2003
MMLA
New Histories of Writing I:
Historiographies
Damian Baca,
Syracuse University
Joddy Murray, Washington State University,Tri-Cities
Image
Writing & Non-Discursive Symbolization:The Limitations of Alphacentric
Historiographies
Introduction
This paper aims to expose current historiography as Alphacentric: a history
of writing that is always tied to the emergence of the alphabet. We propose
that any "new" history of writing must also consider what constitutes
writing in the first place, especially in the context of non-Hellenic,
non-Western traditions of writing. If the definition of writing is expanded
to include any surviving symbolization, then the possibilities of including
the histories of cultures more reliant on diverse textual systems suddenly
become available. Historiography, then, becomes the act of writing histories
about symbolization in general, whether it be in the form of images and
icons, textiles, architecture, ceramics, etc..
What this paper will do is twofold: 1) We will expand the term "writing"
to be the production of "text" that may be discursive or non-discursive:
"text" is a word that has come to mean any artifact of symbolization
that can be "read" by an audience; and 2) We will demonstrate
how such an expansion of the term "writing" can change historiography
by reconstructing cumulative histories of Mexican-Amerindian codex writing.
This in turn can also work against the "print dominance" found
in most composition classrooms while attempting to expand what is considered
legitimate products of composition-especially within the pressures of
multi-genre, multimedia views of composition.
We do not intend to limit our examination of Mexican-Amerindian codex
writing as a mere "alternative" narrative that ensures the staying
power of "non-Western" traditions. Narratives, Malea Powell
reminds us, are more than survival and endurance; they have the power
to inscribe, re-inscribe, and un-inscribe our world (427). Such narratives
are valuable to writing specialists, especially those concerned with how
cultural identities in the Americas are shaped, destroyed, and sustained
through official, resistant, and ritualistic uses of writing.
The narratives we telescope here illustrate the written responses to dominant
historical narratives in the work of Mexican-Amerindian Codices, some
of the only major Aztec poetic forms to survive after the transnational
importation of Iberian customs. While we offer a brief overview of the
colonial era manuscripts produced in the sixteenth century, our focus
is primarily on the contemporary Codex Espangliensis: From Columbus to
the Border Patrol by Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Enrique Chagoya,
and Felicia Rice. Specifically, we argue that Mexican-Amerindian codex
rhetorics have continually adapted, rejected, and revised dominant historical
narratives of the West, that they continue to do so today, and that our
analysis of the Codex Espangliensis can offer much to scholars in Rhetoric
and Composition still searching for productive ways of examining "race,"
rhetoric, and the plurality of writing practices that thrived in America
long before the arrival of the Puritan colonies and the rise of Western
European education institutions-a task that requires an expanded conception
of language beyond the discursive.
A Rejection of "Alphacentric" Language Theory
Historiography remains both a methodological as well as a disciplinary
concern for contemporary scholarship. In our field, Composition and Rhetoric,
the difficulties and rewards of historiography come in and out of vogue
depending on the amount of historical scholarship being published at the
moment. In 1988 and 1997, the Octalogs (I and II, respectively) published
in Rhetoric Review testified as to how divergent our discipline is concerning
the way history gets written. In the first Octalog, Nan Johnson, takes
a position in the debate by saying, simply, that she "proceed[s]
on the assumption that historical research and writing are archaeological
and rhetorical activities" (9). Similarly, Janet M. Atwill, in Octalog
II, proclaims how historians both conform and stretch the traditional
forms of historiography: "I have submitted to the conventions of
a patriarchal discipline, but I have tried to use those conventions to
raise as much hell as possible" (25). There seems to be as many perspectives
as there are historians, and it is this kind of rich debate about historiography
that keeps at the forefront the important role histories (and narratives
in general) maintain in directing, as well as authorizing, scholarly inquiry.
