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?”
3 December 2007 at 1:06 pm
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”?
I thought about this a lot, and I always remember an episode from my lacanian therapy, some years ago. I had attended this psychodrama session where people were acting their psychological conflicts. The idea seemed appealing to me, because they would use their bodies. So I asked my analyst why we always end up talking, why I never dance, or express things with my body in some other way. And my analyst asked me ”really, why don’t you?” - meaning to say that the prohibition never came from him. I realized then that I was referring to my parents prohibition, to the limits they set on my ambitions to become an artist.
3 December 2007 at 8:41 pm
This makes sense to me. The “why don’t you?” wasn’t a permission/encouragement to go ahead and dance but an invitation to think about the prohibition.
I’m thinking of those bodily expressions that aren’t just about associations that could or should have been spoken. I have a sense that there are associations that can only be communicated viscerally, and sometimes in the most subtle of ways: the tone of a voice or the wave of a hand for instance. There isn’t much in the analytic literature that deals with speaking as a bodily experience as opposed to a re-presentational act.
Roughly, I’m asking the question of the “how?” in addition to the “what?” and the “why?”
4 December 2007 at 11:02 am
that can only be communicated viscerally, and sometimes in the most subtle of ways: the tone of a voice or the wave of a hand for instance.
but something isn’t clear to me technically, the wave of a hand and the change of tone both belong to LANGUAGE systems, and unless lacan was expressly forbidding the research of body language, which i don’t get the impression he did, … I don’t think that those analysts that privilege speech are legitimized by their teacher.
or are you talking to visceral communication that is beyond any language? something that only certain new kinds of instruments could access?
or is the question really the primacy, dominance or structuring force that speech has over other variants of the symbolic function?
4 December 2007 at 4:20 pm
I am only thinking things through so be patient with me here.
I do get the sense that Language has been elevated to the highest of standards; in fact, to the status of the one and only standard. As a technical term, “Language” has become the catch phrase for all sorts of languages that have little to do with the language of the structuralists. There is a reductionist bias that turns body language or sign language, for instance, into just an instantiation of that “Language.” And so I have to disagree with you that the wave and the tone “both belong to LANGUAGE systems.” They do more than just serve the linguistic function of re-presenting objects, relations, or experiences that have not been spoken.
In the most abstract of senses, language bridges the gap between presence and absence; of course, the moment the bridge is set up the gap is confirmed. Most analysts agree on that. What happens next, how the gap is experienced and how the bridge is crossed and for what purpose, these all depend very much on the particular school or orientation. Ludicrous as it may sound, is it not possible that the bridging is what installs the gap? Not in a self-serving but in a creative way. If that is the case, should we then not consider those layers of the analytic situation that present for the first time, rather than re-present in order to cure? Clinically, must the wave of a hand always be a substitute for or a resistance to speech? Must the word and its tone always be subsumed under that same category? (I am not addressing my question specifically to Lacan and the Lacanians. Some hard-line Ego psychologists are notorious for dismissing everything outside the word as acting out.)
Allow me to quote from a non-analyst: ”In the beginning was not the word but the place we learned to pin the word to” (Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2). My hunch is that in beginning were the word, the place, and the pinning.
4 December 2007 at 5:36 pm
There is a reductionist bias that turns body language or sign language, for instance, into just an instantiation of that “Language.”
well I do like Deleuze and Guattari’s idea much better whereby that Language is just one of the possible languages produced by the desiring-machine, not a ”dominant” one. But I always though that in order to reach any progress on that issue we must first find out why and how that Language came to be seen as privileged or dominant. Is it perhaps the Christian legacy? Or is it that that Language gives certain advantages, in the sense of being more directly able to manipulate the environment?
I recently visited a fabulous exposition called ”The Body” in Amsterdam where corpses were displayed in suspended animation. You could get a very clear look on how the body is an incredibly complex and intricate communication system, but using connections very different from those of grammar. The layered nature of the body also made me think, as a visual metaphor, that the language we speak is like a layer around the body - existing parallel to other sign systems.
4 December 2007 at 11:32 pm
I wouldn’t blame it on the Christian legacy, John’s Gospel notwithstanding. The Word was already privileged by the classical Athenians, from Heraclitus and down to the Stoics and Aristotle. I think it’s Philosophy more than Christianity that’s fostered the practice.