The Body of Nature and Culture

The Body of Nature and Culture Rod Giblett The Body of Nature and Culture Also by Rod Giblett FORRESTDALE: PEOPLE AN...

Author: Rod Giblett

102 downloads 1715 Views 2MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

The Body of Nature and Culture Rod Giblett

The Body of Nature and Culture

Also by Rod Giblett FORRESTDALE: PEOPLE AND PLACE HEALTH RECOVERY: THE TAOIST TAI CHI TM WAY LIVING WITH THE EARTH: MASTERY TO MUTUALITY POSTMODERN WETLANDS: CULTURE, HISTORY, ECOLOGY SUBLIME COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES

The Body of Nature and Culture Rod Giblett Edith Cowan University, Australia

© Rodney James Giblett 2008 Taoist Tai Chi™ and Taoist Tai Chi Society™ are trademarks used under license by the International Society and its member organisations, in association with the instruction of various internal arts of health transmitted by Moy Lin-shin. All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–22273–1 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–22273–0 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Giblett, Rodney James. The body of nature and culture / Rod Giblett. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–230–22273–1 (alk. paper) 1. Body, Human–Social aspects. 2. Culture. 3. Human ecology. 4. Culture. I. Title. GN298.G53 2008 306.4–dc22 2008024818 10 17

9 16

8 15

7 14

6 13

5 12

4 11

3 10

2 09

1 08

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

To Zoe and Blake

The Body Judith Wright I am the depth below. You would do well to look down, sometimes. I can be your tree, solid in the gale – if you consent to be flower, seed and fruit. But you don’t believe in me except as crass and suffering and to be suffered, or instrument of your uncertain love. I am your notion of hell and your tool for discovering heaven. But perched on me you lean out with your arrogant polished eye – trying to be God. Look down; remember where you are. I am the strata that reach from earth to star and the great cliff down which your father Adam fell. You would do well to look down. More was built into me than quickset night. God walked through all my ages. He set in me the key that fits the keyhole; use it right and eternity’s lightning splits the rock of time. And there I was begun and so begotten in that unspeakable heart of flame. From that light where flesh on flesh was welded the world itself unfolded. Look down through me on the light you have forgotten. I am your blundering kind companion. I am your home that keeps out bitter weather. I am the perilous slow deposit of time’s wisdom. You are my threat, my murder. And yet remember, I am yourself. Come let us live together.

Contents List of Table and Illustrations

ix

Preface

x

Acknowledgements

xv

1

Where Land and Body Meet: Body Culture and Nature The body: The starting point Stigmata Body techniques

1 2 7 13

2

Machine Body of Modern Western Medicine The body as machine Body machinery Medical mechanics Mapping the machine of the body

19 20 23 27 31

3

Battlefield Body of Illness Narratives Illness narratives The body as battlefield The military metaphor in hypermodern medicine The earth as body/body as earth

37 37 41 47 49

4

Grotesque Body of the Lower Strata The popular body of the marketplace The bourgeois body The s(ub)lime and beautiful body and landscape The body without organs

56 56 60 63 69

5

Monstrous Body of the Slimy Depths Grotesque, gargantuan, generous, grateful The monstrous-maternal Orally sadistic alien Sky gods, earth goddesses

74 76 80 82 86

6

Fascist Body of the War-Machine Maculinist, monumental, machinic, metallic, muscular Bachelor machines for a bachelor birth The militarisation of civilian life The war against nature vii

90 91 95 99 102

viii Contents

7

Writing on the Surface of the Textual Body Is the soul the prison of the body? The body writes back Body-writing machines

108 109 113 118

8

Sporting Body Imprisoned in the Time-Machine A body built on pain Speed, suffering and sublimation in sport The sporting body of Australia

125 125 131 136

9

Cyborg: The Body-Machine of the Civilian-Soldier Cybernetics and cyborgs Symbiosis and symbionts

140 140 148

10

Taoist Body of the Earth Taoism Picture of internals Taijiquan Health recovery stories

157 158 161 164 167

11

Healthy Land, Healthy Body: State of the Environment, State of Health Soil conservation Taoist ecology The body of the earth with organs and the body of Australia

173 174 178 185

References

191

Index

203

List of Table and Illustrations Table 11.1

Chinese ‘elements,’ organs, emotions, etc.

184

Illustrations 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4

François-Antoine Boniface Heirisson Rivière des Cygnes (Swan River) 1801 State Library of WA The Digestive Tract Swan River as Digestive Tract David Mowaljarlai, Bandaiyan: The Body of Australia, Corpus Australis in his Yorro Yorro: Everything Standing Up Alive: Spirit of the Kimberley

ix

187 188 189 190

Preface The body is always with us, and we are always with, or in, our bodies. We are embodied beings, but whether we are (our) body, is another question. The way in which we live with our own body operates along a continuum from mastery to mutuality. A similar continuum from mastery to mutuality applies to living with the earth (as I have argued in a previous book; see Giblett, 2004). The present book is concerned with the relationship of human bodies with our natural and cultural environments. It suggests that these categories are linked and intertwined. It argues for an environmentally sustainable and healthy relationship between the body and the earth. Humans affect their natural and cultural environments and those environments affect humans. The mutual construction of culture and nature, and of the organic interdependence between humans and nature, is expressed in the concepts of body culture and eco-health communication. Body culture can be defined as the ways in which we understand, perform and make meanings through, with and on our bodies. It is concerned with the ways in which we shape, respond to and modify our biological, physical and psychological capacities and aptitudes. Modifying and performing the body through fashion, clothing, tattooing, piercing, shaping, dancing, playing sport or games, taijiquan, yoga, martial arts, fighting, exercising, dieting, sitting, eating, sleeping, walking, being healthy, becoming ill, being sick, having sex, being born, giving birth and dying are some of the areas in the broad field of ‘body culture’. The culture of the body is always related to the nature of the body and to the nature of the environment in which bodies are positioned, on which they depend, which they affect and which affects them. Ecohealth communication addresses these inter-relationship and aims to make ecologically sustainable the relationship and interaction between human beings/bodies and ecosystems/ecology. It is a new trans-disciplinary field of study and practice that looks at the impacts of each on the other and develop sustainable relationships between the body and the earth. The ways in which the body has been modelled, and the ways in which the body, disease and illness have been figured primarily in metaphors, are a central concern of this book. These include: the body as machine; the body as landscape; the body as land, and land x

Preface xi

as body; the body as ‘cyborg’ (or cybernetic organism); and disease and illness as an invading army to be fought and defeated on the battlefield of the body. All of these bodies are considered in this book, often on a chapter-by-chapter basis. There is thus no single body, but a number of different bodies. These bodies have an environmental politics that are healthy or unhealthy for the body and the earth. Some of these bodies are represented in a discourse, an institutional practice of meaning-making. Just as there is no single discourse of nature (as I have argued elsewhere; see Giblett, 2004, chapter 1), so a number of discourses compete over the body. These include the body as machine in modern western medicine and the body as battlefield in hypermodern western medicine and in some illness narratives. This book critiques these discursive bodies for both their bodily and earthly politics. It also promotes ways of living and being in the body that defy or resist discourse, such as play, movement, performance and story-telling. These ways are exemplified in the body as earth or land, the grotesque body, the monstrous body and the Taoist body of taijiquan. These bodies are expressed in carnivalesque tales, eco-friendly illness narratives and health recovery stories. Both discursive and counter-discursive bodies are considered chapterby-chapter. Chapter 1 considers the body as the starting point for any philosophical or cultural enquiry into human life. It also looks at the ways in which the body is made to make meanings, including through various models or figures for the body. The body is both an inscribed surface of events and an inscriber itself on its own and other surfaces. It is also a performer of actions and the receiver of actions done to it. This chapter considers the body as both active and passive, as performing actions, engaging in events, being engaged in events and having actions performed upon it. The second chapter considers the body in western culture at the crucial turning point from pre-modern to modern medicine. In premodern western (and non-western) medicine the body is figured as earth and the earth as body. In modern western medicine the body is figured as machine. The work of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) is on the cusp of this transition as in his writings on the body he figured the land as body, land as body and the body as machine. In the work of Rene Descartes (1596–1650) the body as machine has won out completely over the earth as body/body as earth. This transition has had profound effects on how we see, live with, and relate to, the body. The modern western body as machine is a body of surface, both exterior

xii Preface

and interior, whereas the pre-modern and non-western body as land/ land as body is a body of depth. The machine is dead whereas the land is living, dying, dead, or being reborn. The third chapter considers a more contemporary view of the body as battlefield in a number of illness narratives. In this scenario, the disease is figured as the enemy, the patient as foot soldier, the doctor as the general, the nurse as officer and modern western medicine as a weapon. This battlefield is a place of a life and death struggle. By contrast, Terry Tempest Williams’ illness narrative, Refuge, figures the body as wetland with the rising and falling of its waters and the comings and goings of its waterbirds linked to the health of her mother’s body. Other illness narratives figure the body as field, the disease as a weed and the patient as a gardener who tends the garden and pulls out the weeds wherever possible. These are much more environmentally- and bodily-friendly figures than the body as battlefield. The following two chapters consider two more ways of thinking and figuring the body counter to the dominant discourses of the body as machine and the body as battlefield. Chapter 4 considers the grotesque body of the lower strata. The body (and the earth) have been subject to a spatial poetics that values the high over the low and in which the upper represses the lower. The grotesque body is associated with the low and is devalued and repressed accordingly. The grotesque body is a repressed body (or aspect of the body) that returns from the depths in the form of the carnivalesque body to threaten, and even undermine, the upper body. It inverts the lower strata over the higher strata and subverts the hierarchy and revalues the whole body, upper and lower, inner and outer. The lower strata of the grotesque body are also the slimy depths of the body, associated with the slimy depths of the earth and its horrific and uncanny monsters. The monstrous body of the slimy depths is linked with the body of the mother that defies the law of the father. Chapter 6 considers how the repressed grotesque and monstrous body produces the horror of the abject and the uncanny. The monstrousmaternal refuses, undermines and threatens to swamp the monumental-masculine, especially as embodied and encapsulated in the body as machine. In the contention between land as body/land as body and body as machine/machine as body, an underlying gender politics is played out with the former assigned to the female/feminine/ist and the latter to the male/masculine/ist. Chapter 6 continues the discussion of the monumental-masculine and returns to the body-as-machine to consider specifically the body as

Preface xiii

war-machine within fascism. The fascist body is a body of solid mass and rugged surface. It is a screen for the projection of reactionary political and ideological messages. Although fascism is officially dead as a political ideology, it lives on in and with the body insofar as it is produced as solid mass and rugged surface. It cannot be merely assigned to the dustbin of history. Indeed, the body is the vector by which fascism communicates from the past to the present into the future. Fascism is alive in the fascist body. Although we may not have, or be, or aspire to be, a fascist body of solid mass and rugged surface, the body is a surface of inscription. Chapter 7 considers the textual body, or the body as text, and the ways in which the body is written upon by the communication and transportation technologies that it uses. Communication and transport technologies increase the range of human visual and aural perception while limiting human bodily movement, and both enhancing and diminishing human mental and sensual capabilities. Communication technologies, such as photography, cinema and radio, and transportation technologies, such as the railway and the car, are considered in Sublime communication technologies (Giblett, 2008b). The present book complements and develops that book, particularly by considering the impact of communication and transportation technologies on human bodily and mental capacities and aptitudes. A highly visible projection of the body today is in sport in which the body as machine is put on display and in which war and the body as war-machine are sublimated into and in competition. The sporting body is the topic of Chapter 8 where it is considered as a body built on pain and as a body imprisoned in measured time. In settler societies, such as Australia and the US, founded on the dispossession of indigenous peoples, sport functions as a kind of moral masochism inflicted in the sporting arena in crude punishment and recompense for the pain inflicted on indigenes. Cathy Freeman is an Australian indigenous sports person who embodied these contradictions. She became the sporting body of Australia in which these forces were played out. She was assimilated into high-profile institutional sport in the Olympic and Commonwealth games, elevated into sport superstardom by winning medals and becoming a Nike athlete, and she yet resisted settler nationalistic embodiment by proudly carrying the Aboriginal flag and displaying her indigenous embodiment. The machinic sporting body is an object of visual consumption and pleasure. The consuming viewer is a machinic body hooked up to communication devices. This cybernetic organism, or ‘cyborg’, is

xiv Preface

considered in Chapter 9. The cultural history and form of television, the computer and information technology are considered in Sublime communication technologies. The present book complements and develops that book, particularly by considering the ways in which the body and technology have become intertwined in a hybridised composite and the ways in which the body is a biological being in symbiosis physically and psychologically with the earth. So far a number of western discourses and representations of the body have been considered. Chapter 10 considers a non-western body, the Taoist body, in particular the Taoist body of/as the earth. A famous stele in the White Cloud monastery in Beijing depicts the embryonic human body as land with parts of the body as aspects of the earth, both those made with human hands and those not: the head as mountains; the neck as a pagoda; the kidneys as a waterwheel; cerebro-spinal fluid as a river; and so on. The Taoist body is akin to the pre-modern western figuring of the body as earth. The Taoist body is enacted and performed in taijiquan, a set of graceful, meditative and health-giving movements. Taoist Tai Chi is a particular ‘style’ or tradition that emphasises health-recovery. Practitioners of Taoist Tai Chi tell what could be called ‘health recovery stories’ which differ considerably from mainstream illness narratives. The final chapter considers the relationship between the earth and the body. It argues for a healthy relationship between the two drawing on three strands of traditional thought: soil conservation classics of the 1930s and 40s; Taoist ecology and feng shui; and Australian indigenous cosmology and corporeality. For all three strands people and land are one; the body and the earth are a single being. The health of one affects the health of the other. Eco-health communication and earthbody culture are concerned to promote eco-friendly, healthy and health-giving models and metaphors of the human body and the body of the earth. Human health is interconnected with the health of the earth for we are one body, the body of the earth.

Acknowledgements Grateful acknowledgement is made to the copyright holder for permission to reproduce Judith Wright, ‘The Body’ from A Human Pattern: Selected Poems (ETT Imprint, Sydney 1999). Earlier versions of Chapter 10 were presented at the ‘Bodies of Knowledge’ Conference held at Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Western Australia, in September 1993 and at ‘The Body in Question’ Symposium held at Alexander Library, Perth, Western Australia, in November 1998. I am grateful to the members of the audience for their helpful comments. I am also grateful to Susan Ash, Heath Greville and Jon Stratton for their comments on written drafts.

xv

This page intentionally left blank

1 Where Land and Body Meet: Body Culture and Nature

Land and body are intimately inter-related. The ways in which we talk about one are often drawn from, or couched in, the ways (and terms) in which we talk about the other. Both are a rich source of metaphor for figuring and understanding the other. We talk about tongues of land, of a mountain range as a backbone, of rivers as arteries of commerce and communication, of arms and legs as limbs like tree branches, of torsos as trunks, of mouths of rivers, and so on. Clichés like ‘the bowels of the earth’ referring to aquifers and wetlands, and ‘the lungs of the city’ referring to parks and recreation areas are not only the stock-in-trade of the creatively bereft and stylistically outmoded but also indicative of the major source we mine for metaphors of land and places on, or in, it. We continue to draw on the body for metaphors of the earth with, for instance, wetlands being troped as the kidneys, placenta or uterus of the earth (see Giblett, 1996). Conversely, these organs can be troped as the wetlands of the body as they purify, nurture and procreate like their fertile and filtering earthly counterparts. Some terms undecidably belong to both the body and the earth. Gorge, for instance, is both ravine and throat. Erotically charged language also draws from this well with, for example, female genitalia and pubic hair being figured as the delta of Venus, just as the delta of the Mekong has been figured in converse terms (see Giblett, 1996). This close interrelationship between the body and the earth is in some ways a throwback to a mythological age when land and body were closer together. Yet their persistence is indicative of a long-held desire to see the two as closely connected. Traditional societies, such as Chinese Taoists and Australian Aborigines, see the land as body (see chapters 10 and 11 below). Modern European societies and their 1

2 The Body of Nature and Culture

diaspora see the body as either landscape, as surface of the land, or as machine, as a system of functioning parts culminating in the cyborg, the hybrid body-machine. Yet traces of that older view still persist in unlikely places (as I have argued previously in relation to mining; see Giblett, 2004, chapter 9). Turning to the earth is not only a rich source of metaphor for the body; it is also drawn upon for the mind. Or certainly for its maladies, and madness. In searching for a literary analogue and exemplar for his own descent into the inferno of madness and depression William Styron (1990, p.83) turned to Dante and the opening lines of the Divine Comedy: In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, For I had lost the right path. Figuring madness and depression as a dark wood is part of a long tradition of troping mental maladies in such terms ranging from Bunyan’s ‘slough of despond’ to melancholic marshes and dismal swamps (see Giblett, 1996, chapter 7).

The body: The starting point Philosophical consideration of the metaphors of the body was first given in the nineteenth century. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) could probably be credited with first turning modern philosophical attention towards the body. He is perhaps the philosopher of the body par excellence (see Flew, 1983, pp.246–249). Schvartz (1972, pp.183–186) calls him ‘a philosopher of fitness’ who, ‘unlike traditional philosophers, took the body seriously’. His influence has been profound, especially on Michel Foucault beginning with his very first discussions of the body to which I return below. Given the close connection between the body and the earth in the metaphorisation of each in terms of the other, if Nietzsche is the philosopher who took the body seriously unlike traditional philosophers, who is his counterpart who took the earth seriously unlike traditional philosophers? If Nietzsche is the philosopher of bodily fitness, who is his ecological counterpart, the philosopher of earthly fitness? If Nietzsche is the philosopher of the body, who is the philosopher of the earth? A number of candidates spring to mind. Perhaps it is Henry David Thoreau (1817–1865), the New England Transcendentalist, the

Body Culture and Nature 3

‘Patron Saint’ of Swamps, the writer of wild(er)ness, the great-grandfather of the American conservation movement. Perhaps it is John Muir (1838–1914), the grandfather of the American conservation movement and of the idea of national parks, the ‘John the Baptist’ of conservationism crying out the redemptive power of wilderness in the modern urban wasteland. Perhaps it is Aldo Leopold (1886–1948), the father of the American conservation movement and the writer of the conservationist ‘bible’, A sand county almanac. Perhaps it is Rachel Carson (1907–1964), the marine biologist, the author of Silent Spring, and the mother of the American conservation movement. As a biologist of the intertidal zone where land and water meet, perhaps Carson is the unlikely bearer of the title ‘philosopher of earthly fitness’ or ‘philosopher of the quaking zone where land and body meet’. The main reason that Carson attracted and endured the ire of corporate bosses and their governmental allies was not just, or even because, she criticised the use of, and the damage done by, insecticides such as DDT as many had done that before her, but because she critiqued the militarisation of post-World War II, Cold War American society. Carson was the critic of a kind of Pearl Harbour-style blitz against nature including plants, animals and human beings that was delivered from the sky by excess planes left over after the war had finished. Yet ‘the military-industrial complex’ that Carson’s critiqued (to which I return in Chapter 6) is part of the history of the modern militarisation of civilian life that Nietzsche was implicated in, or complicit with, too. Nietzsche is a notoriously difficult and politically incorrect thinker, not least because he was a proto-fascist whose work was appropriated by the Nazis and because he was a misogynist whose work has quite rightly been critiqued by feminists. Both fascism and misogyny will be critiqued in this book so it has no truck with these aspects of Nietzsche’s work which will not be denied or repressed or whitewashed. There are other aspects of his work, though, which are useful and productive for theorising the body and which will be used as the foundation for the critique of fascism and misogyny that follows. Nietzsche’s thinking was deeply contradictory which is one of the reasons why it is so interesting, suggestive and worthy of attention, and critique. Nietzsche’s posthumously published collection of notes, The will to power, contains his major thinking on the body. In The will to power (1967) the body for Nietzsche is the starting point. But this raises the question: the starting point for what? For everything. For his critique


of western philosophy for a start. Before Nietzsche, philosophy, he suggests, began with ‘the subject’, a thinking substance, or ‘I’ as in Descartes’ famous cogito ‘I think, therefore I am’. Even though thinking is supposed to constitute the I, an ‘I’ who think is postulated prior to, and capable of, thinking. Nietzsche in §484 argues that ‘“there is thinking: therefore there is something that thinks”: this is the upshot of all Descartes’ argumentation.’ Without an ‘I’ who thinks there cannot be an ‘I’ (who thinks). The argument becomes circular. The attempt to establish a foundation presupposes that which it is trying to establish. For Nietzsche in §481 ‘the “subject” is not something given, it is something added and invented and projected behind what there is’ (my emphasis). The subject is a back-projection behind the what-there-isness of the body. Who or what adds, invents and projects the subject behind what there is? The answer for Nietzsche is simple: the body. The body is the starting point. Before we are subjects we are bodies. Just as we are individuals who are interpellated (or hailed as in ‘Hey you!’) as subjects in Althusser’s famous phrase, so we are bodies before we are subjects. Rather than the grammatical fiction that wherever there is a deed there is a doer who is the subject, wherever there is a deed there is a doer who is a body. Nietzsche goes on in §547 to argue that ‘the body, the thing, the “whole” construed by the eye, awaken[s] the distinction between a deed and a doer; the doer, the cause of the deed, conceived ever more subtly, finally left behind the “subject”’. The body can be construed as a whole by the eye but otherwise it cannot be grasped in its entirety. The body is largely, or at least initially, a visual category. It is something we see, and know through seeing. The other senses come later, if at all. To engage with other bodies through the other senses entails close proximity to them. Seeing other bodies can occur over the furthest distance, then comes hearing them over a lesser distance, then smelling them over a still lesser distance (but depending on which way the wind is blowing), then finally touching and tasting them when we are really up close and personal! Our engagement with our own bodies involves a more intimate use of all five senses which may reverse the order of priorities. We touch and smell our own bodies more intimately than we can look at them in their entirety. We see other bodies, but we cannot see all of our own body. It is in this discrepancy between seeing other bodies, not wholly seeing our own body and having our body seen by others, this play of gazes between ourselves and others, that the body is constituted primarily as a visual phenomenon (and so as an aesthetic category).


The body may be the starting point, but then comes the subject who constitutes objects: no objects without subjects. Rather than objects preceding subjects, objects are the product of the subject-object distinction. Nietzsche makes the hypothesis in §569 ‘that “object” is only a kind of effect produced by a subject upon a subject – a modus of the subject’. This is not only an interesting philosophical point but also an important psychological one. In order to regard anything as object the subject has to objectify it, and in objectifying it, the subject becomes subject. Without the subject/object distinction, there is no subject and no object. If I regard you as a subject, we can have an intersubjective relationship whereas if I regard you as an object then we can only have a subject-object relationship. For Freud a subject-object relationship is sadistic in an even more basic way than gaining pleasure in the pain or suffering of another – the basic definition of sadism. The subject-object relationship sets up a relation of mastery between two subjects. This argument has profound implications for the way in which we regard not only each other but also other things such as plants and animals. Instead of seeing them as objects to study, manipulate, control and exploit, if we saw them as subjects we could enter into inter-subjective relationships with them. It is all very well to make the body the starting point as Nietzsche does but this raises the question, as Deleuze (1983, p.39) asks in his book on the philosopher, ‘what is the body?’ He goes on to argue that ‘we do not define it by saying that it is a field of forces, a nutrient medium fought over by a plurality of forces. For in fact there is no “medium”, no field of forces or battle.’ There are only forces that constitute or produce the body. Deleuze makes a Nietzschean turn here: just as there is no substance to the subject prior to the subject, so there is no substance to the body. The body is the product of the forces that act upon it. The body may be a useful starting point for a postCartesian philosophy but for a truly Nietzschean philosophy the body cannot simply be reinstated in the position vacated by a dethroned subject. This would be to reproduce the structure of the Cartesian cogito in the form of a Nietzschean corporealism: ‘I am body therefore I am’. This would also postulate, moreover, an ‘I’ who is outside and prior to the body, precisely the point of Nietzsche’s critique of the Cartesian cogito, that it postulates a thinking substance. Deleuze (1983, p.40) goes on to suggest that ‘what defines a body is this relation between dominant and dominated forces. Every relationship of forces constitutes a body – whether it is chemical, biological,


social, or political. Any two forces, being unequal, constitute a body as soon as they enter into a relationship’. This is why we use the term ‘body’ in a number of different senses that all amount to the same thing. In a university we can talk about the body of students because there is the body of academics and the body of administrators. As the forces operating between these entities is unequal and as they are in a relationship they are constituted as bodies. Similarly the forces of humans and the earth are unequal with one alternately dominating the other so there is a body of humans and a body of the earth. For Deleuze rather than the body being the starting point, chemical, biological, social, and political forces and the relationship between them constitute the body. Those forces rather than the body are the starting point for his, and Foucault’s, post-Nietzschean philosophy (and this is where we see Deleuze’s ‘influence’ on Foucault’s work). The upshot for Deleuze (1983, p.40) is that, ‘being composed of a plurality of irreducible forces, the body is a multiple phenomenon, its unity is that of a multiple phenomenon, a “unity of domination”’. The body is constituted by the plurality of forces that dominate it and that it dominates. The body is not a singular, unified, homogeneous entity, but the clashes of forces. The body is not a field of forces that pre-exists the forces that play in and upon it, but the field of forces that result from forces meeting and clashing. Similarly for Blondel (1991, p.206) the body for Nietzsche is ‘a series of instincts (Instinkte) or drives (Triebe) that constitute reality as they interpret it’. There is no pre-existing reality, or facts, prior to the body and the acts of interpretation that constitute reality. In this respect Nietzsche is an early proponent of ‘the social construction of reality’, or perhaps more precisely of the hermeneutic construction of corporeal reality. Two metaphors of the body contend here and elsewhere in Nietzsche’s work, and in the body itself: the gastroenterological metaphor as Blondel calls it (pp.211, 219–230) and the political metaphor (pp.218, 230–234). The gastroenterological metaphor can be found in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of morals, especially in the first section of the second essay where the body is defined in terms of ‘an underworld of organs’ (cited by Blondel, 1991, p.209). This metaphor for Blondel (1991, p.211) is gastroenterological because Nietzsche ‘compares the non-conscious body as a whole to the internal processes of the digestive tract’. For Nietzsche this underworld has its depths into which he descends, its swamps, tunnels and mines into which the Nietzschean underground man burrows like a mole as Blondel (1991, pp.212–213) goes on to


relate. Here he encounters ‘sucking, pumping monsters – formless or ugly or grotesque, and unpleasant to smell on top of that’ (cited by Blondel, 1991, p.220) of his own organs in a modern descent of the post-epic hero into the secular underworld of the body (see Giblett, 1996). The body in the political metaphor, on the other hand, is, Blondel (1991, p.218) suggests in Deleuzian terms, ‘a more or less regulated collectivity’. The body on this view, Blondel (1991, p.232) concludes: is not a machine, but a political organization based on relations between forces that are unstable and not univocally regulated by conscious causal logic: there is no submissive obedience or function that is harmoniously regulated by laws. The body is not a rationalist machine, nor an autocratic kingdom, nor a functionalist unity but a political struggle, an anarchist collectivity.

Stigmata The body does deeds; the body is a doer, but the body also has deeds done to it. The body is done to. The body is both doer and done to. The body is marked by what it has done and what has been done to it. In Nietzschean and Deleuzian terms. and in one of his earliest writings on the body, Foucault (1977b, p.148) agues that ‘the body manifests the stigmata of past experience and also gives rise to desires, failings and errors’. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (p.3059) gives two related definitions for ‘stigma’ in the singular and for ‘stigmata’ as the plural. A stigma is ‘a mark made on the skin by pricking, cutting or (esp.) branding as a sign of disgrace or subjection’. The subjection of subjects as subjects is marked on the surface of our bodies. And the subjection of the earth is marked on the surface of the earth in the survey lines and fences of private property and in the grid of streets, roads and railways of city and country. Branding is usually thought of as branding pastoral animals to indicate ownership (private property) and labelling the surface of a product with a brand name or trade-mark as a marketing gimmick or fashion statement. Human bodies are also branded to indicate subjection or ownership. Our bodies bear the branding of ownership by and ownership to a class, a gender, an ethnicity, a sub-culture, a religion, a style, a fashion. ‘Stigmata’ in the plural are ‘marks resembling the wounds on Jesus’ crucified body, said to have appeared on bodies of certain saints, etc.’


Foucault is suggesting that we have been crucified by our past experiences and that we bear the scars of the wounds that have been inflicted upon us. The body, however, does not just manifest the wounds that have been inflicted upon it, but it also shows the wounds that have been inflicted upon our minds. Foucault argues that the stigmata of past experiences are manifested in and on the body, and that the body is also the surface of expression for the wounds inflicted on the mind. This is not unlike Freud’s theory of symptom (see Giblett, 1996, pp.77–80) in which the symptoms of the patient’s psychopathology are manifested or inscribed on the surface of her body in behaviour. Likewise the symptoms of psychogeopathology are manifested or inscribed of the surface of the earth such as in the will to fill wetlands (see Giblett, 1996) and in the oral and anal sadism of mining and pastoralism (see Giblett, 2004, chapters 9 and 10). An extensive dictionary such as the Shorter Oxford gives interesting examples of the usage of words and ‘stigma’ is no exception. Virginia Woolf ‘s narrator in one of her novels describes how one of her characters ‘was indelibly marked with the hereditary stigmata of … wealth and aristocracy’. Paul Fussell, the travel writer, says that ‘the upper class has its distinct stigmata’. For both writers the upper class is marked and wounded by power and privilege. Class is marked on the body so it would also be possible to say of a working class character or person that she or he was indelibly marked with the hereditary stigmata of poverty and work, and that the lower class has its distinct stigmata. Similarly with age which has its stigmata. In one of Colleen McCullough’s novels her narrator describes one of her characters as ‘old and plain and marked forever with stigmata of years of toil’. In working the body is also worked upon. As is the earth. The body does things, but things are done to the body in the process. The body is part of a relay system between doer and deed and done to. What is done is an event. An event in philosophical terms is an occurrence happening at a determinable point in time and space (see Flew, 1983, p.115). The body is the point of intersection of doer and deed, doer and done to, that constitute an event occurring at a particular point in time and place in space, in a grid of space-time coordinates. The body is marked but the body also makes marks. For Foucault (1977b, p.148): The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual dis-


integration. Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body. Yet the body is not only inscribed but also inscribes. The body is both active and passive (though in Foucault’s view above and below (as we will see) the body is passive as Lash (1991, pp.257–260) points out). It engages in events; it is engaged in events; it performs actions. These events and this engagement make their mark and inscribe the surface of the body (see Chapter 7 below). These events are traced by language. They are not wordless; they are not purely bodily events. Language makes it mark on the body and leaves it traces. The body is both the inscribed surface of events and the traced depth of actions. The body performs and is performed upon; the body performs actions, and events are performed upon it. We use language and language uses us. Yet the body cannot be reduced to the language or ideas about it. Nor cannot it be associated strictly or necessarily with the self. The self is dissociated from the body, though the self may give itself the illusion of being associated and coterminous with the body. Yet this is only an illusion. The body is greater than the self, and even the self greater than the body. The self is a volume in perpetual integration, integrating everything around it into a substantial unity. The body is a volume in perpetual disintegration, falling apart, its centre cannot hold. But it is also an organism in perpetual renewal and regrowth though ultimately we will all die. The body is historical. It has its own history, and the concept of the body has a history too, or perhaps more precisely a genealogy. The concept of the body has not always been with us. Before the body was the flesh as Foucault remarked. The concept of the body is descended from the concept of the flesh. The methodology appropriate for studying this descent for Foucault is what he calls, following Nietzsche and his ‘genealogy of morals’, a genealogy, or a history of the present. Foucault is not interested in the history of the body in order to trace the periods of the past in which the body changed and developed. Rather he is interested in the birth of the body and how we, who regard ourselves as somehow being a body or having a body, came to think and act in this way. He starts from the present and researches the past to show the line of descent between the past and the present. The body has been imprinted, branded, inscribed and stigmatised by history. The body is not outside history as if bodies acted in history and were unmarked or unaffected in the process. The body is history.


Let me give a brief example of this drawn from China where there was a shift over two millennia and more from what has been called ‘the Taoist body’ (Schipper, 1978, 1993) to ‘the Maoist body’ (Brownell, 1998, pp.56–58). The Taoist body is the body of traditional Chinese medicine (including acupuncture) and of traditional Chinese philosophy (to which I return in Chapter 10). With the ‘opening’ or exposure of China to the west during the nineteenth century China moved away from what Brownell (1998, p.17) calls ‘the Taoist “way of lifecultivation” and toward “physical education”’. This move was tied up with the development of Chinese nationalism as the body and the nation came to stand for, and figure, each other. Chinese nationalism, Brownell (1998, p.22) goes on to argue, ‘has been very closely linked with the body, so that the act of individuals strengthening their bodies was linked to the salvation of the nation’. This phenomenon was by no means limited to Chinese nationalism but was a feature of all nationalisms. Nationalism is characterised by a bellicose and chauvinistic form of body culture (as displayed today in the Olympics and World Cup (football, rugby or cricket)). It is also characterised by an analogous form of earth culture about the national territory (as displayed in the national, or nationalist, park (see Giblett, 2004, chapter 8)) and more recently in the desire to protect national borders from incursion by asylum seekers. The body shapes the nation, the nation shapes the body; the nation shapes the earth; the earth shapes the nation. These processes of shaping use space and time to mould all three. The body for Foucault (1977b, p.153) is ‘broken down by the rhythms of work, rest, and holidays; it is poisoned by food or values, through eating habits or moral laws; it constructs resistances’. Work, rest, and holidays are an integral part of everyday life but they have their rhythms that break down the body and its rhythms. The body has its own rhythms that are situated somewhere between work and rest and that oscillate between the two. The body constructs resistances to the rhythms of work, rest and holidays out of its own rhythm. For Foucault values and moral laws can poison the body just as much as food and eating habits can poison it. The body is not just a biological entity but also a social and psychological being that is affected by the values and laws it subscribes to and that are inscribed on it. The body is a set of aptitudes, capabilities and techniques that engage in work, rest and holidays. It is poisoned by what it consumes and by the institutions and traditions in which it is positioned and the other regimes that mould the body and which the body resists.


Besides work, rest, and holidays, the body is also the surface of inscription for disease and morality. The body is the surface of inscription for the diseases which it is suffering and has suffered. The body is stigmatised by disease. Indeed, disease is a stigma that is often read as a sign of immorality. The Greeks according to Goffman (1963/1974, pp.1, 2) were ‘apparently strong on visual aids’. For him they: originated the term stigma to refer to bodily signs designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifier. The signs were cut or burnt into the body and advertised that the bearer was a slave, a criminal, or a traitor – a blemished person, ritually polluted, to be avoided, especially in public places. Later, in Christian times, two layers of metaphor were added to the term: the first referred to bodily signs of holy grace that took the form of eruptive blossoms on the skin; the second, a medical allusion to this religious allusion, referred to bodily signs of physical disorder. Today the term is widely used in something like the original literal sense, but is applied more to the disgrace itself than to the bodily evidence of it… The term stigma … refer[s] to an attribute that is deeply discrediting. A stigma visibly marks the surface of the body but signifies a fault invisibly deep. Stigma relies on Euclidean geometry of solid, three-dimensional objects with surface and depth. Stigma construes the body in these terms with a surface to be read. But as the depths of the body are invisible, the surface is read as the manifestation of the depths. This construction of the surface of the body to be read as manifestation of its depths (biological or moral) has characterised western medicine (and religion) for a long time as we shall see later. The stigmatisation of the ill is by no means a relic of a bygone era. In his own experience of cancer Arthur Frank experienced stigmatisation. Following Goffman, a stigma for Frank (1991, p.91) is: literally, a sign on the surface of the body marking it as dangerous, guilty, and unclean. Stigmas began as judicial punishments in the form of notched ears, brandings, and other visible mutilations of the body. These marks allowed those who came into contact


with the stigmatised person to see whom they are dealing with. The stigmatised were expected to go to the margins of society and hide their spoiled bodies. The stigma is a sign not only of medical and physical condition but also of morality and metaphysical condition. The power of stigma for Frank (1991, p.96) sees the body’s condition ‘as an expression of morality’. Stigma bridges the mind-body gap with a one-way route from the sign on the surface of the body to the depths of the mind, or spirit. A stigma is a sign of immorality whereas a symptom is a sign of disease (see Foucault, 1973, p.92). As a disease can be read as a stigma, a semiotic chain is set up: Symptom → sign of → Disease → read as → Stigma → sign of → Immorality The body is a bearer of not only medical meanings but also of moral meanings. The body is a surface of inscription in which the moral and medical are written over each other. The body is a palimpsest with layers of writing written over each other. Besides being a sign of immorality, the stigma of disease can also be a sign of poverty. The hospital for Foucault (1973, p.44) ‘stigmatises the sick in a state of penury’. Although Foucault is referring specifically to the stigmatisation of the poor in the eighteenth-century, nowadays exorbitant hospital and medical fees stigmatise the sick in general in a state of penury. The stigma can be reworked or rewritten by the stigmatised in writing their own story such as in illness narratives where the ill person tells their own story and remarks the body in different terms to medicine and morality. In his later book on what he calls ‘the wounded storyteller’ Frank (1995, p.40) describes illness narratives as ‘post-colonial affirmations of stigma’. Instead of denying or trying to hide the stigma of disease, the patient owns and affirms their own stigmata. Post-colonialism for Frank (1995, p.13) ‘in its most generalized form is the demand to speak rather than being spoken for and to represent oneself rather than being represented’. Yet post-colonialism is an empty cry of impotence if it does not follow decolonisation of the colonised territory of the body and the seizing of power over one’s own body. In the post-colonial illness narrative, instead of disease, there is illness; instead of the disease being read as stigma, illness is written as narrative; instead


of being written upon and marked, the body writes and remarks itself: Disease → read as → Stigma → sign of → Immorality of passive patient/wilful sinner Illness → written as → Illness narrative → remarks → the body of active agent/adventure hero Although illness narratives give agency and activity to the ill, they are often couched in militaristic and colonialist metaphors that are as pernicious as the mechanistic and aesthetic metaphors of modern medicine (as we will see in Chapter 3).

Body techniques The body both acts and is acted upon. The body is constituted by forces acting upon it and by the forces with which it acts. Some of these ways and forces are what the early French sociologist Marcel Mauss calls ‘techniques of the body’. He defines techniques of the body as ‘the ways in which, from society to society, men [and, I would add, women, and children] know how to use their bodies’. Although Mauss uses men in the generic sense to include women as he discusses giving birth and children who can squat, adding women and children highlights that differences in gender and age produce different ways in which people use their bodies. No doubt all people know how to use their bodies, and indeed use their bodies, but many people do not know how to use their body well. Mauss is not only concerned with the differences between cultures in the way in which people know how to use their bodies, but also with difference within cultures between genders and generations (and classes I would add) in the ways in which people know how to use their bodies. There are also similarities across cultures in the ways in which people know how to use their bodies. Eating and sleeping, having sex and giving birth, dancing and singing are pretty universal, but there is great cultural variation in how people perform these activities and what they mean. People use their bodies, and know how to use their bodies to perform basic activities of everyday life and for survival, but the ability of people, and peoples, to use, and to know how to use their bodies varies greatly across cultures and time and within cultures.


This cultural variation in the use of body techniques is what Brownell (1998, p.10) calls ‘body culture’ following on explicitly from Mauss’s (1992) and Eichberg’s (1998) work. Body culture for her is: Everything that people do with their bodies (Mauss’s ‘body techniques’) and the elements of culture that shape their doing. Body culture is a broad term that includes daily practices of health, hygiene, fitness, beauty, dress and decoration, as well as gestures, postures, manners, ways of speaking and eating, and so on. It also includes the way these practices are trained into the body, the way the body is publicly displayed, and the lifestyle that is expressed in that display. Body culture reflects the internalisation and incorporation of culture. Body culture is embodied culture. Brownell sees a dialogue or even dialectic between body and culture in which culture shapes bodies and what they do, and bodies do things that shape culture (I will return to this interrelationship below). Mauss begins with some fairly banal but instructive examples of techniques of the body such as swimming, digging and marching. Mauss relates his own experience with learning to swim and the changes in how some of the strokes are taught, such as breaststroke. The strokes have changed a lot more in the intervening years since he wrote 70 years ago and today. Swimming has been scientificised as reference to any book on swimming techniques shows (see for example, Colwin, 1992). Mauss also indicates how hard it is to change to a new style of swimming once you have learnt one particular style. You can probably think of examples from your own experience. Changes in swimming style take place over generations. An even more banal and commonplace instance of a body technique is walking. Mauss wondered why French nurses walked like American ones and came to the conclusion that French nurses had adopted what he calls ‘American walking fashions’, no doubt from watching American films. For Mauss ‘there exists an education in walking too’. Walking in the sense of moving the body through space propelled by the body is natural but the way in which we walk is learnt and so cultural. In order to walk we must have the bodily and mental capacities to do so, but the ways in which we walk are the result of the ways in which those capacities have been shaped and directed by training. The body is both something which we do things too and something we do things with. The body for Mauss is the first tool and the first object the tool works upon. He says that the body is ‘man’s first and most natural


technical object, and at the same time his first technical means’. In other words, we do things to our body, we act upon it, and we do things with our body, we act with it. The body is both object and subject (or agent). Yet the ways in which we work on and with our bodies varies across cultures and between genders and generations as I have already suggested. Mauss goes on to look at the different ways in which men and women form a fist and throw a stone. There is a difference in body techniques not only between genders but also between generations. Mauss says that ‘the child normally squats. We no longer know how to’. There is also a difference in body techniques between countries and cultures. Mauss’s ‘we’ is obviously referring to French adults, or perhaps European adults in general except for some ‘white Australians’ he came across in the trenches in the first World War who sat on their heels (which is not really squatting, only semi-squatting). Mauss was envious because they could sit down without sitting on the ground, or in the mud, so they kept cleaner. Adults from many other cultures squat, and adults who have trained in techniques like taijiquan have re-learnt how to squat. Mauss ‘believes that this [loss of the ability to squat] is an absurdity and an inferiority of our races, civilisation, societies’. Yet to make this claim might seem like an absurdity itself but there are good physiological and health reasons for squatting. Squatting is the best way to lift heavy objects without straining the back. Squatting relies on, and builds up, muscle strength in the legs, and it requires and produces flexibility in the hips and promotes elasticity in the tendons. Squatting also exercises the muscles of the pelvic floor, develops core stability and reduces incontinence. Mauss concludes his discussion of squatting by suggesting that ‘a certain form of the tendons and even of the bones is simply the result of certain forms of posture and repose’. Our bodies are not a given. The curvatures in our spines are the result of the fact that we walk in an upright position. Through bad posture or poor alignment of the limbs, the spine can develop a pronounced curvature one way or the other with detrimental effects on health and wellbeing. Even with the act of giving birth there is difference between cultures. There are also cultural differences in the ways in which pregnancy is regarded. After discussing techniques of giving birth Mauss discusses techniques of infancy, such as rearing, feeding and weaning the child; techniques of adolescence and techniques of adult life such as sleeping and waking, resting, walking, and running; techniques of what he calls


‘active rest’ such as dancing, jumping, climbing, swimming, pushing, pulling, lifting, and taijiquan I would add (which can be included in what Mauss concludes by referring to as ‘the techniques of Taoism, its body techniques, and breathing techniques’); techniques of care for the body such as rubbing, washing, soaping, teeth cleaning and finally consumption techniques in eating and drinking. Mauss concludes with some general considerations in which he suggests that movements of the body require what he calls ‘an enormous biological and physiological apparatus’. Mauss sees the body as machine and the mind as director of the machine. He regards ‘psychological facts as connecting cogs’ in the apparatus that coordinate movement. The body as machine is a persistent metaphor in western culture, especially modern western culture and modern western medicine as we will see in the next chapter. One way in which Mauss categorises body techniques is biographically beginning with birth. Interestingly he does not end with death. This absence is doubly interesting as he quotes from Robert Hertz’s work on the right hand, but not his work on death (Hertz, like Mauss, was a student of Durkheim.) Unlike Mauss, Hirst and Woolley begin their discussion of ‘body techniques’ with death, and with Hertz’s work on it. Everyone dies (a biological or natural event) but everyone dies differently, or more precisely, people of different cultures die in different ways (a cultural or social event). Hirst and Woolley (1982, p.23) are ‘concerned to examine the ways in which social relations, in the sense of particular beliefs, practices and institutions, both organize and constitute human beings’ bodily and mental capacities’. They are also concerned to examine the converse: the ways in which human beings’ bodily and mental ‘capacities … organize and limit social relations’. They point to the example of the opposable thumb as necessary for tool use, the freeing of the forelimbs from locomotion and the development of the intellect as instances of the way in which bodily and mental capacities shape social relations. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Did we develop tools because we have an opposable thumb or did we develop an opposable thumb because we were developing dexterity with tools? The point for Hirst and Woolley (1982, p.23) is not to establish primacy, whether the chicken or the egg came first, but to argue that ‘there is no hard and fast divide between nature and culture’. They go on to demonstrate this permeability between nature and culture in relation to death and belief systems, to techniques of the body (including left- and right-handedness), to psychological techniques associated


with writing and print technology and culture, with speech, memory stability and order in language use, and to authorship and property in the word, and finally to isolation and its consequences which considers ‘wild men’ and feral children. They conclude the chapter by stating that they have tried to show that ‘the sources of definite mental and physical attributes can be sought in forms of technique, training, and practice dependent on social relations. At the same time we have seen that these forms intersect with and are made effective by definite physiological processes and bodily aptitudes’ (Hirst and Woolley, 1982, p.57). This is a useful and powerful explanation of the relation between body and mind, and nature and culture. The idea of mutual construction of culture and nature and of organic interdependence between humans and nature is not, of course, new. Engels (1934) saw what he called a ‘dialectics of nature’ operating in the way in which nature and the natural environment affects and impacts on, as well as constrains and limit, human (natural and cultural) activity, and vice versa. Nature and culture operate in a complex, dialectical relationship both within and outside the human, and between them in what Marx calls the interchange or metabolism (Stoffwechsel) of humans with nature (Grundmann, 1991, pp.90, 99; Parsons, 1977, pp.11, 173, 223; and Schmidt, 1971, pp.63–93). The transition from ‘pre-capitalist’ social formations to the capitalist mode of production brought about the ‘great transformation’ in the way this metabolic exchange operates from nature as organic to nature as inorganic. The construction of the working subject as individual with the use of ‘his’ labour constitutes nature as his inorganic body, as something separate from him, and so not living. In the Economic Manuscripts of 1857-8, or Grundrisse, Marx maintained that ‘‘as the working subject appears naturally as an individual, as natural being – so does the first objective condition of his labour appear as nature, earth as his inorganic body, but also the subject of this inorganic nature’’ (cited by Lyotard, 1992, p.131). The working subject is still in metabolic exchange with nature – ‘he’ would not survive without it – but nature has become inorganic. Commenting on this passage from Marx’s work Lyotard (1992, p.131) argues that ‘the body of the earth is called inorganic only so as to be distinguished from the organic body of the worker himself’. The worker is alienated not only from ‘his’ own work and his own body as nature as the young Marx of the 1844 manuscripts argued, but also from nature outside his body. His body is organic whereas the body of nature is inorganic. The body of nature is constituted as dead matter so


that he can work on it with impunity and derive surplus value from it. This is Marx’s ‘labour and land’ theory of value as distinct from the labour (alone) theory of value of classic political economy. The worker is not part of a land and society organism, as Aldo Leopold (1991, p.217) might put it, but only part of society as Lukacs (1971, p.19) argued: the economic relations which directly determined the metabolic exchange between men and nature progressively disappear. Man [sic], becomes in the true sense, a social being. Society becomes the reality for man. The worker is not part of a bioregional organism engaged in ecologically sustainable livelihood. Capitalist economic relations determine indirectly the metabolic exchange between ‘men’ and nature so that it is mediated. ‘Man’ ceases to be primarily a natural being and nature is no longer ‘the reality’. Capital disjoined the conjunction of the three terms of worker’s body, social body and earth body of pre-capitalist modes of production and social formations. Lyotard (1992, p.132) goes on to argue that ‘the three instances, proper body, social body, the body of the earth, are articulated together as so many pieces of the same machinery, which is nature’. This ‘machinery of nature’ was constructed by mercantile capitalism in the Renaissance. Industrial capitalism both relies on and runs down nature as machine. Capital is both creator and destroyer of nature as machine. Lyotard (1992, p.137) concludes that ‘the “body of capital”… is not an organic body’. Capital constitutes nature as an inorganic body, as the inorganic body of the worker. In ‘pre-capitalist’, or pre-modern and non-western, social formations nature is an organic body, the organic body of the indigene and the bioregion. Similarly and analogously, in pre-modern medicine the body is organic, the earth, whereas in modern medicine the body is inorganic, a machine, the topic of Chapter 2.

2 Machine Body of Modern Western Medicine

The modern western medical discourse of the body is dominant in our society, and the world, today. One of its main features is the separation of the body as anatomy, a structure of parts (including organs), from the body as physiology, a system of functions (performed by organs). Both anatomy and physiology operate together as a whole; one is not possible without the other, except perhaps in death when physiology ceases to function, but anatomy is still intact at least for a short while. By separating out structure from systems, parts from processes, form from function, modern western medicine figures the body as a machine (with, for example, the heart as a pump which Harvey ‘discovered’ only after seeing a pump in operation). The body from this point of view is, as Mumford (1934, p.32) puts it: a sort of microcosm of the machine: the arms are levers, the lungs are bellows, the eyes are lenses, the heart is a pump, the fist is a hammer, the nerves are a telegraph system with a central station. This view is historically contingent because figuring the nerves as a telegraph system and the brain as the central station could only occur after the invention of such systems of communication technologies. Similarly, any contemporary attempt to figure the brain as a computer is also doomed to such historical contingency (see Porter, 1997, p.550). Besides drawing a parallel between the body and the machine, there is a long tradition in the west, and elsewhere, of seeing the body as a microcosm (‘small world’) of the macrocosm (‘large world’). Drawing a parallel, as Kuriyama (1999, p.50) puts it, ‘between the earth’s rivers and the currents of blood and breath recur worldwide in the poetics of microcosm and macrocosm’. Yet not all cultures have done this in the 19


same way, nor in the same way over time. In fact, the obverse also applies in which a parallel is drawn between the currents of blood and breath and the earth’s rivers. Leonardo da Vinci (as we shall see shortly) did both, but he also saw the body and landscape as machine whereas ancient Chinese and Taoists see the body as land and indigenous Australians see the land as body (as we shall see in the last two chapters).

