Márta Csabai and Ferenc Erõs (1)

The history of 20th-century discourses about the body is marked by a resolute search for the definitions and "determinable" features of the body. This project has always gone hand in hand with efforts to conceptualize the genealogy and evolution of (post)modern identity. This development has also meant the further fragmentation of the already dichotomic Western view of the human subject. If we take an overview of the major theories of the body, we find at least as many "bodies" as theoretical approaches and epistemologies. According to the most widespread classification, there are three bodies at three separate but overlapping conceptual and analytic levels.(2) The individual body is conceptualized in phenomenological theories of the body while the social body means the symbolic, representational uses which are found most commonly in structuralist theories. The third and most widely known in contemporary post-structuralist theory is the body politic which is formulated through the regulatory practices and controls of power. The fact that we can find a growing number of "bodies" in theories of the social sciences reflects both the significance and indeterminacy of the "body-problem" in contemporary society and also uncertainties in relation to the questions of identity. Naturally, these "bodies" also signify the major problems of (the body of) society and its institutions of power which label individuals through their bodies as deviant or normal, impure or clean, needful of control or disciplined.
Besides the evergreen controversies of biological essentialism and social constructivism, late 20th-century discourses about the have body brought together the problems of bodily control, commodity culture, self-expression and narcissism. In post-structuralist theory the human body can no longer be regarded as a given reality but as a product of knowledge. In this sense "bodies ... are not born: they are made".(3) Even it should it seem a causeless naïveté or a useless pompousness, we still have to end the sentence with a question-mark and ask: "Are bodies born or made?". We have to do this until we can decide whether the right answer (if an answer can be given to this question at all) or the re-formulation (elimination) of the question would help us to think about the body and its relation to subjectivity differently. It may also help to avoid the further fragmentation of the body and promote our understanding of it as a basis and frame of the subject's identity.

2. Surfaces and boundaries of the body-the body as surface and boundary

This is a question not only of the diversity of theories and the boundless fragmentation of the body, but the need for a new, "holistic" model also seems to be formulated in different criticisms of contemporary theories. One of the most common arguments against analyses of the discursive or textual construction of bodies-i.e. how the body is seen and portrayed-states that they tell little about the body's implication in human agency, of how people experience the "lived body".(4) Another frequent critique is that the body should not be regarded simply as an object of sociological investigation, but as an inherently sociological and historical phenomenon. Further, there are authors who emphasize that we have to find the place of psychical representations in conceptualizing the body not in opposition to the social dimension but as necessarily interactive with it, to create a living subjectivity, a corporeality of the body.(5) In this regard the body itself has to be understood as a "threshold" or a "borderline" concept that not only reflects both the diversity and indeterminacy of its components but also involves the notion of totality. The Janus-faced concept of the border inherently refers to both fragmentation and non-differentiation. Does this "totality" of the body suggest the (re?)unification of the above-mentioned fragmented aspects? Does it mean the desire for the demolition of boundaries between different concepts and theories? Are we fascinated by the indeterminacy of the body or, on the contrary, do we feel embarrassed-even scared-by it?
Today it is often argued that there is a certain nostalgia about the body, a homesickness, a "not feeling at home" in the body. This is reflected particularly in those contemporary theories of postmodernity which put forward the vision of the "death" of the body and its replacement by technology. The repeated appearance of the themes of the fracture, instability and fluidity of modern life-and modern identity-in different scientific, popular and lay discourses may reflect a certain nostalgia for the spontaneity and emotional passions often associated with the non-disciplined, "different" bodies-grotesque bodies of the Other. The wish to "reconsecrate" the profane could explain the renewed interest in nature, magic, cults and fate, etc.(6) It could also be a possible explanation for the invention of traditions and (new) national or ethnic identities.
Mary Douglas has described the body as a metaphor of social cohesion, differentiation and conflict (7). A widespread concern with the maintenance and purity of bodily boundaries is most present at times of social crisis, when dominant bodies and established identities are threatened. The body has become an intensified object of concern in the last few decades. This has happened parallel with the processes of globalization which threatens individual and national boundaries. It is also widely discussed that the cleanliness of the body has become a central issue in contemporary discourses about health and illness. As bodily hygiene and also health and fitness have gradually become a moral issue, the search for a cleaner, harder, more defined body promoted the strengthening of distinctions, the construction of frontiers between different social groups.
All these points could be connected to more general questions of globalization and identity (gender, ethnicity, etc.). Responses to the pressure of present-day globalization processes may be very different, but the most important is the creation of new artificial borders. One significant form of this is metaracism which tries to legitimate itself by building up a border around the cultural Other.(8) The creation and disqualification of the cultural Other as an abject from society's body is endemic to any creation of group identity, but in excessive forms it may lead to ethnic, gender, and other forms of discrimination. All of these raise the question of where the borders of the body start and end, what kind of imagoes and-unconscious-fantasies form (and transform) representations about our own and the Other's body.

