors? Black albinos take on an external cultural burden of whiteness in postcolonial Africa whether they like it or not. As a Jew, Valeska Gert, was in the similar position of discovering that she was being read from her genetic and cultural heritage. Yet, as an artist, she sought to use her body to express the cultural contradictions of the times in which she lived. Foellmer’s paper shows the ways in which the body is not simply at the mercy of the past and the future, but can be developed to interact with time, place and discourse. Gert, in her dance practice, was thinking through the results of the rapid mechanisation of urban life as experienced in post-World War One Berlin so as to suggest new possibilities for the body in engaging with, enacting, and challenging modernity. In these ways she looked to the future as a place in which the body would be liberated from its old constrictions of behaviour. Of course, we, with the benefit of hindsight, know that her work was to have a limited impact. As Foellmer concludes, “her radical and groundbreaking art was attacked in a pamphlet by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Jewish and leftist, stigmatized as producing ‘Entartete Kunst’ (degenerate art), Gert had to flee temporarily to the alternative modernity of New York” (112). The bodies that Gert conjured out of the air were, thus, the product of a specific set of historical circumstances. When she flickered and jumped, disturbing her audience, she was reacting to the new and shocking experience of the flickering and jumping of the cinema. Yet she was acting out a fascinating modern paradox, that of the unique moment in the age of mechanical reproduction. In a sense, the power of time to single out and distinguish can seem in tension with the mass-production of things, objects and situations, such that in certain forms of post-modernist theory there is no longer a history but simply a seamless web of interchangeable expressions. But if this is the truth of modernising society then it was sharply interrupted, as we have seen, by Nazi censorship and warfare. For Gert’s art was not simply another example of mechanical

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production (something that was essential to the Nazi war-machine) but represented a satirising or problematising of the boundary between bodies and machines. If Goebbels would have liked to preside over a nation of machine-like efficiency, Gert was, through her grotesque impersonations, requiring her audience to confront the possibilities for human standardisation through subordination. She produced bodies of the past which speak to us of dangers which have never gone away. Gert escaped to America, and thus hardly from “time” and “progress”, but two papers in this volume explore the notion that there is an escape out of time, or at least out of the tyranny of time. Time, in the Western, Christian tradition, and its cycles of growth and death, is the product of the Fall. The Garden of Eden before the Fall had no development, and neither does Heaven. States of perfection simply exist. Time itself is the demon unleashed by the act of free will. Corazza and Lobetti discuss East Asian views of embodiment which take significantly different theoretical positions from that which I have just outlined. Corazza emphasises that “fundamental to the Japanese approach is that bodily activities are primarily considered in terms of basho (the Japanese word for ‘place’ or ‘space’) rather than time”. The Word in the Western, Christian tradition; that is that discourse that dances between minds considered as immortal souls, is considered as superior to the mutability and frailty of mere worldly space (including the space that is the constituent and habitat of the body). Hence, it can be argued that the very textuality of this current volume represents a denigration of the body and an elevation of mind-discourse. Corazza, however, explains Japanese concepts of bodily space as being not simply more prominent that in the west, but also qualitatively different and more nuanced. She emphasises the ways in which there are a variety of dimensions of bodily space which, crucially, are not limited by the skin. A person’s space, therefore, is not a singular pinpoint location but the product of the sum of that person’s inter-relationships. Our bodies, in this understanding, are in intimate contact and dialogue with, to use her examples, a stone that one holds, or an object that one sees. It is important to emphasise the intensity of touching that this attitude emphasises. This is very different from the notion that the apprehension of reality happens only within the body, in a central processor, either disembodied as the mind, or embodied as the brain, and that the rest of the body is simply a conduit for information from the outside. The implication is that what is of importance in much of Japanese thought is the intensity of engagement, emphasising individual bodily perception and effort. In this view it is not that time does not happen, but that it is simply not the most important factor. The time-related problem then appears in the form of inquiries as to why the Western body has not in the past been engaging with space in the ways

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recommended by such Japanese viewpoints. The volume returns to Japan with the work of Lobetti, but first further explores Corazza’s notion of the potential of what she calls the “extended body”. Frampton’s concerns are with the potential for bodily extension and pleasure. She writes about wet-nurses, their presence and absence over the last three centuries. She tells a fascinating story of the ways in which the wet-nurse has vanished. The function of the wet nurse was to suckle the children of families who could afford to pay for this activity. The notion was that the provision of milk was simply an alimentary service. However, new notions of sanitation focussed on protecting the boundaries of the physical and metaphorical body increasingly rendered the wet nurse suspect. She was of inferior social class, she penetrated into the heart of respectable families and, it was thought, threatened to pass on taints, even hereditary taints, via the milk to the child. Meanwhile, the experience of breast-feeding was increasingly seen as something which had an important role to play in emotional connection between mother and infant. Frampton argues that this process can be thought to a further stage of development in which breast-feeding can be identified as having elements of pleasures and engagements between bodies that provide alternative potentials for bodily communication compared with those advocated by discourses that emphasise the intensities of sexual contact. Frampton highlights notions of “intercorporeity” in which “the outside world thus enters into and alters us, at the same time that we alter it” (137). This provides an optimistic sense of the possibilities and pleasures of bodily potential. But what if “intercorporeity” is forced? What if we want to be bodily extended not just in ourselves, but into being someone else? The feeling that technology might assist us to, in a sense, become the beings around us that fascinate seems like a modernist fantasy of empowerment, and a most disturbing one since it seems to offer up the potential to divide the world into a new set of colonisers and colonised. Such worlds are explored by Segal in her readings of three late twentieth-century films, Gattaca (1997), The Talented Mr Ripley (1999), and Being John Malkovich (1999). These films are, to a greater or lesser extent, enjoyably exuberant fantasies. But to what do they point towards? Segal suggests that the last of the three is particularly revealing of what she calls “queer desire”. Why, the fantasy asks, do we need to be restricted to the old biological tropes of a man and a woman producing a child? Why cannot a child give birth to a parent, and indeed be in the parent? There is an uncannily eugenic theme running through these films. In Gattaca and The Talented Mr Ripley the world belongs to those who appear to be superior (and, typically, are blond). The libidinous desire to be perfect and powerful and to possess someone beautiful and powerful lends perverse sexual energy to these films and implies that the frightening attraction of fantasies of perfection and domination has not

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disappeared. If people differ in power then who will be the winners and who the losers in the struggle to extend the body? Does the body extend beyond death? Tomasini disagrees with Aristotle over the importance of respecting the dead. It is not that Tomasini supports notions that there is a supernatural reason for being careful with corpses. Rather, his paper argues that there is a deep-seated cultural understanding of humans as embodied entities, such that a corpse is not, at least, initially mere matter, but is still, in some degree a person. The case studies used to support this contention derive from the “improper removal, retention and disposal of children’s organs” at Alder Hey Hospital, Liverpool [U.K.] in 1999 (164). He references Ricoeur’s theories that present embodiment as being a key aspect of personal identity. This indicates that the notions of the extended body in its special connections with other bodies were well appreciated by outraged and grieving parents of the children in question, even if they were not appreciated or understood by the then medical authorities. The physical boundaries of the self, therefore, blur into those of others. Ones selfhood is at stake in the fate of a loved one and their body. But there are other ways in which the extended boundary of the embodied self is problematised: notably through cyborg entities and situations. The cyborg sounds new but, in some ways, is not. O’Neill reminds us that “humans and their bodies have been engaged with technology, its manufacture, use and consequences, since tools were first fashioned”, and she reminds us that since the sixth century B.C. teeth from the dead were being used prosthetically (174). She is worried, however, that with the growing complexity of medical possibility “it may be that our human embodiment will not assimilate to such a multiple or heterogeneous cyborg sense of belonging” (190). In other words, might we become metanthropoi by addition rather than transformation? Will we become so extended as to become merely things that are parts of other things? The suggestion is that the body/thing divide will be increasingly problematised, just as artificial intelligence will increasingly blur the mind/computer divide. Can we cope with the absence of boundaries, or will we generate new boundaries? Looking back to the future of the body suggests that we may, in fact, come to love our “attachments” even if, as in Tomasini’s paper, we come to find it hard emotionally to tell what is us, and what is not. A transcendent material and mental union has been dreamed many times before. Lobetti provides a fascinating account of Japanese ascetic practices. He describes ways in which, by following a range of practices, including “a diet consisting of pine needles, tree bark, pinecones, chestnuts and occasionally stones and crystals” (193), ascetics found ways to die in ritual circumstances such that their bodies, if all went well, did not decay, and they would then be held to have become “sokushinbutsu”, “Buddhas in their very bodies”. The

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result is understood by devotees as an extraordinary exhibition of transcendence and bodily integrity (which is entirely vitiated should the body succumb to rot). The resulting “objects” (I use the word in relation to an outsider’s viewpoint) then become the focus of veneration, and, since the soul is alive and transcendent, as active forces in social life. It can be seen, therefore, that there are some similarities with the medieval cult of Christian relics. And just as in the shrines of medieval saints, so these bodies establish zones of sacred space providing opportunities for engagement between ordinary persons and transcendent beings. These ascetics chose their fate. The potential for the body may lie not just in the ways in which it can grow or transform, but in the location and degree of personal agency involved. McCarron presents us with narratives of people possessing limited agency. He discusses prison lives in which the surface of the bodies of prisoners is made to express via the medium of tattooing. An important shift appears to have occurred between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in so far as the themes of tattoos are no longer focussed upon “the possibility of bodily transcendence”, but, as depicted in recent narratives, suggest that “the overwhelming majority of them [the tatooees] believe that there is nothing to them but bodies” (229). Such prisoners are, it is argued, objects that have significance only when under observation. In this sense, the life/death boundary has been transcended. Reality is the enactment of forms of death when in life, as in the skull tattooed on the skin, or as a biker in Hall’s Prison Tatoos claims, “’death is no big deal… Most guys in here are just as good as dead. We eat, we sleep, we shit. But what’s that? They already took our life’” (1997: 12). Agency here operates in relation to the degree to which inmates are able to extend the meanings of their bodies through surface decoration. Imprisonment, and hence liberation, can, of course, take both physical and ideological forms. Budgeon conducts a detailed examination of ongoing feminist attempts to discuss and understand and enhance the lives of women and their embodied experiences. Female experience is understood in feminist narratives as having been, historically speaking, more or less influenced by male oppression, distortion and appropriation. Attempts to redress the balance are, of necessary, implicated in such narratives, in that their reason for existence is partly to correct past inequality and this at least implies some sort of unequal performance in a gendered struggle for ideological and practical dominance. One approach taken by some feminists has been to return to the body; to celebrate its potential and materiality as being something “pre-social”, as a core of magnificent reality that has been obscured by misogynist discourse. Others, as Budgeon points out, (249) embrace a view of radical social construction in which the female body can be culturally reconstructed into positions of

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empowerment. Both approaches can also be divided between those that wish to posit a mind that is transcendent of both body and gender, as the latter approach can sometimes suggest, or else to emphasise that male and female bodies in both their strength and weakness need to be foregrounded. Budgeon concludes by propounding the idea that both approaches are valid, so as to “engage with women’s embodied agency as it is located within specific locations and sets of practices” (250). In other words we can think with the body, in all its fleshy glory, and in its socially constructed temporal context. Whilst Budgeon traces the complexities of feminist strategies of theoretical engagement with the body, Kotef does this and something more, commenting that “like any other subject, women are constructed by complex, overlapping, and shifting grids of discourses” of which feminist theorising is one (268). This paper emphasises that studying such phenomena may not ultimately result in some sort of perfect “understanding” of past and self. Nevertheless, such struggles are not simply an ongoing enactment of evolving forms of hermetic criticism. Kotef’s paper is about a struggle for freedom, both ideological and also physical, as represented by the nineteenth-century, dress-reform movement. In material terms the paper is about bloomers: “a dress, composed of loose trousers that narrowed at the ankles, covered by a skirt the often only covered the knees” (254). The aim was, quite literally, to enable women to move more easily and even, should they wish, to be able to visibly part their legs in public just like men. The resulting furore and ultimate abandonment of the dress has been understood in terms of, firstly, an attempt to liberate women from bodily encumbrances or, secondly, a moment when there was an unusual focus on bodiliness in the context of female emancipation in which women wanted to focus attention on the stifled potential of their bodies or, thirdly, the moment when the ideal of transcending the female body was produced as the result of “an agonising sacrifice” (268). From this point it was decided that reform of female appearance would be abandoned and energy focussed on the notion of mental equivalence to men and the demand, coming in the wake of this assertion, for the vote.

Conclusion The theme of the last essay brings us back to the underlying issue of why we are here: if it is not to perpetuate a pre-existing consensus, is it simply to engage in a form of conversation, a minority discourse in which conceptions of the body are comfortably relegated to the role of symbolic traces of the real business of academic career progression? Hopefully not. Out there, beyond the recondite delights of reading and reasoning, there are bodies that are not just symbols of something else; bodies that are culturally constrained when they need not be,

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that are misunderstood when they need not be. The papers of this volume cannot provide a programme for the potential and future of the body through its necessarily limited investigations of the past. Above all, there has not been space to engage with every important issue: most notably, the volume does not engage with the problems of the medically diseased body (Porter, 2001: particularly chapters 3 and 4, provide a useful introduction to several key issues). What this volume can hope to achieve, however, is to aid the imagining of forms of cultural health for the body. Such states that transcend prior limitations and disabilities could, and I would argue, should, take many forms. This agenda is not simply about perfecting a salvation narrative of rebirth such as that which puzzled the initial viewers of Stanley Kunbrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey: reviewers had gone into the screening expecting a traditional drama of human crisis, love, hate, battle and resolution up among the stars. What they got was one man’s obsessively detailed, multi-million dollar waking dream of humankind’s evolutionary and technical destiny… [which ends with] one of cinema’s most extraordinary images of hope and wonder: the benevolent wide-eyed starchild at the film’s end, all wisdom and compassion (Bizony, 2000: 15-16).

In Arthur C. Clarke’s novelisation of the screenplay he wrote jointly with Kubrick, the human who has been reborn as a result of an alien-encounter returns to earth and saves the planet from nuclear destruction (Clarke, 1968: 223). This collection of papers does not, I am afraid, point to such a single amazing solution as being on its way to us courtesy of either alien or human science. As Blake knew, we must work for our own bodily revolution. We do not, of course, all want to, or need to, come to resemble the perkily youthful, male, English pinkness of Blake’s eighteenth-century starchild (fig. 1.1). Our “metanthropoi”, these papers suggest, can be extraordinarily diverse. In this volume we find men, women, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, feminists, whites, blacks, albinos, tattooed prisoners, grieving relatives and medically enhanced patients displaying, defending, understanding and extending their bodies in ways which may give us ideas for the future of our own.

Acknowledgements I must thank all the contributors, the organising committee and all the other participants of the Bodies Past workshop on which this volume was based. Special tribute must go to the then Director of the Birkbeck Institute for Humanities, Prof. Donna Dickenson. Thanks are also due to the Trustees of the British Museum for permission to reproduce Blake’s “Albion Rose” and to Andrew Rudd for reading the final text of this introduction.

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Works Cited Bizony, Piers, 2001: Imagining the Future (London: Aurum Press, 2000). Butlin, Martin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake: Text (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). Canning, Kathleen, “The body as method? Reflections on the place of the body in gender history”, Gender and History 11 (1999), pp. 499-513. Clarke, Arthur C., 2001: a Space Odyssey (London: Hutchinson, 1968). Dutton, Kenneth R., The Perfectible Body: the Western Ideal of Physical Development (London: Cassell, 1995). Eder, M. D., “Good breeding or eugenics,” The New Age, May 16th (1908), p. 47. Engelstein, Stefani, “The regenerative geography of the text in William Blake”, Modern Language Studies 20 (2000), pp. 61-86. Gruber, Howard E., “Darwin on man, mind and materialism”, in R. W. Rieber, ed., Body and Mind: Past, Present and Future (New York: Academic Press, 1980), pp. 79-115. Hall, Douglas, Prison Tattoos (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). Howard, Seymour, “William Blake: the Antique, nudity and nakedness: a study in idealism and regression”, Artibus et Historiae 3 (1982), pp. 117-49. Hubbard, Philip, Sex and the City: Geographies of Prostitution in the Urban West (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999). Macfie, Ronald Campbell, Metanthropos, or the Body of the Future (London: Kogan Page, 1928). Porter, Roy, Bodies Politic: Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain, 1650-1900 (London: Reaktion, 2001). Turner, Bryan S., “The body in western society: social theory and its perspectives”, in. ed. Sarah Coakley, Religion and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 15-41.

CHAPTER TWO THE BODY AS A MACHINE: DESCARTES, SHERLOCK HOLMES AND ROBOTS PIERRE CASSOU-NOGUÈS

My paper is mainly concerned with Descartes’ representation of the body as a machine. It aims at contrasting this Cartesian machine with images of “robots” in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. As is well known, Descartes distinguishes the mind, which is a thinking substance, and the body, which he considers as a machine. In a way (and that has been discussed by various philosophers) this distinction between mind and body, with the definition of the body as a machine, is a consequence of the new physics that emerged at the turn of the seventeenth century.1 Descartes, taking the full scope of this new physics, seemed to open up a new era for philosophy in which we still live. I will argue, however, that the Cartesian representation of the body as a machine, with its specific characteristics, has somehow been abandoned. We now have a different image of the body as a machine. As various examples in science fiction show, we may still see the body as a machine but we tend to give different characteristics to it. That also leads to a shift in the mind-body problem. Considering the body as a machine, Descartes is led to a whole series of questions: for example, how do I know that the person in front of me is indeed a human being and not a machine (a robot as we would say) pretending to be human? The machine as a representation of the body is always also a possible representation of the human being, body and mind. It is true of Descartes’ machines, and it is true of the robots of science fiction. In fact, several times, especially in his correspondence, Descartes makes thought experiments, which could easily be (and in fact have been) turned into science-fiction stories. However, these stories, in science fiction, would hardly end with the same conclusion. Descartes’ machine no longer appeals to us as it did to the philosophy and the literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It has 1

For a recent discussion, Putnam (1999).

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become uncongenial to our imagination. I will contrast two images of the manmachine: one that is defined in Descartes’ texts and a second one that appears in literature in the second half of the nineteenth century and, in particular, in science fiction.2 What then distinguishes the Cartesian idea of the body-machine from ours? I will delineate my theses and come back to the texts later on. First, the paradigm of the machine as a representation of the body, in Descartes, is a clock, an automaton that, once set in motion, as it is wound up, seems to act by itself. On the other hand, when we speak of a robot, we rather imagine a calculating machine, a computer. The robot, it is true, is not simply a computer, but its central part is a computer. What distinguishes different generations of robots in science-fiction novels is essentially their brain, the computer that animates the various parts of the machine. Moreover, Descartes admits that a machine could express any kind of emotions or what he calls passions. That includes hunger, cunning, anger, fear or love.3 What distinguishes human beings from machines is language (speech). Machines, according to Descartes, cannot use language or cannot use language normally. Now, generally, our robots, in science fiction, have the opposite characteristics. They can use language (they speak, they reason, they may even joke), but they cannot show emotions. Though one can find counter examples, the image of the robot that circulates in science fiction is apathic (without passion). The human being is no longer defined by its language but by its emotions. On one hand, we have a clock, which is mute but can express love for its master, or distress when it unwinds. On the other hand, we have a computer, which can talk to us but remains impassive. My point is that the mute but sympathetic clock is no longer a plausible image for us. It also follows that, if one may speak of a mind-body problem in literature, the problem of finding out what makes a human a human is no longer the same as it was for Descartes. The problem is no longer to unite the machine with a mind that would explain the use of language, which a machine by itself cannot produce. The problem is rather to find out how emotions may come to a body, which, apparently, could still be a machine.4 I will try to give textual evidence for this shift in our images 2

The term “man-machine” was coined by La Mettrie (L’homme-machine, 1748); the term “robot” was coined by R. Capek in the play RUR in 1920. I will use these terms to refer to any machine (also in Descartes’ texts) that might imitate human behavior. 3 Descartes’ examples, in his letter to Morus, Feb. 5th 1649 (Descartes, 1953: 1318, 1320 ; Descartes, 1985: III, 360 and sqq.). 4 Descartes considers that speech is ”le seul signe certain d’une pensée latente dans le corps” (“the only certain sign of a thought hidden in the body”), To Morus, Feb. 5th 1649 (Descartes, 1953: 1320 ; Descartes, 1985 : III, 366). Language, or speech, is the only

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of the body as a machine. But, beforehand, I would like to make three more points. First remark: Descartes’ machine and the robot of science fiction are not the same device and it is not the same function that these machines lack. Now one thesis would be that this function, which the machine lacks, is itself projected into another figure. In Descartes’ texts, it is language that machines miss, or a certain kind of speech, and that speech is always referred to the figure of the madman. Incidentally, it shows that the figure of the madman has a function in Descartes’ epistemology. It is not simply an exteriority, a figure outside rationality and by the exclusion of which rationality is defined, as Foucault argued. This role given to the madman seems to bring us closer to Derrida’s interpretation (see below footnote 8). I will give some quotations later on. The discourse of the madman is, in Descartes’ texts, the paradigm of a speech that a machine will never master and that defines humanity. Now, in our literature, say in science fiction generally, machines lack emotions, desire in particular, and it seems to me that a good candidate for a figure of emotions, which would correspond to the figure of the robot, is the vampire. The character of the vampire as we know it, an aristocrat (“male” or “female”) who needs to seduce its victims before it can draw their blood, appears earlier, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but it seems afterwards to develop parallel to the new image of the man-machine, the apathic computer. The vampire seems to be the opposite of the robot: the vampire is essentially governed by its emotions (its desire for blood) whereas the robot only follows its reason. The opposition of the man-machine and the madman would then structure classical imagination whereas the opposition of the robot and the vampire would structure our imagination.5 Second remark: in this discussion, I only refer to the robot, a machine that imitates, as far as it can, human beings and constitutes an individual. However, there are in science fiction other kinds of machines, which, like Descartes’ machines, have something to do with the production of emotions. I am thinking in particular to the machines that enter into the constitution of the cyborg. The cyborg is a mixed entity, with both organic and mechanical components. Now, function that cannot be accounted for by the mechanism of the human body. It forces one to acknowledge the presence of a soul in the body of another. Emotions, or sympathy for other beings, in science-fiction seem sometimes to play the same role as speech in Descartes’ texts: “If a mechanical constructs halts in its customary operation to lend you assistance, then you will posit to it, gratefully, a humanity that no analysis of its transistors and relay systems can elucidate. A scientist, tracing the wiring circuits of that machine to locate its humanness, would be like our earnest scientists who tried in vain to locate the soul in man.” (Dick, 1995: 212). 5 At least, it is the thesis I defend in my book (Cassou-Noguès, forthcoming).

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as components of the cyborg, machines seem to take a new role. There is a whole corpus of texts around cyborgs that relates the mechanical components to the production of emotions and thus delineates another image of machines. That image is also at the center of the concept of the “desiring machine” in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. I will leave that image aside to concentrate on robots that are mechanical individuals.6 Third remark: I argue that our machines, contrarily to Descartes’ machines, may use language, I only refer to our image of machines, to the machines of literature, science fiction in particular. I do not mean that, since Descartes, we have been able to build machines that speak normally, or that we know that machines, in principle, may use natural language. That, obviously, is still a question for philosophy or cognitive science. However, generally speaking, the robots of science fiction may talk as well as human beings do. They can only be distinguished from human beings by their lack of emotion. The machine, as an image, is talkative but apathic. By an image, I understand a description, which appeals to us, even though its characteristics are not rationally justified. There seems to be a relative independence between images and knowledge. On one hand, images modify with knowledge and technology, as the whole development of science-fiction shows, but, on the other hand, images do not simply illustrate knowledge. We imagine talking machines, machines that use natural language although we do not know whether machines can use natural language. I will now try to substantiate these points by a few examples. Let us start with Descartes’ position. Descartes distinguishes the mind, which is a thinking substance, and the body. Descartes is convinced that all the functions of the body, breathing, digestion, the beating of the heart, can be explained in mechanical terms. The body then appears an automaton, a machine that, once wound up, acts by itself till it breaks or unwinds. The example that Descartes takes is almost always that of a clock: these functions [such as digestion of the food, the beating of the heart, etc.] follow from the mere arrangement of the machine’s organs every bit as naturally as the movements of a clock or other automaton follow from the arrangement of its counter-weights and wheels (Descartes, 1985: 108).

Again: 6 Similarly, I will ignore the gender of the robot. There are, of course, famous “female” robots such as in Hoffmann’s novella Der Sandmann, Hadaly, in Eve future from Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1886), Rachel Rosen, in Dick (1968). It is not clear however that these “female” robots have specific characteristics, except that “insensibility” that defines modern machines.

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the difference between the body of a living man and that of a dead man is just like the difference between, on the one hand, a watch or other automaton (that is, a self-moving machine) when it is wound up and contains in itself the corporeal principle of the movements for which it is designed, together with everything else required for its operation; and, on the other hand, the same watch or machine when it is broken and the principle of its movement ceases to be active (Descartes, 1985: 330).

It is clear in these texts that the model, for the body-machine, is the clock, an automaton that seems to act by itself. This image is not peculiar to Descartes, One also finds it in the introduction of Hobbes’ Leviathan. Now, according to Descartes, a human being is the union of a soul that is a thinking substance and a body. Descartes is then led to consider all animals as machines, since otherwise one would have to give them a soul. Therefore, every aspect of the behavior of animals must be considered as the result of their mechanism: this includes breathing and digestion, but also hunger, cunning, anger and, apparently, love. Descartes does not deny that animals do appear to have some kind of life, some sensibility or may express some emotions. He argues that these can be accounted for by mere mechanism.7 This question reappears with respect to human beings. Of course, I know that I am not simply a machine but also a soul, a thinking substance. I know that I think, and thought, as experienced in the first person, has to be referred to a thinking substance, a soul, beside the body. However, how do I know that the person whom I face is not a machine? The experience of thinking, in the first person, might assure this person that he or she is not a machine but this experience by itself does not communicate. It is then a problem, for Descartes, to find out whether it is possible to recognize from the outside a human being from a machine that would imitate human behavior. As in the case of animals, Descartes believes that the expression of natural “appetites” (hunger or thirst) and “passion” (joy, fear, love, anger) can in some case be accounted for mechanically and, therefore, could be reproduced by a machine. A robot, to use a term Descartes does not know, could show us his hunger or his love. It is only the use of language that distinguishes the human being from a machine or an animal. Descartes clearly separates the use of language from the expression of passions, which machines can imitate: “we must not confuse speech with the

7 “I am not disturbed by the astuteness and cunning of dogs and foxes, or by all the things which animals do for the sake of food, sex and fear; I claim that I can easily explain all of them as originating from the structure of their bodily parts.” Descartes also mentions “natural impulses of anger, fear, hunger, and so on” (To Morus, 5th Feb. 1649) (Descartes, 1985: III, 365-366).

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natural movements which express passions and which can be imitated by machines as well as by animals” (Descartes, 1985: 140). Or again: in fact, none of our external actions can show anyone who examines them that our body is not just a self-moving machine but contains a soul with thoughts, with the exception of spoken words, or other signs that have reference to particular topics [ou autres signes faits à propos des sujets qui se présentent] without expressing any passion. I say “spoken words or other signs”, because deaf-mutes use signs as we use spoken words; and I say that these signs must have reference [que ces signes soient à propos], to exclude the speech of parrots, without excluding the speech of madmen, which has reference to particular topics even thought it does not follow reason. I add also that these words or signs must not express any passion, to rule out not only cries of joy or sadness and the like, but also whatever can be taught by training to animals (Descartes to the Marquess of Newcastle, 23 November 1646) (Descartes, 1991: 302).

Of course, Descartes knows that an animal like a parrot can articulate a few words. He defines true human speech, which neither machines, nor animals can imitate, with two negative criteria. First, words must not be the exterior signs of an immediate passion (like the cry of joy, the “I am thirsty” of the child or the “hello” of the parrot which expects a candy). Second and more surprisingly, human speech must be able to be unreasonable, not to follow the laws of reason. A good example of this human speech, I think, would be wit (because wit neither expresses an emotion, neither follows logic). Descartes does not mention wit but he always refers this human speech to the madman. The discourse of the madman makes sense even though it might be both impassive and unreasonable. Thus the madman, as the keeper of true human speech, seems to become a peculiar figure in the Cartesian texts, opposite to that of the machine.8 Finally, Descartes is led to thought experiments that anticipate science fiction. In a letter to an anonymous correspondent, in 1638, Descartes imagines the following situation. A child is raised in a faraway land where he only meets human beings, such as his parents, and automata: automata in the shape of human beings and automata in the shape of small animals that are offered to the child for him to play with. There are no animals in this land, just humans and 8

The role of the figure of madness in Descartes’ metaphysics was at the centre of the controversy between Derrida and Foucault. In a nutshell, Foucault (Foucault, 1961: Part I, chapter V) argued that classical rationality (in particular, in Descartes) is defined by the exclusion of madness and, therefore, related to the social exclusion of madmen (with the multiplication of asylum). Derrida (Derrida, 1963), relying on the Méditations Métaphysiques, maintained that madness was incorporated into Descartes’ metaphysics. The text just quoted on language and machines seems to confirm Derrida’s position. Madness appears as an irreducible feature of humanity.

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machines. Of course, none of these machines are able to speak (they are Cartesian automata). So the child is used to distinguishing true human beings from human shaped automata by talking to them. If the figure answers him, with a meaningful discourse, he or she is a human being, if not it is an automaton. Now the child returns to his motherland, he discovers animals and applies to them the same criterion: they cannot speak, they must be machines. By this story, Descartes intends to show that it is by prejudice only that we are disinclined to consider animals as machines, so that another education, in different circumstances, would, on the contrary, lead us to see animals as machines. But let us replace the faraway land by a space ship and we have a science-fiction story. Still what would the conclusion of this new story be? When the child returns to Earth and meets his first animal, does he recognize something like himself that truly lives or does he just see another automaton? I think the “ideology”, the images that science fiction conveys would lead to a conclusion different from Descartes’. In science fiction, machines are defined by the absence of emotions. They are only set apart from human beings, and from truly living animals, by their inability to express emotions. So that animal machines always seem dead and can be distinguished from living animals at one glance or, so to speak, by instinct. It is true that when one starts thinking about it, one may become doubtful. Various tests have then been invented, in sciencefiction, to distinguish between robots and living beings. However, these tests are never completely safe, as if for knowledge the difference between living and mechanical beings could always be reduced to nothing. It is only a certain kind of emotion, a subtle and faint voice that tells the characters that, whatever says the test, the being in question is or is not a robot. There are numerous examples in P. K. Dick’s novels of the conflict between what an immediate knowledge, a sort of instinct, tells the characters and what the context leads them to think. In fact, Descartes’ story does reappear with this anticartesian conclusion in a science-fiction novel by P. K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?9 This novel is shot through with Cartesian references. Even the main character, the android hunter, seems to be a direct descendant of the philosopher: René Descartes, Rick Deckard, the names are too close for it to be simply a matter of 9

It is a dialogue between the android hunter, Rick Deckard, and Eldon Rosen. Rick Deckard has just given an “empathy” test to Rachel Rosen, which showed her lack of sympathy for animals. In fact, she appears to consider them as pure objects, inanimate things, as if they were machines. Her uncle then explains Rachel’s insensibility by her childhood. She has been raised on the Salander 3, a space ship, which carried only automata, beside the crew. She is the child that Descartes imagined. However, in Dick’s universe, her childhood does not account for her later insensibility. As we find out later on, Rachel is herself an automaton, without feelings and, therefore, unable to recognize feelings in other beings.

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coincidence. However, in Deckard’s world, it is emotion, and no longer speech, that distinguishes human beings and android automata. “Empathy” (a sympathy for other beings on which is based “Mercerism”, a religious experience en vogue in that twenty first century) unites all human beings and separates them from androids. Here emotion literally replaces language. Descartes believed that “Such speech is the only certain sign of thought hidden in a body. All human beings use it, however stupid and insane they may be, even thought they may have no tongue and organs of voice; but no animals do” (Descartes to Morus, 5th Feb. 1649) (Descartes, 1991: 366). In Deckard’s rougher words, “an android, no matter how gifted as to pure intellectual capacity, could make no sense out of th[is] fusion. […However, Mercerism is] an experience which he, and virtually everyone else, including subnormal chickenheads, managed with no difficulty” (Dick, 1968: 27). There would be many other examples, in science fiction, of the apathy of robots. However, one of the first instances of this new image of the manmachine is Sherlock Holmes. The scene takes place at the beginning of the second novel, featuring the detective, the Sign of Four. Miss Morton, who will become Doctor Watson’s wife, has just exposed her case to Holmes. Watson is stunned by her beauty, which his friend has not “observed”. Watson then understands the truth: “you really are an automaton – a calculating machine… There is something positively inhuman in you at times” (The Sign of Four, in Conan Doyle, 1981: 96). Watson also describes Holmes as “the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen” (A Scandal in Bohemia, in Conan Doyle, 1981: 161). In fact, the physician keeps notes of the times when the detective, working on a problem, takes this “composure, which made so many regard him as a machine rather than a man” (The Crooked Man, in Conan Doyle, 1981: 412). And the times when Holmes becomes human again, are when he is capable of feeling. It is usually vanity: “it was at such moments that for an instant he ceased to be a reasoning machine, and betrayed his human love for admiration and applause” (The Adventure of the Six Napoleons, in Conan Doyle, 1981: 593). Watson’s remarks make clear two points: first, the machine, as image of the human being, is now a calculating machine; second, it is both his intelligence and his a-pathy that relate Holmes to the calculating machine. Holmes uses language, he can be witty. The difference between the human and the machine no longer lies in speech but in emotions. With Dick, this lack of emotion will not only characterize machines as opposed to human beings but literally define what a machine is: “within the universe there exists fierce cold things, which I have given the name ‘machines’ to” (Dick, 1995: 211).

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The Cartesian image of a mute but sympathetic clock is no longer part of our imagination. It was a possible image of both the human and the animal body but it is no longer. It is a body of the past. Now, in this discussion, I have opposed Descartes’ image of the manmachine to “ours”. In fact, I have defined “our” image with reference to late nineteenth-century literature and science-fiction of the Golden Age. Even, in this period, there are counter-examples to the thesis that our machines do not feel. For example, the computer Hal, in A. C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, does have feelings. Nevertheless, it requires from the writer some explanation to have us believe that a computer has feeling. It does not come “naturally”, so to speak. The usual robot, the robot in the most immediate sense, is apathic, without feelings. It is particularly clear in Azimov’s stories. Another question is whether what I have called “our” image, by contrast to Descartes’, is not already a body of the past. It is remarkable that contemporary science-fiction involves few robots in this sense, and when it does, these robots are introduced with distance and irony. The mechanical beings of contemporary science fiction are more complicated: the androids, the inhabitants of the matrix in Cyber-punk, the desiring machines, opposed to the body without organs in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. It then seems that contemporary literature involves yet another image of the body in relation to the machine. It would probably not be the body as a machine but the body with its machine. This new image would rather focus on the relationship in a living body between “artificial” and “natural” parts. To define this new turn would definitely require another discussion. But, to a certain extent, what I called, in the present paper, “our” image is losing its predominance. We have imagined our body as a mute but sympathetic clock, we have imagined our robots as talkative but apathic computers, and it remains to see with what we are left as the robots become fully aware and alive.

Works Cited Cassou-Noguès, Pierre, Une histoire de machines, de vampires et de fous (Paris: Vrin, forthcoming c.2007). Conan Doyle, Arthur, The Complete Sherlock Holmes (London: Penguin, 1981). Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix, Anti-Oedipus (Paris: Minuit, 1972). Derrida, Jacques, L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967). Descartes, René, Œuvres et lettres, (Paris: Gallimard, 1953). —. The Philosophical Writings, vol. 1, trans. Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). —. The Philosophical Writings, vol. 3, trans. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

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Dick, Philip K., Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (London: Millennium, 1999). —. The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick (New-York: Vintage Books, 1995). Foucault, Michel, Histoire de la folie, (Paris: Gallimard, 1972). Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929). La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, L’homme-machine (Paris: Denoël-Gonthier, 1981). Putnam, Hillary, The Three Fold Cord (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1999). Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Auguste, L’Eve future (Paris : Garnier-Flammarion, 2000).

CHAPTER THREE THE BEARD AND VICTORIAN IDEAS OF MASCULINITY JACOB MIDDLETON

One of the most important features of Victorian discussions of gender was the concept of “manliness”. As the academic Norman Vance observed, manliness was an almost wholly positive trait; by being manly one distinguished oneself from the childish or effeminate and the word, according to Vance, carried “connotations of physical and moral courage and strength and vigorous maturity” (Vance, 1985: 8). Masculinity and the concept of manliness were an important part of Victorian discourse. It was, in the words of Andrew Dowling, “natural and obvious”, an unquestioned part of Victorian culture (Dowling, 2001: 1). Manliness was, and remains, a problematic concept in its intangibility. The concept is without easy definition for the modern historian. Equally, the Victorian male was left with the problem of how to indicate his masculinity. Some men turned to athletic pursuits; this subject has attracted considerable attention from historians, who have noted that, in the Victorian era, “Masculinity and sport went hand in hand” (Huggins and Mangan, 2004: 209). Others chose to indulge in alcohol and boisterous behaviour. Such behaviour transcended classes, leading the novelist Wilkie Collins to complain of the “rough with the clean skin and the good coat on his back” (Collins, 1999: 6). Masculinity was, it seems, very much a question of behaviour. The response of historians has been to concentrate largely upon gender relations and domestic life, where the contrast between male and female roles has highlighted masculinity (Francis, 2002: 637). The dominant methodology of historians has been the relational approach, which explores manliness as defined by its relations with those individuals and groups within society seen as lacking masculinity (Roper and Tosh, 1991: 12-13). However, a limitation of this approach is that it is largely subjective, relying on an individual’s perceptions of others, through their interactions with class and society, or their perception of the self, through inner reflection (Harvey and Shepard, 2005: 275). Whilst the

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relational approach is a valid and useful way of understanding masculinity, it neglects those aspects of masculinity that were not dependent upon interactions in society. One aspect of masculinity that has been marginalised by this approach is its physical nature and historians have rarely taken into account the quantifiable physical differences between men and women. In recent years this problem has become more noticeable; for instance, John Tosh has highlighted this issue in his recent review of masculinity in industrial societies, noting the importance of physical difference to historical conceptions of manliness (Tosh, 2005: 336). By looking at the body it becomes possible to identify conceptions of manliness not apparent through social relations. Perhaps the most important physical indicator of masculinity during the nineteenth century was the beard. Although it had been normal for most men to shave in the early part of the nineteenth century, the beard made a return to popularity during the 1840s and 1850s. The effect of this sudden interest was such that the medical writer George Sexton was led to comment that: the advocates of the beard… sprung upon every hand in such numbers, wielded such powerful weapons, and produced such an extensive practical effect upon society, that those of us who did not feel disposed to convert our razors into carving-knives appeared to stand in danger of being completely overwhelmed by our ferocious-looking hirsute antagonists (Sexton, 1858: 29-30).

Whilst Sexton’s comments may seem exaggerated, the concerted debate over the value of beards was a surprisingly important social issue during the middle of the nineteenth century. Although the debate focused upon health, religion and practicality, the discussion of beards always would return to the subject of masculinity; for the Victorian male, the beard was an important indicator of manliness.

The Revolt Against Shaving In the mid-nineteenth century it was observed that Victorian society considered it “an offence against society, an offence against good taste, and almost an offence against morality” not to shave (Artium Magister, 1867: 3). The response to this belief can be seen in the works of a number of Victorian writers who, under a variety of pseudonyms, set forth arguments in favour of the beard, such as in Xerxes’ Folly and Evil of Shaving or Artium Magister’s Apology for the Beard. The debate on shaving had become sufficiently prominent in Victorian society that, by the early 1850s, it could be claimed as “a recognised individuality among our social agitations” (David, 1854: 3). A common factor amongst many of these works is their reference to religion.

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Although Christianity does not lay down any explicit rules on the subject of shaving popular religious imagery in Western Europe has always portrayed many key biblical figures as bearded. The beard, by association had a popular association with piety quite separate from organised religion. One example of this can be found in John Nichol Tom’s failed attempt to lead a millennial uprising in rural Kent in 1838; when investigators later asked why the local population had so readily believed Tom’s claims they found that, with his long, luxuriant beard, Tom matched the popular image of a prophet (Liardet, 1839: 97). If the middle-classes were less likely to be lead to violent insurrection by the sight of a beard, they were still capable of associating facial hair with individual piety (Theologos, 1860: 21). The clean-shaven men of Western Europe were compared unfavourably with bearded Greeks, Turks and Jews who, for all their religious errors, were considered to be devout (Theologos, 1860: 24-25; Henslowe, 1847: 5-6). This image of the pious oriental could be used to pour scorn upon a society in which men were mostly shaven. Shaving was seen as nothing more than a fashion, one which had replaced the practices of former eras when men were closer to God (David, 1854: 12-14). The religious arguments in favour of the beard relied largely on the idea that, if God had created the beard, it must necessarily be a mistake to shave as, by doing so, one would be thwarting God’s purpose (Artium Magister, 1867: 16; Henslowe, 1847: 7). In this context, shaving on a Sunday was particularly reprehensible. One writer, going by the pseudonym “Theologos”, suggested that Sunday shaving was a particularly serious matter and was, according to the title of his book, a “hindrance to the spread of the Gospel” (Theologos, 1860: 4). Criticisms of this kind drew angry responses; one Bristol barber, Mr. Davidge, complained that, were this true, “many churchmen would be guilty of wickedness” adding that he had previously shaved the Bishop of Bath and Wells on a Sunday (“A Nice Question”, 1861: 5). Although commentators were certain that God had created the beard for a purpose, they were less than certain as to what this purpose might be. To simply assert that shaving was morally wrong was an insufficient reason for growing a beard. Therefore, whilst writers such as Artium Magister insisted that the beard was the product of a wise creator, they offered what they felt to be rational reasons not to shave (Artium Magister, 1867: 3, 9). The beard, it was argued, was “nature’s own covering” for the throat (Barbarturus, 1860: 10). Xerxes, for instance, claimed that an important reason for retaining the beard was that it was a product of the laws of nature; as nothing is produced by nature without purpose, man must be bearded for a reason, even if this reason is not readily apparent (Xerxes, 1854: 5). The processes of nature were seen as relentless and inescapable, ones that an individual would be foolish

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to resist. As one author claimed of nature: no law of hers was ever more distinctly uttered than that which ordains that hair shall grow upon the lips of man; and when Fashion presumes to contravene that law, and to require of man that he shall engage in a laborious contest with Nature, ending only when the coffin-lid is nailed over his shaven face, she is beyond her sphere, and has no authority on which to claim obedience (David, 1854: 5).

The idea of natural law was important in suggesting that the proponents of the beard were impartial observers, free of personal prejudice in their advocacy of the beard. For instance, one writer working under the pseudonym of “Natural Philosopher” introduced his work on the “sin and folly of shaving” with a denial that he is concerned with the propriety, or lack thereof, in shaving, but in establishing that the activity was opposed to the laws of nature (Natural Philosopher, 1860: 3). Similarly David concludes his work with a statement that the beard was bestowed on man by God with good purpose, but argues that objections to the beard are not unholy, but unreasonable, and acknowledging the value of the beard was a matter of common sense (David, 1854: 11-12, 16).

Fashion, Masculinity and the Practicality of Shaving Although the reasons for wishing to grow a beard might, in this way, be ideological, it was necessary by the nineteenth century to give some rational justification for the practice. The reasons given varied greatly and the opponents of shaving were prepared to seize upon any excuse to abandon the razor. Xerxes, for example, complains that the “time, trouble and expense” of shaving is good enough reason not to, whilst HM notes the scarcity of barbers who have achieved “great eminence in the world” (Xerxes, 1854: 6; H.M., 1886: 7). Possibly the most unusual argument was made by William Henry Henslowe who described shaving as a “fatal fashion”, suggesting that the prevalence of razors was a cause of murder and suicide (Henslowe, 1847: 7). Questioning shaving on the grounds of practicality is less unreasonable than it might at first appear. The safety razor had yet to be invented and the maintenance and use of a razor required considerable time and skill. As one wholesaler of shaving products pointed out, it was preferable to have one’s limb removed with a blunt instrument than to shave everyday with a blunt razor (Teetgen, 1844: 5). Even the proponents of shaving admitted that it was a less than pleasant practice; George Sexton noted that anyone who willingly “submits to the torture every morning of scraping his face with a razor is capable of enduring any amount of hardship you can conceive” (Sexton, 1858: 35). Such considerations did not figure prominent in the arguments of those who

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favoured the beard. Although these practical considerations might be a good reason not to shave, they were seen as helping the individual develop the manly virtues of care, patience and insensitivity to pain (Southey, 1849: 395). However, most writers felt more comfortable arguing against the razor for the reason that the beard promoted public health. By using such arguments, opponents of shaving could combine an idea that God had created the beard for a purpose with concrete and practical reasons for not shaving. The most common variant on this is the idea that the beard, and particularly the moustache, forms a kind of “natural respirator”, which protected the respiratory system and mouth; although this notion was questioned by medical authorities it was a popular idea during the middle of the nineteenth century (Xerxes, 1854: 5; Natural Philosopher, 1860: 5; David, 1854: 9; Theologos, 1860: 12-13; Artium Magister, 1867: 36-37; Henslowe, 1847: 14; Gowing, 1850: 5; Brough, 1854: 5; Sexton, 1858: 33). One correspondent to The Times claimed that an acquaintance was cured of a severe pulmonary illness, which had previously caused him to spit blood, after he ceased shaving (Barbarturus, 1860: 10). These beliefs drew heavily on the fears of the period, in which massive industrial and urban growth had tainted the environment. The journal Household Words, in advocating the advantages of the beard, noted that the post-mortem examinations had found that the lungs of those living in industrial cities were discoloured by the pollutants they had breathed (“Why shave?”, 1853: 563). By growing a beard a man might protect himself from this danger. The beliefs surrounding health and facial hair are less irrational than they might at first appear. Despite scientific advances, the means by which diseases were transmitted were still poorly understood. Observations could easily be extrapolated into scientific laws, without an understanding of underlying principles. Doctors had long observed the poor condition of hair during serious illness (Fish, 1851: 2-3); the opponents of shaving reversed this proposition and claimed that damaging hair could harm one’s health and urged their readers not to shave. Throughout the nineteenth century it was suggested that shaving might be the root cause of many medical complaints that affected the face. One writer implied that shaving caused localised paralysis and might be a cause of cancerous tumours on the face (H.M., 1886: 9). Another recorded the suggestion that shaving the upper lip damaged the eyes in some unspecified manner, though admitted the belief could only be founded “on the authority of some clairvoyant” (David, 1854: 8). Such arguments were found to be unsatisfactory, and proponents of the beard sought for rational reasons why shaving might have a negative effect upon the health. Xerxes, for example, quite reasonably noted that shaving frequently results in small cuts to the face “thereby opening a door for cutaneous diseases to enter the system” (Xerxes, 1854: 5-6). Xerxes argued,

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not unreasonably, that such injuries might easily become infected and endanger the health of the shaver. Despite Xerxes’ eminently rational suggestion, writers on the beard were more interested in what they believed was its role in respiration. It was claimed, for instance, that the growth of the beard was a form of respiration, which extruded harmful carbon from the body (“Why shave?”, 1853: 561) This argument reveals an important aspect of the debate about shaving, which was the manner in which beards were conceived of as an indicator of gender roles. Women might have essential biological similarities to men, but did not grow beards; it was noted that God had not intended women to work and, as a result, chose not to cover their faces with the protective covering of the beard (“Why shave?”, 1853: 562). It was, in fact, frequent for writers to suggest that the biological differences between the sexes were specifically for the purpose of reinforcing gender roles in society. The beard was, in particular, used to support this claim (Natural Philosopher, 1860: 6). Men were intended for the hardships of physical work and were expected to protect women, who, by implication, need not grow beards (Gowing, 1850: 11-12). These ideas were emphasised by the popular association between facial hair and manly military professions (David, 1854: 4). At the beginning of the Victorian period the bearded man in Britain would mostly likely be a soldier or a foreigner (“The moustache”, 1843: 6). The soldier was, however, an icon of masculinity and, as interest in manliness grew throughout the Victorian period, so did the popularity of facial hair. Whilst it would be impossible to put a precise date on this shift, late Victorian commentators dated it to the period after the Crimean War, an event that helped to create a popular image of the heroic and bearded soldier (Price, 1894: 5). The adoption of this most military of symbols was popular because it required little actual effort from the individual concerned. In the mid-nineteenth century, the moustache and beard were commonly seen as pretensions of youth, cultivated by young men to stress their masculinity. Although the beard was linked with manly work, it was popular amongst all classes, with one satire complaining that “now all classes have left off shaving there’s no telling a duke from a dustman” (Brough, 1854: 7). It was debated as to whether beards were nothing more than the pretension of the office clerk and whether it was reasonable to discriminate against those men who refused to shave (Price, 1894: 5-6; “The Moustache”, 1843: 7). Young men saw particular difficulties when working for those organisations aware of their public image; Anglican bishops, for instance, condemned the “development of beards and whiskers” amongst their junior clergy, whilst the Bank of England allegedly prohibited its employees from wearing moustaches “during office hours” (“Bishops on

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Beards”, 1860: 6). This preoccupation with masculinity and the role of men reveals one of the important anxieties of early Victorian society, the role of men in an industrialising world (Rosen, 1994: 20-21). A growing urban middle-class was finding themselves dislocated from what were seen as traditional, manly professions; physical labour, meanwhile, was becoming seen as an integral part of the image of masculinity during the mid-Victorian period (Sussman, 1995: 39-40). Facial hair became a means of identifying with this masculine ideal. The office clerk might cultivate the image of a soldier or adventurer by the simple expedient of growing a beard.

Manliness, Effeminacy and Empire This desire for manliness was, in part, driven by a fear of effeminacy. The effeminate man was treated by Victorian society with suspicion and effeminacy was seen as a wholly undesirable trait. This concept was quickly adopted by the proponents of the beard, who argued that growing a beard was the best method by which one could gain a manly appearance. It was argued that the “chief object of nature is planting hair on man’s face is to distinguish him from woman” (Natural Philosopher, 1860: 7). To shave, then, was effeminate and it was feared that those who shaved were deliberately cultivating a feminine appearance (David, 1854: 7; Artium Magister, 1867: 80). Moreover, it was argued that shaving was not merely a sign of the effeminate man, but also could be a cause of effeminacy. Xerxes, for example, was to suggest that shaving could lead to the nervous system becoming “deranged”, which in turn would lead men to develop the typically feminine traits of timidity and bashfulness (Xerxes, 1854: 6). This was conclusively proved, it was suggested, by scientific experiments in which quadrupeds were found to be disturbed by being forcibly shaved (Xerxes, 1854: 6). The beard was thus a “badge of manly dignity” and could only be forsaken at great risk (David, 1854: 15). Societies that transgressed this natural law could find themselves in great peril. For instance, an important theme in the work of T.S. Gowing was how empires rose and fell by the length of their beards (Gowing, 1850: 4-5). His writing traced the decline of Rome through the hardy and bearded inhabitants of the republican era, to the shaven and feeble men of the later empire, via the debauched and beardless Julius Caesar (Gowing, 1850: 35-36). Shaving and the decadence of Rome was, in fact a common theme; William Henslowe was to claim that barbers were first brought into Rome from abroad, an imported foreign decadence, whilst Artium Magister went as far as to suggest that the collapse of the Roman Empire was related to their shaving, an activity inseparably linked to effeminacy (Henslowe, 1847: 10; Artium Magister, 1867:

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11-12). The ruminations on the state of Rome were particularly relevant in a period when Britain was building an empire. Parallels could be drawn between the effeminate Romans of the later empire and the unmanly Britons of the contemporary world. These notions were reinforced by historical narratives of how the beard had fared in Britain. It was, for instance, a common suggestion that shaving was not a practice native to Britain, but had been introduced by the Norman kings, who despotically forced their subjects to go without beards (Xerxes, 1854: 4; Gowing, 1850: 36; David, 1854: 13). It was even suggested that the Saxons noble who fled Britain after the Battle of Hastings, were fleeing to avoid the cruel tyranny of shaving (H.M., 1886: 33). It was extrapolated from this, and other events in British history, that wearing a beard was a sign of a good king, whilst a clean-shaven monarch should inspire deep suspicion (H.M., 1886: 33-34). The claimed importance of the beard to Victorian masculinity thus drew heavily upon images of the beard throughout British history. These notions could be strengthened by parallels from other cultures, from which general rules on the importance of the beard were argued. As one writer argued, in “many nations and through many centuries, development of beard has been thought indicative of the development of strength, both bodily and mental” (‘Why shave?”, 1853: 560). To support this, histories were recited in which the natural rulers of society were found to have long beards, whilst the ignoble commoners shaved (Henslowe, 1847: 9). One writer stated that the beard reemerged from under the veneer of civilisation with every European struggle for independence, so great was its association with freedom (H.M., 1886: 29). Liberty was seen as a natural state to which man should aspire, whilst a beard was seen as a natural facial adornment. This freedom need not be in a political sense. One manly trait in the midnineteenth century was the courage to resist fashion (Brookes, 1859: 104). To grow a beard contrary to prevailing fashions was, therefore, was not just a sign of physical masculinity but also of a manly character. Those who succumbed to the practice of shaving were, conversely, the metaphorical slaves of both fashion and the barber (Henslowe, 1847: 8; “Why shave?”, 1853: 11). The popular narrative created around the history of the beard was one of a heavily romanticised past, in which the bearded ancestors of the Britons would fight their clean-shaven oppressors, such as the Romans or the Normans. It was only in modern times that men had been lead astray, and risked losing their manliness by the whims of fashion. Such a history was necessarily highly selective and heavily criticised by those with a vested interest in shaving. One notable critic was John Teetgen, a retailer of shaving tackle and author of an 1844 pamphlet on the proper manner in which men should shave. The pamphlet set out to show that shaving was a

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perfectly natural practice, with Teetgen pointing out that “shaving has been a practice almost as long as beards have grown” (Teetgen, 1844: 29). Another writer, going by the pseudonym “London Hair-Dresser”, was to argue that the historic popularity of beards was as much a fashion as shaving was in the midnineteenth century (London Hair-Dresser, 1844: 5).

The Rise and Fall of the Beard If the beard was nothing more than a fashion, a return to popularity was not unreasonable to expect, as fashions are constantly changing. Although many writers during the 1840s and 1850s were lamenting the fact that the beard was out of favour, the historical evidence shows that this period was the start of an era of renewed popularity for facial hair. The evidence for this is provided by sociologist Dwight E. Robinson’s survey of images of men pictured in the Illustrated London News between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. Robinson found that the beard grew significantly in popularity from the mid-1850s, being most popular during the early 1890s, whilst the moustache continued to grow in popularity until 1919 (Robinson, 1976: 1135-1136). It is unlikely to be a coincidence that the beginning of this period of popularity was at a time when many writers were advocating facial hair. It seems equally unlikely, however, that their works caused this upsurge in popularity and there is little evidence to suggest that the beard was a popular literary subject. Many writers were forced to publish their thoughts on the subject privately, with one writer even complaining of the “tyranny of publishers” who had evidently shown no interest in his work (H. M., 1886: 1) Instead it seems likely that these authors were responding to the growing interest in masculinity and manliness during this period. This popularity was aided by the Crimean War, an event that helped to associate manliness and the beard. As Robinson was to note, the popularity of facial hair was to increase from the time of the war and was not to peak until the end of the First World War (Robinson, 1976: 1135-1136). It is clear, then, that the beard was used as a signifier of masculinity during the nineteenth century. More problematic is the question of why it was so widely embraced as a symbol of manliness. The beard was not the sole means of signifying masculinity during the period; advocates of muscular Christianity such as Charles Kingsley felt confident to assert their masculinity by their deeds, without needing to resort to physical adornment. Conversely, the dandy, another highly masculine stereotype of the period, felt comfortable to express his masculinity through his clothes, style and virility. The advocates of the beard saw the dandy as effeminate; even when cultivating the moustache the dandy was seen as motivated by a “foppish desire of personal adornment” (David,

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1854: 15-16). There is no question, however, that adopting the role of the dandy was one means by which nineteenth century men could express their masculinity. Nor was the beard a clearly positive symbol. During the 1850s, before it had become broadly popular throughout society, facial hair in general and the moustache in particular were seen as signs of youthful rebellion. One doctor was to complain that moustached medical students distinguished themselves as “the idlest, the vainest, and the most self-conceited” he came into contact with (‘Uses of a moustache”, 1850: 5). Over time wider society came to accept the beard. In the words of George Price, what had once been met with “horror and disgust”, had now been transformed into respectability; Price delighted in the fact that, though the work of the portrait artist, the image of the bearded Victorian patriarch would be preserved for posterity (Price, 1894: 6-7). These later Victorian paintings, created at a time when the beard was respectable, play an important role in how we imagine the era; it is easy to forget that in the early Victorian period the beard could be a radical fashion statement. Despite these issues, the beard soon became a preferred means of displaying one’s masculinity, aided by two important contributory factors. Firstly, the beard was a romantic symbol. As is evident from the work of mid-Victorian writers on the subject, it conjured up images of past eras and freedom, as well as feeding into images of the natural states of man. It was also favoured, for largely practical reasons, by explorers, adventurers and soldiers, which contributed to its glamour. An individual might exploit this popular imagery simply by growing a beard; when the Victorian showman Albert Smith launched a speaking tour on the subject of his 1851 ascent of Mont Blanc, he grew a rugged beard in order to fit better the romantic image of the mountaineer (Fleming, 2000: 159). It was, of course, considerably easier to grow a beard than climb a mountain and this fact reveals the second advantage that facial hair had over other means of displaying one’s manliness, its ease of adoption. To tap in to the popular imagery surrounding the beard one need do nothing more than cease shaving. It was also a clear and unambiguous symbol of masculinity. The physical manliness promoted by authors such as Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes certainly played an important part in developing Victorian notions of masculinity; however, their “Muscular Christianity” was not as demonstrative as the act of growing a beard and required both greater effort and confidence. In contrast, it was the simplicity and ease of growing a beard that formed its appeal. It was a measure that one could adopt at any time in one’s adult life; as one author was to note, “in the matter of beards it is never too late to mend” (H.M., 1886: 44).

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Conclusion Although the value of the beard as a symbol of masculinity reveals some important reasons for its popularity in the late nineteenth century, this does not explain the preoccupation with facial hair during the 1840s and 1850s. For some writers, the beard was an issue of great importance. They frequently wrote their tracts on the subject in the fear that the popularity of the beard might never be re-established. As Artium Magister noted: the tyranny of custom is so great and the will of routine (though on some occasions so much condemned) so universal, that unless some great evil absolutely prevents either from holding unlimited sway common sense will never be heard. (Artium Magister, 1867: 38)

In actuality there was far less resistance to the beard than Artium Magister feared, but his tone reveals something of the strength of feeling on the subject. It seems likely that the interest in beards was driven by the particular need for symbols of manliness during the early part of the Victorian era. As the historian David Rosen has noted, the initial interest in the concept of manliness was triggered by the dislocation of traditional gender roles in the urbanisation and industrialisation of early nineteenth century Europe (Rosen, 1994: 20-21). Yet masculinity was poorly defined, even in the most basic senses. For instance, the historian John Tosh has noted that the “passage to manhood in middle-class England was marked by no common rite de passage” (Tosh, 1999: 122). However, whilst rituals may have been lacking, the acquisition of manhood would always be defined by the growth of facial hair. As one Victorian writer noted, the beard would first appear during the “most important natural change for man” at adolescence (Gowing, 1850: 4). As such, it was perhaps the easiest symbol of masculinity to which one could refer, a valuable trait in a culture which struggled to define manliness. A useful parallel can be made here to the Elizabethan period, an era during which men chose to define their masculinity by their facial hair. The academic Will Fisher has how, during this period, the beard was seen as a primary indicator of masculinity and a key defining feature that separated men from women and children (Fisher, 2001: 175). The period saw the development of a wide variety of beard styles, used as conscious statements about one’s manliness (Fisher, 2001: 159; Repton, 1839: passim). The most important aspect of the Elizabethan interest in beards is it shows that the Victorian preoccupation with facial hair was not unique. The beard was a natural symbol of masculinity that might be adopted whenever the cultural need presented itself. Moreover, it is a very tangible symbol. The Victorian interest in masculinity has been difficult to date and the dates given by historians have often been

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imprecise. David Rosen, for instance, has suggested that the interest was beginning as early as the 1830s, whilst J.A. Mangan and James Walvin have stated that the “cult of manliness” pervaded society between 1850 and 1940 (Rosen, 1994: 20-21; Mangan and Walvin, 1987: 2). However, if we accept that facial hair was an important symbol of masculinity, we can date the cult of manliness with far more precision; if we accept Robinson’s figures, we can see that the idea of manliness was a particularly important trait between the early 1850s and the end of the First World War. Whilst it is easy to see Victorian trends in facial hair as indicative of nothing more than fashion, the symbolic nature of the beard gives us an insight into nineteenth century conceptions of masculinity. The cult of manliness was an important feature of gender relations during the Victorian period and the contemporary interest in beards gives a new perspective upon this issue.

Works Cited Artium Magister, An Apology for the Beard; Addressed to Men in General, to the Clergy in Particular (London: Rivingtons, 1867). Barbaturus, “Clerical beards”, The Times, January 8th (1860). “Bishops on beards”, The Times, December 27th (1860). Brookes, John, Manliness (London: James Blackwood, 1859). Brough, Robert, The Moustache Movement, an Original Farce, in One Act (London: Thomas Hailes Lucy, 1854). Collins, Wilkie, Man and Wife (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). “David”, The Beard! Why do we Cut it Off? An Analysis of the Controversy Concerning it, and an Outline of its History (London: Thomas Bosworth, 1854). Dowling, Andrew, Manliness and the Male Novelist in Victorian Literature (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2001). Fish, H. F., Treatise on the Hair, its Structure, Production and Growth: a Synopsis of the Diseases to which it is Liable, with a History of the Customs Observed Respecting it, from Past Ages to the Present Time (Waterbury: n.p., 1851). Fisher, Will, “The renaissance beard: masculinity in early modern England”, Renaissance Quarterly 54 (2001), pp. 155-87. Fleming, Fergus, Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps (London: Granta Publications, 2000). Francis, Martin, “The domestication of the male? Recent research on nineteenth- and twentieth century British masculinity”, The Historical Journal 43 (2002), pp. 637-52. Gowing, T. S., The Philosophy of Beards (Ipswich: J. Haddock, 1850).

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H. M., Why Shave? Or, Beards v. Barbery (London: W. Odhams, 1886). Harvey, Karen and Shepard, Alexandra, “What have historians done with masculinity? Reflections on five centuries of British history, circa 1500 – 1950”, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005), pp. 274-280. Henslowe, William Henry, Beard-Shaving and the Common Use of the Razor, an Unnatural, Irrational, Unmanly, Ungodly, and Fatal Fashion Among Christians (London: William Edward Painter, 1847). Huggins, Mike and Mangan, J.A., “The dogs bark but the caravan moves on”, in eds. Mike Huggins and J.A. Mangan, Disreputable Pleasures: Less Virtuous Historians at Play (London and New York: Frank Cass, 2004), pp. 204-10. Liardet, F., “State of the peasantry in the county of Kent” in ed. Baldwin Duppa, Central Society of Education, Third Publication (London: Taylor and Walton, 1839), pp. 87-139. London Hair-Dresser, The Gentleman’s Companion to the Toilet, or a Treatise on Shaving (London: W. Strange, 1844). Mangan, J.A. and Walvin, James, Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America 1800-1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987). ‘The moustache”, The Times, May 2nd (1843). Natural Philosopher, An Essay on the Sin and Folly of Shaving (London: Thomas Scott, 1860). “A nice question”, The Times, April 19th (1861). Price, George, Ancient and Modern Beards (n.p., 1894). Repton, John Adey, Some Accounts of the Beard and the Moustachio, Chiefly from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (London: J.B. Nichols and Son, 1839). Robinson, Dwight E., “Fashions in shaving and trimming of the beard: the men of the Illustrated London News, 1842-1972”, American Journal of Sociology 81 (1976), pp. 1133-41. Roper, Michael and John Tosh, , Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain Since 1800 (London: Routledge, 1991). Rosen, David, “The volcano and the cathedral: muscular Christianity and the origins of primal manliness”, in ed. Donald E. Hall, Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 17-44. Sexton, George, The Hair and Beard and Diseases of the Skin (London: Gilbert, 1858). Southey, Robert, The Doctor (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1849). Sussman, Herbert, Victorian Masculinities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

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Teetgen, John, My Razor and Shaving Tackle! (London: J Stratford, 1844). Theologos, Shaving: A Breach of the Sabbath and a Hindrance to the Spread of the Gospel (London: Saunders, Otley, and Co., 1860). Tosh, John, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999). —. “Masculinities in an industrializing society: Britain, 1800 – 1914”, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005), pp. 330-42. “Uses of a moustache”, The Times, January 11th (1850). Vance, Norman, The Sinews of the Spirit: the Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). “Why shave?”, Household Words, August 13th (1853). Xerxes, The Folly and Evil of Shaving (London: Edward Stanford, 1854).

CHAPTER FOUR THE HISTORY OF THE FUTURE: THE CHANGING ROLE OF THE FUTURE 1 IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE GENDERED BODY MERAV AMIR

“Reproduction” has long been a central feature in regulating sexualities and gender identities. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, fundamental political, techno-scientific, social and cultural shifts took place, which changed the manner in which “reproduction” operates (Malson and Swann, 2003: 191; Marsh and Ronner, 1996; Coontz, 1992). This paper examines these transformations as they occurred in the United States, claiming new forms of biopolitical patterns have appeared, altering the dynamics of the construction of gender difference and regulating heteronormativity.2 More particularly, it maintains that the biological clock of the female reproductive system is one such construction, a form of imprinting the gender difference onto the body. The biological clock first appeared in the popular discourses in the United States

1

An earlier version of this paper was published in Polygraph 18 (2006). I use the term “heteronormativity” to describe the manner in which social institutions and cultural mechanisms support clusters of presuppositions about the natural sexual order. These presuppositions include the beliefs that individuals naturally fall into two distinct and complementary categories, male and female; that the social institution of marriage is rightfully privileged; that only heterosexual sexual relations are normal; that marriage should unite only a man and a woman; and that each gender has certain natural roles in life. Thus, according to these presuppositions, the alignment of biological sex, gender identity, and gender roles may be assumed in any given person according to male or female norms, and heterosexuality is considered to be the only normal sexual orientation (Berlant and Warner, 1998; Ingraham, 1994: 204).

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during the last two decades of the century and has since functioned as a new regulatory mechanism for producing the gendered body.3 Portraying the emergence of the biological clock enables us to depict the manner in which normative constructs of temporality materialize the gendered body as a locus of social- and self-regulation. This analysis also elucidates the emergence of a biopolitics, in the Foucaultian sense of the term, which inscribes the heteronormative order into the bodies of women, by intertwining contingent and culturally specific social arrangements with what are perceived to be objective biological facts. In the name of the temporal “logic” of the female body, new forms of intervention and management of life foreclose future possibilities and life narratives in order to suit ideological formulations of the family.4 Analyzing the discourses from which the biological clock derives its cultural significance illustrates how they are genealogically linked to the eugenic discourses that dominated concerns about reproduction and population control at the turn of the twentieth century in the United States. By employing selective pronatal discursive strategies, this new form of biopolitics implicitly demarcates socially advantaged women using biological criteria. The gendered aspects of prevalent concepts of time, the different temporality regimes which govern gendered subjects, and the gendered differentials in the ways men and women experience time have been well researched by feminist scholars. Feminist analysis suggests that there are feminine and masculine patterns of experiencing time due to the gendered division of labour, different ways men and women experience time because of their socialization and relative social positions and the gendered conceptualization of time in capitalist societies.5 Following the emergence of the biological clock and the ways it 3

The term “biological clock” is also used to describe the operation of other bodily functions, such as sleeping patterns and circadian rhythms. Yet, in this paper I am only referring to its use in relation to the reproductive system. 4 In accordance with a long tradition of associating infertility deficiency with women, the biological clock links the decreased ability of older couples to conceive with the age of the female partner, despite the fact that reproductive specialists have known for years that age also significantly decreases the reproductive ability of men (March and Ronner, 1996). In 2002, research was published claiming that in comparison to women “[f]ertility for men is less affected by age, but shows significant decline by the late 30s” (Dunson, Colombo and Baird, 2002). Since then, mentions of the male biological clock have appeared in the popular press; see, for instance, BBC News (2002). However, the modes of operation of the male biological clock significantly differ from that of women. This issue requires an extensive discussion which cannot be developed here. 5 For a discussion of the gendered division of labour see Davies (1994), Leccardi (1996) and Adam (1993). For differences in socialization and social positions see Odih, (1999) and Seidler (1989). For an analysis of the gendered conception of time and capitalism see Mellor (1997).

