Abdel evocation

    We have to find and even subtler sense in understanding how the institution arises in writing. We must recognize that in it obsessive activity to remember langue, writing forgets the subject. I would say that the subject is doubly forgotten in writing and that we must remain attentive to this. When we write we feel that we reflect better because we silently hear our thoughts in a quiet recitation. But when we look at the written text, writing seems to slip into its own and it asks for something more. If we do not listen to its demands and enfold ourselves into it so as to express our thoughts, writing detains itself. We have to observe in this how writing insists on thinking for us. The dilemma begins here, when the subject, recognizing that its place could be omitted in writing, invents itself through writing. We know that the subject always invents itself—even if we want to forget it—we must know, how the subject invents itself as institution through writing. It is in the invention of the speaking or writing subject as institution that writing forms the text. I stated that writing reflects for us. The subject discovers it is absent from its place and invents itself. But it is not “it self” that it invents. When the subject projects itself—although already displaced—to the exteriority of writing it forms the spatial image of memory. I think that this image of memory—which is already text—helps the subject resolve the dilemma of the impossibility of remembering itself in temporal memory by substituting in its place the possibility of been remembered in spatial memory.

    The moment in which this occurs is difficult to reconstruct, but we must seek it. I am referring to a function secretly linked to a particular idea of memory that is invented by writing itself. There is no identity between temporal memory’s transition into writing, writing’s transition into text as spatial memory, or in text’s transition into institution. I see no necessary causality in this sequence. Perhaps that is why institutions appear alien to us. I think the institution is born from the break between the temporal as event and the temporal as spatial representation. A critique of writing in ethnography must recognize that primitive break between temporal memory discontinuity and the invention of memory by text. In the act of writing we have the impression that writing fixes—like a film—what have been remembered o said. We experience writing as if in it, we could retain events and things as they happened in the temporality of memory. But the sensation that we can retain the temporal is precisely how we hover over the spatial without remembering how we were projected there to its exteriority. We reach the realm of space, of the exchanges of bodies, of the economy of signs, attaining that instant where writing is an autonomous and frozen text. We have hovered over a very light surface, falling into space, into the text: the text appears then, next to the body, as the primer matter that feeds power and capital. 

   The text that writing forms returns to us refortified. It is returns refortified because the text brings with it in its periphery the accumulation of everything writing has displaced. We must be attentive to this in the ethnographic process, because once writing forms a text, the fact becomes irreversible. Everything revolves around the text. It is like a park, where the monument’s location defined once and for all the surrounding, tying everything to its positioning, naming everything else: periphery. Once the text is realized, or once the text is manifested then we become caught in the trap that everything—the “I”, “the other”, “data”, the “experience”—must be textualized in order to be understood, comprehended and rendered meaningful. Here the will to textualize, to convert the saying into the said is the arrival of the first allegory of the flight of time. Tyler, I think that there cannot be ethnographic evocation where writing-text plays the central role in the inception of field work by regulating all the relationships between interpretation and experience, by domesticating modes of editing the experience with the others as one faces the phantasm of a reader or imagined audience, and by making this imagined public inclusive in each decisive act and experience in the relation with others. There cannot be ethnographic evocation either where the writing-text plays a final role through the manipulation of documents, testimonial evidences, or other data to form a orgasmic history, a dramatic climax, a finality for the whole ethnographic process. 

   When I said this to you, I apply it to all sorts of ethnography: dialogic, autobiographical, confessional and of course the various strains (positivist, functionalist, Marxists). Evocation makes us think of decentering ethnographies in which the peripheries—all the lateral remnants repressed by the text, all the uncertainties the text collapsed—comes back, with all the possible relationships between subject and object, subject and subject included there. Now, once we take the notion of text beyond a verbal-non verbal relation, the text’s peripheries are not formed necessarily by gestures within a nonverbal world of corporeality. The opposite of text –this will be one of my main ideas—is not the non textual. Rather, the opposite of text is temporality. The opposite of text is that which slips away loaded with temporality becoming irreducible to the effort of concentration implied in the work of textualization.

