66. Expanding the Dimensions of Metis

Non-Western formulations of cunning have the potential to challenge how oppressors view the suffering subject and systems of oppression in which she suffers. The sphere of social reproduction hands down feminine craftiness as the tactics of the oppressed, used righteously and compassionately in pursuit of safety and self-determination (Fortunati, 2015). The clever storyteller Scheherazade enacts this, volunteering to marry a king who married a new virgin each night only to behead her the next morning; each night, she craftily postpones her execution by starting to tell an engrossing tale whose conclusion spills into the next night, for 1,001 nights, until the king falls in love with her and spares her life. Embodied cunning is pedagogical, attempting to inculcate in the oppressor empathy for the Other and a sense of justice. A woman like Scheherazade illustrates the cunning use of storying, humor, and a combination of obliqueness and explicitness in pursuit of this aim. A woman like Kannagi, coupled tightly with justice and self-righteous anger, demonstrates the destructive potential of harnessing tragedy to speak truth to power.

It's not lost on me that I'm doing this as well: telling the same story repeatedly, with tightly controlled antagonism, to survive in the clinic and academy.

The predominant ancient Greek conceptualization of metis doesn't touch on morality or minor affects, which Ngai (2005) describes as weak negative emotions, like envy, irritation, indignation, or anxiety, or the equivocal despair and gratification of a Pyrrhic victory, a metaphorical suicide bombing. Ngai contends that irritation, a minor affect, is diffuse, unlocalizable, racially marked, and written in the psyche and epidermis, part of the fascial organ (pp. 2-3, 182-183). Fibromyalgic fascia dries and sticks with irritation that deforms the tissues while demanding a corporeal response. Ngai argues that ostensibly undesirable affects are desirable for political resistance. As irritation is my normal, the fascial position-state I cunningly contend with and use, its resistive potential is encoded in my every movement and restriction.

As Ahmed (2017) says, "Irritation registers contact as intrusion. . . . The quality of an experience is that of rubbing up against something other than yourself, but once you are rubbed up the wrong way, it can feel like your own body is against you, even in those moments of relief" (Ahmed, 2017, p. 190).

Aristotle calls the unirascible "fools" (Ngai, 2005, p. 183), implying that irascibility is central to cunning.

Homeric stories about metis, such as Antilochus' race or Odysseus' many wily exploits, are seemingly void of morality, unlike the metis of Hesiod's Theogony. Faraone and Teeter (2004) argue that the fragments of Hesiod and Chrysippus, whom Detienne and Vernant's (1978/1991) elide, present a Metis closely aligned with the Egyptian goddess Maat. Maat is also swallowed, used to legitimize (male) monarchic rule due to her association with cunning, justice, and righteousness (pp. 178-179). In ancient Egypt, maat was both "the abstract concept of truth and correctness in the cosmic and social spheres and [the] anthropomorphic form [of] a goddess (Maat) who personifies truth and order" (p. 186). Often incorporated into the coronation names of kings to designate them wise and righteous, Maat was designated the "author of justice" and the representative of the moral, social, and legal order (pp. 187, 202). Influenced by maat, Hesiod stresses that Zeus' metis is not "crooked" like his father Kronos' because Zeus preserves Metis in his nēdús, the divine receptive, reproductive cavity and source of his violent impulses, where her moral authority can curb his immoral desire (p. 206).

Raphals' (1992) study of cunning intelligence in the classical Chinese tradition (zhi) is propelled by the notion that Detienne and Vernant (1978/1991) identify metis as a universal mode of intelligence, so it should be evident in other cultural traditions and languages. Zhi, or "to know," has a "semantic span from wise counsel and foresight to deception and craft" (p. 13). It is often gendered, laudatory when applied to a man but critical in relation to a woman, with the exception of the Buddhist Guan Yin in Journey to the West and Zhuge Liang's shrewd wife Huang Yueying in Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Zhi is often assessed in oracular terms, as the foolish man is mystified by present circumstances, but the wise man can perceive what has not yet happened. Zhi is also discursive: that is, the wise man understands what he perceives and knows how to articulate it (p. 21). In this sense, zhi is founded on the "belief [that] there is a correspondence between language and reality, that language can express the actual relationship between words and things" (p. 30)

Raphals (1992) traces the relationship between ethics, language, and zhi in multiple schools of early Chinese thought. Early conceptions of zhi were likely amoral and ambivalent, but post-Confucian zhi acquires an ethical outlook and accords with codified rules, while "crooked" or "mere cleverness" is degeneracy (p. 38). Classical Confucianism accepts cunning intelligence but considers some of its expressions, like "merely clever" language, to be underhanded conduct. The Mohist canon positively associates cunning with practical know-how, connoting talent and capability, clear vision, forethought, planning, skill. As a departure from Confucianism, craft was recast as skill instead of trickery, and skill constituted "real knowledge," the "ability to respond immediately, effectively, and it would appear, intuitively to rapidly changing situations" (p. 69), much like metis. Finally, the extralinguistic intelligence that Taoists describe parallels metis (p. 70). For philosophers like Laozi, there is no distinction between virtuous and vicious cunning, dispensing with the ethical tension between wisdom and cunning, allowing a description of cunning that isn't dichotomous.

