Let me begin with a Summation, of sorts, to contextualize the end of our reading of Lyotard with the rest of the course material:

Lyotard’s ‘simple’ enquiry into the differend revealed many different things, most essentially, it revealed:

Language, what it is, how it is, and what it is to us, that is to say:

-The Structure of Language:

-Epistemological and Ontological implications:

-Relation to language:

… and under these three points, various, come all the following :

Phrase regimens: rules for phrases

Genres of discourse: rules for linking phrases

The many different theories how we name things, verify these names

What is a phrase? 

How does a phrase come about, happen?

How does a phrase found reality (epistemological and ontological) (§18)

How reality is not fixed (§§ 10, 60 world)

We do not own it; it is not a tool (§§20, 25);

The trouble we get into in the practical realm when we speak as if we owned language (sophism, truth; §29 science; §32)

What else have we learned from Lyotard?  What is the flow of the work?

The double bind has a double consequence: silenced and suffer vertigo of endless phrasing.

There is nothing we can do to fix it, but we are nonetheless called to do something.

Historian’s bad faith (§33) (sophism vs. truth)

--Ethically?  Humanism (§31)Vengeance (§42-5)

no

--Tribunal of History? 

no

--Scientifically?  (§§29-32, 47-9)

no—Lyotard shows us that we need fluidity, not fixity. 

So, we plunge back into language… there are two pursuits, first, let us linguistically analyze and deconstruct the revisionist logic, and, second, is there a way to express what it prohibits, to express otherwise?  §§55-68

These dual reasons for returning to language lead him to explore how we see and experience reality (e.g., phenomenology) (§§69-73)

He reveals that the historical revisionist logic is simply flawed (§§78-92, 95-9) BUT the differend to which it points is valid (§93).

So!  How do we honor it by trying to bear witness to it? (§§100-104, G Stein Notice).

Why is Auschwitz a differend?  What are the stakes by which we must express it?  He ends on a consideration of varying types of narrative (§§155-160).

A useful summation runs across the following: §§184-187, 196-197

Hence… all of the brief supplements we have read thus far and will continue through fit within this project… they help establish his argument between logic and alogic and/or help to provide a model of expressing the inexpressible:

Aristotle: how to know, how to name, categorize, fix X

Paradoxes: sophism versus truth, how fixity can fail us

Chuang Tzu: why it may be good for logic to fail

Poetry: exercises in speaking otherwise

Pseudo-Dionysius: a model how to speak impossible; passions not reason

Art: exercises in expressing otherwise, passions not reason

Kant: thinking through this expressing otherwise; sublime

Textual Analysis of §§155-160:

Pseudo-Dionysius desperately seeks merger with God, union with his creator.  Without, his faithful exists so desperately single, so solitary, condemned to isolation; not just in the arms of loneliness, but refused entry into the meaningful. 

 

There is something parallel in the survivor.  This complete effacement is the object of inquiry in Lyotard’s §§155-160.  These sections reveal the ethical weight of the differend perhaps most clearly.

 

 

§155.  We.

 

“If, ‘after Auschwitz,’ the Resultat is lacking, it would be for want of determination.  ‘Auschwitz’ would have no speculative name because it would be the proper name of a para-experience or even of a destruction of experience” (§155).

 

With an allusion to Adorno’s infamous conclusion to his essay “Cultural Criticism and Society,” that one cannot write poetry after Auschwitz, Lyotard is asking the same question Adorno asked about what we can know after the holocaust and that Heidegger posed to death…[1]  “After” an event, we imagine ourselves being done and through it in such a way that we can turn back, in our minds, turn over the event in its every moment, stretch it out linearly, rewind it and play it again, turn it over and again and “know it.”  “After Auschwitz” there is no conclusion, no knowledge/information output, no Resultat.  Auschwitz is a differend precisely because it leaves us in want of determination; it is a negative presentation.  It can answer no future questions because it denominates an experience that can only be thought of in the negative, a picture in reverse, in negative print.

 

“What determination would Auschwitz be lacking so as to turn it into an experience with a Resultat?  Would it be that of the impossibility of a we?  In the concentration camps, there would have been no subject in the first-person plural.  In the absence of such a subject, there would remain ‘after Auschwitz’ no subject, no Selbst which could prevail upon itself to name itself in naming ‘Auschwitz.’  No phrase inflected in this person would be possible: we did this, we felt that, we didn’t think about . . . , and even: each of us was reduced to solitude and silence.  There would be no collective witness” (§155).

