Body, Interrupted: Textual Montage, Traumatized Bodies, and the De-Disciplining of Knowledge

This work examines the production of cultural knowledge through alternative writing practices such as textual montage. I am interested in demonstrating the experimental value of textual montage for the representation of personal and embodied knowledge. The first section outlines the meaning of this textual strategy for de-disciplining knowledge and the mind/body dichotomy. The second part is a demonstration of how this particular writing technique can be used to deal with trauma in the context of the medico-industrial complex, its use of medical imaging and the outmoded Cartesian logic of the mind/body split in the constitution of the patient/doctor relationship.In my writing practices I turn, repeatedly, to an exploration and articulation of traumatized bodies, bodies which have been experienced some form of violence. I define violence broadly to include representational violence, the violence of the gaze and the violence of being rendered invisible; or epistemic violence, the violence of knowledge and the violence of a sanctioned ignorance that keeps knowledge from people or mystifies it and renders it inaccessible. Representational violence and epistemic violence are discontinuous from, however mutually related to, feminist interrogations of domestic violence and sexual abuse; economic violence such as the brutality of poverty; and technological warfare, or the violence of technology and mechanization in the military and medico-industrial complexes, for example. Body, interrupted is a metaphor for the irreducibility of this traumatized body, a body too often anatomized into animal, human, mechanical, and commodified parts. It is my contention that the traumatized body is now writing its history and will not be silenced. It asks, what are the rights of my body, the wounded body, the dismembered body, the disabled body? Answering these questions requires a different organization or practice of knowledge. It also requires different representational strategies. The book has somehow to be adapted to the body, and at a venture one would say that women's books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men, and framed so that they do not need long hours of steady and uninterrupted work. For interruptions there will always be. Again, the nerves that feed the brain would seem to differ in men and women, and if you are going to make them work their best and hardest, you must find out what treatment suits them - whether theses hours of lectures, for instance, which the monks devised, presumably, hundreds of years ago, suit them - what alternations of work and rest they need, interpreting rest not as doing nothing but as doing something but something that is different; and what should that difference be? (Woolf, 1981, p. 78).(1)Criticalspace: the metaphor and the materialI am acutely aware that it is the business of ideas that I traffic in but I want to do something different with them. I also want to shift the lines of intake and output from that conventional space of academic knowledge that I occupy -- no, that is my occupation -- and turn toward other material sources -- disparate materials that constitute the flotsam and jetsam of post- and not-so-post-industrial worlds. To do so is to enter criticalspace. I characterize criticalspace as a site of assemblage created by objects, things, words, and images on the page. It is not an a priori configuration but rather something I have come to know from my writing and visual practices. I have given it a name so that it can enter into the circulation of knowledge but it has yet to be demonstrated or, for that matter, proven of any value. What exists is a series of textual emplacements, transpositions, and articulations; textual threads that have come together out of no particular necessity, brought into contact with each other on a contingent basis, without fore-knowledge and without knowing what future consequences may emerge from such an event. This is by no means an innocent activity but one that would destroy the mystique surrounding authorship, the apparent uniqueness and singularity associated with the production of academic knowledge by individual authors (see, for example, Stuart Hall, 1996). …

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