Jane Gallop's Thinking Through the Body

I found a great "definition" of the body in Jane Gallop's Thinking Through the Body:

The body is "all that in the organism which exceeds and antedates consciousness or reason or interpretation. By 'body' I mean here: perceivable givens that the human being knows as 'hers' without knowing their significance to her." (13) Any knowledge of the body, then, is partial: a knowing without knowing.

Then... Gallop goes on to discuss the ways in which we come to "know" our own bodies: "One way to make sense of, rationalize, aestheticize our bodily givens, our embarrassing shapes and insistent tastes is to transform them into a consistent style. [Roland] Barthes theorizes this opposition between consistent style and the insistent. In the preface to Sade, Fourier, Loyola [which I'll be reading later this semester if you're interested :)] he specifies that, as opposed to the 'consistency' implied by style, 'writing, to borrow Lacanian terminology, knows only insistances.' An 'insistance' is a 'symptom,' an unconscious message that persists in manifesting itself despite its nonsense or inconsistency" (13). When we seek to know the body, then, we're actually "writing" the body -- not reading it. Reading implies a taking in of knowledge while writing implies the creation of it. Thus, if, as Gallop via Barthes via Lacan insists that it's writing that recognizes insistances, when we think we're only "reading" the body, we're actually writing it -- creating it from repetitions we observe emanating from it.

So -- the way that we (and by "we," I mean our intellection) come to know our bodies is through the body's persistent repetitions. We hear our body scream "I WANT CHOCOLATE" enough times, we start to define our selves as people who like chocolate. Thus, it's through compulsion, habit, and repetition that the body makes itself known to the mind -- it's through repeating itself that it communicates its desires to the mind. From those repetitions, we glean consistency, patterns, rhythms... and those repeated patterns and rhythms become who we think we are.

But Gallop doesn't believe that this is who we are, she -- via Barthes -- believes that the system we conjure to make sense of the senseless repetitions and patterns is "a guess at the puzzle, a response to the inscrutable given. A taste for women, or men, little children, decrepit invalids: a predilection for legs, breasts, asses, hands, feet, panties; a repulsion for spiders, worms, blood; we can (and do) theorize endlessly about the peculiarities of individual taste/distaste. But the theorizing is precisely endless, an eternal reading of the 'body' as authorless text, full of tempting, persuasive significance, but lacking a final guarantee of intended meaning." (13) Whereas Gallop sees our understanding of our body as a reading process, Barthes implies it's a writing process that manifests a cohesive understanding of the body. It's basic Composition pedagogy: writing to learn. Writing as process. And here, writing as product.

She and Barthes, then, call our constructed sense of embodied self "the bodily enigma." The thing we cannot figure out... the entity that lacks referentiality, primarily because of the mind/body split that fails, philosophically, to be reconciled. Gallop says that it's the recognition of the split between the mind and body -- and the consequent desire to connect them -- that leads structuralists like Barthes and Foucault toward the invention of poststructuralism. Whereas structuralism takes on a "scientific stance," Gallop describes the shift into poststructuralism as a "push out of objective, scholarly discourse into something more embodied"... "into something that seemed softer, more subjective, more bodily" (11).

So if the move from structuralism to poststructuralism is a movement from the immanent to the material... a movement from the mind to the body... from object to subject... from other to self... from biography to autobiography... and if understanding of the latter words in these pairs is really an interpretation of repetition, then would it be fair to say that any knowledge of the body and therefore poststructural knowledge is a knowledge of the non-present... a knowledge of that which is latent within us? that a knowledge of the body is a knowledge not of origins but of shadows, redundancies, repeated episodes? Is knowledge of the body really knowledge of the body at all?? Is it a recognition of imitation, reenactment, performativity? Does the bodily enigma allow us to examine and "know" the rind but never reach the core, to use Andrew Bird's metaphor?

Seeking a knowledge of the body, to me, seems like foreplay. It's the cyclical experience women have just before they orgasm... the feeling of the waves of pleasure "coming back around" -- repeating. Naturally, I'd be remiss if I didn't say that repetition compulsions are the basis of trauma theory -- and the idea that we know something only through it's delayed repetition and never through the actual originary experiencing of it is traumatic at its core. Ergo, could I say that any knowledge of the body is a traumatized knowledge, without origin -- an awareness and interpretation of repetitions without original referents? A reading of the signifiers without access to their signifieds?

Just sayin'. :)