The ghost-body-as clockwork is manifested when certain kinds of movement quality are present. These may be as varied as the slippery smoothness of Fred Astaire in a tap routine, the lanky disjointedness of the dancers in William Forsythe’s company, the formal tilts and geometric spatial orientations of Cunningham technique, the refined isolations that are one characteristic of jazz dancing, or the robotic moves that are found in breakdance and hip-hop. What these diverse movement qualities share is the way in which they engage the parts of the body relative to one another. Each movement style allows a particular body part a freedom of motion, by constructing its independence from the parts of the body around it. According to the ghost-body-as-clockwork, the body’s parts are separate and discrete entities, whose individual and local workings are to be perfected.
Though the ghost-body-as-clockwork influences the different kinds of dance mentioned above, it is one which crystallized in the technique of ballet. Even more specifically, the ghost-body-as-clockwork can be seen in its most condensed and exemplary form in the figure of the dancing automaton, the eponymous heroine of the 1870 ballet, Coppélia. The technique of classical ballet is one which is founded upon the smooth and easy independent movements of the body’s articulations. Ballet teachers enjoin their students to ‘oil their joints’; speak of ‘polishing’ a movement; describe as a ‘lever’ the forceful first leg lift in a grand jeté’, and explain rond de
jambe par terre in terms of a compass, one of whose hands is the stable unmoving
reference for the circular movement of the other. These metaphors reveal that the body is imagined as if it were a metal instrument, a mechanical tool, one whose moveable parts engage with one another in precise and controlled ways. Each movement is imagined and trained in the dancer as being a local one which should not
disturb the poise of any other part, nor the equilibrium of the body as a whole. This constitutes a way of looking at the body which is essentially bio-mechanical, one which understands the body through the observable workings of man-made machines. Yet, as Steven Vogel points out in Cat's Paws and Catapults: Mechanical Worlds o f
Nature and People (1998):
Natural and human technologies differ extensively and pervasively. We build dry and stiff structures; nature mainly makes hers wet and flexible. We build of metals; nature never does. Our hinges mainly slide; hers mostly bend. We do wonders with wheels and rotary motion; nature makes fully competent boats, aircraft and terrestrial vehicles that lack them entirely. Our engines expand or spin; hers contract or slide. We fabricate large things directly; nature’s large things are cunning proliferations of tiny components. (16)
The understanding of the body as a machine is one which is embedded in the history of Western medicine, and intimately linked to the development of technology. Western medicine evolved its particular view of the body in relation to the metaphors that became available for its conceptualisation of the body. In The Body in Question, Jonathan Miller traces the way in which Western medicine’s theoretical models were beholden to actual tools and machines, whose discovery and use were at the source of medicine’s successive theories. Miller suggests:
It is impossible to imagine how anyone could have made sense of the heart before we knew what a pump was. Before the invention of automatic gun-turrets, there was no model to explain the finesse of voluntary muscle action, (xiv)
Miller writes that William Harvey’s De Motus Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (On
the Motion o f the Heart and Blood in Animals) (1628) explained the circulatory
system in terms of a mechanical pump with a series of pipes and valves. In “A Mechanical Microcosm: Bodily Passions, Good Manners and Cartesian Mechanism” (1998), Peter Dear stresses the way in which René Descartes’s view of the body, as it appears in his posthumously published Traité de l ’homme (ca. 1633) is beholden to mechanical metaphors. Not only do our lungs work like bellows and does our blood flow as within a hydraulic system, but our memory, sleep, passions, hunger, pain, dizziness and sneezes can all be accounted for mechanically. For Descartes, functions in the human body-machine follow:
Simply from the disposition of organs as wholly and naturally as the movements of a clock or other automaton follow from the disposition of its counterweights and wheels. (Dear, 59)
In The Mechanical Turk: The True Story o f the Chess-Playing Machine That Fooled
the World (2002), Tom Standage supplies the following definition of “automaton”:
(from autos, the self, and pao, to seize): a self-moving machine, or one in which the principle of motion is contained within the mechanism itself. According to this description, clocks, watches and all machines of a similar kind are automata, but the word is generally applied to contrivances which simulate for a time the motions of animal life, (xi)
Echoing this definition, in Living Dolls: A Magical History o f the Quest For
Mechanical Life (2002), Gaby Woods suggests that one of the stakes in Descartes’s
conceptualisation of the body as an automaton, was a desire to see it removed from outside jurisdiction. Clockwork was precisely governed by internal necessity; it was untouched by external forces, and did not require outside government. This made Descartes’s writing potentially subversive of the monarchy, which governed by divine right, and of religious belief which conceptualised the deity as the prime mover; for it provided the analogy by which the social body could be imagined as self-governing.
