The Grotesque of the Body Electric
[In the following essay, Hitchcock uses the biographical details of Bakhtin's physical deterioration and the amputation of his legs in an exploration of the possibilities of the grotesque inherent in the carnival.]
We must share each other's excess in order to overcome our mutual lack.
—Michael Holquist
I begin with Bakhtin's leg; or rather, its manifest absence. I will begin by singing Bakhtin's body electric, the materiality of his body and the body-image that, in true historico-allegorical fashion, move across the borders of theory and practice.1 I commence, therefore, with the practical experience of Bakhtin's body. Bakhtin, a consummate theorist of the body, begins with the unconsummated nature of his own tissue, a body that for most of his life painfully reminded him of its fleshly imperfections. From an early age Bakhtin suffered from osteomyelitis, a bone disease that can set light to nerve endings as easily as it can kill them. The disease takes a variety of forms but in its chronic manifestation it causes inflammation around the bones (especially the long bones of the arms and legs) and secondary infections that often require high doses of anti-biotics. Common symptoms when present include sinus tract drainage which often emits a foul odour, bony sequestra, and non-healing ulcers. Although much about Bakhtin's health remains somewhat murky, there is no doubt that osteomyelitis played a crucial role in the decision to amputate his right leg in 1938. People do not write about the body merely because their body appears in permanent revolution against them but one might take on the possibility that Bakhtin's excessive body, its grotesque order of pain, has a pertinent and permanent inscription in his theorization. By the time Bakhtin is considering the borders of answerability in Vitebsk, the osteomyelitis has spread to his left shin, a hip joint, and to his right hand (Clark and Holquist, 1984). His body, weakened by the relentless nature of the disease, then suffers from a bout of typhoid, which further inflamed the bone marrow in his right leg and, in 1921, required an operation. Clark and Holquist note:
As a result of the operation on his right leg, Bakhtin was subject to periodic inflammation of the hip joint, which flared up several times a year, giving him acute pain and high temperatures and obliging him to spend as much as a month or two in bed. The fever was so high that his wife had to change his bedshirt several times a night. The pain was so great that he conducted his classes while lying on a couch.
(Clark and Holquist, 1984: 51)
It is likely that the periodic inflammation addressed here was again a product of chronic osteomyelitis but was exacerbated by typhoid. In his correspondence, Bakhtin comments, ‘It was a very grave operation: they chiselled through my leg, across the hip, they even chiselled through my shin’.2 Within the architectonics of answerability Bakhtin is at least attempting to answer the painful demands of his flesh. He is the author, and what Other confronts him as he lays upon the couch? Much more, of course, can be said about the value of Bakhtin's body in history. In general I am interested in Bakhtin as ‘a constant meditator on the meaning of borders’ (Holquist, 1990: xix), but particularly where the borders of the body exceed themselves. Architectonics is not a simple compensation or displacement device for the wholeness that Bakhtin does not feel; it is, rather, an attempt to understand the logic of work in effecting wholeness. It is not a theory on the perfectability of ‘Man’ but a detailed exegesis on the will to construct a human differently. True, in the early philosophical manuscripts Bakhtin will often discover an aesthetic solution to what is properly a sociopolitical problem (itself perhaps an allegory of Bakhtin's misgivings about the solutions posed in terms of Soviet Marxism at the time), but even when he finds that the artist and art ‘as a whole create a completely new vision of the world, a new image of the world, a new reality of the world's mortal flesh’ this whole is not solace from the mortal world but a ‘new plane of thinking about the world’ (Bakhtin, 1990: 191).
Diseases work in mysterious ways. In 1924, Bakhtin returns to Leningrad because the severity of his illness disqualifies him from officialdom's definition of the physically able: he is awarded a state pension (second class) and is no longer required to work. The paradox of illness is that a great deal of the world's most significant art and thinking would not have been possible without it (and one should add that a socialist outlook towards disability—or ‘socialized’ medicine for those who wish to overlook what Marx would call the rational kernel for its mystical shell—has played an enduring role in this realm of possibility). While one could argue that authorial will will overcome any obstacle, Bakhtin's pension provided him with a vital resource: time. This is by no means an endorsement of Soviet social relations of the 1920s. The same system that produced state pensions threw Bakhtin in jail in January 1929 (as part of a general purge of intellectuals). Again, however, his body intervenes, as if its persecution was better than the state's. The effects of osteomyelitis killing his right leg were compounded by paraphrenitis in the kidneys. Thus, in June 1929 Bakhtin's condition was ‘upgraded’ to Category Two which rewarded him with a hospital bed rather than a prison cell. In addition to an appreciable campaign to release Bakhtin from the thrall of political persecution, Bakhtin himself sent an application to the Commissariat of Health for official confirmation of the severity of his illness (he believed at this time that he was to be sentenced to several years at the dreaded prison camp on the Solovetsky Islands—easily a one-way ticket for someone in his condition). In a somewhat apposite interpretation of Derrida's work on the Pharmakon as poison and cure, one could say that what was killing Bakhtin was also preserving him. He was sentenced to exile in Kustanai, Kazakhstan, which, while no holiday, greatly improved his chances of survival.
