Melanie Jackson,
In milk, all contradictions can be contained. Out of milk arises all imagination – but not an expansive one for those who imagine milk to be white and only white and so without hope. Hidden in milk, beneath and inside that whiteness, is a multitude, another world or worlds, invisible things and knowledge. Milk fans out widely, from reason to imagination. Any understanding of a phenomenon, this one of milk, is achieved through a synthesis of the ‘whole’ entity. This entirety of the thing includes all that is magical, dreamlike, absurd and incredible, as well as all that is real and lucid. In milk, there is blackness and whiteness and all that might be found in its spectrum of all possible and impossible colours.
Milk is white. Milk is every colour, and so milk has also been black, black in the mind’s eye. As Paul Celan put it in his poem from 1944 titled ‘Death Fugue’: ‘Black milk of morning we drink you at dusktime, we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at night, we drink and drink.’ Celan’s black milk is a perversity and a necessity. It is other to itself, wholly defamiliarised, a horror that must be imbibed without respite. For Elif Şafak,
Julio Guerra,
There is another world of black milk, as Marcus Wood calls it; the milk of the Black slave mother, milk that flowed from the breasts of the Mammy and the Mãe Preta into the mouths of white infants for four centuries in Brazil and North America, while their own children were compelled to go hungry or had to be fed on dirty water and animal milk.
The producing body of the milk giver is no simple entity. It is monstrous. It refuses. It takes on other shapes. For example, humans have engaged and imagined other milk suppliers, which take on the figure of nonhuman caregivers. In myth, a nanny goat called Amalthea – tender goddess – was said, in some accounts, to have nursed the baby Zeus. Her horn, the
A she-wolf fed Romulus and Remus, the abandoned twin offspring of Mars and Rhea, whose story recounts the founding of Rome and the Roman Kingdom. Goats often let the Gods and heroes of Antiquity suckle: Dionysus; Asklepios, God of medicine, and Aegisthus, killer of Agamemnon. Telephus, the son of Heracles and Auge, while exposed on Mount Parthenion, was said to have been suckled by a deer as portrayed on the 1 st century CE fresco at Herculaneum – his name is perhaps derived from a dug and a doe.
Melanie Jackson,
Brigid, a Celtic Goddess or a Saint – the patron saint of Ireland and protector of dairymaids, cattle, midwives, Irish nuns and new-born babies – mingles with milk in many ways and her milk is miraculous. Some say her mother was a milkmaid and Brigid was born out of a milk pail, or at least doused in warm new milk, or
Between myth and rumour, Wild Peter, who appeared in North Germany in 1724, was covered with thick hair, said to have grown as a result of him suckling from a bear – he imbibed with the milk his nursing mother’s characteristics.
Auðumbla licking Búri out of a salty ice-block, 1765, from the Icelandic manuscript NKS 1867 4to, Danish Royal Library.
A woman breast feeding two puppies whilst two Mexican peasants implore her to feed their baby, which is lying on the floor on a bed of straw. Chromolithograph after A. Utrillo, Wellcome Collection no. 17506i.
Étienne Aubry,
While the animal aspects of breastfeeding were acknowledged in the pre-modern period, such that images of interspecies nutrition were available without concern or horror, the modern period introduces a series of separations and divisions of class and status. Attendant on this is a philosophy of Humanism dependent on hierarchies of beasts and humans, as well as a pyramidal structure within humankind, which renders these other hierarchies problematic. The very act of breastfeeding, of women feeding babies, begins to appear as an animal act, suitable only for those who live amongst animals and are themselves considered more animal-like. Why would a woman of status wish to turn herself into a
Abandoned syphilitic children suckled from mercury-infused goats and other creatures. Teats, not nipples, were for their mouths. Today’s plastic bottles have teats rather than nipples too, linking these artificial feeding mechanisms to cross-species wet nursing, which has now become, for the most part, an alien practice.