Yet the condition of self-rule was that rule be internalised. As Michel Foucault and others have argued, the move to create a social body of free agents, who could, according to the political revolutions of the century, determine their own destiny, albeit collectively, was simultaneously a move to greater regulation of the individual’s body. This implies that a greater freedom of movement on the level of the social body was intrinsically linked to a more thorough discipline of the body in daily life. In the same way, I shall argue, the very concept of the individual’s agency is utterly dependent on an Other’s subservient body. The ballerina’s body became a favoured Other in the nineteenth century, the sight of which neutralised a host of concerns and anxieties bearing upon the questions of freedom and determinacy. The ballerina was the dancing automaton through which spectators knew themselves as agents.
Two examples of recent publicity campaigns for high quality watches illustrate well the ghost-body-as-clockwork and the concerns it involves, ones which still touch the dancing body in the present day. The first (Plate 1) is an advertisement for Rolex in which French ballerina Sylvie Guillem is shown in a full-body shot, and
in which the contrast between face and body is striking. For while Guillem’s gaze confronts her viewers straight-on, her four limbs shoot out from her body at alarming angles. Executing a développé à la seconde, Guillem’s legs have become like the hands of a clock, straight arrows seemingly unconnected the one to the other; in such a way that any dancer viewing the advertisement must be aware that the image condenses layer upon layer of irony. The first of these ironies dictates that if Guillem’s body incarnates the principles of clockwork, then this is because it was trained with this image in mind, proof of which is given as Guillem describes her position. It is “six o’clock, exactly” she declares in the advertisement, meaning that Guillem imagines her lifted leg as the minute-hand which indicates the twelve position on a clock-face, while her standing leg on demi-pointe corresponds to the hour hand which points to six. The photo’s grain shows the muscles of Guillem’s bare legs in high definition, revealing their streamlined, fine yet intricate lineaments. Her body is a precision instrument, as sophisticated as the product it endorses.
The connection between articularity, muscularity, and agency in Western culture is explored in Shigehisa Kuriyama’s The Expressiveness o f the Body and the
Divergence o f Greek and Chinese Medicine. Kuriyama’s research discloses that the
clustering of these concepts is peculiar to Western culture, and traces the history of their coming together by considering early Greek pictoral and literary representation. Kuriyama discovers that while the word “muscle” was late to emerge in medical treatises, what one might now call a “muscular” body was present in early Greek painting and sculpture. The word contemporaneous writers used to describe the quality of those bodies was arthros, literally, jointedness. However, studying these texts, Kuriyama finds that “arthros” is not entirely synonymous with “articulation” in the modem anatomical sense. Rather, it designated the “divisions and distinctions which gave the body distinct form” (135).
Kuriyama writes that for the early Greeks, what hinged upon the distinctness of the body was identity itself. In the pseudo-Aristotelian text Physiognomies, the force of a person’s character could be judged to the extent which his body looked defined - and I use the masculine pronoun advisedly. For if brave and forceful characters were “well-jointed and sinewy” the opposite body-quality, anarthros, characterised the bodies of a host of identities, which for one reason or another were judged inferior. “Anarthros” designated the soft bodies of women or those of slaves.
the unformed malleable bodies of children and embryos, the feebleness of the old and the ill, the strange difference of the foreigner (135-142).
