‘Beside myself’: touch,maternity and the question of embodiment

Being beside (the side of) another

In her highly influential work on the metaphor of the cyborg, Donna Haraway imagines an identity that exceeds the material limit of the body, challenging the presumed containing function of the skin: ‘Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?’ (1991: 220). Her rhetorical question has been productive. As Sarah Jackson points out in Tactile Poetics, the skin has moved from the periphery to the centre of theories of subjectivity and embodiment. Often, these theories dwell on the implications of the paradoxical functions of the skin, showing how these destabilise self-containment. ⁷ The skin fascinates as it is a supposedly limiting surface that comes to mark the very site of the body’s implication in others. It makes the contained body subject to interaction, touch, connection and dependency. In other words, one of the reasons that the skin matters to theories of subjectivity is because it disproves what it ostensibly represents: the bound body, marked by this material limit.

What if bodies begin with the skin? In the first weeks of her life, my daughter’s body is never without another, supplementary surface. When she weighs, it is only ever along another surface – a chest, a mattress or an arm. Her body is never without an indent. She comes always with another, supplementary surface. If I begin with her skin, therefore, I also begin with the always present surfaces that surround and touch this skin. I begin with the expanse against which her body lies, with the indented. If I begin with my skin, I begin with that which touches. I begin with the border to another. I begin not with the limit to my own body, but with the comfort, beginning and animation of another. I begin with my impact. In this relationship, skin is both the illusory end to one’s own body and the material, formative beginning of another’s. This differs from most approaches to the skin, showing how encapsulation – the way she is wrapped in a blanket, held in my arms – itself upsets and makes ineligible an interiorised and self-contained mode of embodiment.

As this section examines, this way we are beside one another – the way I am her border, another’s limit – illustrates unexpected alignments among dispossession, self-decentralisation and embodied subjectivity. When my daughter was little, I would lift her out of her bath and turn her to me, wrapped in a towel, and she would stand on my knees and start to pat and stroke my face. The pattern of her touch was familiar. I had washed her face just so a minute before, rubbing the soap between my hands before touching her face. Now, when she rubs her hands together and pats and strokes – and hits, slaps – my face, she is mimicking me. It is unnerving how she slaps my face, how invasive I find this slap, and I must think back: How is she receiving my care? How does my touch feel? How gentle am I? Am I gentle enough? She looks into my eyes, turns her head to the side and pushes it against mine laughing. The exchange forces me to confront my own touch. It forces me to confront my own tenderness or roughness, gentleness or abruptness. It de-centralises me, shifting my attention to my limit, measuring me there.

In this exchange, the way in which I touch, my effect upon the world, becomes central, a measure of myself. Recognising the pattern of her small palms slapping against my face, I come close to learning my own touch, to touching my own touch. It is a startling and unavoidable mode of self-knowledge, a disruptive self-reflection come from the other that re-frames my self-perception. I come to know myself as my touch, an estranging view of myself framed by the close presence of both my violence and my tenderness, brought into processes and patterns that come repeated across my own body. It is an unavoidable, undeniable disavowal of my discreteness, my capacity to be without touching, my distance from my own limit. It also de-centralises me from my sense of myself. Refuting the idea that self-touch affirms one’s presence and interiority, Jean-Luc Nancy argues that ‘I have to be an exteriority in order to touch myself. And what I touch remains on the outside’ (2008: 128–129). While Nancy uses this condition of being ‘outside’ to be a destabilising denunciation of the possibility of presence and self-knowledge, it also aptly conveys an aspect of the sensed experience of my relation to my daughter. In relation to my daughter, I have and I feel myself to be a limit that touches. In this prolonged contact with another, I come to know myself as this touch. To totalise even further, as Corpus also declares, ‘“I” is a touch’ (Nancy, 2008: 131). Brought home to my own impact, I become exterior to another, decentred from my own life. This is a form of de-centring, an interiorised sense of my self giving way to a sense of my self in my relation to another, as their limit. I am ‘an exteriority’. Precisely because I am in close contact with another, traced along another’s body, I learn the possibility of modes of selfhood beyond my own bounds.

