Disruptive Fluidity: The Poetics of the Pop "Cogito" (Literary and Cultural Theory) 9783631633984, 9783653021875

Citation preview

Literar y and Cultural Theor y General Editor: Wojciech H. Kalaga

Vol. 38

Peter Lang

Frankfurt am Main · Berlin · Bern · Bruxelles · New York · Oxford · Warszawa · Wien

Anna Chromik

Disruptive Fluidity The Poetics of the Pop Cogito

Peter Lang

Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main · Berlin · Bern · Bruxelles · New York · Oxford · Warszawa · Wien

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Cover Design: © Olaf Glöckler, Atelier Platen, Friedberg

This publication was funded by the University of Silesia, Institute of English Cultures and Literatures.

ISSN 1434-0313 ISBN 978-3-631-63398-4 (Print) ISBN 978-3-653-02187-5 (E-Book) DOI 10.3726/978-3-653-02187-5

© Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main 2012 All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. www.peterlang.de

“The individual’s self-containment and self-sufficiency may be another illusion.” Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity

Acknowledgements

Writing this book has often been a struggle between the discipline of academic clarity and a temptation to write a long poem. Many people and institutions have had a hand in the final reconciliation, and I am happy to be able to thank them here. In 2008 I was awarded a research grant funded by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education, which enabled me to do a large part of my research and complete the first draft of this book. I owe a large debt of gratitude to Professor Wojciech Kalaga for providing excellent advice and criticism, while still giving me the freedom to follow the sometimes volatile path of my own thinking. I am also grateful to Professor Zbigniew Białas and Professor Mirosława Buchholtz for their kind and helpful comments, and to David Schauffler for his invaluable editorial assistance. My thanks go to my colleagues at the Institute of English Cultures and Literatures, University of Silesia who saw this project through its earliest incarnations as material for numerous workin-progress papers and offered their generous support and inspiration. My deepest thanks go to my family and friends – for understanding my need to read and write, for encouraging me to discover the hidden rooms in my dreams, for your patience and support – I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Contents

Introduction .......................................................................................................... 11 CHAPTER 1 Pre-Modern Undifferentiation ................................................................................ 25 CHAPTER 2 Birth of the Subject ................................................................................................ 37 CHAPTER 3 Pre-Subjective Merger ........................................................................................... 63 CHAPTER 4 Body without Boundaries ....................................................................................... 83 CHAPTER 5 Asubjective Incontinence ...................................................................................... 111 CHAPTER 6 Precarious Borders .............................................................................................. 131 Conclusions ......................................................................................................... 151 Bibliography ....................................................................................................... 159

Introduction

This book explores the textual modes in which the phenomena of fluidity and solidity are represented in the context of contemporary reconstructions of modern subjectivity. The key idea that frames the following discussion is the assumption concerning the culture-creating functions of such dichotomies as containment / incontinence, interior / exterior, cleanliness / contamination, and demarcation / boundlessness, and their role in the process of defining the notion of modern subjectivity. These assumptions are based on a conviction that categories traditionally identified with corporeality do not exist in separation from the discourse of subjectivity. What is more, they might even constitute an inscription and record of its norm-creating practices. Treated as constructs reflecting the hierarchies and paradigms of prevailing discourses, they will be analysed as products of a certain conceptual apparatus which also shapes our perception of identity and subjectivity. The modern / Cartesian subject is constructed in contemporary philosophical discourse in opposition to the metaphorical fluidity that can be identified with unstable borders and a lack of clear-cut identity. The starting point for this study is thus the assumption that the imagery of solidity, along with the implied metaphorics of fluidity, shapes the discourse of subjectivity and strategies of material culture, and, therefore, might be treated as a key to the analysis of the contemporary conceptualization of the modern subject. As much as postmodern philosophies link the twilight of the era of the dense, coherent subject to the fall of grand narrations (Jean-François Lyotard) and the liquefaction of discourse (Zygmunt Bauman), the studies dealing with the discourse of corporeal phenomena point to the significance of strategies aimed at “sealing” and “consolidating” modern structures. The nomenclature of theories describing the process of the emergence of the individual self (Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva) reverberates with metaphors of solidity and fluidity similar to those which are used to create an image of the constitution of the Cartesian cogito (Susan Bordo, Dalia Judovitz, Fritjof Capra). What is more, the discourse of body borders in contemporary studies that theorize corporeality (Elizabeth Grosz, Gail Kern Paster, Mary Douglas) is constructed in strikingly similar terms. The central notions for these seemingly distant spheres overlap and per-

12

Introduction

meate each other, thus creating a space for analysis founded upon a fresh perspective, shedding new light both on the discourse of subjectivity and on the discourse of corporeality by pointing to their mutual impact. The general message of this book is thus a critique of the perception that the phenomena traditionally associated with corporeality exists in separation from the notions that construct our discourse of subjectivity. What should be considered instead is an attempt to demonstrate the mutual connections and cross-contamination of these categories, thus pointing to the close relation that exists between central values of the prevalent discourse on the self and the symbolic mechanisms for curbing elements constructed as “disruptively fluid.” It has to be stressed at this point that my aim is not to explore the ontological complexities of the modern subject as such, but rather to focus on the mechanisms that create this notion as a “standard textbook anecdote, a symbol of the seventeenth-century rationalist project.”1 In the “digested” discourse of the humanities the cogito serves as a universal mental shortcut, implicitly marked by a series of adjectives that describe this abstract phenomenon, such as: detached, thinking, autonomous, autoreferential, independent, clearly delineated, coherent, consolidated, and so on. The Cartesian subject, according to Žižek, functions today as a kind of a shibboleth, a buzzword, both in the standard philosophy of subjectivity and in the discourse of postmodern critique of the “unified transcendental subject.”2 The process at work here is thus a procedure of iconisation, schematisation, and reduction, which makes the conceptualisation of cogito possible. As Susan Bordo claims, the dominant discourse of critique of the modern project is imbued with the conviction that “we are now grasping ‘modernity,’ ‘the scientific paradigm,’ ‘the Cartesian model,’ as discrete, contained, historical entities about which coherent ‘closing narratives’ can be told.”3 Thus, the Cartesian subject we now know is a term already processed through the twentieth-century narration on the project of modernity and put to work for a classifying grid of meanings whose central function is the ordering of experience. There is no assumption in this discussion about the existence of the “actual” phenomenon of modern subjectivity, nor an attempt to establish its subjectmatter around the historical experience of the Cartesian cogito. Its focus is rather on what might be labelled a “pop-cogito” – a product of a postmodern narrative 1 2 3

Susan Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity. Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press), 1987, p. 1. Slavoj Žižek, “Introduction: Cogito as a Shibboleth,” in: Slavoj Žižek, ed.: Cogito and the Unconscious (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 3. Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity, p. 2.

Introduction

13

(however paradoxical this idea might seem) which has processed the notion and reduced it to a series of images functioning as useful “buzzwords” in contemporary critical theory. Roy Porter writes: Narratives of this kind – of how the West discovered a unique self unknown to former times, an inner psyche unfamiliar in other cultures –carry a huge appeal and underpin familiar thinking. They shape our image of the medieval peasant, of the Romantic poet – and of ourselves. And who can deny they contain a measure of truth? After all, much of our artistic and intellectual heritage – Petrarch and Rilke, Milton and Mill, love poetry and liberalism – amounts to defences and celebrations of the uniqueness of the outpourings of the individual imagination and heart. Yet the tale also has the ring of myth, even an air of soap-box rhetoric especially when recounted as an epic in which the heroic self is portrayed as surmounting ridge after ridge until it reaches its peak of perfection in our own times. That’s a story flattering to ourselves [...]. Looked at closely, however, it also proves a story full of loose ends and begged questions. And so it’s time to rethink our received grand saga of the self.4

The following discussion by no means sets as its goal the tracing of these loose ends, or ontologizing the subject, or excavating the core of the cogito, or examining its seventeenth-century conditioning. Quite the opposite – by deliberately following the path of contemporary academic clichés5 and handbook catchphrases, it takes as its subject matter not the essentialist Cartesian subject, but the conventionalized construct already processed through the mechanisms of constant defining and classifying. It is the very nomenclature of the mythologized cogito that facilitates the examination of the procedure of creating its schematized conceptualizations, at the same time revealing the role certain notions play in constructing the conceptual frame of modernity. Moreover, what contributes to the schematization of the cogito is the whole spectrum of connotations connected with its attributes, such as coherence, clarity, and distinctness. And vice versa – the conceptual frame that maps our understanding of coherence, clarity, and distinctness is marked by the prevalent cognitive model of subjectivity. Slavoj Žižek argues: “[o]ur philosophical and everyday common sense identifies the subject with a series of features: the autonomous source of spontaneous, selforiginating activity, the capacity of free choice; the presence of some kind of ‘inner life’,”6 but there are many attributes we could add to the list, such 4 5 6

Roy Porter, “Introduction,” in: Roy Porter, ed. Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 8. Mostly based on the analysis of critical texts from the last forty-year period, or texts that have been considered most influential for contemporary critical theory. Žižek, “Introduction: Cogito as a Shibboleth,” p. 5.

14

Introduction

as autonomy, agency, self-determination, individuality, self-identity, distinctiveness, etc. At the same time the conceptual picture of the Cartesian self is constructed by such values as cohesion, self-containment, and separateness. According to Bordo, the modern subject is branded with the epistemological ideals of clarity, differentiation and objectivity, which have often been interpreted as manifestations of an obsessive pursuit of purity and transcendence of the messier dimension of existence,7 as well as the “sense of the separate self, conscious of itself and of its own distinctness from a world ‘outside’,”8 and the concept of “clean boundaries and discrete natures, a universe amenable to conceptual sorting.”9 The Cartesian cogito thus appears as clear and turned towards itself, separated from the world of extended things, which suggests that our conceptualization of the phenomena of clarity and distinctness must have an influence on our conceptual picture of the cogito. The notion of a separate self associated with inwardness, subjectivity and “locatedness” in space and time creates and perpetuates the differentiation between inside and outside, mind and matter, cohesion and extension. What is important is that the prevalent conceptualization of the modern self metaphorically delineates it as an entity which, to constitute itself as a subject, has to solidify, congeal, and harden. Hence its most significant features include coherence, hermeticism, and impenetrability. Expressed in such a way, the determinants of the self also constitute the conceptual tool of description of such categories as inside and outside, subject and object, and even purity and impurity, or order and disorder. The concept of borders seems to be a key notion here. The modern self is preoccupied with delineating the boundaries between itself and the world: “[c]ertainly, Cartesianism is nothing if not a passion for separation, purification, and demarcation,”10 and it is mostly on those notions that the subject depends in terms of its identity. What is more, in so far as the conceptual frame of modernity is based upon the semiotics of demarcation and maintaining borders intact, its significant opposite – “pre-modernity” – is often associated with a lack of boundaries and with the plasmatic, pulsating continuity of experience. If the key-word in our conceptualization of modernity is order, then the notion of a boundary is inscribed in the very core of this concept, as order appears to be a central notion in what Adeline Masquelier calls the “semiotics of

7 8 9 10

Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity, p. 4. See also: Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1993). Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity, s. 7 Anthony Kenny, Descartes: A Study of His Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 19. Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity, p. 17.

Introduction

15

boundary maintenance.”11 In this connection, the principles of modern subjectivity which regulate the self’s position and relation in the world are built upon the notion of borders: “[t]he whole concept of body-image boundaries has implicit in it the idea of the structuring of one’s relations with the world.” 12 Analogously to its understanding of subjectivity discussed above, the reading of “modernity” that this argument offers is thus informed by the critique of modernity in contemporary critical theory, and not the actual historical sources. The closest definition of the term “modernity” to the one used throughout this thesis is probably what Chris Barker broadly labels the “post-traditional, postmedieval historical period"13 associated with industrialization and secularization, and with the rise of capitalism and the nation-state with its mechanisms of control. Such a definition implies that modernity should be understood not necessarily as a specific historical period, but rather as a mode of the political, economical and philosophical status of a society marked by those processes. It is therefore impossible to confine in to any definite frames – very broadly, it can be said that modernity might be associated with the recent history of the West, from the Enlightenment era (although in some of its aspects the Renaissance will be considered a modern epoch14) to the twentieth century with its failure of the totalizing metanarratives of universal and transcendent truths.15 This lack of chronological precision (often implying generalizations and simplifications) is justified by the objective of this study: it analyses the notion of modernity as a construct processed through the contemporary critical discourse and therefore follows the historical inaccuracies present in that discourse.16 11

12

13 14 15

16

Adeline Masquelier, “Introduction,” in: Dirt, Undress, and Difference. Critical Perspective on the Body’s Surface, ed. Adeline Masquelier (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005), p. 7. Seymour Fisher and Sydney Cleveland, Body Image and Personality (New York and London: D. van Nostrand Company Inc., 1958), p. 206, quoted after: Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen and Co. Ltd, 1986), p. 10. Chris Barker, Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice (London: Sage, 2005), p. 444. I will come back to these terminological discrepancies later on. I follow Lyotard who associates the decline of grand narratives with the Second World War, which he saw as an abuse of modern ideals which called the whole project into question, so that “the grand narrative has lost its credibility.” (See: Jean-François Lyotard, Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennigton and Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, p. 37). Similarly, Zygmunt Bauman sees the Holocaust as “a byproduct of the modern drive to a fully designated, fully controlled world.” (Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and The Holocaust, New York: Cornell University Press, 1989, p. 93). This point will be elaborated upon at the beginning of Chapter 1.

16

Introduction

In its reflection on how the emergence of the modern self is conceptualized in the contemporary discourse of the postmodern critique of the project of modernity, in which it has been reduced to a set of instantly recognizable images and cognitive catchphrases, the following discussion deals with the modern project as a concept already processed through the cognitive categories of the present. “Modern subject” is seen here as a certain finite construct consolidated by constant revisiting and revising. In this process it has also become mythologized, that is, to refer to Roland Barthes, given a natural and eternal justification, a clarity that is “not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact.”17 Myth, according to Barthes, does not reject reality per se; it rather simplifies facts by purifying them and making them innocent. Mythologizing, he argues, is economical in its attempts to reduce the complexity of experience to simple essences. It helps organize the world by focusing on what is immediately visible and disregarding ambiguities and contradictions. Myth flattens reality and makes it blissfully clear.18 The mythologized “modern subjectivity” may be the only “modern subjectivity” we now have access to: this constructed project that emerged not only in Descartes and Kant, but also in Lyotard, Rorty, Foucault, and Habermas. Its systematic character and finiteness is a result of a certain schematization whose proceedings invite a scrutinizing view. What is striking in the “mythologized” accounts of modern subjectivity understood as the “grand epoch” identified with the ideas of the Enlightenment is that it often reverberates with the imagery of solidity, coherence, and selfcontainment. It seems that to “grasp modernity,” the contemporary critique very often operates within the conceptual field normally associated with categories of corporeality: the ideal modern subject appears as pure and detached, with clearly delineated boundaries. At the same, time identifying cleanliness with what is separate, individual and distinct constitutes an important part of modern narratives. The notions of such concepts as fluid / solid, pure / filthy, finite / infinite, and coherent / incoherent are deeply embedded in the cognitive structure of modern subjectivity with its conceptual constructions of rationalism, individualism, efficiency, objectivism, and mechanization. The relation is reciprocal: modernity is described by the language of the body just as the concepts which construct the imaginary categories of modernity contribute to the construction of the modern discourse of the body. The “synoptic” understanding of selfhood that relies on the notions of individuality achieved by the process of emancipation and the idea of an authentic 17 18

Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), p. 143. Barthes, Mythologies, p. 143.

Introduction

17

‘core’ self is commonly believed to date back to early modernity. At the same time, the modern era of the self is not identical with modernity as such – although we identify the origins of a conscious subject with the Cartesian cogito, we also tend to associate the germs of individuality with the Renaissance.19 The conventional schoolish division of the history of ideas into epochs is perpetuated by such a classification: history is presented to us as a tale of the development of subjectivity, a narrative of a teleological process in which the collective ‘tribal mentality’ of ‘primitive societies’ becomes gradually supplanted by the budding sense of personal singularity. We are taught to think of humanism as a process of the ascent of selfhood, a trend displacing a worldview which had not valued the individual, and such schematization is inscribed in the general view of history as a process fuelled by the human aspiration for self-betterment and selfknowledge. The onset of this human-centred Weltanschauung is commonly viewed in terms of a turnover that spurred new optics in culture. The history of ideas draws a connection between the new position of man in the centre of the universe and such phenomena as the development of perspective in arts (which required the acknowledgment of the individual, self-centred beholder), the focus on the creator in terms of artistic activity (epitomized by replacing the anonymity of artists with the pursuit of individual recognition), the emergence of new genres such as the portrait, biography, and diary (with special attention paid to self-portrait and autobiography as symptoms of man affirming his own being). The appeal of all the details fitting together into a meaningful and deliberate whole is also quite significant as a symptom of mental and conceptual processes that condition our cognition in terms of our needs for purposefulness, classification, and narrativisation. It must also be stressed that the term “modernity” is used in this context to denote a specific cultural construct. The manifestations of the modern project most relevant to this study are the narratives of individuation and rationalization. These categories overlap and merge, as they are both related to one of the key notions in the project of modernity, that is, the idea of emancipation, which presents the human being as a separate individual able to control the world. The subject-centered reason of the Enlightenment epitomizes not only the independent, detached human identity, but also confidence in systematic ways of cognition that present the world as manageable. Individuation, the trademark of modernity, can be described as a process in which the self emerges out of the undif19

See: Peter Burke, “Representations of The Self From Petrarch To Descartes,” in: Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 17.

18

Introduction

ferentiated world. Horkheimer and Adorno describe this process as a division of nature from the self, a split between subject and object, separation of the selfidentical and ordered from the chaotic and multiple.20 Rationalization in turn is a consequence of individuation, resulting from the fact that once the connection with nature is severed, nature becomes “a mere undifferentiated resistance to the abstract power of the subject.”21 The process of rationalization stems from a new perception of nature: an alien force which is to be curbed and whose language should be deciphered by means of objective science and mathematical systems. The apparently totalitarian, systematic character of modernity is embodied by all-encompassing modern systems: “[f]or enlightenment is totalitarian as only a system can be.”22 Lyotard sees the monumental modern projects that aspired to embrace the unity of experience (like, for instance, Hegel’s Encyclopedia) as embodiments of the attempt to realize the project of totalization, “the idea of the System.”23 What is characteristic in the contemporary notion of “modernity” is its construction as a breakthrough which, for the first time, introduces the concept of individuality. Such a view is prevalent in critical accounts of modernity: for instance Emilie Durkheim claims that the notion of “the individual” did not exist in traditional cultures. It was only with the emergence of modern structures, especially the differentiation of labour, that the separate subject became a central notion.24 In a similar manner, for Jerrold Seigel it is clear that the notion of “an individual and subjectively grounded selfhood” is understood, especially in the anthropological discourse, as a peculiarly Western and modern category: “[i]t is surely true,” he writes, “that non-Western and pre-modern cultures have valued individuality less than Europeans and Americans in the relatively recent past.”25 Pre-modern European societies are very often portrayed, as the first chapter will corroborate, as assemblages of people devoid of the awareness of a “separate, private self, because such a consciousness is supposed to be excluded by the deeply felt sense of embeddedness in a social and cultural matrix recognized as 20

21 22 23 24

25

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 31. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 70. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 18. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, pp. 33-34. Emilie Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society (London: Macmillan, 1984) quoted in Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 75. Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self. Thought and Experience In Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 25.

Introduction

19

prior to individuality and regulative of it.”26 Analogically, the view that the idea of self-identity is a particularly modern phenomenon with its origins in Western individualism is presented by Roy Baumeister, who claims that in pre-modern times our current emphasis on individuality was virtually absent.27 The notion of modernity that emerges from its contemporary critique stresses its discontinuity with pre-modern cultures,28 as well as its alignment with such phenomena as nation state, the development of organization, bureaucracy, and regularized control.29 In the context of the contemporary construction of modernity, subjectivity has to be equally theorized as a construct, a product of language and imagery that has to be labeled as particularly modern. According to Merleau-Ponty, “[s]ubjectivity was not waiting for philosophers as an unknown America waited for its explorers in the ocean’s mist. They constructed it, created it in more than one way.”30 The construct is yet so well-established that it has dominated not 26 27 28

29 30

Seigel, The Idea of the Self, p. 26. Roy F. Baumeister, Identity. Cultural Change and the Struggle for Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), quoted in: Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, p. 75. A question may arise about the position of postmodernity in this division. Much as the notion of postmodern subjectivity is beyond the scope of this book, the very methodological stance of this argument might be defined as postmodern: subjectivity is considered as a function of language rather than an ontological category. The postmodernity that emerges from the following discussion is thus not a subsequent epoch in the history of ideas spurred be the “Derridean breakthrough” (analogous to the Cartesian breakthrough), but it is rather a critical – or even self-critical – revision of the systematic totalitarianism of the modern project without, however, breaking free from it. In other words, postmodernity appears as a state of modern self-awareness which allows for the critique of its metanarrative character. The modern metanarration has lost its credibility, but it does not mean that the return to the pre-modern paradigm is possible, neither does it trigger the creation of a new paradigm. The poststructuralist undermining of the basis of Western thought by questioning the metaphysics of presence and the subsequent identification of the boundaries of cognition with the boundaries of language is a challenge to the modern model of knowledge based on the concept of objective truth determinated by the certainty of the subject and object of cognition. This destabilization of the objective and extra-discursive metaphysical references does not, however, entail a re-immersion in the pre-modern merger preceding the clear division between the controlling subject and the objectified world, but rather decentres this distinction by opening itself to the constant and destabilizing flickering of the hierarchy. See: Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, pp. 15-16. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Partout et Nulle Part,” in : Signes (Paris : Gallimard, 1964), p. 193, quoted after Dalia Judovitz, Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes. The Origins of Modernity (Cambridge, New York, New Rochelle, Melbourne, Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 2. It is worth mentioning that according to some

20

Introduction

only philosophy, but also our common perception of ourselves and our relation to the world to such an extent that conceiving man or nature outside this structure of representation is virtually impossible. A frame of cognition which constructs the world in terms of mythologized images and makes sense of it through such notions as “subject,” “the outside world,” or “the boundary between the subject and the outside world” is thus also a peculiarly modern phenomenon, which is probably best summarized by Martin Heidegger: The world picture does not change from an earlier medieval one into a modern one, but rather the fact that the world becomes a picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age.31

The objective of this study rests therefore upon an assumption that subjectivity should be studied as a category of language, and not necessarily as an ontological category per se. The central assumption is, as has already been stressed, that the way we understand the notion of a “subject” is a product of certain linguistic coding, of overlapping of connotations and metaphors that have been used by philosophers, writers, and critics to conceptualize it. And because these connotations are mostly based, as has been said, on corporeal categories of description, analysing subjectivity in relation to the terminology of body boundaries seems relevant. The following analysis will thus study epistemological constructs of language, terminologies and nomenclatures, images, subtle connotations, and implicit clusters of superimposed clichés that together make up the semantic mesh in which the terms delineating our concept of body boundaries interweave with those that create our notion of subjectivity. The fragmentariness and ephemerality of these mutual relations deny all pretense to primacy of any of these discourses; therefore, it has to be assumed that our perception of subjectivity is influenced by our notion of body borders to much the same extent as it works the other way round. The first two chapters seek to demonstrate the confluence of terms used to describe the onset of subjectivity in two different discourses: the critical narration on the project of modernity and the theoretical deliberations on the birth of subjectivity in individual psychological development. The fact that both processes are presented via similar imagery indicates two important problems: first of

31

contemporary views on the American culture, America was invented rather than discovered, which locates both subjectivity and America in the realm of imaginary constructs acquiring coherence and meaning in the process informed by certain ideologies and power relations. Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in: The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt (New York: Harper, 1977), p. 130, quoted after: Judovitz, Subjectivity and Representation, p. 188.

Introduction

21

all, it shows that the notion of individual subjectivity is a deeply modern category, and, as such, possesses traits of a grand narrative (in the Lyotardian sense). Secondly, such a convergence of conceptualizations creates an area for the analysis of subjectivity from a much under-thematised perspective, that is, by tracing the terms and notions that constitute the contemporary image of modern subjectivity understood as a conceptual construct. The main assumption of these two chapters is thus the following: if the prevailing model of modern subjectivity is built upon the parturition / separation image, then establishing the central metaphor that constitutes the core of this image will point to the discursive mechanisms of meaning construction that otherwise remain concealed. This central metaphor, as the following discussion asserts, is the concept of subjectivity presented in terms of a certain detached entity that emerges out of undifferentiated, amorphous, and fluid mass. This precarious state of undifferentiation marks the epistemological limits of modern cognition – it becomes an embodiment of the anti-thesis of modernity, subjectivity, and objectivity, and, as such, is imaged as a mythical and unattainable state “before” that cannot even be expressed once the subject enters the realm of reason. The first two chapters thus address the presence of the “parturition metaphor” in the discourse of subjectivity, pointing to the confluence of imagery between the contemporary critical discourse of modernity and the Lacanian discourse of psychoanalysis. The said confluence is examined from the perspective of terminology used in both discourses that refers (directly or indirectly) to the central metaphor framing the modern discourse of theorizing the subject: namely, the image of emerging out of the state of primal (maternal) amorphousness. At the same time the discussion lays the ground for the further parsing of the amorphousness metaphor, which, serving as an epitome of the antithesis of modernity, becomes a key to understanding the contemporary mechanisms of constructing its symbolic opposition – the modern subject. The chapters thus proceed from substantiating the confluence of “parturitive” terms in discourses of subjectivity, through extracting their central constituents in an attempt to establish the frame of cognition that creates them, towards the overall question of this thesis: how does the imagery of fluidity and solidity condition the categories of modern subjectivity? The two initial chapters establish a background for the subsequent discussion of fluidity / solidity as notions delineating the conceptual apparatus of representing modern orders and “anti-orders.” Chapter Three, entitled “Pre-Subjective Merger,” brings together the notions analysed in relation to the “birth of modern subjectivity” and the origins of the subject in the psychoanalytical discourse, pointing to the areas where these discourses overlap – that is, the common metaphorics of viscosity and fluidity associated with the “maternal space” as well as the sense of union with the

22

Introduction

world. The experience of the world which these notions recreate is thus defined as pre-subjective and pre-modern, and, consequently, rejected in the modern process of separation from nature (defined as maternal) and “masculinization” of thought. Chapter Four (“Body without Boundaries”) explores the conceptual construction of the pre-modern experience of the merger with nature: it introduces the notion of the “humoural world” as a radically anti-modern construction, and analyses this construction in relation to the terminology that describes it, mainly its correlation with the “maternal” and “feminine” metaphors. It also indicates the mutual interdependence between the conceptualization of the premodern and pre-subjective maternal sphere discussed in the two initial chapters and the depiction of humoural world as maternal and boundless. The chapter also introduces the concept of boundary establishment as a token of the modern “quest against fluidity” and explains the methodology of the link between firm body boundaries and coherent subjectivity. Chapter Five, entitled “Asubjective Incontinence,” continues the argument concerning the interdependence of self-identity and self-containment as notions describing the subject and the actual continence and coherence of the body structure. It focuses mainly on such terms as dispersion and continuity of the self, individuality and blurring with the world, and analyses the lack of selfcontainment characteristic of the pre-modern / pre-subjective body as a metaphorical anti-thesis of the modern subject. The analogies are emphasized between the conceptual construction of the pre-modern “humoural body,” the Bakhtinian concept of the grotesque body, and the nomenclature of what Julia Kristeva labels as “the abject.” The last notion comes back in the last chapter (“Precarious Borders”) where the opposition between the abject and the propre (the “clean and proper self”) is discussed in terms of the concept of body boundaries. The relation between these oppositions and the discourse of subjectivity is highlighted by the discussion of the concept of “locatedness” of the self in space (as opposed to the contaminating dispersion associated with the abject / grotesque body) as a prerequisite of subjectivity. The last chapter also focuses on the “quest for firm body margins”32 in relation to subjectivity and in this context discusses the “solidifying” bodily practices and concepts (hygiene, scientific anatomy, the machine body) as metaphorical procedures of “solidifying” the subject. Assuming that not only is there the opposition between fluidity and solidity which constitute the key concepts in defining modern subjectivity, but that there also exists a “modern” understanding of the notions traditionally ascribed to the 32

Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1995), p. 191.

Introduction

23

discourse of the body, this book aims to build a link between the contemporary critique of the project of modernity and recent theories of corporeal practices as cultural concepts. In this perspective, it can be presumed that there exists a certain universal model of conceptualising the process in which order and structures emerge, and the metaphors of cleanliness and disorder constitute the central notions of this model. Hence the bold form of this argument can be summarized in the following statement: we conceptualize modern subjectivity as solid and ordered, and pre-modernity as fluid and disordered, as much as we construct our notion of lack of structures as pre-modern and pre-subjective, and structures as enlightened and individual. What is more, by demonstrating the “constructedness” of such binary oppositions as: modern / pre-modern, subjectivity / “presubjectivity,” coherent / incoherent body boundaries, self-contained subject / “incontinent” subject, as well as their mutual dependence in terms of their construction and existence as products of language, this discussion questions the apparent stable nature of such dichotomies. Exploring this reciprocal relation will hopefully contribute to the discussion of the mechanisms of the postmodern creation of modernity as a myth, as well as deconstruct the apparently “natural” category of body boundaries by showing its rhetorical and cultural determinants.

CHAPTER 1

Pre-Modern Undifferentiation

What may raise objections in the following discussion is the apparent inconsistency in what is actually referred to as the “birth of modern self.” Although the breakthrough moment that will reappear throughout this thesis as a landmark caesura between the pre-modern and modern times is the seventeenth century, with a particular emphasis placed on the Cartesian “revolution” (or rather the way it is theorized in the contemporary discourse of modernity), this chapter will also revolve around periods as remote as the Renaissance (in the discussion of Jacob Burckhardt’s thought) and the eighteenth century (when referring to Kant’s discussion of the Enlightenment in which he focuses on the definition of his contemporary epoch). In response to any possible reservations, it should be made clear that the objective of this study is by no means delineated by either the history of ideas or philosophy. First of all, the multiple delineations of modernity offered by contemporary critical theory render it vague and imprecise – for instance Habermas invokes the Hegelian understanding of the term, according to which it signifies the “new age” beginning with the breakthrough of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the discovery of the “new world,” all constituting a threshold between medieval and modern times.1 Moreover, as has already been said in the Introduction, the scope of this study lies in the field of philology rather than philosophy, in the sense of focusing on a certain semantic frame that shapes our conceptual images of such abstract notions as individuality, subjectivity, modernity, and reason. The key for the selection of examples to be discussed is thus not historical, but conceptual: based on the metaphorics used to describe these notions, especially on all the points of convergence between the imagery constructing the concept of subjectivity and that constructing other discourses, such as the discourse of maternal separation in the course of individual development. It is significant that the divergence of historical periods which the birth of modern subjectivity is identified with, might be, paradoxically, considered a legitimizing factor for this argument, as it demonstrates the 1

Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987), p. 5.

26

Chapter 1

existence of a certain prevalent model of presenting the origins of modern individualized selfhood in contemporary discourse – epitomized, for example, by the following quotation: Between 1500 and 1700 there was a dramatic shift in the way people pictured the world and in their whole way of thinking. The new mentality and the new perception of the cosmos gave our Western civilization the features that are characteristic of the modern era. They became the basis of the paradigm that has dominated our culture for the past three hundred years and is now about to change.2

The convergence of the metaphorics that exists between the imagery used by such widely separated theoreticians as Immanuel Kant, Jacob Burckhardt, Jacques Lacan, Susan Bordo, and many others, cannot be underestimated, as it encourages closer examination which, instead of claiming the right to ontologise the analysed narratives, will proceed along in a way that could be called “semantic tracing.” In his classic 1860s work on the civilization of the Renaissance, Jacob Burckhardt claimed that the concept of individuality as such was born in fifteenth-century Italy, and stressed the importance of individualism and the discovery of man for the development of modernity.3 Although his views are challenged today by a new understanding of medieval culture which problematises the alleged lack of individual identity in the Middle Ages,4 his influence on the modern history of ideas remains enormous. His understanding of the onset of modernity as a process of individuation both reflected and shaped the prevalent view on modern self in the Western discourse. According to Burckhardt, medieval man’s awareness of himself was only in terms of group affiliation, whereas the Renaissance times brought a sense of recognition of individuality as such: There is a standard way of telling the story of subjectivity as one of the main determinants of Western thought: the notion of the human self as subject is constantly presented as having its origins in the dramatic change of the conceptualization of man and his position in the universe that occurred at the break2 3 4

Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point: Science, Society and the Rising Culture (London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1983), p. 37. See: Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, ed. Peter Burke, trans. S.G.C Middlemore (London: Penguin Classics, 1990). The main objections to Burckhardt’s ideas stress the fact that his contrast between the medieval and Renaissance view of man is too dramatic; he underestimated the medieval symptoms of subjectivity and overestimated the Renaissance penchant for the individual self. He is also criticized for drawing broad conclusions based on narrowed perspectives (Eurocentric, upper class, male). See: Peter Burke, “Representations of The Self From Petrarch To Descartes,” in: Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 18.

Pre-Modern Undifferentiation

27

through of modernity. It is the early modern times that we often associate with the birth (or rather a harbinger of hatching) of the separate, self-conscious, and independent individuality, that later developed into the Cartesian cogito. There is also a prevailing conviction that before the modern period our current emphasis on individuality was virtually absent.5 This modern self is often visualized within certain representational frames, and the dominant trajectory of presenting it is the conceptual picture of a discrete, individual unit that emerged or distinguished itself from some undifferentiated matter of pre-modern self / world unity.6 The following chapter explores and analyses the dominant metaphor of the modern breakthrough – the metaphor of parturition and separation – which, in the subsequent part of this book, will be discussed in the context of its correlations to the story of subjectivity as it is told by the psychoanalytical mode of narration. In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness – that which was turned within as that which was turned without – lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation – only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment and consideration of the State and of all the things of this world became possible. The subjective side at the same time asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such.7

Similarly, Fritjof Capra in his Science, Society and the Rising Culture claims that the dominant world view in Europe before the 1500s was “organic,” based on the interdependence of material and spiritual phenomena and the subordination of individual needs to those of the community.8 Interestingly, the conceptual frame that maps Burckhardt’s discourse is constituted by two crucial images: that of differentiation / individualization and that of growing out of childhood. The connection between these two, their relation to the notions of developing 5

6

7 8

See: Roy F. Baumeister, Identity. Cultural Change and the Struggle for Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 74. See, for instance: Susan Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity. Essays on Cartesian Culture (New York: State University of New York Press, 1987); Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981); Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe (New York: Macmillan, 1959). Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance, p. 98. Capra, The Turning Point, p. 37.

28

Chapter 1

civilization and maturation of subjectivity, is so deeply rooted in the contemporary discourse on modernity that it is often taken for granted. However, when analysed closely as a certain conceptual construct, a result of cultural inscription, it might become a significant metaphor for reflecting the mechanisms of meaning production in the Western discourse. The metaphor of the “common veil” is already a powerful one. This densely-woven fabric Burckhard refers to seems to muffle human consciousness, which lies under it “dreaming or half-awake,” immersed in “strange hues” of sensations, impressions, and impulses. The birth of individuality is thus aligned with human disentanglement from the covers that shroud the consciousnesses in darkness. Significantly, the images of the loom, weaving, and fabric are culturally loaded metaphors traditionally associated with femininity and maternity; the cycles of birth, the phases of the moon, and the ebbing and rising of waves, are, according to Mircea Eliade, all linked to the idea of weaving in the European folklore.9 Trailing and stretching into infinity, the feminine thread blurs individual distinctions, denies beginnings and endings, and merges singularities into the amalgam matter of collective mentality. The veil thus becomes an embodiment of the maternal space,10 this unspecific matrix which diffuses any traits of individuality, changing it into an entangled net of interwoven threads. In this poetics, to become a recognized individual, a person has to differentiate himself from the ever-spinning maternal fabric, detach and separate himself from it. The veil / thread metaphor reappears also in other texts dealing with the notion of modernity. For example, Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno consider the process of “unmasking” as being crucial to modernity, connected with the notion of autonomy of Reason and self-reflection, juxtaposed with “anima9 10

Mircea Eliade, Symbolism, the Sacred and the Arts, ed. Diane Apostolos-Cappadona (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1985), p. 4. See: Kazimiera Szczuka, “Prządki, tkaczki i pająki. Uwagi o twórczości kobiet” in: Kopciuszek, Frankenstein i inne. Feminizm wobec mitu (Kraków: Wydawnictwo eFKa 2001), pp. 27-44. Szczuka links the notions of weaving, plotting and prattling with feminine activity and creativity, relating her argument to the mythical figures of the Parcae (the Moirae), Arachne, and Penelope. As the epigraph of her article, Szczuka quotes the stylized Indian song by Adele Getty: “There is a woman who weaves the night sky See her spin, watch her fingers fly She is within us beginning to end Our grandmother, our sister, our friend She is the weaver and we are the web She is the needle and we are the thread.”

Pre-Modern Undifferentiation

29

listic magic.”11 Here, as in Burckhardt, the process of disentanglement or shedding the veil / mask is identified with autonomous scrutiny. An interesting use of the thread metaphor appears also in Hannah Arendt’s discussion of the break with inherited tradition as being crucial to the process of self-assurance of the modern self. She associates tradition with fabric that had “worn thinner and thinner as the modern age progressed” until “the thread of tradition finally broke.”12 Her argument concerns the commonness of self-reflection in modernity, but it is the specific use of the symbol of thread to indicate the connection with pre-modern inherited tradition that is significant: for the gap (detachment) to appear, the thread has to be cut just like the umbilical cord. The thread / fabric metaphor is no more than a digression on the margin of this argument, but a digression that points to a very interesting affinity between the maternal symbolism and the imagery of the birth of subjectivity. As a point of convergence between the imaginary construction of the two discourses, it can also be interpreted as a kind of epitome of the mutual confluence of terms that might not otherwise seem directly connected. The metaphor of the infant gaining independence by breaking the continuum with his13 mother seems deeply embedded in the conceptualisation of the modern breakthrough. The transition from the medieval world to modernity is often presented as a process in which the 11

12 13

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1972), p. 11, discussed in: John W. Tate , “Kant, Habermas, and the 'Philosophical Legitimation' of Modernity,” Journal of European Studies, Vol. 27, Issue 3 (1997), p. 291. The abandonment of magical thinking in favour of rationalization is central to Max Weber’s notion of the disenchantment of the world (Entzauberung der Welt) which he defines as the exclusion of all superstition and trust in the magical forces and a landmark of the Protestant cultures. See: Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London and New York: Routledge 2002), pp. 61, 71, 97, 178. Weber’s argument seems to have had a great influence on other critics of the modern breakthrough; Morris Berman, for instance, claims that “[t]he story of the modern epoch, at least on the level of mind, is one of progressive disenchantment.” See: Berman, The Reenchantment of the World, p. 16. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Classics, 1993), p. 14. The apparent “default masculinity” of the subject in psychoanalysis is a widely criticized issue. Much as contemporary gender and feminist theory rightly objects to such gender marking, this work will perpetuate it deliberately, since what it outlines as its field of study is not actual subjectivity or the way it is experienced by individuals, but subjectivity as a product of certain discourses which construct it in accordance with their prevalent mode of the production and circulation of meaning. This notion of the “subject” becomes a reflection of the dominant rules, hierarchies, and power relations, and can thus be parsed and deconstructed, which is what this work aims to do.

