Body Transformations: Evolutions and Atavisms in Culture

Body Transformations Body Transformations Evolutions and Atavisms in Culture Alphonso Lingis Published in 2005 by ...

Author: Alphonso Lingis

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Body Transformations

Body Transformations Evolutions and Atavisms in Culture

Alphonso Lingis

Published in 2005 by Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016

Published in Great Britain by Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN

© 2005 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 International Standard Book Number-10: 0-415-97366-X (Hardcover) 0-415-97367-8 (Softcover) International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-415-97366-3 (Hardcover) 978-0-415-97367-0 (Softcover) No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

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Table of Contents Introduction Discontinuities . . . 3 Our Species: Premature, Symbiotic, Atavistic . . . 9 The Evolution of Splendor Quadrille . . . 21 How One Feels, How One Looks . . . 45 Dismemberments The Social Body . . . 57 The Physiology of Art . . . 73 Transparency . . . 89 Attachments Appetite . . . 101 Fetishism . . . 111 Potlatch Flesh Trade . . . 127 Good Deeds . . . 147

Notes on the Photographs Frontispiece — Transvestite, Bangkok, 1995 Discontinuities — Ethiopia, 2000 Our Species: Premature, Symbiotic, Atavist — Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, 2003 Quadrille — Waadabe dancers, Niger, 2003 How One Feels, How One Looks — Mary Anne Papageorgiou and Janice “Z” Turlington, State College, Pennsylvania, 1999 The Social Body — Lani man, Irian Jaya, 1988 The Physiology of Art — Photograph by George Dureau, courtesy of GMP Press Transparency — Lani woman, Irian Jaya, 1988 Appetite — Cebu, Philippines, 1988 Fetishism — Tibetan ritual drum made of two childrens’ skulls; fossilized elephant tooth; Mongolian ritual horn made of human femur bone; Tibetan ritual horn made from a child’s femur bone Flesh Trade — Samba dancer, Olinda, Brazil, 1996 Good Deeds — Grand Mosque, Djenné, Mali, 1999 All photographs by the author, except for Figure 7 by George Dureau

In this book, we study some eruptions of archaic compulsions and behaviors and the forms that they acquire in contemporary societies. In the society established by rules and obligations—the economic and ethical society, we find potlatch behaviors still and a return to the pre-ethical sphere of chance or fatality and luck. In the rational organization of society governed by transcendent law, we find libidinal energies and couplings. The body politic was depicted as adult bodies writ large, but we find in it the irradiations and couplings of primary-process libido. In the high culture of art, we find evolution through sexual selection rather than natural selection. Beneath the idealism or animism that exposes things to have no meaning other than that which human intentions, aspirations, and transactions put on them, we find the subsistence of fetishism, where humans are subjects constituted by the action of objects on them. We employ a great deal of cerebral energy in acquiring the relevant information and applying paradigms to problems; indeed, the information age promises to force us to do so ever more. We also reflect on our experience. We consider this to be really thinking. Explanations of the evolution of sexual selection, of economic and political systems, and of animism and fetishism only seem to be conducted from an outside, objective position; in reality, such investigations work back from the present situation and they, too, require that the present experience be scrupulously described. These studies then alternate with analyses of the content of our experience. To have been born structures all our subsequent experiences, and we experience not only others being born but also others who have long existed being born into our lives. We have a whole gamut of feelings of our bodies, and these give rise to images of our bodies and ideal images of ourselves. We experience a longing for integrity and wholeness, but drives to dismember our bodies as well as orgasmic and artistic compulsions are in us. There are things we long to acquire and assimilate; there are other things to which we are even more attached, but to which we subject ourselves. We posit our worth in seeking to perform good deeds. We speak of the content of the experiences of others; in some experiences, others are transparent to us as we to them.

INTRODUCTION

DISCONTINUITIES

Looking up by day at the sky and by night at the stars, we see a blue that the outer spaces do not have; we see stars that have burnt out millions of years ago. When we lift our eyes from the narrow radius of things that we can reach, do we see only illusions? But astronomers see the past. In idle moments, our eyes can get captivated by surface effects—the reflections on the lake or on the eyes of a child, or the rainbow after a storm and the minute rainbows in the bubbles of a glass of champagne. However, when scientists observe the universe about us, they observe endurance and evolution, the immemorial antiquity of physical laws, and the continuity of causality in all entities and events. What we have passed through remains with us and is our past; it clings to us. To recall something is to reactivate one of our past states of consciousness, for they never did disconnect from us. The initiatives that we have taken mark us; those surges of energy have subsided into inert states that still trail behind us. We cannot stamp our feet in the present, leap up to bound ahead toward new vistas without dragging with us the weight of our past failings, mistakes, compromises, and betrayals. Our life is more and more encumbered with its bunglings and achievements. A crocodile breaks through the egg and stretches his wet back into the sunlight. A newborn colt lurches into a standing position, looks about. A human infant cries out, begins to draw in air. A newborn life

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BODY TRANSFORMATIONS

interrupts the continuities of material and physiological causality. The force and momentum of the past come to an end in a birth. Birth is discontinuity, unreason, and violence. It is our life that we gave to our child; he lives with our life. A child is, without being on his own. He leaves the burden of carrying on the projects initiated in the past and the task of securing resources for the future to his parents. His life is play. His birth is irresponsibility and revolt against the past. In our child, our life is disconnected and alienated from our life, and new. There is a break, a cut, in the continuity of time; the past is cut off and, in this hiatus, a new life surges up with a force that begins with it. This event—something new, a naked life commencing—calls out to us. Walking the roads of South Africa, how overwhelmed we are by all the crimes committed in this land, crimes that cling to the hearts of these people. How impossible it seems that a new, rainbow nation could be shaped out of such a history. Yet, to see the children is to see that possibility. Each child is a new beginning, a cut in the continuity of time, a presence without a past, a commencement. Do we not come up against a birth each time someone turns to face us? We had seen him, observed how he oriented himself, what implements he took up, and to what objective he turned; we had put that together, interpreted. But now he faces us. That move interrupts the continuity of our interpretations, our judgments and predictions about him. His face breaks through the picture we had composed of him. Because the past that we had put together for him is abruptly disconnected, he is born now in the theater of our life. With exceptional force someone enters our life from nowhere. This backpacker met in the dust of one afternoon in the Sahel: he is an adult, but he is newborn in our life and something of him is born in us. Our own adulthood, with all its history, its experiences and skills, its initiatives and burdens, falls away; we feel that a backpacker was born in us. We join him in the innocence of his birth. The camera shows us the landscape of burnt villages and barns reduced to ashes. Then it shows us a child. We see a vivacity of life in the eyes that look out to us that is innocent, without a past, a new beginning. The camera shows us the same kind of childlikeness in the

DISCONTINUITIES

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face of an old woman. Destitute now, her past is gone from her, as from us who have never had any access to it. We see her on the television; we feel the impulse to drop everything and rush over there and make her a hot meal. It is not that we would set out to recover her past: her life would be reborn. Her life is already born in us. We would open our eyes in the morning on an Albanian or Eritrean landscape with her, like a newborn child. The police identify us by the singular lines of our fingerprints; no one else among the six billion people now on the planet has these dozen lines on the skin of my finger. We, however, identify individuals by their faces. Each face has a complexion not really like any other: a singular shape of the forehead, the brow, the cheekbones, the mouth, the jaw that turns on us a brutal or candid, somber or buoyant, melancholy or mellow, composed or quizzical cast. The hair that adorns our heads, which, unlike our body hair and our pubic hair, has no natural length, is so visibly different on each of us. Between that forehead and jaw that just grew, there appear tightness or laxness, shudders and tremors, blushes and tics. If most of what we say was picked up from parents, friends, television celebrities, and comedians, each one says these things in a different mix and with his or her own intonation, pitch, and rhythm, linking them up with piecemeal reports from his or her own history. In a nature governed, as all science affirms, by universal laws, in a perceived environment where most of the time we catch on to and follow recurrent situations and patterns, in a social world where most of what we do and see others do is standardized operations with conventionalized gestures, individuality is generated by faces. In a police station, facing a uniformed officer enforcing the law and reading off regulations, we record that one incomparably individual thing in the room: his face. Has Modigliani or Brancusi ever fashioned so elegant a form as the head of a flamingo, with its Roman-nose beak, softened by the shellpink colors of the miniscule feathers in the midst of which gleam those flesh-crystal eyes—a face turned in every direction by a long neck

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whose spirals seem never to repeat themselves? We may brush off an ant from our sandwich, but what a fascinating form we see under a magnifying glass, its egg-shaped face gleaming with iridescent colors, shifting back and forth continually. The dense or translucent colors that plants open out on flower petals and the shimmering hues that the sun spreads across the immensity of the sky each morning and each evening draw our eyes, detaching them from our projects and routines. Immanuel Kant said that the aesthetic gaze is disinterested; it takes pleasure in forms and colors independently of any possible uses. When we look at the frame and musculature of men or women, we may envision enlisting them for labor; when we look at someone’s genitals, we may imagine using them to arouse pleasure in ourselves. However, the contemplation of the form and complexion of a forehead, the high-boned cheeks, or the arc of a jaw presents us only with forms at a distance; we can imagine almost nothing for which to use them. Is there not an aesthetic preoccupation along with the glance at a face to acknowledge a greeting or affirm a flow of information or orders? In the set expression that we see while someone pronounces a prohibition or in the eyes on that blank face where we see whether someone is pleased or displeased, our look also records whether that alpha female has a handsome face or whether the colonel looks impressively brutal or just rotten ugly. Eyes are seductive. Nothing is more alluring in the bodies of humans, cats, owls, chameleons, or cicadas than the eyes. There is vertigo in this seduction; when we look into eyes that look at us, we lose sight of our projects and initiatives and of our own separate identity. What percentage of the hours of their waking lives do peafowl, pheasants, or birds of paradise spend transfixed by the glamour that they display for one another? What percentage of the hours of our waking lives have we spent sneaking glances at the profiles of strangers outlined by candlelight in restaurants, by the last rays of the setting sun, or by the night lights of the city? We can be mesmerized by the radiant expanse of a woman’s face or by the vigorous contours of a man’s face as by an idol. Indeed, to make an idol, we carve a face upon a rock or the trunk of a tree. Kant said that, although there is no ideal of beauty for fish or birds or mammals, for flowers, furniture or houses, there is an ideal of beauty

DISCONTINUITIES

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for the human body. That is, he explained, because the shape of a human body inevitably materializes ethical traits: composure, equilibrium, strength, and endurance. It is true that the shape and color of a face materializes these things, as well as ardor, melancholy, candor, vivacity, obtuseness, rigidity, or foolishness. These traits remain on the face of a corpse; in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, we cannot look at the mummy of Queen Hatshepsut without seeing nobility and sensitivity in her dead face. Somberness, melancholy, haughtiness, and sensuality appear in stone or wood as soon as we carve a face in them. Kant declared that there is an ideally beautiful face because he believed that there is but one thing worthy of respect and admiration in humans: obedience to duty for the sake of duty. However, we admire the ingenuity of civil disobedience as well as the lusty rebelliousness of adolescents visible in their sly grins and mocking eyes. We admire the single-minded fortitude seen in the faces of divemasters as we admire the sensuous languor of women of dubious morals in the tropics. We admire the artistry and artifice of transvestites and the hauteur with which they look disdainfully at the straight and the square. We admire the irresponsibility and animal carefreeness of children and shameless old women. These traits fascinate us because on their faces they are each time incomparably individual.

OUR SPECIES: PREMATURE, SYMBIOTIC, ATAVISTIC

An individual of every species is innately equipped to recognize vital resources and dangers and the cues to which it should attend, and is innately equipped to store and subsequently draw on new information. Environments vary from individual to individual and from day to day. The individual must accurately perceive the resources in its environment and remember how to find a resource again, and retain the general form of what proves dangerous. It forms a map of its territory, which functions as a program for its future behaviors and operations. In humans, learning includes the ability to form generalized conceptual categories and to perform cognitive trial and error—that is, to recall and combine separate bits of information so as to envision possible future situations and formulate new behavioral solutions. This mental ability would affect the nature of human perception, memory, emotion, and behavioral patterns. That the human mind and human action are essentially turned toward possibilities and the future has been a theme of philosophy. The capacity to reshape the environment actively—indeed, to construct an environment to our liking—has been taken to characterize the human species. Humans construct their history and shape their evolution. Martin Heidegger does not take this distinctive future orientation as an adaptation explained by evolutionary biology; instead, 9

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he explains it by the difference between the being of things and the existence of humans; for humans to ex-ist, he says, is to project their stance ahead of themselves. To ex-ist is always to envision oneself in other ways, in other places, in the time ahead. It is the future that gives meaning and weight to the past and to the present. A mind that does not record the particular pattern without positing the category, that does not map the territory without envisioning alternate possible locations and functionings of things in that territory—a mind thus turned to the possible and the future—evolved in a primate species with distinctive bodily traits. The upright posture, the primacy of sight, and the reversed thumb have been singled out as decisive. Anatomist Louis Bolk instead focused on the strikingly slowed down metabolism of hominids. Humans live about the same natural life span as chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas, but, while the latter reach reproductive age at seven to ten years, humans do not until around sixteen years. The other primates are born covered with hair, with muscle strength and coordination so that they can cling to their mothers and within days move on their own; human infants cannot even hold their heads upright and remain as dependent on the mother as they did in the womb. Contemplating the similarity of the fetuses of the other primates with those of humans at successive stages of development, Bolk speculated that if a chimpanzee fetus were born prematurely and survived, it would have the big head and hairless body of a human infant and, to bear that big head, would toddle upright on two legs. In humans, the long extended years of childhood and adolescence are years of dependence on adults. Unlike the other primates, the human offspring must live long in an environment for which he or she does not yet have physical and mental abilities. It is this physiological condition that would be congruent with the evolution of a mind that produces categories and practices cognitive trial and error, that is distinctively turned to the future. A mind that envisions possibilities in the outer environment envisions also its possible position and behaviors in that possible future. Certainly an ideological agenda has been at work, with practical con-


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sequences in the dealings with other species, in asserting that selfconsciousness is distinctive to humans. But the evolutionary biology of emergent self-consciousness has been obstructed by the positivist and behaviorist dictum that the empirical researcher has no direct access to the consciousness of others. Self-consciousness has been left to philosophy, where the specific concerns of epistemology have given it a particular construction. The philosophy of mind was predominantly concerned with self-consciousness as a source of knowledge (Descartes’ I know I exist as long as I am thinking…). Self-consciousness is understood to mean a deflection of the mind that perceives external objects back upon itself. Sensations, concepts, and mental operations would be the objects of this observation, and they would be recognized and identified with categories. They are also identified as our own sensations, concepts, and mental operations. A mirror provides a viewer with an object—his body form and movements—for observation; he would have to recognize and identify it as his body. The self-consciousness that observes and identifies our mental patterns and operations is conceived parallel to this recognition of a body observed in a mirror as our own. For an animal or bird to fail to recognize its mirror image indicates a lack of self-consciousness. Jacques Lacan used mirror self-recognition, taken to be distinctive of humans, to explain the psychogenesis of self-consciousness and its particular connection with a consciousness operating with categories and with cognitive trial and error, oriented to the future. For the infant to recognize himself in the mirror is to identify his sense of himself where he is—an affective and kinesthetic sense of himself—with the visual image of his body seen at a distance, in the mirror. The visual image presents to the infant for the first time a total and integrated visual experience of his body; in pleasure, the infant affectively projects himself into it.1 The mirror image also offers to the infant the perceptions others have of him. The mirror image would be the original signifier for oneself as a publicly designatable whole. It makes possible the correct use of the personal pronoun “I,” which the child picks up about this time (before the “mirror stage” the child says “candy!”; then in parallel

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to others: “Mummy wants candy, Daddy wants candy, Johnny wants candy”). The projective identification of the infant with this visually integrated whole, at a distance from where he feels and acts, projects the image others have of him as an ideal image of himself. Ambition, jealousy, envy, regret, and guilt can only be understood by recognizing that human consciousness exists in tension with an ego ideal. But is the ideal image that a human forms only that of human adults? Lynn Margulis has argued that the eukaryotic cell first formed when proteobacteria and cyanobacteria, entering a host cell as indigested prey or parasites, entered into symbiosis with it, and evolved into mitochondria and chloroplasts. In the ocean, algae live in symbiosis with sea anemones; on the continental surfaces, algae entered into symbiosis with fungi to form lichens. They began to crumble the rock and decompose into soil in which complex plants evolved. Our mouths contain 600 species of symbiotic bacteria, which neutralize the toxins plants produce to prevent themselves from being eaten and produce vitamins essential to the human organism; our digestive system contains 400 species of bacteria upon which our organisms depend to break down substances and make them able to be assimilated by our bodies. New bacteria and viruses continue to penetrate our porous bodies, perhaps at first wreaking havoc on them and then provoking antibodies in our immune system to neutralize them; eventually, they may become ingredients in that immune system. Orchids and wasps evolved in symbiosis, as did tics with deer and egrets with water buffalos. The earliest gods of humanity were not the abstract forces of Nature but the lordly beasts and birds—tigers, lions, jaguars, eagles, condors, and cobras. Sacrifice is the fundamental religious act, and Barbara Ehrenreich speculates that it originated in the practice of exposing deformed infants and the sick and dying to placate beasts of prey.2 The oldest religions depicted humans becoming half-lion, halfbull, half-stag, half-fox, or half-ibis. Maasai and Papuan warriors, Sumerian lords, Japanese samurai, the kshatriyas of Rajasthan, and European warrior-knights decorated


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themselves with eagle plumes and lion or wolf pelts and took on the fixed gaze of eagles and the silent, stealthy movements of lions and wolves. They acquired the suppleness of quetzal and birds of paradise plumes and the stately bearing and courtly dances of black-necked cranes and tragopans. The sharing of traits with other species is the most ancient ethics. What humans looked up to was the sensibility of eagles and wolves, the strength and endurance of elands and bears and the sacrificial loyalty of small birds defending their offspring. In hunting them or hunting with them, humans acquire the singlemindedness, sensibility, and intelligence of predators. Still today, the Kazakhs of the Altai Mountains use eagles as falcons to hunt fox, mink, and wolves and acquire keen eyes, long patience, and quick reflexes. The courage of the torero rises in his confrontation with that of the black bull. Sedentary and gregarious humans came to acquire the restricted diet of their domesticated herds and flocks (as well as their diseases—the principal infectious diseases such as smallpox, influenza, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, measles, and cholera have passed to humans as mutations of diseases that subsist among gregarious animals). They became dependent on one another and on herd leaders, came to prize security, regularity, predictability, and conformity, came to value prudence, compliance, and usefulness. Have sedentary populations even taken on the perspective of plants, for which all things are usually in repose, and that maintain their identity throughout changes, and aim at a final state?3 Modern ethics concedes that Nature is thoroughly amoral and sees morality as having to be continually elaborated as societies and technologies change. What morality calls virtues—behavior habitually determined by conscious choice and for which a self-conscious ego is responsible—would be specifically human, dependent on categorizing, inferring, reckoning, coordinating cause and effect, and cognitive trial and error. However, humans have long looked up to qualities that are less those of their conscious initiatives than those of their nature: forthrightness, courage, pride, the resolute presence in the present that disconnects the regrets and remorse of the past and the longings for compensation from the future.

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These characterize people who have everywhere and from all time been recognized as noble; they are, Friedrich Nietzsche explained, the traits of noble—nongregarious, nondependent—animal species and acquired by association with those species. The noble have strong healthy instincts and have an instinct for health, for beauty, for vitality, for joy; they live by instincts. They do not understand the others; their riches are squandered and they are victimized by the calculating: they are not very intelligent, not wily, not crafty. The primary trait that Nietzsche recognizes in the noble is truthfulness; they are as they present themselves, and they are as good as their word. By instinct, they declare what they see to be the case. It is the weak and the servile who have developed wariness, dissimulation, and cleverness. In depicting the forces of inanimate nature in anthropomorphic forms as Marduk, Shiva, Zeus, Jupiter, Mercury, or Wotan, ancient religions formulated the longing of humans to move with the force of tidal waves and earthquakes, to move with the speed and agility of the wind, to soar with the serenity of the sky. Modern technology fabricated prostheses—microscopes, telescopes, sound amplifiers—so that humans would see with the eyes of dragonflies and eagles and hear with the ears of elephants and bats; the cyborgs now being fabricated will see with the powers of crystals, record sunspots and Earth tremors with the sensitivity of Earth’s magnetic fields, communicate messages with the speed of light, soar with the speed of comets. If the distinctively long period of human childhood is governed by the tension between the child’s physical and mental capacities and the ideal, total and integrated, image of himself, it is, Sigmund Freud argued, a time when libidinal energies and impulses dominate, if anything, more than in adulthood. The infantile libido is given to immediate gratification and is polymorphously perverse. The delayed and the sublimated gratifications of adults are secondary processes built over the primary processes of infantile libido. But Freud demonstrated the subsistence of the primary processes of infantile libido and the return of the repressed, the return of infancy in the adult. The


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eruption of primary-process infantile libido produces dreams, neurotic formations, and the “psychopathology of everyday life.” Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck4 maintained that organs are improved with repeated use and atrophy with disuse and that, when organisms reproduce, the improved or atrophied condition of their organs is passed on to their offspring. It would follow that the historical advance of civilization would produce individuals adapted to the technological and cognitive skills of civilization; in the human species, history would take over from natural evolution. Charles Darwin conceded that “from what we know of inheritance, there is nothing improbable in the transmission of a habit to the offspring at an earlier age than that at which it was first acquired by the parents.”5 However, the principles of Mendelian genetics exclude the inheritance of acquired characteristics, and August Weisman first accumulated empirical evidence to exclude it. It follows that the bodies of long ago, with their organs, instinctual functioning, and appetites, recur in the civilized populations of today. Drives and tastes that once thrived in environments of long ago can recur today. Friedrich Nietzsche found residues and resurgences of instincts and behaviors of earlier times everywhere in the scientific, rational and utilitarian, and democratic societies of modern times. He tirelessly exposed the instincts and tastes of the “lowest” animals beneath all that idealism and morality had determined as distinctive traits of the higher human nature. This is not simply the elaboration of a systematic cynicism. Nietzsche argues that the return of ancient instincts and pleasures produces new excellences. The geological and biological environment and the accumulation of technological means in a society determine the technical and social skills of individuals and also their perceived needs, desires, and satisfactions. For Nietzsche, ser vility is characterized by dependence—dependence on one’s fellows, the institutions, and the technological equipment in place. Nobility realizes traits, behaviors, and works that do not depend on support from the contemporary social and technological environment. It is thus not simply the result of finding new opportunities in the existing environment, the result of calculation of the forces in effect. Nor does it result from divining

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new opportunities in technical and social skills: nobility does not arise from character management. Its energies come from instincts and tastes that drove institutions now abolished but that recur in individuals and are now channeled into works no longer required by the contemporary economy and social goals. Their goals and efficacy having fallen into oblivion, they recur as instincts. The libidinal forces of an individual can withdraw from the ideal image of himself projected by adults of his family, class, ethnicity, nation, and race to invest in those ancient instincts resurging in himself, affirming them and empowering them. They will make that individual maladapted to his time and can make him an eccentric or mad. When these forces have been those of noble animals and when individuals find the strength and resources to empower them effectively, they can give rise to a new nobility. Thus, in the bourgeois mercantile era, hunting and jousting are still espoused and can be eccentric and criminal, but also noble pursuits. Nietzsche also speaks of the return of religious instincts in our scientific and rationalist age, instincts driving individuals to sacrificial ordeals and extraordinary feats; these find their old ardor in science, politics, and artistic pursuits. These libidinal forces drive a specific self-consciousness: affirming and espousing these instincts and tastes, the individual becomes truthful—the first trait of the noble. The truthful self-consciousness becomes truthful with regard to the outside; the individual will feel heat in things that feel cold to everybody else, discover values for which no scales have yet been invented, offer sacrifices on altars dedicated to an unknown god, exercising courage without any desire for honors. His self-sufficiency overflows and gives to men and things.6 Against Rousseau’s image of the noble savage, Nietzsche here presents the savage born too late, in the midst of a civilized society: it is he who makes himself noble or else perishes. The instincts that humans share with other species are then not simply leftovers from earlier organisms that subsist in the more developed state of the organism; they are the sources from which new structures arise. The more archaic are the mammalian, reptilian, and insect impulses that recur in the human organism, the more likely it is that the behaviors they drive will be either insane or noble.


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The essential means that converts an archaic impulse that recurs into the force of nobility is its affirmation and consecration in the language of values. Nietzsche argues that human speech developed out of vocalization and singing. So few other mammals sing; must not humans have picked it up from birds and insects? The primary function of singing is not informative but seductive. The throats and also air sacks of birds, as well as the insect organs for vocalization—scaly feet, rubbed thoraxes, vibrating wings—send forth chants whose repetitive codings are not representations re-presenting ideal forms; they reaffirm and reiterate the forces of beauty, health, and superabundant vitality. Is not then the noblest form of language, the language of values, an atavistic return of insect cries? Notes 1. Lacan’s account posits two essentially different terms that must be identified: the location that the infant has where he feels and moves—his affective–kinesthetic sense of himself—and the location at which he sees a whole and integrated visual image. How is this projective identification possible? Lacan explains that the infant also has fragmentary visual perceptions of his body where he feels and moves himself, and the mirror image is greeted with pleasure by the infant because it gives him the integration and completion of those fragmentary percepts. In fact, the infant works the identification by posturing before the mirror. What he recognizes in the mirror is that the image there corresponds to the quasivisual image generated by his postural schema. 2. B. Ehrenreich. 1997. Blood Rites. New York: Henry Holt, 23–35. 3. Nietzsche says that the thought governed by principles of identity, noncontradiction, and excluded middle reflects the realm of plants. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge University Press, 21. 4. It was Lamarck who first named the scientific study of species “biology.” 5. C. Darwin. 1998. The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. New York: Oxford University Press, 45. 6. F. Nietzsche. 1974. The Gay Science. trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 117.

THE EVOLUTION OF SPLENDOR

QUADRILLE

The pair of long, highly decorative feathers of the king-of-Saxony bird of paradise are valued as decorations both by bowerbirds and by Papuan people. The selection process by which these feathers evolved was carried out by female birds of paradise, not by humans or bowerbirds—but all three species find them attractive.1 Ornamentation and Display Behaviors

What is being attractive to others, not by virtue of strength and willingness to protect and to help, but by virtue of appearance? Why does lust demand beauty? Charles Darwin distinguished sexual selection from natural selection. Thinking of the cumbersome tails of peacocks and their ostentatious display behaviors, Darwin noted that the only advantage the males seem to have is the fact that females find them attractive. In natural selection, environmental factors result in a selection of traits that make a species able to thrive on the resources of the ecosystem in which it emerges, resistant to disease and parasites, strong and wily enough to avoid climatic hardships and predators. Individuals of a species behave in such a way as to maximize opportunities to produce their offspring. In many reptilian, avian, and mammalian species, males are greater in size and strength than females (human males are on average 20 percent

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greater in size), but they do not simply use their greater size and musculature to subdue females forcibly so as to reproduce their genes. In most species, mating is not random. Individuals will select mating partners with fitness traits that their offspring will inherit. Mutual selection leads to the most enduring pair bonds and also the greatest similarity between the sexes. Intersexual selection consistently promotes the most striking contrasts between the sexes in appearance and behavior. Although natural selection tends to make individuals inconspicuous, conservative of energy, and streamlined for more effective action, sexual selection frequently promotes brilliant colors; ornamental crests, antlers, manes, or tails; and noisy and conspicuous display rituals, all of which consume a great deal of energy and make males vulnerable to predators. Elaborate and fantastic courtship rituals have been documented among jewelfish, whitefish, sticklebacks, cichlids, and guppies; among fruit flies, fireflies, cockroaches, and spiders; among crabs; among mountain sheep, antelopes, elk, lions, and sea lions; and among emperor penguins, ostriches, argus pheasants, and hummingbirds. To understand this evolution, it is necessary to identify the costs and the benefits of these anatomical elaborations and display behaviors. The establishment of feudalism in Europe freed the warrior caste from bondage to agricultural and craft labor, and their military and police obligations became episodic. Their existence became only the more public—a display of signals. In order to be effective, signals must be reliable and, in order to be reliable, signals must be costly, argue ethologists Amotz and Avishag Zahavi. If the signaler could have given the opposite signal and gained thereby, the signal that he did give at a loss gains credibility.2 The knights began to dress in refined fabrics, linens, and silks set off with ruffles and lace. They grafted upon themselves the glittering plumage of rare birds, the nacreous spirals of deepocean shells, and the lustrous furs of fox and mink. They wore rings set with precious stones on their fingers and gold chains on their chests over which hovered perfumes made of musks. Unlike the stately and static raiment of the monarch, their apparel was designed to be displayed in movement—in parades, tournaments, and dances—although the bulk and the refinement of this apparel handicap movement.

