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THE
POLITICS OF ABJECTION
The
linguist, philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva,
projects a fascinating
description of the cellular transformations that provide the
very foundations of the biological processes of gestation driving
the 'biosocial history' of the maternal project. A project and a 'history'
Kristeva describes as a 'process without a subject', where the very
meaning of the concept of the 'subject' and 'identity' is brought
into question:
Cells
accumulating, dividing, fusing, splitting, multiplying and proliferating
without
any identity (biological or socio-symbolical); volumes grow,
tissues stretch,
and body fluids change rhythm, speeding up or slowing down. Master-
Mother
of instinctual drive. Material compulsion, spasm of a memory belonging
to
the species, the same continuity differentiating itself that either
binds together or
splits apart to perpetuate itself, with no other significance than
the eternal return
of the life-death biological cycle.
Kristeva appropriates and re-defines Plato's conception
of the chora, designating a site of undifferentiated being,
connoting the shared bodily space of mother and child prior to the
child's acquisition of language; and the child's sensation of continuity
or fusion with the maternal body, which is experienced as an infinite
space. In what Kristeva terms the 'semiotic', the newly-born child
possesses no sense of itself as an identity separate from its mother;
it therefore perceives no distinction between 'self' and 'other'.
Devoid of language, its existence is regulated by a rhythmic flow
of bodily desires, pulsations and bodily drives and impulses, mobile,
fluid and heterogeneous; where opposites (subject and object, male
and female, inside and outside, fascination and repulsion, life and
death) merge together into a contradictory unity: archaic and potentially
disruptive desires which are curtailed only through the arbitrary
imposition of paternal law and the 'symbolic order' of language.
For
Kristeva the maternal function subverts the traditional notion of
a fixed division between active subject and passive object. Instead,
pregnancy transforms the woman-as-subject into the passive object
or effect of a series of uncontrollable bodily processes. The biological
processes of gestation places women at the point where 'nature' intersects
with 'culture', as a sort of 'inside-out' mediator between the internal
and the external, such that the relationship between them is explained
by their reciprocal connection, their unity; a unity of the opposition
of the maternal body to itself which leads to a division of its unity
and to a splitting of its flesh. Where the mother exists as a mere
cipher or "filter" whose role is to fulfill the 'biosocial
program' of reproducing the species; where, "to imagine that there
is someone in that filter - such is the source of religious
mystifications, the font that nourishes them." The childbearing woman
is immersed in the corporeality of the maternal function, the subject
of "physiological operations
and instinctual drives dividing and multiplying her".
As
a process the woman is subjected to, the experience of gestation and
birth leads to a disintegration of the mother's self-image and symbolic
identity and a confusion and subsequent reorganisation of the boundaries
between self and other. This results in the mother internalising the
split between self and other, producing a self-division accompanied
by feelings of alienation and estrangement towards the foetus developing
within her womb, which is experienced as an 'abject' 'other' inhabiting
her body, akin to an invasive foreign organism or internal parasite:
Within the body, growing as a graft, indomitable, there is
an other. And no one
is present, within that simultaneously dual and alien space, to signify
what is
going on. 'It happens but I'm not there'".
An
internal self-contradiction finally resolved in the birth of the child
and the establishment of a maternal unity between mother and child.
A unity Kristeva pictures as an "auto-erotic circle": an imaginary
fusion of mother and child enclosed within a protective 'shell' (or
"enceinte"), where distinctions between self and other, subject and
object, are dissolved: "Narcissuslike, touching without eyes, sight
dissolving in muscles, hair, deep, smooth, peaceful colours". This
imagined unity is, however, a complex unity of opposites, a heterogeneous
and ambivalent conglomeration of experiences involving mixed emotions
associated with the processes of differentiation and separation; feelings
of love and hate, pain and pleasure, desire and fear, fulfillment
and loss: Frozen
placenta, live limb of a skeleton, monstrous graft of life on myself,
a living
dead. Life....death....undecidable....My removed marrow, which nevertheless
acts as a graft, which wounds but increases me. Paradox: deprivation
and
benefit of childbirth. But calm finally hovers over pain, over the
terror of this dried
branch that comes back to life, cut off wounded, deprived of its sparkling
bark.
Kristeva
explores themes that connect with the
psychoanalyst Melanie Klein concerning the aggressive drives and body-destruction
phantasies of children. Thus the developing child acquires an image
of itself as an integrated 'whole', and not simply as a mess of conflicting
sensations and fragmented body parts, through a traumatic and never
fully completed process in which 'good' objects and pleasurable sensations
are incorporated into the body ('introjected'), while objects and
sensations perceived as 'bad' are expelled ('projected') out into
the external world. A process that includes aggressive phantasies
involving the murder, dismemberment and consumption of the maternal
body. Phantasies which, when projected onto the mother, create in
the mind of the infant traumatic experiences of bodily disintegration,
accompanied by the image of a hostile mother as a terrifying figure
who will eviscerate, devour and destroy it.
There
is an interesting link between these psychoanalytical theories of
bodily fragmentation and disintegration and historically archaic beliefs
concerning the deformed and the monstrous. According to the ancient
Greek natural philosopher and physician Empedokles, the evolution
of "whole-natured forms" was preceded by a lengthy period when the
earth was peopled by hybrids and mutant forms, "dream shapes" consisting
of "separate parts which were disjointed". Empedokles describes this
earlier world and its variety of polymorphously perverse forms and
monstrous combinations with a certain horrified fascination:
Many
foreheads without necks sprang up on the earth, arms wandered naked,
separated
from shoulders, and eyes wandered alone, needing brows..........and
creatures
made partly with male bodies and partly with female bodies, equipped
with
shadowy limbs.
In
paintings such as Virgin and Child with St. Anne, (1500-1510),
and Mona Lisa, (1503), the artist Leonardo Da Vinci
represents for Kristeva the identification of femininity with motherhood
and the ideal of the Virgin, where the female body is divested of
its material aspects and is transmuted through the development of
a progressively formalised set of artistic conventions and practices
into the spiritualised and reified figure of the 'phallic mother'.
The maternal (phallic body) is represented as inviolate, distinct
and whole, symbolising an established order that maintains secure
and impervious boundaries separating and distinguishing the inside
from the outside, the proper from the improper, order from chaos,
and the spiritually aesthetic or beautiful from what is deemed abject
and material.
For
Kristeva this fantasy of the phallic mother consists of an idealisation
that shields us from the threat of non-being, and the experience of
nothingness and the collapse of identity: "If, on the contrary, the
mother was not phallic, then every speaker (or 'subject') would be
lead to conceive of its Being in relation to some void, a nothingness
asymmetrically opposed to this Being, a permanent threat against,
first, its mastery, and ultimately, its stability". Kristeva thereby
concludes that the artist Leonardo Da Vinci is a dutiful "servant
of the maternal phallus", and his paintings are expressive of "the eye and hand of a child, underage to be sure, but of one
who is the universal and complex-ridden center confronting that other
function, which carries the appropriation of objects to its limit:
science ".
Kristeva
challenges the Cartesian notion of the isolated, self-contained human
being or 'ego', unmixed with others. She replaces it by the awareness
that we exist as members one of another, as a system of surfaces that
briefly intersect around a centre or constellation that dissolves,
forming parts of a 'self' conceived as a 'subject-in-process' (or
better still, as an open-ended 'work-in-progress'); a 'subject' both
constant and fluid, immersed in a continuous process of formation
and exchange, summation and integration.
This
accords with Antonin Artaud's rigorous interrogation of the fragmented
but transforming body, in art, literature and performance –
combining chance and necessity, disintegration and reconstitution.
Artaud's body-in movement attacks stasis in favour of the transcendence
of regeneration. Painfully contorted, steeped in desire, combining,
through vocal movements and screams, violent and erotic manipulations
of the anatomy, Artaud produced in his gestural performances beautiful
images of fracture and desire. Representation is here attacked in
favour of a visceral, bodily immediacy – Artaud's Theatre of
Cruelty. The body comes before the word, and before the world:
..........
In-between
these two realms is Plato's 'Demiurgus' who creates by 'making'. A
metaphor for cosmogenesis taken from the activities of the artisan,
who shapes things from dead stuff, and not from the reproductive processes
of begetting and gestating. This concept of the cosmos as 'made' and
not 'begotten' later emerges in Christian theology as the primary
means of distinguishing between the generation of the divine in the
Trinity, and God's creation of the world. The Platonic Demiurgos first
shapes the space into the primal elements of fire, air, water, and
earth, and then shapes these into the spherical body of the cosmos.
Plato
conceptualises this sphere as a kind of living entity, without an
inside or an outside, perfectly self-contained: "Nor would there have
been use of organs by which it might receive its food or get rid of
what it had already digested, since there was nothing that went from
it or came into it". A universe, therefore, where organs of ingestion,
digestion and excretion are unnecessary, for there is nothing else
in existence, no 'other' to incorporate or excrete, nothing outside
itself it could eat even if it desired to eat, in fact, nothing it
could desire even if it desired. A perfectly self-sufficient universe
complete unto itself: "By design it was created thus, its own waste
providing its own food, and all that it did and suffered taking place
in and by itself".
Plato's
idea of the universe as some kind of living entity, is a theme taken
up by the nature philosophy of Baron Friedrich von Hardenberg (pen
name, Novalis), a leading poet and novelist of European Romanticism,
who contends that when we look at what is generally regarded as inert
matter we fall into the error that it has no consciousness at all.
But it may well be that its consciousness is so fragmented and diffused
that we can only understand it through rational systems of statistical
organisation which the study of science as hitherto revealed as the
so-called 'laws' of nature. This means that in the human knowledge
of nature, nature perceives itself; and that the subject-object (male/female)
relationship to nature is in fact nature's relationship to itself.
A complex relationship indeed, where, to quote Novalis, "the organs
of thought are the sexual organs of nature, the world's genitals".
A conception of nature that the inveterate anti-Platonist Friedrich
Nietzsche reacted to with disgust and revulsion: "The modern scientific
pendant to a belief in God is the belief in the universe as organism:
such belief makes me want to throw up".
Novalis
continues: for him the process of self-knowledge is a natural and
universal drive towards expansion and fulfillment, where the urge
to know is identical with the urge to appropriate and ingest, where
differences and distinctions are abolished, and the 'other' becomes
the same as 'oneself': "How can a human being have a sensibility for
something if he does not have the germ of it in himself? What I am
to understand must develop organically in me; and what I seem to learn
is but nourishment - something to incite the organism. Thus learning
is quite similar to eating".
For
Novalis the act of philosophising culminates in the 'kiss', an act
symbolising the unity of subject and object. "Life, or the essence
of spirit, thus consists in the engendering bearing and rearing of
one's like. The human being engages in a happy marriage with itself,
an act of self-embrace". Like the myth of the youth Narcissus, hopelessly
in love and unwilling to separate himself from the beauty of his face
reflected in a pool of water, his body gradually fading away, to be
replaced by a flower. A jouissance involving a blissful acceptance
of life's transience, and a willing immersion into the chaos of unformed
matter into one all-encompassing unity. Leading to a pantheism like
that of the heretic and philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who rejects the
philosophical dualism and the principles of transcendence and sublimation
of the established Christian order in favour of a God who is the immanent
cause of all existence, where everything is considered alive and all
things in the world are one, and what's in all things is God. A mystical
and pantheistic view of Nature, an oceanic feeling of 'oneness with
the universe', which, according to Freud, amounts to the restoration
of an archaic infantile state of limitless narcissism, a condition
articulated poetically by the philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who describes
the world as "an immense Narcissus in the act of thinking about himself.".
In
accordance with Kristeva's re-mix of themes and stanzas sampled from
the Romanticism of Novalis, 'love', or the desire that is expressed
in song, in the disposition to rhythm and intonation
"makes individualities communicable and comprehensible"; makes
nonsense abound with sense: makes (one) laugh. For Kristeva "The amorous
and artistic experiences are the only ways of preserving our psychic
space as a 'living system'" 'opening' up the individual's psyche to the point where the
outside world of the other is no longer perceived as a threat but
instead becomes a stimulus to adaptation, change and self-transformation,
revealing the participating 'subject' as "a work in progress capable
of auto-organisation on condition of maintaining a kind of link with
the other. I have called this the amorous state".
To
rediscover the intonations, the lyrical patterns, repetitions, and
rhythms preceding the subject's establishment within the paternal
(symbolic) order of language is to discover the voiced breath that
fastens us to an undifferentiated mother, a semiotic motility, a playful
polyvalence, released and restructured in the poetry of art. The discovery-in-utterance
is also at the same time an act of losing, of distancing, of separating
oneself from what has been discovered; it is an act of unknowing,
a dissolution back into an active potential. The potentiality of the
fragmented unity of the symbolic revitalised by energies borrowed
from the prehistoric and archaic realms of the semiotic; a disruptive
negativity involving a dialectical tension between dispersal and unity,
rupture and completion, producing a 'fluid subjectivity. A 'subjectivity'
of 'difference' where continuity is achieved
through an ongoing process
of transformation.
Accordingly,
it is not the possession of a fixed 'truth' so much as the realisation
of the 'known' so that it becomes the 'given', thereby not arresting
reflection, but renewing and stimulating it. Novalis compares it to
the ignition of a flame, a leaping outside oneself in desire and ecstasy:
"The act of leaping outside oneself is everywhere the supreme act
- the primal point - the genesis of life. Thus the flame is nothing
other than such an act. Philosophy arises whenever the one philosophizing
philosophizes himself, that is, simultaneously consumes (determines,
necessitates) and renews again (does not determine, liberates). The
history of this process is philosophy".
According
to Kristeva, we attempt to prevent the disruption and destabilisation
of the socially determined and 'ideological' belief that we exist
as unchanging subjects with fixed identities within an organised and
static social order, by denying and excluding as unclean and disgusting
anything that reminds us of our (material) corporeal natures. This
dual process of denial (repression) and exclusion (projection) is,
however, only ever partially successful. The presignifying traces
of the chora: the maternal, corporeal desires that underlie
the socio-symbolic order of signification, are forever irrupting as
emotional affects, permanently threatening to destabilise the finite
unity and autonomous, fixed, and singular identity of the 'ego' or
'subject'.
