dily organs and technology: “If our organs are natural instruments, our instruments must be artificial organs: the workman’s tool is a continuation of his arm, the tool-equipment of humanity is therefore a continuation of its body” ( 2002: 339, emphasis added). If the arm is continued by a tool, the arm is also a working tool. If the tool continues the arm, the tool is also a living arm. The worker can diminished by this continuation, which might how the specific story of the workman does not simply fold back into a general story of the human. Or the story of the workman’s arm might be another way of telling the story of the human. Arlie Hochschild describes how: “The factory boy’s arm functioned like a piece of machinery used to produce wallpaper. His employer, regarded that arm as an instrument, claimed control over its speed and motions. In this situation, what was the relation between the boy’s arm and his mind? Was his arm in any meaningful sense his own?” ( 2003: 7, emphasis in original). We need to tell these (unfinished) histories of lost arms, of how workers lose their arms, as the loss of a relation of ownness, when arms become tools in the creation of wealth. The loss of the worker’s arms in becoming tool is also the acquisition of arms by others.
When some bodies provide the “whole social body” with arms, other bodies are freed from the necessity of this becoming. The freedom not to be supportive is the freedom not to become the arms: by employing others to be the arms. We can consider how a wide range of power relations can be understood in terms of some becoming the limbs to support others. We can simplify this formulation: some bodies become supporting limbs. The “servant class” could be one way of thinking how some individuals become the “hands” that exist only to support others. The female servant is a handmaid. Bruce Robbins shows how servants as represented as and through hands in nineteenth century British fiction as “parts without a whole” (1993: ix-x). Perhaps the hand is cut off from the worker’s body in order to be given to the body of the aristocrat. Robbins cites William Hazlitt’s essay, “Footman” from 1830, written from the point of view of the gentleman with the aim of satirizing that viewpoint: “what would be the good of having a will of our own, if we had not others about us who are deprived of a will of their own, and wear a badge to say ‘I serve’” (17). The aristocratic class rule through the will: an exercising of will that take the form of the deprivation of others of a will of their own, treating others as servers, in the case of handmaids, as hands, in the case of footmen, as feet. An unwilling servant would be “impertinent,” a word that now implies “rudely bold” but derives from the Latin for “unconnected” or “unrelated.” An unwilling servant would but a part that is not related to a whole, as the one who is unwilling to subordinate her or his will to the will of the whole.
It is an impertinent history, this history of willfulness. A willful part might be the part that has stopped working. No wonder: willfulness is striking.
So many histories are at stake in this differentiation between willing and unwilling or willful parts!
We could think also of citizenship in these precise terms: citizenship as becoming part. Of course in multicultural liberal secularism, a diversity of individual parts is permitted. A diversity of individual parts might even be encouraged but on condition that each part is willing to participate in national culture, where participation requires an agreement with a common end or purpose (see here for a reflection on conditional will). We learn the requirements of participation from those whose particulars fail to meet them. Think of how “the veil” has acquired a willfulness charge. The veil becomes a willful part, a part that refuses to take part in national culture; a stubborn attachment to an inassimilable difference.
The creation of a distinction between willing and willful parts is thus a crucial mechanism for reproducing the national body. My account here dev