the prefaces of edward bond

127 TERRY EAGLETON

Nature and violence: the prefaces of Edward Bond

Writers are not conventionally expected to theorise about their own work, and when they do so in the unabashedly large generalities of Edward Bond’s prefaces to his plays, it is predictable that criticism will find itself a little embarrassed. It is customary, confronted with such tenaciously ‘abstract‘ texts, to argue that they are of course outstripped, even perhaps overturned, by the rich concreteness of the art itself. Bond’s prefaces, however, seem to me documents of considerable urgency and power; and it would be a pity if the banal anti-theoreticism of English criticism, with its patronising dismis- sal of such supposedly home-spun autodidactic wisdom, were allowed to bury these writings entirely. Much of what I say of them in this essay will be sharply critical; so I suppose I should make it clear at the outset that I have chosen to discuss them out of political solidarity with Bond’s aims. He is, I believe, probably the most important writer in Britain today - not necessarily the most brilliant or original, but the one who has most profoundly, single-mindedly meditated upon the single most important question in an epoch of probable nuclear destruction, that of human violence. If this essay fastens upon certain confusions and contradictions in his thought, it is because I believe such thinking is far too vital to remain unclarified.

Many of the apparent inconsistencies in Bond‘s prefaces are rooted in a well-known paradox in radical political thought. Against a conservative belief in a fixed human nature, radicals want to stress the possibilities of transformation; but in order to establish some criteria of what would count as apositive transformation, you seem to need to appeal to some model of human nature. Bond’s thinking, just as much as Marx’s, revolves in this familiar circle, as a comparison between his Introduction to The Fool and his Preface to Leur would make clear. In the former text, Bond argues an orthodox ’culturalist’ case about the concept of human nature: ‘We don’t have a fixed nature in the way other animals do. We have a ”gap” left by our freedom from the captive nature of other animals, from the tight control of instincts. The gap is filled by culture. Human nature is in fact culture.’ In the Leur Preface, by contrast, the notion of a ’human nature’ seems firmly in place: Bond writes here of human beings under capitalism as alienated from their ‘natural’ selves, speaks of the’natural functioning‘ of men and women, of people living ‘unnatural’ lives, and even of what he terms ’biological justice’. Rejecting the doctrine of an innate human aggression, he insists that such violence is essentially a response to ’unnatural’ social conditions,

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conditions for which human beings are not biologically adapted: 'We can see that most men are spending their lives doing things for which they are not biologically designed. We are not designed for our production lines, housing blocks, even cars; and these things are not designed for us.' How is it, then, that an animal whose nature is culture can come to live unnaturally? What are we unnatural to ?

Human aggression, Bond claims, is essentially unnatural. But what this actually means is that it iscaused by 'unnatural' societies. The actual response of aggression itself, far from being unnatural, is the most natural thing in the world - 'a natural, biological aggressive response'. Human beings, then, would seem to be relieved of the moral guilt of violence in two directly antithetical ways. First, because aggression is only provoked by 'unnatural' social conditions; and secondly because what such conditions elicit is, it would seem, a purely biological reflex beyond the reach of moral discourse altogether. Aggression would appear to be both too natural and too unnatural to be an object of moral blame. But we can note that this argument involves a covert shift in the meaning of the term 'natural'. 'Natural', when used to describe the aggressive response, means essentially 'biological'; 'unnatural', when used to characterise the social conditions of capitalism, is inescapably a moral evaluation. Working on a production line may be 'unnatural' in one sense, but in another sense men and women are indeed 'biologically designed for it because they can do it, as opposed to, say, flying, without mechanical aid. If 'natural' means 'that for which we are biologically designed, then everything that we do is natural; the sheer facts of human biology will not supply us with a morally discriminating norm here, other than in some primitivist gesture which would rule out artificial lighting along with production lines. Bonds appeal to the biological structure of the body will only function as a moral, political criterion if that structure is seen to be fundamentally creative; what is then unnatural are conditions which surpress or inhibit such creativity. Human beings, in a familiar Marxist humanism, are 'natural' when they are able freely and fully to develop their creative capacities. 'We're born with many capacities and potentialities', Bond remarks in the Introduction to The Fool, 'and these can be developed rationally so that we became socialised members of a culture.' But the term 'capacity', like 'nature', hovers ambiguously between a descriptive and an evaluative sense. Which capacities are to be developed? All of them? But the human body's 'creativity' (another term stranded between 'fact' and 'value') includes the capacity to construct production lines. The 'creative' structure of the body, in other words, will not itself provide the moral and political discriminations between this and that capacity which Bond requires, precisely because, as his 'culturalism' recognises, human