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operates provides an additional perspective to these discussions as it enables the portrayal of how patterns of temporality are constructed onto and then articulated as derivative of the gendered body. Analyzing and identifying the construction of the differential temporal regimes as located in the biological functioning of the body undermines essentialist presuppositions about the nature of sexual and gender difference, which are sometimes left unquestioned in feminist discussions. Moreover, the linear, goal-oriented and clock-driven temporal pattern of the biological clock which exclusively marks the female body differs from prevalent accounts of gendered classifications of time. As prior feminist research has shown, linear time is perceived as primarily applying to masculine subjects or to male social positions. The entailments of this particular temporal regime of the biological clock are therefore in need of further examination. The manner in which the age-related decrease in female fecundity poses constraints on the life-course decisions of young women, constraints which put them at a relative disadvantage in comparison to their male counterparts, has not eluded feminist criticism. While these studies tend to resort to economic models of analysis, some accounts deal with sociological and psychological aspects as well (Siow, 1998; Goldin, 2004; Dessy and Djebbari, 2005). Other discussions by feminist scholars consider the manners in which new reproductive technologies may offer women an escape path from these constraints, adding a cautious optimistic viewpoint to the on-going debates within feminism on the pros and cons of these innovations for women (Baruch and D’Adamo, 1985). While these accounts raise crucial issues concerning the function of the biological clock in determining women’s current and expected experiences, they share common assumptions, leaving gender definitions and the materialization of the body as sexed unquestioned. Yet, except for a single study by Nicole Keating (1999), which clearly demonstrates how the regulatory aspects are intertwined into the metaphor of the clock and how it conceptualizes reproductive decisions for women in terms of constraints, the manner in which the concept of the biological clock operates as a regulatory mechanism has received little attention in prior research. The aim of this paper is to understand some of the current discursive practices which construct and regulate the “biological reality” of the body, for the purpose of establishing gender difference by analyzing the biological clock. As a relatively novel phenomenon, the biological clock provides a rare opportunity to examine these processes as they materialize, in a sense, right before our eyes. Even more so, since the biological clock is a concept which directly relates to the functioning of the sexed body in the realm of reproduction, it is, seemingly, the last uncontested biological fact which enables the drawing of the line of sex and therefore also of gender distinctions.

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Judith Butler (1993) provides a conceptual framework for considering the construction of the sexed body by claiming that it is erroneous to consider sex as an attribute of the body, a consideration which implies the body precedes its sexual assignment, since the sexual assignment is a condition of possibility for the material signification of the body as such. If sex is a precondition for the materialization of the body and not a derivative of its biological nature, then sex is a product of discursive practices. There is, therefore, an ever-present need to reinscribe the sexual demarcation of the body through what Butler calls gender performativity. The concept of gender performativity implies particular temporal relations: while the past provides a fictitious link with an origin from which the normalized identity draws the authenticity of its appearance in the present, the future holds the promise of a repetition with an intentional or unintentional difference, in which unexpected change may occur. Thus, the articulation of gender performativity, according to Butler, implies progressive temporal relations. This progressive temporal formulation holds the future as an open horizon of potential radical political changes (Freeman, 2000). Yet, Butler’s insistence that the persistence of the body is not a property of its biological nature but a demand of language (Butler, 1993: 67) means that not only the past but also the future plays a role in preserving normalized identities, since this consistency is projected onto the future of the individual body. Nevertheless, this is a primarily static conceptualization of the future. Drawing on Butler’s account, the aim of this paper is to provide an analysis for how dynamic patterns of the future mark gender difference in our understanding of the body and how they are configured as normative imperatives for individuals.

The Future is not what it Used to Be In Discipline and Punish Michel Foucault makes his famous assertion that the human subject as we know it is a product of modern society. The modern subject is produced through the operation of disciplinary institutions, for which prisons serve as the model. The same disciplinary techniques, also found in schools, factories, families and hospitals, which differ only in scale and in the severity of their rituals, create the modern soul as the regulatory principle of the subject (Foucault, 1977: 30). In his “Postscript on Control Societies” Gilles Deleuze (1995) writes that, according to Foucault’s description, disciplinary societies operate through well-defined spatial enclaves which yield to coherent rules. He claims that the Foucauldian description shows that while these enclaves are analogical and exercise the same mechanisms, they are discrete. Years after Foucault’s death, Deleuze continues their interrupted dialogue by claiming that in the latter half of the twentieth century, disciplinary societies,

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which were so accurately described by Foucault, have dissolved into what can now be called control societies (178). According to Deleuze, the spatial enclaves, so crucial for the disciplinary institutions, are now, in control societies, breached and can no longer operate as a means of social regulation. In control societies, space has turned into an endless continuum, characterized by differential potentialities, and the distinction between interiority and exteriority can no longer be sustained. Thus the factory, which was the basic manufacturing unit, has been replaced by the business, which is everywhere and anywhere and which places all individuals in constant competition. Similarly, the educational process, which took place in the school, has yielded its place to an ongoing training procedure in which continuous assessment replaces the function of the examination. Deleuze claims that while disciplinary societies were built on the irresolvable tension between the individual and the masses, in control societies “individuals become ‘dividuals,’ and masses become samples, data, markets, or ‘banks’” (180). In an introduction to Deleuze’s text, Ariella Azoulay (2004) writes that one fundamental contribution of Foucault is the notion that, in the institutions of disciplinary societies, life is constantly managed; however, she continues, the constant management of life does not come to a halt in control societies. The locus of management shifts in control societies from the enclosed environment to the body of the singular: “The body of the singular is invaded by the different ‘superpowers’ which cross through him turning him into a satellite unit, a control post.” While in disciplinary societies one would enter and exit the enclosed environments, which were run by the “superpowers,” in control societies “where the simulation of being outside no longer exists and the singular is completely woven into the channels in which he is managed … the superpower has completely collapsed into the self and the self has turned into the object of resistance.” Thus, according to Azullay, since social regulation no longer takes place in the disciplinary institutions, in control societies the body has become the locus of constant social management (233). Deleuze claims that the manner in which temporality operates has also changed in the transition from disciplinary to control societies: “control is shortterm and rapidly shifting, but at the same time continuous and unbounded, whereas discipline was long-term, infinite, and discontinuous” (Deleuze, 1995: 181). Time, in the disciplinary regime, was sharply divided into distinct periods by the spatial enclaves: the lesson at school, the shift at work and the time of incarceration. However, since in control societies these enclaves can no longer maintain their distinctness, they can also no longer bestow meaning on time; no longer is the nature of time determined by spatial definitions; it is time which constructs space. Working hours, for instance, are no longer defined as the duration one spends in the work environment. It is instead the time devoted to

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work which turns the immediate space—be it the home, the airport terminal, or the car—into productive space. Losing its differential segmentation, time has also turned into a continuum. Hence, in an ongoing postponement of any conclusion, in control societies each person is the spatial unit which is subjected to a continuous management of life over time. Deleuze states: we're in the midst of a general breakdown of all sites of confinement—prisons, hospitals, factories, schools, the family. The family is an ‘interior’ that’s breaking down like all other interiors—educational, professional, and so on… Family, school, army, and factory are no longer so many analogous but different sites converging in an owner, whether the state or some private power, but transmutable or transformable coded configurations (1995: 178 and 181, emphasis added).

Deleuze does not argue that under a radically different regime the old order simply disappears without a trace, or that in control societies the former configurations of social regulation become redundant, but that their modus operandi undergoes a fundamental transformation. In his analysis, Deleuze focuses on the consequences of the emergence of the business from the ruins of the factory, hinting that the reorganization of the economic logic of late capitalism may provide the explanatory power for the changes he describes. However, his description also allows us to draw conclusions about the implications of these changes for the family. Since the concrete institution of the family can no longer sustain its interiority, and can no longer create the distinct definitions of an “in” and an “out” in relation to it, our spatial relations to the family in control societies is, therefore, one of proximity. Thus, now that it does not operate as a disciplinary institution and the family has turned into a “coded configuration,” its main function has shifted to its role as a regulatory principle, an organizing ideal. It is not that the family did not traditionally operate as an organizing ideal, nor that families ceased to exist in control societies, but while families still constitute a central social arrangement, they can no longer fulfil their traditional disciplinary role. Hence, families as sites of social regulation are displaced by “The Family,” the latter functioning as a dense ideological construct which can then operate in particular social situations as a moralistic and normalizing yard-stick loaded with social values. For the purpose of determining one’s proximity to “The Family,” one can then be subjected to enquiries and assessments which are the basis for interventions and regulation. While in disciplinary societies all environments of enclosure were central in constructing modern subjectivity, the spatial configuration created by the family in the disciplinary regime had an additional role to play. By enabling the distinction between the public and the private, the family was a central site for

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interweaving the gender difference into the framework of society. Since in disciplinary societies the categories of the private and the public served as a means for establishing the difference between man and woman, the family, as a social institution which allowed the creation of spatial differentiations between the private and the public, was therefore instrumental in conceptualizing gender difference and maintaining it.6 What, then, has become of the mechanisms of the construction of the gender difference in control societies, in which the family can no longer secure this fundamental spatial dichotomy? As I will later show, many shifts occurred in the manner in which gender operates in the latter half of the twentieth century, but gender difference has yet to disappear altogether, and the family has not ceased to operate as a central means for securing it. Alternative mechanisms for securing gender difference have appeared which, while drawing on particular aspects of traditional methods, are better suited to the logic of control societies. The biological clock of the female reproductive system is one such mechanism. The fact that the reproductive abilities of women end at a certain age is in no way new (Amundsen and Diers, 1970); yet, as I will attempt to show, the biological clock is not a modern and scientifically-proven version of this knowledge but a new form of constructing gendered bodies. The biological clock is produced as a means for regulating forms of living according to heteronormative perceptions which ensure the persistence of gender difference. My claim is that this form of social regulation, which operates according to dominant political and economic agendas, first appeared in the last quarter of the twentieth century as a product of developments in techno-science and of cultural and social changes. The term “biological clock” first appeared in the mainstream press in the United States in the context of the female reproductive system in a 1978 Washington Post article (Cohen, 1978). Then, in 1979, a book entitled Up Against the Clock: Career Women Speak on the New Choice of Motherhood was published (Fabe and Wikler, 1979). Only in the early 1980s did the term make its debut appearance in other publications.7 The shift which I wish to portray here, from gender regulation through the institution of the family as a disciplinary enclave to the temporal mechanism of gender management through the biological clock, may help illustrate the changes in the forms of social organization which occurred in the transition from disciplinary societies to control societies. Understanding how the biological clock operates may illustrate how aspects of gender difference and heteronormative order, which can no longer be 6

See, for instance, Vickerey (1998) and Hausen (1981). In the New York Times, for instance, it first appeared in 1981, and the first time it was mentioned in Time Magazine was in 1982. See The New York Times (1981) and Reed (1982).

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regulated through the institution of the family, are made to construct the sexed body. The biological clock of the female reproductive system gives meaning to time by managing life-courses while examining the gender performance of the individual and reinscribing gender difference. While primarily operating in the temporal domain, the biological clock inherits its divisions from the spatial configuration of gender difference; once again the female is located inside and the male outside: the biological clock constructs a crude gender differentiation between the female bodies, to which it applies, and the male bodies, which are beyond its reach. Yet the gender regulation which the biological clock allows is not merely constituted by its differential range of validity. The breakdown of institutions which Deleuze describes has led to an epistemological crisis in relation to gender difference since neither the distinction between the private and the public, nor the family as a disciplinary institution, could effectively regulate it any longer. However, since gender difference was in no way extinct, regulatory anxiety emerged, questioning how gender difference might be secured as traditional forms of gender management withered away.8 In this light, we must consider the emergence of the biological clock as a substitute mechanism: the biological clock contains the relics of the crisis which begot it, and its conceptual framework is constituted by a compensation for a loss. The biological clock, therefore, includes the wish to turn back the clock and remedy a disrupted order. For instance, as I will later show, the biological clock is often referred to as a problem which emerged as a result of the disruption of the normal, natural, or otherwise desirable way of life. Since this disruption might presumably bring about confusion in gender roles, the gender performativity of the individual, be it a concrete “case” or a hypothetical one, is the primary target of investigation and can then be deemed inadequate and in need of intervention. Understanding the operation of the biological clock from this perspective allows us to articulate the ways in which the regulation of gender performance functions through ideological narration of time. The biological clock functions primarily in the name of the family, but it is not an actual familial institution; it is in the name of the family as an a priori ideological construct, and it allows the measuring of one’s proximity to it over time. As a temporal regulatory mechanism, the biological clock constructs time as a continuum of successive checkpoints, permitting constant management of the gender performativity of individuals while framing life-courses according to a pseudo-biological determinism which forecloses future possibilities in order to suit a narrow definition of familial narratives. 8

Gender difference management anxieties may be found in abundance in conservative and moralistic reflections on this period. See Gilder (1987) and Jasper (1988).

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While Deleuze’s depiction of the shift from disciplinary to control forms of social management provides the framework for understanding the modes in which governmentality operates, these changes occurred in and were enabled by concrete social conditions. Following the emergence of the biological clock may help elucidate how these changes have transformed the way in which sexuality, gender, and reproduction are mutually configured.

Changing Times Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English (1978) make a similar claim to that of Foucault (1978: 104) concerning the medicalization of the female body. Focusing on the American context, they claim that the industrial revolution which brought about radical social changes also gave birth to a new social player: the scientific expert. Ehrenreich and English claim that the business of the new scientific authority “was not to seek out what is true, but to pronounce on what is appropriate.” Professional physicians, psychologists, domestic scientists, and parent educators could explain how woman’s “nature” differed from that of man, why the home environment better suited the female character and needs, and how to remedy cases of discontent and deviation (28). Ehrenreich and English's book describes an escalating process of pathologization of women’s bodies and minds, which reached its climax in the 1950s. Then, the authors claim, in the 1960's and 70's fundamental social changes occurred, which brought about the sexual revolution and the second wave of women’s liberation movements and freed women from the authority of the medical experts (269-312). Without committing to Ehrenreich and English’s narrative of liberation, one can still see that for a wide range of reasons, the medical establishment and its medical discourse significantly lost their cultural centrality and their incomparable ability to impact the construction of gender and sexuality during the 1960s and 70s, as competing social forces and configurations of power/knowledge emerged (D’Emilio and Freedman, 1997). The social transformations which occurred in the United States during those two decades included a general trend of a steadily rising marriage age and of first becoming parents, a decrease in the number of children per adult, an increase in sexual activity outside of marriage, especially for young people, and an increase in women’s absolute and relative level of education and their participation in the work force. These changes were accompanied by fundamental cultural shifts, which reflected the fact that, relatively speaking, life-courses of men and women became more similar, with fewer sexually segregated social arenas and more socially-sanctioned options for women than there had been previously (Coontz, 1992: 187). As gender definitions lost some of their definitive association to particular and well-defined social roles, the

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need for the medical expert to guard the difference which assured these definitions also diminished (Ehrenreich, and English, 1978: 284-85). Different perspectives may yield different combinations of economic, demographic, or cultural and social reasons for explaining the changes occurring during the 1960s and 70s (Coontz, 1992: 192, Freedman, 1997: 305-7); paradoxically, the social transformations which undermined the centrality of the medical establishment were also enabled by an innovation in the field of medical intervention in reproduction: the development and the commercial distribution of new types of birth-control methods. While almost all societies have been known to exercise some kind of birth-control techniques, the birthcontrol pill, which was first distributed commercially in 1960, and, later, the intrauterine devices (IUDS) were the first widely available birth-control methods that allowed prevention of pregnancy without any temporal relation to actual sexual intercourse. By enabling large segments of the population to maintain forms of living which were shaped by the ability to exercise long-term reproduction control, the new birth-control methods were instrumental in bringing about the social changes which have occurred since the 1960s. The most significant implications of this development was for the generation of the baby-boomers, who were just coming of age and were given the means for prolonging their child-free years while remaining sexually active (Coontz, 1992: 193). In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault claims that “in the socialization of procreative behaviour, ‘sex’ was described as being caught between a law of reality … and the economy of pleasure” (154). Thus, in addition to facilitating these life-course changes for young adults, conceptually speaking, the birth-control pill specifically transformed the cultural signification of sexuality by undermining the “law of reality” which linked it to reproduction. Even more so, it rendered traditional forms of socialization of procreative behavior inadequate, destabilizing one of the fundamental axes of biopolitics and creating a void. During the 1960s and 70s, several discourses and forms of knowledge production, some scientific, such as the field of demographics, and some which grew from oppositional politics, such as the growing movement of feminism, cooperated and competed to fill this void by resignifying reproduction (Marsh and Ronner, 1996: 211). Thus, it may be stated that approaching the end of the 1970s the conjunction of social, political, economic, cultural, and technological conditions transformed the signification and mutual configuration of gender, sexuality, and reproduction. Social structures which, for a long time, defined the relations between these factors were irreversibly reconfigured, and new narratives formed and competed for their re-articulation. However, in the early 1980s a neoconservative sentiment swept the United States. “Something strange has

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happened to citizenship,” states Lauren Berlant (1997) in an analysis of the social and political circumstances of this period, “[d]uring the rise of the Reaganite right, a familial politics of the national future came to define the urgencies of the present”(1). Berlant claims that although rhetorically it draws its legitimacy from the past, neo-conservative politics is in fact a new and distinct national political discourse. This discourse equates the violence and injury experienced by stereotyped individuals, women, gays, people of colour, with the complaints of citizens who feel enraged at losing their dignified and unmarked social standing, mainly white heterosexual men. To mend the harm, a nostalgic image of the nation is evoked, which is fantasized as conflict-free and in which people are imagined to have lived “normal” intimate lives. In the effort to sustain this image, the political public sphere was transformed into what Berlant calls the intimate public sphere, in which, in the name of the future of a presumably fragile nation, a preoccupation has developed with the behaviour of citizens in the intimate aspects of their lives: [t]he intimate public sphere of the U.S. present tense renders citizenship as a condition of social membership produced by personal acts and values, especially acts originating in or directed toward the family sphere. No longer valuing personhood as something directed toward public life, contemporary nationalist ideology recognizes a public good only in a particularly constricted nation of simultaneously lived private worlds (1997: 5).

In the intimate public sphere of the 1980s, medical experts returned once again to centre stage, and the knowledge produced by them, which was given the cultural centrality it had lacked during the previous two decades, could provide the conceptual framework in which reproduction was culturally articulated and socially managed. The fluctuations in the social standing of the medical establishment and, as a result, that of medical discourse, can be seen not only by analyzing changes in the cultural construction of gender and sexuality, but also in the changes which occurred in social attitudes towards services and treatments offered by doctors. In the pronatalist, technologically and scientifically optimistic atmosphere of the 1950s, couples who encountered infertility problems rushed to infertility clinics. However, the doctors in those clinics had very little to offer them in terms of new treatments. While infertility specialists in the mid 1950s had newly acquired knowledge concerning the human reproduction process, due to the discovery of hormones and their roles in reproduction, they did not have at their disposal any procedures of medical intervention which were not already in use in 1940 (Marsh and Ronner, 1996: 34). Nevertheless, during the 1970s, when both progressive and conservative skepticism towards medical and technological innovations was most prevalent

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and the authority of medical experts reached an all-time low, some of the most significant developments in reproductive technology were made (228). During the 1970s, hormonal drugs, such as Clomid and Pergonal for treating ovulation irregularities, were authorized for use, new techniques for inserting semen into the womb to facilitate the process of insemination were developed, and the discovery of the procedure for freezing sperm led to the establishment of sperm banks and made the use of donor semen much more accessible for couples in which the man suffered from fertility deficiency (208). However, these innovations did not raise interest in the possibilities they allowed: in 1968 there were approximately 600,000 visits to doctors concerning infertility problems; this number did not change significantly until 1980. As of 1981, there was a sharp increase in the number of visits of couples searching for infertility treatments, and by 1983 this number exceeded two million annually (Pratt, Mosher, Bachrach et al., 1985). These figures show that the issue of infertility was rediscovered at the beginning of the 1980s and became the focus of interest for the general public during this period. Although research shows that the frequency of infertility problems in the United States did not change during the twentieth century, the renewed interest in this issue was perceived, as one infertility specialist described it, as a growing public health problem of epidemic proportions (Sandelowski, 1990: 476). Contrary to what we might expect, neither scientific developments nor changes in the prevalence of infertility can account for the shift in general attitudes toward the medical establishment. We can assume that the neoconservative and reactionary political atmosphere beginning in the early 1980s, accompanied by new waves of pronatalist sentiment, can explain it (Marsh and Ronner, 1996: 255). The familial politics of the neo-conservative period required, once again, the authority of the medical experts and the knowledge they developed in their medical discourses for rearticulating the significance of gender identities and behaviours, since in the intimate public sphere of the period they were inseparably linked to the biological functioning of the individual body.

Manufacturing Sexuality The implications of menopause on the reproductive abilities of women were already recognized in ancient times; however, the effect of the age of premenopausal women on their reproductive abilities first became a subject of medical research only in the early 1980s. Until then, physicians believed that the fecundity of women reached its peak at the age of 25 and remained at that level until 35, yet this knowledge was based on commonplace observations and was not regarded as requiring scientific examination (247). In 1982, a team of

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French doctors published a research paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, which analyzed data accumulated at infertility clinics regarding couples in which only the man was diagnosed as suffering from fertility deficiencies and who were therefore undergoing artificial insemination procedures using donor semen. The research, which was the first to scientifically examine this issue, concluded that the fecundity of women starts to drop around the age of 30 (ibid). In the introduction to their research, the authors of the paper stated that artificial reproductive technologies provided conditions for isolating the factor of age in women from other interfering variables: “Artificial insemination with donor semen (AID) seems to present an opportunity to control certain variables in the study of female fecundity over time” (Federation CECOS at al., 1982: 404). They claimed that since age might also have an effect on the reproductive abilities of the male partner and since older women tend to have older partners and older couples tend to decrease their intercourse frequency, which might also significantly influence pregnancy success rates, it is difficult to isolate the influence of age in women on success rates of couples who are trying to have children without medical intervention (ibid). However, artificial reproductive technology did not only provide the conditions for performing a long-awaited analysis of the impact of women’s age on their reproductive potentiality; it is the artificial reproductive technology which turned women’s age into an issue in need of scientific examination.9 One might argue that the rising age of first marriage and women postponing their first child into their thirties have brought about the need to explore this issue, but as Stephanie Coontz (1992) shows in her book The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, “the age of marriage today is no higher than it was in the 1870s, and the proportion of never-married people is lower than it was at the turn of the century” (183, emphasis in original). My claim is that reproductive technologies provided the conceptual framework in which the age-related reproductive potentiality of women was attributed with new-found value and, therefore, gained significance. In 1978, what would prove to be the most significant development in the field of the new reproductive technologies was accomplished, as Louise Brown, the first baby to be born as the result of an in-vitro fertilization (IVF) procedure, was born (Marsh and Ronner, 1996: 236). Asexual reproduction, epitomized in 9

It is important to note that even without undermining the scientific validity of the research findings or questioning their objective status, there is still room for examining the circumstances in which particular issues appear as needing scientific research. For an extended discussion on this topic, see Davidson (2002: 5). Nevertheless, the validity of the research quoted herein was later questioned. See, for instance, Bongaarts (1982) and Gray (2005: 14).

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the IVF procedure, gained new public interest not only due to the renewed pronatalist atmosphere, which sent infertile couples to the specialists, but also because of the heated debates which the new technologies stirred. The “ProLife” conservative organizations which were organized during the 1970s had gained significant political visibility and influence by the end of that decade. The main focus of these organizations was the abortion debates, but they perceived the new reproductive technologies as unholy interventions of godplaying doctors in natural processes, which would bring about the ruin of the institution of the family while condemning numerous fetuses to death (Henig, 2004: 206).10 The loud objections conservative organizations raised had a profound influence on the field of assisted reproductive technologies. Turning it into a delicate political issue, these organizations deterred the federal government from addressing such controversies and caused it to refrain from funding research clinics which were developing IVF-related treatments (12). Yet, while the opponents of these technologies assumed that the lack of government funding would halt all progress in the field, the withdrawal of these funds had a paradoxical effect. IVF technology was still funded privately by infertile couples, who were willing to pay significant sums for the chance of having a biological baby of their own. IVF and the public interest it drew attracted the attention of investors to the field of assisted reproductive technologies and turned it into a rapidly growing market (Robertson, 1996: 911). By the end of the century, the market of assisted reproductive technologies was estimated to exceed several billion dollars annually (Gray, 2005: 28). Relying on private funds, researchers and doctors in this field did not have to adhere to regulations and restrictions which are imposed on publicly-funded research (Richardt, 1996). However, the shift from public to private funds did not mean that the researchers and doctors were freed from all regulation; it simply meant that the field was now subject to a different type of regulation—that of the market. As governmental regulation not only sets the boundaries of research but also channels it in certain directions, the dynamic of supply and demand has a profound influence on the knowledge produced by fields of research which operate as an industry.11 The greatest novelty of IVF with regard to infertility treatments does not stem from the fact that the conception process takes place in a Petri dish instead 10

For an articulation of the objection of conservative organizations to the IVF procedure, see Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (1987). 11 For discussions of the influence of government regulation on scientific research, see analysis of developments in HIV research: Montagnier (2002: 1727-8) and Martin (1995). On the influence of supply and demand on knowledge production, see Critical Art Ensemble (1998).

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of in a woman’s body; the novelty lies in the fact that, unlike other methods for inducing pregnancy at the time, IVF is not a method of treatment for the problem which caused the infertility in the first place. IVF is a method for bypassing any deficiency which hinders conception, even if the reason for the deficiency is unknown; it may therefore be regarded as a type of medical service, rather than a method of medical treatment. In order to perform the IVF procedure, all that is needed is the “raw material”—the eggs and sperm—no matter how they are obtained and whether they are extracted from the body of the patient or from other sources.12 The development of the IVF method disassociated the field of assisted reproductive technologies and the services it offered from infertility as a medical condition with a particular history and with demographic characteristics.13 The services IVF offered were at least potentially applicable to the population at large, and now that it was subjugated to the economic regulation of the market, the only question which remained open was who its potential customers would be and how they might be reached.14 Hence, while infertility is much more prevalent among members of disadvantaged groups and minority populations, the assisted reproductive technologies industry targeted upwardly mobile educated professional couples and single women, who could afford the high costs of infertility treatments, as its primary client base (Marsh and Ronner, 1996; Richardt, 1996). In this context, the age-related decrease in the fecundity of women was attributed a financial value, since it was one of the primary causes of impregnation difficulties in its potential clients (Franke-Ruta, 2002), and as such, it demanded research and frequent reevaluations. However, the industry was quick to discover that it was not the actual biological findings which had such significant value; it was the widespread perception of the social and cultural meanings derived from this

12 This is not to claim that particular medical treatments are not sometimes needed in order to extract the eggs or the sperm or that the re-implantation procedure in the womb does not require medical intervention. However, one does not need to address the source of the fertility deficiency in order to perform IVF, one need only provide the conditions for the treatment in which it might succeed. 13 For the claim that, once the IVF treatment became so profitable, treatments which could address and cure conditions which cause infertility were under-funded or abandoned altogether see Critical Art Ensemble (1998). 14 Michael Fox (2000), a reproductive endocrinologist, claimed that, currently speaking, infertility clinics are treating subfertile couples and not infertile individuals: “We know that a significant proportion of patients who are not pregnant after one year will achieve a pregnancy with continued attempts. Therefore, patients are most commonly considered subfertile and not sterile. Therapies used to treat infertility are thus designed to shorten the interval to pregnancy in this group.” (210).

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fact, framed in everyday language as the “biological clock,” that draws patients to the clinics.15

Turning Clockwise The fundamental social changes which occurred during the 1960s and 70s persisted and even grew during the 1980s (Coontz, 1992). The mass life-long participation of women in the work force was not only a well-established fact by the early 1980s, it was also an economic necessity, since women’s work was needed to support the growth of the service portion of the market, which was dependent on increasing numbers of white- and pink-collar professionals (D’Emilio and Freedman, 1997: 305). Therefore, now that social domains were not sufficiently segregated, traditional configurations of signifying and regulating reproduction, the heteronormative order, and gender difference could no longer operate effectively since they relied, among other things, on gendered spatial configurations and on the distinction between the private as the realm of the feminine and the public as that of the masculine. Additionally, in spite of being under reactionary attack, the social movements and scholarly efforts of oppositional politics, such as feminism and the gay liberation movement, managed to reconceptualize gender roles and sexuality in many ways and redefined the conditions in which these issues were now addressed. Thus, while historical differentiations of social roles and divisions of labour allowed the marking of particular social functions as essentially feminine or masculine, the profound disruption of traditional assumptions concerning the essence of the genders during the 1960s and 70s rendered these definitions inadequate for securing these concepts. However, despite all these changes, men, women, and gender difference did not cease to exist as central social and cultural categories. The neo-conservative familial atmosphere of the 1980s called for reinforcement of the heteronormative order and, by extension, the gender difference which makes it possible (Berlant, 1997: 4-5); new forms of signification and regulation were therefore explicitly called for.16 In this atmosphere, the renewed public trust in 15

A comprehensive report of the artificial reproductive technology industry assigns women’s perceptions of their biological clock as a significant factor influencing the growth of the industry. The report states that while data which was published in the popular media might have been less than accurate, it still attributes importance to women’s beliefs “that their biological clocks were not only ticking away, but also somehow running down.” (Gray, 2005: 14). 16 For instance, an article covering Ronald Reagan’s first presidential campaign, published in The Washington Post in 1980, states that “To many he represents a world where men were men and women were in the kitchen.” See The Washington Post (1980).

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the medical experts and their knowledge allowed for the articulation of these social and cultural categories once again in the conceptual framework of biological determinism. As a result of the oppositional political movements of previous decades, by the early 1980s assumptions about how women’s “nature” differed from that of men, which used to provide the basis for rationalizing the gender order, were politicized and could no longer be unwaveringly excepted. Hence, the new knowledge produced by medical experts concerning the deterioration of women’s fecundity with age could, at last, provide a seemingly objective and impartial scientific fact about gender difference. The influence of age on female fecundity as a scientific fact has become a form of temporal regulatory force which is coined in the term “biological clock,” by enveloping it in an extensive framework of normative presuppositions.17 On the level of the individual, the biological clock narrates notions of life-course for women as governed by a succession of essential checkpoints drawing their logic from a familial determinism which is portrayed as derivative of their bodies. As Foucault (1977) claims, the norm is “a mixture of legality and nature, prescription and constitution” (304). The construct of the biological clock, binding the natural and the social, allows one to condemn inevitable deviations from the desirable narrative it constructs as a breach of constituent principles. Foucault continues: “The judges of normality are present everywhere … it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behaviour, his aptitudes, his achievements”(ibid). Indeed, as a norm, the biological clock turns the family into a temporal regulatory principle, allowing a continuous assessment of the relative proximity of women in relation to the complete and successful fulfilment of a particular familial configuration. This exclusive familial configuration, comprised of a discrete family unit constituted by a man and a woman who are married to each other and parent their biological offspring, is constructed both as an imperative and as an ideal, and the continuous measurement and analysis of deviations from it set a path for increased management of life by self and others. For instance, for single childless women in their twenties and thirties, the biological clock dictates notions of the future according to the following logic: if women’s chances of getting pregnant sharply decrease in their mid-thirties, they should reach that age after meeting their future partners, spending a few years getting to know him and deciding that he is the one, and a few more 17 In addition to the operation of the biological clock as a norm which is discussed below, the concept of the biological clock has a significant role to play in other types of debates, such as the moralistic debate and the demographic debate. In this paper, I focus on the normative operation of the biological clock while elsewhere I discuss the complex role which is assigned to it in other types of debates (Amir, 2005).

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enjoying a child-free relationship.18 Provided that they plan to have more than one child, the time span between each pregnancy and the period of time it might take to conceive also have to be considered (Frey, 2004). This formula shows that according to the “nature” of their bodies, approaching the age of thirty, women who do not completely forfeit the possibility of having children should already be in a committed relationship with the future father of their unborn children. On more general terms, it implies that in their late twenties and early thirties, years which are most crucial for developing one’s career, women should invest their energies building a home, lest they be left without one.19 It is most evident that this articulation of the implications of the biological clock on the life-course decisions of women is loaded with socially specific assumptions about how and under which conditions one should become a parent, yet it is constructed as the inevitable conclusion of a “natural law.” While imprinting familial and heteronormalizing notions of the individual future onto the body, it frames life-courses according to normalized narratives, which foreclose future possibilities. It might seem strange to claim that the concept of the so-called traditional family forecloses future possibilities for women in a society in which most adults live outside this familial arrangement.20 However, prevalent as these diverse forms of living are, when examining the available narrations of the future for single childless women in their twenties and early thirties, these possibilities exist first-and-foremost in relation to that family formulation and as degraded variations thereof. Moreover, such regulatory mechanisms eradicate unforeseen forms of kinship, not only as personal aspirations but also as lived experiences. *** The following are two prevalent strategies for exemplifying the normative regulation which the biological clock allows; the first focuses on regulating gender performance using essentialist claims, and the second promotes the 18

Since the construct of the biological clock assumed heterosexuality, lesbians were categorically excluded from the range of the operation of this power configuration during the 1980s. However, as the gay and lesbian struggle to receive acknowledgment of their familial arrangements on the basis of their resemblance to “normal” families from the state and from the public at large, to a certain degree, the range of validity for the biological clock expanded to include them as well. 19 On the importance of these years for the career development of women, see Fels (2005: 213). 20 This familial arrangement was far from being statistically normal either in the latter quarter of the twentieth century or in any other historical period apart from the 1950s. For an extensive discussion of this topic see Coontz (1992: 188).

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fulfilment of perceived demands of heterosexuality. The former claims that although in current-day society women are not bound to the home and may strive to fulfil themselves professionally, the biological clock “reveals” the fact that the “natural laws” of women's bodies do not coincide with the values and lifestyles they are so eager to adopt, which are, according to this logic, masculine. For example, an article in Time Magazine quotes Ann Hewlett saying that “women embraced a ‘male model’ of single-minded career focus, and the result is ‘an epidemic of childlessness’ among professional women” (Gibbs, 2002).21 The underlying assumption here is that it is not merely an erroneous management of time which leads to these grave results, but an inappropriate mind-set, a masculine one, which manifests in the nullification of their reproductive abilities. These arguments, which once again evoke the well-worn dichotomies placing man and culture on the one side and woman and nature on the other, may account for the paradigmatic theme of these texts: the need to make women aware of the “ticking” or the “ringing” of their biological clocks.22 Thus, while on the one hand, heteronormative desire and appropriate gender performance are constructed as constitutive of the female body and as originating from its “nature,” on the other, they are portrayed as in constant need of regulation, due to a discrepancy between women's masculine mind-sets and the temporal law governing their bodies. This discrepancy is historically narrated as resulting from novel social conditions, implying that in the past women naturally assumed their appropriate roles.23 The second strategy, which may be found in abundance in “how to” books and advice columns for single women, is aimed at correcting the gender performance of women without resorting to essentialist presuppositions, instead relying on speculative notions of “male desire.” These texts claim that as the adolescence stage extends and both men and women tend to postpone the age at which they want to “settle down,” the biological clock, which applies only to women, creates an inter-gender imbalance, putting women at a disadvantage. Thus, according to this viewpoint which draws from economic models of supply and demand, around the age of thirty women become more eager to enter committed relationships and are, therefore, forced to comply with the demands of choosy male candidates.24 The male desire constructed in these texts is not as 21 For an extensive criticism of Hewlett’s work, both on the conceptual level and on the methodologies of data analysis see Franke-Ruta (2002). 22 For an elaboration of the role of “awareness” in the regulatory operation of the biological clock, see Keating (1999: 10). 23 For an example of this approach see Nolte (1997). 24 For the historical contextualization of the infiltration of conceptual frameworks of the market into the context of relationships, see Ehrenreich and English (1979: 283). For an

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progressive as the society at large; apparently, men are searching for “oldfashioned women” who express “true femininity” (i.e. women who are not too independent, successful, smart, assertive, or have short hair).25 This form of intervention and regulation is notably illusive since its proclaimed aim is not to correct deviations but to aid and to better the lives of its addressees by gently persuading, correcting, and improving their chances of succeeding in the singles’ market. *** Examining statements made by medical experts in the popular press about the biological clock shows that there are two different narratives portraying the relations between the newly-developed medical technologies and the reproductive female body. The first tells a story of technological progress and medical optimism; the second repudiates the first, urging women and couples not to be led to false expectations and unjustifiable beliefs as to the abilities of these same technological means. With the first signs of positive results in a new procedure of reproductive technologies, feeble as these signs might be, the popular media is swept up with headlines announcing that science has finally found a way to stop, delay, or completely turn back the biological clock.26 These reports are soon followed by others, giving voice to experts who occupy the position of the friendly realists, warning women not to be caught in these overoptimistic portrayals of the abilities of the new reproductive technologies.27 While these two narratives seemingly contradict each other, a closer look reveals that, in fact, they serve the same interests and completely coincide, forming a single coherent narrative. Considering the historical fluctuations in the standing of medical authority in popular discourses, as above-mentioned, it is important not to overestimate the importance of the apparently contradictory narratives drawn by disagreeing medical experts, since such disagreements only call for the proliferation of these discussions. The prolonging of any decisive conclusion in these debates ensures their persistence while it emphasizes the need to turn to the medical specialist for knowledge about the nature of the female body and the truth about sexual and gender differences. Moreover, the commercial interests of this industry do example of the implications of this viewpoint for gender discourse, see Greenwald (2004). 25 The full list of do’s and don’t’s, including the hairstyle remarks, can be found at Greenwald (2004). Additional partial lists may also be found at Stahl (2003), Hayden (1998) and Jackson (2004). 26 For recent examples see Oshima (2000) and Powell (2004). 27 See, for example, Stahl (2003), and Newman (1997).

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not lag far behind, for they are advanced by the underlying message conveyed by both voices: while the optimistic speaker bluntly promotes reliance on what this industry has to offer, the cautious warns potential clients not to be caught in complacency and postpone resorting to medical interventions until it is too late. Adding a grain of paranoia to this analysis, it is also possible to see how the split between these two narratives completely coincides since, in fact, their addressees are two different groups. While the former, speaking of forthcoming developments which are not available just yet, is aimed at younger women and couples, assuring them that they should not worry about postponing their childbearing years since technology will be there to aid them conceive when the time comes, the latter turns to older potential clients, reminding them that there are also limits to what technology may have to offer them if they do not rush to the nearest infertility clinic immediately. It is important to re-emphasize the fact that since the IVF procedure is designed to produce a pregnancy without having to address the causes of infertility, it may be exercised on couples who would have succeeded in conceiving without medical intervention, provided they had continued trying to do so in the traditional way (Fox, 2000). Hence, we once again see the crucial role of the continuous reminder given by the fertility expert of the biological clock for this industry. From this perspective, one of the idiosyncratic features of the biological clock as a temporal pattern can be understood. Analyzing the most common gender differentiations of temporality, an obvious pattern appears: masculinity is articulated in terms of linear time and femininity in non-linear temporal patterns. This is not to say that women are not governed in particular ways by linear constructions of time, but the gender split is articulated in the manner in which women’s experiences and the temporal logic of the work which is assigned to women in the gendered division of labour exceed linear time. A prevalent example shows how the time demands posed on wage-workers, both male and female, yields to linear logic, while the labour which relates to the sustenance of life cannot operate under the same temporal pattern. Thus, the labour of raising children, feeding and caring for family members, and doing house work, which is performed largely by women and more generally associated with female social positions and feminine attributes, is governed by temporal patterns which do not coincide with a linear perception of time. Feminist discussions of this issue emphasize the manner in which these types of labor are expelled from the logic of the market in capitalist societies; deemed to reside outside of the economy, they cannot be considered work which can be assigned a value in the economic sense of the term (Adam, 1993; Leccardi, 1996). Similarly, as Emily Martin (1992) shows, the male and the female reproductive bodies are regarded as governed by two types of logic which imply two different patterns of time. She shows how descriptions of both human

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reproductive systems are caught in their own metaphors as they illustrate reproduction in terms of industrial factories: in reproductive biology, bodies are organized around principles of centralized control and factory-based production. Men continuously produce wonderfully astonishing quantities of highly valued sperm, women produce eggs and babies (though neither efficiently) and, when they are not doing this, either produce scrap (menstruation) or undergo a complete breakdown of central control (menopause) (121-2).

Although, seemingly, both reproductive systems adhere to the same temporal framework, while the male epitomizes the highly-efficient wellmanaged production line, the female is illustrated as a degraded version of this model, in which much time and effort are wasted. Thus, according to Martin’s analysis, the temporal logic of the female reproductive body differs from that of male by its inability to coincide with the demands of efficiency posed by linear time (ibid; Martin, 1991). The biological clock diverges from these gendered temporal constructions since it is articulated as linear time in the strictest sense of the term: according to most medical experts the biological clock is defined as the time period between a woman’s first period and the onset of her menopause (Keating, 1999: 2).28 Thus, as a linear construction, the biological clock deviates from the prevalent temporal form of demarcating gender difference, a deviation which can only be understood as resulting from the commercial interests which brought it into being, as portrayed above. Once the age-related decrease of female fertility was assigned with financial value in the assisted reproductive technologies industry, it was also subjected to the linear temporal logic of the capitalist market.29 *** Determined by commercial considerations, the biological clock is not only constructed according to economic formulations of time but its range of applicability is also restricted accordingly. As mentioned above, in the process of establishing itself as an industry, research in the field of assisted reproductive technologies turned its gaze from the infertile body as such to that of the potential client, and the knowledge it produced reflects this diversion. The biological clock, as a brainchild of this new knowledge, is emblematic of this 28

For a more elaborated discussion about the biological clock as linear time, see Keating (1999: 9, 17). 29 For a comprehensive analysis of economic time as linear time in the capitalist logic, see Mellor (1997).

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process, and the strong class bias at its core is evident. When speaking of the applicability of the biological clock, it is important to distinguish between the act of ascribing the biological clock to a particular body and reference made to it as an abstract phenomenon in the media by medical experts and others. Being a regulatory mechanism, it easily yields itself to ascription and may, therefore, refer to almost all subject positions in its application to particular instances;30 however, in the latter instance, abstract of any concrete body, its fundamental range of validity becomes apparent. Thus, media references to the biological clock consistently associate it with university graduates, professional women who are single and childless, from the middle- to upper-classes, and in their twenties and thirties. This categorization also entails other classifications, which are not explicitly mentioned. For instance, it is obvious that it strictly refers to heterosexual, able-bodied women who are living in urban areas. Additionally, since in the United States the divisions between class and race tend to show relatively high degrees of correlation, it is also a racial category and, to a certain degree, an ethnic one as well (Grusky, 2001). Texts dealing with the biological clock as a general social phenomenon repeatedly state that single motherhood is one of the unfortunate consequences of women’s erroneous management of their lives, as they do not take into account their temporal constraints. However, as Robin Silbergleid (2002) suggests, analysis of statements made in conservative texts which relate to single mothers shows that they explicitly refer to those who are single mothers by choice, mainly white financially-secure professional older women who decide to have children on their own, while, in fact, they are concerned with young black single mothers who earn low incomes or are welfare-dependent. Thus, positioning a class- and culturally specific notion of the family within the framework of the biological clock serves as a means to implicitly regulate other forms of kinship relations which do not coincide with it. The normative concept of the family at the root of the biological clock is constructed first-and-foremost in contrast to other familial configurations against which it positions itself, which in addition to single mothers include homosexual couples and families, black kinship networks, and the Latino and immigrant families which supposedly have more children than they can support (Stack, 1974). The biological clock therefore encapsulates the notion euphemistically called “demographic concern” which, in fact, claims that while the “right” segments of the population are not procreating enough, the “wrong”’ ones are breeding out of control. Hence, it is apparent that the discourses which bring into being the biological clock can be genealogically traced back to the eugenic discourses of the turn of the century, such as that of the concept of “race suicide,” which was 30

Even that of gay men, for instance, see Gay Gaze (1997).

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introduced by Theodore Roosevelt in 1903 (Sandelowski 1990; Marsh and Ronner, 1996: 113). The fact that the construct of the biological clock reflects eugenic considerations should come as no surprise since, as suggested above, it is a product of the knowledge produced by the field of assisted reproductive technology discourses. As prior research has suggested, eugenic impulses are in no way foreign to present-day practices of assisted-reproductive technologies.31 This new form of eugenics differs from the old not simply by the technologies at its disposal but by the fact that it “naturally” operates through commercial interests and consumer desire instead of being centrally controlled by the sovereign power.

Conclusions The biological clock of the female reproductive system first appeared in the neo-conservative political climate of the early 1980s as a result of the newly acquired interests on the part of the artificial reproductive technologies industry and was quickly adopted into everyday language as the temporal signifier of inter-gender difference. After two tumultuous decades, where traditional forms of social regulations were irreversibly disrupted, the biological clock enabled the reconfiguration of lost forms of marking gender difference in new cultural circumstance. As a configuration of regulatory mechanisms, the biological clock imprints an abstract, ideal notion of the family as the marker of the female body, especially that of the educated professional middle- to upper-class single woman. Constructed as resulting from a disrupted social order which is nostalgically attributed as agreeing to the natural constitution of women’s bodies, this regulatory mechanism reconstructs traditional forms of spatial definitions into the temporal domain. Thus, it may be asserted that the biological clock draws the heteronormative order from the bodies of women by intertwining contingent and culturally specific social arrangements with what are perceived to be objective biological facts. In addition, operating as a means for normative regulation, the biological clock forecloses the horizon of future possibilities by defining narratives which coincide with ideological formulations of the family as determined by the temporal nature of women’s bodies. Privileging these narratives undermines the viability of alternative life-courses, whether they are lived experiences or imagined possibilities, while it naturalizes an ideologically loaded and narrow definition of desirable familial arrangements. Additionally, it provides a

31 Daniels and Golden (2004); Stanworth (1987); Haraway (1991); Critical Art Ensemble (1998).

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seemingly scientific and value-free point of departure for stigmatizing stereotyped social groups. Since this paper focuses on the productive aspects of a particular configuration of power, it does not discuss potential positions of resistance produced by its operation. The question of how we might articulate such forms of resistance is therefore in need of further discussion. We should assume that since the normalizing impulse is at its core, it is possible to imagine identities, modes of identification, and forms of living which are anti-normative in ways that undermine the operation of the regulatory mechanism of the biological clock. It is important to note that I am not referring to mere declarative objections to it or to life-narratives which seemingly do not conform to its demands since they might still operate according to its logic, for every rule also sustains its exemplary deviations, which do not undermine its existence. Forms of resistance are enabled by attempts to give meaning to ways of living which do not comply with the normative imperatives the biological clock dictates, while striving to sustain their intelligibility. Such forms of living may produce opportunities to imagine narratives which do not comply with the linear logic of life-courses of birth-marriage-reproduction-death and rearticulate prevalent binaries such as that of youth-versus-adulthood. As normative articulations portray a life-course narrative that links the transition from a dependent childhood and a rebellious adolescence to responsible maturity as enabled by marriage and reproduction, oppositional manners of living may give way to new forms of adulthood which are not determined by family and reproduction. My aim here is not to promote alternative temporal templates, such as seeing life as cyclic or living in an everlasting present, to replace the linear temporality the normative perspectives provide, but to suggest that complex and unpredictable patterns of relating to one past and future may be configured.32

Works Cited Adam, Barbara, “Within and beyond the time economy of employment relations: conceptual issues pertinent to research on time and work,” Social Science Information 32 (1993), pp. 163-84. Amir, Merav, “The emergence of the biological clock of the female reproductive system as a mechanism for social regulation,” Tel Aviv University, M.A. dissertation (2005). Amundsen, D. W. and C. J. Diers, “The age of menopause in classical Greece and Rome,” Human Biology 42 (1970), pp. 79-86. 32 For an extensive discussion on non- and anti-normative temporalities, see Halberstam (2005).

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Azoulay, Ariella, “P.S.—An introduction to post-scriptum on control societies,” Theory and Criticism 24 (2004), pp. 231-4. Baruch, Elaine Hoffman and Amadeo F. D’Adamo, Jr., “Resetting the biological clock: women and the new reproductive technologies,” Dissent 32 (1985), pp. 273-6. BBC News, “Male biological clock is ticking,” http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi /health/2328909.stm. Berlant, Lauren, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). Berlant, Lauren and Michael Warner, “Sex in public,” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998), pp. 547-566. Bongaarts, J., “Infertility after age 30: a false alarm,” Family Planning Perspectives 14 (1982), pp. 75-8. Butler, Judith, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (Routledge: New York, 1993). Cohen, Richard, “The clock Is ticking for the career woman: biological time clock can create real panic,” The Washington Post, March 16 (1978). Coontz, Stephanie, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992). Critical Art Ensemble, “Eugenics: The Second Wave,” Ctheory.net (1998), http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=101. Daniels, Cynthia R. and Janet Golden, “Procreative compounds: popular eugenics, artificial insemination and the rise of the American sperm banking industry,” Journal of Social History 38 (2004), pp. 5-27. Davidson, Arnold I., The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2002). Davies, Karen, “The tensions between process time and clock time in carework: the example of day nurseries,” Time and Society 3 (1994), pp. 277303. Deleuze, Gilles, Negotiations: 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). D’Emilio, John and Elisabeth B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Dessy, Sylvain and Habiba Djebbari, Career Choice, Marriage-Timing, and the Attraction of Unequals, Discussion Paper 1561 (Bonn: Institute for the Study of Labor, 2005), http://132.203.59.36/CIRPEE/cahierscirpee/2005/files/ CIRPEE05-07.pdf. Dunson, David B., Bernardo Colombo and Donna D. Baird, “Changes with age in the level and duration of fertility in the menstrual cycle,” Human Reproduction 17 (2002), pp. 1399-1403.

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Ehrenreich, Barbra and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women (New York: Anchor Press, 1978). Fabe, Marilyn and Norma Wikler, Up Against the Clock: Career Women Speak on the New Choice of Motherhood (New York: Random House Inc, 1979). Federation CECOS, D. Schwartz and M. J. Mayaux. “Female fecundity as a function of age: results of artificial insemination in 2193 nulliparous women with azoospermic husbands,” The New England Journal of Medicine 306 (1982), pp. 404-6. Fels, Anna, Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women's Changing Lives (New York, Anchor, 2005). Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1977). —. The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1978). Fox, Michael, “Age and infertility: the biological clock: fact or fiction?” Jacksonville Medicine, May (2000), pp. 210-4. Franke-Ruta, Garance, “Creating a lie: Sylvia Ann Hewlett and the myth of the baby bust,” The American Prospect 13 (2002), http://www.prospect.org/ print/V13/12/franke-ruta-g.html. Freeman, Elizabeth, “Packing history, count(er)ing generations,” New Literary History 31 (2000), pp. 727-44. Frey, Hillary, “The rules of attraction,” The Nation, July 5th (2004). Gay Gaze, “Andrew, Dec. 8, 1997,” http://gaydaze.com/gdindex.htm. Greenwald, Rachel, Find a Husband After 35 (Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School) (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004). Gibbs, Nancy, “Making time for a baby,” Time Magazine, April 15th (2002). Gilder, George, Men and Marriage (Los Angeles: Pelican Publishing Company, 1987). Goldin, Claudia, The Long Road to the Fast Track: Career and Family, NBER Working Paper No. 10331 (Cambridge, Mass.: NBER, 2004), http://ann. sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/596/1/20.pdf. Gray, Lynn, Human Reproductive Technologies: Products, Markets and Manufacturers (Connecticut: Business Communications Company Inc, 2005). Grusky, David B, “The past, Present, and future of social inequality,” in ed. David B Grusky, Stratification: Class, Race, and Gender in Sociological Perspective (Boulder: Westview Press, 2001), pp. 3-51. Halberstam, Judith, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005). Haraway, Donna J., Simians, Cyborgs, and Women the Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991).

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Hausen, Karin, “Family and role-division: the polarization of sexual stereotypes in the nineteenth century; an aspect of dissociation of work and family life,” in ed. Richard. J. Evans and W. R. Lee, The German Family: Essays on the Social History of the Family in Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Germany, (London: Barnes and Noble, 1981), pp. 51-83. Hayden, Sherly, “Tough reasons you're still single,” Cosmopolitan 15 (1998), pp. 101-4. Henig, Robin M., Pandora’s Baby: How the First Test Tube Babies Sparked the Reproductive Revolution (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004). Ingraham, Chrys, “The heterosexual imaginary: feminist sociology and theories of gender,” Sociological Theory 12 (1994), pp. 203-19. Jackson, C. F., “Black professional, educated, and self-reliant woman - why am I still single?” Sage Heart, October 15th (2004), http://sagehearts.com/ dating-advice/Black-professional,-educated,-and-self-reliant-woman-whyam-I-still-single.html. Jasper, William, “Perversion and ignorance,” The New American, April 11th (1988), p. 45. Keating, Nicole, And Sarah Laughed: the Biological Clock Metaphor and its Entailments, International Communication Association (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania, 1999). Leccardi, Carmen, “Rethinking social time: feminist perspectives,” Time and Society 5 (1996), pp. 169-186. MacPherson, Myra, The Washington Post, “The first salvos; Reagan's main street; Ronald Reagan takes over and takes aim,” The Washington Post, June 5th (1980), p. D1. Malson, Helen and Catherine Swann, “Re-producing ‘Woman’s’ Body: Reflections on the (Dis)place(ments) of ‘Reproduction’ for (Post)modern Women,” Journal of Gender Studies 12, no. 3 (2003), pp. 191-201. Marsh, Margaret and Wanda Ronner, The Empty Cradle: Infertility in America from Colonial Times to the Present (London: John Hopkins University Press, 1996). Martin, Emily, “From reproduction to HIV: blurring categories, shifting positions,” in ed. Faye D. Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 256-69. —. “The egg and the sperm: how science has constructed a romance based on stereotypical rale-female Roles,” Signs 16 (1991), pp. 485-501. —. “The end of the body?” American Ethnology 19 (1992), pp. 120-38. Mellor, Mary, “Women, nature and the social construction of ‘economic man,’” Ecological Economics 20 (1997), pp. 129-140.

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Montagnier, Luc, “A history of HIV discovery,” Science 298 (2002), pp. 17278. Newman, Anne, “The risks of racing the reproductive clock,” Business Week, May 5th (1997), http://www.businessweek.com/1997/18/b352592.htm. Nolte, Larry, “Call no man father: the attack on fatherhood,” This Rock Magazine 8 (1997), http://www.catholic.com/thisrock/1997/9710fea1.asp. Odih, Pamela, “Gendered time in the age of deconstruction,” Time and Society 8 (1999), pp. 9-38. Oshima, Sumiko, “Stopping the biological clock: the brave new world of delayed motherhood,” The Japan Times, December 13th (2000), http://search. japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fe20001213a1.html. Powell, Kendall, “Age is no barrier…,” Nature: International Weekly Journal of Science 432 (2004), pp. 40-2. Pratt, W. F., W. D. Mosher, C. A. Bachrach, et al., “Infertility—United States, 1982,” The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 34 (1985), pp. 197-9. Reed, John D., “The new baby bloom,” Time Magazine, February 22nd (1982), http://www.time.com/time/archive/printout/0,23657,922762,00.html. Richardt, Nicole, “Feminist discussion on IVF in the USA,” Biomedical Ethics 1 (1996), pp. 38-44. Robertson, John A., “Assisted reproductive technology and the family,” Hastings Law Journal 47 (1996), pp. 911-33. Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Donum Vitae: Instruction on Respect for Human Life, Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (1987), http://www. nccbuscc.org/prolife/tdocs/part2.htm. Sandelowski, Margaret J., “Failures of volition: female agency and infertility in historical perspective,” Signs 15 (1990), pp. 475-99. Seidler, Victor J., Rediscovering Masculinity: Reason, Language and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1989). Silbergleid, Robin, ““Oh baby!’ Representations of single mothers in American popular culture,” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture 1 (2002), http://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/fall_2002/silberglei d.htm. Siow, Aloysious, “Differential fecundity, markets, and gender roles,” Journal of Political Economy 106 (1998), pp. 334-54. Stack, Carol, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). Stahl, Lesley, “The biological clock,” CBS News Online Edition, August 14th (2003), http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/08/14/60minutes/main568 259.shtml.

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Stanworth, Michelle, “Reproductive technologies and the deconstruction of motherhood,” in ed. Michelle Stanworth, Reproductive Technologies: Gender, Motherhood and Medicine (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), pp. 1035. The New York Times, “The only-child phenomenon,” The New York Times, January 18th (1981), pp. 26-7. Vickerey, Amanda, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

CHAPTER FIVE A CONSTANTLY SHIFTING IDENTITY: THE PROBLEMATIC NATURE OF THE ALBINO BODY CHARLOTTE BAKER

In the body of the black African albino the familiar is mixed with the strange and as such it is rendered simultaneously recognisable and transgressive, a threat to the established criteria of the normatively embodied Self.1 The albino body is most overtly subversive in its challenging of the chromatic hierarchy. It has been claimed alternately as Black and as White, but is consistently positioned as “other”, for it is potentially acceptable to both, but accepted by neither. However, in simultaneously embodying and challenging the boundary between blackness and whiteness the albino body resists categorisation, thereby contesting established notions of difference. The body of the albino also demands a questioning of the limits of the ordinary and the excesses of the abnormal. It emerges as a threat to the constructed boundary between the body perceived as “normal” and the deviant or disabled body, exposing the tendency to stigmatise certain people as different and their bodies as “deviant” in an attempt to mark them as others who represent a threat from the outside. This paper will explore the fictional representation of the figure of the black African albino in the work of Guinean writer Williams Sassine, and in the novels of contemporary French writers Didier Destremau and Patrick Grainville. The fictional work of these writers has been selected for analysis because they position albino figures at the centre of their novels, exploring the problematic constitution of albino identity.2 While Sassine’s Wirriyamu is set against the 1

The term “albino” will be used for ease throughout this paper, although I recognise that the term “person with albinism” is considered more acceptable as it puts the person before the condition. 2 In all four novels, the protagonist is a black male with albinism, so I will refer to the figure of the albino as “he” throughout this paper. This paper will focus on the black albino of African descent, although many of the issues discussed are experienced by people with albinism of other races too.

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background of colonial Africa, Grainville’s Le Tyran éternel and Destremau’s Nègre blanc focus on the aftermath of colonial rule, while a second novel by Sassine, Mémoire d’une peau, presents an uncompromising picture of postcolonial Africa. Arguing that these writers locate the subversive nature of the albino body in its very ambivalence, this paper will examine the threat posed by this body and its implications, both for the albino individual and in relation to the broader postcolonial context. The term “albinism” refers to a group of related conditions, the result of altered genes that cause a defect of melanin production. Although up to twenty sub-types of the condition have been recorded, there are two main types of albinism. Oculocutaneous albinism results in the partial or full absence of pigment from the skin, hair and eyes, so that albinos have a pale complexion and blonde or even red hair. Reduced pigment in the eyes makes them appear to be a pale blue or grey colour and causes visual impairment. The second type of albinism is masked by near-normal pigmentation in the hair, skin and eyes, but the lack of pigment in the retina results in impaired vision.3 Oculocutaneous albinism will be the focus of this paper, as it is the very visual impact of this type of albinism which it is often seized upon in representation. Although people of any racial origin can inherit this genetic condition, albinism is often wrongly assumed to occur only among those of African descent, for it is clearly more visible within Black communities. This assumption is typical of the misunderstandings surrounding the albino that manifest themselves in myth and stereotype. Apart from the real disability caused by albinism — that is to say, the vulnerability of non-pigmented albino skin to damage from the sun, and the poor visual acuity of many people with albinism — the albino body is often attributed other inadequacies that are imagined or assumed, such as deafness and muteness.4 Furthermore, albino skin is frequently perceived as a sign of physical weakness that is subsequently interpreted as indicative of mental inadequacy. Although there are a significant number of albino figures in literature, film and art, there has been little critical attention to the albino body; a body which, in terms of its stereotypes, is considered to be lacking racially, physically, mentally and sexually and which has long been the focus of taboo, prejudice and judgement.5 This lack of attention is echoed in the failure of 3

For further reading on the condition, see Roy and Spinks (2005). Many albinos are registered disabled in the West since the majority of people with albinism are legally blind, suffering from photophobia, increased sensitivity to light and nystagmus, which causes involuntary eye movements. This can further isolate the individual not only in terms of physical appearance, but also in the conduct of their everyday life. 5 Albino characters continue to appear in literature and film, most recently in Dan Brown’s, The Da Vinci Code (2004). Brown’s representation of the albino Silas, an 4

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current discussion of the body to account for the multiply marginalised albino, a figure that challenges the “norm” and refuses categorisation. Given that the very visible difference of the albino in Africa manifests itself in the whiteness of albino skin, it is not surprising that this is the focus of much fictional writing on the condition. The novels of Grainville, Destremau and Sassine posit the skin of the Black albino as an indefinable entity in their constant struggle to interpret it. Exaggeration and the overuse of adjectives reveal the inadequacy of language for the expression or definition of the albino body and the albino becomes, “le Nègre blanc”, “a whitened Black” (Destremau, 2002: 239), “le Nègre pie”, “the piebald” (Destremau, 2002: 65), “blanc, rose, gris, le sans-peau”, “white, pink, grey, skinless” (Grainville, 1998: 56).6 The struggle to define the albino body is further revealed as the writers resort to hyperbolic language and the frequent use of metaphors to ascribe meaning to the albino individual. In Sassine’s terms, “un albinos est comme une luciole dans la nuit”, “the albino is like a firefly in the night” (Sassine, 1998: 81). The image gives some sense of the ephemeral nature of the albino, which is emphasised too by Grainville in his description of his protagonist Alpha as, “cet exilé mystérieux”, “a mysterious exile” (Grainville, 1998: 28). Significantly, such attempts to define the albino fail to do more than further confirm his ambiguous nature. The albino body is consistently portrayed in literary representation as being troubling to Blacks and Whites alike, for the enigmatic location of white skin on “black” features problematises racial categorisation according to the connotations of skin colour. The description of the albino in Destremau’s Nègre blanc as being, “hors des normes tolérées”, “beyond tolerable norms” (Destremau: 2002: 237), articulates the bounds of acceptance and is particularly telling in terms of the albino body marked as “deviant”. The juxtaposition of “normal” and “deviant” bodies is prominent in each novel, exposing the importance placed on “normality” and what is “known”. The need to see recognisable traits is constantly inhibited by the deviance of the albino body, which fails to reflect the characteristics of those around it. Albino writer Ngaire Blankenberg describes how, when others look at the albino, all that is “known” is suddenly disrupted, “for a minute, their sense of the ways of the world [is] ruptured. Just by looking” (Blankenberg, 2000: 7). This sense of disruption underpins the four novels explored here, in which the highly visible physical differences between parents and child are drawn out and given meaning. In Sassine’s Mémoire d’une peau, the protagonist Milo is constantly reminded of

albino with red eyes who carries out a series of bloody murders draws heavily on the stereotype of the “evil albino”. 6 My translations throughout.

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his physical inadequacy and this is only aggravated by his mother’s insistence on comparing father and son, “ton père avait toujours des filles. Grand, costaud, des muscles durcis… Toi, tu restais tout rabougri, tout blanc”, “your father always attracted the girls. He was big, strong, muscular… You, on the other hand, stayed puny and white”, (Sassine, 1998: 25). Milo’s whiteness is equated to physical weakness whilst, typical of Western stereotypes of blackness, his father Charles is portrayed as strong and virile. Similarly, in Destremau’s Nègre blanc, the incongruous difference between the whiteness of the young Samate’s, “corps blanc laiteux”, “milky-white body” (Destremau, 2002: 43) and his mother Mbuya’s own body which is a deep black colour is emphasised as she struggles to see her likeness in her son. Mbuya’s blackness strongly identifies her as being African, confirming her belonging whereas, in direct contrast, her albino child’s non-pigmented skin signals his difference and consequent marginality. The association is repeatedly made between the appearance of the albino and a way of being, a logic of identification that recalls Fanon’s description of the racial epidermal schema, “assailed at various points, the corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema… It was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the third person but in the triple person… I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors” (Fanon, 1972: 90). Fanon’s “racial epidermal schema” is essentially a value system that identifies black skin with a range of stereotypical characteristics which have been internalised by both blacks and whites. However, when looking at the albino body, one does not see his race, his ancestors, his lineage. Instead one is confronted with a veneer of whiteness. Thus, the albino body marks the site of ambivalence, and one that problematises identification of the albino as Black African. Consequently, a different set of values are attached to this body, explaining the tendency in the novels to associate the whiteness of the albino body with uncertainty and non-belonging. Interestingly, the novels suggest that the skin colour of the person of mixed race is equally as ambiguous and problematic as that of the albino. The most striking example in Grainville’s Le Tyran éternel is the description of the métisse or mixed-race Akissi’s skin, “cette chair ombreuse, insaisissable…”, “this shadowy, elusive skin” (Grainville, 2998: 121). While the skin of the métisse individual is troubling in its appearance - neither Black nor White, yet both - it is the absolute absence of pigmentation in albino skin that problematises his identification as African. Typically disruptive of established categories, the albino body challenges the assumption that all Africans are black, in turn undermining notions of Black essentialism. The problematic veneer of whiteness that marks the albino apart is closely associated with the negativity of the portrayal of the albino in the work of

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Sassine, Grainville and Destremau, which in turn is characteristic of the wider representation of albino figures in science fiction, in film and in the media. Writers, dramatists and film producers have consistently highlighted marginalisation and exclusion of albinos across different historical and cultural contexts, revealing a notable failure to portray the albino in terms other than those which mark the albino apart. The complex nature of the albino body and the taboos and prejudice that it evokes make it an inspiring subject. However, albino characters (usually villains) are consistently represented as having snowwhite skin and hair, and blood-red eyes; physical features that are exaggerated for dramatic effect. It becomes clear that the albino body is defined in representation not in terms of its own qualities and character, but by its difference, as the perceived inadequacies associated with the albino body and its divergence from the accepted bodily state mark it from others. The identities of the albino protagonists Milo, Samate, Condélo and Alpha are all shaped in terms of that which is perceived to be lacking or inadequate in the albino body and by the albino individual’s consequent failure to meet the criteria of acceptability. Manuel Castells argues that, “it is easy to agree on the fact that... all identities are socially constructed. The real issue is how, from what, by whom and for what” (Castells, 1997: 7). The novels of Sassine, Grainville and Destremau all suggest that the construction of boundaries and the marking of difference are central to the defining of albino identity, for it is as a result of these boundaries that marginal identity is most frequently shaped. Thus, the boundary emerges as a means of social control that is closely related to the organisation of power in society, for boundaries function both to protect and to differentiate. At once imposing and resisting difference, they dictate the inclusion of certain individuals and the exclusion of others. The construction of social and cultural boundaries and the imposition of limits at once expose the fear of and fascination with that which lies beyond them and signal the consequent need to contain and to delimit the deviant or the unknown, marking it apart. The need to protect the “norm” or that which is constructed as “normal” results in the control of access to, or even the complete exclusion of certain individuals from, the realm of acceptance. Bodies that deviate from that which is constructed as being “acceptable” serve as sites for the contentious struggle over what constitutes “normativity”. The albino body does not only diverge from the “norm” in terms of its colour, but also in terms of its other physical differences. The disability/ability binary marks and devalues bodies that do not conform to cultural standards, functioning to preserve and validate the privileged designation of “normality”. To counter this definition of the disabled body in terms of its failure to meet the “norm”, recent theories of disability have argued that disability is not a natural state of corporeal inferiority or inadequacy,

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but is a cultural construct, like that of race.7 Concepts of “normality” and “deviance” contain often enigmatic and unquestioned value judgements. In the face of normality, which carries with it notions of convention and the preference for certain standards or states of being, deviance becomes un-natural. The novels suggest though that deviance and normality are not independent, selfcontained categories, for neither exists in isolation. Destremau, for example, describes the albino as, “une anomalie probablement nécessaire aux autres afin de goûter de tout son saoul le fait de bénéficier de la normalité”, “an anomaly that is probably necessary so that others can understand the benefit of their normalcy” (Destremau, 1998: 29). In Destremau’s terms the albino is defined in relation to the “norm”, but this is represented as a two-way relationship as individuals who are portrayed as being “normal” repeatedly define themselves in comparison with the deviance of the albino. Therefore, the albino body invites reflection not only on the perceived deviance of the albino, but on the criteria that define the “normality” of others. On the level of personal identity, the novels demonstrate that the straddling of boundaries, whether of colour, ability, disability (or more than one of these, in the case of the albino) results in a complication of the politics of identity and renders recognition of the albino problematic. The potential for the “misidentification” of the albino is a central motif in the fictional work of Sassine, Destremau and Grainville. Their novels pay much attention to the possibility of misinterpreting the whiteness of the albino, which is signalled by Destremau’s Nègre blanc, “ne serait-ce sa chevelure rousse qu’il conserve courte et épousant fidèlement les formes de son crâne, et ses traits négroïdes, à distance on pourrait se méprendre sur sa race”, “were it not for his red hair, which he kept cut short to the contours of his skull, and his negroid traits, from a distance one might be mistaken over his race” (Destremau, 2002: 241). Blankenberg also discusses the difficulty of identifying the albino body, giving an example of the momentary misrecognition of the albino by other Blacks. Blankenberg refers to the moment of acknowledgement between Blacks in the West as, “the nod of recognition” which, she notes, may or may not occur. Rewriting this as, “the nod and the stare” Blankenberg comments that, “for the albino, the second of identification passes, is stretched out in time, as the brain absorbs the trick that the eye is playing. The totality of the image seems African – the hair, the nose, the facial

7

“New Disability Studies” revises a previous model that viewed disability as a medical issue to be considered and managed within disciplines such as rehabilitation, psychology and other professional fields. New Disability Studies, by contrast, considers that disability is not a natural state of corporeal inferiority or inadequacy, but a culturally fabricated narrative of the body, similar to the fictions of race and gender. For further reading, see Thompson (2002).

