The Chrysalides of Being
By Abdel Hernandez San Juan
Book information
Author: ©Abdel Hernandez San Juan
The author rights of this book belong to Abdel Hernandez San Juan, its author, conceiver, writer and composer
Title: The Crysalide of being
Type of Work: Literary of theoretical essays/book
Destination: Books Libraries and biblioteques
Sides of Covered and Print Publications Sides: 22.5 cm x 15 cm
Number of Pages: 200, Reproduction: from 1 to 5000 exemplars, Covered Conservation and Protection Sides: 21.59 cm x 27.54 cm, Covered Lectures Sides: 21.59 cm x 27.54 cm
Translated to english by Abdel Hernandez San Juan
Contents
The Chrysalides of Being
The Phenomenic
The Eclipse of the Eye
The Presentational Linguistic
The Eclipse of Evocation
Restitution of Voice
The Chrysalides of Being
©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan
Written, conceived, composed and created in English
by Abdel Hernandez San Juan
When Hegel committed to define and discuss his science of logic, he started it by asking about if science should have a beginning and how can be defined such a beginning, and when he response himself to stablish it the objective logic of being appeared as it.
The reason to stablish being as the beginning of science was related with how in being coincidence something that seems to be by itself a samennes ontology or Inmanence which simply occur in coincidence with itself without yet an exteriorization of it while paradoxically that impression can only be feel and recognized by a subject.
Being itself consist precisely in the impression of it by a subject who feeling to be inside himself or outside, creates in awareness, reflected feelings, the appearing of being. By this reason, the beginning of science in being revolves around the crucial point of epistemology and ontology.
But according to Hegel, concepts and knowledge can’t not be excluded from being, it is a part of it and precisely because being supposes the paradoxes of something ontologically “being itself” since a sense of it appear in the subject while it is only also since to be it have to goes inside being and as a part of it.
The incredible genius of Hegel, in my opinion, consisted about how this dilemma and paradoxes far to make him to feel insecure, all the contrary, inspired and stimuled him to demonstrate his capability to abstract a logic of being.
I would like to short recapitulate his thesis given that I will need it to my discussion of this paper.
There is in Hegel several moments to a being, a moment of “being itself”, this moment, the ontological one receive a long and extensive attention in Hegel logic while paradoxically it finally end as just a moment of being, when late it can’t be understand in the itself of it without “the becoming” meaning that at the same time, this “being itself” without a “becoming” maybe simply “nothing” and by this reason a discussion about the relation between “being” and “nothing” appear as a negation of itself, a discussion I am excluding, while to me, since form is there, it is regarded to the phenomenology of appearance.
But according to Hegel, like a relation between “to be” and “not to be”, there is a “traspaso”, (this word have an interesting mean, it is translated as transfer, but also evolves to pass, to go by), meaning “traspaso” of being in its opposite “a non being” which like the impression of “nothing” explain to him how “being” can “pass” in “the becoming” and how “becoming” which to him contents itself “a non being”, a being negated with “nothing”, can late also pass in that “being itself” again.
If we pay attention to how a “being itself” to just be and to just be the ontological one supposes to evolve inside itself and as a part its own nature, “the becoming”, given that if it supposes to be, to be in itself it have to become (be-come, the becoming of the beenlless being of being) and to become it have to be, there is then not a need to point out or to imagine a “non being” or “a nothing” to the nature of being and to the nature of becoming.
But according to Hegel we can’t negate “becoming itself” perse a being and that “becoming itself” supposes to him a “non being” or “a nothing”, the pass, transfer or go by appear at this point to imagine how each one considered as distinct, pass (tras-pass) in or through the other considered as its opposite, as a moment of negations of itself.
In usual terms Hegel efforts to explain both moments, the one of mutual necessity and the one of mutual negation. But such a “being itself” is also negated in another form probably important than the previous one, it is a being negated as a “being itself” by another moment of being, that one when a “being to himself” appear.
This “being to himself” and or “to itself” turn being to its own (also stablishing a “self” and an “I”) and start to be from its own out of the first ontology when such a “being itself” appeared, like in the verbal formal time conjunction of “is” and “are” as simply the samennes of being and becoming mutual dissolutions late discussed by Derrida as a concept of being evolving time resolved only in grammatology recalling together at Ousia and Gramme, Aristoteles, Hegel and Heidegger.
When the moment of a “being to himself” turn to its own we get “the monad”, “the self”, “the I” and “the subject”, but according to Hegel this moment of “being to himself” to which he also dedicated extensive discussion have also an end appearing like “being itself” also as just a moment of being, since turning to “its own” its opposites appears as its own negation discussing then the “being to another” and “being another”.
This “being to another” is explained by the mutual inclusivism of pairs, for example, “one” to “multiples one” and biseversa, “being” to “becoming” and biseversa, “finity” to “infinity” and biseversa, something Hegel discuss as moments of mutual samennes or dissolution and as moments of mutual negation considered as opposites pairs.
While “being another” appears as being one between the multiples as soon as we are back again in a “being itself” or in a “being to itself” it also have an end.
For example, “being another” looks to negate “being itself” from the moment we question how can it “be another” and be at the same time “being itself”?.
Leibniz Monad appear here to solution the opposite, how?.
On the one side we have The “one” of my “one” or of “your one”, this one may be considered as the “single one”, and on the other side we have the “one” of anyone, but this one of any one may appear also at the single one when we say “when one think” or “when one experience” or “when one feel” using the single of the plural or the plural of the single. What we are in front here is about the “to Be” of the verb time, expressed as the “is” and the “are” of any conjunction, in fact, in language verb time we already have this Leibniz monadic solution (and dissolution or sameness) between being it-self and being another as well as of being and is (the to be of conjunctions).
The Turn in fact happens at the same time, as soon as being another appear as a moment of being, “being itself” turn to “being to himself” or “to itself” simultaneously, to “its own”.
In fact the only ways for the pairs to be inclusives or even sameness, to dilute each one into the other solutioning its opposites a “being itself”, the ontological one, the one which simply “is”, should be reestablished.
Only in a “being itself” a “becoming”, which to him evolved “to be” the opposite of a being, a “non being” or a “nothing”, can become inclusive to a being, a negation of the negation should appear to solution the rejection of a “one” against “multiples ones” and biseversa, between “finity” and “infinity” as well.
A “being itself” should appear and also a “being to itself” should turn to “its own”.
There is in Hegel logic of being also a distinction between a “being itself”, the ontological or immanent one and a “putted one being”.
In the first side there is “being itself” and a considerable part of a “being to itself” that turns to “its own” and in a second side there is a “putted being” as the opposites.
This “putted being” appear continuously in his theory to make distinctions between something that “is itself” and an “extrinseque relation”.
This extrinseque relation is almost present continually in all Hegel theory of being, for example, reflexion itself start to be first an “extrinseque being” in its relation to a “being itself” ontology, he defined it with an interesting concept I would like to discuss late, the concept of “inmediation”.
While I am working in my books with the concept of immediacy my immediacy maybe certainly defined as a pristine one, a pure one, things as simply given to our sensations and impressions, Hegel assign to the immediacy a certain level of mediation defined as inmediation.
For example, reflexion maybe considered originally as an extrinseque “putted being”, but this “putted being” negates “itself” in “it own” extrinseque nature and is being late absorbed by “being itself”. In a few words, a reflection start to be first a “putted being” but it late appears again as a part of “being itself”, this maybe defined as the inmediation level of the immediacy, in-mediation (the mediation potential of the immediacy) and is defined as when “being itself” mediate reflection transforming its original putted, extrinsique nature in a part of a “being itself”, (it happen in Hegel nor only with reflexion but with all the forms of “putted beings”).
And the opposite, also a “being itself” which seems to correspond only to an undiferienced, samennes ontological being without extrinseque relations to it, appears also working in several forms of “putted beings” in Hegel discussion.
However, the final resolution of the logic of being is far to be resolved with a theory of moments since there is not an escape to “monad” something stablish the pair of “one” and “multiple” as the more objective one.
This pair concept of “one” and “multiple” which grow up and born from the concept of “monad” that Leibniz previously discussed, occupy a significant place in Hegel science of logic and I agree with it even when Hegel dedicate almost the half of his logic of being starting from “one” and “multiple” to discuss the relation between “finite” and “infinity”, “quality” and “quantity”, numbers, quantum’s, geometry and mathematics. In fact, more than a half of Hegel logic of being is dominated by this pair of “one” and “multiple” which is the pair of the Leibniz “Monad”, with a half of it on quality and a second half on quantity.
Finally, there is certainly in Hegel as I has discussed in some other papers a general regard of being to Inmanence which generally stay to be an abstract theory of being that can be equally applied to the Inmaterials as to the material.
In fact, “being itself” can still be in Hegel just a necessity to stay discussing a unity or a term, a something or a concept, at the end a “monad” again.
The “being it-self” can be, for example, “the infinity” as there is a moment of the infinity that is being the infinity “in itself”, but there is a moment of infinity that “turn to itself” or to “its own” and then is not already the being of it “in-itself” but the turn to “its own”, if we don’t have such a “turn to its own”, we can’t discuss “concepts by it owns” or any “unity’s by its owns”.
With the exception of a few examples, there is not along the whole science of logic first book dedicated to the logic of being, a regard of any of this concepts to the inmaterial or to the material.
A “being to another”, can be simply a necessity to define how the “finite” is being to the “infinity” and the “infinity” to the “finity”, how the “one” is being to the “multiple” and biseversa, while a “being to itself” may turn to “its own” in the form of a term or a concept “turns to its own”, easing to stay discussing it to “its own”, “the one to its own”, “the infinity to its own”, “the becoming to its own”, “being itself to its own” perse a becoming, as concepts, as monads, as units.
“Being itself” at the same time can be the “being itself” of anything, of “something”, of “a thing”, of “finity”, of “infinity”, of “the one”, of “multiple”, of a “quantum”, of a “number”, while “being another to other” can be, like the pair of “one” and “multiple”, exteriority in general, the exteriority of numbers, for example, to plus 3 plus 9 we need each one to be “another to the other” since numbers itself are exteriors, externality maybe here the reason to define a moment of being defined as a “being to another” or being “another to another”.
