from Hypatia Volume 16, Number 2On the Lap of Necessity: A Mythic Reading of Teresa Brennan’s Energetics Philosophy
Jane Caputi
Hypatia vol. 16 no. 2 (Spring 2001) © by Jane Caputi
Permission to CopyYou may download, save, or print for your personal use without permission. If you wish to disseminate the electronic article, or to produce multiple copies for classroom or educational use, please request permission from:
Copyright Clearance CenterFor other permissions, use our online reprint request form.
Professional Relations Department
222 Rosewood Drive
Danvers MA 01923 FAX: 978-750-4470/4744
Web address: www.copyright.com
In several works Teresa Brennan examines how, contrary to social notions of the separate and contained self, all that exists in the natural world is connected energetically. She identifies a “foundational fantasy” whereby the ego comes into existence and is maintained by the notion that it controls the mother. The effects of this fantasy are socially oppressive and, in the technological era, environmentally disastrous. My examination of narratives and images in ancient myth, popular culture, literature, and art suggest ways to counteract the destructive fantasy through re-symbolization of the relation to what Brennan understands as the original/living nature, which is correlated to the mother’s body.
It is thus to the Mother that man owes the World of Forms or Universe. Without Her as material cause, Being cannot display itself. It is but a corpse. . . . primacy is given to the Mother, and it is said, “What care I for the Father if I but be on the lap of the Mother?”
Arthur Avalon, Shakti and Shakta
Thinkers such as Teresa Brennan (1993), Mary Daly (1978, 1984, 1998), Vandana Shiva (1988), Luce Irigaray (1985, 1993), Alice Walker (1983), Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), Donna Wilshire (1989), Nancy Tuana (1993), Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor (1987), and Paula Gunn Allen (1986) all, with varying emphases, perspectives, and degrees of explicitness, have pointed to the ways that maternal origins and the feminine principle have been marginalized, distorted, suppressed, trivialized, and denied. This reconstruction/destruction of the Mother in the realms of the sacred, scientific, social, philosophical, psychological, technological, and cultural has contributed to such deleterious characteristics of modern societies as hierarchical and oppositional consciousness (light and dark, masculine and feminine, self and other, spirit and matter, culture and nature, high and low, mind and body, life and death, heaven and earth); a corresponding denigration of all that is associated with the feminine (the second part in these oppositions); exploitation of the elements and nature; and a pervasive cultural necrophilia. That necrophilia is evidenced in an identification of both knowledge and pleasure (from science to sexual murder) with invasion, torture, bondage, dismemberment, and destruction (Merchant 1980; Harding 1999; Caputi 1987) and in the preference of the imitation to the original, as well as in the proliferation of consumer objects that necessitate the degradation of the elemental world.
In History After Lacan (1993) and Exhausting Modernity (2000), Teresa Brennan identifies what she terms a “foundational fantasy” that drives this massively destructive and ultimately suicidal world view. As she defines this fantasy, the “ego comes into being and maintains itself partly through the fantasy that it either contains or in other ways controls the mother; this fantasy involves the reversal of the original state of affairs, together with the imitation of the original” (1993, 167). Drawing upon the psychoanalytic insights of Melanie Klein, Brennan highlights Klein’s notion of the “splitting” found in infantile aggression against the mother. Splitting provides a strategy whereby the infant can disown in the self what it fears or dislikes, separating it from the “good.” The “bad” is then projected onto the other, specifically the “bad breast” of the mother as the infant divides the mother (the breast) into “good” and “bad” (Klein 1980, 1–24). Furthermore, the infant desires to “abject” the mother, to “poison or dismember her, to spoil and poison the breast (and the mother) with its own excrement” (Brennan 1993, 93). The bad breast, then, is the one contaminated by the excrement that he has dumped in it. Brennan extends this notion of splitting, arguing that through the foundational fantasy we come to know the world through such schisms as those between the mental and the physical, the social and the natural.
Because, as Brennan argues, the mother’s body is correlated with “living nature,” the enactments and effects of this fantasy in the technological era have become ever more environmentally disastrous. Brennan argues for the development of “a vocabulary which constrains manifestations of a destructive psychical fantasy, as well as one that symbolizes the relation to maternal origin” (1993, 174). My purpose here will be to explore one aspect of that emerging vocabulary: that which concerns the symbolization of relation to the original/the mother/living nature. This vocabulary, consisting of both words and images, takes shape, potentially, in a variety of forms: reinstatements of life-preservative taboos1; the revival and reconceptualization of potentially helpful concepts (for example, “Mother Earth,” “Mother Nature,” the “feminine principle”)2; criticism and reconceptualization of notions such as the hierarchical high and low (Christian 1997), light and dark (Anzaldúa 1987); the invention of wholly new words and phrases (Daly 1978; Irigaray 1985); as well as deliberate excursions into realms the foundation fantasizes as obscene (for example, the artwork by Chris Ofili discussed later in this essay).
Brennan’s call for a new vocabulary, her theorization of energetics, and her emphasis on maternal origin all invite an application of feminist mythmaking and mythic analysis. For it is myth—living symbols and stories—I shall argue, that is most capable of speaking about the original, and it is myth that is the form of language and imagery most charged with the energy to transform consciousness.
Myth and the Original
Come out of their language. Try to go back through the names they’ve given you. I’ll wait for you, I’m waiting for myself. Come back.
Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One
[M]yths . . . are the deepest . . . innermost cultural stories of our human journeys toward spiritual and psychological growth. An essential part of myth is that it allows for our return to the creation, to a mythic time. It allows us to hear the world new again.
Linda Hogan, “A Different Yield,” in Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World
Time comes into it.
Say it. Say it.
The universe is made of stories,
Not of atoms.Muriel Rukeyser, “The Speed of Darkness”
Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum (2000) describes the characteristic form taken by processions in honor of the Black Madonna in Sicily: participants take three steps forward and then two steps back.3 One way to interpret the meaning of this ritual movement is that it teaches that progression must be based in the past—a zone understood not only as a historical past but as a mythic source of origins. Similarly, Linda Hogan (1995) explains that in order to create the new—in consciousness and culture—we must first go back to the time/space of the original. Myth is one vehicle to accomplish this intricate, spiral passage.
While primarily informed by psychoanalytic theory and Marxism, Brennan shares with other key feminist thinkers a reliance on such a mythic frame. In her emphasis on the original (about which I will have much more to say throughout this essay), Brennan participates in a stream of feminist theory that articulates a mythic space to “go back to,” one that pre-exists master-slave/patriarchal/colonial definition and occupation—a space/time that is variously imaginative, ideal, historical, emergent, and/or psychical.
Myths can be understood as coded transmissions communicating “certain basic, universal meanings” that exist in an ongoing process of manifestation, interpretation, and reinterpretation (O’Flaherty 1988, 31). Even to tell a myth is to interpret it. Hence meanings expand, shift, and are revealed over time. Donna Wilshire (1989) finds primal myth to be a particularly vital source for feminist interpretation. The retellings of myths can themselves be transformative, she asserts, opening “doors long-closed on the riches of the so-called ‘female’ perspective. . . . primal Myth exposes a way of thinking and being in the world that dissolves dualism, neutralizes coercive hierarchies, and puts some old taboos (especially about women’s blood and bodies with their dark interiors) into new and positive framework” (1989, 97). Feminist reinterpretations of myths of origin demand, as we shall see, radical reconsiderations of the maternal and of related concepts including darkness, descent, dependence, dirt, and death.
