to eat, to speak, to skirt: reading the little girl's lips: sarah mann-o'donnell's...

To Eat, To Speak, To Skirt: Reading the Little Girl’sLips: Sarah Mann-O’Donnell’s World

EINAT BAR-ON COHEN

Department of Sociology & AnthropologyThe Hebrew University of JerusalemJerusalem 91905, Israel

SUMMARY Participants of the Deleuze Studies conference were not preparedfor Sarah Mann-O’Donnell’s presentation. She climbed onto the desk, crushed redplums, separated them into pits and peels, ate the pulp, and then vomited it onto thetable through a pipe. Her actions were interspersed with stuttering and strange littlestories. She was creating an enclave that generated sensual sense, affect, bringing to lifea particular short-lived cosmology. Naturally, her world entertains tight connectionswith Deleuzian thought, in particular with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Bodywithout Organs, and Deleuze’s remarks on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in The Logic ofSense. But the consequence of presenting philosophical ideas in such a way reachesbeyond philosophical debate: when ideas are brought to life—given an actual, perfor-mative social life—they acquire their own mobility and generate fresh, new spillovers,breaching borders, leading elsewhere. They do not represent, but engender somethingnew in the world, they do, thus coming close to a performance of ritual. Connecting herouter self with her interiority, Sarah can summon brute and creative forces embeddedwithin the body through practice in its own right. [Body and affect, body and thepresocial, creativity, Deleuze, performance of ritual]

“But it’s no use now,” thought poor Alice, “to pretend to be two people! Why, there’shardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!”

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1994[1865]:19.

To eat and to be eaten—this is the operational mode of bodies, the type of their mixturein depth, their action and passion, and the way in which they coexist within oneanother. To speak, though, is the movement of the surface, and of ideational attributesor incorporeal events. What is more serious: to speak of food or to eat words?

Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 1990:23.

“You can circulate around me and come closer,” said Sarah introducing herpresentation,”But you may not want to be too close at times.” Then she steppedonto the small white board she had set on the lecturer’s desk, carefully placingher bare feet on scores of sharp-edged lightweight metal brackets that she hadupturned and arranged as footholds. Some of them had already flown off thetable onto the carpeted floor of the sloped classroom, hinting at the mess thatwould ensue. When her feet had found their place on the sharp edges, shebegan her presentation, which she called “To eat, to speak, to skirt: Readingthe little girl’s lips.1“ Participants in the Amsterdam University classroom onthe morning of the second day of the summer 2010 third Deleuze Studies

bs_bs_banner

Anthropology and Humanism, Vol. 38, Issue 1, pp 19–35, ISSN 1559-9167, online ISSN 1548-1409.© 2013 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.DOI: 10.1111/anhu.12000.

conference were transported; they entered the world of Sarah, an enclavethat generated sensual sense on its own terms, bringing into being a particularshort-lived cosmology.

I would like to peer into that cosmology and make a succinct suggestionconcerning how it works and what it can do. Obviously, this world entertainstight connections with Deleuzian thought, in particular with Deleuze andGuattari’s Body without Organs (BwO; 2005:149–166) and Deleuze’s remarkson Lewis Carroll’s Alice in The Logic of Sense. But the consequence of presentingphilosophical ideas the way that Sarah did goes beyond philosophical debate:when the ideas are brought to life—given an actual, performative social life—they acquire their own mobility and generate fresh, new spillovers leadingelsewhere.

An idiosyncratic world emerges from Sarah’s little performance, a world thatclearly points at the creative forces embedded within the body, which come tolife as they are transformed into practice. By subverting and reshaping herbody, her performance taps onto the presocial within it: the invisible, inacces-sible, mystical interiority of the body, which follows its own routes and pro-cesses. Although the interiority of our body is us in an intimate way, it can neverbecome utterly tamed or socialized, yet by connecting her outer self with herinteriority, Sarah can summon brute forces more powerful than words, morepungent than philosophical concepts, and more overwhelming than any rep-resentation; thus she can also skew and undermine the authority of the hyper-civilized agents of representation. Undoing semiotics, her performance latchesonto the potentiality of somaticity to become an ambiguous creature, a bodymade of pipes that spills into the world, or a living tentacle of the inert world:feeling, taking in, forcing the still substance to feel. Inseparable from puremateriality, her creativity is no longer hers alone, instead it engages with theforces of organicity and of physics. Sarah’s world is a bricolage, assembled andperformed by her intentionality and imagination, yet once it is out in the worldit espouses its own dynamics.

Looking closely at this distinct world, I will examine how “a small, eventiny system is organized to create a specific outcome through its own interiorrelational working, an outcome that would be quite different from where [it]began” (Handelman ms). Handelman’s remark concerns ritual, and althoughSarah’s presentation is not ritual, it does comprise ritualistic elements andshares several traits with it. The main shared trait is that both ritual and Sarah’slittle world are capable of generating sense in their own terms, Sarah’s presen-tation is a “performance of ritual” in which the ritualistic element concernsmainly the sacrificial role of the plums (see below). This is also why, like ritual,Sarah’s performance can lead elsewhere and produce transformation throughits interior connections alone. And, as in some rituals, the transformationcreated by Sarah’s presentation is made of intensities and difference; within thisworld, practice represents nothing, while connections make sense.

And so the anthropological question becomes—to paraphrase “how tobecome a Body without Organs” (Deleuze and Guatarri 2005:149–166)—howdoes Sarah organize her confined space and body–self to become what shealready is yet something totally different? Her world sets into motion a newactuality, following its own dynamics into an idiosyncratic logic closed upon

20 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 38, Number 1

itself, at the same time opening new conduits to the exterior world. Sarah’sworld—that of the little girl, or at times some other devouring creature—isBody deterritorializing its Organs, evacuating or extending them to include bitsof the inert piping of the exterior world. Within Sarah’s world the evacuated-extended organs continue their own itinerary.

