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Return to Inscriptions
Corporeographies
Vicki Kirby
From Inscriptions, vol. 5: 'Traveling Theories,
Traveling Theorists' (1989).
[N.B. As at 12 July 2008, the original version is not on-line. This copy was made
from a Google cache on 12 July 2008 by Adrian Harris]
I want to begin by conjuring the image of a man who is participating in the Hindu ritual festival of
Thaipusam. What can be said about such an image? Detailing an ethnographic contextualisation
will not prove helpful for its reading, at least not in terms of what focuses my own particular
fascination. For even if I could presume to elaborate the cultural significance of this festival within
Hinduism, as it is expressed in a specific geographical location and as it is understood by this
particular man whom I have isolated, such an explanatory narrative would still not answer my
curiosity. This is because I am not so much interested in the orthodox question of what this man
makes of his ritual action as I am in asking what this ritual action has apparently made of him. Or
to put it another way, it is not this man's cultural mind-frame upon which my prurient inquiry
fastens. Rather, it is the enigma of his body that attracts my interest: his tongue, his neck, his belly
and hands, and then the substance of his viscera and lungs, their surfaces and depths, his blood
and the strange information that it must carry.
This particular man is part of a religious procession. He is walking a considerable distance with
many others who are similarly regaled within what could be described as a type of elaborate, metal
scaffolding. The infrastructural support for these constructions is the devotee's own body. Myriad
metal spokes are driven into the skin and through the vital organs. The hands may also be pierced
and even the tongue immobilised by long spikes thrust through the face, lips, and neck.
To be thus impaled by any one of these metal prongs would prove at least painful for most of us, if
not lethal. Bleeding, scarring, and serious internal injury would be the predictable results of such
self-abuse. And yet for the serious participant, none of these effects is realised. Indeed, whatever
the belief system--structural frame or cultural text, call it what you will--through which this man's
body is ciphered and located as "being" in the world, one can only presume that this information
also informs the very matter of his body's material constitution, even at the level of data in and
between cells. For this body does not show any evidence that its boundaries have been breached.
Its interior and exterior surfaces, the skin and membranes that divide as they connect the
complexity of its parts, have not functioned as borders which separate one thing from another. And
this confounding of the inside/outside division also confounds the very notion of an essential
integrity, relying as it does on a border that will secure one body as an entity separable from
another.
Indeed, this image is provocative precisely because it problematises orthodox understandings of
just what a body is. The body--that universal, biological stuff of human matter--that "something
shared" that the social sciences assume is the common ground for all their inquiries--is somewhat
qualified here. The devotee would seem to share his body's peculiarly plastic articulation with
other devotees. However, this cultural/ritual incorporation is not generalisable. And yet, because
medical discourse arbitrates the final truth of a body, social scientists have tended to delimit their
field of investigation to the interpretation and contextualisation of bodies. In other words, they stop
short of asking how it is that the cultural context that surrounds a body seems also to somehow
inhabit it. Ironically perhaps, the acknowledgement that there are remarkably different cultural
interpretations of the body can nevertheless still presume an essential, universal body that is just as
variously explained.
This disciplinarisation of what can be asked relegates the discussion of certain curious (because
difficult to interpret) observations to the safe containment of "corridor talk" or dinner party
anecdote. This means that such observations are not given legitimacy by being acknowledged as
curious within conventional, ethnographic representation. And here, I do not want to suggest too
quickly that such omissions be taken as evidence for alterity's unrepresentableness. The
announcement that Western modes of knowledge and representation have reached their explanatory
limit is interrupted in this cautionary hesitation from Blanchot, who says:
There is an "I do not know" that is at the limit of knowledge but that belongs to
knowledge. We always pronounce it too early, still knowing all--or too late, when I
no longer know that I do not know ... [1]
I want to propose here that what counts as knowledge operates via an economy of representation
that requires, as a necessity, that this lapse in the otherwise careful intellectual rigour of the
ethnographer take place: that is, Knowledge itself is predicated on a strategic oversight.