Of course, so much of primal myth seems to be mired in gynephobic, misogynist, and frankly infantile points of view. Over and over, we find a masculine inability to face the mother, horror at femaleness, and fantasies of heroic slaughter of the feminine (Lederer 1968; Neumann 1963). These myths, Mary Daly argues, point to a paradigmatic act of “goddess murder,” one serving to legitimate consanguineous attacks against female bodies and psyches throughout global history (1978). Yet, Daly continues, patriarchal myth also contains stolen energies. Feminist interpreters can see through the “foreground” deceptions of patriarchal myth, reverse their characteristic reversals, and thereby tap into the Background (1978, 3, 26)—which we might recognize as one face of the original—a realm of wild, inimitable, and inviolable reality.
Interpreting myth, then, not only challenges established meanings but connects interpreters to a transformative ideational energy. Challenging traditional rationalist notions, Paula Gunn Allen argues that myths are stories that are sacred not only because they are meaningful but because they are able to influence reality, imbued with the “power to transform something (or someone) from one state or condition to another” (1986, 103). Here we again find a key link between feminist theories of myth and Brennan’s philosophical work. For Brennan bases her thought in a recognition of energetics: “All beings, all entities in and of the natural world, all forces, whether naturally or artificially forged, are connected energetically” (2000, 41). Myths and mythic images must be comprehended as energetic phenomena; they are living symbols, forces with which we interact, powers capable of opening up “levels of reality otherwise closed to us and . . . unlock[ing] dimensions and elements of our souls which correspond to these hidden dimensions and elements of reality” (Daly 1984, 25). Daly further asserts that the act of “Re-membering and decoding” certain primal myths and images can itself “conjure vortices of force” (1998, 187). Hence, I turn to a mythic vocabulary for the two reasons I have just outlined: the capacity of myth to speak of and to the original; and the unique transformational powers of mythic dialogue and interpretation. The energetic elements of this mythic vocabulary can be found, read, and communicated with in both ancient and contemporary forms, from the worlds of religion as well as art and popular culture.
The Foundational Fantasy
Brennan argues that an egocentric paradigm of consciousness, (masculine) subjectivity as we know it, is crucial to this culture of objectification, fragmentation, and domination. What she calls, after Lacan, the “ego’s era” derives from a foundational fantasy in which the masculine-identified and infantile subject imagines himself as the “locus of active agency and the environment as passive” (1993, 11). This begins with the mother, as the subject makes her into an object that the subject in fantasy commands. At the same time, the subject denies its history “in so far as that history reveals its dependence on a maternal origin” (1993, 101). This includes dependence not only on the actual mother but also upon living nature. Brennan further explains: “I am positing that the desire for instant gratification, the preference for visual and ‘object’-oriented thinking this entails, the desire to be waited upon, the envious desire to imitate the original, the desire to control the mother, and to devour, poison and dismember her, and to obtain knowledge by this process, constitute a foundational psychical fantasy” (1993, 101).
A postmodern current (for example, Baudrillard 1981; Haraway 1991, 150–51) explicitly rejects any notion of an “original.” Yet Brennan asserts her belief in an “original,” a “living nature” (1993, 14) that is correlated with the mother’s body. This original pre-exists the foundational fantasy and is first known in the earliest experiences of the mother’s body. Psychoanalysis and deconstruction have characterized any notion of a foundation as being laden with narcissism, inscribing the white male modern subject as the source of all meaning. Yet, such a critique actually promotes that same narcissism by implying that if the white male modern subject is not the source of meaning, then there is no meaning and no origin. Brennan’s articulation of the “foundational fantasy,” instead, explains how it is that we have come to think of the elite masculine subject as the source of meaning and agency. Moreover, it points us toward necessary knowledge of the original that the fantasy would deny and distort.
The foundational fantastic rivals and reverses the original in any number of ways—for example, via the common notion of the man as the provider on whom the woman depends as well as through masculine envy, appropriation, control, and imitation of the mother’s powers. Both of these arguably motivate and structure not only interpersonal relations (consider Ronald Reagan’s pet name for his endlessly adoring and acquiescent wife Nancy—“Mommie Poo Pants”) but also much economic, religious, and technological activity (Daly 1978, 57–64; Easlea 1983). Later in this essay, I will consider Brennan’s analysis of the relationship of the foundational fantasy to technological development. For now, however, it might be instructive to contemplate these themes as they coalesce in a 1996 advertisement for British Airways.
This advertisement uses a collage that is overtly fantastic. An idealized white, young, properly coifed, and tastefully, if suggestively, sweater-clad mother is shown in sepia tones. The seated mother holds an infant in her lap, upon whom she gazes adoringly. The diapered infant’s head and upper torso are replaced with a full color insert of an old bald white man, wearing a white shirt and red tie. He smiles in his sleep. A headline touts the “New Club World cradle seat” and adds this disclaimer: “Lullaby not included.”
In the overt text of this ad, the mother is controlled by being rendered a phantasm, an unrealistic sentimentalization, the narcissistic projection of a perpetually infantile elder. On a less visible level, the mother, with her capacity to carry, is imitated, rivaled, and replicated by the airplane, a device that Marshall McLuhan (1953) would recognize as a “mechanical bride.”
Here as elsewhere, denial and control of the mother is effected through promoting the image of an idealized angel-mom, one who is nurturant, passive, devoted, young, beautiful, and ever so happy to clean up “baby’s” messes. Yet, the fantasy itself inevitably contains the splitting that is endemic to masculine subjectivity and egocentric consciousness. Just as the “whore” lurks behind every “virgin,” so too the mad, bad, and devouring monster-mother (Hitchcock’s Psycho [1960] is a key text here)4 is the perverse underside of this idealized maternal fantasy.
It doesn’t take long to discover the “dark side” of this ad. The ad is for a “cradle” seat; its headline mentions a deliberately excluded “lullaby.” “Rock-a-bye Baby” might come to mind. In that hardly restful ditty, the bough notoriously breaks and the cradle fatefully falls. And indeed, much to the masculine subject’s dismay, mothers can abort; airplanes, cars, computers, stock markets, and egos can crash.
The entire ad, again, is manifestly chimerical, signposting the presence of the destructive psychical fantasy. In Brennan’s view, that fantasy produces a “complex physical alternative world which papers over the original” (1993, 195). Yet, she cautions, this virtual reality should “not blind us to the existence of the original” (1993, 196). In this virtual world, the ordinary one we inhabit, Brennan cautions, we “cannot know the original with certainty.” Still, we can begin to discern it through “tracing the inverted path of the imitation.” This is possible because “an unconscious knowledge of the original informs the direction and content of its competitive contender” (1993, 195–96).
Hence, if we wend our way back, regressing through the mythic image, we can recover knowledge of the original. Returning to the airline ad, for example, we can look behind the foreground opposition of the angel-mom/monster-mom and find its symbolic etymology in a complex mythic conception of the maternal divine. In any number of world figures—Kali from the Hindu tradition (Dalmiya 2000), Isis from the Egyptian (Baring and Cashford 1991, 264), Demeter from the European, Tlazolteotl, Coatlicue, and Tlaelcuani from the Aztec (Anzaldúa 1987, 46), Oya from the Yoruban (Gleason 1987), even the vernacular “Mother Nature” (Caputi 1993, 46–47)—the unsplit, original Mother is equally and always creator, preserver, destroyer, and transformer (Baring and Cashford 1991; Sjöö and Mor 1987). And she knows exactly what she is doing.
The Unsplit Mother
Kali is thus the paradox: She is the Primal Mother who brings forth all life even while she signifies Death. Everything that there is, everything “natural,” is the vale of Death even though it is nothing other than Kali/Prakrti, the source of life.
