This is a three-part post, be warned..

Humans and spiders have a complicated relationship to say the least. As a child (ahem, and still now) I was terrified of spiders; the way they creeped, crawled, and seemed to have it in for me. As an adult, I have more of a business style agreement with them - a relationship built on a mutual trust that neither of us will harm the other; let sleeping lions lie. I’m still pretty scared of them and so I really enjoyed my Anthropology of Monsters class during my undergraduate, in which we dissected the psychoanalysis behind arachnophobia. Now bear with me here, because I really didn’t think I would have mentioned ‘him’ twice on this blog already, but here we are… Freud suggested that ultimately we are scared of spiders because they reflect a glitch in our psychosexual development as children. This theory rests on the assumption that spiders look like hands (what Noel Carroll calls ’symbolic biology’), or more specifically hairy hands, and therefore act as a visual simile of the old wives tale warning that masturbation would result in hair growing all over your palms. Just a heads up, there are no hair follicles on the palms, so this is highly unlikely to happen (and also I’ve tried and tested the theory and can confirm it’s not true…). Freud also argued that humans are more specifically scared of the spider’s mouth, and it’s potential to bite us, poison us or suck our blood. While I may agree with him on this, I’m not convinced by his rationale. Freud being Freud (ugh) explained that this fear of the spider’s ‘orality’ (the focusing of sexual energy and feeling on the mouth), was to be feared because it subconsciously reminds us of being babies and breastfeeding/learning to relate to the world and our parents through the mouth. David D. Gilmore (book can be found here) expands this saying that this sensation when seeing a spider, provokes the memory of being held by a giant (the mother) and her giant mouth, which could (I guess, in theory) eat the baby (??!?!?), and whats more taboo than cannibalism (…incest). Of course, as humans, we love to feel the adrenaline of being scared and tapping into those taboos, hence the success of all those giant spider films (Eight Legged Freaks, etc.).

Stick Weaving. Found at:https://www.theweavingloom.com/weave-experiments-stick-weaving/

But how does this relate to weaving or technofeminism, you ask?!?! Well I briefly mentioned the story of Arachne in my general post on weaving in mythology, and going into more detail reveals a whole-lotta important symbolism and meaning. Arachne was from a humble family, but gained a reputation for being a great weaver and embroiderer and thus it was assumed that she must have been directly taught her skill by Athena, the goddess of spinners (AKA Minerva, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses). Yet Arachne refused to attribute her talents to the goddess, and challenged Athena in order to prove that her own talents far surpassed Athena’s, and thus could not have come from the goddess. At first, Athena warned Arachne not to challenge a goddess, but Arachne did not back down and a competition was set to see who could weave the best tapestry. Athena wove an image of the gods and goddesses of Olympia in their majesty, and at each corner of the tapestry scenes depicted the tragic defeat of mortals who dared to challenge the gods, all bordered by an olive branch of peace (how pleasant). However, Arachne’s tapestry revealed the hypocrisy and corruption of the gods, as she depicted love affairs (e.g. Zeus and Europa, Zeus and Danae - NB. Zeus is Athena’s father) and mortals deceived and ridiculed by the gods. Arachne’s tapestry was far more skilful and beautiful than Athena’s, and so in a bout of rage Athena ripped Arachne’s work and struck Arachne with the shuttle. Shamed and scared, Arachne hung herself with the thread she has used for weaving. Athena, however, did not think death was punishment enough, and transformed Arachne into a spider before her death, condemning her to a life of unceasing weaving. The myth then acts as an aetiology of spider’s association with weaving and web-spinning, but also metaphorically warns mortals not to challenge the gods.

“Live!’ she said, / ‘Yes, live but hand, you wicked girl, and know / You’ll rue the future too: that penalty / Your kind shall pay to all posterity!’ / And as she turned to go, she sprinkled her / With drugs of Hecate, and in a trice, / Touched by the bitter lotion, all her hair / Falls off and with it go her nose and ears. / Her head shrinks tiny’ her whole body’s small; / Instead of legs slim fingers line her sides. / The rest is belly; yet from that she sends / A fine-spun thread and, as a spider, still / Weaving her web, pursues her former skill. (from Metamorpheses).

