Becoming Singular in That Hideous Strength

CS Lewis, That Hideous Strength

*************************************

“That is the point,” said Frost. “One must guard against supposing that the political and economic dominance of England by the N.I.C.E. is more than a subordinate object: it individuals we are really concerned with. A hard core of individuals really devoted to the cause—that is what we need and are under orders to supply. We have not succeeded so far in bringing many people in—really in..."

“Of course,” said Wither, “nothing is so much to be desired as the greatest possible unity. Any fresh individual brought into that unity would be a source of the most intense satisfaction—to—ah—all concerned. You need not doubt that I would open my arms to receive—to absorb—to assimilate this young man."

*************************************

I. Ice-burgs in the Oceanic Mind

Following my post on Fragmenting Minds, I wanted to address the benefits and dangers of Defragging a mind, or making it singular.

The benefits are in many ways clear to me during brief vacation to Chicago for Thanksgiving where I get to eat, sleep, and hopefully reset my brain some before returning to work. Fragmenting requires creating walls and distinctions which take much effort to maintain and which ultimately fail. We might loosely think of the efforts of structuralism to hold off deconstruction, or normativity to hold off queerness.

Things relax and we can focus (or not) on singular things. We can thus shake off the strain of stress and complicated mental processes. This simplicity makes thought and work easier, often because it involves simplifying our reading of the environment. This may even be relatively harmless, given we don't need to make any complicated or consequential decisions. Following our "gut" may be dangerous when electing politician, but is less so when electing which glazed doughnut to buy.

The dangers of Defragging however can be illustrated by the complimentary pair of antagonists in CS Lewis's That Hideous Strength: Prof. Frost and Mr Wither. Both have effectively made their minds singular.

The former has sharpened his thought (we are told) to a point, coming as close to a singularity as possible. The latter has broadened his thought (we are told) to be utterly open, becoming as global in his thinking as possible. Both, as is seen, in doing so not only dissolve the distinctions of other bodies, but themselves come as close to 0 as possible in their attempts to become 1. They are either too narrow or too wide to seem to be anything at all.

*************************************

“Before going on,” said Frost, “I must ask you to be objective. Resentment and fear are both chemical phenomena. Our reactions to one another are chemical phenomena. You must observe these feelings in yourself in an objective manner. Do not let them distract your attention from the facts...Motives are not the causes of action but its by-products. When you have attained real objectivity you will recognize all motives as subjective epiphenomena. You will then have no motives and you will find that you do not need them...”

“And that,” continued Frost, “is why a systematic training in objectivity must be given to you. It is like killing a nerve. That whole system of instinctive preferences, whatever ethical, aesthetic, or logical disguise they wear, is to be simply destroyed...."

He understood the whole business now. Frost was not trying to make him insane; at least not in the sense Mark had hitherto given to the word “insanity”. To sit in the room was the first step towards what Frost called objectivity—the process whereby all specifically human reactions were killed in a man so that he might become fit for the fastidious society of the Macrobes. Higher degrees in the asceticism of anti-nature would doubtless follow.

*************************************

II. Prof. Frost: the Frozen Mind

Prof. Frost appears to embody the critique that is often made against Modernism: it becomes increasingly focused and narrow in its parameters until next to nothing fits into it.

This form of singularity can be incredibly efficient and justified, as simplistic thinking often can. People like seeing hard decisions made quickly and willfully, hard questions answered easily and with brevity, and things getting done in sensitive and consequential circumstances. But this usually depends on setting values and methods which set up unsustainable ecological conditions and which do great violence to anything that does not fit within the real of valued bodies.

Focus, logic, and objectivity are great. They are however ideologies. That is to say, we may be able to imagine them in the abstract, 1 + 1 = 2, but they are hard to "prove" or much less "use." Without going into the entire history of pre-modern, modern, post-modern critiques of reason, it is enough to say that it may seem pragmatic to give your new step-cousin roller-blades for Christmas, to stay up all night preparing for a meeting, or to try to set up your lonely co-worker Jim with a woman from the mail-room. But then you find out after doing so, that your new cousin is in a wheel-chair, your workplace burned to the ground that night, or that your co-worker prefers to date men.

It is often required that we make decisions and act as one person, but the more diverse things we can be conscious of at once, the better decisions we can make. It may be straining, especially when many important thoughts are operating at once, but we experience the benefits and pleasures of having those "nerves" active. I wrote earlier derogatorily of following your "gut" but your "gut" or emotions or subconscious or however you come to understand the less articulate parts of your consciousness is information as well. 

It seems from my experience that when two choices seem equally logical, then following my various feelings can put me in touch with lots of "little" observations or memories. This also fits in with what last post I negatively described as "choosing what you really want." I may want the burger and the hot-dog and the salad but can't eat them all at once, but listening to the various parts of me that just aren't in the mood for meat right now may lead me to selecting what is really the healthier choice. Plus, I may be more likely as a result to enjoy the results. 

Such are the joys and perils of being "Frosty."

*************************************

"The Deputy Director [i.e. Wither] hardly ever slept. When it became necessary for him to do so, he took a drug, but the necessity was rare, for the mode of consciousness he experienced at most hours of day or night had long ceased to be exactly like what other men call waking. 

