This book review was originally commissioned by American Anthropologist and an edited version will appear in the journal soon.
Herself a twin sibling, Dona Lee Davis has interviewed identical
(monozygotic) twin pairs to demonstrate the performed and negotiated quality of twin identities in a society largely organized by, and structured for, singleton expressions of self and sibling experience. With chapters organized around broad themes – ‘Twinscapes’, ‘Talk’, ‘Performance’, ‘Body’, ‘Bond’, ‘Culture’, and ‘Twindividuals’ – Davis weaves her own experience of being a twin and of attending conferences such as the International Congress of Twin Studies into material gathered through her interviews with 23 twin pairs at the annual Twins Festival at Twinsburg, OH. She is open about the pleasurable complications of describing herself a ‘native’ (p. 33) alongside her twin informants, claiming a level of access to her subject that those born without a direct experience of the life-long condition of being a twin would struggle to fabricate. Davis’ affective, autoethnographic proximity to her interviewees is at once an engaging and revealing feature of this book. Consequently, her presentation of twinship is entangled in the desire to supplement an outsider’s with an insider’s perspective: to provide a record of twin personhood that has been collaboratively ‘voiced’ into anthropological significance, alongside the analytic desire to bring coherence to and amplify those voices beyond the economically and politically specific time and space of their festival origins.
Despite aiming to ‘normalize twinship’ (p. 7), the gestationally and experientially exclusive position adopted by Davis is one that serves to extend the long and complex history of phenomenological mystery, exoticism, and categorical indistinction attributed to twinship in canonic works of ethnography (Rivers 1906; Evans-Pritchard 1936; Lévi–Strauss 1964; Turner 1969; Peek 2011) and in broader works of sociology and cultural theory (Schwarz 1996; Stewart 2001; Bacon 2010; Viney 2014). The difference is that while these works are largely concerned with how singletons have defined twins, Twins Talk focuses on how twins co-produce ‘self’ and ‘identity’ within and without the twin dyad. Perhaps it is necessary that Davis locates twins at numerous cultural and psychological ‘faultlines’, with the insider-outsider structure of the author’s analytic position made symmetrical with the ambivalently distributed identities that it brings to light. Davis concludes that she and twins are counterhegemonic subjects, able to refuse dominant notions of body or selfhood determined by Western individualism.
Twins Talk seeks to listen to how pairs talk their way through interpersonal relationships; performing the complex ‘self work’ (p. 8–9) of narrativised becoming that are structurally occluded by biomedical research projects. This contrast finds traction through the selective ways that Davis approaches biomedical twin research as a field replete with what she calls ‘blindspots’ (p. 101, p. 170): the failure to speak about twins in terms that recognize an expanded and expansive sense of autonomy and personhood. She is particularly critical of researchers who use the language of the instrumentation or thingliness of twins, to stress the primacy of genes and genetics to twin identities, for example. By taking the controversial and idiosyncratic work of Thomas J. Bouchard and David Teplica as exemplary, Davis suggests a view of contemporary twin research dominated by a crude scientism that ‘exists above and beyond culture’ (p. 173). This largely ignores the rich culture of dissent that has left a 140 year-old tradition of using twins in medical research no more internally consistent or univocal in content than ‘anthropology.’ Though Davis makes passing reference to the novel, postgenomic epistemologies, technologies and methods that have revolutionized twin research in the last 10 years (Bell and Spector 2011; van Dongen et al 2012), a frustratingly one-sided battle emerges between a malevolently blunt genetic determinism on the one hand and Davis’ benevolently sophisticated conception of culture on the other. We are not told why approximately 1.5 million twins should volunteer to be treated as ‘zombies or performing monkeys’ (p. 37) or for the alienation, misrepresentation, and reductiveness that Davis complains are endemic to twin research in the life sciences. It might be telling that these feelings are scarcely registered among her interviewees. More needs to be understood about why twins volunteer for health research, how molecular and molar relations can or cannot come into the public domain, and why twins continue to be used to explore an incredible range of traits, behaviors, and diseases.
There is no doubt that Twins Talk is an invaluable record of a particularly voluble minority of festival-going twins who are willing, eager, and capable of presenting themselves as talking twins, sympathetic to their biographies being raised to anthropological significance. Davis has worked hard to translate the specificity of her talking partners so that their experience may resonate among those voices that have not been recorded in this study. ‘There is one thing twins know how to do,’ she says, developing a metaphor introduced by one set of her talking partners, ‘it is to interchangeably lead and lean while sharing the stage’ (p. 27). Yet the presumed heroism of transforming silence into speech ought not be at the cost of understanding why some twins prefer not to talk, neither leading nor leaning nor even identifying themselves as “twins” above all else, and before all others.
References
Bacon, Kate 2010 Twins in Society: Parents, Bodies, Space and Talk. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Bell, Jordana T. and Tim D. Spector 2011 ‘A Twin Approach to Unraveling Epigenetics.’ Trends in Genetics 27, 3. 116–125.
van Dongen, Jenny, P. Eline Slagboom, Harmen H. M. Draisma, Nicholas G. Martin and Dorret I. Boomsma 2012 ‘The Continuing Value of Twins in the Omics Era.’ Nature Reviews Genetics 13. 640–653.
Evans-Pritchard, E. E 1936 ‘Customs and Beliefs Relating to Twins Among the Nilotic Nuer.’The Uganda Journal. 230-238.
Lévi–Strauss, Claude 1964 Totemism. Translated by Rodney Needham. London: Merlin Press.
Peek, Philip M. Ed 2011 Twins in African and Diaspora Cultures: Double Trouble, Twice Blessed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Rivers, W.H.R 1906 The Todas. London: Macmillan.
Turner, Victor 1969; 1997 The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure Piscataway, NJ: AldineTransaction.
Schwartz, Hillel 1996 The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles. Zone Books: New York.
Stewart, Elizabeth A 2003 Exploring Twins: Towards a Social Analysis of Twinship. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Viney, William 2014 ‘Curious Twins.’ Critical Quarterly 53.2. 47–58.
The birth of twins in the literary art of the Middle Ages frequently marks an opportunity for one woman to accuse another of adultery and thus the twins as illegitimate. Erik Kooper has analysed twenty European stories, many of which were translated, redacted and adapted, and he divided these according to the way in which twinship is represented.[1] ‘If one thing becomes clear from this kind of classification,’ Kooper concludes, ‘is that multiple births do indeed lead to numerous kinds of disaster, both for the mother and for the children.’[2] Of the twenty or so stories he lists, only four of these leave mother or child protagonists untainted by accusations of adultery or monstrous birth. In stories that are free of these kinds of accusation, like the late twelfth-century French story Aiol whose royal twins are born in a prison and later exposed, twins are by no means free of other kinds of peril. Similarly, in the early fifteenth-century romance, Sir Torrent of Portyngale, the eponymous hero is separated from his twin sons without negative judgement being attached to the phenomenon of twinning, but that does not mean that its twin protagonists are straightforwardly celebrated either. The stories benefit from the narrative pathos and closure forged through the eventual reunion of parents children: extending and complicating the romance drama of ‘setting out’; incorporating, in both senses, multiple protagonists. These twin stories, however, form a minority. Many others involve an accusation of adultery and/or animal birth, the threat of such accusations, and the retribution served by the religious and civic orders that these accusations threaten to disrupt.