   A critique of writing as institution presupposes the relocation of ethnographic writing next to the ephemeral. Ephemeral writings can be identified as those that, from their inception, are not made to last or persist –even if they persist—such as certain forms of shamanic writing where it is common and usual to write in the air, or as in the case of Yoruba writings originated in South Nigeria, where any object, furniture, corner and even the hands can be inscribed. I observed highly developed forms of ephemeral writings within markets in Venezuela where I noted the exchange and agreements on prices and the list of products names and characteristics by the vendors using ephemeral materials and crayons and fast forms of spontaneous writings. I understood that one could reach a highly contextualized rapport, since there is no pretension to textualize in order to represent.  When ethnography defines itself in the ephemeral it does not transform fieldwork into writing, rather, it re-established an ongoing fieldwork in multiples sites and temporalities. The creation of ethnographic interfaces based on performativity leads us to explore diverse possibilities of writings and books as individual authors which seek to avoid or decrease the impact of the text. Currently the creator is seen as an uncreated figure, produced ex-nihilo, while the work is seen as a creature-depository. A transtextual ethnography, contrary to that Judeo-Christian duality of process-text, must be founded as a poiesis: an open process including many creative processes that no have closure. 

   Sush ethnography does not go to look for tools as if it embarked on a trip to collect funds. Because, it constitutes an art theory and critique as well as a philosophy of science. In  summing up, Tyler, there are three things I emphasize. First, the critique of the text in writing leads ethnography to define itself as a temporal eclipse. Second, the question about why and how ethnography speaks of cultures is addressed by the eclipse of time. Third: just as issues arising  from description, reporting and documentations in textual ethnography once elaborated a notion of the other, in transtextual ethnography ethics cannot address questions in the same manner, since devices themselves trigger their own questions. Some ethnographers are surprised when we use the notion of text in this semiotic sense. They seem to be trapped in a classical world when they hear text. 

   There is no place here to speak about decisive development of the present notion of text or to present my objections. I only want to point out a paradox: if notions of text, textuality, intertextuality, effected transformations in the reflections about genre in the field of postmodern anthropology, it has been precisely due to that renovation, when the notion of text was extended beyond writing through semiotics.

   your seminal essay “Postmodern Ethnography” (1986) was the document that kept itself representing a different epistemological position, instead of advancing towards the literary work as a paradigm, your essay aimed to release ethnography in its own paradigmatic direction. 

   I don’t pretend a deconstruction showing what was necessary not to say in order to state what you said. Hermeneutics and deconstruction are the two figures in whose excesses the eighties debates renewed and exhausted themselves. Your paragraphs on evocation constitute today, ten years later, a premonition and an unexplored island in the archipielago of postmodern ethnography. I only want to say that ethnography’s textual consciousness has taken a different path to the one you explore and the one I pointed out here. Many would agree that it declined into picturesque activism, bad literature or writings dictatorship of the genre. 

   This constitutes genre dictatorship not because some genres predominate over others as they result more or less dialogic, but because repressive ideology overcomes them when innovation and tradition are viewed through the genre. It is seemingly a more dominant dictatorship than the artistic avant-garde of XX century’s first decades: abstraccionist defended their truth (to do away with representation) in opposition to the Cubists (who maintained the figure in its place with the ground), and the Expressionists (who distorted those contrasts). One would have to remind those ethnographies that revolution effected through form –in reference to europe--was the main trait of cultural modernism and its totalitarism.

 

Evocation

 

   Tyler. For me evocation is a transtextual ethnography. However, to speak of it, it is necessary to show why evocation develops in tension with writing. In my idea of ethnography, when I think of evocation, there is no longer an ethnographer that writes. Evocation cannot be spoken, it cannot be written. To say, for example, “to evoke evoking” as if we tried controlling the effect of evocation is the same as saying, to “run running” or “to talk talking”. The verb loses its force of gravity because of the gerund’s redundancy, it loses the characteristic of being in the center and under, as Foucault suggested when he explained that all forms of language form strata above and in the peripheries of the verb. However, it gets worse (or better) than this. The verb to evoke does not end up defining the action: “he evokes”, for example, is not as clear as “he dreams”. To “dream dreaming” is more graphic than to “evoke evoking”, since we can at least imagine that the one who dream, dream that he dreams. However, to “evoke evoking” cannot be sustained. We cannot think that the one who evokes, evokes that he/she evokes. The play of words becomes useless. 

