ANTHRO 1795: LANGUAGE AND POLITICS IN LATIN AMERICA

NOTES ON DECONSTRUCTION: CLAUDE LEVI STRAUSSS A WRITING LESSON

AND JACQUES DERRIDAS OF GRAMMATOLOGY.
PREPARED BY EDWARD AKINTOLA HUBBARD

It is always tricky to represent Derridas ideas, because part of the purpose

behind his writing is to revolt against the violent fixing or stabilization of
meanings in language. In an intellectual operation like a clear explanation or
clarification, even of Derrida, I am resorting to all kinds of violence as I pin
down and fix certain meanings to words in order for you to understand.
THE SPEECH/WRITING BINARY
What Derrida is arguing in Of Grammatology is that the western intellectual
tradition is dogged by a conceptual problem: a binary opposition set up between
speech and writing in which speech is always privileged over writing. What
Derrida is showing is that from Platos philosophical arguments about poetry
right up to Saussaures linguistic structuralism, speech has been widely
understood to be the form of communication that most directly expresses and
authentically represents human thought. Even though writing assumed an
important place in Western education and scholarship and has become (in
Western cultures) one of the main indicators of human progress and civilization,
it has occupied a secondary position in certain key philosophical ideas on
language and art, and especially in anti-ethnocentric or liberal frameworks.
Writing has been viewed as merely a graphic imitation of speech (orality is seen
as closer to thought, while writing is a step removed), a supplement to speech,
rather than a true method of communicating ideas.
It is no coincidence, then, that writing becomes the activity for intellectual
reflection and composed thought, that is, once these attributes are held up as key
modes of philosophical exposition and of erudition in general. Today, anyone
making a legitimate critique of colonization, of ethnocentrism, or of the excesses
and horrors of Western imperialism, or anyone engaged in the objective,
systematic study of culture, would agree that writing is a western mode that has
eclipsed, colonized and served to eradicate primarily oral cultures. But this is
what Derrida calls attention to: the way that Truth and other such unassailable or
unquestionable transcendental ideas (logos) hold tyranny over their debased
binary opposites (logocentrism) even in the most liberal, anti-ethnocentric
theoretical and intellectual programs.

In the case of the speech/writing binary, Derrida shows how speech is the
privileged term in Plato, Rousseau and Levi-Strausss structural anthropology.
He shows how this binary opposition, in fact, provides the entire basis for the
discipline of anthropology: as the story goes, oral cultures always understood
to be pristine, innocent and primitive suffer a loss of primal innocence once
writing is introduced. To understand this, one must understand the ambivalence
of the concept of civilization in the Western imagination: while civilization is the
mark of progress away from the primitive, it is simultaneously a dangerous loss
or denial of the state of nature (as elaborated by Rousseau).
THE AMBIVALENCE OF CIVILIZATION
To see this ambivalence at work pride over the progress of civilization along
with a sentimentalist sense of loss (even fear at the loss) of more natural
(primitive) lifeways one only has to consider the idea of the noble savage that
permeates eighteenth-century Western liberal discourse i.e., the idealized,
romantic image of the savage as natures gentleman, uncorrupted by
civilization, closer to nature, and thus more authentically human (indeed nobler)
than modern civilized man; or one can observe the paranoia expressed in Mary
Shelleys Frankenstein over modern mans obsessive quest for advanced
technological knowledge and his fatal use of this knowledge to harness the laws
of natural creation; or even the contemporary moral debates over cloning the
usual headline covering such a debate reads: Has Modern Science Gone too
Far? The fact is that since the Enlightenment, while Western civilization has
celebrated its great scientific and political achievements in relation to its lesser
civilized counterparts, this same civilization has ironically bemoaned or feared
the loss of its connection to the order of nature.
This is why "oral" cultures (even today) are viewed as primal, coming "before"
literate cultures on the evolutionary scale, and therefore innocent, childlike,
pristine, uncorrupted, closer to nature, more authentic and in need of protection,
salvage and (more recently) humanitarian attention. Derrida is showing the
irony of how this secondary place given to writing in Western discourse is what
gives writing that colonizing power over the speech in the end.
In Of Grammatology, Derrida takes on the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de
Saussure, showing how, in Saussures theory of the linguistic sign privileges
speech over writing, and thus, created a whole disciplinary logic wrapped
around this binary opposition. More relevant to our purposes, however, he takes
on the ethnography of the structuralist anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (and,

one could say, anthropology in general).

