Figure and Ground: the body as a locus of narrative and knowing
Eleanor Dare
Abstract
This paper investigates the way bodies and language are intertwined, examining how illness or trauma require us to speak from the body in different terms from those of orthodox academic research or Cartesian epistemologies. The paper looks at ways in which the body, particularly in illness, may be a site of transformation and a means for re-conceptualising epistemology and narrative. The fictional and factual, or indeed, factional book I have written over the last three years, South: a psychometric text adventure, is committed to an investigation of alternative forms of knowing that are grounded in material practices, such as the generation of meaning through sensory experiences. Readers are invited to construct their own narrative interpretations through touch, sound and movement, to locate themselves within and through the environment. This paper will demonstrate how my work makes an explicit connection between subjectivity, epistemology and location, citing Grosz (1994) and Quartararo in Van Cleve (1999) as theorists on the role of both embodied and environmentally situated knowledge production, but also describing the specific practices I have developed and through which I have generated alternative forms of knowing and narrative within the South system. I have also drawn upon my own family history to situate and frame my relationship to issues of embodiment and narrative, showing how two of my grandparents experienced formative (and historically significant) restrictions upon their languages. These family histories, as this paper will outline, have significantly informed my construction of this work.
Above the South ‘egg’ and book. The egg carries tailor-made
content for readers generated by the South software.
‘Those of you who are expecting to read a scientific treatise should already be dismayed by the subjective slant of my writing. Others may be wondering what on earth I am doing using such resources – as the phobia, the displacement, my years of being mute. Are these theoretical assets? My goal may once have been to make you all say a resounding communal ‘yes’ following a meticulous submission to the elegance of my logic. But there is no longer an ‘I’ to either persuade or be persuaded. In fact, If I am supposed to be writing an autobiography there is a fundamental flaw in the contract which my publishers have hitherto not noticed - there is no real ‘I’ to autobiographise. Although it is true I use this solitary symmetrical construction on a habitual basis. This ‘I’ of which there is no solid empirical evidence represents a vast number of un-useful habits – such as the continuous construction of injurious symbols, phobias and fears.
Taking a small stroll through Borough Market not far from where I was born and brought up, will expose a cornucopia of such anxieties, the fear of not having material things and sensuous experiences, to name just two. You may retrace these steps yourself; beginning perhaps by the ship of avaricious cruelty we currently call the Golden Hind. A boat that represents every malignancy you can care to name. Start here, at this mendacious centre piece of Thames-side reverie. Through larceny and brute self-serving this vessel has triggered chains of greed that bring us, for example, the ostrich salami, the Kenyan Kum Quat, not to mention new world pineapples. Here we may test not only our personal degrees of freedom – our slavery to the senses, but those of geo-political proportions, how sites and selves and senses form a complex political ecology in which we are all deeply embedded.
Instructions:
Walk from the Golden Hind to Borough Market. You will surely become increasingly aware of gustatory representations. Can you resist them? What happens if you do? After 20 minutes suspend resistance, now what do you do? Write down exactly what happens. Describe before, after and during. Describe urges, flavours and regrets. Next time you come here do the same exercise. Note carefully any differences between each visit. In this way you will begin to understand your own degrees of freedom.’[i]
The quote above is taken from South, a psychometric text adventure, an artists’ book that, along with a software interface, guides readers through a non-linear narrative, and a specific site, the South bank area of south London. The book also asks readers to investigate their own subjective responses to this experience. The book and software were produced over three years as part of my doctoral practice, working at the intersection of art and computational technology. Among other things the book features fictional narratives about and ‘by’ a reclusive computer scientist called Ivan Dâr. His experiences of language loss and a condition called legendary psychasthenia are at the centre of these narratives.
This paper will demonstrate how these narratives connect to my research as an artist-programmer, and how the body, both in illness and in health, can have profound implications for our understanding of language, logic and our relationship to the notion of ‘the site’. By re-enacting scenes from Ivan Dâr’s life and illness readers are offered the opportunity to confront their own subjectivity and to investigate their own bodies as the ‘ground of stories’. Habitual desires, anxieties and fears are also uncovered in these site specific encounters as well as the pleasures and challenges of living in and writing about life in London.
Below, the South software evaluates readers ‘psychometrically’ in order to generate tailor made content for them. But the notion of such evaluation is also contested, how accurately can any automated system generate insights into its users? Readers can explore this through their interactions with the software and book.
