Theory

by Dionne Brand

  I don’t think that I was trying to fool my lovers. As I said from the beginning, I merely thought that my lovers would give me respite from the worries of my thesis. I thought they would give me a view on the world that would attenuate my gloom. And truthfully, they did. I loved being with them. I made myself useful where I could. If that meant giving advice, certainly I gave advice. I’m not one to coddle people. I’m not one to patronize. Though…wasn’t that, in fact, what I did in all cases? I must be honest. But that time was that time, and now I really don’t need another person in my life. It’s so disconcerting when one’s ideas, one’s view of the world doesn’t coincide with one’s actual life. But as I said, I will be diligent about examining this.

  This thesis will attempt to show some aspects of the constitutive whole….What are the unabstracted and real relations that are lived out every day? This thesis is only a preliminary study and perhaps as such it will prove the basis for further study.*7 I’ve gone back and forth on that last sentence. It smacks of a false modesty. This is not a preliminary study in the least. I’ve spent many years on this proposition. I’m not sure how this modesty will be understood. I may be laughed at, given how long it’s taken me to complete my thesis. Some may think that I’m hedging my bets, afraid of the deluge of criticism that I am sure will follow. On the other hand, it could be a meaningfully rude gesture on my part, suggesting that if this great work is preliminary, I challenge anyone to top it. The cross-disciplinarity of the work is breathtaking, if I say so myself. In it, I’ve cited architecture, literature and semiotics. I believe that I’ve made intelligible for the first time the theory of instrumentality and longing. And the image of women in painting from antiquity to the nineteenth century—let me not fail to mention the great John Berger here—I’ve scattered throughout, with brief exegeses on them in order to illustrate my point about the complete absence of theorizing the male body. When I say theorizing, I mean that it has never been the body in question. The female body has been gone over, it has been done to death. I don’t mean any pun here, but it is indeed a dead body, an embalmed corpse that is shuttled out as ancient priests might in some bizarre ceremony for an ancient relic. Our gaze should light now on the male body, its location and its excesses. Theory has failed so far to witness the spectacle of the masculine. Theory has merely assumed the spectacle of the masculine as a priori. Theory has fallen down in rooting out this ubiquitous being that commands everything but appears nowhere, is fed and nurtured on a corpse, and requires more and more feeding. So the female body is placed on the pyre every day, roasted and dressed to enliven this necrophiliac. Who is at the centre of this body, how is it constituted, how is it hidden from observation; who enforces this regimen of necrogenesis? This is my line of inquiry. Simply, who is the being that feeds off the corpse of femininity? My chapter is therefore called “Male Bodies: Eating the Dead.” Some will think that I’ve gone too far. I think that I haven’t gone far enough. Bertolt Auer never liked this chapter. It made him uncomfortable. I understood why. We had a prolonged argument about what I call the excess of the male body. My view, I told him, was that the male body was the unregulated body in the context of regulations imposed on bodies qua bodies; that the male body was hidden in its excess; that it overreached, leaked as existence. Auer could not grasp what I was coming at theoretically, and so he became defensive, as if I were speaking of his body, his personal body. I tried to say—because after all he was a philosopher—that I was problematizing a thematic, a paradigm, a quality, if not the dominant quality, of being. “Being,” I said, “is constituted as male and I’m trying to untangle the ontogenic and the philogenic and to propose a sociogenic in Fanon’s terms as regards the male.” Auer wasn’t usually so reticent. At least, not when it came to expatiating on being. He would have involved Heidegger here, but he couldn’t collect his tongue from the floor. I continued: By “excess” I mean that this body, the one we are problematizing, its wants, its desires and its needs, are taken as given. As natural. And therefore these desires, wants and needs are never brought under scrutiny or reined in. It is, in fact, the male body that is biology. I know this sounds counterintuitive, given feminist theories that posit, I would say rhetorically, that it’s the female body that is treated as solely biology. No, I say it’s the male body that’s marked as unsociable, as unable to be brought into society or brought under the regulations of the social or the political. What I call its excess—that is, the way this body’s “biology” supersedes the social and resists socialization—is the focus of my examinations. If socialization is the process of humans coming into society, coming into the social, why are men excused from this task? And why do we call it society if we exempt the excess of the male body from coming under the breadth of its possible processes? Auer, and by way of Auer, Heidegger, takes this state as a priori.