The manner and outward attitude which he had adopted half a century ago were now an organisation which functioned almost independently, like a gramophone. While the brain and lips carried on his work, and built up day by day for those around him the vague and formidable personality which they knew so well, his inmost self was free to pursue its own life. A detachment of the spirit not only from the senses but even from the reason was now his. 

Hence he was still, in a sense, awake an hour after Frost had left him. His eyes were not shut. The face had no expression; the real man was far away, suffering, enjoying, or inflicting whatever such souls do suffer, enjoy, or inflict when the cord that binds them to the natural order is stretched out to its utmost."

*************************************

III. Mr Wither: the Oceanic Mind

Mr. Wither on the other hand appears to embody the critique often waged against many post-modernists, which is that they become relativists, and become so open as to lose any sense of form, position, or decision making ability.

The benefits of this frame of mind are also pretty apparent. Being able to listen without speaking over another or pushing them aside, remaining flexible, at least appearing to be able to accept new persons or new ideas with ease. But these also presume that at some point a response will be given, a position enforced, and acceptance given which effectively denies certain possibilities from becoming realized. If trying to persuade Frost is like running at the point of a sword, then trying to persuade Wither is like running through mist. Nothing really happens, but you might become a bit more disoriented.

Fluidity is great. But this too is ideology. While Frost once again illustrates a kind of fanatic or fundamentalist ideology, Wither illustrates an ideology which never rises to the level of articulate thought. A person who exhibits too oceanic thought in this sense may seem like they are on every ones side, but when push comes to shove, they slip away. It is fair to say "I do not know" or "I cannot say definitively" because totality escapes us as it does Frost, but to presume you do not know anything is deny your vary ability to think (however imperfectly) and your ability to speak (however inarticulately). 

It is often required that we remain open to change and unexpected outcomes, but refusing to move ahead because you cannot know or control all things will lead to either bring about little good for the things you do value (which in the extreme may be all things or effectively nothing) or bring about negative effects by refusing to participate or use the things you are given. Using the example from before, it may be that you are not sure on the ability of your cousin to roller-blade, your business to be there in the morning, or the sexual orientation of your co-worker, but to be too Withered would mean potentially slighting your relative by not giving a gift, being unprepared for a meeting, or leaving your co-worker totally alone when he could use some company.

Gathering further knowledge and view-points is helpful, as is expecting the unexpected, but not acting because it might be a mistake may be more or equal an act of pride as Frost's assertions of self. Both refuse to admit the possibility of failure. Is that not a critical element in the stress of Fragmenting? We fear failure in our thinking and our work. What singularity offers us is a way to ignore the potential for being wrong. This is itself almost an insurance that failures will occur, you just won't be worrying or cognizant of them. You become like Wither, a tool of great violence but with no idea of what he is doing.

Such are the joys and dangers of being "Withered."

*************************************

"Neither at this stage of the conversation nor at any other did the Deputy Director look much at the face of Frost. But either Frost or Wither—it was difficult to say which—had been gradually moving his chair, so that by this time the two sat with their knees almost touching...

They were now sitting so close together that their faces almost touched, as if they had been lovers about to kiss. Suddenly there was a crash. Who’s Who had fallen off the table, swept on to the floor as, with sudden, swift convulsive movement, the two old men lurched forward towards each other and sat swaying to and fro, locked in an embrace from which each seemed to be struggling to escape.

And as they swayed and scrabbled with hand and nail, there arose, shrill and faint at first, a cackling noise that seemed in the end rather an animal than a senile parody of laughter."

*************************************

IV. N.I.C.E.: The Meeting of Single Minds

In addition to being another example of CS Lewis attaching queer sexualities and gender identities on his "evil" characters, the meeting of Frost and Wither to form a unified body illustrates that in their extremes the Frost and the Oceanic come together.

As noted, both arise out of a desire to become 1: Frost by becoming a single colonial power and Wither by disappearing into a sort of pantheistic mind (which as articulated earlier, in equating a = b and b=c says that effectively a and c do not exist; all is b). The one becomes narrower and wider until they effectively become 0. With a diversity of things always at work, both methods commits violence against the self and others (in a sense by refusing to acknowledge the ways they coincide and conflict).

For those who suffer with anxious-depressive tendencies, this may seem lall too familiar. The deep desire to do one thing perfectly and the despair of doing anything both freeze up the body. Tricks to overcoming episodes of both are likewise similar: do something else. It sounds flippant, but to quote GK Chesterton's critique of rationalism and madness, he notes that usually monomaniacal thought streams cannot be argued out from because they are extraordinarily logical. They simply are very closed loops. Pushing on them or trying to think through them may not be effective because it just pushes things around the circle. The trick, as I said, is to loosen or divert thought out from its path. Get it to do "other" things which may very well not be logical. Get the mind to make mistakes and accept different thoughts at once; such as "mistakes are okay." This is at least one example.

