Infiltrative Inscription

At fairly regular intervals, it seems, I find myself returning to what we might call David Olson’s “originary prose scene.” I’m referring to that place in The World on Paper where he models the cognitive transformations wrought by literacy. To recall: Olson locates the difference in writing in the representation of the speech of others. In an oral culture, if you report the speech of another, you would simply imitate the manner in which that person said it; and presumably, put your own spin on it at the same time. So, if you’re reporting the speech of someone who who was himself reporting on some imminently dangerous situation, you, in reporting his speech, would speak in an urgent, excited manner; meanwhile, if you though he was exaggerating the danger or its imminence, you might include that in your restatement by exaggerating the urgency of the speech (and you’d have to know how exaggerated you’d have to be to convey to your audience exactly how exaggerated you consider that person’s concern to be). In writing, if you want to convey the other’s tone along with your assessment of the tone you have to do so with metalinguistic markers—the other “claimed” (thereby distancing yourself from the “claim”), he “exclaimed,” “contended,” etc.

My main interest here (and Olson’s too, pursued to its conclusion in the more recent The Mind on Paper) is the development of a metalanguage of literacy comprising all the discourses of the disciplines. These discourses, which purport to observe and describe scenes without intervening, can therefore be traced back to their scenic roots. Every word that we use that can ultimately be traced back to the natural semantic primes “say,” “think,” “see” and “hear” and so on, which is to say, the discourse in which all of us conduct our intellectual lives, can all be “redescribed” as stances and actions on a scene. But what scene? We’ll get to that. I first want to remark on something which I’ve never really discussed, which is the fascinating, if implicit, portrait of an oral cultural Olson suggests here. If repeating and reporting the words of others always entail imitating the tone and, we can assume, gesture and posture of those whose words you are conveying, we’ve got a representation of a social order that is a constant theatrical production. Each member of the group must inhabit dozens of identities daily—imagine the skill in mimicry each must develop as a result. If we consider that the words of ancestors, the recently dead, and whatever divine beings govern the community from the ritual scene, our picture becomes even more, let’s say, extravagant. No one could really have anything like an individual identity—each would be an articulation of all the voices channeled, and each would presumably come to be identified more with certain voices than with others.

Olson’s implicit portrayal of orality confirms my own sense that the earlier we go back in human sociality, the more directly and comprehensively mimetic humans must have been. The emergence of language and the human as a result of the deferral of violence in the mimetic crisis would not have reduced the mimetic propensities of the new species—quite to the contrary, in fact. The sign itself only “works” as a kind of meta-mimetic gesture, since it’s an imitation of the aggressive, appropriative advance toward the central object while also needing to be imitated itself by all members of the group, but this time in a deliberate, knowing way. The emergence of language and reality would reveal the power of imitation to the new group, and quickly increase its members’ mimetic capacities. Replaying the originary scene over and over again in the form of ritual would further intensify mimetic tendencies, which would also lead to new forms of mimetic crisis, requiring further variants on the originary, now ritual, scene. Imitation, confrontation, resolution and commemoration of the resolution in a new name for the object, action or place involved in the cycle would be a rapidly repeated “rhythm” of human interaction. The introduction and spread of declarative sentences (almost certainly a very early development) would curb some, more intense (for us, if we could see it, psychotic) forms of imitation while facilitating others.

Writing, then, which, as Olson also insists, is bound up with the study of the declarative sentence in particular (words and words within sentences had to be represented, and how to do so with signs representing individual sounds was no simple matter), i.e., an originary science of language, distances us yet further from these mimetic intensities. But perhaps, like the creation of the declarative sentence, writing facilitates yet other modes of mimesis and commemoration. The alternative to this assumption would be to accept what we might call the ideology of literacy, according to which the “liberation” from mimesis allowed by writing leads to such things a “free thought,” “individual conscience,” “open dialogue,” and so on. Olson’s originary scene of prose helps us to see where this ideology would come from. (Here I’m returning to some familiar territory.) Following Turner and Thomas’s study of “classic prose,” Olson contends that writing creates a scene, implicitly oral, which the writer allows the reader to join him in viewing it from the outside—the best seats in the house, we might say. (An inferior writer places you in the cheap bleacher seats.) The classically constructed prose scene is interested only in providing a clear view of the scene that anyone might observe equally—“clear” in this case (and, not coincidentally, in the view of most of the writing instructors you’ve had) means that nothing in the writing draws attention to the writing; instead, all attention is directed toward the scene, leaving the prose transparent.

But (and here is where I’d like to push the inquiry further), the scene upon which prose opens up cannot be a genuinely oral scene, the intense, unremitting mimetics of which would be unrepresentable, even with the metalanguage of literacy. Olson starts with reported speech which means the representation of an other scene, with a clear demarcation between the two—the circulation of speech across scenes, which can only be kept from constantly erupting into new crises by the especially severe mimesis of the ritual scene (where everything must be done in just this way for the scene to “take”) cannot be represented from the externalized scene of writing. (Maybe this kind of completely oral scene is something like what Antonin Artaud was aiming at in his “Theater of Cruelty.”) That’s why everyone on the scene presented prosically (I don’t want to say “prosaically,” which has a meaning I don’t want to invoke here) is him or herself a speaker of classic prose, even if “defectively,” in the interests of “realism.” This is a large part of what I think Derrida was getting at in his notion of ‘logocentrism”—this phantom oral scene upon which writing is predicated, whereas writing is really only representing its own scene of production and emergence. The “clarity” of prose effaces this elision, and all of the very powerful mimetic energies brought to bear upon producing the writer and reader (here, we are talking about years-long, rather rigorous, repetitive and “denaturing” educational practices) serve to enable this effacement: the standardization of orthography and grammar, along with often tacitly and unintentionally imposed models of prose, which one could see the cultural and civilizational necessity of.