According to the sociologist Arthur W. Frank, the Greek prophet Tiresias was granted narrative powers by dint of his blindness. But is this a humanist interpretation (replete with all the abstract and rationalist positionings the term might imply) or is Tiresias’s story an opportunity for what Michel Foucault might have called a ‘bio-political’ exegesis, in which we see political power impacting on every facet of human life, including our bodies? Frank’s stated goal was to ‘shift the dominant conception of illness away from passivity – the ill person as “victim of” disease and then recipient of care - toward activity. The ill person who turns illness into story transforms fate into experience” he writes.[ii] Though Frank’s telling may be humanist in part, his theme of the body ‘as the ground of stories’ [iii] is larger than a humanist positioning might entail. The body in illness becomes not only as Frank puts it, ‘a witness to the conditions that rob others of their voices’[iv] but an opportunity to re-conceptualise the body as a site of epistemological agency, to re-conceptualise our sense of our being in the world, and to integrate the body into new epistemologies and methodological approaches.
The body in my own work has been both the material and agent for a series of epistemological investigations. These investigations are offered throughout ‘South, a psychometric text adventure’, which is both an artists’ book and a software package that works dynamically with the book and its readers. My doctoral work operates within the interdisciplinary areas of fiction and interactivity, subjectivity and agency. It supports the case for epistemological fluidity, and emphasises that such volatility does not emanate from post-modern philosophy alone but from the body itself. These ideas are also investigated via my fictional stories about Ivan Dâr, whose extreme experiences of, on the one hand, mind-body separation – the idea that the universe contains two fundamental types of entity: mental and physical, and, on the other hand, the opposite of substance dualism, a sense of external space invading and annihilating his subjective boundaries.
Above, bespoke content generated by the South software, below, a reader, Machinka Savić[v], takes the book and egg to the South Bank, the egg gives her tailor made instructions and generates a specific pathway for her through both the book and the city.
Above, Machinka’s tailor-made content leads her to investigate the degree to which the body is generative of spatiality. She is encouraged to re-perform Ivan Dâr’s experience of the illness Legendary Psychasthenia, a ‘mental’ condition in which the boundary between the body and external space is eroded. The egg asks her to take on multiple points of view, imagining herself as passers by while also casting herself as the River Thames. She stands on the middle of the Millennium Bridge. By coincidence, like Ivan Dâr she is also anxious about bridges. She feels the flow of the water as an annihilating force. Ivan’s illness, which initially seemed purely conceptual and alien to her, is briefly revealed as an embodied event which she herself can experience, albeit fleetingly.
The South project has aimed to place location, sensation and tactile response at the forefront of the site-oriented experience it offers to readers. Spatial fragmentation and psychic disorientation are also part of my site-specific narrative works, in which readers can find narrative threads through tactile experiences or lose themselves and find the work collapsing around them. The South project is committed to an investigation of alternative forms of knowing that are grounded in material practices, such as the generation of meaning through tactile experiences. Readers are invited to construct their own narrative interpretations through touch, sound and movement, to locate themselves within and through the environment.
Above Machinka is invited to construct her own narrative interpretations of the South text through touch, sound and movement, to locate herself within and through the environment. Machinka represents herself in specific textures and tastes, these representations are documented in her copy of the South book.
Within the complex formation represented by the South project, embodiment, contingency and site specificity are linked. The knowledge generated by the reader in engaging with the South algorithms is not separable from the processes that form that knowledge. Hence, the emphasis on re-formulating radically different experiences dependent on local and subjective conditions. The South book and its readers, like the volatile content of the Thames itself are inherently unstable and localised, at least in this project’s conception of them. The interdependency of each algorithm, and its direct relationship to the subjective state of readers, enables the book to also at times deliberately limit the mobility of users, emphasising the idealisations as much as the realities at play in this work.
In conjunction with the South software and egg, the book takes on an even greater degree of contingency, issuing instructions that have been generated in response to economic and meteorological events as well as my own subjective changes. It is significant that in this largely mutable configuration it is the overtly fictional content, the stories I have written about Ivan Dâr and his subjective dis-integration that retain the greatest degree of stability. Ambiguity, tension and mystery, if they exist at all, emanate from the experiences readers generate for themselves in the materiality of their research into the site and their own subjectivity and embodiment. As Grosz[vi] states, eschewing disembodied, computational models of cognition represents an opportunity to ‘displace the centrality of the mind, the psyche, interior or consciousness (and even the unconscious) in conceptions of the subject through a reconfiguration of the body’.[vii] But, in reconfiguring the body we might also seize an opportunity to reconfigure the inter-subjective and technological boundaries between bodies and computers.
