Evocation english end

  One think here particularly of Gergen’s concept of the “fragmented subject” or of Deleuze and Guatari’s idea of the “deterritorialized subject”, and of their notion of “lines of flight” that characterize the constant differentiation of nomadic and hybrid subjectivities. Just as evocation is, as you say, actually opposed to the lineal trajectory of writing and its institutionalization of authority, it is nonetheless often connected with writing. It is also associated with speech or orality, and thus seems to fall neatly into the discourse about the opposition between orality and literacy. In a way, it is not surprising that evocation should be linked to the voice, since both voice and evocation derive from the same root (latin uoc- “to speak”), but the connection in literature is not really with the idea of speech as sush. The sublte difference between “speech” and “voice” is the source of an equivocation here. Note, first of all, how the idea of voice has been “literalized” as when we speak of the “voice” if an author, invoking by that expression the distinctive and characteristic mode and manner of the author’s written expression. “Voice”, in this context of literary avocation is disassociated from speech, apart from indicating the syntactic role of the semivocal subject as a means of discriminating among the grammatical categories of active, passive, and middle voices. What calls out here is the revocation of speech as the speechlessness of voice, the provocation of voice as writing, as literature and grammar. 

   Still, I hesitate to advocate completely the disassociation of evocation and writing, if for no other reason than that evocation is necessary to writing. 

   Evocation that can be written is not evocation, but it is not therefore, absent from writing, for if it were absent there could be no writing. Writing depends on the activity of evocation and cannot found itself without it, even as it seeks to usurp evocation by reducing it to the acts of signification and analytic reason. Evocation is neither a function of the subject nor of a system of signs. In addition to these critiques of sign and subject, evocation recommends itself for other reasons, which I characterize as the “pluralization of discourse” and the “decline of general persuasion”. The diagnostic signs of the pluralization of discourse are the revisioning of rhetoric as the “rhetoric of inquiry”, the relativization of all discourse to the media of discourse, and the decline of textual authority. By general persuasion I mean the legitimated forms of arguments, such as the science model, the rhetoric model, and the commonsense model. Each of these is a mode of persuasion and each is legitimed either in itself or by the fiat of convention. By the decline of general persuasion I mean the emasculation of rhetoric and common sense by rationality and expert knowledge, and the relativization of reason to politics and aesthetics. In other words the rhetoric of politics and aesthetics undermines the pretension to universal validity that is supposed to differentiate reason from rhetoric. Consequently, reason, rhetoric, and commonsense can no longer be constituted, either on the basis of form or content, as distinct genres. 

   The decline of general persuasion is manifest not only in the pluralization of discourse, but in this refusal of “good forms”, “the rejection of a well defined, autonomous, and universal method of investigation and argumentation. It is also evident in the politization of consensus which at least in part, reflects the fragmentation of the community of scholars into separate, differentiated groups that no longer agree among one another in perceptions or judgements. In other words, the Logos is no longer the product of general persuasion, but is enacted   by the dynamics of aesthetics and politics—or to put it differently, is performed  in its poetry and rhetoric, the logos is dispersed into its situated enactments. This development is most evident in the changed role of writing. In the views of Popper and Lakotos, for example, scientific laws were supposed to be encoded ultimately in the form of written texts which thus become the memory system of science---its thesaurus or treasury of knowledge. Today, however, writing plays a rather minor role in science, and certainly not the one envisioned by Popper and Lakatos. One could even say of the scientist what Plato said of Socrates—a scientist is ”he who does not write”. The writing of books, in particular, is suspect, being largely the function of “popularizers” or of senescent scientists no longer actively producing science. ‘Been there” and “doing that” are “Where it’s at”.

   With specific reference to ethnography, the decline of general persuasion and the pluralization of discourse mean that we can no longer assume that ethnography can be automatically justified by appeals to knowledge. Knowledge production is itself the creature of cultural institutions and political practices, and its authority is thus limited by the unaccounted-for context. We cannot easily assume, for example, that ethnography is some kind of hypothesis testing, experimental program supplementary to psychology, economics, or history, what I call, borrowing a phrase from Wittgenstein, the “underlaborer function” of ethnography. Nor can we readily assume that ethnography serves some critical function mediated by knowledge production in the form of practical applications of general or specific ethnographic findings—the “trickle down” justification. So too, with programs of social reform or to corrections to commonsense in the manner of the Margaret Mead’s advice columns in the popular magazine, Redbook. Finally, there is no sure ground even for the kind of ideology critique practiced in cultural studies, the more so since that discourse is totally encapsulated within an academic discourse that renders it harmless to the rest of society. So, our usual excuses and justifications for ethnography, which include knowledge production, aesthetic integration, the exorcism of person demons, no longer have the force of general persuasion and good form. 