Of course, the major medical event in Bakhtin's life took place on 13 February 1938 in Savelovo. The osteomyelitis had become so severe that Bakhtin's right leg was amputated. He would use crutches or a stick for the rest of his life. But, more importantly, he would experience the borders of the body in a different way, as a zone of prosthesis and image. I would argue that if the concept of the cyborg is founded on the body's shadowy existence between its fictional and fleshly self, then this notion came to write itself into Bakhtin's very being. In Savelovo Bakhtin would begin his most significant statement of the body's function in art and life, his ‘dissertation’ on Rabelais. As he struggled with his own carnivalized body, Bakhtin writes one of the twentieth century's most provocative works on the culture of the body. The cyborg confronts the grotesque.
Bakhtin as cyborg? This will require some qualification. The cyborg remains a symptom more than a reality—a concept with enough liminal being to provide both radical critical possibilities and conservative techno-determinist appropriations. We can, on the one hand, celebrate the cyborg for its guerilla epistemology because, in challenging dualisms of various kinds in the representation of the body, it explodes some of the trusted ‘truths’ of contemporary social formations (this, indeed, has been its particular allure for a developing corporeal feminism, of which more below). On the other hand, the cyborg embodies (sometimes literally) a deeply problematic thesis about the role of advanced technology with ‘actually existing’ transnational capitalism so that its very status as bodily enhancement or interface of flesh and technology is the last frontier of social control (and who gets what form of cyborganic being is also a direct integer of brute economic power). For some, the contradictions of the cyborg are a badge of faith in the undecidability of the moment: it is a symptom, therefore, of the nervousness with our system. Yet one wonders whether theory cedes too much in representing the cyborg as an inevitable symptom and that what results from this fatalism with fantasy is to pre-programme the future, and indeed the body, with a logic that is itself an instantiation of corporate lore (like Ford's famous quip about a choice of colours for a car that had only one)? Rather than simply read the cyborg as an allegory about the perfectability of ‘Man’ gone wrong (say, ‘from thesis to prosthesis’), we will explore the contours of its counter-logic, the conditions of its knowledge for body politics. On one level, these will be read (as I have already suggested) in relation to the tortuous labours of the body for Bakhtin. On another, these conditions, while fashionably eliding the absolute, suggest why the human in the cyborg says ‘no’ to the corporate logic that demands its obeisance. They are the conditions, I will contend, of the grotesque in body, action, and mind. They are the embodiment of imperfections and of pain.
This, too, should be clarified, for one could easily argue that whatever the conditions of knowledge in the concept of the cyborg, good old plodding techno-capitalism can still make robots of us all. Yet this misses the point. It is not enough to locate the radical potential of the cyborg in its shadowy being, then go on to admit that, after all, cybernetic developments will occur under the aegis of corporate capital or not at all (this is precisely Donna Haraway's intervention in her ‘Manifesto for cyborgs’ (1985)—of which more below). The initial explorations of a properly cyborganic imagination (redolent, for instance, in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein) pick up on a narrative of what makes a human, human, and link this to a horrific encounter of nature and science. The discovery is not the truism that when science plays god ‘Man’ is denatured (although the progressive politics in and around the formulation should not be disparaged): the crux of the matter is whether greater understanding of what makes a human, human, under historically specific conditions actually renders the domination of techno-capitalism impossible. In this sense (and sense perception is part of the argument), the cyborg is not the scene of carefully contrived discursive duplicity, but a ‘real contradiction’ with socio-economic portent. Could it be that the paradox of progress is that Marx's famous gravedigger of capitalism will be a machine-human composite who putatively at least was meant to be the ideal worker?3
I want to connect (or, more appropriately, reattach) Bakhtin's body to his concept of the grotesque in a way that inflects the determinate being of the cyborg. The subtext of the critique is the link between Bakhtin's experience of the liminality of his own body and the thesis of grotesquery that is coterminous with it. The symptom here is not the mere correspondence of biographical details (Bakhtin's lifelong battle with osteomyelitis) with certain theoretical formulations (the grotesque as excessive body and as an imaginative plane), but rather that Bakhtin's body is inextricably implicated in the grotesquery he elucidates in a way that emphasizes the material conditions of the body's question for the social. Indeed, it is the sublation of a conventional theory/practice split that makes Bakhtin's concept of the grotesque a vital contribution to materialist thought.4 Bakhtin (like Mary Shelley in this regard) explores the condition of the cyborg without ever naming it. And this is where the imaginative field of the grotesque, of the monstrous, of the excessively human, has its revenge on exploitative forms of rationality.
