Hanson, Erin 2019 English Thesis Title: “An Unexploited Mine” : the Body, Ecology, and Virginia Woolf's Aesthetics of Inte

Hanson, Erin 2019 English Thesis

Title: “An Unexploited Mine” : The Body, Ecology, and Virginia Woolf’s Aesthetics of Interruption Advisor: Walter Johnston Advisor is Co-author: None of the above Second Advisor: Released: release now Authenticated User Access: Contains Copyrighted Material: No

“AN UNEXPLOITED MINE”: THE BODY, ECOLOGY, AND VIRGINIA WOOLF’S AESTHETICS OF INTERRUPTION

Erin Hanson

Professor Walter Johnston, Advisor

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in English

WILLIAMS COLLEGE

Williamstown, Massachusetts

May 10, 2019

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments i

Prelude: “queer, difficult” iii

Chapter One: “a flat tire” 1

Chapter Two: “get up steam again” 22

Chapter Three: “hag-ridden” 50

Works Cited 77

Acknowledgments

Over the past three years, Walter Johnston has been a staggeringly patient, attentive, and encouraging adviser. His edits were absolutely heroic -- the difference, more or less, between having something I’m proud of and having nothing at all -- and his encouragement kept me in school. Walter, I began believing in myself because of you. I have been blessed to have wonderful mentors, interlocutors, and friends among the Williams faculty. Early on, Margaux Cowden advised the first project that allowed me to see myself as a scholar. This year would have been impossible without Bernie Rhie’s monumental generosity. Bernie, you are showing me a new way to live that is already saving my life. Watching Chris Pye teach has changed how I think about learning and thinking. And, Chris, there is little about Williams I will miss more than sitting in your seminars or dropping by your office. My writing -- and love for Lily Briscoe -- have benefited tremendously from Stephen Tifft’s influence; almost nothing can cheer or charm me so much as running into him. The only thing that has gotten me through these last few days has been the promise of drinking tea with Christopher Bolton; I feel so lucky to be able to share this place, Williams, with him. Special thanks are due to Anjuli Raza Kolb. Anjuli has known me since I was eighteen; I’m twenty-three now. Since that first day in Rumble in the Jungle, so much of this half-decade has been made with your help or made in your image. You are written into my intellectual DNA. I am so grateful we can be on each other’s teams. Gage McWeeny and Krista Birch at the Oakley Center have been wonderful all year, but in particular these last few months as I have abdicated my fellowship’s responsibilities to tend to a brain injury. I have been so welcomed at the OC this spring, and -- extenuating circumstances notwithstanding -- the space and community among the other fellows has been one of the best parts of my senior year. A particular highlight has been having Emily Vasiliauskas as a literary ally (and advice-giver) around the Oakley Center; she has taught me so much about intellect, focus, and balance. I also owe many thanks to the Ruchman family; not only did their incredible generosity fundamentally enable much of my academic work this year, but their warmth and kindness converted the major disappointment of cancelling my “Ruchman Seminar” into the great joy of getting to know the Ruchman family. Kirsten Lee did everything first and better, and showed me how to balance ambition with limitations. Every time I have faced a moral conundrum for the past three years and handled it well, it was because I asked myself “what would Tony Wei Ling do?” Overwhelmingly, my friendship with Vidya Venkatesh is and has been one of the most important things in my life. Eliza Klein has been a wonderful comrade. Sarah Fleming was my concussion goddess before I knew I needed one. Nothing was more fun than living with Max Harmon, Carlos Malache, and, most of all, Alex Griffin; I want to be more like each of you: Max’s selflessness and humour, Carlos’s style and sweetness, Alex’s -- everything about Alex. Natalie Wilkinson should know how much making home with her and Morraine this year has meant to me. My grandmother Gaye is an inspiration, and has brought so much silliness and fun into my life. My sister Emily remains my first and best role-model; she is the coolest person I know. My brother Ian has shown me all the different ways strength and courage can look. I don’t know how to begin thanking the three people to whom I owe the most: my partner and my parents. Bertie Miller, meeting you was the reason this has been worth it. Bird, you pulled up weeds while I wept; you lifted me up the stairs for fatigue and for fun; you made dinner and then thanked me for swallowing it whole. To be able to start a garden with you is my greatest happiness. I can’t wait to spend years and years together.

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Mom and dad, there is no greater force in my life than your support of me. No index of your contributions could fit you who have home-schooled me for twenty-three years. You both already know just how you have made this completion (of this thesis, of this degree) possible in its most basic ways. But Dad, so much of what I am proudest of in this work -- all that derives, for instance, from its impracticable but resolute ambition -- I inherited from you. And mom, you were the vital origin of this work’s verve: what it means to be in a world, in a body, among others -- all of this, at its best, you taught me. Dad and mom -- however scant a recompense, this thesis is for you. Thank you.

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Prelude: “queer, difficult”

In artist and writer Carolyn Lazard’s 2015 video Get Well Soon, a nightgowned figure trapped in a meadow follows instructions as a roleplayer in a video game.1 Of their well known essay, “How to be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity,” Lazard writes, “The story I’m telling here is equal parts a processing of the trauma of illness and an exploration of how the body is treated under the regime of capitalism.”2 The same could be said of Get Well Soon. A two-pronged metaphor for the acute solitude of illness and the maddening, labyrinthine bureaucracies of the American healthcare system: the game mode is cut through with a series of domestic vignettes. At one end of a galley kitchen, Lazard sits alone on a red chair at a red-accented table slicing red meat.3 A close-up shows them handle the raw beef, and a voicemail lists their prescription medications in concert with non-diegetic ambient tension. This opening scene establishes the house as a space of illness, in which one -- too tired to stand -- sits through the slow chore of parceling the flesh and blood required to feed oneself. But soon the bright greens and yellows of the meadow replace the sterile black, white, and saturated vermillion of the kitchen.4 Walking with a cane through tall grass, Lazard’s character finds a letter which they are instructed to open and read: “Your journey starts here./ You are on a quest to cure that which ails you.”5 Thus initiated into a “quest” or “mission” game, the meadow becomes the space of pursuit and of health, and the escapism of signing-on becomes the curative impulse of seeking care (and of the title’s hackneyed command). In Get Well Soon, real illness and aspirational wellness are provisionally spatialized as interior and exterior: the filming moves paratactically between indoors (the kitchen, hallways, bathroom, or bedroom) and outdoors (the grass and trees of the meadow); between incorporation (the game’s final command reads “ingest”) and expulsion (sitting in front of the toilet, whether to clean it or to sully it with vomit); between innards (thigh flesh pierced with syringe and edible meat sliced with knife) and the extended or outstretched (syringe, cane, and knife brandished, box in tree reached for at arm’s length).6 But as this list itself already begins to suggest, what’s at stake in the video’s arc is the mutual contamination -- rather than quarantining -- of inside and outside. The narrative concludes with the failure of the elsewhere to extricate one from the here; Lazard arrives by the end of the tiring and circuitous quest not to panacea, but to yet another command to “ingest” an unknown substance, the outcome of which we do not see.7 The video game’s nostrum is delivered mythologically -- in a unlabeled bottle that appears spontaneously in a box in a tree -- rather than pharmaceutically, sure, but -- fine print notwithstanding -- not more enigmatically or arbitrarily than the great needle of “Humira” with which Lazard stabs themself. Lazard repeatedly ironizes any binary between inside and outside the body. In one instance, a visual repetition of the meat-cutting scene, Lazard sits at the kitchen table, decapitated by the camera frame, chopping beets (Fig. 1).8 “There is an intelligence in your body that takes care of it for you,” a saccharine voice croons in the background. “It breathes your body. It beats your heart. It digests

1 Carolyn Lazard, Get Well Soon (2015), from Vimeo, video, 13:30, http://www.carolynlazard.com/get-well-soon. 2 Lazard, “How to be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity,” Carolyn Lazard, accessed December 11, 2018. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55c40d69e4b0a45eb985d566/t/58cebc9dc534a59fbdbf98c2/1489943709737/H owtobeaPersonintheAgeofAutoimmunity+%281%29.pdf. 3 Lazard, Get Well Soon, 0:17-1:24. 4 Ibid, 1:24 - 1:30. 5 Ibid, 1:30 - 2:30. 6 Ibid, 0:00-13:00. 7 Ibid, 12:30 - 12:50. 8 Ibid, 3:49- 4:52.

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your food.”9 “This intelligence enables you to sing, to walk, to hold things, to communicate with others, and to love,” it continues. The narration describes the function of respiratory, vascular, digestive, and ambulatory systems with a cognitive metaphor. Thus conceived, matter itself is possessed of its own sort of intelligence, an attribution that at once breaks with and reinscribes the infamous Cartesian split -- breaks with insofar as body parts are not consigned to the merely mechanical, temporary, and incidental material homes for a spirit or an intellect; reinscribes insofar as body parts are bodies (and their intelligence) are still somehow fundamentally separable from the self (the “you”) with which it shares space.

Fig. 1. Get Well Soon , Carolyn Lazard10

Fig. 2. Get Well Soon , Carolyn Lazard11

But the soothing, almost placating voice competes with the macabre suggestions of the large knife, the beet’s striking pigmentation, and the table’s design -- which, from our angle, evokes puddles of spilled red liquid. The beet is almost as fleshlike as the meat Lazard chopped earlier, and its stems could pass for limp, hypertrophic, and severed veins. Sound and image coincide in the pun on “beet” and “It beats your heart.”12 But a confusion of bulb, organ, and offal even more forceful than the homonym is the horizontal alignment the camera creates of the beet with respect to Lazard’s chest. The beet’s uniplanar placement against their breasts -- a line of sight only possible because they sit at rather than stands over the table -- gives the horrible impression that Lazard is peeling and slicing their own heart. Lazard holds their stained hands in front of them as if to regard the evidence of their crime (Fig. 2).

9 Ibid. 10 Ibid, 3:56. 11 Ibid, 4:38. 12 Ibid, 4:00-4:05.

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Part Martha Rosler’s “Semiotics of the Kitchen,” part Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth: the gothic potential of this image is actualized as Lazard wipes their beet-stained hands down the front of their nightgown, smearing down their breasts -- not to rid but to display the “damned spot” -- precipitating the gore that had hovered as latent tension in the quaint domestic scene (Fig. 3).13

Fig. 3. Get Well Soon , Carolyn Lazard14

The conversion of nurturing womanhood and docility to the hag-ridden rancor of Lady Macbeth’s “Come to my woman’s breasts/ and take my milk for gall” becomes a horrific metaphor for autoimmunity: handling the beet-heart, Lazard is both murdereress and victim -- their body not the “intelligent” steward of self, but its failed nurse and deranged hostess.15 In an interview with Art Blog, Carolyn Lazard explains that their own experience with chronic illness both is and is not the “raw material” for their artwork on sickness.16 When asked, “to what extent you are interested in people getting to know you?” Lazard responds:

Maybe distinguishing a little bit between the autobiographical and the personal, . . . there’s something about autobiography that has to do with a kind of narrative, which I think my work -- obviously has something to do with narrative -- but I guess I would think of it more as being personal than autobiographical, and maybe more invested in the kind of intimacy of these experiences rather than the story of these experiences.17

Lazard’s approach, which takes “intimacy,” (a kind of relation to others or to the world) rather than “autobiography” (the story of oneself) as raw material, distinguishes their work from that of other chronically ill artists. Michael Bise, for instance, whose body of work can be summarized, as Houston’s Moody Gallery does on its webpage, as “graphite drawings that combine autobiographical narrative with labor-intensive attention to detail.”18 The most direct comparison between Lazard’s art of illness and Bise’s is perhaps his 2013 Love in the Kingdom of the Sick, which, as one critic described, served as a “kind of a document of the time [he] spent in the hospital

13 Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen, (1975), from YouTube, video, 6:21, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuZympOIGC0&t=297s; William Shakespeare, Macbeth, annotated by Burton Raffel, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 5.1.31. 14 Ibid, 4:47. 15 Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1.5.45-6. 16 Lazard, “Carolyn Lazard on what happens in private,” interview by Imani Roach. Artblog Radio, October 17, 2017, 0:39-0:42. https://www.theartblog.org/2017/10/carolyn-lazard-on-what-happens-in-private/. 17 Ibid, 2:25- 2:51. 18 “Michael Bise,” Moody Gallery, accessed 10 May, 2019, http://www.moodygallery.com/Artists/Bise/Michael.html.

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undergoing a heart transplant.”19 Lazard’s Get Well Soon makes of autoimmunity a kind of gothic kitchen table surgery; Bise, too, recruits “the genre of horror” as a “filter” for his experience in the hospital.20 And yet the distance between Lazard’s “heart-beet” and Bise’s “portrait of a . . . moment” indicate a fundamental divergence in how each artist understands the role of art in portraying illness.21 In titling his show Love in the Kingdom of the Sick, Bise aligns himself with Susan Sontag’s position in “Illness as Metaphor,” which she opens with what she calls “a brief, hectic flourish of metaphor, in mock exorcism of the seductiveness of metaphorical thinking”: “Illness is the night- side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.”22 Stated more plainly, Sontag’s “point is that illness is not a metaphor and that the most truthful way of regarding illness -- and the healthiest way of being ill -- is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking.”23 In working directly from photos, Bise’s drawings -- of himself in bed, of his wife in the waiting room, of his father, who died from the same congenital heart disease, in his casket -- pay homage to Sontag’s representational ethic of verisimilitude and literalism.

Fig. 4. Love in the Kingdom of the Sick, Michael Bise24

Perhaps the best example of this fidelity is the lithograph that, titular and reproducible, serves as something of a movie-poster for the show (Fig. 4). Of all the pieces in Love in the Kingdom of the Sick, the eponymous work comes closest to fictionalizing or sensationalizing the trauma of Bise’s heart transplant. Indeed, the image of outstretched hands clasped around a spherical object, as if

19 Troy Schulze, “Michael Bise: ‘Love in the Kingdom of the Sick,’” interview of Michael Bise. Houston Public Media, October 1, 2013, 1:00-1:06. https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/arts-culture/2013/10/01/46723/michaelbise-love-in-the-kingdom-of-the-sick/. 20 Bise, “Michael Bise: ‘Love in the Kingdom of the Sick,’” 6:30-6:38. 21 Ibid, 2:26-2:42. 22 Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors, (New York: Picador, 1988), 116; 7. 23 Ibid, 8. 24 Michael Bise, Love in the Kingdom of the Sick, 2013, plate lithograph, 18" x 22", Moody Museum, https://michaelbise.com/artwork/3208020-Love-in-the-Kingdom-of-the-Sick.html.

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offering it to the viewer, unmistakably recalls the cover to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight -- the first book in the teen vampire romance series that grew into a multi-billion dollar franchise, -- on which pale hands, cropped as Bise’s, cradle an apple seen from above.25 And yet the citation of drama serves only to amplify the sheer realness of the portrayal. That is, in suggesting exaggeration or spectacularization, the poster serves to underscore only that the horror was in fact lived: someone opened Bise’s body and removed, held, and replaced his literal heart. To a similar end, Bise’s heart-transplant credentials inaugurate his contentious review of Taraneh Fazeli’s 2016 essay “Notes for Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against Capitalism’s Temporal Bullying, in Conversation with the Canaries.” Fazeli’s essay was first published to accompany her curatorial project of the same name with the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Bise’s review -- “Snake Oil” -- appeared in 2016 in the Texan art magazine Glasstire:

I was born with a genetic heart disease called Hypertrophic Obstructive Cardiomyopathy. It’s a disorder of the heart muscle that causes it to thicken over time. Eventually the heart becomes too inflexible to pump enough blood to supply the body. I’ve spent a large part of my life in waiting rooms, hospital beds and government healthcare offices due to this genetic expression disorder. It occurs prior even to those DNA markers that determine sexuality. Before I was male or female, I was sick. I had my first open-heart surgery when I was 17 years old and a heart transplant four years ago at the age of 35. If I understand nothing else, I understand illness.26

“Before I was male or female, I was sick”: Bise thus turns to Fazeli’s work on “sleepy time, sick time, crip time,” having established the genderless ontological primordiality of his own claim to illness. From this privileged epistemological position he announces her theorization to be “Snake Oil,” the stuff of “fantasies” rather than “truth.” “Fazeli is simply wrong about how illness works”: to demonstrate this, Bise paraphrases each of her major points and then provides a discrediting counterexample, taking her to task for “mysticism, “hypochondria,” and “fuzzy thinking.”27 To provide just one example: through a series of rhetorical questions, he scoffs at Fazeli through’s naming of “the bifurcation of body and mind in Western bio-medicine”: “What is Western bio-medicine? . . . . Is influenza Western? Is there an Eastern way to transplant a heart?”28 Indeed, Bise believes in the dualism of body and mind -- or at least in its medical efficacy: “Doctors don’t need to have a particularly holistic view of the human being in order to treat disease. They need to be razor-sharp, monster practitioners within a narrow field of expertise.”29 Bise’s heart transplant becomes metonymic for the entire medical field: to treat is to wield “razor-sharp” scalpels with masterful precision, to contract one’s visual field to the relevant ventricles with all the focus of dissection. The removal and replacement of an individual organ: to generate one’s definition of “treatment” out of a heart transplant seems to yield a fractional (rather than systemic) approach that prioritizes the capacity for dismemberment (rather than interconnection). The body does not seem a unified whole. It seems an amalgam of substitutable parts. Thus defined, the discipline of medicine is an exaggerated and scalpelled anatomy; the former cuts with exactness what the latter exactingly names and describes.

25 Stephanie Meyer, cover to Twilight, (New York: Hachette Book Group USA, 2005). 26 Michael Bise, “Snake Oil: Taraneh Fazeli, Critical Writing Fellow, Core Program,” Glasstire, 9 May 2016, https://glasstire.com/2016/05/09/snake-oil-taraneh-fazeli-critical-writing-fellow-core-program/. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid.

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Medicine is a practice, and doctors are practitioners. Perhaps this is why Bise bristles at Fazeli’s introduction of queer and crip “theory”: “Fazeli shields her postmodern patchwork of pseudo-religious ideas behind the designation ‘queer theory.’”30 “The point should not be to question Western bio-medicine,” he writes, “but to think about ways to make its enormous benefits available to more people.”31 The sharp razors of western bio-medicine differentiate it from reflective work of like Fazeli’s; rather than question what the body is, for example, or ask what healing and wellness could be, “monster practitioners” treat the self-evident, incontestable, and real substance of bodies, organ by organ, nation by nation. In his keenness to defend “truth,” “science,” and “rationality,” Bise commands the considerable affective power of his transplant story to install a (globalized) vision of reality -- of what bodies are and what medicine is -- unassailably reducible to it. As a result, diseases that are not legible to the atomizing monster practitioners do not pass epistemological muster. Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that, in “Notes for Sick Time,” Fazeli anticipates such accusations -- like Bise’s “mysticism,” “hypochondria,” and “fuzzy thinking” -- at the moment she introduces autoimmunity: a biological glitch that refuses to view the body as a summation of atomistic innards, and demands to be understood (and treated) holistically. In his article “Self, Not-Self, Not Not-Self But Not Self, or The Knotty Paradoxes of ‘Autoimmunity,’” Ed Cohen writes that autoimmunity “describes a situation that occurs when this essential bifurcation between self and not-self falters or collapses” and “thus violate[s] the law of non-contradiction, the ‘law’ that since Aristotle has governed the ‘rationality’ of Western reason, including all its scientific manifestations.”32 Similarly, Fazeli explains that autoimmune illnesses are “generally defined by an immune system that goes into overdrive and attacks itself, unable to differentiate between the body and harmful foreign agents.”33 “These chronic illnesses,” she writes,

are thought to be triggered by either environmental irritants or an immune system confused as a result of overly hygienic environments and are not mental illnesses. However, because they often resemble other illnesses, are hard to diagnose, and three quarters of those afflicted are women, they have historically been wrapped in discourses of feminized hysteria and hypochondria. Often clinicians initially understand patients as merely over-reactive or one of the “worried well,” so it takes an average of five years and five doctors to get diagnosed.34

Due to its “environmental” rather than uniquely ontogenic pathography, treating autoimmunity (on “average”) requires a muddling combination, rather than a narrowing specification, of fields of expertise. By Fazeli’s account, such indeterminacy makes the diagnosis and treatment of autoimmune disorders a target for the (monster) misogyny of institutionalized medicine.

30 In response to Fazeli’s assertion that “disabled and debilitated bodies ‘are simply not as valuable to capitalism, which assesses human bodies by their ability to labor,’” Bise points to the profits of the “pharmaceutical industry.” He likewise disputes the “non-compliant” and non-linear -- “[d]ragging on, circling back” -- temporality Fazeli attributes to illness: “Chronic illness (when it isn’t hypochondria) often demands strict compliance.” “For a full year before my heart transplant I was only able to drink 12 – 16 ounces of water a day because my heart was unable to move fluid through my body and water had begun to settle in my lungs,” he explains, listing real stakes and real organs as if to perform his distance from the (parenthetical) valetudinarians. 31 Bise, “Snake Oil,” https://glasstire.com. 32 Ed Cohen, “Self, Not-Self, Not Not-Self But Not Self, or The Knotty Paradoxes of ‘Autoimmunity’: A Genealogical Rumination,” Parallax 23, no. 1 (2017): 29. doi: 10.1080/13534645.2016.1261660. 33 Taraneh Fazeli, “Notes for Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against Capitalism’s Temporal Bullying, in Conversation with the Canaries,” Temporary, 26 May 2016, http://temporaryartreview.com/notes-for-sick-time-sleepy- time-crip-time-against-capitalisms-temporal-bullying-in-conversation-with-the-canaries/. 34 Fazeli, “Notes for Sick Time,” http://temporaryartreview.com.

