|
In
recent critical writing, the act of inscription has been treated
as an event, the production of a material trace that resists human
meaning. Although provocative, such an approach has nonetheless
bracketed the labor of the body responsible for the inscription,
thereby denying the possibility that the matter of the sign might
speak to the viewer in non-semantic ways. In contrast, I recast
the act of inscription-the production of marks-as a variety of performance.
I read acts of inscription as elements of a cultural habitus (Pierre
Bourdieu), as "operating chains" (André Leroi-Gourhan)
that simultaneously focus the energy of a body and help constitute
that body through gestural routines. Such gestural routines-however
technologically mediated-leave behind a residue of kinetic energy,
a residue that inflects and determines the sign's capacity to bear
meaning.
The book I am currently writing (also entitled Inscription as Performance)
is on twentieth-century artists and writers who work to display
and dramatize the gestural force they imagine residing within durable
signs. Today (online), however, I want to present to you some of
the theoretical materials I am developing in order to treat the
works of these artists and writers. First, in this electronic format,
I will sketch out my general approach to writing as a type of staged
corporeal activity; next, when we meet in person in Chicago, I will
provide you with an interpretation of a specific theorist-Claude
Lévi-Strauss-whose understanding of the inscriptive act as
a variety of performance has influenced my own.
By resituating inscriptive practices in the domain of the physical,
of the corporeally generated, I necessarily disrupt the conventional
semiotic distinction between embodied and disembodied signs, that
is, between signs that employ the body as a support (such as dance,
theatre, and mime) and those that depend upon the mark as a support
(such as painting, drawing, and writing). The disembodied sign (letter,
character, mark) has traditionally been the provenance of semiotics,
linguistics, literary theory, and philosophy; in contrast, the embodied
sign has more often attracted the attention of anthropology, dance
ethnography, performance studies, and visual studies. My contribution
involves crossing the boundaries that have prevented greater communication
among these disciplines in order to apply insights pertaining to
the act of human meaning-making gained in one domain to works usually
studied in another. I ask whether it is indeed possible to think
of choreography, as Susan Foster has done, as an "inscription
in motion" while approaching writing, in Maxine Sheets-Johnstone's
terms, as a "gestural activity."
By focusing on artists and philosophers who attempt to recall the
moving bodies-and gestural routines-that generate inscriptions,
I join a growing number of scholars, including Anne-Marie Christin,
Johanna Drucker, Garrett Stewart, and Fred Moten, who are engaged
in exploring the non-semantic, sensual features of disembodied signs.
Unlike these other critics, however, I focus my investigation on
the gestural component of signing. I am interested in philosophers
and linguists-primarily Charles Sanders Pierce, Ferdinand de Saussure,
Georges Bataille, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty-who have either explicitly
or implicitly challenged the semiotic opposition between embodied,
movement-based signs and disembodied, mark-based signs. The artists
and writers I study-Joan Miró, Henri Michaux, Cy Twombly,
the American minimalists Robert Morris and Yvonne Rainer, hip hop
and gang graffiti writers and Crip Walkers, and digital poets such
as Camille Utterbach and Servovalve-all materialize this challenge
through expressive practices involving simultaneously movement and
writing. They overtly approach inscriptions as bearing the imprint-and
transmitting the kinetic charge-of the gestures that produced them.
Their works reveal that as the written character dissolves into
graphic trace, the kinetic force responsible for depositing the
trace becomes visible, evoking in the viewer/reader a somatic memory
of the writing body.
The theoretical stakes of considering the material trace to be charged
with corporeal energy are in fact quite high. To claim that traces
preserve a kinetic intensity, and that this intensity can be retrieved
in the sign itself-either as labor, as libidinal investment, or
as the resistance of soma to cognition-is to reverse the momentum
that has driven much poststructuralist theory until now. Paul de
Man and Jacques Derrida have moved us toward an understanding of
all signs as iterative, conventional, and unmotivated, decidedly
divorced from the intentionality that might have characterized,
at one point, their situated production. It is crucial, however,
to shift one's perspective and, conversely, see all signs, even
the most disembodied traces, as "dynamic objects" in Charles
Sanders Peirce's sense, that is, as objects charged with a vibratory,
graphic, and gestural force that receives definition dialectically
through contact with a sequence of interpretants over time. It is
not that the materiality of the sign has to be seen as invariably
burdened with cognitive freight. Rather, it is necessary to consider
the kinds of cultural and somatic knowledge transmitted through
the gestural routines of signing, thereby enlarging our understanding
of what it means for signs to mean.
