Body Modification and the Madness of Decision

Karmen MacKendrick and Crispin Sartwell

I. Deliberation and Spontaneity

In our experience--our practice and reading and conversation and observation--people follow two kinds of decision-making processes when they get their bodies modified. In the first, a sort of commemorative marking, we get tattooed to mark passages or significant events in our lives, or to mourn and memorialize the dead. In the second, the work is acquired spontaneously, as when one walks by a piercing shop and acquires a sudden urgent need for a septum ring. These two intersect; even a carefully-planned, long-contemplated work often waits for the moment at which one simply feels (or, perhaps, simply knows) that the time for it is now.

Besides commemorating in a planned way or marking an on-the-spot decision, body art may be deliberately self-transformative. Moving neatly between the options of Oscar Wilde's famous dictum that "One must be a work of art, or wear a work of art," such self-transformation takes the body as a long-term art project, the canvas for one large work or a number of carefully related pieces. Here, the temporal orientation seems to be toward the future, the construction of one's bodily self one has in mind--suggesting, when we factor in the past-oriented elements of commemoration and the unpremeditated present of spontaneity, that the temporality of body modification is complex regardless of the motives behind it.

But before we go into more detail on these various decision-making procedures, and before we go on from there to consider just how that distinction (fair warning: the seeming distinctions are going to get themselves ever more entangled) plays out in body art, perhaps a few words on decision and memory are in order.

The processes of decision-making are more philosophically fascinating, and part of a richer philosophical history, than one might at first suspect. Both Plato and Aristotle concerned themselves with such matters. Plato has Socrates declare that we only make bad decisions, particularly unethical decisions, out of ignorance; if we know what we're doing then, since we're rational beings and we want to do in every situation what it is best to do in that situation, we'll always decide rightly (the rightness of reason is, of course, presumed). need to get this reference.

For Plato, though, the process of coming-to-decide is still regarded as fairly self-evident, the only real question being what kind of evidence one uses in deliberating. Aristotle will undertake a considerably more elaborate analysis.

In Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, we learn that a decision is the result of rational and systematic deliberation about the means to achieve a wish--wishes being themselves rational desires for good ends. Deliberation tells us what form of action is needed to get what we wish, and decision occurs as a desire to act accordingly. (Aristotle, 1111-1113) Conveniently, this process of deliberation followed by decision applies only to desires which are in fact rational, not merely emotional or appetitive, since we can't really be said to deliberate, nor (therefore) to decide, about the irrational. In other words, when we act on emotion or appetite, we haven't decided to do it, we just do it. (Aristotle, 1142-1152)

As far as Aristotle is concerned, deciding is better. As translator Terence Irwin informs us in his explanation of prohairesis, the term rendered "choice" or "decision" in the Nicomachean Ethics: "Etymologically prohairesis suggests 'choosing (hairesis) before.' For Aristotle the 'before' has a temporal sense (1132a2-9) though no doubt also a preferential sense." (Aristotle, p. 393)

In the philosophical understanding of decision-making, then, we historically find a sense of order, both temporal and logical. But there's an interesting little gap in this impressively tidy account, right between the deliberation and the choice-to-act [karmen; isn't the gap between choice and action?]: a temporal gap and a rational gap. When, exactly, do we go from deliberative organization (sorting out the facts and the options) to having-chosen? Where, precisely, does that logical step occur, the one taking us from this-is-how to now-I-do? Or is that step, perhaps, not a logical one at all?

II. The Gap Between Deciding and Acting

The practical "syllogism" runs as follows: I want to achieve end e. I believe that means m is the best way to achieve e; therefore I will do m. But the decision to do m is not itself m. It is a perfectly familiar human experience to decide to do something and then to fail to do it, or to do it at some later time than the decision, even if the decision itself did not entail any delay. That I decide with all my might to jump out of an airplane and parachute to earth does not actually entail that I have done, or even that I ever will do it. So the question might be put like this: what infinitesimal moment, or event, is the moment when decision becomes action? Surely it cannot consist of another practical syllogism, else we face an infinite regress of deliberations. There is, therefore, always an excess to deliberation in action, always a moment, impossible to hold or define, at which visualization becomes reality. Action can be taken without deliberation. But action can be decided about and never performed.