Each school rejects cunning as an aspect of true wisdom but perceives it as acceptable and necessary in the martial sphere. The Chinese strategist-general represents a shift to an intellectual rather than a heroic view of military affairs, but it remains concerned with the transmission of texts as a means to knowledge and power (Raphals, 1992, pp. 101-103). This focus on the intellectual nature of warfare leads to the disparagement of unnecessary force or violence. In military treatises, zhi is value-neutral, while Confucian tracts use moral terminology, and literary accounts like the Romance combine the two. The resulting philosophical and semantic contrast echoes the repeated, cross-cultural contrast between "heroes of force" and "heroes of guile" that implicitly interrogates the linkage between honor and (moral) straightforwardness and craftiness and (amoral) illusion.

Cross-culturally, the heroic agon is deeply concerned with cunning, as it is with social order and the relationship between wisdom and ethical outlook. Where Homeric metis is wisdom apart from whether its employment is righteous, Hesiodic metis and post-Confucian zhi both position wisdom in relation to justice, virtuousness, and legitimate, absolutized sovereignty and in opposition to underhanded deceit.

The Sanskrit term upaya-kausalya couples expedient means with cleverness, resulting in skill in means: a pedagogical concept and a set of practices that aid individuals in attaining Enlightenment. As an action that is expedient and cunning, it is kairotic, phronetic, metic, applied with compassion, and permitted to deviate from Buddhist doctrine in acknowledgment of the fact that teachings are meant to be orientating, not absolute. Upaya-kausalya belongs to the constellation of cunning as conceptualized in the ancient world, but to the principle of justice it adds empathy (Detienne & Vernant, 1978/1991; Faraone & Teeter, 2004; Raphals, 1992). In explicitly restoring this dimension of care to cunning as practice and pedagogy, upaya-kausalya automatically associates itself with the righteous decision.

This survey of cunning intelligence in the ancient world helps me think through thanthiram, which isn't as heavily theorized through literary or historical accounts. The argument could perhaps be made that thanthiram, the ability to see through the illusion or trick, couples wisdom with righteousness, as when Karna understands it is Indra to whom he is giving his armor but is generous, and with irritability, as when Vishvamitra recognizes Indra's tricks and reacts with rage — foolishly undoing the fruits of his long meditation. The person with thanthiram relies on not only crafty language and storytelling, but also the fascial position-states encouraged by her own storytelling disposition, which may embody compassion, humor, courage, anxiety, or frustration. Like Maat and the "person of 'zhi,'" she learns to orient herself and her flesh for the straightforward attainment of just ends. Fibromyalgic cunning, in search of empathy from care providers or personal justice, instinctively employs "skill in means" to habituate fascial position-states that bring her closer to these aims.

Thanthiram or upaya-kausalya injects a sense of homeland-based community, minor affects, and anger into my specific fibromyalgic fascial cunning. Irritability often accompanies post-traumatic stress and the experience of chronic painervation. There is an envy of those who reside on the soil most compatible with their substance, implicit in Daniel's (1984) ethnography of Tamil Nadu when his informants who are Vellalar-caste Tamils claim that they possess great "tantirakkunam" (a word that shares a root with thanthiram), the crafty, cunning disposition required to be a successful businessmen or politician; but up-country Tamils who settle on Sinhala soil are affected by its substance and, disequilibrated, become "kenakkunam," or gullible, their crafty orientation not gone but displaced, muffled (pp. 93-94).

Thanthiram is both value-neutral — artful, crafty, wily — and negative — the underhanded (if amusing) trick — and community-defining — Tamil. It is the wisdom of the fish in the Panchatantra story just as it, unlike other conceptualizations of cunning, is tightly coupled with irascibility, a stereotypical trait of the South Asian sage.

A Ph.D. candidate and professor, I am a learned Tamil woman. I like to think my gut and fascia have acquired the choleric temper of the wise sage Vishvamitra, whose fits of anger comprised some of my favorite stories as a child. He meditated so intensely he frightened the gods, but he was often easily angered into breaking his penance, expending energy earned through years of austerities and maintaining perfect equilibrium on a single curse. It feels close to life with chronic pain.