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The knights contrasted the sleek clinging of stockings and leggings and bared chests with billowing shoulders, flared sleeves, and flowing capes. At their crotches, they sported brocaded and jeweled codpieces. Their heads were helmeted in gleaming metal fanned with filmy plumes; their feet were shod with silver-buckled boots. They remained warriors and bore arms, but their swords were forged of rare metals and the hilts adorned with jewels. Their fantastically arrayed bodies were set apart, remote from all laborious concerns, ostentatious and alluring. The knights evolved a specific beauty that is ornate, spectacular, monstrous—glamorous. This was not the beauty of ideal bodies celebrated in classical sculpture: that of proportion, harmony, and inner timelessness, that is, without internal factors of disequilibrium or change. It was not the functional beauty of workman’s garb—Mongolian herdsmen’s longcoat, boots, and fur hat; or aviator’s jacket and helmet. The knight’s apparel monstrously enlarges and distorts the proportions of body parts: the head, the arms, the genitals. The body is used as a frame for the display of the gossamer texture or heavy folds of fabrics. The linen, cotton, or wool is dyed in intense and showy colors petaled with intricate embroidery and beadwork. The strokes and shimmer of plumed helmets and the billowing of capes take possession of the space that they traverse. Knights cultivate ceremonious and gallant ways of gesturing and moving and their pauses are marked in statuesque postures and poses. Mounted on embossed and studded saddles, they parade on prancing horses. They carry on their wrists hooded falcons whose intricately penciled plumage gleams in the sun. Sexual display behaviors are probably innate to some degree and are certainly influenced by internal and also environmental stimuli and inhibitors. The displayed behaviors are instinctual as well as learned; because the individuals who display are in competition, they involve mimicry of the most sexually successful individuals and often of other species. Species of birds that include a great deal of mimicry of other species in their songs are typically species in which sexual selection is at work. Mimicry is a means by which language becomes attractive. Natural cries, shouts, outbursts, and murmurs give place to vocalizations, all of which are to be some measure mimicry. Whenever he speaks, the

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male came to speak as a knight, a prince, a priest, a peasant, a foreigner, a servant, or a supplicant. The knights elaborated declamations, epic chants, and romantic songs.3 Sexual selection can mean intersexual selection—females select sexual partners for traits attractive to them—and intrasexual selection—males determine dominance through aggressive display behaviors. Whether intersexual or intrasexual selection, or both, are at work must be decided by empirical studies of individual species. In some species the males drive off and even kill rival males. However, when sexual selection is present, actual physical aggression among males is rare and more often ritualized; it is competition in display that determines dominance and rank among them. Do males see in the extravagance of a signal that a male gives the high costs to him and thus his superior vitality? In sexual selection, males and females have conflicting interests. The number of offspring that a female may have is limited; a male has an interest in breeding with a large number of high-quality females. A female may settle on finding the best-endowed sperm donor among the males, even if she must share his favors with many other females.4 In milieus in which males do provide for and participate in the rearing of the offspring, they can commit themselves to only one female at a time and the female may well need to compromise on quality in order to get a male willing to commit with her. In many species, ornamented males gather in specific arenas, leks (from the Swedish leka, to play), and spend weeks in display. Male ranking is produced through competitive display and ritual combat. Females visit these arenas and typically select the most imposing males and copulate with them, leaving most males without sexual partners. In these species, the males do not participate in the rearing of the offspring, which is done by the females alone. Lek mating has been documented in insect species, especially butterflies, bees, and wasps; fish such as cichlids; toads and tree frogs; salamanders and newts; marine iguanas; some ninety-seven species of birds; mammals such as some deer and antelope species; an African bat; an Australian marsupial; and at least one population of dugongs. The knights’ helmets, capes, bouffant sleeves, and codpieces, which enlarge the bulk of the body, are designed to be intimidating. Many

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venomous species have bright coloration that stands out from their surroundings; aposematic coloration advertises boldness and challenges the enemy. Armed, bold, ostentatiously exhibiting virile postures and vigor, the knights flaunt a touchy susceptibility and sense of honor before other males. Competition in display among the knights determines ranking in elegance, strength, and belligerence. For a threat to be reliable, the signal must increase the danger to the threatener—must increase the risk that the threatener will be attacked or will be at a disadvantage if he attacks.5 The knights are warriors, but their contests occur in carrousels, tournaments, and on parade grounds. Their jousts stop short of killing or even serious injury. Most warfare is psychological warfare. Knights also compete with one another in rescues, in assistance to the exploited and the weak, in taking risks. Their social services are not cases of reciprocal altruism. Other than recognition of their superior status, they want nothing from those they benefit. Their high-principled beneficence shows that they have excess energies and resources to squander.6 The epigamic traits for which males are selected also function as stimuli for sexual arousal of the females.7 At the present time, we do not know how much a mode of display behavior of a species has been incorporated in the central nervous system, ready to be called into play by the action of sex hormones liberated during the maturation of the gonads.8 Recently, biologists have argued that ostentatious appearance and noisy display behaviors may also signal general fitness traits to females. These traits seem to handicap individuals: the cumbersome tail of peacocks and noisy and ostentatious behaviors consume a great deal of energy and make them more vulnerable to predators. Could it be, as Zahavi and Zahavi propose, that survival, despite the handicaps that such individuals give themselves, signals superior fitness? Women who become entranced by the most lavishly attired males or those who display most dashingly or persistently would choose for vigor, perhaps unwittingly. It is not among the knights, however, that they will find the qualities of a good spouse: someone who would cooperate with the female in setting up a household, someone with skills in agriculture and craft, someone who would cooperate with the female in

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rearing the offspring. The knights, susceptible to going off to war at any time and disengaged from agricultural work, are at best intermittent parents. The choice thus effectively selects racial vigor but not husbandly virtues. The knightly glamour spread to the clergy. For the princes of the church, no fabric was too refined and no expenditure for jewelry excessive for their raiment. Even plebeian parish priests began dressing in courtly ceremonial vestments. Should it be objected that this extension to the clergy of the knightly display demonstrates that it was not intrinsically sexual display? In fact, throughout the feudal period, clerical celibacy was not honored in practice even by the pope. In any event, celibacy is part of the courtship system: whenever males enter contests of display, females are going to be drawn to the most imposing and spectacular ones and many males will have to make do without sexual fulfillment. When species practice sexual selection, the males typically evolve impractical ornamentation and ostentatious behaviors. The females perform most or all of the work of rearing the offspring and evolve unostentatious or camouflage appearance. In some species, however, the reverse is the case. The ostentatious splendor of the knights eventually produced permission for their female consorts to adorn themselves with impractical garb of luxurious fabrics and designs. The courtesans were chosen to breed offspring and reproduce the genes of the knights, but they were able to separate themselves from the burdens of parenting and leave nursing and nurturing to servants. In the measure that the courtesans ornamented themselves more extravagantly and displayed themselves in civic and religious processions and in dances, competing with one another for the favor of the knights, sexual selection tended to become reciprocal. Strenuous intrasexual competition, coupled with de facto polygamy, has resulted in the evolution of the blustering vigor, aggressive temperament, histrionic raiment, and elaborate display specializations of the knights. It is a remarkable fact that the evolution of this astonishingly complex reproductive mechanism has apparently rendered the knighthood neither more nor less numerically successful in reproducing their

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genes than the undistinguished males of many other ecosystems and sociopolitical environments. 9 This seems an obstacle to the recent efforts of some biologists to integrate sexual selection in the explanatory paradigms of natural selection—to understand the female sexual selection as selection of fitness and reproductive success. Could the ostentatious appearance and noisy display behaviors have simply resulted from what Ronald A. Fisher10 described as a runaway process: originally some females must have chosen the more ostentatious males, but these males will also be candidates for the nonchoosey females? They will thus have more offspring, and these offspring will show off and be attractive to females too. Thus, females lose by having offspring who waste resources on showing off. However, is not something else evolving also in courtship—so widespread in species from fruit flies to hummingbirds and emperor penguins—namely, individuality and individual attachment? “Sexual selection provides our earliest clear examples in the animal kingdom of the selection by one individual or another for personal qualities such as appearance, behavior, and probably other attributes that we fail to recognize,” ornithologist Alexander Skutch observed. “It is an important step in the emergence of personality from the level of specific uniformity. When mutual, sexual selection leads to lasting individual attachments and, ultimately, to friendship and conjugal fidelity, thus contributing to moral as well as physical beauty.”11 Transfer Effects

In a great number of species, males attract sexual partners by first taking possession of a territory and its resources and/or by offering food or nesting materials. Male village weaverbirds and male house wrens build a number of nests; the female visits the nests made by several males and selects the one with the best constructed nest offering, which she may then dismantle and rebuild herself. Darwin’s concept of sexual selection applies to species in which the males (or females) attract sexual partners solely with their ornamentation and display. In some species, the males make offerings that are not actually consumed or used in rearing offspring, but rather seem simply to be attractive to females—offerings of songs and flowers, as do the black-throated weaver birds of India. In

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these species, often the males are not ostentatiously ornamented. E. Thomas Gillard introduced the concept of “transfer effect” to understand the evolution of such species: attractive offerings allow the males to dispense with ornamentation of their bodies. In species in which males make offerings, utilitarian or not, to females, there is typically a display performance also. It is this that justifies the concept of “transfer effect” in sexual selection; in the display, the attractiveness of the offering transfers to the male himself.12 In Europe, the knightly caste evolved eventually into the uniformity of conscript soldiers, and the captains of industry marshal their troops suited in gray flannel. Ornamentation and display behavior has become increasingly assigned to females. Males compete for females no longer with their body modifications and adornment—cabinet ministers and bank presidents are dressed as drably as insurance salesmen—but with collections of objects. There is sexual selection and not simply natural selection when the attractiveness is determinative and not the control of territory and resources or the utility of their possessions on display. Offerings of glamorous raiment and jewelry embellish females; displays of architecturally designed homes and designer furniture, luxury automobiles, and collections of antiques and paintings enhance the attractiveness of males. The adornment has separated from the performer, to stand apart as artwork. Men acquire glamour by acquiring antiquities and masterpieces for which vast fortunes can be spent and by financing the production of new masterpieces. Recent developments in the “art world” have reversed this evolution. The more than five hundred photographs taken in the summer and early fall of 1950 by Hans Namuth in Jackson Pollock’s studio and the black and white and the color movies made by Paul Falkenberg of Pollock at work have been decisive. Jackson Pollock held it essential to maintain “contact” with the canvas; he danced over canvases laid horizontally on the floor, dripping and pouring paint to create fields of color. The photographs and films showed Pollock as a painter caught in the arena of a ritualized yet explosive creative activity. The vast canvases ceased to be objects contained within frames to become environments. They also ceased to be spaces for compositions that depicted indepen-

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dently existing things—spaces for illusions. Critic Harold Rosenberg noted that at a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyze or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.”13 The separation of the artist from his object was being reversed; the subject of art increasingly became its own making. The Namuth photographs and Falkenberg film revealed Pollock’s activity of painting as a dance to those who were not there, but did not make a dance of his painting for Pollock. A performer does not require mirrors, the mirrors which are the eyes of others or films of himself, to see his own poise or rigidity, grace or awkwardness. In taking a stand and orienting ourselves into movement, our bodies contract an internal postural axis that dynamically integrates our organs and limbs and systematically redistributes their vectors of thrust and support. This postural diagram produces a kinesthetic sense of itself; as we sit, we have an internal, postural sense of the position of our legs under the table and do not need to look. This postural schema emanates a “body image”—a somewhat misleading term for what is a quasivisual sense of how our body looks from a viewing distance where our posture would be seen. In thrusting and gesticulating, in crouching or leaping, we quasisee where we are and how we are moving in the visible layout about us. A dancer recognizes his image that he sees in a mirror because it matches the quasi-image that his postural axis generates. As he dances, he quasi-sees how graceful and gorgeous he is. As a result of the popularity of Namuth’s photographs and Faulkenberg’s films of Pollock, the persona of the artist took on a dimension greater than his works. The generation of artists who worked in the late sixties and seventies focused much energy on projecting a persona or selfimage that could be as compelling as Pollock’s media image. This was to issue in what came to be known as “performance art,” including artists who explored persona and self-image as a significant and appropriate subject. The sociosexual function of art objects to give glamour to their patrons or collectors is transferred upon the artist performer. The emergence of female performance artists around 1970 marks a second reversal. Pollock put himself in the artwork; Orlan set out to

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inscribe major artworks onto her face. She created a composite image, via morphing computer software, of her face, combined with features of females in artworks. Leonardo’s Mona Lisa was chosen “because she is not beautiful according to present standards of beauty, because there is some ‘man’ under this woman. We now know it to be the selfportrait of Leonardo hiding under that of La Gioconda.”14 Diana, the goddess of the hunt, was chosen because she was aggressive and did not submit to males. Orlan incorporated the forehead and temples of Mona Lisa into the image, adding the nose of an anonymous School of Fontainebleau sculpture of Diana. Orlan appropriated the mouth from Gustave Moreau’s Europa, who looked to another continent, permitting herself to be carried away into an unknown future. From Botticelli’s Venus, goddess of love, fertility, and creativity, she took the chin. She appropriated the eyes of François Pascal Simon Gérard’s Psyche because of Psyche’s need for love and spiritual beauty. Orlan then integrated these features into her face via ten plastic surgery operations. The composite, she explains, corresponds to her inner image of herself; she has called her transformation a “woman–woman transsexualism.” Plastic surgery has seemed only a further extension of display existence before males that has been assigned to females in recent centuries. Involving a confession of natural faults in their bodies, it would be done in secret and, ideally, completely deniable. Orlan makes performance art of her surgery. She determines the colors in which the operating room is to be painted and dresses the surgeon and nurses in clothes designed by top Parisian haut couturiers; the surgeries are broadcast live in galleries in Paris, London, New York, Montreal, and Tokyo. During the whole of a typically six-hour operation, she remains conscious and recites texts chosen from Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Blanchot, and Lacan and answers telephone calls and faxes. Surgery remains akin to butchery, so any surgery is repellant, with the anesthetized patient spared the witness of the violence being done to his or her body. Surgery on the face is particularly horrible to watch because all that is most personal and individual in our sense of our identity and will is condensed on our face, which the surgeons cut loose and now have in their hands. However, this does not make Orlan’s sur-

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gery another spectacle in which the performer is denuded and displayed in some physically degrading position and which the viewer does not watch without a sadist awakening in him. By remaining conscious and speaking during the entire operation, Orlan retains all the initiative of the shock that she imposes on viewers; her surgery cuts away their complacent excitement. As the surgeon inserts the scalpel, cuts through the thickness of her face, and lifts it from the skull, the flesh darkens and swells. For weeks afterward, the face remains discolored and swollen; Orlan exhibits daily photographs of this in galleries, along with vials of the blood shed and fat extracted during the course of the operation. In a recent operation, she had two ridges inserted monstrously in her temples. These performances shock, horrify, and repel males accustomed to watching females display for selection by them. Neither complacent nor sadistic, medieval knights risked their glamorously arrayed bodies with poise and style in bloody games intoning declamations, epic chants, and romantic songs. Orlan’s performance selects for a new kind of male, summons a new knighthood. In order to be effective, signals must be reliable and, in order to be reliable, signals must be costly, ethologists Zahavi and Zahavi had argued. The songs [of humpback whales] have musical structure. They are comprised of four to ten themes sung in the same order, and each theme is a unique set of musical note sequences—phrases and subphrases…. Of vast significance for understanding musical intelligence is that, when played at high speed, whale songs are indistinguishable from bird songs; at an intermediate speed, they can be mistaken for possible human compositions. Apparently, birds, humans, and whales possess a basic musical intelligence since they can listen to, appreciate, create, and sing intricate and beautiful music that is executed by each taxon at a different tempo.15 Since its foundation by Karl von Frisch, Nikolas Tinbergen, and Konrad Z. Lawrence, ethology has elaborated an autonomous technical terminology with which to record and describe species’ behaviors; in

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recent decades, it has integrated its discourse increasingly with the terminology, paradigms, and etiological schemata of evolutionary biology. The communication systems of species have also attracted more detailed research. In popular parlance, turkeys gobble and ducks quack; however, thirty-one different vocalizations have been identified and decoded among wild turkeys and forty-seven among wood ducks. In the more easily observed species, the communication systems for sexual selection have been recorded. Complex vocal and kinetic signals have been recorded for many species. Among manufacturers and practitioners, the vocabulary for human ornamentation and display behaviors has also attained quasiscientific precision. Musicians and musicologists have developed a standard language to produce and describe musical compositions and developments; choreographers have created a precise terminology for details of dance compositions and performances. Textile manufacturers, jewelers, and fashion designers have produced a terminology coextensive with the gamut of substances, forms, textures, and hues used in body ornamentation. This technical and quasiscientific discourse has hitherto remained as autonomous from ethology and evolutionary biology as it has from the metaphorical and emotive discourse of traditional aesthetics. The Glamour Professionals

The sage grouse inhabit the vast plains of the northwestern United States and southern Canada. The cocks are clad in brown or graybrown flecked with white, with a black foreneck and belly and a white breast. Their eighteen tail feathers taper from broad bases to long pointed ends. The dark undertail coverts are tipped and spotted with white. The females, much smaller in size, are clad in uniformly grayish brown plumage, with fine buff and white mottling. In late February or early March, the cocks gather on traditional ceremonial arenas, on open plains or gentle slopes covered with short grass surrounded by sparse, low sagebrush.16 They come there from as far as a hundred miles away. The arena is long and narrow; it may be as much as a half mile long and two hundred yards wide. Up to four hundred cocks come to perform there. The performances are held each day in the late afternoon. The performers position themselves thirty feet

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apart, and each dances across an area of from sixteen to twenty square yards. As the new moon rises higher in the sky after nightfall, more and more cocks remain on the display ground, dancing and challenging rivals in the middle of the night. The dancer draws himself upright, erects his tail with the attenuated feathers spread out and widely separated, like the plumed sheaths used in the great samba competitions in carnaval in Rio de Janeiro. He raises his wings at the base and bends them sharply downward at the wrist; the tips of the longest primaries often touch the ground. He gradually raises his back, so that in the second movement his back is held at a 45° angle from the ground. The anterior neck feathers then suddenly part, exposing two olive green skin patches. The dance is stately with the strutting postures and abrupt movements of flamenco. The third movement begins as the performer opens his mouth apparently to take a breath but instead fills his air sac, an expansion of his esophagus, until it swells out hugely with four or five liters of air, spreading the stiff white feathers of his breast until they cover the whole front of his body and hide his head. In the midst of this white expanse appear two egg-shaped patches of yellowish bare skin. He then lifts the pendent esophageal bag and the skin patches disappear; he takes another step forward and quickly draws his folded wings across the stiffened feathers at the side of his neck as it is jerked upwards, producing a brushing sound. In the fourth movement, his mouth is shut; he moves his wings forward again and lowers his esophageal bag. He again swells out his neck, exposing the oval skin patches a second time but again not greatly inflated, and makes a second, silent backward stroke of his wings; this is the fifth movement. In the sixth movement, he takes a third step forward and moves his wings forward again; the skin patches are somewhat more fully expanded, and the esophageal bag begins to move upward again. For the seventh movement, he extends his neck diagonally as the esophageal bag is strongly raised, nearly hiding his head, and he again rubs his wings against his breast feathers as they make their third backward stroke. For the eighth movement, he withdraws his head into his erected neck feathers, the esophageal bag bounces

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downward, and the inflated bare skin patches form large oval bulges while he moves his wings forward and back a fourth time. In the ninth movement he quickly withdraws his head into his neck feathers so that it becomes completely concealed, compressing the esophageal bag so greatly that the skin patches bulge strongly outward in the shape of hemispheres, and his wings complete a fifth backward stroke. He now suddenly releases the pressure on the trapped air in his esophagus and moves his head upwards toward a normal position. The expulsion of the air produces two explosive sounds that, on a still evening, can be heard a mile away. In the tenth and final movement he returns his head to the original starting position, his white neck feathers close over the bare skin areas, and he returns to the stance assumed at the beginning of the display.17 This is the classic dance. In the movements held and those abruptly changed and in the explosive vocalizations, it is akin to the crane dances and the vocalizations in Japanese kabuki theater. Individual performers, however, give their own style to it and vary the steps. There are also different traditions in different arenas. For example, the explosive contraction of the air sacs is done twice in the classical dance, but occurs eight times in Gunnison County, Colorado. The dance is extremely strenuous and uses up energy at the typical maximum rate sustainable by homeotherms. For several weeks, the performers dance before one another and gradually rank themselves. Top performers accompany their dances with combats that are the stylized movements of a martial art. A challenger runs toward another with guttural, menacing cries. Often only a few wing blows are exchanged. If the opponents are more evenly matched, they stand side by side, head to tail, a foot or more apart. With body, wings, and tail quivering with excitement, they rapidly repeat the guttural challenge. Suddenly, one lashes out with a wing at the other, who may dodge or parry the blow and strike back in turn. Rarely, one seizes the top of the other’s head with his bill and holds him while thrashing him loudly with a wing. More often, before the fight escalates to this extreme, one of the contestants slowly backs away after the exchange of a few blows.

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The center of the arena is the place of greatest prestige, and eventually the most magnificent performer occupies it. His chief rival will occupy an adjacent square, and three to six other stellar performers will circle these two as their honor guard. Females begin to arrive two or three weeks later. They come by air but land to walk to the arena. As they stroll through the four hundred assembled dancers, they pause near a dancer whose performance impresses them. Over the course of days they gravitate to the master cock, who may thus have fifty to seventy admirers watching his performance. He performs the dances with greatest virtuosity, most intensely and most frequently. Aficionadas admire particularly a certain vocalization and a certain pause within it, which accompany a specific movement in the dance. Evidently, only the most accomplished performers can achieve this particular combination within the strenuous choreography of the dance.18 The females award their sexual favors to the most admired performers. Of the four hundred performers in one arena that was carefully observed, four master dancers won the favor of 74 percent of the females. Most of the other cocks, performing from late February through mid-June, get no one at all. Once a hen has chosen her lover and made love with him, she goes off to make a nest, incubate some sixteen eggs, and rear the offspring by herself. The cocks do not acknowledge their paternity and do not assist her in any way. They are full-time professional performers. We can think that the performing artists have the glorious life, utterly freed from domestic labor. Indeed, how did it come about that boys so predominate among births? One census taker counted three hundred sage grouse cocks to eighty hens.19 Georges Bataille inaugurated an erotics, to determine the traits of erotic glamour, ostentatious and alluring, that evolved and evolves in sexual selection.20 Erotic beauty flaunts flamboyant colors in monstrous forms. Peculiar adornments are thrust into prominence: crests, wattles, ruffs, collars, tippets, trains, spurs, excrescences on wings and bills, tinted mouths, tails of weird or exquisite form, bladders, highly colored patches of bare skin, elongated plumes, and brightly hued feet and legs. Attitudes and movements tend to be odd, exaggerated, or unwonted. The display is nearly always beautiful; it is always striking.21

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Whereas classical beauty shows the power and poise of athletes and the ideal of human beauty that Kant recognized materializes ethical attitudes, erotic glamour and rituals do not depict but deflect from view the chaotic release of body fluids in orgasmic abandon. The crest, the tail ending in points, the silky plumage, and the designs on the raiment completely ignore the segmentation of physiological functions on the body. The performance maintains tension between the glamorous external display, held at a distance and apart, and the organs of sexual contact and penetration. Bataille argues that this exhibition that holds back excites the onlooker. The tension of the distance maintained drives both erotic glamour and the orgasmic release, achieved by transgressing that distance and violating that glamour, to extremes. Bataille’s conception of transgression posits a polarization between a beauty that is ethereal and sacred, and the sexual violence that is invited and aroused and that Bataille conceives as profanation and defilement, befoulment. There is female repugnance before the crouching position with which she exposes herself to copulation, but also a vertiginous attraction to it. Yielding to the male who is physically larger and stronger and chosen for his aggressive splendor “invites,” Marguerite Duras writes, “strangling, rape, ill-treatment, insults, cries of hatred, unleashing of whole, deadly, passions.”22 The fascination with glamour ends in a muck of steamy breath, vaginal fluids, semen, and blood. Bataille’s conception of erotic transgression depends too much on the decomposition of the body in orgasm and its release of fluids and energies, which leaves the orgasmic bodies depleted and exhausted.23 In the pleasure of orgasmic release Bataille sees a vertiginous attraction to death. However, in fact, among the glamorous, bearing the ornamentation and executing the performance is far more depleting than the actual sexual orgasm. Bataille does not give enough attention to the dangers to which an individual who displays exposes himself. Most individual murders are crimes of passion. Jackals track and vultures circle over celebrities. Not for nothing are the hens clad in camouflage colors. Annual mortality of adult sage grouse cocks runs about 50 percent.24 The vertiginous proximity to death is on the side of the erotic performance rather than in the eventual orgasm.

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Bataille’s erotics is marked with the biases of his time, his gender, and his species. Although he had explained that glamour in Europe was invented by the knights, he envisions it primarily in women, and assumes it exists for male appreciation. He neglects the intrasexual rivalry in which it develops. He also neglects the autoerotic character of erotic beauty. The great majority of sage grouse cocks, assembling at the arena year after year, receive the sexual favors of no one. The performer who makes himself into a spectacle is a spectacle before himself: in his ritual movements and acrobatics, his postural schema generates a quasi-image of himself: he knows how glamorous he is. In performing for several weeks before other cocks, he knows that the center of the arena is his or is not his. His splendor is his pleasure and his life. Performance Art and Installations

In the southern and central eastern forests of Australia performs the satin bowerbird. His black plumage glistens with tints of violet, purple, and blue. The dull green female has dark crescentic marks on her creamy yellow underparts. Both have bright blue eyes. He clears a patch of ground of every twig, stem, leaf, and root. It will be a hundred yards from any other male’s chosen site. He then covers the cleared area with a mat of small twigs and grasses. At one side of it he builds an avenue of vertical twigs set in a north–south direction—a passageway about five inches wide with a wall of twigs down either side. The parallel walls are about twelve inches high and four inches thick, arranged to arch over into a bower. In front of the north entrance of the avenue, he first covers the mat with straw and clear yellow leaves; upon it he will display a collection of objects: blue parrot feathers, blue flowers, blue berries, blue beetles, fragments of blue glass, pieces of blue crockery, and blue buttons. He strips the branches above of leaves so that his collection is spotlighted with rays of sunshine. Every day he runs a careful check on his collected objects. If any have lost their color during the night, flowers wilted or berries shriveled, they are discarded on a garbage dump, far from the stage. When Morrison–Scott showed 340 shades of colored objects to satin bowerbirds, he found that their absolute preference was for cornflower-blue and lemon-yellow. Rare objects are especially prized. One

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satin bowerbird had put in his display patio seventeen blue feathers, thirty-four pieces of blue glass, eight blue bags, ten pieces of blue matchboxes, one blue State Express cigarette packet, one blue envelope, one piece of blue string, one blue marble, one car park ticket white with blue printing, four blue chocolate papers, a blue invitation card, eight yellowish wood shavings, two pieces of yellowish green onion peel, eight snail shells, one cocoon, six cicada cases, and many blue and yellowish green flowers, laid out over a very large number of yellowish green leaves, mostly the stiff serrated leaves of banksia. A satin bowerbird paints his bower. He searches out blue berries, plums, green liverworts, or charcoal, grinding the material and mixing it with saliva. Working a piece of bark into a soft sponge-like wedge, he brushes this thick shiny paint over the inner walls. Any strong rain washes it down and he may have to repaint frequently. Satin bowerbirds build their bowers beginning in May; hens begin to visit them but there will be no mating until October and November. When a female visits a bower, the owner often emits a volley of harsh notes and flings his display objects around as though he were angry. His bower is his most precious possession; he attends it devotedly, keeping it in good repair, often flying far for items to adorn it. He guards it from intruders who might damage his treasures or carry them off and is understandably wary of visitors. Thus, he begins his courtship blustering, while the female, prudently keeping the bower walls between her and him, waits passively until he calms down, which may take many minutes. The performance is scheduled for dawn. The first and most extensive part (three quarters of the total performance time) is a concert of vocalizations, performed while the singer is hidden from view behind a small tree. His song is his own, but he also blends in the calls of a kookaburra (only the first two bars) and a butcher bird, and the cries of a sulphur-crested and a black cockatoo. His tone poem can include the cries of a crow-shrike and magpie and the peculiar grunt of the native bear. Spotted bowerbirds imitate the cries or calls of eagles, hawks, butcher birds, and magpies, and the wail of a domestic cat. One spotted bowerbird reproduced the sound created by sheep scrambling through a wire fence. A toothbilled catbird, a virtuoso in mimicking the notes

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of many birds of the tropics, was heard duplicating the whirring of a cicada when held by a bird and the distressed croak of a frog when caught by a snake.25 The song of each bowerbird is as individual as his bower and his collection of objets d’art. Then the singer suddenly pops into view to begin the performance piece. The female spectator is at her place inside the bower. He positions himself on his display arena and selects one of his colored objects, while making a strange whirring noise. With his blue eyes bulging, he fans his tail feathers and starts to flick his tail and his wings in short sharp movements; his head is held low with his neck extended in what looks like a threatening stance. As he shifts, his plumage shimmers and flashes in the solar spotlight. He leaps and hops with tensed body about his display arena, picking up first this and then that object. The female occasionally gurgles softly and sometimes gives a small start when his actions are particularly forceful. He does not face her or offer his objects to her. However, if she suddenly departs, he stops displaying immediately and starts calling to her until she returns. A Lauterbach’s bowerbird builds transverse walls on each end of his avenue and weaves thousands of small pebbles into the walls. He collects red and pale gray objects, placing them in separate areas inside his bower. A fawn-breasted bowerbird collects pale green berries and places them in front of the bower and also on the inner walls. A great gray bowerbird collects a huge pile of white objects, arranging them in front of the avenue, and places pale green objects on either side of the white ones. The display stage of one collector was found to contain over a thousand small white bones, and also white pebbles and stones and white snail-shells. When he can collect pieces of green glass, these are laid out at the bower entrance and inside the bower.26 A Queensland gardener, only nine and a half inches long, builds twin pyramidal constructions up to nine feet high, with a bridge connecting them, and decorates the inner walls with pale moss, lichens, ferns, flowers, and bunches of berries. The flowers are fixed upright. W. S. Day turned one of the bird’s orchids upside down. Upon his return, the owner made a great fuss and noise and replaced the flower in its proper position. Day put another flower upside down the next day, and the bird again fixed it correctly. A striped gardener packs twigs with

