[wordup] The Art of Mutilation

[Adam Shand]

It took me a while to sink into this article but it's an interesting  
take on why people modify and control (or give up control of)  
themselves.  I don't agree with everything in it but it's certainly  
thought provoking.

Adam.

Via: Erica <erica at spack...>
Source:  http://crispinsartwell.com/long/tattoo.htm

The Art of Mutilation

You may have noticed that a lot of people are getting pierced and  
tattooed
these days. I call these art, a point that I'm not really going to argue
about at the moment. All cultures, of course, practice body adornment of
various kinds, from cicatrization to high fashion, and many cultures
practice extreme or painful forms of body transformation. Call these art
or not, but I suspect we could agree that they are aesthetic  
activities in
some broad sense. Like dance, they have the human body as their medium.
What I want to do here is speculate on some of the reasons why such
transformations of the body are practiced in Western culture and what  
they
mean.

To paint on the body with needles, or to make holes in it and push  
jewelry
through those holes, is to try to transform the body into an artifact.  
Or,
to give an alternative formulation, to do these things is to emphasize  
the
fact that the body is an artifact. I give these two formulations to
satisfy both sides of a familiar pomo debate about whether there is any
decent distinction between culture and nature. Many folks argue, for
example, that the gendering of bodies is a cultural or discursive
formation rather than a natural biological fact. But whether the human
body is always already a cultural artifact or not, to pierce and tattoo
the body is to try to take some control over it as an artifact. Many
things about us can be changed by efforts of will: we can learn new
skills, buy new clothes, perfume ourselves, get a haircut. But tattooing
and piercing can be distinguished from these in that they introduce more
enduring transformations to our bodies and in that undergoing these
transformations is painful . Tattooing, in particular, is relatively
permanent, though less so in the face of new laser technologies, and in
this it resembles such practices as footbinding, skull shaping, and the
elongation of lips and earlobes.

We could think of these activities as attempts to reduce the  
recalcitrance
of ourselves to our own wills. For whatever your position on the
artifactuality of your body may be, you have noticed that your body
responds only in very limited ways to your desires. You are not going to
be able to stay awake forever, for example, or jump over the moon. In  
fact
you are not going to be able to desire what you think you ought to  
desire:
like all of us you are at times anyway the victim of your own desires.
That is, you are recalcitrant to the operations of your own will. We  
maybe
have this kind of commonsense notion that we are our own masters (and
hence our own slaves) that we can want what we want to want and maybe
achieve it. But this is really crazy. You cannot want what you think you
ought to want; you cannot even want what you want to want; from which it
follows that you cannot decide what to want. Are you with me on this? It
is not too much to say that we are the victims of our own desire, and
actually I think that is a very good thing. For one thing, it means you
can get swept away into desire, that you can have the very human
experience of being seduced or swept away in virtue of your own desires.
It is almost as though you could ravish yourself. Creatures who were the
arbiters of their own desires (and I think, again, that that notion is
literally nonsensical; certainly it would entail a bizarrely fragmented
account of the self; not that our selves are not bizarrely fragmented,  
but
they can't be fragmented in just this way); creatures who were the
arbiters of there own desires would find themselves utterly boring, you
see? Desire is what takes ahold of you from somewhere outside your  
will or
it is not desire.

To get back on track, it is certainly right to say that none of us fully
chose our own bodies, or fully chose to be who we are. In that sense we
are our own victims or the victims of fate: for the most part we all  
have
to play the hand we are dealt. But we also all engage in an attempt to
expand the operations of our own wills in the arena of our selves, to  
get
some kind of rudimentary command over something about ourselves. That we
actually can get any command over our bodies is probably a pathetic
delusion; nevertheless we're out here trying. Now I suggest that many of
the things we do, and indeed many of the things we think of as
pathological, are attempts of this sort to make ourselves the objects of
our own will and hence to transform ourselves into things that are free.
You see? We're trying to make ourselves free by treating our own  
bodies as
material that is subject to the operation of our wills, trying to make
ourselves free by enslaving ourselves, by taking command of ourselves.
We're trying to carve out a zone of control in the absolutely
uncontrollable crushing chaos of the universe, even if this zone extends
no further than our own skins.