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structure – but the colour is incompatible. What is, is not what seems. There is no nod, only a look, and a deep, pensive scrutiny” (Blankenberg, 1997: 34). The same moment of (mis)recognition occurs too in György Sebestyén’s A Man too White, but this is a moment of mis-identification on the part of the albino as he seeks his likeness in another. The protagonist recalls, “I knew no albino except myself. Sometimes, in the street, I would see a man who was very blond and I would think, ‘There’s one. At last’. He would look me in the eyes for a second as he walked past and I saw that he was not an albino, merely blond. I know that look well” (Sebestyén, 1993: 82). The desire of the albino to find his likeness in another person is momentarily realised by Destremau’s protagonist Samate, but only in a mis-recognition of the whiteness of the man he and his mother find lying injured in the forest; Samate ne se lasse pas de contempler l’homme blanc avachi à ses cotes. Moins bronzées que les bras, certaines parties de sa poitrine découverte présentent des similitudes troublantes avec sa propre peau, et le petit garçon est fasciné par la présence d’un individu possédant les mêmes caractéristiques que les siennes. Il place son bras laiteux aux côtés d’une hanche du blessé, le tourne dans un sens puis dans l’autre, émerveillé. Il a trouvé son semblable. Samate could not help but contemplate the whiteness of the man lying at his side. Less tanned than his arms, certain parts of his body presented similarities to his own skin, and the little boy was fascinated by the presence of an individual possessing the same characteristics as him. He put his milky coloured arm next to the injured man’s thigh, turned it one way and then another, marvelling. He had found his likeness (Destremau, 2002: 153).

The troubling nature of the White man’s skin for the young albino is expressed in a moment of simultaneous recognition and misrecognition; a moment in which the body of the other is seen as precisely that which it is not. For, as Samate is to discover, the man’s experience and racial identification as White could not be in more direct contrast with his own black African albino identity. The troubling nature of the albino body is expressed in this enigmatic moment of (mis)recognition of the body of the other.8 The albino body emerges as problematic, constantly open to misrecognition, misinterpretation, and misrepresentation. Whereas the White sees his likeness in the albino before becoming aware of the albino’s black features, the Black fails to recognise the “blackness” of the albino because of the whiteness of his skin. 8

This moment might be explained in terms of Freud’s notion of the Uncanny. The Uncanny is bound up in the uncertainty of boundaries; it is so unnerving because rather than representing the unknown, it is familiar, disturbing precisely because it cannot be separated from the Self. For further reading, Royle (2003).

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It is because the albino body moves beyond definition in terms of established categories of Black or White, able-bodied or disabled, that it is perceived and represented as being problematic. The elusive nature of the albino body renders it a threat, for fundamental to the marking apart of the albino body as deviant is the need to establish an other against which the “norm” can be defined. In terms of the colonial and postcolonial settings of the novels, the inability to recognise, identify and distinguish between Africans and Europeans, or between “Blacks” and “Whites” emerges as being potentially subversive, for it contrasts sharply with the colonial administrators’ obsessive classification of their subjects in the colonies. Given that the aim of the French mission civilisatrice and the process of assimilation was to “whiten” the Black, the boundaries between Black and White needed to be firmly imposed and degrees of “whiteness” or “civilisation” established. Under this system, the attempt to direct the ways in which individuals perceived themselves and their relation to the world involved the control and regulation of the body and its expression. Thus, during colonial times, the black African body was subject to the imposition of values and prejudices, firmly subordinated to the white body of the coloniser. The desire to maintain these boundaries is clearly illustrated in the declaration of a soldier, a member of the colonising armed forces, in Sassine’s Wirriyamu, “mes compatriotes et moi voulons un monde clair et net. Des Noirs ou des Blancs. Mais pas de Noirs blancs ou de Blancs noirs. Nous aimons l’ordre”, “my compatriots and I want a clear and tidy world. Blacks or Whites. But not white Blacks, or black Whites. We like order” (Sassine, 1976: 158). To contest the boundaries would be to challenge the founding principles of the mission civilisatrice. The location of whiteness on a body deemed to be “Black” threatens this allimportant divide between Black and White. Not only does the albino body disrupt the boundary between blackness and whiteness, but also the perceived marking by colour of the degree of civilisation of an individual. The whitened body of the albino gives the visual illusion of fulfilling the aims of the mission civilisatrice, as its “whiteness” is perceived as being the same as that of the coloniser, implying civilisation. For Charles Martin, the albino, “embodies the desire of the coloniser to strip away the traditions and culture of the colonised people and to replace them with a duplicate ‘whitened’ citizen” (Martin, 2002: 6). The external whiteness of the albino body is identified as a sign of civilisation or lactification, almost perversely fulfilling Fanon’s declaration in Peau noire, masques blancs that, “pour le Noir, il n’y a qu’un destin. Et il est blanc”, “for the Black there is only one destiny, and it is white” (Fanon, 1972: 8). However, this is firmly established as a mis-identification on the part of the coloniser and as such, the troubling whiteness of the albino unbalances the very foundations of racial identification. At once embodying and challenging the

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boundary between blackness and whiteness, the albino resists categorisation, challenges notions of difference and thereby undermines the constructed differences upon which the colonial system so firmly relies. The ambivalence of the albino body and its potential threat means that it must be contained, categorised, and ultimately controlled. The stereotypes surrounding albinism serve this purpose, operating as a means of fixing in place the deviant albino from a particular and privileged perspective. In so doing, they operate as “co-ordinates of knowledge”, in Bhabha’s terms, “modes of differentiation, defence, fixation and hierarchisation” (Bhabha, 1994: 72). Creating an illusion of order, stereotypes lock groups and individuals into place in terms of an seemingly secure framework of relations, serving to protect those who promote them. Destremau’s Mbuya reflects on the little she knows about people with albinism, concluding that, “on disait d’eux qu’ils apportaient le mauvais œil”, “it is said that they bring misfortune” (Destremau, 2002: 30), attributing one trait to all albinos. It is precisely because stereotypes portray particular groups or categories as being homogeneous and interchangeable that they are usually considered inaccurate. In Grainville’s novel too, although the discussion at the time centres on one particular individual, Dje Dje makes the generalising remark that, “les albinos n’ont pas bonne presse. Ils portent poisse”, “albinos have a bad press. They bring bad luck” (Grainville, 1998: 88). In the creation of a dichotomy between Self and Other – in the identification of the Other and in turn the confirmation of the security of the Self – the logic of exclusion and containment behind stereotypes becomes evident. The fictional works of Grainville, Destremau and Sassine suggest that the ordering that stereotyping produces is always at a cost to those who are stereotyped, damaging to an individual’s social and personal identity. The stereotypical insistence on the homogeneity of groups that is fundamental to the marking of deviance results in a loss of individualism for the stereotyped individual, a notion that is expressed repeatedly in writing about albinos. The failure to acknowledge difference in the rush to categorise is illustrated by the constant definition of the albino as no more than albino; a denial of originality and selfhood. A wealth of traditional beliefs also surrounds the albino body, and many of the associations of albinism are deeply embedded in the mythical and the mystical. These beliefs are found around the world. Albinos appear in the Dogon myth in which Yasigui gives birth to an albino child instead of the expected twins, a punishment for transgressing tribal rules. The Aandonga, in the south of Angola, tell of the albino being an ogre while the Mayombe of the Congo believe that albinos are spirit children and observe particular ceremonies

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on the birth of an albino.9 Albinos are described as “moon-children” by the San Blas Indians, a term which refers to the common belief that albinos can only be seen by night; a belief perpetuated by their avoidance of the sunlight that can be so harmful to the non-pigmented skin of the albino and to their eyes (Jeambrum and Sergent, 1991). The San Blas call people with albinism “moon-children” not only because they avoid the sun, but also because it is believed that they can see in the dark (Wan, 2003). The same ability is attributed to the albino in Destremau’s novel Nègre blanc. Not only is the albino supposed to be able to see by night, but his apparent insight into the souls of others inspires terror in those around him. Myth and superstition surround not only the life of the albino, but also his death. The association of the albino with the spirit world is returned to time and again, in the work of Grainville in particular, as albinos are described as being like the living dead and the protagonist Alpha is referred to by HouphouëtBoigny as “un cadavre en marche”, “a walking corpse” (Grainville, 1998: 125). Supposedly appearing only by night, the albino becomes a phantasmal, spectral figure; an image that is compounded by his skin, “couleur de linceul”, “the colour of a shroud”, (Sassine, 1976: 60). Grainville’s Houphouët-Boigny asserts that the albino has returned from the dead, “il n’a jamais quitté la mort. Il n’a jamais opéré le partage. Il est un entre-deux détestable”, “he never left the world of the dead. He didn’t make the break. He is a revolting intermediary” (Grainville, 1998: 116). The albino is portrayed as an emissary from the spirit world; a reference to the liminal position of the albino, between the living and the dead, playing a role in both, yet belonging to neither.10 Destremau’s Mbuya, describing the sacrifice of an albino baby, recalls a ritual in which an albino child is lifted by the nganga towards the sky to a background of incantations, the throwing it into the raging water of the river. Whereas the killing of disabled children is portrayed in Destremau’s Nègre blanc as a secretive act that is carried out discreetly, the sacrifice of albinos is portrayed as a symbolic, shared act. Sassine’s Milo also comments on the act of sacrifice, “nous servons de sacrifices dans certaines régions d’Afrique”, “we serve as sacrifices in certain parts of Africa” (Sassine, 1998: 133). The significance of his words is exposed in Sassine’s second novel, Wirriyamu which focuses on the last days of Condélo’s life, evoking the concurrent fear and naivety of the albino who is pursued in the belief that, “le sang d’un albinos porte bonheur”, “the blood of the albino brings happiness” (Sassine, 1976: 70). The sacrifice of the albino 9

Albinos also appear in the Maori myth of “Ko Mutalau mo Matuku-hifi” and there are frequent references to albino animals in the mythology of Native American Indians. 10 This belief is found elsewhere. In the Congo, for example, the Nzondo community considers albinos as intermediaries between the living and the ancestors.

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body is represented as being the consequence of his intermediate position between the living and the dead, the real world and the spirit world. The segregation of the albino does not end with his death, for not only is he set apart spiritually when he dies, but also physically. We learn in Destremau’s Nègre blanc that the bodies of babies are also buried away from other graves, “n’étant pas considéré comme déjà entré dans le monde réel des vivants, le corps du nourrisson n’a pas de valeur que celui d’un animal domestique et est enterré à part, loin du cimetière traditionnel”, “not being considered as having entered into the world of the living, the body of the infant does not have any more value that that of a domestic animal and is buried far from the traditional cemetery” (Destremau, 2002: 38). Traditionally, many African tribes buried albinos by night and positioned their graves away from the usual burial grounds. However, it is impossible to generalise when speaking of the beliefs surrounding the death of the albino. Médard Djatou notes that, “the Bakweri people bury the albino under the Bouma tree. The corpse is covered in banana leaves and it is believed that after three days it will disappear. This signals that the deceased has rejoined the spirit world” (Baker and Djatou, 2006: 68). Despite the changes that have taken place in Bakweri society with the introduction of the use of coffins and cemeteries in modern burials, a young Bouma sapling is still always planted on the tomb of an albino. It becomes clear that albino identity is alternately created, imposed and contested, and in each case it is problematised by the web of myths, beliefs and stereotypes that have long surrounded the albino. The beliefs surrounding the condition have been sustained and elaborated upon in the form of stereotypes, which function as devices of “marking apart” that stigmatise the albino individual. Much of the prejudice towards people with albinism stems from a fear of the unknown and ignorance or misunderstanding of the condition. Despite the wealth of research and documentation on the genetic nature of albinism, a failure to communicate this has resulted in the continued misunderstanding that surrounds the medical condition. The rooting of these misconceptions in traditional belief means that even when the genetic provenance of albinism is fully explained, an undercurrent of superstition remains. Given the misunderstanding surrounding the condition, it is not surprising that rarely does a fictional work on albinism escape being a list of stereotypes. Only novels which present albinos as individuals and not in terms of the traits that link them with other albinos or posit them as representative can truly move beyond stereotypes. Although Sassine, Destremau and Grainville portray their albino protagonists as individuals, Mémoire d’une peau, Wirriyamu, Nègre blanc and Le Tyran éternel are in many ways typical of representations of albinism, presenting the albino body as deviant and in turn signalling

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conventional and traditional claims to the superiority of bodily, racial and sexual forms that represent, for want of a better term, the illusion of normality. In his study of the monstrous body, Richard Kearney argues that experiences of extremity subvert established categories, threaten both the known and the unknown, and serve as a reminder that the Self is never secure (Kearney, 2003). Kearney suggests that the recognition of otherness in sameness is necessary, arguing that, “if others become too transcendent, they disappear off our radar screen and we lose all contact” (Kearney, 2003: 11). This sense of something strangely familiar, yet indefinable, recurs throughout fictional writing about albinos, signalling the troubling nature of the albino body and the problematic (mis)identification of its whiteness. Quite literally embodied in the figure of the albino, the moment of recognition becomes problematic as self and other come too close. For Black and for White, for able-bodied and disabled, the albino body is disturbing precisely because of its similarity to the body of the onlooker. Yet, at the same time there is a sense of unfathomable difference that ultimately renders identification impossible. The ambivalent nature of the albino body complicates the process of marking it apart, for the lack of certainty inherent in a body that constantly challenges the need to recognise and to categorise, renders it problematic on many levels. Myth and stereotype continue to be associated with the condition because these are the means by which the albino body can be contained, accounted for and marked apart in an attempt to protect the “norm” from the threat of the deviant.

Works Cited Baker, Charlotte and Médard Djatou, “Enduring negativity: literary and anthropological perspectives on the black African albino,” in eds. Charlotte Baker and Zoë Norridge, Crossing Places: New Research in African Studies (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006), pp. 63-76. Bhabha, Homi, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Blankenberg, Ngaire, “That rare and random tribe”, Critical Arts 14 (2000), pp. 6-48. Brown, Dan, The Da Vinci Code (London: Corgi, 2004). Castells, Manuel, The Power of Identity (London: Blackwell, 1997). Destremau, Didier, Nègre blanc (Paris: Hatier International, 2002). Fanon, Frantz, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972). Garland Thompson, Rosemary, “Theorizing disability”, in ed. David Goldberg and Ato Quayson, Relocating Postcolonialism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 231-269. Ginsberg, Elaine, ed., Passing and the Fictions of Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).

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Grainville, Patrick, Le Tyran éternel (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1998). Jeambrun, Pascale, and Bernard Sergent, Les enfants de la lune: l’albinisme chez les Amérindiens (Paris: Editions Inserm, 1991). Kearney, Richard, Strangers, Gods and Monsters (London: Routledge, 2003). Martin, Charles, The White African American Body (New Jersey: Rutgers, 2002). Roy, Archie and Robin McKenzie Spinks, Real Lives: Personal and Photographic Perspectives on Albinism (London: Albinism Fellowship, 2005). Royle, Nicholas, The Uncanny: an Introduction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). Sassine, Williams, Wirriyamu (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1976). —. Mémoire d’une peau (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1998). Schlossberg, Linda, “Introduction: rites of passing,” in eds. Maria Carla Sanchez and Linda Schlossberg, Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race and Religion (New York University Press: New York, 2001), pp. 1-12. Sebestyén, György, A Man too White (Riverside: Ariadne Press, 1993). Thompson, Rosemary Garland, “Theorizing disability” in eds. David Goldberg and Ato Quayson, Relocating Postcolonialism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002) pp.231-269. Wan, Nathalie, “Orange in a world of apples: the voices of albinism,” Disability and Society 18 (2003), pp. 277-296.

CHAPTER SIX DISPLACED BODIES: THE DANCE AVANT-GARDE IN THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC AND ITS STRATEGIES OF DECONSTRUCTION AND MONTAGE SUSANNE FOELLMER1

Berlin in the 1920s: the whole city is dominated by an atmosphere of growing industrialization, mechanization and most of all velocity. The invention and then widespread use of the tram system has become emblematic of new aesthetic perception. Sitting in the tram, looking out the window while speeding through the streets, the world is framed and segmented, creating a kind of cinematic view. Passing houses and buildings lose their shape and transform into an everchanging stream of colours and waves. These experiences discovered some decades before by Impressionist painters are now transformed into an everyday life experience marked by a multidimensionality and discontinuity of the gaze. The entire field of perception is in revolt and this influences not only the Dadaists and Futurists, but also in particular new dance protagonists. Two main groups have discovered the body as an experimental field for the development of new movement strategies. The one attempts to define the body as a guarantee for so-called “authentic experience”, as in the case of Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman or the movement school of Loheland. Far from the bourgeois restrictions of the body, these artists literally seek to liberate the body from its cramped corset and formalist codes of classical ballet. They have established a new movement vocabulary serving the idea of a “natural body” that swings, glides and jumps. Back in the city and its new deconstructed perception of reality, another group of artists was inspired by the body in motion as it appears in connection with the newest technical developments occurring in cinema and the new labour practices such as Taylorism. Berlin as a metropolis has literally become synonymous with velocity and the involvement of mankind in an increasing 1

English translation by Elena Polzer and Christopher Langer.

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atmosphere of noise, machines and erupting new styles in dance, theatre and the visual arts: among all this was the dancer and actress Valeska Gert.

Berlin – The Capital City of Velocity The 1920s and their artistic development were characterized by political as well as economic revolutions in which the effects of newly introduced industrial production methods and their products played a central role. Henry Ford’s introduction of assembly line production and the accompanying heightened accessibility of industrial products for the general public resulted in a shift in the perception of time.2 The acceleration of living processes marked both the realm of industrial manufacturing as well as the appearance of public and cultural life. Trains and cars changed the speed and rhythm of travel, the cinema as a new medium of representation demanded a revision and broadening of the aesthetic Blick (gaze/view) and opened up new aesthetic possibilities for depicting reality. The connection implied here between industrial production and cultural perception is also commented on in Joachim Fiebach’s writings. The industrial revolution’s new technologies “here translate into a specific new rhythm of life, sensitivities, habits, modes of seeing… as factors… in the urbanization of the twentieth century. Urbanity or the big cities grow as a result of their spatial unfolding” (Fiebach, 1995: 35). Erika Fischer-Lichte refers to the cultural triad of “perception, body and language”, the scrutiny of which grew in the wake of the “language crisis”: the radical cultural transition, which these changes put into effect, now no longer appeared as the result of a sum of individual changes independantly each impinged upon perception, body and language. It was much rather the case that all these changes were more or less interconnected. And so… it was the accelerated locomotion of the body (in trains, the electric, automobiles) which brought about a new form of perception; the development of new movement patterns (through reform clothing, sports, gymnastics) which accompanied a shift in the function of language (Fischer-Lichte, 1995: 6).

2

Greiner, 1989: 64 ff describes Charlie Chaplin’s reception of Taylorist production methods in his films: “1913 – Chaplin was shooting his first film – he, Taylor, introduced the assembly line in the Ford motorworks. That was the decisive step towards “high performance industry”. In these factories the workforce were expected to be extremely productive and disciplined. Ford’s hallowed maxim was save time.… ‘no more than one grip per worker and no grip by hand if it can be done by a machine’. The reform bore fruit… The assembly line hadn’t even been introduced for a year, when the sales of the “Model T” began to soar.”

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I consider the approach formulated here as useful for a better understanding of Valeska Gert’s appropriation and artistic transformation of the new dance phenomena of the early twentieth century.3 Sabine Huschka refers to how embedded modern dance was in the context of ‘social, technical and aesthetic developments”: if perceived as a dynamic force field, the dancing body is, as a result, set into new relation to its kinaesthetic and scenographic-kinetic possibilities. The interface between body and movement is aesthetically rearranged: movement forms, spatial-analytical models, technical ways of handling both the body and the stage stand under the sign of a dynamic exposition of the body (Huschka, 2002: 34, 37).

Ever since the end of the twentieth century, the city has become the culmination of the aforementioned cultural processes. The kind of multidimensionality and discontinuity of perception demanded by the artistic products of the Dadaists developed both out of the dissolution of canonized concepts of artistic practice as well as through the changing routine of modern urbanity.4 Exemplary of this is the tram, which allowed simultaneity in the reception of passing images. Publications from this period equate the perception of a tram passenger with the experience of the cinema, as the “perceptual offerings resemble the alternating scenes and segments of a film” (Fiebach, 1995: 36). Inge Baxmann emphasizes that this experience of “juxtapositions” also influences the delineation of dance and choreographic concepts at the beginning of the twentieth century, as she demonstrates in the case of EmileJacques Dalcrozes: the experience of various temporal structures’ parallels coexistence and the simultaneous occurrence of distinct movement sequences inside the body allowed the rhythmically trained body to become acquainted with modern reality in all its facets… Modern technology, from trains, airplanes, up to radio, film and the illumination of the big cities dissolved the unity of the place into a multitude of perspectives. Time lost its linearity, the juxtaposition of distinct time frames became a quotidian experience (Baxmann, 2000: 141).

The Dadaists described their new approach to life and art in the context of artistic revolutions as follows: “life resembles a simultaneous entanglement of sounds, colours and mental rhythms, which, with all the sensational screams and fevers of its bold quotidian psyche and the totality of its brutal reality, is 3

Foellmer, 2006: 45 ff. Fischer-Lichte, 1995: 6. As examples, she quotes sound poems and text assemblages. See also Bergius, 2000: 6.

4

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unflinchingly adopted by Dadaist art.”5 As a new phenomena of perception, the “flood of images” triggered hereby, aside from changing life’s tempo, had major influences on the avant-garde (Bergius, 2000: 17). That it was precisely major cities such as Berlin and Paris that became the capitals of modernity (Burt, 1998: 20) can be explained in light of the history of their architectural development. According to Paul Virilio, the modernist city and speed are inseparable concepts. The broad boulevards and passageways transformed places like Paris into a ‘speed city”: “speed developed with the city, i.e. with the mastery of movement. The city is a speed box from the outset. The village, on the other hand, is a labyrinth, a place of relative settledness” (Virilio, 1993: 24). It seems to have been difficult for villagers to find their way around the fastpaced Berlin of the early twentieth century, as accounts from this period indicate: “we painstakingly made our way through the hustle and bustle of pedestrians, cyclists, trucks, cars, omnibuses and street cars… the bulk of people and vehicles flowed past us, restless, unceasing”.6 Walter Ruttmann’s movie Berlin – Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin – Symphony of the Metropolis, 1927) is exemplary in the almost choreographic structure of its rhythmically composed images of man and machine. Kurt Pinthus, Ruttmann’s contemporary, described the film in terms of a living, concentrated work of art, of temporality set into images: “as a rapid series of simultaneous events, a highly rapid succession of images, as interlaced and cross-fading back and forth, across and through, over and out. Nothing is staged, everything snatched up… Our retinas, our nerves, our consciousness whipped around like Meisel’s stamping, rolling, roaring background music in our ears”.7 This film description is exemplary of the new aesthetic vocabulary with which impressions of artistic activities and productions of the “roaring twenties” were captured.8 In this description, machine terminology (“stamping”) and verbs of movement express the mutual relationship between the economic and artistic spheres. Industrial production and its resulting acceleration influenced artistic concepts of the avant-garde, which in turn inscribed the newly developing vocabulary of movement and language into the context of a new aesthetic paradigmatic shift. In the light of the concepts of the Taylorist movement, Wsewolod E. Meyerhold coined the term biomechanics as a method of 5

Tristan Tzara, Franz Jung, George Grosz, Marcel Janco, Richard Huelsenbeck, Gerhard Preiß, Raoul Hausmann, “Dadaist Manifest” (1918), cited in Bergius, 2000: 7. 6 A. Eloesser, “Die Straße meiner Jugend” (Berlin: 1919), cited in Fiebach, 1995: 36. 7 Kurt Pinthus, “Tagebuch” (1927), cited in Schwind, 1995: 84. 8 In view of Peter Bürger’s findings, I would like to exercise caution in the use of the concept of art as a self-contained, “organic” entity. Exemplary of this are Dadaist “performances”, which cannot be accorded the status of having a ““Werkcharakter” (hermetic body of work) (Bürger, 1974: pp. 25, 68).

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controlling the body with the precision of a machine.9 Similarly Nikolaj Foregger, ballet master and sympathizer of Russian Futurism, developed choreographies for “machine dances” (Lämmert, 1994: 68). Baxmann sketches out the debate that developed between the aspects of body and technology and, among other things, “sought out the possibilities of new life forms which aimed at reconciling technology and nature” (Baxmann, 2000: 105). The Futurists’ concepts also similarly sought a unity of the apparently inconsistent. Giacomo Balla for example “attempted to uncover the inner unity of polyphone modernity through an aesthetics of simultaneity… A movement of systematic de-composition would lead to that very synthesis – inherent in modern reality – that expresses the modern way of life” (Baxmann, 2000: 121). In Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s manifest “Das Varieté” (The Variety Theatre) the demand for a “plausible explanation for the dominant rules of modern life” is evident; a demand which will only let itself be fulfilled in the variety theatre in demarcation to bourgeois theatre, because of its use of stylistic elements such as ‘simultaneity” and “breakneck speeds” (Marinetti, 1913: 88f.). “The futuristic synthetic theatre” should thus be dynamic and vital; it shows the “boundless passion for the current, fast, fragmentary… fleeting and futuristic life” (Marinetti, Settimelli, Corra, 1915: 95). Valeska Gert also participated in such artistic speed events: the Dadaists gave a matinee in Berlin. The highlight of the show was a race between a sewing machine and a typewriter. George Grosz sat at the typewriter. As soon as they discovered me in the audience, they dragged me onto the small stage and I danced to the noises produced by the two machines, a paper bag filled with two pounds of asparagus in one arm. I had just bought them at the weekly market. So you see, we already had happenings then (Gert, 1989: 49).10

It is interesting to note that speed was often positivistically equated with high velocity. Intoxicated by the “beauty of speed”, it is “perceived as a way to 9

Eberhard Lämmert writes: “while cognitive biology today attempts to re-explain the information pathways of the neural cord according to the model of electronic computer networks, in this period it was the exact mechanics of steam and electromachines that were meant to convey to all members of a conscious working collective through appropriately rhythmically set texts and choreographies. This technique, which compared the actor’s body to a machine over which he could gain complete control, became the model for far-reaching preliminary theatrical exercises aimed towards the organized enhancement of all of society’s performance standards” (Lämmert, 1994: 68). 10 As a spontaneous and coincidental anecdote, this may have taken place as described. What is however also certain is that Gert was frequently invited to Dadaistic matinees in 1919 i.e. to those of Raoul Haussmann. See Bergius, 2000: 165.

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perceive and experience reality… speed becomes a guarantee for a more intense sense of life, heightened via technical acceleration”, as Franz Loquai analyzed (Loquai, 1994: 76). It should however be noted that not all avant-garde representatives were bitten by the myth of speed.11 Walter Benjamin, for example, already introduced a counter concept to the tempo-driven society in the aesthetic figure of the “flaneur”: “the speed of the flaneur is to be confronted … with the speed of the masses. It symbolizes a protest against said masses… Boredom arises within the production process due to its acceleration (through machines). The flaneur protests against the production process by means of his ostentatious sobriety” (Benjamin, 1977: 243).12 Giovanni Lista also casts a critical eye on the Futurists’ superficial glorification of technology, amongst other things in terms of their avantgardistic artistic methods and in doing so establishes an oscillation between technological euphoria and phobia (Lista, 2003: 82). It is conspicuous that the postulated use of new technology in the performing arts and in painting was basically never truly put to use, but that instead, on the contrary, the use of conservative painting techniques continued. The prominent motif was also not the machine but rather its vibrations as movement, which were however usually expressed in paintings. Film experiments such as those attempted by Fernand Léger or the attempted deconstructions of artistic convention by Marcel Duchamp were quite foreign to the Futuristic experiments (Lista, 2003: 83 f). As early as 1931, Carl Einstein submitted Futurist art to a critical revision in his third edition of Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, arguing that they neglected to ask themselves whether their continued use of conventional, foreshortened images still met the requirements of their own demands in respect to dynamics, acceleration and the deconstruction of pictorial unity (Einstein, 1996: 180 f.). Evidently under the effect of Marinetti and his artist colleague’s Fascist passions, Einstein states: the Futurist simultané was used to describe anecdotally; they painted a genre-like dynamism; the arbour is shifted to the left and in spite of the spatial shift one preaches didactically. The Impressionist moment has been expanded through

11

See also Brandt, 1995: 71 ff. The technical enthusiasm is here read in contrast to the Dadaist Movement’s distrust in progress. 12 Interestingly the glorification of machines and technology, which the Futurists installed as a surrogate for the theatre’s crisis of representation, found no such enthusiastic equivalent on the level of, for example, the natural sciences. Anja Klöck shows that Albert Einstein in his essay “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper” (“Towards the electrodynamics of moving bodies”, 1905) criticized an unreflected relationship of “knowledge representation and technology” and was rather critical of the Futurist’s confidence in progress (Klöck, 2003: 235 ff.).

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I would like at this point to differentiate between the early phase of Futurism and the second period from 1922 onwards, the latter being strongly influenced by political dynamics that pointed in a Fascist direction. 13 The “conservativism” of Futurist artists, as deplored by Einstein, can be better understood in light of this aspect. Lista contributed much to the interpretation of Futurist experiments by differentiating between their claims and the resulting materialisations in their artistic products. However, propagating a new way of looking at the phenomena of an accelerating environment does not automatically necessitate the use of machines and new technology in the art itself. The innovations of Futurist experiments - especially in the fine arts - lie to a greater degree in the translation of phenomena of speed into the “old” medium of painting, as the paintings of Giacomo Balla und Umberto Boccioni show, and which Lista ultimately points out (Lista, 2003: 86). The varieté, which the Futurists postulated as the culminative apex of avantgarde art, should also, according to Lista, be seen less under the primacy of the technical or serial. Much more significant is a re-presentation of the body and its movements as well as an “absolute presence” of the image, which is brought to bear at the varieté with its fast paced succession of scenes (Lista, 2003: 88). The Futurists therefore found themselves less in the proximity of Edward Gordon Craig or Oskar Schlemmer than in that of those representatives of Expressionist dance whose goal it was to capture human movement in the moment of its existence.

Critical Speed: Valeska Gert In high spirits I popped like a bomb out of the set. And the same movements I had danced in rehearsal so gently and gracefully, I now exaggerated wildly. I stormed straight across the stage with giant steps, arms dangling like a giant pendulum, hands splayed, face contorted to brazen grimaces. Then I danced sweetly… One minute later the audience got their ears boxed again. The dance 13

Schmidt-Bergmann, 1993: 14. The author goes as far as to ask to what extent “totalitarian aspects… which were already part of the early political program of Futurism with its totalitarian technical mythology, served as an inspiration to the Fascist movement”.

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was a spark in the powder keg. The audience exploded, screamed, whistled, cheered. I withdrew, brazenly grinning, from the stage. The modern dance satire was born, without my intention or knowledge. And by my being abruptly sweet after impudent, putting gentle after harsh, I, for the first time created something very characteristic for this period: imbalance” (Gert, 1989: 31 f.).

Gertrud Valesca Samosch, later known as Valeska Gert, was born on January 11th 1892 into a well-to-do Jewish family. At the age of seven she took her first ballet classes and developed an enthusiasm for dance that grew after theatre visits as a result of which she discovered her reverence for Anna Pavlova. Valeska Gert’s talent for ironic exaggeration had already became clear in the framework of fashion articles for the Elegante Welt magazine. Directly thereafter she received acting lessons from Maria Moissi who then sent her to Rita Sacchetto after discovering her dance talent. In 1916 Gert debuted as Sacchetto’s student with her Tanz in Orange (Dance in Orange) in the context of a dance evening. This immediately pushed her into the public spotlight. Numerous solo appearances followed in Munich and Berlin where she was also employed for one season respectively at the Kammerspiele and Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater. Guest performances in Bucharest, Moscow and Paris followed. In the 1920s she not only acted and danced, she also had showings in cabarets such as Munich’s Bonbonnière and Berlin’s Schall und Rauch as well as the Kohlkopp in Berlin that she founded in 1932. She had contact with the important representatives of the avant-garde such as Bertolt Brecht, the Dadaists Georg Grosz and Walter Mehring as well as Sergei Eisenstein and André Breton. She also appeared in films by G. W. Pabst, Carl Junghans and Jean Renoir. At the end of the 1920s the changes in the political atmosphere limited Gert’s possibilities to perform. First she went to London where she married Robin Anderson; 1939 she emmigrated to the USA. In 1941 she opened the Beggar’s Bar in New York after a suggestion by Tennessee Williams. After the war came to a close she returned to Berlin, also as a result of problems she had with the American authorities in relation to her nightclub. Since she was not immediately allowed to re-enter Berlin, she had short stays in Paris and Zurich where she headed her café Valeska und Ihr Küchenpersonal. In 1949 she returned to Berlin. She then established the Hexenküche cabaret in 1950 where a young Klaus Kinski read poems by François Villon. As in the Beggar’s Bar, Gert concentrated on satiric presentations and songs such as "Ilse Koch", a poignant parody of the Buchenwald concentration camp commander. The Hexenküche was not granted a long life; it was closed in 1956. From this point on she retreated to the island of Sylt, her summer residence before the war. There she ran the cabaret Ziegenstall though she no longer went on stage herself. She only appeared in small roles as an actress in films by Federico

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Fellini and Volker Schlöndorff. On March 18th 1978 she was found dead in the upper floor of the Ziegenstall that had served as her home. In the context of the previously described aesthetic changes, marked by high speed, simultaneity and the hustle and bustle of the modern metropolis, Valeska Gert appeared on the scene literally as the personified expression of the fast, nervous Berlin, soaking up the atmosphere of the 1920s and transforming it into artistic energy. Rudolf Frank summed it up at the time: “a summary expression of this day and age is… Valeska Gert, she danceperforms [sic] subway trains and the subterranean feelings of the big city, the maze of streets, narcotics, film, rummage sales, ravaged alley cats… East Asia and Western Europe” (Frank, 1987: 9). Both from a receptive-aesthetic (viewer-response) position as well as in the aesthetic terms of her production methods, Valeska Gert was well-placed within the phenomenological context of the 1920s. An idea of how she was received can be gleaned from numerous reviews and autobiographical material, which, as previously outlined, make use of the vocabulary of machines and speed as the instrumentarium of their artistic analysis. In them Gert boards “a high speed train to new pastures” (Anonymous, ca. 1920).14 She bursts right into the bourgeois theatre “like a bomb”, utilizes “Berliner Tempo” and “hurls” her body onto the stage (Gert, 1989: 31 and Schulze).15 She concentrates in her performances on that which is typical for Berlin: “the modern German city and its… human absentmindedness sets the stage” for her art (Anonymous/F.H.). “Fully a child of her day and age, she has stylized the rhythm of our age… in dance” (Anonymous, ca. 1920). These aesthetic characteristics expressed themselves in dances such as (Berliner) Verkehr (Berlin Traffic), Nervosität (Nervousness) or Zirkus (Circus): ‘she danced Berlin’s traffic… The hustle and bustle of the cars, the confusing neon advertising… the haste of the pedestrians… the crazy jostling crowds. She also danced a stalemate, with everyone raging and ranting at each other, with everything hopelessly wedged together and with no way forward nor backward” (Hildenbrandt, 1928: 115). The primacy of speed is evident in Gert’s dance Zirkus: In Zirkus I portrayed one after another, the panneau rider, jumping up and down in triumphant ballet poses high up on the horse’s back, the athletic muscle man and the frenzied finish of a horse race. I galloped with the legs and whipped with the arms, so that I was both horse and rider all in one. This dance struck like a 14

This and the following newspaper reviews are from the Valeska Gert Archive of the Akademie der Künste Berlin. The names of the authors of the reviews as well as precise information on the date of publication are often missing. They are listed in the archive under “Anonym” (“Anonymus”) and the respective folder number. 15 Feuilleton portrait from the 1920s from Hanns Schulze, “Tänzerinnen – II. Valeska Gert”.

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real bombshell every time. The tempo was crazy, the audience came along for the ride and got all fired up just like at a real horse race (Gert, 1931: 40).

So city traffic and tempo in no way remained solely the realm of those artists involved in the circle of Futurism or Dada, but also became relevant in the field of dance.16 The statement by Valeska Gert quoted at the beginning of this section describes the Tanz in Orange that she presented during a student recital in 1916 and brought her sudden fame. Looked at from a historical perspective, this fame arose not only out of the scandalous effect that her performance aroused in comparison to the harmless-graceful dances of Rita Sacchetto’s students (Ochaim, 1991: 25). It was rather the circumstance that her dancing concentrated in itself all the fundamental artistic methodology of prevalent revolutionary avant-garde aesthetics. The moment of shock, which Walter Benjamin and later Peter Bürger defined as a constitutive versus contemplative viewing stance, is put into practice here (Benjamin, 1935/36: 38f. Bürger, 1974: 108).17 So is the principle of montage which, through the contrasts and extremes in the dance, resulted in a “montage of attractions” (Eisenstein, 1923: 263).18 In doing so, Valeska Gert translated the avant-garde possibilities of film into a distinct movement vocabulary which identified itself – not only in respect to the temporal-rhythmic structuralization of her dances – with the aesthetic production means of film, as is demonstrated in the use of slow-motion, stop-

16

This phenomenon is also used as a model to explain the free rhythmic arts, especially concerning the richness of variations in rhythm and movement, as can be gleaned from the modern metropolis’ everyday streets. Oscar Bie praised the meeting of pedestrian and automobile traffic as a chance to unfold one’s own rhythm, whereby he surely tended towards a, in those days quite widely found, slightly euphemistic view of the increasingly automobilized cityscape: “every second there are people on the streets and in rooms carrying out movement rhythms, which seem to follow uniform rules and yet defy description… The weft in the taught weave of the uniform traffic rhythm is the millionfold difference in individual traffic. Each pedestrian with the rhythm of his disposition or his momentary business, every private car, automobile, bike, hired cab, the public wagons, the lorries, everything, that can be used as a means of transportation in this age or whatever any individual has chosen to be used as such, blends into this indescribable concert” (Bie, 1923: 92 ff.). According to Sabina Huschka “movement and rhythm have become the leitmotif of modernity” (Huschka, 2002: 156). 17 Benjamin describes the shock effect of film from which the audience in contrast to theatre cannot flee. In this context Bürger referred especially to the Dadaistic events aimed at destroying bourgeois “aesthetic immanence”. 18 Here Eisenstein is referring to a “new artistic practice – the free montage of consciously chosen, independent… impressions (attractions)… with the precise intention of reaching a certain thematic final effect – the montage of attractions”.

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motion and compression in some of her works (Brandstetter, 1995: 446 ff.).19 Magnification and distortion, with “giant steps”, sprawling movements and the use of facial expressions, are artistic references to the Futurist calls for a hyperbolized form of expression which Gert among other things took up again in her thoughts on film (Marinetti, 1913: 91; Gert, 1925: 33). Gert integrates and condenses, in a succinct form, moments of discontinuation, reduction and extraction in her short dances. According to the description, the shock caused by Valeska Gert’s Tanz in Orange seems to have been from a superficial point of view a “typical” avant-garde scandal as caused by the Dadaists or Futurists (or as they would have liked to produce). According to Bürger, however, this disruption of the bourgeois attitude towards art can be understood as a constitutive moment in avant-garde art production. However, it carries in itself the twin dangers of audience inurement and institutionalization, as can be seen best in the art of the “neo-avant-garde” since “nothing loses its effect faster than shock, because it is a once in a lifetime experience” (Bürger, 1974: 82). In repetition it changes fundamentally, for there is such a thing as an “expected shock” (Bürger, 1974: 108). What is more, shock is not necessarily useful for producing an ongoing effect on the audience, because it neglects to trigger a change of attitude about art and society in the recipient, being more likely instead to lead to a state of simple superficial “rage” (Bürger, 1974: 108). The scandals which Valeska Gert’s dances provoked seem to confirm this viewpoint: “the people hollered, clapped, they lost all inhibitions, threw objects at us. Delicate Sidi half-swooned into the set. For me the din was invigorating, I wanted to move people, the more they hollered, they bolder I got” (Gert, 1989: 32).20 The second part of the quote already reveals the desired and apparently also necessary interaction between Gert and the audience; an interaction that went beyond simply angering the audience with shock effects. Of course this does not mean currying favour with the audience, as the quote documents. On the contrary, Gert was more interested in a “productive” audience that she wished to be stimulated in her performances (Gert, 1923: 24). Critics at the time already observed: “when has there ever before been such a lively, even heated debate on the streets as here? It’s the best indication that the audience has begun to think for themselves… we need the like more often” (Anonymous, Ostdeutsche Zeitung). I would like to look closer at the aesthetics of shock, as it, read with Benjamin, gives intense insight in Valeska Gert’s avant-garde artistic practice, 19

Brandstetter refers to demands formulated by Meyerhold on the “Filmization of Theatre” and examines the artistic influences of Valeska Gert and Charlie Chaplin in this context. 20 Gert had her second performance with Sidi Riha, a friend, in the Berlin Theater am Nollendorfplatz.

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setting it apart from the reduction of shock to an “unspecific reaction” (Bürger, 1974: 108). According to Benjamin, the aesthetic of shock arose with the advent of film, which broke with the classic reception of theatrical art. Film makes it impossible for the viewer to “immerse” himself in the action as the images presented evade “contemplation” through their rapid “alteration” (Benjamin, 1935/36: 38f.). Benjamin draws a parallel herein to the Dadaists, whose art worked in a similar way: “from an alluring appearance or persuasive structure of sound the Dadaist’s art became an instrument of ballistics. It hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality” (Benjamin, 1935/36: 38).21 Gert’s performances had the same “smashing” effect, as she herself reported.22 However, this filmic shift in the image points to something beyond a short, momentary effect and represents a much more forceful principle in terms of a changing receptive stance. This topos delineates a visual stance, which is (as already described) influenced by urban tempo henceforth characterized by “simultaneity” and “multidimensionality” and a mobilization of the gaze, as Fiebach states. While travelling in a train for example: the perceivable and perceived world appears as a panorama, the images or objects as panoramatic, in the simultaneity of temporal spaces, as simultaneously occurring complexes of images… These seem in a particular way to… focus on the constantly changing, visualized apparitions and relationships of things (Fiebach, 1995: 26).

With this new background of aesthetics of perception in mind, we must therefore examine to what extent film truly had such a massive effect on the contemporary receptive stance, as Benjamin describes. Bürger therefore also criticizes his concept in respect to his overzealous positivistic understanding of radicalization through the introduction of new production means in the artistic process.23 With Valeska Gert’s art in mind, I would like to venture the hypothesis that she drew on the aesthetics of rapid changes of images free from 21

Translation by Andy Blunden; page numbers are those of the German edition. In Volker Schlöndorff’s film Nur zum Spaß, nur zum Spiel. Kaleidoskop Valeska Gert (BRD: 1977) Gert describes her attitude towards the audience as: “I made wild caricatures of everything, so madly over the top in all directions… I simply sprang people in the face.” 23 Bürger here comments critically on the “transfer” of “Marx’s theorems” from industrial production conditions onto those of the arts. One must question, “whether at the end of the day this transfer remains no more than a simple analogy… but it is doubtful whether a concept of artistic powers of productivity can be derived, for the simple reason that in artistic production the subsuming of the producer’s abilities and skills and the development level of material production and reproduction techniques under a single term may prove to be difficult” (Bürger, 1974: 38 f.). 22

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recourse to technical production means and that this was precisely the method by which she evoked a productive receptive stance in her audience and which shall be looked on as the basis of the methods identified by Benjamin as the constitutive elements of film. The camera brings about a structuralisation of the film through ‘slow-motion” and through “interruption and isolation… extension and acceleration of the process… enlargement and… reduction” (Benjamin, 1935/36: 36). Benjamin’s approach is also useful in a second respect. Film actors and actresses are not able to continuously play a “consistent” role like in the theatre. Instead their acting “is composed of many individual performances” (Benjamin, 1935/36: 26). According to Bürger, Benjamin therefore positions himself precisely within the context of avant-garde criteria, which he is also quick to subsume in his term “allegory” (Benjamin, 1977: 236). The principle of avantgarde creation is therefore the detachment of the individual out of the (“organic”) context. The extracted fragments are then, in installed form, allotted a new manner of “assigning meaning” (Bürger, 1977: 93 ff.). Valeska Gert uses those principles in the creation of her solos, which she assembles avantgardistically through extreme contrasts and “editing techniques” (Brandstetter, 1995: 451). The creation of a danced “montage of attractions” becomes, in Eisenstein’s analysis, obvious in her artistic work. This will be analyzed later in more detail.

The Art of Speed Valeska Gert’s approach to the temporal-rhythmic structuring of her dances can be assessed as a fundamental basic principle of her artistic oeuvre. Tempo is split thereby into compression and condensation, acceleration, expansion and slow-motion as well as stagnation. These stand as parameters next to metrically unspecific aspects such as haste and “imbalance” as an expression of the rhythm of life in Berlin (Hildenbrandt, 1928: 59 and Gert, 1989: 32). “There is something urgent, pervasive in these movements; a valuable agitation, a polemic creature, laughing, dancing at the world”, wrote Ernst Blass about Gert’s dances (Blass, 1921: 42). Gert typified the aforementioned “parable of our sense of time” in her solos Nervosität und (Berliner) Verkehr (Anonymous/L.D.). Nervosität makes use of a seemingly unspecific body language that exposes the aimless and uncurbed movements of the “nervous” age of the 1920s: “a shooting back and forth, senseless, useless, a wringing of hands, tearing of hair, a fidgeting, trembling, whirling” (Anonymous/L.D.). Nervosität acts on various levels: on that of movement and that of the costume (fig. 6.1): “the costume itself already emanated nervousness. One leg black, the other in white tights, hair in disarray,

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the “blouse” in wild stripes, enough to make a sensitive heart grow pale.”24 The performance of contradiction and contrasting techniques of montage are therefore already implied in the choice of costume.25 This dance, moreover, already indicated aspects of Gert’s critical attitude towards social phenomena: “we supposedly nervous people of the twentieth century find ourselves caricaturized by Valeska Gert in such a way that we immediately promise to mend our ways” (Anonymous/Dr. H.F.).

Fig 6.1, Gert, Nervosität [1917], in Gert, 1931: appendix. 24

Anonymous/Dr. H.F.: “Valeska Gert tanzt”. A similar costume, designed by Fernand Léger was worn by the “Poet” in the 1922 ballet Skating Rink, which played with contrasting black and white checks and stripes, continued in the facial make-up. See Burt, 1998: 40, picture. 25

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Fig. 6.2, Gert, Verkehr, photo by Lili Baruch, courtesy Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung Schloss Wahn, Cologne, Germany. The lightning speed movement patterns described above are especially evident in the design of the dance (Berliner) Verkehr, in which Gert “dances people rushing to and fro, cars and the traffic constable” (Gert, 1931: 40). This danced compression of urban tempi corresponds with the Benjaminian description of compression and disruption, which according to the critics of the day arose from the “brief, strikingly interlaced symbology” (Anonymous/O.A.Sch.). The two illustrations of the solo (Berliner) Verkehr (figs. 6.2 and 6.3) show Gert in a highly contrasting chequered, short costume, whose black and white seems to refer both to the confusion of the streets and the criss-crossing of the cars and carriages as well as underlining the montages and rapid shifts of “roles”. The remarkable thing in these photographs is that Gert not only condenses the traffic policeman’s laconic movements in posed imitations (fig. 6.3) but also evidently illustrates the tempo and tides of traffic in almost abstract curved movement arches (fig. 6.2). It is the only illustration that lets us guess at similar movement vocabulary for other dances, such as Kino (Cinema). All other photos are generally characterized by the gestus of mimicry, posing or rather excessive gestures, as in the Kupplerin (Procuress). Last but not least Gert’s dance stands almost topographically for the bustle of people and vehicles

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at the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, the most important traffic junction of the time, which was equally an inspiration to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, a member of the Expressionist artist group Die Brücke.

Fig 6.3, Gert, Verkehr, photo by Lili Baruch, courtesy Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung Schloss Wahn, Cologne, Germany. Gert’s fast-paced montages show the influence of the Reinhardtian theatre work, in whose ensemble she was a member, sporadically taking small roles between 1917-19 (Peter, 1987: 19). Max Reinhardt’s use of the revolving stage gave the theatrical event a dynamic quality that apparently matched roughly that of the movies. Critics of the period described as early as 1912 the “performative moments in Hebbel’s Nibelungen that resembled cinematic edits” which made an immersion into a “comfortable universal scene” impossible for the audience (Fiebach, 1995: 24f.). Valeska Gert then transferred principles of rapid scenic changes established in such a manner for the stage into a specific mode of physical movement. Freed in this manner from technical production means, she

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“personified” the movements of the technological world (Anonymous/Gg.Th.). In the process, Gert’s art dialectically formed the rhythm of time through the transformation of technical-mechanical movement vocabulary into a texture of the body, which in turn examined urbanity and the medium of technology. The same can be said of the act Zirkus in which Gert, in the manner of a variety show, presented figure upon figure in rapid succession. Hans Schulze finds vivid words of description: Varieté and circus… Berlin tempo. Wild like Mehring’s verses. Implicative, redefining red and yellow striped dress. Knee-high stockings held up by white ribbons, let teasing, fresh flesh emerge. Jugglers, tightrope walkers, acrobats, jockeys, horseback riders, athletes. A roar, storm!… To the booming of the drums fat wrestlers stride forth… dancers in Marseille sailor’s hustle and bustle, primaballerinas of past royal theatres bloom from her dancing (Schulze, undated).

Aside from the various tempo variations Gert also danced interruptions of an objectified kind, as traffic accidents and traffic jams (Hildenbrandt, 1928: 115).26 The subject of “relâche”, which Gabriele Brandstetter specifies as a ‘structural principle situated between dance, theatre and film” and which is the title of a corresponding piece by the Ballets Suédois also becomes a topos in Valeska Gert’s work, showing itself most clearly in her dance Pause (Intermission) (Brandstetter, 1995: 454 ff.).27 I would like to precede the discussion of the impossibility of movement as exemplified in the dance Pause (fig 6.4) with the topos of slow motion. Virilio describes the moment of “pausing, interruption” as the truly interesting aspect in the discourse of speed: “an interruption means changing one’s speed” (Virilio, Lotringer, 1993: 74f.). In her danced standstill, Valeska Gert distances herself from the seemingly infinite speed records and technical possibilities. In the 1920s, she is an interested observer, but also critical analyst of the unbroken, mystifying passion for technology that led to a glorification of war - “the world’s sole hygiene” - among the Futurists and others (Marinetti, 1909: 178). It is interesting to compare the images of the aforementioned dance Pause and the 26

In an untitled, English language text fragment Valeska Gert writes, “I created a dance, “City-Traffic”. I danced the movements of the cars, the cop, the nervousness and hurry of the passers-by and traffic accidents” (Gert, Fragment: 5). This is probably the written version of one the “lectures” that Gert often held at the Beggar’s Bar: “sometimes I held lectures on theatre and film, on religion and politics. I criticized and animated, as best I could” (Gert, 1950: 88). 27 Relâche was premiered on December 12th, 1924 in Paris. The title according to Brandstetter means “closed”, “no show today” or also “currently not playing”“ (Brandstetter, 1995: 455).

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dance Tod (Death). Pause appears as a standstill abandoned in motion, an interruption and wait. The legs are frozen in place at various angles, the arms are stretched out into the air, the head is bent contrapuntally to the side, tiredly lingering. In the play of tension (arms and legs) and relaxation (head) the arms are fixed in an ornamental gesture, with the position of the hands reminiscent of flamenco gestures, awaiting resumption of the dance. It is important to also mention here the medium of photography with which Gert’s posture and her standstill in the flow of time is recorded. It is, therefore, possible to speak here of a duplication and reinforcement of the arrested gesture. Roland Barthes commented on this function of photography: “in photography the discontinuation of time reveals itself only in an exorbitant monstrous way: time stands still” (Barthes, 1989: 101). In the piece Tod, by comparison, this tension has been resolved (fig. 6.5). Valeska Gert evidently no longer attends to the audience for whom a dance

Fig. 6.4, Gert, Pause, photo by Käte Ruppel, courtesy Tanzarchiv Köln, Germany.

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Fig 6.5, Gert, Tod [1925], photo by Suse Byke, in Hildenbrandt, 1928: 48. movement must be presented; the head is tilted to the side and as in Pause falls back into the nape in expectation of what will come after death (“up there”). Virilio also referred to death as the “great interruption” (compared to sleep for example), which, like all other absences and temporal caesuras influences the perception of time (Virilio and Lotringer, 1993: 77): ‘sight is always a montage… of temporalities. Time is not only organized by power alone, but also by technologies. In the case of the interruption it is clear that it is temporal rather than spatial” (Virilio and Lotringer, 1993: 75). Bearing this in mind, it once again becomes evident to what degree Gert was “an arm’s length ahead” of the historic avant-garde (Sahl, 1974: IV). The aberration of dynamism – exaggerated in Tod and Pause – is, as an “aesthetics of interruption”, according to Virilio, also “kinematics”, so bringing the theoretical circle back around to Benjamin. In her consequent application of avant-garde means of production, Gert’s use of temporal structure and assemblage in her dances therefore obtains from time to time an anticipatory dimension. Hildenbrandt’s comment that Valeska Gert’s technique was better than slow motion itself becomes understandable in this light and goes beyond

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the simple technical validation of dance precision with the help of filmic slow motion (Hildenbrandt, 1928: 124).28

Playing with Time The use of slow motion and the compression of time in Valeska Gert’s dances will now be examined in more detail: “I often used slow motion and rapid movement for my dances. Slow motion serves to italicize some gestures or magnify a tension” (Gert, Fragment: 5). The use of the verb “italicize” is here remarkable. Whereas Gert usually speaks in the vocabulary of scandals, dynamics and the crudity of her dances, she refines at this point her use of language and associates slow motion with the effect of punctuating, “italicizing” fundamental dance moments. 29 So steering the gaze to fine details invisible at normal speed. Virilio describes such “vision impairment” as a necessary paradox needed in order to be able to perceive any details at all in the frenzied speed of postmodernity (Virilio, 1986: 95). John Schikowski already recognized in the 1920s these new aesthetic possibilities of deceleration in film: the slow, extraterrestrial hovering and wandering through the air, the majestic greatness of movements in treading and in sinking folds as demonstrated by slow motion exposures, contains an entirely singular artistic value of expression, which could be put to use. I hope that film directors and dancers will take on this problem lovingly and so contribute to new forms of expression in dance (Schikowski, 1926: 148).

Although he directs his attention to her skilful trenchant depiction of her subjects, in the process, he overlooks the fact that she is already drawing on the means of expression he is advocating, even if not exactly in the harmonically soft curves of conventional Expressionist dance (Schikowski, 1926: 152f.). Aside from emphasizing details, the extension of movement has another, additional function in Gert’s dances. Hildenbrandt has examined it rather extensively and differentiates between dances that are simply too slow, too “slow-motion-ly”, too looped one after the other from those in which slow motion as a device has both a temporal-expansive, as well as a spatial28 Hildenbrandt here is referring to the “heartless” medium film, whose means of slowmotion mercilessly reveals the smallest of mistakes: “if someone like Gert comes along and precedes and counteracts slow-motion and dances from the onset as if slow-motion were verifying her, such a dancer need have no fear of herself in dance, she must and will succeed.” 29 As shown by Gert for example in the hyperbolisized gestures of her dance Tanz in Orange.

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expanding function: “she dances in slow motion, she enlarges and coarsens, she stretches it out, out of a tiny cheeky idea, she makes a whole cheeky dance, she stretches the idea out like a rubber band, she inserts what is not explicitly visible, and it is still not boring, but instead incredibly interesting” (Hildenbrandt, 1928: 60 and 115). 30 Dances like the Menuett (Minuet) belong to this “category” (Hildenbrandt, 1928: 120).31 The most important creative moment of oversimplification, which Gert herself demanded in film is here confirmed by Hildenbrandt, allowing for a more profound examination of the Gertian artistic principles of the grotesque than contemporary critics simple descriptions allow for (Gert, 1925: 33). All too often the grotesque carries a half-negative colouration, paired with the regret that Gert did not allow herself to be moved to produce more “serious” art.32. The grotesque however makes up a fundamental avant-gardistic artistic practice in Valeska Gert’s oeuvre (Foellmer, 2006: 109 ff.). Apart from slow motion, temporal compression is also an important part of Gert’s approach to dance. For Gert, acceleration served as a counterpoint to the flowing, abstract movements of Expressionist dance, as brought forth for example by Mary Wigman.33 Her dances are meant to “be very, very fast and not watered down by any kind of abstract movement” in the process sharpening the audience’s perception of the dance subject (Gert, 1936). The frenzied tempo also served to carry the audience, by whose reactions Gert was in turn inspired to ever more accelerated record-breaking performances, as has been previously described. The fast-paced tempo, however, also went beyond the simple purpose of “violent” effect. In the previously cited English language fragment Valeska Gert described her dance Nervosität in terms of velocity: “in my dance Hysteria I used rapid movements. I made my movements so fast that they looked like a

30 Out of all the dances, the (Berliner) Verkehr falls through the net of Hildenbrandt’s otherwise passionate enthusiasm for Valeska Gert: “everything in it is a bit too one after another instead of beside each other, everything is here a bit too slow and too much in slow-motion.” 31 Hildenbrandt also emphasized her technical skill: “she danced this minuet as if in slow motion and there it is, a ruthless and exacting test of her capabilities and I admit that she passes the test well”. 32 One critic for example attempts to lift Gert out of the depths of simple scandal but in so doing implies a kind of auto therapeutic effect of her art: “here in the dance Laster (Vice) Gert shows that the grotesque is only one side of her power on stage and maybe not even her strongest. That her dancing is occasionally also an end in itself and not just the means of parody” (Anonymous/H.-d.). 33 Both Brandstetter as well as Peter show this contrast (Brandstetter, 1995: 449 f., Peter, 1987: 35 ff.).

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convulsion, like the mad essence of nervousness” (Gert, Fragment: 5).34 The English translation of nervousness into hysteria here also demonstrates both Gert’s trenchant-overstated approach and the aforementioned unspecific movement patterns of haste and agitation. These also characterized the dance Kino: “I performed an endurance runner from the newsreel, a cartoonist, a cranking film operator, the funny old lady, the diva, a silly teenager and stubborn soldiers all mixed together. The movements flickered, so that they looked out of focus” (Gert, 1931: 40). As Hildenbrandt notes, Gert already comments here on the altered viewing conditions of the still quite young medium of film. She dances “the entire world of the cinema, even from way back then, when everything wobbled so horribly on screen that one’s eyes started watering and hurting” (Hildenbrandt, 1928: 111). Kino displays a range of aesthetic levels. On the one hand, Valeska Gert concentrated in this dance and in Varieté on the “segmentation of movement”, which then she assembled into independent units of meaning using montage technique resulting it what can be called, as mentioned above, a dance version of Eisenstein’s “montage of attractions”.35 In her dance of flickering movies she reflected the new urban conditions of perception manifesting themselves in the experience of railway travel and film as described above. Aside from the gestus of trenchant display through intense physical presentation on stage, as also postulated by Bertolt Brecht, Gert here refers to the topos of disappearing bodies. This absence however is not marked by the enveloping flow of the folds of her dance dress, but in the acceleration of the body, whose contours are blurred, out of focus.36 Gert is hereby not interested in the liquidation of the human body as the main component of theatre.37 On the contrary, the “unfocused dance” is conceived as an aesthetic adoption of the period’s “new medium” film as well as a critical analysis, which precisely reconstructs the invasive encroachment of the technology of acceleration in the human speed of life. Taken out of time, Gert can be resituated into the company of Virilio, who gave this phenomenon ample room in his philosophical writings: 34

It is not quite clear whether Gert here simply was imprecise in her translation; however a study of her descriptions and pictures that describe the dance Nervosität reveal no specific examination of the phenomena of (female) hysteria. It must be assumed that Gert here translates and overstates the hectic of the metropolis in the term “hysteria”. 35 As Brandstetter states, “the temporal and movement structuralization of Valeska Gert’s dances is characterized by editing techniques, the fragmentation of motoric units, abbreviations of revue-linked scenarios. This segmentation pattern is most evident in her piece Kino” (Brandstetter, 1995: 451). 36 See Brandstetter’s reading of Loïe Fuller’s dances (Brandstetter, 1995: 336). 37 Brandstetter, 1995: 451 f. The author here differentiates between Valeska Gert and the Futurist ideal of the body liquidated by movement.

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In the 1920s Gert had not yet developed such a similarly culturally pessimistic view of the physical destiny of mankind, but moved once more within the dialectical parameters described above. In examining filmic velocity, Gert transports these same conceptual tools into the specific expressivity of her movements. Pulling the audience into the action, she was able to “arouse in the viewer, this voyeur and traveller, a feeling of dizziness and to elicit the impression that he himself is being catapulted into the picture” (Virilio, 1986: 65). The difference from the Futurist dynamic can be read, with Virilio, not in the replacement and liquidation of the person, but as a form of “delivering spare parts for the organism and adapting to the proportions of the human body while also creating in every individual a parasensitive competitor, to multiply his/her existence” (Virilio, 1986: 75). Tempo is then also no longer machine-glorifying, body-replacing technical euphoria for Gert, but instead involves re-determining the place of the body in the concordance of space and time: “you have no body, you are body!”, Wilhelm Reich exclaimed; today power and its techniques reply with: “you have no speed, you are speed” (Virilio, 1986: 49). However, the pictures of Umberto Boccioni already referred to the depiction of “pure” speed and to their opposites, adhesion and standstill, as evident in the two paintings States of Mind I: Those Who Leave and States of Mind II: Those Who Stay (both 1911). The following passage details Valeska Gert’s translation of the possibilities of the new medium of film into her dance practice.

The Montage of Danced Attractions Gert formulated the principle of montage as an aesthetic tool on the one hand as theory in her writings on film and on the other hand used it as artistic practice in her dance and theatre performances. In her text “Phantastisches im Film” she explains her concept of new production aesthetics. The augmented possibilities of film compared to theatre are to be particularly made use of. The Shakespearean Puck serves as an example for her statements concerning the fragmentation and enlargement of the acting figure: “Puck should never be fully visible, just parts of him, so that the audience has to assemble the figure themselves” (Gert, 1925: 33). No more than the legs or a hand appearing on the edge of the stage should be visible of the body, physically deconstructed; a principle which Jean-Luc Godard was later to set as a counterpoint to the

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illusionistic style of Hollywood. Beside the described fragmentation, Gert placed enlargement in the sense of a fantastic hypertrophisation: “you see for example a laughing face; the face grows bigger and bigger until it fills the whole screen. Then the screen is not longer large enough and only has room for a gigantic, wide-open laughing mouth. Then ten, twenty mischievous faces like balloons here and there” (Gert, 1925: 33).. In this text Valeska Gert specifically plays with the camera settings of detail, long shot and close-up, which later became the constitutive characteristics of Hollywood film in the 1940’s. The goal however was not to produce the illusion of a organic sequence of action but the direct fragmentation of old patterns of perception which, she held, constituted film in comparison to theatre and demanded a constructive, active role from the audience.38 The establishment of the fragment versus the organic context positions Gert in the aesthetic productive proximity of avant-garde writings. Bürger’s paraphrase of allegoric fragmentation according to Benjamin lays the foundation for a principle of montage: “the allegorical rips an element out of the totality of the context of life. It isolates it, robs it of its fiction. The allegory is, therefore, by nature a fragment and stands in contrast to the organic symbol” (Bürger, 1974: 93 f.). The structural characteristics of montage in film are formed on the one hand by “fragmentation of reality” as postulated by Bürger as well as by the “disruption and dislocation of metric and rhythmic temporal order as syncopation” described by Brandstetter (Bürger, 1974: 98). Valeska Gert in turn incorporated these aspects into the design of her dances. The avant-gardistic work process takes recourse in the “emancipation” of the fragment versus the regulative context (Bürger, 1974: 107). It no longer stands as pars pro toto but instead independently refers to its own interpretative cosmos or revokes, as in the collages of John Heartfield, its symbolic function as part of reality itself (Bürger, 1974: 101 ff.). Here Gert situates herself right in the middle of the field of a fragmentary placement of splinters of life’s reality, producing stylized typecasting by means of the extreme distillation and concentration of gestural means and the creation of new ways of viewing the representations of reality through the montage of fragments of social and artistic reality. This is especially evident in her pieces Varieté and Tanz in Orange in which she, in Bürger’s words, distances herself 38

In the 1960s Gert suggested a new form of theatre without public funding. The audience can visit the theatre at any time of the day and just see short pieces for which they pay according to the number of pieces seen or the length of their stay. Gert here also calls for a synthesis of film and theatre. The actor’s expression is to be enhanced with hanging magnifying glasses: “the audience can now simultaneously enjoy both the closeups of film and the human proximity of the theatre,” Valeska Gert: “Vorschlag zu einem neuen Theatertypus ohne städtische Zuschüsse” (Gert, 1973: 119 f.).

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avant-gardistically from the “total construction of the visual space as a continuum” (Bürger, 1974: 104f.). Gert find herself thereby in the excellent company of the Dadaists, to whom she maintained regular contact that went beyond the chance encounters she herself described.39 In his essay “Montage der Attraktionen” (Towards a Theory of Montage), Sergej Eisenstein comments on the composition of “real made things”, which he sees produced in the best dialectical way in Valeska Gert’s dances (Eisenstein, 1923: 263 and 1987: 121). Brandstetter refers to the possibility of a possible mutual artistic influence in the work of Gert and Eisenstein, who were involved in a platonic love affair (Brandstetter, 1995: 452; Gert, 1968: 52ff.).40 In his article on Gert, Eisenstein describes the contents of avant-garde art as the “dialectical tension between inertia and action”, structured by the use of the means of the “syncopation” (Eisenstein, 1987: 121). In shaping the dialectical contradictions of the 1920s in her work, Gert once more proves herself to be a “summary expression” of her age (Frank, 1987: 9). The tension in her dances, for Eisenstein, is formed by a “discrepancy between customary performances and the performance that she dances” (Eisenstein, 1987: 121). This form of dialectic aesthetics generates itself out of the contrast of initiated and continued movement. Gert combines this principle as well as the already previously described rapid visual shifts (as for example in Zirkus) into a form of danced “montage of attractions”. According to Eisenstein, the montage, however, is meant to serve the effect itself and not the regulatory rules of the stage, nor be subordinated to an organic endowal of meaning (Eisenstein, 1923: 263). Film, varieté and circus are therefore “the school of montage” (Eisenstein, 1923: 264). Interestingly, the conceptual tools of montage are best demonstrated in Gert’s similarly named pieces. Exemplary is Gert’s dance Varieté, but also in its aesthetic of opposition, the Tanz in Orange. In view of its extreme contrasts and scenic changes, Varieté seems to have been especially impressive: “she danced everything she’s ever seen at the varieté, the curtain is raised and she dances in, one second she is a pony with checked bridle, holding its head stiffly… and in the next, she is already the little demoiselle in ballet skirts, swinging herself up onto the horse and dancing around” (Hildenbrandt, 1928: 110). As in the already cited Tanz in Orange, Gert worked with the tools of opposition, which however produced more than the simple effect of a rapid-fire succession of scenes, as described in the following review: she says ‘varieté’ and then brings in a rapid series of movements everything that one associates in one’s mind’s eye with the term varieté. Now dancer, the next 39 40

See footnote 10. See also Seton, 1960: 135 f.