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It was in response to lived experience with such discrimination in illness that, in 2013, three artists -- Carolyn Lazard, Jesse Cohen, and Bonnie Swencionis -- started the “Canaries.” An artmaking and caretaking collective by and for cis women, trans folk, and genderqueer people with autoimmune illnesses: the Canaries’ began, in Fazeli’s words, as “an informal support coven.”35 Over time, its mission grew: to change how autoimmune illness is understood. While the typical explanatory framework for autoimmunity is individualist -- “your body is attacking itself for no reason” -- the members of the Canaries, as founder Jesse Cohen recounts,

came to this realization, that I think many of us had had before, but which we could finally put into words: which is that this is not a mechanical failure, that our bodies are barometers for what’s happening; we’re registering imbalance and toxicity, our symptoms are clear articulations of what’s wrong. So it’s not an individual problem. It’s cultural. It’s political. It’s environmental.36

Recognizing their autoimmune illnesses as “barometers for what’s happening . . . registering imbalance and toxicity,” the Canaries’ “coal mine” is made up of a web of debilitating “cultural,” “political,” and “environmental” factors: everything from the extractive logic of the medical industrial complex, pharmaceutical corporations, and privatized healthcare, to the extractive logics of the fossil fuel economy, colonial legacies of possession and dispossession, and the unregulated channeling of toxicity to the world’s most vulnerable.37 (In Get Well Soon, Lazard parodies an extractive way of seeing the world; in the meadow scenes, the camera flickers in and out of first- person perspective, at moments only leaving Lazard’s right arm visible in the bottom right corner of the frame: a direct allusion to the optics of the videogame Minecraft, in which players build worlds by extracting natural resources.38) Cohen’s talk, “Canaries in the Coal Mine: We Need One Another as Never Before,” advocates mutuality, collectivity, sharing, and solidarity as alternatives to the many violent (dis)possessions, privatizations, and individualisms of capitalism; for the Canaries, healing begins by undoing the (homographic) “mine” of late-stage capitalism. The Canaries’ mission is an adaptation and specification of an idea popularized in the 1970’s by the German activist group “Socialist Patients’ Collective” (SPK), which -- as Jean-Paul Sartre summarized in his forward to their polemic Turn Illness into a Weapon -- argued “capitalism’s atomizing powers systematically and permanently cripple a class of people into vassals.”39 Carolyn Lazard, describing SPK in their essay “How to be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity,” writes:

As a perpetual patient, this rhetoric is refreshing. The chronically ill are often cast as victims of fate or genetics. Rarely are we politicized or allowed to relate our personal experiences to larger social or cultural phenomena. As far as doctors are concerned, our diseases are empirical facts and not much else.40

35 Ibid. 36 Jesse Cohen, “Canaries in the Coal Mine: We Need One Another as Never Before.” Lecture, Chemical Entanglements: Gender and Exposure Symposium, from University of California Los Angeles, LA, posted 12 January 2018. http://wearecanaries.com/personal-accounts/canaries-cofounder-jesse-cohen-at-the-ucla-chemical- entanglements-gender-and-exposure-symposium/. 37 See: Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). And Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017). 38 See Lazard, Get Well Soon, 12:03. Many thanks to Tony Wei Ling for pointing this out. 39 Jean-Paul Sartre, forward to Turn Illness into a Weapon: A Polemic and Call to Action, by the Socialist Patients’ Collective of the University of Heidelberg, translated (unauthorized) by K.D., (Munich, TriKont-Verlag: 1972), vii. 40 Lazard, “How to be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity,” https://static1.squarespace.com.

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“The Age of Autoimmunity” calls for an environmental and political reconceptualization of embodiment and healing, which would understand it to surpass the body’s empirical facticity, however razor-sharp. This very capacity for contextualization and politicization derives from autoimmunity’s idiopathic and environmental rather than congenital pathography; these same features render autoimmunity ontologically and epistemologically tenuous by Bise’s professed standards: “Before I was male or female, I was sick . . . . If I understand nothing else, I understand illness.”41 Bise’s title, “Snake Oil,” his snide dismissal of “shamanic guidance,” his unmitigated advocacy for exporting and globalizing western medicine, his portrayal of Fazeli as a “triggered” snowflake co-ed, his blanket dubiety about the intellectual rigor of queer theory: it is not difficult to identify the hetero-masculinist and imperialist discursive formations that undergird Bise’s certainty in his own reality, and his quickness to monopolize the terms of all reality. Indeed, as much as Bise casts his medico-scientific definition of sickness as apolitical, ahistorical, and universal, both he and the Canaries implicitly situate their debate in history. Bise characterizes the Canaries as regressive, calling Fazeli representative of a “New Age cult of mysticism, fear and weakness that feels more and more like a canary in the coal mine for the onset of a new intellectual Middle Ages,” and he derisively notes her characterization of the Canaries as a “coven.”42 Defending Fazeli, a commenter on “Snake Oil” picks up on the Dark Ages metaphorics, positioning Bise and his allies as a witch-hunting mob: “I’d respectfully suggest that Glasstire readers check their pitchforks at the door.”43 The history of 16th and 17th century witch hunts is invoked more rigorously by the Canaries; Silvia Federici’s groundbreaking work Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, for instance, appears on the “Bookshelf” of the We Are Canaries website (Bise sardonically describes the same bookshelf as “link[s] to Paleo cookbooks, Yoga instruction and yes, shamanic guidance” and as the stuff of “crazy patients and bad agit-prop art”).44 Caliban and the Witch tells the history of the original transition from feudalism to capitalism (“primitive accumulation”) as it was concomitant with a new administration of gendered dominance. Federici shows how capitalism’s disseverance of (waged) “production” from (wageless) “reproduction,” succeeded both in subordinating women to men and in “profiting from the wageless condition of the labor involved”: caretaking and child rearing produce, reproduce, and maintain labor power.45 In criminalizing women who lived, worked, and cultivated meaning outside the social and economic unit of the family, witch hunts inaugurated capitalism’s new sexual division of labor. The public persecution of witches functioned not only as a spectacle of patriarchal discipline, but as the signal and enforcement of a new epistemic regime: the end of medieval “natural magic” and the take-over of mechanistic philosophy and modern science, both of which participated in the production of a new understanding of the body as a “machine” that could be automated, expedited, and put to work. Because magic offered “power and an instrument to obtain what one wanted without work,” hunting witches was requisite to “the development of the body into a work-machine”:

What died was the concept of the body as a receptacle of magical powers that had prevailed in the medieval world. In reality, it was destroyed. For in the background of the new philosophy we find a vast initiative by the state, whereby what the philosophers classified as “irrational” was branded as crime. This state intervention was the necessary ‘subtext’ of Mechanical Philosophy. “Knowledge” can only become “power” if it can enforce its

41 Bise, “Snake Oil,” https://glasstire.com. 42 Bise, “Snake Oil,” https://glasstire.com. 43 Andy Campbell, May 11, 2016 (15:47), comment on Bise, “Snake Oil,” https://glasstire.com. 44 “Bookshelf,” We Are Canaries, Accessed 19 May 2019, http://wearecanaries.com/bookshelf/; Bise, “Snake Oil,” https://glasstire.com. 45 Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2004), 8.

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prescriptions. This means that the mechanical body, the body-machine, could not have become a model of social behavior without the destruction by the state of a vast range of pre- capitalist beliefs, practices, and social subjects whose existence contradicted the regularization of corporeal behavior promised by Mechanical philosophy.46

In other words, witches had to be eliminated so that the economic system that extracts value from labor-power could emerge. A major component of the campaign of terror against witches was a systematic “rationalization of space and time.” As Federici explains, “magic”

Capitalism required a certain temporal “regularity and immutability,” a division into workweeks and workdays that organize the hourly time of wage labor.48 Timekeeping and predictable intervals thus stamped out the rupture and randomness of magic. Schedules obliterated a temporal order in which there might be days “on which one should not move from home.” In other words, the rationalization of time at stake in the witch hunts was the first form of “Capitalism’s Temporal Bullying,” that Fazeli positions against “Sick Time, Sleepy Time, [and] Crip Time”:

Dragging on, circling back, with no regard for the stricture of the work week or compulsory able-bodiness, sick time is an amalgam of queer and crip times. Sick time is non-compliant. It refuses a fantasy of normalcy measured by either-in-or-out thresholds, demands care that exceeds that which the nuclear family unit can provide, and hints at how we might begin to tell capitalism to back the fuck off and keep its hands to itself (i.e please stop expropriating even our most basic reproductive labor and resources).49

Like magic, sick days are a kind of “refusal of work in action.”50 The temporal waywardness of debility places it in a legacy of feminine resistance to patriarchy and capitalism’s many expropriations. And, in designating the Canaries an “informal support Coven,” Fazeli claims a version of precisely what Bise derides: that “cult of mysticism, fear, and weakness,” which threatens to resuscitate anew the pre-capitalist “middle ages.” In their well-known feminist booklet, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English link “the suppression of witches in medieval Europe” with “the rise of the male medical profession in 19th century America.”51 In “Snake Oil,” Michael Bise implicitly and explicitly affiliates himself with this rise, insinuating the Canaries “mystical” “coven” has no place in the medical field run by “razor-sharp monster practitioners.” But

46 Ibid, 142; Ibid, 141. 47 Ibid, 142. 48 Ibid, 143. 49 Fazeli, “Notes for Sick Time,” http://temporaryartreview.com. See also: Alison Kafer, “Time for Disability Studies and a Future for Crips” in Feminist, Queer, Crip, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 25-46. 50 Fazeli, Caliban and the Witch, 142. 51 Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, (Old Westbury, NY: The Feminist Press, 1973), 5.

xi “AN UNEXPLOITED MINE”

perhaps the most notable indication of his allegiance is the Thomas Eakins’s painting that accompanies the review.52

Fig. 5. The Gross Clinic, Thomas Eakins53

If the Canaries, with their heart-beets, are “bad agit-prop art,” Eakins’s 1875 “The Gross Clinic,” though unmentioned, is the putative upright art of surgery and illness (Fig. 5). His masterpiece, “The Gross Clinic” -- depicting Dr. Samuel Gross’s scalpel-wielding pedagogy from a Philadelphia surgical amphitheater -- solidified Eakins’s reputation as an “uncompromising realist.”54 The only woman in the painting (traditionally identified as the patient’s mother) cowers, twisting away and covering her face in horror or disgust.55 By contrast, the surgeon, Dr. Gross, stands erect and unflappable -- razor-sharp -- directing his men like a general. Fazeli and the Canaries counter Bise’s western biomedical “monster practitioners” with the traditionally feminine -- mothering, nurturing, or nursing -- values of “reliance on others” and “care relations beyond that of doctor-to- patient.”56 They call for a departure from the Smithian self-interest that undergirds “western bio- medicine,” and for a movement to collectivity, structured out of a fundamental obligation to, and dependence on, “one another.”57 According to the editors of Temporary, Bise’s criticism of Fazeli reflects, “a fundamental disagreement on how the two authors view disability”: when Bise proclaims “I understand illness,” he works from a “medical/individual model which privileges independence,” while Fazeli foregrounds the “possibilities for . . . agency” emergent from “a political relational model that views

52 Bise, “Snake Oil,” https://glasstire.com/. 53 Thomas Eakins, Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic), 1875, oil on canvas, 243.8 × 198.1 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections, https://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/299524.html. See Bise, “Snake Oil,” https://glasstire.com/. 54 H. Barbara Weinberg, “Thomas Eakins (1844–1916): Painting,” The Met: Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, (October, 2004), https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/eapa/hd_eapa.htm. 55 Ibid. 56 Bise, “Snake Oil,” https://glasstire.com; Fazeli, “Notes for Sick Time,” http://temporaryartreview.com. 57 Fazeli, “Notes for Sick Time,” http://temporaryartreview.com.

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dependency with others positively.”58 With an eye toward “The Gross Clinic,” I want to suggest that Fazeli’s divergence from Bise is as much about disability as it is about the representation of disability -- and that these two things are in some ways mutually constitutive. I want to suggest, in other words, that as capitalism advanced and medicine became modernized, professionalized, globalized, and masculinized -- as witches, women, and mothers were excluded from both -- another, concomitant shift took place: that with the demise of the “holistic” body, and with the bifurcation of mind and machine, there emerged the groundwork for embodiment’s representational ethic of mimetic verisimilitude. The mutual quarenting of illness and metaphor, the fear of “romanticizing” or “aestheticizing” illness, the standards of embodied “realism,” are only intelligible under a very narrow (anatomized, substantive, of organs and innards) conception of what the “real” body is. And, as Corrine Fitzpatrick, writes in her 2018 “Illness as Festival”:

With the advent of research confirming that our brains, epigenetic processes, and immune systems are affected by our environments and experiences -- our zip codes and our traumas - - is the argument against metaphor beside the point? What are the implications of conceiving of our illnesses as literal expressions of who we are?59

Limned by the Canaries and beginning with Virginia Woolf -- whose essay “On Being Ill” serves as an epigraph to Fitzpatrick’s and is quoted in Fazeli’s and Lazard’s -- the thesis that follows seeks to answer those questions. Chapter One re-introduces the representational problem of “literalism” or “materialism” that pervades a great deal of writing about bodies, illness, and disability. The chapter counterposes the logics of that ethic -- which tends to affiliate itself with “materialism,” and “aesthetics” with anti- materialism -- with Virginia Woolf’s critique of materialism, arguing that Woolf’s distaste for “Edwardian” fiction centers on its conflation of property and properties with verisimilitude -- as if adumbrating the properties of life (or illness) somehow captures its experience, meaning, and essence. My initial suggestion is that Woolf offers a version of illness rooted in metaphor, and thus rejects the “realist” or “literalist” ethic of excluding, repressing, or disavowing metaphor. Chapter Two situates the conflation of the body with property and properties -- Woolf’s representational problem -- within the philosophical development of a new individual under capitalism and technological modernity. I link the writing that advocates a “literalist” ethics of embodiment with the development of Cartesian coordinate space, suggesting that certain “dimensioned” or “spatialized” aspirations for language both rely on and participate in the reification of body as property that can be extracted for labor power. In the second half of the chapter, I link modern capitalism’s notion of “ownership” over the body’s properties with ownership more generally construed, in particular an extractive possession of the environment. To understand the body as property is not only to turn it into a raw material, but to turn the world into a raw material. I suggest the body’s breakdown -- in illness or other states of debility -- offers a productive challenge to the conflation of embodiment with properties and with utility. Reading Woolf with her contemporary, Martin Heidegger, yields an understanding of illness as an interruptive force to modernity’s relentless instrumentalizing of body and world, with ecological consequences. Chapter Three is motivated by the question: if embodiment is not first its properties or extension in coordinate space, then how might materiality be represented? I trace Woolf’s answer throughout her oeuvre, in which materiality is given as a kind of interruption. Although Woolf often

58 Prefatory note to Fazeli, “Notes for Sick Time,” http://temporaryartreview.com. 59 Corrine Fitzpatrick, “Illness as Festival,” Triple Canopy 24, February, 6, 2018: https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/issues/24/contents/illness-as-festival.

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tries to repress or overcome interruption -- and, with it, illness -- ultimately, in her 1927 To the Lighthouse, interruption is formulated as integral to, or constitutive of, aesthetic production and the art object. Under pressure of Fazeli, Cohen, Lazard, and Fitzpatrick, my implicit suggestion is that Woolf offers an autoimmune materialism of “sick time.” Emergent is an aesthetics of interruption that understands embodiment “in time” as implying a kind of ecology, and that offers an alternative to literalist representations of the body as property.

xiv

“And why couldn’t I see or feel that all this time I was getting a little used up & riding on a flat tire? So I was, as it happened; & fell down in a faint at Charleston, in the middle of Q’s birthday party: & then have lain about here, in that odd amphibious life of headache, for a fortnight. This has rammed a big hole in my 8 weeks which were to be stuffed so full. Never mind. Arrange what pieces come your way. Never be unseated by the shying of that undependable brute, life, hag ridden as she is by my own queer, difficult nervous system. Even at 43 I don’t know its workings, for I was saying to myself, all the summer, ‘I’m quite adamant now. I can go through a tussle of emotions peaceably that two years ago even, would have raked me raw.’ I have made a very quick & flourishing attack on To the Lighthouse, all the same -- 22 pages straight off in less than a fortnight. I am still crawling & easily enfeebled, but if I could once get up steam again, I believe I could spin it off with infinite relish. Think what a labour the first pages of Dalloway were! Each word distilled by a relentless clutch on my brain.”

~ Virginia Woolf (September 5, 1925)1

Chapter One: “a flat tire”

A syncope snuck up on Virginia Woolf at a dinner party in August of 1925 and inaugurated a period of convalescence that would last until the new year. In her first return to her diary since the episode, she describes her body and the aftermath in rotating metaphors of equipment and mobility

-- “I was getting a little used up & riding on a flat tire”-- like a decrepit version of the actual bicycles that she and her husband Leonard pedaled to the luckless event. The trope thus moves toward the literal or, rather, toward the actual objects and events of the day. Embodiment is here interrogatively implied as a set of spatially extended mechanics that require fuel and operate as an assembly of moving parts. Hers is hardware worn out. But the wearing of the wheel seems to open a metaphorics of riding -- and with it, automobility, spin, or cyclicality -- that seep out from the event proper into life entire, as one moves through it in fits and starts, in fortnights and life spans: “eight weeks” stuffed full then punctured like flat tires; “life,” itself “ridden,” threatens to “unseat”; the chains and gears of physiological processes -- the “workings” -- remain indecipherable “even at 43.”

1 Virginia Woolf, “Saturday 5 September,” in The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3, 1925-1930, ed. Anne Oliver Bell, assisted by Andrew McNeillie (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 38-9.

She concludes the paragraph with an “adamant” hope for a linear or progressive temporality debunked by a cyclical one: finding herself back where she was, once more “raked . . . raw.” The spokes of the wheel turn like hands of a clock.2

Up against such spin, Woolf considers the labor of writing. Illness hampers but does not preclude composition: “I have made a very quick & flourishing attack on To the Lighthouse, all the same.”3 The counterfactual that follows -- “I am still crawling & easily enfeebled, but if I could once get up steam again, I believe I could spin it off with infinite relish” -- once more casts the ill body as stunted mobility (“crawling,” the beveled locomotor function of her own body) up against an ideal of wellness as freedom of movement unburdened by the body, enabled by technology and industry

(“steam” power, which easily traverses great distances, and spinning with the no-longer-manual efficiency of a loom).4 In keeping with fin-de-siécle Social Darwinist understandings of the relationship between the individual and the population in the forward march of time, the experience of ontogenetic regress (to crawl like a baby, to not know oneself “even at 43”) seems to place one in adverse relationship to phylogenetic progress. Or, put another way, the “amphibious life of headache,” occasions rhetorical reliance on humanity’s evolutionary advancements, on one hand, and the technological advancements that signal modernity, on the other. Woolf’s faint is a fall from a disembodied ideal that is at once evolved, matured, civilized, and mechanized. A human body that usurps attention from the intellectual work of writing is toward animal, and both is and fails to be a machine (is a machine because it is a broken machine). Put another way, the fantasy or temptation to

2 Mel Chen writes similarly of the temporal dimension of illness as disruption to narrative and to work: “living through illness” seems, at least at first, to confound the narrativized, temporalized imaginary of “one’s human life,” for it can constitute an undesired stopping point that is sporadically animated by frenzied attempts (to the extent one’s energy permits) to resolve the abrupt transformations of illness that often feel in some way “against life.” Some transformations suggest a suspension of time (productivity time, social time), and some involve the wearing of a deathly pallor or other visible registers of morbidity. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 20. 3 Woolf, “Saturday 5 September,” 38. 4 Woolf, “Saturday 5 September,”, 39.

understand the body as a machine is occasioned by the experience of this “machine’s” failure to produce up to standard. If only aspirationally, literary writing is converted into a mechanized production process with putative predictable outputs based on inputs, duration, intensity, and perhaps also make and model.

Under pressure of illness, even Woolf’s “quick” and “straight” accomplishments are rung in by the industrial revolution. The image has a long history. Between her two essays, “Illness as

Metaphor,” and “AIDS and its Metaphors,” Susan Sontag summarizes the tropes of illness, and writes of “the notion of the body as a factory, an image of the body’s functioning under the sign of health.”5 Contemporary artist Carolyn Lazard picks up this question in their essay, “How to be a

Person in the Age of Autoimmunity”: “What happens when our bodies ‘revolt’ and the factories stop functioning so smoothly?”6 To this same question, Woolf’s answer involves a kind of loss of sovereignty over her own life -- life, not she, sits in the driver’s seat; and yet life is itself ridden, the wheel heisted by a the “hag” of her nervous system (or, relatedly, by her unconscious; “hag-ridden” also means “afflicted by nightmare”).7 When broken, auto-mobility reveals a kind of auto-opacity, in which the assurance of temporal continuity between selves gives way to surprise, return, or disjunction. A rupture across time produces an alienation or estrangement within the supposedly unitary self: a “brute . . . queer and difficult” multiplicity capable of revolting against its erstwhile sovereign, such that the onward and upward “attack” of linear time gives way to self-defeating cyclicality.

5 Susan Sontag, “AIDS and its Metaphors,” in Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors, (New York: Picador, 1988), 120. 6 Carolyn Lazard, “How to be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity,” Carolyn Lazard, accessed December 11, 2018. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55c40d69e4b0a45eb985d566/t/58cebc9dc534a59fbdbf98c2/1489943709737/H owtobeaPersonintheAgeofAutoimmunity+%281%29.pdf. 7 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “hag-ridden, adj.,” accessed December 7, 2019, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/ 83256?rskey=jLVNrm&result =1&isAdvanced=false.

In his published seminars, “The Beast and the Sovereign,” Jacques Derrida reads Daniel

Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe alongside Martin Heidegger’s The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (a lecture series that debunks the “questionable character of that conception which understands . . . the organism as a machine.”)8 Derrida constellates notions of “auto-mobility” with “auto-immunity,” attending to Crusoe’s famous attempt at marooned sovereignty or autonomy in isolation. Thus he writes of the wheel:

The wheel describes the circular return upon itself around an imobile axis, it becomes a sort of incorporated figural possibility, a metaphora (metaphora in Greek means vehicle, even automobile, autobus) for all bodily movements as physical movements of return of auto- reference, and therefore of more than the mirror and specularity in general, more than theoretical reflection which consists merely in seeing one’s own image. This metaphora carries or transports the dream of being oneself, in displacement, of displacing oneself while remaining oneself, of being one’s own rotation around oneself, of pulling the body and the incorporated relation to oneself, in the world, toward the return to self around a relatively immobile axis of identity -- not absolutely immobile, for the axis, the axle, the hub moves too, but immobile with respect to the circle of the wheel itself which turns around it. . . . The metaphora of this extraordinary apparatus is a figure, the turn of a trope that constructs and instructs in the relation to self, in the auto-nomy of ipseity, the possibility for unheard-of chances and threats, of automobility, but also, by the same token, of that threatening auto- affection that is called autoimmunity in general. What I call iterability, which repeats the same while displacing or altering it, is all at once a resource, a decisive power, and a catastrophe of repetition or reproduction. In this logic of iterability are found the resources . . . . 9

Derrida contrasts the mirror, that primal scene of subject formation, with the wheel’s “logic of iterability.” In replicating the world, the mirror locates it as stable and singular; its mimesis offers a visual metaphor of representational intactness and surveyability and an epistemology of transparency. The wheel makes no transparent guarantee. (Such is the broken promise of visuality in

Woolf’s opening question: “And why couldn’t I see or feel that all this time I was getting a little used up

& riding on a flat tire?”10) “[D]isplacing oneself while remaining oneself” is at once the mechanism

8 Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 212. 9 Jacques Derrida, “Third Session: January 22, 2003” in The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 2, translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 75. 10 Woolf, “Saturday 5 September,” 38. My emphasis.

of the wheel and the trope; metaphor works as a vehicularity without accomplished transportation.

Every turn of auto-mobility is, that is to say, dislocated by “autoimmunity”: the failure of completely self-enclosed and self-replicating sovereignty over oneself or the failure of perfect coincidence between naming and named in “auto-deixis.” Aristotelian metaphoric transference, which “consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else,” precedes the first instance of belonging: the “something else” is already in the “I” of auto-nomy.11 Every linear movement of the wheel implies a circular return, some lost ground. “This metaphora carries or transports the dream of being oneself,” writes Derrida, “in displacement, of displacing oneself while remaining oneself, of being one’s own rotation around oneself, of pulling the body and the incorporated relation to oneself, in the world, toward the return to self around a relatively immobile axis of identity.” Relatively but “not absolutely immobile”: we might say the “dream of being oneself” is hag-ridden.

