Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Notes
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Introducing Lacan (with Judy Groves)
Why Do Women Write More Letters Than They Post?
Promises Lovers Make When It Gets Late
Freud’s Footnotes
Stealing the Mona Lisa: What Art Stops Us from Seeing
Why Do People Get Ill? (with David Corfield)
The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression
What is Madness?
Strictly Bipolar
For Jack, Iris and Clem
The new era of the Internet, the smartphone and the PC has purportedly had radical effects on who we are and how we relate to each other. The old boundaries of space and time seem collapsed thanks to the digital technology that structures everyday life. We can communicate instantly across both vast and minute distances, Skyping a relative on another continent or texting a classmate sitting at the next table. Videos and photos course through the Web at the touch of a screen, and social media broadcast the minutiae of both public and private lives. In the train, the bus, the café and the car, this is what people are doing, tapping and talking, browsing and clicking, scrolling and swiping.
Philosophers, social theorists, psychologists and anthropologists have all spoken of the new reality that we inhabit today in the twenty-first century as a result of these changes. Relationships are arguably more shallow or more profound, more durable or more transitory, more fragile or more grounded. As the workplace for many becomes virtual, new possibilities emerge to construct lives beyond the nine-to-five paradigm. Whatever we make of these changes, everyone seems to agree that they are indeed changes, that the world is a different place, that the digital era is something incontestably new.
But what if we were to see this chapter in human history through a slightly different lens? What if, rather than focusing on the new promises or discontents of contemporary civilization, we see today’s changes as first and foremost changes in what human beings do with their hands? The digital age may have transformed many aspects of our experience, but its most obvious yet neglected feature is that it allows people to keep their hands busy in a variety of unprecedented ways.
The use of hands is indeed changing. The owner of the famous Shakespeare and Company bookshop describes the way that young people now try to turn pages by scrolling them, and Apple have even applied for patents for certain hand gestures. Patent application 7844915, filed in 2007, covered document scrolling and the pinch-to-zoom gesture, while the 2008 application 7479949 covered a range of multitouch gestures. Both were ruled invalid, not because gestures can’t be patented but because they were already covered by prior patents.
At the same time, physicians observe massive increases in computer- and phone-related hand problems, as the fingers and wrist are being used for new movements that nothing has prepared them for. Changes to both the hard and soft tissues of the hand itself are predicted as a consequence of this new regime. We will, ultimately, have different hands, in the same way that the structure of the mouth has been altered, it is argued, by the introduction of cutlery, which changed the topography of the bite. The edge-to-edge bite that we used to have up to around 250 years ago became the overbite, with the top incisors hanging over the lower set, thanks to new ways of cutting up food that the table knife made possible. That the body is secondary to the technology here is echoed in the branding of today’s products: it is the pad and the phone that are capitalized in the iPad and iPhone rather than the ‘I’ of the user.
Yet if the way that we employ our hands is changing, the fact that we have to keep our hands busy is nothing new. From weaving to spinning to knitting to texting, human beings have always kept their hands occupied. If the playground parent would once have been knitting or turning the pages of a newspaper, today they are texting and surfing. At home, computer games occupy the hands and fingers, and Minecraft, the world’s most successful game, includes a curious onscreen hand that accompanies the player wherever they go. The phenomenal popularity of Lego, likewise, is not just due to clever marketing but to its basic function of giving work to the hands.
Once we recognize the importance of keeping the hands busy, we can start to think about the reasons for this strange necessity. What are the dangers of idle hands? What function does relentless hand activity really have? What role do the hands have for the infant and how does this change during childhood? What links are there between hand and mouth? And what happens when we are prevented from using our hands? The anxious, irritable and even desperate states we might then experience show that keeping the hands busy is not a matter of whimsy or leisure, but touches on something at the heart of our embodied existence.
