what a thrill ---
my thumb instead of an onion.
the top quite gone
except for a sort of a hinge
of skin,
a flap like a hat,
dead white.
then that red plush.
-- Sylvia Plath, “Cut”
You lie painfuly bruised on the floor. One arm dead on your side. It seems the pure bloody flesh can rot any time. You can smell the sickening stench of decay in seconds. It is something different now..
***
Self-mutilation or self-injury, is not just about self-punishment or past trauma, although grows mental roots there. We can say that, it is the creative reconstruction of satisfaction from “the unsatisfactory”. It is redefining your own body by immobilizing it partially, experiencing an agonizing moment of illusionary control over it. When asked why did she cut herself, a self-mutilator answers: “I wanted to test my limits”. A test of breaching the limits of being alive. It is your abstracted organ, free from the body that let’s you experience how to die. How to kill yourself, piece by piece, and yet remain immortal like “germ-cells” (Freud Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle) . However it is not a “suicide attempt”. The act of self-harm hardly carries an intention of ending life. It is just the language of the pain. The urge to speak the unspeakable. We can even say, it is a struggle to survive, by releasing the devastating load of the orderless “words” from your mind. Body becomes the text, where you can inscribe and mark the state of pain beautifuly. In fact, if we turn the phrase up side down like David Fincher’s Fight Club did (quoted in Zizek Slavoj. Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences), it is a “near-life experience”. Peta Malins elaborates on the notion of “textual becoming” of the body in a rather ironic way:
"My breasts are for whipping(masoschism), my mouth is for emptying my stomach (anorexia), my arm is a blank canvas (tattooing), my tounge is for dissolving a trip (raving), my veins are for transporting the drug (injecting) "
Now this unique and painful “language” makes much more sense when we look deeper into it in terms of Jacques Lacan’s controversial arguement “la femme n’existe pas”, or in Zizek terms, “there are no talking vajinas...” . The intention or “need” to self-harm is more meaningful when articulated through the feminine symbolic “non-existence”. While feminine “langue” struggles to find a subtle ground in the masculine symbolic order, it creates its own matrix to cope with the dominant mechanism. Marks of mutilation is not just a metaphor, furthermore a metamorphosis of that structure. The body is the re/de-constructed “canvas” searching for new meanings and waiting for a transgressing understanding of them. Let’s picture it through the shocking sequence of Adrian Lyne’s 1987 feature “Fatal Attraction”. In the middle of the film Glenn Close’s character is struck with the feeling of awareness that she just can’t leave without Micheal Douglas’ character, Dan. She starts acting peevish from the sourness inside her. She doesn’t want him to leave, doesn’t want to let him go back to his beautiful wife’s arms. But in reality, if they are to act like “rational adults”, she is expected to be cool about his marriage and face the fact that it was just an affair, just a fling which gave them both pleasure. Unfortunately things don’t work out that way. Her state is completely unspeakable, completely out of the language system we know of, which falls inadequate to describe the agony and rage inside her. So guess what she did? No suprises, she cuts her wrists. Not to end her life right there on the kitchen floor but to scream something to this man who is completely safe out there in an orderly rational, male world. Alex Forest (Glenn Close) used her blood to say; “You can not just fuck me and leave… That hurts, but see, I can give much more pain to myself and not a single hair on my back will move. This body is mine, and I can shut it out whenever I like. I can kill every single organism in and on it, so that you will see that I can die but yet survive forever. Although you may never truly understand it...” Alex may or may have not speak these exact words, it is the view from Dan’s side we can be sure about. He watches a live show of “the other” and will never have a clue about that feeling of release there.
