Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves

The Rhetoric of Reproduction in Early Modern England

Eve Keller

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780295990767
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves examines the textured interrelations between medical writing about generation and childbirth - what we now call reproduction - and emerging notions of selfhood in early modern England. At a time when medical texts first appeared in English in large numbers and the first signs of modern medicine were emerging both in theory and in practice, medical discourse of the body was richly interwoven with cultural concerns. Through close readings of a wide range of English-language medical texts from the mid-sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, from learned anatomies and works of observational embryology to popular books of physic and commercial midwifery manuals, Keller looks at the particular assumptions about bodies and selves that medical language inevitably enfolds. When wombs are described as "free" but nonetheless "bridled" to the bone; when sperm, first seen in the seventeenth century by the aid of the microscope, are imagined as minute "adventurers" seeking a safe spot to be "nursed": and when for the first time embryos are described as "freeborn, " fully "independent" from the females who bear them, the rhetorical formulations of generating bodies seem clearly to implicate ideas about the gendered self. Keller shows how, in an age marked by social, intellectual, and political upheaval, early modern English medicine inscribes in the flesh and functioning of its generating bodies the manifold questions about gender, politics, and philosophy that together give rise to the modern Western liberal self - a historically constrained (and, Keller argues, a historically aberrant) notion of the self as individuated and autonomous, fully rational and thoroughly male. An engagingly written and interdisciplinary work that forges a critical nexus among medical history, cultural studies, and literary analysis, Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves will interest scholars in early modern literary studies, feminist and cultural studies of the body and subjectivity, and the history of women's healthcare and reproductive rights.

1 / On Either Side of the Early Modern:

Posthuman and Premodern Bodies and Selves

I INTEND TO DISCUSS A WIDE RANGE OF ENGLISH-language medical texts written between the mid-sixteenth and the early eighteenth centuries. By offering close readings of their rhetorical practices, I hope to elucidate some of the ways in which emerging understandings of gender-defined subjectivity are implicated in and enable discursive formulations of the body. But I want to begin by looking away from my subject in two, opposite directions, to the long before and the long after, because I think that considering the bio-medical versions of the early modern body in the diachronic perspective of the long arc of western intellectual history will help us to understand what is so peculiar about the bodies and selves that get constructed in the early modern period itself.

There are, of course, dangers in making the comparison I am about to propose; minimally I lay myself open to charges of presentism (that is, of anachronistically employing current conceptual categories to talk about premodern constructs) and, more generally, to the charge that I ignore crucial differences in order to make a claim about similarity. I would respond by saying that my intent is not to argue that the distant past is best understood in terms of present concerns and concepts or that ancient ideas fit easily and accurately into current preoccupations, but rather to suggest the existence of long-term and fairly broad-based continuities even amidst the epistemic upheavals of millennia. Differences abound, but there are points of contact, too, and I think they are worth noting, partly because they might help us think through questions about bodies and selves in our own time, but also, and more particularly for my purposes, because they might help us better understand how the versions of body and self that emerged in the early modern period differed from both what had gone before and what has followed since. I will argue that it is at just those points of difference, registered in the subtle rhetorical moves of these vernacular texts, that we can most clearly see what interested—and troubled—early modern writers about the idea of a self and how it might (or might not) be related to the material stuff of the bodies they wrote about.

My premise is twofold: first, that despite important and evident differences both in biological detail and in ideological and methodological assumption, there are remarkable (though typically unremarked) areas of overlap between some recent figurations of the so-called posthuman and the premodern human as it is modeled in some of the foundational medical writings of Galen; and second, that the early modern figurations of the human that this book will address differ from both the before and the after on precisely these points of overlap.

Because it offers an argument about similarity, this chapter proceeds somewhat schematically. I begin my case about these areas of overlap by establishing some of the essential characteristics of posthumanism. Although typical treatments of the posthuman emphasize the idea of the interfacing of flesh and wire, human and machine, I argue here that the underlying idea of posthumanism is broader than that. Specifically, by looking to some recent research in robotics and neurophilosophy, I point to three recurrent features of the posthuman self, namely, embodiment (the self is inextricable from its material substrate); embeddedness (the self is not an inviolable entity but rather a point in a network of relations); and distributed function (there is no homunculus or central control feature of human being; the self arises, rather, from the distributed functioning of semiautonomous systems).

Having established my portrait of the posthuman, I turn to survey some of Galen's essential ideas about physiology in order to show how these three features of posthumanism—embodiment, embeddedness, and distributed function—characterize the Galenic notion of personhood as well. I consider by turns Galen's theory of the elements to explicate his understanding of embeddedness, his views on the status and physiological role of the psyche to elucidate his position on embodiment, and his treatment of the four natural faculties to show how personhood is not separable from but consonant with the distributed workings of these psychophysiological functions. In concluding the chapter, I consider the importance of the comparison: the early modern models of selfhood with which this book is primarily concerned constitute the one clear break in otherwise continuous understandings of body and self between the premodern and the posthuman in western thought.

