Body and Sign

        For the longest time, sign language was considered a kind of pantomime, a crude iconic code lacking the sophisticated complexities and potentials of language. Its speakers were often relegated to the realm of the childish, pathological, or primitive because of their supposedly restricted capacities to communicate and therefore to think symbolically. William Stokoe has since corrected this view. Through its use of the three dimensions of space (from the directionality of its nouns, verbs, and adverbs to the perspectival qualities of its narrative) as well as its inscriptions in time, Sign exploits to their fullest the grammatical and syntactic possibilities of language that neither speech nor writing can even begin to approximate (“Syntactic Dimensionality”). The “deaf and dumb” are so only because most of us the hearing do not have the experiences, or perhaps even the cerebral capacities, to grammaticize space, to use it linguistically (Sacks, Seeing Voices, 76), to, in other words, cross into a mode of expression and thought that surpasses the one-dimensional recording of speech or the two-dimensional recording of writing.

        Is it any wonder then that our civilisation has consistently valorized the so-called “properly” linguistic at the expense of the visual? And is it any wonder that the psychoanalytic field has picked up the bias and extended it to the point where the two-dimensional structure of language (its metonymy and metaphor à la Lacan) and its testimony to a higher capacity to mourn (as a symbolic representation à la Klein and Segal) have colonized our understanding of the unconscious and relegated any non-linguistic presence in the analytic session to the realm of the unmetabolized and acted out resistance or, better still, the symptom of a regression to the so-called “pre-verbal”?

        One of the principal effects of language as a machine is to produce, regiment, and prioritize structure over experience, to relocate and devalue the non-verbal as pre-verbal, which is to say infantile. As much as, and hence precisely because, the body is available for verbalisation, it is also, in at least one of its core registers, a body without language, a body whose tremors and passions often cannot be spoken.

        If that is the case, then what is one to say of the ego as Freud had conceived it, of the ego as first and foremost a “body ego?”