  Auer, if not Heidegger, blew up when I said this.

  “Auer,” I said, “I am not you; this is what you fail to see. And for that matter, you’re not you, if in fact the you that you think you are is without history, and in that, like me. I refuse your starting point. It’s arbitrary, vague, deliberately vague and generalizing.”

  The day of that argument, Auer finally opened his office door and directed me out. His face was a strange colour. He was silent. “But let me continue,” I said without moving. “By excess I mean it’s the thing we never speak of. It is sediment we never disturb, we never address. If it’s addressed, a brutal response is applied. The only reason for women’s subjugation and negation, I’d say, is the sustenance of this unspeakable.” This was the last argument I had with Auer. Much as I hated him, I certainly hope that it did not contribute to his ill health and subsequent end. Whatever I’ve said about him here, I didn’t wish him dead. Not in the physical sense. Only his ideas, his modernity. I will say no more. I don’t want to descend into hypocrisy. And my chapter has outlived him, and will continue to outlive him. I want to return to this idea of excess. I’ll put it in capital letters. EXCESS. I want to say that the leakage, the overproduction, of masculinity is at least responsible for the dreadful violence in the world. Yes, I quite like that concept—the overproduction of masculinity. Just as one may overproduce a certain commodity and then find oneself with its overgrowth or decay. This excess then becomes the state of affairs, the state of being, and the very production of being. Certainly, as a parenthetical, there are masculinities. The idea I’m referring to is plural, and not all masculinities, or not all areas of those masculinities, produce, in and of themselves, excess. I feel I’m appeasing Auer here, so let me banish that last notion. Because as we live today, none of this is disrupted, shaken loose by—as useful as they might be—theories of radical thought that unearth and contest hegemony. These theories subtend the excess.

  Everyone retreats into this excess when a critique is launched. They retreat into this excess as “being.” Eliding what might be into what is. There’s a certain cowardice to this, a mendacity. Half of us know that we’ll be killed if we provide a sustained attack on the overproduction of masculinity, and half of us will be the killers. I say “us” only out of habit. There is no “us.” Another elision. Who am I, then, if I’m not Bertolt Auer? I am the being who recognizes Bertolt Auer and who shocked Bertolt Auer into recognition. It might have caused his death. It’s not for me to say.

  This reminds me of Nawal El Saadawi’s Death of an Ex-Minister. In it, the ex-Minister falls ill and dies because a woman looks him directly in his eyes. Or, one could summon Adorno’s Metaphysics. Auer himself, were he to take his theories to their obvious indications, would quote Adorno: “I would say, not that evil is trivial, but that triviality is evil—triviality, that is, as the form of consciousness and mind that adapts itself to the world as it is, that obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil.”