Levi-Strauss, a great admirer of
Rousseau and walking in the footsteps of Saussaure, wrote Tristes Tropiques as a
travelogue of Brazil punctuated with anthropological insights. According to
Derrida, Levi-Strauss had pondered the status of writing vis--vis oral cultures in
other writings, but it is in the chapter "A Writing Lesson" in Tristes Tropiques that
we see the most sustained argument he makes against writing and its role in the
development of civilization.
LEVI STRAUSS ON WRITING AND CIVILIZATION
Levi Strauss states that [w]riting is a strange invention (p. 298). It is an
artificial memory that increases our ability to organize both the present and
future. He argues that it is tempting to consider writing as the ultimate mark of
civilization from the way we tend to judge civilizations and the ways we
understand the function of writing in relation to it, however, this is a false
understanding. Writing, he argues, had nothing to do with the real advancement
of civilization. Levi-Strauss points out that, in the early stages of the Neolithic
period, the development of agriculture and the domestication of animals one of
the single most creative steps in human civilization happened in the complete
absence of writing! And it happened because these ancient communities could
experiment, observe and work from their own findings, all without recourse to
writing. This, Levi-Strauss claims, clearly proves that the creativity of a
civilization had or has nothing to do with literacy. No major invention from
antiquity onward can be said to be the direct result of the invention of writing.
From the early developments in the Neolithic period right up until the
emergence of modern science, human knowledge has fluctuated more than it
increased despite the invention of writing between these periods. In fact, LeviStrauss can see no comparative achievement in human civilization in the 5000
years that separated these periods, during which writing became central to
human knowledge. He even suggests that perhaps writing and literacy per se
had little to do with the rise of modern scientific methods.
Levi-Strauss argues that writing is actually concomitant with the rise of cities and
empires integration of individuals into political systems, hegemony and the rise
of social stratification. Levi-Strauss states clearly that writings invention was
largely to facilitate human slavery, that it has a sociological rather than
intellectual function to increase the authority and prestige of one individual
or function at the expense of others (pp. 297-298). He argues that the ancient
Inca empire and many African empires (remember, these are pristine native

empires that had no writing) rose and declined rapidly. Where there is writing,
there is greater social differentiation, oppression and hierarchy and therefore
more effective empire. The Inca and African empires were weak because they
had no writing, and as such, they could have no generalized social stratification
and complex bureaucracies (all features of more advanced civilizations). These
small oral cultures with innocent communitarian values could have never
survived. Writing strengthens dominion, so European civilizations that enforced
literacy naturally flourished since literacy could ensure that citizens could be
brought under the aegis of the law ignorance of the law is no excuse
THE ANTHROPOLOGIST AT THE SCENE OF VIOLENCE
In A Writing Lesson, Levi-Strauss watches as the Nambikwara (an Amazonian
Amerindian tribe), who have no written language and cannot draw either (p.
269) are fooled by their chieftain into thinking that he can write like Levi-Strauss.
In the infamous scene, the chieftain pretends to write (he only succeeds in
drawing wavy lines on piece of paper yes, the same Nambikwara who cannot
draw) while Levi-Strauss, inexplicably complicit in this ruse, pretends to
understand and decipher this non-writing in front of the other Nambikwara.
Levi-Strauss credits the genius of the chieftain who, in this moment, intuitively
perceives the hidden purpose of writing: to consolidate his own power and
authority over his people. The chieftain eventually fell out of favour with the
rest of the tribe it is still unclear from the text if this writing lesson incident
was the actual reason for the chieftains political decline, but Levi-Strauss
nonetheless praises the Nambikwara who withdrew support for the chief
because they (once again, intuitively) suspected that writing was somehow
connected with deceit.
Levi-Strauss sees writing as an unfortunate and violent intrusion into the
innocent lives of these savages, and therefore anthropology, at his hands, is
constructed as the true humanistic, anti-ethnocentric discipline. Anthropology
alone goes to the source of pristine cultures (like that of the Nambikwara)
around the world and taps directly into them with primarily oral research
methods. Anthropologists do not peddle in the artifice of literary analysis, or in
the over-synthesized information contained in written documents or other
secondary data. They get to understand the natives point of view (Geertz)
by learning to speak the natives language, and by constant oral communication
with the native while living in the natives world. Thus, ethnography, like
Saussurean linguistics, is founded on this (hidden) primacy of the oral over the
literate.