To this extent, it does not really matter what is tattooed on your body;
what matters most is simply that your body is somehow marked. The tattoo
is a sign of sign; that is, it inscribes the resolution to make your  
body
a semiotic site. It is a kind of pure syntax: you might notice that for
the most part, even in the case of good tattoo work, it is very  
difficult
to tell what the tattoo is unless you are standing very close, in good
light, with some time to inspect. Mostly what you notice is just the  
sheer
fact that someone is tattooed. This used to mean something fairly
specific: bad boy. It identified you by class, gender, and by  
propensity;
you were maybe a biker type, anyway probably a substance abuser and a
"rebel": kind of out of control: willing to do crazy shit. Now of course
people of all classes and genders are getting tattooed and its
significance has shifted: it still means something, but not as much.  
What
it expresses these days is fairly amorphous: again the sheer will to  
mark
your body, to turn it into a text or an image, or to incorporate the  
text
or image on your body. This has also, and appropriately, corresponded to
an increase in "abstract" or "tribal" style tattooing, where obviously
what the sign or image is a sign or image of is not the point: it's just
that you want a cool design which displays your body as marked. Here
tattooing becomes a pure syntax, a system of signs without signifieds.  
In
this it resembles most of our talk and most of our writing and most of  
our
singing and most of our painting and so on: the point is not ultimately
"what you are saying" but just to keep yapping, keep communicating, keep
making some kind of quasi-organized noise. Your body is intentionally
marked, which signals a kind of power over the self; the content, if  
any,
of such marks, are secondary.

Again, I suggest that a lot of what people do, and a lot of what we  
think
of as contemporary body pathologies, can be understood from this angle.
For example, there is a certain story about what anorexia is supposed to
be; it's supposed to be a response to magazine spreads of skinny models,
an attempt by young women to bring their bodies into conformity with  
what
they see as a cultural norm of beauty. Maybe it is sometimes that. But  
it
is also sometimes this: an attempt to gain control of one's own body or
even to transcend one's embodiment altogether: it is an attempt to  
become
a free spirit, to seize control of oneself and hence also the attempt to
enslave oneself. Anorexia may be about beauty, but it is above all about
power. As we know, food can be a vector of power between parents and
children: children can be punished by having food withheld or by being
forced to eat. This form of power may be experienced as particularly
violating because it reaches inside the body of the person over whom  
it is
exercised. Thus, refusing to eat, or taking control over one's intake of
food, can be a resistance to domination and an expression of self- 
control.
And it is an assertion of power over one's own body through an assertion
of power over its desires: its hungers. It is an attempt to make oneself
autonomous or to refuse to be penetrated; one disavows one's  
dependence on
a world of things. And it is, as well and relatedly, a kind of ascetic
spiritual expression of self-overcoming.

That is, the power one asserts in resistance to the blandishments to eat
is also and primordially a power of the self and its appetites; for  
though
we cannot control what we desire, it seems, at any rate, as though we  
can
sometimes control whether we act on those desires. And any assertion of
power over other people, even the power to resist or rebel against their
power, can only be legitimated by one's power over oneself; the threat  
of
violence is always an expression of one's own courage, for example. The
basic site of power is within the self; the basic dramas of power are
enacted within the self or transacted between the "parts" of the self.  
To
assert the will's power to resist one's own desire it to assert one's
"self-command" or "self-control" and hence signals, for let us say an
adolescent girl, that one has achieved the forms of self-division and  
the
internal arrangements of power among the portions of a divided self that
we associate with adulthood or maturity. The child starts out as "the
slave of his own desires": that is every desire is immediate, whole, and
cannot be resisted. We mature, at least in this culture, by instigating,
or receiving from others, various fragmentations of the self that make  
the
self a transaction of power.

Here is another example: substance abuse. One thing that motivates the  
use
of drugs is an extreme desire for self-control. It is sometimes said by
folks who don't know any better that addicts lack will power. But it  
takes
a hell of a lot of will power to keep swilling cheap vodka until you  
pass
out: you must have a very firm resolve and not listen to what your  
body is
telling you. Being an alcoholic requires iron self-discipline. Addiction
is an attempt to control how you feel. A typical addict wants to wake up
instantly with cocaine or caffeine, wants to feel ecstasy on demand,  
wants
to go to sleep by knocking himself unconscious: he wants perfect control
over his brain chemistry. The things he puts into his body are toxic: he
is damaging his body, but he is seeking a transcendence of the mundane
limits of his biology: he is seeking to make himself safe and  
independent
of the world by perfect control and transformation of his body. Do you
see? He has turned against his own body or pitted one desire against
another until the inner conflict begins to rip him apart or collapse him
into permanent coma. Will/body/desire: and all of them themselves  
multiple
and mutating at all times: self as war/as weapon/as hive/as electric
chair/as stone/seed/secret/feather/father/fear.