The body as machine In pre-modern western and non-western medicine the body is figured as earth and the earth as body whereas in modern western medicine the body is figured as machine. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) figured the body in terms of both. He is on the cusp of this transition. For him, the human body is a sort of microcosm of both the machine and the earth, and the earth the macrocosm of the human body: While man [sic] has within himself bones as a stay and framework for the flesh, the world has stones which are supports of earth. While man has within him a pool of blood wherein the lungs as he breathes expand and contract, so the body of the earth has its ocean, which also rises and falls every six hours with the breathing of the world; as from the said pool of blood proceed the veins which spreads their branches through the human body, so the ocean fills the body of the earth with an infinite number of veins of water… In this body of the earth is lacking, however, the nerves, and these are absent because nerves are made for the purpose of movement; and as the world is perpetually stable, and no movement takes place here, nerves are not necessary. But in all other things man and the earth are very much alike. (da Vinci, 1977, pp.45, 46) On this view, the body of the earth (the body and the earth) is inert, motionless, passive and unmoving, despite the lungs contracting and expanding and the pool of blood ebbing and flowing in Leonardo’s pre-’heart as pump’ view of the circulation of blood. These are counterbalanced movements, or actions and reactions that are not particularly purposive; they just occur and recur in homeostasis. The only difference for Leonardo between the body and the earth is that in his view the earth does not have nerves to make it move whereas the body has. Interestingly, the development of telegraphy using wires and cables, and radio using the electromagnetosphere, were

Machine Body 21

later figured in terms of an earthly nervous system as Mumford intimates. Conversely, the bodily nervous system, or at least what Breuer called ‘the paths of connection and conduction in the brain’, could be figured as an electrical system that supplied both light and power to the rest of the body. What Breuer and Freud (1893/20041; p.197) went to call on ‘a cerebral path of conduction’ should not be pictured ‘as a telephone line that is excited electrically only when operating’ but as ‘an electrical system with many different branches for supplying light and transmitting motor power’. Modern industrial technology gave nerves to the earth and an electrical system to the body that both otherwise lacked. Like the nervous system, telegraphy and radio were the control system that coordinated the movements of empires and corporations. Telecommunications and the Internet perform the same function today of a command and control nervous system for international trade and transnational corporations (see Giblett, 2008b). Although Leonardo does not explicitly mention the machine, it is implicit in the idea that the body is a passive assemblage of parts (anatomy) until and unless it is acted upon by the nervous system and made to move and function (physiology). The editor of a selection from Leonardo’s notebooks argues that he ‘looked upon anatomy with the eye of a mechanician’ (in da Vinci, 1977, p.150). Leonardo also looked upon geology and geography with the eye of a mechanician. In a similar vein, Kenneth Clark (1939, p.175) comments that, to Leonardo a landscape, like a human being, was part of a vast machine, to be understood part by part and, if possible, in the whole. Rocks were not simply decorative silhouettes. They were part of the earth’s bones, with an anatomy of their own, caused by some remote seismic upheaval. To Leonardo the whole could be taken apart to be understood part by part without necessarily understanding, or leading to an understanding of, the whole. Water was not simply a pool of fluid but was part of the earth’s blood with a physiology of its own caused by the shape and lie of the land, its topography, or anatomy. Both the human body and the body of the earth have veins as Leonardo suggests. Both the landscape and the body is a machine composed of parts. The body is figured as

1

I am grateful to Bethany Andersson for pointing out Breuer’s comparison.


earth, but both are figured as machine. The machine is the master trope that serves equally well for the body and the earth. In drawing in two senses a parallel between the body and the earth Leonardo was not simply and unthinkingly following convention but deliberately setting up an explanatory device. Introducing a series of his drawings, Leonardo announced that: In fifteen entire figures there shall be revealed to you the microcosm on the same plan as before me was adopted by Ptolemy in his cosmography; and I shall divide them into limbs as he divided the macrocosm into provinces; and I shall then define the functions of the parts in every direction, placing before your eyes the representation of the whole figure of man and his capacity of movements by means of his parts. (da Vinci, 1977, p.152) ‘Man’ moves by means of his parts but these parts are coordinated into a whole. If the parts were to move independently, the whole would be wracked by them moving in contrary directions and they would be torn apart. By constituting ‘man’ as made up of parts, Leonardo has reduced the body to machine, not only in the structure of its parts, its anatomy, but also in the functioning of its parts, its physiology. This view persisted through the nineteenth century when physiology, for Thomas Huxley, is ‘the mechanical engineering of living machines’. By performing the function of eating the alimentary and digestive parts of the machine are put to work in transforming dead matter into living organism: Man and animals are really the passage and conduit of food, the sepulchre of animals and resting-place of the dead, making life out of the death of the other (taking pleasure in the misery of others), making themselves the covering for corruption. (da Vinci, 1977, p.278) Beneath the skin, the skull lies. The skull beneath the skin is a traditional Christian reminder of death. The human body for Leonardo is a cloak for death and a reminder of death, a memento mori. It is a sadistic device for taking pleasure from other’s pain. It is a machine for making life out of death. Yet, as I have argued elsewhere (see Giblett, 1996), the body is both a tomb and a womb. The body is both crucifixion and resurrection, mass and transubstantiation, the transformation of the dead elements of bread and wine into the living body, the alchemy of the dross of dead matter into the gold of living

Machine Body 23

being. ‘Man’ is a secular Christ; Renaissance humanism, a secular theology. If the body is machine, the doctor is a mechanic, and medicine is servicing, tuning and repairing the machine (see Stibbe, 1996, p.186). For da Vinci (1977, p.279) ‘medicine is the restoration of discordant elements; sickness is the discord of the elements infused into the living body’. From where do the discord of the elements come to be infused into the living body? It comes from the body of the earth, from the mixing of elements in the body of the earth (see Giblett, 1996, chapter 5). How do discordant elements come to be infused into the human body? Through the nose and the mouth principally, those orifices through which what is outside is taken inside. Leonardo was not alone in the Renaissance in espousing the worldview of the body as earth, and the earth as body. Walter Raleigh in his History of the World propounded the view that: his [sic] blood, which disperseth itself by the branches of veins through all the body, may be resembled to those waters which are carried by brooks and rivers over all the earth, his breath to the air, his natural heat to the inclosed warmth which the earth hath in itself . . our eyes to the light of the sun and the moon. (cited in Tillyard, 1943, p.99) The diabolic genius of da Vinci was not only to propound this view of the body as earth or landscape, but also to combine it with the view of the body as machine.

Body machinery The body as machine can also be traced through the views of René Descartes (1596–1650) who propounded mind-body dualism. Descartes inherited and elaborated the Renaissance view of the body as machine, but dropped the view of the body as earth or landscape. He developed the distinctively modern view of the body as machine alone disconnected from the body of the earth. Up until the rise of modern European society, ‘east’ and ‘west’ at least shared a common view of an analogy or correspondence between the body and the earth. For both there was a body of the earth. Even though, as for Leonardo, the body and the earth was a machine, at least the earth was also a body. Descartes changed all that – or at least, around his name this change occurred. His name and work can be read as a sign of that change.


In both his 5th Discourse and 6th Meditation Descartes (1968, pp.73 and 163) considered ‘the body as a machine’ ‘built and composed of bones, muscles, veins, blood and skin’. Such a view extended into the smallest parts of matter. The translator of Descartes’ Treatise of Man commented that he likened ‘man’s body … to machines … to him the mechanics of the physiologist is the mechanics of very small things. It begins just below the level of vision and reaches downwards to the level of elementary particles of matter’ (Steele Hall, 1972, p.xxix). This fascination with the small beneath the level of visibility reaching down to the elementary particles of matter characterises the science and mechanics of the time too with its dissection and microscopes, watches and automatons and more recently with very small particles in microphysics and nanotechnology. Descartes departed from Raleigh and the ‘physiologists of all previous eras [including Leonardo who] had drawn analogies between man, to whom they often referred as a ‘little universe’ or microcosmos, and the universe at large, or cosmos’ (Steele Hall 1972, p.xxx). Descartes explicitly draw an analogy between ‘man’ and machine whereas Leonardo had only implicitly drawn that analogy and explicitly drawn an analogy between land and machine. For Descartes there was no analogy between land and machine, but there was between the body of ‘men’ and machines. For Descartes (1972, p.2) ‘I assume their body to be but a statue, an earthen machine’. The body for him is made up of earthly elements as a static collection of parts. These parts then function as a machine disconnected from the earth. Descartes not only suffered explicitly from mind-body dualism (1968, pp.54, 163), but also implicitly from body-earth dualism. Yet the earthly cannot be repressed without returning in monstrous form, either in the grotesque and monstrous body and body of the earth, or in the monumental and fascist body and body of the earth. Descartes espoused the view of the body as machine, not restricted to the body of animals (as Kern (1975, p.68) incorrectly contends) but also applied to the human body. By representing the human body as machine, Descartes not only contributed to anatomy and physiology but also to politics and society. Descartes for Michel Foucault (1977a, p.136) wrote the first pages in what he calls ‘the neo-classical book of Man-theMachine’. Subsequent pages were written by many others, including la Mettrie (1997, pp.7 and 31) in his treatise ‘Machine Man’ published in 1747 in which he propounded the view that ‘the human body is a machine which winds itself up, a living picture of perpetual motion’ and that ‘the body is nothing but a clock’. Such views are the stuff in trade of

Machine Body 25

modernity, and modern heroes. For instance, Napoleon for Buber (1970, p.117) is a master of our modern age because: he views the beings around him as so many machines capable of different achievements that have to be calculated and used for the cause. But this is how he views himself (only he can never cease experimenting to determine his own capacities, and yet never experience their limits). The idea of limits to human and bodily capacities is anathema to the machine-man. In the modern project of the sublime limits are to be overcome using machines. For Foucault figuring the body as machine works in two ways, both in figuring how the body works and also in how the body can be made to work. If the body is machine in its internal workings, it can be controlled from outside in its external operations. The body as machine is thus both a medical and political metaphor. This is one of Foucault’s great insights: the classical age discovered the body as object and target of power … The great book of Man-the-Machine was written simultaneously on two registers: the anatomico-metaphysical register, of which Descartes wrote the first pages and which the physicians and philosophers continued, and the technico-political register, which was constituted by a whole set of regulations and by empirical and calculated methods relating to the army, the school and the hospital, for controlling or regulating the operations of the body. (Foucault, 1977a, p.136) The figure of body as machine was extended from medicine to politics. And the figure of the body politic, the idea that the state was a body, was replaced by body politics. The body became a site of not only medical mechanics but also of political mechanics. The human body, Foucault (1977a, p.138) goes on to argue, was: entering a machinery of power that explores it [like the earth], breaks it down [like a machine] and rearranges it [like a new machine]. A ‘political anatomy’, which was also a ‘mechanics of power’, was being born. The body, like the earth before it in the age of exploration, becomes a frontier to be crossed and a wilderness to be explored, mapped,


conquered, colonised and exploited in the ages of colonialism and imperialism. The body, like the earth, becomes a site and target of power. Mapping is one device that makes both the body and the earth a site and target of power. Just as mapping the earth is an instrument of colonisation (see Giblett, 1996, chapter 3), so mapping the body in the atlases of human anatomy is also an instrument of colonisation. Both employ a scalar calculus that miniaturises the larger object in the flat surface of representation and reduces the three-dimensionality of lived space to the virtual two dimensions of represented space. Both are synchronic reducing the diachronicity of lived time and space to a single instance of perception and representation frozen in time and localised in space. Mapping reduces the depths of the body and the earth to surface. It fills up the hollows and levels the humps of both to create a pure surface for the construction of cities or reconstructive surgery and a screen for the projection of designs and desires, fears and phantasies. The body becomes an object of power, and power is introduced into its relation to other objects. ‘Over the whole surface of contact between the body and the object it handles’, Foucault (1977a, p.153) goes on to argue, ‘power is introduced, fastening them to one another. It constitutes a body-weapon, body-tool, body-machine complex’. The body as machine ceases to be separate from the machines, tools and weapons it handles. The machine ceases to be a figure for the body and becomes the body. The body becomes machine. The body on this view, Foucault, (1977a, p.164) argues, is ‘constituted as a part of multi-segmentary machine’. Modern society for Foucault (1977a, pp.242 and 243) is ‘a machine-society’ with ‘machine-men’ and ‘human machinery’. The body could only become an object of power after if it had become an object full stop. It could also only become an object by ceasing to be a subject, or more precisely by becoming both subject and object, a subject and object of power and knowledge. It could only become an object of knowledge by being deadened. And by distance being instituted between seeing and saying, words and things. Disease was constituted as an object in and by the discourse of medicine associated with the discourse of nature. The development of what Foucault (1970, pp.157–162 and p.135) calls the ‘discourse of nature’ involved observation (seeing linking spontaneously with saying). Until the seventeenth century signs according to Foucault (1970, p.129) were ‘part of things themselves, whereas in the seventeenth century they became modes of representation’ (see also Giblett, 2008b, chapter 1).

Machine Body 27

Medical mechanics This is the period leading up to the birth of modern medicine as Foucault (1973, p.xii) argues that ‘modern medicine has fixed its own date of birth as being in the last years of the eighteenth century’. Foucault (1973, p.xi) begins The birth of the clinic by stating that he is searching for that period and ‘region where ‘things’ and ‘words’ have not yet been separated, and where – at the most fundamental level of language – seeing and saying are still one’. This period was before the beginnings of modern medicine when seeing was transcribed into saying, disease transformed into discourse, and signs represented things. In transforming disease into discourse – just as nature had been transformed into natural history and sex into sexuality – the depths of the body were transformed into surface. Modern medicine constructed what Foucault (1973, p.xviii) calls ‘corporal space (for example, the isolation of tissue – a functional, two-dimensional area – in contrast with the functioning mass [and so depth] of the organ, constituting the paradox of an “internal surface”)’. Medical bodily space is predominantly two-dimensional mainly because it is a construct of the gaze. Disease is construed as a surface phenomenon. Disease for Foucault (1973, p.6) is ‘perceived fundamentally in a space of projection without depth… The form in which truth is originally shown is the surface in which relief is both manifested and abolished – the portrait’. And the landscape in the same period, and later the screen, I would add. All three are flat spaces of projection without depth that reduce depth to surface in representing depth as relief. The body and the earth, and the depths of both, are projected onto the flat surface of the anatomical illustration, the portrait, the landscape, and the screen. Time, history and temporality are also frozen in that one moment of representation. For Foucault (1973, p.6) ‘the first structure provided by classificatory medicine is the flat surface of perpetual simultaneity’, or synchrony. Disease, Foucault (1973, p.9) argues, ‘only exists in that space, since that space constitutes it as nature’. Nature is constructed in that two-dimensional, flat surface and frozen moment, just as the human face is in what Foucault (1973, p.9) calls ‘the fine two-dimensional space of the portrait’, and the land is in landscape I would add (see Giblett, 2004, chapter 3). As disease is constituted as nature in that space it achieves a status and legitimacy that is difficult to argue with. Similarly classificatory thought constituted natural history as nature at about the same time.


Disease for Foucault (1973, p.9), ‘which can be mapped out on the picture, becomes apparent in the body’. The surface manifests the depths just as the landscape painting maps out the natural features of the land. In medical discourse, Foucault (1973, p.10) argues, ‘the essence of the disease, with its structure of a picture, is articulated upon the thick, dense volume of the organism and becomes embodied within it’. The portrait of the disease is embodied within the patient to the point that the patient becomes the portrait of the disease. The patient, Foucault (1973, p.15) argues, is ‘the rediscovered portrait [and landscape] of the disease; he [sic] is the disease itself, with shadow and relief, modulations, nuances, depth’. The patient becomes the portrait and landscape of disease. In the same period that the land was being constituted as landscape and nature as natural history as a conjunction of subject and object wherein the former is a seeing eye/I and the latter a perceived object, so the body was constituted as a set of visual phenomena and visible surfaces, and subjected to aesthetic and medical examination. As such, Foucault (1973, p.121) argues that ‘the whole dimension of analysis is deployed only at the level of an aesthetic’ because it only takes place on the surface. Foucault (1973, p.19) argues that ‘the space in which disease is isolated and reaches fulfilment is an absolutely open space, … reduced solely to the plane of visible manifestations’ just as land and natural beings were. It is in this space that disease is read. The body of the patient becomes text, the text of the body. Foucault (1973, p.59) argues that ‘it is “the different diseases that serve as the text”: the patient is only that through which the text can be read’. The patient is a means to an end, a way to read the text of the disease written in and on their body. Doctors, according to Foucault (1973, p.89), ‘botanize in the field of the pathological’ just as the natural historian botanised in the lands of the geographical, the painter illustrated the landscapes of the aesthetic and the flâneur botanised on the macadam of the boulevards. Natural history, landscape painting and the clinic all employed the gaze to classify the features of natural and human beings according to their visible characteristics (Foucault, 1973, p.89). The medical gaze for Foucault (1973, p.135) travelled ‘vertically from the symptomatic surface to the tissual surface; in depth, plunging from the manifest to the hidden’. The medical gaze travelled from one surface to another, never into the depths, or more precisely never into the depths of the body and tissue, only into the metaphysical depths and distance between the latent and the manifest that was not open to the gaze only to surmise, infer and diagnose, the

Machine Body 29

metaphorical ‘gaze’ or insight. The medical eye for Foucault (1973, p.136) must ‘see the illness spread before it, horizontally and vertically in graded depth’. Disease for Foucault (1973, p.136) is ‘no longer a bundle of characters disseminated here and there over the surface of the body’. At the end of the eighteenth century the doctor, Foucault (1973, p.136) goes on to argue, began to ‘perceive what was behind the visible surface … and to map the disease in the secret depths of the body’. The autopsy (literally ‘the desire to see for oneself’ as Porter (1997, pp.177, 185) points out) was the means to do so. The anatomical atlas was the map for doing so based on the body écorché, the body flayed after death ‘to reveal the secrets beneath the skin’ as Porter (2001, p.70) puts it. The dead body of the patient made possible an entry to the living body of the disease. The ‘opening up of a few corpses’ (Foucault, 1973, pp.124–146) allowed penetration of the gaze into the depths of the body, and into the depths, and truth, of the disease. Truth lay in the depths whether it was in dead or living bodies. Medicine for Porter (1997, p.181) ‘would thenceforth be about looking inside bodies for the truth of disease. The violation of the body would be the revelation of its truth’. With the new discipline of pathology pioneered in the 1760s the living body itself for Porter (2001, p.89) was ‘rendered transparent and forced to display and yield up its diseases’. Disease for Foucault (1973, p.131) is thus ‘an autopsy in the darkness of the body, dissection alive’. The modern western medical body is not a dead body, nor is it a lived body but what Leder (1992, p.20) calls ‘a kind of animated corpse, a functioning mechanism.’ Similarly medical illustrations are not of dead bodies nor of living bodies but of dead living bodies (see Giblett, 2008b, chapter 4). The depths of the living lived body are lost in the flat surface of the anatomical illustration and in the semiology of symptomatology that reads the depth of the disease in its surface manifestations. By instituting the doctrine of tissues, Foucault (1973, p.131) argues, Bichat and his disciples ‘revealed, in depth, the order of the surface of things’. For Foucault (1973, p.134) ‘a clinic of symptoms seeks the living body of the disease; anatomy provides it only with the corpse’. Tissues in Porter’s (1997, pp.265 and 307) terms simultaneously provided ‘a new map of the body’ and ‘made death the essence of medical enquiry’. The map kills. It is both a powerful instrument of knowledge and equally a powerful force of destruction (see Giblett, 1996, chapter 3). Instead of surface, and only relief, depth was added, but only in death. Instead of the landscape of the surface of the body, there was


the depth of the land of the body, and disease, but only the depths of a dead body. Death in eighteenth century medical thought, Foucault (1973, p.140) argues, was a truism of both ‘the end of life … and also the end of the disease.’ Whilst on the one hand the truth of the disease was revealed and its course run, on the other, the course of disease and life were only manifested in death. Death was the master term for both life and disease just as the machine was the master trope for the body and the earth. To complete the circle, the machine is ‘dead matter’, or at least nonliving matter. To figure the body as machine is to figure it as dead. Similarly, to figure the landscape as machine is to figure it as dead. For Foucault (1973, p.149), ‘from the point of view of death, disease has a land, a mappable territory, a subterranean, but secure place where its kinships and its consequences are formed; local values define its forms’. But the land of disease opened up by the autopsy is dead, a wasteland. Although it is not a landscape of surface, it is not a living body, just as geology and geography are an autopsy of dead land, not appreciation for the living body of the earth. Although life escapes autopsy and anatomy, the latter represents the dead living body. Death for modern western medicine is what gives meaning to life and disease. Life has no meaning otherwise in this paradigm. Life on this view, as Foucault (1973, p.158) argues, ‘with its real duration and disease as a possibility of deviation find their origin in the deeply buried point of death; it commands their existence from below’. Disease is concealed in the depths of the body but it also has a function revealing the depths, and truth of the body, albeit a dead body, or a dead living body. For Foucault (1973, p.166) ‘that which hides and envelops, the curtain of night over truth, is, paradoxically, life; and death, on the contrary, opens up to the light of day the black coffer of the body’. Nineteenth-century medicine for Foucault (1973, p.166) was ‘haunted by that absolute eye that cadaverizes life and rediscovers in the corpse the frail, broken nervure of life’. Disease, according to Foucault (1973, p.196), ‘finds in the visibility of death the full form in which its content appears in positive terms’ and death becomes ‘embodied in the living bodies of individuals’. Whereas disease had been embodied, death became embodied. In order to reveal (the living body of) disease dead bodies were opened up, but in the process death was embodied in the living bodies of individuals and became their truth. Death is the truth of disease. Doctors were empowered and legitimated to speak the truth of the disease. Bichat (cited by Sontag, 1978, p.48) called ‘health “the silence

Machine Body 31

of organs”, disease “their revolt”. Disease is what speaks through the body’. The doctor was not just an absolute eye but also an absolute ear and voice. Disease speaks to the doctor who is the licensed listener. S/he is authorised to speak the (truth of the) disease. In chapter 4 of The Archaeology of knowledge Foucault (1972, p.50) discusses the discourse of nineteenth century doctors. The doctor in this discourse is situated as the institutionally legitimated figure who has the power and right to speak the truth of the disease. At the end of the eighteenth century this statutorily upheld privilege not only applied to the individual and his or her body but also to the health of the population, the body politic-mechanic (see Foucault, 1980; Haley, 1978). With both bodies the doctor performs the semiotic activity of decoding. In similar vein Kleinman (1988, p.16) writing on illness narratives refers to ‘the semiotics of diagnosis’ decoding ‘the signs of disease’. He concludes that ‘diagnosis is a thoroughly semiotic activity’. This decoding is performed within a culturally specific grammar legitimated, not only institutionally, but also as natural. What is cultural is legitimated as natural. For Kleinman (1988, p.10) ‘the meanings of symptoms are standardized “truth” in a local cultural system, inasmuch as the groups’ categories are projected onto the world, then called natural because they are found there’. Nature is a self-confirming and narcissistic projection: what is cultural is projected on to natural and made natural, not cultural, in order to legitimate what is cultural by making it appear natural. Culture and nature are set up in mutually regarding and reinforcing reflection (see Giblett, 2004, chapter 1).

Mapping the machine of the body Besides the atlases of human anatomy that map the human machine (and reduce depth to surface, life to dead living), it is important to note the exception (that proves the rule) of the wax models that represent the depths of the body in three-dimensional form. In the eighteenth century the Grand Duke of Tuscany brought together a collection of wax models of human anatomy and housed them in a museum of natural history and physics in Florence commonly known as ‘La Specola’, the observatory. These wax models, as During (2001, p.30) notes, ‘in their three-dimensional form represent for the first time the original specimen much more accurately than a flat drawing could do’. By modelling the body ‘much more accurately’ the wax model represented the living depths of the body. In the wax model, During goes on to note, ‘the whole body is felt to be alive’ as there is ‘complete


refusal to depict a dead body. The form and shape of the human body thus appears as a living unit’. Yet the model, just like the illustration, and indeed the map, is synchronic, freezing one moment in time. None of them are diachronic, showing movement through time. Although the model may felt to be alive and although it may appear as a living unit, the feeling and the simile mediate and model the body. The model maker takes the dead matter of wax and transforms it into a model of a living being based on dead bodies. Just like the automatons that perform movement through time (but whose depths and functionality are purely mechanical and who only represent human physicality on their surface), so the models freeze function and display structure in their depths (but do not represent functionality and process unfolding in time). By figuring the body as machine with exterior surface and interior depths the depths of the body are hidden and inaccessible and only knowable through signs and symptoms manifested on the surfaces of the body, even on the interior surfaces. Body becomes text to be read; body and text are surfaces to be read to reveal depths beneath – literally. The twentieth-century anatomical atlases for Armstrong (1983, pp.1–2 and 103): inform the gaze deep into the body … [A] more penetrating gaze used the techniques of palpation, percussion and auscultation and made the deepest recesses of the body transparent to the medical eye… The clinical examination involved an invasion of ‘private’ body space … and subjected the whole body – its surfaces, crevices, its insides, its workings – to a medical gaze. Despite its critique of the reduction to surface of the anatomical atlas, this description has recourse to the metaphors of land – a return of the repressed. With the development of the x-ray, the interior depths and private space of the body become so many more surfaces to be explored and exteriorised (see Sturken and Cartwright, 2001, p.291). The x-ray allows what Leder (1992, p.22) calls ‘a kind of dissection of the living body, analysing it into its component parts, exposing what life ordinarily conceals’. X-rays were what Porter (1997, p.605) calls ‘the most decisive new windows into the body’ of the late nineteenth century. They were just like the windows of their near contemporaries of the cinema screen and the car windscreen, and they prefigured, like them, the screen of the television and the computer monitor (see Giblett, 2008b).

Machine Body 33

The opening up of the interior anatomical terrain of the human body by x-ray was part of what Stephen Kern (1983, p.7) describes as: a general re-appraisal of what is properly inside and what is outside in the body, the mind, physical objects, and nations. Thomas Mann’s hero in The Magic Mountain remarked that he felt as though he were peering into the grave when he observed his cousin’s insides by means of x-ray. And well he might for was peering into the depths of matter laid out like a cadaver in the horizontal space and surface of the x-ray. Matter that had lived in its depth, secret and fertile, is exposed to the penetrating gaze, laid out for inspection, open and dead. With the development of communication technologies, such as cinema and radio, the body-machine becomes the body electric; with the development of electronics and computers, the body-machine becomes the body electronic, the cyborg; and with the development of ultrasound, the body-machine becomes the digital body (Sturken and Cartwright, 2001, p.300). The ultrasound image is, as Sturken and Cartwright (2001, p.300) put it, ‘a kind of window into the body’, just as the television screen is a kind of window into the world (see Giblett, 2008b, chapter 8). Ultrasound, like so many other communication technologies, has its origins in the military, in this case in sonar devices, data from which computers translate into graphic images. Sturken and Cartwright (2001, p.300) argue that ‘the desire to visualize the interior of the body has been a central aspect of Western medicine for its entire duration’. But, as they go on to argue, ‘increasingly digital rather than analog technology is being used to map the body’ (Sturken and Cartwright, 2001, p.301). And increasingly digital code rather than analogue language is being used to do it. This is particularly the case, as they go on to point out, with the Human Genome Project which has ‘mapped’ the ‘codes’ of the human genome thus transcribing the life and depths of the human body into the dead matter and surface of code. Life is reduced to code. Just as Morse code was a secret code that could only be decoded by trained operators, so with genetics the human body is encoded in a secret code that only geneticists can decode. The body is constructed as ‘a communication center’ and as ‘a medium of communication’ as Sturken and Cartwright (2001, p.303) conclude where the discourse of communication and media is used to figure and control biological and social processes.


The body on this view is not just any old machine, but quite specifically a computer to be understood in terms of information technology. The new genetics, as van Dijck (1998, p.120) argues, ‘derived its primary images from the burgeoning computer industry’. Indeed, he goes on to argue, in the 1960s it derived its primary language and metaphors of ‘information’ and ‘code’ from communication theory and technology to explain the flow of ‘messages’ from RNA to protein. In the 1980s, however, van Dijck (1998, pp.120–121) argues that there was a shift from ‘information’ as metaphor to information as what he calls ‘material inscription’ when, with the computerisation of genetics, ‘the body became part of an informational network’. The body was not merely coded or metaphorised as information but is now materially inscribed information. For van Dijck (1998, pp. 123–124): the idea that the human body can be coded in a decipherable sequence of [the] four letters [of genetics], and hence in a finite collection of information, is based on the epistemological view that computer language … is an unambiguous representation of physical reality. Yet computer language is a digital encoding in terms of the binary code of zeroes and ones that attempts to translate the complexity of the human body into a collection of information. The body, van Dijck (1998, p.124) concludes, ‘ceases to exist as an object or entity because the digitised sequencing of DNA turns it into an inanimate compound of encoded numbers’. More to the point, the body ceases to exist as living being and becomes dead living matter. This shift can be seen as a shift from modern medicine which saw the body as machine to what Parker (1997, p.19) calls ‘postmodern medicine’ in which ‘the body has come to be thought of metaphorically as a communication field, as a text which can be read by advanced technology’. Rather than post-modern, postmodern medicine (and the postmodern body) is not post modern enough but is hypermodern. The body as text is present in modern medicine’s reading of symptoms, and modern culture’s inscription of law on the surface of the body (as we will see in a later chapter). The body in hypermodern medicine ceases to be lived, corporeal reality and becomes a bearer of codes, a set of messages to be encoded and decoded by digital technologies, a cyborg (as we will also see in a later chapter). The body as land, deep, temporal and natural, becomes the body as

Machine Body 35

text, ‘flattened, spatialised, denaturalised’ in Parker’s terms (p.20), as in the screen of the heart-rate monitor. Postmodern medicine that was post the modern would see the body as land, and so as deep, temporal and natural. It would deconstruct the hierarchical distinction between mind and body, and in modern bourgeois patriarchy between culture and nature, male and female. It would decolonise the colony of the body and decolonise colonised regions of the human body. It would involve developing eco-friendly and bodyfriendly figures for the body as earth, as living depth rather than dead surface. These concerns with the surfaces and depths of the body are played out most famously and most recently in Gunther von Hagen’s exhibitions of ‘plastinated bodies’ in which in his terms ‘the insides of bodies cease to be objects of revulsion [as] observers are not bothered by any kind of offensive smells’ (von Hagen, 2002, p.20). In other words, the insides of bodies are aestheticized as objects of sight and not of the other senses at all. Just as anatomical drawing freezes the living human body in a moment in time and reveals its depths, so ‘plastination creates beautiful specimens … frozen at a point between death and decay’ and provides ‘an open view into the innermost realms of the body’. And just as anatomy regards the human body as dead machine and leads to a fascistic fascination with hardness, so plastination ‘makes otherwise soft body parts, such as muscles or the skin, rigid’ (von Hagen, 2002, pp.20, 21). Considering the body as machine has a number of implications including exercise, management and our relationship to our own bodies. With exercise the body is not only treated like a machine but is also disconnected from the mind and the earth. Exercise for Foucault (1977a, pp.161, 162) is a product of the mind-body split. Exercise is routinised, regulated and broken down into parts to exercise parts of the body. The second implication for considering the body as machine is the ‘scientific management’ advocated in Taylorism which Levidow and Robins (1989b, p.169) call ‘a form of behavioural engineering that treated the body as a machine’. There are also implications of the view of the body as a machine for our relationship with our own bodies. In his essay on the tenth anniversary of Kafka’s death, Walter Benjamin (1973, pp.126 and 132) relates that, ‘just as K lives in the village on Castle Hill, modern man lives in his body; the body slips away from him, is hostile towards him… Exile – his exile – has gained control over him… the most forgotten alien land is one’s own body’. Modern ‘man’ lives in his body like a castle on a hill; modern ‘man’ is a king in the castle of his own


body (see Easthope, 1986). I use ‘man’ in the sense of a modern masculine construction of humanity. He is a mechanical king imprisoned in a corporeal castle. Modern ‘man’ has become alienated from his own body like an exile from his or her own country. Modern man is alienated from the body of the earth. Modern man can be contrasted with the so-called ‘primitive man’ who lives in his body and mind like a suit of clothes. In his collection of aphorisms and meditations called ‘One-way Street’ Benjamin (1979, p.99; 1996, p.483) suggested that: To turn the threatening future into a fulfilled now, the only desirable telepathic miracle, is a work of bodily presence of mind (my emphasis). Primitive epochs, when such demeanour was part of man’s daily husbandry, provided him, in the naked body, with the most reliable instrument of divination … What would have become a portent of disaster he binds bodily to the moment, making himself the factotum of his body. He does all kind of work for his body whereas modern man tends to do only limited kinds of work with or on his or her body. The pre-modern works his or her whole body and not just parts of it. Mind and body are one whole. Bodily presence of mind overcomes Cartesian mindbody dualism and body machinism. Cultivating a bodily presence of mind is possible in holistic practices such as taijiquan as we will see in a later chapter.

3 Battlefield Body of Illness Narratives

The modern western medical body is an object of discourse, of examination and diagnosis for and by the doctor. Modern western medicine is an institutional practice of seeing, saying about, and doing things to, the body. The doctor is the institutionally and legally legitimated figure authorised to speak the truth of the body. The body is mute, or speechless, until and unless it is made to speak by the doctor. The patient may be invited to contribute to this process, to describe symptoms, to relate the course of a disease, but his or her participation is peripheral; his or her role as person is secondary to his or her body, to his or her constitution as ‘the body’. That the medical body also happens to be the patient’s body is coincidental, and accidental. In the process of speaking the truth of the body the patient’s body, and voice, is often denied, ignored or suppressed.

Illness narratives Yet that body and that voice are increasingly finding expression in what have come to be called ‘illness narratives’, or ‘pathographies’. A small, but lucrative and vital, section of the publishing industry has been in the business recently of producing and selling (often without much marketing) stories about illness. More specifically, these stories are, as Frank (1994, p.1) defines them, ‘nonfiction first-person accounts of illness’. Yet as Middlebrook (1998, p.55) points out in her illness narrative, ‘when one is really sick, one can’t write about it’ (p.55). This is the limit of the illness narrative. Illness narratives are not ‘really sick narratives’. Illness narratives are narratives of the ill, not of the ‘really sick’. Illness narratives give a voice to the ill, not to the ‘really sick’. 37


The illness narrative, according to Hawkins (1999, p.ix), is ‘a popular literary genre’ though for Frank (1994, p.2) it is ‘an orphan genre’. Yet who are its deceased parents? Indeed, who were its parents? Two possible candidates are autobiography and medical writing, but both are alive and well. Perhaps it is a disinherited and disowned genre rather than an orphan genre. Its aunts and uncles in literature and sociology disown it unless, as Frank (1994, p.21, n.4) puts it, ‘their authors are otherwise social scientists or novelists’. Frank himself is a case in point as he is a sociologist who has written his own illness narrative (see Frank, 1991) and his own sociological study of illness narratives, including his own (see Frank, 1995). Perhaps the illness narrative is a hybrid genre of autobiography, health and medical writing, literature and sociology with no strict parentage, no readily traceable genealogy. Rather than an orphan genre, illness narratives are a bastard genre. Like nature writing (which I have described elsewhere as a bastard genre borne of the illicit alliance of literature and science which crosses the great divide of two cultures of the humanities and sciences and delivers a plague on both their houses (see Giblett, 2004, pp.11–12)), illness narratives are a product of the union between non-fictional literature and medical science which also cross the ‘two cultures’ divide. Yet they can and do reproduce some aspects of the dominant scientific discourse of the body just as some nature writing reproduces the dominant discourse of natural history. Rather than illness narrative Hawkins prefers the term ‘pathography’ and refers to Freud’s use of the term in his study of the life and work of Leonardo da Vinci. Yet for Freud (1985, p.223) writing in 1910 ‘readers to-day find all pathography unpalatable’. How times have changed! But then so has what constitutes pathography; so has the meaning of the term. Readers today find pathographies palatable and publishers find them profitable. As Hawkins (1999, p.229, n.1) concedes in an endnote, for Freud pathography ‘refers to a biographical study that focuses on the way pathological elements in a person’s life can illuminate other facets of that life’, especially psychopathological aspects of a deviant sexual nature (as one would expect) in, for example, Freud’s account of da Vinci’s and other cases, though Freud is keen to defend his account from the charge of reductionism, that da Vinci’s ‘genius’ and ‘deviancy’ can be explained by ‘a memory of his childhood’. Hawkins lets the relationship between pathology and psychology ride though it is an important one in most illness narratives as their writers are concerned to write not just about the course of their illness (which would just be a medical case history from the patient’s point of

Battlefield Body 39

view) but also about its impact on them psychologically and spiritually and how they responded psychologically and spiritually. Thus the illness narrative, as Hawkins goes on to argue, can be a kind of spiritual conversion story, or a journey (both physical and psychological) in quest of a cure, or for a resolution of both. Pathology and psychology cannot be kept in separate boxes as they impinge on each other, and though Freud’s implied reader may find pathography unpalatable, he was referring to the biography of pathology whereas the autobiography of pathology is dominant today. Illness narratives are largely autopathographies. The doctor wrote the medical pathography whereas today the patient (or loved one or close friend) writes the (auto)biography of pathology. The priority of the terms have changed too: whereas pathology was used to describe psychology nowadays pathology affects psychology. Pathographies for Hawkins (1999, pp.ix and 1; see also p.13) include ‘recent autobiographies and biographies that describe experience of illness’, as well as ‘treatment and sometimes death’. Not only is ‘the pathography … our modern adventure story’, but it also constructs ‘the patient as hero’ or heroine (Hawkins 1999, pp.1 and 27). The illness narrative is often organised along the familiar plot lines of the adventure story: the hero or heroine goes on a journey or quest in search of a cure, or for enlightenment, or for just sheer survival; like the epic hero before him or her, s/he descends into the terrifying underworld, in the case of the pathography, of either disease or the hospital and the medical profession or both; there s/he struggles or fights against either or both figured as a horrific monster; and in the end s/he emerges either defeated or victorious, successful or failed, alive or dead. Despite the differences in point of view between the illness narrative and the medical case history, both share some common organising tropes. The Cartesian dualism of mind and body, ‘a cornerstone of modern scientific medicine’ as Hawkins (1999, p.9) puts it, has been strongly associated with the metaphor of the human body as a machine ‘basic to contemporary biomedicine’ as she also puts it (Hawkins, 1999, p.22). In fact, the two go together even in Descartes’ writings as we have seen with the body as machine being governed by the mind as director. The body as machine is reproduced in some illness narratives. Frank (1991, p.8), for example, describes how ‘one day my body broke down’, perhaps just like a car. Ironically, and by a cruel act of poetic injustice, he had a heart attack while he was leaning on the hood of a car. If the body is a car that breaks down, then the doctor is the mechanic who


fixes the breakdown and medicine is mere motor mechanics. The doctor’s role is to diagnose ‘the mechanics of disease’ and fix, remove or replace ‘the parts that have broken down’ (Frank, 1991, pp.11 and 12). Yet this reductionistic view of the body reproduces mind-body dualism in which the body is detached from the mind and talked about as an object whereas for Frank (1991, p.10) ‘this engine was inside me’: The body is not to be managed, even by myself. My body is the means and medium of my life; I live not only in my body but also through it. Bodily breakdown in medical terms is disease, whereas the patient experiences illness. Disease is breakdown from the doctor’s external and objectifying point of view, whereas illness is breakdown from the patient’s internal and subjectifyng perspective. Despite the difference in point of view, both invariably use the same discourse, and share the same trope, of the body as machine. Although Frank rejects mind-body dualism, he still persists in using the body-as-machine medical metaphor with which it is so intimately associated and with which it was associated in its beginnings in Descartes’ thought. Disease is a discourse, an institutionalised way of seeing, saying and doing. Illness for Frank (1991, p.103) ‘does not matter for institutions’. Illness is not a discourse, a way of seeing, saying and doing; illness narratives can be ways of being that have not been institutionalised. Bodies only matter for institutions insofar as they can be transformed into discourse and disciplined by training. When Frank is diagnosed with cancer a year later after surviving his heart attack he figures his body differently from a machine. For him the heart is an engine inside the body machine that breaks down in heart attack and the body is a machine that then needs fixing. Frank (1991, p.43) figures cancer as a breakdown in a sewerage treatment plant with ‘the body spewing out foul fluids’. After he undergoes chemotherapy, he says that ‘my body was a toxic waste dump, but it was also a living miracle’ (Frank, 1991, p.82). Whereas with his heart attack the engine inside him had broken down and had to be fixed, with cancer his whole body broke down and became a site of both toxic contamination and of medical investigation: I, my body, became the passive object of this necessity, the investigation. I could imagine how native people felt when European explorers arrived on their shores, plant a flag, and claimed their land


on behalf of a foreign monarch who would bring civilization to the savages. To get medicine’s help, I had to cede the territory of my body to the investigation of doctors who were yet anonymous. I had to be colonized (Frank, 1991, p.51). Medicine for Frank (1991, p.51) ‘colonizes the body’. In Frank’s later book on what he calls ‘the wounded storyteller’ he describes how ‘modernist medicine claimed the body of its patient as its territory’ as part of ‘medical colonisation’ (Frank, 1995, p.40). In Frank’s (1991, p.77) case medicine planted flags on his body, like explorers and adventurers, by sticking catheter lines in it. Disease for medicine is an epic myth in which the doctor is the hero in search of a cure and the patient’s body the pretext for, and context in which, the quest takes place. By contrast, illness for Frank (1991, p.81) ‘became an adventure’, an illness narrative in which he is the central character of his own life story.

The body as battlefield All adventure stories have a location; they take place in a place; they are set in a particular setting. The adventure story of the illness narrative is no exception, except that the place in which the story takes place is the human body. This is not a traditional site of story. The inner landscape of the body is not the site of story. This landscape is dark, obscure, in many ways a dark continent, much as Africa, female sexuality and swamps were for nineteenth-century Europe. To make the body speak it has to be figured, much as modern western medical discourse figures the body as machine. Illness narratives, by contrast, largely figure the body as battlefield. Although illness narratives resist the dominant modern medical trope of the body as machine, they reproduce a dominant modern militaristic trope of the body as battlefield. In the beginning of a chapter entitled ‘The Struggle is not a Fight’ Frank (1991, p.83) discusses the war metaphor in which ‘the fight against cancer’ is usually couched. Cancer is often figured as an invading alien against which the cancer ‘sufferer’ or warrior has to fight (see Hawkins, 1999, p.64). Cancer, as Sontag (1978, p.9) puts it, ‘fills the role of an illness experienced as a ruthless, secret invasion’. Cancer cells are invasive and colonise outposts in the body overcoming the defences of ‘the body landscape’. The body is the battlefield on, and in, which the cancer warrior fights. From ‘the field of battle’ s/he may


emerge ‘scarred but alive’ as one illness narrative puts it (Foley, 2001, p.36). Not only the body and the disease but also the treatment for cancer is couched in ‘this military terminology’. Radiotherapy, Sontag (1978, p.69) argues, uses the metaphors of aerial warfare as ‘patients are bombarded with toxic rays’ whereas chemotherapy uses the metaphors of ‘chemical warfare’. One illness narrative describes cancer as ‘the secret malevolence’ and chemotherapy as the ‘body invaded by toxins’ (Payne, 2001, p.67). Cancer is figured as a guerrilla fighter like the Viet Cong and chemotheraphy is like the US-led invasion of Vietnam. Both radiotherapy and chemotherapy are reminiscent of the bombing of Pearl Harbour and Vietnam and the aerial spraying of DDT and napalm. Both militarise the civilian body. Both produce the ‘collateral damage’ of ‘friendly fire’ in which the disease may be destroyed but the patient is dead too. One patient with liver cancer says ‘I’ll get it … get it in the end. Even if I go, it’ll go with me. I’ll burn this bloody cancer. Burn it until there is nothing left. I’ll win’ (Whitting, 2002, p.43). Other writers of illness narratives of cancer are not so gung ho. Christina Middlebrook (1998, p.2) relates in her illness narrative how she has what her surgeon calls an ‘invasive carcinoma’ in/of her right breast. As the mastectomy approaches she mourns the loss of ‘that invaded breast’ (p.2), the first of a number of ‘lethal invasions’ (p.99) as (her) cancer had already metastasized. She says she has ‘been through a lot, fighting this disease. I need the proof, my war wounds, my badges of honor’ (p.4). There are no medals for soldiers in this war, only the honor badges of wounds worn like medals on the chest. She fought many ‘battles … in our war against cancer’ (p.75) including ‘the battle’ of a bone marrow transplant (p.80). The battle against cancer is fought in the body where the paradox of ‘collateral damage’ and ‘friendly fire’ apply as Middlebrook goes on to argue: The technology that has saved me has killed me in order to rescue me. We destroyed villages in Vietnam, too, in order to save them. I remember that. So here I am, destroyed and saved, returned from war … [in] yellow-ribboned glory (p.77). She later: wonders whether there was another era, different from this, when the words for illness and war were not so irretrievably intertwined?


Can I understand better what has happened to me as I lie beneath and inside the machines of medicine – so advanced that they are equal, I am sure, only to machines of war – can I understand better if I think of war? (pp.78–79). Unlike the stereotypical image of Victorian sex in which the middleclass married woman was supposedly supposed to ‘lie back and think of England’, treatment for breast cancer is a travesty of sex in which the patient is supposed to lie back and think of war. In this war the body of the patient is both the terrain on which the war is fought and one of the soldiers who fight (in) the war against the enemy. The war against cancer (like the war against pests, or drugs, or terrorism) is a part of the militarisation of civilian life of hypermodernity. Militarisation has taken place through the machines and metaphors of war. Some machines of medicine, such as ultrasound, were developed from machines of war, such as sonar. Machines of medicine have incorporated the body of the patient. The patient is consumed by the monstrous machines of medicine. The patient is in the body of the beast like Jonah in the ‘whale’. The patient lies beneath the machines of medicine to be inscribed by them like the body-writing machine of Kafka’s short story, ‘In the Penal Colony’. Both machines have a bed on which the patient (or ‘condemned man’ in the case of Kafka’s story) lies. Inside the bone scanner she receives and obeys commands ‘from the war room, the place where strategy is mapped’ (p.79)’. This strategy is then mapped on to her body, colonising it. Strategy is the activity of the generals, whereas tactics are the ruses and practices of everyday life of ‘enlisted men, grunts’ (p.79, see also title of this chapter, chapter 9). ‘What I, what we, soldiers and cancer patients, have to do is to go it alone’ (p.79). Middlebrook figures cancer as ‘this vile crab’ (p.4) and later as simply ‘the crab’ with whom or what she ‘handles a confrontation’ (p.13). Hippocrates used the terms karcinos (Greek for crab), presumably, Porter (1997, p.575) surmises, ‘because the pain resembles a crab’s pinching’. The crab as the astrological sign for cancer under which one can be born is used as the pathographical sign for cancer as a death sentence under which one can die irrespective of when one was born. One can be born under the sign of cancer, and/or one can die under the sign of the crab. The crab for Middlebrook is ‘a shifty beast … Like cancer, it never takes the direct path, preferring to move sideways and furtively’ (p.14). ‘Cancer sidled into our life’ (p.15) she concludes.


Middlebrook tries to tease apart the dense knot of metaphorisation of war and cancer. She insists, ‘war is war. Cancer is cancer. Symbolic death is not death. War, cancer, and death are archetypally real. The urge to soften them, to fend off their reality, to metaphorize them, this urge overpowers our ability to speak the truth’ (p.203). But there is no truth without metaphor. Metaphor is a means to cope with reality. Middlebrook metaphorises. By extending the old metaphors, such as that cancer is an invasion and treatment for cancer is fighting a war, they reach their limits and deconstruct. By creating new metaphors, such as that cancer is a crab that sidles sideways and furtively into one’s life and body, one is no longer a victim of other people’s metaphors, one is no longer a grunt, or a general, or a ‘patient’, but a person, often an im-patient. Along these lines similar to Middlebrook John Diamond begins his illness narrative with the disclaimer that: this book isn’t … a book about a battle against cancer because I despise the set of warlike metaphors that so many apply to cancer. My antipathy to the language of battles and fights has nothing to do with pacifism and everything to do with a hatred for the sort of morality which says that only those who fight hard against their cancer survive it or deserve to survive it – the corollary being that those who lose the fight deserved to do so. (p.10; see also p.72) Those who fight hard in war don’t necessarily survive it anyway. Surviving war hasn’t got a lot to do with fighting hard or not. War has a lot to do with fighting (hard or not, though soft fighting seems an oxymoron) and not a lot to do with deserving to survive it or not. My antipathy to the language of battles and fights has a lot to do with the gender politics and poetics of space and place that makes the body into a battlefield for a social Darwinian struggle between winners and losers, between good patients and bad cancer cells, thus militarising the civilian body. Diamond is not a hard fighter but a hard gem (he never puns on his own name), a tough nut to crack. Giblett is a soft gut and an organ of the grotesque lower body. Later Diamond rails that ‘this [moralisation of the battle metaphor] is the infantile Victorian language of the good dying young and death transformed into a matter of not being lost but having gone before’ (p.72). In the modern war metaphor, the hard fighters don’t die and the good don’t die young, but forge a path, not forward into unhomely death, but back home into life. The Victorian sentimental obsession


with death is transformed into a hyper-modern fear and repression of, and fascination with, death. Many of the cancer narratives are about death, and life, as signalled in their titles and subtitles. Reynolds Price called his, A whole new life; Christina Middlebrook subtitled hers, A Memoir of Dying before I Die; Ruth Picardie’s is called Before I say goodbye and Marion Woodman’s subtitled hers, Dying into life. Diamond died in 2001. Near the end of the book Diamond returns to the idea of the good dying old and living as winning and argues that it ‘leads to the idea of the survivor as personal hero – that only those who want to survive enough get through to the end, and the implied corollary that those who die are somehow lacking in moral fibre and the will to live’ (p.196). He critiques the boy’s own adventure story stuff, beginning with Robinson Crusoe as the hero of his own story of survival. Crusoe/Defoe invented a world, gave birth to a brain-child, and crafted a world with his own hands all without reference to, or dependence on, a mother, or mother earth. This world was a Bachelor Birth from a Bachelor Machine. Illness narratives as adventure story are made in the same mould. Although Diamond ostensibly rejects ‘the traditional bellicose metaphors’ of battle and the battlefield (p.72), they re-appear in the alternative metaphors he uses for cancer cells and radiotherapy. War is a young man’s game just like cancer cells for Diamond. He replaces a militarist metaphor with an ageist, if not masculinist, one by suggesting that: a cancer cell is one what never grows up. The metaphor isn’t a casual one: the cancer cell bears all the nastier traits of reckless youth. It defies order, goes where it likes and above all believes itself to be immortal. Indeed, in practical terms the cancer cell would live forever were it not that doing so does away with the host upon which it needs to live. (p.35) The cancer cell is figured here as a guerrilla fighter and as a parasite or guest who survives as long as the cells on which it feeds and depends survive. He goes on to suggest that ‘it’s as if these cells, previously healthy productive conformist members of the corporeal society, suddenly – and let us change metaphors here – become members of some wacko religious cult. They become obsessed with immortality and at same time cease to be of use’ (p.36). A diagnosis of cancer is a death sentence. ‘There is no curing the cancer patient: the most that can be hoped for is a temporary


remission while the appeal court argues about the precise date of execution’ (p.37). Radiotherapy turns the body into a battlefield. The military metaphor returns under a different guise. Diamond may eschew the war metaphor in which the patient fights a battle against cancer, but he uses the body as battlefield metaphor. In undergoing radiotherapy: the therapee is strapped down to a bench and has beams of radiation fired at his cancer cells. Or, rather, at where his cancer cells are believed to be. If the radiation could be so finely tuned that it hit only the cancer cells this would be a perfect treatment indeed. As it is, the radiation is fired in the general area of where the radiologists think the cancer probably is. And the cancer isn’t just a homogeneous lump but clusters of cells within and around and next to healthy cells. Thus the healthy cells get zapped too. Indeed one of the principles of radiotherapy is that the go-getting, fast multiplying cancer cells are rather more susceptible to irradiation than are normal non-cancerous cells. A burst of radiation will damage both cells but the healthy cells will recover. Well, up to a point anyway. For it was with radiotherapy that I would first discover the principle of gradual disclosure which all doctors practise. (p.63) And probably which all generals practise too: let the grunts know all that they need to know at the moment. Treat them like mushrooms: keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit. ‘The radiation gun’ (p.84) is fired at a target with cancer cells in the middle and healthy ones around it. Its rays will hit both. Cameras are also sold as ray guns as Sontag argues in her book on photography. She also traces the origins of the military metaphor in her book on illness as metaphor. Figuring radiation as a ray gun zapping the body as battlefield brings both together, completes the circle of metaphorisation and demonstrates the militarisation of civilian life in modernity. Body as battlefield: body is passive; cells are active, radiotherapy is resistive including inflicting ‘collateral damage’ under ‘friendly fire’ that kills off healthy cells as well as cancerous ones. In the moralised military metaphor ‘defeating cancer was an active rather than a passive process’ for Diamond’s correspondents offering free advice (p.72), whereas in the body as battlefield metaphor the body (of the patient) is passive and his or her body is the field in which a battle between healthy cells and cancer cells takes place (with radiotherapy like aerial bombing intervening to kill off cells both healthy and cancerous being


administered by the generals) and ground over which the battle rages with the patient looking on as an interested spectator yet whose body is actually also the field on which the game is being played (to change the metaphor slightly) by doctors and nurses.

The military metaphor in hypermodern medicine In the previous chapter I argued that the body in hypermodern medicine is figured as a communication field to be decoded by digital technologies. There is a profound historical irony that at the very time that communication technologies were altering the face of war, were being developed for use in war and were used in war (see Giblett, 2008b), they were also being similarly deployed in medicine. Just when war and the landscape of war was being encoded and decoded in information technology, so was the landscape of the body digitised in the same way using similar devices. The communication field is a military field irrespective of whether the field is a battlefield or body. The dominant trope of both hypermodern medicine and illness narratives is the body as battlefield. Military terminology persists in hypermodern western medicine. ‘The principal metaphor of illness in conventional western medicine’ for Stibbe (1996, p.182) ‘involves fighting, where curing illness is a kind of warfare’ and where illness is ‘cast in the role of an enemy, a foreign invader’. Even when the war is being lost, the metaphor is still used. Porter’s monumental history of medicine describes how ‘the cancer war’ is not ‘being won with the routine weaponry in the arsenal: surgery, chemotherapy and radiation’ (1997, p.578). These three ‘weapons’ are described as ‘the slash, poison and burn methods the doctors use for treating cancer’ by one witty cancerian (Richards, 2001, p.21). The military metaphor in medicine, Sontag (1978, p.70) argues, ‘first came into wide use in the 1880s, with the identification of bacteria as agents of disease’. The body as battlefield became enshrined in hypermodern western culture with the development of wars of mass destruction and weapons of mass communication. The battle against disease, especially the fight against cancer, has sounded for Sontag (1978, p.70), ‘like a colonial war’ with ‘a large number of cancer specialists talking like battle-weary officers mired down in an interminable colonial war’, such as the Vietnam War, the first hypermodern war because of its use of electronic communication technologies (see Giblett, 2008b, chapter 10). Much of that war was fought in the mire of the Mekong Delta and


the Plain of Reeds (see Giblett, 1996, chapter 9), the metaphorical body landscape in which the war against cancer is fought. The swamp is even used to figure the causes of cancer in a metaphorical reprise of the discredited miasmatic theory of disease (see Giblett, 1996, chapter 5) as in Reich’s reference to ‘the swampy quality [of] stagnant, deadly water which doesn’t flow’ and cancer being ‘due to the stagnation of the flow of life energy of the organism’ (cited by Sontag, 1978, p.71). Sontag rejects the miasmatic and military metaphors of cancer but as Gwyn (2002, pp.127–128; see also pp.110–111) points out: it is an inevitable irony that in arguing for a metaphor-free view of illness, she finds herself constantly seduced by, and reverting to, a rich and potent supply of metaphoric devices to put forward her argument. Whilst this irony does seem to elude her, and whilst the desire for a metaphor-free view of illness is doomed to failure as ‘disease’ itself is a metaphor (dis-ease), her metaphors are not drawn from the miasmatic and military registers but from night and day, citizenship and kingdoms (Sontag, 1978, p.3). Rather than trying to rid illness of metaphor (as futile a task as trying to rid language of metaphor), it is more a matter of ridding it of destructive metaphors and replacing them with other more productive and eco-friendly ones such as the body as field or as earth (to which I return below). Figuring ‘the body as a battlefield’ (Frank, 1991, p.85) makes it into a zone of destruction with the patient and the disease as combatants. Frank (1991, p.83) prefers to figure himself and his wife ‘as civilians whose home had become a battlefield’. Rather than soldiers fighting against an enemy invader, they are civilians struggling with a recalcitrant and foreign relative from out-of-town or from across the border. Frank (1991, p.88) not only learnt that ‘we cannot fight cancers or tumors’, but also writes about ‘the value of not fighting’. By not fighting, he did not become the passive victim of the disease, nor the unwilling ally of his own illness. Rather, he became like the biblical Jacob who wrestled with the angel of himself and his own condition and body. He may have been ‘at the will of the body’, but he was never at the whim of the body, nor was he at the mercy of medicine. Neither the master of, nor a slave to, his body Frank sought a decolonising middle course of mutuality and reconciliation with his body and illness. He became a postcolonial body.


