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Body & Society
http://bod.sagepub.com The Great Ephemeral Tattooed Skin

Patricia MacCormack Body Society 2006; 12; 57 DOI: 10.1177/1357034X06064321 The online version of this article can be found at: http://bod.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/12/2/57
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The Great Ephemeral Tattooed Skin

PATRICIA MACCORMACK
Tattoos create a new surface of the body as text. This surface has been represented, interpreted, signied and discursively exposed as an external articulation of a subjects will, based both on individuality and belonging. In this article the body of the tattooed women in the West, as a still fairly remarkable phenomenon, will be explored. I will attempt to rethink the tattooed body, particularly the female tattooed body, as an example of the philosophical complexities of thinking the bodys surface as a frontier between self and culture. Using JeanFranois Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, this article will suggest that a tattooed body can challenge representations of the traditional female body and the body itself as an intelligible and xed phenomenon. Consistencies between a1 tattooed body and the female body will be used in this article to explore power and resistance in a subjects relationship with signifying their own body. A tattooed body as transgressive body seeks recognition, but not necessarily recognition that reies subjectivity once it is recognized. A tattoo adds to a body. The female body has been dened by lack. However, both deviate from the unremarkable body. The body is a material inextricable from the ways in which it is signied. While a tattooed body as a site of analysis is not equivalent to the female body, both raise issues concerning self-representation. In sociological studies a tattooed body forms a discursive relation with another (usually nontattooed) body.2 The tattooed body will be used as a starting point in thinking
Body & Society 2006 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 12(2): 5782 DOI: 10.1177/1357034X06064321
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Body & Society Vol. 12 No. 2
the ways in which different bodies can challenge signications of and the power to signify the body. The relation between discourse and esh is a crucial tension in addressing the resonance between the corporeal signication of the female, the tattooed and the tattooed female. The female body is a contested site of power. This article will primarily discuss the discursive demands placed on tattooed women to speak their bodies. Before the choice to be tattooed there is evidence in interviews with tattooists that the female body needs special consideration because womens choices are unreliable, illogical and frequently annexed to a partners will. While not equivalent to tattooing, another form of body modication piercing evokes similar concerns. Piercer Jim Ward emphasizes: I wont pierce a woman whos obviously come in because her husband or boyfriend wants it to me thats a violation, a subtle form of rape, and I wont be party to that (in Juno and Vale, 1989: 161). Sanders cites a male tattooist who was confronted with a girl [sic] wanting a name tattooed on her breast: This girl was extremely fragile . . . she was not, in the American sense of the word, a beautiful girl. . . . I didnt want to do this tattoo because I knew this girl has problems emotionally (1989: 79).3 These statements resonate with Lvi-Strausss positioning of the female body as a site of exchange of meaning and value between men. Many theorists have engaged with the notion of tattooing as a mode of empowerment, yet these studies frequently posit the tattooed subject as distinct both discursively and epistemologically (and at worst, intellectually) from the sociologist. The ssure between theorist/sociologist and tattooed subject often presents a tattooed subject as irreconcilable with her or his capacity to know the motivations for tattooing. Yet tattooing itself is as complex as any other form of creativity in that motivation is not clear. The question could be turned from Why does one tattoo ones body? to Why do we want to know why we or another tattoos? Lyotard states:
To ask someone a question is to presuppose that the person understands it and wants to reply . . . do we ask this question about ourselves? . . . Or else they will not reply and the question will remain your business, and youll have you deal with it without them. (1991: 129)
The results of these questions include arguments that fail to sufciently problematize the relationship between will and act, and studies that conate the anthropological with the sociological (hence the term modern primitives).4 One does not need to replace the question with silence. What is at stake is what is invested in the dialectic structure of enquiry. How can the ssure between questioner and questioned, between bodies themselves, be thought differently? The desire to know becomes a desire to be affected, what Deleuze and Guattari call proximity rather than opposition. Proximity is a haecceity, a moment unique to time, place, event and intensities, not a repeatable project of analysis.
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This principle of proximity or appropriation is entirely particular and reintroduces no analogy whatsoever. It indicates as rigorously as possible a zone of proximity or copresence of a particle, the movement into which any particle is drawn . . . [an] appeal to an objective zone of indetermination or uncertainty, something shared or indiscernible. (1987: 2723)
This article will address the tattooed body as an altered corporeal plane and through the affects it evokes. The empowerment of being a tattooed body is not about choosing something taboo or transgressive to inscribe on the body in order to retaliate against strict regimes of signication. Tattooing is not necessarily a form of active will to present a body in relationship with the subjects own volition. The tattooed body problematizes binaries of the natural/volitional, surface/interior, discursive and designated. How does indiscernible proximity challenge notions of alterity? The Signifying Skin Skin is the site of encounter between eneshed self and society. The skin is where the self involutes into the world and the world into the self. Skin is a marked surface inscribed with texts of race, gender, sexuality, class and age before it is marked by ink. These corporeal expressions exist beyond the choice of the individual to dene them. They are inscriptions created by historical and social consensus, while tattoos are usually formed through individual or small peer group consensus. Race and gender place the body within a hierarchical system before the subject can reect on her or his capacity to represent the relationship of race and gender to self. The tattoo is an addition to the surface rather than a plane of signication into which we are born. Theoretically, tattooing is available to most genders, races and cultures. The tattoo has signied liberation (through choice), commodication (as fashion) and terrorization (in the Holocaust). It suggests individuality and belonging (subcultural, tribal, but also through the forced homogenization of tattooed people by non-tattooed culture). The surface the tattoo creates complicates the already complex sense of immediacy between the internalization of social discourse (from institutionalized discourse, such as the prison, to gendering) and the externalization of self as an enacting entity in the world. What philosophical questions can a tattooed body raise to deterritorialize the very notion of reading a subject through the signiers of the skin? The division between the natural materialization of skin and the cultural, volitional marking of skin by a tattooists needle is perhaps best described as elucidating nuanced versus gross material expression rather than natural versus cultural skin. Either way, skin is encountered as legible. Power could be seen as the interface between the discourses of society and self-expressed subjective inscription from gender to race to body modication. The skin is where the
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self enters the world and the world enters the self, similar to Merleau-Pontys model of two hands clasping each other. Even though the hands clasp, their relation is of two not of one, each with their own specicity yet indivisible. Elizabeth Grosz emphasizes the relation of power within this model. For [Merleau-Ponty] there is always a slippage in the double sensation: they remain irreducible to each other. The left hand feeling the right hand is not the same as the right hand feeling the left (1999: 157). An individuals enactment of their body is different to society exerting power upon the body, but the inextricable nature of the encounter resonates with this phenomenological example. Each single body exerts forces upon its own sense of self, made from a selection of binary choices male/female, black/white, etc. coalesced into a unied subject. Deleuze and Guattari call this biunivocalization, as translatability of any kind requires a single substance of expression (1987: 179). Each body represents a constellation of forces, and assemblages of bodies can create strategic forces to alter other forces, from patriarchy to feminism. The specicity of a tattooed body is another layer of differentiation. If the black face is a failure to be a white face, and the female to be male, a tattooed body fails to be the base-level zero of non-inked skin. Instead of an individual body having to privilege one aspect of difference over another for example black women or lesbians having to deal with the politics of their race or sexuality separately from their gender a bodys differences create a specic plane of its own relationship to all its differences. Should a tattooed woman have to be a non-gender-specic tattooed person when dealing with issues of body modication? Should she be a non-body-modied woman when dealing with feminist issues? For it is necessary to produce successive types of deviance for everything that eludes biunivocal relationships (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 177). The skin of women as the interface of esh within and as a part of culture is a contested site, as skin refers to everything from genetic sex to gender enactment, from real-life suffering to philosophical positioning. Skin itself marks the body as both taking up space and existing within a particular space. Within corporeal feminism nothing can be thought without being thought materially, not because the body is now privileged over the mind but because it is impossible to refer to one without the other being included in any reference. Tattooed Bodies without Organs The expression Deleuze and Guattari use to refer to the illegible body is the Body without Organs (BwO). The BwO is not a thorax emptied of its viscera but emptied of immobilized signications of the function, meaning and capacity for us to read each aspect of corporeality reliably and permanently. According to Deleuze and Guattari, a BwO is the degree zero of corporeal matter, but zero
