The Tongue's Break Dance- Theory, Poetry, and the Critical Body.pdf

The Tongue's Break Dance: Theory, Poetry, and the Critical BodyAuthor(s): Zali GurevitchSource: The Sociological Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 3 (Summer, 1999), pp. 525-540Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the Midwest Sociological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4121340Accessed: 18/03/2010 08:29

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THE TONGUE'S BREAK DANCE:

Theory, Poetry, and the Critical Body

Zali Gurevitch Hebrew University of Jerusalem

In the present essay the participation of the body as tongue in the ritual of speech and conversation is depicted in terms of performance. To reveal the intricate relations between body and language, moments of impediment in the flow of speech are

explored as events that inform the tongue's performance and make it a kind of break dance, a dance whose breaks and silences are not merely deficiencies in the machine of talk but are part of the information it carries, that is, they are indicative of the inherent

participation of the body-its resistance and silence-in language, as well as in the

inscription of language in the body. This is developed as a poetics of break, which combines ethnography, critical theory, and the actual (poetic) production of writing.

In his essay "Lacan: an Ethics of Speech," Michel De Certeau (1986, p. 51-52) describes Jacques Lacan as a performer, or an artist of speech, who in his seminars made

speech into an art that "is constantly reborn of the impossibility which brought it forth." The details of the description focus on the speaking body:

The actor is at work... assumed by the speaking body, and especially by this body's throat. Coughing, slightly grumbling, clearing the throat-like tattoos on the process of

phonation-punctuate the chain of words and indicate all their secret of being "for the other" and producing for the listeners the effects of meaning, of the signified.

This exercise works against identification of the speaker with himself or with his speech, the tricks of the body playing out the role of resistance, "a 'fundamental failure' of action in order to return to the desire which resides there." It reminds us that the meaning produced and the knowledge passed from the teacher to the seminar audience cannot truly transcend speaking.

To recall speaking in speech, the body must be brought forth to curtail the trance and

sway of the imaginary of both speaker and audience. The impediment of the body and the

interruptions in the course of meaning production punctuate and hinder the symbolic, requir-

ing new beginning, new effort. Speech is brought back to its break, the body-iconoclast. It

plays the meaning game at the chasm, proceeds from interruption, proposing knowledge at

the very break of knowledge.

Direct all correspondence to Zali Gurevitch, Sociology and Anthropology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem, ISRAEL 91905.

The Sociological Quarterly, Volume 40, Number 3, pages 525-542. Copyright ? 1999 by The Midwest Sociological Society. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to:

Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2120 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, CA 94720. ISSN: 0038-0253

526 THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY Vol. 40/No. 3/1999

The artist of speech who performs out of failure is a poignant figure of what I wish to

explore in the following essay: speech as a break dance. One aspect of this is the experience of break in and of speech, where words don't come to mouth, either from the throat or from thought, imposing silence, nonspeech in the midst of speech. The other aspect is the interpretive and theoretical implications of this experience: both for the way we relate to facts of the field and the hard impact of dumbness or stammer as facts of theory, too- where theory itself is silent, dumb, stuttering.

As Chekhov said of art, "It is like lightning-illuminating but itself demanding explana- tion," so is speech. What is critical in speech has to do with reflexivity (Guess 1981) that diverts attention to utterance as the dark substance of that which illuminates. This diver- sion introduces difficulty into speech, which concerns the body as a crucial part of enunciation. The resurgence of the body is important also in the new import of the poetic into

sociological writing. By turning to itself, it underlines what Roman Jakobson called "the

poetic function." The poetic (see also Brown 1977) implies a reflexivity of utterance

(word, sentence, line) that shifts the focus from the referential function-speaking about

things-to speaking or language itself as matter, or as that which matters. If this formalist aspect is followed to its deconstructive vein, critical speech becomes

also a study and performance of speech's inability, impossibility, impotence, to use some

expressions of Samuel Beckett and Maurice Blanchot. The form, even the performative form, namely, the poetic, that which is done, made, constructed, created (Carlson 1996; Denzin 1997), is founded on its own critique, its own break and silence. Critical speech is thus becoming a poetics of break, or what I will figuratively call a "break dance."

This figure relates to speech's subversive powers that resist not only simple notions of

representation, truth, reality by making speech itself the object of scrutiny and suspicion, but resisting utterance, reminding speech of its uneasy, aching, injured body that cannot find words, cannot repair and make whole, not even critical speech itself. The process of at-one-ment in speech (which the English poet Geoffrey Hill [1984] regards as the essence of poetry), the way it moves toward completion, closure, perfection, is explicated as a

poetics of break-the constructive and the deconstructive, the creative and the breaking interfere and cannot be pulled apart.

The poetics of break marks also the line between individual speech and collective

speech. It invites the individual to look for a way to negate the institutionalized language and to emerge with conversation, autobiography, experiment and personal soliloquy. On

the crest of contemporary thinking and the new writing, speech reveals its own hindrances and breaks, which become a crucial part of its poetics. The shift to individual reality within the field and personal utterance within the text reintroduce the body as a corrective to the detachment of theory and the stiffness (if not untruth and illusion) of the "objective." It focuses thus on a free personal gesture and on conversational gestures.

This enforces us to deal not only with the hermeneutic problem of fact, fiction, and

interpretation and with the issue of multiplicity in the text but also with the speaking body

partaking in a conversation of gestures. The body resurfaces from the mind-body as well as language-body splits. Exposed and tapped, the body is invigorated as a figure and a site of knowledge rather than rendered transparent (e.g., Csordas 1994; Carlson 1996).