   I do not want to give the impression that the pluralization of discourse and the decline of general persuasion are bad things. Quite the contrary, for they have enabled a moment of freedom where none of the old constraints on the manner and purposes of expression –whether of writing, film or performance—can be so effectively deployed. There is a moment then, a brief and soon to be terminated moment of, not so much free-play, but of the falling away of the conventions that both constricted ethnography and enabled it. This actuality of freedom comes only with the necessity of confusion, uncertainty, and nostalgia for lost directions and easy purposes. 

   The decline of general persuasion articulates with many things, not the least of which is the fact of writing itself. Writing enables a general environment of mendacity. It does this because it differentiates itself from what it represents and because it erases the subject by reducing all authorial intentionality to the system of signs or to the intentionality of an interpret. Writing cannot do otherwise than lie, even as it attempts to hide this fact through the invention of the idea of truth as a correspondence between sentence form and the form of nature. Writing thus attempts to overcome its mendacity by establishing rules of good form that purport to determine representations, expressions and interpretations. It seeks to regulate the relationship of signs to signifieds, and to control expression and interpretation by circumscribing the interest and intents of readers and writers. 

    The whole desire here is to “automate” the processes of representation, expression and interpretation, and thus to limit the inherent and irremediable mendacity of writing. The whole discourse becomes a discourse of limits and exclusions that create a hierarchy of genres and styles organized around the principles of accurate representation and objective expression and interpretation. This ambiance of simultaneous affirmation and denial of truth becomes a generalized cultural context in which mendacity is an accepted form of communication. For all our interest in science, facts, evidence, and logic, our real situation is one in which there are either evidence, and logic, our real situation is one in which these are either absent or appear only as rhetorical strategies. Mendacity comes to have the seeming form of its opposite, and we are daily surrounded, not only in print, but even more in its surrogates, radio, television, cinema, and the internet with presentations that have the form of objective discourse, but whose purposes serve interests that have nothing to do with truth, but are instead toward persuasion, objective and subjective. The form of truth has been usurped by the needs of capitalism and can no longer control representation, expression and interpretation by limiting them to contexts in which truth is produced. This will always have been the situation with writing, but with the new and powerfull means of mendacity now at our disposal, we can no longer so easily hide this situation from ourselves. The failure of general persuasion then, reflects the hegemony of mendacity in all our cultural productions—including this one. Mendacity is our way of life, which me must confess we most confess in our attempts to insist that it is not.

   So, evocation presents itself, on the other hand, as the absolute other of the ideas that have made the hegemony of mendacity—not only of representation, reason, identity, truth, signs, objectivity, but equally of all those notions that are conceived of as the opposites of these, such as passion, difference, subjectivity. Evocation, in other words, is not the emasculated other of difference, which serves merely as the means by which the positivity’s of good form construct their identity. Evocation can be captured neither in the duality of opposition nor in the separated poles of opposition that make the discourse of identity. Evocation is not then, a concept indicating the identity of an essence, positive or negative. We know it neither as an essence nor as the concept of an essence. It makes itself available to us as its effects, and these effects are ephemeral, singular, non-empirical, multisensory events. Now the question must be, “how can something with these characteristics make an ethnography?”. The answer must be, “it cannot” if we continue to thing of ethnography as an artifact of writing, a representation, a record of essence or a remembrance of experience. How might we think of it otherwise?. The first easy answer is :”write differently”, but we have already seen the futility of this move. There is no compromise with writing, and all the so-called attempts at experimental writing merely displace one defect in favor of another. The second easy answer is “don’t write”, but if we cease writing, what can we do instead that would not recapitulate the issues of writing in another medium such as cinema, tape-recording, or computer simulation. 

   There is no technological solution, and it is typical of our hubris that we should think that there is one. We are prone to forget that every technological solution is just another problem, or the same old problem in a new form. Can we just let the others write for themselves then?. No doubt. Many, including myself, have already done this, but we would still want to know why the others would want to write and whether that writing, even though it is by them, is really for them, but is instead really just for us. If it is only for us, we will thus have enslaved others as out scribes and will have shackled them to our cultural imperatives. Virtual reality seems to suggest itself as a non representational medium, but despite this claim, we still call it a medium, and must ask “what or how is it between?. Its “between” so to speak, may not be a representation, but it is a construction, and the con- in construction signifies our role in the production of the construction. Ethnography as virtual reality is simply the most recent final solution to the problem of others, which ensures, no less than ordinary writing, the complete disappearance of others as anything more that creatures of our interest and technology.        

