So Much Wasted: Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance (review)

In So Much Wasted, Patrick Anderson turns the performative lens on the practitioners of self-starvation as they remake subjectivities using similar acts on different stages. From case studies of anorectics and the “starving girls” of the late 19th century, through performance artists of the 1970s and 1980s, and contemporary hunger strikers in Turkish prisons and at Guantanamo Bay, Anderson demonstrates convincingly that the refusal to eat is a productive act, one which he claims has the potential to remake the subjectivity of the actor and circumscribe the power of the state.

Part of what makes this book so compelling is that the ability to choose not to eat is almost universally accessible (in the afterword he addresses the case of Terry Schiavo who was unable to choose whether to continue receiving sustenance or not). Choosing not to eat is potentially a radically subversive act that any of us could perform. Yet we do not usually choose everyday to eat or not—for most of us, we may choose what to eat but the choice to eat is unmarked.

This is not the case for anorectics for whom the choice is real and urgent. The first substantive chapter of Anderson’s book deals with what he calls “the archive of anorexia.” He explores the history of the “disease,” feminist concerns, and the more recent attention to anorexia in men and boys. Of his cases, anorexia is probably the most familiar to a general audience—both because of its representation in popular culture and its prevalence. Anderson’s reading of texts about anorexia is strongly influenced by Foucauldian notions of the subject and he sees anorexia as “emblematic of subjectivation” (36), claiming that “anorexia derives, concentrates, and facilitates its clinical and cultural power as a performance” (38). He claims this is so because it is: a) durational—the refusal to eat must be continuously reproduced, b) it stages the effects of ideological normativity on the human body, c) it is mediated through representational forms—clinical and medical records, as well as journalistic accounts and pop cultural artifacts, d) it is defined by specularity—the body is subject to the gaze of the anorectic self and others. This performance disrupts commodity culture, both because of the refusal to consume and because the effects of anorexia make both men and women (men are important in Anderson’s account) less capable of reproducing human subjects. Ultimately, anorexic bodies “simply stop performing” (51). Yet this does mean that anorexia is entirely destructive—it is also, in Anderson’s account, a “becoming.”

The second chapter of the book “Enduring Performance” introduces Dr. Henry Tanner, who in 1880 staged a widely publicized 40 day fast in order to demonstrate the restorative properties of abstaining from food. Anderson compares this with Chris Burden’s “endurance performances” a century later. Both required active audience participants as witnesses to their emaciation. Tanner’s fast was an empirical and experiential intervention in debates between practitioners of conventional and homeopathic medicine. Tanner’s body, and the witnessing of its emaciation, was a spectacle that in Anderson’s words “revealed these functions—seeing and being seen, consuming and being consumed—to be profoundly interwoven” (73).

Burden’s first work involving fasting was staged while he was still a graduate student. Though he apparently expected Five Day Locker Piece to be an exercise in isolation (he lived in his campus locker for five days and nights), people were compelled to come and watch his performance, and his inputs and outtakes were measured, much as Tanner’s had been. In this and in some of his later works, the artist fasts, but the audience is complicit in his starvation and ethical dilemmas—to intervene or to simply observe—trouble spectators and curators alike.

The third chapter continues the examination of self starvation in performance art. In Adrian Piper’s Food for the Spirit she undertook a juice and water fast for two months, while practicing yoga and reading Kant...