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| ISBN-13: | 9780521838535 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/09/2004 |
| Pages: | 246 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.38(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.79(d) |
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Cambridge University Press
0521838533 - Semiologies of Travel - From Gautier to Baudrillard - by David Scott
Excerpt
Introduction: nostalgies du symbole
Avec l'Amérique indienne je chéris le reflet, fugitif même là-bas, d'une ère où l'espèce était à la mesure de son univers et où persistait un rapport adéquat entre l'exercice de la liberté et ses signes.
(Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1955: 171)
Encore aujourd'hui la nostalgie d'une référence naturelle du signe est vivace.
(Jean Baudrillard, 1976: 79)
L'imaginaire d'un retour à l'origine du signe prend naissance [chez Michaux] dans cet idéogramme [chinois] indéchiffrable, qui a suscité la nostalgie d'une lisibilité primitive.
(Jean-Pierre Martin, 1994: 391)
Tout rite est analogique.
(Marc Augé, 1994b: 110)
SYMBOL AND ANALOGY
The relationship between sign systems and travel, the symbolic and the real, seems to have been of fundamental concern to European writers from the beginning of the age of exploration - on both a hermeneutic and semiotic level. This is because from the Renaissance period onward, fresh encounters with the real in newly discovered and far-off lands tended to initiate reflection on the phenomena encountered as much in terms of their status as signs as the problems they posed to interpretation. As early as 1516, Thomas More in his Utopia, recounting an imaginary voyage across the Atlantic to a newly discovered country, is as deeply concerned with its modes of symbolic representation - as we shall see in Chapter 4, he goes so far as to invent for it an alphabet and language, rooted in Greek - as with the physical aspects of its culture and environment. This preoccupation continued well into the seventeenth century when, as Paul Cornelius has shown (1965), the interest in both imaginary voyages and imaginary languages was founded on a realistic basis: linguists were searching for traces of the originary or universal language that it was believed was shared by humankind throughout the world before Babel, while theorists and practitioners of the newly developing sciences were interested in the possibility - often worked out in experimental terms in the literature of imaginary voyages - of languages or other symbolic systems in which the relationship between sign and object was philosophically motivated: '[In seventeenth-century Europe], there was much discussion about the possibility of making language a perfect representation of material reality, and there were a number of attempts to make an artificial language which imitated the European notion of the language of China - a scientific, universal language, with ideograms that represented the things and concepts for which they stood' (Cornelius, 1965: 2).
So while European thought was negotiating the complicated transition between a pre-Renaissance, analogical mode of thinking and a post-sixteenth-century rational approach to knowledge - what Foucault (1966), as we shall see below, refers to as the Enlightenment épistèmè - it was at the same time exploring the possibility of superimposing an iconic (or visually motivated) system of representation on a symbolic (or conventionally logical) one. The link between this epistemological project and travel to unexplored countries, real or imagined, is symptomatic of a deeper impulsion in the early modern European sensibility - that of a desire to relate the new - whether scientific or utopian - to the past - whether historical or mythological. In this way, the quest for the new and the different is paradoxically accompanied by a nostalgia for an integrated semiotic system. This nostalgia becomes, after the nineteenth century, an integral part of the appeal of the exotic, part of whose underlying project, as Chris Bongie suggests, is 'to recover the possibility of this total "experience", this concrete apprehension of others that is [. . .] typical of traditional communities but has been [. . .] eliminated from our own' (1991: 9).