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moss about the trunk of a sapling; about this “maypole,” he constructs a dome-shaped pavilion two or three feet in diameter, cements it waterproof, and covers it with living orchids. On the floor of the pavilion, covered with a mat made of blackish fibers from the trunks of tree ferns, he arranges bright yellow flowers, many scarlet and bright blue berries, yellowish green leaves, and mauve-colored beetles. A Vogelkop bowerbird builds a dome-shaped pavilion eight feet long, six feet wide, and four and a half feet high. In front of the pavilion he creates a garden of moss, upon which flowers and fruits are placed. S. Dillon Ripley dropped a pinkish begonia, small yellow flowers, and a red orchid on one such garden. Upon his return, the gardener at once threw aside the yellow flowers. After some hesitation and many nods and looks and flicks of the tail, the begonia was also cast away. Perplexed by the red orchid, the gardener took it from one of his piles of fruits or flowers to another, trying to find one that it matched. Finally, with many flourishes, he set it on top of some pink flowers. Bowerbirds do not become sexually mature until about six years of age. During their long adolescence, they spend much time watching adults at their bowers. Their earliest constructions are rudimentary, and only by much practice do they become proficient in building and decorating their bowers. Birds building bowers regularly spy on one another but do not fight one another. They do, however, steal objects from each other’s collections and actively wreck the bowers of rivals during their absence. Female bowerbirds visit all the bowers in the area and end up selecting the best constructed and best decorated bower. They especially prize novel and unusual decorative objects in the collections. They are also partial to singers with superior creative mimicry interwoven in their songs. After making love with her chosen top performer, a female leaves and does all the work of building a nest, incubating eggs, and feeding the offspring with no attention on the part of the father. The nests are shallow bowls built high in trees. Since she must do all the feeding, she lays but one or two eggs. The father continues to tend to the bower, embellish it, and vocalize and dance in it for months afterward. When

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the young are raised, the males leave their bowers and collect in gregarious flocks until the next theater season. While I have ascribed a utilitarian basis for each of the behavioral phenomena discussed, I see no reason, provisionally, to deny that bower-birds possess an aesthetic sense [A. J. Marshall writes], although, it must be emphasized, we have as yet no concrete proof that such is the case. Some bower-birds certainly select for their displays objects that are beautiful to us. Further, they discard flowers when they fade, fruit when it decays, and feathers when they become bedraggled and discolored. But, it must be remembered, however beautiful such articles may be, they are still probably selected compulsively in obedience to the birds’ heredity and physiology…. The choices, in the species we know best, are mechanical; and so, seemingly, are the other bizarre activities which have excited so much imaginative writing in the past…. It would, of course, be unthinkable to suggest that bower-birds…do not get pleasure from the vocal, architectural, and other activities they perform, but whether such pleasure has much in common with that of Man, engaged in comparable pursuits, has yet to be proved.27 In the Renaissance, as already had occurred in Hindu antiquity, texts were written to identify beautiful vocal compositions and architectural forms; in the eighteenth century, the distinct discipline of aesthetics formulated the nature, ends, and function of aesthetic taste. It aspired to a quasiscientific theory in drawing up the canons for architecture, painting, and dance; later, aesthetics was formulated in a metaphorical and emotional vocabulary. This aesthetics first found the forms and compositions of Hindu temple sculpture, Maya stelae, and African and Polynesian fetishes repugnant. However, twentieth-century artists regularly repudiated the aesthetic canons, and patrons and collectors determined a taste for their works. Aesthetics came to admit this taste, as well as the taste of the creators of Chinese, Nazca, Hittite, and Maori “ritual objects” promoted to the status of art objects. Researchers in culture studies seek to account for these varied tastes by investigating nonaesthetic environmental factors: religious ideology, political aspirations and victories; economic demands and goals; and

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psychological drives, ambitions, and unconscious conflicts. Is aesthetic pleasure then a pleasure systematically deceived about itself? Erotics separates from general aesthetics to determine the traits of erotic glamour, ostentatious and alluring, that evolved and evolves in sexual selection. However, like general aesthetics, it is troubled by the suspicion that erotic pleasure does not know what it likes. Writing within the discourse of evolutionary biology, A. J. Marshall posits a finality beyond the pleasure that bowerbirds get from their vocal and architectural activities: the imperative to reproduce their genes. What remains puzzling is that achieving this imperative is not reinforced with pleasure: male bowerbirds do not visit the nests made by the females nor take pleasure in seeing their offspring. But then does a knight or Jackson Pollock, who unquestionably takes pleasure in mating with a large number of different females if only they are beautiful, anticipate a conscious pleasure on seeing sons and daughters who look like him when he passes through Orleans or the Loire Valley, or drives through Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Kansas City, and Brooklyn? Why is the male glamour of European knights so different from the male glamour of Japanese samurai? Why, through female sexual selection, have thirty-three of the forty-two species of birds of paradise evolved high-necked collars, bustles of filmy flank plumes, six stiffened head feathers like antennae, or long curved tail wires? Why does the blue bird of paradise display by hanging upside down? Why do Japanese kabuki dancers dance like black-necked cranes? Why do samba dancers adorn themselves with sheaths of ostrich and peacock plumes? Why do sage grouse particularly admire a certain vocalization and a certain pause within it that accompany a specific movement in the dance? Why do bowerbirds build bowers? Indeed, why does lust demand beauty? Why is the answer, “for the pleasure,” which forces us to admit an irreducible aesthetic pleasure, less explanatory than the answer, “to reproduce my genes”? Notes 1. J. D. Ligon. 1999. The Evolution of Avian Breeding Systems. New York: Oxford University Press, 223.

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2. A. Zahavi and A. Zahavi. 1999. The Handicap Principle. New York: Oxford University Press, xv. 3. A red-eyed vireo in eastern North America sang 22,197 songs in a single day. L. de Kiriline. The voluble singers of the tree-tops. Audubon Magazine. 56(1954):109–111. 4. Zahavi and Zahavi, 27. 5. Zahavi and Zahavi, 16. 6. Zahavi and Zahavi, 149. 7. “Pair formation having taken place with or without a certain amount of display, the posturing of the paired birds has the effect of establishing in-phase correlation between them. Chapman says of Gould’s manakin, “Whatever be the sexual condition of the female she apparently must be courted before she will receive the male.” Similarly, Bristowe, writing of certain spiders, thinks that without prior courtship display it is impossible for the female to copulate. Selous reached the conclusion that greyhens come to the lek for the definite purpose of being aroused sexually, and if the stimulation is not sufficient they depart without coition having taken place. Without sex play the reproductive cycle of certain frogs, toads, newts, lizards and fish apparently cannot be completed.” E. A. Armstrong. 1965. Bird Display and Behaviour. New York: Dover, 341. 8. A. J. Marshall. 1954. Bower-Birds. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 166. 9. Ibid, 27. 10. R. A. Fisher. 1958. The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. New York: Dover. 11. A. F. Skutch. 1992. Origins of Nature’s Beauty. Austin: University of Texas Press, 58. 12. E. A. Armstrong. 1965. Bird Display and Behaviour. New York: Dover, 14. 13. H. Rosenberg. 1959. The American action painters. In H. Rosenberg, Tradition of the New. New York: Horizon Press, 25. 14. Orlan. 1996. Carnal art. In Orlan: ceci est mon corps…ceci est mon logiciel (This Is my Body…This Is my Software), trans. T. Augsburg and M. A. Moos; ed. D. McCorquodale. London: Black Dog Publishing, 88–89. 15. T. X. Barber. 1993. The Human Nature of Birds. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 132. 16. Skutch, 62–67. 17. P. A. Johnsgard. 1973. Grouse and Quails of North America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 169–171. 18. Zahavi and Zahavi, 34. 19. Another observer found that of 204 hummingbirds of ten species, 166 were males and only 38 were females. 20. G. Bataille. 1986. Erotism, trans. M. Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights, 142-46. 21. Armstrong, 305. 22. M. Duras. 1982. La Maladie de la Mort. Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 21. 23. Bataille, 144–145. 24. Ligon, 390. 25. T. Iredale. 1950. Birds of Paradise and Bower Birds. Melbourne: Georgian House. 26. By use of poker chips, Jared Diamond experimentally confirmed individual variation in their preference of colors of decorative items. Provided with poker chips of a variety of colors, different individuals within a population varied in their selection criteria and in the way in which they arranged the chips chosen to decorate their bowers. Decorating decisions involved trials and changes of mind. J. Diamond. Evolution of bowerbirds’ bowers: animal origins of an aesthetic sense. Nature, London. 297:99–102; and Animal art: variation in bower decorating style among male bowerbirds, Amblyornis inornatus. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A., 83(1986):3042–3046. 27. Marshall, 185–186.

HOW ONE FEELS, HOW ONE LOOKS

Where is she? She is in this compact mass of bones, glands, veins and arteries, nerve fibers, muscles, blood, and bile—made up of carbon compounds, minerals, salts, trace metals, and colloidal and jelled water. She exists where her feeling is. When her body is functioning normally, the inner feeling she has of it is vague and stale. On television, biochemists, anatomists, and physiologists have shown her quite complicated and curious operations going on behind her skin. However, she feels no runs of excitement or ripples of apprehension as nutrient-rich blood is pumped down minute tubes or as electrical charges travel up and down dendrites. The undifferentiated and stale feeling is what she wakes up to each morning and immediately recognizes. It is what makes her feel that she is still herself, in this chunk of spongy and gelatinous matter, her body. When she trains herself to ride a bicycle, type, or operate a punch press, certain sequences of contracted and relaxed muscles become smooth and efficient. As long as it functions properly, a typewriter, a bicycle, a car, or a punch press does not call attention to itself. When her body acquires skills, the feeling of effort recedes; even the feeling of smooth efficiency fades out. The more competent and effective that these motor circuits in her body are, the less they call attention to themselves. As the hours occupied at her tasks go on—typing on a computer or operating a punch press in a factory assembly line—the stale feeling 45

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turns into apathy and boredom. The day’s work comes to an end in a feeling of listlessness. She sinks into a sofa so as not to hold up the weight of her torso and limbs and not to push against that torpor to move. She pours a glass of wine; it does not really make her feel high—floating over her body; it instead makes most of the feeling in her body, most of that heavy and sluggish feeling, fade away. In the vague, stale zone that is her body are inner feelings that stand out: hunger, thirst, cold, heat, and fatigue. Attending to these feelings of appetite or discomfort results in feelings of contentment. Relaxing in warmth and comfort, savoring the flavors of food and drink, her body feels dense and substantial—a harbor for the light of her life. Before long she feels the fat. Her sinuous movements are turning into thrusts and proddings at things. The flaccid substance blurs the inner lines that tension and strain make her feel. When she probes her body, feeling for valleys and slopes that generate pleasure, she no longer finds the tinglings, the static, or the spasms. Lounging on a couch, her eyes are no longer in immediate contact with her environment: between her and other people and things are the mounds of her belly and thighs. When the carving knife slipped and cut into her, she felt a bolt of pain, but she felt nothing of the surgeon's knife. The anesthesia left her groggy for a few days, as did the loss of blood; however, she also discovered blanked out areas on her body where nerve fibers had been cut. Waking up in a hospital bed after she had fallen and broken a leg, she felt a spasm of repugnance and horror before the stiff swollen limb that she bumped into under the bedcovers. It was disconnected from her inner feeling; she felt it outside like still warm dead meat. Long before she felt what physical contact with the dead body of another feels like, she has felt this surge of revulsion on contact with one of her own limbs that had become alien and dead to her. Surgery on her hands and especially on her face disconnects her more strangely from the space she occupied. When she squeezes the hand that was operated on, it does not awaken any inner feeling. She kneads the side of her face; it feels like the padding in stuffed furniture. Before, her wanting to attend to another and draw that person’s attention to her and her curiosity, amusement, tact, and courtesy were not just mental states; they were diagrams in her face and hands, diagrams


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forming in flesh and blood. Now her desire to draw someone’s attention, her curiosity, and her surge of affection all feel gagged and muffled behind the substance of her face. Sickness—a bacterial or viral infection, a glandular malfunction, or a neurological disorder—may well be localized, but the feeling that it brings is not localized. She feels any initiative or any effort getting mired in the sluggish substance of her body. She tries to read or watch television, but her eyes are opaque; when she shuts them to try to sleep, she feels hot gritty or slimy lumps under her eyelids. There is a sour and nauseous taste and smell to her mouth, armpits, breasts, and clammy skin. Aging makes her feel her movements lagging behind the decision and wish to move and her desires and impulses increasingly sinking back into the inertia of her trunk and limbs. Her skin feels like hide; when she strokes it, it no longer flushes with the thick pleasure she once knew. Aging feels like sickness—that weariness and inner fog increasingly difficult to shake in the morning. The pores and orifices of her body continually exude secretions and excrement, but surface or internal wounds turn her flesh into filth. She coughs out phlegm; a wound secretes pus. Once, in Patagonia, a dog bit her, the wound scabbed over; and then, in Venezuela six weeks later, the wound infected. She had not noticed anything when she took a shower that evening, but the infection raged under cover of night. She felt herself struggling to awaken out of a deep torpor. Then she became aware that the room was filled with the greasy foul stench of a piece of rotten meat in the room. When she swung out of the bed, she realized that the rotten meat was her leg. She had seen a dead person lying in a coffin, a dead cat, and dead birds on the grass, and she felt a composure and sometimes an unearthly tranquility in the stillness of the corpse. Now she begins to feel horror and repugnance before a corpse; its sight gives her a premonition of corruption, of the rotting of flesh that pollutes the bed and the ground with its bile and the air with its stink. It recalls the horror and disgust that she felt before the fetid infection in her body, where she first smelled and saw the decomposing, putrid cadaver into which it was turning. After that she feels a new revulsion in catching sight of the malnourished street kids of São Paulo or the homeless aged of New York. Until

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now, she had thought, in aversion, that their suffering was feeling weakness, exhaustion, the numb throbbing of hunger, the misery of unwashed grime, and only cardboard boxes laid over the cement to lie down on at night. Now, when she notices bruises on their legs and cuts in their arms, all the fetid blood sickness of an infection and the revolting stench that she felt steeped in comes back to her. Seeing them in dark alleys, sprawled against the filthy walls, she feels and smells the filth into which their bodies are turning. Sometimes, too, the vague and stale feeling of her body gives way to surges of exuberance. Something switches her metabolism to overdrive; her movements pump with a vigor in excess of what the tasks require and she has energy to burn. She whirls and dances in the spring winds. On Saturday she goes out of town and wherever the mountain path goes she feels like going still further, still higher. Caught in a summer thunderstorm, she races laughing down the streaming mountain path. Unless she deliberately acts to smother them, these states of elation become intoxicating and the reckless moods and actions they issue in become irresistible. Each day she washes away the wrinkles and scum of the night, arranges her hair, and dresses with clean and becoming clothes. Sometimes, when she gets caught up in the gleam and ardent shadow of the swirls of her hair and the liquid colors of her eyes, they seem to her to be an extravagance in which her body indulges. She looks at the splendors secreted by the flesh of the other animals, the pearls of oysters, the silks spun by moths, and the plumes of pheasants; she grafts them onto herself. The sheen of glamour spreads across her body, and she, like birds of paradise, butterflies, and coral fish, finds it addictive. She finds herself scanning the garden and the street with a song in her eyes and a melody in the movements of her torso, legs, and fingers. Throwing a punch, a kick in the air, a sudden impulse that hurls her body against her pal standing there in the park, she felt hot bursts of muscled pleasure. She gets intrigued with the energy packed in muscles and with the substance of muscles. In the gym, she feels them swell and harden at grips with iron weights on steel bars. At this late date in our civilization, powerful musculature is no longer needed in an industry that has become mechanized and robotized, nor in war, which has become automated. Even in the infantry,


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she will find that it is endurance, rather than bulk and delineation of musculature, that counts. Bodybuilding is not a sport, in which skill and precision of operations are competing. Apologists call it an art—not decorative art but real art, like sculpture. Culture critics call it a strategy to change the image, and thus the status, of women—an operation of empowerment, a politics. In fact, it is not the discovery that she is an artist or a militant that keeps her in the gym. She is fascinated with growing muscles—all the possible muscles to the max; never mind the uses to which they might then be put. She feels pleasure glowing in her excess of muscle that she sees and fondles. Sociologists might try to explain her fascination with musculature by the addictive force of cultural images—the aesthetic glory that artists since the age of Pericles have spread over titanic bodies or the political power, the leadership, that sculptors have depicted in bronze statues of muscular males. The truth is that her addiction to musculature has its source in her body. Although resentment at being pushed around by images of male toughness and fear of being physically attacked and overpowered may make her despise her weakness, the addiction to the gym and muscles comes out of pleasure. The first day that she went to the gym, she was shown how to work out different body parts with the barbells, dumbbells, and machines. The next day, she felt weariness all over and fault lines, webs, and sheets of ache in the substance of her body, delineating within muscle systems that she had no idea existed. Now, as she works out, concentrating her attention on her biceps, deltoids, and abdominals, and hoisting the weighted bars to muscle exhaustion, there is this raw feeling in inner crevasses which is never without a sizzling edge of elation. From time to time, a trip, vacation, illness, or just the press of other interests keeps her from the gym for a week or a month. When she goes back, she feels, the day after, that inner anatomy diagram of braided lengths of muscles drawn with lines of ache and burn. Feelings of pumped, compacted power and stinging tension advance upon and enshrine her sense organs and the orifices of her body. Before, her eyes, ears, nostrils, and mouth felt like openings on the surfaces of her head; now she feels the contracting power of her back and neck lift her eyes. She feels the shifting axis of her torso pan her ears

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across the rumbling highways and the forest. Her hands and fingers were sense organs, antennae that registered the softness and bristle of things, their sleekness and stickiness. Now she feels her biceps extending her fingers, her triceps lifting them to know the solidity and weight of things, to tack across the streaming sunlight and the winds. Before, she felt her anus secluded deep within flesh, exposed only in squatting to excrete waste. Now, she feels it enshrined in the pride of her bounding buttocks, whose beat generates melodies in her body. Before, she felt her private parts at the base of her belly and half covered with the breadth of her thighs; now she feels the diaphragmatic power of her abdomen and the flexing of her thighs throbbing in her vagina. Mixed in with this feeling of exuberance each day, in the full pump in each rep, is a triumphant feeling. It is not only the feeling of overcoming the dead weight of the barbell and adding yet another weight to it. As her musculature swells and becomes more precisely articulated, there is the taste of victory—in the battle today, not the war—against the corruption of sickness and aging, against the surgical scarring and deadening, against the fat. The exultant, triumphant feeling is the sense that she is advancing ever further where the stakes are higher. An injury first fills the abused flesh with pain and then with the inexpressivity and insensitivity of stiff meat. The compulsion to push on risks pulled tendons, torn muscles, and injuries that require surgery. Sickness and infection enter the body silently through unnoticed breaches in the invisible masses of macrophages and T-cells that lurk behind the pores open on all her surfaces. She becomes aware of them with the electrolyte drinks, the protein and carbohydrates supplements, and the vitamins and minerals that she measures out to turn back the states of exhaustion in which the viruses and infections proliferate. As she works out, she writhes voluptuously in the pungent massage oils of her own secretions and sweat. Her hands rub them off under the flow of the shower before they irrigate and fertilize funguses. Later, in her soiled clothes, she already smells the stench of dead skin cells and souring body fluids—the stench of death. She is not seeking the exultation of triumph of the competitive sportswoman over other sportswomen. Nevertheless, the thrill of overcoming inner adversaries feeds her appetite for the daily workout. She


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still feels it when bounding down the steps of the gym, striding down the streets, or working at her job. At any moment, while extending her hand for some practical task, she flexes her biceps and tightens and pumps her wrist muscles. In getting out of a chair, she hardens and splays her torso. This superabundance is radiant, and it is exposed, paraded. How muscular exuberance eradicates the retractile feelings of fear, timidity, and shame! She cannot avoid feeling that her body is not flowing into the willowy evanescent forms of Persian courtesans, geishas, flower women of the court of the Sun King, or fashion models; it is not metamorphosing into the astral forms of Venus, Shakti, or Kanon. Her body is not maturing into the sheltering and nurturing forms of Earth mother and Madonna. Yet, how can she not feel that she is beautiful, increasingly beautiful, with an animal beauty resplendent of the sovereignty, ease, and abundance of gratuitous energy? It is true that her beauty is not demure but brazen and crosses lines that opposed genders; there is something satanic in her beauty, suggestive of the most troubling perversions. She positions her body triumphantly, not as the faded expression of an angelic ideal but as an immoral and sacrilegious splendor. We open our eyes, in uninhibited fascination, upon sunfish, dragonflies, leopards, and eagles, whose actions occasionally may be, but whose natural bodies never are, obscene. We talk, abashed, about elk, lions, cassowaries, and sea lions. We contemplate, without alibis for being thrilled, the powerful musculature of greyhounds and racehorses, of the black bulls in the corrida, and of cheetahs in the savannah. However, our ethics, which has built up so extensive a vocabulary, has not given the name of a virtue to the compulsion of a woman to move with the grace, as well as the powerful and proportioned musculature, of solitary beasts of prey. Morality is set up to recognize merit—that is, what has been acquired by effort and labor and what also serves some good. Of course, in the pride of the swell, delineation, and proportions of her musculature, she sees materialized a corresponding number of months and years, of kilograms of weights to which she has willfully applied herself. Unlike the beauty of her hair or her designer evening dress, she has acquired all her muscular distinction by herself. However, this effort is pitted against genetic endowment and continually reveals that genetic

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program as a destiny and a limit. Effort and determination and perseverance in the gym only make her body not be less than what nature has destined it to be, but destination to physical splendor can only come from the rare luck of her genetic constitution. That she feels great is the outcome of her intelligence and resolve. But her science issues in witchcraft—the heightened sense of fate and destiny. That she looks great is the mark of her genetic constitution, which is the result of extremely improbable accidents. Morality is right, then, to find something suspect in the bodybuilder’s attitude and feelings. Her exuberance and the triumphant pleasure that she takes in her carnal glory are not moral satisfactions. They are not celebrating her existence, her body, in the world of effort, merit, law, and obedience, which is the world of morality. They are celebrating her body, her existence, in the world of luck and celebrating the amoral universe of chance. Just as she looks upon the powerful grace of a puma, the incalculably grand outcome of a million genetic accidents, so she looks with awe upon her physical splendor. We have come to take our minds—our awakened perceiving and thinking minds—to be located in our heads. It is with our heads (our brains) that we observe, judge, evaluate, and decide. Are not our eyes, noses, and ears fastened directly on our heads, fastened there on our minds? Of course, we also feel (observe, judge, and evaluate) textures, temperatures, and pressures with our fingers, toes, and all the surfaces of our bodies. We observe, judge, and evaluate with surges of energy and body rhythms. To understand someone who rushes into the room and says something to us is not simply to decode his word and grasp the concepts; it is first to pick up the tone, the intensity, and the rhythm—anxious, terrified, raging, exultant, quizzical, or probing. We might rather locate this very basic level of understanding, as did the ancient Greeks and the Hindus, in our chests, our hearts and lungs. An ordinary Tibetan meditation practice is to shift the locus of the ego. The ego is a transient and transitory identity and point of view. I can look at my hands, locating myself in my eyes. I will then shift my location to my hands and, from there, view, feel, and explore the eyes and face above me. The meditation teacher teaches me to migrate to my


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lungs and, from there, to view and feel the ribs about me and the hands and head outside that are driven with my pumpings of air in and out. If, in the daytime, using our head to solve problems in the office or the factory, we locate our ego in our head just behind our eyes and between our ears, at night this location shifts. Do not all our dreams feature eyes, lips, jaws, teeth, or fists? Do not all the images of clouds, mountains, lakes, and buildings in our dreams seem to extend core images of body parts or to contain them in palimpsest? In dreams, do not caves turn into jaws and eyes into stars? Freud was convinced that the phosphorescent mirages of dreams shimmer over penises and vaginas, but eyes, jaws, and fists are equally cores and source points of our dreams. It is not that our minds, detached from our sleeping bodies, generate phantom limbs, eyes, jaws, penises, and vaginas. What is dreaming is agitated, lascivious, orgasmic, metamorphosing, and discharging. Not our minds but our eyes, lips, jaws, teeth, fists, thighs, penises, clitorises, and vaginas are generating images: they are dreaming. Dreaming begins when the ego shifts from the skull to the dismembered organs. Our bodies continually visualize themselves. Psychologists have studied the “body image”—that quasivisual sense that our body has of itself, which does not necessarily coincide with the objective size and shape of the body—that is, the others’ perceptions of it: an amputee has a phantom limb, an anorexic sees herself as fat. It is not some visualizing power in the mind running on empty that produces the quasivisual sense of our body, but the postural diagram of that body. The body feels and also quasisees itself stiffening in anger, crouching and tightening in greed, opening up and letting go of its grip on things in surprise and wonder, and sketching out multiple movements in hope and delight. A body just released from the hospital after surgery that then finds itself surrounded by muggers uses all its power to protect its abdomen, its body image reduced to the sutured still raw abdomen and the shield of arms and hands. A body on the bed, its limbs settling by gravity, its postural axis contracted into the orientation and focus of the eyes only, generates a quasivisual image only of insomniac eyes suspended in the dark of night. As sexual excitement subsides and the body reorients, its postural axis reassembles its motor limbs and the genitals fade back into the continuity of

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the body image. A body’s image of itself expands as it encounters no resistance, running with the wind down a hillside, swimming down a placid river, unfolding into a swan dive, or paragliding in the summer sun. These contracted, fragmented, and dilated quasivisual images of our bodies are dreams that our bodies dream in broad daylight. During the succession of exercises with barbells and dumbbells of her workout, she shifts her sense of herself successively into her swelling biceps, deltoids, thighs, calves, and abdominal muscles. Before, she looked out through the windows of her eyes over the vague and stale mass of her body. Now, each time that she flexes biceps, calves, and buttocks, they quiver with sensitivity; they become sense organs. She views and feels the surrounding things—the walls, the mirrors, the corridors, the streets—with a self located in those biceps, in those thighs, in that sprung muscled back. The ego in these quivering muscle fibers secretes dreams; it cannot help but secrete dreams. Her legs and arms and back are exposed, pumped with power but not put to use; the force and the feeling in her muscles does not run up against and adjust to reality. With all the excesses of her muscles, she rises out of an office or an assembly line and emerges in an epic and heroic space. She strides across the barriers and channels of domesticity, charm, compliance, and leniency. The delineation and proportioned development of her musculature incarnate a sense of rightness and justness; her body is made to exultantly restore nature by excluding men with devious minds, monstrous tastes, and brutal bodies. Her muscled back splays her spine—a Zen archer’s bow, shooting off arrows of power into the springtime hills. Her thighs and calves launch her up cliffs over oceans, into herds of impalas in African deserts, or into outer space among rockets and comets. Her shoulders spread her arms to soar the storm clouds with Valkyries for company. Her heart is no longer cowering behind rib walls, and her pectoral muscles, not simply holding firm her breasts, reach out to embrace and hold children, lovers, small animals, and savage beasts against the warmth of her heart. She no longer folds her hands protectively about the cave of her abdomen and womb. Her fingers are no longer antennae of insects and tendrils of vines; they close in fists that open breaches in the walls of the gym, the house, and the city, and extend talons to carry off us with her.