 

Is the negative presentation of Auschwitz (partially?) because of the lack of the “we,” the lack of a subject, plural or singular?  (Particularly interesting to compare this to his address of the subject, and unsettling of the power of the I to found experience when addressing Descartes’ cogito, §94 ff.)

 

There is, for most once-deportees, only silence, shame, anger.  The anger is not for what was suffered, per se, but over “the explanations and interpretations—as sophisticated as they may be—by thinkers who claim to have found some sense to this shit” (§155). 

 

Any claim to know may grant one power, but it is a pretentious, insolent claim.

 

A disauthorization; a case of dispersion worse than the Diaspora, a dispersion of the phrase(s)? 

Diaspora: exile of Jews from Israel; Jews living outside of Israel; scattering of language, culture, people.

What would a dispersion of phases look like, perhaps God confusing the tongues of people in punishment for constructing the tower of Babel?  But, here, an act of man, of men, that renders a phrase “Auschwitz” that shuns linkages?

 

“In a republic, the pronoun of the first-person plural is in effect the linchpin for the discourse of authorization” (§155). 

 

Think, for example, of the American constitution’s preamble: “We, the people…”  The declaration of our independence and rights begins by invoking the power of our collectivity, the “we.”[2]  The “we” is supposed to be able to substitute for a proper name (the American people) and link and validate prescriptions (we declare X, Y, and Z and legitimate them by the power we hold as a ‘we’).  Lyotard shows how, in the republic, the prescriptives issued by the ‘we’ holds the addressor and the addressee as the same; ‘we’ make the laws that will also govern over ‘us.’  Here, the legislator is not exempt from his/her own laws and is expected to promulgate it (speak the law that binds you, to whom I speak, and me, who speaks the law).  There is a circularity herein, not a vicious one, but one that grants something: “This is the principle of autonomy” (§155). 

 

Yet, “This construction of a homogeneous we conceals, however, a double heterogeneity” (§155).

 

First: a “heterogeneity tied to the pronouns”—that is, the normative phrase implies the prescriptive phrase (the we declare is also the we are obliged), even while the position that the ‘we’ occupies in the two phrases is not the same and even opposed: the addressor of the norm is not the same as the addressor of the obligation.  While the “we” unites the I and You, the two phrases show the clarity of their invocation of an I and You. 

 

Second: a heterogeneity about the phrases—a normative phrase (we declare X) is not a performative phrase (X is, by our declaration) and, yet, they share the fact that they can stand as isolated phrases that do not require another for their legitimacy; a prescriptive, however, (we ought) requires a second phrase linked to it to establish its validity.  “For, in the obligation, it is up to the addressee to link upon the chain… and he or she can do so in many ways…” (§155).

 

“Thus: on the side of the norm, a phrase universe imputed to an addressor and which is immediately everything that it is without appeal (on the model of sublimity given by Fiat lux et lux fuit).  On the side of the obligation, a phrase universe centered upon an addressee, with the expectation of the latter’s responsibility to link in accordance with the command” (§155).

 

Fiat lux et lux fuit: Let there be light and there was light

 

The two sides of the heterogeneity: the norm and the obligation.

On the norm side: the phrase universe is given sans appeal;

On the obligation side: the phrase universe is given demanding the addressee to link in accordance with it.

 

The differend occurs when the formation of the republic’s phrase demands that the we issuing it is the we receiving it, making a demand the norm-we is the obligation-we, when these positions designate two different modes of being.

 

Yet, there is an absurdity here that is utterly common, as Lyotard notes, “It is the property of proper names to receive such heterogeneities (Nos. 80, 81).  But it is not legitimate, it is even illusory, in the Kantian sense of a transcendental illusion, to suppose a subject-substance that would be both a ‘subject of the uttering’ (even though it is not the addressor in the prescriptive) and the permanence of a self (even though from one phrase to the next it leaps from one instance situation to another)” (§155).

 

A single “we,” standing in as a proper name, “designates an entity astride two heterogeneous situations,” wherein it is a subject of the uttering even while it is not the addressor (it is the addressor of the norm but, in the prescriptive, it must respond, not be the addressor) and, at once, is supposed to be a subsistent self through this split (§155).  It is nearly a schizophrenic split, a disassociate experience, utterly common and impossible at once. 