Performance of Ritual

Antonin Artaud (1964) claims that theater has a double, a twin of sorts, ashadow that follows it everywhere. He also claims that one of those twins is anillusion (Deleuze and Guattari 2005:542, n. 48), but it is nearly impossible to saywhich came first: Did theater yield its double, or was it the other way around?Following Artaud’s denunciation of the “civilized” person who cultivates thefaculty of separating thought from deed ad absurdum and who asserts thattheater imitates life, it would be futile to separate Sarah’s sequence of deeds asperformance from its double. Sarah’s presentation is embedded in life and actsupon it with no gap between what it does and what it means. Deleuze andGuattari do not favor either theater or its double and do not consider one anymore of an illusion than the other. They formulate the relations between thevarious planes of art—form-contents, perception-expression, potentiality (of atree in a seed) and the unfolding of its becoming tree (2005:266), performanceand its double—asserting that “there are only speeds and slowness betweenunformed elements, and affects between nonsubjectified powers, as a functionof a place that is necessarily given at the same time as that to which it gives rise(the plane of consistency or composition)” (2005:267–8). One plane is a given,while the other must be worked at. Art therefore always yields or contains morethan its composition. The question of performance, then, is how do the relationsbetween the multiple planes function? How does one plane give birth to theother(s) and transcend itself to yield or contain more than its composition? Howcan the connections between the planes of consistency attain this feat?

Within the performance of ritual the connection between the planes of theworld become apparent because ritual is often oriented to change somethingin the world we live in, a change that is planned, often teleological, especiallywhen it does not represent but rather does something in the world. Ritual setsconnections into motion, and through this connectivity it holds the potential-ity to transform. Sarah’s presentation as performance is akin to the perfor-mance of ritual: it is a small system organized to create a specific outcomethrough its own interior relational working, which is quite different fromwhere it began (Handelman ms.). Sarah sets into motion a certain idiosyn-cratic logic that follows its own dynamics in transforming her body and self,affecting the participant-spectators by opening new conduits into the exteriorworld.

Artaud (1964:14) claims that the “European” semiotic way of perceivingculture is not only a monstrosity but may doom civilization to death, which iswhy he suggests that the true actor is to be found in what he calls the “totemic,”which is the performance of ritual. The magic of civilized theater is make-believe magic, he continues, whereas true magic can only be generated by theQuetzalcoatl Serpent,2 namely, by the shaman performing ritual. Deleuze and

Bar-On Cohen To Eat, To Speak, To Skirt 21

Guattari refer to this ritualistic option of transformation, basing their observa-tion on Victor Turner’s description of the Ndembu healing: “the exegeticalmeaning (what is said about the thing) is only one element among others, andis less important than the operative use (what is done with things) or thepositional functioning (the relationship with other things in one and the samecomplex), according to which the symbol is never in a one-to-one relationshipwith what it means, but always has a multiplicity of referents” (2009:181). Sarahdoes just that: she brings into play external meanings which become steppingstones for reconnecting things that are potentially connected (such as the seedand the tree), but by setting these relations into motion she generates a complexthat yields or contains more than its composition and thus breaches the bordersbetween theater and its double to act in the world.

A Presentation

Dressed in tights and form-fitting spaghetti-strapped shirt that exposed thetattooed wings extending from her shoulders and down her back, Sarah stoodon the sharp upturned brackets, took a deep breath and started telling her firststory. She spoke matter of factly, with no drama in her intonation. At hermother’s house, she said, the sink taps broke, and when the plumber replacedthem, he remarked that they had originally been installed the wrong way, andhe had now corrected the mistake. Both the hot- and the cold-water taps pre-viously turned in the same direction but now would turn in opposite directions.Since the plumber’s visit, however, whenever Sarah wanted to use the sink,her left hand moved smoothly but her right hand faltered because it moved inthe wrong direction—and she demonstrated by rotating her hands. Now itmoves clockwise when it should, according to her habit, be moving “counter-clockwise,” she said, and again demonstrated with her hands.

She crouched on her knees and repeated “counter-clockwise”; she stuttered,she choked, she spit the word out, stammering and stumbling over the conso-nants: “ccccounter-clockwise, counttter-clockwise, counter-clockkkkkwizzz.”The sounds sprouted from within her onto her surface, and she spewed themout. She put one of the brackets in her mouth, chewing on it as she continued tostutter “couuunttter-cllockwizzz”3, her body convulsing to get the words out,her face turning red. And then she straightened up, composed herself, took adeep breath and began a second little story, concerning a performance that waspart of her art studies. Titled “Pit and Peel,” it took place at the seashore andentailed Sarah’s wading into the sea to wash fruits she held in her apron, andthen eating as many of them as she could. But then came the first chill of theyear and the water, she said, was the coldest she had ever experienced. Shebegan turning blue, and her teacher made her stop eating any more fruit for fearof hypothermia.

At this point in her presentation, Sarah moved the purple plums she had setout around the white board onto the board. She then stepped on them, crushingthem and creating a soft and wet surface of smashed plums that squirted juiceall around her and onto the carpeted floor of the neat classroom. Her bare feetbecome red and the firm round balls that had been entire plums soon becamea mush.


Now kneeling on the table, Sarah urgently began peeling open the trampledblood-red fruit, putting the peels in a pile to her left, and stuffing the fruit intoher mouth, grunting as she devoured them with the savage gluttony of a starvedpredator, and then delicately discarding the pits from her mouth and placingthem on a pile to her right. Juice was now running down her chin, which lookedas if it were covered in blood and gore, as she stuffed more and more fruit intoher mouth. Then she held two plums in her hands and turned them like the sinktaps she had demonstrated, and then stuffed those too into her mouth. Shewiped her hands on her tights and began telling her third and final story. As shedid so, she assembled a long copper pipe: She attached pieces of copper pipingtogether with adhesive tape and added a jointed segment that she covered inStyrofoam, meticulously cutting off the excess with a knife. She drew a deepbreath and told her last story, about the summer she had worked in the home ofa paraplegic. He designed his own home, which she helped him build. As one ofher chores, she had to install a faucet, so she took a one-day course in plumbing.