The salient differences between the two types of signs have, to
some extent at least, justified their isolated treatment. It is
clear, for instance, that gestural signs and verbal signs maintain
distinct relationships to time (duration) and space (extension).
When the support of the sign is a human body, the temporal relation
is immediate: the gesture unfolds before our eyes in linear time.
The production of the embodied sign is processual; gestures are
dependent upon the rhythms and the scale of the body (while participating
in the formation of this body as well). Alternatively, when the
sign's support is a mark of some kind, a trace left behind on a
moveable or stationary surface, the sign does not necessarily testify
to the amount of time that elapsed in order to produce it. As traditionally
conceived, disembodied signs reveal little or nothing about the
(gendered, racialized, and historically conditioned) bodies required
to produce them, whereas embodied signs are taken to reflect in
their distinctive form and manner of execution the particularities
of the bodies that serve as their vehicle. Finally, embodied signs
encode and (re)produce cultural knowledge of a non-semantic variety,
whereas disembodied signs do not so clearly communicate, as dance
ethnographer Deidre Sklar has put it, the "felt energies"
associated with movement in space.
This said, however, it is also true that a surprisingly large number
of modernist and postmodernist aesthetic practices strive to reveal
the hidden continuities between the embodied and the disembodied
sign. In fact, unless the possibility of questioning these distinctions
is acknowledged, it becomes impossible to perceive one of the major
conceptual threads running through a wide variety of twentieth-century
philosophical and aesthetic works. A desire to render problematic
the strict distinction between body and mark is the impetus governing
theorists from Antonin Artaud to Jean-François Lyotard. Further,
a questioning of the distinction between living flesh and dead matter
underlies the historical avant-garde's obsession with the "fetish"
as well as the contemporary performance artist's manipulation of
the body as thing. Finally, the possibility that a sign is never
fully disembodied, never entirely drained of libidinal charge, kinetic
energy-or even mystical force -is one that secretly haunts and disrupts
much writing that goes under the heading of Marxist critical theory,
deconstruction, and "rhetorical reading," even though
these movements appear to take the distinction between the embodied
and the disembodied as their ontological ground. To be sure, many
individual works of poststructuralist criticism promote the notion
of a disembodied trace (eschewing, for instance, the cabalistic
belief that a letter is invested with mystical power). Yet it is
equally clear that one of the most important debates propelling
the evolution of critical theory from phenomenology to deconstruction
(or, to trace a slightly different trajectory, from Freud to Judith
Butler) concerns the unsettling implications of considering acts
of signing to be crucial to the performance of subjectivity. To
leave a mark is, after all, an act requiring the expenditure and
modeling of a particular quantity and quality of corporeal energy.
It is arguable that such a mark-whether manually or technologically
produced-testifies to and is inflected by the material conditions
of its own production, that is, by the specific duration and rhythm
of its execution, the nature and dimension of its support, as well
as the affect or somatic knowledge it encodes. As literary and cultural
theorists have argued, disembodied signs enter into a dialectical
relationship with the subject, limiting as well as enabling the
possibilities of self-expression at the subject's disposal. In addition,
as the work of dance ethnographers suggests, the very gestures required
to produce disembodied signs constitute-as well as express-the body
of the subject who inscribes.
