Evocation 1

 Evocation


A philosophical dialogue


By Abdel hernandez San Juan and stephen a tyler


Rice University, anthropology faculty,

September 1997-december 1998

Houston, texas


The Eclipse of Evocation

By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

 

(Anthropology Faculty at Rice University, Houston, Texas, EUA, 1997-1998)

Translated from Spanish to English by Surpic Angelini

 

Dear Stephen Tyler 

 

Entry

 

  We know that the journey towards evocation takes us through a winding and labyrinthine path. This is the first break in our trajectory: to desire to speak of things that are difficult to speak. We have agreed to dialogue using correspondence, but we know, as Bakhtin said, that there is no dialogue if there is no reply implied within the phrases. This is the second break: to desire a dialogue and yet to be forced to write. In short, there is a double eclipse between the “what” and the “how”. Since there is no given path to follow in order to talk of evocation, I will begin with eyes closed, without and idea of a beginning or an end, listening to that music of shadows creates the eclipse of evocation. There, in that transient place, where everything is realized in folds and shadows, I hear a subtly monologue written by Mark Twain. From that place, I speak to you of my vision of ethnography. 

   “I am almost one day old. My arrival dates from yesterday. At least, that’s what I believe. Undoubtedly, it must be so, since if the day before yesterday was a day I did not witness the event. Let’s take notice and hope this serves me as a warning. I will be doubly vigilant so that if a day before yesterday reoccurs it will not pass inadvertently. I think the best method is to note it immediately, in order to avoid confusion, since a secret instint tells me that these details will be very important in the future to the historian. I am an experimental fact. No one can experience more profoundly this feeling of constituting a simple experiment. The feeling leads me to a profound conviction. I affirm it: I am an experimental fact and nothing else”

 

(Mark Twain, Eves Monologue)

 

Critique of the Text

 

  My ideas about ethnographic evocation evolve in tension with writing. In this notion of writing I include the phonetic-alphabetic system, which attempts to represent both the voice of speech, langue, and their inscription in writing, as well as inscription in general which questions the notion of writing itself as representation by pointing to what Derrida called “ gramma” and ”difference”. In the end, both are writings: the first represents an originating word in each graphic (graphie) presence or absence, and the second negates that transparency by putting in its place a differentiated inscription lacking an “outside”. Both writings, which refers to extreme opposition in which many other writings appear between their polarities cease to interest me in this debate from the moment they form a text. The field that the critique of writing has opened up is vast and discontinuous. Bakhtin’s significant ideas on bivocality and polyphony would not have been possible, just to cite one example, if he had not defended the dependent and derived character of writing in the face of the lived enunciated. On the other hand, without the opacity that Derrida finds in writing as a trace disconnected from any originary representation, reflections on logocentrism and scriptural logistics would not have advanced sufficiently. Further, as Foucault intended to prove in “Words and Things”, to see discourses as a spatialized grammar, as topographies of sense, and as scriptural enunciations, helped us understand how language creates and names things. 

   Critically important here are cognitive studies on writing and audible language. The investigations of Havelock (1963-82), Goody (1977), Ong (1982) and Olson (1977-96), though at times charged with speculative historicism, throw light on the issue of the contextualization of speech and the descontextualization of writing as well as in the relationships between writing, speech and the generation of states of consciousness. While some defend the dominance of writing over speech in highly differentiated cultures, others argue in favor of situational fecundity of speech by referring to the intrincate mnemotechnical dexterity of some cultures. On the margins of these theoretical determinations, we are continually surprised by phenomenon of the grammar of consciousness that are better studied. Many pedagogical spisodes in the learning of reading and writing are also enigmatic. Recall the example that St. Augustine describes as he declares that reading is a form of oral recitation in an audible voice or whisper, though later, he is surprised to discover that reading can be practiced in silence. In any case, given that the field is so broad, that when I speak of a critique of writing, I prefer to leave aside ontological definitions about what it is and what it is not, how it is, and how it is not.

  Noŵ, I think that a critique of writing in ethnography must be a critique of writing as institution—as Bakhtin might have suspected in his references to the medioeval vision of the world upside down. Writing, whether in its form of representation or difference vis a vis langue, is the first form of institution. It is the place where text is formed. Writing as institution includes its most primary form preceding textualization, when it intervenes in meta-oral or extraverbal forms and simulates the fixation of the spoken in langue itself. As I suggest here, writing form the institution, not because it guarantees the inscribed memory, but because it makes itself visible through the linear effects of its inscribed geography, as if it could resolve the defects of memory. The power of writing is not roted in its capacity to store oral memory’s un-fixed data, but in its power to invent the idea of memory as accumulative and textual remembering. Far from storing data writing invents the institution in opposition to the nonlinear nature of memory. It is in this intersection between the discontinuity of memory and the textuality of writing that evocation is situated for ethnography. As you know, the notion of text is broad, since it reflects?, accrues? Very different meanings in its passage from pragmatics (semiotics) to hermeneutics (interpretation). However, in my understanding of evocation in tension with writing as text, I refer to what constitutes text in writing: that semiotic operation in writing which allows us to discover and reveal its most repressive history. I speak of text from a more general perspective which is that of the economy of language, of text as archive, or of texts as memory’s prostetic imager, as an accumulation, as an artifact, as a struggle, as a regulator of the remainder and of what remains, or as that pedestal of autonomy to which all productions aspire: as an institution. 

   A critique of writing in ethnography is, in my opinion, a critique of the event that brings about the text-institution. But it must extend beyond a simple critique, because we are not out to improve writing in order to perfect representation, but to avoid its textuality at all coast. When we do ethnography, we must survey plow through, recognize meticulously the instance when alphabetic writing creates a text and forms an institution. Then and there, we find that to write, we become deprived of an relation with the others and with ourselves. We are submerged. We relate to things through the spatial indicatives of grammar. There we discover that writing is a remembrance of language and langue and that langue is never purer than when we remember it in writing. We must recognize how writing initiates this first form of remembrance of langue. Writing is an activity that discriminates between the senses of discourse and its contexts, even in the writing of simple descriptions. To write we discriminate all the meanings that cannot be textualized: and they are projected toward the peripheries and we locate all those meanings that the institution can produce. In the act of writing, we remember langue and we make it present. I contrast, in speech, we use language and push it to change. We transgress langue with multiple meanings that renew themselves even until we forget it


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