Embodied humanism: performative argument for natural rights in 'The Solitude of Self'.

• Author: Stormer, Nathan

The body bound is an apt frame for discussing corporeality as a source and site of argument. The body, meaning both the biological entity and the cultural schemas that articulate its structure and importance, binds discourse by setting limits. Among other kinds of delimitation, the body can function as the limit of the imagination by binding the range of thought within the five possible senses. It can function as the limit of history for what is not marked on or experienced by humans escapes history. It can also function as the limit and authorization of political power, which is the sense of bondage I wish to bring to a remarkable address by Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In 1892, Stanton delivered on three separate occasions what many consider her masterwork, "The Solitude of Self" (Anthony and Harper, p. 186; Campbell, 1980, 1989; Griffith, p. 203). Consisting of thirty-one paragraphs, the full circumference of her speech is previewed in the first wherein Stanton states she will dwell on the rights due woman "in a world of her own, the arbiter of her own destiny, an imaginary Robinson Crusoe, with her woman Friday on a solitary island" (p. 372). The remaining paragraphs embellish that image, re-figuring solitude more than a score of times with metaphors, allegorical anecdotes, literary references, or representative fictions. She refers to life as a voyage, march, battle, or storm and characterizes isolation with sketches of prison, empty wilderness, or the loneliness of a crowd. Every paragraph makes reference to solitude, self-reliance, or individual responsibility. Although ostensibly a statement of universal human rights, her success was flawed as the reference to Crusoe and a "woman Friday" indicates. Nonetheless, the breadth and depth of solitude are represented, from childhood to old age, from enforced segregation to the gap between inner life and expression. She delivered her meditation on human isolation twice before Congress, to the House Judiciary Committee and to the Senate Committee on Woman Suffrage, and once at the National American Woman Suffrage Association's yearly convention as her last Presidential address to that organization (Campbell, 1989, 2:371).

Karlyn Campbell explains that among its other qualities the speech was "extraordinary because it was a social reformer's defense of humanistic individualism, and because it was a rhetorical statement of the limits of what could be achieved through words or social action" (1989, p. 1:133). According to Campbell, it is unusual in the context of nineteenth-century woman's activism because it "violated nearly all traditional rules" of persuasive discourse, particularly those rules common to women's advocacy Stanton herself helped pioneer. The speech "made the simplest of arguments, and it presented no evidence" and yet it had a powerful effect on her listeners as reported by Rev. Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, Frederick Douglass, and Susan B. Anthony (p. 1:135). Although appreciated for its skillful divergence from persuasive norms, as political philosophy the use of the body to claim rights has not been discussed. Using what Campbell describes as a lyric structure and a tragic amplification of human isolation, Stanton delivered a performative argument for humanism that warranted individual rights through the embodiment of solitude.

As philosophical argument, it was deceptively simple. Repeated with many subtle nuances, Stanton argued that the inevitable challenges and responsibilities of isolation warranted full advantage for each individual. Grounded in the universal experience of solitude, individual rights are entitled to all. Reduced to its bare bones, one need go no farther than an elementary application of Toulmin's model to understand her claim and its lack of formal support, indicating that one would learn little new about natural rights argumentation from her speech which, in turn, would lead to an appreciation of its poetic qualities and psychological impact. However, although simple when observed in its rationalist form, her argument is quite complex when approached materialistically. In contrast to the abstract individualism of modern political philosophy, Stanton constituted the body's isolation as the terrain for debating individual rights and, in the process, naturalized a political fiction in the intimacy of loneliness (Clark; see also, Pateman, 1985). In a brilliant stroke, she shifted the justification of rights from conceptual qualities of the citizen to the lived boundary of corporeality. The power of her argument's simplicity results from her skillful embodiment of the abstract individual.

