The tongue's break dance: Theory, poetry, and the critical body

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 t he intricate relations between body and language, moments of impediment in the flow of speech are explored as events that inform the tongue's performa nce and make it a kind of break dance, a dance whose breaks and silences ar e not merely deficiencies in the machine of talk but are part of the inform ation it carries, that is, they are indicative of the inherent participatio n of the body-its resistance and silence-in language, as well as in the ins cription of language in the body. This is developed as a poetics of break, which combines ethnography, critical theory, and the actual (poetic) produc tion of writing.