Cultural Phycology

C H A R G E D A RT I FAC T S A N D T H E D E T O N AT I O N O F L I M I N A L I T Y Teddy-Bear Diplomacy in the Newborn Incubator Machine

◆ K Y R A M A R I E L A N D Z E L I U S

Visiting fellow, Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, UK

Abstract This article employs ethnography to explore the multiple significations of ornamenting the incubator, a quasi-ritual practice wherein mothers of preterm babies place rudimentary things, like stuffed animal toys, into their infants’ life-support machines. I contend that such enactments pose more or less conscious endeavors to domesticate and animate these prosthetic devices, as veritable cyborg wombs which interpolate mother–child bonding and problematize maternal identity. In these acts, the ‘technoscapes’ (Appadurai, 1990) of cheap, mundane items and exclusive, precision instruments converge in a paradoxical, but fertile juxtaposition to make the ambiguous figure of the preterm infant culturally-intelligible as well as biologically- viable. It is suggested that the liminality of toys and trinkets out of place empowers them to attenuate the alienness of the incubator and its techno- liminal capacity to alienate. A kind of teddy-bear diplomacy is in play wherein juvenile playthings are enlisted to detonate the charged foreignness of the incubator-other, and bring baby into familiar cultural grammars.

Key Words ◆ incubator ◆ liminal ◆ motherhood ◆ preterm ◆ prosthesis ◆ technology ◆ teddy bear

INCUBATING INFANTS AND INCUBATOR ORNAMENTS

Over the past two decades, a new techno-medical artifact has come into prominence on the expanding frontier of cyborganized human survival

323

Journal of Material Culture Copyright © 2001 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol. 6(3): 323–344 [1359-1835(200111)6:3; 323–344;019589]

03 Landzelius (to/d) 22/10/01 4:10 pm Page 323

at WORCESTER STATE COLLEGE LIBRA on July 3, 2015mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from

and identities. A precision player in the dramatic theater of scientific life- support, the miracle machine in question is the neonatal intensive care monitor, what in the vernacular we might call an ‘incubator’. Its task is no less than to artificially gestate to maturity a baby born before its time, that is to say earlier than 38 weeks gestational age. The experience of premature delivery and the ensuing prolonged hospitalization of the infant characteristically rip asunder a new mother’s lifeworld, destabi- lizing her post-pregnancy subjectivity and desires, and denaturalizing her taken-for-granted maternal identity. Moreover, the incubator machinery that labors to sustain the infant, and its attendant medical entourage of physicians, protocol and procedures, necessarily – as an incontrovertible feature of the therapeutic process itself – intrude upon her relationship with her newborn and thwart yearnings for emotional and bodily bonding with child. Nonetheless, while a mother may be periph- eral, my ethnographic research has found that she is far from passive, for it can be said that many a mother symbolically ‘stakes her presence’ in the machine, namely through the widespread practice whereby

J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 6 ( 3 )

324

F I G U R E 1 Incubated infant with incubator ornaments Internet photo used by kind permission of the Bruckman family.

[http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Valley/7553/index.html]

03 Landzelius (to/d) 22/10/01 4:10 pm Page 324

at WORCESTER STATE COLLEGE LIBRA on July 3, 2015mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from

mothers place stuffed animal toys, dolls, ribbons, photographs, greeting cards, and like trinkets into their babies’ incubator units (see Figures 1 and 2).

The objective of this essay is to explore how this decorative activity embeds coping mechanisms to help women (psychological and socially) come to terms with the exigencies imposed by the existential crisis of a preterm baby. Given the baby’s extreme developmental immaturity and the invasive nature of the medical treatment, and based on my fieldwork experiences, I interpret this behavior to be directed less towards the infant, but rather to be oriented as a kind of overture to the incubator. My focus here is thus to probe the implications of ornamenting the incu- bator, as I have observed it unfold through anthropological study of one local universe of North American women. Because ornamentalizing practices are semiotically-loaded acts with patterned formalities, a specific context and a transformative agenda (see Bell, 1997), I argue that they gravitate towards ritual, and hence analyze this behavior as a quasi- ritual endeavor. It can be contended that the enlistment of juvenile play- things and nostalgic mementos in such quasi-ritual endeavors represents an obvious turn towards items of comfort and everyday familiarity, which may manifest a more or less conscious gesture to mitigate the

Landzelius: C H A R G E D A RT I FAC T S A N D T H E D E T O N AT I O N O F L I M I N A L I T Y

325

F I G U R E 2 Incubated infant with incubator ornaments Internet photo used by kind permission of the Frackiewicz family.

[http://www.geocities.com/EnchantedForest/Mountain/1038]

03 Landzelius (to/d) 22/10/01 4:10 pm Page 325

at WORCESTER STATE COLLEGE LIBRA on July 3, 2015mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from

threatening alienation of the incubator machine. I wish to examine this thesis by examining the nuances and multiple significations of the per- formative and transformative acts I nickname teddy-bear diplomacy. In so doing, I seek to ponder the role of both esoteric and trivial material culture as meaning-making artifactual others in our consciousness and in our relationships. In the practice of incubator ornamentation we witness fertile incongruities at play in a paradox whereby cheap, alienable, mass- produced toys and trinkets come to be nestled together with baby – inside a high-tech, exclusive, vital instrument of life support and sur- veillance.

PRECISION INSTRUMENTS AND INDETERMINATE PLAYERS

From their crude 19th-century agricultural origins as heating chambers for chicken eggs, to the development of the first oxygenated bathtubs in the 1930s, to today’s multi-applianced conglomerates, incubators have been engineered into complex cybernetic systems that traffic in nutri- ents, gases, pharmaceuticals and waste products, whilst also monitoring the vital statistics of their human inhabitants. During the same historical period, ‘preterm’ infants have evolved from being freaks-on-parade at Victorian carnivals, to being hailed ‘wonders of science’ at successive World’s Fairs where prototype incubators were first exhibited (see Baker, 1996). Today, preterm infants constitute a not-inconsequential percent- age of newborns who demand extensive investment with state-of-the-art resources, and profoundly alter the taken-for-granted course of human existence. Indeed, an entirely new field of science – the barely 4 decades strong medical subdiscipline of neonatology – has emerged to attend this new ‘category of person’. Or we might more accurately say that this person has emerged as an ontological invention of the biomedical para- digm; and, on occasion, even an iatrogenic (i.e. medically-produced) con- sequence, because precipitating factors for premature birth in certain cases implicate medical practice itself – like in-vitro fertilization, along- side demographic (e.g. older maternal age) and lifestyle risks (e.g. illicit drug use). In other words, a preterm infant is not simply a patient of high-tech healing, it is acutely a product/byproduct of technoscientific parentage and modes of knowing and doing. By making life possible for a human who ‘ought’ to have been as yet unborn or fated to a near- certain death, the technology ‘at our disposal’ introduces a taxonomic puzzle. The ‘preterm’ infant – a being who, by another name, could well be called a ‘post-corporeal fetus’ – begins life betwixt and between the womb and the world. The resulting ambiguous status endows preterm infants with a categorical indeterminacy; and I propose that this qualifies them into a transitory condition known as ‘liminality’ in anthropological

J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 6 ( 3 )

