The world correlate chapter 5 continuation

  The attention of Stephen to the worldneess of discourse is usually related with the analysis of the constrictions that made a text something clearly discussed in a beautiful paragraph devoted to the analysis of the constrictions of discourse between propositions and concepts, thus as between the author intentions and the text in his essay on India a point of order quoted in one of my books

  The fact that Stephen has assigned to evocation a place as determinant in writing and tropes, thus as to representation be adequate to what it represent, leads then to the point that evocation is not only relative to the ontology that made language possible, but also to the analysis of the internal logics of discourse thus that if Stephen said that tropes are not tropes when it is analyzed on the other hand leads us to the internal composition of discourses in between the parts and the wholes

    In fact to make work evocation within the relation between the parts and the wholes of a discourse is to make function the relation between propositions and concepts in a way exploring the constriction’s and the horizonts of sense that the text may evoque both in respect to its topics and themes, which patter the whole of the discourse, as in respect to the sense that closure the discourse as a whole and the sense of its parts

   Hence. on the other side, this awareness might be apply to our own discourses papers, essays and books, but also to the analysis of any discourse made by another’s. If evocation is at the same time that which habilitate and made possible language including writing and something that rule the adecuations of representation in respect to the represented it must be find in between our effective manipulation of language subjected to patters of language structures and the ontological condition habilitate it as possible on the other

   We should not forget that Stephen expressed that evocation fall out of the usual realms of epistemology and ontology while I think that this affirmation is related with nothing else than with the phenomenological relation between genesis and structure again remembering derrida paper on hurssel

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  But on the other hand it leads us to something I insist frequently, to the relation between that about which we have not yet a language and that to which we already have a language which toward us to a certain phicoanalytical issue, I see some relations between this psychoanalysis issue and the insistence of Stephen in the unwriteable, the unspeakable

  If language because of its own limitations offers a resistance given in its grammatical forms and constriction’s to the form of our previous wishes and intentions of expression such as when we want to express ideas, to pay attention to evocation might be also a form to be attentives to the relation between the wishes to say and the taking shape of language, again an issue discussed by derrida and as such attentive to how evocation might solve that problem in the composition of the whole of our discourses both in writing, papers, books as in speech

  And this may address us to a question, if Stephen assigned such an ontological play to evocation in respect to both what made possible language and what guaranty the adecuations between representation and the represented we must conclude that it is always present in all the moments of writing each time the relation become adequate so as to suppose then a variety of possible forms and then evocation must suppose the claim of a certain form to that relation so that it is about how are we write.

  On this regard Stephen focused my concept of non-repetitive repetition and affirmed that evocation is the concept propitious to work with such kind of non-repetitive repetitions

   The kid of this relation is defined as follow, on the one hand representation is never identical to what is represent and in that sense it is non-identical, meaning, non-repetitive, but at the same time representation is associated with the repetition of an identity so that the point of recognizing the non-identity of the repetition is in general unconcient to representation and shows its own limits, its is non-identical but function as if and regulated by a principle that forget that difference, forgetting differences is what made the fiction of the discourse of identity, in this sense the recognition of the non-identity is an overlined we perceive thanks to evocation, only through evocation we can perceive that representation is in defect or in excess and as such a critique of representation is needed, this critique of my concept of the non-repetitive repetition show us how evocation can solve the dilemma

   So it must allow us to deliberate how the relation between adecuation and non-repetitive repetitions must work in our papers and books, this are then the main territories of evocation

(…) Evocation can be captured neither in the duality of opposition nor in the separated poles of opposition that make the discourse of identity. Evocation is not then, a concept indicating the identity of an essence, positive or negative. We know it neither as an essence nor as the concept of an essence.

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

   One think here particularly of Gergen’s concept of the “fragmented subject” or of Deleuze and Guatari’s idea of the “deterritorialized subject”, and of their notion of “lines of flight” that characterize the constant differentiation of nomadic and hybrid subjectivities.

   Ït is nothing else than an analytic of the organization of discourse of oneself, the modes one have to deliberate in its books those things as well as an analytic on the discourse of any one, supposing thus also the hermeneutic and interpretation of it. Thus, this must leads us to a critique on tropes and symbolic forms in general in any discourse because although he say that analyzing the tropes is to be outside the effective function of it the analysis of it is evolved under its negation

The analysis of a trope is always after the fact and largely unconnected to its effectiveness and irrelevant to its understanding. If a trope has to be explained, it isn’t a trope. Evocation then, is not about tropes, except in the sense that tropes would be ineffective without it.