3. Bodies in transition-representations of the body during political transition

1989-90 was the period of "transition from dictatorship to democracy" in the Central European communist countries. As part of this historical process, free election was held in Hungary in the spring of 1990-this event led to the formation of the first non-communist government for more than forty years. Before the election an extremely heated and exciting campaign had taken place-the parties, most of them newly created, not simply the revitalization of the old, "historical" ones-
competed for the allegiance of the voters. Naturally, the central issue of the campaign was the evaluation of the past and the delineation of the future course. In this respect most of the parties (including the Socialist Party, the ex-communists) agreed, at least on the surface, that a historical period was closing forever and something new had to begin; thus, the elections marked a radical caesura between past and future. Although the transition took place peacefully, constitutionally, through negotiating a consensus between the various groups of the political elite of the country, which was to guarantee a relatively smooth transformation of the political, social and economic system, a genuine revolution had taken place in the symbolic sphere. Old taboos collapsed suddenly; repressed, frozen or marginalized identities came to life again; new discourses were set in motion. Many people started to rewrite their life history and to redefine their identity; "overnight converts" discovered their lifelong democratic attitudes. "There is a big swarm on the road to Damascus"--the Hungarian writer Péter Esterházy wrote in 1989.
The electoral campaign in 1990 was very rich in visual elements as well-TV programs, political advertisements, leaflets, posters, graffiti were spread all over the country. The visual propaganda-beyond its immediate political messages-also had a hidden, symbolic structure which appealed not only to the political and ideological attitudes of citizens but to their fantasy structures as well. While the surface of these messages aimed at gaining votes by trying to convince citizens about the rationality and the possible benefits of the realization of a given party's program, that is, at a change of attitude, the hidden message was aimed at identity change, an overall change or redefinition of individual as well as collective identities. In this visual propaganda the representation of the body had a particularly important role.
The role of body images in political propaganda has become a widely discussed topic since Wilhelm Reich's pioneering work The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933)(9), and, most notably, since Klaus Theweleit's two-volume book (first published in German in 1978).(10) While most of these analyses are preoccupied with totalitarian propaganda, in our case it is the dissolution of a totalitarian regime which creates body representations as part of political propaganda that is of interest. (11)
To illustrate this, we have chosen two political posters from the 1990 Hungarian election campaign. Both posters had been celebrated-in Hungary as well as abroad-as the most representative visual expressions of the period of political transition. The first one, which was one of the elections posters of the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF, the party which finally won the elections) shows the thick nape of a man, a Russian officer as ugly, disgusting-and the text of the poster contains two Russian words, printed in Cyrillic (though well known for most Hungarians, even for those who didn't understand the language): TOVARISHCHI, KONIEC, "Comrades, this is the end!". (See fig. 1).

The function of transforming the Russian body into an abject is not simply to get rid of the occupying forces-it is about the radical exclusion of the former authority from the collective identity, a radical redefinition of this identity which excludes "foreigners". This is not the place to discuss the further implications of this poster, namely, its nationalist overtones which became evident subsequently in the ideology of the party in whose name the poster was originally issued. Nevertheless, the Russian figure represents here not only the "invaders" but the filthy, malignant, threatening Other in general. The spectacle puts the finishing touch to the removal of the remains of the Other. As Roland Barthes put it:

The petit bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the Other. If he comes to face with him, he blinds himself, ignores and denies him, or else transforms him into himself. [...] Sometimes-rarely-the Other is revealed as irreducible: not because of a sudden scruple, but because common sense rebels: a [sic] man does not have a white skin, another drinks pear juice, not Pernod. How can one assimilate the Negro, the Russian? There is here a figure for emergencies: exoticism. The Other becomes a pure object, a spectacle, a clown.(15)

This poster, however does not tell us what happens after one gets rid of the "comrades". What happens after they crossing the border? What is the power which is going to replace the old one-the power of the "comrades"? What happens after the father the Big (Br)other has been killed?