So Woolf and Derrida seem to agree that illness -- or, at least, autoimmunity, metaphorizes well as wheel. The status of illness, and of corporeality more generally, in metaphor has been a mainstay concern in contemporary disability studies and modern writing on illness and pain. Perhaps best known is Susan Sontag’s essaysitic diptych, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors, which tracks the Romantic aesthetic practice of “romanticizing” illness -- for instance, the beautiful suffering of TB -- by turning it into trope, and its deleterious consequences for how cancer and

AIDS patients continue to be treated, both medically and in public imagination. Sontag begins the latter essay recursively, underscoring the simplicity of her definitions: “By metaphor I meant nothing more or less than the earliest and most succinct definition I know, which is Aristotle’s, in his

Poetics”: “giving a thing a name that belongs to something else.”12 She opened her first essay with similar directness: “My point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of

11 Aristotle, Poetics, translated by Ingram Bywater, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1920), 1457b1-30. 12 Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors, (New York: Picador, 1988), 116.

regarding illness -- and the healthiest way of being ill -- is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking.”13 The healthiest way of being ill is the most literal, in which the thing holds dear to its proper name as an irreplaceable belonging.

Sontag’s thesis is plainly stated, to be sure, but not without paradox -- being ill without metaphor is the healthiest way of being ill? Does she mean “healthiest” literally? In any case, Sontag’s curative ethic of, we might say, literalized illness, has been reiterated by a number of prominent scholars. Elaine Scarry’s well known book The Body in Pain -- which Sontag blurbs, calling it “large- spirited, heroically truthful. A necessary book” -- begins by marking pain’s vulnerability to or susceptibility to metaphor. Borrowing loosely from phenomenologists Franz Brentano and Edmund

Husserl’s theories of “intentionality,” or consciousness as fundamentally directed toward objects,

Scarry explains pain as a state of exception:

If one were to move through all of the emotional, perceptual, and somatic states that take an object -- hatred for, seeing of, being hungry for -- the list would become a very long one and, though it would alternate between states we are thankful for and those we dislike, it would be throughout its entirety a consistent affirmation of the human being’s capacity to move out beyond the boundaries of his or her own body into the external, shareable world. This list and its implicit affirmation would, however, be suddenly interrupted when, moving through the human interior, one at last reached physical pain, for physical pain -- unlike any other state of consciousness -- has no referential content. It is not of or for anything. It is precisely because it takes no object that it, more than any other phenomenon, resists objectification in language.14

Scarry takes for granted the “boundaries” between one’s “own body” and the “external, shareable world,” a bifurcation which, she avers, is reflected in the grammatical structure of consciousness.

13 Ibid, 8. 14 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 5. See Franz von Brentano, “The Distinction Between Mental and Physical Phenomena,” in The Phenomenology Reader, edited Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney, (London: Routledge, 2002), 35-50. Brentano writes of intentionality: Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not all do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in judgement something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. (41) See also Edmund Husserl, “Consciousness as Intentional Experience,” in The Phenomenology Reader, edited Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney, (London: Routledge, 2002), 78-108.

That the world is spatialized externally relative to self (internal, private, unshareable) corresponds to a linguistic transitivity, in which “referential content” normally permits one passage between the inward and outward. Language thus understood as locomotion, that is, as an “affirmation of the human being’s capacity to move” -- though without displacement -- from place (self or world) to place

(world or self).

But pain thwarts such linguistic auto-mobility. “Pain is not of or for anything” Scarry writes, and “precisely because it takes no object . . . [it], more than any other phenomenon, resists objectification in language.” It does not refer to anything outside itself. For Scarry, its intransitivity means pain is necessarily articulated through “mediating structures” of metaphor(a) that can provide their own objects -- “(‘It feels as if . . . ,’ ‘It is as though . . .’).”15 “Thus a person may say, ‘It feels as though a hammer is coming down on my spine’ even when there is no hammer,” explains Scarry.

“Physical pain is not identical with (and often exists without) either agency or damage, but these things are referential; consequently we often call on them to convey the experience of pain itself.”16

That pain is not referential puts it in a peculiar relationship to what Scarry calls “shareability.” Pain is unshareable: it does not register in any “external” or “public” reality -- a consequence of its material and linguistic resistance to objectification -- and thus achieves an “absolute split between one’s sense of one’s own reality and the reality of other persons.”17 Thus, for Scarry, “privacy” is the phenomenology of pain.

And language at once reflects and participates in pain’s isolation: “its resistance to language is not simply one of its incidental or accidental attributes but is essential to what it is.”18 But, in

Scarry’s philosophical system, by enacting the rupture of material and linguistic realms, pain imputes

15 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 15, 22. 16 Ibid, 15. 17 Ibid, 4. 18 Ibid, 5.

their originary alignment or their referentiality. That is to say, a fundamentally referential or content- based vision of language is requisite to equating grammatical and material objectification. Language thus understood is primarily something that transmits content between self and world or between persons; pain becomes shareable only when it becomes referential. Words signify as an ostensive approximation of the material world, permitting communication of inner experience through its externalization (and external experience through its internalization). The conflation or collapse of the material and the linguistic thus, in its unification, underlies Scarry’s division of public (shared, external, material, linguistic) and private (unshareable, interior, subjective, pre-linguistic) realms.

Thus understood, “privacy” and “publicity” are constituted through a distribution of certainty (to selves) and doubt (to others).19And Scarry’s understanding of language is central to this end:

[P]ain enters into our midst as at once something that cannot be denied and something that cannot be confirmed . . . . To have pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt. But we will see that the relation between pain and belief is even more problematic than has so far been suggested. If the felt-attributes of pain are (through one means of verbal objectification or another) lifted into the visible world, and if the referent for these now objectified attributes is understood to be the human body, then the sentient fact of the person’s suffering will become knowable to a second person. It is also possible, however, for the felt-attributes of pain to be lifted into the visible world but now attached to a referent other than the human body. That is, the felt-characteristics of pain -- one of which is its compelling vibrancy or its incontestable reality or simply its ‘certainty’ -- can be appropriated away from the body and presented as attributes of something else (something which by itself lacks those attributes, something which does not itself appear vibrant, real, or certain). This process will throughout the argument of this book be called “analogical verification” or “analogical substantiation.” It will gradually become apparent that at particular moments when there is within a society a crisis of belief -- that is, when some central idea or ideology or cultural construct has ceased to elicit a population’s belief either because it is manifestly fictitious or because it has for some reason been divested of ordinary forms of substantiation -- the sheer

19 Though with different parameters than in the Meditations on First Philosophy, Scarry’s phenomenology and epistemology of pain works by moving between the famously Cartesian poles of internal and external, doubt and certainty. In the Meditations -- that famous inauguration of philosophical modernity -- René Descartes assumes a position of radical doubt to the existence and knowability of the shared, external, material world. He then works from this position of skepticism back to one of assurance: assurance of the existence of material reality and of God, both of which are routed through pursuit of assurance that the soul is divisible from the body that it inhabits. Without explicitly laying claim to a Cartesian ontology, The Body in Pain takes materiality that occasions motion between certainty and doubt -- a motion constitutive of the modern philosophical subject at its emergence -- as its epistemological and phenomenological point of departure. Chapter Two explores this topic further.

material factualness of the human body will be borrowed to lend that cultural construct the aura of “realness” and “certainty.”20

The referentiality of language has the capacity to work as publicizing proof of the existence of an individual’s felt experience -- an individual who, without objects and reference to them, is separated from them, as if islanded. To be “lifted into the visible world”: Scarry’s synesthesiac metaphor for language’s role in objectifying pain solidifies a connection between knowledge and sight, in which the condition of possibility for knowing pain -- having certainty of it -- is seeing it insofar as it is represented audibly through “one means of verbal objectification or another.” This lifting into the visual world is ethical when its referentiality remains singular and intact. That is, objectification of pain is useful when “the referent for these now objectified attributes is understood to be the human body”; by keeping in sight the correct, bodied object of reference, “the sentient fact of the person’s suffering will become knowable to a second person.” The intimate privacy of embodiment or of pain can thus be overcome.

The ethical representation of pain hinges on a version of what might be called private property or private properties, the mark of which is the encroachment of the unethical when this property is stolen: it is possible for “the felt-attributes of pain to be lifted into the visible world but now attached to a referent other than the human body,” writes Scarry. “That is, the felt-characteristics of pain -- one of which is its compelling vibrancy or its incontestable reality or simply its ‘certainty’ -- can be appropriated away from the body and presented as attributes of something else.” Like

Sontag’s account of the “healthiest way of being ill,” pain-reference not adherent to a bodied realism lends the effect of its reality to something else at its own expense: analogical rather than mimetic signification erodes the properness or properties of the body, as registered etymologically in

“appropriation,” and directionally in “away,” which both imply an original self-contained or proper

20 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 13-4. Her emphasis.

locus. In “analogical verification” or “analogical substantiation,” substance and verification are equated, nominalizing the association of embodiment and confirmation or corroboration -- what

Scarry describes as the extra realness or surplus certainty of pain -- which she positions against and as antidote to doubt. That which is external to one needs to be confirmed before it can be relied upon. Substantiation and verification function as synonyms only when doubt is first assumed as the epistemology of all that is not proper to one, an assumption that conversely relies on the verifiable self-identity of property, of self and substance.

Doubt is requisite to Scarry’s equation of substantiation and verification, but so is the structure of “analogical,” which is to say, the exploited capacity of linguistic “objectification” to be

“appropriated away” from its proper referent. The distancing or severance from (the “sheer material”) referent implied in the away-ness of that appropriation, which Scarry identifies as posing an ethical danger in representations of embodiment, is recognizable as the Derridean “logic of iterability” (that is, the logic that characterizes metaphora and the wheel -- the “essential drift” or “non- unity” of identity itself, the autoimmunity of automobility.)21 As Derrida writes of such disseverance in “Signature, Event, Context”:

It is because this unity of the signifying form is constituted only by its iterability, by the possibility of being repeated in the absence not only of its referent, which goes without saying, but of a determined signified or current intention of signification, as of every present intention of communication. This structural possibility of being severed from its referent or signified (and therefore from communication in its context) seems to me to make of every mark, even if oral, a grapheme in general, that is, as we have seen, the nonpresent remaining of a differential mark cut off from its alleged ‘production’ or origin.22

For Derrida, something like a “unity of signifying form” becomes possible only through its dis-unity, which is to say, through the “structural possibility of being severed from its referent.” When Scarry calls for sentience to be “lifted into the visible world” through becoming “audible” and “referential,”

21 Derrida, “Signature, Event, Context,” in Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Blass, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 316-8; Jacques Derrida, “Third Session: January 22, 2003,” 75. 22 Derrida, “Signature, Event, Context,” 318. His emphasis.

she calls upon the hope of presence that is not, in Derrida’s terms, “cut off” from its production. To articulate analogical verification, née substantiation, as she does, Scarry endeavors to enforce a kind of linguistic presence -- the very loss of which, for Derridean if not Aristotelian metaphor, constitutes the condition of possibility of signification itself.23 “If the felt-attributes of pain are

(through one means of verbal objectification or another) lifted into the visible world,” writes Scarry,

“and if the referent for these now objectified attributes is understood to be the human body, then the sentient fact of the person’s suffering will become knowable to a second person.” The ethical is thus located cognitively, in what is “understood” of attributes. The recourse Scarry takes to deliberate thought in her account of embodiment reflects the extent to which it becomes necessary for her philosophical system to repress, rather than somehow overcome, what Derrida identifies as language’s structuring waywardness.

That Scarry’s ethical concern about the misappropriation of reference from bodies is rooted, from a Derridean or deconstructive point of view, in the structuring capacity of language itself, has been born out in contemporary disability studies both directly and indirectly. In his 2007 book

Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation, Ato Quayson borrows from Scarry to bolster his reading of certainty and doubt in Samuel Beckett: “It also leads to the problem of analogical verification, since in contexts in which previously assumed social verities are in doubt the body itself is conscripted as an instrument of verifying the values of the system.”24 It is no mistake that Quayson aligns analogical substantiation with Derridean sensibility: “physical disability is assimilated to a variety of philosophical categories in such a way as to obliterate the specificity of the

23 Though divergently, Scarry, too, articulates a primordial or originary connection between pain, and the “mediating structures” of language: To witness the moment when pain causes a reversion to the pre-language of cries and groans is to witness the destruction of language; but conversely, to be present when a person moves up out of that pre-language and projects the facts of sentience into speech is almost ot have been permitted to be present at the birth of language itself. (The Body in Pain, 6). 24 Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 80.

body and render it a marker of something else . . . [like] existential phenomenology and deconstructive antihumanism.”25

Quayson’s self-conscious distancing of disability studies from high theory, generally construed -- the “something else” of “existential phenomenology and deconstructive antihumanism”

-- is echoed throughout disability studies. In his 2001 article “Disability in Theory: From Social

Constructionism to the New Realism of the Body,” Tobin Siebers advocates that disability thinking shift away from what he calls “social constructionism” and “interpretation theory” -- and their impact on “cultural and critical theory, especially in gender studies” -- in favor of a “new realism.”26

He ventriloquizes social constructionism/interpretation theory thus: “The human subject has no body, nor does the subject exist, prior to its subjection as representation. Bodies are linguistic effects driven, first, by the order of representation itself and second, by the entire array of social ideologies dependent on this order.”27 Putting aside this disputed reading of Foucauldian “discourse,” which does not hold subjective embodied experience and language to be ontologically coextensive, it is worth noting the affinities between Siebers and Scarry’s account of representing bodies and the stakes of this representation for each of them.28 As for Scarry, for Siebers, language has the power to lift “into the visible world”: “what I have in mind -- perhaps I should say in hand,” he writes, associating the true language of disability with a certain tangibility that toggles between internal and external, cognition and signification.29 Both Scarry and Siebers conceive of the politics of representation as a movement from inner to outer, private to public, and hearth to polis: “The

25 Ibid, 56. 26 Tobin Siebers, "Disability in Theory: From Social Constructionism to the New Realism of the Body," American Literary History 13, no. 4 (2001): 737-9. http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy2.williams.edu/stable/3054594. 27 Ibid, 739. 28 For just one careful refutation of such a reading of Foucault, see Johanna Oksala’s “Sexual Experience: Foucault, Phenomenology, and Feminist Theory.” She argues against a reading of Foucault that understands him to jettison “discourse” (in Sieber’s terms, “linguistic constructivism”) from the materiality of lived experience. (“Sexual Experience: Foucault, Phenomenology, and Feminist Theory,” Hypatia 26, no. 1, (Winter 2011): 207-223.) 29 Siebers, Disability in Theory, 738.

central issue for the politics of representation is not whether bodies are infinitely interpretable but whether certain bodies should be marked as defective and how the people who have these interests may properly represent their interests in the public sphere,” asserts Siebers.30 Similarly, Scarry writes:

[I]f property (as well as the ways in which property can be jeopardized) were easier to describe than bodily disability (as well as the ways in which a disabled person can be jeopardized), then one would not be astonished to discover that a society had developed sophisticated procedures for protecting ‘property rights’ long before it had succeeded in formulating the concept of ‘the rights of the handicapped.’ It is not simply accurate but tautological to observe that given any two phenomena, the one that is more visible will receive more attention.31

Both Scarry and Siebers, then, imagine a politics of pain proper to a rights-based discourse, in which articulation in the public square -- which is equated with material visibility -- are the means and end of disability’s speaking subject.

Embodiment thus theorized places pain and disability in a particular relationships to aesthetics, at once fundamentally dependent on and fundamentally outside of the aesthetic realm as it has been traditionally theorized. For instance, Scarry’s argument that, in representing pain, “one passes through direct descriptions very quickly and . . . almost immediately encounters an ‘as if’ structure: it feels as if . . . ; it feels as though . . . ,” (an “as if” structure that leaves pain vulnerable to a set of “metaphors whose inner workings are very problematic,”) shares, if nothing else, its grammatical structure with “the beautiful,” in Immanuel Kant’s conception of aesthetics. In the

Critique of the Power of Judgement, Kant writes of one’s experience of taste for the beautiful: “he judges not merely for himself, but for everyone, and speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things.”32 At least formally, then, the similetic imputation of (subjective) taste to (objective) properties “of things” is homologous in structure to Scarry’s account of the referentially externalizing impulse of bodies

30 Ibid, 742. My emphasis. 31 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 12. 32 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, Critique of the Power of Judgement, translated and edited by Paul Guyer, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 98.

and minds in pain, which is to say, to the outward approximation of inner experience enjoined physically, psychically, and grammatically by pain.

But the impulse to make things “shareable” by virtue of their reference to direct (and materially existing) objects, is fundamentally distinguished from a Kantian aesthetic impulse. For

Kant, aesthetic judgments are distinguished from “teleological” judgments of the “agreeable” and the “good” insofar as they are “disinterested.” Taste for the beautiful is experienced as a pleasurable free play of the mental faculties independent of any extra-subjective determinate concept. It thus takes the form of what Kant calls “purposiveness without a purpose,” which is to say, it cannot be communicated the way knowledge with objective universal validity can be. Rather, by virtue of its merely formal “as if,” the aesthetic object has “subjective universality” and is possessed of a different sort of communicability than that of a concept or object of knowledge. Requisite to a

“teleological judgement,” by contrast, is either determinant rational concept with an empirical basis

(for the “good”) or a materially existing object, one with substantial existence capable of affecting pleasure or pain (for the “agreeable,” which is marked by the “absence of all bodily pains.”)33 So while there is much “difference between the agreeable and the good,” Kant explains, “the two still agree in this: that they are always combined with an interest in their object,” whether that object has material or conceptual existence.34 Aesthetic experience, unlike the agreeable, is registered without respect to “all bodily pains.” And indeed, for Kant, sublime experience works by rendering “trivial” the material concerns of “goods, health, and life.”35

In his book Disability Aesthetics, Siebers critiques Kantian aesthetics for precisely the representational consequences he understands to follow from beauty’s structuring “as if.” For

33 Ibid, 94. 34 Ibid, 94. 35 Ibid, 145.

Siebers, the disinterestedness of aesthetic judgement with respect to the existence of natural or material things situates it in an ableist history of anti-materialism in aesthetics:

There is a long tradition of trying to replace the underlying corporeality of aesthetics with idealist and disembodied conceptions of art. For example, the notion of ‘disinterestedness,’ an ideal invented in the eighteenth century but very much alive today, separates the pleasures of art from those of the body . . . . The result is a nonmaterialist aesthetics that devalues the role of the body in the definition of art.36

Siebers counterposes “disinterested” “nonmaterialist” aesthetics with the fleshy, visceral work of artists like Carolee Schneemann and Damien Hirst, who use bodies as subject and raw material. The basis of a disability aesthetics, Siebers argues, is attention to the body in its substance. Or, we could say after Scarry, that the “referent” for the art objects of a true disability aesthetics is “understood to be the human body.” Accordingly, the relationship between subject and aesthetic object is visceral rather than purposive, and the arousal not so much of higher principles as of nerve endings -- an aesthetics, if not a metaphysics, of presence. Siebers advocates what would be paradoxical for Kant: an agreeable aesthetics based off of bodily or sensory response. For Siebers, this shift gets aesthetics out from under the deleterious Kantian legacy, which “devalues the role of the body in the definition of art.” To be disinterested in materiality amounts, for Siebers, to something like being uninterested in materiality.

As Kevin McLaughlin has shown in his careful reading of Kant’s aesthetic communicability, however, disinterestedness amounts to an abdication less of materiality as such than of materiality- as-property: aesthetic judgments are distinguished from teleological judgments on the basis of their

“physical starting point” insofar as this physical starting point remains, in Kant’s words, a “true acquisition.”37 In his book Poetic Force: Poetry After Kant, McLaughlin usefully elaborates this connection through extended attention to the place of “property” and the “power of possession” as

36 Tobin Siebers, Disability Aesthetics, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 1. 37 Kevin McLaughlin, “Ur-ability: Force and Image from Kant to Benjamin.” Poetic Force: Poetry After Kant, (California: Stanford University Press, 2014), 2.

it emerges via the shifting figuration of the “sea” in Kant’s writing. Regarding “the empirical limits of property rights,” McLaughlin summarizes Kant’s position:

From the perspective of its possesibility the sea is seen as a finite thing extended in space and time that can be used for certain ends. It is a matter of limited resources that can be acquired to the precise extend of the owner’s capacity to control them.38

“From the perspective of its possesibility,” the question becomes whether and exactly where one may, to use Kant’s example in Practical Philosophy, “fish, haul up amber from the ocean floor.”39

McLaughlin observes how such extractive “possesibility” works in contradistinction to the

“purposiveness without a purpose” of aesthetic judgements, quoting Kant in Critique of the Power of

Judgement:

In just the same way, we must not take the sight of the ocean as we think it, enriched with all sorts of knowledge . . . , for example as a wide realm of water creatures, as the great storehouse of water for evaporation which impregnates the air with clouds for the benefit of the land, or as an element that separates part of the world from one another . . . , for this would yield teleological judgements; rather, one must consider the ocean merely as the poets do . . . .40

To consider the ocean “merely as the poets do” is to consider it as an “appearance” rather than as a habitat, repository, benefactor, or barrier. The geographer, fisherman, meteorologist, merchant, traveler, and tycoon all turn to the sea teleologically, as a vision “fully secured by the sight of a common possession of a portion of the earth’s surface.”41

As I have already noted, Kant’s aesthetic experience, by contrast, works without respect to the “physical starting point” of one’s properties: “goods, health, and life.”42 Woolf makes a case for such aesthetic dispossession in her 1924 essay, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” arguing that her contemporaries ought to upend “materialist” literary convention “[a]t whatever cost to life, limb,

38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, 153. 41 McLaughlin, “Ur-ability: Force and Image from Kant to Benjamin,” 4. 42 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, 145.

and damage to valuable property.”43 In essays like “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” and her 1921

“Modern Fiction,” Woolf’s critical energies coalesce around her distaste for materialist -- named variably under the epithets “sympathetic,” “realist,” and “Edwardian,” -- sensibility. When Woolf asserts that “materialists” have “disappointed us” because they “are concerned not with the spirit but with the body,” she means the “body” portrayed as its physical “properties,” and impugns a conflation of property and possession as the essence of lifelike literature.44 “House property was the common ground from which the Edwardians found it easy to proceed to intimacy,” writes Woolf in her challenge to Arnold Bennett’s conception of “character making.”45 She elaborates,

Here is the British public sitting by the writer’s side and saying in its vast and unanimous way: ‘Old women have houses. They have fathers. They have incomes. They have servants. They have hot water bottles. That is how we know that they are old women. Mr. Wells and Mr. Bennett and Mr. Galsworthy have always taught us that this is the way to recognize them.46

In Woolf’s account, materialist literary work is thus converted into an answer to an invented epistemological problem: how to “know” or “recognize” an “old woman,” as if novel reading were an exercise in taxonomy. The list of possessions -- “houses . . . fathers . . . incomes . . . servants . . . hot water bottles” -- furnishes proof of existence; belongings evince being. “Edwardian tools,” she writes, “have laid an enormous stress upon the fabric of things. They have given us a house in the hope that we may be able to deduce the human beings who live there.”47 (In Scarry’s terms, we might say that Edwardian tools work to verify or substantiate their subjects.) In such fiction, the old woman emerges only after -- as a consequence of -- the pieces of her property (and its upholstery) accrete painstakingly into direct objects, described and accounted for by its Edwardian author.