When the catheter line was pulled and the incision sewn up at the conclusion of his successful treatment Frank (1991, p.131) comments that: Medicine, as ritual, inflicted another mark on my body, giving that body a value it did not have before. Ritual markings are not just stigmas; scarification during an initiation rite marks the person as having passed through some level of experience, entitling him to higher status as a result. Thus initiated, my body was mine again. Frank reclaims his body from medicine and reads his scar not as stigma, as sign of moral fault, but as cicatrice, as mark of initiation.

The earth as body/body as earth The view of the earth as body is not just a relic of the Renaissance that died with it. It persists as a counter to the dominant view of the body as machine in the work of marginalised writers and painters. The earth is seen as body in Francis Bacon’s portraits of Van Gogh. These are unlike Van Gogh’s self-portraits in which for Alphen (1992, p.144) he ‘paints his own body … as if it were a landscape’. In the self-portrait of 1887 his face is ‘composed of yellow strokes that give it the texture of a cornfield’. In this and other paintings he ‘turns the body into a landscape’. Bacon, by contrast for Alphen (1992, p.144) in his Van Gogh series: Makes the space which surrounds Van Gogh … into a metaphor of the body. In Study for Portrait of Van Gogh III (illustration 74 [Alphen, 1992, p.131]) … the road and the land have the rawness of decomposing meat. Bacon’s fascination with meat is well-known, but rather than a sick obsession it functions as a grotesque body, an inside-out body (as we shall in a later chapter). By painting the land as grotesque body Bacon seems to want to turn the inside of the earth out to shows its insides, its veins, its organs and muscles. The landscape, as Aphen (1992, p.144) puts succinctly, is ‘in fact a bodyscape’. Bacon reconnects with the history of seeing the land as body. The land as body is a place to inhabit, a place to call home. The history of the body for Kuriyama (1999, p.237) ‘is ultimately a history of the ways of inhabiting the world’. But there are different ways of


inhabiting the world, different histories of the body and histories of different bodies. Reflecting later on the Hippocratic writing on airs, waters and places and on the Chinese doctrine of feng shui Kuriyama (1999, p.262) relates how: Once upon a time, all reflection on what we call the body was inseparable from inquiry into places and directions, seasons and winds. Once upon a time, human being was being embedded in a world. The erosion of what Kuriyama (1999, p.262) calls ‘this meteorological consciousness’ could be traced through ‘the Renaissance culture of dissection, the nineteenth-century clinical gaze, the contemporary reign of technology’. The Utahn nature-writer and naturalist Terry Tempest Williams has also critiqued medical language and sought feminist, ecological, postcolonial and postmodern alternatives. For Williams (1991, p.43) medical language is ‘loaded … with military metaphors: the fight, the battle, enemy infiltration, and defense strategies’. If the body is battlefield, the soldier-patient is fighting against themselves on the battlefield of their own body. Hawkins (1999, p.46) comments on Williams’ discussion of the military metaphor in her illness narrative about her mother that ‘though cancer is often viewed as an external, foreign, reified entity, in fact it originates within one’s own body’. Instead of treating her cancer as something separate from, but inside, her own body, Williams’s mother ultimately says to her that she is ‘able to embrace my cancer. It’s almost like a friend … The cancer is very much a part of me’ (p.156). Cancer is also part of her family as Williams (1991, p.214) later realises that ‘an individual doesn’t get cancer, a family does’. Cancer is a family friend, but if cancer is figured as an invading alien, and if the body is figured as battlefield, ‘the sick person becomes the battlefield’ as Hawkins (1999, p.66) puts it later. On this battlefield hypermodern medical science and the patient, ostensibly as allies but often with ‘collateral damage’ being inflicted by the former against the latter, fight against the alien. Yet to fight cancer on the battlefield of one’s own body is to fight the enemy within, a battle as ultimately futile as the war against drugs or against terrorism. The enemy is within, the enemy is us. For one pathographer ‘the battlefield is inside my body’, whilst another was engaged in ‘a war against cancer taking place in my own body’ (cited by Hawkins 1999, p.66). Williams (1991, p.46) wonders ‘if this kind of aggression waged against our own bodies is counterproductive to


healing’. She goes on to ask ‘can we be at war with ourselves and still find peace? How can we rethink cancer?’ Williams finds the answer and ways of rethinking cancer in what Hawkins (1999, p.46) describes as ‘the continuity between her mother’s body and the land’. Hawkins (1999, p.xiii; see also pp.181–185) sees this continuity as a feature of a few illness narratives of the 1990s which use ‘the Gaia myth (linking illness and environmental problems)’. Not only are ecology and health one, the life of the land and the health of the body integrated, but also semiology, spirituality and ecology are one. The life of mind and the spirit and the language of the land and living beings are intertwined. Williams’ grandmother tells her that ‘the Earth is not well and neither are we. I saw the health of the planet as our own’ (pp.262, 263). Williams’ Refuge: An unnatural history of family and place is a remarkable book as it weaves together a first-person illness narrative of her mother’s journey and struggle with ovarian cancer with a naturewriting journal of the lives of birds and levels of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Each chapter of the book is named after a bird that frequents the Lake and is subtitled with the water levels of the Lake. The names or behaviour of the birds are associated metaphorically with the health or condition of Williams’ mother, and the fluctuating fortunes and levels of the Lake are linked with hers. Thus in the mid 1980s with the rising waters ‘the pulse of Great Salt Lake, surging along Antelope Island’s shores, becomes the force wearing against my mother’s body… Antelope Island is no longer accessible to me. It is my mother’s body floating in uncertainty’ (Williams, 1991, p.64). If water is the life-blood of the body of the earth, then land is its organs, or more precisely for Williams (1991, p.109) ‘there is musculature in dunes. And they are female. Sensuous curves – the small of a woman’s back. Breasts. Buttocks. Hips and pelvis. They are the natural shapes of Earth’. The body is the earth. Where land and water, dune and wetness meet in the wetland is the womb of the world. Although Williams (somewhat surprisingly) does not make this connection, she does acknowledge that ‘marshes are among the most productive ecosystems on the planet’ (p.111). Also for her ‘wetlands are refuges’ (p.254) for herself and for waterbirds. Yet ‘wetlands have a long history of being dredged, drained, and filled, or regarded as wastelands on the periphery of our towns’ (p.265). Wetlands are not only wombs that give new life but also tombs that take dead matter and transform it into new life (see Giblett, 1996). They can also become wastelands when they are dumping grounds for the detritus and rubbish of industrial capitalism.


Just as the land has been subjected to surveying, to the grid of longitude and latitude, and to the grid-plan town and grid-iron drains so is her mother’s body. Her abdomen is ‘tattooed … with black dots’ and her belly has ‘a grid’ drawn over it with ‘a blue magic marker’. Williams’ mother comments that the technicians had ‘turned my body into their bull’s-eye’ which they then ‘zap’. Williams asks her mother how she feels to which she replies ‘I feel abused’ (Williams, 1991, p.77). The earth too has been abused by patriarchal industrial capitalism, raped by mining and stripped by agriculture, pastoralism, and soil erosion (see Giblett, 2004). The earth has also been militarised. On a field trip to some caves used by the Fremont people for a millennium an archaeologist friend reminds Williams that ‘if you look straight up that’s not blue sky you see – that’s military airspace’. Blue sky has not only been mined for spectrum auctions but it has also been militarised for surveillance and bombing (see Giblett, 2008b). And not only has blue sky been militarised but also brown earth as it has been bombed with devastating consequences often decades afterwards. Williams’s friend could have equally said ‘if you look straight down that’s not brown earth you see – that’s a bombing range. Or it was’. In the epilogue to Refuge entitled ‘The clan of one-breasted women’ Williams relates how above ground atomic testing in Nevada from 1951 to 1962 resulted in radioactive fallout drifting downwind into Utah. Utahns were called ‘downwinders’, though as the commander of the elite Air Force squadron responsible for monitoring the nuclear test clouds during the 1950s and who was suffering from cancer said, ‘there isn’t anybody in the United States who isn’t a downwinder’ (cited by Davis, 2002, p.46). Williams remembers the flash of one test when she was young and she and her family were driving in the desert early one morning in 1957. Her father reminds her that light ash fell on their car. Her mother developed cancer fourteen years later, the same time as an authority on radioactive fallout says radioactive cancer needs to become evident (Williams, 1991, p.286). Williams is thus not only telling the story of her mother’s illness, but also the story of the earth’s illness without necessarily ascribing a cause-effect relationship between the two: I cannot prove that my mother, … or my grandmothers, … along with my aunts developed cancer from nuclear fallout in Utah. But I can’t prove they didn’t. (Williams, 1991, p.286) Williams may not be able to prove anything, but she can dream anything she likes. She can dream that nuclear tests on the body of the


earth meant that ‘stretch marks appeared. The land was losing its muscle’. The dunes were being bombed into obliteration, the womb of the world repeatedly impregnated and giving birth to mutant children. The earth was in labour pains but instead of giving birth to new life ‘the red hot pains beneath the desert promised death only, as each bomb became a stillborn’ (p.288). The development of the bomb, and the bomb itself, ‘fathered the unthinkable’ as Brian Easlea (1983) calls it in his study of the development of the nuclear bomb; every bomb engendered a new world from the father’s brain without reference to, or reverence of, the mother’s body or the body of the earth. As a result ‘a contract had been made and broken between human beings and the land’. In response, and in resistance, Williams also dreams that ‘a new contract was being drawn by the women, who understood the fate of the earth as their own’ (p.288). What the French philosopher of science Michel Serres (1995) calls ‘the natural contract’ between human beings and the earth is broken by the militarisation of civilian life. Arguably the militarisation of civilian life is a key feature of modernity whose beginnings can be traced back to the invention of the steam engine, through aerial bombardment of cities during the Second World War, to the development of the US as a ‘Warfare State’ from the 1950s in the Cold War (see Giblett, 2008b). The roots of the militarisation of civilian life in the twentieth century lie ultimately in the birth of the modern state in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when several European societies were wracked by Civil Wars, or Revolutions. War for Foucault (2003, p.267) ‘presided over the birth of States’. War, indeed, is the State. Clausewitz said that war is politics by other means. To invert this aphorism, as Foucault relates others do, is to claim that politics is war by other means. The beginnings of the State as war lie for Foucault (2003, p.49) in ‘a discourse of war’ arising out of the ‘the end of civil and religious wars of the sixteenth century’. This discourse on war for him was ‘understood to be a permanent social relationship, the ineradicable basis of all relations and institutions of power’ (Foucault, 2003, p.49). War is inscribed in all power relations and institutions. War, Foucault (2003, p.50) argues, is ‘the motor behind institutions and order’. Thus the social order, Foucault (2003, p.110) goes on to argue, is by implication ‘a war, and rebellion is the last episode that will put an end to it’. War, Foucault (2003, p.110) concludes is ‘both the web and secret of institutions and systems of power’. These institutions and systems give rise to and are aimed at, amongst other things, what Foucault


(2003, p.245) calls ‘biopolitics’, one of whose domains is control over human beings and their environment including what he goes on to list as ‘the direct effects of the geographical, climatic, hydrographic environment: the problem, for instance of swamps, and of epidemics linked to the existence of swamps throughout the first half of the nineteenth century’ (see Giblett, 1996). Biopolitics also constitutes the body as battlefield for disease. The human body and its environment become contiguous and both became the target of military technologies. Rather than the military metaphor of the battlefield, it is much more healthy both environmentally and bodily to think of the body as simply a field which one tends, grows plants in and weeds. A number of African-American women with breast cancer from eastern North Carolina do not employ the body as battlefield metaphor in order to figure, and ‘fight’, cancer. They employ the body as field metaphor in which cancer ‘takes on a life of its own’ (Mathews, Lannin and Mitchell, 1994, p.793). The metaphor for Mathews, Lannin and Mitchell (1994, p.793) is of ‘a living thing, sometimes explicitly equated to a plant, as when patients refer to lumps as; ‘a kernel under my arm’, or ‘a knot rooted in my breast’ or a ‘growth that has taken hold in my side’. Some of the women, though, in the terms of Mathews, Lannin and Mitchell (1994, p.796) who ‘bought into the oncology model … also tended to embrace the metaphors of warfare and sports used by the clinic staff’ as if there were only one way in which cancer could be talked about. This seems like a gross act of cultural insensitivity, the imposition of one set of categories on another, and the denigration of one language (rural, ‘backward’, folkloristic) by another (urban, ‘progressive’, scientific). In figuring the body as field these women were part of a long tradition of regarding and tending the body as living being, not as dead matter, nor as machine, nor as enemy, but as ally (see Virilio, 2002, p.50). The challenge for oncology (especially nursing) would be to introduce body-friendly metaphors at early diagnosis and to encourage patients to use them in their illness narratives. Further research could establish if there was any efficacy in doing so by setting up a control group with no input into the type of stories they told (and who would probably tell stories that figured the body as battlefield) and another group who would be encouraged to explore other metaphors such as the body as earth or as field. I hazard that the difference in outcomes would be demonstrable. Using body-friendly and eco-friendly


metaphors would not be ‘a cure for cancer’ but it would be a cure for cancer as alien and as enemy, and for the psychopathology of figuring the body as battlefield in oncology and in illness narratives of cancer. Using eco-friendly metaphors of the earth as body would not be a cure for environmental ills but it would be a cure for the psychogeopathology of figuring the earth as battlefield.

4 Grotesque Body of the Lower Strata

The grotesque body is the belching, farting, gluttonous, lusting, creative, procreative body; it is a body having sex, giving birth, being born, eating and shitting, living and dying; it is the body of the marketplace (as distinct from the market) and it is the popular body (as distinct from the official body). The champion of the grotesque body was the Russian literary theorist, early Soviet semiotician and internal exile under Stalin’s regime, Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) in his book on the carnival first published in Russian in 1965.

The popular body of the marketplace What Bakhtin (1984, p.9) calls ‘the popular sphere of the marketplace’ in medieval Europe was distinct from the official sphere of the court and the church. This distinction cuts across, precedes and refuses the classical Greek distinction between the public sphere of the polis (political authority) and the private sphere of the oikos (household) (see Giblett, 2004, chapter 2). The distinction between public and private is constructed in terms of official discourse, social position and occupation of physical place whereas the distinction between official and popular is configured in terms of mode of expression and conjunction of time and space. The former is static, the latter dynamic. The distinction between official and popular also cuts across, precedes and resists the modern distinction between the public sphere of the nation-state, the bourgeois public sphere of the periodical press and the coffee-houses, the bourgeois private sphere of the conjugal family and intimate charm of the private dwelling and the semi-public and -private sphere of the market or ‘civil society’ (commodity exchange, social 56

Grotesque Body 57

labour, corporations and non-government organisations). Finally, it cuts across and resists the modern metaphorical extension of oikos to the -ospheres of nature, the earth-household. The popular sphere of the marketplace is akin to the commons that precedes, and was enclosed in, private property. The market in its original sense, according to Flichy (1995, p.50), meant ‘a place where transactions take place’, including originally the barter of a good for another good and then money in exchange for a good, and later the exchange of money for a commodity whereas the marketplace is a place where interactions primarily take place, including barter but also social and symbolic exchange. The carnival in the marketplace is an occasion on which inversions take place and subversions can take place. The market is permanent whereas the marketplace and the carnival are temporary. The market for economists, Cournot (cited by Flichy, 1995, p.50) argues, is ‘an entire area where all parties are linked by free trade relations’ whereas the marketplace is place where all parties are linked by a variety of free relations: mercantile, cultural, sexual, carnival. The marketplace cannot be confined to one particular place but is symbolic of all unofficial, popular places both earthly and bodily. The marketplace according to Bakhtin (1984, pp.154–155) was ‘the centre of all that is unofficial; it enjoyed a certain extraterritoriality in a world of official order and official ideology’. It was outside official territory so it was not just confined to the marketplace or any one particular place but included all unofficial places. It was forest, fen and commons, wherever the official was not, wherever it did not reign or would not go, the place of the outlaw, out-lawed places. It was not only extraterritorial but also pre-territorial as it existed before the defining and closing of the borders of the nation-state, before the enclosure of the commons into private property and before the enclosure of the body into the private individual. Unofficial places were the place of the grotesque, the place where the grotesque was expressed. Allon White (1993, p.167) defines the grotesque as the ‘perilous sumps of ambiguity’. The grotesque is the place in a culture to which the discarded misfits of meaning run to wallow in a mire of monstrosity. The grotesque is a dangerous swamp of monstrosity. Grotesque places are not only geographical places but also corporeal places. Grotesque places are physical places, both earthly and bodily. Just as the popular sphere of the market-place was opposed to the official sphere of the court and the church, so the grotesque body of the popular sphere opposes


the monumental body of the official sphere. For Bakhtin (1984, pp.317–318): the artistic logic of the grotesque image ignores the closed, smooth, and impenetrable surface of the body and retains only its excrescences (sprouts, buds) and orifices, only that which leads beyond the body’s limited space or into the body’s depths. Similarly it ignores the closed, smooth, and impenetrable surface of the landscape and retains only its excrescences (outcrops, tors) and orifices, only that which leads beyond the limited space of the polis and the oikos or into the earth’s depths, into the underworld and the depths of the ‘jungle’ (rainforest) and the ‘swamp’ (wetland). The popular sphere of the marketplace is also the sphere of the bodily lower stratum. This stratum is associated with the earthly lower stratum (see Giblett, 1996, chapter 6). The grotesque body of the marketplace and the grotesque lower bodily stratum are linked closely to the grotesque body of the earth and to the grotesque lower earthly stratum of the fens and swamps. What Bakhtin calls (1984, p.147) ‘the material bodily stratum’ is ‘the zone of the genital organs’ just as the material earthly stratum is the quaking zone of the fecund swamps and the intertidal zone of the fertile lagoons (see Giblett, 1996). Both the lower bodily and earthly strata are the quaking zone (see Giblett, 1996) where the earth and the body tremble, where solid and liquid mix and where the inside and the outside meet and mingle. The sphere of the marketplace celebrates what Bakhtin calls ‘the indissoluble unity’ of ‘the sphere of earth and the body’. Unlike modern ecology that separates the earth from the body and makes the earth the household of and for the body, for postmodern ecology (as in premodern societies) earth and body are inter-connected. The grotesque body for Bakhtin (1984, p.341) is ‘“at home” in the cosmos’. It lives at home with the living earth (see Giblett, 2004, chapter 12). It does not live away from home, away from the home of the living earth. It does not live like K in his castle, an alienated mind in a body. Rather than a Cartesian dualist, the grotesque body is a homely holist. The body of the earth is at home in the cosmos. Perhaps the writer to have most precisely and passionately expressed this sense of the body of the earth as home is Henry David Thoreau. In a description of a landscape in his journal dated 23 March 1859 Thoreau’s representation of the landscape bears traces of life as a living body, even as an imagined or remembered or strictly phantasised and

Grotesque Body 59

feminised body, the phantasmatic body of the mother with its ‘undulations’, ‘its nerves and muscles’ (Thoreau, 1962, XII, pp.74–76). The sight of the land evokes the touch of a body ‘firm and soft [almost a contradiction in western terms] as velvet’. Yet the earth is still a body viewed from afar, a body of smooth surface, a screen, onto which the Thoreauvian viewer can project his phantasies of a full and replete body. Landscape enables the viewer to remain distant and aloof. The closest he comes to intimacy is through memory and imagination. The landscape remains removed, the land is reduced to phantasised body as it was for Ruskin who, like Thoreau, his contemporary writing at about the same time anthropomorphised it: Mountains are, to the rest of the body of the earth, what violent muscular action is to the body of man … the plains and the lower hills are repose and the effortless motion of the frame … The spirit of the hills is action; that of the lowlands, repose … Mountains are bones of the earth … the best image which the world can give of Paradise is in the slope of the meadows, orchards, and corn-fields on the sides of a great Alp. (Ruskin, 1990, pp.233–234; see Giblett, 1996, Figure 1, chapter 2) The landscapist never enters the landscape to relate to the land as working country whereas the wetlander enters the wetland to relate to the wetland as Thoreau did enter swamps and write about them (as I have noted elsewhere; see Giblett, 1996, especially chapter 10). In the aesthetics of nature land is reduced to landscape, the occasions for taking, and making, and giving prospects. These prospects could be indistinct or distant as they were on more than one occasion for Thoreau (1962, IX p.495; X, p.430; and XII, pp.366, 367), rather than merely pleasing, the dominant mode of the nineteenth century (see Giblett, 2004, chapter 4). With landscape, the sense of sight is dominant. If the earth is body, then lakes for Thoreau are its eyes into which the viewer looks to measure the depth of his or her own being in the look that is given back. For him ‘a lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is the earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature’ (Thoreau, 1982, p. 435; see also pp.339, 437 and 527). Why? Because in it the viewer can see reflected the heights of the heavens, and even bring the heavens down to earth. For Thoreau (1982, p.448), ‘White Pond and Walden [Pond] are great crystals on the surface of the earth. Lakes of Light’. They are lacus luci. The


lake is ‘a field of water … intermediate in its nature between land and sky’ (p.437). For Thoreau a lake mediates land and sky and is even an intermediary between earth and heaven. Moreover, a deep- and hardbottomed lake for Thoreau is symbolic of a kind of highly philosophical self-reflexivity, rather than of merely narcissistic self-contemplation. The deep-bottomed, open-watered lake reflects the sky and so for Thoreau the ‘smooth, reflecting surface’ of a small pond, ‘full of light and reflections, becomes a lower heaven itself’ (p.339). The surface of water could even multiply the heavens for Thoreau as he indicated in his journal (1962, IV, p.21). Open water reflects and multiplies the higher heavens, the sublime heights of philosophy, which seduced the transcendentalist Thoreau despite, or as well as, his love for the slimy depths of swamps which he celebrated as the patron ‘saint’ of swamps (see Giblett, 1996, especially chapter 10). Besides fulfilling a sublimatory role for the Romantic poetphilosopher, the lake serves a prophylactic function for nature. On his winter walk Thoreau (1982, p.67) remarked that ‘this woodland lake … in summer … is the earth’s liquid eye, a mirror in the breast of nature … It is nature’s saloon where she has sat down to her toilet … a fresh surface is constantly welling up’. In looking into the surface of the lake and measuring the depths of his own being, the Romantic poetphilosopher also looks into the breast of mother earth and contemplates his own visage in her mirror. J.M. Coetzee (1988, p.44) has remarked that ‘tranquil water is the only reflective medium in nature… Bodies of still water lend themselves to metaphors of thinking’, at least for the Romantics. Like Wordsworth, Thoreau feminised the lake as narcissistic young woman, whereas the swamp has generally been feminised in patriarchy as the orally sadistic old mother (see Giblett, 1996, especially chapter 6).

The bourgeois body With the rise of the bourgeoisie and the birth of modernity, the unity of body and earth were dissolved. We saw this in a previous chapter with the figuring of the body and the earth as machine beginning with Leonardo da Vinci and Rene Descartes. The body becomes a private matter and a site for public regulation, and the earth is reduced to ‘nature’ and regarded as a source of common free goods to be enclosed in private property and commodified for private gain. With what Bakhtin (1984, p.23) calls ‘the breaking away of the body from the single procreating earth’, the body becomes disconnected from the

Grotesque Body 61

processes of regeneration and degeneration taking place on and in the earth. The body is denigrated as a harbinger of death, rather than celebrated as a bringer of life out of death. The positive and negative features of the body are split, and the body itself is split between the upper and lower stratum. The upper is valued in positive terms and the lower in negative ones, rather than both the upper and lower being both positive and negative. Bakhtin (1984, p.23) argues that ‘in the private sphere of isolated individuals, the images of the bodily lower stratum preserve the element of negation while losing almost entirely their positive regenerating force’. The lower bodily stratum, just like the lower earthly stratum (see Giblett, 1996, chapter 6) became solely a negative place and not a positive place at all. Both are construed as horrific, grotesque and monstrous, places of both physical disease and moral filth. The body, especially the lower body, becomes so much organic matter to be transcended through and by aesthetics. Aesthetics is the means of transcending the lower body and lower earth. For Bakhtin (1984, p.24) ‘the bourgeois conception of the completed atomized being’ went hand in hand with what he goes on to call ‘“classic” aesthetics, the aesthetics of the ready-made and the completed’ (Bakhtin, 1984, p.25). By contrast, the popular sphere of the marketplace went hand in hand with the grotesque and the monstrous (Bakhtin, 1984, see p.43) with their images of ‘pregnant death, a death that gives birth’ (Bakhtin, 1984, p.25). Instead of seeing death in bourgeois terms as the end of life, death is seen in popular terms as the beginning of a new life. Whereas the neo-classical, bourgeois body is self-contained and has a strong sense of maintaining and policing its own borders, the grotesque body for Bakhtin (1984, p.26) ‘transgresses its own limits’. The grotesque body crosses over and defies it own limits. It is open and permeable. With the grotesque body Bakhtin (1984, p.26) argues that: the stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world … the emphasis is on the apertures and convexities. The emphasis is on protuberances and cavities, on humps and hollows just as with the lower earthly stratum the emphasis is placed on the nether lands, the low lying swamps and marshes in contrast with the smooth surface of the beautiful and the rugged terrain of the sublime.


For Bakhtin (1984, pp.26–27) ‘the unfinished and open body … is not separated from the world by clearly defined boundaries’ unlike the neo-classical bourgeois body that for him: presents an entirely finished, completed, strictly limited body, which is shown from the outside as something individual, … strictly limited mass, the impenetrable façade. The opaque surface and the body’s ‘valleys’ acquire an essential meaning as the border of a closed individuality that does not merge with other bodies and the world. (Bakhtin, 1984, p.320) The bourgeois body with its closed surface and the modern city with its massive and monumental structures and impenetrable façades was the great labour of the bourgeois public sphere. It regulated the private body of individuals in the interests of the private bodies of corporations and the public body of the nation-state. It also regulated the grotesque physical body in the interests of the cultivated bourgeois body and mind. Drawing on Bakhtin’s work, Stallybrass and White (1986, p.105) argue that ‘the suppression and distancing of the physical body became the very sign of rationality, wit and judgement’. Suppression (pushing downwards) and distancing (lifting upwards) are the characteristic trajectories of sublimation whether it be in the aesthetics of the sublime landscape or of the sublime body. Sublimation for Norman O. Brown (1959, p.293) ‘presupposes repudiation (negation) of the body’. Yet sublimation not only involves repression of the body but also a whole social semiosis, an entire cultural production of meaning. Sublimation for Stallybrass and White (1986, p.197) is: a process of upward displacement through the social stratification of discourse. It is both a semiosis and a class variable, detectable only in a perceived difference from ‘unsublimated’ practices. It is in fact the main mechanism whereby a group or class or individual bids for symbolic superiority over others: sublimation is inseparable from strategies of cultural domination. Sublimation is the means whereby the bourgeoisie secured and maintains its hegemony in the semiotic and symbolic realm over other classes, the body, and the earth (see Giblett, 1996, chapter 2). The impenetrable façade of the sublimated body is unlike the penetrable surface of the grotesque body that merges with other bodies and

Grotesque Body 63

the world. The grotesque body for Bakhtin (1984, p.339) ‘has no façade, no impenetrable surface, neither has it any expressive feature’ unlike the expressive features of the sublime. He goes on to argue that ‘it represents either the fertile depths or the convexities [and surely concavities] of procreation and conception [and surely parturition]. It swallows and generates, gives and takes’ (Bakhtin, 1984, p.339). It exchanges and reciprocates; it is symbiotic, not parasitic. The grotesque, and the grotesque body, can partially be defined in terms of what it is not: it is not sublime. The grotesque for Bakhtin (1984, p.35) ‘did not respond to the demands of the sublime’ and ‘does not obey the aesthetics of the beautiful and the sublime’ (Bakhtin, 1984, p.35; see also p.43). The grotesque is anti-aesthetic; in a word – Freud’s word – it is uncanny (see Giblett, 1996, chapter 2). It is recalcitrant and resistive to the penetrating power of the phallic sublime. It is a female commons of procreativity. As such it is outside the masculinised enclosure of private property and of the private individual. It is outside the official domain of the aesthetic and in the popular area of the slimy lower bodily and earthly stratum (see Giblett, 1996, chapter 2). Bakhtin (1984, p.45) concludes that ‘there was no room for it in the system of aesthetics’. Its ruling passion is horror as distinct from the terror of the sublime (see Giblett, 1996, chapter 2). Terror for Bakhtin (1984, p.336) is ‘conquered by laughter’ so that for him ‘all that was terrifying becomes grotesque’ (Bakhtin, 1984, p.91). The grotesque (and the monstrous) overcomes and disarms the monumental and terror through the power of laughter.

The s(ub)lime and beautiful body and landscape The sublime and the beautiful are crucial components of the aesthetics of the landscape and of the body. The sublime body, beautiful land and the slimy body and land are found in the work of three early nineteenth-century writers, William Cobbett, George Crabbe and William Hazlitt. Despite the political radicalism of Cobbett and Hazlitt, both reproduce the conventional aesthetic hierarchy that valorises nature’s ‘glories’ over nature’s ‘shames and ills’ (see Giblett, 2004, p.49). For Cobbett the former resides in the beauty of the gentleman’s park whereas Hazlitt finds, and repels from, the latter in Crabbe’s description of slimy marshland in his ‘Peter Grimes’ poem. Both these aspects of the language of landscape have their counterpart in the portrayal of the body. Hazlitt contrasts the smooth (or beautiful) body with what he calls the gusto of the muscular (or sublime) body portrayed by


Michelangelo. He also associates Crabbe’s marshland with the slimy body of a monster. On his rural rides Cobbett (1830/2001, p.362) encounters Stanford Park and describes it as: everything that is beautiful. On one side of the house, looking over a fine piece of water, you see a distant valley, opening between lofty hills; on another side the ground descends a little at first, then goes gently rising for a while, and then rapidly to a distance of a mile perhaps, where it is crowned with trees in irregular patches, or groups, single and most magnificent trees being scattered all over the whole of the park; on another side, there rise up beautiful little hills, some in the form of barrows on the downs, only forty or a hundred times as large, one or two with no trees on them, and others topped with trees; but, on one of these little hills, and some yards higher than the lofty tree which are of this little hill, you see rising up the tower of the parish church, which hill is, I think, taken all together, among the most delightful object that I ever beheld. Although Cobbett is not a landscape architect attuned to the controversies and fashions in laying out the gentleman’s park estate that consumed his contemporaries, and although he calls beautiful what in strict aesthetic terms should be called picturesque, he is sensitive to the defining features of the pleasing prospect. Some of the main features he is attuned to are the water view opening to the further view of a valley between framing hills rising to the background of higher hills dotted with trees in both wild profusion and picturesque poses. Yet this description of a pleasing prospect is probably more interesting for what it excludes than for what it includes. What is absent is not only all reference to what Raymond Williams calls ‘working agriculture’ and to the labour of the labourer that produced the pleasing prospect, but also any recognition of the natural forces that made the pleasing prospect possible. The earth is rendered all surface and no depth. This is the body of the earth without organs. None of the actions – human and nonhuman – that produced this object are evident. The landscape is an aesthetic object of sight that occludes the messy and abject processes of geological formation and vegetative generation, decomposition and regeneration that produce the pleasing prospect. Beautiful land has the heights and depths of hills and valleys, but this verticality is above the surface of the earth and not below it. The

Grotesque Body 65

‘most beautiful rural objects’ that Cobbett later ‘delights in’ include ‘smooth and verdant downs in hills and valleys of endless variety as to height and depth and shape’ (p.380). The most beautiful land has a smooth surface just like the most beautiful body. The smooth surface is not flat, but has undulations. It is a body posed in death, or death-like fixation. The beautiful is a cold, static surface and ‘not a warm, moving mass’ to use Hazlitt’s phrase (p.202). It is not a living body. Beautiful land is not the living body of the earth. It is a machine for the generation of aesthetic pleasure and for the production of agricultural wealth. Stasis, surface and coldness characterise beauty whereas dynamism, mass and ruggedness characterise the sublime body and land, and flow, depth and softness characterise the slimy body and land. The glories of nature can be contrasted with nature’s ‘shames and ills’ in Crabbe’s ‘Peter Grimes’ where the lower reaches of the pathetic fallacy are overworked so that the wetlandscape is the projective screen for Grimes’ guilt for his sadistic paedocide and his socially outcast status: Thus by himself compelled to live each day, To wait for certain hours the tide’s delay; At the same time the same dull views to see, The bounding marsh-bank and the blighted tree; The water only when the tides were high, When low, the mud half-covered and half-dry; The sun-burnt tar that blisters on the planks, And bank-side stakes in their uneven ranks; Heaps of entangled weeds that slowly float, As the tide rolls by the impeded boat. When tides were neap, and in the sultry day, Through the tall bounding mud-banks made their way, Which on each side rose swelling, and below The dark warm flood ran silently and slow; There anchoring, Peter chose from man to hide, There hang his head, and view the lazy tide In its hot slimy channel slowly glide; Where the small eels, that left the deeper way For the warm shore, within the shallows play; Where gaping muscles, left upon the mud Slope their slow passage to the fall’n flood: Here dull and hopeless he’d lie down and trace How side-long crabs had crawled their crooked race;


Or sadly listen to the tuneless cry Of fishing-gull or clanging golden-eye; What time the sea-birds to the marsh would come, And the loud bittern, from the bull-rush home, Gave from the salt-ditch-side the bellowing boom: He nursed the feelings these dull scenes produce And loved to stop beside the opening sluice; Where the small stream, confined in narrow bound, Ran with a dull, unvaried, saddening sound; Where all, presented to the eye or ear, Oppressed the soul with misery, grief, and fear. (lines 171 to 204, quoted by Hazlitt, 1970, pp.252–253) Whereas the gentleman’s park gives the eye and the horseman the power to wander, the marsh constrains the eye and boatman and subjugates him to the power of the tides. This is not a pleasing prospect; it is not beautiful land; it is not aesthetically pleasing, but the extract does contain some finely observed and evocative nature writing. Despite the overworking of the pathetic fallacy, the description of the sea-shore, and of the eels, mussels, crabs and bittern is a precursor to Rachel Carson’s writing about the edge of the sea (Carson, 1955). Yet it is more than mere nature writing as the best nature writing is. One of Crabbe’s editors observes that: the whole passage (lines 171–204) is no vague evocation: it depends on a variety of precisely observed details which build up a set of impressions of dullness, flatness, sterility, lack of motion, purpose or hope… While based on an actual fenland estuary that you can still recognise at Aldeburgh, it is transformed into something strange and remote. It sounds eerily primeval, a featureless, unformed landscape with rudimentary forms of life … It is also like the world after the flood, with the mud, the water draining away and the smelly warmth and decomposition. This corresponds fundamentally to Grimes’s slow moral decay and physical torpor. The landscape and his body, the ebbing water in the channels and the sluggish life in his veins – these become hardly distinguishable. (Mills, 1967, pp.xxxi–xxxii) Although Crabbe makes no moral judgment on Grimes and the fenland, his conventionality was to associate the marshland with the outcast, the slimy with the sadistic. It was to make the wetland the projective

Grotesque Body 67

screen for the lower stratum of the pathetic fallacy. The wetland is not valued for its natural features and functions, nor is Grimes a rebel who finds refuge there (see Giblett, 1996, chapter 9). At best, slimy land and body are indistinguishable in the material and moral grime of both and the wetlandscape is monstrous and uncanny. At worst the fenland is stigmatised like Grimes as a ‘scapeland’ in Lyotard’s terms and both are constituted as dirt, as matter out of place in Mary Douglas’s definition – Grime by name, grime by nature – in the place of grime (see Giblett, 1996, pp.12–13). At worst, too, for Hazlitt the scene is unlovely and repulsive and Crabbe’s marginal world of protean life was all too much. After quoting the passage above Hazlitt comments that: this is an exact fac-simile of some of the most unlovely parts of the creation. Indeed the whole of Mr Crabbe’s Borough from which the above passage is taken, is done so to the life, that it seems almost like some sea-monster, crawled out of the neighbouring slime, and harbouring a breed of strange vermin, with a strong local scent of tar and bulge-water. The marshland does not please the eye and the sense of sight, unlike the gentleman’s park, but offends the nose and the sense of smell. The marshland is monstrous; it is born out of slime; it is the grotesque lower bodily stratum come to the surface and come to life. Rather than the grotesque, Hazlitt much prefers what he calls gusto; rather than the slimy monstrous body of Crabbe’s grimy fenland, he prefers the monumental sublime body, especially as portrayed in Michelangelo’s statues. Michelangelo’s statues for Hazlitt: obtrude the sense of power upon the eye. His limbs convey an idea of muscular strength, or moral grandeur, and even of intellectual dignity: they are firm, commanding, broad, and massy, capable of executing with ease the determined purposes of the will… [H]is style is hard and masculine… expressing energy of will. (p.202) His sublime body is the precursor of the fascist body: Michelangelo is the stylistic father of Mussolini. The monumental body is the obverse of the grotesque body; Michelangelo’s monumental bodies are the obverse of Francis Bacon’s grotesque bodies. Francis Bacon’s paintings, as we saw in the previous chapter, in the words of Allon White (1993, p.169), ‘turn the world inside out rather


than upside down’. They are a postmodern carnival. Modern medicine created a body of depths and surfaces in which depths resided below the surface. Disease is manifested on the surface of the body in symptoms, and the role and power of the doctor is to decipher the causes of symptoms in the depths. Bacon’s paintings transgress this spatial metaphysics. Bacon’s subjects for White (1993, p.169): are eviscerated and disembowelled, displaying on the outside what is normally hidden within. Bone and flesh confront each other or remain distressingly and inertly juxtaposed. Mush, coagulated forms tumesce and slump; bodies churn and spew… The inside is evacuated to the outside. Instead of the inside staying inside to be read through the outside via the anatomical atlas or to be viewed from the outside via x-rays and ultrasound or to be surgically invaded in the hospital, the inside is turned out, living flesh turned into dead meat. Commenting on Bacon’s paintings, Deleuze (2003, p.21) suggests that ‘every man who suffers is a piece of meat’ and that ‘meat is the common zone of man and the beast’. Bacon depicts the suffering of Christ on the cross where he is not only God become man, but also God become beast, become meat, the ultimate abjection. The righthand panel of Bacon’s 1962 painting Three studies for a crucifixion not only shows the inside of Christ’s body but also his body is upside down. Here is both the grotesque inside-out and upside-down. In an interview Bacon discusses this painting and refers to ‘the great Cimabue Crucifixion’ painted in the thirteenth century. An accompanying illustration to the published interview shows clearly the similarity between the two paintings. Bacon goes on to say that ‘I always think of that as an image – as a worm crawling down the cross’ (Sylvester, 1987, p.14). Worms are creatures of the grotesque lower earthly and bodily stratum associated with death and decay (but also with new life if one is an organic gardener). Bacon’s painting not only shows an upsidedown crucifixion but also an inside-out crucifixion in which Christ seems to give birth to himself in agony, a monstrous alien just like the alien in Ridley Scott’s The Alien. Christ is also hung upside down like a side of beef or bacon in a butcher’s shop. For White (1993, p.169) it is ‘amusing… almost touching that a painter named Bacon should be obsessed with depicting dead meat’. It also ironic that a writer named Giblett should be fascinated with the grotesque lower (and inner) earthly and bodily stratum

Grotesque Body 69

(as giblets are the inner organs of fowl). Both also embrace slime and refuse the sublime and sublimation (for Bacon see White, 1993, pp.161 and 168; for Giblett see Giblett, 1996, chapter 2).

The body without organs The grotesque body of the solid melting into the liquid and living flesh decaying into dead meat is a slimy body whereas the monumental body of strictly delimited mass with a smooth impenetrable façade is a sublimated body. Drawing on and elaborating Bakhtin’s work on the grotesque body, and on Artaud’s, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the body without organs, Stallybrass and White (1986, pp.93–94) argue that: the creation of a sublimated body without smells, without coarse laughter, without organs, separate from the Court and the Church on the one hand and the market square [or place], alehouse, street and fairground on the other – this was the great labour of bourgeois culture… A sublimated body is also separate from the earth, or the -ospheres (biosphere, atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere). The grotesque body is the body of the marketplace, the common body, whereas the sublimated body is the body of the market, or the body on the market, the commodified body. ‘The ‘marketplace’ has become ‘the market’ as Stallybrass and White (1986, p.104) put it succinctly. The sublimated city, and its sublime art and technology, is erected on the surface of the body of the earth without organs. It is removed from the depths of the body of the earth, the grotesque lower earthly stratum (see Giblett, 1996, Figure 1). It is written, or more precisely inscribed, on the recording surfaces made from commodities supplied by the earth, through parchment and paper, to film, tape, disk and hard drive. The organless body for Guattari (1984, p.51) is a tabula rasa, a pure surface of inscription on which the law writes the law (see Chapter 7 below). The body without organs for Patton (1981, p.43) is ‘what remains when the body is stripped of all its organs, pure naked surface, surface of inscription, scene of the theatre of cruelty’. The play of desire and pleasure is staged in this theatre, or more precisely the body without organs produces desire, and the theatre of cruelty is a machine for producing desire, not just staging plays. For Deleuze (1978, p.161) ‘there is


desire as soon as there is a machine or a “Body without Organs”’. Moreover, for Deleuze and Guattari (1981, p.269) ‘it is through the BWO that one desires. There is desire every time there is BWO of one kind or another’. Desire is a superficial productive phenomenon of the body. It is produced by the plays of capitalism across the surface of the body (including its interior ones). It is not a manifestation of the depths of the body, of its living substance. The organless body for Guattari (1984, p.142) ‘can only survive as best it may be oscillating between emptiness and the fullness of a malignant tumour’. An instance to exemplify this is the relationship between the star and the fan. In modern cinema the star is a heavenly body sublimated into the realms of a dead living body. The fan, on the other hand, is a body without organs that oscillates between the emptiness of their collection of memorabilia and mediated experience of appearances or concerts and the fullness of their unmediated experience of live appearances or concerts (see Giblett, 2008b, chapter 7). The body without organs is located in the liminal, twilight zone between life and death. A body without organs for Deleuze and Guattari (1977b, pp.139, 140; see also Deleuze, 2003, pp.39 and 41): is not an empty body stripped of organs, but rather a body into which what serves as organs … distribute themselves in line with crowd phenomena … in the form of molecular multiplicities … Therefore, the body without organs is opposed not so much to organs, as to the organization of organs inasmuch as this organization would constitute an organism. The body without organs is not a dead body, but rather a living one, all the more living, all the more swarming since it threw out the organism and its organization… The full body without organs is a body populated with multiplicities. The theory of a body constructed around organs, Kuriyama (1999, p.263) argues: matured only after Hippocrates, and when it matured the theory was emphatically not … a theory of processes that occur naturally, of themselves. It was a theory of action. Organs perform actions, just as muscles are instruments of the will and agents of the self. Organicism is an instrumentalist view of

Grotesque Body 71

the body, and of the body of the earth. Kuriyama (1999, p.264) goes on to argue that ‘organa were tools – the original meaning of the term – instruments with specific uses. And they presupposed a “user”’. Kuriyama (1999, p.264) concludes that the theory of organism was linked to ‘the idea of the body as an implement’. And to the idea of the mind, soul, self, or will as the wielder of the implement. Artaud’s (1965, p.164; see also pp.59 and 61) concept of the body without organs harks back to the pre-organic body, to the time when the body was without organs, when the body was viscera, or a tree: The time man was a tree without organs or functions But only will And was a tree walking at will Will return. It was, and will return. For the biggest lie ever was to frame man as an organism. The body without organs is a tree, not a machine. Deleuze and Guattari confuse the capitalist body without organs of the machine, of surface (of the earth, the machine, the body) with the ‘pre-capitalist’ body before it had organs, before it was organised, when it was a tree, when it was the body of the earth. In Chinese medicine the body has stems and roots, trunks and branches (Kuriyama, 1999, p.187). The Chinese, Bodde (cited by Kuriyama, 1999, p.191) argues, ‘were apparently much more interested in crops and plants than in animals’ whereas Greek anatomy, Kuriyama (1999, p.191) goes on to argue, ‘revolved around animals’: A major inspiration for inquiry into musculature, moreover, was the desire to illuminate the secrets of animation, to clarify the wonderful capacity for self-movement which made animals, including human animals, distinct from plants. The model for musculature comes from animals. The Chinese sought their model for the body and found their touchstone in plants whereas for the Greeks it was in animals. For Artaud (1965, p.61), ‘there is nothing more useless than an organ’. An organ in physiological terms performs a useful function. An


organ is a vital cog in the modern medical machine of the human body. Yet for Artaud (1965, p.59): The body is the body Alone it stands And in no need of organs, Organism it never is, Organisms are enemies of the body, Organisms are parasites always, Covering parasitic functions. The capitalist body without organs is a living body, but it is a body inscribed by law and wracked by desire on a torture machine like the one in Kafka’s ‘Penal Colony’ as we will see in a later chapter. It is a body positioned to consume representations of other bodies, bodies that are dead living bodies like its own. The capitalist body without organs is a dead living body (see Giblett, 2008b, chapter 4). The dead living body of capital consumes and produces what Brown (1959, p.295) calls ‘the dead life of the body’, his definition of excrement. Money is shit as Freud said. Conversely, shit is money, and as money is dead matter and shit dead living matter, the living life of the body is deadened by money, and capitalism. Sublimation is linked with anality, as Deleuze and Guattari (1977a, p.143) said. There is no sublimation for Brown (1959, p.281) ‘without the projection of the human body into things’. Sublimation for him is ‘a mortification of the body and a sequestration of the life of the body into dead things’. (Brown, 1959, pp.297, 298). Dead things, such as commodities, are imbued with life as in Marx’s theory of the fetishism of commodities. Life becomes associated with the dead life of matter made into dead commodities. Sublimation for Brown (1959, p.295) ‘represents a dying to the body’. The body is drained of life. The once living depths of the body are drained to become the dead surface of private property just as the depths of the swamp were (see Giblett, 1996, chapter 3). The body without organs of capital is not the productive body of capitalism but its consumptive, and consuming body. The body without organs, in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1977a, pp.8, 9 and 15) terms, is ‘unproductive’, ‘non-productive’ and produced as ‘antiproduction’. Desire is productive and associated with machines because machines are bodies without organs made from metal, the body without organs of the earth. Metal is matter extracted and abstracted from the depths of the body of the earth. Metal for Deleuze and Guattari (1986b,

Grotesque Body 73

p.103) is ‘neither a thing nor an organism, but a body without organs’. Metal is thus the raw material for machines, another body without organs. It is hardly surprising that the ideal body for the fascist soldier male was the metallic body without organs of the machine (see Chapter 6 below). It is also hardly surprising that the ideal facial expression for the fascist soldier male was granite facial expressions. At rest the fascist soldier male desired to be hard, cold and impassive like rock; in motion, to be hard, cold and precise like a machine; and in substance to be as hard, cold and intransigent as metal.

5 Monstrous Body of the Slimy Depths

The monstrous body of the slimy depths is associated with the body of a monster lurking in such places. It is the body of the slimy lower strata, of the contiguity between the lower places of the earth and of the body. Unlike the grotesque body, it is not associated with a wide range of bodily functions. It is associated with a narrow range of interstitial places and figurative feminine features. It is associated with the holes and orifices that cross the boundary between inside and outside and with the substances that mix the qualities of wet and dry, the elements of earth and water, and the categories of solid and liquid. The grotesque body crosses gender lines and relates to the lower strata in both genders. It upsets a common human hierarchy of the body. The monstrous body is a feminine body that lurks within the masculinist body as the repressed that returns. It is either a masculinist projection within to be abhorred and feared or it is a feminist construction of the goddess within to be revalued and respected. What Barbara Creed calls ‘the monstrous-feminine’ is ‘what it is about woman that is shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject’. For whom, one might ask? For the masculinist mind, conscious and/or unconscious, one might answer. The monstrous-feminine body of the slimy depths postulates by implication its obverse, its other, the monumental-masculine body of the sublime heights. These bodies are locked in cultural and political contention. And have been for a considerable period of time. Plotting the beginning historically and the extent culturally of this contention is fraught with universalising dangers, an occupational hazard for anyone who enters into any terrain of intellectual endeavour vaguely associated with Jungian archetypes. In such a sweeping gesture, for instance, Creed (1986, p.44) claims that ‘all human societies have a conception of the monstrous-feminine’. All 74

Monstrous Body 75

human societies may have, or may have had, such a conception of ‘woman’ (as distinct from women), though Creed offers no great evidence for this other than to refer to similar sweeping generalisations and cultural universalisations made by Freud and Campbell. All human societies may have, or may have had, such a conception of ‘woman’ but historically the values placed, and the attitudes to women based, on this conception have changed. What it is about woman that is shocking, horrific, and abject, such as her sexual organs and her reproductive ability, have only been denigrated in patriarchal times and cultures. The monstrous-feminine is more precisely the monstrous-maternal as I have argued elsewhere (see Giblett, 1996, p.183) and to which I return below. In matrifocal times and cultures, and in matrifocal sub-cultures today, the maternal is highly valued. This in itself is seen as a threat to patriarchy and marked as shocking, horrific and abject. Patriarchy construes the monstrous in misogynist terms. To construe the monstrous in feminist terms is to revalue and reassert it. Feminism construes the monstrous in matrifocal terms. Now that feminism as a term (though not as a politics) may have reached its use-by-date, the matrifocal may have new legs. Creed invokes Kristeva’s (1982) discussion of the abject which can be defined simply as the mediating category or figure between subject and object that makes both possible (see Giblett, 1996, especially chapter 2). The abject is neither subject nor object, but that out of which both spring and that to which both return. We have already seen in the first chapter that there is no object without a subject, and no subject and object without the subject/object distinction. The abject is the ‘/’ that separates and mediates both subject and object, and makes both possible. The abject is the body in Nietzsche’s terms as discussed in Chapter 1. For Creed (1986, p.49) the abject is ‘that which crosses or threatens to cross the ‘border’. This definition raises the question of the border between what or whom? Creed (1986, p.50) refers to ‘the border between human and inhuman, man [sic] and beast’, and so on. These border-crossings are certainly the stock-in-trade of the horror film. Other borders in other genres and media of horror include those between inside and outside (including the inside and the outside of the body), between the solid and the liquid, between land and water, and so on (see Giblett, 1996). The concept of the border for Creed (1986, pp.48–49) is ‘central to the construction of the monstrous in horror films’, and in other genres of the horror mode or modality, such as literature (see Giblett, 1996). The function of the monstrous in horror films for Creed (1986, p.49) is


‘to bring about an encounter between the symbolic order and that which threatens its stability’. Arguably the monstrous in general creates conflict between the Law of the Father, or patriarchy, or what Creed (1986, p.51) refers to as ‘paternal laws’ and the Body of the Mother, or what Creed (1986, p.51) refers to as ‘maternal authority’, or what Eisler calls gylany, the social structure in which both the sexes were equal (see Giblett, 1996, esp. pp.xi and xii). Creed (1986, p.59) goes on to associate the latter with ‘the Mother-Goddess’ and with ‘the great mother-goddesses’ of what Gimbutas (see Giblett, 1996, pp.196–198) calls ‘Old Europe’.