One of the most famous narratives in which the mother of twins is accused of adultery is found in Marie de France’s short romance, Lai Le Fresne.[3] It is one of Marie’s shortest lays, written in French some time in the late twelfth century, and it bears close similarities to ballads such as ‘The Man With Two Wives’ and ‘Fair Annie.’[4] Marie’s story begins with the birth of twin sons to one noble woman. A jealous neighbour claims that the twins are not the sons of her husband but that the noble woman has, in fact, had sex with two men:
Ich have wonder, thou messanger,
Who was thi lordes conseiler
To teche him about to send
And telle schame in ich an ende,
That his wiif hath to childer ybore.
Wele may ich man wite therfore
That tuay men hir han hadde in bour;
That is hir bothe deshonour. (65–72).[5]
The poem matches contemporary theses advanced by natural philosophers and theologians, such as Albert the Great, who argued that superfecundation, female sexual proclivity, and the generation of twins were all entwined. Note that in Marie’s story the twins are treated as the sole evidence of an adulterous act: it is not supplemented by any other kind of visual, verbal or written proof. Shortly after making this accusation the nameless woman who accuses her neighbour then conceives twin daughters of her own; she is therefore incriminated by her earlier accusation. Not only does this disrupt the moral polarity between accused and accuser, it also contravenes the major conventions of romantic literatures, epitomised by figures such as Guenevere and Iseut, which tended to amplify acts of adultery with threats of infertility.[6] In a complex way, the issue of twins as a result of an adulterous union compromises the gendered, political, religious, and literary conventions of the period; its narrative impact is to suspend a damaging doubt over who is the rightful father and legitimate heir.
Multiple birth – a taboo that inspires accusation, punishment, and abandonment – also seems to displace the incest taboo that frequently motivates infant exposure in stories about male foundlings.[7] Hence, the accusing noble woman in Marie’s lai, now pregnant with her own twins, seeks to protect herself and the reputation of her offspring. First she considers killing one of her daughters – a reflection of how exposure was a response to unwanted births during this period[8] – but then gives one infant child to a servant who takes and hangs it in an ash tree, wrapped in an expensive cloth and with her mother’s ring. She leaves the child in the grounds of a convent and it is by this ash tree, le frêne in Old French and frein in Middle English. Named after the tree in which she was found, Frein is raised and educated by the abbess’ niece and later falls in love with a wealthy knight called Guroun. But the knight is persuaded to marry someone rich and have legitimate children. Without realising the family connection the knight decides to marry Frein’s twin sister.[9] Frein, though sorry for her loss, graciously adorns the matrimonial bed with the cloth in which she was abandoned and, when this garment is recognised by her mother, she also produces the ring and explains how they came into her possession. Her sister’s marriage is quickly annulled and Frein marries Guroun. Frein’s twin is married to a suitably wealthy knight and, despite the years that have passed, order is restored.
To the turbulent plot of Frein we can add Octavian, a popular family romance throughout the fourteenth century, initially composed in Old French and then abbreviated into two Middle English versions.[10] In this story, the Emperor Octavian and his Empress seek an heir – there are concerns that the Empress may be infertile – and so they build an abbey in the hope that their piety may bring them divine favour. Their prayers are answered in the shape of twin sons. In this respect, their children have divine connotations; a sign of divine intervention and a resolution to anxieties surrounding royal succession: ‘An abbaye than he gerte wyrke so / And sone he gatt knave chidire two, / Als it was Goddis will’ (82–84),[11] In a way which corroborates the notion that twin births are difficult and painful, the text stresses the physical exertion and exhaustion of twin delivery: ‘Full grete scho wexe with paynnes sore’ (86). Further difficulties arise when the Empress’ mother-in-law claims that the twins fathered by the cook’s assistant and the Emperor exiles wife and children. The family undergo further separation when each twin is abducted, the first by an ape and the second by a lioness. After further abductions, adoptions, giant killings, battles and romantic conquests, displays of taste and indications of their innate nobility, the adult children are restored to their parents. At the point of reunion, ‘full joye there was also / At the metyng of the brethir two’ (1898–1899). In a fashion that seems to stress the dramatic capacity of twinning rather than any intrinsic or absolute quality unique to twins, their ‘true’ identity is revealed by their actions; through their valour at court and on the battlefield. The deceitful mother-in-law, now threatened by her husband to death by fire, takes her own life. According to literary convention, order and peace are restored.
As much as it is important to stress a continuity between works of natural philosophy, medicine, and literature in the Middle Ages, which all in their different ways highlight how twinship was viewed as a fundamentally disruptive event – a woman’s natural and spiritual burden – it is also essential to identify the drama and entertainment afforded by the birth of twins; twins are catalysts for demarcating the orderly from the disorderly, the usual and the unusual, the desired and the undesirable. This optical and instrumental quality of twinning is not specific to this period of human history. Though what is viewed, calibrated, or measured may change, the inclusion of twins as evidence for the orders and aberrations of nature is a persistent aspect of human self-assessment. The category of ‘twin’ is unusual, therefore, since it is not simply defined by authorities who build upon one another’s knowledge in an accumulative fashion, but twins gain their transhistorical meaning from the many different and divergent kinds of authority that is achieved using their bodies.
[1] See Erik Kooper, ‘Multiple Births and Multiple Disaster: Twins in Medieval Literature,’ in Conjunctures: Medieval Studies in Honor of Douglas Kelly
[2] Kooper, ‘Multiple Births and Multiple Disaster,’ p. 260.
[3] The extent to which Marie de France’s Lai le Freine is a ‘romance’ in a generic and critical sense is discussed by Elizabeth Archibald, see ‘Lai le Freine: The Female Foundling and the Problem of Romance Genre,’ in The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance, edited by Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert (Harlow: Longman, 2000), pp. 39–55.
[4] See Francis J. Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, vol.2 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co. 1883-86), II.63–83, and Erik Kooper, ‘Multiple Births and Multiple Disaster: Twins in Medieval Literature,’ pp. 253–270.
[5] All quotes from Marie de France, Lay le Freine, in The Middle English Breton Lays, Edited by Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995), pp. 65–74.
[6] See Peggy McCraken, ‘The Body Politic and the Queen’s Adulterous Body in French Romance,’ in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, edited by Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 1993), pp. 29–64.
