Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 42:3

0021-8308

Modifying the Modifier: Body Modification as

Social Incarnation
WILL JOHNCOCK

jtsb_488

241..259

The violence of writing does not befall an innocent language. There is an originary violence of writing because
language is first, in a sense, writing. Usurpation has always already begun.
(Derrida 1976 [1967]: 37)

DO YOU DO BODY MODIFICATION, OR ARE YOU BODY MODIFICATION?

Body modification practices are typically characterized as acts in which an individual plays an agentive role in the changes to their corporeality.1 Bodies are
expected to change naturally, whereby something like the gradual wrinkling of the
skin is acknowledged as an aging process. There is however a different social
appreciation of the change that is brought about by something like tattooed skin.
The notion that body modification occurs when one undertakes practices like tattooing, piercing or scarification engenders discourses in which: (i) body modifiers
endorse such practices as instrumental in ones self-construction, distancing their
practitioners from social regulation and a deterministic biology, whereas; (ii)
critics condemn their seemingly violent, corporeal interference, as is found in
modern medicines pathologization of some forms of body modification.
Interestingly, both these seemingly polarized positions rely on the assumption
that body modifications arrive upon, and invade, a passive human corporeality,
producing pre-modified and modified bodies. This posits an oppositional relation
between the natural body, and those practices said to violently denaturalize
it via their incorporation of non-human matter into human flesh, and consequent
interference with natural, biological processes. Such an interpretation duly posits
a cognitive agent who possesses control over their corporeality, whereby the body
becomes a self-construction of a presiding subject.
However, in suspecting, from my frame as a sociologist, that an analysis of such
behavioural practice should be attentive to its concurrent individual and social
co-constitution, a sociological and post-structural interrogation of this characterization of body modification as a sovereign, denaturalizing endeavour is
demanded. This is what is at stake in the first part of this article, which will
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manifest as an examination of the aforementioned belief that one can denaturalize

their corporeality, distance themselves from social regulation, and control their
corporeal self-production, via the implementation/introduction of body modification practices. In exploring whether body modification represents a selfconstruction that one undertakes, or simply exemplifies the inescapable natural
fluidity of being bodied that one is, we will then be in a position to explore the social
classification of such behavioural practices. In this regard, the exclusive categorization of certain practices and behaviours as body modifying will emerge as the
second aspect at stake in this article. This is because if, in the first part of this
exploration, it is argued that body modification is not a denaturalizing, socially
demarcating practice, but rather is something more inherently natural, then there
will be considerable ramifications for the social categorization of only certain
practices as body modifying.

DENATURALIZATION AND BODY MODIFICATION

The presumption that body modifications inscribe the body is integral to characterizations of their de-natural introduction to corporeality. Such corporeal
inscription is seen in the literal marking of the skin in something like tattooing,
and as a social inscription which manufactures the individual body. When considering the notion of inscription, one is also bound up in notions of writing.
Indeed, dictionary definitions of the term inscription refer to this correlation as
the act of inscribing [a writing upon] (Collins Dictionary 1990: 584). Writing
takes on the character of a synthetic, cultural process, or a representation of the
real, which arrives after the original, incarnated expression of Being. In what will
emerge as a prominent thesis within this article, the French post-structuralist,
Jacques Derrida (19302004), duly observes the common assumption that
writing, like all artificial languages, is a deviation from nature (1976: 38).
The interpretation that body modification is anything but a natural, human
endeavour can be challenged however by the observation that the voluntary
modification of the body is not a new phenomenon, nor is it the exclusive domain
of any particular class, race or other human demographic. The anthropological
research of Gloria Brame, William Brame and Jon Jacobs notes in this regard that
historically, travellers tales and the works of anthropologists have shown that
body modification is virtually universal (1993: 298). It is in the context of cultural
acceptance that discourses concerning body modifications denaturalizing effects
emerge.2 In a current, Western regard, accepted forms of body modification
typically include beautification processes such as laser hair removal and skin peels,
whereby EuroAmerican culture has esteemed modifications that reverse or stall
the effects of aging (301). Conversely, scarification, a practice which involves
professionally performed, artistic cuts, is typically aligned with extreme, disfiguring forms of body modification such as dermal implantation and branding. In this
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regard, Victoria Pitts, the author of In The Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body
Modification (2003), observes that these practices are usually seen as self-mutilating
rather than self-beautifying, to the extent of being linked to anorexia, bulimia,
and what has been called delicate self-harm syndrome (2003: 25).
Medical institutions duly become participants in discourses concerning body
modifications, which contentiously presents mental health practitioners as
experts on body modification (2003: 293). The normal, healthy body, as a solid
entity of defined borders and contained fluids, is perceived to be harmed by
non-normative modification practices, orchestrated by a mind that requires
medical attention. Here I am reminded of Immanuel Kants duty of selfpreservation, a duty which Kant says is violated in acts of self-harm, where one
proceeds to maim oneself (1996 [1797]: 177). In representing self-maiming, the
porous, uncontrollable, modified body is presumed to be an indicator of a similarly dangerous, unruly mind, whereby socially sanctioned medical intervention is
required in order to prevent such a mind from grotesquely modifying the passive
corporeality to which it is attached.

