BodyCartography Project

Watch me. Watch me. In your imitation is the attention I crave.

“He’s going to feel watched.”

“He’s going to seek my approval.”

“He thought about how space is anything but neutral.”

 

What does it mean to be identical to someone else?

Oskar Stohr and Jack Yufe are identical twins who were separated shortly after their birth on the island of Trinidad in 1930.[i] The brothers grew up in very different backgrounds and finally met each other as middle-aged men recruited for a study in Minneapolis, Minnesota. When they met, Stohr and Yufe discovered they were similar in a remarkable number of ways. The psychology textbook quotes the author of the study in which Stohr and Yufe were subjects:

They share idiosyncrasies galore: they like spicy foods and sweet liqueurs, are absentminded, have a habit of falling asleep in front of the television, think it’s funny to sneeze in a crowd of strangers, flush the toilet before using it, store rubber bands on their wrists, read magazines back to front, dip buttered toast in their coffee. Oskar is domineering towards women and yells at his wife, which Jack did before he was separated.[ii]

Otto and Emmett are twins. Are they identical? Identical twins come from the same zygote (egg). One sperm crawls into the egg. The fertilized egg splits into two embryos. Science dictates that identical twins are always the same sex. Indeed, the very scientific definition of “identical” assumes that both twins are the same chromosomal, genital and psychological sex. It is not unknown for one member of a set of identical twins to be born intersexed: that is, a person who has ambiguous or atypical combinations of anatomical features that usually distinguish a male body from a female body. According to scientists, sets of twins in which one twin is intersex are not strictly identical. These kinds of twins have been renamed “semi-identical”—that is, identical in all but sex. Biologists theorize that maybe two sperm crawled into the same egg.

In movies, books and folk theory about twins, sameness is fetishized. I do not mean “fetishized” in a sexual sense (although this also happens); here I am talking about fetishization as a fascination with, or valorization of, an object or phenomenon. Sameness between individuals has a particular value: it is meant to show us the zero sum of genetic coding, where genetics, and by extension biology, is assumed to determine everything. Researchers in twin studies take a peculiar pleasure in how even twins reared apart can be so similar. Their descriptions shrug happily at the oddness, as if to say, “How can we explain it other than genetics?!” In the same way, gender roles are assumed to be just as genetic, biological and therefore set in stone: my mother used to shrug and laugh at how my brother fantasized about the number of bulldozers he owned as a small child. Oh, he’s just being a boy. That’s just who he is.

Where did you come from?

Otto and Emmett come from Minnesota. Norwegian midwesterners. Tall, blue eyes, strong jaw. High forehead. Slim and muscular bodies. Well suited to be dancers. Are they really Norwegian? Emmett and I talk about our ancestry. His mother’s family has been in the United States since the American Revolution. His father’s father was Norwegian; his grandmother was born on the contested lands of the Hungarian-Czech border. But the name Ramstad marks them as Norwegian. Maybe they will apply for funding to go to Norway and find their “roots”. What does Norwegian mean? I think of good skiiers, tall blondes, saunas, meatballs and whiteness. In the same way, we shrug and laugh at the way our mannerisms or everyday habits confirm our heritage. This makes me different. (Although we take a contradictory pleasure in asserting these differences despite how they make us the same.)

Twin studies and scientific belief in the superiority of northern races unite in the person of Sir Francis Galton. Galton was Charles Darwin’s first cousin. He traveled the world and wrote about why some humans and animals were more successful than others. Galton’s great idea was that intelligence was inherited. He contributed to eugenics, which was then a very popular philosophy, by advocating that the “feeble-minded” shouldn’t be allowed to breed. Other biologists, sociologists and demographers took this line of thinking and used it to argue that the poor or mentally ill, people on welfare, black and Native women in the USA and elsewhere should be sterilized to prevent their bad blood continuing to mix in with the population. Galton also developed a theory that African people were “two levels” below white Europeans in terms of intelligence and ability. In a study on genius, Galton wrote about the increased incidence of high intellectual achievement in brothers in the same, usually aristocratic, British families. (Women did not enter here; Galton was interested in men’s intelligence.) Critics of Galton claimed that since the brothers came from the same families, they were all of the same socio-economic status, and had similar access to quality of education and social capital—therefore one couldn’t claim that intelligence was genetic. In order to solve this pesky problem of nature versus nurture, Galton hit on a solution: identical twins. Since identical twins grew from the same genetic material, they should provide answers. “[I need] some new method by which it would be possible to weigh in just scales the effects of Nature and Nurture,” wrote Galton, “and to ascertain their respective shares in framing the disposition and intellectual ability of men. The life history of twins supplies what I wanted.”^[iii] Galton sent 600 inquiries to people he knew to be twins. Thus, twin studies were born. His results were inconclusive. But ever since, biologists interested in solving the puzzle of nature and nurture have looked to twins to provide the answers.

