For our close reading we turn to Derrida. Violence is invoked by Derrida as fundamental to the process of writing. In a deconstructionist critique violence, which is synonymous with the act of writing, is essential to understand the written also as always-already dead. In his critique of Lévi-Strauss in Chapter 1 The Violence of the Letter: From Lévi-Strauss, Culture, Writing, Derrida comments on violence and language in relation to Lévi-Strauss' anthropological and ethnographic study which is highlighted in his “A Writing Lesson.”
On Page 112 Derrida lays out three forms of violence, or more carefully “arche-violence[s].”:
“There was in fact a first violence to be named.”- Naming, a suturing within language.
“Out of this arche-violence [naming], forbidden and therefore confirmed by a second violence that is reparatory, protective instituting the 'moral,' prescribing the concealment of writing and the effacement and obliteration of the so called proper name which was already dividing the proper...(emphasis ours)”- This second violence unlike naming is the prohibitory act, the law which enforces the “concealment” or “effacement” of the first violence, or naming. In this act the violence is always-already inscribed because the prohibition brings that which is prohibited to light.
“Out of this arche-violence...a third violence can possibly emerge or not (an empirical possibility) within what is commonly called evil, war indiscretion, rape; which consists of revealing by effraction the so-called proper name, the originary violence which has severed the proper from its property and its self-sameness.”- This third violence is that which ultimately undoes the prohibition of the second violence “by effraction” revealing the “proper name.”
It seems that Derrida reveals that Lévi-Strauss is engaged on the this third level or tertiary violence in his “Writting Lesson” or in the act revealing the proper names of the Nambikwara. Are we to interpret his “Lesson” or the game he plays as violence of this third order? If so, does the deconstructionist critique remove all value of Lévi-Strauss' anthropological theoretical work? Is he not any different from his “American” counterparts who simply mark the “savage” with difference?
In addition, in what sense is Derrida in naming violence, and particularly these three violences (mainly the tertiary which exists only as an “emiprical possibility”) committing the violence he speaks against? How is Derrida to escape the act of violence, or in the act of writing is there only violence, the process of violence always-already occurring within the act?
1. An underlying formula of Rousseau/Levi-Strauss (as noted by Derrida) is the notion of ‘social inauthenticity’ as a derivative of the written word (136) in so far as it acts as intermediary elements and the destruction of presence. In turn, Derrida proposes that “the ethic of speech is the delusion of presence mastered” (139). In considering the capacity or incapacity of speech versus writing to allow for presence, consider the following ideas/quotes in From Sign to Subject: A Short History and their relevance to the arche-violence committed by Levi Strauss in “revealing by effraction the so-called proper name” (112)
ReplyDelete--“'I' refers to the act of individual discourse in which it is pronounced, and by this it designates the speaker. It is a term that cannot be identified except in what we have called elsewhere an instance of discourse and that has only a momentary reference. The reality to which it refers is the reality of the discourse. And so it is literally true that the basis of subjectivity is in the exercise of language” (43-44) – Emile Benveniste
--Benveniste’s distinguishes between the speaking subject (referent), subject of speech( signifier; ‘narrative within which the spectator is encouraged to “find” him or herself, and the characters with whom he or she is encouraged to identify’) and the spoken subject (the subject who is constituted through identification with the subject of speech” (46-47). To what extent (and by what means) does Levi-Strauss act as the speaking subject and determine the subject of speech – therefore positioning his subject of anthropological study as the spoken subject?
-- “We are cognitively available to ourselves and others only in the guise of signifiers, such as proper names and first-person pronouns, or visual images, and consequently are for all intents and purposes synonymous with those signifiers” (18) – On Pierce’s notion of man as a sign and thus a product of language
2.Consider these instances of nostalgia:
The tone exhibited by Levi-Strauss in A Writing Lesson, is recognized by Derrida in The Violence of the Letter as “nostalgia for what preceded this degradation, an affective impulse toward the islets of resistance, the small communities that have provisionally protected themselves from corruption” (134) – discussed on 114 as well
.. as compared with the satisfaction of the New Guinea inhabitants in First Contact as they watched footage from ‘how they use to be’ and took pleasure in recalling their enthralled reaction to shiny lids and other novel material goods introduced by the Australian prospectors.
-AM
This is an abbreviated version of my response (to be elaborated/filled in later), but I just wanted to get these questions and topic on here before class:
ReplyDelete1. Writing and representation. Ethnography and the representation of the other. Ethnocentrism, writing, and history. (Wolff's Europe and the People Without History)
2. Fundamentals of the human condition (universality). Anthropology, as is often noted in department descriptions on college websites, or as Rousseau mentions in Essay on the Origin of Languages, (not speaking specifically about anthropology, but the 'study of men')"one must first observe the differences in order to discover the properties." Has the field of anthropology and the practice of ethnography moved beyond concerns of whether or not we are all basically the same/debates on the role of culture and acculturation... How does this relate to debates on universal human rights?
3. Saussaure and L'Enfant Savauge
Again...apologies for the incoherence and incompleteness!
To elaborate on the topics above:
ReplyDelete1. What is behind this desire to represent the other, or to represent ourselves, for that matter? In "A Writing Lesson", Levi-Strauss writes that not only were the Nambikwara unable to write, they were also unable to draw [288].What does this say about our tendencies to representation? How can we begin to think about the differences between representation through speech, writing, or the image and the move from the traditional written ethnography to the ethnographic film?
Also, what happens to Levi-Strauss' "authentic" primitive society when it is mediated through writing, which he claims makes the contact "unauthentic"? [136-137].
3. I was particularly interested in the way the the "'arbitrary' nature of the linguistic sign" (the fact that there is no natural link between an object and the word that signifies it) was played out in L'Efant Savauge. Language, it seems, is not natural in the sense that we don't have any kind of natural inclination to call an object by a certain name.
I'm interested in the moral tone Derrida's writing takes with his use of the term 'violence' to mark the acts of interpretation and inscribing difference upon the world (what I take to be Derrida's 'arche-writing') and subjects within it.
ReplyDeleteHe writes, "Rousseau and Lévi-Strauss are not for a moment to be challenged when they relate the power of writing to the exercise of violence. But radicalizing this theme, no longer considering this violence as derivative with respect to a naturally innocent speech, one reverses the entire sense of a proposition--the unity of violence and writing--which one must therefore be careful not to abstract and isolate" (106).
If the violence of arche-writing is one so fundamental to what humans do in the world, language--the attribute so often deployed to distinguish humans from other forms of life--in what sense is that act a 'violence'? If it is only through the "violent opening" (140) of arche-writing that allows of morality, how does he justify that opening in terms that presuppose ethics?
Derrida places much attention on the impact of human action on what I take him to posit as an 'uncorrupted' world. He describes "violence as the possibility of the road and of difference" (107), "already in the differance or the arche-writing that opens speech itself" (128). I believe that by figuring the inscription of difference as a violent act, Derrida ascribes a transcendental essence to the world, taking it to be an innocent object, which human interpretation and distinction violates. This, however, certainly clashes with the manner in which the authors of the introduction to Derrida found in Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism situate Derrida's work as a project seeking to eradicate the assumptions of such a transcendental quality to the signifieds of language. I wonder if I'm misreading him, but I can't see how arche-writing would be considered so 'violent' without such a metaphysical conception. He brings up the problematic nature of such a categorization when he discusses Marx and Freud's assumed reluctance to accept the 'great sweetness of nature,' but doesn't really address the claim there. I wonder how Derrida would make sense of how Povinelli characterizes the creation of tracks as "a generalized mandate from 'the country'" (106), or the desires of totemic ancestors and the land they 'represent'.