If the unirascible woman is a fool, the irascible sage is cunning for her ability to reformulate her fascia and the fascia of her oppressors with her irritation and frustration. It brings to mind a peer who told me that taking medication is a sign of weakness, to which I felt my entire soft supportive skeleton rise to the shoulders and drop everywhere else, and my face, my voice when I said "Oh?," conveyed the minor affects my flesh was communicating. Or a physical therapist who commented while manipulating my right leg that I didn't look like the movement hurt me, and I bit back irascible words, but the instinctive irascible reformulation of the flesh stiffened my leg while he had it in his hands, its sudden immobility shocking him.

The biological substrata of the disabled multitude grants us a shared capacity to unintentionally shock, because fascially, enterically, the bodymind acts. Gut negativity, as in merycism in infants or irritable bowel syndrome in fibromyalgic patients, is directed at relations of care, damaging and damaged by that to which it is attached. How many of us, organized into a crip commons around a fibromyalgic microbiome (which already influences our social lives just as our social bonds influence our microbiomes), hate our ableist environments, hate the side-effects of our medications, hate masquerading, hate disclosing, hate tirelessly self-advocating, hate the clinic, the academy, the bodymind that we simultaneously love and want to live? Like Medea's metis, "the gut devours and rejects and reincorporates; it damages and attempts repair and thrives on its revenge" (Wilson, 2015, pp. 82-83), acknowledging what so many people can't bring themselves to admit: that negativity is politically salient and socially bonding (Cvetkovich, 2012; Wilson, 2015; Ngai, 2005).

Like trickster figures and fascia, these South Asian sages are not indomitable or flawless. Their slips of anger are fuck-ups that can't be undone and must be mitigated every time. To use a Eurocentric example, this is akin to the Norse trickster Loki, divine irritant of the Aesir. In Norse myth, the relationship between cunning and legitimate sovereignty is even more firmly established, but the figures who represent each move in and out of ambivalence, and sovereignty itself cannot be absolute given the cyclical nature of time (Wanner, 2009, p. 213). Odin is cunning, far-seeing, and wise, portrayed as a legitimate, absolute, but precarious ruler, protecting a precarious order: "all victories are tactical and temporary, serving perhaps to stave off but never to thwart the inevitability of ragnarök, the 'doom of the gods,' in which both god and world order will meet their end" (p. 221).

Loki and Odin both possess metic intelligence, representing the conflict between moral and amoral cunning, illegitimate power and sovereign authority. Wanner (2009) contends that the disparity between the two gods is not exactly moral in nature, as Odin's cunning is slightly moralized but shares the semantic field of Loki's cunning. Loki is crafty, wicked, calamitous, polymorphic, while Odin is wise, knowledgeable, a master of disguise; both frequently confront opponents stronger than themselves, relying on polumetis (infinite wiles) and kairos (the opportune moment); both are masculine figures with feminine dimensions, due to sex changes or the "unmanly" practice of magic (pp. 221-222). Both engage in flyting, the dialectic of insults where victory is founded on clever wordsmithing, though the former does so with Thor and the latter with all of the Aesir.

Loki is a change-agent, spitefully engineering the beloved Baldr's death as a demonstration that control is never comprehensive: there is always an exploit to be found, however violent its exercise. Also, and importantly for misability and the fuck-ups of fibromyalgic fascial cunning, Loki is too clever for his own good. Many tricksters, like Coyote, Raven, and Hermes, create snares for food or pleasure. In his flight from Asgard after Baldr's death, Loki crafts the fishnet to imagine how the Aesir might catch him and how he might break free. However, he is interrupted in this pursuit by the other gods, so he casts the net on the campfire, transforms into a salmon, and leaps into the river. Kvasir, wisest of them all, spies the burning net, and the Aesir create a copy of it and use it to capture and bind Loki for good (Hyde, 2010, p. 18).

Cross-culturally, this theme recurs: trickery undone by foolishness, impetuousness, or accident, caught in the snares of its own devising. Ravana excluding humans from his list of potential threats. Antilochus' cheat exposed. Karna, believing his introduction to Parasurama is a lie because he is the son of a charioteer, not because he is (unknown to him) a kshatriya, an accidental trap of his own making.

This constellation of cunning, somatic intelligence includes in its semantic field justice, empathy, expedient pedagogy, feminine intuition, and innovation as well as the ugly feelings that contribute to the thickening, dehydrating, stiffening, and rearranging of fascia. Irritability, (knowing or unwitting) foolish action, and failure develop and decolonize dominant rhetorical conceptions of cunning.

The reality for the chronically ill is that ugly feelings are elicited in us every day, due to ableism, healthcare management, pain, fatigue, and the culture of overwork. From a praxis-oriented perspective, fibromyalgic fascial cunning must be cross-cultural and kaleidoscopic to retain the qualities of the material existence of the pained Eelam Tamil American subject, as embodied existence is more complicated than an archetype. ↩