To illustrate and clarify what I mean, I will substitute the spectacle of my original, exotic example
with one that is more immediate if less dramatic: R.S.I. (Repetitive Strain Injury, or "kangaroo
paw"), an Australian "disease." You will see the problem already. How can you have such a thing
as an Australian disease? As this disease has incurred the largest number of compensation claims in
Australia's history, it is a question whose significance has come to exceed my own personal
curiosity. This affliction is purportedly a product of word processing and other repetitive work
practices. Firstly and very briefly, the symptoms are usually felt as intense pain in the shoulders,
arms, wrists, and hands. The victim suffers varying degrees of incapacitation. The arms may have
to be supported in a sling, the wrists and hands strapped in splints. This condition may last for
years, and the body's restrictions become permanent. Work becomes impossible, and the personal
life of R.S.I. sufferers is seriously impaired.
Understandably, employers are dubious and financially unsympathetic when they learn that R.S.I.
doesn't seem to occur elsewhere in the world. This suspicion is exacerbated when many of their
employees, although trussed in splints and armbraces, are nevertheless diagnosed by the medical
profession as malingerers. Ergonomists argue that it's an engineering problem. They claim results
from such things as the adjustment of chair and desk heights and the resetting of keyboard angles.
Against this, psychologists have proven, at least to their own satisfaction, that it is an attitudinal
syndrome, even offering to conduct personality tests in order to anticipate the bad-risk employee.
And yet, whatever is proffered as the actual etiology of this disease, no one has been able to
explain why workers experiencing what seem to be identical conditions in different industries do
not also suffer from it. I should also mention here that victims of R.S.I. show a tendency to fall
into significant social categories that articulate with sex and/or class (usually female and/or working
class).
A battery of disciplinary regimes has seized upon this strange phenomenon to pronounce the truth
of the body that manifests it. That each interpretation undercuts the claims of another is not in itself
especially significant. What is of specific interest, however, is that given this fact, nowhere in the
vast and competing literature on R.S.I. has any mention been made of the common assumption that
underpins
all of these discourses, for a strict nature/culture division organises these
interpretations into the predictable either/or of the mind/body split. Consequently, only two
questions are then possible: Is this disease a real (because biologically determined) phenomenon,
or is it just thought (erroneously) to be so? This award of compensation will be more or less
difficult depending upon which side of this division the explanation is located. It is clearly then, a
politically inflected conceptual opposition.
The binary logic by which these regimes of truth have been structured is threatened by the
ambiguities of R.S.I.'s symptomatology, hence the rush to explain and thereby contain the
phenomenon as an expression of either body or mind. Ironically then, despite the appearance of
engaged disputation between different and competing discourses, the motivating anxiety to find a
singular solution could be said to derive from a shared apprehension; namely, that their apparent
differences are actually the articulation of a common logic. All these discourses assume that the
body is the naturalised material given of human substance, a body that mind, as culture or
psychology, in this case, merely interprets.
If we could concede for a moment that the body might fruitfully be considered instead as a social
site, we would have a very different horizon of possibilities to think with. For a start, the body
could then be understood as the manifold expression of a generalised intertextuality in which
biological discourse, another cultural discourse, is but one of myriad constituting discourses.
Dangerous stuff this, given that the body is so often made to operate as the naturalised and
therefore passive ground for cultural and political analysis. But why is it that so many disciplines
evidence an essential necessity to organise knowledge around a mind/body split, one that would
seem to uncritically refigure Marxism's base/superstructure problematic? And why, against this, is
it politically significant to argue that the body is always/already culture's dynamic effect? In the rest
of this paper, I will attempt to address these questions and try to explain why, although seemingly
marginal, I consider them central to the concerns of this conference.
