Body, Interrupted: Textual Montage, Traumatized Bodies, and the De-Disciplining of Knowledge. (Research Articles/Rapports De Recherche)

This work examines the production of cultural knowledge through alternative writing practices such as textual montage. lam 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. Ce travail examine la production du savoir culturel travers des pratiques alternatives d'ecriture tel que le montage textuel. Je m'interesse demontrer la valeur experimentale du montage textuel en vue de la representation du savoir personnel et corporel. La premiere section delimite la signification de cette strategie textuelle afin de de-discipliner le savoir et la dichotomie esprit / corps. La seconde partie demontre comment cette technique d'ecriture en particulier peut etre employee afin de se confronter au traumatisme dans le contexte du complexe medico-industriel, l'emploi qu'il fait des images medicales et la logique cartesienne demodee de la division entre l'esprit et le corps dans la constitution du rapport entre patient et medecin. ********** 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 material I 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. …

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