Junctures - The Journal for Thematic Dialogue

Surin, Kenneth

English

The Society of Control and the Managed Citizen

Jutel, Thierry

Societies of Control, Compulsory Ecstasy and the Neo-Liberal Subject

Martin, Michael G

85
MICHAEL G MARTIN
Even the Dust
Dick tossed his cigarette butt out the window.  He inhaled deeply, the rank smell of raw sewage 
filling the cab of his truck as we squinted in the glare and crossed the bridge.  He said, “Ah, 
New Jersey,” and laughed.
We took I-95 down along the river past the airport and got off in Eddystone.  I was quiet.  I’d 
lost my job, and Dick was throwing me some laborer’s stuff, some nasty, dirty under-the-
table demolition work in an abandoned foundry.  There were chemicals involved – a huge, 
terrifying plastic tank bearing a sign in red foot-high letters (DANGER ACID), buckets and bins 
of caustics, black barrels marked with ominous symbols.  And marijuana flowing through 
us like the lie that adversity makes you stronger.  We were strong.  The first hit of the day is 
sometimes the most important.
The foundry was ice-cold and musty.  We spent a few minutes stretching and drinking Cokes. 
I was wearing longjohns and layers of clothes, but the morning air sent fingers through me. 
I hated what lay ahead: the taste of drywall, the numbness of arms vibrated by power tools, 
the sickening ozone of a Sawzall held at precarious angles, eyes red with sweat, shitting in 
toilets that hadn’t been cleaned in ten years.  I wanted my shitty old job back, my shitty old 
life back home.  I got tricked into a promotion 300 miles away from Pittsburgh, only to find 
that my new boss was looking at a fat bonus if she could turn me out quickly.  We played 
cat and mouse for a while, and then Cadence nailed me because I lost my girlfriend and 
went crazy.  With no woman and no job I got crazier.  Dick liked the change.  He wanted me 
to work this job, take the cash, sell my car, buy an old Dodge panel van and set out on the 
American Tour.  He was sure it was the best thing for me to do, the best thing for anyone.  I 
thought about vandalizing Cadence’s car, about waiting late at night to shoot the evil bitch in 
the head.  I prayed for Unemployment.  I didn’t sleep.  I started smoking again.  I lay awake 
and dreamed of cancer.  I wished that the pain inside of me would jump up and throttle me; 
I was calling its bluff.
We worked all day, stapling plastic sheets to walls, cutting out copper pipe, watching the 
soles of our work boots begin to melt in the ooze that covered some of the floors.  That was 
the idea: industrial waste cleanup on the cheap.  They weren’t going to do anything with the 
FICTIoN
Martin – Dust – Junctures, 8, Jun 2007
86
building because, over a dozen reincarnations, it had acquired the sludge of a dozen toxic 
industries.  “Make it look neat,” the guy had said.  Even the dust frightened me.
And the fucking tank of acid.  We had a warm day, and the whole place smelled of it, our eyes 
stung.  The money wasn’t just good, it was all we could find.  A few months later we could have 
cut lawns six days a week and blown it all on Corona and Mexican Brown.  
We worked quietly, but there were outbursts.  Dick surprised me with the pressure washer, 
trying to clear the muck from my Tyvek suit, and hit me in the balls.  I went down on one knee. 
He couldn’t stop laughing, and, eventually, neither could I.
We bought Polish sausage sandwiches with brown mustard from the roach coach that still 
sailed the complex, and we ignored the shit all over our hands when we ate.  Dick showed 
me how to use the butcher paper that came wrapped around our sandwiches so I didn’t have 
to touch anything I put in my mouth.  We made jokes: “Hey, Mike, wouldn’t you like to send 
Cadence for a swim in the big vat of acid?”  We named that fear: the Vat of Acid, something 
from the horror film that our lives were becoming.  Dick was cheating on disability doing this 
job, and his hands were claws frozen on the steering wheel as we drove home at night.  I was 
300 miles from home, broke, unemployed, alone.  We decided we’d wear dime-store red-devil 
costumes and black leotards, play the theme from The Addams Family over and over, suspend 
her from the ceiling by a rope, pare it down strand by strand with a Buck knife.
Cadence, my old boss, became someone for him to blame, too.    
We tore out wire and drop ceilings, light fixtures and air conditioners.  We used a pressure-
washer to scrub everything that might be sold later.  I climbed ladders and used a Sawzall 
upside down.  I choked on the dust.
When I thought of the woman I lost I could do those things.  When I thought of April, curly red 
hair and hot freckled skin, I had just enough courage to stand in front of a locomotive.  
We worked on fixtures one day.  There was a heat exchanger hanging from the ceiling, a quarter 
ton of steel.  Dick was cutting with the Sawzall, and I was on the short ladder, holding the 
thing, feeling the mad vibration of all of those pipes, that steel.  The leg came off my ladder, 
broke just below the bottom rung.  Dick shouted.  I pushed myself backwards, all of that steel 
swaying on the tow strap supporting it.  I hit a steel support and then the ground.  I held my 
head.  I heard Dick’s voice.  I looked up at the swaying steel.  I wondered if it would fall and 
crush me.  I looked at it coming a little closer, going a little farther away, and wondered.  I 
scuttled backwards as it rocked.  My heart was beating.
“Mike?” 
“I’m okay,” I said.  “You okay?”
He rounded the corner, picked up the remains of the wooden ladder with one hand, and threw 
it outside. I sat in sawdust and filings on the cool floor, feeling the bruised but whole bones 
of my hands, legs, neck, arms, back.  He jumped on the ladder.  He kicked it with his boots, 
brown leather opalescent with accidents of chemistry.  He swung it against the wall of the 
building.  He looked at me.
Martin – Dust – Junctures, 8, Jun 2007
87
Dick loved me, completely and without reservation; he called me “brother” sometimes.  He 
was my oldest friend, a felon and a sociopath, the boy who invented Baby Bird Season and 
taught me to hunt groundhogs with a Volkswagen, the young barbarian who introduced me 
to drugs.  I once watched him pull a treble hook out of his scalp, and he only seemed puzzled 
by the blood that soaked his hair and ran down his forehead.  People were scared of him.
He said, “I taught that fucker a lesson.”
I nodded and tried to light a cigarette.  I was shaking.   A truck shifted gears out on the highway. 
There were no birds.  There was lichen growing in a crack in the asphalt, a gray-green fault. 
Dick put his hands over my fist.  He struck the lighter and guided the flame to my cigarette. 
“Hey buddy,” he said softly.  “That was a good fall; you kept your head up.”
He sat down and lit a cigarette.  He looked out over the lot.  A wide muddy puddle lay like a 
moat before the concrete steps.  The wind kicked up grit that hissed against the corrugated 
sides of the next building.  He said, “Feel good to be alive?” and we sat listening to someone 
testing helicopter turbines up at Boeing.  After a while, we collected our tools, locked the place 
up.  We walked to the truck in silent agreement: fuck Eddystone.  Fuck this job.  
Driving back across the bridge, the winter sunlight pale and the arc of the bridge carrying us 
toward it, we smelled the sewage, and Dick said, “Welcome to Philthadelphia,” while I cried 
and he looked away.
Michael Gerhard Martin is a professor of rhetoric at Babson College in Massachusetts. 
He was raised in Pennsylvania and received his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh 
in 1998.
Martin – Dust – Junctures, 8, Jun 2007