   Now, if evocation cannot be spoken and cannot be written it is due to the fact that there is no place for it in discourse nor a place for it in writing. Ethnographers think of writing when they hear evocation. They think of a text open to multiple interpretations, of an ethnography written with poetic strokes of penmanship, why?. Evocation cannot be written because it is neither a rule nor a derivation of a rule. It does not make roles and there are no rules in language that form evocation.  A trope can be evocative, but evocation itself is not a trope. Evocation is not a genre nor a figure capable of forming genre. Genres of writing comes from other places and provoke other things. To look for evocation in ethnography by choosing genres is like a fetichist, who seeks sexual pleasure by choosing scraps of leather from Russian boots or by picking some types of mushrooms. According to Bakhtin, genres evolves from situational enunciations (greetings, farewells, replies) that become regular, regularized and become figures of writing. Writing is an imitation. In its simple form of visual sign it imitates sounds, pauses, spaces. In its complex form as grammar, it freezes and later on develops genres that first establish themselves as genres of discourse. Evocation is not a form that is reiterated in speech acts in order to attain writing. There is no genre that corresponds to it, that encompasses it better. 

    Evocation is not a language game. If aside from genres of speech there are also constituted language games hat form writing, we do not find evocation there either. According to Lyotard, language gamed that end up in writing emerge from ways in which time is exchanged (economy, art, etc), within social communication (economists, artists, etc). To think that evocation belongs to art’s constituted language game and not to ethnography’s, based on the fact that in art there is “enough time” to evoke, is to disregard that aesthetic emerges from the contemplation of unused time or a of temporality used in time. In contrast, evocation emerges from an excess of time in things. I am not arguing that there is not evocation in aesthetics, there is, just as there is also economy in aesthetics. Also, it is not that there is no aesthetics in evocation, as there is also aesthetics in relations, for example, in the relations of demand and offer whether in the field of economics or in ethnography. 

   Evocation is not a sum of signs and signifiers: it is not the writing of the signifier. One can not obtain it by linking or separating signs. Evocation does not form an entity in some territory of language. It does not collect around something. It is not preceded or followed by something, it is not, as in discourse or in enunciation, a phantasm without a map that leaves its trace in sentences. It is not before and outside language making something possible and extruding it to make a form. In another sense, it is not inside language forming links between signs. It is not in an “outsideafter” either, being formed by a sum of signs, it is not an effect of accumulation of sense that remains in an outside and in an after in language’s territory, or in an inside territory trying to emerge. It is not a metaphor, it is not a metonyms, it is not an allegory, it is not a symbol. All those figures can be evocatives but evocation itself is not defined and confined to any one of them. All those figures can be spoken, written, repeated. All those figures in tropology leave a trace in the constitutive language game.  Furthermore, situated in the metaphor’s and allegory horizont we can link and generate metaphoric and allegoric discourses. They are forms of rhetoric. Forms deriving from the rules of use that generate rules, forms of producing effects of discourse or writing. Tyler, what I have stated above leads to the fact that when I think of transtextual ethnography, meaning evocation, I do no imagine on the other side the release of the poetic only. 

   There cannot be evocation in ethnography when the ethnographer, refusing to remit to the experience, or believing that he/she evokes it through writing, releases what is ethnographic in a form of poetic writing only. I stated that evocation is not a writing of the signifier. Let me show this, because while some get tired of theory, they later launch onto the beaten path using their incorporated (embodied) theories to object without understanding. The critique of the writing of the signifier helps clarify the separation between ethnographic evocation including the evocative of certain languages figures from ethnographic writing with poetic twists. Writing of the signifier is characteristic by the way it breaks the transparency of writing vis a vis the world of speech, and in its place it establishes another nontransparent one, this time claiming that in writing, which is already disconnected from acts of speech, the sign does not remit to itself. Not possessing an outside or an exterior, writing appears like a logographic trace. According to Derrida this serves to deconstruct forms of logocentrism as they become trapped as writing, but in its place Derrida imagines a release of writing aimed at the eternal metaphor without closure, the poetic game: writing of the signifier leads up to a kind of erotic tropology. 