And this brings us to a paradox that will run throughout the pages to follow. The most obvious answer to the above questions is that we need our hands to do things with. They serve us. They are the instruments of executive action, our tools. They allow us to manipulate the world so that our wishes can be fulfilled. We show our hands to vote, to seal an agreement, to confirm a union, to such an extent that the hand is often used to stand for the human agent that bears it. In zombie and Frankenstein movies, the creatures walk with hands held out in front of them, not to suggest difficulties in vision but, on the contrary, pure purpose.
Yet at the same time, our hands are precisely what disobey. Although there are stories and films where a body part such as an eye, a foot or even an ear becomes animated or possessed, this is nothing compared to the vast number of examples where it is the hand – either joined to the body or severed – that starts to function on its own, and nearly always murderously. When body parts become possessed in horror films, from The Hands of Orlac to Evil Dead, it is almost always the hands that are controlled by some evil force, rather than the feet, the eyes or the mouth.
In most of these fictions, the hands act in opposition to the conscious volition of the person. They may perpetrate the murder or revenge that the person at some level desires, but which society and their own self-image prohibit. In The Hand, the comic-book artist played by Michael Caine has to discover that the carnage wreaked against those who have wronged him is in fact the work of his own severed hand. In other scenarios, the hands may embody the will of someone else entirely, perhaps a spirit or the donor of the surgically grafted member. Whatever the case, they show a division or splitting, as the unhappy hero of these sagas has to fight against their own body.
And don’t such divisions persist in everyday life? As we might strive to focus on what our partner or friend is telling us, our hands itch to send a text, to check our email, to update our Facebook page. People complain of being too attached to their phones and tablets and iPads, as if their hands just can’t stop touching them. The hand, symbol of human agency and ownership, is also a part of ourselves that escapes us. In what has become one of the most successful cultural products of all time, Disney’s Frozen explores the dilemma of a girl whose hands do things she doesn’t want them to do. Elsa’s hands turn whatever they touch into ice, and the story concerns her efforts to censor, control and perhaps accept this part of herself that is, to adapt St Augustine’s expression, ‘in her more than her’.
When American ex-President Jimmy Carter told the world in 2015 that he was suffering from brain cancer, he said that matters were now ‘in God’s hands’. To localize agency and volition, it is the hand rather than the mind or brain that is singled out, as if the hands have come to stand for motivation itself. We could think of the final scene in Terminator where the cyborg whose only purpose is to eliminate Sarah Connor still inches forward with extended pulverized hand, even after the rest of its body has been destroyed. It is pure purpose, and indeed, in the subsequent films in this series, it is this single preserved hand that will generate the new lethal technologies of the future.
This association of the hand with agency and power has a long history, stretching from biblical texts to Galen, from Calvin’s ‘manual theology’ to Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand and beyond. The hand is referred to more than any other body part in the Bible, and appears in the Old Testament more than 2,000 times. In early Christianity, the deity is often pictured as a massive hand emerging from the clouds, and the tablets of the law may originally have been hand-shaped, with five commandments inscribed on each. The ubiquity of this image of the divine hand is sometimes given an iconoclastic interpretation: as it was forbidden to show the face of God, a bodily extremity was chosen instead. The hand appears only because we aren’t allowed to see the rest of the body.
The idea of the hand as a tool that serves us to propagate agency is common also in classical times. Where Anaxagoras had argued that humans are intelligent because they have hands, Aristotle, and many after him, countered that they have hands because they are intelligent, as the hands perpetuate our will instrumentally. Medieval etymology had indeed derived the term for ‘hand’ (manus) from that of its ‘service’ (munus). This same idea features heavily in the manuals of rhetoric compiled by Roman orators. They detail complex protocols for the hands to illustrate, punctuate and emphasize speech. Quintilian described the ways that hands could be used to ‘request, promise, summon, dismiss, threaten, entreat, show aversion or fear, question and deny’, and he claimed to be able to tell just from reading Cicero at which points in his oration the latter would have used gestures when speaking.
