3. On Birthing and Our First and Second Births: Towards a Feminist Theory of Natality
“Moreover, since action is the political activity par excellence, natality, and not mortality, may be the central category of political, as distinguished from metaphysical, thought (Arendt 1958, 9).
“With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance” (Arendt 1958, 176 emphasis mine).
What about our first birth? When Hannah Arendt posited natality as the grounding for her political ontology (as opposed to the grounding of metaphysics in mortality), she successfully rebuked the death-centered philosophies of the Western canon with the “naked fact of our original physical appearance.” Having already presented my account of the scale of Arendt’s contributions in formulating a politics of action through plurality and natality, I will not return to these points. Arendt located her concept of natality in Augustine’s “that there be a beginning, man was created before whom there was nobody” (Arendt, citing Augustine 1958, 177 emphasis mine). While Arendt spent a considerable amount of time and energy working through the meanings and implications of the meaning of beginnings, birth, and creation she never discussed the second half of this quote: before whom there was nobody. Arendt makes the genuine contribution of grounding natality in plurality, where people in all their diversity come together. In the setting of understanding (in the Arendt’s sense of the word) the politics of new reproductive technologies, our second birth must also be understood as being grounded in our first birth.
Kathleen Jones, in her outstanding critique of masculinist models of power and authority, made this point by way of reading Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born and Carol Gilligan’s work in tandem with Arendt’s concept of natality (Jones,1993). Jones focuses on Arendt’s critique of authority as mastery as,
a scarcely veiled desire to return to the womb, as a wish to be reincorporated by making the many into one, this renunciation of action, and the exchange of authority as augmentation for authority as command both mark a kind of resentment that we were ever “of woman born.” Why couldn’t we be protected from life’s futility and the haphazardness of living in the world of plurality, of difference (Jones 1993, 170)?
Masculinist conceptions of authority (conflict resolution through making the many into one) are at odds with Jones’ goal of constructing a theory of compassionate authority. And, Jones successfully articulates an empowering theory of authority. But, while I am very sympathetic to her project, Arendt rarely wrote on the meaning of being “of woman born,” and the one case where she did, another host of assumptions and problems present themselves. Jean Bethke Elshtain in “Political Children” argues that Arendt made the case for the “first natality” at her worst moment, her attack on desegregation in “Reflections on Little Rock.” In this piece Arendt argues against the politicization of children. Elshtain writes, “Those who indoctrinate the young politically produce controlled robots or rabid zealots, not free agents. Protection of the first natality in order to make possible the second…is a private, hidden activity” (Elshtain 1995, 266-267 emphasis mine). Even here, the political significance of the “first natality” is left uninterrogated. Or, it is a form of natality relegated to the realm of necessity, a natural given that should not be exported into the social or political realm. I want to pursue another trajectory, one that does not assign the activity of motherhood and the moments of birth solely to the realm of necessity. What implications might this being “of woman born” have for constructing a theory of action and resistance, particularly in the context of new reproductive technologies?
Mary O’Brien’s The Politics of Reproduction, articulates a socialist-feminist critique of Arendt (1981). O’Brien takes Arendt to task for her discrediting of the realm of necessity in the categorical division of the public and private realms. O’Brien reads Arendt as an Aristotelian at heart, making the now more common criticism of what I call Arendt’s “polis envy.” Perhaps the division of private as necessity and public as freedom would not be so troubling, but for the long history of women and slaves being relegated to that “realm of necessity.” By locating freedom in the public realm (and grounding her theory in Athenian “democracy”), O’Brien charges Arendt with working from within “an exclusively male perspective” (1981, 110). More pointedly, within the realm of necessity, Arendt presents reproduction as a natural, “animal” activity. In so doing, Arendt “throws out the significance of reproductive labour, genetic continuity, and forms of social relations of production” (O’Brien 1981, 149). For O’Brien, the capacity to begin anew on the social level – in any egalitarian sense of the word – must include a reconfiguration of the social relations of reproduction.
While O’Brien spends a considerable amount of time on Arendt, apparently, she is less interested in her philosophy of natality and plurality – or for that matter – her critique of (masculinist) authority as mastery. However, O’Brien’s critique of Arendt’s categorical distinctions may explain why Arendt worked through natality as second birth, rather than valorizing the political significance of the first birth. For Arendt, natality, as a source of freedom cannot be in the realm of necessity. Thus, “birth was not, and will not become, a worthy subject for male philosophy. It is negated so that man may make himself, control the conditions of his self-made second nature and house his divided self in an uneasy separation of the public and private realms” (O’Brien 1981, 156-157). Must a significant political philosophy of new beginnings, a philosophy also grounded in plurality, that celebrates those spaces where word and deed do not part – must this philosophy originate in the idea that man is the originary appearance of freedom, “before whom there was no one”?
