ABSTRACT
Actors are always aware that the body ‘is’ more than we can ever consciously or rationally intend. Its multiple potential effects, its multiple potential meanings, all indicate its potency as an unruly source of inspiration. For even the most successful actor, the body can evade conscious control; Laurence Olivier thus describes the ‘unruliness’ of his big toes: ‘I had not too happy a memory of Alfred Lunt’s remark to me after Oedipus: ‘I was fascinated by your feet; the more intense you got, the more rigidly did your big toes stand straight up in the air!’ I was horrifi ed as well as disappointed’ (Olivier, 1983: 270). To consider the body as only that which is intended or that which is discursively framed is akin to looking down the beam of a torch and claiming that everything that is lit is all that there is or can be. We must not be afraid of the darkness, of the unshapely materiality which will, despite our ‘clear vision’, eventually fi nd its way into our consciousness. In this way new knowledges are possible. Elizabeth Grosz, in a discussion on body building in Volatile Bodies (1994), proposes the following relationship between the discursively inscribed body and the material body:
[B]ody building does not simply add to an already functional, nonmuscular body; rather it operates according to a logic that Derrida describes as supplementary-in which the primary term, in this case the “natural”, pre-inscriptive body, always makes possible, through the impossibility of its own full presence, its binary opposite, the term which has been expelled in order to constitute it, in this case the “workedover” muscular body. There must be some shortfall of nature in order
to make possible the augmentation of nature; there must already be a plastic and pliable body in order for it to be possible to mold and sculpt it according to the canons and dictates of body-building protocols.