Turner and Thomas, and Olson as well, can say pretty much exactly what they mean by “clear prose,” which is a lot more than you could say for about 99.99% of the people who will demand clarity in the writing of others and complain bitterly when they are deprived of it. “Clarity” is pretty much an “I know it when I see it” phenomenon and there’s a lot one could say about the “historical” and “cultural” context enabling every reader of a text to imagine (and prove to the satisfaction of others?) that they all occupy the same scene with the writer and each other, but I think the notion of clarity can be dismantled with one simple gesture: it can only work if you only read the text once. As soon as we reread, which we do because, at the very least, we’re not sure we’re on the same scene with that text as others, or even ourselves, and we turn it over in our minds (already a kind rereading), and when we do, we start to notice the “devices” that make the prose transparent (tricks, really, passed down from writer to writer, i.e., imitated, learned from how-to books on writing or from copying models, etc.), at which point we are on a very different scene. And once you start to think that you’d like to write something that might be reread, discussed, reread again, in different contexts and for very different readers, then you’re thinking in terms of “density” and “resonance” at least much as you’re thinking in terms of “clarity.”

Let’s also recall that Thomas and Turner locate the origin of classical prose at a very distinctive historical moment: the prose of Descartes, which is to say, at the origin of modern philosophy. This makes sense because both philosophy and classical prose concern the immunology of the declarative sentence—philosophy would be complete once a complete set of sentences, irrefutable in themselves and completely inter-referential amongst themselves, would provide for a replacement of “natural language.” Classic prose would disavow such totalizing ambitions but what would it mean for all sentences to be “clear”? We would have classic prose representations of classic prose scenes all the way down. And the only thing wrong with that is that you must be forbidden from rereading except under the tutelage of the expert in prose who measures your “understanding” of a given text against the universally shared and certified reading and finds it to be deficient, in which case rereading the text is merely a matter of getting the first, authorized and only needed reading right.

The alternative or, to recall the much-lamented post-structuralist prose endlessly denounced as “unclear,” the “other” of classic prose is the insistence on the continuity of writing with the “excessive” mimesis of orality. As those old-time postructuralists liked to say, every utterance is a citation, which is no less true in a literate world, and perhaps far truer in a “networked” world, than in the oral world. To be Cartesian for a moment, is not citationality self-evidently true? It’s best to assume that we’re always trying to say the same thing as everyone else but everyone else’s attempts to say the same thing as everyone else along with the infrastructural conditions of bringing what everyone is saying into alignment so their reciprocal sameness can be attested to pose obstacles to doing so—obstacles, though, that can never be accepted as insurmountable. So, your prose slices and hacks its way through tissues of prose brazenly asserting that this is what you’re all saying—I’m just citing all of your attempts to cite all the other utterances circulating in the inscribed world.

Citationality in originary terms is “commemorability,” which is inscription, which is prior to “clarity.” This involves contributing to the building of automated systems of imperative exchange, which we can think of in terms of “affordances,” which as Jenny Davis points out in her How Artifacts Afford, are bound up in (what I could call) imperative [including interdictive] language: affordances “request, demand, encourage, discourage, refuse and allow” (a very rich imperatival vocabulary of insistences, urgings, limitings, etc. is to be assigned inscriptive correspondences). She’s speaking of technology, of course, but writing is a form of technology, and creating affordances is what “prose” should be doing—requesting, demanding, encouraging, discouraging, refusing and allowing are also the language of ritual and prayer. Writing is also making yourself citational, which means that writing articulates inscription or scenic design with singular succession—writing has always been about immortality (it is noteworthy that the first phonetic writing was created for inscriptions of statues with declarations of the emperor, so that through endless repetition the emperor’s claim to greatness would live forever in the voices of readers of the inscription (of course there’s the other hypothesis that the first phonetic writing was invented by slaves for inscriptions—graffiti—in the only possibility for communication in a multilingual population with creolized speech and no access to institutionalized forms of writing—but this would just be more desperate bid for immortality)). Nor can we, as Justin Joque in Deconstruction Machines: Writing in the Age of Cyberwar insists, separate writing from programming at this point. Programming is writing instructions that are to be carried out be machines so as to provide for affordances for people who, one way or another will be doing their own programmatic writing that will interfere with your own. So, writing is turning the commemorated past into instructions for future activity, deriving requests, demands, suggestions, interdictions, and deferrals from inscriptions so as to sculpt a mold for successors. And in that case, the best source for deriving this imperative architecture is from the molds that were involved in your own sculpting which, it must be acknowledged, we come to participate in only in its last, but still crucial stages.