'Even the Dust"

Brody, Patricia

85
PATRICIA BRODY 
WE WERE DEAD
We were dead, we were leaping over snow.
That’s where I thought I’d find you
plowing through fresh-noon drift on the old slope.
you had just departed.
I heard your breath in the cold space
 between birches.
Crisp, tingling — happy? you blow out
you breathe in. you blow out
the breath-cloud’s little mockery of ghost.
Oh —-  ! I cried your first name into the blue.
Noon-sun, hot-cold as when you’d force me to come out,
leave my cheese & mac, my book, Lad, a Dog.
Creamy bite, then zip the parka
 tumble out in snow.
El’s winter pasture. I climb until I reach the altar.
Crotch of poplar          polar ghostly bells.
Last summer’s shiver-ling, o silver bells.
Unzip the down, lean through
and whisper your code to the chasm / your name
Surely you’d come out if you were
 anywhere
Tree, you’d say, spicing the syllable / my name
That peppery murmur my dotter
So we’ll be dead together, snowy father.
Patricia Brody is a CSW (certified social worker)/psychotherapist specialising in 
families. She is raising three children in New york City and her poems appear in many 
journals including Room of One’s Own (vancouver); Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 
and The Paris Review.  She teaches English and American Literature at Boricua 
College in Harlem.
Brody – We Were Dead – Junctures, 6, June 006


"We Were Dead"

Weireter, Megan

 21
MEGAN WEIRETER
Postcard from Conwy, North Wales
I must tip like a teapot from this hill and pour myself out
over the pack of roofs, these upturned paper boats,
 
over the castle that hunches like the child who upturned them. 
Over the pink-faced kids drinking milk in the pubs, 
the backpackers scavenging the streets for scraps of view. 
Out over the pebbles, the thin low-tide sea, the skiffs pimpling it, 
far out where the sea deepens and tides are just shallow breaths. 
I must fly and find you, mime you the voices I don’t understand, 
tell you of the wind driving my hair into knots over my ears, 
the clouds that wring messages I can’t read from the sky.
Megan Weireter, originally from Norfolk, Virginia (USA), received her MFA in Creative 
Writing at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared in 
Cream City Review and Atlanta Review.
Weireter – Postcard from Conwy – Junctures, 5, Dec 2005