30

Chapter 1

human being emerges as a separate entity to cut the cord which had once connected man and the maternal universe. In this context, the maternal body is reflected in the idea of the medieval world: the modern man has to detach himself from nature (traditionally coded as feminine) to objectify and master it (her). Again, such imagery is a part of a larger net of significations entangled in the process of meaning production within the discourse on modernity: gender, subjectivity, nature / culture relations, and many others. Meanings are constructed at the intersections of those areas, shaping the cognitive frames of the notions of subjectivity, modernity, pre-modernity, femininity, masculinity, nature, culture, etc. In other words, if we assume that language maps culture in such a way that the semantic load of each element within the structure exerts influence upon the semantic load of all other elements it interacts with,14 then analysing some constituents of the semantic load of one element will entail a series of disclosures within the semantic frames of other elements, thus revealing components that contribute to their meaning, but would otherwise remain concealed. The following analysis therefore assumes as its principal starting point the question: what are the main constituents of the semantic load of the metaphor of parturition / differentiation, and how do they relate to the prevailing conceptualisation of modernity and subjectivity? Embedded in the imagery of subjectivity emerging out of an undifferentiated matrix of mass identity is also the idea of growing out of immaturity and childhood. In the fragment quoted above Burckhardt speaks of “childish prepossession” – a state in which the human being does not possess himself / his self yet, but exists as a part of a mother-infant circuit (or, in the context of mass identity, the constantly spawning continuum of maternal space). Self-possession will thus be linked to acquiring autonomy, but also to disentangling oneself from the muffling cocoon of the pre-rationalistic veil of superstition and illusion, entering a new narrative space where stories and plots are not spun endlessly, but where language puts reality into logical frames.15 Burckhardt’s frame of reference seems to reverberate with the Kantian discourse on the Enlightenment: “[e]nlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of

14 15

See, for instance, Yuri Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, trans. Gail Lenhoff and Ronald Vroon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977). The connotations of the above with theories of Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva will be explained later in this chapter.

Pre-Modern Undifferentiation

31

another,”16 as well as with Descartes’s assertion in which he juxtaposes childhood with the guidance of reason, and describes it as the time when we are “governed [...] by our appetites and our teachers.”17 And although all three scholars talk about different periods in history and point to different social and cultural determinants that spur the emergence of the subject, they in fact talk about the same process described by means of very similar stylistic devices. The crucial events that mark the beginning of the modern era rely therefore upon the assertion of the authority of the subject and the acknowledgement of his individual autonomy. Modernity in this connection is related to detachment, that is, not only the emergence of subjectivity and individualism, but also the right to recognition and agency. What is most significant for the scope of the current discussion, however, is the fact that all the three “maturation” metaphors are in fact those of symbolic infantile disconnection from the maternal space. For Burckhardt, the onset of subjectivity is “not a mere fragmentary imitation or compilation, but a new birth.”18 Thus the idea of “modernity as maturation” becomes inscribed in the wider conceptual frame that constructs the modern self: the metaphor of parturition. Let us now focus on the lexicon of this symbolic birth to establish the points of convergence and trace the recurring themes that, in turn, will map the semantic frame for further analysis. When Foucault discusses the Nietzscheian notion of Entstehung (emergence – in this context the emergence of a species), he stresses the significance of the ideas of solidification, uniformity, resistance to external forces, and durability as the necessary factors for the uprising of new form of identity.19 These are the very concepts that seem to delineate the ‘universal’ cognitive model of the constitution of individuality, as it seems virtually impossible to conceptualize the process of the birth of subjectivity in the modern sense beyond this model. Breaking it down into constituent parts might be a revelatory experience, disclosing components and connections that remain buried under layers of cultural signification. Foucault, following Nietzsche, criticizes the inflated rhetoric of the myth of the origin of things: “[w]e tend to think that this is the moment of their greatest 16

17

18 19

Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” in: From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology, trans. H.B. Nisbet, ed. Lawrence E. Cahoone (Maldena and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), p. 51. René Descartes, “Discourse on the Method of Properly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking the Truth in the Sciences,” in: Discourse on Method and the Meditations, trans. F. E. Sutcliffe (London: Penguin Books, 1988), p. 36. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance, p. 122. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), pp. 83-84.

32

Chapter 1

perfection, when they emerged dazzling from the hands of a creator in the shadowless light of a first morning. The origin always precedes the Fall. It comes before the body, before the world and time; it is associated with the gods, and its story is always sung as a theogony.”20 Both Nietzsche and Foucault are critical of the idea of the mythologized origin, claiming it has an aura of selfconsolation, or even self-flattery, to the idealized modern subject. It is a product of the modern narration of the history of reason, and as such it has to be exposed: “[w]e wished to awaken the feeling of man’s sovereignty by showing his divine birth: this path is now forbidden, since a monkey stands at the entrance,”21 says Nietzsche. Foucault juxtaposes the modern narration of unbroken continuity with the working of genealogy, that is, acknowledging the dispersions, incoherences, and discontinuities: Where the soul pretends unification or the self fabricates a coherent identity, the genealogist sets out to study the beginning – numberless beginnings, whose faint traces and hints of color are readily seen by a historian eye. The analysis of descent permits the dissociation of the self, its recognition and displacement as an empty synthesis, in liberating a profusion of lost events.22

What is interesting in the above quotation from the point of view of the current discussion is not only Foucault’s delineation of the genealogist’s task, but the very “pretended unification” of the soul and the self “fabricating a coherent identity” in opposition to which genealogy sets itself. The coherence and unification of the subject are thus considered to be constructs, or products of a certain mode of thinking which has to be labelled as specifically modern. Genealogy works then against the principle of closure and in opposition to a “genesis oriented towards the unity of some principial cause.”23 In his tracing of the genealogy of the modern subject Foucault does not, however, avoid his own “parturition metaphor,” so to speak. Foucault stresses the central position of the subject for Western culture in its scientific, political, social, economic, legal, and philosophical traditions.24 “My objective,” claims Foucault in “The Subject and Power,” “has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made

20 21 22 23

24

Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” p. 79. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn of Day (New York: Gordon Press, 1974), p. 49, quoted after Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” p. 79. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” p. 81. Michel Foucault, “What is Critique?” in Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 1997), p. 64. See: Paul Rabinow’s “Introduction” to The Foucault Reader, p. 7.

Pre-Modern Undifferentiation

33

subjects.”25 To start with, it has to be explained that, paradoxically, in the Foucauldian discourse there is a strong correlation between the creation of subjectivity and the process of objectification. Objectification, as a “technology of the self,” is a process of normalization turned inwards. As such it embodies selfdiscipline and self-mastery. And although it is an exercise of power upon the subject, it actually brings out the very subjectivity of this subject – self-control becomes a condition of autonomy. Modern rational subjectivity is then, according to Foucault, an effect of certain objectifying practices whose central theme seems to be a metaphor of division: “the subject is objectified by a process of division either within himself or from others.”26 According to Rabinow, one of the main modes of objectification of the subject in Foucault’s theory can be summarised in what he calls “dividing practices” (I will come back to this notion in subsequent chapters). Foucault sees a connection between those “dividing practices” – classification, containment, and categorisation – and the general modern modes of progress and development.27 What the constitution of subjectivity involves then is the subject’s becoming entangled in the processes of objectification and constraint which takes place through a series of divisions. In his discussion of the Enlightenment, Foucault very often refers to Kant’s famous 1784 essay “Was ist Aufklärung?” He stresses that “the Enlightenment period is certainly designated as a formative stage for modern humanity.”28 It is especially the notion of autonomy in Kant’s argument that seems crucial for Foucault. He focuses on Kant’s discussion of the “minority condition” of humanity that has to be abandoned in order to fully enter the Enlightenment and its relation to external authority: the minority condition must be lifted so that man can be majoritised.29 Foucault, of course, criticises Kant’s “maturational” or “educational” notion of modernity as a monolithic teleological narrative. What is more, for Kant maturation signifies, to a certain degree, desubjugation from the power of authority, whereas for Foucault the self-formation of the subject takes place through the mediation of an external figure of authority:

25

26 27 28 29

Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), p. 208. Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” p. 208. Rabinow’s “Introduction” to The Foucault Reader, p. 8. Foucault, “What is Critique?,” p. 57. Foucault, “What is Critique?,” p. 48-50.

34

Chapter 1 There are two meanings of the word subject. Subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience of self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to.30

Both Kant’s Mündigkeit and Foucault’s divisions bear a distinct mark of the metaphor of parturition. Paul Rabinow claims that the main topics in those works of Foucault that deal with the dividing practices are “the objectification of individuals drawn first from a rather undifferentiated mass”31 – a phrase that in an obvious way reverberates with the Burckhardtian individuation discussed above. Similarly, Kant juxtaposes man’s autonomous reason with the leash of prejudice associated with “the great unthinking mass.”32 The Kantian imagery of the Enlightenment as “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity” bears startling resemblance to Burckhard’s common veil “woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession.” The model of modernity that presents it as acquiring distance from childhood is also visible in the discourse of manners. Norbert Elias writes: “the distance in behavior and whole psychical structure between children and adults increases in the course of the civilizing process,”33 and Mary Douglas asserts that “[t]he assumption is that in some sense primitive cultures correspond to infantile stages in the development of the human psyche.”34 The homogeneous character of the “great unthinking mass” again brings to mind the undifferentiated matter of the symbolic feminine fabric, the constantly spinning maternal fabric that flows, spreads and muffles and from which the subject has to disentangle himself in order to emerge and solidify as an autonomous individual. The vocabulary of Jürgen Habermas’s Philosophical Discourse of Modernity is also imbued with parturition metaphors. When Habermas talks about modernity, he uses such words as “emancipation,” “development,”35 “selfreassurance” (Selbstvergewisserung), “detaching,”36 “individualism,” and “autonomy.”37 He also refers to the “classical picture of modernity” as constructed by 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Michel Foucault, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), p. 212, quoted after Rabinow, “Introduction” to The Foucault Reader, p. 21 Rabinow’s “Introduction” to The Foucault Reader, p. 8. Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?,” p. 52. Norbert Elias, The History of Manners, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1978), p. xiii. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger. An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 142-143. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 7. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 16. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 17.

Pre-Modern Undifferentiation

35

the image of the growing child, the influential metaphor that not only shaped the Kantian notion of the Enlightenment, but also became prevalent for the discourse of modernity in general: Emile Durkheim and George Herbert Mead saw rationalized lifeworlds as characterized by the reflective treatment of traditions that have lost their quasinatural status; by the universalization of norms and action and the generalization of values, which set communicative action free from narrowly restricted contexts and enlarge the field of options; and finally, by patterns of socialization that are oriented to the formation of abstract ego-identities and force the individuation of the growing child. This is, in broad strokes, how the classical social theorists drew the picture of modernity.38

Habermas stresses the significance of the separation metaphor for the discourse of modernity which establishes its own dawn at the point where the “spheres of knowing were separated off from the spheres of belief,”39 thereby inscribing his idea of the modern discourse into the prevailing symbolic system of separation and the traditional (male) reason / (female) belief opposition. Summing up the above analogies, it certainly can be said that the prevailing mode of theorizing the modern breakthrough is that of abandoning the amorphous (female) space of undifferentiation, and, by establishing structures based on divisions and delineations, entering the sphere of masculine relations in which the self defines itself as a subject in opposition to the rest of the world – now objectified by the subject. The key words are those of detachment, differentiating oneself from amalgamated mass to develop individual identity, and the metaphor of growing out of childhood and gaining independence. The primal state of borderlessness and lack of separation that must be rejected by the self to become a subject is often expressed by means of a metaphor of fabric, thread, or cloth – traditionally associated with modes of representation of femininity in culture. Hence the next chapter explores the notion of the “birth of subjectivity” and the way it is conceptualized in the discourse of psychoanalysis in relation to the “parturition metaphor” as it appears in the philosophical critique of modernity.

38 39

Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 2. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 19.

CHAPTER 2

Birth of the Subject

The examples discussed in the first chapter justify the seemingly sweeping statement that the emergence of modern self is consistently, although not always directly, characterized in terms of birth and disconnection from the maternal body. Dalia Judovitz in her Origins of Modernity even speaks of “the traditional humanistic account that confuses the birth of man with that of the subject.”1 The key terms appearing in the discourse of modernity are those of independence, autonomy, self-reassurance, emancipation, separation, and departure from the past presented as an undifferentiated matrix of pre-reason, fabric of prejudice, habitual tradition, lack of individuality. It is the division that shapes the picture of the modern breakthrough: “[h]istorians of Western philosophy have often identified the seventeenth century as the great divide, the point from which rationality could serve as the foundation-stone of the self-determining individual.”2 The poetics of birth is prevalent in the discourse of the modern breakthrough: in her Flight to Objectivity, Susan Bordo analyses the origins of Cartesian cogito in the cultural context of the seventeenth century, which she sees as a turbulent period of changes when the modern consciousness slowly and painfully emerges. Cartesian doubt is thus perceived as an expression of a “drama of parturition”3 – the difficult but inevitable emergence of the modern self from the maternal universe of the Middle Ages. Bordo sets as her narrative framework the imagery of the mother-infant relationship: she claims that the creation of the modern world was based on a cultural birth out of the medieval and Renaissance mother-world. The maternal-medieval universe in which the body was regarded as a credible epistemological guide4 was rejected as other in order to enable the 1

2 3 4

Dalia Judovitz, Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes. The Origins of Modernity (Cambridge, New York, New Rochelle, Melbourne, Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. x. Roy Porter, “Introduction,” in: Roy Porter, ed. Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 3-4. See: Susan Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity. Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1987), p. 5. See: Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity, p. 45.

38

Chapter 2

infant-self to build its own identity. In this context the Cartesian struggle towards objectivity can be perceived as the separation anxiety of a newly developed self which must detach itself from the “organic female universe.” Cartesian rationalism thus discloses itself as a defensive reaction to the separation trauma which negates both the maternal and the bodily (the mat(t)ernal) and seeks refuge in “the modern scientific universe of purity, clarity, and objectivity.”5 Horkheimer and Adorno also link the (painful) emergence of the modern subject with the hatching of individual subjectivity observable in every human: Humanity had to inflict terrible injuries on itself before the self – the identical, purpose-directed, masculine character of human beings – was created, and something of this process is repeated in every childhood. The effort to hold itself together attends the ego at all its stages, and the temptation to be rid of the ego has always gone hand-in-hand with the blind determination to preserve it. […] The fear of losing the self, and suspending with it the boundary between oneself and other life, the aversion to death and destruction, is twinned with a promise of joy which has threatened civilization at every moment.6

The rejection of the maternal-material sphere in order to enter the realm of objectivity and clarity, the process of disentanglement and differentiation as a condition of subjectivity – this kind of imagery reverberates not only in the pictures of the modern breakthrough, but also in the story of individual development as told by structural psychoanalysis. The ideas of Jacques Lacan, so widely used in critical theory, resonate with some innermost intuitions we seem to share and thus emanate an aura of universal models; some of their metaphors evoke instant recognition and trigger sequences of images (it is precisely this feature of Lacanian discourse that Slavoj Žižek stresses in his analysis of films informed by it). The following discussion of the developmental imagery used by theoreticians at the crossroads of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literary theory will establish a basis for the further discussion of the convergences and reciprocal influences between the contemporary conceptualizations of the origins of the modern self and the constitution of subjectivity in an individual human being. It is the analogy between the image of the emergence of modern subjectivity and the presentation of the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic as three stages of infantile development that is most interesting from the point of view of my argument. Generally speaking, it can be said that there is a parallel between the Lacanian imagery of the real reverberating with the images of primeval maternal undifferentiation and the metaphors of lack of autonomous individuality 5 6

Bordo, The Flight to Objectvity, p. 5. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1972), p. 26.

Birth of the Subject

39

in numerous accounts of pre-modern selfhood. In the Lacanian model of psychosexual development, subjectivity comes into being through the entrance into language, which, at the same time, involves a radical break from the materiality of the real. The subject has to “lose touch” with the real in order to construct meaning and reality in the symbolic, which is marked by language, binary oppositions and recognition of the self / other distinction. The real, which is beyond (and primary to) signification, becomes virtually nonexistent as a sphere which “resists symbolization absolutely”7 and therefore becomes impossible to express in language (it will, however, lurk in the dark corners of the symbolic to threaten it with the potential of a disruptive invasion of materiality). The individual process of entrance into language is therefore, roughly speaking, a progression from the real, through the imaginary (the mirror phase necessary for the recognition of one’s own individuality) into the symbolic. The rhetorical references to the conceptual construction of the emergence of modern subjectivity are best visible in a rough and schematized outline of the Lacanian model (which will be discussed in greater detail as the chapter proceeds), in which the state preceding the individuation of the subject is conceptualized via metaphors of merging, dissolution, and suspension of boundaries. In this connection, the earliest stage of development appears as a phase of materiality, in which the baby is overwhelmed by undifferentiated urges and impulses, where the boundaries between the infant and the mother are not yet acknowledged. The libido is not ascribed to any particular location and circulates around the infant’s body as jouissance, the pleasure of dissolving. There is no division between subject and object. The mother-child unity appears as a pulsating borderless entity, absorbed by its environment and all-pervasive,8 until it is severed by the crucial moment at which the child recognizes his specular reflection (or rather misrecognizes it for himself). Subjectivity is born when the child is able to see himself as a subject separate from his objects. The imaginary order associated with the mirror stage is connected with recognizing one's body as separate from the maternal body and the outside world.9 The entrance into the symbolic, which takes place through the acceptance of the Name-of-the Father and the acquisition of language, is the entrance into the sphere of culture and bipolar relations marked by the ultimate rejection of the non-differentiated ma-

7 8 9

See: Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), p. 69. See: Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 44. Jacques Lacan, "The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience," in Écrits. A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London and New York: Routledge 2001), pp. 4-5.

40

Chapter 2

ternal real.10 The process of development is thus also a signifying process, as it is directed towards the subject’s entrance into the symbolic, that is, the existence in language. The question arises at this point: why should we focus on the imagery of the Lacanian model in an argument concerning the conceptualisation of the modern self? The reason is that, as the above discussion has illustrated so far, the cognitive model for presenting the birth of the modern subjectivity is the “parturition model.” At the same time, the Lacanian developmental scheme constitutes (as much as it duplicates) a certain “universal” frame of reference for the “parturition” metaphor. Thus analysing the points of convergence between these two models should reveal certain “ingredients” of the notion of modern subjectivity that will help us grasp the conceptual processes that construct it. We will try to break the parturition metaphor down into its constituent parts: how is the image of separation from the maternal body constructed? What notions contribute to it and how are they reflected in the conceptualisation of the birth of the modern subject? What is the key trope in it and what elements of our linguistic image of the world does it resonate with so that it becomes iconified to such an extent that we can grasp the emergence of the modern self almost intuitively and make sense of it? It is quite clear now that the emergence of the modern subject is often imaged in terms strikingly similar to those discussed above: the major metaphor being that of an individual separating itself out of an undifferentiated mass / matter / amorphousness (often represented by the image of dense fabric or organic circuits) and congealing into an individual shape with strictly delineated boundaries. It can also be argued that, as a conceptual construct standing for the primal, pre-symbolic and organic unity, the image of this amorphous veil or homogenous mass is constructed as female and / or mat(t)ernal. There are numerous manifestations of the correlation between this imagery and the conceptualisation of the modern self as being born out of the maternal body of the premodern universe in the critical texts that theorize modernity. This convergence displays itself in the prevailing metaphor which constructs the commonplace image of modern subjectivity as an entity brought to existence in the process of separation from initial union with the natural world. The cosmological revolutions of Copernicus and Newton are perceived as having ruined the ideal harmonies of the medieval universe, as well having spun spirit out of matter, thus destroying the pre-modern apparent inseparability of form and matter.11 At the sa10 11

Anthony Easthope, The Unconscious (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 98-99, 132. See: Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self. Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 54.

Birth of the Subject

41

me time man ceases to be “the microcosmic representation of the larger universe from which all meaning derived”12 and is hence defined in mechanical terms. Although the identification of the pre-modern world with the maternal body might not always be explicit, an analysis of the imagery used in the texts discussed below will point to the role that the conceptual picture of the birth of subjectivity plays in the construction of the dialectical structure of the modern self. In studying these examples I will focus on a certain confluence of terms that should be helpful in determining the key metaphor played out in the almost “archetypal” construction of the emergence of individuality. This central metaphor built around the oppositions amorphous / defined, mass / individualized, blurred / delineated, and finally fluid / solid, is the main point of reference, a frame on which the conceptualisation of the abstract processes of individualisation can be built. The developmental model (Lacanian and Lacan-inspired) is significant for the current discussion due to its rhetorical construction, which bears close resemblance to the mode of representation of the modern subject in the discourse of critical theory. It is especially the metaphorics of the mother-infant union preceding the emergence of subjectivity and individuality that seems to be built upon a similar conceptual frame. Elizabeth Grosz, for example, describes this union as a period when the infant’s body is not yet a self-contained entity, distinct and separate from the world. The body and its various sensations are projected onto the world, and conversely the world and its vicissitudes are introjected into the body of the subject-to-be.13

Lacan designates this space as the real, the flowing circuit which is prelinguistic and therefore pre-cultural, with its primal animality revealed in the basic need to satisfy the urges. It is the metaphoric “continuity” of the real that strongly resembles the pre-subjective experience of pre-modernity. The same sense of an all-pervasive flow of sensations, impressions, and impulses that permeated, for example, Burckhardt’s discussion of the medieval experience, is present in the imagery of the Lacanian model and its numerous glosses. For instance, Bruce Fink, in his discussion of the Lacanian subject, writes: The real is, for example, an infant’s body ‘before’ it comes under the sway of the symbolic order, before it is subjected to toilet training and instructed in the ways of the world. In the course of socialization, the body is progressively written or overwritten with signifiers; pleasure is localized in certain zones, while other zones are neutralized by the word and coaxed into compliance with social, behavioral norms. Taking Freud’s notion of polymorphous perversity to the extreme, we can 12 13

Seigel, The Idea of the Self, p. 54. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 74.

42

Chapter 2 view the infant’s body as but one unbroken erogenous zone, there being no privileged zones, no areas in which pleasure is circumscribed at the outset.14

The designation of the real as maternal is another factor which evokes analogies with the metaphorical construction of pre-modernity in its affinity for the (feminine) fabric allegory, and the poetics of the pre-symbolic merger in the context of the union between the maternal universe and the human embryo, which will be discussed in the next chapter. To prepare the ground for that discussion, we shall now have a closer look at the Lacanian model, especially at the rhetorical construction of the stages preceding individuation. The pre-subjective space of the real is presented as the opposite of the symbolic order. This depiction is founded mostly on the antonymous metaphorics framing the Lacanian model: the real is maternal and associated with continuity, the symbolic is paternal and linked with separateness, the real is all about satisfying bodily impulses, whereas the symbolic is about meeting rational regulations, etc. Because of its relations to the maternal body, the real must be guarded by the incest prohibition inscribed in the symbolic,15 which prevents the reunification of the mother and child, thus guaranteeing the individual separateness and integrity of the self. Again, there is an interesting parallel with the schematised image of the birth of the Cartesian cogito: in order to become a truly modern subject, the self has to abandon the undifferentiated union with the maternal universe and enter the “masculine” system of reason, mathematical structures, and clear divisions.16 Just like the pre-modern self, the infant has a sense of neither individuality nor of unity: there is no differentiation and there are no binaries. At the same time, to use Lacan’s words, the “motor unco-ordination of the neonatal months” entails a certain “anatomical incompleteness.”17 Lacan even claims that the real is an epitome of a “specific prematurity of birth in man,”18 in the sense that a newborn baby, although formally separated from the mother’s body, still seems to be connected to it by means of a lack of its own identity. Moreover, up to the third month (according to Merleau-Ponty), the child does not differentiate between introception and extroception, does not recognize the “otherness of others.” Even when the baby cries after the mother has left the room, claims Merleau-Ponty, it is not because of her absence, but due to a “sen14 15 16 17 18

Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject. Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 24. Easthope, The Unconscious, p. 98. I will expand on this analogy later in this chapter. Lacan, "The mirror stage,” pp. 4-5. Lacan, "The mirror stage,” p. 5.

Birth of the Subject

43

sation of incompleteness” experienced internally.19 The real thus seems to be marked by a lack of awareness of one’s body, which cannot be distinguished from the bodies and sensations of others, “a phase of confusion and indistinction, in which the child does not recognize any boundaries separating itself from the world.”20 Grosz refers also to René Spitz’s work on baby development, in which he claims that in this period there is no distinction between the “psyche and soma,” between inside and outside, between the “I” and “non-I,” and “not even regions of the body.”21 This rhetorical construction of pre-subjectivity in psychoanalysis bears an obvious resemblance to the pre-modern undifferentiation, especially to the notions of group identity as opposed to the modern individual identity, as well as to the lack of clear differentiation between the spiritual and the corporeal dimensions of existence.22 An epitome of the primal undifferentiation in the psychoanalytical model, analogical to the pre-modern dissolution, is jouissance – the pleasure of dissolving which is ascribed to the real. This is, according to Lacan, what the infant experiences before language and loses with the entry into language (that is, the symbolic): “[j]ouissance is forbidden,” claims Lacan, to anyone “who speaks language as such.”23 Julia Kristeva links jouissance with the vagina, claiming at the same time that maternal jouissance becomes suppressed in the symbolic community in the Name-of-the-Father.24 The pleasure of jouissance is thus inseparable from the mother’s body.25 In Kristeva’s theory the equivalent of the Lacanian real is the semiotic chora, a term she borrows from Plato, signifying maternal space regarded as a receptacle, a nursing vessel, thus drawing a link between maternity and matter as opposed to form: “in the case of reproduction [...] the mother provided the formless, passive, shapeless matter which, through the father, was given form, shape, and contour, specific features and attributes it otherwise lacked.”26 Kristeva uses chora to designate the nondistinctive totality of the pre-specular 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1963), p. 124, quoted after Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 93. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 92. René Spitz, The First Year of Life : A Psychoanalytical Study of Normal and Deviant Development of Object Relations (New York : International University Press, 1965 ), p. 35. This aspect will be discussed in detail in the subsequent chapters. Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), p. 319, quoted after Easthope, The Unconscious, p. 101. Julia Kristeva, “About Chinese Women” in: The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 146. Kristeva, “About Chinese Women,” p. 148. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 5.

44

Chapter 2

phase, its flowing impulses and pulsating continuity: “a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is full of movement.”27 And although the image of the receptacle (conventionally associated with the notion of confinement, or delimitation of space) seems to stand in opposition to the amorphousness of the real, Kristeva stresses its volatile character: “[w]e borrow the term chora from Plato’s Timaeus to denote an essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases.”28 The amorphousness of the receptacle of chora is, according to Plato, “nourishing and maternal, not yet unified in an ordered whole.”29 Kristeva defines chora in opposition to representation, geometry, sense of space, and phenomenology. The chora is a rupture that precedes signification and “locatedness” in space and time.30 The chora as the sphere associated with what Krsiteva calls the semiotic is also juxtaposed with the symbolic: The semiotic is articulated by flow and marks: facilitation, energy transfers, the cutting up of the corporeal and social continuum as well as that of signifying material, the establishment of a distinctiveness and its ordering in a pulsating chora, in a rhythmic but nonexpressive totality.31

This quotation reveals the chora’s affinity to the Lacania real: again the metaphors are those of liquidity and organic movement (flows, transfers, pulsation, rhythm), and lack of differentiation (continuum, totality), as well as bodily experience (corporeality, materiality). Another image of the “continuum” ascribed to the presubjectivity is that of an “hommelette” or “lamella,” used by Lacan to illustrate the plasmatic experience of the infant in the pre-specular phase. In “From Love to the Libido” Lacan jokingly refers to the undifferentiated being of the real as “l'hommelette” – a pun on the French words homme (man) and omelette, thus referring to the fluid homogeneity of beaten eggs: Whenever the membranes of the egg in which the foetus emerges on its way to becoming a new-born are broken, imagine for a moment that something flies off, and that one can do it with an egg as easily as with a man, namely the hommelette, or the lamella. The lamella is something extra-flat, which moves like the amoeba. It is just a little more complicated. But it goes everywhere. And as it is something – I will tell you shortly why – that is related to what the sexed being loses in sexuality,

27 28 29 30 31

Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 25. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 25. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language p. 26. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language pp. 25-26. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language p. 40.

Birth of the Subject

45

it is, like the amoeba in relation to sexed beings, immortal – because it survives any division, and scissiparous intervention. And it can turn around. 32

The hommelette is what spreads in all directions, a thing whose borders are not distinct from the outside world as it spills, crawls, and “moves like the amoeba.” It is not liable to any divisions, so it resists the bipolar differentiation ascribed to sexed beings, but also the basic self / other distinctions. The fascinating “liquid” quality of the lamella will be discussed later; for the time being I shall concentrate on those aspects of the real which evoke the non-differentiated character of the pre-individual unity. Another significant illustration of the primal non-differentiation in the developmental model which is constructed via imagery similar to the metaphorics of the pre-modern self, is the ethological notion of mimicry: the interchange or confusion of an organism with the space surrounding it. Roger Caillois in his “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia” (which, according to Grosz, was a powerful influence on Lacan’s notions of the mirror phase), discusses the phenomenon of mimicry in the natural world and outlines the ways in which organisms blur and blend with their environment so that it becomes one with it.33 The mimicry is a kind of replacement, when “the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses (…). He feels himself becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put.”34 Of course the Lacanian real and Caillois’ mimicry differ to a large extent in the scope of their application, but the imagery and metaphorics they rely upon are strikingly similar: in both cases the being is immersed in the external world and melts with it, the notions of individual boundaries do not apply, and therefore the concept of subjectivity is virtually nonexistent. It is actually the image of blurring with the environment that determines the primeval liquidity of mimicry and constructs it as an antithesis of subjectivity. The sense of union and continuity concerns not only the mother-child connection, but also the link between the infant and the “external” world (which, obviously, is not yet perceived as external), the link which, as Elizabeth Grosz writes, is “the circuit or flow between the external object, the bodily erotogenic source, and the fantasmatic link between them.”35 The infant’s body itself is,

32

33 34 35

Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. The Seminars of Jacques Lacan. Book XI, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company 1998), p. 197. See: Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” October 31 (Winter): pp. 17-32, discussed in Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 47. Caillois, “Mimicry,” p. 30, quoted after Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 47. Italics original. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 54

46

Chapter 2

according to Grosz’s reading of Lacan, “a series of surfaces, energies, and forces, a mode of linkage, a discontinuous series of processes, organs, flows, and matter.”36 Such imagery reverberates with the previously discussed images of pre-modern “fabric” or “matter” out of which modern individuality has to differentiate itself. Bruce Fink writes: Lacan’s real is without zones, subdivisions, localized highs and lows, or gaps and plenitudes: the real is a sort of unrent, undifferentiated fabric, woven in such a way as to be full everywhere, there being no space between the threads that are its ‘stuff.’ It is a sort of smooth, seamless surface or space which applies as much to a child’s body as to the whole universe.37

This imagery, as we can see, again bears strong resemblance to the conceptual frame of the cultural birth of subjectivity in the early modern period: Grosz’s metaphors of energies, forces, flows, and circuits are constructed upon the basis of similar conceptual pictures as the Burckhardtian metaphor of a pre-modern subject “immersed in strange hues” of sensations and impulses. The metaphor of mergers and fluxes between self and world likewise characterizes the premodern humoural self which will be discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. Again, the “undifferentiated fabric” is used to describe pre-individuality. Analogically, Merleau-Ponty describes the stage of indistinction and confusion that precedes the recognition of boundaries separating the self from the world as a phase of “anonymous collectivity” or an “undifferentiated group,”38 and Morris Berman speaks of “original participation” in which the self is bound to the world by means of emotional identification with it.39 Participating consciousness, common veil, lack of individuality – all these notions, as was previously argued, bear a strong affinity to the maternal imagery, both in their traditional symbolic construction and via the imagery of the undifferentiated “smooth, seamless surface” of the Lacanian real. This fabric “woven in such a way as to be full everywhere” which applies, according to Fink, “to a child’s body as to the whole universe” signifies the congruity of the continuity with the maternal body with the continuity with the world. Such a confluence points to the affinity between the imagery used to depict the individual development and the birth of modern subjectivity as an abstract notion: the general metaphor is that of indivi-

36 37 38 39

Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 120. Fink, The Lacanian Subject, p. 24. Emphasis mine. Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, p. 119, quoted after Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 92. Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univeristy Press, 1981), p. 71.

Birth of the Subject

47

duality born out of a rather plasmatic, homogenous matter in a moment of recognizing the boundaries between self and world. This homogenous continuity is expressed in the Lacanian discourse by the image of the infant-mother union, which additionally implies a sense of a union with the world. Analogically, the narrative of the pre-modern self-world relation constructs its own equivalent of the real. The understanding of the natural world as being maternal dating back to the ancient can be found in Plato and Aristotle, in the ideas of nursing matter, the receptacle chora. The passive maternal matter was perceived as a receptive shapeless clay that must be given form by an active male element.40 The maternal metaphor still reverberates in such expressions as “mother nature,” “mother earth,” or even the very word “nature” which comes from Latin natura meaning “birth,” related to natus, “born.” As has been said, the transition from the Middle Ages to the early modern period is often conceptualised in terms of human separation from the maternal universe, a separation that allows for the individualisation and development of man’s self-assurance and autonomy which finds its expression in humanism. As we have seen, the modern breakthrough is often characterized as a bodily act of individuation that enables the autonomous human infant to acquire his subjectivity and therefore objectify the world. Susan Bordo in her Flight to Objectivity develops a narrative framework which she labels a “drama of parturition,” that is, “a cultural birth out of the mother world of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and creation of another world – the modern.”41 The vocabulary used in this discourse is very significant: Bordo borrows the term “drama of parturition” from Jose Ortega;42 Arthur Koestler speaks of homo sapiens being expelled from the womb of the finite universe;43 and Owen Barfield compares the pre-modern man’s embedding in the world to that of an embryo in a uterus.44 The relation is also marked in the modern construction of female universe as other (or mOther), an engulfing and homogenous entity that the infant subject of the early modern times has to situate himself in opposition to in order to achieve his maturity, which, in an obvious

40 41 42 43 44

See: Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity, pp. 101-102. Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity, p. 5. Jose Ortega y Gasset, Man in Crisis (New York: Norton, 1958), p. 184, quoted after Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity, p. 59. Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1959), p. 218, quoted after Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity, p. 59. Owen Barfield, Saving Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, n.d.), quoted after Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity, p. 59. See also: Berman, The Reenchantment of the World, p. 77.

48

Chapter 2

way, refers us back to Kant and his ideas of the emergence from immaturity and releasing oneself from the “guidance of another.”45 The Lacanian equivalent of the subject’s rhetorical release from engulfment in the maternal world would be the acknowledgment of the borders of the self in the mirror stage: the child recognizes its mirror reflection as himself. This phase of misrecognition, the identification with the imaginary self that is distinct and external to what is ‘other,’ is necessary to realize one’s contours – the infant is still rather uncoordinated (the mirror phase is commonly ascribed to the period around the eighteenth month of life) and perceives its own body in terms of ambulatory fragments, often blurring with the environment. Merleau-Ponty writes: “[u]ntil the moment when the specular image arises, the child’s body is a strongly felt but confused reality.”46 It is only via the mirror reflection, via this look at oneself from the outside, that a sense of “locatedness” in space, sovereignty from the outside world, and bodily unity may be later achieved: The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation – and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic – and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development.47

The mirror phase is thus a fantasy of unity and wholeness, the first cohesive perception that in fact preconditions the unitary and independent self – a prerequisite for the formation of a full subject which will soon enter the language and, accordingly, the symbolic order.48 Lacan suggests that the mirror stage should be understood only as an identification, the formation of a subject made possible through assuming an image. At this stage, the infant is “still sunk in his motor incapacity” which precedes the sense of corporeal unity, so the identification with an integral body image is in a way precipitated. The imaginary is thus a phase that precedes the subject understood as a function of language.49 The total form of the body is a sine qua non of the formation of subjectivity, so subjectivi45

46 47 48

49

Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” in: From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology, trans. H.B. Nisbet, ed. Lawrence E. Cahoone (Maldena and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), p. 51. Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, p. 136, quoted after Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 93. Lacan, “The mirror stage,” p. 5. See: Catharine Belsey, “Constructing the Subject: Deconstructing the Text,” in: Feminisms: an Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Robyn R. Warhol (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1991), p. 596. Lacan, "The mirror stage," p. 2.