43 Woolf, Virginia. Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. (London: Hogarth Press, 1924), 17. http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/ MrBennettAndMrsBrown.pdf. 44 Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” from McNeille, Andrew, Ed. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume 4: 1925 to 1928. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1984), 158. 45 Ibid, 14. 46 Ibid, 16. 47 Ibid.

Woolf names “description” as the representational mode of Mr. Bennett: “So he began, being an Edwardian, by describing accurately and minutely the sort of house Hilda lived in . . . .”48

She parodies a conversation with the “Edwardians” in her attempt to capture the essence of Mrs.

Brown:

I asked them -- they are my elders and betters -- How shall I begin to describe this woman’s character? And they said: ‘Begin by saying that her father kept a shop in Harrogate. Ascertain the rent. Ascertain the wages of the shop assistants in the year 1878. Discover what her mother died of. Describe cancer. Describe calico. Describe--’ But I cried: ‘Stop! Stop!’ And I regret to say that I threw that ugly, that clumsy, that incongruous tool out of the window. For I knew that if I began describing the cancer and the calico, my Mrs. Brown, that vision to which I cling though I know no way of imparting it to you, would have been dulled and tarnished and varnished for ever.49

In “The Bloomsbury Fraction” in his 1980 Culture and Materialism, Williams usefully identifies

Woolf’s mocking rejection of “social description,” -- and the working class concerns of “rent” and

“wages,” -- as representative of the liberal bourgeois value of “social conscience.” Williams distinguishes the individualized “conscience” from class- or group-based alternatives like consciousness, affiliation, or solidarity, and tracks its synergistic emergence with waves of liberalization and modernization in the early twentieth century west -- waves that merely re-designed rather than disturbed its plutocratic norms.50 Woolf seems to confirm this in “Mr. Bennet and Mrs.

Brown,” remarking with some derision on the coalitional, remunerative, or redistributive impulse occasioned by Edwardian novels: “They leave one with so strange a feeling of incompleteness and dissatisfaction. In order to complete them it seems necessary to do something -- to join a society, or, more desperately, to write a cheque.”51

48 Ibid, 14. 49 Ibid, 16. 50 Raymond Williams, “The Bloomsbury Fraction,” Culture and Materialism, (London: Verso, 2005), 188. 51 Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” 9.

Williams demonstrates that the Bloomsbury circle’s ostensible (and actual) progressive political positions were governed by an underlying logic of individualism and individual freedom, which left their political allegiances ambivalent:

. . . for all its eccentricities, including valuable eccentricities, Bloomsbury was articulating a position which, if only in carefully diluted instances, was to become a ‘civilized’ norm. In the very power of their demonstration of a private sensibility that must be protected and extended by forms of public concern, they fashioned the effective forms of the contemporary ideological dissociation between ‘public’ and ‘private’ life.52

Installing the private individual as the unit of a progressive politics, tempered feelings of obligation to more basal projects like wealth redistribution. For all Woolf’s writerly distaste of “property” and

“possession,” the formation of the Bloomsbury fraction’s commitments -- to civilization, to “one’s own” sensibility, to the private work of artist, writer, or intellectual -- worked to ratify a vision of the individualist subject predicated on the division of public and private spheres, which left its own copious holdings unchallenged.

The same aporetic quality governs Woolf’s account of literary transmission: vociferous through her denunciation of the collapse of representational projects into property indexes may be,

Woolf nevertheless describes her own relationship to artistic inspiration as a kind of jealously guarded possession: “For I knew that if I began describing the cancer and the calico, my Mrs.

Brown, that vision to which I cling though I know no way of imparting it to you, would have been dulled and tarnished and varnished for ever.53” Her “vision” of Mrs. Brown -- “Mrs. Brown is human nature,” she says-- to which she clings, is at threat of becoming a panoply, the risk of which is not just its readily oxidizing exterior, but its thingness at all: its “varnish” as much as its

“tarnish.”54 That is, the “vision” is at once held by her, she “cling[s]” onto it, and yet, however narrowly, avoids being ontologically tangible in the way of something with the superficial capability

52 Williams, “The Bloomsbury Fraction,” 189. 53 Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” 16. 54 Ibid, 13.

to rust or to benefit from polish -- implying, in its surface treatment, an accompanying Cartesian depth. “Description” -- “that ugly, that clumsy, that incongruous tool” -- would make this contradiction collapse in on itself, would make visual “clinging” and physical “holding” coincide such that they lose the distance Woolf needs language to keep between them.

This distance is precisely what disability thinkers who advocate description or literalism need language to cross. The locomotion of language for Scarry has the power to “lift” private sentience

“into the visible world”; the thingness of expression for Siebers enables the normative equivalence implied in “what I have in mind -- perhaps I should say in hand.”55 Siebers’ idiom, we might say, pursues the capacity of one’s vision to tarnish and varnish, to achieve the haptic dimensionality of depth and surface. Woolf’s Edwardian “would observe every detail with immense care”; for Siebers,

“detail” is a laudable hallmark of materialist aesthetics, which dwell in the external, visual world:

“Absorption in detail, whether on the surface or not, is one signal that a reading has taken an unusual course forward to image and that the text would call for visual analysis.”56 Language is for

Scarry an “affirmation of the human being’s capacity to move” between certainty and doubt, or private and public. This broadly construed mobility between individual and society, underlies description’s alignment with the visual: “if property,” she writes, “were easier to describe than bodily disability . . . then one would not be astonished to discover that a society had developed sophisticated procedures for protecting ‘property rights’ long before it had succeeded in formulating the concept of ‘the rights of the handicapped.’”57 Scarry, Siebers, and Woolf all agree that such descriptive language -- in its conversion of visions to things with “properties,” or at least with real dimensions in Cartesian space

-- enables mobility between private or inner and public or outward. For Scarry and for Siebers, such

55 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 13-4; Siebers, Disability in Theory, 738. 56 Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” 11; Siebers, Disability Aesthetics, 125. 57 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 12.

linguistic mobility is crucial to the politics of disability and the ethics of its representation, in which the solitary speech of sufferers arrives, felicitous, into public view. Starting from Woolf’s very different account of the “mobility” of illness -- hag-ridden by flat tires -- the chapters that follow will point toward a new account of the language of embodiment, putting the ontological underpinnings of The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World under pressure of, for instance, Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak’s final note in “Unmaking and Making in To the Lighthouse”: “no human hand can catch a vision, because, perhaps, no vision obtains.”58

58 Gayatri Spivak, “Unmaking and Making in To the Lighthouse,” In Other Worlds, (New York: Routledge, 2006), 45.

Chapter Two: “get up steam again”

The question of whether or not a “vision obtains” can be posed afresh by asking after imagination. Imagination, as a process, force, or capability, takes up a special place in the writing on the bodies I have identified as advancing an “ethics of literalism.” What are the logics of the association between the (ailing) body and imagination? To answer that question, I return to The Body in Pain. “The Making and Unmaking of the World” subtitles The Body in Pain because, for Elaine

Scarry, imagination is pain’s lost twin: “While pain is a state remarkable for being wholly without objects, the imagination is remarkable for being the only state that is wholly its objects.”59 “There is in imagining no activity, no ‘state,’ no experienceable condition or felt occurrence separate from the objects,” she writes, “the only evidence that one is ‘imagining’ is that imaginary objects appear in the mind.”60 Furnished with the “evidence” of its visible “object,” the mind’s eye undoes pain’s destruction in a neat obverse-reverse structure guaranteed by the “essential integrity of act-and- object in the human psyche.”61 Imagination thus becomes the intentional (that is to say, objectified or object-directed) counterpart of pain, through the predicating copula of work and its tools:

Far more than any other intentional state, work approximates the framing events of pain and the imagination, for it consists of both an extremely embodied physical act (an act which, even in nonphysical labor, engages the whole psyche) and of an object that was not previously in the world, a fishing net or a piece of lace where there had been none, or a mended net or repaired lace curtain where there had been only a torn approximation, or a sentence or a paragraph or a poem where there had been silence. Work and its ‘work’ (or work and its object, its artifact) are the names that are given to the phenomena of pain and the imagination as they begin to move from being a self-contained loop within the body to becoming the equivalent loop now projected into the external world. It is through this movement out into the world that the extreme privacy of the occurrence (both pain and imagining are invisible to

59 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 162. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid, 170

anyone outside the boundaries of the person’s body) begins to be shareable, that sentience becomes social and thus acquires its distinctly human form.62

Scarry’s materialism, extrapolated in her later chapters on Marx, the “artifact,” and “the nature of human creativity,” derives its theoretical underpinnings from the psychical suturing of “work” to the nature of human consciousness in this description of imagination. Work and its ‘work’ perform and record the unification of pain and imagination, the “framing events” of, she tells us elsewhere, consciousness itself. Ultimately, I’m interested in how “work” becomes as if endemic to the

“human” under certain definitions of the body, endowing a kind of putative instrumentality or ur- utility to embodiment. (For negative exemplification of this tendency, see Scarry’s brief account of pleasure.)63 Demonstrating something of the genesis of that conflation -- first in theories of imagination -- will be, so to speak, the initial work of this chapter.

For Scarry, “work” emerges as solution to a spatial problem, to the crisis of certainty and doubt posed by the “inner” body or consciousness and the “outer” world. Just as “framing” consciousness implies its demarcation of an in and an out, work traverses a certain geography of the internal (“self-contained,” “within the body,” “extreme privacy,” “invisible) and external (“the external world,” “outside the boundaries of the . . . body,” “shareable,” “social”). The “world,” as its defined here, has a thickness or dimensionality “into” which, with effort, it is possible to penetrate, but from which our bodies and minds are first definitively separate. The locomotion of language between these spheres, attended to in the last chapter, which has the power to “lift[]” the “felt- attributes of pain . . . into the visible world,” is ontologically equal to any actualization of the imagination, to whatever sort of arduous hoisting and heaving requisite to “work and its work.”

That a “sentence,” “paragraph,” or “poem” exemplifies the same rule as “a fishing net or a piece of

62 Ibid. 63 Scarry, her quote about pleasure. Refuses the possibility of auto-affection and a non-unitary self. After Derrida, her point of departure is the impossibility of auto-immunity.

lace,” reflects Scarry’s ethical conviction “that . . . . as in medicine, the human voice must aspire to become a precise reflection of a material reality.”64

Tobin Siebers’ aspirations for language exceed even such razor sharp verisimilitude as

Scarry’s; beyond similarity to materiality, his disability ethic requires its acquisition: “When words gain materiality and appear in the world as visible things, reading comes to a halt, but words acquire an additional power as a result.”65 This additional power is the motivating force of Siebers’ method, which he describes as “twofold: to reverse the hierarchy between literary and visual studies by using disability studies as a pivot point to attempt a revision of the image -- not to deny its disabled status but to assert the value of disability for the human imagination.”66 Resonant with Scarry’s association of the imagination with vision and its objects, Siebers reckons:

All images picture bodies, but the most compelling images often summon visions of the human body, and of these the ones that picture wounds or markers of physical or mental difference are the most potent for the imagination. For words to rise to the surface of the text and stare back at the readers like a glass eye, they must acquire the status of the detail, and where there are details, human difference is not far away. It is not merely that a recognizable formula or syntactic device, like a metaphor or a simile, organizes the words to new effect. It is as if a body rises to the surface of the page and moves into the emotional consciousness of the reader.67

By “picture,” Siebers means “depict” or “represent”: an agency of the beheld object rather than the viewing subject, despite the fact that the verb more commonly connotes something like “visualize.”

Much like the sightless gaze of the “glass eye,” which works as a false encounter, unidirectional- mutual regard, or moment of intersubjectivity that has been emptied out, “picture” cinches a reversal that both bestows and withholds subjectivity from an object. Siebers’ election -- and repetition -- of the nominal verb “picture,” accomplishes, I think, something of what he’s after in his advocacy for visual analysis over literary interpretation; “images picture bodies” -- subjects, copulas,

64 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 9. 65 Siebers, Disability Aesthetics, 124. 66 Ibid, 133. My emphasis. 67 Ibid, 125.

and predicates that read like lists of things, are, perhaps, “more potent for the imagination” than a mere “syntactic device, like a metaphor or a simile.” Are these, then, the ingredients of Siebers’ materialist aesthetics -- nouns that stack bricklike in a row?

By naming the “emotional consciousness of the reader” as the destination, and “markers of physical or mental difference” -- of which “wounds” are the privileged example -- as the point of departure, Siebers’ seems to evoke a special vividness of viscera or gore. Accordingly, he names the section “Words Made Flesh.” But perhaps more important than the subject matter is its mode of affecting the reader-viewer (reader and viewer are the same for Siebers because this “compelling” mode closes the gap between “literary and visual studies”).68 “It is as if a body rises to the surface of the page and moves into the emotional consciousness of the reader,” writes Siebers. It is as if a body rises. But he has just told us the effect is not merely that of metaphor or simile shuffling the words.

In rising to the surface of the page, the words surpass meaning. Thus the chapter’s allusions to a

“glass eye” pulled from its William James epigraph: “If we look at an isolated printed word and repeat it long enough, it ends by assuming an entirely unnatural aspect . . . . It stares at him from the paper like a glass eye, with no speculation in it. Its body is indeed there, but its soul is fled.”69 James’s account of defamiliarization, which makes simile of blindness and metaphor of death, suggests that words that rise to the surface of the page lose all the conjecture, forecast, and vision of a speculative interior. They achieve this flatness -- are stamped out – conversely, through the attribution of depth to the page. This ascent penetrates the emotional consciousness of the reader, a felicity certified by impressing the imagination as “most compelling.”

How to account for the persistence of tropes of ascent -- “lifting” and “rising” -- in these materialist accounts of embodiment? Whether by imitating materiality or becoming it, words in each

68 Ibid, 121. 69 William James, The Principles of Psychology, quoted in Seibers, Disability Aesthetics, 121.

case are asked to shuttle bodies from the invisible or dimensionless into the visible, tangible, and dimensioned. The persistent recourse to the tropological -- in writing that has staked its own differentiation from trope -- taken without negotiating contradiction, suggests the height and depth through which these images literally “rise” has more to do with presuppositions around the shape of self and space of world than with the nature of human consciousness, the truth of perception, the work of language, or the autochthony of imagination to flesh.

Indeed, the philosopher who first argued for imagination’s inextricable tie to bodies was the mathematician of space given by length, width, and height. The same René Descartes who laid out coordinate space, linked the work of the “mind’s eye” to “corporeal things.”70 It’s possible to see his sense of dimension in his explication of difference between the mind’s intellection and the body’s imagination:

And I readily understand that, were a body to exist to which a mind is so joined that it may apply itself in order, as it were, to look at it any time it wishes, it could happen that it is by means of this very body that I imagine corporeal things. As a result, this mode of thinking may differ from pure intellection only in the sense that the mind, when it understands, in a sense turns toward itself and looks at one of the ideas that are in it; whereas when it imagines, it turns toward the body, and intuits in the body something that conforms to an idea either understood by the mind or perceived by sense.71

The body’s relationship to the mind is derivative of an incidental proximity. (Crucially, a Cartesian mind could exist without a body; its mode would be pure intellection.) The body’s only relationship to the mind is routed through the visual field -- it is possible “to look at it any time it wishes.” The faculty of imagination, it seems, modulates the fact that corporeality is, from the mind’s perspective, an effect of where one directs one’s gaze. The imagination is the mode of orientation fixed both by a particular subject matter (the body) and by the mode of looking (outward). Imagination (from Latin, to picture oneself) is a way of regarding the body to exteriorize it. In one gesture, then, the

70 René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, 3rd ed., translated by Donald A. Cress, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 48. 71 Ibid, 48.

imagination sures up the interiority of self and mind, and serves as the bridge between them: imagination is the mind’s answer to the body. Argumentatively for Descartes, imagination emerges as a consequence of a definition of embodiment that links the material world first and foremost to a way of looking and a capacity for sight.

A spatialization of self (inward) and world (outward) is coeval with a definition of imagination as the bridge between the two. For Scarry as for Descartes, imagination is the internal’s answer to the external in the recourse it takes to the visual. In each case it solves the problem -- ontological, epistemological, phenomenological -- of bridging the gap between inner and outer through the (mind’s) eye. Siebers’ advocacy for a return to the “visual studies” over literary studies, or to the “image” as the integral unit of an ethical disability hermeneutics, similarly calls upon the imagination’s power to see the page as a body. Visual imagination is the epistemology of the flesh. In their own ways, these materialisms are constituted perspectivally. They conflate the representable with what rises or lifts into sight, which is to say, into consciousness or into the world: two substances defined by the play between surface and height, depth, or thickness.

The previous chapter interpreted Scarry’s equivalence of “analogical verification” and

“analogical substantiation.” In response to her assertion that “[t]o have pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt,” I noted that there is for her something compensatory about the task of representing embodiment, as if it need quell an originary dubiousness, whose sole antidote is the cold, hard truth of direct objects in direct reference. Only transitivity can carry the weight of such incontestable reality as having a body, lift its testimony. In some ways, as I have endeavoured to show, such suspicion is prefigured in the role of imagination: that it “solves” the problem of the body for the mind in the world, naturalizes a definition of embodiment that puts it at ontologic odds

with its mind or its world.72 The representational consequences of this indisputably Cartesian legacy have been enshrined in a certain strain of disability theory, which pits illness and pain against metaphor (or, more extreme, language) and aligns them more properly with visual studies or description.

And yet, as I will show, the metaphor of illness is crucially present in the philosophical origins of an inner subject constituted through its suspicion of what’s outside it, a paradigm necessary to render intelligible any equation of “verification” and “substantiation.” While Scarry and

Descartes distribute certainty and doubt differently across the poles of inwardness and outwardness

-- variably body, self, mind, and world -- they both ratify the fact of an originary rift and an accompanying epistemological stumbling block. Scarry’s solution is the coupling of imagination with

“work,” which, together, enable the production of “shareable” objects to supplant embodiment’s

“privacy.”

Descartes introduces the sixth and final meditation, “Concerning the Existence of Material things, and the Real Distinction between Mind and Body,” with “It remains for me to examine whether material things exist.”73 He does eventually, in a recursive conclusion that reviews his enquiry’s progress from certainty, to doubt, back to certainty -- in order to determine whether “I can obtain any reliable argument for the existence of corporeal things from those things that are perceived by the mode of thinking I call sense.”74 “I am of the opinion that I must not rashly admit everything that I seem to derive from the senses,” he explains, “but neither, for that matter, should I call everything into doubt.”75 He rehearses example after example of naive belief challenged by

72 “If the double consequence of making were intact, then his own alterations in the material world would be accompanied by alterations in himself in the direction of disembodiment; instead, his unreciprocated labor of projection heightens and intensifies the problems of sentience.” Scarry, The Body in Pain, 267. Notice how embodiment is posed quantitatively, as if it is something of which one can have more or, preferably, less. 73 Ibid, 47. 74 Ibid, 49. 75 Ibid, 51.

thwarting counterexample: I believe the evidence of my senses like light, color, and texture, but I do so also when I am dreaming and it’s all happening inside my head; pain and pleasure have an ostensible self-evidence in my flesh and nerves, but amputees have phantom limbs; I can follow my gustatory instincts to guard my health, but sugar coated poison would do me in.76 In the Cartesian philosophical project, then, body, and all spatially extended materiality, produces a kind of onto- epistemological betrayal that works as an argumentative rhythm: a second glance that undermines the first, a tantalizing fullness evacuated, a rug unfurled only to be pulled out from underfoot. (A betrayal that lags just behind perceived, deceptive safety -- for Virginia Woolf such is the temporality of coming to terms with illness: “And why couldn’t I see all that time I was getting a little used up and writing on a flat tire?”77)

In the final movement of his Meditations, Descartes calls upon this error or the potential for the deception or mis-behavior of matter and the senses under illness to metonymically represent the apparatus of doubt that undergirds his philosophical system; the final sentence of the Meditations -- after he has proven the existence of material things and clarified the reality of the division between the mind and body -- reads: “But because the need to get things done does not always permit us the leisure for such a careful inquiry, we must confess that the life of man is apt to commit errors regarding particular things, and we must acknowledge the infirmity of our nature.”78 Coming back to the safety of reason and certain knowability requires recognition of quotidian, factical sensory betrayal. (Thus bodies are consigned as ontical nuisances, and minds as ontological necessities.)

People are typically too absorbed in their worlds for the slowness and deliberation of philosophical insight; only in the meditative withdrawal of philosophical practice can one’s mind account for and

76 Ibid, 47-55. 77 Woolf, “Saturday 5 September,” 38. 78 Descartes, Meditations, 59.

thus overcome the fallibility inherent in having “a body that is very closely joined to me,” in, that is, being in essence a spirit or “thinking thing” which is in existence commingled with the vulnerable corporeality of the res extensa, or the world of “extended things.”79

The “infirmity” of our natures -- the unreflective absorption that dupes us into trusting things through which we have not adequately reasoned; the absence of a salutary doubt that comes only through “careful inquiry” -- is extrapolated through an extended example of “dropsy,” a condition which swells the body with excess fluids but does not inhibit thirst:

But we not infrequently err even in those things to which nature impels us. Take, for example, the case of those who are ill and desire food or drink that will soon or afterwards be injurious to them. Perhaps it could be said here that they erred because their nature was corrupt. However, this does not remove our difficulty, for a sick man is no less a creature of God than a healthy one, and thus it seems no less inconsistent that the sick man got a deception-prone nature from God. And a clock made of wheels and counter-weights follows all the laws of nature no less closely when it has been badly constructed and does not tell time accurately than it does when it completely satisfies the wish of its maker. Likewise, I might regard a man’s body as a kind of mechanism that is outfitted with and composed of bones, nerves, muscles, veins, blood and skin in such a way that, even if no mind existed in it, the man’s body would still exhibit all the same motions that are in it now except for those motions that proceed either from a command of the will or, consequently, of the mind. I easily recognize that it would be natural for this body, were it, say, suffering from dropsy and experiencing dryness in the throat (which typically produces a thirst-sensation in the mind), and also disposed by its nerves and other parts to take something to drink, the result of which would be to exacerbate the illness. This is as natural as for a body without any such illness to be moved by the same dryness in the throat to take something to drink that is useful to it.80

The conjectured definition of the body at which Descartes arrives halfway through the paragraph --

“a kind of mechanism that is outfitted with and composed of bones, nerves, muscles, veins, blood and skin . . .” -- emerges in response to a comparison between a man’s body and “a clock made of wheels and counter-weights.” Illness occasions a definition-through-distinction of wellness, and usefulness emerges in the similetic clause as at once property and pursuit of the well body. The technicity of this usefulness, metaphorized here in the ticking counter-weights, is made more explicit

79 Ibid, 51. 80 Ibid, 55.

elsewhere in Descartes’ writings on the animal-machine: “the variety of movements performed by the different automata, or moving machines fabricated by human industry,” are easily but unfavorably, he writes, “compared with the great multitude of bones, muscles, nerves, arteries, veins, and other parts that are found in the body of each animal.”81 The corporeal, material “substance” of res extensa is at its most material and thus most instrumentalized in the bodys of animals and machines alike, for neither is animated by the will and reason of the human mind, which--if the body and material world are adequately jettisoned--permits the slowness of deliberation.