But as we look at the challenges and shortcomings brought on in part by
the changing definitions of "history," very little attention
is being paid to the way the changing definitions of "writing"
impacts historiography. Walter Ong, in his influential and troubling book
Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World, does little to
help historians of writing think broadly and across cultures because he
consistently reinforces a notion of writing that privileges the alphabet
as a precondition for "literacy":
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We
quote this at length because Ong manages to state in this passage the
more common perspectives concerning writing, especially as it is talked
about in linguistic and archeological contexts. Though Ong manages to
make some important points in this book about the connection between "literacy"
and technology, this specific passage rather elegantly provides a glimpse
into beliefs about writing that this paper most ardently refutes. From
Ong, we can get a clear picture of what writing is not: that for writing
to be "true" it must have an alphabet; writing must also must
not be "interpretable only by the one who makes it"; that writing
conceived as "any visible or sensible mark" becomes "purely
biological behavior," and when this happens such confusion with semiotics
"trivializes its meaning"; and, most damning for the history
of writing, Ong's passage makes it clear that in order for writing to
spawn the "critical and unique breakthrough into new worlds of knowledge"
comes only through the creation of "exact words" from which
a reader could "generate" the transferred thoughts of the writer.
In other words, Ong defines writing-"in the strict sense of the word"-as
a type of semiotics consistent with the sender-message-receiver (or "communication
triangle") view of writing in which a thought is sent via a message
to a receiver where it can be exactly and completely translated back into
the original thought. We dispute this position in favor of a definition
of writing that comes from an expanded view of language theory-one that
allows for each of these elements Ong declares as outside the "true"
sense of the term "writing."
Ong's view, then, is most certainly alphacentric in that he centers the
very definition of writing on the precondition that it must have an alphabet:
an abstracted symbol system that is wholly discursive in nature. In order
to understand what we mean by "alphacentric" histories of writing,
and to grasp why Ong's view of writing leads to the writing of such histories,
we must first examine why the communication-triangle view of language
fails as a model and, specifically, why language is made up of more than
just discursive writing. Writing, as we wish to define it here, includes
the discursive "word" in all of its forms, but it also includes
the more non-discursive image as well. Susanne Langer first defined the
terms "discursive" and "non-discursive" in her book
Philosophy in a New Key. The discursive, the form of symbolization most
common to composition classrooms, includes the kind of language-making
in which we "string out" our ideas; it relies on language to
be ordered, sequential, and adherent to the "laws of reasoning"
often assumed to be synonymous with the "laws of discursive thought"
(82). Discursive texts often take the form of the expository essay, the
oral presentation, research and argument papers, and the common "modes"
such as narrative and description, etc. The discursive is bound by semantic
forms and, consequently, limits itself by those forms because it assumes
that the "word" is the only means to articulate thought, and
that anything that cannot be directly conveyed by discursive means-i.e.,
anything unsayable or ineffable-is mere feeling, or too "fuzzy"
for serious study, or merely "biological," as Ong put it. The
discursive, therefore, is commonly referred to as "verbal" or
a kind of "literacy" opposed to speech. The discursive, therefore,
is often what we consider to be "written" communication because,
like this paragraph, it aims to convey one idea after another, as precisely
as possible, with as few transmission "errors" as possible.
Conversely, the non-discursive is free of such ordering. In fact, its
most apparent difference from discursive symbolization is that it often
happens at once, is primarily reliant on image (taken here to mean both
sensory and mental images), and that it comes to symbolize what cannot
be said or written directly by the word. Here is what Langer says about
the non-discursive:
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Langer frames
the difference between "visual forms" and "words"
(her way of simplifying the difference between "non-discursive"
text and "discursive" text) as differing primarily through "laws"
that "govern" them. What Langer will clarify later is that images
are not just "visual forms" but any form taken by the senses,
and that these forms are necessarily more complex, in part because they
are "simultaneously" received, and because it "contains
too many minute yet closely related parts." Non-discursive symbolization,
therefore, includes those "things which do not fit the grammatical
scheme of expression" (89). It is symbolized language, but it is
a form not limited to the "chain-of-reasoning" we require in
discursive text. Its strength, in part, is that it suddenly can handle
thoughts that are otherwise too complicated-unutterable, or pre-vocal
even-and that there are connections through images that may lead to further
articulation. The codices we will discuss later, for example, rely as
much on their extra-communicative elements as they do their direct historical
or contemporary references. The value of non-discursive text, therefore,
is that it thrives and derives meaning from the complexity and ambiguity
of its medium, whereas discursive language works best when it reifies
and reduces complexity and ambiguity as it goes along.