Pleasure attained by self-mutilation has a transcending quality. When we scan through what psychoanalysis said about the “pleasure principle”, we can see that pleasure gains its character from limitations. The illusion of pleasure is to “enjoy as little as possible”, thus, trigger the need to go beyond that prohibitions. However, beyond awaits pain, rather than pure pleasure. So the paradox of “jouissance” is the bliss of transforming pleasure to pain, and madly enough, feel the transcending satisfaction from it. The “becoming” process, the breaching of the limitations, following the path towards death like a fearless undead connotates the phrase, “playing God”. You interefere to God’s form (the body) and its limited structure. Body is invented over and over again by repetitive death trials. It is modified, even improved as pure subjective qualities attributed to it. The self-mutilator goes in and out of the womb again and again, a trip from inorganic to organic in front of his/her very eyes. In Samuel Beckett’s words, s/he yearns to “fail again, fail better..”.
The pleasure from this satisfaction is somehow necrophilic. The “undead- becoming” reminds the idea that, it is not just about the “death drive” or “excess jouissance” but also the otherness of the dead. The love for the stationary, desire to touch and feel the inorganic. Thus, the self-mutilator practises necrophillic homicide on the organ. So, the desire opens a passage to the corpse . Taking from the point where psychoanlaysis defines self-injurious acts as the need to return to mother’s womb, in parallel to the “death-drive”, we can go further to say that maybe it is just the seperated, abstracted organ not the “body” as a whole strives to go stationary in absolute darkness.
If we have found the body - the corpse- then, we can go looking for the murderer. As dead as an organ can be, it can be uncontrollably alive too. As in Zizek’s example, the self-beating scene in David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) , the hand goes out of control of the body. It claims a character of its own while it is beating the hell out of Edward Norton.
"The self-beating begins with the hero’s hand acquiring a life of its own, escaping the hero’s control- in short turning into a partial object, or to put in Deleuze’s terms, into an organ without body" (Slavoj Zizek, Organs without Bodies)
This “split structure” shows us the chosen method to scatter the wholeness of the body and the totality of it. By producing specter doubles, desire works through out the system, breaking the unity, thus freeing the pain. Silent release from the body gives birth to a masochist and a sadist. The sadist “hand” for example, tends to posess the needy masochist part. David A. Goldfarb’s reference to Deleuze can be of use:
"Deleuze defines masochism by its symbolic structure and sharply distinguishes it from sadism, in contrast to the traditional view that sadism and masochism are complimentary. Sadism, he argues, is driven by the desire for possession; whereas, masochistic relationships are constituted by pact and mutual initiation.. "
This definition differs from the pychoanalytic view of sadism and masochism being complimentary. They are not, as the body and spirit are not. As being one of the definitive syndromes of the “borderline disorder” self-injurious acts’ intentions vary, same as the bodily structure. So, we can not conclude to a complimentary solution. One never completes the other, they even clash not to “complete” one another.
Self-mutilation resists conceptualization. It is not the subsitute of being loved in the form of being castrated. In that sense it is “de-oedipal”. The continous quality abstarcts it from the intentional engine of death-drive. The aim is not to kill, not to stop but to do it over and over again. Not to kill as a whole but to murder one by one, piece by piece. So, it is necrophillic as well as bearing “necromancerly” aims to animate it from the dead state. The Deleuzian model of “desiring-machines” can be useful to understand this fragmented structure. First the term "machine" favorably used by Gilles Deleuze, is like the alteration of pyschoanalytic "unconscious". Unlike psychoanalysis "schizoanalysis" takes the unconscious as something "based on production/formation, rather than representation/writing". Deleuze and Guattari has argued that the only way to deal with the -no-more-existing- binaries is to take one side of the binary and use it to cancel the other, thus crash the whole system. The “machinic” system is already fragmented, so we can no longer take the organs, the "partial objects" forming the desiring machine, as a full structure. So if the organs are instruments of imposed repression over desire what if there is no organs, just the body, --or what if there is no body?-- If this conception should work to de-construct the system of ordered organism, we will see that we are left with only the intensity of desire, not trapped by the partially related system. The "Body without Organs" which is a term coined out by Artaud in late 40s, can be taken as the pathway formed for the "desiring" flow. Antonin Artaud used the term “body without organs” in his manifestation entitled the Theatre of Cruelty, he states in a rather radical way that symbolically "the organs" which made the human body function, granted the men with something he did not deserve. The freedom lies in the "body without organs", which lacks the ordered functioning and resembles the "truth" of death in a way. This also addresses the idea that particles (organs) of the system are analogically the institutions that form the network of organism. They are carriers of the viruses. The parasitic.