The first being to be termed a cyborg was a white rat in the 1950s, a fact with enough symbolic overtones to make an argument in itself.5 What is a cyborg? Conventional wisdom tells us that it is shorthand for a cybernetic organism, an expanding and problematic interfacing of human and machine. It can also represent the constructed wholes of separate organic systems. In recent years the definitions have multiplied which, while it has greatly expanded the borders of 'Borg culture, has tended to blur its potential for socio-critique. For instance, since we all interact with machines of various complexity, humanity is always already cyborgian by some accounts (all humans are ‘soft’ cyborgs or low-tech cyborgs). If one reduces cyborgian phenomena to the fact that machines are extensions of the self, then the specificities of integration may well be elided, as well as the more nefarious logic that makes the self an extension of the machine (the factory system within industrialization has consistently rationalized the latter). Let us say that the cyborg as a sign, as an arena of (class) struggle (to borrow from Bakhtin/Voloshinov) constructs its own hierarchies of significance according to ideologies of power, but these, from low-tech to advanced, do not define the real foundations that are their genesis. The plethora of definitions, therefore, should not obviate the need to analyse what conditions their possibility, including their function as ideology. The original development of cyborgs was fostered by the needs of the military-industrial complex: the quest for a sophisticated ‘man-machine weapon’ was as much a staple of the Cold War as it is of more recent high-tech ‘low intensity’ conflict (the representation of the Gulf War as a video game on CNN is, for the Pentagon, a triumph of cybernetic systems development). Of course, not all cyborganic development is military, but even otherwise benign technical advances in replacement body parts move in symbiosis with military conflict (‘refinements’ in anti-personnel mines have clearly intensified research and development in prosthetic limbs, whose fleshly counterparts are torn asunder in ever-increasing numbers from Vietnam to Afghanistan). The cyborg as killing machine crops up all over popular culture (Terminator, American Cyborg, etc.): this kind of cyborg is the Id of the military mindset, the ‘what if’ of technology's destructive self. On one level then, the grotesque cyborg is merely the name for obscene violence.
I have suggested that the chief representation of cyborg reality, however, is its function as symptom and, if we are to understand Bakhtin's profound contribution to the field of the cyborganic, this must be explained. There are many reasons why Donna Haraway's ‘A manifesto for cyborgs’ (1985) has become a classic statement on cyborg Being, and they all in varying ways advance key theses on the cyborg as symptom.6 First, cyborg politics are posited as a powerful rhetorical device. There is an endearing playfulness in Haraway's approach which is, as she notes, girded by an ‘ironic political myth’ (1985: 65) that the cyborg inspires. How so? The cyborg exists in a form of nether-world between fiction and reality, just as its subjectivity is caught in the contradictory hybridity of machinery and flesh. What Haraway does is pose this border being as a symptom of specific political dilemmas. To read the cyborg, in and of itself, as the solution to political problems in feminism or socialism (the subtitle of Haraway's essay is ‘Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s’) is to misunderstand her ironic stance. Thus, when Haraway boldly declares that ‘the cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics’ (1985: 66), it is irony that saves the formulation from crude technological determinism. The stress is on a Being at or beyond ‘our’ normative Selves. And, as Haraway emphasizes, one must come to terms with the chimerical components of our existence if we are to reformulate a properly radical political agenda.
The manifesto's second intervention is an extension of the first, for to embrace the rhetorical strategy of foregrounding the cyborg as an historical agent is to confront the possibility that its transgressive boundaries might form a political space for new tactical alliances. Obviously, the danger in this move is that the cyborg may be interpreted realistically rather than ironically and that activists may be dutifully miffed that the cyborg elbows its way into the political arena as a substitute for the delineated struggles of race, gender, ethnicity, class, and sexuality (to name just a few of the areas of social conflict with their own theories of ontology and politics). Nevertheless, in demonstrating the logic of what she calls the ‘informatics of domination’ (1985: 79), a logic that is predicated on oppressive dualisms or false dichotomies, Haraway shows how the advent of the cyborg offers new combinatory potentials in oppositional work. Again, for the uninitiated the difficulty is in seeing beyond the shorthand cyborg of popular culture (the T1000 of Terminator 2: Judgment Day seems to offer only an ontology of death) yet even then the popular embodies elements of the counter-narrative that Haraway is at pains to elucidate. The second intervention, then, proposes the cyborg as a heuristic device: it is a way to learn about the forms of politics possible at the end of the twentieth century.
The most important reason for the continued relevance of Haraway's strategy vis-à-vis cyborganic politics is in its lessons for feminism's critique of science. There are many other examples of feminist polemic against the patriarchal structures of supposedly neutral scientific thought (including the work of Sandra Harding, whose debate with Haraway over the status of the cyborg for feminist politics would provide a separate argument in itself), but few have so deftly raised the banner of feminism against the scientific rationalism busily fulfilling promises of an avaricious world system. True, Haraway has since significantly qualified her initial statements (which is as much a register of the dangers of irony as anything else), but her analysis of how cyborganic systems directly impact and are transformed by woman as subject remain a prescient critique of science's failure in the modern era. Technology may offer the cyborg, so says Haraway, but it cannot determine in advance all the forms of hybridity that its liminal being may make possible and this can be a touchstone for feminism's transgression of woman's objectification in scientific ‘development’.
What is feminist about Haraway's intervention is also what is Bakhtinian in this instance. First, cyborg imagery is deployed to displace the obsession of reproduction with regeneration: the bio-politics of birthing are carnivalized by the non-originary theses (or prostheses) of cyborganic being. Clearly, the psychoanalytic valorization of the Name of the Father must be continually challenged; Haraway's attempt is through the transgressive body boundaries of the cyborg with its hope of a ‘monstrous world without gender’ (1985: 67). The prerequisites of this monstrous world are the conditions of the monstrous body. Bakhtin suggests that ‘the grotesque body is a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body’ (Bakhtin, 1984: 517). True, Bakhtin will often use images of procreation and birthing to elaborate ‘becoming’, but only because in his reading of Rabelais these are instances of the body opening out. For Bakhtin, as for Haraway, the body does not end with the skin. The cyborg exists in Bakhtin to the extent that becoming is the very ground of augmentation and reconstruction.