I will begin with the proposition that the different corporeal ambiguities just described may be
exemplary of something as yet unthought rather than anomalies to be rendered commensurate with
one discourse or another. Retaining this possibility, and keeping in mind that both examples are
represented as phenomena specific to particular cultures, the experience that anthropologists must
labour to re-produce or evoke for their readers becomes a very difficult one to represent if it is also
to embrace these peculiar cases. One of the aims of ethnography is to achieve what Clifford Geertz
calls "the postcard effect of being there." However, Geertz argues that ethnographers have only
recently discovered what mathematicians and poets have known for a long time, namely, "the
inadequacy of words to experience and their tendency to lead off only into other words." Although
he concedes that what the anthropologist faces is "a task at which no one ever does more than not
utterly fail," he does make a commitment to the value of attempting "to convey in words 'what it is
like' to be somewhere specific in the lifeline of the world," because "... it is above all a rendering
of the actual, a vitality phrased" (103). Although many of us may want to agree with the
desirability of and pragmatic necessity for Geertz's conclusion here, an understanding of just what
it is that determines the task's difficulty deserves further elaboration.
Geertz is just one among a now growing number of theorists and anthropologists who directly
engage with the problematic issue of ethnographic writing and cultural representation. (A
convenient anthology of this type of work appeared in the pathfinding book
Writing Culture
(Clifford and Marcus). Anthropology's credulous appeal to an empirical reality whose facts
might effectively arbitrate the truth of ethnography is called into question by such writers. Indeed,
for these writers the weight of the problem falls on the suffix "-graphy" in the ethnographer's craft.
The ethnographer makes reference to an extra-textual world which must nevertheless be re-
presented through textual practices. The battery of tropological conventions that organise a text, its
coherence and narrative resolution, or the rhetorical means by which an author establishes his or
her authorising presence or "writerly identity"--these writing strategies suggest that anthropology is
a literary craft rather than the transparent medium of things as they are "in the field."
Against this apparent iconoclasm, defenders of the faith, such as Michael Carrithers, here
specifically reproving Geertz's claims, will respond that
... whereas the canon of a fictional realist might be to achieve verisimilitude,
ethnographers adhere to quite a different standard. In their writing the touchstone
must be fidelity to what they experienced and learned about others, and much of
what they write has to be verifiably true ... a very different matter than the
plausibility or inner harmony we ask of realist fiction. Ethnographic scholarship
possesses a standard to which individuals may respond with different capacities,
but it possesses a standard all the same. (22)
Requisite to preserving the possibility of "a veridical or interpretive success" is the clean separation
of the literary and rhetorical form from the detail of its factual, ethnographic content. For it can then
be maintained that the truth resides outside the discourse that merely represents it.
But it is precisely this separation that is now being contested. The constitutive role of the author in
the making of ethnographic texts confounds claims of scientific objectivity, and further to this, it
undermines the political authority that motivates such claims. If the mimetic force of scientific
rhetoric is found to be a textual construction, then perhaps less inhibited writing genres that strive
to evoke rather than repeat the fieldwork experience can legitimately be entertained. A literary and
theoretical reflexivity that is avowedly subjective can then elicit the poetic dimension of
ethnography--the dialogical gaming of negotiated meanings, the experimental use of fiction and
autobiographical accounts that risk self-irony, the self-conscious attempt to convey the fieldwork
experience as a series of broken fragments rather than a coherent narrative, and so on. James
Clifford concisely explains that such types of writing are grappling with the realization that,
"Ethnographic truths are thus inherently
partial--committed and incomplete" (Introduction
7).
Clifford also anticipates a possible misreading of this turn from objectivity to romantic or
modernist subjectivism. He insists that "... to recognize the poetic dimension of ethnography does
not require that one give up facts and accurate accounting for the supposed free play of poetry.
'Poetry' ... can be historical, precise, objective" (Introduction 26). Clifford goes on to say that
although ethnography is always writing, it is not "only literature."
This valuable reconceptualisation of the ethnographic project inaugurates the possibility of thinking
differently about cultural difference. By questioning the objectivity/subjectivity split through the
revaluation of the negative side of this binary logic, the orthodoxy of the canon's rigid economy is
challenged. The strategic rehabilitation or attempted reversal of determinate negation (here
subjectivity) provides a space from which to question the necessary interrelationship between the
different sides of the binary.