Or think about body-building. I am attempting through exercise to
transform my own body; I make my body the object of my own will in an
enduring way. I am refusing to agree to the body I have and, as it were,
growing a new body according to my own specifications. And of course the
body I am making is a powerful body, a body armored in muscle, a body  
that
does not need and which cannot be penetrated. I am making my body into  
my
own artifact by a discipline or a craft, and the fact that I am
disciplined is signified by the look of my body, which says: this has
taken years of hard exercise to achieve. My body is hence a sign of  
power,
of my power over myself, my self-possession, self-domination. It is
relevant here as well that I am also trying to heighten the sexual
desirability of my body, just as perhaps the anorexic is trying to
heighten the sexual desirability of her body. But of course, that,  
too, is
a kind of power: to be desired is in some ways to master the one who
desires. Very simply: if you want me, I can manipulate you; I can make  
you
pay; I can make you flatter; I can make you perform. One comes to  
control,
through anorexia or body-building, at least in one's own imagination,  
not
only one's response to one's own desires, but the desires of other  
people.

It is relevant in all these cases, as in other cases of physical
self-transformation--think of plastic surgery--that the process hurts.
That you have mastered yourself can only be demonstrated by the fact  
that
you can inflict pain on yourself and tolerate or come to desire that  
very
pain. The pain is the sign and the measure of your self-enslavement,  
that
is, of your self-command. That you have the will to transform or
transfigure yourself is shown by your willingness to do what you don't
want to do; that you have mastered your body is demonstrated in your
refusal to accede to its demands. Indeed, finally the desires themselves
are transformed, so that one no longer hungers, so that one takes  
pleasure
in the pain of exercise or the disability of intoxication: one wants,
finally, what hurts, or finally becomes someone for whom pain and  
pleasure
are not firmly distinguished or are inverted. That is the dirty secret  
of
ascetics everywhere: they get off on it. And tattoos and piercings hurt
too: not excruciatingly, but enough to signal power and transcendence.
Because I believe that all these forms of self-command and
self-enslavement through pain and mutilation are strategies for
transcendence: think of the figure of Christ, who must be pierced and
lacerated in his journey from sinful human body to godhead. Nailed and
bound and displayed in his suffering, he arouses our desire.

If this is beginning to sound like sadomasochism, it should. A
sadomasochistic couple is an ascetic machine, a system dedicated to
transcendence. Foucault once said that "power comes from the bottom," a
scary and profound statement. He had in mind power in big social  
systems,
but he also had in mind bondage and discipline. When I tie you up and  
hurt
you in small ways, I do so by your own consent: I do so because that is
that you want, a fact about which I will take care to remind you. Your  
own
desire is the instrument of your pain and humiliation. And you seek by
this experience a transformation or transcendence of your desire, or a
perfection of your desire, or an annihilation of your desire. (Those are
all the same thing; or they can all be achieved simultaneously: the
perfect satisfaction of desire is precisely its annihilation: desire
consumes itself in its own satisfaction: what one seeks through the
intensification of desire is the transcendence of that very desire: its
surcease in ecstasy.) What I the sadist seek, on the other hand, is an
intensification of agency, a transposition into the realm of pure  
will; I
seek annihilation of my objecthood as you seek annihilation into  
yours. I
want to become pure action, agency; I want to disavow my passivity. All
this requires pain, or at least it requires that pain be signified. I
impose my will in a simulated rape, as you let your will go.

The point of this is that we together form a system for the  
transcendence
of desire by the indefinite intensification of desire and the indefinite
deferral of its satisfaction. Your will is annihilated precisely by the
act of your own will: you will your own disappearance, like the  
anorexic:
that is ecstasy. You are overcoming yourself. I am intensifying myself
into a pure will, a pure power to command, a sheer imperative  
statement of
what will satisfy my desire. But I am relinquishing my will in the very
act by which I impose it: I am releasing myself from myself into your
desire, annihilating myself into you. Together we are making pain; we  
are
making pleasure; we are letting go of ourselves and seizing control of  
one
another. We are playing with desire, playing with will, playing, in  
short,
with power, and merging into a system that transcends itself.

