Sun Moon Silence

Abstract

These are the questions that led me to this writing. They are questions inspired as much by the mind as by the body and the spirit. They circulate in an alternate register from the main of academic knowledge production, what Diana Taylor might describe as the “repertoire” of embodied performance. The repertoire is significant because it works to dislodge the often-unspoken hegemony of the archive. As a repository of written history, data, maps, documents, literary texts, letters—archival memory stands in as “fact” to legitimate Western knowledge itself. Fact: immutable, objective, solid, resistant to change. Fact somehow reassures us, even though, or perhaps because, its irrefutability lies outside of our fallible capacity to grasp it. The hegemony of the archive elides the ways we know through the body and through the spirit, Taylor writes, making it difficult to “think about embodied practice within the epistemic systems developed in Western thought, where writing has become the guarantor of existence itself” (2005, p. xix). Thus, the dynamic tension between the archive and the repertoire is metonymic of the Western subject’s being-in-the-world as ontology itself is “guaranteed”—somehow affirmed as certainty—through a faith in the written word and the facticity it ascribes with alleged transparency.