There is not in Hegel in general a literal definition of this concepts regarding distinctions between the material and the Inmaterials in his logic of being, not between the wordless world of life and the universe of geometry, mathematics of chemistries while he assigns existence to everything including the infinity.
Remembering that he considers that knowledge’s and concepts are both a part of being his logic of being stay to be apply to everything as possible, it may be applied to literal wordless life, but maybe applied to concepts and knowledge being, maybe applied to mathematics, quantum’s, chemistry and substances, in fact, yes he dedicated also extensive pages to discuss Kant antinomies revolves precisely around this dilemma of the relation between parts and wholes, elements and conjunctions and mainly the antinomies, the one the paradoxes of the composition of substance and matter.
In fact, Kant antinomies both, the one around substance and matter and the one about space and time are both discussed in the first book dedicated to the logic of being which maintains all the time, as previously explained, the ambiguity or neutral one position of letting it open in a form to be apply to anything without defining if it should be considered as material or Inmaterials, letting it open.
I am not saying that Hegel never discuss the issue of matter and forms, but he regarded it to his book on essence and excluded it from the logic of being.
Why, we will see and discuss it late.
To this point I would like to resume toward the whole of this paper, two things, first, the Hegel moment of “being itself”, the ontological one moment, to which all the rest of the moments of being needs to be back to solution, through negation of negation, the opposites and to be mutual or a samennes, need to include and discuss a relation between “being” and “time” that stablishes it as the immediacy, as “the present of time”, considering the immediacy itself as a pristine and pure immediacy without considering yet a Hegelian attribution of mediation to that immediacy, his in-mediation.
This “being itself”, the ontological one, the one which simply is, should be defined as my immediacy considering it as “the present of the present” and evolve time in a form that also suppose to discuss how time entrance in a being and biverseversa, how a being entrance in time to which we will clearly need to discuss the questions of “the sense of being” at the relation between “sense” and “time” needed nor only to stand the immediacy of space and time “present of the present” but also being and time inside language, (of any language, textual or visual).
Derrida discussed this “present of the present” at his Ousia and Gramme re-calling Aristoteles Physis and discussing together Aristoteles, Hegel and Heidegger to stablish “the nun”, “the right now of time”.
Second, to this point we have in Hegel to the moment only two concepts of mediation, a first one level of mediation assigned to the immediacy and defined as “in-mediation” thanks to which all the forms of being included the putted ones being are mediated by the immediacy (his inmediation) and transformed in a “being itself” and a second one level of mediation defined by how each pair mediate in itself its opposite.
We should remember that Hegel discussed the pair of “being” and “nothingness” as a pair itself before assigning late “nothingness” and “non being” to the nature of becoming. But as examples of this second level of mediation we may see somes examples.
For example, when we figure out a “being itself” as an ontological undiferienced samennes without extrinsecación to it, it looks to be infinity but that sensation or impression of infinity can be feel only in sensibility and not demonstrated yet, to be demonstrated, infinity should be considered itself, but as soon as we are considering infinity by itself turning to its own, infinity itself appear as a “non being” or as a “nothing” by itself meaning something opposite to a being, the question is then, how can “being itself”, which supposed to be the more ontological level of being, be feel as infinity in sensibility if infinity considered itself is a “non being”.
Well, according to Hegel, becoming, which evolve to be to being an opposite “non being” mediate being and only in this form a sense of infinity corresponding to the feeling of becoming, can be assigned to “being itself”, so that a being is already mediated by the “non being” of becoming.
According to me a distinction as such is needed to explain the differences between “being” and “is”, but it is also needed for sensibility to feel the infinity of being, according to Hegel. However, at the same time, it is also impossible to figure out both “becoming” and “infinity” without a feeling of being, because only provided by a sense of the “beinless time of being” something as “becoming” and something as a sense of “infinity” can be reflected by sensibility, to this point “being itself” -mediate at the same time “becoming” and “infinity” because without such a mediation of “becoming” and “infinity” by being, “becoming” and “infinity” can’t just be nothing itself.
The opposites mediated themselves while to mediate in between the pairs negates in between and the eliminations of each one of the pair by the other one is needed to each one be the itself of it, the being of it by the way is being defined by “what it is not”, the pass by, and the “non being of It” is being participating in defining the “being of it” and the opposite, the “being of it” participating in defining the “non being of it”. There is some other concepts of mediation working in Hegel but I will discuss it late.
Certainly, there is not as clear a well stablished “right now of time” in Hegel, nor a “present of the present” strongly stablished, in fact, the way I has previously discussed becoming, helps to see becoming in a form that distance a letlee the very specific sense this concept have in Hegel as we may say that there is an inclusive sense of time in Hegel concept of becoming defined as a concept ready to exit the present toward the future defined as telos, teleology and overall an idea of progression and progress, becoming is in Hegel affected by both the idea of infinity progress and by the idea of infinity itself, so that the time of such a becoming, when he imagine the trasspass or go by of being and becoming mutually, being and non-being, lost a letlee “a sense of the present of present” toward the future defined in this sense.
We may say that the “right now of time” appears in Hegel near to my concept of the immediacy, but we should also point that my immediacy is affected in Hegel by his “in-mediation” in a form that start to be far from that pristine nature of my immediacy of the “here and now”.
To Hegel a continued process of mediation between “being in itself” by “putted beings” and biseversa, “putted beings” by “being in itself”, transform the immediacy in an space of constant mediations that difference between the “world in itself” as “it is” and the “phenomenological world” start to be a “reflected world” in both levels of reflections mediated by the immediacy of “being itself” and of reflections stablished as a “phenomenological world” under “world in itself”, he define this complex issue as “two sides” that at the same time coincidence in a unity but also negates itself being defined each one by its opposite, “world in itself” and the “phenomenological world”.
We may be clear on the fact that this point start to exit his logic of being to entrance his logic of essence evolve a discussion on essence, identity, diference, form and essence, form and matter, phenomena, appearance, things etc., to which we will go late.
In fact, in front of the question of the “right now” of time Hegel recognize it in term of the logic of being to the moment of the “being to himself” or “to itself” which is the moment of the “being to its own”, I am pointing here a pivotal theoretical issue not previously discussed nor only not about Hegel but I would say in general, given that first it is not clearly focused by Hegel himself, but as I has really read it with exhaustive attention several times certainly, in the precise moment of asking about the “right now of time”, Hegel recognize and assign that time to the moment of the “being to himself” or “being to itself” the one that turn to “its own” not to “being itself”.
This is a complex issue because a pristine, pure immediacy accepted as the “right now of time and space” supposed to be also the space of a “being itself” as I discussed before, but certainly a “being to itself” or to “its own”, the born of “the I”, “the Self” and “the Monad”, the “one” versus the “multiple”, is needed for the immediacy of the “right now” of time be fully stablished ending then to win Leibniz again regarding ancients and classics discussions.
We should be also clear at this point on the fact that Deleuze beautiful recalls of Leibniz at “The Fould: Leibniz and the baroque”, move exclusibly to the soul and exclude this turn of “being to himself”, “to itself”, to “its own ” forgetting both “being” and the “worldness world of life” both of “the world” and of “the present” which I has proposed and developed in my books to which only Shurt and Habermas coincident with me, while at the same time Derrida visionary recall of Aristoteles physic together with Heidegger and with Hegel, stablish the “nun” of time.
This “nun” in Derrida is exactly the “right now of time”.
Going in a form also discussing dots, lines and surfaces –space and time—, Derrida strongly establish “the present of the present” as the more transcendental time, his definition of the “alive present”, but it is instead then regarded by Derrida to the ousia of gramme, meaning to the entity of the substance of presence in phenomenology and language.
Definitely, Derrida turn from being to the “nun”, in his way only to the ousia of gramme was extremely important, I am not negating it, it was a necessity to stablish how all we are is about a phenomena of presence, present and presentation including the fact that awareness itself evolve being in the presence of itself as it appear to itself in conscience and by the way “the nun” of it, the “right now of time” of gramme and language from which he define “the sign” as this first apparition of us in front of us assigning it as a Hegel semiology.
But the right now of time is not excluded from Hegel logic of being it is assigned to the moment of the “being to itself” which is in the basis of my discussion of the time and space basis of monad and of my proposal and developments of my concept of the world of life, my whole issue on how to develop a new phenomenological sociology, my Intramundane Horizont thanks to shurt but going beyond innovating it.
Abdel Hernandez San Juan
Seminars on Hegel, Various Seminars are upcoming by Abdel Hernandez San Juan
Visit the previous one In Front of Inmanence: Hegel, Frankford and Habermas
Notes
1-The right now of time appears in Hegel Logic of being mainly in his discussion of Kant Antinomies discussing space on ancient’s surfaces and spacialities such as euclides and when answering the question about if the world have a beginning he establish that certainly there is an absolute beginning in time defined by the relation between dots, lines and surfaces as the now.
2- Derrida defined this concept of a sign exactly as previously explained as the first form to define a sign, a form to call the phenomenology of the appearance of presence of ourself to ourself in conscience as a sign. Obviously inclusive as certainly evolved as one of the main peculiarities of Hegel way to theorize, Derrida generously attribute it as a Hegel semiology when certainly it is more a Derridean interpretation of Hegel or a way through which Derrida recognize or declare the Hegelian basis in his theory of language, not excluding Saussure, but getting it together. I am not sure if there is a semiology in Hegel as Derrida assigned, I am yes sure about that Derrida way to develop his semiology needed Hegel theory, but I am open to late consider from sociology autonomy and axiology if there is an anthropology when Derrida discussed such a Hegel semiology as a form of anthropology.
3- Derrida recognize this “alive present” to Hurssel not to Hegel as certainly there is not a clear “liveness of the present” as an “alive present” in Hegel, since Hegel complejization of the immediacy with constant mediations far to it, (his “in-mediation”), however, paradoxically, at the same time, Hegel assign a relevant place to “livennes thought”, but that thought is in Hegel completely out of a world as also a world in Hegel transform in a complex process of mediations between “world itself” and the “phenomenological world”, while Hurssel discussed a transcendental abstract concept of world coincident with the “alive present”, but this world againt is still an abstract one needed but far yet to my “Intramundane Horizont” world of quotidian life, as to Shurt “worlds of everyday life” and to Habermas “World of Life” too.