Again, Fragmenting the mind has its strain and Defragging has its perils, but both prove useful in their own ways. Working under a lot of deadlines and also enjoying Thanksgiving dinner with family, I am experiencing both right now. In fact, adding these blog-posts has been a useful way to Fragment and do something different to help get my mind out of its loops; in addition to being an interesting line of thought in its own right.

*************************************

*************************************

Fragmenting Minds: Becoming More than One Person

"Action is not done under the full control of consciousness; 

action should be felt as a node, a knot, and conglomerate 

of many surprising sets of agencies"

Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern

"So who is pulling the strings? 

Well, the puppets do in addition to their puppeteers” 

Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Some might call it being able to "multi-task" but that move shuts down what I feel to be a complicated and important ability we have to fragment our minds to be able to process different tasks simultaneously or switch from task to task without needing to start again from step 1.

Moving into application season, at the same time as term papers, while managing a list of other professional and personal works, I have become more and more aware that I've needed to be more than one person to get it all done at once. 

As often as I have the benefit to do so, or when something receives the whole of my attention, I can use the fragmented abilities of my mind to receive, organize, and respond to multiple things at once to get the best visual picture of the situation that I can. When listening to a colleague make an astute point, it is helpful to be able to listen to their language (physical and verbal), imagine what they are saying, connect it with past experiences and conversations, then initiate numerous responses at once: 

1. listening with an initial head-nod, 
2. a probing question for the next pause in the conversation, 
3. what is their expected response to that question,
4. the beginnings of a contribution for several minutes later when a more developed response will be expected, 
5. potential counter-points to that contribution,
6. an off-topic joke or personal comment to ease tensions just in case they seem to be anxious about the matter at hand,
7. some way to incorporate the other person at the table, who has been giving subtle signals of being bored and disengaged but not at a level which requires this task to be raised to a higher level of urgency (yet), 
8. what meeting do I have next?, 
9. did I remember to call my mother back?, 
10. this sitting position is uncomfortable, please shift it.

We all do it. Also, I might add I left out the other subtle dips we might take which can include many of the auto-responses of the body. This was listed in an order which somewhat suggests a hierarchy of thought, with the most attention being given to the higher and less engaged parts of the mind working over the lower. Within a moment however all that can change and it is not a perfect spectrum. Nonetheless, this gives the impression of the powers of the mind when most of it can be put on a single task.

When work piles up, however, which is the usual state of affairs, I find that I am able to designate parts of my thinking to specific tasks and use additional prostheses to my mental work that allow me to "wear many hats at once." The goal of this frame of mind is to give multiple things the benefit of my "100%" effort or my "full attention." The paradox is of course that in fragmenting my mind, it is no longer at 100% in the sense of being one whole thing. But the task still gets the 100% insofar as it gets a whole mind to focus on it. True, usually one mind is at the forefront, able to sit at a computer or work station and get the benefit of being "what I am doing right now." Still the other processes are going on. Even while one task is being worked on, my mind may look like this:

• ...the grant proposal needs to have language that better reflects the specific backgrounds of the participants and the institution. I made a draft of that earlier, where are my notes...
• ...the paper on Thomas Coryate needs to address his relations to language more in depth, but so far it has focused on his materiality. Derrida might be useful but might pose some problems...
• ....the seminar tomorrow has been trending towards disease, but has avoided discussing issues of how bodies might be read as normative versus diseased, or how disease may have been normalized...
• ... in the meeting tonight will probably end up reviving questions about the impact on the community, be good to look through my notes from two weeks ago to make sure we don't spend time simply regurgitating the same cycle of thought...

The effect of this from the outside is of course the appearance of some disorder, because the multiple notes, tools, computer files that I have open may seem like they are not connected and are just taking up space, but what is going on is the externalization of the thinking process using material aids so as to expand what I can think through by giving some of the tasks of memory or organization to paper or computer agents. 

Likewise, I have had it often pointed out to me, mostly by room-mates who get to see me in the midst of my writing projects, that I have a tendency to return to topics in the conversation or start new ones with little or no transition (something I of course avoid in public speaking or writing). This post is in fact inspired by one room-mate who informed me about myself by explaining one such topic shift to a friend as "oh, yeah, conversations with M during term paper time is often more like juggling topics than moving through them."

So, scattered brained and absent minded? I don't think so. Usually my brain is pretty organized and pretty present, its just fragmented. I admit it can be a bit jarring at times to jump from thing to thing, and there can be conflicts. I never understood it when people asked "well, okay, but which one of these options do you REALLY want?" I want both AND another AND another option! Parts of my thought push me in one direction while others compete with them. Sometimes there can be a consensus made or a new piece of information brought to light that can subordinate others, but often a decisions means some thought processes win out over others. There is joy, and disappointment, as well as mild-amusement and other reactions from parts of my thought which were less engaged.

Perhaps this came from listening to music, reading, and watching TV all at once as a student, but I doubt most of the people I meet can get through their day and get all their work done without in some way fragmenting their minds. Of course, there are limits for how many times you can divide yourself before things, well, fall apart.

Coming soon:
"Defragging: the Art of the Oceanic Mind"

No Sign(al): Your Call Cannot Be Completed as Dialed

or, Becoming Static: Can Queer Bodies Network?