So the word spider actually comes from the Old English ‘spinan’, meaning ‘to spin.’ I’ve briefly written about the association of weaving/spinning and sexual purity, as represented by the dualism between Athena and Aphrodite, but we can also see the origin of the word ‘spinster’ in this connotation and how this is portrayed physically through Arachne’s spider form. ‘Spinster’ normally means unwed woman, but it more generally is used to describe a physically unattractive woman. What’s interesting about the description of Arachne is the uncanny body horror of the shrunken head, huge belly, and 8 slim fingers (shudders). Perhaps this is another reason why we are so scared of spiders, and why we think of them as monsters. Referring back to ’Monster Theory’ (any excuse) Buffie Johnson further claims that spiders are liminal creatures, they weave webs in the air and yet anchor them to the ground; they are neither a creature of the sky nor of the earth, and just like the uncanny-ness of Arachne as half-spider, half-woman, they resist ontological categorisation - and we know humans (# not all men) hate that! Arachne’s liminality and sheer monstrosity made her an appropriate figure to encounter in the Purgatory of Dante’s Inferno. Here, she is the materialisation of the sinful duality of the word ‘bastard’ (‘impure’ or ‘hybrid’). and is depicted as a madwoman denied the right to create (spinster) or even share her knowledge (remember, matrilineal oral culture). Arachne has also cameoed as a monster in a number of films, for example, in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, she is pictured as a hideous half-woman, half-spider monster who preys on people to feed killer spiders. Other evil spiders, specifically noted to be women, include Shelob (from The Lord of The Rings, duh), also referred to as “Her Sneak”, who was “bloated and grown fat with endless brooding on her feasts, weaving webs of shadow; for all living things were her food, and her vomit darkness”. Interestingly, Shelob is pretty sexualised, and Alison Milbank claims that part of our fear towards Shelob comes from the Freudian vagina dentata (toothed vagina), which ultimately stems from the male fear of the powerful, unknown vaginal orifice and thus castration anxiety - physical and symbolic emasculation (Freud >> Derrida >> Irigaray). Nietzsche also holds Shelob’s gluttony, laziness and sexual desire for her many offspirng, accountable for her monstrosity. ANYWAY enough about incest. It is kinda suspicious though, that a male spider, aka spider man, is represented as the hero; a cunning, slick, agile, and totally un-monstrous half human half spider… !??!?

Arachne, therefore, is undeniably not the hero, especially not in contrast to Athena. Told with sympathy for Athena, the Greek myth is a parable of the dangers of a student outperforming their master, and also of the importance of maintaining peace through conformity. More literally, perhaps, the story reflects the conditions of women’s domestic textile production, whereby their sole purpose was to weave for practical, and not artistic, reasons. There are many similarities here with Ariadne’s story, and equally there is a feminist re-interpretation that reveals Arachne’s symbolic potential.

Most obviously, Arachne’s skill in speaking out represents the power of the female voice, and the need to speak out against injustice. This reiterates the myth of Philomela, and I have written a whole post on the importance of women’s writing and voice, particularly as an artistic practice (‘feminist poetics’). One of the first proto-feminist texts ever written, Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies, (written in 1405 so pre Cavendish), sought to undermine Arachne’s patriarchal confines by presenting her as a matriarch of ‘new art’ and an all-round creative genius. Depictions of spiders from other cultures reflect this credence, for example the ‘Spider Grandmother’ or ‘Thought Women’ in some Native American myths is a powerful woman who created life itself. Similarly, spiders often symbolize patience and persistence when spinning their web and catching prey, which could be interpreted as traits needed by women in order to remain strong/optimistic when challenging the status quo (patriarchy), as Arachne does. I’m also reminded of Louise Bourgeois, whose huge spider sculptures are said to be an ode to her mother, who was strong, maternal, powerful, clever, and a weaver.

