CREACION DEL CASCO

In her article ‘The Voice on the Skin’, Janice McLane argues that for as long as we are subjects, ‘we will say our lives in order to have or live our lives’ (1996: 107; emphases in original). In other words, without the possibility of speaking, the possibilities of life are delimited. Here, speaking animates life and determines its

limits. But if the promise of language fails and speaking cannot sustain life, another ‘voice’ must be found, especially when faced with the need to testify to the traumatic conditions of life itself. Here, then, wounding one’s own skin is another way of speaking of trauma and pain. Indeed, according to McLane, the ‘voice’ of self-cut skin is a very specific language for gesturing toward childhood trauma, especially childhood sexual abuse, where the act of testifying typically involves using either knives, razor blades or broken glass secretively and ritualistically to cut the skin.1 _{Alternative, yet still common, acts of testimony include inflicting}

blows on the body with the aim of bruising the skin, as well as scalding and burning the skin with, for example, cigarettes and caustic chemicals (Smith, Cox and Saradjian 1998). In all such cases, as indeed with all imperatives to speak of past trauma, it is unclear to what degree the act of self-cutting lies within or beyond conscious control. According to Pembroke, the common reference to ‘deliberate self-harm’ actually serves to obscure this important ambiguity of intent. Thus, she argues that acts of self-harm can be ‘spontaneous and sudden with little awareness or conscious thought’ and yet, at times, ‘the drive to self- harm may be powerfully constant and unrelenting with a conscious battle raging’ (Pembroke 1994: 2).

With regard, then, to the relationship between the disavowed trauma of childhood sexual violation and self-cutting, McLane writes:

When hidden pain starts to speak, it will speak silently. Its voice may appear as a cut on the leg, a burn on the arm, skin ripped and scratched repeatedly. There will be no sound, not any, only unfelt and silent pain which makes its appearance in another pain, self-inflicted, and when that second, collateral pain emerges, it will articulate in blood or blisters the open definition you desire, although it may not be in a language you care to see. This, it says, is pain, and this is real in any language you care to speak.

(McLane 1996: 111; emphasis in original)

Although socially silent, self-harm appears here as a language that articulates past trauma by repeating it in the present of pain. The cutting of skin is thus a way of speaking the past by re-enacting it with a difference: matching pain for trauma. Indeed, here the significance of self-cut skin – its appeal – lies in its own economy of exaggerated and aggressive mimicry. It is a language that communicates the real of past trauma by rendering it more real through a repetition of pain. Argu- ably, there is a sense in which the pain expressed by cutting one’s own skin is, albeit belatedly, the trauma of past violation.

But self-harm also gains its significance because it represents an exaggerated breaking with language: it supplants the promise of language to communicate trauma by rendering the site of pain a language in itself. As self-harm campaigner Louise Pembroke writes of her own practice of self-cutting, when ‘I could not find the words to describe it, cutting had become the language to describe the pain, communicating everything I felt’ (1994: 35). Again Kim Hewitt writes, ‘In an act of self-mutilation gesture replaces language. What cannot be said in words becomes the language of blood and pain’ (1997: 58). Unlike notions of ‘body Bearing witness to self-harm 125

language’ or ‘body talk’, which ostensibly refer to non-aggressive and social ges- tures of the body, the ‘voice’ of self-cut skin is an extreme substitute for language. Skin deliberately wounded and cut thus speaks violently of the failed promise of language to communicate trauma: it is a rupturing force that tears itself, and its significance, apart from language.