The most important aspect to this distinction between discursive and non-discursive
text is that image becomes language "in the strict sense of the word"
because it is defined as language. Image can even be discursive, as in
the form of charts, graphs, and icons in ideographs. But by allowing non-discursive
elements of text to be considered on par with discursive elements of text,
we are displacing the alphabet from the center of notions of writing.
The term "writing," therefore, becomes a term inclusive of the
rich complexity inherent to non-discursive symbolization. It is no longer
limited, or reduced, to simply those types of symbols for which Ong would
deem trivial, interpretable only by the author, or even less "true"
(84). In the end, one of the most vital roles for images is that it embraces
cultures with diverse symbol systems as "literate," or, in Ong's
terms, able to achieve "breakthroughs" in "human consciousness."
This type of historiography (and view of language) is then capable of
accounting for both the discursive and non-discursive aspects of human
activity, thereby providing a view of writing responsive not only to a
panoply of other (non-Occidental) historical cultures, but also to current
trends in digital discourse-trends that call for increased attention to
visual, multi-genre, and multi-media composition practices.
In order for us to write non-alphacentric histories, therefore, the first
thing we must do is expand our theories of language beyond its discursive
bias. There have been many theories of language, and many have their merits
for their particular disciplinary audiences. In fact, Composition and
Rhetoric scholars are always necessarily theorists in language, even if
such a theory remains subsumed by whatever emphasis or specialization
is currently occupying the discussion (a point that I.A. Richards originally
voiced years ago).1 If we are to theorize writing beyond an alphabetic
system, then by necessity we must also come to theorize language beyond
the discursive.
How does redefining our view of language to include image and the non-discursive
open up possibilities for historiography? The following discussion attempts
to answer this by proposing that inclusion of images in our conceptions
of language frees it from the more linear, non-affective, enthymemic set
of resources found in discursive text; more than the one-to-one correspondence
between sender to message to receiver; and more than any supposition that
language is primarily a set of (arbitrary) linguistic sign systems useful
in communicating thought transparently. Once such view of language, the
Shannon-Weaver view, posits language within an informational paradigm
useful in just this kind of communication-a practical way to move a message
between sender and receiver. Indeed, this role for language is acceptable
and necessary. However, even the Shannon-Weaver theory of communication
eventually acknowledges the complexity that emerges from human symbol
systems.2 And as Langer states, "If the mind were simply a recorder
and transmitter, typified by the simile of the telephone-exchange, we
should act very differently that we do" (New Key 36). Language for
Langer includes all symbol systems, some of which-specifically ritual,
art, and dreams-are not exclusively external to the individual, nor are
they necessarily intended to convey the "facts of consciousness"
(36). It is too often the case that the communicative role of language
becomes the entire concept of language; that in our efforts to clarify
our discursive texts, we often overlook the pivotal role of the non-discursive
within language. In contrast, the view of language proposed here necessitates
and values all that language-specifically image-can do: its affectivity,
circularity, ambiguity, incongruity, and even its ineffability.
We must stress, however, that the main consequence of Langer's insistence
on including both discursive and non-discursive symbolization in her theory
of language is that it broadens the term "language" itself.