"I can't see a thing on the video,

I can't hear a sound on the radio,

in stereo in the Static Age"

Green Day, Static Age

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Second Look at Extra-Personal Communication

You sit across the table from Megan and Katie in a window-side booth of a neighborhood Chicago diner. Megan and you have been going out for a few weeks now (depending on when you count from) but this is the first time you've met one of her really good friends.

The conversation lags in the beginning as your shyness competes with Katie's strangeness and Megan's inexplicable reticence. Then Megan offers that Katie and you both hate the Packers and things pick up; via a shared interest in teasing Megan on her clumsy social skills. From there, Megan watches and smiles over her food until the conversation turns to how you and her met, then it becomes a duet of storytelling with each partner sharing the many little details that the other drops out, now from an established stock of previous tellings, while Katie takes her turn as the bemused audience.

Then suddenly you are alone as Megan and Katie both got up and went to the bathroom together. You absentmindedly eat some more of your fries and stare at a text from a friend asking if you think things are going well.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the wake of the George Washington University Conference on Composing Disabilities: Writing, Communication, Culture, I have returned to a question I posed i an earlier blog-post on communication and what happens when there is a "Error, Misuse, Failure" Response, a Queer Response, a Response with no Sign(al). As we delve into Queer Materiality this is a pertinent question, both in regards to that which does not manifest into readable/normative signs and that which objects translation into language.

Returning to the scenario I posed: What if Katie suddenly got ill and had to leave before she could articulate her feelings on you? What if your question to your friend via text on how to read a certain exchange is ended by a cell phone dying? What if they never return from the bathroom?

These inquiries  reach back to my inaugural post for this blog, where I quoted Judith Butlers treatment of questions posed to any other. In light of her quote on "the question that does not seek to know" and the need to live with the "unknowability" of the other, we find our scenario has three parts:

1. Desiring to Know the Other
2. Telling the Other What it Is Through Our Question
3. Admitting our Impotence and Accepting the Ineffability of the Other

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"HELLO?!"

1. Is Anyone (Out) There?
or, Desiring Responses

The queer as that which sets and defies the limits of epistomology, as the face of the unknowable other, embodies the question: Che vois?

What do we do when we do not receive the desired feedback but our interlocutor remains in sight? What does the graduate student do when their professor stares enigmatically back at them after what had initially felt like an intelligent and daring point but which with every lingering moments feels all the more foolish or pedantic or worse? What do we do when we are faced with the terror of the unresponsive "Che vois?" in OUR body?

Psychoanalysts, such as Slavoj Zizek in the Sublime Object of Ideology, offer that there is an essential lack/nothingness that is at the core of consciousnesses, which propels into language, causing it to desire and to question. These questions perform the role of not only seeking that which would sure up its existence, thus filling the lack and ending the desiring/questioning, but primarily the role of obfuscating that the lacking/questioning is all that exists. We can never get what we want to know, because it does not exist and we cannot stop asking for it, because then we would cease to exist.

Actor-Networkers, such as Bruno Latour in Resembling the Social and Aramis, or the Love of Technology, offers that it is movement that sustains existence, so that questioning insofar as it is a velocity in the ecology towards other things continues the chain of causation. Looking at the question not in terms of consciousness but in terms of materiality, Latour nonetheless provides an answer by suggesting that while acts like questions may sometimes have reciprocity effects like answers, they need not. Still, the question itself is an effect of things entering the node of the body and bringing about the inquiry, so even if it is not an ANSWER, there is a response of things returning back to questioner, but they merely serve to perpetuate or divert the questioning.

In this case, it is the QUESTION which is the primary ANSWER.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Chaos is the ultimate muteness that forces speech to go faster and faster,

trying to catch the suffering in the words”

Arthur Frank, the Wounded Storyteller

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"#&$@%*?!!!"

2. The Persistent Ringer

or, Normifying Responses

Another answer is that we create an-other ecology which will feed-back an answer in the place of the silent, distant or inarticulate body.

In his book, Phantoms in the Brain, V.S. Ramachandran, M.D., Ph.D. puts his study and theories of the brain, and phantom limbs in particular, into accessible narratives for a lay audience. He explains how one of the most common phantom pains that patients complain of having is the sensation of having the absent fingers clenched, digging deep, nails penetrating, into the absent palm. Ramachandran suggests that this is the result of signals (little emissions of nervous energy) out from the brain towards the location of the severed hand, where it would typically would continue until the nervous system twitched slightly into the gripping position, possibly making contact with the skin. This twitch, however small, sends feedback information of the resistance and locations of the muscles (among other minute information) and with the loop complete the signals remain minor.

What happens when the hand is absent however is that in some cases the signal from the brain (in the form of energetic-material) does NOT feed-back and thus the signals become stronger and stronger, searching for a high enough intesntity in which the hand would twitch and send back an impulse (if it was there). With no response but with the persistant mapping of a hand in existence, the brain creates a smaller secondary circuit of impulses which registering the intensity of the impulse for the hand to twitch/squeeze makes the logical connection that this force MUST be incredibly now, to the point of a hand (if it was there) to be digging its nails deeply into the palm, and thus produces that corresponding experience.