Once again she crouched on the table; she put the copper pipe into her mouthand very slowly, very intently, and with a very slight convulsion as a few dropscame out of her nose, vomited the plums she had swallowed up through thepipe and onto the center of the table. Now there were three piles on the table:to the right, the plum pits; to the left, the peels; and in the center, the red pulpthat had come out of her and through the pipe: a composition of intensities ofplums. Then she took the deep, dark crimson fleshy peels and stuck them in hermouth so that they dangled from it like some internal organ that had emergedfrom her mouth, or perhaps a little animal that had been hunted and devoured,leaving only bloody remnants hanging from the predator’s mouth. She stood upwith the pipe in one hand, a mock Statue of Liberty.

The lights dimmed; when they came on again, the devouring beast—and theanorexic little girl—were all but gone, and Sarah was with us again, dirty, wet,wiping herself and the table clean of debris. Collecting the rubbish, the vomit,the pits, the peels, and the juice that had landed everywhere, Sarah said, “I amwet.” Her toe was bleeding slightly and she remarked that she had done thisbefore and each time hurt herself somewhere else, the last time cutting hertongue.

What sort of a world was that, I wondered?

Sarah’s World

Toward the middle of the presentation-performance, a woman walkedinto what she thought would be a straightforward, probably lethargic, early-morning conference session and found herself facing a young woman vomiting.She contorted her face in disgust while we, the other participants who had beenthere from the start, looked on intently as the events unfolded. Disgust is themost visceral of “ugly feelings,” one of the hardest to control when it makes ourthroats and stomachs reflexively contract and evacuate. Disgust is at once part ofdesire and its enemy (see Ngai 2005:332–354). However, as Sarah vomits withno apparent contraction of the alimentary canal, the sensation she generates inthe spectators who had been present from the outset is a cold, nearly intellectualdisgust.4


The emotional tone of the presentation was one of equanimity, of doing andaffect. Here was praxis set between reading (Deleuze) and doing, in which thedistinction between the conceptual reckoning and the actual somatic engage-ment with the concepts were in the process of erasure, projecting a completeholistic becoming, the entire body turning into a whole: tool, meaning, andfinality all at once, as the gap between the conceptual plan and performativeexecution was blurred (Bar-On Cohen n.d.; Handelman 1991:205). Sarah deter-mined the terms, constraints, conditions, and scope of our experience, while thehall of academia was transformed into an intimate lavatory where private thingswere carried out; and we were all enthralled and affected by it. The woman whostrayed into the classroom had not been captured into Sarah’s world; she couldonly see a young woman sticking a copper pipe into her mouth.

Sarah fabricated new connections, which in turn generated affect in a non-representational way. There was a blurring of distinction between the outsideand the inside of the body; between the organic digestive tube and mechanicplumbing; between story, stuttering, and body; between the sharp edges,the mushy fruit, and the soft membrane of skin inside her mouth and inher extremities (her toe); between the hunter and the hunted; and betweenthe personalized Sarah Mann-O’Donnell and the unidentifiable “she” who attimes lost her gender to become “it.” Oscillating between intensities—eating,cold, paralysis, and habit—the new connections flowed without externalreason or formal cause, from one to the other and back, pursuing their owndynamics into tentative junctions, opening up potentialities, following roads,encountering dead ends. Yet although the presentation meandered, thesequences had linearity in the sad tale of the plums, whose route from solidround fruit to pulped waste was causal and inevitable, from being stepped on,having peel torn from pulp and pit, being ingested and then vomited out, andthe blood-red scraps of peel hanging from Sarah’s mouth then being thrownout. From self-enclosed whole to soggy mess, from cute little creatures tosacrifice: for them there was no return route. Sarah’s body had only one aper-ture: the mouth; and as the time for the bloody plums to pour out came, theyemerged with no convulsion. She was menstruating from her mouth, an infer-tile femininity

René Magritte’s 1927 painting “Desire (the Young Girl Eating a Bird)” showsa girl in a dark brown dress with wide white lace cuffs and collar, diggingher teeth into a black bird’s heart. Her face is framed with her brown hairand her gaze is calm, intent, even dreamy with pleasure, her fingers are stainedwith blood, as is her white collar. The dead bird’s wings are slightly spread insurrender, its head drooping, while the other colorful birds go on with theirbirdness in the tree behind her. Unlike the world of Magritte’s little girl, Sarah’sworld is not oedipal (in the sense Deleuze and Guattari give it), it is notcathartic, not the innocent black and white desire of a young girl to plunge herteeth into a black bird.

Nor is Sarah’s world Alice’s Wonderland; the aspiration to become a“respectable person”—to cite Carroll as quoted in the epigraph of this paper—isof no consequence. At the same time, like Alice, Sarah cannot “pretend tobe two people,”5 because she cannot dissociate her eating anorexic self—attempting to wash her mess at her mother’s house—from the one eating her.


Because her food is ejected, she must derive her nourishment from her ownflesh. In Sarah’s world the hunter and the hunted are inseparable and so are“the way in which they coexist within one another” (Deleuze 1990:23). Thehunter not only devours the hunted, but also is the hunted, as they recursivelynourish and eliminate each other, or each itself. The birds on Sarah’s tree do notgo on with their carefree chirping, because the wings tattooed on her backtransform birdness into an innocent, yet monstrous, angelness.

