The gut that thinks

I turn now to a neurological account of the human peristaltic system that dates back to about the same era when scientific managers applied time and motion studies to the labouring body, to increase efficiency and decrease waste in both industrial and domestic workplaces. In this account, the peristaltic system is sometimes under the domain of the brain and central nervous system, but more often controlled by what has come to be termed ‘the second brain’, a division of the autonomic nervous system that completely escapes directives from the first brain, and yet which is responsive (and therefore susceptible) to the natural and cultural environment. In this account, our gut ‘thinks by itself’ insofar as it functions independently of our first brain; but at the same time, like the leg that marches, the arm that aims the rifle, the hand that practises perfect penmanship, it offers another target for the modern fashioning of what Foucault calls the ‘docile body’. Mary Ann Doane has commented that modernity ‘was characterized by the impulse to wear time, to append it to the body so that the watch became a kind of prosthetic device extending the capacity of the body to measure time’ (Doane 2002, 4). I would argue, in fact, that the body itself became, and continues to function as, a kind of chronometer, its neurological capacities engaged for the purpose of gauging and modulating duration, thus making of itself a guarantor both of the regularity and the uni-directionality of time.

I will be considering two representative medical accounts of how digestion and excretion work, one by neurogastroenterologist Michael Gershon, whose 1998 book The Second Brain details the emergence of the enteric nervous system in early twentieth-century physiological science, the other by British medical practitioner Josiah Oldfield, whose 1943 article on constipation was typical of the discourse of regularity throughout the previous four decades. Read together, these texts offer a striking Darwinian account of the human body in an evolutionary context, and demonstrate that, while the neurological model of the ‘second brain’ was developed in the early twentieth century, when the discursive distinction between organic and psychological concepts of the ‘nerve’ had not yet solidified, it has since received renewed attention at the turn of the twenty-first century, allowing for a particularly labile approach both to the embodiedness of linguistic and cultural aspects of subjectivity and to the social aspects of embodiedness. As I will show, the modern concept of the ‘nerve’ and the persistent history of its ambiguity as at once a physiological, a psychological and a social phenomenon, especially with regard to its role in peristaltic processes, permits a promising approach to the question of the relationship between the subject and the social realm.