Nature and violence: the prefaces of Edward Bond 129

creativity is that peculiarly open-ended, instinctually ill-constrained process we call culture or history. The fact that Bond refuses the title 'culture' to contemporary society, in the Introduction to The Fool, suggests that he needs the word as a political value-judgement as well as the 'neutral' description of what is distinctive to all humanity which it is elsewhere in his work. 'Biologi- cal nature' has a similar ambivalence: it appears to be purely descriptive, but can in fact only do the work he demands of it as prescriptive, as a concealed norm. Both 'culture' and 'biology' represent for him an uneasy nexus of 'fact' and 'value', and his difficulty is how to exploit the suggestive identify of fact and value they signify while recognising a certain non-identity at the same time. Human biology would seem to offer grounds for a materialist theory of political morality: those societies are 'natural' and 'rational' which develop rather than frustrate the body's natural capacities. But morality must already be the hidden ground of this judgement, since certain human capacities and not others have already been silently selected as normative. A political morality may be roofed in the body - this is one of Bonds most original, illuminating moves - but it cannot simply be read off from or reduced to the body, for the body is already caught up in discourse from the outset, constructed in particular ways. It is not possible to ground this construction in turn in the body, since the body is its object rather than its source.

Bond hesitates, then, between a full-blooded culturalism which would deny the very existence of 'biological' aggression, and biologism which would hope to palliate its own rather disabling acknowledgement of an aggressive capacity in human beings by insisting that such a capacity is only ever socially catalysed. The hesitation is apparent in Bonds claim that the unjust, unnatural state of society 'create(s) a natural, biological aggressive response in the members of society'. But if social conditions actually create the aggressive response, in what sense can it be said to be 'natural' and 'biological'? Does Bond really mean that the conditions create the response, or that they activate an existing biological capacity? His language is symp- tomatically incoherent here: society, surely, cannot create a biological response, in the sense of fashioning that which was not potentially there already. If society can make human beings violent, then it can only be by catalysing an already-existent biological potential, for no society can trigger a reflex of which we are biologically incapable. In acknowledging this, however, Bond is in danger of deconstructing his own argument and play- ing into ;he hands of the innatist reactionaries; for how does this 'natural, biological aggressive response' differ from their own case? Is it the fact that violence is socially provoked which marks the difference? But the innatist does not need to deny this to sustain his claims, and indeed it is in one sense

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no more than a tautology: how could any human activity not be in some sense a social affair? (Just as, in another way, it is tautological to claim that violence is biological, for how could it not be a matter of our bodies?) What case does Bond consider the innatists hold?

Perhaps the difference lies in his insistence that violence is anability only, not a necessity. But this opposition can also be deconstructed. Jacques Derrida has shown that the Possibility of reinscribing a piece of writing in a different context, one which may or may not be empirically realised, must actually be structural to the piece of writing in question.’ Such a possibility, whether enacted or not, is necessarily inscribed within it; it is not in that sense merely ’contingent’. Similarly, if human beings have the ability to be violent, then this ability must be structural, and in that sense necessary, to them, whatever particular human beings may or may not do. It is not of course necessary, as Bond well recognises, that they should always be violent; like Bond, I believe in the possibility of a non-violent society. But in suggesting that aggression is ’only’ an ’ability‘, Bond cannot thereby deny its structural nature. To say that human beings have ’the ability to sing’ is to say that they sometimes do. How would we know if they did not?