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moment juggler or tightrope walker. From all, she has borrowed typical movements and combines these to a whole that is varieté par excellence (Anonymous/S-c.).

In its trenchant combination of a wide range of figures, the piece in fact resembles more a new composition of meaning generated from fragments (in Bürger’s terms) versus a detailed work of composition. Another aspect of Valeska Gert’s technique referred to here is typecasting. With a “vivisectionist’s” precise eye for detail, she removes her subjects from everyday reality and inserts them into dichotomizing-alienating images of sensuous quality, as is even more evident if read with Brecht and with what Alfred Richard Meyer described as follows: “her thighs of fantastically-fleshy plumpness rained sparks. Blood screamed through the make-up of her lips and turns her into flows. A hand that just a moment ago had the grace of a white quail rising in flight, twists itself sadistically to a paw, a claw, a talon” (Anonymous/S-C.; Meyer, 1921).41 Moreover, Gert’s interpretation of Eisenstein’s films reveals her own approach to art: “maybe Eisenstein just wanted to say: I don’t want to make aesthetics nor do I want to make romantic art. I want to produce a taut and precise portrayal of this age we are in that is just as brutal and sober as the age itself” (Gert, 1927: 945). The “dialectical leap” that Valeska Gert, according to Eisenstein, achieved in her art, transpires on the one hand on the basis of the aforemetioned typecasting, which Gert acomplished inter alia through her montages and which elevate her work beyond that of simple parody as Eisenstein emphasized (Eisenstein, 1987: 121). On the other hand, Gert also literally takes this leap by suspending the standard schemata of audience expectation and artistic presentation. To demonstrate the establishment of syncopation as an interruptive pause, we must look at the dance Ballett: ballet is the essence of lightness… I did not jump nor go on point, I had other methods. With rubbery elasticity, I launched into the jump, pausing for some seconds at the onset. Pause. I hypnotized the audience, who believed they were seeing the jump, which I had begun but not yet fulfilled. They were ecstatic for I had made them use their imagination. No jump can be as light as the one see before one’s mind’s eye (Gert, 1968: 41).

41

Alfred Richard Meyer, “Valeska Gert”, in: Der Drache 15 (1921), p. 37-38, Valeska Gert Archive, Folder 383.

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Valeska Gert danced not only the contradictions of 1920s society, but also advocated an aesthetic change of perception.42 She endeavoured to “stir up” people. They should “realize… the meaning lying behind all that which is simple and common” (Gert, 1931: 43). Gert found herself herein in the company of Brecht who also demanded a “critical approach” from the audience, which could be reached with the help of a playground of allusion that offered alternatives, a method termed the “fixation of the non-particular”. Ultimately, I would like to emphasize that Valeska Gert transferred the mostly technical means of the avant-garde such as velocity and montage, as used by the Futurists and Dadaists, into physical expression itself. Her radical and groundbreaking art was attacked in a pamphlet by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Jewish and leftist, stigmatized as producing “Entartete Kunst” (degenerate art), Gert had to flee temporarily to the alternative modernity of New York.

Fig. 6.6, Gert’s signature, courtesy, Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung Schloss Wahn, Cologne, Germany.

Works Cited Anonymous, “Valeska Gert”, reviews from ca. 1920, Valeska Gert Archive of the Akademie der Künste Berlin, folder 481. Anonymous, “Valeska Gert im Großen Konzertsaal Beuthen”, in Ostdeutsche Zeitung, Valeska Gert Archive, folder 395. Anonymous, “Dr. H. F.”, “Valeska Gert tanzt – Ein neuer Tanzabend im Coburger Landestheater”, Valeska Gert Archive, Folder 395. Anonymous, “F. H.”, “Valeska Gert”, Frankfurter Zeitung, Valeska Gert Archive, folder 395. Anonymous, “Gg.Th.”, “Stadttheater Würzburg – Tanzgastspiel Valeska Gert”, Valeska Gert Archive, folder 395. 42

Eisenstein judged Valeska Gert in a similar way: “our age is an age of the dialectical discovery of contradictions. This is why Gert makes this aspect a particular question of style” (Eisenstein, 1987: 121). “The actor… acts in such a way that alternatives are made as visible as possible, so that his acting adumbrates that it is only one possible variation… That, which he does not do, must be retained in that which he does” (Brecht, 1940: 163).

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Anonymous, “H-d.”, “Tanzabend Valeska Gert”, Valeska Gert Archive, folder 395. Anonymous, “L.D.”, “Valeska Gert”, Dresdener Neueste Nachrichten, Valeska Gert Archive, folder 402. Anonymous, “O. A. Sch.”, “Valeska Gert – Gastspiel im Schauspielhaus”, Düsseldorfer Nachrichten, Valeska Gert Archive, folder 395. Anonymous, “S-c.”, “Die grotesken Tänze von Valeska Gert”, Danziger Neueste Nachrichten, Valeska Gert Archive, folder 395. Anz, Thomas and Michael Stark, eds., Die Modernität des Expressionismus (Stuttgart: 1994). Barthes, Roland, Die helle Kammer. Bemerkungen zur Fotografie (Frankfurt: 1989). Baxmann, Inge, Mythos: Gemeinschaft. Körper- und Tanzkulturen in der Moderne (Munich: 2000). Benjamin, Walter, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit [1935/36], (Frankfurt: 1977). —. “Zentralpark”, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminationen – Ausgewählte Schriften (Frankfurt: 1977), pp. 230-250. Bergius, Hanne, Montage und Metamechanik. Dada Berlin – Artistik von Polaritäten (Berlin: 2000). Bie, Oscar, Der Tanz (Berlin: 1923). Blass, Ernst, Das Wesen der Neuen Tanzkunst (Weimar: 1921). Brandstetter, Gabriele, Tanz-Lektüren – Körperbilder und Raumfiguren der Avantgarde (Frankfurt: 1995). —. “Tanz-Avantgarde und Bäder-Kultur – Grenzüberschreitungen zwischen Freizeitwelt und Bewegungsbühne”, in Fischer-Lichte (1995), pp. 123-155. Brandt, Sylvia, Bravo! & Bum Bum! – Neue Produktions- und Rezeptionsformen im Theater der historischen Avantgarde: Futurismus, Dada und Surrealismus. Eine vergleichende Untersuchung (Frankfurt: 1995). Brauneck, Manfred, Theater im 20. Jahrhundert – Programmschriften, Stilperioden, Reformmodelle (Hamburg: 1993). Brecht, Bertolt, “Neue Schauspielkunst” [1940], in Bertolt Brecht, Werke: Schriften (Frankfurt: 1991), pp. 161-193. Bürger, Peter, Theorie der Avantgarde (Frankfurt: 1974). Burt, Ramsay, Alien Bodies: Representations of Modernity, “Race” and Nation in Early Modern Dance (New York: 1998). Einstein, Carl, “Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts” [1931], in Einstein, Werke, vol. 5, eds., Hermann Haarmann and Klaus Siebenhaar (Berlin: 1996), pp. 170183. Eisenstein, Sergej, “Montage der Attraktionen” [1923], in Brauneck (1993), pp. 260-265.

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—. “Im Weltmass-Stab [sic!] über Valeska Gert”, fragmentary text, in Peter (1987) p. 121. Fiebach, Joachim, “Audiovisuelle Medien, Warenhäuser und Theateravantgarde”, in Fischer-Lichte (1995), pp. 15-57. Fischer-Lichte, Erika, ed., TheaterAvantgarde – Wahrnehmung – Körper – Sprache (Tübingen: 1995). —. “Wahrnehmung – Körper – Sprache. Kultureller Wandel und Theateravantgarde”, in Fischer-Lichte (1995), pp. 1-14. Foellmer, Susanne, Valeska Gert. Fragmente einer Avantgardistin in Tanz und Schauspiel der 1920er Jahre (Bielefeld: 2006). Frank, Rudolf, “Das moderne Theater” [1927], in Peter (1987), p. 9. Gert, Valeska, six-page English fragment numbered from pp. 3-8, text beginning “than by the dynamic power of emotion...”, Valeska Gert Archive, folder 209. —. “Das Menschentheater” [Berliner Tageblatt April 19th 1923], in Peter (1987), pp. 23-24. —. “Phantastisches im Film”, Die Neue Schaubühne 1 (1925), p. 33. —. “Es lebe der Durchschnitt, es lebe der Rückschritt”, Die Weltbühne 51 (1927), p. 945. —. Mein Weg (Leipzig: 1931). —. “Meine Auffassung vom Tanz” [1936], Valeska Gert Archive, Folder 408. —. Die Bettlerbar von New York (Berlin: 1950). —. Katze von Kampen, (Percha am Starnberger See: 1973). —. Ich bin eine Hexe [1968] (Munich: 1989). Greiner, Bernd, Ein Hauch von Anarchie – Der Tramp bei Ford (Berlin: 1989). Hildenbrandt, Fred, Die Tänzerin Valeska Gert (Stuttgart: 1928). Huschka, Sabine, Moderner Tanz. Konzepte – Stile – Utopien (Hamburg: 2002). Klöck, Anja, “Die Wahrnehmung des Apparats: Experimentelle Physik und futuristisches Theater zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts”, in eds. Hajo Kurzenberger, Annemarie Matzke, TheorieTheaterPraxis (Berlin: 2003), pp. 230-239. König, Johannes Karl, ‘Stadttheater Würzburg – Tanzgastspiel Valeska Gert”, Valeska Gert Archive, folder 395. Lämmert, Eberhard, “Visionen vom Maschinenmenschen”, in Anz and Stark (1994), pp. 62-75. Lista, Giovanni, “Maschinenverherrlichung und Technikangst bei den Futuristen”, in eds. Evelyn Benesch and Ingried Brugger, Futurismus: Radikale Avantgarde (Wien: 2003), pp. 81-89. Loquai, Franz: “Geschwindigkeitsphantasien im Futurismus und im Expressionismus”, in Anz and Stark (1994), pp. 76-94.

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Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, “Das Manifest des Futurismus” [1909], in Brauneck (1993), pp. 177-185. —. “Das Varieté” [1913], in Brauneck (1993), pp. 85-92. —. Emilio Settimelli, Bruno Corra, “Das futuristische synthetische Theater” [1915], in Brauneck (1993), pp. 92-96. Meyer, Alfred Richard, “Valeska Gert”, Der Drache 15 (1921), pp. 37-38, Valeska Gert Archive, folder 383. Ochaim, Brygida Maria, “Die getanzten Bilder der Rita Sacchetto”, Tanzdrama 14 (1991), pp. 22-25. Peter, Frank-Manuel, Valeska Gert – Tänzerin, Schauspielerin, Kabarettistin (Berlin: 1987). Sahl, Hans, “Valeska Gert, Memoiren einer Tänzerin. Draculas Tochter”, Die Welt, Sonderteil Welt des Buches, March 21st (1974), p. iv. Schikowski, John, Geschichte des Tanzes (Berlin: 1926). Schlöndorff, Volker, Nur zum Spaß, nur zum Spiel. Kaleidoskop Valeska Gert, documentary film (BRD: 1977). Schmidt-Bergmann, Hansgeorg, Futurismus. Geschichte, Ästhetik, Dokumente (Reinbek bei Hamburg: 1993). Schulze, Hanns, “Tänzerinnen – II. Valeska Gert”, Valeska Gert Archive, folder 394. Schwind, Klaus, “Die Entgrenzung des Raum- und Zeiterlebnisses im ‘vierdimensionalen Theater’. Plurimediale Bewegungsrhythmen in Piscators Inszenierung von “Hoppla, wir leben!” [1927], in Fischer-Lichte (1995), pp. 58-88. Seton, Marie, Sergei M. Eisenstein (Bristol: 1960). Virilio, Paul, Ästhetik des Verschwindens (Berlin: 1986). —. Revolutionen der Geschwindigkeit (Berlin: 1993). Virilio, Paul and Sylvère Lotringer, “’Technik und Fragmentierung’, Paul Virilio in conversation with Sylvère Lotringer”, in eds. Karlheinz Barck, Peter Gente, Heidi Paris and Stefan Richter, Aisthesis – Wahrnehmung heute oder Perspektiven einer anderen Ästhetik (Leipzig: 1993), pp. 71-82.

CHAPTER SEVEN EXTENDED BODIES: HOW DO WE THINK AND FEEL ABOUT THE BODY IN THE TWENTY FIRST CENTURY? ORNELLA CORAZZA

In the past few years, for a variety of reasons, some more sociological than academic, we are again interested in issues related to the human body. This tendency has been confirmed from the increased number of articles, books and symposiums on the topic from a multidisciplinary point of view. Fundamental to this debate is a reorientation in our understanding of the human body in order to overcome dualism. Partially inspired by an Eastern way of conceiving the human body, this perspective opens up to new and more comprehensive notion of embodiment in terms of both its psychophysiological and interrelational set of activities by emphasizing the spatial domain of the human body: what do we mean by human body and is the body delimited by the skin, or does it extend outside its physical boundaries? With these questions in mind, this paper will discuss several Japanese theories of the human body, according to which the human body is not delimited by the skin but it extends far beyond the physical membrane. I have called this phenomenon that of the extended body.

Space and the Body: Toward an Eastern View of Embodiment In the tradition of Western philosophy, the idea that mental is analytically distinguishable from the somatic, is usually traced back to the work of the philosopher-mathematician René Descartes (1596-1650) in the seventeenth century. Descartes, a devote Catholic, expressed his conception of the body with his famous Latin dictum cogito ego sum (“I think therefore I am”), according to which two different classes of substances constitute the human body: an

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immaterial (rational) mind and a physical body1. He was able to identify some physical point in the body through which the immaterial mind could actually operate to effect changes in the physical world. He believed the pineal gland, located between the left and the right brain, made this function even more likely. He understood the process as follows: by them; and it carries this motion on to the soul. Then conversely, the bodily machine is so constituted that whenever the gland is moved in one way or another by the soul, or for that matter by any other cause, it pushes the animal spirits, which surround it to the pores of the brain (Descartes, 1954: 357).

As Gilbert Ryle has point out in his The Concept of the Mind (1949) there has been a “deliberate abusiveness” in discussing Descartes’ theories of the body. Most of those involved in the debate seem to ignore his original position, which was clearly in favour of mind-body unity. For instance he wrote: “I am not only lodged in my body like a pilot on a ship, but besides I am joined to it very closely and indeed so compounded and intermingled with my body that I form as it were a single whole with it” (Descartes 1968: 159). The argument that mind and body are not ontologically distinct never became dominant in Western philosophy, although major attempts have been made by disciplines such as Western phenomenology, psychoanalysis and psychophysiology. On the contrary, the principle of mind-body unity is at the foundation of an Eastern approach of the human body (especially in Japan), which rejects any kind of dualism (see for instance Yuasa, 1993; Nagatomo, 1992). Fundamental to the Japanese approach is that bodily activities are primarily considered in terms of basho (the Japanese word for “place”, or “space”) rather than time. As Yasuo Yuasa has pointed out, such an idea largely contradicts Western notion of embodiment where “mind” (time) is primary and “space” (body) is secondary (Yuasa, 1993). From a Japanese point of view a person always exists within a definite “context”, or a specific network of interconnections. Only if considered within a social nexus, the individual acquires meaning as a human being. This idea is implicit in one of the three Japanese terms to indicate a human being (ningen), which literally means between a person and a person rather than an individual subject.2 Japanese philosopher Watsuji’s called this phenomenon a state of 1

Such a dualistic conception of human being, reflects the Christian dualism of flesh and spirit although according to Descartes, the essence of the mind has to found in terms of intellectual and cognitive functions. 2 In Japanese, such as in other languages, there are several ways to indicate a human being. These are: (a) hito (“man/woman”); (b) kojin (“individual”); (c) ningen (“human being”). Ningen is particularly relevant to my discussion, because it literally means

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“betweenness” (aidagara) (Watsuji, 1978), which for him was the most important aspect of a human being. But what does it mean to exist in a “state of betweenness”? From an etymological point of view the term “between” (aida) signifies a spatial distance separating thing and thing. So our “betweenness” implies that we always exist within a given “life-space”, which is characterized by a large set of interrelationships (or “personal context”). In his Climates, Watsuji (1889-1960) defines betweenness as “the extension of [embodied] subjective” to underline that to exist in space is the primordial fact, the primordial significance of human beings. In a way Watsuji’s interest in space is a response to Martin Heidegger emphasis on temporality, which he well expressed in his Being and Time. As Watsuji commented: “his attempt to grasp the structure of man’s existence as temporality was extremely interesting, but my concern was this: while temporality is presented as the subject’s (shutaiteki) structure of being, why is not spatiality equally well presented a fundamental structure of human being?” (Watsuji, 1978). According to Yasuo Yuasa the state of “betweenness” has to be understood in physical terms. A very well known example that Watsuji made is that of friendship, or motherhood. He wrote, “that one wishes to visit a friend implies she intends to draw near to the friend’s body. If she goes to visit a friend who is at some distance by streetcar, then her body moves in the friend’s direction, attracted by the power between them that draws them together (Watsuji, 1996: 62). In other words, for Watsuji the relationship between two people are not only psychological (or “mind based”), but also somatic (or grounded on the “physical body”). Space for him was the most crucial fact in the life of a person, rather than the conscious subject as it emerged from Cartesianism.

Brain, Science and Extended Bodies The relationship between the body and space has been extensively studied by Japanese phenomenologist Hiroshi Ichikawa (1931-2002). His primary objective was that to reveal “the nakedness of Being” by assuming the point of view of the body as “lived from within” (Nagatomo 2006: 4). He called this phenomenon that of the “body-space”. In his book The Body as Spirit, published in 1979, he was able to propose a threefold classification of the human organism. The first category that is called the “innate-body space” (seitoku-teki

between a person and a person rather than an individual subject. According to Thomas Kasulis (1981: 6) “when the Japanese see someone as an individual (kojin), they see him or her as an object among many, but when they see someone as a ‘human being’ (ningen), they see that person in a specific context”. In his view, the term ningen opens up a ground for both (a) the individual and (b) the universal aspects of human beings.

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shintai knjkan). This can be defined as the body delimited by the skin that we see reflected when we look at ourselves in a mirror. The second category is called the “semi-definite body space” (junkǀsei-teki shintai knjkan). This is the body that expands through the use of a tool. An example that he gives is that of the surgical knife in the hand of a surgeon, a sort of “incarnated, second finger”, where the tip of the surgeon’s fingers extend as far the end of his/her knife. Another classical example is that of the stick in the hand of a blind, where the arm of the blind extends as far the end of the stick. In both these cases the tools have to be intended as a sort of internalized “second nature”, rather than an external aid. The third category is called the “indefinitely varying body-space” (fukaku-teki na kahen-teki shintai knjkan). This has three main characters: (a) it is always changing; (b) it is temporary; (c) and it is non habitual. According to Ichikawa, this third category goes far beyond the previous two. He defined it in terms of a “bodily dialogue” (shintai teki taiwa) between the body and the object perceived. In our common language, the term “dialogue” implies a verbal communication between two parts. But how can we have a dialogue with the objects of our intentions? Ichikawa uses the example of an individual looking at the leaning tower of Pisa. He wrote: “when we look at the tower, our body (has a proclivity) to lean toward it in an attempt to assume potentially a posture similar to the (leaning) form of the tower. We stretch it and respond to it. We feel within our body a tension between the power that inclines with the tower and the power, which restores it (Ichikawa, in Nagatomo, 1992: 14). The hypothesis that a human organism can extend beyond its physical boundaries is radically different from conventional scientific theory in which the objects of perception are supposed to be inside our head, rather than outside it. This phenomenon has also been called the “cartesian theatre”, a sort of metaphorical space, or “stage”, where the conscious experience takes place, and within which the “contents of consciousness” come and go (Dennett, 1991: 39). The contrary was true for Ichikawa, according to whom: “the retina does not directly touch the objects that make up the landscape… but the act of visual perception extends as far as these objects seen, enabling the individual to feel depth in the scenery. Therefore as visual perception is lived, it extends to the object seen” (Ichikawa, in Nagatomo, 1992: 13). A similar argument has been recently supported by Kevin O’Regan and Alva Noë in an article where they claimed that the: “activity in internal representations does not generate the experience of seeing… the experience of seeing occurs when the organism masters what we call the governing laws of sensorimotor contingency” (O’Regan and Noë 2001). In other words, this means that when there is a direct contact with the object of our intention the act of perception does not happen on the surface of our body but it is rather the product of a bodily “extension” towards it. Let us take for

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instance a stone in our hand. According to Ichikawa we are able to detect a stone’s shape and/or hardness not by mere contact with the surface of our hand but rather by means of a corporeal extension toward it, that he named a “bodily dialogue” (shintai teki taiwa) (Ichikawa, in Nagatomo, 1992: 13). In this sense, without a “dialogue” with the object of our intention we would not be able to determine a depth (or a “inner horizon”) to things around us. Only in this way the act of perception becomes a lived experience. In the West the idea that an immaterial mind could extend outside its physical boundaries has been grasped on various degrees by Rupert Sheldrake. In a book entitled The sense of being stared at and other aspects of the extended mind (2003), he suggests that minds are not confined to the insides of our heads, but they stretch out beyond them. In his view, the images we experience as we look around are just where they seem to be, outside ourselves. Sheldrake writes: “if you feel the pressure of your bottom on a chair, this sensation is located inside the head and not where they seem to be. By contrast, I suggest that these feelings are just where they seem to be” (Sheldrake 2003: 281). He explains his theory in terms of what he named “morphogenetic fields” (Sheldrake 2003). A classical example is that of “phantom limbs”, which refers to phenomenon when a person loses a limb and still feels the limb is there. It is a phantom, but it feels real. In this respect Sheldrake comments: “I suggest that phantom limbs are fields of the missing limbs”, while the conventional theory says that they are in the brain (281). The British biologist is currently studying the implication of morphogenetic fields in terms of particular phenomena such as telepathy. A major difference between Ichikawa’s theories of the extended bodies and Sheldrake’s theory of the extended mind is that this latter is based on the perspective where mind largely prevails over body.

Yasuo Yuasa’s Bodily Scheme A useful category for a better understanding of the relationship between body and space is that of “bodily scheme”. The concept was first introduced by Merleau-Ponty (1962), who recognized the centrality of the lived body, or the “habit body” (le corps habituel), as a built-in-body-scheme (le scheme corporeal). By doing, he aimed to overcome the mind and body dichotomy by introducing a third term, which underlies both terms. According to this, the body scheme’s primary function is to integrate all the somatic sensations, which are found at the base of kinesthesis and direct them toward the thing-event of the external world. A further elaboration of Merleau-Ponty’s scheme has been presented in more recent years by Yasuo Yuasa (1925-2005), who expanded the concept by incorporating an Eastern mind-body theory. His model, known as “Yuasa’s bodily scheme”, gives a particular relevance to bodily unconscious

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activities. Essentially it considers the body as endowed of four information circuits. The first level relates the body with the external world. In our everyday life we are constantly engaged in an infinite number of outside perceptions. We meet people, we go to work, we look up to the sky, we listen to music, we go shopping and so on. Following Yuasa, this is the setting of our first information system, which connects the body with the external world. He calls this the “external sensory-motor circuit” (gaikai kankaku undǀ kairo) (Yuasa, 1993: 43). The second system of information, named the “circuit of coenesthesis” (zenshin naibu kankaku kairo), is linked with the relationship between perceptual cognition and action. In short, it enables us to become aware of the internal condition of the body (e.g. “I am hungry”; “I am asleep” and so on). The third information system is the circuit to the “automatic” nervous system, which is called the “emotion-instinct circuit” (jǀdǀ honnǀ kairo). As Yuasa observed: “this circuit has a very close relationship with human instincts such as sexual desire and appetite. For this reason, I call it emotion-instinct circuit” (1993: 49). This has the function of maintaining life. When the first circuit is not active, like in the case of anaesthesia, this circuit is still functioning. This “automatic” function is an unconscious function, which seen from a psychophysiological point of view cannot be specifically located in any section of the brain or body and for this reason, along with the forth circuit, it is difficult to investigate. The fourth circuit called the “unconscious quasi-body” incorporates a vast region of the mind and body that was left implicit in Merleau-Ponty’s body scheme. The term “unconscious” here indicates that this is an invisible circuit, which cannot be detected by ordinary field of consciousness in everyday life, but only in particular altered states of consciousness, such as near-death experiences or meditative states. The term “quasi-body”, indicates that the body at this level does not conform to the idea of the body-subject or the body-object, which have been previously analysed. The peculiarity of this fourth circuit is that it “designates a pathway of emotional energy flowing in the unconscious, and is a quasi-body system which activates physiological functions together with the objective body” (Yuasa, 1993: 119). This kind of energy is a life-force called ki – or, the Chinese equivalent Qi or ch’i –, which circulates though an invisible system of channels present in the body, known as ki-meridians, or “acu-points”.3 According to an 3

The concept is essential in treatments such as acupuncture, which supports the life activity of living organisms, and regards the living body not as formed matter, but as a comprehensive whole of vital energy or life-energy. This is differentiated from the medical practice/science which regards the living body as organic, comprised of a system of organs, and which further breaks it down into DNA consisting of various particles.

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Eastern philosophical tradition ki is present within the human body as well as in the surrounding environment. In other terms, it is by means of the ki that we are “animate corpse”, which move about in the everyday life until the moment of our death.4 According to Yuasa this system has immediate effect of both body and mind and for this reason can be viewed as a “breakthrough” point capable of transforming the existing scientific paradigm of thinking based on Cartesian mind-body dualism. He wrote: the ki-meridian system is related closely to both mind and body, both spirit and matter, and is a middle system that influences them. For this reason, it is a third term, which cannot be explained by Descartes’ mind-body dichotomy, but it forms a mediating system that links the mind and the body. Herein lies, it seems, a break-through point that reforms the paradigm of empirical science [established] since Descartes (Yuasa, in Nagatomo, 1992: 71). 5

Perhaps this can result a nebulous concept to understand from a Western point of view. As Suzuki said, ki “is a difficult term to translate into English. It is something imperceptible, impalpable, that pervades the entire universe” (Suzuki, 1959: 149). One of the first attempts to study “ki-energy” from a more scientific point of view has been made by Professor Hiroshi Motoyama, who invented AMI (Apparatus for Meridian Identification), a device that is able to measure the function of meridians and their corresponding internal organs (Motoyama, 1975).

Conclusion The idea that the body can extend in space has been very little explored in our Western societies and it will probably be one of the areas to develop in the future. It enables us to glimpse a bit of a new worldview by offering us a better understanding of not only of what a human being is, but also of what it can also be. Fundamental to this new perspective is an Eastern view of embodiment 4

The notion bears some similarities with Western idea of “consciousness” or “soul”, but it is much broader in the sense that it is comprehensive of various factors such as a climatic condition, an arising social condition, as well as psychological and pathological condition. For instance a Japanese might say that “heaven’s ki is bad” when there is bad weather. Or when two persons are getting on well together, they use the expression “ki ga au”, which literally means that “ki accords with each other”. On the contrary, when a person faces an unstable situation, which generates fears or suspicious sensations, Japanese uses the expression “ki mi ga warui”, which corresponds to “the taste of ki is bad”.

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according to which the body cannot be considered apart from space (or “place”), which represents the “ground of our being”. The argument has also important implications in terms of how we think and feel about the body in the twenty-first century, especially in terms of contemporary technological progress, rapid communication and transportations. For example, a computer can be viewed as an extension of the brain, a car as an extension of the legs, a telephone as an extension of the human voice, glasses as an extension of the eyes, etc. So we can finally ask: “are these just tools and machines, or are they part of an organism which extends in space?”

Works Cited Corazza, O., ‘Space and embodiment: a Japanese understanding of human beings,’ unpublished conference paper delivered at “Embodiment and the environment”, Oxford Brooks University, Oxford, July 5th-8th (2005). —. ‘Consciousness and place: the phenomenology of the near-death experience and similar states induced by dissociative anaesthesia’, Ph.D. Dissertation, School of Oriental and African Studies (2006). Damasio, A., Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (New York: Avon Books, 1994). Descartes, R., ‘The interrelation of soul and body’, trans. P. Wheelright in, The Way of Philosophy (New York. Odyssey, 1954), 357. —. Discourse on Method [1637], trans. F.E. Sutcliffe (Penguin Books, 1968), pp 159. Dennett, D. C., Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little Brown, 1991). Ichikawa, H., Seishin toshite no Shintai [The Body as the Spirit] (Tokyo: Keisǀ shǀbǀ, 1979). Kasulis, T. P., Zen Action, Zen Person (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1981). LaBarre, W., The Human Animal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955). Leder, D., The Absent Body (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990). Meltzoff, A. N. and M. K. Moore, “Imitation of facial and manual gestures by human neonates”, in eds., A. Slater and D. Muir, The Blackwell Reader in Developmental Psychology Oxford: Blackwell; (1999), pp. Merleau-Ponty, M., The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1962). Motoyama, H., How to Measure and Diagnose the Functions of the Meridians and their Corresponding Internal Organs (Tokyo: The Institute for Religious Psychology, 1975). Nagamoto, S., Attunement Through the Body (New York: State University of New York Press, 1992).

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—. “In praise of non-performance in the performing arts”, in The International and Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Changing Body in Training and Performance, January 6-8, 2006: Conference Papers (Exeter: University of Exeter, 2006), pp. 1-10 O’Regan, J. K. and A. Noë, “A sensi-motor account of vision” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (2001), pp. pp. 939-1031. Ryle G., The Concept of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949). Suzuki, D. T., Zen and the Japanese Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959). Turner, B. S., Regulating Bodies: Essays in Medical Sociology (New York: Routledge, 1992). Watsuji Tetsuro, Iwanami Shoten, 8, 2nd ed. 1978. vol. 8, trans. Geoffrey Bownas, Climate and Culture (New York: Greenwood Press, Inc. (1978), pp 1-2. Yuasa, Y., The Body: Toward an Eastern Mind-Body Theory, ed. T. P. Kasulis (Albany: State University of New York Press., 1987). —. “Contemporary science and an eastern mind-body theory”, in ed. E. J., Brill, Science and Comparative Philosophy: Introducing Yasuo Yuasa (Leiden: 1989), pp. 193-239. —. The Body: Self-cultivation, and Ki-Energy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).

CHAPTER EIGHT WRITING IN “WHITE INK”: RECONFIGURING THE BODY OF THE WET NURSE EDITH FRAMPTON

To imagine writing in “white ink”, as Hélène Cixous challenged us to do in 1976, disrupts traditional conceptions of not only canonical literary concerns but also, more generally, of visibility in the world and the binary logic upon which understanding is founded in the modern West (Cixous, 1976: 251). The notion of white ink conjures up multiple conceptual difficulties. White ink on white paper would be as invisible as everything that was never even written down, as invisible as what has been erased or left unread. Cixous’ paradoxical image is thus suggestive of all that has remained unwritten, unwritable and illegible. White seems to insist upon what we have conceived of as its opposite, black, in order to be recognised and valued at all. And to call attention to the indispensable black figures playing against the ubiquitous white background of the page reminds us of the stark way in which we have often chosen to understand people themselves, in spite of our multifarious differences and similarities. At the same time, Cixous’ image signifies the materiality of the white liquid upon which we have all of us, from every racial background, depended for life when first entering the world: milk. As part of her narration of the atrocities of institutionalised slavery in the nineteenth-century US, writer Toni Morrison exposes the power of the oppressor’s ink, as it systematically inscribes and justifies exploitation and violence on the basis of racial difference. Writing in the wake of Cixous’ theorisations, critic Anne Goldman has cogently argued that Morrison’s Beloved offers a powerful alternative to the “master’s ink” with the breastmilk that is foregrounded in this 1982 novel (Goldman, 1990). Both Cixous’ theoretical interventions and Morrison’s literary engagements with the breasted body, lactation and infant feeding can be seen as aspects of a transcultural exploration of the meanings and values of the embodied breastfeeding relationship in recent decades. This essay draws on some of this work, bringing into dialogue the historical figure of the wet nurse and contemporary narratives of wet nursing by

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Toni Morrison, Sherley Anne Williams, Louise Erdrich, Mahasweta Devi and Michèle Roberts. In conclusion, I consider how the concept of chiasmus, as it has been explored by the mid-twentieth-century French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, might reflect upon some of this work.

The Wet Nurse Historically In Western culture, wet nursing continued through antiquity, the Middle Ages and the early modern and colonial periods, lingering even through the nineteenth and into the early-twentieth centuries. Professional wet nursing thus provided a remarkably longstanding occupation for women and, alongside maternal nursing, made the lactating body – largely invisible today – a very visible component of societies historically. One of the most frequently cited examples of the prevalence of wet nursing in the past is the case of eighteenthcentury France. While, according to contemporary accounts, the practice fell out of favour through much of the rest of Europe in the eighteenth century, it became increasingly widespread in France over the same period and carried over as a significant practice into the nineteenth century, aside from a brief period during and after the French Revolution (Sussman, 1982: 5-8). For instance, within eighteenth-century Paris alone, there were “four… placement bureaus for wet nurses, which were consolidated into one municipal Bureau des Nourrices in 1769”, presided over – tellingly – by the lieutenantgeneral of police (Sussman, 1982: 20). Historian George D. Sussman summarises the statistics for this bureau as follows: [o]f approximately 20,000 babies born each year in Paris at the end of the Ancien Régime, nearly one-half were placed in the country with rural wet nurses procured through the municipal Bureau of Wet Nurses, 20 to 25 percent from the wealthiest classes were placed directly by their parents with more highly paid wet nurses closer to Paris, 20 to 25 percent were abandoned with the foundling administration to die early or to be nursed far from Paris by a poorly paid woman, and a small remainder (a few thousand at most) were nursed in their own homes either by their mothers or by live-in wet nurses (Sussman, 1982: 22).

By the end of the nineteenth century, 80,000 French infants a year (ten percent of children born in France) were being placed with wet nurses outside their parents’ homes, according to Sussman’s research (Sussman, 1982: 182). However, organised commercial wet nursing was not unique to eighteenthcentury France. Historians such as Sussman and Valerie Fildes have cited numerous Biblical references, a multitude of ancient Islamic laws, and evidence from ancient Rome, where nursing children were brought to the Lactaria, in the Forum Holitorium, to be placed with wet nurses (Fildes, 1986 and 1988 and

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Sussman, 1982) – all indicating the widespread and socially integrated practice of wet nursing through much of human history. Sussman demonstrates its prevalence among not only the royalty and upper levels of societies, but even among people of lower social standing in the Middle Ages (Sussman, 1982: 34). He shows how the employment of wet nurses gained popularity, among the families of officials, artisans and shopkeepers, as well as within the social elite, in the seventeenth century, through much of Europe (Sussman, 1982: 5-6, 19). Historians Rima Apple and Janet Golden have traced wet nursing in the American context since the colonial period (Apple, 1987 and Golden, 1996). Within many cultural contexts historically, the wet nurse even enjoyed a position of relative social esteem. For instance, Janet Todd points out that in seventeenth century England “[t]there are records of many middle-ranking women, even aldermen’s wives, serving as wet-nurses and making on occasion a very good living”. Furthermore, it was probably because “the tie between the suckled children and [a wet nurse’s] own [children] was honoured” that Aphra Behn, the daughter of a barber and a wet nurse, received the education that would enable her to become the first professional female author in England and to be claimed as a “foster sister” by Colonel Thomas Colepeper, a gentleman who had been nursed by Behn’s mother through his early years (Todd, 1996: 13 and 16). In spite of the esteem occasionally granted the wet nurse, debates surrounding her profession are just as old as the practice itself. Fildes makes the claim, in keeping with Sussman, that “[f]or thousands of years there has been controversy over who should suckle young babies: the mother or a hired wet nurse”. (Fildes, 1986: 98) In support of this, she cites trans-historical exhortations to women to breastfeed their children on the part of medical doctors, philosophers, novelists, politicians and other public figures, from Aristotle to Thomas Jefferson. As early as 1622, Elizabeth Clinton, Countess of Lincoln, was motivated to publish a treatise on the subject of wet nursing, charging that the renunciation of the maternal duty to breastfeed rendered mothers “more savage then the Dragons, and as cruell to their little ones as the Ostriches” (Clinton, 1622: 8). And a century later, in 1728, Daniel Defoe was to warn mothers further against wet nurses, arguing that: tis well worth their considering how they debauch the noble blood of a gentleman and corrupt their own race by mingling the blood of a slav[e] and a scoundrel…with the nourishment and life of their own progeny. The ladyes had much better, if they find it inconvenient to suckle their own children, for some can not do it, I say, they had much better have them fed by the spoon, or, as ’tis call’d, brought up by hand; then they are sure they have no corrupt, tainted

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English visitors in the American colonies expressed shock and horror that plantation owners commonly allowed their children to suckle at the breasts of African slaves (Fildes, 1988: 139-43 and Golden, 2001: 26). The notion that the “corrupt”, “tainted” aspects of the debauched and debauching wet nurse were passed on to her infant charge was sustained through the late-nineteenth century, at which point it is no longer bad blood that is theoretically transmitted through the breast milk but bad character traits. The profession of suckling babies is conflated with sexual promiscuity and the wet nurse is conflated with that other professional who trades in the transmission of body fluids, the prostitute. Thus, as late as 1884, C. Cleveland would write in Archives of Pediatrics that, “the physical defects of the bottle we understand pretty well, and can, to a great extent, guard against them. Its moral qualifications, compared with those of the wet nurse, are simply sublime” (Cleveland, 1884: 346 and Apple, 1987: 7). By the close of the nineteenth century in England and America, the progressive process of demonization of the wet nurse served as one, out of multiple, incitements to the first manufacturers of artificial baby foods, in the mid-nineteenth century, who represented themselves, in part, as eradicating the social scourge of the wet nurse. Surprisingly, an incidence of such demonization recently re-emerged in the international news. In the 2003 collection Fresh Milk: The Secret Life of Breasts a New Zealand mother relates the recent story of her eight-month-old daughter, Natasha, who was breastfed by a child minder without parental consent. The child had been left with a professional child-care service at a conference, for a few hours’ time one evening. When she collected her child, the mother was shocked and horrified to learn that her child had been breastfed in order to calm her hysterics, according to the staff. After subsequently writing to the child minder, demanding to see the results of blood tests, and having received no reply, the mother says: I rang the police to see what I could do, and asked about laying an assault charge. That was suggested to me by someone, and I quite liked the sound of that. Because it was an unwanted action. I certainly felt violated, heaven knows! And Natasha was violated. The thing was, a stranger put her nipple in my baby’s mouth… It’s like coming home and finding your partner in bed with another woman and being told, “Oh, you weren’t here and he needed it”… With Natasha it was worse, because she wasn’t given a choice. Breastfeeding is not sexual. It’s sensual. But it’s personal and it’s intimate. I don’t want to share my partner. I sure as hell don’t want to share breastfeeding my children (Giles, 2003: 36-37).

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When this mother became frustrated with the lukewarm response she received from the police and an attorney, she shared her story with the national media. The incident became the story of the week and news of it even spread to the US and the London Daily Telegraph, in the UK. The story illustrates something beyond the demonization of the wet nurse. The intense privatisation of the breastfeeding relationship, signified by this mother’s sense of her daughter’s violation, is linked to the decline of the practice of breastfeeding generally. The materialities of women’s milk and the practice of breastfeeding became progressively more removed from everyday public visibility in the story’s locale of New Zealand, as well as in Britain, the US and other parts of the world, beginning in the middle of the twentieth century. What had once been a very visible aspect of women’s lives, crossculturally, was transformed into something hidden from sight, with an aura of secrecy and prohibition. The steep mid-twentieth century drop in breastfeeding rates is demonstrated in Andrew Chetley’s 1986 study, The Politics of Baby Foods. According to Chetley, in the UK forty percent of three-month-olds were breastfed in 1947, but that figure had dropped to just under ten percent by 1968 (Chetley, 1986: 7; see also Jelliffe and Jelliffe, 1978: 188-91). Similarly, within the US, while in 1922 ninety percent of babies were being breastfed at one year of age… [by] 1966, breastfeeding in the US had dropped to eighteen percent at hospital discharge, with only five percent of babies being breastfed after six months of age in 1971. Similar trends can be seen within other Western and developing countries according to Chetley’s research: the shift occurred first in the industrialized countries of Europe and North America… In Sweden in 1944, just under 90 per cent of babies were breast fed at two months of age; by 1970 the figure had dropped to under 40 per cent. In Poland, over 80 per cent of three-month old infants were breast fed in 1937; by 1971, the figure was 30 per cent… This dramatic pattern soon spread to the developing countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. In Singapore, over 80 per cent of babies were breast fed at birth in 1951; by 1971, the figure had dropped to just under 30 per cent. In Brazil, 96 per cent of babies were breast fed at one month of age in 1940; by 1974, only 39 per cent were breast fed (Chetley, 1986: 7).

While, in some cases, there has been a slight reversal of this decline in the last two decades, the practice of breastfeeding has never resumed anything near its previous prevalence. For instance, according to the most recently published statistics of UNICEF, while 69 percent of UK mothers attempt breastfeeding just after birth, by six weeks after birth only 42 percent have continued and by six months only 21 percent. This is in spite of paediatric recommendations that,

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for optimal health benefits to both mothers and babies, infants be fed only breastmilk for the first six months of life, with supplemented breastfeeding continuing for at least one year, and World Health Organisation advocacy of breastfeeding for the first two years of a child’s life. Simultaneously with the decline of the practice and hence the material visibility of breastfeeding, in some cultural contexts nursing in public or evidence of lactation became a focus of legal or employment contestation. A range of cases came to light, beginning in the 1970s, in which American women were evicted from such public places as shopping centres, museums and pools for breastfeeding. For instance, in 1977 a mother in New York State was asked to leave the premises and had her family’s pool pass revoked when she refused to stop nursing her infant at the poolside and to do so instead in the women’s lavatory. Her village then enacted an ordinance forbidding public breastfeeding at the pool, which was not revoked for three years (Baldwin and Friedman, “Breastfeeding”, 1994: 164). Similar events occurred in the UK. The experience of being banned from breastfeeding in a supermarket café, led Labour MSP Elaine Smith to propose a bill in 2002, making it an offence in Scotland to prevent a woman from breastfeeding her child in public places (Scott, 2002: 2). The vocal defence and resistance received by the bill, which became law in January 2005, is evidence of the continuing battles over regulation of the maternal breast. A movement legally to guarantee women’s right to breastfeed has also been underway in the US, where half of all states have now passed legislation clarifying women’s right to breastfeed in public (Baldwin and Friedman, 2004: 1). In 2006, there were calls for legislation similar to Scotland’s from the Welsh Assembly Government and MP David Kidney put forward a Private Member’s Bill for a UK-wide breastfeeding law. To look beyond the West to, for instance, the context of Brazil, in recent decades breastmilk has been progressively recognised not as a professional opportunity but as an employment hazard for the impoverished domestic workers of the northeastern state of Pernambuco, according to anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s acclaimed 1992 study, Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Scheper-Hughes recounts the following interviewee’s explanation for weaning her children in order to return to work: her patroas would never allow her to enter their homes if they even suspected that she were lactating. “Dá nojo [It’s disgusting]!” Irene exclaimed, gesticulating to indicate heavy, pendulous breasts dripping milk. One could not run the risk of suddenly having a wet blouse, she explained, in the middle of serving the family a meal: “It would make everyone lose their appetites” (Scheper-Hughes, 1992: 323).

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Scheper-Hughes, and theorist Donna J. Haraway after her, have shown that the rejection of breastfeeding by poor mothers like this one, for multiple reasons, is an important factor contributing to the devastatingly high infant mortality in Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, 1992: 316-26; Haraway, 1997: 206-12). In short, in the twentieth-century breastfeeding went undercover. It was transformed from a widely practised and conspicuous aspect of women’s quotidian existence, something often shared communally or professionally, which – among other things –linked women of different classes together, into, instead, what it often is considered today: something rarefied, seemingly exotic, intensely private, regulated and even secret. As a part of this process, the figure of the wet nurse, a prominent feature on the landscape of women’s history, has all but disappeared from sight. She has left behind her very few of her own words; her experiences are, in that sense, as invisible as “white ink” on a white page.

The Wet Nurse in Recent Literature In tandem with this rather momentous shift in a primary aspect of women’s existence, an eruption of discourses centred on breastfeeding emerged, beginning in the 1970s, within the social sciences, psychoanalytic theory and literature. In contrast to the historical demonization of the wet nurse and the decreasing visibility of breastfeeding generally, twentieth-century literary writers have reclaimed and reconfigured the lactating woman, and particularly the figure of the wet nurse. These writers could be said, in another sense of the phrase, to have begun writing in “white ink”, by bringing into visibility a prominent part of women’s lives historically and thereby disrupting traditional conceptions of the literary terrain. Subverting the hegemony of the private, autonomous body, these writers foreground intercorporeality, interdependence and the polymorphousness and mutuality of embodied pleasure. For example, in African-American novelist Sherley Anne Williams’s 1986 novel Dessa Rosa, the wet nursing conventions of the American colonial South are reversed, as a white plantation owner’s wife breastfeeds the infant of an escaped slave. Ultimately, this unconventional wet nurse finds the experience both pleasurable and transformational: the sight of him so tiny and bloodied had pained her with an almost physical hurt and she had set about cleaning and clothing him with a single-minded intensity. And only when his cries were stilled and she looked down upon the sleek black head, the nut-brown face flattened against the pearly paleness of her breast, had she become conscious of what she was doing. A wave of embarrassment had swept over her and she had looked guiltily around the parlor… Whatever care she

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Writing in “White Ink”: Reconfiguring the Body of the Wet Nurse might have had about the wisdom of her action was soon forgotten in the wonder she felt at the baby (Williams, 1986: 101-02).

In Dessa Rose, the practice of wet nursing ultimately forms the basis of an evolving relationship, mutual understanding, and interdependence between the two main female characters, so different in terms of social class, race and life experiences. It thereby demonstrates the potential for support networks between women. An even more unconventional wet nurse can be found in the OjibwaAmerican writer Louise Erdrich’s 1998 novel The Antelope Wife. Within the opening chapter, “Father’s Milk”, the nineteenth-century US Cavalry soldier Private Scranton Teodorus Roy, through a chain of circumstances, finds himself in the wilderness with an Ojibwa infant (Erdrich, 1998: 3). In his desperation to comfort the baby, he allows her to suckle at his nipples, and, after a period of several days of this eager suckling, he is astonished to realise that he has begun to lactate: the baby kept nursing and refused to stop. His nipples toughened. Pity scorched him, she sucked so blindly, so forcefully, and with such immense faith. It occurred to him one slow dusk as he looked down at her, upon his breast, that she was teaching him something . . . Half asleep one morning, her beside him, he felt a slight warmth, then a rush in one side of his chest, a pleasurable burning. He thought it was an odd dream and fell asleep again only to wake to a huge burp from the baby, whose lips curled back from her dark gums in bliss, whose tiny fists were unclenched in sleep for the first time, who looked, impossibly, well fed. Ask and ye shall receive. Ask and ye shall receive. The words ran through him like a clear stream. He put his hand to his chest and then tasted a thin blue drop of his own watery, appalling, God-given milk (Erdrich, 1998: 7-8).

As miraculous as this event may seem to both Scranton Roy and the reader, lactation in men has in fact been historically documented. Erdrich’s inclusion of this account of a man’s embodied experience of wet nursing subverts the gendered conception of the maternal subject position. Although Scranton had consciously attempted to rescue the infant, he had not intentionally sought out the parental subject position; it is thrust upon him by circumstances. However, once he accepts this role, allowing the baby to suckle in order to comfort her, he is represented as beginning a process of transformation. Scranton recognises that he is learning from the infant, through the experience of caring for her. This education is not only emotional and intellectual but physical as well. His body is learning, as a result of the baby’s tenacious teaching, to lactate. Child care, and more specifically breastfeeding, is represented by Erdrich as a transformative phenomenological experience. Scranton’s engagement with

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nurturance has created a new way of “being-in-the-world”. The former soldier, who had been capable of impaling an elderly woman on his bayonet, in a raid on an Ojibwa village, now instead inserts his nipple into the mouth of a baby, thereby becoming “the giver of the milk”; he does so, to his own surprise, with pleasure. Breastfeeding, including wet nursing, is also a recurring motif in the fiction of Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, as I indicated at the beginning of this essay. In Song of Solomon, of 1977, the adult, male protagonist is perpetually linked to his nursing relationship with his mother, through the nickname by which he is known, Milkman (Frampton, 2005). In Tar Baby, of 1981, Thérèse is a former wet nurse, whose “magical breasts” are reputed to have fed hundreds of babies, like a subversive force countering the infant “formula” that, as one character asserts, “sounds like murder and a bad reputation” (Morrison, 1981: 112 and 155). In Morrison’s best known novel, Beloved of 1987, breastfeeding represents not only an alternative, pre-Oedipal relational space between mother and daughter, but also constitutes an overtly political act, signifying a repossession of one of slavery’s multitudinous appropriations – specifically, the enforced wet nursing of African slaves. Morrison thus provides an opposing view on the idealized wet nursing scenario of Williams’s book of the previous year, Dessa Rose. In the inner monologue directed to her daughter returned from the dead, the protagonist, Sethe, articulates the deprivation and discontinuity engendered by the theft of breast milk from the enslaved babies and mothers to whom it rightfully belonged: nobody will ever get my milk no more except my own children. I never had to give it to nobody else – and the one time I did it was took from me – they held me down and took it. Milk that belonged to my baby. Nan had to nurse whitebabies and me too because Ma’am was in the rice. The little whitebabies got it first and I got what was left. Or none. There was no nursing milk to call my own. I know what it is to be without the milk that belongs to you; to have to fight and holler for it, and to have so little left. I’ll tell Beloved about that; she’ll understand. She is my daughter. The one I managed to have milk for and to get it to her even after they stole it (Morrison, 1987: 200).

The former slave who fiercely asserts her capacity to breastfeed here has reclaimed a commodity and a right historically denied to her people. Rather than responding by rejecting embodiment, Sethe instead embraces her own determinative power over it. In keeping with Baby Suggs’s unordained preaching to the community within the novel, Morrison insists that “this is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved” (Morrison, 1987: 88). Thus, while the imperative of wet nursing within the context of slavery is

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denounced by the novel, at the same time breastfeeding is associated with women’s reappropriation of their bodies.

Mahasweta Devi’s “Breast-Giver” Another text inscribing breastfeeding from the perspective of a paid wet nurse, by the Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi, also appeared in English in 1987, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. “Stanadayini”, or “Breast-Giver”, is the story of Jashoda, a West-Bengali Brahmin woman who, through a chain of circumstances, ends up being hired as a wet nurse for thirty years of her life. After having suckled twenty of her own children and thirty from her patron family, she ultimately dies of breast cancer, destitute and deserted by family and friends. It is a narrative that is riveted to the breast and lactation, but one in which the links between breast milk and nature are significantly problematised. As is consistently reiterated through the story, Jashoda, is a “professional” mother and her milk is the commodity that supports her. This, as the story’s translator, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, points out in an essay on the text, is “mothering in its materiality beyond its socialization as affect” (Spivak, 1998: 118). Thus, mothering and breastfeeding are not simply representative of “the natural”, as against the artificial baby milks of multinational food manufacturers. Commodification becomes entwined with the lactating body within “Breast-Giver”. Devi herself has asserted that her story was intended as an allegory of India after de-colonisation, with the protagonist, Jashoda, serving as a symbol of Mother India, sucked dry by both her biological and adopted children (Spivak, 1987: 244-45 and Spivak, 1998: 78-80). Yet, this nationalist reading of the text has been importantly supplemented with other readings by its translator. Spivak discusses the text in terms of Lacanian theories of jouissance, arguing, among other things, that jouissance is represented, paradoxically, as the cancer that ultimately destroys the protagonist’s breasts and life; this is the profound “excess” of the narrative (Spivak, 1987: 260). However, I would argue, following Spivak’s lead, that there is, in fact, another significant space in Devi’s story in which another pleasure – another experience that is “in excess” by escaping reproductive, copulative or even “orgasmic” pleasure – is put into play. This is Jashoda’s experience of breastfeeding. Through much of the narrative, Jashoda’s breasts and milk are discussed in utilitarian terms; they are her means of income, her “rice-winner” (Devi, 1997: 73). However, at key points in the text an altogether different perspective on them emerges. This occurs towards the end of the narrative, when Jashoda – dying of cancer – reflects back on her experiences of nursing, contrasting these to her present situation. We’re told that: “Her breasts feel

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empty, as if wasted. She had never thought she wouldn’t have a child’s mouth at her nipple” (Devi, 1997: 63). Devi here contrasts the present sense of emptiness with the former phenomenological experience of the full breast of milk, connected to the child’s mouth. Further on in the narrative, when her husband pays her one of his rare visits during her final days, we are given the following account: “Jashoda smiled suddenly. A heart-splitting nostalgiaprovoking smile. Jashoda said, ‘Dear, remember?’ ‘What, wife?’ ‘How you played with these tits? You couldn’t sleep otherwise? My lap was never empty, if this one left my nipple, there was that one, and then the boys of the Master’s house’” (Devi, 1997: 66). Once again, Devi evokes a sense of loss, emptiness and remorse for the embodied engagement that has passed. And, in a passage that precedes these other two slightly, this perspective is elaborated upon. Before Jashoda has become ill, during the period after she is no longer needed as a wet nurse and so must look for other work, we are told that “Jashoda returned home, half-crazed by the injustice of the world. But her heart couldn’t abide the empty room. Whether it suckled or not, it’s hard to sleep without a child at the breast. Motherhood is a great addiction. The addiction doesn’t break even when the milk is dry” (Devi, 1997: 61). Addictions are negative things in that they demand subservience; however, addictions are able to demand subservience partly because of the intense pleasure that they provide, the jouissance. Devi is here locating pleasure in the breast for the lactating subject herself. Jashoda not only offers pleasure to her husband and her many “milk-children” as she earns her living as a wet nurse; she also creates and experiences pleasure in herself. Along with other contemporary women writers in English, Devi thus opens up the possibility for an advocacy of breastfeeding for subaltern women on the grounds of jouissance, of bliss – for the lactating woman as well as for the child – a very different advocacy than the moralistic, maternalist one often associated with breastfeeding. Furthermore, Devi has delineated a subject position defined by lactation. Having phenomenologically oriented herself in relation to such embodied experiences as sleeping with a child at the breast, Jashoda is disoriented by the cessation of that experience. Her “addiction” is to the phenomenology of breastfeeding.

Michèle Roberts’s Daughters of the House Writing within the cultural context of Britain, Michèle Roberts published a very different narrative of wet nursing in her 1992 novel Daughters of the House, set in post-Second-World-War France. In the chapter titled “The Ivory Ring”, the experience of breastfeeding is focalised through the breastfeeding subject, a

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subject that is alternately the wet nurse, Rose, and the infant, Thérèse, who had been sent to live with Rose between the ages of two and eighteen months: she knew Rose’s smell, her milk and sweat, her brown skin. She knew the shape of her hips, from riding on them, and the tumbling rhythms of her high-pitched voice . . . If the child woke and cried at night, sleepy Rose took her into the warmth of the big bed’s flannel sheets, opened her nightdress to her. She’d doze off again with the little one curled like a cat between her stomach and arm. Bliss. Feeding and being fed. Love was this milky fullness, Thérèse born a second time, into a land of plenty. And she has a good pair of lungs to her, hasn’t she, Rose said to her three-year-old son Baptiste: she can scream good and proper that one can. The tearing pains of hunger, her stomach ready to fly apart and explode with raging emptiness, these did not last too long. Need was assuaged. Torture subsided as the searching mouth fastened the breast to it, gobbled, drank. Savage little pig, Rose would shout as the hard gums clamped on to her, then she’d jiggle her, pleased at the child’s appetite (Roberts, 1992: 33).

The site of bliss is represented here as located between breastfeeding woman and child. Bliss is to be found in the space of reciprocal giving and receiving, in the experience of mutually feeding and being fed. It is a relational bliss. Furthermore, in keeping with the intercorporeal reciprocity inscribed here, the focalisation of the passage shifts back and forth between infant and parent. The reader sees from the child’s perspective and then from the woman’s, then again from the child’s and so forth. These rapid shifts create a blurred effect, in which the breastfeeding dyad appears as a single, unified subjectivity, rather than two entirely separate individuals. Like bliss itself, the breastfeeding subject exists between individuals. It is a subjectivity founded on interconnectedness, the intertwining of individuals, focused on nurturing with mutual pleasure, on respecting, and seeking to meet psychosomatic needs. Stylistically too, as the narrative alternates back and forth between the consciousness of the baby and that of the wet nurse, the divisions are blurred and dissolved between child and maternal figure, body and fluid, food and pleasure, inside and outside, nurturance and the erotic. The experience of suckling is revisited in the penultimate chapter of the novel, when Léonie dreams of having been breastfed by Rose as well, alongside Thérèse. Here “intercorporeity” of nursing is further explored: she was inside what happened, and also outside. Her edges were of warm flesh, arms that held, contained. The world bent forwards, over her and into her, and she seized the world and leapt into it. Sweetness was her and it, her two hands grasping, her mouth demanding and receiving the lively flow. She was in a good place. Where the arms that held her would not let her drop, where her name was

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called over and over, where she was wanted, where she could stay and enjoy. The name of Léonie was the name of bliss. There was enough room for her. She did not have to go, to stop, to stand back. Rose sat easily, a baby on each arm. She looked from Léonie to Thérèse and she smiled. Of course I fed you both, silly. I had plenty of milk didn’t I. Of course I fed you both. Rose, fostermother, mother-in-law, second mother, fostering mother. Rose in her chair by the fire, feet up, blouse undone, a lapful of babies, a shout of joy, the smell of milk, there, my dears, there (Roberts, 1992: 168).

Once again, borders dissolve as bodies meld together in the nursing embrace, as milk passes from one body to another.

Conclusion: Merleau-Ponty’s Chiasmus The passage above from Daughters of the House comes very close to philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s conceptualisations of chiasmus. On one hand, “chiasmus” is the term for a grammatical figure, in which the order of words in one of two parallel phrases is inverted in the other. A well known example is the aphorism that “one should eat to live, not live to eat”. MerleauPonty appropriates this figure within his philosophical work, particularly in his posthumously published The Visible and the Invisible, published in French in 1964 and in English in 1968. Here Merleau-Ponty most fully develops his philosophical orientation towards interconnectedness, suggesting an ontology of reciprocity and interdependence. In the chapter called “The Intertwining—The Chiasm”, he stresses what he calls “intercorporeity” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 141). He is exploring the intertwining or “reciprocal insertion” through which one simultaneously touches and is touched, sees and is seen, thereby, he says, “creating a circle which I do not form, which forms me” in the world (MerleauPonty, 1968: 138, 140). The outside world thus enters into and alters us, at the same time that we alter it. Merleau-Ponty foregrounds the “interworld”, to use a word of Judith Butler’s in relation to him, of sentient and sensible, of object and subject. He remarks that: [t]hrough the other body, I see that, in its coupling with the flesh of the world, the body contributes more than it receives … For the first time, the body no longer couples itself up with the world, it clasps another body, applying [itself to it] carefully with its whole extension, forming tirelessly with its hands the strange statue which in its turn gives everything it receives; the body is lost outside of the world and its goals, fascinated by the unique occupation of floating in Being with another life, of making itself the outside of its inside and the inside of its outside. And henceforth movement, touch, vision, applying themselves to the other and to themselves, return toward their source and, in the patient and silent labor of

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Writing in “White Ink”: Reconfiguring the Body of the Wet Nurse desire, begin the paradox of expression (Butler, 1989: 97 and Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 144).

The phenomenal interrelationality that Merleau-Ponty theorises here within philosophical discourse can be seen as given literary articulation in Roberts’s Daughters of the House. Like Merleau-Ponty before her, Roberts explores an ontology of the intercorporeal and intersubjective and she associates the breastfeeding subject with that ontology. In conclusion, in addition to the transformative potential of articulating the silenced voices of mothers and wet nurses historically, there is an intrinsically revelatory value to excavating narratives of the sensual, playful, nurturant, and sometimes painful relationship of breastfeeding. Such narratives illuminate a potentially rich and meaningful experience and relationship available to people, which has, in various ways, been ignored, undervalued, demonized, rendered impracticable, sanitised or monumentalised within the various discourses that circulate around the mother and the maternal. However, at a broader and yet more radical level, these narratives posit a subject position that is, on one hand, founded upon an embodied relationality and, on the other, is not tied to compulsory heterosexuality. Narratives of the intimate corporeal and affective experience of breastfeeding contribute to the subversion of the cultural hegemony of the heterosexual dyad. The pleasures of embodied interaction are thus lent multiplicity and diversity, and thereby, in a sense, re-inscribe the polymorphousness of experience not only for the child but for the adult as well. At the same time, these narratives possess a unique purchase on the articulation of a subjectivity that, rather than being stable, homogenous, autonomous and resolutely rational, is instead embodied, relational and in process. Juliet Mitchell defines “Lacan’s human subject . . . [as] a self which is only actually and necessarily created within a split – a being that can only conceptualise itself when it is mirrored back to itself from the position of another’s desire” (Mitchell, 1982: 5). “The giver of the milk” fleshes out such conceptions of subjectivity, in that this subject position so overtly comes into being only by means of an intercorporeal reciprocity; it thus adds dimension to Lacan’s specular plane. Furthermore, it emphasises the relational, rather than the intrapsychic, uniting the subjectivity of the one who offers milk to the child, with that of the child whose suckling initiates lactation. The wet nurse gives milk to the child; but it is the child whose suckling chiasmically sustains the flow of milk. Hence, the second level on which subjectivity is explored by some of these texts is an intersubjective one. Emergent from contemporary narratives of wet nursing are not only the singular voices of lactating women but also a voice that encompasses dual or multiple individuals. Late-twentiethcentury writers, building upon the modernist multiplicity of selfhood explored

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by predecessors such as Virginia Woolf, blur the boundaries between subjects, articulating an intercorporeal and interpsychical selfhood. They give literary realisation to, and further extend, Jessica Benjamin’s theorisations of the “intersubjective view” within psychoanalysis, which foregrounds “emotional attunement, mutual influence, affective mutuality, sharing states of mind” (Benjamin, 1988: 16). But the figure of chiasmus may also be extended to represent the mutually dependent relationship historically of the biological mother and the surrogate maternal figure of the wet nurse. The wet nursing relationship, and cross nursing generally, can signify the potential intersections not only of individual bodies and psyches but also the intersections of very different women’s lives, in the shared work and pleasures of nurturance. On one hand, the biological mother potentially provides an income and a child to the wet nurse, while the wet nurse chiasmatically returns something back to the mother and child. The figure of the wet nurse thus enables a reconsideration of contemporary categories of the body, of female collectivism, of the maternal and of the literary, suggesting potentialities for the future as surprising as Cixous’ trope of “white ink”.

Works Cited Apple, Rima D., Mothers and Medicine: A Social History of Infant Feeding, 1890-1950 (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1987). Baldwin, Elizabeth N. and Kenneth A. Friedman, “Breastfeeding Legislation in the United States,” New Beginnings 11 (1994), pp. 164-167. —. “A current summary of breastfeeding legislation in the U. S.,” [State listing updated by Melissa R. Vance (2004)], La Leche League International, accessed July 21st 2004, http://www.lalecheleague.org/LawBills. html. Benjamin, Jessica, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon, 1988). Butler, Judith, “Sexual ideology and phenomenological description: a feminist critique of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception,” in eds. Jeffner Allen and Iris Marion Young, The Thinking Muse: Feminism and Modern French Philosophy (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 85-100. Chetley, Andrew, The Politics of Baby Foods: Successful Challenges to an International Marketing Strategy (London: Frances Pinter, 1986). Cixous, Hélène “The laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, in eds. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivon, New French Feminisms: An Anthology (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), pp. 245–264 [trans. of “Le Rire de la méduse”, 1975].

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Cleveland, C., “The wet-nurse vs. the bottle,” Archives of Pediatrics 1 (1884), p. 346. Clinton, Elizabeth, The Countesse of Lincolnes Nurserie (Oxford: John Lichfield and James Short, 1622). Defoe, Daniel, The Compleat English Gentleman [1728], ed. Karl D. Bülbring (London: David Nutt, 1890). Devi, Mahasweta, “Breast-Giver” [1987], trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in Devi, Breast Stories (Calcutta: Seagull, 1997), pp. 39–75 and in ed. G. C. Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 222-240. Erdrich, Louise, The Antelope Wife (New York: HarperCollins, 1998). Fildes, Valerie, Breasts, Bottles and Babies: A History of Infant Feeding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University, 1986). —. Wet Nursing: A History from Antiquity to the Present (London: Blackwell, 1988). Frampton, Edith, “‘You just can’t fly on off and leave a body’: the intercorporeal breastfeeding subject of Toni Morrison’s fiction,” Women: A Cultural Review 16 (2005), pp. 141-163. Giles, Fiona, Fresh Milk: The Secret Life of Breasts (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003). Golden, Janet, A Social History of Wet Nursing in America: From Breast to Bottle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Goldman, Anne, “‘I made the ink’: (literary) production and reproduction in Dessa Rose and Beloved”, Feminist Studies 16 (1990), pp. 313-330. Haraway, Donna J., Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan ©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997). Jelliffe, Derrick B. and E. F. Patrice Jelliffe, Human Milk in the Modern World: Psychosocial, Nutritional, and Economic Significance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, “The intertwining – the chiasm” in Merleau-Ponty, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp. 130-155. Mitchell, Juliet, “Introduction – I. ‘Feminine Sexuality’”, in eds Jacqueline Rose and Juliet Mitchell, trans. Jacqueline Rose, Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne (London: Norton, 1982), pp. 1-26. Morrison, Toni, Beloved [1987] (London: Picador, 1988). —. Song of Solomon [1977] (London: Vintage, 1998). —. Tar Baby (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981). Roberts, Michèle, Daughters of the House (London: Virago, 1992).

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Scott, Kirsty, “Scots move to protect nursing mothers,” The Guardian, June 10th (2002), Guardian Unlimited Network accessed June 10th 2002, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,730558,00.html. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, Death Without Weeping: the Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (Berkeley: University of California, 1992). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “A literary representation of the subaltern: a woman’s text from the Third World,” [1987], in ed. Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 241268. —. “‘Breast-Giver’: for author, reader, teacher, subaltern, historian…,” in Mahasweta Devi, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Breast Stories (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1998), pp. 76-137. Sussman, George D., Selling Mothers’ Milk: The Wet-Nursing Business in France 1715-1914 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1982). Todd, Janet, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997). Williams, Sherley Anne, Dessa Rose [1986] (London: Virago, 1998).

CHAPTER NINE BEING JUDE LAW, BEING JOHN MALKOVICH: THE BODY IN THE BODY NAOMI SEGAL

When Gide looked at a photo of Pierre Herbart, a handsome young friend of Cocteau’s whom he met in 1927, he said “‘I really think he has the physique that I would most like to inhabit’” (Van Rysselberghe, 1974: 205). We need to distinguish this fantasy of entry inside the other from a notion of sexual penetration. In the instances I shall be looking at in this article, the skin or external appearance of another is not so much the object as the context for desire, the imagined pleasure of being rather than having. What we want is to live as another person, don their appearance, in order to do something we cannot imagine doing any other way. I am going to look at three films made in the last years of the twentieth century, in each of which the protagonist seeks to be another character, in the strong sense of ‘be’ which goes beyond the copula into an assumption of difference – as for instance children say ‘I’m going to be the Big Bad Wolf this time; you be’d him last time’. These films are Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca (1997), Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) and Spike Jonze’s/Charlie Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich (1999). I shall argue that these represent three different structures of desire conditional on ‘being inside the skin of the other’: three versions that can be summed up as ‘two, three, many’ – or: ‘duality, triangularity and queer desire’.

Duality Gattaca is a dystopia set in “the not-too-distant future”.1 The eponymous space station is spelled with the four letters of DNA, G-A-T-C – which appear also in 1 Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from the films discussed in this article are taken from the DVDs.

