Mahmut Mutman

Department of Design and Communication
Bilkent University
mutman@bilkent.edu.tr

 

Vicki Kirby, Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal. New York & London: Routledge, 1997.

 

As the newly branded Cultural Studies makes its way into Western academia, it seems as though we have left a number of dogmas behind. A strange, hybrid blend itself (of Gramscian Marxism; semiology; psychoanalysis; ethnography; post-structuralism; Frankfurt School, feminist, and post-colonial criticisms), the emergent field of cultural studies is apparently established on an epistemological refusal of truth or reality and in relentless opposition to a positivistic or realistic concept of natural laws. We are produced by signifying practices and ideologies, discourses motivated or determined by power, and our gender or cultural identities are contingent politico-cultural constructions, not natural givens. Culture thus becomes a new object of study in a new broadly “constructionist” ethical and political framework.

 

Endorsing its critical conceptual and political insights, Vicki Kirby is nevertheless skeptical of the current state of cultural theory and provides us with a productive criticism of its present linguistic framework. Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal focuses on the nature/culture divide as this binary opposition is implicated with other binarisms which inform the data of cultural studies: man-woman, mind-body, sex-gender, sign-referent, west-rest. Kirby convincingly demonstrates that an argument which takes the sign as that which institutes culture should attend to the fact that the sign is not a homogenous object, and the strange duality internal to it is never closed. At the moment we accept a final closure as the identity of sign or of language in opposition to body and substance, we inevitably inscribe nature into culture precisely under the guise of their radical separation or difference. Given the association of woman and cultural “others” with nature, an uncritical acceptance of the culture-nature divide would have critical ethical and political consequences. Kirby’s argument is refreshing, opening the path where it is closed. Thus, where many of us find a home for radical theorizing, a secure new beginning in the tranquillity of the cultural sign, Kirby finds a risk, an unnoticed reversal which might leave “nature” intact in its very institution or inscription of “culture.” To her, cultural studies is hazardous terrain, one where we must move vigilantly. More importantly, Kirby develops her argument in the no less hazardous terrain of feminist theory, through a deconstructive engagement with the arguments of its most eminent writers in the Anglo-Saxon world.

 

Telling Flesh is no easy read. But, a book of exceptional significance and merit, it has much to offer to the patient and meticulous reader. In the opening chapter of the book, Kirby accomplishes a fascinating reading of Saussure and post-Saussurian theory of the sign. As intriguing and complex as it is, this chapter draws the main contours of her argument. Taking her lead from Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, Kirby offers an original account of “what Saussure saw without seeing, knew without being able to take into account,” and evokes the rich potential implications of Saussure’s predicament for the present work in feminist theory and cultural studies. We must remember that, as cultural studies owes much to semiology, it is a commonplace to the radical cultural analyst/critic that the sign is arbitrary. What this is supposed to mean, however, is little asked, while the implications of rooting the sign in the real object are regarded as naturally conservative. Kirby shows how Saussure’s definition of the sign as arbitrary is constantly visited by the ghost he wished to expel: the nomenclature theory as simple naming of objects in the real world. Hence the complex, repetitive, and often contradictory account of sign and language in Saussure’s text calls for close scrutiny, especially given that, in their disciplinary haste to begin from a methodological foundation, “the interpreters have tended to defend the value of its legacy by separating its insights from the peculiar ambiguities of the text’s failures” (9). The inevitable result is that they have missed its most radical implications. While Saussure’s ambiguities implied that the referent is not easily dispensable, the followers have insisted on a radical separation between language and its outside–an insistence that is reminiscent of a moral injunction. However, Saussure’s concept of language as a differential system without positive terms implied that the concept of arbitrariness cannot simply be located between two separate terms; it is also within each term. The implication is that “identity is always divided from itself, constituted from a difference within (in between) itself; a difference that at the same time determines its difference from another supposedly outside itself” (30). As this puts the identity of both language and identity in crisis, the logical implication is that the sign’s identity cannot be foreclosed. The sign is informed by a context that is more than linguistic, and the morphology of the Derridean grammatological textile cannot be confined within society. Therefore “the transformational plasticity that identifies culture must also inhabit nature” (56). The body is as mutable and articulate as culture.

 

Kirby’s contention is that Derrida’s concept of text has been mistaken for a phenomenal concept of writing, while this philosopher’s aim was to deconstruct precisely a linguistic metaphysics or linguisticism which is based on an absolute separation between signification and reality. The view that is predominant in cultural studies maintains that reality is an ideological effect that might be constructed differently through time and space. Kirby warns us that this view has already assumed an immutable ground or natural limit: the body is excluded from the analysis as the universal biological stuff. However, the uncanny examples that she gives speak a body that is never mute: the hysteric body that is written upon signs itself, the Hindu devotee who walks a distance with metal spokes driven into his skin and organs does neither bleed nor scar, the deaf percussionist hears the wrong notes. The body is not the universal biological stuff written by culture, that dead, inert matter assumed both by the culturalist and the biological reductionist, but this matter is endlessly transformable and mutable, a fold, a fascinating plasticity where the distinction between culture and nature, the inside and the outside, are convoluted. What writing measures itself up (body, substance, matter) is also a scripture. The intertext of this mutual implication of body and signification disrupts the temporal determination of what comes first.