In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici shows how Descartes’ contribution to “Mechanical

Philosophy” did not take place within a disinterested philosophical vacuum, whatever his pretensions may have been to the contrary. No, the project of reducing the body to the gears, wheels, and counter-weights of a clock was just one piece of the much larger epistemic transformation -- a renovated “concept of the person” -- underpinning the inauguration of capitalism: “the development of the body into a work-machine,” Federici argues, constituted “one of the main tasks of primitive accumulation,” beyond and in synergy with land seizure and other forms of dispossession.82 Descartes’ divorcing of “body” from the “human” for the “animal-machine,” cooperated with, even enabled, the worker’s alienation from his own body under capitalism that

Marx identified. Writes Federici with Marx:

with the development of a capitalist economy, the worker becomes (though only formally) the “free owner” of “his” labor-power, which (unlike the slave) he can place at the disposal of the buyer for a limited period of time. This implies that “[h]e must constantly look upon his labour-power” (his energies, his faculties) “as his own property, his own commodity” (Marx 1906, Vol. I: 186). This too leads to a sense of dissociation from the body, which becomes reified, reduced to an object with which the person ceases to be immediately identified.83

81 Descartes, Discourse on Method, translated by Richard Kennington, (North Charleston: Classic Books America, 2009), part 5. 82 Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2004), 140. 83 Ibid, 135.

Descartes’ dehumanizing of the body reflects the requirement of capitalism that dispossesses workers of the body in order that they may be possessed of it in the right way, which is to say, possessed of it -- and it alone--as a piece of marketable property. The worker selling his labor power can “look upon” his body but not be his body. Recall corporeality defined earlier in the chapter as an effect of where one directs one’s gaze; the naturalness and necessity attributed to selling one’s labor power for a wage is an effect of a Cartesian body, at which a mind can “look . . . any time it wishes.”

“Looking” as the epistemological access to embodiment: perhaps the “anatomy theaters” popular in 16th-century Europe inspired Descartes’ trips to Amsterdam slaughterhouses. In 1629, he would there perform diurnal dissections as practical study for his metaphysics.84 Descartes casts organs as “wheels and counterweights”: the clock’s “innards,” invisible when the clock is running properly, but available for display when broken down and deconstructed into its constitutive pieces.

So Descartes’ metaphor for the body works at least partially in the spirit (or spectacle) of vivisection.

But not just any machine, the clock commands a temporal order in addition to a visual-spatial one.

Federici explains that the imposition of regularized time was requisite to the system of wage that extracted value from labor, and that discarding the prevalent, competing temporalities (of supernatural mysticism, magic, and occult) was a central task of primitive accumulation. “Magic,” writes Federici,

rested upon a qualitative conception of space and time that precluded a regularization of the labor process. How could the new entrepreneurs impose regular work patterns on a proletariat anchored in the belief that there are lucky and unlucky days, that is, days on which one can travel and others on which one should not move from home, days on which to marry and others on which every enterprise should be cautiously avoided? . . . [M]agic placed the determinants of social action in the realm of the stars, out of their reach and control. Thus, in the rationalization of space and time that characterized the philosophical speculation of the 16th and 17th century, prophecy was replaced with the calculation of probabilities whose advantage, from a capitalist viewpoint, is that here the future can be anticipated only insofar as the regularity and immutability of the system is assumed; that is,

84 Ibid, 157-8.

only insofar as it is assumed that the future will be like the past, and no major change, no revolution, will upset the coordinates of individual decision-making.85

The workweek, with its serialized “ends” and beginnings, built into time a conveyor-belt-like monotony that replaced Natural Magic’s randomness, interruption, and externalized control with predictable rhythms, standardized intervals, and internalized mastery. Domesticated, time passes as scheduled rather than in fits and starts. Descartes’ model of the body as a “clock,” assembled by its

“maker,” recruits creationist doctrine for what Federici names as the “mechanisms of self-discipline, self-management, and self-regulation,” which frame the individual as both “master” (over his body) and “slave” (to its congenital mechanization), so as to democratize and decentralize discipline.86 This is one way the Cartesian degradation and separation of the body couples with proof of afterlife: as

Federici summarizes, “‘this machine’ (as he persistently calls the body in the Treatise of Man) is just an automaton, and its death is no more to be mourned than the breaking of a tool.”87

“[T]o what extent is the organ not an instrument?,” asks Martin Heidegger in his 1929 lectures compiled as The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Heidegger, a critic of Descartes’ writing in the same throb of literary and philosophical modernity as Virginia Woolf, intervenes in the discipline of biology, where he understands the mechanistic principles that equate organisms with machines to hold ongoing sway. Sections 51-61 of The Fundamental Concepts are devoted to the elucidation and correction of this misunderstanding. Heidegger argues that organs are differentiated from tools on the basis of their irreducible immanence: while a tool, like a hammer or a pen, “is an independent being, something that is to hand for use by various different human beings,” the organ is, first, fundamentally “incorporated into the user” and, second, essentially “subservient” to its capacity within--and only within--the organism it serves.88

85 Ibid, 142-3. 86 Ibid, 149-50. 87 Ibid, 139. 88 Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 219-220.

Such subservience is not an effect of spatial organization, or of the organism’s bodily integrity, construed as organ ‘innards’ covered underneath a skin; it is not a question of access or where one can reach or what one can manipulate. It is a question, Heidegger tells us, of the organ’s

“having a possibility,” which “cannot mean being equipped with a property” or being “present to hand.”89 Heidegger’s specific definition of the organ, which involves intricate taxonomies of human and animal being, is less relevant to my project than is the basis on which he distinguishes organ from instrument, and -- relatedly -- possibility from property. Take, for instance, the methodological mistake Heidegger identifies as understanding the organ “independently”:

But, are we holding fast to the facts when we say that the eye, taken independently, no more possesses a capacity than does the pen? When we consider it independently in this way, are we treating the eye as an eye? Or have we not already committed a crucial mistake which is precisely what allows us to equate the eye as an organ with an independent piece of equipment present to hand? An eye taken independently is not an eye at all. This implies that it is never first an instrument which subsequently also gets incorporated into something else. Rather, the eye belongs to the organism and emerges from the organism . . . . 90

A “crucial mistake” underlies the equation of the “organ with an independent piece of equipment present to hand”; in other words, a crucial mistake underlies the assumptions that have predominated biology ever since embodiment derived its ontological groundings from the fact that, in the words of a 17th century physician, “the body can be opened,” -- and its parts removed and displayed, one by one.91 The anatomy theater takes as its point of departure that organs can be best understood if taken in hand and made visible, best understood if their individual properties are examined. Dissection reverse-engineers the organism’s inception; the animal is thus given as a consequence of the summation of its morphological components. For Heidegger this fundamentally dis-orders the chronology of being: “What is essential is simply the fact that the organism as such asserts itself at every stage of the life of the living being. Its unity and wholeness is not the

89 Ibid, 220. 90 Ibid, 221. 91 Wightam, quoted in Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 172.

subsequent result of proven interconnections.”92 For Heidegger, “independently” observing the eye’s spherical softness, even passing it between one’s fingers, cannot grant access to the eye’s being.

The organ is not a freestanding entity, incidental to the organism but for the use to which it is put.

Before it has texture or dimension, the eye -- ontologically if not ontogenetically -- has the possibility of sight: “we cannot say that the organ has capacities, but must say that the capacity has organs.”93

Heidegger’s revision of organistic ontology should be contextualized in his larger philosophical project. At stake in the animal-machine is confusion over the relationship between organ and organism, part and whole. Similarly, in his 1927 Being and Time, Heidegger diagnoses the

Cartesian bifurcation of being into things -- both thinking and extended -- as a kind of problematic

(and disavowed) synecdoche:

Thus the ontological grounds for defining the ‘world’ as res extensa have been made plain: they lie in the idea of substantiality, which not only remains unclarified in the meaning of its Being, but gets passed off as something incapable of clarification, and gets represented indirectly by way of whatever substantial property belongs most pre-eminently to the particular substance. . . . What is here intended is substantiality; and it gets understood in terms of a characteristic which is itself an entity.94

Parts (“whichever substantial property belongs most pre-eminently to the particular substance”) get passed off as the whole (“Being” as substantiality). This conflation of belongings with being echoes

Virginia Woolf’s ventriloquized “materialists” in “Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown”: “‘Old women have houses. They have fathers. They have incomes. They have servants. They have hot water bottles.

That is how we know that they are old women.’”95 Woolf argues that the index of properties (what

“[t]hey have . . . have . . . have . . .”) does not constitute “being” (what “they are”) and that a materialist representational mode, which records “every detail with immense care” jettisons “the

92 Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts, 262. 93 Ibid, 221. His emphasis. 94 Ibid,, Being and Time, 127. See Paul De Man, “The Epistemology of Metaphor,” in Critical Inquiry 5, no. 1 (1978): 13-30. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1342975. 95 Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” 16.

essential thing”: “Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide”96 Put simply: “Life escapes.”97

For Descartes, escaping life is the methodological condition of possibility for philosophy: “I will now shut my eyes, stop up my ears, and withdraw all my senses,” Descartes begins his third

Meditation, “I will also blot out from my thoughts all images of corporeal things, or rather, since the latter is hardly possible, I will regard these images as empty, false, and worthless.”98 For Heidegger, such sensory deprivation is the problematic starting point that permits a whole tradition of philosophy to confuse present-at-hand substances and their properties as “Being.” In Being and Time,

Heidegger flips this starting point. Rather than begin by blotting out and then re-discovering the world, or by setting aside the “need to get things done,” he begins by attending to the ordinary ways we are wrapped up in the world from the get-go. That is, the point of departure of Heidegger’s ontology is pre-phenomenal or pre-ontological -- in absorption rather than withdrawal, familiarity rather than estrangement, flow rather than stopping or shutting up. “The kind of dealing which is closest to us is . . . not a bare perceptual cognition,” Heidegger explains, “but rather that kind of concern which manipulates things and puts them to use.”99 In the organ-like immediacy, of their unreflective use, which designates how we relate tools “at first and for the most part,” tools are the first way of being-in and having access to the world that is proper to, a mode of being that

Heidegger argues, is capable not only of being in the world but also of transforming the world— capable, that is, of what Heidegger calls “world-formation.”

96 Ibid, 11; Ibid, “Modern Fiction,” 159. 97 Ibid, 159. 98 Descartes, Meditations, 24. 99 Heidegger, Being and Time, 95.

The activity of hammering becomes the paradigmatic example of this primary, basal intimacy of world-formative “involvements.”Entities, when in use, do not present the user with the Cartesian properties of “Being as substantiality, materiality, extendedness” that comprise the res extensa. “The entities which we encounter in concern are,” rather “proximally hidden.”100 The worker hammering does not encounter the hammer first as a thing, with components (a handle and a heavy head).

Something has to disrupt the unreflective absorption in use for these properties to become relevant or “conspicuous”:

When we concern ourselves with something, the entities which are most closely ready-to- hand may be met as something unusable, not properly adapted for the use we have decided upon. The tool turns out to be damaged, or the material unsuitable. In each of these cases equipment is here, ready-to-hand. We discover its unusability, however, not by looking at it and establishing its properties, but rather by the circumspection of the dealings in which we use it. When its unusability is thus discovered, equipment becomes conspicuous. This conspicuousness presents the ready-to- hand equipment as in a certain un-readiness-to-hand. But this implies that what cannot be used just lies there; it shows itself as an equipmental Thing which looks so and so, and which, in its readiness-to-hand as looking that way, has constantly been present-at-hand too. Pure presence-at-hand announces itself in such equipment, but only to withdraw to the readiness- to-hand of something with which one concerns oneself. . . . The helpless way in which we stand before it is a deficient mode of concern, and as such it uncovers the Being-just- present-at-hand-and-no-more of something ready-to-hand.101

Here Heidegger describes the phenomenological conditions of possibility for objective presence. By this account, an experience of “pure-presence-at-hand” requires some form of interruption -- he names “conspicuousness, obtrusiveness, and obstinacy” -- of equipmental “use.” Presence-at-hand surprises and intrudes on the primary and original familiarity of one’s environment, disrupting the worldhood’s initial intelligibility as “ready-to-hand.” A workman reaches for the hammer and finds he cannot lift it -- only then does he notice its weight. In the italicized sentences in the middle of the passage, Heidegger distinguishes two versions of experiencing objective presence: one derived from “looking at” an entity and “establishing its properties,” and another of “conspicuousness,” which splinters from equipment when handiness is interrupted. The former is Cartesian, and

100 Ibid, 96. 101 Ibid, 102-3. My emphasis.

affiliated with the extended things of res extensa; Heidegger here implies that Descartes defines the world in the way he does by treating it as something to “look at” -- or to shut one’s eyes and “blot” it out, which amounts to the same thing. And yet, considered within the context of Heidegger’s existential analysis, the withdrawal of the hammer’s readiness to hand is different than the philosopher’s withdrawing into his study.

While for Descartes, the body’s breakdown is at once what makes you (into) a body and, as a natural infirmity, what compels the hygienic practice of closing one’s eyes to think, a practice through which the subject achieves its characteristic dominance over its most intimate object, the body, understood as a more or less recalcitrant tool.

For Heidegger, by contrast debility does not culminate in an ontology of objective presence, whose emergence it nevertheless helps to explain. The experience of obstinacy or un-readiness-to- hand is indeed initially that of an instrument that, like the vivisected organ, seems to just lie there,” severed from its “totality of involvements.” And yet he elsewhere argues that “organs are precisely not like things that are fabricated and made ready,” and “can never be set out or set aside somewhere” without, that is, abdicating their organistic being.102 For Heidegger, in other words, the non-coincidence of organ and instrument derives from the interruption of the primary and immediate familiarity characteristic of use, and this, in turn, makes conspicuous the at-first inconspicuous equipmental medium of Dasein’s formative relation to world.

In a series of recontextualizations, Heidegger gives several slightly modified accounts of this conversion throughout his oeuvre. In Being and Time, as Giorgio Agamben notes, handiness has to be

“neutralized” in order for Heidegger to “inscrib[e] care into the very structure of being-in that defines the originary relation of Dasein with its world.”103 He shorthands Heideggerian “care” simply

102 Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts, 225. 103 Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 42-3.

as “the striking form of a finding oneself always already in something else,” or, restated, “Dasein, which is always ahead of itself, finds itself always already in the power of the things of which it takes care.”104 Heidegger revisits and revises this account in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, in which

Dasein’s essential thrownness is what distinguishes its (human) being from animal being. The distinction between the thrownness of the human organism and what Agamben paraphrases in The

Use of Bodies is the centrality of tools to Dasein’s being as “already ahead of itself.” While Dasein has

“equipment,” animals have “organs.” Animalistic Being is a kind of “captivation” in an undifferentiated “encircling ring” -- what Heidegger calls “proper peculiarity.”105 Animals are “poor in world” rather than, like Dasein, “world-forming.” Animals can never find themselves already in something else. That is, Dasein can interrupt the absorbed familiarity of equipmentality (or, rather, be interrupted by a tool’s breaking) and can therefore have an experience of, reflect on, the conditions of possibility for its Being and its world. Encountering the tool in disuse discloses the mediated nature of Dasein’s own “world-formation.” World-formation is “mediated” in the sense of not immediate “proper peculiarity” and in the sense of through media: language, tools, or moods.

First at the breakdown of instrumentality, a certain capacity for mediated non-continuity with the world characterizes Dasein’s being-in the world.106 Thus Dasein’s essential being as “care,” which negotiates first, that Dasein “in its Being, has a relationship towards that Being -- a relationship which itself is one of Being” and, second, that Dasein is always already “thrown” in an inherited world that preceded it rather than one merely punctual to and handy for it.107 From use to care and from organs to tools, Heidegger elaborates this process on the level of an individual Dasein

(in a fundamental ontology) and on the level of species (in an ontology of human and animal

104 Ibid, 38. 105 Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 247. 106 In Being and Time, this becomes the estrangement or uncanniness of anxiety in the face of being-in-the-world. 107 Heidegger, Being and Time, 32.

organisms). If, between Being and Time and Fundamental Concepts, Heidegger moves from the ontogenetic to the phylogenetic, he ultimately elaborates the transition from “use” to “care” in the epochal or historical Being of Dasein. In his 1954 essay “The Question Concerning Technology,”

Heidegger specifies and historicizes the equipmental nature of Dasein’s world-formation in the context of modernity’s scientific, industrial, and technological overhauls. The essay can be understood as an explication of one paragraph in Being and Time, which, in “An Analysis of

Environmentality and Worldhood in General,” distinguishes the way “Nature” is encountered in equipmental circumspection (as ready-to-hand) with the potential aesthetic pleasure one might take in landscape:

“Nature” is not to be understood as that which is just present-at-hand, nor as the power of Nature. The wood is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock; the river is water-power, the wind is wind ‘in the sails.’ As the ‘environment’ is discovered, the ‘Nature’ thus discovered is encountered too. If its kind of Being as ready-to-hand is disregarded, this ‘Nature’ itself can be discovered and defined simply in its pure presence-at-hand. But when this happens, the Nature which ‘stirs and strives’, which assails us and enthralls us as a landscape, remains hidden. The botanist’s plants are not the flowers of the hedgerow; the ‘source’ which the geographer establishes for a river is not the ‘springhead in the dale.’108

Just as the hammer’s manipulability is uncovered in hitting the nail rather than in its size and shape, wood, mountain, river, and wind are encountered in use as resources. Neither botanist nor geographer has any use for Nature outside of the context of his involvement with it, that is, for flowers in the hedgerow or for the flowery language that Heidegger emphasizes with scare quotes:

“‘springhead in the dale.’” Dasein’s first experience of its world or “environment” is not the rich and poetic experience associated with “Nature,” or even an experience of Nature’s present-at-hand objects, but the instrumentalized circumspection of the ready-to-hand.

In “The Question Concerning Technology,” an amplified form of such circumspection is given as historically produced rather than as the first and inevitable familiarity of Dasein with its

108 Ibid, 100.

world. Like the world-formation of equipmentality, which is not an aggregation of component instruments, Heidegger insists the “essence of modern technology is . . . nothing technological, nothing on the order of a machine.”109 Rather, the essence of modern technology is a way of revealing the world or the way “what presences come[s] forth into unconcealment” under technological modernity.110 In general, technology is not a simple means to an end, but a mode of poiesis, the Greek word for “making” or carrying something from non-being to being. Not the “‘springhead in the dale,’” the world-formation of -- specifically -- modern technology’s fundamentally poietic nature as well as the experience of nature with which it is associated:

And yet the revealing that holds sway throughout modern technology does not unfold into a bringing-forth in the sense of poiesis. The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging, which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored and such. . . . [A] tract of land is challenged into the putting out of coal and ore. The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit. The field that the peasant formerly cultivated and set in order appears differently than it did when to set in order still meant to take care of and to maintain. The work of the peasant does not challenge the soil of the field . . . . But meanwhile even the cultivation of the field has come under the grip of another kind of setting-in-order, which sets upon nature. It sets upon it in the sense of challenging it. Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry. Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium, for example; uranium is set upon to yield atomic energy, which can be released either for destruction or for peaceful use. This setting-upon that challenges forth the energies of nature is an expediting, and in two ways. It expedites in that unlocks and exposes. Yet that expediting is always itself directed from the beginning toward furthering something else, i.e, toward driving on to the maximum yield at the minimum expense. The coal that has been hauled out in some mining district has not been supplied in order that it may simply be present somewhere or other. It is stockpiled; that is, it is on call, ready to deliver the sun’s warmth that is stored in it. The sun’s warmth is challenged forth for heat, which in turn is ordered to deliver steam whose pressure turns the wheels that keep a factory running.111

Heidegger here describes modern technology’s dessicated mode of “revealing”: its essence is

“enframing,” which orders the world as “standing-reserve.” The peasant’s role of taking care and maintaining gives way to a quantitizing grip, which converts seed, stalk, and harvest into the

109 Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question concerning Technology, and Other Essays, translated by William Lovitt, (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977), 21. 110 Ibid, 21. 111 Ibid, 15. His emphasis.

“objectlessness” of standing-reserve: the maximums and minimums, profits and percentages of nitrogen-fixing fertilizers, soil yields, and crop storehouses.112 “Challenged-forth,” nature is essentially fungible -- ready to be unlocked, extracted, stored, stockpiled, supplied -- rather than

“simply present somewhere or other.” Standing-reserve’s abdication of simple presence aligns it with the animal’s captivation in its encircling ring, which prevents it from “being able to grasp . . . as such” or “being able to reflect upon [the world] as something thus grasped,” and, with the original serviceability of equipment, prior to the substitution of “care” for use. In other words, enframing the world is a way of “revealing” the world, of opening and exposing it, as if without mediation: available in its pure, immediate presence for the user. For standing-reserve’s infinite exchangeability, man never has to find himself standing “helpless” before a broken hammer or an inkless pen. Under

“sway” of modern technology, man does not have to encounter the tools that relate him to the world. Enframing “expedites” because it ventures itself as immediate and unmediated, which is to say, uninterruptible. The endless utility, or unbroken “use,” of the world enframed: Dasein never has to find “itself always already in the power of the things of which it takes care.”113

Nature’s seeming lack of mediation and unremitting availability subtends technological modernity’s pretense of human mastery.114 But for Heidegger, this “illusion” of control in fact cloaks an ever-encroaching mechanism of human subjection. In other words, modern technology’s way of revealing the world is so totalizing that man “comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth.”115 “Only to the extent that man for his part is already challenged to exploit the energies of nature can this ordering revealing happen.” Heidegger elaborates:

112 Ibid, 19. 113 Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 38. 114 Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 27. 115 Ibid, 27.