  Anyway, I’ll stop here. When I begin to talk out my ideas before committing them to paper, by the time I get to my desk the ideas h
ave slipped me. Often I’d begin to tell Selah a thought, and her silence would lead me to think how important the idea was, and so I would talk and talk over dinner or on our evening neighbourhood walks, and then when we returned home I’d have lost my train of thought. Then I would ask Selah to reprise my thoughts for me, and she would say, “——, I can’t talk the way you do. You said something about some guy.” This would disappoint me and infuriate me. Some guy? As always, she was right. It was about some guy. I would sit at my desk and try to recuperate my ideas that had felt so generative when I was telling Selah, but which now, at my desk, seemed derivative because Selah had astutely précised them into “some guy.” There was an acuteness to Selah; she could condense a thought of mine into its irrelevance. But Selah thought that every idea that didn’t involve her beauty was a waste of time. How much time had I spent trying to convince her otherwise? Hoping that she would adopt my language, my way of seeing the world? At the same time, I valued Selah’s way of looking at the world and I didn’t want that to change. I don’t want to revisit my life with Selah. I can’t be certain of my interpretation, and it would be better not to skewer any views of that past. I haven’t spoken to Selah since our breakup. I haven’t seen her since the day I put my belongings in a rented car and sped away, singing. It wasn’t really down a highway; it was across town. If I were to add up the notes I kept when I was with Selah, they would be a deluge. Completely incomprehensible notes, but a deluge. I have to make a bold decision regarding their indecipherable language: Keep them or throw them away? For the moment, I’ve stuffed them into two ottomans, as each time I get ready to throw them out I’m swept away by a nostalgia for the thought itself discernible in the note. This thought had a life; it was once accompanied by supporting evidence. Then I look at another thought, written in another note, and recognize it as something so recondite, so epicurean, yet so ephemeral that even if I could recuperate it, this thought wouldn’t have a life in the world of brutalism I now inhabit. So I visit the ottomans as one visits a library—simply for the hints and the references, for inspiration. I can’t throw these notes out. The Ottoman Files, I joke about them. I imagine them going on in their life as I imagine the set of ideas of a separate culture; this one inhabiting the thoughts of these sets of people, the other inhabiting another—all of them existing in a parallel universe. Others may see a messy rubbish dump when they open my door; I see the great propositions I’ve written, the breathing room I’ve made between myself and the dread.

  When my brother, Wendell, came to see me a year ago, his face registered increasing horror with each step through the hallway. I thought: how people change. How people conform to the most grim manifestations of the human. It’s truly amazing. His room in my parents’ house used to be a pigsty—not of paper like this, but of pizza boxes and stinking socks and porn magazines under his mattress. There were cups unreturned to the kitchen for weeks, growing colonies of fungus and spiders. Now he hesitates in my apartment as if he’s seen something terrifying. I showed him the alleyway through my books toward the kitchen, but he backed away toward the front door saying he had to have a smoke and wouldn’t want to cause a fire. I agreed and followed him out. He didn’t deserve to be among my precious books and paper. I told him this as we stood on the sidewalk. He said, “Are you alright?”

  I said, “Don’t bullshit me, what do you want?”

  He said, “Nothing. Why can’t I come to see you?”

  I said, “Why would you leave your downtown posh condo to come to my dump?”

  He said, “For god’s sake, you’re sounding fucking crazy. And you’re right, that apartment is a dump. Shit, why don’t you move home?”

  “Home?” I said, “Home? Now who’s sounding crazy?”

  “Well,” he said, “father and mother could use some help. They’re not getting younger, you know.” It was my turn to look incredulous.

  “You’re out of your fucking mind,” I said. “Look,” I said, “I’m trying to work on my diss. What fucking shit are you bothering me for?”

  “We used to talk about a lot of things,” he said. “Why don’t we anymore?” Christ, I thought, he’s having a crisis of some kind and I can’t deal right now. He sat down on the sidewalk and smoked. So I sat down beside him.

  “You’ve chosen what you’ve chosen,” I said finally. “Yeah,” he said. “You’re lucky.”

  We talked like this, my brother and I, when we were alone. Short, staccato, colloquial affectations—in homage to our incipient teenaged rebellion. We sat there that night for a while, smoking. I don’t even smoke. But I smoked with my brother. Yes, he chose what he chose, and yes, I’m lucky. “Well, fuck,” I said. “Well, fuck,” he said. I don’t know what time it was when we got up and I went inside and he went his way. I could always sit in silence with my brother for a long time. He’s the only person I could do that with. Ever since our childhood. And it gave me a peace to sit on the sidewalk with him, even though the evening had started out with my annoyance with him. We sat in my luck and his choice. Anyone else, I would’ve said, “I’m not lucky. You chose, I chose.” But I allowed my brother the balm of thinking I was lucky and that he had fallen into some hard thing. We sat there for hours. People came into the building and people left. We talked until no one came in and no one left. A little drizzle fell and then it stopped. If we talked, it was only because he brought up The Alienist by Machado de Assis and we both laughed. My brother loved Machado de Assis. He half-learned Portuguese to read Machado de Assis in the original. He devoured anything by Machado de Assis. Philosopher or Dog?, Dom Casmurro. I think he talked about Machado de Assis that night in order to live for a while with his true passion. In The Alienist, there’s a doctor who returns from Europe to a small town in Brazil and begins putting everyone who doesn’t conform into an asylum. Then, changing his theory about who’s mad, he releases them and he puts everyone who conforms into the asylum. And then finally, on further development of his theory, he lets those people out and puts himself, alone, into the asylum. My brother loved this novella; he loved the doctor, Simão Bacamarte. My brother had been in the middle of his PhD on Machado de Assis when my father finally got to him. But maybe my brother always wanted my father to get to him. “You’re in the asylum,” I said to him. He laughed out loud; his shoulders shook. He said, “You’re in the asylum.” We both laughed for a long time. Maybe I was in the asylum too. I loved my brother. It must’ve been four in the morning when we stopped smoking and got up from the sidewalk. I watched him get into his car. He waited for me to go into the doorway. He left. What a strange evening that was.

