Artwork that studies the abject is something that I have tried to form an interest in, but it seems that the more I learn about it, the less I care. While I can appreciate that there are a number of silly psychological hang-ups on our bodies that abjection in art helps to expose, I seem to be comfortable with my bodily functions and those of others, not because I am a physician or a farmer, nor because I have seen countless artists eat their own shit. I am cool with it because anything less than total indifference would limit me to a life bound by social conditioning and the incapacitating terror of farting in public.
Kristeva's argument tried to do an impossible thing, that is, to suggest the effect of a phenomenon (viz. a fear of the abject) can be traced to one particular cause (viz. leaking into the world and our mothers' leaking into us). As far as I am aware, there are very practical reasons why we have evolved to dislike the taste of piss, the smell of shit and the sight of our own blood. In the millennia before antibiotics, cholera vaccines and band-aids, early humans would do well to avoid any potential carrier of disease, be it rancid meat or a substance of our own bodies.
But I don’t want to appear so arrogant as to say there is nothing I can learn from an analysis of ‘the phobic object’. I found the concept of ‘the abjection of the maternal body’ very stimulating indeed. The ramifications in gender politics seem to correlate: men and, to a tragically similar extent, women are trained from an early age to be fearful of vaginas, acknowledging the horror of their existence only by the mark of reticence that surrounds them. I find it hilariously ironic that, for Creed, the maternal body, as interpreted through patriarchy, is the pervasive source of Kastrationangst, perhaps better known as Freud’s theory of castration anxiety.
In this way, one can see how art that deals with the abject has a particular talent for accentuating the absurdity of hegemonic morality. So long as we continue to divide conversation topics into ‘private’ and ‘personal’, or worse still, social and medical, our apprehension to discuss the human body in all its squirting glory will only serve to prolong our fears of sweat-patches, penis-loss and vaginas in general.
Feminist/queer theory has been in the common Western consciousness for over forty years, yet every facet of our culture today, from our language to the arbitrary identifiers of gender, remains structured in patriarchy. Though one cannot deny the social benefits that have come from feminist/queer ideologies, these changes are unhurried to say the least. If essays, protests and even legislation cannot alleviate us of our prejudices, perhaps an impending, inescapable reality will force us to consider just how substantiated our body-fears really are. Unfortunately it is not until the final paragraph that The Phobic Object addresses the rivalry between the body and technology.
I would like to end my response by offering a ridiculous idea. Perhaps, once we realise we are at risk of being prosthesized to the point of being almost or completely inhuman, we will begin to unconditionally cherish every limb, lobe and lactation of the bodies that make us human.
Cloaca, 2000 by Wim Delvoye
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