The Tongue's Break Dance: Theory, Poetry, and the Critical Body

Abstract

In the present essay the participation of the body as tongue in the ritual of speech and conversation is depicted in terms of performance. To reveal the intricate relations between body and language, moments of impediment in the flow of speech are explored as events that inform the tongue's performance and make it a kind of break dance, a dance whose breaks and silences are not merely deficiencies in the machine of talk but are part of the information it carries, that is, they are indicative of the inherent participation of the body—its resistance and silence—in language, as well as in the inscription of language in the body. This is developed as a poetics of break, which combines ethnography, critical theory, and the actual (poetic) production of writing.

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