In the following, the criticality of the body is depicted as an eruption of the body to the surface of talk that results in interruption and impediment, unknowledge in the midst of

knowledge, impotence in the midst of the poetical, and silence as part of speech. The pro- tagonist of this essay is the tongue-the one part of the body that gives its name to lan-

The Tongue's Break Dance 527

guage and "dwells" in a critical position, being both body and word. Since the focus here is speech "for" the other, the "ethnographic" field of my exploration is conversation. The poetics of break, however, is dealt with not as a mere ethnography of conversation but as an exchange between ethnography and writing, as well as between theory and poetics as exem- plified and performed through the gesture of speech. Furthermore, the conversational serves as a critical figure in its own right. It, in fact, defines critical speech as daimonic, to use Plato's term from the Symposium (Gurevitch 1998). Daimonic is that which cannot extricate itself from betweenness. It is the quality of Eros, the god, whom Plato in the words of Diotima describes as a daimon: not one (beautiful) or the other (ugly) but, as conversation is, in between. The tongue's break dance is, in that sense, not only critical but daimonic, that is, it couples critique with poetics.

THE RESURGENCE OF THE BODY

The symbolic edifice, or the system of signs, cannot reconcile with dumb matter, as form cannot. Language cannot suppress the body; neither can it articulate the body fully. This is so both when the body is the dumb one that cannot moor the system to an enunciation and when the signs or uttered words themselves are depicted as concrete, dumb entities, empty shells signifying nothing, as Dada and its branch of "concrete poetry" have illustrated.

The production of meaning-topic, self, word-involves a body that sits, lies down, walks, falls, dances. But it is not merely a question of learning a body language that

accompanies the production of words as accents and inflections of a voice (as other gestures of the body). What is at point here is the awareness of the body as both a participant in speaking and a nonparticipant embodying resistance, that is inexpressible in speech. The body is that nonlinguistic stratum and agent that is part of language yet out of it, marking its edge of silence both in the external object that remains out of grasp and in the

speaker's body that remains unspoken, unspeakable.' We may call speech an appearance between two silences-the silence of language and

the silence of the body that speech must break. Breaking the silence of the body may come as a shout, but to tie syllables and words into the voice, speech must have a figure of speech. What we meet on the "floor" of conversation is this figure-the performance of the word and its gestures that we can generally describe as a dance, sometimes a break dance, at others a tango or a waltz of "hellos" and "how are yous" or a slower, more serious dance of "I am," "You are," and "It is." The performance of the body "verbs" the language of conversation. The body speaks, hears, expects a word.

The speaking body involves hands, face, throat, and tongue as participants in conversation. Our face and our hands proliferate the music of speech. They do not necessarily say what words are saying as they speak; sometimes they offer a different speech all together, rather than a mere accompaniment. The talking body conveys the multiple tongues of talk-

ing, the polyphony of the speaking body. As language cannot disengage itself from the body so the body cannot "speak" itself

without the word, being already in the ritual. It is a connective, a dance of and between word and body. The actual performance of the body in conversation, the conversing body, is a body with a word at the tip of its tongue. The tongue grabs, sends itself with the word but remains under and behind it when the word is off in the air. It is a sort of resistance, being tied to its back, grounded to its body.


Both "expression," the inwardness of feeling, and "language," the structuralist's arbi- trary system of signs, are in conversation, between tongue and "tongue"-the name of language in language, "language" itself, the word, meaning-tongue. The tongue, that "forward" tail of the face, clucks and wags language, wags us, and returns silently to the mouth, in pleasure or pain, in anger or peace.

Moments of acute awareness of the tongue involve a process of "making strange" (Gurevitch 1988), where the presence of speech is disengaged from its taken-for-granted identity, breaking the flow of meaning, the reflexive repetition of the context, or the trance of speech itself. In these instances, the body returns to the surface of the communicative floor not merely as a medium of gestures but as matter itself. It reminds us that whether it stumbles or comes through, the body participates in conversation and is part of speech. The word is between the symbolic and the tongue, between the ultimate sign and the dumb, silent body.

At these cracks of reality we find parody. The gesture is pulled out of the context in which it is embedded and is thus exposed, detached of its contextual meaning, which also covers it. Parody extricates gestures from their supposed meaning and, denuded, they appear as a dance of speech. It's embarrassingly funny. An imitation of the speech dance (tone, gesture, body expression, movement), perhaps with a little exaggeration, is enough to make a caricature, mock and ridicule of any speech. Paul Valdry's (1977, p. 5) Monsieur Teste is said to have gotten rid of that: "When he spoke he never lifted an arm or a finger; he had killed his puppet." The shadow or the double that the speaking body makes becomes a mechanical or bestial thing, a monkey or a bear, the "withness of the body" as the poet Delmore Schwartz (1950) phrased it:

The heavy bear who goes with me ... Clumsy and lumbering here and there ... Breathing at my side, that heavy animal ... Moving where I move, distorting my gesture A caricature, a swollen shadow A stupid clown of the spirit's motive ...

The parodying instinct notwithstanding, there is also a mystery in the voiceless dance of words. Simply observe others speaking through a closed window from outside. The words spoken are not heard, yet it is evident that those behind the window are engaged in conversation. Only their bodies move "conversationally" in a way we can recognize almost, at times, to the point of trying to guess what these "bodies" are actually saying. Television allows us a similar experience by an easy trick-shut off the volume and watch the "dialogue" as some strange dance on the screen "talking heads" or "talking bodies" in a room, a street, in the midst of "action."