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is not absence. As there is no two (male/female, tattooed/not-tattooed) matter is not understood as situated comparatively in relation to a set of pre-formed options. Zero is matter as intensity. A BwO has no vertical metaphoric striation of the body. Vertical axes section the body, and each section is given value and meaning, both physiological (heart as pumping blood) and conceptual (heart as love). Metonymic horizontal relations signify the body in relation to another body in terms of comparative value (male, not female). A tattooed body as a BwO cannot necessarily be dened as belonging to the collective body of other tattooed bodies, or as only not the non-tattooed body. It is not a body whose skin is marked as a function of anything self-expression, symbolic representation, rebellion or mutilation because the tattoos are not read as part of the traditional organization of the body. Marking the skin is an addition or transgression. The BwO is not a body without signications but any signications are localized, tactical and temporary. The BwO can refer to a space within a body, one body and a collective of persons as political body. Most importantly, the BwO exerts its forces not through its meaning but through its capacity to affect other forces and alter force relations. Affect is the openness and possibility of experiencing that irrevocably alters the self. Zero intensity is a principle of production (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 164). A tattooed body is an experiment without a hypothesis.
Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, nd an advantageous place on it, nd potential movements of deterritorializations, possible lines of ight, experience them, produce ow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 161)
A tattooed body creates segments of affective movement rather than segmenting the body into tattoos placed upon the signied skin. Rather than explain his own tattoos, multiply tattooed tattoo artist Greg Kulz states:
A painting isnt just a two-dimensional surface with a funnel attached to your eyes; its the whole room, the air youre breathing, and the creepy people next to you making pretentious comments. Equally a tattoo isnt just a decal on my back, it does certain things. (in Juno and Vale, 1989: 154)
Deleuze, Guattari and Kulz use words such as experiment, ow, conjunction, try out and does certain things. As verbs rather than nouns these expressions emphasize a tattooed BwO as non-organized producer of affects. Dorothea Olkowski explains:
Deleuze and Guattari describe the body in terms of speeds and intensities, productive ow of forces seeking to escape the authority of unity, organization and hierarchy, what they refer to as stratication. . . . Race, sex, class these groupings are too xed, too stable to give way to reform and rethinking. It is only by rst breaking up these molar unities into a thousand tiny races, sexes or classes that we can begin to undermine their authority and regroup ourselves on a pragmatic level. (1999: 57)
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Authority and Affect Olkowski points to the key notion of authority in unity. Race and gender and, particularly in relation to a tattoo being associated with a lower social level, class5 are all authorized in the rst instance via the skin. A tattooed body is not inherently a BwO. It is the mode of production that occurs in proximity to it. Those in proximity to a tattooed body (including that very body) must open themselves to experiments in affect and force. This may suggest that a tattooed body can be a BwO. A tattooed body in relation to another body creates a BwO, rather than a dialectic. And the body in proximity, through being affected, produces its own intensities and thus itself may become a BwO. What happens when, instead of reading a bodys gender through the phantasmatically stable signiers of skin, voice, genitals and face, we open to the gendered tattooed bodys potential(s) to affect(s). Instead of Who is this (female, black, old) body? one asks What is this body doing, to what is it connecting, what new formations is it creating? Deleuze demarcates two axes of affect that elucidate all force expressed by all individuals, and the corresponding forms societys forces take as affect-relations. He states:
To incite, provoke and produce (or any term drawn from an analogous list) constitute active affects, while to be incited or provoked, to be induced to produce, to have a useful effect, constitute reactive affects. The latter are not simply the repercussion or passive side of the former but are rather the irreducible encounter between the two, especially if we believe that the force affected has a certain capacity for resistance. At the same time, each force has the power to affect (others) and be affected (by others again) such that force implies power relations: and every eld of forces distributes forces according to these relations and their variations. (Deleuze, 1988: 71)
Macropolitical bodies, from phallocratic dominant culture or feminism, individual bodies in familial or localized situations, and a bodys own potential to affect itself are three bodily assemblages of possible relations to other bodies. Bodily assemblages are inexhaustible and dynamic. Each bodys capacity to affect is what forms everyday real-life encounters and their aptitude to repeat or transform power relations. The body is broken down (or connected up into larger assemblages) into segments or molecules of force that each express a capacity to affect. The organ-ized body, that is, the body whose meanings and functions are xed, is read before it exists. Seeking to know risks coming to tattooed esh only through pre-formed possible signication. An example of a tattooed person becoming an urban model for an anthropological study can be seen in Paul Sweetmans Anchoring the (Post-modern) Self in which he claims: Drawing . . . from interviews with a variety of contemporary body modiers this section will suggest that for some tattooees and piercees, there is . . . evidence to suggest that
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their tattoos and piercings are experienced as more than mere accessories (1999: 52). Even the title of the article points to the authors desire to anchor the meaning and potential of these bodies. His insistent inclusion, when citing his interviewees, of everyday banal speech (including erm . . .) juxtaposed against his theoretical language further positions a tattooed body as vaguely hierarchically inferior. This implies that the project addresses a body to be analyzed rather than being an enquiry into power relations and connections forged between tattooed and other bodies.
Signiance and Subjectication We read the esh into established modes of comprehension so that anything remarkable within a body is subsumed into a univocal series made from binary choices, which privilege one term over anothers failure to signify the dominant. We see women as not-men, racial others as not-white. A tattooed body as notnatural or given emphasizes the signifying regimes of materiality in place within the discursive systems that precede it. Deleuze and Guattari state:
Let us consider the three strata that most directly bind us: the organism, signiance, and subjectication. The surface of the organism, the angle of signiance and interpretation, and the point of subjectication or subjection. You will be organized, you will be an organism, you will articulate your body otherwise youre just depraved. . . . To the strata as a whole, the BwO opposes disarticulation (or n articulations) as the property of the plane of consistency, experimentation as the operation on that plane (no signier, never interpret!), and nomadism as the movement (keep moving, even in place, never stop moving, motionless voyage, desubjectication). (1987: 159, emphasis added)
The skin is the most accessible and immediate textual surface of the organism. The subject is interpreted via the skin in two ways. Signiance reads what each part or aspect of the skin means, its colour, its gender, its age. Subjectication assembles each signied element and subjects it to a place within any situation as meaningful. The subject is a unied single corporeal expression made from signiance and subjectication. Signiance and subjectication are phenomena of the esh (inextricable from the psyche within it) but because they exist as and at the interface between experiencing the esh of another and the self in the world they are both linguistic and corporeal. Signiance and subjectication give the body a function, purpose and meaning in the world and give the world meaning, function and purpose to the body. The axes of linguistic and corporeal emphasis and experience are where the organized body departs from the BwO. Instead of speaking my body or the body of another as it is, instead of living my body or seeing the body of another as being lived as a reiteration of what that body is, the BwO speaks an open
