Cultures of Fetishism (19 page)

American and European tattoo artists with a lecture on skin:

Measuring in at an average six pounds and about twenty square feet is the largest organ of the human body—the skin. And what a fantastic organ it is! With a remarkable ability to repair itself it is the first and best defense that we have against all manner of microorganisms, chemicals and even ultraviolet radiation. . . . The total thickness of human skin averages between one and two millimeters but the epidermis is only a small fraction of that, only one tenth of a millimeter thick. . . . The dermis underneath, however, is a pretty complicated place. Heat, cold, pressure and pain are felt through tiny bulges of the dermis as

it intrudes a bit into the epidermis. Also, the dermis has collagen fibers, sweat glands, hair roots, nerve cells, lymph vessels and blood vessels. . . . Wow, all that in such a shallow space!
42

As we know, a tattoo is pigment that is inserted into the dermis. When you look at a tattoo you are looking at it through the epidermis. An electric tattoo machine punctures the skin with sterilized metal needles, pushing ink through the epidermis into the dermis. The needles that deliver the pigment are in a sterilized hollow tube that acts as a container for the ink, which then coats the needles. Different needle configurations are used for different parts of the design. The needles travel just a tiny distance into the dermis, not too deep, but not so shallow that the ink only gets as far as the epidermis. Finally, after the healing process (which requires considerable time and patience), the ink concentrates between epidermis and dermis. The outline process, usually done in black ink, is more painful than the shading process that comes afterwards.
43
The choice of tattoo design is personal but also influenced by the traditions

of tattoo art. Tradition-oriented young men are likely to chose the homey old-fashioned images of blood-tipped swords, fiery-tongued serpents, skull and cross bones, anchors, fists, flying fish, mermaids, suns, slivers of moon, stars, a portrait of Christ, Christ on the cross, St. John’s cross, Sacred Heart, Our Lady of Guadeloupe, national flags, red leaf maple, Statue of Liberty, eagle killing a snake, flower petals, ocean waves, palm trees, clouds, pin-up girls like Betty Boop or Marilyn Monroe, the word “Mother,” and Cupid with arrows that aim at the word “Mother.”
44
A young man who hires a tattoo artist to tattoo these images into his skin is rarely aware of the fantasies under- lying them. If he thinks about them at all, he thinks of the dragons and Cupid arrows as aesthetic statements meant to beautify his body and give his skin an erotic boost. He might be somewhat aware and gratified that his exhibition- istic bravado has excited the eyes of an innocent viewer.

Now that tattooing is considered a fashion statement and even a religious calling, the girls have joined the guys. Butterflies are said to be the most popular tattoo among females, especially the single butterfly on the small of the back, just above the buttock cleavage, peaking out from the low-slung pants or skirt. Females are sometimes even more avant-garde than males when it comes to choosing the latest fashions in tattoo design. Unlike the tra- ditional anchors and Cupids of yore, the most popular contemporary tattoos have “new age” references: There are Western Zodiac signs from Aquarius to Capricorn; Eastern Zodiac signs from the Year of the Rat to the Year of the Dragon; Chinese and Japanese and Arabic letters; Polynesian shapes and geo- metric designs; the elephant god Ganesha, the beautiful blue-faced Krishna, and the multi-armed dancing Shiva; protective Sanskrit writings of Buddhist prayers; new age animal heroes such as whales, dolphins, and beavers of the Pacific Northwest; cartoons of Calvin and Hobbes and Japanese
anime
sweethearts like Battle Angel Alita or Sailor moon; ghouls and tombstones; Japanese Kanji pictorial letter characters that can be used to spell out names, places, and secret messages; Egyptian hieroglyphs.
45

There are more extreme tattoo images, such as biomechanical images of the skin ripped open revealing the inside of the body. But that imagined inside is not composed of muscles, bones, and organs. The image of ripped-open skin reveals images of metal rods, pulleys, gears, and tubes;—sort of like “Alien meets Terminator in ink.”
46
These seem to be a masculine prerogative, although some women are beginning to favor them. Among the unisex favorites at the turn of the twenty-first century were abbreviated versions of the Japanese
Bushido
“body-suit” tattoo.