Kimberley Curtis argues effectively that feminist critiques of Arendt fail to accurately account for the significance of the “realm of necessity” in her essay, “Hannah Arendt, Feminist Theorizing, and the Debate Over New Reproductive Technologies” (1995). For her, while feminists such as O’Brien have made valid criticisms of Arendt, they have “rushed head-long past the considerable and important existential weight she accords to the natural-bodily dimension of life, including reproductive life” (Curtis 1995, l71). The life of animal laborans, laboring within the realm of necessity, is not meaningless but a calling to “remain touched by and involved with the conditions under which life has been given” and as such, serves as the very grounding for “our ability to politically resist those conditions that degrade and violate the human status” (Curtis 1995, 174). Her essay is particularly relevant here as it crystallizes the possibilities of Arendt’s (and feminist theorists’) critiques of (post)modernity as they pertain to new reproductive technologies.
Curtis locates Arendt’s sense of wonderment and gratitude in the miraculous “givenness” of the world of nature, writing that Arendt “perpetually reminds us that we are not nature’s creators” (Curtis 1995, 173). Technological developments such as Sputnik, the atom bomb, and new reproductive technologies (e.g. IVF, cloning, provider-dependent contraception) introduce “the logic of a perpetual and finally empty war with the life process and its finitude” (Curtis 1995, 180 emphasis mine). This logic that stands “outside the human condition” but inside the realm of “nature” instrumentalizes the “given” bodily world of reproduction and of nature.
Absent a sense of wonderment (or as Arendt and Augustine might have it, caritas) at that which is “given as a free gift” (Curtis, citing Arendt 1995, 183), the distinction between freedom and necessity dissipates: “What may be at stake is the ability to encounter that which we are not” (Curtis 1995, 185). The instrumentalization of the natural realm produces the possibility of a limitless reencounter with the same (e.g. eugenic policy). For Arendt, we cannot know nature in any final sense. Releasing the unpredictability of human action into nature, creating nature, could result in producing a predictable set of events that retain unpredictable, dangerous, and limitless outcomes. Curtis’ work presents the most articulate and challenging argument to date on the relevance of Arendt’s thought to reproductive technologies – and she rightly delineates the limits of some feminist critiques of Arendt. Though Arendt does not give adequate attention to the gender dynamics of natality, Arendt’s work frequently avoids many of the pitfalls of masculinist theories of power.
I see an abyss in this before-whom-there-was-no-one of natality, akin to the problematics of the sublime. However, Arendt effectively holds these dangers in check through her concepts of plurality, memory, forgiving, and memory. Freedom, at the end of the day (or the beginning), is grounded in an abyss. This “no one” is found elsewhere in her work. It is manifested in Arendt’s account of action at times, “action, though it may proceed from nowhere, so to speak, acts into a medium where every reaction becomes a chain reaction…” (Arendt 1958, 190 emphasis mine). It is present in Arendt’s account of feeling (particularly relevant, given Arendt’s attention to caritas in the context of natality), where “thought is related to feeling and transforms its mute and inarticulate despondency” (Arendt 1958, 168). This is crucial to a critique of new reproductive technologies because Arendt highlights humans’ inability to know nature in any final (or originary) sense. Acting as if we do (know), is not only a mark of hubris but potentially lethal – politically and literally.
Arendt’s concept of natality carries with it a danger, by her own admission – a danger that emerges from its fundamental boundlessness and unpredictability. Arendt avoids the dangers of a politics grounded in the abyssal boundlessness of coming “in the first instance” from nowhere with the fundamental egalitarianism of plurality and the historical rootedness of remembrance, forgiveness and promising. I propose to articulate a politics of freedom that does the work of natality, but is also grounded in the political relations of reproduction, and the phenomenological reality that we are of woman born. In a masculinist logic that is independent of the human condition we may, in the first instance, come from a “nowhere.” The valuable sense of the mystery of being can ground political recovery in the idea that we come not only from a “somewhere,” but that we come from embodied subjectivities, reminding us of the context and consequence of our embodied beginnings in space, place and time. Whatever happened “in the first instance,” being of woman born for as long as humans can remember is a bodily grounded encounter with the miraculous.
Politically speaking, while grounding natality in Augustinian concepts of caritas (engendering a love of the world, a love for that mystery of being) has its advantages, as I have discussed in Chapter Four, the Augustinian concept of natality is incomplete in one respect: the abyss of “before-whom-there-was-no-one.” While Arendt successfully reduces this problem by turning to plurality, the contributions of contemporary feminist theorists on giving birth and being “of woman born” situate the politics of action within the corporeal ground of Being. This is one reason why the Norplant® Condition is particularly significant. The Norplant® Condition serves as a rearticulation of the masculinist instrumental rationality of disciplinary power on the mind-body experiences of women – and of all those who are of woman born. In one sense, the “logic” of new reproductive technologies does its work in the realm that Arendt misses: the fundamental socio-political import of women and of women’s reproductive roles in contemporary society. Curtis takes some of the force away from criticisms by Rich and O’Brien, but does not address the problematics of a politics located in the originary notion of the “first instance” and sometimes also downplays the significance of birthing and contraception as a cultural-political practice.