For
Kristeva the whole affair revolves around the establishment of a series
of demarcations and dichotomies between an "inside-outside", a "me-not
me", and a "'not-yet me' with an 'object'". A theme initially explored
by the Kleinian school of psychoanalysis:
Owing
to these mechanisms (of introjection and projection) the infant's
object can
be defined as what is inside or outside his own body, but even while
outside, it
is still part of himself, since 'outside' results from being ejected,
'spat out': thus the
body boundaries are blurred. This might also be put the other way
round: because
the object outside the body is 'spat out', and still relates to the
infant's body,
there is no sharp distinction between his body and what is outside.
This
brings into question the whole Cartesian 'inside' and 'outside' dichotomy.
The cohesion and unity of the 'subject' or 'ego' is based upon its
ability to distinguish itself from those objects that lie outside
it. The ego's relationship to the outside world is explained by psychoanalysis
through the processes of 'projection' and 'introjection'; processes that create the
distinction between the internality of the 'ego' or 'subject' and
the 'externality' of 'objects' residing in the world 'outside'. For
both introjection and projection are mutually interdependent, one
upon the other, both inside and outside each other at the same time;
thus the inside is also on the outside, while the outside is both
inside and outside too. The ego wants to 'introject', to bring 'inside'
only that part of the external world with which it can identify. However,
this very identification of the subject with these external objects
puts the absolute externality of these objects in doubt. The question
therefore arises: is it a part of the outside world that the subject
wishes to introject, or is it merely a part of the subject itself;
a part, moreover, which has to be 'projected' and externalised into
the world 'outside' before it can be introjected 'inside'? A question
(and a potential antagonism) first expressed in the language of the
"oldest" instinctual drives - the oral - through the contrast between
incorporation (eating) and expulsion.
Accordingly
the 'ego' introjects and incorporates into itself everything that
is 'good', and ejects from itself everything that is 'bad'. The boundary
between subject (ego) and object (external world) is, however, somewhat
paradoxical: the 'outside' is forged and maintained at the heart of
the 'inside', and is kept 'outside' by the very living organism from
which it is supposed to be separated. The limits of the ego's boundaries
thus resembles a form similar to that of the mouth. Like the mouth
(which is also a point of incorporation
or 'taking in'), the ego's 'boundary' is not just a system of surfaces
that divides inside from outside; it is also and equally a meeting
of surfaces, a permeable interface, amounting to a blurring of boundaries.
For
Kristeva, therefore, the mouth is both a place of entry and exit,
one of the body's orifices that connects inside with outside, forming
a vulnerable corporeal boundary or threshold that can easily be trespassed.
The mouth can eat, kiss, suck, emit sounds, and produce language.
In addition, cultures and religions elaborate complex taboos concerning
food designated as 'unclean', setting the boundaries between what
may or may not be legitimately consumed. According to Kristeva, "food
is the oral object (the abject) that sets up archaic relationships
between the human being and its other, its mother who wields a power
as vital as it is fierce". A complex borderline between self and other,
initially permeable, like the embryo in the womb, and, after birth,
as the infant sustained by milk from its mother's breasts. However,
in the process of accepting the gift of milk, we confront the realisation
that we exist as the separate objects of our mother's desire. The
infant's refusal to separate is expressed as physical nausea. This
sensation of nausea not only exposes the complex relationship of sameness
and difference between our mothers and ourselves, but also reveals
the threat posed by the maternal space as the final collapse of distinctions
between subject and object; the loss of identity and of an integrated
sense of 'self ' which the contained body represents; and a slippage
between opposites, suggesting an indivisibility of erotic attraction
and repulsion which are held apart within the conventional binary
division of sexual difference.
Like
an hermaphrodite who combines the two sexes in one body (in accordance
with Artaud's biography of the third-century transgendered Roman Emperor,
Heliogabalus) a potential bisexuality of desires in which self and
other cannot be fully separated. For Kristeva, "To believe that one
'is a woman' is almost as absurd and obscurantist as to believe that
one 'is a man'". It is not the sexual difference between subjects
that is important, so much as the sexual differentiation within each
subject. The bisexual constitution of the child, the presence of masculinity
and femininity within the same body, informs her view. The anorexic's
refusal to eat can be explained as a desperate attempt to maintain
the boundaries separating subject and object, reminding us of the
bone beneath the skin, our mortality, and the materiality that necessitates
our decay, while simultaneously expressing the attempt of an irrevocably
divided subject to become united with itself; where the wholeness
and integrity of the human body and of the unitary 'subject' is equated
with holiness, and connected to the being and goodness of God - the
Ideal: "To be holy is to be whole, to be one; holiness is unity, integrity,
perfection of the individual. Dietary rules and prohibitions merely
develop the metaphor of holiness".
Eating
dissolves the boundaries separating the self from the world, a process
described by the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, in his
meditation on the mystery of the Eucharist: "Yet the love made objective,
this subjective element becomes a thing, and only reverts once
more to its nature, becoming subjective again in eating". Hegel describes
his philosophy as "a circle returning upon itself, the end being wound
into the beginning, a circle of circles", culminating in "the crowning
glory of a spiritual world", the Absolute Idea, where spirit is reality
and reality is spiritual. For Hegel the identification of the object
with itself can be thought of as a unity of the opposition of the
object to itself up to and including identity which leads to a splitting
of its unity.
This
dialectical notion of the self-motion of the object takes the form
of an impulse, a vital tension, or, to borrow a term used by the medieval
mystic Jakob Bohme, a 'qual' of matter. 'Qual' meaning an internalised
pain or torture, an agony issuing from within; a quality Bohme considers
as intrinsic to all material substance, which drives to action of
some kind; an activating principle, arising from, and promoting in
its turn, the self-movement and spontaneous development of a thing,
in contradistinction to the development or movement of a thing derived
from a pain or pressure inflicted from without. This dialectical notion
of the self-motion of the object includes an identity of the object
with itself such that the object is and is not, at one and the same
time, and in one and the same relation, in one and the same state,
which leads ultimately, by virtue of the internal dynamic of its 'qual'
or agony, to its transformation into another object. The contradictoriness
of this self-transformation of the self-moving object is logically
overcome by admitting of the possibility of relating the self-moving
object with itself as with 'its other', which appears as the identity
of equal quantities, but of opposite sign.
For
Julia Kristeva an androgyny or bisexuality seen as the traversing
or transgression of boundaries, where the 'subject' no longer experiences
sexual difference in 'essentialist' terms as a fixed opposition between
'man' and 'woman', but as a liberating process of sexual differentiation
amounting to a perpetual alternation and confusion of 'subject-positions',
eluding the totalising grasp, or the Aufhebung of the philosopher
Hegel, which expresses his desire for a final resolution or synthesis
of the opposed terms; where spirit unites with nature and indeed becomes
its master because nature turns out to belong to spirit, to be nothing
other than spirit, where, as Hegel writes, "nature is the bride which
spirit marries". A reunion of opposites essentially identical, just
like the marriage of Adam and Eve.
By
rejecting the invasion of the body by external matter, and avoiding
the consumption of food as an external 'pollutant', the anorexic -
like a true philosophical idealist! - aspires to escape from the confused,
mutable and brutish world of materiality towards a stabilised unity
of identity, the Good and the Perfect, the Absolute Idea or Universal
Subject, which is God: disembodied thought thinking itself. For the
anorexic, therefore, "The ultimate self-abjective wish becomes the
desire to completely eliminate 'flesh', to become 'pure'".
As
an alternative to the transcendental ego of the Hegelian spirit, Kristeva
opts for a disordered and lyrical 'subject-in-process'. This amounts
to a dislocation of historical syntax such that history is experienced
not as a narrative progression and sequential unfolding of a
story-line or 'plot', in accordance with Hegelian notions of
'historical development' and inevitable 'progression' towards some
climactic conclusion or final synthesis, but is instead pictured as
a rhythmic drive that disrupts, opposes and threatens meaning and
social order. A drive that destabilises the fixity and allocated subject-positions
of the speaking 'I' or unitary 'subject', towards a more primitive
and dynamic aggregation of pleasurable and erotic bodily sensations.
A process of perpetual negation involving continual irruptions of
powerful semiotic pulsations and drives, with the potential to break
up the inertia and calcified
rigidities (character armour) of routine behaviour patterns and the
sclerotic deposits (cliches) of language habits, thus presenting a
threat to such fixed signs of the symbolic order as paternal authority,
the state, the family, private property, and propriety.
The
polymorphously perverse desires and pulsating drives of the semiotic
body are revealed in rhythmic flows, intonations, repetitions, and
psychotic babble; where distinctions between reality and fantasy,
male and female, 'self' and 'other', the psychological and the somatic,
the 'subject' and the processes of history, are mixed and
juxtaposed; like a poetic text where rupture and discontinuity
predominate, and fragmentation replaces cohesion. A condition resolving
itself in an 'impossible dialectic': a transgression and dissolution
of boundaries; a hybridity and an androgyny, simultaneously enacting
socially prohibited impulses while demanding their 'symbolic' repression,
containment, ordered articulation and enunciation, in the organised
form of a speaking 'subject'. A process culminating in the necessary
curtailment and organised 'symbolic' articulation, codification and
recuperation of an ambivalent and provisional 'unity' of opposed desires:
"(appropriation/rejection, orality/anality, love/hate, life/death)".
A condition described by Kristeva in the following terms: "She was
a man; she was a woman.......It was a most bewildering and whirligig
state to be in".
The
'abject' is a term employed by Kristeva to refer to a class of unspeakable
phenomena excluded from our sense of social order,
something that "disturbs identities, systems, orders. Something that
doesn't respect limits, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous,
the mixed". The 'abject' also includes whatever reminds us of our
material natures, threatening to disrupt the notion of ourselves as
individual subjects, with secure borders and an unchanging essence
or inner 'core' of identity, unified and in command of ourselves and
our environment. For Kristeva abjection is a complex mixture of yearning
and condemnation, the proper and the improper, order and chaos, preserving
"what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the
immemorial violence with which the body becomes separated from another
body in order to be".
Human
beings therefore repress that which reminds them of their corporeality
by categorising it as unclean and disgusting. This attempt at exclusion
can only ever be partially successful. At moments when we are forced
to recognise this, the reaction is one of extreme repulsion - what
Kristeva calls an 'act of abjection'. Dirt, disorder and formlessness
pose a threat to the body and its boundaries, in the form of a vital
distinction between the inside of the body and its outside, the self
from the space of the other. In other words, the fixing of limits
and boundaries is bound up with the construction of the individual
subject as a unified self, with a central 'core' of identity unique
to each individual. Conceptualised as wanton materiality, the female
body is perceived as a potential threat to this order, lacking containment
and issuing filth and corruption from permeable boundaries, porous
surfaces and indefinite outlines:
Any
structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins. We should expect
the orifices of
the body to symbolise its specially vulnerable points. Matter issuing
from them is
marginal stuff of the most obvious kind. Spittle, blood, milk, urine,
faeces or tears
by simply issuing forth have traversed the boundary of the body.
In
addition, Kristeva describes the abject as possessing the qualities
of Otherness, and the ambivalence of horror and desire. The abject
is a polluting agent, defined against the boundaries it threatens.
Excluded as unclean and improper from the logical and social order
of the 'symbolic', its psychic structure can be traced, according
to Kristeva, to a primary narcissism ; a narcissism laden with an
hostility without limits, where the instincts of life and death merge
together into a "violence of mourning for an 'object' that has always
already been lost".
The
lost object is the mother, and the unfulfilled desire for her is laden
with unacceptable wishes of forbidden (polymorphously perverse) pleasures
and drives (love/hate, life/death) that need to be sublimated. Like
a taboo it is born out of primal repression which designates and excludes
the mother's body as the non-object (or 'abject-object') of desire.
According to Kristeva, this primal repression, which is pre-verbal
(unspeakable), is displaced through a process of denial onto another
object, a metaphor, through signification, symbolisation and sublimation
(including fetishism and phobia). Thus the psychic and social mechanisms
of displacing the abject are a transformation of the impossible object
into a fantasy of desire, where the unspeakable is uttered through
rhythm and song and the sublimation of artistic reproduction.
According
to Kristeva "the existence of psychoanalysis reveals the permanence,
the ineluctability of crisis" of
"The speaking being (who) is a wounded being, with its discourse
dumb from the disorder of love, and the 'death drive' (Freud) coextensive
with humanity". In Beyond The Pleasure Principle, Sigmund Freud
describes the death drive as "the most universal endeavour of all
living substance - namely to return to the quiescence of the inorganic
world". Like a river winding its way back to the sea, life is but
a series of "complicated detours" or "circuitous paths to death".
Freud's illustrations of this drive include the "momentary extinction"
of orgasm, and a story of origins derived from "the poet-philosopher"
Plato: "the hypothesis that living substance at the time of its coming
to life was torn apart into small particles, which have ever since
endeavoured to reunite through the sexual instincts".
The
speculations of Freud on the nature of living substance at the time
of its coming into being bears a resemblance to the theories of the
biochemist Lynn Margulis on the origin of nucleated cells. According
to Margulis, for millions of years before cells with nuclei appeared,
living prokaryotes (cells without nuclei) dominated the Earth. Margulis
contends that nucleated cells originated when non-nucleated bacteria
devoured one another. Some of the bacteria that were eaten were not
digested or destroyed, but somehow managed to survive and adapt to
live inside their host predator cells as symbiotic organelles: little
organs. Cells within cells utterly interdependent (endosymbiotic),
forming stable, compound organisms - new wholes far greater than the
sum of their parts. These compound organisms gradually evolved into
fully fledged eukaryotes - living cells that possess a central nucleus
suspended in cytoplasm: the whole wrapped in a cell wall, like the
yolk of an egg surrounded by a protein sac, safely enveloped within
a protective shell (an 'enceinte'). For Margulis, multicellular organisms
such as ourselves are coordinated collective composites or colonies
of cells, and each individual cell is likewise a composite of cooperating
micro-organisms.