Psychometric tests
A significant part of my practice has involved the construction of evaluative processes and procedures, both in analogue and digitally mediated forms. I have also researched the historical context of such evaluations and critical approaches to the notion of personality assessment. The analysis of psychometric tests relates closely to my research into the notion of the subject. The notion of psychometric evaluations has its roots in the evaluation of intelligence (associated in particular with the nineteenth century eugenicist Sir Francis Galton) but later also evolved into the investigation and evaluation of ideas around personality traits or the notion of psychological types, such as ‘extroverts’ and ‘introverts’. My own interest in psychometric tests stems from my childhood exposure to many forms of psychometric test designed by my Grandfather, who was an educational psychologist involved professionally (and ambivalently) in the psychometric evaluation of children. The procedures he designed were often tested on myself and my siblings and had the quality, at least in my own mind, of games. But despite their ostensibly ludic features, such assessments are also rooted in rigid, disembodied and de-contextualised framings of the subject, framings that do not consider the body as a site of epistemological or even subjective agency. In the South project these evaluation techniques are themselves subject to investigation by readers; each reader tests and reports upon the efficacy of these disembodied representations. Reader generated reports are published in subsequent editions of the South book. Readers are also assisted in hacking into and reformulating, or even sabotaging these evaluations, via the South Hacks section of the South book.
Below, in order to generate content readers of South must engage critically with their own psychometric evaluation, or personality measurement.
Treacherous Blue Books: South stories.
‘It was clear that crossing the forest had cost each of us the power of speech’.[viii]
Arthur Frank (1997) writes of the way in which bodies can ‘infold’ cultural traumas into themselves. These types of trauma are investigated in South and are woven into the algorithmic procedures embedded in the book as fictional narratives, these narratives and meta-narratives enjoy varying degrees of convergence with reader experiences and with the narratives readers themselves enact through their exploration of and response to the South Bank. The stories of Ivan Dâr articulate questions of authenticity, separability, normalcy and ‘natural’ language. These questions are embedded within my own cultural and socio-historical background, particularly the lives of my paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother. My grandmother, who was profoundly deaf did not learn sign language but instead attempted to lip-read (with, as I remember it, little success). This may be viewed within a wider historical context in which ‘oralism’ (the use of spoken language) was emphasised over the use of sign-languages, not least for it normalising significance in relation to the majority hearing community. In Van Cleve (1999) Anne T. Quartararo’s chapter on deaf identity and French republicanism succinctly expresses the relationship between language and ‘civilisation’, and the motivation for making the deaf speak like the hearing as opposed to using manual sign languages, ‘The goal was to make deaf people more “human”, or, like the rustic peasant forced to learn correct French, make deaf people more “civilized” through the use of the “spoken” word’.[ix]
In 1880 the Second International Congress on Education of the Deaf was held in Milan. The congress infamously ruled that oral education should prevail over sign language. This resulted in the widespread promotion of oralism (including lip-reading) over manual languages, arguably motivated by a strong desire to make deaf people appear ‘normal’. While I do not wish to portray my grandmother as a victim of these policies, I think it is arguable that the normalising sensibility underpinning these rulings did have an agential role in her ability to communicate and by extension to many wider aspects of her life.
Above readers engage in many exercises including the identification of their ‘sensory modalities’ (dominant sensory modes of engagement), they may also be guided to follow Salvador Dali’s ‘paranoiac critical activity’ (Dare, 2011: 255) to invent new words (284), to describe themselves as objects (303), to imitate people they see on the South Bank (287) among many other exercises.