This curiosity/nostalgia relation becomes integral to travel writing, in particular from the end of the Enlightenment period. So, although the voyage theme goes back in Europe at least as far as Homer's Odyssey, travel writing, increasingly important in Europe from the sixteenth century's voyages of discovery (Affergan, 1987a; Cornelius, 1965), became a major literary genre in the modern period (nineteenth and twentieth centuries). Its early expansion coincided with the development of a more scientific approach to history, anthropology and semiotics, and evolved against a background in which the scientific/rationalist model of thinking of the Enlightenment was beginning to come to terms with the relativisation of knowledge and of cultural prestige that a study of history, and, later, semiotics and anthropology, brought to European understanding. It also reflected a heightening of that nostalgia in the early modern period for a holistic, analogical pre-Renaissance approach to knowledge, the equivalent of which anthropologists were rediscovering in so-called primitive societies. For ethnographers were uncovering in native cultures epistemological structures in which the sign still seemed to have a motivated or sacred connection with its object, a link that each ethnic group's social organisation and ritual activity were structured to strengthen and maintain.
For travel writers, in the wake of Enlightenment rationalism and scepticism, and the decline in religious belief, such epistemic models were irresistibly attractive, offering in terms of the real what the Romantic imagination was committed to salvaging - but, in effect, only in terms of literature. This attractiveness was still powerful well into the twentieth century, the anthropological project of Lévi-Strauss, for example, being, as we shall see, in part motivated by a profound nostalgia for a primitive state in which human society was bound to both itself and the natural world by a unified and integral symbolic order.1 From the nineteenth century, then, an important motivation governing travel writing (though in some earlier cases it was not formulated systematically or consciously) was the quest for an ideal model of human interaction with the social and natural worlds. While the Utopian strain implicit in this ambition will be investigated more specifically in a later section (Chapter 4), this book's aim in general is to investigate the ways in which confrontation of difference - through anthropology and history - and the clarification of the operations of the sign - through semiotics - became fundamental strategies in modern French travel writing in the pursuit of this quest.
For a model describing the fundamental categories different cultures use to shape their representation of the world, this study will in particular adapt that outlined by Michel Foucault in Les Mots et les choses (1966). In framing the concept of the épistémè, Foucault clarifies the way the basic epistemological structures of a culture organise themselves, establishing codes governing knowledge and custom (1966: 11-13). Each épistémè is relative both historically and in its claim to knowledge of the world, myths of one kind or another forming an integral part of every one. But each épistémè has an internal coherence and is in theory comprehensive within the given culture or ethnic group it governs. It is only in the modern period that western cultures have become aware of the épistémès governing their own outlook, as a result both of the work of anthropologists from the nineteenth century onwards in uncovering that of other ethnic groups, and of the work of modern historians. It is against this background indeed that Foucault, as historiographer and philosopher of history, produced in Les Mots et les choses his theory of the épistémè. In effect each ethnographer attempts to describe the épistémè of a culture, in particular the myths and prohibitions governing its rituals, social organisation and knowledge, which Foucault refers to as the 'codes fondamentaux d'une culture' (1966: 11). These codes are often 'deep' or hidden - Foucault refers to the necessity of an archeology to unearth them - and the 'structuralist' anthropology of a one-time geologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, was developed precisely in an attempt to reconstruct their complex ramifications. In a sense, every serious travel writer is an ethnographer, and in confronting a new épistémè, is faced by a surprise or a bewilderment comparable to that felt by a reader of Borgès's Chinese encyclopedia, cited by Foucault in the preface of Les Mots et les choses (1966: 7). For Borgès's encyclopedia proposes categories and classifications inconceivable to, incompatible with the Enlightenment épistémè that, Foucault argues, still governs much western thinking.