In eighteenth century Europe, breastfeeding was unfashionable amongst the aristocracy and rising middle classes. Ladies believed it would ruin their figures, spoil their health and interrupt the endless rounds of card games, social visiting and theatre trips. For royal brides, or others bound by duty to issue as many heirs as possible, breastfeeding was discouraged in case it made future pregnancies less likely. Aristocratic nipples were considered ‘vestigial’, as male nipples were – as if they had evolved to transcend their use in base, more animal-like acts. Later research, by contrast, has found that nipples are as fundamental to human life as limbs, ears, and all other shared organs. They precede in utero sexual differentiation and appear on the bodies of all mammals.
In Paris, wet nursing often involved a separation of birth mother from baby, for the wet nurses might live in the countryside around Paris, and the child would be raised by the wet nurse and her family for as long as eighteen months. This then led to another separation, more broken bonds. A painting from around 1776–77,
In the tenth edition of
William Cadogan was another influential advocate of breastfeeding and his ‘Essay upon Nursing and the Management of Children from their Birth to Three Years of Age’, from
The
Cadogan understood the ‘Lower Class of Mankind’ to be confined by their poverty, their ‘Want of Superfluity’ within the ‘Limits of Nature’. It is the rich who suffocate their young under a ‘Load of Finery’ and stuff them with dainties until they are sick.
Aristocratic beauty queens in pre-revolutionary France were also dairy queens – if milk flowed not from their breasts, it streamed from the architectural follies, the only architectures they were allowed to commission. The devoted women played together at Versailles and elsewhere with faux-peasant fashions and pleasure dairies. As the country whirled into revolution, Marie-Antoinette – known as Madame Deficit – copied another queen of France, Catherine de Medici, who, childless and unpopular, had the first of her pleasure dairies built at Fontainebleu. Marie-Antoinette’s was at Rambouillet, and here she and her bosom friends could play at being milkmaids and consume milk products from a sixty-five piece Sèvres porcelain service. One of its forms was the ‘breast cup’, flesh-coloured, tipped by a pert nipple in pink. It was handleless and designed to be cupped in the hands. Rumoured – falsely – to be cast from Marie-Antoinette’s own breast, it became a symbol of her suspect lasciviousness. She also had the peasants’ wooden dairy churns and buckets copied in perfect porcelain mimesis.
Other aristocratic women indulged in the craze of the pleasure dairy. One was Madame de Pompadour, who, ensconced in the court, became a bosom friend of the king. As a courtesan of King Louis XV, she was known more unkindly as a royal whore. For pleasure, she sponsored pastoral festivals and set up model working dairies for royal entertainments. She was responsible for designing porcelain drinking vessels for milk, such as the
In the pleasure dairies, the women of the elite indulged in a public fantasy of being nurturing, in touch with nature, maternal, fertile – every quality that France needed to regenerate itself without suffering the agonies of revolution. It did not work. And for these elite women, a separation of significance came with it. It was that of their heads from their bodies, as the new regime overturned the hierarchy: ‘au reste, après nous, le Déluge’.
Nipple-cup known as the Breast bowl: Jatte-téton, dite bol sein, 1788, Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory, Musée National de la Céramique, Sèvres, France (Photo: M. Beck-Coppola).
Melanie Jackson,
The image of the prim mother of the Republic, the stabilising force after the French Revolution who dispenses mercy and enlightenment from her breasts, is one negation of the aristocratic women whose heads fell. The French draughtsman Honoré Daumier made several images of women nursing. In 1848, he entered a sketch into a state-sponsored competition. The aim was to define the painted face of the Republic for a picture replacing the portrait of the old king at the Hotel de ville. Daumier‘s sketch,
It is no coincidence that, in the new Republic, actual women were no longer able to institute feeding networks, and informal networks of wet nursing became illegal.