LIBERTY, SOVEREIGNTY AND THE BODY

The choice to modify ones body would not be a liberty that a Kantian frame of
ethics could accommodate. Nevertheless, in a contemporary setting, such practices are seemingly exercised from well within the mantra of something like liberal
political philosophy. In its most straight-forward conception, this ideology is
concerned with the nature and limits of government intervention within a society.
Liberalist thought focuses upon ones freedom of choice, concerned with, as
political philosopher Jean Hampton observes, the danger to liberty coming from
the power of the state (1994: 188). A liberal conception of the body defines ones
corporeality in terms of an autonomous, cognitive ownership. As philosopher
Elizabeth Grosz notes, in this context the subject has authority over their body,
which takes on the form of a possession, a property of the subject, who is thereby
dissociated from carnality and makes decisions and choices about how to dispose
of the body and its powers (1994: 8).
Exhibiting similarities with the liberal notions of power and the body, the body
modification community generally defines its practices in terms of a control over
corporeality, and a defiance of, or detachment from, social power and regulations.
This is reflected in the manifesto found on the website that has come to function as
its central hub, the Body Modification Ezine.3 The founder and creator of this site,
Shannon Larratt, confirms the ideology that ultimately a person has fundamental
ownership of their own body, and we dont have the right to try to take away that
sovereignty (Larratt 2004). Relevant to such discourses is the way some women
describe their body art, and practices such as genital piercing. These body modifiers
often understand their own practices as a way of claiming their body back from a
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masculine power structure which has objectified female corporeality.4 This

gesture against the body natural (2000: 2), using the description of body modification commentator Mike Featherstone, is intended to denaturalize the body by
constructing it on ones own terms, rather than submitting to a deterministic
biology and patriarchal framework. Such an interpretation envisages a demarcation, or break, from the social in these practices, designating bodies as loci of
resistance.
SPEECH AND WRITING

Both positions, be it the liberatory endorsement of body modifiers, or the condemnation of the medical establishment, divide the natural human body and those
culturally informed inscribing practices which are seen to intrude upon and rewrite
it. This is the very divide with which we are concerned, and it is in this regard that
Jacques Derrida can assist, via his call for an end to the book and the beginning
of writing. The book for Derrida is logocentrism, or more specifically, as Derridian
scholar Niall Lucy clarifies, the belief that before everything else, such as history,
consciousness, knowledge . . . there is the logos of presence (2004: 71). The
assumption that this logos represents the origin of meaning has significant
ramifications when it comes to corporeal temporality. A logocentric presence for
the body underpins the aforementioned self-mutilation argument, which relies
upon an impression of the skin as passive and unmarked. The anterior presence of
this natural surface precedes the cultural inscription of body modification
practice, which arrives subsequently as a representation of the real.
Derrida notes a similar frame in the spoken/written dichotomy. Phonocentrism, a
belief in the absolute proximity of the voice to what is signified, excludes the
written signifier, which functions as a supplement of speech. In this regard,
Derrida observes the belief that the order of natural and universal signification is
produced as spoken language (1976: 11). A concern we should have with phonocentrisms exclusion of writing is the way it naturalizes speech and denaturalizes
the written word. Along such lines, considering body modification practices as
instrumental in producing the written body, results in such practices being correlated with what is denatural.
BODY MODIFICATIONS AS NODES OF SIGNIFICANCE

Derrida believes that this frame which hierarchizes speech and marginalizes
writing is evident in the structural anthropology of Lvi-Strauss,5 stating that
Lvi-Strausss structuralism is a phonologism. . . the exclusion or abasement of
writing (1976: 102).6 Structuralism is particularly relevant, given that its differential process produces meaning via how a particular sign relates to, and differs
from, a whole system of signs. In terms of language, the meaning of the word
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mother only manifests via a comprehension of related terms such as father

and daughter. Because the letters or sounds which constitute a word cannot
convey meaning as a sovereign entity, the production of a word instead relies
upon a relation with other words. In this regard, words do not pre-exist their
relational/differential/structural production. Just as meaning is produced differentially within a structure of language, similarly a system of shared conventions is
exhibited in other social structures. The normal body, for instance, is produced
in relation to all other bodies and not-bodies. This implies that corporeally
constructive practices like body modification can also only be read within a
relational system of organization, whereby the pierced or tattooed body functions
semiotically, as an inscribed sign in a corporeal structure.
This appreciation of a socially structured inscription for corporeality contests
the body modification communitys equation of certain practices with a demarcated control of ones self and identity. A structuralist appraisal would be that
whilst body projects appear to be self-productions which take the body from a
pre-modified, to a modified, state, they actually only manifest within the organization of a social system which differentiates bodies. No body, nor indeed any thing,
pre-exists this relational/differential/structural production. This resembles what
anthropologists have observed in many tribal cultures, where tattooing speaks of
collective, rather than of personal, expression. Alfred Gell duly notes that in
traditional Polynesian settings the tattoo was significant not so much as a thing in
itself, than as the relative social standing it declared (1993: 305306).
Correlatively, we see how each piercing is linked to the piercings, and nonpiercings, of others, and produced accordingly. A piercing means nothing individually, whereby the metal spike through ones lip, or the nipple piercing of
another, only manifest via their differentiation from other body-modifications-assigns. A body modification thus acts as a node from which signification radiates
relationally. Despite this dependence of all things, such as body modifications, on
all other things, for their production and meaning, some modifications are marginalized in a social, corporeal structure. The ground for this, as we have seen, is
the interpretation that certain modifications represent a pathologically unhealthy,
socially contingent inscription of the body, evoking the exteriorization of writing
by phonologic structuralist anthropology. This is troubling, for if we understand
the written word as an artificial signifier derived from a natural phoneme, then the
materials (jewellery), and the processes (piercing techniques), incorporated into
the body via a practice like body piercing could only represent a synthetic
intrusion into ones natural or given body. This production of the written body
would duly take the human to a point further from its natural state.
THE VIOLENCE OF WRITING?