"Postcard from Conwy, North Wales"

Schmidt, Leoni

 7
LEONI SCHMIDT
Editorial: Moving Across Terra Infirma
The theme of this issue of Junctures, “movement”, lends itself to a wide range of perspectives
and positions, some of which are presented or suggested in the contributions to follow. While
considering significant issues within this body of research, Irit Rogoff’s 1  publication entitled
Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture 2  proves useful as she discusses a range of questions
that connect to the various issues addressed in this issue of the journal.
An editorial does not usually include a book review, but in the manner of the London Review
of Books and other such publications, the format of the review can sometimes stand an
editor in good stead as a focusing device when the publication under review aligns with, or
brings into sharp relief, the issues encompassed within a particular issue of a journal. In this
case, the relevant publication is open-ended enough to allow for a wide range of issue-specific
thinking, and it responds intelligently to many currently acclaimed theorists working with
aspects of movement.
In the first instance, Rogoff consistently acknowledges movement in her own writing practice:
“the project’s point of departure is not quite as clearly indicated or grounded as one might
wish…[it] seemed an opportune moment for thinking through all the investments and
certainties…I wanted the work to reflect somehow the processes which I myself experience
as I move back and forth between critical theory, feminist studies and contemporary art
practices…certain encounters…would provide a bridge for the next step for thought…”3  In
this issue of Junctures, Khyla Russell contributes an article in which she considers her writing
as a “roam” on which she should like to take readers and she describes the progression of
her scholarly reflection in terms of “movement” in her thinking.
Rogoff explores the notion of deterritorialised epistemologies and she works step by step to
instigate an epistemological opening up of the borders around disciplines; the walls around
guarded contexts for understanding; and the policed boundaries between (now, arguably,
disrupted) knowledge orders. Here, she moves on dangerous ground. On the one hand she
argues for “active processes of unlearning which need to be carefully plotted out into active
theories of unlearning which can be translated into active positions of unbelonging” in order
for critical questioning to take place. On the other hand she acknowledges the need for “an
Schmidt – Editorial – Junctures, 4, Jun 2005
8
epistemological inquiry which stresses difference rather than universal truth...[and]
understandings regarding belonging and rights.”4  Elsewhere she states: “I see my task as an
attempt to trace a certain [fluid] meeting ground…”5 ; while Russell hopes that contributions
in this issue will create “a form of movement understanding.” Russell also suggests her
movements between paradigms, whether these be between Maori and European contexts or
between disciplines (Anthropology, Education, Indigenous Studies and History); while Rogoff
writes about her own efforts to find an uneasy common ground through her “endless
movements between English and Hebrew and German”6 .
Elsewhere, Rogoff writes about “loss as the point of departure for something else…The moment
in which loss is clearly marked and articulated is also the moment in which something else,
as yet unnamed, has come into being.”7   She is speaking about the loss of clear navigational
principles in the face of “conflict between entities (named tribal) and authorities (named the
state).”8
Kevin Fisher discusses “loss” in his article on surf subcultures. In an era of late capitalism in
which everything easily becomes absorbed into paradigms of utility, some surfers resist through
maintaining movement rather than becoming aligned with accumulation economies
(Capitalism and Marxism). Fisher writes: “The wave is an unregulated movement and an end
in itself. It is good for nothing, and the act of riding each wave is an expression of expenditure
that is always singular and irrecuperable. It is thus that movements of expenditure become
performances of sovereignty, released from the scheme of utility but simultaneously connected
to place.” The recent hikoi (protest walks) in Aotearoa/New Zealand also come to mind here.
With regard to “a dance or sequence of music [becoming] the organizing principle through
which mapped knowledge is assembled,”9  Rogoff discusses various forms of the dance;
their connectedness to bodies and places; with histories; and with an “‘epistemology which
posits the corporeal as essential to knowledge’”10  as argued for by Ikemefuna Okoye. In this
issue, Karyn Paringatai writes about “poi” which “refers to a Maori dance or game performed
with a ball-like object [and which has] connections to mountains, rivers, forests, villages,
whanau (families), hapu (sub-tribes) and iwi (tribes).” She undertakes an “unearthing of the
knowledge of the past” through her exploration of poi and its history and connectedness with
bodies and places.
The importance of embodied, “lived experience”, also speaks from Karen Barbour’s
contribution to this issue. She explores phenomenology and movement research in dance
and articulates a productive view of dance: “lived dance experiences are a source of self-
knowledge, a way of knowing about the world, and a way of generating knowledge. Dance is
of profound epistemological significance” in recouping the absent body in Western culture.
Rogoff quotes Arif Dirlik: “An authentically radical conception of culture is not only a way of
seeing the world but also a way of making and changing it…Culture is an activity…in which
the…relations that are possible but absent, because they have been displaced or rendered
impossible…are as fundamental as the relations whose existence it affirms.”11  (my emphasis)
Elsewhere, Rogoff enters a conversation with James Clifford and focuses on the ubiquity of
terms connected to movement in recent discourses: travel; exploration; voyage; migrancy;
Schmidt – Editorial – Junctures, 4, Jun 2005
–
–
– –
 9
displacement; touring; adventure, etc. She writes: “Theory travels; so do theorists. In the late
twentieth century the producers and audiences of theory can no longer be situated in a more-
or-less stable map…‘travel [can be] seen as a complex and pervasive spectrum of human
experiences…this interactive process [is] relevant in varying degrees, to any local, national or
regional domain…everywhere one looks, the processes of human movement and encounter
are…complex’.”12  In this issue of Junctures, Leoni Schmidt connects research on human
displacement to contemporary drawing practices as she presents four “thumbnail sketches”
of migratory encounters and the material form through which they manifest in dispersive
drawings.
Constance Richard contributes a poem to this issue and obliquely suggests movement rather
than writing of it — thereby utilising one of the strengths of poetry. Rogoff writes about the
need “…to avoid a discourse which perceives itself as ‘speaking about’ and shift[s] towards a
discourse of ‘speaking to’…” even to the extent of re-examining writing practices to alter the
objectifying structures by which we organise and inhabit culture.13
Rogoff argues for situated knowledge and is conscious of being placed within“…a culture
that is working very hard to produce another universal unsituadedness through the global
circulation of electronically disseminated information [especially] the fake liberationist claims
made for it.”14  Rodney Browne’s review of Video Art by Michael Rush in this issue warns that
whether “we speak…of mainstream film, television, the internet, computer games, or domestic
video, it is the illusion of motion that is so enthralling as it seduces us into participating in the
emotion, drama, visual gratification and deception of the moment.”
“I wanted to set up an exploration of links…thinking through all the investments and certainties
[in] the arena] of geography,”15  writes Rogoff of her own project. Thinking through philosophical
positions and the very movement of thought are performed through the conversations between
Michel Serres and Bruno Latour in Conversations on Science, Culture and Time. Jim Searle’s
review of this book concludes this issue of Junctures.  Searle writes: “to and fro [allows]
thought to move quickly and lightly…The problems of communication and semiotics mix
themselves with those of navigation and geography. Here we find ourselves in (rather than
looking upon)…The two men celebrate thinking not only as a tool but also as movement.” I
am reminded of the movement in Russell’s thinking i te ata tu (in the wee small hours of the
morning).
Leoni Schmidt
(Editor)
Schmidt – Editorial – Junctures, 4, Jun 2005
–
10
1 Irit Rogoff is Chair of Art History and Visual Culture at Goldsmith’s College, University of London.
2 (London & New York: Routledge, 2000).
3 Ibid, 9.
4 Ibid, 1 & 2.
5 Ibid, 8.
6 Ibid, 7.
7 Ibid, 3.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid, 106 & 107.
10 Ibid, 107, quoting from Ikemefuna Okoye, “Shamanic Penumbra: Houston Conwill’s Art of Color”,
New Observations, 97, October 1993, 28.
11 Rogoff, 152, quoting from Arif Dirlik, “Culturalism as Hegemonic Ideology and Liberating Practice”,
Cultural Critique, 6, 7.
12 Rogoff, 48 & 49, quoting from James Clifford, Routes:Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth
Century (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 46.
13 Rogoff, 32, in response to Trinh T Minh-Ha in “Cotton and Iron”, in Russell Ferguson et al (eds), Out
There: Marginilizations and Culture (Cambridge MA: MIT, 1992).
14 Rogoff, 12.
15 Ibid, 1-2.
Schmidt – Editorial – Junctures, 4, Jun 2005