In a different, though not unconnected form, my paternal grandfather also experienced constraints upon his language. Although he was born and brought up in South Wales (like my grandmother, in the early twentieth century), he was not allowed to speak Welsh. This fact exists within the wider historical context of Welsh language suppression which reached its apotheosis in the so-called ‘Welsh-not’. The Welsh-Not was a wooden block that children were forced to wear as a punishment if they were caught speaking Welsh at school. The denigration of the Welsh language was supported by the infamous ‘Treachery of the Blue Books’ (Brad y Llyfrau Gleision), an influential report into the state of education in Wales commissioned in 1846 and presented in 1847. The report enforced a notion of Welsh culture as inferior and the speaking of Welsh as educationally and socially detrimental. In my grandfather’s case it was his own Welsh mother who enforced the prohibition, based on the idea that the Welsh language was ‘common’ and a language for peasants, an idea that had been widely reinforced and apparently absorbed by many Welsh people as a result of the 1847 report. In light of the fact that some of my Grandfather’s relatives on the Island of Anglesey (Ynys Môn) were reputedly monoglot Welsh speakers, the prohibition could be interpreted as effectively severing him from those family relationships.
Like my Grandfather, Ivan Dâr, experiences a breakdown in which he can no longer speak English, this echoes the fact that, in addition to the restrictions imposed upon my grandfather’s childhood mode of speech, in the early 1930s in London my Grandfather experienced a twelve month psychosomatic ‘breakdown’ in which he could also not speak at all. This inability to speak is framed within my re-telling as a silent articulation of some of the tensions inherent in the hierarchies of value faced by migrant and colonised communities in relation to their ‘mother tongue’, even (perhaps especially) if their own mothers collude in its suppression.
In illness Ivan Dâr experiences a bewildering lack of groundedness, loosely based on ‘legendary psychasthenia’. While experiencing this condition Ivan Dâr cannot locate himself, or differentiate himself in relation to the wider world, which one might conceptualize as the environment beyond the boundaries of his own skin. Roger Caillois in 1935 described this condition as one in which space becomes an annihilating agency acting against subjects. ‘Space pursues them, encircles them, digests them in a gigantic phagocytosis. It ends by replacing them. Then the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space. He feels himself becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put. He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar. And he invents spaces of which he is "the convulsive possession." All these expressions shed light on a single process: depersonalization by assimilation to space, i.e., what mimicry achieves morphologically in certain animal species’.[x]
The closest we can get to a view without perspective is the fragmentation of Ivan Dâr’s condition, legendary psychasthenia, as Grosz writes (1994), it is a view that can form no perspective and cannot locate itself in time or space. Grosz emphasises the notion of body image as intrinsic to our ability to create a ‘distinction between the figure and the ground, or between central and peripheral actions. Relative to its environment, the body separates the subject’s body from a background of forces’.[xi] By stating this, Grosz is challenging Cartesian mind-body dualisms and placing the body at the centre of epistemological processes. But Grosz is keen to deny holism or transcendental notions of mind-body unity. Her approach is more complex, alluding to mind-body processes as a form of interconstitutional entanglement, a mobius strip of ‘inscriptions and transformations’.[xii] Elizabeth Grosz’s work on the body reconceptualises subjectivity and provides a framework for explaining subjectivity through corporeality rather than through binary notions of the conscious versus the unconscious. Likewise Grosz does not construe mind and body as opposites, but as two parts of a whole.
Ivan Dâr describes his experience of illness as analogous to the borderless Klein bottle, which has no inside nor outside, but he is also subject to the reductionist accounts of his illness articulated by doctors. Within the South book Ivan’s doctors describe him in clinical detail but never grasp the value of his radically altered perceptual experiences, instead he is too often reduced to a pathology, a propositional ‘type’, not unlike the a priori models of psychometric evaluation.
Arthur Frank makes the connection between modernist medicine and colonisation, stating that colonization was central to the achievement of modernist medicine, in which the ‘sick person’ emerges ‘as a recognisable social type in the early eighteenth century. The condition necessary for the emergence of this type was that “the diversity of suffering be reduced to a unifying general view, which is precisely that of clinical medicine”’.[xiii] This reduction can be connected to the top-down, disembodied and propositionally based structures and representations that have dominated computation. However, it would be naive to present an alternative conception of the relationship of the body to the mind as a straightforward opposition to rationalism or positive science, or as Grosz warns us not to replace one orthodoxy with another, such as those of holism or transcendentalism. In the case of the sick body Frank writes ‘Bodily systems are the infolding of cultural traumas into the body. As these bodies continue to live and to create history, these symptoms outfold into the social space of that history’.[xiv]
The contingency of the body in illness is connected to the contingency that underpins all knowing and all being – the ‘burping, spitting, defecating’ body of Kristeva’s abjection. Likewise the stigma of illness is linked by Goffman, Parsons and Frank to the kind of contingency sickness manifests. But Frank complicates this role of illness by stating that the ‘doing-something’ of proclaiming and narratavising is a form of meta-control over illness. [xv] In the face of such complexity it is necessary for the readers of South to test the limits and distributions of these notions experientially and subjectively.