Japanese
Bushido
—Bu (military), shi (man), do (way)—is associated with Samurai warriors and their ethics. As with Samurai ethics,
Bushido
emphasizes self-control, inner personal strength, and Zen-like self-discipline.
47
Full-body
Bushido
, which encompasses the entire body from the shoulders to the ankles, requires endurance of severe pain and an extended series of appointments often extending over several years.
48
It requires great patience and diligence, both on the part of the
sensei
,—the tattoo artist—and his client. The Japanese word for tattoo is
gaman
, or perseverance.
49

The Japanese think of
Bushido
as emphasizing the role of the body in human life. The transient nature of the tattoo, which can only live as long as the body lives, suggests the ephemeral nature of life.
50
The Japanese expression
mono no aware
refers to a deep appreciation of beauty along with a sense of longing or sadness at the transience of beauty.
51
The cherry blossom, which blooms for a week or two and then dies, is a symbol of
mono no aware
.

The tattooed back, which stretches from the neck and encompasses the buttocks and ends at midthigh, is the largest unbroken space on a body to view a single image and therefore is considered the ideal canvas for a Japanese tattoo artist.
52
There is also the split chest body suit for the front of the body and the
Hikae
, or chest panel that covers the chest and goes over the shoulders, across the back and halfway down the arms.
53

The traditional full-body suit tattoo bears the images of the bodies and elaborate garments of Samurai, of tigers, dragons, fire-breathing foxes, cherry blossoms, Japanese gods and goddesses, butterflies, birds, and fish, especially the carp.
54
These intricate designs are outlined by a tattoo machine and then filled in and shaded in by a “hand poke,” in which “needles are attached to the end of a long, thick handle (typically made of pliable materials such as wood or stainless steel), dipped into ink and pushed into the skin by the tattoo, almost as though with a small pool cue.”
55

In these days of globalization and global travel, Japanese are visiting the United States and becoming captivated by American ways of doing things and Americans are visiting Japan and becoming entranced with the Japanese ways. While the Japanese are becoming more casual about their tattoos, Americans are opting for the more painful, time-consuming variations of the full-body, hand-poke tattoo.
56

Now that tattooing has become a popular form of writing on the skin among late adolescents and young men and women in their twenties, thirties, and forties, the practice no longer seems to belong in the category of the fetishism perversion—a fanatical devotion to an irrational personal practice. Nevertheless, as with the piercings of ear, nose, eyebrow, cheek, tongue, and

navel and nipple, tattooing can still be interpreted as an expression of the fetishism strategy. These forms of body writing can still be seen and interpreted as ways of taming and subduing the urgencies of the body—as anchors that hold the unruly skin in place. Or, they could have the opposite meaning—as acts that attempt to undermine the fetishism strategy, which favors organiza- tion, control, and social conformity and thus be interpreted as resistances to social inscriptions of the body.

However, perhaps we interpret too much. Perhaps a delicate cut is just a delicate cut and a tattoo is just a tattoo—savage inscriptions on the skin with no inner meanings whatsoever? In which case they can be seen for what they appear to be—attempts to extend the erotic surfaces of the body, as Alphonso Lingis suggested. Theoreticians of the body disagree on these matters. For example, Elizabeth Grosz feels that Lingis’ insistence on distin- guishing “savage” from “civilized” forms of body writing suggests a “touristlike position of spectatorship.”
57
Despite her gesture of protest, Grosz proceeds to give Lingis’ basic distinctions between savage and civi- lized some theoretical twists of her own. For example, she suggests that a civilized person’s conviction that she is not merely a surface but a creature with profound depths that can be interpreted, may be an ethnocentric ploy designed to put herself above those who act on instinct or impulse without any understanding of their psychic life. Grosz, therefore, is suspicious of the civilized tendency to give deep interpretations to skin markings such as del- icate cuts and tattoos. She asks whether these writings on the skin are really best interpreted as symptoms, signs, and clues to an interior psychic life? Or are they, like the “savage” skin mutilations, actually indications of an equally violent social inscription?
58