What constituted the bodily definition upon which identity and agency both depended, was the individuation of the subject, which came about through its differentiation from other bodies. Differentiation was, in turn, seen to be dependent upon agon or struggle. Kuriyama quotes from The Histories, in which Herodotus describes the Sythians’ physiognomy. Herodotus writes:
The seasons being uniform and altering but little, wherefore the men are also alike one another in physique...For neither bodily nor mental endurance is possible where the changes are not violent. (141)
Struggle was seen by the ancient Greek world to be formative of the individual and his singular abilities, a vision that continues to influence Western medicine and art. Struggle or competition, “agon” in Greek, was thought to characterise the body itself since its musculature was categorised as pairs of opposites called “agonists” and “antagonists”. While the body’s musculature may indeed work through the production of tension and countertension in these opposing muscle pairings, this is not the only bodily coordination possible. Yet because of the way Western anatomy names the body, the concept of struggle remains an important conceptual category. This in turn frames the Western vision of the body and influences how it can be used. In the Rolex photograph, it is the “arthrosity” of Guillem which is being celebrated and at the same time seen as founding her as a self-moving agent.
The second advertisement (Plate 2), for Omega, was part of a campaign whose slogan was “James Bond’s Choice”, in the run up to the release of the new Bond movie. Die Another Day, in 2003. In this advertisement it is actor-celebrity Pierce Brosnan who endorses the product, though not in his own right, but rather in the persona of the famous secret agent he plays. Bond is a mere number, a servant in her Majesty’s secret service; yet the bond(sman) becomes agent by mastering others, particularly through his ability to use the latest intelligent technology. The technological instruments Bond uses are miniature versions of Bond himself, in that they too are kinds of intelligent agents (though inanimate ones) in disguise, just as Bond’s singularity is all but hidden by the interchangeable tuxedo of Western evening dress. For typically they are objects which seem the standard issue for the normal business man: cigarette lighter, pen, briefcase, but under which innocuous guise they
conceal their true power, intelligence, and function. The advertisement is playing with this aspect of Bond’s discretion, which it intimates also characterises Omega’s design.
What the two advertisements share is how they juxtapose animate and inanimate bodies, and suggest a hierarchy between them. They work by promising that the human will attain agency (and status) through the use of the watch. Yet the object relations of the two putative users of the watches are substantially different. The Bond character is a famous user (and spoiler) of objects and new technologies which become his prostheses: that by which he extends his power in the world; while the sole prosthesis associated with the ballerina remains the point shoe. Bond’s strategy with technology is to miniaturise it and make it portable: his toys are microscopic condensations of knowledge which enable him to act in all places. By contrast, the technologies which touch the ballerina are typically bigger than she: the
mises en scène in theatres, there before her, and the conservatory system which
produced her, both of which are thus beyond her control. By stark contrast with what happens to Bond, these technologies are all around her body, framing how she can dance, making her own skills the reverse of interchangeable. Rather, her skills are ones that are particularly embedded in a very specific context.
The divergence between the two potential watch-users’ object relations derives from the fact that their energies are oriented in opposite directions. Bond’s agency is constituted by his outward thrust: the subjection of other inanimate and animate bodies (fast cars and women respectively); while the ballerina’s agency is constituted by the turning inward of her powers, which makes her own body the mastered object. This divergence between these two subjects’ agency is linked to a further concern, which, using terms offered by historian of science Simon Schaffer, I can now identify as the question of “the place where intelligence is to be found inside a space to which access is forbidden” (“Babbage” 78-79). The two photographs dramatise the spatial mode of intelligence’s place, and its relation to gender. Brosnan’s photograph is a head-shot, implying that Bond’s intelligence is localised in his brain; Guillem’s image is of her entire silhouette, suggesting that her intelligence is located in her body.