 

“The we would be the vehicle of this transcendental illusion, halfway between the rigid (constant) designator that the name is and the ‘current’ designator that the singular pronoun is.  It is not surprising that, in the ‘currentness’ or ‘actuality’ of obligation, the we that reputedly unites obligee and legislator is threatened with being split” (§155). 

 

 

§156   “Beautiful death.”

(cf. §168)

 

“This threat [of the self being split] appears at its height when the obligation made to the addressee is that he or she die” (§156).

 

The norm at “Auschwitz” [in scare quotes to universalize it beyond a single place and event, but, at that where all those atrocities took place and remain beyond our grasp to conceptualize and ‘make sense’ of them] would be formulated as: “… It is a norm decreed by y that it is obligatory for x to die” (§156).  This is a norm that is also an obligation in mimicry of those issued by any republic discussed in §155.  But, if it were to operate the same, that “we, the people” declare X and hold ourselves under the same rule of law, we would be decreeing our own end, thus, “the addressee’s death,” our own, since “we” are addressor and addressee, “prohibits the formation of the we.  It would be absurd for the we of the norm to decree its own banishing.  But this is not at all so” (§156). 

 

Where Lyotard showed the common “we” declaration to be common, but actually absurd, this expression is absurd, but actually more common than not… insofar as the public can and has, frequently in history, declared its preference to die:

Socrates is prison: die rather than escape

The Paris Commune: die rather than be enslaved[3]

Thermopyles, Stalingrad: die rather than be defeated[4]

 

For “Auschwitz,” it is distinctly different; it is not a die rather than, but, simply, just die.  To have a reason creates a powerful bond for a “we.”  Lacking reason, “Auschwitz” is refused a “we.” 

 

The Athenian “Beautiful Death” can occur wherein the “we” makes its name rigid; it exchanges the finite for the infinite by choosing its own death, to “die in order not to die,” the name lives on in glory.  This beautiful death is prohibited to “Auschwitz.”

 

 

§157    Exception.

 

“‘Auschwitz’ is the forbiddance of the beautiful death” (§157).  The deportee at “Auschwitz” has no choice, no “rather than” that motivates death and gives it reason and beauty; the deportee, then, is not the addressee of the obligation and cannot be in the position of the “we.”  We can speak of the SS issuing a decree to be received by the deportees; it is impossible for the deportees to speak in the “we,” the “we” is forbidden them.

 

Note, that any litigation must permit a “we,” a common grounding wherein each side can be substituted on the other. 

 

Forbidding the deportee a choice, is to forbid them the beautiful death, also to forbid them immortality, to forbid them the possibility of sacrifice, to forbid them a collective name.  The “final solution” sought to erase even the death. 

 

“The individual name must be killed (whence the use of serial numbers), and the collective name (Jew) must also be killed in such a way that no we bearing this name might remain which could take the deportee’s death into itself and eternalize it.  This death must therefore be killed, and that is what is words than death.  For, if death can be exterminated, it is because there is nothing to kill.  Not even the name Jew” (§157).

 

“That is why the question “Auschwitz”? is also the question “after Auschwitz”? … For it is not even true, as Hegel believes, that afterward it still remains for us to chew and digest, in our lair, the ‘nul and void’ of the legitimating linkage, the extermination of a determined we.  The dispersive, merely negative and nearly analytic dialects at work under the name of ‘Auschwitz,’ deprived of its ‘postive-rational operator,’ the Resultat, cannot engender anything, not even the skeptical we that chomps on the shit of the mind.  The name would remain empty, retained along with other names in the network of a world, put into mecanographical or electronic memory.  But it would be nobody’s memory, about nothing and for no one” (§157).

 

Disembodied memory; forbidden self.

 

 

§158  Third Party?

 

In the declaration of laws of death, the “we” is impossible because each I declare he must die or he declares I must die has singulars that slip into the other’s third parties, prohibiting a collective we. 

 

But, does this “we” have to be the legitimation of the obligation, that is, the I plus you?  Cannot I form a we?  Like a representative, a spokesperson, an envoy?  But, this would still miss the mark.  “Auschwitz” has no addressee; “the absence of an addressee is also the absence of a witness” and the I as a we implies there is still an I/We address you.  In “Auschwitz,” the you is effaced (cf. §157).