References
Derrida Jacques, Ousia and Gramme: Notes on Sein and Zeit, Margins of Philosophy, The University of Chicago Press and Cathedra
Derrida, Jacques Genesis and Structure and Phenomenology, Anthropos
Derrida Jacques, The well and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel Semiology, Margins of Philosophy, The University of Chicago Press and Cathedra
Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Being and Monad, paper chapter. Being and monad, book
Hegel G.W.F, Science of Logic, Tome I, Doctrine of Being, Solar, Hachete
The Phenomenic
©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan
It is not sufficient for us to say that a form have a sense, a center of evidence, or to assume that the essence of a form is given to us as it, we truly can’t disassociate the concept of form from the concepts of sense and appearing because only a form can have an essence and only a form presents itself as it is, eidos and morphe, something that brings us to presence as a general theme, to what let us to be seen and think. Thought and phenomenology is always a thought of being as form, in a form a thought can think on itself as form and as formality of form and a final last sign of what Hurssel determined and defined a alive present (El Presente Vivo), --lebendige Gegenwart.
Alive present is the ultimate, universal and absolute form of the transcendental experience in general
Jacques Derrida, Form and Wishes to Say, Notes on the Phenomenology of Language
Written in English and translated to English
by Abdel Hernandez San Juan
I am still fascinated with proximity, impressive and sensorial proximity and probably for long time. While I am writing the current book, creating, composing it, I have at the same time in front of me a monitor in proximity, the one of my laptop and I can feel it as a quotidian phenomenic spectacle so enigmatique to my philosophical curiosity. When I touch digitally the letters I can see simultaneously, from the tactile and connective to the visual, the apparition on the tactile screen of that dactylo graphemic suscitation word by word. A very simple phenomena in proximity. I am Feeling now through the materiality of the monitor glass and I can see how the digital coupunture brings to presence all that. My curiosity goes through, on the one hand, the volatilization of everything, ontos, matter, sensoriality, feeling, connection which seems to be vehicled by the delicatessen of that ultrasensual tactile screened, glassesned/unglassed environment, by the sense of that impressive word on the virtualized idea of the Microsoft word page.
On the other hand I ask if such materiality has some spesures and how is it?, cumulated, pregnated, stratified, just digital?, tactile?, copunturated?, or even less, liquidized?, and to what principles of matter ontology should that sensoriality of untangibilized tangible coupure be remitted, to what other phenomenology?. My finger is here touching a permanent point, a digital technologically miniaturazed/virtualized concept of a mouse, a dot, through which, translating a variety of intentional hypothetical, imaginative and simulated impressive sensations over it, the tactility of the finger impressive, I can obtain visually, at the monitor cursor, the anticipated field of movement meeting at the glass screen virtualized page the grapheme of what I was a few second a go feeling as a field in my finger skin.
Everything should be feel by figuring it out as a field hypothetical stimulus. Nothing is happening between my finger and that plastic point. I am just moving my finger over the same surface all the time, something apparently monotonal, but it is at the same time anticipating a whole field of visual suscitation through the glass. Even, moving out of just the screen, which fascinated me still again a lot, (the tactility of that screen), but as a 24 hours connected cibernaut who is travelling through the laptop-making clicks on a variety of Microsoft windows programs services, to everything in comfort, typography, images, a whole trip through the internet within a incommensurable variety of webs, sites, spaces, windows, texts, images at incredible velocities of ephiciency and within an experience that evolves a simultaneous alive process in which the digital impressive sensations of being writing and touching the plastic, simultaneously seems to appear through another surface, and materiality, glassened, while at the same time I am listening the sound of emails entrances, entering, to the inbox.
I am then clicking already, I close fast the window page, instead of letting it open, at the down margins of the screen, which can be easily reactivated, to open other ones, my monitor become defined by virtual leafs, everything is leafted here, reading emails, sending somes, and I am now back to the document, revising a paragraph, lining it with colour easy and fast for revision, then inserting something and back again, a few minutes, following a sound of advertising, now at the internet, letting myself go through navigation, immersed at the cyberspace, a chat at mid day and then back to writing. Abdel Hernandez San Juan
Far to an idea of phenomena seen as just the appearance or the outside of a given essence and far to the idea of phenomena understood as a superficial form or an external surface relative to a certain essence, another ductile, plastic, dynamic and mobile phenomena and phenomenic has proliferated and is extended on the sensorial and perceptive horizont of our technology modernity.
Certainly it is difficult to our common sense to assume or accept the idea of a phenomena without a surface, we commonly supposes to any phenomena a corresponding surface, but with modern technologies as the internet and computer environments, we are not today experiencing phenomena’s according to our old parameters about relationships between appearances and essences as we use to suppose to any or each sense of appearance a corresponding phenomena as the superficial manifestation of essences, phenomena seen as an apariential form of something we should look for behind as the one truly essence, a deepest one, non explicit at a visible surface but related as by necessity, readable by clues as something expressing a coincidence between superficial forms and depth substrates’, appearances and essences, forms and contents.
Very far from those our old ideologies of such a relation, we are experiencing today a new phenomenic, one without substratum, without something behind or depth, a completely superficial one, an ultravolatile one, something having only laterals contiguities and contiguity laterality relate to space and the relation between space and space. This new phenomena is asking a new philosophy, waiting for it. Let then recapitulate a letlee more in remembering how was our old ideology on such a matter. Some decades ago we explained phenomena as the aparience of something in several forms, one was through causation, asserting that phenomena should be always something generated by a cause and we looked causes as essences, another one was related to a necessity, phenomena should be always the superficial form of a necessity and we looked necessities under phenomena train to get in necessity the justification of an essence, phenomena seen as a simple appearance or a form of an essence, to each phenomena we supposed an essence and we understand aparience as an external form.
There was also a relationship between aparience as concept and a relation between absent and nothiness, we explained absent as the opposite of presence, something is absent because it is not presence, it was absent as the image of a non presence or of the absent of presence, we adjudicated aparience to such the presence of presence, it is appearance because it have a presence of presence, appearance was to us the external form of something, the presence of presence, and nothingness something similar to absence, if it is absent is nothing or if it is nothing then is absent, meaning to the absent of presence, so in a way our old relating of nothingness to being, nothingness seen as the opposite of being in existential terms, supposed a relation between being and presence, if nothingness is absent and absent nothing, then a being is only in presence and only a presence is being.
This recapitulation about our old ideologies will be important to understand how our current new phenomenic ciberenvironments, the internet and our media ultramodern connected technology reality of everyday life evolves our being and spiritual world, and how in developing the new philosophy of such a rich phenomena and ourselves in it evolves a whole understanding on how are we becoming and on how to think today about all our main concepts, sensoriality, being, memory, culture, an alive field to rethink almost everything. Of course, we did it in the past about ourselves and our societies with each new technology already, we did it with light, with phone, with vehicles, with television, etc, but no one of our old technologies evolved a transformation to ourselves as significant as the one we are living today as cibernauts in our ultraconected accelerated world on being online 24 hours a day at home, several years after our new 21 century.
We have in front our screen perceiving the amazing appear of words behind the monitor glass, a simple digital hand writing as phenomena is coming into view, becoming visible, something is being materializing behind the monitor glass and becoming graphemes on the virtual pages, being seen under a tactile screen through leafed relations of simultaneity. We are opening and closing virtual pages, cleaking and processing dynamic software’s, opening and closing windows while writings texts and listening sounds and we ask on the material ontology of all that, (on conseity), what kind of sensoriality of matter is it about?, can we say it have a grain comparing with the rest of our sensorial memory on matters?, why such an ingravid sensation of a crystalline volatile?, a liquid ingravid under glasses?. We are of course simultaneously online connected, receiving emails in our inbox while processing multimedia environments and writing, leistering the sound of messages entrances, going to sites and webs by cleaking, getting a distributed universe of indexes lists of a variety of heterogeneous stuffs from a search line and back to our doc writing.
A first easy image to this phenomenic can be the notion of intrasensorial translations, tactile into the visual or as if through it, visuals into tactile or as if through it, to this point regarding multimediality, all the senses together, a kind of visible ephimerality. But this phenomenic goes so far away much more than simple intrasensorial translations.
We should be clear about that the time of this phenomenic is an inner time and the matter is a fractal matter, by the way, it is a kind of orbital or suspended time through which images seems to be provided by an eter, such a peculiar or unique form of images as presence. I am meaning here etter as the immobile aparience of an orbital presence, as a permanence, as another type of mobility, something like the harmony relation between planets in a constellation, earth in regard to constellations planets, earth in respect to the sun, an orbital time in which matters being in movement seems to be immobile as presence, by the way, the internet phenomenic is harmony and peace, a time of presence and a memory of matter, something remnant, something good.
Fractal matter, in fact, evolves a devolution of matter to its relation with inner time, something beyond fragments, fractalized fragmetariety, it is about matter back to aleatorial principles, visually, physically, temporally and logically and such a remanence of matter is a time of simultaneity.
It is all about tangible and intangible, material and immaterial in a same presence, in a same ontology. And we ask, how can something be in a same ontology tangible and untangible at the same time, material and immaterial?. I am pointing out here a pivotal philosophical question, it is at the same time physical and spiritual. All we are is in front of a mathematic of matter as computational technology, formal logic, cybernetics.
This are the new volatiles technologies, technologies of the new velocities of apparition, technologies of the new apparitions of presences, virtually presents and unpresents. An overabundance of sensation and perception. A new tecnosenso moving from computers to our bodies. The new velocities of fashion. A phenomena beyond hypertext. Oscillations, orbitation. Simultaneity of presence. Redundancy of presence. Ephimerality is a pivotal notion to understand both sensoriality and impression in regard to matter and the visual about this phenomena, something looks to ephimeralize in the same constancy of matter and visuality, plasticity, ductile, laxity, another corporeal, another intensity of matter.
Is it an orbitant?. It is an abstraction of form, without doubt, an abstraction that supposes an abstraction of relations or relations which evolves and supposes ludricity as relationality, affect, affection, affective relations.
