i. Derrida's critique of the primacy of speech
Jacques Derrida's Of grammatology (1976) provides the chief impetus for the perspective from which I read the writings on the /Xam narratives. This work, particularly the sections on Levi-Strauss and Rousseau, offers crucial insights into the different forms of western interest in people such as the /Xam. Crucially, too, Of grammatology, contains an enquiry into the distinction between nature and culture that has framed the way in which critics such as Roger Hewitt have read the /Xam narratives. Derrida's work, as I will show, suggests reasons as to why there should be a bias towards the interpretation of the /Xam stories as stories of origin.
It links the phenomenon of othering to an ethnocentrism that plays itself out in apparently divergent colonial and post-colonial discourses, discourses which
include writing about the /Xam and other "bushmen." This line of enquiry has been pursued in the works of thinkers like Gayatri Spivak, which show how the
discourses of the enlightenment and humanism have inscribed within them a rationale of European difference from and superiority to colonial "others." 69
The separation of speech from writing and the privileging of the former over the latter is, as Derrida shows, an overt theme in the works of writers like Rousseau and
69 Spivak (1976) translates Of Grammatology into English and contributes a long preface to it.
Levi-Strauss. The assumption, however, that speech is closer to "reality",
"presence" or "truth" and that writing is supplementary and derivative underlies much of the western intellectual tradition, maintains Derrida, and has invested this tradition since its beginning with a metaphysical predilection, which he terms
"logocentrism." This "metaphysics of phonetic writing", Derrida states at the outset (1976: 3), constitutes "the most original and powerful ethnocentrism", one that is central to the intellectual history of the west. I will investigate the presence of the sort of ethnocentrism identified here by Derrida in later chapters when I discuss the writing on the /Xam narratives that concerns creation tales and the trickster, with whom the /Xam Mantis figure, /Kaggen, is regularly identified.
Logocentrism sets up a hierarchical Platonic or Gnostic structure in which absolute presence is progressively diluted as it assumes the form of concepts, words and, finally, the images of words that constitute writing. In terms of Saussurean linguistics, maintains Derrida, the signified is interior while the signifier, which is derived from the signified, is exterior. This system of linguistics relies on a transcendental signified in order for "the difference between signifier and signified to be somewhere absolute and irreducible" (20). The voice is proximate to the signified. Writing, the preserve of the signifier, merely represents speech. It is alienated from presence, to which its signs can only gesture. Logocentric thinking is characterised by a nostalgia for the fullness of presence and a desire for a
"transcendental signified", a signified that contains a meaning that is beyond signs.
Language itself gains its self-assurance and its guarantee from "the infinite signified" which seems "to exceed it" (6). God, nature, truth and the self have all assumed the role of the transcendental signified in different western epochs and in different philosophical discourses. With seventeenth century rationality and nationalism, for example, "absolute presence is constituted as self-presence, as subjectivity" (16). I will argue that the /Xam and other "aboriginals", conflated
This transcendental signified is not always made explicit. It often forms the unspoken premise of this type of thinking.
with nature and pure presence, function as transcendental signifieds in certain
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discourses.
Derrida shows how the nature of language renders the quest for absolute origin or for fullness of being and presence impossible. By Saussure's own logic, meaning does not reside in an ideal, presence-filled, pre-existing realm but is generated
79 •
through the relations between signs. This means that no sign is pure; it always carries the traces of all the other signs. This entails not only a spatial relationship of difference and relationship, as Saussure describes, but also a temporal one of
deferral. Meaning is never absolutely present, fixed or univocal, as it was understood to be in the theological "age of the sign" (14); it is always postponed, always unstable. Speech and writing both participate in this motion of difference and deferral, which Derrida terms "differance." Both speech and writing rely on an interplay of presence and absence rather than their opposition. All signification arises from this interaction between the properties traditionally imputed to speech and writing.
73Speech and writing participate together in the semiological order.