Dalmiya, “Loving Paradoxes: A Feminist Reclamation of the Goddess Kali”
In The Sacred Hoop (1986), Paula Gunn Allen describes the primal or original force, known variously as Old Spider Woman, Thought Woman, Serpent Woman, Earth Woman, and Corn Woman: “There is a spirit that pervades everything, that is capable of powerful song and radiant movement, and that moves in and out of the mind. The colors of this spirit are multitudinous, a glowing, pulsing rainbow. . . . Her variety and multiplicity testify to her complexity: she is the true creatrix for she is thought itself, from which all else is born. She is the necessary precondition for material creation, and she, like all of her creation, is fundamentally female—potential and primary. . . . To assign to this great being the position of ‘fertility goddess’ is exceedingly demeaning: it trivializes the tribes and it trivializes the power of woman. Woman bears, that is true. She also destroys” (1986, 13–14; emphasis added).
As Allen’s language suggests, this quintessential power also can be known by the name of Necessity. Proverbially, necessity is the mother of invention, that is, of everything that comes into material being. In the Greek tradition, Necessity is the mother of the Fates or Moirae, the three ancient goddesses who are older than all the gods and to whose dictates even Zeus must yield. Euripides (cited in Ann and Myers 1993, 148) calls Necessity “the most powerful of the deities.” Plato (1992) in the last chapter of his Republic tells the “Myth of Er,” in which individual souls participate in a lottery presided over by the Fates. In order of a number falling to them by chance, each soul chooses a life or destiny. The soul then proceeds under the hand of each of the three Fates. Then the soul passes under the lap or throne of Necessity before emerging into material existence.
Although she does not refer to them explicitly, Brennan’s work is informed by the knowledge encoded in these ancient myths: that the original, the primal creative source, is correlated with the mother. Yet, what do we mean by “the mother?” In her interpretation of Kali, Vrinda Dalmiya distinguishes between biological and metaphysical motherhood, with Kai epitomizing the latter. “Kali/Prakrti is the Ultimate monistic stuff from which everything emerges but which nevertheless is distinct from and transcends these emergents” (2000, 134). Biological motherhood, Dalmiya explains, requires impregnation by a male and is constructed, however erroneously, as being passive. But “emanation from Prakrti is not dependent on a male being the source of everything. Prakrti is prior to even the male . . . [and] is definitely the active principle in generation” (Dalmiya 2000, 135). A culture inimical to female genius, divinity, and creativity distorts the concept of motherhood, narrowing it to a solely biological, passive, and mindless activity.5 This is pure reversal. Thought, as Allen reminds us, is the first principle of cosmic or metaphysical motherhood.6
Brennan also addresses this distortion. She points to the splitting at the core of the foundational fantasy as producing the notion that “direction or agency is . . . mental and mindful, while activity, paradoxically, is . . . something that lacks intelligence” (2000, 28). Outrageously, the activity of women as mothers is (mis)understood as passive, as something that is directed from elsewhere—by the sperm, by the fetus, by the doctor, by god. Concomitantly, as Brennan recognizes, this dismissal of maternal agency “can be extended readily to living nature overall” (2000, 28). Contemplating the oft-repeated association of women with nature, Brennan argues that this “can be explained not by what women and nature have in common, but by the similar fantasmatic denial imposed upon both of them. In the case of women, it is one’s will that is denied. In the case of living nature, its own inherent direction is disregarded” (2000, 28). In short, the envy of the masculine subject for the creativity and power of the original drives it to deny the intelligence of nature, and to impose a notion of motherhood as an allegedly mindless biological activity.
Deepening our notion of motherhood to include the intelligent, mindful, and metaphysical, we can reconsider the innumerable religious icons (including the subliminally sacred imagery of the British Airways ad) that display a (sometimes remote and sometimes tender) mother/goddess with a (frequently nursing) child on her lap or in her arms—for example, the Yoruban First Ancestor and child, the Egyptian Isis and Horus, Catholicism’s Mary and Jesus, and Haitian Vodou’s Ezili Dantò and daughter Anaïaut;s (Graham 1997, 51–62; Austen 1990, 22; Neumann 1963, plates 37–47; Houlberg 1995, 273). Although we might be tempted to focus on the child or even the mother in these images, that would be a mistake. These really are not family portraits. Rather, they are living symbols communicating complex concepts regarding the nature of the cosmos.
Erich Neumann explains that the great mother “as a whole is a symbol of creative life and the parts of her body are not physical organs but numinous symbolic centers of whole spheres of life” (1963, 128). The key element in these icons is not the foreground figures; rather it is the lap.7 The lap, seemingly the most passive of all places, is in truth the most active. The mother/lap represents the original, the intelligent matrix or cosmic womb. The name Isis derives from a word meaning seat, lap, throne (Lurker 1980, 71). Isis characteristically appears with the throne on her head and is “goddess of the throne upon whose sovereign lap the king sat as her infant child in the image of all humanity” (Baring and Cashford 1991, 225). She is always behind him, making possible not only his rule but also his life—his very coming into the “World of Forms” or material existence. As a praisesong to this Goddess avowed, everything is “because of Isis” (Monaghan 1999, 145).8
Understanding the metaphysical mother as the ultimate cause, as Necessity herself, we recognize that while the original bears, nurtures, and sustains life, that same original also ultimately takes back all of life into her lap. There, she decomposes and recomposes these elements, resulting in ceaseless action, movement, and transmutation. Returning to the lap icons, we find that sometimes a son is dead. Consider the resonant mystery of Michelangelo’s Pieta. Even the bizarre collage of the British Airways ad, linking the infant and the old man, suggests the mother’s lap as the beginning and end of life. Here, the mother represents the eternal, the infinite, mindful primal potency, and potential; the son represents the transitory and finite.9 The process signified by the mother’s lap is the ceaseless intelligent movement of life, growth, and change. This quintessential process—one that encompasses organic death—is the life force.
Death and the Ego
Kali is she who swallows the universe. She consumes your smallness, your pain, your guilt, and finally your ego, if you will allow her to. Kali is the Black Mother, the dark mother of the night. It is she who kills the ego dead.
Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati, “Kali Who Swallows the Universe”
Although Brennan does not specifically link the modern notion of the self-contained individual to the ego, the two are arguably synonymous. The splitting involved in the foundational fantasy includes a rupture between subject and object, resulting in the ego that imagines himself as separate and contained. This self-concept is intrinsic to oppressive and splitting practices such as objectification, prostitution, racism, abandonment of the homeless and elderly, and genocide (Williams 1991, 62). Likewise, the ego imagines himself able to poison the mother/nature without simultaneously destroying himself. This conception of the self-contained bounded individual, while found in ancient thought, has “hardened” through time (Brennan 2000, 47). In the West, such individuality now is accepted as the standard version of subjectivity.
Yet the conception of the maternal/original evoked here radically challenges that model. One theorist of myth and consciousness, Gloria Anzaldúa, finds that when she attends to the “darkness that was ‘present’ before the world and all things were created,” the darkness “equated with matter, the maternal, the germinal, the potential” she is “led back to the mystery of the Origin” (1987, 49). Descending into the “Coatlicue state,” Anzaldúa finds that she is able to move beyond the “conscious I” which looms as a boulder in her path of becoming (1987, 50).
Particularly in her manifestation as the cruel hag, Kali also “dashes to pieces the finite world of individual egos” (Brown 1987, 121–22). As the ego is annihilated, a different conception of the self is freed to emerge. In other words, when understanding of the original transforms and deepens, so necessarily does understanding of the self. Drawing upon environmental philosopher Val Plumwood (1993), Dalmiya (2000) identifies the ego or “master identity” as a self-construction formed in response to fear of death, opposition to nature, and a failure to acknowledge that life and death are intertwined (2000, 140). The mythic mother-child bond with Kali, she argues, bespeaks a radically different self-construction, a “‘relational identity’ that may well curb the excesses of the domineering self” (2000, 142) and aid in “ethico-political struggles for justice” (2000, 25).