Margulis'
theories intersect with Freud's own speculations about the history
of living substance, with the added twist that for Freud this substance
was originally a unity that has somehow been torn apart and is forever
striving towards regaining this long lost unity in the form of an
ever more complex "combination of the particles into which living
substance is dispersed". Freud marvels at the seemingly insurmountable
difficulties encountered by these early unicellular organisms - "splintered
fragments of living substance" - in their first attempts at reuniting
as multicellular entities, and the necessity "which compelled them
to form a protective cortical layer.......by an environment charged
with dangerous stimuli". For Freud it would appear that the colonies
of cells that make up the multicellular organism collectively constitute
a defence mechanism against a hostile external environment.
Then
there is Freud's equation of life and death, the animate and the inanimate:
"the hypothesis of a death instinct, the task of which is to lead
organic life back into the inanimate state". Perhaps this final state
of entropic dissolution and restful oblivion is a return to the unity
originally lost. Freud's answer to the question of life's purpose
and direction appears endlessly circular, a ceaseless ebb and flow
- "But here, I think, the moment has come for breaking off". For
Artaud the term 'cruelty' encapsulates the tight rapport between life
and death:
Above all, cruelty is lucid, it is a kind of rigid direction,
submission to
necessity. No cruelty without consciousness, without a kind
of applied
consciousness. It is consciousness which gives to the exercise
of every action
in life its colour of
blood, its cruel touch, since it must be understood that to
live is always through the death of someone else.
The
process "which makes mammiferous larvae into human children, masculine
or feminine subjects" begins with the body of the newly-born
infant, which is a seething mass of excitations, impulses and instinctual
drives; a disorganised bundle of parts and sensations (the body 'in
bits and pieces'), completely lacking in any sense of itself as a
coherent, unified entity. Freud terms this the 'primary narcissistic'
or 'polymorphously perverse' stage of infantile development: a stage
with no sense of 'self', centring or organisation, where the desiring
sensations ('libido') are diffused throughout the entire body, internally
and upon the skin's surface. A strange blend of self-sufficiency on
the one hand, mobility and dispersion on the other.
Gradually
the infant begins to view itself as a coherent, unified being, distinct
from its mother and its environment. This awareness of the difference
between the self and the rest of the world is the foundation upon
which the infant begins to acquire language. Language provides the
infant with a means of articulating reality in a way that seems to
realise its struggle for reintegration as a coherent subject. For
Kristeva, however, both the infant's and adult's idealised representation
of themselves as autonomous, whole beings is an illusion. The 'self'
or 'ego' is 'in reality' fragmented and disjointed; and the sense
of completeness, wholeness, and oneness characteristic of the imaginary,
ideal self which we identify with and seek, exists as an unattainable
fiction.
For
Kristeva cultural production is implicated in an ideological process
of constituting undivided subjects - in conformity with the controlling
ego of traditional Western philosophy (a view enunciated by the philosopher
Rene Descartes, who declares: '(I) think therefore (I) am'). The fractured,
multifaceted, fragmentary and contradictory nature of the self is
denied, and anything that threatens the illusory integrity of the
ego and its borders is ruthlessly excluded as 'abject'. The classic
realist text or painting plays its part in constituting the subject
by inscribing the viewer or reader within the work itself, providing
a place for the viewer or reader to occupy if 'he' or 'she' is to
enter this ideal fiction of an integrated subject, and be entertained,
basking in the illusion of possessing secure boundaries and a stable,
fixed 'subject-position' (and sense of 'self').
If
the classic realist text provides the reader with the illusion of
stable boundaries and a fixed subjectivity and identity, for Kristeva
the 'revolutionary' ('avant-garde') art of the late nineteenth and
twentieth centuries exploited the semiotic dimension of what Kristeva
calls the signifying process. Mallarme, Joyce, and Artaud have shaken
the existing configuration of the symbolic and given rise, in Kristeva's
interpretation, to a theory of the subject in process: a subject equally
constituted by symbolic and semiotic elements. The resulting subject
exists as a rhythmic reverberation in the symbolic, a reverberation
that connotes both union with, and separation from, the mother. According
to Kristeva:
Artaud
interrogated the established institutions in order to have done with
language
and the unity of consciousness. He set up this tug of war with possibility,
where
on the one hand there was the possibility of speaking to people who
came to hear
him or of writing books, and on the other hand there was the experience
of non-sense,
for example in the texts composed of glossololalia which mean nothing
and are totally
explosive, which are no longer language but pure drive. So it was
this kind of
balancing act that he was trying to sustain with regard to values
– whilst exposing
himself in an immense rage against others and himself – that
I was examining and
was attempting to go along with.
The
notion of the infant's body as fragmented and fluid (the body 'in
bits and pieces') corresponds to the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's
'pre-mirror' stage. For Lacan, the newly-born infant is not yet a
complete human being: physiologically the nervous system is not yet
fully formed, and socially language is still to be acquired. The infant
is unable to differentiate itself from its mother or its surrounding
environment. A condition described by Freud as resolving itself through
a process whereby the child's disorganised desiring sensations gradually
coalesce and become focussed on the mouth as the first in a developmental
succession of organs of pleasure ('erogenous zones'). For it is through
the mouth that the child makes contact with the principle object of
desire - the mother's breast.
To
the newly-born infant, the outer world with its infinite stimuli is
chaotic, a chaos from which the sensations from its own body are a
part. Ego and outer world, self and other, are experienced as a unity.
All that is pleasurable belongs to an expanded ego, "which absorbs
into identity with itself the sources of its pleasure, its world,
its mother" With time, this changes. Sensations belonging to the outer
world are recognised as internal to the body, while parts of the outer
world which are pleasurable, such as the maternal nipple, are recognised
as belonging to the world outside. In this way, a unified ego gradually
crystallises from the primordial chaos of internal and external perceptions,
and establishes boundaries separating itself from an outside reality.
The ego thus becomes "a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive (oceanic)
feeling - a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable
connection of the ego with the external world".
Freud's
pre-Oedipal stage of the self-absorbed, narcissistic infant and Lacan's
notion of the 'pre-mirror' stage share in common an understanding
of the similarity between the infant's and the adult schizophrenic's
manner of experiencing the world. Both experience a harmony without
any boundary between ego ('self' or 'subject') and the outer world
of 'external' 'objects'.
The
onset of Jacques Lacan's 'mirror stage' marks the illusory and complex
development of a separate ego formed as part of a narcissistic relationship
between self and other, and the division of an androgynous whole into
two symmetrical male and female images; torn halves that gaze longingly
at each other across an abyss of difference that both joins and separates.
Lacan uses the term 'imaginary' to denote the way in which the subject
is seduced by this image of otherness (initially the mirror reflection
of the body) and takes this image as a representation of the 'self'.
In the mirror stage, the human being attempts to coordinate an amalgam
of sensory and motor reflexes and responses via the establishment
of a fixed and rigid 'Ideal-I', consisting of an imaginary, ideal
image with which he or she will never coincide, and an 'I' that can
never be realised. This ideal domain of the self-contained ego belongs
to the symbolic order of language, of the Name-of-the-Father, of castration
and the unconscious (an internalised authority Lacan describes as
the 'ideal incubus').
Lacan
contends that at the heart of the ego lies a complete void: "The ego
is constructed like an onion, one could peel it, and discover the
successive identifications which have constituted it". An inexhaustible
search comparable to the endless labour of 'laying bare', 'extracting'
and 'refining', involved in the process of revealing that seemingly
elusive 'rational kernel' concealed somewhere beneath the superimposed
skins - "of a certain crust which is more or less thick (think of
a fruit, an onion, or even an artichoke)" - constituting the external, 'mystical shell' of Hegel's philosophy
of the Absolute Idea. Referring to Hegel's system, Lacan concludes:
"when one is made into two, there is no going back on it. It can never
revert to making one again, not even a new one. The Aufhebung
(sublation) is one of those sweet dreams of philosophy".
Freud
discusses the formation of a bounded sense of self, of the 'ego',
and the separation of the ego (subject) from the external world (object)
as a process whereby:
objects
presenting themselves, in so far as they are sources of pleasure,
are absorbed by the ego into itself,
'introjected'...........while, on the other hand the
ego thrusts forth upon the external world whatever within itself gives
rise to
pain (the mechanism of projection).
According
to Lacan, prior to the onset of the 'mirror stage', the child is completely
devoid of any sense of itself as a 'unity', and lacks a fixed sense
of itself as possessing a coherent 'identity' separate from whatever
is 'other' or external to it. A transformation takes place however
with the arrival of the mirror stage, when the child, like the legendary
Narcissus, falls in love with the reflected image of itself, and identifies
with this illusory 'other' as an ideal image of wholeness and 'subjecthood'.
Lacan describes the mirror stage as the ineluctable unfolding of a
drama:
The
mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated
from insufficiency
to anticipation - which manufactures for the subject, caught up in
the
lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that
extends from a
fragmented
body-image, manifested in dreams as the individual's aggressive disintegration,
in the form of disjointed limbs, or of those organs represented in
exoscopy, growing wings and taking up arms for intestinal persecutions
- the very
same that the visionary Hieronymous Bosch has fixed, for all
time, in painting, in
their ascent from the fifteenth century to the imaginary zenith
of modern man.
A
drama that commences with the infant's emergence from an undifferentiated
state of insufficiency (a body in bits and pieces) into an orthopedic
'form' which is then 'finalised' in the fixed position of a unitary
'subject' in conjunction with the formation of a protective armour:
the isolating "armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with
its rigid structure the subject's entire mental development". The
armour of an alienating identity that compares with the carapaces
of insects and the rigid, undifferentiated, automatic (and 'unfeeling')
nature of their stimulus and response motor reactions towards the
pressure of instinctual drives triggered by external events. For example,
the 'ichneumonid wasp' (a group of several hundred related species
of wasps) seeks out and encounters either a cricket or a caterpillar,
paralyses the 'host' insect with its sting, and then inserts its eggs
into the host's body. When the larvae hatch they eat the living, paralysed
body of the host from the inside out -
carefully avoiding the vital organs in order to extend the
life (and agony) of the host for as long as possible lest its body
decay prematurely, spoiling the meat .The entomologist William Kirby
esteems the ichneumonid wasp most highly for its judicious husbanding
of its economic resources:
In this strange and apparently cruel operation one circumstance
is truly
remarkable. The larva of the Ichneumon, though every day, perhaps
for
months, it gnaws the inside of the caterpillar, and though
at last it has
devoured almost every part of it except the skin and intestines,
carefully
all this time it avoids injuring the vital organs, as if aware
that its own
existence depends on that of the insect upon which it preys!
With
equal respect, the entomologist J. M. Fabre describes with horrified
fascination and in meticulous detail how the lava of the Ichneumon
dictate the movements of its cricket host:
One may see the cricket, bitten to the quick, vainly move its
antennae and
abdominal styles, open and close its empty jaws, and even move
a foot, but
the lava is safe and searches its vitals with impunity. What
an awful
nightmare for the paralyzed cricket!
The
ability and the calculated precision of the Ichneumon is not acquired
through practice - it is an inflexible 'instinctual' response to external
stimuli, a biological quality inherent in the wasp. As a matter of
fact we know that the outstanding difference between human beings
and their fellow animals consists in the infantile morphological characteristics
of human beings, in the prolongation of their infancy. This prolonged
infancy allows for a certain plasticity whereby the rigid motor responses
of instinctual behaviour are superseded by the transmission of culture
and the capacity to 'learn', adapt to and modify the external environment.
This explains the traumatic character of sexual experiences not shared
by our animal brethren and the existence of the Oedipus Complex itself
which is a conflict between the instinctual drives of the Id and the
demands of cultural adaptation, expressed as an internalised conflict
between archaic and recent love objects. Finally the defence mechanisms
themselves owe their existence to the fact that the human 'Ego' is
even more retarded than the instinctual 'Id' and hence the immature
'Self' or 'Ego' evolves defence mechanisms as a protection against
libidinal quantities which it is not prepared to deal with:
In man, however, this relation to nature is altered by a certain
de-hiscence
at the heart of the organism, a primordial Discord betrayed
by the signs of
uneasiness and motor unco-ordination of the neo-natal months.
The
objective notion of the anatomical incompleteness of the pyramidal
system and
likewise the presence of certain humoral residues of the maternal
organism confirm the view I have formulated as the fact of
a real specific
prematurity of birth in man.
It is worth noting, incidentally, that this is a fact recognized
as such by
embryologists, by the term foetalization, which determines
the prevalence
of the so-called superior apparatus of the neurax, and especially
of the
cortex, which psycho-surgical operations lead us to regard
as the intra-
organic mirror.
The theory of retardation is also put forward from another point of view by Robert Briffault:
It
has been seen that the power of nutrition and of reproduction decrease
in the cell in proportion to the degree of fixation of its
reactions, that is, in
proportion to its differentiation and specialization.....The
higher the degree
of specialized organization and differentiation which the cells
of the
developing being have to attain, the slower the rate of growth.
Hence it is
that the higher we proceed in the scale of mammalian evolution,
the longer
is the time devoted to gestation.
Even more important is the fact that, although the time of
gestation is
thus lengthened, the rate of individual development becomes
slower as
we rise in the scale of organization and the young are brought
into the
world in a condition of greater immaturity. Infantile
or fetal characteristics which are temporary in other animals therefore
seem to have become stabilised in the human species. In Race, Sex
and Environment, Marett makes bold as to speculate that the causes
of human retardation can be traced back through psychology and the
endocrine system to minerals available in the soil. According to Marett,
"Lack of any structural material would seem in the long run likely
also to result in a slow rate of growth". "Lime deficiency is thus
thought to encourage femininity, and iodine shortage to favour fetalization.
Yet since many of the aspects of youth and femininity are similar,
it will not be easy to distinguish between the two possible causes
of a similar state". Regardless of the validity of these conjectures,
fetalisation or paedomorphosis are generally acknowledged
as one of the processes whereby human characteristics have emerged
in evolution. The
structural anthropology of Claude
Levi-Strauss focuses on the analysis of the 'synchronic' structures
characteristic of 'cold' or 'primitive' societies designated as timeless
and static, and permanently stabilised in the reproduction of one
and the same cycle. In contrast, the 'diachronic' sequences of 'hot'
or 'advanced' societies considered as evolving 'in history', involving
processes of movement and change, seem to elude the grasp of Levi-Strauss'
structural analysis. It appears that events already frozen in the
historical past survive in our consciousness only as myth, for it
is an intrinsic characteristic of myth (as it is also of Levi Strauss' system of structural analysis)
that the chronological ('diachronic') sequence of events is irrelevant.