A more troublesome experience of disengagement of the talking body from the meaning of words occurs in first person, when rather than viewing another from a distance, one becomes aware of his/her own speaking body in the very act of utterance, hearing one's own voice wording. The "grain of the voice" (in Roland Barthes' phrase) breaks the vessel of meaning and provokes into awareness the presence and figure of the body in speech. Some such moments are moments of rest-points, periods, pauses, breaths. Others are moments of break, stumbling and falling, choking, stuttering.

In hearing, such moments bring back to the ear the ordinary heard but unnoticed noisy


blur that talk is. It is surfaced by the strange sound that unconnected letters may create or

by the physicality of tears, shrieks, the vomiting voices of laughter, sighs, lisps, whispers. The "word"-that entity of clear meaning-is, metaphorically, where the electricity switch is on, and "there is light." The switch, however, has an "off" mode, where the word, rather than enlightening itself with the fullness of meaning that is bodiless, returns to the utterance where it then loses its meaning in the tactility of enunciation.

On the one hand, you see "the sea" when I say "sea." On the other hand, do you see the word sea? See the saying of it.

Language has in it that strangeness. We can behold it, in our own mouth and ear, as a

foreign tongue. Words that usually pass through, resist passage and return to the ear. This

may be an aesthetic experience of wonder when a sound is played with, as in alliteration, but it may be an unpleasant experience-words that return, as the Hebrew poet H. N. Bialik (1948) phrased it: "as crows from the filth." The foul ear rejects its own mouth. Similarly, the French poet Francis Ponge (quoted in Derrida 1992, p. 153) recounts how dirty and troubled he feels frequently after conversation, even an intelligent one, with friends. Words rejected amplify the silence of the ear, as the wish to return to silence, to cleanse oneself from speech.

Between tongue and "tongue," the word has no ultimate proof for itself; it exists between meaning and utterance, abstraction and the body, precarious, shaking, full of its own flesh. The word is not exhausted by the communication of meaning; it is corporeally silent. The "flesh" of the word (playing here on Merleau-Ponty's [1964, p. 179] "la chair du visible") renders not only its irreducibility to meaning, the symbolic order of the word, but also its mortality and liveliness. With the flesh of the word we return to where speech begins and where it ends. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1977, p. 48) writes:

Our view of man will remain superficial ... so long as we fail to find, beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence, and as long as we do not describe the action which breaks that silence.

Breaking the silence of the body in speech is not only an individual act. It is a basic gesture in the ritual or conversation of gestures. This is why laughter is part of the ritual even when considered from this aspect of it. Laughter breaks the word and bursts out in laughter. It breaks the law and equalizes, tricks language in its own game and returns to the

erupting body. My purpose, then, is not to ground language and unify the communicative

body (as John O'Neill [1989] tries, for example, to do). Rather, it is to impede that unification and explicate further the moment of break between word and body and its

implication. The resurgence of the body disrupts not only language (as an irreducible essentiality)

but also the binary language/body (or form/matter) rendering language and body as insep- arable and irreconcilable. It is not, then, a primordial silence, but a body that is from the start a broken silence. This brings us to Judith Butler's (1993, p. 53) formulation of body as matter: "The preservation of the outside, the site where discourse meets its limits, where the opacity of what is not included in a given regime of truth acts as a disruptive site of linguistic impropriety and unrepresentability." What this implies is not simply a claim against any reduction of materiality into "linguistic stuff" but as that which is itself "founded


through a set of violations ... [and] constructed through a problematic gendered matrix" (p. 29).

Since the body (as matter or sex) is not prediscursive, it is also in difference, which is necessarily performed rather than stamped or inscribed on a passive body. The body is not only in service of speech or in resistance to it but is itself a signifying practice. The dis- tinction Butler makes at this point is between performativity and performance, the first referring to the reiteration of a certain discourse, while the latter, to a theatrical performance, a free play. Speech, in terms of the present essay, is to be found between these two notions of performing and being performed, and specifically, in Butler's statement, as sexual difference that takes place between sex and a matrix of gender (and may be applied for any other performance of differences).

Any speech, therefore, is also a break dance of difference, the disruption of a unified identity. The body resurges into speech as a sexed body that cannot but perform itself to become speech. It becomes a "critical matter" between identification and disidentification, negotiating prohibition and deflection, standing in some relation to an imaginary threat, both being broken by it and breaking it: in the masculine it is an inevitable failure, the threat of losing or dispossessing the tongue (castration) and the threat of feminization. The feminine, on the other hand, is "the figural enactment of that punishment, the very figura- tion of that threat and, hence, is produced as a lack only in relation to the masculine subject" (Butler 1993, p. 102). Thus, not only speech is sexed but the break itself becomes charged with different meanings in the masculine and in the feminine, namely, failure or lack, respectively.

THTHTH

Let me come back to the concrete break of speech when it halts at a stutter. This may mark both failure (of the desire to speak) or lack (dumbness, finding nothing to say). Actual stutter is more conspicuous, because it happens at the site of effort. The mouth stutters, but indeed the whole body can stutter, emphasizing the recruitment of the body to the effort of speech.2 The mouth desires to speak, but despite itself it is dislocated from the word. For a stutterer, the word is already there, obviously, only it has a hard time being uttered-so it is sometimes guessed by the interlocutors, attempting to help the word out and save the day. Because it must be said, even if it is guessed right. The body must come through.