Foucault cites Borgès's Chinese dictionary as a model of knowledge comparable to that governing pre-Enlightenment European epistemology. Before the Renaissance, western thinking had much in common with the pre-scientific, analogical models operative not only in an imaginary China but in many still existing so-called primitive societies. Such épistémès were capable of integrating monsters and myths into a scheme which also accommodated what we might still today describe as 'scientific fact': divisions between the imagined and the scientifically proven were still fluid. The analogical model, Foucault argues, was largely superseded in the Enlightenment by an épistémè that established universal, scientific principles, capable in theory of accounting for all experience, able to acclimatise all difference. Foucault's distinction is of special interest to any study of travel writing in that the latter invariably expresses, in one form or another, a clash of the analogical and rational épistémès. With the nineteenth-century shift into what Foucault describes as the modern period, such epistemic clashes become relativised, as historical and anthropological perspectives added to and nuanced all branches of knowledge. A corresponding increase in complexity is evidenced in travel writing, in which a nostalgia for holistic, mythical models of truth has to be correlated with the realities of a modern, scientific age. In this respect, there is a travel literature for each age: Homer and Marco Polo, with their real itineraries leading to mythical beasts - golden fleece or dragons, both explore a pre-Renaissance épistémè; in the eighteenth century, James Cook and Bougainville investigate an Enlightenment globe, while a panoply of modern writers, particularly English and French, seek out the fast-disappearing traces of once magical worlds.
The nostalgia for an analogical as opposed to a rational approach to experience or knowledge (to use Foucault's distinction, 1966: 44-5) is in part a function of the épistémè or paradigm shift marked by Romantic and early modern European literature. As Foucault states it, in the Renaissance period the hermeneutic, the science of making signs speak - 'l'ensemble des connaissances et des techniques qui permettent de faire parler les signes et de découvrir leur sens' (1966: 44) - was ideally in correlation with the semiological, the science of sign recognition - 'l'ensemble des connaissances et des techniques qui permettent de distinguer où sont les signes' (1966: 44); however, there was always a gap or décalage between these two grids which was sufficient to problematise knowledge. The Romantics sought, after the Enlightenment separation of the scientific disciplines, to superimpose again, this time in imaginative terms, hermeneutics on semiology as in Renaissance thinking and theories of resemblance. However, since the scientific/rationalist revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such a superimposition was viewed as increasingly problematic and relegated to more imaginative realms of cultural expression such as literature. As a model, it could only be found playing a central role in other cultures, considered more 'primitive'. Correspondingly travel writing, as a (pseudo-)ethnography, will seek to re-enchant the world, expressing in the process a nostalgia for and desire to experience other, seemingly more integral, signifying systems (Foucault, 1966: 48).
The Romantic concern with metaphor forms part of an awareness, expressed in travel writing as well as in lyric poetry, of the mythical nature of analogical thinking. As Foucault argues: 'Connaître une bête, ou une plante, ou une chose quelconque de la terre, c'est recueillir toute l'épaisse couche des signes qui ont pu être déposés en elles ou sur elles' (1966: 55) [To know an animal, a plant or any earthly phenomenon is to apprehend fully the thick layer of signs that have been deposited in or on them]. This 'thick layer of signs' provides the basis of both the so-called 'primitive logic' as studied by ethnography and the poetic logic which through metaphor links the real to the imaginary and vice versa. So, just as primitive societies or exotic cultures offer the possibility of experiencing an earlier, pre-rationalist épistémè, so Romantic writing once again strives to propose a textual model that both is linked to the real and yet, through a complex layering of signs, liberates the imagination. Travel writing is a paradox in that it is a rite of passage both to the real - that is, to an epistemic system different from that of the writer and which thus provokes a profound re-assessment of experience and values - and to the ideal - that is, to a world of renewed and heightened meaning. Likewise, travel writing's search for the exotic shares another paradox with the Romantic project, being built in part upon the nostalgia that came with the discovery of the historical dimension to all experience (and thus the desire to rehabilitate the previously known) and in part on anticipation of the new and strange (the desire to discover the differently known). The theory of the exotic is given ultimate expression by late Romantic writers such as Segalen, after whom later twentieth-century travel writers either mourn the exotic's passing or begin to explore, in a post-colonial context, new configurations of intercultural communication.2
The complex form Romantic cultural nostalgia takes may in part be a function of the fact that Europeans were never really able to sustain for long an originating myth of their own: their culture and beliefs are a function of a long history and pre-history of successive invasions - military, cultural, ideological - depriving them of the millennial stability enjoyed by other civilisations - Indian, Chinese - and the numberless so-called primitive societies of the Americas and Australasia. The word 'civilisation' is indeed problematic when applied to European culture which - unlike Egyptian, Greek, Chinese, Indian - has never - except perhaps during the Christian Middle Ages - been stable for long enough to establish a unifying system. Europa was only ever a raging farmyard animal, an iconoclastic bull, tossing about and eventually shattering the icons and belief systems of previous or other cultures - a power-house of energy but one never able to live at peace with itself. This relative cultural rootlessness may be one of the reasons why travel writing has been more elaborated in European than in other cultures.
