The object I chose was brought out of the store in the Hunterian museum (thank you to Simon Chaplin). It was a human skull, one of many hundreds, if not thousands, that the museum holds. Distinguished by a number written across the forehead and the word “British” written across the cranium, the skull was still, for me, an ambiguous object, as I had no information as to the sex, age, or ethnicity (although hinted at in the term British, I had no date for when the word was written on the skull) of the person it came from or how it came to be part of the Hunterian collection. All I knew, from being told by Simon, was that is was a real, human skull.
During our discussions, Alannah Tompkins made an interesting distinction between different ways of looking at objects. She suggested that objects might either be analysed in terms of their provenance and specific history or be looked at as having many potential connections and relationships stemming from them. It was the latter idea that characterised my thoughts on the skull. This was not only for expedient reasons (I would probably not have been able to determine the specific history in the half hour we had to do our presentations!) but more importantly, I was interested in the potential possibilities and meanings which it might embody. It was the skull’s ambiguity which drew me to it as an object.
Looking around the Hunterian, with its juxtaposition of human and animal body parts (including skulls), presented in a similar way as in John Hunter’s time, I realized that debates today which posit the emergence of a posthuman subject, a breakdown in human/animal boundaries, provoked, in many cases, by new genetic technologies, echo the idea of a close relationship between human and animal which Hunter seemed to be suggesting in the 18th century. The skull enabled me to make a connection between past and present ways of thinking about the human. It also led me to consider the differences between past and present constructions of race and how this reflects changes in science. Where once the skull, through phrenology, was central to racial science and constructions of racial difference, race is now (to borrow from Paul Gilroy) debated at a genetic level, it is said to be embodied at the interior, unseen level of the gene. Yet despite this move from the overtly physical to the internal, a concern with classification and ordering, similarity and difference, continues to be as predominant in scientific thinking as it was over 200 years ago.
It is of course possible that I might have made these connections through reading a text. Through research for my PhD – Race and Genetics in Contemporary British Fiction – I am already aware of the various uses to which skulls have been put in science in the past, and their role in racial science. However I think that, if I had had more time, an historical analysis of my skull would have yielded interesting and original insights, which might not be gained through secondary reading. An object’s specificity, as well as its multiple possible meanings, have the potential to provoke new interpretations and analyses (an approach which is also increasingly being applied to texts). It is thus a combination of the methods suggested by Alannah which I think might work together to provide new perspectives in research such as mine. “Reading” an object requires many of the same skills as reading a text, and giving objects the same careful consideration as texts can be both interesting and productive.
Josie Gill
Excellent Josie – it’s an interesting idea that a finite ‘thing’ such as a skull can still be ambiguous, and that we need to be skilled in reading objects as much as texts.
Comment by Sharon Ruston — April 21, 2010 @ 10:03 am
Hi Josie,
I really enjoyed reading your 500 words. Does the fact that you isolated the skull from the many hundreds or thousands for specific attention change its meaning, do you think? It seems to me that the very fact that these skulls are legion impart a specific (and possibly terrifying) meaning?
Also, you mentioned animal-human similarity. I shall offer something I came across about his experiments that came from his thought about that close relationship between animal and human. I remember reading in one of his biographies that when he was looking at a human tooth, one day, he was reminded of when he was working with lizards with their ability to grow back tails that had been lopped off. In fact, that’s where his idea to stick a tooth into a cockerel’s comb came from – and the idea to stick a cockerel’s testicle into a hen. I could go on… but that’s part of my Ph.D.!!!
Oh, and someone mentioned to me the term ‘post-human feminism’ yesterday. You used the word ‘post-human’ so do you think you could please shed light on what it means for me?! Is post-human feminism feminism for dead people? Surely, there can never be a post-human anything!!!
Comment by Paul William Craddock — April 24, 2010 @ 1:30 pm
Dear Paul
Thanks for your comments -I’m so sorry it has taken me this long to get back to you!
So, a definition of posthumanism. Well, I fear that like postcolonialism and postmodernism it is one of those terms which seem to have various meanings attached to them. So I can only offer what I understand by it (which has nothing to do with dead people!) I think that posthumanism encapsulates a way of thinking about the human which departs from humanism, where humans were defined as central to the world, in part due to their unique capacity for reason. Of course, this is a very reductive definition of humanism, but the point is that posthumanism challenges these ideas, so that the human is no longer singular or central. Posthumanist theories view the new genetics and technologies which promise to change the nature of human beings as evidence that the boundaries between what is human and non-human, or human and animal, are no longer clear, requiring a reconceptualisation of our relationship to the world.
I find these ideas interesting because Enlightenment humanism was itself never as universal as it claimed to be, it developed alongside colonialism and slavery, where black/colonised peoples were excluded from “the human” in order to justify their exploitation. So for me it is interesting to consider what happens to ideas about race and difference in a posthuman context – does race disappear in the confluence of the human/non-human/animal?
I’ve just watched your film, which I really enjoyed, and there was a particularly interesting part where the white female heart and lung transplant patient describes how her heart has been given to an asian man, which she thinks is quite unusual. I think that this is an example of the way in which medical technologies are provoking questions about the traditional ways we define ourselves. In this case, the meaning and significance of race is implicitly challenged by organ transplantation, which itself creates new relationships between all human beings. It is these kind of issues which I think the idea of the posthhuman is trying to encapsulate. Hopes this makes some kind of sense!
Comment by Josie Gill — May 21, 2010 @ 2:08 pm
Dear Josie,
How very interesting! I am not sure how I feel about the ‘post-’ set of words. They’re something I used to use a lot when I was in performance (but then I wasn’t dealing with the 18th and 19th centuries very often!) but now I can imagine that they would be incredibly difficult to use because they seem essential in order to refer to some current, uncertain or otherwise unmapped concept. I never really knew what I was saying when I was writing about performance – indeed, all explanations of ‘post-modernism’ or ‘post-structuralism’ (more so the former) seem to actually state this ambiguity as part of the definition of the word. I suppose that makes sense because the ‘post’ bit refers to something coming after. If there was something after the something that came after Modernism then I suppose ‘postmodernism’ would have a different name! Your explanation is very good, though, and I think I get the gist of the meaning.
That reminds me: I was filming outside of one of the locations for my LitSciMed film the other day and two really nice women came up to me. I thought they were coming to tell us to stop filming but they actually wanted to ask something about race and genetics in literature and film. I thought ‘I know the person for you!’. I asked her to write down what she was trying to say or proposing and to email me. I emailed her when I got home so that she had my email address. She said she would go to her briefcase and get her proposal to type up to send me so that I could send it to you. This was over a week ago. Either her briefcase is very far away or she forgot! If I hear from her, I’ll certainly pass her message onto you and if you think it’s of any substance or interest you can give her an email.
Thank you so much for watching the film – and I’m glad you enjoyed it! I like your observation about the asian man with the white woman’s heart – that’s really interesting. I’m not sure how uncommon it actually is to find a match between different ‘races’… I feel proud to have been part of a post-human work!
Comment by Paul William Craddock — May 22, 2010 @ 9:01 pm