DECONSTRUCTION EXPLAINED??
Derridas concept of deconstruction is a method of reading texts in order to
find and expose the binary opposites immanent in the texts claims to truth,
authority and authenticity. Deconstruction involves three main operations: (a)
finding the core binary at work in the texts construction; (b) exposing the
category that is privileged in the binary (the logos) and upon which the truth
claim is based as well as exposing the secondary, debased category (or the
appurtenance); (c) using the very terms of the truth claim to invert the binary,
showing how an equally valid truth claim can be made if the logos is decentred
and the appurtenance becomes privileged. This last move is not merely to invert
the binary opposition permanently and make the underprivileged category
win over the privileged category that new, inverted order would only become
a new logocentric truth claim. The whole point of deconstruction is to show how
truth and meaning are always unstable and contingent, brought into existence by
force by stabilizing or fixing a meaning (based on a binarism) in place and by
the elevation of a privileged category within the binary and the simultaneous
suppression of its opposite. Deconstruction is a way to critique regimes of Truth
by way of showing how this Truth is always based on logocentrism. Derrida
does not suggest that we can escape logocentrism without it, there would be no
Truth, no meaning in the world but he suggests that deconstruction can become
a powerful tool in challenging transcendental ideas that support regimes of truth
and for dismantling powerful oppositions in politics and philosophy.
In his legendary deconstruction of the speech/writing binary in Of Grammatology,
Derrida takes on the notion of writing as a supplement to speech, arguing that
a supplement is actually something that fills in a lack in something else therefore writing, in a sense, supplements speech only because speech must be
lacking in something. He comes up the notion of arche-writing a concept
that effectively de-centers the logos of speech by showing how orality is, in a
sense, always a kind of writing, and that scribal writing and orality are really two
kinds of writing. With this concept, Derrida argues, Levi-Strauss could never
have masqueraded as an anti-ethnocentrist, while concluding in a decidedly
ethnocentric way, that the Nambikwara were simply illiterate:
It is, however, an ethnocentrism thinking itself as anti-ethnocentrism, an
ethnocentrism in the consciousness of a liberating progressivism. By

radically separating language from writing, by placing the latter below

and outside, believing at least that it is possible to do so, by giving oneself
the illusion of liberating linguistics from all involvement with written
evidence, one thinks in fact to restore the status of authentic language,
human and filly signifying language, to all languages practiced by peoples
whom one nonetheless continues to describe as without writing.
(Of Grammatology, p. 120)

THE FREE PLAY OF SIGNIFIERS

For Derrida, truth is based on language, and language is not a fixed system (the
way structuralists conceive of it). Language is chaotic words not only have
many different meanings and uses, but words (signifiers) themselves do not
simply correspond with their definitional meanings (word-concepts or signifieds).
These meanings are dependent on other signifiers. For example, when a reader
looks up a dictionary definition of a word, s/he does not find the signified of it
but is only confronted with more words (more signifiers) that try to explain that
original word. Derrida argues that language is not, as structuralists assume,
dependent on a correspondence between established codes and the fixed
meanings attached to them, but that language exists in an unstable, free play of
signifiers. It is only through what he calls violence (the kind of violence that
freezes a binary opposition in place and institutes logocentrism) that a word can
gain a fixed meaning. Words are constantly threatened by the encroachment of
new or unexpected meanings, words constantly evoke other words and meanings
(rather than merely reflecting their own, exclusive meanings) for example, the
sign The Joshua Tree does not simply reflect one (or three) stable signifier(s)the
signifier(s) can reflect the meaning affixed to them in the dictionary: Yucca
brevifolia, a monocotyledonous tree confined mostly to the Mojave Desertor
those same words can make us think of the Cahuilla Native Americans who used
the tree for making sandals, baskets and mealsor it can make us think of the
Mormons who crossed the Mojave Desert in the 19 th century, saw the tree and
gave it that nameor those words can evoke for us the meaning it had for the
Mormons that gave it the name: the tree resembled the biblical Joshua raising his
hands to the skythis kind of tree is frequently used to construct the expansive,
arid and forlorn desert aesthetic of the American southwest in films and visual
artyet still, those same words can evoke the Grammy-award winning U2 album
of the same name, the classic album cover art no doubt referencing the desert
aesthetic in which this tree plays a signifying role this monocotyledonous tree
in the Mojave Desert, that was prized by the Cahuilla, and named by the
Mormons after a physical act of Joshua in the Holy Bible. This signifier The