Of course the comparative stability of other, non-European cultures and civilizations is partly illusory, a function of the nostalgic, idealising European gaze seeking a millennial permanence in societies outside itself which appear less prone (until the modern period at any rate) to historical change. In a sense, of course, it is Europe's exceptionally tumultuous recent history (in particular the last millennium) that has in part provoked its nostalgia for permanence and stable meaning. Once again, as Foucault correctly observed, the Renaissance was a watershed: apart from historical factors (the wars of religion and those waged in nationalist power struggles), the Enlightenment compartmentalisation of knowledge led to the outstripping of some disciplines in relation to others (e.g. science over theology) and to a clash of ideologies within the system. This in turn led, in conjunction with economic and industrial expansion, to an acceleration of history unparalleled in any other culture or recorded civilisation. Of course, in seeking to escape this acceleration by reference to other, non-European ethnic groups, Europeans simply brought about, through colonialism and other forms of cultural interchange, a corresponding acceleration of history in other cultures. This acceleration has in turn resulted in an upsurge of travel-related writing from formerly colonised countries, especially in Africa with its growing literature of exile in Europe.3
The problematic status of history in so-called primitive societies has become a major topic of discussion in contemporary ethnology, whether it be the difficulty of identifying historical change in societies without writing (as analysed for example by Lévi-Strauss in the introduction to Anthropologie structurale, 1958) or the problem of what happens when European history, through colonialism, impinges on other cultures (as discussed by Marc Augé in the context of contemporary Africa, Le Sens des autres, 1994a). Discussion of such problems has also filtered into some recent travel writing. It is paralleled by the modern (that is post-mid-nineteenth-century) concern with tourism, a phenomenon that has in the twentieth century increasingly exercised sociology and ethnography as well as travel writing.4 Like all foreign influences, tourism ultimately destroys the object - the exotic, the Other - that it seeks to possess, converting it into matter for consumption comparable to the manufactured or industrialised objects it offers to primitive or colonial or post-colonial societies in exchange. Popular travel is now estimated by the various branches of the human sciences to be not just a product but also a defining characteristic of post-modern society.
In addition to history5 and instead, as it were, of civilisation, Europe offers the rest of the world an 'intellectual tradition' whose main vocation, based in particular on its classical Greek ancestry, has been to question and problematise both its own and other cultures' belief systems. Drawing its knowledge from a heterogeneous and successive series of sources, post-Renaissance Europe has leant increasingly away from holistic and religious models towards a science based on questioning and experiment, away - as has been shown in the context of Foucault - from the analogical principle towards the rational. The multiplicity of sciences - physical and human - in Europe is in part a function of the lack of a unifying belief system: after the Renaissance, theology branches into philosophy (reason), science (empiricism) and literature (imagination). Emerging from the relatively stable period of the Middle Ages, when the Christian Church and Latin language provided a spiritual and conceptual frame within which major issues of faith, truth and knowledge could be contained, the Renaissance, with its revival of the vernacular and of alternative systems of representation (in particular Greek) initiated a process of desacralisation which today shows no sign of abating.