DISMEMBERMENTS

THE SOCIAL BODY

The evolution of the human primate effected certain disconnections of body operations with the environment and set up different connections. Unlike other mammals, which make their way head first, the nose is no longer in contact with the environment; the eyes have become the directing organ. The upright posture disengaged the hands from the terrain; they now become coordinated with the eyes. As humans begin to alter and reconstruct the environment about them, new functions are taken on by different body parts and organs. Paleontologist André Leroi–Gourhan divides the history of technology accordingly as when humans first made cutters, choppers, and grinders of stone, thus disconnecting their teeth from these functions; then domesticated beasts of burden, and water and wind power, thus displacing onto them the functions of their muscle power; and finallly invented the clock, which could be used to turn on and off operations of wind, water, gasoline, or electrically driven machines, thus displacing onto it the surveillance function of their eyes. It is understood that technological discoveries or inventions generated changes in the forms of human association. Hunter–forager societies are different from the societies that arose among sedentary, agricultural peoples; slash-and-burn agricultural economies are different from the hierarchical societies ruled by divinized kings that characterize societies in

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which rice terracing and irrigation have transformed agriculture. Industrialization generated the break-up of feudal society. Recent historians, however, have been exercised by the question of why technological innovations were not adopted in regions where they were known. Why were animals not domesticated in southern Africa and Australia? Why did irrigated rice terracing spread only in the arc from northern Indochina, Java and Bali, Luzon, to Japan? Why did the Polynesian “Argonauts of the Pacific” not circumnavigate the globe and build transcontinental empires? Why was industrialization brought to China from Europe, which had acquired so many decisive technological innovations from China? For Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the explanation must be found in the type of society or, more exactly, in the way in which a specific type of social machinery codes (records, channels, and regulates) the connections of body parts that are productive of surplus energies.1 It was not the stirrup, which made possible the use of horses in military raids, that made feudalism possible; it was feudalism that made possible the use of the stirrup for military purposes. It was empires ruled by divinized kings that made intensive irrigated rice-terracing economies possible.2 The recording, channeling, and regulating (coding) of productive energies characteristic of specific social machineries are not simply the result of intellectual innovations. They are produced and reproduce in a specific social substance upon which human organisms are attached—more exactly, upon which specific body parts are attached and become productive. Modern Western individualism depicts the generic human as an integrated organism capable of exercising all the skills required by these agricultural, maritime, military, and technological innovations under the surveillance and control of his intellect and will. It is this image of homo faber that must be set aside in order to catch sight of the social body and its evolution. The Enlightenment characterized modern societies as associations formed by contract with law as the transcendent, universally valid and transtemporal, framework for interactions among individuals. The notion of contract posits persons as autonomous agents exercising

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understanding and will. It is taken that humans associate because they are needy and vulnerable; their bodies are hungry, thirsty, and exposed to the elements and to predators. It is these needs and wants that drive them to act and to modify their environment. They act effectively inasmuch as, in growing up, human bodies integrate their limbs and organs, defer immediate gratification, and survey the field broadly so as to envision possibilities and objectives. Psychoanalysis offered an account of this maturation and socialization. The infant finds immediate gratification in contact with the maternal breast and lap and with his own body which he strokes. He also finds immediate gratification in mental images, taking them for reality and believing in the omnipotence of thought. However, the father will eventually intervene to detach the child from his mother. He prohibits contact gratification, threatens castration. The boy will take the threat seriously when he discovers that the mother lacks a penis. Then he understands that he has come from that gaping wound between her thighs; he is the body part severed from her body. He understands now why she holds him close, fondles him, and dotes on him. He catches sight of the possibility of being the phallus that she lacks and thus of demanding her total devotion. He will then be able to assent to the prohibition required of him, giving up his real penis as a source of immediate contact gratification in exchange for an ideal phallic existence, which demands all his pleasure, his happiness, from the woman. He internalizes the paternal law and identifies with the father in order to take the place of the father. Giving up immediate gratification, subjecting himself to the paternal law, and demanding his happiness from the other, the child is ready to enter society. Anthropologists recognize that the Enlightenment concept of society is recent and ethnocentric. Sigmund Freud explained that primitive societies are characterized by immediate gratification—not labor and ordered manufacture—and by belief in the omnipotence of thought, that is, magic, where contact with an image effects the realization of desires. In subsequent despotic societies, the males identify with the father figure without taking his place; the identification is and remains symbiotic. Such societies are the adolescence of human history.

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Freud also believed that the primary processes of infantile libido are repressed by the prohibition of immediate gratification and the subjection of desires to the law and of the mind to reality—but not eliminated. They subsist in conflict with the libidinal life of the adult and in law-regulated modern societies. Infants attract intense affection on the part of adults. This is not only because the mother sees a part of her body in the infant, but also because the infant, closed in his immediate pleasures, is an image of self-sufficiency and completion envied by the adult, who is driven by needs and committed to the ever wider and endless search for happiness from others. If the primary processes of infantile libido push up against and break through the secondary processes of the laborious and law-regulated adult, it is because they produce and reproduce. The original libido does not subsist inertly. Deleuze and Guattari argue that this requires a new conception of life and its libidinal forces. Everything is recast when an organism is no longer viewed as a material assemblage in which, through leakage, evaporation, and the conversion of fuel into energy, needs and lacks develop that activate the organism to open to the environment and act to take what it lacks from it. Instead, the organism must be viewed as a material substance that generates energy, as an engine producing energy in excess of what it needs. In organisms, energy is produced, reproduced, cut free, distributed, and consumed. Genetics places the maintenance of codes—the DNA and RNA molecules—at the point of origin of living systems in the nonliving. If vital systems can be called “machines,” it is because their operations are not simply random; they are coded or, rather, are loci where coding forms and maintains itself. Deleuze and Guattari distinguish three different productions in this energetic body. From birth, the orifices couple onto organs that they find contiguous with them, and draw in nutritive flows. With the force of its strong cheek muscles, the infant’s mouth draws in the milk, along with gulps of air and warmth. These ingestions produce satisfaction: plenitude and contentment. Contentment is not simply an affect simmering over the inner content; it is a force: the infant body closes its orifices, curls up upon itself, closes its eyes and ears to outside fluxes, and makes itself a “body without organs,” in Antonin Artaud’s expres-

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sion. This undifferentiated and closed plenum produces and reproduces. Deleuze and Guattari identify the Id, and the primar y repression that produces the Id, with this state of the body. Its contentment is a death drive, which is not a compulsion to disintegrate into the quiescence of the inert but a primary catatonia. Freud discerned libidinous pleasure already in the slavering and drooling with which the infant, over and beyond contentment, spreads a surface of pleasure. Here is a second production. Every organ coupling can, by an anaclitic deviation, be turned to the production of erotogenous surfaces: the mouth can draw in nutriment but also slaver, drool, google, and babble; the anus can release excrement but also spread it into a surface of warm pleasure. Now the organs figure no longer as orifices leading into the inner functional body, but as productive apparatuses attached to the surfaces of the closed plenum of the body, functioning polymorphously perversely to extend pleasure surfaces. The pleasure surfaces thus extended are surfaces of contact, where infant face and maternal breast, infant cheeks and blanket take form together as the convex reveals the concave face of an object. They are surfaces of sensuality—not of contentment, but of what Freud called excitations, freely mobile excitations. Excitations are not properly “sensations,” that is, sense data, givens of meaning and orientation, information bits that would be fed into the inner functional body. They are flows of energy that ripple, irradiate, intersect, and condense. The infant intensifies its surplus energies in extending surfaces; discovers the pleasures of surfaces; and discovers the pleasures of having surfaces, of being outside, being born. This extension of pleasure surfaces to which life attaches blocks the compulsion to return to the womb, the primary death drive. These freely mobile excitations converge, affect themselves with their own intensities, and discharge in eddies of egoism. Nomadic, multiple, ephemeral surface egos form where surplus energies are consumed in pleasure—eddies of egoism that consume themselves. This is a third production. The contented infant, mouth, eyes, ears, and fists closed, gives us the image of a sated, satisfied plenum, a “body without organs.” Freud even

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reduced a great deal of the charm of babies to our fascination with this spectacle of narcissism, of closed individuality. Yet, the infantile body is anything but a separate substance; from the first, it is in symbiosis with mother, Earth-mother, Earth; it is in symbiosis with a mother harassed, preoccupied, and weighed down with the social and material world. In this attachment, it can produce and reproduce as a sated, satisfied, closed plenum. In being coupled to the maternal breast, the blanket, the toys, the tools, and the machines, it can produce pleasure surfaces and produce a sense of self—that is, produce irradiations of excitations that condense, intensify, and are consumed in eddies of egoism. The body as an individual substance, which is then put into relations with other bodies and things, only appears so in the discourse and practices of our epoch. This individuated body substance is the product of a process of abstraction and formalization—the residue of a historical process of disconnection. The infant is already attached and the adult remains attached to the social body. The social machinery operates essentially to record, channel, and regulate the coded flows of vital energies onto the social plenum. Deleuze and Guattari distinguish the way in which the codings of the social machinery attach productive body parts on the body of the Earth in hunter–forager societies,3 on the body of the despot in imperial societies, and on the body of capital in capitalist societies. Hunter–forager societies do not subdivide the territory; they subdivide the humans on it. The Earth figures as the undivided plenum upon which the productive organs of humans are attached; the societies are territorial or terrestrial. Here someone does not enter the society by assuming civic rights and responsibilities, as a juridic person. He or she does not enter the society by taking up a post in the distribution of tasks that the society organizes, by fulfilling a productive or defensive role; in hunter–forager societies, every adult performs pretty much the whole gamut of male or female tasks. A child enters the society by initiation. In the initiation ceremonies, he will be marked; more exactly, energy-productive organs and limbs will be separately marked. Body parts will be tattooed, scarified, perforated, circumcised, subincised, and clitoridectomized.

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Among the Lani of Irian Jaya, the people perforate the ears of the initiates and insert the plumes of eagles, marking their belonging to the high crags where the eagles dwell; among the Kapuaku, the initiated will have the septum of their nostrils perforated and the tusks of wild boars inserted, marking their belonging to the dense forest; among the Azmat, the initiated will have the ridges of their ears perforated and the teeth of crocodiles inserted, marking their belonging to the swamps and rivers. Among Australian aborigines, men at initiation will have the opening of their penis cut back, in monthly operations, until it is open to the root, so that they will urinate stooping like women, marking their belonging to the fertile body of maternal Earth. The myths tell of these couplings, these marked and separate productive organs and limbs, and their attachment to the Earth: Sati is dismembered, and her body parts fall to the Earth; at Naina Devi her eyes fall and forms a lake; at Jwalamukhi her tongue falls and form inextinguishable flames; at Vajreshwari Devi her breasts fall and form mountains on the plains; at Kelika Devi her hair falls and forms striated cliffs. The marked penis of Shiva falls to the Earth, forming linga, stalactites, and outcroppings in rivers, caves, and high mountains. Deleuze and Guattari direct this conception against the exchangist conception of society, such as that at work in Claude Lévi–Strauss. Society is not a network that gets elaborated in the measure that individuals exchange women, goods, services, and messages with one another, and, in the delay between giving and receiving, contract obligations represented by claims. In a hunter–forager society, I may owe no one anything, but when the clan goes on a hunt, is attacked by wild beasts or human enemies, or pulls up its camp and moves elsewhere, I who live in this area, who have been marked with the tattoo of the leopard people or wear in my perforated septum the tusks of a wild boar, have obligations to all those who are so marked. It may well be that I will suffer loss without getting the equivalent in return from the others, or even that I will risk or lose my life. When the group needs to reproduce and approaches the other moiety during the annual betrothal feast, all women who have been clitoridectomized are obliged to bring their reproductive bodies to the feast and accept a man of that moiety.

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Among hunter–foragers, society is constituted in and by the regulation, or coding, of certain body organs, coupled with other things in specific ways. The voice is coupled with hearing: hunter–forager cultures are oral, narrative, epic cultures. The societies of New Guinea, speaking seven hundred mutually incomprehensible languages (fully a third of the languages of humanity), have never engaged in any empire building. They have no hereditary or elected chiefs. Most of these societies are headhunting societies. Headhunting is not war; territory, booty, or women are not captured in battles. Each young man seeks to kill the most brave and spectacular warrior on the field to cannibalize his body so as to interiorize his spirit. Men who have killed more than one are not respected and do not gain power over the group; they are regarded as twisted killers. “Big men” are big by virtue of the power of language and the capacity to organize feasts in which households assemble, reaffirm their bonds, and communicate with distant peoples. They have extraordinary memories and linguistic capabilities; they are capable of telling their ancestries back dozens of generations and of recalling and retelling in captivating ways the history of the people, its luck, feasts, heroisms, and ordeals. This power to hold an audience spellbound on long nights constitutes the prestige of big men. The languages are extraordinarily difficult to learn; not only is their grammar extremely complex but also they develop great elaborations of ceremonious, poetic, and epic styles. A society is made of all those who speak the same tongue, who have heard these chronologies and epics. Second ly, hands are coupled with surfaces of inscription. Hunter–forager societies are not manufacturing but graphic societies. Legs inscribe the earth with their paths and their dances; hands inscribe the walls of caves or huts, cut twigs to mark paths, carve tools, and weave colored fibers into designs on baskets and clothing. Hands do not learn skills from explanations of the meaning and methods of handling and manipulating or from being shown the diagram or the model. They learn by immediate induction: the hands of a child imitate the movement of the hands of men and women. These markings are not related to the voice and do not express ideas. The intricate pattern of weaving on a Lani armband reveals the dexterity of hands working

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on surfaces, just as the arabesques inscribed on his tattooed skin do. The footprint seen on the path does not refer to the name and notion of “leopard,” but links up directly with the leopard. The claw print inscribed by human hand on the path or on the body of the initiate does not refer to the voice that utters the name “leopard” and the mind that conceives the meaning of that name; it makes the leopard present in the initiate and to the viewer. The third coupling is that of eyes with pain. The pain inflicted in initiation rites is public and theatrical: one watches. The markings, perforations, inscriptions, incisions, circumcisions, subincisions, and clitoridectomies are painful. The eyes are not circumscribing, surveying, or comprehending; the watcher winces and senses the pain. As the young Maasai maiden is scarified, the thorn is inserted again and again all afternoon to raise scars in regular patterns across her back and down her thighs; the others watch, eyes feasting on the pain. Rites of passage include gratuitous fasting, long incarcerations in dark men’s houses, beatings, and bleedings. Infections and deaths occur. The markings are done in long public feasts. There is a clearly collective pleasure in this cruelty, this savagery that so revolts us. It also excites us, childhood readers of National Geographic, colonists, and missionaries, who are enflamed by these societies of pain and soon indulge our own cruelties, unleashing upon the natives insults, beatings, hard labor, and enslavement. Those who live long among savages acquire cruel habits. I remember spending a week with a missionary, a member of the order of Saint Francis, who had been in Irian Jaya for twenty-seven years; each morning, I helped him in the clinic that he had set up and personally staffed. I was surprised, intrigued, revolted, and then excited by the roughness with which he tore off bandages and the extra touch of cruelty with which he manhandled and jabbed children while vaccinating them. Those he baptized, initiated into his parish, were also perforated and scarred—marked. During a visit to a mine on the Arctic Ocean at the border between Finland and the Soviet Union, the young miner showing me the mine put out every cigarette that he smoked on the back of his hand. I saw that the other young miners all had the backs of their hands covered with scar tissue. When I saw them, I did not read them as marks of

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words that could be pronounced, like tattoos where things such as “47th battalion, Nam” can be read. Rather, when my eye fell on them, I flinched, seeing the burning cigarette being crushed and sensing the pain. In these scars, I saw the ardor of these fiery and defiant men who had come from the south to these mines on the brink of the Arctic Ocean and whose branding of their hands functioned as a seal of their fraternity. Savage societies are among us today—gangs, packs, milieus, and “society”—which occupy a certain turf undivided among them and speak a certain lingo—street talk, drag-racing lingo, or high-society politesse. They mark the space with graffiti or with club parking lots for limousines; they mark their body parts with pain, tattooings and brandings, or stiletto heels and gym-built corsets of musculature. Hunter–forager societies are transformed or incorporated into barbarian societies in a change in the nature of the codings. By overcoding, all the lines of filiation and alliance are made to converge upon the body of the despot. As the productive organs are attached to the closed plenum of his body, they are detached from the earth. As the barbarian horde invades lands remote from their homeland, they maintain their identity as the eyes and ears, and hands and legs of the despot, though they no longer hear his voice or even understand his language. Writing begins with empires. It is contrived for use in the levying of troops, supplies, tribute, and slaves; the collection of taxes; the constitution of the state monopoly and bureaucracy; imperial legislation; and dynastic and imperial historiography.4 Hunter–foragers do not lack writing for lack of manual dexterity. When the hunter–forager’s eye saw the claw-mark cut into the trunk of the mopane tree, he winced; the eyes felt the wound of the tissue and the bleeding sap of the tree and jumped to the wound on the flesh and the blood of the Yoruba initiate. Writing is produced when graphics are coupled with the voice to become signs of words spoken. Now the viewer no longer winces when he sees the mark; the eyes do not see the incision with which the chisel or the stylus has cut into the surface of the stone or parchment. They pass lightly over the inscribed surface, not seeing, not sensing the grain of the stone or the tissue of the parchment at all; they see the words as though they were flat patterns sus-

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pended in a neutral emptiness. The eyes are no longer active, palpating the pain and jumping to the leopard; they are now passive before the lines of abstract patterns reflected on it. Writing is graphics now coupled on the spoken word, but in the coupling the voice is transformed. Before, the voice speaks, is heard, and awaits an answer; the movement zigzags from one to the other, and it is broken by pauses and silences. Now the words exist in a linear progression in a space that is everywhere and nowhere. When I read, on paper, the lines, “The citizens of New Spain are hereby taxed five gold pesos each per year,” I neither hear a voice nor respond to it; I am instead relayed to the meanings of these signs, which exist transtemporally and transspatially. I receive the message equally whether I am within hearing distance of the voice that issued it or remote from it. The voice is there only as that, now mute and anonymous, which once decreed that this inscription means this concept and that decrees that one no longer settle on the resonance of any utterance but take it as a sign that refers to other signs. To receive the message, it is necessary to subject oneself to the phonetic, taxonomical, syntactical, and semantical rules of significant language. It is necessary to derive the meaning of the words from the semantics and grammar of this particular society—the code of its order. Writing is produced when graphics are coupled with the voice—not the voice that resounds from a throat situated someplace, but a transcendent voice that detaches the words from vocalizations. This remote voice is the voice not of universal reason but rather of a particular social substance, an empire. You wander the High Andes; you look at Quechoa inscriptions carved in stone or painted on the boards of huts, seeing incisions and markings in the substance of the stone or wood forming patterns with the cracks and fissures in the stone, the grain and weatherstained and bleached colors of the wood. By night, you hear the murmurs of the people around the fire, the supple tripping of the sounds, and the intonations and the silences, as you hear quail foraging a field or settling in a thicket for the night, vocalizing their togetherness. Suppose that, like Wagner’s Siegfried in the Enchanted Forest, you were to drink some

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magic potion, some cocktail of maté de coca and whisky, and suddenly understand their language: now you hear them speaking about “transporting raw coca into the hands of the Columbian agents.” Abruptly, you hear their words not resonating in their throats but designating concepts fixed in the international code established by the market and police of the transnational order, in which coca means the same thing—crime—however, whenever, and wherever it is spelled out. You cannot detach this meaning from their murmurings around the fire without subjecting yourself to the decrees that fix the imperial code. At the same time, you insert yourself in the code; you are designated as an observer and reporter bringing back to the imperial metropolis handcrafts and idols, souvenirs and memories, photographs and field reports on the activities of outlaws. If you want to speak of them murmuring together, without subjecting them and yourself to the law, or if you want to tell of them speaking to you as outsiders, you must never pronounce this word. How, then, will others understand what you say—others who, like yourself, speak imperial English? At best, you can speak of them in the imperial code, as cocaine traffickers and terrorists, but in such a way that the words become shifters and squibs. You can try to make others conspirators who use the imperial formulas as passwords with which outsiders and outlaws recognize one another. In the mercantile era now extending globally, the productive organs and operations are detached from the body of the despot; the social substance to which they are attached is capital. All productions are coded with their value in money. Coded with monetary value, anything can be coupled on to and exchanged for anything. Marx had seen the dismemberment of the human body in the social machinery of industrial capitalism. Laborers are coupled on to the productive process as hands that assemble on assembly lines, as legs and backs that bear burdens, or as arms that stoke furnaces. It is the hands and eyes of clerks in offices that are paid for. Soldiers are limbs connected to weapons and disconnected from brain and imagination. Foremen are eyes disconnected from heart. The lord of industry is the calculating brain disconnected from the taste and caprice of lords. The industrial enterprise,

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where everything is coded as money, is the whole body upon which these part-organs are attached. Marx conceptualized as alienation the dismemberment of the body whose productive parts and organs are attached to the full body of industry governed by the internal laws of the market; he invoked the idea of integral man, whose body parts would belong to himself and who, as species man, would belong to a society where the economy is at the service of the integral social body. However, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the notion of the integral man who belongs to himself is a moment of the capitalist coding. It is the notion of a source of flows of substance and energies that are of themselves without coding—without social recording, channeling, and regulation. But the social machine codes productive couplings as well as disconnects them, making their flows of substance and energies abstract. Marx and Freud noted that money, which has only abstract, mathematical properties and its material substance, whether of paper or gold, lacks use value, is like excrement, although in capitalism money is precisely the universal agency effecting productive couplings and producing society. Is it not with excrement that capitalism produces the private individual, the integral man? Deleuze and Guattari point out that the first organ to undergo removal from the social substance was the anus. It has long since ceased to function in connection with the earth, joining our excrement to the humus. Now the social coding decrees that no use is to be sought for the body’s production of excrement, nor meaning given to it: it is not to be spoken of in public. It has become a pure residue—an abstract flow without significance. The notion of the private individual is that of one whose productive organs are all progressively disconnected and rendered abstract. Capitalist coding produces bodies thus susceptible to being connected to any agricultural, maritime, military, and technological innovations. The surface productive of the social is being extended, elaborated, and transformed not simply by new laws being legislated; by new enterprises being launched for the international exchange of messages; and by transnational corporations shifting capital through Singapore, Tokyo, and Brussels; shifting industries to the Third World and indus-

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trial goods to the First World; Korean Scuds to Iran and Ukrainian plutonium to Japan; and Filipino maids to Kuwait and England. To continue to exist in society is to recycle oneself, learn new skills, detach productive hands, eyes, or brain from one post to couple them to another. The social body is being laid out, laid, excited, and metamorphosed where the hands of the medical technician implant the detached, marked, labeled fertilized egg of an upwardly mobile couple into the womb of an unemployed woman. Where eyes watch a CATscan of a metastasizing cancer or the sonar probe of a pregnancy. Where genes are spliced in a fetus in the womb. Where organs from cloned pigs are grafted onto old people. Where the hearts, livers, and kidneys of newly executed Chinese prisoners are rushed to clinics in Hong Kong where ailing financiers and aging media superstars arrive by limousine. Where the ear put against the cellular receiver hears the order from the field manager or the investment broker on another continent. Where automated, robotized, cybernetically programmed industry detaches the hands from any craft, except that of touching buttons that project patterns on computer screens, which vanish without leaving a trace. Where the eyes no longer feast on the agony of enemy soldiers cut down by someone’s arms, sword or bayonet, and are fixed on screens showing smart missiles from unmanned drone planes pulverizing hangers, barracks, and factories. Where the receiver hears not a narrative or epic voice, but, rather, information, that is, data that organize and order segments of cerebral activity. Where a plastic handgun makes it possible to skyjack a multimillion dollar jet airplane. Where the hand with a syringe in a supermarket anywhere in the suburbs injects cyanide into some bottles of Tylenol and bankrupts a multinational corporation. Where one modular sector of the brain of a high-school dropout in Karachi inserts viruses into computer programs that shut down the Pentagon. Where the hands of technicians in uniform tap on keys on a computer and an unmanned drone launches a missile on a factory or town on the other side of the planet. Notes 1. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari. 1983. Anti-Oedipus, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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2. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 427–437. 3. “Savage societies” follows Marx’s term and is still used in Lévi–Strauss’s pivotal work, The Savage Mind. 4. “What a strange thing writing is! It would seem that its apparition could not fail to determine profound changes in the conditions of existence of humanity, and that these transformations would have had to have been especially intellectual in nature. The possession of writing prodigiously multiplies the aptitude of men to preserve knowledge. We like to conceive of writing as an artificial memory, whose development should be accompanied with a better consciousness of the past, hence a greater capacity to organize the present and the future. After one eliminates all the criteria proposed to distinguish barbarism from civilization, one would like at least to retain this: the people with writing are capable of accumulating ancient acquisitions and progress more and more quickly toward the goal they have assigned themselves, while the peoples without writing, incapable of retaining the past beyond the fringe that individual memory suffices to fix, would remain prisoners of a fluctuating history which would always lack an origin and the durable consciousness of a project. “And yet nothing of what we know of writing and its role in evolution justifies such a conception. One of the most creative phases of the history of humanity took place during the approach of the neolithic age, responsible for agriculture, the domestication of animals and other arts. To reach it, it was necessary that during millennia little human collectivities observed, experimented and transmitted the fruit of their reflections. This immense enterprise was carried on with a rigor and a continuity attested to by success, while writing was still unknown. If writing appeared between the fourth and third millennia before Christ, we must see in it an already distant (and no doubt indirect) result of the neolithic revolution, but nowise its condition. To what great innovation is it bound? On the plane of technology, we can cite hardly anything but architecture at this period. But the architecture of the Egyptians or the Sumerians was not superior to the works of certain Americans who were ignorant of writing at the time of the arrival of Cortéz. Conversely, from the invention of writing up to the birth of modern science, the western world lived some 5000 years during which its knowledge fluctuated more than it was increased. It has often been remarked that between the kind of life of a Greek or Roman citizen and that of a European bourgeois of the 18th century, there was hardly much difference. In the neolithic period, humanity took giant steps forward without the help of writing; with writing the historical civilizations of the West long stagnated. No doubt the scientific expansion of the 19th and 20th centuries would hardly be conceivable without writing. But this necessary condition is certainly not sufficient to explain it “If we want to correlate the apparition of writing with certain characteristic traits of civilization, we have to look in another direction. The sole phenomenon that faithfully accompanied writing is the formation of cities and empires, that is, the integration into a political system of a considerable number of individuals and their hierarchization into castes and classes. Such is, in any case, the typical evolution we see from Egypt to China, the moment that writing begins: it appears to favor the exploitation of men before it favors their illumination. This exploitation, which makes it possible to assemble thousands of workers to yoke them to extenuating tasks, better accounts for the birth of architecture than does the direct relation envisioned a moment ago. If my hypothesis is correct, we have to admit that the primary function of written communication is to facilitate enslavement.” (C. Lévi–Strauss. 1992. Tristes Tropiques. New York: Penguin, 265–266.)

THE PHYSIOLOGY OF ART

Apotemnein: Greek for “to cut off, to amputate.” Orgasm, according to Freud, is a state of built-up tension, which is abruptly released. In the vagina, there are contractions, segments of tension that tighten, push across duration, and then abruptly are cut off; there are discharges. The penis gets swollen and hard; then abruptly it lets go a spurt of jism. The jet is cut off; the penis deflates, shrivels, and hangs down. In painting, composing songs, and writing poems or novels there is a flow of fluids and excess energies, and there is cutting off, sectioning, and segmenting. The artworks are cut off from the artists; like a child delivered and wandering off on his own, or like an ejaculation, the artists let them go. Paintings come in triptychs; today, artists do not paint masterpieces that stand by themselves; they paint series and sequences. Galleries and museums put on retrospectives, in which we view an artist’s itinerary or research segmented in canvases, each framed and cut off from the others. Poems and songs come in stanzas and novels come in chapters. They move along like the sections of a centipede or a segmented worm. Humans adorn their bodies and put artistry in their movements, but we also work on the very substance of the body. Artistry supplies for body parts cut off; artistry also cuts into and cuts off the substance of the body.

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Prosthetic Body Parts and Art

A man’s penis is cut off; it happens in war, in automobile accidents, and in bedrooms. A man or a woman gets a foot, a leg, a hand, or an arm cut off; a woman’s breast is cut off. Mechanical engineers design prostheses contrived to restore the harmony and proportion of the natural body and equilibrium and poise in its movements. They practice a very classical art—that of Greek antiquity and the Renaissance. Friedrich Nietzsche explained that the whole of Apollonian art is prosthetic. The population of anthropomorphized deities in Homer and the statues and friezes of the Age of Pericles functioned to add on to the sense of themselves that humans had—the sense of their infirmities and debilities—so that they could see themselves whole. This art is in a quest for the holy grail of perfection, for immortality—for the beauty that looks immortal because without any inner disequilibrium that could bring about collapse. Most of us never saw that the two sides of our face are not really symmetrical, until a photographer cut a photograph of our face in half and joined each half with its duplicate turned over. It has been shown recently that, across cultures, people find faces that really are nearly symmetrical to be more beautiful. Every zebra is striped differently, but the stripes on one side are the same as those on the other. In nature, very few species are randomly mottled; virtually all color patterns and designs on birds, mammals, and fish are the same on both sides. Does not the artist’s celebration of symmetry and proportion have its biological source in the very nature of an organism? Supernumerary Body Parts

Because nothing demonstrates the demiurgic power of art more than the ingenuity and artifice that goes into fabricating prostheses, there is the inevitable temptation to add more prosthetic parts: to add wings, like Icarus; to add the powerful rear legs of a goat or a horse, like satyrs and centaurs; to add a third arm, like Australian performance artist Stelarc. However, adding prosthetic body parts in excess of what the natural body has is really done only in art and not in real life. It is done not in classical art, but rather in that somewhat dubious and marginal art of the horror movie.