[7] See Elizabeth Archibald, Incest and the Medieval Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
[8] John Boswell details the history of child abandonment in the Middle Ages; he writes that ‘between 1195 and 1295 at least thirteen different councils in England alone passed legislation directly or indirectly bearing on the abandonment of children’, see The Kindness of Strangers (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 322.
[9] On medieval theories of resemblance, see Paul Vincent Rockwell ‘Twin Mysteries: Ceci n’est pas un Fresne,’ in Conjunctures: Medieval Studies in Honor of Douglas Kelly, pp. 487–504.
[10] See Harriet Hudson, ‘Octavian: Introduction,’ in Four Middle English Romances: Sir Isumbras, Octavian, Sir Eglamour of Artois, Sir Tyramour, edited by Harriet Hudson (Kalamazoo, MI: The Consortium for the Teaching of Middle Ages, 1996), pp. 45–52.
[11] Citations are to Harriet Hudson’s edition of the Northern, Thornton version, Four Middle English Romances, pp. 53–114. Line numbers are given in parentheses in the main body of the text.
Back in March I published a short piece in Frieze about the use of twins in contemporary art. This will develop into a much more substantial piece of work later this year, when I begin a chapter on twins and performance. The article, though, gave me a chance to go to Berlin and see a piece of installation art by Richard Kriesche, which featured twins sitting in the gallery reading a text by Walter Benjamin. You can read about that work and the other works I think it can be grouped with here.
The animal nature of twins is deeply implicated in the emergence of anthropological theory during the twentieth century. The anomalous statuses attributed to twins, and especially the intermediary capacity to be a hybrid mix of human, spirit, inanimate thing, and animal, have captured the imaginations of (predominately) white, Western sociologists and anthropologists. That twins can be viewed as simultaneously animal and human, for example, has provided some with a powerful explanatory license, especially to those wishing to collate and tabulate various oral, written, material records of custom and belief in order to understand what motivates local practice. The remaining mystery of twins, when analysed across many different communities, has produced a situation in which twins, much like the spirits that are said to possess them, are understood to the visible, manifest content of deeper, more latent structures of cultural meaning and social reproduction. The logic here is that, were it was possible to find a prior cause for the classificatory anomalies that twins are understood to represent, then wider patterns and rationales of social organisation may become clearer.
In the 1930s E. E. Evans-Pritchard reported that, much like the spiritual simian flight of the Yorùbá or the snake-born twins of the Ubangia, the Nuer of South Sudan viewed their twins to be sacred children of God. With striking parallels in terms of birth and marriage rites, the sacred aspect of Nuer twins was expressed to Evans-Pritchard in a way that also drew attention to their animal capacities. In a statement that has now entered as formative statement in the history of cultural anthropology: ‘a twin is not a person, he is a bird’.[1] The ‘correct’ way to interpret such declarations about twins and birds – as a metaphorical speech-act or a literal description of an alternative way of understanding the world or a demonstration of the symbolic, meaning-making structure of a ‘primitive’ mind – came to dominate debates in social anthropology. Keen to develop a more symbolically adept alternative to the functionalist perspective of human rite and ritual, Evans-Pritchard argued that by claiming that ‘a twin is a bird’ the Nuer display a kind of pragmatic or adaptive relativism. Twins, in this view, are malleable objects whose meaning is caught in a dynamic structure of cultural need and interest: ‘an object may be perceived in different ways according to different affective interests.’[2] Thus, Evans-Pritchard explains that the equivalence drawn between twins and birds is not based on a fact of physical or social similarity but on a common access to God and spirit. As he wrote later in his book Nuer Religion, birds are ‘a suitable symbol in which to express the special relationship in which a twin stands to God.’[3] Evans-Pritchard was in disagreement with the ideas of Lucien Lévy–Bruhl, whose theory of ‘primitive mentality’ argued that people such as the Nuer had a pre-conscious capacity for articulating contradictory notions – their ideas about twins should be read as an expression of this underdeveloped, contradictory style of ‘primitive’ cognition. Evans-Pritchard cautioned against naïve literalism and, instead, demanded a deeper understanding of how the mind poetically engages with an environment. The spiritual and animal quality of twinship for the Nuer were not to be taken at face value, but were evidence of a cultural poesies that should be as comprehensible to the outsider as it is intended by their informant: ‘an imaginative level of thought where the mind moves in figures, symbols, metaphors, and analogies, and many an elaboration of poetic fancy and language’.[4] The distinction here between poetry and its hidden meaning, the explanans and the explanandum, is a distinction that wholly supports the role of a mediator, analyst, or interpreter; in short, an anthropologist to bring an event into meaning. In an attempt to characterise both the multiplicity of meanings that entities like twins can elicit, as well as the urge to provide anthropological readings of such entities, Wendy James has argued that, ‘Actions, however plain, tend to carry something of the ambivalent about them, to refer implicitly to other actions and actors off-stage, and thus to resist reduction to plain singular meaning.’[5] Anthropological practitioners such as James, in this guise, can acknowledge their partiality and their descriptive compulsion as part of a common metaphysical problem. Twins are not unique and alone in demanding the expert intervention of anthropologists to be made meaningful, but their presence – whether observed, reported, or discussed across anthropological theory more broadly – permits a dichotomy between what they are taken to be and the many different things they could signify.
Developing his commentary on Evans-Pritchard’s work, Claude Lévi–Strauss argued that the cause of what he termed ‘totemism’ – of which a comparison between human groups and animals may be taken as an example – should shift both from subjective utility to objective analogy but also from ‘external analogy to internal homology.’[6] In other words, from self-interested individualism to the universal and objective condition which causes humans to compare themselves to animals. With an analytic trajectory set towards causal objectivity, Lévi-Strauss argues that the meaning the Nuer ascribe to twins and birds reflects ‘a series of logical connections uniting mental relations.’[7] On a hierarchy of relations, twins are elevated above other humans in a way that birds are to other animals. Therefore, what is being expressed by the expression ‘a twin is not a person, he is a bird’ is a simple form of relational thinking. A geographically and culturally isolated belief is raised to the level of universal significance: ‘this kind of inference is applicable not only to the particular relationship which the Nuer establish between twins and birds […] but to every relationship postulated between human groups and animal species.’[8] It is within this context – in a discussion regarding the quasi-animalilty of twins – that Lévi–Strauss declared his now famous bon mot: ‘natural species are not chosen because they are “good to eat” but because they are “good to think [with]’’’.[9] Widely quoted and influential this statement encapsulates a way of seeing and interpreting the cultural beliefs of others by recognising how material objects, animals, and other totems do not exist to serve straightforward utilitarian purposes. Rather, these are things by which the world comes to be identified and understood, objects of thought whose symbolic substance reflects the ways in which humans construct and assign meaning. What is especially complex about this statement is that the equivalence made between animals and twins, in whatever context, is understood as an instrument for modelling social relations while, of course, being a social relation in their own right. Their lack of unitary exclusivity, as mobile and symbolic intermediaries, makes twins thinking, feeling things who do work for both the subjects of study (e.g. the Nuer) and the anthropologist who seeks to refine a descriptive expertise or, as Lévi-Strauss does, uses them to provide the evidence for a foundational and universally observed form of human cognition. It must be emphasised, therefore, that twins in these anthropological texts are objects with which to establish, test and debate the nature of ‘anthropological authority’.