The loosening of the sacred bond between sign and object that brought about this desacralisation is a central issue of semiotics. As has been shown, Foucault in Les Mots et les choses sees the separation of hermeneutics from semiology as being part of the birthright of the Enlightenment, whose project it was, while attempting to systematise the relation between words and things, precisely to separate irrevocably the sign from its object. So, while metaphysics was re-invented by Descartes and his followers in part as a counter to scepticism and the decline in religious belief - belief in the Word as the word of God, the divine and all-knowing principle - proposing instead a truth based on reason and logical deduction, it also inaugurated the liberation of the true from the sacred, the word from the Book. The thesis of Descartes's Discours de la méthode (1637) was thus that if the meaning of signs (words) could be clearly and distinctly defined and the relation between them plotted logically, then Truth could be accessed. There was no longer any need for an iconic relation (similitude) between sign and object if reason were able clearly and distinctly to grasp the link between the separate but analogous systems constituted by signs and objects. Indeed iconic relations between sign and object were to be distrusted given the potentially deceptive nature of the sensual apprehension on which they were often based. In this respect, the arbitrariness of the European alphabetic language systems proved a definite advantage: lacking the iconic similitude of pictographic (Egyptian) or ideogrammatic (Chinese) languages, the truth of the relation between sign and object was lodged not in its signifying surface or signifier, but in its internal logic, i.e. what it signified. So, while on the one hand non-iconic sign systems make the relation between sign and object more difficult to grasp, on the other they constitute an unrivalled system for analysis and for the accommodation of countless words and concepts from the outside (Foucault, 1966: 100).
In re-inventing metaphysics, however, Descartes also re-invented metaphysical doubt and was only able to circumvent it, as Pascal clearly saw, through metaphysical sophistry. Doubt is always the result of the emergence of an alternative sign system which undermines or problematises that which precedes it.6 The rapid and catastrophic collapse of so-called primitive systems of belief has mostly been the function of contamination by contact in the post-Renaissance period with European sign systems, just as Christianity slowly collapsed beneath the onslaught of alternative models and sources of knowledge. In so-called primitive societies it is not access to but maintenance of the Truth that is of the essence: primitive societies are self-contained - their myths are both integral and inviolable, but, like all human phenomena, susceptible to forgetting and decay. Hence the vital role of ritual in constantly rehearsing the myths binding the community. The semiological project of primitive societies as analysed by Lévi-Strauss and theorized by Baudrillard is essentially one of repeatedly re-assigning the sign to its object in a sacred bond and thus maintaining a stable environment for meaning. In this respect, European colonisation of American and African worlds is a revisiting of cultural aggression as catastrophic as that visited on Europe in pre-historic and early historic times. As has already been noted, the other side to this restless intellectual inquiry is the nostalgia for a fixed or stable belief system, one capable of surviving the aggressions or encroachments of other knowledge systems. This nostalgia is accompanied, however, by a paradox we have already mentioned in the context of history and tourism: to seek and to find an alternative and authentic tradition is almost certainly to destroy it through the contamination of contact.
This fear of contamination through contact may be a major factor in the historic mistrust between Moslem (Near and Middle Eastern) and Christian (European) civilisations. As the Iranian philosopher Javad Tabatabai convincingly demonstrates in his essay 'L'Incompréhension des civilisations: le cas de la Perse' (2002), for the last millennium the opposition of Islam and Europe is a concomitant of the respective states of fixity and crisis the two civilisations represent:
L'identité telle qu'elle est entendue dans le monde de l'islam - contrairement à la conception européenne - est l'identité en tant qu'uniformité, monotonie et monolithisme; l'identité de l'Europe n'est ce qu'elle est que parce qu'elle est plurielle et en devenir; elle vit de la crise et dans celle-ci, et le mode de l'islam ne peut guère comprendre cette situation de la crise permanente, puisque l'identité dans le monde de l'islam est notre 'authenticité', qui n'est d'ailleurs authentique que parce qu'elle demeure intouchable, inchangée et inchangeable. (Javad Tabatabai, 2002: 72-3)
[Identity as it is understood in the world of Islam - contrary to the European conception - is identity as uniformity, monotonous and monolithic; European identity is what it is only because it is plural and evolving; it lives off and in a state of crisis; Islamic thinking has difficulty understanding this state of permanent crisis, since identity in the world of Islam is our 'authenticity', which is moreover authentic only because it remains untouchable, unchanged and unchangeable.]