Lvi-Strauss believes that he observes this progression from nature to culture that
Western society enforces upon humans. During a series of encounters with the
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Nambikwara tribe from South America, he observes that as an outsider he is not

permitted to know their names, whereby around the anthropologist the tribe
members are not allowed to use proper names (Derrida 1976: 110). By encouraging the children to fight amongst themselves, and then to reveal the names of
their combatants to him by way of reprisal, Lvi-Strauss learns the names of the
entire community (1992 [1955]: 270). This breach of tribal law is interpreted as an
insight into the vulnerability of the primitive Nambikwara peace to infiltration
from Western civilization.7
In furthering his argument about the violation of a pre-culturalized utopia by
Western civilization, Lvi-Strauss recounts the writing lesson. Here he distributes writing materials such as pencils and paper to these purely oral people to
observe what they will do with them, for that the Nambikwara could not write
goes without saying (288). With these new implements the tribespeople begin to
scribble, which, given Lvi-Strausss assumption of a people without writing,
are perceived to be acts of pure imitation (288). The only member of the tribe seen
to comprehend the purpose of writing, to have understood what writing was for
(288), is the chief. He not only scribbles horizontal lines along with the other
tribespeople, imitating the anthropologist, but also understands that these
scribbles are meant to possess meaning, even if he does not understand exactly
what that meaning is.
The imitation with which Lvi-Strauss attributes the chiefs writing practice
bears an inverted resemblance to notions of mimicry that are invested in a cultural
hierarchy within the body modification community. This is particularly evident in
the perceived appropriation of Eastern tattooing styles. The introduction of such
designs marks the point where Western body modifiers are commonly seen to be
writing their bodies with symbols that they do not entirely understand,8 just as
Lvi-Strausss chief participates in a writing practice grounded in imitation rather
than comprehension. The Western body modifier is interpreted to only have a
rudimentary appreciation of the signification of such symbols in an Eastern
culture. Thus, their intention is to harness the symbolic effect, without anticipating
a participation in its production.
In noting this effect that writing produces, it is during a subsequent exchange of
gifts between the Nambikwara and another tribe that the chief introduces a new
stage in the procedure, by taking out a writing pad and reading the distribution
of gifts from a list. For Lvi-Strauss, this is an exhibition by the chief that he had
allied himself with the white man, and that he could now share in his secrets
(289). As Derrida notes, the chief has understood writings role as sign, and the
social superiority that it confers (1976: 125). Likewise, in extending my argument
from the previous paragraph, the Western body modifier identifies the Eastern
tattoo as a more powerful, deeper sign than those from their own culture. Given
the increasingly fashioned status of the tattoo in Western culture, a return to
Eastern forms of the art could be perceived as conveying a more sincere appreciation of ones body art, and indeed of the art of tattooing itself, beyond the
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realms of a Western fad. Thus, an alignment with the bodily writing of Eastern
tattooing functions as a powerful status symbol.
That the pre-literate tribal elder has grasped the notion that writing is a tool of
power troubles Lvi-Strauss, for the anthropologist understands what he has
taught (122). In teaching the Nambikwara how to write, Lvi-Strauss believes he
has corrupted the innocence of this primitive natural state. This supposed pure,
pre-written nature again resembles the impression of the pristine, unmarked,
natural body which precedes the violent intrusion of body modifying writing
practices. As we will see, I do not disagree with Lvi-Strauss that there is an
essential relation between writing and violence. This is also Derridas position,
stating that Lvi-Strauss is not to be challenged when he relates writing to the
exercise of violence (106). In recalling our earlier explorations into structuralism
however, what is apparent is that because each body is only produced structurally,
that is, via their differentiation from other bodies and things, no body pre-exists
such relational production. What we can now interrogate, given this logic which
demands that no thing pre-exists a co-constitutive relational production with
its Other, are the ramifications for the supposed pre-violent state of the
Nambikwara. Such an exploration has the potential to considerably inform
our arguments contestation to the notion of a pre-modified body existing
prior to the violent introduction of de-naturalizing body modification practices.