This exteriority, however, does not substitute my self for its loss; rather, it entwines them both, provoking a sliding and slippery confusion between being, being beside and being the side of. As Sedgwick makes clear when she uses this preposition to highlight the theoretical stakes of her collection of essays in Touching Feeling, the possibility of being beside another is not an assurance of solidarity or consensus; it is a process of disruption and friction:

Beside permits a spacious agnosticism about several of the linear logics that enforce dualistic thinking: noncontradiction or the law of the excluded middle, cause versus effect, subject versus object. Its interest does not, however, depend on a fantasy of metonymically egalitarian or even pacific relations, as any child knows who’s shared a bed with siblings. Beside comprises a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations. (Sedgwick and Frank, 2003: 8; emphasis in original)

My relation to my daughter expands the significance of beside, describing not only a relation between distinct bodies that foregrounds their reciprocal touch, but also the indistinction between these two bodies, in which selfhood is only tenuously disjoined from another, only superficially accepting of the divides and the borders between us. Rather than only being beside her and experiencing the disorienting effects of this shared space, I come to occupy a sense of self centred around myself as a side, in which I am put to the side of myself. This is the beside of our relation, the turn that comes from one’s encounter with one’s touch. I feel myself to occupy a place beside myself, as I am decentred, but am also reoriented around the new centrality of a shared surface. The limit to my body forms the beginning to hers, a form of folding or continuation that, along with touch, alters the relation to my own skin. She takes place at the point of my impact on the world, where it is central to her, at the very edge of myself, where she begins. My surface becomes woven into my centre, my edge into her containment. My texture and my impact become dominant characteristics of this surface once known at a distance as my limit. My body is undone – I lose a governing sense of interiority – and my surface becomes sensed as another’s.

Butler’s idiomatic use of this preposition therefore becomes pertinent, showing how loss and dispossession can themselves be bound up in self-formation. For Butler, ‘beside oneself’ captures the sensed effects of one’s constitutive relations to another. To feel ‘beside oneself’ is to undergo the ecstatic effects of grief, rage and desire, all of which reveal the body’s and identity’s dependence on and origination in relation. The idiom reflects a constitutive non-sovereignty that foregrounds the un-deniability of connections and binds between bodies and is tied to the notion of dispossession:

It won’t even do to say that I am promoting a relational view of the self over an autonomous one or trying to re-describe autonomy in terms of relationality. Despite my affinity for the term relationality, we may need another language to approach the issue that concerns us, a way of thinking about how we are not only constituted by our relations but also dispossessed by them as well. (Butler, 2004: 24)

From these borders which are another’s, which shake the self, comes a mode of selfhood that is neither one’s own nor the other’s, a being beside. Beside her, being the side of her, I am also beside myself, tracing a form of embodiment that exceeds the limits of the bound subject through its very attachment to the possibility of another’s bounds, tracing a form of dispossession that derives not from one’s emancipation from one’s self, but from a binding to and for another, a binding to another that liberates from self-encapsulation through the releasing claim of another’s touch. It is a strange break, a strange freedom, wrought from the very undeniability of one’s own presence to another, the confrontation with one’s touch as the history of another. This centring on one’s limit as it touches and becomes another entwines the body and its dispossession in a way that prohibits their clear disarticulation, that makes us rethink our allegiances both to exceeding the limit of the skin and to affirming the delicate histories of our bounds.

The texture of form

This way we are beside one another also brings a new perspective to the question of whether we possess the borders of our own bodies. On many nights when my daughter was small, I would wake up in bed and, forgetting she was in her crib, would reach out my hand to check for her presence. When I encountered only bare sheets, I would be thrown into brief terror. The sheets were not a reminder of her translocation – she was in her crib – but the cold horror of an absent certainty. I had been certain to find at the end of my stretch the sleeping body of my daughter. I was certain she was there, as I was certain my own arm would be there, should I reach out to touch it. It was an inversion of Merleau-Ponty’s chiasm: I missed the returned touch of the body I knew to be there. Yet, as I reach across my bed, I do not encounter only her absence or only the indent left by her body; in the stead of her body’s reciprocal touch come other surfaces, the smoothness of bare sheets.

While this anecdote appears to re-centre birth in our relation – describing, as it does, a proprioception haunted by pregnancy, when I believe the impossibility of her distance, when she cannot but be close – it undoes the temporality that typically defines the event. For one, it denies that birth is an event bound in time, foregrounding its haunting, showing that it is never completely achieved. It folds the past into the present, making the event not an origin but a disjunctive interruption. For another, this haunting is not limited to the one who underwent the event. When I hold my daughter’s body, the experience of containment haunts me. As she rests against my chest, head against my heart, I am haunted. Birth can haunt anyone. Finally, this haunting unsettles the distinction between our bodies that this event supposedly initiates. Our separation and her mobility now dis-orient me, make me uncanny, make the limit of my body a disavowal of my felt sense of my body. While my border is hers, she also marks the limit of a border haunting, her body carrying the ghost of mine.

