It was the beginning of a wonderful friendship.
These are some of my first thoughts about scars, and difference. I'm not sure I stand behind the ideas about stats/summation of difference, but it was something I was interested in at the time. The paper was for a course taught by the ever-popular Jordan Peterson at the University of Toronto, where I was finishing my degree in psychology.
Abstract:
Whether through surgery or accident, incisions and abrasions on our bodies leave their mark. These scars seem random, unsightly and personal. The study of these scars is necessarily the study of anomaly. Because scars are distributed across the body, the averaged human body would have no scars on it. Every body, however, has a scar on it.
Many biomedical practices focus on gaining structural knowledge of the body’s interior. The surgeon delves within the body and removes, inserts or otherwise changes it. Surgeons create maps to make scars; they follow these maps with their hands to explore the unknown territory of another’s body. When the patient is not in an empowered position, this mapping results in a colonialist perspective of the body. The scars that result from surgery can also be envisioned as personal maps. We must work towards an approach to the body which comes more from within than from without.
Introduction:
Whether through surgery or accident, incisions and abrasions on our bodies leave their mark. These scars seem random, unsightly and personal. To ask someone about a scar is to invite the telling of his or her life story. What is it about scars that we find so disturbing and so compelling? Why are we so disgusted by them? How can we otherwise conceive of scars – and thus, our bodies – to feel stronger and more embodied because of them? To explore these issues, we must incorporate terms and approaches from psychology, philosophy, cultural studies and medicine; we must also examine our subjective physicality.
Writing about bodily experience is necessarily limited in that it enforces linearity on non-linear sensations and emotions. In an effort to encompass non-linear modes of thought and experience, I have completed two art pieces which explore these questions (see appendices A and B). The first is an art installation, through which one can examine the spatial dimensions of this issue; the second is an edited photo, which explores metaphorical and iconic symbolic representations.
Background:
The study of scars is necessarily the study of anomaly. The study of anomaly is in turn the study of the norm. One can only conceive of anomaly when one can conceive of a norm to deviate from; being abnormal is discouraged in our society. In Constructing Normalcy, Lennard Davis posits the origin of our desire to represent normalcy in our person in the rise of statistical measures:
It was the French statistician Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1847) who contributed the most to a generalized notion of the normal as an imperative. He noticed that the ‘law of error,’ used by astronomers to locate a star by plotting all the sightings and then averaging the errors, could be equally applied to the distribution of human features such as height and weight. He then took a further step of formulating the concept of ‘l’homme moyen’ or the average man (26).
With the concept of the norm – as represented by the ‘average man’ or those who fall under the bell curve in its densest places – comes the concept of deviation. As Davis writes, “…the average then becomes paradoxically a kind of ideal, a position devoutly to be wished” (27) . If one were to make a composite photograph of all the people in the world, one could present an image of the ‘average’ human. Similarly, because scars are distributed across the body, the averaged human body would have no scars on it. Every body, however, has a scar on it.
To escape from the distortion of the norm, we must change our ideas of the ideal. The pragmatic advantage of the statistical norm is that it allows us compare people to it. It is useful in education, for example, when one wants to identify and segregate children whose abilities lie at the extremities of the bell curve. We must keep this advantage in our new conceptualization.
The Installation (Appendix A):
In my art installation, I propose a spatial summation of difference. Where physical realities are ignored or distorted in statistical norming, this process acknowledges and includes them (see Appendix A). Where in an ‘average’ the scar disappears (and thus becomes deviant), here the scar is highlighted, becoming a shared phenomenon. The idea of the ‘norm’ is turned on its head: what was abnormal is now normal.
Theorizing the Installation:
The idea of the ‘untouched’ or pure body goes beyond the aspect of the norm as ideal; it is the basis of all that we perceive of as young and attractive. We spend much of our time pursuing the ideal of the unscarred and unblemished. There are uncountable techniques for minimizing or disguising variable marks upon our skin. In my research for this paper, I constantly came across websites promoting scar ‘removal.’ One stated,
Scars -whether they're caused by accidents or by surgery- are unpredictable. The way a scar develops depends as much on how your body heals as it does on the original injury or on the surgeon's skills…no scar can be removed completely, plastic surgeons can often improve the appearance of a scar, making it less obvious through the injection or application of certain steroid medications or through surgical procedures known as scar revisions (American Association of Plastic Surgeons, italics added).
