LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

these conceptualizations of indigenous life entail epistemic violence. Epistemic violence reduces indigenous life to superstition, magic, and irrationality.¹

      In its most benign form, the consequences of writing violence institute develop- mentalist tropes that place Christianity and its institutions as historical necessities within spiritual and material teleology. In its most destructive form, writing violence sets the moral and political scenario for wars of extermination. This would be instances of writing that exert violence, but they are often intertwined with writing about violence as in telling the stories of wars against Indians, in describing massacres, or in characterizing indigenous life as inherently violent. Having said this, I would add that Spaniards, Indians, and mestizos were particularly lucid in exposing the violence of writing in the colonial period. With the exception of Christopher Columbus’s Diario, the journal of his first voyage to America, which remains exemplary of writing that discovers, my examples will be drawn mainly from sixteenth- and seventeenth- century Mexican sources, but similar examples could be drawn from the eighteenth century and the Republican period, up to the present time. The current uprising of the Zapatistas in Chiapas should be conceived, at least partially, as an epistemic struggle.

To compensate, though also to complement the concept of writing violence, I will briefly outline the parameters for an echography of voice.² Literacy is most often opposed to orality as distinct realms that exclude each other. Thus writing would exert violence to the extent that it brings about the destruction of oral cultures. Beyond alphabetization and the transformations of speech brought about by the homogenization of culture through a written grammar, one often finds arguments concerning the ways in which written representation of oral discourse destroys the spontaneity and creativity of orality. Speech, like the gestures that accompany it, pertains to the ephemeral. They disappear in the flow of time. But in the same ways that one speaks of photography as capturing the real, one may speak of writing as the recording of voice, both internal and external. It fixes speech in time. It leaves the trace of what once was. The concept of echography would seek to explore ways of talking about the traces in alphabetical texts of voices that once were. If the photographic image can be manipulated, doctored, altered, one can also speak of the real that remains in spite of the changes. Recorded speech bears a similarity in that minimally it conveys an internal voice of someone who thinks that his or her representation of speech approximates what speakers would have sounded like. Alphabetically recorded speech also partakes of ghosts that are brought to life in the act of reading.

      Rather than assuming that writing by its nature stands in opposition to speech, one would have much to gain to observe the multiple definitions of writing practices. The ephemeral pertains to all mimetic technologies, whether they are alphabetical writing or live video recording. They mark the end of time in unbridgeable distance. There are, of course, ideologies that seek to domesticate speech or that pretend that only alphabetical writing is worth considered such. Schooling brings about processes of homogenization by implanting correct forms of address and grammatical regimentation of thought. The tyranny of the alphabet presumes that only writing can preserve memory and history. That pictography is deficient. But these absolute definitions and reductions of writing to ideology and prejudice must be complemented with an awareness that the processes of education and adoption of alphabetical writing form part of a two-way street, in which the subjects that practice alphabetical writing might very well have things in mind that the rectors of correctness and western hubris might not have anticipated. That is why writing violence must be complemented with an echography of voice if we are to avoid oppressive absolutes and theoretical dead ends. Otherwise, we run the risk of perpetuating claims to superiority and power. We should devise reading (as well as writing) strategies that would recognize as well as enable acts of resistance and transculturation.

      At this point I would like to raise the paradox implicit in the call to invent forms of writing, reading, or teaching (against) violence. The parenthetical “against” points to the agonistic dimension implicit in making manifest the ways violence operates in texts. Texts clearly carry material implications insofar as they may unchain terror, persecution, and torture (acts of war generally), but also consider the benevolent discourse that denounces all violence while constituting one exclusive form of thought, what in Spanish is referred to as “el pensamiento unico,” which in English would translate as “the only valid thought.” If “democracy” and neoliberal economic policies reign today, Catholic universality constituted a most lucid antecedent. Indians in the sixteenth century could not afford to refuse the acts of love by missionaries and bureaucrats.

      Writing that Discovers

Those involved in the exploration and conquest of the Americas were expected to write about their findings and significant events, and provide exhaustive descriptions of the lands and peoples they invaded. I prefer the term invasion to that of encounter in that the later often diminishes the violent nature of the exchanges, tending to suggest a peaceful gathering of cultures that examine each other in symmetrical power relations. This might seem a truism, but it must be emphasized that the explorers and conquistadores of the sixteenth century approached the native cultures they came in contact with the intent of subjecting them politically, if not by military means. This conceptualization necessarily entails asymmetrical power relations insofar as the indigenous cultures were oblivious to the conquering aspirations of the Europeans. In order to carry out this political objective, Europeans counted on firearms, horses, and the ability to draft armies consisting of thousands of Indian allies. But writing constitutes a technology that enabled Europeans to record information regarding natural and cultural phenomena, but also to create a memory of the expeditions. Over the course of the sixteenth century the Spanish crown devised a series of laws and ordinances, ordenanzas, which were intended to rationalize expeditions as well as to structure the communities that settled in appropriated territories. These laws were intended to systematize the acquisition of knowledge and to regulate the behavior of those participating in the discovering enterprises. Note that discovery is bound to appropriation to Spanish rule and that Columbus, in his contract with the Spanish crown, was granted the titles of Admiral of the Ocean Sea, as well as that of governor and viceroy of all the lands he would discover. Discovery also uncovers, makes manifest what had not been visible before, hence the insistence on mapping and description. Discovery in its most elemental mode amounts to the act of having seen first, in fact, of having reconnoitered the territory for the first time without actually visiting the lands and even less established settlements. Claims will be bitterly disputed by other European nations, who challenged Spain’s possession with arguments that only territories with permanent settlements could be considered legitimate possessions. Needless to say, for indigenous peoples discovery is a fraught concept, but we need to account for the ways Indians return the gaze of the intruders by which they circumscribe them to their worlds.

For Columbus the act of discovering is inseparable from taking possession. Writing in this regard does not just constitute an ideological justification of territorial claims and the eventual wars of conquest, it also constitutes devices for the appropriation of peoples and natural resources. Laws and the definition of religious motivations can obviously be unmasked as offering ideological alibis, but the question of ideology can also be pursued in the examination of the categories used in recording information. As early as Columbus’s first voyage, his Diario produces a textual place in which the new lands would be mapped out; indeed, he speaks of creating a new map of the world and of a detailed inventory of natural resources. His systematic recording of data and descriptions of the lands under survey continues to surprise us today:

      Also my Lord Princes, besides writing down each night whatever I experience during the day and each day what I sail during the night, I intend to make a new sailing chart. In it I will locate all of the sea and lands of the Ocean Sea in their proper places under their compass bearings and, moreover, compose a book and similarly record all of the same in a drawing, by latitude from the equinoctial line and by longitude from the west. (Columbus, 1989: 21)

      Writing the discovery entails a systematic ordering of the world on a blank page. It is a textual production that intends to locate the new lands within a new picture of the world. Writing has as its objective “to compose a book,” but also a visual representation that would “record all

Скачать книгу