Connerton’s understanding of the techniques, ceremonies, and properties of the body in order to present what is incorporated into our body in our daily habitual performances – as eating, sitting, and withdrawing money off an ATM, for instance – gives us a glimpse into how we can interpret people’s actions grounded not just in a historical context, but also with a critical perspective of how those techniques, ceremonies, and properties were used to build a certain society, observing the social practices.

As he presented, incorporating action is one of the two bases for a social practice, because we learn codes to coexist in societies. However, the inscribing practice is the second basis to ensure how people will continue (or change) their way of living, as the example of the bloodline royalty. These two foundations are intrinsically connected. Acknowledgment of how it works may expand our interpretative activity. The logic presented reminds me of the work of Judith Butler in Gender Trouble, as Butler reads gender as a daily performance construction, in which cultural agency and subjectivity are a discourse* that normalizes our gender identity as it was “natural”. Marianne Hirsch will similarly introduce a gender issue regarding how the “pre-established” and well-rehearsed forms can provoke us on how we theorize memory and gender through time.

Although Hirsh uses Connerton’s concepts of “acts of transmission” and “inscriptive and incorporative practices”, she observes the signals of absence in her analysis. She brings the passive figure of the mother in the narrative, in contrast with the maternal recognition that seems to be a great aspect of Art’s analysis. She uses the concepts of Peirce’s tripartite of the sign, Barthe’s punctum, and Didi-Huberman’s contradictory codifications of the photographs from Auschwitz to approach the polysemic power of those complex memories connecting trauma and violence from the past juxtaposed to an imaginative narrative, allowing a dialogic interpretation of the graphic novels.

* I wrote the text before the discussion in class, that used the same example by coincidence. Yet, the word “discourse” was problematized (and I agree), and I chose to maintain it because of the rest of the thought.