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We do not find a child with a missing arm or foot repugnant; we feel instead a surge of tenderness and care. A three-legged dog was in the neighborhood where we grew up; nobody found the sight obnoxious. However, the excess of body parts provokes nothing but repugnance. Bodies with double penises or clitorises, three testicles, or several breasts are not only ugly, they are abhorrent. Our eyes shrink back from gazing long at photographs of the body of William Durks, who had two heads imperfectly separated so that he had a double nose and a split lip as well as a third eye, as well as of the bodies of persons born with incomplete parasitic bodies stuck to their own. We cannot really endure imagining living in the body of Frank Letini, with three legs and two penises; Betty Lou Williams, with four legs and three arms; Myrtle Corbin, with four legs and two vaginas; Jean Baptista dos Santos, with four legs and two functional penises; Lazarus Colloredo, who had a second head grown out of the chest, with eyes that never opened and mouth that never closed; Pasqual Piñon, who was born with an extra head growing out of his forehead that was able to move its eyes and see, and open and shut its mouth. Cloning brought up the possibility of producing, with every child born, a clone of that child with only a vegetative brain. The clone would be raised to the age of fifteen, then its life would be terminated and it would be quick-frozen and kept as a source of organs for any failing liver, kidney, heart, or amputated or crushed finger, hand, or penis in the child and adult. This procedure would replace the fine art of mechanical prostheses. This idea aroused considerable malaise when word of it got out, and provoked alarm in the public and politicians over cloning, which animal biologists viewed with equanimity and enthusiasm as the key to top-quality sheep, cattle, and poultry. It was not simply the idea of terminating the life of the clone and then to farm his body for organs that people found appalling; that would not be significantly different from the use of body parts of stillborn fetuses. It was not simply the social uneasiness with a procedure that will be available only to the rich; such issues have, since the time of the Bible, been rationalized away. However, a nauseous horror subsists over all those extra body parts waiting there in the deep freeze to be connected to our bodies and then to begin gesticulating and flailing.

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Apotemnophilia

How about cutting off not only the flows of body fluids, but also body parts? How is that connected to sex and to art? The following item in the press gets us started: SAN DIEGO, CA—An unlicensed doctor who amputated a healthy leg to satisfy his elderly patient’s rare sexual fetish has been sentenced to 15 years in prison after the botched operation cost the man his life. John Ronald Brown, 77, had been a doctor for almost 30 years until his medical license was withdrawn in 1977 for negligence in performing numerous sex-change operations and other procedures. Living in southern California, Brown continued to operate in secret just across the Mexican border—even after being jailed for three years for working without a license. Brown received ten thousand dollars to perform the bizarre amputation on Philip Bondy, a 79-year-old New York man, who suffered from apotemnophilia, a fetish shared by only about 200 people around the world in which sexual gratification is derived from the removal of a limb. Bondy’s longtime friend, Gregg Furth, a Jungian psychoanalyst from New York, testified under a grant of immunity during the two-week trial in San Diego that he and Bondy had contacted Brown as a last resort to fulfill their lifelong desire to amputate their legs. Mr Furth himself paid Brown to amputate one of his legs last year but changed his mind when he saw a Mexican doctor who was to assist in the surgery walk into the clinic carrying a butcher’s knife. Bondy, however, was determined to go through with the operation because he felt that his left leg did not belong to his body. “When you’re on the fringe yourself you have to find someone in the medical profession on the fringe,” Mr Furth explained. According to the prosecutor, Brown “just chopped off ” Bondy’s left leg below the knee in a crude operation in Mexico, and buried the stump in the desert to hide the evidence. Furth testified that Bondy was “delighted” the night after his leg had been cut off, although he was upset because he had fallen down several times in the San Diego Holiday Inn hotel room where Brown had taken him after the surgery. Bondy died two days later of gangrene poisoning. In a court-ordered report, a probation officer wrote: “In retrospect Mr Brown stated that he made a poor decision in this instance. He feels that he is too old to be performing surgery in the future.”1


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How we understand Mr. Bondy! Is there any of us who at this age still will not think that we can do what we want, as long as we do not bother other people? He, like anyone who goes into any kind of surgery, knew of the risk of death, but he was already seventy-seven, after all. How fortunate he was to have a counselor in psychotherapist Gregg Furth, who so well understood the problem—and who had the solution. About the time that I came upon this news item, I was in a bus in Bangkok; looking out, I was drawn to an amputee on crutches. He was standing in front of a department store, and he looked in no way pathetic. The Thais are Buddhists and do give to the unfortunate, and I saw they shared a few words with him when they passed him some money. I realized that I have often been drawn to amputees in the street. I suppose I imagined that what intrigued me was to see how they cope, despite their infirmity. Now I wondered if it was not rather some envy of them that drew me to them—if there is not a closeted apotemnophile in me. So, we understand apotemnophilia. Although there is evidence that psychiatry does not. Psychiatry

Since 1882, psychiatry has identified apotemnophilia as a paraphilic fixation of the stigmatic/eligibilic type in which sexuoerotic arousal and facilitation or attainment of orgasm are responsive to and contingent on being an amputee. An apotemnophile becomes fixated on carrying out a self-contrived amputation or obtaining one in a hospital. His fixation is accompanied by obsessive scheming to get one or more limbs amputated. Apotemnophiles say that they are suffering from being “disabled persons trapped in nondisabled bodies.” The reciprocal paraphilic condition in which the partner is an amputee is acrotomophilia or acrotmetophilia (the liking of an amputated extremity): the condition of sexuoerotic arousal being contingent on having an amputee partner, fantasizing about an amputee, or fantasizing that a nonamputated partner is an amputee, in order to obtain erotic arousal and facilitate or achieve orgasm. An acrotomophile is erotically excited by the stump(s) of the amputee partner. Acroto-

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mophilia is close to amelotasis: the condition of having an erotic inclination toward the stump of an extremity missing congenitally or as a result of amputation. Thus, a constellation of acrotomophiles and amelotatists surrounds apotemnophiles. Apotemnophilia is related to autoabasiophilia: a paraphilia of the eligibilic/stigmatic type in which sexuoerotic arousal and facilitation or attainment of orgasm are responsive to and contingent on the fantasy of being lame, with a limp, or crippled. The reciprocal paraphilic condition is abasiophilia, in which sexuoerotic arousal and facilitation or attainment of orgasm are responsive to and contingent on the partner’s being lame, with a limp, or crippled. In the vernacular, apotemnophiles are called wannabes, or pretenders, and acrotomophiles are called devotees. Devotees speak of “the Interest.” Pretenders want to “feel” disabled. One pretender asks online where he can buy long-leg braces on the black market so that he can use his newly purchased crutches to crawl the mall. Another says, “My biggest hang-up is wanting to feel paralyzed. I can only experience it by using leg braces or a wheelchair in public.” He admits to being frustrated by heavy doors and small bathroom stalls and is not sure why he voluntarily puts up with the nuisance. “I don't know. I have a genuine visual handicap and I know what it’s like to live with that. You would think my actual disability would make a difference. Somehow it doesn’t.” Many pretenders have, since childhood, tied up one leg, fashioned crutches, and imitated amputees around the house. Some tape an ankle to their thigh and roam the streets on a pair of crutches. Wannabes, in contrast, long for the real thing. Although the newspaper article said that Mr. Bondy “suffered” from apotemnophilia, in fact, apotemnophiles suffer from frustration: from having a limb that they do not want and not finding a surgeon willing to cut it off. Medical journals have described people who tried to cut or shoot their legs off. One woman who wanted both legs amputated above the knee used dry ice on her legs to cause gangrene. After years of inner pain and suffering unfulfilled sexual desire, one person, famous in apotemnophile circles, decided to lie down at a railway track and drink himself into unconsciousness. When he awoke, he was an amputee.


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Devotees are erotically excited by the stump of an extremity missing congenitally or as a result of amputation. King Adolphus Frederick, who ruled Sweden in the eighteenth century, had seven mistresses: two had one eye each; two had one leg each; two had one arm each; and one had no arms.2 One study found that 71 percent of devotees are also pretenders or wannabes. That devotees are latent apotemnophiles, argues Dr. Richard L. Bruno, is supported by the finding that only 13 percent of acrotomophiles have had a long-term relationship with an amputee.3 Dr. G. C. Riddle comments, “No amputee is the right amputee,” noting acrotomophiles’ obsessive but typically unsuccessful search for the “amputee of his or her dreams.” An actual relationship would cause the disabled individual to become a “real person,” making projection of the devotees’, pretenders’, and wannabes’ needs into him difficult or even impossible.4 How many prosthetists, orthotists, and personal care assistants are closet apotemnophiles? Drs. Wakefield, Frank, and Meyers5 have related attraction to disabled persons to sadism, bondage, and homosexuality. An amputee’s stump, they suggest, resembles a penis and therefore provides a less threatening sexual stimulus for male latent homosexuals. A stump’s similarity to a penis also raises the possibility that a desire for amputation is a “counterphobic antidote” for male acrotomophiles’ fear of castration—although these psychiatrists admit that such fears have not been documented. More recent surveys find no increased prevalence of homosexuality, sadism, or interest in bondage among acrotomophiles. And any similarity between a stump and one’s own penis, notes Dr. Richard L. Bruno, would have little personal meaning for patient Ms. D., not only because she is a woman but also because she is primarily attracted to men with braces and crutches and is herself interested in pretending to be a wheelchair user. Further, Ms. D. is exclusively heterosexual and had no interest in sadism or bondage.”6 Bodies in Segments

The urge to contrive prostheses seemed to refer us to the basic level of the formation of an organism in which we find a drive for bodily integrity, symmetry, equilibrium, and balance. Does not the orgasmic urge

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to cut off body parts likewise refer to the primordial levels of organisms? The primitive one-celled forms of life first expanded into organisms where all the functions were in each of the segments; any segment that gets severed from the rest can move, take nourishment, grow, and reproduce. The original whole died without leaving a corpse. Starfish and octopuses disconnect from a limb that has been caught fast, though now the limb will die; brittle starfish do this so readily that it is hard to pick one up whole. Some crabs, instead of waiting for a predator otter to attack them, grab hold of the otter’s flesh with their powerful claws, clamp tight, and then disconnect the claws from themselves. If a predator takes interest in them, many lizards disconnect and drop their tails. Anglerfish comprise some sixty species of deep-ocean fish found widely across the Pacific at depths of two and three thousand feet. The newborn male anglerfish has very large tubular eyes and an enlarged olfactory organ. His sexual development advances rapidly. When he has found a female, who is as much as twenty-five times his size, he grips her body anywhere with specialized small teeth. The main thing is to avoid being swallowed by her, as she is wont to do. Once attached, his lips and mouth tissues fuse with the female’s tissue, and his alimentary tract degenerates. In time, their bloodstreams intermingle and he loses his now useless eyesight. Two small openings remain where the mouth was to allow water to enter for respiration. The male has become a parasite, but he apparently puts no strain on the female; some have been known to support as many as three males. Normal, Everyday Apotemnophilia

Ruth Benedict, in a classic essay entitled “Anthropology and the Abnormal,” 7 wrote that for every character trait or impulse that is rejected as abnormal in our psychiatry, such as bellicose character, suspicious character, or the propensity to fall into trance, anthropologists know of a well-documented culture in which it is positively valued. However, it does seem that no culture has been able to value all of them positively. Apotemnophilia is designated a pathological fetishism in our psychiatry, but the Japanese yakuza chop off a finger upon initiation into


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the group. Papuan women chop off a finger to mark each lover, spouse, or child whom they have lost. In both cases, the sexuoerotic connection is patent. In Italy, castration produced singers who had a vocal range and volume impossible for women. In the seventeenth century some four thousand castrati were in Italy; they sang in the Vatican choirs until 1878. Male circumcision is obligatory in Jewish communities and routine for virtually all boys in the United States, and female circumcision is widespread in Africa. Cross sections of tongue, nipple, and cartilage are taken out in body-piercing; cross sections of bone are taken out in the now hip skull-boring. Is there not something libidinous in suburban housewives’ obsessive talk about the details of their hysterectomy or appendicitis operation? Psychology has so far centered on the sexuoerotic nature of the doctor–patient relationship. Could it not be that the operation, the removal of a body part, yields sexuoerotic gratification? In Copacabana in Rio de Janeiro, a young man with one arm amputated just below the shoulder and the other amputated just below the elbow is circulating in sidewalk restaurants selling—knives. He pushes up against tables at which tourists are eating their meals with their knives and forks. He is getting a raucous pleasure out of grossing them out. At the time, I thought that he had so admirably turned his amputations into these powers and pleasures. However, did he not first glimpse the pleasure possibilities of his amputations in the pleasure of the amputations themselves? At the time, I envied his chutzpah. Now I wonder if I was not also envying his amputations. Freud laid out the continuity between orgasm and having a child. Orgasm for a man or woman is pleasure, jouissance, in discharging some body fluids. For the woman, this pleasure leads to the pleasure, jouissance, in pushing out and disconnecting an infant and the placenta, which have been part of her body. The endorphin rush of being delivered of a baby by Caesarian section rejoins the purest apotemnophiliac pleasure. Bulimia and anorexia are metonymies for apotemnophilia—parts for the whole, or whole for the parts, depending on how they are viewed. Acts that are metaphoric apotemnophilia include the multitude of timid, miniaturized, and disguised and symbolic, and also hypocritical,

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petit-bourgeois, apotemnophiliac acts: shaving the beard or skull, plucking eyebrows, chewing on fingernails, picking at scabs, leaving a pulled tooth unreplaced, or enjoying a bowel movement. We human apes have lost most of the hair that must once have covered our bodies and protected them from the sun and the cold. We have replaced it with hides of other animals or clothes made of plant fibers. When we aim to excite one another sexually, we first take pains to cover our bodies with glamorous garb, jewels, and perfumes. The climactic moment of excitement is when we drop our clothes. Georges Bataille saw in it the invitation and temptation to transgression. His conception of transgression is constructed on an opposition between the human and the animal and between the sacred and the profane, and is therefore ethnocentrically biased. Is not the excitement aroused by disrobing an apotemnophiliac excitement? Think of the nudes revealed to be or depicted in art to be integral, wholesome bodies; their nudity appears natural, and we easily picture them strolling about in the Roman baths or reclining at some fin-desiècle open air picnic. They are not erotically exciting; the gentlemen at the dejeuner sur l’herbe are not even inclined to take off their hats and jackets. The nudity that excites us when someone disrobes is the nudity of a body that needed those clothes to be self-sufficient. This is the guy whose black jeans, leather jacket, and sunglasses make his body that of a biker; the woman who needed this power-dressing to be a junior executive; or the guy in the bar who cannot be imagined dressed in anything but plaid shirt and jeans. When these people drop their clothes, they drop whole chunks of their body identity; they are peeled or flayed. The excitement that it arouses is acrotomophiliac and, arousing a like urge, apotemnophiliac. The body collapses on the bed or the grass; the postural axis that had splayed and sprung the limbs and body parts softens and dissolves. The legs lie on the bed or rock and roll about on their own. The arms expose themselves to manipulation and caresses and the hands lie disconnected from the rest of the body and its will, their positions determined just by gravity. The breasts, belly, and buttocks are animated with movements that begin and end in them—shivers, shudders, spasms,


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contractions, and giggles. The orgasmic body has lost its integrity; the body parts are disconnected and on their own. We Artists

We artists.—When we love a woman, we easily conceive a hatred for nature on account of all the repulsive natural functions to which every woman is subject. We prefer not to think of all this; but when our soul touches on these matters for once, it shrugs as it were and looks contemptuously at nature: we feel insulted; nature seems to encroach on our possessions, and with the profanest hands at that. Then we refuse to pay any heed to physiology and decree secretly: “I want to hear nothing about the fact that a human being is something more than soul and form.” “The human being under the skin” is for all lovers a horror and unthinkable, a blasphemy against God and love.8 “We artists,” Nietzsche says. We leave out the kidneys, the pancreas, the liver—and we become artists. From the beginning, from the earliest rock carvings, we have been leaving things out, in our pictures of one another. The artists at Cosquer, Chauvet, and Lascaux depicted the limbs and musculature of mammoths, aurochs, and rhinoceroses with the most painstaking anatomical accuracy, but when they depicted humans, they drew stick figures. The charm of a cartoon consists not only in a whimsical emphasis on some facial feature or gesture but also in how much is left out. “Photographically realistic” is a disdainful expression among artists. Those who could afford it, matrons of distinguished families or governors of states, were painted in oils. The portrait was hung in the house even when the person was alive: what is it that the portrait adds to the presence of the individual in flesh and blood? It does not add; it subtracts. In portraits by the old masters, which have the density of carnal reality depicted in perspective, is it the illusion of three dimensions on a two-dimensional canvas that we admire? Is it not rather that the model has so much presence there even when so much is left out? Only one ear is visible; the portrait will never turn to show the other ear. Sometimes only one side of the face is there. Often, only one arm is in the painting; sometimes the legs and feet are not there at all. Could

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it not be that seeing how much can be eliminated from a body and not be really missed is one secret of the pleasure? The voluptuous excitement of feeling that we can do without the clothes dropped on the bedroom floor, that jet of jism we cut off so insouciantly, or that other hand, those legs, or that third dimension. Slicing off one’s ear in the heat of erotic passion is the sort of thing that an artist would do. How can we make things beautiful, attractive, and desirable for us when they are not? Here we could learn something from physicians, when for example they dilute what is bitter or add wine and sugar to a mixture—but even more from artists who are really continually trying to bring off such inventions and feats. Moving away from things until there is a good deal that one no longer sees and there is much that our eye has to add if we are still to see them at all; or seeing things around a corner and as cut out and framed; or to place them so that they partially conceal each other and grant us only glimpses of architectural perspectives; or looking at them through tinted glass or in the light of the sunset; or giving them a surface and skin that is not fully transparent—all this we should learn from artists while being wiser than they are in other matters. For with them this subtle power usually comes to an end where art ends and life begins; but we want to be the poets of our life—first of all in the smallest, most everyday matters.13 An artist is not a special kind of man, Eric Gill said; every man is a special kind of artist. However, he is so intermittently, by segmenting his life and by cutting one segment free from the rest. Those crowds in the streets out there—all those people trudging up and down with leaden eyes and dour faces, stopping to greet one another and exchange banalities—how could they become poets of their lives? Should they try to find the relationships between the segments and the meaning of each segment and of the whole? Should they try to write some narrative to connect all the segments of their lives together in a beautiful story with beginning, middle, and end? At their funerals, their pastors will sketch out such a story, showing that all that added up to their being one of the good, decent, ordinary people, or even a child of God now being welcomed into the mansions of heaven.


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He tells that story to people in the church with leaden eyes and boorish faces who will greet one another and exchange banalities when the service is over, and go on trudging up and down the street. However, if we were to follow those people with a camera and tape recorder, would we not find that each one, perhaps just once in the course of a day or once every third day, comes out with a few words graceful and lilting as a song? Perhaps just once in the course of a day or once every third day, an intoxicated beam of spring sunlight or the reflected ray off a neon sign finds the glory in his or her face. To be able to see these small, everyday flash-fires of poetry in lives, we must stand precisely in the right spot and at a distance so that there is much that we no longer see; we must section and segment those moments and frame them. These moments of poetry disconnect from the prosaic continuity of a life and are cut off and cast off: that outburst of reckless laughter that broke from the throat of a stout middle-aged woman in the alley. That accountant who looked up from his computer and slid his power bar lunch to a chipmunk on the windowsill. That faint suggestion of perfume found lingering on the pillow after the stranger with whom one made love for an hour has left. Suppose we were to follow ourselves around all day with camera and tape recorder. If we were standing precisely in the right spot, would we not find moments when a beam breaks out of the turbid clouds of the sky to gild our face in glory and when words comes tumbling out of our mouths like a song? By standing on the levels and supporting ourselves on the continuities in our everyday world, we maintain ourselves functional in the prosaic practical world. However, is it not by disconnecting and letting go of the prosaic continuities, cloying resentments, and practical opportunities or difficulties ahead that we release segments of poetry in our lives? Notes 1. Bangkok Post, Sept. 30, 1999, 3. 2. D. P. Mannix. 1976. Freaks: We Who Are Not as Others. San Francisco: Re/Search Publications, 112. 3. R. L. Bruno. 1997. Devotees, pretenders and wannabes, Journal of Sexuality and Disability 1997. 15:243–260.

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4. G. C. Riddle. 1988. Amputees and devotees: made for each other? New York: Irvington Publishers. 5. P. L. Wakefield, A. Frank, and R. W. Meyers. 1977. The hobbyist: a euphemism for self-mutilation and fetishism, Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic 41:539–552. 6. R. L. Bruno, Devotees, pretenders, and wannabes, op cit, p. 254. 7. R. Benedict. 1934. Anthropology and the abnormal. The Journal of General Psychology 10(2):59–82. 8. F. Nietzsche. 1974. The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 122. 9. Nietzsche, 239–240.

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What is anomalous, deformed, perverted, grotesque, monstrous, or depraved arouses disgust and horror. These recoils of feeling drive us to avoid and flee and to conceal and exterminate the weird and repugnant. Throw the tarpaulin over it and get the kerosene! These negative feelings and behaviors can be partially replaced with neutral or positive feelings and responses to the extent that it can be shown that the anomalous functions normally in its environment and the ugly has charm when seen with a stronger lens or a filter. Unlike the Victorians, we do not see mountains as deformations from the ideally spherical or as pockmarks on the surface of Earth. Non-Japanese can come to see beauty in the maneuvers and bodies of sumo wrestlers. A systematic reversal of norms and values can be attempted. With Nietzsche, we can evaluate positively the bodily, the instinctual, the earthly, and the transitory. We can feel liberated and open to vaster and richer realms once we really warm up to hippopotamuses, octopuses, and tapeworms; once we value the savagery of the inner city streets over the serenity of the suburbs; once we acquire a taste for trash art and noise; and once we come to prefer the company of spongers, smoochers, and strumpets to entrepreneurs and professors. These acquired tastes give rise to moralizing. The previous norms and values are now denounced as snobbish and hypocritical. All that had been reproved or shunned in horror is now championed. Snicker89

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ing gives place to liberal earnestness. Moralizing is laying out a program; it is replacing instinctual and visceral reactions with attitudes that are productive and rational. You were passing through Heidelberg and went that night to see some of the famous student bars. After a few brews, you had to pee. You went down the narrow stairs to the basement and found the toilet. As you stood against the urinal, you were aware of someone coming in through the door, taking his place next to you. You kept your eyes decently turned to the wall. However, after a moment you heard, “Excuse me, will you pull out my dick?” You turned and saw that the man standing next to you had hands attached to his shoulders. In a jolt, the words “thalidomide kids” and “seal babies” hit you. Twenty years had passed; they had grown up! You unzipped his fly, pulled out his dick, held it till he finished, flicked off the last drops, and tucked it back. Even as you did so, you were already anticipating the first person to whom you could recount the scene, to gross him out and guffaw. What makes moralizing so stern, tightlipped and tight-assed, is all the force that it must oppose not so much to the natural impulse to flee a grotesque physical deformity or a really depraved action, but rather to the equally inevitable impulse to laugh. When, along with fierce eyes and clenched fists, we threaten or shame someone with words and pass on, the echo of those words mocks them. Our threatening and violent words turn buffoonish when those fierce eyes and clenched fists no longer stiffen the silence. The opposite of laughter is not dismay and disgust, because these so readily convert into the most uninhibited and raucous laughter. The opposite of laughter is scrupulous self-criticism—that finger-wagging Socratic injunction: know thyself! Laughter affirms itself indubitably and believes in the world illuminated by its delight. That at which and with which someone laughs is true. We work to impose order and meaning upon the senseless play of lights and shadows, and patterns and rumblings about us, but this world constructed of words is laughable. The more we think, the more holes in the world of words we come upon. Gaping into an abyss, we send our laughter sputtering like a lit fuse into it.

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A Freudian slip, breaking up the subjugation of our flow of words to overall meaning and to interlocked reasons, releases laughter. A moment liberated from the future and from the enchainment of moments in time, recognizes itself in laughter. The moments liberated in laughter are not subordinated to any project and not put to use. Jets of alertness and quick-wittedness catch the instant on the run. Laughter is deadened by the ponderous, the slow, the insistent, and the mulish. How little laughter is in the chuckling of people with blunt, set, cast-iron minds! Anything unadapted or unworkable produces laughter. The anger pounding against frustration turns into burlesque. As we become aware of how riled up we are, we smile and are on the verge of laughing. In trying to get something done, we had felt the subjection of each step to the following step and to the goal and seen each moment geared into the following moments. A breakdown is a release of the present, which floats disconnected and sovereign. Adrift in a moment that no longer makes sense—no longer has to make sense—we feel giddy freedom. Next to her bed, she has three antique telephones, none of which is connected to a phone line. When the repairman told her that her refrigerator was not worth fixing, she had him move it into her bedroom; she keeps her stash of old love letters in it where they won’t get cold. Over her bed, she has a big kitchen clock stopped for good at midnight. On the dresser, she has an old television set with some transistor burnt out in it so that all the channels show dancing snow or jittery colored waves. She turned it on while she prepared a joint for you. A blowout or a breakdown liberates us. Laughter is freedom. We laugh with everything newborn that has not yet been harnessed to tasks. We laugh at the sight of the colt trying to skip about in the world he got dropped into and getting tangled up in his legs. There is that special kind of pleasure at seeing someone “getting away with it.” However implacably we demand that the malefactor pay, some rascal spirit in us is on the lookout for this pleasure: the highschool dropout who created the computer virus that shut down multinational corporations and the Pentagon; the FBI found him in the Philippines, where the legislators didn’t know enough about computers to have made laws to charge him with violating. The filmmaker whose

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wife accused him in court of having sex with his adopted daughter—who then had a daughter with that daughter and produced a film about it. The sailor who exposed himself in the cinema in Brazil; the judge dismissed the case because that week he had seen the crowd cheering the prime minister watching the carnaval parade with the reveler at his side, her upraised waving arms raising her already minimal miniskirt. We laugh, too, when Nature gets away with it. It is not just with dismay that we watch the television reports of electrical storms grounding jet airliners. Nothing but air—giddy gusts of air, air sputtering, guffawing, and lit up by madcap streaks of lightning—shut down the airport. We cannot watch laughter without being rocked into it. The passengers held up at the airport mostly kid around with the airline staff, make jokes among themselves, and poke fun at the briefcase-carriers shouting angrily at the service desk. The force that turns everything into something laughable, even the most sublime, ideal things, is something quite devastating, of course. Nothing stands against laughter. What happened to the gods? Nietzsche reports that they died of laughter when one of them claimed to be the one sole and supreme god. What I remember of the start of the dream—she said—was that I woke up in the bathtub, finding the water had gotten cold. I put a towel about myself and stepped out into the corridor and then suddenly wondered if I were not dreaming. I went downstairs to where the bathroom really is. There I found myself in the tub; the water was not only cold, it was filthy, yellow and stinking with pee, and with turds floating about. I woke myself up with a few blows on the face, and then as I was stepping out of the tub, I started retching and puked on the floor. Suddenly there was this loud shouting. I turned around and over by the door was a chubby cockroach, who was looking at me with disgust and scolding me, “You uncouth, vulgar woman! What kind of a housewife are you? This is the filthiest bathroom I have ever crawled into.” Then a centipede scurried nimbly on all his legs, scribbled out a prescription, and passed him a Prozac. He then led him to a couch in the other room to get back to the analysis of his dreams; it seems the centipede was a licensed psychoanalyst.

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Although psychoanalysis finds in our dreams the most urgent, most tormenting, and pathetic needs of our minds, in fact, even when we awaken from our dreams cold with anxiety, as soon as we begin to recall them, they seem only to be goofy. If we go over them again, it is because they strike us as far-fetched, sly, and ingenious. Nietzsche and Freud wrote that our dreaming mind is more artistic than our waking mind; especially, it is more clever and hilarious. Even when dreams do reveal a predicament in which we find ourselves and that we cannot stop going over and over, even in sleep, they reveal a still more compulsive need to depict that problem in outlandish and preposterous ways. Dreams reveal that amusement is the deepest need of the mind. You still had this Volkswagen bug, Nazi car for the masses, gray in color; it was fourteen years old. The mechanic told you that you would need to patch up its rust holes in order to get it through inspection. You spent a Saturday patching it up, then went to the paint store where you selected a motorcycle paint, candy-colored sunshineflake streamlinebaby, called “Aztec gold.” You sprayed three coats on it and took off for the West coast. Out in those wide open spaces of Wyoming, the car was finally in its glory, a glittering gold comet that could be seen by your average state trooper for seventy-five miles. Then, one morning, careening down the Rocky Mountains, speeding in at least two senses of the word, you lost the road on a curve and the car rolled and bounced its way down the ravine. When it finally rolled over the last time and lay there, bug on its back, you unbuckled your seat belt, but then it took you some ten minutes shifting through the broken glass to find and shake out a pair of shorts to put on before you could crawl out the back window without getting arrested for indecent exposure too. When we are paralyzed with terror and then suddenly the situation appears absurd, we see ourselves in the slapstick images with which we will later describe it to others. Then frozen terror abruptly cracks into laughter. How this laughter shakes the very bottom of our being! Laughter is older than the satisfactions of competency. We laugh at our clumsiness when we are taught any new skill, feeling the pleasures of infancy again. Is not laughter older than speech? Infants, without the use of language, laugh.