BODILY WRITING AS ORIGINARY VIOLENCE

In Saussures structuralist theory of language,9 which we have already discussed,

and which informs Lvi-Strausss structural anthropology, a proper name only
manifests due to its relation to other proper names. No name can ever be
proper in itself, just as it has been argued that no body modification has
meaning positively, but rather only manifests as a differing incarnation or trace of
a system. Similarly for Derrida, the proper name is only possible through its
function as a classification within a system of differences, within a writing retaining the traces of difference (109). This is what he refers to as the death of the
proper name, whereby the expression proper name is improper (111).
According to such logic, violence does not arrive from without to the Nambikwara
via Lvi-Strauss enabling the disclosure of proper names. Rather, there is an
originary violence already operating differentially in the tribe members being distinguished by names. This is the violence of the arche-writing, the violence of
difference, of classification (110).
Derrida identifies an essential relation between writing and violence, even in
the Nambikwaras supposedly pre-literate culture. This is based on Derridas
contestation to the characterization of violence as something which is introduced
to the tribal culture as an external, imposing force. Rather, for Derrida, violence
is differentiation. We have seen how according to the structural mechanism, a
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thing only becomes distinguishable via its differentiation from other things (and
even, it must be said, not-things). This productive differentiation is originary
violence, something Derrida describes as the archetypal writing of Being. This
originary violence that precedes the intrusion of the anthropologist is similarly
traced in the prohibition on the disclosure of these proper names. For Derrida,
such law is a violent institution born from this arche-violence that institutes the
moral (112). Law differentiates between lawful and unlawful after all.
Accordingly, Lvi-Strauss exposes what is inherently violent about law, rather
than committing a straight-forward offence against it. This uncovers the true
nature of violence that operates within Nambikwara society, an originary level
network of relational differences which characterizes writing in its most primordial mode10 and contradicts the possibility of an absolute. Rather than manifesting
as a subsequent violation of a prior integrity, originary violence operates differentially as Being itself, realizing/distinguishing the entirety of harmful and beneficial possibilities.
Hence, in terms of body modification, even before such practices occur, or are
supposedly introduced, to ones corporeality in a violent manner, the body itself
expresses violence due to it being the condition of differentiation from other
bodies, and other things. Such writing of the body therefore occurs even in the
prohibition of certain practices and their verifiable traces. In this regard, the
typical tattoo shop manifesto of no minors and no facial tattoos (DeMello 2000:
20) does not prevent the writing of the under-age body, or of the face. If tattooed
bodies only manifest in terms of how they relate to, and differ from, other tattooed
and non-tattooed bodies, accordingly there is a bodily writing-violence occurring
before tattooing arrives like an anthropologist on the scene of the supposedly
unmarked body. Again, this violence occurs in/as the originary differentiation of
things such as bodies, a process which produces all bodies concurrently via/as the
productive, structural, relational involvement of each in/as each other. That is,
each body depends on its relation with all other bodies (and not-bodies) in order
to manifest as the body that it is. Thus, the non-tattooed body is in a way already,
and always, tattooed, by its differentiation from, and production in, a corporeality
which conditions the possibility of the tattooed body.
Earlier, the implications of structuralist thought for corporeal meaning challenged the belief from the body modification community that practices such as
tattooing demarcate a subjects self-production. Now we can observe that this
originary differentiation of bodies means that the embodied individual is actually
unable to avoid a productive participation in their own modification. However,
this occurs at an inescapable, incarnated level, simply on the basis of being bodied.
The unavoidability of ones body modifying capacity should not be interpreted as
something which precludes the individual from an agentive participation in such
practice. Rather, what is required is a re-conception of agency, beyond the
reductive model which separates, and hierarchizes, a cognitive subject over their
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as-subject is recognized. The productive body does not carry along a subservient
subject, but instead, the body is that subject, whereby there can be nothing
disembodied about the subject, or agency, whatsoever. That the body always
was/is writing, via its differentiation from other bodies, exemplifies the productive
capacity of the subject-as-body-as-body-modifier. The idea that ones corporeality
is inscribed only once certain recognized practices write it in a hyper-visible
manner now seems reductive. Ones first tattoo does not mark the beginning of
self-writing, but rather is simply another form of writing which the self-as-body
already conditions. Just as the Nambikwara are not introduced to writing by an
anthropologist, but in their differentiation via naming and law already undertake
writing, neither is the body introduced to writing by an exclusive set of practices.

THE ERASURE OF BODY MODIFICATION AS A CATEGORY OF PRACTICE?