If man is challenged, ordered, to do this, then does not man himself belong even more originally than nature within the standing-reserve? The current talk about human resources, about the supply of patients for a clinic, gives evidence of this. The forester who, in the wood, measures the felled timber and to all appearances walks the same forest path in the same way as did his grandfather is today commanded by profit-making in the lumber industry, whether he knows it or not. He is made subordinate to the orderability of cellulose, which for its part is challenged forth by the need for paper, which is then delivered to newspapers and illustrated magazines. The latter, in their turn, set public opinion to swallowing what is printed, so that a set configuration of opinion becomes available on demand.116

When enframed, mediation -- in this parable, given literally as the print media: “news papers and illustrated magazines”-- is revealed in the same way cellulose is extracted from timber, and is likewise

“commanded by profit-making . . . industry.” The lumberjack’s morning paper serves only to close the loop (we might say, the “encircling ring”) between his waged-work and his orienting experience of the world, in its immediacy, availability, and homogeneity. It is “swallowed”: man literally ingests the standing-reserve. Such assimilation supports the experience of a kind of auto-continuity with the world that Heidegger names as modern technology’s “final delusion: It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself.”117 After Derrida’s reading of Heidegger in The Beast and the Sovereign, we could say technology fosters man’s dream of all the world being himself, of being incorporated into himself. Enframed, the world and its media are a kind of “mirror” that “repeat the same” without “displacing or altering it.”118

The Forum, an American “illustrated magazine” that ran from the 1890’s to the 1950’s, is likely the kind of publication Heidegger had in mind when writing of standing-reserve’s man- devouring medialessness. Its April 1926 edition, for instance, included an article called “Farming the

Ocean,” which takes on the problem of man’s consumption and the multiplying global population’s expenditure of caloric resources. The solution is to farm the ocean: “He may go down to the sea,

116 Ibid, 18. 117 Ibid, 27. 118 Derrida, “Third Session: January 22, 2003,” 75.

modify its economy to his use, and draw from its teeming life sustenance for his increasing numbers.” Writes Forum contributor and ichthyologist John Treadwell Nichols:

The oceans and seas, and the rivers that flow into them, are a vast storehouse of food, and one that has scarcely been tapped. The land surface of the earth is only 52,000,000 square miles. The water surface is 145,500,000 square miles, nearly three times as much. Of the land surface of the earth, only a limited portion can be used for agricultural purposes; and of this limited area only a part may be devoted to food growing. Man demands standing room. He builds great cities, ringed with ever widening suburban circles. He dots the land with industrial regions; traverses it with a network of railways and highways. Not all the forests can be cut down; not all the mountain sides terraced; not all deserts irrigated; not all swamps drained. Man must have parks for his recreation, and productive land on which to grow those essential non-food crops, such as cotton, upon which the existing economy of civilization depends. The ocean, on the other hand, is limited as a food producing area only by the small region toward the poles where cold locks its waters in ice. Even this limit is probably more fanciful than real, in view of the pasturage that seals find under the ice. And this is not all. Though we plant seeds in the land, we grow plants on the land and reckon the land in two dimensions. The ocean has three dimensions. In some places it is over five miles deep. At the surface, in the depths, and to an uncertain degree between, it teems with myriad forms of vegetable and animal life.119

Nichols advocates expanding enframed “industrial agriculture” to the seas, as the planet’s landed resources pose limits: “not all the forests can be cut down.” “Nearly three times greater” than that of solid land, the ocean’s surface area alone recommends it as a storehouse. But its surface does not represent the ocean’s most promising frontier. Indeed, the land has been exhausted precisely for its surficial limits. “Man demands standing room,” so a certain axial or verticalizing contortion of

Earth’s surface -- of its “two dimensions”-- has been, from its inception, the organizing logic of all

“civilization.” Man “dots the land with industrial regions”; as verb, “dot” implies mark-making, its most common usages connoting the activity of penmanship (dotting the i’s and j’s) or the scattering or placement of “like dots at separate points on a surface.”120 Stubbornly two-dimensional, industrial pointillism has run its course.

119 John Treadwell Nichols, “Farming the Ocean,” The Forum, LXXV, no. 4, April 1926, 560-561. His emphasis. 120 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “dot, v.1," accessed May 05, 2019, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/56964?rskey =bycK8D& result=3.

By contrast, the ocean’s limitlessness is alleged precisely for its capacity to be “reckoned” in three-dimensions. Nichols here begins the attempt of such a spatial re-conceptualization, the breaking upwards of coordinate space into a z-axis. His italicized prepositions and dimensions encourage the reader to “imagine” the ocean precisely in the Cartesian sense: as an extended thing.

The re-modulation of the “dotted” page into fishable depth shares its vector and geography with

Siebers’s literary “detail,” in which “images picture bodies” and “rise to the surface of the text,” and with Scarry’s account of imagination’s work, in which language strives to become so “precise” a

“reflection of material reality” that a “sentence or poem where there had been silence” is ontologically identical to “a fishing net . . . where there had been none.”121

Man’s demand for “standing room” might be understood as the behest that heralds modern technology: that endlessly “on demand” world in which “man . . . exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth.”122 If not for Nichols, then for Heidegger, such erect mastery is an “illusion” or a

“delusion.” And so for Virginia Woolf. In her 1926 essay “On Being Ill” -- republished alongside

Nichols’s “Farming the Ocean” in The Forum as “Illness: An Unexploited Mine” -- she writes:

[I]n health the genial pretense must be kept up and the effort renewed -- to communicate, to civilise, to share, to cultivate the desert, educate the native, to work together by day and by night to sport. In illness this make-believe ceases. Directly the bed is called for, or, sunk deep among pillows in one chair, we raise our feet even an inch above the ground on another, we cease to be soldiers in the army of the upright; we become deserters. They march to battle. We float with the sticks on the stream; helter-skelter with the dead leaves on the lawn, irresponsible and disinterested and able, perhaps for the first time for years, to look round, to look up -- to look, for example, at the sky.123

The onward and upward injunction of civilization and cultivation are “pretense” and “make- believe,” until the performance “ceases.” In a run-on sentence that moves between the passive voice

(“the bed is called for”) and the (“irresponsible”) concatenation of active independent clauses

121 Siebers, Disability Aesthetics, 125; Scarry, The Body in Pain, 170. 122 Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 27. 123 Woolf, On Being Ill, 12.

without coordinating conjunctions (“we . . . we . . . we . . .”), the subject of illness is dissimulated as it is introduced.124 The first-person plural: the reclining convalescent sink back, “raise our feet,” and occupy more chairs than one. By contrast, in its fungible units, “the army of the upright” -- like the standing-reserve -- designates the posturing of health and civilization as a kind of institutionalized tumescence. Perhaps it is by way of contrast to this bristling infantry that Woolf -- in the diaristic account of the episode that inspired this essay -- describes becoming ill as the flaccidity or deflation of “getting a little used up & riding on a flat tire.”125 Surpassing utility, or defecting from use, is basic to the de-perpendicularizing of posture.126 As slack horizontality replaces firm verticality, so decay

(“dead leaves”), slowness (“float”), and chaos (“helter-skelter”) replace ordered and expedited efficiency.

Waste of time and space, then, mark illness. But one joke of the alternate title, “Illness: An

Unexploited Mine” is that infirmity is valuable (and ought to be excavated) precisely for its uselessness. Supine, one is able, “perhaps for the first time for years, to look round, to look up -- to look, for example, at the sky.” Woolf finds the value of waste in its perspectival transformation -- the roaming regard which replaces the forward gaze of standing at attention. Horizontality permits a

“disinterested” experience of the sky above:

Now lying recumbent, staring straight up, the sky is discovered to be something so different from this that really it is a little shocking. This then has been going on all the time without our knowing it! -- this incessant making up of shapes and casting them down, this buffeting of clouds together, and drawing vast trains of ships and waggons from North to South, this incessant ringing up and down of curtains of light and shade, this interminable experiment with gold shafts and blue shadows, with veiling the sun and unveiling it, with making rock ramparts and wafting them away -- this endless activity, with the waste of Heaven knows how many million horse power of energy, has been left to work its will year in year out. The fact seems to call for comment and indeed for censure. Ought not some one to write to The Times? Use should be made of it. One should not let this gigantic cinema play perpetually to an empty house. But watch a little longer and another emotion drowns the stirrings of civic

124 The disintegrating repetition of the first person plural recalls the warbling “dispersed are we” in Between the Acts. Virginia Woolf. Between the Acts. (San Diego: Harcourt, 1969), 98. 125 Woolf, “Saturday 5 September,” 38. 126 See Travis Chi Wing Lau, “Revaluing Illness: Virginia Woolf’s ‘On Being Ill,”’ Synapsis, October 3, 2017, https://medicalhealthhumanities.com/2017/10/03/on-being-ill/.

ardour. Divinely beautiful it is also divinely heartless. Immeasurable resources are used for some purpose which has nothing to do with human pleasure or human profit.127

In its upturning, illness shuttles one beyond the limits of everyday familiarity or awareness and orients one aesthetically to the foregrounded background: “This then has been going on all the time without our knowing it!” Em dashes hold Woolf’s ekphrastic account -- of “buffering clouds together,” of the “incessant ringing up and down of curtains of light and shade,” and of “gold shafts and blue shadows” -- in suspension from industry standards of utility: “this endless activity, with the waste of Heaven knows how many million horse power of energy, has been left to work its will year in year out.”

Just as, for Heidegger, enframing’s efficiency abdicates “flowers in the hedgerow” and the

“springhead in the dale,” the sky’s painterly and poetic formal features soon register as “waste.” And just as, under sway of modern technology, a “set configuration of public opinion becomes available on demand,” through “newspapers and illustrated magazines,” Woolf’s ventriloquized modal verbs,

“should” and “ought,” serve to consolidate witness -- audience or public, the cinema’s viewership or

The Time’s readership. The public response to illness’ upside-down sight lines, then, is to right them: to reinstate the origin of sight and or the primacy of human witness.128 Their response, in other words, is to carry on the mission of the “army of the upright.” Through The Times, they stiffen, fortify, and posture themselves back to “lords of the earth.”

For Heidegger, modern technology’s unique way of revealing the world -- enframing it -- preceded the actual machinery of modern technology; it began instead with “[m]odern science’s way of representing,” which, from physics to ichthyology, “pursues and entraps nature as a calculable coherence of forces.”129 We could say it began with, in Silvia Federici’s words, “the rationalization of

127 Woolf, “On Being Ill,” (Ashfield, Massachusetts: Paris Press, 2012), 13-4. 128 For an account of erection as hominization, see Derrida’s “The Animal That Therefore I am (More to Follow),” in The Animal That Therefore I Am, translated by David Wills, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 1-51. 129 Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 21.

space and time that characterized the philosophical speculation of the 16th and 17th century,” in which, for example, “prophecy was replaced with the calculation of probabilities.”130 If witchcraft and hag-ridden occult passed agency to the “stars” and the supernatural, mechanistic philosophy grounded it, taking the sky --“with the waste of Heaven knows how many million horse power of energy” -- back for the human. The advantage of this “from a capitalist viewpoint,” Federici tells us, is that “no major change, no revolution, will upset the coordinates of individual decision-making.”131

Nothing will interrupt efficiency. The space and time of the body, as the wheels and counterweights of a clock, are central to the imposition of the regularity and immutability, which “seeing” the body as the efficient machinery of labor power requires.

Both Heidegger and Woolf counterpose the regime of modern technology with “poetry.”

For Heidegger, “modern technology” is a “danger” that carries with it a “poetic” saving power.

Similarly, Woolf opens her “Modern Fiction” essay by asserting “the analogy between literature and the process, to choose an example, of making motor cars scarcely holds good beyond the first glance.”132 Such an analogy presumes a transitivity or vehicularity (transport) of meaning whose possibility rests, to use Heidegger’s term, on a particular way of revealing the world, which reaches for material ostensibly without the warp of mediation. Such suppression of mediation is inherent to the danger and unfreedom of modernity’s standing-reserve; by contrast, “[f]reedom is that which conceals in a way that opens to light,” Heidegger writes, “in whose clearing there shimmers that veils that covers what comes to presence of all truth and lets the veil appear as what veils.”133 In other words, to access freedom from modern technology man must not exalt himself to the posture of lord of the earth, but realize his own original beholdenness to the “realm of destining,” or poietic

130 Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 142-3. 131 Ibid. 132 Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” 157. 133 Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 25.

media, in which he has always been thrown. For Heidegger, the poet lets the mediating veil shimmer as truth.

Woolf’s materialist, by contrast, constructs to lay bear. He “takes too much delight in the solidity of his fabric,” and spends “too much time making things shipshape and substantial” -- “to the extent of obscuring and blotting out the light of the conception.”134 He thinks to use language to reveal, by its own airtight capacity to transport, the unmediated shape, solidity, and properties of things -- as if words could vessel the world as a ship does its cargo. For Woolf, illness brings one into uselessness and waste. And as the recumbent defect from the army of the upright, language desists from efficient vehicular transport. By interrupting the body’s smooth functioning, debility makes a kind of Heideggerian tool out of the organ -- which is to say, when the body is in danger, poetry is revealed as a saving power.135 When modern technology converts all into mine and storehouse, the sick stay useless, unexploited, and unreserved in their un-standing. Looking up, the recumbent disrupt business as usual with their “disinterested” theater of the clouds; looking round, the ill see the body as the poets do the ocean.

134 Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” 159-60. 135 In his introduction to his 1952 essay “The Upright Posture,” -- “Upright Posture, Which Distinguishes the Human Genus from All Other Species, Pre-Establishes a Definite Mode of Being-in-the-World” -- Erwin Straus writes of the interruption to absorption caused by illness and recumbency in terms very similar to the breakdown of Heidegger’s hammer: A breakdown of physical well-being is alarming; it turns our attention to functions which on good days we take for granted. A healthy person does not ponder about breathing, seeing, walking. Infirmities of breath, sight, or gait, startle us. Among the patients consulting a psychiatrist, there are some who can no longer master the seemingly banal arts of standing and walking. They are not paralyzed; but, under certain conditions, they cannot, or feel as if they cannot, keep themselves upright. They tremble and quiver. Incomprehensible terror takes away their strength. Erwin Straus, “The Upright Posture,” The Psychiatric Quarterly 24, no. 1-4 (1952): 530, doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01568490.

Chapter Three: “hag-ridden”

The essay most commonly known as “On Being Ill” was published three times in Woolf’s lifetime.136 It first appeared in January of 1926 in the New Criterion, a quarterly issue that took on the challenge of distinguishing literature from other kinds of writing. “The profounder objection is the impossibility of defining the frontiers, or limiting the context of ‘literature’,” wrote the editor, T.S.

Eliot in his preface, “The Idea of a Literary Review.” “Even the purest literature is alimented from non-literary sources, and has non-literary consequences. Pure literature is a chimera of sensation; admit the vestige of an idea and it is already transformed.”137 Rather than pursue the myth of an uncontaminated object, Eliot reasoned, the task of a literary review is to “protect its disinterestedness,” that is, to “avoid the temptation ever to appeal to any social, political or theological prejudices.”138 A literary review must admit to its impurities but not succumb to them aesthetically. Thus, “On Being Ill” first appeared alongside works by literary luminaries like Aldous

Huxley and Jean Cocteau, high modernist experiments in abstraction in Gertrude Stein’s “The

Fifteenth of November,” and a tribute to aesthetic decadence in Ada Leverson’s “The Last First

Night,” a reminiscence of Oscar Wilde.139

If its first publication was cocooned in “disinterested” aestheticism, the essay’s second publication donned different garb and kept very different company; “Illness--An Unexploited Mine” reappeared in the April 1926 edition of The Forum, an American magazine. This venue made for, as

136 Mark Hussey, “On Being Ill,” Virginia Woolf A to Z: A Comprehensive Reference for Students, Teachers and Common Readers to Her Life, Work and Critical Reception, 1st ed. (New York: Facts on File Books, 1995), 195-6; Jan Freeman, “The Paris Press Publication of On Being Ill,” Woolf in the Real World: Selected Papers from the Thirteenth International Conference on Virginia Woolf, (South Carolina: Clemson University Press, 2005), 143-4. 137 T.S. Eliot, “The Idea of a Literary Review,” in Anthony Cuda and Ronald Schuchard, The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: The Perfect Critic, 1919–1926, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press and Faber & Faber Ltd, 2014), 763–764. 138 T.S. Eliot, “The Idea of a Literary Review,” in The New Criterion IV, no. 1 (January 1926): 1-6. 139 Hermione Lee, Introduction to On Being Ill, by Virginia Woolf, (Ashfield: Paris Press, 2012), xxi.

Hermione Lee puts it, “a much more glossy, middle-brow setting, with many more ‘issues’ under discussion.”140 Rather than tout its political disinterest, the 1926 Forum plunged into hot-button debates. The issue opened with a pair of articles, “Fascism: The New World Issue” and “The Case

Against Fascism,” that were answered morbidly with “Is Democracy Doomed?” “A Plea for

Psychical Research” implored readers to search for “empirical evidence that the mind transcends the categories of mechanistic science” before deciding one way or another.141 “To the North Pole by

Airship” argued that planes or dirigibles are the best way to survey the poles in arctic exploration.142

“Farming the Ocean” called for enframing the seas.143 Indeed, while the title “On Being Ill” invokes a 1916 essay of the same name by Henry Dwight Sedgwick, and thus positions itself as a literary inheritance or critical response, the eponym “An Unexploited Mine” plants Woolf in the midst of the political event that dominated the front pages of April 1926.144

In April of 1926, The Daily Mail, The Daily Herald, Manchester Guardian, and British Gazette reported with foreboding the looming face off between the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and the mine owners, who were backed by the state.145 Called by the TUC in solidarity with coal miners, the

General Strike of May 1926 had percolated since the summer of 1925, when the British government raised the external value of the sterling without matching its internal value, a policy that effectively lowered wages for workers in export industries like mining.146 A government subsidy temporarily postponed these effects (and, thus, a strike). When it expired in May of 1926, miners could either accept thirteen percent pay cuts and extend to eight-hour days or be locked out of their workplaces

140 Ibid. 141 William McDougall, “A Plea for Psychical Research,” The Forum, LXXV, no. 4, April 1926, 532-536. 142 Fridtjof Nansen, “To the North Pole by Airship,” The Forum, LXXV, no. 4, April 1926, 538-547. 143 John Treadwell Nichols, “Farming the Ocean,” The Forum, LXXV, no. 4, April 1926, 560-567. 144 Henry Dwight Sedgwick, “On Being Ill,” in An Apology for Old Maids and Other Essays, (Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1916), 82-109. 145 Mark D. Harmon, "A War of Words: The British Gazette and British Worker during the 1926 General Strike," Labor History, Volume 60, no. 3, 2018. 193-202. doi:10.1080/0023656x.2019.1533731. 146 Kate Flint, “Virginia Woolf and the General Strike, Essays in Criticism 35 no. 4, 1986, 319-334.

and face unemployment. The miners opted to strike: “Not a minute on the day, not a penny off the pay!”147 As a footnote to Woolf’s “diary of the Strike” explains, the strike had been all but inevitable since both parties rejected the Samuel Commission's Recommendations in March.148

Between January and April--that is, between its first and second publications-- Woolf’s essay on illness underwent a conversion. It metamorphosed from a “disinterested” meditation on the ways literature and literary thought are at once enabled and warped by illness, to a topical, if still literary, editorial that positioned illness as a prism for punctual political commentary. While this transformation was accomplished mostly through the essay’s altered frame of meaning -- the hermeneutic implied by its title, location, and neighboring writing -- the one major alteration to content contributed to the shift. The chief difference between the essays was the latter’s exclusion of passages on Shakespeare and Augustus Hare that concluded the former.149 Hermione Lee summarizes the function of the “peculiar coda” as follows: “Like so many of her essays on women

(“Geraldine and Jane,” “Miss Ormerod,” Mary Wollstonecraft,” A Room of One’s Own), this tells the story of a gifted woman suppressed and imprisoned by her circumstances.”150 The continuity between illness and (an aristocratic) feminism is what “An Unexploited Mine” seems to temper in cutting the conclusion to “On Being Ill.”

Nevertheless, scholars of the essay have in main interpreted it to be advancing a unified project -- unified unto itself, across its publication history, and unified thematically with major works of Woolf’s ouvre.151 That a version of the essay ever appeared under a different name has been

147 Elizabeth Wood, "Build-up to the General Strike," The Library Modern Records Centre. Accessed May 10, 2019. https://warwick.ac.uk/services/library/mrc/explorefurther/digital/gs/timeline/before/. 148 Virginia Woolf, “Wednesday May 5th,” The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3, 1925-1930, ed. Anne Oliver Bell, assisted by Andrew McNeillie (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 77. 149 Hermione Lee, “Introduction,” xxi; Virginia Woolf, “Illness--An Unexploited Mine,” The Forum, LXXV, no. 4, April 1926, 582-590; Virginia Woolf, “On Being Ill,” New Criterion IV, no. 1, January 1925-1926, 32-45. 150 Lee, “Introduction,” xxxiii. 151 Lee lists “Geraldine and Jane,” “Miss Ormerod,” “Mary Wollstonecraft,” A Room of One’s Own (introduction to On Being Ill, xxxiii). Kimberly Engdahl Coates, in her multiple articles on the essay, includes The Voyage Out, To the Lighthouse,

treated as by some as incidental. Mark Hussey, for instance, merely approximates the title in his encyclopedic entry on “On Being Ill”: “An essay by Woolf published in the New Criterion in January

1926 and under the title “Illness: An Unexplored Mine” in April 1926.” Others note the name change to highlight the project’s synergies with more famous works.152 Coates addresses the intermediate version in a footnote: “Woolf plays with the words ‘mine’ and ‘unexploited’ in several different ways. ‘Mine,’ in its noun form, refers to a large excavation made into the earth from which precious stones are taken . . . .”153 About this definition Coates has no further comment. “In addition,” she continues, “‘mine’ is a possessive pronoun: to be ill is to possess oneself in the fullest possible sense.”154 This latter definition corroborates the main theme of her essay of “an imaginative space swept clean by illness and its symptoms, a space that is uniquely ‘mine.’”155 The thesis that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” is replaced, in On Being

Ill, with the conviction that sickness emboldens creativity insofar as it shuttles one to, following

Coates, “a space that is uniquely mine” and an awareness that, as Woolf tells us, “has nothing to do with human pleasure or human profit.”156 In other words, On Being Ill seems to vaporize the materialism of A Room of One’s Own, leaving behind a feminist individualism unencumbered by the necessities of walls or wages.

For Raymond Williams, Woolf’s feminism, in the context of the “Bloomsbury Fraction,” represents the development of an intellectual elite that needed to understand itself as liberal,

The Years, Three Guineas, “Professions for Women,” and, again A Room of One’s Own. Coates, “Phantoms, Fancy, (and) Symptoms: Coates, “Phantoms, Fancy (and) Symptoms: Virginia Woolf and the Art of Being Ill,” Woolf Studies Annual, 18 (2012) 1-28; Coates, “Exposing the Nerves of Language: Virginia Woolf, Charles Mauron, and the Affinity Between Aesthetics and Illness,” Literature and Medicine 21, no. 2 (2002) 242-263. 152 Hussey, “On Being Ill,” Virginia Woolf A to Z, 143. 153 Coates, “Phantoms, Fancy (and) Symptoms,” 9. 154 Ibid, 8-9. 155 Ibid, 8. 156 Woolf, “On Being Ill,” 14.

modern, and “socially conscious.”157 Though they too often chafed (see: A Room of One’s Own), the bourgeois intellectual class evolved fundamentally in synergy with Woolf’s brand of modern feminism, as they circuited together through the promise of freedom for the “civilized” and self- sufficient individual. That Woolf published her essay on illness yet again -- this time in a 1930 book with Hogarth Press, reverting to the content and title of the New Criterion edition,--seems to cement the essay’s canonization among the literati, not the wider public and leaning on the “disinterested” aesthetic more than timely political stakes (or, at least, with political stakes planted in aristocratic feminism rather than in, say, movements against the extraction of coal from the earth and the abstraction of value from wage labor).