With no return messengers, the kingdom assumes (i.e. creates a secondary, personal feed-back loop to provide it self with the information it is not getting, or not recognizing from outside) they must be fighting an intense battle on the front lines and require further aid.

With no sign from their god, daemon, spirit, etc, the devotees commit themselves to an ever deeper self-sacrifice before the altar.

With no reply of love from the beautiful Olivia, Orsino assumes that his arbiter Cesario must not have effectively transmitted the minds of the would be lovers; he "will not be so answered." He will continue in his self-languishing and to lecture his messengers to be all the more vigilant and crafty as he sends them off again.

In this case, the QUESTION short-circuits into a reiterated intensification of SELF.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Queer does not have a relation of exteriority 

to that with which it comes into contact...

If orientation is about making the strange familiar 

through the extention of bodies into space, 

then disorientation occurs when that extention fails."

Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

" --- "

3. No Sign(al),

or, Queering Responses

Like NASA pointing arrays of satellites towards the sky, often we must simply wait listening to the static noise, hoping either for something to translate into recognizable signs or for us to somehow discover a new language in the inarticulate sounds.

At some point we must face the reality of the Other, that is, the reality of transformation: what we transmit may not come back to us in the same form. Katie, or our arm, may no longer be there, but that does not necessarily mean that no-thing is there. To assume that simply because we do not and perhaps cannot understand what it going on does not mean that no-thing speaks back or no-thing exists; to assume that is not only insanely arrogant, it runs contrary to our very experience of discovery and wonder.

What might the queer answer sound like?

Moving Messages

• A shout or a call across the table will have very different responses than one made across the room, across the street, from a moving car, from a moving planet, across a swirling galaxy and beyond. Our call will shift as it leaves us, and even if all we here is an echo, it may not sound like our voices and we may not be alive to hear it. If we do receive a response, transportation may radically warp the message so as to duck the sign(al) out of our patterns for understanding.

Mixed Messages

• Like anyone who has ever listened to themselves shout in front of a vast, multidimensional space, the echo often comes back as a chorus of voices and baring the mark of a multiplicity of objects. The voices together make a new message and may contain in, like a hole or silence, that which can be carried but not articulated into signification.

Changing Messages

• Things, including language, are dynamic and will constantly suggest other forms, temporalities, places, languages as they churn in and out of our recognizable sight. Like Graham Harman's retreating objects, things have an interiority of which we can only perceive the external performance. Our strongest vision can never make a thing transparent to our sight and our greatest code crackers can never fix into language that which is not of language.

In this case, the QUESTION becomes not a question, but a MYSTERY.

ANSWERING our initial QUESTION: Yes, Queer Bodies can network but they Transform the Network in the Process.

Blood Economies in the Spanish & Revenger's Tragedy

“Fortunes flow to you -
what will you be, a girl?” 
Revengers Tragedy 2.1 167-68

*************************************

the Body Politic’s “Woman Problem” 
in the Revenger’s Tragedy

If the Body Politic is built on the politics of bodies, then we see in the Revenger’s Tragedy a battle to purge and police the polis against “incontinence” (as expressed by Steven Mullaney in the Place of the Stage: London, Play and Power in Renaissance England) coded through gendered movements of ebb and flows. If the city has been poisoned and is being or is to be punished for its sins, then the Revenger’s Tragedy demonstrates the evils of simply bleeding or flushing out the bad, instead taking issue with the over-flow of wealth, booze and bodies in and out of the city: in short, the body politic has plumbing problems which means, genders the language of the play. They have a woman problem.

By coding men as solid and women as liquid (a concept also expressed in Elizabeth Grosz’s Volatile Body: Towards a Corporeal Feminism), the problems of the city all come back to the feminine problem of things flowing red: blood, wine and the hot, blushing bodies of women who play the role of “bri(d/b)es” so men may inter-penetrate each other and thus perpetuate their material existence and their fantasies of wholeness.

“In the midst of all their joys they shall sigh blood” (5.2.22) 

Blood for blood is the motivation of the play’s keys players which is condemned by the tragedy’s literally damning ending, suggesting that continence and restraint of the body would be the more virtuous program. This over-flow of blood is itself constantly pinned to women by painting them as the reason for initial transgressions providing that the seductive beauty of a woman cannot be resisted by men and they are compelled to rape or murder them if women do not give over what their beauty has inspired desire for. Likewise women are the intermediaries by which such seductions or manipulations of justice are brought about, leading to the spurring on of vendettas to settle what the law did not. Furthermore, the very act of men penetrating men with their phallic swords, suggesting homosexuality is here tacitly coded as feminine as well and against nature. Murder is a kind of sodomy and the penalty for sodomy is death. Men are not to become women, they are not to flow, as the bodies of women are to be policed.

“I was begot of impudent wine and lust” (1.3.190)

Booze, specifically wine, is a lubricating agent which literally flows into the bloody/bodies of men and women spurring them on to acts deemed sexual incontinence and to murder. The play warns that an intoxicated man is more disposed to do evil but when women are present or even worse are themselves drunk then sin is sure to happen. Once again drink makes a man’s body flow (both in movement as well as through the expulsion of sweat, vomit, defecation and pending his further actions: blood and semen) and thus resulting become disgracefully feminized.