 

The differend:  “‘Auschwitz’ would be the coexistence of two secrets, the Nazi’s secret and the deportee’s secret.  Each knows something ‘near oneself’ about the other (one: That s/he die and the other: That’s his/her law), but neither can state it to anybody” (§158).

 

Is there no one who can tell one’s secret to the other?

 

“… a double agent …” (§158).  “An agent is double, however, only for a third party who can bear witness to the fact that this agent knows about each partner what each of them knows about oneself and the other.  Lacking this third party, a double agent is not a double agent but two plain agents with two pseudonyms.  The agent is double only when unmasked, once the secret has been divulged and a single name assigned to him or her by a third (fourth) party” (§158),

 

The speculative insists that there must be a third, there… alluding to the speculative dialectics of Hegel, wherein any thesis confronted by its antithesis resolves itself in a third movement, a synthesis, which can propel the problem, self, or history onward (cf. Hegel Notice, pp.93-4).  But, no; there is no “we” at “Auschwitz,” which means that there is no passage from one regimen of language to another, no means of translation between the SS and the deportees’ testimonies, no linkage between them. 

 

There are many I’s, you’s, them’s, etc. at “Auschwitz,” but these cannot coalesce into a “we.”

 

 

§159   Without a result.

 

“The contingent name for this merely effectuated movement is ‘Auschwitz.’  But its speculative name, its name as a concept, ought precisely to designate the conjunction of two unconjugateable phrases: a norm without an addressee, a death sentence without legitimacy” (§159).

 

Not even “Terror” describes it; in the Jacobin Reign of Terror, even “I,” Robespierre fell under the totalization of its norms.

 

“At ‘Auschwitz,’ on the other hand, exception is what rules” and, if Nazi rule was terror, than it was a “pure” terror wherein purity was included, all else excluded to the degree of nonexistence.  “Racist or exceptive ‘terror’ is exclusive and regressive ….  ‘terror’ without a tribunal, and without a pronounced punishment.  Death is sufficient, since it process that what ought not to live cannot live.  The solution is final” (§159). 

 

Note how Lyotard is establishing “Auschwitz” as radically unique; we can try analogies to other events to try and conceptualize it, but all these attempts fail.  It is not just a silence within one of the instances of a phrase universe, but one or many more of those instances occupied by shifting black holes. 

 

“Speculative discourse cannot help but hesitate over the name to give it, and it will hesitate a long time: how can what spirit has gained at ‘Auschwitz’ be discerned?” (§159).

 

“As for ‘us,’ ‘afterward,’ we receive these two phrases [the heterogeneous] as two silences.  Far indeed from signifying these silences in the phrase of a Resultat, ‘we’ deem it more dangerous to make them speak than to respect them.  It is not a concept that results from ‘Auschwitz,’ but a feeling (No. 93), an impossible phrase, one that would link the SS phrase onto the deportee’s phrase, or vice-versa” (§159).

 

 

§160  Return.

 

In the Plato Notice, we saw how Plato took on the voice of the funeral orator and showed its slippage of identities from you mourners for these dead soldiers to the nobility of their deaths to the nobility of you who mourn their death.  “Like everyone, Socrates wishes to ‘die well,’ but he doesn’t want the praise of ‘well-dead’ citizens made before living citizens to persuade the latter of their own virtue,” he does not want the assimilation of virtue between the living with the dead (§160).  The “we,” the dead Athenians, the living A Athenians, confuses the moral/civic obligation for each to earn their own moral nobility.  “Through this slippage of the pronoun substituted for the name, the supreme virtue that one ought to ‘die well’ becomes a privilege of exception: that of being well born.  Exception turns the moment of virtue around: it has already taken place” (§160).

 

The Nazi Aryan narrative mimics this granting of virtue already by birth. 

 

The telling of the narrative is ritualistic and instills what tells; there is a sharp protocol for this transmission, “Tell = has told = will tell; do = has done = will do” (§160).

 

(Savages) War extends this narrative on and again, endlessly.  “Nazism restores this genre of discourse, which modernity has brought to ruin” (§160). 

 

Jewish Cabbala is a genre of discourse of questioning antithetical to the self-referential and cyclic narrative of the Nazis/beautiful death. 

 

“The linkage between the SS phrase and the deportee’s phrase is undiscoverable because these phrases do not arise from a single genre of discourse.  There are no stakes held in common by one and the other” (§160). 