Haraway's feminist challenge is also Bakhtinian in the way it elaborates a constructive strategy of responsibility. Arguing away from models of victimhood that pose technology and science as smothering human agency, Haraway instead offers feminism the challenge of embodied power. While the cyborg is an image of the pleasure of confused bodily boundaries, a cyborg body politic stresses responsibility in the articulation of such transgression. Certainly this is not answerability in the precise terms that Bakhtin elaborates it. Yet Bakhtin, I believe, would not have found Haraway's stress on the agency of the transgressive body anathema to his philosophy of the deed. According to his architectonics of answerability, Cartesian dualism fails to understand the body's axiological dependence on the Other in constituting value. Bakhtin develops this principle in relation to aesthetic acts, but it is clear that the material realization of the body as value-constituting makes answerability a general concept of challenging the idea of the body as a monad. For Bakhtin, crossing normative notions of body boundaries implies ethical responsibility: it is the mode in which agency is situated.
The strongest affinity between Haraway's ironic vision of cyborg politics and Bakhtinian critique is the stress on a radical heterogeneity in discourse and language. Haraway ends her argument by suggesting that, ‘Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia’ (Haraway, 1985: 106). We recall that Bakhtin used heteroglossia to refer to the contextual specificity of meaning in the utterance, the radical heterogeneity of the utterance in its centrifugal and centripetal elements. Its infidelity is not to meaning, then, but to any abstract systematicity in linguistics or indeed formalism in discursive critique. Both Haraway's and Bakhtin's interpretations of heteroglossia can be challenged for their extravagance. For instance, clearly the pleasures of heteroglossia (responsible or not) do not in themselves negate the powerful cyborgian imagery in the informatics of domination. And the more one states the positive inclinations of heteroglottic border-crossing, the more one risks reinventing a dualism vis-à-vis monoglossia. The weaknesses in Bakhtin's argument are legion: from the tendency to hypostatize the novel as heteroglossia's most privileged aesthetic form, to the confusing shifts between heteroglossia as the ‘normal’ condition of languages and as the historically specific instance of one language in particular. There are counter-arguments available, but let me stress the positive confluence of the concept in Haraway and Bakhtin. If we accept the boundary-breaching condition of cyborg ontology, the task is continually to concretize the context of this event. Bakhtin allows for all kinds of possible influences on the ‘eventness’ of heteroglossia's distillation in discourse and the I/Other relations of subjectivity. Surely cybernetics is a science of contexts in this light—an approach to the field of connectivity and integration in differing environments? What the problem of the cyborg demands in Haraway's rhetorical ‘dream’ is an infidelity to normative claims or rationality as currently construed, for the latter fail, socially and philosophically, to understand the ways in which the body and body image get articulated in heteroglottic profusion. I will mention two of these aspects here: the grotesque and the phantom limb.
The body in revolt is often a revolting body. The grotesque is not a tribute to the embodiment of technological will, but rather it is the scene of its mise en abyme. The body constantly contradicts the pretensions and ideologies of perfection in its defecation, sneezing, farting, belching, and bleeding. Bakhtin is impressed by Rabelais's celebration of these bodily functions because they simultaneously transgress and destabilize the ideologies of the medieval world order. If god made ‘Man’ in his own image, then he must have had a sense of humour. Just as Rabelais characterizes the belly laughter of a world turned upside down and inside out, so religion is made to see the comedy in its bodily imagery (this takes many forms in Bakhtin's critique, but the discussion of the grotesque in religious relics, particularly those of dismembered bodies of the saints, is pertinent in this regard). The body's materiality, especially the materiality of what Bakhtin calls its ‘lower stratum’, conspires against the codes of order and rationality issued by its ‘head’. It wants nothing of ‘discipline’ and ‘regularity’; it prefers, inestimably, the excessive processes of waste, procreation, and decay.
But of course, the body needs its head, even if we know that it can survive without it (for instance, in madness and in the cyborgian stasis of the braindead on life support). What interests Bakhtin in the grotesque, however, is its meaning within Renaissance thought, principally as an index of ‘Man's’ inscription in a much broader cosmology, one where the body is in the world and not separate from it, one in which the body is open to organic processes that ‘hold no terror for him’ (Bakhtin, 1984: 365). To laugh at our bodily imperfections is not base or gross in Bakhtin's theory of the grotesque: it is an affirmation of our extraordinary material being.
I will not detail all of the elements of the grotesque that Bakhtin outlines, but several are clearly appropriate to the present discussion. First, the grotesque life of the body is not a pure negativity but a warning about any system of thought that renders the body either abstract or easily perfectable. The process or ‘becoming’ of the body resists its codification: it answers hypostatization with hyperbole, excellence with excrement. For the French humanists of the Renaissance the body provided endless fascinations—even Rabelais performed a public dissection to underline a non-disciplinary philosophical disposition in the medical science of the time. Indeed, the body itself is simultaneously a sign of ‘interchange’ and ‘interorientation’ (Bakhtin, 1984: 317) with the world, but also a catalyst for radical thinking about that world. Clearly, this is a lesson that Bakhtin wants to be read into his world, a place where the righteous and the regulative were in danger of sucking the spontaneous and festive from a revolutionary spirit. For those, however, who willy-nilly make the carnivalesque and the grotesque transhistorical categories, it is worth reiterating that they are both radically historicized in Bakhtin's conception. Ever attentive to the material conditions of thought and practice, Bakhtin will even go as far as suggesting that Rabelais's Pantagruel inflects the weather that accompanied its genesis: a heatwave and drought in which ‘men actually walked with their mouths open’ (Bakhtin, 1984: 326). He later remarks that a plague, too, marks the eventness of this tome because this, like the drought, had awakened the people's ‘cosmic terror and eschatological expectations’ and Rabelais's book was ‘a merry answer to these fears and pious moods’ (Bakhtin, 1984: 339). My point here is to draw attention to the material conditions of the production of Bakhtin's own book. But while other studies have focused on the carnivalizing tendencies of Bakhtin's intervention vis-à-vis the terrors and errors of Stalinism, I would argue that the material and materialist manifestations of this work can also be understood in terms of the evidence of Bakhtin's own body.
