Knowing the Difference

Feminist Perspectives in Epistemology

Kathleen Lennon, Margaret Whitford, Kathleen Lennon, Margaret Whitford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134877904
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Including contributions from an international list of renowned authors, this text seeks to address the controversial issue of difference in feminist philosophy, using approaches from both analytic and continental thinking.

Part I

OBJECTIVITY AND THE KNOWING SUBJECT

1

BODY-IMAGES AND THE PORNOGRAPHY OF REPRESENTATION

Rosi Braidotti

An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.

(Djuna Barnes)

INTRODUCTION

In this paper, I would like to (try and) take some of the issues involved in the medicalization of the female reproductive body and situate them within the area of contemporary feminist theories of subjectivity. This problem-area refers to the project of enacting and theorizing an alternative female subjectivity and of finding adequate forms of representation for it.

To situate this issue within the debate on the structures of the contemporary philosophical ‘subject’, I will be using Michel Foucault’s idea of embodiment, or of bodily materiality: the materialism of the flesh. This notion defines the embodied subject as a material, concrete effect, that is, as one of the terms in a process of which knowledge and power are the main poles. The idea of a constant, continuous all-pervading normativity is alternatively defined as the microphysics of power, bio-power or as the technology of the self.

In trying to evaluate the position of the body in such a framework, Foucault (1963, 1966) distinguished between two lines of discourse: one is the anatomo-metaphysical one (which has to do with explanation), and the other is the techno-political one, which has to do with control and manipulation. The two intersect constantly, but Foucault argues that they acquire different prominence at different times.

In the first volume of his Histoire de la Sexualité (1976), Foucault analyses the organization of sexuality in our post-metaphysical or postmodern world according to this double axis. On the one hand, we can make a distinction or a category relating to the techniques of medicalization of the reproductive body (scientia sexualis), and on the other, the arts of existence or practices of the self (ars erotica). Modernity as a whole, argues Foucault, marks the triumph of the medicalization process, or rather of the simultaneous sexualization and medicalization of the body, in a new configuration of power which he describes as ‘bio-power’ —the power of normativity over the living organism.

It can be argued, of course, that the management of living matter has always been a priority for our culture, and that what is new now is the degree of mastery that bio-technology has acquired over life. Foucault emphasizes the fact that since the Enlightenment the embodied subject has been located at the centre of the techniques of rational control and productive domination which mark the order of discourse in modernity. As a consequence of the crisis of metaphysics, and the related decline in the Enlightenment, understood as the belief in reason as the motor of historical progress, however, a set of interrelated questions about the embodiment of the subject has become not only possible but also necessary. The body as mark of the embodied nature of the subject thus becomes the site of proliferating discourses, forms of knowledge and of normativity: economy, biology, demography, family sociology, psychoanalysis, anthropology, etc. can all be seen as discourses about the body.

Following the Foucauldian reading, a new division of labour seems to have emerged between the sciences of life—the bio-discourses—and the human or social sciences. The former concentrate on the anatomo-metaphysical analysis of how the embodied subject functions; their aim is to explain and analyse. The latter pertain to the technico-political in that they elaborate a discourse about the nature of the human. In other words, the human sciences are intrinsically connected to normativity and control, in so far as they take into account, by definition, the question of the structure of the subject. In this respect, they are necessarily connected to the question of an ethics or a politics; which is not necessarily the case for the hard or for the bio-medical sciences.

This division of labour corresponds to the splitting of the bodily entity according to the twofold schema Foucault proposes: on the one hand the body is simply another object of knowledge, an empirical object among others: an organ-ism, the sum of its organic parts, an assembly of detachable organs. This is the body which clinical anatomy studies, measures and describes. On the other hand, no body can be reduced to the sum of its organic components: the body still remains the site of transcendence of the subject, and as such it is the condition of possibility for all knowledge. Foucault concludes that the body is an empirical-transcendental double.

A major role is played by the discourse of psychoanalysis which is one of the major retheorizations of the body. Far from being a mere therapy, psychoanalysis has developed into a philosophy of desire and a theory of the body as libidinal surface, a site of multiple coding, of inscription—a living text. Although Foucault’s theoretical relationship to psychoanalysis, and especially to Lacan, is far from simple, I take it as a fact that Foucauldian epistemology acknowledges the corporeal roots of subjectivity.

