Table Of ContentINSISTENCE OF THE MATERIAL
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Insistence of the Material
. . . .
Literature in the Age of Biopolitics
Christopher Breu
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges financial assistance provided
for the publication of this book from the Department of English and the College of Arts
and Sciences at Illinois State University.
Portions of the Introduction were previously published as The Insistence of the Material:
Theorizing Materiality and Biopolitics in the Age of Globalization, Institute on Globalization
and the Human Condition Working Papers Series 12.2 (August 2012): 1–2 0; reprinted with
permission. An earlier version of chapter 1 was published as “The Novel Enfleshed: Naked
Lunch and the Literature of Materiality,” Twentieth- Century Literature 57, no. 2 (2011):
199– 23. An earlier version of chapter 4 was published as “Disinterring the Real: Dodie
Bellamy’s The Letters of Mina Harker and the Late- Capitalist Literature of Materiality,”
Textual Practice 26, no. 3 (2012): 263– 91; reprinted with permission of Taylor and Francis.
Copyright 2014 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401– 2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Breu, Christopher.
Insistence of the material : literature in the age of biopolitics / Christopher Breu.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978- 0- 8166- 8891- 3 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN 978- 0- 8166- 8946- 0 (pb : alk. paper)
1. American fiction—2 0th century— History and criticism. 2. English fiction— 20th
century— History and criticism. 3. Materialism in literature. 4. Biopolitics. I. Title.
PS374.M395B84 2014
813'.5409— dc23 2014001436
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-o pportunity educator and employer.
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface: Origin Story vii
Introduction: Theorizing Materiality in the Age of Biopolitics 1
1. The Novel Enfleshed: Naked Lunch
and the Literature of Materiality 35
2. Vital Objects: Materiality and Biopolitics
in Thomas Pynchon’s V. 61
3. The Late- Modern Unconscious: The Object World of
J. G. Ballard’s Crash 93
4. Disinterring the Real: Embodiment, AIDS, and
Biomedicalization in Dodie Bellamy’s The Letters
of Mina Harker 121
5. Almanac of the Living: Thanatopolitics and an Alternative
Biopolitics in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead 151
Conclusion: Tarrying with the Material 183
Acknowledgments 201
Notes 205
Index 233
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• PREFACE •
Origin Story
The body as a material fact is given, but sex is not.
— Katrina Karkazis, Fixing Sex
This book had its initial genesis in an open- ended sequence of hospital
beds or, more precisely, in the catheter-p unctuated body that occupied
those beds. The disjunction between the ideal male body posited by my
surgeons and the recalcitrant flesh of the body they attempted to cor-
rect provided the context in which I began to think about the disjunction
between language and other forms of materiality. It is this disjunction that
lies at the heart of the countertradition of late twentieth- century writing
that this project engages. And while in the pages that follow I will address
this disjunction in a wide array of texts and global phenomena that seem
(and often are) far removed from this initial context, the three- through
thirty- eight- year- old body that found itself returning to the seemingly
same operating room and allowing itself to be perforated by many of the
same instruments is never far away, at least on an affective level. As far as I
can reconstruct it, there were fifteen surgeries in all, a number in that first
year, and they were all a product of “complications” from the first unneces-
sary surgery.
As psychoanalysis reminds us, all stories are, in part, about the body.
The story told by Insistence of the Material, while conceptualized within
the language of critical theory and literary criticism, is no different. In
many ways unremarkable, my body is relatively distinct in its genital con-
figuration. I have a relatively pronounced version of a condition called
hypospadias, a “disorder of sex development” that is often categorized as
a form of intersex.1 According to the United States National Institute of
Health, hypospadias occurs in four out of every thousand births and is
characterized by the opening of the urethra on the underside rather than
the end of the penis.2 The standard medical practice (still in use today,
despite the best work of intersex activists) regarding hypospadias is to
· vii ·
viii PREFACE
rebuild the urethra, restoring the penis to ostensible normality. Unfor-
tunately, this unnecessary surgery regularly produces complications due
to urinary tract strictures, which, as in my case, manufactures the need
for multiple necessary surgeries. Indeed, it is only since I have returned
my body to something approximating its original state with my last two
surgeries (actually, the urethra had to be taken down further because of
the scar tissue, which may have been produced by the catheters or other
instrumentation from my many surgeries) that I have achieved some relief
from the seemingly eternal return of the hospital bed.