All language "is writing as the disappearance of natural presence" (159). There is
71 Cf. Wilmsen (1989): "Bushmen" or something similar had to be invented to satisfy the "idealist search for human authenticity" (187)
7" Much of the analysis of the narratives, in my view, is premised on the supposition that meaning does indeed reside in an ideal, presence-filled, pre-existing realm. This is particularly apposite to the reading of/Kaggen as the /Xam representative of a universal type and to the designation of the stories as mythology.
73 This insight is contained in the title of Brown's study of South African oral literature, Voicing the text (1998), which contains an important section on the /Xam materials. Brown (2006: 22) argues that the separation of orality and writing is a false division which obscures the fact that a form of signification such as rock art "uses an 'alphabet' of symbols, signs, colours, shapes and images in making its meaning, and which demands intelligent 'reading.'" The activity of tracking "requires decoding, involving the analysis of signs in context, the creation of hypotheses, and so on: the same cognitive processes as reading printed texts."
no "thing in itself that is not already a representation (49); there is no unmediated knowledge. From this it follows that "We think only in signs" (50).
Writing, in terms of the move by which Derrida extends the term to societies without writing in the conventional sense, is the name of the gesture which effaces
"the presence of a thing" and yet keeps it "legible" (Spivak 1976: xli, preface to Of grammatology). Derrida uses the term arche-writing to refer to a semiotics that embodies this understanding. Speech is then considered as much a play of signs as is writing and is seen to precede the speaker in the same way. It is not, as in the logocentric view, a revelatory expression of an inner substance "The text belongs to language, not to the sovereign and generating author" (lxxiv). A writer (and a speaker) participate "in a language and in a logic whose proper system, laws and life his discourse by definition cannot dominate absolutely" (158). This is a view whose implications have important consequences for the reading of "oral"
narratives, as I show in the chapters that follow. While critics who read the narratives as timeless myths miss the role of the narrators and the way in which stories participate in specific processes of cultural production, a contrary approach that overemphasises individual creativity misses, in my view, several important characteristics of the narratives, namely their textual and discursive properties and their ability to deliver meta-commentary.
Significantly, in terms of the parameters of this study, Derrida turns to anthropology, in particular the work of Levi-Strauss, to demonstrate the consequences of separating writing from speech and investing the latter with presence. In Tristes tropiques (1961), Levi-Strauss expresses the belief that his introduction of the idea of writing to the Nambikwara has corrupted the immediacy
The very process of perception is itself a kind of inscription since "the workings of the psychic apparatus" which receives "stimuli from the outside world" are "themselves not accessible to the psyche" (Spivak 1976: xl).
73 See chapter 6, section iii, for an elaboration of this point.
of their existence and the purity of their ways. Where before they knew only speech, that almost unmediated secretion of the soul, they have now been introduced to the artificial order of writing. Levi-Strauss believes that he has initiated the Nambikwara's fall from presence and innocence. Not only does he enter the mode of Christian confession and guilt, he also reiterates the terms of
"Christian creationism" and its appropriation "of the resources of Greek conceptually" (13), in which the sign is linked to an alienation from presence.
Derrida argues that the terms nature and culture, so central to Levi-Strauss's readings of myth, are separated in terms of a metaphysical system of opposing
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binaries that flows from the division of speech and writing. Speech is equated with nature and writing with culture. This obscures the fact that the "natural" is also a realm mediated for humans by codes. In Levi-Strauss's structural
anthropology, the order of nature, to which "everything universal in man relates"
and which is "characterised by spontaneity", is aligned against the order of culture, to which belongs "everything subject to a norm" (104). Nature, operating as a transcendental signified, is complete; it can only be substituted by something outside it (215). Evil is exterior to nature (144). Derrida claims that Levi-Strauss's following of Rousseau's attack on writing leads to his inability to see that there is
"no society without writing", whereas all "societies capable of producing, that is to say obliterating, their proper names, and of bringing classificatory difference into play, practice writing in general" (109). All culture and language is reliant on systems of signs in which relations of power are encoded. Levi-Strauss's failure to see this and his scorn of writing lead to an ethnocentrism in which the absence of writing is equated with innocence and non-violence and the primitive "other" is
The Nambikwara are an indigenous Amazonian tribe with whom Levi-Strauss stayed for nearly a year. Tristes tropique itself is part travelogue, part ethnography and part philosophy. It covers Levi- Strauss's experiences of Brazil, where he taught at the University of Sao Paulo and went on field trips in the Amazon.
