Abstract
In exploring cultural difference through cultures of memory, this chapter discusses European conceptions of memory and technics. While engaging with the classical debate concerning orality and literacy (from Plato to Stiegler) it points to the historical undermining of embodied mnemocultural traditions in European heritage. The chapter offers a mnemocultural critique of Derrida’s conception of “writing” and Stiegler’s account prosthetics.
Performative or practical knowledge is the ability to act recursively in the world. The social environment created in such a culture will itself be recursive, exhibiting the properties of recursive systems. The history of this culture, of the coming-to-be of a people, just like the way it is with the West, is the story of the emergence, crystallization, and the development of recursively structured learning configuration.
Balagangadhara (1994, p. 465).
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Notes
- 1.
(I am not taking into account the more ancient Egyptian cultural memory here. This is because the Europe that expands its intellectual regime is predominantly formed by Greek-Jew [and Christian] lineages. All the major thinkers of Europe confine themselves to this lineage in their accounts of European thought.) Although archaeologists argue that the “modernity of human behavior” can be traced back to the “liberation of memory” achieved by the “storage of symbolism outside the brain”, in the petroglyphs or rock drawings of paleoart, such modes of externalization must be distinguished from the archive-museum based politico-epistemic dominations of modern European regimes. The paleoart was certainly not driven by any form of “archive fever”. Cf. Bednarik (2006). Also cf. Leroi-Gourhan (1993), especially the chapter “The Language of Forms”; also Derrida (1976), esp. “Of Grammatology as a Positive Science” (pp. 74–93); and Derrida (1995).
- 2.
The philosopher in question here is Socrates and the account of memory here refers to Socrates’ discussion of the relation between memory and dialectics in the Phaedrus (Plato 1952c, pp. 124–125).
- 3.
Plato’s Ion demonstrates the epistemic difference that was beginning to emerge between two modes of thinking in ancient Greece. This difference in this dialogue, however, is framed entirely from the vantage of the philosopher Socrates. The rhapsode Ion is grilled by Socrates to make explicit the “principles”, the general (i.e., epistemic) basis of his recitations. Socrates ridicules Ion for singing without knowing; his lively performance is said to be devoid of “art” (techné) and knowledge (episteme). Ion is either a deceiver or an inspired (that is, without being conscious about what he does) person. He does something without knowing what he is doing. Socrates turns the rhapsode Ion into a straw figure by exposing his ignorance of “art” (techné) and “knowledge” (episteme)—the weapons of the new master of truth (philosopher). Cf. Plato (1952b, pp. 142–148). The figure of Ion will obliquely move in, as much as the Shadow of Plato falls on, this entire work on mnemocultures.
- 4.
The Phaedrus, it must be said, presents an ambiguous picture about writing. Although Socrates, citing the Egyptian myth about writing, seems to discount writing, when we closely look at the beginning of the dialogue, we notice that he insists on Phaedrus reading out from the written document about Lycias’ account of love. Denying Phaedrus “hope of practicing my art” of oratory, Socrates demands: “but you must first of all show what you have in your left hand under your cloak, for that roll, as I suspect, is the actual discourse. Now, much as I love you, I would not have you suppose that I am going to have your memory exercised at my expense, if you have Lysias himself here.” That is, the physically absent Lysias himself can be present in the recorded manuscript and Socrates wants to access that carried over presence from the hidden pages. Succumbing to the pressure of the master, Phaedrus says “if I am to read…” Plato (1952c, p. 116). Curiously, this scene of writing does not receive much of Derrida’s or even Stiegler’s attention.
- 5.
It must be pointed out that Plato’s position with regard to writing and its relation to memory remains ambivalent. On the one hand Plato is the philosopher who writes and records and on the other hand he defends memory against the art of writing. On the one hand he can’t tolerate the singers and bards (his Oedipal tussle with Homer) and on the other hand he makes Socrates dream about practising music in prison in the last few days of his life. Cf. Plato (1952a, d).
- 6.
Jean Pierre Vernant chronicling the changing fate of memory in Greek antiquity argues that by the time of Aristotle memory gets dissociated with traditional techniques of remembrance (meleté and mnemé), its filiation with the soul, its discerning intellection and becomes more and more bonded with the senses (as a perceptual category). (Vernant 2006b, pp. 130–140).
- 7.