While there is no evidence available for the frequency of hypospadi-
as in earlier eras (the condition as a “birth defect,” rather than a specific
configuration of the body, being something of a discursive invention), its
medical “treatment” does have a history that is relatively traceable and
rather recent. As Elizabeth Reis tells it, there is documentation of the
medical treatment of hypospadias and intersex in the nineteenth cen-
tury.3 Indeed the presence of the surgical “repair” of hypospadias in the
nineteenth century has recently been turned into relatively common
knowledge by mystery writer Patricia Cornwell, who speculates (prob-
ably erroneously) that Jack the Ripper’s misogynist violence was the
by- product of the trauma experienced by her candidate for the famously
elusive London serial killer, painter Walter Sickert. Sickert underwent
extremely painful surgeries (without anesthetic) for hypospadias.4 Thank-
fully, given the violence of this Grand Guignol scene of medical horror,
surgical procedures for hypospadias have largely occurred during the era
of anesthesia. Indeed, as Kartina Karkazis has noted, they only became
routinized in the United States (and then only for those subjects who
came under and could afford medical scrutiny) in the middle decades of
the twentieth century.5 Outside this relatively limited temporal and geo-
political context, hypospadias has gone “untreated.” This routinization can
be seen as an early version of the forms of overmedicalization that Adele
Clarke et al. argue characterizes the regime of “biomedicalization” in the
contemporary United States— one that exists in dialectical tension with
the lack of access to basic medical care throughout much of the world and
in the United States itself.6
As my description of it as a form of overmedicalization begins to sug-
gest, the treatment of hypospadias is unnecessary, as is its categorization
as a medical disorder. Instead, the treatment of the hypospadias body
reveals more about our fantasies of the way in which the male body should
PREFACE ix
appear and the way it should be biomorphically distinguishable from the
female body.7 As I have already noted, because it challenges gender bio-
morphism, hypospadias is often, although not always, categorized as a
form of intersex.8 While I have written about it in the past as a form of
intersex, the inclusion or exclusion of the “condition” or, better, “embodi-
ment” as a form of intersex seems less important to me than attending to
the material differences presented by all bodies that challenge our binary
understandings of sex (and the often still binary conceptions of gender
attached to them).9
This insistence on and of the material is the central focus of this book.
I not only work to theorize the material but also work to theorize the
material’s insistence and its refusal to regularly conform to our cultural,
linguistic, and indeed theoretical scripts. Instead, I posit the material as
it refuses full symbolic recuperation—i n its contingency, obduracy, and
recalcitrance yet also its vulnerability and fragility. The forms of materiality
theorized in Insistence of the Material range from the vulnerable yet some-
times resilient materiality of bodies, to the often obdurate yet deteriorating
materialities of our late- capitalist built environments, to the endangered
yet dynamic materialities of various ecosystems, to the changing yet recal-
citrantly material dimensions of political- economic production.
In tracing this insistence of the material, then, I am working outward
from my body and its own refusal to follow the cultural scripts assigned to
it. The best writing always works in two directions at once— both outward
toward the contradictions and inequalities that shape the world and inward
toward the complexities and knots of contradiction that shape our sub-
jectivities and embodiments. In my first book, Hard- Boiled Masculinities,
I both worked outward toward a larger cultural fantasy about masculinity
in the interwar years and also worked through (although I did not reveal
this at the time) my own investments in fantasies of a hard- boiled mascu-
linity. Thus if the inner life of my first book, Hard- Boiled Masculinities, was
about the violent fantasies produced by my medical experiences (perhaps
Cornwell’s account of Sickert holds a kind of psychoanalytic truth), in the
inner life of this book, I am trying to stop clinging to that prophylactic
tough guy and exist within and work outward from my vulnerable, aging,
and much worked- over, yet resistant and willful, body.
In Insistence of the Material, then, I attempt to work from my body
outward to the forms of materiality and material contradictions that char-
acterize life (primarily but not exclusively in the global North and the