My reach, moreover, the very stretch of my arm as it extends across my bed in search of the absent body beside me, derails the temporality insinuated by the haunting containment that made me believe she was there still beside me. This section considers this reach, using it to reveal the substitutability of surface and to extend the time and space of ‘beside’. For Merleau-Ponty, the act of reaching out to touch another is closely associated with the possibility of coming into being. It demonstrates the possibility of transposition, a shift in our sense of ourselves when we look at or reach for an object of desire, which makes us dependent on that object for our own restoration: ‘When I move my hand towards a thing, I know implicitly that my arm unbends. When I move my eyes, I take account of their movement, without being expressly conscious of the fact, and am therefore aware that the upheaval caused in my field of vision is only apparent’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2002: 195). As Salamon foregrounds, while this creates a ‘decentring’, it is stilled by the presence of the desired object, its persistence ‘as the focused and sustained object of my look’ (2010: 53). A reach, then, is ‘simultaneously disorienting, dizzying, decentering, and consolidating, purposeful, incorporative’ (Salamon, 2010: 53). The end of one’s reach for another restores oneself.

My reach across sheets complicates this narrative of restoration as the object towards which I turn – and which would still the shifting world – is unexpectedly absent. As I reach away from myself, I settle not upon her I know to be there, but upon her absence, which is itself signalled by the presence of another, alien object. In this event, the world continues its shift and upheaval, the decentring has no focus or quieting. I am oriented towards and inclined towards a possible absence. This builds uncertainty into my reach, inclines me without end. The absence interrupts the coming into body that Merleau-Ponty describes. My body feels out of time, its restoration delayed. Yet, the end of this reach is not only absence. Although the restoration is delayed and the sense of upheaval accentuated, the object for which I reach is replaced by something else, a surface smooth to the touch, without end, without form – a cold sheet. Rather than only a jolting absence that denies proximity and asserts our separation, this reach re-traces my own boundaries, extending my sense of myself.

As a journal entry written months after I gave birth illustrates, this substitution gestures towards other bodily formations, ones that exceed the owned boundaries of the body. This entry, written when I was still exhausted and would still reach across open space to find my daughter, is filled with metaphors and descriptions of my skin. My focus on the skin suggests a heightened sensitivity that veers close to the unbearable, a yearning for a lost ideal of my surfaces. It professes a desire ‘for smooth lines, for smoothness, no dirt, calmness, no bumps or ridges, nothing to irritate, to touch the skin’. A few lines later in the entry, my desire for ‘smooth lines’ reappears: I would have ‘Nothing to bother, to shake up. Clean, smooth, fresh-smelling lines that sooth’. The entry betrays an echoing confusion between my skin, the surfaces upon which I rest, the world as a surface I move against, the page on which I write and time. The lines I discuss are those of the house – cluttered now – the lines of my body, and the lines of writing. Everything must be as I would have my skin be. Time, pages and writing must all be smooth. Writing itself becomes a substitute for what appears to be a disruption to my sense of self articulated through the contours of my body.

On the face of it, the entry recalls Butler’s description of the subject that comes ‘undone’ in the encounter with its binds to another. As Butler writes of the effect of grief: ‘One does not always stay intact. One may want to, or manage to for a while, but despite one’s best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of touch, by the memory of feel’ (2004: 23–24). This unexpected feeling of unknown binds coming undone – revealing themselves in their undoing – prohibits the possibility of self-narration, unsettling the I that would tell this story:

I might try to tell a story here about what I am feeling, but it would have to be a story in which the very ‘I’ who seeks to tell the story is stopped in the midst of the telling; the very ‘I’ is called into question by its relation to the Other, a relation that does not necessarily reduce me to speechlessness, but does nevertheless clutter my speech with signs of its undoing. I tell a story about the relations I choose, only to expose, somewhere along the way, the way I am gripped and undone by these very relations. My narrative falters, as it must. (Butler, 2004: 23)

