2.1.i Plato's chora
The collapsing of the female body and a 'natural' or biologically predisposed subjectivity, in terms of the historical association between woman and matter, or formless space, can be seen to have a pervasive precedent in masculinist classical thinking. Indeed, the universal of woman as formless space or volume and man as the time of generation can be traced back explicitly to Plato's theory of the chora (Grosz 1995). In Timaeus, Plato posited that there is an invisible and unchanging world of perfect forms that pre-exist the sensible. The realm of the sensible is the visible realm of sensory perception. In order for the intelligible to be comported into the realm of the sensible, there must be a third term or bridge. Plato refers to this bridge as the chora. The chora acts as "...a receptacle,
intermediary, [a] kind of womb of material existence" (Grosz 1995:115). The function of the chora in the production of forms is non-contributive, indeed the chora must be a neutral (non)entity in order to ensure that the reproduction of forms remain traceless to its incubator.
The chora is not sexedper se but is feminine gendered (in Greek). Plato compared explicitly the role of the Forms to the role of the male and the chora to the role of the female, that is, the biological male is assumed to possess a generative function whilst the female is the carrier of the masculine imprint. It is noted that Plato's philosophy was in a sense limited to the socio-historical context of classical Greece in which the prevailing reproductive myth was that a male/father contributed all specific characteristics to the nameless and formless incubation provided by the female/mother. However, as will be seen in the discussion of modern biomedicine, the ontology that underpins this discourse is not entirely innovative in its perceptions of sexual difference. Plato's logic is also
supported by the classical Hippocratic and Aristotlean texts9 in which it is assumed that the female of the (human) species is by nature lacking the fundamental charateristic-/ogos- of the masculine (that is, a full and proper) subject and hence access to the world-forming temporal powers attributed to the rational individual. That is, women, like unformed space, were assumed to be without logic (alogos) and irrational.
9 The specific texts referred to here are the Hippocratic Corpus (medical texts) and Aristotle's Generation of Animals.
The function of the chora is to "nurse, support, surround, protect, incubate, to sort or engender the worldly offspring of the Forms" (Grosz 1995:115). The function of women elided thus with the chora, is to reproduce without mark or intervention offspring that have a paternal origin. In Plato's logic, the 'time', or instrumentality, of female bodies is negligible in comparison to the crucial instance of man's time, as Grosz (1995:116) reiterates when she states that:
This peculiar receptacle that is chora functions to receive, to take in, to possess without in turn leaving any correlative impression. She takes in without holding onto: she is unable to possess for she has no self-possession, no self-identity. She supports all material existence with nothing to support her own. Though she brings being into becoming, she has neither being nor the possibilities of becoming; both the mother of all things and yet without ontological status, she designates less a positivity than an abyss.
Thus, the ontological reduction of the female body to an envelope of space forecloses the possibility of taking up a position of generative contribution. The maternal body, conceived of as a space or chora is thus the quintessentially silent body. This silent, spatialised body can be seen to re-emerge in Judaeo-Christian and modern secular forms, most notably in the form of the Madonna in the former and the castrated female of psychoanalytic tradition in the latter, which I will discuss.
2.1 .ii Madonna/Whore
One of the foundational fantasies of pre-modern western theology that relies upon the ontology of 'woman as space' is the Madonna/whore dichotomy. The virgin mother has been reified in Christian doctrine and popular iconography as the apotheosis of feminine virtue joined, I might add, with generative function. The production of the Madonna will be seen to be little more than a rehearsal of Plato's thinking on the chora, although Christian monotheism displaces the realm of Plato's Forms with one, originating God.
The Madonna springs from the Biblical tale of the immaculate conception, in which God's representative, the angel Gabriel, descends from an invisible, heavenly realm to visit
the Virgin Mary and inform her that she has been chosen to carry the Son of God. The seed (Word) of God is thus despatched into Mary's ear, an act that displaces performatively the womb to the ear (see Phelan 1993). The phallic Word thus enters the ear/womb and the law of the father is in effect reproduced via the body of a woman who has no contribution to the generation of the Son of God except the carte blanche space of her body. The Madonna is a universalised maternal bodily container that comports the performative Word of God into the material world in the form of a male child. The virgin female becomes a body-as- blank-page, so to speak, which is paramount to the production of a being with a singular, immaculate, paternal origin. The immaculate conception supports the belief that the genesis of bodies, meaning and worlds is guaranteed by masculine time that has authority in and over space.
