Evocation english

 Evocation: The Unwriteable/A Response to Abdel Hernandez


By Stephen Tyler



September 9, 1997


Dear Abdel Hernandez San juan


   Evocation that can be written is not evocation. You are right, evocation is neither a method nor something that works according to rules. There is no how-to book of evocation. It is an effect that cannot be controlled, even when we attempt to. Thus it is not something that is genre specific, as in poetry, or a special forms of discourse. Since it is not a representation, it falls outside of the normal realms of epistemology and ontology. It is then, something already provided for in the system of signs, in the general economy of langue and therefore, in at least that sense, subject to principles of pattern and structure even if they are unconscious and beyond our effective manipulation?. Well, yes and no. Yes in that evocation is essential to language. No language could function either as representation or communication without it, but it is not therefore defined by any specific set of linguistic patterns or structures.

   Languages are always inadequate in themselves. First, they are excessive. They do more, effect more than their structures or the intentions of their users can account for or desire. Secondly, they are always lacking. They neither adequately express our intentions nor fully represent the things for which they are substitutes. Either too much or too letlee, they are simultaneously more and less than their representations and expressions, as judged either by their failure adequately to express our inner thoughts or represent outer facts. 

   Evocation, in short, is what makes languages work. It fills the spaces and times languages cannot inhabit. It bridges the gaps between words and occupies the empty margins of texts and the silence of speakers and hearers. It connects the meanings dispersed by the lineal trajectories of syntagms and paradigms. It is the unsaid that enables the saying and the said. It is the unspeakable of linguistic, but it is not itself unspeakable. It makes the tropes work but it is not itself a trope. Despite all our attempts to explain away tropological effects by analyzing them as mere comparison or analogy or as special forms of implication, it is still the case that tropes inspire our understanding in the kind of immediacy that argues against the mental reality of any step-by-step analytic process. The analysis of a trope is always after the fact and largely unconnected to its effectiveness and irrelevant to its understanding. If a trope has to be explained, it isn’t a trope. Evocation then, is not about tropes, except in the sense that tropes would be ineffective without it.

   Evocation is sometimes explicitly linked with the past, as memory and remembering, particularly in discussions of poetic effect. In The Remembrance of Things Past fragments of the main character’s current sensory experience set into motion a multitude of dispersed and seemingly forgotten and unconnected scenes and episodes from his past. And yes, evocation can do this, but it is not just confined to the past, either in its passive form as memory or in its active form as remembrance. Nor is it linked exclusively or necessarily to that special form of the past that Aristotle called mnesis, then body’s memory of its own passion (passchein). And yes, evocation does travel in these realms, but it is not originated in them. 

   Remembrance is concerned principally with the particularities of individual experience and the associative network emergent within the activity of remembering, akin to what some psychologists would call episodic memory. Remembrance, however, is not just the active construction of what are taken to be the subject’s actual past experiences. They are necessarily constructed through the mediation of the totalizing system of memory that is given by language, what some psychologists would call semantic memory. It is tempting to think of remembering as an action directed by the subject as a kind of zetesis, or ratiocination constrained by the logic of inference, implication, and association, and by the traces of the subject’s past experience.

   Remembering thus constrasts with the seemingly passive character of the memory system of langue that constrains zetesis by providing it with ready-made likelihoods and schemata whose structures are the necessary form of any possible remembrance. We could call this a forms of evocation in which the searching act of zetesis “calls forth” the traces of past experience, but it would only be as a way of saying that we do not really understand how this zetesis work.

    If evocation this enables this curious past/present of remembering, but is not determined by or in the past, what is the time of evocation---the present, the future?. It is none of these, for it involves itself as you say, in the eclipse of this threefold time. Recall that time, and also space, are posited by Kant as intuitions because they are the necessary conditions of any representation. Thus, if evocation is not part of the program of representation, it is free of the necessities of both time and space. This does no mean, however, that evocation is somehow excluded from determinations of representation. It is, in fact, also necessary to any representation in order for the representation to be adecuated to what it represents. This process of adequation is not something that can be accomplished through the usual means of analytic reason. Analytic reason is inadequate to adequation, except as an after-the-fact rationalization. 

   It is tempting to think that evocation must be something like simultaneity or synchrony and thus an a-causal principle, and even though it does manifest these characteristics, it is probably better to think of it simply as undetermined by time but still capable of functioning within the usual three-fold of time. Since it is untimely, evocation also alters our sense of the “temporal loci” of being and becoming. The affinities between being and the timeless time of the present, on the one hand, and between becoming and the present-anticipated future, on the other hand, are particularly suspect. Evocation, again as you aver, dispenses with the idea of being-as-present-object and entails instead and idea of becoming that has not temporal locus, but inhabits all determinations of time and collapses within itself the possibilities of cause, origin and telos. Does it sound mystical and mysterious?. It does, but only if we insist on objectifying it and reducing it to the play of signifiers. It is akin to the Kantian sublime but, unlike that notion, is not restricted to contexts of aesthetic judgment. It is, after all, an enabling condition of the commonsense world, and our everyday discourse would not be possible without it. It has nothing of the awesome or monstrous about it. It is at the opposite pole of the extreme situations of judgment and perception Kant predicated for the sublime. We might call it an “every day sublime” as a way of capturing both its affinity to and difference from the aesthetic sublime


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