This experimentation with new and imaginative writing styles and strategies is considered
preferable because it more honestly negotiates "(t)he gap between engaging others where they are
and representing them where they aren't ... " (Geertz 96). Or, to put this another way, it seems
perhaps more politically and ethically able to answer Geertz's question, "What happens to reality
when it is shipped abroad?" (96) However, this concern to enlist innovative writing strategies that
seem better to express what was previously excluded can unwittingly operate to defer the crucial
question of cultural difference. For in itself, the turn towards negation is still caught within the
self-same logic that it appears to contest: the desire to re-present the fieldwork situation as mimesis
is refigured in the desire to evoke something of its experiential complexity. Indeed, inhabiting the
very word evocation--that suggestive calling up of what could not simply be repeated--is the
seductive lure of an uncanny proximity that only sound appears to embody. It is as if we are really
getting closer.
What needs to be asked here, rather than simply assumed, however, is: What are we supposed to
be getting closer to? It would seem that confessing "... the inadequacy of words to experience"
predicates "experience" as the unproblematic stuff of this recollected immediacy. Indeed,
experience is thereby installed as a horizon of intersubjectivity, a presence now deferred. To be
more precise, the supposed shared matter that has been made to naturalise such a claim continues to
be the inert, passive material of the body itself--that universal tabula rasa upon which culture is
thought to be inscribed. If objectivity was previously problematised as having a privileged relation
to "the Real," now subjectivity, via experience, has reclaimed the same foundational ground for
another, if more subtle form of universalisation.
In the economy of signification--that system through which meaning (value) is organised--a mode
of thought has here been preserved by being merely reversed, just as if the face of a coin had been
flipped from head to tail. The coin remains the same, and so does the economy that gives it value.
It should be remembered that the problem with a binary is not that there are only two
conceptualisations possible, nor simply that one side is not valued as is the other, although this
provides us with a clue to the problem. Rather to describe a binary as the articulation of a selfsame
logic is to acknowledge that there was only ever
one term and that difference was therefore
only apparent. In contrast, the attempt to think difference differently must begin by positing the
possibility of (at least) two terms.
When ethnographic representation inscripts alterity/difference into this binary, even though
reversing it, alterity again risks being rendered transparent. The West generously gives it voice
while still conserving itself as sovereign subject. If we grant that History is always greater than our
personal benevolence and intellectual perspicacity, it is important to retain a certain caution as we
turn, or are made to turn, towards "otherness." Western Reason, now that it is called upon to
justify an inherent phallocentrism and ethnocentrism, will unfortunately be able to manage the
crises, with no fundamental changes, if alterity is so easily recuperated. Given this, the following
intervention is motivated by the belief that the anxiety that this predicament generates should not be
facilitated but should instead be sustained and intensified.
My initial strategy is a simple one that has been much rehearsed within conventional, contestatory
political practice, namely, the attempt to radicalise the familiar. Invariably, the task is to challenge
an assumption that has been naturalised and therefore neutralised in order to acknowledge the
political investments that such an oversight contains. However, the task accrues a heavier burden
when it poses a question that underwrites all of the previous ones; that is, when it questions the
interrelationship between truth, representation and subjectivity. A Derridean interrogation of this
involvement requestions and revalues just where the political takes place, and it is because of this
that deconstruction has incurred the wrath of critics from both the Left and the Right. What these
guardians of political orthodoxy are defending is their common assumption that a certain
foundational ground must guarantee all political practice and that this "given" cannot itself be given
up. In response to this oppositional coalition, Derrida has commented as follows:
It is in the interest of one side and the other to represent deconstruction as
turning inward and an enclosure by the limits of language, whereas in fact
deconstruction begins by deconstructing logocentrism, the linguistics of the
word, and this very enclosure itself. On one side and the other, people get impatient
when they see that deconstructive practices are also and first of all political and
institutional practices. (Critical 168)
I want to pick up this last point and try to suggest how a deconstuctive approach might usefully
further our thinking about difference and representation. At least it can begin to loosen this
content/form split through which the problem is usually considered.