326

03 Landzelius (to/d) 22/10/01 4:10 pm Page 326

at WORCESTER STATE COLLEGE LIBRA on July 3, 2015mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from

parlance. Turner defines liminality as the ‘state and process of mid-tran- sition in a rite of passage’ (Turner and Turner, 1978: 249); and, follow- ing Van Gennep, equates it with being on the threshold – the limen – of orthodox states-of-being, particularly during major life transitions (Turner, 1969: 94). The ideological values pertaining to liminality gener- ally hold that the secular powerlessness of the ‘neophyte’ liminal figure- in-transition is compensated for by a sacred powerfulness (Turner and Turner, 1978: 249–50). Accordingly, a condition of liminality character- istically presupposes ritual action (and vice versa); indeed, in Turner’s theorizing, liminality is inherently the most important dynamic of ritual. In a general sense, we can say that liminality connotes a simultaneous vulnerable/empowering state of transition, but also of potentiality (Turner and Turner, 1978: 3). It is problematically outside conventional taxonomies and requires new structural responses. In adopting the concept of liminality to situate the preterm infant, I here put forth the conjecture that bio-technological practices are themselves implicated in creating new forms of liminality, what we might call techno-liminalities, like the ‘mutation’ (Dumit, 1997: 84, and passim) in the category of person newly recognized as the preterm baby. Equipped, or burdened, with extraordinary liminal distinctions, this person is emerging as a neo- phyte social player to be reckoned with, and one whose identity (at least in the formative years of childhood) is expressly brokered by mothers through practices of incubator ornamentation. These nascent ritualizing processes themselves work alongside other world-making venues, like Internet solidarity-networks and (self-proclaimed) ‘cybernursery web- rings’ where parents of ‘preemie’ babies exchange heartfelt stories about their experiences amidst graphic photographs of their hospitalized infants (see Landzelius, 1999).

Tiny infants connected to massive incubators present an arresting sight indeed. As noted, incubators comprise an assembly of precision instruments with a mission to gestate, and can be said to collectively function as a veritable prosthetic umbilicus provisioning the extracorpo- real fetus. Given the organic/inorganic hybridity of the incubator-child dyad, the simulated ecosystem plus inhabitant approximate what I have termed a cyborg womb (Landzelius, 1999). Elsewhere (1999: 95) I have proposed that cyborg wombs constitute a type of charged artifactual other, a category I define with triple intent. First, charged artifacts are charac- teristically vital machines or devices charged with existential tasks to endow life and/or to normalize, via prostheses, the human organism ‘as we know it’. Second, charged artifacts are invested with (and evocative of) heightened emotional charge, in ways that radically reorder our inter- subjective relations with human and technological others. Third, charged artifacts impose charges on us: they extract costs by making dis- sonant taken-for-granted identities; and they extract costs in the ways

Landzelius: C H A R G E D A RT I FAC T S A N D T H E D E T O N AT I O N O F L I M I N A L I T Y

327

03 Landzelius (to/d) 22/10/01 4:10 pm Page 327

at WORCESTER STATE COLLEGE LIBRA on July 3, 2015mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from

that their irresistibility (the near-impossibility of imagining to resist them) unhinges our pre-charged being-in-the-world. Taking these thematiza- tions as a point of departure, I wish to note that it is mothers whose worlds are most charged by the foreign element of simulated vitality and surrogacy that is the artifactual incubator-other. It bursts onto the horizon of her consciousness and her paradigmatic relationships, dis- torting her experiential codes and relegating her to an auxiliary status vis-à-vis her own infant – a being who exists in a state of symbiotic co- dependency with this very machine-other. And yet, the machine meta- phorically also holds mother: positioning her in a double bind that is anchored in her own problematic ambivalence and the utter inconceiv- ability of resistance towards this artifact, to which she is simultaneously profoundly grateful and uneasily resentful (Landzelius, 1999). As I have proposed, one way in which mothers have collectively sought to negoti- ate these charged artifacts into their lives is by embellishing them with simple playthings and kitsch recast in the a-typical role of incubator ornaments. By virtue of their incongruous assignment, it is suggested that such objects, out-of-place themselves, assume a ‘liminal’ status characteristic of items on the threshold of conventional cultural uses, contexts and classifications. If we apply Douglas’ theorizations on ambi- guity and the ritual potency of disorder, the liminality of incubator orna- ments accordingly tenders them, symbolically speaking, with ‘both danger and power’ (Douglas, 1984: 94). ‘To have been in the margins is to have been in contact with danger, to have been at a source of power’ (1984: 97). It follows that liminality can have fertile consequences for the invention of new orders, as Douglas explains: ‘disorder by impli- cation is unlimited, no pattern has been realized in it, but its potential for patterning is indefinite . . . We recognize that it is destructive to exist- ing patterns, also that it has potentiality’ (1984: 94). It is the simultaneous disorderly, but restructuring, communicative potentiality of toys and trinkets out of place in the social drama of the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) that constitutes the issue under study here.

That mothers keenly recognize, even consciously exploit, the incon- gruous nature of toys and trinkets stationed in incubators is attested to in their narratives, which often iterated the striking differences between furry animal toys and hard precision instruments. Notably, it is mothers who orchestrate these enactments of polarity, a telling consideration given the satellite position that the maternal figure occupies vis-à-vis the cyborg womb. Given their protagonist role, mothers’ penchants to dec- orate the machine comprise transindividual social initiatives to recon- figure maternal status and agency within the hospital milieu. Hereby, in response to the situational liminality of the preterm infant and the techno-liminality of the cyborg womb, mothers invent a rejoinder limi- nality in the contrastive form of incubated teddy bears. Like many ritual

J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 6 ( 3 )

328

03 Landzelius (to/d) 22/10/01 4:10 pm Page 328

at WORCESTER STATE COLLEGE LIBRA on July 3, 2015mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from

acts, their performances can be regarded as ‘nonformalized gestures that emerge under experimental conditions and have the potential to gener- ate new rituals as well as new cultural forms’ (Alexander, 1991: 16). In seeking to distinguish the empowering ambiguity of incubator orna- ments, I turn to ethnographic accounts of decorating the machine.

My analysis is based upon the personal stories of 124 mothers of preterm, hospitalized infants whom I interviewed during two years (1990–92) of participant-observation in the NICU of a major US hospital (see Kaiser, 1993; Landzelius, 1999). These women came from diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds; however, for the sake of brevity their heterogeneity must be glossed over herein. Likewise, citations are here decontextualized from any given mother’s narrative (presented under pseudonym) and untethered from the dramatic, often traumatic, details of her and her child’s experiences. What emerges is a constella- tion of attitudes drawn from mothers’ words and deeds. Taken together, maternal quotes and actions express the range, but even more tren- chantly, the convergent themes of these women’s experiences. Their re- presentation here is framed by the tenet that ‘[h]umans always find themselves in a world that is saturated in signification, and whose char- acter only reveals itself gradually and in fragments’ (Thomas, 1998: 108). By mapping mothers’ attitudes I hope to discern from such fragments the dynamic spectrum of saturated significations that shape the world of incubator ornamentation. The majority of things so appointed start the venture as items of recent purchase; there were, however important exceptions, most notably in the use of family photographs, religious icons, and what mothers referred to as ‘good luck charms’ to which they harbored prior attachment. The objects of adornment described here, and collectively implied in my discussion of ‘teddy bears et al.’ (stuffed animals by far being the most frequent) typify the repertoire of material culture that has found its way into neonatal life-support chambers.