The analysis of structures is strictly designed to determine how relations
which exist in Nature (and are apprehended as such by human brains)
are used to generate cultural products which incorporate these same
relations. Against the philosophical 'idealists' who contend that
Nature has no existence other than its apprehension by human minds,
Levi-Strauss' approach is 'materialist': Nature is for him a genuine
reality 'out there'. A Nature governed by natural laws which are accessible,
at least in part, to human scientific investigation. But our capacity
to apprehend the nature of Nature is severely restricted by the nature
of the apparatus (the human brain) through which we do the apprehending.
The structural analysis of 'primitive' myth, by carefully examining
the classifications and resulting categories used in the processes
of apprehending Nature, attempts to gain an insight into the workings
of the 'universal' codes and structures that govern the mechanisms
of our thinking.
On
the face of it, Levi-Strauss' notion of a fundamental divide between
'myth' (the synchronic) and 'history' (the diachronic) seems to share
an affinity with Julia Kristeva's perspective on the division between
the cyclic or monumental time of motherhood and reproduction, and
the linear, historical time of production and the symbolic discourse
of language, considered as the enunciation of an ordered sequence
of words. However, Kristeva transforms this division into a complex
dialectical relationship and reciprocal interaction between a polymorphously
perverse and chaotic semiotic realm, "detected genetically in the
first echolalias of infants as rhythms and intonations" and the symbolic
order and fixity of the speaking subject.
A
division that compares with the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's
duality of the Dionysian element of raw chaotic sensual power versus
the balanced order and organisation of the Apollonian aesthetic (and
the synthesis of the Dionysian with the Apollonian in the culture of the ancient
Greeks), or the philosopher Henri Bergson's duality of the spontaneous
and creative flow of interpenetrating qualities which he terms 'duration',
in opposition to the 'geometric' order of well-defined elements organised
in accordance with definite rules. For Leon Trotsky the powerful flow
is by its very nature a primordial rawness prior to any organised
structure. Moreover, it expresses a protest against artificiality,
a move away from the static rigidities and impositions of an outworn
established order: "While in our uncouth Russia there is much barbarism,
almost zoologism, in the old bourgeois cultures of the West there
are horrible encrustations of fossilized narrow-mindedness, crystallized
cruelty, polished cynicism".
In
accordance with this view, civilisation establishes an elaborate code
of distinctions, and these distinctions govern everything. As distinctions
exhaust their power to distinguish, new ones are employed. The tendency
is toward finer and finer discrimination and increasing attention
to detail, to the point of decadence. A view taken up by Roland Barthes
who contends that 'myth', like a parasite, saps the living energy
of history:
For
the very end of myths is to immobilise the world: they must suggest
and mimic
a universal order which has fixated once and for all a hierarchy of
possessions.
Thus, every day and everywhere, man is stopped by myths, referred
by
them to this motionless prototype which lives in his place, and stifles
him in the
manner of a huge internal parasite assigning to his activity the narrow
limits within
which he is allowed to suffer without upsetting the world.
The
civilising process is directed towards self-restraint, as Norbert
Elias so clearly shows. The ways in which this restraint is marked
- the specific forms, details, and nuances - give class culture its
distinctive flavour at each point in history. Habituated and internalised,
the emotional economy of social nicety creates thresholds of embarrassment
that shift. Practices once considered perfectly acceptable, such as
wiping the hands on the table cloth, are later experienced as disgusting.
Nowhere is taste so vividly inscribed as on the body, which the good
manners of polite society so systematically denies. The body in good
taste is conceived as self-contained, whole and complete (or is discreetly
altered to appear so). It derives from the values propagated by the
European Enlightenment - reason, moderation, classical formality,
individual autonomy, and monadic self-sufficiency. But there is also
a grotesque body, which, according to Kristeva's study of Mikhail
Bakhtin's work on the writings of Francois Rabelais, is "not a closed completed
unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits.
The stress is laid on those parts through which the world enters the
body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out
to meet the world. This means that the emphasis is on the apertures
or the convexities, or on the various ramifications and offshoots:
the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the
potbelly, the nose". And it is the image of the prominent Jewish nose
that the critical theorist Theodor Adorno considers as a focal point
of difference contributing to the virulent hatred of the anti-Semite.
The despised prominence of the persecuted Jew's nose is described
by Adorno as: the
physiognomic principium individuationis, symbol of the specific
character of an
individual, described between the lines of his countenance. The multifarious
nuances
of the sense of smell embody the archetypal longing for the lower
forms of existence, for direct
unification with circumambient nature, with the earth and mud.
Of all the senses, that of smell bears closest witness to lose oneself
in and become
the 'other'. When we see we remain what we are; but when we smell
we are
taken over by otherness. The trend to lose oneself in the environment
instead of
playing an active role in it; the tendency to let oneself go and sink
back into nature.
Freud called it the death instinct, Roger Caillois 'le mimetisme'.
This urge underlies
everything which runs counter to bold progress, from the crime which
is a
shortcut avoiding the normal forms of activity, to the sublime work
of art. A yielding
attitude to things, without which art cannot exist, is not so very
remote from
the violence of the criminal. Hence the sense of smell is considered
a disgrace
to civilization, the sign of lower social strata, lesser races and
base animals.
According
to Freud the replacement of smell by sight as the dominant and superior
sense occurred at a stage in human evolution when "as a result of
our adopting an erect gate, we raised our organ of smell from the
ground". The adoption of an upright posture visibly exposed the vulnerability
of the human genitalia, necessitating the development of a protective
sense of shame associated with the emergence of an 'organic repression',
ultimately resulting in the foundation of the family unit and civilised
society. Freud associates the diminution of the olfactory sense with
the "cultural trend towards cleanliness" resulting in general feelings
of disgust directed towards bodily excreta. The residual coprophilic
instinctual components of the body are in turn derided by society
as perverse and incompatible with the norms of civilised 'human' behaviour
and the refinements of culture. But the instincts remain active, which
is why, still, "the excremental is all too intimately and inseparably
bound up with the sexual". Accordingly, Freud concludes that the net
effect of society's repression and sublimation of these bodily instincts
can be detected in a general lack of sexual satisfaction and in a
corresponding increased incidence of mental disorders and neurotic
illness.
Julia
Kristeva's celebration of ugliness as thematised in the writings of
Mikhail Bakhtin and Charles Baudelaire, signifies an eruption of the
sensual and erotic drives of the semiotic body in protest against
its repression on the part of the rational ego, which belongs to the
established order of the 'symbolic'. As such, the thematisation of
ugliness represents a direct assault on enlightened subjectivity's
horror of the unformed, its aversion in face of that which has escaped
the levelling, identitarian stamp of 'civilised' life. The aesthetics
of ugliness, therefore, reminds civilisation of a stage of development
prior to the rational individuation of the species in face of primordial
nature, the stage of its undifferentiated unity with nature, a moment
of 'weakness' and 'vulnerability' civilisation has attempted to repress
from memory. For civilisation is seized by an overwhelming fear of
relapse into that primordial, pre-individualised state against which
it struggled so concertedly to free itself that it has become tragically
incapable of releasing itself from the rigidification of the ego synonymous
with the principle of rational control. For in order to elevate itself
above the level of a merely natural existence and thus arrive at self-consciousness
as a species, humanity is required to subjugate its own inner nature,
that is, become attuned to the renunciation of the instinctual drives
of the semiotic body demanded by a 'reality principle' necessary for
the level of cooperation required for the conquest and subjugation
of external nature.
For
Kristeva, the 'pre-symbolic' realm of nature is synonymous with the
'pre-symbolic' semiotic space/time of the child's initial fusion with
and dependency upon the body of its m(other). The dialectic or process
of self-consciousness which enables self-identity (the same) to distinguish
itself from what is 'other', that is, the formation of subjective
and objective identity, necessitates the denial and repression of
this pre-symbolic state of fusion with the maternal body. The repression
of the maternal body in turn provides the foundations for the social
and symbolic mastery of nature, the body, of the non-identical, and
of the heterogeneous. According to Kristeva, "Fear of the archaic
mother proves essentially to be a fear of her generative power. It
is this power, dreaded, that patrilineal filiation is charged with
subduing". Yet, in the end, the rigidification of the ego required
for this purpose is ultimately so extreme that the original goal of
the process, the eventual pacification of the struggle for existence
and the attainment of a state of reconciliation with nature, is eventually
lost sight of; and the means to this end, the domination of nature,
is enthroned as an end in itself. For once the 'subject' comes to
perceive itself as absolute and its 'other', the maternal body of
nature, as merely the stuff of domination, this logic ultimately exacts
its revenge upon the 'subject', which has somehow forgotten that the
'other' is a moment internal to itself, in other words, that humanity,
too, is part of corporeal nature and is consequently a victim of its
own ruthless apparatus of control. A tragic dialectic ensues, whereupon
"Man's domination over himself, which grounds his selfhood, is almost
always the destruction of the subject in whose service it is undertaken;
for the substance which is dominated, suppressed and dissolved through
self-preservation is none other than that very life as a function
of which the achievements of self-preservation are defined; it is,
in fact, what is to be preserved".
Reason
abstracts, and seeks to comprehend through concepts and names. Abstraction,
which can grasp the concrete only insofar as it reduces it to identity,
also liquidates the otherness of the other. By making ugliness thematic,
the poetry of Charles Baudelaire gives a voice to those oppressed
and non-identical elements of society anathematised by the dominant
powers of social control that are commonly denied expression in the
extra-aesthetic world. Baudelaire's poems articulate the right of
the other, of the non-identical, to be. It accomplishes this task
by rejecting the burden of the concept and returning to the word's
forgotten, repressed meanings through the agency of metaphor. The
significance of ugliness, the tendency toward the incorporation of
increasingly ignoble, unrefined themes in art, in contrast to the
consistently more exalted concerns of classical art, is clearly expressed
in the title selected by Baudelaire for his major collection of poems,
Les Fleurs de mal.
The
notion that something ugly can be 'beautiful', that in fact in can
be beautiful precisely because it is ugly, tests the boundaries of
the permissible, opening up immense, previously untapped reservoirs
of experience. Poking fun at those painters who find nineteenth-century
dress excessively ugly, Baudelaire celebrates the black frock-coat
and dress-coat as "the necessary costume of our time" expressing the
intimate relationship of modernity with death: "The dress-coat and
frock-coat not only possess their political beauty, which is an expression
of universal equality, but also their poetic beauty, which is an expression
of the public soul - an immense cortege of undertaker's mutes (mutes
in love, political mutes, bourgeois mutes). We are each of us celebrating
some funeral".
Baudelaire
cites the example of the artist Constantin Guys, a spectator and collector
of modern life's curiosities: "this solitary, gifted with an active
imagination, ceaselessly journeying across the great human desert
- the last to linger wherever there is a glow of light, an echo of
poetry, a quiver of life or a chord of music; wherever a passion can
pose before him, wherever natural man and conventional man display
themselves in a strange beauty, wherever the sun lights up the swift
joys of the depraved animal". Julia
Kristeva shares Charles Baudelaire's fascination with the combined
figures of the dandy and the flaneur, the artist and the poet,
keenly receptive and perfectly at home in the streets, drifting through
the crowded boulevards, painting in colours and in words the sensory
array and variegated experiences of modern life. The artist adrift,
acutely sensitive to the sadness of loss and the inevitably of decay
captured in the fading and fragile beauty of each fleeting moment;
a sadness reflected in the momentary glance of every stranger briefly
encountered while passing through the city's crowded streets. The
wandering poet whose
artistic creations disrupt the fossilised social conventions of the
symbolic order by resurrecting through the colour and play of words
the memory of the semiotic experience: a feeling of bliss and unity,
an ecstatic dissolution of the boundaries and divisions that separate,
a sensation of 'oceanic' oneness; feelings and sensations synonymous
with that original state of fusion of the infant's body with the body
of its mother. The restoration of a 'love' experienced as the extinction
of otherness; a love that the art of poetry articulates through the
agency of 'metaphor', or the 'marriage' of one object with another;
an analogical mode of thinking defined by the poet Stephane Mallarme
as the secret to the 'mystery' of poetic creation: "Herein lies the
whole mystery: to pair things off and establish secret identities
that gnaw at objects and wear them away in the name of a central purity".
The
flaneur or dandy, immersed in the flux of each passing moment,
produce themselves as objects of a continual aesthetic elaboration
whereby their passions, their behaviours, and their very lives, become
works of art in perpetual progress of formation. Charles Baudelaire,
poet and dandy, exemplifies for Kristeva her notion of the 'subject-in-process',
with "flowing locks, pink gloves, coloured nails as well as hair",
who produces himself through the very act of writing his poetry. Poetry
that dissolves and then merges objects together again into one harmonious
unity of the senses: a 'synaesthesia' of the senses consisting in
the disintegrated displacement and reassembled condensation of sensations
fused together into a unity; a process amounting to the poetic re-enchantment
of the everyday, familiar world. Poetry that evokes for Kristeva "that
archaic universe, preceding sight, where what takes place is the conveyance
of the most opaque lovers' indefinite identities, together with the
chilliest words: 'There are strong perfumes for which all matter is
porous. They seem to penetrate glass'".
Mikhail
Bakhtin traces the historical process by which images of fundamental
bodily processes like "eating, drinking, copulation, defecation, almost
entirely lost their regenerating power and were transformed into 'vulgarities'".
Thus a hierarchy is established between the high and the low, the
official and the popular, the classical and the grotesque, the top
and the bottom, the face and the body's nether regions. Bakhtin celebrates
the festivities of the carnival and the antics of the carnivalesque
as the symbolic inversion and cultural negation of traditional distinctions
between the 'high' and the 'low', leading to the negation and inversion
of established social and political cultural codes and norms.
The
grotesque body of the carnival is the corporeal body of the multitude,
associated with the 'low' and the base, with orifices that leak and
drip, with impurity, disproportion, immediacy, and with the porousness
and indeterminacy of abject materiality. This is the material body,
the direct antithesis to the classically beautiful, ideal body, which
is culturally defined as symmetrical, elevated, and refined. An ideal
body conceptualised as a sealed, self-contained vessel, with a protective
shell, or shield, serving to conceal (and deny) its material, corporeal
aspect. A bodily ideal verging on the spiritual, symbolising a set
of ordered and hierarchical relations serving to maintain secure and
impervious boundaries separating vital distinctions between such designated
terms as inside and outside, proper and improper, order and disorder,
ugliness and beauty, the corporeal and the spiritual.