Preparing a public speech would have involved careful rehearsal of the splay of the fingers, the angle of the hand and how it would be positioned in relation to the body. Hand gestures formed an integral part of speech, of what Cicero called the ‘sermo corporis’, the language of the body. These were sometimes considered to be even more important than the content or composition of a speech. As the historian of classical gesture Gregory Aldrete observes, it was presumably no accident that after Cicero’s murder it was both his severed head and his hands that went on public display.
This special value accorded to the hands is just as present today as it was in classical times. It seems as if almost every science-fiction, espionage and adventure film contains a scene where the protagonists have to override a computer manually. The sheer frequency of this motif suggests that it touches on something profound for us. We could interpret it as simply human unease about the power that machines have over us, but isn’t it also an attempt to sustain the belief in the hand as agency, as the point of ultimate control?
This emphasis on the hands as embodiments of agency is so powerful that the presence of a hand can even be posited to explain what seems to be action without an agent. Neurology describes the ‘alien hand’ syndrome, in which one hand may act at cross purposes to the other, failing to obey the conscious commands of the patient. An early research paper had hoped to term it ‘Dr Strangelove’s Syndrome’ – after the film in which Peter Sellers has to repeatedly use his left hand to stop the right hand from making a Nazi salute – but the peer reviewers did not like this. ‘Alien hand’ is often distinguished from ‘anarchic hand’, where the hand disobeys yet is still experienced as belonging to the body.
The case reports are filled with examples in which the hands seem to be at war with each other: one hand closes a book as the other tries to open it, one lights a cigarette while the other tries to extinguish it, one turns on a TV programme while the other tries to change channels. In more sinister examples, one hand tries to throttle the person while the other hand tries to loosen its grip, one hand forces food into the mouth while the other tries to stop it, or one hand tries to drown the swimming patient while the other tries to restrain it.
In Kurt Goldstein’s original 1908 paper, his patient had grabbed her own throat and squeezed with the left hand, saying ‘the hand does’ rather than ‘I am doing’. It had required considerable force to disengage it. She tried to make sense of this traumatic insubordination in terms of there being a ‘bad spirit in the hand’. She told Goldstein that ‘the hand is not normal; it does what it likes’, and that she felt as though two people were present, the hand and herself.
Many strategies to pacify the unruly limb are reported by those suffering from alien hand. Physical restraints like slings have been used, but it seems more common for people to try talking to the hand in the hope that it will start to obey. Goldstein’s patient would slap it or beg it to calm down as if speaking to a child: ‘My little hand, be quiet,’ she would say. In another case, a woman who felt that her hand harboured hostile intentions towards her eventually found peace by treating the alien limb like a child, and it would be difficult not to infer that the mother–child relation itself did not have some part to play in her experience.
Some researchers try to distinguish cases where ownership of the hand is denied from those in which it is recognized, despite its apparent autonomy, yet the distinctions and subsequent attempts to correlate these with localizations of cerebral damage are not always convincing. What is clear is that the intentionality of the alien hand is recognized, even if how this intentionality is understood will vary from case to case. The patients perceive that the hand is doing something goal-directed, but may say, like Goldstein’s patient, ‘the hand did that’ rather than ‘I did’.
What is especially fascinating in terms of the question of hands and agency is that in some cases, in trying to explain the bizarre behaviour of the alien hand, the person will evoke a third hand that is controlling the insubordinate one. This ‘bad hand’, in one case, was causing the patient’s left hand to act at cross purposes to the right hand, guiding its movements from above. Rather than appealing to a split brain – that is, to ‘another’ brain or mind – the explanatory concept is ‘another’ supernumerary hand.
This shows us how the hand cannot be easily withdrawn from ideas of ownership and autonomy. If we mean to do something, a hand must be operative, even if our actual empirical hand is disobeying us. This paradox of manual agency is echoed in the strange transformations of the modern idea of freedom. We are continually encouraged to achieve autonomy by the very agencies that deprive us of this possibility. In Man of Steel, the latest version of the Superman story, his father explains that on their planet everyone is born with a predetermined future, but that he wanted to create one being who was free, who was different from the others, who could decide for himself. The circularity is obvious: in this gesture of defiance, freedom itself becomes a mandate. In other words, a fate that is predetermined for his unborn son.