On the other hand, the strain of the dumb body manifests "out loud," in performance, that its expressivity is not in unity with language. At times the body is stuck and speech is uttered, but it is strained and detached from the body. The event of stuttering exposes the handicapped, stuck body and, in that sense, unconceals the actual state of the stuck speaker-the word at the mouth cannot come through, not the word already thought, not the right word, not, sometimes, any word.

The event of speaking, precisely in its moment of failure, reveals itself and causes embarrassment as an improper exposure of the body. Such impediment may be used delib- erately as mentioned at the beginning of this essay. In moderate manner (coughing, chuckling, repeating a syllable), it may make an impression of renewing the connection of body to speech, reintroducing, in the tactility of the living voice that it is thinking and working "now," as it speaks, presenting the first-person speaker in speech, hence, the hesitation of knowledge and the return of knowledge to speech.


"The stutterer" can be considered, then, as more than just an accident. It embodies a principle of knowledge and as such is of crucial importance in the highest figure of the word in the Bible, that of Moses, the receiver and giver of the word. Moses stutters (other prophets also have difficulties with words). He halts in difficulty the expected connection of speech and thus lays bare the human mouth, the speaker, into the story's picture:

I am not eloquent, neither heretofore, nor since thou has spoken unto thy servant, but I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue. (Exodus 4: 10)

The medium of the word of God, Moses, is thus relegated from the word to the heavy mouth. Rather than being "possessed" by the word and becoming its medium, he deau- tomatizes it and thus acknowledges the human mouth, body, tongue and their fundamental childish stutter as part of the myth of receiving the divine word. Moses figures the break of the word as inherent in the word. An association may be appropriate here between this and the other break-that of the first tablets that preceded the given law. In a similar way, he breaks his mouth and liberates for the reader, or the bearer of the law, the break between word and body, mouth and law, the written book. The word must be uttered, born in effort, figured bodily, in order to be received.

Plato employs a similar insight in a critical comic way in the Symposium, when describing the attack of hiccups that Aristophanes undergoes when it is his turn to speak. The body of the comic poet betrays him when he is about to carry his speech in praise of Eros. As Martha Nussbaum (1989, p. 172) puts it: "It makes Aristophanes (and us) wonder at the way in which the good order of the body gives way, as though a willing and desiring victim, to the most absurd of sub-human noises." And it is not only the good order of the body, but the good order of speech that is disrupted here. The failure is deliberate on the part of Plato. It reminds us, in a comic way, and yet very serious, as Socrates himself claims at the end of the conversation, that speech, as Eros himself, is not exempt from the failures of the body.4

The hiccups of Aristophanes remind us of the connection of myth to mouth. Every (mythical) word is conversational, even if poetic. Even Eros, as such, depends on the mouth that stops and begins, or does not begin, because, as Aristophanes at that moment, it is impeded by "sub-human noises." Charles Olson (1977, p. 38) speaks of the myth in terms of mouth and calls mythology muthology:

We can say mythththology is stories of myths-which is the word "mouth." Muthos is mouth. And indeed logos is simply words in the mouth. And in fact I can even be stiffer an etymologist and tell you that if you run the thing right to the back of the pan and scraped off all the scrambled eggs and there's still rust on it and you can't wash it, you'll find that what you have to say muthologos is, is "what is said of what is said"- as suddenly the mouth is simply capability, as well as words are a capability, they are not the ultimate back at all ... the whole damn thing is simply naming God-one of the quickest ways to call that thing.

The sputtering of the ththth returns the logos or the word to the mouth, the resistant body that impedes sense and abstraction, the projected telos of myth's transparency.

A less mythical but poignant example of hesitation and nonspeech in speech is given by Heinrich Bell in a story called "Dr. Murke's Collection of Silences" about a radio man who collects brief silences, the awkwardness of the ehs that disconnect not only speech


from speech but word from mouth. He tapes them together to make one long albeit frag- mentary silence, a ragged continuing eh, the vocalized nonword as an independent utterance. We make a point in conversation to ignore these nonsyllables and to concentrate on the flow of meaning. But we recognize them, and if they linger, the conversation is shamed. Society is breached.

The gap between the prophet, the mythologer, or the radio man and their words sheds

light upon the more mundane phenomenon of learning to speak, of socialization by the word. The child is no different than Moses when he receives the word and makes an effort to acquire a social mouth. The effort at utterance is instantaneously an effort to inculcate the word. Speaking the word is its reception. It also returns us to the child who is in wait for the word. Both in the ordinary stutterer and in the prophet-stutterer, the basic situation is of expecting, of turning toward the word together, to the word that has not yet come, that is only about to be uttered, about to be heard. The desire of speech and the craving for a word is revealed in the very posture of "about to speak" or "about to be heard" appeared in the poise of body and mouth toward speaking, the posture of the ear-cocking the ear toward a message, or the reading eye-what card shall show its face, what is it that is

engraved on the tablets? Automatization of the word and the immediacy of speaking, which is the ordinary state,

is not unconscious at the background of moments of stuttering, suspense, and hesitation at the "site" of utterance, when to have a word (with you) meets resistance in mere utterance, let alone clarity and flow. Immediacy is informed with the potentiality and imminence of break, which is accentuated when performance is less easy and strained by an attending audience. The pending pen above the page, the "eh" of gathering a word, chuckling the throat, and catastrophic fantasies that come with stage fright are all instances of this. The word shows its labor when the ability to talk is impeded and when enunciation is not taken for granted but is exposed.