Body and Affect

Despite the immense potentiality of the body to actually fabricate the worldand to yield worlds of meaning in its own right—following Marcel Mauss (1950[1936]), Mary Douglas (1971), and others—the anthropological tendency wasto decipher culture in symbolic terms, to look at the body as the most readilyavailable and generalized source of symbolic structuring of society, somethingthat is “good to think with.” Yet the body is not a cultural object meant togenerate symbols and representations; rather, it is what it does, it is nothing“but affects and local movements, differential speeds” (Deleuze and Guattari2005:260). The body is immanent; it is immanence itself. Thomas Csordasattempts to rectify the neglect of the lived in body in anthropology by un-covering the ways in which the body operates and the social potentialitiesembedded in it—particularly to healing—through phenomenological scrutiny(elsewhere I have followed the anthropology of the body more carefully: Bar-OnCohen 2007). Following Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Csordas claims that a gapexists between the body as a tool of perception and the body as a tool ofobjectivization, and that this gap may very well be the universal source ofmystery and religions (2004).6

My own anthropological experience with Japanese martial arts has clearlyindicated that some cultures do not presume such a gap. Because we use ourbodies actively to make food, eat, vomit, menstruate, crush, and wipe clean—tomention only some of the actions performed by Sarah—anthropologists mustfind a way to consider the role of the body as “something to do with,” ratherthan merely “something to think with,” and replace the question of “what doesit mean,” with “how does it do.” The body is sensing, acting, making a worldthat makes sense with no possible gap between collecting information, process-ing it, engaging with it. And the body is not narcissistic: it comes into beingsocially, within interaction. As Erin Manning (2007) insists, the body does notfill an empty space and a regularly ticking time; rather, it generates a certainspace and time and operates in it, changing the affects of this space and time asit creates the world it lives in, sensing, making sense, operating—all of these aremixed, mingled, and affected by other bodies and by the environment at large.Kathleen Stewart calls the nonsemiotic stamps that the body impresses on theworld “ordinary affects.” She formulates the challenge of showing the world innon-semiotic terms: the question “they [ordinary affects] beg is not what theymight mean in an order of representations, or things, but where they might goand what potential modes of knowing, relating, and attending to things arealready somehow present in them in a state of potentiality and resonance”(2007:3)7.


Sarah Mann-O’Donnell’s presentation does not represent anything. She doesnot stand for anything absent, as do symbols, nor does she depend on narrativesor tropes, or any other construct we usually call semiotic. On the contrary, sheis thoroughly present, she strives to systematically annihilate any potentialnarrative from assuming her place, and so no gap is formed between what sheis doing and what it does to us, the participant-spectators. Her body spawnsaffect in its own right.

Deleuze chose “affect” to replace semiotic sense making, to express “thelimit of semiotics that tend to structure emotional responses to aestheticand physical experiences” (Coleman 2005:12). It is an “explanatory concept”(Blackman and Venn 2010:8) that is “more than sensate experience or cognition”(Coleman 2005:12), “the knowable product of an encounter, specific in its ethicaland lived dimensions and yet [it is] also as indefinite as the experience of asunset, transformation or ghost” (2005:11). Coleman suggests that affect is theconsequence of something that exceeds description and cannot be completelyaccounted for in words.8 Manning also thinks about affect: it “is not emotion,though it does play on the idea of movement within the word emotion. Emotionis affect plus an awareness of that affect. Affect is the with-ness of the movementof the world” (2007:xxi). Stewart describes ordinary affects as the “shifting ofassemblage of practices and practical knowledge, a sense of both liveness andexhaustion” (2007:1). Lisa Blackman and Couze Venn (20109) are concerned withthe somatic sense of affect, which they deem an explanatory concept for phe-nomena of breaching boundaries, for instance, the kinesthetic communicationthat can overcome the borders between nature and culture, and more particu-larly, across species, between animal and human: the tool of becoming animal.This interpretation, however, is problematic because “affect,” then, is the residueof whatever cannot be communicated in “normal” semiotic means; this in turnthreatens to reintroduce the dual divide in updated terms. Affect is not residue;it accounts for the entire event with all its manifestations.

Like many other Deleuzian concepts, “affect” is relatively easy to definein negative terms; it is not semiotic, it replaces the absurd separation betweenthoughts and deeds with a holistic imprint. But in positive terms affect iselusive; the above attempts to pin it down and connect it to emotion or sensa-tion in some way, to consciousness or to knowledge, which may be ethical oraesthetic. There is, however, a social dimension to the term, beyond the simplesensation of a single person, which affects the entire social setting comprised ofboth semantic and nonsemantic manifestations. Because affect is a result ofpractice, it is both passive and active, it imprints a change or transformation ona sociality, and in its wake, that setting is positioned at a new starting point, notjust once but over and over again, whether consciously known or sensed by theparticipant or not. Sarah is affect; she generates affect; she alters the conferenceroom in a way that makes it wiser, somatically and emotionally inseparablyfrom intellectually.

Sarah manipulates another somatic conundrum: whereas the exterior ofour bodies is seen as our selves, the part most determinant of our fate, ourinterior, remains out of sight and out of reach; although our health and survivaldepend on whatever is going on inside us, we have no direct access to our innerorgans; moreover, our well-being depends on this enclosure by the skin.10 Sarah


breaches the border between our mysterious innards and our exterior surfacewhen she brings her body interior onto the surface, not as the expression ofinterior feeling and emotions (Taylor 2005:747) but as a new way of relating toherself as concomitantly a subject and object. Sarah brings onto the self of thesurface, that which should remain out of view, by connecting these two facets ofthe body she dredges up her true embeddedness within the world.