Such an approach to disembodied signs as forms of embodiment has
been most firmly supported in the Western tradition by the clinical
and theoretical work of Melanie Klein. While studying kindergarten
children in the early 1920s, Klein discovered that learning to write
is in fact a discipline requiring the channeling of libidinal energy
into the telescoped gestures responsible for lettering. In "The
Role of School in the Libidinal Development of the Child" (1923),
Klein claims that the acquisition of orthography permits the discharge
of libidinal energy that, because the child is ordered to remain
stationary, cannot be expressed in any other way. Klein argues that
the gestural routine involved in producing written characters shares
with masturbation the same repetitious, rhythmic movements. However,
repetitive movement is not only biologically required but also culturally
shaped. Writing and drawing (not necessarily distinguished from
each other by small children) involve a combination of anatomically-generated
and culturally acquired movements. They are corporeal techniques
that focus the energy of a body in part constructed by that very
focalization. The miniature movements required to leave small marks
on a defined surface are condensed physical force, and inscribed
traces are, to borrow Georges Didi-Huberman's expression, "a
support for intensity" (un support d'intensité).
Part of my task in Inscription as Performance involves retrieving
histories of writing (and accounts of the origins of writing) that
stress the imbrication of inscriptive practices in larger cultural
rituals involving choreographic elements. Histories of writing that
contextualize the gestures of inscription are not hard to find;
in fact, they are often right under our noses. However, much of
the work of contemporary literary and cultural theory-and I would
single out deconstruction in particular-has consisted in rewriting
these accounts in order to detach acts of writing from their material
and cultural contexts. The conceptual rewards of assembling diverse
writing practices-from cinematography to choreography-under the
generalizing rubric of écriture have been great; however,
there have been losses as well. Most notably, as a result of Derrida's
daring conceptual move in De la grammatologie (1968), the specificity
of inscription as a corporeal practice was obscured. A paper I presented
a year ago at the University of California Humanities Research Institute
made the claim-which I will rapidly summarize here-that one of the
formulations of inscription as a corporeal practice that could have
been available to scholars, namely, Saussure's treatment of writing
in the Cahiers, was utterly ignored by the poststructuralist readings
his work received. Due to the efforts of Jean Starobinski and Derrida,
during the late sixties and early seventies a particular version
of Saussurian semiotics gained dominance in anthropology and literary
analysis, a version which clearly divorced disembodied, written
characters from the embodied, physical gestures required to produce
them. In addition, the richly dialectical models of inscription
developed by other modernists such as Georges Henri Luquet, Merleau-Ponty,
Bataille, and Lévi-Strauss were also, during that same period,
eclipsed by poststructuralist critics intent upon lending the mark
only impersonal agency rather than embodied force.
The erasure of this more anthropological Saussure occurs most clearly
in Starobinski's influential presentation of the linguist in Les
mots sous les mots: Les anagrammes de Ferdinand de Saussure (1971).
Starobinski's organization and annotation of Saussure's 1906-09
notes on the frequent return of particular letters in Latin poetry
glosses over entire sections in which Saussure refers directly to
the origin of inscriptive practices in ritualized gestural performances.
Advancing his theory of the free and aleatory play of the letter,
Starobinski distorts Saussure's far more complex anthropological
understanding of how disembodied signs are linked both to belief
systems and corporeal movements. In Les mots sous les mots, Starobinski
shapes before our very eyes the disenchanted version of Saussure
that poststructuralist thinkers such as Paul de Man and Derrida
will inherit, a version which neglects the contextual and diachronic
aspects of Saussure's linguistic theory that have only come into
prominence since the 2002 publication of the Écrits de linguistique
générale. By examining the permutations of this neglect
over time, I indicate how the repressed anthropology of Saussure
returns to haunt the later Derrida in particular, determining, for
instance, his continuing interest in Antonin Artaud, as well as
his growing concern with the interrelationships between writing,
gestures, and mystical experience as explored in works such as Mémoires
d'aveugle of 1990.