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their dazzling permutations on an identity screen: above the genome, it reads “Morrow, Jerome”, and above the name, in large capitals, the word “VALID”. The face in the image is a blend of the faces of actors Ethan Hawke and Jude Law. Blended in a way genes cannot be (they fall and reassemble by the mechanics of dimorphic reproduction, a negotiation, not a melding), these facial features stand for the possibility of inside becoming outside. In order to reach the stars, Vincent Freeman has to lodge his “dreams” in a better body. His ambition needs Jerome Eugene Morrow’s frame to function in. Vincent is the elder of two brothers. The product of love in the back seat of a car, he is what is known in this world as a “god-child”: his genes carry a likely early death, whereas his younger brother Anton has the carefully selected genes that make him a “valid”. The epithet “in-valid” follows Vincent everywhere but most especially into Gattaca where, his father has warned him, “the only way you’ll see the inside of a spaceship is if you’re cleaning it”. Cleaning is the work of keeping in order surfaces he wants to penetrate. To enter, you press a fingertip against a reader that takes a drop of blood and judges you with the buzz of a red or green light. The most intimate stuff from depth or surface – a smear of blood, a drop of urine, a single hair or flake of loose skin – acts as a forensic index of worth. In order to get off “this ball of dirt”, Vincent has to appear to be someone else, and that someone is Jerome Eugene Morrow (Jude Law). He has to borrow his body. But does he enter his skin? In the end, this is the question I think Gattaca poses. The beautiful frame of Eugene is bought by the determined Vincent in order to provide him with the space to enter space. Vincent’s motives are large and pretty simple: he wants to go up in a rocket, and he doesn’t think beyond the pleasure of being permitted to leave. On the way he achieves the traditional three versions of approval: the love of “the girl” (familiarly, there is just one in this fraternal universe: Irene, played by Uma Thurman); the assistance of a couple of subordinate fatherfigures, Caesar and Dr Lamar, and the sacrifice of Director Josef (Gore Vidal), convicted of a murder Vincent/Jerome has been suspected of; and triumph over his brother Anton. Anton is motivated by the knowledge that he is superior, but (for all we see) by little else: we find him in adulthood in the guise of the “investigator”. Brought in to solve the murder by intricate inspection of bodily forensics, he realises that a stray eyelash belongs to the in-valid Vincent – but how to convict him, seeing that he is passing himself off as Jerome? We never wholly divine Anton’s thoughts – the suggestion is that he wants to save his brother from discovery, though the sting of rivalry is never resolved: he hates the idea of Vincent’s triumph – but it may be that he, like the others but without the spacefantasy, chiefly wants knowledge. To whom does the body part evidentially belong? How has the technology been made to lie? Whose face do you see when

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you compare identity image with fleshly head? In the two main male pairs of this story, we see fraternal difference played out in two ways via the virtual similarity of the body: Vincent and Jerome use the body for an economic transaction in which advantage trades with desire; Vincent and Anton, who have drawn (but not simultaneously or similarly) on the same gene-pool, play out their rivalry by moving in parallel lines. The quintessential, and finely conceived, occasion of this parallel, is a swimming contest they call “Chicken”. Present place in this film is always bounded – chiefly by the fathomless sky which Vincent intends to penetrate, but elsewhere, more locally, by the sea. Again the surface of an element is only apparent; it is, more accurately, a context for conquering. So the closest to real passion Vincent and Irene get is to walk and gaze together, in respectful wonder, at the rose-pink sky. As children, Vincent and Anton would arrange footballs and fruit on the beach to imitate the planets, and then swim out side by side in competition to see who will give up first and turn back. The clever thing here is that each must estimate not so much his total available strength (measured against the other) but half the total, for he must be able to reach land again, turning round at the exact midway point to exhaustion, “always knowing each stroke to the horizon was one we were going to have to make back to the shore”. In fact twice Vincent beats Anton, indeed saves his life, seemingly by knowing his own half-capacity just that bit better than his brother, but actually because “I never saved anything for the swim back”. In this hare-and-tortoise morality tale, those gifted by the technology that nature has turned into will inevitably suffer from complacency: sublime recklessness is available only to the truly driven. Earth-bound, grown-up Anton pursues others, hosts the order of things. He knows that a stray eyelash, hair or skin-flake is not self but evidence. We are used to this principle – derived from Mary Douglas’s insight about dirt being matter out of place (Douglas, 1966) – as the source of delight in such detective series as America’s CSI or the UK’s Silent Witness or Waking the Dead, in which, in one way, the “scene” can never be clean enough for the criminal, but never soiled enough for the beautifully groomed and sensitive detectives. They and their prosthetic machinery – red goggles and a green beam expose invisible spots of blood or semen, careful careful tweezers gentle out a single hair from a car-headrest, brute evidence of foregoing violence now turned into seeming order – see what cannot (but must) be seen. There is nowhere to hide from their gaze which is actually not so much penetrating as determinedly superficial, superficial at such a level of expertise that my skin is no longer my home but only the source of bits that will betray me. Remember that Vincent was destined only to enter a spaceship by being its cleaner? In our contemporary world – from which this fiction is meant to be “not too distant” – hygiene has long since become an affair of pursuing invisible

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enemies, for which even domestic technology is never good enough, and our meagre housewifely skills quite inadequate. Invisibly awaiting us “out there” in the air, the enemy is also from us and of us: bad bits fly off to harm ourselves and others. Naked Vincent scrubs himself on the beach after a night of love because his psychic world is that of the psoriatic: every flake of skin must fall, and it falls live from the orbit of his control. So how is he to have the skin he “deserves”? By purchasing the “good dirt”, the valid evidence, of Eugene Morrow’s body. Gattaca is a fantasy of the revenge of dirt on cold-hearted hygiene: Vincent/Cinderella will go to the outer-space ball, by dressing up in Eugene’s droppings. Eugene is in a wheelchair since a self-inflicted accident some years earlier. His lower limbs – though even thus he is taller than Vincent, who has to undergo a gruelling operation to lengthen his legs – are useless: we watch him at one point, when Anton is about to find them out, drag himself excruciatingly up the spiral staircase of his elegant condominium. We know why Vincent buys Eugene/Jerome’s body. But what’s in it for Eugene? What I want to look at particularly here are two things: firstly, what motivates Eugene’s part in the other man’s metamorphosis; and secondly, what precisely is the process by which Vincent turns into – or rather does not turn into, as we shall see, for he both already is, and never will be – his other? As far as Eugene Morrow’s motive is concerned: the story gradually emerges that he despaired of life because he never was – of course! – quite perfect enough: he waves a silver medal bitterly in Vincent’s face, saying “Jerome Morrow was never meant to be one step down on the podium”. He dies in the closing frames still clutching the medal, on which we glimpse the figures of two men swimming side by side. Thus in his own way (inverting the to-andfro tracks made in the sea by the Vincent/Anton rivalry), he has followed the reverse trajectory to the aspirant: having discovered he could not be the best, he chose to die, threw himself in front of a car, and ended up in a half-life, halfwasted, “uselessly” handsome, smoking and boozing in his chair, alone indoors, watching the sky from a small elevated window beside the incinerator-space, with no other seeming purpose than a monetary one. Actually gratuitous action for oneself or another who represents oneself seems to be the base of this parable. In the end, Eugene is left behind, apparently a shell, watching Vincent soar in his space-prosthesis, having made the ultimate tribute: “I got the better end of the deal. I only lent you my body. You lent me your dream”. Leaving behind a fridge full of specimens for the return Vincent does not talk about, he consigns himself to the incinerator - hell to the other man’s heaven, down to his up. Has he, like the other helper-men, offered himself up for the sake of the hero’s triumph? It is true that we expect him to disappear once Vincent goes away, because his function is to supply, not

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to demand. But I wonder exactly why this is; for they are not hydraulically exchangeable according to the fraternal equation “Is that the only way you can succeed: to see me fail?” Nor do they exactly blend either, despite the identity picture that puzzles the investigator. There are two reasons for this. One is that the process of borrowing body detritus is never complete: Vincent never starts “growing” Eugene’s body parts of his own accord. This is most definitely not a cyborg fantasy. Body and technology, for all the intentions of the civilisation the film represents, never do work together; they are always inimical. So Vincent never gets a transplant or transfusion of Eugene, he has to renew the process laboriously day by day – this is Groundhog Day, not The Fly. It is the laboriousness, the risk (when he throws away his contact lenses to avoid detection, he is almost run over), the hard work, of the process that is the moral basis of the tale: masculine aspiration is no easier than feminine housework, both are reproductive, apparently purposeless repetition, the mountain never conquered, until suddenly it is, and you are no longer Sisyphus/Prometheus but the eagle. The lesson is that you really will only see the inside of a spaceship by cleaning it, and by cleaning yourself, over and over again every day. But then, one is tempted to ask: what is the point of seeing the inside of a spaceship? Whatever it is that Vincent thinks he is going to it is as much a further degree of enclosure as a wide-open vista. In mocking mood, Eugene says: “Anyway, the room I’m stuck in is bigger than your tin-can […] I go places in my head”. And Vincent, “going home”, as he lyrically thinks, imagines the object of his aim as “the closest thing to being in the womb”. The refusal to think about his return in a year’s time suggests that Eugene is imitating, rather than serving, him, when he chooses to die. The second reason takes us into an extra-diegetic area. I want to suggest that it is the non-identity of the two men for the audience (and this applies to all three of my films) that provides part of the effect of the film’s myth. Intradiegetically, the disguise, although always provisional, is successful. “You look so right together I want to double my fee”, says black market agent German. “We don’t look anything alike”, Vincent replies. “It’s close enough”, says German; “when was the last time anyone looked at a photograph?” Both their eye colour and their accents are different, yet it is understood that with the prosthetic adjustments this will not matter: “He’s a foreigner”: “They don’t care where you were born: just how”. And it doesn’t. Bit by bit the identity-swap “takes”. Typing composedly at her work-station, Irene doesn’t connect the Vincent identity image flashed up on her screen with the “Jerome” she is about to seduce. When Vincent wants to give up, Eugene retorts angrily: “You still don’t understand, do you? When they look at you they don’t see you, they only see me”.

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For his lover, it is important that Vincent can plead “I’m the same person I was yesterday” – though he then turns to Eugene and says half-jokingly: “I think she likes us”. For his brother, non-recognition is mutual; and the audience is uncertain when or whether each knows who the other “really” is. The question is here, of course, what “really” means. The inner identity that supposedly never changes is certainly preserved intact as an idea in the film; this is why the labour of disguise needs to be renewed each day, this is what takes Vincent up in the rocket. In Gattaca, what makes a self self, the defiance of genetic destiny, is assigned to the mystery of the transcendent will. Will the audience be willing to share that parti pris? If, ultimately, we see what we want to know, we virtually invent the blended face of the neo-Jerome Morrow, which neither we nor the characters in the fiction have ever actually perceived. It appears that Eugene/Jerome accepts this logic, for he fills his fridge with sachets and disposes of himself as the credits roll – down with the rubbish, like a golden Gregor Samsa. Or rather, he knows he has not been blended, and perhaps this is what makes him the most sure of being redundant. The obliging Lamar who lets Vincent go through knowing he (like his own son) is an in-valid with the soul of a hero but the urine and the lefthandedness of a fallible mortal has, in an early scene, proved that phallic is as phallic does. As Vincent pees, or pretends to, he looks down and comments: “Beautiful piece of equipment […] an exceptional example”. And so, after all, if we needed to be told, it turns out that the only prosthesis a man needs is the one he has already (almost) got, and all he needs to be recognised by is his desire. If we in the audience desire to desire in his way, we will believe. There is a pleasure in overriding the evidence of our senses – or in other words in suspending disbelief – if it allows us, like Eugene, or for that matter like the two actors, to “borrow” Vincent’s dream. To do that we must declare our body a housewifely inconvenience, a temporary measure.

Triangularity In Gattaca, the question of desire begins as something between the individual and his body –his body, since the story is entirely about masculinity, as we have seen – but it quickly becomes a question of duality: of who owns the man’s aspiration and the body needed to enact it, and of how other men may be either rivals or helpers in his individual plot. In Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley, again essentially the story of a single individual, the issues are triangulated. How Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) will use and destroy others, chiefly the object of aspiration Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law), in order to be someone he has not had the opportunity to be, is shown not only through a series of splits in the self – stripes across Damon’s face in the opening and closing sequences, repeated

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flashes of body fragments in Italy’s ancient sculptures - but also through the frustrations of perfect moments disrupted: there is always a knock at the door, a twist, or a meeting that has to be conducted in front of a third party. Indeed, the main changes Minghella has made to Patricia Highsmith’s novel (Highsmith 1999) are a set of triangulations, adding elements of mediation most particularly to the question of desire. The plot is simple: Tom Ripley, a footloose New Yorker, is invited by shipping magnate Herbert Greenleaf to go to Italy to persuade his son to come home. Greenleaf deludedly thinks that Tom and Dickie were friends at Princeton; Tom lets him believe this and embraces the unhoped-for opportunity to see Europe. He enters the charmed world of 1950s Italy, where his mealticket is charming, feckless Dickie who, with his girlfriend Marge, represents a class born to fine objects and limitless cash changed at American Express offices under the eyes of obliging functionaries. Dickie is beguiled by Tom’s talent to impersonate and his artful borrowing of his own passions: jazz, Italy. But when he tires of him, as Marge has warned he will – “The thing with Dickie: it’s like the sun shines on you, and it’s glorious; and then he forgets you and it’s very very cold… when you’ve got his attention, you feel like you’re the only person in the world, that’s why everybody loves him” (Minghella, 2000: 48) – Tom’s attachment turns to bitterness and he murders him. It is easy and gratifying to pretend he is Dickie: moving to Rome, he lives in luxury, takes on that classy world – until upper-class Freddie finds him out, and he must be murdered too. Thereafter the talents are turned to the art of evasion: Tom and Dickie by turns, depending whom he is with, brilliantly covering the tracks of both as the police gradually come to suspect Dickie of having first murdered Tom, then Freddie and then committed suicide, he finally faces Marge, who understands everything but is ignored; Dickie’s father, who has decided his son is the culprit and is best buried; and Peter Smith-Kingsley, with whom he might have been perfectly happy but whom he is forced in the end to kill as well. In this summary, I have followed the common plot of the novel and the film, up to the last few lines, in which I take Minghella’s conclusion because this is the version I am focusing on here. Both Highsmith’s novel of 1955 and René Clément’s film Plein Soleil of 1959 are, in different ways, studies of a gifted and unlikeable go-getter, a petty criminal who supplements his many lucky breaks with a talent to amuse and an opportunistic ruthlessness. In both cases the idea of killing and impersonating Dickie (Philippe in Plein Soleil) precedes the moment of murder and the motive is predominantly practical. Minghella’s Ripley is written in a tragic mode, more psychologised, and even though Highsmith’s third-person narrative does not prevent us from entering him sympathetically, Minghella requires us to experience through his viewpoint the trajectory that takes him from the basement to the sunlight and back again,

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ending with the terror of having murdered his true love-object and remaining in darkness for ever. The fractured mess of his inner world begins and ends with a series of chances. He starts out as a Cinderella who “has the manner but not the manner born” (Minghella, 1999), whose native gifts include a sensitivity to classical music which he can play only if a Princeton graduate has a broken wrist or the lights are down at the concert house where he works brushing dandruff off the shoulders of rich men in tuxedos. He ends as Cain, carrying the mark of his crimes in the form of an unconscious loaded with darkness, a locked basement containing himself. If the motive of murdering Dickie is, in Highsmith, tied up with the enigma of Tom’s sexual repression, and in Clément with a simple case of financial and heterosexual rivalry, in Minghella it is complicated by a broader class fetishism: Tom wants what Dickie both is and has. Dickie is clothed in the ease and charm of those born to wealth: his skills (playing the saxophone, swimming, skiing) never seem to have to be rehearsed, whereas we watch Tom practising the identification of Chet Baker or Charlie Parker just as he practises Italian; and he has to pretend to like jazz – his natural taste is for classical music – until the joy of singing with Dickie in a jazz club seduces him to share its pleasure. Once he has killed Dickie, he uses his money to enter that world, and the world is the body: we see him smooth and assured in his new suits, having cast off his glasses like the proverbial Hollywood heroine, using Dickie’s voice and wearing his rings. By the use of a number of additions or developments of characters (Silvana, Meredith Logue, Peter Smith-Kingsley), Minghella opens up the path of desire to mediation and complication. Another way that it is amplified is by the indirection of its aim. In Gattaca there is only one subject of desire and he simply wants to take off. In The Talented Mr Ripley, there is only one object of desire, Dickie; and the others vie in creating ways of coming closer to him. Marge has the conventional role as preferred lover, Silvana is the exploited “other woman”, his father highlights a necessary flaw in heredity, Freddie plays the accomplice in decadence… Tom alone goes far enough in taking on the object as his skin and disguise. It is surely the success of his cannibalism that makes Meredith and Peter recognise something in him that is more than he could have been before. If Tom does not exactly want Dickie himself (or rather he does, but much more), what does he want that only “being Dickie” can allow? We have already seen that he wants what Dickie has – what he takes on are Dickie’s clothes, name and things. These objects have an air of fetishism not only because they are another mediation, representing the wealth that makes them possible, but also they can – must, by the interloper – be appropriated caressively. They are surfaces of desire – fine leather, velvet, cashmere. When briefly, on a train, Tom

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lays his cheek on the surface of Dickie, it is his lapel he reaches for, not his skin (as, later, just before strangling him, he lays his cheek on Peter’s sweatered back). Dickie’s clothes are his skin, they contain his solar glow as their extension, exactly as Princess Diana’s fabled outfits contained hers. The metaphor of sunshine, used both in the screenplay and in the director’s commentary, is not a positive one: Dickie as played by Jude Law is “so sunny, such a sun-god”, but his skin is a reflective rather than radiant surface: his surface has a “metallic, cruel” quality. By contrast, Minghella refers to Tom having to return to a dull texture, “the corduroy jacket” (all these quotations: Minghella, 1999) when he gives up the Dickie persona to hide from the police. So: does Tom want what Dickie has, or what he wants? Or does he, rather, desire the way that Dickie wants? Like a foetus, Dickie scarcely knows desire, so quickly are his wants met by the world he glides through. Perhaps Tom wants to stop desiring. In Dickie he might be able to take a break from it; Dickie does not need to long for anything, it is at once his. He magnetises the wishes of others, and this is what radiates from him, what he laughs off. Tellingly, when this momentarily fails, at the point of Silvana’s suicide, he strikes out because he has no strategy for frustration. Tom, let us say, wants Dickie’s ability not to waste time on desire, but to exist instead on the gleaming surface of things, himself being the surface of the things others look at. Unlike in Plein Soleil, this is not the triangulation of jealousy or envy; but a wish to be a still point that is the indifferent site of other people’s passions. Can the manner (precisely not the manner born) be acquired? If it can, it is not by purchasing things – Freddie is right to disparage this as clumsy, “bourgeois” – nor even quite by what I have called cannibalism, because actually Tom does not ingest Dickie, he puts him on. Not simply like the gross Buffalo Bill of The Silence of the Lambs, but by acting out, literally, the gesturality of Dickie. The implication is that you cannot act the externals without pretending to the internal impulses that make them appear: “The main thing about impersonation, Tom thought, was to maintain the mood and temperament of the person one was impersonating, and to assume the facial expressions that went with them. The rest fell into place” (Highsmith 1999: 114). Which is, finally, as much as to say that Tom already is Dickie because he can imagine him so accurately - this must be what is meant by “talent”. He barely needs to imagine what it is to be as unimaginative as Dickie, already he can play it. But he can only “be” Dickie when the latter is dead. And similarly he cannot play Peter because the latter is there, offering to supplement Tom as his accepting other. Tom Ripley does not want – or, he thinks, he must not want – any other. And yet, unlike Vincent, he has no choice but to remain mediate. I think this is what the ending is meant to convey: if his inner space exists at all, it is as a place where “self” can no longer be shifted out into a gestural, careless

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surface, but is established as an inescapably hidden, “locked”, secret, nasty, endlessly reflected thing.

Queer Desire Being John Malkovich differs from both the other films in being not a modernist myth of masculine identity but a postmodernist narrative of multiplying desire. Its predominant metaphors for “being” someone else are puppetry and acting, and it follows two men through their experience of exchanging these roles while, intersecting with this, another myth about how to desire brings together the two female protagonists to undermine a reproductive heterosexual triangulation. Thus the version in play here is that of quadration. Four-way structures in fiction have hitherto generally been a superimposition of two traditional triangles. Consider that of Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften [Elective Affinities] (1809). Here a central couple is perturbed by the entry of two desiring strangers – rather than one, as in the usual novel of adultery. These strangers both, in different styles, invade the couple in oedipal mode, prising open an apparently stable attachment. In Henry James’s The Golden Bowl (1904), the base couple is a father-daughter bond invaded by another couple whose liaison is secret and whose adulterous motive is disciplined by the daughter’s refusal. In neither case is there a transaction among four elements but a variation on the theme of adultery, played on a more complicated chess-board with inter-generational nuances. But in Being John Malkovich we see the idea of multiplication running wild – it has both an anarchic and an over-crafted flavour, goes on too long, seems to try to do too many things at once. I’ll be looking chiefly at the consequences of the fantasy of entry: what can you do when you are “being” John Malkovich that you can’t do when you are not? Whatever the answer is, it is clear that only the four figures acting together produce the total effect of multiplication - and the final product, which is a child. I will very briefly begin with the set-up, a science fiction sub-plot based on Dr Lester (really Captain Mertin, for he is already on his second body). Dr Lester is the owner of LesterCorp which is located on the 7½th floor of the Mertin-Flemmer building, and where, hidden behind a filing cabinet in a small office, there is the doorway to what the screenplay calls a “dark and wet membranous tunnel” leading to a portal into the head of actor John Malkovich. Along with a number of elderly friends, Dr Lester plans to enter Malkovich on the optimum day of his 44th birthday and thus to live for ever. A Hollywoodized version of metempsychosis, this expresses a desire that is both modern and very ancient: never to get old and to stay sexually active for all time. The “insane old lech”, as Craig describes him to Lotte (Kaufman 2000: 29), drinks so much

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carrot juice that it makes him have to pee every fifteen minutes “sitting down like a goddamn girly girl” (Kaufman 2000: 22) - but the result is that he retains a cheery lustfulness into his third century; and at the end of the film he is planning his next move, into the body of seven-year-old Emily, the daughter of Maxine and Lotte/Malkovich. In taking the four protagonists in turn, I am looking for the ways in which the base plot, that of Craig, runs towards its nth point. Craig starts us off in the conventional place of the artistic adulterer. What can he do from inside John Malkovich that he cannot do when he is not? An under-employed puppeteer who manipulates his dolls “with incredible subtlety”, he shows a pair of figures enacting the passion of Heloise and Abelard with such sexual explicitness that a father beats him up in the street. His passional engagement with the puppet figures is so direct that we see it as playing out all the longings his sweet dull marriage does not fulfil – in proper artistic sublimatory mode (“you’re making him weep but you yourself are not weeping!”, he/Malkovich accuses a pupil in a master-class shown later in a TV documentary (Kaufman 2000: 94)) he uses fiction to channel his desires. This creative manipulation is inevitably a form of indirection, as it both preserves and diverts fantasy: the subtler the play of strings, the more complete the control, the more an artist takes away a segment of him-/herself and exerts power over it – takes away, because this segment is excepted from the negotiations of everyday life. This will continue to be Craig’s dilemma. The day he joins LesterCorp as a lightning-fingered filing-clerk, he is captivated by a colleague, guesses her name, is rebuffed on their brief date and goes home to make a Maxine puppet who will murmur to the Craig puppet (unlike her original): Maxine: Craig: Maxine:

Tell me, Craig, why do you like puppeteering? Well Maxine, I’m not sure exactly. Perhaps the idea of becoming someone else for a little while: being inside another skin, thinking differently, moving differently, feeling differently. Interesting. (Kaufman, 2000: 30)

Craig’s motive for entering the portal, then, will primarily be the wish to “become someone else for a little while” in the way that puppeteering has almost allowed him, because what he desires is Maxine. To “have” Maxine he is willing to sacrifice everybody else, his wife, John, his own separate existence, and even possibly Maxine herself when she is kidnapped by Dr Lester. It is not easy to work out whether his art, and the power that belongs to it, is only a means to this end, but this is implied by the fact that when Maxine suggests commercially exploiting the portal and later his skill at manipulating the

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Malkovich body, he abandons his earlier insistence on the purity of his art and follows this speedier means to gratification. Once Craig has chased his rival Lotte out of Malkovich and laid claim to a surprised Maxine, he learns to puppeteer the body, first to “feel what Malkovich feels rather than just see what he sees”, then to “control his arms, his legs, his pelvis, and make them work for me” (Kaufman, 2000: 65) and finally, in a nice parody of sexual zen, to “hold on as long as I want. Oddly, it’s all in the wrists”.2 He then stays inside for eight months, marries his beloved, becomes world famous as John Malkovich star-turned-puppeteer and, with combed-over hair grown straggly and Craig’s own giggle and aesthetic pretensions, bathes in gratification, despite the indifference of pregnant Maxine, until the day Dr Lester kidnaps her. He ends still in love, still frustrated, “absorbed” inside the head of little Emily and trapped for ever, because, as Dr Lester explains to Lotte, those who enter a “larval vessel” are “held prisoner by the host’s brain” (Kaufman 2000: 84), unable to control anything, doomed to watch the world through someone’s eyes. The punishment of libidinous Craig, who betrays all those who love him and (worse?) his considerable artistic gifts, is to dwell eternally, disempowered, inside the body of the daughter of his two womenfolk, gazing at a lesbian primal scene. The comical nature of this radical exclusion is that it actually has him enclosed at the very centre of a set of Russian-doll containers, and it asks a few questions about the simplest or primary form of desire, a man’s demand to “possess” a woman. In his final state he fulfils the final version of his wish: the phallic trapper entrapped, inserted into a feminine space he cannot manipulate. The only puppetry (glove puppets are never mentioned in this fiction) is not to be had by nimble-fingered manipulation of strings from above, but rather by disappearing inside the puppet-object; Craig tries this when the opportunity offers, for his puppets were, after all, always the instruments of a phallic aim; but when he does, neither Maxine nor even Malkovich answers to his powers. He should have stayed outside – but that too would not have brought him what he desired. Lotte starts out as the sweet frumpy wife, ever consoling, doling out nurturance to a family of assorted animals her husband cannot reliably name; by contrast to sassy Maxine, she is an “indoor woman”, contained in her chaotic home, waiting disconsolately for the errant Craig. But then she goes inside 2

The second sentence here is from the original screenplay (Kaufman n.d.), and the words are slightly different in the film, though the sexual analogy is still there. Craig/Malkovich says to an admiring Maxine: ‘I’ve finally figured out how to hold on as long as I want. It’s all a matter of making friends with the Malkovich body – rather than thinking of it as an enemy that has to be whipped into submission. I’ve begun imagining it to be a real expensive suit I enjoy wearing’ (Kaufman 2000: 86).

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Malkovich, and thereafter, in a series of comic declamations - “Don’t stand in the way of my actualization as a man, Craig”, or like GI Jane “Suck my dick!” becomes seduced by the experience of living in a male body. One of Dr Lester’s elderly ladies expresses it for her: “I’ve always wanted to know what it’d be like to have a penis. Now I’ll know!” Her first visit inside finds Malkovich soaping himself in the shower; she utters little cries of excitement. In her next, he is reading from The Cherry Orchard into a dictaphone, and she murmurs “I want that voice”, forces him by thought control (her own puppetry) to go to a certain restaurant and, once there, watching Maxine through his eyes, marvels: “I’ve never been looked at like this by a woman before”. Unlike Craig, Lotte will, after passing through a genuine wish to be also the other sex, be loved as herself. Maxine sets up the challenge: “Craig, I just don’t find you attractive. And Lotte, I’m smitten with you, but only when you’re in Malkovich. When I looked into his eyes last night, I could feel you peering out. Behind the stubble and the too-prominent brow and the male pattern baldness, I sensed your feminine longing peering out, and it just slew me”. Lotte is thus fulfilled by being the subject whose subjectivity is the other’s double-gendered object. When she returns into Malkovich to make love to Maxine, the script reads: Maxine: John: Lotte :

Oh my sweet beautiful Lotte! Yes Maxine? Oh Maxine, this is so right!

- and they consummate a mediate union that fulfils them both. It must be on this occasion that Lotte/Malkovich impregnates Maxine. Interestingly, John Malkovich the actor is never required to play Lotte; when she is in him, the two characters speak separately in their own voices, and they remain separate though simultaneous in the eyes of Maxine, as we shall shortly see. Lotte has her reasons for saying to Craig “We love her […], John and I”: firstly because it arrogates both the bodies he too wants to “possess”, but secondly because it is as the two of them simultaneously that she wants to desire - still herself, but herself “actualized as a man”. After all what originally fascinated her about the Malkovich body was its having, in the form of the portal (shades of Jude Law in Existenz!) both “a penis and a vagina”. The trajectory that brings Lotte from Cinderella to Princess Charming has to go via a journey through an other-sexed body that gives her enough pleasure for her not to need to stay there; she “has” and then loses Maxine, survives loss and anger and comes through with both genders triumphantly intact. That she ends up as the father not the mother of Emily is a proper riposte to her housewifely beginnings, but it is also because the two versions of femininity in this fiction can only find their happy ending by swapping styles.

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In the figure of John we find the most passive of the four protagonists – precisely because he represents the alpha-male body that everyone thinks can attain their desires for them. Dr Lester has been watching and grooming him, it seems, since infancy; queues of sad fat people want to occupy his head for their fifteen minutes – at least he was their “second choice”; Lotte has a “very unhealthy obsession” with him, and even Craig sees him as his “livelihood”. The real-life actor John Malkovich lent his body and a camped-up version of his public persona, male-pattern baldness and all, to this combination of narcissism and humiliation. It is, indeed, difficult to distinguish absolutely between the fictional John and the real-life John Malkovich, because the meaning of both as we view them in the film is that they are actors, both possessed and possessors of the characters embodied in their skin. He gets to play not only a bit of Shakespeare, a bit of Chekhov, John Cusack, Orson Bean, a puppet doing ballet, a host of simultaneous cameos, and himself – he also acts, dramatically, what it might be like to battle against one or many occupying personalities as they vie for your voice, face and gestures. In other words, John Malkovich has the fun of playing an actor who becomes a puppet. And the fun is significant, because it means that we cannot ask the questions we asked, earlier, about Jude Law in the extradiegetic pact. As an actor-persona, John Malkovich carries connotations of intellect and European sophistication (he has played Valmont and Charlus as well as Gilbert Osmond and, more recently, Tom Ripley), but no one would say he was the most beautiful of male leads. What is it, then, that makes his the body everyone wishes to desire through? Or, to take a different entry-point, what do we see John experience when he repeatedly finds himself reduced to a conduit, an “unhealthy obsession” or a vessel for other people’s gratification? His friend Charlie Sheen (played of course by himself) loves the idea of a Maxine as “hot lesbian witch” (Kaufman, 2000: 70) whose fancy it is to call her sexual partner Lotte. But John himself is freaked by the feeling that “someone was just moving all the way through me, moving my arms, moving my hands, talking for me” etc. And I wonder if the question this character most pertinently raises about desire is the idea that we – and especially if we are celebrated, recognised alpha males – are unhappy being penetrated and occupied by other people’s will, demands or bodies. This is a version of the pregnant man motif featured in a number of 1990s movies. But, let’s not forget, it is usually the Schwarzenegger-type, the excessively masculine frame that is thus comically invaded. Observe, then, that the ability to ironise your masculinity is a sure-fire way of being assured of it. It once more separates outer husk/hunk from inner other. Like the drag artist whose version of the money shot only reassures, the “possessed man” goes beyond humiliation. John is the inverse of Craig, finally removed from the whole arrangement; but real-life John Malkovich, full of his

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flirtation with the feminine, ends triumphant as the envelope of envelopes, his eponym and face dominating the movie for ever after. An actor is the object of everyone’s gaze – but is he desired? The answer, for both the John Malkovich and the two Jude Law figures, seems to be no: he is desired with, through or by; he is a puppet. It is interesting to wonder why Spike Jonze chose to make an apparently minor change to Kaufman’s original screenplay: he changed Craig’s artistic self-reinvention from a Malkovich puppet to a Malkovich puppeteer. The logic of the original version is that actors are the instruments of other people’s fantasy. The logic of the new one is more flattering: actors are themselves manipulators; this is, we have seen, John Malkovich’s film. In the intra-diegetic terms of the functions of desire, however, it is Maxine’s. Maxine starts out as a cross, glossy model type as ready with a put-down as a come-on. She bedazzles both Craig and Lotte, not only as the object of their lust but as possessing, seemingly without effort, the smooth surfaces their chaotic bodies lack. She wears close-fitting monochrome outfits, sits with her legs comfortably spread, smokes, leafing magazines, mobile phone in hand; she is always who and where she wants to be. Her ideology is enviably simple and it seems to permit not only her but others too to satisfy desire: Maxine:

The way I see it, the world is divided into those who go after what they want and those who don’t. The passionate ones, the ones who go after what they want, may not get what they want, but they remain vital, in touch with themselves, and when they lie on their deathbeds, they have few regrets. The ones who don’t go after what they want… well, who gives a shit about them anyway? Maxine laughs. There is another silence. Suddenly, at the same moment, both Craig and Lotte lunge for Maxine and start kissing her passionately about the face and neck. They stop just as suddenly and look at each other. (Kaufman, 2000: 51-2).

What is universally desirable about Maxine – it attracts John as well – is this insouciant version of natural selection and carpe diem. This suggests that in a more metaphorical way (as hinted by Craig’s Maxine-puppet dialogue) the object of desire is another person we wish to be. But in this case the metaphor goes a different way: one does not put Maxine on but discovers her principle as one’s inner unlived self. Maxine gives Craig the chance, after all, to abandon high-minded poverty for a bit of John Malkovich-like stardom and she gives Lotte the chance to impregnate another woman without changing sex. What does she herself want? While Craig and Lotte learn new ways to act on desire, John and Maxine are possessed by the desires of others. It destroys John but it is the making of

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Maxine. Narcissistically she gains in proportion as he loses: he is the occasion of her being able to say ecstatically: “Have you ever had two people look at you, with complete lust and devotion, through the same pair of eyes?” (Kaufman, 2000: 61). She becomes the princess they all long for, but here and now, with the focus of the bedroom not the diffusion of the balcony: she is neither gazed up at nor down on, but looked straight at, the object of an endless point-of-view shot. Just as the tunnel of the portal flows down into the telescopic view by which the screen represents what people see where they are being John Malkovich, so the sight of Maxine made available to Lotte or Craig is almost precisely the phallus-eye view into the beloved. Maxine is the person we may enter if we find the way, who will always welcome us and never wish to be us. This is what excites and gratifies her. Maxine exemplifies the magnetic energy of the feminine “active pursuit of a passive goal”. She alone never goes into John Malkovich, nor seems to want to. Instead she is happy running the business empire he becomes with Craig inside him – “Craig can control Malkovich and I can control Craig”; for after all, “it isn’t just playing with dolls […] it’s so much more, it’s playing with people!” (Kaufman 2000: 87) – but she is not simply the manipulator of manipulators, for in the end she is undone by love. This, I suppose, is because her function of focusing other people’s desires into her own narcissism finally leaves her prey to a directionless gratification. Only when she finds herself pregnant is she, unexpectedly, filled with something. In Maxine we see the undoing of the outdoor woman who has given herself up too eagerly to a passivity. While Craig/Malkovich lounges in front of his TV doc, she croons to her belly and strokes the Lotte puppet he hung up long ago beside his worktable. Pregnancy, this suggests, is the last and most satisfying way of “being possessed”. What becomes of the “thing inside” after it is born is answered in a negative mode. The delightful healthy Emily who swims underwater to the closing credits cut comma is a new Malkovich, containing now Craig and in the future probably Lester/Malkovich, Sheen, their wives and who knows what others. The outcome of multiple desire, embedded in its women’s space, her body is in no sense a resolution. Why is this? I would see the impossibility of the process as its main significance: in none of my three films does “a third being” get definitively made. In that sense the housewifely metaphor holds for all of them: making, cleaning, desiring are all provisional. It is true that a reproductive dialectic informs all these fictions. When two, three or many come together in desire there is, it seems, always an implicit outcome to the act of “merging”. In Gattaca and The Talented Mr Ripley, it is achievement – and death. But in Being John Malkovich it is neither. As has often been observed of the pregnant body, any containing body is intrinsically uncanny to the observer because of the ambivalence of its

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declaration: at once autonomous and ‘possessed’, and possessed invisibly. Inside seven-year-old Emily, reliably virginal, permitted by her two loving mothers to go amniotic in the safe space of a sunlit swimming-pool, we are shocked to discover sad Craig skulking unrequitedly, repeating “Maxine. Maxine. I love you Maxine”. But I’d like to finish this article on another set of questions. When Maxine tells Lotte she is the father of the child, she means not that Lotte’s sperm impregnated her egg (that must have been Malkovich’s) but that the conception – in a very ancient fantasy – was aroused by the desire of Lotte (“of” in both senses). If conception is traditionally “an idea that a man has inside a woman”, then Emily is Lotte’s idea - Lotte as fantasising being a man but actually gravitating towards an all-female genealogy. But suppose that Emily was conceived when Maxine thought she was responding to Lotte’s desire, but actually it was Craig inside Malkovich. In this case, we arrive at three questions: How many fathers and mothers does this child have? Is it the actual or only the fantasised desire of the other that makes us quicken? And is Emily daughter or mother to the puppeteer she carries inside her?

Works Cited Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966) Highsmith, Patricia (1999), The Talented Mr Ripley (London: Vintage, 1999) [orig. 1955]. Kaufman, Charlie, Being John Malkovich, screenplay (London: Faber and Faber, 2000). —. (n.d.), Being John Malkovich original screenplay: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Lot/9161/00s/BeingJohnMalkovich/be ingjohnmalkovich.html Minghella, Anthony, The Talented Mr Ripley (Miramax: DVD commentary, 1999). —. (2000), The Talented Mr Ripley, screenplay (London: Methuen, 2000). Niccol, Andrew, Gattaca, screenplay (1997), http://www.script-o-rama.com/ movie_scripts/g/gattaca-script-screenplay.html Van Rysselberghe, Maria (1974) Les Cahiers de la Petite Dame, 2 (of 4 vols.) (Paris: Gallimard, 1974).

CHAPTER TEN CAN WE HARM THE DEAD? UNDERSTANDING EMBODIED HARM AFTER ALDER HEY FLORIS TOMASINI

Introduction: Respecting the Dead Darius King of Ancient Persia, intrigued by the variety of cultures he encountered on his travels, thought that a sophisticated understanding of the world must involve an appreciation of differences between cultures. He knew that the Callatians (a tribe of Indians) and the Greeks had very different customs surrounding the proper treatment of their dead. On the one hand, he knew that the Callatians customarily ate the bodies of their dead fathers, while the Greeks practised cremation and regarded the funeral pyre as the natural and fitting way to dispose of their dead. In order to demonstrate his superior knowledge of cultural difference, he summoned the Greeks, who happened to be at his court, before him and asked them what they would take to eat the bodies of their dead fathers. Shocked and appalled, as Darius knew they would be, they replied that no amount of money could persuade them to do such a thing. Then Darius called in some Callatians, and while the Greeks listened, asked them what they would take to burn their dead fathers’ bodies. The Callatians were as equally appalled as the Greeks, adding that he should not even mention such a dreadful thing. The story is recounted by Herodotus in his History and illustrates that different cultures hold different moral codes (cited by Rachels, 1986 and White, 1989: 277). While the Callatians appear to have different values from the Greeks, further questioning of why they treat their dead differently may reveal that while they may have different belief systems, they do, in fact, share common values. That is, they respect their dead; that any disrespect shown can be conceived as some form of harm to their dead and; that harm, in some way, extends to the way the physical body is treated. In this chapter, I am interested in the common values that underpin the treatment of the dead, rather than the differences in belief systems. I begin with two questions: Can we harm the dead? And if we can harm the dead, what does

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this mean precisely? Using Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle translated by Irwin, 1999) and George Pitcher’s extension of this argument (Pitcher, 1984), I argue that we can harm the dead, if we recognise that the dead once had interests and desires when they were alive that extend beyond the grave. While there are significant differences between the ancient and modern arguments, Aristotle and Pitcher’s philosophical positions are similar enough to warrant a critical look at the underlying presuppositions they hold in common – an exercise I leave to the end. Both Aristotle and Pitcher, I argue, fail to fully understand the strength of the relationship between the living and their dead within the grieving process, to be able to comprehend the possibility of post-mortem harm (by this I mean, harm to the integrity of the physical body after death and how this affects memory). In order to understand this more deeply, I look at the Alder Hey case, where children’s organs were improperly removed, retained and disposed of, causing great grief to their parents who were faced with burying them incomplete. To deepen understanding of the central questions, I return to Aristotle and Pitcher’s arguments, critically reviewing them in light of lessons learned from Alder Hey. To develop the philosophical argument still further, I borrow an idea from Paul Ricoeur, who in reframing personal identity (Ricoeur, 1992), opens up the possibility of understanding post-mortem harm.

Philosophical Perspectives: Can we Harm the Dead? Part of the difficulty in answering the question “Can we harm the dead?” is that there is no simple and definitive answer. Rather than providing an exhaustive analysis, or indeed one based on straightforward conjecture and refutation, I have opted for a number of strategic insights, from ancient to modern, from philosophical to empirical, each providing deeper layers of understanding about what harming the dead might mean. Near the end of book one of the Nicomachean Ethics, a work dedicated to understanding happiness, Aristotle broaches the unusual topic of “how happiness can be affected after one’s death” (1, 11: 1999). An alternative, but related way of putting this is; can a person’s happiness be harmed or benefited after they are dead? Aristotle thinks that we can harm the dead. Before explaining why he thinks we can, there are two interpretations that he immediately rules out. The first is the supernatural explanation, where if the soul managed to survive death, the answer would presumably be “yes, we can harm the dead” because the soul retains the capacity to be harmed. This can be discounted on the basis of Aristotle’s empirical method that relies on his functional and natural definition of a soul; “the form of a living body” by which he means the organising and structuring principle of its life. The second answer

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that Aristotle rules out is a common sense explanation, where it is counterintuitive to harm dead matter, as in harming a pile of ashes or a mouldering corpse for example, since it makes little sense for the happiness of dead matter to be harmed, as the corpse no longer possesses mental states and therefore has no capacity to experience anything at all. Aristotle’s “yes, we can harm the dead” relies on a lateral way of thinking about harm; instead of thinking of harm as exclusively associated with a capacity to have mental states (which relies on the distinction between life and death) Aristotle re-conceives harm in an extended spatio-temporal dimension, in terms of a life that has future interests and desires that extend beyond the grave. So, although after death the dead may be devoid of any mental states, they still, according to Aristotle, have had interests and desires that were projected beyond the point of their death. Such interests and desires, are ideally protected and/or carried forward, “in memoriam” by friends and relatives who remember the dead. In essence then, we can harm the dead indirectly, by not being faithful to interests and/or desires we know our friends and relatives had when they were alive. Aristotle takes on Solon’s point of view as his point of departure (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1100a10-20: 1999). According to Solon, when a human being has died, we can safely pronounce [that he was] blessed [before he died], on the assumptions that he is now finally beyond evils and misfortunes.1 Aristotle, however, sees this as disputable on the grounds that the effect of having lived a happy and blessed life stretches beyond ones awareness of it in death as in life. What Aristotle seems to be saying is that happiness and its affect, stretches well beyond the grave through, for example, conferring posthumous honour and dishonour on the dead, which in turn, may affect any fortune and misfortune on their descendants. Aristotle’s position however is ambiguous; he argues that post-mortem events can effect a person’s happiness, but the effect is “weak and unimportant” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1101b2: 1999), or “not enough to make people happy who are not already happy, or to take away the blessedness of those who are happy” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1101b5: 1999). His reason for saying that there is an effect is that: “to deny it would seem unfriendly and contrary to common beliefs” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics: 1101a: 1999) and elsewhere that “it would be absurd if the condition of the descendants did not affect their ancestors at all” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1100a30: 1999). The effect, in his view, is “weak and unimportant” because “surely it would be 1

This sort of view resonates with another common sense point of view that death is about “resting in peace”. This appears later in the oral testimony of bereaved parents of children at Alder Hey.

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an absurd result if the dead person’s condition changed along with the fortune of his descendants, so that at one time he would turn out to be happy and at another he would turn out to have been miserable” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1100a27-30: 1999). What Aristotle seems to be objecting to, is the possibility of “backwards causation” where later events can somehow alter the course of earlier events. Presumably what he means by this is that whatever life one has lived, good or bad, is what it is and cannot be changed through subsequent events after one’s death. “Speaking ill of the dead”, for example, may confer a backwards shadow of misfortune to how a person maybe remembered, but it cannot alter the fact that they have lived a the life they did live, despite what malicious gossips may have to say. One reason that he thinks that the “effect is weak and unimportant” lies in a more general argument where he notes that happiness rests on virtuous activity intrinsic to a life lived and that any subsequent misfortune that may follow is unlikely to seriously affect such a state. What Aristotle finds hard to accept is the fickleness of fortune and misfortune of the lives of descendants, and how this could be reflected back onto any proper judgment about the intrinsic happiness of their ancestors. Aristotle’s more general argument is incontrovertibly sound, in my view, because it moves beyond the idea that happiness, and the potentiality to harm it, is simply an affect of ones immediate self awareness of such a mental state when alive, i.e. I am happy now, does not exhaust the possibility of more happiness to come, since happiness can also depend on a project that has a future horizon that has yet to be realised and that is, to some extent, independent to the timing of ones inevitable demise. Furthermore, the realisation of such happiness is protected “in memoriam” by relatives who remember the desires and interests of their dead faithfully. Indeed this is reflected in ordinary language use; “she would have turned in her grave if X had said/done that”. Fidelity to the deceased’s interests and beliefs as in, for example, bearing true testimony to a life lived, is a significant underlying theme in Aristotle. It follows that “speaking ill of the dead”, bearing false testimony to their memory, is harmful. Even if the dead had few virtues and more vices when they were alive, it would perhaps be “unfriendly to common beliefs” ( in Aristotle’s words ) to say so. Partly because Aristotle sets up the question, in terms of happiness rather than harm (harm is only implied), it is difficult to be precise about what harming the dead may be constitutive of. For this reason it might be useful to examine a modern analytic philosopher who extends the Aristotelian argument in a way that clearly distinguishes between the possibility of ante-mortem harm and the impossibility of post-mortem harm.

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Pitcher and the Misfortunes of the Dead: Ante-Mortem and Post-Mortem Harm George Pitcher is in broad agreement with Aristotle’s claim that it is possible to significantly affect how one judges the happiness of a person after they have died. Pitcher, however, builds on Aristotle’s arguments through making some fine distinctions. Instead of starting with the less specific investigation of how happiness can be affected after one’s death, Pitcher critically examines whether or not the dead can be harmed? This allows Pitcher to be more specific about where the harm is being done. He mobilises two key arguments in support of his thesis that we can harm the dead. The first, and most fundamental, argument can be understood by the linguistic act of describing a dead person. According to Pitcher, there is a significant difference between describing a dead friend as she was at some stage of her life – what Pitcher refers to as the ante-mortem person – and describing that same friend as she is now in death, a post-mortem person – mouldering, perhaps, in a grave. It is Pitcher’s contention that although both ante-mortem and post-mortem persons can be described after their death, only ante-mortem persons can be wronged and/or harmed after their death (Pitcher 1984: 184). One can illustrate the persuasiveness of his argument through a common sense example. In the prestigious Nobel Prize giving ceremonies last year, Professor Xavier received the title of Nobel Laureate for a truly outstanding and ground-breaking academic thesis on renewable energy. He has since died. Now, the international panel of elite academics who had awarded the prize, but who disliked Xavier and were secretly envious of his achievement, decide to posthumously strip him of his award, by accusing him of having plagiarised his thesis from a colleague who they favour. Professor Xavier, who has no recourse to defend his name and prove his innocence, is a victim of gross injustice, we naturally think. The dead can be wronged. For Pitcher being wronged is quite specific, it is aimed at the ante-mortem and not the post-mortem person. That is, our sense of injustice is directed at the ante-mortem Xavier; the living Xavier who actually put in the work to come up with the idea and was later wronged when the judges stripped him of this accolade.2 The first argument that Pitcher delivers makes sense of our common intuitions and practices, where “speaking ill of the dead”, is considered wrong whatever its linguistic form – i.e. slander, injustice etc – because it concerns wronging someone’s memory. Pitcher’s argument is not limited to wrongs perpetrated “in memoriam”; he offers us an account of harming the dead, in 2

This example, like the use of others in this particular section, are my own examples which, to be faithful to Pitcher’s argument, are similar.

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which he construes harm or misfortune as “an event or state of affairs contrary to one or more of a person’s important desires or interests” (Pitcher 1984: 184). This leads to a more radical and perhaps more controversial set of conclusions because harm – as in acting contrary to a person’s interest or desire – may contravene how they may wish to be treated, whether or not they are aware of the fact.3 This again fits in with our common sense intuitions. For example, let us imagine that Xavier, when he was alive, was despised and ridiculed behind his back while treated politely to his face by his academic colleagues, for his desire to be a serious contender for Nobel Laureate. Despite never finding out, it seems clear that it is still a harm or misfortune. For Pitcher then, like Aristotle, harm perpetrated is not necessarily something that the harmed need to be consciously aware of. What is particularly interesting about this is that it is possible to harm the future completion of someone’s interests and desires regardless of whether or not they become aware of it. Why? Because it is conceivable to think of a sort of “backwards misfortune” where once we are aware of any contravention of another person’s interests or desires (whether they may be aware of it or not), it confers the shadow of misfortune backwards on any memory or final testament. For example, imagine Xavier had had a daughter who was also a promising academic, the fact that she dies in a car crash on the way to the lab one day – after her Father’s earlier demise – casts a backward shadow of misfortune on the desires and hopes Xavier had for her, regardless of the fact that he never knew of this tragic event. To conclude, Pitcher builds on Aristotle in two important ways. First, like Aristotle, he thinks the interests and/or desires of the dead stretch beyond the grave. Furthermore, this exceeds any harm done “in memoriam”. Unlike Aristotle, Pitcher specifies what these interests and/or desires are by focussing on where to locate harm – harm is possible ante-mortem not post mortem. The problem with this argument, I contend, is that the distinction is too strong from within the perspective of grief; it separates out ante-mortem person/harm and post-mortem person/harm in such a way that it effectively severs any connection between them. One of the important lessons of the improper removal, retention and disposal of children’s organs at Alder Hey Hospital, Liverpool and at Bristol in 1999, is that it shows that this distinction cannot neatly be upheld. To understand why, I first outline the significance of the findings of the Alder Hey Public Inquiry from the perspective of the parent’s oral evidence that connects post-mortem with ante-mortem harm only. I revisit Aristotle and Pitcher arguments, in light of lessons learned from Alder Hey, and critically examine how one can think more liberally about post mortem harm. In doing so, I show how Aristotle and Pitcher’s arguments are underdeveloped 3

Note this picks up on the Aristotelian theme of awareness and its limits.

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and too narrow (rather than simply wrong) to able to account for events like Alder Hey. I argue, that they do not go far enough to be able to develop an understanding of what harming the dead can mean in grief.

Alder Hey and the Significance of Harm after Death Between 1999 and 2000, the Bristol Royal infirmary and Liverpool’s Alder Hey Hospital were amongst the two most prominent institutions exposed as having retained children’s organs and body parts following post-mortem examinations.4 This practice caused a national scandal. The “retention” of organs scandal involved the improper removal, retention and disposal of children’s body parts. Much of the blame was centred around one rogue pathologist, Professor Dick van Velzen. Despite van Velzen’s excesses the problems at Alder Hey went very much deeper, supported as they were within a culture endemic of “medical paternalism” and institutional mismanagement. The Royal Liverpool Children’s Public Inquiry (2001) or, the Redfern Report from here on in, that followed, involved a thorough examination of what went wrong and why. The Redfern Report identifies four contributing and complicating factors to Van Velzen’s excesses: 1. the uneasy relationship between Alder Hey and Liverpool University 2. a lack of clarity with regard to coroner’s procedures 3. the culture of medical paternalism in which parental consent was significantly undervalued 4. the way the hospital dealt with the affair once it was discovered (Harrison et al, 2003: 47)

A thorough understanding of the overall significance of lessons learned from Alder Hey, in light of the Redfern Report, is beyond the scope of this argument. I am chiefly concerned with the Report and its use of extensive Parental evidence that was submitted orally to the Inquiry. This provides the most ready empirical evidence as to how parents of dead children felt about how their children had been harmed post-mortem (Redfern, 2001: 338-445).

4

It is worth pointing out that the removal of body parts without full informed consent was a widespread practice nationally; many pathologists presumed consent and did not see that full consent was necessary.

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Parental Perspectives on the Improper Handling of their Children’s Organs Post-Mortem The Alder Hey scandal concerned the removal, retention and disposal of infant body parts without proper parental consent. For the most part unaware of the law around this issue, parents were extremely distressed to have their children’s bodies returned to them “incomplete”, with organs missing. Many parents went through multiple funerals in an attempt to retrieve their children’s body parts and bury them whole. The harm parents perceived to their dead children was expressed as oral evidence given to the Royal Liverpool Public Inquiry. It has been transcribed in the third person rather than the first person, making it more of a summary report of parental statements put forward as oral testimony to the Inquiry.5 It can be summarised in the following way. Note that the concept of post-mortem harm was raised by the parents themselves. From the mother of Alexandra (stillborn child): “because she knew to people not involved it must seem incomprehensible why anybody would get upset about a dead person’s organs because at the end of the day they are dead” (Redfern, 2001: 406). From the mother of Sam (18 months): “the impression given by Alder Hey was that an individual’s identity ends at post mortem if not death” (Redfern, 2001: 424). The affect of dismembering children’s corpses, stripping them of their organs and returning them incomplete, devastated parents. They desired their children to be buried whole and had painful second and third funerals to be able to achieve this. The importance of physical integrity of the deceased cannot be underestimated. For example, oral testimony from the parents of Philip (3 months): “they discovered that Philip’s organs had been retained in December 1999. Initially, they were not told of the full extent of the retention, from brain to reproductive organs, and were shocked. A second burial took place in January 2000. It had always been their desire to bury their child intact” (Redfern, 2001: 394). From the mother of Lisa (stillborn): “that her daughter came into the world whole and should have been buried whole…Her major concern now is how she can manage to reunite the heart with the body which was buried in a public grave…” (Redfern, 2001: 417). The return of the child’s physical body with organs missing sometimes had an affect on parents being able to remember their children as they were. For example, oral testimony from the mother of Kenneth (5 weeks): “that the memory of her child has been ruined by living under the illusion that he was buried intact when in fact he was missing his heart. She cannot even look at pictures of him now because she just sees him in a different way” (Redfern, 5

While this may not be as reliable as what was actually said, if it is nevertheless a faithful summary, it is still a useful source of evidence.

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2001: 411). Also oral testimony from the parents of Christopher (5½ years): “after Christopher’s death and during the post-mortem process his parents were assured he would be cared for. Christopher was as precious in death as he was in life. His parents can never forgive or erase the memory of what happened to him following his death.” (Redfern, 2001: 436). Parents were let down and clearly deceived by the post-mortem procedures. Full information was often not given. At worst parents were lied to about postmortem procedures on their child; at best they were given inadequate information. This was made worse by ambiguities of meaning between the removal of organs and tissues, i.e. the meaning of taking tissue samples was often a euphemism for the removal of whole organs. For example, oral testimony from the parents of Sam (18 months): they feel let down and deliberately misled. They were not told the facts and procedures they were entitled to know… They describe Alder Hey’s handling of the tissue as appalling with denial of knowledge… They feel that the meaning of tissue and organ is very clear. It is their view that an organ is the whole organ and tissue is a thin slice of organ usually for examination. They were told precisely what was involved in the major cardiac surgery their son underwent. They should have had similar full information about post-mortem examination, organ retention and the results of post-mortem examination (Redfern, 2001: 425).

Parental consent for post-mortems on their children took the form of presumed consent rather than full consent. More generally this kind of practice was supported within a culture of medical paternalism. These were two major findings of the Redfern Inquiry. Post-Alder Hey the requirement of full parental consent became obligatory. Particular attention needs to be given to the kind of language parents used to describe their feelings about how they felt their children were treated, about how they felt they had been treated by hospital staff and, about how they felt about themselves after they received the news about their children. Many parents talked about how they felt their were children treated, using evocative language that expressed outrage and anger, s/he was “violated”, “desecrated”, “butchered” and “treated like a piece of meat”. They talked about how hospital staff had “lied to them”, “deceived them”. They talked about not being able to lay them “to rest”. They talked about not being able to “protect” their children (in death) and that not being able to do so was difficult to live with. Many parents felt guilty as well as angry. For example, oral testimony from the mother of Alexandra (stillborn): the third and most compelling reason for her emotion as a parent is that she would have done anything to protect her child. That was what she was there to do even more so in death because it was the only thing she could do for her child at

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Can we Harm the Dead? Understanding Embodied Harm after Alder Hey that stage… There was only one thing she could do and that was to protect her in death and she did not do it and she has to live with that. (Redfern, 2001: 408).

Conclusions: Philosophical Perspectives on Harming the Dead Revisited in the Light of Alder Hey There are two perspectives from which one can understand the questions “can we harm the dead?” and “what does harming the dead mean?” I call these the non-attached view from reason and the attached view from grief. The nonattached view from reason seems to exhaust the philosophical wisdom on the subject to date. It certainly characterises Aristotle and Pitcher’s views. To understand it in light of the Alder Hey scandal, it is necessary to expose the presuppositions on which it is based. The basic presupposition on which this view is based is pure reason, where the relationship between the dead and the living is of importance only insofar as it is expressive of fidelity to interests and desires the dead may have had when they were alive. Pitcher develops this view further by making a distinction between possibility of ante-mortem and the impossibility of post-mortem harm. From within Aristotle or Pitcher non-attached rational perspective, harm to the physical body is not especially interesting other than that physical “harm” to the corpse, could only be harmful if it was contrary to dying persons’ wishes to be interred in a particular way. This notion can be extended in two ways. Physical harm to the corpse is still harmful if it is an affront to the “common belief” about how the dead should be interred. The latter is certainly pertinent to Alder Hey, since burying the dead “incomplete” was an affront to the practice of strong Christian (often Catholic) funeral rituals. While these interests could, in many cases, not have been expressed by children, it was still damaging to their potential interests as future members of particular socio-cultural community. 6 Physical “harm” is generally unimportant, for Aristotle at least, because it is not intrinsic to harm caused to a life lived. It is a weak secondary harm for reasons given above. Aristotle and Pitcher’s perspective on harming the dead fails to provide any justifiable explanatory account as to why parents at Alder Hey reacted so strongly to the dismemberment of their loved ones. From within the confines of this perspective, their reaction can only explained in terms of the above. In other words, as contrary to the potential interests of children whose 6

Aristotle and Pitcher associate a dead person’s interests with that of an adult and not a child. There are, naturally, important differences. Even so, one could conceivably extend Aristotle and Pitcher’s arguments to say that harm has been done to the future (potential) interests/desires of the child (whether they are aware of it or not), because physical harm to the body would not be in their long-term interests given the religious beliefs they are likely to have held as adults in that particular community if they had survived that long.

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values are shaped within a given socio-cultural community with common beliefs and shared social practices. However this is a weak argument because their actual interests, as young children, are quite basic and rudimentary compared to those of an adult. This explanation does very little to make any sense of post-mortem harm perceived by the parents at Alder Hey. Therefore we must either conclude, with Aristotle, that physical harm to the dead body is “weak and unimportant” or with Pitcher, that post-mortem harm really does not make any sense at all. Both options are, in my view, unhelpful, and do little justice to understanding why parents reacted to what they perceived as embodied post-mortem harm. To understand why parents reacted in the way that they did, we need to perceive harming the dead from an altogether different perspective.

The Attached View from Grief Alder Hey quite clearly shows us the importance of physical integrity to the corpse and how, if that is not respected, it can adversely affect the grieving process. Unlike the perspective from rational non-attachment, where there is a clear demarcation between where to locate harm, the ante-mortem person as opposed to post-mortem corpse, the distinction is highly problematic from within a perspective of grief (Redfern, 2001: 406 and 424). To understand why this is the case, it is important to understand something of the nature of the grieving process. Grief is predominantly an affective state where identification with a dead body can be so strong, as to make it difficult for those grieving the loss of a loved one to demarcate any clear boundary between where personal identity of the recently deceased begins and ends. This is by no means straightforwardly explained away as the living being in a state of denial about the actual status of their dead. The oral testimonies did not attest to parents being in denial about the fact that their children were dead. For those people involved in the grieving process, personal identity is not clearly demarcated by the ante-mortem person and the post-mortem corpse. In short, personhood is an ambivalent concept; personal identity of the recently dead taking on a contingent status for the grieving through the emotional attachment the grieving have with their dead. In fact the word corpse is ill fitting, because while the grieving may rationally recognise that their child is dead, they are often emotionally unable to let go (see also Sque, Payne and Clark, 2006: 125-127). It is this that makes more sense of parental oral testimony at Alder Hey; affective attachment sometimes being expressed in the desire “to protect” their children in death and the guilt at being denied the possibility of doing so (Redfern, 2001: 408).

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Harm to the dead from within the perspective of grief also significantly alters how one might conceive of “backwards causation”. For Aristotle, it will be remembered the point is purely a logical one, about the temporality of cause and effect, life and death; the intrinsic value of a life lived cannot be subject to backwards causation by misfortune post-mortem. Again, this is true from a purely literal and rational perspective where temporality is expressed purely in terms of the actuality of deeds carried out in one’s life that cannot be undone post-mortem. From within the grief perspective, backwards causation is not so immune to misfortune, because physical harm to the corpse distorts how the dead are remembered (Redfern, 2001: 411). It is wrong, in my opinion, to down play harm to the dead, as Aristotle does, by dismissing it as “weak and unimportant effect”. There are two related reasons for this. The first has to do with understanding from within a different perspective altogether; the attached view from grief. For example, from within the attachment perspective of grieving parents, post-mortem harm is perfectly understandable as Alder Hey demonstrates, because improper treatment of their dead is felt as if it were a direct harm done to them. Moreover, as Aristotle might be right to intimate, that although the death of a person as an adult, may be more about fidelity to their interests, it would be wrong to generalise this to children. In the case of the death of a young child, it may be more about our interests as parents that we harbour for our children. In this case the primary affect of harm is going to transfer (from the dead) to grieving relatives. The affective impact of harm is exacerbated further by the fact we are talking about parents “protecting” young children and their potentiality to a life not yet lived. In this respect, Alder Hey, shows us that the affect of happiness/harm beyond the grave is not as “weak and unimportant” as Aristotle claims it to be. It is also wrong, in my opinion, to follow Pitcher’s rigid distinction between ante-mortem and post-mortem harm in the case of Alder Hey. While the argument has much to commend it, from a non-attached rational perspective, it is a false distinction, from within the grieving perspective, which severs the active connection between the two. The fundamental dehumanizing connection between the maltreatment of the body post mortem and the living memory of it is poignantly captured in the Bishop of Liverpool in his Alder Hey memorial service: this is why the taking of our children’s organs and tissues has been such an offence to parents and families. When your child is sick and helpless, you hold them to yourself to let them feel the warmth and reassurance of your body. When they die, the memory you cherish is the warmth of that embrace – body to body, flesh to flesh, heart to heart. The body – their body – weak and vulnerable, pressed against yours – strong and caring – hoping for a miracle. …To discover that their body – so precious to your memory – has been violated leaves you

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understandably traumatised. Their body and the memory of their body are both marred. … When you discover what has been done without your knowledge, without your consent, you feel betrayed – so much so that it becomes difficult to trust anybody in authority (cited in Harrison et al. 2003: 9).

The strength of the connection between the post-mortem body and the antemortem memory of that person can be understood philosophically, if we significantly re-configure what personal identity is constitutive of. In the traditional philosophical argument harm to a dead person’s body does not make much sense because it is predicated on what Paul Ricoeur calls idem (identity), which concerns whether or not someone is the same substance over space and time. Clearly, death marks a significant change, where any claim to be the same substance runs the risk of not being able to account for vital life and its animating constituent: consciousness. However there is another way to conceive of personal identity which may extend to the post-mortem body. Ricoeur understands personal identity to have a symbolic character; that is a person is not just a physical unity but also symbolic unity, presented towards other(s). Ricoeur distinguishes between personal identity as idem and ipse, where ipse identity is created through interpersonal relations, shared practices and narratives. This kind of identity is not spiritual, it is embodied. From this perspective embodied harm of the physical corpse begins to make more sense, since parts of the body like the heart, eyes, face and hands, for example, represent relationships with others that are symbolically inscribed, i.e. they are implied within body parts. So, if body parts are missing, such as the heart, then harm has been done, because body parts still represent the memory of personal relationship to body parts strongly identified with when the person was still alive.7 In this sense personal identity is at stake (see also Dickenson and Widdershoven 2001). In short, body parts symbolically bridge a relationship to others, so that any “desecration” of the physical body post-mortem is expressed as a relational violence at the symbolic level.

Acknowledgements I would especially like to thank four people: first, Professor Alan Holland for inspiring Aristotle lectures that enabled me to re-think the question of whether we can harm the dead and what this means. Second, Professor Sheila Payne whose excellent work in understanding discourses in this setting has given me 7

Sque and Payne (1996) call this “dissonant loss”, where organ donors for example refuse to donate certain organs, because of their symbolic significance – especially corneas, because of the symbolic significance of the eyes which were described by one participant as being “a window to the soul”.

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the confidence to be more convinced about the fact that personal identity is likely to be at stake post-mortem. Finally, Dr David Littlewood and Margo Selene, whose philosophical friendship stands me in good stead in everything I commit to print. .

Works Cited Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Irwin, T, (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company Inc., 1999). Dickenson, D. and G. Widdershoven, “Ethical Issues in Limb Transplants,” Bioethics 15 (2001), pp. 110-124. Pitcher, G, “The misfortunes of the Dead”, American Philosophical Quarterly 21.2 (1984), pp. 217-225. Rachels, J., The Elements of Moral Philosophy (Random House, 1986). Redfern, M., The Royal Liverpool Children’s Inquiry Report – The Redfern Report (London: The Stationary Office, 2001). Ricoeur, P, Oneself as Another, trans. K. Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Sque, M. and S. Payne, “Dissonant loss: the experience of donor relatives,” Social Science and Medicine, 43 (1996), pp. 1359-70. Sque, M., S. Payne, and J. M. Clark, “Gift of life or sacrifice?: key discourses to understanding organ donor families’ decision-making”, Mortality 11 (2006), pp. 117-132. White, J., Introduction to Philosophy (St. Paul: West Publishing Company, 1989).

CHAPTER ELEVEN THE RAW AND THE VITAL: MEDICAL TECHNOLOGIES AND ARISTOTLE’S PSUCHƜ FIONA K. O’NEILL

Long before Freud, or Shelley’s Frankenstein, the uncanniness of the (re)animated inanimate was recognised. And to this day we find something distinctly disquieting about instances which blur, broach or breach the given boundary between the animate and the inanimate. Nonetheless, countless recipients of medical technologies practically and emotionally live with and through a vital and animating love-hate, and on occasions, a disquieting humantechnology relationship. For instance, Jo uses a hearing aid: hearing aids are no use at all in noisy streets … cafes with cappuccino machines … they pick up all the background noise and amplify it, rather than letting you hear the person who is talking to you… But when I feel that it’s all getting me down, I remember that my hearing aid allows me to hear birds singing… But [then] the audiologists say ‘well – the aids can’t clear up every situation’… I have a relationship with it [the aid]. I am to some extent dependent upon it. I look to it for support… I feel guilty, like a neglectful parent… when needing repair I feel sorry for it… My hearing technology is not something I would have chosen, but it is my constant companion and it… will be my companion and part of me for the rest of my life (research participant: O’Neill, 2007b).

The following considers the intimacy and integrity of such humantechnology relations through the raw materials, vital and vitalising capacities of the human and the technological alike. In doing so two complementary perspectives will be initially considered: technology mimicking the human as a referent, and technology assimilating the human as an equivalence. Both perspectives suggest and question Aristotle’s discussion of psuchƝ, the soul; which provides a valuable and intriguing past perspective on human-technology

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relations.1 In short, this chapter suggests that both “fleshy” and “artificial” raw materials can become vital animated technologies when integrated into the recipient’s body and embodiment. By critically utilizing psuchƝ and latterly Aristotle’s discussion of philia we may gain a better appreciation and understanding of the intimate “companionable” relations that medical technologies can engender.