Creativity and the Presocial

A creative act is a conundrum, it can never be entirely explained by what-ever culture had devised before it. It, by definition, contains something new,something drawn from elsewhere, something that defies ordinary social struc-ture and norms. Tim Ingold (2000), Ingold and Elizabeth Hallam (2007), andStuart McLean (2009) award creativity a central role; they set it betweenculture and nature, between interiority and exteriority; creative ingenuity, theyclaim, draws on the environment and on exteriority for its miraculous origi-nality. Within real creativity, the “formal resemblance between a copy and themodel is the outcome of this process, not given in advance” (Ingold and Hallam2007:5), the plan is an outcome of execution, the template follows practice andnot—as we normally tend to think—the other way around. Moreover, byreversing the temporal order between plan and execution, Ingold also stipu-lates how creativity orders other binaries. Nature and its potentialities is thesource of creativity, it sets the restraining rules of materiality on humanendeavor, and these limitations also, in turn, provide a vast field for noveltyand improvisation. Thus, nature precedes culture, and also exteriority—takenin by humans and adapted through improvisation to create culture—precedesinteriority.

Ingold and Hallam understand creativity as generative, relational, temporal,and material; an improvisation rather than an innovation. Instead of celebratingonly the new, and awarding the blueprint and the abstract idea the sole titleof creative, they think of creativity as an ongoing process of adaptation, adjust-ment, and improvisation that accompanies our every move. Imitation is thegenuine creative process, repetition, rehearsal, and learning of skills are cre-ative, they all demand solutions for emerging puzzles. As time inevitablymoves on, at each repetition the conditions change ever so slightly so that everyperformance of the same task demands improvised corrections. As “it mingleswith the world, the mind’s creativity is inseparable from that of the total matrixof relations in which it is embedded and into which it extends, and whoseunfolding is constitutive of the process of social life” (2007:9). Ultimately cre-ativity is central to human behavior within the environment and accounts for“the way we work” (2007:12). Emphasizing creativity as the process of solvingemerging problems, this attitude lends priority to the interface between humanand environment, while concomitantly playing down intentionality and per-sonal ingenuity.

McLean goes a step further and positions creativity—as interface betweenhumans and environment—at the outset of cosmology. He seeks to “outline anexperimental, multiagentive and pluralistic vision of creativity” (2009:213) andclaims that the making of the material universe as well as the production of


human imagination are equally creative. Creativity participates in the ongoingmaterial world-forming processes, setting into motion relations between bodiesof different kinds, both animate and inanimate, and thus creativity becomesdissociated from human assignment of cultural meaning (2009:214), nearlyinseparable from the self-correcting processes of autopoiesis. McLean neverthe-less objects to the usage of the concept of autopoiesis, because it stresses thedifference between internal processes and external intervention, thus reinstat-ing the binary of inside and out (2009:237 note 4).

Positioning creativity at the interface between human endeavor and envi-ronment, while according primacy to the world at large, however, points onlyat one possibility out of a multiplicity of potential cultural ingenuities. More-over, the relation between binaries such as culture and nature, or interiorityand exteriority, are dissimilar for different societies; they depend on cosmologyand are recursively reiterated by cultural creativity. An organic holistic cosmos,for example, allows no exterior at all, in it autopoiesis becomes the processby which such a world self-corrects, indeed by improvisation and repetition(about holistic worlds see Handelman and Lindquist 2011; Handelman andShulman 1997; on organicity see Bar-On Cohen 2011). The mechanical option ofan exterior intervention, namely correcting from the outside, is another sort ofcreativity, which may emerge within a cosmos that does define strict borders,in which interiority is quite distinct from exteriority. Whereas in an organiccosmos no primacy is defined between nature and culture, for a cosmosthat does emphasize separations, human planning is situated at the outset ofcreativity. Namely, stipulating binaries, undoing them, and determining therelations between them is in itself a cosmological act, independent of anytheoretical anthropological proposal. What is more, the question of “what camefirst,” nature or culture, exteriority or interiority, plan or execution, alsodepends on the cultural logic as it is reiterated by its creativity. In their “Trea-tise on Nomadology,” Deleuze and Guattari (2005:351–423) propose that,whereas for the nomads in their “minor science” apprenticeship proceeds theplan, for the striated and its “royal science” the converse is true, plan mustdirect action.

The body adds further complexity as it includes its exteriority inside itself,because its interior is undomesticated and can only be corrected mechanicallyby opening it up as does modern medicine, while the body as a holistic unitlends itself to autopoiesis. Auto-urine therapy, an Indian neotradition, as oneexample, engages the body in creative autopoiesis, because according to thishealing method, urine as the substance that was purified by the body can,if ingested regularly, heal that same body. Moreover, auto-urine therapy canaccord more than just immunity to disease; it can provide extraordinary facul-ties (Alter 2004:181–210). Auto-urine therapy molds that body into a self-correcting self-sustaining unit, which is composed of interiority alone.

Sarah too draws on the inert world to create her world, and on the traits ofexteriority within her body, she connects her material body to the materialworld. Nevertheless, it is her creativity, creating a hybrid, a monster, forcing herbody to flow against the autopoietic processes. Unlike Ingold’s claim, in Sarah’sworld no priority is stipulated, nature—which I prefer to call the presocial11—does not lend itself easily to Sarah’s creativity, she has to force it, to go against


the direction of the flow of materials within it. Instead of leading from mouthdown, food comes up again through the mouth. Neither does exteriority takeprecedence over interiority in Sarah’s performance, the unexplored space of thebody’s interiority—the presocial within that obeys the processes of the worldand always exceeds cultural taming—is made evident in all of its disgustingglory. Last, plan does not follow execution, as the planned correction—such asthat of the taps in Sarah’s mother’s house mechanically corrected—does notmeet with the appropriate practice. Here creativity aborts all attempts to set anysort of order of priority in time, her creativity obliterates difference betweeninterior and exterior, between the social and the presocial, and between planand execution. Instead of an interior autocorrection of autopoiesis or a mechani-cal correction stemming from the outside, she promotes a mess.