For instance, on several occasions in Rabelais and His World Bakhtin lists key elements of grotesque imagery in male speech: ‘Wherever men laugh and curse, particularly in a familiar environment, their speech is filled with bodily images. The body copulates, defecates, overeats, and men's speech is flooded with genitals, bellies, defectations, urine, disease, noses, mouths, and dismembered parts’ (Bakhtin, 1984: 319). Most of these elements are either the site or the process of bodily functions but two in particular need further explanation. The body is naturally prone to disease either as a potential or as an embodiment from birth (something genetically prescribed), but if you subtract disease from these elements few would argue that the body represented would be abnormal. To put this a slightly different way: the inclusion of disease disrupts the series of bodily attributes—it is not parallel in the way that a nose or urine may be. A similar point could be made about ‘dismembered parts’ which, again, is something done to the body and does not stand in the same relation of bodily functions as say a belly or defecation. This occurs again later in Bakhtin's argument where he suggests, ‘In the oral popular comic repertory we also find everywhere the reflection of the grotesque concept of the body: specific obscenities, debasing parodies, abuse and cursing, and dismembered parts’ (Bakhtin, 1984: 354). Here the false series is even more glaring: the list begins by ennumerating forms of comic repertory but ends with a subject of that repertory. Why did this particular component of grotesque anatomy suggest itself?
Diseases, of course, play a key function in grotesquery. It is not just the way they can deform the human body (although that is of great interest here), but also that they are the body's classic manifestation of fallibility. This does not make Bakhtin fatalistic; on the contrary, what he admires in Rabelais is that he interprets disease as an opening out of the body, that disease regularly and insistently transgresses the body's boundaries with the world, integrating it with the lively complexities of an entire cosmology. For this reason, Bakhtin is particularly taken with the philosophy of the ‘Hippocratic anthology’ (Bakhtin, 1984: 357) which elaborates the symptoms of life and death along the same continum. When we say that someone is living with disease rather than dying from it we are stating a cornerstone of Renaissance cosmology and the grounds for Bakhtin's rearticulation of it. To excise Bakhtin's theorization from his experience of his own body seems to me to misunderstand profoundly his reading of the carnivalesque and grotesque. Bakhtin's body was also the ‘epitome of incompleteness’ (Bakhtin, 1984: 26).
To the extent that every writer's corpus is dictated by his corpus there is nothing particularly inflammatory in invoking the materiality of Bakhtin's body, yet it has a specific prescience given his unique contribution to our sense of the body's possibilities in culture and politics. Evidence suggests that Bakhtin may have developed osteomyelitis from as early as nine years of age. From that point he could no longer exercise or indeed play with other children. For those who marvel at the fact that he read Kant's ‘Kritik der reinen Vernunft’ at the age of twelve one might add that his remarkable self-education was due in part to the isolation that came with his disease.7 As I have mentioned, some bouts of the disease were more debilitating than others but, typically perhaps, the disease had positive and negative valences. Bakhtin's relative immobility and official status as a disabled person allowed him inordinate time to read and write. With his wife, voluntarily or not, reduced to the role of servant and secretary, Bakhtin could spend days on end in fervent contemplation. Yet it is important to keep in mind that there were as many days of excruciating pain and no day when a manifestation of grotesquery did not threaten what passed for a modicum of well-being. As I look at a photograph of Bakhtin bedridden with osteomyelitis in March 1930 (Clark and Holquist, 1984: 144), just before his exile to Kazakhstan, I am reminded of what Bakhtin calls a ‘remarkable excerpt’ from the ‘Prognostics’ of the Hippocratic anthology:
In acute diseases it is necessary to make the following observations: first of all as to the patient's face: does it resemble or not the face of persons in good health, and especially does it resemble itself? For the latter sign should be considered the best, and the lack of this resemblance presents the greatest danger. The face will then offer the following aspect: sharp nose, sunken eyes and hollow temples, ears cold and taut, the ear-lobes twisted, the skin on the forehead taut and dry, the color of the face greenish, dark or leaden.
(Bakhtin, 1984: 358)
Bakhtin uses this example to illustrate the Hippocratic focus on the face as an integer of ‘death's proximity or remoteness’. It is hard to find a photograph of Bakhtin where this drama of life and death is not drawn across his face. After his leg was amputated, Bakhtin was quite proud of the fact that he could move around on crutches at least as much (or as little) as before. There was also an attempt to fit Bakhtin for a prosthesis. Unfortunately, because the amputation was so high on his leg, almost to the groin itself, he did not have enough stump to wear a prosthesis comfortably. Indeed, the pain of using a false leg was almost as great as the pain provided by its fleshly counterpart.8 Even the use of crutches took its toll. The cartilage in his left leg was progressively weakened by his dependence on it and made even assisted movement a painful experience.