In this age of the medicalization of life, social ideas about multiple births have changed dramatically. Since 1978, twin births have increased by over 50% in the USA. The increase is attributable to technological developments in assisted reproductive technologies. In IVF it is common for multiple fertilized embryos to be implanted in the uterus in a single cycle, increasing the chance of a viable pregnancy—but simultaneously increasing the likelihood of multiple embryos being born. Twins are no longer viewed as a happy accident of nature, blessing their parents with cuteness. They are seen as a risk of using fertility technology. But twins have always been seen as a little freakish, a little special: similar to the freakishness of the genius or of the elite athlete. Genius and elite athleticism are regarded as things that can be generated or regenerated through the proper biocapitalist rituals: investing in “good genes” by marrying someone rich, intelligent, beautiful, and sane. (God forbid that we should reproduce with people who are poor, “ugly”, mad or disabled: although these words carry with them the weight of pathologization in way that makes me hesitant to repeat them.) Just as these contemporary ideas throw us back to (historically recent) ideas about the dangers of racialized or social miscegenation, twenty-first century ideas about twinship throw us into a boiling pot of ideas about the importance of sameness. At the intersection of nature and culture, twinship straddles an unstable line between the rarity that signifies specialness or goodness, and the rarity that is considered to be pathological or weird.

We are not the same

The etymology of the word “identical” is the Latin word idem, meaning the same. From idem we also get identitas, or identity. This points us to a paradox. What we understand as identity not only indexes what sets us apart from others as individuals, but also what binds us to other people—the ways in which we can be classed or identified as the same as others. Sex (or gender) is crucial to this capacity for being identified. This is particularly so in our Euro-American culture, where scientific knowledge would divide us all into male and female, taking these two categories to be hard-wired predictors of how we will move, dress, fuck, speak, emote and desire.

The stakes of this process of questioning are immediate. How might the process of viewing change if you knew that one of the Ramstad twins identifies as transgendered? This is why it is so important for twins in which one is intersexed to be renamed “semi-identical”, no matter what sex the intersexed child is assigned or what they might identify as later on in adulthood. In order to retain the ontological coherence of the concept of identitas, science must retain the same-sex rule in the meaning of “identical”.

But what this means is not all that different to anyone else: the truth is, we all invent histories for ourselves. And these histories may be deeply felt and have deep implications for who we are now. The idea of identicality that permeates theories of twinship comes into focus here as something that also organizes our capacity to tell our stories, move through the world. This is what we are playing with in Symptom. Somewhere, Otto and Emmett are rhizozygotic twins separated at birth. Some other where, they are not the same. Which story is true? Does it matter?

He’s going to say something. He moves his lips in front of the microphone. He adjusts. He adjusts again. At the back of the space the other dancer is moving in position. He stands up, walks to the front. Then they are both standing alert. Still. Breathing. Then break.

Shadows against the white paper. Copy me. I’ll do what you do. What am I doing. I know, I’ll follow you. What are you doing. No, you follow me. No. Yes. I’m doing it wrong. I’ll fix it.

Deleuze wrote of the philosopher Spinoza that he defined a body in two ways. First, he defined bodies in terms of their motions and rest; the movements of the particles in space. Secondly, he defined bodies in terms of how they could affect and be affected by other bodies. In Spinoza’s universe bodies are always involved, always interacting. New questions must be asked about these interacting bodies. These questions will be specific. “How do individuals enter into composition with one another to form a higher individual, ad infinitum? How can a being take another being into its world, while preserving or respecting the other’s own relations and world?”