Sarah’s performance erases the distinction between processes of the world,her body within that world, and her intentionality, between the manmademaking and the organic progression of growing (Ingold 2000:339). Neverthe-less, when the interweaving of making and growth is negative, namely, destruc-tion and decay, these two processes are not oppositions at all. Sarah meandersbetween manmade damage and organic decay and death. Her creativity, aswell as that of the world, is violent. Sarah’s world destroys words, makes themstutter into unintelligibility and then taps onto her own body, she coercesherself to disclose her presocial self, which she renders intimately continuouswith the inert world. She generates affect, a social and cultural event that stemsfrom the body that she is.

A Deleuzian Presentation

In the main, the conference participants transposed words into other words;Sarah’s cosmology, on the other hand, was achieved by turning her reading intopractice. And because, unlike words, practice can hardly be tamed to perfection,the passage from words to deeds yields recursiveness, difference, and circular-ity of the body-self into, and out to, the world, returning, albeit now different,to the point of departure. Sarah’s is a world that stutters counterclockwise;nothing dramatic can emerge from a stutter, no heroic “self-critic” or “self-vivisection” (Mann-O’Donnell 2010:163)—no, nothing like that, merely some-thing we can all do. We can all eat, speak, vomit, fix the plumbing: these arecommonplace potentialities embedded in all our bodies and selves; the worldcreated by Sarah’s presentation is an aborted “self-opening” (2010:170). Sarah’sstomach was empty when she came in and empty when she left, yet an eventtook place. Between the cautionary note introducing the performance and hercleaning up the mess after it, aborted nourishment and bleeding through themouth occurred, resulting in the slaughtered plums. Meanwhile, a differentpassageway was made, not the one leading into the body, but a new one, leadingout.

Sarah’s presentation reveals how, through intensities, a dynamic of becomingBody without Organs is espoused: the sundering of fruit peel from pit and pulp,treading, being chewed, diluted and mixed with stomach fluid, the egg-shapedwhole fruit disclosing interior mushiness, “plum” becoming “plum-(b)ing,”eating, digesting, vomiting, exteriorizing words and storytelling, internal and


external pipes, lips, taps, cold seawater, the immobility of paraplegia, thesharpness of metal, the mushiness of plums, the vulnerability of a protectiveskin—all these are the intensities of this personalized Body without Organs(BwO).

In Sarah’s own words, a BwO “constitutes a mode of living and thinkingas continual [. . .] self-construction through the production of intensive differ-ence” (Mann-O’Donnell 2010:173; Deleuze and Guattari 2005:203). It “disavowsdepth, enacting this disavowal through its self-unfurling” (Mann-O’Donnell2010;174; Deleuze and Guattari 2005:197). So the BwO is a stubborn insistenceon surface, a systematic denial of any option of profundity, achieved throughthe self-generation of continuity. The BwO challenges the borders of thebody by making them specific, by almost detaching itself from all the rest ofthe world, by nearly dying. A BwO is a whole that becomes so specialized orobsessed by one thing that it is nearly completely disconnected from everythingelse, holding on by a thread as it were. This obsession brings it to the verge ofdeath—the anorectic dedicates herself to avoiding eating, the addict aspires tothe coldness of the drugged body, the masochist is obsessed by pain—the BwOis enclosed upon itself, cut off from the external world, challenging borders byinflating one part of a whole (nonsustenance, coldness, pain) and neglectingthe other parts; the rest shrivels, becomes vestigial and useless, and threatens tokill it.

Becoming BwO is a practical project, and Deleuze and Guattari explain howthis can be accomplished. By driving the body to the extremity of life, the BwOfacilitates the breaching of borders—borders within the body and between thebody and the environment (Bar-On Cohen 2009). “If the BwO is a limit, if oneis forever attaining it, it is because behind each stratum, encasted in it, there isalways another stratum”; and the BwO is freely “cutting across and dismantlingall of the strata and the surfaces of stratification that block it or make it recoil”(Deleuze and Guattari 2005:159). Behind—or perhaps in some other geometricalrelation to each facet of the lived body—is another facet, and the relationsbetween those facets are reorganized, forever attaining other strata encased inthem. By its smooth, nearly imperceptible passage between the strata, BwOavoids stuckedness, and thus it has the capacity to augment traits of selfnessas nomadism, as movement “(keep moving, even in place, never stop moving,motionless voyage, desubjectification)” (ibid.). BwO is the futile motion in placethat makes excess recognizable; the self is excess. The BwO recursively stretchesitself thin, discarding all but intensive difference. And that is exactly what Sarahis doing. However, when the conceptual proposition of dismantling depth istransposed into the world, carried into actual somatic practice, something elsehappens, some depth is nevertheless generated.

To my anthropological mind, BwO drives to excess the separateness ofthe individual, the unit of one person, and points at its absurdity. The self isprofoundly social, as it is inextricably connected with others. The BwO, on theother hand, moves towards ultimate separation of the one from the social,specializing in and becoming obsessed with one aspect of the self, with the selfitself, driving it to its limit. When BwO is put into practice, actualized in a livingbody, it can break boundaries and lead toward openness. It clears a passage thatcan enhance connections, which are there all along but are habitually dulled,


diluted. and muted imperceptibility in the bustle and noise of everyday life.Elsewhere I have shown this tendency of practiced BwO through the analysisof a specific karate training exercise, an extreme situation of prolonged stress,a BwO of pain (Bar-On Cohen 2009). The outcome there is the shattering ofboundaries within and among the participants, so that they can make energyflow between parts of their bodies-selves and from one to another, an energythat enables them to sustain the excruciatingly painful position.

The particular BwO set into motion here—Sarah’s, Alice’s, or some othercreature’s—is also potentiating openness, obliterating boundaries, negatingeven the lips as a threshold to the body. The lips are stretched out, in Alice’stelescopic manner, to the edge of the copper pipe, itself jerry-built with flimsyadhesive tape. The upper apertures—the mouth, the nose—are open, and theirpotentiality is extended to include food going down, and coming up againthrough the copper pipe, extending to the world of objects. However, thisextension is not growth; it is the sending of tentacles into the world, which alsoimplies that the lower apertures remain closed, inoperative, as the food cannotgo all the way through; and the girl can remain a girl. The anus and the vaginaremain shut, but not sewn together in the manner of the sadist (Deleuze andGuattari 2005:151); they simply have no work to do, nothing passes throughthem.