Grotesque, gargantuan, generous, grateful Angela Carter’s novel, Nights at the Circus, first published in 1984, exemplifies the earthly goddesses and the monstrous-feminine. It centres on the heroine Fevvers who has wings growing from her back and who can fly. She is described as ‘a fabulous bird-woman’ (p.15), as a ‘humpbacked horse’ (p.19) and as ‘a marvellous monster’ (p.160). She is both a fabulous creature and a grotesque monster, the female hunchback of Notre Dame. Or more precisely, she is our lady the hunchback. She earns her living as a trapeze artiste in a circus. She is the star attraction as she is both freak and performer, not only an object of the gaze for gawking and incredulous spectators, but also a subject of performance who requires little apparatus for her gravity- and death-defying stunts. She is a literal reminder of the etymology of the word ‘monstrous’ from the Latin term ‘Monstrum’ meaning ‘something put on show’ (Porter, 2001, p.53). Fevvers is monstrous as she is unnatural and excessive; she is an instance of the monstrous-feminine as she disrupts patriarchal order; and she is also grotesque as she has a gargantuan appetite, but is also generous. She is not greedy and orally sadistic (see Giblett, 2004, chapter 9). One important aspect of the monstrous-feminine is smell, both valuing the sense of smell and enjoying the act of smelling. Both figure prominently in the early pages of Nights at the Circus when the reporter Jack Walser interviews Fevvers in her room after a performance. He knocks from her mantelpiece ‘a writhing snakes’ nest of silk stockings … that introduced a powerful note of stale feet, final ingredient in the highly personal aroma, ‘essence of Fevvers’, that clogged the room. When she got around to it, she might well bottle the smell, and sell it’ (p.9). A grotesque idea indeed! The writhing snakes nest alludes to the Medusa’s head of Greek mythology. Fevvers is a latter day Medusa and

Monstrous Body 77

phallic woman who is perceived as a castrating threat. Her smell also threatens to undo the privileging of sight and to return the body to an intimate connection with the body of the mother, and the body of earth, with both the lower bodily and earthly strata (see Giblett, 1996). Her smell pervades ‘the room, [which] in all, was a mistresspiece of exquisitely feminine squalor, sufficient, in its homely way, to intimidate a young man who had led a less sheltered life than this one’ (p.9). Her room is an urban swamp and a spatial extension and expression of her womb. The womb is the first home, the first homely place and for many men an unhomely place. Another aspect of the grotesque and the monstrous-feminine already alluded to here in this episode is generosity. Fevvers spills champagne into a pot of rouge ‘there to hiss and splutter in a bloody froth. It was impossible to imagine any gesture of hers that did not have that kind of grand, vulgar, careless generosity about it; there was enough of her to go round, and some to spare’ (p.12). Her generosity is tied to her gargantuan appetite. They are two sides of the same coin. Such a gargantuan appetite requires monstrous food which Fevvers finds in ‘hot meat pies with a glutinous ladleful of gravy … ; a Fujiyama of mashed potatoes; a swamp of dried peas cooked up again and served swimming in greenish liquor’ (p.22). This meal is a miniature land of sublime mountains and slimy swamps. It runs the full gamut from the upper heights to the lower depths. Fevvers consumes the earth in miniature; her meal is a microcosm of the earth. She does not consume the earth itself, unlike mining with its gargantuan appetite (see Giblett, 2004, chapter 9): she tucked into this earthiest, coarsest cabbies’ fare with gargantuan enthusiasm. She gorged, she stuffed herself, she spilled gravy on herself, she sucked up peas from the knife; she had a gullet to match her size and table manners of the Elizabethan variety. (p.23) At last ‘her enormous appetite was satisfied’ and ‘the spectacle of her gluttony’ concluded. ‘Gargantuan’ is an intriguing word with an obvious reference to Rabelais’ novel Gargantua. Drawing on chapters 7 and 44 of Gargantua, Bakhtin (1984, pp.459–460) has traced how the word ‘gargantua’ ‘in spanish … means the throat. The Provencal tongue has the word “gargantuan” meaning a glutton’. He goes on to argue that ‘gargantua’ ‘symbolize[s] the gullet, not as a neutral anatomical term but as an abusive-laudatory image: gluttony, swallowing, devouring, banqueting. This is the gaping mouth, the grave-womb,


swallowing and generating’. Fevver’s gluttony is not a greedy, oralsadistic devouring that destroys but a generous life-giving creativity; the tomb-womb gives birth. The ultimate bodily region of the monstrous-feminine and of the grotesque lower bodily stratum, the (un)homely place par excellence is female genitalia. The dastardedly Mr Rosencreutz who tries to imprison and sexually enslave Fevvers construes female genitalia in patriarchal and misogynist terms as ‘the female part, or absence, or atrocious hole, or dreadful chasm, the Abyss, Down Below, the vortex, that sucks everything dreadfully down, down, down where Terror rules …’ (p.77). By contrast, in this spatial metaphysics that valorises the upward and denigrates the downward, the penis, or more precisely the phallus (p.70), the erect or rampant (p.70) penis, ‘aspires upwards … but is dragged downwards’ by and into ‘the ‘orrible orifice’ (p.77). Yet out of this place new life comes as we shall see. Men have a grotesque lower bodily stratum too. Although the penis may aspire in some men’s minds to be always pointing rampantly upwards, it will spend most of its life hanging limply downwards. Besides lower bodily external organs, men also have lower bodily internal organs. In the carnivalesque world of the circus and of Carter’s Nights at the Circus what is internal is externalised, and what is lower is made upper. Inner and outer are reversed, upper and lower are inverted and their metaphysics and politics subverted. Buffo the Clown: mockery of mockeries … wears a wig that does not simulate hair. It is, in fact, a bladder. Think of that. He wears his insides on his outside, and a portion of his most obscene and intimate insides, at that; so that you might think he is bald, he stores his brain in the organ which, conventionally, stores piss. (p.116) Buffo is a piss head in two senses of the word as not only does he wear a bladder on his head, but also he is an alcoholic. Brain and bladder are inverted so that airy thoughts are watery streams; the obscene made into a scene, or into a prop, the unseen seen. Buffo performs what Bakhtin (1984, pp.353 and 370) sees as the characteristic logic of the carnival: the inside out and the upside down. For Bakhtin (1984, p.11): We find here [in the carnival] a characteristic logic, the peculiar logic of the ‘inside out’ ( à l’envers), of the ‘turnabout’, of a continual shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear, of numerous

Monstrous Body 79

parodies and travesties, humiliations, profanations, comic crownings and uncrownings. A clown wearing a bladder on his head is a comic crowning if there ever were one that parodies and profanes the king’s crown. Bakhtin (1984, pp.353 and 397) sees this logic being played out principally in the Harlequin’s somersaults, cartwheels and other movements in which ‘the buttocks [are] persistently trying to take the place of the head and the head that of the buttocks’. Buffo’s (and Carter’s) crowning (excuse the pun) and clowning achievement in having the bladder take the place of the head and vice versa is not only to invert the upper and lower but also simultaneously to reverse the inner and outer. And so subvert the spatial metaphysics and politics of patriarchy. The comic inversion of the upper and lower is also found in the fourteenth century middle-English poem Piers Plowman. In a rogue’s gallery of the seven deadly sins gluttony is described as having: … y-globbed · a galoun an a gille. His guttis gunne to gothely · as two gredy sowes; He pissed a potel · in a pater-noster while, And blew his rounde ruwet · at his rigge-bone ende, That alle that herde that horne · helde her nose after, And wissheden it had be wexed · with a wispe of firses. In other words in modern English, gluttony gulped down a gallon and a gill until his guts began to gurgle and rumble like two greedy sows. He then pissed four pints in the time it takes to say the Lord’s Prayer and then blew his small, round trumpet at the end of his backbone. All that heard that horn held their noses and wished that it had been waxed with a wisp of furze. Farting means that the arsehole does not merely become the mouth in a spatial inversion of top and bottom, but that it also becomes an instrument to emit sounds and smells. The mouth that takes in becomes the arsehole that gives out, and the mouth that emits sounds becomes the arsehole that also emits sound. If farting is the mouth of the arsehole blowing its own trumpet, then belching is the mouth blowing its own trumpet too. Both farting and belching are grotesque; both are noise rather than speech; both are emissions of air or gas; both are not sublime speech but slimy miasma. Another example of the arsehole becoming a mouth is the birthday party scene in John Waters’ infamous film Pink Flamingos where a body artist makes his


anus open and close like a mouth. Rather than mouthing obscenities, the body is inverted and the obscene mouths off.

The monstrous-maternal If the ultimate bodily region of the monstrous-feminine of the grotesque lower bodily stratum, the (un)homely place par excellence is female genitalia, and if the ultimate logic of the carnival is the substitution of the head by the buttocks and vice versa, giving birth brings both aspects together (as Bakhtin (1984, p.353) noted). Although the head of the newborn infant is not in the place of the buttocks per se, it appears in the place of the mother’s grotesque lower bodily stratum. The buttocks are associated with the uterus and vagina in that misogynist misapprehension of female anatomy that not only confuses procreation with excretion but also conflates their associated organs (and sexuality) into the carry-all category of the cloaca (see Giblett, 1996, pp.82 and 88). A picture is worth a thousand words and Frida Kahlo’s 1932 painting called My birth is no exception (for a colour reproduction see Kettenmann, 2000, p.38). For her biographer, Hayden Herrera (1983, p.157), this painting is ‘one of the most awesome images of childbirth ever made’. Madonna bought this painting for £2.1 million in the 1980s. She uses it as a kind of litmus test of her guest’s squeamishness and embodiness by gauging their reaction to it. If they grimace, they can never be close friends. During an interview recorded in 1990 for the BBC Madonna described what Chedgzoy (1995, p.40) calls ‘her intense emotional investment’ in this painting. ‘She said [that this painting] had come to fulfil the iconic function in her life to which the Catholic images of her childhood were no longer adequate’. Interestingly, the painting includes, and subsumes, a reproduction of a Catholic image. Thereby it also subsumes Catholicism in general within the mythology of the great goddess mother. Chedgzoy goes on to relate how ‘a friend of mine who works with young women in crisis commented that a number of her clients lay claim to a similar fascination with this terrible yet haunting image, circulating reproductions of it among themselves as amulets or fetishes’. Kahlo’s life and work has been fetishised in the commodities of paintings in the art market, as books in the book market, and now as a film in the film market. But it also circulates as a fetish in the noncommodified market place, the unofficial popular place of the grotesque and the monstrous. Just as Kahlo in her self-portraits, to use

Monstrous Body 81

Angela Carter’s (1989, p.9) terms, ‘turned herself into a folkloric artefact’ and ‘turned her appearance into a piece of political theatre’ so do these young women turn her painting of her own birth into the same sort of fetish and into a prop of political theatre. Kahlo’s mother died while Kahlo was painting this work so the shrouded figure of the mother is perhaps a biographical reference to her mother’s death (Merewether, 1990, p.15). It could also represent the fact that out of death new life springs and that many mothers die in giving birth. It could signify that Kahlo was unable to imagine or represent (much less remember) what her mother looked like at the moment when she gave birth to her. Interestingly, Kahlo represents herself as child rather than as newborn baby, or even her own face at the time of painting (Merewether, 1990, p.15). Perhaps she represents herself as she is depicted in the first photograph she had seen of herself. She seems concerned to mark the newborn figure autobiographically as the title emphasises. This is not the birth of anyone, or a generalised birth scene, but a specific event in time and space. This painting shows a moment that can only be imagined, the moment of one’s own birth. This moment is not remembered (by and large) by the offspring. It is a scene that it is not depicted from the point of view of the baby, nor of the mother, but from a god-like point of view looking down on mother and child. This mirrors and transcends the picture of the Virgin of Sorrows hanging on the wall. This is another reference to death as the Virgin of Sorrows (or Mater Dolorosa) is mourning the death of her son Jesus. Her name is associated with his crucifixion as he carried his cross along the Via Dolorosa. Yet out of death and sorrow, new life comes. According to Herrera (1983, p.123) ‘a favorite theme’ for Kahlo was ‘life-death duality and the fertilization of life by death’. Likewise for Kettenmann (2000, p.25) ‘her favorite subject’ is ‘the birth of new life through death’. Life and death are a duality, but not a dualism. Rather, they are a holism and part of the same cycle, ‘the principle of duality in unity’ as Kettenmann (2000, p.72) puts it. Kahlo, for Herrera (1983, pp.323 and 327; see also pp.430 and 439), ‘always … presents death as part of the cycle of life’ as well as ‘procreation as part of the cycle of life’. Kettenmann (2000, p.76) concludes that ‘life and death are incorporated equally into the artist’s harmonious conception of the world’ where conception is not cerebral but procreative. Death is a part of life, whereas monstrosity is counter to life. Monstrosity, for Canguilhem (2005, p.188), ‘not death, is the countervalue to life’. This is not to say that the monster is valueless or dead,


but rather, as for Canguilhem (2005, p.188), it is ‘the living being of negative value’ and this value is that of a foil. Like Madonna’s squeamish guests, the monstrous threatens not only the stability of the symbolic order but also its child and progenitor the semiotic subject – the viewer, the reader, the maker of meaning. For Creed (1986, p.64) the viewing subject confronted by what she calls ‘the sight of the monstrous’ is ‘put into crisis – boundaries, designed to keep the abject at bay, threaten to disintegrate, collapse’. The dyke against the flood, the bulwark against the tide, the lock against the canal all threaten to crumble and collapse and swamp the subject with the monstrousmaternal and the slimy depths of the body and the earth.

Orally sadistic alien This threat, as Creed (1986, p.54) goes on to argue, is often and archetypically figured in oral-sadistic terms. The monster is orally sadistic as Creed (1986, p.54) argues in relation to the monster in Alien with its ‘devouring jaws’ and ‘voracious maw’ as Bundtzen (20001, p.102) and Creed (1986, p.63) put it. On the one hand, the maternal threatens the stability of the paternal and on the other the paternal tries to master the maternal. One of the ways in which the symbolic order ties to master the maternal is by appropriating this function either in a fantasy of men giving birth or in a technology in which men produce new life out of dead matter, or both, a technology that gives birth. As ‘the male lacks the organs of parturition and nutrition’, as Zoë Sofoulis (1983, p.8) puts it, he suffers from what she elsewhere calls ‘womb envy’, from ‘envy of feminine reproductive and nutritive organs’ and from ‘the femininity complex’ (Sofia, 1990, pp.136 and 137; 1992, p.391, n.7; see also Doane, 1990, pp.167–170). Womb envy manifests in what she (1983, pp.8 and 9) calls ‘Man’s technological projects (viz., the emulation of female reproductivity through machines)’ and in what she sees as ‘the complementarity of male anatomy and masculinist technology’ to the point that for her ‘every technology is a reproductive technology’ (Sofia, 1984, p.48 her emphasis). Both Sofoulis and Creed turn to the 1979 Ridley Scott film Alien to argue and illustrate their case (see also Bundtzen, 2000, pp.101–109 for 1

This article about monstrous mothers refers to Grendel as one such monstrous mother from the Old English Beowulf. Yet Grendel is a male monster and it is Grendel’s mother who is obviously the monstrous mother. Both are marsh monsters as I have argued elsewhere (see Giblett, 1996, pp.182–183).

Monstrous Body 83

a reading of both Alien and Aliens). Creed (1986, p.63) states that ‘there is an attempt in Alien to appropriate the procreative function of the mother, to represent a man giving birth’. There is also an attempt in the film to appropriate this function in the technology depicted in the film such as the spaceships, the pods and the computer called ‘Mother’. As Sofoulis (1983, p.13; see also Sofia, 1989, p.6) argues in her reading of this film, ‘Mother’s central console is shown as a cosy spherical container, the brain-womb’. The immaculately conceived and born computer in Alien is the technological analogue of the spherically shaped cranium and womb. The womb, though, is displaced upwardly and sublimated technologically into the brain away from the messy and monstrous process of birth, at least as it is portrayed in this film. The ‘rapacious monster’ in Alien, as Sofia (1989, online) calls it, orally inseminates Kane in a strange take on procreation. In fact, it is an inversion of insemination that displaces penetration and insemination upwards (see Giblett, 2004, chapter 10). This ‘polymorphous beast’, as Sofia (1989, online) goes on to describe it: Leaps from its egg as an orally raping penis-breast, to be succeeded by its second stage, a toothed penis (penis dentatus) which gnaws its way out of its surrogate (male) mother’s chest, and transforms into a penis-headed, double-jawed excremental monster that looks like space machinery and chews up most of the crew. This penis breast is what Sofoulis (1983, p.3; see also Sofia, 1992, p.380) calls ‘an undecidable fetish object’. It is both an impossible object and impassible abject, both sublime and slime, in a word s(ub)lime. This penis breast is both subject or agent of oral consumption and its object as later she refers to it as ‘this penis dentatus (toothed penis), … both faeces and breast’ (Sofoulis, 1983, p.18; see also Sofia, 1992, p.381). The monster is a dickhead, but also turd, tit and tooth. The monster is an anal-sadistic product, and an oral-sadistic object and consumer. In appropriating birth in metaphors and technology ‘man’ does not give birth through the grotesque lower bodily stratum but through the monumental upper bodily stratum. The lower is displaced upwards and desublimated into the monstrous (metaphor of the) penis-breast. This is an unthinkable metaphor, a metaphor of the unthinkable, what Sofoulis (1983, p.4) calls ‘a metaphor of metaphoricity’.


This upwards displacement contrasts with the lower emplacement of the Harlequin’s somersault, Buffo’s piss head, Gluttony’s fart trumpet and Pink Flamingo’s body artist in which the upper is brought low, the brain placed in the bladder, and the head and mouth put in the place of the arse, and arsehole. Both displacement upwards and emplacement downwards into monstrous metaphors involve inversion and can entail desublimation, but in the former case the movement is up and away from the grotesque lower bodily and earthly strata whereas with the latter the movement is down into it. Inversion is not necessarily subversion. Turning things upside down does not subvert per se the hierarchical order that privileges upper over lower, outside over inside, brain over bladder, head over arse, mouth over arsehole, dryland over wetland. Displacing the lower upwards, sublimating or desublimating it in the process, represses what is below whereas emplacing the upper downwards brings the high and mighty low and subverts the system that privileges upper over lower. The penis-breast combines procreative and nutritive functions, phallic and spherical forms, inseminating and nurturing processes, paternal and maternal principles in the production of white liquids and the production and maintenance of new life. Sofoulis (1983, p.5) associates the penis breast in Alien with the uroboros, ‘the serpent with its tail in its mouth’. Sofoulis is drawing on the work of Erich Neumann (1954, p.10) for whom the uroboros: slays, weds and impregnates itself. It is man and woman, begetting and conceiving, devouring and giving birth, active and passive, above and below, at once. The uroboros takes itself into its own mouth and gives birth to itself out of its own mouth. It is the original unity of giving birth and taking life, of nutrition and parturition, of living and dying, masculine and feminine, upper and lower bodily and earthly strata (see Neumann, 1954, pp.13, 19 and 24). Yet in Alien the lower is displaced into the upper and the uroboric is associated with and appropriated by the masculine. In Neumann’s (1954, p.22) terms, ‘the paternal side [of the uroboros which] procreates without the maternal womb’ is privileged over ‘the maternal side of the uroboros [which] gives birth without procreation’. The maternal uroboros for Neumann (1954, p.27) is ‘the source of food and satisfaction’ and is associated with ‘the alimentary canal’, or it at least with its upper entry via the mouth and not with its lower exit via the anus. The

Monstrous Body 85

paternal uroboros is the site of waste and sadism and is associated with the excremental end of the alimentary canal. The maternal uroboros is associated with birth and life, the paternal uroboros, with decay and death (Neumann, 1954, p.45). Both are necessary: no death without life, but no new life without death. The uroboros symbolises the cycle or wheel of life and death (Neumann, 1954, pp.39 and 45). In Alien Kane unwillingly dies to give birth to the new life of the monster. Kane is impregnated through his mouth but gives birth, not via his alimentary canal at either end, but through his chest or breast which lacks the milk to suckle and nurture the monster. Kane gives birth neither through his head (as a Bachelor Birth from a Bachelor Machine in the upper echelons) nor through his anus (at the excremental lower end of the alimentary canal) though the monsters itself is excremental. For Sofoulis (1983, pp.18–19; see also 1991, p.17) Alien: in addition to the usual sublimated representations of masculine reproductive capacity, exemplified in biomechanical and brainwomb images, … presents us with a desublimated male birth fantasy, in which the sad truths of male anatomy cannot be overlooked. For all of his intellectual and mechanical generative powers, Man lacks the organs of parturition. He animates the materials he consumes with his own bodily life, and does so giving birth to unnatural children… the film fulfils the masculinist wish for excremental self-replication without the aid of women. And without the aid of ‘nature’ I would add, without both the body of the mother and the body of the earth. The film has two contrasting figures of upward displacement: first, sublimation into the brain-womb of ‘Mother’, and secondly, desublimation into the breast-womb of Kane. The first feeds on inorganic data and gives birth to commands, communication and control, the second feeds on organic matter and gives birth to the oral-sadistic monster. If the monster represents the fulfilment of the wish for excremental selfreplication without the aid of women and ‘nature’, the film also shows the consequences of doing so as the alien is an oral sadistic monster that consumes everything it can get its hands on and teeth stuck into. The monster, and monstrous, perform the useful function of both critiquing the dominant order as well as being its child (see Giblett, 1996, p.192). Part of the fascination with the monstrous, and the monstrous-feminine, is its liminal crossing of boundaries, its transgression of the law. Both are a


threat to the Law of the Father, and to the patriarchal body, especially as embodied in the fascist body as we shall in the following chapter.

Sky gods, earth goddesses The Law of the Father is underwritten by the sky gods of Hellenic Greek mythology; the Body of the Mother is embodied in the earthgoddesses of pre-Hellenic Greek mythology. In patriarchal Greek mythology Zeus is the sky god, ‘or rather of the phenomena of the sky or, more accurately, of those of the atmosphere’, such as thunder and lightning (Rose, 1928, p.47; see also Hammond and Scullard, 1970, pp.1146–1147). Zeus is thus the god of what is seen in modern terms as ‘electrical phenomena’ (Rose, 1928, p.48). Zeus is thus the god of the electromagnetosphere, of spectrum and of orbital extraterrestrial space. Zeus, in short, is the god of telecommunications. It is hardly surprising for a telco, or internet company, to call itself Zeus. One has done so, or at least a computer hardware and software wholesaler has done so as there is a company in Perth called ‘Zeus Technology’. Zeus is the god of the sublime heights. Zeus is ‘enthroned on mountains; Olympus is a pre-Greek word signifying ‘mountain’; and among other peoples also the thunder-god became the supreme god (Hammond and Scullard, 1970, p.1146). The hypermodern Zeus of communication technologies is enthroned on the artificial Olympus of orbital extra-terrestrial space and is a thunder-andlightning god who rules over the electromagnetosphere (see Giblett, 2008). Zeus is also the god of the household. Similarly the hypermodern Zeus of communication technologies is the god of the hypermodern earth household of a networked world. He escaped Poseidon’s fate of being eaten by his father, Kronos, as he ‘was hidden in a cave’. Zeus escapes time just as communication technologies transcend time (see Giblett, 2008b). But he only did so by first taking refuge in the earth as communication technologies such as satellites can only transcend time by taking materials from the earth and by taking off from the earth. Zeus is the god of sublime communication technologies who rules ‘by the terror of his thunderbolt’ (Spretnak, 1992, p.65). Zeus’ brother Hades is the ‘lord of the lower world’ (Hammond and Scullard, p.484). Hades is the god of the nether world, the underworld, the grotesque lower bodily and earthly strata construed in patriarchal terms (Giblett, 1996, chapter 6). Zeus is the god of the sky, of heavenly bodies, of the star, the sublime, of mountains, of the airy heights above the earth, the place of the dead living. Hades is the god of the under-

Monstrous Body 87

world, of the fan, of hellish bodies, slime, of wetland, of the depths of the earth, the place of the dead (see Giblett, 2008b). It is important, however, to distinguish between the dead living of the star who dwells in the Elysian Fields where ‘all is perfect happiness … and no one ever dies’ (Rose, 1928, p.80) because everyone is already dead as with the star, the cinema, the car and the city, and the dead living of the fan who dwells in the Plain of Asphodel ‘living a tasteless and colourless life … the merest shadows of living men … lacking the essentials of real vigorous life’ (Rose, 1928, p.79). Poseidon completes the trinity of Greek sky gods as he is the third son of Kronos and the other brother to Hades and Zeus. He is the Greek sea-god of earthquakes and water (Rose, 1928, p.63). His name is usually interpreted as ‘Husband of earth’ or ‘husband of the earthgoddess’ or ‘Lord of Earth’ (Hammond and Scullard, pp.866–867). He is the son of Kronos (time) and he is swallowed and spewed up by his father so he is an object of oral incorporation and regurgitation. Perhaps this is the first myth of father-son consumption. According to Homer, Poseidon is the younger brother of Zeus. Zeus is the god of the electromagnetosphere, the god of spectrum, the god of blue sky extraterrestrial mining whereas Poseidon is the god of black earth terrestrial mining. Zeus is the god of aerial or ethereal mining, whereas Poseidon is the god of solid or terrestrial mining. Poseidon is the god of mining, miners and monstrous, oral-sadistic mining machines that eat the earth (see Giblett, 2004, chapter 9). Poseidon is the god of the sea, of earthquakes and water, of mining and miners including media magnates and their political mates who are mining spectrum. Mining uses the artificial earthquakes of explosions to break up the earth for mineral wealth and water to flush it out. Not surprisingly, Poseidon is ‘commonly the father of strong, but rough and brutal men, or monsters’ (Hammond and Scullard, p.867). The goddesses are much more people- and environmentally-friendly. Artemis is ‘the Goddess of untamed nature’ (Spretnak, 1992, p.75), ‘the Lady of Wild Things’ (Rose, 1928, pp.112, 113). As the Goddess of the Moon she is a ‘light-bearer’ and ‘at home in the night’ (Bolen, 1984, pp.46 and 48, 49). She is not scared of the dark, and the dark is not unhomely and uncanny for her. It is not the haunt of terrifying and orally sadistic monsters, but of horrifying and nurturing mothers. Artemis is the Goddess of the electromagnetosphere for currents and sparks of energy come from her and circulate through all things like ether (Spretnak, 1992, p.80). Yet rather than a disembodied,


denigratory ether, Artemis is like the Chinese chi, the energy that pervades all things. The goddess Themis is ‘the force that binds all people together’ (Spretnak, 1992, p.61). Her name means literally ‘Sky married Earth’ (Rose, 1928, p.51), or Zeus married to Gaia. Rather than the sky being divorced from the earth, and the sky gods being divorced from the earth goddesses, the two would be married together (see Giblett, 2004). Rather than the sublime divorced from the slime, the two would be united in the s(ub)lime (see Giblett, 1996, chapter 2). Rather than the clean and shiny goods, and gods, installed on the mountains and removed from the dirty and slimy bads, and goddesses, living in the swamps, the two would be joined together. Rather than obeying the divisive law of the father, the cohesive body of the mother is a gylanic principle. The goddess Persephone is ‘the Grain-Maiden’, the daughter of Demeter, ‘the Grain-Mother, the giver of crops’ (Spretnak, 1992, p.105) and of new life in general coming out of death and the earth. Rather than the dead underworld of Hades, in the living underworld of Demeter new life springs. Instead of the patriarchal Persephone ‘who was carried off to the underworld and forced to become the bride of Hades’ (Spretnak, 1992, p.105; see Bolen, 1984, pp.169–171; Bullfinch, 1993, pp.64–71), the matrifocal Persephone chooses to go into the underworld and redeem the dead, and the dead living of the star and the fan. Rather than Zeus, the god of the rainbow spectrum, Demeter’s and Persephone’s embrace radiates ‘rainbow auras of love and protection’ (Spretnak, 1992, p.113). The heavens are Mt Olympus on which the patriarchal gods reside and the earth is the great mother of matrifocal goddesses. Zeus, the sky-god, Poseidon, the sea-god, and Hades, the underworld-god, ‘hold the earth in common’ (Rose, 1928, p.49). The earth is the commons, or should be. The earth deity is Gaia, the Goddess of the Earth. Rather than the orally sadistic and monstrous machines that consume with greed and without gratitude (see Giblett, 2004), Gaia is the Goddess, not only of the earth as a whole, but also of particular areas of earth. She is the Goddess of place. Rose (1928, p.20) argues that: It is unlikely that she was, to begin with at least, anything so huge as the planet Earth in general; rather was she the particular piece of earth (farm, group of farms, or territory of a petty state) with which the particular worshipper or worshippers were acquainted; or, still

Monstrous Body 89

more likely, the power residing in the patch of ground which made it produce all manner of plants. Gaia is the goddess of local place before she is the goddess of global space. We live in both; both are our home. We are in symbiosis with her, either masterfully parasitic or mutually sustainable. Gaia ‘unceasingly manifested gifts on Her surface and accepted the dead into Her body (Spretnak, 1992, pp. 48, 49). And still does so. She is not the coded, cyborg Gaia of James Lovelock (see Haraway 1995, pp.xiii, xiv; see also Dyens, 2001, p.49), but Gaia who is our mother beyond mere metaphor (see Giblett, 2004, chapter 9). Rather than the distant Olympian gods in the heavens who are removed and ‘up there’ (Spretnak, 1992, p.18), the close Great Goddess of the earth is near and ‘down here’. Rather than the sky gods underpinning the mythology of technology, the earth goddesses support earth-home economics (see Giblett, 2004). Rather than sublime communication technologies that sublimate solid matter and transcend the earth (see Giblett, 2008b), panentheist communication is both immanent and holistic. ‘The Goddess’ for Spretnak (1992, pp.xi–xii) is ‘a potent metaphor for both the immanence of creativity in the universe and the transcendence that is the larger reality, the sacred whole’. The Goddess is the figure of and for the global commons of the ecosphere, the earthly household.

6 Fascist Body of the War-Machine

The modern western body as machine is not confined to medicine but also operates politically as Foucault argues (and as we saw previously) in the neo-classical book of ‘Man the Machine’ beginning with Descartes and la Mettrie in the seventeenth century. The body machine also operates politically, and aesthetically, in the artistic manifestos and work of the Italian Futurists in the early twentieth century (Benthall, 1976, p.55) and the Italian and German fascists in the 1930s and 1940s. Walter Benjamin (and Scholem, 1992, p.203; Benjamin, 1994, p.544) described an actor who portrayed Nazis in films: ‘his posture copies that of Hitler down to the last detail, and his bull neck perfectly complements the barrel of a revolver’. This ideal fascist body as warmachine is still very much with us. Fascism (either in its Italian or Nazi German manifestations in the 1930s and 40s) cannot simply be relegated to the dustbin of history as either the whipping boy of the left or the bad dream of the right. It is the boy’s own wetdaydream of the solid mass and rugged surface of the body and the earth (see Giblett, 1996, p.115). Since, as Virilio (1986, p.117) puts it, ‘fascism never died it does not need to be reborn… Fascism is alive,’ and well, in, amongst other places, the body, the gym and environmental management. The body is the vehicle and vector by which fascism sends its message to us in the present and ensures its survival. The most fundamental goal of the Nazis for Dyens (2001, p.67) was to ‘disseminate Nazi ideology through time and history’. It means to do so was not so much in the monumentalism of fascist art, film, sculpture and architecture or the militarism of fascist politics but in fascist politics of the human body either in ethnic (Jews and Gypsies), homosexual and political cleansing or in eugenicism. Whereas the first two were failures, the fascist politics of the body lives on in survivors of the holocaust and 90

Fascist Body 91

the search for their surviving oppressors. It also lives on in the eugenicist project of biotechnology. The fascists constituted the body as the communication and transportation technology – the vehicle – by which to communicate their ideology through time and across space (given that many holocaust survivors and exterminators turn up in Australia). Fascism lives on in the militarisation of the body. Fascism also began with the militarisation of the body. The fascist body is a militarised body. From machine body to militarised body there is a direct line of descent. The fascist body for Mangan (2000, p.1) was ‘crucial to fascism’. The fascist body is what he earlier calls ‘the martial male body’ which is both bodily reality and ‘a fascist political symbol’ (Mangan, 1999, p.xi). Fascism for him is not only ‘inseparable from militarism’ but is also embodied in ‘the formalized muscular male body … honed by hard exercise’. What Hoberman (1984, p.105; see also pp.95–104) calls ‘the cult of hardness’ was for him ‘a specifically fascist style’. The official high, public art of the fascist hard body was sculpture. The supreme sculptor of the fascist body was Arno Breker whose Fascist Warriors (or ‘Naked Supermen’) were, as Mangan (1999, p.13) puts it later, ‘hardened men … whose steely will was made flesh through iron muscle, cold expression, calm gaze’ and who were, in the words of George Mosse, ‘brutal in their monumentality’ (cited by Mangan, 1999, p.124; see also p.139; 2000, p.15 and van der Will, 1990, pp.31 and 46). The fascist monumental body is at the opposite end of the political and aesthetic spectrum to the grotesque monstrous body.

Maculinist, monumental, machinic, metallic, muscular In his two-volume study Male Fantasies Klaus Theweleit (1987, 1989) argues that what he calls ‘the fascist soldier male’ desires a cold, hard metallic body with an impenetrable, reflective surface like a shiny machine. This machinic body would protect and maintain the ego against incursions from without and repel all attempts at penetrating its armour. This body is also basically the craggy, mountainous body of body-building, of bulky, massive muscles, of rock-like hardness and rigid strength, of rugged, extensive surface. This body is, in short a sublim(at)ed body as it transcends and transforms the depths below – the grotesque lower bodily (and earthly) strata – into the heights above – the monumental upper bodily (and earthly) strata (see Giblett, 1996, chapter 2). The fascists inherited and elaborated a masculinist and western poetics of the body that valorised the hard over the soft, muscle over


fat, firmness over flab, the powerful over the disempowered. For Kuriyama (1999, p.141) ‘the difference between firm bodies and soft bodies was the divide between rulers and slaves’. And fascists were rulers, if not by birth at least by right, or might, by muscle. The hard, muscular body is a particularly western fetish as Kuriyama (1999, pp.111–151) demonstrates extensively. He traces its birth from classical Greek art (fifth century BCE) through the Renaissance and ‘beyond’, but not much further, certainly not to the twentieth century. ‘The European muscular body’ (p.112) was expressive of ‘the Western preoccupation with muscle’ (p.116) not shared by the Chinese (pp.111–112) whose traditional medicine expressed in acupuncture ignored, or failed to observe, muscle. This preoccupation not only gave rise to a particular sort of body, but also produced a specific sense of self and identity. The rise of the preoccupation with muscles, Kuriyama (1999, p.144) suggests, is: inextricably intertwined with the emergence of a particular conception of personhood. Specifically, in tracing the crystallization of the concept of muscle, we are also, and not coincidentally, tracing the crystallization of a sense of an autonomous will. Interest in the muscularity of the body was inseparable from a preoccupation with the agency of the self (my emphasis). Similarly, in tracing the crystallization of the concept of muscle we are also poetically tracing the crystallization of a sense of an autonomous will for we are tracing the crystallization of a soft, fluid body into a hard, phallic one. Muscles are instruments of an autonomous will, the will to power; muscles are agents of the self. Kuriyama (1999, p.149) concludes that ‘the obsession with muscles reflected the birth of a new experience of embodied life and an altered perception of the person’ different from the Chinese experience of embodied life and the person (as we shall see in a later chapter). Fascists inherited and elaborated this fetishisation of muscle, this crystallization of the body. In their foreword to volume two of Theweleit’s study, Jessica Benjamin and Anson Rabinbach (1989, p.xix) argue that ‘fascism is an extreme example of the political polarisation of gender’ with: two basic types of bodies [which] exemplify the corporeal metaphysics at the heart of the fascist perception: the soft, fluid, and ultimately liquid female body which is a quintessentially negative ‘Other’ lurking inside the male body … [and] the hard, organised,

Fascist Body 93

phallic body devoid of all internal viscera which finds its apotheosis [its supreme, divine expression] in the machine. The essential characteristic of the machine for Michel de Certeau (1986, p.166) is that it is ‘male’. The machine is male obviously not in the biological sense as it is not an organism, nor merely in the gendered sense of being masculine, but in the cultural sense of displaying male physical, biological, even hormonal characteristics (testosteronal). It is no accident that some men call their penis a tool. The tool is the first machine, and rather than the hand being the first machine, it is the hand on the tool that constitutes the first machine, or perhaps constitutes the first Bachelor Machine, but more of that anon. Fascism not only has two types of human body but also two types of the body of the earth. Ernst von Salomon was the poet laureate of both bodies: We lay in the sand, chins propped on angled left arms, nestled against the ground, heads raised to spy out a distant goal. Side by side our bodies lay, row upon row anticipating the signal. Jump! – and the body tensed, left legs too were suddenly sharply angled, chests lifted easily from the sand, every fiber, pressed forward. Up! March! March! – and our muscles tensed again, the earth sank and slid away behind us, our bodies were pointed arrows storming forward. Silently the ranks advanced, each man quite alone. Down! And suddenly now the earth swelled and breathed; where before a flat surface had extended beneath our stamping feet, waves and folds now grew, embracing and giving cover to our bodies as they crashed down. Our lungs labored and our eyes sought the target once more. Again the ranks worked their way forward, and yet again; but now the forest’s edge was close and there were snipers in the trees. Every artery surged with fire as we prepared to storm. Then the signal, two notes only, brazenly dancing: the infantry signal to advance. All our thinking now dropped like useless ballast. Out bodies were light and wind-whipped from behind. Now the charge became a tearing pleasure, the earth smooth and sloping toward our goal, one long, unobstructed pathway. Now we were upon them, breath gathering in our breast, the broken panting of a moment earlier growing to a fearsome scream, every mouth stretched wide, our cheer exploding from blood and bones, hammering into the air in a raw, howling crescendo; now we ourselves were the storm, we were the force unstoppable, crushing, thrust and power, breaking to the forest’s edge, trampling bushes and roots to explode against the


enemy. We met no resistance as we ran tumbling far beyond our target, laughing and possessed and intoxicated by this unbridled force, till we stopped, a little, ashamed – for after all, our target was imaginary – and tried quickly to collect ourselves, a little shocked at the ease of our victory – and returned, abashed to the order of the ranks. (cited in Theweleit, 1989, pp.176–177) The earth in the beginning of this passage is a protecting mother. ‘The body of the earth,’ as Theweleit (p.177) comments on this passage, is ‘a living body’ that ‘swells and breathes’. but ‘the earth subsequently becomes subjugated territory’. The body of the fascist soldier is not part of this body of the earth. His body to begin with is angular, his arms and legs are angled and propped against the earth even though it nestles him. He does not nestle into it. The fascist soldier makes contact with the earth, not to engage with it, but to use it for protection and surveillance. The fascist soldier is not interested in the earth here, below him, but in the distance, over there. The fascist soldier can be contrasted with the ‘normal,’ non-fascist soldier of Erich Maria Remarque’s (1929, 1994, p.39) All quiet on the western front with its paean to the earth (no wonder the Nazis burned the book): The earth is more important to the soldier than to anybody else. When he presses himself to the earth, long and violently, when he urges himself deep into it with his case and with his limbs, under fire and with the fear of death upon him, then the earth is his only friend, his brother, his mother, he groans out his terror and screams into its silence and safety, the earth absorbs it all and gives him another ten seconds of life, ten seconds to run, then takes hold of him again – sometimes forever. Earth – earth – earth – ! Earth with your ridges and holes and hollows into which a man can throw himself, where a man can hide! Earth – in the agony of terror, the explosion of annihilation, in the death-roar of the shell-bursts you gave us the massive resurgence of reconquered life. The madness, the tempest of an existence that had practically been torn to shreds flowed back from you into our hands, and so we burrowed deep into you for safety, and in the speechless fear and relief of having survived the moment, our mouths bit deeply into you! Although there is an overtone of rape and sadism here, there is also reciprocity and gratitude. The soldier takes, but is grateful for what is given, whereas the fascist soldier takes and gives no gratitude.

Fascist Body 95

In von Salomon’s account, at the command to advance and attack the body of the fascist soldier is transformed from a set of angles to a projectile, a weapon, an arrow, hurled and hurtled against his or its target. The earth slips away below him as he becomes erect, sharp and loses contact with its surface except through his feet. The surface of his body that had been in contact with the earth is now erected perpendicularly above and its surface falls away below. Its surface become depths, the surface that had nestled him like Remarque’s soldier now becomes folds and hollows that he could use for cover when he needs, when his body comes crashing into and against it. The angular motionless limbs of the soldier’s body is transformed into a machine, an internal combustion engine through which fire and heat surge containing and controlling an explosion but ready to explode into action like a storm, an electromagnetic phenomenon. When the command to charge comes the application of heat to base organic matter alchemically sublimates the body of the soldier into air, light and windwhipped. The charge is an act of rape tearing through the smooth earth down a long vaginal passage sloping towards the soldiers’ goal, a gang rape. When they are upon the enemy the pent up, raging fire in their belly explodes forth in a terrifying scream in which they become the storm, they are the storm. No longer machine, no longer a set of angular limbs or an idling internal combustion engine, they have become the explosion in the engine exploding against the enemy. No longer a weapon they have become the bullet, the grenade to explode against the target. But alas the target is imaginary; the whole event and experience a sham; the gang rape, a group jerking off; the fighting machine, an act of masturbation in which limbs are not pistons but just limbs; the battle is a Bachelor Birth from a Bachelor Machine.

Bachelor machines for a bachelor birth Theweleit (1987, p.330n; see also p.315) describes Bachelor Births from Bachelor Machines as ‘attempts to create a new reality by circumventing the female body – to engender the world from the brain’. The Bachelor Birth from a Bachelor Machine is a brainchild (see Sofia, 1992, p.380). It is what Theweleit (1989, p.127; see also Giblett, 1996, Figure 1) later calls ‘cerebral parthogenesis (the masculine form of the virgin birth)’. The first brainchild, and the first Bachelor Birth from a Bachelor Machine, was the birth of Pallas Athene from the head of Zeus (see Rose, 1928, pp.50 and 108; Theweleit, 1987, p.315). Or more precisely, Zeus swallowed Athena’s


mother Metis (wisdom, good counsel) whilst she was pregnant and then gave birth to Athena from his head. Commenting on this myth Rose (1928, p.50) argues that ‘plainly, we have here a very odd combination, the ancient and savage myth of swallowing being blended with what seems to be a sort of allegory; the chief god has Wisdom always within him’. Not only that but the chief male god has swallowed womanly wisdom and a pregnant woman in order to give birth himself, not from his grotesque lower bodily stratum, but from his monumental upper bodily strata, in fact, from the pinnacle of his body, the top of his head. The chief male god appropriates both wisdom and birth, and makes them into his own. Also commenting on this myth Sofia (1989, pp.5–6; see also 1984, p.51; 1991, p.6; 1999; pp.58–59) argues that: in a miracle of upwards displacement which denies the excremental production that usually follows oral consumption, Zeus’ head became a brain-womb from which emerged the goddess Athena, fully grown and fully-armed. Athena is born without labour, growth and nutrition all of which deny the work of women in giving birth and in nurturing and feeding offspring in utero and ex utero. Jump forward about 2000 years to 1910–1914 when a number of Bachelor or ‘Celibate Machines’ appeared in painting and writing, including the body-writing machine in Kafka’s story ‘In the Penal Colony’ (Kafka, 1914/1949; de Certeau, 1984, pp.150–153; 1986, pp.156–167). This machine is described by Deleuze and Guattari (1986a, p.70) as ‘plugged… into a social field with multiple connections’. The first commentator to discuss celibate machines was Michel Carrouges in a book of that title published in 1954. He places the beginning of this fascination in the 1840s with some of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories such as the ‘Gold Bug’ and ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’. Carrouges’ book has never been translated into English, but excerpts from it were translated to accompany an exhibition of Bachelor Machines mounted in Venice in 1975. For Carrouges (1975, p.21) a Bachelor Machine is ‘a fantastic image that transforms love into a technique of death’. As a Bachelor Machine is basically a masturbation machine, it transforms sexuality, not into new life, but into lifelessness. The best example of this I know (as it brings together the car and cinema both of which are Bachelor Machines in their own right) is a scene in Fellini’s film Amarcord in which a

Fascist Body 97

group of adolescent boys jerk off in a bouncing but otherwise motionless car while intoning the names of film stars: Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida. The Bachelor Machine not only transforms love and sex into a technique of death but after it kills, it then tries to destroy dead matter. Ernst von Salomon was the poet laureate not only of both fascist bodies, the human and the earthly, but also of the drive to destruction, the will to annihilation: We smashed our way into startled crowds, raging and shooting and beating and hunting. We drove the Latvians across the fields like frightened hares; we set fire to their houses; buckled their telegraph poles; pulverized their bridges. We hurled the corpses into wells and threw hand grenades after them. Anything that came within our grasp was decimated; we burned whatever we could. We had seen red, and our hearts were emptied of human feelings. At every stage of our journey the earth groaned under the weight of our destruction. Where there had been houses, there was now only rubble and ashes, smouldering woodpiles, ulcers festering on naked terrain. Giant smoke plumes marked our passage across the landscape. We had built a funeral pyre to burn dead matter; but more than this we burned our hopes and longings, codes of civil conduct, the laws and values of civilization, the whole burden of fusty verbiage we carried, our belief in the things and ideas of a time that had rejected us. We withdrew, swaggering, intoxicated and booty-laden. (cited in Theweleit, 1989, pp.386, 387) The soldiers have become a ravening, predatory, hydra-headed monster who constitutes the Latvians as trivial prey. They are not content to herd, hunt, beat, shoot and kill. They also want to obliterate all matter, living and dead, even after the living has died. The body of the earth groans in apocalyptic revulsion at this destruction as suppurating ulcers fester and burst on its surface. The soldiers have made their mark on the surface of the earth, have written signs in the landscape for all to see, even from faraway as the fires of destruction telecommunicate across considerable distance (see Giblett, 2008b, chapter 3). After smashing and burning, nothing seems to be left, but they want to smash and burn some more until nothing of nothing is left. They want to return to the state where God created matter out of nothing. From this scene of rape and pillage they withdraw with what they regard as good matter leaving whatever is left of bad matter (living or dead) behind


intoxicated with their spoils, exhilarated by being literally outlaws, the title of the novel from which this passage is drawn. Unlike God who created heaven and earth out of nothing, the Bachelor Machine transforms matter into nothing. It also gives birth to a brainchild, to a bright idea, to a theory. It even gives birth to oneself in what Susan Bordo (1986, pp.448–453) calls ‘the “father of oneself” fantasy’. Louis Althusser (1984, p.148) recounts how Freud: had to cope with the following situation: to be himself his own father, to construct with his own craftsman’s hands the theoretical space in which to situate his discovery, to weave with thread borrowed intuitively left and right the great net with which to catch in the depths of blind experience the teeming fish of the unconscious, which men call dumb because it speaks even while they sleep. Althusser has Freud appropriating Athena, just as Zeus did because Athena presides over what Bullfinch (1993, p.132) calls ‘the useful and ornamental arts, … such as agriculture and navigation and … spinning, weaving and needlework’. She is the ‘patron of wisdom, arts, and skills’ (Spretnak, 1992, p.97). Out of his theoretical weaving Freud constructs the matrix, the artificial womb, in which to ‘situate’ his ‘discovery’ of the unconscious which is figured as deep, dumb and dark, like an ocean or a swamp full of seething and teeming life. Freud inseminates this matrix, makes himself pregnant with himself, and then gives birth, not to Pallas Athene, but to himself as his own father, and mother. He appropriates wisdom not to give birth to wisdom, nor even to a theory, but to give birth to himself. Theory is merely the matrix, or artificial womb, from which he gives birth to himself. As both father and mother of himself Freud is also his own child. As he is his own parents, they are internalised within himself. Freud calls this internalisation of the parents the super-ego. As a result, and as Norman O. Brown (1959, p.129) argues, through the institution of the super-ego the parents are internalised and man [sic] finally succeeds in becoming father of himself, but at the cost of becoming his own child and keeping his own ego infantile. But in Freud’s case, in his Bachelor Machine for a Bachelor Birth, he has internalised himself as his own parents. Freud or ‘man’ gives birth to himself and becomes not only his own parents but also his own

Fascist Body 99

child in the process. He is thus split between the parental and the infantile, between a parental super-ego and an infantile ego. He is also split between the monumental upper bodily (and earthly) stratum and the grotesque lower bodily (and earthly) stratum. Bachelor Machines for a Bachelor Birth transform and upwardly displace the lower into the upper, and deny and repress the dependence of the upper on the lower. They sublimate solid matter into gaseous nothing (see Giblett, 1996, chapter 2). This applies as much to the human body as machine as to the body of the earth as machine. In this respect the ultimate, and first, Bachelor Machine for a Bachelor Birth is the city. In a section called ‘The City Sublime’ Brown (1985, pp.281–283) argues that: A city reflects the new masculine aggressive psychology of revolt against the female principles of dependence and nature … In the new space of the city, which is always a sacred space, man succeeds for the first time in constructing a new life which is wholly superfluous and wholly sacred. A city is by definition divorced from primary food production, and therefore by definition superfluous… the essence of sublimation is the reification of the superfluoussacred in monumental, enduring form. The city sublimates the grotesque lower earthly stratum of the swamps into the monumental upper earthly strata of skyscrapers. Many cities, such as Perth and St Petersburg, were built on drained marshes and swamps (see Giblett, 1996, chapter 3). A city is a matrix of streets and lots written on the surface of the earth. Out of this weaving, out of this theoretical space, new life springs but a dead kind of half-living life, the dead living (see Giblett, 2004, 2008b).

The militarisation of civilian life Figuring the earth as battle-landscape is by no means confined spatially and temporally to Europe in time of modern warfare. Excess military capacity left over from the Second World War was redeployed against nature, especially in the use of planes and pilots to spray insecticide. In the aftermath of the Second World War the United States’ military engaged in a holocaust against nature, in genocide, or at least ‘specocide’. Contemporaneous with the Cold War against the USSR and the American West (see Davis, 2002) was the Chemical War against pests. The war against pests was a second Pearl Harbour using planes to bomb


insects and weeds. The use of chemicals against humans was outlawed but not against non-humans. The US enacted a terrible displaced revenge against natural ‘aliens’. Both Cold War and Chem War involved and entailed the militarisation of civilian life. Although the US may not strictly be a fascist regime (as it does not have a dictator), it has ‘a cult of personality’ in its heroes, stars and celebrities (see Giblett, 2008b). Fascism is also an aesthetics and politics that aestheticised and militarised civilian life. The US has a militaristic culture from its inception (see Giblett, 2008b). The US not only tested nuclear bombs on its own soil and subjected its own citizens as ‘downwinders’ to nuclear fallout (as we have seen in a previous chapter) but also sprayed its own farms and suburbs with insecticide and subjected its own citizens to toxic chemicals. In doing so the US extended the militarisation of civilian life to include nonhuman life such as insects, other animals and plants by bombing them with pesticides such as DDT. A powerful protest against the use of DDT in the US was voiced in Rachel Carson’s classic environmental book Silent Spring first published in 1962. It is usually read today as an anti-DDT tract and as a green consciousness-raiser. In fact, it is seen as the founding text of the modern environmental movement and as being broadly influential in the latter half of the twentieth century. Former Vice-President and Presidential candidate Al Gore (1994, p.xxv) in his foreword to a reissue of Carson’s classic relates how, ‘in 1992, a panel of distinguished Americans selected Silent Spring as the most influential book of the last fifty years’ (for Carson’s life and work see Lear, 1999). Yet Carson was more than just a nature-lover and accredited expert ecologist. She is what Guattari (1989, pp.131–147) calls a third ecologist who critiqued the whole of capitalist economic power relations and subject formations, including the militarisation of all life. Perhaps more than the expose of chemical abuse, this is what really got up the noses of the chemical corporations. In Silent Spring Carson (1962, p.3) was prepared to confront, and convey, that ‘a grim spectre has crept upon us almost unnoticed’. This grim spectre, whether it be merely the Grim Reaper of death, or a state or corporate cult of death, or both, was the ghost who haunted the battlefields of what Carson (1962, p.7) called ‘man’s war against nature’. Not only the body but also the earth had become a battlefield. The battlefields of the earth were no longer confined or limited to the fields of war. The earth was not only the ground on which the war against nature took place but also the home of the enemy – nature.