Xenophanes and Heraclitus denounce Homer and Hesiod on the one hand, and the “oral order” on the other. (cf. Ferrari 1984). Ferrari critically reviews the orality/literacy debate in this article. He critiques Eric Havelock’s biased reading of pre-Socratics as belonging to oral traditions. Ferrari’s point is that Havelock insufficiently attends to the impact of literacy on pre-Socratics.
- 8.
It must however be pointed out that Jewish cultural history is surfeit with song cultures. The three techniques of cantillation, psalmody and modal chant were central to the transmission of the Hebrew liturgy. The first and second Temples were associated with songs in varying degrees (sometime with musical instruments and sometimes without). Enchantment was achieved in the synagogue by the chants (cf. Levine 2010).
- 9.
Dominic LaCapra (2009, pp. 192, 220) contrasting “traditional” societies from Western ones thinks that in the case of the latter “there may be something like transhistorical or structural trauma,” some kind of disruptive fissure (such as original sin, transition from nature to culture, separation from mother, crucifixion, “revolutions”, etc.). LaCapra does not see such structuring ruptures in “traditional” societies. We shall see later how such tropes of rupture structure European descriptions of India.
- 10.
The most succinct and comprehensive formulation of these relations could found in Samkhyakarika of Iswarakrishna. The Karika conceives these elemental relations and their coming into being in the phenomenal form of the body complex along with an irreducible alterity in prominently gendered and erotic terms (cf. Koteswarasarma 1996). In this work, the critical centrality of the body in Sanskrit mnemocultures (the question of what one does with one’s body) is partly grasped from this Karika.
- 11.
Eva Jablonka contends that there are therefore at least four dimensions of evolution. Along with the DNA lines, the neglected heritable resources are the non-DNA (“daughter cells”) paths, the behavioural transmission (as in the case of animals), and symbol-based inheritances (such as language and gesture) play substantial role in the evolution of life forms, argues Jablonka (Jablonka and Lamb 2006). Also of more direct relevance here is the work of Bernard Stiegler (1998).
- 12.
Plato, who inaugurates the tradition, asserts that “philosophy begins when one stops ‘telling a story,’ that is defining entities by recourse to some other entities, as is done in the presocratic doctrines of Being” (cf. Dastur 1998). Historicizing this move from myth to philosophy, Kirk et al. (1957/2006) thematize this as a transition from “the closed traditional society (which in its archetypal form is an oral society in which the telling of tales is an important instrument of stability and analysis) and towards an open society in which the values of the past become relatively unimportant and radically fresh opinions can be formed of the community itself and of its expanding environment” (pp. 72–74).
- 13.
“I will disregard…”, declared Derrida in a related context, “everything that consists in reducing the concept of text to that of written discourse, in forgetting that deconstruction is all the less confined to the prisonhouse of language because it starts by tackling logocentrism” (Derrida 1990, p. 91, emphasis in original).
- 14.
Derrida wrote elsewhere, emphasizing the singular traits of writing (in the empirical sense): the “structural possibility of being severed from its referent or signified (and therefore from communication and its context) seems to me to make of every mark, even if oral, a grapheme in general… the nonpresent remaining of a differential mark cut off from its alleged ‘production' or origin” (Derrida 1982, p. 318, first emphasis mine.)
- 15.
The figures of “inscription”, “cut”, “substrate”, “impression”, the “press”, “house”, and a whole lot of substitutes of writing (in the narrow sense) pervade this text.
- 16.
Although Derrida wrote that he was always drawn to both the “general and universal figure of circumcision, of excision and in all the ethno-religious marking of the body,” it is abundantly clear in his work that his reflective concerns (like those of most notable European thinkers) were circumscribed by monotheisms of Judeo-Christian-Islamic relays. Curiously, Derrida wrote, “if circumcision is abandoned (literal or figural circumcision, but everything played out around the letter, in Judaism as well as in Islam), one is on the road to an abandonment of phallocentricism. This would apply a fortiori to excision. This abandonment applies also to Christianity. Since these three religions are powerfully, although differently, phallocentric. In any case, phallocentricism, and circumcision link Islam and Judaism” (Derrida and Roudinesco 2004, pp. 194–195). If this is Derrida’s way of exemplifying the universalizability of the singular (a conviction that he radically affirmed in his essay, “Faith and Knowledge” [1998, p. 18]), then one wonders how this monotheistic inheritance can become a synecdoche for a cultural/conceptual universal. For circumcision and excision are not necessarily the universal “ethno-religious markings of the body”. One wonders why Derrida, who wove his texts with such extraordinary figural traces of the feminine (track, sign, furrow, hymen, invagination, etc.), who taught us so much about the originary violence of the irruption of life itself, should not consider the deepest mark, that deepest “wound”, that brings forth every hominid body. This “wound”—linked to a bare fibrous thread, floating in the non-space, non ground, of the bodily fluid, yet absolutely essential for any being's coming forth—leaves the most literally indelible mark on every body. This thread—the umbilical cord that connects the fetus to the mother in the womb—ought to remind every body of the source, indeed “memory” or “history” and the untraceable origin of the body’s emergence. Yet, the thread is the absolutely significant mark, a mark that no one excepting a woman (female) can inscribe. It is rather a mystery why this deepest mark of woman does not find a hospitable shelter in Derrida’s figural weave.