Over time, as the nineteenth century passes on, issues of milk supply become crucial in the context of deprivation and displacement. Instead of the state dispensing metaphorical milk in the shape of welfare to its citizens, state and private industry combine to control the supply of milk to those who are becoming undernourished within the ravages of the industrial capitalist system. Milk’s fortunes are entwined with the state of national health. Milk became institutionalised as an essential foodstuff for the general population over the course of the following centuries, and its properties were extolled by the government as an essential part of the diet. William Prout, the London physician who developed ideas of nutrients through his chemical analysis in the 1820s, alighted on milk, ‘which he decreed the only article actually furnished and intended by nature as food. It is, he observed, composed of the three necessary ingredients for healthy life, for milk alone, and the mechanism by which milk is secreted, ‘were designed, and made what they are, by the great Creator of the universe’: ‘In milk, therefore, we should expect to find a model of what an alimentary substance ought to be—a kind of prototype, as it were, of nutritious materials in general’.
Honoré Daumier,
In the nineteenth century, animal milk – cow’s milk – comes to the fore as a substitute for mother’s milk for the mass population. There was apparently a happy coincidence between the superior taste of cow’s milk and its profitability. Cow’s milk more easily presents a predictable and constantly manageable flow that can be subjected to technical analysis and commodification, and thereby incorporated into the necessary systems of economy and policy that are emergent. The imperative of ‘purifying’ milk became a driving principle of the modern era and it is in milk that public health battles occur. Nowhere was bacteria pursued more aggressively than in milk – which nurtures when drunk directly from the body, and has a tendency to poison when removed from it – the milky environment perfect as it is for nurturing all scales of life, including those not congruent with human life. In milk, a battle against disease, against microbes, took place. Louis Pasteur fought microbes in milk in the laboratory, as part of a war that seemed to parallel the one being fought by Napoleon in Russian territories and elsewhere. Healthy people are needed to defend the country, and so the twin sciences that emanate from the dairy – that of Pasteurisation and vaccination, as developed by Edward Jenner from cows against smallpox – develop industrially and are incorporated into effective public health policies. Hygiene is the result of this laboratory work – with Pasteurised milk becoming more widely available from the 1890s – and it makes possible the mass deaths of millions of healthy men in the muddy, rat-infested trenches of the First World War; for had the war on the microbes not been won, then the war in the trenches could not have proceeded. Even in the heat of battle, the war on microbes kept alive so many bodies where before so many had succumbed, so that they might, subsequently, die in excessive numbers on the battlefield.
Formula milk, made up from cow’s milk, is presented as a fix to problems of undernourishment and infant mortality – and it will become a part of the quest for ‘scientific motherhood’. The history of infant feeding was a triangulation between the promises of technology, commercial pressure, and the promotion of biology (or scientific knowledge of the body). Women’s inadequate knowledge of infant nutrition, it would seem, could be augmented by the application of science. First invented by Justus von Liebig in 1867, ‘Liebig’s Soluble Food for Babies’ was manufactured and sold in London by the Liebig’s Registered Concentrated Milk Company. It was composed of cow’s milk, wheat, malt flour and potassium bicarbonate. By 1883, there were twenty-seven patented brands of infant food on the market.
‘Bess’, Condensed Milk Label, 1915.
In the 1910s, evaporated milk began to be widely commercially available at low prices. Milk corporations funded clinical studies that suggested that babies who were fed on evaporated milk formula thrived better than breastfed babies, when their weight gain was compared. In North America particularly, some paediatricians promoted the view that bottle-feeding was as good as breastfeeding, based on progressive weight gain. The monitoring of growth then became a benchmark justifying the charts and weighing clinics. As infant welfare and health surveillance grew, there was a notional standard established on the basis of readings from these formula-fed babies. In today’s climate, there may be more concerns that these weight gains and formulae contribute to diabetes and obesity in later life – and now feeding ‘success’ is as likely to be measured in achieving cerebral milestones. In the rapidly growing Asian markets, breast milk substitutes make unsubstantiated claims that the addition of vitamins will increase height, weight and intelligence. A mother from Vietnam, who spends nearly all of her income on formula milk from a German manufacturer, observed that: ‘Most people here look for the weight and the height … We always see chubby children on formula packages and on TV. We all want that.’