Fascist Body 101

The war against nature included for Carson (1962, p.34) ‘our war against insects’ and ‘our simultaneous war against the weeds’. It was also a war against ‘man’ himself for ‘man, however much he may like to pretend to the contrary, is part of nature’ (Carson 1962, p.188). If, as Carson (1962, p.86) puts it, ‘man’s [sic] announced goal’ is ‘the conquest of nature’, then he must also aim to conquer himself in a selfdefeating assault. When ‘he’ mounts what Carson (1962, p.74) calls a ‘chemical assault’ against nature, he mounts a chemical assault against himself for he is a chemical compound, a biogeochemical being. This chemical assault is recent, and a child of industrial capitalism and its technology. Carson (1962, pp.219–220 and 277) relates that: with the dawn of the industrial era the world became a place of continuous, ever-accelerating change, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed. Instead of the natural environment there was rapidly substituted an artificial one composed of new chemical and physical agents, many of them possessing powerful capacities for inducing biological change. Many of these capacities were unknown, or were only known in relation to a specific use or application, and rarely in a broader context, and in combination with other chemical substances. Carson (1962, p.187) relates that: as the tide of chemicals born of the Industrial Age has arisen to engulf our environment, a drastic change has come about in the nature of the most serious public health problems… Today we are concerned with … a hazard we ourselves have introduced into our world as our modern way of life has evolved. Modern industrial technology has produced chemicals that are hazardous not only to the rest of the world but also to humans. ‘Man’, for Carson (1962, p.219) ‘alone of all forms of life, can create cancer-producing substances, which in medical terminology are called carcinogens.’ Pesticides turn not only the landscape but also the human body into a battlefield. What Carson (1962, pp.219, 221 and 242) calls ‘the battle of living things against cancer’ began a long time ago but it reached new heights with ‘that malignant disease [threatening to] strike’ ‘one in every four’ individuals (now one in three) and ‘two out of three families’. Hypermodern medicine has waded, and weighed, into this metaphorical landscape of the body individual and politic to wage war


against disease. Hypermodern medicine fights what Carson (1962, pp.240 and 266) calls ‘battles in the war against disease’ hoping eventually to win ‘the triumphant war against disease’. Hypermodern medicine is militaristic. Post-Second World War medicine is part of the militarisation of civilian life. Post-Second World War natural ‘resource management’ is also part of the same militarisation of civilian life. Carson (1962, p.296) couches the alternatives in the same terms as for her ‘there is a whole battery of armaments available to the forester who is willing to look for permanent solutions that preserve and strengthen the natural relations in the forest’. In seeking to critique the militarism of pesticide spraying she uses the same rhetoric in advancing alternatives and is unwittingly complicit with the militarisation of language. Not only ‘man’ himself but also others are caught up in what Carson (1962, p.94) calls ‘the chemical war’. This war is unwinnable not only because the enemy develops resistance and fights back but also because friends are killed outright. For Carson (1962, p.8) ‘the chemical war is never won, and all life is caught in its violent crossfire’. All life suffers ‘collateral damage’ from ‘friendly fire’. Carson argues that (1962, p.251) ‘we have turned our artillery against our friends’. For Carson, (1962, p.99) ‘the question is whether any civilization can wage war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized’. By doing so we have become more barbarian than the barbarians. The barbarians are not at the gates but already within the walls of the city-del.

The war against nature We have turned our artillery against our insect allies who ‘keep at bay’ what Carson (1962, pp.251 and 246) luridly calls ‘a dark tide of enemies’, a veritable ‘horde’ of insect enemies. Carson employs the metaphor, and raises the spectre, of the barbarian hordes of insects overrunning the ramparts of civilisation and trying to take over the world just as they do in Starship troopers. The war against nature, and the chemical war against insects and weeds, was born out of war. The industry for the production of what Carson (1962, p.16) calls ‘man made or synthetic chemicals with insecticidal properties’ is ‘a child of the Second World War’. The insecticide industry is a Bachelor Birth from a Bachelor Machine. The child went off to fight the war. Modern insecticides for Carson (1962, p.18) are ‘agents of death’. The war against nature, and the chemical war against insects and weeds, was not only borne of war but is also fought like war using the

Fascist Body 103

same technologies, such as planes in aerial spraying. The war against nature was not only fought by military means but also couched in natural terms. Carson likens aerial spraying to rain, albeit synthetic and deadly. Carson (1962, p.12) refers repeatedly to ‘the chemical death rain’, to ‘a rain of chemicals’ (1962, p.89), ‘the death rain of poison’ (1962, p.258) and ‘a rain of poison falling from the skies into the world of wildlife’, (1962, p.87) and tame life too. This rain was not the black rain of pollutants pumped into the air that later fell back to earth to poison plants and animals but the toxic rain of poisons sprayed from planes directly onto plants and animals, including humans. Carson (1962, p.89) relates how ‘one of the first large-scale attacks on the Japanese beetle from the air’ occurred in 1959 in Michigan. Planes were authorised to fly low in a kind of second Pearl Harbour, not in revenge for the first as that had already been inflicted terribly at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but ironically against the Japanese beetle and the houses and other places that harboured it with a twisted sense of poetic justice. In chapter 10 of Silent spring entitled ‘Indiscriminately from the Skies’ Carson (1962, pp.155–172) describes how ‘the abundance of surplus planes after the Second World War’ were used for aerial spraying. These demobilised planes were remobilised in the war against nature in which they ‘showered down’ what a British ecologist (cited by Carson, 1962, p.156) called ‘“an amazing rain of death” upon the surface of the earth’. This rain of poison accumulates and forms what Carson (1962, p.146) calls ‘toxic river water’ with ‘its deathdealing power’. If life-giving rain is poisoned, if poisons are rained, and if rivers run with poison, then we engaged in what Carson, (1962, p.34) called ‘the poisoning of the environment’. The post-Second World War era for Carson (1962, p.174) was, and still is for us, ‘the age of poisons’. Aerial spraying was part of the increasing militarisation of civilian life that characterised the Cold War (see Giblett, 2004, chapters 7 and 9). Fascism institutionalised the militarisation of civilian life and other life, including the life of the earth, during the time of declared or formal war in the Second World War and in the lead-up to it in the aftermath of the First World War. The Cold War heightened and extended the militarisation of all non-military life during a time of undeclared, informal war. In the 1960s ‘the militarisation of American society’ proceeded apace as Rapoport (1968, p.60) argues in his introduction to the Penguin edition of Clausewitz’s On War. The defining feature of this process was the construction of what Rapoport (1968, p.61) calls ‘a permanent and implacable enemy who is everywhere’. If


the enemy is everywhere, then the war has to be fought everywhere. All aspects of life become militarised. The same sort of rhetoric has been employed recently in the ‘war on terror’. This ubiquitous enemy could be reds under the bed, insects on every leaf, drugs on every street corner, or cancer in every body, or terrorists in every neighbourhood, even right next door. All these enemies had to be fought in the Cold War, the Chem War, the war against drugs, the war against cancer and the war against terrorism. Civilian populations for Rapoport (1968, p.62) were not only mobilised as part of the war effort in the age of total war, but also constituted as military targets. He cites in support a US Air Force manual that defines a military target as ‘any person, thing, idea, entity or location selected for destruction’. This definition could include one’s own civilians, one’s own plants and animals and one’s own lands. For Rapoport (1968, p.62), ‘the concept of the battlefield dissolved in twentieth-century war’. Or more precisely, the battlefield was dispersed and extended in twentieth- and twenty-first century war and life to include interior bodily space (as we saw earlier) and extraterrestrial space (see Giblett, 2008b). The battlefield included what the nineteenth-century theorist of war Clausewitz called ‘the inner front of civilian life’. For the twentiethcentury theorist of war Fuller (1961/1992, p.74) the inner front ‘eventually became as important and finally more important than the outer front – the traditional battleground of contending armies’. Instead of the traditional battleground of contenting armies we have the hypermodern battleground of contending civilian populations including terrorists, tourists and workers in skyscrapers and bars as in ‘9/11’. Deliberately drawing on the language of nuclear war and atomic weaponry Carson (1962, p.156) argues along similar lines that ‘not only the target insect or plant, but anything – human or nonhuman – within range of the chemical fallout may know the sinister touch of the poison’. The grim reaper was not merely a spectre of death but also of death by chemical fallout. Chem War was Cold War by other means. Unlike the Cold War in which nuclear weapons were not used but were tested, in the Chem War chemical weapons were used. Chemicals for Carson (1962, p.211) ‘play a role similar to radiation’. Carson also draws on the language of nuclear war and atomic weaponry to describe the outcome of radiation by employing the term contamination. She critiques the ‘contamination’ of ‘our world’ and she is critical of how our ‘public waters’ are contaminated (Carson, 1962, pp.173 (2x), 176, 179, 181 (3x), 182, 188). To contaminate is to

Fascist Body 105

‘make impure by contact or mixture; pollute, corrupt, infect’. Contamination is ‘the action of making impure or polluting; defilement, infection’. Contamination is a ritual, religious and health phenomenon with resonances in all three domains. By extension, it can refer to radioactive contamination, linguistic contamination and textual contamination. By implication it suggests bodily, spiritual and ecological freedom from pollution, corruption and infection. In the post-Second World War environmental ‘holocaust’, as Carson (1962, p.257) puts it, genocide, or more precisely specocide, was the war plan deployed against targeted species such as the gypsy moth. This moth gave its name to a plane only to be rewarded with what Carson (1962, p.157) calls the ‘blanket spraying’ (like blanket bombing) of its (and others) habitat with the announced aim of ‘eradicating’ it. Eradication, Carson (1962, p.157) points out, ‘means the complete and final extinction or extermination of a species throughout its range’. In what Carson (1962, p.158) calls this ‘all-out chemical war’ against the gypsy moth in 1956 planes ‘showered down the prescribed DDT-infuel-oil’ over nearly a million acres in four states including such areas as dairy farms, fish ponds, salt marshes and suburbia ‘drenching a housewife making a desperate effort to cover her garden before the roaring plane reached her, and showering insecticide over children at play and commuters at railway stations’. This scenario is a replay of the iconography of Pearl Harbour – only the arsenal and target is different. Civilians were targeted as in war and ‘citizens had to suffer the prescribed drenching with DDT’ (Carson, 1962, p.159) just as sheep are drenched with chemicals and just as they suffered nuclear fallout in western states. The US state apparatus regarded its own civilian citizens as a target for a military, Pearl Harbour-style operation and as docile sheep to be drenched in their techno-pastoral suburbs (see Giblett, 2008b, chapter 2). Carson saw broadcast spraying as a crude weapon like blanket bombing that killed every living thing in its field and range. Carson (1962, p.64) bemoaned ‘our unthinking bludgeoning of the landscape’. She bewailed ‘the unselective bludgeon of insecticidal poisons’ (Carson, 1962, p.127). For her ‘as crude a weapon as the cave man’s club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life’ (Carson, 1962, p.297). Not content just to wage war against nature by bombing it with insecticides, we bludgeon it into submission, and even blast it into smithereens to destroy the basic building blocks of matter that seem to defy us. We are like the proto-fascists of von Salomon who try


to destroy matter, to making nothing out of everything, a reversal of God who created everything out of nothing. The scientist bludgeoning nature is for Carson the cave man of the stone age of science. His mantra of the ‘control of nature’ is for Carson (1962, p.297): a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth. And against ‘man’ himself, for ‘man’ is a part of nature. By taking up arms against ‘nature’ we take what Carson (1962, p.67) calls ‘the shotgun approach to nature,’ not only shooting broadcast at all and sundry (including ourselves), but also shooting first and asking questions later. Nature is presumed guilty until proven innocent. The shotgun approach to nature is not even a shotgun wedding, but a shotgun funeral. This approach gives what Carson (1962, pp.68–69) ‘a giddy sense of power over nature’, or what T. Coraghessan Boyle calls ‘the heady exhilaration of the victory over nature itself’. According to Carson, (1962, p.85) ‘the man with a spray gun’ has replaced the man with the six-shooter as the culture hero of the war against nature, of the conquest of the wilderness and its indigenous inhabitants. The hero of Chem War against nature is no longer Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett, the heroes of the war against wilderness, but the Wyatt Earp of the spray gun, the Red Baron of DDT, the barnstormer of pesticides. As spraying for Carson (1962, p.135) is ‘a weapon’ the sprayed landscape is a battlefield after the battle. Following spraying and bird deaths in Norfolk in the UK in 1960 a landowner wrote that ‘the place is like a battlefield’ (cited by Carson, 1962, p.123). Carson (1962, p.71) critiques ‘the sterile and hideous world we are letting our technicians make’. But more than aesthetic considerations are at stake, as Carson (1962, p.72) argues, in the preservation of roadside vegetation. For her ‘in the economy of nature the natural vegetation has its essential place’ (Carson, 1962, p.72). Economy of nature, or ecology, takes precedence over the aesthetics of nature (unlike the Romantic for whom aesthetics took precedence over the economy of nature (see Giblett, 2004, chapter 3)).

Fascist Body 107

For humans and other animals and for Carson (1962, p.189) the effects of pesticides on species other than the target one ‘is a problem of ecology, of interrelationships, of interdependence… , [of] the web of life – or death’, of life and death. There is an ecology of plants and animals, soils, air and water but there is also what Carson (1962, p.189) calls ‘an ecology of the world within our bodies’. For her there is also an aesthetics and a mechanism of the world within our bodies. She refers to ‘the extraordinary energy-producing mechanism of the body’ and to ‘its beautifully functioning mechanism’ (Carson, 1962, p.200). Aesthetics re-asserts itself in constituting the body as beautiful (small, smoothly functioning, organic, or organicist) object. Modern western medicine also asserts itself in constituting the body as (energy-producing) mechanism. What Carson (1962, p.201) calls ‘the transformation of matter into energy in the cell is an ever-flowing process’ necessary for life, but it is not necessarily a beautiful, mechanistic process. This is to figure life in aesthetic and mechanistic metaphors. ‘The balance of nature’ for Carson (1962, p.246) is ‘a complex, precise, and highly integrated system of relationships between living things, in a constant state of adjustment’. Nature for Carson is, in other words, a machine. The balance of nature is homeostatic and cybernetic. Ecology for her is earthly mechanics. Earthly mechanics takes precedence over landscape aesthetics. Life, of course, can only be figured in metaphor, but there is a world of difference between aesthetic and mechanistic metaphors and the Taoist metaphor of life as an ever-flowing process and as a body of energy (a subject to which I return in later chapters). Rather than bludgeoning the landscape, we should, as Carson (1962, p.69) puts it, promote ‘the long-range health of the landscape’. For Carson (1962, p.78) ‘soil and the living things in and upon it exist in a relation of interdependence and mutual benefit’. Symbiosis and mutual aid, rather than the parasitism and survival of the fittest, are, or should be, the norm (see Giblett, 2004, chapter 12). Cooperation rather than competition is the motto of ecological sustainability. The long-range health of the landscape for Carson (1962, p.79) depends upon ‘the health of the soil’. Healthy bodies also depend upon healthy land.

7 Writing on the Surface of the Textual Body

The modern western view of the body as machine applies not only to medicine but also politically and aesthetically. If the body is regarded as machine to be repaired medically, it can also be regarded as a machine to be regulated politically. The body as machine is both a medical and political model. The body for Foucault (1977a, p.25) is ‘directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs’. The body is written on, meanings are made on it, and the body makes meanings by writing both on itself and on other surfaces. This process exercises power over the body, and over what and how it means. Marking the body can be taken quite literally to include torture. Torture, according to Foucault (1977a, p.34), ‘must mark the victim: it is intended, either by the scar it leaves on the body, or by the spectacle that accompanies it, to brand the victim with infamy…; it traces … on the very body of the condemned man signs that must not be effaced.’ The evanescence and performance of the trace is replaced and superseded by the permanence and monumentality of the inscription. The two sides of writing take place on the body, writing as trace and writing as inscription (see Giblett, 1996, chapter 3; 2008b, chapter 1). The signs inscribed on the body must be read by the spectator, including the torture victim or the condemned man himself, who will not necessarily read them visually but will learn them corporeally, and decipher them through his wounds just like the condemned man in Kafka’s (1914/1949, pp.191, 198) story, ‘In the Penal Colony’. Through this process of inscription on the body the truth of the crime, and its punishment, is revealed for all to see. The tortured body for Foucault (1977a, p.35) ‘is first inscribed in the legal ceremonial that 108

Textual Body 109

must produce, open for all to see, the truth of the crime’. This truth is revealed for all to see, including both the spectator who sees the punishment inflicted on the victim (and sees in the case of Kafka’s (1914/1949, p.194) story the letters of the law that has been broken as they are being inscribed on the victim’s body) and the victim who purportedly achieves enlightenment in the process as in the same story (1914/1949, p.198).

Is the soul the prison of the body? Kafka’s story comes at the moment in history when there is a change in penal punishment from the body to the mind as the target and site of power, and its exercise. Foucault argues that historically from the late eighteenth century to the late nineteenth there is a shift from torturing the body to counselling the soul or mind; a shift from the body to the mind as the target of power. The counselled soul is inscribed with the truth of the crime for the criminal to see. The truth of the crime has changed from a physical to a psychological truth. There is a shift from writing on the surface of the body to writing on the surface of the mind, or soul; from the spectacle of torture in which the body of the prisoner is inscribed to internalisation of discipline in which the mind of prisoner is inscribed. Either way, inscription still takes place; inscription is the modus operandi for truth. Truth is produced, revealed and disseminated in and by inscription. It is just a matter of whether it is the mind or body that is being inscribed. Truth is tied up with inscription: no inscription, no truth, only truths. Truth is the product of inscription whereas truths are tied up with traces (see Giblett, 1996, chapter 3). Like the body, the soul for Foucault (1977a, p.30) ‘is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body’. The aim of counselling is to free the body from the prison of the soul by breaking down the doors of the soul. The body is regarded as pure, the soul as contaminating. This modern relationship between body and soul inverts the ancient, classical view of Socrates in Plato’s Gorgias (§493a) that ‘the body is the prison of the soul’. Irrespective of whether the soul is the prison of the body, or the body the prison of the soul, both views are predicated on soul-body dualism in which one is privileged over, and to the detriment of, the other. Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo (§80c and §81c) propounds the view that: The soul, the invisible part … goes away to a place that is, like itself, glorious, pure and invisible – the true Hades or unseen world – into the presence of the good and wise God… [whereas] the corporeal is


heavy, oppressive, earthly and visible. So the soul which is tainted by its presence is weighed down and dragged back into visible world … and hovers about tombs and graveyards. The soul is associated with the heavenly, the body with the earthly. The body is not only the prison of the soul but also its tomb, and womb, out of which the soul is born or resurrected to fly free. For Socrates in the Phaedo (§83a) philosophy is the means to liberate the soul from the prison of the body: Every seeker after wisdom knows that up to the time when philosophy takes it over his soul is a helpless prisoner, chained hand and foot in the body, compelled to view reality not directly but only through its prison bars, and wallowing in utter ignorance. And philosophy can see that the imprisonment is ingeniously effected by the prisoner’s own active desire, which makes him first accessory to his own confinement. The prisoner is complicit with their own imprisonment in the prison of the body, and even desires it. The role of philosophy for Socrates is to set the prisoner free by letting the prisoner see reality directly, instead of mediated through prison bars. In contrast to classical philosophy, the modern psy-technologies (psychiatry, psychology, and psychoanalysis) try to free the body from the prison of the soul by using instruments that write on the mind. Technology is directed against the mind rather than the body. Technologies of the body are rather crude instruments, whereas technologies of the mind are much more sophisticated. The modern prison employs both. It incarcerates the body and writes on the surface of the mind of the inmate. The modern prison for Foucault (1977a, p.125) is ‘a machine for altering minds’. In the modern prison, and in modern society more generally, the mind rather than the body becomes the primary target of power. In modern societies Foucault (1977a, p.101) argues that ‘the point of application of … power … is no longer the body…, it is the mind or rather a play of representations and signs circulating discreetly but necessarily and evidently in the minds of all. It is no longer the body, but the soul’. The aim is not to apply power to the body but to the mind. Then the body is regulated through and by the mind. Modern society, Foucault (1977a, p.102) argues, has: a sort of general recipe for the exercise of power over men [women, and children]: the ‘mind’ as a surface of inscription for power, with

Textual Body 111

semiology as its tool; the submission of bodies through the control of ideas; the analysis of representations as a principle in a politics of bodies that was much more effective than the ritual anatomy of torture and execution. In this recipe the mind is a surface of inscription for power over the body. A technologist of signs wields the tool of semiology. The technologist is separate from the body on which s/he writes (even though it may be his or her own body). Sign and thing are separate. This disjunction between signs and things is historically and culturally contingent (see Giblett, 2008b). Signs until the seventeenth century, Foucault (1970, p.129) argues, were ‘part of things themselves, whereas in the seventeenth century they became modes of representation’. The gap between things and words, between bodies and signs, produces representation no longer tied to the thing itself, including the body. The tool of semiology writing on and about (in a word, inscribing) the body produces representations of the body separated from the body itself. Semiology (and semiotics) is not a neutral study of the ‘life of signs in society’ as Ferdinand de Saussure envisaged it, but a technology for the production of meaning in society, including ‘the general recipe’ for the exercise of the power of the mind over the body. This general recipe works across modern society, but it is inflected differently in various places and institutions. In prison the mind is a surface of inscription for power; outside prison the body is a surface of inscription for the law. The prisoner has been found to have broken the law and has been sentenced to serve a prison term. His or her body is incarcerated and his or her soul or mind targeted in order to reform and rehabilitate it so that s/he does not re-offend. The prisoner does not escape having his or her body inscribed by the law (after all, s/he is imprisoned in a cell and made to wear prison clothes, eat prison food, adopt the prison schedule and so on). But these are instruments that are used to change the mind and regulate behaviour. In prison, the body is the easy target, the soul the harder one. The body has already been reached and marked whereas the soul lies elusively inside, behind or beyond the body, recalcitrant, even resistive. The tool of semiology is what Foucault (1988, p.18) later called the technology of signs by which we work on our bodies and selves to transform them in what he called ‘technologies of the self’ which: permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and


souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. Technologies of the self are for Foucault (1988, p.18) one of four technologies that ‘hardly ever function separately’. The other three are: (1) technologies of production, which permit us to produce, transform, or manipulate things; (2) technologies of signs systems, which permit us to use signs, meanings, symbols, or signification; (3) technologies of power, which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination, an objectivising of the subject. (1988, p.18) All four technologies operate together inside and outside the prison. Outside prison the non-prisoner does not escape having his or her mind inscribed by the law either (after all, s/he observes or does not observe the law and follows or flouts the rules of everyday life by observing certain codes and conventions). But the main target of the law outside prison is the body, and not merely via the threat of incarceration. S/he wears certain clothes, eats certain foods, performs certain exercises, and so on. For de Certeau (1984, p.139), ‘there is no law that is not inscribed on bodies. Every law has a hold on the body… From birth to mourning after death, law “takes hold of” bodies in order to make them its text’. The law is written in books of the body. The effectiveness of the law is not limited to statutes but is extended to bodies. Bodies are books of the law for all to see and read. The eighteenthcentury spectacle of the tortured body in which the truth of the crime is revealed for the spectator is replaced by the twentieth and twentyfirst century inscription of law on all bodies for all to see. The law is inscribed in (and on) pages and bound into volumes of the body with covers of human skin and pages of flesh, with surfaces to see and depths to read. Bodies are thus like books. Books for de Certeau (1984, p.140) ‘are only metaphors of the body’. Books, like the body, have volumes, spines and backs. For de Certeau (1984, p.140) ‘every power, including the power of the law, is written first of all on the backs of its subjects’. Writing on the backs of the subjects of law occurs literally with the body-writing machine in Kafka’s story. The law is written not just on backs, but also on the whole surface of the body as Theodor Adorno (and Benjamin, 1999, p.69) remarks in commenting on Kafka’s story:

Textual Body 113

‘the machine inscribes not merely the backs of the delinquent inhabitants of the penal colony, but their entire bodies’. The ‘Bed’ of the machine turns the body of the condemned man over so that the ‘Harrow’ can write on every external surface. The condemned man becomes a part of the machine to the point that, as Dyens (2001, p.65) puts it in his reading of the story, ‘the body is machine’. Kafka’s story is both a literal ‘what if’ story of the body and machine becoming one and a kind of allegory for the body in modern society in which the body is inscribed on every surface by codes and conventions in performing the practices of everyday life, such as wearing clothes, travelling in cars, and preparing and eating food. Clothes for de Certeau (1984, p.147): can be regarded as instruments through which a social law maintains its hold on bodies and its members, regulates them and exercises them through changes in fashion as well as through military manoeuvres. Clothes mark the law on the body, including the law of gender, one of the most powerful laws to inscribe the body. Bodies are inscribed with gender. Grosz (1990, p.72) argues along similar lines to Hirst and Woolley (as we saw in an earlier chapter) that: Biology provides a bedrock for social inscription but [it] is not a fixed or static substratum: it interacts with and is overlaid by psychic, social and signifying relations. There is a bedrock of biological difference between the sexes, but this is construed and inscribed socially. Indeed, biological difference is constructed as sexual difference and made the basis for gender. After all, men and women are biochemically 97% the same. The 3% difference is the matter for gender. The 3% difference is used as the critical and crucial factor for the expression of a normative heterosexuality that constructs and valorises sexual difference. Difference between the sexes is only marked in a normatively heterosexual social system. And used as the basis for a hierarchical, patriarchal social order.

The body writes back This difference is marked on the surface of the body. The body is the surface of inscription for the law of gender. Yet the body is not only a


surface of inscription for inscribing the law but also a surface for tracing counter-law. Writing is double, split between inscription and trace; between the deep mark scratched into the surface (of the body, or the earth, or both) and the shallow shadow etched on the surface (see Giblett, 1996, chapter 3). The body for Grosz (1990, p.72): can thus be seen not as a blank, passive page, a neutral ground of meaning, but as an active, productive, ‘whiteness’ that constitutes the writing surface as resistant to the imposition of any or all patterned arrangements. The body writes back. The colonised empire of the body writes back. Every power, including the power of the law, is written first of all on the bodies of its subjects. Similarly, every resistance to power is written by the subject in his or her own body. The law performs a kind of legal ‘tattooing’ as de Certeau (1984, p.141) puts it; resistance to the law performs a kind of counter-tattooing (literal or metaphoric). Tattooing (literal and metaphoric) is double, or split: normative and resistive. Tattooing is not quintessentially resistive (or normative) but it is resistive or normative depending on the context in which it is performed and on the way in which it is read (see Caplan, 2000). Law marks the body, but resistance to the law re-marks the body, even plays the body, the body plays. The popular, grotesque, monstrous body of the depths resists and subverts the official, monumental body of the smooth surface. The body for Grosz (1990, p.64): and its energies and capacities exert an uncontrollable, unpredictable threat to a regular, systematic mode of social organization. As well as being the site of knowledge-power, the body is thus also the site of resistance, for it exerts a recalcitrance, and always entails the possibility of a counter-strategic re-inscription, for it is capable of being self-marked, self-represented in alternative ways. The body is also capable of being self-marked, self-represented in oppositional ways so it is not merely the passive site of resistance but the active means for resistance. Law inscribes the body; resistance to the law reinscribes the body. Resistance to the law effaces the traces of the law, or attempts to, and leaves traces of resistance. Reinscribing the body can be an expression of disempowerment in which the body is the only surface left to mark, the only means of expression left. It can be a form of self-torture in which the subject chooses to torture his or

Textual Body 115

her own body in self-mutilation rather than be tortured bodily or mentally by others in inscription. Reinscribing the body can also be empowering when it is grotesque, monstrous, celebratory, carnivalesque. Any act of re-inscription can be either or both or can oscillate between both. It all depends on context and the ways in which it is read, and written. It can be a tactic or a strategy. The distinction between strategy and tactic is useful for a progressive politics that does not essentialise a body-act like tattooing as necessarily resistive or normative. De Certeau (1984, p.xix) calls a ‘strategy’: the calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated from an ‘environment’. A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper (propre) and thus serve as the basis for generating relation with an exterior distinct form it (competitors, adversaries, ‘clientèles,’ ‘targets,’ [‘niche markets,’] or ‘objects’ of research). Political, economic, and scientific rationality has been constructed on this strategic model. A strategy is a hierarchic, monologic relationship between a subject and an object. A strategy draws a circle between an inside and an outside, surveys and patrols the frontier between civilisation and the wilderness, between the clean and proper surface of the body (of the earth) and the dirty and improper depths of the body (of the earth), between the monumental upper body and the grotesque lower body, between a stable, centred sense of self and an environment out there that is removed and alien. The concept of the environment implies a separation between a subject and its environs, and a strategic relation between the former and the latter. The word ‘environment’ for Bill Lines (1998, p.309) means: a world separate from and outside of human but with humans at the centre… Environments are technologies … Environments invite management [whereas for him] nature spurns management. Nature is a problematic term as I have argued elsewhere (see Giblett, 2004) as is ‘environment’ which raises, as Lefebvre (1991, p.326) suggests, the unanswerable questions of ‘whose environment?’ or ‘the environment of what?’ The term ‘environment’ for Cheng (1986, p.353) is ‘conceived as a passive deadwood’ to be rid of


whereas the earth for the Taoists and the tacticians is an active live-wood. Writing as inscription is the technological means that enables a strategic self to operate on, and in, a separate environment. De Certeau (1984, p.134) designates as writing: the concrete activity that consists in constructing on its own blank space (un espace propre) – the page – a text that has power over the exteriority from which it has first been isolated. The blank page, the white space, is not just paper but the body and the earth on which writing inscribes the law, including the city (see Giblett, 1996, chapter 3). The blank page for de Certeau (1984, p.134) ‘assumes the withdrawal and the distance of a subject in relation to an area of activities’ and ‘the mastery (and isolation) of a subject confronted by an object’. It does not assume the mutuality of an abject playing with other abjects. Writing as inscription enshrines the subject-object distinction. It not only creates the capacity to ‘act on the environment and to transform it’ as de Certeau (1984, p.135) puts it, but is also the means to do so. What de Certeau (1984, p.135) calls ‘the scriptural enterprise’ ‘creates internally the instruments for an appropriation of external space’, especially via the modern city. Writing as inscription is ‘capitalist and conquering’ of space and place. Writing as inscription is colonialist, not only endo-colonialist of European countries and countryside but also exo-colonialist of nonEuropean ones. Writing as inscription enshrines and re-enacts the city-country distinction, central to modernity. The modern city for de Certeau (1984, p.135) is ‘a circumscribed space’ in which ‘the will to make the countryside conform to urban models’ is realised. The modern city is written on the blank page of the earth. The modern city is inscribed on the surface of the body of the earth (see Giblett, 1996, chapter 3). The surveyor, the town planner, the urban dweller, the subject of writing, the living body is distanced from the living body of the earth. The scriptural system not only produces what de Certeau (1984, p.136) calls ‘a cybernetic society’ and a cybernetic organism (as we shall see later), but also a cybernetic environment all three of which are mastered by writing including encryption in binary code and by a monologic and strategic relationship between subjects and objects.

Textual Body 117

A tactic, by contrast, is a dialogic relation between abjects, between fluid, unstable, decentered bodies of humanity and of the earth, between self and other. De Certeau (1984, p.xix) calls a ‘tactic’: a calculus which cannot count on a ‘proper’ (a spatial or institutional localization), nor thus on a borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality. The place of a tactic belongs to the place of the other. A tactic insinuates itself into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance… Many everyday practices (talking, reading, moving about, shopping, cooking, etc.) are tactical in character. A good example of a tactical everyday practice that de Certeau (1984, p.25) discusses later is: what in France is called la perruque, ‘the wig’. La perruque is the worker’s own work disguised as work for his employer. It differs from pilfering in that nothing of value is stolen. It differs from absenteeism in that the worker is officially on the job. La perruque may be as simple as a secretary’s writing a love letter on ‘company time’ or as complex as a cabinetmaker’s ‘borrowing’ a lathe to make a piece of furniture for his living room … la perruque actually diverts time (not goods, since he uses only scraps) from the factory for work that is free, creative, and precisely not directed towards profit. In Australian terms, la perruque is not ‘ripping off’ the boss by petty pilfering, but working creatively on the boss’s time using his or her resources to do things for oneself. It is a practice not confined to the factory floor or to the company office but is a feature of all work in all spaces, including professional work. The professions – doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers, journalists, academics, sports players, etc. – are largely self-scheduling. Their time can be managed to include time spent on creative, pleasurable tasks, on one’s own work. The boundary between one’s own work and work for the boss can become blurred. The upside of this is that the professional can be paid for doing what s/he enjoys or what for others is a leisure activity (e.g., golf or tennis). The downside is that the professional is always on the job or has no leisure activity outside of the one s/he performs for a living. Besides la perruque there is also a kind of la anti-perruque in which work for the employer is disguised as the worker’s own work.


Body-writing machines Mastery of the world around and a strategic relationship with it is achieved through technologies. Technologies write on the surface of the earth and the body. Communication technologies are tools for inscribing power over the body through the body. Communication technologies also write on the mind. They are technologies of mind, body and the earth (see Giblett, 2008b). The mind is a surface of inscription for power over the body. The idea of a body-writing machine is not merely a clever or heuristic metaphor, but applies to all machines as they all leave marks, literally or metaphorically, on the body. All technologies leave their mark on their user. As communication technologies are technologies of the mind as well as the body, they leave their mark on both (see Giblet, 2008b). Communication technologies are prostheses for eyesight, feet, ears, etc. They are also prostheses for the mind. Communication technologies enhance human mental and physical aptitudes and capabilities. The body, whether it is the human body or the earth-body, is the inscribed surface of events. Communication technologies, such as photography and cinema, inscribe the events of the body onto the surface of a recording device and project them on to a screen of a viewing device. Communication technologies, such as the camera and the car, inscribe the surface of the body of the earth. The devices of ocular recording (such as the camera) and those of ballistic projection (such as the car and the gun) are in the business of producing events. The gun is also an ocular device with a line of sight and fire, and the camera is a device of ballistic projection that shoots and ‘kills.’ The camera is a gun (see Giblett, 2008b). Both leave their mark on their user, on his or her body, and on the earth. In J.M. Coetzee’s (1974, pp.84–86) stunning fictionalised account of a colonial South African explorer and hunter the camera can be substituted for the gun. For the explorer Jacobus Coetzee: The gun [or camera] stands for the hope that there exists that which is other than oneself. The gun [or camera] is our last defense against isolation within the travelling sphere. The gun [or camera] is our mediator with the world and therefore our saviour … The gun [or camera] saves us from the fear that all life is within us. It does so by laying at our feet [or in our hands] all evidence we need of a dying and therefore a living world. By shooting and killing animals, or events, the camera and the gun constitute their wielder as living on the logic that ‘I kill therefore I am

Textual Body 119

(living)’. The gun and camera constitute the object of the shot as dead and the subject of the shooter as living. They mediate between them. They are communication technologies. Rather than the camera or the gun being a prosthesis for the eye, the body of the wielder has become an ambulatory prosthesis for them, a means for them to get around. Coetzee continues: I move through the wilderness with my gun [or camera] at the shoulder of my eye and slay [or at least shoot] elephants, hippopotami, rhinoceros, buffalo, lions, leopards, dogs, giraffes, antelope and buck of all descriptions, fowl of all descriptions, hares and snakes; I leave behind me a mountain of skin, bones, inedible gristle, and excrement [and discarded cartridges of bullets or canisters of film]. All this is my dispersed pyramid to life. It is my life’s work, my incessant proclamation of the otherness of the dead and therefore the otherness of life. A bush, too, no doubt is alive. From a practical point of view, however, a gun [or camera] is useless against it. There are other extensions of the self that might be efficacious against bushes and trees and turn their death into a hymn of life, a flamethrowing device for example. The gun and camera are an appendage to the body and an extension of the eye and of the power of sight. To look, is to shoot, is to kill, is to constitute the shooter as alive. By creating otherness, the self is created – no other, no self. The other is constituted as dead by being shot so that the self is constituted as living. Without death, there would be no life (to state the bleeding obvious), but without the death of the other, no life of the self. The dead other constitutes the living self. ‘The other is dead, therefore I am living’. Unlike the camera, the gun is designed primarily for shooting and killing literally the corporeal. Coetzee goes on: But as for a gun, a charge of shot into a tree means nothing, the tree does not bleed, it is undisturbed, it lives on trapped in its treeness, out there and therefore in here. Otherwise with the hare that pants out its life at one’s feet. The death of the hare is the logic of salvation. For either he was living out there and is dying into a world of objects, and I am content; or he was living within me and would not die within me, for we know that no man ever yet hated his own flesh, that flesh will not kill itself, that every suicide is a declaration of the otherness of killer from victim. The death of the hare is my metaphysical meat, just as the flesh of the hare is the meat of my


dogs. The hare dies to keep my soul from merging with world. All honour to the hare. Nor is he an easy shot. The other dies that the self may live. Shooting an animal, or another human for that matter too, with a gun keeps my soul from merging with the world, and especially keeps the soul of the animal or human merging with my soul in an auratic embrace. Shooting a tree or a landscape with a camera keeps them out there and in here and allows my soul to merge with the world in a romantic, oceanic feeling of the sublime. Both the camera and the gun are devices for shortening the distance between the machine and its target. The gun is a device for shortening the distance between a bullet and its target. A car is a device for shortening the distance between a driver and his/her destination. The driver may arrive at his/her destination, but the gun keeps the shooter and the shot distant from each other. Similarly the camera keeps the photographer and the photographed distant from each other. Coetzee continues: The instrument of survival in the wild is the gun [or camera], but the need for it is metaphysical rather than physical. The native tribes have survived without the gun [or camera]. I too could survive in the wilderness armed with only bow and arrow, did I not fear that so deprived I would perish not of hunger but of the disease of the spirit that drives the caged baboon to evacuate its entrails. Now that the gun [or camera] has arrived among them the native tribes are doomed, not only because the gun [or camera] will kill them in large numbers but because the yearning for it will alienate them from the wilderness. Every territory through which I march with my gun [or camera] becomes a territory cast loose from the past and bound to the future. The camera, like the gun, is a metaphysical weapon of defence against the preternatural wilderness. By taking photographic shots of the landscape, or gunshots at its inhabitants, the wilderness trekker creates a present of this moment in time. Without these devices for creating events of death in the present he would be cast loose on, and drown in, the sea of linear time of past, present and future alienated from the cyclical time of the wilderness (see Giblett, 2004). Without the gun and the camera the wilderness trekker would not only be imprisoned in time, but would also be enslaved to space. Coetzee concludes:

Textual Body 121

Savages do not have guns [or cameras]. This is the effective meaning of savagery, which we may define as enslavement to space, as one speaks obversely of the explorer’s mastery of space. The relation of master and savage is a spatial relation. The African highland is flat, the approach of the savage across space continuous. From the fringes of the horizon he approaches, growing to manhood beneath my eyes until he reaches the verge of that precarious zone in which, invulnerable to his weapons, I command his life. Across this annulus I behold him approach bearing the wilderness in his heart. On the far side he is nothing to me and I probably nothing to him. On the near side mutual fear will drive us to our little comedies of man and man, prospector and guide, benefactor and beneficiary, victim and assassin, teacher and pupil, father and child. He crosses it, however, in none of these characters but as a representative of that out there which now promises to enfold, ingest, and project me through itself as a speck on a field which we may call annihilation or alternatively history. He threatens to have a history in which I shall be a term. Such is the material basis of the malady of the master’s soul. The malady of the master’s soul, the soul of mastery rather than mutuality, has its material basis in a body attached to the prosthesis of gun or camera, prostheses for the eye and hand, or car, a prosthesis for walking. Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, first published in 1908 and ostensibly a ‘children’s book’, is a powerful critique of the destructive forces of the car on the countryside and on the body imprisoned in its metal box (see Giblett, 2008b). It shows how the car is characterised by a class politics of domination (if not destruction) of others and the countryside, by a modern (and not just a Futurist) intoxication with speed and by the violent pornography of a masculinist sexual fascination with technology. The car writes on the surface of the earth and on the body of the driver. In The Wind in the Willows Toad is transported into orgasmic bliss by his first encounter as a bystander with a speeding car when he, Mole and Water Rat: were strolling along the high road easily … when far behind them they heard a faint warning hum, like the drone of a distant bee. Glancing back, they saw a small cloud of dust, with a dark centre of energy, advancing on them at incredible speed, while from out of the dust a faint ‘Poop-poop!’ wailed like an uneasy animal in pain. Hardly regarding it, they turned to resume their con-


versation, when in an instant (as it seemed) the peaceful scene was changed, and with a blast of wind and a whirl of sound that made them jump for the nearest ditch, it was on them! The ‘poop-poop’ rang with a brazen shout in their ears, they had a moment’s glimpse of an interior of glittering plate glass and rich morocco, and the magnificent motor-car, immense, breath-snatching, passionate, with its pilot tense and hugging his wheel, possessed all earth and air for the fraction of a second, flung an enveloping cloud of dust that blinded and enwrapped them utterly, and then dwindled to a speck in the far distance changed back into a droning bee once more. (Grahame, 1908, pp.38, 39) The ‘intimate charm’ of the car’s interior private sphere is an instance of mobile privatisation and private mobilisation (see Giblett, 2008b, chapter 6). The car privatises the public sphere of the road as well as earth and air, two elements of the ecosphere. This possession of space and time may be momentarily experienced as a bystander, but is far more extensive and damaging in terms of the earthly resources it consumes and the air and water it pollutes through its fiery technology. The car affects all four elements in its use of resources from the earth, its use of fire in internal combustion, and its pollution of air and water. Rat admonishes the driver and the car’s occupants as ‘road hogs’, an early instance of this persistent term of abuse. Yet whether this is the earliest extant usage I could not ascertain as this combination is curiously absent from the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. By contrast, the Toad was: in a sort of trance, a happy smile on his face, his eyes still fixed on the dusty wake of their destroyer. At intervals he was heard to mutter ‘Poop-poop!’ … ‘Glorious, stirring sight!’ murmured Toad, never offering to move. ‘The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! Here to day – in next week tomorrow! Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped – always somebody else’s horizon! O bliss! O poop-poop! O my! O my! . . O what a flowery track lies spread before me, henceforth! What dust-clouds shall spring up behind me as I speed on my reckless way! What carts I shall fling into the ditch in the wake of my magnificent onset’. (pp.41, 42) Toad as bystander experiences what he calls ‘that beautiful, that heavenly vision’ of ‘that swan, that sunbeam, that thunderbolt!’ (p.44).

Textual Body 123

The car is here figured as the bearer of a Promethean solar and divine technology and the driver as the master of time and space through speed. After an unfortunate and dangerous driving escapade, Toad’s friends restrain him to prevent him from driving. He suffers such deprivation, even withdrawal symptoms, that he becomes a simulator of the car and the car-crash: when his violent paroxysms possessed him he would arrange bedroom chairs in rude resemblance of a motor-car and would crouch on the foremost of them, bent forward and staring fixedly ahead, making uncouth and ghastly noises, till the climax was reached, when, turning a complete somersault, he would lie prostrate amidst the ruins of the chairs, apparently completely satisfied for the moment. (p.116) Toad’s simulated car and car-crash is a Bachelor Machine for a Bachelor Birth, or a masturbatory machine in which he achieves sexual release in a simulation of death. As we have seen, Theweleit (1987, p.330n; see also p.315) describes Bachelor Births from Bachelor Machines as ‘attempts to create a new reality by circumventing the female body – to engender the world from the brain’. The Bachelor Birth from a Bachelor Machine is a brainchild (see Sofia, 1992, p.380). It entails what Theweleit (1989, p.127; see also Giblett, 1996, Figure 1) later calls ‘cerebral parthogenesis (the masculine form of the virgin birth)’. It creates a new reality by circumventing not only the body of the mother but also the body of the earth. The Toad as driver is ‘the Terror of the Highway’ (p.111) of ‘the terrible motor-car’ (p.204) who transcends the earthly into the seventh heaven, his body sublimated and transfigured into a heavenly body: as the car devoured [like a greedy oral sadistic monster] the street and leapt forth on the high road through the open country, he was only conscious he was Toad once more, Toad at his best and highest, Toad the terror, the traffic-queller, the Lord of the lone trail, before whom all must give way or be smitten into nothingness and everlasting night. He chanted as he flew, and the car responded with sonorous drone; the miles were eaten up under him as he sped he knew not whither, fulfilling his instincts, living his hour, reckless of what might come to him. (pp.122, 123)


The car driver’s mastery of time and space reproduces the aesthetics of the sublime that inflicts terror on the countryside and other living beings. The driver is connected to the car and becomes a cyborg, a cybernetic organism, a single machine. Circuits of instincts and intellection are wired into the machine. This occurs when for Toad ‘the rush of air in his face, the hum of the engine, and the light jump of the car beneath him intoxicated his weak brain’ (p.206). The machine is not merely writing (on) his body and mind but become his body and mind. The machine is us.

8 Sporting Body Imprisoned in the Time-Machine

The body playing sport is probably the most visible and spectacular display of the body in contemporary culture, especially when displayed on television. Television sport shows the body running the full gamut from triumphal win to painful injury, from glorious victory to abject defeat, from dexterous skill to humiliating blunder – all displayed in the public arena of a sporting field, and possibly in the public sphere of television as well. The sporting body is subject to emotional and physical highs and lows, and every point on the continuum between them. The sporting body is the modern body par excellence because it combines supreme physical power and supine physical powerlessness. The sporting body embodies the paradox of modernity: speed, power and prowess combined with pain, suffering and breakdown. The sporting body is the body in extremis. In and with sport the body is trained for, and performs at, a high level of efficiency and skill achieved with large doses of self-inflicted pain.

A body built on pain The sporting body is ‘a body built on pain’, to use the title of one of the chapters of the story of Herb Elliott, the Western Australian-born and -raised runner who won the Gold Medal in the 1960 Olympics for winning the final for running 1500 metres (Trengrove, 1961, p.48). Elliott had travelled as an 18 year-old spectator to the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne. Of all his memories of those Games ‘the one that burns deepest’ he said, is of a Russian long-distance runner who was obviously tired ‘and yet tortured himself by continual bursts of sprinting’ (p.30). This heroism of self-inflicted torture becomes the ideal to which Elliott aspires. He found the same quality in his coach Percy Cerutty 125


who ‘courageously whipped himself to perform almost frightening athletic feats. I reckoned that if I didn’t try to punish my young, strong body as he did his older body I’d despise myself’ (p.36). Punishing his body becomes the means of not despising his self. Body and self are separate and antagonistic entities, not two parts of one whole. The sporting self is disembodied. Self and body are dualistic entities, just as the soul and body were for Socrates and the mind and body for Descartes. The sporting body suffers (from) body-self dualism. Torturing and punishing the body as a means to subdue the flesh and purify the soul (or self, or mind) has a long history in ascetic religions. Modern athletics and sport is the inheritor and reproducer of this doctrine. Sport is a secular religion. The choice, as Cerutty (1967a) summed it up in the title of one of his books, is to ‘be fit, or be damned’. Fitness equals salvation through pain whereas unfitness means damnation through a lack of self-discipline and an inability to inflict pain on oneself and endure it. The alternative to fitness is damnation, not unhealthiness. Fitness is moralised in Christian terms as salvation. The alternative is stark with no other option than to either be fit for heaven or be damned to hell. A far more fitting (pardon the pun) and affirmative title would have been, ‘be fit and be healthy’, or at least, be healthier. Pain for Cerutty is the means to achieve salvation. Cerutty advised Elliott to ‘thrust against the pain … Pain is the purifier’. He introduced Elliott to every book ever written about Francis of Assisi and told Elliott to ‘walk towards suffering. Love suffering. Embrace it’ (p.38). Elliott follows this creed as he ‘forced myself to suffer’ (p.49) and tried to ‘hurt myself more’ if he felt he was ‘surrendering too soon to superficial pain’ (p.50). Yet this ‘self-inflicted scourging’ was paradoxically coupled with ‘Percy’s theory that running should be a freeexpression of the body’ (p.50) in which ‘relaxation is essential’ (p.51). Cerutty’s (1964, p.180) theory of running was ‘learn to suffer pain’. In a caption to a photograph of Elliott’s face in pain Cerutty elaborates that ‘the athlete must learn to suffer, and to give this suffering free and full expression, as is seen on Elliott’s face’ (Cerutty, 1964, facing p.128). Cerrutty did not believe in, or recommend, hiding pain, or pretending that it was not happening. Suppression of pain could be damaging; expression of pain is healthy and normal, even desirable. The athlete ‘suffering pain’, Cerutty (1964, p.159) argues, is ‘part of his “trade”’. He is the passive object of the active subject of pain. He suffers pain to be inflicted upon him. Yet the athlete is not the unwitting object of pain, but consents to, or even colludes in, the pain

Sporting Body 127

inflicted upon him. The athlete inflicts the tool of the trade of pain on his own body. Pain is a means to an end, though, never an end in itself. An athlete, Cerutty (1964, p.159) goes on to argue, ‘knows that when there is little pain there has been little true effort: that he was functioning below his total capacity’. In other words, pain is the tool of his trade that maximises the efficiency and performance of the body-machine. And the athlete knows it. He also knows that if he breaks through the ‘pain barrier’, Cerutty (1964, p.155) maintains, ‘pain and fatigue seem to disappear as if by magic… He has conquered – not space, or time, but himself. Some would say – the greatest victory, or over-coming, possible to man’. By breaking the pain barrier the athlete conquers and overcomes himself, but remains imprisoned in measured time and linear space. The point is to achieve maximum performance through pain. The point was to ‘strive for perfection through pain’ (Trengrove, 1961, p.51). Pain was inflicted on the body by the mind. Elliott admonishes himself that he ‘must have faith in my body and allow it to run instinctively, i.e. without the mind’ (Trengrove, 1961, p.51). The sporting body is a body without the mind. It is a mindless body. The sporting self is disembodied; the sporting body suffers (from) both body-self and body-mind dualism; self and mind are separate from the body. Yet pain is inflicted on both body and mind. The athlete suffers both physical and mental pain. Physical pain, for Cerutty (1964, p.159), ‘can be excruciating, but there are definite limits to its intensity. It is “mental” pain that tortures, and for which there often seems no surcease’. The sporting body manifests mind-body dualism and reproduces the model of the body as machine found in modern western medicine and exercise. Sport for Brohm (1978, p.29) is couched and expressed in mechanical language: ‘the vocabulary of the machine dominates the language of sport. The body is reduced to the status of a machine or a quantity of energy’. Sport assembles body machines into what for Brohm (1978, pp.28, 29) ‘may be regarded as a sort of mega-machine’ in which bodies are ‘machined’ by what he calls ‘human engineers and body technocrats’. Sport couples the body as machine with other bodies as machines. It then orchestrates the clash of body against body literally or metaphorically in all sport and the conjunction between bodies in the same team in team sports. Sport is a kind of metamachine that regulates the operation of machinic bodies in a megamachine. The body as machine is coupled with other machine-bodies


to produce a mega-machine. Sport assembles machine components and parts like a car into a greater machine. The sporting body as machine needs to be serviced and tuned to maximise performance measured mathematically in space and time. To achieve speed and endurance like a machine, or as a machine, the body becomes an object to be manipulated and propelled. Sport for Brohm (1978, p.29) ‘treats the body as an engine, as a specially equipped apparatus, as an instrument and in fact as a reified ballistic object in abstract space-time’. The body becomes bullet. The starting gun projects the body down the smooth barrel of the running lanes. The body-machine is not fixed and static like a lathe, but is dynamic and moves like a car. The athletic body for Virilio (1986, p.116) is ‘prytanic – projectile or projector’. The sporting body is subjected to the same technologies of timemeasurement as those directed against the working body by what Thompson (1993) calls ‘the work discipline of industrial capitalism’. The sporting body is subjected to the discipline of industrial capitalism, even though it may be engaged in a leisure activity. Measured time is the technological means to exercise this discipline. More than any other modern invention, the clock for Mumford (1934, p.14) is ‘the key-machine of the modern industrial age’ as it ‘dissociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences’. The sporting body, whether in team or individual effort, is subjected to the measurement of time, whether it is the length of the game, or the time allowed to take a shot, or the speed of the performance. These measurements are abstracted from the actions of living, breathing and suffering bodies and translated into mathematised events disconnected from the body and abstracted from living, concrete flesh. Subjecting the sporting body to the clock disciplines it just as the working body is disciplined by clocking on and off in Taylorist fashion. It is no accident that, as Thompson (1993, p.368) puts its, ‘a general diffusion of clocks and watches is occurring … at the exact moment when the industrial revolution demanded a greater synchronisation of labour’. The time-discipline of industrial capitalism did not start and finish at the factory door with work, but was carried in the body of the worker into leisure where the sporting body or spectating body was subjected to the leisure discipline of industrial capitalism. The spectating body watching television was also subject to the spatial and temporal discipline of panoptic and panoramic television (see Giblett, 2008b, chapter 8).

Sporting Body 129

The panopticon is both a spatial arrangement with its partitioned cells and a temporal device with its daily schedules and time-tables. It is also a specific instance of the deployment of panopticism, a disciplinary device for placing bodies under surveillance, for producing docile bodies and for educating bodies to internalise their own surveillance. Panopticism is not only, as Foucault (1977a, p.195) puts it, ‘a segmented, immobile, frozen space’ wherein ‘each individual is fixed in his [sic] place’, but also a segmented, measured, frozen time wherein each individual is fixed in his or her moment. Foucault (1977a, p.197) remarks that ‘this enclosed, segmented space … in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place [in panopticism] … constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism’. To paraphrase Foucault, this enclosed, segmented time in which individuals are inserted in a fixed moment in panopticism constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism. The panopticon encloses the commons of time and space (owned by none and shared by all) into the private property of a seat at home or in a stadium (owned by one and shared with none), and into the public sphere of the stadium or television (owned by many and shared with all – for a price). Panopticism is an instrument of power and a network of power relations in which the body is constituted. Power, for Foucault (1977a, p.202): has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up. Sport distributes bodies and arranges their surfaces to catch the light and so to be objects for the gaze of spectators. The sporting body is constituted in this arrangement. Power not only has this spatial configuration, but also a temporal dimension; not only this visible, spatial manifestation in bodies, but also an invisible, temporal encoding of bodies. The disciplinary mechanism is concerned with not only ‘the analytical arrangement of space’ (Foucault, 1977a, p.203) but also with the ‘analytical partitioning of time’ (Foucault, 1977a, p.221), not only with the partitioning of space in walls and windows but also the division of time into hours and minutes and, in the case of sport, into tenths and hundredths of a second. A cellular mentality prevails in space and time – the tiny cell of the monastery, prison or apartment, and the brief cell of the measured moment, of tenths or onehundredths of a second.