This powerful exposure and redrawing of the social parameters of language carries, however, considerable risks. In a general yet decidedly apt discussion, Judith Butler argues that if subjects speak at the borders of discursive possibility they risk being cast into the realm of the unspeakable, where they become the object of explicitly punitive operations of power. She writes:

If the subject speaks impossibly, speaks in ways that cannot be regarded as speech or as the speech of a subject, then that speech is discounted and the viability of the subject called into question. The consequence of such an irruption of the unspeakable may range from a sense that one is ‘falling apart’ to the intervention of the state to secure criminal or psychiatric incarceration. (Butler 1997: 136)

Here Butler points up the distinct dangers of breaking with language altogether, not the least of which is the erasure of the subject. Indeed, the excessive and idiomatic language of self-harm typically carries this risk, where struggles over the power to name the testimony of self-cut skin serve to reflect the incomprehension witnesses feel toward self-harm and the consequent possibilities of punitive censorship. So there is, for example, a profusion of officially recognised names for self-harm, including: ‘deliberate self-injury’, ‘self-inflicted violence’, ‘self-attack’, ‘self-cutting’, ‘deliberate non-fatal act’, and ‘symbolic wounding’. But many of these names are subject to dispute on the grounds that they fail to hear the voice of self-cut skin as testimony or that they represent a hostile response to its testi- monial appeal. ‘Para-suicide’ and ‘attention seeking’ are two terms that are sub- ject to particularly intense contestation. These terms are rejected as substitutes for ‘self-harm’ for two related reasons. First, ‘para-suicide’ condenses a reading of self-harm into the sign for a failed act of suicide, when in fact the cutting of one’s own skin could be understood as a means of defying death. As one woman writes, ‘ “Attention seeking” and “attempted suicide” are just a couple of the “profes- sional” myths attached to self-harm. Suicide is final. Self-harm is a release from emotional pain and a struggle for survival’ (Helen in Pembroke 1994: 23). Second, when self-harm is read as a para-suicidal act of ‘attention seeking’ (within the context of professional care), self-cutting women emerge as individuals irrespon- sibly playing with their body surface and flirting with death.

Self-harmers are thus deemed to be playing on/off the moral gravity of skin and death. As a consequence, they are seen as ‘time wasters’, wasting not only the time of the medical staff – time which could be spent on saving and caring for the lives of the ‘legitimately’ traumatised – but also their own future life-time. Thus, Pembroke recalls how a nurse, responding to the sight of her self-cut skin, asked: ‘Don’t you want to get married, have children?’ (Pembroke 1994: 41). For 126 Jane Kilby

Pembroke, the nurse’s enquiry served only to indicate that her life-time, or the life of her skin, was not hers anyway: she should be saving it for an already mapped-out future. Her body and its testimony of cut skin is thus already read (and erased) as the site for the heterosexual (re)production or (re)generation of (family) time. There is no time for her and her skin as such; she is ‘not worth it’ (Pembroke 1994: 41).

Reading the testimony of self-cut skin as an act that signifies only a desire for attention or the finality of death reduces the complex relationship women sur- vivors of childhood trauma have with their skin and their bodies to an instru- mental and calculative narrative of life-time that can be ‘spent’, ‘wasted’ and/or ‘saved’. More importantly, such a simplification means that life is only ever read as being on the side of life, and death can only be read as being on the side of death. Highly critical of such a teleology, Peggy Phelan argues that while it ‘insists that we die once in an expository, teleologically driven future’, we can, in fact, die many times in one life-time (1997: 17). Indeed, Phelan goes on to argue that sexual trauma ‘is an event of unliving’ (1997: 60); it constitutes a hiatus in the structure of life. Similarly, the experience of sexual trauma has been figured as an outliving of the self (Brison 1997). Within the context of self-harm, therefore, hidden and silent trauma is lived precariously at/on the edge of one’s skin. So, those who read self-traumatised skin as representing a desire for death and not life negate the experience of living out past trauma. But if, on the other hand, self-harm is read as a testimony to the ‘will to survive’ pain and trauma, it can be understood as a means of marking the difference between dying in life and death in all its finality, a difference whose border is animated by the effort of cutting skin. As McLane puts it, ‘self-mutilation reinstates the boundary between the existence and nonexistence of self’ (1996: 112). However, to the degree that the skin border is already rendered animate by social and political discourses, and more specifically here by a prior violating touch, self-harm is a project of re-articulating, if not disrupting, these processes of animation. As a project of re-animation, self-harm reworks the condi- tions of possibility for the subject at the limits of language. And in so doing, it is a testimony that aims to give a life to skin in a manner that momentarily exceeds its felt state of deathly suspension. By reanimating the skin boundary, the testimony of self-harm serves as a reminder of the line between ‘social’ and ‘literal’ death. It serves as a warning that this line should not be crossed, which, in turn, explains the habitual character of self-harm.