This is familiar to practitioners of the arts. A rather good analogy is fresco painting, in which it is very difficult to revise once a mark has been made. (Not as difficult as with a tattoo, perhaps, but even harder to cover over.) Then you had better be sure that the mark is the one you want. But the fact is that you can be sure of it, surer of it, certain of it, and not make the mark, or make the wrong mark. It is possible to get frozen within this infinitesimal gap, to lose the ability to act in the interstice between decision and movement.

That interstice, its minisculeness and its infinity, is what drives the philosophy of Kierkegaard. You want to have religious faith, want with all your heart to believe with all your heart. And so you deliberate. You argue with yourself. You provide yourself with arguments. You pray for faith. You read the gospels. And though this gets you closer and closer to faith in an "approximation process" it has actually not moved you one iota closer to faith. Indeed, the closer you get to faith in approximation, the further it recedes. The moment when you accept God is instantaneous, and there was no process that brought you there. You brought yourself to the edge of the abyss, but that didn't help you leap off. At one moment there was no God-relation, at the next there was nothing but God-relation.

Contemporary philosophers, especially in the Continental tradition, are fond of these little gaps that threaten systematic orders--fond both of finding them and, more engagingly, of figuring out how they change or implode what had previously looked like an orderly system. But in fact the consideration of such gaps considerably predates contemporary philosophy. Writing in 1843, Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard sharply distinguishes the instant of decision from the process of deliberation--surprisingly according the far greater value to the former. Indeed, deliberation for him may be a way of avoiding decision [action?]. Deliberation can entail taking pleasure in one's own mental back-and-forth, but in the end it hasn't much at all to do with the decision it seems to approach. For Kierkegaard, in fact, decision is not a logical, nor even temporal, consequence or outcome of deliberation.

Decision may still come after deliberation, of course, but what is key is that it doesn't come as a consequence of the deliberative process. Instead, the instant of decision is a moment of madness, wholly unsubsumable to rationality. The act itself, whether it is an action in the external world or an act of belief, is always infinitely in excess to the process of deliberation, and no exercise in practical rationality actually entails that one does anything. Whereas the deliberative procedure is one that anyone similarly circumstanced might undergo, the act is done uniquely by you at a unique moment: it is an existential instant rather than a rational process. But this instant, unplaceable in time, has decided temporal consequences: in deciding I choose not only a course of action but a construction of myself. Deliberation, Kierkegaard suggests, actually "prevents you from choosing." The weight of choice is in its transformative aspect, and in the possible difficulty of sustaining that transformation: "…the question is under what determinants one would contemplate the whole of existence and would himself live," Kierkegaard says (107); but the danger of choosing-the danger that endless deliberation rather wimpily avoids-is "that the next instant it may not be equally in my power to choose, that something already has been lived which must be lived over again." (103)

III. Choosing the Self

The idea that acting and believing are a choice or construction of the self - that ultimately what one chooses is a self - is of course especially appropriate as a way to understand the aesthetics and ethics of body modification. Here one directly chooses how one appears to oneself and to others: one makes oneself over into the artifact of one's own will: one becomes one's own work of art. All art is in part, we might say, a construction of the self who makes it: both an external display or "expression" of the self that already exists, and a resolution to be the self that made that particular work. We should think of the output of Picasso as an expression and communication of internal states, but of course it is also a realization of the self he resolves to be. The intensity of Picasso's work is a reflection of the latter resolution: he reflects "externally" the choice of himself, the existential moment of self-creation. This structure is at its most intense in a case where the work cannot possibly be conceived as external to the self is the choice, the act, the medium, and the work simultaneously.