Hence, the “terrible mother” generated by the foundational fantasy is so horrific to masculine subjectivity as we know it because she signifies not only natural death, but also the “death” of the ego and the alternative world built in its image. Curiously enough, this theological understanding is coded into that mysterious lullaby, “Rock-a-bye Baby.” Its implicit mother does not impel the actual death of her child. Rather, she ends the infantile stage. As baby comes “down,” the illusory ego and its “cradle” are dashed to bits. The mature being is now able to emerge. And, we might recall, in worldwide myth, descent is a principal way of knowledge. Referencing the Myth of Er, and the passing of the soul under the lap of Necessity, James Hillman identifies a need for individuals to mature, to “grow down” into this world (1996, 41–62).
The figure of the inexorable and ego-shattering mother/hag, embodied in such mythic figures as Coatlicue and Kali, is crucial to a resymbolization of the maternal—and, thereby, of the self—that would counteract the foundational fantasy. Having established this, we can now turn more detailed attention to the material effects of the fantasy itself. As Brennan outlines this, the ego, unable to face the shattering of self-important subjectivity and the illusion of omnipotence, constructs an “alternative psychophysical world,” one that “guarantees a self which sees things from its own standpoint” (1993, 185). This fantastic, self-centered consciousness attempts to keep at bay all fears of falling and demonizes the very process of maturation that would render that fear bearable if not moot. The construction of this world and its characteristics, dynamics, and implications are theorized in Brennan’s clarifying article “Social Pressure” (1997).
Psychical Matters
The capacity for growth, exuberant expression, and transcendence, symbolized esthetically as well as sexually by the flowering plants—this is the primal gift of life; and in man it flourishes best when living creatures and equally living symbols are constantly present.
Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine
According to Brennan, it is an error to believe that the social is “immaterial, as lacking matter and/or energy” (1997, 257). Rather, the social is “physical, a force that interacts with and affects the biological body” (1997, 258) and the material world. Brennan theorizes the energetic forces and patterns, both fluid and bound, which exist between humans, between humans and objects, and between humans and nature, arguing that “affects and desires can be communicated from the one to the other, and . . . both the one and the other can be born into affects that pre-exist them” (2000, 41).
Brennan’s use of the term social pressure shares in its traditional meanings but expands these to understand the energetic, physical pressures exerted by bound energies or fixities (1997, 257, 275). These fixities first take the form of pathways in the psyche that result from repression. Energy is bound in pathways that are created as a result of experience as well as habitual fantasies, thoughts, and behaviors, including the foundational fantasy. While some are necessary in order to learn, bound pathways also leave the subject less access to freely mobile energy and presumably less ability to change and adapt. This can cause one to age poorly, to become numb, entropic, uniform, inert, and death-like. At the same time, this binding of energy leaves us in a “world with different energetic coordinates” (1997, 263). The recurrent binding of energies and subsequent exploitative relationships changes the external world, creating the alternative physical world.
This dreary world is manufactured as the foundational psychical fantasy makes itself materially true, Brennan explains, through an exploitative transaction. The binding of energy into fixed pathways causes rigidity, a kind of psychophysical waste. Carrying this rigidity can make the subject ill, entropic, and so on. The master identity then finds a solution in exploitation. Exploitation always demands an “energetic transfer that depletes one agency while enriching the other. . . . One is empowered, subjectified, by the energy of the other. At the interpersonal level of image, and imaginary fixing, one ‘makes it to subject’ by directing aggression and a negative image outwards, freeing oneself to move” (1993, 185). In other words, the subject dumps his (the subject is masculine, Brennan writes, though both females and males can assume that position) negative affect onto and into the other. At the same time he is enriched by mining the resources of loving attention (living energy) of the other. This exploitative relationship is clearly a political one. The “other” is variously compelled—economically, socially, or psychologically—to act as a repository, carrying the shame, pain, impotence, and feelings of inferiority of the subject. Any hierarchically gendered relationship—the colonial relationship, the battering relationship, the incest relationship, the relationship of prostitute to John, of servant to mistress or master, the normative heterosexual relationship—is paradigmatic here.10
If we turn to literature we can find an almost exact description of this process in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1996). A lovemaking scene between Gerald and Gudrun is noteworthy for its portrayal of what Brennan terms the transmission of affect or “dumping,” the energetic transfer whereby the masculine partner is both relieved of his waste and revivified, while the feminine is depleted:
Into her he poured all his pent-up darkness and corrosive death, and he was whole again. . . . This was the ever-recurrent miracle of his life, at the knowledge of which he was lost in an ecstasy of relief and wonder. And she, subject, received him as a vessel filled with his bitter potion of death. . . . As he drew nearer to her, he plunged deeper into her enveloping soft warmth, a wonderful creative heat that penetrated his veins and gave him life again. He felt himself dissolving and sinking to rest in the bath of her living strength. It seemed as if her heart in her breast were a second unconquerable sun, into the glow and creative strength of which he plunged further and further.” (1996, 384)
After this transference, Gerald sleeps, the “sleep of complete exhaustion and restoration. But Gudrun lay wide awake, destroyed into perfect consciousness.” Later she feels “old, old” (1996, 385).11
Catholic Church fathers quite openly acknowledged the operation of an exploitative energetic relationship in the institution of prostitution. Mary Daly (1973, 60–61) points out that Augustine and Thomas Aquinas scapegoated the prostitute as unclean but useful. Augustine excoriated prostitutes as the most sordid, immodest, and shameful of all women, yet warned that if they were removed from human affairs it would result in a pollution of “all things with lust” (cited in Daly 1973, 60). The celibate Thomas Aquinas, who entered the monastery at age six, drew upon Augustine to compare the social function of prostitution to that of sewers in a palace (cited in Daly 1973, 61). Contemporary popular imagery remains infused with the stereotype of the prostitute as contaminated scapegoat. But, simultaneously, it is suggested that she is able to contain and even recycle that “pollution,” for she is not only a human dump but also a therapist, mother figure, nurse, and midwife assisting at death. She is said to possess a “heart of gold” but the alchemical transformation she performs is all to the psychophysical benefit of the “John” who, in countless Hollywood films, deposits his refuse into her and emerges from the encounter cleansed, healed, energized, and otherwise transformed (Pretty Woman, L.A. Confidential, He Got Game, Leaving Las Vegas).
And it is not only interpersonal relationships that must be considered in a theory of energetics. Brennan (1997) proposes that paralleling the fixity or bound energy of the psychophysical pathways, and the psychophysical dumping of the subject’s rigidity into the other, are the unbalanced and destructive energetic patterns brought into being by the mass production of consumer goods. Consumer objects, dominating our habitats and made in the image and likeness of the ego and its desires (for example, instant gratification, narcissism, perpetual youth, speed and power), are characterized by bound energies. In these commodities, living energies are fixed, slowing down their motion and re-entry into the life cycle. Similarly, I would add, in many mass-mediated images the living energy of myth and symbol is fixed into stereotype and objectification, promoting super–self-absorption for those positively portrayed and what Patricia Williams calls “spirit murder—disregard for others whose lives qualitatively depend on our regard” (1991, 73) for those victimized by images of deviance, stupidity, sinfulness, hate, and fear.