Birth of the Subject

49

ty in a way depends on the body, or, at least, on the identification with the integral image of the body. This image is only given in the exteriority of the mirror, so beyond oneself, beyond the flickering mechanics of the bodily interior, flattened, reduced to two dimensions, iconified. The mirror image thus fixes the body in an inverted symmetry, which contrasts with “the turbulent movements that the subject feels are animating him.”50 It is only in the mirror phase that the modes of spatiality become ordered and thus the mirror stage becomes a necessary condition for the development of perspective vision. The hatching subjectivity has to establish its own boundaries against the outside world, become a subject differentiated from its objects, attain a sense of space in which the point of view of the subject is central, and the environment becomes objectified. Subjectivity is thus a sine qua non for perspective – in the undifferentiated mass no point of view can be established as a central point of reference that conditions the sense of space and distance from the eye of the beholder, as no beholder is the point of reference. The Lacanian mirror stage is the first confrontation of the infant with a view “from the outside” – a gaze which gives coherence to the uncoordinated, ambulatory self and which makes the objectifying gaze at the environment possible. It is no coincidence, then, that the perspective perception is often thought to have originated in the early modern times51 – the lack of perspective in the medieval art is an epitome of a certain concept of the self in which individuality cannot play the central position, and the size of the elements depends not on the distance from the viewer (which is a modality of a certain “locatedness” in space, and as such is based on the assumption of the beholder as a central figure located in space and time) but on such factors as their social rank or religious significance. There may be a correlation, then, between the change of the infant’s perceptual structure of self and the development of perspective as a cultural mode of perception. Namely, the child is “absorbed in things”52 and therefore cannot break away from a perceived reality which blurs with experienced reality, while the pre-modern experience of the world, according to Morris Berman, lacks objectifying vision mainly due to the medieval sense of “immersion” in the world, similar to the experience of being wrapped in folds of fabric: Throughout the Middle Ages men and women continued to see the world primarily as a garment they wore rather than a collection of discrete objects they confronted.53

50 51 52 53

Lacan, "The mirror stage,” p. 3. Compare: Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 48. Term used in Jean Piaget, The Construction of Reality in the Child (New York: Random House, 1954), p. 240, quoted after Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 62. Berman, The Reenchantment of the World, p. 73.

50

Chapter 2

Symptomatically, the “garment world” becomes yet another use of the fabric metaphor in yet another dimension: the environment which is “worn” by the self becomes in a way inseparable from it and excludes any form of peripheral vision, as it can never be seen as a whole and from the outside. It is only in the “specular” moment that such a gaze is made possible through the identification with the reflected self which can be now distinguished from the “outside.” In her conceptualization of the mirror phase, Kristeva stresses the problem of detachment, separation, and division: From that point on, in order to capture his image unified in a mirror, the child must remain separate from it, his body agitated by the semiotic motility we discussed above, which fragments him more than it unifies him in a representation. According to Lacan, human psychological immaturity, which is due to premature birth, is thus what permits any permanent positing whatsoever and, first and foremost, that of the image itself, as separate, heterogeneous, dehiscent.54

Detachment from the symbolic chora conditions, according to Kristeva, the capture of the image of the self and becomes one of the two key moments (the other being the discovery of castration) that prepare the way for the sign, and to which Kristeva refers as “separations.”55 The mirror stage is thus again defined as a precondition for signification, where the sign is like a voice projected from chora (the “agitated body” as Kristeva writes) onto the imago or the object that at the same time detach the imago / body from the “surrounding continuity.”56 If we thus conceive of the birth of subjectivity with all its consequences (including the objectification of the perceived world – a prerequisite for the development of perspective) in terms so closely akin to the discourse of infantile development in psychoanalysis, we are bound to see the metaphoric affinity between the mirror phase and the emergence of the modern unitary and autonomous self. An example of this confluence might be found, for example, in Habermas’s discussion of modernity: In modernity, therefore, religious life, state, and society as well as science, morality, and art are transformed into just so many embodiments of the principle of subjectivity. Its structure is grasped as such in philosophy, namely, as abstract subjectivity in Descartes’s ‘cogito ergo sum’ and in the form of absolute self-consciousness in Kant. It is the structure of a self-relating, knowing subject, which bends back upon itself as object, in order to grasp itself as in a mirror image – literally in a ‘speculative’ way.57 54 55 56 57

Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 46. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 46. Kristeva, Revolution In Poetic Language, pp. 46-47. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987), p. 18. Emphasis mine.

Birth of the Subject

51

The key concept in this passage is the reciprocal relation between the centrality of the notion of subjectivity for the modern state of mind and the role modern structures of knowledge play in sustaining the sense of subjectivity which can only “see itself” reflected in those structures, from a certain perspective that allows a unificatory gaze, possible only after the self acquires the necessary sense of “locatedness” / separateness in space. The subject grasping itself “as in the mirror image” of self-relating corresponds to the Lacanian notion of the mirror phase: the self must differentiate itself, its experiences and perceptions, from the continual flux of bodily impulses characteristic of the maternal union. In the modern sense of self, according to Berman, we cease to be our experiences and a part of the world around us, and this very caesura brings to life the construction of the world as “other,” non-me, alien.58 Again, the rhetoric of the modern subjectivity discourse and the psychoanalytical model overlap in the self / other distinction: the mirror stage is the point of recognizing the otherness of the other in the same manner as the emergence of modern subjectivity is based on what Burckhardt refers to as becoming a “spiritual individual” and recognizing oneself as such. 59 To enter the symbolic, which is the sphere of language, the child has to position itself as distinct from the outside world. Catherine Belsey writes: In order to speak the child is compelled to differentiate; to speak of itself it has to distinguish ‘I’ from ‘you.’ In order to formulate its needs the child learns to identify with the first person singular pronoun, and this identification constitutes the basis of subjectivity. Subsequently it learns to recognize itself in a series of subject-positions (‘he’ or ‘she,’ ‘boy’ or ‘girl,’ and so on) which are the positions from which the discourse is intelligible to itself and others.60

The symbolic order therefore relies upon the acquisition of language which is made possible by a certain rejection, or by placing oneself in opposition to the other. This relation is stressed by Lacan in a rather epigrammatic quotation from his second seminar: “[o]nce the subject himself comes into being, he owes it to a certain nonbeing upon which he raises up his being.”61 In order to become a subject, the self has to refuse to acknowledge the previous pre-specular unity, and thus build his subjectivity on its alleged non-existence. The Name-of-the-Father that must be recognized as the subject enters the symbolic stands for the figure

58 59 60 61

Berman, The Reenchantment of the World, p. 17. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance, p. 98. Belsey, “Constructing the Subject,” p. 596. Jacques Lacan, Seminar II (1954-1955): The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), p. 192, quoted after Fink, The Lacanian Subject, p. 33.

52

Chapter 2

of law and gives the subject a position in language, and therefore an identity, by sustaining the structure of desire with the structure of law.62 Accepting the Name-of-the-Father thus means rejecting the ‘real’ of the mother – the non-specific and volatile jouissance has to replaced by a structured order of desire regulated by law (ascribing desire to certain zones and also demarcating the amorphous body) and language (constituting, by means of binary oppositions, the radical difference between self and other, as well as the sexual difference). Kristeva writes: “[t]he paternal voice names, but without transforming anything into a sign; it names by flinging itself wide open to the semiotic material that creates a pre-object which carries a foreseeable jouissance.”63 The Name-of-the-Father disrupts the continuity of the real by breaking the material / maternal union. Kristeva stresses the importance of rejection, scission, and separation as the key moments that shatter the unity and thus mark the onset of significance. She talks about a certain rupture which constitutes the subject as a unity maintained by language and social norms.64 Similarly, Bruce Fink refers to Lacan’s statement that “the letter kills,” interpreting it as the account of the symbolic murder of the real, that is, of that “which was before the letter, before words, before language.”65 In other words, the symbolic “cancels out” the real, and creates “reality”– namely, what can be expressed in language. And since what cannot be said in language does not exist, the real cannot be said to exist, as it is said to precede language.66 The entrance into the symbolic order should also be characterized in terms of abandoning mat(t)ernal fluidity in favour of paternal solidity: the shapeless spilling clay is given form and congeals in stable, solid structures of linguistic forms and social norms. The paternal function severs the undifferentiated mother-infant union and transforms the pleasure of the real into delineated structures of social norms and language. A stabilized image of the body acquired in the mirror stage requires the definition of the boundaries of the self and establishing one’s position in opposition to the other which henceforth should be defined as external. For the self / world separation to occur, the infant has to, first and foremost, separate himself from the mother: “the subject, finding his identity in the symbolic, separates from his fusion with the mother, confines his jouissance to the genital, and trans-

62 63 64 65 66

See: Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 34. Julia Kristeva, “The True-Real,” in: The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 230. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, pp. 147-149. Fink, The Lacanian Subject, p. 24. Fink, The Lacanian Subject, pp. 25, 56.

Birth of the Subject

53

fers semiotic motility onto the symbolic order.”67 The m/other (or mOther68) is thus the first other, standing for the newly developed otherness of the external world, which is well grasped by Kristeva: [T]his other, who is no longer the mother (from whom the child ultimately separates through the mirror stage and castration), presents itself as the place of the signifier that Lacan will call “the Other.” [...] Dependence on the mother is severed and transformed into a symbolic relation to an other; the constitution of the Other is indispensable for communicating with an other.69

The separation from the mother, cutting off the organic and unrestrained circuit of sensations and impulses, is thus a necessary condition for accepting the Name-of-the-Father and entering the socially acceptable structures of language, law, regulations, and social norms, all based on the recognition of the self / other binary opposition. Suppressing the maternal chora is at the same time a process of solidification and containment “against” the primeval mimicry, that is, the blurring of self with the environment. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, the suppression of the maternal union in order to enter the paternal symbolic order is a conceptual construct based on a rhetorical frame similar to the delineative model of the birth of the Cartesian cogito. The overlapping of these two conceptualizations can be observed in their metaphorical underpinning: generally speaking, both discourses are built upon what might be reduced to a schematic image in which the maternal / corporeal / continuous experience is replaced with a mode of existence that could be described as paternal / rational / individual. Thus, the mythologized and “digested” conceptualization of the onset of Cartesian dualism can be analysed as another notion built upon the metaphorical frame of separation: the dualism is not so much a distinction between body and mind, but rather between mind and nature, or self and world. Identifying the self with res cogitans, with Reason, and setting it in opposition to res extensa, which embraces the natural world and the body, automatically separates the self from the natural world. Taking into account the feminine interpretations of nature discussed above, it can be presumed that, conceptually, the Cartesian subject comes into being via the symbolic process of separation from the maternal universe of nature, then adopts the objective perspective in the course of a distancing similar to the Lacanian mirror phase, only to become a full subject by adopting the perspective of “masculine” objectivity. Susan Bordo in her essays on Cartesian culture identifies the onset of modern notion of subjectivity with the formulation of Cartesian cogito. Her idea of 67 68 69

Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 47. Emphasis in the original. See: Fink, Lacanian Subject, pp. 56-58. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 48.

54

Chapter 2

interpretting the Cartesian breakthrough through the developmental theory offers a crucial point of reference for the confluence of the individual emergence of subjectivity and the modern construction of the separate subject – a central issue in this chapter. Bordo focuses on such notions as individuation, separation anxiety and object permanence in relation to the “existential and epistemological changes brought about by the dissolution of the organic, finite, maternal universe of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.”70 Her work therefore points to the confluence of terms this thesis seeks to explore, but, in spite of the apparent concurrence, it does not argue quite the same point. First of all, whereas Bordo’s methodological position arises from the interpretation of Descartes through theories of separation and individuation, the present argument approaches both the discourse of the modern self and the discourse of cognitive development, as well as the discourses that point to the affinity of the two (such as, for instance, Bordo’s own work), as manifestations of a certain mode of conceptualisation which constructs the cognitive model of the birth of subjectivity. Bordo also does not refer to Lacan and Kristeva in her analysis, but focuses mainly on theories of cognitive development formulated by Jean Piaget. Therefore, Bordo’s discourse offers not so much a methodological background for this study, as material for analysis, a set of case-studies to serve as an illustration of the points argued here. Bordo seems to struggle to avoid allowing developmental theory to directly describe cultural developments, yet sometimes her argument appears as the epitome of the conceptual construction of subjectivity that is a subject of the present critique, as in the following quotation: In an important sense the separate self, conscious of itself and of its own distinctness from a world “outside” it, is born in the Cartesian era. It is psychological birth – of “inwardness,” of “subjectivity,” of “locatedness” in space and time – generating new anxieties and, ultimately, new strategies for maintaining equilibrium in an utterly changed and alien world.71

Bordo’s work tends to perpetuate the discourse of mutual influences of the models of individuation and modern subjectivity. Although she begins her argument with a series of qualifying remarks, disclaiming any pretensions to creating ahistorical categories, she does not escape some sweepingly ontological statements – for example, when claiming that the pre-modern world “was a mother-world – symbolically, imagistically, and, perhaps, experientially.”72 Her theory clearly is part of the vein of theorizing the modern breakthrough as a process of emancipation from a certain continuity and as a suppression of the mat(t)ernal world of nature. 70 71 72

Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 7. Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 7. Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 59. Emphasis in the original.

Birth of the Subject

55

Such a picture of the modern self as something that is “born,” located in space, and situated in opposition to the alien world is of course confluent with the discourse of individual development discussed above. Both these discourses rely heavily on defining themselves against their opposition, i.e., a certain conceptual construction of the state “before” subjectivity. Whether that is the reassuring protection of the universe, or the maternal circuit of the real, the metaphors that construct this “primal stage” are very similar. What is more, both discourses are marked by the modern sense of loss: the impossibility to return to, or even describe, once we have crossed the line of becoming subjects. Bordo stresses the fact that although theories of separation, individuation, and cognitive development belong to a peculiarly modern discourse, they cannot be transported directly to interpret cultural developments of a historical era. Still, the primal undifferentiated infantile “state of nature” constitutes a certain “horizon for the imagination” which informed the modes of describing human relatedness to the world of pre-modern times in such theoreticians of modernity as Morris Berman and Owen Barfield, who use the categories of developmental theory as hermeneutic tools.73 In the contemporary critical discourse, the seventeenth-century breakthrough is constantly characterised – as this discussion has suggested and will continue to corroborate – in terms that might be broadly subsumed under the umbrella image of “man acquiring a certain distance from the world.” Recognizing the distance between the self and nature is presented as being necessary for the acquisition of knowledge.74 In a similar vein, it can be claimed that what Descartes did by reducing himself to a purely mental being was to widen the gap between self and world.75 The metaphor of “acquiring distance” is significant for several reasons: first of all, it invokes the idea of detachment – the modern self is necessarily a self dissociated from the world. Such detachment, or cutting oneself off from the world, is also a prerequisite for objectivity: it is only by characterising the world as “other” that the boundaries between the subject-self and objectworld can be established. The perspectival, objectifying gaze requires the “locatedness” of the gazing subject at the same time in the centre and outside, thus resembling the “taking off” of the “garment space” and seeing it for the first time from the outside, as a whole, and as “other.” What is more, the distance entails a new self-scrutinizing view that the self adopts, a view that embraces the idea of man as a new quality of wholeness, a self-enclosed unit separate from the external reality – an idea that is very close to the self-identification of the 73 74 75

See: Flight to Objectivity, pp. 7-8. Berman, The Reenchantment of the World, p. 71. Seigel, The Idea of the Self, p. 57.

56

Chapter 2

mirror phase. It is the mind that becomes a mirror of nature and of the self, which is reflected in the course of Descartes’ Meditations. The whole discourse of the Meditations is permeated with a narrative of gaining distance, which becomes a precondition of the objective look at the self, similar to the adjusting of the optical apparatus: from absolute proximity to and absorption in the senses / world / body, to distance and objectivity marked by the subject’s ability to identify with res cogitans and detach itself from res extensa. In a similar manner, Horkheimer and Adorno link the process of acquiring distance from nature with the modern objective of controlling it (“In thought, human beings distance themselves from nature in order to arrange it in such a way that it can be mastered”76), which reminds us of the specular distance necessary for acquiring motor control of the body. The seventeenth century, writes Bordo, “in contrast to prescientific cultures, seems preoccupied with firming the distinction between self and world.”77 Scientific consciousness is defined through the process of alienation; instead of merging with nature, it separates itself from it, thus defining itself as subject in opposition to object – world78 in a specular moment of acknowledging the boundaries by outlining the “contours” of the self against the outside environment. In Modernity and Self-Identity, Anthony Giddens stresses the importance of the mirror phase in its bodily aspect for the construction of subjectivity as a non-corporeal entity: For if the hypothesis of the mirror stage is valid, perception of the body as separate – in the imaginary – is central to the formation of self-identity at a particular phase of child development. A narrative of self-identity cannot begin until this phase is transcended; or more accurately, the emergence of such a narrative is the means of its transcendence.79

The self / world union must be restructured into the sense of discrete self / external world division. This disentanglement is a crucial moment in which the self becomes a subject and, simultaneously, the world becomes objectified. It is, after all, through the discovery of the other that one becomes aware of one’s own subjectivity: [I]n the modern era, and in the work of Descartes in particular, we witness precisely that final detachment of self and world, that firming of the distinctions between in-

76 77 78 79

Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 31. Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 8. Berman, The Reenchantment of the World, p. 17. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 60.

Birth of the Subject

57

ner and outer, between mental and physical, that were to dominate philosophical imagery and argumentation for the next three hundred years.80

Juxtaposed with the world, the self becomes a distinct, discrete entity by assuming an “alienating identity,”81 to use Lacan’s words. Developing such “alienating identity” is apparent also in the modern idea of replacing “participation” with “spectatorship” with reference to the self’s relationship with the world: the “immutable state of mind” Descartes aspires to becomes a sine qua non for the acknowledgement of a coherent perception of the self and external reality, and the position of the self in the world.82 It is no coincidence, then, that seventeenth century science is identified with “spectatorship”: the subjectified Reason can observe nature only when it is detached and may thus become an object of observation. And perceiving itself as separate requires a look “from the outside.” The modern mind becomes “the mirror of nature,”83 the opposite of the premodern mirroring of the universe-macrocosm in the human microcosm. This primeval circular mirroring implies constant flux and lack of solidity; it is a selfechoing and self-referential circuit prone to constant flow. In the pre-scientific Weltanschauung, “[s]elf-knowledge and knowledge of the world mirror each other through the paradigm of interpretation, which cannot be fixed for lack of a foundational difference separating the subject and the world.”84 Bordo refers to the Baconian notion of a “masculine birth of time” to stress the masculine character of the new epistemological model based on “detachment, clarity, and transcendence of the body,”85 a notion that invokes the previously mentioned Lacanian acceptance of the Name-of-the-Father. Although Bordo does not refer to Lacanian theory, her argument abounds with terms that closely correspond to the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic: for instance she describes the “Cartesian masculinization of thought” as a “flight from the feminine, from the memory of union with the maternal world,”86 which bears strong resemblance to the Lacanian detachment from the real by acknowledging the otherness of the mOther. And Descartes’ gradual detachment from the bodily sensual experience into the realm of clean and distinct perceptions guaranteed by God can be interpreted (if we consider Bordo’s hypothesis of the flight to objectivity as a flight away from the feminine) as an act of the self surfacing out

80 81 82 83 84 85 86

Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 31. Lacan, "The mirror stage,” p. 5. See: Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 88. See: Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 88. Judovitz, Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes, p. 13. Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 8. Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 9.

58

Chapter 2

of the mat(t)ernal world in which it was immersed into the realm of paternal authority. In Descartes, the immersion in the body characterised by the erroneous trust in the senses, so similar to the Lacanian imagery of the real, is juxtaposed with the clear and distinct perceptions that are given by God: “I recognize very clearly that the certainty and truth of all knowledge depends on the sole knowledge of the true God.”87 God endows the subject with the ability to distinguish between the binary oppositions of “false suppositions” and “true ideas,”88 and at the same time the conviction about the existence of God is inextricably linked with the notion of subjectivity: it is, after all, the Third Meditation that proceeds from such statements as “I am a thing which thinks” and “I can already establish as a general rule that all the things we conceive very clearly and distinctly are true”89 to the evidence of the existence of God. The connection between the divine paternal authority and subjectivity is in a way circular: Descartes knows that God exists, because he has a clear and distinct idea of God,90 but at the same time the capacity for clear and distinct perception comes from nowhere else but from God.91 As Capra has it, “[t]his picture of a perfect world-machine implied an external creator; a monarchical god who ruled the world from above by imposing his divine law on it.”92 The protective maternal unity is thus replaced with rules and regulations, or the law of the father-God. Analogically, accepting the Name-of-the-Father is what “makes” the subject through introducing him into language. Language is nothing but the knowledge of the world that is based on difference and distinction, which is, in turn, evocative of the Cartesian clear and distinct perception. Descartes’ Meditations can be also read as an account of a process in which the mind is struggling to establish its autonomy from the body. This emancipated mind becomes a “pure mind,”93 a detached entity that is capable of clear and distinct perception precisely because it managed to differentiate itself from the

87

88 89 90 91 92 93

René Descartes, “Meditations on the First Philosophy in which the Existence of God and the Real Distinction between the Soul and the Body are Demonstrated,” in: Discourse on Method and the Meditations, trans. F. E. Sutcliffe (London: Penguin Books, 1988), p. 148. Descartes, “Meditations,” p. 146. Descartes, “Meditations,” p. 113. Descartes, “Meditations,” p. 119. Descartes, “Meditations,” p. 146-8. Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point: Science, Society and the Rising Culture (London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1983), p. 52. Compare: Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 91.

Birth of the Subject

59

continuity of extended things.94 Abandoning the prejudices or false presumptions that stem from the inability to distinguish between the qualities of the mind and those of the senses is a central concern of the Meditations. It is the moment of breaking this continuity and disentangling from the body, i.e., from the erroneous “knowledge” coming from the senses (“I have sometimes found that these senses played me false, and it is prudent never to trust entirely those who have once deceived us”95) that establishes the birth of Cartesian cogito. Apparently, Descartes himself treats the Meditations as a gradual process of rebirth: at the beginning he deliberately recreates a state of primal confusion of the senses and reason by endeavouring to deceive himself and pretending that all his “opinions are false and imaginary,” “that all the heavens, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds, and all external things that we see, are only illusions and deceptions,”96 in order to re-enact the route of dividing true knowledge coming from the “clear and distinct perceptions” of Reason from the hazed and blurry impressions based on the senses. This conscious immersion in the state of prerationalistic non-differentiation finds its reflection in the imagery of continuity of dreaming and madness: I must here consider that I am a man, and consequently that I am in the habit of sleeping and of representing to myself in my dreams those same things, or sometimes even less likely things, which insane people do when they are awake.97

The impression of confusion and of blurred borders is highlighted a few lines later when Descartes claims that “there are no conclusive signs by means of which one can distinguish clearly between being awake and being asleep,”98 thus locating himself on the verge of insanity marked by the inability to distinguish between bodily sensations and rational thought. Such reconstruction of what might be seen as “infantile” or pre-Oedipal confusion becomes a means to a radical re-emergence from it, while simultaneously re-enacting the philosopher’s track towards individuation. Cartesian separation is thus a quest for disentangling oneself from the false prejudices based on sensual (bodily, organic, material) perception – an image evoking extricating oneself from the folds of clinging fabric, or the mat(t)ernal amorphousness of the real – which leads to reliance on observation based on the subject’s own reason.

94 95 96 97 98

I will come back to the imagery of res cogitans and res extensa in relation to the notion of boundaries in the next chapter. Descartes, “Meditations,” p. 96. Descartes, “Meditations,” p. 100. Descartes, “Meditations,” p. 96. Descartes, “Meditations,” p. 97.

60

Chapter 2

Symptomatically, Bordo’s reading of the first meditation draws heavily upon the association of the Cartesian confusion with the image of an infant “swamped” inside the body and thus hyperabsorbed in the senses.99 The induced condition of inability to distinguish between dream, madness, reason, and sensual perception – boiling down to the inability to separate inner impulses from external stimuli – resonates with the imagery of the pre-Oedipal continuity of the real. In such an interpretation, the cogito emerges in the process of cutting off the connection with the sensual and therefore the bodily and the material – all these spheres finding their correspondences in the Lacanian real. The second meditation can thus be interpreted as an account of the inner self becoming a discrete and autonomous entity capable of objectively judging the world by a process of internalizing reason and constructing the world as external by distancing oneself from sensual perception. Sensual perception in the Cartesian discourse is connected with the body which, as part of res extensa, belongs to the realm of material reality, that is, the things the subject defines himself in opposition to. In the Second Meditation Descartes stresses that he is “only a thing that thinks” and “not this assemblage of limbs called the human body”100 and identifies sensual perception with “the intermediary organs of the body,”101 thus juxtaposing the “true knowledge” from sensual perception. Next, after examining a piece of wax, first solid and then melted, and realizing that all its sensible properties have changed, he reiterates the conclusion that the senses cannot be trusted, as the only way to know the nature of things is by the “understanding of the mind.”102 He even refers to his senses as “external”103 thus stressing the newly divided opposition: I=mind=subject=res cogitans versus body=senses=external world=res extensa. Descartes associates the immersion in sensual perception (which, as has just been said, can be interpreted as an equivalent of the immersion in the bodilymaternal continuity of the real) with being wrapped in folds of fabric (again!) that becloud the real nature of things, evoking the recurring motif of the modern separation narrative. He compares his gradual mistrust of sensory perception with “removing garments,” or “external forms” of the perceived reality, so that it can be seen “quite naked,” that is, in its real nature which is accessible only to the human mind.104 Descartes concludes the meditation with an assertion that he is a thinking thing, that only the mind can be known clearly and distinctly,

99 100 101 102 103 104

Bordo. Flight to Objectivity, p. 91. Descartes, “Meditations,” p. 105. Descartes, “Meditations,” p. 107. Descartes, “Meditations,” p. 109. Descartes, “Meditations,” p. 110. Descartes, “Meditations,” p. 111.

Birth of the Subject

61

whereas the body is subject to (and a subject of) sensory perception that should not be trusted: And so many other things besides are to be found in the mind itself, which can contribute to the clarification of its nature, that those which depend on the body [...] scarcely deserve to be taken into account. 105

In this respect, the Second Meditation is an account of a process parallel to the mirror phase in which the self, initially “swamped” inside the body, emerges and congeals (even if this is in fact an induced re-enactment of the actual course of development). Being “swamped” inside the body is reflected in the self’s susceptibility to the continuous flow of undifferentiated sensory stimuli that confuse the “perception” coming from the body with that which comes from imagination and mind, but also obscure the distinction between the “knowledge” that comes from the inside of the self with that which comes from the outside. Because the senses belong to the body, and the body, like the rest of the material world, is among the extended things (the non-self, the subject’s other), they become the marginal site of blurring borders and therefore must be rejected. This rejection allows the subject to emerge in the process of disentangling from the viscous fabric that prevented seeing reality from a distance. What the foregoing discussion has sought to assert is the existence of a certain spatial model of the birth of modern subjectivity, a picture or conceptualisation that always possesses an aura of familiarity, an impression of an instantly recognizable essence that triggers the mechanism of mental “autocompletion” any time we encounter it. It is probably the mythological character of this model (mythological in the Barthesian sense of the world) that determines the alleged “universality” of its manifestations. A perfect example is the indisputable appeal of Lacan’s ideas for critical theory: in spite of their complexities and opaque language, they are often enthusiastically taken as a point of reference or a methodological tool by critics from various fields, ranging from film studies through literary criticism to gender theory. One of the reasons for this popularity is the apparent “intuitive” character of Lacanian theory – even readers not too well versed in psychoanalysis might feel they “grasp” a certain picture which resonates with some other models they are familiar with. Accordingly, many contemporary critical works abound with phrases in what is sometimes ironically referred to as “Lacanese” – buzzwords with a life of their own, detached from their original context, theoretical “picklocks” ostensibly suitable for the interpretation of literary anything. The aim of this study is, however, not to point out the risks arising from the “universal” character of such conceptual

105 Descartes, “Meditations,” p. 112.

62

Chapter 2

pictures of modern subjectivity, including Lacan’s model, but, as has already been said, to identify and parse the grounds of this universality, that is, to distinguish the elements that determine the “recognizability” of the model by evoking the sense of recurrence and referentiality.

CHAPTER 3

Pre-Subjective Merger

The spatial model of modern subjectivity that has emerged from the discussion so far is built upon the anti-model of a primal state of non-differentiation, characterised by the lack of necessary distance between the self and non-self which often finds expression in the use of the fabric / garment metaphor. The Cartesian turn is thus identified with the obligation to objectify the world, including our own bodies, that is, to “see them mechanistically and functionally, in the same way that an uninvolved observer would.”1 The “garment world” which “clings” to the self, preventing the acquisition of a distance necessary for the self to realize its separateness (which is linked to the perspectival perception), also implies the imagery of viscosity, of being submerged in matter which, although it is not part of the self, cannot be recognized as such until the self frees itself from it. Morris Berman introduces the notion of “participating consciousness,” which corresponds with the above delineation. It involves “merger, or identification, with one’s surroundings, and bespeaks a psychic wholeness”2 and is characterized by the individual “immersed in a sea of contradictory experiences [...] [who] learns about the world through emotional identification with it,”3 as well as “a total submergence of oneself into the other.”4 This descriptions builds a suggestive image evoking the continuity of the maternal real / chora, along with the metaphors of fluidity and viscosity that construct its conceptual frame. What is more, this continuity is constantly characterized in opposition to the distance necessary for the emergence of reason, which reminds us of the Cartesian distance discussed at the end of the previous chapter. Berman also juxtaposes the pre-modern participating knowledge of the world epitomized by alchemy with the modern nonparticipating consciousness in which “knowledge is acquired by

1 2 3 4

Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 145. Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univeristy Press, 1981), p. 16. Berman, The Reenchantment of the World, p. 71. Berman, The Reenchantment of the World, p. 72.

64

Chapter 3

recognizing the distance between ourselves and nature.”5 Similarly, Charles Taylor presents the modern separation as a precondition for the objectification of the world: Descartes’s ethic, just as much as his epistemology, calls for disengagement from world and body and the assumption of an instrumental stance towards them. It is of the essence to reason, both speculative and practical, that it push to disengage.6

Symptomatically, the claim of Cartesian dualism that the body is a sort of envelope for the essential self entails the notion of a “swamp” in which the self is entrapped;7 an image – as it turns out – with a long tradition in the Western discourse, as references to the body as “fastened and glued” to the self can be found even in Plato.8 The notions of the bodily swamp and the body clinging to the self lead us to a very important point in which all the threads of the foregoing disquisition converge: viscosity (of the body and of the world) appears as the anti-thesis of the contained, coherent mind, a hindrance that the cogito has to overcome to achieve its clarity and distinctness. This is the common denominator for the stories of the emergence of modern subjectivity discussed above (the Cartesian breakthrough and the entrance into the Symbolic Order): the metaphor of viscosity (with its implied connotations: fluidity, shapelessness, pollution) permeates what the subject is defined against. The “garment world,” the “bodily swamp,” and the maternal space, interconnected in their symbolism, are all imbued with the metaphorical load of amorphous clinginess from which the self must emerge in order to achieve its distinct and separate status. The Cartesian idea of the “prejudices of childhood” that must be abandoned by the modern subject (also expressed in Kant’s notion of man’s emergence from immaturity and in Burckhardtian “childish prepossession”) implies the infant’s inability to distinguish between the knower and the known, and is connected with the repudiation of childhood “commonly associated, as Descartes associated it, with sensuality, animality, and the mystifications of the body.”9 Body defined in opposition to mind is what must be “expelled” for the mind to retain its integrity, and thus is defined as the

5 6 7 8 9

Berman, The Reenchantment of the World, p. 71. Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 155. See: Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body ( Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1995), p. 144. Plato, Phaedo. The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1953), p. 45, quoted after Bordo, Unbearable Weight, p. 144. Susan Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity. Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press), 1987, p. 98.

Pre-Subjective Merger

65

“unruly, disruptive” element.10 The fabric that muffles the pre-modern mind in Burckhardt, the Cartesian immersion in the senses, the mat(t)ernal undifferentiation of the real – all these images reverberate with a certain degree of nebulosity, or shapeless fluidity that blurs the boundaries of individual selves. The prevailing metaphor of the emergence of subjectivity is thus that of the self’s dissociation from the formlessness that finds its expression in the primal union with the mother, the fabric / veil that blends the self with the other, the matter of body that prevents any clean and distinct perception. The prevalence of such conceptualisation is manifested in the mutual merging of these epitomes of pre-subjective viscosity: there is a longstanding tradition in Western thought that identifies the mother with “formless, passive, shapeless matter,”11 and at the same time there exists a strong affiliation between the symbolism of fabric / thread and the maternal metaphor (explored in the first chapter of this study), not to mention the conceptual proximity of the bodily and the feminine / maternal, a construct that has been referred to in the above argument as the “mat(t)ernal.” According to Elizabeth Grosz, Western discourse renders female sexuality and corporality (especially with reference to maternity) viscous, indeterminate, fluid, and half-formed, which has to do with the “cultural unrepresentability of fluids within prevailing philosophical models of ontology.”12 The association of femininity with fluidity dates back to the ancient era, finding its expression in the Hippocratic Corpus, a collection of writings by several anonymous doctors from different parts of the Greek empire, which had a strong influence on Western medical discourse. The ideas of woman's flesh as being “softer and more porous than man's and therefore more prone to absorbing moisture, becoming loose and flabby where a man's body was lean and hard,”13 reverberated in nineteenthcentury views on hysteria as a condition caused by the womb moving around the body seeking moisture,14 or on excessive humidity as a source of women’s madness or manic behaviour.15 Even the contemporary locationist movement in neu-

10 11

12 13 14 15

Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 3. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 5. The association has to do with the notion of chora in Plato’s Timaeus, and the idea that, in the case of reproduction, the mother provided the shapeless matter, or “clay,” which had to be given form by the active male element. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 195. Pamela Norris, The Story of Eve (London: Picador, 1998), p. 138. Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 56. Norris, The Story of Eve, p. 138.

66

Chapter 3

rology supports the argument that female brains are “less localized, more fluid and plastic.”16 The appealing (although sometimes clichéd and even platitudinous) notion of “feminine fluidity” turned into a positive value is an oft-used catchphrase in poststructuralist feminist theory, especially in the works of such authors as Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva. Cixous, in her idea of écriture feminine – non-linear, cyclical writing which is fluid and unstable, which flows and “goes and goes infinitely” (as opposed to the “masculine writing” embedded in the symbolic order) – keeps referring to the poetic metaphors of “waves” and “seas and mothers.”17 Commenting on Irigaray's works, Grosz writes: “[t]his metaphorics of fluids, emblematic of femininity [...], signifies not only the ‘formlessness’ of feminine jouissance but more particularly the amniotic element that houses the child in the mother's body and continues to be a 'watermark' etched on this child's body.”18 The “watermark” signifies the borderless continuity of the pre-Oedipal phase which is radically severed by the child’s entrance into the paternal order. This continuity is a state that precedes the subject / object recognition, as the self is “immersed” in the maternal body. Such state of immersion (also epitomized by the metaphors of being “swamped” in the body, or being “wrapped” in fabric) prevents perspectival vision with its implications of subjectivity. Irigaray’s critique of Merleau-Ponty’s argument concerning the preconditions of vision revolves around the metaphors the latter uses when alluding to intrauterine life: he employs the “the ‘images’ of the sea and the strand,” and also “of the immersion and the emergence.”19 Her own account of perception of colours (which, she claims, should be theorized in terms of fluidity and the smooth weaving of one value into another) also abounds with liquid-maternal phrases: colour “pours itself out [...] imposes itself upon me as a recall of what is most archaic in me, the fluid. That through which I have received life, have been enveloped in my prenatal sojourn, have been surrounded, dressed, fed, in another body.”20 This short passage epitomizes the conceptual connection 16 17

18 19 20

Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 65. Hélène Cixous, “Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays,” in: The Newly Born Woman, ed. H. Cixous and C. Clement (London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 1996), pp. 8889. See also Hélène Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation,” in: Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern: A Reader, ed. Sean Burkey (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), pp. 174-176. Grosz: Volatile Bodies, p. 104. Luce Irigaray, Ethique de la différence sexuelle (Paris: Minuit, 1984), pp. 144-145, quoted after Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 104. Irigaray, Ethique de la différence sexuelle, p. 147, quoted after Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 105.

Pre-Subjective Merger

67

between the imagery of fluidity, (archaic) maternity, corporeality, and the idea of being enveloped, or “dressed” in the other (which is not yet recognized as the other) that marks the contemporary image of pre-subjectivity. The conceptual picture of the maternal universe of pre-modernity is delineated by various terms: sometimes it is directly constructed by the “mother nature” image with all its repercussions, sometimes implied through more indirect connotations, symbolisms, or metaphors reverberating with “maternal” attributes. The Copernican revolution with its denial of the rotation of heavens around the earth might be conceptualised as the loss of the comforting sense of a protecting cocoon swaddling the infantile humanity,21 or a peculiar “sense of continual nurture and intimacy”22 provided by the maternal universe. The medieval universe is regarded as maternal because the pre-modern human body is conceptualized in a continuum with the world, as the infant is in continuum with his mother. The contemporary discourse on the pre-modern self constructs it as a shifting, formless man-nature circuit; the body is regarded as a credible epistemological guide23; the self as immersed in the body and its sensations, and the body’s boundaries as not limited by the skin. To indicate the difference between the modern and pre-modern sense of consciousness, Owen Barfield argues that “[i]n his relation to his environment, the man of the middle ages was rather less like an island, rather more like an embryo.”24 The pre-modern self is often imaged not only in terms of the lack of individuality in the sense of the undifferentiated human mass (the Burckhardtian group identity discussed above, the lack of individual subjectivity, etc), but also in terms of the material continuity of self and world. A member of this world was not an alienated observer, but as Berman has it, a participator. The “participating consciousness” involved “merger, or identification, with one’s surroundings [...], a psychic wholeness,”25 characterized by “a total submergence of oneself into the other.”26 The self which is pre-Cartesian appears to us as preceding the res cogitans / res extensa division: the spiritual aspect of existence is intermingled with the material one, and the human being seems to be a part of a circuit which consist of a material exchange between the self and the universe. The images of immersion in the maternal cosmos, including the 21 22 23 24

25 26

Compare: Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 13. Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 57. See: Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 45. Barfield, Saving Appearances, p. 78, quoted after Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 53. See also: Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 77. Berman, The Reenchantment of the World, p. 16. Berman, The Reenchantment of the World, p. 72.