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Laughter is a break in the rhythmic seriousness of breathing for tasks being undertaken, for maintaining all the machinery of the body. It begins in the first days of life, when the mother, tickling the infant, interrupts the seriousness of his breathing. We human animals recognize others of our religion, culture, class, and skin color. Under all that, we recognize our kind, our humanity. How do the sea birds, ten species milling about in the same rookery, recognize members of their species? Is it not in nonsense and indecency—in laughter and in orgasmic excitement—that we, more than recognizing members of our species, find ourselves transparent to one another? Nobody speaks your language in this city where you are looking for the bank office in a giant commercial building. There is a ruckus: a thickset woman in a dark blue two-piece suit is shouting something and pushing a subordinate out of her office. She lunges at him, skids on the polished marble floor, and lands on her ass with a stuck-pig squeal. Further back, bystanders are laughing out loud; as your eyes meet the downcast eyes of those about her, you see their shut mouths choking back sputterings. The impenetrable opaqueness of their minds has suddenly become transparent. Whoever laughs with us is of our kind. It is not yet the pleasure of recognizing that our minds understand one another. Communication with words when we do have a language in common is not the deep complicity with one another that we feel in laughter. The infant waddling across the room who keeled over looks up at us who are laughing and laughs with us. Intimacy and complicity use not the clear and distinct formulations of grammatical language but allusions, cryptic passwords, erotic glances and touches, sacrificial impulses, and laughter. If we begin to speak to someone, it is because first we see him or her as someone with whom we could laugh and grieve. The transparency of our minds in laughter and in grief gives us the conviction that we can understand one another when we exchange information and directives. Humans, Bataille noted, spit, cough, yawn, belch, blow their noses, sneeze, and cry much more than the other animals, but above all, they have acquired the strange faculty of sobbing and bursting into laugh-

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ter.1 They laugh at their spitting, coughing, belching, sneezing, and shitting. Laughter is a spasmatic reaction of the muscles of the mouth, like the spasms of the sphincter muscles of the anus during defecation. The nervous discharge that could have been liberated by the anus or the neighboring sexual organs is liberated by the mouth. When the line of meaning in a statement breaks off into nonsense, the voice ejects laughter. When the progressive steps of an operation abruptly collapse, laughter breaks out over the botched result. What is expelled by the mouth in laughter—this meaningless ending, this worthless outcome of an operation—is the image of feces, urine, blood, and sperm. Parasites—leaches, or crabs in the pubic hair—on our bodies, like excrement spasmodically expelled from them, provoke laughter, as do big floppy hats or droopy pants. A button that pops bounces into laughter, as does the sight of a fall when someone’s arms and legs are cast out uselessly from under him. How hilarious to see someone in the pride of his strength and skill run down a bank to leap and soar over the river, but instead flop headlong into the mud! We shit on things with words that should not be heard in public. Words that are malapropos, out of place, obsolete, or outmoded have an excremental character; they are lumps dropped over the utilitarian gleam of things. The postures and attitudes of eminent personages when persisting in situations of ordinary people are comical—a bishop, whose limousine had to be pulled in for an emergency repair, being a bishop at the truck stop toilet. With scatological derision, one class expels another from the social arena. The older generation, eyeing one another and chuckling, treats the younger one as little shits. The younger generation, with shouts and whoops, shits on the possessions, attitudes, and injunctions of the older. Who can help laughing at the suburban mother each time she utters one of her sensible, cautious, parsimonious maxims? If you really think about spending the only life you have being an insurance salesman, sitting on your fat ass and peering over little rules and columns of numbers for eight hours a day for forty years, the asininity of it will crack you up. There are so many people who, when they finally retire, we

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think that their lives were not just pathetic, they were absurd. We laugh at people whose oafish or slob bodies are ludicrous; whose lives we cannot take seriously; whose jobs or careers are a joke; and who were conceived out of spite and died in some glitch of the machinery, of nature, or of their program for surviving. See those people whose lives are advancing down dead ends and who are perfectly aware of this, who find their lives ridiculous—and set out to outdo themselves. Drag queens are past masters or mistresses at this. With their skinny, uncoordinated bodies, they never could be good at rough team sports or at swaggering and bullying their way through adolescence. Their bodies are a kind of genetic or biological prank. Their whole existence in society, through long years of schooling, maturity, and old age, is hopeless—a joke not only for normal people but for themselves. The system is hardly in danger of being subverted by them. Political movements, even minority equal-rights movements, do not trust them and cannot count on them for any serious work. They do not want to be, and do not pass as, women. They want to be outrageous. Their acts depend entirely on surprise; their effects are momentary: surprising the queer-basher with a put-down so witty that he finds himself unable not to laugh at himself. Here’s a subcult of drag karate. The master in Oriental martial arts catches the lunge of the adversary and throws him with the strength of his own blow. Whenever we laugh, and with it see deeply enough, we find that we are laughing at such an improbable birth and such a ludicrous death—theirs, our own. We feel connected to the real world in laughter. If we can laugh, we can deal with reality! Laughter is provoked by causes that could just as well have provoked the congestion of sexual organs prior to their spasms: the tickling that can prime vaginal secretions can also trigger giggling. An obscene tale or scene that can give us a hard-on can also make us laugh. In fact, voluptuous pleasure is laughable pleasure. The awkward thrashings of people copulating, not keeping track of their own limbs, is nothing if not comical. Already the gleam of eagerness and desire in the eyes provokes teasing and giggles. Does any pleasurable activ-

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ity—any activity—arouse laughter more than sex and eroticism? Orgasm is the spasms, pantings, and releases of the whole body in laughter. In 1991 a corpse was found melting out of a glacier in the Ötztal Alps, on the mountain border between Italy and Austria. It was removed from the ice, and archaeologists identified it as five thousand years old. His freeze-dried body was almost perfectly intact, including his scrotum. The glacier had preserved his sperm, quick-frozen, as is done in sperm banks. A number of women immediately set out to do or pay whatever it took to be inseminated with it and have his baby. Because the very idea is such a gas. Because the very idea is such a gas, it is irresistible. We laugh at the awkwardness and tumblings of a child. Our laughter is indulgent; we think with pleasant assurance that by these gropings her coordination and skills are being developed. This laughter has a self-congratulatory crest; her ineptness delineates our competence and our savoir-faire. The child laughs with a different laughter: the laughter that explodes in the sudden collapse of the enchainment of moments and of subordination to a future. Our laughter is innocent and inoffensive; the child’s is self-indulgent and dissolute. Later, we deride the irresponsibility and recklessness of our adolescent son. No longer indulgent, we jeer at his incompetence and bullheadedness. We mock the bumbling, clumsiness, and faux pas of hayseeds and foreigners. We jeer at people who are deviant, perverted, and depraved. This mockery can sour into indignation and rancor. The white suburbanite becomes trapped in the indignant misery of feeling victimized by immigrants; the father gets mired in an abject ulcerous obsession with his son. Fuming, ranting bigots, haranguing zealots, prickly and tightlipped, tight-assed liberals—it is hard to keep that up and, especially, it’s a drag. If we pull away a chair as a professor or corporate executive bends to sit in it, there is the sudden revelation of an inability to maintain his poise, authority, and seriousness. If we can refrain from laughing, we maintain a position of power over the professional or corporate power. However, we lose our seriousness in laughing. Then it’s relief we know,

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relief at escaping sufficiency and seriousness, and escaping the need to be concerned with them. Mockery wants, instead, to feel triumphant and invulnerable. Our mockery aims to make the professor, corporate executive, or the immigrants see themselves, to make our son see himself, as laughable. However, then we must let the perverts, the foreigners, or our son get close so that we can hear the laughter. They who are not laughing, but are hurting and fuming, do not want to silence us; they want the last laugh, over us. It is a risk, but also a relief, to let the adolescent try to show his father’s competence and authority to be laughable, to let the foreigner try to show our ways as foolish, our opinions asinine, or our customs rattlebrained. How can we be induced to get close enough to our son, to foreigners, to perverts? Drag queens flaunt their perversions and incite our laughter at them. When a father finds himself unable not to laugh over his son’s mockery of his paternalism, a white yuppie unable not to laugh over a black junkie’s jeering at his tight ass, a cop arresting a whore unable not to laugh at the insults that she sticks up his ass—then, suddenly, the laughter of the son and the father or of the cop and the whore appears no more separate than are two waves, although their unity is as uncontained and precarious as that of the agitation of the waters. In the moment of laughter, there is a transparency among individuals, as if the outburst of laughter gave rise to a single torrent surging within them. Thus drag queens are the paragons and forgers of public morality. Laughter freezes when someone who brings death to our friend or to a whole people gets away with it. Yet Nature does get away with it: the wind sputters through the eyes and jaw of a skeleton. We understand that we can laugh in the face of death. We catch sight of the possibility of seeing our death as a joke. We understand that we can die laughing. Notes 1. G. Bataille. 1985. Visions of Excess, trans. A. Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 89.

ATTACHMENTS

APPETITE

The contrast between nature and culture is scattered all over our books and our talk; “natural” and “cultural” form a pair of categories that we use a great deal to map things out and then to explain. “But look,” complain theorists, “they are neither very fundamental nor clear. Couldn’t you say that behaviors such as speaking a language, making music, making representations of things to make, and making art objects are natural to humans—just as choreographing their messages to one another is natural to bees; singing natural to birds and whales; making dams natural to beavers; and mooching off humans natural to cats?” Epistemologists, philosophers of science, and deconstructionists disdain the categories as unscientific and naive. However, in our lives, the terms keep getting recharged. We take trips to go to nature or to go to culture. Tarrying in one zone or the other has very different effects on our lives and our sense of ourselves. When we decide to rough it for a month in the Canadian wilderness, we are opposing and rejecting the prospect of becoming cultured in Paris, Florence, or Kyoto. Going off to nature can be a trip to the Serengeti or the Galapagos. It can be a couple of hours spent in the back yard, inspecting the flowers of wild-seeded plants or watching a pair of wrens frame out a nest. The outing repositions us: we stop seeing the surroundings as a stage upon which we are the central character of a play whose plot we make

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up as we go along. We see that in nature, we are just one short-lived item in a complex construction of resources and limits, reciprocally interacting forces, along with innumerable other kinds of life. Contemplating the each time different stripes on zebras, the plumes of a peacock, the coils of sea shells, or plants whose minute seeds the breeze brought in that, not an inch high, already are opening their flowers in the back alley, our eyes are captivated by the intricate designs producing and being produced by these living things. We are confronted with a will to live unflagging over two millennia in those hoary sequoias and baobabs, a will to live in this minuscule stray plant creating its flower with a gram of inert substance and a few drops of water. We recognize this will to live: the same will to live is in us. We are baffled at it too—the will to live in a sequoia whose core has burnt out under two millennia of lightning strikes or in a butterfly that finally emerges from a chrysalis to live but a few days. Of course, we cannot explain and do not understand the will to live in ourselves either. To recognize in them the same will to live as in us is somehow to recognize in them the same right to live. Monkeys a few days old fearlessly scramble up trees. Only trained dancers among us move with the power and grace of leopards taking a late afternoon stroll. We spot a mouse a few steps away; a hawk sees it from 500 feet above. Sharks can discern an electrical impulse of 5 volts from a half-mile away. In the late summer, a Clark’s nutcracker, a bird of the American Southwest, stores as many as 33,000 piñon pine seeds in caches of four or five seeds each, and then finds most of them again, buried under the snow of the winter; most of us would lose track after making a dozen or so caches. Our neighbor sent to California by airplane a homing pigeon who returned to Pennsylvania in five and a half days, finding the very town and back yard from which he was taken. It has often been said that our minds are superior to the minds of anything else alive on the planet. Therefore, everything else is naturally subordinate to us. We have a right to use them, kill and feed on them—or is it the reverse: by killing and eating their bodies we posit our superiority over them? The brains of some idlers and scoundrels among us store far more knowledge than do those of people whom we admire. Each species has

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evolved in and exists in a specific ecosystem. If it has survived and flourished, it has evolved the intelligence needed to flourish in that ecosystem: an octopus in the ocean, a leopard in the jungle, a honeybee in the prairie, or an albatross in the trade winds. Biologists hold it meaningless to grade minds across species, as though the mind were a metaphysical entity that would have value unto itself. A trip to culture can also be just down the steps to our back yard for an afternoon with a book. However, like Madame Bovary, we do feel that it is essential to get to Paris—and to Greece and Egypt and Japan. We are regaled by the brochures put out by countries’ tourist ministries and travel agencies and the magazines put out by the airlines. In them, seductive photographs crowd one another off the page: for India, the Taj Mahal, a beautiful young woman with a jewel in her nostril, and a table spread with curries, pomfret, koftas, mangos, crisp spiced breads, and wafers; for Jamaica, a colonial mansion, a stretch of beach viewed from the shade of coconut palms, a beautiful young woman garlanded with flowers, and a black man in a white chef ’s hat holding a tray piled with lobster, rice light as snow, codfish and ackee, pineapples, and sapodillas; for Qosqo, a street with colonial mansions built over Inca walls, a beautiful young woman in Indian embroideries and lace, and a table set with heavy brass candlesticks and crowded with coriander and mint soup, cebiche, lemons, beef hearts with peppers, corn on the cob, quince, and passionfruit. Often we keep these brochures and airline magazines after the trip; they give a better picture of what our trip was like than our snapshots do. Oh, we got some views of some of the most famous sights—the Taj Mahal, the colonial cathedral, or Machu Picchu; we were greeted at the airport, hotel, restaurants, and night clubs by beautiful young women upon whom we feasted our eyes, without getting one of them into our bed for the night before we left the country, without even trying. What we did have in abundance, what we really got into, explored, lingered over, discussed, and learned about, was the food. It is what will stay with us when we get back. It is a rare friend who will ask us to describe the Taj Mahal or the Viceroy’s mansion in Qosqo, and our plan to read books on them when we got back is put off and forgotten. Nevertheless, when we go out, we will think of exploring the Indian or Jamaican

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or Brazilian restaurants of Philadelphia or Austin or Cleveland; our friends will ask us for help on the menu, and we will remember and learn more. Pizarro stared agape at the meals of the Inca Atahualpa. Nothing attested to his divinity more. The Inca ate alone. The table was set with dishes and utensils made of precious metals set with jewels. Laid out before him were thirty or forty of the most exquisite dishes. Fresh fish was brought by runners in relays from the sea to Cajamarca in fortyeight hours; ice was brought from the glaciers of the Andes above. The Inca came clad in a robe made of vicuña wool, with a bat-fur or hummingbird-feather cloak. These garments were worn only once. If, in the course of the meal, something fell or dripped on them, they were changed at once. The Inca was fed by hand by beautiful young women. When he spit out a fishbone or fruit pit, he spit it into the cupped hands of a serving maiden. Pizarro’s men inquired about what was done with the garments prepared anew for each meal, the uneaten food, and with what the Inca spit out into those cupped hands; they were told that all was kept in great chests and were shown well-guarded warehouses full of these chests. Pizarro’s chroniclers seemed unclear how to interpret this; they wrote that everything that the Inca touched or that was brought to him was to such an extent held to be sacred. They also wrote that the Inca was very afraid of sorcery, which requires hairs or fluids from the body of the one upon whom evil spells are to be cast. It’s no hassle to travel anymore, but still the finest room in a resort hotel does not have the dozens of indulgences with which we have furnished our homes over the years. The air-conditioned bus or even the rental car is not like driving our car back home over decent roads where people obey the traffic signals. However cordial the tour guides and hostesses were, they, Egyptian or French or even British, only make us understand the more poignantly how the really deep levels of friendship are only possible with people with whom we share stretches of everyday life. Actually going to a culture, as opposed to reading books and studying photographs of it, gives us a second-rate knowledge of that culture. So much of what is described in books—the harem in the Seraglio of

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Istanbul, the apartments of the Vatican, the palace of the king of Nepal, or the mosques of Kabul—will be off limits. The sweeping views of the flying buttresses of Notre Dame and of the Black Pagoda at Puri were taken from helicopters or from balconies in buildings to which we will not get access. The close-up views of the emerald Buddha in Bangkok’s Wat Phra Keo and of the interior of Freud’s study in London are views given only to the contracted photographer. Tour guides’ explanations on the site will be anecdotal and insensitive to the real human or aesthetic significance of an object or a place; the dates and the facts recounted are unreliable. We are not going to be led through the royal palace of Luang Prabang in Laos by a tragic princess whose childhood was spent there, but rather by a local guide who cares more about Raybans and Sony TVs than astrological instruments or medieval scrolls. Going to the Amazon to see the rain forest and some tribal people is less interesting and less informative than watching a television documentary made by expert biologists and anthropologists. In fact, as opposed to reading books in which everything is edited, composed, and laid out with literary artistry, and studying photographs of objects sprayed with dew or glycerin and backlit or shot with polarizing or ultraviolet filters, actually going to a culture is inevitably going to be a synthetic experience of that culture. The trance rituals we will see in Bali will be faked and the macumba ceremonies in Salvador or Rio de Janeiro staged for tourists. The guides with dubious certifications, who alone speak English in Qosqo or in Kuala Lumpur, will tell us stories about their families and home villages that they picked up from watching television programs or shorts run by the local movie house before it shows the feature film made in Hollywood or Hong Kong. The guru clad in saffron who knows English and comes to speak with us in the garden of our hotel in Kathmandu has not done yoga or walked on pilgrimage to a sacred shrine or fasted for twenty years. Well, there was nothing ersatz or second rate about the meals. We could get “international cuisine” if we were a little worried about our stomach acidity and its workaday enzymes, or even get a real hamburger pretty much anywhere. But everybody who travels eats real, unforgettable French cuisine, Spanish paella, Moroccan couscous,

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Indonesian Reistafel, or Brazilian feijoada. On any day, we can eat the dishes that even aristocrats would have had only for weddings or state occasions. In the shadow of the Alhambra, Taj Mahal, or Louvre, we eat dishes made with the very recipes of the royal courts, using ingredients that are, in fact, fresher and of finer quality than what the king’s cooks could get back then. When we tour palaces, we begin to notice that the dining room at the Tour d’Argent really is as splendid as that in Versailles; the dining room at the Great Wall Hotel in Beijing has a more sublime view than the imperial one in the Forbidden City; and the revolving top-floor restaurant in the Meridien Hotel is more grand than the dining hall of the Palace of the Viceroy. At the No Hands Restaurant in Bangkok, lovely maidens cut up the food for us and feed us, as the Inca Atahualpa was fed, morsel by morsel; our idle hands are free to fondle their loins. Of all the local personnel with whom we deal in traveling, only the restaurant staff are impeccably accommodating and solicitous, treating us like royalty. Sitting in the restaurant, even of the train station, at a table covered with a real tablecloth and set with a vase of flowers, beautiful glasses, and real silver and savoring each of a two-hour succession of dishes and wines, we reflect that the one thing traveling gives us is a sense for the quality of life that we did not have before. It seems to us that culture really is not to be measured by the pomp of monuments and the grandiloquence of the literature and painting with which court artists celebrated military victories and marital alliances, or even by the loftiness and mystery of its sacred places. To become cultured, it might be important to see the Taj Mahal and the onion domes of the Kremlin, but the monuments of genius are in fact like freaks of nature. Genetics hit the jackpot: Fra Angelico, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Dante were born in Florence within a century; in the following centuries, Florence had just good ordinary people like our Minneapolis or Cleveland. But take Rio de Janeiro—a place that has not produced a writer, painter, or composer of whom we have ever heard—there we found a way of life, refined and sensitive, hedonist and reflective. It is in those long hours in the dining rooms of old aristocratic cities that we discover the ways of life produced by high culture. Saigon was a com-

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mercial port, not a cultural capital, and never had important pagodas. Ho Chi Minh City today is dilapidated, polluted, and crowded with beggars, addicts, and thieves. Everybody goes to dine chez Madame Dai; the official tours tell you to make reservations. Madame Dai was a Sorbonne-trained lawyer and, before the fall of Saigon, president of the Senate. “The second great love of my life always was cooking,” she said as she greeted us in her home. In her living room with all its walls lined with bookshelves and art objects, she brought us the court dishes that she had prepared that afternoon and joined us to talk in five languages late into the night. There we discovered the high culture of Vietnam. Eating is biting, gnawing, masticating, ingesting, and consuming. It is appropriating: devouring, absorbing, digesting, and assimilating. At least that is what a certain kind of eating is—a certain time, place, and quality of eating—the royal dining, the eating of the dominant class, which is what we are doing when we say that we are discovering other cultures. If we are not just stagnating biliously in bigotry, but rather are cultivating ourselves in turning the pages of books, watching public television, or shuffling through museums, we are absorbing, assimilating, and appropriating. We are getting satisfactions and gratifications. Becoming cultured is also appropriating the lives of other beings: animals butchered and plants chopped up, devouring them for the momentary satisfaction of the appetite. It is the same in the restaurant and in the museum: the Japanese tycoon who bought a Van Gogh for $82 million that he hangs in his living room or in a museum that he founds is appropriating a vision obtained by Van Gogh in an agonizing and irreversible descent into hell. That, too, is consuming the life of another for the satisfaction of one’s appetite. Somehow that does not sound very moral, even though we have just agreed that the real daily high mass of high culture is celebrated in restaurants, where egoisms and affectations are forgotten in admittal of common needs, speaking now that distinctive kind of language of disinterested sharing that cultures developed about the dining table. The answer to that, to the moral question is: It’s natural. Perhaps nowhere is the irrefutability of nature by morality so evident than in the inevitability of appetite. Annie Dillard tells of the gall gnats and Miastor flies and of the female who was not able, due to a few days of uninter-

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rupted rain, to find a suitable body in which to plant her eggs; now, those eggs have hatched inside her body and are consuming it from within. The pages in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek1 where she forces herself to think of this are outcries of revulsion and revolt. However gentle and miraculously exquisite living things may be, they are all segments of a global food chain, in which nothing can live without devouring the lives of others and without being destined to feed the appetite of others. Except us. Is not the great dogma proclaimed in every one of those daily high masses of high culture that of a reverse Eucharist? Eat not of my body and drink not of my blood! Rural famine recurring over centuries put bamboo shoots, seaweed, serpents, and sea slugs in the Japanese cuisine. But we nibble at more and more in the measure that we rise in the ranks of the dominant classes. Gusanos de manguey, inch-long eel fry, and ant’s eggs were the hors d’oeuvres of the best restaurant in Mexico City, followed by steak cut from the bull killed that afternoon in the corrida. By bringing every plant, fish, serpent, bird, and mammal to the table, we put ourselves at the summit of the great chain of being. In this way, we posit our value and posit ourselves as values. More exactly, in philosophy’s terminology, we posit our dignity. Value is the measure of exchange; the value of something is determined by the other things taken to be equivalent to and interchangeable with it. In an economic system, something acquires more value in the measure that more things are required in exchange for it. Something acquires that transcendent status that Immanuel Kant calls dignity when all things may be or may need to be exchanged for it, but it is not exchanged for anything further. The members of a society exchange goods of necessity with one another; they exchange goods and labor for protection and exchange labor and luxuries for temples and monuments, which are not exchanged for anything further. The society will sacrifice its wealth and the lives of its citizens to protect its temples and monuments. In taking possession of jungle, tundra, oceans, and polar ice-caps, and in unhesitatingly defying all the genii loci to make all substances resources for human needs and pleasures, the politico–economic institutions of humankind establish not only their sovereignty within the

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family of nations but establish a cosmic sovereignty over all things. In traveling from country to country and being served like an emperor in restaurants in which any and every plant and animal is laid out for our consumption, we situate ourselves in the food chain at the top; we make ourselves the uneaten ones, the unexchangeable values, the cosmic dignity. Eat me. Take me. Dismember me. This voluptuous demand, this craving to be devoured rises in erotic delirium. Drink my saliva, my sweat, my vaginal fluids, my milk, my jism. To be swept away into voluptuous passion is to lose the sense of one’s self, one’s status, one’s reputation, one’s identity, one’s dignity. Take this my flesh and eat; take this my jism and drink and forget me. Notes 1. A. Dillard. 1982. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. New York: Bantam, 172–173.

FETISHISM

As our voice resounds over the perceived environment, we do not only hear its echo reverberating over the things and landscapes. We hear the sound and fury of things. They provoke us, seduce us, command our movements, deceive us, and jinx us. Animism recognizes a spirit in material things. The voice that we hear in things is not their voice, the voice of matter; material things are animated by a spirit or by spirits. Things are relays of the voice of the spirit. On the forms, uses, and trajectories of things are messages and directives put on them by humans. Fetishism recognizes a spirit of material things. Things emit signals and issue directives on their own. The voice is the voice of their material bodies.1 Are not contemporary social sciences fetishist? They study the layout and movement of things—resources, energy, equipment, and products—and find in them an explanation for the responses and intentions of humans. Economists seek in technological innovations the explanation for changes in production and, in the laws of the market, the explanation for changes in distribution. Art historians seek explanations for the changes in artistic technique, intentions, and taste in the power of certain materials, such as stucco, plaster, acrylic, and laser beams. In a study of the geographical and meteorological conditions of a region, its resources, and the available technology, anthropologists 111

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seek an understanding of the political, cosmological, and religious ideology of a people. However, contemporary philosophy is animist. It explains that an interpretative intention of our minds animates sounds or visual marks so that they function as words and phrases. A perceiving intention of the mind animates nervous impulses in the organism so as to make them function as sensations of sound, color, savor, and odor. An identifying act makes patterns of sensations represent aspects or signs of things. The classifying and relating operations of the mind animate things with meanings, connecting them to the context in which they are found and the class to which they belong and assigning causality and value to them. Things have no meanings apart from those with which human attributions, motivations, and transactions endow them. Creative artists endow material substance with sublime meaning. The Fetishes of Africa

In the fifteenth century, Portuguese and Dutch merchants descended upon the West African coast to trade—a vanguard of what was to become global mercantilism. They discovered that the Africans prized objects such as skulls, animal bones, fossil stones, crystals, or carvings, which they were reluctant to offer in trade or for which they demanded great quantities of the commodities brought by the merchants. In the pidgin of trading, the merchants dubbed these things fetissos. During the dissemination of their reports in the seventeenth century, the word got its equivalents in the languages of Northern Europe, in English “fetishes.” In the eyes of the merchants, these found objects or objects crudely made of base materials were assigned value far in excess of what any rational calculation of utility and exchange value would justify. For the merchants, valuable goods were not goods of use value for themselves, but commodities—goods of exchange value: spices, ivory, jewel stones, and gold. Because the West Africans were taken to treasure trifles, they could be duped; what the Europeans considered valueless—glass beads, for instance—could be exchanged for valuable goods. What the Africans were unwilling to trade were unique and anomalous objects. Unlike foodstuffs and souvenirs, a fetish is not singular-

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ized by absorption into the person or history of someone. Its singularity is not due to an outside spirit—that of a person for whom it has unique sentimental value because of its association with some particular event in the biography of that person. Its singularity is not due to its historical significance for a people because of its association with some cardinal event in their history. However, a fetish is not simply an object that resists the significance and worth that human dealings and transactions give to goods; it confronts humans and can move them. Fetishes are coveted and elicit passions; they generate what are taken by the Europeans to be fanciful elaborations. They are objects to which the possessor is in thrall. The one who possesses them is possessed by them. Fetishes belong not to the domain of production and commerce, of contract and merit, of satisfaction earned, but to that of luck, where happiness is distributed by chance. A fetish is acquired by luck. Wearing a fetish on the body is a badge of being a lucky man or woman. (For the Europeans, Christianity had colonized the whole outer zone of luck, extending the network of effort and merit and earned happiness across it [Yet lovers and sportsmen and sportswomen wear amulets].) The European merchants found these skulls, animal bones, and squalid figures covered with blood repulsive; they saw them as so much filth, which the Africans imagined to possess extraordinary power and to be capable of healing humans or infecting them with diseases or striking them dead. The word fetissos, fetish, invoked the late medieval Portuguese term feitiços, which designated the appurtenances associated in Europe with witchcraft. Applied to the things that the West Africans kept out of the market and to which they had an apparently irrational attachment, the term “fetish” demonized these things. Relics and Rarities

The great monasteries and cathedrals of medieval Europe displayed collections of relics. More prized than icons and statues that represent saints, relics are parts of saints—bones or pieces of their clothing. The saint’s power is really present in them, demonstrated by miracles performed by wearing a relic on the body or touching a relic exposed in a shrine or procession.