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

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

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

    I would like however to add that evocation is something distinguishible also in effective languages as already created outthere and of any kind, so that it can be effective within theoretical discourse as well as within visual and any kind of discourse, on the one hand there is evocation at the level of sense between the concepts and in concepts itself while there is evocation too outside propositional theoretical discourses as well

   In this sense I propose distinguishing between sublimes evocations and adyect evocation as both positives and negatives forms of it

   Sublime evocation let open the relations of sense between concepts and forms making possible the form by which such discourses close as wholes as evocatives, the relation between the climax of discourse and the aesthetics dimensions of it are in this case subjected to a sublime temporality in which harmony rules and domain the relation between the parts and the wholes in its orders, in the abject forms of evocation all the contrary, the harmony is broken, instead of semantic isotopies of co-currencies well organized between parts and whole in a harmonic and evocative form to play the senses in sublime forms, adyect forms are disordered or as Stephen say out of the effective voluntary control of its creators to generally become in a kind of disjunctive forms of fragments disseminations

   Now after calling the attention on the organization of discourse it is needed also to return and pay attention to the fact that evocation also work before and after outside language both between expression and language as between genesis and structure, in such a sense the idea of the semantic memory of the body and its pasheins as Stephen called it are of particular interest, the so-called embodiments and enactions when evocation work in the ledges of discourse or between the discursive and the non-discursive, the body and its semantique memory, the relation between being and becoming, the sublime of the quotidian, the semantique memory, episodic memory and the forms of zetesis so to speak remembering Stephen pointing

   What must be crucial at this point is our attention on the relation between subjectivity and objectivity around which we deliberate the relation between subject and object since we can work that relation in a form more or less evocative

   This specific issue evolving the body also allow us to consider it under research and fieldwork when evocation is not ever regarded to mere discourse

    Although in his analysis within some other of his essays Stephen is not generally focused in aesthetic issues as something to be discussed I would like to tell here that the worldneess of a discourse is always significantly related with its aesthetic, so that what Stephen defined as cocurrencies to understand the constrictions of discourse to examine the text as a whole coincident with the kind of question we should usually pay attention to comprehend aesthetics dimensions

    As I have discussed several times the aesthetic of something is always evolved within the temporality of it since our attention is on the how, only as we perceive the how between the present of a part and the sense of the whole, we perceive aesthetically whatever in the sense of taste or of more or less beauty, aesthetic and style are nothing else than also the result of the interaction between the how of the elements and the whole, it require of us a self-representation of time under it and how it is expressed in the mode the discourse or phenomena close

      In his essay Prolegomena to the next linguistic Stephen focused himself on the relation between presentations and re-presentations from the point of view he defined as remediations, this concept of remediation seems to pick up and be related with what he discussed in our philosophical dialogues as superobjetifications, but remediation’s is related with the relation between performance and terapon or therapy as well

   It is obvious that the repetition of the presentation evolved in the idea of re-presentation is already in a certain form a mode of representation, this tautological principle relates presentation and re-presentation suggest that the concept of remediation might be understand in the following mode

   If a presentantion represent from that moment there is already mediation the idea of remediation come to try to unveil how that mediation let allow a remediation, so that on the one side from the moment there is mediation in presentation remediation might be implicit in mediation being nothing else than a redundancy of mediation so to speak on another mediation which mediate the former one but instead that mediation is itself remediational in both senses of the words that solve and solution a problem and remediation in the sense that mediation is remediational

   Here we must pay attention to the major play of the concept of mediation in the logic of science as this logic was earlier discussed by hegel when almost all the concepts are nothing else that mediations of another concepts and when this mediation is precisely one of the main ways to solve contradictions or opposites, otherness and alterity between concepts that are inclusive one to the other but at the same time different in between, while there is mediation also not only between concepts but between concepts and ontology, at this level all the previously discussed on presentation, re-presentation, mediation, remediation may be defined in the following form

Presentation: is already re-presentation –a presentation is ever the re-of a repetition that re-present presentation, re-presentation as the repetition that made presentation is already mediation and mediation is already re-mediation

   But this although logically attractive in the science of logic among concepts dynamics of self and mutual implications reduce everything to presentation and not always re-mediation is linked to presentation

  For example, I discussed and theorized a form of anthropology highly environmental, but to be presented out of his places of developments in communities and villages, this anthropology is obligated—because of the kind of fieldwork evolved in it—to work with references to another anthropologists and archaeologies and as such intertextuality made that anthropology saturated of references far it from its environmental basis and source progresibly becoming unenviromental so losing environment in the pass by from experience in space to representation, from this point, remediation appear as a possibility to reestablish environment within the forms of representation avoiding the effects of intertextuality, such an entrance of remediation is remediational in the sense that it solve and solution problems in a form that might be called therapeutic