The expectation for the word is still high, but we have to draw every letter with a pen, or punch every letter on the keyboard. The ththth of punching a word "grounds" us to our mouths and to the resistance and critique of the body. The word is inscribed, and we inscribe ourselves in words. We hug with the word hug, we make love with the words make love, we bodily punch the word.

What we can say of the conversational text is that it is woven of tongues, we "speak in

tongues," not necessarily in the pentecostal understanding of this phrase, which requires radical ecstasy. Even moderate ecstasy is required for the tongue to speak, to get into the trance of conversation, to weave the text, especially a strong text that is destined to hold a conversation, to hold (or behold) the tongue. The text itself, or the con-text of the woven break, becomes a "texture" or "textile"-touch of body in speech.

TOUCHE

At times it is the conversation that actually touches, as the French word used to acknowledge a hit in fencing for a witty, pointed remark: "touch6." The body is touched by a word- sword, thus recovering that strange capability of words to become at their other side, pointed and hurting, as material bodies. Butler (1997) analyzes language as having within it its own possibilities of violence, wounding power and world shattering. She considers the offensive utterances of "hate speech" as speech acts that produce responses of injury, threat, fear, and pain that is suffered as a consequence of them.


The injuring word can cross the limit of what we would call a conversation scene. It may become a cruel weapon with severe political and personal implications. But even in ordinary conversation it is a matter of everyday-hurt, insult, shame, guilt. The transfigura- tion of such instances into dance are of concern in the present context, namely, an acknowledgment of verbal violence but in a playful spirit that remains serious but allows the aggression to be held within, rather than shatter, the conversation. To draw a portrait of this fight/play of bodies in conversation, let me use here an example from Henry Louis Gates (1988). First, it is the performer body in speech that is noteworthy and for which Gates evokes the figure of the "signifying monkey," taken from African myth reenacted in Afro-American culture. The signifying monkey performs the ritual act of "signifyin " rather than "signifying;" it brings the body back into speech and conversation, and rather than involved with representation and truth it dabbles in a rite of speech, reflecting its own speaking rather then forgetting itself inside the balloon of signification. It figures the figure of speaking rather than its signified meaning:

The signifying monkey is often called "the signifier," he who wreaks havoc upon the signified ... The speech of the monkey exists as a sequence of signifiers, effecting meanings through their differential relation and calling attention to itself by rhyming, repetition, and several of the rhetorical figures used in larger cultural language games." (Gates 1988, pp. 52-53)

In one of the forms of signifyin' called "playing the dozens," the speech-monkey is figured as an artist of insult, who participates in a verbal ritual that is not unlike a speech duel, where, as in a Hegelian struggle for mastery, there is a winner who has the last word and a loser who is forced into silence. This is not a controversy where truth wins or an expres- sionist contest where the emotional courage and freedom of confession win. It is a game or a dance of words where the strongest speaker, the one who insults best, has the last word (here I quote only the last lines out of a long sequence that builds up to this point):

"Yeah," said Al. "When my greatgreatgreatgreat grandma who was a Zulu queen got through eating them missionary chitterlings, she wanted to build a sewer-ditch to take away her crap, so she went out and saw your poor old greatgreatgreatgreatgreat grandma sleeping under a coconut tree with her old mouth wide open. She didn't need to build no sewer ditch ..."

"Jeesus!" yelled Slim, closing his eyes and holding his stomach. "I'm dying!" Jake screwed up his eyes, bit his lips, and tried hard to think of a return. But, for the

life of him, he could not. Al's last image was too much; it left him blank. Then they all laughed so that they felt weak in the joints of their bones. (Gates 1988, p. 99)

This ritual of speech modulates the talk of the body and makes speaking itself a theatrical act, both for the audience that sits down, watches, and rolls in laughter and for the actors who take a bodily risk in the game-they rise and they fall, but they are also partly watchers, which allows them at the end to laugh, too. "Then they all laughed," as it says above.

The importance of body-talk performance in signifyin' practices is largely evident in its kin, hip-hop culture, which has become by now a worldwide style. This African American and African Caribbean youth culture features different ways of the "tongue" in talk (speaking-singing rap), body (break dancing), and writing (graffiti), combining funk rhythm, biting criticisms, and in-your-face rhetoric that sticks its tongue out with scornful


fire, rage, screeching guitar riffs and scratching turntables. The aesthetics of these various

performance styles is founded on breaks and ruptures that are not merely a style but

employed as strategies and forces in cultural-political discourse:

The line is both a series of angular breaks and yet sustains energy and motion through flow ... abrupt, fractured yet graceful fastwork leaves the eye one step behind the motion . . . Rappers stutter and alternatively race through passages, always moving within the beat or in response to it ... highlighting lyrical flow and points of rupture ... These effects suggest affirmative ways in which profound social dislocation and rupture can be managed and perhaps contested in the cultural arena. (Rose 1994, p. 39)

The tongue's break dance in hip-hop culture becomes an enactment and reinvention. As

such, it is not only a break in performance but a performance of break-breaking pitch, time, and beat and making the body into a talking instrument using postmodern aesthetics in a politics of resistance and identity, as Simon Frith (1996, p. 115) describes it:

Hip-hop ... with its cut-ups, its scratches, breaks and samples, is best understood as

producing not new texts but new ways of performing texts, new ways of performing the making of meaning ... the fun lies in the process not the result. Not for nothing is rap a voice-based form with an exceptionally strong sense of presence. The aesthetic question about this postmodern music, at least, concerns not meanings and their interpretation ... but mutual enactment, identity produced in performance.