Power not only has its spatial and temporal configuration and placement of bodies in space and time but also has its principle in the measurement of the speed of bodies, in the placement of bodies in schedules and timetables (see Foucault, 1977a, pp.149–151 and 220), in time elapsed, in ‘personal bests’, and in records (world, Olympic, Commonwealth, national, state). The panopticon is both ‘a type of location of bodies in space’ (Foucault, 1977a, p.205) and also in time. The sporting body in the panopticon is posited through a grid of spatial and temporal denomination. It is made visible and made to speak, or at least to signify, by the play of light on the surface of his body, by the forms and postures it assumes and by the measurement of its performance by the stopwatch and its recording by cameras and replaying or screening ‘live’ on television. Sport is imprisoned in measured time as the title of Brohm’s (1978) book suggests; the sporting body is a prisoner of measured time. Just as clocking on and off symbolised the factory discipline of industrial capitalism so the stopwatch symbolises the sport discipline of industrial capitalism. Time is measured in a readable form in a fixed or portable technology appropriate to the site or arena of its deployment. The increasing use of the stopwatch after 1730 to measure achievement in sport was a key watershed in the development of the sporting body. The stopwatch for Eichberg (1982, p.47) ‘became a symbol of the new combination of striving for achievement, measuring that achievement, and the dynamics of time’. The result, Eichberg (1998, p.39) argues, is that ‘after 1800, an increase in performance, tension, and thus an emphasis on the dynamics of time, permeated sport. It thus brought along a certain shift from … spatial orientation to a temporal orientation’. Or perhaps more precisely, there was a re-orientation in the reconstruction of space in order to achieve faster times. Time in modern sport for Eichberg (1998, p.149) is ‘one-dimensional and absolute; it is not poly-dimensional or relative’ and it has ‘a direction just as running is directed towards a goal; it is irreversible’. Time is spatialised in linear terms. The sporting body is imprisoned in both time and space. Not only time but also space is reconstructed in order to accommodate the race against time, against the stopwatch. The space of modern sport for Eichberg (1998, p.150) is ‘dominated by the straight line; it is panoptical, creating the impression of a total survey’. When sport is televised, the panoptical space of sport is reproduced in the panoptic and panoramic space of television (see Giblett, 2008b, chapter 8). The panoptic and panoramic space of sport is made for viewing. The modern body

Sporting Body 131

culture of sport is characterised by what Eichberg (1998, pp.149 and 177) calls both ‘straight-lined space and one-dimensional time’ rather than the curving lines, circular shapes and multi-dimensional time of traditional, indigenous, matrifocal cultures. The coach is the wielder of the stopwatch, the disciplinarian of measured time, the recorder of temporal performance, the relay for encoding performance in analogue or digitial format, all separate from the living, breathing, suffering body of the athlete. In one of his books Cerutty (1967b, facing p.137) is photographed ‘in a characteristic pose’ holding a analogue stopwatch with his finger poised on the start and stop button ready to start timing ‘his athletes’. Part of his role is to measure the performance of the athletes he coaches. The stopwatch is the means to do so. Coach and stopwatch are appendages of each other. They are prostheses for each other: the coach enables the stopwatch to get around; the stopwatch enables the coach to measure the time taken to traverse a given distance in linear space. The coach can also become equated with the stopwatch, a cyborg. The cover of Cerutty’s book has a cut-out photograph of Herb Elliot receiving a medal from the Duke of Edinburgh with no background or context, such as a crowd scene. The space of sport is here reduced to a representative of the modern nationalistic state giving a prize to the triumphant athlete. Superimposed between the two men is a headshot of Cerutty on the face of a line drawing of a stopwatch (Cerutty, 1967b). The face of the coach is placed on the face of the stopwatch. Not only has Cerutty become the stopwatch, but also this cyborg of human organism and cybernetic machine is the means and mediator between Elliot and the medal. Without Cerutty and the stopwatch the implication is that Elliot would not have won the race and received the medal. Take Cerutty/stopwatch out of the picture, and there would be no Elliot receiving a medal. Cerutty has become disembodied as his head floats free from the rest of his body. The coach is no longer merely a prosthesis for the stopwatch to get around – the coach has become the stopwatch. The stopwatch does not need the coach to get around. The coach has been sublimated into the stopwatch and has ceased to exist as a living, breathing body.

Speed, suffering and sublimation in sport Sport is a sophisticated and competitive display of precise skill, fierce determination and sublimated aggression. Sport is the sublimation of two major displays of aggression: hunting and warfare. Sublimation of


the hunt, Virilio (1987, p.163) argues, is manifested in the race in which athletes compete against each other to win the race and the prize for first place. Sublimation of war, Virilio (1987, p.163) also argues, is manifested in record speeds in which athletes compete against the clock to record the fastest speed and to set a record speed. As speed is the essence of war as Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese military strategist, said a long time ago, sport is war by other means, to rephrase von Clausewitz who suggested that politics is war by other means. Victory in war and the spoils of war usually go to the fastest, as do victory in sport. Speed in sport is part of the militarisation of civilian life that characterises hypermodernity. Record speeds are inscribed in record books. The record is a monument to the athlete who broke the old one, set a new one and rewrote the record book. Athletes with monumental bodies set monumental records in monumental stadiums. The Olympic Games encapsulate this monumentalism in sport. Its ‘other’ is the carnival and the monstrous, grotesque body. Sport sublimates the carnival and the carnivalesque; the sporting body sublimates the monstrous and grotesque body. In their introduction to Eichberg’s (1998, p.13) book on body culture, Bale and Philo argue that ‘the subjecting of the body to rigid temporal and spatial disciplines [is] designed to oust ambiguity, play, wilfulness, humour from the sporting body culture of modernity’. For Eichberg (1998, p.40) modern sporting body culture is obsessed with achievement whereas non- and pre-modern non-sporting body culture is concerned with performance; the former with speed and with setting, and breaking, records, with winning games by getting the highest score; the latter with rhythm and slowness, with tracing movement in space; the former with linearity and spatiality, the latter with eternity and temporality (see Giblett, 2004, chapter 1, figure 1). The body culture of achievement in modern sport is sublimatory. For Eichberg (1998, p.40) modern sporting body culture produces ‘an open horizon, a direction, forward progress and a climb into infinity’. All of these characterise sublimation and the sublime which entail upward displacement away from what Ecihberg (1998, p.141) calls ‘the convulsive body, laughing and laughable’, and what Bakhtin calls the carnivalesque and grotesque body, into a pure realm of mathematical abstraction, of speed, and stress. For Eichberg (1998, p.153) stress is ‘the dark double of futurist time enthusiasm’ which is characterised by fetishisation, not only of the machine, but also of speed. Eichberg goes on to contrast this obsession with speed in sport with ‘a new slowness’ associated with meditation, taijiquan and yoga. Recently slow food and slow cities have arisen too (Parkins and Craig, 2006).

Sporting Body 133

Speed in sport and warfare prefers a flat surface, or what Virilio (1987, p.163) calls ‘a pure surface’, just as the city, the result of war, or least the preparations for it as Virilio (and Lotringer, 1983, p.3; see also Giblett, 1996, chapter 3) agues elsewhere, prefers the same sort of surface. The sporting body, like the body of the earth for the city and sport, should be smooth and sleek, with no bumps and hollows to impede progress in two senses. The sporting body is built for speed, as is the sporting arena. The sporting arena on land or water is a flat, pure surface marked out with lines in lanes and grids, just like the architectural drawing that precedes it, and just like the map of the rectolinear grid plan of streets and lots that precedes the colonial city (see Giblett, 1996, chapter 3; see also Eichberg, p.12). Circular Wright Lake in Armadale, Western Australia, once a perched, ephemeral wetland, is lengthened and artificially maintained to become the rectolinear Champion Lakes for rowing and kayaking races, a long, sutured scar on the land. The pure surface of the drawing, the map, the sporting arena and the sporting body deny and repress the grotesque lower bodily and earthly strata. Depths are filled up and the volume of the body reduced to a surface of inscription for the law, the law of speed. The commons of the earth and the body are colonised in the public property of the nation-state and enclosed in the private property of sport centres and stadiums (see Eichberg, 1998, p.50). The carnivaleque of the marketplace is commodified into the spectacle of the sporting event in which the sporting body is put on the market. The point of modern sport is not to exercise the body, nor to celebrate the performative capabilities of the body (though both may come into it), but to compete against a competitor and to win. Brohm (1978, p.23) points to what he calls ‘the alienation involved in sport stemming from the oppression of the body pushed to the limits of physical effort’ and ‘the repression which athletes voluntarily undergo in the course of competition and training. Suffering in sport has today reached truly inhuman proportions’ (see also Easthope, 1986, pp.68–73). The sporting body for Brohm is politically oppressed and the mind is psychologically repressed. The sporting body is a kind of rebellious or recalcitrant peasant to be disciplined and trained by an aristocratic and mastering mind in a feudal regime of power and knowledge, a hypermodern reworking of the master-slave dialectic. Sport involves internalising oppression and repression and sublimating both in ritual. Sport encompasses the full range of the psychological and physical hierarchy: from pushing and putting down to lifting and raising up. The spatial poetics of sport, and the poetics of space in


sport, is hierarchical. This hierarchy is strongly imbued with theology and psychology. Oppression and repression entail masochism and mortification of the flesh for the sports player. It entails sadism and sublimation of the body for the spectator. Sport for Brohm (1978, p.23): Means tearing your guts out, writhing in pain, and sweating it out all day long in the toil and torment of physical effort for its own sake [or for the prize, or the medal]. The sporting legend is above all else a story of the pain barrier, of going to the limits of endurance, of being drunk with ‘animal’ fatigue and of getting a kick out of bruises, knocks and injuries. The intensive practice of sport is an institutionalised celebration of the mortification of the flesh, the acting out of a sado-masochistic ideology, its compulsive repetitiveness and sexual frustration are sure signs of the neurotic obsession of the ascetic with discipline and self-mastery. Sport not only entails repression but also sublimation both of which are closely linked as I have argued previously (see Giblett, 1996, chapter 2). Repression pushes down and excludes what is threatening and then sublimation raises it up and transforms it into the uplifting. The body itself can be threatening. It has been repressed and sublimated. Sport both represses and transforms the body. Sport for Brohm (1978, pp.24 and 27) is ‘the refuge of sublimated pain’, ‘a sublimation of aggressivity’ and ‘a transfiguration or sublimation of death’. Rather than being a celebration of life, sport for Brohm (1978, p.27) ‘represents a veritable ideological apparatus of death’. Sport inherits the modern western medical view of the body as machine and reproduces the modern western fascination with, and repression of, death. As the machine is dead matter, or at least not living matter, sport also inherits and participates in the modern, if not fascist, cult of death. Sport runs and plays across the ideological state apparatuses of the bureaucracy and the school, the ideological private apparatuses of the family and the church, and the ideological corporate apparatuses of the sports store and the media to produce a fascination with suffering and torture put on public display. Sport is a secular religion in which fans assemble in the hypermodern cathedrals of sports stadiums to participate in rituals, hymns, scriptures and mass or communion in which the body and blood of sportsmen and women is transubstantiated into the glorious spectacle of skill, dexterity, scoring and winning for one team and its fans. This ritual is broadcast live via television in

Sporting Body 135

media events to enable viewers in their own homes to participate in the mass-at-home. Brohm (1978, p.27) goes on to argue that ‘physical torture, tolerated and put on as entertainment, is held up as political neutral and culturally legitimate’. In sport as entertainment bodies are submitted to what he goes on to call ‘a refined, superior form of internalised and accepted suffering’ and sublimated into what he calls ‘the lavish spectacle of sportsmen [and women’s] bodies’. Brohm sees this suffering and spectacle as a displacement of the suffering of political prisoners in oppressive regimes like Apartheid South Africa where, as Brohm (1978, p.28) indicates, ‘sport reigns supreme’. What Brohm is arguing here can also be applied to other ‘sports mad’ countries such as Australia and to the treatment of its indigenous people, ethnic migrant minorities and asylum seekers. Instead of acknowledging and confronting the dispossession and oppression of these people by the white hegemony, the suffering of the former is displaced and sublimated into spectacles of suffering in sport for the latter. Rather than confronting and dealing with the suffering of others, sports mad countries would rather deflect attention away from it and inflict suffering upon themselves in a massive act of displacement and disavowal. It is as if they are saying to their indigenous peoples, ethnic migrants, and asylum seekers: ‘you have suffered, but we suffer too – look at our sport’. But the latter is self-inflicted and masochistic (pleasure gained from pain inflicted on oneself) whereas the former is inflected by oppressive regimes and sadistic (pleasure gained from pain inflicted on others). This displacement of suffering amounts not only to sado-masochism (gaining pleasure from pain being inflicted on others and oneself) but also to what Nacht (cited by Brohm, 1978, p.27) calls ‘moral masochism’ (punishing oneself for inflicting pain on others, and enjoying it). Sport for Brohm (1978, p.27) ‘offers its practitioners the possibility to explore their physical being organ by organ, muscle by muscle, limb by limb by gradually experiencing longed for tortures through a controlled process of self-inflicted punishment or even self-destruction’. Sport atomises the machine body bit by bit to inflict pain on individual muscles (e.g. pecs, quads), ligaments (e.g. the cruciate ligament, osteopubis), tendons (e.g. archilles tendon), organs (e.g. kidneys), and bones (e.g. clavicle). The amount of medical knowledge bandied about in sports commentary has increased exponentially in my lifetime. No longer just the sight of exterior spectacle, the sporting body has also become the site of interior investigation. The body is not only displayed in its surface


of swelling and shiny muscle but also explored in its depths of organs, bones, ligaments and tendons. The camera is the purveyor of the exterior and the surface whereas the commentator is the mediator of the interior and the depths. The boundary rider (usually a former player) down there close to the action is particularly the mediator of information about injuries and updater of medical conditions. He or she is the kind of local priest to the commentator’s bishop. The commentator up there away from the action in the commentary box does not get involved in the messy business of bodies being injured, feeling pain, and suffering. Sport is bad for you, bad for the body, but good for business. Sport is big business. The sporting body is a business body.

The sporting body of Australia Cathy Freeman is a person, and site, on which the contradictions and tensions of sport were played out in her private life, athletic career and sporting body. An indigenous Australian, Freeman is famous not only for winning the gold medal in the women’s 400 metres at the 2000 Sydney Olympics and for previous exploits on the track but also for carrying the Aboriginal flag after winning the Gold Medal for the 400 meters at the 1994 Commonwealth Games. Freeman’s body is both a projective screen for the tensions regarding the rights and status of Australian indigenous people and a vehicle for expressing indigenous pride and the desire for social justice, land rights and selfdetermination. Freeman is ‘corpus Australis’, the body of Australia, the individual complement to David Mowaljarlai’s Corpus Australis, the Australian land as body to which I return in the final chapter (see also Giblett, 2004, chapter 11). Freeman’s biographer links her life to a number of aspects of the body we have already encountered, such as the penal colony and eugenics. Freeman’s mother was born on Palm Island off the coast of Queensland. McGregor (1998, p.15) describes this island as a ‘penal colony’, just as Australia as whole is an island and some of its islands, such as Norfolk Island, Rottnest Island and Tasmania were penal colonies. McGregor (1998, p.15) goes on to suggest that successive Queensland governments enacted laws on this island that were ‘directly responsible for the Stolen Children generations’. Although laws were not written literally on the body by tattooing or by Kafka’s horrendous bodywriting machine as in his nightmare of the penal colony, the law was written on the body of the ‘Stolen Generation’ to be read, not only by contemporaries in the present, but also by descendants in the future.

Sporting Body 137

The body is a vehicle and vector of communication from the past to the future. Just as the body was colonised in the past, the body is colonised into the future. Eugenics is a means of communication between the present and the future (as we saw in the chapter on the fascist body). In this regard the ‘Stolen Generation’ policy and programme was a form of eugenics, which McGregor suggests in not quite so few words. He goes on to define eugenics as ‘a racist concept committed to policies to improve [sic] the genetic stock [sic] of a nation’s offspring [sic]’ (McGregor, 1998, p.15). The terminology smacks of breeding livestock. The eugenicism of the ‘Stolen Generation’ policy and programme was to ‘absorb’ aboriginal people into the majority white population and to enact ‘the final solution’ of genocide through racial intermarriage. Yet for McGregor (1998, p.16) the Nazi Holocaust ‘so totally discredited eugenics’ that the rationale and justification for the Stolen Children policy and programme shifted to ‘cultural assimilation’. Cathy Freeman is both the product of and response to this shift. Her body is the site on which is played out not only the eugenicism of the ‘Stolen Generation’ and of cultural assimilation but also the affirmation of indigenous cultural identity, pride in its heritage and aspirations for the future. Freeman has been described as ‘an indigenous Boadicea’ (quoted by McGregor, 1998, p.96), a kind of Aboriginal Amazon leading her people into battle against the white invader. In her autobiography she expresses the pain and dislocation inflicted by stealing children and berates the Federal Government for not apologising for doing so. This situation both inspires her and ‘fuels her resentment’ (Freeman with Gullan, 2003, pp.78, 79 and 257). She says that she wants to be ‘a freedom fighter’ (Freeman with Gullan, 2003, p.79). Freeman is locked into, and is trying to escape from, what Nietzsche (1968, pp.472–473) in the Genealogy of morals called the ‘ressentiment’ of the master-slave dialectic in which ‘the slave’ enacts an imaginary and reactionary revenge against ‘the master’. The slave for him has internalised his/her own oppression and reproduces it, even in trying to escape from it. Not merely resentful, the oppressed reproduces resentment him or herself with his or her body. The only way in which the slave can escape from this dialectic is to deconstruct the system that produces it in the first place, and to decolonise the places and body on which that dialectic is inscribed through carnivalesque inversion. Freeman has deconstructed the master-slave dialectic and decolonised her body with her carnivalesque play with flags.


Rather than painting her body with woad like her Britannic predecessor, Freeman has become famous for draping her body in flags, the symbol of nationhood. Most famously and controversially, she carried the Aboriginal flag after winning the 400 metre final at the 1994 Commonwealth Games in Victoria, Canada. Four years earlier at the Commonwealth Games in Auckland Freeman had run in the victorious 4 × 100 metre Australian women’s relay team. Freeman was handed the green and gold boxing kangaroo flag made famous by Alan Bond’s America Cup victory. McGregor (1998, p.72) wryly observes that ‘nobody complained that it was not the Australian flag’. Not so four years later with the Aboriginal flag. McGregor (1998, p.162) writes that Freeman ‘had always dreamed of winning a gold medal and doing a victory lap draped in the Aboriginal flag’. She went to the 1994 Commonwealth games with her own Aboriginal flag folded in her backpack. She said ‘it’s part of me’ (cited by McGregor, 1998, p.163). In her autobiography she says that she ‘really wanted to show it to the rest of the world’ (Freeman with Gullan, 2003, p.60). After she had won the 400 metres final she was handed her Aboriginal flag as arranged and ran with it for 50 metres before going over to the crowd and getting an Australian flag. Freeman’s carrying of the Aboriginal flag became not only, as McGregor (1998, p.169) puts ‘a huge cause célèbre’ but also a media circus with newspaper readers, television audiences, commentators and even the then Prime Minister Paul Keating getting in on the act. Generally the mood was positive and the support overwhelming, but the media attention was intense. When Freeman went on to miraculously win the 200 metres final as well she carried the Aboriginal and Australian flags together. Freeman not only embodies the tensions between Aboriginal and white Australian culture. She also embodies the tensions of globalisation as Freeman is sponsored by Nike. Although McGregor (1998, p.171) is disparaging about ‘true believers [who] can catch Nike fever, where all roads lead to Nike HQ in Oregon, and staff and athletes are a worldwide fraternity marching successfully to the rhythm of Swoosh! Swoosh! Swoosh!’ he later describes how ‘Freeman had come to embody Nike’s image’ (p.276). Presumably and more precisely she had come to embody Nike’s image of itself and not the image of Nike as exploiter of cheap labour in Asian sweatshops. Freeman has generally tried to keep sport and politics separate, or to select the type of politics and the timing for its display focussing on Australian indigenous politics and showing her support at big events on big occasions rather than showing much support for and solidarity with other oppressed peoples. The

Sporting Body 139

messy everyday politics of finance and footwear have been her Achilles heel. The Nike sponsorship also highlights the tension between corporation and nation. This tension also became embodied in Freeman, or at least on her feet and in her face. Freeman became ‘the recognisable face [rather than body] of the host nation’ for the Sydney 2000 Olympics as her then partner reasoned she would four years earlier (McGregor, 1998, p.277). She was the central icon of the opening ceremony. Freeman had made the transition from runner to star. This transition was not only because of her media exposure but also because of her corporate sponsorship. Becoming the recognisable face of the nation meant that she could, as McGregor (1998, p.277) puts it, ‘ascend to the rarefied global earnings’ of other professional Australian sport-stars. The body of the sport-star is a sublimated business body orbiting in the sublime company of other heavenly bodies of other stars and in the ethereal realms of high finance. By embodying a corporation and by becoming the face of the host nation, her media image became parasitic on the host, rather than her body embodying the first nation of Aboriginal people. Freeman seems to want to try to hold all these forces in some sort of creative tension as she ‘parades her dual love of her nation and country’ as McGregor (1998, p.334) puts it. Her body (including her face, and her image) is the site where the forces of nation (the first nation of indigenous Australia and the second nation of non- indigenous Australia), of globalisation (the transnational corporation) and country (the land of Australia) meet and play out. These forces predate and extend beyond her, but they come to meet in her, and even to constitute her in a unique way. No other Australian Aboriginal person is such a high profile international sport-star. It is this unique combination of forces that makes Freeman such an interesting case study of the Australian sporting body, indeed of the body of Australia at least in its individual and indigenous manifestations.

9 Cyborg: The Body-Machine of the Civilian-Soldier

From the body AS machine (in modern western medicine, fascism and sport) where the machine is a figure or metaphor for the body we come to the body AND machine (in technologies, especially communication technologies) forming a composite. From the machine-body of modern western medicine, through the fascist body of the war-machine, we come to the body-machine of the civilian-soldier, to, in word, the cyborg. The term ‘refers to [a?] cybernetic organism, a self-regulating human-machine system’ (Featherstone and Burrows, 1995, p.1). Cybernetics is the study and use of command and control systems in machines and organisms (see Wiener, 1954/1989, pp.15–17). As command and control involve feedback, cybernetics is more precisely ‘the science of automatic, self-regulated control’ (Levidow and Robins, 1989a, p.8).

Cybernetics and cyborgs The term ‘cybernetics’ comes from the Greek word for ‘the steersman’ (see Wiener, 1954/1989, p.15) and from ‘the governor’ of nineteenthcentury steam machines and thermodynamics (see Tomas, 1995, p.23). Cybernetics can thus be considered as an extension of what Foucault (1979, pp.5–21; 1991, pp.87–104) calls governmentality. He used this term to describe all the ways and means by which the lives of populations are policed by state apparatuses. It can be extended to apply to the functioning of the body self-regulated by communication technologies. It also applies to the functioning of the body policed by transnational corporations, the successor to the state as the dominant institution of our hypermodern age. Cybernetics can also be considered as an extension of the internalisation of the panoptic principle of 140

Body-Machine 141

self-surveillance (see Foucault, 1977a) through the use of communication technologies (see Giblett, 2008b). Yet the cyborg is not only a product of science but also a creature of science fiction. A cyborg for Haraway (1985, p.65) is ‘a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction’. The cyborg for her is a matter of lived experience and of science fiction ‘full of cyborgs – creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted’ (Haraway, 1985, p.66). On the side of social reality and lived experience, modern medicine for Haraway (1985, p.66) is ‘also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine’ such as IV drips, heart-rate monitors and pacemakers. On this side too ‘modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command-control-communicationintelligence’. Cybernetics began in Wiener’s work on predictive gun-sights during the Second World War. C3I reached highly visible manifestation in the Gulf War of 1991 where satellites and computers were used with deadly accuracy in aiming smart bombs. Cyborgs abound not only in war, but also in non-war, not only in the military but also in civilian life. For Gray (1989, p.67), one of Haraway’s students, ‘in Europe and North America [in Australia, New Zealand, Japan] we are cyborgs in many ways already: medical implants in our bodies, mechanical connections close at hand, products from around the world in every corner of our lives’. Globalisation makes us into cyborgs not only by bringing products to us via transportation but also by bringing TV and computer programs to us via communication. The cyborg is not so much a matter of hardware, but of software, of programs and coding. It is also a matter of software and wetware coming together, and of wetware being programmed and coded. The cyborg is cultural and natural; the cyborg is a creature, and creation, of culture and nature. More to the point, the cyborg is the creature of the opposition of culture to nature. The human body is the creation of both culture and nature. Capitalist modernity instituted a binary opposition and a hierarchical relationship between culture and nature (see Balsamo, 1995, pp.215 and 217; and Giblett, 2004, chapter 2). Culture was privileged over nature; and culture was pitted against nature in such a way that the former would inevitably win and the latter lose. Capitalist modernity ascribed the body to nature and the mind to culture. It also figured the body and nature as machine produced by culture and the mind, and so prefigured the cyborg.


The cyborg is a creature that crosses the boundary of the capitalist opposition of culture to nature and that hybridises the two (rather than deconstructs or decolonises this opposition). Rather than ‘becoming cultural bodies’ and already being them as Dyens (2001, p.2; see also p.19) argues, we have always been cultural bodies (as previous chapters demonstrate). The cyborg is different in degree rather than in kind from, say, the gunner and cinemagoer, and they in turn from, say, the hunter and the cave painter. The difference between them lies in the different ‘cultures of natures’ they enact, between the first nature of first peoples and cultures, of the cavepainter, the second nature of agriculture, mining and cities, the third nature of modernity, of the cinemagoer, and the fourth nature of hypermodernity, of the cyborg, though the cyborg in fact is prefigured by the cyborg in fiction of high modernity (see Giblett, 2008b, chapter 5; for the ‘cultures of natures’, see Giblett, 2004). The cyborg, as Featherstone and Burrows (1995, p.2) define it, is ‘a human-machine hybrid’. It tries to combine the best of both worlds, of both humanity and machinery, (but also produces the worst of all possible worlds). Rather than a liminal or transgressive or even monstrous figure, the hybrid is the norm (Latour cited by Lykke, 2000, p.77), especially when it comes to gender for the body, nature and the machine have been gendered as female/feminine whereas the mind, culture and the machinist (inventor, scientist, technician, mechanic) have been gendered as male/masculine. The cyborg is a hybrid that crosses the culture/nature, mind/body and male/female divides. A cyborg may be femininised as with the female cyborgs of film and novel such as Maria in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis of 1926 or ‘the magnetic-metallic organism’ of Hadaly in Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s L’Eve future written in 1886 (1981, p.92; see also Balsamo, 2000, pp.149–150). Or it may be masculinised as with the male cyborgs of the Terminator films. Cyborgs, Balsamo (2000, pp.150 and 155) argues, ‘fascinate us by technologically refashioning human difference … because they are not like us, and yet just like us’. Cyborgs are uncanny, just as automatons were for Freud. As artifacts that ‘come alive’ or mimic life they fascinate us with their mechanical reproduction of human aptitudes and they terrify us with their resemblance to human minds and bodies. They cross the human-machine divide and bring the news that the difference is not all that great. The cyborg is the uncanny flipside to sublime communication technologies. Sublime communication technologies are an integral part of life today. Just as we do not get much choice about whether or not we use

Body-Machine 143

them, so we do not get to choose whether or not we are cyborgs. ‘We are cyborgs’ whether we like it not as Haraway (1985, p.66; see also Featherstone and Burrows, 1995, pp.3 and 10) puts it. ‘We are not becoming cyborgs’, as Dyens (2001, pp.8 and 88) puts it, as ‘we ourselves have become cyborgs’. Every time we use the phone, the computer, the ATM, have an injection or medical test, pop a pill, drive a car, take a bus, watch TV, listen to the radio, see a film, play a video games, surf the Net, send an email, we are cyborgs. Our bodies have entered into some sort of dependence on, and enhancement by, a machine, principally a communication technology. We have ceased to be our own body exclusively and we have become a body-machine hybrid, a cyborg. ‘The machine is us’ Haraway (1985, p.99) concludes. The machine is not something outside us that we control and manipulate, and then stow away or dispose of, but something that becomes us. As Dyens (2001, p.32) concurs, ‘we are machines and the machine is within us’. Yet the cyborg is more precisely the interface with an electronic machine rather than with an electromagnetic machine or an internal combustion machine. The body as machine, as made up of parts, is as old as the Renaissance; the nervous system as telegraphic control system as old as telegraphy; the body electric is as old as the discovery of electricity and its use in electric motors. The body electronic, what Wiener (cited by Tomas, 1995, p.23) calls ‘the body as an electronic system’, is the creature of what Tomas (1995, p.23) calls ‘the age of communication and control’. Not only, as for Cubitt (1998, p.50), ‘the cyborg is alive, and working for RTZ’, but also anybody who works for any corporation or university for that matter, just like Cubitt, is a cyborg. Yet the cyborg is not merely used in war as a weapon, but is the child of war. Whether it is the legitimate or illegitimate child of war is another question. Haraway (1985, p.68) concedes that ‘the main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism’. By arguing that the cyborg is illegitimate Haraway is then able to use it as a figure of irony and resistance against militarism and patriarchal capitalism. Yet the cyborg is the legitimate child of militarism and patriarchal capitalism as they are married and as they gave birth to modern machines and bodies in industry and war from the first factories, the first rapid firing guns, and the first use of communication and transport technologies, such as the railway and telegraphy, in both war and industry (see Giblett, 2008b).


In fact, militarism and patriarchal capitalism were married and gave birth to war-machines and to the soldier from their very beginnings. The cyborg is the youngest offspring of this marriage that in its latest twist gave birth to the soldier-civilian in the increasing militarisation of civilian life. ‘All of us are already civilian soldiers, without knowing it’ says Paul Virilio. The cyborg is not only a hybrid of machine and organism, but also of soldier and civilian, or perhaps more precisely it embodies or empanels the colonisation of the civilian by the soldier, the grafting of the soldier on to the civilian. The cyborg is a creation of modern militarism and militaristic modernity. The cyborg is a creature, figure and product of the militarisation of civilian life. As such its genealogy can be traced at least back to fascism that aestheticised civilian life with military style. Cybernetics was a military creation in a long line of communication technologies with beginnings in the military (see Giblett, 2008b). The cyborg is the legitimate child of militarism and patriarchal capitalism. The point of establishing the illegitimacy of the cyborg for Haraway is that it provides leverage in resisting militarism and patriarchal capitalism by virtue of being illegitimate. In particular, it provides the irony that Haraway and so many other postmodern theorists see as necessary for resistance. Yet given the dubious parentage of the cyborg, but still acknowledging that we are cyborgs, irony and resistance lie more effectively in the grotesque and the monstrous, in recoupling the cyborg with the what Haraway (1995) later called the symbiont. We are cyborgs, but we are also symbionts who are in symbiosis with the oxygen-producing plants of this planet, with other animals, with bodies of water, and with other bodies of earth. Whether this symbiosis is mutual and sustainable or masterly and parasitic is another matter (see Giblett, 2004). The boundaries between ourselves as symbionts and as cyborgs are being blurred as cybernetics is reshaping our bodies. Communications technologies and biotechnologies are for Haraway (1985, p.82) ‘the crucial tools recrafting our bodies’. These technologies, and the ‘communication sciences and modern biologies’ associated with them, are constructed for Haraway (1985, p.83) by ‘a common move – the translation of the world into a problem of coding’. Although undoubtedly both communication and biological sciences and technologies do translate ‘the world’ into a problem of coding, the question remains should they, and indeed can they without reducing the world to a set of numbers and mathematical formulae and sets of calculations, to digital data, to binary oppositions. And thereby killing it. We not only murder to dissect as Wordsworth said, but also murder to decode and encode.

Body-Machine 145

Communication and cultural students and semioticians may respond positively to the mention, and notion, of code, but this is a dubious response that takes us back into the C3I (command-controlcommunication-intelligence) composite of militarism and patriarchal capitalism. To encode (and decode) is to reduce communication to the transportation of messages (see Giblett, 2008b). Even the seemingly innocuous communication model of Shannon and Weaver has military overtones not only because of Weaver’s successful application of mathematical and statistical techniques in deciphering enemy messages and any simply authorial intentionalism that would ascribe a causal relationship between his employment and his theory (see Hutchins, 1999, pp.5–6), but also because encoding and decoding messages is the stock-in-trade of war. Not only coding bodies as machines as in modern western medicine, but also coupling bodies to machines as in modern western technologies has effects on both bodies and machines, and changes their meaning, and nature. Evelyn Fox Keller (1994, p.316) wonders whether it can be ‘any surprise that, in modelling organisms and machines, each upon the other, not only do organisms and machines come increasingly to resemble each other but also that … the meaning of both terms undergoes some rather critical changes?’ Foremost amongst these changes for Keller (1994, p. 321) is the way in which ‘the body of modern biology, like the DNA molecule – and like, too, the modern corporate or political body – has become just another part of an informational network, now machine, now message, always already ready for exchange, each for the other’. To code the body and the self is to make it communicable semiotically and transportable virtually. When Haraway (1985, p.82) argues that the cyborg self is ‘the self feminists must code’, she is advocating a militarist and patriarchal capitalist self rather than a self and a body that cannot be reduced to a code. Rather than a cyborg self, a playful, grotesque, monstrous body resists all attempts to encode and decode it. To figure the body and self as land is to connect it to a place and a community that cannot be communicated or transported without killing it. Similarly, to code the earth as Gaia as Lovelock has done is to code it as cyborg, as Haraway (1995, pp.xiii, xiv; see also Dyens, 2001, p.49) points out. It is not to live with the earth as living body, as goddess. It is merely to use Gaia as a metaphor whereas the earth is our mother beyond mere metaphor (see Giblett, 2004, chapter 9). Yet the earth, like the body, has not only been encoded but also subjected to, and represented by, visual technologies. Just as the body has


been encoded in DNA and in the Human Genome Project and investigated by x-rays, cat-scans and ultrasound, so has the earth been photographed from outer space and constituted as scientific object, as ‘the environment’ (see Haraway, 2000, p.222). As discourses constitute their objects, so for Haraway (2000, p.222) ‘both the whole earth and the foetus owe their existence as public objects to visualizing technologies … The global foetus and the spherical whole earth both exist because of, and inside of, technoscientific visual culture’. The biosphere ceases to have an existence, let alone life, outside of visualising technologies. As some aspects of the ecosphere, such as the electromagnetosphere and global extraterrestrial space, are invisible, they are not acknowledged, let alone respected, as part of the earth household. In a peculiarly hypermodern twist the whole earth photographed from outer space and the foetus photographed in inner space come to stand for the sign itself in what Haraway (2000, p.225) goes on to call ‘ordinary magico-secular transubstantiation’ in which the image or symbol is transformed into the body and blood of the foetus and the earth. Instead of the sign representing the thing as in modernity, and the sign being the thing as in pre- or non-modernity (see Giblett, 2004), ‘the sign becomes the thing itself’ (Haraway, 2000, p.225 (my emphasis)). The hypermodern moment is not merely signs disconnected from things, but signs become the things themselves (see Giblett, 2008b) when the thing itself (foetus and globe) is not accessible to ordinary human vision either because it is hidden from view or too big to be seen. By being figured as machine, by being coded as a message, by being scanned and x-rayed, the body has ceased to be the ground of our being and the ultimate matter of our life – though it is still the ultimate matter of our death. Bodies, according to Virilio (2000, p.11), ‘are no longer the ultimate matter, our skin the final frontier, our consciences the training ground for a world turned on its head. The new limits are now to be found beyond, in otherwise transcendent realms’. The ultimate matter is light beyond whose speed nothing can travel. Bodies are constituted as a frontier to be crossed, not a home to dwell in, but they are still a constraint, a limit-case. Death is the ultimate limit, and matter, dead matter. The body is living matter, or at least the living body is. Or the body is living or dead. A dead body is still a body. The body can be either alive or dead. What is the body? The set of biological and physical processes and structures that lives and dies. Just as the machine-body gives rise to a disembodied self in modern western medicine and sport, the cyborg for Haraway (1985, p.82) gives

Body-Machine 147

rise to what she calls ‘a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self’. This is a good self whereas, in strong contrast to Haraway, Robins and Levidow (1995a, p.119; 1995b, pp.105–106; see also Levidow and Robins, 1989b, p.172) characterise the cyborg self in the following terms: through a paranoid rationality, expressed in the machine-like self, we combine an omnipotent phantasy of self-control with fear and aggression directed against the emotional and bodily limitations of mere mortals. Through regression to a phantasy of infantile omnipotence, we deny our dependency upon nature, upon our own nature, upon the ‘bloody mess’ of organic nature. In what they go on to call ‘a sublimatory, compensatory control’ (Levidow and Robins, 1989b, p.172) the cyborg self thereby ‘transcend[s] human limitations’ (Levidow and Robins, 1989b, p.168), especially the earthly and natural limits and prison of the body, into the sublime realm of heavenly bodies. As the sublime for Kant is the category by which we deny our dependence upon nature, the cyborg self encapsulates and embodies the sublime (see Giblett, 1996, chapter 2). The cyborg self is sublime. It is a self linked to sublime communication technologies (see Giblett, 2008b, chapter 9) like a life-support system. Robins’ and Levidow’s cyborg self is akin to Haraway’s (1995, p.xi) later characterisation of what she calls ‘the Terminators’ drawing principally on the second film: ‘the jelled-metal, shape-shifting, cyberenhanced warriors fighting in the stripped terrain landscapes and extraterrestrial landscapes of a terrible future’. Even ordinary cyborgs like ourselves are ‘cyber-enhanced’ so in dealing with the difference between the cyborg and the Terminator we are dealing with a difference in degree rather than kind. The term ‘cyborg’, Haraway (1995, p.xv) goes on to point out, was coined by Clynes and Kline in 1960 to refer to ‘the enhanced man who could survive in extraterrestrial environments’. There is not much difference between the cyborg and Terminator here. Nor much difference between astronauts and cybernauts like ourselves who survive in the extraterrestrial environment of the electromagnetic spectrum, the ether of telecommunications, and ‘off-world’ in the global network of cities connected by an umbilical cord, like an astronaut, to mother-earth-ship (see Giblett, 2008b). The cyborg and the Terminator are not that much different. Perhaps their difference lies in gender, in their gender. The Terminator is the bad boy of postmodern culture whereas the cyborg for Haraway is the bad girl


or good bitch of socialist feminism, the cyberfeminist. Haraway (1985, p.101) would rather be a cyborg than a goddess, but Lykke (2000, pp.75, 82 and 85) would like to be a cyborg and a goddess, a ‘cybergoddess’. The Terminator for Haraway (1995, p.xv) is ‘the sign of the beast on the face of post-modern culture, the sign of the Sacred Image of the Same … The Terminator is the self-sufficient, self-generated Tool in all of its infinite but self-identical variations’. The Terminator is not simply the fascist machine-body but the fascist machine-tool-body that manufactures machines. The Terminator is a Bachelor Birth from a Bachelor Machine, and a Bachelor Machine for a Bachelor Birth. The cyborg is the legitimate child of the marriage between militarism and patriarchal capitalism. Whereas we can refuse to be Terminators, we are already cyborgs. Haraway (1995, p.xix) concludes by suggesting that: I do not think that most people who live on earth now have the choice not to live inside of, and not be shaped by, the fiercely material and imaginative apparatuses for making ‘us’ cyborgs and making our homes into places mapped within the space of titanic globalisations in a direct line of descent from the cybernetic Gaia seen from NASA’s fabulous eyes. Most people who live on earth don’t have access to electrical power, phone lines, computers and western medicine so they are not cyborgs though they may not have much choice about whether or not they are targeted to become cyborgs. As for those of us who have access to these things, we may not have any choice about being cyborgs but we do have choice about being Terminators. We can choose to be either ‘Cyborgs for Earthly Survival’ as Haraway (1995, p.xix) puts it or ‘Terminators for Earthly Destruction’. We may not have any choice about living on earth but we do have choice about whether we regard the earth as ‘cybernetic Gaia’, as ‘a dynamic, self-regulating, homeostatic system’ (yuk!) as Haraway (1995, p.xiii) puts it, or as living, uncodable home, as grotesque and monstrous body, fecund and procreative, lifegiving and death-dealing. We are cyborgs and symbionts, but we have to choose whether we will also be goddesses and symbionts for earthly survival or Terminators for earthly destruction.

Symbiosis and symbionts In her later writing about the cyborg, Haraway complements this figure with that of the symbiont in order to foreground the organic

Body-Machine 149

component of the cyborg. The cyborg is a composite cybernetic organism, but the organism is often overlooked in the emphasis on the cybernetic. The shiny hardware and calculating software are often emphasised to the detriment of the messy wetware that helps to make up the cyborg, that makes it possible for the cyborg to survive and function. Without the organism, there is no cyborg. In coupling the symbiont with the cyborg Haraway draws on the work of Lynn Margulis. For nearly 30 years Margulis (1998, p.33; see also Warming, 1909, pp.83–95) has been the most cogent proponent of the notion of symbiosis, ‘the term coined by the German botanist Anton de Bary in 1873’. Margulis (1971, p.49; see also 1981, p.161) defines symbiosis as ‘the living together of two or more organisms in close association. To exclude the many kinds of parasitic relationships known in nature, the term is often restricted to associations that are of mutual advantage to the partners’. As Robert Fordeman (1992, p.319) argues, ‘we are in symbiotic relation to the oxygen-producing plants of the world’ – whether we like it or not. Every breath of air we take re-affirms this symbiosis. As Margulis (1998, p.5) puts it, ‘we are symbionts on a symbiotic planet’. Symbiosis has been not only used as a biological term but also as a psychological one. Margaret Mahler (1968, p.6) could be described as a neo-Freudian psychoanalyst whose work on what she calls ‘the symbiosis theory of the development of the human being’ spans over three decades beginning in the 1950s. In this theory there are basically three phases of personality development: the normal autistic; the normal symbiotic; and the separation-individuation phases. These refer primarily to what she calls ‘the development of object relationship’, especially with the mother, and corresponding roughly to Freud’s oral, anal and phallic stages. Mahler’s theory begins from the foundation of what she calls ‘that vital and basic need of the human young in his [sic] early months of life: symbiosis with a mother or mother substitute’ (Mahler, 1968, p.2). For Mahler, Pine and Bergman (1975, pp.6, 8), normal symbiosis is the phase in which ‘the infant behaves and functions as though he [sic] and his mother were an omnipotent system – a dual unity within one common boundary’, just as the bioregion normally is the dual unity of indigenous humans with the earth within one common boundary (see Giblett, 2004). The autistic child for Mahler develops a psychotic defense against the lack of this need. The psychotic symbiotic child is thus in Mahler et al’s (1975, p.12) terms ‘unable to use the mother as a real external


object as a basis for developing a stable sense of separateness from, and relatedness to, the world of reality’. Similarly the psychotic city-dweller is generally unable to see the earth as separate and is unable to relate to her other than as Mother Nature in the packaged commodities of nature documentaries, national parks, processed food, tourist destinations, and so on (see Giblett, 2004). For Mahler (and Furer, 1966, p.559) this lack of separation in ‘symbiotic child psychosis’ involves ‘a regression to the stage of object relationship that exists before self and other representation have been distinguished’. In other words, symbiotic psychosis entails a regression to the symbiotic state of early infancy, even to the parasitic, or perhaps more precisely, intrauterine state, in which the infant is unable to distinguish between self and (m)other.1 Similarly, the symbiotic psychotic city-dweller is unable to distinguish between self and the earth. This regression is thus, Mahler (and Furer, 1996, p.560) argues, ‘an archaic defence mechanism, a restitutive attempt that, by way of the delusion of oneness with the ‘mothering principle’, serves the function of survival’. This delusion of oneness entails delusional feelings of omnipotence so for Mahler within this sense of oneness lie the seeds of its own destruction. She goes on to argue that ‘the essential feature of symbiosis is hallucinatory or delusional somatopsychic omnipotent fusion with the representation of the mother and, in particular, the delusion of a common boundary between two physically separate individuals’ (Mahler et al., 1975, p.45; cf. Mahler, 1968 p.92). The psychotic city dweller has a delusional oneness with the mothering principle of nature, and a delusional omnipotence over it/her, through the produced and packaged commodities of the hypermarket shelf and the electronic media which serve the function of survival (and to that extent is ‘successful’), but not the function of living symbiotically, sustainably and spiritually with the earth. 1

Following Helene Deutsch, Mahler (1952, p.286) argues that ‘the intrauterine, parasite-host relationship within the mother organism must be replaced in the postnatal period by the infant’s being enveloped, as it were, in the extrauterine matrix of the mother’s nursing care, a kind of social symbiosis’. Mahler repeated the same view 16 years later (1968, p.34). Yet it is arguable whether the intrauterine relationship is strictly parasitic as the foetus does not gain considerably at the mother’s expense. It is perhaps more precisely inquilistic (see below) as the uterus shares the body of the mother without significant disadvantage to the mother. 2 The word ‘physically’ is added to the later version.

Body-Machine 151

The symbiotic psychotic, Mahler (and Furer, 1966, p.560) go on to argue, does not cling to the mother per se, but to ‘a hypercathected, yet at the same time devitalized and deanimated concrete symbol which he [sic] substitutes for her – a psychotic transitional object to which he constantly resorts in stereotyped fashion’, what she also calls ‘a “psychotic fetish’’’. The living body of the earth, nurturing and horrifying, life-giving and death-dealing becomes the dead matter of Mother Nature, an industrial resource to be extracted and exploited, a commodity to be bought and sold, produced and consumed, a bauble to be fetishised in advertising, documentaries and tourism. The modalities of this relationship between subject and object give rise to what Mahler (1952, p.292) calls ‘the brittle ego of the “symbiotic psychotic child”’ who experiences the world as ‘hostile and threatening because it has to be met as a separate being’. The response of the symbiotic psychotic, the fragile, hard-edged ego of the city dweller, to this world is to phantasise it precisely as not a separate being. So much for the symbiotic psychotic. What of the normal symbiotic? The normal symbiotic child in Mahler’s sense would presumably be the isolated individualist who is constituted as subject insofar as the earth is constituted as object. These terms need to be reconstrued critically in postmodern ecological terms. The ‘normal’ symbiotic city dweller (if such a thing is possible) or the normal symbiotic bioregion dweller, would use the bioregion as a real external subject, as Great Goddess, in her own right for developing a stable sense of intersubjective interaction and mutual aid with her. The normal symbiotic has developed from and cannot return to the symbiosis of early infancy. In theorisng the normal symbiotic phase of early infancy Mahler (1968, p.7) is quite explicit that ‘the term symbiosis is borrowed from biology, where it is used to refer to a close functional association of two organisms to their mutual advantage’. Yet if there is mutual advantage in the symbiosis of early infancy it is not a commensurable one as the infant requires the mother or mother substitute to survive biologically whereas the mother does not require the infant for her to survive biologically. In biological terms the relationship is strictly commensal – benefit to one, no harm to the other. Infantile and childhood development can be seen to go through two distinct symbiotic phases: first, an intrauterine period of inquilinism ‘where one party shares the nest or home of the other without significant disadvantage to the “owner”’ in contrast to parasitism ‘where one party gains considerably at the other’s expense’; secondly, a postnatal period of commensalism


‘where one party gains some benefit … while the other suffers no serious disadvantage’ (Abercrombie, Hickman, Johnson and Thain 1990, pp.542–543). A third stage of mutualism where both parties benefit and neither suffers would perhaps ideally be achieved in later childhood and adulthood. Yet rather than using the term symbiosis in a strict biological sense, Mahler (et al., 1975, p.44; see also Mahler, 1968, p.9) go on to argue that: the term symbiosis in this context is a metaphor. Unlike the biological concept of symbiosis, it does not describe what actually happens in a mutually beneficial relationship between two separate individuals of different species. It describes that state of undifferentiation, of fusion with mother, in which the ‘I’ is not yet differentiated from the ‘not-I’ and which inside and outside are only gradually coming to be sensed as different. Yet symbiosis in the normal symbiotic relationship could describe what actually happens in a mutually beneficial relationship between two separate individuals, or more precisely communities, of different species living in a bioregion. Symbiosis would no longer be a mere ‘metaphor’, or a heuristic device or explanatory trope for something else, but a lived relationship. Rather than being in a state of fusion with the earth, humans in bioregional symbiosis would experience themselves as members of a community interacting in mutual benefit with other species within a common bioregion, indeed, with the whole earth, and with the whole earth considered as a living organism. Mahler’s work has been critiqued for this dubious premise of an undifferentiated, symbiotic union between mother and child.3 In the 1980s Daniel Stern (1985, p.10) contended bluntly that ‘infants never experience a period of total self/other undifferentiation’. Analogously the indigene is never totally undifferentiated from or completely symbiotic with the earth. In the loving union of people and earth, indigenous people are not subsumed beneath, or swallowed up by, or completely identified with, the earth to the point of losing their own separate identity. People and earth are subjects in their own right just as the mother is a subject in her

3

For a critique of Mahler’s work see Klein, 1980.

Body-Machine 153

own right. Jessica Benjamin (1990, p.20) picked up and developed Stern’s position and argued that: the other whom the self meets is also a self, a subject in his or her own right … that other subject is different and yet alike … the idea of intersubjectivity reorients the conception of the psychic world from a subject’s relations to its object toward a subject meeting another subject. The earth whom the self meets is also a self, a subject in its or her own right. Although the earth is a subject like the self, the earth is not the same as the self. The earth is different and yet alike. Benjamin (1990, p.47) argues that ‘sameness and difference exist simultaneously in mutual recognition … self and other are not merged … the externality of the other makes one feel one is truly being “fed”, getting nourishment from the outside, rather than supplying everything for oneself’. In mutual recognition the earth is different from and the same as people. Indigenous people and the earth are not merged into an oceanic feeling of complete undifferentiation or loss of mutually distinct identity. The externality and recognition of the earth makes one feel one is truly being fed by nourishing terrains rather than fed by consuming land, by eating earth. The idea of intersubjectivity reorients the conception of the psychic world away from a subject’s relations to its object toward a subject meeting another subject. The earth is another subject as Benjamin (1990, p.23) puts it in relation to the mother: The idea of mutual recognition is crucial to the intersubjective view … the mother is a subject in her own right [just as the earth is, or should be, a subject in her own right] … She is external reality [the earth is external reality] – but she is rarely regarded as another subject. The earth is rarely regarded as another subject despite its generosity, despite our lack of gratitude towards it and despite the lack of reciprocity in our relationship with it/her. Yet, as Serres (1982, p.8) puts, it ‘the parasitic relation is intersubjective’. The parasitic city and the parasitic modern city-zen constitutes itself as subject and its host, the earth, as subject. The psychotic city dweller, by contrast, has a hypercathected and delusional sense of oneness with the earth that denies its/her subjectivity.