There is, however, a paradox in this analysis of the embodied nature of the modern subject, which is rich in implications for feminists. The body emerges at the centre of the theoretical and political debate at exactly the time in history when there is no more unitary certainty or uncontested consensus about what the body actually is. Given the loss of Cartesian certainty about the dichotomy mind/body, one can no longer take for granted what the body is. The absence of certainty generates a multiplicity of different discourses about the body. Modernity is therefore the age of the inflationary overexposure and yet absence of consensus as to the embodied, material nature of the subject. The body has turned into many, multiple bodies.

In this framework of simultaneous overexposure and disappearance of the body, the case of reproductive technologies is a very significant one, in that it both highlights and exacerbates the paradoxes of the modern condition. With the reproductive technologies, the split between reproduction, or scientia sexualis and sexuality, or ars erotica becomes institutionalized and officially enacted.

Obviously, the present situation does not arise out of the blue: the split between sexuality and reproduction, as far as women are concerned, has quite a history. I would sum it up by saying that, with chemical contraceptive techniques (the pill) we could have sexuality without reproduction— sex without babies. With the latest reproductive techniques, especially in vitro fertilization, we can have reproduction without sexuality—babies without sex. This paradox conceals, in my opinion, many theoretical and political challenges.

BIO-POWER AND WOMEN

Organs without bodies

Of great significance for feminism is the way in which the new reproductive technologies, by normalizing the dismemberment of the body, transform the body into a mosaic of detachable pieces. The phenomenon of ‘organs without bodies’ is, of course, a respectably ancient one: in the eighteenth century, with the transformations in the status of the embodied subject that I briefly sketched above, the study of the body through the practice of anatomy was momentous enough as a bio-technological innovation to require the construction of special institutions devoted to this task. The clinic and the hospital are the new monuments of the new scientific spirit; they transform the body into an organ-ism, or mass of detachable parts. They also suitably transform the relationship between the doctor and the patients, in a mirror relationship that Foucault describes admirably at the end of Histoire de la folie, as well as in Naissance de la clinique. As usual, however, Foucault devotes little or no attention and insufficient emphasis to the specific case of women’s bodies. That the body that is so often studied, comprehended and intellectually possessed is the woman’s, and especially the mother’s body, is a point that seems to escape Foucault’s attention.

Nevertheless, the point remains: genealogically speaking, the invention of a clinical structure is linked to the medical practice of anatomy. This is the practice that grants to the medical sciences the right to go and see what goes on inside the human organism. The actual elaboration of the discourse of clinical anatomy can be considered as quite a scientific progress, when compared to the centuries-old taboos that had forbidden the access to the ‘secrets of the organism’. We must remember that our culture had traditionally held the body in awe, severely regulating knowledge relating to it. Not only was it forbidden to open up the body in order to disclose its mechanisms, but also it was absolutely sacrilegious to use the bodily parts for the purpose of scientific investigation. The dissection of corpses was forbidden till the fifteenth century and after that it was subject to very strict regulation. Even nowadays, the field of organ transplant is ruled by a web of laws and regulations that restrict the gift of organs and their usage for scientific experiments.

Clearly enough, clinical anatomy is a death-technique, it has to do with corpses and fresh supplies of organs. As such it marks an epistemological shift in the status of the body; the living body becomes, in the process of clinical anatomy, a living text, that is to say material to be read and interpreted by a medical gaze that can decipher its diseases and its functions. Anatomy results in a representation of the body as clear and distinct—visible, and therefore intelligible.

As the French psychoanalyst Pierre Fedida has suggested (1971), the opening of corpses in the practice of anatomy marks an epistemological break vis-à-vis the scientific order of the previous centuries. The rational, visible organism of modern science marks the end of the fantastic, imaginary representations of the alchemists, and consequently empties out the body of all its opacity and mystery. The paradox is that this new process of decoding and classifying the bodily functions—which opens up new, unexplored spaces to the medical gaze—also closes the body off in a new concept: that of the appropriate shape, form and function of the organs. The different organs, in other words, only make sense and become decodable, readable and analysable because they all belong to the same assembled unity, the same organ-ism: like the letters of a corporeal alphabet.

