#allon white

[scowlofminerva-blog]

Discursive space is ever completely independent of social place and the formation of new kinds of speech can be traced through the emergence of new public sites of discourse and the transformation of old ones. [...] And so, in large part, the history of political struggle has been the history of attempts to control significant sites of assembly and spaces of discourse.

Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression

[viviannebaba]

The vertical axis of the bourgeois body is primarily emphasized in the education of the child: as s/he grows up/is cleaned up, the lower bodily stratum is regulated or denied, as far as possible, by the correct posture ("stand up straight" "don't squat," "don't kneel on all fours"-the postures of servants and savages), and by the censoring of lower "bodily" references along with bodily wastes. But while the "low of the bourgeois body becomes unmentionable, we hear an ever increasing garrulity about the city's low"—the slum, the rag-picker, the prostitute, the sewer—the "dirt" which is "down there." In other words, the axis of the body is transcoded through the axis of the city, and while the bodily low is "forgotten," the city's low becomes a site of obsessive preoccupation, a preoccupation which is itself intimately conceptualized in terms of discourses of the body. But this means that the obsessional neurosis or hysterical symptom can never be immediately traced back through the psychic domain. To deconstruct the symptomatic language of the bourgeois body it is necessary to reconstruct the mediating topography of the city which always - already inscribes relations of class, gender, and race.

PETER STALLS BRASS AND ALLON WHITE - THE CITY: THE SEWER, THE GAZE, AND THE CONTAMINATING TOUCH  (BEYOND THE BODY PROPER - Reading the Anthropology of Material Life)