The notion that the sign is what speech most naturally evokes is consequently
negated. Without the exteriority of a linguistic sign before writing, the very idea of
the sign falls into decay (1976: 14). Derridas aforementioned end of the book
is the end of logocentrism, challenging the presumption of a totality to a preexisting sign presiding over the inscription that its signifier(s) perform(s). This is the
beginning of writing, avoiding the exclusive categorization of empirical marks and
inscriptions, to something which conditions the possibility to write in an empirical
form. If language and the sign do not precede writing, then speech, graphic script,
and the body are all forms or species of writing (8). The body-as-writer is
something with which Derrida would agree, given his demand that the most
elementary processes within the living cell are also a writing (1981: 61). The
productive capacity of body-as-space is thus exemplified in its chained capacity as
writer-modifier-differentiator.
That body modification practices are typically aligned with an authorship of
ones body, as earlier illustrated, is consistent with the usual impression that
writing is an authors re-presentation of reality. Now, however, we have a corporeal scene of writing, whereby the subjects agency is their corporeal constitution.
Body modifications exhibit the anterior always writing, rather than introducing
writing as new. Consequently, just as the Derridian model of writing-asdifferentiality spelt death for the proper name, similarly, for body modifications,
this incarnated, originary violence of writing suggests the erasure of body modification as a distinct category of practice.
In terms of the struggle between normative and non-normative forms of body
modification practices, we are left with a body which writes the very norms by
which it is framed. Moreover, the originary, and entirely natural, normative
capacity of corporeality is that it writes, blurring the classical nature|culture
divide, and characterizing as redundantly subsequent the exclusive categorization
of certain bodily writing practices. Being bodied writes/produces ones body,
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other bodies, and the structures that write bodies meaningfully. Being bodied is
writing. This dissolution of writing with corporeality, a written, writing flesh,
re-writes time. Time, as difference, can now also be read as a perpetual violence,
in the manner that it concurrently produces, and renders ambiguous, the distinction between a pre-modified, and post-modified, body. The body must write/
be-written in order for it to erase/be-erased, just as for Derrida the proper name
must classify/be-classified in order for it to obliterate/be-obliterated.

THE FUTILITY OF THE EMANCIPATORY EXERCISE

The subsequent character of body modification as a category of practice is not

being claimed because a meal eaten, a step taken, a blink or a breath modifies the
body to some degree, whereby the demarcated classification of practices such as
tattooing or piercing as body modifying is negligent of other, seemingly less
dramatic, but nevertheless body-altering, processes. Rather, what is being
acknowledged is that the inescapability of ones embodiment makes one a body
modifier by sheer incarnation. The body is not an object, or a canvas, which a
separate cognitive agent can modify, but instead is the agentive thing-as-subject
which cannot help but modify, cannot help but write, cannot help but temporalize. I am, therefore, acknowledging what it is that conditions corporeal difference,
rather than attending to the political stakes that are contingently associated with
particular forms of corporeal difference(s).
Consequently, the validation, or legitimization, of seemingly marginalized
practices is not my concern. Indeed, it is possible that calls of this kind from the
body modification community contribute to the marginalization of such practices,
rather than engender their emancipative progression into the promised land of
normativity. Such a claim is consistent with Michel Foucaults suspicions of the
effectiveness of the Gay and Lesbian liberation movement.11 Foucault doubts that
such ideology emancipates non-normative sexualities from an oppressive heterosexual frame, instead contributing to the discursive construction of instilled sexual
frames which marginalize homosexuality.12 Queer theorist Annamarie Jagose
notes in this regard that Foucault questions the liberationist confidence that to
voice denied and silenced lesbian and gay identities and sexualities is to defy
power, and hence induce a transformative effect (1996: 81).
Such an argument relies upon Foucaults decentralized impression of power, in
which one perpetually participates. This conceives of power not as a group of
institutions and mechanisms that ensure the subservience of the citizens of a given
state, but rather as a system whose effects pervade the entire social body (1978
[1976]: 92). This is in contradistinction to the conception of power which defines
such a phenomenon as a hierarchical possession. Incorporated into this top-down
model, in which one holds power over another, is the ever-present potential for
the subservient subject to defy their institutionalised oppression, and thus position
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oneself outside the effects of power. Conversely, a Foucauldian conception of

decentralised power posits an all-pervasive discursive mechanism, in which all
social members are inextricably productively participatory, and by which all are
produced. One cannot escape or defy power, attributing the individual with an
unavoidable capacity to re-produce it. The body politic is the individual, in that
one is always inside power, there is no escaping it, there is no absolute
outside where it is concerned (95). The temporal chain for Foucauldian power is
thus not a linear passage of cause and effect imposing power from without, but
instead an immanent mechanism of power producing social processes, where the
subject manifests as concurrent cause and effect. As a consequence, attempts at
sexual liberation can never be detached from the production of institutionalized
frames. Indeed, throughout this project, it has been by employing an impression
of subjectivity consistent with a Foucauldian model that I have challenged the
liberatory characterizations of body modification as being a demarcated production of the self in defiance of social power.
Rather than attempting to liberate body modification practices from the realms
of marginalization/non-normativity/denaturalization, what interests me, in
developing this articles second argument, is exploring our potential liberation
from the categorical restriction of body modification. Indeed, Foucault echoes
such a call in relation to sexuality, stating that it is not enough to liberate
sexuality; we also have to liberate ourselves . . . from the very notion of sexuality
(1988: 31). What is at stake in my project, and in Foucaults, is something more
primordial than the contingencies of particular body modification practices or
sexualities.