In
contrast, Bakhtin and Kristeva celebrate the grotesque, lower bodily
stratum, expressed in the antics of the clown and the frivolity of
the circus, and in the folk imagery contained in Rabelais' joyful
descriptions of the medieval carnival. Images of bodily satisfaction
and sensual gratification preserved within the oral language traditions
and festivities of the common people, and recorded in historical texts
concerning antique satyric drama and ancient practices such as the
Roman Saturnalia. A history that represents for Bakhtin and Kristeva the material principle of the body's resurrection as the location
and promise of a utopian
alternative. The 'primary processes', subterranean drives, rhythmic
pulsions, and libidinal connections of the semiotic body continuously
irrupting, subverting, destabilising, and threatening the rigidities
and stases of a sociosymbolic order that in turn endeavours to recuperate
and contain these potentially destabilising affects by incorporating
them into its very structure, in what can only be described as a dialectical
conflict and provisional unity of opposites.
For
Julia Kristeva "The semiotic (body) is articulated by flow and energy
transfers, the cutting up of the corporeal and social continuum as
well as its ordering in a pulsating chora, in a rhythmic but
nonexpressive totality". Mikhail Bakhtin's image of the grotesque
body is Kristeva's semiotic body, the earthly element of the maternal
womb, epitomising the cycles of life, death, and renewal, terror and
delight, as it flowers into new life. For Kristeva and Bakhtin the
world of Francois Rabelais is an ever-present memory, the return of
the repressed, marking the temporary suspension of hierarchy and prohibition,
and accompanied by the 'unofficial truth' of laughter and freedom
from everything that oppresses and restricts; a topsy-turvy, inside-out,
back-to-front world. A union of opposites where the top and the bottom
change places, where the spiritual is displaced to the physical, and
the superiority traditionally attributed to the mind is overthrown
in favour of the 'lower' bodily processes of humanity's supposedly
'animal' functions.
This
connects with Kristeva's exploration of the notion of transgression,
where to break with conventional cultural boundaries of order and
acceptability runs the risk of being designated as 'other' or 'abject';
where difference is associated with deformity, disease, formlessness,
disintegration and decay; and where people considered as somehow indeterminate
or marginal, that is, as a threat to a culture's definition of what
constitutes its notion of secure borders, either geographically (ethnic
minorities, refugees), or psychologically (the sexually transgressive,
outsiders, the disabled, the sick, women), are liable to be victimised
and persecuted in order to preserve an illusory sense of social 'order'.
Arguing
against the type of abstract rationalism and 'monological' discourse
that recognises only one kind of truth, Bakhtin's and Kristeva's celebration
of the grotesque and the carnivalesque affirms the indeterminate,
the intermixed, the paradoxical, and the ambivalent. For Bakhtin and
Kristeva the grotesque body exists as a fluid, split, multiple self;
an unfinished and desiring subject-in-process; a corporeal entity
open to the processes of reciprocal interaction and exchange occurring
in its surrounding environment. In contrast, the classical bodies
of the bourgeoisie are described as closed, centred, symmetrical and
homogeneous.
Threatening
the symmetrical proportions of the classical body and the centrality
of the self-contained ego, the 'grotesque' body expresses the supposed
vulgarity of corporeality: the physicality and materiality of the
'grotesque' body marginalised and excluded from the privatised interior
realm of the privileged and the culturally refined. Accordingly, the
materiality of the grotesque and the vulgar is designated as 'other',
occupying a low and dirty periphery or 'outside', which, in turn,
guarantees a coherent identity to the 'inside'. Ironically, however,
the identity formation of the monadic 'subject' is dependant upon
this very 'other' which is excluded as an inferior object of disgust
(and desire). Thus the 'ideal' realm of 'high' culture, rationalism
and civilisation, is based upon psychical processes of disavowal,
denial and projection, where it is always someone else who is possessed
by the grotesque, never the 'self'.
Moreover,
with the extension of the civilising process there arises the necessity
for greater controls over 'lower' bodily functions and emotions, producing
changes in conduct and manners which heighten the sense of disgust
directed towards the direct expression of bodily needs, desires, and
emotions. Mikhail Bakhtin builds his conception of the polyphonic
'multi-voiced' novel upon a fundamental break with this notion of
a self-contained monadic subject, the narrative 'I' with a 'single
voice'; instead, characters are conceptualised as nothing more than
multiple points of view, a continuous intermixture, a dispersal and
provisional reassembly of diverse 'subject positions'; culminating
in the open ended freedom of Julia Kristeva's 'subject-in process. Accordingly, the separation
of oneself, as 'subject', from others and the environment, as 'objects',
this differentiation makes culture (the symbolic order of language)
possible: "I am not part of the street - no, I describe the street.
One splits off, therefore".
Kristeva
approves of Bakhtin's determined opposition of "the explosive politics
of the body, the erotic, the licentious and semiotic" against the
"official, formalistic and logical authoritarianism whose unspoken
name is Stalinism". A formalism, along with its attendant hierarchy,
detected in the novels dissected by Leon Trotsky, the exiled opponent
and critic of Russia's ruling, parasitic bureaucratic caste, lead
and personified by Stalin:
The normal
bourgeois novel has two floors: emotions are experienced only in the bel-etage
(Proust!), while the people in the basement polish shoes and take
out chamber-pots.
This is rarely mentioned in the novel itself, but presupposed as something
quite natural. The hero sighs, the heroine breathes; it follows that
they
perform other bodily functions too; somebody, then, has to clean up
after them.
I remember reading a novel of Louys called Amour and Psyche
- an unusually
sham and banal concoction, completed, if I am not mistaken, by the
unbearable
Claude Farrere. Louys puts the servants somewhere in the nether regions,
so that his enamoured hero and heroine never see them. An ideal social
system
for amorous idlers and their artists!
The
inversion of hierarchy is celebrated in Artaud's description, in 'The
Race of Lost Men', of the Tarahumara Indians and their inimical style
of begging in the streets of Mexico. The Tarahumaras displayed an
attitude of 'supreme contempt. They had an air of saying: "Since you
are rich, you are a dog, I am worth more than you, I spit on you".
Julia
Kristeva supplements the materialist dialectics of Marxism with psychoanalytical
theories in an attempt to bridge the gulf separating the 'external',
the 'objective' and the 'social' from the 'internal' processes of
continual dissolution and reconstruction of the 'subject' conceived
as a fluid entity. The result is Kristeva's 'subject-in-process',
an inversion of the philosopher Louis Althusser's notion of 'history'
as a 'process without a subject'. In this way we arrive at two antithetical
systems which internalise and reflect one another's qualities:
On
the one hand, we are presented with the view, espoused by Louis Althusser,
of the individual as a 'sub-jected' social entity or 'object' of the
social ('symbolic') order, allocated a fixed 'subject-position' objectively
determined by the dominant mode of production. A process achieved
through the mechanism of an ideology designed to constitute individuals
as imaginary 'subjects' - centres of free initiative - of society,
in order to assure their real subjection to the social order,
as blind supports or victims of a 'closed system' where the worker
as the occupant of a predetermined function or position is no longer
individually differentiated as a 'work in progress', subject to the
processes of change and renewal, but instead is compelled to operate
within the rigidly circumscribed and narrowly specialised demands
of their particular function and fixed subject-position without ever
achieving the opportunity to open themselves up (amorously) to the
'other' as the creative and artistic being s/he
potentially is.
On
the other hand, we are presented with Kristeva's alternative of a
'living' or 'open system' combining the amorous and the artistic in
the mutable form of the 'subject-in-process', conceived as an effective
agent of social transformation, heterogeneous and open to the play
of difference, exploded, multiple, and fluid, whose transgression
of established boundaries is an expression of the jouissance
embedded in the continuity of self and other that is repressed by
the Law of the Father but is never totally destroyed. The organised
stability and fixity of society and the 'subject' are revealed as
based upon a somewhat tenuous symbolic control over the polymorphous
pleasures and the dispersing impulses of the semiotic drives, which
threaten apparent unities and stabilities with disruption and dissolution.
There is thus a dialectical conflict and resolution of opposites at
work; consisting, on the one hand, of drives and impulses belonging
to the realm of the semiotic and the biological, and, on the other
hand, of organised family and social structures belonging to the symbolic
and the social.
The
formalism of refined culture, and discourse designated as elevated,
dignified and refined, feed voraciously upon, and are nourished and
replenished by, the experiences of those designated as low and base,
vulgar and exorbitant. Ironically, the socio-symbolic order of 'high'
culture thrives upon, articulates, refines, codifies and preserves,
in a coherent form, that very 'body' of impure and messy semiotic
matter from which it seeks to cleanse itself. Accordingly, Kristeva explores relationships not only
of production (cultural and technological), but also of reproduction
(corporeality) - "survival of the species, life and death, the body,
sex and symbol".
Julia
Kristeva's fascination with the conflict, unity, and oscillation between
such dualisms as sameness and difference, unity and dispersion, continuity
and disruption, sexual desire and death, is an effective reworking
and elaboration upon themes explored by the surrealist writer, Georges
Bataille. Drawing upon the works of de Sade, Bataille writes of the
fundamental link "between death and sexual excitement", adding, "In
essence, the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation".
In exploring the perverse and violent nature of sexuality, Bataille
rigorously avoids any association or contamination of human eroticism
with anything to do with what might be called purely spiritual concepts
of ideal beauty, love or romance. Instead, Bataille revels in the
connections he painstakingly establishes between eroticism and the
more earthly concerns of ripeness and decay, the cycles of sexual
expenditure, discharge and release, and 'abject' feelings of repugnance
and disgust.
For
Bataille "Eroticism springs from an alternation of fascination and
horror", a fascination expressed in the seductive nature of the monstrous
and the grotesque. The goal of course is the attainment of unity through
the symbolic fusion of two individuals in a sexual embrace that collapses
social boundaries and constraints while at the same time destroying
for the participants the 'isolation' and 'self-contained character'
of their 'normal' lives as 'discontinuous individuals'. An erotic
union that completely breaks down the distinction of self and other
through a process of the inside collapsing into the outside producing
"a feeling of profound continuity", where the individual, who would
normally regard themselves with the utmost importance and their sexuality,
as a means, like any other, for their own satisfaction, become conscious
of themselves from a biological standpoint as only a brief episode
in a succession of generations, as merely a short-lived appendage
to a germ-plasm endowed with virtual immortality.
Plato's
Symposium recounts the ancient Greek myth of the Orphic Eros,
simultaneously male and female. A perfect unity expressing the original
harmony and unity of the universe:
In
the beginning.............there were three sexes, not as there are
now two, male and
female, but there was also a third which constituted a synthesis of
the two others..............It
was 'androgynoid', i.e. man-woman, inasmuch as it had the appearance
and name of both the male and female sex.
According
to Plato's account, as recounted by Aristophanes, this primeval race
of androgynes, the ancestors of us all, were bizarre creatures with
two faces looking in opposite directions, and with two sets of each
pair of limbs: four arms, four legs, two heads, and two sets of genitals.
Endowed with this remarkable collection of body parts, and with the
back and sides of their bodies forming a perfect circle, they could
move either forwards or backwards with incredible speed, rolling around
performing cartwheels with the agility and athleticism of circus performers.
Zeus, the primal father of the
gods, threatened by the might, skill
and strength of this race of androgynes, acted to diminish
their power and self-sufficiency by splitting them in half "like a sorb apple which is halved for pickling, or as you
might divide an egg with a hair". Thus split into two halves, and
forever driven by the desire for reunion, each half seeks the other
half; a desire only partially and temporarily
fulfilled in the unity of the sexual embrace - as if a person looking into a mirror were able to merge with
their idealised reflection, becoming one with it. A coupling that
allows the two separated halves of humanity an imaginary restoration
of completeness and wholeness, which was ours originally before the
onset of the male-female polarity.
This
division of an original unity is analogous to the critical theorist
Theodor Adorno's description of the relationship between high art
and popular culture: "torn halves of an integral freedom, to which
however they do not add up". Or Kristeva's psychoanalytical reflections
on the overt bisexuality of children: that is to say, a girl not only
possesses an affectionate attitude ('object-choice') towards her father
and an ambivalent attitude towards her mother, but at the same time
she also behaves like a boy and displays feelings of jealousy and
hostility towards her father and a corresponding affectionate and
'masculine' attitude towards her mother; a process through which 'female'
'subjectivity' is born. This corresponds with Freud's speculations
concerning bisexuality and its role in the development of the male-female
polarity; speculations that go back to the very origins of his psychoanalytical
theories. For instance, in a letter to his friend and collaborator,
the nose-and-throat specialist Wilhelm Fliess (who influenced him
greatly on the topic), Freud writes: "Bisexuality! I am sure you are
right about it. And I am accustoming myself to regarding every sexual
act as an event between four individuals".
The
ancient Greeks were keenly aware of the crucial importance of clearly
defined boundaries as guarantors of human order. Women were regarded
as individuals especially lacking in control of their own boundaries.
The ancient Greek natural philosopher and physician Hippokrates attributes
the difference between male and female to the following:
The
female flourishes more in an environment of water, from things cold
and wet and
soft.............The male flourishes more in an environment of fire,
from dry, hot foods
and mode of life. According
to Hippokrates, the condition of dry stability characteristic of the
male body is something never attained by the female physique, which
remains cold and wet all its life. Due to her innate wetness, women
were considered more prone than men to liquefying incursions upon
the integrity of their bodies and minds, especially those of love
and emotion which were thought to be particularly endangering forms
of wetness. The emotions associated with female eros were regarded
as especially liquid and liquefying, acting to soften, loosen, melt
and dissolve physiological and psychological boundaries which men
prided themselves on being able to resist.
The
clean and proper body for the (male) social subject is therefore based
on the exclusion of 'abject' substances that threaten to break boundaries,
on the principle of identity without intermixture, the condemnation
of hybrids, and an obsessive fear of the threat of undifferentiation.