4. The promise of unlimited jouissance with no disciplinary Gaze

The next poster we have selected shows exactly what happens after killing the father. (see picture 3.)

5. The double-bind nature of the border

Identification with the border, "remaining stuck in" the Oedipal dilemma threatens the subject with the end-result of missing identity. As an example we can mention hysteria which is an often used metaphor for the fragmentation of (fin-de-siècle) bodies and identities. The hysteric is someone who is looking for the unlimited possibility of choosing identity but is unable to make any decision. We may suppose that there must be some kind of anxieties (besides desire) which contribute to the ambivalence about "making a choice". The hysteric is not able to escape from the Oedipal circle, because s/he is afraid of the suffocating, death-bearing qualities of the "good" mother (and her womb) but at the same time s/he does not want to leave its safety and warmth, and simultaneously s/he is attracted to the world of the father, but scared of the power and dominance it symbolizes. So s/he wants to be neither mother nor father, but desires to be both (or neither).(18). S/he wants to remain there, at the source of beginning, the place of origin. S/he does not want to be either female or male, but wants to be both (or neither) of them, wants to remain indeterminate (19). S/he is struggling for non-differentiation, for a "borderline" body and-as Juliet Mitchell has put forward-a traditionless Self. S/he wants to be the Origin, s/he wants to be the Secret, the ultimate Truth. We know from classical and contemporary cases of hysteria that the hysteric pays the price of her/his never-fulfilled, impossible desire. S/he pays with loss of libido, with mental and physical symptoms-the fragmentation of her/his body and also of her/his Self.(20)
The impossibility of identifying with the border has very similar consequences as to occupying it. It will result in the death of desire and also the death of the body. In a Lacanian sense, the total confrontation with jouissance is always a fatal act. Non-differentiation and arbitrary, autocratic determination are two sides of the same coin.
A good example of this can be seen in Peter Greenaway's movie The Pillow Book. As a child the protagonist film Nagiko, was greeted by her father every birthday with the words: "When God created mankind, he made the first figure of clay, painted on it the eyes, the mouth and genitals. He was worried that people would forget their names, so he also painted names, one name for each person". While listening to this declaration we see the father painting four letters on the girl's forehead, cheeks and lips. Nagiko's life is determined by this childhood experience and this is why in her adult life she is able to make love only with men who are willing to write on her body. She also writes on the body of her elderly lover, takes photographs of the inscribed surface, and these photos will comprise her first book. She tries to sell the book to a rich, sophisticated, influential, decadent and homosexual publisher, who sends her away. Nagiko seduces the publisher's young lover, Jérôme, writes her subsequent works on the young man's body and follows the bombarding of the publisher with her new books. But the publisher does not want the photos of the "body-books", he wants to possess the whole body, specifically its borders both in the symbolic and literal senses of the word. One of the most harrowing scenes of the movie is when bored garbage-men empty the inner parts of Jérôme's body in front of the publisher's building. (In a Foucaldian sense, the body has to perish after the inscription of the message.) Then we watch the publisher spread the book made of the young man's skin on his own naked body: he is trying to "read" it with his own skin. (After occupying the border, he wants to identify with it.) In the end of this triangular story (a Holy Trinity, in which the third vertex is occupied by the woman) (21) Nagiko gets back the book, the text, the boundary from the economically-intellectually-erotically powerful publisher. (Though the publisher is not immutable since his decadence symbolizes susceptibility of decadent power and his homosexuality deviance.) After the two men's death it is Nagiko who occupies the textualized surface of the body with its all meanings. She possesses control over the permeability of the body. But the story does not end here. Nagiko does not remain entrapped by the Oedipal circle. The happy ending of the movie is a satisfactory and "fair" solution offered by Greenaway. On the first birthday of her daughter-whose father is Jérôme-Nagiko buries the "leather-bound" book of (Jérôme's) body under a blossoming bonsai-tree. She buries the boundary, closes it away from consciousness, knowledge, rationality and power. The border (of the body) is in a safe place now, there is no one who can occupy or manipulate it. The one-year-old child can live, life can go on, but only under these conditions.