However, evocation in ethnography, as I understand it, leads to a different place. As I will try to suggest with this critique of signifier-writing ethnographic inventions of collage, automatic writing, and desfamiliarization live mostly in texts and within its institutions; they are generally institutional effects of ethnography. 

    When Derrida intends to capture logos within writing, attempting to free writing from its logographic I ask what do the signifiers do amongst themselves when they are not in the lime light of act of speech?. What do these signifiers do when  they refract each other as in a house of mirrors?. I think they recreate langue. Poetry remembers langue stretching the echoes of retained speech. Poetry tends to associates and is associated by sounds and images repressed in langue. Derrida wants to transform theorists into Dadaists, but something Derrida idealizes the poetic game that Bakhtin questioned and found monologic. An ethnography that discuss the text must be sensitive to this issue. The language in poetic genre is the Ptolemic unitary and unique world outside of which there is nothing and there is no need for something to exist. The idea of the plurality of language worlds is closed to poetic style (…), it is characteristic that if the  poet does not accept a given high form of language, he dreams instead with an artificial production of a new language, specially poetic, rather than with the use of real social and usable dialects (Bachtin).Bahktin bases his argument regarding poetic language as a special language that represses natural dialogics in language, its tendency being authoritarian dogmaticism. It conceived the poetic word as lacking of suppositions, not needing context, being self sufficient and abstaining from any relation to an other word. A poet appears as a singular speaking subject, alone with his unique language and in a world about which nothing has yet been said (Lachmann, “Dialogicity and Poetic Language”, Criterios Ed Desiderio Navarro, 1992. It seems, Tyler, that many think that evocation is a simple effect of certain forms of representation produced by poetic writings that are open to multiple interpretations. For example, in some passages in fiction when a character remembers, his remembrance evokes. But, does it evoke remembrance?. If It is possible to evoke remembrance why does one have to accept that it is through remembrance that we reach what is remembered?, it is said that remembrance evokes, as a poetic form of saying that remembrance remembers, but evocation is nor a remembrance. 

  I venture to said that there is not evocation if there is remembrance. In this sense evocation closely approximates not remembering what is remembered in remembrance. However, evocation is not just faulty remembrance, since faulty remembrance, as remembrance itself, deals with a past situation and evocation not only emerges in relation with a past. On the one hand, in remembering one needs someone, outside the story who can see –as a viewer of the film and or a reader of the fiction—who can perceive the fictional images and or narratives of the character who remembers, a viewer and or a reader who has lived a similar experience and who can perceive the character images or narratives of remembrance as evocatives. But on the other hand evocation is possible when a relationship has existed between two subjects and one is absent—which those relates evocation how one subject evocates his relation with the other. Evocation is for those have participated in fieldwork. But it is not the memory nor the remembering of that engagement. Here Tyler, one is dealing again with the issue of memory, now as a temporal issue, evocation is neither in the past, nor in the present, nor in the future, even through it seems to be formed by an eclipse of these three propositions.

  This reminds me that now I remember that I forgot to explain the epigraph by Twain that triggered this letter to you, in which Eves monologue addresses this temporal eclipse that forms evocation. In the monologue, Eve has arrived but she does not remember the event. Perhaps God constitutes an ethnographic evocation in this issue between presentiment and not remembering. Eve recognizes being one day old and inform us that her arrival dates from yesterday; at this point she tells us, with certain doubt, that she believes it and affirm it, since her certainty as well as  her doubt, in having arrived yesterday, are linked to not remembering if the day before yesterday was a day. We could say that Eve—the creature—as well as the lack of memory making her insecure and vigilant—are an evocation, because evidently Eve herself is this issue, she is made up of this issue and does not live outside of it. Moreover, it is to be expected, that the vigilant Eve promises to reinforce, her obsession for taking note of a coming “day before yesterday”, reports her back as an evocation. We could then say that Eve herself is an ethnography and that her sense of constituting a simple experiment would last permanently. At least that is what Eve believes, because if the day before yesterday was a day that she did not notice the happening-event.