68

Chapter 3

imagery of man as microcosm safely embedded in the universal macrocosm, the harmonious exchanges of humoural fluids between the mother-world27 and the infantile human being, and the very idea of the human being immersed in his own body (which is not yet quite his own, as it is part of the material world), are all built, as the examples below should illustrate, upon a cognitive frame that is very similar to the imagery of the Lacanian real or the Kristevean chora. The original participation is characterized by the self “immersed in a sea of contradictory experiences” that “learns about the world through emotional identification with it.”28 Moreover, what many contemporary accounts of the pre-modern union bring forward, along with the discourse of the recognition of the worldmother as mOther which leads to the emergence of individual subjectivity, is the implication of a prevailing sense of loss, or inability to return to the stage of primal non-differentiation of the mythologized “nursing universe.”29 The alleged sense of loss or estrangement experienced around the time of the scientific revolution (roughly between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries) is identified by such authors as Capra, Merchant, Bordo, and Koestler with the “separation anxiety” resulting from the severance of the union with the maternal cosmos. As Arthur Koestler argues, after the Copernican breakthrough “[t]he sky no longer had a limit, infinity opened its gaping jaws.”30 Koestler’s hypothesis about the state of mind of early modern man in the face of a radical reevaluation of his epistemological frame illustrates the prevalent twentieth century conception of the beginnings of modern subjectivity. His idea that after Copernicus “[t]he reassuring feeling of stability, of rest and order are gone; the earth itself spins and wobbles and revolves in eight or nine simultaneous different motions”31 is contrasted with the image of the alleged pre-Copernican sense of comfort and protection of the human being safely nestled in the arms of the maternal universe: This feeling of safety was derived from the discovery that, in spite of the tumultuous private lives of the sun and moon gods, their appearances and movements remained utterly dependable and predictable. They brought night and day, the seasons and the 27 28 29

30 31

I will come back to the notion of the humoural body soon. Berman, The Reenchantment of the World, p. 71. Such a “nostalgic” attitude can be found especially in works that tend to “smuggle” some ideological message into an (often solid and well-researched) critical argument. See, for example, Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature. Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (London: Wildwood House,1982); or Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point: Science, Society and the Rising Culture (London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1983). Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe (New York: Macmillan, 1959), p. 217. Koestler, The Sleep Walkers, p. 217.

Pre-Subjective Merger

69

rain, harvest and sowing time, in regular cycles. The mother leaning over the cradle is an unpredictable goddess; but her feeding breast can be depended on to appear when needed.32

The maternal metaphor seems to mark many of the accounts that strive to reconstruct the pre-modern state of mind, often functioning as a central image on which the construct (as has been noted, we treat such reconstructions as products of certain connotations and images) is built: Bordo’s notion of the Cartesian “Flight to Objectivity” is in fact, as she often stresses, of a “flight from the female cosmos and ‘feminine’ orientation of the world” and an attempt to restructure the world in the “masculine” parameters of knowledge based on objectivity and reason, and not the body and sensory experience.33 In an emphatic manner she stresses the alleged “femininity” of the pre-modern world that was to be tamed by the project of modernity: the medieval cosmos whose destruction gave birth to the modern sensibility was a mother-cosmos, and the soul which Descartes drained from the natural world was a female soul.34

The intensity of this assertion only accentuates the mythological character of the construct of pre-modernity that permeates modern critique: gendering historical époques is difficult to justify in terms of the history of ideas, and yet the concept of feminine pre-modernity and masculine modernity is in tune with the prevalent cognitive frame of these terms, thus establishing their status as language constructs based on sets of instantly recognizable images. And since the sources of the natural world as mothered are, for the Western tradition, in Plato and Aristotle35 (in the idea of the formless receptacle or chora which must be given form by the male element that “informs her”), the prevalent notion of nature has been that of natura naturata, a passive mother-nature figure.36 Such notion of the pre-modern world implies that the seventeenth century is conceptualized as a scission leading to the masculinization of thought: Descartes’ reconstruction of the earth as mechanical matter devoid of spirit (classified, along with the human body, animals, and the whole material world, as res extensa) marks the end of the feeling, interacting, maternal macrocosm closely linked with the human microcosm in a circuit that was both organic and metaphysical. Determining the connection between “historical” subjectivity (understood as an inherently modern phenomenon and a product of the scientific revolution) 32 33 34 35 36

Koestler, The Sleep Walkers, p. 20. Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 100. Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 101. Emphasis in the original. Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 101. Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, pp. 101-102.

70

Chapter 3

and “psychoanalytical” subjectivity (as it is conceptualized in the theories of individual development) reveals, as it has already been asserted, the existence of a particular “origin myth” of subjectivity. These “stories of subjectivity” are certain constructs of language operating on particular metonymies, connotations, metaphors and similes that render the notion of subjectivity comprehensible. Owen Barfield’s metaphor of the human embryo in the pre-modern body of the universe is an example of such a construction: without determining it directly, it implies the whole spectrum of notions constructing the image of the preCartesian self as well as the anti-thesis of the detached and delineated subjectivity of the modern discourse. The symbiotic link of “merging with” or “union” with nature is the opposite of the scientific mind that can clearly establish itself as a knower that can differentiate itself from the objects of knowledge.37 The centrality of such detached, scientific mind for modern science is at the core of what some writers describe as a “supermasculinization of rational thought.”38 The separation project a modern self undertakes is thus constructed in terms of abandoning and rejecting maternal amorphousness in favour of paternal objectivity, detachment, and clarity: In becoming a separate self, in the disentangling of self from primary union with the mother, the child is not only learning how to be an ‘epistemic subject’ (according to our modern norms, at any rate); the child is also learning to live in the absence of the sense of continual nurture and intimacy, of absolute emotional union with the mother, that characterizes womb-life and the earliest stages of infancy. This process of emotional separation from the mother is probably the most wrenching tear in the fabric of human condition that we ever experience.39

This tear results in separation anxiety which can only be reconciled by the process of individuation and objectification of what had previously been seen as part of the self. Bordo claims that such separation anxiety reverberates also on the cultural level, manifested in the preoccupation with the distance between self and world, in the constant struggle to maintain the newly acquired opposition between inner and outer, human and natural, mind and matter. Hence the modern models of knowledge are based on rigid divisive paradigms, or “masculine” values: “the more aggressive, progress-oriented science and technology,”40 with the key requirements in the masculinised model of knowledge being “detach-

37 38

39 40

See: Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, pp. 102-104. See: Sandra Harding, “Is Gender a Variable in Conceptions of Rationality?” Dialectica 26: 1982, pp. 225-227; Karl Stern, The Flight from Woman (New York: Noonday 1965), p. 104, quoted after Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 104. Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 57. Emphasis mine. Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 58.

Pre-Subjective Merger

71

ment, clarity, and transcendence of the body.”41 The elements that are constitutive of modern Western cultures, that is, self-assertion, control, and competition, are thus inherently coded as “masculine.”42 The associations with the developmental scheme are inescapable: the rejection or suppression of the maternal element is often described as compensation for the profound sense of loss of safety and protection. One of the coping strategies is the mechanism of denial of any affiliations to the maternal union whatsoever. Instead, the child seeks mastery over the frustrations of separation and lack of gratification through an assertion of self against the mother and all that she represents and a rejection of all dependency on her. In this way, the pain of separateness is assuaged, paradoxically, by an even more definitive separation – but one that is chosen this time and aggressively pursued. It is therefore experienced as autonomy rather than helplessness in the fact of the discontinuity between self and mother.43

The separation is thus re-defined as deliberate autonomy rather than painful and forced disconnection, yet the separation anxiety will become manifest in the exaggerated emphasis placed on the disconnection, or even expressions of mastery and control over the entity that had earlier been perceived as a dependable source of protection and safety.44 The notion of controlling and “taming” the female universe that can be treated as an epitome of the compensation-strategy narrative is the key issue in Carolyn Merchant’s Death of Nature. Merchant claims that the prevalent cosmological view of the pre-modern culture, undermined by the Scientific Revolution, was the notion of the female-organic earth.45 For Merchant, the seventeenth century was a critical period in the transition of the world from an organism into a machine: the central metaphor that bound together the self, society, and the cosmos of the medieval and Renaissance times was, she argues, the metaphor of an organism, of nature identified with a nurturing mother, which was to be supplanted by the modern notion of nature as disorder that had to be subdued, rationalized and mechanised.46 Similarly, Fritjof Capra talks about the “turning point,” or a “radical change” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the

41 42 43 44

45 46

Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 8. See: Capra, The Turning Point, pp. 29-29. Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 107. See: Melanie Klein, “Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict” in The World of the Child, ed. Toby Talbot (New York: Jason Alonson, 1974), pp. 98-111, quoted after Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 107. Merchant, Death of Nature, p. xvi. Merchant, Death of Nature, pp. 1-2.

72

Chapter 3

period when the notion of an organic, living, and spiritual universe was replaced with that of “a world as machine.”47 The redefinition of old structures is a source of tremendous epistemological anxiety embedded in the sense of profound distance between the newly separated self and the “cold, indifferent universe” of the early scientific era.48 If, as Berman argues, the predominant Western view of nature that preceded the Scientific Revolution was that of an “enchanted world,” with the cosmos perceived as a “place of belonging,”49 then the “disenchantment” of the world, or, as Freud put it, “the unshakable confidence in the possibility of controlling the world,”50 might be interpreted as an aggressive instance of a compensation strategy. If the precondition for knowledge is the distance between man and nature, then knowledge – in its modern manifestations – becomes an epitome, as many critical texts indicate, of aggressive mastery and control over the maternal universe the self was previously merged with. Significantly enough, the epistemological context of the modern breakthrough can only be reconstructed in contemporary language and frames of reference, as there is no escape from, or going beyond, the structures of cognition developed since the Scientific Revolution. Thus it comes as no surprise that the milieu into which the modern subject is born should be nowadays drawn by the imagery imbued with late-modern terms, such as separation anxiety, crisis of identity, and even ecological deterioration, which can be found in the following passage from Merchant’s work: Fear that nature would interdict her own laws, that the cosmic frame would crumble, and that chaos and anarchy would rule lay just beneath the sheen of apparent order. Fostered by the competitive practices of the new commercialism and reinforced by the religious wars of the Reformation period and the growing stress on individualism and the senses over the authority of the ancients, the perception of disintegration increased. The ecological deterioration of the earth, changing images of the cosmic organism, and a sense of disorder within the soul of nature reflected an underlying realization that the old system was dying.51

Merchant’s choice of vocabulary, as well as the overall message of her study, reverberate not only with the contemporary psychological discourse on separation anxiety, but also with the ecofeminist critique of the alleged modern “misogynist” approach to nature. Strong as the ideological bias delineating the inter47 48 49 50 51

Capra, The Turning Point, p. 38. Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 73. Berman, The Reenchantment of the World, p. 16. Sigmund Freud, “Totem and Taboo,” in: The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1991), p. 89. Merchant, Death of Nature, p. 126.

Pre-Subjective Merger

73

pretation frame of her argument might be, it still fits into the prevalent image of the story of subjectivity, and at the same contributes to it by adding a new – yet perfectly adaptable – dimension. This is a story in which, after the initial separation, the protective closeness of the caring mother is presented as the unpredictable capriciousness of a dangerous virago. At the same time, the newly emerged subject, in a struggle to break away from the threatening whims of the unbridled female element, defines itself not only in opposition to it, but as its master and tamer. The notion of the expression of the “mother nature” Merchant writes about52 can thus be seen as an epitome of a defensive strategy: the organic universe turned into a machine becomes more predictable and less threatening, with the notions of control and human agency inscribed in it. Just as the mother has to be turned into the “other [...] who is no longer the mother,” 53 the epistemological separation of man and nature is a sine qua non of objective knowledge: “the ‘otherness’ of nature is now what allows it to be known.”54 It is necessary to acquire a certain distance, to break away from the “clinging” universe, in order to achieve a perspective vision based on the objective gaze. As theoreticians of visual culture often point out,55 Western tradition ascribes the notion of gaze to the active male agency, whereas the object that is looked at is traditionally coded as passive / feminine: The determining male gaze projects its fantasy on to the female form, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed [...], so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-atness.56

Such a claim is in accord with the overall view of the modern approach to “female nature” as it is presented by such authors as Merchant, Capra, Bordo and 52

53 54 55

56

The rhetorical construction of this notion in Merchant’s argument might be thought quite controversial: as far as she presents the notions of “maternal universe” and “mechanical universe” as tangible epistemological representations present in seventeenth century experience, she also makes it quite clear that the idea of “death of nature” was not experienced as the actual decay of the figure, but functioned as a stylistic device for replacing one framing concept with another, as is shown in her citation from Johannes Kepler: “My aim is to show that celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism but to a clockwork.” See: Merchant, Death of Nature p. 129. Julia Kristeva, Revolution In Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 48. Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 108. See, for example: John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972), pp. 4564; Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in: Contemporary Film Theory, ed. Anthony Easthope (London: Longman Group, 1993), pp. 111-124. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure,” p. 116.

74

Chapter 3

Berman. The female nature is, according to their interpretation, objectified by the male gaze of modern science (symbolically constructed, as has already been argued, as “masculine,” based on objective scrutiny). At the same time this objectification signifies the exercise of human control over it, which might be interpreted as a tyical epitome of a compensation strategy: the human subject defines himself in opposition to the maternal universe in order to exercise his domination. The notion of nature as other (or mOther), an object of cognition, discovery and control, requires a redefinition of the pre-modern idea of a protective and nurturing maternal figure. Instead, in the seventeenth century nature is transformed from natura naturata into natura vexata, an untamed virago. Control over and domination of the dangerous female element could be achieved by knowledge (implying the gaze / perspective factor) and technology, whose aim is to bring nature into human service:“[o]ur science and technology are based on the seventeenth-century belief that an understanding of nature implies domination of nature by ‘man’.”57 The picture of domination and mastery over nature is often drawn, especially by feminist theoreticians, by means of the imagery of “ravishing” or “subduing.” Merchant, for instance, talks about the “penetrating mind” of a seventeenth-century scientist as a tool for taming the hysterical whims of nature, and about the exploration of natural resources as “wresting nature’s secrets from her.”58 Merchant’s most powerful analogy is that of natural philosophers as interrogators / inquisitors at a witch trial. Not only does Merchant see the connection between the construct of natura vexata and the condemnation of witchcraft,59 but she even claims that natural philosophy’s method for discovering the secrets of nature was analogous to the methods of inquisition used at witch trials, and quotes Francis Bacon to justify her point: For you have but to follow and as it were hound nature in her wanderings, and you will be able when you like to lead and drive her afterward to the same place again. (…) [A] useful light may be gained (…) for the further disclosing of the secrets of nature. Neither ought a man to make scruple of entering and penetrating into these holes and corners, when the inquisition of truth is his whole object.60

Generally, Merchant points to those aspects of Bacon’s discourse which evoke the concepts of examination, inquisition, and “straightening,” referring to an 57 58 59 60

Capra, The Turning Point, p. 28. Merchant, Death of Nature, p. 171. See: Merchant, Death of Nature, p. 132-140. Francis Bacon, “Preparative Towards a Natural and Experimental History,” in Works, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, Douglas Devon Heath (London: Longmans Green, 1870), vol. 4, p. 263, quoted after Merchant, Death of Nature, p. 168.

Pre-Subjective Merger

75

image of nature “bound into service” and made a “slave,” put “in constraint” and “molded” by the mechanical arts. The modern philosophers, as “searchers and spies of nature,” are presented as those who “discover her plots and secrets.”61 Similarly, Berman claims that Bacon’s method consisted in questioning nature directly “by putting it in a position in which it was forced to yield up its answers.”62 These interpretations point to the existence of a certain longstanding, almost archetypal metaphor of curbing the unruly (feminine) element and reforming it by means of ordered mechanical structures. What stands behind the interplay of images is the central connotation of fluidity (aligned with femininity, unruliness, pre-modernity, lack of structures, pre-subjectivity, etc.) and solidity (as an alleged connotation of masculinity, order, modernity, subjectivity, etc.). Instead of endorsing such mythologized conceptualisations, we shall continue to bring out their impact as references in other constructions, and thus point to the self-referentiality of images that go to constitute our conceptual frames of modernity and subjectivity. Even if we put aside the gender-related dimension of the problem, it has to be admitted that the seventeenth century is often portrayed as a period which saw a growing tendency to perceive both nature and society as unpredictable and violent wildernesses whose forces must be controlled and subdued.63 Merchant’s arguments, far-fetched as they might seem, describe Bacon’s philosophy as a total program for human control of nature. The epistemological model deriving from Bacon’s assumptions is not grounded in experiential interaction or reciprocation with the world, but founded on the principle of man imposing his orders on the environment. The new understanding of nature characterizes it as working under man’s authority, with man being henceforth defined as the subject who, after losing his safe position in the divinely created cosmic order, wishes to master the world through representation founded, according to Judovitz, on the criterion of mathematical representability.64 Similarly, Horkheimer and Adorno

61 62 63

64

Merchant, Death of Nature, p. 169. Berman, The Reenchantment of the World, p. 28. The testimony for such tendencies can be found in the literature of the period, like, for instance, Machiavelli’s The Prince and the Discourses and Shakespeare’s The Tempest with its overall message of Prospero struggling to civilize wild island and the savage Caliban by exercising his power and control. Compare: Merchant, Death of Nature, pp. 129-130. See: Dalia Judovitz, Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes. The Origins of Modernity (Cambridge, New York, New Rochelle, Melbourne, Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 108.

76

Chapter 3

claim that “[f]or enlightenment, anything which does not conform to the standard of calculability and utility must be viewed with suspicion.” 65 Generally speaking, Horkheimer and Adorno’s notion of the dialectic of the Enlightenment can serve here as a case-in-point example of particular “universality” (or at least prevalence) of a certain model of theorising the modern relation between the self and nature. The general conceptual frame of this relation overlaps with the aforementioned views presented by Merchant, Capra, Bordo, or Berman (the split between subject and object, nature and the self, the separation of the chaotic and multiple from the self-identical and the ordered66). Enlightenment is thus presented as the “advance of thought” that installed man as master of the earth by pursuing the Enlightenment’s program of the disenchantment of the world. 67 The modern knowledge, claim Horkheim and Adorno, along with establishing man as the master of nature, construct nature as “a mere undifferentiated resistance to the abstract power of the subject.”68 The early modern attitude to nature is marked with acknowledging its uncontrollable, wild and abysmal power which can, however, be somehow tricked or mislead. The Cartesian definition of nature as res extensa turns it into mindless mechanical automaton which could be dangerous and powerful, but devoid of conscious agency. The notion of “outwitting” nature that appears in Merchant’s discussion of Bacon also appears in Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis of the myth of Odysseus: The formula for Odysseus’s cunning is that the detached, instrumental mind, by submissively embracing nature, renders to nature what is hers and thereby cheats her. 69

Interestingly enough, Horkheimer and Adorno’s discourse also exploits the gender marking of the nature / reason opposition: the systematic organisation (exemplified by, for instance, agriculture and time-management) is juxtaposed with passive dependence on external forces and Hadestic imagery of matriarchal underworld in which language and meanings fail.70 The contribution of the selfassurance of the newly developed individuality is the abandonment of the paralysing fear and replacing it with the bold trust in the human potential to deceive this overwhelming yet unthinking power. 65 66 67 68 69 70

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical Fragments. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002, p. 3. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment p. 31. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment p. 1. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment p. 70. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment p. 45. See: Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp 50, 59.

Pre-Subjective Merger

77

Many accounts of the redefined model of world as machine appear as strongly imbued with the previously discussed discourse of compensation for infantile separation anxiety, a struggle to make sense of the situation where the maternal protection and nurture is lost: The ancient concept of the earth as nurturing mother was radically transformed in Bacon’s writings, and it disappeared completely as the Scientific Revolution proceeded to replace the organic view of nature with the metaphor of the world as a machine.71

Capra also argues that the modern redefinition of the universe as a mechanical system in a way sanctioned “the manipulation and exploitation of nature that has become typical of Western culture.”72 Thus, if we follow the “parturition” narrative of the origins of the modern self, the interpretation concerning compensation strategies fits into the story of mechanising the world as an attempt to make it more controllable. The process of epistemological upheaval that leads to the rationalisation of Western thought, or, as Max Weber referred to it, the disenchantment of the world (Entzauberung der Welt),73 is often characterised as disempowering the “living” universe. The disenchantment of the world is, as Hegel stressed, an affirmation of the sovereignty of man’s subjectivity: [t]hus, all miracles were disallowed: for nature is a now system of known and recognized laws, man is at home in it, and only that remains standing in which he is at home; he is free through the acquaintance he gained with nature.74

In this context Charles Taylor even used the metaphor of “neutralizing the cosmos,” as it is “no longer seen as the embodiment of meaningful order which can define the good for us. And this move is brought about by our coming to grasp the world as a mechanism.”75 Capra defines it as a drastic change in the image of nature from organism to machine,”76 and Merchant writes about the notion of “man operating on nature to create something new and artificial.”77 The modern idea of science is all-encompassing; it assumes the existence of one system of science that would “give precise account of all natural phenomena 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

Capra, The Turning Point, p. 41. Capra, The Turning Point, p. 46. See: Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London and New York: Routledge 2002). Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York, 1956), p. 433, quoted after Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 17. Taylor, Sources of the Self, pp. 148-149. Capra, The Turning Point, p. 46. Merchant, Death of Nature, p. 171.

78

Chapter 3

in one single system of mechanical principles.”78 The very idea of machine might be treated as a symbol of ordering life itself, as machines, made up of parts, and based on order and regularity, always follow certain orders and sequences, have a limited domain of operation, and thus give us the sense of control.79 Thus, the notion of mechanical universe is, in fact, constantly characterized as a transfer of agency from the world onto the human being. The postmodern critique of modernity seems to be preoccupied with this concept: the notion of human agency exercised through the introduction of mechanical structures is seen as a landmark of modernity and appears in such “canonical” texts as, for example, Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition (in his discussion of technology and the “principle of optimal performance”80), Habermas’ Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, or Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment discussed earlier. The central theme of modern human – nature relation is thus constantly characterized as a conviction that, as Taylor writes, [w]e demystify the cosmos as a setter of ends by grasping it mechanistically and functionally as a domain of possible means. Gaining insight into the world as mechanism is inseparable from seeing it as a domain of potential instrumental control.81

Nature objectified “ceases to function in its own right, since it is subsumed under the aegis of the axiomatic system – as a sign, a component element of the new mathematical language.”82 The objectification concerns the material world, which, now devoid of its spiritual and feeling dimension, seems to call for an imposition of external rule. The continuity of “garment world” or “fabric” is torn; the invisible organic connections between matter and spirit, senses and thinking are severed; the sense of protection, nurture and sense is lost. Matter (understood as the basis of existence, material world) becomes a multitude of separate objects devoid of spirit, so the only way it can be given significance, or made sense of, is when it is imaged in terms of objects assembled into a complex machine. The solution offered by Cartesian dialectics is as ingenious as it is logically circular: according to the Cartesian principles of clarity and distinction, matter (including the human body) can be an object of cognition only if it is seen as disenchanted, and de-spirited. At the same time, the great stance of Cartesian dualism makes the subject identify itself in opposition to the body when 78 79 80

81 82

Capra, The Turning Point, p. 48. Compare: Merchant, Death of Nature, p. 234. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 43-45. Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 149. Judovitz, Subjectivity and Representation p. 47.

Pre-Subjective Merger

79

the meditator stresses that he is “only a thing that thinks” and “not this assemblage of limbs called the human body.”83 The process of “Cartesian disenchantment,” as it could be called, consists thus in the subject’s differentiation out of the flux of the enchanted world which blends and merges the bodily and the spiritual. After such emergence the subject has to ascribe itself with the powers of cognition and agency, and thus res extensa becomes a mere mechanism, spiritless matter. It is only through such detachment that the reason’s mastery over nature can be transferred to the mastery over the passions and senses,84 and the construction of the body as an automaton, with all its functions reduced to mechanical operations. Such a mechanical model has a great influence over modern scientific medicine. Unlike the medieval / Renaissance notion of the humoural body (I will come back to this notion soon) immersed in nature like an embryo in the maternal body, the Cartesian paradigm resulted in the foundation of the so called biomedical model in which the body is regarded as a machine consisting of separate yet connected parts. Consequently, disease is perceived as a breakdown of a part of the mechanism. In such a concept of the organism the task of medicine is to repair the specific faulty part85, and not, like it was in the case of humoural medicine, to restore the balance between the humours and the elements in nature. Curiously enough, another aspect of modern mechanization of medicine might be seen in the gradual medicalisation of the process of birth, which – if combined with the notion of suppression of the organic, maternal universe – might offer an interesting perspective on the problems in question. The modern relocation of experience connected with changes in obstetrics, the gradual replacement of midwives with doctors inscribing labour into the discourse of medicine and thus identifying it with the potentiality of pathology86 became an epitome of compensation strategy and the mechanisms of denial. Birth becomes identified with a site of potential danger and disorder, and, as such, requires medical / scientific care and control – in the same vein as the “wild” nature of the Baconian discourse is supposed to be “straightened” or “put in constraint” by natural philosophy.87 Even the popular contemporary “new age” discourse of “holistic medicine” reverberates with the echoes of such rhetorics: the medicali83

84 85 86 87

René Descartes, “Meditations on the First Philosophy in which the Existence of God and the Real Distinction between the Soul and the Body are Demonstrated,” in: Discourse on Method and the Meditations, trans. F. E. Sutcliffe (London: Penguin Books, 1988), p. 105. See: Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 151. See: Capra, The Turning Point, p. 118. See: Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 109. See: Merchant, Death of Nature, p. 169.

80

Chapter 3

sation of labour is often criticised as a reflection of man’s alienation from nature, as well as an expression of the “masculinisation” of the Western discourse on the body.88 However debatable such an argument might be, the fact that it “fits in” with the issues discussed in this chapter perfectly illustrates the mechanism of constructing the conceptual frame of self / world relations in the discourse of subjectivity. Such a frame appears as yet another product of the interactions of various elements, such as the oppositional imagery of machine / organism, male / female, gaze / to-be-looked-at-ness, science / senses, distance / immersion, flux / stability, etc. These elements both contribute to the frame and confer meaning in accord with it, which means that their oppositional character might not necessarily be an inherent quality, but a product of a mesh of interrelating connotations in the process of meaning construction. An account of a conceptual frame which is symptomatic of the schematic thinking employed to make sense of the complexities of the pre-modern versus modern Weltanschauung is presented by Morris Berman in his Reenchantment of the World. Berman presents a diagram in which he juxtaposes various aspects of experience, as they were perceived before and after the Cartesian turn (or rather, we should say, how we image those perceptions today). His neat chart comprises the essential contrasts: the medieval geocentric universe of crystalline spheres, closed with God as the Unmoved Mover, is set against the modern heliocentrism in which earth has no special status and the universe appears as infinite. The pre-modern notion of continuous matter and cyclical time is contrasted with atomic matter and linear, progressive time of the seventeenth century. The nature of the Middle Ages is presented as organic and alive, whereas the postCartesian nature is dead, mechanic, and cognisable via manipulation and mechanical abstraction.89 Such a series of oppositional images in a concise way indicates the constituents of our conceptual frame of modern subjectivity, at the same time pointing to the twentieth-century radicalisation of modernity. This chapter has focused on parsing certain shibboleths in order to demonstrate their mutual connections and influences. The objective of the discussion has henceforth been to determine how these notions complement each other and how they together make up cognitive frames of such abstract phenomena and processes as the emergence of subjectivity, individuation, the birth of objective cognition, the infantile dissociation from the mat(t)ernal, the modern redefinition of the perception of nature, etc. Demonstrating the connotations determining our perceptions of one notion demonstrates how it is transferred into other inter88 89

See, for example, Edwin van Teijlingen, ed., Midwifery and the Medicalization Of Childbirth: Comparative Perspectives (New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2005). Berman, The Reenchantment of the World p. 50.

Pre-Subjective Merger

81

related terms. In this connection, the argument has so far proceeded from pointing out the ways in which the notion of modern subjectivity is symbolically represented as “being born,” aligned with such metaphors as childhood, emergence, and separation from the maternal body. At the same time the discussion has sought to demonstrate how the discourse of maternity appears to be marked by the imagery of volatility and non-differentiation, and, at the same time, aligned with the material world. The imagery of materiality / nature, in turn, appears as imbued with the feminine traits, undifferentiation, and continuity. The modern subject thus comes into view as en entity defined in opposition to corporeality, mat(t)ernal continuity, and fluidity, that is to say, defined by the notions of objectivity, separateness, and solidity. The subsequent discussion concentrates on the analysis of various manifestations of such “negative definitions” as they appear in the contemporary discourse of modern material / corporeal culture.

CHAPTER 4

Body without Boundaries

The “participating consciousness” of Berman’s notion of pre-modernity, this “merger, or identification, with one’s surroundings [...],” “psychic wholeness,”1 characterised by “a total submergence of oneself into the other,”2 implies not only the maternal embraces of nature, but also a self-echoing, borderless circuit of pre-modern union in which the notions of inside and outside do not apply. It is only through the process of separation that, by delineating the boundaries of the individual self, the concept of the internal and external space is defined. The metaphors of “participating consciousness,” “common veil,” or “undifferentiated mass” discussed in the previous chapters overlap with their more common or even schematic equivalents permeating school handbooks and the contemporary discourse of humanities in its compendious, analectic version. What the notion of pre-modernity that emerges out of these images conveys is a lack of individual identity (the schoolish example that is often referred to in this context is the literary concept of everyman and the anonymity of artists). Such imagery concerns the idea of society, as well as the relationship between man and nature: man appears as a reflection of the universe, a microcosm mirroring all the regularities of the macrocosm, a being that remains in a state of organic communion with nature. Owen Barfield writes about the discourse of pre-modernity: before the scientific revolution, [t]he background picture […] was of man as a microcosm within the macrocosm. It is clear that he did not feel himself isolated by his skin from the world outside to quite the same extent that we do. He was integrated or mortised into it, each different part of him being united to a different part of it by some invisible threads. In his relation to his environment, the man of the middle ages was rather less like an island, rather more like an embryo.3

1 2 3

Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univeristy Press, 1981), p. 16. Berman, The Reenchantment of the World, p. 72. Owen Barfield, Saving Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanowich, n.d.), p. 78, quoted after Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity, p. 53.

84

Chapter 4

The notion of man-embryo “mortised” into the body of mother-nature has already been exhausted in the previous chapter. What I will focus on now, in turn, is the imagery of those “invisible threads” integrating man into cosmos in such a way that his skin does not constitute the boundary of the self, as opposed to the man-as-island embodiment of modern subjectivity. This image of human embryo connected with the maternal universe with an umbilical cord is fed by the theory of humours, which, according to Gail Kern Paster, constituted the dominant physiological paradigm of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.4 Although in popular consciousness humourism was long ago supplanted by the modern scientific biomedical model, the sediments of the humoural theory remain embedded in culture and language – not only in its most obvious manifestations, like the temperamental typology, but also in many everyday expressions, such as “to catch a cold,” “to be filled with grief / anger / joy,” etc, or “to be in good / bad humour.” Humorism, dating back to the ancient Roman medicine, explained the constitution and the workings of the human body in terms of four humours: black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood. Each of the humours corresponded with a type of personality (sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic), an organ (liver, spleen, lungs, gall bladder), and, most importantly, an element in nature (earth, fire, water and air). For an individual organism to be in good health, the humours had to remain in a state of balance – any surplus or disproportion in this delicate equilibrium would affect the patient’s mental and physical state. What is most significant, the humours were thought to be a part of the natural world in a human being – they would wax and wane, totally dependent on the working of the elements. Consequently, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the link between nature and human being is still very strong (like in the Middle Ages): the threads that link the internal organs and humours with the elements are like the umbilical cords which determine the union between the human body and the maternal body of the universe. The humoural theory is a perfect epitome of the pre-modern view on the human body as a microcosm which through some incredibly tight and organic bonds reflects the rights and workings of the macrocosm.5

4 5

Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed. Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 2. There are numerous literary references to the theory of humours which had to be omitted here for the sake of methodological clarity of the argument. The most canonical examples include Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, numerous references in the Elizabethan drama (especially in William Shakespeare and Ben Johnson’s plays), and the descriptions in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.

Body without Boundaries

85

The notion of spiritus mundi implied that the harmonies and influences of the macrocosm-universe could be absorbed by men, as each body could be infused by the influences of celestial bodies, and thus made “consonant with the cosmos and integrated with the larger universe.”6 Each part of the body was ascribed to one of the zodiacal signs, so man-microcosm, was, in a way, “a miniature replica of the celestial spheres, or macrocosm.”7 Such a unity, or communion, is possible only in the conceptual picture of the universe that constructs it as organic, that is, presenting the notion of man and world as made up of the same matter, or cut from the same cloth. Curiously enough, the “cloth” idiom refers us back to the fabric metaphor discussed earlier: “being made from the same cloth” implies the identity of matter and its transmutability, analogously to Burckhardt’s “common veil” which entails a lack of distinct individuality and fungibility of elements. The macrocosm-microcosm bond appears as an integrated and interconnected system, but not necessarily built of separate parts, rather made of constant pulsating flux, or, as Taylor says, based on “attunement.”8 The magical and alchemical traditions are interpreted by some critics (for instance Berman and Merchant) as reflections of the pre-modern merging / attunement of man to nature, embodying the union and identification with the world rather than cold intellectual scrutiny.9 The Gnostic / alchemical emblem of the coiled serpent eating its own tail is often interpreted as a symbol of such

6 7 8

9

Carolyne Merchant, Death of Nature, Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (London: Wildwood House, 1982), p. 85. Merchant, Death of Nature, p. 101. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 155. It is important to note here that the concept of the attunement to the World was a subject of numerous Renaissance works of art, including the famous Harmonia Macrocosmica by Andreas Cellarius and Integrae Naturae Speculum by Robert Fludd. Also the medieval imagery of homo quadratus and homo altus (described, for example, by Umberto Eco in his History of Beauty and Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages) might serve as a fascinating illustration of the man-universe connection in the entzauberte Welt. The “Vitruvian Man” by Leonardo da Vinci is probably the most famous examples of Homo quadratus (tetragon) embodying the alchemical coordination of the physical properties of the human body, moral virtues, and natural elements; with its four cardinal points, elements, seasons, winds, and the phases of the moon. A medieval illustration of the idea can be found in Hildegard von Bingen’s "Universal Man" illumination from her Liber Divinorum Operum (1165) which depicts a “Cosmic Wheel” with the osmotic connections between orbis interior and orbis exterior, the human microcosm and the universal macrocosm. Berman, The Reenchantment of the World, p. 73.

86

Chapter 4

unity of oppositions and the cosmic metamorphic cycles,10 thus contributing to the iconised image of pre-modernity and its organic constitution. Although Merchant’s and Berman’s reasoning might sometimes appear as imbued with some clichéd rhetoric, their accounts are still valuable for this discussion, as they epitomize the “iconized” picture of pre-modernity processed through the cognitive apparatus of postmodernity and the (sometimes quite superficial) critique of scientific revolution and Cartesian dualism. The theory of the four humours belongs to the myths of pre-modernity, to the “nostalgic beliefs, and ancestral lore replaced by more efficacious, if less colourful, truths.”11 The humoural man-world relation is closely connected to the mother-nature cognitive frame discussed above. The picture of a human embryo in the body of maternal universe implies the organic constitution of not only the human microcosm but also the maternal macrocosm, in accordance with the medieval theory that nature, like a human being, has a circulating system of veins that transport her “blood.”12 The connection between man and world is thus established on the basis of circuits, systems of circulation of matter naturally defined as fluid and flowing, constantly in flux and exchange. The idea of an organic holistic cosmos implies that “[n]ature was an organic whole in which both the natural and human cycles were integrated.”13 Such imagery in an obvious way reverberates with the maternal union discussed in the previous chapters: in the psychoanalytical discourse the prevailing metaphor is that of an “undifferentiated continuum between child and world” in which the child “does not distinguish between its impulses, perceptions, emotions, and actions and events occurring external to it – there is no construction of ‘inner’ and ‘outer,’ no sense if ‘I,’ no perception of experience as bounded by ‘self’.”14 This inability to distinguish between experiences happening in the self and events occurring in the world mark the continuum of the pre-subjective real. Analogously, the pre-modern sense of space is often characterized as “a kind of unindividuated, all-enclosing continuum,”15 with the humoural theory as one of the factors contributing to such an image.

10 11 12

13 14 15

See: Merchant, Death of Nature, p. 17 Paster: The Body Embarrassed p. 6. Merchant, Death of Nature, p. 26. Merchant refers to the medieval theory explaining the origins of stones and minerals, according to which they were products of earth’s “blood” surfacing through the cracks and crevices in its surface. Merchant, Death of Nature, p. 83. Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 29. Barfield, Saving Appearances, pp. 148-149, quoted after Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 69. Compare: Berman, The Reenchantment of the World, p. 77.

Body without Boundaries

87

Thus, the discourse of the humoural universe inscribes itself into the prevailing mode of presenting the pre-subjective experience of undifferentiation, flux, and liquid continuum. The disruptive character of such fluidity manifests itself in the fact that subjectivity is defined in opposition to it: in the narration of individual development such a negative definition is epitomised by the image of separation from the maternal body, and – in the story of modern subject – by detachment from the organic cosmos, which, as we have seen, is also conceptualised as disconnection from maternal nature. The modern breakthrough is thus presented as dissociation from the “primal” fluidity in terms of severing the “undifferentiated continuum between child and world”16 in which the impulses, stimuli, and emotions perceived by a child are not marked by a division between the “inner self” and the “outer world.” Instead, the self’s distances itself from the maternal element symbolically coded as more fluid and amorphous than male structures. The subsequent symbolic “solidification” of the newly emergent subject, that is, the process of delineating its own boundaries and strengthening them, is an epitome of defining oneself in opposition to the “blurry” undifferentiation of pre-modern / pre subjective “common veil,” as well as further “defeminisation” of the individual subject. The cultural alignment of femininity / maternity and fluidity has already been discussed in relation to the image of the subject’s disentangling from the maternal veil, which is still valid for the point currently raised. Femininity is traditionally coded in the modern Western discourse as associated with the kind of corporeality which – due to its metaphorical connection to volatility and liquidity, according to Elizabeth Grosz – is presented as uncontrollable, excessive, expansive, and disruptive (on the physiological level). Male body, on the other hand, is coded differently: not in terms of its fluidity but rather solidity and impenetrability.17 In a similar vein, Adrienne Rich suggests that the prevailing Western discourse of femininity constructs the female body as challenging the conventional ideas of boundaries, especially the boundary between the body and the world, between self and other.18 Also Linda McDowell claims that women’s physiological experience (like, for example, menstruation, childbirth, and lactation) presents a metaphorical threat to bodily boundaries, whereas masculine

16 17 18

Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 29. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 198-201. Adrienne Rich, “Notes towards a politics of location,” in: Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1986) quoted in Robyn Longhurst, Geography and the Body: Exploring Fluid Boundaries (London: Routledge 2001), p. 3.