It is not irrelevant to observe here that the figural-literal “thread” is the most central, inherited mark that one finds on the bodies of several communities in India. The figure of the thread has a more profound significance in the differentiated memories of jatis. One is made to remember constantly that the “thread”, the “c(h)ord” as the “link” that, even after its literal severance, continues to remind one of its pull or touch. In the Telangana colloquial Telugu, this thread is called the “pegu” (literally, a piece of rag). The figure, it must be pointed out, refers to the mother’s bodily experience. This figural mark appears in various ways (sacred thread, origin thread [moltadu], thread of well-being [mangala sutra], etc. The figure of thread refers also to an extraordinary reflective-poetic genre in Sanskrit tradition which was the most productive form for over a thousand years—the Sutra tradition.). Given such singular-plural, singular but with a cultural universal status that the figure of thread signifies, it is rather strange that this figure does not receive attention in Derrida’s critique of phallocentrism. Reflecting from the specific monotheistic heritage, Derrida sees the possibility of abandoning phallocentrism in the abandonment of circumcision. Reflecting from the other possibilities that the figure of the thread suggests, one begins to see the necessity of rethinking the cultural universal status phallocentrism has been given in psychoanalytic and deconstructive work. It is here, once again learning from Derrida, that one must begin to explore the most singular, idiomatic articulations of the body and symbol in the heterogeneous inheritances of the past that still weave our existences and beings.
- 17.
This appears to be the case even in critiques, which insist that deconstruction should attend to the specificity of different communication systems. For instance, in Bernard Stiegler’s attempt to differentiate the digital conjuncture from the alphabetic context—it is once again the figure of literacy—writing—that by default enters the horizon as a frame of reference. In an interesting dialogue, in contrast to Stiegler’s insistence on the alphabetic writing as the inaugural event of testimony (“Isn’t this [alphabetic] writing what makes historical work possible ?”), Derrida makes an unusual comment: “Yes, language, but I prefer to say speech or the voice here. Language in the singular event of a phrase, that is to say, the voice… the voice makes language an event. It takes us from the linguistic treasure-house to the event of the phrase.” If speech or voice has this enunciative, event-making force or effectivity, one is impelled to ask, why is it this figure of speech/voice doesn't lend itself to unravel the heritage of the West in Derrida’s work? (Derrida and Stiegler 2002, pp. 100–101).
- 18.
Despite Derrida’s extended use of acoustic terms (“Glas”, “otobiography”, “ear”, “tympanum”, etc.), it must be noted that all these are in the service of overturning the alleged privilege they enjoyed in association with speech in Western thought. For a more recent critique of Derrida’s erroneous approximation of acoustic apparatus in his critique of speech see Veit Earlman, Reason and Resonance (2010).
- 19.