Our obsession with scar minimization is part of our culture’s general approach to bodies as strange and compelling. It seems that the body is paradoxically both known and unknown to us; both a source of pleasure and disgust. Because we inhabit our bodies – we move in, with and by our bodies – we alone are privy to our physical sensations, and our bodies’ interior functions. At the same time, we are not aware of and cannot control the structure of our bodies’ interiors.
Even if one has studied anatomy and ‘knows’ all of the organs and tendons of the body, one never knows the exact state and composition of one’s physical interior. We feel much of what happens behind our skin, but we are not always aware of it; we do not know what it looks like and we cannot explain it. Thus, it is like a land unknown. Many traditions and thinkers have focused on this aspect of the interior.
Erich Neumann was one such thinker. As a Jungian psychologist, he believed the ‘vessel’ was the primary symbol of the feminine aspect of both male and female psyches. This aspect is always represented by,
The basic symbolic equation woman = body = vessel…All the basic vital functions occur in this vessel-body schema, whose ‘inside’ is unknown. Its entrance and exit zones are of special significance…All body openings – eyes, ears, nose, mouth (navel), rectum, genital zone – as well as the skin, have, as places of exchange between inside and outside, a numinous accent for early man…The concrete corporeity of the body-vessel whose inside always remains dark and unknown is the reality in which the individual experiences the whole unconscious world of instinct (39-40).
While the unknown can also be represented in the outside world, the physical interior is always unknown structurally and only sometimes known experientially.
Many wellness practices based in Eastern philosophies focus on gaining knowledge of the experiences of the body. These include mindfulness mediation, yogic practices and body psychotherapy. Many biomedical practices focus on gaining structural knowledge of the body’s interior. David Michael Levin posits that the dominant intellectual conflict is no longer between “mind” and “body,” but between the body of medicine and the body of experience (Johnson). Dissection, the X-ray and laparoscopy are all ways of interrogating the body for this knowledge. So is surgery, which requires the creation of x-rays and consequent cutting open of the skin to explore and to make right the organs within. The surgeon delves within the body – Neumann’s numinous unknown – and removes, inserts or otherwise changes it. Once the work is done, he/she stitches or staples the cut skin together, with the intention of making the incision close.
The practice of stitching two materials together is an old one. The word stitch comes to us from Old English stice, a puncture or stab, akin to the Old English word for stick; sew is even older, having been derived from the Proto-Indo European base *siw-, to sew. Although we have innovated aspects of stitching – such as the threads that decompose once the wound has healed, or the use of staples – the basic pattern of sewing has not changed. Sewing is traditional ‘woman’s work’ and its use in modern surgery has an element of obscenity and pragmatism.
We would like surgery to be literally clean-cut, simple and high-tech. Hospitals convey this need with their beige walls and white lab coats; surgery is not supposed to be about cutting open and stitching up real bodies – that is for the realm of the horror movie. Because surgery accesses the unknown and the personal, while also confronting death, we would like to distance ourselves from it as much as possible. This is, in the end, an impossible narrative if our bodie live to tell it.
Surgery comes from a Latin word which evolved from the Greek kheirourgia “hand-work” based on kheir “hand” + erg- “work.” The same root underlying erg-/org- became "work" in English.
Peterson also discusses hand-work in relation to the unknown, albeit not in the sense of literal surgery:
The capacity to create novel behaviours…in response to the emergence of the unknown might be regarded as the primary hallmark of human consciousness…this process literally allows us to carve the world out of the undifferentiated mass of unobserved and unencountered “existence”…We carve out the world as a consequence of our direct interactions with the unknown – most notably, with our hands (66-67).