The macro-level clarity that twins might bring to some research projects can be grounded in local-level ambiguities. As structuralist anthropology competed with symbolist approaches, and where theories that prioritised higher-order unity over the contradictory, messy or contingent, twins were again the favoured objects of discussion. Victor Turner’s study of Ndembu twins in Zambia developed the concept of ‘hybridity’ in anthropological thought, providing a means to account for the diverse response to twin births and higher order multiples in African societies. Misty Bastian claims Turner’s study ‘helped to frame most anthropological debates about multiple birth’, especially for those who seek to foreground tension, conflict, and discomfort as an explanation for ritual process as well as tacit evidence for social development.[10] It is telling that Turner’s analysis is one that keenly focuses upon category distinctions and their transgression – defining cultural hybridity according to how twin births cause members of Ndembu society ‘classificatory embarrassment’.[11] The birth of twins is simultaneously ‘a blessing and a misfortune’ because in terms of kinship, corporate relations, and social status, twins do not fit into single-born norms, such as the norm of bearing one child at a time or the conformity to birth orders used as a primary means to share out resources. Hence, Turner argues that the hybridity of twinship is expressed in these socially–embedded terms: ‘what is physically double is structurally single and what is mystically one is empirically two.’[12] Such a formulation works to locate hybrid identities both internal to the twin relation and against exterior cultural organisations and practices. On account of being so riddled with yet further paradox, Turner argues that twins gain their explanatory capacity:
In many societies, twins have this mediating function between animality and deity: They are at once more than human and less than human. Almost everywhere in tribal society they are hard to fit into the ideal model of the social structure, but one of the paradoxes of twinship is that it sometimes becomes associated with rituals that exhibit the fundamental principles of that structure; twinship takes on a contrastive character analogous to the relationship between figure and ground in Gestalt psychology.[13]
To the trained observer, twins are an enlightening paradox – an aporia that illuminates and provides a measuring stick for social order and ritual necessity. The ritual treatment of twins is, therefore, an expression of collective desire to restore an ideal order. Though they are disruptive and liminal figures, attempts to incorporate and manage difficulties associated with twins helps to clarify ideals that are otherwise hidden.
Turner’s analysis has been hugely influential and his ethnographic successors have reflected upon the difficulties attached to the ‘plural and contested identities’[14] of twinship. In analyses such as these twins remain stranger outsiders. Whatever magic, mysteries, or malevolence might be attached to them their identities are framed in such a way that compounds this difference by adding a responsibility of anthropological power. So Susan Diduk, writing of the Kedjom of Cameroon, places the telling capacity of twins in the hands of twins themselves: ‘By doubling personhood, by appearing to be so extraordinary, twins allow exploring the ordinary qualities of the person in Kedjom and Grassfields society. They help to construct a language of difference that ironically is contingent upon and reveals the mundane.’[15] Twins ‘allow’ and ‘help’ to elicit the broader nature of what it means to be a ‘person’ among the Kedjom. This is, I think, more than a rhetorical formulation but subtle proof that twins are used as evidence of a society trying to organise itself, to affect distinctions between the extraordinary and the quotidian. She writes how twins ‘illustrate something central to Kedjom and Grassfields conceptions of childhood. Beliefs about twins reflect and reproduce the cultural emphasis on inequality at the same time that they are also treated as profoundly equal.’[16] Helping, allowing, illustrating – twins are both active and inactive in these verbs. In a quite a simple sense, twins do all these things by doing nothing at all. They are neither asked for their assistance, nor are they allowed to object to the inferences made in their name. Whether or not recuperation into a norm is possible or even desirable, anthropological theory has sought to safeguard twins as a tool of cultural analysis because they are circumstantial and pre-existing, beyond the manipulation of the dispassionate observer. As a consequence, it is important to observe how ‘classificatory embarrassment’ felt by the communities discussed is in sharp contrast to confident descriptions of that ambiguity. ‘Twins are never children, never adults,’ writes Walter E. A. van Beek in connection to the twins of the Kapsiki/Higi of North Cameroon and Northeastern Nigeria, ‘but forever liminals: they are born initiates, they remain so during their whole lives, forever in-between, powerful but fragile, a dangerous blessing.’[17] Used to bring clarity to societies, twins become ‘equipmental figures’ in anthropological accounts such as these – their patterns of kinship and religious practice, brought to light through the ambivalence surrounding their status as humans. They are, as van Beek calls refers to them elsewhere but without the same sense of classificatory mystery, ‘monitoring instruments’; a means for anthropologists to get a better view of the shifting and competing political, gendered and generational tensions which have so influenced the course of the social sciences in recent decades.[18]
[1] E. E. Evans-Pritchard, ‘Customs and Beliefs Relating to Twins Among the Nilotic Nuer’, The Uganda Journal (1936), p.236.
[2] E. E. Evans-Pritchard, ‘Lévy–Bruhl’s Theory of Primitive Mentality’, Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts, Cairo University, II (1934), p.32.
[3] E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), p.132
[4] Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion, p.142.
[5] Wendy James, The Ceremonial Animal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p.7.
[6] Claude Lévi–Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham (London: Merlin Press, 1964), p. 78. Italics removed.
[7] Lévi–Strauss, Totemism, p.80.
[8] Lévi–Strauss, Totemism, p.81.
[9] Lévi–Strauss, Totemism, p. 89. ‘With’ is added because the adjectival plural of the French expression bonnes à penser is difficult to translate and ‘good to think’ grammatically incorrect. See Edmund Leach, Claude Levi-Strauss (New York: Viking, 1970), p.31.
[10] Misty L. Bastian, ‘‘The Demon Superstition’: Abominable Twins and Mission Culture in Onitsha History’, Ethnology 40.1 (2001), p.14.
[11] Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago, IL: Chicago UP, 1969), p.45.
[12] Turner, The Ritual Process, p.45.
[13] Turner, The Ritual Process, p.47.
[14] Susan Diduk, ‘Twinship and Juvenile Power: The Ordinariness of the Extraordinary’, Ethnology 40.1 (2001), p.42.
[15] Diduk, ‘Twinship and Juvenile Power’, p.30.
[16] Diduk, p.34. Italics removed.
[17] Walter E. A. van Beek, ‘Forever Liminal: Twins Among the Kapiski/Higi of North Cameroon and Northeastern Nigeria’, in Twins in African and Diaspora Cultures: Double Trouble, Twice Blessed, ed. Philip M. Peek (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), p. 180.