Joshua Tree, as we can see from the example, refuses to be one, stable sign-entity,
the way Saussurean linguistics assumes it to be. The signifier does not
correspond to its signified, but slips easily into free play: its dictionary meaning
evokes so many signifieds that slip, slide and flow between botany, geology and
climatology, Native American history and culture, the history of Mormons in
America, aesthetics, cinema and visual arts, Bible characters and stories, modern
pop music. Instead of having a simple, stable signified (a clear, finite meaning)
that corresponds to the words The Joshua Tree, this original signified is merely
another signifier reaching for yet another meaning. This is the Derridean vision
of language: this slipping and sliding of signifiers over each other without ever
reaching a signified a ground or an end-point for stable thought or for the
emergence of Truth.
Some argue that scribal writing indeed has certain properties that make it
different from orality things like materiality (graphic characters have a physical,
material presence that the spoken word cannot have), a notion of fixity or
permanence (writing can set something in stone while speech dissolves in the
air, unless recorded), and usually an author who takes responsibility for what he
writes. What Derrida is also arguing is that these things (materiality, fixity and
author[ity]) are all types of logos that ground orality in the primitive, and that
make scribal writing the modernist mode of intellectual reflection.
SOME QUESTIONS RAISED BY THE LEVI-STRAUSS DERRIDA
ENGAGEMENT
What if we take seriously the idea that materiality as we know it is a false
construct? What if we assume that fixity is not really necessary for knowing
something (maybe that knowing is as dynamic and shifting as the mind itself)?
What might our notion of orality look like? And what would happen if
knowledge could be freed from the shackles of its author who claims (perhaps
falsely) to "own" his knowledge. If we could challenge ourselves to overcome
these constructs, can we close the gap between orality and literacy in most
cultures? Or are these two activities inescapably different and forever doomed to
be hierarchically arranged?
Michel Foucault also has a great discussion of what he calls the author
function - the voice behind many different forms of scribal writing that claims to
be the absolute origin of everything it says. In his essay What is an Author?",
Foucault shows how discourses become author-ised by this voice behind the
text pretending to give it life. Foucault argues that the concept of the author

only emerged recently in history. In the middle ages and before, most texts were
written with no name attached to them, no one taking credit for them, no person
claiming to be the genesis of what was written. It is here that Foucault famously
proclaims the "death of the author. What would knowledge be like today if we
did not sign off on what we say? What would discourse (verbal and written) be if
we did not see ourselves as creators/inventors of what we think, say and write?
What kind of activity would knowledge building be if it were not grounded in an
endless search for originality? (NB: the aim of academic work is always to
produce an original contribution to knowledge) What if we saw the notion of
authorship as a constraint on discourse, rather than a magnificent gift that
legitimizes the author, enshrines his thinking in our knowledge, and
immortalizes his personhood forever? What if expository writing (with all its
citations, footnotes and bibliographies) did not amount to a conversation between
and across various sources what if knowledge did not HAVE a source?
Both Derrida and Foucault's arguments beg the question: do our vanity and our
quest for immortality not seem to take precedence over knowledge building? Is
this not partly the reason why scribal writing cultures encroach on oral cultures
and colonize them? In pondering questions, consider Christopher Columbuss
so-called discovery of the virgin lands of the Americas?: Columbus suddenly
emerges in history as a single author of vast expanses of the earth, despite
what and who existed there before? Consider, in general, how the age of
European discoveries is long tragi-comedy of self-proclaimed orginators,
implanting themselves everywhere, suddenly taking ALL the credit for what
they saw and knew of these disparate places?
RELEVANT READINGS
FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE, A Course in General Linguistics
CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS, Tristes Tropiques
JACQUES DERRIDA, Of Grammatology
MICHEL FOUCAULT, "What is an Author?" in Language, Counter-Memory and
Practice.