The entry, however, is more than a flaying. Although narrating loss and disturbance, it also intimates new – more difficult, more complex and poetic – forms of coming together. First, as Renu Bora helps to articulate, my accentuation of smoothness betrays not only an impossible desire, but also the abrasively restorative effects of being touched. Bora’s essay, confronting the ‘liminality of space (and of materiality itself), on the borders of properties of touch and vision’, qualifies my yearning for smoothness by highlighting its differing relation to two kinds of texture, ‘texture’ with one x, and ‘texxture’ with two (1997: 96). In Sedgwick’s reading of this doubled meaning, ‘Texxture is the kind of texture that is dense with offered information about how, substantively, historically, materially, it came into being. A brick or a metalwork pot that still bears the scars and uneven sheen of its making would exemplify texxture in this sense’ (Sedgwick and Frank, 2003: 14). Texture, on the other hand, ‘defiantly or even invisibly blocks or refuses such information; there is texture, usually glossy if not positively tacky, that insists instead on the polarity between substance and surface, texture that signifies the willed erasure of its history’ (Sedgwick and Frank, 2003: 14–15). My desire for ‘smoothness’ is also a lingering desire to refuse ‘information about how, substantively, historically, materially’ I came into being, a ‘willed erasure’ of history. When I realise I am not ‘smooth’, when my yearning reveals this loss, I signal that I am becoming situated in relation to my own uneven making, made to bear its scars. New texture for another, I am, too, newly texxtured.

Second, the last line of my entry articulates a sense of self emerging from out of the apparently raw sense of unravelling. Compact and sibilant, this final line – smooth sheets self of my skin – re-affirms that all that is undone is the presumed smoothness of liveable embodiment. Recalling the absence of my daughter’s body, the return of smooth sheets, their answer to my stretch, and aligning surface, self and other in a confused expression of presence, the line substitutes my skin with another surface. A clear description of a strange sense of dispossession articulated in terms of skin, the line is, in the face of a faltering narrative, in the face of lost linearity – the prose of the body – a metaphorical expression of confusion and indeterminacy that traces a newly sensed self onto the space of undoing. Falling from narrative and giving up the grammar of the sentence, the line loses the subject only to change its expression. In the place of coherence, a poetics emerges – smooth sheets self of my skin – grammar the necessary loss that allows the articulation of an embodiment to the side.

To sum up the argument thus far, our relationship following this supposed event of birth becomes stretched and patterned otherwise to our material contours. Our relation, rather than being defined by a linear narrative of reproduction, stretches our bodies across time and space, re-framing the temporality of our togetherness. One final example, taken from an ordinary day years after birth, further illustrates the implications of this possible stretch of beside across time and space. On this day, as I stood beside my daughter, she now a toddler unsteadily occupying self and body, I watched her walk away along the narrow pavement. As I watched her, I stretched and yawned, my elbows out and my head falling back from exhaustion. She turned back towards me, stopping on her way to mimic my yawn. It is at this point, as I arch my back, my elbows bent, and she copies my body’s arch, that I feel in my stretch an alignment with her own stretching. I not only recognise, but I feel the similarity of our stretch – the way of our arc – and the stretch seems to belong more to her than to me. It was no longer mine, this stretch; it was an unclaimed stretching of a fatigued body, itself too much bent over, hunched as a matter of course, out of alignment, always leaning over.

My own body’s response to its tiredness sensed these movements to take form through her body, and it brought me into her space: a brief touch in arc, in pose, a kinship in pose that brought me again to her. The stretch was an echo and not simply a reaction to my tiredness; it was a copy, a reply to her stretch, her motion that interrupted and disturbed my relation to my own body. The only breach in this overlay between us were the elbows whose sharpness was only mine, jabbing, my own sharp bend to my own body. I was otherwise an extension of her action, a taking up and continuing of a stretch that began with her and that I recognised as hers. It unfolded over time, a kind of stretching time itself that imprinted the moment, that image of us turned towards each other, me stretching and finding myself once again in some extension or memory of her, through this very motion.