When asked about this behavior, one mother explained to me that it was her ‘desire to make things cozy, more home-like’ that motivated sit- uating a ‘family’ of stuffed teddy bear figures in different sizes and colors inside her child’s incubator. Ginger, another mother, stated that she found it ‘so much easier’ to see her daughter surrounded by ‘some col- orful toys and friendly-type things,’ like the bunny-shaped rattle propped at her baby’s feet. Emma expressed her wish to ‘soften’ the ‘cold and impersonal’ hospital setting and ‘give it a positive boost’ by stringing mini banners, computer-printed with cartoon graphics and her son’s name, around the perimeter of the unit. Likewise, Rochelle confessed to ‘trying to brighten up the atmosphere’ by equipping the incubator with a stuffed ‘happy face’ toy (a yellow cloth sphere with a smiling-mouth- and-eye pattern, which is a mildly ubiquitous and oft-satirized souvenir of ludic Americana). Alicia made decoration imperative, and hinged it to

Landzelius: C H A R G E D A RT I FAC T S A N D T H E D E T O N AT I O N O F L I M I N A L I T Y

329

03 Landzelius (to/d) 22/10/01 4:10 pm Page 329

at WORCESTER STATE COLLEGE LIBRA on July 3, 2015mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from

the task of enlivening the machines: ‘Watcha gonna do but decorate these cold, hard machines, and make them cheery and homey . . . well – as alive as we can’. Alicia’s rhetorical challenge ‘watcha gonna do but . . .’ was given a more pointed directive in Latoya’s pronouncement that: ‘to see such wee babies in such gigantic monitors without so much as giving them something . . . you’d have to be heartless’. Claire put the matter in terms of sartorial decorum: ‘well them monitors should be dressed up a bit’. Marta articulated similar sentiments in describing ‘how sweet’ the ‘cute and classy’ white booties with blue laces looked as addi- tions to her son’s artificial life-support chamber. Helen explained that the family photograph and greeting card she had taped to the sides of the chamber made her daughter appear ‘less lonely’: ‘I want her to know I’m always here’.

Such sentiments – that incubators ‘needed’ to be made lively, pretty, cozy, soft, more cheery, homey, colorful and the like – surfaced recur- rently in the reasons mothers gave for embellishing high-tech medical contraptions with low-tech toys and trinkets. Reading backwards from these graphic adjectives, we encounter the attributes mothers tacitly assign to incubator machines; and expose the attitudes underlying mothers’ proactive motives for turning simple objects-of-recreation into objects-of-transformation imbued with serious meaning-making tasks. Borrowing the expressive phrase ‘human-object entanglement’ from Thomas (1991), my interpretive framework maps descriptive fragments into two predominant modes of mothers’ entanglements with the ‘object- ness’ of the machine and the ornaments situated therein, given the ‘sub- jectness’ of its infant inhabitant (for a psychoanalytic reading of these practices, see Landzelius, 2001). I theorize that these ‘modes of entan- glement’ premise and act upon desires to: (1) domesticate the cyborg womb, and symbolically bring it into the moral economy of home; and (2) animate the cyborg womb and enculturate it away from the global, impersonal machinations of technoscience and engineering networks. Both modalities work alongside other persuasions towards an ultimate goal of socializing, humanizing, and in some cases even spiritualizing the machine.

DOMESTICATING THE MACHINE

Considered collectively, mothers’ comments about incubator ornamen- tation can be said to have engendered a leitmotif of ‘home’. Some nar- ratives invoked the potent signifier itself (i.e. in expressing desires to make the incubator ‘more homey’); whereas others discursively couched it in synonyms or idioms approximating home (e.g. familiar, welcome, comfy, secure, cheery, cozy). At times, the rhetorics of home yielded more concrete references to the real article, as in Samantha’s contention

J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 6 ( 3 )

330

03 Landzelius (to/d) 22/10/01 4:10 pm Page 330

at WORCESTER STATE COLLEGE LIBRA on July 3, 2015mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from

that ‘. . . to see that [nursery] room already decorated and everything back home, it’s too much, it’s too hard when my baby is here [at the hos- pital] instead’. In an analogous vein, Grace poses the pregnant question: ‘Why be home? It’s lonely, empty-feeling’ to rationalize her long hospi- tal stays. Her narrative later hints at a vicarious, compensatory resolu- tion of her own alienation from home in her choice of ‘cuddly’ and ‘personal’ to characterize the furry koala bear cling-toy she fastened to the mattress of her baby’s chamber. This mother’s despondent inter- rogatory ‘why be home?’ keenly verbalizes the dilemmas facing these women; for in the event of a sick newborn, the hospital supplies de facto first home for baby. By default it thus becomes ‘second home’ to mothers, some of whom adopted this clichéd, if nonetheless enigmatic phrase; and by so doing, implicitly conceded their forfeiture of any uncontested (i.e. emotionally and physically integrated) attitudes vis-à- vis their own homes. Even if she is afforded sympathetic treatment and privileged visiting hours at the hospital, a mother is ultimately relegated to the outsider status of ‘visitor’: shuttling to and fro between home and ‘second-home’ in order simply to be near her child. This provisionally appoints mothers to a condition of circumstantial nomadism in which they must navigate the dialectic of public and private on a trek wherein home-point becomes nebulous and untethered, a disengaged subjectiv- ity – ‘empty’ in the words of Grace, ‘painful’, ‘lonely’, ‘all-wrong’ to quote other mothers. Given such enforced (spatial and mental) migra- tions, a mother’s psychological drama may parallel that of a refugee, for whom the notions of home and origin ‘may . . . refer to many places and not one fixed locus’, as Parkin (1999: 309) proposes. Indeed, one might well say that the technoscientific invention of the preterm baby, in effect makes mothers into classificatory ‘refugees’: exiled from traditional maternal identities and role expectations. Notably, one of the first of many let-downs a mother of a hospitalized newborn must endure is the situational affront to normative expectations of home, wherein heartfelt anticipations to bring the baby – who is, after all, the newest kinship actor – back home are painfully thwarted. From this perspective, mothers’ expressive ornamentalizing acts might be read as gestures to syncretize the disparate worlds of hospital and home. Partially aestheti- cizing pain becomes tantamount to anesthetizing it.

Hence it is suggested that by aspiring (through objects of adornment) to make the artificial incubator – the surrogate mother – more ‘homey’, mothers are engaged in a sort of domestication-at-a-distance. This exer- cise proceeds by symbolically shifting the territories of home and hos- pital both discursively (in defining the decorated monitor as more ‘homey’) and materially (in transporting items from home to hospital in order to ‘personalize’ the medical environment). To place a familiar play- thing or personal memento in the multiply-gadgeted high-tech crib can

Landzelius: C H A R G E D A RT I FAC T S A N D T H E D E T O N AT I O N O F L I M I N A L I T Y

331

03 Landzelius (to/d) 22/10/01 4:10 pm Page 331

at WORCESTER STATE COLLEGE LIBRA on July 3, 2015mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from

be conceived as an act of inscription, a liturgical performance to inscribe ‘unconsecrated’ (read: anonymous, dangerous, mysterious) institutional- ized space with the (familiar and safe) kitsch of home. Decoration is thus akin to an enculturation of the machine into the household; or more accurately, into that protective realm of security, predictability, and idio- syncrasy whose referent conjures the dense imaginary of home. Given that ‘home’ is a saturated root metaphor and quasi-localizable ‘relation- ship’ in addition to a geography, I want to emphasize that homey knick- knacks were insignia less of a residence called home than of a cultural schemata-made-discretionary project of ‘home’. Such private projects are arguably wedded to an archetype (albeit individualized) whose imagin- ary is rehearsed in the gifts of sentimental value that a mother chooses to bestow upon the entity of incubator-plus-child.