The proliferation of bound energies—pavement, buildings, objects, images, machines—is attended inexorably by the diminishment of the ever fluid natural world of living, reproducing, and decomposing plants, soil, creatures, elements, ideas. The replacement of this mobile force by bound energies then constitutes social pressure. Brennan explains: “Socially constructed fixities [are] . . . felt as a pressure, and not just in the sense that they are pollutants. Their very existence means there is less that is living in the atmosphere. This new dead weight must be felt as a pressure for the reason that any presence which cannot escape, which is confined by its inability to re-enter the flow, is felt as a pressure” (1997, 274–75).
While Brennan allies social pressure with “death” and the “death drive” (1997), that which obliterates distinctiveness and yields inertia and uniformity, I would prefer to call this deathlessness, which is, of course, equally lifelessness.12 The oppositional split between life (good) and death (bad), might itself be a product of the foundational fantasy. In this fantasy, death, identified with the demise of the ego, is demonized, while struggles against “evil” (a mask for that which causes death) are heroized, resulting in tragedy and the causation of genuinely evil consequences (Becker 1975, 146–70).
Yet, organic death, the inevitable outcome of life, cannot reasonably be understood as evil. Death releases energies back into the flow of life, into the regenerative lap of Necessity. These energies then reconstitute in new forms. A fear of flowing (as well as falling/dying) is everywhere manifested in the monocultures, objects and objectifications, commodities, and other such monuments to the ego that Brennan so astutely identifies.
Technological (In)Toxication
Before the advent of a Western technology capable of fulfilling the desires embodied in the foundational fantasy, it is contained. The advent of that technology is prompted by the fantasy and represents an acting out of it on an increasingly global scale, an enactment that reinforces the psychical power of the fantasy.
Teresa Brennan, History after Lacan
The exploitation of resources, annihilation of living being, and generation of toxic waste that characterize technological development provide touchstones to identify the operation of the foundational fantasy. So too is another technological tendency—that which seeks to immortalize the ego through its personification in the artificial intelligence machine. Fear of ego death, resulting in the attempt to deny death and to control matter, the body, and the maternal is nowhere more apparent than in contemporary technological “posthuman” or “postbiological” discourse. Technicians such as Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil fantasize a “postbiological future” where computers and other machines surpass humans in intelligence and render us, in a word, unnecessary. Moravec (1988) plans the obsolescence of the mother and welcomes the fading away of humans, who are to be replaced by “mind children,” future machines invented by (male) artificial intelligence engineers. Kurzweil, in his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines, eagerly anticipates a cyborgian future in which human beings merge with machines, downloading their consciousness into computers and becoming, literally, software. The fantasy that turns him on involves abandoning the body, spurning living nature and encasing the ego in an idealized fixity, the computer and a completely virtual reality. In so doing, the self can become like god. This new species will eventually consider the “fate of the universe” (Kurzweil 1999, 280).
In these frantic fantasies, the ego not only makes a new species but, blatantly rivaling the biological and metaphysical mother, overcomes the powers of the Fates, Necessity, and Death. Kurzweil’s model for the “god” he wants to become is the familiar immutable heavenly father. That god lives in bodiless heaven, neither on the Earth nor immanent in matter. This notion of omnipotent divinity is made in the image and likeness of the ego and leads inexorably to loneliness, alienation, objectification of the body, and destruction of the environment.
Noting that humans are becoming increasingly inert while our machines are becoming more lively, Donna Haraway, in her influential “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1991), raises not an alarm but a flagpole. Creatively attempting to shake up received categories and concepts, she claims the cyborg, a fusion of animal, machine, and human, as a revolutionary feminist identity. While noting its origins in the military-industrial complex, Haraway nonetheless claims the cyborg to be “the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism” (1991, 151), and hence potentially disloyal to these “inessential” fathers. It seems that there are no maternal origins for the cyborg. Haraway chides other feminists who “insist on the organic, opposing it to the technological,” and celebrates the cyborg for its abandonment of the spurious organic: “The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust” (1991, 151). The most desirable devices for Haraway seem to be those most removed from the earth and matter: “Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum. . . . People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque” (1991, 153).
As her metaphors suggest, Haraway’s cyborg might well be a product of the destructive fantasy. The imagination of the cyborg persists in the foundational denial of the maternal source, here disregarded as the mud, matter, the dark, the low, the Earth. Although cast as fluid, Haraway’s cyborg is fixed, outside of Necessity—the cycle of life, death, regeneration. It neither begins nor ends. Some years earlier Lewis Mumford (1970) lamented that an egomaniacal technological culture, dominated by the “myth of the machine,” has long idealized “a world of light and space, disinfected of the human presence” and fit only for machines (1970, 33). Moravec, Kurzweil, and even Haraway are disturbingly close to this ideal of disinfection and, hence, a cosmic sterility (Caputi 1998).
What might we make of Haraway’s ascription of a desirable “cleanness” to the cyborg? The neo-colonial/militaristic/patriarchal culture, with its seemingly limitless capacity to generate toxins (material and psychic) and dump these onto others, is characteristically obsessed with promoting itself as the “light” and the “clean.” High-tech and often futuristic spaces—in ads and other such iconic images for nuclear power plants, cloning, and biotechnologies—conventionally are presented as sterile places with “clean” functional lines and a total absence of color. There is no acknowledgment of the carnage and waste that is necessarily behind this façade.
In Tar Baby (1981), Toni Morrison scathingly points to a colonizing culture’s characteristic movement: “to defecate over a whole people and come there to live and defecate some more. . . . That was the sole lesson of their world: how to make waste, how to make machines that made more waste, how to make wasteful products, how to talk waste, how to study waste, how to design waste, how to cure people who were sickened by waste so that they could be well enough to endure it, how to mobilize waste, legalize waste and how to despise the culture that lived in cloth houses and shit on the ground far away from where they ate” (1981, 175).13 With the inversion and denial typical of the foundational fantasy, the colonizers imagine themselves as clean, advanced, white, pure, and progressive and those they subjugate, exploit, foist their psychophysical waste upon, and depend upon for sustenance as foul, dirty, smelly, dark, and backward. A key component of the foundational fantasy is a desire to poison, to piss and shit on the source—technologically, verbally, literally, and virtually. This superficial fixation on cleanness and lightness masks the colonial and technological obsession with its own waste and a concomitant denial and projection, resulting in the production of unprecedented toxins—nuclear waste, hydroflorocarbons, dioxin and so on. Behind the facade of every shiny consumer “good” is a “slimy bad by-product” (Sofia 1984, 46), bound and poisonous fixities, a strip mine, a deforestation, a wasted species, a pile of nuclear droppings (Caputi 1993, 223–24).
Consuming the Source/Feeding the Ego
This ego-driven world, Brennan writes, characteristically refuses to acknowledge indebtedness to and dependence on the mother and, correspondingly, “on the extraordinary creativity of the ‘God as Nature’” (1993, 194). This parallel factor makes the “feminist concern with symbolizing divinity in maternal terms an imperative” (1993, 194). A world in denial of responsibility to the Mother is one in which Being does not readily display itself. This world, founded upon reversal and imitation, is a world of virtual corpses that take even such everyday and familiar forms as TVs, VCRs, sport utility vehicles, and computers as well as dehumanizing images, objectifications, and stereotypes.