With a stage, sound, lights, microphone cables, a yellow pair of headphones, white paper and themselves, Emmett and Otto Ramstad negotiate the microphysics of interaction. I say microphysics, following Foucault, because microphysics describes power. “Micro” here does not mean miniature; it means “mobile and non-localizable relations”. Power constantly flows across, along, through the space. Sometimes it follows the lines made as the performers draw things. Sometimes power is evidently a push-pull back and forth between the performers—evident in the shrug of shoulders, an eyelid twitch, a covert glance. But the invisible power lines are important too. These are the lines of power that spectators use to interpret what they are seeing.

From a filmed interview:

Olive: What do you know about your birth?
Emmett: Well, our mom had a C-section, and they pulled me out first. I was pulled out by the head and Otto was pulled out by the feet.
Otto: Yeah.
Olive: Can you talk about what you consider to be the same and different about you?
Otto: I guess I’m just a lot more verbal. More of a lyrical genius. Emmett is more just like a… I don’t know, sort of, better at any construction and more good at uh spackling.
Olive: Can you talk about similarities, not just differences and competition?
Otto: We’re both really good at wiring and electrics.
Emmett: I would think our differences are, I’m a more visual, and literal kind of person, and Otto’s more kinesthetic. And that could be because I was pulled out by my head. I’m more in my head, and Otto’s more in his feet.

An experiment: three viewings take place during an artist residency in Florida. Each audience is offered something different to frame their experience of watching the show. In the first viewing, the performance begins as Olive interviews Otto and Emmett about their twinship. Feedback consists of audience members talking about the differences and similarities between Otto and Emmett. At the second viewing, an article purporting to be from Scientific American is placed on the theater seats before the performance. This article introduces Emmett and Otto as rhizozygotic twins: twins whose ova were released four years apart, but whose embryos grew and fused together. Technical language, historical facts about the history of artificial reproductive technologies and cryogenics, and quotes from “specialist researchers” bestow an aura of truth upon the text. In the Q&A later, viewers interpret the microphone cord drawings as the umbilical cord and birth references. One graduate student viewer writes feedback: “Without the Scientific American article, I would not have understood this performance at all.” At a third viewing, audience members are given no texts, no introductory interviews. No personal information. This time, viewers talk about the performance as “art” rather than “interpreting truth”. We discuss the shadows on the back wall, the feelings that erupt as the performers come close together and far away; the temporal rhythm and stillness in the piece; how the back-and-forth of the duet triggers memories of relationships or family situations.

In this science experiment, we learn that truth effects are easy to simulate. Scientific language, no matter how rudimentary, retains an unquestionability, a magical power. This power has the capacity to stratify the lines of interplay between knowledge and movement that “Symptom” seeks to disrupt and bend into new or other openings. Emmett and Otto become other to the individuals in the audience, placed on stage as science experiments themselves. “In the twin study, they were really interested in the shape of our heads,” Emmett explains in the filmed interview. Someone in the audience hears this and responds in three ways. She looks at the shape of the heads of the performers. She thinks of “twins” and wonders if Otto and Emmett live apart, if they tell each other everything, if they date sisters (or brothers). Which is the “evil” twin and which is the “good” twin? Third, she feels a twinge of sympathy for these twins who have been studied since birth. Poor things. What freaks. How weird. It’s all they can do, I suppose, to take power into their own hands and exhibit themselves.

“It’s like a feedback loop,” Dan Graham wrote about his artwork Past/Future Split Attention. Graham could have been talking about the möbius strip that happens between two people when one predicts the other’s movements/feelings and the other describes what the first has just done or felt. The secret of a möbius strip is that it never repeats a circle. The path of a finger tracing the surface of the paper can’t ever be only inside or outside. The logic of cause and effect bends into a loop where one becomes indistinguishable from the other. A feedback loop can take place between audience and performers too. But the finger tracing the möbius strip still repeats. Inside or outside, cause or effect, the path is the same. So we ask different questions: how can we open up the space, the performance, the frame, so that we are all disrupting the repetition of cause and effect, inside or outside, sameness and difference?