Disney’s delightful Brave illustrates the same process. The young princess’s mother insists on an arranged marriage, totally against her daughter Merida’s will. To extricate herself, she casts a spell on her mother, which goes slightly awry: the latter is turned into a fearsome bear that sees the princess as either her ally or as a morsel of prey. At the close of the film, Merida makes an impassioned speech in front of her father and a hall filled with suitors about the importance of free choice and independence. And yet what they don’t see is that in the shadows at the back of the hall is the bear, guiding her through her argument. The act of autonomy is in fact an act of ventriloquism.
These examples illuminate the paradox at the heart of modern notions of agency and choice. The obligation to be free and to make our own choices is framed within a network of imperatives that come from without, ordering us to be free. The consequences here are quite clear: the more that autonomy and self-determination are valorized, the more that all basic human activities that fail to come under complete conscious control became pathologized.
And this would explain why the field of so-called ‘addictions’ is expanding so rapidly. The shopping addictions, sex addictions, Internet addictions and phone addictions that fill the diagnostic marketplace have become seen as addictions because they are apparently not under conscious control. But the real addiction that lies behind them is autonomy addiction: the illusion that we can be fully masters of ourselves. The more we buy into this, the more disorders there will be.
These forces have become so powerful that today even staying alive is seen as a choice, something that we have power over. By devoting ourselves to a healthy lifestyle, eating well and exercising, we will prolong our lifespan. Even when he is being attacked by a vicious monster, Will Smith can still calmly make the free choice of survival. In After Earth, he describes how he has been pinned down underwater, with a pincer through his shoulder. He realizes that his time is up and he can see the blood bubbling up through the water. Then it all slows down. Looking at the pincer, ‘I decide I don’t want that in there any more, and I pull it out and he lets me go.’ ‘Fear,’ he continues, ‘is a choice. We’re all telling ourselves a story and that day mine changed.’
How different from the cognitive universe of the concentration camp survivor. Where Smith’s character made a rational choice at a moment of supreme self-determination, many of those who escaped the camps attributed their survival not to some set of skills but to pure chance. Camp testimonies don’t tell us that ‘fear is a choice’, or that survival depended on working on oneself. Rather, a terrifying contingency was at work, one that has little place in today’s world of self-development and realization.
The mandate to survive, to live longer, has also introduced into the twenty-first century what we could call a separation of two lives. In earlier times, there was life on earth and then, for many, the belief in another life beyond that. But today we have a new demarcation. It is not between earthly and heavenly life, but between two lives lived on earth, a purely biological one and a real, lived, experiential one. The State in most Western countries now has a duty to keep its citizens alive, and the notion of living has become reduced to basic biological parameters.
The recent case of Ashya King brought this out clearly. After a brain tumour had been diagnosed in this five-year-old boy, his parents wanted to take him abroad for proton beam therapy rather than the standard radiotherapy available in the UK. Proton therapy is used in many other countries to target certain types of cancer, but the UK has not yet built the particle accelerator necessary for it, due to the high costs involved. Although British doctors insisted that Ashya should have the treatment they could offer, King’s parents left the country with him, but were soon tracked down and arrested in Spain, as if they had kidnapped their own child. During their seventy-two-hour detention, the five-year-old was separated from his mother and father for the first time since his birth.
Although they were thankfully released following a public outcry, the case shows this clash of two lives. There was the pure biological life of the boy, and then there was the actual, real life he had, including within it his attachment to his parents. One hundred years of biology, psychology, not to speak of psychoanalysis, shows beyond any reasonable doubt that the health of the body is linked to our relationships. As Susie Orbach put it, the single most important discovery of the twentieth century was that hard-wiring and soft-wiring are the same thing. A baby given food and drink yet deprived of any emotional contact with its caregivers will perish. Even Aristotle recognized that without sight or hearing, there could be life, but without touch, death would follow. Yet in the harsh world of modern medicine, although lip service may be paid to the idea, biological life is brutally separated from real life.