MARKING AND OTHERNESS

The originality of this aspect of my argument is best illustrated by distinguishing

it from that contributed by an established body modification commentator. In this
regard, the influential work of Nikki Sullivan is something with which I have
recently become acquainted, having been advised of the intersection of some of
our research interests. Sullivan challenges the notion that the body modifier
brings to the surface, via modification practices, an impression of their preestablished, deeper truth. This problematizes the self-authorship discourses typically associated with body modification, in a manner that is consistent with my
argument. As Sullivan states in Illustrative Bodies: subjectivities, sociality, skin art (1995),
the inscription of body modification becomes the codification of social excitations
rather than a self-imposed intentional process (1995: 146). Sullivans general focus
is upon what body modifications do, rather than what they mean,13 demanding that
there is no demarcated subject to be captured or represented in body modification. Rather, the subject/body only comes into being via its social relation with
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other subjects/bodies. This perpetual fleshed encounter determines that both self
and the other are continuously (re)constituted, are (re)read and (re)written, mark
and are marked (2001: 35).
Our engagement with Derridian writing-violence has acknowledged an originary differentiating process that conditions the possibility of distinguishable
bodies, bodies which via their differentiation, condition the production of any
thing. Taking a different approach, in Tattooed Bodies: subjectivity, textuality, ethics, and
pleasure (2001), Sullivan utilizes the work on alterity by twentieth century French
philosopher, Emmanual Levinas (19061995). Much has been written on the
tensions between Derridian and Levinasian notions of difference, alterity and
trace,14 and I do not intend to attempt to contribute anything new to this confrontation. Rather, what I am interested in is how Sullivans application of
Levinasian alterity to an interrogation of body modification practices represents a
very different set of concerns from my engagement with Derridian violence, and
why these differences are important.
In considering subjectivity, Sullivan engages Levinas notion of alterity as
conditioning the possibility for the production of both the I and the Other.
The I is separate from the Other, but is not autonomous, in that its separateness
is only possible because the Other exists, whereby I am, despite this dependence
or thanks to it, free (Levinas 1969 [1961]: 37). Subjects only come into being
structurally, through their alterity from that which they are not (but in which they
are necessarily involved). Just as Derridian originary violence conditions all
possible identities (and their perpetual slippages) through differentiation, Levinass
primordial alterity is a structural possibility that precedes and makes possible
(45). In contesting the idea that body modifications represent ones internal,
demarcated meaning, Sullivan duly argues that in any encounter, the subject does
not exist prior to a relational production with the Other. Rather, the self exists
through and for the Other; the self/psyche is engendered or inspired, as Levinas
puts it in and through alterity (2001: 103). As with Derridian violence, the
One/Other co-production is a relational, structural, porous process that negates
positivity in identity.
Concerning the earlier observed presumption that Western tattooists appropriate Eastern imagery in order to harness the symbolic power of the Other culture,
what Levinasian alterity and Derridian violence clarify is that neither West nor
East exists in isolation from, or prior to, each other. West and East, as with
Lvi-Strausss civilized and primitive cultures, come into being concurrently and
structurally. Thus, what seems to be a straightforward adoption of Eastern
imagery, I reconceive as being an overt emergence of the structural trace of the
East that is already operating in the (originary) possibility of a Western aesthetic.
Subject (West) and Other (East) co-manifest, whereby the trace of what is Other
constitutes the production of the subject.
This trace manifests in embodied terms as a condition of the production of
corporeality, or in Levinasian terms, as having-the-other-in-ones-skin (1998
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[1974]: 114115). The subject never comes to the Other pre-defined, but is
perpetually, corporeally produced by a beyond which it equally constitutes.
Meaning for the modified body is thus a tenuously blurred, rather than reliably
self-expressive, exercise. As Sullivan astutely concludes, not only is the distinction
between self and other undermined by Levinas, but the question of what the
tattooed body of the other means, or whom the tattooed wo/man is, is rendered
redundant (2001: 111). Signification for body modification is redundant thanks
to this implicated relation that conditions the slippery production of corporeality
beyond demarcated intention or control. Sullivans application of a Levinasian
subjectivity model to meaning for body modifications is insightful in this regard.

THE REDUNDANCY OF BODY MODIFICATION?

By restricting the ramifications of Levinasian alterity to the notion that meaning

