Discursos ortodoxos sobre identidad

For Theodor W. Adorno, the work of art is not fragmented by chance, but is “essentially fragmented”. He fittingly noted that, “the splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass”, drawing attention to the potential and power of the fragment to magnify and therefore, allow us to see more clearly and more in depth (Adorno, T. 2005: 50). Is there any truth then, in the single fragment? Is it possible to rid the fragment of the burden of its implicit wholeness?

What does it mean to imply the logically impossible idea of the fragment without its whole?

2 See chapter five and chapter seven.

After World War II, Theodor Adorno wrote, “the whole is the false”, contradicting Hegel’s, “the true is the whole” (Adorno, T. 2005: 50). In opposition to the traditional aesthetic favoured by Plato, Augustine and Hegel, who defined beauty as “completeness”, Adorno insisted on the primacy of fragmentation in opposing wholeness.³ Indeed, for him “the fragment is that part of the totality of the work that opposes totality” (Adorno, T. 2013: 61).

The fragment is not just part of a lost whole but becomes an independent signifying entity that resists wholeness. This balance, between fragment and totality, is disrupted in the work of art.

As Adorno asserts:

…tension in great works of art would need to be not only resolved within their scope…but also

preserved within the same scope. But this means nothing less than that precisely in legitimate works the whole and the parts cannot coincide in the way demanded by an aesthetic idea, by no means confined to classicism (Adorno, T. 2002: 182).⁴

Nevertheless, Adorno still understands the fragment in relation to the whole. This need to relate the fragment to its whole highlights the modernist’s “ambivalence of the condition of fragmentation”, as well as the centrality of this loss of wholeness in creating the necessity of compensation. In Adorno’s view, only art can assume this compensatory function

(Grundmann, R. 2010: 374-375).

Fragmentation seems to be characteristic of both the modernist and the post-modernist periods. The philosophers Theodor Adorno and Jean-Francois Lyotard could be taken to represent these different periods. Although they lived during different times and were

influenced by different school of thoughts, both shared an interest in the role of fragmentation in understanding ‘reality’ and its representation. What distinguished these two philosophers,

3 Kant in, Critique of Pure Reason, highlighted the fact that we observe the world from a specific viewpoint. In his view, the subject cannot attain any absolutely true and unconditioned knowledge, because as soon as we try to separate knowledge from our experience we encounter contradictions, which Kant called ‘antinomies’. The only way to prevent antinomies is to “resist the temptation to fetishize our own ideas by claiming knowledge of the absolute, eternal nature of things” (Hawkes, D. 2003:

75). Hegel saw in this impossibility to obtain absolute knowledge a challenge. In Phenomenology of Spirit he stated that the truth is by definition historical and the only way to understand history is in relation to the whole, which he calls Geist (Mind or Spirit). For him the identity of everything (people, things, words, events, ideas and so on) is established by the sum of its relations. Identity, therefore, it is not only determined by all its direct relations but also by all “its determinative negations”, by what it is not (Belfour, I. in Tronzo, W. 2009: 83) Hegel with his dictum “the True is the whole” was asserting that to achieve

“Absolute Knowing”, which is real wisdom and knowledge in philosophical matters, all the historical and present

philosophical theses must always be considered, as each of them may express a fragment of truth (Hawkes, D. 2003: 78-79).

Since at the basis of Hegel’s thinking there is the assumption of wholeness, the true meaning of any fragment can only exist in relation to the whole of which it is a broken part. “Philosophical discourse will follow the unfolding of fragmentation toward the wholeness that is necessarily inscribed in the fragment itself” (Desmond, W. 2005: 101)

4 Adorno’s discussion of the fragment in his book Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music refers to his study of Beethoven’s music. He divides the composer’s music in three periods and argues that the thematic unity found in the first two periods starts to disappear in the third period (Bernstein, J.M. 1994: 304).

however, was the way in which they conceived ‘reality’. In Adorno’s theory of ‘Art and Aesthetic’, the only way reality can be approached is through art. Because society has lost the capacity to judge, art has to take over this responsibility. On the other hand, for Lyotard, justice cannot be obtained, so art’s accountability to the world is to spread the message that justice is impossible to obtain (ibid: 376).