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language of possibilities and corporeality as a creative involution of the bodys relationship to the world. Interpretation is the body reected in an already thought concept. To speak the BwO would be to engage with what Foucault calls language that spreads forth rather than infers meaning. This non-sovereign mode of speech creates: the void in which the contentless slimness of I speak is manifested [is] an absolute opening thought which language endlessly spreads forth, while the subject the I who speaks fragments, disperses, scatters, disappearing in that naked space (1987: 11). To experience the BwO resists all modes of comprehending it in order to achieve it. The BwO is what Rosi Braidotti (1994) would call the nomadic body. The BwO is continual transformation of the static body redistributed, intensity that presents in matter.
A BwO is made in such a way that it can be occupied, populated only by intensities. Only intensities pass and circulate. . . . It has nothing to do with phantasy, there is nothing to interpret. The BwO causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not a space nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree to the degree corresponding to the intensities produced. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 153)
Signication of subjectivity through skin is a persistent conguration of the mobile skin based on established patterns being repeated. To understand a body is to organize it. To organize a body is to exert a power through it, enclosing it in limited meaning. The body itself engages with and negotiates this power. A tattooed body resists organization by presenting another layer which must be organized, the signication of which is volitional but neither clear nor stable. Signiance and Female BwOs As a BwO a tattooed body adds to the population of elements of skin, intensies different points, and resists interpretation but also deterritorializes those planes of skin which precede it. Just as the signier woman is not a stable term beyond its failure to signify man, a tattooed body is the added-onto body that fails to signify the natural, raw or unmarked body, of course always and already marked with signications. Unfeminine women or rebellious women who tattoo themselves to create their own visual or aesthetic representation may seem to resist traditional versions of femininity. Covertly female tattooist Vyvyn Lazonga describes tattoos as forming another plane of the traditional ornamentation of women: Women are masters of illusion. They always have been with clothes and make-up. A tattoo is just part of that illusion (in Juno and Vale, 1989: 126). But neither the concept of the feminine woman taking performance to an extreme, nor that of the rebellious woman, give the female body the volition of
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discursive self-representation, including the refusal to speak. Indeed these implement a new biunivocal operation. Deleuze and Guattari point to woman as already a BwO. They claim the unorganized bodies of children are invaded with organizing principles, the rst being the principle of female lack, followed by the threat of male lack to organize the male.
The question is not, or not only, that of the organism, history, and subject of enunciation that oppose masculine to feminine in the great dualism machines. The question is fundamentally that of the body the body they steal from us in order to fabricate opposable organisms. This body is rst stolen from the girl: Stop behaving like that. . . . The boys turn comes next, but it is by using the girl as an example . . . the reconstruction of the body and a Body without Organs, the anorganism of the body, is inseparable from a becoming-woman. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 276)6
Woman dened by lack, historically denied self-representation, means that what woman is is, of course, a contentious term. Lazonga states tattoos can stand alone as a powerful example of who the person is or is becoming (in Juno and Vale, 1989: 126). Technically, woman cannot make a statement as to what she is, because she has been denied access to enunciation of self. Woman is what she isnt, man. Does this mean that based on Lazongas statement a tattooed woman is always and already becoming? If the female body is thought as a BwO then where and what is tattooed upon it is, by turns, irrelevant, contingent in meaning, or a form of increasing the intensity of the BwO. Does a tattooed male enter a becoming woman because tattoos pleat the organism-signifying skin into new folds of (de)signication? Deleuze states: We go from inection to inclusion just as we move from the event of the thing to the predicate of the notion, or from seeing to reading (1993: 41). Seeing a tattooed body is evocative but reading one envelops it into a comparative system of self and other, distancing its power to act as a catalyst toward thinking body relations differently. The interpretation exists before a tattooed body can. Even tattooed interviewees often claim they always knew they wanted tattoos, or the desire to be tattooed was in my blood (Juno and Vale, 1989: 186). But in order for these claims to be made the question must rst be asked, placing a tattooed body into a dialectical situation. Whether the tattoo is seen as beautiful, political or tribal, reading it stabilizes the meaning of a tattoo upon an organized body. If the body is resistant to being described as an organized body with a tattoo, then the role and force of the tattoo in relation to the body can change the very denition of woman that succeeds the adjective tattooed. Like tattooed bodies in sociology, womens bodies in philosophy and psychoanalysis are more often spoken about than heard speaking for themselves. Any discourse that does emerge is usually tempered by the difculty of speaking a
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hitherto minimally acknowledged subject without reifying it. To re-present immobilizes the subject while emphasizing the need for a historically silent or silenced body to speak itself. This need evokes the intensely difcult conundrum that if a body has the freedom to speak itself, essentialism, albeit from itself rather than from outside, may result. Can the body as a speaking subject remain mobile? The intensity of feminism as a BwO is an example of different bodies assembling to form a specic spatial and temporal force. Feminism describes a collective of very different people. For a variety of purposes these different people wish to resist the frequently homogenizing and repetitive force of dominant discourse. Here intensity corresponds to matter to the degree that forces from dominant systems can change the shape of this BwO and the BwO reacts by degrees to the spaces available to it (through need or opportunity), hence altering the matter of repeated patterns of dominant cultural ideology. We could call the non-dominant force feminism, even though it does not describe any single kind of person. The outcome will not necessarily be predictable; the intensity of the force of feminism will be based on the intensity of the resistance or give of dominant discourse and hence both forces will alter their shape and intensity depending on how the relations of forces unfold. There are no hard and fast rules for practices toward change; if there were, many may be excluded instead of included in this BwO. For this reason feminism is not an organized body, it is a phenomenon produced through the intensities of the culture in which it exists and thus the direction, force and form of feminisms intensities are in constant circulation and ux. This is the power of feminism as a cultural need and a philosophy that includes the real lived bodies of women. Women do not become immobilized as anything because the feminist movement itself is a BwO. So if we can think the importance of feminism as a BwO what are the needs and risks of thinking women as such, and therefore tattooed women as an example of both a representation of women as the BwO and the BwO that is pure intensity without the signiance of gender at all? Mutilation and Signiation Tattooing has been referred to as a form of self-mutilation. Women in particular have been the objects of analysis as representing the point at which body art and self-mutilation seem to lose their demarcation. Tattooing becomes another incarnation of self-loathing, conated with other corporeal pathologies such as anorexia, bulimia and self-harm, where all acts of opening the skin are themselves homogenized (such as sexual cutting play, vampirism practice or performance art). Victoria Pitts cites Hesse-Biber, author of a text entitled Am I Thin Enough Yet?, as claiming Women particularly are pushing the envelope of body
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decoration and the question is why? is this body enhancement or body dissatisfaction? Pitts points out:
The image Hesse-Biber depicts is instead presented as evidence for the suggestion that bodymodiers are victims. . . . In this and other accounts the image of the suffering body-modier is added to other gures of escalated female victimization, such as the anorectic, the delicate self-harm cutter and the objectied teenager. (1999: 297)