One can discern processes of sympathetic magic at play in a quasi- ritual wherein indices of domesticity (objects brought from, purchased for, or constitutive of the domestic sphere) are imbued with the power to transform the circumscribed incubator cubicle into a domicile more like the (expected) baby’s room back home. The transference of material proxies of home to the hospital can be said to enact an equivalence that rehearses – in reverse – the transferal of the child, and thereby symbol- ically ‘performs’ the wished-for exchange that one mother confusingly, but (from a Lacanian [1977] appreciation of the significance of ‘defective language’ for communicative intent) tellingly articulated in the remark: ‘I want to transport [my baby’s] room right here [to the hospital], or really of course it’s the other way around: I mean that, of course, home is where I want to picture her’. Through the ‘agency’ that is (culturally and personally) assigned to toys and trinkets out of place, the incubator- plus-inhabitant are thus syntagmatically brought into the moral economy that signifies the household. Here, within the orbit of domesticity, family affairs and personal histories, is where – naturally and rightly – the child ought to be. Accordingly, it warrants conjecture that ornamenting the machine harbors aspirations of mild insurrection, such that to magically expropriate the cyborg womb into the values and significations of ‘home’ precipitates a cosmetic act of benign resistance. Because, following Butler (1993: 35) ‘the intelligibility of materiality is an effect of power, realized in performance’, mothers’ performative actions which stretch the cultural intelligibility of material trinkets therefore subvert forms of power conditioned through normative discourse and practices. From this perspective, decorating stages a spatial contest which playfully chal- lenges the medical regime’s disciplining of mother-visitors. By taking space in the incubator, items of trivia are symbolically engaged in phys- ically staking a mother’s presence and asserting kinship rights. The sub- version proceeds despite (or perhaps because of) the subordinate status of crude materia relative to sophisticated life-support equipment.

J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 6 ( 3 )

332

03 Landzelius (to/d) 22/10/01 4:10 pm Page 332

at WORCESTER STATE COLLEGE LIBRA on July 3, 2015mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Importantly, such vicarious resistance is both orderly and condoned: for example, a contemporaneous textbook on the care of preterm babies actually instructs nurses to extend polite indulgence, even encourage- ment and guidelines, to mothers’ desires to place personal objects and small toys in the intensive care chambers (see Lancaster, 1986: 411). Per- mission to indulge these slight transgressions is defended on the grounds of a ‘therapeutic’ paradigm: that striking out against the psychological sterility of the hospital environment with the accoutrements of home affords an acceptable, ‘healthy’ outlet for maternal grief, anger and anxiety. The ironic entrapment, however, is that to some degree any pseudo-resistance is, by default, institutionally co-opted – ‘tamed’ – alongside a mother’s own object-oriented taming of that foreign element which technologically nurtures her infant.

The resulting assimilation of resistance has affinities with the situ- ation that Marcuse (1965) formulated as ‘repressive tolerance’: the ten- dency for institutions of power to necessarily co-opt resistance. In the asymmetrical relations characterizing dominant systems, dissonance is elusive and illusionary; indeed the only expression dissonance can take preconditionally renders it ineffective. Similarly, the permission the hos- pital accords mothers to enact subliminal fantasies of resistance bespeaks tacit recognition of the pragmatic value vested in accommo- dating a mother’s imagined escape from the double bind the crisis of a preterm, hospitalized infant imposes. Hereby, the opportunity to con- structively ‘let off steam’ through ornamenting the incubator helps mothers not only better cope with the exigencies of the crisis, but more willingly comply with the protocols of the institution. Mothers’ pseudo- resistances as well as their unequivocally humane indulgence by hospi- tals (contra their strict regimens and policing of hygiene) can also be read as adaptive responses to what I described earlier as the irresistibility of charged artifacts like the cyborg womb, which engender challenges and problematic ambivalences that require strategic management.

ANIMATING THE SURROGATE

Metaphorically and materially summoning movable proxies of ‘home’ as a means to resist the disciplined sterility of the hospital enclave marks a gambit to superficially, but nevertheless critically, punctuate the sepa- rateness of these places. In choosing stuffed animals, dolls, pictures and ribbons to be aestheticizing accoutrements in this endeavor, mothers are deliberately reacting to the incongruities of hard machines versus soft toys; high-tech versus low-tech; cold, white, lifeless appliances counter- acted by warm, colorful, lifelike comfort items. Mothers discursively align ornamentation with desires to: ‘enliven’, ‘soften’, ‘enrich’, ‘comfort’, ‘brighten up’, and even ‘give a heart to’ the cyborg womb. The

Landzelius: C H A R G E D A RT I FAC T S A N D T H E D E T O N AT I O N O F L I M I N A L I T Y

333

03 Landzelius (to/d) 22/10/01 4:10 pm Page 333

at WORCESTER STATE COLLEGE LIBRA on July 3, 2015mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from

word ‘color’ frequently seasoned mothers’ narratives, and by implication was accredited with making the incubator ‘more cheery’ and bringing it to ‘life’, possibly because color pointedly contrasts with the sterile white landscape of the hospital. Moreover, despite the fact that bright heating lamps keep the chamber at body temperature and its surface warm to the touch, mothers frequently describe the incubator as ‘cold’, suggest- ing that their attitudes are indebted less to perceptual experiences of its operating conditions (which they certainly have) and more to a projected schemata. Alexis’s stated purpose to make this apparatus seem ‘less harsh’ by placing a plush teddy bear inside, presupposes to tame the impersonal milieu through soft objects symbolically imbued with tran- quilizing powers. Likewise, mothers talked about ‘dressing up’, ‘dolling up’, ‘fancifying’ and ‘sprucing up’ the incubator, the latter phrase resort- ing to slang to evoke ambitions to make the incubator ‘fresher’ and alive – in the manner of an evergreen tree. Tanya used the vernacular in artic- ulating her wish to ‘deck out’ the incubator with the selected greeting cards she had placed therein. Lisa struggled to articulate her feelings: ‘[the machine] well it’s . . . there, just there, not moving, but there and big. I know it’s doing something, something very, very important . . . but it’s still so – there it is. Well, I can’t explain it’. Arguably, what is so ‘just there’ is the machine’s unwieldiness, its non-negotiability, its stoic, unpacified properties; arguably what Lisa can’t explain, in part, is the ambiguity and contradiction of a complex contraption which nurtures life, but which is itself inert. If we probe the meanings taking shape in mothers’ explanatory repertoires, we can trace ideological connections between the words mothers choose to justify ornamentation and hidden longings to counter its implied ‘lifelessness’. This rhetorical association prompts me to contend that decorating enacts a desire to animate the machine. In various guises and modes of expression, the goal of enliven- ing was sought after and lauded, almost as if mothers harbored some kind of predilection to initiate these contraptions into the category of vital beings.