Fluids attest to the undignified material attributes of a bodily existence:
to the body's permeability, its vulnerable dependence on an outside,
and to the precarious division between the body's inside and its outside;
and the ever present danger of its complete collapse into this outside
(which is what death represents).
Female
sexuality is regarded as an uncontainable flow, associated with what
is unclean and contaminating (such as the menstrual flow), with infection,
disease, and decay. Liquids are devoid of shape or form. Bodily fluids
flow, seep, and infiltrate; their control is a matter of perpetual
uncertainty. For Julia Kristeva:
These
body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands,
hardly, and with
difficulty, on the part of death. There I am at the border of my condition
as
a living being................ Excrement and its equivalents (decay,
infection, disease,
corpse, etc.) stand for the danger to identity that comes from without:
the ego
threatened by the non- ego, society threatened by its outside, life
by death.
Artaud
celebrates the gestural immediacy and vitality of a theatre that will
obliterate the 'spiritual':
a theatre of blood,
a theatre where at each performance
something
will be won
physically...
In reality, the theatre is the birth of creation.
That will happen.
The
artist Jana Sterbak's Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic,(1987),
an installation consisting of approximately fifty pounds of ageing
meat (flank steak) organised by the National Gallery of Canada and
presented in Ottawa in 1991, visibly portrays the relationship of
meat with the female body as an object of consumption. The decaying
meat combined with images of rotting fruit and vegetables, and flowers
long past their bloom, suggests the cycle of fertility, birth, ripeness
and decay, with its attendant intimations of human mortality. The
work plays with the binary distinctions of wet and dry, animal and
human, inanimate and animate, body and garment, interior and exterior,
life and death. The fifty pounds of decaying meat enclosed within
the space of an art gallery also recalls Theodor Adorno's discussion
of the unpleasant undertones associated with the German word for museum
('museal', 'museumlike') and its phonetic association with
the word 'mausoleum', where "objects to which the observer no longer
has a vital relationship are in the process of dying. Museums are
like the family sepulchres of works of art. Art treasures are hoarded
in them, and their market value leaves no room for the pleasure of
looking at them".
In
response to Sterbak's installation, the newspapers Toronto Sun
and Ottawa Sun launched a negative campaign against the 'wastefulness'
of the exhibition. This included a digitally manipulated image of
the flesh dress alongside a recommendation from the editors urging
the readers to cut the image out and then mail it to the curator responsible
for the exhibit - Diana Nemiroff (address supplied) - suitably smeared
with the most disgusting materials possible. Over two hundred readers
responded. Some of the mailed images were smeared with excrement,
and the gallery's mailroom staff were obliged to sort and open all
incoming mail with rubber gloves for weeks on end.
The
negative reaction to Jana Sterbak's installations suggests that her
flesh dress did not accord with conservative tastes and was perceived
as a transgression threatening certain acceptable
boundaries. The sheer corporeality of Sterbak's installation shocked
a conservative viewing public, and suggests numerous implications.
In her book The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol Adams writes:
People
with power have always eaten meat. The aristocracy of Europe consumed
large
courses filled with every kind of meat while the laborer consumed
the complex
carbohydrates. Dietary habits proclaim class distinctions, but they
proclaim
patriarchal distinctions as well.............The sexism in meat-eating
recapitulates
the class distinctions with an added twist: a mythology permeates
all
classes that meat is a masculine food and meat-eating a male activity.................Women........are
more likely to eat what are considered second- class
foods............vegetables, fruits, and grains rather than meat.
The
words 'matter' and 'material' come from the Latin word 'materia'
. But 'materia' is derived from 'mater' , meaning 'mother'.
The material out of which everything is made is, as it were, a mother
to it. Male and female
are matter and also mater, flesh of their mother's flesh - the male
in the early embryonic stages of his development is originally a female,
too; and then becomes a variation or possibly even a mutation of the
female. Whatever man is, however, woman is not; and with this imposition
of the principle of sexual opposition comes the gradual historical
definition of man as monopolising all the human skills and abilities,
with an emphasis on thought as dominating, and altogether more noble
and important than woman conceptualised as the half-formed, imperfect
opposite.
This
hierarchy of mind over body is duplicated in the hierarchy of male
over female, humans over animals. It is also duplicated
in the class hierarchy of rulers over workers. In ancient Greek society
slaves were the human tools from whom wealth was extracted through
exploited labour, preserving aristocratic leisure and culture for
the rulers. For Adorno, all
'pure culture' is based on the freedom of mental pursuits and
their radical separation from the necessities and constraints of physical
labour. The ancient slave-owning Athenians despised work, and held
their slaves in contempt. Yet the rulers suffered an uneasy conscience
which they dispelled by projecting it upon their slaves, thereby confirming
the abject 'baseness' of physical labour.
Accordingly, the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle
both assert the primacy of disembodied mind or intellect over the
'base' physicality of the sensate, corporeal body. A philosophy organised
around two gendered concepts: form and matter. Form is defined as
masculine, and is regarded as active, rational, and superior. Matter
is designated as feminine, and is regarded as passive, chaotic, and
inferior. We therefore have two essentially different worlds confronting
one another with no passageway in-between them. A dualism that leads
to the splitting of the human being into a divine immortal soul and
an earthly corruptible body, degrading the fecund and ever-changing
corporeal world of nature into abject materiality. A polarisation
or split between the flesh and the spirit, the carnal and the divine,
masters and slaves; and a division of the sexes in which men are associated
with the divine qualities of spirit and transcendence while women
are associated with an inferior and degraded material realm encompassing
the body, flesh, carnality, nature, and the earth.
The
violence implicit in this philosophy is expressed in the form of a
hierarchy that asserts the superiority of men and the mind over an
inferior realm encompassing women, slaves, and corporeality, in a
chain of being that stretches from immaterial mind or Logos at the
upper end of the hierarchy, to unformed matter at the lower end. This
fetishisation of disembodied intellect is expressed in Aristotle's
demotion of women to mere passive material receptacles of a spiritually
transcendent male potency. According to Aristotle, woman "is matter
waiting to be formed by the active male principle. Of course the active
elements are always higher.......and more divine. Man consequently
plays a major part in reproduction; the woman is merely the passive
incubator of his seed.......the male semen cooks and shapes the menstrual
blood into a new human being". The female herself is a result of a
maternal failure in this process of formation, in which the female
as matter is left incompletely formed by the male potency. A potency
synonymous with pure thought as spiritual, dominating, and altogether
more noble than woman as the half-formed, material opposite.
The
Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus accentuates this hierarchy of ideal
form over formless materiality, rational thought over bodily sensuality.
For Plotinus, Absolute Being, or the One, is a realm of light and
intelligibility distinct from the confused darkness and multiplicity
of materiality. The divine soul is imprisoned within the body and
the sensory world, an evil from which it endeavours to free itself
in its eternal quest for reunion with the Absolute. Matter, isolated
from the beneficial influence of the Ideal Principle, is described
as "ugliness, utter disgracefulness, unredeemed evil".
For
the Neoplatonists, the material, corporeal world represents a descent,
a falling away, from a primordial unity with the One: it is efflux,
detritus. There is also an association with the phallus in this ancient
philosophy:
The
secret phallus of philosophy, the one that transpired in Plotinus'
discourse as
a metaphor of the One............As the male organ of generation,
the phallus is therefore
essentially logos or source of the logos: rational power,
or intelligible reason......the
integration of rational power and the phallus.......The masculine
organ
is spiritualized, idealized, to the point of becoming a sign of intelligence.
The
philosopher Karl Marx, commenting on the social conditionality of
the scientific discoveries that find application in technology, includes
in a footnote the following question: :
A
critical history of technology would show how little any of the inventions
of the
18th century are the work of a single individual. Hitherto there is
no such book.
Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature's Technology, i.e.,
in the
formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve
as instruments
of production for sustaining life. Does not the history of the
productive
organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of all social
organisation,
deserve equal attention?
Darwinian
science investigates the following question: At what point in their
biological evolution did our anthropoid ancestors acquire their present,
quite human hands, which have exercised such a remarkable influence
in promoting the success of the human 'intellect'? The philosophical
'materialist' would argue that they were probably formed due to certain
peculiarities of the geographical environment which made useful a
physiological division of labour between the front and rear limbs.
Accordingly, the development of the human intellect appeared as the
consequence of this division and became in their turn the immediate
reason for the appearance of humanity's artificial organs, the use
of tools. These new artificial organs furthered the development of
the human intellect, and the successes of the 'intellect' again reflected
themselves upon the organs.
A
lengthy historical process emerges, in which cause and consequence
are constantly alternating. Thus human society adapts itself to nature,
and strives towards equilibrium with it by extracting energy from
it through the process of social production. In the process of adaptation,
human society develops an industrial technology (a 'second nature')
consisting of an artificial system of organs - prosthetic enhancements
designed to extend the range and capabilities of the human organism.
Developments that progressively eliminate the distinction between
subject and object, culminating in the final union of "the human
essence of nature" with "the natural essence of man". Freud
agrees: "Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When
he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent". An optimism
contradicted by Christian Bok who predicts a very different vision
of a near-future where the corporeal substance of the human organism
is progressively extinguished and then superseded by the externalised
artificial exoskeleton of its technology: "As Alfred Jarry observes,
'the machine is born of the ashes of the slave'. Like a dangerous
supplement, every machinic tool augments, then replaces, the anthropic
limb that wields it. Each limb that constructs a limb for itself risks
not self-emendation but self-amputation".
In
conjunction with the accelerated development of cybernetics human
beings and the natural environment increasingly fuse as part of a
self-regulating system as information-exchanging internal elements.
While this cybernetic sociobiogeosystem is self-regulating, its internal
elements (humanity and nature), taken separately, progressively lose
their capacity for independent self-regulation. Nature exists no longer
as something external but
is progressively internalised as a component of a self-contained technological
system. Humanity and nature prove to be mere sub-systems of a universal
cybernetic sociobiogeosystem. This amounts to the realisation of a
technology 'confronting' nature to a technology incorporating it.
A technology encompassing and transforming not only the natural environment
but humanity as well. "The human cortex is the most complex material
organisation that we know; the machines it engenders are extensions
of it; the network they will form will be like a second and even more
complex cortex" ultimately superseding the first, resulting in a conclusive
"final blow to humanity's narcissism". Reflecting upon the magnitude
of these technological developments, and its possible impact upon
the human form, the performance artist Stelarc concedes that the impact
will be 'traumatic', where the human body as 'subject' will be reborn
as a designed artefact or 'object': "the body is traumatised to split
from the realm of subjectivity and consider the necessity of re-examining
and possibly re-designing
its very structure".
A
technology fully self-contained, subsisting on its own wastes; a condition predicted by Karl Marx when he writes that as science and technology progress,
they will be able "to throw the excrements of the processes of production
and consumption back again into the circle of the process of reproduction",
and that, he suggests, "without any previous outlay of capital, creates
new matter for capital". The transition from simple mastery and utilisation
to maximum optimisation and reproduction resulting in a complete reconstruction
(not only systemised but integrated) of all scientific and technological
activity. The fusion of beauty, fashion and function, art and industry,
the senses and the machine, collapsing the distinction between the
senses and their objects, inside and outside.
Simultaneously,
through technology and its link to art and sensation our unconscious
is in the process of reconstructing itself in bits and pieces outside
us. Technology breaks down the unconscious and then recombines it
in forms that restructure the 'external' world. Just as the technical
world and the world of commodities and objects become anthropomorphic,
so the human world becomes technomorphic. What follows is the neotechnic
adaptation of technology to biology: "instead of mechanism forming
a pattern for life, living organisms begin to form a pattern for mechanism".
Leading to a confusion or blurring of traditional distinctions between
the animate and the inanimate, suggesting links between Freudian and
Marxist theories on the nature of fetishism. Thus, Freud's definition
of the sexual fetish as an inanimate object invested with the sexual
appeal of a human, combined with Marx's analysis of the commodity
fetish as possessing human characteristics: "far more wonderful than
if it were to begin dancing of its own free will".
We
can no longer confine ourselves to the customary thesis that the object
exists outside the subject and that the subject transforms the object.
When we examine the history of humanity's evolution as a whole, experience
coincides with activity and merges into the aggregate of social practice.
The concepts of practice and sensation reflect different aspects of
the interaction of subject and object that are a unity.
In other words, the concept of practice characterises the interaction
of subject and object from the side of its continuity, while the concept
of sensation illustrates this interaction from the side of its intermittency,
lack of continuity, and discreteness. It is often argued that humanity's
central position is ensured in subjective idealism at the price of
losing the subject's connection with the real world, and reducing
it to an aggregate of sensations. The most extreme type of this variant
of anthropocentricism is solipsism, which denies the existence of
all other people. Conversely, we are presented with the danger of
a 'materialist' homofundamentalism positing maximum penetration of
the object by the subject in order to achieve a maximum convergence
of the 'subject' with the 'external' 'real' world.
Humanity
is, as it were, shaping its environment, and indeed, the environment
of a given generation of people is largely the product and results
of preceding generations. Differentiation of the interaction of the
subject and object, the pulsations, drives and echolalias of the semiotic
underlying the static forms of language and culture (the order of
the symbolic), makes it possible to disclose certain features involving
the accumulation and transmission of experience and culture in human
society in contrast to the biological laws of the transmission and
relay of life from generation to generation. If the chaotic, polymorphous
drives of the semiotic were not objectified in material and linguistic
(symbolic) form as 'its other', yet differing from the drives themselves
as their 'quiescent' or objectified result, the transmission and accumulation
of socio-cultural and historical experience would be impossible.
Kinaesthetic
sensations unite various sensations in the integral image of an 'object'
as distinct from the experiencing 'subject', which is an important
aspect of the living organism's attempts at differentiating itself
and maintaining its internal coherence and integrity in relationship
to its surrounding environment. For example, among single-celled or
unicellular organisms, the protozoa, there exists two regions: an
outer, clear and relatively homogeneous layer, or ectoplasm, forming
a barrier separating the protozoic cell
from its surrounding medium or environment; and an inner 'core' or
endoplasm. The outer ectoplasm consists of a plasma membrane or 'skin',
which forms a permeable and
mutable boundary allowing for the diffusion of materials into
and out of the cell. In particular, protazoa readily change their
shape by protoplasmic flowing into forms exceedingly diverse allowing
for the permutation and realisation of every possible form; a complicated
mix of polymorphic life cycles including parasitism and a variety
of variations in reproduction and sexual differentiation, complicating
and bringing into question the very concept of 'individuality' in
the protazoa just as it does in plants and animals.