88

Chapter 4

experience of self appears to be separate, distinct, and unconnected.19 Referring to McDowell’s statement, Robyn Longhurst writes: This comment about women’s and men’s bodily boundaries can be linked to a politics of fluidity/solidity and irrationality/rationality. Women are often understood to be in possession of insecure (leaking, seeping) bodily boundaries; in particular they may leak menstrual blood, and milk from their breasts. It is commonly thought that such bodies are not to be trusted in the public spaces of Rational Man. Men, on the other hand, are often understood to have secure (autonomous) bodily boundaries – bodies that are ‘in control’.20

The imagery which links female body with liquidity finds its expression even in the medical discourse, with the previously mentioned alleged link between hysteria and the moving of the womb in search of moisture.21 Connected with the feminine “liquidity” is what Foucault calls the “hysterization of women’s bodies.”22 In a similar vein, Paster claims that the production and maintenance of the “hysterization” was incited by the humoural theory.23 In the humoural physiology the female body was perceived as “moister than men’s and cyclically controlled by that watery planet, the moon.”24 Interestingly, whereas Grosz’s argument is openly ideological and the generalisations she makes do not always refer to any particular historical examples, Paster’s analysis is embedded in specific early modern texts, ranging from literary classics, through popular / festive culture, to scientific works of the time. From the examples she meticulously analyses emerges an early modern notion of femininity that is coded as “naturally grotesque – which is to say, open, permeable effluent, leaky”25 as opposed to masculinity depicted as “naturally whole, closed, opaque, self-contained.”26 The early modern medical treatises, claims Paster, “construct the female body as effluent, overproductive, out of control,”27 thus becoming an inherent part of the prevailing model of representation in which corporeality, formlessness, femini19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Linda McDowell, “Space, place and gender relations,” in: Progress in Human Geography, 17, 3: 305-318, quoted in: Longhurst, Geography and the Body, p. 3. Longhurst, Geography and the Body, p. 3. Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 56. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), p. 104. Paster, The Body Embarassed, p. 7. Paster, The Body Embarassed, p. 39. Paster, The Body Embarassed, p. 92. Paster refers to the Bakhtinian grotesque body here – I will return to this notion soon. Paster, The Body Embarassed, p. 92. Paster, The Body Embarassed, p. 21.

Body without Boundaries

89

nity, matter, fluidity, pre-modernity, etc., belong to the same semantic field and together condition (however implicitly) the prevalent conceptual picture of subjectivity. Also Linda McDowell claims that women’s physiological experience (like, for example, menstruation, childbirth, and lactation) presents a metaphorical threat to bodily boundaries, whereas masculine experience of self appears to be separate, distinct, and unconnected.28 Referring to McDowell’s statement, Robyn Longhurst writes: This comment about women’s and men’s bodily boundaries can be linked to a politics of fluidity/solidity and irrationality/rationality. Women are often understood to be in possession of insecure (leaking, seeping) bodily boundaries; in particular they may leak menstrual blood, and milk from their breasts. It is commonly thought that such bodies are not to be trusted in the public spaces of Rational Man. Men, on the other hand, are often understood to have secure (autonomous) bodily boundaries – bodies that are ‘in control’.29

The imagery which links female body with liquidity finds its expression even in the medical discourse, with the previously mentioned alleged link between hysteria and the moving of the womb in search of moisture.30 Connected with the feminine “liquidity” is what Foucault calls the “hysterization of women’s bodies.”31 In a similar vein, Paster claims that the production and maintenance of the “hysterization” was incited by the humoural theory.32 In the humoural physiology the female body was perceived as “moister than men’s and cyclically controlled by that watery planet, the moon.”33 Interestingly, whereas Grosz’s argument is openly ideological and the generalisations she makes do not always refer to any particular historical examples, Paster’s analysis is embedded in specific early modern texts, ranging from literary classics, through popular / festive culture, to scientific works of the time. From the examples she meticulously analyses emerges an early modern notion of femininity that is coded as “naturally grotesque – which is to say, open, permeable effluent, leaky”34 as opposed to 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Linda McDowell, “Space, place and gender relations,” in: Progress in Human Geography, 17, 3: 305-318, quoted in: Longhurst, Geography and the Body, p. 3. Longhurst, Geography and the Body, p. 3. Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 56. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), p. 104. Paster, The Body Embarassed, p. 7. Paster, The Body Embarassed, p. 39. Paster, The Body Embarassed, p. 92. Paster refers to the Bakhtinian grotesque body here – I will return to this notion soon.

90

Chapter 4

masculinity depicted as “naturally whole, closed, opaque, self-contained.”35 The early modern medical treatises, claims Paster, “construct the female body as effluent, overproductive, out of control,”36 thus becoming an inherent part of the prevailing model of representation in which corporeality, formlessness, femininity, matter, fluidity, pre-modernity, etc., belong to the same semantic field and together condition (however implicitly) the prevalent conceptual picture of subjectivity. In the context of Cartesian clarity, the corporeal experience blurs (or muffles, like the maternal fabric does) the clear and distinct perception, so the cogito defines itself, as we have seen, against corporeality and matter. Cartesian dualism works in complicity with a “mechanics of solids” which implies selfidentity and “entails a thing (including a subject) that is identical to itself.”37 Thus the traditional inscription of women’s corporeality as seepage, uncontainable flow, as “[a] body that is permeable, that transmits in a circuit, that opens itself up rather than seals itself off”38 constitutes a significant landmark against which the modern subject defines itself. In the context of the issues discussed in the previous chapter – concerning the emergence of the subject in opposition to the organic feminine mat(t)er – it can be claimed that the prevalent trajectory of conceptualizing subjectivity is in opposition to fluidity. The key notion here is that of the subject being “identical to itself,” that is, as the further analysis will soon demonstrate, coherent, cohesive, with clearly delineated boundaries, “undispersive,” not “spilling” into the other. The central position of the fluidity metaphor is thus substantiated by the common imagery of fluids as entities which have no definite borders, are unstable, indeterminate, and thus elicit the picture of moving, pulsating matter as opposed to a metaphysics of self-identical objects.39 In this connection the cultural inscription of women as “leaky vessels,”40 and the maternal chora as formless, passive, shapeless matter, or the transmission of flow,41 is a part of a discourse that marks the “negative copy” of subjectivity, or those aspects of experience against which the subject has to define itself. 35 36 37 38 39 40

41

Paster, The Body Embarassed, p. 92. Paster, The Body Embarassed, p. 21. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 204. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 201. Compare: Iris Marion Young, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 192-3. See: Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger. An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 156; Paster, The Body Embarassed, p. 25; Grosz, Volatile Bodies, pp. 196, 203. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 201.

Body without Boundaries

91

The image of dangerous and archaic motherhood (often played out, for example, in horror films) implies a “totalizing and oceanic mother, a shadowy and deep unity, evoking in the subject the anxiety of fusion and of dissolution.”42 The fear of dissolution and incorporation is what Kristeva describes as fear of “sinking irretrievably into the mother.”43 Thus, when the modern self dissociates itself from “mother nature,” as well as from the maternal world, it does so in the pursuit of “self identity” aligned with solidity and stability of boundaries. By dissociating from the “feminine” dimension of the universe, the subject detaches itself from the maternal amorphousness which, as Grosz emphatically stresses, is constructed in the Western discourse as a leaking, uncontrollable, seeping liquid; as formless flow; as viscosity, entrapping, secreting; as lacking not so much or simply the phallus but self-containment – not a cracked or porous vessel, like a leaking ship, but a formlessness that engulfs all form, a disorder that threatens all order.44

The modern subject is therefore a construct defined against the formless flow and viscosity, with the emphasis on borders which metaphorically prevent “uncontrollable leaking” and threatening the existing order with dispersing parts of itself. The above arguments concerning “the flight from the feminine” (Bordo), “death of mother nature” (Merchant and Capra), and the patriarchal construction of femininity as a flow (Grosz) or a “leaking vessel” (Paster) are deeply embedded in feminist criticism. Regardless of the legitimacy of the ideological aspects of these views, one has to acknowledge that subjectivity IS defined against fluidity, and this definition, on a conceptual and connotative level, operates within metaphors commonly used in the modern Western critique although hardly ever directly related to each other. If the modern subject depends on the dissociation from the maternal element, and the maternal element is, as we have seen, constructed as fluid, volatile, and not respecting boundaries, then it can be assumed that these qualities constitute the implied negative against which the subject is constantly (as much as implicitly) defined. Coming back to Barfield’s ingenious statement of the human “embryo” mortised into the body of the maternal microcosm, we shall now focus on probably the most intriguing fragment of this excerpt, namely the claim that the premodern man “did not feel himself isolated by his skin from the world outside to 42 43 44

Roger Dadoun, “Fetishism in the horror film,” in: Fantasy and the Cinema (London: BFI, 1989), quoted after Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, p. 20. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 64. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 203.

92

Chapter 4

quite the same extent that we do.”45 The picture that emerges from various discussions of the humoural world is that of lack of individuality due to the precariousness of body boundaries. Recognizing the notions of “discrete self” and “external world” appears as dependent on the suppression of the initial formless “communion” with the maternal body. At the same time the newly emerged subject defines its boundaries, which are supposed to guarantee a certain “immunity” to the flows (of matter, of nature, of other entities) and thus to secure the subject’s identity with itself. With the semipermeable boundaries that mark the human-nature connection in the humoural world, the bodily interior is constantly exposed to the unpredictable moods of nature and totally dependent on the wild, uncivilized world of elements. The notion of self-identity is at odds with the picture of human microcosm within the organic macrocosm, as the “embryo” mortised into the universe is the exact opposite of a finite, auto-referential subject identical with itself and endowed with a body defined as a mechanical system separated from the external world by impenetrable boundaries. In the case of the humoural body, the connections and unities are somewhere else – between organs, humours, and elements. In other words, the conventional representation of compact bodily unity makes us see links between internal organs within the frame of one individual organism delineated by borders of skin that separate it from the outside world. Within this frame, this individual constitutes a finite, self-referential entity, and the connections would better be seen between, for instance, one’s liver and one’s pancreas than between one’s liver and air, or one’s lungs and fire, which is actually the case of the humoural body. And we have to bear in mind that in the humoural body, the connections are thought of as not only symbolic, but actually physical. If the humours constitute a natural element in the human, then the internal organs, the circuits of bodily fluids and the bodily interior generally do not belong to the human being as much as they belong to nature. The humoral man appears to be better connected with the universe than he is with himself, as the relations between individual organs, temperaments, and their corresponding elements are stronger than the relations between individual organs within the body itself. The unity of man and universe takes place, so to speak, beyond the body borders, or circumventing those borders, which, after all, distinguish man as an individual being.46 45 46

Barfield, Saving Appearances, p. 78, quoted after Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity, p. 53. For more on the humoural man, see: Nancy G. Sirasi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

Body without Boundaries

93

The epistemological construction of the beginnings of the modern era as a discourse of establishing borders between self and world seems to complement the cognitive model of coherent and separate subjectivity, endowed with its own contours and separate identity. What is more, while the conceptual frame of modernity is based upon the semiotics of demarcation and maintaining the borders intact, pre-modernity is aligned with the lack of boundaries and with the plasmatic, pulsating continuity of experience reverberating with the undifferentiated experience of an infant in the psychoanalytical discourse. Morris Berman describes an attempt at recreating this continuity: “[p]articipation is self and non-self identified at the moment of experience. (...) [M]y skin has no boundary. I am out of my mind, I have become my environment.”47 The notion of skin functions here as an expression of the boundary not only of the body, but of the self, and so becomes an equivalent of the boundary of subjectivity. What might be a potential source of reservations at this point is the apparent attempt in the current discussion to treat the experience of corporeal cohesiveness as central to the consistency of subjectivity, while the modern outlook in an obvious way draws from the Cartesian dualism which juxtaposes the body and the mind, locating the cogito on the side of the latter. However, we have to bear in mind that the same rational discourse favours bodily integrity over incoherence, firm body boundaries over permeable ones, a body that is identical with itself in its solidity over one that disperses in its liquidity into the other. Although there seems to be no direct correlation between intact body boundaries and coherent subjectivity, there certainly exists an implicit assumption of the integrity of the body image being a guarantee for the integrity of the self. This claim underlies the theory of the development of subjectivity: in the mirror phase, the (imaginary) sense of bodily completion is central to the creation of self-identity. In Lacan the human subject is “manufactured” in the fantasy of a spatial identification that endows a fragmented body image with a form of totality and coherence.48 The perceived unity and separateness of the body builds an imaginary identity of the mirror phase that will later be congealed in the process of the subject’s interactions with others: The constitution of the subject’s imaginary identity in the mirror phase establishes a provisional identity which still requires the stabilization, ordering, and placement of the subject in a sociosymbolic position where it can engage in symbolic and linguistic exchange with others.49

47 48

49

Berman, The Reenchantment of the World, p. 75. Jacques Lacan, "The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience" in Écrits. A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 5. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 44.

94

Chapter 4

The significance of the unified body schema at this point manifests itself in the fact that its dissolution or disintegration bears a risk of moving the subject back into the preimaginary real.50 The body is rewritten and mapped in the cartography of the mirror phase. The narcissistic sense of bodily completion, wholeness, and unity developed in the mirror stage becomes a sine qua non for subjectivity as such. Lacan’s theory suggests, according to Grosz, that the “desire for a solid stable identity may help explain our fascination with images of the human form.”51 Self-awareness is thus a product of bodily differentiation, not the other way round. In other words, the perception of the body as separate is actually what forms our subjectivity.52 A coherent image of the body appears to be one of the main prerequisites of the individual and subjective self not only in psychoanalysis. What is characteristic, many critical texts discussing the modern notion of subjectivity (which is, after all, set in opposition to corporeality) theorise the subject in terms normally used to describe corporeal categories of experience. The modern subject is thus defined as whole, complete, coherent, autonomous, cohesive, continuous, and so on. For instance Anthony Giddens argues that one of the most central notions for the institutional orders of modernity is the notion of self-identity embedded in the sense of “continuity of the self,”53 as well as “the persistence of feelings of personhood in a continuous self and body.”54 According to Giddens, selfhood can be described by, among other things, the following traits: it is a reflexive project shaped by the individual, and this reflexivity is continuous, it is firmly located in time, it forms a coherent trajectory of development from the past into the future, and it strives towards personal integrity conceived as the

50 51 52 53

54

Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 44. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 43. See: Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 56-60. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, p. 33. Interestingly enough, Iris Young sees a connection between the metaphysics of selfidentical objects and the modern discourse of the domination over nature, which she links with the domination over women and feminine bodies. See: Young, Throwing Like a Girl , pp. 192-3. The conceptual trajectory of such an argument is a case-in-point illustration of what this thesis attempts to argue: there is a prevalent way of presenting the story of modern subjectivity based on the opposition: solidity (implied in the notion of self-identity) versus fluidity (implied in the notion of femininity, “nature” – or “mother nature” that is controlled by the modern discourse). These images might not always be explicit, yet – in relation to other texts – constitute important links in the mesh of constructing meanings. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, p. 55.

Body without Boundaries

95

ultimate achievement of the development of an authentic self. 55 The notions of coherence and integrity keep reappearing in many contemporary texts theorising subjectivity. Just to mention a few more examples (which surely would not exhaust the topic, but might offer a representative sample of the general trend): Charles Taylor links the notion of integrity with that of autonomy,56 and Susan Bordo associates the modern subject with the epistemological ideals of clarity and differentiation embodied by a “sense the separate self, conscious of itself and of its own distinctness from a world ‘outside’.”57 In a similar vein, Robert Pippin claims that: [i]t is after all relatively recently in Western history that we began to think of human beings as something like individual, pretty much self-contained and self-determining centers of a casual agency [...].58

The above examples show how the abstract and non-corporeal notion of subjectivity comes into being as a product of terminologies which are normally associated with bodily and material categories, such as continuity, location, coherence, integrity, clarity, separateness, distinctness, self-containment, and so on. The only image of modern subjectivity we have is also to a certain extent corporealised, however paradoxical it might seem in light of the fact that the modern subject is delineated as separate and distinct from immersion in the corporeal materiality, the Cartesian “bodily swamp.” The self-containment and firm boundaries, as the further discussion will demonstrate, metaphorically “seal off” the cogito against the undifferentiated flux of matter. The existence of such a paradox points to a certain “constructedness” of notions normally taken for granted, a revelation hinted at in the epigraph of this book: “[t]he individual’s selfcontainment and self-sufficiency may be another illusion.”59 The mutual exclusivity of these constructs is a token of the mechanism of production and distribution of meanings: the notion of modern subjectivity is reconstructed in the process of textualisation. The only “access” we might acquire to the notion of the modern subject is by situating it on one side of such norm-creating binary oppositions as solidity / stability, coherence / incoherence, integrity / lack of integrity. The process of acquiring meaning is also, in a way, reciprocal – after all, the corporeal categories of description do not exist in isolation from the system of culture that creates them, but function as integral elements of it and, as such, re55 56 57 58 59

Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, pp. 75-80. Emphases mine. Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 12. Emphases mine. Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 7. Emphases mine. Robert B. Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity. On the Kantian Aftermath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 7. Emphasis mine. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), p. 34.

96

Chapter 4

flect its tensions and hierarchies. Thus it is impossible to establish which discourse is the primary one: does the terminology of the body determine the categories in which we describe subjectivity, or is the modern discourse on the subject so well-embedded in Western culture that its assumptions are projected on the way we perceive the human body? The question will have to remain unanswered, according to the assumption that the stories of the seemingly noncorporeal subjectivity and de-subjectified corporeality are constructs created by the same cognitive apparatus and must be treated as parts of a larger set of images, connotations, and metaphors that condition our sense of experience. The postmodern critique and revaluation of the notion of subjectivity often uses the bodily categories of description not only to refer to “fluid” and “volatile” subjectivity and identity, but also to problematise the Cartesian opposition between mind and matter. The psychoanalytical notion of the imaginary body image constructed in the mirror phase as a sine qua non of subjectivity is a potent expression of such a redefinition: [t]he body becomes a human body, a body that coincides with the ‘shape’ and space of a psyche, a body that defines the limits of experience and subjectivity only through the intervention of the (m)other and, ultimately, the Other (the languageand rule-governed social order).60

In the redefined notion of selfhood, the body and its boundaries define the limits of expressions of subjectivity, so the body understood as a point of convergence between biology and culture might be read as a text, a surface on which, according to Susan Bordo, “central rules, hierarchies, and even metaphysical commitments of a culture are inscribed.”61 In such an understanding, however, the body does not have to be only a biological medium for cultural inscriptions, or a natural entity oppressed by cultural mechanisms of power, but can be perceived as a structure that emerges and comes into being as an effect of those inscriptions. Not only is a human body textualised, but also social laws are, as Elizabeth Grosz claims, incarnate and corporealised. The concept of the “lived body” presented by Grosz defines it as biological material which can be only recognized as a human body in a certain system of conceptualizations that makes it comprehensible. Therefore the “purely biological” body (as opposed to the purely metaphysical “subjectivity”) does not exist, because the organic structure needs culture to make itself meaningful. This understanding corresponds to Grosz’s claim defining the body as “a concrete, ma60 61

Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion : Essays on the Politics of Bodies (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), p. 104. Emphases mine. Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1995), p. 165.

Body without Boundaries

97

terial, animate organization of flesh, organs, nerves, and skeletal structure, which are given a unity, cohesiveness, and form through the physical and social inscription of the body’s surface, the body is, so to speak, organically and biologically ‘incomplete’; it is indeterminate, amorphous, a series of uncoordinated potentialities that require social triggering, ordering, and long-term ‘administration’.”62 Corporeality cannot be thus viewed in opposition to spirituality, but both these concepts should rather be perceived as products of a certain discourse which makes them thinkable. What is more, such an understanding of corporeality excludes the existence of a “natural” or “essentialist” body that is triggered and curbed by its cultural representations, proposing instead a view that the very representations actually constitute the body.63 The triggering and administration Grosz writes about should not be considered in the context of cultural oppression, but rather, as Michel Foucault proposes, in the context of the workings of a system that becomes internalised by the body. The body which, Foucault argues, has always been “in the grip of very strong powers, which imposed on it constraints, prohibitions or obligations,”64 should thus be interpreted as a social object which internalizes the discourse, becomes its instrument and medium, and consequently, can be viewed as a source of information about this discourse. The internalisation of power in bodies is what Foucault calls “biopower.” He links “biopower” with the development of modern institutions (connected with education, public health, demography, militarism, etc) whose aim is to discipline and control bodies: there was an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations, marking the beginning of an era of “biopower.”65

For Foucault, biopower is a phenomenon specifically linked to the classical era and the development of capitalism, which inserts bodies into the machineries of production and efficiency.66 Generally, Foucault stresses the attention paid to the body in the classical age and links the appearance of various modern bodily practices with the development of individuality. It is through those corporeal procedures that the human becomes subjected, and the Foucauldian image of a docile body strongly resembles the conceptualisation of the modern subject as it is discussed here. 62 63 64 65 66

Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion, p. 104. See: Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. x. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish and The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 136. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 140. Foucault, The History of Sexuality p. 141.

98

Chapter 4

In the classical age the body was, according to Foucault, discovered as an object of manipulation, shaping, and training, so that it became obedient, responsive, and skilful. This reconceptualisation is in accord with the epistemological change of the material world – including the body – into machine (discussed in relation to the “death of mother nature” myth). The indicator of docility is thus the body’s compliance with the modern values of usefulness and intelligibility. A docile body is analysable and manipulable.67 What is, however, most important from the point of view of this discussion is the fact that those corporeal practices also individualise the body: it was a question not of treating the body, en masse, ‘wholesale’, as if it were an indissociable unity, but of working it ‘retail’, individually; of exercising upon it a subtle coercion, of obtaining holds upon it at the level of the mechanism itself [...].68

The notion of “treating the body individually” which appears in this excerpt bears a strong resemblance to the notion of human individuality emerging out of the undifferentiated amorphousness of the pre-modern “common veil,” described by Burckhardt as an indicator of modernity (the awakening of individual consciousness and the abandoning of identity based on group belonging69). Along the prevalent trajectory of “separation against primal formlessness” is Paul Rabinow’s statement that the main topics in those works of Foucault that deal with the dividing practices are “the objectification of individuals drawn first from a rather undifferentiated mass.”70 To emerge as a subject, the self has to define itself against the blurring fluidity of this indissociation by constituting its own boundaries. Foucault’s notion of dividing practices and partitioning is closely related to the process of demarcating the self. In his tracing of the “different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects”71 he stresses the notions of self-discipline and self-mastery as conditions of autonomy. In Foucault’s view, the internalisation of the “technologies of the self” (such as dividing, classifying, and separating oneself from others) brings to life what might be labelled as “the modern subject.” Foucault does not directly theorise the notions of body

67 68 69 70 71

Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 136. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 136-7. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, ed. Peter Burke, trans. S.G.C Middlemore (London: Penguin Classics, 1990), p. 98. Paul Rabinow, ”Introduction” to The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 8. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), p. 208.

Body without Boundaries

99

boundaries, of skin as a border, and of demarcating the separate body image in the process of becoming a subject. He rather talks about dividing spaces (be it the external space or the bodily space), and the distribution of bodies in space, but the terminology he uses to describe space divisions, power relations, and discourse imprints is built upon corporeal – and sometimes even anatomical or physiological – metaphors. For Foucault, the “dividing practices” – classification, containment, and categorisation – are in a way conditions for the general modern modes of progress and development72: In this process of social objectification and categorization, human beings are given both a social and a personal identity. Essentially, ‘dividing practices’ are modes of manipulation that combine the mediation of science (or pseudo-science) and the practice of exclusion.73

Modernity in Foucault’s analysis is thus marked by processes of individualising bodies, such as the isolation of contagious patients, the fragmentation of labour powers by specialization,74 spatial ordering, etc. Similarly, for Anthony Giddens modernity is characterised by separation of time and space, disembedding mechanisms (symbolic tokens – like money and expert systems), and institutional reflexivity (“the regularised use of knowledge about circumstances of social life as a constitutive element in its organisation and transformation”).75 What is more, in Foucault the link between modern subject and body is direct – it is not that the discourse of subjectivity mirrors the practices of the body in such a manner as, for example, the solidification of the body might be treated as an “allegory” used to describe the modern subject, with its metaphorical coherence, integrity, etc. In Foucauldian terms the solidification of the body actually makes the modern subject. Paradoxically, only a body “organized by power in its grip on bodies and their materiality, their forces, energies, sensations, and pleasures”76 can become “autonomous,” within the limits of autonomy conditioned and permitted by the discourse,77 which, as we remember from the discussion in Chapter 1, is best illustrated by Foucault’s observations about the ambiguity of the very word” subject”: 72 73 74 75 76 77

Rabinow’s “Introduction” to The Foucault Reader, p. 8. Rabinow’s “Introduction” to The Foucault Reader, p. 8. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 144-5. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, p. 20. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 155. Foucault explores the relation between autonomy and obedience in his essay “What is Critique” in Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 1997), pp. 48-50. On the relation between subjectivity and objectification, see also Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987), p. 260.

100

Chapter 4 [t]here are two meanings of the word subject. Subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience of self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to.78

The double meaning of the word subject is a perfect symbol of the modern process of individuation: on the one hand, the constitution of individual boundaries is perceived as a condition of the subject’s autonomy, yet at the same time it is a process of subjugation to certain rules and techniques that normalise, moderate, and police the body, its borders, and its interactions with the world. Still in accord with the prevalent image of solidifying the amorphous and fluid shapelessness into demarcated structures, the process of subjectification is also what constructs the docile body. The famous example of a body of a soldier perfectly illustrates this construction: the modern view of the soldier’s body, according to Foucualt, presents it as something to be made, moulded out of formless clay that, changed into machine, silently turns into the “automatism of habit.”79 The machine metaphor implies containment80 and denies the presence of any threatening spilling. The self is kept safely “within” the body with tight and wellcontrolled borders, thus becoming an embodiment of modern hierarchies of selfidentity. The reason for referring to Foucault’s notion of subjectivity at this point is that it helps to contextualise the methodological stance this book assumes in the following discussion of the representation of body boundaries in relation to subjectivity. As much as modern subjectivity is constantly defined as a construct emerging in opposition to materiality and corporeality, the postmodern critique not only theorises the subject by means of corporeal terminology, but also draws a direct link between the discourse of the body and the prevalent notion of the self. It is the case not only with Foucault, but also, for instance, with such authors as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (especially in One Thousand Plateaus), and Judith Butler (Gender Trouble, Bodies that Matter).81 Those critics, however, as Longhurst points out, hardly ever refer to the actual “messy surfaces/depths of bodies, their insecure boundaries, the fluids that seep and leak from them, that which they engulf, the insides and outsides that sometimes collapse.” 82 Instead, she argues, “[t]he materiality of bodies becomes reduced to systems of signification.”83 Such a confusion of terminology characteristic of

78 79 80 81 82 83

Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” p. 212. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 135. See: Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. xii. See: Longhurst, Geography and the Body, p. 23. See: Longhurst, Geography and the Body, p. 23. See: Longhurst, Geography and the Body, p. 23.

Body without Boundaries

101

contemporary critical theory – the blending of the corporeal and the metaphysical, or rather replacing the transcendental with the material – actually constitutes the research ground of my argument here. As has already been said, the object of this study is the intuitive image of modern subjectivity, and such a picture can only be theorised as an outcome of the overlapping of certain imageries, terminologies, illustrations, connotations, etc. Juxtaposing the critical discourse on the subject with texts dealing with the “corporeal” aspects of experience demonstrates how slippery is the border between these seemingly separate epistemological fields, especially in contemporary critical theory. When discussing body boundaries and their meaning for any form of identity, one ought to mention the classic text by Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger. Its groundbreaking character lies in the fact that Douglas discussed the symbolics of boundary-maintenance through the seemingly arbitrary rules concerning certain dietary and hygienic customs. The significance of the boundary, on the other hand, is explained in terms of system and identity maintenance. In spite of the fact that Douglas’s work is mainly anthropological and that her assumptions concerning dietary rules as they are presented in the Bible were found wrong (which she admits in the Preface to the 2002 edition), it has had a powerful influence on many crucial texts discussing corporeality and identity, including Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, Judith Butler’s works on the performativity of gender, and Slavoj Žižek’s works on desire. The timeless and interdisciplinary character of Purity and Danger probably stems form the fact that Douglas embedded her anthropological case studies of “primitive societies” in a wider conceptual frame, thus creating a “universal” notional apparatus that can be applied to an analysis of any constructed system with delineated borders, as well as to its strategies of maintenance against potential threats. The key issues of Douglas’s study that are significant for the current discussion include her general assumption concerning the human body as a symbol of any bounded system, the emphasis she puts on divisions and borders, and the notion of dirt / danger understood not as an inherent quality, but as a transgression of these borders and divisions. The first point makes an important contribution to the methodological assumptions discussed above: Douglas claims that the body as a complex structure is a model whose boundaries can represent any boundaries that are perceived as threatened or precarious. What is more, the body is not only a symbol of society, but a field on which the prevalent discourse, “the powers and dangers credited to social structure,” are reproduced.84 Along these lines Douglas’s stance substantiates the notion of “bodily inscriptions” discussed above, which provides grounds for drawing analogies between corporeal practices and the discourse of subjectivity. 84

Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 142.

102

Chapter 4

The correlation between the metaphorical unity, integrity, coherence, and solid autonomy of the modern subject and the literal tightness and cohesiveness of the body boundaries constitutes a theoretical position assumed by many critics of modernity (even if assumed briefly and without making methodological reservations, in the form of intrusions which, instead of being metaphorical illustrations, turn into instances of mixing registers). For instance, Anthony Giddens, like Foucault, postulates that being a competent modern agent involves continuous bodily control85 which he links with a feeling of bodily integrity –“of the self being safely ‘in’ the body”86 – a notion which in an obvious way reverberates with the phenomenon of body boundaries. To be safely kept ‘in’ the body, the self must be clearly delineated by tight borders that will guarantee its self-identity. “In the body” means within the boundary drawn by one’s skin, to prevent the identification of self and non-self, the blurring of the self with the environment. The presence of that boundary also implies solidification and defining oneself against the fluidity of experience: the subject who is “safely ‘in’ the body” does not pose a threat to self-identity by spilling or leaking into the world and into the other. The borders thus protect the subject against a potential reimmersion into the pre-subjective flux of experience dominated by the sensual and corporeal impulses of the undifferentiated self / world union. The notion of the body boundary as a model for the bounded subject thus delineates the context in which we can discuss the contemporary construction of the modern “solid” subject and the pre-modern “liquid” self and examine the correlations between the discourse of the corporeal practices and the policing of subjectivity. The epistemological ideals of clarity, differentiation and objectivity, so characteristic for the modern subject, have often been interpreted as manifestations of an obsessive pursuit of purity and transcendence of the messier dimension of existence,87 as well as the concept of “clean boundaries and discrete natures, a universe amenable to conceptual sorting.” 88 Douglas argues that there is a constant aspiration in culture to protect the “distinctive categories of the universe” against ambiguity which is perceived as threatening.89 All rational behaviour, claims Douglas, involves classification:

85 86 87 88 89

Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, p. 56. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, p. 58. Bordo: Flight to Objectivity, p. 4. See also: Genevieve Lloyd: The Man of Reason: Male and "Female" in Western Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1993). Anthony Kenny, Descartes: A Study of His Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 19. Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. xi.

Body without Boundaries

103

For I believe that ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience. It is only by exaggerating the difference between, within and without, above and below, male and female, with and against, that a semblance of order is created.90

The passage is probably the most oft-quoted excerpt from Purity and Danger, as its allegedly universal character seems to fit all kind of reevaluations of rational (and therefore modern) discourses: from material culture to gender identity, from race and colonial relations to discussions of ideologies. Douglas relates her statement to the notion of dirt, stressing its ambiguous nature and systematic belonging (the notions will be discussed soon), but the “inherently untidy experience” might be, in fact, treated as an example of any form of ambiguity, of crossing boundaries, or a potential of threatening the “semblance of order.” One of the most important assumptions arising from the above quotation is the implication concerning the constructedness of the bounded structure. Any system (be it a social structure, a unified body scheme, or the individual self) is portrayed as a fragile construct that must be protected against a potential disruption of the arduously maintained division between inside and outside: “[f]rom where and from what does the threat issue? From nothing else but […] the frailty of the symbolic order itself.”91 The need for over-rigid boundaries is a projection of the anxiety over the stability of this system, and, analogously, the borders of the body might be perceived as metaphorical boundaries of the self. The prevalent imagery of the modern practices of the body refers (although not always explicitly) to the notion of firm “body margins” which metaphorically protect us against blurring with the other and which constitute the clear-cut demarcation of the self within the symbolic order, necessary for the existence of this order. Barbara Creed writes: “[f]ear of losing one's boundaries is made more acute in a society which values boundaries over continuity, and separateness over sameness.”92 All the practices of policing body boundaries (like, for instance, hygiene and bodily discipline), as well as the psychological mechanisms aimed at maintaining them (for example abjection, revulsion, a struggle for a sense of bodily coherence) stem from the fact that “stability of the unified body image . . . is always precarious.”93 Boundaries and separateness are landmarks of the modern individual self, as the idea of the boundary signifies holding things in place, immobilizing the un-

90 91 92 93

Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 5. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 69. Creed, The Monstrous, p. 29. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 42.

104

Chapter 4

controllable flux, preventing the mixing of elements, but also endowing the shapeless and amorphous entity with some sort of structure. The process of the emergence of modern subjectivity discussed in the initial chapters of this study is, in fact, conceptualised, however implicitly, as what Kristeva referred to as setting a “[m]argin on a floating structure”94 with the pre-imaginary real presented as a floating confusion of urges and impulses, with all the viscous and fluid implications of such notions. The metaphorics of the modern self is often marked with connotations of solidity (as opposed to pre-modern fluidity), fixedness (versus flow), and “locatedness” (versus dispersion). Such conceptual constructions can be found, for example, in Horkheimer and Adorno’s discussion of subjectivity: “[t]he formation of the self severs the fluctuating connection with nature.”95 The Cartesian cogito, as it is portrayed in its “mythologized” representation, develops in the process of abandoning the “bodily swamp” and the amorphous veil shrouding solid perceptions, and defines itself in opposition to the borderless union with “mother nature” – again, a “fluid” figure. The subject emerges in a process of fixing the flow, giving it shape, and delineating it. The development of perspective discussed earlier in this study is an instance of such fixing – not only does it require, as has been said, the central position of a subject that looks, but it also “freezes” the experience of perception into static images delineated by the visual field of the beholder. The inside and outside, the self and other are thus clearly separated, and the floating experience is demarcated by its margin. The terminology of fluids, as we have seen, is used in an anti-definition of the coherent subject. The fluid refuses to conform to the “laws governing the clean and proper, the solid and self-identical,”96 and thus becomes a negative mirror image of what the modern subject is – a clearly delineated, coherent self that does not blur the distinction between self and other. Fluids threaten this self with disruptive disclosures of the constructedness of the unified body image, and thus pose the threat of throwing the self back into the undifferentiated real: Body fluids attest to the permeability of the body, its necessary dependence on an outside, its liability to collapse into this outside (this is what death implies), to the perilous divisions between the body’s inside and outside. They affront a subject’s aspiration toward autonomy and self-identity. They attest to a certain irreducible ‘dirt’ or disgust, a horror of the unknown or the unspecifiable that permeates, lurks, lingers, and at times leaks out of the body, a testimony of the fraudulence or impossibility of the ‘clean’ and ‘proper’. They resist the determination that marks solids, 94 95 96

Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 69. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1972), p. 41. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 195.

Body without Boundaries

105

for they are without any shape or form of their own. They are engulfing, difficult to be rid of; any separation from them is not a matter of certainty, as it may be in the case of solids. Body fluids flow, they seep, they infiltrate; their control is a matter of vigilance, never guaranteed.97

The above excerpt specifically treats of bodily fluids, evoking the concept of Kristeva’s abjection – a notion that will be dealt with later on in this discussion. The reason for quoting it here, however, is that it is a case-in-point manifestation of what might be referred to as a nomenclature of fluids, a general cognitive frame that the metaphorics of liquidity evokes. The imagery it sets off constitutes an antithesis for the model of self-containment which describes the ideal modern subject. Grosz also claims that what is disquieting about fluidity is its indeterminacy which has to do with its cultural unrepresentability “within prevailing philosophical models of ontology.”98 Fluids stand in opposition to self-identical, solid and unified bounded entities, which are the ground for the modern sense of identity. The infiltrations and seepages not only pose a threat of annihilating the border between the inner and the outer, but also evoke an anxiety concerning immersion into formless union with the surroundings and reversion to the primal state of undifferentiation, a threat to the very notion of subjectivity. Exposure to fluidity or viscosity (with reference to the notion of the premodern garment world and its correlations with the “bodily swamp” discussed earlier) is often presented as an experience that calls into question the modern divisions between inside and outside, self and other. Referring to Sartre’s essay on stickiness, Mary Douglas argues that contemplating the properties of solids and liquids triggers questions concerning “the essential relation between the subjective experiencing self and the experienced world.”99 The viscous thus appears to attack “the boundary between myself and it”100 because it elicits an impression that although the subject remains solid, the risk of its being diluted into viscosity is present in the anxiety of being absorbed by something which has no boundaries of its own. The swampy quality of the viscous stimulates constant vigilance (manifested in various practices used to police the body borders, which will be discussed later) over the body boundaries in encounters with the entities that are potentially non-self-identical, inherently fluid or viscous, that threaten with uncontrolled spilling and breaking the rule of self-containment. Another instance of the nomenclature of fluids that induces such imagery is Mircea Eliade’s reflection on water: 97 98 99 100

Grosz, Volatile Bodies, pp. 193-194. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 195. Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 47. Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 47.

106

Chapter 4 In water everything is ‘dissolved’, every ‘form’ is broken up, everything that has happened ceases to exist; nothing that was before remains after immersion in water, not an outline, not a ‘sign’, not an event. Immersion is the equivalent, at the human level, of death at the cosmic level, of the cataclysm (the Flood) which periodically dissolves the world into the primeval ocean. Breaking up all forms, doing away with the past, water . . . restores – even if only for a moment – the integrity of the dawn of things.101

Although Eliade’s description does not explicitly concern the notion of subjectivity, his metaphorics is imbued with concepts that appear in this discussion. The image of the dissolution of all form, outline and signs corresponds with the threat of annihilation of the “outline” and “form” of the embodied self in the process of formation of subjectivity, and the risk of disruption of the system of signification of which the subject becomes a part when entering the symbolic order, to the collapse of meaning that appears also in Kristeva’s account of abjection. Another example of how the metaphor of fluidity functions in contemporary theory is Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of “liquid modernity.” Bauman labels late modernity (or postmodernity) as “liquid,” as opposed to solid modernity, that is, the period when modernity was still imbued with the ideals of scientific revolution and values of the Enlightenment. The imagery of fluids and solids permeates Bauman’s discussion of social and economic paradigms of the modern era, and this is a good indication of how these notions affect the contemporary discourse on modern narratives by offering a notional apparatus that renders them comprehensible. Fluidity appears in Bauman as a potent metaphor, a selfexplaining cultural idiom which reduces the complexities of modern / antimodern hierarchies to powerful single images. For example, Bauman identifies fluids with lightness, mobility, and inconsistency, as fluids travel easily and are difficult to stop.102 What is more, “liquids, unlike solids, cannot easily hold their shape. Fluids, so to speak, neither fix space nor bind time.”103 The solid modern world, based on the principle of “locatedness” in space and time, has to define its central values in opposition to the capriciousness and liability of fluids: Solids are cast once and for all. Keeping fluids in shape requires a lot of attention, constant vigilance and perpetual effort – and even then the success of the effort is anything but a foregone conclusion.104

101 Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (London: Sheed and Ward, 1958), p. 194, quoted after Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 199. 102 Bauman, Liquid Modernity, p. 2. 103 Bauman, Liquid Modernity, p. 2. 104 Bauman, Liquid Modernity, p. 8.