77 As I will show in chapter 4, Hewitt's influential study of the /Xam narratives (1986) is also framed in terms of a nature/culture binary.
constituted as the "model of original and natural goodness . . . " (114). Rousseau himself applies this model especially to foraging people for he considers that writing "is born with agriculture." "The furrow of agriculture", as Derrida puts it,
"... opens nature to culture (cultivation)" (287).
Orality, in Rousseau's scheme, is linked to community and writing to a lack of authentic relationships (135). The consequence of this way of thinking is that people such as the Nambikwara are divested of the order of culture, which is associated with writing and dependent on the absence of genuine and direct social relations. A particular view of these societies is presupposed, at once pure and peculiarly susceptible to outside corruption: "Only a micro-society of non-violence and freedom, all the members of which can by rights remain within range of an immediate and transparent... address, fully self-present in its living speech, only such a community can suffer, as the surprise of an aggression coming from without, the insinuation of writing, the infiltration of its 'riise' and of its 'perfidy'. Only such a community can import from abroad 'the exploitation of man by man' "
(119). Such a society is pre-political for politics presupposes that liberty has already been lost; politics is "always the supplement of a natural order somewhere deficient ..." (298). Writing and political enslavement, in this scheme, necessarily accompany each other. Writing is an instrument of power, commanding "by written laws, decrees and literature" (302). Levi-Strauss follows Rousseau, whom he hails as his antecedent and the founding father of anthropology (105), in claiming that exploitation of man by man is peculiar to literate societies. The species of ethnocentrism that attend such views, claims Derrida, constitutes itself as
"anti-ethnocentrism, an ethnocentrism in the consciousness of a liberating
progressivism" (120). It is able to do this since the ethnocentric move is apparently avoided after it has already been made in the false distinction between written and unwritten cultures (121).
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's "harmless people" come to mind. See Thomas, E.M. 1989. The harmless people.
Much of the ethnological project, maintains Derrida, is impelled by a nostalgia for origins and "an ethic of archaic and natural innocence, of a purity of presence and self-presence in speech" to be found in exemplary societies, such as the
Nambikwara (Spivak 1976: xix). Frustratingly, the zero point of origin always proves unattainable for there is always another "prehistoric, presocial, and also prelinguistic stratum" to be laid bare (Derrida 1976: 252). Rousseau, however, points in the direction in which this point will be approached, in the warm,
passionate South (251) and in the time before time inhabited by the primitive who, although already partially wrenched from nature, is not yet in society (253). The savage life of hunters is lived at "the ungraspable limit of the almost. Neither nature nor society, but almost society" (253). The family group in which he lives is a natural, pre-institutional phenomenon; it does not yet constitute a society. The /Xam, "illiterate" foragers and inhabitants, literally and metaphorically, of the South, almost perfectly fulfil the conditions for the "natural man" that Derrida finds in Rousseau and in the ethnological literature he has inspired.
Derrida observes that the nostalgia for the origin and the association of the primitive with it occurs within a wider grand narrative:
Non-European peoples were not only studied ... [as the] ... index to a hidden good Nature, as native soil recovered, of a 'zero degree' with reference to which one could outline the structure, the growth and above all the degradation of our society and our culture. As always, this archaeology is also a teleology and an
eschatology; the dream of a full and immediate present closing history ... (1976:
114-115)
As Derrida points out, the North and South are not so much territories as "abstract places that appear only to relate to each other .... [L]ocal difference is nothing but the differance between desire and pleasure" (267-268). Those in the South remain closer to nature and presence, those of the North have had to pay the price of greater distance from the origin for their more developed faculties and their greater capacity for progress.