   In any case, Eve is an experimental ethnography and only she can be experimental because if someone outside herself observed the event, who was it?, the other?, a writer?, God?. With this monologue Mark Twain makes a critical parable of the observer by situating Eve in the crux of the issue of memory and temporality, since any other person in a relative position regarding Eve would tell us that anyone who writes about her would be a god, meaning historical man. Any possibility that Eve has to remember would constitute remembering God, therefore god could be observed by his creatures, which is something that seriously speak against him. In this monologue, Mark Twain makes us aware of the text’s function, because even though Eve wants to report, her report is an eclipse of the dilemma, since the historians are elsewhere. Where are they?. This constitutes a very strong irony within the monologue. If Eve stops writing from her situation, it would not be possible to evoke god, nor would it be possible to be evoked by writing. Of course, god can exit, above all practicing hermeneutics and textualizing his creation, god could be making poetics out of poor Eve—making her say what can not be uttered. Evocation begins in fieldwork and it eclipses writings. Eve’s sense of constituting an experiment is also rooted in her. 

   These ideas seem to place ethnography in the axis of cognitive studies. When we speak of memory it would seem like we are offspring’s of cognitive science as Geertz attempted to suggest when defending his idea that meaning and culture belong to the public sphere, he questioned Ward Goodenough and compared him with You in his essay “Thick Description” (1973). This allusion is still be expected today. In order to avoid the text that writing tends to form, ethnography becomes trapped –like Eve—in the temporal issue. The ethnographic situation never remains secluded by lived experience and data, experience and report. Writing remain as dispersed evidence –disseminated—but not the text that they form. Evocation, what is evocation?. It is the allegory of how the text is substracted from writing making inscription impossible, it is the performance through which the ethnographer and the ethnographic situation are evoked by the discontinuity of memory. This does not amount to an elogy of memory in its opposition to text, as if memory constituted a place charged with a kind of primitive power preceding language, or as if thought and language occupied parallel series. On the contrary, an ethnography that works in that interstice avoids memory as storage and seeks the incorporeal. 

   It is not interested in the event as remembered fact because the power to remember events as if they are facts is an invention of text. In my opinion evocation is comprehensible for ethnography and operates transformative effects in it, when we place it in another realm that is different from poetics. Poetics, structural, hermeneuticals or historical, is a form of psychosis. The “cold” observer in poetics is and more omnipresent than in all of positivism. In positivism we are faced with a neurosis, an obsessive delirium to classify, to dissect and find facts. If the empiricist deal with Eve’s story he/she would try to prove if there really was a yesterday. The empiricist looks for facts, describes them, classifies them, and tries to intervene in things without letting them affect him/her. In poetics the observer who is as involved as the positivist in the indeterminate nature of the present, acts as if he/she could gain for themselves time in things, is doubly aloof, non participatory, does not intervene nor allows to be intervened by things. This observer—let us imagine him/her in Eve’s example—pretends to find the said in the spoken as well as the text in processes. Pretending and acting as if he/she were after and outside the event, he/she manipulates a simulacrum of time through which a subject position as parasitic interpreter is created that allows for him or her to proclaim, “this is only an interpretation”. Poetics, it is time symbolic exodus. It is as if Eve, immerse in time dilemma, attempted to exit her story and instead of defining herself as an experiment, tried to represent more accurately. 