If we take those approaches to understand pain, we can see that the origin of pain coincides with the mentioned aim to fragment the body and all it stands for. As well as being a pure subjective notion, it is also the thread that ties one to the real world. As Andrea Gutenberg notes clearly, “it helps the subject to situate itself in relation to the world: it works both as a world-constructing and as a world-reconstructing faculty”. Lacking an adequate vocabulary, “pain” strives to communicate, to find a satisfactory expression to let loose the bounds of silence. To do so, it breaks and smashes the limits of the symbolic order. The silence when any chosen “weapon” harms the body, is actually comes out as a scream. If we look closely to self-injurious acts, we’ll see that they are done in nearly absolute silence, counting little sounds of the cuts, burns etc. out. Even this can lead us to self-mutilation’s unsharable, unspeakable character by itself, since it bears the need of communication; a need to tear the wall of silence, which is the invisible boundary before the world outside. In almost all qualities mentioned the craving to breach, to transgress, to tear down is evident. The need is not just to hide, but to be “involved” at the same time.
For psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu, this limit breaking tendency is the very cause of self-harm. He argues that patients are almost lost in a world where they can not relate whether they are outside or inside a territory. Also can not distinguish between memories whether if they are on conscious level or retained by the unconscious, as they are “too traumatic to speak”. Anzieu, observes some of his patients and concludes;
“He is uncertain of the frontiers between the psychical and
bodily Egos, between the reality Ego and the ideal Ego, between what belongs to
the Self and what to others (…) a confusion of borders and limits
as symptomatic of Western culture at the end of twentieth century (…) we no longer recognize definite boundaries..”
If that is the case, self-mutilator can not relate to the truth of the traumatic memory, as s/he is unable to draw a thin line between reality and phantasms on the unconscious level. Hence, the marks and scars on the skin serves as a “memoroire” for the integration of the body and psyche. “If damage to the material skin can be remembered physically, damage to the psychic envelope can be remebered physically.” This approach takes us back where the body is re-structured as a “canvas”. The point we should highlight here is, why the painful memories or traumas are objectified this way. As it is mentioned above the self-harmer has problems to interact with the world outside. S/he struggles to transfer the dark load, hidden in his/her unconscious, to the plane of reality. The ego is confused, as it is unable to distinguish inner and outer stimuli. The body then, needs to be transformed as a coping mechanism to let the inner disturbance out by making it visible. So the intangible pain is replaced by a concrete landmark of the feeling. A mark that serves as a subsitute, a codified word that lets the self-injurer interact with reality and the world outside. By inscribing such markings and signs a new identity is constructed. Thus, the performative existence is altered.
At last, it is not a pleasent art work but mutilation is still “artly”. The body is a diary, a portrait, a caligraphy tablette. Apart from its painful becomings and transformations it preserves the aesthetic subjectivity. It can even be considered literally as pure art, since performance artists like Stellarc mutilate their bodies in front of their audiences, films like Crash (1996) -or J.G Ballard’s novel- fascinates the watching eye. The age we live in even more tickles the need to immobilize the body partially, to transform it into a machine, modify it to become a cyborg by an operation without narcotics and sedators.
The words of a self-mutilator can sum up the sinking, itching feeling of this frustration:
“I used to feel like the world was going on around me but I was not part of
it. I interacted with it like a robot. The real me was locked up inside but I
couldn’t reach it. I was sealed off and I would get really desperate to
break out.”
my thumb instead of an onion.
the top quite gone
except for a sort of a hinge
of skin,
a flap like a hat,
dead white.
then that red plush.