PERFORMANCES

This leads us to a consideration of the body-in-talk as performance not only in what is intended as outspoken or publicly displayed show but in ordinary situations as well. The

exposure of effort in speech illustrated above alludes to the fact that in ordinary conversation an effort is made to cover it up. The trance of speech is said to engulf the body or at least cover up the body that does not engage in speech, in the common text that holds the conversation. The silence of the body, its refusal to speak, breaks the spell and curbs conversation back to its limp.

This cover up, however, does not eliminate the presence of the performing body in any ordinary conversation, although frequently it is buried under the current or currency of talk. Sitting around the table, only half the body appears on the level of talk, and this part is also preoccupied with other matters: it eats, drinks, writes something, scratches its head. That massive part of the body can be heavy, covered, and untalkative.

Nevertheless, the basic gesture of the body remains conversational. I return here to

George Herbert Mead's (1934) definition of dialogue as "a conversation of gestures" and thus to "gesture" as the figure of "speech." Unlike Mead, however, I believe the gesture is not a pragmatic act, the telos of which is meaning. It extracts out of meaning the presence of the

gesture, portrayed as body performance, and defines not only speaking but writing as a "performance text" (Denzin 1997). This returns the spoken into the textual as performance.

What is specific to the body in the performance of speech or in text, if we wish to understand it in conversational terms, is the gesture, or performance, as a "turn." This is already alluded to in the word "conversation" (con-versare: turning together). What we reveal is that the body is constantly turning. It has no "degree zero" of rest, where it is not in a turn. It is not the body as a carnal entity or a physiological system that is the focus


here, but the body in speech, the way it looks, feels, weighs, performs. It must turn. It is

already in a turn. Any way you look at it, or phenomenologize it, it turns, defining its space as forward and backward as well as around, on the side, outside, within. The front is

opened and the backside arranges itself, not only as a backstage that is cut from the stage, but as the inevitable silent wake of a turn. Forward and backward are in movement. At

every moment, the body is caught "red handed," forwarding itself, not necessarily toward a topic but as body to body "corps a corps"-as they say in French. So even if the turn is convoluted by partly turning toward the other conversant and partly turning away, or sink-

ing heavily into itself, or theatrically or textually transfiguring itself, it is in a turn. This is part of the hidden dimension of what has been named the "personal space"

(Sommer 1969), though the space here is more dynamic. It is not merely a delineated hori- zon around a person but a conversational space of turning. In turning, the body spaces itself out and brings itself to the break forwards, erupts. So conversing, in bodily terms,

actually means to perform a break of space-touching each other's and one's own space of the body about, between, and within. The convergence of Eros and conversation, as well as the touch that hurts becomes evident here.

On the other hand, the performing aspect also blocks conversation. It "monkeys" us, brings us back to the tongue, the wagging tail/tale, the talking hands, the grimaces of the

face, the "primitive" postures of the dance. For a moment, the balloons that flower or burst from the mouths of comic figures are seen not for what's written in them (even bodily noises as grunting, snoring, hissing, etc.) but for their own blown figures-the blowing of

speech. As such it serves as a check against inflated balloons and enhances an acknowl-

edgment of infancy or primitivism and of speech. This double existence of speech posits for us a break of conversation, rather than a

complicity of body and language. Because of this break bodies can never "come

together"-not with the word and not with each other. They can only encounter each other as dance versus dance or in a dance together. In sexual intercourse (Scruton 1986) lan-

guage can be silenced, relinquished, or quieted down, and the body surfaced as the main medium brought to the level of communication. On the other extreme, we can think of words without body, as abstract mathematical signs (even though they too betray a certain

figurative quality). Conversation takes place between these spaces and cannot bring them to converge into one space.

This has crucial importance for the question concerning the very possibility of conversation-whether we truly meet (Gurevitch, 1995). The body works with and is molded into communicative acts, but it is also a resistance and the eruption of noncommunicativ-

ity, breaking our sense of dancing together in the realm of signs, meanings, common social worlds. The body, then, is an index of break, a break in conversation. It means that we communicate through a break and that performance is informed by it, making it a break-

performance from the start. It is no longer the mere "aboutness" of the content but the

speaking of it, utterance, movement, meter, tone of voice, effort and ease, flow and stutter,

that inform talk. It is part of the aboutness of speech telling about itself. The figurative and the rhetorical are embedded in the informative.

David Sudnow (1979) has offered a notion of talk as improvisation, the run of speech as the fingers of a jazz pianist run on the keyboard. Indeed, in improvisation, it is the actual movement of speech-its body "finding places" in space, stretching, reaching and

making momentary decisions. The conversational occurrence "involves two bodies con-

jointly moving through a strangely shared system of inner spaces together" (p. 46). The


notion of "break dance" alters the harmonious movement of bodies with each other that Sudnow portrays. It adds the crucial sense of break to the movement itself. The body moves not only along with speech and conversation but also against them. Its gravity forms a resistance to the flow. Speech cannot always recruit the body into its communicative projects. It must acknowledge, sometimes in spite of itself, the body's gravity and

weight, the crudeness of the sound, the slouching pace.