Language becomes all symbolization: the language of poetry, math, music,
textiles, food, commerce, violence, inaction, and even silence. The world
is text because we read the world as symbols, and, in turn, create symbols
to be read.3 Jacques Derrida acknowledged this in Of Grammatology, and
his notion of the sign continually rewriting itself is consistent with
the way language is viewed here: what we know about the human ability
to symbolize is that we must, and that we do it often, and that language
itself recreates itself as it goes along.4 We create and produce symbols
whether or not we are educated or uneducated, within a community or alone,
naïve or wise, destitute or wealthy, sleeping or awake. Language
consists of more than its discursive function, more than the traditional
sender-messenger-receiver paradigm. Rather than consider language to be
primarily communication in the absence of noise, we prefer to think of
language as encompassing all of our powers to symbolize.
Image Writing and Historiography
Michael Ann Holly's book, Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the
Rhetoric of Image, demonstrates how historiography and image writing may
function to turn the hermeneutical gaze of the historian inward. Like
many historians in Composition and Rhetoric, she attempts to negotiate
what is perhaps the most pressing question in all historiography: How
do we write history and come to terms with both our desire for truth and
our acknowledgement that truth is unattainable? Holly provides a possible
compromise to this question near the end of her book:
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By reconciling
both the empiricists and the narrativists as legitimate histories, and
by calling for their layering in the production of the two in historical
scholarship without making any attempts at mastering truth, Holly makes
a methodological argument. But the primary thesis of this book is not
necessarily a methodological one-it is a rhetorical one.
Through the use of examples found in a range of influential texts within
the field of art history, Holly resurrects the subject/object debate in
light of the rhetoric of images: specifically, she wants "to consider
the ways in which the binary opposition between subject and object can
be regarded as perpetually unfixed, as historically 'on the move'"
(7). She guides the reader through several very clear (and well illustrated)
examples of medieval, Renaissance, baroque, and contemporary art histories
in order to show how historians are constructed rhetorically by what they
study as indicated by their own compositional narratives. In the case
of the Renaissance, for example, Holly examines the compositional style
in Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy: An
Essay (1958). By comparing the rules of perspective first posed by Leon-Battista
Alberti in 1435 with Burckhardt's text, Holly shows how historical data
actually dictate to a degree how historians write: "Burckhardt's
history is a part of what it is looking at. Instead of being an analytic
of the period, his history is an analogue of a Renaissance procedure.
Subject and object interpenetrate. Cause and effect scramble their linearity"
(48). Holly repeats this claim using examples from several other prominent
histories in her field. She repeatedly shows how "representational
practices encoded in [artifacts] continue to be encoded in their commentaries"
(xiii).
If it is true that historiographers see their histories through contemporary
lenses, Holly argues that the very same historiographers were, to some
degree, also designed to see them according to the artifacts own rhetorical
purpose. Holly's two major themes concerning historiography are clearly
developed throughout the book: "[f]irst, perhaps it has never been
true that historians of either art or culture can easily escape the lure
of casting their histories in the shape of those objects they have set
out to investigate," and "[s]econd, it follows that the historian,
as a special kind of spectator, is herself or himself always already anticipated
or implicated in the formal logic or play of the works she or he is describing.
The author is never exclusively on the outside" (79). In reviewing
these points, any scholar about to undergo historical research might take
into account how they will map out the past as well as consider if "centuries-old
light has been illuminating [their] gaze all along" (208). Not only
must historiographers contend with what they see, but also whether they
were predestined to see it a certain way in the first place. Self-reflexivity
becomes even more important to such histories, especially for those more
geographically and chronologically distant.
One of the ancillary aspects of the book which was particularly remarkable
was Holly's characterization of the historical imagination, or "the
way we see and shape the world of the past" through invention (9).