Sociological academic studies of tattooing are matched with a plethora of studies in clinical journals where tattooing is taken as a form of pathology, or as inherently associated with other pathologies such as juvenile malaise (Putnin, 2002); criminality, drug abuse (Braithwaite et al., 2001); self-harm (Claes et al., 2005); addiction, including addiction to getting tattooed (Vail, 1999); ascetic refusal of alcohol, drugs, sex and crime in straightedge (Atkinson, 2003); and general deviance (Koch et al., 2005).7 Irwins (2003) sociological study negotiates its theoretical premises as much around the social compulsion to be either for or against a tattooed body, as around a tattooed body itself. Signiation of the body before the tattoo is inked is important in contextualizing the image when the tattoo arrives. Psychoanalytically the body is rst and foremost organized around the presence or absence of the phallus, and women come to be organized not so much on what their bodies signify but what they fail to signify. Race can be described similarly. The non-white body is not a specic and different body to the white body, it rather fails to signify whiteness. Hence the act of organizing bodies refers to the organization of a very particular kind of body, a white male body, and the failure or success of other bodies to full the indices of this body.8 Here we nd the female body dened in psychoanalytic terms as lacking. Renata Salecl, from within a Lacanian frame, claims the disrespect for the body apparent in body art reects disrespect for castration. She states: Respect is therefore an imaginary relationship that the subject has towards another subject, or, better, towards the symbolic status that this other subject temporarily assumes (1998: 34). Tattooed women are frequently described as disrespecting the sanctity of their female bodies, which Salecl could claim is a disrespect for the symbolic power of the phallus. Hence tattooed women and feminists are part of a greater frame of resistant women who must either continue to be dened through their antagonistic relationship with psychoanalysis and phallomorphism or think outside of lack. Tattooed women can be represented as being tattooed because of body dissatisfaction, to attain a certain image as a result of social pressures to appear attractive. Simultaneously a tattooed woman is more likely to be represented as unfeminine, extreme or radically departing from the norms of feminization. Cummings quotes two female interviewees:
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. . . for whom the stigma of non-mainstream body modication remains strong. Exacerbated one woman asked why does it mean we mutilate our bodies if we choose to wear ink? . . . Another woman chimed in when I got it I didnt expect old ladies would glare at me in the grocery store and that my mothers room-mate would go on days-long crying and drinking binges because I could mutilate myself. (2001: 305)
These responses are interesting not because the women do not give reasons, but because they themselves ask questions. Licit and Illicit Organs: Faces and Genitals As a BwO, the female tattooed body can redistribute the organized body. Although the following sentences are generalized I will refer to some gross stereotypes of tattooing to elucidate the importance of the body as organized, even if that body creates a new plane of interest by being tattooed. The organization of the body assists in interpreting tattoos as much as tattoos themselves are able to signify. For example, certain parts of the female body are seen as appropriate for tattoos, such as the hip, the upper thigh or the shoulder. These areas are often graced with feminine, small images. Florida resource website bellaonline.com marks female-owned tattoo shops and shops with female tattooists with a ower icon. Here decals of presumed feminine tattoos are part of icons which allow women to access tattooists, although the website does not claim that only women would want to be tattooed by women.9 According to Fisher, 85 percent of tattooists are men (2002: 97). Being tattooed with large, less feminine images, blackwork (blocks of shapes ooded with black ink), or being tattooed in a place such as the arms, the neck, hands, mons veneris or face are not generally described as feminine forms of tattooing. The male body seems more readily a canvas able to be written on in its entirety, with the possible exception of the penis. One rarely sees images of men with tattoos on their face or penis, although the penis is a common site for piercing, usually to heighten sexual pleasure. The face is a place seemingly inappropriate for both sexes because the face, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is the plane of signiance and subjectication par excellence. The face, more than any other surface, with the possible exception of the genitals, is the legible tableau of the subjects being. Because the genitals are not seen in everyday life the face becomes a semi-sacred site of selfrepresentation. Tattooing the face becomes taboo and many tattooists will not tattoo faces, especially the faces of women. Andrea Junos interview with full body tattooed Michael Wilson includes the question After you got your face tattooed did the world change? (Juno and Vale, 1989: 39). Writer and artist Jane Handel is the only woman in the Modern Primitives book with facial tattooing small tears and dots under her eyes. Even through the fashion zenith of female
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tattooing in the early 1990s the facial tattoo was a rare sight. The signicance of this will be discussed below. Manchester tattooist Irene Fraenkel-Rietti states the following in the manifesto section of her website tattooed-lady.co.uk:
Many artists, for a variety of reasons will not do tattooing above the collar and below the cuff. I am willing to tattoo on faces, heads and hands, providing I feel sure that it is an informed and reasoned choice by the client and on their signing an indemnity or release to the effect that I, my staff and the Studio will not be held responsible for the social (and employment related) consequences in their lives of such radical display. Similarly I am willing to do both male and female genital tattooing, which many artists will not undertake.
Fisher calls this issue a moral choice (2002: 99) for the tattooist. This choice places the power of manipulation of signication of self with the tattooist rather than the tattooee. A tattooed body is denied volition before the fact, rather than after the fact when a tattooed person is compelled to speak his or her body. If a tattooed persons power is contingent to the tattooists moral dilemma (a deeply problematic term Fisher does not dene) then can a tattooed body be asked to describe their choice to be tattooed as a choice at all? Heavily tattooed all over her own body, Fraenkel-Rietti positions herself at the extreme margins of tattooing practice. Fraenkel-Riettis manifesto is explicitly oriented around the work of Aleister Crowley. Her eight precepts are from Crowleys Book of the Law. The traditional stereotypical associations of women with witchcraft and with an inclination toward the spiritual could be seen to be fullled here. Many of her tattoos are magick symbols. But many are not. The compulsion to read her esh as a signied incarnation of her religious beliefs is foxed at every turn of her body with images ranging from the ordinary a frog to ones which directly challenge and pervert magickal lore instead of a third eye on her forehead plexus, Fraenkel-Rietti has two eyes tattooed above her left ear. Perhaps its placement could resonate with Crowleys religion of Thelema as left-hand path magick, but the neatness of the symbol is contorted and proliferated by not one but two eyes. While I could suggest, after Irigaray (1985), the multiple is a feminine challenge to the phallic paradigm of the one, this tattoo is powerful not in what it represents but because it confounds the function of fullling an expected and pre-formed symbolism. The image asks a question, it both resonates with and twists a religious or symbolic belief. This is in addition to the deterritorializing affect of nding an ear beneath two eyes instead of a nose. Fraenkel-Riettis head is shaved, but her body, always shown nude in the pictures on her webpage, is voluptuously feminine. Thus her bald head could be purely functional, for more tattoos. Shaving the head creates a space for the tattoos to come, rather than being a retrospective part of the entire look. A traditional tattoo narrative follows: wanting a tattoo, then designing, experiencing the sensation of and having a
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tattoo, then perhaps altering ones look to go with the idea that one is now a tattooed body. Another narrative is: acquiring a tattoo as a permanent afrmation of an already extreme look punks, goths and people involved in other theatrical subcultures are frequently tattooed. Shaving the head is separately symbolic, particularly for women; skins, lesbians, cancer sufferers and other female subject types are bald. Fraenkel-Rietti does not mention her baldness on her page. Her tattooed aspects are intensied and the usually demarcated micropolitics of tattooed subject or bald woman involute. There is an uneasy oscillation with what parts of her signiation are most important to her subjectication. Bald is masculine, voluptuous woman feminine, naked is sexual, but here it is functional, yet it is the oscillation rather than the exchange that keeps this bodys image mobile and meanings dynamic. A similar form of mobile signicance, but on a male body, can be found in Australian performance artist Pluto, who uses temporary piercings, full body paint and tattoos to create trajectories and lines on the body independent of outlines of face and genitals (see MacCormack, 2004). Sympathetic Tattoos and Patterned Becomings Conceiving female difference must think the esh itself through a different system of corporeal (lack of) comprehension. Women have rightly refused lack as the dening point of their gender. If tattooing mutilates the female body, we should ask whose version of the female body is this body? Men do not get their penises tattooed on the whole because, within a phallocentric system, this is the symbolic signier of their subjectication, the point where the esh is already not marked but subsumed entirely as a symbol. Is the mutilation of a female body only a mutilation in one system of understanding the body? Can tattooing not only be non-mutilative in the BwO but a form of becoming the BwO? Certainly if a man were to tattoo the penis heavily, replace its signiance with new illegible symbols that changed the penis from a symbol of a phallus to something out of the ordinary, strange or not acceptable, he would be on the way to becoming a BwO.10 Women are often tattooed in delicate places, especially places where the tattoo can be easily hidden. The bikini-line, upper thigh or breast tattoo sometimes represents a secret gift for a lover; it is revealed when clothing is removed. Within phallocentric culture the revelation of a tattoo in these places, near the site of castration, could present as fetishes. This would explain a tattooed woman described as unfeminine, disavowing lack in a permanent way. If the images in these areas are feminine birds, butteries, etc. then this disavowal of castration is questioned. But how would psychoanalysis explain extreme tattooing such as large amorphous blackwork that does not represent an