This BwO extends to the world through obstructed, stuttering repetition.When it was fixed, the tap in her mother’s house could turn in only onedirection, against the habitual movement, or else falter and become stuck in thefrustrating repetition of stutter. Meanwhile, Sarah’s esophagus became a two-way passage; sensibly, it should work in one direction only, leading food to thestomach, where it should stay and then continue its journey within the body,becoming something else: blood, excrement. Sarah, however, liberated thedigestive conduit from being stuck, from its one-directionality. Now it couldlead in and out, but the two directions are in fact one, because—as in Alice’sworld—”sense always goes in both directions at once” (Deleuze 1990:77). Senseis linear both in time and space, and thus Sarah’s world is linear in one senseyet not “sensible” in another, because it is not “sensible” to let food, onceswallowed, come up again. Thus Sarah’s world opens up a parallel world, thatof the erratic movement of the stutter, and releases—even liberates—the two-way passage to the potentiality of multiplicity.

Another consequence of this liberating BwO is that Sarah reverses the rolesof food and speech: the food comes back out of her smoothly, while the wordsmust be convulsed out. She liberates food from profundity and words fromshallowness.12 Returning to the performance’s name “To eat, to speak, to skirt:Reading the little girl’s lips,” if, as Deleuze would have it, to “eat and to be eaten[. . .] is the operational mode of bodies, the type of their mixture in depth, theiraction and passion, and the way in which they coexist within one another,” andif “to speak, though, is the movement of the surface, and of ideational attributesor incorporeal events” (Deleuze, 1990:23), then “to skirt”—in the double senseof border or moving on the edge and wearing a skirt as women do—is toreverse those roles.

Words are no longer movement on the surface; rather, they have to be rippedout from the deep presocial within, making no more sense than affect, coming


from a profound place within the body to be transformed into intensities ofeffort and pain. Vomit, on the other hand, comes out smoothly, it aborts thepotentiality of food to become living matter once again; eating is a dispassionateact by which food becomes waste, devoid of depth, yet is extended into theworld. Thus it is the surface—food—and not the abstract word that enables theboundaries between body and world to be breached. To skirt, namely, to movealong the rim of the world and of womanhood, is an act that can affect thisreversal, where words acquire somatic depth, food is extended into the world,and the plums are separated in a sedentary way “on the one hand and on theother hand” (Deleuze 1990:75). They are dismantled, classified, dissected intocategories: pits, peels, pulp-turned-vomit. Yet the result is not good order, it isthe senseless order of mushiness. The plums are the little creatures sacrificed inorder to achieve the feat of reversal.

Whereas “wonderland exists in an always subdivided double direction”(Deleuze 1990:78), Sarah’s is a world that refuses to open where it should: it isstuck. The path to liberation begins with the fakir-like act of standing on sharp-edged brackets and continues with the sacrificial odyssey of the plums. Theplums are an offering for linearity, causality, and sensibility, sacrificed in the lineof duty. Sarah’s world sets into action a circular desiring machine, repeatingitself in the hope for oedipal deliverance that will enable the plums to go all theway through, becoming real blood, opening up the anus—and the vagina,which will allow its monthly stream of blood to flow—reading the little girl’sother lips into becoming woman. Just as a philosophical concept has a life of itsown, so too lived worlds have a propensity to go places.

* * *

And then there is another reversal. Sarah’s world is a caricature, a mock sacri-fice, a toy pipe, an ironic Statue of Liberty (perhaps hinting at the liberation ofthe hunter and the hunted from their constraining opposition?), a distortedcircus, plumbing only for Deleuzians: a private joke on our account, understoodonly by us. Bateson (2000) has suggested that humor is a meta-message and thatthe only difference between what is serious and what is play, or humor, is theframing in which it is communicated. Humor is the framed announcement(this is not serious), and whatever is outside that frame is serious (see alsoHandelman 2001). The only difference between the nip of a young puppyplaying and the bite of an angry adult dog is the frame. “Simultaneously theplayful nip is not only a bite and a nonbite, not only one thing and another . . .but also a bite in process, in transformation to something else. Somethinglooking like what it isn’t and indeed it is that” (Handelman and Shulman1997:39). But what happens to humor when the borders are breached andbecome fuzzy, when the BwO makes them flow and lose their steadiness, as inSarah’s presentation? How then does humor operate? In such a world a nipmight bite or become something altogether different.

If you think about it, it is both shocking and yet funny to walk on sharp-edged cookie cutters and smashed fruit instead of a tight rope. It is ridiculousto train the body for the fantastic feat of throwing up without convulsinginstead of swallowing swords. It is preposterous to replace bleeding little


creatures with plums. It is just as absurd to tell pointless stories that don’t goanywhere instead of displaying human silliness through tripping clowningacts. But isn’t that what we all do? We train ourselves to become maestros of ourown silly habits; we sacrifice little things for no reason at all; we communicatethrough senseless stories; and we generate pipes and taps that will lead out intothe world in our attempt of some understanding.

Notes

1. This is the title as it appeared in the conference program. Sarah told me laterthat she had wanted to change the title to “To eat, to speak, to skirt, or, Plumbing forDeleuzians.” We were the Deleuzians that she was plumbing for. I will relate to bothtitles.

2. Quetzalcoatl is the Aztec feathered serpent god.3. Sarah wrote me that the sharp brackets she was standing on “were metal alphabet

cookie cutters, which is pretty central. So when I chewed on one, I was chewing on aletter—an “H” to be exact, because I was playing with the title of the piece which I’dspelled out with the letters—”Count(h)er Clockwise.” This, however, was completelylost on me during the presentation.