 

Lyotard goes even further, saying there is not even a differend between them because there is no possibility of there even being a trial to show their heterogeneity.

 

The Jewish question has been disregarded; Nazism has been beaten down instead of refuted.  Both sides met the worse of ends.

 

“Those silences signal the interruption of the Selbst, its splitting apart” (§160).

 

Notes to the above: 

[1] Theodor Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), 34.

[2] “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America” (U.S.A. Constitution).  Note the power of “we” and the power of naming, bringing a country, not just a land but also a set of principles, into existence.

[3] A government of the conjoined Anarchists and Socialists that ruled Paris from march to may 1871 in the name of the Working Class; it rose in rebellion of France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war

[4] The Battle of Thermopylae: an alliance of Greek states led by Sparta against the Persian Empire in 480 b.c.e. during the Persian invasion of Greece; while dramatically outnumbered, the Greek held the Persians back for seven days—it is a preeminent account of a famous, courageous last stand.  Stalingrad was a major battle in WWII between Nazi Germany and the former USSR for control of Stalingrad in 1942-3; it was the bloodiest of battles, nearly two million dead at its end, it was the first substantial German defeat and a first turning point in the war.

Lyotard’s The Differend,

“The Sign of History,” §§218-20 and The Cashinhua Notice

 

§218: 

“A phrase, which links and which is to be linked, is always a pagus, a border zone where genres of discourse enter into conflict over the mode of linking” (§218).  I think this flows more smoothly with the rest of the section with the insertion, after “pagus,” of “which has.”  This makes the phrase into the pagus and the phrase/pagus as having a border, not being that border itself. 

 

Pagus: Latin, a district within a state, a community (from the Greek: pagos: that which is fixed)

Pax:  Latin, peace

Heim: German, home

Volk: German, the people

Pagani: Latin, country-dweller (root of ‘pagan,’ the polytheistic)

 

Within the pagus, pacts and peace (pax) are made and unmade.

“The vicus, the home, the Heim is a zone in which the differend between genres of discourse are suspended.  An ‘internal’ peace is bought at the price of perpetual differends at the outskirts” (§218).

 

Elucidating his notions through a topographical sketch, Lyotard shows differends to be able to be “suspended” within one’s home (more broadly construed than simply the walls of a house) at the price of pushing them to the borders between your homeland and another’s.  So, the phrase/pagus/homeland can arbitrate its differences and mutually agree on avoiding conflict within differends, but as you move further from consensus, you enter something like a demilitarized zone full of potential squabbles and reawakenings of conflict following from phrases’ linkages. 

 

How does one achieve peace within the pagus?  How does one achieve consensus there, when consensus in a differend is impossible?  By narratives: “This internal peace is made through narratives that accredit the community of proper names as they accredit themselves” (§218).

 

He identifies Joyce, Schönberg, and Cézanne as pagani, as those ‘country-dwellers,’ those ‘pagans,’ who inspire potential conflict in the border zones. 

 

James Joyce: (1882-1941) Irish writer, poet, key innovator of the modernist novel, most famous for his massive tome Ulysses (1922, not published in the US until 1933 because censors declared it obscene), his short story collection Dubliners (1914), and novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). 

 

Arnold Schönberg: (1874-1951) Austrian-American classical music composer famous for his innovative atonal music, notably his invention of the 12-tone technique [dodecaphony], which sounds all 12 possible notes of the chromatic scale in perfect balance so that no one or several notes are played more often than others within a piece and which prohibits the music being in any one key; his music, with jazz, was labeled “degenerate” in Nazi Germany and is the basis for 20th c. avant-garde composition.

 

Paul Cézanne: (1939-1906) French post-impressionist painter, represents the cusp between 19th and 20th c. painting (or, from impressionism to cubism, etc.).  He may be most known for his impressive and real, yet dramatic use of color and his high skill in draftsmanship (attention to form) in his paintings which focused, often, early on landscapes and later on subjects.

 

 

§219

“Narrative is perhaps the genre of discourse within which the heterogeneity of phrase regimes, and even the heterogeneity of genres of discourse, have the easiest time passing unnoticed” (§219). 

 

Why?  Narrative does not reject differends, but, rather, recounts them: every good story needs a central problem.  Narratives retell an event and imposes its end.  The recount avoids binding them to silence if it imposes, on the differend, an end, a conclusion.  That is, in retelling a differend, the completion has already been had for the story to begin. Even if the end told is not the actual end, the story can pick up at any stop in the event and reorganize it to make it make sense (this is what a narrative does, it organizes, renders a series, a line, with beginning and end, by which the middle makes itself make sense). 