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image but pure design? The great Omi, a Victorian circus performer who tattooed his entire body with interconnecting globulous black forms, did so as a career move, making himself a sideshow freak because he had no congenital defects to exploit. His claimed motivation does not immobilize the affects produced by these confounding patterns. The patterns are irregular, so they are not really patterns at all. The modern tattooist relies less on individual images on walls being chosen by clients, and is now more likely to design an image in sympathy with the musculature inections of the client. To Vales comment, I like tattoos that take advantage of body topography, Kulz replies, Like this [whirls right arm furiously, then shows forearm where the veins stand out and articulate the design itself in 3-D] (in Juno and Vale, 1989: 154). The photo shows the non-specic design (not a series of demarcated images) on his arm articulated by his veins. Kulz also has a stylized spine tattooed on his spine. Two regular customers in attendance at London fetish club Torture Garden have Vesalius-like anatomical revelation tattooed on their bodies. Both are female, ones back is tattooed as if it has been peeled to reveal the subcutaneous musculature, the other has a side piece of skin pulled away, beginning at the front of the ribs under the breast and ending at the hip.11 Kulz states: I did a tattoo on a girls instep with the tentacles reaching down to each of her toes, so when she wiggled her toes the squid would come to life (in Juno and Vale, 1989: 154). Here a hermeneutic image can still be in sympathy with the body. The image is a kinetic one, dependent for its aesthetics as much on movement as the image itself. A further example of the animal tattoo colonizing the human to make a humAnimal BwO is seen in the relatively common tattooing of animal print work, where large parts of or the whole body and head are covered in zebra stripes or leopard spots, scales or feathers. The whole body is territorialized by the becoming-animal of human skin or the redistribution of the bodys traditional outline by large swirls and whorls of black. The bodys look as human is challenged. Issues of male or female tattooing are troubled by the introduction of human and non-human, and the distortion of body outline through the emergence of new abstract lines and forms. Simultaneously, sympathetic tattooing exploits the specicity of each body as unique, and the same image will not move or create the same trajectory on different bodies. The body is organized now by the blackwork or the animal pattern, which may or may not cover the breasts and genitals, but reorganizes their role in bodily signication. The body is not white woman but zebra-person, not black man but irregular blobs folded as blocks and shapes, repeated patterns that mean nothing.
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The Temporal Skin Flix Guattari calls the act of interpretation or knowing a body the massacre of the body. He writes:
It is the body and all the desires it produces that we wish to liberate from foreign domination. It is on that ground that we wish to work for the liberation of society. There is no boundary between the two elements. I oppress myself inasmuch as that I is the product of a system of oppression that extends to all aspects of living. . . . We can no longer allow others to turn our mucous membranes, our skin, all our sensitive area into occupied territory territory controlled and regimented by others, to which we are forbidden access. (1996: 301)
Tattooing is one form of the many, micro-political acts a body can perform to reoccupy itself with multiple meanings. Tattooing should not be considered the form of dermic resistance par excellence simply because it is often described as permanent or extreme. It can be political or aesthetic or both, but it does include certain elements that disperse the traditionally organized body during and after the act of tattooing, transcending any particular reason for which the tattoo is acquired. Some of these elements include but are not limited to (and of course alter in their own expression between bodies and within the one body): pain (particularly cut-in tattoos, where a scalpel traces the design and ink is rubbed into the wound); masochism; endurance, The shame of not being strong enough to nish will last a lifetime (Lyle Tuttle, in Juno and Vale, 1989: 117); a sense of the capacity to alter the phantasmatically given body; banality; economic or visual extravagance (tattoos cost a lot and look visually elaborate in many situations); transcendence and spiritualism; a sense of permanence; continual transformation; narcissism; anacliticism (taking ones body as an object distinct from the self); nostalgia (currently, in psychobilly a fashion for sailor tattoos augments the 1940s retro subculture); extreme respect or disrespect of sense of self. This shopping list of motives and affects could continue innitely, even if I was to describe one body acquiring one tattoo. The point I am making, relating to Guattaris suggestion, is that for whatever reasons a body thinks or refuses to think the act of tattooing and being in a tattooed body, theorizing or interpreting such a body risks colonizing the skin of ones self or another. If we judge what a tattoo means we are holding it against an original and disavowing the specicity of any image, occupying tattooed skin with transcendental essence. We bring a perceived natural body massacre to an apparently synthetically placed rupture. If we ask the bearer (including ourselves) to articulate a tattoos meaning we risk involuting the occupation so that even if (and its a big if) the body expresses its own meaning, the body is forced to express itself within the dominant systems mode of intelligibility, given by whoever asks the question. Deleuze relates the project of denition thus:
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A denition poses the identity of one term (the dened) with at least two other terms (deners or reasons). The denition can possibly be substituted for the dened, this substitution being the reciprocal inclusion: for example, I dene 3 by 2 and 1 . . . the deners or reasons must precede the dened since they determine its possibility, but only by following the power, and not the act that, on the contrary, would suppose the antecedence of the dened. Whence, justly, reciprocal inclusion and the absence of all temporal relations. (1993: 43)
The dened tattoo includes the reasons given by the deners or, if given by the tattooed as something outside the possibility of being dened within dominant discourse, comprehended (another way of saying dened) by the deners. In the situation of a tattooed woman we have two terms to be dened which produce a third. The act of tattooing is not taken as a dividuated phenomenon. The term woman and the term tattoo produce the term tattooed woman. The third term is formed by the denition of the rst two terms, which themselves are often formed by other multiple terms lesbian, black and so on. Repeated patterns of discourse refer back to established possibilities of denition rather than new modes of embodiment. If terms do not go together within denitions they will sit uncomfortably and may incur discursive resistance. Traditionally terms like sailors, prisoners or other gross stereotypes are congruent with tattoos. The reasons for these have a (phantasmatic) historical clarity. Dominant discourse demands motives for the partnership of woman and tattoos. Demanding a reason is a form of violence perpetrated upon the female tattooed body. The process of denition xes the body, just as the process of prejudice that denes woman as . . . has traditionally xed the female body. If a denition is sought, if a reason is required, the bodys capacity to become a BwO is re-occupied and subsumed. The act of tattooing may simply elucidate a rupture in the demand or compulsion for subjects to speak. The act of xing refuses the body itself as temporal before it is tattooed, and may even perpetrate within traditional discourse the power of permanence because the risk of tattoos cited by both enthusiasts and critics is that tattoos are for ever. Resistance to being a tattooed body may reside more in resistance to dening ones body than in the act of tattooing, a concrete example of Foucaults earlier call to speak as an act that fragments, disperses, scatters and makes meaning(s) disappear. Speech that fragments is like a tattooed body itself. Images, sounds and sensoria refer to possible futures and scattered micro-sensations of the embodied psyche. A tattooed body as a BwO can be compared to the act of being tattooed. Contrary to popular apocrypha tattooing does not hurt because of the needle (another object dened through its singularity both as object and in function a needle) but, referring back to Olkowski and Grosz, is more like a thousand tiny needles.
