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The violence of writing does not befall an innocent language. There is an originary violence of writing because
language is first, in a sense, writing. Usurpation has always already begun.
(Derrida 1976 [1967]: 37)
Body modification practices are typically characterized as acts in which an individual plays an agentive role in the changes to their corporeality.1 Bodies are
expected to change naturally, whereby something like the gradual wrinkling of the
skin is acknowledged as an aging process. There is however a different social
appreciation of the change that is brought about by something like tattooed skin.
The notion that body modification occurs when one undertakes practices like tattooing, piercing or scarification engenders discourses in which: (i) body modifiers
endorse such practices as instrumental in ones self-construction, distancing their
practitioners from social regulation and a deterministic biology, whereas; (ii)
critics condemn their seemingly violent, corporeal interference, as is found in
modern medicines pathologization of some forms of body modification.
Interestingly, both these seemingly polarized positions rely on the assumption
that body modifications arrive upon, and invade, a passive human corporeality,
producing pre-modified and modified bodies. This posits an oppositional relation
between the natural body, and those practices said to violently denaturalize
it via their incorporation of non-human matter into human flesh, and consequent
interference with natural, biological processes. Such an interpretation duly posits
a cognitive agent who possesses control over their corporeality, whereby the body
becomes a self-construction of a presiding subject.
However, in suspecting, from my frame as a sociologist, that an analysis of such
behavioural practice should be attentive to its concurrent individual and social
co-constitution, a sociological and post-structural interrogation of this characterization of body modification as a sovereign, denaturalizing endeavour is
demanded. This is what is at stake in the first part of this article, which will
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The presumption that body modifications inscribe the body is integral to characterizations of their de-natural introduction to corporeality. Such corporeal
inscription is seen in the literal marking of the skin in something like tattooing,
and as a social inscription which manufactures the individual body. When considering the notion of inscription, one is also bound up in notions of writing.
Indeed, dictionary definitions of the term inscription refer to this correlation as
the act of inscribing [a writing upon] (Collins Dictionary 1990: 584). Writing
takes on the character of a synthetic, cultural process, or a representation of the
real, which arrives after the original, incarnated expression of Being. In what will
emerge as a prominent thesis within this article, the French post-structuralist,
Jacques Derrida (19302004), duly observes the common assumption that
writing, like all artificial languages, is a deviation from nature (1976: 38).
The interpretation that body modification is anything but a natural, human
endeavour can be challenged however by the observation that the voluntary
modification of the body is not a new phenomenon, nor is it the exclusive domain
of any particular class, race or other human demographic. The anthropological
research of Gloria Brame, William Brame and Jon Jacobs notes in this regard that
historically, travellers tales and the works of anthropologists have shown that
body modification is virtually universal (1993: 298). It is in the context of cultural
acceptance that discourses concerning body modifications denaturalizing effects
emerge.2 In a current, Western regard, accepted forms of body modification
typically include beautification processes such as laser hair removal and skin peels,
whereby EuroAmerican culture has esteemed modifications that reverse or stall
the effects of aging (301). Conversely, scarification, a practice which involves
professionally performed, artistic cuts, is typically aligned with extreme, disfiguring forms of body modification such as dermal implantation and branding. In this
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regard, Victoria Pitts, the author of In The Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body
Modification (2003), observes that these practices are usually seen as self-mutilating
rather than self-beautifying, to the extent of being linked to anorexia, bulimia,
and what has been called delicate self-harm syndrome (2003: 25).
Medical institutions duly become participants in discourses concerning body
modifications, which contentiously presents mental health practitioners as
experts on body modification (2003: 293). The normal, healthy body, as a solid
entity of defined borders and contained fluids, is perceived to be harmed by
non-normative modification practices, orchestrated by a mind that requires
medical attention. Here I am reminded of Immanuel Kants duty of selfpreservation, a duty which Kant says is violated in acts of self-harm, where one
proceeds to maim oneself (1996 [1797]: 177). In representing self-maiming, the
porous, uncontrollable, modified body is presumed to be an indicator of a similarly dangerous, unruly mind, whereby socially sanctioned medical intervention is
required in order to prevent such a mind from grotesquely modifying the passive
corporeality to which it is attached.