Taking this general statement, and applying it to the specific situation of surgery, illuminates issues of subjectivity and objectification. Many patients never meet their surgeon; to the surgeon, the patient’s body is literally, “the undifferentiated mass of unobserved and un-encountered ‘existence.’” If one is being operated on, one is being constructed (‘carved out’) by the hands of another.
The patient is usually prone and almost always under anesthetic when surgery takes place. The most prominent part of both our personal known (experienced) and unknown (unexplored internal structures) are explored by another, in our absence.
The second objectifying aspect of surgery is the creation of an impersonal map upon one’s body. Excepting cases of emergency, the surgeon will draw upon the patient’s body a few lines where he/she plans to make the incision. Surgeons create maps to make scars; they follow these maps with their hands to explore the unknown territory of another’s body.
***NB (this was a footnote): In her play, The Good Body, Eve Ensler explores the issue of surgical mapping in her monologue of ‘A Thirty-Five-Year-Old Model’:
My surgeon literally changed me with his hands, with his instruments, with his vision. He removed some things and added others. I’m not anything like the person I was six years ago…After I woke up from my first surgery, he was there standing over me. He was very excited. He had taken a life-sized photograph of my entire body naked. It felt a bit invasive. I mean, I am shy and I didn’t really know him. There were corrective red marks all over my body like the kind you got on your spelling mistakes in seventh grade… “Your body is a map,” he said. “These red marks are designated beauty capitals that need renovation and work.” That was six years ago and today I am …[my surgeon’s] creation.
In this mapping, the patient is not in control; in the process described above the (female) patient is nothing more than passive territory to be explored. This mapping results in a colonialist perspective of the body. The challenge that arises is to take the tracks that have been made by the other’s mapping and to make them into one’s own. A personal map includes one’s own set of directions and feeling of location. This is what I aim to do with my installation piece, and with the attached photo.
The Edited Photograph (Appendix B):
***NB: These were the early days of photoshop.
In the attached piece (Appendix B), I have reclaimed my scar. Instead of the straight line that it usually is, my scar becomes an escher-esque pattern, with no end or beginning. I think it looks more organic but also more purposeful – more in line with practices of body modification or mutilation than the passivity that usually accompanies surgery. The design also encompasses the symbol of the oroborus, a metaphor for the “precosmogenic chaos…the self-consuming serpent…represents the union of matter and spirit, and the possibility of transformation”(Peterson, 89). As the serpent eats its tail, so my scar squares itself.
When the great unknown is represented by the serpent, it is almost always female. In the same way, our disgust with scars relates to our disgust with the female body. The conceptualisation of the interior body as ‘unknown’ carries with it the element of femininity. Neumann’s woman = body = vessel equation exemplifies this, reflecting the Jungian characterization of the unconscious as feminine. If the interiors of our bodies are the feminine unknown, incisions that allow us contact with the interior are analogous to other openings on women’s bodies. To be specific, cuts are vaginal; thus, scars have a womanly connotation. This image is frequently denigrated. The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre described, “the obscenity of the feminine sex…of everything which “gapes open.”…the hole, before all sexual specification, is an obscene expectation, an appeal to the flesh” (85-86).
Conclusion:
Scars indicate our abnormality and thus our deviance. Scars remind us of a rupturing between the realms of the known and the unknown. Scars are often created as a result of processes in which we are passively mapped. Scars are feminine. All of these elements have relevance to the social structuring of incision, wounding and healing; in conclusion, it may be beneficial to turn to a more depth-analytical psychological perspective.
The process of splitting in two (of which the scar is evidence) can be seen metaphorically as a process of differentiation. Like the process of mapping or exploring the body’s interior through surgery,
The killing of an all-embracing monster and the construction of the universe from its body parts is symbolic (metaphorical) representation of the central, adaptive process of heroic encounter with the undifferentiated unknown, and the construction or generation of differentiated order as a consequence (Peterson, 124).
In Jungian fairytale interpretation, the act of cutting in two does not signify death so much as life and new growth (Yeoman). If we could see our scars as evidence of our ability to define, heal and grow from our own bodily experiences, perhaps we would not find them so frightening.
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