Holly focuses not only how historians compose their narratives, but also
"how [the imagination] sets us (its scholars) up as spectator-historians
to see things in certain rhetorically specific ways according to its own
logic of figuration" and that "we may be striving to look at
its visual traces without realizing that those works of art are also forever
looking back at us" (xiv). Just as archival work, for example, allows
us to "see" imaginatively some new narrative of the past, the
historian is also becoming part of the work studied: "The historian
is caught up in the lure of the gaze and has mapped herself or himself
onto the screen, taking on the coloration and playing the part that the
work on the other side has preordained" (24). Invention through the
imagination plays its rhetorical part on both sides of the historical
timeline. It is imbued with everything the historian brings to the archive,
and the historian, consequently, becomes similarly affected by the artifacts
waiting there. Holly also reminds historiographers about the myth of discovery
and the difficulty such archeological metaphors present. Metaphors such
as "digging deeper" or "uncovering" belie an enlightenment
rhetoric bent on discovering Truth: "In purging our historical consciousness
of the idea of depth, of latent truths lying beneath manifest clues, [we]
return to the surface of interpretation and linkages that lie there"
(138). These archeological metaphors tempt the treasure hunter inside
us, betraying even further the impossibility of cool objectivity.
Past Looking answers the call for "transdisciplinarity" of research
and methodologies from other fields of study. Holly's book attempts to
address "a crucial problem in late twentieth-century historiography:
the question of 'adequacy,' or at the very least 'suitability,' in historical
representation (7). As she illustrates using Burckhardt's traditional
history of the Renaissance, old methodologies die hard-the lure of claiming
empirical truth through history remains strong. She says, "I think
it is intriguing to contemplate why many historians, not to say most twentieth-century
thinkers in general, are driven to think perspectivally, compelled to
create worlds in which all things fall into place. In this sense . . .
perspective is not liberating. It is dogmatic and doctrinaire. It admits
no disjunctions or contrarieties into its scheme. By contrast, the medieval
treatment of space could be construed as creatively freeing" (50).
By this description, such "perspective" can be likened to the
penchant for discursive text because it too privileges the clear and unemotional,
the scheme of sequential analogue, and the unambiguous.
Just as Rhetoric and Composition begins to digest new histories which
vacillate between traditionalist and non-traditionalist methodologies,
Holly's book becomes especially important. By examining the nature of
"the gaze," or seeing, or looking back into history, Holly the
art historian foregrounds epistemological and phenomenological concerns
with postmodern and poststructuralist theory in order to emphasize how
the "figural logic of the [artifact] effaces the writer and puts
in his or her place the logic of semantic space: two narratives tattooing
each other across historical distance" (176). In doing so, Holly
finds some middle-ground for writers interested in "seeing"
and "looking" into the past without falling victim to the illusion
of intransigence. She also opens up a space for image writing to become
analyzed historically without necessarily being rewritten through an intra-European,
alphacentrist viewpoint.
The Codex as Image Writing
De-naturalizing this history is vital to reading codex image writing,
as too many in the field have biased their theories on evolutionist and
colonialist narratives that obscure Mesoamerican and Mestiza writing as
pre-literate. George Kennedy's ambitious Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical
and Cross-Cultural Introduction, for example, reconstitutes Mexican-origin
peoples as cultures without writing and ranks them on a great rhetorical
chain of being and social order midway between the animal world and Ancient
Greeks. Glyphs in Oaxaca, however, situate the earliest known evidence
of North American writing between 650-700 B.C.E. The glyphs, about 2,700
years old, would not only establish early Mexicans as plausibly the first
writers and teachers of writing on this hemisphere, but they would also
locate the cultural province of México as potentially one of the
earliest on the planet to advance a complex inscription system. These
historical legacies are important, as codex writing references this past
while simultaneously addressing today's world. Rather than attempting
to preserve or re-create a Mesoamerican "authenticity," Mexican-Amerindian
codex writing instead generates new visions of history and identity to
be realized and inscribed, "from Columbus to the Border Patrol."
In particular, we hope these stories will add to the larger project of
including non-discursive symbolization into our definition of writing-one
that is not contingent on having a Western alphabet in order to be legitimate.