Arising from the challenges presented to the idea of human being by research and technological developments in artificial intelligence, bioengineering, and robotics, the posthuman refers to a loosely defined network of ideas about subjectivity and its relation to embodiment, agency, and information. Posthuman critiques typically treat the technoscientific—the cyborgian mergings and biological manipulations made possible in thought or practice by robotics, virtual reality, genetic engineering, and stem cell research. The posthuman cyborg is not only the person with the cochlear implant, the runner with the robotic prosthetic leg, but also the bioengineered skin graft, the laboratory-synthesized liver.¹ Wholly a hybrid, a merging of categories popularly held distinct, the posthuman tests the limits of the human, questioning its coherence as a category, its givenness in nature. The posthuman is therefore post not only in the sense of coming after the humanist vision but also in the sense of challenging its basic assumptions of the human self as natural, inviolable, autonomous.

Yet, as many have noted, posthumanism often perpetuates the very humanism it purports to supplant.² In many of its forms—though not in the one that will concern me here—posthumanism occludes the body as much as any dualism might; what counts in these versions is not the material substrate of mentality but the structure of the informational flow that results in cognitive capacity. The key idea in these versions is that the mind (whether human or artificial) can be profitably understood and analyzed as an information-processing system; as the neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland rather felicitously (if derisively) explains it, in this view, “the mind is analogous to software running on a computer. Like Adobe Photoshop, the cognitive program can be run on computers with very different hardware configurations. Consequently, although mind software can be run on the brain, it can also run on a device made of silicon chips or Jupiter goo.”³ Because the particular matter of which the creature is made is deemed incidental to its intelligence, some researchers who support this view speak comfortably of a postbiological future for human being. The roboticist Hans Moravec, perhaps the most notable proponent of this position, forecasts a time when it will be possible to “download” an individual's consciousness into a machine, thereby perpetuating “life”—and the individual herself—in a siliconbased, rather than a carbon-based, entity.⁴ As the cultural and literary critic Katherine Hayles has pointed out, these versions of the posthuman, though radical in their belief in the possibility of a seamless interface between human being and intelligent machine, actually perpetuate one of the central features of liberal humanist subjectivity, namely, the privileging of cognition over embodiment and the allied assumption that cognition is the exclusive realm of the subject.⁵

But other modes of posthumanist thought do not as readily engage the dualisms of our humanist legacy, and it is these that recapitulate premodern models. Evident in some recent work in robotics, neurophilosophy, and cognitive science, these versions are rightly deemed posthuman, even when they do not explicitly refer to themselves as such, because they counter some of the central characteristics of the distinctly humanist self; they view embodiment as fundamental, as in fact the necessary substrate of human being, consciousness, and selfhood. Focused on a creature's fully embodied existence, these forms of posthumanism typically consider cognitive capacity and agency to be widely distributed phenomena, rather than exclusively localized in an autonomous, conscious, and individuated mind, and they assess intelligence in terms of a creature's embedded, networked, and fully imbricated behaviors among manifold social and natural environments.

A ready example of this mode of posthumanism is the work of Rodney Brooks, Director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, whose work with mobile robots in the 1990s revolutionized the field. In the paradigm used by the so-called old AI, mobile robots typically employed a centralized control system, what Brooks calls a “cognition box.” In order to navigate their way through a particular space, these systems would first compare information about the local environment gathered by the robot's sensors to a model of that environment preprogrammed into the robot's centralized computer. Then they would figure out, based on the relation between the scanned information and the built-in model, what to tell the actuators in the robot to do. This process involved quite a bit of number crunching and would take some time, so there was always an inelegant (even an “unintelligent”) time lag between the sensing and the subsequent moving. The process as a whole, though, was based on the idea that the robot's “intelligence” was situated in its computer “brain,” which, especially in early versions of such robots, was housed in a mainframe computer physically separated from the mechanical robot itself.⁶

Brooks's innovation was to dispense with this centralized intelligence system, in essence, to do away with the need for mind conceived of as abstract cognition. As an alternative, he began to build robots that relied on direct sensorymotor loops, on unmediated connections between what the robots sensed and what they did, with no detailed models of the world between them.⁷ Brooks built robots from the bottom up, employing relatively simple and autonomous programs, each designed to perform a specific task. The robots were able to act efficiently, even “intelligently,” in their environments through distributed control systems rather than a centralized plan—that is, through groups of autonomously operating software programs that, functioning in concert, gave rise to complex behaviors that were not themselves programmed into the machines. The intelligence was not in the computer brain; rather, it emerged through the robots’ embodied interaction with their environments.