   It is a clear example of the play of remediation beyond only logical principles between concepts

    Thus in the field of sociology and anthropology were everything are not as in philosophy and epistemology regarded to relations between concepts remediation appear as a therapeutical concept

   Another example of remediation might be discussed among the universe and the world of technologies and medias were everything is already remediational without our usual attention while paying attention to it may considerably solve and help to retheorize and understand new avenues to the research between technology and culture as I have developed it in several of my books on modern technologies and culture, finally, we have the almost illustrative example I choiced to discuss in one of my book about a television program which present inside it the director of another television program as a redundancy that shows the remediation already evolved in mediation and so on the mediational dimension of remediation when the dialectique between presentation and the presented as discussed in my book the presentational linguistic are of a tautological, redundancy and therapeutical one nature

   However it is interesting to note out that while Stephen concept of remediation help to solve contradictions generated by the saturations of intertextuality at the same time Stephen himself have proposed from semiotic intertextuality in ethnography. I already discussed in the previous chapter of this book certain issues on this topic, a definition as such of Stephen intertextuality need a retheorization of the concept beyond literary criticism so as to be re-valuated from sociology and anthropology in new terms

      Intertextuality in Stephen is evolved overall at least from my point of view in the sense that his work evolved translating ancient literature from India, sancrit and koya and translation itself evolve to set aside and in between a variety of textual forms in an intertextual manner

      If we take a way of a distance from Stephen theorizations on the social order of India and instead pay attention to his analysis of indian cosmology we will perceibe references to phenomenas might be define as alosemiotics in relation with semiospheres something evolving in the case of india correlates of culture and subjectivity difficult to be seize in words and fulfill with relations between hermeneutic, culture and religion, I understand here the concept of cosmology in a phenomenological and semiotic sense near to the infinity semiosis of Peirce, Peirce himself in fact assigned to his infinity semiosis a certain sense of cosmology, a cosmology of signs so to speak

(…) Whether we speak in cold mathematical parables of the myths of modern science or relate those of ancient religion in symbols grown smooth and warm to the tongue through long and familiar use, still we speak a language of metaphor and only spin fables of the birth and death of the cosmos. Where we imagine a difference between the language of science and the voice of religion, the skeptic finds unity; and when we seek to abandon language altogether, seeing it as the last wedge of ignorance separating the structure of mathematics from cosmic order, he reminds us that this is only an ancient urge to compass the cosmos through metaphor and bend nature to analogy, that others have thought their vast, self-confirming systems of knowledge revealed the order of life in the order of the cosmos. Thus reproved, we little care if our object of analysis is a myth of modern science or of ancient religion, for we find in both the same structures of thought, the same dialectical movements, the same metaphors, and the same exalted pride that tempts us to see the order of things in the order of our language.

        (…) When we understand the problem in these terms we recognize it as the social reflex of a cosmo1ogical problem whose themes can be found in the earliest speculations in the Rg Veda and traced through the more sophisti- cated philosophical literature of later times. 1 refer here to the well-known lndra myth-a tale of combat belween the gods and demons for control of the life-giving waters which make possible the growth, development, and expansion of the universe. The demons want to bind up the waters, to prevent differentiation or expansion, and the gods of course desire just the opposite. In the later system of Siimkhya philosophy these symbolic values are inverted and the great aim of life is to prevent expansion, to return to an undifferentiated state (cf. Tyler 1973:71-73). The synthesis of these two conflicting solutions constitutes the body of thought that we have come to know as Hinduism. The quest for equilibrium, a dynamic balance between change and permanence, the tyo contending forces of the cosmos, characterizes not only the Dharma Siistras but the whole of Hinduism. What seemed at first a rather simple problem of the social order now stands revealed as a restatement of one of the most significant themes of Indian thought, or for that matter, of any thought, namely, "Can the cosmos expand infinitely without degenerating into chaos?"

     (…) If These things appear odd to the empirical understanding because they do not readily respond to material interpretation. They are symbolic values rather than material significances, and as symbols of an idea of order it is no more likely for them to signify its material conditions than it is for those conditions to symbolize the idea of order.