THE QUIET BODY

The break dance of talk has a nervous aspect to it. I connect this with Michael Taussig's (1992, p. 10) concept of "the nervous system":

How to write the nervous system that passes through us and makes us what we are- the problem being, as I see it, that everytime you give it a fix, it hallucinates, or worse, counters your system with its nervousness, your nervousness with its system.

The system of nervousness I employ here signifies the way the body is electrified with a

system of speech, repressions, incisions, topics, breaks, silences. This highlights the way language is inscribed in the body and tilts it from its supposed potentiality of restful, easy, and free movement, thus interfering with the body and what finally the body dances in

speech. It perhaps says something general about any speech, but more acutely it reflects

upon a reflexive anthropological description of "our," that is, contemporary, modem, or

postmodern conception of conversation or social discourse that registers in our speech. The nervous body is traversed by unfinished thoughts, severed in their midst by press-

ing things, other thoughts, controlled thoughts, uncontrolled thoughts. Like electrodes that hook into the body, speech is experienced as a kind of terror: it encroaches the body, pricks it, demands response, provokes speech, alien speech, or too much speech for the body to

cope with. Conversation is, in this way, itself nervous, tense, and can hardly bring to the surface its own silences. By silences, I mean not the paralysis of embarrassment, a blush-

ing face, a squirming body, fumbling hands, or the repression of words, but rather moments of subsiding noise that relax, open, and expand the field of speech. Is the body merely fallen language, a ruin within the word, heavy matter that cannot arise to the occa- sion of mind, meaning, light(ness)? Can the noise stop? Not by silence, that is, repression, cutting it away, closing in-but quiet: opening out, shedding off, in peace.5

What is the ritual of quietude or peace that is won at the ritual of war-as the struggle for speech? Is it merely "peace from war," being left in peace, relieved from the burdens of conversation, competition, struggle, to rest in peace? Or is it peace in conversation, which bears in it the notion of participation, the responsibility to enter, to break dance in peace? Even in erotic relations, the hidden dimension of the body may embrace but cannot merge (Gure- vitch, 1990), lest in unio mystica practices where the body melts into an other and attains an oceanic experience of union between tongue and "tongue." If we are short of unio mystica, then the embraces of the body, awkward or in dance, are inflicted with breaks.

How quiet can it get? The figure of the "quiet body" is not absolute because it is not out of the dance, but still in dance, including the one who sits down from the dance (resting its tongue and getting carried away in the hovering speech of thought) or the body who writes, runs its fingers, dances with a pen sowing the spacious white, blank paper, or cir-


cling in the air above it with what to say and what not. As a figure of a dance, it is also a critical body, posing its own postures and questions.

The tongue that lies at the back of the mouth is not merely like Plato's captives tied in the dark cave. It rests. The critical body knows the breaks and also knows subdued voices,

pauses, silent leaps, flows of nonspeech. Surely, when the tongue rests, the hollow of

thought and dream can still be humming with words uttered by an inner tongue. Yet here, too, rest may be regarded not as a mere hallucination of the nervous system but as a viable

counterpoint, a stance of the critical body that should not be terrorized and obliterated by the infinity of action imposed on speech, the nonexit condition of language when it

imposes itself on the speakers as endless chatter (Fenves 1993). This may take us afar to adhere to the figure of the meditating yogi who empties him-

self of language to attain absolute quietude. But we may employ this notion more mod-

estly and think of it as an archimedean point of rest that enables the very possibility of

speech. It enters language, opens spans and chords between action and rest, and elaborates itself as the rhythm of the speaking body, of conversation, and of music. We may combine these latter three and say that the quiet body introduces music to conversation. Even chatter can be quiet.

I find G. W. F. Hegel's ([1801] 1977, p. 484) idiom at the end of the Phenomenology- "simple immediacy"-an appropriate one in this context: "this is simple immediacy, which is as much being and existence as it is essence; the former negative thought, the lat-

ter, positive thought itself." The positive thought here is connected with the action of posing and positing. It cannot rest solely on negativity-the struggle for mastery of speech, being, existence. It can be read, in a way perhaps not fully in line with Hegel's simple and immediate unity of essence and existence, or substance and subject, but still as a gift given at the end of dialectics, the free "externalized Spirit" in a movement that leads to the quiet simple immediacy of speech. At the end of the struggle, at the edge of "absolute knowl-

edge," we find but the tongue's break dance, not nostalgic or hallucinatory, or the last

word, but a positive conversational gesture. It may be lucid and clear but it retains the obscure weight of the body as a part of

speech and thus its rhythm, pace, and lightness. At the light end of speech, the dreamy or

poetic edge of stutter (Dante says in La Vita Nuova [xix]: "Then my tongue spoke, almost as though moved of its own accord, and said .. ."), the tongue is enlightened. Still a break dance, scarred with ththths, ehs, touch6s, and the effort of performance, and yet flowing. It

may be "how to dance sitting down" as Charles Olson phrased it, Henri Matisse's light circle of dancers giving hands, or the seesaw dance between gravity and levity-sitting at once on the two seats of the seesaw, the heavy and the light.