My focus on motives of animation to help explain the behavior of mothers is not, however, intended to indicate that incubators necessarily strike mothers as ‘inanimate’; nor to imply that these devices are without signs of ‘life’. To the contrary, although incubators and toys are equally non-organic, both harbor certain simulated qualities stereotypically (perhaps instinctively) associated with life. Neonatal intensive care machines (perhaps like all prostheses) are quasi-lifelike: they beep, buzz, blink as an expressive feature of their appointed task to perform cyber- netic life-support. That is, they have sounds and lights, internal pro- gramming and clocks that automatically turn gadgets, printers, heating units, etc., on and off in response to critical feedback from the infant. Their assembly of component systems thus together orchestrates a

J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 6 ( 3 )

334

03 Landzelius (to/d) 22/10/01 4:10 pm Page 334

at WORCESTER STATE COLLEGE LIBRA on July 3, 2015mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from

unique functional whole with vital communicative potential. Such pro- found physical and informational symbiosis with their human inhabi- tants is essential to their dynamic assignment; and, as I have elaborated elsewhere (Landzelius, 1999) establishes the incubator to be taken as no less than an extra-corporeal sign vehicle of the very terms of the baby’s survival. It sustains, registers, supplies, monitors and signifies ‘a life’ by means of mechanical, electrical, chemical grammars. But emphatically (and to the unversed novice, decisively) its signals are intimidating, its lights haphazard, its codes undecipherable, its constitution faceless. Such built-in tensions (i.e. between giving life, but not living; sending vital messages, but not interacting) may drive mothers’ resolves to animate the machine. From this perspective, it is precisely because the machine’s ambiguity (its own techno-liminality as simultaneously animate/inani- mate) ‘needs’ resolution in one direction or another, that a stuffed animal toy might redeem intentions to give a ‘face’ to the cyborg womb.

As commonplace objects in the culture inventories and cognitive tax- onomies of western(ized) children (albeit imbued with local variation and meanings) teddy bears and like anthropomorphized animal incar- nations are aptly enlisted to give this face. Created in our own image, diminutive teddy bears, et al. are almost invariably interpreted as ‘cute’ and ‘adorable’, and are cuddled, named, and animated by adults as well as children. Given their ‘neotenic’ features (i.e. human-like frontal faces, spherical heads, big eyes, juvenile body proportions) they have been deemed to inspire pan-human care-giving proclivities and instincts to nurture (Lorenz, 1950); and, indeed, they have ‘evolved’ (or rather have been selectively designed) along a continuum of increasing baby-like traits (Hinde and Barden, 1985). In all-too-human array, fanciful beasts ubiquitously populate our metaphorical worlds, and become the subject/objects of vast psychological projections in fictions whose purpose is actually to edify us in the ways and wherefores of human sociality. Though presupposing a great deal of semiotic plasticity, they are nonetheless kindred to the ‘distinct category of cultural artifacts which deflect creativity and innovation, which cultivate continuity, con- formity and routine, which celebrate sentiment and banality’ that Binkley (2000: 134) attributes to kitsch. By enlisting creatures of kitsch and carriers of myth for animating tasks, a mother implicitly mines the fertile reservoir of orthodox values associated with cute things (e.g. inno- cence, nostalgia, dependency, domesticity, predictability). In his work on the multivocality of ‘cuteness’ and its subordinate implications in con- temporary Japan, McVeigh (1996: 297) explores how the ‘abstractness of cuteness allows it to be generalized across different situations and semantic domains’. Likewise, I would argue that the normative signifi- cations of cute stuffed animals in the contemporary US are (more or less consciously) mobilized in incubator ornamentation to broker a mother’s

Landzelius: C H A R G E D A RT I FAC T S A N D T H E D E T O N AT I O N O F L I M I N A L I T Y

335

03 Landzelius (to/d) 22/10/01 4:10 pm Page 335

at WORCESTER STATE COLLEGE LIBRA on July 3, 2015mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from

social relations and legitimize her role as nurturer, while simultaneously comforting her own anxieties about the cyborg womb. Teddy bears, et al. that ‘people’ the baby’s incubated world initiate that remote world, and to some extent its inscrutable canon, into popular cultural gram- mars. In addition, their semiotic elasticity as toys and trinkets out of place allows mothers to negotiate power and powerlessness, by balanc- ing the need for affirmation and a sense of effectuality with the need for reassurance.

Stuffed animal toys – the graphically most obvious, most caricatured exemplars of the inclination to animate – were also the most popular genre in the NICU. Still, alongside them or sometimes in their stead could be found items of related intent. In this context, greeting cards harbor interesting collateral implications. Due to the abnormal events surrounding delivery and the uncertain fate of the child, mothers of preterm babies rarely receive the ‘pre-packaged sentiments’ (Jaffe, 1999) tendered through printed cards customarily exchanged on occasions of birth. It appears, whether because of the upbeat tone and generic lan- guage of card discourse or because of the ambiguity of commodified words (poised between not-pure gift and not-merely commodity status [see Jaffe, 1999]) that celebrating the arrival of a preterm ‘family member’ with greeting cards is deemed inappropriate. Given this com- municative void, cards in the incubator – though uncommon – become transactionally significant: as ‘epideictic discourse’ (D’Angelo, 1992: 337) their presence betokens the dedication of significant others (‘senders’) and the affirmation of mother–child (‘receivers’). By thus marking a sym- bolic extension of the mother’s support network into the NICU, these ‘sites of virtual interaction’ (Jaffe, 1999: 117) arguably perform a meaningful role as ‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu, 1977). They implicitly advertise a vote of social confidence in a woman’s maternal endowment. As tokens enlisted by a mother in her personal project to animate the machine, greeting cards might also be said to ‘dress’ the cyborg womb in (and into) cultural garb and values.

When the ornament in the incubator constitutes a photograph of mother and/or other family member(s), the animating mission arguably coalesces with a wish to participate ‘imagistically’: As one mother put it, ‘I want to be there. I want my daughter to know she’s safe, that Mommy’s with her’. In interpreting this notion of ‘being there’, a notion frequently voiced in narratives, it seems clear that the photographic image serves less for baby to ‘know Mommy’s there’ than for mother to keep, by symbolic proxy, a watchful eye on her child. Here, a photo- graphic visage is conceived to fulfill – vicariously, aesthetically, indexi- cally – a form of vigilant engagement and round-the-clock involvement. While a doubtful mnemonic device for the child, by bearing testimony it materially/spatially serves to make tangible mother’s uninterrupted

J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 6 ( 3 )

336

03 Landzelius (to/d) 22/10/01 4:10 pm Page 336

at WORCESTER STATE COLLEGE LIBRA on July 3, 2015mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from

‘presence’, promoting, perhaps, an imaginary of seamless constancy within the ‘temporal alternative to space, the memory’ (Morgan, 1998: 19). Accordingly, we might speculate that the act of mentally ‘picturing’ her photo in the incubator might well provide a measure of comfort to a mother – reassuring her not only that she is ‘there’ (mentally and through graphic representation of her embodiment), but further signify- ing that she has never faltered in her devotion to her child. Along these lines, one mother’s explanation that ‘it’s good to feel family around’ hints that the placement of photographs may embed fantasies to metonymi- cally personify, even channel, protective energies. Like a talisman of sorts, the use of images herein gravitates towards aspirations to ‘human- ize’ the machine.