Moving Across "Terra Infirma"

Ingram, Simon

Machinic Practice in Painting

Dolan, John

58
JOHN DOLAN
Justice for the Trilobites
‘How were the limestone cliffs built?
Practice, practice, practice.’
Darwin’s favourite joke.
‘There’s a broken trilobite for every glint on the white cliffs.’
World-weary biologists’ tag line.
Why be stingy? There are a billion for every glint.
Every brick in Carnegie Hall
Pressed from their carapaces.
Sheer peer pressure, the way
They make Peking Duck. Velly frakey
Golddiggers of 1933
Million or so years back.
That was the Great Depression.
To make a stage for soliloquies.
It can’t last.
They’re already teaching tort litigation
At Burgess Shale U. The hotheaded
Trilobite princes are planning
To sue every multicelled organism
As a monopoly. The possibilities
Are infinite. Of course
There’s the problem of collecting
Damages. Since the Princes
Are fossil paperweights
By now. And the daunting prospect
Of molecular class-action cases
Against unicellular hosts. It’ll get
Fractal for a while. A kind of feeding
Frenzy in reverse, with the predators
The first to go, big fish to little,
Little fish to least, least to the amoeba,
Down to the quark, to the Bosnian forests
Of every balkanised cell, its constituents
Staging legal crowbar fights from now
Till the sun goes nova. Like they say in New York,
‘Take a number and wait.’
Dolan – Trilobites – Junctures, 2, Jun 2004
 59
Try telling them that, though, as they
Wriggle toward Hollywood, trilobite chicks
Expecting stardom the second they step off
The bus. Pimps take some of them,
Gulls even more; the rest
Are found floating like hubcaps
In the surf at Malibu. They’ll never
Be more than extras, hired at scale
By the trillion to be a white-cliff backdrop
For a hunk star’s pirate speech. Hired
By the inch, each inch
A trillion trilobites; and those cliffs
Are a hundred metres high.
That’s a lot of extras, a lot
Of pressure. It’s the lawyers
Who benefit.
And the quarries.
John Dolan has taught rhetoric, creative writing and poetry
at UCLA Berkeley, the University of California and the
University of Otago. He is currently the literary editor of the
scurrilous on-line journal, the eXile, published in Moscow.
Dolan – Trilobites – Junctures, 2, Jun 2004


"Justice for the Trilobites"

