Page 22 - Studio International - July August 1972

`body politics'. O'Neill refers to Marx and unnaturalness or animality have been used in This article was written with the help of some
members of the BAAL group at the ICA, in particular
Freud, but also to the activists—such as Norman our culture to crush sexual deviance, as 'nigger' Ted Polhemus. The main lecture-series will be
Brown, Jerry Rubin, Cassius Clay, Eldridge has been used to repress the blacks. Even in published as a book by Longman and Dutton. A
Cleaver and Fritz Fanon—who have between more sophisticated discourse, the homosexual source-book of key texts will also be published.
(BAAL =Body Arts At Large.)
them 'taught us to understand the deep political is taught to regard himself as doomed to miss
structures of sex, language and the body'. essential human experiences such as the
According to Rubin, 'Nobody really procreation of children. The ethos of the
communicates with words any more'. Western homosexual sub-culture is celebrated
Demonstrations, street art and sit-ins are today in the world of dance and ballet.
literally and palpably embodying arguments to The Deaf Lacking a sense—claimed by the
challenge verbal mystification and lies. dominant speaking-hearing majority as
(Polhemus will speculate that it is the essential to fully human communication—the The diverse list includes Yves Klein, Manzoni, the
arbitrariness'10 of verbal language which makes deaf often communicate by manual signing Wiener Aktionismus, Lygia Acconci, Gilbert and
it the most 'alienating' form of communication.) which to the speaker-hearers is a crude— George, Nauman, Burgy, Oppenheim, Rinke, Dan
Graham, Brisley, Michel Journiac. I approached the
O'Neill writes of the 'non-verbal rhetoric' almost animal—version of verbal language. theoretical question of how the body is used as a
of political dissidents. Developing his case, we Cicourel has brilliantly criticized this medium in Studio International October 1971, 'The
are working on the hypothesis that, since our logocentric view, reminding us that all the inflation of art media'.
2J. Kristeva, 'Le Geste: pratique ou communication'
society uses words as its primary means of notations used to describe deaf-sign languages in enuelwtlkn: Recherches pour une Semanalyse
social control, all repressed groups will tend to are invented by speaker-hearers. He imagines an (Seuil, 1969).
find their most effective and confident anthropologist from another planet who can 'Moreover, many artists are averse to art magazines
and criticism. In the literary world, a 'retreat from
expression through the body's wider resources only make a field-study of the earth-people by the word' has been described by George Steiner.
rather than within the enclosure of verbal using the deaf people as his informants. The 4 Kristeva and the Tel Quel circle have persuasively
language, in so far as they opt for self- anthropologist ends up feeling sympathy with argued that the notion of 'communication' should be
discarded (since it reflects a society based on the
assertion rather than for integrating with the the deaf for having to live with such a barbaric economics of exchange, and an outdated metaphysic
norms of the majority. There are three community as the speaker-hearers. of the disembodied subject). I cannot consider this
clear test-cases : blacks, male homosexuals, and I have left to the end of this article the argument here except to comment that many of us
have been too slow to question the idea of art as a form
the deaf. (Other test-cases—such as women, question which perhaps the reader is asking: of communication. Tel Quel wish to substitute a
female homosexuals, artists, lunatics, children— why write an article on the subject ? Why allow vocabulary of terms such as production, praxis, texte,
are not so clear but could be brought into the new jargon to proliferate on this subject, of all signifiance. I should also note here that, for reasons
of space, the Tel Quel concept of logocentricity has
argument at a later stage). subjects ? Why organize a series of lectures ? been over-simplified in this article.
Blacks Any student of the history of white This is a good objection: our answer is that, 5The relativeness arbitrariness—or opaqueness, or
attitudes to the negro will be aware of the whereas the ICA programme on the Body has non-motivation—of verbal language is illustrated by
the existence of totally different names for the same
intense interest in the negro's body and his been conceived by highly logocentric people, we object in various languages; e.g. book, livre, biblos, etc.
place in the Great Chain of Being." Racial are keen to hand on its direction to people with 6Indexicality has two confusing senses, both deriving
theory attempted to define scientifically how different qualifications as soon as possible, and from C. S. Peirce. The sense meant here is that of
deixis (pointing). (The other sense of indexicality
exactly the black body was set off from the from the start the lectures will be interleaved refers to signals that give information about the
white body. In reaction to stereotyping by the with performances, demonstrations, workshops sender or source, eg rash which is an indexical
whites as a mindless brute, or a phallic and classes. The initial response to our proposals `symptom' of an illness. See J. Lyons's article
`Human Language' in Non-Verbal Communication.)
symbol, the black has recently asserted his from dancers, choreographers and mimes has 'Aaron V. Cicourel, 'Ethnomethodology' to appear
relationship with his body as different from that been most encouraging. We hope for similar in Current Trends in Linguistics vol. 12 (ed.
of the white. This is articulated in the ideologies participation from people working in the visual T. A. Sebeok et al., in preparation).
8Cicourel belongs to a new school of sociologists called
of negritude and of Black Power. arts, theatre and film. q `ethnomethodologists' who study the rational
Male Homosexuals Epithets implying JONATHAN BENTHALL properties of everyday mundane experience and
`indexical' practice. Such research necessarily returns
frequently to the body as the source of such
experience and practice. Harold Garfinkel's paper
`Passing and the managed achievement of sex status
Members of the small shopkeepers' union, seeking Enoch Powell's support in their fight against supermarkets,
in an "intersexed" person'—the case-history of
in Blackpool 1971
`Agnes', a psychiatric patient of ambiguous sexual
status—is a classic of sociological reportage, complete
with a narrative twist at the end that makes most
contemporary fiction seem pale. Garfinkel's
experiments—which he prefers to call 'demonstrations'
or 'aids to a sluggish imagination'—recall the
practices of certain avant-garde artists today; for
instance, 'Students were instructed to select someone
other than a family member and in the course of an
ordinary conversation, and without indicating that
anything unusual was happening, to bring their faces
up to the subject's until their noses were almost
touching...' (H. Garfinkel, Studies in
Ethnomethodology, Prentice-Hall, 1967).
If art seems to revert again and again to the body
as a source of meaning and understanding, it is
because no attempt to repair indexicality, to transcend
the flesh, can ever complete itself. This argument
was classically elaborated by Merleau-Ponty in La
Phénomenologie de la Perception.
°Especially Levi-Strauss's La Pensée Sauvage (The
Savage Mind); and Mary Douglas's Natural Symbols
(Barrie and Rockcliffe, 197o) and 'The Social Control
of Cognition: some factors in joke perception' (Man,
vol. 3 no. 3, Sept. 1968).
10 See note 5 above.
" See Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black (Penguin).
8