Electronics stuffs. A phenomena retaining something about electrode yet?, beyond diesel?, something as a virtual water?, something about an old impressive memory of celluloid in how presence appear and aparience?, why this ingravid appearance of presence of an image at the internet not appearancing essence?, is it presence?, is it present?, and how is it?, a resemble?, something apparently?,
It is a miniaturized event.
Something without substance or with less substance, technology vegetarian copulations.
It is a mutant without doubt and is alive
Something muting
Should we develop a linguistic of the mutants?
An this remarks looks regarding substance a transubstantiation, to evoque a Kristeva recurrent notion in her book The Sensible Time.
Our visual impression on a matter ontology ephimeralize while it is going through as if inside a whole sensorial spectacle to our eyes in just processing programs, openings, closings, recordings, transporting, linking, clicking. Regarded here is our memory on how something arrives to presence, on how something come into sight, come out, grow, begin, turn up, develop, become visible, materialize, look as if, surface, occur or happen This in regard to our sensorial and visual memory and impression about what a presence is.
Sensorial suscitations
Formal Logic, Cybernetics, again and again…
Oh, miniaturized event!
of matter and soul, matter and inmaterial, tangible and intantible, relationality and spirituality.
It is not about absent in regard to presence, not about the invisible but instead about the overabundance of visibility, as much presence to all our senses at the same time that it goes beyond hipereality
Kristeva uses the metaphor of Ojarazcas
Ojarazca mean a layer of a confiture, a dolce, but it evoques also the vegetarian consistence of a paper page and a leaf
A technology vegetarian phenomena?
Are we leafed and papered in the virtual?
How about the relation between moving and complexioning, going and being back, sending and bringing, oscillation and playing, continuity and simultaneity, how about our means on texts, on perceptions, on developing and retaking, between what we are doing and what is happening?, how about writing on this electronically visual surface connected on?, how about writing on such a surface?. how about a doc as such on this pages?. Something here is being foulding and unfolding, it seems like disolvences in video and film, when something as a sound or an image seems to be dissolved from a plane to another, from a form to another at incredible velocities and accelerations.
Dissolvences evoques it, but it goes beyond dissolvences
Something lacking impression of aparience of presence of essence?, not exactly, it is much abundance of presence, of appearance of presence not in the sense of an apparent presence, but in the sense of appearance as the presence of presence here abundantly overcoming our sensorial impressions of presences of presence
We usually recognize in our body the sensorial memory of a given matter and we know which sensorial memory correspond to a given matter, but we ask about this phenomenic why it seems to be under a sensorial impression which is characteristic of a given matter that sensorially we consider in experience as corresponding to another matter we visually recognize?. Should we assume, according to our sensorial memory of pre-given matters the idea of several impressions of various matters ontology going through just one matter, the one which is visually tangible as unicity in Benjamin terms?, layers?.
It is extremely real even ultrareal and absolute in presence and seems to be a sobreimpresion of presence, both, in the sense of impressions of the senses and in the sense of impressions as the repetition of printings as repetitions of presences
Vestiges of virtual memories
It is something beyond superposition, juxtaposition and montage.
Beyond holographic impressions of presences
A whole memory on arrivals to presence
My Microsoft Word page is appearing now as a memory of a paper page
The idea of the hipereal was related with overimpregned saturations and this phenomenic is certainly the opposite of saturations, it is not about a surface of saturated grains.
In Spanish leaf and paper sounds phonetically equal, hoja
What it means to us to be leafed?
Should we ask on ourselves evolving everything according to a leafleting of pages, windows, clicking, opening, closing, bringing to margins, making appear something
It is the opposite of a phantom appearing inexistent
Conceived, Composed, written and created by Abdel Hernandez San Juan In English and Spanish, (translated from Spanish to English by Abdel Hernandez San Juan English)
©Abdel Hernandez San Juan, All natural rights reserved by Abdel Hernandez San Juan, The Author
Bibliography
Bergson Henry, Duración y Simultaneidad, Ediciones del Signo, 2004
Derrida Jacques, Form and the Wishes to Say, Notes on the Phenomenology of Language. Margins of Philosophy, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, EUA
Kristeva Julia, El Tiempo Sensible, Editorial Eudeba, 2005
de Certaud Michael, The Practice of Every Day Life, The University of California Press, 1999
The Presentational Linguistic
©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan
The privilege of the present, Gegenwart predomine yet Parmenides poetry, Legein, noein, the present under the form of persistence and permanenships, something nearly, accessible, available, affordable by the gaze Vorhandenheit, a presence presenting, apprehended in legein and noein according to a process to which a temporal structure is a pure presentation, maintenance, reinen: Gegenwarttigens, the one who exist, the existent only shows itself in presentation, explained and comprehended by a present, captured as presence in the present of a pure presentation, as ousia
Jacques Derrida, Ousia and Gramme
Written in English and translated to English
by Abdel Hernandez San Juan
In the world we are living in everything is presentation. Long time ago, in introducing persons to persons, books to readers and art works to collectors, presentation was a mise in scene, today, however, surrounded by new technologies as the internet, medias, designs and publicity, presentation is becoming the horizont of all our environments evolving all our relationships between texts, images and environments. If you are walking in New York avenues and looks around, everything surrounding your turns is presented, frontages (frontispiece, façades), sidewalks you are on, publicities, street lights, everything evolving your body immersions through sensual, dynamic presentational forms, overflowing landscapes confines, the whole city horizont, even the fast coffee paper glass in the car at lunch or dinner presents itself outside as printed texts/images on surfaces, your fast food paquet, your sandwich and everything around, libraries you entrance and corner shopping stores, everything is being presented.
In this presentational world, however, something scarce being insufficient, there at libraries and books stores, our own books linguistically theorizing and philosophizing, objectifying presentation and ourselves in it. Are we clear about what a presentation is? how can we objectify The Presentational Linguistic?, it is maybe so near to our senses?. What is a presentation in language level?, now, in our internet age, when everything is presented even at home, presentationalism, presence and phenomena?.
We are experiencing today a new sensorial age of presentationality evolving as ever our sensorial bodies in new forms, and our everyday rituals, presences and phenomena’s being more than simple a mise in scene, a let me introducing you, a nice to meet you, a see this program, a product, a book or a piece of art. Notably to be presentational a language doesn’t need necessarily to present as something literal, it can be presentational without explicitly presenting something but by the ways what is present is presented in presence and certainly also, presenting something in new forms as can be sensorially and visually perceived at the internet.
However we will steel seen and discuss modalities of the presentational also in the linguistics of television, film, high land art and performances art too. Carnap, Berthan Russel, Wittgenstein, Jacobson, Saussure, Benveniste, Hemslev, Sapir, demos their theories since early xx century using language sentences and phrases as examples, a subject and a predicament, but they never imaging a philosophizing of language which instead of sentences basis subject and object a technology reality as given and ungiven to our senses, when a presentational linguistic being a phenomena of language evolves, more than denotation and referenciality, the presenting of worlds.
Instead of traditional sentences as “Robert is walking on the park” or sentences evolving our performance such as “wait, I am back soon”, “hold up my bag” Austin use to “On how to do things with words” I would like to show how the presentational linguistic evolves our immediacies senses in a form that goes beyond performatives even if they are not necessarily excluded. Not only confined to reference and detonate realities out there our languages also serves to present worlds and ourselves in it presenting a world, a publicity, a product, a poster, a catalogue, an exhibit, a web, a cyber site, a television program, books, objects and merchants in stands, showlesnnes and many things presentationally unfolded, releases, etc.
Something scientifically out of questions, we need today to improve to new potentials and avenues our theoretical developments and explorations on presentation in the technology world of everyday life. I am presently committed to discuss it. Without excluding performativity but moving beyond it, we should pointed out that we never receive the presented without a presentation, in a few words, the presented seems to be present as presence, it is what is present in presence since it was presented, but being or not explicitated, perceived, redundant or tautological in the presence of the presented, presentation itself continues overthere yet, sometimes redundantly obvious so in a form that we can distinguish both in the same, the presented and presentation, sometime not much or even apparently not there, presentation always stay and the present presence of what is presented suppose to be under a presentation given to it material reality, coseity and overall redundancy of language.
The Presentational Linguistic should be defined by this redundancy; it is defined by the relation between what is presented as it is already a present presence and presentation as a redundancy of presence that presents the presented and presence the presentational present of a presentationality order. This redundancy of presence between the presented and presentation opens a series of interesting questions in which the phenomenology of language stay under a phenomenology of technology, of tangibles and untangibles, of matter and the inmaterials, stays from the moment a question on sameness comes to the front, how can the presented be a presentational presence in presentation and not only something presented by an external useful presentation presenting it to us as by first time tollsfully?.
Can we figure out a relation between two presentations?, the one which present and another one in which the presented being a present presence is being presentationally steel presented in presentation even when the moment of presenting seems to be not explicit?, should we imagine a presentation similar but not the same one, meaning a simultaneous and before one so external as presentation to the presentation in which the presented is being a present presence or should we figure out only one presentation in several moments of redundancy?. This phenomenology of technology in the pregiven to our senses world of the internet technology environments is also a question on language, a linguistic one. We will seen also, however, forwards, how a performance, especially in the arts, but in general, consist precisely in presenting presentation, presenting the presentational.
A big dimension publicity on a simple product, a lotion to the skin creaming a sensual woman feminine body printed poster, a library metal stand unfolding academic and commercial books in sales and/or offers including prices to a sidewalk walker, a client, a citizen, a potential consumer explicit the same principle, what is presented as a present presence is being at the same time presented by a presentation which more or less explicit is given to it the presentational form it have. The Presentational Linguistic will be then more or less explicited, a redundancy of presentation that can be more or less accented in several forms. A publicity as such may include for example a continues slogan identifying a publicity company that promotes not only such a product but several ones regarding skins or woman publicity models, for example.