For Tabatabai, almost from its Greek beginnings, European thought has been a reflection on change, on successive crises and moments of decline, one that from the Renaissance has progressively accelerated. Within the more homogeneous conceptual frameworks of Islamic thinking, on the other hand, such a reflection was impossible. The result of this, Tabatabai argues, was that Islamic thinking was unable, first, to grasp and, second, to evaluate what was at stake in European self-analysis, taking it literally as a sign of cultural decadence rather than of intellectual creativity. In semiotic terms, the effect of this was that Islam, through its relative stasis, has preserved the violence of signs - a unified religious, legal and social code observing a fixed, sacred and non-negotiable link between sign and object - whereas, in the Greek period and since the Renaissance in particular, Europe has tended progressively to separate sign from object, liberating thought from any attachment to the real and so from immovable violent hierarchies.7
SEMIOTICS AND TRAVEL
The separation during the European Enlightenment of semiology and hermeneutics and the subsequent early modern nostalgia for their superimposition no doubt had some bearing on the subsequent development, in both philosophy and the new science of linguistics, of theories of signs. For although sign theories originated in ancient Greek philosophy, it was only after the paradigm shift from the Enlightenment to the early modern period that semiotic theories developed sufficiently to provide a foundation for the modern human sciences. This basis was provided in particular by two thinkers, one a philosopher, the other a linguistician, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) and Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). Although both elaborated semiotic theories comprehensive enough to embrace both the hermeneutic and semiological aspects of sign articulation and recognition as analysed by Foucault (1966: 44-5), the emphasis in each tends towards one or other of these two. In Peirce, it is the mechanisms of interpretation (or hermeneutics) that are given more extensive elaboration than in Saussure, while the latter focuses more particularly on the internal structure of the sign (or semiology). Peirce is father of Semiotics in the broadest sense of the term. Saussure, on the other hand, though he coined the word 'semiology', was primarily concerned with one branch of this new general science - that of Linguistics, a study area that his Cours de linguistique générale (1916) was the first to establish on a truly scientific footing - and it was correspondingly to the linguistic sign that he devoted his closest attention.
The difference of emphasis between these two seminal semioticians is worth pursuing here to the extent that it clarifies the nature of the theoretical models developed in modern ethnography and sociology, and the responses to difference and the other as explored in modern French travel writing. To summarise, one might say that Saussurian semiology is concerned with difference, whether within a given system or as between different systems, while Peircian hermeneutics is concerned with the other, in particular in so far as it approaches the real. This difference is reflected in the varying structural emphasis of the Peircian and Saussurian systems: Saussure works within a format of binary opposition - same/different - while Peirce's thinking is essentially triadic. Where Saussure, bracketing the sign's referent, concentrates his attention on the internal structure of the sign - the relation of the signifier as visual or acoustic sign to the signified as concept or idea - Peirce is concerned with the triangular relation between sign, interpretant and object; that is, not only with the relation between signifier (sign) and interpretant (signified) but also with the sign's relation to the object (whether the latter be a thing, an idea or another sign). The hermeneutic process - 'l'ensemble des connaissances et des techniques qui permettent de faire parler les signes et de découvrir leur sens' (Foucault, 1966: 44) - is clarified in particular in Peirce's theory of the sign by his analysis of the interpretative process: the interpretant's grasp of the sign as a function of different but complementary logics - deductive (or immediate), abductive (imaginative) or inductive (epistemological). At the same time, the hermeneutics/semiology distinction as made by Foucault is maintained in Saussure's distinction between parole - a hermeneutic activation of signs - and langue - the theoretical disposition enabling the signifying process to operate: semiology.8
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