Conclusion
The end of modernity… is an end of history
and the beginning of many histories.
- John Frow
What is it that
the bra contains?
The 'nature' of
our bodies - like the nature of our 'selves' - is to some extent a choice
(or set of choices) that we make culturally. There is no way to confidently
define 'the body' in any universal or permanent sense, no way to conceptualise
or represent its role that doesn't contain within it a belief system.
In this thesis
I have been exploring ways to conceptualise the body that return breath
and heart to it, that acknowledge the productive possibilities in its
unboundedness, excessiveness, variety and fluidity.
Drawing on ideas
from the post-structuralist paradigm shifts of the twentieth century
that have left their mark on philosophy, science and spirituality, I
suggest that one way to mend the split between nature and culture, mind
and body is to understand these as involved in a multi-faceted and dynamic
network of interdependence, with no controlling term, no 'master of
the domain'. As a complex feedback system that extends outside of the
boundaries of the skin, this concept of embodiment suggests that we
are inter-connected with each other and with the whole of matter in
subtle ways. As such it is also a profound way to destabilise all dualities,
including the primary dividing terms of self and other.
While exploring
the body as fiction, I have also been exploring fiction as a way of
thinking that uses and values the intelligence of the body.
In writing A Short
(Personal) History of the Bra and its Contents, fiction has allowed
me to create a discursive field in which the wide range of subjects
raised by my topic - concerning issues to do with bodies, identity,
knowledge, and power at the cusp of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
- can coexist without the constant requirement to lift, separate and
impose discipline(s). As a research technology, fiction encourages casting
a wide net and fosters a high level of cross-fertilisation of ideas.
It provides an artificial space, or laboratory, where theories can be
tested and explored by grounding them in concrete circumstances. As
such it is not just a place to express ideas, but to generate, develop,
process and refine them.
In the novel samples
that comprise Part 2 of my thesis, I have developed a style using montage
and a multi-vocal narrative that allows a plethora of cultural and historical
'bits' to rub shoulders and work off each other in non-linear ways.
My aim has been to create a text in which authority keeps circulating;
where the contradictions and discontinuities can have full play; and
where the gaps, texture and juxtapositions help to create a fluid system
of meanings in which readers are actively involved. What I wanted was
a text that invites thought, but doesn't require agreement; a process
able to tap into and map aspects of the cultural unconscious; and one
able to provide an evocation of post-modern history and contemporary
life, by re-presenting a taste of the organic cultural fields, or 'datasphere'
in which meanings are constantly being made and remade.
Fiction can also
help us move beyond the fundamental 'misrecognition' where we see and
experience ourselves as separate beings (the totality of the self identified
with the visibly unified body in the mirror, and everything else defined
as Other), by allowing us to re-experience our deep interconnection
through our ability to empathise.
It is the body
that reminds us of what we most value, and what makes us feel most at
home. The body gives us important feedback about our decisions and choices;
and is thus vital in developing not just subjective knowledge, but all
knowledge, insofar as all knowledge is inter-subjective or relational.
Some of the outcomes
of my use of fiction as a research technology include, for instance,
a productive theory of body modification that doesn't disable ethical
critique, and a way of conceptualising disease that provides an alternative
to the (self/other) war and battle metaphors.
However apart from
these more specific outcomes, what I hope this novel can achieve is
to provide a meditation on certain cultural themes (such as gender,
or illness, or our relationship to our bodies) that creates an opportunity
for a shift to take place in the habitual ways in which we think and
feel, or know, things. As a psychophysiological practice, writing and
reading fiction can allow ideas to be processed in multiple subtle ways
by stilling the body and holding our focus emotionally, sensually and
intellectually.
Fiction is a place
where reason and passion can be companions, supporting each other. And
while these novel chapters don't necessarily do the work of theory (illustrating
or explaining it), they may sometimes be able to clear space for it.
By deconstructing or denaturalising old habits of thinking, breaking
them up, re-experiencing them and re-scripting their emotional charge,
even by generating a feeling of exhilaration in the face of uncertainty,
perhaps reading this kind of fiction can create a greater receptiveness
for concepts that involve a paradigmatic shift in thinking when these
are encountered in other contexts. It can make them more relevant, and
help to create a more feelingful knowledge of these concepts: helping
us to grasp them, or incorporate them.
In fiction, jokes,
play, gaps, contradictions, ironies, the sensuality of language and
images are all part of the texture that allows readers to become physically
involved in the subject, to be seduced, surprised, captured by it. To
be moved to pay attention to ideas and feelings that might in other
contexts be dismissed, ignored or avoided. For fiction presents a way
to write about the body and to involve it in relationship at the same
time; to engage and move readers on an emotional (affective) as well
as intellectual level: indeed, to explore the place where these are
inseparable.
As a companion
text to the novel samples, the first section of this thesis has explored
points of convergence between feminism, post-structuralism, quantum
physics, ecological spirituality, and the discursive strategies of history
and fiction - in particular, regarding the connections between body
and mind, matter and spirit, nature and culture, as well as the overriding
question of: 'how do we know what we know?'
By constantly questioning
the givenness or 'naturalness' of the ways we think about our bodies,
our 'selves', and the relationships we have to each other and the environment,
my aim is to create a text that intervenes, rather than just documents:
a text that invites us to explore that degree of flexibility in what
we choose to think of as 'reality'.
1. John Frow, Time
and Commodity Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) 9.
2. See the hybrid
piece, 'From the "Primitive Droop"
to the "Civilised Thrust": Towards a Politics of Body Modifications'
and Chapters 4 and 5, 'The Art of Peace, parts one and two', in the
novel samples in Part 2 of this thesis.
*
http://www.bethspencer.com/body-as-fiction.html
Phd thesis, University of Ballarat, Australia, March 2006
The Body as Fiction
/ Fiction as a Way of Thinking:
On Writing A Short (Personal) History
of the Bra and its Contents
Beth
Spencer
email: beth at bethspencer dot com