         (…) We better understand the symbolic order when we recapture it in the immanent forms of its expression-in the categorial and proposi- tional devices of language and thought. We thus constitute native conceptions by means of native accounts, and we know how the natives conceive of the world when we understand how they account for it in their accounts of it. We now know, for example, that the scriptural varna scheme is a means of accounting for jiitis, not only in the ~~stras but among contemporary Indians as well. The jZitis are homo- Iogously related to the varna categories and both are lexical structures exemplifying the same underlying logical principles (Dumont 1970:67-68; Leach 1967: 10-1 1; Tyler 1973:82-83). Dumont correctly characterizes this logic as one of sequential oppositions of dichotomously contrasted semantic features, the result of which is always a ranking of categories. This logistic system corresponds to a particular semantic structure known as a tree (Tyler 1973:82). What is not clear, or more precisely, what is left to the reader's intuition is how this static structure of features distributed across a set of vocabulary items (the names of varnas) entails a particular and definitive set of relations between categories. That is, "how does the formal semantic structure of a vocabulary set relate to anything other than its own formal properties?"

         (…) This The SZistric authors proceed by piling one homology on top of another, stretching the initial root metit- phor of creation to cover more and more conceptual territory, gradually bringing every aspect of the universe into a coherent relation. Underlying this structure is a dominating system of archetypal concepts consisting of key words and symbols whose interconnections provide the ultimate source of structure and whose extensions through metaphoric processes create new structures. AH ordered conceptual domains, whether of religion, science, literature, or myth, operate according to these processes of meta- phoric representation. Scientists and other ideologues share the same ultimate monomaniacal aim-to bring more and more of the facts of the world under the control of a guiding analogy or metaphor. None has yet mat5hed the coherence of the enormous homological structure erected hy the SZstric authors. It is both a tribute and a challenge to the human im- agination. If it is objected that the Indian solution to the probIem of order and change is either incoherent or unpalatable because it contemplates a cosmic condition that is neither ordered nor disordered, a great emptiness that is yet the ultimate source of all things, consider the state of contemporary thought, Modern science encourages us to believe that certain isolated systems become progressively disordered and that certain isolated systems become progressively ordered. The concept of enfropy thus calls for the development of disorder from order while evolution foresees order develop- ing from disorder. Are we to conclude that these two produce equilibrium, or are they conveniently in complementary distribution throughout the universe? Did the universe originate in chaos or is that merely its terminus? If order emerges from chaos, does this not mean that the latter somehow contains and engenders the former and that we may speak of chaos as the fecund repository of order, as the sum of all orders, as that totality of order which is not itself an order, but mereIy the possibility of it? Must we too, then conclude that all possible orders coexist, that past, present, and future are only illusory refractions of the timeless present?

  It seems to be a characteristic of Stephen generation in thought a certain esoterism which we might easily recognize also in the gillez deleuze of the logic of sense and the Jacques derrida of Margins of philosophy who explicitly speak of an esoteric in Aristoteles but beyond peircian sense of cosmology as well as this certain spirit of thus more associated with postmodernism the more attractive analysis of Stephen on India from my perspective are precisely those devoted to the symbolic analysis of markets

On the analogy of physics we focus on transactions that signify just the objective movement of things, forgetting that exchange may also affirm the moral basis of society.

  Transactions do not just signify~ the movement of goods, they symbolize mutual obligation. The objective movement of goods can only signify the fact of exchange, and because it thus implies nothing more than exchange, it cannot by itself reveal its meaning, cannot speak of what it symbolizes. We must distinguish then, between transactions that merely signify and those that symbolize. Thus, when an Indian farmer, from his hard-won crop, gives a traditional share of grain to the blacksmith who fashioned his implements of production, it is not just a payment for goods and services but an affirmation of a continuing relationship which recognizes the fixed pattern of statuses and symbolizes the performance of mutual duties. His act symbolizes the moral obligations of the social order. It symbolizes dharma in both of its senses as duty and order, The mutually implicated acts of the farmer and the blacksmith are simultaneously expressions of their respective duties (dharma) and affirmations of social order (dharma).

  Significantly, economic transactions are but one of the many possible settings in which these group relations may be symbolized. The giving and taking of food, the exchange of women in marriage, precedence in ceremonies, patterns of respect and deference in speech and behavior, and performance of religious observances serve equally as appropriate settings.

  in the Dharrna S6stras nothing is more clear than that the moral or cosmic order (dharma) dominates the economic and social orders. This view contradicts our notion that "business is business," the predominant presumption distilled out of the historical circumstances of the Western experience of the industrial revolution.

  We first see this conception of society as a transcendent unity created by transactions between egoistic atoms in our idea of the market, and we trace this purely cognitive transformation of the idea of the market from that of a concrete locality to a transcendental abstraction in the writings of proto- economists of the eighteenth century who both effected and documented it. In its earlier concrete form the market was simply a neutral place of ex- change, the brief meeting of strangers solely for the purpose of handing over natural goods, goods which had not been culturally transformed, which had not become symbolic.

