Conclusiones Generales de Fauna Terrestre

In this study I work with Jameson’s ideology-utopia dialectic and consider the

potential of abjection, as identified through the women’s narratives, to enable

that dialectic to work slightly differently. This is in contrast to considering

children’s possible experiences of abjection in separating from the maternal body. Such a focus may be considered somewhat unusual, if not heretical, for a thesis upon sustained breastfeeding. Yet it speaks of my desire to develop

social understanding of sustained breastfeeding, rather than what might be considered speculation on the possible psychological effects of sustained breastfeeding upon children. In a related context, the British sociologist Imogen Tyler (2013) finds aspects of the notion of abjection to be useful in social analysis. However, she expresses unease over what she dubs Kristeva’s

“psychoanalytic origin story” (p.29) of abjection as rooted in a “personal archaeology” (Kristeva, 1982, p.13) of the child’s separation from the maternal

body. In so far as such an aspect of Kristeva’s work is viewed with sociological suspicion, Kristeva’s possible views on the appropriate duration of breastfeeding might also be seen as largely irrelevant to my own socially- focussed narrative analysis and to my deployment of the notion of abjection in reworking Jameson’s utopia-ideology dialectic.5

In the context of my own work I read the state of abjection, of ‘casting off’, with all the bodily sensations entailed, as a corporeal reminder (there are likely to be others, anxiety for example [Tie, 2014]) of the fragile foundations upon which ideologies rest and utopias are imagined. Put slightly differently, there is no

4

It is at least partially in this context that for Kristeva abjection is particularly and therapeutically present in the work of avant guard poets and writers (Smith, 1998, p.34; see also Kristeva,

1982). For a detailed discussion of Kristeva’s understanding of the manifestation of maternal

dimensions (the “semiotic” and the “thetic”) in language, see Smith (1998).

5

Furthermore, I have not been able to ascertain from Kristeva’s work specific discussion regarding when and how the weaning of a child might most appropriately occur, and the possible relation of that to her understanding of abjection in childhood. Oliver (1992) reads Kristeva as assuming that a child “must be weaned” in order to develop his/her own independent subjectivity: “the infant must substitute speech for its mother’s breast” (Oliver, 1992,

p.70). Yet the relevance of this to sustained breastfeeding is unclear. Both weaning and a child’s

acquisition of speech occur over time (perhaps over many years), and precisely when the use of language might ‘fully’ replace the breast appears ambiguous.

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need to depend entirely upon reason and rationality to inform of the exclusionary practices of our present or of our imagined futures. Our bodies speak of that. Examples of people feeling repulsed by breastfeeding (in whatever socio-cultural, ideological or personal contexts that repulsion might emerge) can be read as examples of this forerunning of physical sensation in relation to thought. The physical experiences of abjection signal a threat to our codes of representation even before the knowing subject has had the chance to rationalise the process.

In this context it is possible to contextualise the difference between ideology and utopia in terms of abjection. Ideology necessarily attempts to repress abjection in order that its structures of representation appear normal and natural. On feeling riddled with abjection, nauseated at the presence of that which has been rendered abject for example, an ideologically infused response is to exclude the abject object with greater force. Utopia, in so far as it is a project with fixed boundaries, must also deny abjection if it is to function as necessarily paradisiacal. However, abjection operates as a murky underbelly to projects based upon exclusion, and so utopia is impossible. Yet if abjection speaks of the impossibility of utopia, potential also lies in moments of abjection for utopia to begin to operate differently. Tentatively speaking, if abjection were to be accepted as an important (if not entirely predictable or pleasant) experience, the possibility is opened for its emergence to be acknowledged (welcomed is likely to be too strong a term) as a reminder of the exclusions and jettisoning on which utopian visions depend. Abjection might therefore serve as a fitful and visceral reminder of the potential to open-up and shift utopian aspirations in order that such aspirations can move in negotiation with excluded and defiled others. This makes concrete sense when one considers that a social phenomenon like racism can be understood as a manifestation of abjection: as a visceral rejection of a discursively constituted threatening (and unknowable) other (Hook, 2104; Kil, 2014).

In a context of attempting to open-up to, rather than to exclude, s/he or that which has been rendered abject, it is difficult to know the directions that utopian wanderings may take. Question marks emerge over moments of proximity to a

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defiled other, in which negotiation may feel intensely difficult, if not impossible.6 I find myself wondering if such moments might somehow productively operate as

checks upon the totalitarian potential of utopian ‘projects’ such as the present

research. This is not without its problems and contradictions. Yet it is partly as a result of the denial of Otherness, as characterises regimes of totality, that utopia now beckons towards an integration of ambiguity and abjection into the future. I do not have answers for the questions raised here, and it is partly because of their persistence that, in such a context, utopia (or that which might come to take the place of utopia in such a revitalisation of the concept) ceases to assume a fixed form. Perhaps utopia might thereby, paradoxically, become more achievable. In such a context abjection is deployed as a “motor of social

transformation” (Sjöholm, 2005, p.97). Those complex borderlands of attraction

and rejection come to facilitate movement towards newly emerging social possibilities.