“the blush of many women, whose chaste presence

would e’en call shame up to their cheeks 

and make wanton sinners have good colours” (1.4.7-9)

Blushing is repeated throughout the play as a point in which the virtue and virginity of a woman can be tested. We can see in Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish the history of how the body was investigated in such a way as to surrender visible signs of truth when the person’s words could not otherwise be taken as honest. In another of Foucault’s works, the Birth of the Clinic, he discusses how the body, particularly the bodies of dominated/marginalized persons are interrogated for signs of disease. In this case, there is a spiritual disease (sin) but also potentially a physical disease (syphilis) which is being investigated based on the preoccupation with women’s sexuality and flow (as syphilis itself was understood to increase and be spread by flow)---this coded theme of a syphilis ridden London in Early Modern drama is treated in depth in Jonathan Gil Harris’s book Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism and Disease in Shakespeare’s England.

Then there is the un-virtuous flow of the seed into the woman (such as by infidelity via cuckolding or incest) of which the resulting child is a sign of her presumed sexual incontinence; again, it is stressed that even in the case of rape she is implicated by her attractiveness (she somehow “was asking for it”) and that her chastity was somehow so directly tied to the literal state of her body/vagina that even in a case of forced penetration she is dirtied. The resulting child itself, displayed in the play via the discussion of “bastards” are living signs of incontinence and are treated as such; leading them to act out their designated station as incontinent, even flowing feminine bodies (i.e. they spend, drink, seduce and kill).

“Men have no power, angels must work you to it” (2.1.86)

The presumed solitude and impermeability of men proves a problem in a world which needs ties to be made and goods exchanged, thus women are treated as the penetrable and movable middle where males can enter into a pact together; the exchange of a wife, daughter, sister for marriage is seen as a proper way in which men can affirm their physical relationship while neither of them having to physically or metaphorically enter each other. The wife is “one body” with her father and then her husband and so she is used to “bind” the male bodies together through a kind of extra-personal intercourse. In the case of cuckolding and rape, however this “one body” of the man’s is penetrated by another man without his consent and thus feminizes him. The woman is reduced to being the husband’s vagina by which he can issue out children but also himself be taken by another man; thus her benefit and peril to him.

Since she is a “middle-man” and a commodity, it may then be little surprise that the flow of money is also condemned in the same breath as women in the play. Both (as well as booze and blood) are seen to be pleasures which are to be held onto and not spread around (as merchants are want to do it, it is suggested, on all those fronts). Thus the question of money/bribery which threatens to sway the law and the rise of gallants to sway the cultural/courtly life of those whose fortunes are “set” and not based on the “flow” of merchandise becomes a central dilemma in the play. It can be read that the gallants (like the often feminized sailors or actors) are read as the false and incontinent imposters which are a living sign of a diseased economic/estate system. The economy of the city has syphilis; it has a feminine problem with flow, but without women or flow, there would be neither men nor London.

“Wipe your lady from your eye” (1.4.72)

All these issues with feminine inconstancy, it is suggested can be solved if women act as virgins, exemplified by the Virgin Queen Elizabeth. Their bodies flow is to be policed both regarding what enters it (including booze and phalluses) and what leaves it (blood and bastards). If this can be done, if men can avoid becoming women and flowing themselves, the play seems to suggest that virtue and justice may win out.  Of course, the concept of a male body which is totally continent and impenetrable, as well as the failure to address issues in the male homosocial by projecting their dilemmas of incontinence and penetrability, even hybridity onto women is doomed to fall apart. Likewise the premise of Virgin Queen which all women should strive to imitate is doomed to fail as well for the same reason as for men. The city flows and had always done so; materially, conceptually, financially it has always been an ecology. The growth of London may compound and introduce many problems but also develops many of the benefits which many of the flow naysayers may project or root in an idealized past which never existed or into a future Utopia which can never exist.

This tendency to long for an imagined pre-existing impermeability , a desire for a kind of Edenic “lost” wholeness which will one day we will be “restored,” a filling up of a “lack” so as to be whole again is a central concern for psychoanalysis. The Revenger’s Tragedy’s disposition towards women is systemic, in this reading, of some Londoner’s desire to “return to womb,” not in the literal sense but rather to an imagined a time and state of virgin perfection that never existed. This tension, Busse goes on to argue is what propels the fascination with women, flow, blood, booze and blushing even as they wish to be rid of them all: “they body forth abjection even as they attempt to contain it.” In this reading, the bodying forth of the feminized male form (with all its corresponding incontinences) is captured in the female characters performance by cross-dressed male actors. The city is becoming female, as are its citizens.

*************************************

*************************************

Blood Economies in the Spanish Tragedy

As in the Revenger’s Tragedy, Kyd sets up a repeated exchange of blood for blood in his play. This exchange seeks to justify the loss of life by sacrificing another body (against its will--- but is willingness the necessary component of a sacrifice or is it not a sacrifice if it is desired?). The result of this exchange is further exchanges of blood, creating an ongoing network of bodies being forfeited for one another.