The choice to modify ones body would not be a liberty that a Kantian frame of
ethics could accommodate. Nevertheless, in a contemporary setting, such practices are seemingly exercised from well within the mantra of something like liberal
political philosophy. In its most straight-forward conception, this ideology is
concerned with the nature and limits of government intervention within a society.
Liberalist thought focuses upon ones freedom of choice, concerned with, as
political philosopher Jean Hampton observes, the danger to liberty coming from
the power of the state (1994: 188). A liberal conception of the body defines ones
corporeality in terms of an autonomous, cognitive ownership. As philosopher
Elizabeth Grosz notes, in this context the subject has authority over their body,
which takes on the form of a possession, a property of the subject, who is thereby
dissociated from carnality and makes decisions and choices about how to dispose
of the body and its powers (1994: 8).
Exhibiting similarities with the liberal notions of power and the body, the body
modification community generally defines its practices in terms of a control over
corporeality, and a defiance of, or detachment from, social power and regulations.
This is reflected in the manifesto found on the website that has come to function as
its central hub, the Body Modification Ezine.3 The founder and creator of this site,
Shannon Larratt, confirms the ideology that ultimately a person has fundamental
ownership of their own body, and we dont have the right to try to take away that
sovereignty (Larratt 2004). Relevant to such discourses is the way some women
describe their body art, and practices such as genital piercing. These body modifiers
often understand their own practices as a way of claiming their body back from a
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Both positions, be it the liberatory endorsement of body modifiers, or the condemnation of the medical establishment, divide the natural human body and those
culturally informed inscribing practices which are seen to intrude upon and rewrite
it. This is the very divide with which we are concerned, and it is in this regard that
Jacques Derrida can assist, via his call for an end to the book and the beginning
of writing. The book for Derrida is logocentrism, or more specifically, as Derridian
scholar Niall Lucy clarifies, the belief that before everything else, such as history,
consciousness, knowledge . . . there is the logos of presence (2004: 71). The
assumption that this logos represents the origin of meaning has significant
ramifications when it comes to corporeal temporality. A logocentric presence for
the body underpins the aforementioned self-mutilation argument, which relies
upon an impression of the skin as passive and unmarked. The anterior presence of
this natural surface precedes the cultural inscription of body modification
practice, which arrives subsequently as a representation of the real.
Derrida notes a similar frame in the spoken/written dichotomy. Phonocentrism, a
belief in the absolute proximity of the voice to what is signified, excludes the
written signifier, which functions as a supplement of speech. In this regard,
Derrida observes the belief that the order of natural and universal signification is
produced as spoken language (1976: 11). A concern we should have with phonocentrisms exclusion of writing is the way it naturalizes speech and denaturalizes
the written word. Along such lines, considering body modification practices as
instrumental in producing the written body, results in such practices being correlated with what is denatural.
BODY MODIFICATIONS AS NODES OF SIGNIFICANCE
Derrida believes that this frame which hierarchizes speech and marginalizes
writing is evident in the structural anthropology of Lvi-Strauss,5 stating that
Lvi-Strausss structuralism is a phonologism. . . the exclusion or abasement of
writing (1976: 102).6 Structuralism is particularly relevant, given that its differential process produces meaning via how a particular sign relates to, and differs
from, a whole system of signs. In terms of language, the meaning of the word
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Lvi-Strauss believes that he observes this progression from nature to culture that
Western society enforces upon humans. During a series of encounters with the
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realms of a Western fad. Thus, an alignment with the bodily writing of Eastern
tattooing functions as a powerful status symbol.
That the pre-literate tribal elder has grasped the notion that writing is a tool of
power troubles Lvi-Strauss, for the anthropologist understands what he has
taught (122). In teaching the Nambikwara how to write, Lvi-Strauss believes he
has corrupted the innocence of this primitive natural state. This supposed pure,
pre-written nature again resembles the impression of the pristine, unmarked,
natural body which precedes the violent intrusion of body modifying writing
practices. As we will see, I do not disagree with Lvi-Strauss that there is an
essential relation between writing and violence. This is also Derridas position,
stating that Lvi-Strauss is not to be challenged when he relates writing to the
exercise of violence (106). In recalling our earlier explorations into structuralism
however, what is apparent is that because each body is only produced structurally,
that is, via their differentiation from other bodies and things, no body pre-exists
such relational production. What we can now interrogate, given this logic which
demands that no thing pre-exists a co-constitutive relational production with
its Other, are the ramifications for the supposed pre-violent state of the
Nambikwara. Such an exploration has the potential to considerably inform
our arguments contestation to the notion of a pre-modified body existing
prior to the violent introduction of de-naturalizing body modification practices.