Despite this difference, the flow of goods between the earth and the psychotic and parasitic city dweller is one way as is the flow of bads back. A similar imbalance pertains in the relationship between the child and its parents. Benjamin (1990, p.14) argues that ‘mutuality … persists in spite of the tremendous inequality of the parent-child relationship’. Mutuality persists in spite of the tremendous inequality of the earth-indigene, and the even greater inequality of the earth-modern city-dweller relationship. Modern mastery has tried to supersede traditional mutuality and to reverse the tremendous inequality of the earthindigene relationship. Despite the inequality of the modern-earth relationship, the former is still in symbiosis with the latter. All people are parasites on the earth to greater or lesser extent. Serres (1982, p.24) argues that: man [sic] is the universal parasite, everything and everyone around him is a hospitable space. Plants and animals are always his hosts; man is always necessarily their guest. Always taking, never giving. He bends the logic of exchange and of giving in his favour when he is dealing with nature as a whole. When he is dealing with his kind, he continues to do so; he wants to be the parasite of man as well. Human beings are always the guest of the earth, plants and animals the host, but there is a world of difference between the oral and anal sadism of mining and pastoralism and the mutual recognition and symbiosis of indigenous people and the earth, between the mediated relationship and interaction of the former, and the immediacy of the other. There is also a difference between indigenes and what Serres (1995, pp.120 and 122) calls astronauts who live ‘off-ground’ in the extraterrestrial world of cities: ‘we have all become astronauts, completely deterritorialized … Astronaut humanity is floating in space like a foetus in amniotic fluid, tied to the placenta of Mother Earth by all the nutritive passages’. Astronaut humanity is floating in the womb of the biosphere tied to the earth mothership at the mouth and the anus and bathing in the amniotic fluid of the atmosphere and the electomagnetosphere inside the skin of oribital extraterrestrial space. Astronaut humanity is not standing with two feet planted firmly on, and rooted in, the ground, drawing nourishment from it and its goods and giving back gratitude and respect. Astronaut humanity ingests good things from the ecosphere, digests them and then excretes bad things back into it. All humanity has ‘an unsevered umbilical cord’ attaching it

Body-Machine 155

symbiotically to the earth but astronaut humanity is attached parasitically sucking out nutrients and giving back wastes and not giving back gratitude and care unlike indigenous peoples.4 Astronaut humanity is a parasite who, as Serres (1982, p.x) puts it, ‘takes without giving and weakens without killing. The parasite is also a guest, who exchanges his talk, praise and flattery for food’. The city and the citi-zen is a parasite who takes from the earth without giving back anything except rubbish and weakens the earth without killing it – yet – for that would be to kill itself. The parasite cannot live without the host; the host can live without the parasite. The city and the citizen at home or abroad is also a guest who exchanges his praise and flattery of the earth for sustenance. Perhaps more precisely, a parasite is what Serres (1982, p.8) calls ‘an abusive guest’. For Serres (1982, p.168), ‘everything begins with what I call abuse value. The first economic relation is of abuse’. Relations of use and use value are pre-economic, or certainly pre-capitalist. The agricultural, manufacturing, mining, and pastoralist industries are instances of industrial capitalist land abuse. Serres (1995, p.36) goes on to argue that ‘the parasite routinely confuses use and abuse. The parasite would destroy the host without realizing it …’. And him or herself in the process. Without mutual recognition we cease to exist and the earth ceases to exist too. Benjamin (1990, p.39) argues that ‘if we fully negate the other, that is, if we assume complete control over him [or her] and destroy his [or her] identity and will, then we have negated ourselves as well. For then there is no one there to recognise us, no one there for us to desire’. If we fully negate the earth, that is, if we assume complete control over her and destroy her identity and will, then we have negated ourselves as well. For then there is no one there to recognise us, no one there for us to desire. As Serres (1995, p.34) puts it, ‘former parasites have to become symbionts … This is history’s bifurcation: either death or symbiosis’. The choice is simple: either no future or a future. Margulis (1998, p.111) concurs that ‘without “the other” we do not survive’. Mutual recognition is not a moral stricture, something that we should do or have to do out of a sense of moral obligation. Rather it is a fact of life, or perhaps more precisely a fact for life as without it we are dead meat. Benjamin (1990, p.40) insists that ‘mutual recognition

4

According to Milton Klein (1980, p.91), Mahler’s concept of symbiosis is based on ‘the image of an unsevered umbilical cord’.


cannot be achieved through obedience, through identification with the other’s power, or through repression. It requires, finally, contact with the other’. Mutual recognition between people and earth cannot be achieved through obedience to environmental laws, or to the figure of the Great Goddess, nor through identification with the Great Mother’s power, nor through repression of our desire. Nor even through a natural contract along the lines proposed by Serres (1995, p.38): ‘we must add to the exclusively social contract a natural contract of symbiosis and reciprocity’. Mutual recognition between people and earth requires contact (rather than contract) with the other, with the earth in mutual reciprocity and symbiosis. Not only seeing the earth, but also tasting (and not just eating) the earth, listening, smelling and touching it – or her. The natural contact of symbiosis and reciprocity is added to the exclusively social contract.

10 Taoist Body of the Earth

The current obsession with ‘the body’ in cultural studies and sociology has something peculiarly western about it as John Hay (1994, p.43) has argued. Yet this obsession is marked, not only by cultural difference, but also by history and class consciousness to reuse Lukacs’ (1971) well-worn phrase. Indeed, as Foucault (1981, p.126) argues, ‘one of the primordial forms of class consciousness is the affirmation of the body’. It might not be going too far to claim that ‘the body’ is, with a high degree of lexical redundancy, a modern, western, bourgeois invention. Such a modern/western/bourgeois invention or affirmation of ‘the body’ is different from Traditional Chinese Medicine for, as Judith Farquhar (1994, p.78) has insisted, ‘whatever it is that doctors of traditional Chinese medicine work on, it cannot properly be called ‘the body’. Rather they work on a system of energy flows between nodal points along passages or channels which experience blockages manifested in ‘diseases’ or pathologies. In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and in the consonant theory and practices of Taoism (including Tai chi or taijiquan) ‘the body’ is conceptualised or metaphorised primarily as the earth with a system of energy-flows. Taoism, taijiquan and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) share a similar view of ‘the body’, or more precisely, the cosmic body. Indeed, Joseph Needham (1970, p.324), that most eminent of Sinologists, argues that ‘ancient Chinese medicine was closely associated with the beliefs of the philosophers who may broadly be termed Taoist’. Needham (1970, p.284) elsewhere argues that ‘many of the most important physicians and medical writers in Chinese history were wholly or partly Taoist’. Fulder (1990, pp.13 and 57) concurs that what he calls ‘Oriental traditional medicine’ had ‘a Taoist framework’. Yet the relationship between TCM and Taoism goes beyond mere association or commonality. Kristofer 157


Schipper (1993, p.124) speculates that ‘there are too many areas of overlap between the ancient medical theories and the inner pantheon of Taoism not to see that they are related. It may well be [that] the mystical vision of the body in Taoism… has served as a model of reference for Chinese medicine’.

Taoism Yet the Taoist pantheon is not in any sense made up of ‘gods’. Schipper (1993, p.69) maintained that ‘the Taoist pantheon’ is equivalent to and identical with ‘the abstract powers of the inner universe’. These powers are thus not external to humans and to nature but are what Robinet (1993, p.100) calls ‘bodily gods’ and ‘gods of the body’. Schipper (1993, p.123) goes on to argue that ‘the true Taoist pantheon exists within us, created by our vital energies … [producing an] ungraspable vision of the eternal forces of nature … ‘As a consequence for Schipper (1993, pp.2, 3) ‘the very notion of religion as we define it in the West is an obstacle’ in understanding Taoism and Taoism does not constitute a religion in the western sense ‘as something setting humanity apart from nature’ – quite the contrary as Taoism had as its conservationist motto ‘not humanity apart’ from nature two millennia before the Friends of the Earth. Such is the integration of Taoism and nature that ‘the Taoist body’, as Schipper aptly calls it of traditional Chinese medicine, is conceptualised as ‘a landscape with mountains, lakes, woods, and shelters’ as Fulder (1990, p.355) puts it. Or more precisely, given that landscape is a surface phenomenon (see Giblett, 2004, chapter 3), the Taoist body is conceptualised as a land with depths and dynamism, not just surfaces and static parts. For the Taoists, ‘the human body is the image of a country’ (Schipper, 1993, p.100), rather than the country as the image of the human body (and mind) of modernity in which, for example, mountains are figured as the heady heights of the superego and theory, and swamps as the grotesque lower bodily stratum and the unconscious (see Giblett, 1996, p.26). Yet the image of the Taoist body as country is, as Schipper (1978, p.357) goes on to argue, ‘a correspondence going beyond a simple metaphor’. For Liu I-ming ‘the human body is the country’. An entire ‘environmental ethics’, a whole ecological way of life, is implied here as ‘the emphasis on country’, as Schipper (1993, p.101; 2001, p.92) puts it, ‘reflects the interdependence of the human being and his[/her] environment’ to the point that the human being is not simply within his or her environment – rather, ‘the environment is within us’.

Taoist Body 159

Besides the correspondence between the human body and the country in Taoist thought in which, as Kohn (1992, p.66) puts, it they are ‘structured in the same way’, there is an overarching correspondence between this body and the cosmos. Indeed, as Lévi puts it, ‘in China the body is perceived as a replica of the universe’. As one Taoist text put it, ‘our body is a small universe’ (Daoren, 1994 p.49). Later Lévi (1989, pp.105, 109) refers to ‘the homology between the body of the universe and the human body’. This correspondence is, in turn, part of what Lévi calls ‘the equivalence between microcosm and macrocosm’, in which the latter could be conceptualised as country or ‘heavens’. The human body for Kohn (1992, p.113) is ‘a microcosm of the universe’. Conversely, the universe is what Robinet (1993, pp.13, 133) calls ‘a makanthropos’, the human body writ large, and ‘each human being is a little universe … The human body … ends up becoming a kind of terrestrial heaven’. Whether the relationship between the two cosmoses is one of equivalence as Lévi calls it; or whether ‘the unity of human cosmos and heavenly macrocosm’ is ‘the founding insight of traditional Chinese medicine’ as ‘we are always told’; or whether there is ‘commonality of the outer and inner realms – of nature and human nature’ as Kuriyama (1994, pp.31, 33) argues; or whether ‘the body and the landscape prove indivisible’ as Zito and Barlow (1994, p.13) surmise; or whether there is ‘correlative thinking’ between body and cosmos, microcosm and macrocosm as Graham (1989, pp.319–325), Bodde (1991, pp.97–103) and Henderson (1984, pp.1–58) argue; or whether there is correspondence between body and landscape as Schipper suggests; or whether the mapping of one body onto another ultimately deconstructs any sense of metaphorical equivalence or correspondence between the two as a post-structuralist might suggest; the point seems to be that we are dealing with a sense of one body, the (human) body of the earth, not two separate bodies between which some sort of relationship or correspondence exists or could be set up. There is thus no human being/natural environment dualism in Taoism. Human bodies are co-extensive with and identical to natural environs, principally the bioregion in which one lives and works, which sustains one being, and to which one returns when one dies. Taijiquan enacts this holism in which ‘the perfect and complete body’, as Schipper (1993, p.42) puts it of hsiu-yang, the art of cultivating oneself in general, is ‘nurtured, its energies strengthened; it thus becomes totally integrated into the natural and cosmic environment’. In this body of the earth the self is, according to Zito and Barlow (1994, p.11), ‘evolving in the relation between the organic microcosm


of the body and the social macrocosm of humanity’, and indeed with the organic and inorganic macrocosm of the earth which sustains the human body and humanity. There are on this view, as Angela Zito (1994, p.111) suggests, ‘no fixed boundaries between the internal self and the external world’. Nor, for that matter, are there fixed boundaries between internal self and external body as body/selves are internal and external. Self and world are, as Zito further suggests, ‘contextualized in a web of interconnection’. Taijiquan enacts this holism also as it is ‘the embodiment of cosmic patterns to properly attune the self in the world’ (Girardot, Miller and Xiaogan, 2001, p.1). Cultural difference in the understanding of body, self and world can be drawn here markedly as Kleinman (1988, p.11) does: For members of [modern] Western societies the body is a discrete entity, a thing, an ‘it’, machinelike and objective, separate from thought and emotion. For members of many [pre-modern or] nonWestern societies, the body is a open system linking social relation to the self, a vital balance between interrelated elements in a holistic cosmos… The body-self is not a secularised private domain of the individual person but an organic part of a sacred, sociocentric world, a communication involving exchanges with others (including the divine). And with the ‘environment’ or ‘nature.’ The metabolic exchange with ‘nature’ operates on a continuum from mastery to mutuality, parasitism to symbiosis (see Giblett, 2004), preferably the latter. The human body is, as Hay (1994, p.66; see also 1983) puts it, ‘the environment of the viscera’ and ‘itself within an environment at a higher level’. Moreover, the natural environment is the viscera of the earth and no mere background, context or resource to be related to, lived in or exploited. In Taoism and Traditional Chinese Medicine there is no Cartesian mind-body dualism. Indeed, Kohn (1992, p.169) argues that ‘it is almost a truism nowadays that the Chinese tradition does not radically distinguish body and mind’. Similarly, Fulder (1990, p.267; see also Allan, 1997, p.85) puts it bluntly, if clumsily, that ‘the Chinese do not have a distinction of mind/body’. Rather for them traditionally there is what Roger Ames calls a holistic ‘psychosomatic process’. Indeed, in the words of the I Ching, ‘one does not have a body’. Rather, in short, one is a body. Or in the words of Chuang Tzu, ‘your body is not your own: it is the delegated image of Tao’ (cited by Watts, 1953, p.28). Or

Taoist Body 161

in the words of Lieh-tzu (1960, p.29), ‘your body is not your own possession … It is the shape lent to you by heaven and earth’, or as we might say, by nature and culture. For the Taoists, as Ames (1984, pp.44, 48) concludes, ‘the body is a “process” rather than a “thing”, something “done” rather than something one “has”, a performance (exemplified in taijiquan), not a product. Although Kaptchuk (1983, p.258) argues that ‘the process is all there is’, this process is not random or chaotic but patterned (rather than ordered) as earth, country or landscape in what Hay (1994, p.65) aptly calls ‘pattern mapped onto process’. Chinese physicians for Porter (1997, pp.153–154) ‘were not interested in the model of the body as a machine… there can be no such thing in Chinese medical thought as a Cartesian mind/body dualism’.

Picture of internals A rubbing on a stone tablet in the White Cloud Taoist Monastery near Beijing, believed to have been etched in the nineteenth century, illustrates the concept/metaphor of the human body is/as the country (see Needham, 1983, Fig. 1587; Schipper, 1978, p.356). In a commentary on this picture Eva Wong (1987) has shown how it represents a sideways (or sagittal) section of the human torso extending from the rump village at the bottom of the picture and the torso (A) up the spine river of heaven or Milky Way (B); through the internal organs including the cave of the mystery of the kidneys, the ‘axle of the river’ (G); through the centre and source of energy represented by the cowherd (F), the fair lady weaving (H) who ‘connects the positive and negative forces’ of yin and yang and the four taijiquan symbols (yin and yang combined) (E); on through the heart as the divine boy stone cutter (I) up through the twelve-storeyed pagoda of the neck (J); across the bridge across the palate over the heavenly pool of the mouth (K); through the celestial jade city behind the optic centre (L); past the moon of the optic centre (M), the blue-eyed barbarian monk (N) and the red sun (O); through the ocular space (S) to Lao Tzu, the meditating man and the putative author of the Tao Te Ching, the most-well known of the Taoist texts (P); through the Palace of the Mud Ball of the brain (an apt name!) (Q); across the nine peaks of the top of the spinal column (R) finally reaching the red pearl at the very top (T), the sign of the completion of the circulation of energy in which, as Eva Wong (1987, p.6) puts it, ‘the body is internally connected … [and] all opposites are united, all fragmentations are undone’, a process which began with the water wheel


treaders representing the reversal of the flow of the generative force (C) and which was continued with the tripod of the elixir in whose cauldron the energies are rechannelled (D). The picture of internals, as it is often called, is thus not a picture of the human body as country as a static structure but as a dynamic process. It is also a journey or story of ever-changing transformation beginning from the generation of energy symbolised by the rump village coccyx and ending with completion and unification. If one word could be said to characterise the Taoist view of the body, as well of ‘life, the universe and everything’, it would be change, even from the beginning of life and the body. Schipper (1993, p.116) argues that the ‘concept of change (hua or pien-hua; also: mutation, transformation, and flux), is one of the very basic ideas of Taoism’. In her commentary on this picture Eva Wong (1987, p.1) has suggested that the figure is ‘shaped like an embryo and foetus’. Indeed, as Kravitz (1998) pointed out in a public lecture, Frank Netter’s (1969, plate 6, p.118) illustration of an embryo at 23 days demonstrates that the figure is a representation of an embryo. In his caption to the White Cloud Monastery rubbing Needham (1983, p.115) argues that it ‘represents the culmination of Taoist anatomy and physiology’, though hardly in the modern western sense. The uncanny resemblance between the rubbing and Netter’s illustration puts paid to Needham’s contention that it ‘shows a fanciful poetical rendering of a sagittal section of the head, thorax and abdomen seen from the left-hand side.’ Poetical indeed, but hardly fanciful when placed side by side with, or even over, Netter’s illustration. Although they do not map on to each other exactly, there is an uncanny correspondence between the two: the Divine Boy Stone-Cutter is the embryonic heart; the Rump Village is the coccyx; the River of Heaven is the spine; the Water Wheel Treaders are the umbilical arteries and veins; the Palace of the Mud Ball is the brain. Even the edges of the field ploughed by the Cowherd where chi or energy is produced look like the mouth of the yolk sack in Netter’s illustration. The picture of internals represents the return to the original body, a return back to beginnings, reversing the aging process. The water wheel symbolises the beginning of the reversal of the aging process. The aim of Taoism and taijiquan is to return the body (and mind) to the perfection of the pre-natal state, what is called Anterior or Earlier Heaven. The Taoist body is supposedly given birth to by the adult, feminised body. The Taoist’s body, ‘in this world’ as Schipper (1978, p. 363 and 1993, p.129) puts it, is ‘the body of a woman, a mother with

Taoist Body 163

Child’. Taoism, according to Schipper (1978, p.365), ‘at least ideally, identified with the female body’ to the point that even ‘the Tao’s action, its creative power, is … feminine’ (Schipper, 1993, p.4) as ‘the female body, the body of the pregnant mother, is the only truly complete body, the only one able to accomplish the transformation, the work of the Tao’ (Schipper, 1993, p.129). He goes on to indicate Lao Tzu in particular as exemplifying this body and suggests that he was ‘his own mother’ (Schipper, 1978, p.371; 1993, p.122). In Taoism, as Lévi (1989, p.106) puts it, ‘cosmogenesis merges with embryogenesis’ which equates embryo with cosmos, and their births, rather than the western idea of ontogenesis (the birth of the individual) repeating phylogenesis (the birth of the race) which privileges individual and race over embryo and cosmos, and the birth of the former over the conception of the latter. For Taoism pregnancy is, as Schipper (1993, p.117) puts it, ‘the paradigm for the creation of the universe,’ the ‘Round Belly’ rather than the phallic orgasm of the ‘Big Bang’ of modern western physics. Taoists believe that the birth of the cosmos and the conception of the embryo can be repeated or retrieved in the rebirth of the human body through Taoist arts such as taijiquan. For the Taoists there is a gender cross-fertilisation in which, as Schipper (1993, p.364) puts it, ‘men [and presumably women too] should cultivate a female character’, rather than cultivating a male or masculine character. A female character in Taoist terms is one which values birth and develops a soft and strong body. Arguably the Taoists were not patriarchal but represented an attempt to harmonise or balance gender features and qualities, though they do appropriate birth imagery yet not in a way which denies the exclusive role of women in giving birth unlike in the modern, masculinist birthing metaphors of machines. The figure of Lao Tzu’s father ‘never really caught on in the Taoist tradition’ according to Schipper (1978, pp.364 and 375) and ‘the place given to women is especially remarkable and wholly unique for the times’, indeed, he concludes that ‘there is also the possibility that women played a major role in the movement’. In fact, one of the traditional seven Taoist ‘masters’ was a woman. Traditional Chinese physicians, according to Fulder (1990, pp.59, 60), ‘view the body as a purely functional set of processes’. For them, Fulder goes on to explain, ‘the body is a dynamic whole, a kind of continuous protoplasm, which could not be chopped into separately working parts’. By contrast modern western medicine, Sivin (1974), p.xiv; my emphasis) argues, ‘deals with material structures and tissues which are able to perform certain functions [whereas] Chinese medicine deals with functions to which physically demonstrable organs happen to be


attached’. In TCM the processes function or perform the organs, rather than the organs performing the functions and processes as in modern western medicine. Organs make up organisms where the same principle applies. For Watts (1970, p.187), ‘every organism is a process: thus the organism is not other than its actions. To put it clumsily: it is what it does’. Form follows function. The Taoist body is a performative body, the modern western body is an organised body; the former is a body of doing with things, the latter a body of things which do. Similarly, in taijiquan, rather than the player performing the moves, the moves perform the player.

Taijiquan The Chinese body, as Elvin (1989, p.267) puts it, is ‘a peg-doll whose role is to be a carrier of corporeal and/or sartorial attributes’. The limbs and organs are attached to the spine and, in the performance of taijiquan, the limbs rotate around the peg of the spine like an oldfashioned peg-doll, the organs are massaged gently and the spine is re-aligned. In Chinese art, and in traditional Chinese culture more generally, as Hay (1994, p.51) puts it, ‘there is no image of a body as a whole object, least of all as a solid and well-shaped entity whose shapeliness is supported by the structure of a skeleton and defined in the exteriority of swelling muscle and enclosing flesh’. Muscle, as we have seen previously, was ignored or overlooked. There is ultimately no hard and fast divide between the surface and depth, outside and inside of the body for Taoism. Depth and inside are considered more important than surface and outside. We are dealing with what Kuriyama (1999, p.166) calls ‘a conception of the body structured by the logic of depth’ rather than ruled by the logic of surface as in modern western anatomy. In Chinese medicine, Kuriyama goes on to argue: all changes in the body, physiological as well as pathological, were governed by the logic of depth… Shape mattered far less than place: the functional structure of the human body was ordered first and foremost by the polarity opposing the body surface (biao) to its inner core (li). Inner core governs body surface. The channels, or meridians, for the flow of energy, as Kaptchuk (1983, p.77) points out, ‘connect the interior of the body with the exterior’. There is no hard and fast distinction between the two in TCM and

Taoist Body 165

Taoism, nor between mass and flow, surface and depth. The Taoist body is a body of a certain critical mass yet it is also a body of flow, the flow of ch’i or energy-matter, or ‘matter that incorporates vitality’ (Lloyd and Sivin, 2002, p.198; see also p.201), or blood (Kuriyama, 1999, p.229), or oxygen (Kravitz, 1998), through the body, the flow of the movements, and a body of depth, working on tendons, ligaments and organs, relaxing the mind, and harmonising the spirit. Fulder (1990, p.273), too, concludes that ‘practices such as taijiquan are the primary means to preserve vitality and are the first steps to harmony and self-transcendence’. Yet transcendence in Taoism, as Schipper (1993, pp.40, 41) points out, is ‘not the result of a spirit separated from matter, an external divine force given to the world, but a spiritualization of ch’i , of energy-matter itself.’ Self-transcendence is what Robinet (1993, p.95) calls ‘“cosmicization” of the human body’. For the Taoists, as Hay (1994, p.66) puts it, ‘surfaces were [and are] not impenetrable faces of geometric solids, but palpable interfaces through which the structural values of interiority interacted with the environment’, both the natural and social environments, and with other embodied selves. In the modern western tradition, as Turner (1994, p.14) puts it, ‘the surface of the body … is the mirror of the self’ which splits the body and the self and sets up the possibility of a narcissistic relationship between the self and the body, whereas in the Taoist tradition the self is embodied; the body/self is surface and depth, mass and flow. For the Taoists the body/self is, as Zito (1994, pp.110 and 117) puts it, ‘a focussed field with a dense centre that could ideally interpenetrate with other selves’ and whose ‘shifting edges and surfaces provided the sites for articulation between inner and outer’, not a flat, reflective surface for the contemplation of the self. This self, says Kuriyama (1999, p.245), is ‘neither a shining Orphic soul imprisoned in the darkness of matter, nor an immaterial mind set against a material body’. Mind and body are material; the self is embodied. The Taoist body dances internally and externally with the circulation of (internal) energy and with the (interior and exterior) movements of taijiquan. Taijiquan involves what Mauss (1992, p.469) calls ‘dancing at rest’; it is also what he calls ‘a technique of active rest’. In Kristeva’s (1992, p.169) novel The Samurai the narrator describes taijiquan as ‘a kind of tortoiselike eurythmics’. One character goes on to elaborate in Maussian terms that in taijiquan: You dance with your arteries and veins … – it’s not a matter of arms and legs. Your blood surges forward, draws back, and then the time


comes when your body’s transformed. It doesn’t disappear, but the rhythm of your blood is in harmony with shapes you imagine in space – your body itself is all space, what’s inside and outside are brought together and redistributed, magnified almost to infinity, anatomised to infinity. Taijiquan is an external and internal dance of bodily limbs, organs and fluids choreographed to the imagined shapes and actions of animal movements: stork cools wings, snake creeps down, golden cock stands on one leg, and so on. Every activity of the Taoist body, and not only taijiquan, is, in Kohn’s (1991, p.229) terms, ‘patterned on the rhythm of the world at large’. The choreography of the body is calligraphy in space. Instead of writing on surfaces taijiquan writes in space. Writing about calligraphy, though it is applicable equally to taijiquan and to other ‘calligraphies of the body’ as de Certeau (1992, p.69) calls them, Schipper (1993, p.42) has suggested that ‘it is nature retrieved, spontaneous creation, the secret stolen from the Tao’. Specifically of taijiquan Schipper (1993, p.138) argues later that: this wonderful method of harmony and well-being is a martial art for the defense of the inner world. The slow supple, dance of taijiquan, performed with no apparent effort, is for everybody an excellent initiation into the very essentials of Taoism … The daily preparatory exercises [of taijiquan] already constitute an entrance into the cosmic rhythm, a way of participating in the spontaneous evolution of nature. As soon as the practitioner enters into this universal movement, [s/]he becomes one with the great mutation of all beings. Taijiquan entails ultimately what Schipper (1993, p.139) calls ‘a ‘cosmologization’ of the individual’ rather than a modern western individualisation of the cosmos. Rather than ‘man [sic] contain[ing] everything in the cosmos’ (Barkan, 1975, pp.1 and 2) as in the western view, for the Taoists the cosmos contains everything in the human body. The Taoists see the individual as the cosmos writ small, as embodied. Rather than ‘the human body … be[ing] the image of a microcosm’, the macrocosm, or perhaps more precisely the social/natural bioregion, is the image of the human body. Instead of the cosmos being corporeal, for the Taoists the body is cosmic, ‘the individual body is the cosmic body’ (Ni, 1995, p.40). In the modern

Taoist Body 167

western individualisation of the cosmos, as Frank (1990, p.159) argues following Lakoff, ‘the body is no longer the metaphor which we employ to understand the reality of the social world. Rather the body is the constitutive image schemata in which we have created that world’. The modern western body is the corporeal cosmos rather than the cosmic body of the Taoists. The reality of the social/natural world for the Taoists is the metaphor to understand the human body and that world is the ‘constitutive image schemata’ in which they create the human body. Kohn (1991, p.247) suggests ‘the world is me, I am the world’ provided the subject ‘I’ and the ego ‘me’ are an embodied subject and ego, embodied in the world, and the world in the body. As Watts (1970) puts it, ‘the world is your body’.

Health recovery stories This is the theory of taijiquan, which relates to practice, but what of the practice of taijiquan as it relates to health? This is what the theorists say about taijiquan, but what about the experience of practitioners? What do they say about it? How do they articulate the benefits they may or may not have gained from doing or performing taijiquan? Taijiquan is now widely recognised in western, industrialised countries and some of its benefits are readily acknowledged. The slow, graceful movements of taijiquan are so well-known that they are occasionally used in television advertisements often just to signify relaxation or a healthy lifestyle. Taijiquan is visually appealing and people who watch it often remark that it looks relaxing. More importantly, the people who do it often say that it feels relaxing, and that it is relaxing too. Yet the practitioners of taijiquan often have a lot more to say about its effects on them. The stories of some people who do Taoist Tai Chi™ taijiquan and who talk about its benefits for them have been gathered together in the book Health recovery: The Taoist Tai Chi™ way (Giblett, 2008a). Many people will have heard that taijiquan is good for relieving arthritis, or for improving balance, or reducing high blood pressure, or preventing osteoporosis, or helping with a range of other conditions. People who practise the Taoist Tai Chi™ internal arts of health sometimes have these, or other, incurable or terminal, conditions such as Lou Gehrig’s syndrome, Multiple Sclerosis, Cerebral Palsy, Alzheimer’s, or have had cancer or a stroke. Health recovery presents the stories of some people who have some of these conditions. Other people start practising these arts because they are unfit and want to get fit; overweight and want to lose weight; and even because they are healthy and


want to stay healthy, especially as they get older. Health recovery also presents the stories of some of these people. There are no miraculous cures to be had through the practice of these arts, but there can be, and are, remarkable transformational experiences and big improvements in functionality, even with the simple practices of everyday life which many of us take for granted such as walking, and even standing; in balance, strength and flexibility; and in a general sense of wellbeing, and so improved quality of life and increased length of life. Some stories about these experiences are recorded and presented in Health recovery. Taijiquan is taught in a number of ‘styles’ or traditions. Taoist Tai Chi™ taijiquan is taught by the International Taoist Tai Chi Society. It emphasises the health-restoring and -maintaining aspects of taijiquan and other Taoist arts of health and well-being. Health-improvement is one of the aims of the Society. Health, however, is not defined in this book (nor by the Society, I would suggest) in narrow, physical terms, but in broad, holistic terms that include physical, mental, spiritual, emotional, and even environmental health. These arts focus on the physical as the initial means to gain health in the other areas as well. Change the body to change the mind and spirit is a motto of the tradition of Taoism from which Taoist Tai Chi and the Society come. Taoist Tai Chi™ taijiquan has a number of specific and demonstrable benefits. It is described in an old brochure published by the Taoist Tai Society of Australia as: a gentle art of health for people of all ages and health conditions. The slow, graceful movements of Taoist Tai Chi increase strength and flexibility and improve balance and circulation. The Taoist style of Tai Chi emphasises stretching and turning in each of the movements in order to gain these and other benefits more effectively. The brochure goes on to relate that: Regular practice of Taoist Tai Chi can bring a wide range of health benefits to the muscular, skeletal and circulatory systems. The flowing movements of Taoist Tai Chi serve as a moving meditation that reduces stress and provides a way to cultivate body and mind. Specific health benefits include: • toning of muscles, tendons and other soft tissues; • rotation of the joints through a full range of motion;

Taoist Body 169

• stretching and alignment of the spine to make it strong and supple; • gentle massage of the internal organs to improve their functioning. Health recovery documents these and other benefits anecdotally and auto-biographically. Taoist Tai Chi™ taijiquan and other internal arts of health were developed by Master Moy Lin-Shin (1931–1998) and brought to the West in 1970 when he initially founded the Taoist Tai Chi Society of Canada and later the International Taoist Tai Chi Society. Since then the Society has grown to be the largest non-profit, volunteer Tai Chi organisation in the world. These arts are practised in over 25 countries and 500 locations around the world, mainly in Europe, North America and Australia. The people who tell their stories in Health recovery come from these three continents. Health-recovery stories are different from illness narratives, or pathographies. As we have seen in a previous chapter, they are personal accounts of illness, written usually by the person with the illness (autopathography). They usually recount an experience with illness that starts with a diagnosis, searching for, and possibly finding, a cure, undergoing surgery or other treatment, and ends with living with the illness, or in death. They are elaborated, written and published narratives. They are published in either books or magazines. Journalists, novelists and sociologists largely write those published in book-form about themselves. They have the writing expertise and experience, and access to publishers, needed to produce books. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule with the odd champion cyclist thrown in such as Lance Armstrong, but in such cases celebrity status greases the wheels of publication. Illness narratives published in magazines are written either by journalists about celebrities, or by non-celebrities about themselves with some editorial or journalistic assistance. They are all amazing and inspiring stories of bravery and heroism in the face of incredible odds, sometimes with remarkable results. From my experience of practising the Taoist Tai Chi™ internal arts of health and of being an instructor of Taoist Tai Chi™ taijiquan for more than 20 years I knew that there were other stories being told by practitioners of Taoist Tai Chi of recovered and maintained health, or improved quality and increased length of life. Unlike the illness narrative where the narrator often has an operable or potentially curable condition such as cancer, many of the tellers of what could be called


‘health recovery stories’ have inoperable or incurable conditions such as Multiple Sclerosis (MS) or Lou Gehrig’s Syndrome (ALS). Cancer lends itself to the typical trajectory of the illness narrative wherein the narrator descends into the murky underworld of the hospital and clinic to emerge triumphant or vanquished in the end, with or without the assistance of medical and nursing helpers. By contrast, the health-recovery story is a story without the same peaks and troughs, beginnings and endings. It is a story of up and downs, occasional breakthroughs and setbacks in trying to improve health, always with the assistance and help of instructors and others in the same boat. Health recovery stories are unelaborated, oral and largely unpublished accounts told by people from a range of backgrounds with different expertise and experience. Some of these stories of health recovery or improvement have been told in ‘testimonials’ published in newsletters by the Society or have circulated in oral form amongst members and practitioners. They have not been told to the wider public. Health recovery tells some of those health recovery stories more widely. It also includes some testimonials. However, the book does not just present individual health-recovery stories in isolation. The chapters are not organised around individual people, though they are divided into sections for each informant. These sections foreground a theme mentioned by these people. The chapters are organised around common topics and concerns that emerged from listening to, transcribing, reading, and rereading, the stories. These are more to do with Taoism and the International Taoist Tai Chi Society than just with Taoist Tai Chi™ taijiquan. Health recovery presents Taoism as a bio-spiritual practice (Girardot, Miller and Xiaogan, 2001, pp.xxxix and xlix), or biospiritual cultivation (Kirkland, 2004, esp. p.43), involving a holistic transformation of mind, body and spirit. Similarly, body, mind and spirit are nurtured within and by the culture and community of the Taoist Tai Chi Society. Yet, as Dr Peter Cook, the Executive Director of the Taoist Tai Chi Society of Australia, points out, the benefits of this practice are not only experienced by those who call themselves ‘Taoists’ but are readily available to all who practise this taijiquan and are members of the Society or participate in its programs. Health-recovery stories are primarily stories about Taoism and the International Taoist Tai Chi Society, and not just about taijiquan. Health recovery: The Taoist Tai Chi™ way, as conveyed in its title and sub-title, focuses on this and other arts as a way to gain access to, and stimulate interest in, and even inspire participation in, Taoism and the Society.

Taoist Body 171

Kirkland’s (2004) acknowledges the importance, and validity, of ‘what Taoists say Taoism is’ (p.8), and not just what dead Taoists say Taoism is, but ‘living Taoists’ as well. Health recovery presents what some people, some of whom may not consider themselves to be Taoists, say Taoism, at least Taoism as expressed in the Taoist Tai Chi ™ taijiquan and the International Taoist Tai Chi Society, is for them. They are what Kirkland calls a ‘Taoist voice’ (p.178). Although Kirkland is a sinologist and ‘not a Taoist’ and his book ‘is written by an outsider’ (p.7), he has opened up a space in which the likes of Health recovery by a Taoist and an insider, but not a sinologist, can be considered a legitimate contribution to the study and understanding of Taoism and as the beginning of a more fruitful and ongoing dialogue between Taoists and sinologists about Taoism. For too long Taoism has been regarded as a dead scriptural or textual tradition and not as a living oral culture as explored and expressed in Health recovery. Just as Kirkland sees the classic texts of Taoism arising out of what he calls ‘the collective wisdom of the community itself’ (p.58), so too does the contemporary practice of Taoism expressed in the Taoist Tai Chi ™ internal arts of health and the International Taoist Tai Chi Society arise from the same source with its emphasis on what Kelly Ekman sees as ‘the real strength in the wisdom of the group’ (cited in Giblett, 2008a, pp. 168–169). Kirkland later notes that ‘some scholars … have been doing excellent fieldwork among Taoists of various descriptions in some regions of China. But … Taoist practitioners and communities in other regions have not yet received the same attention’ (p.116) – until now as Health recovery considers Taoist practitioners and the community of the International Taoist Tai Chi Society in other regions such as Europe, North America and Australia. Kirkland concludes his book by suggesting that ‘vestiges of nearly every Taoist idea and practice ever attested in China endure in the minds of someone in East Asia today’, and elsewhere, as Health recovery demonstrates. Kirkland goes on to argue that ‘many such people, of course, continue to self-identify as Taoist, both in China and throughout the diaspora’ (p.210). The founder of the International Taoist Tai Chi Society, Master Moy Lin-Shin, was a member of the diaspora, as are many of those he taught, whilst others, such as myself, are not members of the Chinese diaspora, but self-identify as Taoist. Even for those members of the International Taoist Tai Chi Society who do not self-identify as Taoist, Taoism has had a significant impact on their lives as Health recovery demonstrates. It is not only possibly the first ethnographic


study of a group of taijiquan practitioners, but almost certainly the first ethnographic study of a group of western, or non-ethnic-Chinese, Taoists. There is no single, homogeneous Taoism deriving from, and adhering to, a classic sacred text as Kirkland argues (see p.181), but a number of different Taoisms and so a number of different Taoist bodies.

11 Healthy Land, Healthy Body: State of the Environment, State of Health

The Australia State of the Environment 2001 report acknowledges that ‘our lifestyles and livelihoods [but evidently not our health] depend on its [Australians’ environment] health’. It does not recognise the interrelationship and inter-dependency between human physical and mental health and the health of ecosystems. It also reports ‘that increasing pressures to extract surface and groundwater for human use are leading to continuing deterioration of the health of water bodies’, but not it seems of other bodies, including human bodies. The impact of human settlements on ‘the health’ of ‘the environment’ is considered, but not the effect of the health of ecosystems on human health. Humans, and their settlements, and health, and ‘the environment’ are treated as mutually exclusive categories. Yet the interrelationship between, and interdependency of, them has been well-established and goes back at least to what I call the soil conservation classics of the 1930s and 40s. Aldo Leopold, the father of modern American conservation, Albert Howard, the father of organic farming, and Elyne Mitchell, the mother of Australian conservation, amongst others, all acknowledged and argued for healthy lands as the basis for healthy bodies. Leopold went one step further and argued for a wholistic concept of land and society as a single organism. In 1942 he asked rhetorically ‘who is the land?’ and replied ‘we are’ (Leopold, 1999, p.4). This concept of people and place as one has a much longer genealogy going back to the ancient Taoists whose art of feng-shui sees the body and the earth as a single being. This concept of people and place as one is also found amongst Australian indigenous peoples for whom land is body, and body is land. 173


Soil conservation Sir Albert Howard (1947/1972, p.12) summed up his life’s work in a number of laws, including the law that ‘the health of soil, plant, animal and man [sic] is one connected chain’. He goes on later to equate health of the soil with fertility and to connect it with human health. In chapter 10 of The Soil and Health entitled ‘Soil Fertility and Human Health’ Howard (1947/1972, p.173) asks the question: ‘what of the effect of a fertile soil on human health?’ Conversely, what of the effect of an infertile, degraded, salinity-affected soil on human health, including mental health? Healthy soil is connected with human health, and conversely human health with soil fertility as Howard (1947/1972, p.175) recognised what he called ‘the connection between soil fertility and health’. The chain connecting them and plants and other animals was interlinked and intertwining. Yet all the links in the chain do not operate equally, or have equal importance. Plants, humans and other animals growing above the ground all depend on the soil below ground for sustenance and survival, and on soil fertility for health. For Howard (1940, p.39; see also p.165) ‘the maintenance of soil fertility is the real basis of health [including public health (p.176)] and of resistance to disease’. In referring to human health Howard is thus not just including individual human health but also social public health. What is health? Howard redefines health in terms of the relationship between humans and their environment without being more specific. For Howard (1940, p.180) ‘medical investigations should be deflected from the sterile desert of disease to the study of health – to mankind in relation to his [sic] environment’. Similarly ecological investigations should be deflected from diagnosing and trying to cure the diseased state of the environment to the study and promotion of health – to the health of the environment in relation to the health of humankind. If medicine should be the study and promotion of health (rather the diagnosis, treatment and curing of disease), and if health should embrace humans in their relationship to their environment, then ecology should be deflected from the sterile diseases of desertification and salinisation to the study and development of health – to the environment in relation to humankind. Ecology should be the study and promotion of health as well as the prevention and curing of disease. If human health and soil fertility are connected, then diseases of humans and the soil are connected.

Healthy Body 175

Writing in the aftermath of the Great Depression of the 1930s and its dust bowl in the United States, Howard (1940, p.139) regarded soil erosion as a disease of the soil. In fact, it is ‘a man-made disease’ (p.140). For Jock Pick (1944, p.53) too writing in the 1940s about Australia’s ‘dying heart’ as he called it, soil erosion is ‘the canker which is, slowly but surely, eating out the heart of the continent’. For Pick ‘the centre of the continent’ is ‘the dying heart’ (p.67). Soil erosion for Pick is ‘an enemy within the gates … a destroyer more deadly than all the Hitlers of history’ (p.91). Soil erosion is a terrorist whose genocide is not confined to humans. It infiltrates the citadel of the nation-state whose boundaries are just as permeable and circumnavigable as the Maginot Line was for Hitler’s ‘Blitzkreig’ of tanks and bombers. Instead of regarding the nation as a castle it may be wiser ecologically to regard it as a body. The body politic was a metaphor for the relationship between king and country in two senses of subjects and lands. In post-monarchical, modern ‘democratic’ societies the country is no longer an extension of the king’s body. The commons are enclosed into private ownership and public lands are managed by the state. Yet reviving a sense of the body politic/ecologic may help to revive and reconfigure the interrelationship between humans and the environment. The Chinese Taoists figured the body as land as we have seen in the previous chapter and the land as body as we shall see later in the present chapter. As soil and soil fertility are the first links in the chain connecting the health of soil, plant, humans and other animals, food is the vital link between humans and the soil and its health. In chapter 12 of An Agricultural Testament entitled ‘Soil Fertility and National Health’ Howard (1940, p.171) considers ‘the possible connection between the produce of a fertile soil and the health of the people who have to consume it’. Food is the linchpin of this possible connection. Howard (1940, p.174) concludes that ‘the greatest single factor in the production of good health is the right kind of food and the greatest single factor in the production of bad health is the wrong kind of food’. Elyne Mitchell, the writer of the ‘Silver Brumby’ stories for children, subscribed to and elaborated similar views to Howard in the 1940s. Unsurprisingly her 1946 book Soil and Civilization refers to Howard in the bibliography. In it she promotes ‘land sense’ rather than simply a sense of place (Mitchell, 1946, p.33). Like Howard, she refers to ‘the health of the land’ (Mitchell, 1946, p.83). Unlike Howard she goes much further in articulating the connection between humans and the land. She insists on ‘the integral unity of man [sic] and the earth’


(Mitchell, 1946, p.4) to the point that the land for her is not separate but ‘part of the entity, body and soul, that is each individual’ (Mitchell, 1946, p.5). The earth is not a thing apart from humans. Rather for her ‘the earth is part of themselves’ (Mitchell, 1946, p.27). Humans are elemental creatures as for Mitchell (1946, p.74) ‘Man [sic] on this earth has a body made up of the earth, the water, the air’. And of fire, the energy of the sun that powers all life on this planet. Yet despite this unity and sense of a single entity made of earthly elements, there is disunity between the two so she insists on ‘the absolute necessity of fusion between man [sic] and the land’ (Mitchell, 1946, p.11). Her idea of fusion promotes symbiosis with the land rather than ‘living parasitically’ (Mitchell, 1946, p.48) off the land as white Australians do which Mitchell (1946, p.67) later critiqued when she states ‘how heedless Australians are of the land that gives them life’. Symbiosis entails mutual benefit between living partners rather than one partner taking parasitically to the point of killing the other (see Giblett, 2004). To rectify this state of affairs, this state of the environment and of human health, Mitchell (1946, p.127) argues that ‘a creative civilization requires a sacramental attitude towards nature’. Rather than a capitalist and sanctuarist attitude towards nature that exploits nature and only conserves it in reserves, Mitchell is a proponent of mutuality and sacrality that promotes symbiosis and sustainability (see Giblett, 2004). For both partners of humans and the earth to go on living together, both need to go on living. In the case of the relationship between humans and the soil, the latter needs to be regarded as living just as much as the former. Mitchell (1946, p.53) refers to ‘living soil’, to ‘living earth’ and insists that ‘every country must have living soil’ (Mitchell, 1946, p.132). Why? Because for her ‘the economy of each nation must… be based on the health of the soil – not on the minerals of the deep earth or the profit of trade’ (Mitchell, 1946, p.128). Economy is, or should be, a matter of the surface of the land and its production, not of the depths. Why? Because working the surface of the earth is sustainable and renewable whereas working the depths is not such as in the extraction of oil, gas and water. By working the depths of the land and extracting oil, water and gas tens of thousands of years old the heritage of the land, what the land has bequeathed us, cannot be passed on to future generations. Land has, or is, a cultural heritage. Cultural heritage is not just built, artifactual or archival heritage but also the land that sustains cultures. Mitchell (1946, p.107) refers to ‘the cultural heritage of a land’. Soil is a

Healthy Body 177

matter of cultural heritage, not just of natural heritage placed on the other side of a culture/nature opposition: the cultural heritage of a nation is the land. Heritage is what we have inherited from the past and what we pass on to the future in a better or worse state than we inherited it. For Mitchell (1946, p.32) ‘the soil, in a large measure, is the people and their future’. Soil is past, present and future. Ecology is a matter of time just as much as it is a matter of space. It is a matter of conserving and rehabilitating the cultural heritage of the soil (not just of buildings, artifacts and archives, nor just of natural heritage) given to us by the past for the future. For Mitchell (1946, p.64) ‘water and soil form the matrix of all culture’. For her, ‘the soil is properly regarded as the matrix of our being’ (Mitchell, 1946, p.88); ‘the soil is the matrix of our lives’ (Mitchell, 1946, p.101) and ‘the soil [is] the acknowledged matrix of ourselves and our art’ (Mitchell, 1946, p.104). Yet land and soil are not synonymous – soil is the Earth Mother or Mother Nature of a benign and malign agriculture whereas land is the Great Goddess, the Great Mother of the earth. The matrix is the grid of farm and town, drains and roads, railway, power and telephone lines, inscribed in soil on the surface of the earth that exploits and depletes the depths of the earth. The matrix is the surface of the land, the landscape (and the portrait) set up vertically against the land rather than the body of the earth in its volume, vitality and horizontality contiguous and continuous with the land. Writing also in the 1940s, Aldo Leopold also distinguished between land and soil. Land for Leopold (1949, p.216) ‘is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals’. Leopold provided the missing fourth element of fire or energy to Mitchell’s three other passive elements: earth, air and water. Leopold (1949, p.218) regards ‘land as an energy circuit’. Mitchell promoted ‘land sense’ as we have seen whereas Leopold advocated a land ethic. For Leopold (1949, p.221) ‘a land ethic … reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land. Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity’. Land is economic base, spatial location and temporal trajectory upon which ‘society’ depends. Yet modern society for Leopold (1935, p.217) has: developed an unstable adjustment to its environment, from which both must eventually suffer damage or even ruin. Regarding society


and land collectively as an organism, that organism has suddenly developed pathological symptoms, i.e. self-accelerating rather than self-compensating departures from normal functioning. Land health is the normal functioning of the land and society organism. Leopold (1999, pp.22 and 219) defined land-health as ‘the capacity for self-renewal in the biota’. By implication, land sickness is the destruction wreaked upon the biota so that it is incapable of selfrenewal. As there is physical and mental health, and physical land health, so there is mental land health, and illness, in the psychogeopathology of self-accelerating departures from normal functioning, such as in mining (see Giblett, 2004, chapter 9).

Taoist ecology The idea of the land being an energy circuit was not an original one devised by Leopold. It stems at least from as far back as the Taoists with their concern with ‘the flow of energy in the land’ (Wong, 2001, p.122). The ancient Taoist art of feng shui is concerned, as Skinner (1989, p.xi) puts it, ‘with the location of dragon lines [or veins (Wong, 1996, pp.30 and 65–68; see also Wong, 2001, p.136)] of energy in the earth and their interaction with man [sic] as part of his subtle environment’. For Cheng (1994, p.123) ‘dragon arteries wind through the landscape’ or more precisely, as landscape is a surface phenomenon (see Giblett, 2004), they wind through the land, both its surface and depth. In Chinese languages, as Allan (1997, p.56) points out, ‘there is no word for landscape as such’. Landscape is a western category that colonises the land conceptually and concretely (see Giblett, 2004) so generally the terms ‘the earth’ or ‘the land’ will be used in preference to ‘landscape’, and ‘Chinese painting’ to ‘Chinese landscape painting’. In Chinese terms energy or ‘life-force’ is ch’i which ‘flows through the earth like an underground stream’ (Skinner, 1989, p.1). Ch’i also flows through the earth like energy through the body. Thus for Skinner (1989, p.1) ‘a parallel can be drawn with the flow of ch’i through the acupuncture meridians through the body’. Conversely, a parallel can be drawn with the flow of energy through the earth. Feng-shui is a kind of ecological taijiquan as Wong (1996, p.46) defines it as ‘the art of seeing the pattern of movement and stillness in the land’ just as taijiquan is the art of performing movement with, and cultivating stillness in, the body (as we saw in the previous chapter). Acupuncture, feng-shui and taijiquan

Healthy Body 179

are Taoist arts of health, longevity and well-being for the body and the earth, for the body of the earth. And for the health of both. Richard Jefferies (1885/2001, p.92), the late Victorian nature writer, related that in order ‘to discover the minute differences, which make one locality healthy and home happy, and the next adjoining unhealthy, the Chinese invented the science of feng shui, spying about with cabalisitc mystery, casting the horoscope of an acre.’ Feng shui is Chinese geomancy (Skinner, 1989). The body and the earth form the body of the earth, what Rossbach (1984, p.8) calls ‘a sacred metabolic system’ of energy flows in living beings rather than the secular metabolic exchange of dead matter in industrial capitalism (as we saw in a previous chapter). Whereas the former is enacted in the cultivation and circulation of energy in the living body of the earth, the latter culminates in the production of the commodity and in the exchange of dead matter and labour for money, and of money for dead matter. And whereas the latter gives rise to nature as ‘man’s [sic] inorganic body’ from which ‘he’ is alienated and on which ‘he’ works in the production of commodities, the former is intimately related to nature as humans’ body with which humans are united and (with) which humans work (see Giblett, 2004). If land is an energy circuit, and if lands and humans are interconnected then the human being, and body, is an energy circuit too. Ch’i or matter/energy is central to a Taoist environmental ethos (rather than ethics (see Ames, 1986, p.341)) and to a Taoist view of the body and of the earth, the body of the earth. Ch’i for Wei-Ming (1989, p.76) is ‘the blood and breath of the vital force that underlies all beings’. The Guanzi (Chuang Tzu) calls water ‘the blood and breath of the earth’ (cited by Kuriyama, 1999, p.50). Ch’i/qi, or vitality as Allan (1997, p.60) as translates it, is ‘closely associated with breath – and mist, the breath of the earth… and in later theory it is said to be that which everything is made of’. For Cheng (1994, p.117) ‘the vital breaths simultaneously animate both the being of the universe and the being of man [sic]’. One breath, two beings: human being and the being of the universe are distinct and not merged into one whole but breathe the same breath. Ch’i/qi contrasts with some major western concepts, such as matter. It occupies according to Graham (cited by Allan, 1997 p.88): the place in Chinese cosmology occupied by matter in ours. The basic metaphor behind the word matter is of timber (Latin materia), inert and cut up and to be assembled by a carpenter; qi, on the other


hand, is in the first place breath, alternating between motion and stillness. In Chinese cosmology the body and the earth are both made of the same living, vital breath (see Cheng, 1986, pp.362–363). In western cosmology the body and the earth are both made of the same inert and desiccated matter. Matter is dry whereas breath is wet. Blood is wet too, and so ch’i/qi is linked to it, and both are linked to water which is the life-blood of the earth and the major component of the human body. Water in the Guanzi is ‘the blood and qi-breath of the earth’ (cited by Allan, 1997, p.123). Conversely, qi is the water and breath of the body. Consequently for Wei-Ming (1989, p.78) ‘we are consanguineous with nature’. We share the same blood, and breath, of ch’i as nature. The same ch’i is pumped and flows through our veins and arteries, airways and lungs, as flows through the rest of nature. Interestingly, in the theory of the four elements (and humous) in western philosophy air and the gaseous are associated with the wet and sanguineous (see Giblett, 1996, pp.156–160). The ch’i in the plural for Graham (1989, p.325) are ‘the energetic fluids in the atmosphere and inside the body’. They are not a singular substance and they are not confined to a single, self-contained entity but run through the body and the earth. The Chuang-tzu states that ‘running through the whole world there is nothing but the one ch’i’ (quoted by Graham 1989, p.328). Ch’i for Sullivan (1962, p.7) is ‘the breath of the universe’. The idea of breath for Cheng (1994, p.118) ‘is at the core of Chinese cosmology’, including traditional medicine. Indeed, medicine is a part of cosmology as Cheng goes on to argue that ‘every living thing is primarily conceived not as a mere substance but as a condensation of the different types of breaths that regulate its vital functioning’. In early Chinese thought the waterwheel depicted in the Picture of Internals interconnects the two bodies of the human body and the body of the earth. The waterwheel, according to Wong (2000, p.16), is ‘both the Microcosmic and the Macrocosmic Circulations and it is the ‘vehicle’ that moves energy in the body’. In the microcosmic terms of the body, the waterwheel for Chung is ‘movement in the body’. In the macrocosmic terms of the earth, for him the waterwheel ‘moves through water’ (Wong, 2000, p.95). It is moved by and through water and thereby generates energy. In Chinese cosmology and medicine the kidneys are associated with water (Wong, 2000, pp.61, 69 and 119).