The apparent contradictions in Bond’s theory between culturalism and biologism are not in fact as severe as they would seem. For the statement that ‘Human nature is in fact human culture’ would seem an exaggeration of what he really believes. Bonds metaphors of this difficult naturelculture interface are considerably more ambiguous than this unguarded slogan would suggest. We do not have a’fixed nature, he tells us; instead, we have a ’gap’. But what is this a gap in, if not in some kind of nature? ‘. . . human nature is a vacuum waiting to be filled in by culture, not a tabula rasa but a set of biological expectations’. Bond argues in the Introduction to The Fool; but these images are not mutually consistent. ’Vacuum’ would suggest no nature at all, a move instantly cancelled by the rejection of the ’tabula rasa’ figure for the considerably more determinate ’set of biological expectations’. His true case, then, would seem the persuasive one that while the human animal does indeed remain subject to biological determination, what is most distinctive about it is its cultural capacity to transcend and transform such determinants. Human beings, to rephrase Marx, create their own culture, but on the basis of anterior biological conditions. Indeed one of the most valuable aspects of Bond’s thinking is his consistent attempt, notably rare within Marxism, to reinsert into social and political theory the biological ’infrastructure’ which culturalism has banished from it.2

If he does this, however, he does it in a notably one-sided way. Briefly, it is possible to argue that Bond is too culturalist about aggression and too biologistic about love. In the Author‘s Note to Saved, he suggests that it


would be absurd to substitute an innately good human nature for the innately evil one he is refusing, claiming instead that the only innate part of our nature is our ’natural biological expectation’ that we will be socially and culturally ’adopted’ - that, as he puts it in the Lear Preface, the infant’s ’unpreparedness will be cared for, that it will be given not only food but emotional reassurance, that its vulnerability will be shielded, that it will be born into a world waiting to receive it, and that knows how to receive it’. The concept of ’biological expectation’ - an ‘objective’, ’species’ expectation, naturally, not a wish on the infant’s part - is surely a fertile one. What Bond means is that, since culture is biologically necessary to our natures, it is also what we have a right morally and politically to desire; there is a nexus here between biological fact and cultural value, which for Bond is the very basis of political morality. ’Culture’ is at once a descriptive and normative term- that without which we are factually speaking non-human (since our biological nature is organised around the ’gap’ where it must germinate), and that form of society which, we may judge, really does shield the vulnerable and nurture the emotionally needy. It is in the latter sense, as I have remarked, that Bond can suggest that contemporary capitalist society is not a culture. By dint of the concept of culture, Bond is able to root political morality in the body without reducing it to the body; and this is a powerful move. For the idealist character of our ruling social moralities nowhere more obvious than in their inability to derive their abstract imperatives from the ’species being’ of the human community itself; and though this, as Man’s early writing well enough reveals, is an enterprise of extreme difficulty, Bond is nowhere more usefully and traditionally Marxist than in his almost single-handed attempt to return to the biological sources of the ’moral’, turning from those orthodox moralities which, precisely because they take their cue from a refusal of the body, are no more than forms of organised violence. Bonds perception of this latter truth is, in the richest sense of the term, Blakeian.

The limits of his thinking, however, are also evident here. For if it is true that the small infant has a biological need for love, and if this might indeed provide a properly materialist basis for all our more sophisticated theorising about political morality, it is equally true that the small infant is much more than a love-seeking creature. It is also, if Melanie Klein is to be credited, murderously aggressive, paranoid, narcissistic and destructive. Bond, in short, is pre- Freudian; indeed one can imagine the scorn he would probably pour upon Freud, as a bourgeois ideologue out to‘fix‘ human nature beyond all social determination. Freud, in fact, did nothing of the kind; it is Bond, not Freud, who speaks (in the Preface to Lear) of a ’sexual need’. For Freud there was no such thing: sexuality for Freud is not a ’need but a ‘drive’, a ’perversion’ or ’swerving away’ of the biological instinct for nourishment


into erotic enjoyment. To attend to Freud and Klein is to enforce the truth that the 'biological facts' will lend themselves indifferently to a whole range of moralities- moralities of murderous aggression just as much as moralities of loving intimacy. For Freud, the loving intimacy that subsists between the infant and those who nurture it is inseparable from egoism, narcissism and a fear or hatred of the intruding alien (in Freud's system, the father). It is only by the trauma of being broken from this claustrophobic biological love - by the Oedipus complex - that we are able to enter upon the stage of social morality proper. The continuity between our infantile needs and adult politics which Bond wishes to underline occurs only in the context of the most unsettling discontinuity we are ever likely to experience - the break, precisely, from nature to culture, need to desire, of which the Oedipus is effective sign.