Virginia Held, in her essay “Birth and Death,” also makes a case in keeping with Arendt’s “natality and not mortality” approach to political philosophy, but does so in the context of women’s experiences with a focus on the significance of motherhood and birthing. Held notes that while constructions of divine births are common in western cultural imaginaries, imaginative portrayals of a woman giving birth, deciding to give birth, choosing not to give birth – are rare in cultural representation. Men, it seems, are more interested in the cultural representation of mortality and death (Held 1990, 95).
Sara Ruddick writes along similar lines in Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. Ruddick creatively and insightfully constructs a relational politics to counterpose the “flight to objectivity” of masculinist Reason. Building on Elshtain’s sympathetic reading of Arendt’s natality in her essay “Reflections on War and Political Discourse,” Ruddick reflects on the natality of birthing, rather than of being born:
Unlike mortality, natality is expressed in a distinctive relation to a particular woman. For every human, to experience fully the “capacity rooted in birth” requires imaginatively comprehending that particular relationship. Central to natality…are interwoven notions of beginning, action, difference, singularity, and promise. To these we can add maternal concepts of humility, trust, vulnerability, and protection, which characterize the birthing act….to give birth is to commit oneself to protecting the unprotectable and nurturing the unpredictable (Ruddick 1995, 209 emphasis mine).
Ruddick’s ethic of “protecting the unprotectable and nurturing the unpredictable,” like Arendt’s sense of the frailty of human affairs contained within her “care of the world,” is bound up with the lived experiences of women birthing. This is not only significant in that it asserts birthing as an action, but also because it articulates meaning in corporeal existence, refusing the mind-body dualism of masculinist Cartesian thought.
Adrienne Rich, in her classic Of Woman Born points to mind-body dualism in “male medical technology,” where childbirth is “defined as a medical emergency” (Rich 1995, 176). Again, childbirth is an event that naturally “happens” and the actions that go into birthing are erased by this naturalization. Childbirth is then, “alienated labor” (Rich 1995, 156). The meanings and significance of childbirth and birthing are subsumed under the male technological apparatus of “reason,” and the productive (what I call “meaning-giving”) aspects of this labor are shadowed by the meaning-given – or lack thereof. Rich contrasts this with a popular refrain found on a feminist poster: “I am a woman giving birth to myself. (For her) Such an image implies a process which is painful, chosen, purposive: the creation of the new” (Rich 1995, 156 second emphasis mine). Rich, O’Brien, Held, Ruddick, and Jones all (albeit in different ways, with varying points of emphasis) displace the “before whom there was no one” of natality, re-placing it in the realm of lived human affairs. Curtis, in turn shifts the ground of feminist reception of Arendt, by locating a profound sense of meaning in Arendt’s accounts of reproductivity.
While one may (as some have) criticize Rich and others for reifying the masculinist notion that a woman’s primary function is to reproduce, Rich, O’Brien and others are working to reconfigure the meaning of birthing. In so doing, they place it in the field of conscious action – rather than reproducing masculinist understandings of birthing as a natural event. Perhaps Rosi Braidotti said it best writing, “The question for the feminist subject is how to intervene upon Woman in this historical context, so as to create new conditions for the becoming-subject of women here and now” (Braidotti 1994, 168). A critique of presumptions that define “motherhood” intervenes at the center of masculinist assumptions of “Woman” as reproducer. As Arendt has noted, words and deeds are boundless (“setting off a chain of events”) and with that there is a danger in radical feminist assertions regarding the nature of male power. But, the danger of strategic reconfiguration of meaning is intrinsic to the nature of speech-acts. Eschewing radical feminist criticism on the grounds that it may be turned on its head is like backing off from Foucault’s contributions to poststructural feminism on the grounds that his work will be used to generate nihilism or relativism.
Action and an understanding of action, particularly action in resistance to the logic of new reproductive technologies, is enriched by radical feminist reworkings of the meaning of birthing and motherhood. While feminist critics of the 70s and 80s may be criticized for their reductivism, their insights into politics, the politics of gender, new reproductive technologies, and motherhood cannot be overlooked. My synoptic reading of Foucault, Arendt, and feminist theories of embodiment has aimed to do the work of understanding the Norplant® Condition as a political problem of liberalism, while articulating the corporeal grounds of natality and resistance. However, it is hoped that this reading has a double-function in that it also works to provide an understanding of these thinkers in the context of contemporary political theory. I conclude with a reiteration of how Foucault, Arendt and feminist theories work together and against one another in the context of the Norplant® Condition.