Most of the medical profession adhered for some time to the idea that bottle feeding was better than breastfeeding. It was regularised. It overcame problems associated with rationing. It fed into the same atmosphere of ‘salvation through technology’ that fuelled the Space Race and the ‘white heat’ of technology of the post war period. This knowledge was taken forward aggressively in projects of exporting Western infant products to be imbibed by colonised bodies. Rationalisation of milk supply allows the penetration of exchange relations into new markets.
Advertisement for Carnation Milk, 1957.
Breastfeeding is not just about the provision of milk. It is also not just about intimate bonds. Like the act of reproduction, lactation is the enactment of a splitting, of a formation of self and part-self that is to become other. It disrupts the dominant motif of the bounded body, of sovereign individuality. Milk is a bridge between bodies: an emission from one and incorporation into another. This can be evidenced in the relatively recent proliferation of the brelfie, the breast-feeding selfie – at once an image of self and not-self, of bodies joined in the transmission of milk.
Perhaps the site of giving milk, of the mother splitting herself, causes social anxieties. This anxiety is mobilised to validate the social separation of the breastfeeding woman from the public environment, whether through shame or through lack of paid maternity leave, which produces the need for the technological fix of the breast pump. Sometimes the breastfeeding woman is directed to separate herself and her baby from the rest of the world, by taking up a position in the toilets. Breast pumps are now designed so that women can continue to be optimally productive while using them – expected to work at the computer whilst lactating, even whilst away from home on business in hotels, or while exercising. As milk is known better through the smartness of our technologies and analytical abilities, its essence is extracted and negated, while the messy body is constituted negatively as a source or vessel. Optimisation is not conceived of as an emotional and embodied issue, but a question of the quality of the fluid, a nutritional source for the brains of the intelligent, adaptable workforce of the future, extracted remotely from the newly-freed bodies of a female workforce that need not leave its desks to do the work of reproduction.
Hands Free Pumping Bra, 2016. Courtesy of Simple Wishes.
Luce Irigaray wrote in
Ours is a social climate that oscillates between a political economy of nostalgia, and paranoia about a techno-utopian euphoria and exaltation in the face of extinctions. Extreme transhumanist fantasies of jettisoning the body altogether and uploading consciousness onto new improved substrates permeates this climate in a further repression of the long-promulgated Cartesian mind-body split.
Milk – like skin – is fully abstractable from its source. The body is no longer required, in industrial processes that remain still on the fringes of the economy. In effect, the cow’s body is no longer needed once the genetic sequence has been obtained, though the marketing speaks rather idealistically of cows being released to roam free. Producing milk or leather is visualised more as a harvesting of data. In contemporary dairy industrial farming, the cow’s body is discardable in any case. It becomes the location of a series of processes to be ‘optimised’ – utilising a language that pervades the industry, where ‘yield’ must be increased by manipulating the cows’ feed, medication, living conditions, and genetics.
The application of artificial breeding techniques to improve livestock is now routine in the dairy industry. Given the advances in embryo transfer technology from the 1970s onwards and the development of sexed semen identification in the 1990s, the dairy industry became enmeshed in dairy genetics. Companies specialising in cattle genetics provide catalogues containing an almost limitless assortment of semen from sires at all pricing points for a worldwide marketplace. There is no longer a need to have live bulls at the dairy. Instead a phial or ‘straw’ of frozen sperm arrives.
Genetic animal ‘improvements’ are often tied into alliances of scientific, government and corporate policy. In similar fashion, humans identified as ‘under-capitalized’ and thus biopolitically ‘backward’, are targeted. The language of optimisation and improvement permeates economics, the food industry, agriculture, and overseas development programs. Humans that do not eat large amounts of meat and dairy, for example, may not be considered ‘optimal’ eaters.