An early example of such a robot is Genghis, now housed at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Genghis is an insect-like, six-legged robot designed to be able to follow any mammal's path without human intervention. Whereas previous robots designed to navigate space would have to compare whatever they actually encountered in their environment with the model of that environment built into their centralized computer brain and only then determine how to act in the world, Genghis was designed with fifty-one independent, parallel programs, each, Brooks says, no more complex than the software that runs a soda machine.⁸ These programs were not centrally integrated (other than minimally, to resolve conflicts); instead, each program interacted with the world on its own to perform a single task based on local and relatively simple computations. When they worked together in a particular environment, however, they enabled Genghis to demonstrate “intelligent” behavior—in this case, following the track of a mammal—without a human controller or a computerized cognition box running the show.

In describing Genghis and the humanoid robots that he has worked on more recently, Brooks alludes to the ways in which his robots engage currently competing models of intelligence and selfhood. Control-box robots manifest what is essentially a reified version of an Enlightenment model: a discrete intelligence responds to and subsequently guides a body's interaction with its environment; agency is localized, centered in the robot's control-box “mind.”⁹ By contrast, Brooks's bottom-up model is based on an understanding of intelligence as being both fully embodied and inextricably embedded in local environments. Without a central control box, intelligent behavior emerges as a global effect of simple, systemwide behaviors that are mediated through the world.¹⁰

Understood with these emphases of embodiment, embeddedness, and distributed capacity, the posthuman need not be confined to its typical realms of artificial intelligence, robotics, and science fiction. Nor need it be exclusively based in the interlacing of human and machine entities, though that certainly is its most common form. One can also see aspects of the posthuman in the feminist epistemology of Elizabeth Grosz, which emphasizes the body's constitutive role in subjectivity; in Donna Haraway's idea of “situated knowledge,” which emphasizes the context sensitivity and necessary partiality of knowledge; and in the cognitive science of Francisco Varela, which understands cognition as necessarily and simultaneously embedded and materially situated in the world.¹¹ But the posthuman selves most pertinent to my purposes are those that emerge from some current research in neuroscience and neurophilosophy, because these imagine selfhood specifically in relation to human biology.

That one can talk at all about brain sciences having anything more or less explicit to say about the self is, of course, a relatively new phenomenon. Until recently, questions related to the contours of selfhood were considered fundamentally philosophical, or perhaps psychophilosophical, in nature, and they were typically addressed by means of introspection and logical analysis. Now, however, partly as a result of developments in neural imaging technologies, brain science has begun to tackle some of these questions head on.¹² What accounts biologically for the existence of consciousness? What gives rise, both evolutionarily and within the individual, to a sense of self, of I-ness? Can agency reasonably be understood as free will?—these questions are now open to empirical analysis.¹³

Precisely because neuroscience could now venture into traditionally philosophical territory, a new discipline, neurophilosophy, emerged in the 1980s to come to terms with what neuroscientific research amounted to philosophically. Neurophilosophy, in other words, is a field of inquiry that approaches topics traditionally considered within the bounds of philosophy (for example, the nature of mind, volition, and the self) from the specific vantage point of neuroscience. Its guiding premise is not simply that neuroscience has something useful to say about these deeply entrenched and knotty philosophical questions but, more strongly, that the best way to make progress on them is to reconsider them in light of neuroscientific research. Patricia Churchland, arguably the founder of the field, has even proposed that it no longer makes sense to pursue epistemology other than in neuroscientific terms.¹⁴

Though biologically grounded studies of these broad questions are currently quite widespread, it is important to recognize that there is no consensus within either philosophical or scientific communities that neuroscience can ultimately answer them. The skepticism comes from those whom Owen Flanagan calls the “New Mysterians,” who argue, for example, that consciousness, because it is by definition subjective and phenomenological, simply cannot be objectively explained, and from functionalists, who do not consider the material substrate of consciousness and cognition to be central to the study of intelligent behavior. Even among those who endorse the usefulness of neuroscientific studies to questions of consciousness and cognition, there is little agreement on whether the widely demonstrated correlation between mental and neural events leads or amounts to an identity between them; that is, just seeing some physical event on a brain imaging machine at the same time that the subject reports experiencing a mental event does not necessarily mean that the physical event (an implied pattern of neural firing) causes or is identical to the mental event (say, seeing the color red). The two phenomena are clearly correlated but no one is ready to state definitively what the correlation amounts to.¹⁵ And even for those who believe it possible in particular cases, scientific reduction—the explanation of a macrophenomenon in terms of causative physical structures, that is, as an effect of microphenomena—appears to be a long way off and there is no expectation of finding a one-to-one correspondence that explains higher order effects such as perception in terms of the lowest levels of neural activity.¹⁶

Still, many now think it fully plausible to develop wholly materialist and naturalistic brain-based frameworks for capacities that have in the popular imagination of the past several hundred years traditionally been accorded to a disembodied mind. Robust research in neuroscience is now yielding results that unequivocally demonstrate that the mind's capacities are materially made, emerge from widely distributed neural networks, and function in fully embedded connection with their environments. What is being eroded by contemporary biological studies, therefore, is precisely the mo...