 

“The narrative function is redeeming in itself.  It acts as if the occurrence, with its potentiality of differends, could come to completion, or as if there was a last word” (§219). 

 

Playing on the French idiom, Lyotard says that the last word [as the idiom “witty remark,” un bon mot] is always a good one [bon]. 

 

“… the unleashing [déchaînement] of the now is domesticated by the recurrence of the before/after” (§219).  The déchaînement, the free and rapid linkage of words, the stream of consciousness, is made common and comprehensible, fixed up with concepts by the linear/temporal arrangement of the narrative.

 

“Narratives drive the event back to the border” (§219).

 

 

§220

Quoting Lacoue-Labarthe, Lyotard identifies myth as the most potent form of narrative to make sense within a community, that myth is “the mimetic instrument par excellance” ad that is has an “identificatory force.”  This use can be seen in the Nazi adoption of the Nordic myths to promote nationalism when the country was economically hurting post WWI. 

 

But, Lyotard argues three points:

(1) The force of myth to identify and let others identify themselves with it, is not debated; but it is not purely mimetic in the sense that, as he notes, the sick do not get better by looking in the mirror.  It is the formal properties (the form) of narrative that contains its force; the names that help to anchor it are invariable (heroes, narrators, and narratees are established—we have our heroes and we equally have the we who tells us and the we who listen to these stories). 

 

(2) “Myth can be used only as an instrument by an instance which is not narrative-mythical” (§220). 

 

(3) “If ‘mimetic’ is understood as imitative or representative, then myth is not exceptionally mimetic.  If mimesis signifies … [as L-L argued] that the presentation (Darstellung) can never be presented … then myth—which is more of a genre of discourse whose stakes are in neutralizing the ‘event’ by recounting it, in appropriating what is absolutely improper, and in representing presentation—occults mimesis as much as it attests to it” (§220). 

 

In other words, myth presents something even if this destroys the event it is presenting, it does not show the unshowable; thus, if mimesis is the latter, myth does the opposite even if it ultimately shows that it is destroying something in order to present it.

 

 

The Cashinahua Notice: (pp.152-155, in eight numbered sections):

 

The Cashinahua Indians are a native population settled in both Peru and Brazil.  The Notice is predominantly a review of select passages on narrative in Le dit des Vrais Hommes: Mythes, contes, legends et traditions des Indiens Cashinahua, a study of the population by André-Marcel d’Ans, a professor of anthropology and political sociology at Paris VII who focused on linguistic ethnology of South and Central American natives.  Lyotard’s analysis of the work concentrates on the population’s use of narrative as binding their history.[1]

 

Their miyoi, traditional narratives, employ a very strict formula of denomination that authorizes every legitimate addressee the right to be its addressor.  This formula, as quoted from André-Marcel d’Ans, begins with: “Here is the story of …, as I’ve always heard it told.  I am going to tell it to you in my turn, listen to it” (p. 152)![2]  Lyotard notes that the narrator’s declaration of always having heard the tale singularizes his authority as it universalizes his history:

 

If every narrator has always declared this, then the story will have been reported with no discontinuity since the time of the Ancients, who were the first narrators as well as the heroes.  There would be no gap, therefore, between the current narrator and the Ancients, except in principle a chronological one (p. 154). 

 

The singularity of a narrator telling the tale, a singular event, universalizes their collective history.  The tale’s inheritance grants authority as it demands authority to be telling it: this question of right is circular while the telling of the tale itself cements Cashinahua reality into a single linear narrative.  We want our myths, histories, and witness’ testimony, likewise, to grant the authority of the one who can tell it and whose telling unfolds it into a perfect, single genealogical line of narrative inheritance.

 

The story is told and concludes with another strictly prescribed formula: “Here ends the story of …  He who told it to you is … (Cashinahua name), or among the Whites … (Spanish or Portuguese name)” (p.152).  Each tale will be unique, yet framed identically to every other traditional Cashinahua narrative like separate volumes within a set of collected works.