Body without Boundaries

107

Keeping fluids in control is thus a central preoccupation of solid modernity, as setting margins to fluid entities seems to be the only way to make the changing world predictable and controllable. Bauman also identifies the modern discourse with the rule of order which is “centrally organized, rigidly bounded, and hysterically concerned with impenetrable boundaries.”105 Although Bauman does not refer to the discourse of the body, the terminology he uses is to a large extent “corporeal”: for instance he associates “heavy capitalism” (capitalism of the era of “solid modernity”) with an obsession “with bulk and size, and, for that reason, also with boundaries, with making them tight and impenetrable.”106 Tight and impenetrable boundaries, in turn, imply self-containment, that is, one of the features describing the modern self, along with self-sufficiency, individualisation, and self-assertion.107 All these notions are in an obvious way connected: individualisation is the process of establishing the boundaries of the self, and once the boundaries are there, the individual is self-identical, that is, self-contained. Self-containment implies also that the subject is kept safely “in the body” (as Giddens has it), yet the corporeal image evoked by the notion is that of the bodily interior curbed within the frames of the body, so that it does not reveal itself uncontrollably, does not spill out of its delineated space. Protecting the division between inside and outside can thus be treated as an instance of what Bauman calls “bonding,” a quality associated with the stability of solids and their resistance against “separation of the atoms.”108 However, before we move to discussing the rhetorics of self-containment, we should focus on the process of boundary constitution as a token of the modern struggle against fluidity. As Mary Douglas argues, the most significant threat posed by liquidity is that it “attacks the boundary between myself and it.”109 This most fundamental division is what forms the basis for the Cartesian notion of subjectivity, also epitomised by the aforementioned self / world, mind / body, subject / object, and self / (m)other dyad. Accordingly, the prevailing narration of modern subjectivity stresses its pre-occupation with delineating borders: “primitive means undifferentiated; modern means differentiated.”110 Society, as a specifically modern construct, is thus all about “boundaries, margins, internal structure,”111 and the

105 106 107 108 109 110 111

Bauman, Liquid Modernity, p. 55. Bauman, Liquid Modernity, p. 58. Bauman, Liquid Modernity, p. 34. Bauman, Liquid Modernity, p. 2. Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 47. Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 96. Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 141.

108

Chapter 4

proper social body is constituted in a process of “sorting, segregating, and demarcating.”112 There is no separate individuality and no borders of subjectivity in the maternal world of pre-modernity, so the boundaries of the body are not subject to such stipulations as in modern times. Interestingly enough, contemporary theory dealing with the discourse of material / corporeal practices often identifies the internalisation of certain bodily practices (the Foucauldian notion of bodily disciplines) with the period of the conceptual “emergence” of the notion of an individual self. The twentieth- and twenty-first-century’s critical thought dealing with material culture has to be perceived as part of a certain discourse of constructing meaning; a discourse entangled in the story of subjectivity to much the same extent as the narrative of subjectivity is embedded in the conceptualisation of material culture. As has already been said, none of these discourses is treated here as primary; they are rather studied as epitomes of a common system of construction and distribution of meaning that relies on a dense mesh of connotations, imageries, and metaphors. So the accounts presented in contemporary studies of histories of manners, spatial relations, and medical discourses can serve as case-inpoint illustrations of such reciprocal influences of the discourses on organic boundaries and images of modern subjectivity. An interesting example of such a correlation is presented in Norbert Elias’s analysis of the differences between the pre-modern and modern manners concerning such activities as sleeping, hygienic practices, and the physical contact between bodies. The picture that emerges from Elias’s study is that of an evolution of manners which leads to a gradual privatisation and internalisation of bodies and spaces, as if the modern individualisation of self proceeded along with the division of space which was aimed at distinguishing individual bodies out of the amorphous corporeal mass.113 For example, his analysis of the status of such functions as sleeping and nakedness in relation to the (modern) notions of private and public space reveals that, in modern times, the nuclear family becomes an enclave with its “visible and invisible walls” withdrawing the most private and intimate aspects of existence from the gaze of others.114 Analogously, Douglas gives an example of marking space, like home, by “separating, placing boundaries, making visible statements.”115 Elias contrasts this modern process of seclusion with the apparent pre-modern openness by demonstrating that the sa112 Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 193. 113 See: Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, ed. E. Dunning, J. Goudsblom, S. Mennel, trans. E. Jephcott (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), pp. 138-142. 114 Elias, The Civilizing Process, p. 138. 115 Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 85.

Body without Boundaries

109

me functions were not separated from social life in medieval society. Elias creates an image of the medieval approach to body boundaries by referring to accounts presenting situations in which contact with naked bodies of others, their skins and bodily fluids, was – allegedly – a natural situation. Such contact was unavoidable in the practices of using public baths or sleeping naked while sharing beds with others – sometimes even strangers116 – and, according to Elias, was not perceived as unnatural or threatening to the self. In a similar manner, Rodolphe el-Khoury points to the development of the notion of private space that “belongs” to the individual. The intimate, individual space is protected by rules of conventions and manners, but also by the developing code of hygiene and medicine. El-Khoury writes: The same olfactory / excremental factors that transformed body, bed, and tomb into distinct spatial units were operative at the level of the building and the city. Their influence is clearly demonstrated in the evolution of the hospital during the second half of the eighteenth century, a process in which many recent studies have recognized the emerging physiognomy of modern space. Its characteristic feature is discernible in the consistent compartmentalization and fragmentation of space into discrete components with sharp edges and clearly delineated contours.117

Analogically, Mary Douglas argues that “our experiences take place in separate compartments.”118 The distinctive feature of the modern / “civilized” experience of the body and space appears to be linked to the notion of bounded units: an individual self set against the other, an individual body differentiated from the swarming crowd, an individual cell as opposed to the continuity of humoural experience (a notion we will soon come back to), an individual compartment in space belonging to a specific body or social unit. The analogies between the above assertions and the issues discussed in the first part of this study are unavoidable: the narration of the emancipation of an individual and the differentiation of individual space is constructed in almost the same register that describes the story of subjectivity in Burckhardt, Kant, Habermas, and others. The story of the pre-modern shared bed, tomb, or bath appears thus as a reflection of our view of pre-modern man – a figure that epitomizes borderless continuity with the world in his alleged lack of identity, individuality and boundaries (at least in the sense in which the modern discourse of subjectivity conceptualises them). This pre-modern self blurs not only with other bodies, but also with what will later be differentiated as the external world. The studies of Douglas, Elias and 116 Elias, The Civilizing Process, pp. 139-142. 117 Rodolphe el-Khoury, “Introduction,” in: Dominique Laporte, History of Shit, trans. Rodolphe el-Khoury (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2000), p. xi. 118 Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 85.

110

Chapter 4

el-Khoury referred to here discuss the general notion of what Foucault labels as “dividing practices” and “treating the body individually”; and, as such, they are descriptions of a “fundamental system of relations involving envelopments, subordinations, divisions, resemblances ”119 which constitutes a distinctive feature of modern structures. The question is not so much whether the pre-modern man really experienced himself as a part of an undifferentiated mass. My point is rather to bring out the awareness that Elias’s reading of medieval and early modern accounts of manners, and el-Khoury’s explanation of modern space in terms of individuation and compartmentalisation, are, to a large extent, informed by the notion of modern subjectivity that they (as we all do) share. This conceptualisation of the modern self, however, does not consist of a clear and definite image that conditions our perception of other phenomena in a particular way. It rather operates through certain images it evokes, through subtle connotations, implicit clusters of superimposed clichés that together make up an intricate semantic mesh whose individual elements cannot be singled out. Hence it can be also assumed that the influence is reciprocal – the interweaving of fragmentary and ephemeral implications deny any pretensions to primacy; the poetics of body boundaries can condition our perception of subjectivity to just the same extent as the discourse of the self can influence that of corporeal demarcation.

119 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic. An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. 5.

CHAPTER 5

Asubjective Incontinence

The foregoing discussion has pointed to the significance of the image of selfcontainment for the notion of the modern self. The picture of the constitution of modern subjectivity and modern structures that emerges from the accounts discussed above is close to Kristeva’s notion of setting a margin on a floating structure. The imagery of the processes of demarcation, division, partitioning and drawing borders implies the presence of some sort of preceding primal amorphousness, union, or borderlessness – with all these qualities coming together, as has been argued, in the metaphor of fluidity. The previous chapter stressed the significance of the metaphorical construction of the concept of the modern self in relation to the notions of self-identity, self-containment, coherence, and demarcation. The aim of the current chapter is to look at the contemporary discourse of pre-modern and pre-subjective corporeality in order to trace in it the rhetorics of disruptive fluidity. This pre-modern and pre-subjective corporeality is also, as the title of this chapter suggests, a-subjective, that is, defined in opposition to the notion of subjectivity, and thus constitutes its metaphorical antithesis. The formulation of the objective for this chapter is based on an assumption that, as was said at the beginning of this book, the metaphorical frame of fluidity / solidity constitutes a referential model not only for the abstract notion of “the subject,” but also for the conceptualisation of the body. If, as we have seen, the bounded body can serve as a metaphor for the bounded self, the examination of how contemporary critique theorises corporeal practices in relation to pre-modern and modern discourses will offer a revealing insight not only into the notions of subjectivity and corporeality. Studying the nomenclature of body boundaries offers an opportunity to localise the position of the notion of the individual body and the modern subject as constructs of superimposed images in the conceptual frame by which we make sense of the world, with a special emphasis on the notion of discrete, bound entities as the very ground of our sense of identity. If, as Bordo claims, what differentiates the seventeenth century from the pre-modern era is its preoccupation with delineating

112

Chapter 5

the borders between self and world,1 the apparent pre-modern connection between the self and the universe appears as a transgression of those borders. This chapter will thus focus on how this union is expressed in contemporary discourse on the pre-modern body. The discussion will proceed from a recapitulation of the rhetorics that delineates the construction of the modern subject to the terminology of the pre-modern body in order to contrast and show the relation of antinomy between them. I shall then move to the concept of the premodern / pre-subjective corporeality characterised by what Gail Kern Paster labels the “humoural body.” Its main characteristics include the emphasis on openness, fluid fungibility, and a lack of clear boundaries, which resembles the Bakhtinian description of the grotesque body.2 The grotesque body, will, in turn, be analysed in terms of its correspondences to the notions delineating Kristeva’s concept of the abject as a mode of corporeality associated with the presubjective phase of development. Demonstrating the parallels between these constructs will help us establish a link between the contemporary conceptualisation of the pre-modern body and what might be called “the pre-subjective mode of corporeality,” analogous to the connection between the models of the birth of the modern subject and the development of subjectivity in the psychoanalytical discourse discussed in the first two chapters above. The previous chapter introduced the idea of the humoural theory as a manifestation of the pre-modern union between man and world. It has also presented the link between the “humoural immersion” of man in the universe and the construction of the pre-subjective maternal union as fluid and amorphous. I shall now return to the notion of the “humoural world,” but this time from a slightly different angle in order tocontextualise the concept of the humoural body as the quintessence of the pre-modern mode of corporeality. One of the main attributes of the humoural world is the fact that it is seen as a confusion of the most basic categories that mark the horizon of modern experience: the bodily and the spiritual, nature and culture, the self and the other, the inner and the outer. The premodern epistemological model is presented as a lack of boundaries, which is visible, for instance, in the following comment on the pre-scientific era, defined as a period when ordinary people understood their emotional life in part in terms of humours [...]. [W]e can see that the boundary between the psychic and the physical had not yet been sharply drawn. The popular belief in magic reflects this. It requires such an open

1 2

See: Susan Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity. Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press), 1987p. 8. Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed. Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 14.

Asubjective Incontinence

113

boundary. The magic which deals in such things as love potions or spells to produce or cure disease in cattle is not just an alternative technology to modern medicine. It relies on a notion that certain powers have their seat in certain substances or in certain speech acts, in the pre-modern sense of this relation. There is no room for this in a ‘disenachanted’ world as Weber’s term (‘entzaubert’) implies.3

Such “oneness” of matter and experience implies, as Taylor argues, an “open boundary,” or rather a boundless sense of experiencing self and world. This open boundary is thus a characteristic of the humoural body. Discussing the theory of humours, Taylor notes that the connection between the psychological disposition and the bodily substance (exemplified, for instance, by the idea of melancholy “residing” in black bile) points to the view that “the substance embodies this significance. This is what links it, for instance, to Saturn, which also embodies this meaning.”4 Thus, the link between black bile, spleen, melancholy, and Saturn is not so much a question of a symbolic link, but an actual indicator of the oneness of substance, a belief that black bile actually is melancholy.5 As has already been said, such oneness of substance manifests itself in the image of man who is better connected with the universe than he is connected with himself, as the relations of individual organs, personality, and temperament with their corresponding elements and planets are stronger than relations between individual organs within the body itself. The humoural body thus implies a sense of unity between man and universe which takes place, so to speak, beyond the body borders, or circumventing those borders, and thus making them semipermeable, unstable and precarious – a concept that we will soon come back to. The notion of the “oneness of substance” is often used to contextualise the “magical” epistemological model of the pre-scientific era. In the absence of modern distinctions between the inner and the outer, as well as the psychic and the organic, the interactions between human dealings and the universe are not perceived in terms of conscious agency, but rather as flows, resulting in a blurring of borders between entities and mutual “contamination” resulting in some substances assuming the properties of others. Such imagery emerges from the discourse of alchemy, magic, and humoural medicine – the conviction that eating lion’s heart would result in courage, the connection between eating pigeons and promoting love, or a belief that “diamonds weaken the toadstone, and topaz weakens lust”6 are illustrations of such ideas. Georges Vigarello notes that the 3 4 5 6

Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 191. Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 189. Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 189. Morris Berman, The Re-enchantment of the World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 75.

114

Chapter 5

pre-scientific medicine draws a link between cold water and health, yet the connection is not understood in hygienic terms, but as an instance of an apparent influence of cold water on good eyesight. The relation is discussed not in the context of actual washing, but rather alludes to the “oneness of substances” (the parallel between clear water and good eyesight) with additional moral connotations (cleanliness was perceived in terms of propriety rather than hygiene).7 This direct correlation between the actions of the unbounded self and the effects of these actions in the world do not imply the presence of agency of an omnipotent subject, but rather some flowing continuum of substance and will, a lack of distinction between subject and object. Such an epistemological model resembles the alleged infantile perception of reality in which, as Jean Piaget argues, “[c]hanges in the states of objects are perceived as extensions of the child’s activity.” According to Piaget, this conviction stems from the fact that “the child is ‘absorbed in things’,”8 just as, one could say, the pre-modern self is absorbed in the universe. Before moving to a discussion of the correspondences between the humoural and the grotesque body, and later to a demonstration of how the metaphorical frame which constructs them overlaps with Kristeva’s notion of the abject, we must (by way of systematisation) establish a contextual link with the points discussed so far. The humoural man, “mortised” into the universe, a microcosm within the macrocosm, not quite isolated from the world by his skin, resembling an embryo rather than an island,9 is, as has been shown, portrayed in terms strikingly similar to those describing an infant in the pre-imaginary union with the mother marked by the lack of distinction between the “psyche and soma,” between inside and outside, between the “I” and “non-I,” and “not even regions of the body.”10 As such, the prevailing mode of presenting the pre-modern experience echoes the imagery of the boundless chora with its “nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is full of movement.”11 The child does not experience space in terms of “locatedness” and relatedness of 7 8 9 10

11

Georges Vigarello, Le propre et le sale. L’hygiène du corps depuis le Moyen Âge (Paris : Éditions de Seuil, 2005), p. 54. Jean Piaget, The Construction of Reality in the Child (New York: Random House, 1954), p. 116, quoted after Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 62. Owen Barfield, Saving Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, n.d.) , p. 53. René Spitz, The First Year of Life : A Psychoanalytical Study of Normal and Deviant Development of Object Relations (New York : International University Press, 1965 ), p. 35. Julia Kristeva, Revolution In Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 25.

Asubjective Incontinence

115

self and objects, which is implied by the lack of perspective discussed earlier in this study: There is no ‘perspective’ in things, because to have a perspective it is necessary to have a sense of “locatedness” – which in turn presupposes the experience of a distinguishable self and a world lying outside the self.12

The “absorption” in the world and the inability to distinguish between internal and external experiences entails that the perception of the external reality as an object is virtually impossible, as the world appears more like a garment (to use Berman’s evocative metaphor) than a separate entity. As has already been argued, the pre-modern sense of spatial organization is based on different objectives than that of a central gazing subject and external perceived reality. Susan Bordo even refers to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “swimming” in a world teeming with exclusive things. According to Merleau-Ponty, the ordered perspective “crystallises” the perceived world into an image of completion, eternity, propriety, and discretion.13 Perspective appears as a quintessential representation of modern discourse: it pinpoints the shifting, organic circuits and geometrises vision, applying mathematical order, which is often associated with modern thinking with its penchant for book keeping, trade, and the spatial organization of the land.14 The humoural connection with the world, on the other hand, is constructed as a mode of corporeality which precedes both perspective and a sense of coherent spatial arrangement. In this respect it resonates with Kristeva’s description of the chora, which she associates with a rupture that precedes signification and “locatedness.”15 Analogically, the image of pre-modern existence drawn by the contemporary discourse on subjectivity presents the earlier mode of interaction more as “swimming” or “flowing” than as stable, well-established settlement. The pre-modern self – just like the humoural body – does not constitute an individual unity, but rather a dispersion, or interplay of loosely connected fragments that assemble easily with other elements in the universe, merging and combining with them beyond the boundaries of the self. The metaphorics of dispersion – present in the description of the humoural body and delineating the notion of the pre-modern self – also implies analogy with the Lacanian “motor unco-ordination of the neonatal months” which entails 12 13

14 15

Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 62. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, trans. John O’Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 53, quoted after Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 65. See: Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 67. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 26.

116

Chapter 5

a certain “anatomical incompleteness.”16 The distinction between inner and outer is ascribed to the development of subjectivity; the human infant learns to perceive itself as a discrete entity with the core of his self located within this self. Again, this basic distinction does not apply to the pre-modern universe, in which, as Douglas writes, the elemental forces are seen as linked so closely to the individual human beings that we can hardly speak of an external, physical environment. Each individual carries within himself such close links with the universe that he is like the centre of a magnetic field of force.17

The opposition to such “locatedness” or “fixedness” of the internalised self is the image of dispersal of the self, of mutual contamination of self and world, where physical forces are thought of as interwoven with the lives of persons. Things are not completely distinguished from persons and persons are not completely distinguished from their external environment.18

This undifferentiated experience is characterised by different parts of the self connected with different parts of the universe while none of these clusters appears to be stable, but is prone to constant flows of substance – and such is the apparent experience of the humoural body. Another aspect of the conceptual image of the pre-modern body that requires a recapitulation of some previously discussed points is the fact that it is constructed as the exact opposite of the prevailing notion of modern subjectivity, which is founded upon the concept of self-containment. Let us now follow through the main characteristics of the modern subject in order to emphasize – by means of contrast – how the terminology of the pre-modern body counterpoints it. First of all, as we have seen, the subject is characterized by its continuity, unity, and coherence. Continuity of the self is presented as a sine qua non of the intelligent agency of the subject and its meaningfulness.19 Robert Pippin describes this mode of thinking as a modern phenomenon characteristic of Wes-

16

17 18 19

Jacques Lacan, "The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience" in Écrits. A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 4-5. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger. An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 101. Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 109. Martin Hollis, “Of Masks and Men,” in: The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History, ed. Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins, and Steven Lukes (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), quoted after Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self. Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 229.

Asubjective Incontinence

117

tern thought, since the modern concept of subjectivity defines human beings as “individual […], pretty much self-contained and self-determining centers of a casual agency.”20 Modernity is also marked by the emergence of subjectivity connected with individualism, the right to recognition, autonomy and the Hegelian idealistic philosophy that grasps the “self conscious […] Idea.”21 Habermas stresses the importance of the subject standing over against the world of objects, as well as the individuality of the I that “appears in this world as a particular entity,”22 which points to the next important quality of subjectivity, namely, its detachment. Detachment signifies the actual and symbolic process in which the self acquires distance from the world (discussed above in relation to the process of “objectification of mother nature” and the infant disentangling itself from the mOther), as well as the maintenance of this distance from the world which is needed in order to sustain the subjectivity. Accordingly, the crucial events that mark the beginning of the modern era are associated with the assertion of the authority of the subject and acknowledging its individual agency.23 At the same time modernity is characterised by its constant pursuit of a “sense of the separate self, conscious of itself and of its own distinctness from the world ‘outside’.”24 The notion of detachment and “disenchantment” of self from world appears to be crucial for Habermas, as noted in Chapter 1. He claims that “the principle of subjectivity determines the forms of modern culture. This holds true first of all for objectifying science, which disenchants nature at the same time that it liberates the knowing subject.”25 To buttress his statement, he quotes Hegel: Thus, all miracles were disallowed: for nature is a now system of known and recognized laws, man is at home in it, and only that remains standing in which he is at home; he is free through the acquaintance he gained with nature.26

Another attribute of the modern subject which counterpoints the humoural mode of existence is the significance of the sovereignty that results from its disengagement from the world. The subject gains its autonomy in the process of sepa-

20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Robert B. Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity. On the Kantian Aftermath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 7. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987), p. 17. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 40. See: Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 17. Bordo: Flight to Objectivity, p. 7 Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 17. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York, 1956), p. 433, quoted after Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 17.

118

Chapter 5

rating from what Descartes calls res extensa – the external experience as well as the corporeal matter – and locates its sense of subjectivity in res cogitans, pure reason. Such disengagement leads to the acquisition of distance towards materiality in general, so the modern self becomes a “sovereign rational subject – atomistic and autonomous, disengaged and disembodied, potentially and ideally self-transparent.”27 For Horkheimer and Adorno too the notion of the self’s disentanglement is crucial: they seek the origins of subjectivity in the process of the division of nature from the self, the subject from the object, the chaotic and multiple from the self-identical and ordered. At the same time, the self’s distancing from nature is portrayed as a precondition for mastering it.28 Such detachment from the surrounding space also produces the self’s sense of “congealment” as opposed to the pre-individual “dispersion” or “clinginess” of the “garment space.” Taylor explores the notion of inwardness as connected with the self’s “locatedness” in space. With the modern breakthrough and the internalisation of the self (also a notion to be discussed soon), ideas and valuations are no longer situated in the world, but within subjects – and this is precisely disenchantment, disengagement from the world, a new and modern understanding of subject and object as separable entities.29 What the humoural body also lacks is the quality of self-containment – another notion that goes to make the image of the modern subject, implying not only the individual character of the subject as an entity, but also a compulsion to keep the boundaries intact and keep the self “in itself.” Again, there is correlation with the metaphorics of subjectivity: the way Habermas constantly describes the subject as self-referential30 evokes an image of a self-enclosed circuit and implies a certain quality of continence. The modern subject is characterised, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, by a compulsion to maintain its “identical, purpose-directed, masculine character, ” and “[t]he effort to hold itself together” spurred by “[t]he fear of losing the self.”31 Such a fear reverberates with an

27 28 29 30 31

Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. ix. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1972), p. 31. See: Taylor, Sources of the Self, pp. 185-191. See: Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 26. In the passage from which these quotations were extracted, Horkheimer and Adorno juxtapose the need for selfintegrity with its opposition – a temptation to suspend one’s boundaries and let the ego disperse, which is often portrayed as the negative reflection of modernity, or its other “dark side” manifesting itself, for instance, in the Freudian “death drive,” or Bataille’s notion of “inner experience,” but also in the threats lurking in what Kristeva labels “ab-

Asubjective Incontinence

119

anxiety of dissolution and incorporation, the atavistic “sinking irretrievably into the mother,”32 that is, the primitive undifferentiated union with the other. The image of a risk of experiences throwing the subject into the pre-imaginary real by means of transgressing its self-containment is also a recurrent theme in the discourse of subjectivity – such a threat is posed, for instance, by an encounter with Kristeva’s abject, or Bataille’s notion of “inner experience” which, by desubjectifying the subject, “opens” it for the sacred. Habermas describes Bataille’s ideas as an experience unbounding the subject from the purpose-oriented utilitarian modern world of rationality, and as a “form of expression that leads the monadically self-encapsulated subject back again into the intimacy of a lifecontext that has become alien, confined, cut off and fragmented.”33 Transgressing the boundaries of the body and the self – so characteristic of the humoural body – is thus an indication of suspension of the self-containment of the subject and, as such, becomes characterised as a threat of return to pre-subjective amorphousness. The “digested” academic discourse on identity presupposes the existence of some real “inner self,” and one that is “whole,” that is, self-contained, bounded, and identical with itself. A “divided self” is seen as sick,34 or as a contradiction of any form of subjectivity whatsoever. Thus the image of the humoural man that emerges from contemporary reconstructions of pre-modern corporeality is sketched as a perfect anti-thesis of the modern subject. Incapable of containment, he blurs with his environment and infests other areas, and at the same time is contaminated by the external world. Since each part of him is associated with a different part of the universe,35 he is a negation of cohesion and self-identity. The terminology of the humoural body actually contains antonyms of the terms that characterise the model of the modern subject: unlike the self-contained, selfidentical, cohesive self of the scientific era, the pre-modern man is open and fungible, characterized by corporeal fluidity, openness, and porous boundaries, transpirable and trans-fluxible,36 permeable and volatile,37 with the surface of his

32 33 34 35 36 37

jection” – a notion that this work explores because of its relation to the phenomena of body boundaries. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 64. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 214. Roy Porter, “Introduction,” in: Roy Porter, ed. Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 1. Barfield, Saving Appearances, quoted after Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity, p. 53. Paster, The Body Embarrassed, pp. 8-9. Paster, The Body Embarrassed, p. 16.

120

Chapter 5

body passively open to be permeated by fluids and air.38 Instead of solid and bounded structure, the pre-modern body’s mode of existence is described as “corporeal flux” with all the instability and unpredictability connoted by fluids.39 Such a body can neither resist external pressures, nor can it contain its internal seepages: with its skin forming no boundary, it is conceived as a “porous and fragile envelope,”40 or a “semipermeable, irrigated container”41 in which humours rise and ebb. Such vulnerability to external conditions also denies the self its autonomy in the sense of self-determination, as, due to its solubility, it is easily influenced by its immediate environment, weather conditions, and movements of celestial bodies: Bodies were always filled with humors, but the quantity of humors not only depended on such variables as age and gender but also differed from day to day as the body took in food and air, processed them, and released them. The humors moved with greater or less fluidity within the bodily container and exited the body with varying degrees of efficiency. The key differentials were heat, which in the mean promoted solubility, and cold, which hampered it. Achieving the ideal internal balance and movement of humoral fluids was also a function of the individual body's capacity for transpiration and evacuation – the exchange of elements with the surrounding air and water.42

The conflicting imagery of pre-modern continuity with the universe and modern demarcation finds its reflection in the early modern medical discourse on hygiene and bodily surface. In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century France, according to Georges Vigarello, it was widely believed that water could ooze into the body through the pores of the skin and by disturbing the fragile harmony of humours and inciting the watery element, alter the organism’s functions mechanically, thus weakening it.43 Such imbalance would result in a number of disorders, both physical and emotional, by affecting internal organs and structures of the body.44 Generally, any interaction between water and the humoural fluids was considered dangerous. The fluids, an unruly element in humans, had to be rigorously disciplined to maintain a certain equilibrium. Yet they constantly posed the threat of sudden and uncontrolled disruption – set out of balance, they were believed to be a direct cause of disease and madness. Fluids could be unpredictable if “incited” by an external watery element: “opening up, exchanges, pressure on 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Vigarello, Le propre et le sale, p. 219. Paster, The Body Embarrassed, p. 10. Paster, The Body Embarrassed, p. 12. Paster, The Body Embarrassed, p. 8. Paster, The Body Embarrassed, p. 9. Vigarello, Le propre et le sale, p. 108. Vigarello, Le propre et le sale, pp. 17-25.

Asubjective Incontinence

121

the humoural fluids introduce a certain disorder.”45 Therefore, the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century “hygienists” discouraged any activities that could open up the body to the workings of pestilence, such as intense physical activity, warmth which “mellows” the skin, or baths. The humoural body is thus presented as a vulnerable entity that is not sufficiently protected by its own external borders, and instead of being a coherent unity, is an open vessel linked to the universe through its leaky boundaries. Simultaneously, the discourse on humours is rather wary: the humours are presented as a capricious, precarious element in humans that can easily be disrupted and therefore must be treated with great care and caution, or, as the discourse of early scientific medicine and hygiene demonstrates,46 must be curbed and controlled. The image of man at the early modern breakthrough left at the mercy of wild and unpredictable elements (presented, for instance, by Vigarello in his study of various hygienic and medical procedures aimed at the external “sealing” of insecure body boundaries) echoes with the “compensatory strategy” employed in the face of loss of the caring protection of mother nature and her subsequent change into a “capricious virago.” The employment of various hygienic practices47 supposed to sever the humoural threads and cut the human body off from the “maternal” body of the universe is in fact another expression of the alleged trauma suppression taken up in the face of the “disenchantment” of the world, “a response to the fragility of the emerging identity as it was establishing itself, a function of its immaturity and lack of solidity.”48 These practices are aimed at restraining the humoural dispersions. At the same time, there exists an analogy with strategies aimed at external formalisation and mechanisation of the now debased organic connections discussed in Chapter 3. What is more, such constructs as, for example, Taylor’s notion of the “open boundary,” which he uses as a tool to theorise the humoural body’s relation to the world,49 are, after all, products of a mode of thinking which assumes the existence of boundaries. Analogously, Vigarello’s idea of the precarious body surface and Paster’s discussion of the semi-permeable and porous container are products of similar semantic frames: the metaphors and connotations they use to create a certain picture of pre-modern corporeality resonate with the conceptual image of the world a contemporary reader might have, because they are built on an interplay with

45 46 47 48 49

Vigarello, Le propre et le sale, p. 22. Translation mine. To be discussed in the next chapter. I will come back to this idea soon when discussing the imagery of “vulnerable margins.” Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 192. Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 191.

122

Chapter 5

their implied (although rarely mentioned) antonyms, such as the contrast between the humoural dispersion and the modern self-containment. We have seen how the contemporary representations of the humoural body render it antonymous to the ideal modern subject. In its undermining of the differentiation between the interior and the exterior, in its openness and vulnerability, and in its denial of the budding concept of the detached self, the pre-modern body bears strong resemblance to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the “grotesque body.” This body, instead of being circumscribed and demarcated, disrespects the delineations and reveals its interior, is “open, permeable, effluent, leaky,”50 and, like the humoural body, emphasises corporeal flux and openness, as well as the sense of belonging to the natural world.51 The grotesque body is a concept Bakhtin introduced in his discussion of Francois Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, in which he analyses the images of bodily grotesque in Rabelais in relation to its socio-political and psychological contexts of the specifically modern conflicts between the interior and the exterior, privacy and openness, selfcontainment and exchange.52 The notion of the grotesque body that emerges from this analysis resembles the picture of the pre-subjective self this argument endeavours to trace: it is portrayed as an amorphous entity (although “entity” might not be a perfect expression here, as it already suggests a certain degree of individuality) blurring with the world, “mobile and hybrid,” “disproportionate, exorbitant, outgrowing its limits, obscenely decentred and off-balance,”53 and dominated by primary physiological needs. It thus constitutes another conceptual construct expressing the mode of representation of pre-subjectivity, reverberating with the pre-imaginary infantile absorption in the world and the maternal body. The idiom of the grotesque body defines it as mobile, decentred, split and multiple, characterised by impurity and heterogeneity, growth, a brimming-over abundance, a mixing of categories, with a focus placed on gaps, orifices, filth, materiality.54 According to Stallybrass and White, Bakhtin’s schema of grotesque realism provides an image-ideal of society as a “heterogeneous and boundless totality.”55 Bakhtin’s discourse thus becomes another illustration of the 50 51 52 53 54 55

Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed. Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 92. See: Paster, The Body Embarrassed, p. 14. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 14. See: Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, pp. 303-322; Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, pp. 21-22. Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, p. 10.

Asubjective Incontinence

123

point this book is arguing: the terminology of the body conditions our perceptions of the history of ideas in socio-historical discourses. What is more, this process also works the other way round – the nomenclatures of the body are strongly entwined in the semiotics of subjectivity, social relations, and the way the self / world relation is portrayed. The grotesque body appears to be yet another expression of pre-modern openness and lack of self-containment: the grotesque body is not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, it outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits. The stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world.56

The grotesque body is thus one of those constructs that, by the use of corporeal vocabulary, constitute the anti-thesis of the modern subject. With its lack of separation, transgression of its own borders, and an open-boundary encounter with the world, it bears obvious resemblances not only to the image of the humoural body, but also to the homogenous formlessness of the maternal union, as well as to the pre-modern notion of social undifferentiation and lack of individuality that was discussed at the beginning of this book. The grotesque body is the exact opposite of the private, individual form of the enclosed subject. Instead, it exists in continuity not only with the material world, but also with other bodies. The grotesque body, like those from the pictures of Bosch and Breugel, is always multiple.57 Outgrowing itself, it constitutes a collective and not an individual body: [T]be body and bodily life have here a cosmic and at the same time an all-people’s character; this is not the body and its physiology in the modern sense of these words, because it is not individualised. The material bodily principle is contained not in the biological individual, not in the bourgeois ego, but in the people, a people who are continually growing and renewed. This is why all the bodily becomes grandiose, exaggerated, immeasurable.58

Such a notion of collectivity and lack of differentiation characterizes many reconstructions of pre-modern experience. The idea of multiple identity of the “undifferentiated mass” which appeared in Burckhardt, is here enhanced by the image of a monstrous bodily form that annihilates any kind of individuality and detachment. It implies, at the same time, a lack of containment that is homogenising, blurring boundaries and denying distinctions – certainly reverberating with 56 57 58

Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 26. See: Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, p. 21. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 19.

124

Chapter 5

the metaphorics of amalgam fluidity that engulfs manifestations of discrete and delineated forms. Bakhtin juxtaposes the grotesque body with what he calls the classical body, embodied by a classical statue59 which has no openings or orifices, no protuberances, which keeps its distance, and is in a way “disembodied.”60 Unlike the images of a swarming confusion of unindividuated human forms in medieval art, the classical body is clearly separated from the outside world, petrified and solid, immune to contaminating flows. Zbigniew Białas refers to such a mode of corporeality as the “body wall”: a notion underpinned with the celebration of the surface rather than the orifice, as well as with all the implications of the opposition between smoothness and penetrability.61 This distinction reflects our earlier discussion of the contrasting imagery of the ideal self-contained modern subject and unruly, blurring pre-subjectivity. The terminology of the grotesque / classical binary opposition is very similar to the humoural body / modern subjectivity juxtaposition discussed above. Again, we are presented with a series of contrasts: the classical body’s self-containment is reflected in its “closed, smooth, impenetrable surface” whereas the grotesque body is the one which “swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world.”62 Like the humoural body, the grotesque body is endowed with permeable boundaries and thus obviates the self-world distinction, as it “by definition cannot belong to or be identified with selfhood, with the discrete, pathetically finite boundaries of the individual life in time.”63 Stallybrass and White associate the protocols of the classical body with the identity of progressive rationalism, pointing to the way the classical body marks such notions as Foucault’s regimen and Weber’s rationalisation,64 all linked by the common denominator of purity, containment, ordering and dividing. The social process of purification is identified with containment of the transgressive elements (a central issue of Foucault’s theory of dividing practices explicated in his Madness and Civilization and Birth of the Clinic): “[i]n the clas-

59

60 61 62 63 64

We should not, however, understand the term “classical” as referring to classical antiquity in historical terms. It should rather be considered in terms of certain aesthetic inclinations best embodied by a classical marble statue with its perfect proportions and smooth surface. See: Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, p. 22. See: Zbigniew Białas, The Body Wall. Somatics of Travelling and Discursive Practices (Frankfurt am Main, New York: Peter Lang Verlag, 2006), p. 20. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 317. Paster, The Body Embarrassed, p. 15. Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, p. 22.

Asubjective Incontinence

125

sical discursive body were encoded those regulated systems which were closed, homogenous, monumental, centred and symmetrical.”65 The Bakhtinian notion of the classical body can thus be treated as a realisation of the myth of coherent modern subjectivity: it is rigidly demarcated against the external world, clearly defined, coherent and integral, identical and contiguous with itself. If, as Giddens argues, being a competent modern agent involves continuous bodily control66 then the self-containment of the classical body fulfills this requirement with its perfectly tight boundaries. It is endowed with the major features associated with ordered systems: separateness, wholeness, unity, integrity, individuality, and completeness.67 It incarnates the yearning for permeability, for “hard lines and clear concepts”68 with its solidity and the impenetrability of a stone. It is certainly an expression of the bodily integrity Giddens writes about, of “the self being safely ‘in’ the body.”69 It also embodies Bauman’s notion of “stability of solids” represented by bonding, the resistance to the “separation of the atoms.”70 All these characteristics inscribe it into the modern ideal of cohesive solidity which preconditions the individual subjectivity, distinct and unique in its existence. The classical body does not threaten the world with seeping out beyond its boundaries; its self-continuity manifests itself in the lack of breaks and gaps in its smooth impenetrable surface. Its “closed orifices” guarantee that it does not transgress its limits and endow it with an “impenetrable façade,” and “opaque surface.”71 Likewise, such an impeccable demarcation also renders the classical body “finished, completed, strictly limited [...], shown from the outside as something individual.”72 Bakhtin stresses the fact that the absence of gaps and crevices creates a “border of a closed individuality that does not merge with other bodies and with the world.”73 The emphasised openings of the grotesque body, on the other hand, highlight its incompleteness rather than closure and coherence: All these convexities and orifices have a common characteristic; it is within them that the confines between bodies and between the body and the world are overcome: there is an interchange and an interorientation [...]. Eating, drinking, defecating and 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, p. 22. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 56. See: Douglas, Purity and Danger, pp. 63-67. Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 200. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, p. 58. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press), 2000, p. 2. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 320. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 320. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 320.