is redundant only for the modified body, Sullivans argument, which posits the redundancy of meaning for the modified body, stops at the point at which mine
overflows into the categorization of body modification practices themselves. The
redundancy of the modified body does not arrive from without, after all. Rather,
such redundancy is, I argue, bound up with the equally redundant character of
the category of modifying practices. Such practices should not be granted, via
omission from such focus, an essentially modifying status. Instead, they must
only be acknowledged as modifying thanks to the originary corporeal process
which conditions the possible differentiation of bodies to begin with. To discuss
body modification practice is to be concerned with a differentiating process which
bodies already condition, and already are. Sullivan, quite rightly, notes that
originary alterity challenges the assumption that meaning/identity is reducible to
an essence present in the textual body of the other (2001: 111). However, I
extend such a thesis by arguing that without characterizing body modification
practices in similarly redundant terms, we are still assuming an essentiality in the
textual processes that they effect. This is not a criticism of Sullivans work, but
instead an indication of how our arguments differ.
The nature of this difference between our arguments is subtle, but crucial. If we
are to recognize the modified body as not representative of the intentions of a
pre-existing individual, but instead as indicative of alteritys relational process, then
the implicated producer, tattooing-as-writing, must manifest concurrently. There
is not a pre-existing act which people undertake and can be classified as body
modifying. Rather, something like tattooing only becomes a body modifying
practice during an encounter when tattooed bodies manifest. Bodies produce
tattooing. The presumed association of tattooing with practices like piercing, or
scarification, under the umbrella of body modification, neglects that the originary alterity/violence of bodies conditions the possible existence of each practice.
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Tattooing cannot be categorized with other body modification practices,

because it has not even become one until its encounter with the already, originary,
modifying efficacy of the body.
To clarify, I am arguing that body modification, as a category (or indeed,
body) of practices, is redundant, according to the same logic that Sullivan
employs for the modified body. For Sullivan, ones body modifications have no
inherent meaning, but are relationally produced, transferring the focus from what
the modified body means to what the process of marking and being marked does
(113). Similarly, body modification practices mean nothing in themselves, but
rather only come to be body modifying via an originary corporeal alterity which
conditions the possible differentiation of bodies to begin with. Categorizing body
modification practices is redundant, given that each practice is not body modifying until it is produced in an embodied encounter which simultaneously produces the body modifier, and the modified body. Indeed, the redundancy of body
modification practices exceeds that of the modified body by also being superfluous
in terms of what they presumably do. This is because such corporeal modification
is always, already, brought about by bodies themselves,15 via the originary differentiation which produces the possibility of bodies, and brings them into a
co-constitutive existence of alterity/production/modification.

DERRIDA OR LEVINAS?

Both Derridian violence and Levinasian alterity contest notions of demarcated

subjectivity, whereby what is, always already constitutes a beyond by which it is
constituted. However, in terms of the specificity of the context in question, that
being body modification practices, the efficacy of Derridian violence emerges.
Derridas re-writing of violence beyond the reductive dichotomies of good and
bad, before and after, or natural and cultural, acknowledges violence
as originary and entirely natural. As a result, I believe the most effective way to
challenge instilled social discourses which, as we extensively explored earlier,
condemn non-normative body modifications according to their supposedly
denaturalizing corporeal violence, is via Derridas reconfiguration of violence. That
is, Derrida brings our attention to the inherently natural character of violence, by
acknowledging it as an originary mechanism responsible for the production of all
things, and not as an introduction or intrusion into a pre-exiting thing (such as a
passive corporeality). Furthermore, this avoids any futile attempt to rescue particular body modification practices from their non-normatively violent characterizations, by instead focusing upon the anteriority which conditions all such
violence. This is the power of the Derridian argument in the case of body
modification practices, it embraces the violent tag by re-writing violence
itself, whereby what is violent is not characterized as disrupting a prior incarnation, but rather is that which is the incarnative process.
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Contrarily, Sullivans deployment of Levinasian alterity provides no real assistance in a direct deconstruction of violence, instead strangely divorcing violence
from alterity. This is evidenced when Sullivan denounces violence as a subjects
domination of the Other, denying the event of becoming/alterity with the Other.
In distinguishing violence from alterity, Sullivan claims that such a disavowel of
alterity results in an hegemony of the Same that is tantamount to an act of violence, to
a single blow in and through which I become master (2001: 139; my emphasis).
Clearly this is in contradistinction to the Derridian appreciation of violence as an
inescapable process, which rather than denying the relation of alterity which
worlds a world, actually conditions it as the differentiation which incarnates.
This interpretation, that Levinasian alterity is inconsistent with violence, again
emerges with the claim that textual violence does not consist of marking and
being marked, but rather is the result of disavowing such a process in the search
for absolute knowledge. Or as Levinas might put it, Western ontology, like war, is
a systematic form of violence that reduces the Other to the Same (2001: 134).
Conversely, my comprehension of alteritys mechanism is of its congruence with
originary violence. Derridian violence demands that textual violence does
indeed consist of the marking, and the production, of bodies, by bodies. Violence
is re-written to indicate an originary process that never disavows alterity, as
Sullivan claims, but rather is the very condition of it. Violence incarnates via
differentiation, whereby bodies do not pre-exist their relation with other bodies
but rather manifest through it, and as it. That Sullivan acknowledges this process
as one of alterity, but not of violence, is a handicap for the efficacy of an argument
which seeks to problematize denaturalizing and violent characterizations of body
modifications. Such an argument is clearly augmented by a reconfiguration of
that term itself, violence. Sullivans reading of Levinasian alterity is suited to general
contestations to notions of pre-formed identities and subjects. However, the particularities of the body modification argument are congruent with a Derridian
argument which emphasizes primordiality as a violence, distancing Levinasian
alterity from one of body modifications key inquiries.