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Leibniz is not saying that pain resembles an object, but that it evokes a vibration gathered by receptive organs: pain does not represent the needle, nor its movement from one level to another . . . but the thousands of minute movements or throbs that irradiate in the esh. . . . Pain does not represent the pin in extension, but resembles molecular movements that it produces in matter. (Deleuze, 1993: 967)
The nociception of the drag of the needle is different to lling in and shading. The area being tattooed elicits different sensations even between the minutest nerves, almost imperceptible from each other. The sensation of being tattooed is an inherently kinetic form of pain pressure, how long the tattooing has been going, length of drag, intensity of black and span of area all occur as continuums more than individuated needle moments. While I am not suggesting the practical experience of being tattooed is an authentic version of Deleuzes denition for pain, tattooing is pain from movement, throb and temporality. It is not like the moment of piercing, or the jab of a needle, it is multiple and temporal. The experience of being a tattooed body or in proximity with a tattooed body does not represent the object of tattooed body or non-tattooed body next to tattooed body. These two phenomena evoke tiny perceptions of esh experienced differently, sensorily, aesthetically, discursively. Both the body and the capacity to describe it scatter into thousands of fragmentary throbs, relational series and micro-corporeal and potentially political movements. A tattooed body is no longer addressed as an object but as an affective body that invites, through its similarity or difference to other bodies in proximity to it, a new experiencing of the body calling into question spatial permanence. Most tattooed people are no longer aware they are tattooed (a comment repeated in many of the interviews in Juno and Vale). Therefore the making aware of being a tattooed subject comes after a time mainly from the encounter with the discourse of other subjects both tattooed and non-tattooed. Thus being a tattooed subject is intensied based on the forces and affects of other bodies. The permanence of tattooing comes into question when the meanings ascribed to an image are not xed. Meaning must be mobile in order for the body to be thought as transformative. Images should not be colonized by meaning, that is, seen as representing a thing, but should be taken as durational phenomena, like the rest of the body, renewed innumerable times. How can we think the body temporally through an act that is most frequently described as a permanent marking of the skin? Even if we see a tattooed body as an affective body it is taken traditionally as a spatial phenomenon i.e. the same body affecting other bodies, not a body able to affect and recreate itself. But Bergson states:
If it is a question of movement, all the intelligence retains is a series of positions: rst one point reached, then another, then still another. But should something happen between these points,
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immediately the understanding intercalates new positions, and so on indenitely. It refuses to consider transition. . . . But it is always with immobilities, real or imagined, that it seeks to deal. Suppose we skip this intellectual representation of movement, which shows it as a series of positions. Let us go directly to movement and examine it without any interposed concept. (1992: 15)
A tattooed body thought as a body with additions to the prior body is a spatial body. Even extreme forms of all-over tattooing or certain non-signifying images, such as blackwork or animal skin work, still remain denable as spatial if we choose to see them as, for example, a zebra-woman rather than a becomingzebra. Tattoos are seen as additions to the base-level body or subtractions from the normal, passive or biological, as opposed to synthetic, body. If a tattooed body is thought as a BwO it cannot be thought as ontological it. What does this body mean? refers to a spatial concept. What can this body do? is an embodied philosophical, temporal question. Thus two major axes of thinking a tattooed body are thinking it affective-ly and durationally. Deleuze calls this the move from the object to the objectile. The new status of the object, he states:
. . . no longer refers its condition to a spatial mold in other words, to a relation of form-matter but to a temporal modulation that implies as much the beginnings of a continuous variation of matter as a continuous development of form. . . . [This] is not only a temporal but also a qualitative conception of the object, to the extent that sounds and colors are exible and taken in modulation. (1993: 19)
Thought materially, tattooed bodies ripple, the skin modulates the image, which modulates the skin. The colours of tattoos change with light, with age, with the emotions of the viewer and the viewed. The tattoo is not necessarily an image of a thing. Certain colours and lines can extricate themselves and be qualitatively affective, leaping from the skin or delving deeper into it as different colours react to different skin types. The Great Ephemeral Skin
Open the so-called body and spread out all its surfaces . . . (Lyotard, 1993: 1)
Lyotard states:
Spread out the immense membrane of the libidinal body which is quite different to a frame. It is made from the most heterogeneous textures, bone, epithelium, sheet to write on, charged atmospheres, swords, glass cases, peoples, grasses, canvases to paint. . . . The interminable band with variable geometry . . . has not got two sides, but only one, and therefore neither exterior nor interior. (1993: 23)
Jean-Franois Lyotards embodied materiality resonates with Deleuze and Guattaris BwO. There are three reasons for my shift from Deleuze and Guattari
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to these nal comments, which use Lyotard. Primarily my use of Libidinal Economy (Lyotard, 1993) only, what Lyotard himself called his evil book, is his direct reaction to Deleuze and Guattaris notion of the BwO.12 Second, Lyotards concept of the great ephemeral skin, while of course not simply skin, seems etymologically apt for a discussion of tattooed skin skin as an organ becoming BwO, resonant with skin as frontier and as sensual and intelligible. Finally, the practical materiality of being a tattooed body, perhaps contradictory to my argument as a whole but nonetheless elemental, should be mentioned. Williams points to Lyotards call to experiment:
. . . with ways of measuring up to contemporary conditions and events. These occurrences change the shape of things and render forms of thought obsolete and reactionary. But more than this, his philosophy seeks to open the way for actions in art, politics and philosophy that are consistent with the unpredictability and as yet unexpressed value of these events. (2000: 36)
The tattoo is an event rather than simply thing (remembering Kulzs claim that tattoos are not things, they do things.) Tattoos are occurrences, at each revelation, when one measures up to the pain, to the acknowledgement that, in relation to pre-established forms of thought, tattooing is perceived by reaction. In spite of its extensive history, the questions tattoos evoke from the non-tattooed evince their unpredictability as simultaneously corporeal, political, philosophical and artistic events. Against Iain Hamilton Grant, I do not think Lyotards is a metaphorical force (in Lyotard, 1993: xvi). Lyotards and Deleuze and Guattaris visceral philosophy marks no discrepancies between lived reality, philosophy, politics and art. Each has investments in, directly affects and is co-present with all others. To claim a concept is metaphoric resonates with the tattoo as a metaphor for something else. My precise reason for writing on tattooing in relation to philosophy comes from the esh as a discursive event, and tattooing as a means to make the discursive event reect on itself while offering breaks and exits from discourse that reies. The body cannot help but be affected, by discourse, art, politics and philosophy. Being tattooed is not the result of a meaningful choice to be affected but an accidental openness at the heart of being embodied. It puts the body at the limits of a permanent quivering, what Deleuze would call, against the enunciation, a stutter, always and already occurring. This possibility is unique, materially beyond the capacity to enclose it in reading or interpretation, which is why reading must occur after an event, covering it over while preceding its potential. Inside and outside, tattooed and non-tattooed are materially inseparable, through differential relations between bodies, images, textures and smells, any sensory phenomena. Tattooed bodies, like womens bodies, are often the object rather than subject of analysis. Thinking the affective potential of a tattooed body attens the surface of differential relation between object and subject to qualitative affect. Thinking