Stearns, Peter N

 9
PETER N. STEARNS
Really Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Body:
 A Cultural Challenge
One of today’s most pressing interdisciplinary tasks involves combining cultural and scientific
research techniques in exploring the human condition. A focus on the body – seemingly, a
scientific domain par excellence – provides a splendid way to illustrate the opportunities
and challenges involved in this call for pushing out the boundaries of interdisciplinarity.
Let’s take the case of fat bodies, certainly a topical issue, increasingly on a global scale as
reports of rising obesity now include population segments in India and China as well as the
industrial world with its American leader in girth. Three lines of scientific research, all winning
substantial public attention, fruitfully explore the question of body fat. First, of course, is
simply nutritional science – studying what kinds of foods, and in what quantities, have what
effect on the body. This is an old subject, though constantly being refined.   Second – and
this kind of inquiry goes back over a century – scientific research treats the relationship
between overweight and health – at an extreme, between overweight and premature
mortality. There is room for dispute here, despite the long track record; experts disagree
about how thin one should be, or about whether dieting is preferable to stability even at
above-desirable weight levels. But there is unquestionably a valid research area. The third
and final tack is more recent, in seeking genetic explanations for why some people gain
more weight than others. Genetic science is trendy, exciting – and it holds some potential
for remedy, for there is always the hope of manipulating genes toward beneficial individual
results.
The limitation on all of the scientific inquiries toward body fat is that they fail, or partially
fail, at three crucial explanatory tasks: first, why different groups have different weight
experiences; second, why societies such as in the United States have seen such dramatic
weight gains in the past two decades; and third, why abundant warnings about overweight
have not produced behavioural changes comparable, for example, to the impact of cautions
against cigarette smoking in recent years. To be sure, group variations may have something
to do with genetic variations in body type. Change over time can be partly explained by
shifts in the amount and nature of available food, combined with more sedentary life styles.
       Stearns – Interdisciplinary Approaches – Junctures, 1, Dec 2003
10
But the fact is that all three topics, vital to understanding why contemporary bodies are as
they are, involve culture. Why, by the end of the 20th century, was the average French woman
only about a third as likely as her average American counterpart to be obese? The answer
has to do with profound differences in expectations about eating (how to define enjoyment,
when to eat), plus notable differences in degrees of emphasis on aesthetic considerations
as constraints on eating (with the French considerably more devoted to beauty as a criterion),
plus considerable differences in approaches toward children and eating, with the French
persuaded that children do not naturally make good decisions about eating and that adult
supervision and restraint are essential. All of these differences in values and beliefs can be
explained, through comparative and historical cultural analysis, and they are indispensable
tools for social diagnosis and, potentially, remedy.
The same approach holds for the vital issue of change over time. Genetics may be invaluable
for showing why, in a social context in which average weight gains are considerable, some
individuals gain more than others – but they do not help explain the social context itself at
all. For this, alterations in food availability – the infamous increase in the size of restaurant
portions – are crucial, but so again is culture, in explaining why people accept the larger
portions, why the role of eating shifts particularly from the 1980s onward.
The third point, on the ineffectiveness of campaigns against overeating, is intriguing, and
oddly neglected. Marshalling scientific data about desirable bodies does not alone suffice.
There has even been some fascinating counterthrust, based on other cultural values
associated with civil rights and feminism, arguing that weight control campaigns are
themselves a trap, particularly for women. Cultural analysis and, in this case, some cultural
experiments seem essential if proponents of slimmer bodies are to win through.
The message seems obvious: while there is important research to be done in both the
scientific and the cultural veins, neither approach by itself suffices around issues of bodies
and obesity. Cultural issues offer intriguing analytical challenges and arguably outweigh –
the word is used advisedly – the scientific issues in explaining why contemporary people
are as they are and in establishing the bases for remedy.
Yet the problems are equally obvious: we have no established apparatus for collaboration
among scientists and cultural analysts in dealing with topics like body weight. Funding
sources are wildly disparate, with most cultural analysis operating with little or no funding
at all, compared to the feasts available, say, to geneticists.
Similar challenges and complexities surround a host of other body topics, though the balance
between physical and cultural assessments will vary somewhat from case to case. No one
would dispense with medical and psychological research on the problem of anorexia nervosa,
for example; but understanding why the disease is modern, and what the dynamics of
family values were in initially causing it brings us straight back to cultural issues. The impact
of ageing on the body is perhaps more heavily a scientific domain, but it has intriguing
cultural angles as well, as assumptions change over time, for ageing individuals themselves