As a reader of her own work, then, Woolf seems to consign “Illness--An Unexploited Mine” to blip status, an exception to, or mere interruption of, the real project of On Being Ill. That it ought to be passed over slapdash or ignored altogether is precisely Woolf’s orientation to her “exact diary of the Strike,” once the TUC was crushed by the government: “I suppose all pages devoted to the

Strike will be skipped.”158 And yet, for Woolf, the experience of illness, before it is anything else, is an experience of interruption. Throughout Woolf’s writing, interruption and illness routinely serve as mutual metaphors. For instance, Woolf describes a visitation during the strike appositionally as

“Clive came in & interrupted” and “Clive calls in to discuss bulletins--indeed, more than anything it is like a house where someone is dangerously ill; & friends drop in to enquire & one has to wait for doctor’s news.”159 Similarly, in A Room of One’s Own, she names the typical obstacles to a woman’s creative freedom: “Generally material circumstances are against it. Dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health will break down.”160 “[M]oney and a room of one’s own”

157 Williams, “The Bloomsbury Fraction,” 166. 158 Woolf, “Thursday 13 May,” The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 85. 159 Woolf, “Thursday 6 May,” The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 78-9. My emphasis. 160 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 51.

insulate against interruption and allow for the “free and unimpeded” concentration requisite to efforts of literary genius.161

Illness and interruption are linked insofar as both prevent one from doing what one wants.

Of the faint and convalescence that inspired “On Being Ill,” Woolf writes “This has rammed a big hole in my 8 weeks which were to be stuffed so full.”162 Here illness is puncture: the piercing and deflating of a temporal container. As she predicted in A Room of One’s Own, “health will break down”: the image deploys the common etymological ancestor of interrupt and rupture -- “rumpere,” to break -- in its double meaning. It conjures the noun “break,” as interval or pause from some original action -- the convalescent break the invalid takes from writing, which preserves the betweenness of inter-rupt insofar as it orients in some sense toward a return -- and the more violent verb “break,” as to rend, sever, fracture, tear, or rupture, and to leave behind debris of what was rather than restore it.

Woolf’s desire to surmount the interruption of illness is plain and admirable. “Never be unseated by the shying of that undependable brute, life, hag ridden as she is by my own queer, difficult nervous system,” writes Woolf of her fortnight of convalescence. “I am still crawling and easily enfeebled, but if I could once get up steam again, I believe I could spin it off with infinite relish.”163 When forced to negotiate her health’s breakdown, in other words, Woolf aspires to ‘take a break’ from (noun) rather than ‘break with’ (verb) her daily regimen. This very desire for normalcy animated her ambivalent position on the General Strike. While she states “everyone is pro-men,” as if with plain self-evidence, and while she helped her husband Leonard circulate a petition in support of the TUC, what Woolf wanted above all was for “normal life” to recommence.164 “[W]e could

161 Ibid, 4, 57. 162 Woolf, “Saturday 5 September,” 38. 163 Ibid, 38. 164 Flint, “Virginia Woolf and the General Strike,” 322.

keep fixed like this for weeks,” she wrote in her May 5th, 1926 diary entry. “What one prays for is

God: the King or God; some impartial person to say kiss & be friends.”165 Woolf’s prayer pairs the sovereign power to enforce unity over a swelling chaos with “kiss & be friends,” a belittling admonition that positions mobilizing workers as intractable toddlers.

Scholarship of the essay, “On Being Ill,” has reproduced that very dynamic,: advocating the integration of what threatens rupture and trivializing what won’t assimilate. There is, then, an underlying coherence, rather than disjunction, across the essay’s publication history, thematic resonances, and political significance. Rather than replicate the old pattern, and subsume the essay under the project of bourgeois feminist individualism, I propose the “break” represented by “An

Unexploited Mine” -- the essay itself and the strike suggested in its eponym, both -- poses a generative question about the status of interruption in Woolf’s writing, with implications for the bifurcation between so-called realist materialism and disinterested or aesthetic anti-materialism, which continues to inform debates in contemporary crip studies regarding the “proper” way to represent disability.

Previous chapters have endeavored to show how formulations which oppositionalize materiality to “disinterested” aesthetics hinge in different ways on “property.” For instance, Kant’s conception of aesthetics is dismissed as anti-materialist by Tobin Siebers’ in Disability Aesthetics: a gesture concomitant with his call for a “new realism of the body,” or representations of embodiment that foreground “description” and “detail.” Those chapters counterposed Woolf to this stance, linking her call for anti-descriptive, anti-materialist, and anti-propertarian fiction with readers of

Kant who understand his “disinterested” aesthetics as abdicating “property,” with its roots in ownership or possession, rather than materiality as such. Put differently, Woolf’s “disinterested”

165 Virginia Woolf, “5 May 1926,” in The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3, 1925-1930, ed. Anne Oliver Bell, assisted by Andrew McNeillie (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 78.

stance contests a conflation of embodiment or materiality with property and its properties. An aestheticized account of embodiment is not somehow less “real” than a detailed or descriptive one.

Beginning with a meditation on the “strange” fact that “illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature,” On Being Ill, enacts this possibility in advocating a literature of illness that is at once “disinterested” and “poetic.”

For the poetry of illness to emerge, however, Woolf would -- in an exception to her usual symbology -- have to disarticulate illness from interruption. This would be a difficult feat, given how thoroughly and how often the two overlap experientially and tropologically. To accomplish it, Woolf had to locate interruption elsewhere: not in the patient, but in the nurse. When, in A Room of One’s

Own, Woolf sought to illustrate the inherent inequity between men’s and women’s opportunity for sustained focus, she called on Florence Nightingale, the well-known founder of modern nursing:

“And, as Miss nightingale was so vehemently to complain, -- ‘women never have an half an hour . . . that they can call their own’ -- she was always interrupted.”166 The profession of nursing, with its sensitivity to others’ needs and its call buttons, represents the distillation of female interruptibility.

In “On Being Ill,” Woolf dramatizes this point:

Sympathy nowadays is dispensed chiefly by the laggards and failures, women for the most part (in whom the obsolete exists so strangely side by side with anarchy and newness), who, having dropped out of the race, have time to spend upon fantastic and unprofitable excursions; C.L. for example, who, sitting by the stale sickroom fire, builds up, with touches at once sober and imaginative, the nursery fender, the loaf, the lamp, barrel organs in the street, and all the simple old wives’ tales of pinafores and escapades; A.R., the rash, the magnanimous, who, if you fancied a giant tortoise to solace you or theorbo to cheer you, would ransack the markets of London and procure them somehow, wrapped in paper before the end of the day . . . . But such follies have had their day; civilisation points to a different goal; and then what place will there be for the tortoise or the theorbo.167

Those who have “dropped out of the race,” its competition and linearity, “have time to spend upon fantastic and unprofitable excursions.” Again, Woolf’s regard of those who break with the work

166 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 66. 167 Woolf, “On Being Ill,” 10.

week strikes a condescending note. Here the materiality of interruption registers in the dispensation of sympathy. And to dispense sympathy is to supply objects -- fire, fender, loaf, lamp, organ, tortoise, theorbo -- in their physical concreteness: to furnish a space to meet a body’s needs or, in the case of tortoise and theorbo, ornament it in frippery.

“Sympathy,” as the disposition of the woman that “builds up” the catalog of objects, and then gifts them to the patient “wrapped in paper,” shares a logic with Elaine Scarry’s definition of

“compassion”:

It is almost universally the case in everyday life that the most cherished object is the one that has been hand-made by a friend: there is no mystery about this, for the object’s material attributes themselves record and memorialize the intensely personal, extraordinary because exclusive, interior feelings of the maker for just this person -- This is for you. But anonymous, mass-produced objects contain a collective and equally extraordinary message: Whoever you are, and whether or not I personally like you or even know you, in at least this small way, be well. Thus, within the realm of objects, objects made-for-anyone bear the same relation to objects-made-for-someone that, within the human realm, caritas bears to eros.168

The ethical case Scarry made in The Body in Pain’s introduction, for a referential and content-based practice of language, is actualized -- literalized -- in these exchanges of compassion.169 Language is literally objects; objects are literally language. That is, the gift economy allows “object’s material attributes” to themselves “record and memorialize” a “message” (appositionally, “interior feelings”).

168 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 292. 169 Scarry’s definition of “compassion” is remarkably similar to Hannah Arendt’s in On Revolution. Indeed, the logic of Scarry’s valorization of Marx is nearly identical to Arendt’s denigration of Marx. For Arendt, the political realm, “in contradistinction to physical matters, need speech and articulation, that is, something which transcends mere physical visibility as well as sheer audibility, in order to be manifest at all” (9). (For Scarry, language ought to be a reflection of -- or, better yet, become -- “sheer material reality.”) By Arendt’s view, Marxist materialism forsakes political freedom by surrendering to the bodily or physical “necessity” of life processes; The French Revolution’s cry for bread was a cry for “compassion,” which is to say, a cry for the redistribution of objects that, because it usurps language, “abolishes the distance, the worldly space between men where political matters, the whole realm of human affairs, are located” (76-7). The bifurcation between the (silent, private) realm of the body and (speaking, public) realm of politics constitutes Arendt’s definition of the political. Judith Butler, from a feminist perspective, and Joanna Hevda, from a disabled perspective, have shown how Arendt’s expurgation of the body from the sphere of political life relies on a sexist and ableist division of labor. I want to suggest Scarry participates in something similar in her binarizing of the private and bodied from the spoken and public. See: Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, (New York: Penguin Books, 2006); Judith Butler, “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street,” European Institute for Progressive Cultural Politics, November 2011, http://scalar.usc.edu/works/bodies/Judith%20Butler:%20Bodies%20in%20Alliance%20and%20the%20Politics%20of %20the%20Street%20%7C%20eipcp.net.pdf; Johanna Hedva, “Sick Woman Theory,” Mask, accessed 10 May 2019, http://www.maskmagazine.com/not-again/struggle/sick-woman-theory.

This agency of “object’s material attributes” recalls Siebers’ description of texts that “gain materiality,” “stare back at the readers like a glass eye,” and “move into the emotional consciousness of the reader,” once they “acquire the status of the detail.”170 Likewise, Scarry’s valorization of the hand-made, as the paradigmatic vessel for the language of compassion, speaks to Siebers’ call for speech one can carry “in hand.” In its very shape, haptic messaging in each case confers an incontestable experience of meaning that language otherwise--language as, say, writing-- obfuscates.171

Yet this meaning is not lost when handicraft is. Scarry asserts that the message of “mass- produced” objects is “equally extraordinary”: that the “most-cherished” sense installed by handiwork abides even under the anonymous and mechanized conditions of post-Fordism. So even as intention -- well wishes -- are registered as if hieroglyphically by the object’s shape, that intention can subsist severed from its origin, or lack thereof, in the conditions of its production. To gesture at the Derridean “logic of iterability” introduced in Chapter One, the “material attributes” (material properties) of Scarry’s objects confer meaning in the absence of a speaker -- or any speaker. Which is to say, the “Get Well Soon” card is delivered with or without a signature. And yet, rather than contend with this condition of absence, Scarry sutures “mass produced objects” to a presence of intention: meaning immanent to details and properties. In a strange torquing of commodity fetishism, modern technology’s factory-assembled products signify homologously to bespoke gifts insofar as they partake of the same intimacy, whether fungibly or uniquely.

The startling capaciousness of this intimacy is intelligible only when one remembers what a dedicated reader of Marx The Body in Pain shows Elaine Scarry to be: how, after all, does she pull off

170 Siebers, Disability Aesthetics, 125. 171 I am thinking of Derrida’s discussion of Rousseau, in particular his account of the (false) promise of presence or immediacy in “savage” hieroglyphic symbols. Derrida, “Genesis and Structure of the Essay of the Origin of Languages,” in Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri C. Spivak, (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976) 165-268.

the ontological equivalence of the gift and the commodity? Scarry pursues a unified theory of “the body” and, convergently, “the object,” -- not its economic system. And the object derives its elasticity, which allows it to stretch homogeneously through the space between gift and commodity, and between workshop and factory, by letting “caritas” relieve “eros” of its duty. The erotic love or interpersonal passion of “eros,” which subtends the “This is for you” sentiment of the gift, is replaced by the root word of “charity,” Caritas, which Aquinas called “the selfless love.”172 In other words, Scarry’s theory of the object is made intelligible under the logics of industrial capitalism by excluding it from capitalism: by consigning the object’s inherent care labor to selflessness rather than

Smithian self-interest, to charity rather than to wage. The history of such an exclusion from capitalism -- the one that relegates care work to a sphere outside the sale and purchase of labor power -- is as old as capitalism itself. As Sylvia Federici demonstrates in Caliban and the Witch, that the “power differential between men and women in a capitalist society,”

should be interpreted as the effect of a social system of production that does not recognize the production and reproduction of the worker as a social-economic activity, and a source of capital accumulation, but mystifies it instead as a natural resource or a personal service, while profiting from the wageless condition of the labor involved.173

With “caritas,” an object’s physicalized intimacy withstands the conversion into modern technology, or an industrialized capitalist economy, with its shifting status of ownership and capability for mechanization. It does so by precisely the same mechanism by which capitalism profits from patriarchy, and the relegation of women’s work to the private sphere: to mystify care as a “natural resource or a personal service.”

“Caritas” from “Eros”: Latin supplants Greek as capitalism supplants the gift economy Marx describes as “primitive communism.” For Scarry, when such un-development or pre-modernity is

172 St. Thomas Aquinas, and Lottie H Kendzierski, “On Charity: De Caritate,” Vol. 10. Mediaeval Philosophical Texts in Translation. (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1960), Line 8.43.10. 173 Sylvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2004), 8. Second revised edition, 2014.

translated into modernity it becomes selfless and wageless work of “caritas.” We could say Woolf’s sardonic description of wageless caretakers and risible sympathy invokes precisely this. With class-

(“laggards and failures”), race- (“dropped out of the race”), empire- (“civilization points to a different goal”), and gender- (“women who . . . have time to spend upon fantastic and unprofitable excursions,” that is, who have excess leisure time for domestic frivolity) coded descriptors, Woolf pauses her account of illness -- the body, mind, and bed of the invalid -- to mock the nurse: a condemnation of the over-objectified, literal, and material “sympathy” that spills over into what feels like a personalized attack on a woman or kind of woman.

Indeed, critics like Hermione Lee and Kimberly Engdahl Coates have read Woolf’s anti- sympathy biographically: not exactly as anti-material but as anti-maternal, against, that is, the ideological project that consigns the female sex into the home for their role in biological reproduction. Woolf’s vitriol, Coates argues in “Phantoms, Fancy (and) Symptoms: Virginia Woolf and the Art of Being Ill,” is a feminist reaction against the “Angel in the House,” the Victorian middle-class feminine ideal that presided over Woolf’s early life in the figure of her mother, Julia

Stephen -- for whom To the Lighthouse’s Mrs. Ramsay is commonly understood to be a roman à clef portrayal.174 Famed for her kindness, selflessness, and beauty, Julia owned an inscribed copy of

Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House; she mothered eight; she paid regular charity visits to local poor and sick people; in 1883 she published a nursing manual called “Notes from Sickrooms” that explained in precise detail how to make patients feel cared-for and comfortable, the logistics of sympathy; in 1889, she signed Mrs. Humprhey Ward’s petition “An Appeal Against Female

Suffrage,” which argued that

the emancipating process has now reached the limits fixed by the physical constitution of women, and by the fundamental difference which must always exist between their main occupations and those of men. The care of the sick and the insane; the treatment of the poor; the education of

174 Mark Hussey, introduction to Julia Stephen’s “Notes from Sickrooms,” in On Being Ill, (Ashfield, Massachusetts: Paris Press, 2012), 37-46.

children: in all these matters, and others besides, they have made good their claim to a larger and more extended powers. We rejoice in it.175

Woolf’s incisive (and often exasperated) challenges to such articulations of a gendered division of labor -- which, in Federici’s words, “mystifies it as a natural resource or personal service”-- are, of course, well documented.

And Woolf’s feminism emerges, at least tactically and rhetorically, by distancing itself from such women: the “laggards and failures” who embrace traditional roles. While the figure of Mrs.

Ramsay in To the Lighthouse ultimately complicates this exclusion, the novel initially entertains it.

Woolf’s snobbery often shades Mrs. Ramsay’s free indirect discourse. While, in the novel’s opening section, “The Window,” she runs errands and visits the sick, Mrs. Ramsay “ruminated the problem .

. . of rich and poor,”

and the things she saw with her own eyes, weekly, daily, here or in London, when she visited this widow, or that struggling wife in person with a bag on her arm, and a note-book or pencil with which she wrote down in columns carefully ruled for the purpose wages and spendings, employment and unemployment, in hope that thus she would cease to be a private woman whose charity was half a sop to her own indignation, half a relief to her own curiosity, and become what with her untrained mind she greatly admired, an investigator, elucidating the social problem.176

With her “note-book or pencil” to document “wages and spending, employment and unemployment,” Mrs. Ramsay’s charitable impulse is given as a kind of instantiation of the

Edwardian or materialist representational mode, as Woolf recounts it in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs.

Brown.”177 As “investigator,” Mrs. Ramsay would work to collect evidence -- like Mr. Bennett,

175 Ward, Humphrey. “‘An Appeal Against Female Suffrage.’ The Nineteenth Century (1889).” Accessed May 10, 2019. https://www.dhr.history.vt.edu/modules/eu/mod02_vote/evidence_detail_04.html. Emphasis mine. 176 Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse, ed. Mark Hussey, (Orlando: Harcourt, 2005), 13. 177 Rita Mae Reese captures a different version of the referential literalism associated with caretaking work in her poem “Dear Reader”: I am simply your nurse, terse and unlovely I point to things and remind you what they are: chair, book, daughter, soup. Rita Mae Reese, “Dear Reader,” in The Alphabet Conspiracy, (Pasadena: Arktoi Books, 2011), 18-9.

“Ascertain the rent. Ascertain the wages.” -- as if her job is to furnish forensic proof of existence, marshaling the “things she saw with her own eyes” into circulars for public distribution.178 Her function, in other words, is to sponsor the Edwardian sense that it is “necessary to do something -- to join a society, or, more desperately, to write a cheque.”179 Her desire to transition from a “private woman” to “investigator, elucidating the social problem” is the desire of an “untrained mind,” as if,

Woolf suggests, only the unlettered could become thusly muddled in the custodial duties of public keepers and seep so willfully into the social.

A departure from the buying and selling of labor power: charity work, like the general strike, is structurally vulnerable to “interestedness” insofar as it relinquishes the spatial and temporal demarcations that waged work affords and is modulated through interruption by external demands.

For Woolf, such interruptibility renders it aesthetically compromising and susceptible to the shortcomings of writers like Mr. Bennett.180 The problem is in equal measure creative and aesthetic.

178 Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” 16. 179 Ibid, 9. 180 Woolf’s aesthetic anti-materialism has its locus in two places beyond its representational commitment. The first, following Raymond Williams, is in an anti-working class sentiment, and in the creation of an individualizing aesthetic and moral system, which insulates against liberal bourgeois from the hypocrisy of their progressivism in the context of their class position. The second, following Coates, is in an anti-maternal “jettisoning” of angelic femininity. As a signifier, “laggards and failures” is capacious; in Woolf’s usage, the twinned denigrations of sympathetic women (who either care about the poor or are poor themselves) and the working class often overlap, usually insofar as they both stand in for a “terse and unlovely” mode of object-oriented, descriptive, or anti-aesthetic social writing -- or, as with the nursing duties or 1926 General Strike, interrupt one’s capacity to concentrate on writing one’s novel. Here, the exclusively bourgeois origins of the modern feminist individualist subject, that of Woolf and Bloomsbury, are consolidated in a set of representational attachments, most notably a capacity for abstraction from the vulgar concerns of material life. For Woolf, entering the wage economy (getting “money and a room of one’s own”) enables such safeguarding. Indeed, initially, A Room of One’s Own actually attempts and advocates something of a “prosaic,” “investigative,”and historiographic mode of researching and writing the lives of women, in response to their historical, political, and archival silence; giving woman money and a room of her own should rectify this silence and therefore obviate the need for a materialist representational mode. Wages and walls serve as barriers to interruption from worldly concerns or material need; they enable poetic disinterestedness and carve out the solitude requisite to the “Bloomsbury Fraction’s” individualism. My hope, in centering interruption over the undisturbed solitude of A Room of One’s Own, is to extricate (but not exonerate) Woolf from this canonization -- though it was often her own -- in hopes that interrupting the hermeneutic circle of her materialism, can in turn intimate a vision of the body not captured by capitalism’s enframing of its properties.

If A Room of One’s Own allows the female creative to, in T.S. Eliot’s words, “protect [her] disinterestedness,” work without office makes one vulnerable to the vulgar concerns of material life.

If Mrs. Ramsay, with her notebook for columns of “wages and spending,” is initially caricatured as something of a “Mr. Bennett” -- that is, the first and vulgarly realist eponymous character of Woolf’s 1924 essay -- she is ultimately ennobled as To the Lighthouse’s “Mrs. Brown” -- the proper subject of modern fiction, the human embodiment of the complexity and incoherence of

“life” itself, and Woolf’s putative subject of modern fiction. “Mrs. Brown is eternal, Mrs. Brown is human nature.”181 Rephrased, the novelist’s job as Woolf describes it is to “catch the phantom” of what Mr. Bennett overlooks:

I have formed my own opinion of what Mr. Bennett is about -- he is trying to make us imagine for him . . . . With all his powers of observation, which are marvellous, with all his sympathy and humanity, which are great, Mr. Bennett has never once looked at Mrs. Brown in her corner.182

Woolf does not shirk this duty in To the Lighthouse, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak states plainly in her introduction to “Unmaking and Making in To the Lighthouse”: “To the Lighthouse can be read as a project to catch the essence of Mrs. Ramsay.”183

“A certain reading of the book would show how the project is undermined; another, how it is articulated.” Spivak’s interpretation involves tracking the shifting status of articulation’s felicity and its breakdown across the novel’s tripartite structure: “The Window,” “Time Passes,” and “The

Lighthouse.” Her initial conceit involves diagramming the book as a sentence structure, demonstrating how the first and last sections undertake, and then achieve, the “predication” of Mrs.

Ramsay in representation: “The second part of the book couples or hinges I and III. In Part I, Mrs.

Ramsay is, in the grammatical sense, the subject. In Part III, the painting predicates her. I could

181 Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” 13. 182 Ibid, 1, 13. 183 Spivak, “Unmaking and Making in To the Lighthouse,” 30.

make a grammatical allegory of the structure of the book: Subject (Mrs. Ramsay) -- copula --

Predicate (painting).”184

Spivak positions “Time Passes,” the lyrical interlude to the novel’s two narrative sections, as the “copula” -- in the grammatical link between subject and predicate, the place of to be -- to the

“sentence” of To the Lighthouse. This is interesting for Spivak’s (characteristically Derridean) reading because “Time Passes” assumes the copula’s crucial station, steward of unity, meaning, and coherence, so as -- nearly -- to abdicate it.