Again, turning to the world of popular culture, we find an extraordinarily vivid enactment of the foundational fantasy. It is one of a series of television commercials for Radio Shack (November 2000). These all feature a pretend married couple, ex-football star Howie Long and actress Teri Hatcher, and all revolve around the jock making a joke of his “wife.” In one, Hatcher, dressed all in white, invites Long, garbed all in black, into a stark, all-white space. She seats him in a throne-like black chair and swivels it around so that he can focus upon the large black television screen and speakers. She powers a remote control, switching on the TV, hands him a drink and popcorn, and then remains standing behind him. Long watches an outer-space machine fight scene from a Star Warsish movie. Zap, zap, zap go the laser beams. There is nothing alive anywhere in sight. He visibly glazes over, thoroughly engrossed in the fantasy. But, he smirks at her, one thing is missing, “a cup holder.” Without even turning to look at her, he reaches back and deposits his cup into her outstretched hand. In this 30-second hallucination, the original (represented by the woman) seems to be utterly controlled. The instantaneously gratified ego (represented by the man) reposes in a completely de-natured environment, happily and perhaps permanently lost in the infantile fantasy. Of course, the real matrix is still behind him, supporting him, feeding him, making him possible. But he can’t face her or his dependence. Instead, he treats her as a serviceable object and depository. And, in the fantasy, she doesn’t even object to her abjection. It’s “Mommie Poo Pants” all over again. While this scenario masquerades as a utopia of total consumer fulfillment, it actually is a vision of profound dissociation, sensory deprivation, and disaster.
In a balanced world, one guided by respect for Death, an appreciation of the necessary energetic connections between living beings and forces, and respect for the need to check egocentric greed and self-indulgence, consumer items and images would not be fetishized and any production would be kept at a sustainable level.14 Yet, in this bizarre, artificial world, these fixities not only are endlessly reproduced, but themselves masquerade as the Source. For example, a 1999 ad for computer software available through the Internet company Amazon.com displays a giant computer screen with these words writ large: “Feed Me.” “Feeding” the computer is an elaborate means of feeding the foundational fantasy, nourishing the ever rapacious ego. This, of course, is the exact inverse of the original pattern whereby humans should nourish the Source, give energy back to the Mother.
Poet, novelist, and essayist Linda Hogan (1995) writes that, estranged from the land, humans are lonely and alienated because we “have been split from what we could nurture, what could fill us.” Still, she continues, many of us do “desire to see the world intact, to step outside our emptiness and remember the strong currents that pass between humans and the rest of nature, currents that are the felt voice of land, heard in the cells of the body” (1995, 84). Hogan is not being metaphorical here. It is through participating in these currents, that Brennan understands as those very real energetic transactions between living beings and forces, that we not only attain nourishment, energy, and ecstasy but ourselves feed the life force. This worldview and practice requires adult accountability and the abandonment of infantile fantasies. It recognizes that humans are not simple dependents on the original but participants in a complex interdependence. It is our responsibility to nurture the Earth and the elemental, to feed the green as it feeds us. Numerous ancient and still vibrant world traditions guide humans to nourish the gods, to “give back” to the Earth.15 Our job as humans, according to Hogan, is to offer prayer, which we can understand as energetic communication with the life force (1995, 81). It is also through our simple life processes, including sexual exuberance, excretion, respiration, and final expiration, that we feed the primal source—for example, by replenishing the soil as our waste and bodies decompose.
Holy/Shit
At the outset of this essay, I indicated that I would return to the consideration of a maternal concept that challenged the foundational fantasy. A radical symbolization of the original/Mother and a meditation on the cycling of energies, wastes, and affects cohere in one controversial recent artwork. In November 1999, Mayor Rudy Giuliani of New York City threatened to close down the Brooklyn Museum due to its presentation of the “Sensation” exhibit. All of the items in the show, works from young British artists, concerned the body—waste, sex, shit, death, and decay. The most inflammatory to Giuliani was a painting by Chris Ofili, The Holy Virgin Mary. It figures a standing Madonna with a flower-like form, dressed in a flowing blue robe. She is black, with pronounced African features. One eye gazes into those of her viewers, the other is cosmically remote. Surrounding the Madonna are cut-outs of buttocks from pornographic magazines. Moreover, the painting rests on two mounds of elephant dung, on which, with colored pins, the name Holy Virgin Mary is spelled out. Her right breast is exposed; it too is composed of a blob of dung with a spiral shape painted on it. A golden aura radiates around her form, enhanced by the addition of glitter and resin to the paint. Here, the invisible energetic patterns are made visible, an alchemical transmutation (from shit to gold) is invoked.
Ofili is of African ancestry. He indicates that his work is anti-colonialist, that he deliberately plays with racist expectations of Black art, and that the elephant dung is a reference to its use in some African art as well as a way of connecting his paintings to the Earth. Enormous angst shadowed the exhibit. Protestors prayed outside daily. In late December 1999, one elderly man threw white paint onto the Madonna’s face and shoulders. His wife told the New York Times that her husband is a devout Roman Catholic who is opposed to abortion. He considered the painting blasphemous and attacked it to “try to clean it” (McFadden 1999, A29).
Brennan observes: “The splitting that secures subjective identity is replayed at all the levels on which the fantasy is acted out” (1993, 194). As we have seen, the mother, including the sacred mother, is viciously divided into two. In the Catholic tradition, the Virgin Mary is identified with purity, asexuality, and life, while Eve is identified with sin, sex, dirt, and death. The Virgin Mary dogmatically is declared to be a product of “Immaculate Conception,” that is, she was conceived without original sin. In this perverse fantasy, the Great Mother herself is rendered spotless, clean, utterly severed from the soil and mud, and, we might note with some astonishment, from the original. She is purified, as Mary Daly observes, of autonomous be-ing (1984, 104).
Despite her dogmatic whitewashing, the Virgin Mary still ineluctably suggests the presence of the ancient Great Mother Goddesses. Even in the Catholic tradition, the continuing presence of the dark Earth/Mother survives, often in the figure of a Black Madonna (for example, the Virgins of Montserrat, Notre-Dame-aux-Neiges, and Czestochowa) (Begg 1986; Birnbaum 1993). The Dark Mother, be she Kali, Tlaelcuani, The Ephesian Diana, or the “dirty” Virgin of Ofili’s painting, is the original unpurified, unrefined Thought/Sex/Source/Shit Goddess.16 She unifies the realms: sex and mind, matter and energy, heaven and Earth, food and waste, life and death.17
Swearing fealty only to their fantasy of a virginal, immaculate Madonna, Spanish Catholic conquistadors in Mexico deplored and defaced the “obscene” Goddesses they encountered, such as Tlazolteotl. In her aspect as confessor she also was know as Tlaelcuani, the “Filth Eater” (Cisneros 1996, 49). The Goddess bore this name because, like Kali, she is able to absorb the sins, ego, corruption, disease, and waste of human beings. Tlaelcuani is equally a metaphysical Mother; her core icon is a naked woman squatting and giving birth (Cisneros 1996, 49). Like Kali and other mythic Mothers, Talzolteotl/Tlaelcuani takes filth (pollutions of all types, psychical as well as material) back into herself and cosmically recycles it, transforming and energizing the cosmos, and rebirthing matter. The exploitative “dumping” strategy of the ego that Brennan theorizes, whereby the masculine subject, aided by social inequality, dumps his negative affect into a feminine object who recycles it, keeping him invigorated, is a perverse imitation if not a thwarting of the transmutational powers and processes of the Original/Mother.
Returning to Morrison’s Tar Baby, we find an extraordinarily revealing confrontation between the white colonizer Valerian, his wife Margaret, and their servants, Sydney and Ondine, a Black island husband and wife. Valerian is rude and condescending to Ondine. Sydney, speaking up for his wife, asserts that Ondine should receive the same respect as Margaret. Ondine interrupts the conversation to tell all sorts of truths. She effectively defends against Valerian’s and Margaret’s attempted “spirit murder” by naming the profound inversion that governs the exploitative relationship and claiming the honor she deserves: “More . . . I should have more respect [than Margaret]. I am the one who cleans up her shit!” (Morrison 1981, 178).