Plato (1952a, Book III, p. 676). For the Czech philosopher Jan Patocka, this theatrocracy forms the “thaumaturgical tradition” of pre-Christian orgiastic and demonic cults. Plato, according to Patocka, draws upon these traditions but overcomes them by incorporating them in his work of philosophy. From the orgiastic mystery Plato develops the idea of soul’s immortality and grasps “subjectivizing interiorization” and this underlines the emergence of egological subjectivity, argues Patocka. But for Patocka the residue of the demoniac in Plato makes his philosophy a sort of thaumaturgy. Patocka argues that responsibility emerges in surpassing the demoniac mystery – ecstatic, orgiastic, pre-religious secrets. In other words, here evolution of ethical responsibility culminating in Christian religious thought is affirmed. If the demoniac survives the triumph of the egological-philosophical despite Christian evolution, it lurks as “a nucleus of irresponsibility or of absolute unconscious, something Patocka calls ‘orgiastic irresponsibility’”. This incorporated (by Plato) and repressed (by Christianity) “irresponsibility” resurfaces, writes Derrida in his commentary on Patocka, in (Platonic) philosophy, (Christian) religion, and even in (Enlightenment) secularization. But this return “corresponds to an abdication of responsibility”, states Derrida. What is at stake in this entire discussion is in reality Christianity’s (failed) maneuvering of the Pagan (mnemocultural) traditions. What this exegesis tells is a (Judaeo) Christian account of Pagan cultures of the ancient world. Christianity or monotheism continues to think about “human kind” from within the theo-conceptual framework which has evolved over two millennia. Patocka, points out Derrida from within the framework, never dissociates himself from Christian Europe. But for the Czech philosopher of responsibility, “Christianity remains thus far the greatest, unsurpassed but also un-thought-through human outreach that enabled human to struggle against decadence.” The “decadence” is the “absolute unconscious” that lurks as the Pagan residue of the Pagan demonic mystery (cf. Derrida Derrida1995/2008, pp. 17–30, emphasis added). For a scintillating critique of this entire mono-theological framework’s descriptions of Pagans, cf. Balagangadhara (1985, Chs. II and III, pp. 33–109).
- 20.
For Nietzsche, Socrates was a “misfortune” that befell Greek culture. This culture, in his view, had “marvelous philosophers” preceding Socrates and they were replaced by the “combative and garrulous hordes of the Socratic schools”. Nietzsche differentiates the non-literacy of these pre-Socratics from Socrates’ avoidance of writing. Unlike the latter, “These early Greeks did not chatter and revile so much; neither did they write so much”. Socratic garrulity, writes Sarah Kofman commenting on Nietzsche, was a “way of exercising mastery over others; one can limit oneself to questioning others without communicating anything to them” (Kofman 1998, pp. 222–224, emphasis in original).
- 21.
These ritual performances can be seen in the Phaedrus, Republic, and Phaedo, among others.
- 22.
In the Phaedrus, talking about skeptical people who discount age old accounts of tradition by reducing “them one after another to the rules of probability,” through rational explanation, Socrates clearly says: “Now I have no leisure for such enquiries.” For, “I must first know myself”, he adds quoting the “Delphian inscription” (Plato 1952c, p. 116).
- 23.
Curiously and ironically, despite her provocative critique of Derrida, Cavarero too functions from within the confines of literate heritage: “the culture of primary orality lacks … the elements that allow the voice to be thought of as an acoustic material governed by the system of signification. A discipline like linguistics – which Plato and Aristotle inaugurate … presupposes writing”. Whereas minute and precise reflections on the sonority and accent, modulation and intonation, utterance and recitation are for millennia transmitted in preliterate Sanskrit traditions of shiksha (“phonetics”). The pratisakhyas (schools of Vedic utterance) offer extended reflective accounts of vocalic expression. Unaware of such traditions, Cavarero goes on to say: “In fact, all scientific knowledge presupposes writing. Linguistics, however, has the direct aim of swallowing the phoné within the space of the sign.” This certainly may be true in the context of European heritage, but this is not necessarily a cultural universal. Frits Staal devoted a significant part of his life to drive home this point – that the “science” of reflecting on language (as utterance) – vyakarana (“grammar”) – existed long before lithic technologies of literacy developed. Also cf., for a valuable account on this tradition, Critical Studies in the Phonetic Observations of Indian Grammarians by Siddheswar Varma (1961). An important thinker, who too functions from within the European heritage but who is sensitive to the independence of metalevel reflections on language from literacy, has this to write: “One need only, in this respect, mention the work of Panini who around the 5th century BC, at an epoch in which writing was not yet a common tool for the notation of spoken language and in a fundamentally phonocentric tradition (that is of the Veda), developed a meta-linguistic analysis of Sanskrit so perfect that today it still constitutes the most commonly used practical manual for learning this language…. Panini termed [this] vyākarana, a word that means at once manifestation and distinction, that is to say, analysis that renders visible and thus makes known the morphology and the syntax of spoken language” (Dastur 2000, pp. 17–18, 94–95). Discretization of “the flux of speech” here has little to do with mnemotechniques.
- 24.
Curtius (1953, pp. 302–347) has extensively documented the centrality of the symbol of script in European heritage which derives from the theological sense that the universe is the colossal script (“natural writing”) of the god. Derrida unravels the legacy of this theological metaphor in his work (1976, pp. 12–18).
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Rao, D.V. (2014). Configurations of Memory and the Work of Difference. In: Cultures of Memory in South Asia. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 6. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-1698-8_2
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