This structure creates its own paradoxes. "On several levels, nature is the ground, the inferior step: it must be crossed, exceeded, but also rejoined. We must return to it, but without annulling the difference" (197). The difference must be maintained for it is the alienation from nature represented by societies and language which
"permitted the actualisation of the potential faculties that slept inside man" (257).
This marks the limits of the compassion for the other that Levi-Strauss admires in Rousseau's writing. Sympathy with the "non-European" follows from the attraction his closeness to the origin exerts and the pathos-ridden knowledge that contact with civilisation must inevitably precipitate a fall away from the origin We must not let ourselves be destroyed by becoming too close to the other, however. The economy of pity and of morality must "always let itself be contained within the limits of the love of self..." (190). Our interest in the other is our interest in a part of ourselves that is no longer present; the other can never become a reciprocating, self-
representing, contemporary subject. The difference between the savage and the civilised must be maintained, for it is precisely his distance from the origin that has resulted in the development of the modem man. Modem man might be further from presence than the primitive but he is also closer to the endpoint of the teleological trajectory in which full presence will be reclaimed on the higher level that has been put in play through the fall from innocence. When the point of total alienation is approached, the "total reappropriation of presence" becomes possible (295). A consequence is that the approach to the other at the limits where he is excluded
"from the play of supplementarity" (242), is "at once feared as a threat of death, and desired as access to a life without differance. The history of man calling himself man is the articulation of these limits" (244). Separation from the origin is both
80 Bregin (1998: 42) describes the manner in which the Bushmen have been regarded as "paleolithic remnants." Solomon (forthcoming: 9-10) observes that " 'San' peoples remain known not so much for their own achievements, but as figures of what we once were and can never be again.... [They have] served as icons of universal humanity, their consciousness untarnished by industrial
modernity. As 'original ecologists', uniquely attuned to nature, they have been a figure of our own nostalgia."
1 In relation to the /Xam narratives, Brown (1998: 27) maintains that this structure can be weakened if "the songs and stories of the /Xam" are allowed to '"talk back' back to modern understanding."
necessary to the process of group identity formation in which man calls himself man only by drawing limits "excluding his other from the play of supplementarity:
'the purity of nature, of animality, primitivism, childhood, madness, divinity'"
(244) and intolerable in so far as it invites the realisation "that what has the name origin should be no more than a point situated within the system of
supplementarity" (243). This complex goes some way towards explaining the paradoxical ways in which people such as the /Xam have been regarded and treated.
It is a structure that can encourage both idealisation and persecution.
To sum up: in the western intellectual tradition, contends Derrida, the very notion of history is defined by the possibility of writing. According to this logic, people who, like the /Xam, possess no system of writing have no history (83). Their proximity with presence means they have not yet fallen into history. This withholding of history from particular people means that of necessity they are understood in essentialist and exclusionary terms (35). Nor are they able to participate in the progressive, teleological movement of history, which, according to Derrida, starts
"with an origin or centre that divides itself and leaves itself, an historical circle is described, which is degenerative in direction but progressive and compensatory in effect" (202). It is the lack in western man, his separation from the origin, that opens him "to the horizon and diversity of universal culture" and, therefore, to the possibility of achieving full human growth (223). This movement began at the
"catastrophic origin of societies and languages" which "at the same time permitted the actualisation of the potential faculties that slept inside man" (257).
8" Wilmsen (1996: 186) writes in relation to the Bushman that "a mythic time is reserved for them, while real time ticks on impartially for us all." Watson (1991: 10) consigns /Xam culture to such a time when he describes it as "a culture in continuous existence for something like five thousand years ...."