III.CorporealSemiotics:TheBodyoftheText/the
TextoftheBody
1.TextualizingLife—anIncompleteProject
Bodieshavealwaysbeenfullofmeaning—oratleastbelievedtobe.
From the earliest days recorded, human beings have asked themselves
what their own particular corporeality, what the configuration and
conduct of their bodies, might signify, in short what these bodies might
be telling them, especially when they were behaving in unusual ways.
Interestingly enough, providing answers to such questions more often
than not invoked super-human, if not supernatural, agencies whose
sentiments (anger or fury most likely) were somehow imprinted on the
body. It was an article of faith that in order to intuit this meaning, the
knowledgeofspecialists,likeshamans,priests,orhealers,wasrequired.
Andlater,whenthegreatbookreligionsevolved,they,too,retainedthe
ideathatthegodheadspeaksthroughthebodyinvariousways.
InthesecularizedworldcreatedbyEuroAmericanEnlightenmentthe
speaker function devolved on the body itself. The history of Western
medicine can be read as a process of a continuous and progressively
systematicsemioticizationofthebody(Baeretal.101-64;Hess203-05,
213). The end product of this process was a detailed inventory of
symptoms which produced the concept of disease as we understand it
today and which continues to be the basis of medical treatment and
research. In our own time, the speaker function has once again been re-
allotted, at least in the halls of the academy. As cultural constructivism
has become something like a critical orthodoxy even in media contexts,
it is perhaps no surprise that everywhere we are told that making the
bodyspeak,forexampleinmomentsofpainandsuffering,is,asDonna
Haraway astutely argues, "the job of discourses" (207).^1 Such
(^1) Although starting from related premises, Judith Butler offers a less generalist
reflectionontherelationbetweenbodyandtext:"Toclaim,forinstance,thatthe