and for groups reacting to the elderly. Modern emphasis on the centrality of gender in
Stearns – Interdisciplinary Approaches – Junctures, 1, Dec 2003
 11
understanding the body gives rise to massive scientific programs, but it is itself partly a
cultural artefact, a context that warrants serious attention. And the list goes on. Whole
fields, including the physical senses, or sexuality, or physical disabilities, now have rich
cultural agendas to complement, sometimes to rival, their scientific counterparts. No full
understanding of vision, for example, is possible without some grasp of the changes in
vision’s role, among all the senses, over the past two centuries.
But the fact remains that culture does not jump to the fore when most people – scholars or
the general public – think about the body. We return to a central dilemma of contemporary
interdisciplinary research, eerily evocative of the old and largely unrevised two cultures
formula: the gap between the physical and the cultural, with its echoes in the gap between
the (seemingly largely) quantitative and the (largely though not necessarily entirely)
qualitative. Over the past two decades, not only in cultural studies per se but in cultural
anthropology, the cultural branches of sociology, history and psychology, there have been
vast gains in our knowledge of the nature and impact of culture in domains such as the
body – but the larger resonance of these gains has fallen short.
Most scientists, even most psychologists, have brushed aside cultural findings, if they were
aware of them at all. Biosociologists have asserted the primacy of inherent physical attributes
more loudly than ever. No new sources of research funding have opened for cultural inquiry.
And no larger curricular changes have marked a recognition that culture demands more
systematic attention. In general education, culture still means great literature, or foreign
language, or formal philosophy – all valid topics, but quite different from cultural analysis
as practiced and available on topics such as the body. Nor has the list of academic majors
significantly altered, with a few exceptions such as gender studies or cultural studies
themselves. Certainly, when we think about interdisciplinarity, we more commonly turn to
new combinations within the sciences – sometimes wedded to computation, as in
computational neuroscience or bioinformatics – than to efforts to bridge the larger divide.
There are several reasons for the distressing gap between significant findings in cultural
analysis and wider reception.  Two key explanations are closely related: the self-indulgence
of culturalists and the hostility of conservatives.
In terms of impact, as opposed to self-congratulation, many cultural-turn partisans have
committed a number of blunders that have called their approach into question.  Some
have, quite simply, pressed the cultural case too hard, ignoring evidence of constant or
‘natural’ features in the human experience and disdaining scientific findings in the process.
Efforts to describe certain illnesses as entirely culturally contracted can fall into this category.
More serious still has been a widespread addiction to exceedingly recondite postmodern
theorizing that has created an often impenetrable in-group vocabulary while, at times,
showing little interest in actual evidence.
Implications of relativism, inherent in the cultural approach to some degree, have often
been presented too baldly or defiantly, distracting from solid findings.  Few disciplines have
really been converted to a sense that everything is in the eye of the beholder, yet grandiose
       Stearns – Interdisciplinary Approaches – Junctures, 1, Dec 2003
12
claims in that direction have, rightly or wrongly, alienated many potential allies.  And some
culturalists have taken such a delight in exploring particular subcultures, for example, where
sexuality is concerned, that larger cultural standards have been underinvestigated or even
ignored.  A colleague recently pointed out to me a graduate student who was amazingly
knowledgeable about cultural evidence for the values of various sexual minorities, but who
knew nothing about either widely current standards or about actual sexual behaviours in
the society he was studying.
For a variety of reasons, thus, it has been too easy for nonconverts to dismiss the cultural
turn as radical self-indulgence.
In the United States, the cultural turn has also run afoul of political conservatism.  In the
hands of critics like Lynne Cheney, the valorisation of the nation as multicultural in the
1960s began to yield to an emphasis on a single inspiring national story in the 1980s.  The
central issue was conservative discomfort with exploration of cultural diversity at a time
when growing immigration seemed to be making the discussion of core values imperative.
Amid the din, findings about values and beliefs as sources of human behaviour could not
overcome partisan objections.
The cultural turn, in other words, got caught up in the wider culture wars.  Theory and
jargon helped comfort culturalists amid growing conservatism, but those tendencies
discouraged wider persuasion while goading conservative intolerance.  And, while the culture
wars may have softened, they are not over today, as new international crises have prompted
reassertions of the need to rally around a national culture.
Most importantly, the sound and fury have distracted us from what should be the principal
discussion: the place of cultural findings in an intellectual community that, particularly in
the United States, has become excessively devoted to a scientism that tends to ignore
culture.
The cultural turn has made no perceptible dent in our deeply rooted attitudes.  Many social
scientists still view cultural data as soft.  Indeed, particularly in disciplines like psychology,
which could serve as a bridge between the humanities and the social sciences by embracing