-- Sylvia Plath, “Cut”
You lie painfuly bruised on the floor. One arm dead on your side. It seems the pure bloody flesh can rot any time. You can smell the sickening stench of decay in seconds. It is something different now..
***
Self-mutilation or self-injury, is not just about self-punishment or past trauma, although grows mental roots there. We can say that, it is the creative reconstruction of satisfaction from “the unsatisfactory”. It is redefining your own body by immobilizing it partially, experiencing an agonizing moment of illusionary control over it. When asked why did she cut herself, a self-mutilator answers: “I wanted to test my limits”. A test of breaching the limits of being alive. It is your abstracted organ, free from the body that let’s you experience how to die. How to kill yourself, piece by piece, and yet remain immortal like “germ-cells” (Freud Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle) . However it is not a “suicide attempt”. The act of self-harm hardly carries an intention of ending life. It is just the language of the pain. The urge to speak the unspeakable. We can even say, it is a struggle to survive, by releasing the devastating load of the orderless “words” from your mind. Body becomes the text, where you can inscribe and mark the state of pain beautifuly. In fact, if we turn the phrase up side down like David Fincher’s Fight Club did (quoted in Zizek Slavoj. Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences), it is a “near-life experience”. Peta Malins elaborates on the notion of “textual becoming” of the body in a rather ironic way:
"My breasts are for whipping(masoschism), my mouth is for emptying my stomach (anorexia), my arm is a blank canvas (tattooing), my tounge is for dissolving a trip (raving), my veins are for transporting the drug (injecting) "
Now this unique and painful “language” makes much more sense when we look deeper into it in terms of Jacques Lacan’s controversial arguement “la femme n’existe pas”, or in Zizek terms, “there are no talking vajinas...” . The intention or “need” to self-harm is more meaningful when articulated through the feminine symbolic “non-existence”. While feminine “langue” struggles to find a subtle ground in the masculine symbolic order, it creates its own matrix to cope with the dominant mechanism. Marks of mutilation is not just a metaphor, furthermore a metamorphosis of that structure. The body is the re/de-constructed “canvas” searching for new meanings and waiting for a transgressing understanding of them. Let’s picture it through the shocking sequence of Adrian Lyne’s 1987 feature “Fatal Attraction”. In the middle of the film Glenn Close’s character is struck with the feeling of awareness that she just can’t leave without Micheal Douglas’ character, Dan. She starts acting peevish from the sourness inside her. She doesn’t want him to leave, doesn’t want to let him go back to his beautiful wife’s arms. But in reality, if they are to act like “rational adults”, she is expected to be cool about his marriage and face the fact that it was just an affair, just a fling which gave them both pleasure. Unfortunately things don’t work out that way. Her state is completely unspeakable, completely out of the language system we know of, which falls inadequate to describe the agony and rage inside her. So guess what she did? No suprises, she cuts her wrists. Not to end her life right there on the kitchen floor but to scream something to this man who is completely safe out there in an orderly rational, male world. Alex Forest (Glenn Close) used her blood to say; “You can not just fuck me and leave… That hurts, but see, I can give much more pain to myself and not a single hair on my back will move. This body is mine, and I can shut it out whenever I like. I can kill every single organism in and on it, so that you will see that I can die but yet survive forever. Although you may never truly understand it...” Alex may or may have not speak these exact words, it is the view from Dan’s side we can be sure about. He watches a live show of “the other” and will never have a clue about that feeling of release there.