Louisa Bourgeois

Nancy K. Miller’s understanding of female authorship is expounded in an essay titled ‘Arachnologies: The Woman, The Text and the Critic,’ emphasising the potential of Arachne directly. While arguing for the importance of feminist re-interpretation, Miller also highlights the ambiguities present in the dichotomy established when dealing with female authorship; that of the creator and her work, or the text and the body. She poses her critique at Barthes, who she argues wrongly privileges the text over the author; a position afforded only to men who have the power to control meaning, or who can write text made up of words already spoken and already imbued with meaning (by men). This language is imposed upon women’s writing, and female characters, when we attempt to interpret them according to existing semantic norms. For example, Miller emphasises the symbolism of the shrinkage of Arachne’s head as the removal of her ‘ability to reason’ (according to Enlightenment thinking), and her condemnation to the body. Now this is an idea saturated in Enlightenment rationale, wherein women were more bodily/emotive/acted on their physical desires, etc., unlike men who could act with reason/the mind/overcome the limitations of the body (for more info, read Foucault). This is further reiterated as Arachne is restricted to corporeal reproduction (as women generally are). What the original myth tries to establish is an analogical distinction between emotion (as Arachne’s tapestry and weaving was, supposedly), and truth (as Athena’s tapestry ‘depicted’). Miller claims, however, that this interpretation only makes sense when read according to androcentric semantics, and that from a feminist perspective the body is in fact the source of truth just as much as the mind, and we are grounded in our reality by our corporeality (perception comes from our integrated senses). Unlike the once fashionable (second-wave) feminist-modernist pursuit to overcome the female body through tech in hope of liberation, there is now a recognition of the vital position of the female body in feminist politics. Today, this idea is most associated with Feminist New Materialism (FNM), and an emphasis on embodied subjectivity, flat ontology (non-dialectic), and process (as non-reductive becoming). Echoing the principles of a flat ontology, Miller reiterates Virginia Woolf who, in A Room of One’s Own, wrote “Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.” . Fiction is always anchored to reality, there is no dichotomy between reason/emotion, truth/beauty, objective/subjective (remember, spiders are creatures of liminality or hybrid). Referring back to Haraway’s ‘situated knowledge’, Arachne represents a somato-poetics of female authorship as autobiographism (writing from oneself) and corporeality (writing oneself).

“By arachnology, then, I mean a critical positioning which reads against the weave of in-differentiation to discover the embodiment in writing of a gendered subjectivity.” (Miller, 1986: 272).

Expanding this idea through FNM, Rosi Braidotti uses the same concept of metamorphoses to describe female subjectivity as always-becoming:

”..the subject of feminism is not Woman as the complementary and specular other of man, but rather a complex and multi-layered embodied subject who has taken her distance from the institution of femininity. ‘She’ no longer coincides with the disempowered reflection of a dominant subject who casts his masculinity in a universalistic posture. She, in fact, may no longer be a she, but the subject of quite another story: a subject-in-process, a mutant, the other of the Other, a post-Woman embodied subject cast in female morphology who has already undergone an essential metamorphosis.” (from Becoming Woman, or
Sexual Difference
Revisited)

A process of always-becoming is significantly feminist, notably in it’s rejection of the possibility of a reducible object, but also in its move away from non-linearity. Women have long been associated with cyclical time - menstruation, the moon, etc. - over masculine narratives of progress as linear or teleological. As Woolf’s quote reflects, rather than existing along a unidirectional line, epistemology is web-like, and stems from multiple points of departure. Feminist knowledge is inherently diffractive, and always in motion - no text exists without a subjective author, no meaning in pre-determined.

Practically, weaving can be said to be an embodied process as described by the anthropologist Margaret Mead (1963: 241): “The woman at her hand-loom controls the tension of the weft by the feeling in her muscles and the rhythm of her body motion…”. Yet when looms were automated, the process became disembodied, mechanical and objective (NB. - objective knowledge as ineffective/detached). Mead finished the sentence, “…in the factory she watches the loom, and acts at externally stated intervals, as the operations of the machine dictate them. … In the factory she is asked to adjust her rhythm to that of the rhythm prescribed by the factory; to do things· according to externally set time limits.”. While some have suggested that the automated loom was a ‘complex human machine’, whereby the weaver was integrated into the machinery, I don’t believe this can be used as an example of cyborg theory, but rather shows a “migration of control” (DeLanda) from human hands to machines, and subsequently the disempowerment of women under industrial capitalism and the failure to replicate or reproduce the art of weaving. Returning to the embodied process of weaving, or to subjective epistemologies, again acts as a form of political resistance. Natural spider silk (and notably from large, female spiders) has been used in a number of scientific developments and technological innovations, for example to mark the centre of time and longitude in the Greenwich Observatory’s most important eyepiece, or as crosshairs in gun sights. Yet, any attempt to artificially replicate the silk has failed; most famously when Canadian scientists tried to genetically modify goats to produce silk-milk, but the silk was no where near as strong as a spider’s - Why? They determined it was all down to the embodied way that the spider spins their silk.

Cya.

2020 - Spiders, feminism, weaving and the web.

Posts tagged with rosi-braidotti

SPIDER FEMINISM - Arachne to arachnology via the web.