both nature and nurture in their explorations of human behaviours, trivial but quantifiable
projects – like those that endlessly count college students’ reactions to this or that stimulus
– easily qualify for funds over projects that explore larger questions with cultural data.
Even more:  widespread assumptions of human uniformity across cultures, ultimately derived
from the Enlightenment and deeply ingrained in disciplines like economics as well as the
life sciences, readily prevail over attention to cultural causation.  It is far easier, for example,
to finance a project on uniform human facial expression (not least because of obvious
relevance in military interrogation) than to find backing for studying cultural distinctions in
emotional standards.
The presumably scientific approach has gained further impetus in recent years from the
new passion for genetics, which, again, seems to dwarf attention to culture.  There has
been undeniable and important progress in genetic research in recent years.  But there has
Stearns – Interdisciplinary Approaches – Junctures, 1, Dec 2003
 13
also been a tendency to claim too much for genes where behavioural changes are concerned.
First, genes have a soothing way of limiting responsibility for one’s actions.  Cultures do not,
since it is widely assumed that individuals should be able to rise above cultural constraints
that are human creations.  Second, there is the hope that genetic identification might lead
to medical remedy (hopefully without much personal effort); but we are less certain about
changing cultures.
The last uncertainty, however, leads back to the need to pay more attention to cultural
analysis.  Cultural factors are often altered, sometimes quite intentionally: eating habits of
our culture can be changed, even if we have not yet hit on a successful formula.  One of the
reasons to urge the continued validity of culture research, in fact, involves our capacity to
learn more about the process of deliberate cultural change than we currently know.  Even
prosaic examples, like the dramatic American shift toward disapproving of smoking and the
reconfiguration of smokers as moral pariahs, provide evidence of change through what one
might call culture management.
We need, therefore, to expand the cultural research agenda.  Continued inquiry into what
cultures cause, in terms of human and social behaviours, remains vital.  Comparative work,
domestic and international, has tremendous additional potential.  We can also think about
‘applied’ cultural work, dealing with the explicit promotion of beneficial cultural change,
and the kinds of methods that are most likely to be reliable, with the fewest unintended
consequences.
Already, there are signs of how a new generation of work on culture can focus on central
issues, even as we discuss moving beyond the cultural turn. There are several points here.
First: the range of aspects of human behaviour, including the body, being investigated through
cultural analysis expands steadily. We have new work on the cultural understanding of
sleep, an important new study of the elusive topic of masturbation, new inquiries on the
cultural construction of boredom – to mention just a few examples.
Second: the complexities of the current global age call attention to cultural factors from
another angle, requiring a new generation of comparative scholarship to explore what is
involved in cultural differentiation. Recent surveys of the Islamic world, for example, reveal
far more disagreement with the West on issues such as gender and sexuality, than on
political systems directly. The range of cultural analysis, including attention to issues
associated with the body, takes on additional significance.
Third: though haltingly, there are signs of greater discourse across the science-culture divide,
around specific issues.  A conference on addiction invites a researcher to talk about the
origins and ongoing cultural functions of the addiction concept in the United States.
Admittedly, the audience, bent on establishing the scientific basis for addiction while
discussing treatment, is not quite sure what to do with the information, but at least a
conversation is launched. A French program, largely staffed by nutritional scientists, invites
another cultural researcher to talk about what comparative history suggests should be
       Stearns – Interdisciplinary Approaches – Junctures, 1, Dec 2003
14
done to avoid American obesity levels.
To be sure, more remains to be done to create a more dynamic and imaginative
interdisciplinary climate around topics such as the body. We need more active work on the
interaction between cultural and somatic causation. We need bolder curricular ventures
that stake a clear place for cultural analysis, in a new interdisciplinary configuration that
does not smother cultural explanations amid conventional bows to the humanities. At the
same time, we need to encourage cultural-studies programs to move beyond their current
isolation and to take more central roles in combining the disciplines that generate
understanding of how cultures work.
Above all, while learning from the mistakes of cultural theory and jargon in the past, we
need more researchers willing to ask what role culture plays, even when their own main
interests lie in other explanations – and more cultural researchers interested in taking
scientific findings more seriously. The challenge is exciting.
Peter N. Stearns is Provost of George Mason University, in Virginia, and Professor of
History. He edits the Journal of Social History. His research, both on modern Europe
and the United States, has focused on using historical analysis to explore human
behaviours in areas such as old age, the emotions, and dieting. His most recent
book, Anxious Parents, deals with the emergence of new kinds of childrearing
challenges in 20th-century America.
Stearns – Interdisciplinary Approaches – Junctures, 1, Dec 2003