4. Vomiting can also be understood in positive terms as a form of purging or reen-ergizing. For the Kwakiutl, Native Americans from the Seattle Bay area who wereintensively documented and analyzed, “vomiting comprises the basic paradigm of trans-formation and rebirth; fire, like vomit, does not destroy, it resubstantiates” (Walens1981:17).

5. Alice can no longer play badminton in her head, taking both sides and havingequally good chances of winning or losing, of b-eating the other or of getting b-eaten.

6. Such a reckoning of the body is culturally specific to monotheistic thinking; itstems from the same sources as do semiotics, both of them claiming a metaphysical,unbreachable gap between the world and us, between a symbol and the thing in theworld that it refers to, between body and soul, and between God and humans.

7. For a complementary anthropological perspective see Persson (2010).8. Notwithstanding Coleman’s inference that they are extraordinary, both transfor-

mation and ghosts are, for anthropologists, part of everyday reality in many places.9. The entire issue of Body & Society dedicated to affect.10. Yogis can defy the inaccessibility of the interiority of the body by controlling their

heart beat, blood pressure and more (see Alter 2004).11. Each cosmology provides a different perception of what nature is and how it

stands in relation to culture, yet we all have some concept of what existed before it wastamed by the social, what will always remain untamed, and what can be done at theborders between the presocial and the social. A twilight zone in this sense is the body,which inevitably connects “us” with the processes of our body.

12. The relation between words and food are longstanding in European history. Inthe Middle Ages, reading aloud the written sacred word was likened to eating anddigesting or ruminating: hearing the written word was eating, while taking it into one’sheart was digesting (Ingold 2007:17–18).

References Cited

Alter, Joseph2004 Yoga in Modern India—The Body Between Science and Philosophy. Princeton:

Princeton University Press.Artaud, Antonin

1964 Le Théâtre et son double. Saint-Amand: Gallimad.Bar-On Cohen, Einat

2007 Timing in Karate and the Body in its Own Right in Anthropology. SocialAnalysis 51(3):1–22.


2009 Kibadachi—Pain and Crossing Boundaries within the Lived-in-Body andwithin Sociality. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (incorporatingMan) 15:610–629.

2011 Events of Organicity—The State Abducts the War Machine. AnthropologicalTheory 11(3):259–282.

N.d. Perfect Praxis in Aikido—a Reflexive Body-Self. In Reflecting on Reflexivity,Evens Terry, Don Handelman, and Christopher Roberts (eds). Special issue, SocialAnalysis.

Bateson, Gregory2000 [1972] Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Blackman, Lisa, and Couze Venn2010 Affect. Body & Society 16(7):7–28.

Carroll, Lewis1994 [1865] Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. London: Penguin.

Coleman, Felicity F.2005 Affect. In The Deleuze Dictionary. A. Parr (ed.). Pp. 11–12. Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press.Csordas, Thomas J.

2004 Asymptote of the Ineffable—Embodiment, Alterity, and the Theory of Religion.Current Anthropology 45(2):163–185.

Deleuze, Gilles1990 Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari2005 [1987] A Thousand Plateaus—Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis:

University of Minneapolis Press.2009 Anti-Oedipus. In Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Penguin.

Douglas, Mary1971 Do Dogs Laugh? A Cross-Cultural Approach to Body Symbolism. Journal of

Psychosomatic Research 15:387–390.Handelman, Don

1991 Symbolic Types, the Body and Circus. Semiotica 85:205–225.2001 Postlude: Framing, Braiding, and Killing Play, in Lindquist Galina and Don

Handelman. (eds.) Playful Power and Ludic Spaces: Studies in Games of Life.Special issue of Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology 37:145–156.

ms Tracing Bureaucratic Logic: How Things Come Together Through Time (WhenThey Do . . .). Unpublished manuscript.

Handelman, Don, and Galina Lindquist2011 Introduction: Religion, Politics and Globalization: The Long Past Foreground-

ing the Short Present, Prologue and Introduction. In Religion, Politics, andGlobalization—Anthropological Approaches. Lindquist and Handelman (eds.).New York: Berghahn.

Handelman, Don, and David Shulman1997 God Inside Out—Siva’s Game of Dice. New York: Oxford University Press.

Ingold, Tim2007 Lines, a Brief History. Abingdon: Routledge.

Ingold, Tim2000 The Perception of the Environment—Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill.

Oxon: Routledge.Ingold, Tim, and Elizabeth Hallam

2007 Creativity and Cultural Improvisation: an Introduction. In Creativity and cul-tural Improvisation. Hallam Elizabeth and Tim Ingold (eds.). Pp. 1–24. New York:Berg.

Mann-O’Donnell, Sarah2010 From Hypochondria to Convalescence: Health as Chronic Critique in

Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari. Deleuze Studies 4(2):161–182.


Manning, Erin2007 Politics of Touch, Sense, Movement, Sovereignty. Minneapolis: Minnesota

University Press.Mauss, Marcel

1950 [1936] Les Techniques du Corps, Sociologie et Anthropologie. Paris: PressesUniversitaires de France.

McLean, Stuart2009 Stories and Cosmologies: Imagining Creativity Beyond “Nature” and

“Culture.” Cultural Anthropology 24(2):213–245.Ngai, Siannes

2005 Ugly Feelings. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.Persson, Asha

2010 Embodied Worlds: A Semiotic Phenomenology of Satyananda Yoga. Journal ofthe Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16(4):797–815.

Stewart, Kathleen2007 Ordinary Affects. Durham: Duke University Press.

Taylor, Janelle S.2005 Surfacing the Body Interior. The Annual Review of Anthropology 34:741–56.

Walens, Stanley1981 Feasting with Cannibals—an Essay on Kwakiutl Cosmology. Princeton:

Princeton University Press.


to eat, to speak, to skirt: reading the little girl's lips: sarah mann-o'donnell's...

Documents