Pleasure attained by self-mutilation has a transcending quality. When we scan through what psychoanalysis said about the “pleasure principle”, we can see that pleasure gains its character from limitations. The illusion of pleasure is to “enjoy as little as possible”, thus, trigger the need to go beyond that prohibitions. However, beyond awaits pain, rather than pure pleasure. So the paradox of “jouissance” is the bliss of transforming pleasure to pain, and madly enough, feel the transcending satisfaction from it. The “becoming” process, the breaching of the limitations, following the path towards death like a fearless undead connotates the phrase, “playing God”. You interefere to God’s form (the body) and its limited structure. Body is invented over and over again by repetitive death trials. It is modified, even improved as pure subjective qualities attributed to it. The self-mutilator goes in and out of the womb again and again, a trip from inorganic to organic in front of his/her very eyes. In Samuel Beckett’s words, s/he yearns to “fail again, fail better..”.
The pleasure from this satisfaction is somehow necrophilic. The “undead- becoming” reminds the idea that, it is not just about the “death drive” or “excess jouissance” but also the otherness of the dead. The love for the stationary, desire to touch and feel the inorganic. Thus, the self-mutilator practises necrophillic homicide on the organ. So, the desire opens a passage to the corpse . Taking from the point where psychoanlaysis defines self-injurious acts as the need to return to mother’s womb, in parallel to the “death-drive”, we can go further to say that maybe it is just the seperated, abstracted organ not the “body” as a whole strives to go stationary in absolute darkness.
If we have found the body - the corpse- then, we can go looking for the murderer. As dead as an organ can be, it can be uncontrollably alive too. As in Zizek’s example, the self-beating scene in David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) , the hand goes out of control of the body. It claims a character of its own while it is beating the hell out of Edward Norton.
"The self-beating begins with the hero’s hand acquiring a life of its own, escaping the hero’s control- in short turning into a partial object, or to put in Deleuze’s terms, into an organ without body" (Slavoj Zizek, Organs without Bodies)
This “split structure” shows us the chosen method to scatter the wholeness of the body and the totality of it. By producing specter doubles, desire works through out the system, breaking the unity, thus freeing the pain. Silent release from the body gives birth to a masochist and a sadist. The sadist “hand” for example, tends to posess the needy masochist part. David A. Goldfarb’s reference to Deleuze can be of use:
"Deleuze defines masochism by its symbolic structure and sharply distinguishes it from sadism, in contrast to the traditional view that sadism and masochism are complimentary. Sadism, he argues, is driven by the desire for possession; whereas, masochistic relationships are constituted by pact and mutual initiation.. "
This definition differs from the pychoanalytic view of sadism and masochism being complimentary. They are not, as the body and spirit are not. As being one of the definitive syndromes of the “borderline disorder” self-injurious acts’ intentions vary, same as the bodily structure. So, we can not conclude to a complimentary solution. One never completes the other, they even clash not to “complete” one another.
Self-mutilation resists conceptualization. It is not the subsitute of being loved in the form of being castrated. In that sense it is “de-oedipal”. The continous quality abstarcts it from the intentional engine of death-drive. The aim is not to kill, not to stop but to do it over and over again. Not to kill as a whole but to murder one by one, piece by piece. So, it is necrophillic as well as bearing “necromancerly” aims to animate it from the dead state. The Deleuzian model of “desiring-machines” can be useful to understand this fragmented structure. First the term "machine" favorably used by Gilles Deleuze, is like the alteration of pyschoanalytic "unconscious". Unlike psychoanalysis "schizoanalysis" takes the unconscious as something "based on production/formation, rather than representation/writing". Deleuze and Guattari has argued that the only way to deal with the -no-more-existing- binaries is to take one side of the binary and use it to cancel the other, thus crash the whole system. The “machinic” system is already fragmented, so we can no longer take the organs, the "partial objects" forming the desiring machine, as a full structure. So if the organs are instruments of imposed repression over desire what if there is no organs, just the body, --or what if there is no body?-- If this conception should work to de-construct the system of ordered organism, we will see that we are left with only the intensity of desire, not trapped by the partially related system. The "Body without Organs" which is a term coined out by Artaud in late 40s, can be taken as the pathway formed for the "desiring" flow. Antonin Artaud used the term “body without organs” in his manifestation entitled the Theatre of Cruelty, he states in a rather radical way that symbolically "the organs" which made the human body function, granted the men with something he did not deserve. The freedom lies in the "body without organs", which lacks the ordered functioning and resembles the "truth" of death in a way. This also addresses the idea that particles (organs) of the system are analogically the institutions that form the network of organism. They are carriers of the viruses. The parasitic.