In other words, this middle section desists from the novel’s character- and human-driven plot (the prosaic daily dramas of the Ramsay family and their guests, to which their summer home serves as backdrop) and commences a kind of apocalyptic narration of the house in their absence, spanning a period of ten years in poetic fits and starts. Spivak argues “‘Time Passes’ allegorically narrates the terror of a (non-human or natural) operation without a copula.”185 For Spivak, with

“Time Passes,” To the Lighthouse poses the copula’s failure as a counterfactual -- what if the copula were not a copula? -- and distresses philosopher Mr. Ramsay’s irreducible “If Q is Q, then R . . . .”186

By way of answer, in “Time Passes,” the Ramsays disappear from the syllogism. As Woolf describes in her diary on April 30th -- the day before the General Strike -- “here is the most difficult abstract piece of writing -- I have to give an empty house, no people’s characters, the passage of time, all eyeless and featureless with nothing to cling to.”187 Shadows, shudders, and stillness are anthropomorphized while real humans are depersonalized in the telegraphic parentheticals that announce that Mrs. Ramsay, then two of her children, are dead. “The brackets are bulletins from a world far away, reporting only a kind of generalized gossip (‘people said’; ‘they said’),” Mark Hussey

184 Ibid, 30. 185 Spivak, “Unmaking and Making in To the Lighthouse,” 43. 186 Woolf, To the Lighthouse, quoted in Spivak, “Unmaking and Making in To the Lighthouse,” 31. 187 Woolf, “Sunday 18 April,” in The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3, 74. Woolf begins the entry on the 18th and starts it again on the 30th: over that period of time she finishes writing “The Window” and begins “Time Passes.”

observes, in his introduction to the novel.188 Plot, character, and epitaph, all have been condensed to expedited dispatch. (In Heideggerian terms, one might say that “Time Passes” -- “written in the gloom of the Strike” -- reflects the essential “danger” of technology: that, under modern technology, man himself might be “enframed” and taken as part of the standing-reserve.189)

Woolf brings her narrative to the precipice of the dispersal, disintegration, and death that, for her, impend in wartime, technological modernity, madness (Spivak argues “Time Passes” is all three), and strike.190 This brink is recognizable throughout Woolf’s writing.191 Indeed, Woolf’s description of the recumbent in “On Being Ill” -- “We float with sticks on the stream; helter-skelter with dead leaves on the lawn, irresponsible and disinterested” -- echoes almost verbatim a nocturnal wildness in “Time Passes”: “The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain pipes and scatter damp paths.”192 In “On Being Ill,” what begins as an aesthetic experience of the clouds above, occasioned by recumbency, turns into a realization that nature’s beauty is governed “by some purpose which has nothing to do with human pleasure or human profit.”193 The suspension of anthropocentrism evokes an uninhabitable earth and the end of time:

188 Woolf, To The Lighthouse: The Original Holograph Draft, quoted by Mark Hussey in his introduction to To the Lighthouse, xiv. 189 Woolf, “1754: To V. Sackville-West,” in The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3: 1923-1928, Edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 374; Heidegger, “A Question Concerning Technology,” 26-31. 190 Gayatri Spivak observes that “‘Time Passes’ compresses 1894-1915--from Mrs. Stephen’s death to the end of the war,” and that, for Woolf, “those years were marked by madness. She broke down after her mother’s death in 1895, after her father’s death in 1904, once again in 1910, lingerly in 1913, most violently in 1915” (“Unmaking and Making in To the Lighthouse,” 35). It has been argued that Woolf’s frequent “headaches” were probably symptoms of manic depression. See also: Hermione Lee, “‘Madness,’” in Virginia Woolf, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996), 171-198. 191 See, for instance, Miss La Trobe’s despair in Between the Acts (another story structured on interlude from narrative), Percival’s death and Rhoda’s suicide in The Waves, the crashing news of Septimus’s suicide in Mrs. Dalloway. 192 Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 132. 193 Woolf, On Being Ill, 14.

It is only the recumbent who know what, after all, Nature is at no pains to conceal -- that she in the end will conquer; heat will leave the world; stiff with frost we shall cease to drag ourselves about the fields; ice will lie thick upon factory and engine; the sun will go out.194

In “Time Passes,” too, Nature makes uncanny fossil and artifact the cultivated domestic: “The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it.”195

But, in each case, entropy is ultimately overcome. As Spivak writes of To the Lighthouse’s project to “catch the essence of Mrs. Ramsay,” “I will suggest that the undermining, although more philosophically adventurous, is set aside by Woolf’s book; that the articulation is found to be a more absorbing pursuit.”196 As Woolf herself put it in her scratchwork for the novel: the ten “chapters” of

“Time Passes” would relate the “gradual dissolution of everything . . . contrasted with the permanence of -- what?”197 “Dissolution” is likewise answered by an immortal “permanence” in

“On Being Ill.” Just as the essay strikes its most apocalyptic note, remission sprouts and paradise hatches:

Even so, when the whole earth is sheeted and slippery, some undulation, some irregularity of surface will mark the boundary of an ancient garden, and there, thrusting its head up undaunted in the starlight, the rose will flower, the crocus will burn. But with the hook of life still in us still we must wriggle. We cannot stiffen peaceably into glassy mounds. Even the recumbent spring up at the mere imagination of frost about the toes and stretch out to avail themselves of the universal hope -- Heaven, Immortality.198

Recumbency’s “disinterested” aesthetic experience of the sky, addressed in Chapter Two, begins as a kind of passive upward gazing that enables one to see the clouds formally -- rather than, say, meteorologically or mechanistically as “horse power.” Woolf first suggests that the value of illness is precisely in its de-instrumentalizing capacity to turn one away from utility and towards beauty. That,

194 Ibid, 16. 195 Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 141. 196 Ibid. 197 Woolf, Appendix A in To The Lighthouse: The Original Holograph Draft, quoted by Mark Hussey in his introduction to To the Lighthouse, xliv. 198 Woolf, On Being Ill, 16-7.

seen from below, this beauty reveals its essential “indifference” to witness -- that it plays irrespective of “human pleasure or human profit” -- elicits the world’s end: the “earth . . . sheeted and slippery,” and humanless. On one hand illness is valuable, but, on the other, its raw material requires processing. Woolf’s invocation of “Heaven, Immortality” reflects a recuperative impulse: a reluctance to submit to (what is for her) the total nihilism of uselessness. But hers is a secularized and artistic faith: “Heaven-making must be left to the imagination of the poets.”199

That is, illness is a double movement: its supine passivity invites apocalypse, and then, in calling upon heaven and immortality, calls up the activity of writing “poetry.” “The duty of Heaven- making should be attached to the office of the Poet Laureate”: Agency cannot be left totally to the indifferent skys; it must be brought back to the imagining earth.200 Woolf wants to make poets into the acknowledged legislators of the heavens.201 Thusly “irresponsible and disinterested” uselessness, the “unexploited mine” of illness, becomes processed, incorporated into vocation -- even career: heaven-making as “duty” (as responsibility) is assigned to the “office” of the Poet Laureate.

199 Ibid, 18. 200 Ibid, 19. 201 See Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” Poetry Foundation, (October 13, 2009), https://www.poetryfoundation. org /articles/69388/a-defence-of-poetry. Woolf’s own association of her account of illness with rather than against Romanticism is significant in the context of Susan Sontag’s unilateral condemnation of the “romanticizing” or “metaphorizing” of illness. Indeed, reviewing Paris Press’s republication of “On Being Ill” for the New York Times in 2002, Judith Shulevitzdec wrote, “For one thing, being ill, in ‘On Being Ill,’ looks a lot like a Romantic’s idea of being interesting, a notion that Susan Sontag dismissed as contemptible in ‘Illness as Metaphor’.” “THE CLOSE READER; The Poetry of Illness,” Judith Shulveitzdec, December 29, 2002. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/29/books/the-close-reader-the-poetry-of-illness.html. For an account of how Romantic metaphorizing of illness might offer crip studies resources see: La Ville, Claire. “Idiocy and Aberrancy: Disability, Paul De Man, and Wordsworth’s ‘The Idiot Boy.’” In Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 47, no. 2 (2014): 187-202. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44030149. La Ville conducts a De Manian reading of “The Idiot Boy” to put pressure on conventional modes of disabled literary interpretation, as they typically work within binaries of the (properly) representational versus the (improperly, or merely) metaphorical, between the material and the aesthetic, between art and life. She traces how these binaries tend to shore up versions of the speaking, self-present subject (as capable of self- advocacy, for instance) predicated on a set of exclusions. Under pressure of De Manian deconstruction, which recruits Romantic metaphor to complicate the relationship between the figurative and the actual, La Ville argues “The Idiot Boy,” refuses facility with naming language as requisite to care, love, or dependence, and therein formulates “interdependence . . . beyond the personal to include the language in which each person is bound, and the objects and creatures that make the bind appear natural” (198).

In “On Being Ill,” Woolf implies that making heaven out of illness requires the “jettisoning” of mother and nurse; the “laggards and failures” who hover around sickbeds -- and their spare

“time” for “unprofitable excursions” -- must be eliminated for Woolf to valorize illness as the

“duty” of the Poet Laureate.202 In other words, the sick artist must be saved from the interruption and interruptibility of the nurse (and, in Woolf’s case, mother) by giving her an “office” of her own.

To the Lighthouse seems to replicate this dynamic: staging the interruption of “Time Passes” as the threatening, but superable, danger to the novel’s writerly and painterly accomplishment. Indeed,

Lily’s creative process in “The Lighthouse” begins with her effort to replicate the conditions of a decade earlier, that is to say, to return intact to the world as it was before the destructive ten years of

“Time Passes”:

Such were some of the parts, but how to bring them together? She asked. As if any interruption would break the frail shape she was building on the table she turned her back to the window lest Mr. Ramsay should see her. She must escape somewhere, be alone somewhere. Suddenly she remembered. When she had last sat there ten years ago . . . [t]here had been a problem about a foreground of a picture . . . . She had never finished that picture. She would paint that picture now. She fetched herself a chair. She pitched her easel with her precise old-maidish movements on the edge of the lawn, not too close to Mr. Carmichael, but close enough for his protection. Yes, it must have been precisely here that she had stood ten years ago. There was the wall; the hedge; the tree. The question was of some relation between those masses. She had borne it in her mind all these years. It seemed as if the solution had come to her: she knew now what she wanted to do. But with Mr. Ramsay bearing down on her, she could do nothing. Every time he approached -- he was walking up and down the terrace -- ruin approached, chaos approached. She could not paint. She stopped, she turned; she took up this rag; she squeezed that tube. But all she did was to ward him off for a moment. He made it impossible for her to do anything.203

Lily’s aesthetic goal to make presence out of remembrances and unity out of fragments (“such were some of the parts, but how to bring them together?”) is concomitant with the effort to furnish a room of her own in the perilous openness of the lawn. Positioning herself close enough to Mr.

Carmichael’s masculine protection, she tries guarding against the hovering threat of Mr. Ramsay’s

202 Coates, “Phantoms, Fancy (and) Symptoms,” 2. 203 Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 151-2.

interrupting need for “sympathy” by performing absorption in the tools of her task; she attempts encircling herself in a ring carved by the engrossment of deixis: “she took up this rag; she squeezed that tube.”

As Lily busies herself -- “She rejected one brush; she chose another” -- waiting to be left alone, her resentments coalesce: “That man, she thought, her anger rising in her, never gave; that man took. She on the other hand, would be forced to give. Mrs. Ramsay had given. Giving, giving, giving, she had died -- and had left all this. Really, she was angry with Mrs. Ramsay.”204 Only in Mrs.

Ramsay’s absence is Lily made custodian of Mr. Ramsay’s (sexual) need for “praise” and

“sympathy.” Her death has thrown the careful balance of the house and lawn out of whack and left

Lily to make up the difference. That Lily could not paint, that she had to turn her “canvas” and

“easel” into a “barrier” -- “it was all Mrs. Ramsay’s fault.”205 “She was dead.”206 And as “ruin approached, chaos approached” relentlessly, Lily’s stopgap solitude and makeshift fortifications could not hold: “Here he was, stopped by her side. She would give him what she could.”207 At first, their encounter is structured entirely by his solicitation and her withholding: “his demand for sympathy poured and spread itself in pools at her feet, and all she did, miserable sinner that she was, was to draw her skirts a little closer round her ankles, lest she should get wet. In complete silence she stood there, grasping her paint brush.”208 She keeps her tools at hand as if she can will them back to use.

The two stand flooded in their mutual alienation, until Lily -- sexually aloof, but not without an appreciation for sensible footwear -- watches Mr. Ramsay tie his laces; she bursts, almost in spite

204 Ibid, 153. 205 Ibid. 206 Ibid. 207 Ibid, 155. 208 Ibid, 156.

of herself, “What beautiful boots!”209 Mr. Ramsay immediately warms to her, and through the boots, they develop a rapport:

“Now let me see if you can tie a knot,” he said. He poohpoohed her feeble system. He showed her his own invention. Once you tied it, it never came undone. Three times he knotted her shoe; three times he unknotted it. Why, at this completely inappropriate moment, when he was stopping over her shoe, should she be so tormented with sympathy for him that, as she stooped too, the blood rushed to her face, and, thinking of her callousness . . . she felt her eyes swell and tingle with tears? Thus occupied he seemed to her a figure of infinite pathos. He tied knots. He bought boots.210

Lily is stunned to find herself sympathetic to Mr. Ramsay after all. That a man’s boots -- the maker, leather, and laces of which he describes in minute detail -- becomes the means through which he becomes not only compelling as a character, but sympathetic as a person, casts this moment as an exception not only to Lily’s artistic, disinterested solitude, but to Woolf’s. For, in her writing in

“Modern Fiction” and “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” Woolf made clear that just this very sort of description ought not to be the stuff of character-making. The “Edwardian tools” -- the tools of

“materialism” and of “sympathy” -- “have laid an enormous stress upon the fabric of things. They have given us a house in the hope that we may be able to deduce the human beings who live there.”211

Just so: Lily Briscoe is given boots and only then can deduce the human being who wears them as “a figure of infinite pathos.” While Woolf writes in “Modern Fiction,” that the materialist author

“spends too much time making things shipshape and substantial” and “takes too much delight in the solidity of his fabric,” by contrast, the “best part of his youth” that Mr. Ramsay spent “to get boots made as they should be made” was every bit justified: “He would have her observe (he lifted his right foot and then his left) that she had never seen boots made quite that shape before. They were made of the finest leather in the world, also. Most leather was mere brown paper and cardboard.”212

209 Ibid, 157. 210 Ibid, 157-8. 211 Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” 16. My emphasis. 212 Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” 159-60; Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 157.

Mr. Ramsay’s self-sufficiency and pathos -- both -- swell so much on occasion of his tying and untying, that, when he finally leaves, Lily’s lingering feeling is not the frustration of his interruption but the “snubbed” sense of being no-longer needed.213 If Lily’s creative process indeed represents a meta-theorization of Woolf’s own, then, at least provisionally, Woolf revises her dismissal of materialism. For the very inner-life of Lily’s labor become boot-laced: “something she remembered in the relations of those lines cutting across, slicing down . . . which had stayed in her mind; which had tied a knot in her mind so that . . . she found herself painting that picture, passing her eye over it, and untying the knot in imagination.”214 Mr. Ramsay’s interruption is thus subtly reformulated as a kind of productive receptivity, in which Lily inadvertently takes on the good wife’s responsibility for and sensitivity to the widower.

Rather than understand it as a capitulation to a patriarchal hierarchy of needs, though, I want to suggest that Lily’s responsiveness to Mr. Ramsay represents the makings of a different sort of artistic permanence or afterlife (in this case, for Mrs. Ramsay) than the “Heaven” and “Immortality” actualized, over illness and apocalypse, by the “office” of the Poet Laureate.215 That is to say, Lily’s creative process is initiated by the breach, rather than establishment, of an “office” of her own. “But with Mr. Ramsay bearing down on her, she could do nothing. Every time he approached -- he was walking up and down the terrace -- ruin approached, chaos approached”: Lily’s very exposure to the traffic of the semi-public lawn, and her vulnerability to “chaos” and “ruin,” initially figured as an impediment, become the condition of possibility for “catching” her vision. “There was the wall; the hedge; the tree. The question was of some relation between those masses”: to solve her artistic problem and accomplish a kind of unity, Lily must riskily become ensnared by the set of relations

213 Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 158. 214 Ibid, 160-1. 215 Here I follow Spivak’s reading of the “rivalry and partnership” between Lily Briscoe and Mr. Ramsay as offering a version of womb-based creative production (“Unmaking and Making in To the Lighthouse, 45).

between hedge and tree, however much she wants to erect her canvas as a barricade and regard the masses from the safety of a fixed distance.

That a room of one’s own enables a sort of insulating privacy, which lets one conceive of the

“masses” in social conscience but not join them: such is Raymond Williams’ diagnosis of the insidious limits of “Bloomsbury Fraction’s” progressivism, which, he argues, above all is invested in protecting the individual aesthetic and intellectual freedom permitted by a bourgeois lifestyle.216

Virginia Woolf’s aestheticism and condemnation of description is thus anti-materialist. Following

Williams in her essay “Virginia Woolf and the General Strike,” Kate Flint reads Woolf’s “drive towards unity, towards wholeness” against the “energies of destruction” as animating her lukewarm support of the General Strike.217 More than a labor victory, Woolf hoped the parties would just “kiss

& be friends.”218 Flint narrates this reconciliatory impulse as Lily’s in “The Lighthouse”: “In May,

1926, the issue which was occupying Woolf’s public mind was the same as that which ruled Lily’s private, aesthetic consciousness: ‘It was a question . . . how to connect this mass on the right hand with that on the left.’”219 While exonerating Woolf from her deep-seated snobbery, her at times reprehensible aversion to “the masses,” or even her conservatizing call for unity, is not my goal (and is beyond even the most generous reader’s power), I do want to suggest that, insofar as Lily’s painting can be interpreted as mise en abyme, the accomplishment of a fully interior, “private, aesthetic consciousness” is not what To the Lighthouse ultimately offers; rather, the “mine” of privacy remains “unexploited.”

By Flint’s reading, Lily’s painting represents a kind of political centrism -- the quelling of discord in the name of unity -- made “aesthetic”: “With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for

216 Raymond Williams, “The Bloomsbury Fraction,” 165-189. 217 Flint, “Virginia Woolf and the General Strike,” 333. 218 Woolf, Diary, 219 Flint, “Virginia Woolf and the General Strike,” 333.

a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying her brush down in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.”220 In one sense, with the “line in the centre” unity is accomplished “between the masses.” In the same gesture, Spivak argues, Mrs.

Ramsay has been objectified, in art; her “essence” has been caught; she has been “predicated” in the allegorical sentence of To the Lighthouse. But Spivak’s retelling of Lily’s creative process in the novel’s concluding section is not quite a triumphalist chronicle of accomplishment or felicity. “Time Passes” does not succeed in altogether destroying the copula, but, for Spivak, “to reduce” To the Lighthouse

“to a successful articulation of that copula is . . . to make a mistake in reading.”221 Rather, the grammatical place of “being” is only ever a “provisional copula . . . a risky bridge,” which, for Lily

Briscoe, “can only be broached by deleting or denying the vacillation of ‘Time Passes,’ by drawing a line through the central section of To the Lighthouse.”222 Even if dissolution is factically overcome, its

“risk” remains. In the very gesture of disavowal, permanence retains a vulnerability to impasse or to madness.223 Mrs. Ramsay is made present in the picture through Lily’s “declaring this indefiniteness (a kind of absence) as a definiteness (a kind of presence), not through the fullness of presence itself.”224

Thus “disarticulation and undermining take . . . take place within the articulation of the project to catch the essence of Mrs. Ramsay in an adequate language.”225

The same can be said for the artist’s “private, aesthetic consciousness,” which can aim for unity and for resolution only by retaining the risk of interruption. In my final turn, I want to suggest

220 Ibid, 30; Woolf, To the Lighthouse, quoted by Spivak, “Unmaking and Making in To the Lighthouse,” 30. 221 Spivak, “Unmaking and Making in To the Lighthouse,” 42. 222 Ibid, 42. 223 Spivak writes, Lily does not question this impasse, she merely fights it. She makes a copula by drawing a line in the center, which can be both an invitation to fill in a blank or a deliberate erasure. If the latter, then she erases (while keeping legible) that very part of the book that most energetically desires to recuperate the impasse, to achieve the undecidable, to write the narrative of madness, -- “Time Passes” -- for that section is “in the centre.” (Ibid, 43-4.) 224 Ibid, 41. 225 Ibid, 31.

that the incomplete triumph of integration and permanence over mutability and dissolution offers a version of aesthetic materialism. Temporal before it is “extended” or “spatial,” Woolf’s interruptive aesthetic materialism work with a very different mechanism for representing embodiment than that of description or literalism, which seeks, in Scarry’s words, to “lift” the privacy (properties) of sentience “into the visible world,” or which, in Siebers’s, to take the body “in hand.”226 When Lily tries to “get hold” of the body, she is thwarted:

What was the problem then? She must try to get hold of something that evaded her. It evaded her when she thought of Mrs. Ramsay; it evaded her now when she thought of her picture. Phrases came. Visions came. Beautiful pictures. Beautiful phrases. But what she wished to get hold of was that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been made anything. Get that and start afresh; get that and start afresh; she said desperately, pitching herself firmly again before her easel. It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically on must force it on.227

Visions, pictures, and phrases do not satisfy that for which Lily pines : “that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it had been made anything.” “Jar” here is a noun, and Woolf describes it appositionally as “the thing itself.” The object of an aspirational grasp, jar’s nominalization connotes the wide-mouthed glass containers, stacked in pantries, which “hold” (and, often, preserve, though not “afresh”) its contents. That is, off by only one letter from “jar of the nerves,” the phrase “jar on the nerves,” invites a kind of prepositional misprision in which embodiment is given as noun -- as thing, as container, or as object. The fleeting intimation of Woolf’s wording is that getting hold of the body in art or in language means catching it in a Canopic jar of sorts: to vessel vivisected innards, airtight for the afterlife, away from the decay of time.

But the “thing itself” is not a “jar of the nerves,” it is the “jar on the nerves”: a disturbance; a quiver; a point of contact; a jolt; a flat tire; a hole; a concussion; an interruption. A “jar on the nerves” is not taking one’s inside(s) and bringing them out “into the visible world.” To get ahold of

226 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 13; Siebers, 227 Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 196.

the “jar on the nerves” is to recognize that the outside, in its chaos and its ruin, makes its way in -- whatever barricades one might attempt. Not pursuit but reception: “predicating” or “objectifying”

Mrs. Ramsay does not look like catching her -- romping through the yard, capping a firefly in a mason jar, holding it aloft -- it looks like standing, exposed, in the lawn, seeing “the wall; the hedge; the tree,” and being jarred by the “relation between those masses” as it flickers and flows. The

“thing itself,” -- a network, an ecology, -- “finds itself always already in the power of the things of which it takes care.”228 Pickling, storing, stockpiling do not achieve permanence in the face of dissolution. One can only lag behind the endless “break down” with endless care: “Get that and start afresh; get that and start afresh.” Hag-ridden, a materialist aesthetics might be those phrases or visions that do not describe the body as property, or as organs, or as a tool, but as uselessness and waste, as a “miserable . . . inefficient machine.”

228 Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 38.

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