  Such ritualistic ceremonies differ dramatically from popular culture performances of sexualized female bodies…with disparate cultural performances yielding relatively the same outcomes across….I am especially interested, what I find important to this dissertation are the eruptions and repetitions yet unremarked upon in previous work.*8 It seems to me that the world would have been different if my brother, Wendell, had completed his thesis. I don’t know why I say this, since he wasn’t about to discover or solve some great scientific mystery—but I feel his seemingly small act of conformity to power set time back. All acts of conformity to power set time back. They set back thinking. A minute, subatomic change would’ve occurred in how social relations are perceived and extended had the regimen of power been disrupted. An anomaly would have occurred in the power grid. And therefore the course of human history may have changed because of this small act. My brother’s life may also have been different. How, I can’t say. I won’t propose the term “happier,” since life is so changeable on the micro level, on the day to day. Yet, as I said, so unchangeable in the macro. He might’ve set off a time bomb in the unchangeable, nevertheless. I don’t say this to boast—but I believe that my positioning, my stance as I’ve outlined so far, represents an explosion, however subatomic, in the networks of power that obviate a life truly lived. My apartment represents the living archive of this life. Meanwhile, my brot
her thinks that I am lucky and he thinks my apartment is a dump. All that indecipherability on the floor, my walls of books, my piles of paper—I appear crazy to him, yet he thinks I’m lucky.

  Now I’m more determined to finish this thesis, even though it involves the gargantuan task of bringing all that I’ve thought into a monumental work. I feel that I should eschew the traditional coherent work of propositions and proofs, supporting documents and footnotes. If Benjamin can do it, so can I. If Barthes can do it, so can I; and certainly if Foucault can do it, so can I. All of the works engage with the immediately chromatic category of race as race replaces and/or coincides with questions of hegemony, historicity, and class, and conquest, to render these previously invisible categories visible.*9 This seems to me a good starting point for chapter three, where I deal with artists such as Benjamin-Constant and Delacroix, who, counter to other assertions, visibilize race, only to spectacularize it. If their art is art at all, which I dispute (I say it is “yellow journalism,” not art), it’s the art of spectacle—of spectacularizing these bodies as outside of the human. The eruptions and repetitions of this visibilization foreclosed any address to the human, added to which a vocabulary of seeing was produced; an alphabet, if you will, of the look. Liberty led the people over the body of the women of Algiers.*10 I know that it will be difficult to get this wide and multi-layered reading through my new committee, when I form the committee. I’m positive they’ll say that I should focus on one thing or another. The problem with these people is they have no concept of history or time. For someone such as me, everything must be done in one shot. I’ll never have another chance to elaborate these ideas. It’s not merely a question of my age but of the urgency of the task and the material conditions. These last militate against ideas such as mine erupting on the surface of the intellectual discourses that are constantly at work dampening down such ideas. We all know what I’m talking about, but the committee will pretend not to understand. I’ll have to insist. Again I am concentrating on these works as they obsessively reproduce and repeat across time and space, the morality plays of the colonialists and imperialists. They force us daily to re-enact these dramas in literature and art as if we were first-grade children learning the alphabet.*11