Despite appearances to the contrary, then, self-harm serves as a means of articulating experiences of childhood trauma, and in so doing it provides a momentary means of living beyond the deadening touch of trauma. As a result, arguably, it also serves as a technique for self-(re)production. So, where giving testimony in general can be seen to serve as a strategy for survival – ‘I testify, therefore I am’ – self-harm is an aggressive attempt to substitute and mimic this logic with disturbing exaggeration: ‘I cut, therefore I am’. Or, as McLane puts it, ‘the feelings caused by the injury make the survivor’s existence unavoidably pres- ent to herself. She feels, and therefore is’ (1996: 113). Thus, where the flow of words and the substantiality of the testimony become the ontological guarantee Bearing witness to self-harm 127

of being (Felski 1989: 112), it is the flow of blood and the materiality of scarred skin that becomes the guarantee of the existence for the woman who cuts. Here, then, the reciprocity between testifying to past trauma and survival cuts deeply.

Yet this means of producing life is put into question by the dominant reading of self-harm. As I have already noted, women who present themselves at Accident and Emergency departments in the UK with self-cut skin are all too easily read as ‘time wasters’, and as a result they typically experience degrading and harsh treatment (Pembroke 1994). So, for example, it is not uncommon for women who have deep cuts to their body to turn up at Accident & Emergency departments only to find themselves stitched up with little or no anaesthetic, or to find that the layers of skin tissue have not all been properly sutured, which exposes them to the risk of infection and serious long-term damage (Pembroke 1994). Thus, the polit- ical and social struggle for appropriate naming is a very real attempt to ensure that women who speak via the act of cutting skin are not stitched-up as ‘just another label and another number’ (Marie in Pembroke 1994: 21).

Ultimately, the testimony of cut skin requires the language that it displaces: it requires social and political language for its very own conditions of possibility. Usefully here Phelan argues that skin ‘cannot hold all we ask it to contain . . . [since] it lacks the depth, the interiority, we want it to give us’ (1997: 41). She goes on to argue that skin cannot be made to bear the weight of our traumatic histories or our faith in its sheer promise of testimony: the ‘drama of suffering flesh’ exceeds the ‘elasticity of skin’ (Phelan 1997: 41). So, although skin does have a capacity to bear the weight of trauma and pain, it cannot be made to bear this responsibility alone. Put differently, because self-cut skin is already subject to determined and often punitively presumptive readings, it needs a context and strategy of reading which will work to secure its conditions of possibility. So, for example, Hewitt recognises the need to translate self-harm when she finds that her own body is eating her scarred skin testimony and when she discovers that she is not the only woman to have cut up. She writes:

My scars have flattened over the years. My body is eating the scar tissue away. Several years ago a close friend confessed that she had been cutting herself. As I listened to her I realised for the first time that I wasn’t alone. I realised the body has a private landscape without words, and I knew I had to find a language to talk about my scars.

(Hewitt 1997: viii)

By pointing up the fragility of self-cut skin (despite its seeming immutability) and the collective status of this ‘cutting voice’, Hewitt realises that her ‘scars’ need a public language which, in turn will open her scars to a general understanding, or at least a general reading; and from there, it is implied, a significance or ‘social life’ beyond her skin.