Supposing that you are currently reading an exhibit catalogue text, the text itself can be more or less referential to the exhibit in question, it can be more or less about the works that you can see exhibited on walls, it may directly afford inside contents the fact of being as present texts the one which presents the exhibit as a whole, the artist and its pieces in several forms, explicitly presenting it, we are today introducing to our community the works of such a valuable artist, calling attention on the fact that the presented is being presented in presentation by the spatial and temporal indexical and deixticals, such a pieces titles, such an occasion, such a gallery in question, the city, etc, or it may just assume the presentational provided by being as text in a catalogue as such becoming just a poetry or an inspired text, so indexically defined by being a catalogue text, presentationally, instead of deictically reference or denotate.
The Presentational linguistic suppose a set in which text and image seems to be distributed, disposed, located and placed according to a relation between the present presence of something presented and a presentational form, also present and presence when a redundancy between presenting and being presented becomes a factice, fatic and conative, (coseided) ultra/sensual ultra/reality abundantly overcoming our immediacy senses, especially when presentation stay or subsist under the presentational of the presented.
We may mostly discuss good examples at the internet. Our so-called web or cyber site we have front already clicked and available provides us something as a window letting us navigating offering itself all we need to a whole trip among texts and images presentationally available. Coming from a search line (as words to be find) a world of presentational indexes is being listed as an unfolded and displayed number of optionals, transporting us further to new sites and webs by which texts and images are again and again presentationally distributed on a surface that may be itself more or less explicitly also presentational evolving the present and presence of presented things presentationally displayed as affordables and availables.
But a cyber site may includes also publicities on the site itself, for example, in a form given to us at the same time the presentational indexes we are looking for, present and presence, and the redundancy of a presentational publicizing provided by the server on the server we are navigating through defined itself by certain kinds of windows, recognized by graphic design and colors in a form redounding the presentational, that vehicles the processing of bringing thing to present presented presentational presences, of making it affordable as a visible settings, as a set, probably to the moment the only one we have to clearly visualize out graphically a presentational linguistic.
Clicking we can navigate according to presentational linguistic figures such as “bringing something to a format”, when texts and images are called to a précised affordability formats of visibility, “going to furthers or forward toward something”, when the moving of a whole set is being replacing and replaced by another one displaying a new setting of cibersites, “moving through something’s else’s” among, within or begin but always betweens something and something, looking for, visiting, itineraries, etc
As I tell before nothing is better to visually and graphically objectify the deepest logic of the presentational as already generally explained than the fractal and cybernetic principles of the internet, however, we steel have a major, pivotal question about sameness and externality that is asking to be explicit first in language being discussed around more simple at least less complex modes of technology to then be back in the internet one. A television program example will provide all we need to figure such an issue expressed in a more simple form. I am thinking here about a program we are washing on TV sporadically interrupted to display publicities on it and then late on anything to be back again through a similar process, from general publicities to publicities on it and back to the program settings.
We are going to some commercials, hold on a moment stay sit, we are back in a minute, entrances to some advances on what is next after commercials, entrance disolvences from the program setting to visualities and sounds steel coded as such the program now providing program publicities commercials on the program to disolvences exits to the channel commercial publicities on such the program and general channel commercial publicities back then through disolvences from general channel publicities to channel publicities on the program, to the program commercials on itself to ending interruption back in the present presence of the presentational program settings. In between we usually recognize program sponsors and channel sponsors to the program kind as we also see the protagonist presenter.
We will seen however some interesting similarities between The Presentational Linguistic as discussed at the fractal and cybernetic principles of the internet and presentationality in general language specially in looking out both redundancy and sameness, sameness and externality as also in regard to presentation, present and presence. A first similarity is about an amazing relation between The Presentational Linguistic and metalanguages that can be explicit in general language and is steel transformed but not logically absent from the abstract formal logic of the internet, being certainly not exactly the same phenomena in language, but distinct, we will give an advance in saying that a presentational linguistic at the fractal, cybernetic order of the internet is the only form of subsistence of something as a metalanguage, in a few words, there is not exactly metalanguage at the internet, but only a presentational linguistic by which the principle of metalenguage subsist to a certain point diluted inside Presentational Linguistics.
In general languages, however, from alphabetic languages, writing and speech, to more simple technologies a clear distinction appear conceptually, formally and visually becoming obvious about Presentational Linguistics and Metalanguages, they are similars and compatibles to certain working levels, and the relation itself opens a field of unexplored questions in philosophy and linguistics, why are they so similar?. A first similarity between The Presentational Linguistic and metalanguages, and a similarity between presentational linguistics at the internet and in general languages, is about being languages having another language about which as horizonts, first, a language which capability to be a language itself is about being related to another language needed for it to be a language itself and second in both cases the relation between a language A, (optionally a Presentational Linguistic or a metalanguage) and a language A1 in case of being a redundant moment of the same language, (sameness), or language B, in case to be another language, (externality), is fully defined by being a redundant, tautological relationship.
They are heterogeneous, distinct phenomena’s, but compatibles and similar in such a regard, but let extend a letlee more before about redundancy and tautology. A Tautology means an abstract, non literal, but formal, as in formal logic, repetition and evolves two main things, a self relation of a language and a self relation of a concept. In tautology a language A without outsiding a language A 1 or B, (sameness or externality), but defined as A1 or B in respect to A by a metalinguistic principle of being a language on language, open a metalinguistic level without exit the language it is or by which it is defined itself as a language something that seems to be the same now in terms of presence looking to be simply another moment of the same language becoming then as tautology redundantly metalinguistic. By the way tautology invites us to think on metalanguage as another moment of a same language and to ask if there is such a language without having another language as main horizont, meaning on language itself as a metalinguistic complex, diverse and highly diferenciated phenomena.
However a presentational linguistic being redundant and tautological is not defined only by being a language on language, but it is defined overall by being a language that far to reference or denotate a reality, (including the reality of another language or moment of a language as reality), presents something, presents a world, a reality or a language as reality, it is a presentation and presentation itself evolves tautology in a very distinct form, a form evolving the relations between presentation as the form of language by which the presented is present and presence and presentation as present presence and also presented by a presentation that present presentation and presence the presentationality of presentational presences presentationally as phenomena. In Presentation the tautological moment works presentationally and it mean a substantial distinction between tautology in presentation and our frequents regard to tautology as the recursive returns of concepts to concepts, there is of course, also a return of concept to concepts in how presentation returns to presentation present and presence presentation, as there is also in theorizing it as I am, but there is not in presentation itself a necessity of a first representational concept to which tautology return to conceptually accent redundantly an initial representational concept.
In frequent tautology repetition and redundancy follow a form itinerary that describes a concepts return on concepts, this tautological return is vehicle itself through concepts meanings to accent or emphasize something at the level of meanings in a first, initial, representational concept. We should figure out or imagine having a concept A representational itself, defining here representational as word by a concept of meaning, a content level as a distinction of concept A from a pure formal logic concept, a number for example, can be a concept without a defined meaning. Further, language A in which representational concept A is being or placed will come from the conceptuality of concept A and will tautologically return to itself always through meanings or synthesis of implicit meanings to accent or emphasize something of such a conceptuality. .
Non representational and at least in some modalities less representational, The Presentational Linguistic will not be redundant and tautological according to or through meanings and contents. Instead of a metatextual return of language A to Language A through the representational meanings of concept A to concept A according to synthesis of contents, with The Presentational Linguistic concept A is a non representational one and the redundancy of tautology will work returning to accent and effazice only the fact of being itself as language a presentation, to accent the media of itself, media, form, matters, and rhetoric’s, a non repetitive form of repetition, a non identitary redundancy, a tautology of matter, a redundancy of presence and presentation presenting a reality of language, a world or something else, presenting itself even as presentation, a tautology of medias as the medias of languages, a virtual recursive, something as saying, I am the media of such a language, a presentation, a Presentational Linguistic.
Let tray some examples in our high art poscage experimental languages, high art performances, film and cinema but not without remembering a classic example in our plastic arts world, the one of Rene Magritte painting This is not a Pipe. Magritte classic painting included only two elements, a biggest painting of a pipe as an image in the whole painting format and a simple writing text in painting down margins This is not a Pipe. By including the word pipe in the down margin text and this is not in regard to a pipe which is what the painting shows as image, the text level is being tautologically a redundant, recursive repetition of the image level, this is not a pipe, but this is a painting will be the pointing here, the text is here presenting the media itself of painting and text, saying this is not a pipe, this is a painting, the image is presenting to us a pipe, but this pipe is not a pipe, because a representation of a pipe is not a pipe but a painting, a media itself, however, the presented here at the level of image meanings denotation, is a pipe, but is a painting so not a pipe, so the text is negating both representation as a representation of a pipe is not a pipe but a painting and also presentation, because a presentation of a pipe in painting is a presentation of painting as the media of painting.
We are certainly clear that Magritte painting is not exactly a presentational linguistic but it shows nearly a principle that seems to be necessary to understand also to understand The Presentational Linguistic. Being an example of a performative critique of representation, Magritte painting is simultaneously saying a representation of a pipe is not a pipe, but a painting, a media, negating a frequent identitary ideology of representation that given representation as the identity of the represented. Certainly we can say that Magritte painting is also saying, this is not pipe, but a representation of a Pipe, but why saying this is not a pipe?, obviously not to assume so easily the identitary ideology of representation that given representation by the identity of the represented, so negating representation at the same time.
We know that the image as sign denote, reference and codify what we by convention recognize as a pipe, but the media of such a painting of a pipe is not a pipe, but a painting, a matter, a media itself, something negating an identitary relationship, the question here of course is about the being of it, the ontology of it, if this is not a pipe, even being recognized as such by sign convention, then, what is it ontologically?, it is simply a painting, a media.
Can we say that in negating the ideology of representation as identitary can we assume Magritte painting as a Presentational Linguistic?, well yes and not, yes because as I tell before as in Presentational Linguistics Magritte painting is tautologically redounding in the media itself in which the painting is being done, as I tell before tautology in Presentational Linguistics works to show the media itself in which presentation is being a presentational phenomena, and not because in saying this is not a pipe, Magritte is negating not only the identitary ideology of representation but also presentation. Any way it serves to our issue, and it is by the way a clear example of performative procedures.
Let move now to more art examples imaging possible performances but not necessarily performed, meaning ideal modalities, like typified potential kinds to then discuss several real examples in modern land art. Let goes through created phrases “as ifs”.