Organized in this manner, the knowledge that the bio-medical sciences get from the organism is, as Foucault put it: ‘epistemologically related to death’ (Foucault 1963:200), in that the dead body alone can disclose its mysteries about life. In turn this changes the position of the doctor: whereas in the pre-scientific period the idea of illness was associated with a metaphysics of evil, in which the visible organ was a sign of disease or malfunction, in modern times it conies closer to a hermeneutics in which the organ produces a symptom. It is because humans are mortal that they can fall ill: the notion of death becomes the horizon to which the idea of illness is attached. The visibility and intelligibility of the living organism are very closely related to the notion of death. ‘Des cadavres ouverts de Bichat à l’homme freudien, un rapport obstiné à la mort prescrit à l’universel son visage singulier et prête à la parole de chacun le pouvoir d’être indéfiniment entendue’ (200).

What is so striking about the discourse and the practice of clinical anatomy, with its closeness to death, is that it marks an experience of loss of illusions. The fantastic, imaginary dimension that was so strong in the discourse of the alchemists, the simple curiosity before the living organism’s complexity, is replaced by the detached power of observation of the clinical standpoint. The body that is open to scrutiny, to observation by the bio-medical gaze, is a body that can be manipulated; it is a useful, purposeful body, that can produce knowledge, thus legitimating the power of the bio-medical profession.

The bio-technological universe clarifies and makes manifest the tendencies that had been operative since the beginning of what we call modern technology and science. Modern science is the triumph of the scopic drive as a gesture of epistemological domination and control: to make visible the invisible, to visualize the secrets of nature. Bio-sciences achieve their aims by making the embodied subject visible and intelligible according to the principles of scientific representation. In turn this implies that the bodily unity can be split into a variety of organs, each of which can in turn be analysed and represented.

In modern bio-chemical research, thanks to the advances of molecular biology, we have gone well beyond the organs, reducing the field of study to tissues, cells and micro-organisms. The phenomenon that I called ‘organs without bodies’ has concentrated on smaller and smaller entities. The change in size also marks a shift in the scale of the exchanges. The commercialization of living matter has grown larger and more effective than ever. Traffic in organs, but also in tissues and cells—in other words, the commercialization of living material for the purpose of medical research or treatment is a world-wide phenomenon, with the Third World providing most of the spare parts: foetuses from Korea, kidneys from Brazil, eyeballs from Colombia.

The idea of traffic in organs, or the exchange of living material rests on a number of theoretical hypotheses that I find questionable: it confuses the parts with the whole and it encourages what I consider to be the perverse notion of the interchangeability of organs. That is to say that all organs, or living material are the same, and thus one kidney is as good as any other, one uterus will do as well as any other. An ovary is an ovary is an ovary. All organs are equal, but some are more equal than others; consequently, all organs are equally exchangeable and the laws trying to regulate this market are notoriously ineffective.

What worries me about the theoretical underpinnings of this practice is the falsely reassuring notion of the sameness of the bodily material involved. In my opinion it conceals the importance of differences in determining what I would call the singularity of each subject.

Killing time

Let me make the same point from another angle, directly related to the new reproductive technologies: what is at stake in all this dismemberment and free circulation of organs or living cells is the disruption of time, or temporality. I stated before that clinical anatomical observations required a corpse, dead material, as the basic matter or text to be decoded. It thus bore a direct relationship to death. The phenomenon of ‘body-snatching’ in the nineteenth century proved a very fertile ground not only for a macabre trade, but also for the popular imagination to speculate about the horrors of modern science.

In modern bio-technologies, time is arrested in a much more subtle manner; just think of what happens to the reproductive process in the artificial insemination cases: the freezing of the sperm, the ova and the embryo suspends the process indefinitely (one can fertilize one’s egg now and bring it to completion in twenty years’ time).

In vitro fertilization has another kind of discontinuity in terms of reproduction: there is first the hormonal pre-treatment of the patient; then the farming of the ripe eggs; the actual artificial insemination; the division of the cells in vitro; the transferral of the embryo into the uterus. At the same time, the new social forms of procreation, such as surrogate motherhood, divide the reproductive continuum into different levels of mothering, corresponding to different moments in the time-sequence: there is the ovular mother, the uterine mother, the social mother.

This dislocation of temporality has paved the way for another phenomenon that I would describe as perverse; it can best be illustrated by an extreme example: inter-genera...