   A crucial and short passage comes to my mind from “Interpretation of Cultures” (1973) where Clifford Geertz, adapting Ricoeur to the ethnographic field, focused on the seminal idea that after inclined ethnography towards poetics: “the ethnographer “inscribes” social discourse, he writes it down. In so doing, the ethnographer turns from a passing event which exists only in its own moment of occurrence” (emphasis added). The ethnographer is then forced to relate to events only through his inscriptions of events. Subsequent to this quote, Geertz asks, through his citing of Ricoeur, “ what does writing fix”? to which Geertz answer himself with a quote form the French critic” “Not the event of speaking where we understand by the said of speaking that intentional exteriorization constitutive of the aim of discourse thanks to which the sagen—the saying—wants to become Aus-sage—the enunciation, the enunciated. It is the meaning of speech event, not the event as event”. (Geertz, “Thick Description”, 1973).

   Once Geertz discovers “the said of speaking” he asks himself, “What does the ethnographer do?” to which he responds “He inscribes”. Next, Geertz questions the reality of the ethnographer’s ideas as “he observes, he records and he analyzes” to conclude, Geertz rebukes the certainties of field work by saying: “The situation is even more delicate, because as already noted, what we inscribe (or try to) is not raw social discourse, to which, because, save very marginally or very specially, we are not actors, we do not have direct access, but only that small part of it which our informants can lead us into understanding (emphasis added)” (Ibid). These principles that Geertz so clearly spells out epitomize the flight of the ethnographer and of his/her escape once the impossibility of controlling catastrophic time is realized. Geertz, without doubt, provided fundamental  and decisive ideas through which ethnography sided with poetics, as if contemplated inscribed time in textualized things or artifacts. Another significant inspiration for musch of the 1980’s experimentation was the James Cliffor’d essay on ethnographic authority, which like Geertz, also returns to Ricoeur but within the context of the ethnographic writing of culture. The brief passage where James Clifford reconsiders Ricoeur’s subject, the transition from Benveniste’s discourse to the text, constitute classical and historical paragraphs for ethnography. 

   I suggest that in order to think of evocation we need to locate ourselves in the center of the temporal issue in which Eve finds herself. The introduction of Ricoeur’s poetics into the ethnographic endeavor was undoubtedly one element among many others that propelled the eighties experimentation. As I has suggested this has led to certain issues, but it is import to  remove this line by which the textual obsession that led to Geertz and beyond has kept ethnography trapped. To introduce Ricoeur was a daring and promising move, due to the suggestive perspectives it opened in cultural anthropology. But such poetics today are a bad omen for ethnographers. By the same token, in art and literature, the poetic founded by Ricoeur resulted in opposite “turns” but to the same effect; that is, it stimulated a return to another climax of essentialism versus ethnographic relativism. 

   His thesis presenting three forms of mimesis constitutes one of the best told stories about the writer in fantasyland: the first mimesis that the work always embodies a primitive connection with culture. The second mimesis is that the writer, through these embodied narratives writes the work of fiction—the work maintains its experiential correlation because its configuration is temporal and it forms a plot. The third mimesis is that in the work, the reader, finally is anticipated which leads directly to the happy ending since the public interpret what has been already interpreted. Perhaps, we too can also return to Ricoeur but in  an attempt to redirect ethnography away from the tired experimentation with the timeless text toward evocation. But this move must be less a return to Ricoeur than a resituating of him in the context of the critique of writing, in which he has among the targets, that I discussed earlier. In this context, we can ask Ricoeur speak not of writing and interpretation but of time and temporality. 

   Ricoeur begins “Time and Narrative” (1985) with the classical question of the ontology of time and ask how can the present be if the past no longer is, when the future is not yet and the present is not always?. His response is that it is impossible to define the present from itself, since it does not have permanence, nor extension in time. In the passage itself, in the transition one must simultaneously search for the multiplicity of the present and its withdrawal.. Thus, through memory, attention and expectation (which are implicated in the subjective certainty of time’s passing) it is established as Saint Augustine would say, that :the spirit distends itself in the measure that it extends itself”. If we substitute the notion of the present for that of transition or passage, we find that “there is no future time, no past time, nor a present time, but a triple present—a present of future things, a present of things past and a present of present things. Augustine has led the way towards the investigation of the most primitive structural temporality of action.