Phrase I- In Third person of the single
- Mr M is moving a honey container in space emptym (spilling) it over a milk container
As obvious this phrase can be a description of something happening in everyday life as any other activity in daily life may be done by someone. But let ask some questions, is Mr M showing how honey can be mixed with milk to get it as dolce as possible flavoring it as if with sugar?, to whom is him showing it?, is him alone at home simply cooking his breakfast or a lunch to his girl friend, to his son or simply to a visiting friend?, or is he doing a basic class of physics to students in an school or simply letting know about the ecological properties of a unique, exclusive honey and of an organic unique milk as in whole foods, maybe doing a publicity to some product including honey and milk?, like a commercial promotion to a corporation that sales both honey and milk?.
Well we already say that Mr M is a visual artist doing an art performance so we should suppose he is not alone having not only us as readers but an art auditorium looking to what he is doing?, all the information I given before as questions is immediately becoming inside Mr M as a presentational linguistic, Mr M is presenting an art performance, a series of elements and gestures, his art performance looks to be simple, a short simple activity, but here the art gallery or exhibit space function as the presentational linguistic, there is not obviously necessarily presentationality in Mr M activity according to the ontology of what he is doing itself if we don’t have an information providing us all we need to understand Mr M performance as art, this example, classical as ideal type about the issues of polisemies, multiple interpretations and ready made in art, explicit, as in our previous example of an inspired poetry non referential text to an art catalogue, here the presentational is being defined by the gallery as a white cube.
Let hear how it sound in a First person: In this moment I am moving in front of you a honey container in space emptym (spilling) it over a fresh milk container.
Let now see an opposite example steel of an ideal performance, now the performance will include and transform the issue of presentationality in a motive to an art performance on it.
Imaging that we are in a high art museum space and we can see a self defined group of artists in the same space we are specting to see showed art pieces, an art gallery exhibit space, but the art performance begins and it explicits to us the group of artist unpacking their pieces in front of us, are we in the wrong place?, why are they unpacking their pieces were it supposes to be showed, exhibited, presented to a public?, are we maybe in a conservation room inside the museum surrounded by specialists on pieces technical and physical conditions after transportation?, in a room of restorations?, or instead, are we being invited by the artists to be part in a process of museography montages, just exactly when they are showing their pieces to a museographers or even before, are we in a curatorial setting near to a moment when artist seems to present their works to the exhibit curator or maybe a sailing room of art pieces as merchants is near to happen?.
As I tell before we are simply enjoying a performance that consist in making the presentational moment and presentation itself the motive and issued question.
Let see the phrases both in thirst person of plural and in first person of plural
“The artists are moving several packages canvasses unpacking it at the art museum in front of viewers”
“We the artists are moving several packages canvasses unpacking it at the art museum in front of viewers”
And what is a performance in art if not precisely the presenting of presentation?, a performance always present presentation, it consist in it in several forms and modalities. This typical example sometimes include empty canvases being painted in front of the viewers or even the artists painting their bodies themselves, a modality that remember Ives Klein performances on canvases including naked woman’s painting directly their bodies and then pushing it on canvases by just printing their own bodies as feminine naked bodies clues and indicial gestures of process late exhibiting the used blue matter and colour on vitrines.
However, there is not in our high art world a best example of presentational linguistics as in Land Art.
In Land Art the art work presented is defined by making the work a presentational present that is presence as a pure presentational phenomena and some time, in some land art cases, a presentation of the presentational that makes the presence of the presented a presentational presence and sometimes issuing it, land art in fact epitomize from our high art the main principles we have previously discussed on The Presentational Linguistic.
I am thinking here about Walter de María greater’s extensions on earth and landscapes such as infinity lines on earth, especially Christo packages of bridges and art museums, Richard Long, Robert Smithson
In packaging a whole art Museum I am presenting the presentational museum of art that consist in presenting art as a packaged work of art, what is presented is here a presentational linguistic and what present the presentational is about what is frequently presented, a piece of art, commonly presented is being here presenting presentation which is simultaneously a piece of art, the tautology becomes infinity but it is always about the principle itself that related presentation and the presented as presentational recursive, tautologically and redundantly presentational. This formal logic of christo being abstract is also the same one that works and explicit the presentational logic of any land art, land art itself consist in making on it the main motive of exploration and research going even to outsides fields and natural terrains and landscapes, to present the presentation of a presented presentational presence that goes around it, In Packaging 500 cubic meters of earth sailing it to the finaltial market I am presenting 500 cubic meters of earth and I am presenting the presenting of it as an art consisting in presenting 500 cubic meters of earth and sailing it to the financial market, yes, this is just a line crossing the earth landscapes, I am presenting it to present a presentational principle that consist in how crossing earth with a line presents a work of art that consist in crossing earth with a line. Using here the first person as the as if of unwritten but logical phrases accompanying or implicit to Land Art demos and demonstrations.
However, the performance theory critique field I has initiated and opened according to this developments is an unexplored field of possibilities that extends to more complex theories of performances as for examples in nominalistic performances around pregiven areas of reality such as introducing some elements around selected fragments exploring ephemeral relations between text, matters and images, relations between maps and territories, maps and cities or site specifics such as my own interdisciplinary developments in communities, descriptions of a pregiven reality, narratives around objects and objects relation to memories, relationships between contextualizing and descontextualizing, cuttings on pregiven and experiences, and/or reflexivity continuity, this are all heterogeneous modalities of what I already discussed, ready mades, or Gordon Matta Clark, for example, site specifics between outsider natural settings and arquitectural, urban ones, as I also did since 88 to currently 2005.
There is also a typical performance about a woman artist walking 40 minuts discalced around repetitions of the same activity again and again, combed and uncombed (peinada y despeinada), walks on the could gallery flour, on a sand gallery delimited area, moving her things from one side to another putting it inside something in the gallery space, it is all about also modalities of The Presentational Linguistic too.
But The Presentational Linguistic is also related as a rhetorical matter to language as configuration, it is also about an articulated relation between elements composing a sequence begin editable and reversible, cut here and paste there, putting this with this and something with something, a rhetorical artilugio
For example imaging a film beginning with a first person monologue being hear as a voice in off, listening as a voice in off, we ask about the voice, the Thought of a subject that we steel don’t know who is?, but which we are going to know after?, immediately nexts or at the film end?, someone who experienced something that is going to be showed to us as the film plot, as the telling of a story?, or at least a one looking from an hexotopic point of view who will always provide us with a sense of the films aesthetic whole? or best even imaging the beginning of a film with any fragment, one taken aleatorially according to a logic we relate to ends, from the moment it is placed to beginning it, it can become a Presentational to paradigmatics.
Composing, editing and configuring plots according to decisions on sequences, before and afters, how’s and forms, rhetoric’s and performatives suppose also always presentational linguistics, it is a memory and sometimes a virtual one about that a language itself as present presence displayed, distributed, unfolded, listed, indexed, etc evolves a presentational reality that is also a reality to language and language as presentational reality of something else.
Being not exactly a presentation but being only in and according to presentations, how can a presentational linguistic being and not?, being a sameness, an a metalanguage without an exterior to language?. To reduce to a minimum expression performance tendency to redundancy, something I already discussed with my concept of non repetitive repetitions, how can a Presentational Linguistic be both a principle at our advance high internet technology in everyday life environments and in general languages and a virtual phenomena?.
And this is all about the becauses of certain kind of current artistic performances, particularly at a literacy level in plastic art writings I has also incursioned, and in poetry too full’s in exploring and researching the potentials of freedom in writings creative performatives:
So the girl have a milk container and is combed and she dress herself
A simple sentence written on a page advancing to a next phrase as such
Dear reader what you are currently reading is simply a performance and let me present you the elements,
Everything only written
This milk container, (The phrase)
And an image as such
A milk container can appear yet printed at the center perimeter of a page, only that image
Turning up to next page,
A dressing body (only the phrase)
Who’s body is dressing? (The phrase)
A metaphor allusion to writing? (The phrase)
A Hair combed, (the image)
This book, (the image)
The minutes passing, (The phrase)
Your not showed book, (The phrase)
Have you confessed about your notes?, (The phrase)
Some silent minutes, (The phrase)
Timid too?, (The phrase)
And everything at the internet 24 hours at home, (the visual image)
Elusive in recursives, the relation between performance and the presentation of the presented in presentation maintains performance and presentational linguistics in an space that we has defined specially in United States as a critique of representation impetus in Anglo-Saxon world, performatives are at the same time as we know ethics and critics
Conceived, Composed, written and created by Abdel Hernandez San Juan In English and Spanish, (translated from Spanish to English by Abdel Hernandez San Juan English)
©Abdel Hernandez San Juan, All natural rights reserved by Abdel Hernandez San Juan, The Author
Bibliography
Derrida Jacques, Ousia and Gramme: Notes on Sein and Zeit, Margins of Philosophy, The University of Chicago Press, USA
Derrida Jacques, Ousia and Gramme, Pp, 63-102, Márgenes de la Filosofía, Catedra, Teorema, Serie Mayor, Madrid, 1989
The Eclipse of the Eye
©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan
Written, conceived, composed and created in English
by Abdel Hernandez San Juan
When Aristoteles, a major classical philosopher to us in art since fine arts begins from the very beginning with obligatory ancient Grieg’s, defined to discuss his logical tractactus there was not yet a clear, well defined distinction between subject and predicament as a sentence matter, the subject which was in fact already considered in Aristoteles logics, was still considered as a function of syllogisms, to ancient Grieg’s logic and logical analysis in general, was related with and subordinated to yet a sense of congruency that was not much being comprehended within a formal and structural abstraction of languages, but by common sense derivations from logics of affirmative and negative assertions.
If A supposes to go all the way to his house, there is a way to his house. A may be then be a person because usually only person goes to a house, but not a dinosaur, because a dinosaur maybe goes away but not to a house and a dinosaur can just broken a house, only a person uses to go all the way to his house, so A may more probably be a person, even when we still don’t know if certainly dinosaurs really existed or if that was just an invention of Hollywood genres or a certain effects of adventures genres in natural sciences imaginations.