 

To some, this may sound like an unfortunate return to biological essentialism. But Kirby defies this reading by confronting the question of essentialism. If body/nature is no longer solid ground, then the question of essentialism can be thought differently. As essentialism is the condition of possibility for any political axiology, its double bind is enabling as well as prohibitive. Kirby succinctly argues that the question is not the what but the how of essentialism: “how is essence… naturalized within our thought and our being? how does it congeal into a corporeal reality?” (72). In an effort to open the question of essentialism, she devotes a separate chapter to three important feminist theorists: Jane Gallop (1988), Drucilla Cornell (1991), and Judith Butler (1993). In a close and diligent reading of their texts, she demonstrates how Gallop, Cornell, and Butler attempt to come to terms with this impasse in their different ways, and each (especially Butler) make important advances. However, they end up excluding the body from the analysis because of their founding commitment to an absolute separation or gap between signification and body. Kirby’s criticisms are not simply negative. Her debt to these feminist theorists is made clear as she mimes their arguments in a deconstructive manner, in a way that opens them up to a different and complex account of the convoluted logic of binarism. The result is more than recognizing their limits; indeed their political force is expanded rather than diminished. Deconstructing their “restricted” economy, i.e., their implicit or explicit reinscription of an hermeneutic horizon which leaves the body/nature as inaccessible and immutable, Kirby argues that it is not the biological truth that is inaccessible to cultural interpretation but “the very tissue of their interweaving” (80). It is this “intertext” she invites us to bring back. However, her proposal is not at all that of an easy transition to Derrida’s general economy, as it may seem to an indiscreet understanding of this philosopher’s notion of text as an expansion of the problematic of language. Rather she suggests that “we work at the interfacings of these binary borders [between culture and nature, mind and body] to question the very notions of identity and separability they maintain” (96). The problem is not indeed simply limited by feminist theory. Kirby shows in another chapter that the recent concern with cyberspace suffers from a similar problem: conceptualizing cyberspace as a form of habitation in a conceptual space without location and without bodily anchor, the recent theorizations of cyberspace, “pro-” and “anti-technology” alike, maintain a Cartesian notion of subject which keeps mind and body separate.

 

The powerful Anglo-Saxon invention of postmodernism and/or cultural studies is not immune to the well-established liberal illusions of modernity. The present canonical and political enterprise of adding more names to the list of identities virtually bars the questioning of the identity’s process of becoming itself. The paradox of the politics of inclusion is its oppositional logic, in which mind and body, culture and nature, self and other are carefully kept separate in order to re-shuffle social identities in multi-culturalism. Arguing that the subject’s assimilative, cannibal economy is overlooked in the present cultural theory, Kirby asks whether the passenger list on the global rail is the menu on the Western subject’s table.¹ Furthermore, can the analysis still be confined with a restricted sense of writing or language, if I am also implicated within the fold of its différance? It is not a question of simply giving up on postmodernism, for indeed, with the interventions of Derrida, Irigaray, Foucault, and Deleuze, we now have the means to contest the culture of cannibalism in and by an engagement of the uncanny confluence of the matter and the idea as generalized writing. Against an old notion of ideology-critique which proposes to “just say no” to essentializing discourses such as biology or sociobiology, Kirby powerfully argues that nothing can be excluded from analysis because “the political force of essentializing discourses cannot be confined to their truth claims, but exceed the politics of correction”: the essence is ceaselessly rearticulated within the complexity of the body as the scene of writing.

 

As we cannot not demand cultural and social rights, we should also be vigilant of the benevolent subject who re-inscribes himself in a circumscription of such demands. Kirby provides a brilliant philosophical critique of benevolence as an epistemological-moral determination of the subject. Depending on a probing observation by Maurice Blanchot, she succinctly argues that if we cannot know the other, nor can we simply declare our non-knowledge, for this would already be a determination of the limits and identity of our knowledge.² We have to work at the border again and never stop asking: who determines cultural “difference”? who makes the oldest demand that the “other” should speak up? For even the most particular is not immune to the viral force field of the general, which is already within it, which keeps it moving (as the deconstructive reading of Saussure has demonstrated). Even a corrective critic such as Edward Said is forced to admit the productive efficacy of writing by describing his work on Orientalism as the inventory of the traces of this hegemonic discourse upon him (1978). Nevertheless Kirby provides a short but illuminating criticism of Said’s corrective politics. If Orientalism’s wrong writings are inhabited by an empowering mutability, she asks, does this not mean that it is determined by a constitutive economy that exceeds the classical notions of identity and mediation? The implication is that we can no longer keep the critique of colonialism within the bounds of a unified subject of humanity, as Said insists most remarkably in his recent work on intellectuals (1994). Orientalism or (neo)colonial discourse is certainly part of the force field of value which produces Man as the subject of humanness. In issues of cultural difference, then, the subject of our query is no less than this subject of “humanness,” i.e., the discourse on cultural difference should be a query of how Man is differentiated, individuated, and given a fictitious autonomy in oppositional terms such as reason versus unreason, civil versus primitive, and so on.