Brennan suggests that when the subject refuses its appointed role “to impose a negative image on the other . . . resist[s] and reverse[s] moments of objectifying aggression . . . these decisions may reverberate throughout the cosmos, like Lorenzo’s butterfly” (1993, 188). So too, the aggressed against “object,” like Ondine, can talk back, refusing to carry the waste and sustain the fantasy, becoming subject and insisting that all understand the world from her standpoint. Such resistance, a kind of reverse “dumping” engaged in here by Ondine, also releases psychical energies that previously have been bound. These everyday resistances powerfully “perturb the established pathways which otherwise guide and limit understanding” (Brennan 1997, 283).
In the same way, realizing the significance of a symbol whose meaning has been forgotten or discredited, or discerning a Background presence that has been frozen into a stereotype,18 releases bound energy back into the cosmic flow. Feminist poets and philosophers—for example, Muriel Rukeyser (1994, 217), Mary Daly (1973; 1978), Luce Irigaray (1985), bell hooks (1989; 1992), and Gloria Anzaldúa (1987, 66–75)—have long insisted that naming, truth-telling, talking back, breaking silence, oppositional gazing, the decoding of myths and symbols, and transformative mythmaking can cause the world to “split open” (Rukeyser 1994, 217). Brennan’s elegant theory affirms these central propositions of feminist thought and provides a framework of energetics to understand how, precisely, this happens.
If we attend to Ondine’s words in Tar Baby, we recognize the voice of Necessity. So too, we can absorb her glowing, pulsing presence when gazing upon the beauty and mystery of Ofili’s Holy Virgin Mary. This Madonna overturns and renders moot what Brennan identifies as the splitting at the core of the foundational fantasy. The realms of dark and light are connected; there is no separation of sex, the Earth, and even dung from the Holy. Yet I also suspect an accompanying admonition. At this advanced stage of the ego’s era, perversely, all esteem, power, and gain is given to those who, overtly or collaboratively, deny dependence upon nature, produce toxic waste, ravage the land, bind energy into fixities, engage in exploitative dumping, cannibalize the Earth, and (suicidally) deny Death. Is this why the bared breast of the Virgin is made of dung? Has the “infant” finally succeeded in poisoning the breast with his own excrement? Or is there a more original interpretation?
Let’s get down. Let’s be real. Ultimately, humans are not capable of poisoning the source, the “Ultimate monistic stuff from which everything emerges” (Dalmiya 2000, 134). We can, however, poison ourselves. Fatally. As Ofili’s Virgin suggests, perhaps even She grows weary of the ego’s assault, immaturity, and disrespect. Change direction, She warns. Grow down, clean up, or you might soon be eating shit.
NOTES 1. In Gossips, Gorgons, and Crones (Caputi 1993, 160–93), I discuss the Gorgon face as a symbolic marker of taboo with special relevance for taboos on nuclear development. 2 Tuana (1993) traces a centuries-old tradition within Western intellectual thought—scientific, philosophical, and theological—that views woman as inferior to man. For example, in Greek patriarchal myth, “originally, the primal creative force, the female principle is ultimately demoted to very minor participation” (1993, 121). Vandana Shiva speaks of nature as the embodiment of the female principle in Indian cosmology. She further notes that “the feminine principle is not exclusively embodied in women, but is the principle of activity and creativity in nature, women and men. . . . One cannot really distinguish the masculine from the feminine, person from nature. . . . Though distinct, they remain inseparable in dialectical unity, as two aspects of one being” (1988, 52). 3 See Birnbaum (2000). 4 In Psycho (1960) a perpetually infantile son murders his mother and then imitates her. He dresses as the mother, murders in her name, and acts out his version of her personality. The masquerade is lost on most male critics, however, who accept Norman’s representation of “the mother” as an authentic representation of the permanently silenced mother. 5 For feminist critiques and reconceptualizations of motherhood see Dorothy Dinnerstein (1976), Sara Ruddick (1989), Emily Martin (1991), and Danah Zohar (1985; 1990). 6 As Allen further clarifies, the womb itself is a manifestation of a cosmic power that “is not really biological at base; it is the power of ritual magic, the power of Thought, of Mind, that gives rise to biological organisms as it gives rise to social organizations, material culture, and transformations of all kinds” (1986, 28). 7 My thought on the interpretation of these icons has been influenced by fruitful conversations with Fran Chelland, Boca Raton, Florida, September 2000. 8 The full text reads: “Because of Isis, there is a heaven. / Because of Isis, there is an earth./ Because of Isis, winds blow on the desert. / Because of Isis, the river floods in spring. / Because of Isis, plants bear fruit. / Because of Isis, we live and grow strong. / Because of Isis, we have breath to give thanks” (Monaghan 1999, 145). 9 I reserve contemplation of any different symbolic meanings that emerge when it is a daughter on the mother’s lap for a future time. 10 Questions inevitably occur. How does the feminized, passive, and receptive subject survive this dumping process? Why doesn’t she just wither away under the onslaught of psychic toxins? Indeed, why do feminine subjects often seem more possessed of life energy than the masculine? One answer might be the feminine is inherently more energetic than the masculine. Another might be that it takes an enormous amount of psychic energy to sustain the fantasy. Hence masculine subjects, those with the most to gain from the fantasy, expend an enormous amount of energy in repressing their awareness that it is, alas, just a fantasy. Feminized “objects,” on the other hand, know, albeit sometimes unconsciously, the truth. Because the feminine subject is not expending as huge a sum of energy in repressing awareness, she does have more accessible energy and resiliency. 11 Hegemonic heterosexuality makes this complementary relationship attractive to some women as well as to men. The bargain is this: While the man is thus cleansed and revivified, the woman, his servant-goddess, receives his private worship and emotional dependence. In Women in Love (1996) the artist Gudrun, a “new woman,” coldly refuses this old role. Moreover, Lawrence wants to punish his character, Gerald, for refusing the purity of man-to-man love with the author’s surrogate, Birkin. Hence, Gerald is killed off, literally frozen, at novel’s end. 12 Conversation with Fran Chelland, Boca Raton, Florida, December 1999. 13 I thank Helene Vann for alerting me to this passage in Tar Baby. 14 For an understanding of principles of balance and respect and their relation to modern wasting of the environment and consumer production see Carol Lee Sanchez (1989; 1993). 15 Linda Alcoff speaks of her grandmother, a peasant sharecropper woman whose hands had never worn jewelry. But her hands could sift and test the dirt of a particular area and enable her to sense whether or not it was a good place for her family. She always kept a bucket to collect every bit of vegetable scrap that was generated and would take these and toss them around the yard. This was not primarily a practical gesture; it was not a piling up of compost. Rather, it was a practice communicating buckets of knowledge about a way of life. As she tossed a scrap under a tree, she would tell her granddaughter: “We take so much from the Earth. We have to give something back.” Conversation with Linda Alcoff, September 2000, Boca Raton, Florida. 16 For a discussion of the Aztec Shit Goddess, see Randy Conner (1993, 322–23). See also the discussion by David Carrasco (1999, 178–79) on the ancient vision of the “cosmos as compost heap” (1999, 178) with the constant transformation of waste into humus, death into life. 17 Thanks to Ceti Boundy for the phrase “unifying the realms.” Conversation in Boca Raton, Florida, October 1999. 18 See Sandra Cisneros’s (1996) reading of the meaning of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and Alice Walker on Aunt Jemima (1997, 137–43).REFERENCES
Allen, Paula Gunn. 1986. The sacred hoop: Recovering the feminine in American Indian traditions. Boston: Beacon Press.