But First, a Little History Humans and their bodies have been engaged with technology, its manufacture, use and consequences, since tools were first fashioned. The vitality of one body has been supported by the “fleshy” raw material of another at least since the sixth century B.C. (Freeth, 1999), when teeth from the dead were used prosthetically. Since the ancient miracle of Cosmos and Damian supposedly transplanting a leg, medical practice has seen human flesh as a resource. In the twentieth century medicine began the comprehensive utilization of human and other bodies; the “vital” potential within raw flesh becoming a “vital” mimetic resource. Recent convergent innovations between plastic surgery, immunology and transplantation have given us over 20 limb transplants since 1998 and two “partial” face transplants since November 2005 (O’Neill, 2003 and 2006). Nonetheless, “artificial” raw materials, which unlike “fleshy” raw materials have never been alive, have also pursued their vital integration within the human body. More recently amalgamated with “fleshy” raw materials in the engineering of tissues: “A bladder biopsy was obtained from each patient. Urothelial and muscle cells were grown in culture, and seeded on a biodegradable bladder-shaped scaffold made of collagen, or a composite of collagen and polyglycolic acid. About 7 weeks after the biopsy, the autologous engineered bladder constructs were used for reconstruction and implanted either with or without an omental wrap” (Atala et al., 2006). The future of the human body, as a source of vital ~ necessary and animate ~ raw materials, amongst other animate and inanimate raw materials, relies in part on the ability to, and methods by which, it can remain vitally animated. For Aristotle, it is the psuchƝ which animates a living body; its ensoulment.2 PsuchƝ 1

PsuchƝ translates from the Greek as soul, without any Judeo-Christian connotations. Importantly, the psuchƝ in not that which renders the thing alive. Aristotle clearly differentiates between psuchƝ as a vital principle, which can be conceptually determined, and the idea that there is some distinguishable distinct vital life force, which he does not find plausible. 2

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is what a living thing possesses, its being vital. It is this vital potential within the “fleshy” body that medicine has always sought to utilize, to mimic and, or assimilate.

Technology as the Mimesis of the Human Routinely technologies are designed to minimise human physical effort and discomfort, and so maximise human efficiency; what we make therefore has an ergonomic relationship to the structure and function of our bodies and our lives in a given environment. With medical technologies this ergonomic relationship becomes distinctly intimate; not only having to imitate body parts, but the embodiment they sustain. Mimesis, mƯmeisthai, is the imitative representation of actions rather than just a copy of the matter; “mime” as opposed to “image”. The power of mimesis lies in the degree to which it can achieve the integrity of the original. In effect, true mimesis of the vital human must make reference not only to the body but the embodiment also. For, as Hayles (1999) notes: embodiment differs from the concept of the body in that the body is always normative relative to some set of criteria… In contrast to the body, embodiment is contextual, enmeshed within the specifics of place, time, physiology and culture, which together compose enactment. Embodiment never coincides exactly with ‘the body’, however that normalised concept is understood… Relative to the body, embodiment is other and elsewhere, at once excessive and deficient in its infinite variations, particularities and abnormalities… Embodiment is akin to articulation in that it is inherently performative, subject to individual enactments, and therefore always to some extent improvisational. Whereas the body can disappear into information with scarcely a murmur of protest, embodiment cannot, for it is tied to the circumstances of the occasion and the person (Hayles, 1999: 96-8).

So, when the referent is a living human being, significantly, mimesis must seek to achieve this capacity to innovate, if and when necessary; for it is this embodiment, which is characteristic of being a human. For Aristotle this capacity is the psuchƝ, the soul of a particular living being; the psuchƝ defines what kind of thing it is and what it is to be that kind of thing. Therefore, for the mimesis of a living being to have integrity it must attempt to acquire this capacity, its psuchƝ. In effect, for human-technology relations, mimesis will be about having the capacity to convincingly represent the original to the original, with integrity.

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Mimesis and Integrity For Aristotle the nebulous, nuanced, even nefarious activities which do possess a living being, constitute the integrity ~ alƝtheia ~ of its particular psuchƝ. That is alƝtheia as the “remembering of the real”. Yet alƝtheia also suggests a lack of concealment as in “being genuine” and it is this that is both the quest and the undoing of mimesis. MƯmeisthai is always in apposition to alƝtheia, perpetually having alƝtheia as its referent. Mimesis must attempt to conceal its difference, with reference to and from, the referent it seeks to imitate. Hence, “genuine” imitation can never be attained, for such concealment makes the ultimate integrity of imitation ultimately elusive; mimesis cannot be “the remembering of the real”. For instance, take a skin graft. Following burns, skin will be taken that effectively makes the best match with the skin that has been damaged. In many respects the imitation is good. Immunologically, there are no problems, as the donor is the recipient. Ergonomically, in a gross sense the graft will provide the structural and functional needs that skin provides all over the body. However, specific capacities of plasticity, sweating, or tanning, may be a poor imitation of the capacities usual to that particular site; as in the arguments for the necessity of facial transplantation (Royal College of Surgeons, 2003). So, the specificities of the body/embodiment experience require a greater degree of imitation than a gross approximation allows. Mimetic success and mimetic failure equally need to be concealed from the referent, for there to be an embodied experience of integrity. It is when this becomes problematic that the love-hate relationship with technology arises.

The “Withdrawal” of Mimetic Success and Failure One way in which mimetic successes and failures become concealed is through the effects of habituation. Habituating to the often quirky mediations of medical technology can occur overtime; this leads to its apparent withdrawal from our perception; as in normally being unaware of one’s clothes or glasses.3 Ihde’s (1990) phenomenological study of the way we are bodily engaged with technologies discusses this technological withdrawal. Ihde notes that: my glasses become part of the way I ordinarily experience surroundings; they ‘withdraw’ and are barely noticed, if at all. I have then actively embodied the technics of vision. Technics is the symbiosis of artefact and user within a human action. Embodiment relations (‘to embody one’s praxis through technologies is 3

Aristotle discusses the role of habituation in forming the soul’s capacity to act consistently toward a given situation, as in hexis (following Aristotle, 1999:349).

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ultimately an existential relation with the world’) however, are not at all restricted to visual relations. They may occur for any sensory or microperceptual dimension. A hearing aid does this for hearing, and the blind man’s cane for tactile motility. Note that in these corrective technologies the same structural features of embodiment obtain as with the visual example. Once learned, cane and hearing aid ‘withdraw’ (if the technology is good – and here we have an experiential clue for the perfecting of technologies). I hear the world through the hearing aid and feel (and hear) it through the cane. The juncture (I-artifact)world is through the technology and brought close by it… Phenomenological theory claims that for every change in what is seen (the object correlate), there is a noticeable change in how (the experiential correlate) the thing is seen… In embodiment relations, such changes retain both an equivalence and a difference from non-mediated situations. What remains constant is the bodily focus, the reflexive reference back to my bodily capacities (Idhe, 1990: 72-4 and 79).

Here, Ihde is acknowledging that the body / embodiment paradigm, as “the referent”, is not only for the technological mimetic, but for the recipient too. It is the specificities of the individual’s lived body which are always the true appositive referent, within the human-technology relationship. However, individual specificities are not necessarily unchanging; as in the bodily developments of ageing.

The “Revelation” of Mimetic Success and Failure Ihde also acknowledges the possibility of withdrawal not occurring or indeed being revealed. Some mimetics are such poor imitations, that habituation is effectively impossible. Others successfully withdraw only to fail and be revealed. Still others are so successfully withdrawn that this too draws attention to there presence. Here Heidegger’s (1962) modes of disclosure can highlight how we might become aware of the failures or “withdrawn” successes of mimetic technology.4 Put simply items become conspicuous when in trying to use them it becomes obvious that they are in fact unusable and in need of repair. Items become obtrusive when what we require is not available to us and what is available makes both its own presence, and that of the item which is missing, all too obvious. Items gain a certain obstinacy when they force us to deal with their 4

However much Heidegger might have conceived being-in-the-world to be about the existential experience of “the world”, and in no way relevant to how we experience failures of the body, which is in line with Merleau-Ponty’s differentiation between how we know the world and how we know ourselves as bodied, it is still valid to consider his three modes of disclosure as helpful in understanding how using medical technology has significantly objectified our bodies, and embodiment, into the world of externalised objects. (1962: H 188-89).

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presence, taking hold of our attention, distracting or disturbing us before we can deal with the issue we intended.

Technology and the Assimilation of the Human Where technological mimesis has the original as its referent; technological assimilation views “the original” as an adjunct; in effect, more of the same. This cybernetic perspective understands living things as a system controlled by feedback; therefore perceiving the integrated human body as an assimilable technology (echoes of the Borg from Star Trek). The posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born … Cyborgs actually exist. About 10 percent of the current U.S. population are estimated to be cyborgs in the technical sense, including people with electronic pacemakers, artificial joints, drug-implant systems, implanted corneal lenses and artificial skin (Hayles, 1999: 3 and 115).

So, with or without prosthetic additions, humans can be considered as cyborgs. Since the riddle of the sphinx there has been an awareness of this technological assimilation; not only reliant upon but integrated with technology.5 The cyberneticist Bateson (1972) posed the question “is the blind man’s cane part of the man?” Initially commonsense tells us that the man is defined, delineated and bounded by the continuous epidermal covering of his body and that the cane therefore does not belong to his body; it is not a material part, integral to the whole. Yet upon deeper reflection, commonsense also suggests that the cane has indeed become part of the man’s integrity of being, qua man’s vital capacities for innovative action. Material boundaries are meaningless to the continuous feedback union of man and cane. Through the cane the man comes to know and be in the world (and potentially an electronic cane “knows” the man and the world too). Such cybernetic prosthetic understandings presage the intimacy of human-technology relations, as being cyborg. Here both organism and device can be explained by the same analogy of action. As Hayles (1999) notes: Fusing cybernetic device and biological organism, the cyborg violates the human/machine distinction; replacing cognition with neural feedback, it challenges the human-animal difference; explaining the behaviour of thermostats 5

The riddle of the sphinx: What goes on four legs in the morning, two legs at midday, and three in evening? A man; eventually with his cane.

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and people through theories of feedback, hierarchical structures, and control, it erases the animate/inanimate distinction (Hayles 1999: 84, my italics).

In disrupting, and even removing these distinctions, cybernetics fundamentally challenges the Aristotelian conception of psuchƝ. The cybernetic perspective specifically collapses the distinction between the artificial and the natural; eliminating any mimetic referent through assimilation.

Technology as Mimesis and/or Assimilation Both perspectives discussed above reflect important aspects of the human engagement with technology. We may design ergonomically to mimic the human referent, but find that we live through assimilated systems. Where mimesis references material distinctions and capacities, the cyborg experience collapses and yet exposes these same distinctions. But there is another significant issue before we engage directly with Aristotle’s perspective. As Latour (1988) discusses, in Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together, when we design technology we delegate to it certain human tasks. This “non-human” then in turn prescribes back, how the human user will access that delegated task. However, for Latour technology remains significantly inflexible, in comparison to the human user, with regard to the capacity for innovative action within this delegation/prescription paradigm: in effect, querying cyborg assimilation. Latour here sees this human capacity for innovative action, Hayles’ embodiment, as that which remains distinctive about humans in comparison to non-human actors. So, the delegation of human tasks through ergonomic mimesis not only references the human, but relies upon the presently distinctly human capacity to innovatively respond to prescription. In effect the human is required to mimic and master the systematics and idiosyncrasies of the technology in order to gain the ergonomic advantage; as in driving a car or using a computer. Thus, the delegation of tasks to technology determines humans as both physical objects amenable to being normatively standardised, as in cybernetic assimilation, whilst also being malleable and manipulable embodied subjects with the capacities to use such technological mimetics. Technologists in mimicking the human, do so knowing that the willing human user will allow the “prescription” of the technology to discipline our habits, becoming assimilated into the system of the technology, in order to access the work that has been mimetically “delegated” to the technology.6 The unwilling, the inflexible or the 6 This reflects Sartre’s (1958) comments with regard to the fascination/fear of being treated as, or willingly treating oneself as a “thing”. We give up certain bodily freedoms

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incapable user will resist such disciplining assimilation and the mimetic design. Again, presaging our love-hate relations with technology.

Nascent Materiality However, Latour’s discussion of materiality does not sufficiently account for the inherent capacities of the “materials” themselves; whatever those materials may be. Although materials are chosen for the potential they offer in receiving delegation and prescribing action, they can retain nascent capacities which are not required or are indeed unknown and therefore remain unaccounted for. This echoes Aristotle’s point in The Physics, regarding Antiphon’s bedstead (2, 1: 1957a: 193a-193b10). If a wooden bedstead were planted in the ground it might retain the capacity for growth; and if it did, it would grow not as a bed, but as a tree. So, despite the incidence of being technically crafted the wood’s nascent capacities persist. Within medicine these nascent capacities may only affect those whose body/embodiment contests “human normativity” as prescribed by medicine, or they may affect everyone within a given group. Many drugs are fine for the majority - penicillin or paracetamol - yet can have catastrophic affects for a few; whereas all those taking diabetic drugs have to avoid grapefruit. It is the potential within these nascent materialities which medicine employs. However, unnecessary or unexpected nascent capacities can become the focus of the human love-hate relationship with technology, on occasion disquietingly so.

Human-Technology Relations ~ Aristotle’s PsuchƝ With the above in mind we now turn to Aristotle’s perspective. Central to this discussion will be the issue of “animation” and the possession of psuchƝ. Here the issue is to question medical technology’s attempts at mimesis and assimilation. Is there a distinction between using raw “artificial” and raw “fleshy” materials? Is there a distinction between “intimation” and “animation”? Might “fleshy” medical technologies possess psuchƝ in and of themselves, as a nascent capacity? Can any raw material assimilate vitality through intimate association with the vital organs of the living host’s body? “A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognised, the boundary is that from which something begins its essential unfolding” (Heidegger, 1971: 332, my italics). This essential unfolding is in order to delegate certain tasks (responsibilities) in order to (re)gain different freedoms, bodily and otherwise.

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fundamental to understanding Aristotle’s view on what it is to be “something”. The psuchƝ is an essential unfolding of a living being’s capacities which define over time, what kind of thing it is and what it is to be that kind of thing; just as the riddle of the sphinx demonstrates the changing capacities of being human. In effect the psuchƝ of any individual cannot be ultimately defined in advance of it achieving its telos ~ its final cause.7 Therefore the cyborg, which blurs, breaks and transgresses numerous boundaries, challenges our ability to define what a thing has been over time, and indeed to venture what it might have been capable of and under what conditions.

Animation and the PsuchƝ For Aristotle the psuchƝ is the particular form of a living thing, the capacities which characterise what it is to be that thing when alive. These capacities are an amalgam of the capacity to change ~ as in the actual movements of growth; and the capacity for change ~ as in a potentiality for an actuality, that is the capacity within the wood of Antiphon’s bedstead to sprout as a tree, given the right conditions toward actualising its psuchƝ; in effect the innovativeness of embodiment. Remembering here that, the psuchƝ in not that which renders the thing alive, rather psuchƝ is what a living thing possesses ~ being vital ~ as in necessary and animated. In De Anima 2, 1 Aristotle posits that: “if the eye were a living creature, its soul would be its [capacity for] vision” (1957b: 71). The eye in fact does not need to be seeing, it may be asleep, but it must possess the capacity to see. The “if” of this statement is crucial, for of course the eye is not capable of being an independent living creature. In Metaphysica 2, 10 he goes on to show that: therefore, whereas the bodily parts are in a sense prior to the concrete whole, in another sense they are not, for they cannot exist when severed from the whole. (Thus a finger cannot properly be described as such in any and every state; a dead finger is a finger in name only) (1956: 191, original emphasis).

Therefore an eye can only exist as a functioning eye, with a psuchƝ, within a living body. Following the arguments of Everson (1997) and Whiting (1995) on these and related texts, it can be said that although some organs palpably possess psuchƝ, as in the eye, they only do so when integrated into the whole 7

Telos is an eventual, but not inevitable, realisation of potential. This realisation comes from the circumstances an individual encounters, in relation to what kind of thing it is and the capacities it can therefore be expected to posses. Telos does not determine the exact outcome, it is not the end purpose of the individual; it is necessarily clarified retrospectively.

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living body. Aristotle goes on to note: “Some bodily parts, however, are neither prior nor posterior. Such are those indispensable parts in which the definition or essence immediately resides, e.g. the heart or the brain – whichever you like” (Aristotle, Metaphysica 2, 10: 1956: 191). This opens up the question of just where, to what extent, and how the psuchƝ pervades a living body; with Aristotle offering various possibilities. However, the clear suggestion is, that some body parts, namely the heart and the brain and may be other organs, are indispensable to the living thing, in comparison to say a finger. And that: there is no need of soul (psuchƝ) in each part, but since it is situated in a central origin of authority [as in the heart or its correspondent] over the body, the other parts live by their structural attachment to it and perform their own functions in the course of nature (Aristotle, Motu Animalium 10: 1961: 477).

Thus, indispensable parts possess psuchƝ in and of themselves. By attachment to them other dispensable parts come in contact with psuchƝ via their integration into the whole. This possession of the capacity for being “such and such a thing” is then only properly expressed when integrated into the living whole. This is referred to as being in the “right relationship” for the conditions of life; a vital, necessary and animating, integration. Interestingly, Aristotle is somewhat ambiguous as to whether severed parts and dead bodies are in some respects the same as their vital counterparts. As Whiting (1995) points out Aristotle “seems to allow that flesh and blood survive (at least for awhile) in a corpse… (H)e acknowledges that it is not always easy to tell what their functions are or when they are still capable of performing them” (79). The point here is that although living and recently dead bodies or severed parts may be composed of the same matter; recently dead bodies and severed parts will lack the psuchƝ form of a living thing, as they are no longer in the “right relation” to the living body. But as to exactly when or how the psuchƝ is lost, following the loss of the vital integration is ambiguous. So, the possession of psuchƝ can only be expressed when body parts are in the right relation to, vitally integrated within a living body. Reiterating his comments on the dead finger, Aristotle posits in De Partibus Animalium that: [yet] the dead man too has the same conformation of shape, but nevertheless is not a man. Moreover, a hand cannot exist in just any condition whatsoever, such as metal or wood, except homonymously, just as with a physician in a picture. For it will not be able to perform the characteristic activities (ergon) (psuchƝ), just as stone flutes cannot perform theirs, or the pictured doctor his (Everson, 1997: 62).

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In effect the wooden hand and the dead body or severed finger, are mere material “images” they have no mimetic qualities, no animate capacity for acting as if living. But here is the vital question, what of medical mimetics? What of prosthetic hands or transplanted organs, are they hands or organs in name only? Or do their mimetic capacities suggest that they are not homonymously, but synonymously hands or organs and therefore in possession of psuchƝ.

Are “Living Cadavers” from the Recently Dead in Possession of PsuchƝ? “Before the removal of organs from donors and their preparation for use as therapeutic tools can come about, the necessary technology must be in place and, furthermore, human organs have to be understood as fungible. Moreover, donors must be designated as dead prior to organ removal. … However, organs for transplantation are, by definition, alive; although objectified, they cannot be reduced to mere things, even in the minds of involved physicians, and they retain, therefore , a hybrid-status” (Lock, 2002: 1409, my italics).

This quote raises several points. Firstly the conundrum, that organs for transplantation whilst irreducible to mere things are nonetheless considered to be therapeutic tools. Secondly the paradox, that although the organ is removed from a body which has been deemed dead, the organ for transplant remains by “definition” alive. And thirdly, that donor organs have a hybrid status, such that they are: at least object-subject, tool-person, dead-alive and possibly homonymously-synonymously organs. The organ is therefore rendered a cyborg through techniques and technologies prior to transplantation and beyond. It is a figure for ongoing negotiation across numerous boundaries, the essential capacities of which may unfold at such boundaries; its mimetic capacities remaining ambiguous and uncertain. The harvested organ is both raw material and vital embodiment. So, we are forced to ask in the light of Aristotle’s work; are harvested organs dead or alive; are they (re)animated upon transplantation; are they organs in name only; what capacities do they still posses, might these be retained from the donor or revitalized from the host body and to what extent might harvested organs retain their particular original psuchƝ? Well, “successfully” transplanted organs can and do maintain the capacity of the host recipient to act characteristically. Aristotle’s ambiguity regarding the status of recently dead body parts allows the suggestion that technology may well now maintain “in vitro suspension” the psuchƝ within the harvested organ. In effect the organ is “reanimated” upon successful transplantation assimilation.

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This in turn implies that these “dis-integrated” parts when re-integrated are not as Aristotle’s perspective suggests “organs in name only”. Until recently organs have been “stored” in saline chilled “suspended animation”; such arrested hearts having a useful “life span” of four to six hours. However, the TransMedics Organ Care System can now ‘sustain’ donor hearts for eight to twelve hours. This portable mini hear-lung machine keeps the harvested beating heart at just below body temperature, perfused with oxygen, nutrients, any necessary drugs and importantly donor blood. Maintaining vitality in this way, forestalls the deterioration of the chilled method (Beating Heart Online, 2006). This innovative technology further blurs significant boundaries in the Aristotelian discussion of psuchƝ. Here the vital animation of the raw organ is perpetuated in vitro through the perfusion of “indispensable” donor blood, despite a lack of gross “right relationship”. This technique puts further “normative” emphasis on brain activity as the only truly “indispensable” criteria for fully human animation. Whether the hosting of the donor organ within another’s body can constitute a “right relation” is a good question. This possibly can only be answered by the long term outcome for the transplant and the recipient. The answer to where the capacity for vitality originates is again ambiguous. Maybe donor and host both retain psuchƝ and it is then reanimated in both and shared. Or maybe it is assimilated from the indisputable parts of the host body now that they are not dying; or vice versa. And maybe the process depends upon the type of organ or tissue donated? And if indeed some donor organs retain their original psuchƝ, which does seem plausible, might this also account for recipient experiences of somatic memory, or the clinical findings of chimerical immunotolerance (Pearsall, 2002 and Starzl, 2000)?8 But what of prosthetics which have never been alive? Well, they too may well help maintain the characteristic activities of the recipient. Many “artificial” prosthetics can be said to be have been designed to support a specifically human telos in that such objects are ergonomically and aesthetically fashioned to compensate for a missing human faculty. They have a function which in 8

Somatic memory is where transplant recipients experience the donor’s emotional, moral or physical habits; dreams, desires, cravings, mannerisms. Chimerical immunotolerence is where donor and recipient bodies ‘naturally’ exchange cellular tissues, such that they become immunologically assimilated by the other. Effectively, this exchange of immunological identifiers confers recognition and acceptance of the other as self. Normally, organ transplants require the life long use of drugs to suppress rejection. Occasionally, spontaneously or by clinical induction, organ transplants can eventually be maintained in the body without drugs because they have become utterly accepted, through chimericism.

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Latourian (1988) terms is delegated to the object by such design, in turn prescribing activity back to the user. But do these mimetic capacities give an imitation or an animation of recipient’s capacities? In terms of say a prosthetic limb, a hearing aid or a pacemaker, it would seem that the recipient is best placed to judge the capacities which have been achieved and whether psuchƝ has been imitated or animated. And much would seem to depend on the willingness of the recipient to be disciplined by the prescription of the delegated task. In effect, the recipient who can master a prosthetic will be more likely to suggest that it innovatively animates their life, rather than gives a mere intimation. It is therefore the withdrawal of technology, or lack there of, into the body / embodiment of our lives which suggests the homonymy or synonymy with which it achieves delegated tasks. It would seem fair to suggest that donated organs may indeed retain their vital original psuchƝ, especially so for warm beating heart donations; and that this can then be more fully reanimated, if it successfully forms a “right relationship” within the host recipient’s body. Therefore “successful” donor organs are synonymously organs; they have retained and reanimated the innovative capacity for change and the capacity to change. But does this then mean that the successful recipient is therefore multiply or even heterogeneously ensouled? And if so, are semi-successful donations, hovering on the boarders of rejection, organs in limbo between synonymy and homonymy? Similarly, prosthetic technologies, which have never been alive, also suggest a degree of ambiguity. For those recipients who have successfully integrated these artificial materials into their bodies and their being, may well feel there is a “right relationship”. This suggests that through integration with the living recipient the artificial material assimilates psuchƝ from the indisputable parts of the host body/embodiment that in turn help maintain the psuchƝ for the integrated lived body. In which case, artificial prosthetics might homonymously and, or synonymously be what they purport to be.

Human-Technology Relations: Aristotle’s Philia To take this discussion one step further, we now need to consider just why human-technology relations within medicine so often conjure a love-hate relationship. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle’s (1999) outline of philia draws a distinction between the love we have for humans and non-humans, based on the possession of psuchƝ. However, as the preceding arguments suggest, variously technologies may possess psuchƝ. And within Aristotle’s philia arguments there is further scope for appreciating human-technology relations, accounting for recipient love-hate relations.

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Philia is a difficult word to capture. It is usually translated as friendship or love. But the scope that Aristotle gives philia defines and delineates how similar and different human individuals come to have a sense of belonging together. The key attributes are the three objects or causes of philia; namely the good, the useful, and the pleasant. “Friendships” are therefore based upon the goodness, usefulness or pleasantness for the other and oneself. Secondly, Aristotle outlines the nature of friendships between equals, unequals and within different gatherings of individuals. Thirdly, he outlines the defining tenets which generically constitute friendship: a friend should wish good things for the other, this should be reciprocated and both should be aware of this. However, this must be set against the following: but friendship seems to consist more in loving than in being loved. … Friendship, then consists more in loving; people who love their friends are praised; hence it would seem, loving is the virtue of friends. And so friends whose love accords with the worth of their friends are enduring friends and have an enduring friendship. This above all is how unequals as well as equals can be friends, since this is how they can be equalized (Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea 8, 8, 1159a28b2: 1999: 128).

This tempers the initial emphasis on reciprocity with and awareness of the other, suggesting how inequalities in circumstances and over time are ameliorated. Initially Aristotle is quite clear that “love for an inanimate thing is not friendship” (Ethica Nicomachea, 8, 2, 1155b27-28: 1999: 121). But the inanimate objects that he focuses on are obviously nothing like modern medical technologies. In Irwin’s notes, he states: "it [the inanimate object] has no choices, desires or aims of its own" (1999: 275) and therefore you cannot wish it good for its own sake. In effect an inanimate object does not have the capacity for mutuality. For underling all this talk of philia is a dependence upon psuchƝ. Hence, it is fair to say that our “love” of inanimate things – such as wine, as Aristotle suggests - is homonymous, a “love” in name only. However, medical technologies which are vital and above all intimate, do belong to recipients in a deep sense, they provoke emotions of love, hate, resignation, fear and fascination; and being so intimate they mutually form part of an individual’s characteristic capacities “for living”. For some these “organ donated” capacities are so vital, that they mutually provide the capacity “for being alive”. Therefore, it would not be unreasonable for a transplant recipient to wish their hosted organ good for its own sake; and at least immunologically the allograft might be said to have choices, aims, and may be even desires of its own. Three aspects of Aristotle’s discussion of philia speak to the love-hate sense of belonging which human-technology relations can engender: the discussion of

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the slaves as a “tool with a soul”, the discussion of “self-love”, and the “friendships of utility”. One, a tool with a soul: just as cybernetics equates the body to a tool so too technology has been equated with slavery, not least in sci-fi literature. And recall that donor organs are considered live therapeutic tools. Therefore could human-technology relations be understood as philia for a slave as the ensouled tool? For where a ruler and ruled have nothing in common, they have no friendship, since they have no justice either. This is true for a craftsman in relation to his tools, and for the soul in relation to the body. For in all these cases the user benefits what he uses, but there is neither friendship nor justice toward inanimate things. Nor is there any toward a horse or cow, or toward a slave, in so far as he is a slave. For master and slave have nothing in common, since a slave is a tool with a soul, while a tool is a slave without a soul. Insofar as he is a slave, then, there is no friendship with him, but there is friendship with him insofar as he is a human being (Ethica Nicomachea, 8, 11, 1161a34-b8: 1999: 132).

Initially Aristotle is reaffirming the lack of friendship toward (or should that be between) inanimate things and the human user. Slave qua tool has nothing in common with the ensouled master (body qua material tool has nothing in common with the psuchƝ form). However, slave qua being human is ensouled (psuchia) in common with the master; and therefore friendship can occur. If successful transplants and other medical technologies can be considered to be psuchia through their “right relationship” of intimate integration and support for the capacity of the recipient, then maybe one way to explain expressions of belonging, as in “friendship for” and “care of”, “irritation with”, and “feeling let down by” is through Aristotle’s friendship toward slaves, as ensouled tools. Those medical technologies that falter or cease to support recipient vitality become mere tools, mere material body parts, failing in their friendship. Two, self-love: having been designed to support a specifically human telos so as to compensate for a missing human faculty, medical technologies not only mirror but become an adjunct to our being human. In the “self-love and friendship” chapter Aristotle notes: for the excellent person is of one mind with himself, and desires the same things in his whole soul… He wishes and does them for his own sake, since he does them for the sake of his thinking part, and that is what each person seems to be. Moreover, he wishes himself to live and to be preserved. And he wishes this for his rational parts more than for any other part (Ethica Nicomachea, 9, 4, 1166a14 -15 and 17-19: 1999: 142).

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Interestingly this is somewhat in contrast to the earlier statement that the soul can have no friendship for the body. What seems to be suggested here is that self-love is not significantly between form and matter, psuchƝ and the body, but within the psuchƝ of the body parts; for the preservation of the capacities to act characteristically. But without the matter of the body there would be no psuchia. Remembering that, the preservation of bodied and embodied capacities is what medical technologies support through mimesis. Aristotle goes on to note the five aspects of being a friend: to wish and do good things for the friend, and to wish the friend to live for their own sake, to wish to live with, and to be of one mind with the friend, and to share in their joys and sorrows. He then notes how each of these aspects are to be found in a decent person’s intrapersonal relationship: the decent person, then, has each of these features in relation to himself, and is related to his friend as he is to himself, since the friend is another self. Hence friendship seems to be one of those features, and people with these features seem to be friends (Ethica Nicomachea, 9, 4, 1166a30-34: 1999: 142).

Suggesting that, the capacity to make friends depends upon a capacity for self-love. And if indeed the maintenance of one’s capacity to act characteristically is successfully supported by a medical technology, then it would seem reasonable to love the “thing” as oneself. Three, friendships of utility: human-technology relations may also be characterised as friendships of utility, in that medical aids are useful. As Aristotle notes these friendships are easily dissolved when the friendship ceases to be useful, in that the friendship is not one of loving the other for who they are (Ethica Nicomachea, 8, 3, 1156a15-24: 1999: 121-2). Friendships of utility are “incomplete” as they do not fully uphold the three generic tenets given initially. Subsequently Aristotle states that: “the friendship of hosts and guests is taken to be of this type too” (Ethica Nicomachea, 8, 3, 1156a31: 1999: 122). This is significant, for that is exactly what the user of a medical technology does; they host the donated guest prosthetic.

A Further Dimension, Benevolence Let us now consider organ donation in particular with reference to Ethica Nicomachea 9, 7. Aristotle’s comments on benevolence make good sense of the mixed feelings which recipients can experience in dealing with their gratitude and indebtedness toward the donor and their family: the beneficiary [recipient] is his [benefactor’s] product, and hence he [the donor] likes him [recipient] more than the product likes the producer… Now the product

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is, in a way, the producer in his actualization; hence the producer is fond of the product, because he loves his own being. This is natural, since what he is potentially is what the product indicates in actualization. At the same time, the benefactor’s action is fine for him, so that he finds enjoyment in the person he acts on; but the person acted on finds nothing fine in the agent, but only, at most some advantage, which is less pleasant and lovable… For the benefactor, then, his product endures, since the fine is long-lasting; but for the person acted on, the usefulness passes away (Ethica Nicomachea, 9, 7, 1168a5-6, 6-13 and 16-18: 1999: 145-6).

In effect Aristotle is making the point that being the product of someone else’s goodwill is an uncomfortable position to be in, especially when benevolence does not engender reciprocity, potentially debasing friendship to utility or slavery. So, Human-technology relations when successfully integrated might be considered as synonymous with friendships akin to those for the ensouled slave, the self or of utility. When technologically such relationships falter or fail they appear as a friend “in name only”, or not at all. And it would seem fair to say that self-love of one’s prosthetic is a more complete friendship than, that of the ensouled slave or one of utility; with the reaction to associations of benevolence potentially playing a role too. Beyond this personal experience of the love-hate relationship there are of course the social relevancies of how technologies are seen to belong to and with the individual (O’Neill, 2007a).

In Conclusion The purpose of these arguments has been to find further ways in which to appreciate and understand the depth of feeling that human-technology relations can engender. Even if an individual hates a particular aid then that hate has come from an expectation of love. Complete indifference, a lack of caring either way, toward medical technologies seems to be rarely expressed. If we can accept that in mimicking “the human”, as body and embodiment, medical technologies have placed us in the guise of the cyborg then we must also consider accepting that our technologies, in some way are psuchia, ensouled. As such it is not unreasonable to find that we form attachments which fulfil some if not all of Aristotle’s tenets for philia. In further utilizing the “fleshy” human body, medical technologies not only identify and draw upon the amazing potential within the nascent capacities of the body, they may also some day reach the limits of our emotional capacity to befriend technology. However, malleable the raw “fleshy” material of the human body may be in affording vital remedies and enhancements; it may be

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that our human embodiment will not assimilate to such a multiple or heterogeneous cyborg sense of belonging.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Em. Prof. Alan Holland for his encouragement to pursue this line of thought; and colleagues at Lancaster University for there comments in preparing the conference presentation.

Works Cited Atala, A. and Bauer S. et al., “Tissue-engineered autologous bladders for patients needing cystoplasty”, The Lancet 15th April (2006), pp. 1241-1246. Aristotle, Metaphysics, ed. and trans. J. Warrington (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1956). —. The Physics, trans. Wicksteed and Cornfield (London, Heinemann, 1957a). —. On the Soul, Parava Naturalia, On Breath, trans, W. S. Hett (London, Heinemann, 1957b). —. Parts of Animals, Movement of Animals, Progression of Animals, trans. Peck and Forster (London: Heinemann, 1961). —. Nicomachean Ethics, trans. and notes, T. Irwin (Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing, 2nd ed, 1999). Beating heart online, “Beating heart transplant UK first”, BBC News online with video clips http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/5041054.stm ) 5th June 2006; and “UK’s first beating heart transplant, medGadget”, Internet Journal of Emerging MedicalTechnologies, http://www.medgadget.com/archives/2006/06/ uks_first _ beati_1.html and http://www.transmedics.com/wt/home/index (all accessed 6.6.2006). Bateson, G., Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York, Ballantine Books, 1972). Everson, S., Aristotle on Perception (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997). Freeth, C. “Ancient history of trips to the dentist”. British Archaeology 43 (1999), http://www.britarch.ac.uk/ba/ba43/ba43feat.html#freeth (accessed 9.2.2006). Hayles, N.K., How We Became Posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature and information (London, University of Chicago Press, 1999). Heidegger, M., Being and Time, trans, J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, (Oxford, Blackwell, 1962). —. Poetry, Language and Thought, trans. Hofstadter (New York, Harper and Row, 1971). Ihde, D., Technology and the Lifeworld: from Garden to Earth (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1990).

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Latour, B. (aka Jim Johnson) “Mixing humans and non-humans together: the sociology of a door-closer”, Social Problems 35 (1988), pp 298-310. Lock, M., “Human body parts as therapeutic tools: contradictory discourses and transformed subjectivities”, Qualitative Health Research 12 (2002), pp. 1406-1418. O’Neill, Fiona K., “Face transplantation: is it should we, or how should we, proceed?” Bioethics Today (online 12.2003. latest article http://www.bioethics-today.org/FSarticles.htm ) (accessed 31.5.2006). —. “What are the ‘what ifs’ for face transplantation?” Genetics Society and Policy Online 2:1 (2006) commentary, http://www.gspjournal.com/) (accessed 31.5.2006). —. “Fashioning flesh: inclusion, exclusivity and the potential of genomics”, in eds. P. Atkinson, P. Glasner and H. Greenslade, New Genetics, New Identities (London: Routledge, forthcoming, 2007a). —. “Uncanny belongings: bioethics and the technologies of fashioning flesh”, IPPP, Lancaster University, PhD dissertation (2007b). Pearsall, P. et al., “Changes in heart transplant recipients that parallel the personalities of their donors”, Journal of Near-Death Studies 20 (2002), pp. 191-206. Royal College of Surgeons, Face Transplantation: Working Party Report, Prof. Sir Peter Morris Chair, (London: Royal College of Surgeons of England, 2003), http://www.rcseng.ac.uk/rcseng/content/publications/docs/facial_ transplantation.html) (accessed 9/2/06). Sartre, J. P., Being and nothingness: an essay on phenomenological ontology, trans. H. E. Barnes (London: Methuen, 1958). Starzl, T. E., “The mystic of transplantation: biological and psychiatric considerations”, in eds. P. Trzepacz and A. F. di Martini, The Transplant Patient: Biological, Psychiatric and Ethical Issues of Organ Transplantation, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 1-19. Whiting J., “Living bodies”, in eds. M. Nussbaum and A. Rorty, Essays on Aristotle’s “De Anima” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp.75-91.

CHAPTER TWELVE ETERNAL BODIES: THE MIIRA, THE SELF-MUMMIFIED ASCETICS OF JAPAN TULLIO LOBETTI

Thinking about the “future of the body” may mean a number of different things. In all cases however, it necessarily involves “the concept” or the “understanding” of the so evident, and at the same time so elusive, idea of the “human body” itself. In this paper I would like to address the question from a point of view that relies on a conception of the body different from the modern western one. The miira, the self-mummified ascetic object of this analysis, represent a peculiar case, in my opinion, of people who made their bodies into “bodies of the future” in their very physical essence.1 Dating from the early seventeenth century on, these bodies are still among us, still performing, and the term cannot be more appropriate, many of the functions they were performing when still in life. They are the object of veneration, dispensers of gifts, refuges in time of calamity: like living Buddhist saints they spread the Dharma throughout the world with their mere physical presence. To describe them, the term “mummy” is probably not the must appropriate one. They are not merely preserved corpses, but sokushinbutsu, “Buddhas in their very bodies”, and in this sense they are still alive, resting in a perfect state of quietness between life and death, and waiting for the next Buddha, Maitreya, to come into this world. After a brief historical overview on some representative figures of the sokushinbutsu phenomenon, this paper will attempt to analyse the meaning of the act of self-preservation vis-à-vis the transitory conception of the human body, then it will inscribe it in a wider context of the theoretical enquiries about

1

The word miira derives from the term mirra, an herb used in the process of mummification of the Egyptian mummies. In Japanese it indicates all kind of mummies and it is not indicative of the self-mummification process. In the area where the Buddhist mummies are kept, in fact, the term miira is avoided, in favour of the more correct sokushinbutsu (a glossary of terms is given at the end of this article).

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the meaning of physicality, performance, and individuality, all categories so obviously dependant on the “human body” entity.

Dramatis Personae The area of Japan in which the sokushinbutsu can be found is mainly the northern part of Honshnj (the central and largest of the Japanese islands), a total of twenty-one mummies, most of which are still preserved in the original place where they “entered deep meditation” (nynjjǀ); to which we may add other nine figures whose names have been preserved in literature but of whom no actual physical remains are left (Matsumoto, 2002: 287). Six interrelated figures are concentrated around the mountain area of the Yamagata prefecture known as the Dewa Sanzan. I will concentrate my analysis on the sokushinbutsu preserved in this latter area since it is where I have conducted my observations, and also because we posses a number of detailed accounts regarding the life of these ascetics, until they “entered the ground” and after.2 The first and oldest sokushinbutsu that we can find in the Dewa Sanzan area is Honmyǀkai, whose nynjjǀ dates back to 1683.3 A former retainer of a feudal lord of Tsuruoka, we are told that he left his family to pursue the ascetic path of life at the Churenji temple4 in order to pray for the recovery of his lord from some serious illness. He lived under a strict ascetic regime in the Senninzawa – the “swamp of wizards”- an uninhabited portion of land that lies between the Churenji and Yudono-san where traditionally people seeking magical and supernatural powers used to train. The practices he underwent at the Sennininzawa, are generally known under the name of mokujiki, lit. “woodeating”, a name that indicates the total refraining from the consumption of the six kinds of cereals, while maintaining a diet consisting of pine needles, tree bark, pinecones, chestnuts and occasionally stones and crystals. This diet is not an unheard thing in East Asia, resembling closely the diet prescribed to those seeking immortality in Daoist texts, like for instance, the Lingbao.5 This 2

The self-mummified ascetics of the Dewa Sanzan area have been the object of an extensive examination conducted in 1961 by a multidisciplinary team of scientists called “Investigating committee for mummies in Japan” (Nihomiirakenkynjgrupu) whose results are collected in the volume Nihon miira no kenkynj (Research about Japanese Mummies), 1969. 3 A concise history of the Dewa Sanzan’s sokushinbutsu can be found in Hori, 1962: 223226. 4 The Churenji temple is located at the beginning of the Senninzawa and was the location of one of the seminars held by the Yudono sect of Shugendǀ (Japanese mountain asceticism). 5 For more about Taoist longevity techniques see Eskildsen, 1998 and Khon, 1989.

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methodology of bodily preservation is set upon a complex cosmological vision that we will analyse in details later. After ten years of such alimentary regime, Honmyǀkai entered a small stone chamber set in the ground where he entered “perpetual samhƗdi” while chanting the nenbutsu. His body was then almost immediately exhumed, dried by incense and charcoal fumes, and then put to rest for another three years. After this period the body was completely mummified and then set on an altar at the Honmyǀji (the temple founded by Honmyǀkai himself) and venerated as a living relic (Nihomiirakenkynjgrupu, 1969: 34-39). The next sokushinbutsu in chronological order, Chnjkai, was a relative of Honmyǀkai, his nephew, who had a firm veneration for the figure of the uncle and eventually resolved to follow his steps as an ascetic. He was buried alive in a wooden coffin in 1755 at the age of fifty-eight, after a period of ascetic training the same as the one described above for the case of Honmyǀkai (Nihomiirakenkynjgrupu, 1969: 56-58). The story of the next sokushinbutsu we are going to examine is somehow more complex and less straightforwardly apologetic that the ones outlined so far. Shinnyǀkai was a simple farmer who accidentally killed a samurai after an argument. He then fled to the Dainichi-bo, a group of ascetics settled near Yudono-san. There he was protected by the principle of extraterritoriality granted to temples in the Edo period. He resolved to become a sokushinbutsu, following the same training path of his predecessors at the Senninzawa. He finally entered the ground in a wooden coffin in 1783, at the age of 96 (Nihomiirakenkynjgrupu, 1969: 59-61). The episode that make the turning point in the life of Shinnyǀkai, the killing of the samurai, belongs to a tradition of tales called bushikoroshi, samurai-killing, in which the protagonist kills a samurai, often following false accusation or misbehaviour by the latter, and is then forced to escape from the punishment awaiting him (Naito, 1999: 222-224). This story framework is a powerful rhetoric device used to tell stories of moral redemption and exemplary loyalty and has been used for this purpose also in the case of the clearly apologetic accounts of the life of some sokushinbutsu. About the next self-mummified ascetic, Tetsumonkai (Fig. 12.1, courtesy Churenji – picture by Gaynor Sekimori), we have in fact at least two interesting, and contradictory, bushikoroshi tales. The first story tells us how the future Tetsumonkai, at the time still named Sada Tetsu, harshly rebuked two drunk samurai neglecting their duties as guards at the banks of a river near to flooding. To defend himself from their rage he eventually killed them and was then forced to flee to Churenji (Hori, 1962: 225). However, another version of the story gives us a less virtuous impression of the deeds of Sada Tetsu. He started quarrelling with two samurai about a prostitute in a pleasure quarter, eventually killing them. He then fled to Churenji were he engaged in ascetic exercise and subsequently wandered throughout northern Japan, benefiting people through

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Fig 12.1, Tetsumonkai.

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the use of his supernatural powers and herb lore. On one occasion, when he was visiting Edo, he came to know that an eye disease epidemic was spreading among the population. In order to halt the spread of the disease he took away one of his eyes and he offered it to the Yudono deities. One day, back at the Churenji, Tetsumonkai was visited by his former lover. She implored him to return to her and, as a response, he cut off his penis and offered it to the woman. She preserved the mutilated organ as a relic, and we are told that because of that her business prospered. (Naito, 1999: 230-234). The mutilated organs of Tetsumonkai are actually still preserved in the Nangakuji in Tsuruoka (Nihomiirakenkynjgrupu, 1969: 125). Tetsumonkai entered his final meditation in the year 1829 at the age of sixty-one, following the usual pattern outlined above, and then his body was enshrined at the Churenji were it is still visible nowadays. Tetsumonkai is probably the best-known sokushinbutsu in Japan, up to the point of becoming, in some cases, a sort of pop icon.6 The two remaining sokushinbutsu of the Dewa Sanzan were both inspired by the strong figure of Tetsumonkai and closely followed his steps. Enmyǀkai entered his final Samadhi in 1822, thus before Tetsumonkai (Nihomiirakenkynjgrupu, 1969: 62-63), and is remembered for his various meritorious deeds, while Tetsurynjkai, the last sokushibutsu of the Dewa Sanzan in chronological order, can be remembered as the only known case in which the process of mummification was completed by artificial means after his exhumation. He was buried alive in 1868, but when his body was exhumed, three years later, the process of mummification was not yet complete. His disciples then removed his internal organs, filling the cavity with clay and then dried the body with candle smoke and incense (Nihomiirakenkynjgrupu, 1969: 69-76). The last sokushinbutsu in Japan entered his tomb in 1903, under the name Bukkai in the city of Murakami, Niigata prefecture. His fate was however quite different from his predecessors. In 1903 the Meiji government, in its pursuit of a total modernization of the country and restoration of the imperial rule, banned all forms of “superstitious and popular belief” including the veneration of the self-mummified ascetics. Following this and a new edict prohibiting the opening of tombs, the body of Bukkai was never retrieved and it had to wait more that fifty years, when it was finally rescued by the same group of researchers who conducted an extensive survey of the mummies in the Dewa Sanzan (Matsumoto, 2002 39-44). The body of Bukkai was well preserved and, after the investigation, was finally enshrined at the Kanzeondera in Murakami. (Nihomiirakenkynjgrupu, 1969: 77-82) 6

For instance, Tetsumonkai has been portrayed in some anime (Japanese animation) as a sort of undead “monster”, and as a “final boss” in the videogame Ninja Spirit.

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A far greater number of people are however missing from this necessarily brief list of self-mummified ascetics in the Dewa Sanzan area. They are all those people who tried the same pattern of self-mummification, endured the same harsh austerities in the Senninzawa, but eventually failed to preserve their bodies from decay. Their names and their deeds are now forgotten, and their remains lie probably around the Senninzawa, hastily buried by their followers to pacify a potentially dangerous wandering spirit (Blacker, 1999: 89). They were considered merely “dead”, while the other successful people became “Buddhas in their own bodies”. For this reason in the previous description of the various sokushinbutsu I voluntarily avoided to use the term death, to indicate the passing away of the practitioner after having being buried alive, preferring instead to utilise terms more proper to that tradition, like eternal samƗdhi, final meditation, etc. It would be way too easy to object that those people are indeed dead, and that the fact that they are still celebrated as living is merely a matter of religious belief, or worst, of popular superstition. The conceptual doctrinal framework lying behind their extreme choice is instead very complex and refined, and, through a different understanding and cosmological conception of the entity “body”, it can challenge our very idea of clear-cut distinction between the living and the dead, spirit and matter. In order to undertake this analysis, let us first take a brief look at the principal characteristics of the sokushinbutsu visà-vis more “traditional” ideas about mummification.

Mummies vs. Sokushinbuts: The Different Meanings of the Preserved Body All over the world there are abundant examples of preserved human bodies, many dating from very distant ages. Many of them were preserved simply by favourable physical conditions, i.e. dryness of the climate, absence of air or bacteria in the surrounding environment and so forth. In this case we may assume that the process of preservation was not intentional, since no particular precautions were taken to safeguard the integrity of the body, and the fact that it eventually turned into a mummy can be attributed to mere chance. The majority of mummies we can think about in the various cultures of the world can however be considered “man-made mummies”, namely corpses that underwent extensive, and in many case complex and refined treatments, aimed to prevent their natural decay (David, 2000: 162-170). From a very broad point of view they present at least one or more of the following characteristics (cf. Naito, 1999: 10-16):

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x

x

Internal manipulation: organs may be removed and/or substituted with filling materials. Objects may be placed inside the body because of their alleged power to prevent decay. External manipulation: the body may be dried, smoked, lacquered, salted, put in wooden resins or any other preserving material. The skin may be treated with paints, oils, essences and other substances in order to maintain its elasticity and avoid decay. Accessorial manipulations: the body may be wrapped in bondages made of fabric, leaves, straws etc. It may wear a suit or garments with alleged preserving proprieties. It may be contained in airtight vessels aimed at protecting it from natural elements. Talismans with preserving powers may accompany the body. Appropriate location: the body is buried in a place that can offer protection from decay, i.e. an extremely cold or dry location.

None of these points seems however to be applicable in full to the sokushinbutsu case (cf. Hori 1962: 226-227): x x

x x

No trace of internal manipulation, organs are still in place, with Tetsurynjkai being the only notable exception. Most of the sokushinbutsu were dried, as we have seen, using smoke and incense. However, it must be remembered that this took place only after their exhumation, namely after the process of self-mummification was already completed. The bodies had no traces of accessorial manipulations; as from the sources, the aspiring sokushinbutsu entered their last abode only wearing their priestly robes, with no special devices or attire. The “tomb” of the sokushinbutsu was generally small stone or wooden cubicles built in the ground, with no particular devices that may help bodily preservation. In some cases we are told that a bamboo pipe was placed through the upper part of the coffin in order to allow the ascetic to breathe. In my opinion, however, this could have not achieved the desired effect since the coffin should have been quickly saturated with carbon dioxide, which is heavier than air and then cannot escape from a pipe placed upwards.

It is then evident that the case of the sokushinbutsu represents a peculiarity in the phenomenon of what we may call post-mortem preservation of bodies. They represent a unique case also from the more restricted point of view of Buddhism and Buddhist mummies in general. In East Asia, from China to Vietnam to Taiwan, we have in fact a considerable number of Buddhist mummies, which often represent the main

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object of veneration of the temple in which they are enshrined.7 Indeed, the fact that a master explicitly manifested his will to be mummified after death was not unusual. As Sharf points out, at least two leading facts were supporting the idea that mummification was the most suitable destiny for the body of a great master (Sharf, 1992: 7-12). First, from a merely theoretical point of view, the fact that the body remained intact even for years after the master’s death was a clear sign of his spiritual achievements. As we are told in the case of the Tantric master SubhƗkarasimha, for instance, who died in 735 and was buried only five years after, his body was so “imbued of meditation and wisdom” that it did not suffer decay for five years after his death (Sharf, 1992: 9). Secondly, following this, these statements were also functional in demonstrating the legitimacy and prestige of a certain temple or school and, in this, economic reasons where not a secondary issue. Temples in fact often benefited from official and private support in relation to the popularity of their masters. In the case that, after the master’s death, no disciple with comparable charisma took his place, the institution was often doomed to an unavoidable decline. Thus, preserving the presence (notably the physical presence) of the master in the temple was an efficacious way of safeguarding the continuity of the temple’s interests, transforming the body of the deceased master into a powerful icon. Chinese Buddhist mummies generally underwent extensive and sophisticated external and internal treatments to ensure preservation and to enhance their appearance. The processes of lacquering, and even gilding, enacted on the remains were very time- and resource-consuming activities, and often represented also a considerable expense for the institution involved. In no case, however, is the fact that the person is definitely deceased put into question. We have in fact detailed manuals regarding the mummification process and subsequent enshrinement of a deceased master, which include extensive funeral and ritual procedure, often dotted by accounts of contacts between the monks working at the mummification and the spirit of the dead himself (Sharf, 1992: 17-20). Also in this regard, then, the case of the Japanese sokushinbutsu seems to stand out for its peculiarity: it is not a process of preservation of a dead body, but a technique to “suspend” life, gaining an imperishable body and then remaining in an intermediate state between life and death indefinitely. The practitioner who successfully “survived” this extreme ascetic exercise had a clear theoretical and cosmological picture in mind to sustain their effort that can help us to paint a different picture for the “future of the body” vis-à-vis the western “materialistic” idea of the human organism for which death and decay seem to be the only possible doom. In order to undertake this comparison, let us 7

For a comprehensive overview of mummification practices in East Asia see Nihomiirakenkynjgrupu, 1993.

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first take a brief look at our understanding of the body and its theoretical background.

Judeo-Christian Antagonistic Dualism? From a religious point of view, at a first glance the clear-cut dualistic and antagonistic stance between body and spirit is generally advocated in Christian culture and its alleged dualism between body and soul, material and spiritual. I would like to point out how the structure of this dualism and its relationship to asceticism is, however, much more complex. Simply saying that western Christianity resolved the relationship between body and soul stating the primacy of the latter and forgetting the former would represent a major mistake. And an even bigger mistake will be to think that the dualistic perception between matter/body and spirit/soul has its root in Christian thought alone. Moreover, if we try to understand the figure of the ascetic practitioner merely using these conceptual means, the only result we can obtain is to construct the figure of a religious person aimed at nothing but a complete and destructive self-denial. Let us think for a moment of the following definitions of asceticism: from the Greek ȐıțȘıȚȢ meaning “self-denial”. The view, which has been an important theme of both Eastern and western religion and has played a minor role in philosophy, that the body is to be denied, possibly mortified, in order to make possible the purification of the soul in its progress toward salvation (Reese, 1980: 34).

And: a variety of austere practices involving the renunciation or denial of ordinary bodily and sensual gratifications. These may include fasting, meditation, a life of solitude, the renunciation of possession, denial of sexual gratification, and, in the extreme, the mortification of the flesh (Crystal, 1990: 75).

These two examples come from two widely diffused encyclopaedic works about religion and more general fields of knowledge. Nonetheless, in my opinion, they are both undermined by the same shortcoming affecting our general perception about the human body as well. In both cases it is taken for granted that asceticism means, above all, the negation of the body as a whole. However, in both definitions the original meaning of the word ȐıțȘıȚȢ itself seems to be forgotten. DZıțȘıȚȢ means indeed “training” and more specifically “physical training”. It was in fact originally used for in reference to the athletes

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exercising themselves for the Olympic games of ancient Greece (Morford, 2002: 7 and 206). The term was employed, in the religious environment of the first centuries A.D., with a wide set of nuances, among which just few exceptions may be referred to as complete self denial. What is true however is that those practices were projected onto a pre-existing well-consolidated background of dualism between body and soul. However, body/soul, matter/spirit dualisms alone cannot necessarily justify the idea that a deeply religiously committed person must deny his physicality as a whole, in order to obtain spiritual benefit. The problem of this sharp dualism between body-soul arises, well before Christianity, in Judaism and is reflected in their strict normative law, developed mostly to prevent bodily pollution (See Leviticus 13).8 It is interesting to notice how many sources of pollution come from the human body itself, like menstrual blood or the contact with a corpse (Brown, 1990: 36). But also the Biblical view is not free from contradictions. Body and flesh are treated like synonyms throughout the Old Testament and their meaning widely changes, from the long series of prohibitions of Leviticus (13 and 14) and Numbers up to the Psalms, where interestingly the body is often portrayed as the inseparable companion of the soul.9 The frequent juxtaposition of the two terms “body and soul” is indeed remarkable. As I see it, they are meant to express the harmonic wholeness of the human being rather than its irreconcilable duality. The Old Testament weaves between these uncertain definitions of the human body - of the flesh - from impure hindrance to exalted object. One thing seems to be clear, however: the body is an integrated component of what we call “the human being”, not an accessory object. It would be very difficult to affirm that Judaism promoted the total negation of the body for the sake of the soul. Throughout the Old Testament the body is instead portrayed as a precious object, an object deserving to be kept clean, pure. It must be nurtured for the

8

All the quotations from the Bible are from the King James Version. Genesis 9: 17, “God said to Noah, ‘This is the sign of the covenant which I have established between me and all flesh that is upon the earth.’” Numbers 19: 13, “whoever touches a dead person, the body of any man who has died, and does not cleanse himself, defiles the tabernacle of the Lord, and that person shall be cut off from Israel; because the water for impurity was not thrown upon him, he shall be unclean; his uncleanness is still on him.” Psalms 16: 9, “therefore my heart is glad, and my soul rejoices; my body also dwells secure.” Psalms 31: 9, “be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am in distress; my eye is wasted from grief, my soul and my body also.” Proverbs 16: 24, “pleasant words are like a honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the body.” 9

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sake of the soul, not negated. It is indeed the body that bears the irrevocable sign of the alliance between man and God in the circumcision.10 The major shift that we can find in Christianity about the issue of the human body, if we compare it with the Old Testament biblical background, is the problem of defining the human nature of Christ. Human nature in this case means that a distinctive characteristic of Christ was the fact that he possessed a true human body. The body of Christ is the vehicle of salvation, the redeeming passion being possible only through his physical suffering and death. Christ’s body is also an exalted body. It is resurrected, perfected and, in its radical physicality a sort of ontological bridge between the present world and the kingdom to come. The mystical unity of the Church is, therefore, represented by the participation of the believers in the mystical body of Christ: “[He] will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power which enables him even to subject all things to himself” (Philippians 3: 21). Christianity thus undertakes apparently the effort to exalt the human body onto a higher dimension. In the Acts of Paul, the apparent desire for the complete negation of one’s physical dimension does not arise from Paul’s desire for the negation of the human body, but from his quest for its exaltation from mere matter to the spiritual body of perfection. Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, and make holiness perfect in the fear of God (2 Corinthians 7: 1). As it is my eager expectation and hope that I shall not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now as always Christ will be honoured in my body, whether by life or by death (Philippians 1: 20).

Paul’s claim, “wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”(Romans 7: 24) does not express his will of annihilation but the labour enacted to make his body the perfect temple for the perfect soul.11 What I want to point out here is that the idea of body and soul as two antagonist entities, forever stuck in an irreconcilable fight, was not the basic position of both Hebraism and Christianity. We shall not forget, in fact, that in the Genesis God created the body as perfect and only the sin of man corrupted that perfection. The word Redemption, in fact, comes from the Latin redemptio, which literally means “to buy back”. The journey to the new world of the 10

Genesis 17: 11, “you shall be circumcised in the flesh of your foreskins, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you.” 11 1 Corinthians 6: 19, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God? You are not your own.”

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Kingdom to come is also a journey backward, the restoration of the original perfection of the work of God.12 The relationships between body and soul shifted sharply in favour of the latter only many centuries later, a shift that was triggered mostly by a radical change in the understanding of the entity “body” itself.

The Shortcomings of Modernity The idea that instinctively comes to the mind of modern men and women when they think about the “human body” is something resembling a picture in a medicine book. Modern medical science heavily redefined our view of our own bodies in the attempt to provide an effective response on what has been for centuries the major bodily problem known by men: disease. As Foucault expresses it: “the human body defines, by natural right, the space of origin and of distribution of disease” (Foucault, 1973: 3). Enlightenment scientist and medical doctors fought a battle “against what they saw as the ignorance and superstition of both the entrenched politico-religious establishment and folk traditions” and eventually won (Loundon, 1997: 86). Starting from the seventeenth century, medical sciences became more and more identified with the sciences of the body par excellence, while philosophy, literature, and also religion had to give up their theories about bodily physiology because apparently unable to compete with the new kind of “scientific” knowledge. It is at that point in history that the perception of the human body turned into what it is now: the body as an organism, a fleshy machine deserving a range of studies comparable more to mechanics than to philosophy. When the human body was dissected, analysed and recorded in the first attempts of practical pathological anatomy its downfall from the temple of the spirit to a mere thing was complete (Foucault, 1973: 124). The body stopped being that magical thing moulded from the shape of the Creator and became a simple host for the much higher value of the human mind. For our study this means also that, since then, any effort to use the body for spiritual exaltation became nonsense, the effort of the self-mummified Buddha came close to the desperate attempts of the lunatic, as we have seen in the “modern” Meiji edicts. The immediate perception of modern men and women in front of the image of the ascetic practitioners of all places and times, from the solitary stylites to the excesses of the Indian aghorƯ, seem to be nothing but a mere act of senseless violence toward our physical constituency, a physicality having the supreme purpose of upholding the existence of our mind or spirit in this world (Raveri, 1984: 184-189). The Enlightenment primacy of mind over 12

1 Corinthians 6: 20, “You were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.”

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body transformed the relationship between these two terms in a one-way relationship. It is the body that can benefit from the mind’s deeds, particularly in the case of modern medicine, but not the opposite. The sense of repulsion and marvel in front of the ascetic effort derives from this medical-scientific stance toward the human body and not from an allegedly innate disregard of the body embedded in the Judeo-Christian culture. As we have seen. Judaism and Christianity maintained body and soul as two clearly separate entities and, although they clearly pointed out the primacy of the latter, they never tried to conceive the idea of a “human being” without the presence of the “human body” - Gnosticism being perhaps the only notable exception. This would have been impossible in a cultural-religious environment in which the body was still believed to be that “magical” thing shaped by the hands of God. Disregard toward the body would have been represented a massive negation of the goodness of creation as a whole. The times when the self-mummified ascetics lived and strived for immortality, the Edo period, is, perhaps too easily, identified as the pre-modern period of Japanese history. For us this means that for them, at that time, the human body was still that “magical thing” moved by mystical forces that we were going to forget only a few centuries later. Yet, sophisticated cosmological and ontological theories supported their quest for immortality, and this is what we are going to examine closely in the following section.

Theoretical Background: What Does it Mean to be “a Buddha in One’s Very Body” The idea of the human body as a possible “tool” that can be employed for spiritual empowerment underlies the disciplines of many East Asian religious practitioners, from the Indian sadhus and pratyekabuddhas, up to the Chinese Taoist ascetics and, of course, Japanese self-mummified ascetics, although the relative cultural-religious background may differ. A considerable portion of the Vinaya, for instance, treats bodily issues, in which food, sexual and appropriate social behaviour are clearly fundamental for the regulation of the life of monks in TheravƗda Buddhism.13 This 13

Vinaya (1881: 4), “whatsoever Bhikkhu who has taken upon himself the Bhikkhus' system of self-training and rule of life, and has not thereafter withdrawn from the training, or declared his weakness, shall have carnal knowledge of any one, down even to an animal, he has fallen into defeat, he is no longer in communion” (PƗrƗgika 1). “Whatsoever Bhikkhu, being degraded, shall, with perverted mind, come into bodily contact with a woman, by taking hold of her hand, or by taking hold of her hair, or by touching any part of her body, that is a SamghƗdisesa [serious fault entailing a meeting of the monk’s community]” (SamghƗdisesa 2).

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discipline, although strict at times, was meant to aid the use of the body in the correct way, and certainly not to neglect it for good. A number of well-known accounts from the life of the Buddha seems in fact to be inspired by the desire to find a sort of middle way between two excesses: the sensual life of pleasures of the young prince SiddhƗrtha in his palace and the harsh austerities of the first part of the life of the Buddha as a wandering Ğramana. These two opposites in the life of the Buddha are obviously strongly connected with the physical condition of his body. They mark the two opposites that should be avoided by the genuine truth seeker: blind enjoyment of bodily pleasures from one side and blind negation of one’s body value on the other. Again, the role of religious practice is not to destroy the body but to trim it properly in order to make it the perfect vehicle for salvation. In the words of the Vinaya, “devotion to indulgence of pleasure in the objects of sense is inferior, low, vulgar, ignoble and leads to no good” and at the same time, “devotion to self-torment is painful, ignoble and leads to no good” (Vinaya, 1881: 1, 10). As I see it, the attitude of TheravƗda Buddhism toward the human body, expressed via the Vinaya rules, represents also the attempt of re-constructing the social significance of the practitioner by redefining the role of his body. The body is in fact first “desocialised” through the privation of its fundamental physical needs - food, sexual intercourse, shelter - and then re-constructed in the parallel but distinct social environment of the Sangha: a perfect body for the perfect collective body of the monastic community (Collins, 1997: 202-203). The MahƗyƗna expanded this theme on a more universal scale: at a first glance, as in the TheravƗda, a consistent number of verses throughout MahƗyƗna literature seem to openly denounce the weakness and the burden of the human body. This is an example from the Vimalakirti NirdeĞa14: Friends, this body is so impermanent, fragile, unworthy of confidence, and feeble. It is so insubstantial, perishable, short-lived, painful, filled with diseases, and subject to changes. Thus, my friends, as this body is only a vessel of many sicknesses, wise men do not rely on it (Vimalakirti NirdeĞa, 1 – Thurman, 1976: 21).

But few lines after, in the same Vimalakirti NirdeĞa we also have that: Therefore, such a body should repulse you. You should despair of it and should arouse your admiration for the body of the TathƗgata… Friends, the body of a TathƗgata is the body of Dharma, born of gnosis. The body of a TathƗgata is born of the stores of merit and wisdom. It is born of

14

All the quotations of the Vimalakirti NirdeĞa are from Thurman (1976).

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Following the TrikƗya doctrine, the MahƗyƗna constructed what we may define as a new form of “reconcilable duality” between two different dimensions of the same body: the material ad the sacred, the “vessel of many sickness” and the body “of merit and wisdom”. 15 The body is thus reconsidered under its potential to become the perfect expression of the DharmakƗya. In the same way it may also become the utmost and most precious offering. The passage of the Lotus Sutra about the Bodhisattva Medicine King is, in my opinion, inspired by the tension that the exaltation of one’s body conversely makes the capacity of a voluntary renunciation of it as the highest possible merit: Though by resort to supernatural power I have made an offering to the Buddha, it is not as if I made an offering of my own body. Straightway then he applied [to his body] various scents… and then burnt his own body (Lotus Sutra, 23 – Kumarajiva (Hurvitz) : 295). 16

The example of the Bodhisattva Medicine King fostered a number of selfsacrificing ascetics, particularly in China. Various evidence proves that their biographies were well distributed and widely read and that they were regarded as the utmost example of the exaltation of the Dharma, despite some criticism by Confucians and Daoists (Kieschnick, 1997: 12, 46 and 124). The leap forward of MahƗyƗna thought is made possible by the presence of a universal body in which the two dimensions of the material and the sacred can mingle into their final perfection, namely the TathƗgata body, the body of the Budhha, as understood by the TrikƗya doctrine. The religious effort, and particularly the ascetic effort, became in this context directed toward a completely different direction: the ascetic practitioner is not anymore the “properly behaving” dedicated man, but it is a man who, through his body, enacted a redefinition of his own ontological constituency.

15

The doctrine of the three Buddha bodies: dharmakƗya sambhogakƗya and nirmƗnakƗya representing respectively the Buddha nature that dwells in itself, the Buddha in his soteriological action (preaching the Dharma) and the Buddha manifested through his acts. The three bodies are distinct but the same time completely identified in each other. 16 The bodhisattva called “Medicine King” is portrayed in the Lotus Sutra as the supreme example of offering. In a passage he offers his own body to the Buddha, burning it like an incense stick. The Buddha praises this offer as the greatest offering, possibly indicating it as an exemplar to the whole of the bodhisattvas.

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This discourse reached its highest grade of sophistication in Japanese Buddhism, precisely in the “attainment of Buddhahood in this very body” (sokushin-jǀbutsu) which worked as the main theoretical support for the efforts of the self-mummified ascetics themselves. The sokushin-jǀbutsu, although generally considered to be as the prerogative of the Shingon esoteric school, is indeed diffused throughout all Japanese Buddhism. A clear explanation of its doctrinal base is offered by Knjkai’s interpretation of the TrikƗya doctrine. In Knjkai’s thought, the totality of the Buddha-body in its absolute aspect – the DharmakƗya - is seen in the four manifestations of MahƗvairocana (Jp. Dainichi, the “universal Buddha”) corresponding to the four mandalas. In terms of the four kinds of mandalas, the universe is identified, first of all, with the MahƗ-mandala and various phenomenal existences can be considered emanating from the original body of MahƗvairocana. Secondly, the universe can be seen as a manifestation of his intentions, represented by the various objects held by the deities in the mandala, such as swords, ropes, arrows, jewels, etc. In this sense, the universe is identified in the Samaya-mandala. Thirdly, the universe is a selfmanifestation of Dharma, and each phenomenal existence is identified in one of the letter (Sanskrit syllables) of the Dharma. Hence, the whole universe is a Dharma-mandala. Finally, the universe is also constituted by the actions of the deities emanating from Mahavariocana, identified in the Karma-Mandala (see Yoshitake, 1965: I, 512 and Yoshito, 1972: 90). Thus, the perception of the universe in everyday life may be represented by this cosmological picture: the MahƗ-mandala representing the sentient beings, the Samaya-mandala representing the environment and the non-sentient, the Dharma-mandala representing rules and precepts and the Karma-mandala representing the TathƗgata salvific activities in the world. This mandalic system should not be intended just as a symbolical representation of the TathƗgata, but as the true nature of all phenomena, because in the MahƗvairocana sutra itself it is stated that the TathƗgata has three secret bodies: ji (written signs), in (seals, mudrƗ) and gyǀzǀ (images). Knjkai relates them respectively to the Dharma-mandala, the Samaya mandala and the MahƗmandala. The Karma-mandala is thus the result of the actions of the three bodies. In the case of the MahƗ-mandala we have MahƗvariocana and the other deities represented in their bodily forms, which matches the sentient beings in their bodily forms as well. Being all the mandalas and bodies, in Knjkai’s words, “inseparably related to one other” it follows that “in any of these four the remaining three are present” (Yoshitake, 1965: III, 402). This then implies that through our bodily dimension is possible to interact with all the remaining dimensions that constitute reality.