Healthy Body 181

The kidneys are the place or organ where ch’i is generated and stored (Wong, 2000, pp.96–7 and 102). Correspondingly, wetlands as the ‘kidneys’ of the earth are the site or ‘organ’ where the life-giving vitality of water is generated and stored. Both are places of the life-giving flow of water, not of foul stagnancy. In Chinese cosmology and medicine the liver is associated with wood and ‘in wood the sap must flow’ (Hammer, 1990, p.57) or else the tree will die just as in the body of the earth water must flow or the earth will die. The liver energies, Hammer (1990, p.64) goes on to relate, ‘play a major part in the movement and circulation of ch’i and the prevention of stagnation’. Although wetlands have been regarded as stagnant, they are dynamic systems often of subsurface water flows. They are vital for life. Like wetlands, the kidneys for Chung (Wong, 2000, p.121) are ‘the root and foundation of life.’ The human body and the body of the earth are connected in and by the life-giving movement of energy. The traditional Chinese, or Taoist, cosmology has profound implications for Chinese painting. Even perspective, that linchpin of Renaissance and modern painting, is different in the Chinese tradition. Chinese perspective, Cheng (1994, p.91) argues, is ‘different from linear [single point] perspective, which presumes a privileged vantage point and a point of convergence… It is a double perspective’ that for Cheng (1994, p.96) ‘finally transforms the relationship of subject and object’ to the point where ‘the outside becomes the inner landscape of the subject’. Land becomes body, becomes the land of the body, as the land becomes body. There is no separation between body and land, though they are not merged in an oceanic Romantic feeling of oneness. A Chinese artist for Cheng (1994, p.2; see also p.62) ‘aspires to the ideal of realizing a living microcosm in which it is possible for the macrocosm to function’. The macrocosm of the universe functions in and through microcosm of the body. For instance, the T’ang (618–907) style of Chinese painting for Cheng (1994, p.3) ‘aims primarily at catching the tonalities of a landscape in their infinite nuances, at capturing the secret vibrations of objects bathed in the invisible breaths which animate the universe’. One such set of ‘objects’ is mountains. For Sullivan (1962, p.1): to the Chinese all mountains are sacred … because, since remote times, the Chinese have held that the cosmic forces, the energy, harmony, and ceaseless renewal of the universe, are in some way


made manifest in them. In popular belief the mountain is the body of the cosmic being, the rocks its bones, the water the blood that gushes through its veins, the trees and grasses its hair, the clouds and the mists the vapour of its breath – the cosmic breath (ch’i), or cloud-breath (yün-ch’i), which is the visible manifestation of the very essence of life. Chinese ‘aesthetics’ (though aesthetics is arguably a modern western concept like the body and landscape) for Cheng (1994, p.viii): being based on an organicist conception of the universe, proposed an art that would strive to re-create a total microcosm, in which the unifying action of breath-spirit plays the leading role, and which emptiness, far from being synonymous with vagueness or arbitrariness, is the inner locus where the network of vital breaths [ch’i, p.100] is established. Later Cheng (1994, p.35) relates emptiness to taijiquan. Taijiquan is a succession of empty and full movements. It begins with ‘empty steps’ in which the foot is placed without transferring weight, then weight is poured into it to become full, and then emptied again in taking the next step forward or back, or in moving the weight back or forwards. This succession begins in the feet and then spreads to other parts of the body. Parts of the body, and the body as a whole, are not passive and active with one active part acting on another passive part. Empty and full are not passive and active, both as features of land and body. Emptiness in the Chinese perspective for Cheng (1994, p.36) is not: as one might suppose, something vague or non-existent. It is dynamic and active. Linked with the idea of the vital breaths and with the principle of the alternation of yin and yang, it is the preeminent site of transformation, the place where fullness can attain its full measure. Emptiness introduces discontinuity and reversibility into a given system and thus permits the elements composing the system to transcend rigid opposition and one-sided development … [and] create a relationship of open reciprocity between the subject and the objective world, thus transforming living time into living space (my emphasis). This transformation is quite unlike the modern western transformation of infinite temporality into infinite spatiality by sublimation and the

Healthy Body 183

annihilation of space by time in sublime communication technologies (see Giblett, 2004). Emptiness for Cheng (1994, p.58) ‘fosters interaction, even transmutation, between heaven and earth, and thereby, between space and time’ again unlike the modern western sublimation and transcendence of earth into the heavens, and the overcoming of space by time. Chinese painting for Cheng (1994, p.97) moves ‘toward a symbiosis of time and space, and through that, toward a symbiosis of man [sic] and the universe’. Unlike the pleasing prospects of the gentleman’s park estate stretching out in front of one in space and time colonising and enclosing the land and the future, Chinese painting marries time and space in mutual sustainability so that the future is not colonised and enclosed by the past and the present but remains open to new possibilities, new opportunities, to change and growth. This difference is found in the presentation (or lack of it) of human figures in painting. Unlike in the west with its landscape paintings of the gentleman and his wife situated as owners of the land as private property as in Gainsbrough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews, or of the lone Romantic hero positioned in sublime isolation against the mountainous landscape or cloudscape, or both as in Casper David Friedrich’s Traveller looking over a sea of fog, or the countless landscape paintings devoid of human figures which may show traces of human labour but which naturalise it, in China ‘landscape painting’ for Cheng (1994, p.134) was ‘not a naturalist art in which man’s [sic] presence was reduced or from which he was absent altogether; nor was it an animist art through which man sought to anthropomorphize the external forms of landscape’. Human’s presence and activity are acknowledged and represented. Culture and nature are thus not set up in a binary opposition but are complementary just like ying and yang which for Cheng (1986, p.364) exemplify and enact ‘the principle of opposite complementarity’ unlike the binary oppositions of western mathematics and modern social sciences, and of culture and nature. Nature, as Cheng (1994, p.133) puts it, ‘is not envisaged as a mere external framework or a term of comparison; it holds out to man [sic] a fraternal mirror permitting him to discover and to go beyond himself’ by going inside himself and nature rather than being a misogynist screen onto which he projects his phantasies (fears and desire) or a narcissistic mirror in which he contemplates his own egotistic reflection writ large (see Giblett, 2004). Land is troped and lived as living, land as body, body as land, not land as dead, not landscape as body (as in modern western culture (see Giblett, 1996, Figure 1)).


Both the Taoists and the west share a common concern with the sublime and sublimation but how this is conceptualised and enacted is quite different. The Taoist sublime involves the transformation of both body and mind, not just transformation of body into mind as in the western sublime. The Chinese, for Kohn (1992, p.11), ‘concentrate on the transformation of body and mind’. The Taoist sublime involves the transformation of body and mind as a whole and not the transformation of body into mind as separate dualistic entities. For Po-tuan (1987, p.29) (c.983–1082 CE) ‘those who understand both essence and life, who have bodies outside their bodies (see also p.53), who are both physically and mentally sublimated and who join the Tao and merge with reality are celestial immortals’. Po-tuan (1987, pp.141, 146 and 189) later argues that ‘body and mind are both sublimated’ and that ‘body and mind [are both] forgotten, physically and spiritually sublimated, merging with the Tao in reality’. Sublimation of body and mind (wholistic) into healthy mindbody occurs, not sublimation of body into mind (dualistic). In traditional Chinese philosophy the body and the earth, the body of the earth, is made up of five ‘elements’ or forces related to virtues

Table 11.1

Chinese ‘elements’, organs, emotions, etc.

ELEMENTS OR ‘REAL FORCES’

Metal

Wood

Water

Fire

Earth

ORGAN, FUNCTION

Lungs

Liver

Kidneys and genitals

Heart

Spleen

VIRTUE, ‘PRIMALLY INHERENT REALITIES’

Justice

Humaneness (benevolence)

Intelligence (wisdom)

Courtesy

Truthfulness

EMOTIONS, Anger ‘TEMPORALLY ACQUIRED ARTIFICIALITIES’ OR ‘REBELS’

Joy

Sorrow (sadness)

Delight Desire (happiness)

REPRESENT, BASES

Sense

Essence

Vitality

Spirit

Energy

THINGS

Wandering Ghostlike Higher lower Soul soul

Earthly vitality

Discriminating Mind

Errant intent

Healthy Body 185

(good deeds) and organs (I-Ming, 1988, p.75; Po-tuan, 1986, p.65 and 1987, pp.30, 48; compare the European philosophy of the four elements related to humours (states of mind and body); see Giblett, 1996, pp.156–162): (Table 11.1). One wonders why is there no force or phase of air in Chinese cosmology? Because air, like ch’i/qi, is all-pervasive and invisible unlike earth, fire, water, metal and wood. Air (or gas) is the end-point of western sublimation. What Cheng (1986, p.365) calls ‘the Chinese notion of the natural environment’ [see pp.352–353] is ‘totalistic, phenomenalistic, and organismic’. He goes on to argue that (1986, p.367) ‘man [sic] is part of the environment; the environment is part of man, and they are both part of the same whole’. Cheng (1994, p.139) maintains that ‘we are in the presence of a unitary conception of the universe, which nevertheless implies the inner, dialectical relationship of man [sic] and nature’. Both share a sense of dialectical exchange between humans and nature, but how this is conceptualised and enacted is quite different. Cheng (1986, p.353) argues that: whereas the West focuses on the external relation of man [sic] to his surroundings based upon a qualitative separation and confrontation between the human and non-human worlds, the Chinese focus on the internal relation of man [sic] to his surroundings based upon an integrative interdependence and a harmony between man [sic] and the world. Or perhaps in more contemporary terms that smack less of Romanticist notions of harmony, ecological sustainability in bio- and psychosymbiosis (see Giblett, 2004).

The body of the earth with organs and the body of Australia If the human body and the earth are one, interconnected body, then the body of the earth has a skeleton, organs, muscles, and flows of energy. Not only is the atlas of human anatomy mechanistic but so is also the atlas of geography, of earthly anatomy. The map is a colonising device (see Giblett, 1996, chapter 2), not only as it reduces depths to surface and freezes diachrony in synchrony but also because it maps a body without organs, the body of the earth without organs. Just as the bourgeois project was to produce the human body without organs, so it was also to produce the earth without organs. Early


colonial maps of Perth, Western Australia (see Giblett, 1996, chapter 3) excluded not only wetlands, but also organs – wetlands as organs, such as the kidneys and liver. Wetlands are the kidneys, liver and placenta of the body of the earth. They are kidneys as they ‘maintain the composition of the blood, removing waste nitrogenous and other matter and excreting it as urine’ (New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, p.1486; see also Giblett, 1996, p.136). Wetlands are ‘waste treatment plants’ that maintain the composition of water, the life-blood of the earth by purifying it. Rather than excreting urine, or waste-water, they produce potable water. Wetlands are also the liver as it ‘secretes bile, detoxifies the blood, and is important in the metabolism and storage of major nutrients’ (New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, p.1609). Wetlands detoxify water, the life-blood of the earth by storing nitrogenous nutrients. They are also the placenta that mediates and regulates the exchange of matter, the metabolism between the human body and the body of the earth, the Great Mother (see Giblett, 1996, p.137). These functions are missing from early maps of the Swan River and Perth area. Heirisson’s map of 1801 (Figure 11.1) shows the Swan River as a kind of alimentary canal draining, consuming, digesting and excreting the interior, the hinterland beyond. It does not show the organs of the earth that make the Swan Valley and the Swan Coastal Plain into a living bioregion. It reduces the digestive system and its organs to a canal, a means of transportation. The life of the land and the flows of its energy are reduced to a single digestive function through a canal. The swamps and marshes alongside the river that flow into the river such as Claise Brook are excluded by the hard line edge of the riverbanks and canalised into the river. The flows of water that communicate between these wetlands and the river are channelled into a single line of communication from exterior to interior, from the ‘mouth’ of the river (which is more like the rectum of the river) to its nether shallows where the boat could go no further. The rectum here is depicted as a discrete, and discreet, hole and not as a cloaca, a fertile region of excretion and reproduction (see Giblett, 1996, p.82). Although the Swan River is estuarine and so cloacal, it has no delta that mediates between the exterior and the interior like the Mekong Delta, the most fertile region of Vietnam (see Giblett, 1996, p.218). Unlike the carnivalesque body in which the body is inverted and subverted so that the mouth is the arsehole, the conventional nomenclature of the ‘mouth of the river’ re-inverts the arsehole and the mouth in order to occlude the excretory functions of the river and

187

Figure 11.1

François-Antoine Boniface Heirisson Rivière des Cygnes (Swan River) 1801 State Library of WA


Figure 11.2

The Digestive Tract

to hide the fact that the exploratory journey up the river is a journey up the rear and inner passage entering through the arsehole, rather than a journey down the upper and inner passage beginning through the mouth (see Giblett, 2004, chapter 10). Heirisson’s map of the Swan River and its immediate environs does not show the whole ecosystem of which the river is a part. It is like an anatomical illustration of the alimentary canal (see Figure 11.2) that for illustrative purposes excludes the enabling organs for the function of digestion and reduces the digestive system to transportation and processing of food into nutrition and waste. Heirisson’s map does not include the auxiliary functions of the liver as an anatomical illustration of the whole digestive system would. Producing a composite of the Swan River as a digestive tract produces a very depleted view of the body of the earth (see Figure 11.3). No self-respecting medical illustrator of human anatomy would depict the alimentary canal without also depicting the digestive system of which it is part. Illustrators of earthly anatomy had no such qualms. Of course, it would have entailed a massive surveying operation to map the region, but that is partly my point, that his map was not designed to give an accurate picture of the country but to portray it as penetrable to a certain extent by transportation, just as later maps that excluded the wetlands and described the region as ‘grassy country thinly wooded’ portrayed the country as settlable (see Giblett, 1996, chapter 3). David Mowaljarlai (1993, pp.194 and 205; see Figure 11.4) of northwestern Australia more extensively mapped the body of the earth in bodily terms by mapping Australia as ‘Bandaiyan – Corpus Australis’ with Cape York and Arnhem Land the lungs, Uluru the navel and the Great Australian Bight the ‘pubic section’. The map of Australia is remapped as a map of the human body. The land is a map of the body; the land is a map not only of the cosmos but also of the corpus. European cartography is deconstructed and decolonised by being cor-

189

Figure 11.3

Swan River as Digestive Tract (composite of Figures 11.1 and 11.2)


Figure 11.4 David Mowaljarlai, Bandaiyan: The Body of Australia, Corpus Australis in his Yorro Yorro: Everything Standing Up Alive: Spirit of the Kimberley (Broome: Magabala, 1993), p.205

porealised, by being made body. Presumably the rivers and wetlands of Australia are arteries and veins, blood and lymph, flowing through organs and muscles making the body of the earth live. Yorro Yorro in Mowaljarlai’s (1993, p.133) terms is ‘continual creation and renewal of nature in all its forms’, including presumably human and water forms. The body of Australia is not a sporting star but the land itself. The body of the earth is a body with organs – and muscles and bones and flows of energy, of chi. The health of one is the health of the other for we are one body, the body of the earth.

References Abercrombie, M., Hickman, M., Johnson, M. and Thain, M. (1990). Symbiosis. The New Penguin Dictionary of Biology, eighth edition, pp.542–543. London: Penguin. Adorno, T. and W. Benjamin (1999). The Complete Correspondence: 1928–1940. H. Lonitz (ed.), N. Walker (trans.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Allan, S. (1997). The Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Alphen, E. van (1992). Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self. London: Reaktion. Althusser, L. (1984). Essays on Ideology. London: Verso. Ames, R. (1984). The Meaning of Body in Classical Chinese Thought. International Philosophical Quarterly, 24, 1, 39–53. Ames, R. (1986). Taoism and the Nature of Nature. Environmental Ethics, 8, 317–350. Armstrong, D. (1983). Political Anatomy of the Body: Medical Knowledge in Britain in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Artaud, A. (1965). Anthology. Second edition revised. J. Hirschman (ed.) San Francisco: City Lights. Bakhtin, M. (1984). Rabelais and his World. H. Iswolsky (trans.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Balsamo, A. (1995). Forms of Technological Embodiment: Reading the Body in Contemporary Culture. In M. Featherstone and R. Burrows (eds), Cyberspace/ Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment (pp.215–237). London: Sage. Balsamo, A. (2000). Reading Cyborgs Writing Feminism. In G. Kirkup, L. James, K. Woodward and F. Hovenden (eds) The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader (pp.148–158). London: Routledge. Barkan, L. (1975). Nature’s Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press. Benjamin, J. (1990). The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. London: Virago. Benjamin, J. and A. Rabinbach (1989). Foreword. In K. Theweleit, Male Fantasies, volume II: Male bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror (pp.xi–xxv). Cambridge: Polity. Benjamin, W. (1973). Illuminations (H. Zohn, Trans.). London: Fontana. Benjamin, W. (1979). One Way Street. In his One Way Street and Other Writings (pp.45–107). E. Jephcott and K. Shorter (trans.) London: New Left Books. Benjamin, W. (1994). The correspondence of Walter Benjamin: 1910–1940. G. Scholem & T. Adorno (eds), (M. Jacobson & E. Jacobson, trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Benjamin, W. (1996). One Way Street. In his Selected Writings 1, 1913–1926, M. Bullock and M. Jennings (eds) (pp.444–488). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Benjamin, W. and G. Scholem (1992). Correspondence 1932–1940. G. Scholem (ed.), G. Smith and A. Lefevere (trans.) Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 191

192 References Benthall, J. (1976). The Body Electric: Patterns of Western Industrial Culture. London: Thames and Hudson. Blondel, E. (1991). The Body and Metaphors. In his Nietzsche: The Body and Culture: Philosophy as a Philological Genealogy. S. Hand (trans.) (pp.201–238). London: Athlone. Bodde, D. (1991). Chinese Thought, Society, and Science: The Intellectual and Social Background of Science and Technology in Pre-Modern China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Bolen, J. (1984). Goddesses in Everywoman: A New Psychology of Women. San Francisco: HarperCollins. Bordo, S. (1986). The Cartesian Masculinisation of Thought. Signs, 11 (3), 439–456. Breuer, J. and S. Freud (1893/2004). Studies in Hysteria. N. Luckhurst (trans.) London: Penguin. Brohm, J-M. (1978). Sport – The Prison of Measured Time. I. Fraser (trans.) London: Ink Links. Brown, N. (1959). Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Brownell, S. (1998). Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the People’s Republic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Buber, M. (1970). I and Thou. Third edition. W. Kaufmann (trans.) Edinburgh: T & T Clark. Bundtzen, L. (2000). Monstrous Mothers: Medusa, Grendel, and now Alien. In G. Kirkup, L. James, K. Woodward and F. Hovenden (eds) The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader (pp.101–109). London: Routledge. Bullfinch, T. (1993). The Golden Age of Myth and Legend. Ware: Wordsworth. Canguilhem, G. (2005). Monstrosity and the Monstrous. In M. Fraser & M. Greco (eds) The Body: A Reader (pp.187–193). London: Routledge. Caplan, J. (2000). (ed.) Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American history. London: Reaktion Books. Carrouges, M. (1975). Directions for Use. In Le Machine Celibi/The Bachelor Machines (pp.21–49). New York: Rizzoli. Carrouges, M. (1954). Les Machines Célibitaires. Paris: Arcanes. Carson, R. (1955). The Edge of the Sea. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Carson, R. (1962). Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Carter, A. (1984). Nights at the Circus. London: Vintage. Carter, A. (1989). Introduction. In Images of Frida Kahlo (pp.2–11). London: Redstone. Certeau, M. de (1984). Scriptural economy. In his The Practice of Everyday Life. S. Rendall (trans.) (pp.131–153). Berkeley: University of California Press. Certeau, M. de (1986). The Arts of Dying: Celibatory Machines. In his Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. B. Massumi (trans.) (pp.156–167). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Certeau, M. de (1992). The Mystic Fable, volume one: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, M. Smith, (trans.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cerutty, P. (1964). Middle-distance Running. London: Pelham. Cerutty, P. (1967a). Be Fit! Or be Damned! London: Pelham. Cerutty, P. (1967b). Success: In Sport and Life. London: Pelham.

References 193 Chedgzoy, K. (1995). Frida Kahlo’s ‘Grotesque’ Bodies. In P. Florence and D. Reynolds (eds) Feminist Subjects, Multi-Media: Cultural Methodologies (pp.39–53). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cheng, C-y. (1986) On the Environmental Ethics of the Tao and the Ch’i. Environmental Ethics, 8, 4, 351–370. Cheng, F. (1994). Empty and Full: The Language of Chinese Painting. Boston: Shambhala. Clark, K. (1939). Leonardo da Vinci. rept. London: Penguin. Cobbett, W. (1830/2001). Rural rides. I. Dyck (ed.) London: Penguin. Coetzee, J. (1974). Dusklands. Johannesburg: Ravan. Coetzee, J. (1988). White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa. New Haven: Yale University Press. Colwin, C. (1992). Swimming into the 21st Century. Champaign, Illinois: Leisure Press. Creed, B. (1986). Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection. Screen, 27 (1), 44–70. Cubitt, S. (1998). Digital Aesthetics. London: Sage. Daoren. H. (1994). Back to Beginnings. T. Cleary (trans.). Boston: Shambhala. Davis, M. (2002). Ecocide in Marlboro Country. Dead Cities and Other Tales (pp.33–63). New York: The Free Press. Deleuze, G. (1978). Politics. Semiotext(e), 3 (2), 154–163. Deleuze, G. (1983). The Body. Nietzsche and Philosophy. H. Tomlinson (trans.) (pp.39–40). London: Athlone. Deleuze, G. (2003). Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. D. Smith (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1977a). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H.R. Lane (trans.) New York: Viking. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1977b). May 14, 1914: One or Several Wolves? Semiotext(e), 2 (3), 137–147. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1981). How to Make Yourself a Body Without Organs. Semiotext(e), 4 (1), 265–270. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1986a). Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. D. Polan (trans.) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1986b). Nomadology: The War Machine. B. Massumi (trans.) New York: Semiotext(e). Descartes, R. (1968). Discourse on Method and the Meditations. F. Sutcliffe, (trans.) London: Penguin. Descartes, R. (1972). Treatise of Man. S. Hall (trans.) Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Diamond, J. (1999). C: Because Cowards get Cancer too. London: Vermillion. Dijck, J. van (1998). Imagenation: Popular Images of Genetics. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Doane, M. (1990). Technophilia: Technology, Representation, and the Feminine. In M. Jacobus, E. Keller and S. Shuttleworth (eds), Body/Politics: Women and the Discourse of Science (pp.163–176). New York: Routledge. During, M. v. (2001). The Anatomy of the Human Body – A Unique Collection of the Late 18th Century. In Encyclopaedia Anatomica: A Selection of Wax Models (pp.30–31). Köln: Taschen. Dyens, O. (2001). Metal and Flesh: The Evolution of Man: Technology Takes Over. E. Bibbee and O. Dyens (trans.) Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

194 References Easlea, B. (1983). Fathering the Unthinkable: Masculinity, Scientists and the Nuclear Arms Race. London: Pluto. Easthope, A. (1986) The Male Body; Play the Game. What a Man’s Gotta Do: The Masculine Myth in Popular Culture (pp.50–54 and 69–73.) London: Grafton. Eichberg, H. (1982). Stopwatch, Horizontal Bar, Gymnasium: The Technologizing of Sports in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, IX, 43–59. Eichberg, H. (1998). Body Cultures: Essays on Sport, Space and Identity. J. Bale and C. Philo (eds). London: Routledge. Elvin, M. (1989). Tales of Shen and Xin: Body-Person and Heart-Mind in China During the Last 150 years. In M. Feher (ed.), Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part Two. New York: Zone. Engels, F. (1934). Dialectics of Nature. Moscow: Progress. Farquhar, J. (1994). Multiplicity, Point of View and Responsibility in Traditional Chinese Healing. In A. Zito and T. Barlow (eds), Body, Subject and Power in China (pp.78–101). Chicago: Chicago University Press. Featherstone, M. and R. Burrows (1995). Cultures of Technological Embodiment: An Introduction. In their (eds), Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment (pp.1–17). London: Sage. Flew, A. (1983). A Dictionary of Philosophy (2nd rev. edn). London: Pan. Flichy, P. (1995). The Dynamics of Modern Communication: The Shaping and Impact of New Communication Technologies. L. Libbrecht (trans.) London: Sage. Foley, D. (2001). Little Pills. Illness: A Journal of Personal Experience 1(1), 31–36. Fordeman, R. (1992). Radical Environmentalism and the Political Roots of Postmodernism: Differences that Make a Difference. Environmental Ethics, 14, 4. Foucault, M. (1970). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock. Foucault, M. (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge. A.M. Sheridan Smith (trans.) London: Tavistock. Foucault, M. (1973). The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. A. Sheridan (trans.) London: Tavistock. Foucault, M. (1977a). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. A. Sheridan (trans.) London: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1977b). Nietzsche, Genealogy, History. In D. Bouchard (ed.) D. Bouchard and S. Simon (trans.) Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (pp.139–164). Oxford: Blackwell. Foucault, M. (1979). On governmentality. I & C, 6, 5–22. Foucault, M. (1980). The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century. In C. Gordon, (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 (pp.166–182). Brighton: Harvester. Foucault, M. (1981). The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction. R. Hurley (trans.) Harmondsworth: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1988). Technologies of the Self: A Seminar. L.H. Martin, H. Gutman, and P.H. Hutton (eds). London: Tavistock. Foucault, M. (1991). Governmentality. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (pp.87–104). London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Foucault, M. (2003). ‘Society Must be Defended’: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976. D. Macey (trans.) New York: Picador.

References 195 Frank, A. (1990). Bringing Bodies Back in: A Decade Review. Theory, Culture and Society, 7, 131–162. Frank, A. (1991). At the Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Frank, A. (1994). Reclaiming an Orphan Genre: The First-Person Narrative of Illness. Literature and Medicine, 13 (1) 1–21. Frank, A. (1995). The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Freeman, C. with S. Gullan. (2003). Cathy: Her Own Story. Camberwell, Victoria: Viking Penguin. Freud, S. (1985). Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910). In A. Dickson (ed.) Art and Literature. J. Strachey (trans.) Penguin Freud Library 14. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Fulder, S. (1990). The Tao of Medicine. Rochester, Vermont: Healing Arts Press. Fuller, J.F.C. (1961/1992). The Conduct of War 1789–1961: A Study of the Impact of the French, Industrial, and Russian Revolutions on War and its Conduct. New York: Da Capo. Giblett, R. (1996). Postmodern Wetlands: Culture, History, Ecology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Giblett, R. (2004). Living with the Earth: Mastery to Mutuality. Cambridge: Salt. Giblett, R. (2008a). Health Recovery: The Taoist Tai Chi™ way. London: ShepheardWalwyn. Giblett, R. (2008b). Sublime Communication Technologies. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Girardot, N., J. Miller and L. Xiaogan (2001). Introduction. In their (eds) Daoism and Ecology: Ways Within a Cosmic Landscape (pp.xxxvii–lxiv). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Divinity School, Center for the Study of World Religions. Goffman. E. (1963/1974). Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Jason Aronson. Gore, A. (1994). Introduction. In R. Carson, Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Graham, A. (1989). Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court. Grahame, K. (1908). The Wind in the Willows. London: Methuen. Gray, C. (1989). The Cyborg Soldier: The US Military and the Post-Modern Warrior. In L. Levidow and K. Robins (eds), Cyborg Worlds: The Military Information Society (pp.43–71). London: Free Association. Grosz, E. (1990). Inscriptions and Body-Maps: Representations and the Corporeal. In T. Threadgold and A. Cranny-Francis (eds), Feminine, Masculine and Representation (pp.62–74). Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Grundmann, R. (1991). Marxism and Ecology. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Guattari, F. (1984). Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. R. Sheed (trans.) Harmondsworth: Penguin. Guattari, F. (1989). The Three Ecologies. New Formations, 8, 131–147. Gwyn, R. (2002). Communicating Health and Illness. London: Sage. Hagen, G. von (2002). Body Worlds: The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies. Heidelberg: Institute for Plastination. Haley, B. (1978). The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

196 References Hammer, L. (1990). Dragon Rises, Red Bird Flies: Psychology and Chinese Medicine. Barryton, NY: Station Hill Press. Hammond, N. and H. Scullard (1970) (eds). The Oxford Classical Dictionary. Second edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Haraway, D. (1985). A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s. Socialist Review, 80, 65–107. Haraway, D. (1995). Cyborgs and Symbionts: Living Together in the New World Order. In C. Gray (ed.) The Cyborg Handbook (pp.xi–xx). London: Routledge. Haraway, D. (2000). The Virtual Speculum in the New World Order. In G. Kirkup, L. James, K. Woodward and F. Hovenden (eds) The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader (pp.221–245). London: Routledge. Hawkins, A. (1999). Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography. Second edition. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press. Hay, J. (1983). The Human Body as a Microcosmic Source of Macrocosmic Values in Calligraphy. In S. Bush and C. Murck (eds) Theories of the Arts in China, (pp.74–102). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hay, J. (1994). The Body Invisible in Chinese Art? In A. Zito and T. Barlow (eds), Body, Subject and Power in China (pp. 42–77). Chicago: Chicago University Press. Hazlitt, W. (1970). Selected Writings. R. Blythe (ed.) London: Penguin. Henderson, J. (1984). The Development and Decline of Chinese Cosmology. New York: Columbia University Press. Herrera, H. (1983). Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo. New York: HarperCollins. Hirst, P. and P. Woolley (1982). The Social Formation and Maintenance of Human Attributes. In their Social Relations and Human Attributes (pp.23–31). London: Tavistock. Hoberman, J. (1984). Sport and Political ideology. Austin: University of Texas Press. Howard, A. (1940). An Agricultural Testament. London: Oxford University Press. Howard, A. (1947/1972). The Soil and Health: A Study of Organic Agriculture. New York: Schocken. Hutchins, J. (1999). Warren Weaver memorandum: 50th Anniversary of Machine Translation. MT News International, issue 22, 8 (1), 5–6. I-Ming, L. (1988). Awakening to the Tao. T. Cleary (trans.) Boston: Shambhala. Jefferies, R. (1885/2001). At Home on The Earth: A New Selection of the Later Writings. J. Hooker (ed.) Totnes: Green Books. Kafka, F. (1914/1949). In the Penal Settlement. In the Penal Settlement: Tales and Short Prose Works. E. Kaiser and E. Wilkins (trans.) (pp.185–221). London: Secker & Warburg. Kaptchuk, T. (1983). Chinese Medicine: The Web that Has No Weaver. London: Rider. Keller, E. (1994). The Body of a New Machine: Situating the Organism Between Telegraphs and Computers. Perspectives on Science, 2(3), 302–323. Kern, S. (1975). Anatomy and Destiny: A Cultural History of the Human Body. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Kern, S. (1983). The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Kettenmann, A. (2000). Frida Kahlo 1907–1954: Pain and Passion. Köln: Taschen. Kirkland, R. (2004). Taoism: The Enduring Tradition. New York: Routledge.

References 197 Klein, M. (1980). On Mahler’s Autistic and Symbiotic Phases: An Exposition and Evaluation. Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, 4, 1, 69–105. Kleinman, A. (1988). The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition. New York: Basic Books. Kohn, L. (1991). Taoist Visions of the Body. Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 18, 227–252. Kohn, L. (1992). Early Chinese Mysticism: Philosophy and Soteriology in the Taoist Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kravitz, E. (1998). Physiology of the Tao. Public Lecture Thursday 30th April 1998, Taoist Tai Chi Society of Australia, Fremantle, Western Australia. Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. L. Roudiez (trans.) New York: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, J. (1992). The Samurai: A Novel. B. Bray (trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Kuriyama, S. (1994). The Imagination of Winds and the Development of the Chinese Conception of the Body. In A. Zito and T. Barlow (eds), Body, Subject and Power in China (pp.23–41). Chicago: Chicago University Press. Kuriyama, S. (1999). The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine. New York: Zone Books. Lash, S. (1991). Genealogy and the Body: Foucault/Deleuze/Nietzsche. In M. Featherstone, M. Hepworth and B. Turner (eds) The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory (pp.256–280). London: Sage. Lear, L. (1999). Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature. London: Penguin. Leder, D. (1992). A Tale of Two Bodies: The Cartesian Corpse and the Lived Body. In his The Body in Medical Thought and Practice (pp.17–35). Dordrecht: Kluwer. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. D. Nicholson-Smith (trans.). Oxford: Blackwell. Leopold, A. (1935/1991). Land Pathology [1935]. In S. Flader and J. Baird Callicott (eds), The River of the Mother of God: And Other Essays (pp.212–217). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Leopold, A. (1949). The Land Ethic. A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There (pp.201–226). New York: Oxford University Press. Leopold, A. (1999). For the Health of the Land: Previously Unpublished Essays and Other Writings. J. Baird Callicott and E. Freyfogle (eds) Washington, D.C.: Island Press/Covelo, California: Shearwater Books. Lévi, J. (1989). The Body: The Daoists’ Coat of Arms. Fragments for a History of the Human Body. Part One (pp.105–126). M. Feher (ed.) New York: Zone. Levidow, L. and K. Robins (eds) (1989a). Introduction. In their (eds), Cyborg Worlds: The Military Information Society (pp.7–11). London: Free Association. Levidow, L. and K. Robins (eds) (1989b). Toward a Military Information Society? In their (eds), Cyborg Worlds: The Military Information Society (pp.159–177). London: Free Association. Lieh-tzu (1960). The Book of Lieh-tzu: A Classic of Tao. A. Graham (trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Lines, W. (1998). False Economy: Australia in the Twentieth Century. South Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press. L’Isle-Adam, V. de (1981). The Eve of the Future Eden. M. Rose, (trans.). Lawrence: Coronado.

198 References Lloyd, G. and N. Sivin (2002). The Way and the Word: Science and Medicine in Early China and Greece. New Haven: Yale University Press. Lukacs, G. (1971). History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. R. Livingstone (trans.) London: Merlin Press. Lykke, N. (2000). Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs: Feminist Confrontations with Science. In G. Kirkup, L. James, K. Woodward and F. Hovenden (eds) The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader (pp.74–87). London: Routledge. Lyotard, J-F. (1992). Libidinal Economy. I. Grant (trans.) London: Athlone. McGregor, A. (1998). Cathy Freeman: A Journey Just Begun. Milsons Point, NSW: Random House Australia. Mahler, M. (1952). On Child Psychosis and Schizophrenia: Autistic and Symbiotic Infantile Psychoses. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 7, 286–305. Mahler, M. (1968). On Human Symbiosis and the Vicissitudes of Individuation, 1, Infantile Psychosis. New York: International Universities Press. Mahler, M. and Furer, M. (1966). ‘Development of Symbiosis, Symbiotic Psychosis, and the Nature of Separation Anxiety…’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 47, 559–560. Mahler, M., Pine, F. and Bergman, A. (1975). The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant: Symbiosis and Individuation. New York: Basic Books. Mangan, J.A. (1999). Shaping the Superman: Fascist Body as Political icon – Aryan Fascism. London: Frank Cass. Mangan, J. A. (2000). Superman Supreme: Fascist Body as Political icon – Global Fascism. London: Frank Cass. Margulis, L. (1971). Symbiosis and Evolution. Scientific American, 225, 49–57. Margulis, L. (1981). Symbiosis in Cell Evolution: Life and its Environment on the Early Earth. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman. Margulis, L. (1998). Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution. New York: Basic Books. Mathews, H., D. Lannin and J. Mitchell (1994). Coming to Terms with Advanced Breast Cancer: Black Women’s Narratives from Eastern North Carolina. Social Science and Medicine, 38(6), 789–800. Mauss, M. (1992). Techniques of the Body. In J. Crary and S. Kwonker (eds) Incorporations (pp.455–477). New York: Zone. Merewether, C. (1990). Embodiment and Transformation: The Art of Frida Kahlo. In The Art of Frida Kahlo (pp.11–20). Adelaide: Adelaide Festival. Mettrie, J. de la (1997). Machine Man and Other Writings. A. Thomson (trans.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Middlebrook, C. (1998). Seeing the Crab: A Memoir of Dying Before I Die. New York: Anchor/Doubleday. Mills, H. (1967). Introduction. In his (ed.) G. Crabbe, Tales, 1812 and Other Selected Poems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mitchell, E. (1946). Soil and Civilization. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Mowaljarlai, D. (1993). Yorro Yorro: Everything Standing Up Alive: Spirit of the Kimberley. Broome: Magabala. Mumford, L. (1934). Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Needham, J. (1970). Clerks and Craftsmen in China and the West: Lectures and Addresses on the History of Science and Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

References 199 Needham, J. (1983). Science and Civilisation in China, Vol. 5¸ Chemical and Chemical Technology, Part V, Spagyrical Discovery and Invention: Physiological Alchemy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Netter, F. (1969). Twenty-Somite Stage (3.2mm) approximately 25 days. In his The Ciba Collection of Medical Illustrations, Vol. 5, Heart (p.118). West Caldwell: Ciba. Neumann, E. (1954). The Origins and History of Consciousness. R. Hull (trans.) Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ni, H-C. (1995). Hua Hu Ching: The Later Teachings of Lao Tzu. Boston: Shambhala. Nietzsche, F. (1967) The Will to Power. W. Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (trans.) New York: Vintage. Nietzsche, F. (1968). Genealogy of Morals. In. W. Kaufmann (ed. and trans.), Basic Writings of Nietzsche (pp.439–599). New York: Vintage. Parker, J. (1997) The body as Text and the Body as Living Flesh: Metaphors of the Body and Nursing in Postmodernity. In J. Lawler (ed.) The Body in Nursing (pp.11–29). Melbourne: Churchill Livingstone. Parkins, W. & Craig, G. (2006). Slow Living. Oxford: Berg. Parsons, H. (1977). Introduction. In his (ed.), Marx and Engels on Ecology (pp.3–118). Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. Patton, P. (1981). Notes for a Glossary. I & C, 8, 41–48. Payne, R. (2001). Charles – 29.9.36–19.7.99. Illness: A Journal of Personal Experience, 1(1), 67–72. Pick, J. (1944). Australia’s Dying Heart: Soil erosion and Station Management in the Inland. Second revised edition. Carlton: Melbourne University Press. Porter, R. (1997). The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity. New York: W.W. Norton. Porter, R. (2001). Bodies Politic: Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain, 1650–1900. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Po-tuan, C. (1986). The Inner Teachings of Taoism. T. Cleary (trans.) Boston: Shambhala. Po-tuan, C. (1987). Understanding Reality: A Taoist Alchemical Classic. T. Cleary, (trans.) Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Rapoport, A. (1968). Introduction. Carl von Clausewitz, On War. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Remarque, E. (1929/1994). All Quiet on the Western Front. B. Murdoch (trans.) London: Vintage. Richards, K. (2001). Forgotten. Illness: A Journal of Personal Experience, 1(1), 21–29. Robinet, I. (1993). Taoist Meditation: The Mao-Shan Tradition of Great Purity, J. Pas and N. Girardot (trans.) Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Robins, K. and L. Levidow (1995a). Socializing the Cyborg Self: The Gulf War and Beyond. In C. Gray (ed.) The Cyborg Handbook (pp.119–125). New York: Routledge. Robins, K. and L. Levidow (1995b). Soldier, Cyborg, Citizen. In J. Brock and I. Boal (eds) Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information (pp.105–113). San Francisco: City lights. Rose, H. (1928). A Handbook of Greek Mythology. London: Methuen. Rossbach, S. (1984). Feng Shui: Ancient Chinese Wisdom of Arranging a Harmonious Living Environment. London: Rider.

200 References Ruskin, J. (1990). From Modern Painters. In R. Finch and J. Elder (eds) The Norton Book of Nature Writing (pp.223–228). New York: Norton. Schmidt, A. (1971). The Concept of Nature in Marx. London: New Left Books. Schipper, K. (1978). The Taoist body. History of Religions, 17, 355–386. Schipper, K. (1993). The Taoist Body. K. Duval (trans.) Berkeley: University of California Press. Schipper, K. (2001). Daoist Ecology. In N. Girardot, J. Miller and L. Xiaogan (eds) Daoism and Ecology: Ways Within a Cosmic Landscape (pp.79–93). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Divinity School, Center for the Study of World Religions. Schvartz, E. (1972). Nietzsche: A Philosopher of Fitness. In E. Gerber (ed.) Sport and the Body: A Philosophical Symposium (pp.183–186). Philadelphia: Lea & Febiger. Serres, M. (1982). The Parasite. L. Schehr (trans.) Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Serres, M. (1995). The Natural Contract. E. MacArthur and W. Paulson (trans.) Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Sivin , N. (1974). Foreword. In M. Porkert, The Theoretical Foundations of Chinese Medicine: Systems of Correspondence (pp.xi–xvi). Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Skinner, S. (1989). The Living Earth Manual of Feng-Shui: Chinese Geomancy. London: Penguin. Sofia, Z. (1984). Exterminating Fetuses: Abortion, Disarmament, and SexSemiotics of Extraterrestrialism. Diacritics, 14 (2), 47–59. Sofia, Z. (1989). The Hyperreal and the Overworked. Praxis M, 24, 5–10. Sofia, Z. (1989, online). Masculine Excess and the Metaphysics of Vision: Some Problems of Feminist Film Theory. Continuum, 2 (2), (accessed online). Sofia, Z. (1990). Spacing Out in the Mother Shop. In T-A. White, A. Gibbs, W. Jenkins and N. King (eds) No Substitute: Prose Poems Images (pp.133–143). Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press. Sofia, Z. (1992). Hegemonic Irrationalities and Psychoanalytic Cultural Critique. Cultural Studies, 6 (3), 376–394. Sofia, Z. (1999). Virtual Corporeality: A Feminist View. In J. Wolmark (ed.) Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace (pp.55–68). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sofoulis, Z. (1983). Alien Pre-Oedipus: Penis-Breast, Cannibaleyes. Presented as Part of the Qualifying Essay, History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz. Sofoulis, Z. (1991). Whose Second Self? Gender, Irrationality, and Computer Culture. Paper for ‘Signifying others,’ 2nd Annual Cultural Studies Conference, University College of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba. Sontag, S. (1978). Illness as Metaphor. London: Penguin. Spretnak, C. (1992). Lost Goddesses of Early Greece: A Collection of Pre-Hellenic Myths. Boston: Beacon. Stallybrass, P. & A. White (1986). The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. London: Methuen. Steele Hall, T. (1972). The Physiology of Descartes. In his (trans.) R. Descartes, Treatise of Man (pp.xxvi–xxxiii). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Stern, D. (1985). The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View From Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology. New York: Basic Books.

References 201 Stibbe, A. (1996). The Metaphorical Construction of Illness in Chinese Culture. Journal of Asian-Pacific Communication 7 (3 &4), 177–188. Sturken, M. and L. Cartwright (2001). Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Styron, W. (1990). Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness. New York: Random House. Sullivan, M. (1962). The Birth of Landscape Painting in China. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Sylvester, D. (1987). The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon. Third enlarged edition. London: Thames and Hudson. Theweleit, K. (1987). Male Fantasies, volume I: Women, Floods, Bodies, History. S. Conway (trans.) Cambridge: Polity. Theweleit, K. (1989). Male Fantasies, volume II: Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror. C. Turner and E. Carter (trans.) Cambridge: Polity. Thompson, E. P. (1993). Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism. In his Customs in Common (pp.352–403). London: Penguin. Thoreau, H. (1962). The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau I–XIV. B. Torrey and F. Allen (eds) New York: Dover. Thoreau, H. (1982). The Portable Thoreau. C. Bode (ed.) New York: Penguin. Tillyard, E. (1943). The Elizabethan World Picture. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Tomas, D. (1995). Feedback and Cybernetics: Reimaging the Body in the Age of the Cyborg. In M. Featherstone and R. Burrows (eds), Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/ Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment (pp.22–43). London: Sage. Trengrove, A. (1961). The Golden Mile: The Herb Elliott story … London: Cassell. Turner, B. (1994). Theoretical Developments in the Sociology of the Body. Australian Cultural History, 13, 13–30. Vinci, L. da (1977). Selections from the Notebooks. I. Richter (ed.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. Virilio, P. and S. Lotringer (1983). Pure War. M. Polizzotti (trans.) New York: Semiotext(e). Virilio, P. (1986). Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology. M. Polizzotti (trans.) New York: Semiotext(e). Virilio, P. (1987). Negative Horizons. M. Polizzotti (trans.) Semiotext(e) USA. 163–180. Virilio, P. (2000). A Landscape of Events. J. Rose (trans.) Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Virilio, P. (2002). Ground Zero. C. Turner (trans.) London: Verso. Warming, E. (1909). Oecology of Plants: An Introduction to the Study of Plant Communities. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Watts, A. (1953). Asian Psychology and Modern Psychiatry. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, XIII, 25–30. Watts, A. (1970). The World is Your Body. In R. Disch (ed.), The Ecological Conscience: Values for Survival (pp.181–193). Englewod Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Wei-Ming, T. (1989). The Continuity of Being: Chinese Visions of Nature. In J. Callicott and R. Ames (eds), Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought: Essays in Environmental Philosophy (pp.67–78). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. White, A. (1993). Prosthetic Gods in Atrocious Places: Gilles Deleuze/Francis Bacon. In his Carnival, Hysteria and Writing: Collected Essays and Autobiography (pp.160–177). Oxford: Clarendon Press.

202 References Whitting, G. (2002). Willo’s Journey. Illness: A Journal of Personal Experience, 1(2), 42–43. Wiener, N. (1954/1989). The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. London: Free Association. Will, W. van der (1990). The Body and the Body Politic as Symptom and Metaphor in the Transition of German Culture to National Socialism. In his and B. Taylor (eds) The Nazification of Art: Art, Design, Music, Architecture and Film in the Third Reich (pp.14–52). Winchester: Winchester Press. Williams, T. (1991). Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. New York: Random House. Wong, E. (1987). The Picture of Internals. Toronto: Fung Loy Kok Taoist Temple. Wong, E. (1996). Feng-Shui: The Ancient Wisdom of Harmonious Living for Modern Times. Boston: Shambhala. Wong, E. (2000) (trans.) The Tao of Health, Longevity, and Immortality: The Teachings of Immortals Chung and Lü. Boston: Shambhala. Wong, E. (2001). Tales of the Taoist Immortals. Boston: Shambhala. Zito, A. (1994). Silk and Skin: Significant Boundaries. In her and T. Barlow (eds) Body, Subject and Power in China (pp.103–130). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zito, A. and T. Barlow (1994). Introduction: Body, Subject and Power in China. In their (eds) Body, Subject and Power in China (pp.1–21). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Index abject 75 Alien 82–86 Allan, S. 178 Alphen, E. van 49 Althusser, L. 98 Ames, R. 160–161 Armstrong, D. 32 Artaud, A. 71–72 Bachelor Machines for a Bachelor Birth 95–98, 123 Bacon, F. 49, 67–69 Bakhtin, M. 56–58, 60–63, 77–80 Balsamo, A. 141–142 Barkan, L. 166 Benjamin, J. 153–156 Benjamin, W. 35–36, 90 Blondel, E. 6–7 body bourgeois 60–62 fascist xii–xiii, 90–91 grotesque xii, 56, 63 machine xi, 19, 21–26 monstrous xii, 74 sporting xiii, 125–128 sublimated 69 Taoist xiv, 10, 157–167 body culture x, 14 body defined 5–7, 157 body techniques 13 body without organs 69–73 Bordo, S. 98 Brohm, J-M. 127, 133–135 Brown, N. 62, 72, 98–99 Brownell, S. 10, 14 Buber, M. 25 Bundtzen, L. 82 Canguilhem, G. 81–82 Carrouges, M. 96 Carson, R. 3, 100–107 Carter, A. 76–79 Cerutty, P. 125–127, 131

Certeau, M. de 93, 112–117, 166 Chedgzoy, K. 80 Cheng, C-y. 180, 183, 186 Cheng, F. 178, 179–183, 185 Clark, K. 21 Cobbett, W. 63–65 Coetzee, J. 118–121 Crabbe, G. 65–67 Creed, B. 74–76, 82–83 cyborg xiii, 140–148 Deleuze, G. 5–6, 68–70 Deleuze, G. & F. Guattari 69–70, 72–73, 96 Descartes, R. xi, 4, 23–24 Diamond, J. 44–47 Dijck, J. van 34 Dyens, O. 90 Eichberg, H. 130–133 Elliott, H. 125–127 Elvin, M. 164 environment 115 Farquhar, J. 157 Foucault, M. 7–12, 24–31, 35, 53–54, 108–112, 129–130, 140–141, 157 Frank, A. 11–12, 37–41, 48–49, 167 Freeman, C. xiii, 136–139 Freud, S. 21, 38 Fulder, S. 157–158, 160, 163, 165 gargantua/n 77 Goffman, E. 11 Grahame, K. 121–124 Grosz, E. 113–114 grotesque 57, 63 Guattari, F. 69–70, 100 Hagen, G. von 35 Haraway, D. 141, 143–148 Hawkins, A. 38–39, 51

203

204 Index Hay, J. 157, 160–161, 164–165 Hazlitt, W. 67 Herrera, H. 81 Hirst, P. & P. Woolley 16–17 Howard, A. 173–175 illness narratives

37–39

Kahlo, F. 80–81 Kafka, F. 96, 109, 113 Kaptchuk, T. 161, 164 Keller, E. 145 Kern, S. 24, 33 Kettenmann, A. 81 Kirkland, R. 170–172 Kleinman, A. 31, 160 Kohn, L. 159–160, 166, 167, 184 Kristeva, J. 75, 165–166 Kuriyama, S. 19, 49–50, 70–71, 92, 159, 164–165 Lefebvre, H. 115 Leopold, A. 3, 173, 177–178 Lévi, J. 159 Levidow, L. & K. Robins 35, 147 Lukacs, G. 18, 157 Lykke, N. 148 Lyotard, J-F. 17–18 Mahler, M. 149–153 Mangan, J. 91 mapping 26 Margulis, L. 149 Marx, K. 17 Mauss, M. 13–16, 165 Mettrie, J. de la 24 Middlebrook, C. 37, 42–44 Mitchell, E. 175–177 monstrous, monstrous-feminine 74–75 Mowaljarlai, D. 188, 190 Mumford, L. 19, 128 Needham, J. 157, 161–162 Neumann, E. 84–85 Nietzsche, F. 2–7, 137 Patton, P. 69 Po-tuan, C. 184–185

Porter, R. 29, 32, 161 power 110–112, 129 quaking zone

3, 58

Rapoport, A. 103–104 Remarque, E. 94 Robinet, I. 158–159, 165 Rossbach, S. 179 Ruskin, J. 59 Salomon, E. von 93–94, 97 Schipper, K. 158–159, 161–163, 165–166 Schvartz, E. 2 Serres, M. 53, 153–156 Sivin, N. 163–164 Skinner, S. 178–179 Sofoulis/Sofia, Z. 82–85, 96 Sontag, S. 41–42, 47–48 Stallybrass, P. & A. White 62, 69 stigma/ta 7–8, 11–13 Stoffwechsel 17 Sturken, M. & L. Cartwright 32–33 sublimation 62, 72 symbiosis 149, 152 Tai chi/taijiquan 157–172 Taoism see also ‘body, Taoist’ 157–161 tattooing 114–115 Theweleit, K. 91, 94, 95, 123 Thompson. E. 128 Thoreau, H. 2–3, 58–60 torture 108 Traditional Chinese Medicine 157–158 Turner, B. 165 Vinci, L. da xi, 20–23 Virilio, P. 90, 128, 132–133 Watts, A. 164, 167 White, A. 57, 67–68 Wiener, N. 140 Williams, T. xii, 50–53 Wong, E. 161–162, 178, 180–181 Zito, A. & T. Barlow

159–160, 165

The Body of Nature and Culture

Landscapes of Culture and Nature

Body Dressing (Dress, Body, Culture)

The Clothed Body (Dress, Body, Culture)

Physical culture, power, and the body

The Recurrent Green Universe of John Fowles (Nature, Culture and Literature 1) (Nature, Culture & Literature)

Customizing the Body: The Art and Culture of Tattooing

Our House: The Representation of Domestic Space in Modern Culture (Nature, Culture and Literature 2) (Nature, Culture & Literature)

The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention

Alternative Femininities: Body, Age and Identity (Dress, Body Culture)

The Culture of the Body: Genealogies of Modernity (The Body, In Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism)

The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention

The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention

The Play of Forms: Nature, Culture and Liturgy

Shakespeare and the Nature of Love: Literature, Culture, Evolution

The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America

Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature

Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture

The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America

The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention

Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture (Race and American Culture)

Body Transformations: Evolutions and Atavisms in Culture

The Nature of Mathematics and the Mathematics of Nature

Nature and Culture: Rebuilding Lost Connections

Refashioning Nature: Food, Ecology and Culture

The Nature of Mathematics and the Mathematics of Nature

Mother Nature: Popular Culture and Environmental Ethics

Nature and Culture: Rebuilding Lost Connections

Race, Nature And Culture: An Anthropological Perspective

Agri-Culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature

The Body of Nature and Culture

Landscapes of Culture and Nature

Body Dressing (Dress, Body, Culture)

The Clothed Body (Dress, Body, Culture)

Physical culture, power, and the body

The Recurrent Green Universe of John Fowles (Nature, Culture and Literature 1) (Nature, Culture & Literature)

Customizing the Body: The Art and Culture of Tattooing

Our House: The Representation of Domestic Space in Modern Culture (Nature, Culture and Literature 2) (Nature, Culture & Literature)

The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention

Alternative Femininities: Body, Age and Identity (Dress, Body Culture)

The Culture of the Body: Genealogies of Modernity (The Body, In Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism)

The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention

The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention

The Play of Forms: Nature, Culture and Liturgy

Shakespeare and the Nature of Love: Literature, Culture, Evolution

The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America

Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature

Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture

The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America

The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention

Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture (Race and American Culture)

Body Transformations: Evolutions and Atavisms in Culture

The Nature of Mathematics and the Mathematics of Nature

Nature and Culture: Rebuilding Lost Connections

Refashioning Nature: Food, Ecology and Culture

The Nature of Mathematics and the Mathematics of Nature

Mother Nature: Popular Culture and Environmental Ethics

Nature and Culture: Rebuilding Lost Connections

Race, Nature And Culture: An Anthropological Perspective

Agri-Culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature

Recommend Documents