    Here it is necessary to recall that, aside from its form of mechanization, virtual reality is nothing new. Writing itself, particularly alphabetic writing, is the original virtual reality, the first mechanization of thought. Recall too, that the term “mechanization” derives from a source that means a “trick” a “sleight-of-hand,”, “an illusion” (Latin Machina), and its kinship with writing is revealed, for writing, too, both, in its mimetic purpose and in its physical form, implicates this same range of “tricky ideas”. You suggest that ethnography could be a kind of participatory performance, “an action which includes others involved in the ethnographic situation”, and that such performances could be “writings of diverse types: mise en scenes, multimedias, museum practices and even books”. These would invent their own identity through a kind of forgetfulness. Forgetfulness, which you define as “not remembered what is remembered in the remembered” is a “non identity between the copy and the original, between the singular and its repetition” (pp 15-16).

   This is an interesting suggestion, if for no other reason than that it changes nothing while changing everything. Thus, we could keep right on doing the kind of things we have been doing all along—“mise in scenes, multimedias, museum practices and even books”, but all of these seemingly normal practices would have to occur in situations what would not pretend to be repetitions in the usual sense of repetition as the recurrence of identities, the reappearance of the same thing at two different times and places. Your idea of non-repetitive repetitions or of repetitions without identity is, on the one hand, a restatement of the idea of representation. A representation is, after all, a repetition of a non identity.  

   The representation is not the same as, is not identical to what it represents. On the other hand, your idea of a repetition without identity is a refutation of the fundamental function of representation, which is to provide us with the repetition of identities. So, in a sense, forgetfulness is not about the remembered, as you aver, but is a kind of collective forgetfulness in which rather than forgetting differences, we forget identities. Recall that a common definition of the idea of identity in representation is the forgetting of differences. Identities becomes identities when we suppress differences and then forget the suppression. They are fictions whose functionality we have forgotten. In effect, I think you describe our current situation. 

   The critique of representation leads us to practices that were conventional before the critique. These practices of representation, however, are now different because they no longer occur in a context of understanding that encourages us to forget the non identity of the repetitions that representation make. We cannot now so easily forget that identities are our constructions and are contingent upon a kind of agreement to forget what we cannot forget. We must continue to act and perform in situations where the “as if” of representational identities cannot be submerges and must instead remain in the forefront of our imagination and discourse. We cannot perform actually if we do not entertain the possibility of our performance. 

   As we like to say, “if you think you can’t do it, you probably can’t”. In the language of self-help books, we are encouraged to? “think positively”, “imagine or visualize yourself doing something successfully and you will increase your chances of succeeding”. We think the power of positive thinking is essential to polished performance, and it may well be if the performance is, indeed, a repetition, but is many not be important at all if we are involved in something other than a repetition, if we are, for example, speaking or thinking in the effective presence of the other.

   This is why then notion of dialogue, both external and internal, has been such an attractive idea. The openness and responsiveness of dialogue seem to capture something of the duality, dubiety, indirection, multiplicity, unpredictability, emergence, and dispersion implicated by your idea of non repetitive identities. And it opposes itself readily to the ideas of linearity, single perspective, certainty, and identity, that after the fact illusion we like to call directed thought. The idea of repetition without identities not only describes our current situation, but also points to evocation as the necessary means for carrying through this kind of repetition. In other places in your essay you suggest a somewhat different context of evocation. As you say, field work is the site in which performance arises (p14). Evocation evolves as “unlimited fieldwork” (p18). 

   If I understand you appropriately here, this notion of unlimited field work does away with the idea of representation and is principally intended as a way of presenting others to ourselves. Moreover, the kind of reciprocity entailed here is not expressed in the grammar of differentiated subjects and objects, us and others. It requires instead, something like the idea of the middle voice in which subject and object, us and them, are not differentiated, but are mutually implicated in some ongoing process or performance whose meaning cannot be predicted before hand, but many found simply in the activity itself or possibly in its joint contemplation. The ideas of mutuality and reciprocity conveyed by the middle voice establish a world of participation in which the distinction between us and them no longer function, a world where others are not reduced to objects of our desire and we are not possessed by them.

   You mention the idea of poiesis as a possible way of thinking about the relation of evocation to ethnography, and as mean to distinguishing evocation from the merely poetic. The later is a useful distinction, but I am uncertain about poiesis because of its association with “creation”, “construction”, “creative act”, the “maker” and from those notions, to its connection with the idea of power and of the individual subject as the active maker and constructor. Poiesis seems to lead back, on the one hand, to the aesthetic idea of creative genius, and on the other hand, to the political ideas of mastery—ideas that do no accord well with the middle voice, and which I would rather subordinate to cooperation and mutuality. It is also possible to think of poesis as a kind of abstract potency to unfold out of its own inherent capacity, but that merely transform it into a kind of cosmo-theological principle like Heidegger’s idea of the “four-fold:” in which poetic language becomes the privileges means of expression. I am suspicious of the usual ideas of poiesis, but I am open to any different development of the concept you may have in mind.

   And so Abdel, we come to the beginning of our dialogue.

Steven Bibliography References

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, The Eclipse of Evocation, (pp 15-16). (p14). (p18