Ann, Martha, and Dorothy Myers Imel. 1993. Goddesses in world mythology. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, Inc.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/la frontera: The new mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute.
Austen, Hallie Iglehart. 1990. The heart of the goddess: Art, myth and meditations on the world’s sacred feminine. Berkeley: Wingbow Press.
Baring, Anne, and Jules Cashford. 1991. The myth of the goddess: Evolution of an image. New York: Penguin Books.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1981. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e).
Becker, Ernest. 1975. Escape from evil. New York: The Free Press.
Begg, Ean. 1986. The cult of the Black Virgin. New York: Penguin Books.
Birnbaum, Lucia Chiavola. 1993. Black madonnas. Boston: Northeastern University Press.
———. 2000. The dark mother, metaphor of the new millennium: African origins and godmothers. Lecture presented 21 March, at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida.
Brennan, Teresa. 1993. History after Lacan. New York: Routledge.
———. 1997. Social pressure. American Imago 54 (3): 257–88.
———. 2000. Exhausting modernity: Grounds for a new economy. London: Routledge.
British Airways. 1996. Print advertisement.
Brown, C. MacKenzie. 1987. Kali, the mad mother. In The book of the Goddess past and present, ed. Carl Olson. New York: Crossroad.
Caputi, Jane. 1987. The age of sex crime. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.
———. 1993. Gossips, gorgons, and crones: The fates of the Earth. Santa Fe: Bear and Co.
———. 1998. The 21st century sex love and death Goddess. Blue Mesa Review 10: 3–14.
Carrasco, David. 1999. City of sacrifice: The Aztec empire and the role of violence in civilization. Boston: Beacon Press.
Christian, Barbara. 1997. The highs and lows of black feminist criticism. In Feminisms: An anthology of literary theory and criticism, ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.
Cisneros, Sandra. 1996. Guadalupe the sex goddess. In Goddess of the Americas La Diosa de las Américas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe, ed. Ana Castillo. New York: Riverhead Books.
Conner, Randy P. 1993. Blossom of bone. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco.
Dalmiya, Vrinda. 2000. Loving paradoxes: A feminist reclamation of the goddess Kali. Hypatia 15 (1): 125–50.
Daly, Mary. 1973. Beyond God the Father: Toward a philosophy of women’s liberation. Boston: Beacon Press.
———. 1978. Gyn/ecology: The metaethics of radical feminism. Boston: Beacon Press.
———. 1984. Pure lust: Elemental feminist philosophy. Boston: Beacon Press.
———. 1998. Quintessence . . . realizing the archaic future: A radical elemental feminist manifesto. Boston: Beacon Press.
Dinnerstein, Dorothy. 1976. The mermaid and the minotaur: Sexual arrangements and human malaise. New York: HarperPerennial.
Easlea, Brian. 1983. Fathering the unthinkable: Masculinity, scientists, and the nuclear arms race. London: Pluto Press.
Gleason, Judith. 1987. Oya: In praise of the goddess. Boston: Shambhala.
Graham, Lanier. 1997. Goddesses in art. New York: Artabras.
Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature. New York: Routledge.
Harding, Sandra. 1999. Is science multicultural? Lecture presented November 9, at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida.
Hillman, James. 1996. The soul’s code: In search of character and calling. New York: Random House.
Hogan, Linda. 1995. Dwellings: A spiritual history of the living world. New York: Touchstone.
hooks, bell. 1989. Talking back: Thinking feminist, thinking black. Boston: South End Press.
———. 1992. Black looks: Race and representation. Boston: South End Press.
Houlberg, Marilyn. 1995. Magique Marasa: The ritual cosmos of twins and other sacred children. In Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, ed. Donald J. Cosentino. Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History.
Irigaray, Luce. 1985. This sex which is not one, trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
———. 1993. Divine women. In Sexes and genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill. New York: Columbia University Press.
Klein, Melanie. 1980. Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. In Envy and gratitude and other works 1946–1963. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis.
Kurzweil, Ray. 1999. The age of spiritual machines. New York: Viking.
Lawrence, D. H. 1996. Women in love. New York: Bantam Books.
Lederer, Wolfgang. 1968. The fear of women. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Levi, Jan Heller, ed. 1994. A Muriel Rukeyser reader. New York: W. W. Norton.
Lurker, Manfred. 1980. The gods and symbols of ancient Egypt: An illustrated dictionary. Trans. Barbara Cummings. New York: Thames and Hudson.
Martin, Emily. 1991. The egg and the sperm: How science has constructed a romance based on stereotypical male-female roles. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16 (31): 485–501.
McFadden, Robert. 1999. Angry man attacks painting in a disputed Brooklyn show. The New York Times, 17 December.
McLuhan, Marshall. 1953. The mechanical bride: Folklore of industrial man. Boston: Beacon Press.
Merchant, Caroline. 1980. The death of Nature: Women, ecology, and the scientific revolution. San Francisco: Harper and Row.
Monaghan, Patricia. 1999. The goddess companion: Daily meditations on the feminine spirit. St. Paul, Minnesota.
Moravec, Hans. 1988. Mind children: The future of robot and human intelligence. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Morrison, Toni. 1981. Tar baby. New York: New American Library, Signet Books.
Mumford, Lewis. 1970. The myth of the machine: The pentagon of power. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Neumann, Erich. 1963. The great mother: An analysis of the archetype. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
O’Flaherty, Wendy Doniger. 1988. Other people’s myths: The cave of echoes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Plato. 1992. Republic. Trans. G. M. A. Grube, revised C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co.
Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the mastery of nature. New York: Routledge.
Psycho. 1960. Hollywood: Universal Studios.
Radio Shack. November 2000. Television advertisement.
Ruddick, Sara. 1989. Maternal thinking: Toward a politics of peace. Boston: Beacon Press.
Rukeyser, Muriel. 1994. A Muriel Rukeyser reader. Ed. Jan Heller Levi. New York: W. W. Norton.
Sanchez, Carol Lee. 1989. New world tribal communities: An alternative approach for recreating egalitarian societies. In Weaving the visions, ed. Judith Plaskow and Carol P. Christ. San Francisco: Harper and Row.
———. 1993. Animal, vegetable, mineral. In Ecofeminism and the sacred, ed. Carol. J. Adams. New York: Continuum.
Shiva, Vandana. 1988. Staying alive: Women, ecology, and survival in India. London: Zed Books.
Sjöö, Monica, and Barbara Mor. 1987. The great cosmic mother: Recovering the religion of the earth. San Francisco: Harper and Row.
Sofia, Zoë. 1984. Exterminating fetuses: Abortion, disarmament, and the sexo-semiotics of extraterrestrialism. Diacritics 14 (2): 47–59.
Tuana, Nancy. 1993. The less noble sex: Scientific, religious, and philosophical conceptions of woman’s nature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Walker, Alice. 1983. In search of our mothers’ gardens. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
———. 1997. Anything we love can be saved: A writer’s activism. New York: Random House.
Williams, Patricia. 1991. Teleology on the rocks. In The alchemy of race and rights: Diary of a law professor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Wilshire, Donna. 1989. The uses of myth, image, and the female body in re-visioning knowledge. In Gender/body/knowledge: Feminist reconstructions of being and knowing, ed. Alison M. Jaggar and Susan R. Bordo. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.
Zohar, Danah. 1985. Quantum physics and motherhood. In About Time, ed. Christopher Rawlence. London: Jonathan Cape.
———. 1990. The quantum self: Human nature and consciousness defined by the new physics. New York: William Morrow.
IU Press Journals
Home PageMore about Hypatia
Library
RecommendationAdvance
InformationTable of Contents
Copyright
Clearance