 

For Kirby, postmodernist cultural theory’s re-writing of Man as intrinsically displaced, dislocated, and hybrid, elaborated in the writings of cultural critics such as James Clifford (1988) and Homi Bhabha (1994), is only apparently a step further than Said’s unified human subject. But this replacement signals a new anthropologism rather than a deconstruction of Man. The replacement of purity with hybridity assumes purity, and thus hybridity functions precisely in the place of purity: a new form of identity politics that does not touch Man but implicitly acknowledges his place as the truth of culture. Kirby suggests, however, that we do not assume the place but question its placing, for there is more to this becoming-place than the logic of sameness or op-position allows. A reversal of binarisms (pure-hybrid or universal-particular) cannot protect the otherness of the other, since this apparently humble pluralism is still a problematical determinism of difference. It reduces a “politics of location,” understood as “the infinity of co-ordinates that produce the re-markability of the body” (161), to the comforting demand that natives talk hybrid.

 

In conclusion, Kirby argues that by replacing culture for nature, representation for origin, and effect for cause, postmodernism has created a new doxa that has become more paralyzing than enabling. The need for a new para-dox might begin with the observation that, by making nature a synonym for what is given and immutable, postmodern doxa has just missed the question of given culture. Those formulaic statements of “our present,” the decentering of the humanist subject, the critique of intention, and the concept of contingency imply a move from the universal to local knowledge. But this replacement is already inscribed within the trajectory of modern thought. What Kirby aptly calls “the subject of humanness” is the blindspot in postmodern cultural criticism: “it is entirely unclear how this subject of humanness recognizes itself as a unified subject of humanity, individuates itself within species-being and identifies itself as possessing sufficient stability to ground the destabilization of grounds” (151). Within the framework of the unified subject of humanity, language belongs to Man, is mediation by and for Man. Against this age-old metaphysics, Kirby proposes a corporeography in which “the body is more than a visitor to the scene of writing… it is the drama of its own remarkability” (154). By a powerful critical articulation of Gayatri Spivak’s reading of Marx’s “body with no possible outlines,” she argues that the infinity of the body’s limits and borders are at the same time internal to the spacing of its tissue.³ With this concept of body, which Kirby derives from a highly original reading of Derrida, the essence is no longer an identity, a seamless unity of its manifold manifestations, nor is it simply lacking, happily replaced by a “plurality” which always remains within the unity of humanity. The essence is now a complex, open-ended, and mutable writing–and it is essence that is writing.

 

The significance of Kirby’s argument for feminist theory cannot be underestimated. Her call for a re-reading of corporeality takes its impetus from an original and powerful reading of Jacques Derrida’s notion of generalized text as a deconstruction of the reduction of the proper or reality to language, as well as Luce Irigaray’s relentless feminist questioning of phallogocentrism, which Kirby proposes to read as “biology re-writing itself.” Within Kirby’s understanding, the body is not just a new object or construct that has finally come to the attention of cultural experts at the end of a long and triumphant theoretical and political progress. The body is never just there, passively waiting to be signified. The effort of telling flesh is the story of the flesh that is never mute but always already telling, always already articulate. Like Irigaray, Kirby too believes and powerfully articulates that the “question” of the body or woman is indeed the question of Man. Thus, far from being a mere denial of progress, her text invites us to see the immense scope of feminism’s relevance today.

 

Notes

 

1. Kirby follows here a recent argument developed by Derrida in an interview with Jean-Luc Nancy, where Derrida relates the question of the “who” (of the subject) to that of “sacrifice.” Their conjunction recalls the concept of the subject as phallogocentric structure, and further concepts of “carnivorous virility” and “carno-phallogocentrism” as the given culture (Derrida 113).

 

2. Blanchot writes: “There is an ‘I do not know’ that is at the limit of knowledge but that belongs to knowledge. We always pronounce it too early, still knowing all–or too late, when I no longer know that I do not know” (qtd. in Taylor 1).

 

3. In her interview with Ellen Rooney, Spivak argues that the body as such has no possible outlines. For her, this means that it cannot be approached: “… if one really thinks of the body as such, there is no possible outline of the body as such. I think that’s about what I would say. There are thinkings of the systematicity of the body, there are value codings of the body. The body, as such, cannot be thought, and I certainly cannot approach it” (Spivak 149). Kirby’s contention is that Spivak has just approached the body when she said that she cannot.

 

Works Cited

 

• Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York and London: Routledge, 1993.
• Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
• Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1988.
• Cornell, Drucilla. The Philosophy of the Limit. New York: Routledge, 1992.
• Derrida, Jacques, and Jean-Luc Nancy. “Eating Well, or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.” Who Comes After the Subject. Eds. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, Jean-Luc Nancy. New York and London: Routledge, 1991. 96-119.
• Gallop, Jane. Thinking Through the Body. New York: Columbia UP, 1988.
• Said, Edward. Orientalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
• —. Intellectuals. London: Vintage, 1994.
• Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, and Ellen Rooney. “In a Word. Interview.” differences 1 (1989): 124-155.
• Taylor, Mark, ed. Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986.