Bull Semen Straws, copyright Animal Breeding Europe <
Dairy is the industry that pioneered the application of big data, assisting milk’s accelerated abstractions into chemical components, economic actions and bodily manipulations. It has provided a model for other industries to generate their algorithmic futures. Big data has been implemented in dairy farming more than in any other industry, and – combined with the financialisation of species and individual worth – pioneered in the field of animal science through quantitative analysis.
Can we identify domesticated animals as trapped – albeit over time and space, intergenerationally? Is the fully roboticised milk production line a transformed representation of its maker, the hunter, and the prey animal, its victim, and of their mutual relationship? Capitalism depends not just upon the exploitation of labour and knowledge, but the expropriation of land and its resources, and the co-option of bodies and body parts as bioreactors. Is the in-vitro mammary gland, which operates as a bioreactor, a form of entrapment? Is the new science of cellular agriculture a form of entrapment? The depletion of species and environmental loss of the present is identified as an acceleration of the burden of human entrapment in dependent relationships, rather than a consequence of the human entrapment of and instrumentalisation of nature, first through industrialisation and then through technoscience, which still seeks to offer positivist solutions for degradation, as it simultaneously quickens it. Like many experimental cellular farming technologies, technoscience is offered as a foil to try to combat the spectre of collapse and destruction, by utilising a frenzy of growth and regeneration. What to think of a distinctly vampiric, indeed, masculine obsession, posed by the renewed interest by venture capitalists in parabiosis, the transfusion of young blood into old people’s veins?
Reproduction is never left alone. Reproduction and the sustenance of life are endlessly augmented. But there is one very present, tangible way in which reproduction and life sustenance is affected today. Over 1000 UK midwives are from EU countries and their future is now uncertain, in a context in which there is already a national shortage of around 35,000 midwives. In August 2017, a charity, Fertility Network UK, collated evidence that there were restrictions being imposed on access to NHS-funded IVF in some areas of England: ‘England pioneered IVF approaching 40 years ago, but that achievement is meaningless if only those who can afford to pay for IVF benefit from it’.
This climate, with its disdain for dependency, the flesh and vulnerability, matches a neo-liberal market-driven economy that draws on pseudoscientific fantasies of genetic and geopolitical advantage. In an age of the surveillance state and corporate data extraction, to be bodiless seems to represent emancipatory freedoms. It is an arena for unrestrained depravity, of ungendered, unracialised, unembodied, multiple selfhood. Likewise, for those who want to disavow their flesh, and hive-mind their intelligence onto some more robust substrate, singularity seems like an attractive proposition. But what we really know is, within our lifetimes at the very least, to be without a body is quite simply to be dead. There is no more present, efficient and fast-acting way for a state to perpetrate ultraviolence on the bodies of its citizens, than the removal of a public health service.
Milk is a liquid latent with the power of annihilation as well as the capacity to provide life. Its hsapings are driven by the attempt to wrestle control of supply, to entrap the milk-giver, to take its milk from it and to remake that milk as something else, as anything else, even as something so different to itself, it barely registers as milk at all. We are far from milk being just milk, however nutritious and feeding it is supposed to be. The force of history, the bio-medicalisation of the body, the intervention of politics into the very start of life: all that is clear. Milk’s components have now been more closely identified: casein, whey, lactose. Each of these has multiple uses. Milk is still mobilised as a cipher of nature, as rendered in the work of lactivists: militant advocates of the normalisation of breastfeeding.
Caroline Baum, ‘Breaking down the boundaries’,
Hélène Cixous,
Wood, Marcus,
Apollodorus,
Julia V. Douthwaite,
William Cadogan,
William Prout,
Thuy Linh Nyugen, Nyugen, Thuy Linh,
Boon, Sonja and Beth Pentney, ‘Virtual lactivism: Breastfeeding Selfies and the Performance of Motherhood’,
Elizabeth Grosz,
Julia Kristeva,
Luce Irigaray,
See ‘NHS access to IVF being cut in England’, BBC News, 7 August
See Faircloth, Charlotte,
The authors have no competing interests to declare.