For modernists, such as Adorno, the centre is lost, hidden or even missing and cannot be found. This absence is seen as a loss and, therefore, a negative event. So modernist thinkers and artists interpret fragmentation as a loss and as destruction, and mourn wholeness. Post-modernists such as Lyotard also acknowledge the fragmented state of reality but, instead of mourning its loss, they manifest a different attitude towards the fragment. Indeed, they consider the fragment as an opportunity for plurality, the chance to be freed from the limits and expectations imposed by the whole (ibid: 374).

According to Adorno, a work of art that seeks to represent totality in a fragmented or

‘damaged’ world has to be considered false. As he writes:

In perfect works art would transcend its own concept; the turn to the friable and the fragmentary is in truth an effort to save art by dismantling the claim that artworks are what they cannot be and what they nevertheless must want to be: the fragment contains both those elements (Adorno, 2013: 259).

At this point the question may be raised as to whether the body fragment in an artwork can still be considered a disruptive mode of representation that resists assimilation into the whole, when the world itself is broken into fragments, and very few traces of its original integrity remains. If totality in the work of art is false or untrue can we assume that the fragment is closer or a better representation of the truth?

Adorno does not directly invest the fragment with the status of complete truth, because his aphorism, ‘the whole is the untrue’ does not necessarily mean that the fragment has to

represent the truth. However, his statement indirectly does seem to confer truthfulness to it. As Ian Belfour affirms, “the whole is untrue, could be a partial performance of its own truth, a fragmentary statement on the falsity of completeness, by implication, the verity of the fragment” (Balfour, I. in Tronzo, W. 2009: 88).

The discussions in relation to the fragmented body always presuppose the discussions of the representation of the body as whole (Owens, M. Laqueur, T. Mirzoeff, N. Foucault, M).

But does the body fragment always imply the existence of the whole body? Is the discussion

of the fragmented body in visual art, without mentioning its wholeness or the implied missing parts, even a possibility? ⁵

A defining attribute of the fragment as a concept is the incorporation of both notions:

presence and absence. Presence is given by the fragment itself, the tangible object, and its materiality. Absence refers to the missing part, what should be there but seems to be missing.

This dichotomy between presence and absence is a defining element in De Bruyckere work.

The notion of presence/absence, similarly to binary oppositions such mind/body, male/female, inside/outside, culture/nature and wholeness/fragmentation, have deeply influenced the

conception of the body. Scholars in different fields have paid special attention to the binary oppositions that underpin Western thought and have challenged the traditional mind-body dichotomy inherited from Descartes.⁶ These critiques produced a variety of theories that refused to accept the limitations and value system inherent in the mind/body opposition, where the supremacy of the mind was considered as natural or as a given. This privileging of one term over the other has its origins in the mind and body dichotomy of Plato, continued by Augustine, and finally, metaphysically expressed beautifully by Descartes in his “cogito ergo sum” (Descartes, R. in Cottingham, J. 1988: 30).⁷ Only one, who could successfully transcend his/her own body, had the opportunity to become a subject and occupy a position of reason and, in doing so, overcome the unreliable experience of the senses (ibid: 61).⁸

Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am”, however, does not explain how consciousness is influenced by the physicality of a person’s own body. The body and the exploration of our embodied experiences preoccupied Merleau-Ponty throughout his career. He drew attention to the problems created by traditional dichotomies, especially Cartesian dualism, involving the

5 It is not the intention of this thesis to discuss issues of disability and physical difference. However, the realisation that the

‘wholeness’ of bodies is a fantasy, a fiction may draw attention to arbitrariness of many subdivisions. In fact, there is no productive distinction to be made between the able or disable body. From a Disability Studies perspective, we must

acknowledge that we will all become disabled if we live long enough or in Robert McRuer words, “Sooner or later, if we live long enough, we will all become normate” (McRuer, R 2006: 198).

6 Foucault, M., Cixous, H., Butler, J., Derrida, J., Merleau-Ponty, M., to name but a few.

7 Rene Descartes wrote Meditations (first published 1641). He is called the founding father of modern philosophy. He questioned all his beliefs as much as he could. This method is called Cartesian doubt. Descartes was not completely original in his argument. Avicenna, a Persian philosopher who lived during the Islamic Golden Age (1000), imagined a human being coming into existence in mid flight trough a vacuum, not getting any sensation, or sensory contact with his body at all.