126

Chapter 5 other elimination (sweating, blowing the nose, sneezing) as well as copulation, pregnancy, dismemberment, swallowing up of another body – all of these acts are performed on the confines of the outer world.74

The modus operandi of the humoural / grotesque / pre-modern body is the exchange of elements with the surroundings, a constant flux, an openness, a flowing with no delineation and no sense of self. The grotesque body is thus a body marked by incontinence with all the ambiguous implications of the word (deliberately included in the title of this chapter): by its inability to restrain and control its corporeal fluxes, it exposes its interior and does not acknowledge the differentiation between in and out. The classical body, as a reflection of modern self-contained subjectivity, is, on the other hand, a perfect container – so perfect that it denies the existence of any interiority whatsoever. “Opaque, closed off, finished, a body all surface and no interior,”75 the self-contained body retains its self-identity by denying any possibility of cross-contamination. Mary Douglas stresses the role the control of “entrances and exits” of the body play in a compulsion to keep the body intact.76 What is worth exploring at this point is the significance of such intactness in relation to the identity of the subject: the particular vulnerability of orifices is parallel to a specific “taboo” which modern culture places on the bodily interior. Orifices and openings are constructed as sites of cultural marginality, threatening the outside with a sudden eruption of the unruly interior. If self-containment, connected with self-identity, is a mark of modern subjectivity, then the incapability of containment, the seeping across boundaries and the refusal to stay within is coded as a transgression of the most rudimentary constituent of subjectivity. When the “body-wall,” as Białas has it, is destroyed, the integrity of the self is also lost.77 Leakage, crosscontamination, the shifting, formless disturbance of the boundary between inside and outside threaten the most basic division between self and other. The notions of cross-contamination, revealing the bodily interior, the disruptive potential of bodily fluids and orifices that mark the Bakhtinian grotesque body, inevitably lead us to the notion of the abject, a term introduced by Julia Kristeva in her influential Powers of Horror. The confluence of metaphorics that can be observed between these terms once again corroborates the proximity of the conceptual frames that delineate the discourse of modern subjectivity (as the grotesque body, due to its affinity with the humoural body, can be considered as an anti-thesis of the modern subject) and the discourse of subjectivity in psycho74 75 76 77

Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 317. Paster, The Body Embarrassed, p. 15. Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 173. See: Białas, The Body-Wall, p. 81.

Asubjective Incontinence

127

analysis. Although the discussion of the abject in the current chapter is limited to the sphere of metaphorics with a special emphasis placed on the overlapping of terms with the notion of the grotesque body, we shall now, for the sake of clarity, briefly outline the definition of this notion. The term “abject” is used to refer to what cannot be fitted in the subject / object distinction in the process of the development of individual subjectivity. The abject blurs this rudimentary boundary and thus poses a threat to the self-identity with a possibility of being re-mortised into the world. Abjection is thus a cost of the emergence of what Kristeva calls the corps propre – “one’s own and clean proper body.”78 This emergence takes place, according to Kristeva, in the primal repression, which is a stage before that in which the ego and its objects spring forth79 and triggers a process in which an infant (still in the imaginary realm) separates itself from anything that is not its “own and clean self,” setting its borders against the primary undifferentiated chora. In this way a sense of subjectivity is constituted, and that which “falls off” in the process is termed the abject – the non-self.80 The abject is repressed, but never excluded entirely; it constantly poses a risk of blurring the frail construction of the subject / object distinction, haunting the self at the most vulnerable sites of its constructed boundaries – the openings and orifices, bodily fluids, reproductive functions, death. If subjectivity is conceptualised as a product of differences (entering the sphere of language represented by the symbolic order), the abject threatens it by drawing us “towards a place where meaning collapses.”81 The most important qualities of the abject from the point of view of this discussion are those which present it as the negative mirror reflection of the modern notion of subjectivity. First of all, the concept of subjectivity relies, as we have argued in the initial chapters of this study, upon a radical exclusion of the maternal entity embodied in the infantile rejection of the amorphous maternal union, as well as the modern quest towards the objectification of “mother nature.” The abject symbolizes a distortion in this separation process:

78

79 80 81

See: Leon S. Roudiez, “Translator’s Note” in Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. viii. A similar concept is proposed by Paul Valéry in his notion of moi pure - the clear and internalized self, which comes into being as a result of negating all the external contents of the self. See: Jerrold Seigel, The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp: Desire, Liberation, and the Self in Modern Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 245-246. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, pp. 10-11. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 2. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 2.

128

Chapter 5 The abject confronts us [...] at this time within our personal archaeology, with our earliest attempts to release the hold of maternal entity even before ex-isiting outside of her, thanks to the autonomy of language.82

Entering the sphere of language, as has already been said, is a landmark of subjectivity: it requires an acceptance of the most basic differentiation between the “I” and the “other,” thus spurring the subject’s striving towards individuality and an aspiration towards separation from the amalgam amorphousness of the real. Signification constitutes the subject by introducing the radical difference between self and world, between self and mOther: “[t]he sign represses the chora and its eternal return.” 83 The abject, on the contrary, triggers a “collapse of language” which poses a risk of re-sinking into the maternal chora and a reabsorption into the undifferentiated union with the mother. By questioning the stability of the subject in the symbolic order, the abject implies the presence of the heterogeneous “I” associated with the experience of jouissance.84 The abject is also related to the maternal sphere through its association with corporeal orifices – what Kristeva labels “maternal / feminine defilement.”85 Relying heavily on Mary Douglas’s work, Kristeva draws a link between the “feminine” pollution associated with menstruation and opening up of the body and the excremental defilement which relates to the maternal sphere through its unspecific identity, or rather lack of identity: something that is out of the body and yet not the body itself, it “reminds” the subject of the existence of such unspecific positions, thus referring it back to the undifferentation of the maternal union. In this respect, the notion of the abject “explains”86 the preoccupation with bodily orifices in the construction of the grotesque body: the openings and gaps in the contours of the self indicate the precariousness and conventionality of the border which can at any time collapse and annihilate the radical difference between subject and object, as the abject is, as Kristeva points out, “transnominal” and “trans-objectal.”87 The questions of orifices and bodily fluids revealing the bodily interior raise the issue of a conceptual sphere in which the metaphorics of the grotesque body 82 83 84 85 86

87

Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 13. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 14. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 10. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 71. It does not, however, mean that we can “interpret” the grotesque body, or any other notion, “through” the theory of abjection. What the affinity of terms indicates, however, is the point that this book persistently argues: the abject is yet another manifestation of the same interpretative frame which produces and sustains meanings by referring to a net of conceptualizations and images that evoke certain sets of connotations. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 11.

Asubjective Incontinence

129

and that of the abject overlap. Kristeva’s suggestive account of abjection relies upon the images of the body inside showing up and the collapse of the border between inside and outside, as if “the skin, a fragile container, no longer guaranteed the integrity of one’s ‘own and clean self’.”88 The bodily flows of urine, blood, sperm, and excrement are radically at odds with one’s “own and clean self.”89 Again, the rhetorical construction at work here is the juxtaposition of flux, incontinence and dispersion with self-containment, cleanliness, and integrity. Such a conceptualisation inscribes this binary opposition in a series of contrasts that has been explored above: the abject becomes an explication of the metaphorics of fluids epitomised by the humoural and the grotesque body, whereas the “clean and proper self” is an embodiment of the modern subjectivity as it has been described earlier in this chapter. The above analogies indicate how the contemporary theorisation of various modes of corporeality inscribes itself in the general discourse of theorising subjectivity with all its nomenclatures of flows and solidities, openness and tightness, viscosity and distance, etc. The binary opposition of the modern subject (self-identical and self-contained) versus the pre-modern body (fluid and permeable) that arises from the above deliberations asserts the existence of a prevailing mode of conceptualizing phenomena imaged as “structured” as opposed to those which characterized as “unstructured.” This bipolarity is also manifested in the abject-propre opposition, which is not inscribed in the pre-modern / modern distinction, and yet is constructed via metaphors strikingly similar to those which delineate the grotesque / classical dyad, thus referring us back to the correspondence between the discourse of modern subjectivity and individual development discussed in the initial chapters of this study. In such a mode of representation, meanings and metaphors are interconnected and mutually conditioned. These analogies could not exist in isolation, as the system they function in is auto-referential – they do not indicate an existence of some “ultimate signified”; they are only signifiers relating to other signifiers90 in the circuit of meanings based on mutual tensions and contamination of metaphors, influences of connotations and references of images.

88 89 90

Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 53. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 53. See: Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), pp. 111-117.

CHAPTER 6

Precarious Borders

The previous chapter discussed the notion of incontinence – with all its corporeal implications of incontrollable bodily fluxes – as a metaphor for the lack of selfcontainment delineating the concept of subjectivity as its radical opposition. Incontinence, as we have seen, could be analysed as a metaphorical anti-thesis of subjectivity, as the two concepts are constructed via antonymous imagery. It was in connection with the terminology of incontinence that the term abject was introduced as a notion whose rhetorical construction overlapped with the nomenclature of other embodiments of “anti-subjectivity,” that is, the humoural and the grotesque bodies. The current chapter will continue the discussion of the abject; however, it will do so from a different perspective, designating the notion of a border as its key point. The boundary will be considered here as a manifestation of the conceptual mechanisms of the modern subjectivity. The argument will proceed from the analysis of the abject as a denial of the border, and thus a contrastive counterpoint of the subject. I will then move to the concepts of pollution and contamination and analyse them as instances of the terminology of the transgression of boundaries in order to demonstrate the link between them and the concepts of the pre-subjective / pre-modern undifferentiation discussed earlier in this study. Having established the concept of the boundary as a sine qua non of modern subjectivity, the discussion will then address the notion of demarcation as a metaphor of “strengthening” or “solidifying” modern subjectivity in contrast to the pre-modern and pre-subjective fluidity that is perceived as disruptive. Finally, I will analyse the binary opposition between dispersion perceived as an epitome of pre-modern lack of subjectivity and “locatedness” as an expression of the modern discourse of bounded and self-contained entities. In her discussion of the abject, Julia Kristeva stresses what Mary Douglas had already brought forward: filth is not a quality in itself, but is always related to a boundary it crosses. It points to the vulnerability of the whole system that this boundary demarcates, exposing its frailty and constructed character.1 In the 1

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 69.

132

Chapter 6

case of subjectivity, then, the abject reveals the constructedness and liability of the unified and coherent body image which, as we have seen, is a precondition of the sense of subjectivity differentiated from the outside world. Subjectivity is (however indirectly) defined by the implicit notions of coherence and selfcontainment which imply the existence of clear borders that separate the subject from the outside world. The anti-subjective incontinence discussed in the previous chapter is thus simply the lack of demarcation. The central notion in the discourse of abjection is the apparent frailty of the boundary delineating the self and the threat of its collapse, which is identified with a threat to subjectivity. We have already pointed to the significance of the notion of creating borders, divisions, and demarcations ascribed to modern subjectivity by contemporary critical theory – manifested, for instance, in Foucault’s ideas about dividing practices, the concept of separation in Habermas, and in Giddens’ notion of continuity and integrity of the self. In her analysis of abjection, Kristeva also highlights the importance of demarcation, claiming that “separating, not touching, dividing, washing” are reactions to “the abolishment of limits and differences.”2 If, as Mary Douglas has it, “separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions,” as well as “exaggerating the difference between within and without, above and below, male and female”3 lies at the core of creating order and imposing system on an inherently untidy experience, then the abject appears as a radical opposition to any attempt to create orders and impose systems. Its nomenclature is a perfect distortion, a negative mirror reflection, of the idiom of setting borders and ordering: it “disturbs identity, system, order [...], does not respect borders, positions, rules. [It is] The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.”4 As cleanliness, according to Adeline Masquelier, has become “central to the semiotics of boundary maintenance,”5 it also should be interpreted as a projection of the most desired state of certainty and regularity, a guarantee of a stable self; and consequently, various practices of cleansing and purifying are aimed at defending the integrity of the “clean and proper self.” Due to the importance of the demarcating qualities of the abject / propre distinction, the polluting factor is often essential to the constitution and well-being of the clean centre. William A.

2 3 4 5

Kristeva, Powers of Horror, pp. 159-160. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger. An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 5. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 4. Adeline Masquelier, “Introduction,” in: Dirt, Undress, and Difference. Critical Perspective on the Body’s Surface, ed. Adeline Masquelier (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005), p. 7.

Precarious Borders

133

Cohen writes about the constructive function of dirt, pointing to the fact that “what is marked as dirty, disreputable, or excluded from official culture” is often “crucial to culture’s self-constitution,”6 because excluding heterogeneous elements means applying all the strategies of dividing, separating, etc., that is, the very processes that constitute modern structures. Such a view of modern structures emerges also from Mary Douglas’ argument: the notion of “dirt” or “pollution” can come up only in classification; its presence indicates that an effort has been taken to organise the environment. The presence of dirt signifies the existence of a system, as dirt is “matter out of place” which exists only in relation to a system that expels it. It is actually through the radical separation from amorphous, indefinite qualities that the self establishes itself as a subject. As the previous chapter suggested, the propre / abject opposition is yet another construct which fits in the narration of subjectivity. There are analogies between propre and the ideal modern subject, the discourse of the classical body, the docile body, etc, as well as the correlations between the abject and the humoural / grotesque body, the pre-subjectivity reality of the infantile union with the mother, and so on. The constitution of the clean and proper self is presented as a process of divisions and setting boundaries – a notion that has already been discussed in relation not only to the theories of Foucault and Douglas, but to the whole discourse of modernity. A significant notion of the modern narration of subjectivity is thus that of discrete natures and individual entities, with the coherent outline of the self as a central issue. The abject as a manifestation of the nomenclature of fluidity is also in radical opposition to the discourse of bounded subjectivity: not only through its “literal” affinity to bodily fluids, but even more through its conceptual construction as that which disrupts the apparent continuity and self-identity of the model modern subject and which renders it incapable of containment. Kristeva defines the abject as a heterogeneous flow, and its most dangerous quality is its tendency to disturb borders. 7 It threatens subjectivity by rendering the construct of an individual body image barely credible, and thus sows the seeds of doubt by undermining the stability of the meticulously established boundaries. The rejected abject haunts the symbolic, challenges the unity of demarcations and threatens to reveal their frailty. It reminds us of the pure materiality of our existence and the constructedness of the social structures and our subjectivities. What is more, the threat to the self-identity stems from the fact that the abject represents the “lea6

7

William A. Cohen, “Introduction,” in William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson, eds., Filth: Dirt, Disgust and Modern Life (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. xvi. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 10.

134

Chapter 6

king” quality of fluids, their resistance to self-identity and a potential for contamination of the self with “the other,” of mixing identities in crosscontamination. Since, as Białas writes, “all subjects have boundaries, and […] all egos are bounded by matrixes,”8 the collapse of the border between the body and the external world represented by abjection as well as the injection of foreign matter into the body9 represents the loss of integrity of the subject. It reflects the terror of the self “seeping” into another self, liquidating the security of one’s own clean demarcations, and thus it calls into question the very notion of subjectivity. It cracks open the clean and proper and undermines its self-identity and continuity, the prerequisites of its subjectivity. The abject is associated with dirt, filth, pollution and contamination. And the discourse of contamination – of “matter out of place” – is, in fact, the discourse of liquidizing the borders of the self. Infection and pollution are states which threaten to transfer the properties of one body into the another. The contamination / infection can be interpreted as the abolition of differentiation between 'I' and the 'other': one becomes the same as the infecting other; the distinctive subjectivity is thus threatened. Individuality, highly valued in modern discourse, is at risk when infection breaks through the borders of the self and triggers an exchange of matter. First of all, contamination reverses the process of individuation as it is described by the narrations of subjectivity. It turns the self back into a borderless state which does not value uniqueness; the self is reabsorbed into the undifferentiated mass of pre-modern amorphousness, or the organic circuit of the maternal chora. Contamination assumes the semipermeability of boundaries, the fungibility of matter characteristic for the premodern exchange of elements with the world; it expresses the primal aspiration to the “oneness of matter” that has to be radically suppressed if the subject is to enter the symbolic order of modern structures. Secondly, the collapse of boundaries implied by cross contamination means that the solid, tightly bound and self-identical individual changes into a liquid dividual.10 Dividuals are subject to divisions, open and incoherent, and prone to the unstable fluctuation of substances which brings subjective identity into question. The concept of individuality understood as in-dividuality is all about a

8 9 10

Zbigniew Białas, The Body Wall: Somatics of Travelling and Discursive Practices (Frankfurt am Mein, New York: Peter Lang Verlag, 2006), p. 45. Italics original. Białas, The Body Wall, p. 45. The concept of “divisable dividuals” and “solid individuals” appears in Sarah Lamb’s discussion of hygienic procedures in India. See: Sarah Lamb, “The Politics of Dirt and Gender: Body Techniques in Bengali India,” in: Masquelier, ed., Dirt, Undress and Difference: Critical Perspectives on the Body’s Surface, p. 220.

Precarious Borders

135

refusal to be divided and dispersed. What Bauman calls “bonding” of the solids, that is, their resistance to “separation of the atoms”11 is a manifestation of a symbolic struggle to maintain the self-identical in-dividuality of the subject. The modern “new individualism” that emerges from the ideas of Descartes and Locke implies, as Charles Taylor writes, that people should be seen as atoms: Disengagement from cosmic order meant that the human agent was no longer to be understood as an element in a larger, meaningful order. His paradigm purposes are to be discovered within. He is on his own.12

In order to become a modern subject, the self must define itself as an indivisible (in-dividual) atom (from Greek ἄτομος, atomos: indivisible) set against the liquid and contaminating continuity of matter. The association of the modern subject with the indivisible / in-dividual atom re-appears (often implicitly) throughout the aforementioned theories on modern subjectivity. Merchant, for example, refers to the mechanical restructuring of the man-universe relation as the influence of mechanical philosophy which “supposed the unchanging constituents of reality to be solid, impenetrable, corporeal atoms that retained their identity through change.”13 She also claims that order, the key term in the new modern mechanical vision of the universe, was attained “through an emphasis on the motion of indivisible parts subject to mathematical laws and the rejection of unpredictable animistic sources of change.”14 In Capra’s discussion of the Newtonian model of the universe, the emphasis is placed on the representation of the world in terms of small, solid, indestructible and impenetrable particles based on the atomistic model of matter.15 Similarly, the much-exploited concept of Cartesian identification of reason with res cogitans as opposed to res extensa also reverberates with the apparent phobia of a dispersed, fragmentary form of existence and the preference for the indivisible atomistic sense of self. In relation to the notion of the boundary as an indication of self-contained subjectivity, the Cartesian account of the body appears – in terms of its metaphorical construction – to be imbued with the sense of fragmentariness of corporeal structures and their lack of overall unity. We could thus suggest that res co11 12 13 14 15

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), p. 2. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 193. Carolyne Merchant, Death of Nature, Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (London: Wildwood House, 1982), p. 201. Merchant, The Death of Nature, p. 216. See: Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point: Science, Society and the Rising Culture (London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1983), pp. 51-52.

136

Chapter 6

gitans is rhetorically constructed as bounded and fixed, whereas res extensa appears as boundless and dispersed. This is clearly visible in the passage of Meditations where Descartes evokes a series of images (of material things) to compare himself to: the subject, according to Descartes, is not “this assemblage of limbs called the human body,” “a thin and penetrating air [that] spread through its members,’” or “a wind, a breath of air, a vapour.”16 What the subject defines himself against is the image of volatility and lack of a solid structure, which automatically brings to our mind the abovementioned pre-subjective image of dispersion or interplay of loosely connected fragments that connect easily with other elements in the world, or the Lacanian “motor unco-ordination of the neonatal months” entailing “anatomical incompleteness.”17 The Cogito is thus constructed in opposition to dividuality and becomes defined as a self-contained and auto-referential individual entity. Descartes also stresses the autoreferentiality of the mind, which, “in conceiving, turns as it were towards itself and considers some one of the ideas it has within itself.”18 The Cogito appears therefore as turned towards itself, and hence clearly delineated from the surrounding world, and the opposition between res cogitans and res extensa is built upon the basis of a dialectics of oppositions between “clear and distinct” and “unclear and blurred.” The atomistic in-dividuality of the modern subject is thus another projection of the ideal of demarcation, self-identity and coherence. An in-dividual subject with solid borders does not spill or contaminate the other with itself, neither can it be contaminated or seeped into. It resists the mixing of properties. Significantly, our notion of in-dividuality implies another dimension of the abovementioned concept of propre. The “own and clean self” signifies the self which is not only delineated by clear-cut boundaries, but also one that is “owned” by the subject: the French word propre in its contemporary use means “clean,” but also, as it is etymologically derived from the Latin prioprius (meaning one’s own, characteristic, proper) indicates ownership and possession – hence the English “proprietor.”19 Thus, cross-contamination, the mixing of properties of different selves, denies property – the contaminated self does not belong to its proprietor 16

17

18 19

René Descartes, “Meditations on the First Philosophy in which the Existence of God and the Real Distinction between the Soul and the Body are Demonstrated,” in: Discourse on Method and the Meditations, trans. F. E. Sutcliffe (London: Penguin Books, 1988), p. 105. Jacques Lacan, "The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience" in Écrits. A Selection, trans. Alana Sheridan (Routledge: London and New York, 2001), pp. 4-5. Descartes, “Meditations,” p. 151. See: Leon S. Roudiez, “Translator’s Note” in: Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. viii.

Precarious Borders

137

anymore. What is more, the proprietor is no longer the subject – the border of the propre has collapsed and undermined his in-dividuality. Pollution, contamination, uncontrolled seepage – all these notions are used to signify borderlessness and “dispersion of atoms” and imply the loss of one’s identity in the other. Inextricably connected with the notion of dirt – matter out of place, as has been noted above – pollution implies a failure of the self to be kept safely “in itself,” “in place,” so to speak. Contamination is what appears in the interplay of form and surrounding formlessness20 when entities fail to maintain their self-containment and seep across boundaries into areas that are not their own, infesting other areas and thus depriving them of their own and clean identity. Contamination is thus very close to infection in the sense that it represents the refusal of self-containment and so threatens the very notion of subjectivity. All the notions previously discussed as constructed in opposition to the modern subject can be also analysed in terms of their potential affinity to contamination. I have already explored the link between the notions of motherhood and fluidity, pointing to the shifting, formless, homogenizing qualities ascribed to both sides of the simile. The same notional trajectories also create the association of femininity with infection and contamination which is based upon the representations of flow, formlessness and seepage discussed above. This conceptual correlation, due to its apparently pejorative constitution, is explored by feminist theoreticians such as Grosz and Kristeva. The juxtaposition of “borderless fluidity” and bounded self-containment is embodied in the contrast between the presubjective maternal continuity and the modern sense of individual subjectivity. The maternal borderlesness is manifested in the metaphorical construction of the feminine body as “formlessness that engulfs all form, a disorder that threatens all order,” a mode of seepage lacking self-containment21 that refuses to stay within its own skin. Such a conceptual frame is linked, according to Grosz, with the identification of women “with infection, with disease, with the idea of festering putrefaction.”22 Grosz writes about the construction of feminine bodies as those which “seep not only outside and beyond the body, forming a kind of zone of contamination, but also into all other regions of the body [...].”23 In a more moderate manner, Mary Douglas writes about the association of femininity with

20 21 22 23

Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 130. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 203. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 206. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 206.

138

Chapter 6

pollution based on the construction of woman as an “imperfect vessel.”24 Kristeva, as has been said, also points to the correlation between the abject and the infecting capacity of “feminine and maternal defilement” associated mostly with the menstrual flow.25 The identification of feminine physiology with fluidity and lack of self-containment (implying the possibility of contamination) appears also in the discourse of grotesque / classical bodies discussed in the previous chapter: woman is naturally grotesque – which is to say, open, permeable, effluent, leaky. Man is naturally whole, closed, opaque, self-contained. To be otherwise is both shameful and feminizing.26

Again, the image of clear delineation versus “blurry borders” becomes a site of contrast representing the juxtaposition of proper subjectivity and the presubjective maternal merger. Bakhtin stresses that the classical body, which is constructed as a token of a perfectly impenetrable, “male” subject, shows “no signs of inner life, fecundation, childhood and pregnancy.”27 The grotesque body, with all its bulges, openings, and lack of self-containment, appears as not only aligned with the feminine body, but also as an open, permeable container that threatens the world with contamination. The fear of “sinking irretrievably into the mother” is thus a fear of contamination with the other, the mixing of properties that have been painfully separated. Just like gaps and orifices discussed in the previous chapter, the bulges and protrusions of the grotesque body signify its problems with self-containment. According to Susan Bordo, the image of blurry, loose, unsolid, excess flesh that is not clearly delineated against the world is coded in Western culture as a metaphor “for anxiety about internal processes of control – uncontained desire, unrestrained hunger, uncontrolled impulse.”28 In a body with unclear margins, the border between what is within and what is outside seems to blur, its visible biologicality revealing the organic nature of the human existence. If the clean, opaque, and continuous surface of the classical body stands for the self-mastery and self-control of the modern subject, the uneven and porous surface of the grotesque body is a manifestation of its lack of self-discipline.

24 25 26 27 28

Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 156. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 71. Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed. Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 92. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 320. Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body ( Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1995), p. 189.

Precarious Borders

139

The notion of the boundary of the body also implies self-containment and continence which, as we have seen, serve as qualities of modern subjectivity. Anthony Giddens stresses that being a competent modern agent involves continuous bodily control: Bodily self-management […] has to be so complete and constant that all individuals are vulnerable to moments of stress when competence breaks down – and the framework of ontological security is threatened.29

Bodily control is thus linked with bodily, as well as subjective, integrity. All the moments of vulnerability, of bodily incontinence and lack of self-containment are manifestations of incomplete subjectification of the self. When the body opens up and loses its integrity, it questions the continuity of its borders: for instance bleeding, as Paster argues, is constructed in the early modern discourse as a “shameful token of uncontrol [...], a failure of physical self-mastery.”30 The emphasis put on the excretory functions in the grotesque body is also an exemplification of its symbolic alignment with the pre-subjective lack of containment. The clean and proper body’s development is directly linked with toilet training and the regulation of bodily fluids.31 Thus, a body that carelessly defecates, secretes fluids, opens up, gapes with open orifices, refuses to stay within its borders – that is, one that shares all the qualities of the grotesque body – represents the pre-subjective lack of selfcontrol characteristic of infantile amorphousness. Contamination perceived as a threat to subjectivity and a transgression of the clear-cut categories of self / other is also conveyed by the image of one entity seeping into the other, invading it, and permeating its boundaries. The image of ruptures that break through the continuity of the bounded self and undermine this continuity are suggestively used in many accounts dealing with the self / other relation. Kristeva describes the symptoms of abjection: “a language that gives up, a structure within the body, a non-assimilable alien, a monster, a tumor, a cancer.”32 The anxiety of “an alien in the self” has to be considered as a typically modern expression of the phobia of tenuous boundaries: the mingling and blending of identities is an oft-recreated image in discussions of pre-modern experience, but at the same time is considered unacceptable and unconceivable for the modern state of mind.33 Images of the hatching self of the early modern 29 30 31 32 33

Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 57. Paster, The Body Embarrassed, p. 92. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 206. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 11. See, for example, Dalia Judovitz’s discussion of Montaigne’s notion of friendship: Dalia Judovitz, Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes. The Origins of Modernity

140

Chapter 6

period which still seems to fluctuate between the sense of individual subjectivity and the merger with the world, of the pulsating subject continuously re-absorbed by the primal undifferentiation only to re-emerge again in its flickering subjectivity, appear in numerous accounts of the birth of modern subjectivity.34 A very evocative example of this mode of conceptualization appears in Dalia Judovitz’s discussion of Montaigne’s account of a kidney stone disquisition, in which he alternately situates the stone as an alien body and as a part of “himself”: The body is here depicted and experienced liminally, both as self and other, in a conflict that marks indistinguishably the site of sexuality and excretion, pleasure and pain. Montaigne’s identity thus emerges through the play of similarity and difference which renders almost indistinguishable his proper self from those already incorporated within himself. The attempts to delimit otherness represented here by expulsion or incorporation, turns back upon the self as a violent disruption that prevents any reappropriation of the self as a proper entity and objective image. The self, created by the movement of similarity and difference, is incapable of constituting itself as a separate and proper entity, in particular as an entity distinguishable from its own medium, that of the discursive body of the essay.35

It is only with the development and “congealing” of the modern notion of subjectivity that the body and all elements “alien to the self” can be clearly distinguished. What characterises the modern discourse of bodily invasion is the terminology of crossing boundaries and uncontrolled seepages. The notion of the abject as the “alien in the self” or a cancerous tumour perfectly illustrates its liminal nature. Similarly, in her Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag analyses the prevalent Western discourse of disease which reverberates with the metaphors of blurring boundaries between the self and non-self. The horror of cancer, apart from its mortality, is the imagery of uncontrolled proliferation, of seeping that does not respect internal divisions of the body. Sontag stresses the fact that, unlike many other diseases, cancer is metaphorically perceived as a disease of space rather than of time. Whereas many diseases are con-

34

35

(Cambridge, New York, New Rochelle, Melbourne, Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 16-17. Such is, for example, the prevailing tone of Bordo’s discussion of Descartes’s struggle towards autonomy. See: Susan Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity. Essays on Cartesian Culture (New York: State University of New York Press, 1987), pp. 33-44. The notion of instability of the newly-emerged subject founded upon the provisional body image is also a recurring theme in Lacan’s notion of the mirror phase. See: Jacques Lacan, "The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience" in Écrits. A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 1-8. Judovitz, Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes, p. 16.

Precarious Borders

141

ceptualised in temporal terms, the main metaphors of cancer are topographical: “cancer ‘spreads’ or ‘proliferates’ or is ‘diffused’.”36 The spatial dimension of cancer is probably its most horrific feature: cancer is a disease of growth,37 disrespecting the generally accepted demarcations. Even cancer which does not affect the body surface and cannot be seen as a protruding bulge is often imaged as a lump, bump, protuberance, or “morbid swelling.”38 In terms of its relation to body boundaries, it is perceived as an invasion of the space of the self by the other, an enemy: “[i]n cancer, the patient is ‘invaded’ by alien cells, which multiply, causing an atrophy or blockage of bodily functions.”39 By colonising the space of the body from within, this “alien in the self” threatens the integrity of individual subjectivity. Cancer is seen as “alive, a fetus with its own will,”40 something beyond the control of its “host.” Generally speaking, the modern discourse on disease, injury, and disorder, just like the discourse of pre-subjectivity, is very often imbued with metaphors of disruptive fluidity. In terms of the self / other relation, cancer is as close to the abject as any contagious disease – both give the invaded patient a new identity41 questioning the delimitation of the propre. The “alien” aspect of a contagious disease comes from the other, whereas in the case of cancer it comes from the self. In the case of the “alien in the self,” the binary opposition of self / other collapses, leaving us with something unspeakable and horrific – the heterogeneous aspect in the self, which at the same time does not possess the qualities of the object. What is more, sickness carries with it the risk of sinking back into the pre-subjective continuity with the other, as it annihilates the subject’s individuality (by means of infection and contamination), but also because it often signifies injuries – the openings of the body revealing its interior. Wounds violate the integrity of our skin, so an open wound – the epitome of filth, the abject and disorder – threatens the body with infection which spreads through its openings: it threatens to transfer the properties of one body (illness) into the other body. The correlation between open wounds and the abject is also manifested in the fact that all the ruptures in the surface of the body break the continuity of the propre; the abject shows up, according to Kristeva, when the body inside is revealed.42 This brings us back to the discussion of the humoural / grotesque body which is 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Picador USA, 2001), pp. 14-15. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, p. 12. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, p. 10. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, p. 14. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, p. 13. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, p. 126. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 53.

142

Chapter 6

portrayed as open; the skin does not constitute its boundary; it “goes out to meet the world.”43 On the other hand, its opposite – the classical body – is portrayed as “[o]paque, closed off, finished, a body all surface and no interior,”44 therefore denying the possibility of wounding. The concept of the threat of revealing the bodily interior and its relation to the body border leads us to another concept this chapter seeks to explore, namely, the strategies of solidification and demarcation as manifestations of the mechanisms of subjectivity construction. A suggestive illustration of such a conceptualisation appears in Jonathan Sawday’s study of the anatomical culture of the seventeenth century. He interprets the early modern conflict between the body’s interior and exterior as an instance of the “confrontation between the ‘grotesque’ and the ‘classical’.”45 With the onset of anatomy, the early modern bodily interior appears as grotesque with all its implications of incontinence and amorphousness. The open body must therefore be sealed and bounded by the mechanisms which would keep it in place and prevent a dangerous dispersion. In Sawday’s discourse, the inside of a human body appears to be vast and abyssal (or even abysmal). Opening the body means discovering its mysterious internal processes and machineries, which seem so much out of control for the categorising modern mind that they must be perceived as horrific. The bodily interior discovered by anatomy seems, according to Sawday, to “operate according to its own laws of hydraulic motion,”46 and therefore transgress the modern paradigms of containment and measurability: The movement of gallstones, blood, and phlegm seems to challenge the laws of reason and the experience of observation. In a similar fashion the body’s ability to excrete substances, or generate new substances from the interior casts a shadow over human perception.47

With its inexplicable mechanics and shadowy links with uncurbed nature, the body turns out to be disquietingly infinite. No longer a safely measurable space, it “emerges as a reservoir of immense size and capacity.”48 Such a gaping abyss threatens the outside world with its endless absorbability, but also with its productive capabilities.

43 44 45 46 47 48

Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 26. Paster, The Body Embarrassed, p. 15. Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 19. Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, p. 18. Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, p. 18. Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, p. 19.

Precarious Borders

143

To emphasize the bodily vastness, Sawday even mentions a long tradition, dating back to medieval times and still alive in the seventeenth century, of considering any body vermin and parasites as originating inside the body, independent of any hygienic processes or devices. Vigarello interprets such ideas as a still vivid echo of the medieval projection illustrating the omnipresence of death in the living body.49 This very aspect of the alleged ability of the body to produce elements that are not “bodily” also preoccupies other critics. For example, Carolyn Merchant mentions the sixteenth-century theory about the origin of vermin, snakes, and frogs out of such substances as mud, human marrow, or the hair of menstruating woman, which she contrasts with the discourse of the new science in which “the generation of new beasts can be strictly observable and therefore controlled.”50 The reason for such preoccupation might be the fact that the apparent pre-scientific belief in bodily “productivity” seems to correlate with the conceptualisation of the pre-modern “oneness of matter.” The lack of distinction between the proper body and the non-self becomes a manifestation of a certain continuity between what was coming from the body and the entities coming from the “world.” The bodily interior appears to be mysterious, dangerous and out of control with its slithering worms, dripping with mucous, pus and blood, belching its venomous gases and seething with its own strange internal mechanics, hydraulics, and gravities. As if to spite the penchant for finding regular patterns in the universe, the internal processes of the body often escape explanation. Instead of being a finite, clear circuit, the inside of the body appears as a vast abyss with its “gloomy vaults, unsounded wells and panting furnaces, lakes of blood and urine”51; it seems to generate substances that appear out of nowhere; it pumps and circulates its fluids and it is disturbing with its overwhelming borderlessness. The grotesqueness of the body is thus created by its fungibility with the world, as well as its lack of any self-containment whatsoever. Such a borderless and dispersive entity calls for demarcation that can also function as a manifestation of the self’s integrity. We are reminded of Michel Foucault’s notion of disciplinary procedures – they are, after all, aimed at maintaining the “continence” of corporeal matter so that it remains subjugated to the rule of reason and therefore does not threaten subjectivity. One of the main disciplinary procedures Foucault discusses is the distribution of individuals in space. Characteristically, the terminology he uses to describe the modern modes 49 50 51

See: Georges Vigarello, Le propre et le sale. L’hygiène du corps depuis le Moyen Âge (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 2005), p. 51. Merchant, The Death of Nature, p. 183. Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, p. 19.

144

Chapter 6

of spatial distribution is imbued with the imagery of policing individual bodily fluidity: the central notions are those of “enclosure,” “location,” and “partitioning.”52 The key principle for the division of disciplinary space is to make it “cellular”: [o]ne must eliminate the effects of imprecise distributions, the uncontrolled disappearance of individuals, their diffuse circulation, their unusable and dangerous coagulation.53

The most striking aspect of this passage is the physiological terminology: what is perceived as disturbing and threatening is the apparent disruptive liquidity of “human traffic,” the pulsating flux of undifferentiated mass that so closely resembles the organic and unruly seeping of the human interior. “Diffuse circulation,” “imprecise distributions,” and “unusable and dangerous coagulations” resemble the uncontrollable and unbounded fungibility of the humoural body and its interactions with the organic universe. Cellularisation of space, in turn, is close to the cellularisation of the body which is the task of the modern anatomist, whose aim is to discipline the unruly and vast somatics by means of mapping, demarcations, and divisions. It is only through the disciplinary demarcations, divisions and partitioning of space that circulations become channelled and fluidities curbed. Cellular space can be interpreted as an equivalent of the cellular organism: the body which is not only delineated by external boundaries that separate it from the world, but which is also internally organised into compartments which – at least symbolically – seem to curb any uncontrollable seepages and thus guarantee the self-identity of substances. Analogically, Foucault’s description of a port as a place of potentially disruptive circulation that has to be controlled in order to prevent “contagion” and “forbidden circulations” can serve as a metaphor for the compulsion to control what is perceived as borderless flux. A controlling mechanism must be introduced “that pins down and partitions; it must provide a hold over this whole mobile, swarming mass, by dissipating the confusion of illegality and evil.”54 Gail Paster also remarks – in the context of the scientific turn of the humoural body into the “modern” body – that the preoccupation of early modern science with anatomy was perceived as taking attention away from the fluid constituents of the body and as being a fixation on the solids.55 If, as we have seen, the early modern discourse on the bodily interior is one of anxiety over its apparent liquidi52 53 54 55

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish and The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 143. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 143. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 144. Paster, The Body Embarrassed, pp. 66-67.