CONCLUSION: DIFFICULTY AND DANCE

In "Anthropology of Performance," Victor Turner speaks of the tendency in modernist

anthropology to regard performance as a "fallen state." He quotes J. Loyons' who relates in his article "Human Language" to the anthropologist's idealization of language behavior: "First of all we discount all slips of the tongue, mispronunciations, hesitation pauses, stammering, stuttering, and so forth; in short, everything that can be described as a 'performance phenomenon.' Turner (1986, p. 77) continues:

The "postmodern turn" would reverse this "cleansing" process of thought... Perfor-


mance, whether as speech behavior, the presentation of self in everyday life, stage drama or social drama, would now move to the center of observation and hermeneutic attention. Postmodern theory would see in the very flaws, hesitations ... clues to the very nature of human process itself, and would also perceive genuine novelty, creative- ness, as able to emerge from the freedom of the performance situation.

There are a number of implications to this. The first is the way data is perceived, collected, and relayed. Turner suggests that "flaws" collected in the field should not be excluded from the ethnographic text. Second, these flaws, hesitations, or breaks should be given value as themselves sites of creativity, where the new, like an herb, grows out of a crack in the wall. Third, the introduction of the break into knowledge, speech, and writing, not nec-

essarily as disorderliness but, as quoted at the beginning of this essay, is an artistic form. The performative is introduced through the presence of a body's silence, in the field, in

theory, in writing. A body's silence is revealed in difficulty, in a stopping break, but it is also the quiet body that moves along even when it sits or lies quietly. The verbs of lan-

guage are of the body; they carry both "silences"-what is silent and what is quiet in them.

Language is in speech, speech is in the body, and silence is already broken. Speech as

writing is a break dance. Isn't that the most difficult thing speech can do? And yet it is the

simplest. Let language go, and it will return through the body to break the silence. When we hear the breaking of silence in someone's speech or writing, our silence is broken, too. Reader and writer together break one another's silence alone. The dance, on it other edge, becomes a performance of breaking the silence that is, at heart, a performance of silence, as well.

The "crisis of representation," which has become a key figure of critical thinking and

perhaps of the age so much that it is beyond a specific quote, is here coupled with another crisis: the crisis of conversation and the flight into "text." The tongue's break dance returns us to the crisis of conversation as a crisis of speech, the difficulty to enter speech: What to

say? Why to say? It is ordinary and all over the place, and yet it also is a theoretical figure for the torn tissue of the text, the interruption of the text by the break of conversation.

In speaking of the dance, we can focus on the actual production of a line, as the circling of a pen, or the two hovering palms over the keyboard. The speech that comes out does so of that break: the beginning is in the end, and the end is an ending, a performance, a dance, a break dance. This introduces poetics into writing. The body that breaks is the body that dances. Writing is of both. This is how I would continue, in terms of the present essay, Turner's "postmodern turn," as the writing of break. In Turner's passage, the break is out there in the hesitation of the Other, the crack in the idea of the whole. But the break is in here, too, that is, everywhere you go. It turns anthropology and sociology into a break dance. How to do it? Only when it happens can we say-here it is. It cannot be pre-scribed.

As an idea, this of course leads us to the "overwhelming question" of science, theory, and critical thinking, versus poetry. There is no ready answer as to how to reconcile this

question. From the poetry side, this has been going on for ages, at least from Philip Sid-

ney's "Defence of Poesy," a short while before Shakespeare through Shelley and Pound to today's language poets in America. From the critical-philosophical side, it has continued since Plato to current debates concerning poetry and philosophy (Rorty 1989) or poetry and sociology (e.g., Qualitative Sociology vol. 19: issue 4 [1996]; Clough 1996; Denzin 1997). The question cannot be resolved and finalized either way. We are too much in its midst. In fact, in terms of this essay, the question is already in the writing. The tongue's


break dance means to perform the question, conclude with it, become a question mark,

perform as waiting for reply.

NOTES

1. The silence of the body as testament of the failure of speech to give meaning or to communicate is described by Jackson (1994, p. 222) from the perspective of people who suffer from chronic pain: "Every time they speak, or groan, or remain silent, and are disappointed (at times a disappoint- ment approximating despair) at the results of their choice of action, they compellingly illustrate the

incommensurability between embodiment-as-lived and embodiment-as-represented." 2. Training to speak is a practice that we recognize when we learn a new language or when an

infant learns to speak. In such experiences, which are close in some ways to each other, we sense sharply the difficulty of the body to come through in speech. The training of a theater actor or a radio or TV announcer includes the tiring process of pronunciation as performance to the point where as one book on such training for actors (Turner 1981, p. 1) describes it, the production of a voice through much laborious experiment of throat, jaws, breath, and so on will be "like any other very highest manifestation of art which is characterized by a technique so flawless that it is unnoticeable as such and becomes one with the art itself." For a lively description of language via the production of sound to the level of letters and syllables see Burgess (1992).

3. The Hebrew reads literally: "I am not a man of words ... I have a heavy mouth and a heavy tongue." The response of God reads, "but who gives a mouth to man" and thus puts the very power of speech in the hands of God and underlines the difficulty of the mouth as a quintessential human

quality, especially when it is attributed to a prophet. 4. Cosi (1987) brings up another Greek mythology figure who is known for his stuttering (apart

from the famous tale of Demosthenes, the stuttering orator): Battos, the founder of Cyrene. Cosi points out how speech difficulty is linked to castration with its implications for a special "heroic morphology."

5. Silence is in language: it comes as an order, a decree of limit, a break, abstinence from speech, or an abstract notion of no speech. Quiet is a state of the body free from disturbance or noise. One sleeps quietly; the night is quiet.

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