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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
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