I have suggested that there is a strong connection between Bakhtin's health and his approach to the grotesque. Bakhtin begins his work on Rabelais around the time of the amputation of his leg, and to underline the significance of this I want to elaborate more of his right leg's afterlife in the theorization of that tome. To do this I want to borrow from what we know of the phantom limb. Briefly, the phantom limb refers to an experience of a body part after its removal, an experience that confirms that humans live with an image of their body's exteriority—their body's existence in a specific time and space. The phantom limb is experienced by almost all people who have endured the amputation of moving, functioning, extremities (the most notable exceptions are young children and the mentally impaired). It can also be experienced by people who have had internal organs removed. Typically, the phantom appears almost immediately after amputation, but it can take up to two years to manifest itself. It is important to note that the phantom limb is an image of what was amputated, not a copy of it. Indeed, the body phantom is often distorted, as Elizabeth Grosz explains:
The phantom is invariably shorter than the limb; often the proximal portions of the phantom are missing; it is commonly perceived as flatter than the healthy limb; it usually feels light and hollow; and the perception of its mobility is extremely impaired … losing its ability to perform finer, more nuanced acts of dexterity which the intact limb was able to undertake.
(Grosz, 1994: 71)
The phantom limb is the scene of a trenchant cognitive confusion: the reality of the stump is co-extensive with the reality of the phantom; that is, one indicates a manifest absence in the same time/space relations as that which indicates a manifest presence. Thus, the phantom limb asks the first question of grotesquery: where does your body end?
When Bakhtin writes of the grotesque open character of the body he is not just reading a wild sixteenth-century narrative: he is articulating the coordinates of his own experience of the liminality of flesh. If he may be deemed nostalgic for a certain symbolic destruction of authoritarian officialdom, then he might also be combating a more personal nostalgic manifestation in his present. Interestingly, the phantom limb expresses a desire for the complete body that is not, but this is not a thesis, or prosthesis, that neatly fits Bakhtin's outlook. Indeed, if he experienced a phantom limb, he embraced its shadowy existence, as if the horror of his own body were the positive symbol of the grotesque incarnate. Let me be clear on this: there is no evidence extant in which Bakhtin discusses either his health or his body in any great detail. What I am suggesting is that the imagery of the grotesque body he elucidates is symptomatic of imagery with a real foundation in his existence.
Grotesque imagery, like the phantom limb, exists in distortion: it only provides emotional effect by virtue of its approximation. Rather than wallow in the fact that disease had carnivalized his body, Bakhtin takes up the issue of disease for its associative effects. Ridicule through the invocation of disease could be therapeutic with respect to disease; one could actually laugh in the face of death. There can be no doubt that osteomyelitis changed Bakhtin's body image even before his right leg was removed: even if you can forget someone else's pain, you cannot forget your own (I will return to the pertinence of pain in the conclusion). Bakhtin made this body image the ground for a life-affirming embrace of the popular and the festive in the social construction of everyday life. For some this may sound like an obvious compensation for the hardships and downright gloominess of Bakhtin's life, but this, I think, misses the point. The body image and the phantom limb which marks its reconstitution are both grotesque images of a chthonian potential, if not reality—the after-images of a struggle with mortality that many aspects of contemporary culture now insistently desensitize, as if the active liminality of the flesh is a ruse of technology. This is where Bakhtin's experience of prosthesis must be read against the grain of normative notions of the cyborganic self. The body image is not just a zone of personal restoration, even if the ideology of the whole, the complete, the autonomous body remains hegemonic in particularly Western concepts of selfhood. Indeed, what the latter attempts to mystify through personification, the grotesque displaces through socialization. For Bakhtin, the ‘material bodily principle’ (Bakhtin, 1984: 19) is embodied by a people, those whose renewal can only occur collectively. It is this principle of sociality that needs to be constantly reconnected to cyborganic critique. Of course, there is no simple formula for the socialization implied here. Bakhtin himself too often subjected the principle to typification—as in his by now infamous reference to the ‘senile, pregnant hags’ of the Kerch terracotta collection—an image that Mary Russo (1986, 1994) has quite rightly challenged and reaccentuated in provocative ways. It is no coincidence that engendering has not only challenged the sexism of Bakhtin's world-view, but the grotesque itself rearticulates the feminist imperative in deconstructing the ‘man-made’ interface of the cyborg as a wholly male Übermensch. In this sense, the grotesque of the body electric is an anxious zone of engagement about imaging the social not as a site in which the normative defines the aberration (as patriarchies have often deigned to mark off the feminine), but as a contestatory space. This understanding is why corporeal feminism has provided some of the most provocative critiques of socialized bodies, including cyborgs. The dismembered body in pain is the mise-en-scène of a social paroxysm about what counts as equally human.