There are, of course, good reasons for wishing to disentangle inscriptions
from both the bodies that produced them and the contexts in which
they were executed. The dangers of mystifying the written sign-of
associating it too closely with either a human or transcendental
intention-are indeed very real. Deconstruction arose in part to
prevent hermeneutics from submitting material traces to ideological
and religious readings that threatened to foreclose certain avenues
of interpretation while advocating others. The move to question
the legitimacy of authorial intention in order to trace the rhetorically,
phonemically and/or graphemically motivated play of the signifier
successfully loosened the grip of both biblical exegesis and biographical
criticism on the development of literary studies. It also freed
criticism to broaden its understanding of how the sign's various
constitutive elements-the phoneme, the grapheme, the morphological
unit, even the letter-participate in the construction of the text
or the logic of the representation. But in the act of divorcing
the sign from presence, breath, and spirit, critics such as Starobinski,
Derrida, and de Man also practiced an obfuscation of their own.
What they obscured was the view that disembodied signs-in so far
as they are dynamic objects-are part of a dialectic of subject-object
relations; as such, they are engaged in larger rituals that both
constitute and reflect patterns of human thought, patterns encoded
in and transmitted through the very gestural practices that produce
disembodied signs. To treat disembodied signs in isolation, without
reference to their modes of performance, is thus to miss the way
in which sign-making is a "technique of the body" (Marcel
Mauss), one, moreover, invested by many cultures with a spiritual
import.
Instead of continuing in a theoretical vein, I will conclude by
offering a clear-and dramatic-illustration of how actual inscriptive
practices can be read as gestural performances. One of the primary
means at the disposal of postmodern cultural producers who wish
to underscore the gestural component of inscription is to extend
its duration, to stretch out the act of inscription over a long
period of time. By playing with the duration of writing, producers
engage the inscribing body in a more overt way. My example here
is hip hop and gang graffiti and the related practice of Crip Walking.
Of interest is not so much the small Tag inscription (defined as
the rapid tracing of initials or name on any surface at hand) but
instead the Throw-Up and the Piece, large inscriptions in bubble
lettering (such as Wildstyle), invented in New York during the 1970s.
These types of large-scale graffiti draw attention to their support-understood
either as the matter upon which they are inscribed (wall, subway
car, highway bridge), or as the graphic form (calligraphic or typographic)
they assume. Such large-scale inscriptions are products of, and
intimately linked to, dramatic performances involving sweeping physical
gestures. Graffiti writers employing broad surfaces, such as train
cars, are forced to use their entire bodies-not just their hands
or arms-to form a letter. Further, graffiti inscriptions are often
staged as performed events; other members of the crew serve as an
audience, watching the inscription unfold in real-time. However,
even if the writer is alone and no one witnesses the performance,
the presence (and endangerment) of the writer's body is nevertheless
implied. In fact, what gives the inscription symbolic weight is
the fact that the writer's body has been placed at risk for the
duration of its execution. Interviews with graffiti writers reveal
that unless the body is endangered during the act of inscription,
the inscription is not considered authentic by other members of
the crew. Finally, an imaginative reconstruction of the performance
influences the reaction of those who observe the inscription later
on. Observers not only of the sign's execution in duration but also
of its post-performance graphic monumentality recollect the gesturing
body in so far as this body is encoded within the inscription itself
through specifics of manufacture. Both the location of the inscription
and the sheer size of its lettering indicate to the viewer the dangers
to which the writer's body was exposed, and thus the investment
the writer made in order to leave his/her trace.
The connection between a disembodied sign and a performing body
(that is, the body that expends energy in the physical act of producing
a letter or word) is rendered even more palpable by gang practices
that combine movement and writing to form semiotic hybrids. As anthropologist
Susan Phillips has documented, such semiotic hybrids are part of
the expressive culture of contemporary gangs in South Central Los
Angeles, the location of her fieldwork. The Crip Walk of the Los
Angeles Crips and the Villain Dance of the Los Angeles Bloods merge
inscription and performance as gang members spell out the names
of deceased friends with their feet. Transferring responsibility
for the tracing of letters from the hands to the feet merely dramatizes
what is always the case: namely, that inscription is a kinetic practice,
a technique of the body, requiring the investment of physical energy
and even, as might be argued here, the transmission of cultured,
gendered, and ethnic knowledge. These specific dance and graffiti-related
forms of inscription remind us that writing is a time-based gestural
routine, one implicated in the production and reproduction of a
socialized subjectivity.
|
