Writing the Body Into Being
“There is no law that is not inscribed on bodies. Every law has a hold on the body. Through all sorts of initiations…it transforms them into tables of the law, into living tableaux of rules and customs, into actors in the drama organized by social order…It makes its book out of them. These writings carry out two complementary operations: through them, living beings are ‘packed into a text’…and on the other, the reason…of a society ‘becomes flesh’(140).
I quote de Certeau at length here because I feel that this passage illustrates a way to reconcile text and the body-of bringing the body into being-of writing the body into being (Conquergood, Madison, Pollock et al). In this passage de Certeau lays out the problematics of simply writing the body as though the body were simply a text. When we think of the body solely as a text to be analyzed we forget its human-ness and the politics associated with its everyday experience. In textual analysis we tend to examine the body as something to read to interpret, while forgetting that it is a living being, constantly in motion, constantly fluxuating its position.
Performance theory is one way to reconcile the textualism that the academy privileges while also writing about the body as living, breathing, moving being. De Certeau has been taken up (in fact the aforementioned passage specifically) in performance studies as a way to account for texts but also for performances—both staged and as everyday practice. As Dwight Conquergood notes, “The hegemony of textualism needs to be exposed and undermined. Transcription is not a transparent or politically innocent for conceptualizing or engaging the world”(147). The body is more than a text, it is a product of historical, political, social, economic, and cultural circumstances.
De Certeau is a good jumping point for thinking about the politics or “the laws” that become inscribed on bodies. We embody the practices of the law, “Sit-down, be quiet, pay attention!” These are not laws, which are written by lawmakers and voted on by those in charge, but are instead hegemonic practices ordering people to conform. In this same respect institutions also attempt to conform to hegemonic white, male, heterosexual, middle-class ways of being—ways that ignore other potentialities of being. However texts in their more traditional form do inscribe laws onto bodies, when sodomy laws were in place restricting the practice of same-sex desire, creating a barrier of access to reproductive rights by creating parental consent laws, and as Conquer good notes, the bureaucratic paperwork presented to immigrants (also discussed by Richard in class). These laws, which are written, try to control and restrain bodies, especially the bodies of whom we conceive of as oppressed.
Foucault expresses the concept of “subjugated knowledges” or the ‘knowledges at the bottom of the hierarchy.”(Conquergood, 147) as the ways that those marginalized people’s experiences and voices are often invalidated. Often times it is these knowledges that are resistive to dominant discourses and dominant performances of power. These “subjugated knowledges make the body central to resistance. This is what Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga describe as, “theories of the flesh” or theories of the body as key and central to writing about human subjects—especially in regards to the modes of power created by the racializing, classing, queering, and gendering, of bodies. In this way we can never separate the body from the politics, which, govern it, but we do have agency and the power to resist. When a person at the bottom of the hierarchy chooses to not sit when told, or protest against a war incited for pitiful fallacies and is physically arrested, those other ways of knowing and being gain some power. They break the inscription of law on the body.
I think de Certeau would agree with Conquergood—who has also influenced my understanding--that we should not rid the world of texts, but that we must think also of the bodies and performances alongside them. We must look at and critique textuality as the assumed norm for scholarship, which, often simply looks at the body as text, as a book (even when used metaphorically) and think of and depict the ways that bodies in their humanity, in their very existence can never be truly captured and represented in a text. Through the intervention of performance however, and the re-centering of the body, we may be able to do a better job describing the practices of everyday lives of ordinary people where their knowledges become pertinent to furthering new knowledges. In this process marginalized people not only are able to tell their experiences but in the telling and accepting may be able to heal.
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