Beginning with his discourse on the value of the human body in history (when his osteomyelitis was already acute) and culminating in his extraordinary work on Rabelais (when, as we have noted, Bakhtin enters the world of the abject amputee), Bakhtin explores in detail the process of grotesquery and the imperative coordinates of the Other. The discourse of the body itself allows a topographic approach to the inner workings of the I/Other nexus. But we must keep in mind that all this talk of body image and phantom limb, crucial elements of grotesque epistemology, is not a paean to metaphoricity, as if the volatile body is only a discursive effect or an aesthetic exuberance for monstrosity: the political space traced by grotesquery is one in which the social, the psychic, and the discursive vectors of power are enmeshed in a determinate, and overdetermined, materiality. Here we may begin to specify dialogism somewhat differently from the social space of the utterance. If we interpret the dialogic as centrifugal interactivity, then the grotesque as transgressive dialogizes both the interpersonal and the intrapersonal. The erupting surfaces of the human body are signs of its unstable or porous existence (as Grosz notes, the ‘detachable, separable parts of the body … retain something of the cathexis and value of a body part even when they are separated from the body’ (Grosz, 1994: 81)), but they are also the manifestation of the relations between its inner and outer ‘selves’. The divisions of the Self, its exclusions and its denials, are the social imprimatur of how it gets articulated, put together, outwardly and inwardly. They are representations not only of social determination but social ambivalence. Indeed, our excitement with the prospect of cyborganic politics has much to do with the ambivalence it entails, with the Janus-faced propensity of interconnectivity. As Russo (1994) astutely points out, the grotesque has a crucial role in the discourse of risk-taking: the error or aberration is a realm of possibility (certainly, this is one way we might understand the pathos and deep irony of Shelley's ‘monster’, as a literal embodiment of the risk of creation). As such, grotesque performances are those that challenge the normative by invoking not only the lower bodily stratum, but an array of practices that foreground and oppose the disciplinary zeal of social hierarchies. We know that modes of socialization create aberration and that the body tenaciously fights the surveiller/punir system of domination that Foucault explores. What is less understood, however, is the ambivalence inscribed in opposition by the mode of the excessive in grotesquery itself. The revolting body is not necessarily the body of revolt.
This, I believe, is a salutary reminder to the doyens of excess, particularly those who celebrate the liberatory prospect of augmentation. The ambivalence of the cyborg is also a question about whether the ‘replaceable you’ is always already a ‘disposable you’. What has often been over-enthusiastically dubbed ‘progress’ in the twentieth century has meant a plethora of prosthetic body parts where alternative modes of socialization might have told a different story (again, the replaceable parts that substitute for the limbs ripped off by landmines do not challenge the culture of violence symbolized by the landmines, but compensate it, appease it). The cyborg was conceived by the military-industrial complex as a more competent killing machine (precisely the symptom most celebrated in its cultural projections—The Terminator, Robocop, and to some extent, Aliens). Individual societies may now breathe a sigh of relief that mutually assured destruction (MAD) did not come to pass. The problem remains that dominant forms of cyborg possibility recode the irrationality of progress as an ineluctable discourse of increased efficiency. The intervention of the grotesque does not end this cycle of apoplexy, but it does raise the stakes in cyborganic critique by continually questioning the logic of body formation, production, and reproduction. For every duplication as sameness, grotesquery offers duplication as difference and disjunction. The grotesque cyborg is one that refuses its own discourse of perfectability and the idealism of transcendence by coming to terms with and questioning the material limits on ‘existence’ (just as Baty recognizes the sham of cyborg socialization in Blade Runner—androids are pre-programmed to expire, just like medicine, food, and almost every electrical appliance you could care to name). When Haraway uses the oft-quoted formulation ‘I'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess’, she articulates, in a profound way, the logic of discrepant cyborganics. The grotesque of the body electric is the place where the normative is undone and undoes itself; it is also the place where the power to make is also the power to make otherwise.
I began with Bakhtin's leg as a way to link grotesquery to the cyborganic and I want to close by noting the power of pain in formulating oppositional critique. Why? Bakhtin, I would argue, does not take his mind off the pain of his osteomyelitis by writing; rather, the pain of his degenerative disease is written into his formulation of the grotesque. In Elaine Scarry's brilliant analysis, The Body in Pain (1985), pain itself is explored as a manifest liminality, one that conjures both aversion (pain is something one fights) and a double-sense of self and external agency (the body fighting itself and being disciplined from without). Significantly, the sense of pain has no external object, a fact that leads Scarry into a recondite critique of its contrastive apoetheosis, imagination (which always has objects, even when imaginary objects, as its projected correlative). In his early work on the aesthetic, Bakhtin has learned the lesson of his body's inconstancy, but turns this into a theory of externality, or exotopy and outsidedness. Reading Scarry's analysis, one begins to see the logic of pain for Bakhtin's own theorization. Bakhtin notes:
When I project myself into another's suffering, I experience it precisely as his suffering—in the category of the other, and my reaction to it is not a cry of pain, but a word of consolation or an act of assistance. Referring what I have experienced to the other is an obligatory condition for a productive projection into the other and cognition of the other, both ethically and aesthetically. Aesthetic activity proper actually begins at the point when we return into ourselves, when we return to our own place outside the suffering person, and start to form and consummate the material we derived from projecting ourselves into the other and experiencing him from within himself.