We can see in the language surrounding these living, dead and undead bodies the anxiety surrounding the unknowability of their worth, the “standard” which serves as the foundation for their being. Without a known standard, the death of a body leaves others uncertain as the exact value of the loss and the proper (or possible) repayment for it. Through the play, three epistemologies of blood (as thing) are performed:  the death-drive (being as nonbeing), blood economies (being as network), and black boxes (being as retreating object).

“To absent yourself and give his fury place” … 

“To love, and fear, and both at once” (III.x.72/93)

Afoot in the play is a shifting game identifying with bodies (as family, friends and fiefs) and alienating them (as villains, monsters and murderers). The identified body is held close as a part of the self or when separate/resistant is spoken of as a love object which will one day be integrated into the self (such as in the case of a lover). The alienated body is cast out, destroyed, imprisoned or murdered. This distinction however is troubled throughout the play because of the failure for the qualities of self and other to ever extricated from one another. Bodies play the role of both other and self, to the self (including and especially ones own body). Thus one can never be sure, for long, whether one loves, or hates a body, or make peace while perceiving both.

The assumption here, among other rationale based on the decision that things which one identifies with (as subject) deserve life and those which is alien deserve death (as object). This is justified based on the further assumption that subjectivity has a standard of being which objects lack. Anxiety (literally “the feeling of death”) arises out the inability the distinguish between subject and object, especially as they relate to the self. The erotic game of sex and murder are then failed attempts to resolve the tension, serving only to defer the revelation of that “standard of being” indefinitely. This anxiety in psychoanalytic terms is the lack, the desire for blood (eros and thanatos) is the death-drive and the “standard” which is not there is the petite object a. What is clarified in these terms is not only that the self erotically desires the destruction of others and the self, but does so out of a desire for a state of “un-death” a return to a baseline “nothingness” which will resolve the tension of being (Zizek: the Monstrosity of Christ).

“for blood with blood shall, while I sit as judge, 

be satisfied, and the law discharged” (III.vi.35-36).

Looking back and closer into the identification and alienation process of the exchange of bodies (both human and non-human, organic and inorganic) we see how they are made of a constant of exchange of things. Money, land, titles, clothes, scarves, armor, swords and humans come together to form a person and are then exchanged to others to keep the ecology of selves alive. At times this exchange is done through friendly gifts, at other times through violent seizures or as court ordered reparations. In any case, things do not stay in one place very long but constantly move between bodies, acting on them as they are acted on (be they inspiring desires, killing, providing courtly pleasures or simply keeping the gears of economic and bodily digestion running).

In this sense, rather than being as the deferral of an inherent nothingness, beings become things through the constant ecstatic motion of exchange. The bodies become a blood economy. While the blood for blood flow in the play may not be “the best” ecology one can imagine, it IS an ecology of things that form a network of relations moving on one another. The blood-exchange keeps things moving and bodies get what they “need” from one another. In this case, the distinction between “living” and “not living” or “subject” and “object” is dissolved, so as the blood in the veins and the blood on a sword (or the sword itself) are revealed to share stations are “actors” in the network. The loss of human life does lose its privileged role but in ecology all things serve as the standard of agency-in/as-being. In other words: blood running through the veins of Horatio or running through the streets/veins of the body politics exemplify different frames/modes of ecological life; with different ethical implications.

“Show him this box, tell him his pardon’s in’t, 

but open’t not, and if thou lovs’t thy life, 

but let him wisely keep his hopes unknown” (III.V, 71-74).

To conclude and bring in a third model for blood-standards, I will dwell on the scene in which Pedrigano is being threatened with torture in order to (a) reveal in his body the truth of his claims and (b) to either purge his sins or reify the tortures of hell he will suffer after his execution (see Foucault’s Disapline and Punish). It is as this time that a messenger carrying a [black] box that is said to hold the T/thing that will save/justify his life; of course they are not able to open and make it disclose this final truth [see Serres/Latour’s black-boxes].

Here we have two objects with contain an unseen truth, a being which is inferred through suggestion and belief, a source at once deep inside and from without (be it in the body or box, or from heaven/hell or sent from the court). The thought in both cases, is that opening these objects would reveal the truth, but in both cases they do/can not. This may be that the standard does not exist or exists in the search for the standard; or it may be that it exists but further in, ever retreating into the body/object [see Harman’s Retreating Objects]. A person can keep digging, keep opening boxes within boxes and bodies within bodies but they will ever be left with both.  The body and the box stand forefront in the scene, visible but not fully present; suggesting but not disclosing their standard of value, being and truth. In this object-oriented ontology reflects the plays captivation of the audience, these things arrest the gaze of onlookers who peer in waiting for a reveal which is not totally differed (insofar as they DO get/see something) but which is never fully present.

So, blood as a queer object: death-drive, blood economy or black box?

Perhaps we have in a sense a trinity or simply three options. One offers an unmoved mover, the second a moving mover and the third a way to mediate between both (at the heart is the retreating object and between these objects a go-between which suggests its present and acts on others).