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thing only becomes distinguishable via its differentiation from other things (and
even, it must be said, not-things). This productive differentiation is originary
violence, something Derrida describes as the archetypal writing of Being. This
originary violence that precedes the intrusion of the anthropologist is similarly
traced in the prohibition on the disclosure of these proper names. For Derrida,
such law is a violent institution born from this arche-violence that institutes the
moral (112). Law differentiates between lawful and unlawful after all.
Accordingly, Lvi-Strauss exposes what is inherently violent about law, rather
than committing a straight-forward offence against it. This uncovers the true
nature of violence that operates within Nambikwara society, an originary level
network of relational differences which characterizes writing in its most primordial mode10 and contradicts the possibility of an absolute. Rather than manifesting
as a subsequent violation of a prior integrity, originary violence operates differentially as Being itself, realizing/distinguishing the entirety of harmful and beneficial possibilities.
Hence, in terms of body modification, even before such practices occur, or are
supposedly introduced, to ones corporeality in a violent manner, the body itself
expresses violence due to it being the condition of differentiation from other
bodies, and other things. Such writing of the body therefore occurs even in the
prohibition of certain practices and their verifiable traces. In this regard, the
typical tattoo shop manifesto of no minors and no facial tattoos (DeMello 2000:
20) does not prevent the writing of the under-age body, or of the face. If tattooed
bodies only manifest in terms of how they relate to, and differ from, other tattooed
and non-tattooed bodies, accordingly there is a bodily writing-violence occurring
before tattooing arrives like an anthropologist on the scene of the supposedly
unmarked body. Again, this violence occurs in/as the originary differentiation of
things such as bodies, a process which produces all bodies concurrently via/as the
productive, structural, relational involvement of each in/as each other. That is,
each body depends on its relation with all other bodies (and not-bodies) in order
to manifest as the body that it is. Thus, the non-tattooed body is in a way already,
and always, tattooed, by its differentiation from, and production in, a corporeality
which conditions the possibility of the tattooed body.
Earlier, the implications of structuralist thought for corporeal meaning challenged the belief from the body modification community that practices such as
tattooing demarcate a subjects self-production. Now we can observe that this
originary differentiation of bodies means that the embodied individual is actually
unable to avoid a productive participation in their own modification. However,
this occurs at an inescapable, incarnated level, simply on the basis of being bodied.
The unavoidability of ones body modifying capacity should not be interpreted as
something which precludes the individual from an agentive participation in such
practice. Rather, what is required is a re-conception of agency, beyond the
reductive model which separates, and hierarchizes, a cognitive subject over their
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as-subject is recognized. The productive body does not carry along a subservient
subject, but instead, the body is that subject, whereby there can be nothing
disembodied about the subject, or agency, whatsoever. That the body always
was/is writing, via its differentiation from other bodies, exemplifies the productive
capacity of the subject-as-body-as-body-modifier. The idea that ones corporeality
is inscribed only once certain recognized practices write it in a hyper-visible
manner now seems reductive. Ones first tattoo does not mark the beginning of
self-writing, but rather is simply another form of writing which the self-as-body
already conditions. Just as the Nambikwara are not introduced to writing by an
anthropologist, but in their differentiation via naming and law already undertake
writing, neither is the body introduced to writing by an exclusive set of practices.
The notion that the sign is what speech most naturally evokes is consequently
negated. Without the exteriority of a linguistic sign before writing, the very idea of
the sign falls into decay (1976: 14). Derridas aforementioned end of the book
is the end of logocentrism, challenging the presumption of a totality to a preexisting sign presiding over the inscription that its signifier(s) perform(s). This is the
beginning of writing, avoiding the exclusive categorization of empirical marks and
inscriptions, to something which conditions the possibility to write in an empirical
form. If language and the sign do not precede writing, then speech, graphic script,
and the body are all forms or species of writing (8). The body-as-writer is
something with which Derrida would agree, given his demand that the most
elementary processes within the living cell are also a writing (1981: 61). The
productive capacity of body-as-space is thus exemplified in its chained capacity as
writer-modifier-differentiator.