   Memory, attention and expectation. These are the three elements linked to the subjective certainty of time that correlated, in the anthropology that preceeded Geertz data and experience. Experience was regarded as a series of events corresponding to facts: this was translated illusively into time for the ethnographer, time “to register”, “to observe” and “to analyze”. Although memory, attention and expectation were moments of rigor they were naïve constructs. The ethnographer sees the time of his stay in fieldwork as an encounter with events: the duration of a shared experience, the extension of a learning process, the intensity of some contacts. Far from seem ethnography as a catastrophe born from temporal issues, Geertz prefers to continue representing cultures, offering the first allegory of the ethnographer’s with drawall from temporal issues. However, in the context of ethnography, time and memory’s issues is more intense and less controllable  as evident in the example of Eve’s experimentation, which does not led us towards events realized facts (in the positivist sense of the word), nor to events realized as texts. Instead, ethnography itself becomes the event, or to use Eves term, an experimental fact and the event of this type of facts experimental. 

   An ethnography situated here, in the crux of the temporal dilemma does not seek to resolve it, nor explain it, nor does it seek to gain time, it comes out of that dilemma, emerging from its eclipse as if the issue itself returned through ethnography—and acted itself out as a performance with all the ethnographic relations implied in it. Tyler, an ethnography questioning the text in writing, a transtextual ethnography that looks for the break between the discontinuity of memory and the linearity of text must be an event itself. Events are not occurrences preceding language, trapped in memory and later manipulated by the ethnographer as if he/she retained them in a film depicting those in fieldwork. But events are not traces either, that live in language as inscriptions that ethnographers can textualize so as to create writing. 

   We cannot even suppose that the ethnographer himself can invent events as if it were possible to have an image of past-present-future events. It is the task of ethnography to find the event—the performance—that makes the ethnographic event-performance speak for itself. It is the task of ethnography to realize this event-performance in the same way that Lewis Carroll asked the reader to quess if he had constructed the lyrics of the gardener’s song according to the events or the events according to the lyrics, and, ethnography must assume this task not to prove that events live in language—this we already know—but to evoke the undefinable incorporeal event. This event that corresponds to the work of ethnography is radically different from the those realized as facts and from those realized as text. I prefer the infinitely singular one, something similar, yet not as aristocratic-as what Deleuze proposes when he says:

   The events is found on the surface—in that faint incorporeal mist which escapes from bodies (…) and if there is nothing to see behind the curtain. It is because everything is visible, or rather, all possible science is along the length of the curtain, it suffices to follow if far enough and close enough, precisely enough, and superficially enough (…) it is by following the border, by skirting the surface, the one that passes from bodies to the incorporeal (…) events are like crystals, they become and grow only out of the edges, or on the edge (…) the surface effects in one and the same event, which would hold for all the events (…) becoming unlimited comes to be the ideational and incorporeal event, with all it characteristic reveals between future and past (…) that which has just happened and that which is about to happen, (Deleuze, The Logic of Sense).

   To contextualize ethnography in this eclipse means to erase fieldwork, but no to avoid the temporal by gaining time through writing, but in the sense of accumulating the greatest amount of possible time—or allowing the accumulation of time to happen—so that we cannot remember and we can no longer want to remember. Since time is nothing but the becoming, this ethnography is always and it will always happen, it was even always happening before our arrival. We do not find correspondence between language and world, identity and difference, what is represented and the one who represents, because we are never in the same place where we made the question. Becoming belongs to ethnography, but this is not the becoming that can be integrated to a narrative representation, it is not the existency of becoming, as if we could find it, as Heidegger does in a correlation of becoming and a certain idea of spirit. It is not what exist in becoming, but rather, what insist in becoming. Ethnography deals with the sense as the fourth dimension, it does not deal with meaning. Thus, the self and the other, the observer and the observed, the before and the after, , the beginning and the end all disappear, but no because we substitute them in their textual representation, but because we discover ourselves evoked by that relation in a contextualized performance.