The construction of a reified, impossible mother (a virgin mother is a contradiction in terms) in the form of the Madonna has established a representational regime whereby women are caught between identifications with the 'good' virgin and the 'bad', abject counterpart, the whore. The whore-body is conceived of as polluted and polluting, she is 'damaged goods' in the sense that she has been stained and is no longer fit for the role of reproduction. Like the unmarking, clean space of the Platonic chora, the virgin and the Madonna remain under the paternal name or mark. The virgin/whore dichotomy binds the female body to an interpretation of that body either as a cultural cloaca in the case of tiie whore, or a potential reproductive function, in the case the virgin. It is not negative per se that the Madonna is a mother but that theological iconography binds the female body, mothers and motherhood to a limited maternal role-one of preservation of the Word, family and nation. Kristeva (in Ruben-Suleiman ed. 1993:34) states: "The biological fate that causes us [women] to be the site of the species chains us to space: home, native soil, motherland (matrie) (as I wish to say, instead of fatherland [patrie]" (emphasis in original).
I would argue that it is more a matter of dominant interpretations of female biology that 'chains' women to space rather than 'biological fate': an interpretation that is borne out by the theological construction of the dichotomy between the good-maternal Madonna and the bad-maternal whore. Even in contemporary Afrocentric discourses that attempt to reverse imperialist discourse (in terms of the reification of 'mother Africa'), the maternal-as-carrier returns and results in the perpetuation of 'woman' as a symbolic repository for authentic or unmarked culture. This in effect negates the dissonant voices from actual women who have been excluded from the symbolic of dominant patriarchies.
The Madonna icon is, of course, far more complex in terms of her appropriation in theological and popular forms and knowledges. However, the history of the Madonna is not my focus here, but rather the way in which the good/bad, virgin/whore dichotomy has been built around the instance of motherhood and its social construction as a "biological fate that...chains us [women] to space" (ibid). In terms of this negative, fatalistic inscription of female biology, I think that psychoanalysis, as I discuss I section 2.1.hi, inherits from Christian doctrine an assumption that woman and space are analogous terms and these function only in relation to The Word or, in psychoanalysis, the crucial instance of the phallus.
2.1.iii The spatial modalities of psychoanalysis
It can be seen that, in canonical psychoanalysis, the religious community established in the European Christian church is pared down to the relationship between analyst and patient, a relationship that is established, simplistically, between a subject and object of inquiry.
What this means for the interpretation of bodies, and the female body specifically, is that the discourse about the female body shifted from a general idea of that body as a containing space to the spatialisation of the female genitalia in the phallocentric symbolic system. In psychoanalysis, the preceding classical time-space matrices conceived in Plato's imagistic forms and the spatial entity of the chora and the theological concept of God"s phallic Word and the corresponding virgin ear/womb are displaced by the imagistic phallus. There is no counterpart to the singular, symbolic phallus other than the zeroed space of castration.
In the Oedipal scenario, the instance of castration is central to the narrative development of the subject's ego. This scenario is hinged upon the outwardly visible evidence of sexual difference, the genitalia. The symbolic phallus is the transcendental signifier or form. Thus, the visibility of the penis holds the promise (always deferred) that he-who-possesses-penis has the authority to satisfy desire/guarantee meaning, which in turn ensures his ontological authority. In canonical psychoanalytic theory it is the visibility and exteriority of the penis (in Freud) and the fixed signifier of the phallus (in Lacan) that privileges the presence of the organ/signifier as the site for the generation of sexuality, subjectivity and language and the satisfaction of desire. As has been established in Chapter
One, the maternal genitalia are negated by the phallomorphic imaginary as a cultural cloaca, site of both fear and infantile desires (Gallop 1988). The internalised structure of the maternal genitalia results, for Freud and Lacan, in a crisis over a lack of visual specificity and so 'her' lips come to represent a spatialised abyss of cultural abjection where language does not hold. The canonical psychoanalytic view, then, clearly inherits from a gender-biased classicism a view that the female body is by nature lacking in the logos that characterises the male subject. Psychoanalysis, however, pins psychic and symbolic lack explicitly to the genitalia.
In psychoanalytic discourse, the trope of the maternal can be seen to displace the iconographic Madonna. However, the maternal body, unlike the Madonna icon, is subject to pervasive new technologies that developed particularly in the discourses of psychiatry and biomedicine (in which psychoanalysis has its grounding). I now turn to consider the idea of the female body as a biomedical space. I give this topic attention because, for one, the discourse of biomedicine is peculiar to the modern context and secondly, it is a pervasive and highly esteemed discourse that establishes and sediments gendered power structures and representations of the body. Moreover, biomedicine deals directly with the body and has established a theatrics that is not unrelated to 'theatre' in the traditional
sense.