Abstract

If John Frow is correct and "culture" is always an "idea of an Other," an inherent disparity that both founds and must be negotiated, then one might argue that cultural studies, in its appropriation of the tools of the social sciences reduplicate the latter's shortcomings, reducing this disparity, this essential difference to non-difference in a dialectic that remains wedded to representation. In a striving toward "meaning" cultural studies sacrifices culture to an opposition between fact and value, between the real and fantasy, to its own assumptions. This is most evident in its concern with "the body image" and its supposed significance. I would suggest that a body has an asignificance that escapes meaningfulness, that is, a resemblance, but that, instead, marks an encounter. The 'blackened' or tattooed body poses precisely this problem. To read this condition as a sign is to read its affect in and upon its being read. A tattoo, in its absolute insignificance, presents a variety of challenges to its own conceptualization. ;Stripped to his naked torso, to a paradoxical skin of variable color, and line and word tattoos, the ex-convict Max Cady has been detained in a cell by the police under a suspicion that he has harassed and threatened the family of his former lawyer. Upon encountering Cady's nakedness from behind a one-way observational window, Lieutenant Efgart responds, "I don't know whether to look at him or to read him?" I take this anecdote from the film Cape Fear to be the pure expression of the modernist problem: the concept of the 'Other person' as the expression of a new perceptual space. The blackened or tattooed body expresses this Other space. Like Lt. Efgart we must admit that we do not yet know what a tattooed body can do. We do not yet know what becomes possible in thinking, in experiencing the Other person in its being a tattooed body