  They were places set aside, immunized as it were, from the surrounding culture-not just secular places, but places of pure objectivity. They were concrete localities where objects of one kind came together in exchange for objects of other kinds. They were meaningless places where disparate groups could meet without incurring moral obligation, places where citizenship, persona, and soul could be forgotten. Be- cause they implied amorality it is not surprising that they should so often have been associated with carnivals. Fairs were, and anyone who has in his youth walked a midnight midway can affirm that they still are, both places of exchange and settings in which everyday morality is temporarily set aside. Fairs, and early markets too, combined exchange with the atmosphere of a carnival.

   This leads us to ask: "What then is the basis for a metaphoric identity between exchange and sacrifice?" There are several, such as for example, the giving of gifts (cf. Tyler 1973:164-165), but more importantly, both sacrifice and exchange imply something about the transformation of one thing into another, the assignment or reassignment of meaning. The root metaphor for this whole process is the idea of creation, that original formation of order out of chaos, that first transformation of the natural world which changed it into a meaningful cultural world. I am suggesting that this process of establishing order out of the disarray of natural phenomena constitutes the basis for the homology between sacrifice and exchange in general.

Stephen A Tyler, A Point of Order, Rice University studies

   Thus all this leads us to the focus of Stephen on the quest for solution avoiding the constrasted relations between subjectivity and objectivity something about which we coincident

The active form in sentence one emphasizes the incorporation of the other into my subjectivity in the manner of Descartes or Hegel or Schelling. It characterizes, in other words, the general priority of subjectivity and identity in Western philosophy which converts the other's difference into my identity. In contrast, the passive form in sentence two emphasizes the incorporation of my subjectivity into the other's objectivity.

The subject disappears into the system of signs, into language. This theme occurs in variety of sources, ranging from Blanchot's "I do not write, it writes" to to the more conditioned phrasing of Heidegger's "language is the house of being"(1971:132), but is probably most effectively represented in the works of Derrida where the self is relegated to a kind of illusion of authorship and intentionality. The self is simply in the system of signs, already implicated and provided for there. It is not outside in an exteriority where it could master the signs and govern their concatenations in the fullness of creative spirit. According to Derrida, every text is a double text, but only one of the two is the object of classical interpretation, which always favors presence, meaning, reason, and truth. The second text is never deciphered, but is made at least partly available through fissures and traces in the first. Every reading is thus a double science in which there is no fusion of the two texts into a single, unitary reading that would surmount or resolve all the differences between them. In effect, the first text is only itself-as-other , its own simulacrum. The veil of difference between the two texts signifies both difference and non-difference, which is an identity indistinguishable from the Hegelian identity of identity and non-identity. When difference can thus become identity and identity difference, no one can decide if this is difference or identity. The outcome is undecidable, and no one can master this duplicity.

    The third thematization of the other is the middle. It is neither subject nor object and corresponds more or less to the grammatical idea of the middle voice in which subject and object mutually implicate or act inseparably on one another. Derrida, for example, claims that différance is akin to the middle voice. The suffixance in différance is neither active nor passive, nor the action of an agent on a patient nor of a subject on an object., nor does it derive from the positing of these as its sources

 (1982:9). This conception of the middle voice differs from most purely grammatical accounts in that it does not posit subject/object, agent/patient, source/goal as existing prior to the action or operation in which subject and object are mutually involved. What the Derridian middle voice says is the non-priority and non-separation of subject and object. Somewhat different is the nomadic subject of Deleuze and Guattari which is constantly being deterritorialized and reterritorialized. It has no permanent character, and no necessary attributes. Always at the mercy of others, the nomadic subject is a structure that is constantly crumbling and remaking itself as the functions of its components cross-cut, overlap, and diffuse over infinite lines of flight that propagate new rhizomatic structures. The subject oscillates between radical difference and radical identity, preserving itself (its past) even as it leaves itself behind when it thinks infinitely of the future, but this preserving repetition is not the return of the same through the reiteration of identity. No experience can confirm a single, substantial self as a totalization and as a cause of its totalization. Repetition is understood instead as the production of difference (1994:207-212). Despite all the talk about difference and the nomadic, non-identical subject, Deleuze is still primarily concerned with the subject as a starting point. His critique of the subject merely dismantles the subject in the same way the Hegelians dismantled the object. Note, particularly in this context, that he locates difference not between the representation and the thing, but between faculties of representation, between the faculty of concepts and the faculty of intuition.

Stephen A Tyler, Them Others- without mirrors, rice university May, 1995