6. An expulsion from Paradise?

Contrary to the great expectations, the Central and East European transition naturally did not create an earthly paradise. It would lead us too far to make a balance of the "gains" and "losses" of transition-it is enough to say here that the young couple portrayed on the 1990 poster had to face various economic and social hardships. Nevertheless, the newly emerged "consumer society" uses them as the "ideal couple" at whom the commercials, the advertisements, all the propaganda of the consumer benefits of the capitalist society are directed. They are no longer the loving, innocent couple who enjoy instead of obeying external rules, their young, healthy, fresh outlook and image is "sold" to the public with the message: make a choice, since you have to be like them, you have to consume our goods, and you can remain young and healthy forever...
The dissatisfaction at the loss of illusions after the transition-the loss of the possibility of remaining young, innocent, and free; losing the possibility of never-ending jouissance-are all portrayed in a caricature, a grotesque photographic montage from 1998 (see fig. 4.).

NOTES

(1) The authors express their greatest gratitude to Professor Naomi Segal (University of Reading, UK) for her suggestions and language editing of this text.

(2) Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margareth M. Lock, "The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology", Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 1987, pp. 6-41.
(3) Donna Haraway, "The biopolitics of post-modern bodies: determinations of self in immune system discourse", Differences, 1989, 1(1), pp. 3-44.
(4) Brian S. Turner, Regulating Bodies: Essays in Medical Sociology. (London: Routledge, 1992).
(5) Elizabeth Grosz: Volatile Bodies. Towards a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
(6) Philip A. Mellor and Chris Shilling, Re-forming the Body. Religion, Community and Modernity (London: Sage Publications, 1997).
(7) Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).
(8) See e.g. Ali Rattansani and Sallie Westwood, eds., Racism, Modernity and Identity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994).
(9) New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970.
(10) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Vol. 1.1987, vol. 2. 1989.
(11) Or, more exactly, a post-totalitarian. See Hanna Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt 1973), especially its last chapter on the Hungarian Revolution.
(12) The last Russian soldier left Hungary in June 1991.
(13) Male Fantasies, vol. 2. p. 51. The topic of the "phallic weapon" is also elaborated by the Yugoslav film director Duan Makavejev in his film "W. R., the mystery of the organism" (1970) in the scene where the making of a plaster-cast of an erected penis is interrupted with the appearances of Mao and Stalin.
(14) Julia Kristeva, "Approaching abjection" in Sue Vice, ed., Psychoanalytic Criticism. A reader (Cambridge: Polity Press. 1996), p. 156.
(15) Roland Barthes, Myth Today, in Susan Sontag, ed., Barthes: Selected Writings (New York: Fontana 1982), pp.141-142.
(16) Sigmund Freud, "The uncanny", in SE, pp. 217-52.
(17) Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1973).
(18) On the hysteric's ambivalence toward sexual identity Juliet Mitchell writes: "The hysteric...will not acknowledge the Law of the castration complex, will oscillate between the two desired positions of the Oedipus complex--being mother or being father--and will be unable unconsciously to acknowledge that the polymorphous delights of infantile sexuality must be forgotten and repressed if past, present and future-traditions-are to be established in the mind. Not properly internalising the representative of the law (the "superego") in fantasy, she will be an incestuous Oedipus before his discovery of his origins, a self without a history." Juliet Mitchell, "From King Lear to Anna O. and Beyond: Some Speculative Theses on Hysteria and the Traditionless Self", Yale Journal of Criticism, 5:2, 1992, p. 93.
(19) This intention is reflected in the bodily forms of the anorectic: her body does not show either female or male characteristics--even her menstruation cycle stops in most cases. Her body looks "ageless": it shows neither the form of a child nor an adult--remains at the border, in the state of adolescence.
(20) See Marta Csabai, "Her Body Her/Self? On the Mysteries of Hysteria and Anorexia Nervosa. A feminine disease" in Miklós Hadas, Katalin Kovács, Emese Lafferton, eds., Replika, Hungarian Social Science Quarterly (special issue). 1998. 99-111.
(21) See Julia Kristeva: "Women's Time" in Toril Moi, ed., A Kristeva Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 187-213.
(22) See also the possible source of this poster, an American postcard cartooning Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan as a crossdresser couple, Reagan in a woman's and his wife in a man's dress. (fig. 5.)