CONCLUSION

No longer can the pre-modified body be opposed to the post-modified body, for
there is no point at which the body was not modifying/being-modified. The
inscribed body, that cultural artefact presided over by a self-constructing subject,
is replaced by the naturally inscribing body, whereby writing/bodying is the originary condition of being-written/being-bodied. The inescapable nature of this Nature
is that one is perpetually bound to be modifying the modifier, the modifier being the
body-as-subject which cannot help but produce bodies.
As we have seen, this addresses what the introduction presented as first being at
stake in this article. Body modification does not represent a violent, denaturalizing
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self-construction that one undertakes in defiance of, or as a reaction to, social

regulation and/or biological determinism. Rather, body modification exemplifies
the inescapable violence of being bodied that one naturally is. To discuss body
modification is to focus upon a differentiating process (originary violence) which
things such as bodies always already condition, and by which things such as bodies
are always already conditioned/produced/modified. It is due to subjects-asbodies that bodily practices emerge as modifying, rather than modification
practices being employed by subjects to produce bodies.
It so follows that the second issue at stake in this article has manifested as a
contestation to the social characterization of body modification as an exclusive
category of practice. Such practices do not arrive, pre-existing, from without, but
rather manifest as the originary violence of bodies, of bodies-as-modifications-which-modify.
This re-defines modification from something that bodies undergo according to the
practices that agentive subjects undertake, to something that subjects-as-bodies
cannot help but be. Consequently, body should be seen as a verb, rather than
as a noun, whereby as we have seen, individual agency is not divorced from
behaviour, but rather emerges as an entirely corporeal, socially structured
production.
Will Johncock
Sociology and Anthropology
School of Social Sciences
University of New South Wales
Sydney 2052 Australia
w.johncock@unsw.edu.au

NOTES
1
For an account of this characterization, see sociologist Nick Crossleys interrogation
of the notion of body work in Reflexive Embodiment in Contemporary Society (2006).
2
In Tattoo, Torture, Mutilation, and Adornment: The Denaturalization of the Body in Culture and
Text (1992), Frances Mascia-Lees and Patricia Sharpe provide a comprehensive collection
of papers addressing the relation between cultural norms and mutilation/denaturalization
discourses.
3
www.bmezine.com.
4
See Christian Klesses Racializing the Politics of Transgression: Body Modification in Queer
Culture (1991) for one such critique of the impact of body modifications on gender and
sexual politics.
5
Derrida also identifies this in the anthropology of Jean-Jacques Rousseaus A Discourse
Upon the Origin and the Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind (1909 [1755]), which assumes
that ones true and unmediated awareness of self is found via speaking and hearing oneself
speak, thus repressing writing on the basis of auto-affection.
6
As an example, see Lvi-Strauss The Raw and the Cooked: Mythologiques (Vol. 1) (1983
[1964]).

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For Derrida however, this reflects an ethnocentric, confessional tradition, depicting

what is non-Western as the index to a hidden good Nature (1976: 115).
8
In The Cultural Geography Reader (2008), anthropologists Timothy Oakes and Patricia
Price ask whether the appropriation of all things Eastern has gone too far? (420).
Also relevant is Margo DeMellos Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern
Tattoo Community (2000: 7177), which discusses the appropriation of Japanese tattooing
aesthetics.
9
Saussures semiological theory was delivered in a General Linguistics lectures series
between 1907 and 1911 at the University of Geneva. Some students organized and
produced this material as Course in General Linguistics (1966 [1916]), which was published
after Saussures death.
10
It is not that Lvi-Strauss is blind to the writings themselves, noting his astonishment
that the societies we call primitive often have a staggering capacity for remembering,
reciting straight off family trees involving dozens of generations (Lvi-Strauss in Derrida
1976: 122). Rather, what has escaped him is that these significations of genealogies and
social structures are writings.
11
In The Passion of Michel Foucault (2000), Foucauldian commentators James Miller and
Jim Miller describe an encounter where Foucault is thanked by a supporter in San
Francisco for making gay liberation possible. Foucault politely refuses the compliment,
replying that really my work has had nothing to do with gay liberation (254).
12
See Foucaults The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom (1994: 281301).
Also relevant is the final chapter from Foucaults The History of Sexuality Volume One: The Will
to Knowledge (1978).
13
A recent example of this is found in Sullivans The Somatechnics of Bodily Inscription:
Tattooing (2009).
14
The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (1999) by English Philosopher Simon
Critchley attempts to assimilate Derridas originary difference with Levinas ethical metaphysics. This inspires counter arguments, such as Swedish philosopher Martin Hgglunds
The Necessity of Discrimination: Disjoining Derrida and Levinas (2004), which demands that such
assimilation reduces deconstruction to a non-violent series of relations, something incompatible with Derridian violence.
15
There is congruence here with the theory of the early 20th century Austrian psychoanalyst, Paul Schilder, who identifies a continual interchange between ones body and
those of others (1950 [1935]: 227), meaning all bodies are modified by the bodies of others
simply by their being.

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