Precarious Borders

145

ty and borderlessness, the discourse of anatomy might be perceived as yet another manifestation of the compensatory strategy that followed the rejection of the humoural model of the universe. If the inside of the body is perceived as grotesque, anatomy is an attempt to make it more classical by incorporating it into the system of mechanical modern structures and representations. It outlines internal links and connections within the human body which replace the precarious humoural connections between organs and elements in the world. By pointing to the correlations between bodily parts, fluids, organs, bones, etc, it presents the body not as some chaotic matter becoming dispersed into “liquefaction, or jelly-like viscosity,”56 but rather as a deliberate and coherent structure, an efficient mechanism in which all the elements are designed to interlock and cooperate. The organhumour-element connection that transgresses individual borders is now gradually replaced with the organ-organ connection within the frames of a finite structure, which constitutes the grounds for modern medicine and science. Another important issue is the question of representation. As an object of analysis, the “untidy” interior undergoes a procedure of schematisation, which deprives it of its depths and irregularities so that it can fit the atlas of anatomy. The “gloomy vaults, unsounded wells and panting furnaces” are compressed into a system of charts, graphs and schematised figures which make them representable. Thus the unspeakable, pre-nominal, organic entity becomes entirely subordinated to language (an ally of subjectivity, as we remember) which explains it and makes sense of it. By way of digression, it should be mentioned that the process of anatomisation is conceptually very close to the process of mapping newly explored geographical territory. Both processes entail an image of appropriation and colonisation, as the early modern body was perceived, according to Sawday, as a territory, an “undiscovered country, a location which demanded from its explorers skills which seemed analogous to those displayed by the heroic voyagers across the terrestrial globe.”57 If the body was seen a terra incognita, anatomists acquired a status similar to heroic discoverers, geographers, voyagers and cartographers, becoming mediators between the disturbing interior available only to the “disciplined eye” and the ordered language of science and control. The confluence of terms between the atlas of anatomy and the geographical atlas cannot be coincidental: the body, like a newly discovered wilderness, has to be mapped, named, divided and demarcated in order to enter the modern discourse.58 56 57 58

Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, p. 30. Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, p. 23. For the somatics / semantics relation in the context of postcolonial criticism, see: Białas, The Body Wall.

146

Chapter 6

Another striking manifestation of the discourse of “solidification” is the constant characterisation of the modern self-world relation as a conflict between “locatedness” and dispersal. As has been demonstrated, the prevailing metaphor of the pre-modern body is that of diffusion and dispersal, whereas the modern mode of interaction with the world is characterized by “locatedness,” implying the “compactedness” and density of the self guaranteed by its internal structure and tight boundaries. The aspects of existence that are now perceived as internalised (such as, for instance, personality traits) are presented in the discourse on pre-modernity as integrated into the cosmos in the pre-modern world characterized by the “oneness of substance”: The theory of humours depended on a conception of ontic logos. When this goes, we are forced to a new, sharper localization. Melancholy feelings are now ‘in’ the mind.59

The anxiety over the self’s connection with outer reality is then seen as modern, as the medieval imagery is rather that of the universe seen as an “organism” and human as part of it, and the relations between human and the world as based on mutual dependence rather than exclusivity. The key difference between the modern experience and the experience preceding it is, according to Bordo, the sense of “locatedness, or situatedness [...] of self in space and time.”60 The emphasis on “locatedness” is in an obvious way connected with a sense of a clear division between the interior and exterior. This opposition is apparently established only with Descartes’s shift in the source of hegemony from senses to reason and the effort to gain mastery of oneself.61 Taylor explores the notion of modern inwardness as connected with the self’s embededness in space, describing it as a situation in which ideas and valuations are no longer situated in the world, but only in subjects.62 The notion of the modern “disenchantment” of the world, or human disengagement from the world, is according to this view founded precisely upon an understanding of subject and object as separable entities: Scientific consciousness is alienated consciousness: there is no ecstatic merger with nature, but rather total separation from it. Subject and object are always seen in opposition to each other.63

59 60 61

62 63

Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 189. Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 62. See, for example: Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Prineton University Press, 1979); Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 143; Bordo, Flight to Objectivity, p. 51. See: Taylor, Sources of the Self, pp. 185-191. Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univeristy Press, 1981), p. 17.

Precarious Borders

147

The transition from medieval to modern Western culture is characterized by the process of internalisation of the self in which the very essence of the self becomes bounded, or, as Richard Rorty argues, becomes the “inner arena” of the human mind.64 Its “innerness” is expressed in the sense that the consciousness is seen as a faculty of the inner self, res cogitans, rather than res extensa, the external world / body; the body becomes the anti-thesis of the integrity and containment of the mind. The containment of the mind is epitomised by the borders of the body and their role in keeping the body together and maintaining its continence and continuity. Body boundaries reflect the systematic character of body-construct: ostensibly natural, they must in fact be arduously delimited and protected, as otherwise they threaten to reveal the “frailty of the symbolic order.” The quest for firm body margins is thus a quest for the subject’s self-identity and coherence – the qualities which moderate its modes of interactions with the outside world. Firm body boundaries metaphorically protect the self against self-contamination and merging with the other, establishing it as a solid structure against unruly fluidity – this “borderline state, disruptive of the solidity of things, entities and objects.”65 A very interesting example of the quest for firm body margins, or for firming the body’s precarious borders, might be seen in the whole construction of the notion of hygiene as a policy of strengthening the body’s boundaries and thus protecting its self-identity. Recalling Douglas’s identification of dirt as “matter out of place,” and the discourse of cross-contamination constructed as a threat to self-identical subjects, the connection between the idiom of subjectivity and the history of hygienic procedures ought not be overlooked. An evocative illustration of this connection can be found in Georges Vigarello’s analysis of modern hygienic procedures, as well as in the accounts of Mary Douglas, Norbert Elias and Rodolphe el-Khoury discussed earlier. For that matter, the bodily interior is constantly characterised as a vulnerable entity which is not sufficiently protected by its external borders, and, what is more, is not a coherent unity, but an open vessel with leaky boundaries. Although he does not directly refer to the notion of subjectivity, the prevalent tone of Vigarello’s discussion is one of concern to strenghten the precarious body borders and anxiety over fluidity. His historical research seems to be informed by the dialectics of culture (linked with structures, impenetrability, selfidentity) versus nature (amorphousness, blurring with the other, crosscontamination), which inscribes his study into the overall argument of this book about the mutual dependence between contemporary discourses on the body and 64 65

See: Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 195.

148

Chapter 6

those on modern subjectivity. The story of modern hygiene appears as another version of the narrative of the body’s solidification and defence against the external world. The medieval images of public baths where naked bodies seem to swarm in borderless and liquid continuity66 are perfectly aligned with the images of pre-modern society as an undifferentiated mass dispersing in viscous borderlessness and merging with each other and with the humoural world. Then, in the context of the early modern rejection of the maternal / humoural union, the anxiety of precarious body boundaries is reflected in the construction of the body as a “porous and fragile envelope,”67 vulnerable to the unpredictability of external conditions – not a safe embryo in the maternal universe anymore, but not yet a tight and opaque machine body, either. The fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury presumption of the weakness of the body’s surface and the porousness of the skin is supposed to constitute the grounds of the early modern aversion towards bathing. Water and warmth were believed to open up the pores and ooze in through skin, making the body susceptible to plague.68 If the semipermeable bodily container was to retain its individuality and separateness, its boundaries had to be protected “artificially.” Vigarello refers, for instance, to the practice of “sealing” the baby’s skin by clogging the pores with special powders, mixtures and pastes which were supposed to strengthen and protect the penetrable surface against any attack from the outside,69 and to the special kind of clothing worn during times of plague – these garments, like “perfected skin,” were supposed to protect the porous body against invisible invasion.70 If we now relate these examples to the overall discussion of the prevalent modes of conceptualising the development of subjectivity, we will we able to observe how they are inscribed in the notions discussed here so far. The early modern anxiety over the porousness of the skin, and the phobia about substances oozing in and leaking out, reflect the transition from the undifferentiated humoural world in which the human body is intermingled with elements in boundless continuity to the mechanical world marked by the death of “mother nature” and the subsequent mistrust of the “natural world” coupled with the reliance on artifice. The image of the early modern body which emerges from such accounts is a picture of an entity not yet endowed with the compactness and density that

66

67 68 69 70

See: Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, ed. E. Dunning, J. Goudsblom, S. Mennel, trans. E. Jephcott (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), pp. 139-142; Vigarello, Le propre et le sale, pp. 37-40. Paster, The Body Embarrassed, p. 12. Vigarello, Le propre et le sale, p. 16. Vigarello, Le propre et le sale, p. 24. Vigarello, Le propre et le sale, p. 18.

Precarious Borders

149

characterizes the ideal modern self embodied in the Bakhtinian classical body. Its borders are not stable and tight enough to protect it against re-merging with the world, or to guarantee its self-identity and sovereignty, so it resembles the ephemeral flickering of the subject / object distinction of the mirror phase. It strives towards separation and independence which might be accomplished by proper demarcation of the self against the symbiotic flux and exchange of elements with the world. The mechanical practices of policing the boundaries of the self, such as anatomy and hygiene, are thus aimed at its solidification. So is the nomenclature of the body-machine and modern organised structures. The normalising discourse of modernity, as we have seen, replaces the premodern amorphousness of the self-world relation with clear and distinct relations based on mechanical and mathematical principles. The Cartesian bodymachine is, as Foucault writes, a “body that is manipulated, shaped, trained, which obeys, responds, becomes skilful [...],”71 and is also a perfect embodiment of the seventeenth-century obsession with objectification, preventability and delineation. This body presents itself as more secure and predictable than the unknown land of the “natural” body; “[t]the mechanical body dispelled doubt, uncertainty and indecision.”72 The imperatives of instrumentation and artifice are often presented (in Foucault, Sawday, Merchant, Capra, and others) as the most common indicators of regulating bodily practices: “the body as a mechanism was now itself subject to mechanism, a technique, a field of productive labour which relied on ingenious inventions and instrumentation.”73 The mechanisation of the body is yet another instance of a “compensatory strategy” after the separation from the maternal cosmos – a conceptual construct widely used in ecological and feminist critique of Western culture, but also implicitly present in the overall discourse of contemporary critique of modernity.74 In terms of its metaphorical construction, the condensation, congealing and solidification discussed in this chapter are linked with what Luce Irigaray would describe as a denial of “the most archaic in me, the fluid.”75 They are also related to Elizabeth Grosz’s notion of the abandonment of the phenomenological relation in favour of “externalization, medicalization, solidification,” coupled with “a reduction of the fluid to the solid, the establishment of a boundary that

71 72 73 74 75

Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 136. Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, p. 32. Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, p. 33. See: Capra, The Turning Point, p. 25. Luce Irigaray, Ethique de la différence sexuelle (Paris: Minuit 1984), p. 147, quoted after Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 104.

150

Chapter 6

congeals, phallicizes.”76 As we have seen, the prevalent narration of subjectivity is built upon an image of the abandonment of the amorphous, liquid undifferentiation in favour of the solid and bounded structures. In other words, to become a subject, the self has to congeal, harden, and develop clear-cut boundaries. The imagery of fluids implicitly delineates the notional frame of the reverse of subjectivity, which is beautifully expressed by Iris Young: Fluids, unlike objects, have no definite borders; they are unstable [...]. Fluids surge and move, and a metaphysics that thinks being as fluid would tend to privilege the living, moving, pulsing over the inert dead matter of the Cartesian world view.77

76 77

Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 199. Iris Marion Young, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 192-3.

Conclusions

The argument of this book proceeded from the assumption that the general way of telling the “stories of subjectivity” – no matter whether it concerns the origins of the historical concept of the self, or the individual development of a human being as a subject – is constructed via similar images. In its “standardised” version, the story of subjectivity begins with a “great divide” embodied by the awakening of a new modern sense of personal singularity, cutting off the “primitive” tribal mentality, or with a perception of one’s own self as separate from the world. The metaphor at work here is that of parturition, breaking off one’s continuity with a sphere that is symbolically coded as maternal, epitomized by the image of a nurturing universe, immersion in the body, or the actual sense of union with the mother’s body. The reason for demonstrating all these correspondences in the initial chapter was to point to a very significant concurrence in their conceptual construction: since the maternal / feminine element has been traditionally associated with fluidity, the “great divide” is always a story of emerging from what is characterised as liquid and undifferentiated in order to undertake a quest towards solidification and differentiation. This common ground has been identified as a certain construct made up by the conceptual images of solidity and self-containment as the notions which define subjectivity and, consequently, the nomenclature of fluidity / incontinence is employed as the anti-thesis of subjectivity. In relation to this imagery I have endeavoured to establish those aspects of modern subjectivity that have emerged as significant in contemporary critique by demonstrating how both the psychoanalytical discourse and the theories of modernity operate within the image of an individuality which develops out of the “undifferentiated maternal unity” marked by borderlessness and embedded in corporeality. The imagery of the transition from the undifferentiated reality of the Middle Ages into the emergence of separate self in the modern era relies, as the second and third chapter show, on breaking the mythical unity between the pre-modern universe and man. This detachment marks the beginning of subjectivity, but also

152

Conclusions

sets the self in opposition to the world; the mother becomes the first other; the newly detached individual needs to accept the objective laws of the masculine system, based on logic, meaning and binary oppositions. The construction of “pre-subjective undifferentiation,” relies, as the fourth and fifth chapters argue, on the terminology of fluidity and amorphousness in the construction of early stages of human development, as well as on the image of the medieval constitution of man in terms of “humoural” connections with the universe. The constitution of subjectivity is identified with individuation out of the undifferentiated amalgam matter. The modern self separated from the universe can construct the world as an entity to be discovered and controlled within a clear-cut hierarchical and systematic frame. The quest for “solid structures,” described in the sixth chapter as a metaphorical reflection of the ideal “modern subject,” appears to be a product of metaphorical categories of self-identity, selfcontainment, and continuity. This symbolic inscription is traced in the discourse of body boundaries: the Bakhtinian notions of the opposition between the classical and the grotesque body, theories concerning cleanliness and contamination, the symbolic construction of the bodily interior and exterior, sheds a new light on the metaphorical construction of subjectivity in the discourse of philosophy. A key theme of this discussion has been the assumption that the cognitive model of modern subjectivity is to a large extent conditioned by the conceptualisation of such notions as compactness, density, tightness, and solidity. These notions, primarily identified with corporeality and materiality, are constitutive for the categories which have not been manifestly classified as “bodily” by the traditional critical discourse, such as the modern self and the Cartesian cogito. That said, the argument has addressed the parallels between the conceptual construction of subjectivity and that of the well-bounded human body, following the postulate that the spatial imagery of the boundaries of the body epitomizes not only the Western discourse of corporeality, but also many prevalent ideas about the self and its relations with the outside world. In other words, what the foregoing discussion has aimed to indicate is the fact that one prevalent idea of “modern subjectivity” is in fact a language construct, an image that we grasp because it is described by means of nomenclatures of the body. At the same time, the discourse on modern bodily practices appears to be highly influenced by the story of subjectivity as it is told in postmodern critique: the docile body described by Foucault, the body striving to establish its boundaries by means of hygienic procedures seen in Vigarello and Elias, the corporeal divisions and demarcations Mary Douglas writes about in the context of creating social structures and orders – all these comply with the narration of a “great divide,” and both complement and reinforce it. The relation between the two discourses – that which creates the modern body and that which constructs the modern sub-

Conclusions

153

ject – is thus an arrangement of reciprocal influences and tensions, in which one term is constantly created and redefined by the other. Such assumptions locate this dissertation in the theoretical position that conceptualises the body / subject relation in terms of language and cultural inscriptions, thus deconstructing the “essentialist” dimension of these notions. By pointing to the mutual dependence of the concepts of “body boundaries” and “subjectivity,” my discussion denies any of them the right to primacy: these complex issues are presented as conceptual constructs, products of certain mechanisms of fabrication and distribution of meaning that are given sense and unity only in relation to each other. Bodies appear to be acknowledged, given coherence and delineated within a certain frame of reference, a discourse that regulates the production and distribution of meanings. Bodies themselves become cultural figures: [f]ood, dieting, exercise, and movement provide meanings, values, norms, and ideals that the subject actively ingests, incorporating social categories into the physical interior. Bodies speak, without necessarily talking, because they become coded with signs. They speak social codes. They become intextuated, narrativized; simultaneously, social code, laws, norms, and ideals become incarnated.1

Not only is thus subjectivity an effect of transcribing corporeal terminology upon the notion of the self; but also the body is furthermore a product of inscription that reflects the dominant trajectory of subjectivity. Thus, it cannot be assumed that the notion of subjectivity is a linguistic map reproducing the discourse primary to it – namely, that of the body. What this book proposes instead is the idea of a mutual interdependence of these two discourses and their equally nonontological status, their constructedness and dependence on the categories of language that frame them. My analysis has focused on studying the relation between subjectivity and corporeality as it is presented by the postmodern critique of the so-called project of modernity. Assuming that the body – as a product of cultural inscriptions – can be treated as a “text of culture” has allowed us to apply the terminology traditionally associated with corporeality to the examination of the values central for the modern discourse. At the same time, by reversing the process, we have traced the nomenclature of modern subjectivity used by contemporary critical theory to trace it in the theories concerning material culture. The mutual dependence of the embodied subject and the subjectified body is described by Elizabeth Grosz, who claims that bodies become

1

Elizabeth Grosz, “Refiguring Lesbian Desire,” in: Time, Space and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 35.

154

Conclusions positioned by various cultural narratives and discourses, which are themselves embodiments of culturally established canons, norms, and representational forms, so that they can be seen as living narratives, narratives not always even usually transparent to themselves.2

Not only are the terms traditionally identified with subjectivity, such as agency, consciousness, sense of identity, etc., seen as effects of corporeal inscription, but also the body itself – the living biological organism – gives coherence and meaning through the process of inscription. Such a reciprocal co-creation of the notions of body and subjectivity is also an a postulate constantly underpinning the above discussion. In its attempt to show the “universal” pattern detectable in the story of subjectivity, this argument by no means strives to ontologise or universalise the notion of the self. Quite the opposite – the very fact that such a “standard version” (delineated, as has been argued, by the discourse of corporeality) seems to exist points to the fact that “modern subjectivity” has become a self-echoing cliché, a groundless term that only reduplicates other constructs. What is more, this way of conceptualising the modern self entails the reduction of certain complexities, emphasizing the significance of certain aspects while understating others, and neglects elements that might problematise the story. The objective of compliance with the standard story of subjectivity favours its mythologisation; cultural contexts, historical data, and so-called “source materials” are often subject to (conscious or not) processes of twisting, manipulation, and selection to fit the authorised frame of presentation of the modern self. This process is well illustrated by the contemporary critique of Jacob Burckhardt’s ideas, which points to the fact that in order to support his thesis about the Renaissance as a period witnessing the birth of a sense of individuality in contrast with the Middle Ages as a period of undifferentiated group identity (an idea that was to shape the notion of modern subjectivity for the next hundred or so years), Burckhardt failed to acknowledge a number of perspectives that problematise his clear-cut division between modernity and pre-modernity. 3 It was precisely this unambiguous and dramatic contrast that made his ideas so appealing – in their mythological capacity, they operate within graphic binaries of undifferentiated / individual, open / 2 3

Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 118. Such as geographical, sociological and chronological: he induced very general statements based on assumptions about the uniqueness of the Western notion of selfhood, and he narrowed his study to a fairly small and therefore unrepresentative social group, that is, the upper-class male Italians. See: Peter Burke, “Representations of the Self from Petrarch to Descartes,” in: Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge,1997), pp. 17-23.

Conclusions

155

finite, and blurred / distinct which at are easily “graspable” and subject to further processing. Michel Foucault in a preface to his Birth of the Clinic wrote: I should like to make it plain once and for all that this book has not been written in favour of one kind of medicine as against another kind of medicine, or against medicine and in favour of an absence of medicine. It is a structural study that sets out to disentangle the conditions of its history from the density of discourse . . ..4

Equally, the foregoing discussion is not an expression of a critique of the modern system of the self-world relation, nor is it a nostalgic romanticization of the imaged “pre-modern” unity. Many texts discussed above, especially those ideologically related to the postmodern eco-feminist critique of the Enlightenment project, reverberate with such nostalgia.5 In criticising the bold attempts of the modern project to subdue and mechanise the “natural world,” and to divide the corporeal from the mental, many postmodern texts advocate (although hardly ever explicitly) the alleged pre-modern unity of man and world, body and mind, the macrocosm and microcosm.6 What they often fail to acknowledge is that such an image of pre-modernity is a purely modern construct, an effect of the classifying thinking that they criticise. Curiously enough, they constitute the richest case-in-point study material for this dissertation, as they provide the most interesting examples of “mythologisation” of the notions in question. The question that arises is: how does the above discussion relate to the postmodern connection between embodiment and subjectivity? Although the postmodern critique seeks to undermine the Cartesian dualism between res cogitans and res extensa (for instance, such ideas are present in the works of Elizabeth Grosz, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the further explication of his ideas, Susan Bordo, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), and deconstructs the notion of the modern self-contained and self-identical body by, for example, introducing the concept of a cyborg (Donna Haraway), our habitual thinking, perception, and understanding are still deeply embedded in the self / body distinction. The general assumption of this book, an assumption which also underlies the construction of particular concepts introduced here, overlaps strongly with ideas that could be described as inherently postmodern. The very act of pointing to the constructedness of the series of oppositions such as the body / self dyad, and the contrasts 4 5

6

Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic. An Archeology of Medical Perception, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. xix. For example, Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point: Science, Society and the Rising Culture (London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1983); Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature. Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (London: Wildwood House, 1982). This is especially visible in Merchant’s theory.

156

Conclusions

between such notions as openness / containment, undifferentiation / individuation, borderlessness / boundary, etc., is already destabilising. The idea that subjectivity and embodiment can be theorised outside the well-established dualistic categories is also a questioning of the modern notions of self and body. In terms of modes of conceptualisation, the postmodern imagery of the selfbody link often recalls that which describes the pre-modern relation between corporeality and identity. For instance, Grosz’s ideas about the experience of the body image as a point of convergence between the psyche and the soma, her idea of the “lived body” as an entity “open” for social and cultural inscriptions, not only deconstruct the Cartesian notions of the superior and internal mind and the inferior and external body,7 but also operate with the field of conceptualisation characteristic of the descriptions of the imagery of pre-modern self / world relation as they have been discussed above. On the level of connotations and language conditioning, there exists thus an interesting correlation, strongly embedded in the terminology of fluids. The most prominent expression of this association is probably Grosz’s discussion of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, in which she identifies the key terms of their understanding of corporeality with the focus on “intensities and flows.” Deleuze and Guattari’s refiguring of the ontology of the body and of subjectivity in terms of “planes, intensities, flows, becomings, linkages,”8 and their notion of the body as a discontinuous series of processes, an assembly of organs, corporeal substances, energies, flows and surfaces, not only deconstruct the traditional binaries of body / mind, nature / culture, subject / object, inside / outside,9 but also, however implicitly, deconstruct the modern construction of pre-modern subjectivitycorporeality relations by exposing the conceptual mechanisms that create it as a function of language. As has already been said, one aim of this discussion has been to undermine the stability of the notion of modern subjectivity as it is used by contemporary critical theory by emphasising its constructed character. Without professing to get to the gist of the “historical cogito,” this book describes a strain of arguments that proceed from tracing the overlapping of nomenclatures of the body and subjectivity, through an assumption concerning their mutual dependence in terms of imaginary and linguistic construction, to reflections concerning the processes of constructing and reproducing meaning. The “preferred reading” of this argument should thus lead to the following reflection: if modern subjectivity is a construct of language based on the terminology of the body, and if the body 7 8 9

See: Grosz, Volatile Bodies; Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 161. See: Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 164.

Conclusions

157

is an effect of the discursive inscriptions of subjectivity, maybe – although we can never know for sure – the difference between the “pre-modern group identity” as opposed to the “modern sense of individuality” is an effect of theoretical exaggeration. Maybe the sense of the self that medieval man had was not much different from the sense of self of modern man. Maybe the experience of an infant is not that undifferentiated, or maybe the individual, “adult” sense of separateness is just a misapprehension. Maybe the humoural connection with the universe did not mean for Renaissance man a sense of being “mortised” into the maternal universe, and maybe our sense of the embodied self as encompassed by the body boundaries is a false representation. Maybe – as the epigraph of this book argues – the individual’s self-containment and self-sufficiency is yet another illusion.

Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Penguin Classics, 1993. Bacon, Francis. “Preparative Towards a Natural and Experimental History.” In: Works, Vol. 4, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, Douglas Devon Heath. London: Longmans Green, 1870, pp. 251-270. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Barfield, Owen. Saving Appearances: A Study in Idolatry. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, n.d. Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. London: Sage, 2005. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. Baumeister, Roy F. Identity. Cultural Change and the Struggle for Self. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Belsey, Catherine. “Constructing the Subject: Deconstructing the Text.” In: Feminisms: an Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Robyn R. Warhol. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1991, pp. 596-597. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books, 1972. Berman, Morris. The Reenchantment of the World. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1981. Biaas, Zbigniew. The Body Wall: Somatics of Travelling and Discursive Practices. Frankfurt am Main, New York: Peter Lang Verlag, 2006. Bordo, Susan. The Flight to Objectivity. Essays on Cartesian Culture. New York: State University of New York Press, 1987. Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1995. Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, ed. Peter Burke, trans. S.G.C. Middlemore. London: Penguin Classics, 1990. Burke, Peter. “Representations of the Self from Petrarch to Descartes.” In: Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter. London: Routledge, 1997, pp. 17-28.

160

Bibliography

Caillois, Roger. “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia.” October 31, Winter 1985, pp. 17-32. Capra, Fritjof. The Turning Point: Science, Society and the Rising Culture. London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1983. Cixous, Hélène. “Castration or Decapitation.” In: Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern: A Reader, ed. Sean Burkey. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995, pp. 162-177. Cixous, Hélène. “Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays.” In: The Newly Born Woman, ed. Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément. London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 1996, pp. 63-132. Cohen, William A. “Introduction.” In: Filth: Dirt, Disgust and Modern Life, ed. William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005, pp. vii- xxxvii. Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Dadoun, Roger. “Fetishism in the horror film.” In: Fantasy and the Cinema, ed. James Donald. London: BFI, 1989, pp. 38-61. Descartes, René. “Meditations on the First Philosophy in which the Existence of God and the Real Distinction between the Soul and the Body are Demonstrated.” In: René Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations. Trans. F. E. Sutcliffe. London: Penguin Books, 1988, pp. 93-167. Descartes, René. “Discourse on the Method of Properly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking the Truth in the Sciences.” In: René Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations. Trans. F. E. Sutcliffe. London: Penguin Books, 1988, pp. 7-91. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger. An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Durkheim, Émile. The Division of Labour in Society, trans. W. D. Halls. London: Macmillan, 1984. Easthope, Anthony. The Unconscious. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Eliade, Mircea. Patterns in Comparative Religion. London: Sheed and Ward, 1958. Eliade, Mircea. Symbolism, the Sacred and the Arts, ed. Diane Apostolos-Cappadona. New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1985. Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process, ed. E. Dunning, J. Goudsblom, S. Mennel, trans. E. Jephcott. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2002. Elias, Norbert. The History of Manners, trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Pantheon, 1978. el-Khoury, Rodolphe. “Introduction.” In: Dominique Laporte, History of Shit, trans. Rodolphe el-Khoury. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2000, pp. viii-xiii. Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject. Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Bibliography

161

Fisher, Seymour and Sydney Cleveland. Body Image and Personality. New York and London: D. van Nostrand Company Inc., 1958. Foucault, Michel. “What is Critique?” In: Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter. Los Angeles: Semiotext/e, 1997. Foucault, Michel. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982. Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In: The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984, pp. 76-100. Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power.” In: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982, pp. 208-228. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish and The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic. An Archeology of Medical Perception, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Foucault, Michel The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Foucault, Michel. “What is Critique?” In Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter. Los Angeles: Semiotext/e, 1997, pp. 41-82. Freud, Sigmund. “Totem and Taboo.” In: The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 13. Trans. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press, 1991. Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. Grosz, Elizabeth. Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Habermas, Jürgen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987. Harding, Sandra “Is Gender a Variable in Conceptions of Rationality?” Dialectica 36.2-3: 1982, pp. 225-242. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree. Dover: New York, 1956. Heidegger, Martin. “The Age of the World Picture.” In: The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. W. Lovitt. New York: Harper, 1977, pp. 115-154. Hollis, Martin. “Of Masks and Men.” In: The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History, ed. Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins, and Steven Lukes. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 217-233.

162

Bibliography

Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical Fragments. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Irigaray, Luce. Éthique de la différence sexuelle. Paris: Minuit, 1984. Judovitz, Dalia. Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes. The Origins of Modernity. Cambridge, New York, New Rochelle, Melbourne, Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Kant, Immanuel. “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” In: From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology, trans. H.B. Nisbet, ed. Lawrence E. Cahoone. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001, pp. 51-57. Kenny, Anthony. Descartes: A Study of His Philosophy. New York: Random House, 1968. Klein, Melanie. “Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict.” In: The World of the Child, ed. Toby Talbot. New York: Jason Alonson, 1974, pp. 98-111. Koestler, Arthur. The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe. New York: Macmillan, 1959. Kristeva, Julia. “About Chinese Women.” In: The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, pp. 138-159. Kristeva, Julia. “The True-Real.” In: The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, pp. 214-237. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Lacan, Jacques. "The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience." In: Écrits. A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London and New York: Routledge, 2001, pp. 4-5. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock, 1977. Lacan, Jacques. Seminar II. 1954-1955: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Sylvana Tomaselli. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988. Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. The Seminars of Jacques Lacan. Book XI, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1998. Lamb, Sarah. “The Politics of Dirt and Gender: Body Techniques in Bengali India.” In: Dirt, Undress and Difference: Critical Perspectives on the Body’s Surface, ed. Adeline Masquelier. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005, pp. 213-232. Laporte, Dominique. History of Shit, trans. Rodolphe el-Khoury. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2000. Lloyd, Genevieve. The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy. London: Routledge, 1993.

Bibliography

163

Longhurst, Robyn. Geography and the Body: Exploring Fluid Boundaries. London: Routledge, 2001. Lotman, Yuri. The Structure of the Artistic Text, trans. Gail Lenhoff and Ronald Vroon. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Masquelier, Adeline. “Introduction.” In: Dirt, Undress, and Difference. Critical Perspective on the Body’s Surface, ed. Adeline Masquelier. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005. McDowell, Linda. “Space, place and gender relations.” In: Progress in Human Geography, 17, 3, pp. 305-318. Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature. Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. London: Wildwood House, 1982. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Partout et Nulle Part.” In: Signes. Paris: Gallimard, 1964, pp. 158200. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Primacy of Perception, trans. James M. Edie. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1963. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Prose of the World. Trans. John O’Neill. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In: Contemporary Film Theory, ed. Anthony Easthope. London: Longman Group, 1993, pp. 111-124. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Dawn of Day. New York: Gordon Press, 1974. Norris, Pamela. The Story of Eve. London: Picador, 1998. Ortega y Gasset, José. Man In Crisis. New York: Norton, 1958. Paster, Gail Kern. The Body Embarrassed. Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1993. Piaget, Jean. The Construction of Reality in the Child. New York: Random House, 1954. Pippin, Robert B. The Persistence of Subjectivity. On the Kantian Aftermath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Plato. Phaedo. The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953. Porter, Roy. “Introduction.” In: Roy Porter, ed. Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present. London: Routledge, 1997. Rabinow, Paul. “Introduction.” In: The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984, pp. 3-29.

164

Bibliography

Rich, Adrienne. “Notes towards a politics of location.” In: Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1986, pp. 210-232. Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970. Roudiez, Leon S. “Translator’s Note.” In: Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982, pp. vii-x. Sawday, Jonathan. The Body Emblazoned. Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Seigel, Jerrold. The Idea of the Self. Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Seigel, Jerrold. The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp: Desire, Liberation, and the Self in Modern Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Sirasi, Nancy G. Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Picador USA, 2001. Spitz, René. The First Year of Life : A Psychoanalytical Study of Normal and Deviant Development of Object Relations. New York : International University Press, 1965. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. London: Methuen, 1986. Stern, Karl. The Flight from Woman. New York: Noonday, 1965. Szczuka, Kazimiera. “Przdki, tkaczki i pajki. Uwagi o twórczoci kobiet.” In: Kopciuszek, Frankenstein i inne. Feminizm wobec mitu. Kraków: Wydawnictwo eFKa 2001, pp. 27-44. Tate, John W. “Kant, Habermas, and the 'Philosophical Legitimation of Modernity’.” In: Journal of European Studies, Vol. 27, Issue 3, 1997, pp. 281-322. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. van Teijlingen, Edwin, ed. Midwifery and the Medicalization of Childbirth: Comparative Perspectives. New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2005. Vigarello, Georges. Le propre et le sale. L’hygiène du corps depuis le Moyen Âge. Paris : Éditions du Seuil, 2005. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London and New York: Routledge 2002. Young, Iris Marion. Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989. Žižek, Slavoj, ed. Cogito and the Unconscious. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.

Literary and Cultural Theory General editor: Wojciech H. Kalaga

Vol.

1

Wojciech H. Kalaga: Nebulae of Discourse. Interpretation, Textuality, and the Subject. 1997.

Vol.

2

Wojciech H. Kalaga / Tadeusz Rachwa (eds.): Memory – Remembering – Forgetting. 1999.

Vol.

3

Piotr Fast: Ideology, Aesthetics, Literary History. Socialist Realism and its Others. 1999.

Vol.

4

Ewa Rewers: Language and Space: The Poststructuralist Turn in the Philosophy of Culture. 1999.

Vol.

5

Floyd Merrell: Tasking Textuality. 2000.

Vol.

6

Tadeusz Rachwa / Tadeusz Slawek (eds.): Organs, Organisms, Organisations. Organic Form in 19th-Century Discourse. 2000.

Vol.

7

Wojciech H. Kalaga / Tadeusz Rachwa: Signs of Culture: Simulacra and the Real. 2000.

Vol.

8

Tadeusz Rachwal: Labours of the Mind. Labour in the Culture of Production. 2001.

Vol.

9

Rita Wilson / Carlotta von Maltzan (eds.): Spaces and Crossings. Essays on Literature and Culture in Africa and Beyond. 2001.

Vol.

10

Leszek Drong: Masks and Icons. Subjectivity in Post-Nietzschean Autobiography. 2001.

Vol.

11

Wojciech H. Kalaga / Tadeusz Rachwa (eds.): Exile. Displacements and Misplacements. 2001.

Vol.

12

Marta Zajac: The Feminine of Difference. Gilles Deleuze, Hélène Cixous and Contemporary Critique of the Marquis de Sade. 2002.

Vol.

13

Zbigniew Bialas / Krzysztof Kowalczyk-Twarowski (eds.): Alchemization of the Mind. Literature and Dissociation. 2003.

Vol.

14

Tadeusz Slawek: Revelations of Gloucester. Charles Olsen, Fitz Hugh Lane, and Writing of the Place. 2003.

Vol.

15

Carlotta von Maltzan (ed.): Africa and Europe: En/Countering Myths. Essays on Literature and Cultural Politics. 2003.

Vol.

16

Marzena Kubisz: Strategies of Resistance. Body, Identity and Representation in Western Culture. 2003.

Vol.

17

Ewa Rychter: (Un)Saying the Other. Allegory and Irony in Emmanuel Levinas’s Ethical Language. 2004.

Vol.

18

Ewa Borkowska: At the Threshold of Mystery: Poetic Encounters with Other(ness). 2005.

Vol.

19

Wojciech H. Kalaga / Tadeusz Rachwa (eds.): Feeding Culture: The Pleasures and Perils of Appetite. 2005.

Vol.

20

Wojciech H. Kalaga / Tadeusz Rachwa (eds.): Spoiling the Cannibals’ Fun? Cannibalism and Cannibalisation in Culture and Elsewhere. 2005.

Vol.

21

Katarzyna Ancuta: Where Angels Fear to Hover. Between the Gothic Disease and the Meataphysics of Horror. 2005.

Vol.

22

Piotr Wilczek: (Mis)translation and (Mis)interpretation: Polish Literature in the Context of Cross-Cultural Communication. 2005.

Vol.

23

Krzysztof Kowalczyk-Twarowski: Glebae Adscripti. Troping Place, Region and Nature in America. 2005.

Vol.

24

Zbigniew Biaas: The Body Wall. Somatics of Travelling and Discursive Practices. 2006.

Vol.

25

Katarzyna Nowak: Melancholic Travelers. Autonomy, Hybridity and the Maternal. 2007.

Vol.

26

Leszek Drong: Disciplining the New Pragmatism. Theory, Rhetoric, and the Ends of Literary Study. 2007.

Vol.

27

Katarzyna Smyczyska: The World According to Bridget Jones. Discourses of Identity in Chicklit Fictions. 2007.

Vol.

28

Wojciech H. Kalaga / Marzena Kubisz (eds.): Multicultural Dilemmas. Identity, Difference, Otherness. 2008.

Vol.

29

Maria Plochocki: Body, Letter, and Voice. Construction Knowledge in Detective Fiction. 2010.

Vol.

30

Rossitsa Terzieva-Artemis: Stories of the Unconscious: Sub-Versions in Freud, Lacan and Kristeva. 2009.

Vol.

31

Sonia Front: Transgressing Boundaries in Jeanette Winterson’s Fiction. 2009.

Vol.

32

Wojciech Kalaga / Jacek Mydla / Katarzyna Ancuta (eds.): Political Correctness. Mouth Wide Shut? 2009.

Vol.

33

Pawe Marcinkiewicz: The Rhetoric of the City: Robinson Jeffers and A. R. Ammons. 2009.

Vol.

34

Wojciech Maecki: Embodying Pragmatism. Richard Shusterman’s Philosophy and Literary Theory. 2010.

Vol.

35

Wojciech Kalaga / Marzena Kubisz (eds.): Cartographies of Culture. Memory, Space, Representation. 2010.

Vol.

36

Boena Shallcross / Ryszard Nycz (eds.): The Effect of Pamplisest. Culture, Literature, History. 2011.

Vol.

37

Wojciech Kalaga / Marzena Kubisz / Jacek Mydla (eds.): A Culture of Recycling / Recycling Culture? 2011.

Vol.

38

Anna Chromik: Disruptive Fluidity. The Poetics of the Pop Cogito. 2012.

www.peterlang.de