Suddenly this being, after the free fall, exists. The question the philosopher asked was: would such a person have any experiences at all? Would he be self-conscious? The philosopher thought that he would, even though there was no input. The person would still be conscious of himself and concluded that the idea of the self was independent from the body. Augustus had a non-dissimilar argument to Descartes as well. Descartes, however, is famous for having expressed this idea eloquently, Tate Modern (2012). Week 2: Mind and Body. [lecture notes]. Mind/Body/Art. Available from http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/courses-and-workshops/mindbodyart [Attended February - March 2012].

8 As Descartes, in his Discourse Four wrote, “we know for certain that it is the soul, which has sensory awareness and not the body. For when the soul is distracted by an ecstasy or deep contemplation, we see that the whole body remains without sensation, even though it has various objects touching it” (Descartes, R. in Cottingham, J. 1988: 61).

mind and the body. The reflections and debates on dualism played a pivotal role in his work, since establishing the body as ‘object’ is essential in the construction of the notion of an objective world, as well as the way in which the world is perceived. According to Merleau-Ponty, as soon as the concept of the body, “the constitution of the object”, is questioned, the notion of an external world completely separated from the “thinking subject”, will be questioned too, revealing in this way “the perceiving subject as the perceived world”

(Merleau-Ponty, M. 2012: 72).⁹

Descartes’ division of mind and body has always been problematic for feminist scholars because of its correlation to the opposition between male and female. Both males and females have material bodies, however for many centuries, only women, in part because of their connection to childbearing, were considered unable to transcend the body. The body was considered a negative term and women, by association, represented that negativity. In this way, the mind/body dichotomy has been linked to the split between culture and nature, with women considered more fully embodied than men, more biological and in tune with their body and for this reason, less able to rise above the uncontrollable natural processes and passions, less rational and therefore, disqualified from and incapable of producing knowledge. Flesh and blood and the capacity to reproduce, which are considered natural ‘processes of nurturance’, have been associated with women and by extension, with Mother Nature herself (Robinson, H.

1995: 18). This ‘phallic logic’ does not only initiate the process of subjectivity by introducing the distinction between I and Not-I, but also produces the powerful opposition to the

masculine active, conscious spirit and concept of presence against the feminine passive, vegetative, primitive body, and absence (Pollock, G. 2013b: 167).

Many feminist thinkers such Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, Griselda Pollock and Amelia Jones, have criticised the disembodied concept of subjectivity.¹⁰ In their writing they had to tackle corporeality and conceive a philosophical framework with which to make sense of

9 Moving beyond dualism, Merleau-Ponty’s embodiment theory denotes a return to ‘existence’ and not interpreting the body as added onto the ‘mental’, but as inseparably linked (Merleau-Ponty, M. 2012: 9). Stating that mind and body are connected is nothing new, since even Descartes noted the complexity of their connection in his sixth Meditation (Descartes, R. 2000: 82-83). Therefore, it is important to highlight that the idea of embodiment by Merleau-Ponty, does not just add ‘having the body’

as another variable in the multi-variables-equation that is the human-subject, but suggests that embodiment precedes all other characteristics. As he puts it “we must not, therefore, wonder whether we really perceive a world, we must instead say: the world is what we perceive” (Merleau-Ponty, M. 2012: xvi). For him both, objective thought and Descartes doubting method (intellectualist) are flawed ways to rationalise the world, as the only way to access the world is through human experience.

10 Poullain de la Barre in 1673 in his work On sexual equality, in agreement with Descartes mind/body dichotomy, stated that

“the mind has no sex” (Fraisse, G. 1994: 19). Early feminists disavowed the body and endorsed dualism to achieve equality with men. The philosophical justification for this approach is based on the Cartesian mind/body dualism, which supports the idea that while real differences may exist on a biological level, the mind is a non-sexed entity (Meynell, L. 2009: 6). However, once the mind is accepted as sole and privileged site of self-awareness, the body and everything connected to it becomes irrelevant. In this case the ‘equality’ relies on the erasing of the body and sexual differences.

sexual difference in order to defy the binaries intrinsic in language and to illustrate its construction.¹¹ Through their theoretical and aesthetic discussions on the body and its role in society, they have reshaped our ideas of how women and men interpret the body.