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tattooed esh involves a attening out and making connective the embodied mind so that the movement of being affected by this tattooed esh creates a particular band, fold, plane of intensity. Corporeal and epistemological difference is not dened as difference from. Differences are both coexistent and specic intensities. Lyotard terms this band of differential relations the great ephemeral skin ephemeral because it is immanently experienced (as opposed to transcendent or truthful), skin because, although not referring to a body, the plane describes a corporeally embodied affective potential. Great, for my purposes, could suggest the area of skin in which Lyotard includes the esh. This skin also includes (but does not oppose) image, thought, the viewed, the esh of others and the opened body attened out toward innity. Looking at tattooed skin creates a band of surfaces of the retina with inked skin. In heat, tattoos (especially blackwork) raise, meaning tattoos can be experienced as purely tactile, offering the skin as a plane of embossed tactile band. We can think tattooing without seeing a tattoo and the affective potential of the suggestion (not concept) can modulate another involution of the band. Great is enormous in size, in shape, in possibility, in time, in matter, in dimensions, innitely. The skin is not ones skin, or my skin, it does not seal, it folds, extends and opens. But my motive in this move to Lyotard is his focus on the gural inextricable from the material notion of skin. The meaning of skin itself as a plane of inclusion recongures the gural notion in phallocentric discourse of skin being the site of opposition. Provocation and Involution: Philosophy without Organs Tattooed skin provokes response, it invites other bodies to fold into it. It demands engagement, whether the interlocutor is critical or celebratory of inked esh. It silences the interlocutor as it folds because a tattooed body both emphasizes the problems in reading any body at any time, and fails to exist within an established epistemology. This is especially so of tattooed women who present (at least) two skin epistemologies side by side woman and tattooed body both of which could be claimed as as-yet under- or untheorized. Meaning is never present in esh and blood (Lyotard, 1993: 44). Like the tattoo, meaning is inked into the esh but the esh resists it like tattoos, the meaning bleeds over time, the wearer will always have a different relationship to the images inscribed upon her/him. But cultures fascination with tattooed bodies (I could suggest, without conating the two, comparable to cultures fascination with the female body) evinces the affective qualities elicited by being in proximity or within one of these bodies. They are rarely met with a lack of reaction. Lyotard claims: To be side by side said the beautiful princess, is not to be alongside but to be inside and nevertheless indissociably in the margins (1993:
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47). Tactically ignoring Lyotards fetishization of the feminine here, being alongside a tattooed body, even if it is ones own, twists one inside and politically alongside the margins of dominant culture. Far from subjugating the self, becoming-marginal questions dominant cultures investment in regulating the body. For those who wish to speak a tattooed body the indissociability of that body with ones own body is always part of such speech. What is said about the body after the fact takes place perhaps despite, perhaps because of, the becoming of a great ephemeral skin of body(ies). Already, by entering into a situation with a tattooed body, be it our own or that of others, embodiment itself has been renegotiated. Fascination with tattooed bodies is a form of desire discursive, aesthetic, whatever that will form new connexions of ephemeral skin, irreversibly moving the esh into different and differing folds and forces. Little matter, but at least see what effects, not causes means, states Lyotard:
It is precisely not a matter of ana-lysing in a discourse that will be necessarily one of knowledge, but rather sufciently rening ourselves, of becoming sufciently anonymous conducting bodies, not in order to stop the effects, but to conduct them into new metamorphoses, in order to exhaust their metamorphic potential, the force [puissance] of effects that travel through us. (1993: 258)
Skin is the proximity of self and world. It is the point of intensity where everyday, unmeaningful pleasure happens, such as thermoception. It is also the surface upon which most forms of prejudice and terror are performed. Skin is where tattoos appear, but also where meaning is read, gender and race enacted. Skin goes right the way through the body, it is the surface of human morphology and the most minute gene. Organs have skin because they are signied, both symbolically and physiologically. Skin is the politic of esh. Tattooing sits within the skin, as the skin sits within the frontier of culture and self. Neither extricates nor separates self from world, they are not borders but the point of inextricable assemblage or fold. Tattoos are not inscribed upon the surface but penetrate beneath our capacity to wrench them out, physically and epistemologically. Perhaps one could say, while Deleuze and Guattari ask how do we make ourselves a Body without Organs?, particularly in the chapter Economy of this Writing, Lyotards Libidinal Economy asks how do we make philosophy a BwO? In this article I have attempted to show both that tattooing is a radicalizing of the skin, and the skin itself is a point where philosophy and our relationship with the world can be radicalized, in reference to difference, especially gender. Tattooing incites, provokes, hopefully in a way that further multiplies differences between bodies. If this is so, then the subjectication of bodies to a homogeneous system of comprehension can be resisted by bodies that nd joy in inscribing difference. Despite claims that tattoos are themselves increasingly
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homogenizing in both a consumer fashion and tribal sense, the amount of resistance with which conservative culture meets them evinces their continuing potential to alter power relations. Tattoos can be called fashion or consumptive products, but on a practical level it would be nave to claim that they are yet socially acceptable. Tattooed persons are still dened as tattooed persons, we are still compelled to cover up, to answer to. As frontier, marked skin reects the forces and resistances which Hardt and Negri see being played out on the borders of bodies and of states in capitalisms turn toward socio-economic and thus ideological empire.
The new range of possibilities in no way guarantees what is to come. And yet, despite such reservations, there is something real that foreshadows the coming future: the telos that we can feel pulsing, the multitude that we construct within desire. (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 406)
Hardt and Negri mention extreme body modication as one way to create a disjuncture, but see it as possibility, not inherently meaningful practice. What their statement emphasizes is that this modication is real. It exploits the pragmatic materialization of the body in the world: it hurts, it is constantly visible in the case of extreme body modication. It makes signifying systems unstable. Systems respond with attempts to colonize a tattooed body with signication, or address tattooed bodies as a kind of citizen.13 Fishers (2002) claim that tattoos are now equivalent to clothes because they can be removed by laser is misguided. Economically, laser removal is far more expensive than being tattooed. Laser removal is intensely painful and frequently leaves severe, raised scars in the form of keloids. Tattooed skin belongs to a more surgical, more visceral and, I would argue after Hardt and Negri, more contested interface with the world than do clothes. Optimistically, I would suggest that, because traditional forces are reactive to the affect of tattooing, tattooing represents a form of active force. This activity comes from the bodys reaction to cultural restrictions in reference to what a body can mean before it restricts what a body can do. Tattooing is an experiment in being a body among other bodies. It addresses issues of inside and outside, self and other, and volition and passivity that are ambiguous in all bodies by further complicating the body with legible and illegible forms. Tattoos both invite and resist the gaze of others. Tattooed bodies are often antagonistic to being stared at because of the ssure the onlooker is afrming through their fetishization of, or distaste for, the tattooing. But looking in fascination, as an opening up to being affected, transforms looking and knowing to seeing and thinking. Deleuze states: Seeing is thinking and speaking is thinking, but thinking occurs in the interstice, or the disjunction, between seeing and speaking (1988: 87; my emphases). Tattooing, at best, makes us think the
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esh differently, which has positive effects for thinking historically subjugated essentialized esh, such as that of women. We see tattoos on the skin just as we see gender on the skin, and both are innitely complex in their capacity to make us speak our own bodies and their force in the world. Tattooing and skin itself occur in an equivalent interstice, forming and forcing the disjunction between matter and thought, inside and outside, self and other, and philosophy and affect. Tattooing is both an expression of will and a failure of a will to be self-evident. Ones own relationship to ones tattoos is as complex as the relationship of the non-tattooed to tattooing. Tattooings capacity to make philosophy re-address issues of bodies as intensity and momentum is where its real power lies. Deleuze and Guattari claim Paintings, tattoos, or marks on the skin embrace the multidimensionality of bodies (1987: 176). Open thought about the affect of bodies that scatters and fragments, Foucaults call to speech, embraces the multidimensionality of those bodies that allow us to rethink bodies themselves. The power of any BwO is not in what it is or prescriptive modes of achieving it, but in how we can think the body differently by entering it into new relations, forces and folds through esh and thought. Notes