If we are liberated by the Oedipal crisis from nature to culture, from biology to society, then it might be possible in a certain sense to reunite Freud and Bond: the nature of human beings is culture. But Bond fails to draw the devastating conclusions of this truth. If it is in the nature of human beings constantly to transgress and transcend their biological determinants, if 'desire' is not identical with 'need', then the maladaptation between such beings and their social environments which for Bond is the source of violence turns out to be 'natural'. Violence is not most importantly natural in the way Bond seems to think, a matter of sheer biological response. It is natural because human beings are cultural. It is natural because it is of the nature of the human animal to overreach its biological limits, the instinctual con- straints of its 'species being'. Culture, history or technology are simply the names we give to this overreaching. It is no wonder that Bond is as fasci- nated as he is by Shakespeare's King k a r , a play much preoccupied with that 'superfluity', that exceeding of what is naturally given, which makes for both cruelty and forgiveness. We are in conflict with our biology by virtue of the very biological beings we are, and this is the ineradicable contradiction of our historical existence. There is no way in which we can develop the capacity for surgery without also having the capacity to torture. Both capacities depend upon a cultural suppression of the biological inhibitions which would normally constrain us from inflicting pain upon a fellow animal. The fact that Bond's theory is insufficiently dialectical is nowhere more obvious than in his failure to emphasise this stark, unwelcome truth. He is right in a sense to remind us that 'It's difficult for human beings to be unkind, and unpleasant to be arrogant' (Introduction to Bingo). It is certainly difficult for us to strangle each other with our bare hands, because it would almost certainly make us sick. Biological inhibitions would intervene, unless we were carried away in an 'abnormal' fit of rage. But it is not at all difficult


for human beings to shoot or bomb one another, because in these circums- tances the biological inhibitions fail to operate. Technology ensures that we can kill each other with a minimum of sickness or pain, and in the belief that it is kind for us to do so.

Technology is an extension of our bodies, but it is also the way in which our bodies may enter into contradiction with themselves. Technology weakens our biological instincts and so makes it possible for us to behave, for both good and ill, in ways in which the body, left to itself, would not tolerate. But technology is of our nature: what is specific about the human body, as opposed to the bodies of other animals, is that because it is linguistic it can create extensions of itself which then outrun its natural inhibitions. The human animal is the animal whose nature it is to overreach itself; its most distinctive mark - language - is precisely such a ceaseless distancing, transgression and transformation of the instinctual. Understandably dis- turbed by this fact, Bond's thinking turns upon the concept of adaptation. A socialist culture, of which his own art is an element, will adapt us to the possibilities which our technology has opened up. This is a project of extreme urgency; but it is also necessary to recognise that an animal whose nature is culture can never, by definition, be 'fully' adapted. Adaptation could onlyfully suppress or eradicate the destructive capacities of such a creature by suppressing or eradicating the creative ones too. It is in our nature to be maladjusted, and it is therefore in our nature to have the capacity for violence. Bond cannot argue simultaneously that the nature of man is culture and that aggression is somehow a contingent fact. His hesitation between culturalism and biologism is an attempt to negotiate this unpalatable situation. The conditions which make for human creativity, conditions which entail a break beyond the instinctual, are precisely the same conditions which make for human destructiveness. The linguistic capacity which allows us to objectify and sit loose to our instincts is radically double-edged. If Bond believes that acknowledging this truth is to sell out to the Tory stockbrokers, then he is mistaken. There is not, as he well sees, a 'fixed' human nature; what is the case is that our very alterability carries within it, as a structural condition of its existence, the permanent capacity for violence. When Marcuse dreamt, in a deeply attractive utopian moment, of a future human being who would be biologically incapable of violence, he could not have realised precisely what he was on the verge of extinguishing. My argument with Bond is not a political one about whether or not it is necessary or feasible to work for a non-violent society; it is an argument over the real obstacles which exist to it, and the necessity of candidly confronting them.