Many contemporary feminists have insisted on greater attention to the body as a site of oppression and freedom (Braidotti 1994; Butler 1990, 1993; Grosz; Haraway, 1991, 1994; Zita). This is not a new call. From its earliest days recognition of the body's subjection has been a central thesis in feminist social criticism. For example, "The emphasis on freedom or enslavement of the body, and the issues that sprang from that focus, were feminists' contribution to nineteenth-century American liberalism, as well as their link to radical thought" (Clark, p. 905). As a premiere intellectual of nineteenth-century feminism, the body as the object of "Self-ownership was the unifying theme that ran through Stanton's political development" (p. 905). Thus, it is important to revisit her masterwork because it is an exemplary case of composing the body as a source and site of feminist political argument. Rather than working with traditional concepts of argument that indicate Stanton offered no evidence, we should consider how Stanton embodied her evidence before our eyes through the shared experience of solitude and, consequently, crafted a motive to seek freedom.

In this essay, first I address how Stanton fashioned a body as evidence for human rights, as the limit of the individual and a boundary for the soul. Using Judith Butler's notion of performativity, I argue that Stanton justifies humanism by materializing individuality as a soul trapped in a body. Forging argument through lyric structure provided Stanton with the room to embody, to literally "figure," human being. Reading her speech through the three organs she uses to condense the soul-the hand, the tongue, and the eye--and their corresponding faculties -making, expressing, and knowing-I argue that Stanton configures the individual through the contingency of life's events and the permanence of our bodies' limits. Presented as the hallmark of the individual, the lonely body's limits, not the mind's expanse, become the source of natural equality.

Second, working with Kenneth Burke's dramatistic grammar, I speculate that Stanton's motive for individual action is the realization of freedom and is driven by an appeal to the sublime. Stanton's vision is tragic and a key component of tragedy is its sense of telos. Visited by unavoidable catastrophe and disorder, human destiny is to achieve freedom through tragedy. We must face life's adversities and vanquish them because the conditions of our liberty are set by the bondage of solitude. Exhorting the audience to seek "full human development," she posits that to face life challenges and learn from them each must have all society can offer in education, health, and opportunity. Placing cultural norms and legal rules in the course of natural development, she accomplishes what natural rights rhetoric must: the naturalization of a rights-based culture. As performative argument, rather than employing reasoned proof Stanton embodies the will to freedom in an everyday struggle against those same limits that distinguish the individual. Thus, the solitary body rather than the assembly becomes freedom's site of contention.

Finally, I conclude by evaluating just how universal Stanton's argument is. The troubled use of Robinson Crusoe in the introduction, the vision of full development that betrays a bourgeois sense of completion, and her vision of a whole, perfected individual are at odds with the universalist theme of the speech. Noting these deficiencies, I suggest how we might take inspiration from her unique reformulation of natural rights and learn from her mistakes.

A LYRICAL EMBODIMENT OF SELF ...

To embody is to "give force, real effect, power, life, authority to something by placing it within a viable framework or working system" (Thesaurus, "Embody"). As a result, "objects like bodies do not pre-exist as such," they must be animated by articulation within some kind of material-semiotic matrix (Haraway, p. 298). The discourse on natural rights is just such a matrix, modulating language and the body through self-sovereignty. The resulting life, the individual, has power over the self that is seemingly authorized by existence rather than social position. The question is how does such a matrix produce a self-authorized body? Butler uses performativity to explain the discursive process by which power and authority are conferred to that which is embodied. She explains the reiterative power of discourse to produce and regulate our sense of material reality, meaning the simultaneous power to normalize and articulate the limits of things through recitation (1990). The boundaries of our world and our bodies are functions of discourses that punctuate our perception and the routine citation of established limits produces the fixity of the real we take for granted. Butler stresses that which matters is made to matter, that materiality and signification are mutually constitutive and indissoluble such that neither precedes the other (1993). This creates opportunities for bodily orthodoxy and subversion because disobedient or parodic recitation of embodied norms can destabilize our sense of a natural foundation (1990, 1993). Drag is Butler's most noted example, although she addresses instances in film, literature and philosophy. The sense of essential life that...