This fun explanation simply explicit in a few words how logics worked to ancients, the subject was not yet recognized as a formal abstraction of the sentence which helps us moderns to extend the syntactical roll of the subject as a general abstraction that helps to relates elements with qualities, the chair is being transported to another room, the chair is the subject, transported to another room the predicament, adjectives to pronoms, the chair is good, the chair supposes not to be a subject out of language but it is a subject to the good as an adjective which qualify how the chair feels.
In ancient thought, the subject was still a function outside language just as a someone who uses language to something else and logically related with sentences by affirmative and negative common sense implications, only a sense of congruence versus incoherence, sense versus non-sense, maybe linked and seen from today as a modern revisitation, relate modern formalism with ancients.
Grammatology, for example, relates in gramatics with such an aspect, if it is grammatical then it is coherent, if it not coherent or makes not sense, then it is not grammatical, there is also an interesting, unexplored and undiscussed relation between ancient logics and contemporary sociology, when we fully read Alfred Shurtz who was the first one who proposed and created a phenomenological sociology, we can see a subject in everyday life who works out of language as a function and to whom language, given to sociology, goes from and through experience, acerbos, backgrounds, repertories, tipifications, significativizations and pertinences, also Junger Habermas in his Theory of Communicative Action I and II understand sentences as enunciations in terms of intersubjective forms.
The modern syntactical rol of the subject which becomes as abstraction almost diluted within infinity formal relations between qualities and things, adjective and substantives, the email was amazing, the morning light is great today, has being the basis to modernity, civilization and evolution, but beyond just a matter of sintaxis abstraction which still works like early xx century machines, compared to current technologies, the modern dissolution of the subject in abstracted formal logics was a necessary condition to the formal logics creates computers and fractal technologies, it helped makings fasters the velocities of inferences and deductions and as results all the mathematical and cybernetic formalism and informatics creates the acceleration and success efficacy of modern technologies congruency.
Modern grammatology in facts worked with the subject already diluted in abstract formal logics inside language as a formalism and beyond sintaxis fasterly given subjects by elements and revisiting classical philosophy from ancients to contemporary in a way which moved philosophy to be with highest precision an exact science as explicit in Jacques Derrida and Junger Habermas, a simple concept, like the chair, the email or a morning light maybe simply the subject.
Anyway, this issue basis the eighties debate turn to the nineties about the death of the subject, a complex and exhausted debate since all the Lyotard philosophical theory of discourses regimes and about the differences between languages genres, artists versus lawyers, lawyers versus medics, medics versus informatics ingeniers, informatics ingeniers versus economists or business managers, business managers versus journalists, journalists versus administrators and all them versus politicians, basis in the prevalence of the subject as he clearly demonstrated exploring –something I defined as domains exchanges-- in the confines of the given subjects, the philosopher as artist, the artist as philosopher, the prevalence of the subject, by the way applies and is needed to any exploration of the confines of givens in the given confines toward the ungiven horizonts, from interdisciplinary and transdisciplinaries, to specialities and expertises domains explorations, communications, exchanges, cooperations.
Of course any valuation of the needed subject after the eighties debates on the death of the subject, should be completely retheorized as I already did in my book The Subject in Creativity, considering all I has explained before, also.
Who is the subject in creativity?, it may be me, it may be the computer softweres to navigations, it maybe designs, it maybe be the business one, it may be any of us exploring confines, it is abstract logic and supposes the already discussed when ontology dilutes in epistemology as computers are, but it is alive in another ways and in another sense, nor a subject death, it maybe in the theory of practice, the curator of exhibits functioning in the structural logic of practices or it may be art exploring social sciences or social sciences exploring art, it maybe literature and literacy, it maybe writing, in fact, its objects as usually object to subject is here being in marketing, it works in and out daily and is current and proper phenomenologically in the three senses of the subject, the ancient one functioned within common sense syllogisms, the one stay outside or inside in another sense to the everyday life world of phenomenological sociology or Habermas intersubjective pragmatism, and the one prevalence abstract formalism diluted at Derrida grammatology and Lyotard as ifs of the philosopher as artist and the artist as philosopher, Duchamp as well.
The philosophy of the subject in fact evolves a few more things to be considered, first science as a subject and art as a subject as there is not possibilities even to explorations in the confines of disciplines, professions and specialities without retheorizing the subject as I did at the subject in creativity, evolves also a primary, pivotal prevalence of the subject in the basis of any epistemology as knowledge itself needs a relation between subject and object, nor only as a matter of pregiven object or constructive object to the subject knowledge, but also at any phenomenological processing of the given world of nature and society to the impressions, senses and perceptions including the eye we later will seen.
The point in question I want to call in this paper is about a research on the point of views in free markets I developed, research and discussed. There is the whole eighties conversations between Junger Habermas and Jean Francois Lyotard mainly accent and effazis theorizing capital versus state, free markets versus state.
While the subject evolves the theory of the state as althusser clearly pointed out when he said that the state interpelates ideologies and awareness, conscience, as forms of the subject there is not a fix or constantly defined notion of the subject as one with itself to free markets and capital given that free market and capital evolves a process of continuum exchanges in which the position of elements is being defined by exchanges itself, saling, buying, business commercializing and or marketing.
Even when this exchanges may evolves also abstractions of space and time maybe defined as diluted subjects like within the formalism of computer formal logics as forms of a syntactical subject just like relations between elements and qualification may be seen as subjects to the accelerated fast inferences and deductions of computational processing, the financial system, for example, or simply the relation between values and credits, the subject in free markets is not already working in the sense of subject and object relations, nor even according to interpelative forms of ideology as form of the subject.
The object to the subject in free markets is the object of saling and buying, the object is being exchanged nor perceived or received by the passive body memory of the senses, there is, of course, a moment of perception in free market as there is also aesthetics in market, but this moment of contemplation as explicit in publicity is regarded not to a passive object as objects are usually given to the impressions or to the passive objects the subject creates as the object of knowledge constructions. Subject and object are the subject and the object of exchanges. There is not in free market a fix point of view to stablish a fix position to the subject, to the object of the subject and to the subject of the object, the whole idea of points of views is itself being relativized in free market.
One cannot define in free markets a fix or a constant position to an eye even to an abstract eye, the position of the eye is being eclipsed itself within free markets, who knows and perceive in free markets?, who defines the privilege eye?, the vendor?, the vendor is sailing something but he may be waiting his whole life a purchaser to his sales, if you don’t have a free market exchanges process of merchants you can’t not figure out a possibility for the vendor to sale it, the vendor becomes the object of the purchaser and both vendors and purchasers are at the same time the objects of merchants. There is not in free markets “an other” to “a self” or “a them” to “an us” or to “a we”, who is “the self”?, the vendor or the purchaser?, the distributor or the merchant?, the exchanges?.
The concept of exchange supposed to describe a certain activity to the figuration of spacial and time meetings of sailing and buying, vendors and purchasers but as you all well know exchanges in free markets are not reducible to the point the actors meets, who is “the us” or “the we” in free markets?, the vendors or the purchasers?, who are “the them” to “the us”, or “the us” to “the them”?, the vendors?, the purchasers?, the financists?, the business managers?, the distributors?, the publicists?, the merchants?. Let supposes a position, a cream lotion product to the skin, a beautiful woman is being here as an image a model at a merchant publicity, she appear at the bottle product etiquettes, at magazines, at posters within the city, any were the product is being in sale, is she “a we” to “a them”?, or is she “an other” to “a we”?, who is being “the we” when she is “the other”?, or who is being “the other” when she is being “the we”?, she is not the vendor nor the purchaser for instance, maybe she is a girl friend of the product owner, let imagine that, then she may be “a we” to the owners of the industries of cream lotions bottles to the skin, and vendors and purchaser “the others” to her and the owners.
But there is many other industries sailing cream lotion products to the skin with different woman models already in competition in free market so that maybe to another owner she and her boyfriend owner maybe “an other”, who defines the privilege eye?, who embody the privilege eye?, product owners, publicity models, vendors, purchasers, consumers, the banks?, the financial system?, walt street?.
The eye should be completely retheorized. This retheorization of the eye applied to the eye in general any were the eye appear as paradigmatic.
Certainly there is a moment in neoliberal capitalism of full free market in which the whole free market progresibly becomes illustrated, I will even define neoliberalism as the turn of free markets advanced capitalism when free markets culture and society commit to illustrates free markets itself, here all the eighties and nineties literacy on business managing, market control of quality, how to successful improve a business, attention to the client, markets nichos, illustration of group dynamics inside an empresarial organization, in which the dialectics of illustration is being fractalized and redistributed inside the logics of free markets as a new culture of free markets qualification services, the born of a new culture of services applies to the general logics of both empresarial organizations, freelance independent professionals, free markets actors such as vendors and purchasers, corporations and companies, but this neoliberal turn of attention of the free market culture on itself resolves not precisely through a privilege point of views in free markets or an eyes solution, in fact, it required already an eclipsed eye and successfully worked through a new mixture of markets pragmatism procedures and illustration dialectics migrated from a sense of a civil citizen and communities educational vocations to the economies of free markets, it was the result of free markets subjectivities learnings on how to improve the success efficacy of free markets culture of services to take amazing advantage or vintage over the state, by self-providing free markets with a metaculture of illustrating free markets, something which, as we well knows also transformed assimilates many things from the nonprofit, volunteers, profitalics and philanthropy logic of the state, to the private sector of initiatives and procedures having definitive consequences in late capitalism, it was then the result of a conversation the nineties heritages from the eighties about the complex relation between theory of free markets, capitals and theories of the state.
To tell the true my idea, my concept, my initiatives, my desition and my creation to decide to conceive an ethnography of markets is more a mixture relates first with marketing as a market illustration of the market in terms of the fold turn out free market attention to free markets on itself and with the philosophizing of such a subjectivity evolving here all I previously discussed on the impossible point of view of any privilege eye in full free markets is being pivotal, there is then as mainfull subjectivity in my move and subjectivity evolves already nor a subject, but subjectivity and intersubjectivity and the only subject to subjectivity and intersubjectivity is a subject in creativity, by the way how may this ethnography I invented and created work as an unprecedent one, it haves a precedent heritage certainly in all I mentioned before about free markets on free markets and the eighties debates Habermas, Lyotard but moves far away from all that metaphors of the eyes and to the ideologies of us them or we and the other relations.