There are times at which Bonds thinking skates perilously close to some


form of ethical naturalism - to the belief that we can derive a political morality directly from the supposed biological facts. There are other times at which he is so far from such a belief that he places an unwarranted emphasis upon technology - upon the human capacity to transform 'natural' conditions. In his Note to The Bundle, Bond asserts that change originates from technology, and contrasts the practical wisdom whichmen and women reap from such technological practice with the ossified, obsolescent moralities of the ruling social institutions. What he no doubt has in mind here is a version of Marx's famous doctrine that revolution results from a contradiction between the forces of production and the social relations of production- or, in a more modern setting, a version of Antonio Gramsci's contrast between the practical sense specific to the working class, who are directly bound up with the transformation of Nature through labour, and the common sense of the ruling class, which is ignorant of such practical wisdom. There may also be in this essay a resonance of the optimistic faith of Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin in the social potentialities of technological change. But nothing could be less Marxist than the view that change originates from technology. Indeed such a view is the Marxist heresy known as 'technologism' - the doctrine that technological development gives birth to social transformation, formulated by Stalin and based upon one or two unwary and untypical remarks of Marx himself. I say 'untypical', because the brunt of Marx's thought places technological development firmly within the context of existing social relations. What is technologically developed is on the whole a matter of what the ruling social relations require to sustain themselves. By the 'forces of production', Marx does not mean technology pure and simple; he means those forces as already socially organised. The social organisation of labour is for Marx part of the productive forces, which are thus not reducible to some set of neutral productive techniques. In his Note to The Bundle, Bond tends to overlook the fact that technology is always already socially organised, and appeals to it instead as a force in itself. He thus tends to reduce class struggle to a conflict between the technologically-conscious - the working class - and a superannuated ruling class which has failed to catch up with such developments. This sentimental, idealist doctrine fails to recognise that the ruling class of capitalist society is thoroughly technological, and that important areas of working-class wisdom consist in a properly Luddite resistance to such technology. Bond, the apologist for the 'natural', is too little a Luddite. The binary opposition between technological wisdom and hegemonic moralities is no more than a version of the opposition between 'biological nature' and our idealist ideologies. Both oppositions are ripe for political deconstruction, and indeed in the case of technology Bond's own work accomplishes this task. For the uncritical celebration of technol-


ogy in the Note to The Bundle is radically challenged elsewhere, not least in the Introduction to The Fool. ’Without technology’, Bond argues there, ’there could be no abundance, no welfare, no hope, no destruction of false myths. But without cultural struggle technology will be irrational and destructive’.

’Justice’, Bond comments in the Preface to Leu, ‘is allowing people to live in the way for which they evolved. The preposition is an interesting one. Bond does not write ‘in the way that they evolved: this, indeed, would be ethical naturalism with a vengeance. But what, in fact, did we evolvefor? What is this teleology of which Bond is apparently so confident? Are not all such teleologies religious or metaphysical, and can Bond really hope, as a materialist, to wield an evolutionary norm or telos over our heads? If Bond is pre-Freudian, he would also here seem to be pre-Darwinist - to reject the truth that we did not evolvefor anything at all. We may indeed select certain aspects of our evolution, and argue that these are the precious capacities which a politics must safeguard. But we cannot claim to anchor such a political choice in the supposed ’natural facts’ of the evolutionary process. The fact that Bond is in a certain sense an old-fashioned nineteenth-century rationalist is the source at once of his major insights and his major blindness. In an almost irresistibly attractive moment, he speaks of a society - call it ’culture’ - which would welcome the small child - which the child would recognise as its own. We need to reassure our infants that they will be cared for, that they will be ‘born into a world waiting to receive (them), and that knows how to receive (them)’. I do not doubt that we have here the seeds of a powerful, subversive political morality; but it is also necessary to add that the world into which an infant is born will always, necessarily, be a stranger to it - that we are, in Jacques Lacan’s terms, born into the world of the Other, and that the fact that such a world will always be other to us, that we will never be quite adapted or at home, is the source of our creativity just as much as it is the source of our violence.

Notes See Jacques Derrida, ’Limited Inc’, Glyph 2 (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Md., 1977, pp. 162-254. But see Sebastionaro Timpanaro, On Materialism (New Left Books, London, 1976).

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the prefaces of edward bond

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