The Drive Toward Piercing and Tattooing: Postmodern Bodies of Performative Excess

An incision is a cut made by an instrument that marks the skin, opening up the body's inside from its outside, drawing blood as the skin's surface swells and becomes raw. Such a scoring by a knife or a stylus exposes us to the sight/site/cite1 of the Real, the psychic realm of the unconscious which Lacan claimed to be beyond language yet intimately dwelling within it. The Real is precisely where the signifier fails; where the Symbolic Order of language no longer holds. The Lacanian Real is “that before which the imaginary faltered, that over which the symbolic stumbles, that which is refractory, resistant” (Sheridan x). The incision produces a momentary trauma, a bodily memory which forces a slippage of signs that begins to change and modify the body's image.

Lacan inverted Saussure's algorithm for the linguistic sign with:

S Signifier

s signified

to show the primacy of the signifier over the signified. Here the bar, as the line that separates the word from its imaged-meaning, designates the impossibility of the signifier ever guaranteeing a correspondent or non-ambiguous meaning. Metaphorically this barred line is like an incision. The cosmetic surgeon's scalpel, or the piercer's needle forces the body's established image to unravel and come apart. The body's image begins to “slip.” In this sense acupuncture is a mild form of piercing where the body's nerve routes and electrical flows are redistributed to relieve pain as the morphogenic image of the body's memory is re-mapped.2

By using the flesh as a medium the Lacanian Real becomes inscribed in these piercings and cosmetic surgical operations whose effects are to psychically re-map and re-member the body differently, with sexually different bodies requiring different inscriptive tools to etch their different surfaces. Hence such extreme skin games are an attempt to challenge The Symbolic Order as it is currently defined by patriarchal and heterosexual dominance by an incr