The example shows a sense of the self enmeshed within the atemporal memory of bodies in touch, of bodies beside themselves. The relationship between these bodies is not one of mimicry or reciprocation. It is no longer clear whose sensations are whose. Expressions come with doubt. As I ask, at times, whose tiredness am I yawning? Whose stretch is this? Whose tension am I stretching? Can she stretch? Her skin is loose, without tension, without resistance. When I put my finger to my lips and gently pull, I recognise the gesture as hers, which I have inherited. The mimicry has inverted and I find myself as her repetition. My sense has become diverted to another, confused. I am no longer certain of my body. I feel her, a confusion of experience that relates bodies not along their distinction, but along their overlap, stepping over time and space in order to interchange experience. While this seems to align with much of the tendency of thinking about the body – that its coherence is a fiction that materiality dispels, or that material coherence is a fiction that the skin dispels – it also suggests the way that one’s sense of self can exceed a body’s material contours, incorporating the surface of another.

Rather than disavowing our connection, the mark of her absence – the ghostly indent without the body, the bend of the sheet – brings my body to another surface, revealing the poetics of embodied subjectivity. The closeness of beside stretches across time even as it extends and folds that time. We are always beside, only ever extended, our absence not refuting this, but showing the poetic malleability of formation, the way we are both fragile and open, the way we can fall and still become restored, the poetic dispossession of restoration. And this, in the end, marks the possibility of inhabiting bodies that stretch across time and space, only ambiguously possessed, occupying this bridging self. It shows that the material contours that enable embodiment are often ghosts – haunted memories of past containments – or substitutes – impersonal lines of cloth, time or writing – that step in to determine one’s sense in place of matter. We are confronted with the space between bodies and how the sense of bodies shared overwhelms and contradicts this space, generating a time and space of sense that exceeds one’s own limits.

Conclusion

Describing being ‘beside myself’ as a mode of embodied subjectivity, I attempt to do two things. The first relates to understandings of maternity that depend upon the act of birth. On the one hand, limiting maternity to the act of birth reduces this experience and effaces the variety of different forms this relationship takes. The act of giving birth should not be considered a condition or a verification of maternity. On the other hand, the implications of this event can alter conceptions of one’s sense of self. Rather than simply separating maternity and birth, I use this period to alter the meaning of birth, describing it as an ongoing event that can move from one body to another, using its effects within maternity to disrupt its dominant meanings. Rather than an origin or a genesis, I describe birth in terms of its haunting, and I depart from an argument about maternity to describe the animating surface sensations that take over from and decentre this event. My second goal is to trace an embodied subjectivity that exceeds the limits of a materialist framework as well as the limits of self-possession. Salamon’s discussion of trans embodiment affirms the role of sense to embodied subjectivity. As she points out, projects such as Merleau-Ponty’s ‘must then be read as a radical unsettling of the Cartesian tradition that understands me to be a subject only to the extent that I am distinct and separate from others, where physical confirmation of that separateness can be found in the perfect boundedness of my body’ (Salamon, 2010: 46). This unsettling allows other views of subjective loss and undoing. Confusion can produce differently imagined subjectivities. Dispossession can be the chiasmic experience of bodies that exceed material contours, that somehow touch at a distance.

Beyond these two goals, I affirm the benefit of living beside oneself. As Butler emphasises, our relations with others and the way we are bound up in the lives of others lead to actions and to states of mind and being that cannot be controlled. Being beside oneself includes acting on motivations that are not entirely clear. To be beside oneself is to be uncertain about what is going to happen next, or about why one responds as one does. We fail to comport ourselves properly. However, this effect is not only negative. To be beside oneself is also to be beyond what one has planned to be; it is to discover what exists beyond the self and beyond one’s plans. It expands how we think of ethic, care and address. To be beside oneself is to imagine forms of responsibility and resistance that are grounded in an appreciation of limits, conditions and material needs but that do not depend upon the integrity of a self. It calls for the kind of care that would de-emphasise bounds and possession in order for it to come into view, that would allow its presence in tandem with the material, that would see the poetry possible of sense.

Beside oneself also describes a new mode of argument. Knowing that I touch and that I am textured, I hesitate to take a clear position and to make a self-sufficient, smoothly coherent argument. Rather than making an argument, I find myself dwelling on the patterns and rhythms of my writing. This is a learned temporal responsibility, in which I found my once self to be the surface of another, in which her dependence on my texture prevented my full claim of myself. I respond to her in spite of myself, and the certain uncertainty of my response overwhelms my desire to clearly occupy a position. Beside is what I hope to keep myself, resisting the defensibility of a secure position in order to remember how I touch, remembering I had to learn to respond to ghosts to find her time.

Author's note

Nicolette Bragg is now affiliated with University of Delaware, USA.