  In this eclipse of these binaries ethnography is revitalized in performance, performance means acting while being acted out, speaking while being spoken, there is no other, neither in the unconscious—as Lacan thought—nor in reality, because both reality and the unconscious concepts forms part of the same homophonic series of being. The work of ethnography is not about others, not with the others, nor for the others. Instead, it lets itself be reported by time as if it were just an eclipse of difference. The situations of ethnographic climax speak for the participants of ethnography through performance. We must find devises that can remark fieldwork into experimentation. An expanded fieldwork in tension with contextual situations of audiences of lectures, readers of books, publics, eclipses itself as performance and eclipses writing. So Tyler, when I think of evocation I find ,myself obliged to look at fieldwork as creative and research process as alive living, in tension with writing as a text, and only afterwards, as a result of that transformation, O see writings eclipses. To contextualize evocation in the ethnographic realms it is necessary to think of issues that emerge when we look at fieldwork as a device from which performance arises: a non empirical multisensory and multitemporal experience. From there we question notions of body and place, discourse and the course of discourse, memory and language. 

Eve’s monologue. This monologue has offered us a parable of the discontinuity of memory and the irreducibility of it to the linearity of text. Eve dispersed writings, that is, everything she reports in her process as she invents herself from day to day, leads us to the redefinition of the statutes of observation, reporting, measuring in ethnography. Eve’s example also illustrates openness works. In this kind of ethnography the material obtained and processes in a moment of time, can be reedited and reported again. A report in this kind of ethnography is always a performance. What does Eve do?. Eve can do whatever she pleases. We can say that what she makes is a diary, a chronicle, a report, but none of these genres can enclose within themselves the situation Eve finds herself. Instead, the situation enclose them. Neither the diary, nor the chronicle, or the report can constitute an ethnographic evocation. Eve makes a performance because when she realizes se is eclipsed by time and memory allows herself to be defined and allows all these genres to define themselves as a simple experiment. In want to clarify that performance can be books as individual authors and writers, museum practices, mise in scenes, multimedias. 

   As I said in the beginning the opposite of text is not the non textual, it is temporality. A book in this ethnography remits us to that beautiful passage where Deleuze said: The book is not an image of the world, much less a signifier (…) in a book there is nothing to understand, but there is much to employ. There is nothing to interpret of signify. But much to experience. The book can constitute a machine with something, it should be a small tool for something outside itself (Deleuze, Foucault, 1986)

   A book among us must always be one among many other places in which evocation eclipses as a performance: an ethnographic one that invents its own identity each time as a permanent critique. What makes those writings experimental is not an effect of penmanship but an eclipse of experience. It is here Tyler, in this fould, in this pleat formed by forgetfulness where we must detain ourselves not to show, surveying meticulously the reasons of this ethnography of eclipse. It is not, evidently, forgetfulness-amnesia that we are talking about, it is not that figure, opposite to remembrance, which remits us to the idea of a forgotten original. As I said elsewhere, it is not remembering what is remembered In the remembered. It is not forgetfulness in that basic sense of non retained, deleted or substitute information. It is much more subtle than this. It is not a kind of forgetfulness that looks back on the past, but a forgetfulness regarded as among ourselves, between ourselves and the things, ourselves and the others. 

   In order to find that other sense of forgetting we would have to refrain from saying or referring to memory. Perhaps we should simply say “to let go”. It is not a defect of memory what leads us to forgetfulness, but it is the non-necessity in the relations between the elements of a sequence. I f we make the mistake of detaining ourselves here, focusing on identity and non identity we would be thrown too far, we would fall too deep, we would become involved in the dialectics of being and nothingness. To forget in the ethnographic sense does not point to something else we must do, it is something that was already occurring, it is not remembering but letting things be and becomes, happen and go.

   Some would call it learning, because, certainly, as Bateson said, We learn when we learn to learn. I think this was the most noble sense that guided the best anthropologists. It is this that survives and maintains us perplexed with Malinowski’s “The Argonauts of the Western Pacific” (1922). However, I don’t want to abandon, with this idea of forgetfulness, what is most important for ethnography in and on the break between the discontinuity of memory versus the linearity of text. 

 

   notes 

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