Focusing on representation then, the dual meanings of the word that are often conflated include its
sense of "speaking for," as in the case of a political leader who is representing the interests of his
or her constituents, and its sense of re-presentation or substitution. These meanings are often run
together because the notion of mediation underscores them both. As a consequence, the ethical and
political motivation behind questions of representation in both its senses will similarly concern the
possible conflict of interests between the mediator and the mediated. This expresses an obvious
political asymmetry that is considerable because unavoidable. To put this simply, because
something is standing between one thing and another, the transfer of information must inevitably
entail a distortion.
With specific regard to ethnography as cultural representation, writing is here understood to be
parasitically dependent upon an originary because of prior experience or reality. Writing must
therefore reconstitute and transform this moment through its very distanciation from that moment.
In other words, it must mediate a complex immediacy, just as Geertz implies in his comment, "the
inadequacy of words to experience." However, this understanding of writing/representation as
transportation or derivation, as something that, to paraphrase Geertz, renders the actual or phrases
the vital, remains within the comfortable belief that language is primarily an instrument of
communication. Following from this, it makes perfect sense to assume that intending, self-present
subjects exchange or negotiate meanings via the separable process of language's signifying
operation. By divorcing language from the constitution of subjectivity, the pressing political
consideration can be reduced to the question of who controls the instrument of representation, or
who can therefore exert power over others. According to this view, the mediator and the mediated
occupy subject positions that are interchangeable, at least in principle, thus assuming the possibility
of eventual social justice.
Against this, a deconstructive reading refigures the subject as an effect of language. The subject
does not precede language, for it is always/already articulated by a political field of signification
that includes it. "Language" in this sense now exceeds its common understanding as speech or
writing. The more common conceptualisations of language assume that an empirical enclosure,
thematic integrity, or intelligible unity can be decided. Saussure anticipated that linguistics would
one day be subsumed to a much more general science, one that he termed "semiology." And
Derrida's "grammatology" tries to think this "writing in the general sense." Derrida's "Writing," or
"archi-ecriture," is a catachretical marker--a metaphor without a literal referent, standing in for a
concept that is the condition of conceptuality. As this notion undercuts the appeal to an extratextual
signified as the final guarantee of meaning, it cannot be recruited for hermeneutics. Given this, the
charge--and it is more often made than not--that Derrida's intellectual and political focus does not
escape the written text is entirely misguided. As Derrida says:
... an hour's reading, beginning on any page of any one of the texts I have
published over the last twenty years, should suffice for you to realize that text, as I
use the word, is not the book. No more than writing or trace, it is not limited to the
paper which you cover with your graphism.
(Critical 167)
"Language," or "writing in this generalised sense," offers us a way to conceptualise why there can
be no outside of such a text because everything is always/already the manifestation of "writing's"
political articulation. Consequently, the problematic of representation can no longer be confined to
its consideration as mediation, because both the subject who investigates and the object
investigated are always/already confounded within a "writing" that constitutes their differences.
When representation is conceptualised as an intervention between one discrete thing and another,
the logical economy that underwrites and constructs these divisions cannot be radically called into
question. Indeed, if reasoning is itself founded on the violence of such bipolar divisions, with an
implicit negation and mastery of contradictories, it is understandable, unfortunately, why it just
doesn't "make sense" to question this logic. However, if difference cannot be thought unless we
broach this autologic circle, we need to learn how to "stop making sense" in quite the same way.
Faced with this impossible prospect, Luce Irigaray asks: "How do we speak the other without
subordinating it again to the one? What method could even render this question perceptible?" She
notes:
A perpetually unrecognized {meconnu} law prescribes all realizations
of language(s) {toutes realisations de langage(s)}, all production of
discourse, all constitution of language {langue}, according to the necessities of
one perspective, one point of view, one economy: the
necessities of man, supposed to represent the human race.... It seems that this self-
evident truth {evidence}, which is at once immediate and inscribed in our
entire tradition, has to remain occulted, has to function as the radically blind
point of entry of the subject into the universe of speech {dire}. To open
one's eyes here amounts to extreme imprudence, a folly as yet unheard of, a
violence that calls for the mobilization of all kinds of arguments....