Iconic gestures to ‘be there in spirit’ (to quote one mother) are ampli- fied to a spiritual realm in cases where the guardian amulet affixed to the incubator marks an icon of supernatural power. On a few occasions I observed a Christian cross/crucifix, a Jewish star or chai, and (in one instance) the hand of Fatima stationed in incubators. In his work on visual piety, Morgan examines how religious images become vehicles to objectify the self, to broadcast religious identity, to shape personal and collective memory, and to symbolize relationships. He writes: ‘popular religious images . . . establish and monitor the perimeter of belonging’ (Morgan, 1998: 18). Likewise, for mothers, we might say that enshrining the incubator with religious icons serves to establish and monitor the perimeter of her longing. ‘It is the function of religious images in visual piety to secure the world or sense of reality in which the self finds its existence’; and, powerfully, to preserve ‘order as the believer negotiates change’ (Morgan, 1998: 205–6). In thus helping mothers to negotiate the unexpected, religious icons are imbued with personal meanings; however, like all religious symbols, they are eminently social and ‘inflected with and constitutive of the social world that binds individuals together’ (1998: 207). Hence, in addition to private understandings of divine power in the incubator, mothers who augment the incubator with religious icons are arguably empowered through their apperceived soli- darity to a community of believers. With religious symbols to grace it, the cyborg womb – itself a testament to the grandeur of omnipotent Science – becomes a subject of divine intervention, married to matters of sacred import. Such a conversion is in keeping with its own powers of authority over life and death productions. Through an assembly of hallowed reification, the task and inhabitant of this modern biotech miracle are commended to a protectorship of deities and entrusted to a curative of divine energy.

Hence, it is suggested that the mothers whose trials and tribula- tions are at the heart of this ethnography are demonstrably committed to some kind of transformation of the cyborg womb. By virtue of

Landzelius: C H A R G E D A RT I FAC T S A N D T H E D E T O N AT I O N O F L I M I N A L I T Y

337

03 Landzelius (to/d) 22/10/01 4:10 pm Page 337

at WORCESTER STATE COLLEGE LIBRA on July 3, 2015mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from

anthropomorphized goods, sympathetic magic and divine intervention, and in dedications reaching from the profane to the godly, they have sum- moned a constellation of things to absolve the machine’s ‘inhumanity’. Each artifact of augmentation affords a creative modality to construe the agency of mother/actor. It also performatively and meaningfully inhabits the physical space where she rightly should be, that is to say, at her child’s side. Such a condition is in keeping with the pivotal role that articles of decoration and animation play in projecting a mother into the turbulent and precarious NICU reality. They are a sign of her hope, an extension of her mothering, a testament to her kinship, the only round-the-clock referent of her existence and her rite of passage into motherhood.

‘SCAPING’ BABY INTO BEING

If we approach the issue of decorating the incubator in terms of ‘human- object entanglements’ taking place in a dynamic global matrix, we encounter a strange meeting between two functionally-specific uni- verses: the universe of medical equipment, on the one hand, and that of ludic paraphernalia, on the other. Each of these artifactual universes is characterized by different material-technological constituents, agents, and objectives, with respective industrial, ideological and infrastructural features; the former under jurisdiction of the hospital, the latter in the dominion of the home. To probe the asymmetrical relations between hos- pital and home that intersect in the meeting of these universes, I find Habermas’ (1987) theorizations of lifeworld and system particularly germane. Lifeworld implies the world of consciousness and communi- cative action, and ‘appears as a reservoir of taken-for-granteds, of unshaken convictions that participants in communication draw upon in cooperative processes of interpretation’ (Habermas, 1987: 124). With the increasing rationalization of modern societies, systemic mechanisms potentially erode the lifeworld into one subsystem among others. In this negative instance, ‘delinguistified’ media, like money and power – and for our purposes here, certain technologies – in ‘hypertrophied’ form are complicit in unleashing system imperatives that ‘burst the capacity of the lifeworld’ (1987: 155). Such resulting ‘technization of the lifeworld’ is arguably at risk in the overlapping enterprises of productivity and those of reproductivity at play in the technological creation of cyborg wombs.

To recap: in decorating the machine we witness the extension of (the domain of influence of) ‘home’ into the hospital through a traffic in cheap goods of sentimental value. These trivial objects (of amusement and adornment) have been mass-commodified in a system-world for incorporation in the lifeworld, but here they are re-semanticized as sur- rogates of domesticity and as maternal referents, and placed in the

J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 6 ( 3 )

338

03 Landzelius (to/d) 22/10/01 4:10 pm Page 338

at WORCESTER STATE COLLEGE LIBRA on July 3, 2015mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from

mechanical womb. This scenario mirrors (and rehearses in reverse) its complement: wherein we witness the infiltration of (the domain of influ- ence of) ‘home’ by the prosthetic umbilicus, an artifact of the ‘genera- tive’ sciences produced as an exclusive good with instrumental value. These vital objects (of life-support and artificial gestation) have been engineered in a system-world for co-option of the lifeworld, and fash- ioned as surrogates for female bodies and as replacements for the mater- nal appointment. Both scenarios predicate complex human-object entanglements that illustrate the ‘dialectical interplay between ordering objects and being ordered by them’ (Miller, 1994: 415). And, in both cases, the artifactual universes (of incubators, on the one hand, and of ornaments, on the other) chaperone ideologies and social relations. The invention of the cyborg womb ‘orders’ new hegemonies of science asserting new jurisdictions over biological phenomena (e.g. the length and manner of gestation) that were previously largely the provenance of ‘nature’. The inventiveness of incubator ornaments embodies the power to reorder a mother’s lifeworld in ways that may attenuate its coloniz- ation by the techno-medical system. Considered from this perspective, mothers’ performances encapsulate desires to revitalize a familiar horizon of meaning. Nonetheless, I would contend that designs to sepa- rate home and hospital ultimately serve instead to highlight the junc- tures that link public and private spheres of activity.

To contextualize incubator machines and toy playthings in planetary networks involving resources, peoples, information and power, I suggest employing Appadurai’s (1990) thematization of the heterogeneous and homogeneous forces that propel the ‘disjunctures’ of today’s global economy. These forces – the ‘building blocks’ of ‘imagined worlds’ – work through an interplay of what he calls ‘technoscapes’, ‘medias- capes’, ‘finanscapes’, ‘ideoscapes’ and ‘ethnoscapes’; portmanteaus for which he enlists the metaphor ‘scape’ from the suffix of ‘landscape’ to highlight that these are ‘deeply perspectival constructs, inflected very much by the historical, linguistic and political situatedness of different sorts of actors’ (Appadurai, 1990: 296). Applying Habermas’ thesis, these ‘scapes’ might be interpreted as networks interdigitating system and life- world, transfusing them in diverse ways. For our purposes here I find the concept of technoscape particularly apt, about which Appadurai writes: it is the ‘increasingly complex relationships between money flows, political possibilities and the availability of both low and highly- skilled labor’ that govern ‘the odd distribution of technologies, and thus the peculiarity of these technoscapes’ (1990: 297–8). Certainly, complex transnational relations drive the peculiar technoscapes (and the other scapes, particularly ideoscapes) that govern the emergence of vital medical machines. These are precision objects characterized by high- tech, high-prestige, high-profit and highly expert professionals, as well