Really Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Body: A Cultural Challenge

Terry, Ana

Hunter, Don

 69
ANA TERRY & DON HUNTER
Functioning Fakes: Prosthetic Bodies
Functioning Fakes, as the installation title suggests, presents a conundrum of artificial
constructs. Within a monochromatic hum, a gang of machines forms a hive of tireless activity
which appears to feed a life support system of both production and consumption. Tethered by
economical lengths of taut yellow power cord, the arrangement suggests a strange and
elaborate choreographed dance, momentarily suspended in the act of discovery. Dry-docked
and grid-locked, the weighty battle-ship-grey vessels appear both banal and comical: hybrids
of industrial artefacts and playful commodities. The adage “I work to play, I play to work”
Terry & Hunter – Functioning Fakes – Junctures, 1, Dec 2003
70
comes to mind; the irony of the human
condition; the dichotomy of leisure and
work in a capitalist economy.
This complex system of unnamed entities
supports extraneous members, tagged on
and amalgamated into their bulky forms
in a shroud of primer paint suggesting an
extravagance of artifice. Rudimentary in
form, complex in internal workings, these
bodies are interlinked by umbilical tubing
and arterial pipes which in turn disappear
into the floor, mockingly ‘feeding’ into
another space. There are other decoys
also. Inert prosthetics engage visually with
their spurious counterparts in labour,
implying a strange sense of mutual
dependency within which their
relationship remains a mystery. Life-size
in scale, the machines express a spatial
reality, while shifts of size in the detailed
microcosms of activity produced by the
mechanics, paradoxically challenge this
momentary sense of relativity.
Within this large cosmos of networks, the
grey bodies wield their own miniature
worlds of theatrical activity. One machine
offers a bird’s-eye view of ant-like workers
who drag their metal filing forms around
a monolithic magnetic rod in some eternal
homage. On another, a black disk, planet-
like, grazes its orbital trajectory in an
endless gesture of wearying fatigue. A
hydropower plant is suggested in yet
another microcosm where glass rods
channel an endless deluge of some
undefined product. These restless
machines continue to play out their
compulsive operations against a
continuous blanket hum while a clunky
switch rifts the comforting lull.
Terry & Hunter – Functioning Fakes – Junctures, 1, Dec 2003
 71
An artificial lung pneumatically operated by an elaborate system of pulleys and switches is
malfunctioning. Unreliable in its draw, the shallow and erratic breath denies the certitude
of the machine’s capacity to fully function. The system’s minimal and unreliable output
contradicts the elaborate mechanisms of potential. Like fledgling juggernauts pitched on
the verge of redundancy, they are barely managing, their existence controlled remotely, the
operator absent.
Terry & Hunter – Functioning Fakes – Junctures, 1, Dec 2003
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Functioning Fakes: a kinetic installation by artist Don Hunter, was exhibited from
13-21 June 2003 at 82 Bond Street Contemporary Art Space, Dunedin, New Zealand.
The lack of manual control and suggested dysfunction reinforces a sense that this is a
metaphor of our consumer society, referencing our co-dependency upon the machinery
that serves us, yet perpetuating our endless servitude in relation to a system upon which
we have inherited our reliance. The unnamed ‘fakes’ – with seemingly familiar contours
and motions, yet unknown and with erratic functions – deploy a sense of entropy, triumphing
over an otherwise orderly world.
Terry & Hunter – Functioning Fakes – Junctures, 1, Dec 2003


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