That body modification practices are typically aligned with an authorship of
ones body, as earlier illustrated, is consistent with the usual impression that
writing is an authors re-presentation of reality. Now, however, we have a corporeal scene of writing, whereby the subjects agency is their corporeal constitution.
Body modifications exhibit the anterior always writing, rather than introducing
writing as new. Consequently, just as the Derridian model of writing-asdifferentiality spelt death for the proper name, similarly, for body modifications,
this incarnated, originary violence of writing suggests the erasure of body modification as a distinct category of practice.
In terms of the struggle between normative and non-normative forms of body
modification practices, we are left with a body which writes the very norms by
which it is framed. Moreover, the originary, and entirely natural, normative
capacity of corporeality is that it writes, blurring the classical nature|culture
divide, and characterizing as redundantly subsequent the exclusive categorization
of certain bodily writing practices. Being bodied writes/produces ones body,
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other bodies, and the structures that write bodies meaningfully. Being bodied is
writing. This dissolution of writing with corporeality, a written, writing flesh,
re-writes time. Time, as difference, can now also be read as a perpetual violence,
in the manner that it concurrently produces, and renders ambiguous, the distinction between a pre-modified, and post-modified, body. The body must write/
be-written in order for it to erase/be-erased, just as for Derrida the proper name
must classify/be-classified in order for it to obliterate/be-obliterated.
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other subjects/bodies. This perpetual fleshed encounter determines that both self
and the other are continuously (re)constituted, are (re)read and (re)written, mark
and are marked (2001: 35).
Our engagement with Derridian writing-violence has acknowledged an originary differentiating process that conditions the possibility of distinguishable
bodies, bodies which via their differentiation, condition the production of any
thing. Taking a different approach, in Tattooed Bodies: subjectivity, textuality, ethics, and
pleasure (2001), Sullivan utilizes the work on alterity by twentieth century French
philosopher, Emmanual Levinas (19061995). Much has been written on the
tensions between Derridian and Levinasian notions of difference, alterity and
trace,14 and I do not intend to attempt to contribute anything new to this confrontation. Rather, what I am interested in is how Sullivans application of
Levinasian alterity to an interrogation of body modification practices represents a
very different set of concerns from my engagement with Derridian violence, and
why these differences are important.
In considering subjectivity, Sullivan engages Levinas notion of alterity as
conditioning the possibility for the production of both the I and the Other.
The I is separate from the Other, but is not autonomous, in that its separateness
is only possible because the Other exists, whereby I am, despite this dependence
or thanks to it, free (Levinas 1969 [1961]: 37). Subjects only come into being
structurally, through their alterity from that which they are not (but in which they
are necessarily involved). Just as Derridian originary violence conditions all
possible identities (and their perpetual slippages) through differentiation, Levinass
primordial alterity is a structural possibility that precedes and makes possible
(45). In contesting the idea that body modifications represent ones internal,
demarcated meaning, Sullivan duly argues that in any encounter, the subject does
not exist prior to a relational production with the Other. Rather, the self exists
through and for the Other; the self/psyche is engendered or inspired, as Levinas
puts it in and through alterity (2001: 103). As with Derridian violence, the
One/Other co-production is a relational, structural, porous process that negates
positivity in identity.
Concerning the earlier observed presumption that Western tattooists appropriate Eastern imagery in order to harness the symbolic power of the Other culture,
what Levinasian alterity and Derridian violence clarify is that neither West nor
East exists in isolation from, or prior to, each other. West and East, as with
Lvi-Strausss civilized and primitive cultures, come into being concurrently and
structurally. Thus, what seems to be a straightforward adoption of Eastern
imagery, I reconceive as being an overt emergence of the structural trace of the
East that is already operating in the (originary) possibility of a Western aesthetic.
Subject (West) and Other (East) co-manifest, whereby the trace of what is Other
constitutes the production of the subject.
This trace manifests in embodied terms as a condition of the production of
corporeality, or in Levinasian terms, as having-the-other-in-ones-skin (1998
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[1974]: 114115). The subject never comes to the Other pre-defined, but is
perpetually, corporeally produced by a beyond which it equally constitutes.