1. The oscillation in this article between the tattooed body and a tattooed body is to demarcate when a tattooed body is positioned as a model for tattooed bodies in general, and when an experience or proximity occurs with a single, unique body. 2. My motivation for writing this article comes in part from being a very heavily tattooed woman. One of the more interesting questions I am asked is not why? but why a person like you?, meaning presumably an academic. Whether this question comes from the presumption that the mental rather than corporeal aspect of my subjectivity should be intensied or that someone like me should know better is beyond the scope of this article. However, were I to do a sociological study on those who ask why, as a reversal of studies about tattooed persons, I am sure some interesting dynamics would occur. 3. The tattooist also claims the girl attempted to seduce him. Both body modication practitioners use explicitly sexual expressions rape and sexual come-ons to explain issues of gender which are not necessarily associated with sexuality. 4. There is a tension between the modern primitive who engages in practices considered primitive (such as piercing, scarication and tattooing) and self-proclaimed modern primitives who claim to be re-presenting a former, less civilized mode of corporeal transformation toward a spiritual goal, such as Fakir Mustafa. Both attempt to subvert the negative connotations implicit in the word primitive. Yet those who use the body to create and subvert traditional experience and those who are recreating a form of tribal experience are radically different and discursively phylic in practices and motivation (or a lack of a claim to motivation). 5. My address to race and class is rudimentary because I wish to focus explicitly on women. Fisher elaborates the class issues in tattooing, but in my research I was unable to nd research on tattooing and race beyond dermatological articles on the propensity of black and Asian skin tending to form keloids in tattoo removal.
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6. The problematic notion of becoming-woman as a simultaneous fetishization and ablation of the particularities of womens suffering and minority positioning has been addressed extensively. Time does not permit me to explore it here. 7. I have not been able to access Koch et al. (2005) or Claes et al. (2005), perhaps as they are new, but I include these references to exemplify a tattooed body as belonging to a variety of clinical and social literature, thus it is a cultural, psychological and even physiologically compelled phenomenon. 8. The rst interviewee associates the response to her tattoos with responses to other cultures which pierce and tattoo for religious reasons. The modern primitives primitivism is usually the appropriation of another culture whose skin is emphatically non-white Polynesian, Maori, Native American, South East Asian and Hawaiian, for example. 9. I have not been able to nd any literature where males state they specically prefer to be tattooed by females. 10. This is seen in such artists as Bob Flanagan and Pluto. 11. I was unable to speak with these women, as I did not have ethical clearance and saw them only once at the club. 12. Written two years after Anti-Oedipus, the books attempt to enesh philosophy as material, a result of libidinality, is resonant with Deleuze and Guattaris focus on desire as the means by which signication is disrupted and revolution mobilized. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari emphasize the importance of J.F. Lyotards recent book . . . due to its position as the rst generalized critique of the signier (1996: 243). 13. It would be interesting to analyse Hardt and Negris ideas on global citizenship with Alphonso Lingiss (1994) work on the community of those who have nothing in common. While Lingiss project is anthropological, both the resonance of body modiers with primitivism and their uncommon commonality in sociology could provide a fruitful analysis which is beyond the scope of this article.
References
Atkinson, M. (2003) The Civilizing of Resistance: Straightedge Tattooing, Deviant Behavior 24(3): 197220. Bella Online: The Voice of Women. Bellaonline.com Bergson, H. (1992) The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. M.L. Anderson. New York: Citadel. Braidotti, R. (1994) Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Braithwaite, R., A. Robillard, T. Woodring, T. Stephens and K.J. Arriola (2001) Tattooing and Body Piercing among Adolescent Detainees Relationship to Alcohol and Other Drug Use, Journal of Substance Abuse 13(1): 516. Claes, L., W. Vandereycken and H. Vertommen (2005) Self-care versus Self-harm: Piercing, Tattooing, and Self-injuring in Eating Disorders, European Eating Disorders Review 13(1): 1118. Cummings, W. (2001) Modern Primitivism: The Recent History of Civilizations Discontents, Critical Studies 15(1): 297316. Deleuze, G. (1988) Foucault, trans. S. Hand. Minnesota: University of Minneapolis Press. Deleuze, G. (1993) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. T. Conley. Minnesota: University of Minneapolis Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi. Minnesota: University of Minneapolis Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1996) Anti-Oedipus, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H.R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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Fisher, J. (2002) Tattooing the Body: Marking Culture, Body & Society 8(4): 91107. Foucault, M. (1987) Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside, trans. B. Massumi, in Foucault/Blanchot. New York: Zone Books. Fraenkel-Rietti, I. Manifesto. www.tattooed-lady.co.uk Guattari, F. (1996) In Order to End the Massacre of the Body, trans. J. Becker, pp. 2936 in F. Guattari, Soft Subversions, edited by S. Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e). Grosz, E. (1999) Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray in the Flesh, in D. Olkowski and J. Morley (eds) Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World. Albany: SUNY. Hardt, M. and A. Negri (2000) Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Irigaray, L. (1985) Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. G. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Irwin, K. (2003) Saints and Sinners: Elite Tattoo Collectors and Tattooists as Positive and Negative Deviants, Sociological Spectrum 23(1): 2757. Juno, A. and V. Vale (1989) Modern Primitives: An Investigation of Contemporary Adornment and Ritual. San Francisco: V/Search. Koch, J., Z. Zhu, J. Cannon, M. Armstrong and D. Owen (2005) College Students, Tattooing, and the Health Belief Model: Extending Social Psychological Perspectives on Youth Culture and Deviance, Sociological Spectrum 25(1): 79102. Lingis, A. (1994) The Community of Those who Have Nothing in Common. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lyotard, J.-F. (1991) The Inhuman, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lyotard, J.-F. (1993) Libidinal Economy, trans. I. Hamilton-Grant. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. MacCormack, P. (2004) Facial Futures and Probe Heads: From Australia Post to Pluto, Journal of Australian Studies 81: 13543. Olkowski, D. (1999) Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Pitts, V. (1999) Body Modication, Self-mutilation and Agency in Media Accounts of a Subculture, Body & Society 5(23): 291303. Putnin, A. (2002) Young Offenders, Tattoos and Recidivism, Psychiatry, Psychology and Law 9(1): 628. Salecl, R. (1998) Cut in the Body: From Clitoridectomy to Body Art, Special Issue on the Ethics of Violence, New Formations 35(autumn): 2842. Sanders, C.R. (1989) Customizing the Body: The Art and Culture of Tattooing. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Sweetman, P. (1999) Anchoring the (Post-modern) Self, Body & Society 5(23): 5176. Vail, D.A. (1999) Tattoos are like Potato Chips . . . You Cant Have Just One: The Process of Becoming and Being a Collector, Deviant Behavior 20(3): 25373. Williams, J. (2000) Lyotard and the Political. London and New York: Routledge. Patricia MacCormack is senior lecturer in Communication and Film at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. Her PhD was awarded the Mollie Holman doctorate medal for best thesis. She has published on perversion, Continental philosophy, feminism and Italian horror lm. Her most recent work is on Cinesexuality, masochism, necrophilia and Becoming-Monster and has appeared in Alternative Europe: Exploitation Cinema since 1945 (Columbia University Press, 2004), Women: A Cultural Review, Thirdspace, Rhizomes and Theory Culture & Society. She is currently writing on Blanchot, Bataille and Cinecstasy.

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Body & Society

http://bod.sagepub.com The Great Ephemeral Tattooed Skin

The Great Ephemeral Tattooed Skin

Body & Society Vol. 12 No. 2

The Great Ephemeral Tattooed Skin

Body & Society Vol. 12 No. 2

The Great Ephemeral Tattooed Skin

Body & Society Vol. 12 No. 2

The Great Ephemeral Tattooed Skin

Body & Society Vol. 12 No. 2

The Great Ephemeral Tattooed Skin

Body & Society Vol. 12 No. 2

The Great Ephemeral Tattooed Skin

Body & Society Vol. 12 No. 2

The Great Ephemeral Tattooed Skin

Body & Society Vol. 12 No. 2

The Great Ephemeral Tattooed Skin

Body & Society Vol. 12 No. 2

The Great Ephemeral Tattooed Skin

Body & Society Vol. 12 No. 2

The Great Ephemeral Tattooed Skin

Body & Society Vol. 12 No. 2

The Great Ephemeral Tattooed Skin

Body & Society Vol. 12 No. 2

The Great Ephemeral Tattooed Skin

Body & Society Vol. 12 No. 2

The Great Ephemeral Tattooed Skin

Body & Society Vol. 12 No. 2

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