As there can be no "outside of text," Irigaray is not simply conjuring with the notion that certain
unfortunate, because powerless, subjects have been denied reasonable access to language and
representation. Her argument is much more profound in its implications. Through a Derridean
recognition of textual materiality, subjectivity is here understood to be a function of a political
economy, produced by its constitutive force and the violence of the principle of noncontradiction.
As Irigaray explains this:
... yes or no, not yes and no at the same time, at least ostensibly....
Alternatives that are then measured, tempered, temporalized, and determined in the
hierarchical mode: the assumption always being that the contradiction can be
resolved in the right term, [can come to a proper conclusion].
The meaning of this reconceptualisation of "materiality" as textual production should not be
interpreted as a more refined reworking of the notion of ideology, for ideology presumes a
rationalist conception of the subject and argues that social change derives from the radicalisation of
consciousness. According to this model, culture is understood to constitute a consciousness that is
indifferently embodied in the uncontested ground of biology's determinations. That this view is
firmly entrenched is evident in the example of Anglo-American feminism's need to carefully divide
sex from gender. This behaviourist model of the passive body, socialised and conditioned in
culture, erases the body as itself an active site where the process of signification must in-form a
lived experience and where mind and body are not so readily separated.
Michel Foucault's valuable intervention against Marxism's base/superstructure model of
materiality/ideality, especially as it specifically addresses the body as a problematic, is helpful here.
Although his thesis is of course quite different from a deconstructive approach, his insistence that
the body is discursively constituted enhances a different understanding of materiality. At the end of
The History of Sexuality Volume 1, Foucault makes this argument quite clearly when he
says:
... we must not refer a history of sexuality to the agency of sex; but rather show
how "sex" is historically subordinate to sexuality. We must not place sex on the
side of reality, and sexuality on that of confused ideas and illusions; sexuality is a
very real historical formation; it is what gave rise to the notion of sex, as a
speculative element necessary to its operation. We must not think that by saying yes
to sex, one says no to power; on the contrary, one tracks along the course laid out
by the general deployment of sexuality. (157)
In other words, Foucault is encouraging us not to think of a body that precedes its entanglement
within discursive regimes. Rather, he invites us to try to entertain the possibility that as the body is
constituted or produced within discursivity, then so is it thereby rendered as a materiality. The
body in this model is, in its entirety, a materiality that is a cultural construct. The culture/materiality
binary is here quite confounded.
What would it mean then, following these interventions against orthodox understandings of
materiality, to bring the body back from its exile? Certainly, the humanist (Western, white, male)
commitment to an
a priori universal of human nature, refigured here as universal
embodiment (the ground of shared experience no less), would at least have to acknowledge the
limitations of its singular perspective. Sexual, cultural, class, and other differences would be
understood to matter, indeed to
be the very matter of entirely different subjectivities, and
therefore of entirely different knowledges
because they are differently embodied.
That these differences are grounded in the body does not introduce an extratextual referent,
although it does insist upon a different understanding of the materiality of reference. I have not
departed from a deconstructive strategy in this claim, for even Derrida himself insists that
It is totally false to suggest that deconstruction is a suspension of reference ...
deconstruction tries to show that the question of reference is much more complex
and problematic than traditional theories supposed.(Dialogues
123)
Any claim that presumes that reference must imply a universal is certainly being denied here:
however, this need not necessarily result in a profound sense of alarm. If reference has had to shed
something of its immutable stability, this means that even what was presumed to be the material
"given" of cultural analysis is contestable and changeable because it, too, is a construct.