 

 

(1) Cashinahua myth begins and ends with a fixed formula.  “By means of a strict denomination, a ritual fixes the extension of myths and their recurrence.  Every phrase contained in these myths is pinned, so to speak, to named and nameable instances in the world of Cashinahua names.  Each universe presented by each of these phrases, no matter what its regimen, refers to this world of names.  The presented hero or heroes and places, the addressee, and finally the addressor are meticulously named.”

 

(2) This society determines its membership not upon bloodlines but upon names, “kinship relations are thus derivable from the system of names alone, without considerations of consanguinity” (p.153).  Your personal name places you in a group and a defined social relations.  Each member has two names: their citizenry in Cashinahua society gives each one a name while their humanity in general gives each member another name.  Each name is determined by three factors: gender, generation, and “exogamic moiety,” which refers to a descent group determined by marriage of parties from different clans.[3]  Being given your names grants you existence as it determines your place within this network and how you link to each of its components and each other individual.  Within the native population, the native name links you to your peers; the “White” name links each member as member and collective population of Cashinahua to the outside world.  The miyoi’s concluding formula’s inclusion of the two names of the storyteller reveals the radical flexibility of their narratives to link to multiple phrase regimens. 

(3) The names constitute the community’s identity; this preference of names over blood practically eliminates sexual taboo.  “…if the child has no name, he is nothing, he cannot exist…” (Lyotard quoting d’Ans, 38).   “Human beings are named, or they are not human.”

 

(4) “In order to hear the narratives, you have to have been named.”  All males and pre-puberty females can hear the narratives.  “In order to tell them, the same applies (only men may tell them).  And in order to be told about (referent), the same applies (all Cashinahua without exception may be told about).

 

“But the system of names does not engender and cannot engender narratives… since the namings are not descriptions” (p.153).  Names grant existence and determine classification within the system, which details what one may and may not do but the names and the system they forge are not a narrative.  To form and tell the narrative of their names, someone must not be one of them and thus be able to view their names as descriptive.  D’Ans, then, must remain “White” as he is a Cashinahua.

 

(5) Style of the narrative

 

(6) Authority from names but name’s authority from stories—vicious circle.

 

(7)  “…the occurrence or event is not taken into account by legends, it would be sublimated in the strict sense of the term.  It would be transformed into an airy element: smoke from sacrificial fired, the volatility of shaman spirits.  The limit of the integrating capacity of narration and of naming would be recognized in this manner, and determination is what evaporates thereby.  Why should that part be accursed?  The sacrifice recognizes the differend which is not digested by the narration and acquits itself of it.

 

(8) “How can this war at the border (Clastres, 1977) be understood through this apparatus of integrated phrases?  Is this too a sacrifice devoted to that major residue of indetermination which surrounds the world of narratives that is constitutive of the ethnic group’s culture?  But in this case, it is done in another mode.  Could it be said that sacrifice represses occurrence, that it accepts it and integrates it the way a dream is able to do with a ‘movement of desire’?  (In the absence of sacrifices, the Cashinahua men give themselves over to collective bouts with ayahuasca, a potent hallucinogen.)  But that war forecloses occurrence at the boundaries of the narrative corpus constituting the social ‘body’ the way paranoia allows the ‘movement of desire’ to return from the outside, as ‘reality’?”

Notes to the Above:

[1] André-Marcel d’Ans, Le dit des Vrais Hommes: Mythes, contes, legends et traditions des Indiens Cashinahua (Paris: Gallimard, 1978).  For a brief biographical sketch, cf. the obituary notice published ahead of an article of his in La Quinzaine Littéraire (972): July 4, 2008, available at: http://laquinzaine.wordpress.com/2008/07/04/andre-marcel-dans-nous-a-quitte/.

[2] Lyotard cites André-Marcel d’Ans, Le dit des Vrais Hommes (Paris: Gallimard, 1978).

[3] Horticulture defines exogamy as cross-pollination of different plants.  Exogamic moiety would be the genetic classificatory groups and would be what one would review to determine the “species” origins of a hybrid, for example, a Heucherella is a distinct plant, yet also the result of a cross between the distinct species Heuchera (coralbells) and Tiarella (foamflower).  For zoology, this type of classification would find that the mule was the hybrid result of the breeding of horses and donkeys.  Within anthropology, the human groups would be divided more subtly, for example, on Cuba one could find a “hybrid” whose parentage is both African and Spanish.  Within linguistics, this practice would be an act similar to tracing the etymology of a word, for example, considering the adoption of a foreign word to name a new phenomenon.