Within the rhetoric of the two photographs, the watch, the inanimate body of intelligence, is placed clearly at the service of the animate body. Outside the rhetoric
of the advertisement, however, the clear superiority of body over machine is not so obvious, especially in the case of the dancing body. The state-of-the-art perfection which is the ballerina’s body requires a daily maintenance and has a famously short life-span. The ballerina’s perishability determines that she must be replaceable, but the imminent absence of her person is foreseen and rendered unimportant by the academy which produced her, which every year produces a crop of young dancers to take her place. Her singular body-of-knowledge will be recuperated by a larger body- of-knowledge; its creations and discoveries will form part of the repertoire which will shape the bodies of future dancers. The fragile temporality, the imperilled longevity, of the dancer’s body ensures that it can exemplify the alienating side of the Janus faced discourse of agency and reification, in that the docility and ductility of the dancing body are posed as the pre-condition of the existence of the repertoire.
The radically different life-spans of the ballet Coppélia, and the choreographer and dancer who created it, illustrate the antagonistic relation between animate and inanimate bodies of knowledge. Both St. Léon and Giuseppina Bozzacchi were dead before the end of the year 1871 (Guest 248, 251); Coppélia, which enjoyed “immediate and unequivocal success” at its 1870 première (Guest 244), remained so popular with audiences that it existed in the Opéra repertoire for an “unprecedented 711 performances over ninety years” in its original version (Bergner and Plett, 160). After seven years of a new version choreographed by Michel Descombey, the Opéra called upon Pierre Lacotte to revive the original in 1973. Dance writer Femau Hall writes that though “an Italo-Russian version of Coppélia survives—we have no way of knowing how much (if any) of the original French choreography of 1870 remains” (391). Yet on the occasion of his revival of the ballet, Lacotte claimed authenticity for his version, based on the rigour and discipline of the academy of the Paris Opéra and the dancers it trained. In “A Controversial Ballet: Reflections on Coppélia”, dance historian Giannandrea Poesio recounts Lacotte’s claims to authenticity. He writes:
Fortunately for [Lacotte], much of the second version of Coppélia— the one performed in 1871 after the disastrous Franco-Prussian war—had survived by oral tradition. The dancer Léontine Beaugrand, who had taken the role created in 1870 by the Italian Giuseppina Bozzacchi, taught it to Rosita Mauri, who, in turn, passed it on to Carlotta Zambelli, one of the great interpreters of Swanhilda. (893)
Lest even this short list of names, only three generations of dancers, suggests that variation might have crept in, Poesio adds:
Zambelli, first as a dancer and then as a teacher, was particularly keen on preserving the ballet as it had been taught to her, avoiding any possible alteration. The 1871 choreography arrived hence directly to Lacotte, who was a pupil of Zambelli. (893)
The exactitude and respect of those who danced Coppélia is here shown as the reason why the repertoire lived on. The dancer’s animate body models itself upon an inanimate body of knowledge, the steps of the repertoire, in order to perform the role of Swanhilda. Subjecting itself to this body of steps, the animate dancing body makes the inanimate body of knowledge come alive again, a state of affairs which is shown as the very condition of a heritage in the art form of dance. This constitutes one more irony of which the dancer, contemplating Guillem’s image, both arrested in time and seemingly outside it, may be aware.
Metaphor as Total Programme: Wavs of Thinking, Feeling and Acting
The metaphor of clockwork is not only explanatory, but is also performative, bringing into being the body as it is imagined, through practices that are peculiar to it. For the body metaphor does not only organise the body’s movement, but also involves modes of perceiving and conceptualising which together form a three-fold programme which directs how the body lives. This programme for action, perception and conceptualisation is active even beyond the body it inhabits, for it structures the ways in which that body will interact with other bodies and how it will offer itself to be seen by them.
The programme for the clockwork body continues to exist in the present day, but it emerged at a particular moment in Western history, a moment when technology, that pragmatic instantiation of the inanimate body of knowledge that the Human produced, was displacing and redefining the place of man, and more particularly the