Many experiences attest to the popularity of spontaneity in body modification. Many people tell stories of accompanying a friend who's planned to get work and finding themselves suddenly inspired--by an image or simply by the availability of the procedure and the materials.[ You have any stories like this? I can look some up on BME if not…{Do: cause people are more often wimping out on me!}]One of the present authors once took a friend out for a septum piercing because the friend was experiencing writer's block, and piercing seemed as good a thing-other-than-writing to do as any. (Said friend agreed and was more productive later that very day, although he complained a lot about bumping his nose.)

Others, especially those who report on self-modifying experiences (that is, who work on themselves rather than having the work done by others), seem to be motivated by significant levels of boredom. Still others tell of a need that just happens-they awaken, or during the day find themselves, with an urge for art. The authors can certainly speak to both of these motives, the former having prompted between them at least a dozen ear piercings. One instance in the second category may make the absence of deliberation especially apparent, because deliberation should have prevented it: a tongue piercing that became imperative for absolutely no evident reason, immediately after an out-of-town lecture (travel bag still in hand) and one day prior to the recording of a video voice-over which consequently became considerably more difficult to perform-and all of this despite having two such piercings already. Sometimes one simply must.

Just as many, however, present stories of careful deliberation in pursuit of meaningful modification. Sometimes the search is for proper imagery, as in the case of tattoos, or appropriate symbolism. People may do research into traditional symbols-religious, nautical (a rich source of Western tattoo imagery), or belonging to any of a number of subcultures (biker, comic book, satanic, gambling); or they may mark the importance of relationshios ("Mom," or the name of your partner (Sartwell has his wife's initials on his forearm); or even political affiliations (Sartwell was the "anarchy" symbol on his ankle); or they may, in an increasingly popular mode, create a more private "symbolism" out of personal associations.

Sometimes the desire to have a particular bit of body art, for the way it looks or feels, joins forces with the commemorative urge-perhaps a piercing one has long craved is finally received when some special occasion really seems to warrant it. The snake around my [McKendrick's] right ankle was coveted long before the publication of my first book finally justified my getting it. But notice: as we've indicated, the "justification" obviously does not entail the modification. In the case of the tongue-piercing, we have something that is acknowledged to be or celebrated for being irrational. In the snake case, one modifies one's body in a "celebration" that follows a long "deliberation." The deliberation takes the form of a sort of propsective reward: if (or when) by book gets published, I'll spend the money. Or: I'll then be someone else (like: the person who wrote this book) and so I will become someone else (the person who has this snake around her ankle

The correspondence to event or occasion may not be evident; the very fact of a marker seeming to be its own purpose. One of us got a nipple piercing to mark the completion of a dissertation draft, certainly not an obviously symbolic gesture; on the other hand, the salamander tattoo marking a divorce a year later was a quite intentional evocation of the animal's mythically fireproof qualities. The other got a tree placed on the upper back two years after the death of an intense relationship, in order to mark the resolution to rebirth: it worked, the obsession faded at the moment of the tattoo.

And sometimes the commemorative urge is more "pure." Sartwell has tattoos commemorating the deaths of his two brothers. The iconography of the tattoos is related to their lives and characters: a rose because Bob had a rose tattoo, an owl because owls remind Sartwell of Adam.

Many people use tattoos in this way and they are appropriate first of all for the permanence of the transformation they induce. The authors would both prefer, in fact, if there were no procedures for removing tattoos. The permanence of the mark is a mark of the permenance of the mourning and of the permanence of the effect of the dead persons' lives on us. More generally, the permanence of the mark is a trace or index of the existential quality of the decision, the "leap" quality that we have associated with Kierkegaard. The tattoo, hence, is not only a particular decision; it is an enactment of the human situation in which we must act, and in which each act is irrevocable. Hence each act is a leap; no act can be withdrawn once it is made, because time is irreversible. Thus the decision, and in particular the spontaneous decision, to make a permanent mark on oneself, is an attempt to show to oneself and to others that one has the courage required to live: that one is able to make decisions.

Sartwell's friend Jack accompanied me on my first outing to get tattooed in 1982. He was going to get one too, but after Sartwell did, Jack couldn't "pull the trigger." Well, that was no less an action than was my getting tattooed, and in its own way no less irrevocable. That moment has never and will never arise again. Jack's move was not, as he may have experienced it, a failure to act, but an action, and that action marks his body no less than does the rose on my right arm.