*************************************

*************************************

Blood and Water in the Lusiads

"One of the soldiers with a spear pierced [Christ's] side,

and forthwith came there out blood and water" (John 19:34)

The image that struck me most in my reading of the Lusiads was the repeated dying of rivers and oceans with blood. These scenes cluster within the narrated histories and prophecies of Portugal's conquest. A total of 13 such references exist in Canto Three; 4 times in Canto Four; and 2 notable times in the Divine Predictions in Canto Ten (to name a few).

So why does de Camoes insist on remembering histories where "swords smoked with blood" when "battle became massacre/with deaths, shrieks, blood and stabbing/such a myriad of people perished/that the very flowers changed color" (Canto 4:39-44) or future visions that "the sea will churn/with blood, fire and iron resistance to "make blood run knee-high/in the enemy ships" (Canto 10: 29-33)? Because in looking at Portugal’s past and "future," in order to describe the present, de Camoes finds the immortal thread which runs through them all: fluids.

In some ways, water and blood are natural symbols for the Portuguese: they are the conquerors of the sea. As de Castanheda writes, the old imperial conquests of Persia, Greece, and Rome "were all by land...but this of the Indies was done by sea" (Travel Knowledge 128). De Camoes and the Portuguese could see that the game of empire had changed so that the old game of the land based army and forts were giving way to ships and control of naval routes. By forcing all merchant ships to pass through their barricades and through their ports, the Portuguese squeeze out a hefty profit. Of course this type of conquest and extortion does not come peacefully, as Shankar Raman observes, "the use of force was in fact an implicit assumption from the very beginning" (Travel Knowledge 144).

But the fact of Blood and Water meant more than just a lot of both, as a pair of Transcendental Signifiers, it was through fluid use of rhetoric and Structure that de Camoes and the Portugese claim authority. It's so fluid it smacks of deconstruction. The way in which de Camoes interweaves the past and present empires into his narratives corresponds to how he mixes Greek and Christian divine powers. Greece and Rome are constantly being invoked in relation to Portugal. Likewise Bacchus genuflects to the image of the Holy Spirit. Venus and Hermes each inspire visions of Eden and Christ. Not only is there a kind of implicit emergence happening but merely in their constant grouping, signs are working together to build a flood of associations. Try to map the direct cause and effect and you might come up short, but passively read through the verse and you may find yourself drawn, perhaps because of distraction, into a belief that "yeah, those goes together."

Of course, Christ is himself a potential Bacchus-figure who himself is embodied in the wine of a destroyed (and fermented body) leading to an ecstatic state; and, along with the Holy Spirit, as a kind of Mercury figure situated as a shifting go-between. The mixture of fluid divine bodies, Greek/Roman/Christian, further demonstrate how even divinity may not be transcendent (above) but rather flowing between things.

This fluid movement of authority and narrative (which is characteristic on one level of the Epic, with all its windings) also allows de Camoes to rewrite histories and nature for the Portuguese. Not only do the "oceans quake spontaneously" (2:46) for them, as if in orgasmic excitement for their approach but the winds bow to their command "as it is now the custom of the sea, the sails unfurled, we bellowed: 'God's speed', and the north winds as usual/heard and responded" (5:1).Raman in fact, sees the whole project of telling the history of Europe and Asia from the Portuguese perspective as a kind of white-washing, which "begins to replace ‘native’ histories with its own representations of these histories" (Travel Knowledge 143).

The bait and switch happens in what Raman describes as "rejection of the signifier in favor of the signified" wherein de Camoes rewrites the icons/religions/books/gods of other cultures as shadowy images of the True God that could correctly signify Christ if only they had eyes to see it (Travel Knowledge 139). This is what the critic calls "the gap between the image and what it represents...to expose the blindness of the pagan to the hidden truth [and]...to convert intended evil into good" (Travel Knowledge 139). This sleight of hand (or rather the eye) is exactly how the Portuguese sailors in the Lusiads avoid numerous dangers, seeing the signs of treachery and transforming the circumstance to their benefit. Likewise, it allows for the appropriation of cultural, economic, political and religious systems for "proper" colonial use and conversion.

This disjunction between sign and signifier allows for the justification of Catholic teaching on scripture and religious icons by the Portuguese as another form of instilling authority. A prominent Reformation criticism of the Catholic Church was the worship of idols. In this rereading of signs and signifiers, it is evident that icons, relics, treasures, Cathedrals and the like are all fine, so long as they point to God and are not worshiped for themselves. According to a form of dialectics (which what John Milank suggests is the mode of Protestant/Enlightenment dualism) this would mean worshipping, or justifying one’s self to the “lack” of a transcendent signifier. As a paradox (which Milbank suggests is the traditional Catholic mode) the use of physical, subconscious (or unconscious?) modes of worship in which the mind is allowed to wander or to be changed through acts on the body which the mind is only lightly engaged in, inter-actions of mediation and slippage is allowed to flow. Without full subjective comprehension, one might wake up from the effects of holy water and wine to discover oneself carried in the flow of Portugal's religious currents.

*************************************

*************************************