File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postco_1995/postco_Dec8.95, message 41


Date: Tue, 12 Dec 1995 17:33:10 -0600 (CST)
From: Quetzil-AT-UH.EDU (Quetzil Castaneda)
Subject: Re: (pre)language/the body


>I'm finding this a very interesting discussion.  Will somebody answer this:
>What is the difference between a "prelinguistic domain" and a
>non-linguistic one?  I'm having trouble with the "pre."  Why before
>language - why not in addition to or alongside language?  This domain (if
>it exists) need not be stable, unchanging, set at some "pre" time.
>
As for me, my foray into the discourse wavered between prelinguistic, 
nondiscursive, precultural, and various similar terms.  I bunched them all 
together in my own speech/argument (and thinking 2 boot).  As a prereader 
and even nonreader of Zizek -- but a "little" reader of Lacan! if U will! -- 
i do not know what the term was that was circulating in either "his" texts 
or the texts of his "readers" here in virtual pocolandia.

but, i might suggest that implicit in what i have been arguing about the 
prelinguistic, prediscursive, precultural as a domain/quality already 
imagined within the histories of the configurations of power/knowledge, is 
the idea that indeed the "nonlinguistic" exists.   But it exists ONLY AS an 
unstable, changing, shifting, nonessential, extraordinarily contestable and 
contested, nontranscendental zone of action/quality since indeed it is 
thoroughly constituted by the viscissitudes of cultural discourses forged in 
the games of power.  This being the case, or at least according to this 
positioning, to talk about the nonlinguistic as "in addition" or "alongside" 
is to miss the point: they are overlapping and intersecting and interwoven.  
I might argee with you in the ideo of being "in addition to" if you meant in 
the derridean sense of supplementary; (i.e., that they are each others 
necessary "inside" located on the "outside" that gets added to the other to 
complete that which is already supposedly complete but nonetheless needs 
this addition that comes from the outside but whose place on the inside is 
already preestablished.)


>And I'm not sure that talking about a non-linguistic domain always entails
>naturalizing something that is constucted.  We may rehearse our bodies in
>such a way that their non-linguistic values are in some ways constructed
>(in time, in space).  Why is the pre/non-linguistic said to be
>unconstructed?

i think of what donna haraway would say:  we are all cyborgs already.  
Meaning that there is no natural body or rehearsal of the body that is not 
already cultural-historical and that there is not cultural-historical body 
that is not natural already.  thus the desire to locate the cultural domain 
or the natural domain of the body is as it were a colonizing drive:  to 
render the body in its entirety as cultural or as natural.  My comments 
argue the latter part of that assertion and enact, rehearse the body as, the 
former.  The politics of my questioning and the analytics that would be 
performed from such questioning would seek to denaturalize the body to 
reveal the games of power in such discourse that wants to find the 
nondiscursive "alongside," "before," "below," or "beyond" culture.

Besides entailing a denaturalizing politics, the pursuit of the 
nondiscursive seems to generally premise itself on models of casuality -- 
most often or most crudely on unilinear models.  I suspect that this is not 
the case with zizek, whose intellectual baggage dips into linguistic 
structuralism via his lacanian posture, which is one great philosophical 
tradition that abhores casuality.  instead, one would pursue multiple and 
mutual or reciprocal effects.  To find a cause in many ways is like trying 
to find the nondiscursive: it is an imposition of an already resolved logic 
on a heterogenous flow that becomes molded into that logic by the erasure of 
the excess that does not match the categories and principles of that imposed 
logic.  Thus, there are only effects and when one discovers the cause of 
that effect one simply is ignoring all of the other causes that also worked 
effectively to cause the effect.  Further, one's language causes the cause 
to become a cause. likewise the body.

enough.
cheers, quetzil.

>
>I think I would like someone to be more concrete, talk about the body.  On
>the one hand I think, I can't know my body except through language.  On the
>other hand, I think about pain and pleasure and what their relations might
>be to language.  Can you only know pain through language?
>
>And why does the body have to be either linguistic or pre/non-linguistic?
>Maybe it's not a whole in those terms.  Maybe there's constant negotiation.
>
>
>And why is it any more "privileged" to say that the body has a
>non-linguistic element, then to say that it is constructed in language?
>Doesn't each approach have its own privilege?


>
>Confused in Canada,
>
>Karen
>
>
>
>
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>



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