[18] Walter E. A. van Beek and Thomas Blakely, ‘The Innocent Sorcerer: Coping with Evil in Two African Societies, Kapiski and Dogon’, in African Religion: Experience and Expression, eds. Thomas Blakely, Walter E. A. van Beek, and Dennis L. Thomson (Oxford: James Currey, 1994), pp.196–228. See also Stephen Van Wolputte, ‘Twins and Intertwinement: Reflections on Ambiguity and Ambivalence in Northwestern Namibia’, in Twins in African and Diaspora Cultures, p.66.
My paper, in a special issue of the journal Critical Quarterly, is now available (£) online. The essay came about through my doctoral research with Steven Connor, who left The London Consortium for Cambridge in 2012. Thanks to Joe Brooker for convening the event and editing the resulting collection, Weather Reports.
Abstract The meaning and significance of human twins is shaped by a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, many of which employ twins to test a variety of hypotheses about who or what we are. Whether twins are viewed as physical anomalies, religious miracles, or scientific marvels, criteria can be identified according to which they are separated from those born alone. This article attends to the ways in which twins are differentiated and shows how they have been used as living evidence or proof that supports sociological, religious, and scientific practice. By collating examples taken from the humanities, the social and biomedical sciences – with particular attention paid to works of social anthropology and molecular biology – William Viney seeks to articulate both the differing scales by which twins become distinct objects of research and how this sense of scale affects the extent to which they are understood as active, formative agents in those research endeavours, used to substantiate, clarify and inform. The wider aim of this article is to understand the dynamic means by which twins are drawn into and sustain explanatory narratives that extend far beyond the twin relation, taken to be generative objects in the formation of new knowledge. By tracing the exceptional cultural life of twins across different fields of inquiry we can better understand the utility of sustaining particular, exclusive human groups, both as an experimental means and as the evidential ends of research practice.
A version of this paper will be given at Reading Animals, The University of Sheffield, 17–20 July, 2014.
Betteridige’s Law states that every newspaper headline that is presented in the form of a rhetorical question is to be answered with a ‘no’: “Is Michael Jackson living on a desert island with rappers Tupac and Biggie?” No. “Does eating meat 5-times a day create immunity to cancer?” No. “Does the proposition of a newspaper headline when formed through a rhetorical question always constitute a false preposition?” Obviously this doesn’t bear too much thinking about, but the question: do twin studies – that is, using human twins in research into problems posed in epidemiology, molecular genetics, and behaviour genetics – constitute “the closest we get to doing animal experiments on humans” is a question without an obvious response. Jokingly, one geneticist thinks that twin studies are indeed “the closest we can get to doing animal experiments on humans.”[1]. The question of doing experiments on human animals is, for me, a matter of animacy – a matter of life and death, matter in life and death. Since my research concerns experiments on humans and I participate in research with humans (mostly epigenetic research, but also cognitive neuroscientific imaging studies, epidemiological studies, and others). I am, as they say, entangled within this statement; ‘entangled’ in the sense that Felicity Callard and Des Fitzgerald have recently described as those “temporary, local assemblages of motivation, interest, people and machinery.” These ‘entanglements’ make it possible “to momentarily think something exterior to the ‘disciplinary’ orthodoxies of experimental and conceptual practice, and the taken-for-granted dynamics of power that underwrite much of their relationship.”[2] Being entangled in this way means that I cannot ‘claim to know where others believe’ to favour the refrain of activist and politically conservative collectives, to condemn someone for not doing something or other. Instead, being entangled means that I am not going to offer you a satisfying response to the question . I want to understand what might be common to experiments on humans and non-humans, to reveal their entanglement, and speculate as to what alternatives might be available to us.
Humans are experimented upon, cut up, observed, named, stitched back together, engineered and synthesised. As well as this situation always, somehow, calling into question what ‘the human’ might mean, the peculiarly animate relations with things assumed to be ‘outside’ the domain of ‘humanity’, brings the animal and the twin to entwine in their co-dependent relation with the experimental. More on that in a bit. For those that don’t know, Mel Chen has brilliantly documented this and allied problems in her award-winning book, Animacies, published by Duke University Press in 2012. This blog post operates as a kind of extended commentary on Mel’s provocations, and I acknowledge a debt to her for a path she has shown to me. However, when considering the status of experiments on live human subjects, a challenge arises in Mel’s book and in my own research regarding the ethics of defending humans against perceived instrumentalisation, objectification, and misanthropy, in times when the relation between humans and non-humans is being systematically, though diversely, challenged by actors big and small, live and dead, benign and war-mongering.
Those born together in a single gestation first entered studies of heredity, genetics, and then a wide range of allied fields and subfields, through Galton’s biometric analysis of “nature and nurture”– a phrase first coined in relation to his twin studies of the mid 1870s. Guided by depth biology, with an implied division between inner and outer, interior natures and exterior environments, Galton hoped to discover the mechanisms that allowed twins to “keep[…] time like two watches, hardly to be thrown out of accord except for some physical jar”[3] From Galton we can trace the long process that has scientifically en-thinged twins – recruited them as evidence and material, imagining and treating them as tools in order to animate new theories of life, development, and disease. Over 1.5 million twins and family members now participate in research worldwide, measured for a huge variety of physical and behavioural traits. Chen, whose academic background is in comparative linguistics, argues that “language users use animacy hierarchies [which is to say: the gradations of sentience, lifeliness, meaning, and individuality] to manipulate, affirm, and shift the ontologies that matter the world”.[4] With this in mind, consider the status of twins when researchers like Nancy Segal – a psychologist based in California – refer to her research participants as “a powerful investigatory tool”[5] or as “living laboratories”[6] Twins matter here, but particularly as they serve as efficient, exploratory and contingent, and future-oriented tools. Robert Plomin – a behavioural geneticist based at the Institute of Psychiatry in London – describes his studies of identical twins who differ for a given phenotype as “a sharp scalpel for dissecting non-shared environmental effects from genetic effects.”[7] Twins, then, are ‘technical things’ absorbed into experimental systems and used to bring to light and make matter the epistemic objects that comprise molecular processes, bringing to light complex organic systems, at once synonymous and experimentally distinct from those systems.[8] I think we broach another question here: What are twin objects when they enter research paradigms as argumentative, demonstrative figures that render them tools, twin-tools, and thus ‘the closest tie’, the most ‘harmonius relation’, even an opportunity to understand the mysteries of so-called ‘person-to-person telepathy’? And here’s the rub – when humans are objectified in this way, with their pre and post-natal lives a proof of meaning, polyvalently attached – are we to respond with outrage and maintain the privileges of our species? So great are the associations between the animal rights and animal experimentation, that when the human takes the place of the place of the animal, an uncomfortable confusion of roles takes place. How we guide ourselves through this confusion is crucial, especially if the molecular substances discovered through twin studies are to be given any ontological reality outside the self-centred hermeneutic loops of European phenomenology, which grounds the animal in the consciousness-dependent otherness of the thing, to understand the thing/the animal through an instrumental for-ness. However, even beyond that tradition, where Husserl, Heidegger, Satre and Merleau-Ponty, are made absent, we can find philosophers like Martha Nussbaum defining the process of objectification through the human’s opposition to and distinction from a ‘thing’. For her, objectification occurs where “one is treating as an object what is really not an object, what is, in fact, a human being.”[9] Twins, however, are not only treated as or “blended” with things – as if ‘things’ should be also understood as separate to the human body – but twins, especially when they are used in the kind of scientific research I am thinking of are fundamentally interanimating; experimental bodies understood as a complex assemblage of cell lines, gene expression levels, methylation sites, and microbial communities, to name just a few kinds of ‘matter’ that twin research has tried to articulate. Notwithstanding this thingliness – twins remain human twins, realised in and through and perhaps despite their things that are explored through them.