This necessity is also hinted at by Naomi Morgenstern (1996) in her article on neoslave testimony. As the distinguishing marks of a traumatic history of slavery, Morgenstern notes thst the scarred skins of black bodies, especially when they 128 Jane Kilby

mark the back of the body, have to be read in order to signify. As Morgenstern writes ‘Scars signify deadness, loss or lack of feeling. The dead flesh of the scar must be read to become meaningful . . . The reading of scars, I want to suggest, is a compelling figure for the process of de-traumatising, or making meaning’ (1996: 199, fn.9). Here, scars represent the dead and traumatising weight of history, and for them to signify otherwise they must be read or witnessed. Moreover, by emphasising the place of scars on the back of the body, Morgenstern implies a complete figuration of reading traumatic history. The traumatised carry a trau- matised history they cannot see (they are constitutively blind to it), thus they require another to see it for them. By getting behind the testifying subject, the historical marks of trauma appear before the witness, thus the past is in front of the witness to be read into being. Here, then is a moment in which the future and the past are folded within the present scene of witnessing.

Although Morgenstern is speaking of a very specific history of scarred skin, there is here a general call for the reading of scars, which I am taking as pertinent to the scarred skin left by practices of self-harm. Indeed, uniting them is a desire to open a future for skin that is untouched by trauma. For, paradoxically, the call for reading the skin-traces of self-harm evinces a desire for securing an end to this form of traumatic testimony. In attempting to ensure the possibility of self-harm being read as testimony, there is simultaneously a hope working to establish the conditions for passing beyond the need for self-harm. Hence, McLane writes ‘This new possibility would not be the hand holding a razor blade which cuts across the skin, but breath being pushed across the larynx, shaped by mouth and tongue, into a spoken word’ (1996: 117). Here, self-harm testimony can be read as articulating a desire for language that can sustain a history of trauma, where the event of ‘saying our lives’ is a moment of casting ‘our body upon air’, not cutting it up (McLane 1996: 108; emphasis in original).

Having said this, it is perhaps somewhat surprising to find that feminist theorists have not taken any particular responsibility for self-harm testimony. For, despite its status as testimony to childhood and sexual traumas, the act of self-harm is rarely read by feminist academics concerned with the relations of language, power and subjectivity. So, while there is a significant feminist literature on anorexia and bulimia (see, for example, Bordo 1993), which can be taken as a closely related form of testimony, there is barely any on self-harm. Can it be then that self-harm disturbs a feminist reading, if not (feminist) readers altogether? And if so, why would the testimony of self-harm trouble a feminist reading, when feminist scholars have not displayed this degree of anxiety when reading the embodied testimony of the anorexic and bulimic? Quite provocatively, Pembroke argues that self-harm confounds readers because it is ‘a bit too close to the bone’ (1994: 3): the woman who speaks by cutting her own skin threatens to act as a brutally powerful mirror for readers’ own painful, if not aggressively compelling, desire to testify to their own traumas. McLane also argues that readers are reluctant to engage with the significance of self-harm testimony because ‘no one wants to be reminded of the fact that there are other voices in them speaking, all the time, which might in fact take up residence on their skin’ (1996: 114; emphasis in original).

Here, there is a suggestion that the force of self-harm lies in its threat to expose the fragility and permeability of the reader’s own skin boundary. Or that self- harm testimony acquires force with an implied threat of contagion. So, not only is the value of a self-cut skin subject to the force of reading, but the reader also appears here to be subject to the voice of self-harm. In a sense, the reader who would bear witness is also constituted in the encounter with the skin testimony of self-harm. This does not leave the reader devoid of agency as a witness, but, momentarily at least, the reader is inaugurated by the scream of self-harm. It is the sense of shock and experience of dissonance or disjuncture between who the reader is before encountering the testimony of traumatised skin and who they are after reading that serves as its occasion for possibility. Here, the loss of all com- prehension becomes the condition of possibility for testimony, since this acute disorientation forces the reader to make a social and political context for both herself and the testimony. Thus, the appeal made by self-harm can be read as