In
accordance with Julia Kristeva's interest in "the 'open systems' of
which biology speaks concerning living organisms that live only by
maintaining a renewable identity through interaction with another",
these unicellular organisms are fluid, mobile and increasingly complex,
moving towards increasing the differentiation of their internal components
and the diversity and dissemination of their external forms and relationships
in the course of ontogenesis and phylogenesis. However, as in all
animals and plants, the reproduction and proliferation of protozoa
is dependent upon cell division.
The
two most common types of cell multiplication in the single-celled
protozoa are binary division and budding. Binary division involves
the division of the cell into two essentially equal daughter cells
that grow into replicas of the parent, making each half into a whole.
The dissolution and extinction of the original parent cell is followed
by differentiation in the daughter cells, such that the daughter cells
are essentially two new organisms. In contrast, 'budding' allows the
parent cell to retain its continued existence as a separate entity
while producing by division one or many daughter cells. Sometimes
the bud is nearly as large as the parent, so the result is nearly
the same as binary fission except that parent and offspring can be
distinguished; but usually the bud is much smaller, less differentiated,
and gradually assumes the form of the parent after freeing itself
from the parent's body. In some species of protozoa the buds arise
on the surface of the parent; in others the buds are nurtured as developing
'embryos' inside invaginated chambers from which they escape at 'birth'.
For
Julia Kristeva the body's boundaries are in a continual process of
production and transformation. There is a constant interchange between
the subject and the world in the ways in which the body's boundaries
shrink or expand, incorporates objects into itself, or expels impulses
and substances emanating from within. Relations between the body and
its surrounding environment are blurred and confused - the outside
environment is not distinct from the body but is an active internal
component of its 'identity'. The borders of the body are not fixed
or confined to its anatomical 'container', the skin. The boundaries
are extremely fluid and dynamic, and there is an ongoing interchange
between inside and outside.
The
plasticity of our conceptions of the body and its boundaries is indicated
by what many social scientists are currently describing as a pandemic
in what they call 'body dysmorphic disorder'. People suffering this
disorder feel that their bodies are somehow incomplete or imperfect.
The illness generally manifests itself in the form of the more common
eating disorders, such as bulimia or anorexia nervosa; but there are
also patients with an obsessive desire to acquire extra body parts,
or to have otherwise healthy limbs surgically removed because they
perceive them as somehow ugly, abject, or extraneous.
According
to Dr Joseph Rosen, Associate Professor of Plastic and Reconstructive
Surgery at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Centre, New Hampshire, our
limbs are intimately connected to neural networks or maps within our
brains which possess the capacity to contract or expand. When we have
a limb amputated, it takes considerable time for our neural map of
that limb to contract or fade (hence the phantom limb effect). And
if we acquire an extra body part, our neural map expands accordingly.
For Dr Rosen, this discovery opens up infinite possibilities for the
reconstruction of the human body.
Dr
Rosen believes, with surgical techniques now in existence that can
rearrange rib bones and stretch torso fat, that within five years
he will be able to create wings for the human body. Although we would
lack the ability to fly, we would resemble angels, and our wings,
hanging flaps of boned tissue, would possess full sensation. He is
also currently developing methods of equipping the human body with
tails and enhanced hearing . In response to criticisms at a conference
of plastic surgeons last year, Dr Rosen posed the question:
Why
do we only value the average? Why are plastic surgeons dedicated only
to
restoring our current notions of the conventional, as opposed to letting
people explore,
if they want, the possibilities?............Human wings will be here;
mark my
words............If I were to give you wings, you would develop, literally,
a winged
brain. Our bodies change our brains, and our brains are infinitely
mouldable.
There
is also, however, the danger that the human intellect, increasingly
divorced from the body and reproductive nature, will become sterile.
In order to be an effective organ of domination, thinking transforms
itself into a self-sufficient, automatic process, becoming like the
machines which itself produces so that eventually the machines will
replace it. The computerisation of labour includes those activities
which pose as purely conceptual. Whether this results in the eventual
merging of body and machine into some kind of hybrid - that is, whether
the body will take on the qualities of the machine (the 'cyborg')
or whether the machine will take on the qualities of the human body ('artificial intelligence') remains uncertain. Artificial-intelligence
proposes formal patterns as the be-all and end-all of intelligence:
where the virtual mind, finally divorced from the body and nature
is transformed into an information processor. For the critical theorist
Olive Schreiner this final sterilisation of thought from contamination
with abject materiality might be a problem: Will
humanity at last break out into one huge blossom of the brain - and
die? Like
one of those aloes, which grow for three hundred years, then break
out into
one large flower at the top of their stem and die!
The
internal coherence, integration, and
completion of the human 'subject' is based upon a subject/object
divide such that the image of external objects forms a secure foundation
for the stability and fixity of the 'subject', and ultimately the
definite wholeness and static stability of the 'object' itself. As
such, our perception of external reality consists of mentally visualised
images of an aggregate of sensations built up and then crystallised
into 'objects'.
Accordingly,
if we consider humanity as the 'formed' result of a succession of
generations, of a 'history', then we must consider the sensory aggregates
and mental images that make up our current notions of reality to be
the end result of aggregations of sensations and mentally visualised
images accumulated by countless preceding generations; an accumulated
wealth of information passed on and incorporated into the 'subject's'
'own' 'individual' experience. An anti-humanism that dispenses with
the notion of the individual 'subject' as the sole author or originator
of ideas in favour of a 'geological' and historical conception of
human knowledge consisting of accumulated deposits and sedimentary
layers of experience, life and language borrowed from a succession
of generations.
An
anti-humanism complemented by the theories of the mineralogist and
crystallographer Vladimir Vernadsky, who argues for an end to the
distinction between biology and geology, giving detailed descriptions
of life as a type of mineral, its cellular structures fusing, splitting
and proliferating, coalescing and disseminating, merging and diverging;
and his analysis of the endless process of biomineralisation of living
organisms, or rather, organic minerals, as they eke out and assimilate
into their physical structures, and then leak out and environmentalise,
minerals temporarily borrowed from the earth. Accordingly,
Vernadsky reproduces his History in ultra-materialist order: the earth,
micro-organisms, plants, articulated skeletons, animals, and finally
'humanity', in a perpetual reference to the reciprocal interactions
between animate and inanimate matter. For Vernadsky "Life is not life
but rock endlessly rearranging itself under the sun".
An
anti-humanism akin to Julia Kristeva's, Roland Barthes', Louis Althusser's,
and Michel Foucault's notion of the 'subject-individual' as merely
the ensemble of material and social relations mediated by history
and the material, concrete processes of language; and their debunking
of the essentialist notion
of the 'subject-author' as the sole originator of ideas. According
to Michel Foucault: This
thin surface of the original is populated entirely by those complex
mediations formed
and laid down as sediment in their own history by labour, life and
language
so that what man is reviving without knowing it, is all the intermediaries
of a
time that governs him almost to infinity. . An
objective law is a boundary separating the possible from the impossible.
Rudolf Carnap stresses that a law generalising empirical facts or
more particular laws formulated earlier provide the answer to why
a particular phenomenon is possible. If we cease to recognise this
kind of explanation as the basis of 'laws', we arrive at the liberating
(and 'pataphysical') science of imaginary solutions, where 'everything
is possible in the world', which is equivalent to the statement 'nothing
is impossible in the world'.
Natural
'laws' are therefore not final, once and for all dividing the possible
from the impossible, and the 'laws' themselves are mutable, and possibly
even cyclic. This connects with Julia Kristeva's notion of the maternal
body as a space or location where the apparent stasis of cyclical
or 'monumental' time exists in combination with the dynamics of a
linear or 'developmental' time consisting of genealogical and grammatical
changes and mutations. Rudolf Carnap duly hypothesises: The
actual world is a world that is constantly changing. Even the most
fundamental
laws of physics may, for all we can be sure, vary slightly from century
to century. What we believe to be a physical constant with a fixed
value may
be subject to vast cyclic changes that we have not yet observed.
The
inner logic of the development of science and technology - the drive
to penetrate further and deeper into matter - is leading in fact to
a discrepancy with the corporeal needs of the vehicle of science itself,
namely, humanity; this, moreover, is not a refined need of some sort,
but a grossly palpable need to survive in a technically reconstructed
environment. The inanimate once seemed the immutable basis of changing
life, fixed once and for all. But now, under the impact of technology,
the biosphere's inanimate parameters themselves are becoming considerably
disordered.
For
"natural science to lose its abstractly material - or rather, its
idealistic - tendency, and become the basis of human science",
it has to set broader aims than simply the intensified growth and
consumption of matter, energy, and information. As technology becomes
ever more powerful, becoming an end in itself, the fragility of nature
is exposed, and its destruction becomes a real possibility, wiping
out the very material foundations of the being of humanity itself.
For we are witnessing a transition from an environment developing
in a pro-anthropic direction to one taking an anti-anthropic path
that could result in the destruction of all 'organic' forms of life.
The transition through infinite accumulation of wastes is a form of
losing the biosphere's qualitative definiteness, a form of transmutation
into something opposite. Norbert
Wiener looks at the problem in accordance with the laws of thermodynamics:
As
entropy increases, the universe, and all closed systems in the universe,
tend naturally
to deteriorate and lose their distinctiveness, to move from a state
of organisation
and differentiation in which distinctions and forms exist, to a state
of
chaos and sameness.
In
relation to the species Homo-sapiens this means that we are
hastening the process of entropic dissolution by introducing regressive
and chaotic elements into the environment. This has lead some theorists
to the proposition of humanity's parasitic essence in relation to
nature. Jean Dorst, for instance, compares humanity with "a maggot
in a fruit", or "a moth in a ball of wool", gnawing away "at his habitat,
while exuding theories to justify his existence". A complete abjection
"where man frightened, crosses over the horrors of the maternal bowels"
and is completely engulfed in a technology parasitically consuming
the corporeal body of maternal nature. The human species transformed
into a "great greedy
parasitic worm, blind and degenerate, snug in excrement, isolated
in a seething mass of eroticised abjection, which he substitutes for
the other. The secret life of Technocratic Man".
In
response to a technological and disenchanted view of nature as just
so much dead stuff, narrowly quantified in accordance with the laws
of computation and utility as simply raw material for profitable exploitation,
and the implacable imperatives of a technology and its impetus towards
the wholesale subjugation of nature, like "some huge engine which
has senselessly seized, cut to pieces, and swallowed up - impassively
and unfeelingly - a great and priceless Being", Julia Kristeva opts
for an interpretation of Marxism based upon a combination of production
and reproduction; and a labour process centred upon the libidinal
intensities of the corporeal body as the underlying form for the realisation
of a qualitative, reciprocal, non-utilitarian, aesthetic, and eroticised
relationship between subject and object, humanity and nature.
Accordingly,
Kristeva defines productive activity and the labour process along
the lines of reproductive sexuality as a relation between the worker's
body and the body of nature, involving an expenditure or discharge
of human energy. Humanity and nature are therefore considered as two
equally necessary halves of a single entity. The union of the two
is considered by Kristeva as an act of love, where subject and object
are conjoined through the
dynamics of the forces and relations of production, in combination
with psychic processes of introjection and incorporation, osmosis
and identification. Where, in place of the existing model of economic
production, with its notions of scarcity, an asceticism of labour,
and its emphasis upon an endless accumulation of surplus value, Kristeva
asserts the need for the construction of a new 'science' of economy
based upon notions of reciprocity, of the gift, expenditure, bodily
enjoyment, play, unification and communion, expressing an awareness
of the shared possession of a common substance. Kristeva illustrates
her proposition with a quotation from Marx: "As William Petty puts
it, labour is its (wealth's) father and the earth its mother".
In
occupying a position of political opposition and criticism towards
the established sociosymbolic order, Kristeva samples, combines and
re-mixes ideas extracted from a variety of sources. These include
the theories of psychoanalysis in combination with the philosophical
systems of Hegel, Marx,
and Lenin. For instance, Kristeva displays an interest in the theory
and application of dialectical materialism when she writes "the Hegelian
conception of negativity already prepares the ground for the possibility
of thinking a materialist process".
For
Kristeva the dialectical method serves to connect any two opposed
terms or positions; it functions to unite, or to separate and divide,
thus undermining stable unities. A dialectic that consists of an open-ended,
continuous flux, a continual becoming that abolishes all classification,
culminating in the disappearance of strict lines of demarcation. An
all-pervasive dynamism, where the distinction between the container
and the contained becomes irrelevant. Where seeing, thinking, dreaming,
and writing are interrelated; and the subject of writing and the subject
who writes alternately fuse and fission, in conjunction with a materialised
process of creation involving the inseparability of object and subject,
and multiple juxtapositions and dislocations of texts involving the
fusion of seemingly unrelated themes. A poetic process that obliterates
limitations and classifications, producing poetry that evolves not
in accordance with any regular progression; but instead, through the
recurrent use of metaphors and motifs, coheres. And where the body
ceases to be circumscribed by barriers that artificially separate
the self from the other, or from the external world.
The
nature of this dialectical and materialist conception of the world
as a continual process of movement and change, perpetually in conflict
with the encrustation of the mechanical in the living, and the tendency
towards sterility, inertia and rigidity symptomatic of the sociosymbolic
order, is succinctly defined by Kristeva with a quotation from Lenin:
"The splitting of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory
parts is the essence of dialectics". Everything is, therefore, to
be understood as a unity of contradictory or opposed elements; everything,
in the language of dialectics, is a unity of opposites. It is the
insistence that change must eventually confront the finite elasticity
of all things and all structures, effecting a fundamental transformation
of their very nature. Accordingly, beneath the appearance of every
seemingly stable and unified thing there lies constant tension and
opposition.