(Bakhtin, 1990: 26; original emphasis)
In the thrall of pain, Bakhtin realizes that pure identification with the Other is a fiction (no one can fully experience his pain), and that the aesthetic begins with an axiological understanding of the Other as separable, and formatively so, in the production of aesthetic meaning. Pain, ironically, becomes the way to explain the conditions of the object-filled world of I/Other relations, the cognitive flux of the imagination. The aspect of negation crucial to pain is also constitutive of popular festive imagery in the book on Rabelais. It is not that Bakhtin's bodily pain gets externalized in the extensive treatment of the carnivalizing body politics of others. I would say, however, that it is not a coincidence that the degenerative body (the body in pain, the decaying, dying body) is overreached by the becoming body (the body in a life-affirming festive mode, the restorative and revolutionary body in the marketplace of the popular). Pain is the absent presence in the odd occurrence of dismemberment in Bakhtin's lists. And pain, of course, with no objective correlative, exists in the phantom limb that would otherwise deny its possibility: ‘The object that has been destroyed remains in the world but in a new form of being in time and space; it becomes the “other side” of the new object that has taken its place’ (Bakhtin, 1984: 410). And thus, I would suggest, even in the heady world of clean, chrome prosthesis, in the bright lights of the cyborg for techno-science, we should look for the ‘other side’ of augmentation: the grotesque in the evidence of Bakhtin's leg.
Notes
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Strictly speaking, the ‘body electric’ is not cyborgian but, since Bradbury's short story, it has come to be interpreted as such. ‘I sing the body electric’ is borrowed from Whitman, whose exuberance for mesmerism included the notion that electricity might cure ailments of various kinds. In a strange way, the cyborg is moving back through history to this mode of understanding.
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Reference provided in personal correspondence with Galin Tihanov of Jesus College, Oxford. The pain associated with Bakhtin's osteomyelitis should not be underestimated. In his later years Bakhtin was taking painkillers by the handful.
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Of course, this chapter does not answer such a question. I would suggest, however, that there are elements to our bodily imperfections that define our agency in relation to capital. One does not have to be a latter-day Luddite to see that machines replace humans on the basis of more than simple efficiency in output, but because humans have an endearing weakness: they challenge structures of oppression.
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Obviously, I do not endorse Bakhtin's theorization tout court, not only because of some of the dubious engendering of the grotesque he deploys, but also because he is impatient with the uncanny, with the psychic aspects of grotesquery (again, these might be read as a symptom of his own condition). For more on this aspect of the grotesque, see Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature (1963). For a feminist critique of Bakhtinian grotesque that combines and transforms concepts of the grotesque body and the uncanny, see Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque (1994). For a detailed if somewhat dry un-festive exegesis on the grotesque, see Bernard McElroy, Fiction of the Modern Grotesque (1989).
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This fact is noted by Donna Haraway in her cogent introduction to Chris Hables Gray, (ed.) The Cyborg Handbook (1995). This is easily the most comprehensive collection on cyborganic phenomena to date, although other useful material will be noted below. The ‘white rat’ as cyborg is a staple of science fiction—see, for instance, the films Cyborg and Blade Runner where the term aptly describes authority's conception of cyborganic being.
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I will not attempt to summarize all the points that Haraway advances, although I am particularly interested in their ironic mode. Avid readers of Haraway know that there are pertinent differences in the versions of her manifesto—some conditioned by her exchanges with Sandra Harding over the status of science for feminism, others overdetermined by the changed circumstances of the socialist-feminist project in the years following Haraway's initial statement in 1985. See, Donna Haraway, ‘A manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s’ (1985: 65-107); edited and reprinted as ‘A manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the late twentieth century’, in Donna Haraway (1991).
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These and other details of Bakhtin's health have been provided for me by Nikolai Panjkov in personal correspondence. Panjkov has been extremely helpful in clarifying some of the mystery of Bakhtin's ailments. Much of this material is now available in Russian in the journal, Dialog/Karnaval/Kronotop, including Bakhtin's conversations with V. Duvakin and excerpts from his letters to Kagan and Pinsky. Presumably it will also form part of the Collected Works, which David Shepherd at the Bakhtin Centre in Sheffield, UK, is arranging to have translated.
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Again, these details emerge in correspondence with Panjkov. We know what happened to Bakhtin's leg. It would be interesting to discover the fate of his prosthesis. Tihanov commented to me that he has not yet seen a photograph of Bakhtin from the waist down after the amputation that clearly shows the results of his surgery. But of course, in my argument, in the realm of the Other one never sees the phantom limb anyway.
References
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. (1984) Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Foreword by Krystyna Pomorska. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. (1990) Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Eds M. Holquist and V. Liapunov. Trans. and notes V. Liapunov. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Clark, Katerina and Holquist, Michael (1984) Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gray, Chris Hables (ed.) (1995) The Cyborg Handbook. London: Routledge.
Grosz, Elizabeth (1994) Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Haraway, Donna (1985) ‘A manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s’, Socialist Review, 80: 65-107.
Haraway, Donna (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: the Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.
Holquist, Michael (1990) ‘Introduction’ to Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Eds M. Holquist and V. Liapunov. Trans. and notes V. Liapunov. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, pp. ix-xlix.
Kayser, Wolfgang (1963) The Grotesque in Art and Literature. Trans. Ulrich Weisstein. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
McElroy, Bernard (1989) Fiction of the Modern Grotesque. London: Macmillan.
Russo, Mary (1986) ‘Female grotesques: carnival and theory’, in Teresa de Lauretis (ed.), Feminist Studies/Critical Studies. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. pp. 213-39.
Russo, Mary (1994) The Female Grotesque. London: Routledge.
Scarry, Elaine (1985) The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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