Although much post-structuralist thought provides us with an enabling critique of these more
insidious, because invisible investments of humanism, it does not follow from this that
essentialism is necessarily targeted in quite the same way. Certainly, essentialising discourses that
claim to represent the identity of otherness, in whatever guise, must effect an allegiance with a
binary and exclusionary model of power that affirms the same violent structures that generate the
original asymmetry. It is inadvertently the expression of a political system that will only tolerate
difference as negation. Minority and oppressed groups are thereby made to celebrate an inherited
burden of meaning as if it articulates the accurate expression of their own, intrinsic reality.
However, inasmuch as essentialism does provide us with axiomatic categories for more
conventional forms of political action--forms that must retain some sort of referential commitment
to the experience of a collectivity--it is not simply wrong. Subjects are incorporated within the
violence of these representational systems and do experience their restraints and empowerments. I
want to argue that the experience of a collectivity is a form of reference that is realised in the shared
embodiment of signification. Against this, although not in opposition to it, each subject should be
understood to occupy a
particular location between myriad competing and contradictory
discourses in the larger web of sociality's text. Consequently, the peculiar, constitutive
contradictions that articulate a single, specific subject must necessarily be different from that
collectivity even as they include the meanings that identify it. This entails the embodiment of a
difference that defies the principle of noncontradiction because essentialism does not exclude
antiessentialism: They are mutually implicated because lived at one and the same time.
In a recent article, "Ethnic Identity and Post-Structuralist Difference," R. Radhakrishnan searches
for an "axial connection" between members of minority and oppressed groups and what locates
their differences from each other. Referring specifically to the constituency of "the ethnic,"
Radhakrishnan describes ethnicity as occupying
... quite literally a "pre-post" -erous space where it has to actualise, enfranchize,
and empower its own "identity" and coextensively engage in the deconstruction of
the very logic of "identity ..." (199)
I want to argue that the body
is that "pre-post-erous space," the site of a corporeography
that conjoins the dynamic political economy of signification--its written surface and writing
instrument.
Clearly, the notion of embodiment and experience that I am trying to think here cannot be
capitalised for consciousness within the colloquial notion of "subjectivity" as unmediated self-
affection. In other words, it can't be mastered and normalised for Truth or Knowledge. Rather, it
is a way to begin to think the complexity of the political field, to grant the possibility that different
truths and knowledges can obtain at the same time. It offers a reconceptualisation of what we might
understand as the politics of location, as the co-location of differences lived in embodiment, and
how we might resist refiguring the other in our own image because there is much that is simply no
longer comprehensible.
Of course, we cannot identify and interpret difference in order to master it. This was the point of
Blanchot's earlier admonition. Indeed, our complicity with totalising regimes of truth that
universalise and therefore deny difference is one of the things that many post-structuralist theories
have insisted is an irreducible fact. If we can sustain the anxiety that comes from the recognition
that we violate whenever we interpret and identify, and if we do not move too quickly into the
space of a general equivalence, then a horizon of different because previously "unthinkable"
possibilities begins to emerge. For example, rather than attempting to penetrate the a-nomalous
bodies that I described in the beginning of this talk in order to enlist them into a binary logic that
they clearly defy, why not acknowledge this resistance and interrogate how an oppositional logic
cannot accommodate their peculiarities.
Finally, although we are all forced to universalise and to deny difference, the violation that this
entails will not be forgotten if it is understood as a necessity to be acknowledged rather than as a
paralysing predicament to be solved.
Acknowledgements
This paper was written with the assistance of a fellowship from the American Association of
University Women. I would like to acknowledge the encouraging conversations with Ros Diprose
that helped me collect my thoughts.
Notes
1. M. Blanchot, cited in
Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy,
ed. M. C. Taylor (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986) 1.
References
Carrithers, M. "The Anthropologist as Author: Geertz's 'Works and Lives.'"
Anthropology
Today 4 (August 1988).
Clifford, J., and G. E. Marcus, eds.
Writing Culture: The Poetic and Politics of Ethnography.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986.
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Modified: Dec 7, 1998 by Megan O'Patry.
This copy taken from Google cache on 12 July 2008 by Adrian Harris