It’s for this reason that I find Mel Chen’s animacy scale, or cline, both incredibly useful but also rather too linear for my purposes, her discursive approach narrows the range of practices that I take to doubly en-thing twins – practices that not only render them technical objects in contemporary genomic research – beings that are corporeally and ideationally measured, sampled, computed, and ‘shared’ as part of a globally-configured experimental apparatus – but also providing the evidence for what Nikolas Rose has characterized as the “molecularization of vitality”; which, with and among other things, decomposes, anatomizes, manipulates, amplifies, and reproduces “tissues, proteins, molecules, and drugs […] to be regarded, in many respects, as manipulable and transferable elements or units, which can delocalized – moved from place to place, from organism to organism, from disease to disease, from person to person.”[10] Here the role of animacy forces a set of ethical, epistemological, and ontological decisions that, for me, makes a critical medical humanities approach to twins necessary and possible – should twins be defended against instrumentality, safeguarding an autonomous, lively, unique, unbreakable and free ‘human’? Or, can we break with the scales of anthropocentric privilege since, doing so, pursues the more difficult and critical – ‘critical’, as in ‘urgent’ or ‘decisive’ – and certainly more risky task of understanding how and why twins come to matter in different ways and at different times? Indeed, a productive line of inquiry, it seems to me, would be to look at how the history of the concept of “animal models” relates to the modelling practices that involve twins. Doing so might allow us to ask the following kind of questions – How are the technical as well as the rhetorical dimensions of research extrapolation handled with different bodies? How exactly are human-nonhuman animacies mobilised across supposedly different research practices, and to what end? In what sense does one form of modelling beget and “model” the other form, adding layers of complexity already at work but made intangible or invisible through the pomp and ceremony of institutional PR? I suspect that these ‘models’ share rather a lot, grounding animal and human research practices in ontologies of animate matter which shore up violent, experimental, and progressive epistemologies alike.
[1]Quoted in Lucy Jolin, ‘Nature’s Control Group’, In Touch, Spring 2013, p. 22. [2] Des Fitzgerald and Felicity Callard, private correspondence. [3]Galton, ‘The History of Twins as a Criterion of Nature and Nurture’, p. 574 [4]Chen, Animacies, p. 42. [5] Nancy L. Segal, Born Together–Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2012), p. 2, pp. 10–11. [6]Nancy Segal, Entwined Lives: Twins and What They Tell Us About Human Behavior (New York: Putnam, 1999), p. 1. [7] Robert Plomin, ‘Commentary: Why Are Children in the Same Family So Different? Non-Shared Environment Three Decades Later’,International Journal of Epidemiology 40 (2011), p. 587. [8] For more on the distinction between ‘technical’ and ‘epistemic’ thing taken from Hans–Jorg Rheinberger, Towards a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube (Stanford: California University Press, 1997), pp. 28–29. [9]Martha Nussbaum, ‘Objectification’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 24. 4 (1995), p.257 [10]Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), p.13, p. 15.
This podcast is about the relations between the social sciences and the neurosciences, and what it might mean to do interdisciplinary work between these areas. Des Fitzgerald and Felicity Callard, two social scientists interested in stepping outside the bounds of social-science methods, and especially experienced in engaging with neuroscientific experiments, offer a new way of thinking about collaboration between the social- and neuro-sciences. They call their approach ‘Experimental Entanglements’.
Research on the brain, as well as the widespread dissemination of this research, has significantly shaped our understanding of what it is to be human in the 21st century. Indeed, many facets of human life that were, for much of the twentieth century, primarily understood through t
Raymond Tallis has, in contrast, argued that it poses the gravest of intellectual threats. Indeed, Tallis is far from being the only one to have worried about the reductive and potentially anti-humanist tendencies of the neurosciences.
And yet, beyond such debates, it is increasingly clear that the more that scientists experiment on and with the human brain, the more it becomes clear that our brains, and the experimental and intellectual practices that attend to them, are bound up in cultural, semiotic, bodily, societal and aesthetic ‘webs’. The current situation in cognitive neuroscience – with techniques such as functional neuroimaging available in ever more sophisticated forms – is ripe for a new level of interdisciplinary engagement.
In the last few years, both Callard and Fitzgerald have participated in a number of explicitly designed ‘interdisciplinary’ ventures that have attempted to bring neuroscientists and social scientists together. The European Network of Neuroscience and Society (ENSN) and the Volkswagen Foundation’s European Platform for Life Sciences, Mind Sciences and the Humanities are two of these. Indeed, Fitzgerald and Callard first developed their approach of ‘experimental entanglement’ in a workshop held at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, which they co-designed, and which was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. In this podcast they reflect especially on the opportunities and constraints offered by such ‘interdisciplinary’ ventures. They counter a model in which social scientists and neuroscientists simply ‘interact’ with one another, secure in their own disciplinary arenas, and instead propose a much more complex and awkward practice of ‘experimental entanglement,’ in which to collaborate both in and beyond the neuroscientific laboratory.
The podcast touches on existing experimental collaborations. Fitzgerald discusses his research in the Urban Brain Lab at King’s College London, which focuses on the overlap between sociology and neuroscience in questions around city life and mental health – and asks what a shared investigation across these disciplines can and should look like. Callard discusses her on-going collaboration on the brain and mind ‘at rest’ with neuroscientists and psychologists. For much of the twentieth century, psychologists were heavily preoccupied with studying how people respond to external tasks, which made it harder for scientists to bring together biology, psychology and culture to get at what the brain, mind and body are doing when they are ‘at rest’ (i.e. not responding to an external task).
In contrast to usual social scientific interest in effects, ethics, or outcomes of the neurosciences as such, Fitzgerald’s and Callard’s collaborative approach focuses on the ‘experiment’ as a space of creative intervention – and it uses the concept of ‘entanglement’ to current bureaucratic and academic fixations on ‘engagement’ and ‘dialogue’. What could experimental practices look like in the twenty-first century, they ask, in which so-called neurological knowledge and so-called sociological and cultural knowledge tumble over one another in a way that ultimately makes it hard to distinguish one from the other?