Landzelius: C H A R G E D A RT I FAC T S A N D T H E D E T O N AT I O N O F L I M I N A L I T Y

339

03 Landzelius (to/d) 22/10/01 4:10 pm Page 339

at WORCESTER STATE COLLEGE LIBRA on July 3, 2015mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from

as by high-stakes consequences. Likewise, the flows of transnational relations in equal measure (albeit, perhaps in less momentous ways) drive the peculiar technoscapes governing trivial playthings, associated with low-tech, low-wage, low-skill sweatshop labor, juvenile matters and picayune contexts. In other words, although the exclusiveness of cyborg wombs contrasts sharply with the banality of teddy bears, and glibly pro- duced toys with mass exchange values differ radically from intensively engineered medical devices obtained through closed-door bidding, neither classes of items are immune to global (nor to local) power flows. Because medical equipment so blatantly advertises its connections with elite enterprises it commands authority (while largely sidestepping accountability for its complicity in global inequities). That teddy bears et al. (and, for that matter, cheaply-manufactured greeting cards or religious icons) are better able to ‘hide’ their unfavorable entanglement in worldwide economic asymmetries is a provocative corollary of their ‘cute’ charisma and unassuming associations. In this case it may well be a condition of their success: for it is precisely such (seeming) situated innocence that mothers’ ornamentalizing practices call into play to counter the conspicuous ‘worldliness’ of scientific gadgets. (Notwith- standing the charm of this deception, it might here be pointed out that teddy bears as commodities and signs harbor their own pointedly politi- cal history [Björk, 1994: 54–9].) In the final analysis, both incubators and teddies are amalgamations of international intercourse, orchestrated by dominant ideologies and commercial trends, which have accordingly determined their shared engagement in the overdetermined nexus of the hospital NICU under study here.

Within the circumscribed incubator chamber, the ‘scapes’ of vital objects and the ‘scapes’ of trivial objects implode at an intersection of arbitrary endpoints, in a curious confrontation that winds from far-flung origins through the varied and sundry actors, materials, and values respectively entangled with these objects. Their unseemly but fertile ‘disjuncture’ ultimately arises from their convergent cultural–historical mission to reciprocally bring a child into being. This ‘bringing into being’ entails making the child scientifically intelligible via biomedical interven- tions with life-sustaining and life-simulating function. This ‘bringing into being’ equally well implies making the child culturally intelligible via enculturating materials with pedagogical, recreational and idle intent. Moreover, because objects of diversion stand opposite objects of reason, ludic amusements can be effective envoys of resistance to scientific instruments. As noted, decorating the incubator implicitly capitalizes upon the transgressive symbolic powers associated with enigma and ambiguity, whereby ephemeral bric-a-brac of relative insignificance comes to temper the monolithic prosthesis.

By ornamenting the machine, mothers extend a kind of superficial

J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 6 ( 3 )

340

03 Landzelius (to/d) 22/10/01 4:10 pm Page 340

at WORCESTER STATE COLLEGE LIBRA on July 3, 2015mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from

character and individuality to this foreign object using teddy bear para- phernalia that are colloquially ‘personalizable’ in ways that incubators are obviously not. Nevertheless, there is an ironic twist lurking in decor- ating practices; for we must acknowledge that few artifacts are as req- uisitely customized as the incubator in a state of action: The strategic configuration of instruments, functions, provisions and so on that it caters to its infant-inhabitant in any one therapeutic endeavor and at any given moment are unparalleled in singularity. While the exclusive cyborg womb is verily and uniquely the patient’s private universe, nonetheless mass-produced teddy bears command better aptitude for individuation precisely through their vernacular appeal. This paradox reveals some- thing telling about our relationship to both profound and mundane materials, and illustrates how human-object entanglements are predi- cated on degrees of proximity to conventional cultural codes.

PASSPORTS THROUGH LIMINALITY

As a charged artifactual other, the cyborg womb inaugurates an alien logic into a new mother’s lifeworld. In Eco’s (1980: 23) words, this arti- ficial umbilicus can be said to lack semantic ‘redundancy’; that is, it has a deficit of standard values upon which to premise communicative understanding in a signifying exchange. Such absence of predictability in the meaning-making process marks a condition of entropy (Danesi, 1994:13), which in this instance problematizes the interpretive schemas of many a mother displaced by the precision surrogate who saves her baby. In asserting the significance of redundant codes in architectural design, Eco argues that ‘moments of high-information content’ must be bal- anced by ‘a certain amount of redundancy’: every flash of the unlikely rests on articulations of the likely’ (1980: 23, emphasis in the original). Toys and incubators enmeshed in a hospital milieu are (like a building) also spatialized and signifying units of material culture. In this context, the teddy bear provides a soft, furry, flexible sign vehicle saturated with denotative redundancies, which is well equipped to articulate likely worlds and temper the ‘flash of the unlikely’ manifest in the radically new ‘high-information’ machine-infant dyad. Strategic, personalizing practices to ornament the machine thus enlist comfort toys – inscribed with sentiments of home and nurturance – to bring incubator-plus-baby into recognizable cultural grammars and everyday experiential codes. Given the familiarity of teddy bears et al. they are ideal ‘diplomats’ to mediate the alien and alienating foreignness of the high-tech womb, and attenuate the cognitive dissonance it sparks.

In keeping with the transformative capacity of ritual, a mother’s quasi-ritual performance helps her to re-choreograph her emotional- somatic bonding with child, in spite of the delimitations imposed by the

Landzelius: C H A R G E D A RT I FAC T S A N D T H E D E T O N AT I O N O F L I M I N A L I T Y

341

03 Landzelius (to/d) 22/10/01 4:10 pm Page 341

at WORCESTER STATE COLLEGE LIBRA on July 3, 2015mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from

treatment regime. On a collective level, over the course of two years of ethnographic fieldwork, I witnessed how mothers inventively, if largely unconsciously, articulated their commonality and indeed forged identi- ties through such shared praxes. Any individual mother who personal- ized ‘her baby’s’ incubator via these quasi-ritual acts was simultaneously authoring herself as a member of the collective of other mothers and also asserting herself to be a bona fide participant in the hospital milieu, which is, importantly, a milieu of healing. While mothers’ performances accommodated improvisational qualities, they also animated some characteristic features of ritual, namely through what Bell calls the ‘dynamics of framing’; and in their aspiration to ‘signify or denote larger truths’ (1997: 160; 224). The emerging formality and relative invariance of incubator ornamentation can be said to have framed a microcosm, or in Bourdieu’s words ‘orchestrated a habitus’, which cognitively and emotionally pulled these women into a NICU experience that they had, in small but significant ways, co-constructed, and in which they could be expressive. Discussing ritual, Turner writes: ‘[t]he primary motivation behind ritual is the desire to break free of social structure temporarily in order to transcend its social and existential limitations and reconfig- ure it (Turner, 1974: 260; Alexander, 1991: 17). In like fashion, I suggest that the mothers I studied aspired to symbolically, vicariously, and tem- porarily – but no less significantly – ‘break free’ of a lifeworld ‘technized’ by the biomedical system and its invention of existential and categorical uncertainties. As an exercise in world-building, ritual characteristically engenders its own categorical ambiguity: as Douglas notes ‘. . . ritual recognizes the potency of disorder’ (Douglas, 1984: 94). By virtue of their poetic assignment, toys and trinkets out of place in the incubator con- figure a potent symbolic disorder in the NICU, one that takes shape in mothers’ mildly resistant re-ordering of human-object entanglements. I have argued that the deviant placement of incubator ornaments make teddy bears et al. into liminal figures whose familiarity is both put into service and put at risk. Consequently, they garner the ritual powers associated with marginality and are thus enigmatically equipped to par- tially detonate the piquant charge of the artifactual other that is the life- support incubator.