The
focus is therefore not on the outward appearance of stability and
permanence, but on the underlying reality of internal conflict and
permanent movement. Where the unity of subject and object, and the
relativity of the antithesis between matter and consciousness, is
expressed in Lenin's declaration: "We must dream!". "Man's consciousness",
Lenin contends, "not only reflects the objective world but creates
it". And he points out that the idea of the ideal turning into the
material is a very profound one, for we are constantly witnessing
complicated processes of the material being transformed into the ideal
and of the ideal being transformed back into the material. These complicated
and contradictory mutual transformations of the material into the
ideal and vice versa demonstrate the relativity of the contrast between
spirit and matter. According to Lenin, human consciousness is therefore
not simply "a reflection in a mirror but a complex act.......which
includes the possibility of an imaginative flight from life; and,
even more, it includes the possibility of a transformation of the
abstract concept into an imaginative fantasy (which ultimately = God)".
Karl
Marx also appreciates the allure of fantasy expressed in the "youthful
and fantastic dream" of Hegelian philosophy, and he aspires to bring
reality into harmony with that idealised image of a world that philosophy
had hitherto realised only in thought. In a spirit of optimism, he
proclaims that the world "has not yet become clear to itself. It will
then turn out that the world has long dreamt of that of which it had
only to have a clear idea to possess it really". For Julia Kristeva
dialectical theory equally applies to Freud's interpretation of the
'dreamwork'. Particularly in the way that dream symbols, through the
processes of condensation (metaphor) and displacement (metonymy),
can say one thing and, at the same time, mean the opposite. Freud's
'Dream-work' provides Kristeva with "a theoretical concept that triggers
off a new research" that places the dream in opposition to the prosaic
world of conscious activity, providing an alternative model of production,
a "playful permutation" whereby things a given a new form.
Accordingly, Kristeva incorporates Freud's definition
of the dream as the symbolic fulfillment of desires denied satisfaction
in the real world, along with the inevitable conflict that ensues
between, on the one hand, the body's demands for a pleasurable satisfaction
of its desires and, on the other hand, a disagreeable reality that
obstructs the gratification of these desires. A conflict ameliorated
through the construction of an interior world of 'phantasy', described
by Freud as a kind of nature reserve where humanity's unfulfilled
desires are protected, providing the blueprints and building
blocks for the construction of a new reality to replace the old.
A
process where the subject-positions of
'normalcy' and 'psychosis'
merge together in the common goal of transforming reality in accordance
with the wishful constructions preserved in phantasy. Resulting in
two different approaches: in practical action directed towards the
outside world designed to achieve the remoulding of objective reality
in favour of erotic desires previously denied (Freud's "alloplastic
adaptation"); or in a 'psychotic', philosophically idealist approach,
concentrating upon passive, internal changes, amounting to the construction
in thought of an ideal reality as a substitute for the partial or
complete denial of the existence of the real external world (Freud's
"autoplastic adaptation").
Kristeva
forcefully proclaims the notion of art as constitutive of the subject,
rather than constituted by the subject:
It's necessary to
see how all great works of art – one thinks of Mallarme, of Joyce, of Artaud, to mention only
literature – are, to be brief, masterful sublimations of those crises of subjectivity
which are known, in another connection, as psychotic crisis..........It is, very simply,
through the work and play of signs, a crisis of subjectivity which is the
basis of all creation, one which takes as its very precondition the possibility
of survival
Julia
Kristeva's analysis of the painter Giovanni Bellini's ideological
and cultural (or 'symbolic') articulation of the mother/child relationship,
includes a detailed examination of the psychological, social, economic,
historical, and artistic practices that together combine to determine
the 'personality' of the painter Giovanni Bellini as a historical
'subject', grappling with the artistic dilemma of representing the
unrepresentable - the shared bodily space of mother and child. According
to Kristeva:
an
artistic practice...not only operates through the individual (biographical
subject)who
carries it out, but it also recasts him as an historical subject -
causing the
signifying process that the subject undergoes to match the ideological
and political
expectations of his age's rising classes....One cannot understand
such practice without taking its
socio-economic foundations into account; nor can one understand
it if one chooses to reduce it solely to these foundations thereby
bypassing
the signifying economy of the subject involved.
Kristeva's
essay on Bellini is a project that incorporates and recombines semiotics,
psychoanalysis, Hegelianism and Marxism to produce a 'semanalysis'
that provides "dialectical logic with a materialist foundation - a
theory of signification based on the subject, his formation, and his
corporeal, linguistic, and social dialectic". Accordingly, Kristeva
opts for a form of (Marxist) historical materialism involving a subtle
and complex appreciation of the relations between the forms of social
consciousness (and the signifying practices of the cultural 'superstructure')
and their material and economic basis. For Kristeva society consists
of a complex and dynamic system of interacting elements, each influencing
the other - a system where the economic factor is the determining
one only in the 'last instance'. A complex unity and mutual interchange
of distinct, necessarily related but relatively autonomous practices,
where the signifying practices that make up the cultural superstructure
actively influence the material basis from which they arise, forming
an organic whole. One in which the 'symbolic order' of the 'superstructure'
- culture, politics, ideology, language - and the corporeal (the 'semiotic')
are treated as specific instances of a complex totality, articulated
upon each other and upon the economy. Where, to quote the philosopher
Louis Althusser:
The
economic dialectic is never active in the pure state; in History,
these instances,
the superstructures, etc. are never seen to step respectfully aside
when their
work is done, or when the time comes, as his pure phenomena, to scatter
before
His Majesty the Economy as he strides along the royal road to the
Dialectic.
From the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the 'last instance'
never
comes.
According
to Kristeva: "Love replaces narcissism in a third person....Hence,
'God is Love': it is for this very reason that he does not exist,
except to be imagined as child for a woman". Kristeva's emphasis on
the social primacy of love is therefore completely at odds with the
type of 'vulgar' Marxism that would compare copulation to the drinking
of a glass of water: a the concept of love and life is de-romanticised
and disenchanted to the point where it loses its poetry, and is rendered
purely instrumental. Kristeva is therefore opposed to a type of Marxism
that reduces love and sex, the amorous and the artistic, to the biological
and the economic by stripping away the cultural accretions that tend
to glorify and preserve a passionate and lyrical relationship to existence.
A Marxism that reduces everything cultural directly to its economic
basis; a type of Marxism also opposed by Lenin:
This
"glass-of-water-theory" has made part of our youth completely crazy.
Its advocates
contend that it is Marxistic. No thank you, for such a Marxism which
makes
all phenomena and all changes in the ideological superstructure of
society derive
directly and immediately from its economic basis. Things are not as
simple as
all that................To try to reduce these ideological changes,
divorced from their
context with the total ideology, to the economic basis of society
would be rationalism,
and not Marxism. Surely, thirst demands to be quenched. But will a
normal
individual, under normal circumstances, lie down in the gutter and
drink from
a puddle? Or even from a dirty glass? What is more important than
anything else
is the social side. Drinking water is an individual act. Love requires
two people
and may result in a third life. This fact contains a social interest.
The
ancient Greeks developed their thought around beliefs concerning body
heat, and its role in determining the differentiation of the sexes.
Foetuses well heated within their mother's womb were born as males;
foetuses lacking heat were born as females. The female was a creature
"more soft, more liquid, more clammy cold, altogether more formless
than were men".
The
philosopher Aristotle investigated this inequality of heat, and drew
a connection between menstrual blood and sperm: menstrual blood was
cold blood, sperm was cooked blood. Sperm was superior as it created
new life; menstrual blood was considered inferior as a substance passive
and inert. For Aristotle, the male possessed the principle of movement,
action and creativity; in contrast, females he defined as identical
with the formless passivity of flesh and materiality.
Aristotle
also investigates the role of heat in the development of melancholia.
According to Kristeva: Aristotle
breaks new ground by associating melancholia with heat, considered
to
be the regulating principle of the organism. This Greek conception
of melancholia
remains alien to us today; it assumes a properly balanced interaction
of
air and liquid. Such a white mixture of air (pneuma) and liquid
brings out froth in
the sea, wine, as well as the sperm in man. Indeed, Aristotle links
melancholia to
spermatic froth and eroti, with explicit references to Dionysus and
Aphrodite. The
melancholia he evokes is not a philosopher's disease but his very
nature, his ethos.
It is what strikes the first Greek melancholy hero, Bellerophon, who
is thus portrayed
in the Iliad: 'Bellerophon gave offense to the gods and became
a lonely wanderer on the Aleian plain,
eating out his heart and shunning the paths of men'. Self-devouring
because forsaken by the gods, this desperate man was condemned to
banishment, absence, void.
Aristotle's
association of heat with the melancholic disposition of male philosophers
and heroes, his conception of blood as either cooked or uncooked,
and the role of blood and body heat in determining the differentiation
between the sexes, relates to an even older tradition which ascribes
"the bones to the male principle and the flesh to the female". In
accordance with this tradition, bone marrow is derived from semen,
which is cooked blood, while the fat in flesh is derived from uncooked
blood, which is cool and female.
In
The Raw and the Cooked, Claude Levi-Strauss explores the binary
opposition between Nature and Culture, and the function of cooking
as a universal means by which raw Nature is transformed into Culture.
The ancient differentiation between flesh and bone, hot and cold,
blood cooked and uncooked, male and female, is analogous to Levi-Strauss'
notion of experience as organised along the lines of binary opposites.
Accordingly, Aristotle's conception of the female as 'uncooked' equates
women with Nature, while his conception of the male as 'cooked' equates
men with Culture.
The
philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel represents nature as the
'alienation' and abject degradation of the Absolute Idea or Spirit.
Hegel provides a lengthy and detailed description of the processes
through which this Absolute Spirit incorporates itself into the objects
of the material world for the purpose of self-realisation, culminating
in a climactic resolution to the conflict between spirit and materiality,
mind and body, subject and object. According to Hegel, the anatomical
distinctions between male and female exemplifies a hierarchical principle
privileging activity over passivity, and productive form over chaotic
materiality. Hegel thus attaches considerable importance to the anatomical
distinction between the testicle, the ovary and the clitoris, with
the female genitalia considered as an inside-out version of the male:
internalised, hidden and enclosed, rather than outward and exposed.
A fact that represents for Hegel an interior-exterior barrier that
determines the difference between Being-For-Itself from Being-In-Itself,
and the distinction between human, conscious existence and the existence
of mere things. Nature (as female) is conceived as a lifeless, dispersed
mode of existence awaiting the purposeful, projective activity of
the (male) Spirit to bring it to fulfilment. A trace of the ancient
conception of the active male principle as synonymous with the bone
is expressed in Hegel's declaration: "The being of Spirit is a bone".
Thus
for Artaud:
To live,
you have to be somebody,
to be somebody,
you have to have a BONE,
and not be afraid of showing the bone,
and losing the meat in the process
The
philosopher Karl Marx, expressing his impatience with Hegelianism,
declares philosophy to stand "in the same relation to the study of
the actual world as onanism to sexual love". In his own words, he
puts Hegel's philosophy "on its feet" by recognising that matter is
the stuff of all existence and that all mental and spiritual phenomena
are its by-products. Henceforth, Hegel's self-realisation of the Spirit
is replaced with the notion of a progressive, historical development
of the material forces of production. A history where the 'humanity'
of "man's relation to nature" can be gauged by "the relation of man
to woman". In this respect it is interesting to compare Marx's (philosophical
materialist) attempt to stand the absolute idea of
Hegel's philosophy "on its feet" with the relentless materialism expressed in Georges Bataille's
essay "The Big Toe", where he concludes that "Human life entails,
in fact, the rage of seeing oneself as a back and forth movement from
refuse to the ideal, and from the ideal to refuse - a rage that is
easily directed against an organ as base as the foot".
In
her article 'Thin is the feminist issue', Nicky Diamond quotes the
actress Jane Fonda, her body honed down and stripped away through
bodybuilding, declare: "I like to be close to the bone". Like the
world champion female bodybuilder Lisa Lyon, who posed for a series
of black and white pictures by the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe
titled Lady:
Lisa Lyon,(1983), Jane Fonda's desire 'to be close to the
bone' suggests an attempt at containment, a fixing of boundaries and
the removal of 'fat' as excess, surplus matter in an attempt to realise
the ideal of the essential, integral self. The achievement of this
ideal of closeness to the bone means that the skin surface that forms
the body's outside tightens and enfolds itself around the skeleton
that forms the body's inside. While the philosophical idea may be
that of the container and the contained, there may also be an allusion
to certain psychoanalytic theories of an early 'skin-ego', conceptualised
as a 'psychic envelope'.
Marx's
exploration of the 'anatomy' of society leads to his assertion of
the determining role of the material, economic 'base' in shaping the
cultural and ideological 'superstructure'. This connection of cultural
forms to an underlying material, economic structure is further explored
in the writings of the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. In a rather
curious passage from The Prison Notebooks, Gramsci employs
the female body as a metaphor to illustrate a more complex understanding
of the relationship between base and superstructure against a Marxism
that treats culture as simply an epiphenomenal reflex of the 'economic':
We
cannot say, with regard to the human body, that the skin (and the
type of beauty
prevalent at a particular time) is mere illusion and that the skeleton
and anatomy
are the sole reality; however, for a long time something similar has
been maintained.
Questioning the role of the anatomy and the functions of the skeleton
does
not mean claiming that men........can live without them. Continuing
the metaphor,
we can say that it is not the skeleton (in the narrow sense) which
makes one
love a woman, but we understand how much the skeleton contributes
to the grace
of her movements, etc.
Julia
Kristeva's study of motherhood expresses an excess that converts the
order of the patriarchal family into a disorder that blurs the boundary
between narcissism and object-love, verging on the breaking of the
incest taboo. Amounting to a re-activation of the relationship between
the maternal and the sexual - from the vantage point of the mother
and her retention of (or return to) some of the characteristics of
infantile sexuality, rather than that of the child and his/her development
toward heterosexual 'normalcy'. An androgynous or same-sex embrace,
an asexual union that breaks down the distinction of inside/outside,
in so doing revealing the process of the inside turning into the outside
producing a hybrid. The liminal space of hybridity, where gender and
cultural differences touch, abolishing the binary oppositions and
distinctions that account for the divisions of gender: Artaud's 'Body-Without-Organs'
– the achievement of non-personalised and uncodified desires,
disintegrating normalised identities; a movement of constant desire,
which relentlessly opposes all systematic organisation.
K.OSMOSIS
Dear
Catherine, Despite my autism, you have got under my skin. I am bereft,
and suffer the torments of the damned.
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