Freedom or transcendence is the state in which your desires and your  
world
match utterly, where everything is exactly as you desire it to be or  
where
you desire everything to be as it is. That is: there is a sadistic
transcendence wherein one is perfectly empowered and bends the world to
one's will and one's will to one's desire. That is why absolute power
corrupts, because power is not absolute until the flow from desire to
reality is uninterrupted by will: absolute power is, hence, a complete
annihilation of self-control, a sadistic transcendence. There is also
masochistic transcendence in which one gives up one's will entirely  
not to
one's own desire, but to the desire of another, to an external reality:
here the channel is also worn smooth and there is no gap between will  
and
desire, though it runs the other way and issues in the perfect
transcendence of self-annihilation.

That there is a masochistic element in the self-mutilating adornment of
the tattoo or the piercing is too well understood, I suppose: it is
important that one experiences pain. But that there is a sadistic  
element
is not well-understood, because it is not well-understood that sadism  
and
masochism always appear as a system or machine. I am experiencing pain  
and
I am taking a certain pleasure in that. But I am also inflicting pain on
myself, willing to cause myself pain. I am a sadomasochistic system for
self-overcoming. When I am pierced, I am figuratively raped, damaged,
penetrated: someone is sticking a stud through a hole in my body. But  
I am
also doing this through my own agency: I am penetrating myself in an act
of self-revelation and self-reflection. I have, in fact, pierced my own
ears, using a safety pin. Was that a sadistic act or a masochistic  
act? I
think you can see that the question no longer makes any sense: either is
always both. And I am claiming, like the addict, the right and the  
ability
to be the maker of my own consciousness, to control my own body. My  
power
over my own body is signaled in the self-infliction of pain. And through
that pain, the body is adorned: I perform a small act of self- 
veneration;
I celebrate my body and draw attention to the point at which by my own
will its integrity has been violated. The piercing is a site of
degradation, decoration, and celebration. It damages and exalts the body
at a perfectly particular point.

A tattoo is a complex signifier: it signals class; it signals sexuality;
and it has specific content as a signifier: a depiction of an animal, a
person, an abstract tribal design. The most usual motifs are  
signifiers of
power and masculinity, especially totem animals such a birds and  
beasts of
prey. But what the tattoo signals above all is the power one seizes over
one's own body: it signals that one is the predator of oneself and hence
also one's own prey. Again, the content of the tattoo is secondary to  
the
general content of tattoos, as the point is just to be pierced in  
various
conspicuous ways: it doesn't matter so much specifically whether it is
your eyebrow or your tongue or both. The point is simply that one has
seized control of oneself: a contradictory act that renders the body a
contradictory location, because it is both sadistic and masochistic,  
both
masterful and slavish, both self-division and, potentially, a site of
self-reunification. To see this, simply note too that the extremely
tattooed body also signals someone who is out of control, dangerously
impulsive, compulsively kinky, and so on. By the very act through which
one accomplishes control over one's own body, one may signal that this
control is actually out of control, if you follow me. Again here, we see
the parallel to addiction, where one controls one's conscious state to  
the
point where one can no longer control one's control over one's conscious
state.

The height of the sadomasochistic relationship is the permanent  
contract,
specifying the forms of cooperative subordination. To understand what
tattoos mean, it is absolutely crucial to keep in mind their  
permanence. A
tattoo is a mark of resolution or bravery for that reason: one is not  
only
transforming oneself, one is inscribing one's willingness to transform
oneself once and for all, permanently. For that reason, tattoos are
excellent markers of passage or initiation, and many fraternities,
military units, athletic teams, motorcycle gangs, and so forth tattoo or
scar their members in order to signal on their bodies the permanence and
the seriousness of their commitment. To be branded or tattooed shows  
also
that you have the requisite guts to join the group. It is not the most
extreme or painful form of initiation, but it serves as a sign of pain  
and
hence of resolution. You see, the seriousness of the anorexic's  
commitment
to transform herself by the power of her own will is inscribed on her
body: it is an enduring discipline that can be read on her body as pain.
There is no sense in overcoming something painful: you have to overcome
what is pleasurable, and you have to do it by inflicting pain. And to  
show
this forth as a permanent transformation is to signal it as a  
discipline,
an ongoing state of the self, an identity.

