‘Ah, little lad, you’re staring at my fingers. Would you like me to tell you the little story of right-hand/left-hand? The story of good and evil? H-A-T-E! It was with his left hand that old brother Cain struck the blow that laid his brother low. L-O-V-E! You see these fingers, dear hearts? These fingers has veins that run straight to the soul of man. The right hand friends, the hand of love. Now watch, and I’ll show you the story of life. [He interlocks his hands] Those fingers, dear hearts, is always a-warring and a-tugging, one agin t’other. Now watch ’em! Old brother left hand, left hand he’s a-fighting, and it looks like love’s a goner. But wait a minute! Hot dog, love’s a winning! Yessirree! It’s love that’s won, and the old left hand hate is down for the count!’
The
world is made up of an eternal struggle between two opposite forces – or at
least, so goes the tale of the Reverend Harry Powell in The Night of the
Hunter, a sinister and shadowy film noir starring Robert Mitchum as Powell.
Explaining the symbolism of the tattoos on his knuckles to a rapt audience
in a bible-belt sweet shop, Powell is preaching the notion of a universal
system of values to the converted. But more than that, the preacher performs
a trick of the trade of the dogmatic moralist: conflating emotions with
principles, blurring the distinction between love and hate on the one hand,
good and evil on the other. He personifies love and hate as warring
opponents – love no more loves, but hates. This contamination of love by its
opposite is the essence of Nietzsche’s notion of the domination of the slave
morality, in which good is produced as a reaction to evil, in terms of ‘thou
shalt not’, not from an idea of good itself.
Powell’s tattoos symbolise not only vision, but mission – intended action as
well as attitude. His is the loving fist that beats you for your own good:
‘for they know not what they do’. No wonder a history of LOVE and HATE
tattooed on knuckles leads us back to the borstals of the early twentieth
century. Self-inflicted tattoos are generally connected to regimes of
discipline, and primarily with sailors, soldiers and prison inmates. This
form mirrors a tradition in which punitive tattooing was used as a means to
stigmatise (the Greek word ‘stigma’ means tattoo): in the nineteenth
century, deserters of the British army were branded with a D on their left
side; until 1832 French convicts sentenced to forced labour had the letters
TP (travaux perpétuels) branded on their bodies; until 1836 katorshniki
(public slaves) in Siberia had KAT pricked on to their cheeks and gunpowder
rubbed into their wounds; and in pre-colonial India the forehead was branded
with a picture of a vagina as a punishment for Brahmans who committed
adultery or unlawful intercourse.
Self-inflicted tattoos in disciplinary institutions should be seen in relation to this history of punitive tattooing. It is not only a sign of sheer boredom, group pressure or an innate tendency of criminals to tattoo themselves (as the nineteenth-century criminologist Cesare Lombroso assumed), but also an ambiguous play on acceptance and subversion. As the institution marks its power over inmates – if not by marking their skin, then at least with rigorous routine and arbitrary rules – the self-inflicted tattoo signifies a moment of control over a body that no longer seems to belong to you. To inscribe the marks of your oppressors onto your own skin internalises and devalues them at the same time – think of the prisoners in the Gulag who tattooed letters signifying ‘prisoner of Brezhnev’ on their forehead. Tattoos like that ridicule punishment through mimicry: it is not redemptive to decapitate someone who invites you to do so with a line of dots drawn around the neck and the instruction CUT written underneath.
The LOVE/HATE tattoo is a more subtle version of this principle: on the one hand it reduces the combination of punishment and moral education in the borstal to its most basic formula. It is as if the inmates’ tattoos denote an understanding of the way punishment operates – like the condemned man in Kafka’s In The Penal Colony (1919) who came to understand the law that he had broken by the fatal, 12-hour process of its inscription on his skin. On the other hand, with LOVE/HATE you take the law into your own hands. It announces ‘I too can divide up the world, judge as you judge’. If the underlying schema of tattooing is ‘the exterorisation of the interior which is simultaneously the interiorisation of the exterior’, as anthropologist Alfred Gell claimed in his book Wrapping in Images (1993), then the LOVE/HATE tattoo is the epitome of this process. It turns the inscription outwards, on the clenched fist, ready to imprint itself on others.
So perhaps Lacan had this tattoo in mind when he wrote ‘the subject … first marks himself as a tattoo, the first of the signifiers’. It is as if the subject with language on their fists says: ‘I judge, therefore I am’. In so doing, it constitutes itself as the product and the producer of a system of binary oppositions that renders difference intangible. The message within the binary logic of LOVE/HATE takes the form of interchangeable opposites: both are on a fist, love can always be hate, and love is a form of hate from the start: (I) LOVE (to) HATE. This might not turn out as glorious rebellion, however, but instead follow the scenario narrated by Joe Strummer in Death and Glory: ‘love ’n’ hate tattooed across the knuckles of his hands / the hands that slap his kid around / ’cause they don’t understand / how death or glory becomes just another story’.
But not all inmates of borstals were into Lacan. Led by libido, a more Freudian approach was chosen by the ones with LTFC ESUK written on their knuckles, whose interlocked hands could proffer silent invitations. Another wakes up, takes a look at himself in the mirror and decides to tattoo UOY on his own forehead. (On second thoughts, maybe he knows more about the Lacanian mirror stage than anyone…). Elsewhere, in the realm of entertainment and pleasure, the boxer on the Pogues’ album cover has an extra digit added to allow him to sport tattoos of LOVE and PEACE, whereas The Simpsons’ Sideshow Bob is a few short and has to make do with LUV and HAT. But perhaps it is the character of Anna in Steven Frears’ Sammie and Rose Get Laid (1987) who truly reclaims the tattoo from the borstal, with a W tattooed on each buttock.
Laura Cull is an artist; Goetz Bachmann is a research associate at Goldsmiths College.