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Among the specific practices related to body, speech and mind, in fact, Knjkai points out that the practice of the body is the performance of mnjdras.17 Being the bodies of MahƗvariocana, both distinct but also “inseparably related to one other”, when the practitioner performs the correct sequence of mnjdras, his bodily gestures, and by extension his body as a whole, is identified with MahƗvariocana in its wholeness. Trough the use of his body he can thus become a sokushinbutsu, a “Buddha in his very body”. This notion of sokushin-jǀbutsu underlies more or less explicitly most of the ascetic practices still alive in Japan. The general concept expressed by most of the practitioners, as we can read in many of their biographies, sounds in fact like “while doing this I am a Buddha” (Yamada, 1988: 97). This complex theory, aimed firstly at the identification of the practitioner with MahƗvariocana, provided also a strong doctrinal and theoretical justification for the deeds of the ascetics in attempting to reach ultimate enlightenment by preserving their body for eternity. To what we have said so far we can add also add at least two important “historical” precedents that were understood as the ideal models for the aspiring sokushinbutsu. The oldest of these precedents is also the most mythical in content. The Miroku Geshǀkyǀ (The Sutra of Maitreya’s descent), is a “prophetic” sutra foretelling us the deeds of Maitreya, the Buddha that will be born in the future. In this sutra we are told that, in order to properly greet the future Buddha, ĝƗkyamuni Buddha asked his disciple MahƗkƗĞyapa not to enter nirvƗna immediately (thus reaching complete “extinction” and abandoning forever the cycle of death and rebirth) but to wait for the coming of the future Buddha to offer him a robe, as a sign of praise. When Maitreya comes to this world, the sutra foretells us, he will crack open the Vulture Peak, revealing MahƗkƗĞyapa still in deep meditation in its depths. MahƗkƗĞyapa will subsequently be awakened by BrahmƗ and then he will fulfil his duty, offering the robe entrusted to him by ĝƗkyamuni to the new Buddha. Supporting this as an historical fact, Faxian, in 399, testifies to having seen MahƗkƗĞyapa in deep meditation in Mount KukkuttapƗdagiri in India (Sponberg and Hardacre, 1990). Centuries later, in 835, the life of the Japan’s greatest esoteric master, Knjkai, was coming to an end. We are told that, perhaps inspired by the figure MahƗkƗĞyapa, he stopped eating and drinking, and on the twenty first day of the third month he entered “eternal samhƗdi” to wait for the coming of Maitreya. Confirming this belief, his body was not cremated as usual, but put in a cave in the eastern peak of mount Kǀya. The legend of his immortality is 17

Magical postures of the hands, usually performed in conjunction with the utterance of dharanis (magical utterances) or the recitation of sutras.

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testified in numerous sources: from the Konjaku Monogatari (Tales of a Time That Is Now Past, compiled c. 1120) to the Heike Monogatari (Tales of the Taira Family, compiled in 1371) we have numerous examples of people visiting Knjkai’s last abode and tonsuring his hair, changing his robe, repairing his rosary or simply marvelling at the perfect state of preservation of his body.18 It is beyond doubt that Knjkai constituted the ideal example for the sokushinbutsu of the Dewa Sanzan, and this is attested clearly by the fact that the character kai of Knjkai is utilised in all their names: Honmyǀkai, Chnjkai, Shinnyǀkai, Tetsumonkai, Enmyǀkai, Tetsurynjkai and Bukkai. Together with the legend and teaching of Knjkai we can then assume that all the practitioners that succeeded in pursuing the sokushinbutsu path were aware of the doctrinal and theoretical background elaborated by Knjkai himself. Understanding their efforts just as a form of popular practice pertaining to a lower or “popular” form of Buddhism would then represent a major error, one frequent in some scholarship still attracted to the very romantic idea of Buddhism influenced by a Zen rhetoric that we have seen instead completely ignored in the reality of the mummified master of the Chan (Zen) school in China. The path of the sokushinbutsu towards immortality was indeed considered a refined exercise of high ascesis and the living incarnation of some of the most powerful Buddhist teachings. The incorruptibility of their bodies was an unequivocal sign of their spiritual achievements, becoming a “living” incarnation of the non-duality of Buddhahood. At the same time, resolving the dichotomy between the “spiritual” and the “material”, the “sacred” and the “secular” seems to put into a quandary also the idea of separation of the “individual” from his environment, the “one” from the “all”. Examining how the example of the sokushinbutsu may help us to broaden our views about these fundamental oppositions is the object of the final part of this paper.

Body and Society If we want to take a closer look at the social role of the human body, vis-à-vis our case study regarding the sokushinbutsu, it is clear that the most basic interaction of a human being with the society or community surrounding him has at its very basic level the need for the presence of a body. By its mere physical presence, the body performs the basic function of affirming one’s existence. Other manifestations of the self must rely instead on what we can generally define as “performances”. Speaking, moving, shouting, any 18

The Buddhist rosary (juzu), generally constituted by 108 grains, can also be seen in the hands of all the sokushinbutsu.

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phenomenon that may show our presence as individuals to a possible “other”, necessarily passes through what, in the most general way, may be defined as an “act” or its results. The body, in this case, seems to be the only notable exception. We can recognise in fact the existence of the other by simply looking at his body, without any need of other performances to prove its substantiality Having said this, we can however try to think about this feature of the body as a sort of performance as well. The social function performed by the body is first of all to visually and physically discriminate the single entities that eventually form the group or the society at large. This form of discrimination is apparently perfectly defined between the single beings themselves (no middle point or series of infinitesimal points exists between two entities, between two bodies), as well as no liminal or superimposed space exists between the entities and their environment (the body is instinctively seen as something different from the environment in which it is acting). I would like to say that the body is generally supposed to be “impermeable” in normal conditions. Impermeable because it acts as an “ontological barrier” for the soul, constituting then an isolated system allowing no “spiritual” exchanges with what is external to it. The creation of the body in Genesis, for instance, resembles in fact, for all means and purposes, the creation of a perfect vessel for the soul. It is made of clay, shaped by the hands of God to contain the spirit of the first man. So, the body as “temple of the spirit” performs its basic discriminating function in virtue of its simple ontological constituency. It does what it does because it is what it is. However, body and soul not always seems to follow the same path. The body is corruptible, not just by age, labour or diseases but it is a source of corruption because is the vehicle of sensual pleasures and desires. The corruption of the body due to its desires seems to affect in some ways also the soul residing in it. Although the soul in itself is not supposed to be susceptible for the desire of food, drink or sexual pleasure, through the mediation of the body it can indeed experience gluttony, drunkenness and lust. The major hindrances that our body places on the activity of the soul are represented mostly by its wide variety of desires. It is not surprising that, the body being a material thing, all its desires must be material as well. As we have seen, the code of rules of the Vinaya regarding the body was specifically aimed to disrupt the natural cravings of our bodies: to the desire for food is opposed the practice of fasting, to the desire for sex is opposed extreme sexual continence, etc. On the other hand, it may be worth to considering that society can also be understood as the will to satisfy and discipline those same needs. Money and the economic system are born in order to regularise the basic supplies for everyday living, the family started taking shape as a sort of regulation of the sexual impulse and then became a sort of standardised archetype for the relationship

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between man and women (Kirkpatrick, 1955: 4 and ff.). By and large we may say thus that society formed as a solution to the practical needs of human beings, most of them physical needs. It is almost automatic that a person capable of withdrawing completely from those basic needs may find himself as an outsider from the civil community as a whole. An unmarried, non-producing, non-consuming person is easily relegated into the ranks of marginality, bearing negligible or no impact on society itself. The examples of self-mummified ascetics we have examined so far seem to pertain to this kind of “desocialised” category of human being. One may then be so misled as to classify the sokushinbutsu as a marginal figure that voluntarily rejected society in order to live in a parallel world of his own. As we have seen, instead, the evidence we can produce about the life of these people seems to put this affirmation in question. The relationships between the immortal bodies of these “solitary” ascetics show a variety of rich patterns of interactions with their respective local communities and society at large. Indeed, in my opinion “interaction” is an inherent characteristic of the body itself. Regarding this last point I would like, as final argument, to briefly introduce the theoretical framework that De Certeau develops in his work, La fable mystique, in order to show the various possible interactions levels between the human body, human society and space at large and how they can be understood as inherent characteristics deriving from the mere ontology of the body itself. De Certeau sets the body as central inside a triangular scheme that represents its possible forms of interactions (De Certeau, 1982: 101) (fig. 12.2). Among the “social practices” is possible to distinguish three basic elements: communication as the basic content of the social practices, the relationship (in its general meaning) as its constitutive unit, the sociality as its function, and the place as its reference (De Certeau, 1982: 101). Because of this, this scheme contains also the basic arguments for a discourse of constructive interaction between the body and the space. By constructive interaction I mean that whilst the body of the sokushinbutsu resides in space, in a place, at the same time it defines that same place. Space is not included in events, which have as their reference time, nor in symbols having as their reference truth (De Certeau, 1982: 101). In other words, in the first two vertices of the triangle the body is taken in account as an absolute (it does not need a reference to be understood), but in the third (the social practices) the conceptualisation of the body is necessarily a relative one. Communications, relations and sociality, presuppose in fact some kind of interaction between different entities that is true just in the case when they share, even for a moment, a common spatial dimension. Also in our case then, we can consider that the sokushinbutsu cannot be understood as a “body absolute”, because it affects the space around him, namely by redefining

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the space from secular to sacred, and, at the same time his body cannot be understood as sacred without the presence of the secular.

Events

The Body Symbolic Discourse

Social Practices

Fig. 12.2. De Certeau’s scheme of the body, below, 12.3, sacred space Having in mind this kind of relationship, and using a triangular scheme similar to De Certeau’s, we can then interpret the “sacred space” as born from the coexistence of three factors; the sacred body: the body of the practitioner that he sacralised during the ascetic training, the actual space: the area in which the practice takes place, in our case, the Senninzawa, the symbolic space: the mountain area of the Dewa Sanzan as sacred site, like a geographic mandala. This could be represented as follows:

The Sacred

The Sacred Space Figure 3 – The

Symbolic Space

Actual Space

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As we have said, the body of the ascetic - the sacred body - cannot be intended as a “body absolute”, because it presupposes a relationship with space. The effort of ascetic practitioners requires space in order to be carried on, and the same time it affects space. The performative power of the body of a sokushinbutsu, consists exactly in this power to extend the locus of the sacred from the sacred body to the surrounding space, and this is achieved by its mere physical presence. Through the presence of the sacred body the extraordinary encounters the ordinary, and the two dimensions mingle becoming meaningful for each other. All the practical and theoretical issues presented, thus, seem to go sharply against our instinctive perception of the ascetic practitioner as a marginal figure. There seems indeed to be some kind of mutual dependence between those holy man of pre-modern times and places and their reference context, and that dependence seems to counter the traditional position that sees the ascetic as an isolated figure, doing something non-essential that, in the end will benefit just himself. Even the unmovable, eternal bodies of the self-mummified ascetics we encountered so far perform indeed a role for the society from which they sprung out by creating areas of sacred space inside the secular world; they have “their place”, and this figurative place is occupied by the holy physicality of their bodies, bodies of the past incessantly indicating the future.

Glossary of Japanese and Buddhist terms AghorƯ: Indian ascetic performing forms of extreme asceticism born as a branch of the Kapalika ĝiva worshipers in the fourteenth century. AghorƯ are known for using a human skull as their bowl and for practicing necrophagy and even self-cannibalism. Dewa Sanzan: mountain area of the Yamagata Prefecture characterised by the presence of three sacred mountains, Haguro-san, Gas-san and Yudono-san, home of the Shugendǀ mountain ascetics. Dharma: “the way” or “the law” in all major Indian religions. Here it is meant mainly as Buddha-Dharma (Jp. buppǀ) the “Way of the Buddha” (the Buddhist doctrine). Edo period (Edo-jidai, 1603-1867): Premodern period of Japan ruled by the military government (bakufu) of the Tokugawa samurai clan. Faxian: (337? - 422?) a Chinese Buddhist monk and pilgrim, who, between 399 and 412 travelled to India to collect Buddhist scriptures and visit important Buddhist sites. Kǀya-san: mountain located in Wakayama prefecture, headquarter of the Shingon school of Japanese Buddhism. The temple complex was founded by Knjkai in 819.

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Knjkai (774–835): the founder of the Shingon-shnj, the main Japanese school of esoteric Buddhism. MahƗvairocana (Jp. Dainichi-nyorai): the embodiment of the DharmakƗya the “truth body” of the Buddha, the Buddha in its universal aspect. All the historical Buddhas, like ĝƗkyamuni, are “emanated” from him. MahƗyƗna Buddhism (Jp. Daijǀ): the Great Vehicle, the largest of the two main branches of Buddhism, the other being the TheravƗda. MahƗyƗna originated in northern India and spread to China during the first century CE and then throughout Asia. Most of the original MahƗyƗna canon was written in Sanskrit, now surviving mostly in Chinese translations. The vast majority of Japanese Buddhist schools belong to this branch. Maitreya (Jp. Miroku): the Buddha that will be born in the distant future. Mandala (Jp. Mandara): pictorial representation of cosmological, ontological and mystical concepts. Buddhist mandalas are generally constituted by the taxonomical representation of Buddhas and deities in a symmetrical manner. It is often used as an object of meditation or visualization in Buddhist esoteric practices. Knjkai’s fourfold mandala system is constituted by: a) The daimandara (MahƗ-mandala, the great mandala) in which MahƗvairocana is seen in his physical extension. b) The samaya mandara (Samaya-mandala ) representing the omnipresence of MahƗvairocana’s intention (samaya). c) The hǀ mandara (Dharma-mandala) representing MahƗvairocana’s preaching of the Dharma. d) The katsuma mandara (Karma-mandala) representing the activities, actions, of MahƗvairocana Meiji period (Meiji-jidai, 1868-1912): the period under the reign of Emperor Meiji. In this period Japan begun its modernization and industrialization. Mokujiki: lit. “eating trees/wood”, A fasting practice involving the complete abstinence from all cereals, meat, cooked vegetables etc. and advocating instead the consumption of tree bark, chestnuts, acorns, pine needles and sometime crystals or stones. It is based on the assumption that if the ascetic will consume “unperishable” food, such as wood or stones, his body will become unperishable as well. This technique, widely employed by the selfmummified ascetics, was probably developed inside Chinese Daoism. Nenbutsu: the repetition of the formula “Namu Amida Butsu” (Praise to the Buddha Amida) often for hundreds and even thousands of times, in order to achieve rebirth into the Western Paradise. Nynjjǀ: “entering deep meditation”; a term often used as a euphemism to indicate the death of a Buddhist master. In the case of the self-mummified ascetics it indicates the moment in which they entered their tomb alive.

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Pratyekabuddha: “a Buddha only for himself”; the term indicates those Buddhist practitioner who were able to reach enlightenment on their own but are incapable to teach others. The term is often understood in MahƗyƗna as indicating a “lesser” kind of Buddha. Sadhu: in Hinduism a renouncer or practitioner of yoga dedicated to achieving moksha (liberation) through meditation and contemplation. SamhƗdi (Jp. zanmai): meditation. Sokushinbutsu: “a Buddha in his very body”, a person who achieved enlightenment in his lifetime. A living Buddha. The term is not used uniquely for the self mummified ascetics, but it is often employed to indicate other ascetic practitioners as well. Sokushin-jǀbutsu, the process of becoming a Buddha during one’s lifetime. Becoming a sokushinbutsu. ĝramana: wandering ascetics of ancient India (since c.a. fifth century BC), performing severe austerities and pursuing a path of salvation outside the traditional Vedic texts. Stylites: ascetics of the early Christianity (fifth century AD) that retired on the top of an abandoned pillar (stylos) meditating and fasting. The most famous of them is probably Simeon Stylites who retired on the top of his pillar in 423 and remained there for 37 years. Snjtra (Jp. Kyǀ): lit. “Rope”, a Buddhist canonical scripture, generally considered a first-hand recording of the words of the Buddha. TathƗgata: the “thus-come-one”; a term indicating the Buddha, referring to his characteristic of enlightened being beyond existence and non-existance TheravƗda Buddhism: the Oldest school of Buddhism, emerging around 250 BC after the First Council, and still diffused in ĝri Lanka and South-east Asia. It is based on Pali texts and rigid monastic discipline. TrikƗya (Jp. Sanjin): the doctrine following which the Buddha possesses three “bodies”: the nirmƗnakƗya, the physical body that manifests in time and space; the sambhogakƗya, the body of the Buddha preaching the Dharma, namely the Buddha in its soteriological action; and the dharmakƗya, the “Body of Truth” the perfect and transcendent body of the universal Buddha. Vinaya: the part of Buddhist text dealing with the discipline of the monastic community, including all the possible offences that can be committed and the way to repair them.

Works Cited Coakley, Sarah, ed., Religion and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

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Collins, Steven, “The body in TheravƗda Buddhist monasticism”, in Coakley (1997), pp. 185-204. Crystal, David, ed., The Cambridge Encyclopedia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). David, Rosalie, The Experience of Ancient Egypt (London: Routledge, 2000). De Certeau, Michel, La fable mystique (Paris : Éditions Gallimard, 1982). Eskildsen, Stephen, Asceticism in Early Taoist Religion (New York: State University of New York, 1998). Foucault, Michel, The Birth of the Clinic, trans. A.M. Sheridan (London: Tavistock Publications, 1973). Hori Ichiro, “Self-mummified Buddhas in Japan. An Aspect of the Shugen-Do (“Mountain Asceticism”) Sect”, History of Religions 1(1962), pp. 222242. Kumarajiva, Scripture of the Lotus Blossom of the Fine Dharma, trans. Leon Hurvitz (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976). Khon, Livia, ed., Taoist Meditation and Longevity Techniques (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989). Kieschnick, John, The Eminent Monk: Buddhist Ideals in Medieval Chinese Hagiography (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997). Kirkpatrick, Clifford, The Family as Process and Institution (New York: Ronald Press, 1955). Kumarajiva, The Vimalakirti Sutra, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Loudon, Irvine, ed., Western Medicine: An Illustrated History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Matsumoto Akira, Nihon Miirabutsu (Tokyo: Rokkǀ Shuppan, 1985). Morford, Mark, The Roman Philosophers: From the Time of Cato the Censor to the Death of Marcus Aurelius (London: Routledge 2002). Naito Masatoshi, Nihon no Miira Shinkǀ (Kyoto: Hǀkǀzan, 1999). Nihonmiirakenkynjgrupu, Nihon - Chnjgoku Miira Shinko no Kenkynj (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1993). Nihonmiirakenkynjgrupu, Nihon Miira no Kenkynj (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1969). Peter Brown, The Body and Society (London: Faber and Faber, 1990). Raveri, Massimo, Il corpo e il paradiso (Venezia: Marsilio, 1992). Reese, William L., Dictionary of Philosophy and Releigion (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1980). Sharf, Robert H., “The idolization of enlightenment: on the mummification of Ch’an masters in medieval China”, History of Religions 32 (1992), pp. 1-31. Sponberg, Alan and Helen Hardacre, eds., Maireya, The Future Buddha (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

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Thurman, Robert A. F., The Holy Teaching of Vimalakirti: a Mahayana Scripture (London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976).

Vinaya, trans. T. W. Rhys Davids and Hermann Oldenberg, in ed. Max Muller, Sacred Book of the East, vol. 13 (1881). Yamada Ryûshin, Aragyǀ: Tatoe Kono Inochi, Kuchihaterutomo (Tokyo: Gendai Shorin, 1988). Yoshitake Inage, ed., Kǀbǀ Daishi Zenshnj, 3rd ed. (Tokyo: Mikkyǀ Bunka Kenkyusha, 1965). Yoshito S. Hakeda, Kukai: Major Works (New York : Columbia University Press , 1972)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN ABJECTION AND AGENCY: PRISON TATTOOS KEVIN MCCARRON

In decadent phases, the tattoo became associated with the criminal – literally the outlaw – and the power of the tattoo became intertwined with the power of those who chose to live beyond the norms of society. —Acker, 1988 The tattoo can be understood as a self-inflicted wound – at once a mark that abjects the bearer, and an assertion of control over abjection. —Fleming, 2000

Although this essay focuses on “prison tattoos” it should be noted from the outset that the tattoo, in any environment, needs to be seen as “unnatural”. In Angela Carter's post-apocalyptic novel Heroes and Villains, Carter’s narrator writes of her protagonist’s response to one of her new husband’s numerous tattoos: “but she was lying again; the tattoo seemed to her a perilous and irrestible landscape, a terra incognita or the back of the moon” (1969: 86). Marianne describes Jewel's tattoo as “unnatural” and while the omniscient narrator observes that she is lying it is noticeable that the succession of images that the tattoo evokes for Marianne are not represented as unequivocally “natural”. I want to suggest that in literature, if not necessarily in life, the tattoo is always represented as unnatural. George Burchett, one of England's bestknown tattooists for more than fifty years, writes in the opening pages of Memoirs of a Tattooist: Only heaven knows exactly when the first man, or half man, first added some natural ornament to his body, or a woman to hers. Not long after, I feel sure, the first primitive attempt was made at putting a permanent decoration, or magic sign, on the skin. If so, it would be a proud claim for tattooing that it was one of man's first conscious acts which distinguished him from the rest of the animal kingdom (1958: 10).

Similarly, Pasi Falk writes of tattooing:

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The irreversible reshaping of the body and its permanent marking manifests the stable and static character of relations in society. It also indicates a specific relation to the body as raw material - clay to be moulded and a surface to draw on. This does not imply contempt for the body nor does it express particular adoration of the “natural” body image. The body is an unfinished piece of art to be completed. It must be transformed from nature to culture (1995: 99).

While any division between nature and culture needs to be distinguished from the idea of “naturalness”, in which “nature” is turned into a cultural, artificial, construction, it is interesting to note that both Burchett, who left school at twelve, and Falk, a professional sociologist, agree on the essential “unnaturalness” of tattooing - its orientation toward the cultural rather than the natural, its fundamental disdain for “naturalness”. In literary texts the tattoo is always used to depict a (Western) character's movement away from the natural toward the cultural, or from the real to the artificial. In their essay “Pain and the mind-body dualism: a sociological approach”, Gillian Bendelow and Simon Williams suggest, “at the hermeneutical level, pain and suffering give rise to the quest for interpretation, understanding and meaning” (1995: 87) In Heroes and Villains, Marianne looks at the most striking of her husband’s tattoos: She parted the black curtains of his mane and drew her hands incredulously down the ornamented length of his spine. He wore the figure of a man on the right side, a woman on the left and, tattooed the length of his spine, a tree with a snake curled round and round the trunk. This elaborate design was executed in blue, red, black, and green. The woman offered the man a red apple and more red apples grew among green leaves at the top of the tree, spreading across his shoulders, and the black roots of the tree twisted and ended at the top of his buttocks. The figures were both stiff and lifelike: Eve wore a perfidious smile. The lines of colour were etched with obsessive precision on the shining, closepored skin which rose and fell with Jewel's breathing, so it seemed the snake's forked tongue darted in and out and the leaves on the tree moved in a small wind, an effect the designer must have foreseen and allowed for (Carter, 1969: 85).

Marianne has no interest in interpreting the tattoo; it is the act of being tattooed that engages her. She asks her husband “`was it very painful?’” and follows this with “’Why did you let him mutilate you so?’” (86). In Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, however, Ishmael has no interest in the pain that the heavily tattooed Queequeg must have suffered. His interest lies elsewhere: And this tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth;

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Abjection and Agency: Prison Tattoos so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume (1988: 480).

Ishmael is interested only in the meaning of the tattoos, what it is they might signify. Carter's protagonist focuses on the act of tattooing and ignores meaning, while Ishmael focuses on hermeneutics at the expense of the physical act of tattooing. Both, of course, are thoroughly artificial distinctions. Although Marianne has no interest in hermeneutics, this is not the case for the reader, who recognizes the conventionally misogynistic interpretation of the Biblical narrative and integrates this depiction into their overall response to the novel. Generally, however, readers of literary texts endorse Ishmael's perspective; they interpret tattoos, or attempt to, and construct thereby an artificial distinction between the act of being tattooed, which is negated, and the meaning of the tattoo, which is privileged. This polarization is also inevitable when considering prison tattoos, by which I don’t mean here only those which are done in prison, I also mean those which have been professionally done outside prison but which are privileged by the narrative gaze within texts set in prison. However, I also want to suggest that it is a mistake to speak of “prison tattoos’ as if they were all the same. I want to discriminate quite emphatically here between the tattoos of inmates who are in prison because they were, or still are, addicted to drugs (usually heroin), and the tattoos of those who are prison because they are criminals – that is, those who commit crimes, but not so that they can satisfy their addictions. Overall, I want to suggest that the tattoos of addict-inmates are designed to dramatize their abjection, while the tattoos of criminal-inmates are designed to demonstrate their agency. Additionally, this essay will suggest that at least one way of thinking about the body which has been formally, and universally, abandoned is the assumption that the body is a site upon which the state can codify its property and inscribe its judgments. A number of scholars, including Jane Caplan, Clare Anderson, Hamish MaxwellStewart, Ian Stewart, Abby Schrader and Steven Connor have traced the history and practice of branding, or tattooing criminals. Considerable evidence indicates that both the Romans and the Greeks tattooed slaves, deserters and criminals and certainly criminals, at least, were routinely, universally and forcibly tattooed until well into the nineteenth century. However, my interest here is to consider a number of contemporary narratives, primarily American, which are set in prisons, or which depict characters that have spent considerable time in prisons. Specifically, I want to discuss the depiction of voluntary tattooing within modern prisons. It is clearly, at the very least, an interesting irony that when the State loses the power to tattoo those it judges to be criminals, they then tattoo themselves. In his The Book of Skin, Steven Connor writes, “the abolition of compulsory tattooing of prisoners in the French penal service during the nineteenth century

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was followed by a huge increase in the activity of voluntary tattooing” (2004: 81). Similarly, in an essay entitled “The tattoo in the later Roman empire and beyond”, Mark Gustafson notes that among the early Christians religious tattoos were in use at the same time that institutions of political authority were using tattoos in a punitive manner. Gustafson accounts for this by referring to the following comment from the apostle Paul’s Galatians 6: 17, “I carry the marks of Jesus tattooed [stigmata] on my body”. Gustafson writes: while Paul surely speaks metaphorically here, he is deliberately invoking the degrading practice of punitive tattooing. Throughout his letters, Paul embraces the role of slave of God and of Christ, and thus embraces humiliation, extreme obedience and bodily suffering. The effect was deeply subversive of earthly authority, a kind of paradigm shift (2000: 29).

I want to suggest that contemporary, voluntary penal tattooing is inseparable from issues of agency, ownership and abjection. I need to note here that I use the word “abjection” in two ways; firstly, in the sense used by Julia Kristeva in her Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982). As Juliet Fleming writes, “tattoo’s uncanny power to affront (and so arouse) the liberal subject is a power of horror that largely coincides with the special effect identified by Julia Kristeva under the name of ‘abjection’” (2000: 63). In this sense, of course, all tattoos, inside prison or outside, on the bodies of criminals or addicts, are capable of producing this “special effect”. However, with specific reference to addict-inmates, I also use the word in its more conventional sense, “being of the lowest degree, lacking self-respect”.

Addict-Inmates and Tattooing In William Burroughs' Junky (1953), Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting (1993), Jerry Stahl's Permanent Midnight (1995), and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996) most of the characters have spent time in prison; nearly all are junkies. In these books, tattoos are invariably of the most primitive kind, and are depicted as, in addition to whatever specific interpretive significance can be attached to them (usually little), visible markers of the hatred junkies feel for themselves and for their own bodies. The body in these texts is always a source of shame and horror. Tattoos in these novels do not decorate addicts’ bodies, rather they visibly emphasize its pathetic corporeality. The central dynamic of these texts is toward the transcendence of the body by the injection of heroin, a use of the needle which mimics the practice of tattooing and stresses the subservient, inessential nature of the body. It is noticeable that tattoos are always represented as a priori; no character is ever described getting a tattoo, but many characters are depicted injecting heroin. The act of injecting heroin is invariably

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represented as a violation of the body, which has become a clearly apprehended Other in the mind of the junkie. In “Merleau-Ponty, the elusive body and carnal sociology”, Nick Crossley writes, “the chief obstacle to the formation of a carnal sociology of the body is the Cartesian ontology which many writers, from quite distinct perspectives, have identified as being inherent in and even foundational to much sociology...” (1995: 44). Crossley notes the limitations of Cartesian ontology before suggesting that the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty productively rethinks the Cartesian position: Merleau-Ponty challenges the mechanistic, Cartesian view of the body. He argues for an understanding of the body as an effective agent and, thereby, as the very basis of human subjectivity. Moreover, he understands embodied subjectivity to be intersubjective and he understands intersubjectivity to be an institutional and historical order. His “body-subject” is always-already situated and decentred in relation to a historical world (1995: 44).

Similarly, in his essay “Justice in the flesh”, David Levin writes, “we belong to a matrix of flesh; so much so that we can achieve an ‘interior life’ only by grace of our intercorporeality” (1999: 41). Both of these views seem truer to life as it is experienced than does Descartes' artificial and mechanistic dualism, but the books cited above are incapable of perceiving body and mind as anything but totally separate: the body is material, the mind is a thinking substance. Junky opens with the narrator entering an apartment full of drug addicts, “the door was opened by a large, flabby, middle-aged queer, with tattooing on his forearms and even on the backs of his hands” (Burroughs, 1960: 5). In Will Self's My Idea of Fun, John, a long-term junkie, is described as chopping the air “with his thin, blue-tattooed forearms” (1993: 175). In Infinite Jest, set for the most part in a rehabilitation clinic, so many of the resident junkies are tattooed that one character, Tiny Ewell, is driven to construct what he refers to as a “dermo-taxonomy” of tattooing (Wallace, 1996: 205). Tiny's appraisal of the specific genre of “jailhouse tattoo”, interestingly, rejects Falk's suggestion, cited above, that tattooing “does not imply contempt for the body”. Wallace writes, “overall searing-regret honors probably go to Jennifer Belbin, who has four uncoverable black teardrops descending from the corner of one eye, from one night of mescaline and adrenalized grief, so that from more than two meters away she always looks like she has flies on her, Randy Lenz points out” (207). Later, Wallace writes that “Ewell's personal feeling is that jailhouse tattoos aren't poignant so much as grotesque, that they seem like they weren't a matter of impulsive decoration or self-presentation so much as simple self-mutilation arising out of simple boredom and general disregard for one's own body and the aesthetics of decoration” (210). It must be stressed, though, that Ewell’s frame

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of reference is limited to addicts. Welsh's Trainspotting depicts another environment full of heroin, prison and ink; one in which the body is first disfigured by tattoos, in a proleptic manner, “he looked seedy and menacing done up in a suit, the wey draftpaks do, indian ink spilling oot from under cuffs and collar onto neck and hands. Ah'm sure Beggar's tattoos move intae the light, resentful at being covered up” (1996: 77). Almost immediately, the body is abandoned completely, “a mosaic shell ay scar tissue and indian ink, ah presume there's some cunt inside it, is screaming” (77). Tattooing is not, clearly, a purely symbolic utterance in such texts; pragmatic issues need to be considered. In Permanent Midnight, Stahl's first visit to a methadone clinic prompts this observation, “right off, what you noticed about the people waiting were their tattoos and their eyes. The green jailhouse ink and the hard dead stare of the majorly incarcerated” (Stahl, 1995: 144). Another dealer has a junkie friend called Felix, “a lumbering, jug-eared tattoo victim he knew from the joint” (266). In the fiction of Jean Genet, much of whose work is set in prisons, the symbolic and the pragmatic are intertwined. Genet's male narrators are often transfixed by desire for heavily tattooed criminals, but their colourful flesh merely encases an essential criminality - and it is this essence which Genet's narrators really wish to possess; the heavily inscribed flesh is the only available conduit. Falk writes of modernity and tattooing that “irreversible body-marking became closely associated with stigmatization” (1995: 102). In addict-inmate narratives the body becomes a surface upon which, socially, and conventionally, the junkie announces his marginalization, but, philosophically, one upon which he utters his contempt for the flesh. The junkie's attitude to his body is effectively Cartesian. Tattooing neatly parallels the junkie's principal noncustodial activity: the injection of heroin, the piercing of the flesh with needles. Conflated, indeed paradoxical, issues emerge here. The junkie, constantly threatened with imprisonment, voluntarily surrenders his freedom immediately upon release from prison, this time to heroin. The needles of the prison tattooist, or, more usually, the prisoner's safety pin and ink, are exchanged for the junkie's own needle; in the former case the body is used as a declarative surface, and in the latter case the body is again used - this time to service the mind. Not only is the addict physically enslaved to heroin, but he is, it can be argued, enslaved to drugs because of an extravagant belief in the mind/body dichotomy. The junkie typically treats his own body as though it were a slave to his consciousness. The injecting user does, of course, actually pierce the flesh; he stabs himself, mutilates himself, violates his own body. A contempt for the body, even a hatred of it, is indeed, I would argue, a pervasive topos of addict-inmate narratives The mind is the master in junk narratives, the body is the slave. Tattoos in such narratives are one manifestation of this distaste for the flesh, but

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their depiction is proleptic in that inscription announces a desire to transcend the flesh; ultimately, to abandon it. It is a striking feature of addict-inmate narratives that the tattoos are always so poorly executed, so lacking in finesse or artistry of even the most rudimentary kind that no specific, interpretive significance can be attached to them. They just are! Here, it is the act of being tattooed that is privileged; in criminal-inmate narratives, however, the act of being tattooed and the specific meanings of individual tattoos are both of significance.

Criminal-Inmate Narratives While the tattoos inflicted upon the criminal by the State proclaimed judgment, ownership and the impossibility of rehabilitation, contemporary, imprisoned criminals’ tattoos announce agency, group solidarity, self-evaluation and the pre-eminence of the convict’s own body as a commoditised object in a world where conventional material possessions are largely absent. Inmate “agency” is clearly an issue in the relationship that incarcerated criminals have with their tattoos. Douglas Kent Hall writes, “the prison tattoo is also a statement that the convict, though resigned to the reality of prison life, still clings to his right to do what he will with his own body, his own mind. The skill of the tattoo artist, and the finished work of the wearer’s body, provide the freedom of creative artistic expression” (1997: 7). Later, he writes, “Jerry, a lifer, who has gradually tattooed most of his body, explained it this way, ‘sure, they got rules against tattooing. The man, he’s got rules against every fuckin” thing. They’ll bust your ass any chance they get. But this is my body. It’s my novel, man, my poem, and I’m just gonna keep writin’ on it’” (8). I want to also suggest that contemporary criminal tattooing carries within it attenuated echoes of the tradition of Christian tattooing prompted early in the first century by Paul’s statement in Galatians - in particular, humiliation, bodily suffering and the rejection of earthly authority. Additionally, I suggest that if the addict-inmate’s tattoos are Cartesian, in that they dramatize the mind/body dichotomy, then the criminal-inmate’s tattoos are, although secular, Berkleyean, in that they are designed to be perceived. Hall writes “A convict in California confessed that his tattoos give him the feeling that he is onstage” (11). Criminal-inmate tattoos are, in essence, Panopticonic, flourishing and multiplying precisely because of the inmates’ awareness that they are being constantly surveyed, by the authorities, and by each other – but, emphatically, not by God. Like Tiny Ewell, I, too, am impelled to construct a taxonomy of the prison tattoo. I want to suggest that there are, at least, five categories to the sub-genre. In ascending order these are the commodified tattoo, the female tattoo, the Nazi tattoo, the religious tattoo and the memento mori tattoo. However, before

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discussing meaning at all, the act of tattooing should be considered. It needs to be acknowledged that the solicitous request of Marianne’s “Did getting that tattoo done hurt?” is unlikely to be heard very often within prisons. Nevertheless, even in a world where nearly everybody is tattooed, the act of being tattooed, irrespective of “meaning”, has “value”, of the kind Pierre Bordieu would certainly see as symbolic value. In prison, respect is accorded to those inmates who boast the largest, the most colourful tattoos and, especially, to those tattooed on the penis, or the face, places which are particularly sensitive areas, where the tattoo is known to cause the most pain; places, too, where, it is known, they will cause the most offence and “horror”, both to inmates and to “straights”. When they are well executed, tattoos have value in prison. However, this value is not economic. In his introduction to Bourdieu’s Language and Symbolic Power, John B. Thompson writes, “one of the central ideas of Bourdieu’s work…is the idea that there are different forms of capital: not only “economic capital” in the strict sense (i.e. material wealth in the form of money, stocks and shares, property, etc.), but also “cultural capital” (i.e. knowledge, skills and other cultural acquisitions, as exemplified by educational or technical qualifications), “symbolic capital” (i.e. accumulated prestige or honour), and so on” (Bourdieu, 1994: 14). In much the same way, Juliet Fleming suggests: for although we say, with horror, “a tattoo lasts forever” – as if, within our cultural or psychic economy, permanence were a recognized evil – most tattoos last only as long as the body endures, which is to say not as long as ink on paper. It may be that disapprobation of tattoos’ permanence has a political, as well as a psychic, dimension. For where classical economic theory recognizes three types of property: the intellectual, the real or immobile (land) and the moveable (chattels), tattoo announces itself as a fourth type: a property that is at once mobile and inalienable (2000: 66-67).

As Foucault has suggested, prison and capitalism are intertwined at the deepest levels: there is an economico-moral self-evidence of a penalty that metes out punishments in days, months and years and draws up quantative equivalences between offences and durations. Hence the expression, so frequently heard, so consistent with the functioning of punishments, though contrary to the strict theory of penal law, that one is in prison in order to “pay one’s debt”. The prison is “natural”, just as the use of time to measure exchanges is “natural” in our society (1977: 233).

But the pain of the tattoo, even its very existence, has no measurable, economic value; the tattoo is a gratuitous gesture, confrontationally, even

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aggressively, lying outside the economic model upon which the prison is built. Pain is not as quantifiably measurable, as are, for example, years. This very gratuitousness is a form of freedom. However, while the tattoo has no economic value; it cannot be sold, or bartered – yet still it is perceived as the “property” of the tattooed criminal. This property, significantly, cannot be stolen – even in a world of thieves. In a world of necessary, inescapable suffering, the unnecessary pain of the tattoo is a statement of contempt and defiance, linking it, I suggest, to the early Christian practice of voluntary tattooing.

The Taxonomy of Criminal-Inmate Tattoos The tattoo as commoditised, purchased object has the least interest and significance within the genre of prison narratives. In Eve’s Tattoo, Emily Prager writes of the tattoo parlour, “on three walls were Scotch-taped hundreds of illustrations of the tattoos Big Dan offered: skulls with fire flaring from the eye sockets, swastikas festooned with roses, panthers on the attack, hearts with blanks for cherished names, snakes and dragons, mermaids and madwomen” (2002: 4). Similarly, in Abraham Verghese’s The Tennis Partner, the narrator notes the tattoos he sees on his patients are of two kinds: “store-brought from one of the tattoo shops on Dyer Street, or homemade. The former were fine lined, black and gray, often elaborate or brightly coloured and chosen from one of the patented patterns (‘mild to wild’ in the catalog)” (1999: 62). In Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Dick’s tattoos are not evaluated in the same way as are his partner in crime Perry’s. Dick’s tattoos are seen as lacking in imagination, as is he: The tattooed face of a cat, blue and grinning, covered his right hand; on one shoulder a blue rose blossomed. More markings ornamented his arms and torso: the head of a dragon with a human skull between its open jaws; bosomy nudes; a gremlin brandishing a pitchfork; the word PEACE accompanied by a cross radiating rays of holy light; and two sentimental concoctions – one a bouquet of flowers dedicated to MOTHER-DAD, the other a heart that celebrated the romance of DICK and CAROL… (1965: 25).

Throughout prison narratives it is made clear that such tattoos are evaluated, at best, as neophytic: the tattoos of an apprentice. Precisely because they are “store-brought” and not “bespoke” they attract little in the way of narrative gaze. However, even then such tattoos are “worth” more than the self-mutilation masquerading as tattoos on the bodies of addict-inmates. The tattoo category “women” is not without surprises. Overall, and perhaps parenthetically, it is noticeable that the absence of women is a burden bourne very lightly by convicts. Often, in fact, women are not seen as the elusive,

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absent and desirable Other that crime has deprived the convict of, but rather the reason they are there in the first place. The following comment from Kansas in Jimmy Lerner’s You Got Nothing Coming: Notes From a Prison Fish is exemplary of the attitude to women in prison narratives: “’this bitch back in Kansas musta dropped a fuckin dime on my convict ass – y’unnerstan’ what I’m Saying?” This reference to the apparent treachery of a woman triggers a fresh outcry from the convict choir on the Group W bench” (2002: 14). Women are usually associated, in one way or another, with the Fall – prison offers an interesting, secularized version of the Edenic myth. Kansas has female tattoos on his body which are, again, exemplary of the genre: “his colossal chest boasted a single massive canvas: the Grim Reaper slashing down with his scythe at a naked prostrate woman. The woman, with long dark hair and breasts the size of mutant cantaloupes, bore a strange resemblance to the bare-breasted motorcycle girl on Kansas’s back” (48). In The Tennis Partner, the narrator writes of a “striking jailhouse image that I had seen on several patients now. It was that of a woman, a chicana, who, like a Hindu goddess, had many forms. The original mold must be housed somewhere in the penal system of West Texas, passed on from one inmate generation to the next. In some versions she was clothed, but most of the time her chest was bare, and her nipples pointed upward in the gravity-defying manner of a young teen. Her pubic hair was a wild, dangerous tangle” (Vereghese, 1999: 63). This is how women are usually represented in the prison tattoo; sufficiently powerful to require the male to depict his ability to subjugate them, yet simultaneously powerful enough to remain outside his control: “her pubic hair was a wild, dangerous tangle.” Ironically, these ostensibly womencentred tattoos are aggressively displayed on the bodies of men who are much, much more comfortable in the presence of other men. The most recent, and the most notorious, instance of the compulsory tattooing of prisoners occurred in the Nazi death camps. In essence, these tattoos were not punitive, they were worse – they functioned as measures of codification, reducing individuals to numbers and dramatically proclaiming that these tattooed bodies belonged, literally, to the State, not only in life but also, as a horrified world discovered, in death. Strikingly, Nazi iconography and emblems are among the most ubiquitous images found in American prison tattoos. In Prager’s Eve’s Tattoo, the protagonist has the identity number of a female death camp victim tattooed on her arm, in order, as she tells her lover “’I’m going to keep Eva alive. She’ll go on living, here, with me’” (2002: 11). With ironic detachment, Prager’s narrator writes of her tattooist, “on his bicep, the full insignia of the elite Totenkopf, or Death’s-Head Squadron of the SS, was perfectly inked with its lightning bolts and skull, and then along the

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forearm, swastikas and iron crosses, ending on top of his hand with ACHTUNG…” (6-7). Similarly, in Lerner’s You Got Nothing Coming…, the Jewish narrator’s cell mate is Kansas: “a skinheaded giant with a three-inch blue swastika tattooed on his neck… (2002: 14) In Jerry Stahl’s Permanent Midnight, the narrator notes of his new drug dealer “(sixteen years inside, twelve on methadone). He had more ink than Satan: calves, neck, and arms a near solid catalog of tattooed Aryan brotherhood icons: Swastikas, Iron Crosses, barbed wire, doe-eyed naked beauties astride S.S. lightning bolts” (1995: 165). A later drug dealer has a “jail green ARYAN BROTHERHOOD on his neck” and a “faded, flaming swastika tattooed on his forearm” (153). Hall writes, “racism separates most prison populations. Many biker tattoos reflect ideas spawned by the Aryan brotherhood, the old prison gang started at San Quentin. These include White Power, 100% White, Pure White, A.Y.M.; the dual lightning bolts of the Nazi SS, the swastika, and the word Germany” (1997: 10-11). In Russell Hoban’s novel Angelica’s Grotto the protagonist, Harold Klein, an elderly art historian, berates several men with swastika tattoos and ends up in casualty as a result. Understandable though Klein’s anger is, it is almost certainly misplaced, even in England, and would be even more so in America. The American Nazi prison tattoo is not, I would argue, anti-Semitic; it is largely ignorant of history but still manages to operate on several levels of signification. Certainly, the Nazi prison tattoo is designed to shock, repel, and even horrify; it invites us to consider Kristeva’s notion of “abjection”, but, in essence, it is a marker of both hatred for blacks and a concomitant proclamation of white solidarity, and even supremacy. It should be noted that in a prison system such as America’s where a disproportionate number of convicts are black, the act of being tattooed with Nazi iconography requires considerable physical courage, and this is understood by the entire prison population. Lerner writes, “yard rats award big points to fish with swastika tattoos” (2002: 178). What is remarkable about Eve’s tattoo in Prager’s novel is that it is an attempt to reclaim precisely the historical specificity of the Nazi death camp tattoos, of which the Nazi prison tattoo is shockingly unaware. In his book, Lerner suggests to Kansas that during a toilet paper shortage they use some of the pages of the numerous Nazi tracts he has hidden in their cell. Kansas’ response is almost comically ignorant: “’no fuckin’ way. You’re talking about writings that are practically sacred, like them Dead Sea Scrolls they found’” (102). In an essay entitled “Religious tattoos and transportation to Australia”, Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Ian Duffield writing of the middle of the nineteenth century note, “the importance of convict tattoos’ adjustability is that, while the state attempted to anatomize convict bodies through the process of description and inscription, many of those bodies were being adapted by

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enterprising subjects of power. In this, religious tattoos played a striking role” (2000: 130). Religious tattoos are also, perhaps surprisingly in the later years of the twentieth century, still pervasive within the prison community. In The Tennis Partner, Verghese writes, “religious figures abounded: the Virgin of Guadalupe above the buttocks. So that the sodomist’s penis would shrivel at the sight of the mother of Jesus. One of my patients – a murderer, in handcuffs, being treated for heart-valve infection – had a giant Christ on a crucifix on his chest (1999: 63). In Permanent Midnight, Jerry Stahl notes of another testee at the methadone clinic that “he laid his head on the desk, crying, so that the tattooed angel on the back of his neck spread her wings for the ceiling” (1995: 91). Hall writes: a younger man, a Hispanic from southern Colorado, offered this story about his full-back Guadalupe: “I was tripping once and I got an idea about the virgin, how she had protected me, kept me alive, stuff like that. I saw her clear, like in a dream. I got psyched and told this guy about it and he started the Guadalupe. I wanted the whole back. And roses (1997: 11).

It is noticeable, though, that the specifically religious tattoos are almost always inscribed on the bodies of Hispanics; such representation, therefore, tends to be offered in the language of orientalism, of the exotic, the anachronistic. When evaluating the tattoos of numerous nineteenth-century Australian convicts, Maxwell- Stewart and Duffield observe that many of these tattoos affirm the possibility of bodily transcendence. Conversely, the culture of tattooing among contemporary criminals, at least as depicted in a variety of narratives, suggests that the overwhelming majority of them believe that there is nothing to them but bodies. If the tattoos of addict-inmates are Cartesian, in that they dramatize a separation between mind and body, then the tattoos of criminal-inmates are Berkelyen, in that they are granted significance only through the gaze of others. Hall writes, “a convict in California confessed that his tattoos give hime the feeling that he is onstage. ‘When you go to the shower, when you work out at the weight pile in the yard or inside the weight room, you get that feeling. People look at you differently, even in here’” (1997: 11). In the contemporary American prison narrative criminal-inmates reject the transcendental consolations of Christianity. In The Book of Skin, Steven Connor suggests, “contemporary mortification does not aim to put the body in proleptic memory of its death, but to transfix the body in its presence” (2004: 90). What modern, secular America offers in the place of conventional religious tattoos is the memento mori motif. Probably the most ubiquitious tattoo in American prison narratives is the skull, sometimes without, but more usually with, a bunch of roses. Hall observes, “in prison tattoos, skulls abound” (1997: 11). In The

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Tennis Partner, the narrator says of one of his patients, “on his right bicep he had “Born to Die” tattooed elegantly in an Old English font; the other arm had skulls and crossbones” (Verghese, 1999: 62). Hall also writes, “flowers, the rose being the most common example, signify beauty, or the unfolding of the soul. The rose itself mirrors divine perfection” (1997: 12). Good writers, of course, can utilize conventions for creative purposes. Capote writes, for example, of Perry’s tattoos: while he had fewer tattoos than his companion, they were more elaborate – not the self-inflicted work of an amateur but epics of the art contrived by Honolulu and Yokahama masters. COOKIE, the name of a nurse who had been friendly to him when he was hospitalized, was tattooed on his right biceps. Blue-furred, orange-eyed, red-fanged, a tiger snarled upon his left biceps; a spitting snake, coiled around a dagger, slithered down his arm; and elsewhere skulls gleamed, a tombstone loomed, a chrysanthemum flourished (24-25).

Capote chooses to end his ostensibly objective survey of the tattoos here. He doesn’t finish on the cat or the tiger or the dagger, but on the skull and the tombstone. His “neutral” description of the tattoos is actually proleptic, anticipating the deaths that give the book its title. Wallace offers an exemplary image, combining the skull and roses: At the height of his obsession this one synthetic-narc-addicted kid came in who refused to be called by anything but his street name, Skull, and lasted only like four days, but who’d been a walking exhibition of high-regret ink – both arms tattooed with spiderwebs at the elbows, on his fishy-white chest a naked lady with the same kind of overlush measurements Ewell remembered from the pinball machines of his Watertown childhood. On Skull’s back a half m. long skeleton in a black robe and cowl playing the violin on a vertical gonfalonish banner unfurling below; on one biceps either an icepick or a mucronate dagger, and down both forearms a kind of St Vitus dance of leather-winged dragons with the words – on both forearms – HOW DO YOU LIKE YOUR BLUEYED BOY NOW MR DETH!? The typos of which, Tiny felt, only served to heighten Skull’s whole general tatt-gestalt’s intended effect, which Tiny presumed was primarily to repel (1996: 208).

Although Hall cites an inmate’s interpretation of his own skull tattoos unquestioningly, I see no particular reason for assuming his “reading” of the ubiquity of skull tattoos is “correct”. “’Death is no big deal,’ explained a biker with at least a hundred various-sized skulls on one arm. ‘Most guys in here are just as good as dead. We eat, we sleep, we shit. But what’s that? They already took our life’” (1997: 12). For Hall, the skull is always juxtaposed with the rose, but there is no sound logic for separating the skull from the rose, and then

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suggesting that each of them “means” something different, like some inky chiasmus. While the tattooed skull speaks of death, so does the rose. Here, teleology is inscribed into the flesh. One has happened; the other will happen. The beauty of the rose is ephemeral, transitory; it, too, will die. The criminal’s tattooed body reminds him, personally, that his suffering body will find release, in death, not transcendence, while the very same tattoos tell his jailers that their authority is provisional, limited, because they, too, must also die. The memento mori prison tattoo seems to me more genuinely subversive than the Nazi prison tattoo, for example, because it is essentially an act, not of defiance, which must, by definition, acknowledge the superior strength of the enemy, but an act of revenge.

Works Cited Acker, Kathy, Empire of the Senseless (London: Picador, 1988). Bendelow, Gillian and Simon Williams, “Pain and the mind-body dualism”, Body and Society 1 (1995), pp.83-103. Bourdieu, Pierre, Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). Burchett, George, Memoirs of a Tattooist, ( London: Pan, 1958). Burroughs, William, Junky (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960). Capote, Truman, In Cold Blood (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965). Carter, Angela, Heroes and Villains (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969). Connor, Steven, The Book of Skin (London: Reaktion, 2004). Crossley, Nick, “Merleau-Ponty, the elusive body and carnal sociology”, Body and Society 1 (1995), pp. 43-63. Falk, Pasi, “Written in the flesh”, Body and Society 1 (1995), pp. 95-105. Fleming, Juliet, “The Renaissance tattoo”, in ed. Jane Caplan, Written on the Body (London: Reaktion, 2000), pp. 61-82. Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). Gustafson, Mark, “The tattoo in the later Roman empire and beyond”, in ed. Jane Caplan, Written on the Body (London: Reaktion, 2000), pp. 17-31. Hall, Douglas, Prison Tattoos (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). Lerner, Jimmy, You Got Nothing Coming: Memoirs of a Prison Fish (Transworld: London, 2002). Levin, David, “Justice in the Flesh”, in eds. George Johnson and Michael Smith, Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999), pp. 35-44. Maxwell-Stewart, Hamish, and Ian Duffield, “Skin deep devotions”, in ed. Jane Caplan, Written on the Body (London: Reaktion, 2000), pp. 118-35.

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Mellville, Herman, Moby-Dick (Evanston : Northwestern University Press, 1988). Prager, Emily, Eve’s Tattoo (London: Chatto and Windus, 2002). Stahl, Jerry, Permanent Midnight (London: Abacus, 1995). Self, Will, My Idea of Fun (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993). Vereghese, Abraham, The Tennis Partner, (London: Vintage, 1999). Wallace, David Foster, Infinite Jest (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1996). Welsh, Irvine, Trainspotting (London: Minerva, 1996).

CHAPTER FOURTEEN MEANINGFUL BODIES: FEMINISM, GENDER AND MATERIALITY SHELLEY BUDGEON

The aim of this paper is to trace various lines of feminist thought as these have historically developed in response to the problem embodiment presents for understanding the production of gendered subjectivities and social relations. In particular this analysis will examine the mind/body dualism; the organisation of gender through this binary and the consequent negation of the feminine. From a feminist critique of biological theorisation which rendered gender “natural”, to the emergence of the sex/gender distinction as a strategy for “denaturalising” gender, towards the yet further movement of understanding sex as a social construction this paper addresses key issues in theorising the relationship between representation and the material. More recent strategies which involve a refusal to pose materiality and representation as a dualism and the debates surrounding this move are presented as a possible strategy for thinking about the problems of essentialism, sexual difference, and gendered agency. As a site through which gendered social relations find their expression, feminism has required strategies for understanding how and why the body has been made meaningful at specific times and in specific places. This relationship between the material, fleshy body and the systems of representation through which the body has been made knowable lays at the core of many theoretical and empirical problems for a feminist project. For feminism the question of the ontological status of the body is underpinned, by among other issues, debates about essentialism, situated ethics, epistemology, the significance of sexual difference and finally, the potentiality of women’s embodied agency. As Brook (1999: 2) argues “all feminist thinking might be described as an engagement of one sort or another with what it means to be, and to be perceived to be, a female body”. Feminist theorisations of the body have in common the aim of challenging representational economies in which women’s bodies have traditionally been essentialised, devalued and negated. Beginning with the

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establishment of the transcendental gendered subject of western metaphysics and ending with contemporary positions which seek to establish an alternative ontological ground for an understanding the body this paper traces various critical strategies which have been used to engage with the body from a feminist perspective. There is a tension in the history of feminist theorising between the body conceived as the fleshy, material of the corporeal body embedded and lived in everyday life and the body which exceeds the corporeal through its production within gendered social relations (Witz, 2000: 1). This tension is evident throughout the problematic of the body for feminist thought and will be explored here via the following five key points of reference. Firstly, looking back, the body was established as a gendered site in the Cartesian opposition of a mind/body dichotomy. This constitutive moment of western metaphysics established a privileging of (male) transcendence over (female) immanence which continued to operate as a key structuring principle of western thought and material relations. Secondly, woman as body was institutionalised particularly in the 19th century through the medicalisation of women’s bodies. These pathologised bodies served as the material upon which the “natural” origin of social difference was established. Thirdly, feminist challenges to this naturalisation of social difference were brought about by a move in which “gender” was denaturalised by separating it from the sexed body, thus providing an important feminist critique of social inequality. This development was then followed by a deconstruction of the sex/gender binary in which the direction of the sex/gender binary was reversed so that that sex, once understood as “natural” was cast as an effect of gender. The problematisation of the relationship between the so called “natural” and the social was rethought such that bodies were understood as brought into being through their materialization in social practices. Finally, a number of contemporary feminists have attempted to re-orient analyses of the body by advocating a Spinozist, rather that Cartesian ontology. In this formulation being is rethought as a becoming in which the body is conceptualised as “becoming-meaningful” (Gatens, 1996). It is suggested that the re-thinking of corporeality as a non-dualism which this requires has the effect of rendering difference as positive, rather than as a negation. As such this allows feminist theory to recognise feminine corporeality in ways which transcend the problematic history outlined in this paper.

The Cartesian Subject: Gendered Minds and Bodies In the seventeenth century subjectivity and matter were conceptually demarcated in a formula that then became constitutive of gendered subjects. During this time the human subject, who is simultaneously the subject of

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governance and one subject to governance is born alongside the birth of the modern body politic (Gatens. 1996: 50). This “human” subject was defined implicitly as a transcendent subject as for Descartes the process of thinking necessarily preceded the process of being in the world. To think was to overcome the flesh and bodily passions and to think rationally was to be selfdefining and self-sufficient (Cranny-Francis et al, 2003: 179). However, in modern political thought: Woman in fact never makes the transition from the mythical “state of nature” to the body politic. She becomes nature. She is necessary to the functioning of cultural life, she is the very ground which makes cultural life possible, yet she is not part of it. This division between nature and culture, between the reproduction of mere biological life as against the production and regulation of social life, is reflected in the distinction between the private and the public spheres, the family and the state. These divisions are conceptually and historically sexualised, with woman remaining mere nature, mere body, reproducing in the private, familial sphere. These associations are viewed as having their ground in woman’s ontology (Gatens, 1996: 51).

Women’s bodies were defined apriori as anarchic and disordered thus women were aligned with nature, irrationality, and corporeality, thereby providing a justification for denying their access to the public sphere (Gatens, 1996: 50-51). This was so not merely because women were seen to be inadequately equipped to operate within that sphere but because the public sphere as an imagined space was constituted on the very exclusion of women’s bodies. This gendered constitution of the public and the private established a core problem for feminist theory – the need to find a way to allow women to be allowed access to the status of subject which the foundation of western metaphysics precluded by defining the mind in opposition to the body. The possibilities for theorising both feminine and masculine subjectivity have intrinsically been bound by this opposition. Where man’s behaviour is underdetermined, free to construct its own future along the course of its rational choice, woman’s nature has over-determined her behaviour, the limits of her intellectual endeavours, and the inevitabilities of her emotional journey through life. Whether she is construed as essentially immoral and irrational (a la Schopenhauer) or essentially kind and benevolent (a la Kant), she is always construed as an essential something…despite the variety of ways in which man has construed her essential characteristics, she is always the Object, a conglomeration of attributes to be predicted and controlled along with other natural phenomenon. The place of the free-willed subject who can transcend nature’s mandates is reserved exclusively for men (Alcoff, 1995: 434-5).

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Women as the body have functioned historically as the counterpart to men’s presumed conceptual supremacy and so not only have male bodies disappeared from view but “women’s bodies, pleasures, and desires are reduced to versions or variants of men’s bodies and desires” and in the process are rendered as inferior, deficient and incomplete “as if these were inherently qualities (or absences) of their (natural) bodies rather than a function of men’s selfrepresentations” (Grosz, 1995: 38). The distinction between female corporeality and male sociality was identified as a key problematic which would continue to operate as the axis around which subsequent theorisations of the significance of sexual difference found their expression.

Woman as Body: Medicalisation The late nineteenth century was a period in which women’s association with the body was particularly pronounced. At this moment women’s bodies became medicalised objects of scrutiny produced through the lens of scientific discourses in circulation at that time. The body could operate within various sites of production as an explanatory “natural” origin for socially organised relations of inequality in terms of both gender and “race”. Sexed bodies were comprehended in terms of fundamental difference but a further move was made to define women’s different (yet normal) bodily functions as pathologies. The so called failings of women’s bodies were then recursively cited as evidence to support laws of “nature” which dictated women’s lack of fitness for entrance into the public sphere. Thus their “natural” inferiority produced the condition for their social confinement. For example in a debate over women’s suffrage in Sacremento, California in 1880 a participant sums up the dangers the public sphere posed for women’s bodies: I am opposed to woman’s suffrage on account of the burden it will place upon her. Her delicate nature has already enough to drag it down. Her slender frame, naturally weakened by the constant strain attendant upon her nature is too often racked by diseases that are caused by a too severe tax upon her mind. The presence of passion, love, ambition, is all too potent for their enfeebled condition, and wrecked health and early death are all too common (cited in Kimmel, 2004: 23).

In setting out to deny biological difference as the grounds for justifying the notion that gender inequality was natural, that is located within innate sexual difference, feminism put forward an agenda where the substance of difference was challenged. However, this challenge did not proceed on ontological grounds. The existence of sexual difference was conceived as a difference that

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may well exist in some form but which certainly did not generate the social consequences it seemingly rendered. The argument proceeded from a specific strategy of minimising or de-emphasising bodily difference as the grounds upon which to explain the social organisation of sexual difference. If the female body could be transcended through bracketing out questions of essence, so would the limitations placed upon it. The differences of the sexed body were not denied but the social arrangements upon which these differences were based were challenged and from this perspective the sexual specificity of the body was rendered irrelevant to women’s capacities to participate fully in male defined social spheres of masculine privilege. Following the logic of liberal political thought the demand for equality rested upon the claim that gender differences were imposed upon otherwise equal beings. In this formulation of sexual difference the separation of nature and culture was upheld leaving traces for what would become a central debate within feminism - the problem of equality versus difference. In these early accounts the problem with advocating the significance of sexual difference was that sexual difference as rooted in bodily materiality had historically been encoded entirely as “inferior” thus the need for women to stake claims to equal social rights on other epistemological grounds. This also gave rise to a key question which continues to occupy feminist thought: What is the relationship between the material body and the systems through which it becomes meaningful? How might women’s bodies become meaningful outside of the systems of thought which have heretofore made them knowable as rational man’s Other?

Denaturalising Gender The social positioning of women on the basis of their bodily difference from men was challenged in the 20th century by a number of feminists. In suggesting that “one is not born a woman but becomes one” de Beauvoir (1972) anticipated the strategy advocated by Ann Oakley in the early 1970s. This involved distinguishing gender from sex and interrogating the cultural formations of femininity. Gender, once separated off from sex, remained as the socio-cultural expression of bodily difference. “Sex” is a word that refers to the biological differences between male and female: the visible difference in genitalia, the related differences in procreative function. “Gender”, however, is a matter of culture: it refers to the social classification into “masculine” and “feminine” (Oakley, 1985: 16).

In this critical formulation of the relationship between the difference of sexed bodies and the meaning accorded to those differences, variability

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provided proof of the social rather than the natural origins of the positioning of men and women in society. Oakley stated that “the constancy of sex must be admitted, but so too must the variability of gender” (Oakley, 1985: 16, cited in Delphy 1996: 32). The differences between the sexes which were important were the ones that were created, not the stable ones which resided in the biological differences of sex. Gender could account for individual behaviours, social roles, representations, as well as, anything that could be deemed subject to temporal and spatial variation. This partitioning of sex and gender into distinct realms served to de-naturalise or de-essentialise gender difference thus lending itself to the political strategy of critiquing relations of power which produced gender difference in such a way as to justify inequality. This strategy of distinguishing and separating the cultural from the natural demanded a rigorous exclusion of the corporeal body as an already given site or natural entity which could account for women’s position in society. Culture, rather than the material body became determinate in questions over the significance of sexual difference. Within phallocentric logic to become a subject required a rejection and transcendence of materiality. For feminists such as de Beauvoir this meant the body was something to be conquered in favour of giving oneself to the life of the mind (Brook, 1999: 15). The body as the site of sex was in effect bracketed off and a critique of social roles and arrangements which sex gave rise to become the dominant project of feminism. From this position “if men and women are always already cultured and gendered then it makes no sense to ask about any essential or natural basis for difference” (Colebrook, 2000a: 77). In this analysis women were retrieved from the realm of the biological, natural and corporeal and reinstated within the realm of the social (Witz, 2000: 3). This retrieval was central to the analysis of gender put forward by egalitarian feminists who argued that the “raw material of socialization are fundamentally the same for both sexes: each has an analogous biological or natural potential that is unequally developed because the social roles imposed on the two sexes are not equivalent” (Grosz, 1995: 51). From this perspective gender inequalities could be addressed by resocialising men and women and restructuring sex roles. For some feminists, however, the call to remove biology from the production of gender difference was not taken up. Unlike egalitarian feminists who had attempted to shift the focus away from essential sexual difference, theorists such as Rich (1977), Griffin (1978) and Daly (1984) instead advocated reclamation of the female body and a celebration of women in the name of their essential differences from men. The historical tendency to denigrate the body and the feminine while elevating disembodied masculine virtues such as rationality was reversed. From this perspective femaleness was often rooted in spiritual and biological difference, and in many cases the maternal body, which for its

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proximity to nature and life giving potential, was promoted as source of ethical superiority. Traits traditionally associated with the feminine such as nurturance, creativity, compassion, and sharing were cited as a natural foundation for an understanding of gender as difference. Sexual difference was defined in asymmetrical terms as a hierarchical distinction in which the feminine could and should be valorised over the masculine. In order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies...; we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal ground of our intelligence. The ancient, continuing envy, aw, and dread of the male for the female capacity to create life has repeatedly taken the form of hatred for every other female aspect of creativity…to “think like a man” has been both praise and prison for women trying to escape the bodytrap (Rich, 1977: 21).

Cultural feminism in its various formulations tended to identify a female essence; to define patriarchy as the subjugation and colonization of this essence derived from male envy and need; and to promote a solution that revolved around re-discovering female essence and bonding with other women (Alcoff, 1995: 437). For instance Rich (1977) encouraged women to view their physicality as a resource rather than to deny it as egalitarian feminism had done on the basis of male definitions of women’s bodies. Daly in Gyn/Ecology also argued that patriarchy sought to control the life-affirming and creative essence of women: “Since female energy is essentially biophilic, the female spirit/body is the primary target in this perpetual war of aggression against life. Gyn/Ecology is the re-claiming of life-loving female energy” (1978: 355). Valorising women’s bodies as the site of feminine energy, for example, not only focused on sexual difference (or natural difference) but defined female specificity within a body that precedes social construction thus asserting a body which is authentically woman. For many feminists this form of cultural feminism could be too closely associated with a form of essentialism not far enough removed from the very essentialism which had served patriarchy so well in the past. Feminist theorists continued to engage with questions of embodied sexual difference and considerations of whether sex and gender should be understood as discrete sites of analysis. Thus the body has never been fully bracketed off within feminist thought although how to handle the question of corporeality is a question which has not reflected a consensus within feminism. The question of the significance of sexual difference and the relationship between the body and the social remained on the feminist agenda.

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Gender and Sex Reconsidered – Denaturalising Sex The distinction made between sex and gender unproblematically appealed to a pre-representational body without questioning what this might mean. This strategy did not destabilise the binarism of the mind/body dualism which for feminist critiques of the subject increasingly became the object of analysis. Delphy (1996: 33) for instance questioned whether sex and gender were really independent from each other. She argued, among others, that despite the distinction made between sex and gender or the body and culture, feminist theory had remained firmly tied to sex. Although Oakley (1985) had attempted to remove questions of bodily difference from the analysis of gender relations this separation was not born out in practice. Gender, Delphy argued, is not separate from sex because we continue to think of gender in terms of sex: “gender is the content” and “sex is the container” (Delphy, 1996: 33). Sex had been seen to give rise to gender in a rather straightforward way, but the question of why sex should give rise to any sort of social classification had not been adequately considered. In Delphy’s analysis, however, sex is a symbolic marker of a social division in which there are those who are dominant and those who are dominated (1996: 35). Social hierarchy precedes difference, therefore, the meaning of sex and its symbolic function, is socially determined. Sex like gender in this formulation could not be natural. Moira Gatens in 1983 also criticised the sex/gender distinction by arguing that gender was not arbitrarily linked to sex. Gatens directed her analysis to those theories which propose “de-gendering” or re-socialisation as the solution to gender inequality. The body in these theories was given the status of a blank slate upon which gender is inscribed. Such an appeal relied upon a body that is a neutral and passive site and as such is logically discrete from the actual content of gender. This neutrality was also seen to extend to the effect sexual difference might have in the formation of consciousness. Cultural meanings or practices which constitute gender work upon an apriori neutral consciousness which in turn operated upon an originally neutral body. If both the body and consciousness in themselves are neutral then a project of de-gendering would be a matter of re-education or a re-socialisation. By logical extension then it should be possible to argue that masculine and feminine behaviours are arbitrary forms of behaviour “socially inscribed on an indifferent consciousness that is joined to an indifferent body” (Gatens, 1996: 7). But for Gatens sex does matter and the kind of separation of sex and gender that these theories imply are deeply problematic because the subject is always a sexed subject. The body is not neutral, “there are at least two kinds of bodies; the male body and the female body” (Gatens, 1996: 8). In her account gender per se is not the issue in critiquing patriarchy, sexual difference is. For example,

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she argued that the same behaviours acted out by a male body rather a female body will have very different personal and social significances (Gatens, 1996: 9). Culture is inscribed on specifically sexed bodies and it is the sex of the body which determines the cultural significances of those inscriptions: some bodily experiences and events, though lacking any fixed significance, are likely, in all social structures, to be privileged sites of significance… given that in society there is a network of relations obtaining between femininity and femaleness, that is, between the female body and femininity, then there must be a qualitative difference between the kind of femininity “lived” by women and that “lived” by men (Gatens, 1996: 9).