There is of course also markets of eyes nor only in prostetic shopping stores which literally sales artificial eyes to blinds or a one eye person, a wrong, or at hospital when organ donations operations helps people without eyes to obtain an eye from another person, and there was also the classical image of surrealism films earlier XX century when Buñuel after placing a she-ass over a piano and an actor similar to Jesus crist moved carefully carry away on the flour to the outside the piano with the she-ass over, he decided, as critical metacomment on the image level of cuts and sequences, juxtaposing or montage, to intercalate several times a clouse up image on an eye in the moment it is being intervened at the hospital operation room.
As I clearly stablished in my prospectus writings on my books I am not a socialist nor a communist, I am an neoliberal democrat in free market capitalism and as I clearly pointed out at my paper The Eclipse of Evocation there is not other even lacanialy nor in outside nor in the unconcient, the ideology of otherness begin at being crisalide as an invention of naming since renascence and Iluminism, here beginning by the christian concept of progimity and the only possible otherness between us is the otherness between nomadic forms of deterritorialized subjectivities, (here me Abdel my life as a Houstonian and texan, before as a Venezuelan and my cuban origin as a nomadic mixture, Surpic Angelini, a Venezuelan married with an italean of armenian phater and Anglo-American mother stablished in Houston), but also all the forms of deterritorialized forms of subjectivities evolves deterritorialized economies, transnationalizations, globalizations, etc, as otherness to territorialized forms of subjectivities defined by countrains of nations and ethnicities, and biseversa.
I am fully indeterminist in epistemology and sociology with only Bourdieu at Saussure, Structure and Practices on top to objective structures. There is not in fact any possibility to relations we and the others as otherness in general less in the sense of traditional anthropology or etnography.
Bibliography
Aristoteles, Logical Writings
Derrida Jacques, The Supplement of the Couple: Philosophy in front of linguistic, Margins of philosophy, the university of California press
Habermas Junger, The Problem of Comprehension in Social Sciences, Theory of Communicative Action, Beacon Press, Boston
Habermas Junger, La Problemática de la Comprensión en Ciencias Sociales, Pp, 144-196, Teoría de la Acción Comunicativa, Tomo I, Taurus
Hernandez San Juan Abdel, The Subject in Creativity, complete works, tome II, book, 2004
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.
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.
Bibliography
Bakhtin M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (University of Texas Press Slavic Series), 1983
Deleuze, Gilles Logic of Sense I and II, Columbia University Press, New York, 1990
Derrida, Jacques, Differaance, Margin of Philosophy, The University of Chicago Press, USA
Derrida Jacques, Differance, Márgenes de la Filosofía, Cathedra, 1989
Geertz Clifford, (1973). Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture, en The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, Basic Books, New York, pp 3–30. [Geertz 1973a]
Geertz Clifford, La Descripción Densa, La Interpretación de las Culturas, Barcelona, Gedisa, 1987
Havelock (1963-82), Goody (1977), Ong (1982) and Olson (1977-96), Writing and orality, Compendium, Canada
Ricoeur Pierre, Time & Narrative, books 1, 2 and 3) University of Chicago Press; 1 edition (September 15, 1990)
Tyler Stephen. “Post-Modern Ethnography, Pp, The Unspeakable, Discourse, Rhetoric and Dialogue in the Posmodern World, Wisconsin University Press
Tyler, Stephen A. Evocation, A Response to Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Sept 9, Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA, 1997
Tyler Stephen. 1986. “Post-Modern Ethnography.” In J. Clifford and G. W. Marcus, Eds., Writing Culture, pp. 122-140. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Twain Mark. Eve's Diary. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1906.
Restitution of Voice.
©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan
Written in English and translated to English
by Abdel Hernandez San Juan
Within the theory of knowledge the concept of performativity has been related to the position of the literal subject. If the subject of knowledge is defined by being in movement and the object of knowledge by the effects of such movements --been performed from the position of knowledge--, then the concept of performativity should be seen through the different positions by which knowledge and the objects of knowledge interact with themselves. While a way can be taken from research problems, another one is possible by defining issues and themes, asking questions, etc, knowledge and the objects interact themselves by different ways according to the position of the subject. On the other hand, the concept of performativity should be seen as related with rhetorics, the media of the discourses and the variability of the meanings which becomes performed according to the media of its presentation and representation, parole, oral speech act, writing, printed materials, slides, video projections, etc, the same text presented within such different medias can be a completely different text, modified by the performativity of the effects and the rhetorics of the media.
Also, beyond the variability of the meanings according to the media of its presentations, performativity and rhetorics relates themselves by presentational modes of genres, a poem can be read on a very serious form, a very serious lecture can be read as a poem, a paper lecture written as a letter, and its is not the same to said something on the same by the first person of the singular, than by the third person of the plural on something out there.
By the way the concept of performativity should be defined according to the genres of discourses, a relationship subject-object which become performed given to the generic triggers of the voice, articulatory forms of the voice. As the concept of performativity results of relevance to the theory of knowledge, it is, however, only one between many other concepts and performance itself is not necessarily something that we should do as additional to the performance that was already there, on the every day life of the quotidian. The concept of performativity and the concept of relation are, in fact, very different one to the other; they are not the same thing. A relation suppose to be a kind of interaction defined by compenetration, introspection, reciprocity and the mutuality of communication, mutual givenness, performativity, instead, is defined by been unexpected, sorpresive, interpelative and usually works out of the principles of compenetration, mutual
understandings and agreements which characterize the composivedness of relations.
A clear example of the principles of performativity can be the idea of someone who creates a response to something that has been said on the auditorium by the lecturer and/or by some other one from the public, some unexpected speech. The performative phrase is always integrated by a response to the meanings of someone another phrase which becomes the object of the performantive effect, something from here and there should be priorized according to the performative purposivedness and attitude as to create a kind of interpelative unexpected response. Within performativity subjects are not in the position of communication but of interpellation and sometime, the performative act can moves outside of our ethical principles.
We should then define a move beyond performativity which I will like to call and define as Restitution of the Voice as the voice brings us beyond the redundancy of performance and performativity. If performance was already there, performativity can be not more than just a redundancy of the same. To go out and beyond the performative redundancy we need something as non repetitive. As the redundancy of performance and performativity suppose to be a kind of repetition of the identity of the represented within representation, it usually work as a redundancy of identity, a kind of identitary redundancy, the usual idea of the speaker and/or the writer who should mention his country of origin and his original cultural background every time when is taking the word.
While performance and performantivy are redundancies of identity, instead of identification, relations suppose to be defined by identification. If we have a relation with basis on compenetration and on the mutuality of communication them we have a kind of identification between the people who are in relation, related themselves. To the redundancy of performance and performantivity identification is not sufficiently, they need something more than just identification, they need the concept of identity and the concept of identity is a redundancy. Within performativity and performance the subject is talking about Clifford Geertz, something, but making redundant his own identity, I am from, I come from and I am saying this or that because, etc, etc, redundant references to identity, something which redound as in the name of who, even when speaking in its own name his name should be a redundancy of some other represented "cultural identity".
The identitary redundancy which evolves the concept of - in the name of who - makes the act of speaking in his own name a redundancy on the identity of the whose name is speaking from, on and/or about. Representation then, as concept, become a redundancy of the performative redundancy evolved within the two concepts of representation, the representational and psychological one–with regard on how well represented is the woman on the painting, a matter of reference and reflex, for example—and representation as the representer, the idea of someone who represent some other one as a delegated.
They are all of them examples of the redundancy of identity by the redundancy of performantivity. If you are original from certain country you should need to said that only one time, to say something, to express yourself you can said it at the very beginning, I am originally from and/or I born, etc, one time and them you can said anything on anything as anybody from everywhere. If representation suppose to be different to the represented and by the way a principle of difference should work without repetition and redundancy to makes difference productive and productivity possible. The concept of difference has been, however, also exposed to the same performatic redundancy of identity. Only the restitution of the voice even within writing can restitute the productive and non repetitive principle of difference. From the relation between performance and parole—Austin and Searle–, to the Wittgenstein one on the common sense, including the concept of performance at the linguistic competence theory – transformational linguistic of learning – and the body art performance proceeded from the painting of gestures, performance is something that was already there.
To be creative and to practice critical conscience – even in unity with himself according to the ontology of the been--, the subject need difference, something that suppose to be related with some empty space between the given and the productive activity. Moving then the relation subject-object considering even the mobility of objectivity – is something similar and perceived among childrens interactivity when making clicks on any computer element, forms and color the openness of combinatory possibilities opens the relations subject-object to a free playing, the same can be exposed to different positions and perspectives impossible to be captured as objective from only one position, objectification then, should be priorized over the idea of objectivity.
As soon as assumed the mobility of objectivity the concept of textual nomadities comes to as primer matter, textual nomadities as the flux, fluctuation and refluxtuation of information as well as the regarding of any effects of contexts to parameters by which the variability of the effects of contexts flux’s and change according to the media of the presentation of text and images and according to the relation between texts and images among such population of textual nomadities, something that can be clearly seen between internet flux’s of texts, clicking of texts and images, the nomadism of constant texts variations and the constant inclusiveness of performativity as the inevitable position by which the subject can opt and click, stop and goes, makes responses to the unexpected when the surprises becomes from the flux’s of clicking and reclining both intentional acts of purposiveness and automata’s of responses, creative navigations and automatic accommodations of textual flux’s, individual itineraries and tendencies of the cyberspace.
The concept of can be seen as literal voice, but also as what can be read as voice on the printed writing material, reading the voice on the printed writing on paper, books, literary works as when writing been even stylistically writing maintains its relation with the alives enuntiated and also as the texturated grane which from writing one can perceived the legibility of the text as something always susceptible to be read on the printed material as the speechnees of the analytical author voice. The voice can be, in fact, the only figure to restitute the truly texture of the individual expressive speaker among such described situation of the current and today performance, performative and performed subject-object relations.
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