Their programmatic statement about such an approach is available, Open Access, in the journal Theory, Culture & Society (‘Social Science and Neuroscience Beyond Interdisciplinarity: Experimental Entanglements’). They are authors of the forthcoming monograph Rethinking Interdisciplinarity across the Social Sciences and Neurosciences (Palgrave). From October 2014, Fitzgerald will participate in, and Callard will be Group Leader of, the inaugural project in The Hub at Wellcome Collection, working with neuroscientists, artists, social scientists and humanities scholars to develop experimental entanglements that are focused around rest, busyness and exertion at the scales of the brain, mind, body, organism and city.
In his introduction to the play, Stephen Greenblatt argues that the identical twins which feature in Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, “are fairly commonplace and the fact that two people can bear the same name even more so, but Shakespeare’s play calls attention to all that is potentially disorienting in the routine circumstances of life.”[1] It is hard to understand what Greenblatt means when he says that “identical twins are fairly commonplace” – in what era, for whom, in what sense? In biological terms they are neither commonplace nor are they rare. In historical terms, being born identical in the late-sixteenth century was extremely hazardous, especially for the twins but more particularly for the mother bearing them. Moreover, the equation suggested in this quotation between identical twins and “routine” and “life”, again elides the biological and historical specificity of multiple birth, and the artistic transformation implied by bringing identical twins to a stage of observation that is both comic and tragic. What Greenblatt “calls to attention” is rather more a narrow understanding of what it means to be and see twins, which he suggest are “as like one another as two coins of equal value”[2] By monetising twinship in this way he overlooks the challenge of staging twins, where one must select players that are not and cannot be identically alike, that are not made of metal but of flesh and bone and genes and hair and so on, and that are not of equal value. Such are the disembodied and paper-based assumptions of a cultural materialist, inattentive to the physicality of theatre and the biology of playing up and out.
[1] Stephen Greenblatt, ‘The Comedy of Errors’, in The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katherine Eisaman Maus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), pp. 683–684.
[2] Stephen Greenblatt, ‘The Comedy of Errors’, in The Norton Shakespeare, p. 688.
I presented this paper to the Centre for Critical Theory at University of Nottingham. Many thanks go to Andy Goffey for the invitation.
I’d like to open a conversation about animacy, matter, and the molecular status of twins, to question what it is that makes urgent the peculiar exigency of twins, the sense that they are both with ‘us’ and against ‘us,’ and so throwing doubt over what sort of ‘us’ is being claimed and where that relation is being located. I would be truly grateful for any comments or recommendations you might have, anything that you feel seems important or germane, but equally, I’d like to invite an intellectual mercy killing if you think that I’m going seriously off the rails.
In what follows I’d like to provide a commentary on Mel Chen’s work on ‘animacies’, a concept that relates to, describes, and can help challenge hierarchies of agency, awareness, mobility, and liveness, to patrol the distinction between what is ‘alive’ and ‘dead.’ Chen argues a scale of animacy has supported normative concepts of ‘the human’ since, at least, Aristotle’s De Anima, and continues to regulate “gradations of lifeliness”[1] from inanimate, ‘dead things’ – minerals, stones and other non-sentient objects – constitute a zero-degree of agency – through to vegetables, smaller insects and non-vertebrates, to larger animals, mammals, children, women, and finally Man as a maximally agentive figure. Animacy stratifies Nature according to liveness, purpose, and sentience over which humans assume privileged access.
For Chen, understanding the racialised, sexualised and abelised political ecologies that can feed off and maintain the animacy scale helps to “trouble the binary of life and nonlife [to give a clearer] way to conceive of relationality and intersubjective exchange”.[2] The failures, breaks, and contradictions between the animate and inanimate reveal how the scale of animacy “must continually interanimate in spite of its apparent fixedness”[3] – hence, her book is called ‘animacies’ on the understanding that other practices, epistemologies, and ontologies are possible.
Ok, so how do twins fit in? And this, perhaps, is my main point, fittedness doesn’t quite cover the specific and often contradictory forms of mobility that twins achieve along this unstable cline, a mobility that is neither ‘culturally’ or ‘naturally’ directed, but articulates itself through the numerous ways that twin bodies can, do, and might matter.
There are a number of ways that twins may interanimate across and along the animacy hierarchy – from a sense of incongruent codependence, to adult infantalisation, to the ableist logic of extrasensory communication to the dis-ableism of infant language impairment. But I’ll focus the rest of this paper on the use of twins in the natural sciences, especially in psychology, genetics, and epidemiology, where they are thought of and make explicit ‘things’; people whose agentive powers both plunge down the animacy scale through their instrumentalisation as and proximity to laboratory materials, animals, and tools – ‘the non-human’ – and projected up the animacy scale, for being a powerful investigatory community generating, to quote one twin researcher “unique insights […] simply by acting naturally”[4]. Their every life event, decision is resonant with scientifically universal information – their bodies are used to stabilise and articulate new vital locations, processes, and therapeutic possibilities.. This is “knowledge and insight for everyone,” to quote one leading epidemiologist, “not just for twins”[5] It’s this particular animation of twins that I’d like to focus on for the rest of this paper and I hope to have time later to consider whether there’s a materialism of twinship that permits us to look at relations and intersubjective exchange in a different light.
***
So: twin things. Those born together in a single gestation first entered studies of heredity, genetics, and then a wide range of allied fields and subfields, through Galton’s biometric analysis of “nature and nurture”– a phrase first coined in relation to his twin studies of the mid 1870s. Guided by depth biology Galton hoped to discover the mechanisms that allowed twins to “keep[…] time like two watches, hardly to be thrown out of accord except for some physical jar”[6] From Galton we can trace the long process that has scientifically en-thinged twins – recruited them as evidence and material, imagined and treated as tools in order to animate new theories of life, development, and disease. Over 1.5 million twins and family members now participate in research worldwide, measured for a huge variety of physical and behavioural traits.
Chen, whose academic background is in comparative linguistics, argues that “language users use animacy hierarchies to manipulate, affirm, and shift the ontologies that matter the world”.[7] With this in mind, consider the status of twins when researchers like Nancy Segal refer to her research participants as “a powerful investigatory tool”[8] or as “living laboratories”[9] Twins matter, but particularly as they serve as efficient, exploratory and contingent tools. Robert Plomin describes his studies of identical twins who differ for a given phenotype as “a sharp scalpel for dissecting non-shared environmental effects from genetic effects.”[10] Twins are ‘technical things’ absorbed into experimental systems and used to bring to light and make matter the epistemic objects that comprise molecular processes.[11] Returning to the animacy scale, I think this use of twins problematizes both the inanimate, stone-like inertia of ‘the thing’ and the spatial and temporal integrity of its all-powerful human antagonist. However, I’m not sure that Chen’s work gives satisfactory guidance when she argues that “when humans are blended with objects along this cline, they are effectively ‘dehumanized’ and simultaneously de-subjectified and objectified”.[12] She uses a distinction between object and subject that finds sustenance in Martha Nussbaum’s claim that objectification occurs whenever “one is treating as an object what is really not an object, what is, in fact, a human being.”[13] Twins, however, are not only treated as or “blended” with things, but are experimental bodies understood as a complex assemblage of cell lines, gene expression levels, methylation sites, and microbial communities, to name just a few kinds of ‘matter’ that twin research has tried to articulate. Somehow, twins remain human twins, realised in and through and perhaps despite their thingliness.