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In the seventeenth century, the rich, cosmopolitan European intelligentsia interested in travel began to keep cabinets de curiosités or Wunderkammern containing relics of saints but also giants’ teeth and bones, unicorns’ horns, burls or fruit shaped like human torsos or animal bodies, and animal freaks such as two-headed snakes. They included works of craft so meticulously decorated that the time that went into their making took them out of prosaic usage, as well as ingenious mechanical contraptions. They displayed antiquities such as Egyptian or Greek statues and pottery. They contained exotic flora, fauna, and artifacts, first brought by Columbus and his successors to the cabinets of the Medicis and other southern noblemen, and later by Dutch and English traders to those of northern collectors.2 African, Melanesian, and Hindu fetishes entered also. These “rarities” must be distinguished from keepsakes: things that are touched and worn and loved because history, memory, and desire are attached to them. Rarities were things that defied classification and broke the rules of the normal and the predictable; they confounded the understanding. These extraordinary, exotic, or radically different things had power, the power to arouse a sense of wonder and marvel. The cabinets de curiosités were theaters in which things did not tell a story; their contents were things removed from their places of origin and natural or political and cultural functions and made to stand on their own. The collectors of rarities introduce an aesthetics of wonder that breaks with the narrative aesthetics of the religious and epic court art of earlier times. Jean Brun identifies this aesthetics as a mercantile aesthetics, where things removed from calculation and exchange nonetheless exist in the homogeneous and empty space of global exchange. Enlightenment

This mercantile aesthetics was to come into disrepute. It prized whatever provokes wonder, the fantastic and the grotesque. The high aesthetics of the courts and of the artists promoted taste, judgment, and style. The collections that merely indulged wonder came to be denigrated as mere objects of fancy, bric-a-brac, or kitsch. Natural scientists expressed their continued hostility to religion by denouncing the sense of wonder and fancy that led to the acceptance of

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miracles. The Enlightenment replaced wonder with doubt. Yet, the cabinets de curiosités functioned epistemologically to separate fact from theory, interpretation, and explanation. The shock of repeated contact with the unexpected and unpredictable functioned to isolate facts from the accounts of natural history, however coherent, consistent, and complete they might be. With the rise of universities and laboratories, the curiosity cabinets of collectors and intellectuals came to be enlisted for pedagogical purposes. The collections were sorted out and rearranged. Exhibits were organized according to the eighteenth century taxonomies of Linnaeus, Buffon, and Lamarck. From being collections of the anomalous and bizarre, they became displays of series and sequences. The butterflies preserved were pinned to show their genus, species, and sex. University faculties set out to display complete collections of insects, tree leaves and fruit, seashells, and mineral samples. Before, the curiosity cabinet presented a theater of heteroclite things shown out of context to provoke wonder before the unclassifiable, monstrous, and awesome; now, scientists showed exhibits that first exhibited principles of identification and classification, a taxonomy, and a commanding system. Rock samples, tree leaves, seashells, or butterflies were arranged in a rational system to illustrate the order of nature. The exhibits now solicited comprehensive understanding and make prediction possible. Medical schools acquired exhibits of anatomy and of deformities and diseases. Science faculties and laboratories assembled biological, botanical, and mineralogical exhibits and exhibits of technological devices. Universities and cities founded natural history and science museums. When the overthrow of monarchs and aristocrats led to the confiscation of private art collections, the principles that had transformed the curiosity cabinets into natural science exhibits and museums were applied to art collections now in the hands of the state and opened to the public. Altar pieces taken from old churches of Europe were added, and statues of gods and goddesses from ancient Greece and Rome and idols from Asia were brought back from imperial conquests. Artworks were identified and classified by geographical and cultural provenance and chronology. The advance of European imperialism and the Enlightenment motivated a concern to exhibit cultural evolution.

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Eventually, African, Melanesian, and Hindu fetishes found their places in ethnological museums. In the general theory of primitive religion elaborated by Enlightenment philosophers in the eighteenth century, these fetishes were distinguished from idols—for example, from the Greco–Roman figures with which Europeans were acquainted, and which represented visibly spiritual beings. In contrast with the philosophers’ now deist Christianity, idolaters worshipped material representations of false spirits. Idols are freestanding; fetishes are especially things worn on the body: masks or leather pouches containing fossils, stones, animal tusks, or fangs, worn around the neck. They are not signs or symbols of an idea or ideal, spiritual force. Africans did not distinguish the spiritual from the material but instead feared and worshiped certain material things. African religion was materialist and atheological. In fact, Africa could not properly be said to have religion; it only had belief in magic. Immanuel Kant wrote: The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling…. The religion of fetishes so widespread among them is perhaps a sort of idolatry that sinks as deeply into the trifling as appears to be possible to human nature. A bird feather, a cow’s horn, a conch shell, or any other common object, as soon as it becomes consecrated by a few words, is an object of veneration and of invocation in swearing oaths.3 The Enlightenment discourse on fetishism is animist. Western Fetishism

In the twentieth century, European colonies progressively regained their independence, and the Enlightenment’s general theory of religion was replaced by the relativism of cultural anthropology. In ethnology, the term “ritual object” replaced the word “fetish.” Meanwhile, the concept of fetish had become a central analytic concept in European social criticism and psychoanalysis. Europeans were exposed as having their own fetishes. Sigmund Freud borrowed the concept of fetish from Dutch mercantile reports of West African practices and the Enlightenment theory of

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primitive religions; he used it to designate things that individuals prize obsessively and that control their movements or repugnance, with those individuals unable to explicate the properties in them that elicit such compulsive passions. Psychoanalysis provides the explanation: the fetishes often worn on the body and felt to control the body are substitutes for a missing body part. This missing body part is originally the phallus, seen lacking in the mother. By now, much speculation of Victorian anthropologists and their readers about fetishes had focused on the phallic components of Hindu iconography, but Freud generalized this phallic obsession. “Probably no male human being is spared the fright of castration at the sight of a female genital,” he wrote. Some people, traumatized by the sight of female castration, become homosexual. Others hold in abeyance the revelation of the female castration by fixating on the sight of the last material object before that revelation. Thus the foot or shoe owes its preference as a fetish…to the circumstance that the inquisitive boy peered at the woman’s genitals from below, from her legs up; fur and velvet…are a fixation of the sight of the pubic hair, which should have been followed by the longed for sight of the female member; pieces of underclothing, which are so often chosen as a fetish, crystallize the moment of undressing, the last moment in which the woman could still be regarded as phallic.4 The material fetish thus would owe all its power to the subject’s anxiety over something immaterial and invisible: the phallus projected into the maternal body. Psychoanalysis gives an animist explanation of fetishism. Karl Marx used the term fetish to designate commodities that have maximum exchange value but minimum use value. What makes exchange value diverge from use value is scarcity, as well as the quantity of human labor that went into the manufacture or availability of a product. These are, in turn, determined by the network of relations among owners, producers, and distributors. The Marxist analysis reveals this network of institutionalized human relations to be the invisible determinant of the exchange value of commodities.

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Marx thus reversed the concept of fetish. Money and commodities, dealt with in capitalism as fetishes and objects of greed and fancy, are not things in their material powers but things whose value is determined by invisible, immaterial forces. Among West Africans, fetishes are things held outside of commerce; however, in capitalism, Marx says that things are fetishized in as much as they are wholly cast into commerce and figure as commodities. What connects the concept of fetish of the Dutch and Portuguese merchants and that, reversed, of Marx is the notion of a power of the things over us. Fetishes elicit passions in humans: the passion to possess and to be possessed, greed and fancy. Before the power of fetishes, humans are objects, sensitive and sensuous substances, thrown into movement by things. Marx wishes to reduce these powers of commodities. They are, in his view, magical powers—false powers. Marx reinstates animism: the blessings and curses emanating from things are only echoes of human voices. Commodities have no other meaning or value than that which humans have projected into them: their scarcity in the market and the quantity of labor that has been put in them in the institutionalized network of human relations. True Fetishes

As European trade relations with West Africa and beyond turned into colonial imperialism, African, Melanesian, and Polynesian fetishes were acquired by European colonists and collectors. Made of base materials and carved into forms repugnant to the canons of European aesthetic taste, they acquired value by reason of their invisible qualities, their scarcity and the network of relations between owners, producers, and distributors. They represented the relations between the primitive squalor of colonized peoples and the colonizers. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the cultural relativism of anthropology and the Freudian doctrine of the return of the repressed infantilism in adults and of the return of primitive stages of culture in the religions and wars of modern Europe motivated new kinds of interest in tribal artifacts, among them the interests of artists and amateurs. Some African, Melanesian, and Polynesian fetishes

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came to be admired for the force of their forms; in Europe, they acquired the status of art objects. They were extracted from the technical and sociopolitical relationships in which ethnological museums had sought to situate them. A mask made of soft wood and fibers, worn in a trance dance, activated by the drums and chants of the participants, and discarded after the feast is hung on a white wall spotlighted in the drawing room of the rich collector. Picasso, Matisse, Braque, and the surrealists acquired collections of “primitive art” and valued them for the materials and forms that could be transposed into their canvases and sculptures. Art objects function to evoke wonder before the epiphany of the beautiful and the sublime, as well as before the terrible and the disgusting. In the modern world of rationalized manufacture of massproduced objects, utility and exchange value—indeed, plastic form and substance—are wholly determined by the design of the manufacturer and the relations among producer, distributor, and consumer. Art objects, in twentieth-century surrealist theory, are true fetishes. They condense in a material object a transitory and unrepeatable or unrealized movement or event. W hat are often dubbed fetishes—patriotic monuments or flags—are only shallow icons of particularist collective imperatives; amulets and shoes and furs are only flotation devices for the grapplings of unintegrated individuals. True artworks captivate an individual wholly and passionately. They are not signs or icons of meaning formulatable in the social codes. The individual in thrall to an artwork separates from the collectivity and its imperatives and values. However, art objects do not today open upon the outer zone of luck outside the social field of production and commerce established by evaluations of equivalence and contracts. As with the found or anonymously made fetishes of Africa and Melanesia, critics working with museums and private collectors assign something made today the status of an art object and determine its exchange value. They also promote its maker to the status of creative artist, someone who projects the sublime into raw materials. The artist as creative genius, Jake Chapman explained, is an animistic return of God in secular mode.5

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Information Culture

We are now in the midst of the third industrial revolution, the information revolution. Miniaturization reduces the raw material costs of information technology; robotization reduces the labor costs. Information is the principal raw material and the principal product of hightech industry. Information is wealth. Prosperity is the acquisition, accumulation, and production of information. The new information technology makes available to us the languages and the symbolic systems in which eventually all cultures as well as all natural landscapes and species, everything that we have perceived or can perceive, will have been identified, recorded, classified, compared, and interpreted. Before viewing any products of industry, we can download photographs of them from the Internet, along with their specifications, uses, and availability. Before buying a book we can download an abstract of its contents and its reviews. Before going to an architect’s or painter’s exhibition, we can download films of his work and read the studies of it. Before going on a trip to West Africa, we can download information about its geography, climate, economy, political system, architecture, language, religion, and cuisine. Before going to view the baobab trees of the Sudan, we can download a description of the species, their modes of propagation, the diseases that may attack them, and the uses to which they can be put. We will no longer have any naive, firsthand experience of manufactured products, cultures, other species, or natural places. We perceive what has already been identified, described, classified, and compared. Our perceptions and encounters are culture specific, that is, media culture specific. The information with which we encounter products, cultures, other species, and natural places is filed, indexed, and retrieved according to the specific capabilities of the media technology. The identifications and descriptions that we download are in conceptual language or in symbols and graphs, that is, in generic and general forms. The photographs are illustrations of plant and animal species; of typical buildings, rituals, and clothes; and of meals of different historical periods, classes, and cultures.

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On television, news is edited, framed, spliced, and dramatized so as to attract and hold the attention of viewers; it is marketed as infotainment. Information about consumer goods and services, about museums and concerts, or about places that seek to attract tourists or legislative protection is edited, narrated, cut, lighted, and dramatized differently for different target groups of information consumers. Nature programs are filmed and narrated as detective stories, tragedies, comedies, farces, and fund-raisers. Information about peoples and cultures is edited according to specific agendas. Today, the information economy induces an information culture. The cultured person is not simply someone who has access to the information highways; he has a personal collection of sites and files. By classifying, editing, framing, splicing, and dramatizing them in their own way, individuals define their identity, establish their status, and measure their worth. They communicate with networks of other media consumers at chat sites. Henceforth, whenever we encounter things, artworks, cultures, species, and places, we see, hear, and touch instances or representatives of categories, models, prototypes, and narratives that have been classified, conceptualized, edited, dramatized, filmed and narrated in the information banks. What we see, hear, and touch is what is coded in things. What animates things for us is information. Ontological Fetishism

Yet, we find ourselves speechless on the uninhabitable icescapes of Antarctica, on Himalayan climbs that may well take our lives, and in the winds and fog into which the sequoia trees rise indifferent to the conquests and defeats of two thousand years of human tribes and corporations. There the force of alien and inhuman domains speaks to us. The things that provoke us, seduce us, command our movements, deceive us, and jinx us come from other worlds. On the edge of Lake Argentino in the far south of Patagonia, at a place called Punto Gualichú, there are paintings on the wall of a cave. They show hands in silhouette, some wavy lines, and lines of dashes and of dots. The caretaker is a young woman who is part Tehuelche; she has studied anthropology and tells you everything that is known about the paintings. They were

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carbon dated at circa 4000 BCE. Nothing is known of the people who made these paintings or of their beliefs; their name is unknown. Anthropologists have not been able to even guess at what these wavy lines and these lines of dashes and dots designate. They say that, at the end of the last Ice Age, small bands of people crossed the Bering Strait into the unknown North American continent. You try to imagine them crossing so many hundreds of miles of glaciers. Eventually, they reached the zones of melting glaciers and then moved southward to lands of forests and prairies teeming with life. They did not stop; they pushed on southward down the Central American peninsula into the southern continent; they did not stop until, having come to the brink of the Antarctic Ocean, they could go no further. Something of their beliefs and their memories of this epic journey is here in these lines of mineral colors clinging to the walls of the cave. Their bodies have been mineralized and sifted into the earth or have dissolved in the tempestuous ocean. They will always be with you, wherever your life passes in the mountains, valleys, land’s end, or oceans—despite the anthropomorphized and providential god of your people, despite the sovereignty of reason in your epoch. When your mother was dying, she told you that she was giving you the linen tablecloth on the top shelf of the closet that she had spread out for so few festive occasions in your life. She knew that you would give the rest of the contents of the apartment—her furniture, kitchen utensils, and clothes—to the Goodwill or discard them. The linen tablecloth was the only thing that her peasant mother had to give her when she left Lithuania to make her way to America, alone, because her widowed mother would not leave. It is only on very rare occasions, and for a dinner with but one or two intimates, that you bring out the linen tablecloth. When you do, these woven flax fibers a century old caution your fingers to touch them lightly. They speak of your grandmother and her love for the marshes of that northern land and the leaves that danced about her and whose fibers clothed her. They tell why she would never leave that place. You do not simply decorate your apartment with some plants; you must set aside time daily to water them, watch that they are getting the right amount of light, and attend to parasites. You spend ten times as

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much time looking after them as you do looking at them for the pleasure of it. A disease breaks out among your tropical fish and you will drop everything and spend the whole evening transferring the fish to quarantine, cleaning the tank, and testing and adjusting the salinity and biochemistry of the water. It is the tropical sun and its seasons that direct you from the plants and the ocean that directs you from the aquarium. One afternoon you picked up a magnifying glass and, like Alice, saw a wonderland: whole ecosystems of mites and silverfish in the corner of your sofa; their scrambling explorations were as balletic and their designs as beautiful as those of the coral fish and anemones of your aquarium. You touched some of your saliva on a glass plate and put it under a microscope and gazed transfixed at the intricate designs of some of the hundreds of kinds of bacteria that dwell in your mouth, in symbiosis with you. The telescope on your back deck and the Hubble telescope viewing the universe from outside Earth’s atmosphere show you a universe in which the niche that you inhabit and your personal collection of Internet sites and files are set. As the information programmed in the data banks becomes increasingly vast, the dimensions of the galaxies, novas, and the dark cosmic spaces are revealed to be even vaster. You see our planet set in the orbit of the Sun, which is burning out as fast as it can. You see our Sun swirling in the cosmic maelstrom of the Milky Way galaxy. You see innumerable galaxies exploding toward immensities and distances that telescopes are not yet able to track. New telescopes and spaceship journeys into outer space will extend your vision of the universe ever further beyond the radius of our managed environment. It will direct our minds with material entities—stars, novae, and black holes—more alien and more forceful than any gods that we had imagined. Notes 1. P. Pels. 1998. The spirit of matter: on fetish, rarity, fact, and fancy. In Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, ed. Patricia Spyer. New York: Routledge, 91. 2. Pels, 105. 3. I. Kant. 1960. Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans. J. Goldthwait. Berkeley: University of California Press, 111.

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4. S. Freud. 1961. Fetishism. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXI, trans. J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 154–155. 5. J. Chapman. 2003. Insult to Injury. Göttingen: steidlMACK.

POTLATCH

FLESH TRADE

Exchanges

Is not the exchange of goods and services as old as humanity and the original form of association among humans? Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, Setting prices, determining values, contriving equivalences, exchanging…these preoccupied the earliest thinking of man to so great an extent that in a certain sense they constitute thinking as such: here it was that the oldest kind of astuteness developed; here likewise, we may suppose, did human pride, the feeling of superiority in relation to other animals, have its first beginnings.”1 The other primates form bands bound together by a basic intraspecies attraction, affection, and sexual interest, as well as for defense. Human societies would be formed inasmuch as humans are interdependent on one another in the daily practice of exchanging goods and services. The first recognition of promises, obligations, and debts in the market would be the basis for the subsequent development of societies governed by internal laws. Nietzsche and anthropologist Claude Lévi–Strauss have, however, diversely argued that the original and fundamental market at the basis of society is not the exchange of commodities but the exchange of people.

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Anthropologists find the incest taboo wherever they find societies. Sigmund Freud sought its origin in the emotions of individuals; so severe a prohibition could have been set up only to counter a correspondingly intense desire. This desire would be the human infant’s primary affective and erotic attachment to his or her parents, and the mother’s attachment to an infant that was once part of her body. Lévi–Strauss focused attention instead on the positive effect of the incest taboo. He declares that the incest taboo is the universal law of society—the law that produces a society. The incest taboo is, to be sure, a prohibition; it decrees that an individual must not marry within his extended family. Positively, it decrees that the parents must find a spouse for their son or daughter outside the household. It divides every clan into moieties and sets up an exchange of sons and daughters between moieties. A son or a daughter is an economic asset to a family; the son hunts and the daughter gardens and weaves. The head of the household who goes to another household to obtain a spouse for his son must compensate that household for its loss. He may well not have a daughter to give in exchange. The father will bring a bride price. The two families will agree to assist one another with house-raising and defense against their enemies. Theirs will be a permanent economic and political alliance. The regulated exchange of daughters and sons as spouses between households, clans, and moieties is the basis for a regulated exchange of goods and services between the households. Prior to this founding pact by which daughters and sons are exchanged between households and moieties, we should not look for something more basic, which would be the exchange of goods and services. In fact, among hunting–foraging peoples, everyone hunts and forages for himself and his or her children. As among the other primates, bonds of affection between one or several would motivate some sharing of food and shelter. An occasional windfall, when a hunter or forager comes upon far more than he or she needs or can use, would result in sharing. However, these casual cases of sharing do not give rise to rules, promises, and obligations. They exhibit herd bonds, not social relations.

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For Nietzsche, what is marketed in the market is pleasure. The one who goes to the market wants not simply yams or a sheepskin in their material nature, but the pleasure of a tasty meal or of warm bedding. A human body is also a source of pleasure. Lévi–Strauss envisions daughters and sons essentially as economic assets: producers and reproducers; his analysis does not take into account the desire of a suitor for a prospective marriage partner’s body as a source of pleasure. To be sure, a man wants a woman to plant a garden and cook his meals so that he can hunt wild boar. But it is because her body is a prime generator of voluptuous pleasure that men compete with one another and offer her parents increasing piles of material goods for her now and later and this suitor thus needs a big garden and time to hunt wild boar. A market begins where the exchange of goods and services is governed by rules; where the exchange is not necessarily immediate but often delayed across time; when there are promises, contracts, and obligations and when these are enforced. Nietzsche fixed his attention on how they are enforced. What is behind the strange practice that allows someone who has not received the goods for which he has contracted to inflict physical punishment on the debtor? How is it, Nietzsche asks, that someone who contracted for yams or for a sheepskin is satisfied if his debtor suffers pain? We want pleasure, but each of us can turn suffering into pleasure. Our bodies know how to turn the tensions and aching muscles of a climb up a mountain into vibrant sensuality. Our bodies would not sustain our foul moods unless they turned them into a morose satisfaction. From infancy, our bodies knew how to turn being chased and being thrown to the ground, gasping for air, into heightened exhilaration. Freud noted that any activity that involves a shattering of built-up physical and psychic structures produces orgasmic excitement; he cites intellectual strain, verbal disputes, wrestling with playmates, and railway travel. And our bodies know how to experience the suffering and the pain of another body as pleasure. How we look with composure at the intimidated, anxious eyes of another! How we laugh when we see someone whose stern look and words blocked our way now skidding and collapsing on the polished floor!

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This man took the pig I brought back from the hunt and contracted to bring a sheepskin the next market day. He could not or would not deliver, and he had fed his family my pig. Copulating with him would give me no pleasure, and he has no daughter. So I beat him. I find the pleasure of beating him and of seeing him bloody and groveling at my feet equivalent to the pleasure of the sheepskin owed me. A punk adolescent broke into our apartment. The police located him, but he had already sold our hi-fi set and collection of CDs to buy drugs, which he has already consumed. How our bored bodies in the comfort of our living room glisten with satisfaction when, on the evening news, we see him brought handcuffed into the court and, because this is his “third strike,” sentenced to prison for life! A market, then, is not simply a place at which pigs, yams, and a sheepskin trade places; it is a place at which humans contract with one another for pleasures. The pledges are made with their bodies. The calculations of equivalences, the rules, and the obligations that govern the exchange of material goods are based on the more fundamental marketing of human bodies as pleasure objects. Lévi–Strauss takes the regulated exchange of spouses between households and moieties to be the first and fundamental form of market society. He does not see that a suitor’s particular take on a prospective marriage partner’s body as a source of pleasure can determine essentially different forms of daughter and son exchange, and thus essentially different forms of society. Anthropologist Shirley Lindenbaum distinguishes three basic forms of marriage transaction in the Melanesian zone.2 In the first form, body fluids are contracted for and given in exchange. In the second form, body parts make up the transaction. In the third form, it is the productive forces of the body and its ability to produce wealth. This may evolve to a fourth form, in which external wealth is exchanged as a token and pledge of those productive forces. These are structurally different types of transaction for bodies; the first is not the most primitive, chronologically or structurally, and the last is not the most advanced. We can find all four kinds of transactions in our Western societies today.

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Transactions with Body Fluids

In Papua-New Guinea, the people whom anthropologist Gilbert Herdt named Sambia (pseudonymously, to protect them) live without rulers in autonomous compounds.3 Sambia society is a dual economy; the men hunt and forage and also maintain their secret orchards; the women garden. Men eat male food—the male milk of the pandanus trees that they cultivate and tend and game from the hunt. They cook and eat together in the men’s house. Relations among men are fiercely egalitarian. Their combats, without battle-chiefs or strategies, are not wars for territory, booty, or women, but feasts of ferocious individualism. Women garden and eat what they raise. A married woman lives in her house with her children. Her husband may visit her for sex, but he returns to the men’s house to sleep. A wife, taken from another compound, remains bound to her own family, and in time of conflict she may lend her force to theirs. The transaction thus does not deliver the whole woman to the ownership of the husband. The parents do not educate their sons; they will be initiated by the whole clan into the skills and tasks of each stage of their development. Mothers keep their daughters with them and educate them in the ways of women. The primary social act is that of a young man who goes to another compound to transact for a spouse. For the sister he takes from them, he pledges to one of her brothers his niece for that brother’s son. He will now give his male essence to her younger brothers aged from seven to sixteen years old; he will give them his penis to suck in order that they, weaned from the female milk of their mother, will have the male milk they need to become men. For the Sambia, the essence of life is fluid; it is in blood, female milk, and male milk. Human bodies are not producers of fluid but conduits of fluids. The milk-sap of the pandanus trees, the milk of female nature, is absorbed by men; in their bodies, it transubstantiates into the male milk of their penises. Men give the milk of their penis to boys so that they grow into men. When these boys are filled with the milk of men to the point that the milk flows in their penises, they will give it orally to young girls until the milk fills them and their breasts swell. Then, when the excess blood of the women begins to flow from their vaginas, the husbands will pump into it their male milk. They will fill

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them continually day after day as the child coagulates in this mix of female blood and male milk. The infant is their coproduction. Mature male and female bodies among the Sambia are parallel, both conduits of fluids, giving their milk to infants so that they grow into women and men. Men are men when they give male milk to women and to boys; when it ceases to flow, they lose their maleness and become sexually indeterminate. Male and female identity is in the flow and is a fluid identity. Among the Sambia, body fluids do not flow freely; they are coded and metered out. The fundamental act of association that organizes society is a transaction with portions of the self—fluid portions of a fluid self. Manhattan: His job takes him to Chicago, LA, Berlin, Tokyo, to business account dinners, hotels, and singles bars. My job requires me to dress chic and to have dinner with advertising executives and out-ofown talent scouts. We have networks of friends; the city is a compound of theaters, galleries, cafés, and discos. We own a private key club: our apartment on the Upper West Side. It was done up by a decorator. We go out or call in to eat; we have a maid. We have no children. We fuck with a condom. I have a vibrator and a dildo and rights to his ass. He gives head; I give head. He nibbles on my tits; I bite his. We Frenchkiss in the elevator, in the taxi, and at lunch break when we meet in the Japanese restaurant halfway between his office and mine. His nervous circuitry is connected to the neon map of my Big Apple and my dreams navigate about the contours of his private movies; my steps move with the rhythms of the songs in his heart and his wit and nonsense ricochets off mine. Our talk is an idiolect of clandestine allusions, private jokes, whimsical taxonomies, perverse explanations. We team up for picaresque escapades in the halls and desks of office buildings and for island-hopping adventures on Caribbean cruise ships. Between us, all the sophisticated and debauched emotions get rolled back and forth—an ocean in an illuminated plastic box with a small motor tilting it back and forth. Transactions with Body Parts

The high valley in the Eastern Highlands of Irian Jaya is wet from the rains that collect about the mountains above and the melting ice. The

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people have dug deep trenches and created raised plots for gardens. The women do not gather foodstuffs from the forest; they are skilled in the arts of gardening. Gardening is very laborious, but the only season here is springtime and the crops do not fail. Except for digging trenches and turning over plots after a harvest, the work is done by women. They have learned to maintain the fertility of the soil by throwing the weeds into the trenches and scooping up the rotted masses to spread back on the gardens for the new planting. They raise yams, rich in nutrients, as the staple and many kinds of vegetables to garnish them. The agricultural prosperity of the women separates them economically from the men, whose domain is the forests above rich in wildlife. The men depart into the forests and return with feasts of game. Men are hunters and headhunters. A young man of the Eastern Highlands walks with the armament of the most noble and fierce lords of the jungle in the perforated lobes of his ears, nostrils, arms, and penis: tusks of wild boars, the beaks of cassowaries with whom he has contended, and the claws and plumes of eagles, as well as shells for which he has braved long treks down the slippery paths of the dangerous jungle to coastal people who plunge into the shark-patrolled ocean for them. He is a warrior. The combats in which he participates are Aztec flower wars or, rather, bird of paradise wars; they are exultant ceremonial feasts in which each is his own chief, elaborates his own strategy, and celebrates his own triumph. In the clash with the people on the other side of the ravine, he pursued and killed the one with boar’s tusks through his nostrils and an array of glittering black bird of paradise plumes on his head—the most brave of their warriors. He cut off the head of the one whom he had vanquished, stripped it of its flesh and brain, and has hung it over his door. He has eaten of the corpse, whose pride and ferocity now smolder in him. Now he is going for a wife to the other settlement, with which one season and against which another season the men of his compound fight. He is bringing her father and brothers the tusks, fangs, shells, and plumes that he will amputate from his body. He will graft these onto their nostrils, ears, arms, and heads, enhancing their male power as hunters by incorporating in them the weapons and power of the

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lordly animals of the mountains and seas. They will take him as his son and their brother and give him the father’s daughter, their sister. Guido was born in Sicily, dropped out of high school, and spent time in prison, first for stealing a motorcycle and then for stealing a BMW and driving it in a 150-km race through the mountains chased by the police. The race was watched on the television news by Pablo Padrone, the local Mafia capo. Pablo visited Guido in prison, and a month later Guido was free. Pablo arranged to have him train as a Formula One racer. In Le Mans, he placed second only to Brazilian Aryton Sena. In Milan, Giovanni Bossi is the owner of a company founded by his grandfather that manufactures luxury automobiles. The company has done well through thick and thin; its cars are known to an elite of old money and junior executives of multinational corporations. The public has never seen Bossi; his face is not known in the marble-sheathed lounges where the politicians decide the destiny of Italy. Several times Bossi has been pressured to merge with great automobile manufacturing companies and offered prospects of vastly increased markets. However, for Bossi, the family pride—his pride—is attached to producing a motorcar as refined and aristocratic as a Samurai sword, something of which the whole world will be in awe. He contacts Guido; will he drive one of Bossi’s cars in the Rio Grand Prix? He sees Guido’s furtive glances at his daughter, Julia, and sees also Julia’s ardent eyes for Guido. He already knows that he will walk down the cathedral of Milan before everyone who counts in Parliament and in Italy to escort his daughter in marriage to his new vicepresident. He will arrive with Julia at the cathedral in the racing car that Guido drove in Rio, his hair disheveled by the wind like the mane of a lion. Transactions with Productive Bodies

In the Western cordillera of Papua-New Guinea, women are skilled in the extensive cultivation of crops and, in addition, have domesticated large herds of pigs. What the men can bring back by hunting in the forests is neither bountiful nor reliable. However, the men have monopolized the sacred rituals and the ideological superstructure of