From this perspective, it is the deceptively innocent counter-limi- nality of teddy bears et al. that empowers them to broker the techno- liminality of the preterm baby, and mediate the challenges triggered by this new category of person. The resulting kind of ‘teddy-bear diplo- macy’ represents mothers’ desires to bring their babies into a lifeworld – an horizon of meaning – of their own semiotic making. Ultimately, both domesticating and animating the machine are performances to socialize and enculturate the cyborg womb in order to reach (out to) the child. While the challenges produced by the biomedical enterprise are

J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 6 ( 3 )

342

03 Landzelius (to/d) 22/10/01 4:10 pm Page 342

at WORCESTER STATE COLLEGE LIBRA on July 3, 2015mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from

inscribed with a logic of zero fallibility, the teddy-bear diplomacy employed by these mothers can be said to follow a logic of ambivalence, one empowered by liminal inversions and indeterminacy. Stretching the metaphor, one might say teddy bear diplomacy provides a kind of pass- port across the borders of uncertainty. Herein, these simple acts of decor- ating the machine facilitate the re-aggregation of the ‘neophyte’ preterm infant over the threshold of techno-liminality and into conventional cul- tural schemas. The move helps a mother reconfigure and re-empower identity during her own transitional rite of passage into motherhood.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the women I interviewed for sharing their stories with me. I am also grateful to Michael Landzelius and Henry Kenny for their intellectual commentaries and practical assistance with this article.

References

Alexander, B.C. (1991) Victor Turner Revisited: Ritual as Social Change. Atlanta: Scholars Press.

Appadurai, A. (1990) ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, Theory, Culture and Society 7: 295–310.

Baker, J. (1996) The Machine in the Nursery: Incubator Technology and the Origins of Newborn Intensive Care. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Bell, C. (1997) Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Binkley, S. (2000) ‘Kitsch as a Repetitive System: A Problem for the Theory of Taste Hierarchy’, Journal of Material Culture 5(2): 131–52.

Björk, C. (1994) Big Bear’s Book by Himself, trans. J. Sandin. Stockholm: R & S Books.

Bourdieu, P. (1977) An Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Butler, J. (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London: Routledge.

Danesi, M. (1994) Messages and Meanings. Toronto: Canadian Scholar’s Press, Inc. D’Angelo, Frank (1992) ‘The Rhetoric of Sentimental Greeting Card Verse’,

Rhetoric Review 1(2): 337–45. Douglas, M. (1984) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and

Taboo. London: Ark. Dumit J. (1997) ‘A Digital Image of the Category of the Person: PET Scanning

and Objective Self-Fashioning’, in G.L. Downey and J. Dumit (eds) Cyborgs and Citadels: Anthropological Interventions in Emerging Sciences and Technolo- gies, pp. 83–102. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.

Eco, U. (1980) ‘Function and Sign: The Semiotics of Architecture’, in G. Broadbent, R. Bunt, and C. Jencks (eds) Signs, Symbols and Architecture, pp. 11–69. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons.

Habermas, J. (1987) The Theory of Communicative Action. Volume Two: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. T. McCarthy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Hinde, R.A. and Barden, L.A. (1985) ‘The Evolution of the Teddy Bear’, Animal Behaviour 33(4): 1371–3.

Landzelius: C H A R G E D A RT I FAC T S A N D T H E D E T O N AT I O N O F L I M I N A L I T Y

343

03 Landzelius (to/d) 22/10/01 4:10 pm Page 343

at WORCESTER STATE COLLEGE LIBRA on July 3, 2015mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Jaffe, A. (1999) ‘Packaged Sentiments: The Social Meanings of Greetings Cards’, Journal of Material Culture 4(2): 115–41

Kaiser, K. (1993) ‘The Early Physical and Mental Development of Cocaine- Exposed Infants’. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Dissertation.

Lacan, J. (1977) Ecrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan. London: Tavistock. Lancaster, J. (1986) ‘Impact of Intensive Care on the Parent–Infant Relationship’,

in S.B. Korones (ed.) High-Risk Newborn Infants, pp. 407–18. St. Louis, MO: The C.V. Mosby Company.

Landzelius, K.M. (1999) ‘Screening Preterm Babies: From Cyborg Wombs to Virtual Attachments’, in S. Lundin and L. Åkesson (eds) Amalgamations: Fusing Technology and Culture, pp. 84–104. Lund, Sweden: Nordic Academic Press.

Landzelius, K.M. (2001) ‘Humanizing the Impostor: Object Relations in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit’, Unpublished manuscript, University of Cambridge.

Lorenz, K. (1950) ‘Part and Parcel in Animal and Human Societies’, in R. Martin (ed.) Studies in Human and Animal Behaviour, Vol. 2, pp. 115–95. London: Methuen.

Marcuse, H. with Wolff, R.P. and Moore, B. (1965) A Critique of Pure Tolerance. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

McVeigh, B. (1996) ‘Commodifying Affection, Authority and Gender in the Everyday Objects of Japan’, Journal of Material Culture, 1(3): 291–312.

Miller, D. (1994) ‘Artefacts and the Meaning of Things’, in T. Ingold (ed.) Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology: Humanity, Culture and Social Life, pp. 396–419. London and New York: Routledge.

Morgan, D. (1998) Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Parkin, D. (1999) ‘Mementoes as Transitional Objects in Human Displacement’, Journal of Material Culture 4(3): 303–20.

Thomas, N. (1991) Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Thomas, J. (1998) ‘The Socio-Semiotics of Material Culture’, Journal of Material Culture 3(1): 97–108.

Turner, V. (1969) The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Turner, V. (1974) Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Turner, V. and Turner, E. (1978). Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press.

◆ K Y R A M A R I E L A N D Z E L I U S is currently a visiting scholar at the Depart- ment of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge. Since 1997 she has been a researcher in the Department of Social Anthropology at Gothenburg Uni- versity, Sweden. Her dissertation work in medical anthropology from the Uni- versity of Pennsylvania involved a study of preterm, cocaine-exposed infants, their mental and motor development, and the coping mechanisms of mothers. Her research interests include medical social movements, the anthropology of cyberspace, and indigenous empowerment. Address: Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom, CB2 1RH. [email: [email protected]]. Address – permanent post: Department of Social Anthropology, Göteborg University, Box 700, Gothenburg, Sweden, S 405–30. [email: [email protected]]

J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 6 ( 3 )

344

03 Landzelius (to/d) 22/10/01 4:10 pm Page 344

at WORCESTER STATE COLLEGE LIBRA on July 3, 2015mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from