But more, there is something about the process of decision itself which renders the tattoo a worthwhile commemoration. Because of the permanence of the mark it is a mark of bravery, of the willingness to make an irrevocable decision, and is hence a resolution to life in the face of death, as well as a kind of ritual reflection of the permanence of suicide (Adam killed himself). But second, the infinitesimal point-instant spreads in the act of commemoration to an infinite extent: a period of no temporal extension represents eternity. The point between decision and mark, the point when the teleological order of purposes and practical syllogisms is finally transcended or annihilated in an act of self-perfection and self-destruction is the point where death or passage are actually contained. Death and profound life passages are the places between decision and action, the eternities demonstrating the infinite divisibility of time, eternity appearing in the temporal order.

Art itself is dedicated to making such moments, or believing in them, or trusting them to bring you home. Art is as intense as possible a context of constant decision, an atmosphere intentionality so thorough as to be invigorating or fatal. The artist lives by transforming decision into action, with all the intervening accidents, mistakes, felicities, destructions. If all decision making is self-making, then the making of art is always making an art-work of the maker in turn. And this is absolutely at its most perfect when the medium is yourself; when you are making your body the site of the eternity between decision and event.

Oddly, the timing of spontaneous decision-making appears, after this analysis, not so different after all. The OED tells us that spontaneity implies the absence of premeditation. That is, here the deliberative part of the process seems to be missing. But that, after all, isn't the instant of decision. If the choice of self occurs in those strange eternities; it may matter to the future whether that self lovingly holds the past or willfully sets it aside, whether it manifests thoughtful precision or eager energy. But the instant is madness either way; a life passage no less profound for the absence of forethought.

Sometimes, as we've suggested, the deliberative process is more purely aesthetic. This seems to occur particularly after one has started to have bodywork done, and wants to present an overall look or to develop a large-scale piece (a full body tattoo would be a fairly extreme example of this). Even here, however, the moment of decision represents a sudden change. Careful art-recipients may do research on both practical and aesthetic aspects of the work: what are likely costs, healing times, places to find skilled artists, and so on are practical concerns, while aesthetic concerns might involve searches for or attempts to create appropriate imagery. But when the image is found, or the non-imagistic modification decided on, one simply knows. And the only way to know is to wait for it. The transformative body-project is not, at least not necessarily, commemorative. In these processes, decision might seem to bear a closer relation, if only by resemblance, to deliberation.

IV. Conclusion

Here the decisions often seem to follow from one another, rather than from an initial grand plan (or to modify the grand plan as they occur). Because, as Kierkegaard argues, "the personality is already interested in the choice before one chooses," one finds that "when at last the choice is made, one discovers…that there is something which must be done over again, something which must be revoked." While Kierkegaard goes on to speak of eradicating the errors one has made in, or made of, oneself, it seems more likely that these errors too are incorporated-not necessarily celebrated, but ineluctably acknowledged as ineradicable, like lousy tattoos creatively made over in the cover work that doesn't try simply to deny their presence (as laser removal might) but makes something else out of them. This merely extends in time the project of making "something else" out of the body, the tattoo work now become part of the body too. The ineradicability of the choices made does not free one from the necessity of choosing any more than from the visible manifestation of having-chosen. But, in one of the most fascinating yet widely ignored aspects of body-as-art, bodies change, constantly and clearly; by choice and by chance, by accident and age as well as by art. chosen with care to carry the past forward, deliberated upon as a grand aesthetic project, or altered in a spontaneous outburst of impulse and spare cash, the mark on the body is the mark of a decisive moment of madness. Like a colour-daub in a fresco, an improvisational riff in a musical collaboration, a leap into the arms of a dance partner, body art represents a decision at once irrevocable and changing. This is characteristic of temporal disruptions: they can't be taken back and, though carrying forward, they can't be kept. To make such a decision (to decide) must, then, be madness. And, like the madness of any art, this is about as satisfying as living gets.