It’s for this reason that I find Chen’s animacy scale or cline both incredibly useful but also rather linear, her discursive approach too narrow for the range of practices that I take to doubly en-thing twins – practices that not only render them technical objects in contemporary genomic research – beings that are measured, sampled, computed, and ‘shared’ as part of a globally-configured experimental apparatus – but also providing the evidence for what Nikolas Rose has characterized as the “molecularization of vitality”; which, with and among other things, decomposes, anatomizes, manipulates, amplifies, and reproduces “tissues, proteins, molecules, and drugs […] to be regarded, in many respects, as manipulable and transferable elements or units, which can be delocalized – moved from place to place, from organism to organism, from disease to disease, from person to person.”[14]
Here the role of animacy forces a set of ethical, epistemological, and ontological decisions that, for me, makes a critical medical humanities approach to twins necessary and possible – should twins be defended against instrumentality, safeguarding an autonomous, lively, unique, unbreakable and free ‘human’, or, can we break with the scales of anthropocentric privilege since, doing so, pursues the more difficult and critical – as in urgent or decisive – and certainly more risky task of understanding how and why twins come to matter in different ways and at different times.
***
If animating twins permits a recalibration of what it means to instrumentalise bodies conceived at a molecular scale, then I join those who are keen to challenge the strict partition between a human inner and non-human outer – to perforate “the exclusionary zone made of the perceptual operands of phenomenology”[15], and, by dismissing its correlationist accessory, which thrives through a plural multiculturism set against a static mononaturalism, I take the study of twin animacies to open up different, transcorporeal, transobjective socialities. Mel Chen’s characterisation of molecular intimacy is, I think, somewhat problematic, based as it is on physical absorption and assimilation: “When physically co-present with others, I ingest them. There is nothing fanciful about this. I am ingesting their exhaled air, their sloughed skin, and the skin of tables, chairs, and carpet of our shared room”.[16] I am both wary of the notion of physical co-presence being valorised and relied on here but also of how Chen’s human-nonhuman assemblies bare some similarity to Jane Bennett’s attempts to elevate “the shared materiality of all things”[17] to stress how each human is “a heterogeneous compound of wonderfully vibrant, dangerously vibrant, matter.”[18]As in Chen’s analysis, this vital materiality finds its force in accommodating and absorbing what is foreign. Bennett writes: “Vital materiality better captures an ‘alien’ quality of our own flesh, and in so doing reminds humans of the very radical character of the (fractious) kinship between the human and the nonhuman. My ‘own’ body is material, and yet this vital materiality is not fully or exclusively human. My flesh is populated and constituted by different swarms of foreigners”[19] We might characterize some of this object-oriented thinking as operating under what Chen calls the “xenobiotic”[20] where the argumentative thrust of these new ontologies, which borrow so much from molecular biology, follow particular trajectories of inclusion as they extend agency into the world by locating the nonhuman within.
***
To revive Chen’s description of the animacy scale and apply it to her own interanimations, I want to ask in what way does focusing on particular kinds of vibrant things “manipulate, affirm, and shift the ontologies that matter the world”? What, after so many years of humanistic, anti-essentialist broadsides against molecular biology, are we to make of the genetic matter that co-ordinates the somatic identity of twins in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? Because, if there is one question same-sex twins are asked by strangers it is this: identical or non-identical, monozygotic or dizygotic? This is gene talk through and through and it’s how twin bodies matter between molar and molecular scales. Despite the informatic metaphors of gene action – where ‘codes’ and ‘scripts’ are ‘read’ and ‘translated’ – Barry Barnes and John Dupré remind us that “DNA is stuff, and we are able to relate directly to it and gain knowledge of it as such–where to find it, how to separate it off, how it behaves as material, and so forth […] DNA is indeed a tangible material substance.”[21] Through twins and the research in which they participate, that tangibility has been made possible. And its on this basis that, in my approach to twinning, I want to resist the absolute collapse of the inner and outer, the rather lava-lamp-like materialism of the xenobiotic, since one does not become a twin in the same way one becomes infected or toxic; twinship may share something in common with concepts of biosociality, biological or genetic citizenship, but not in the same way that all of these terms have become tied in the STS and sociology literature to the circulation of “disease, disfigurement or disability”[22], what we might think of as the ‘proper terrain’ of biopolitics. No, I think the animate matter of twins makes another perspective possible; one that does not let the molecular elide the molar and one that does not over- or undermine the physicality of genes, but one that opens up the thingliness of specific people whose animate identity is internally-external, materially distributed within and between bodies.
[1] Chen, Animacies: Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), p. 167.
[2] Chen, Animacies, p.11.
[3] Chen, Animacies, p.30
[4] Nancy Segal, ‘Twins: The Finest Natural Experiment’, Personality and Individual Differences 49 (2010), p. 317.
[5] Tim Spector, ‘The Use of Twins in Research’. BRC Biomedical Forum, Guy’s Hospital, 9th January 2013.
[6] Galton, ‘The History of Twins as a Criterion of Nature and Nurture’, p. 574
[7] Chen, Animacies, p. 42.
[8] Nancy L. Segal, Born Together–Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2012), p. 2.
[9] Nancy Segal, Entwined Lives: Twins and What They Tell Us About Human Behavior (New York: Putnam, 1999), p. 1.
[10] Robert Plomin, ‘Commentary: Why Are Children in the Same Family So Different? Non-Shared Environment Three Decades Later’,International Journal of Epidemiology 40 (2011), p. 587.
[11] For more on the distinction between ‘technical’ and ‘epistemic’ thing taken from Hans–Jorg Rheinberger, Towards a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube (Stanford: California University Press, 1997), pp. 28–29.
[12] Chen, Animacies, p. 40
[13] Martha Nussbaum, ‘Objectification’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 24. 4 (1995), p.257
[14] Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), p.13, p. 15.
[15] Chen, Animacies, p.209
[16] Ibid.
[17] Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 13.
[18] Bennett, Vibrant Matter, pp. 12–13.
[19] Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, p. 112
[20] Chen, Animacies, p. 208.
[21] Barry Barnes and John Dupré, Genomes and What to Make of Them (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2008), p. 64
[22] Rose, The Politics of Life Itself, p. 137.
The Wonder of Twins 