production of spiritous seed in the testes. In this symbolic short-hand, creative acts are not about male brain-wombs but rather the microscopic making of the seminal liquor which expands and unfolds as a male principle of body and mind. Sterne offers up his own comic redaction of the brain-testes homology in Walter’s meditations on the seat of the soul, one of whose possibilities is the “very thin, subtle and very fragrant juice which Coglionissimo [big balls] Borri, the great Milaneze physician, affirms, in a letter to Bartholine, to have discovered in the cellulae of the occipital parts of the cerebellum.”43 Hilariously blurring the distinction between semen and neurospinal fluid, Sterne implies that great thoughts about the brain—indeed, the soul itself—might come from the personified testicles of the good Italian doctor. Satirists such as Swift would also come to the mind-genitals equation with a sophisticated sense of their interaction, even though his put-down of the Fanatic would depend on the crudest reduction of intellect and spirit into lust and sperm:
the Seed or Principle, which has ever put Men upon Visions in Things Invisible, is of a Corporeal Nature: For the profounder Chymists inform us, that the Strongest Spirits may be extracted from Human Flesh. Besides, the Spinal Marrow, being nothing else but a Continuation of the Brain, must needs create a very free Communication between the Superior Faculties and those below: And thus the Thorn in the Flesh serves for a Spur to the Spirit. I think, it is agreed among Physicians, that nothing affects the Head so much, as a tentiginous Humor, repelled and elated to the upper Region, found by daily practice, to run frequently up into Madness…. I have been informed by certain Sanguine Brethren of the first Class, that in the Height and Orgasmus of their Spiritual exercise it has been frequent with them *****; immediately after which, they found the Spirit to relax and flag of a sudden with the Nerves, and they were forced to hasten to a Conclusion. (A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit)44
In this comical parley of body and mind, Swift anatomizes religious hypocrisy by deploying iatromechanical concepts which transformed mind and body into simple machine laws. However, he also insinuates an inescapable presence of a genital sexuality as it will affect the farthest reaches of mind into philosophy, religion, and the visionary. While Swift might parody “mechanical operations” as a methodology for investigating the interface of body and mind, his own ironic play with “Spirit”—as ineffable mind/soul, animal spirits, or sperm—points to the complex linkage of consciousness, nervous system, and libido.
That the very seat of male thought or masculine identity could be influenced or even defined by a man’s sexual organs is a significant historical formation, but in this early phase the newer symbolism which came into being was characterized by contradictoriness. As we have seen, the conceptualization of the traffic between brain and genitalia contained a fundamental tension: on the one hand, the relationship could be a directly proportional one in which the presence and activity of testicles, yard, and seed created and defined a physical and mental maleness itself (as with notions of aura seminalis); on the other, the mind-genitalia connection could be inversely proportional (as with the brain-testicles homology), which meant a potential antagonism between genital and mental performance. These contradictory views existed simultaneously in the medical and sexological treatises, and their alternative (and highly problematic) implications for notions of masculinity and male identity are never clearly resolved. The non-medical discourses are likewise uncertain about the significantly different ramifications of these two models, sometimes exemplifying both systems within a single text. Unlike high and low medical narratives, however, the other discourses provide a clearer picture of how these competing concepts might have informed cultural constructions at large, the first model of direct relationship allowing for equations of male mental capacity with lust, reproductive potency, phallic size, or excessive intercourse (think, for instance, of the libertine sexual energy of the witty Restoration stage-rake). The second model of inverse proportion offered either/or scenarios in which one could possess either heightened mental or genital ability but not both at the same time, allowing for complex exchanges in which large amounts of wit or intellect might compensate a missing phallicism and vice versa.
The medical commentaries intensified the link between the male reproductive system and an essentialized maleness, refining the conceptual bridging between genitalia and the male mind in particular. But they are also witness to the uneasy and uneven cultural terrain as a newer symbolism about the male organs of generation came into being. As we turn now to the moderns’ approaches to the penis/phallus, we will see that the most problematic and contradictory features of the genitals-mind models were shifted onto the yard.
The Problematic Penis and Male Identity
As I have suggested, the penis is problematic in the twofold sense that Enlightenment usage was differential and ambiguous, and that the subject “the penis” has been plagued by a twentieth- and twenty-first century ahistoricism. The history of the penis, I am arguing, has not been well served by current theory. At the heart of my quarrel with psychoanalytical and feminist methodologies is their tendency to separate the penis and the phallus, forgetting that in so doing they are participating in a history of such splitting which privileges the metaphorized erection. An almost obsessive attention to the phallus as symbol has created the illusion that we are studying the cultural implications of male genitalia, when in fact we have focused on a single aspect—the erection as abstract idea—all but ignoring the relationship of hard and soft penis with its implications for studies of the male body. Lacan, as is well known, insists that the phallus is not a penis, but rather “the privileged signifier of that mark in which the role of the logos is joined with the advent of desire.” Lacan’s phallus is thus a linguistic concept, “a sign of the latency with which any signifiable is struck,” and a symbolic attribute no more in the possession of men than of women, both of whom will experience not the transcendental expression of a unitary, integrated self—one version of “having” the Phallus—but rather a perpetual “play of displacement and condensation … [which] marks his [or her] relation as a subject to the signifier.”45 Occupying a symbolic role qua signifier at the level of desire in general, Lacan’s phallus is thus to be carefully distinguished from the mundane penis, whose cultural and representational function is all but dismissed. Feminist critiques of the Lacanian phallus have exposed the rhetorical slight of hand which places Lacan himself at the center of definitional power whose patriarchal authority cannot be confronted.46 But feminist psychoanalytical frameworks have tended to follow Lacan in their absorption with the metaphorical phallus, as well as in their reluctance to recognize the value, or indeed the necessity, of reconstructing a history of penis-phallus conceptualizations which would explain why we have arrived at our current mode of privileging an ahistorical, symbolic phallus over the material penis.
There are signs that this theoretical myopia is giving way to a historical curiosity. David M. Friedman’s recent popularized approach in A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis47 suggests a mainstream interest in such a history. But scholars have also begun to speculate about a history of penis-phallus relationships in western culture, wondering why and when the penis and phallus came to be separated symbolically, with the latter becoming an intellectual icon and the former a taboo or at best an impolite subject not quite fit for professional academic discussion. One version of this historicization is the difficult question of how to explain the historical distance and differences between the early phallus worshipers of classical periods and the all but invisible phallus of postmodern theory and psychoanalysis. Jean-Joseph Goux has considered the differences between the symbolic “phallophorism of antiquity” (i.e., rites of Osiris, figures of Hermes and Dionysius) and the “modern phallocentrism” of psychoanalysis and philosophy, suggesting that “The modern phallus is a deciphered phallus…. The phallus is rediscovered, but, being no longer religious, sacred, ritualized, figural, it is no longer the same. It is unconscious and structural. There is a major difference between a culture which reserves a mythico-ritual place for the phallic emblem, and one which has a need for the experience and theoretical reconstruction of psychoanalysis to uncover the role and function of the phallus.”48 Daniel Boyarin argues in a different vein that “The phallus became