If we take those approaches to understand pain, we can see that the origin of pain coincides with the mentioned aim to fragment the body and all it stands for. As well as being a pure subjective notion, it is also the thread that ties one to the real world. As Andrea Gutenberg notes clearly, “it helps the subject to situate itself in relation to the world: it works both as a world-constructing and as a world-reconstructing faculty”. Lacking an adequate vocabulary, “pain” strives to communicate, to find a satisfactory expression to let loose the bounds of silence. To do so, it breaks and smashes the limits of the symbolic order. The silence when any chosen “weapon” harms the body, is actually comes out as a scream. If we look closely to self-injurious acts, we’ll see that they are done in nearly absolute silence, counting little sounds of the cuts, burns etc. out. Even this can lead us to self-mutilation’s unsharable, unspeakable character by itself, since it bears the need of communication; a need to tear the wall of silence, which is the invisible boundary before the world outside. In almost all qualities mentioned the craving to breach, to transgress, to tear down is evident. The need is not just to hide, but to be “involved” at the same time.
For psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu, this limit breaking tendency is the very cause of self-harm. He argues that patients are almost lost in a world where they can not relate whether they are outside or inside a territory. Also can not distinguish between memories whether if they are on conscious level or retained by the unconscious, as they are “too traumatic to speak”. Anzieu, observes some of his patients and concludes;
“He is uncertain of the frontiers between the psychical and
bodily Egos, between the reality Ego and the ideal Ego, between what belongs to
the Self and what to others (…) a confusion of borders and limits
as symptomatic of Western culture at the end of twentieth century (…) we no longer recognize definite boundaries..”
If that is the case, self-mutilator can not relate to the truth of the traumatic memory, as s/he is unable to draw a thin line between reality and phantasms on the unconscious level. Hence, the marks and scars on the skin serves as a “memoroire” for the integration of the body and psyche. “If damage to the material skin can be remembered physically, damage to the psychic envelope can be remebered physically.” This approach takes us back where the body is re-structured as a “canvas”. The point we should highlight here is, why the painful memories or traumas are objectified this way. As it is mentioned above the self-harmer has problems to interact with the world outside. S/he struggles to transfer the dark load, hidden in his/her unconscious, to the plane of reality. The ego is confused, as it is unable to distinguish inner and outer stimuli. The body then, needs to be transformed as a coping mechanism to let the inner disturbance out by making it visible. So the intangible pain is replaced by a concrete landmark of the feeling. A mark that serves as a subsitute, a codified word that lets the self-injurer interact with reality and the world outside. By inscribing such markings and signs a new identity is constructed. Thus, the performative existence is altered.
At last, it is not a pleasent art work but mutilation is still “artly”. The body is a diary, a portrait, a caligraphy tablette. Apart from its painful becomings and transformations it preserves the aesthetic subjectivity. It can even be considered literally as pure art, since performance artists like Stellarc mutilate their bodies in front of their audiences, films like Crash (1996) -or J.G Ballard’s novel- fascinates the watching eye. The age we live in even more tickles the need to immobilize the body partially, to transform it into a machine, modify it to become a cyborg by an operation without narcotics and sedators.
The words of a self-mutilator can sum up the sinking, itching feeling of this frustration:
“I used to feel like the world was going on around me but I was not part of
it. I interacted with it like a robot. The real me was locked up inside but I
couldn’t reach it. I was sealed off and I would get really desperate to
break out.”
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