 

Scientific American, 14 June 2007

Emmett and Otto Ramstad present a fascinating glimpse into the diversity of biology. They are rhizozygotic twins. Rhizozygotic twins are an extremely rare form of multiple birth, enabled by the wonders of assisted reproductive technology. On September 20 1975, an egg, or blastocyst, was harvested from the Ramstad twins’ mother Josie Winship and cryogenically frozen. Four years later, in January 1979, Ms. Winship decided to have the frozen egg thawed to try for pregnancy. Because doctors were unsure whether this blastocyst would survive the perils of cryopreservation, they harvested a fresh blastocyst. Both eggs were fertilized. At the time, it was standard procedure to keep multiple fertilized embryos in the same test-tube. In a scientific first, the two embryos fused in the test-tube and were injected together into the mother’s womb. The two embryos shared a placenta and grew to term; they were born on September 28 1979 and named Otto and Emmett.

At the time, this procedure was radically experimental. Scientists began developing methods of cryopreservation, or slow programmable freezing (SPF) in the early 1970s. The first frozen human embryo and IVF baby, Louise Brown, was born in 1978. The success rates of cryogenically frozen embryos were very low at the time. Nowadays, however, scientists estimate that around 20% of babies born through IVF were cryogenically frozen embryos.

The amount of genetic material that both twins share is open to debate. Their DNA profiles are like those of monozygotic twins, or twins that come from the same egg. However, they did not come from the same blastocyst, so how they share so identical a DNA profile is quite a mystery. Dr Maynard Howe, of Minnesota State University, has been working on the biology of rhizozygotic twins since the birth of the Ramstad twins. He coined the term “rhizozygotic”. He argues that the polyembryony of rhizozygosis is similar to some species of armadillos. “I believe the Ramstad twins may have been produced through a biological anomaly seen in Euphractus armadilloes called monchorial twins. In these species of armadillo, two separate eggs fuse in the womb and produce a set of twins that look very much like identical twins, but are not,” he explains.

Scientific anomalies like this are rare, but not as rare as you might think. A Texas mother of twins discovered in 2009 that her children carried DNA from two different fathers. She had released two separate eggs and slept with two different men around the same time. Both eggs fertilized with different sperm, and matured in the uterus together. They were born seven minutes apart. The scientific term for this is heteropaternal superfecundation.

Emmett and Otto were born twins in Norway in 1979, the year of the blizzard. You know, the blizzard of 1979 that wiped out all the power to the entire country and left folks cross-country skiing to neighbors’ houses for weeks. Anyhow, when Emmett and Otto were born the electricity had just turned off in the hospital. The hospital was small with wood panels and the electricity turned off at the moment of their birth. Darkness. The Ramstads’ mother, a conceptual artist living in Norway in a self-imposed exile from American capitalism, caught each of them and brought them to her breast following a vision of being a reindeer mother and proceeded to lick them clean. Nuzzled and safe the twins locked hands and spirits. However, this union was short lived, for after the electricity returned their father made a split second decision to move to the Arctic Circle, taking Emmett with him. Once there he invented a new split-kick ski trick and became famous for his ability to herd reindeer. Otto, on the other hand, moved to Guam with his mother while she worked on an art project meant to simulate post-capitalist society by teaching monkeys to make crafts communally and sell them on the fair trade market.

Emmett spent his childhood riding reindeer. He became an especially keen observer of snowflake patterning. He found himself living in Minnesota as a teenager on a scholarship from the American Norwegian Embassy for Cross Cultural Art and Kin, in order to replicate snow patterns created inside ice fishing houses on Lake Minnetonka. Otto was used as a monkey handler by his mother and was highlighted in Artforum and other art digests for his site-specific installation work at a young age. Otto and his mother moved to San Francisco when he was fourteen. After leaving home, Otto moved to Minneapolis and began developing a movement-based art practice. At age twenty-three, the twins reconnected in the twin cities. They realized it was their dream to make art together. Symptom is the culmination of this dream.