Meaning for the modified body is thus a tenuously blurred, rather than reliably
self-expressive, exercise. As Sullivan astutely concludes, not only is the distinction
between self and other undermined by Levinas, but the question of what the
tattooed body of the other means, or whom the tattooed wo/man is, is rendered
redundant (2001: 111). Signification for body modification is redundant thanks
to this implicated relation that conditions the slippery production of corporeality
beyond demarcated intention or control. Sullivans application of a Levinasian
subjectivity model to meaning for body modifications is insightful in this regard.
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DERRIDA OR LEVINAS?
255
Contrarily, Sullivans deployment of Levinasian alterity provides no real assistance in a direct deconstruction of violence, instead strangely divorcing violence
from alterity. This is evidenced when Sullivan denounces violence as a subjects
domination of the Other, denying the event of becoming/alterity with the Other.
In distinguishing violence from alterity, Sullivan claims that such a disavowel of
alterity results in an hegemony of the Same that is tantamount to an act of violence, to
a single blow in and through which I become master (2001: 139; my emphasis).
Clearly this is in contradistinction to the Derridian appreciation of violence as an
inescapable process, which rather than denying the relation of alterity which
worlds a world, actually conditions it as the differentiation which incarnates.
This interpretation, that Levinasian alterity is inconsistent with violence, again
emerges with the claim that textual violence does not consist of marking and
being marked, but rather is the result of disavowing such a process in the search
for absolute knowledge. Or as Levinas might put it, Western ontology, like war, is
a systematic form of violence that reduces the Other to the Same (2001: 134).
Conversely, my comprehension of alteritys mechanism is of its congruence with
originary violence. Derridian violence demands that textual violence does
indeed consist of the marking, and the production, of bodies, by bodies. Violence
is re-written to indicate an originary process that never disavows alterity, as
Sullivan claims, but rather is the very condition of it. Violence incarnates via
differentiation, whereby bodies do not pre-exist their relation with other bodies
but rather manifest through it, and as it. That Sullivan acknowledges this process
as one of alterity, but not of violence, is a handicap for the efficacy of an argument
which seeks to problematize denaturalizing and violent characterizations of body
modifications. Such an argument is clearly augmented by a reconfiguration of
that term itself, violence. Sullivans reading of Levinasian alterity is suited to general
contestations to notions of pre-formed identities and subjects. However, the particularities of the body modification argument are congruent with a Derridian
argument which emphasizes primordiality as a violence, distancing Levinasian
alterity from one of body modifications key inquiries.
CONCLUSION
No longer can the pre-modified body be opposed to the post-modified body, for
there is no point at which the body was not modifying/being-modified. The
inscribed body, that cultural artefact presided over by a self-constructing subject,
is replaced by the naturally inscribing body, whereby writing/bodying is the originary condition of being-written/being-bodied. The inescapable nature of this Nature
is that one is perpetually bound to be modifying the modifier, the modifier being the
body-as-subject which cannot help but produce bodies.
As we have seen, this addresses what the introduction presented as first being at
stake in this article. Body modification does not represent a violent, denaturalizing
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NOTES
1
For an account of this characterization, see sociologist Nick Crossleys interrogation
of the notion of body work in Reflexive Embodiment in Contemporary Society (2006).
2
In Tattoo, Torture, Mutilation, and Adornment: The Denaturalization of the Body in Culture and
Text (1992), Frances Mascia-Lees and Patricia Sharpe provide a comprehensive collection
of papers addressing the relation between cultural norms and mutilation/denaturalization
discourses.
3
www.bmezine.com.
4
See Christian Klesses Racializing the Politics of Transgression: Body Modification in Queer
Culture (1991) for one such critique of the impact of body modifications on gender and
sexual politics.
5
Derrida also identifies this in the anthropology of Jean-Jacques Rousseaus A Discourse
Upon the Origin and the Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind (1909 [1755]), which assumes
that ones true and unmediated awareness of self is found via speaking and hearing oneself
speak, thus repressing writing on the basis of auto-affection.
6
As an example, see Lvi-Strauss The Raw and the Cooked: Mythologiques (Vol. 1) (1983
[1964]).
257
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