The denaturalising of sex marked a significant theoretical juncture in feminist thought. Whereas egalitarian feminists had de-emphasised sexual difference, feminists of difference argued that feminism had to be concerned with sexual difference because bodies “are recognised as different only in so far as they are constructed as possessing or lacking some socially privileged quality or qualities…bodies become invested with differences which are then taken to be fundamental ontological differences” (Gatens, 1996: 73). Masculinity and femininity are the expressions of culturally and historically based phantasies about male and female biologies and as such gender is not arbitrarily connected to sex (Gatens, 1996: 13). The two main points to take from this analysis are that sex does not exist as an authentic site in and of itself, and secondly, gender is not an arbitrary cultural artifice overlaid on the “pure” surface of sex (Colebrook, 2000a: 83). Analyses such as those offered by Gatens and Delphy have contributed greatly to a rethinking of the ontological status of the body and this problem continued in the work of feminist theorists who began to reorient thinking about the female body and subjectivity in ways that challenged the mind/body dualism and interrogated the relationship between sex and gender. Materiality continued to challenge feminist thought finding expression in new and provocative ways.

Deconstructing Sex In critical analyses of gendered social divisions feminist theorists had tended to position themselves either in favour of advocating equality (the body is inconsequential) or difference (the sexed bodies which exist prior to (mis)representation do matter). Problematising the presumed distinction between sex and gender made clear that theorising the body was central to the deconstruction of the sameness/difference binary. To demand equality means that gender differences are imposed on otherwise equal bodies (beings). To advocate difference is to emphasise that different bodies may require different

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forms of recognition. The problematic relation between representation and the body is that either meanings are imposed upon equal or neutral bodies, or, as some feminists of difference have suggested, sexed difference provides the ontological grounds from which representation arises. Both positions presume the existence of a pre-representational body. Critics point out that these positions replicate the mind/body binary “but if we were to argue that the very notion of the pre-representational body is effected through representation, we would have to move beyond discussions of women’s essential sameness or difference” (Colebrook, 2000a: 76). Feminism it is argued requires a strategy for moving beyond discrete binaries. In a number of analyses the complex relationship between the material body and systems of representation have been re-worked raising important questions for the sex/gender distinction. The engagement of feminism with poststructuralist thought has proven to be particularly useful. This anti-humanist “stance questions the idea that the body has a priori needs, desires or functions which determine the form of culture and politics” (Gatens, 1996: 51-2). Previous theory had suggested that the body was constituted by a fixed essence which set limits to the forms of socio-political structures possible for those bodies to inhabit. Foucault, however, reversed the terms of reference when he asked how it is that socio-political structures operate to create specific kinds of bodies which are constituted by particular needs and desires? In his reformulation of the relationship between representation and materiality both the outer surface of the body and its interiority as well are understood as products of discursive inscription. Bodies are “intextuated, narrativized; simultaneously social codes, laws, norms and ideals become incarnated” (Grosz, 1995: 35). Theories of the body developed by Foucault and many other post structuralists were, however, gender blind. A number of feminist theorists implemented a reworked Foucauldian framework in order to examine how sexed bodies could be explained as products of discursive and disciplinary processes (Bartky, 1988; Bordo, 1993; McNay, 1992). Foucault’s theory of power allowed an analysis of gendered bodies which avoided essentialism or biologism. For Foucault, the body was the primary site through which the power relations constitutive of the social realm are made visible. In his genealogical method the material (power) and the non-material (knowledge) are brought together in a recursive relationship (McNay, 1992: 28). Therefore, one of the advantages of this framework for feminists is that it offered a useful way of negotiating the sex/gender distinction without having to rely on a “true” or “real” material body. Building on this idea feminists focused on how bodies are inscribed and invested with particular properties according to gendered regimes of truth. Bartky (1988) developed the notion of a “disciplinary regime of femininity” to describe the techniques which operated to discipline feminine

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bodies. Bordo (1993) also analysed the disciplinary effects of the gendered relation between power and knowledge in terms of the docile feminine bodies thereby produced. The discursive production of particular bodies according to historical sociopolitical demands meant that a variety of processes brought into being a body that was dichotomously sexed. This formulation of the sex/gender distinction for example was examined at length by Thomas Laqueur (1995) in his fascinating study of the one sex model. His documentation of the historical shift that occurred in interpreting male and female bodies as variations on a singular sex towards an understanding in which the sexes were defined as intrinsically distinct from each other reveals the operation of the social on the supposedly fixed category of the biological. The production and subsequent policing of the sexed boundary between two distinct sexes was tied to a set of historical processes and socio-economic transformations that produced a set of conditions which demanded that sexual difference matter in new and distinct ways. This social need for a system of hierarchical differentiation was inscribed on material bodies that previously were understood as quite unproblematically having essentially similar sexual organs. Employing a similar strategy John HoodWilliams has deconstructed the sex/gender distinction in his examination of the cultural production of DNA within the study of genetics. He argues that “gender is always already implicated within attempts to define sex – whether as difference or similarity” (Hood-Williams, 1996: 13). Derrida’s work has also been influential and controversial within feminist analyses of the mind/body binary. For Derrida the essentialist discourse of logocentrism has defined woman as the subjugated difference within a set of binary oppositions: man/woman; culture/nature; analytical/intuitive and so on. To assert an essential female character as both some feminist and patriarchal discourses have done, therefore, is to re-invoke this oppositional structure in which woman operates as Other. If woman is a category produced by phallogocentrism then feminists have had to ask if there is such thing as a woman and if so, on what basis can this category be defined? From a nominalist approach to this question the category “woman” is a fiction that must be dismantled because it is a category that has been made knowable through the implicitly masculine representational economies of western. Women’s bodies are a constitutive term within this epistemological condition. As Grosz argues, Men take on the roles of neutral knowers only because they have evacuated their own specific forms of corporeality and repressed all its traces from the knowledges they produce…women are thus conceptualised as castrated, lacking, and incomplete as if these were inherently qualities (or absences) of their (natural) bodies rather than a function of men’s self-representations (Grosz, 1995: 38).

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In the binary of materiality and representation the material is determined by culture but in a culture where meanings are produced by phallogocentric representational economies it becomes doubtful whether it is possible for women’s bodies and by implication, the feminine to be known authentically and thereby presumably in a way which would enable women to transcend the negative representations which have produced femininity and feminine bodies. By engaging with deconstructive strategies the problem of representing femininity in ways other than those that reproduce male privilege has been well documented. These economies not only misrepresent the feminine but the very production of meaning depends crucially upon the negation of the feminine. This leaves in doubt whether deconstruction is able to ultimately deliver anything more than a practice negative of critique. For Kristeva: A woman cannot be: it is something which does not even belong in the order of being. It follows that a feminist practice can only be negative, at odds with what already exists so that we may say “that’s not it” and “that’s still not it”” (cited in Alcoff, 1995: 442).

If deconstruction offers up woman as a category defined by its undecidability then the possibility of a positive or affirmative construction is prevented from finding articulation. In addition gender as a meaningful category potentially disappears from the analysis. If woman is pure fiction then any attempt to speak about woman may potentially reinforce oppressions either by reinstating the gendered binaries of western metaphysics or through the erasure of difference within the category of woman. This problematic produces the question of whether there is an authentic, pre-discursive female body that may be retrieved and if there is, then how does this affect the representational economies which generate meaning within our culture. The disappearance of women’s agency has also been another limitation that has emerged from analyses which take post-structuralist assumptions as their point of departure. According to deconstruction the pre-representational status of the body must be questioned for its implicit essentialism, however, this critique of the over determination of subjects by essentialist arguments does not necessarily lead to the subject then being cast as underdetermined in its capacities or potentialities. Rather, the charge has been made that in these analyses the subject has been over determined, not by an essentialised biological body but by the social discourses and/or cultural practices through which it is constructed (Alcoff, 1995: 440) For instance according to Foucault we are bodies “totally imprinted by history” (Foucault, 1984: 83). For a feminism committed to normative critique, as well as, social change, this position restricts

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a necessary engagement with women’s agency and the potential such agentic capacities have for social transformation. Material, fleshy embodiment seemingly disappeared in many feminist deconstructive accounts which were criticised for over privileging the discursive at the expense of acknowledging the existence of women’s lived bodies. Often criticised for imparting an overly linguistic account of gender and sex at the expense of engaging with the ontological status of materiality Butler responded in Bodies That Matter with her account of matter in which matter was posed as only thinkable as discourse’s other and hence as already discursive. She argued that the material is not a pre-representational ground but a discursive effect of representation which passes itself off as a grounding (Colebrook, 2000a: 77). The constitutive powers of discourse rely upon an outside to discourse. The materiality of sex, therefore, operates as a constitutive exclusion but one which its construction depends upon. In this formulation construction and materiality are not positioned as necessarily oppositional but for Butler the problem of materiality is such that “we may seek to return to matter as prior to discourse to ground our claims about sexual difference only to discover that matter is fully sedimented with discourses on sex and sexuality that prefigure and constrain the uses to which that term can be put” (Butler, 1993: 29). Sexed bodies, therefore, only appear as sexed through discourse and the discourse of gender legitimates itself by positing sex as its ground (Colebrook, 2000a: 78). Butler does not presume materiality nor negate it but aims to problematise the matter of bodies in order to initiate new possibilities or new ways for bodies to matter (Butler, 1993: 30). Butler’s crucial contribution to the debates are to be found in her attempt to overcome the main problem of social constructionism – an overly determinist model “whereby the social unilaterally acts on the natural and invests it with its parameters and meanings” (Butler, 1993: 4). In constructivist accounts which construe gender as the social meanings which sexual difference assumes, “sex is relinquished in the course of that assumption, and gender emerges, not a term in a continued relationship of opposition to sex, but as the term which absorbs and displaces “sex”“ (Butler, 1993: 5). Deterministic accounts also beg the question of agency both in terms of the agency of the one who is inscribing meanings on bodies and the agency of the body being inscribed. In order to transcend the problems posed by various constructionist strategies Butler proposes “a return to the notion of matter, not as a site or a surface, but as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of a boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter” (Butler, 1993: 9). The concept of “materialization” allowed Butler to claim that in her work matter is not left untheorised because matter is always materialized as an effect of regulatory power. Butler reworks the concept of materiality so that it no longer

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refers to a static substance but to the “temporally specific effect” of “processes of discursive formations, identifications and reiterations” (Rahman and Witz, 2003: 255). In her account the focus moves away from an analysis of how gender is constituted through particular interpretations of sex to an analysis of the regulatory norms through which sex is materialized (Butler, 1993: 10). The very thing that attempts to denote “materiality,” suggests that it is not the case that everything, including materiality, is always already language. On the contrary, the materiality of the signifier (a “materiality” that comprises both signs and their significatory efficacy) implies that there can be no reference to a pure materiality except via materiality (Butler, 1993: 68).

Against positions which claim that the body is simply an effect of signification Butler argues that the materiality of the signifier itself must be recognised: “to posit by way of language a materiality outside of language is still to posit that materiality, and that materiality so posited will retain that positing as its constitutive condition” (Butler, 1993: 30). Materiality is that which is bound up with signification from the start: The body posited as prior to the sign, is always posited or signified as prior. This signification produces as an effect of its own procedure the very body that it nevertheless and simultaneously claims to discover as that which precedes its own action. If the body signified as prior to signification is an effect of signification, then the mimetic or representational status of language, which claims that signs follow bodies as their necessary mirrors, is not mimetic at all. On the contrary, it is productive, constitutive, one might even argue performative… (Butler, 1993: 30).

Butler explains the problem of sex and gender, materiality and representation as one in which the issue isn’t that we are unable to get outside of language in order to theorise materiality but that every effort to refer to materiality occurs via a signification process which is always already material.

New Ontologies – Rethinking Difference Butler’s reworking of the relationship of materiality and representation in order to retrieve the material body has been very productive for feminist debates. However, her position has been received critically by several theorists who argue for the need to move towards analytical frameworks which transcend the fundamental binaries of western metaphysics. These radical positions require in the first instance a rethinking of difference in ways that do not reduce it to the negated status of Other. To recast difference as positive or as “pure difference” requires the formulation of a set of ontological questions that unsettle those

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analyses of the body and representation in which embodied sexual difference is seen to operate as a condition for the production of a devalued femininity. Again, the problem for feminism throughout the discussion in this paper has been how to acknowledge the material body and its effects in ways that do not render it as a pre-representational surplus, a determining essence or a negated grounds for the production of social relations. Grosz (1995: 31) similarly states that “analyses of the representation of bodies abound, but bodies in their material variety wait to be thought”. Theorists who begin from this point pursue the task of thinking the body beyond the structural or semantic distinction between mind and body and advocate the development of non-dualistic formulations: “as long as corporeality, materiality, and authentic sexual difference are understood as radically anterior to thought, or negated by representation, feminist critique will only be a reaction against dualism” (Bray and Colebrook, 1998: 38). To these theorists, the body is more than a limit, a negation or the other of representation. According to Colebrook: the task of feminism as the task of corporeality demands a transfiguration of thought itself. The body is not to be reconsidered as just some other thing. Rather, the body is a site, a space, a condition or horizon. It’s relation to thought is not that of a simple vehicle or outside…it’s meaning is constitutive of what it is to exist or think (2000a: 35).

Like approaches which seek to think the body beyond sameness/difference this approach recognises that no simple appeal can be made to the body as some ultimate foundation. While the body may only be referred to through deploying discourse or representation, it nonetheless “possesses a force and being that marks the very character of representation” (Colebrook: 2000a: 77). Colebrook argues that theories such as Butler’s, rather than question the very ontological status of representational structures has tended to suspend this question in favour of pulling apart the system of representation from within (Colebrook, 2000a: 78). For Colebrook the positing of materiality as its constitutive condition conflates the being of a thing with the mode in which that thing is known (2000a: 78). Therefore, while Butler’s work focuses on the epistemological conditions through which materiality comes into being as a constitutive outside Colebrook argues that what feminist theory really needs is to ask questions about the ontological status of materiality. In order to question the ontological status of the body we must begin with a reconceptualisation of the relationship between power and difference. In Butler’s account power operates as exclusion where difference is posited as a constitutive outside. The problem for Colebrook is that what Butler takes from her reading of Foucault is

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a theory of power as primarily repressive or regulatory in its force. Power in Butler’s account operates to produce difference as a discursive exclusion. Locating materiality as an outside to “iteration, performativity or discourse need only be posited if we enclose difference within signification” (Colebrook, 2000a: 82). If instead we read Foucault differently and understand power as immanent then power ceases to operate as a closed system and, therefore, it makes no sense to consider an outside or the exclusions that Butler’s theory depends upon (Colebrook, 2000a: 78). In other feminist readings of Foucault as that undertaken by Grosz (1994, 1995) there is an explicit concern with the ways in which power operates as an immanent force. In this formulation power occurs as a multiplicity of differing forces. It is only once we can conceive of power as productive and multiple can we deploy a notion of difference as positive or productive. This is an ontological project that exceeds the epistemological one put forward by Butler. Theorists working from this position follow Deleuze’s assertion that thought is not the negation or repression of a pre-representational matter or presence and as such thought does not have an outside. This means that sexual difference can be cast in positive, active and affirmative terms rather than the body as the site of sexual difference being cast as the negation of thought. Positive difference means that identity is not the effect of a differentiating structure such as language but that existence itself is field of singularities expressed through differing relations and effects (Bray and Colebrook, 1998: 40). Rather than view the body as an effect of representation it is analysed in terms of its effects and forces. This crucially allows being and the body to be recast in terms of an active becoming and as a positive force. The process of becoming meaningful does not refer to a system of signs or a symbolic framework thought by a rational disembodied mind (Colebrook, 2000a: 86). Thought is not transcendent but “an immanent power of active nature” (Gatens, 1996: 148). For Braidotti this reconceptualisation of the sexed body is crucial for a redefinition of subjectivity. As she argues the embodiment of the subject “is to be understood as neither a biological nor a sociological category, but rather as a point of overlap between the physical, the symbolic and the material conditions” (Braidotti, 2003: 44). As an active force bodies intersect, connect, and affirm their existence. For feminism this means analyses of embodied subjectivity need not begin from some point beyond patriarchal or phallocentric thought but start with questions about how specific bodily practices contribute to creative self formation (Bray and Colebrook, 1998: 36). For Braidotti, this means rejecting a Hegelian framework in which identity is posed in a dialectical opposition to a devalued and marginalised other: this definition of the feminist subject as a multiple, complex process is also an attempt to rethink the unity of the subject, without reference to either humanistic

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beliefs or naïve social constructivism. It critiques dualistic oppositions, linking instead body and mind in a new flux of self (Braidotti, 2003: 46).

This is a crucial development which allows non-reductive feminist analyses of female subjectivity and its relation to materiality to be studied (Budgeon, 2003).

Conclusion The history of theorising the body is a long one in feminist thought. As a central problematic within feminist thought the relationship of the body to the social and cultural has been contested and articulated in many ways across a series of debates about its ontological and epistemological status. The politics of gendered subjectivity are intrinsically a politics of the body, both in terms of its fleshy, lived corporeality and the systems of thought and signification which always transcend this body and produce a virtual or imagined body. The terms of debate have centred on the relationship between the material body and the systems of thought through which the sexed body has been made knowable. For feminism the separation of sex and gender involved a debate over the political efficacy of either, on the one hand, dealing with the body through a radical deessentialisng of the biological identity of woman (Balsamo, 1996: 31) or, on the other hand, by a radical reclamation and valorising of the essential female body. An analysis operating within a frame which brackets out the body is faced with the prospect of privileging either the mind and its transcendence or, on the other hand, the body and its immanence (Brooks, 1999: 8). Both positions, however, advocate an authentic body which exists outside the bounds of patriarchal culture. Feminists tended to position themselves on one of the sides of the binary: the body was either theorised as pre-social or on the other hand, as a product of the social (Gatens, 1996: 4). Engaging with poststructuralism has complicated the terms of the debate by problematising the separation of the mind/body binary. This has proceeded primarily from two different strategies. In the first the status of the prerepresentational body is engaged with but not as an ontological foundation but rather as an effect of representation. In the second strategy a more radical analysis is offered. The body is removed from a critique of representation which relies upon an economy of signification in which meaning emerges through relations of difference or negation. In this reworking of the concept of power, the body can be thought of in affirmative and non-reductive ways which ultimately opens up the field for new questions to be asked about the potential of gendered, embodied subjectivity. The approach advocated here is one in which the sociality of gender and fleshy, embedded and embodied materiality are both recognised as neither term is held as reducible to the other. This

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ontological re-orientation allows us to ask very different questions about women’s identity and experience. In particular it allows us to engage with women’s embodied agency as it is located within specific locations and sets of practices without privileging any one explanation or account in advance

Works Cited Alcoff, Linda, “Cultural feminism versus post-structuralism: the identity crisis in feminist theory”, in eds. Nancy Tuana and Rosemarie Tong, Feminism and Philosophy (Oxford: Westview Press, 1995), pp. 434-456. Balsamo, Anne, Technologies of the Gendered Body (London: Duke University Press, 1996). Bartky, Sandra Lee, “Foucault, femininity and the modernisation of patriarchal power” in eds. I. Diamond and L. Quinby, Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), pp. 61-86. Bordo, Susan, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Braidotti, Rosi, “Becoming woman: or sexual difference revisited”, Theory, Culture and Society 20 (2003), pp. 43-64. Brook, Barbara, Feminist Perspectives on the Body (London: Longman, 1999). Bray, Abigail and Claire Colebrook, “The haunted flesh: corporeal feminism and the politics of (dis)embodiment”, Signs 24 (1998): pp. 35-67. Budgeon, Shelley, “Identity as an embodied event”, Body and Society 9 (2003), pp. 35-55. Butler, Judith, Bodies that Matter (London: Routledge, 1993). Colebrook, Claire, “From radical representations to corporeal becomings: the feminist philosophy of Lloyd, Grosz, and Gatens”, Hypatia 15 (2000a): pp. 76-93. —. “Incorporeality: the ghostly body of metaphysics”, Body and Society 6 (2000b), pp. 25-44. Cranny-Francis, Anne, Wendy Waring et al., Gender Studies: Terms and Debates (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003). De Beauvoir, Simone, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). Daly, Mary, Gyn/Ecology (Boston: Beacon, 1978). —. Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984). Davis, Kathy Reshaping the Female Body: The Dilemma of Cosmetic Surgery (London: Routledge, 1995).

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Delphy, Christine, “Rethinking sex and gender,” in eds. Diana Leonard and Lisa Adkins, Sex in Question French Materialist Feminism (London: Taylor and Francis, 1996), pp. 30-41. Foucault, Michel, The Foucault Reader, ed. P. Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984). Gatens, Moira, Imaginary Bodies (London: Routledge, 1996). Griffin, Susan, Women and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (New York: Harper and Row, 1978). Grosz, Elizabeth, Volatile Bodies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). —. Space, Time and Perversion (London: Routledge, 1995). Kimmel, Michael S., The Gendered Society, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Hood-Williams, John, “Sexing the athletes”, Sociology of Sport Journal 12 (1995), pp. 290-305. —. “Goodbye to sex and gender”, Feminist Review 44 (1996): pp. 1-16. Laqueur, Thomas, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (London: Harvard University Press, 1995). McNay, Lois,Foucault and Feminism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992). Oakley, Ann, Sex, Gender and Society, Revised Edition (Aldershot: Gower, 1985). Rahman, Momin and Witz, Anne. “What really matters? The elusive quality of the material in feminist thought”, Feminist Theory 4 (2003), pp. 243-261. Rich, Adrienne, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Bantam, 1977). Witz, Anne, “Whose body matters? Feminist sociology and the corporeal turn in sociology and feminism”, Body and Society 6 (2000), pp. 1-24.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN BLOOMER SCANDALS: UNCOVERING THE POLITICAL BODY HAGAR KOTEF

Sex is deep at the heart of our troubles…and unless we eliminate the most pernicious of our systems of oppression, unless we go to the very center of the sexual politic and it sick delirium of power and violence, all our efforts at liberation will only land us again in the same primordial stews. —Millet, 1970: 22 History becomes “effective” to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being – as it divides our emotions, dramatizes our instincts, multiplies our body and sets it against itself. “Effective” history leaves nothing around the self [and] deprives the self of the reassuring stability of life and nature. It will uproot its traditional foundations and relentlessly disrupt its pretended continuity. This is because knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting. —Foucault, 2003: 360

Sometimes it seems to me that a rapid glance at the relevant shelves in bookstores, a swift browsing through syllabi, is all it takes to demonstrate the centrality of the body to nowadays feminism. The subject matters of current feminism – from prostitution to reproduction to drag – ceaselessly orbit the body, seize it (are seized by it), and problematize it, as if they are all part of one endeavor: an endeavor to uncover the political aspects of the body, the political relations to which it is exposed and in which it participates. Though this assumption could not be justified here, I would like to suggest that third-wave feminism, diverse as it is, has one common supposition: that the body is a political thing and that women’s oppression occurs mostly through and on the surface of the body. However, this understanding of the body as a political being was not always the prevalent approach of feminism, and the relations of the body to the feminist struggle (or rather: to feminist struggles) modify and shift through time and schools. To better understand these relations – an understanding that will allow us to better comprehend the meanings, limitations

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and conditions of feminist discourse but also of bodies, sexuality, and gender – a genealogy is required. This genealogy, whose methodological framework is given to us by the works of Michel Foucault, is in fact a double one: a genealogy of the politicization of the body in feminist discourse, leaning against a genealogy of the political ontologies assumed by feminism.1 My premise is that each political theory, political movement, or political action (as long as it is reflective or selfaware) has an assumption about the identity of the political thing, or in other words: has a political ontology. This ontology will not always be sophisticated, and many times it will never be articulated or even thought of as a political ontology. Nevertheless, there will always be some border demarcating the political sphere, a border determining what action, what utterance, what social element is political or has a political relevance. Feminism, both as a political movement and as a theory of the political, is not an exception, and different feminist schools diverge also in the political ontologies lying at their bases. They maintain different conceptions regarding the nature of the political, the matters composing it, the issues forming its frame of reference and thus delineating its boundaries. These different conceptions of the political necessitate different notions regarding the modus operandi of power and oppression (women’s oppression), the means to emancipation and equalization, and the nature of the political subject (Woman, woman, women – and of what kind? constructed of what? which of its elements are of relevance? which are to be left out of the political engagement? and with what consequences?). By tracing these we will be able to analyze the places the body occupies in the various demarcations of the political introduced throughout the history of feminism. They will enable us to locate and examine the corporeal aspects of the female subject (as an object of a specific political discourse); the bodily aspects of what is referred to as female subjection; and the sites around and through which the body is problematized, politicized, and emerges as an object for political concern (sites like motherhood, prostitution, violence, sexuality, fashion, beauty, thinness, etc).2 1

On the methodology, praxis and theory of genealogy see Foucault 2003a-c; for some of his genealogical projects see Foucault 1977, 1990, 2003c 2 By that I wish to separate the physical nature of “real”, concrete women and the physical nature of women as far as they are included in the discourse of feminism, as far as the category of woman (or women) as the category of feminist discourse is concerned. Yet, this distinction should not be read as one suggesting a radical gap between “concrete women” and the notion of (discursive, in that case also political) categories. As Foucault and Butler have taught us, the discursive fields within which one exists and gains meanings are a crucial part (perhaps the only part) in constructing one’s “concrete” identity. The historical moment we will encounter here is located at some of the junctions

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The current paper is a segment of this genealogical project. This segment focuses on one moment in the history of the formation of liberal feminism; it is what I would like to call “the bloomer episode”. The bloomer was a dress, composed of loose trousers that narrowed at the ankles, covered by a skirt the often only covered the knees. The story of its appearance in the political realm, as a subject and object of a feminist struggle, can serve as an emblem for the relations between the body and the political sphere as it demarcated by liberal feminism. As such, this appearance can be told through at least three different stories, stories that vary slightly in their content and radically in their structure. Yet, in all versions it has the same beginning: In 1852 Elizabeth Miller appeared on the front lawn of her cousin, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, dressed in the outfit which would later be known as “the bloomer.” This appearance launched a twoyear struggle for dress reform that was led by a group of American suffragists, and spread rapidly to England.3 The main argument in this struggle was that the heavy and tight dresses of the period cause severe damage to the bodies of women (including lasting damage to their spine and many other nerve diseases). Its goal was the liberation of the body with a new, emancipatory form of dress.4

in the construction of the fundamental category (categories) of feminism. This moment can be seen as part of an attempt to extricate the category of woman from everything that soils her, and thus to create “the abstract woman.” But it can also be viewed as a perplexity, a confusion of a discourse that still lacks the explicit categories of gender and its correlates. It can be a story about a discourse still wrestling with its own limits, seeking its own language and its own referees. 3 This paper will focus on the American context not only since this is the site from which the campaign was lunched, but also since focusing on this particular group will allow me to better juxtapose the bloomer campaign against the very lucid liberal feminism they represent. Nonetheless, the campaign for dress reform appeared in England almost at the same time, and operated there within and against very similar backdrops, as will be unfolded in what follows. 4 Dress reform campaigns were very fashionable during the 19th century. However, while most of them were embedded in socialistic agenda (Entwistle, 2005: 109), the bloomer episode was unique in its focus on equality along the lines of gender rather than class. In fact, the absence of class-relating arguments during this campaign for dress reform is telling, as working class women wore trousers at the time (Entwistle, 2005: 166-168) and hence could have functioned as a frame of reference for the reformers. The lack of allusions to their cloths might serve to demarcate this struggle for suffrage as one limited to middle- and upper-class white women, has many have suggested in different contexts.

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Rude, Vulgar Men or: Why Women Should Be Emancipated from Their Bodies To tell the first version of this story, let us detour, for a short moment, in order to locate ourselves better within backdrop against which this scene is set. Let us sketch the more classic, more familiar story about the politicization of the body in feminism. Feminism, this story suggests, produced itself as a political theory through the exclusion of the body from the political realm. It arose as a discourse in the eighteenth century, mediated by a struggle against the image of nature (and the body within it) as determining women to the margins of society.5 Complying with the logic of this struggle, this particular mode of feminism conjugated to the body/mind binary and was concerned mostly with elevating the mind (of women; especially through education). This elevation necessitated a rejection of what was described by these texts as an obsessive occupation of women with their bodies, endless fussing, preening, and an overestimation of aesthetic qualities (Wakefield, 1997: 124, 139; Astell, 1997: 187, 201-205; Unknown, 1997: 207). The body appeared within this feminist strand as something one has to renounce in order to constitute herself as a free, equal being. It was seen as natural shackles one has to be freed from in order to enable a problematization of the political status of women, in order to fracture what seemed to be a natural given (i.e., women’s subordination).6 With the crystallization of feminist thought within the theoretical framework of liberalism (during approximately the first half of nineteenth century), the elimination of the body became complete. The body was entirely excluded from political deliberation; now it was not even present there as a given to struggle 5 The term “feminism,” appearing only in the beginning of the 20th century, is certainly used in an anachronistic manner here. The assumptions that the term is applicable here, and that it is applicable for certain texts but not others, seems almost arbitrary. Perhaps the ascription of the term to these texts finds its justification only in retrospect. In order to delimit the reference to women’s writing of that era (some would say that the mere fact of writing ascribes a feminist quality to the text, considering the exclusion of women from writing at the time, c.f. Jones 1997, 140-144), I include as “feminist” only texts seeking to identify and destabilize power relations between men and women; texts that aspire to analyze the structure and origins of female subordination; and sometimes texts that offer a “solution” for women’s subjection. 6 For instance, we can notice repeated versions of the argument suggesting that the subordination of the consciousness of women is not a consequence of “natural” physiology but of poor educating (a socio-political function). This argument is one part in an overall move to establish a distinction between body and politics, and thus to make possible the proposition that women can be at the same time physically inferior and politically equal. (Macaulay, 1997: 112-113; Woolstonecraft, 1997: 55; Astell, 1997: 199)

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with, a threatening “infection” that needed to be monitored and managed. At this stage the political subject remained, according to the political ontology hiding at the foundations of liberalism, nothing more than an empty juridical construct: an anchor to a whole set of liberties and rights, without any unique, concrete, or physical characters.7 As feminism evolved, the body has found different spaces inside and beside the political in which to dwell: it found spaces within struggles for labour conditions in socialist and progressive feminism, it penetrated the frontiers of feminism through questions of race, and it could always count on the resurgence of issues such as reproduction and motherhood to open it some more leeway. Then, in the late 1960s, it broke into the centre of the political arena, and was now thought of as the primary object of power relations: from that point on (with a few exceptions), the subjection of the body will be conceived as the most basic and intense manifestation of patriarchy.8 Within this framework, the bloomer episode appeared contained by a liberal surrounding. The women that lead this particular struggle for dress reform (Elizabeth C. Stanton, Amelia Bloomer, Lucretia Mott, and Suzan B. Anthony) were also the main figures in a group that consolidated around the Seneca Falls Convention (1848) and the many suffragist conferences that followed it. The liberal nature of this group is well known, but if some demonstration of it is in need, one can consider not just their demands (a very specific formulation of suffrage based on the idea of full equality, alongside an obsession with property rights), but also their rhetoric. It was a very self-conscious liberal discourse, intentionally portraying itself with liberal colours by duplicating classic liberal documents (the American Declaration of Independence, the U.S. constitution, and others). Our discursive scenery, thus, is liberal-feminism, and on this stage the body played a very specific part: that of the absentee or the excluded. The body was 7

One can find it hiding relatively in the open in Rawls (1999), for example. Rape is conceived as what constitutes, preserves, and characterizes the political relations between men and women; pornography appears as a key aspect (or at least key representation) of male domination; prostitution serves as the most paradigmatic site of this domination; battered women become an exemplary political issue; anorexia is perceived as an instrument for female subjection; etc. one must note that due to the malefemale binary at the foundation of all these relations, this model describes patriarchy, with its special power relations, and not politics in general. Accordingly, when politics presences, it presents through power relations; when these power relations involve the male/female binary, politics manifests itself through sexual power relations. Nevertheless, many radical feminists argue that this manifestation of politics is the most stable, most intense, and most permanent, and thus the paradigmatic manifestation of the political. (Millett, 1970; The Boston Women's Health Book Collective, 1975; MacKinnon, 1978; Brownmiller, 1975; Barry, 1979) 8

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detached from – or yet un-attached to – the political sphere. The Political was understood to be the sphere of rights and liberties; the political subject who functioned within it was the citizen: a subject that is nothing but an empty function whose sole attribute is the inclusion in the system that allocates those rights and liberties.9 As a liberal discourse, the feminist liberal discourse – so the story goes – was a discourse consisting of abstractness. The demand for full political equality required that Woman – the object of that discourse – be disembodied. On this backdrop, the bloomer episode might appear as yet another example for this purification endeavour. Under this account, the struggle for dress reform was a struggle for the emancipation from the body (and not as a struggle for the emancipation of the body, as will immediately be suggested). The bloomer was intended to liberate women from their grounding to physicality: the “old” dress should be disavowed since it necessitates a constant accounting to the body – a continuous effort of breathing, walking, carrying a heavy weight. The new form of dress would allow women to forget their bodies and thus to pursue more ‘noble’ goals, such as suffrage. However, after two years the campaign was forsaken since the reverse outcome was produced: the public appearance of the bloomer did not suppress the presence of the body but rather constantly presented and represented it: …rude, vulgar men stare me out of countenance and heard them say as I opened the door, ‘There comes my Bloomer!’ O, hated name! …Here I am known only as one of the women who ape men – coarse brutal men! Ho, I can not, can not bear it any longer (Anthony, cited in Harper, 1899: 116).

Every public appearance with the bloomer resulted in countless reactions evoking what was seen as a new – perhaps even provocative – presentation of the body. This was exactly what the bloomer women intended to prevent, and thus it was unbearable to them. Therefore, the bloomer was abandoned; it was abandoned in order to facilitate the extrication of Woman from corporeality, in order to enable the construction of “the abstract woman”.10 9

This claim could be established via an assessment of the major goals of this school. The three key demands they introduced were: 1. suffrage (i.e. full inclusion as citizens in the political sphere); 2. property rights (one of the central rights – some would say the central right – within liberalism, and therefore this objective should be understood as a demand for inclusion in the sphere of rights); 3. an equal right for divorce (which is interpreted as a demand for freedom, thereby completing the triangle of inclusion-rights-liberties). 10 By no means do I suggest here that this abstract notion of the subject depicts properly Victorian women or womanhood. The notion of Victorianism as a refusal of corporeality has long been problematized and abandoned. Foucault (1990, 2003c) suggests that what

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Since this is a more or less familiar story – if not in its content at least in its form – we will not dwell on it further here. As opposed to this version of the story, which relied on the genealogy outlined briefly above, the next two versions suggest that this genealogy should be revisited. Both see the bloomer episode as an instance that calls into question the clean and clear-cut account this genealogy provides. It is perhaps important to stress that in that the bloomer episode is not just a concrete historical case, nor even merely an example; it is also a parable.

Clothes Instead of Words: The Gap Theory Let us move to the second story. This story sees the bloomer episode as a gap in the surface of abstractness drawn by liberal feminism; a gap in which clothing, and as its bearer, the body, became a central aspect of the political struggle of Seneca Falls’ suffragists; a gap in which the delineation of the political in the discourse of this group was altered. The alteration the bloomer introduced into the demarcation of the political sphere was threefold. First, it changed the political language. Concepts like “spine”, “waist” or “heavy” entered the domain of the political, a domain which was previously relatively “pure” of corporeal components. Furthermore, old concepts attained new meanings and were now deployed in new fields. For instance, the concept of “slavery,” previously used to describe the legal status of women, was shifted and attached to the body. Elizabeth C. Stanton reports that the change of dress made her feel “like a captive set free from his ball and chain”. She celebrates the new freedom the bloomer bestowed upon her body: “I was always ready for a brisk walk throughout sleet and snow and rain, to climb a mountain, jump over a fence, work in the garden…what a sense of liberty I felt with no skirt to hold or brush…” (Stanton, 1971: 201). This level of change was only a symptom of a deeper level: a change in the goals of political struggles, in the characterization of political oppression, and seems to be a discourse of repression is in fact one aiming towards the intensification of longevity, fertility, and health. As such, this discourse is a component in a much larger effort of shifting the body into the core of the political. Historians like Lefkpwitz Horowitz (2002) and Degler (1974) further expose that what is considered to be a consensual attitude towards women’s sexuality in the Victorian era (the very attitude Foucault problematizes) was in fact under dispute. In many fields of life Victorian women were engaged with their bodies, and by many they have been referred to not just as the “angels of the house” but also as creatures whose bodies must be fostered and attended to. My claim in this paper is a different one. It refers only to one dimension of existence- the political dimension: as political agents women – as well as men – were considered to be abstract entities or else had to be constructed as ones.

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more generally, a change in the conceptualization of power. At that discursive moment feminism (or rather: this specific feminist school) started to understand power as exceeding the legal realm and the realm of political representation; power (as a political element, and not mere force) was now conceived also as a physical operation upon bodies, a physical operation that is political in itself, or at least has political consequences. The body became the locus of the operation of power not just as the surface upon which oppression operates directly, but also as a threshold through which almost all other political forms of oppression traversed. Consider, for example, Gerrit Smith’s (a keen supporter of the bloomer and the husband of Elizabeth Miller) refusal to attend the 1856’s Women’s Rights Convention, after most of the Seneca Falls women abandoned the new dress: …I believe that poverty is the great curse of woman, and that she is powerless to assert her rights, because she is poor. Woman must go to work and get rid of her poverty, but that she cannot do in her present disabling dress, and she seems determined not to cast it aside. She is unwilling to sacrifice grace and fashion, even to gain her right…Were woman to adopt a rational dress, a dress that would not hinder her from any employment, how quickly would she rise from her present degrading dependence on man! How quickly would the marriage contract be modified and made to recognize the equal rights of the parties to it! And how quickly would she gain access to the ballot-box (cited in Harper, 1899: 119).

Smith bases women’s subjection on economic inequality. This is not a new or unique feminist claim; however, in Smith’s version this claim takes an exceptional twist: it can be traced down to the choice of dress women have (or make). And so, even if the key to women’s liberation in Smith’s version is economic equalization, this can be achieved only through dress reform. This form of argument repeats throughout the bloomer episode. The old style of dress becomes the emblem, the cause, and the foundation of all other types of women’s subjection. All debates concerning women’s political status suddenly transfer through the question of clothing and fashion; as though by changing the length of the skirt or the tightness of the corset all the maladies from which women suffer, all forms of inequality, will be resolved. These two changes, in the understanding of oppression and in the language describing this oppression, were rooted in a third, more profound change: the change in the category of woman. The political goals should be altered since woman is constructed from different matters than what seemed before. She was no longer seen as a mere juridical function, to which feminism should attach rights and liberties; she was a bodily creature, with a spine and lungs that could be damaged without a certain political transformation. What was the exact

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nature of this corporeality? To answer this, a further reading through this episode is needed. The struggle for dress reform was taken very seriously. Its rhetoric was strictly political, and it was managed like all other political campaigns: articles in newspapers and magazines, lectures, pamphlets, establishment of associations, and more. But this seriousness was not shared by these Seneca Falls women alone. The appearance of the bloomer was accompanied by an earthquake; an earthquake in which something that has been natural to everybody for a long time is shaken and creates fractures upon the public surface.11 In the US as well as in England, newspapers’ front pages reported “events” at which two or three women were seen wearing the new outfit; in both countries people defined themselves along the lines of anti/probloomerism; comedies mocking it were staged; conventions and lectures were held, explaining the benefits (or detriments) in wearing the new dress; even God was invoked, and theological discussions regarding the question of whether God forbade females to wear trousers were held in churches. We have here a genuine struggle between passionate advocates and determined objectors, accompanied by a cheering crowd viewing this tussle and applauding the winners. For a short while it seemed like the public sphere was concerned with one thing alone: the bloomer.12 The question that immediately jumps to mind is: why? what was at stake here? What was at stake, I believe, was not merely a concrete issue concerning fashion, nor was it even a political problem concerning the political status of women. It was the cracking sounds of the crust of the political, the detonation effects of its re-demarcation when bodies were introduced into it. From an ontological perspective, we can claim that bodies and their gender performativity in dress disclosed their political nature.13 From a genealogical angle, we might prefer to argue that performance of gender through dress, and with it dressed bodies, were being politicized. They transgressed the realm of nature into that of politics. Accordingly, the story of the bloomer was a story of a rupture in the discourse of liberal feminism, a moment in which the body bursts through a surface whose constitutive rule is abstractness. However, this tumult persisted for a very short while. After creating turbulence that shook the political scene, the bloomer was abandoned after only two years. Stanton explained: 11

In that we have here a political moment in the Rancierian meaning (Ranciere, 1999) One can compare this turmoil to the debate about the veil in France today. Here, too, the dressed body of women functions as a visual symbol, in which (or should I say: to which) moralism, culture, religion, and women’s status collide, and which also takes place largely within the discursive frame of liberalism. 13 For more on the notion of gender performativity see Butler 1999. 12

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[T]o escape constant observation, criticism, ridicule, and persecution, one after another gladly went back to the old slavery, and sacrificed freedom of movement to respect. I have never wondered since that the Chinese women allow their daughter’s feet to be encased in iron shoes, nor that the Hindu widows walk calmly to the funeral pyre; for great are the penalties of those who dare resist the behests of the tyrant Custom. (Stanton, 1971: 204)

How easily the body is sacrificed in the name of other forms of emancipation. How quickly Stanton is willing to accept the subjection of her – and any other woman’s – body. The reasons for this desertion are far from clear (ridicule and scorn could not be the only reason: Stanton suffered from them also at the suffrage front, and there she never thought of surrendering), but the outcome is evident: the struggle for dress reform was forsaken. And with the abandonment of the bloomer the body was (re-) excluded from the concept of the political upheld by liberal feminism. The subject was purified again. Stanton reports feeling “mental freedom” following the return to the traditional dress, and asks: “We put [the bloomer] on for greater freedom, but what is physical freedom compared to mental bondage?” (cited in Harper, 1899: 116). Anthony writes: I felt the need of some such garment because I was obliged to be out every day in all kinds of weather, and also because I saw women ruined their health by tight lacing and the weight of their clothing; and I hoped to help establish the principle of rational dress. I found it a physical comfort but a mental crucifixion. It was an intellectual slavery; one never could get rid of thinking of herself, and the important thing is to forget the self. The attention of my audience was fixed upon my clothes instead of my words. (ibid)

And so, once again, the mind overcomes the body in the story of liberalism. Words are more important than flesh and bones; mental liberty is considered to be higher than physical freedom. And post-factum, the corporeal is recharged with mental meaning: the dress was rational and the freedom of movement was an important goal not (just) in itself, but for the sake of suffrage: it enabled Anthony to tour the land and spread the message. But these words of Anthony’s carry within them the seeds of a whole different explanation for the abandonment of the bloomer, the third story I wish to sketch here. The story I’ve just told portrayed a structure of a surface, the surface of the political sphere of liberalism in general and of liberal feminism in particular. This surface is presumably left cleansed of corporality, which is either excluded or repressed. However, it is paved with gaps; gaps through which the body materializes and appears, gaps such as the bloomer episode. Following this kind of reading one can further explore liberal feminism seeking such gaps. Indeed, a close reading through this discourse uncovers many episodes, paragraphs, and debates through which the body emerges; it also

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reveals that this emergence is not an emergence of a stable and self-identical entity. There are many pivots of embodiment through which the politicization of the body materializes, through which the body consolidates, is constructed, and enters into the political sphere. The current episode supplies one such pivot: the dressed body, interlaced with at least two other pivots of embodiment: the motile body and the healthy (or ill) body. Before long it will instigate a discussion regarding another pivot: the sexualized body. Throughout the discourse of feminism one can encounter many others: the reproductive body, the labouring body, the racialized body, and the body subjected to violence. All are different axes of materialization that rise up and become points of gravitation for political interests in the body.

The Behests of Tyrant Costumes The following story will comply with a different structure: it will be a story that does not assume this surface of abstractness, but goes back and asks how it was constituted and how it changes through history. It will be a story that sees the bloomer as a moment in which the whole demarcation of liberal feminism alters (not a story of a gap in a given demarcation), a moment in which the borders of the political shift, the borders of liberal-feminist discourse itself are (re)constructed, and the abstract woman is produced. To tell that story, let us return to the particular reactions that troubled Anthony so much. Among these reactions we find the repeated appeal to moral issues (is wearing such short skirts moral? is wearing trousers?), and to gender binaries (do women now look so much like men that one might make a horrible mistake?). By wearing shorter skirts and “masculine” trousers, these suffragists threatened a very delicate fabric: the pure and precise partition into two demarcated and sealed sexes/genders. Therefore, they were accused of subverting morality. The bloomer women, on the other hand, emphasized again and again that they did not wish to undercut morality, and repeatedly defended themselves as moral women. They did everything they could to displace their discourse from that of morality and sexuality, and insisted upon it consisting of two realms alone: that of health and that of freedom of movement. Was that an attempt to “neutralize” the body? an attempt to state that though Woman is nonetheless a political category with corporal elements, these elements are un-sexed (perhaps even ungendered)?14 14

Consider, for example, the next paragraph by Bloomer: “It is only one of our rights to dress comfortably…I feel no more like a man now than I did in long skirts, unless it be that enjoying more freedom and cutting off the fetters is to be like a man. I suppose in that respect we are more mannish, for we know that in dress, as in all things else, we

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I would like to suggest that it was a part of a double endeavour, an endeavour to constitute at the same time a distinct feminist discourse, and the object of that discourse: a woman, concrete and embodied however still unsexed. Why unsexed? Because Woman had to be rescued from sexuality; because the fusion of women with sexuality was one of the main impediments the feminist discourse had to work through in order to constitute Woman as a subject with legitimate ground from which to make political claims. Entitled political entities could not be sexed; entitled political claims could not be made from the position of sexuality. In the overall political discourse of the nineteenth century, sexuality functioned in a double way. First, it functioned as a threshold of the political, as a disqualification criterion according to which those who are imprinted with it are excluded from the political sphere; and second, as an exclusive mark of women. Sexuality, then, was one of the most predominant mechanisms of assuring the persistent exclusion of women from politics. This was an exclusion either through over-sexualization (which makes women unworthy political subjects) or over-moderation and chastity (which would be compromised by an inclusion in politics).15 have been and are slaves, while man in dress and all things else is free…I feel that if all of us were less slaves to fashion we would be nobler women, for both our bodies and minds are now rendered weak and useless from the unhealthy and barbarous style of dress adopted…” (Gattey, 1968: 114). Bloomer sees in the dress reform a part, equal in essence even if not in importance, to the struggle for women’s rights. As any other aspect of this struggle (i.e., as any other right to be attained), in dress amelioration women should be put under the same umbrella as men. It is not – she stresses – a question of uniqueness, of that which distinguishes women; it is not a question of sex. 15 Accordingly many suffragists were often disqualified through accusations with free love. Or, from a different direction, women’s suffrage was attacked as a process that will lead to the sexualization of the poles (Banner, 1974; Evans, 1989; Marilley, 1996). Yet, as any discourse, the discourse of sexuality in the 19th century was paved with contradictions. The assignment of both a-sexuality and sexual saturation to women was just one of them. Another one concerned the exclusive tie between womanhood and sexuality. And so men – especially young men – were often depicted as possessing oversexuality that threatened society (Lefkowitz-Horowitz, 2002). Still, I would like to suggest that it was woman that came to posse sexuality as a political identity – women were sexed, not engaged in sexual activity. Men sexual activity did not endanger their rationality; women’s did– it was instable, unruly, disruptive. Men could subject their sexuality to reason and therefore were free agents; women could not and therefore had to be controlled (Shuttleworth, 1990; Foucault 1990: 104-105). In that, the sexualization of women was part of a wider context, in which the portrayal of Woman as an essentially bodily creature served “to deny her full status as a human being wherever and whenever mental activity as over against bodily activity has been thought to be the most human activity of all” (Spelman, cited at Smart, 1992: 26). Accordingly, even if male sexuality

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Most of the suffragists of the discourse in question contested the latter attribute of sexuality. They defied the notion that sexuality is exclusively a trait of women, or even (in some versions) one of their traits at all. But they did uphold the former (continuing to see sexuality as something that cannot be reconciled with political status). Hence, the necessity for splitting woman from sexuality. “The woman question”, which was at that time inseparable from the discourse of sexuality, had to be extracted from this discourse in order to enable a discourse that could coherently conceptualize political equality among the sexes; in order to enable liberal feminism. There are two aspects of this argument, two ways in which it can be read. The first is a form of ‘discursive pragmatism’: according to it, all new discourses are dependent upon a given accumulation of available meanings. They cannot be coherent and comprehensible if they alter completely all existing categories. The realm of meanings can be altered only one small step at a time, or ‘meaning’ will collapse. Hence, a new discourse is still limited in its concepts; it still lacks its own language. Under the available matrix of meanings at the time, “sexuality” could not be conceived as something that can be attached to political subjects. One could be political and participate in the political sphere only insofar as he/she is not a sexual creature.16 A different reading will see the argument in the above paragraph as a product of a choice, a choice made by the bloomer women not to defy the treacherous connection between sexuality and political exclusion. And indeed, the bloomer women had an alternative option; they had an alternative discourse on which they could relay, a discourse that sees in sexuality – of males as well as of females – a healthy and desirable thing. As Historians such as Degler (1974) or Cott (1978) have shown, the Victorian attitude towards women’s sexuality was by no means homogeneous and was in fact under dispute. Women were engaged in questions of birth control, desire, or orgasm, and were not confined in a regime of repressing – or even managing and regulating – their bodies. Since the mid 1820’s, groups of physicians, physiological reformers, and “free thinkers” endorsed (hetero-)sexual activity, was considered at times dangerous to the social and political order, and perhaps even made men incapable moral, and thus political, agents, it did not render them apolitical by nature. (For more analyses of the role of sexuality in particular, and corporeality more generally, in the exclusion of women from the political domain see Riley, 1995; Grosz, 1994). 16 This latter formulation acknowledges the notion that sexuality is part of the subject – every subject – but alongside this notion it carries the belief that subjects are stratified beings, and that this stratification enables us to detach “parts”, “aspects”, “strata” and include them in assolation in the political domain while leaving behind other parts/aspects/strata that will be marked – to use the familiar liberal sign – as “private” (or “natural” or “social”).

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especially when moderate and provided that it is done within marriage, as increasing longevity, robustness, and physical – as well as mental – well being (Lefkowitz-Horowitz, 2002: 54-61, 111-115; Krug, 1996). Stanton herself had several pro-sex assertions, and though most of them were more private than public or political, some of them, and in particular her campaign for divorce, might be read by as part of a pro-sex framework (Gordon and Dubois 1987).17 And yet, the bloomer women chose not to take this path. However (under any reading one favours), the discourse of sexuality seized feminism; it is as if its strong grasp tore pieces from the feminist discourse that was still struggling to emerge. What was left behind, ‘in the hands’ of sexuality, were all the aspects of Woman that feminism had to abandon in order to constitute itself as an antithesis to a whole matrix that captured women and maintained them in a state of inferiority. The constant ridicule and scorn that led to the abandonment of the bloomer should be understood in this context. Consider again Stanton’s report: [T]o escape constant observation, criticism, ridicule, and persecution, one after another gladly went back to the old slavery, and sacrificed freedom of movement to respect. I have never wondered since that the Chinese women allow their daughter’s feet to be encased in iron shoes, nor that the Hindu widows walk calmly to the funeral pyre; for great are the penalties of those who dare resist the behests of the tyrant Custom.

This paragraph was read before as an all-too-easy renunciation of corporeal forms of subjection in the name of more “pure” ends. But if we lay emphasis on the fact that this subjection is still equivalent in Stanton’s eyes to slavery, another picture is revealed. It is a picture of an unsuccessful negotiation and of a sacrifice; of an attempt to liberate the body that encountered an opposition so powerful it had to surrender; of a surrendering that carried a heavy price: the body had to be de-politicized – and thus be exposed to subjection, left vulnerable to power – so women would have an admissible claim for political equality. The attempt latent at the bloomer campaign to disentangle feminism from sexuality was not an attempt to depoliticize sexuality; it was an attempt to proclaim its irrelevancy to feminism, exactly because it had a decisive political role. And thus, it was an attempt to delineate a border, within the political sphere, between the discourse of sexuality and the discourse of feminism. This 17

Such as the following remark in her diary vis-à-vis to a Whitman’s poem: “…he speaks as if the female must be forced to the creative act, apparently ignorant to the fact that a healthy woman has as much passion as a man, that she needs nothing stronger than the law of attraction to draw her to the male” (cited at Gordon 1977: 96).

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act had a double effect: on one level it constructed feminist discourse by defining its borders, but it also created a whole sphere of ‘outside’. As for the outside, this obsession with discarding sexuality reproduced the conventional political role of sexuality. Sexuality was reaffirmed as a politically destructive attribute, and thus – we might argue – a political power that historically made women’s political status particularly precarious was reinforced. As for feminism itself, here we have a more complex operation. In order to detach sexuality from feminism, sexuality had to be detached from woman insofar as she is a political subject. At the same time there is an attempt to declare that other aspects of women’s bodies are political. Accordingly, this whole campaign rested on an assumption that the body can be split into at least two political entities. One (the sexual body) is political, but is located at a political scene that is extraneous to feminism; the other (health, motility) is political and intrinsically relevant to feminism (by virtue of being intimately connected to women’s political status). Silverman (1994) claims that clothing is “a necessary condition of subjectivity” (191), thus, “every transformation within… vestmentary code implies some kind of shift within the ways of articulating subjectivity” (193). Indeed, it seems that the bloomer campaign was an attempt to constitute through cloths a new form of (female) subjectivity, one comprising a new set of relations between corporeality and sexuality. However, this split did not work. In spite of all this, the body appeared as a sexual body. Does this mean that the body is sexual? that one cannot have political bodies without sexuality? or perhaps that at that historical moment this separation was not possible? Consequently, the bloomer women had to make a choice. And the abandonment of the bloomer for right-oriented struggles can be seen as a choice to depoliticize the body completely. The bloomer women preferred denying the body all political relevance to introducing sexuality into feminism. But this depoliticization was not accompanied by a new understanding of the body as free of power relations. To the contrary: in light of the liberal pretension to offer a political sphere which sublimates power, which diminishes it if not abolishes it completely, the depoliticization of the body is an abandonment of the body to power; however, not to a political power, but a natural one: a power of nature. In following years the effects of this move would reveal themselves. Sexuality would assume a completely new position: woman’s sexuality would be conceived as subjected to power (in opposition to the relations of woman and sexuality in the current episode); however, this will take place only after sexuality had been relocated in the domain of nature. Thus, a new understanding of women’s oppression would emerge, and with it a new female subject (a new discursive object which would function in a different scenery): the mother of the race whose body subsists in feminist discourse mostly through the axis of

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reproduction and whose attributes and subjection are less and less political and more and more natural. In that, feminism would adjoin a drift that was the share of a vast variety of disciplines in the Anglo-American scene at the last decades of the nineteenth century (Smart, 1992: 11, 16-24). As Eherenreich and English (1978: 74) suggest, “By the eighteen eighties it is difficult to find a popular tract or article on any subject – education, suffrage, immigration, foreign relation – which is not embellished with Darwinism metaphors”. Tangent to this bio-moral-political framework, in which science provides not only moral guidelines for every aspect of living, but also demarcates – from within and without – the political community (Foucault, 2003c), feminism would construct itself a new niche. The discourse of rights and liberties would be charged with biopolitical aspects, and women’s rights – now getting the form of women’s responsibilities – would be a function of their reproductive capacity. Women would claim an improved political status as the mothers of the race, as the carriers of the future of society.18 The notion of the mother of the race did not simply appear out of nowhere at that points; discursive shifts are never done in sharp leaps but are rather shifts in balances propensities. The mother of the race is a descendant of the idea of “republican motherhood” which preceded and originated many feminist schools, and continued to be latent in many of them as late as the 1950’s (Marilley, 1996; Evans, 1989). Yet, one can trace its expansion and locate a proliferation of this category as sexuality, race and society amalgamate in the second half of the nineteenth century together with biology, hygiene, and psycho-pathology (Foucault, 2003c, 1990). It is at this point that the mother of the race materializes as a key category for feminism. The story of the emergence of this new figure is yet to be told. Yet the horizon it posits demands that we revise the stories of purification with which this paper was opened. The category of the abstract woman, whose body has no 18

For example, the right for divorce will be rephrased from the outset. It will no longer be based on the abstract notion of freedom, but on a different ground. In suggesting that women should be allowed – even encouraged – to divorce their drunkard husbands Stanton writes: “As the state has to provide homes for idiots, it certainly has the right to say how many there shall be. The Spartans had some good laws, in relation to marriage and children.” “Spartan rules” are used here by Stanton to suggest that drunken parents (i.e.: fathers) should not be in a position to reproduce, meaning, that in these cases divorces are in need. “Man in his lust has regulated this whole question of sexual intercourse long enough; let the mother of mankind whose prerogative it is to set bounds to his indulgence, rouse up & give this whole question a thorough, fearless examination.” (Stanton and Anthony, 1997: 162). This type of argumentation repeats and is intensified until an almost complete convergence of the discourse of marriage with that of eugenic (see Stern, 1974)

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political significance, was not a pre-existing category to which the Seneca Falls women returned thereby, closing the gap that was opened with the introduction of the bloomer to the political arena. The abstract woman was rather a product of necessity, of an agonizing sacrifice: the sacrifice of her body for something perceived as more important: the vote. Furthermore, sexuality was not a natural attribute that was politicized by feminism in later days. The politicization of sexuality in the second and third waves of feminism is a return of sexuality to the domain of the political, after its naturalization during this moment in firstwave feminism. This was a proto-dialectical return, in which that which was positioned as the clearest antagonism of feminism is fully integrated into it. As disciplines, ‘sexuality’ and ‘gender’ are, nowadays, almost inseparable.

Conclusions These three stories, told against each other and on the backdrop of current feminisms, can begin to uncover some of the complexities of the political characters of the body. They can show us that the body was not always conceived of as political, but they can also show us that the story of the politicization of the body cannot be told as a simple story of a growing politicization, starting with complete abstract political sphere and subjects, and climaxing in the 1970’s with the understanding of issues such as rape, anorexia or abortions as the kernel of patriarchy. These stories demonstrate that the politicization of the body occurs in diverse forms and that corporeality is not a stable and permanent entity. It is constituted and materialized differently and through various grids in different discourses (and sometimes in different moments within the same discourse). These understandings offer more than a step towards a better comprehension of the history of feminism. If subjectivity, as Foucault claims, is a discursive function and construction, then these understandings are also a step on the long path towards a better comprehension of ourselves. They can reveal some of the changing meanings and changing in experiences of womanhood and of being a woman. Like any other subject, women are constructed by a complex, overlapping, and shifting grids of discourses (of which feminism is one). The changing nature of the discursive object of feminism thus takes part in the modes and manners through which women perceive themselves, mold their identities, as well as are perceived and identified. Finally, “understanding” might not be the sole product of such a genealogical project. This project can be read not just as offering a glance to different understandings of oppression, corporeality, or sexuality by different feminist schools. It can also be taken as aiming to show – or even perform – what, I believe, any genealogy aims to do. Genealogy, as “a historical investigation into the events that have led us to

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constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying”, is a critique which aspires to “separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think. It is not seeking to make possible a metaphysics that has finally become a science; it is seeking to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom” (Foucault, 2003b: 53-54). This “freedom” is, of course, far from being within reach, and it will always remain more of an endless quest than a comprehensive emancipatory solution. Yet, as they reveal the contingencies, the fissures, the other possibilities latent in who we are – who we have become to be – genealogical projects may take us one more step in this quest.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Adi Ophir, Anat Biletzky, Judith Butler, Yves Winter and Merav Amir for reading different versions of this paper and for their mosthelpful comments and suggestions – not all were successfully addressed here.

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Macaulay Graham, Catherine, Letters on Education, in ed. Vivien Jones, Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 112-116. MacKinnon, Catherine A., Sexual Harassment of Working Women: a Case of Sex Discrimination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978). —. “Sexuality” in MacKinnon, Towards a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 126-154. Marilley, Suzanne M., Woman Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism in the United States, 1820-1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). Millett, Kate, Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1970). Ranciere, Jacques, Dis-Agreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Riley, Denise, Am I that Name? Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 1995). Robinsson, Harriet H., Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement: A General, Political, Legal and Legislative History from 1774, to 1881 (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1881). The Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments (1848), http://www.ukans.edu /carrie/docs/texts/seneca.htm Shuttleworth, Sally, ‘Female circulation: medical discourse and popular advertising in the mid-Victorian era’, in eds. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller and Sally Shuttleworth Body/Politics, Women and the Discourse of Science (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 47-68. Silverman, Kaja, ‘Fragments of a fashionable discourse’, in eds. Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferriss, On Fashion (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), pp. 183-196. Smart, Carole, ed., Regulating Womanhood: Historical Essays on Marriage, Motherhood and Sexuality (New York: Routledge, 1992). Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences 1815-1897 (New York: Schocken Books, 1971). —. and Susan B. Anthony, The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, ed. Ann D. Gordon (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997). Stern, Madeleine B., ed., The Victoria Woodhull Reader (Weston: M&S Press, 1974). Unknown, An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (1696), in ed. Vivien Jones, Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 207-217.

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Wakefield, Pricilla, Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex; with Suggestions for its Improvement (1798). in ed. Vivien Jones, Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 121-130 Woolstonecraft, Mary, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: with Reflection on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life, in ed. Vivien Jones, Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 54-56 and 110-112.

CONTRIBUTORS

Merav Amir is a PhD candidate in the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at the Tel Aviv University. Her fields of research are critical cultural studies, political theory, gender studies and queer theory. Her MA thesis researched the social and cultural implications of developments in the new reproductive technologies. Currently she is working on a gendered analysis of forms of social activism in the context of the IsraeliPalestinian conflict. Charlotte Baker is a doctoral student in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at Nottingham University. Her research interests centre broadly on twentieth-century French and African francophone fictional writing. Her thesis addresses the representation of the African albino in the fictional work of Williams Sassine, Didier Destremau and Patrick Grainville. Her other research interests include the literary representation of marginalised and stigmatised groups in Africa, the theory and representation of disability, madness and monstrosity, and recent developments in Francophone postcolonial studies. Shelley Budgeon is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Birmingham. She specialises in the sociology of gender and feminist theory. Her interests include feminist theory and epistemology, cultural and social theory, the body, identity, sexuality and personal relationships. She has published on the meaning and relevance of post-feminism both as a recuperative discourse and as a way to rethink the feminist project. Recent research explores the ethics of friendship, non-conventional partner relationships, and narratives of belonging within the context of emergent cultures of intimacy in post-war Britain. Pierre Cassou-Nogués is a researcher at the CNRS and teaches at the Philosophy Department of University Lille III (France). His work concerns the epistemological tradition in French philosophy (Cavailhs in particular) and the existence of relations between logic and literature. His principal publications are De l'expérience mathématique (Paris: Vrin, 2001) and Une histoire de machines, de vampires et de fous (Paris: Vrin, forthcoming in 2007).

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Contributors

Ornella Corazza has recently gained her PhD at the Department of Study of Religions at SOAS and she is now a Post-Doctoral Associate at the same Department. In 2005 she was a member of the 21st Century COE Program on Death and Life Studies at University of Tokyo, Japan. Her main interests of research include near-death studies, mind-body theories, ethics and Japanese Zen Buddhism. Susanne Foellmer graduated from the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen, Germany and is currently working as a dance scientist and dramaturge (with Tanzcompagnie Rubato, Elettra de Salvo and Jeremy Wade amongst others). In 2004 she was given a grant by the Akademie der Kuenste Berlin to develop an artistic research project revolving around choreography and film on stage. Since October 2003 she has been a member of the Graduiertenkolleg “Koerper-Inszenierungen” at the Freie Universitaet Berlin, writing her doctoral thesis on the notion of the grotesque and the open materiality of bodies in contemporary dance. Edith Frampton is the author of Michèle Roberts, forthcoming in the Northcote House series Writers and Their Work. Her essays on contemporary women writers, Kleinian theory and maternal embodiment have appeared in Textual Practice, Australian Feminist Studies and Women: A Cultural Review. She is currently a Lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University, in California. Dominic Janes gained his PhD from Cambridge University in 1996, published as God and Gold in Late Antiquity two years later. In addition to a spell as a lecturer at Lancaster University, he has been a research fellow at London and Cambridge universities. He has also taught for the City Lit and the Open University, and has lived in several countries including Malawi, Iraq, Indonesia and the United States. He currently works part-time at Birkbeck College, London, as a lecturer in the Faculty of Continuing Education and otherwise at the Foundation for International Education where he is academic director. When not editing scholarly collections, he is currently working on his third monograph project which examines discourses of idolatry in Victorian England. Hagar Kotef is a PhD candidate at the School of Philosophy, Tel Aviv University, and is currently a visiting scholar at the Department of Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley. She works mainly on continental political philosophy, focusing on political ontologies, gender, sexuality, and the work of Michele Foucault. Her dissertation project concerns the politicization of the body in feminist discourse(s).

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Tullio Lobetti is a PhD candidate at the School of African and Oriental Studies, London, whose interests focus on philosophy of Religion, epistemology, ontology, and Esoteric Buddhism. The title of his dissertation is “Faith in the flesh: body and ascetic practices in contemporary Japanese religious contexts”. Kevin McCarron is Reader in American literature at Roehampton University, London, UK. He has published numerous articles in scholarly journals and has contributed chapters to nearly fifty books on subjects including tattooing, cyberpunk, popular music, horror fiction, dystopian literature, drug addiction, alcoholism, and blasphemy. He is the author of William Golding (1995; second edition 2006), The Coincidence of Opposites: William Golding’s Later Fiction (1996), and he co-authored Frightening Fictions (2001), a study of adolescent horror narratives. Jacob Middleton is currently completing a PhD at Birkbeck, University of London. He has a broad range of research interests in Victorian cultural history, with a focus on the history of education. He has published on a number of subjects relating to Victorian schooling and is currently working on a history of school discipline in Britain Fiona K. O’Neill is a research associate based at the Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics, Lancaster University. She is working on young persons’ perceptions of risk with regard to enhancement technologies. She is completing her interdisciplinary PhD entitled; “Uncanny belongings: bioethics and the technologies of fashioning flesh”. Her current work considers humantechnology relations with regard to the embodiment of bioethical issues across standard and innovative medicine. She continues to contribute to the ethical debates regarding face transplantation and has a particular interest in socioethical issues of mental health. Naomi Segal is Director of the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London. She is the author of over 50 articles and 10 books, most recently Indeterminate Bodies (2003, coedited), Le Désir à l’Œuvre (2000, edited), André Gide: Pederasty and Pedagogy (1998), and Coming Out of Feminism? (1997: coedited). Among other things, she has published on the French récit, the novel of adultery, triangles in Fatal Attraction and The Piano, birds and boys in Gide and Barrie, and Princess Diana. She is currently writing a book entitled Consensuality: Didier Anzieu, Gender and the Sense of Touch.

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Contributors

Floris Tomasini, prior to turning to academia, worked as trawler man, a “roadie’” for big act rock bands and as a full-time volunteer in a night shelter for the homeless in London. He now works at the Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics at Lancaster University, collaborating with Ruth Chadwick on the Bioethics and the Institutionalisation of Ethics in Science and Technology Policy Project. His current interests and research are diverse: philosophy of place and space in collaboration with English Heritage; phenomenology and the rehabilitation of amputees at the Royal Preston Hospital; the ethical implications of forensic data-bases and inclusion of children with Mairi Levitt; trust as a central concept in healthcare with David Pilgrim, and the philosophy of mind and body and meta-ethical investigations into the connection between personal identity and ethics.