Above, the borderless Klein bottle, taken from South (537), it is the character Ivan Dâr’s metaphor for his own experience of illness.
Conclusion
In offering embodied experiential investigations the South book attempts to reconstruct some of the infoldings and assimilations to space I have discussed, both in its structures and in the exercises readers are invited to take part in. They are invited to follow Ivan Dâr, who is framed as a man literally in search of himself, struggling with both ‘breaking the boundary of his own skin’ (as Callois puts it) and of physically locating himself.
Ivan Dâr endures, ‘a space where things cannot be put’, because he has no location in space. This lack of self-representation is also manifest in his difficulties with speech. At times the South book deliberately aims to bewilder or undermine its own readers, directing them towards a performative insight into Ivan Dâr’s illness. Readers might experience directly the sense of space as an annihilating agency working against them. At times the software generates a hostile space by means of its aesthetic strategies and by asking readers to undertake paradoxical or impossible tasks, lying to them, issuing contradictory instructions or leaving exasperating lose ends. Ivan Dâr’s narratives return to the theme of his so called sickness and the strategies he devises to still operate within the city despite his phobias and disintegrating boundaries. These strategies are framed as transformative and creative, offering valuable insights into the shifts in consciousness that illness can engender.
This paper has aimed to elucidate how illness can ‘involve a restructuring of consciousness and perceptual experience leading to a profound alteration of how one exists in and experiences the world’,[xvi] but it has also touched upon the notion that the body is epistemically embedded both with other bodies and with the outer world, such that, to quote Merleau-Ponty the body ‘is the source of spatiality’.[xvii] This remains a radical notion and is in direct conflict with the still prevalent Cartesian approach of the ‘brain in the vat’ propounded by Daniel C. Dennet[xviii] and Hans Moravec[xix] (among others); an approach that is predicated on a mind-body split and the belief that the body is not epistemically implicated beyond the transmittal of raw data to the brain.
The insights gained from experiences of illness and also those that are supported by recent developments in neuroscience, have profound implications not only for human-computer-interactions and the logical frameworks of computation, but the logic of all knowledge generation and the multiplicity of our artistic practices. As Shaun Gallagher writes ‘language transcends embodiment at the same time that it depends on it’.[xx] But it is also inter-subjective, forming a logic which Merleau-Ponty describes as ‘shared by the body and the world’.[xxi] The South project proposes that we are epistemically embedded with our environments in a dynamic process of continuous co-becoming from which the mind and the body, and hence our being in the world, cannot clearly be separated. Readers of the South book are invited to test this proposition experientially, to re-conceptualise their own bodies as sites of epistemological and narrative agency.
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Notes
[i] Dare, Eleanor, South: A psychometric Text Adventure, (Raleigh, NC: Lulu, 2011): pp. 464-465.
[ii] Frank, Arthur. F., The Wounded Storyteller, Body, Illness and Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997): xi.
[iii] Ibid., p. xi.
[iv] Ibid., p. xi.
[v] Machinka Savić is a pseudonym.
[vi] Grosz, Elizabeth, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
[vii] Ibid., p. vii.
[viii] Calvino, Italo, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977): p. 4.
[ix] Quartararo in Van Cleve, J. V. (ed), Deaf History Unveiled: Interpretations from the New Scholarship (Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 1999): p. 45.
[x] Roger Caillois, Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia (1935)< http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpcaillois.htm > [accessed 27/10/10].
[xi] Grosz, p. 83.
[xii] Ibid., p. vi.
[xiii] Frank, p. 11.
[xiv] Ibid., p. 28.
[xv] Ibid., p. 32.
[xvi] Gallagher, Shaun, How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2005): p. 59.
[xvii] Merleau-Ponty cited in Gallagher, 2005, p. 59.
[xviii] Dennet, Daniel, Content and Consciousness (New York: Routledge, 1990).
[xix] Moravec, Hans, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
[xx] Gallagher, p. 127.
[xxi] Merleau-Ponty cited in Gallagher, 2005, p. 41.