Our civilized bodies are involuntarily marked, but by acts that we believe are voluntary. According to Grosz, “Makeup, stilettos, bras, hair sprays, clothing, underclothing mark women’s bodies, black or white, in ways in which hair style, professional training, personal grooming, gait, posture, body building and sports may mark men’s.”
59
The person who has been inspired to adopt these modes of body inscription thinks of them as perfectly natural, and a true index of who they are beneath the skin.

Grosz argues that the social inscriptions that have left their mark on the surface appearances of the human body are also identifiable if the person is stripped of clothing and makeup and other adornments and stands naked in the world. The body au naturelle would still be marked by its diet, its patterns of body movement, “its disciplinary history.”
60
The naked body is not a nat- ural body, for it is marked by “the history and specificity of its existence.”
61
A person’s biography is written on her body. It need only be read and deci- phered. She insists that::

This history would include not only all the contingencies that befall a body, impinging on it from the outside—a history of the accidents, illnesses, misad- ventures that mark the body and its functioning; such a history would also have to include the “raw ingredients” out of which the body is produced—its inter- nal conditions of possibility, the history of its particular tastes, predilections, movements, habits, postures, gait, and comportment.
62

However, the skin does not just yield to whatever is written on it. The skin modifies what is written on it and sometimes even rebels against it. The human skin always has a texture.

“The texture of the skin” is my metaphor for these exchanges between the human body and society. The texture of the skin shapes and contours the mes- sages that the social order tries to impose on the body. Diet can alter the texture of the skin. Body-building and exercise can make it bulkier, tougher, or firmer. Sun can dry it out. Moisture can soften it. Age can wrinkle it. Fires can scar it. But, to the extent that a person’s skin has an essential inborn tex- ture, which sets a limit to what, when, and how much the environment or the agencies of the social order may try to impose on it, she is a biological entity—a DNA machine, if you will. However, she is an intricate, inventive machine that is designed to be able to protect its integrity. A human being is not destined to accept everything the social order attempts to write on her skin. Because of the texture of the skin, the socializing pen or stylus cannot inscribe any message it wants to, no matter how much force it applies, no matter how subtly gentle or seductively caressing it may be as it glides its message across the skin.

Some writers, and the vast majority of painters and sculptors, consider the texture of the paper, canvas, clay, marble, and steel they “write” on as crucial to the meaning of the words or images they create. Of course, these days, most writers who write on paper are only vaguely aware of the texture of the paper on which they are inscribing their words, and very likely, do most of their writing on a computer that later prints up the words to a twelve-point font on twenty-pound bond. But texture matters. Calligraphers know this well. The texture of the paper is as decisive for the shape of the words they will inscribe as the textures of the hairs of their brush. These words that I am now writing might have had a different shape if I had written more drafts of them on paper before copying them into my computer. I try to write my first drafts on a soft textured paper that yields to my #2 carbon pencil. The texture of the paper seems to respond to my words. The ridges either absorb and cra- dle the words that my pencil writes, or resists them, causing me to re-think my words. (Of course, it is me who is inspiring the paper to resist.) In the same way, the texture of the human skin can absorb the pressures put on it or can set a limit to what may be written on it.

Peter Greenaway’s film
The Pillow Book
is about the texture of the skin and the words that can be written on the skin. Greenaway explores the several ways in which body surfaces can give expression to the depths of a human psyche. On the surface, the film is about writing on the skin, specifically Japanese calligraphy—although after the Japanese-born heroine meets her lover-to-be, a blond British translator, a lot of words are destined to be written in bold, upper- and lower-case English, French, Yiddish, and finally also in Italian and German.

What I recalled of
The Pillow Book
before I decided to look at it again and study it more closely was an adorable little Japanese girl having her face