Two of my tattoos are tributes to the dead. After my brother Bob died in
1983, I got a rose on my arm. He had a rose tattoo. When my brother Adam
died a few years ago, I asked my parents what animal Adam reminded  
them of
and put an owl on my shoulder. I have talked to other people as well who
used tattoos to commemorate the dead. What is relevant here is, first of
all, the permanence of the tattoo; I wanted to transform myself
permanently outwardly to show that I felt transformed permanently  
inwardly
by their lives and by their deaths. And I wanted a way to show the
seriousness of my mourning, both to myself and to other people. I wanted
to mutilate myself, which is a very typical response to the death of
someone you love. People rend their flesh, pull out their hair, or shave
their heads. They are marking themselves as mourners, and they are
entering into solidarity with the dead: with the pain of the dying. We
signal in a small way that we want to die with them or that a part of us
has died with them. We want to perform a small annihilation of ourselves
in public space, a small act of masochism by which we can be  
transfigured
and participate in the transfiguration of the dead. We signify the
transcendence of our embodiment on our bodies.

I know I have made these things sound unbearably perverse and kinky;  
I've
probably embarrassed those of you who are tattooed and repelled those of
you who are not. Sorry about that, but I think that we're all kinky, at
least in small ways, and that's ok. If you are expecting me now to start
condemning anorexia or bodybuilding or alcoholism or sadomasochism or
tattooing or describe them as sicknesses or start designing treatment
programs, you'll have to wait for another day. Because what I am  
trying to
say is that these things respond to a fundamental human dilemma and
dynamic. We are powerless over much of the world; we are powerless over
ourselves, and it is the latter powerlessness which is most intimate,  
most
acute, most important. Finally, what we seek by ascetic discipline, what
we seek by mystical ecstasy, what we seek by self-starvation, what we  
seek
by intoxication, what we seek by self-mutilation, what we seek by
sadomasochism, is a letting-go into that powerlessness, a reconciliation
with ourselves as objects, a destruction or releasement of subjectivity.
The tattoo, finally, is an emphasizing of embodiment, a way of drawing
attention to the body, including one's own attention; it is a monistic
gesture, an attempt to reconcile oneself with one's embodiment. The
sadistic moment is a dualistic moment, but the masochistic moment is a
moment of release into objecthood. We take command of ourselves in order
that we might be commanded, that we might feel even more acutely the  
power
that hurts us, that mutilates us, that kills us. This power is the  
world,
a fearsome senseless world of sheer objects. And you will have guessed  
by
now what I think we are in this world: also fearsome, senseless, also
objects.

We intensify our power over this world and ourselves in a thousand ways
and I have been talking only about the most personal of them. We seek to
control the environment as a whole, seek its total technological
transformation into an object of will. In bondage and discipline, the
technology is very, very important: you want to have exactly the right
restraints, exactly the right devices so that the transformations that  
you
visit on the body of your lover or which are visited on your body by  
your
lover, are exactly as you will them to be. And we are in a sadistic
relationship to our world as a whole. Every attempt to transform out
environment shows exactly this dynamic. Art, at its most intense as
absolute mastery of the medium, is a most effective expression of this
impulse: Vermeer or de Kooning are masters of paint; their paintings are
enduring signs of their ability to transform materials exactly as they
willed. Their art is an overcoming of the world that is born in
self-overcoming; their craft is a discipline that has its origin in
self-discipline, in obsession.

But finally what they seek is the moment at which will and world become
identical; in which the paint assumes the perfect form by an effort so
intense that it appears only as a perfect letting-go. Their
self-expression, in its ecstasy, is a self-annihilation: they have
expanded into everything and disappeared. There are two ways to find  
this
place: first, by simply falling away into immersion, by refusing to  
be, by
self-annihilation: the fantasy of the masochist. Second: by total  
control
and total transformation, by acts of self-discipline and world- 
discipline
by which the world and the will are made to merge: the fantasy of the
sadist. What I'm saying is: these are the same thing, finally. What I am
saying is: we are all engaged somewhere in this dynamic, in an
accumulation or a letting-go of power and desire that is a self-control
and an ecstatic release.