Echoes 1998

Steve Ouditt, 'Echoes'

In: Annotations 4: Steve Ouditt: Creole-in-site. Edited by Gilane Tawadros. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1998, pp. 31-32.

'Indigenism' and 'tribal' when used these days in the wrong places can frighten hybrid scholars who have argued quite well for cases and states of hybridity in the contemporary world. But Devi's positioning is less about a fast-paced mobility of cultural miscegenation from 'within' the tribe and more about a lineage of secular forest and hill dwellers who were/are the internal ostracised in India, even worse off than low caste Hindus because they were not religious, or not institutionally or – now as Hindu nationalism is sweeping across India – nationally religious. To appreciate their presence is to look at important dynamics and routes of Western or Western styles capitalist models of development which according to its implicit philosophy must grow. And this means to continue with the structures of Western expansion to secure more resources for greater production.

Attention here to 'tribalism' or 'indigenism' will help us to make space in our internationalist dealings to remember not only the benefits of 'multicultural' initiatives but also the harm of ‘multinational’ enterprises. We now have to start learning from below. There are many ways to interpret this, and one of the more philosophical engagements with learning from below or reading between or beyond the spaces of texts (in their largest sense) have been in the great works of Jacques Derrida. [1]

But we must be careful not to exoticise, romanticise or primitivise in theory. I say in theory because often in 'literature' writers may play with these meanings as 'paths' or 'lines' into the poetics or plots of a story. It’s not at all different for the visual artist. How often have we accused Warhol and pop artists of 'scandalising' 'Ar'’? How often have we wondered whether they were playing 'Artists' or were artists for 'real'?

A voice in terror that speaks in figures in my work could be seen as a character who inhabits some of the work of the writers mentioned above. This voice like the characters is obviously quite 'emotional', and to attend to this is a good beginning in learning from below because sometimes too much scholarship may cause an aversion to another kind of readership. Paul de Man in Process and Poetry writes: 'However, by overcoming the dread felt in the face of something unknown only because it is in reality the one thing that is truly familiar, we would somehow be able to move back into the light, and finally "to dwell poetically on earth"'.

This readership is one that I interact with by looking at the ways 'voices' in 'literature' can attend to political liberation and to one of the more useful aspects of Enlightenment philosophy, that of the emancipatory project by being able under the guise of fiction and poetry to say anything, to make great claims for human rights in complicated plots. This right to make claims in poetry or poetics for greater democracy and justice is sometimes more sensible – about the senses, about the body – than hyper-structured reasoning, - which is worthwhile – but must always grapple with the aesthetic. In other words I am advocating an aestheticisation of theory, or a greater 'play' between theory and literature without compromising the rigorousness with which we must attend to the specialist and specific languages and concepts of both. Perhaps here we must look at, or employ 'metaphor', that figurative use of language (or is it the use of the figurative in language? or to learn how to use the figure in language?).

I am also suggesting that entrapment in space or sucrotopia is not unrelated or dissimilar to an entrapment in the structures of text or writing. One must always look for another way out of a trap, his/her own way. An own voice perhaps?

[1] Christopher Norris writes in 'Deconstruction, Post-Modernism and The Visual Arts' from What is Deconstruction by Christopher Norris and Andrew Benjamin, London: Academy Editions, 1988: 'When Derrida affirms, notoriously, that there is "nothing outside the text". …The sentence should rather be construed as arguing first that we can have no access to reality except through the categories, concepts and codes, the structures of representation that make such access possible. … This writing is not in the restricted sense of phonetic – alphabetical marks on a page, but a generalised writing – archi-écriture – which in Derrida's usage comes to include all those systems of language, culture and representation that exceed the grasp of logocentric reason of the Western "metaphysics of presence".'