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society. Acquiring a woman is acquiring a producer of external wealth, so men are motivated to acquire more than one spouse. With status in the ritual and political sphere, men can transact with other men for the acquisition of many women. This young man has undergone the seventh-stage initiation and has been accepted into the clan; he knows the secret myths and rituals of the men. For him, to acquire a wife is to acquire a producer of wealth, but he must also obtain status in the ritual and political sphere. He is a man; now he will become a “big man.” He sets out to acquire the daughter of an important man for a wife. By entering the household of a man of status and wealth, and guardian of sacred rituals, he will be able to acquire more wives and more wealth. He will perfect his prowess in the hunt, his father will call upon men indebted to him, until he can put before the important man and his sons a pile of rare shells, ritual objects or insignia of status, and large quantities of game. They will demonstrate his male power to acquire wealth in the hunt and through his political connections. The shells, ritual objects, and insignia will not be grafted onto the bodies of the prospective father- and brothers-in-law; they will be added to their family treasure. The game will be consumed in feasts in which the father-in-law extends his connections with other men and their obligations to him. What the suitor brings is his body, which is that of a “big man”; what he offers is wealth that makes the father-in-law yet more of a “big man.” In the course of the past century, such Melanesian societies have entered into relationship with Western societies. Food production in the village is supplied by the women; with game scarce and headhunting suppressed, the young men are drawn off to the plantations and the mines of the white men. They really cannot use their wages to acquire productive wealth, plantations or mines, and the profitable plantation crops cannot be grown in their Highlands homeland. They use their wages to buy metal-buckled belts, wrist watches, macho jackets, and eventually motorcycles, which they will take back to their villages to offer as bride-price in exchange for women, the local wealth-producers. The fathers-in-law add these things to the hoard of shells, ritual objects, and insignia that constitute status within male society. Filling

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his compound with the sumptuary objects of white male prestige, the big man extends his prestige to white male society also. The greatest male power that a father can have is to be the headman of the village, with whom the white labor-recruiter will have to deal. The white men have a society in the region. Their connections and the various kinds of debts owed them by other white big men enable them to become big men. They contract with other white big men for productive property, for plantations, mines, and shipping vessels. They enter into transactions with the native big men for black laborers for their plantations and mines. The raw materials that these laborers extract and the commodities they harvest the white men market for a profit, which they invest in equipment for more profit. The wealth of the Melanesian big men is unproductive; it is consumed in feasts that expand their connections with other households and big men and those men’s obligations to them. The wealth of the white big men produces more material wealth, which they also use to extend their connections and make junior partners, rivals bought out, and bankers obligated to them. The resources supply their needs; the property that produces more property materializes their independence, freedom of initiative, and status. Big men marry among their own kind. Here, what figures in transactions is the treasure someone has and the connections with other big men that give his body social power. When a suitor goes to his prospective father-in-law, he goes with his big man body; he is the eldest son of a plantation. He has connections: he is an officer of the Raj whose father is a general; he is the Oxford-educated son of a prominent London lawyer. Their marriages are alliances or mergers among plantations, mines, and shipping companies. Lounge bar in São Paulo: Sky-view restaurant in Berlin. Fashionable club in Los Angeles. We professional, affluent, broad-minded, healthconscious, cultivated, and sensitive white males are meeting educated, financially independent, streetwise, liberated, and caring women. We are not, like savages or fiancés, just showing off body parts. We must present and represent ourselves in the “in” way. By going to certain clubs, stepping out of limousines or off Harley-Davidsons, the suave or

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swaggering choreography of our gestures, an intricate rhetoric of allusion and multiple things to which we never allude, our bodies attract attention. With tinted contact lenses and hair implants, diamond chokers or razor blades, designer gowns or leather jackets, our bodies represent us. The invisible raiment that our choreographed movements weave about our bodies and the sophisticated lighting our sparkling allusions project upon our bodies enhance them with our training, education, business acumen, and connections. We are amused by the tvs, the starlets, and the nerds who also deck themselves out with these things; the instant executive, instant fashion model, or instant punk from Kansas or Belgium come from an afternoon’s shopping on the Upper East Side or in the Sixième. It helps to really have a degree from Princeton or an executive job at Macintosh or to be an editor of Ms or a dancer in Chippendale’s. Vassar graduate on a date with a French yachtsman. Hollywood surgeon on a date with a British novelist. Our lean, tanned, designer-clad bodies are the embodiments of a trend, the action, a caste, or an empire. You get established in a career, you build up a business, and you build a home that represents success. With these, you have credit, can get loans, and can transact for more productive wealth. What Aristotle Onassis produced with all his wealth generating wealth is Aristotle Onassis. A name with which he gets a Kennedy, not the hottest woman there is but the woman that represents all that Camelot America is. Potlatch

You are a hunter, you are a forager; you have also produced some things: made a canoe out of sealskins, a blanket out of fox fur. You were lucky to be born in this region of abundance and in this community. You had the luck to be born vigorous and without birth defects, to have escaped crippling diseases, to have the vibrant energy attracted by the distances; and to have been gifted with sharp eyes and quick reflexes. Now you have had luck in foraging and in the hunt. It confirms your sense of the good fortune of your birth, your vigor, and your keen eyes and flair. Luck comes to the lucky.

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The excitement of hunting does not come from the assurance of knowing that you will be successful; it is the excitement of gambling where you risked coming back with nothing or even being killed. Gardening is drudgery; foraging is exciting because there are poisonous vipers in the thickets where berries grow. Women laugh at night over a leopard that stalked them or a horny guy that chased them over the rapids of the river. The sense of good luck is joyous. The proof of being lucky that comes in the lucky find or lucky hunt makes happiness a joy of existing. Joy is an onrush of vibrant energy that breaks out of self-preoccupation and bounds forth to the distances. The happiness of good luck is realized, is real, and is released in laughter. Laughter exists and extends outside. You were lucky in the hunt and killed an oryx; you were lucky in foraging and came back with a whole load of mangoes. You will part with them. You give them away to those who need them—food for your children and aged parents. You give them away to those who do not need them; you spread out your finest blanket and cover it with roast meat or mangoes and, laughing, call everyone to days and nights of feasting. You are intoxicated with the recklessness and freedom of parting with the boar that you killed, even if you would get grain enough for a couple of months in exchange for it. Swapping is an admission that, although lucky today, you are not a lucky guy. Parting with what you obtained by luck, you are wagering that you are on a lucky streak and blessed by fortune. This ostentatious parting at a loss is glory. The buyer is always humble. It is humiliating to admit to no luck in the hunt, to buy a coat from the lucky one with the fox skin, or to buy an ordinary basket just to carry foodstuffs. In a community in which everybody knows everybody, the one who parts with his oryx or fine blanket defies the others. He or she will find his or her equal in the one who brings a wild boar or the one who has a finer blanket woven of brightly colored bark fabric to throw into the feast. Reckless joy spreads by contagion like laughter. In a forced attempt to maintain the exchange model, economists may say that the one who comes back from foraging or from the hunt with a bagful of fruit or an oryx and calls upon everyone around to feast

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is receiving prestige. However, this prestige is not a commodity like food, clothing, and tools; it is the recognition by others of good fortune and happiness. Is some kind of Hegelian process at work here, whereby the lucky one can only recognize himself and his good fortune by having it recognized by others? To the contrary; his sense of being lucky and happy is immediate; happiness breaks out in laughter and laughter exists in contagion. Everybody rushes to the side of the lucky one in the hunt, in foraging, in battle, or in gambling because luck is contagious. We laugh: his laughter is not an initiative or an attitude that he takes up marking his distinction from us. His separate identity and that of the others appear as epiphenomenal and ephemeral as waves that rise in the agitation of the sea. Happiness is exhilaration—that is, recklessness and freedom. Someone brings in a winter’s collection of beaver hides; sells them to abject buyers, or to merchants whom everybody disdains; spends everything on food and drinks for peers and nights of voluptuousness; and sets forth gaily for the forest again. The merchants do not become rich by exchanging for the equivalent; they become rich by their skilled eye and flair and by the luck of being there when the big spender arrives. They also have the luck of being born in Myanmar where their fathers knew where the rubies are found, of having the connections to obtain Chinese silks, and of eluding Shan bandits in the mountain passes. No one is more superstitious than merchants. From 1.4 million years ago, archeologists in Africa, the Middle East, Siberia, and Europe have found stone tools that they call “bifaces.” The two sides are chipped into corresponding convex faces and the edges skillfully chipped into arcs, exhibiting a drive for aesthetic perfection exceeding utility. In archaic societies inhabiting the most inhospitable regions, craft is not restricted to objects of basic utility. Every society not imminently threatened with starvation or siege produces jewelry, body ornamentation, and ceremonial objects—luxury objects not destined to be bartered or sold but given away in feasts. Lévi–Strauss and Nietzsche have argued that the fundamental market at the basis of society is not the exchange of commodities but the

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exchange of people, those economic assets and pleasure objects. Georges Bataille has instead emphasized the festive nature of marriage. For the father, his daughter is not simply an economic asset that he has produced; she is a luxury object. He gives her away in a feast for which he also squanders great quantities of his wealth on rare foods and intoxicating drinks. Luck and prodigality spread by contagion; the wedding guests, carried away in the festivity, will be inspired to do likewise. A great wedding launches the community into a competition of great weddings. The mother says, “I have not lost a daughter; I have gained a son.” She is beaming to have a son whose new home she can finance; upon whom she can lavish her time on baby-sitting when he wants to go to the clan dances, a concert, or on vacation; and to whom to leave her savings when she dies. The bridegroom gives his bride to all the men to kiss. He will sink weeks and months worth of his labor into buying her glamorous gifts on her birthday and on the anniversary of their marriage. He will take her to clan feasts arrayed in jewelry, to balls clad in gowns with plunging neckline, to give her to everyone as a feast for their eyes. The Brazilian day laborer who has nothing but a lover inexhaustibly prodigal in kisses and caresses deems himself the luckiest man in the world. On the anniversary of their engagement, this woman in a slum in Mexico City does not deprive her husband of the plain food that he needs to sustain his strength in his grueling factory job. Instead, she fills their shanty with wild flowers, which the earth gives freely, that she finds in the railroad embankment. The deep-seated conviction that love and having a body at one’s side that is productive of pleasures are not earned and paid for but gifts of luck leads so many gays and lesbians, but also a growing number of straight couples, to repudiate every thought of the political and economic contract of marriage and every thought of contract in their sexuality. The transactions characterizing the three kinds of society that Lindenbaum distinguishes are doubled up and undermined by festive, celebratory proceedings, just as in the hub cities of advanced capitalism the casino is next to the stock market; indeed, the casino is in the stock

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market. We can see these festive, celebratory excesses in our societies today, and it is probable that they have always existed in the markets of all kinds of societies. Potlatch of Body Fluids

“Give blood” stands out as the sincerest, most uncynical cry in a media and billboard world in which marketing experts use language to tease, deceive, badger, and befool. The most precious liquid is beyond all price. Blood is life; to sense the coursing of our blood is to sense our fluid bodies, our fluid identities. Blood is to be given, given freely to the unlucky, to victims of car crashes, of leukemia, and of failed operations in hospitals, as blood—life—is given freely, by luck, to us. Giving blood to a lover, child, parent, or wounded buddy on the battlefront is the strongest affirmation of the pure luck of having that lover, child, parent, or buddy. Men identify being lucky with being sexually potent. Only the very worst households—spouses of aristocrats who want children so as to have something of their own or spouses denied voluptuous nights with their husbands—speak of marriage rights, that is, the right set up in ecclesiastical law of a woman to the semen of her husband, or of a husband to use his wife to reproduce his lineage. Nowadays, the downand-out can sell their semen to semen banks. Male prostitutes are seen as renting their bodies for pleasure and marketing their charm, not their semen. For those lucky enough to have reached the age or lucky beyond the age, semen is a luxury production of their bodies, to which no price is attached, like champagne poured out prodigally or the seed released by the meadows to the winds. What is more universally understood on the seven continents than a woman giving her breast milk to the infant of the woman who has none? This image appears in the work of every photographer who visits a refugee camp and sets out to show that these people are not the rabble their pursuers have proclaimed them to be. Potlatch of Body Parts

As his father-in-law roasts all the pigs he owns to celebrate the giving away of his daughter, this young man throws into the feast the tusks of

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wild boars, the beaks of cassowaries, and the claws and plumes of eagles. These arms of the lords of the jungle grafted onto his body are prostheses, supplementary body parts, but as talismans they serve to proclaim him lucky. As such, they are also destined to be given away. No more than a king sells his crown to his debtors does a warrior in Irian Jaya sell his shimmering headdress of bird of paradise plumes to a Javanese merchant marketing steel axes and mosquito netting or to a tourist. The most successful businesswoman buys costume jewelry for herself, but the real jewels, the ruby earrings and the diamond ring, must be gifts. Even her stay in a Beverly Hills clinic for a face-lift must be the gift of her lover. Men can purchase Swatches, but the gold Rolex must be a gift. A young man may finance his crotch-rocket motorcycle, but his spaceman helmet should be a gift from his lover. The supreme virile glamour of a bodybuilder is a luxury product; he must not use this superlative musculature to demand extra pay for extra work, but his honor holds him to be always there whenever a woman, a stranger, or a weakling is being picked on. Potlatch of Productive Body Parts

Karl Marx eloquently analyzed the resources that industrial capitalist society finds in human bodies. For industry, people are hair that gums up, loses its luster and its bounce, gets gray, and falls out; people are teeth that get yellow or brown with smoking or tobacco-chewing and accumulate plaque, acids, and foul odors; people are feet whose arches fall, that develop odors, and whose toes develop fungus; people are stomachs that get acidic, develop cramps, bloat after Thanksgiving and Christmas meals, and develop gas that awakens the body at night. To pay for shampoo and jeans, foot powder and work shoes, toothpaste and beer, hamburgers and antacids, the workers sell their manpower, their skilled hands or the brute force of their arms and back, their 20–20 vision, their brainpower, or their imagination. Surrogate mothers sell the sustenance of their wombs. The unemployed or unemployable sell their jism or their blood. These productive body parts are also given away. “Let me give you a hand,” says one worker to a novice or weaker worker who is being paid the same for his manpower. “Come give us a hand!” shout the team try-

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ing to shift an I-beam or deal with the crates spilled out of a truck to workers employed on other tasks in the yard. We see the contractual relationship signed by the hand of the employer with men for the strength and skill of their hands; we see those countless acts of giving a hand, in factories, on docks, in garages, on highways, and in back yards. See Médicins sans frontières, Greenpeace, physicians spending their vacations performing cleft palette surgery on peasant children in Guatemala and Thailand so that they will grow up able to smile, nurses working in refugee camps on five continents, amateur naturalists spending their vacations doing bird censuses on Caribbean islands, people rushing out to help when whales are beached—see people giving a hand. In medical laboratories, in the rain forest, and in isolated stations in Antarctica, minds are devoted to unlockng the secrets of plague-bearing viruses, of intricate ecosystems within ecosystems, of the ozone shield, of the formation of the solar system five billion years ago, and of the final apocalypse of the universe a trillion trillion light-years from now. Minds disconnected from the noise and fury of the market connected onto thin columns of ants, the thin strands of synapses in the bodies of bats, electron microscopes, carbon-dating equipment, geneanalysis equipment, and telescopes in outer space. Brainpower in the right places in industry is, to be sure, highly paid, but so many of these researchers are researching things that will never have market value. What do they do after hours or on weekends? Their brains continue to research. What do they do after they retire? They research. Potlatch of brainpower! We let it all go and give it all away for nothing; we die. Throughout history, death and life have overlapped, so that living was dying. Mothers often died in childbearing, giving birth to a life not their own, and dying. Mothers expected to die about the time that their children gave birth to children. In Bali, parents who live on after their children have had children are treated as walking dead—ghosts lingering where they are out of place. People experienced their labor, when the life in them was most powerful and most intense, as a dying: to labor is to expend one’s forces. One should not because one cannot conserve one’s forces.

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You worked all a lifetime and in the end gave it all away, took nothing with you, not even your corpse, for you went nowhere. That you die by a stroke of bad luck shows that you were lucky to have lived. Happiness consists in knowing that we live by luck and in the reckless freedom of staking our life. A wedding feast, an extravagant gift, an exhausting effort made to rescue someone lost at sea or in an avalanche, or a life spent in research that brought no profit and perhaps ended in a dead end—all these forms of potlatch get their meaning from death; they are festive and celebratory ways of dying. Notes 1. F. Nietzsche. 1989. On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 7. 2. S. Lindenbaum. 1984. Variations on a sociosexual theme in Melanesia. In G. Herdt, Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia, Berkeley: University of California Press, 337–361. 3. G. H. Herdt. 1981. Fetish and fantasy in Sambia initiation. In Rituals of Manhood. Berkeley: University of California Press, 17–27; 52–53; and 1981. Guardians of the Flutes: Idioms of Masculinity. Univ. of California Press, New York: McGraw–Hill.

GOOD DEEDS

Justice is such an elusive thing of which to get any kind of concrete idea. It is usually a notion only hovering on the horizon; to put it at the center of any discussion is to see the discussion get inconclusive. We first must talk about how a system works, a particular kind of market economy, how abstract things like intellectual property are assigned value, the kinds and availability of education and health care, access to and manipulation of the organs of information and the expression of opinion, the different migrations of peoples into a region, and the different economic niches that various ethnic groups have come to occupy. Justice seems to be marginal and for tomorrow—something to keep in mind somehow as the present economic and technological situation works out or evolves. Then, one day, you see justice; it materializes in front of your eyes. The day before you had been released from the hospital in Rio de Janeiro; you got up just before sunrise and decided to go out to walk a little down Avenida Atlântica. You took your wallet, thinking you would treat yourself to a good breakfast at the Meridien Hotel three blocks up. You were shuffling along bent over due to the sutures. “Senhor, que horas são?” You looked up; an adolescent kid was pointing to his wrist and asking the time. You looked at your watch; it was 6:10, and then suddenly you knew what was going to happen. Five or six of them closed in; you thought to protect your sutured abdomen and sank

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to the sidewalk, trying to close your body upon itself. One of them held a knife to your throat. You really did not feel them taking your watch and clearing your pockets. Then they pulled back. As you started to get up again, one of them—noblesse oblige—tossed you your hotel room key before prancing off. They crossed the avenue and vanished into the city. The flawless timing and the rhythm of the action still gleamed in your mind. It was like a well-choreographed scene in a cabaret—the actors appearing from backstage, closing in about the gleaming prop or fetish, the knife, the group unfolding and vanishing without missing a beat—more absorbing than a play in a football field watched from the bleachers. The question, banal as a password, had set the scenario in motion, as you had sensed even as you looked at your watch to answer it. Who after all is strolling along the sea at daybreak and wants to know exactly what time it is? Senhor, que horas são? meant: “Hey mister, you got a fine watch there!” There was an erotic charge in the play. Nobody walks Copacabana beach at any hour of the day or night with anything but lust in his or her heart. It just isn’t possible; the most serious joggers cast prurient glances at one another’s sweat-molded shorts as they pass one another. You had had glimpses only of the blazing eyes of the one who asked you the time and of the other, who held the knife to your throat; the others had blankets like capes about them, having, no doubt, spent the night sleeping on the beach. As you kept your eyes fixed on the phallic knife at your throat, they, reduced to gleaming eyes and blankets, had taken your watch and wallet with fingers light as caresses. While it was happening, the stylized perfection of the operation and its erotic pulse filled your consciousness. Then, an idea shone in your head: justice. An $80 watch, a white tourist well-dressed in fashionable shorts and t-shirt on the way to the Meridien, a cobra-skin wallet with maybe $75 in cruzeiros in it, six adolescents running now across the boulevard to return to the favela from which they came. This notion of justice didn’t come out of a piece of reasoning, intelligibly assembling these elements of a morning on Avenida Atlântica. It came right in the conjunction of knife with throat. The throat of any one of those idle rich old farts that come from thousands of miles away to bask on the

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beach at Copacabana, eat lobster, read newspapers, and go back again. And you guys—you are there, you got born, you with this young and hungry body, you who do not have the coins for rice and black beans. The tourist’s hotel room key was good-naturedly tossed back to him; the knife, it turned out, was a tourist souvenir knife that had been grabbed off one of the stands that vendors were already setting up; it was tossed back to the vendor by the departing assailants. A souvenir knife and a throat: suddenly, justice materialized there, under the rosetinted dawn clouds of Copacabana. (The fact that it happened to be the knife at your throat was a detail that naturally could not make it occur to you that what they did was in any way objectionable; morality, Immanuel Kant explained, can be identified as the kind of thinking in which one does not make oneself the exception.) Heading back to your hotel, it occurred to you that your credit card was in that wallet, and, noticing now a police post, you stopped to get the police report you would need when going to American Express for the replacement. The chesty cop grabbed his hat, headed to where you were attacked, and then pulled his gun and jogged across the sands. You dragged after him. He yanked the shirts back from the faces of sleeping people on benches and on the sands or turned them over and demanded of you if this was one of them, although you told him in your crude Portuguese and with gestures that your attackers had run off into the city. “They come back,” he muttered. You said that you had to file a report and would go to the precinct station. “No,” he said, “you wait.” You went to have coffee at your hotel. Fifteen minutes later, the hotel desk clerk came to tell you that the police had captured your attackers. They had three scrawny kids and explained to you that these had changed clothing in the meantime, but it was them—they had been identified by witnesses. You looked at their faces without recognizing them; when you were set upon, you had not seen faces, only eyes, hands, and a knife that fitted together like notes in a rapid melodic line. The cops made each of the three captives stand up, turn around, take off his clothes so that you could see all there was to them as they insisted it was these three. Then, impulsively, you said, “No.” You insisted that it was not these three. You stood there until, finally, the police let them go. In Rio de Janeiro the police, who have

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the guns, are hired by the shopping centers as night guards. They shoot street kids, throw the bodies in dumps, and attribute them to gang killings among themselves. An item in a newspaper had said that some five hundred children were killed in the city that way last year. The knife at the throat as the watch and wallet are being lifted were not an instance of that big and universal thing, Justice—the universal distributive law that must reign throughout society in order to be real anywhere. The knife at the throat and the watch and wallet being lifted were a little choreographed number complete and perfect in itself, expressive of nothing further and terminating any relations existing or to be between you and them. Since they have the knife, you are not going to run after them yelling for the cops. They will vanish. Luis Buñuel liked to mock the notion of Christian charity, in which an individual makes an isolated gesture, momentarily relieving the misery of another individual, while the whole system, intact, perpetuates itself. This act is of the same kind; the white man will be as laden with his ill-gotten gain as before and the street kids of Rio will be as desperate as before. Kant would demand that we apply the test of universality to their initiative that morning, and the critique of practical reason would demonstrate that this act is perfectly self-defeating: to the exact proportion that street gangs hold knives to the throats of rich tourists, the rich tourists cease to come at all. However, the rightness of the coupling is evident in the coupling. The sense of justice is the sense that certain pairings of body parts are right: the tourist’s aging white throat and the knife in the adolescent fist, for example. It makes sense and helps you make sense of the social field. It started you seeing something about police and shopping centers and those who can afford to shop there and those who cannot. The flawless timing, the rhythm of the action, and its erotic pulse made visible the rightness of the coupling. Beauty, Martin Heidegger wrote, is the radiance of truth. What is a friend for, we say, if not to help? Yet it really is very hard to really help, and many of us have been able to help a friend maybe once in a lifetime; we cherish that time as one of the best things about having lived. Sometimes people seem to have found the formula early in

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life and they apply it with equanimity until they die: they are genial, affable, helpful. Others find it is good sense: before any problem, they appraise the issue, survey the alternatives, select the best one, and do not worry over it if, as often happens, the best available decision did not work. The majority of people may seem to fall into those categories—the kind ones and the sensible ones. The majority of people are vaguely repugnant—trivializing, leveling kindness, shallow, and selfjustifying sensibleness. Most of the things that we do routinely that the people around us find praiseworthy and that make them think of us as a good man or woman are behavioral patterns that are there and are known, that the situation calls for, that we do more or less automatically, and that, in fact, it would be harder for us not to do. Of course, we stay overtime so that a colleague can take off early to pick someone up at the airport, visit a friend in the hospital, give blood for a neighbor who was in a car accident, lend the kid who cuts the lawn 500 bucks for bail for his buddy who got busted for dope. A brave deed is something else and, when we manage it, we know it. Maybe nothing very spectacular, but it is like a piece of thinking that is really our own, something that engages our powers and to which we really devote ourselves; we somehow manage to compose it so that it is right, coherent, consistent, closed in itself. When we are the recipients of such good deeds, we know it and remember them always.—I was eighteen, flunking out of college and in a fucked-up relation with a woman. My parents declaring that this was it, when the semester was over, you go get yourself a job and pay rent, and then he came along and said a few things or maybe said nothing but made it clear he believed in me and made me believe in myself and passed me the money to go to the conservatory and study dance without expecting repayment or wanting thanks.—We really weren’t friends, we just used to go to the same health club, and have a plate of fruit together after, sometimes—I don’t know how it started, and I started telling her about my marriage and my herpes and the depression I’d been in for months and all the doctors I’d gone to and then it got worse and went on and on and she just kept with me, sometimes she’d

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come over and spend the whole night with me, she’d cancel dinner dates, even birthdays and anniversaries…. These things leave you empty when you do them. You happened to be there at the right time, somehow said the right thing to the kid, were able to pass him the money for the tuition in such a way that he would take it. It needed to be done with a lot of tact and secrecy in order to be done right, and any lifting of that veil of secrecy would spoil it now. Nietzsche understood that, and wrote that when you do a good deed, you had better grab a stick and give a sound thrashing to any bystander who happened to see, to muddle his memory. Prostitutes understand that, covering their kind hearts with harsh and cynical words. There are some, Nietzsche went on, who know how to grab a stick and muddle their own memory. Or whack it with that stick, break off that segment, and let it wriggle off into the dark. You cannot anchor its diagram in yourself, make it a paradigm, and then be on the lookout for cases when you can recycle it. Someone I know, after drifting a bit after graduating, started to work in state institutions for the retarded. A fine, positive, generous work when everyone else in his generation went off to exploit the market and see how far, how fast they could get up on the pile. He quit after a few years, said you have to. It does weird things to the soul, he said, to be the sugar daddy, the Santa Clause, the Jesus Christ to a bunch of people. He told me of those who did’t quit—the “Big Nurse” ones, every last one of them. Being there when the situation needed you, some third eye finds the right thing to do somehow; then, like coming up with an idea when thinking, it sticks to the bones like a paradigm. The hard thing is to be ignorant and concerned and afraid the next time. Out of that ignorance and concern and fear alone the good deed, the brave deed, could come. One is left the next day emptied, one’s good deed more a burden than a glory, the glory of it surely a burden, not left with strengthened powers but with harnessed powers, not knowing if new powers, the right powers, will be there when the time comes. One might well have to learn wickedness before one can do a good deed again. Notes 1. Friedrich, Nietzsche, 1966. Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage Books, 50.

Index A

E

Aesthetic pleasure, 41–2 Apotemnophilia, definition, 77 Armstrong, E. A., 43n Autoeroticism, 37

Ego, location of, 52–3 Eyes, seductiveness of, 6

B

Falkenberrg, Paul, 28, 29 Fate, 52 Fisher, Ronald A., 27 Frank, A, 79 Freud, Sigmund, 14, 59–60, 61, 69, 81, 93, 116–117, 128

F

Bataille, Georges, 35–37, 82, 94, 140 Benedict, Ruth, 80 Birth, 4 Body image, 29, 53–4 Body without organs, 61–2 Bolk, Louis, 10 Bowerbirds, 37–41 Braque, Georges, 119 Bruno, Richard L., 79

G Gill, Eric, 84 Gillard, E. Thomas, 28

H

C Chapman, Jake, 119

Heidegger, Martin, 9, 148 Herdt, Gilbert, 131

D

I

Darwin, Charles, 15, 21, 27 Day, W. S., 39 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63, 69 Descartes, René, 11 Diamond, Jared, 43n Dillard, Annie, 107–108 Dreams, 53–4, 93 Duras, Marguerite, 36

Identity, 5

K Kant, Immanuel, 6, 7, 36, 108, 116, 150

L Lacan, Jacques, 11

153

154


Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste de, 15 Lawrence, Konrad Z., 31 Leks, 24 Leroi-Gourhan, André, 57 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 63, 71n, 127, 128, 130, 139 Lindenbaum, Shirley, 130 Luck, 52, 137–139, 141–2

Postural schema, 29 Punto Gualichú, 121

R Riddle, G. C., 79 Ripley, S. Dillon, 40 Rosenberg, Harold, 29 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 16

M Margulis, Lynn, 12 Marshall, A. J., 41–2 Marx, Karl, 69, 117, 142 Matisse, Henri, 119 Meyers, R. W., 79 Mirror stage, 11–12

S Sage grouse, 32–35 Sexual selection, 21–22, 24 Skutch, Alexandcer, 27 Songs of whales, birds, humans, 31 Symbiosis, 12

N

T

Namuth, Hans, 28, 29 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 14, 15–16, 17, 74, 83, 84, 89, 127, 129, 139, 152 Nobility, 14, 15

Tinbergen, Nikolas, 31 Transgression, 36

O

Von Frisch, Karl, 31

Orlan, 29–31

P Past, 3 Picasso, Pablo, 119 Primary processes of libido, 60–62 Psychoanalysis, 59 Pollock, Jackson, 28–29, 42

V

W Wakefield, P. L., 79 Weisman, August, 15 Writing, 66–7

Z Zahavi, Amotz and Avishag, 22, 25, 43n

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