Incongruous bodies: arguments for personal sufficiency and public insufficiency.

• Author: Hauser, Gerard A.

Regarding the body as a discursive site is not new. As early as Homer (1990), we find corporeal reference used to convey strong emotions. In Book 5 of The Iliad, for example, Homer structures his narrative of a world in chaos through the anatomical destruction wrought by spear, arrow, and club during full-scale combat before Troy's gate. His graphic depiction of Acheans and Trojans meeting their demise made each individual body's destruction synecdochic for the devastation war had visited upon Attica and Troy. His battlefield scene bound the physical piercing and breaking of flesh and bone to the devastation each death visited on that warrior's family and world. More formally, since antiquity the rhetorical canon of delivery has included gesture and posture among its sources of influence. Rhetoric's oral tradition has theorized discourse in a manner that, at least implicitly, acknowledges its worldly appearance as an embodied performance. And in the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud's theory of psychopathology established the pleasure principle as the basic motivation for individual conduct, thereby wedding the body inexorably to the formation of subjectivity and an explanatory mechanism for human action.

However, explicit attempts to theorize the body as a discursive formation are relatively recent, with a flood of work since the mid-1960s. Most prominent among the contributions to our understanding of bodies as contested sites are the works of feminist intellectuals and of Michel Foucault. As Patterson and Coming (1997, 6) observe, feminist scholarship has made a massive contribution to rhetoric's understanding of the body as a discursive construction that extends beyond the provinces of medicine and psychology, and they provide an annotated bibliography of over 30 recent scholarly works in which this extension is elaborated. And the Foucaldean explorations of the other as insane (1973), as subjected to the medical gaze (1975), as disciplined through panoptic surveillance (1979), and as a sexuality defined through confession to a higher authority (1980) disclose a massive network of institutional topoi discursively forming the body as an object of desire whose appropriation authorizes knowledge and power.

Feminists and post-structuralists are among a larger group of researchers centering a discussion of meaning and influence, which is to say a discussion of knowledge and power, on the body. Richard Sennett's Flesh and Stone (1994) chronicles how symbolic representations of architecture and urban design historically have reflected cultural understandings and attitudes toward the body. Likewise, Gilles Lipovetsky's The Empire of Fashion (1994) details a similar relationship between cultural understanding of the body and the way it is displayed as an object of social attraction and influence. Elaine Scarry's Bodies in Pain (1985) offers a meditation on our search for language capable of giving voice to the body's vulnerability. And Russian poet Irina Ratushnikaya's Grey is the Color of Hope (1988) takes the reader into the labor camp at Barashevo's surreal world, in which its female prisoners of conscience used their bodies as contestive sites to challenge the authorities' denial of their personal and political identity and rights.

Collectively such works reflect how we experience our bodies in incongruous ways. The privacy of our sensations, the personal awareness derived from physical acts, the joys and pleasures aroused through intimate contact with other bodies teach us profound lessons about our personal identity and self-sufficiency. We experience our own body in ways that are unavailable to the inspection of others. Our pain or ecstasy is our own and known only second hand to those with whom we share its secrets. But our bodies also are in the world. There we encounter strange and unlike things and a larger authority that scrutinizes our engagement of them and gives them meaning. Like Adam and Eve after the fall, our innocence is lost and we experience shame in our nakedness. Beyond the gates of our privacy we become aware of our flaws and experience rebuke for our personal insufficiency. This double issue of Argument and Advocacy explores the struggle over bodily sufficiency as a source and site of arguments dealing with personal identity and the larger authority that seeks to discipline them.

The claim that bodies can argue, admittedly, can be problematic. The body is an ambiguous form of signification. Arguments are warranted assertions. They are claims supported by evidence and reasoning. But the body, as a corporeal entity, is an organism; its biological status is not symbolic. At the same time, limiting our understanding to its status as a biological organism ignores the body's symbolic significance and the numerous ways in which it is used as a form of signification. More narrowly, Thomas Darwin's "Intelligent Cells and the Body as Conversation" offers a provocative argument for revisiting even the biological construction that would preclude the body from being an argumentative site. His exploration of mindbody medicine is grounded in this alternative medical practice's understanding of the body itself as a vast cellular democracy engaged in internal deliberation over collective policies. His analysis suggests that the question is not whether bodies can be sources and sites of argument but in what sense (s) we may say this is so and the insights such understanding(s) might offer into the character of public advocacy as a constitutive agency.

For example, once our physical bodies pass beyond the gates of privacy they acquire a worldly identity of physical sufficiency based on their appearance as abled. Disabled bodies are remanded to the care of the able bodied for...