We want these codices to lead to what Jacqueline Jones Royster cites as
inventing "other ways of reading" the history of writing while
promoting a critical intervention in the politics of composition instruction
in the present (3). Such hermeneutic reconstructions of our world, however,
call into question the dominant histories of writing that recast the intellectual
provinces of greater México as mere peripheries in the disciplinary
imaginary of Rhetoric and Composition.5 The wish-horizon of Hegelian Enlightenment,
still virulent in the field, proscribes a single road for progress, imagining
the story of writing and writing instruction advancing East to West. The
field's largely unquestioned global trajectory initiates in Ancient Greece,
then Rome, then Western Europe, until finally growing mature in America
but only in the North and not until the 19th century, during a critical
stage of EuroAmerican nation-building.6
The stories we offer are an invitation to examine how codex image writing
has continually created "new" literacies: new ways of speaking,
writing, and reading that promote anti-colonial translations of history
and memory in the Americas. Our method will be to read codex technologies
as rhetorical texts: places and performances of meaning-making which provide
arguments for and against certain things, namely, the dominant historical
narratives of what José David Saldívar in Border Matters
calls the "transfrontera contact zone," spaces of colonial encounters
imposed by global capitalism across the México/United States borderlands.
Mexican-Amerindian image writing is thus a distinct enunciation, grounded
in the lived experiences of the peripheral colonial world. These expressions
illustrate new potentials that surpass the limits of post-Enlightenment
rationality-yet these are not projects of deconstructionists or postmodernists,
as such critics continue to center European modernity as their organizing
horizon. Instead, these "subalternized" representations posit
new articulations of our time that provide not only much-needed correctives
to historiography, but political expressions better suited to current
material realities for both the "Global North" and "Globalized
South." In place of the uni-linear developmental "Composing
East-to-West" wish-horizon, Mexican-Amerindian codices invoke the
idea of Argentinian philosopher Enrique Dussel's transmodernity: a hermeneutic
reconstruction of temporal and spatial correlations across the globe,
in which it becomes possible to perceive multiple histories and memories
coexisting, without assumptions that all civilizations follow a single
Occidental, alphacentric trajectory. The following analysis addresses
how the reproduction of codex technology is displacing the global design
of the Civilizing Mission. Particularly, we focus on the Civilizing Mission's
consequent oppositions of "civilization/barbarism," "literate/illiterate,"
"first world/third world," "developed/underdeveloped,"
and "Indianism/Hispanophobia" across the transfrontera contact
zone. The emerging language processes in texts such as the Codex Espangliensis
not only displace Western oppositions but also allow for possibilities
beyond such dichotomous reasoning.
Codex Rhetorics of Resistance
Through the denial of Western historical centrality, "subalternized"
Mexican-Amerindian subjects transcend binaries such as "First world/Third
world," "Developed/Underdeveloped," and "Mesoamerica/later
America" by engaging both yet neither at the same time. Mexican-Amerindian
writing practices have continually adapted to new ways of social life
while at the same time retaining roots in older pre-Columbian communicative
forms. The Amerindian codices, then, are discursive manifestations of
continuity and adaptation that comprise this survival. Further, codex
technologies offer powerful critiques of the dominant historical narratives
of Western expansion, colony, and the border in an age when such things
are hotly contested.
Historically, the rhetorical work of Mexican-Amerindian pictography was
one of the only major Aztec poetic forms to survive the brutal campaign
of the Western alphabet. The codex "books" were productions
of paper, hide, or woven cloth; marked on one or both sides and folded,
rolled or left flat; and sometimes protected with wooden end-pieces. The
Náhua provide one of the earliest Mesoamerican expressions for
writing: tlacuilolitzli, which means both "to write" and "to
paint." While the tlacuiloque composed the books' images, it was
the tlamatinime who assumed ownership as well as the task of textual interpretation.7
Traditionally, the codices were tools of the Mexican intelligentsia to
record genealogies, migrations, other political affairs, and origin myths.
Of the pre-Hispanic era, only twenty-two codices survive, along with fifty-four
commissioned immediately after the conquest of Tenochtitlán in
1521.
Spanish colonial powers, in the interest of reconstructing Amerindian
memory and history, commissioned new productions. The Codex Mendoza, for
example, was written in 1542 by the order of Virrey Mendoza and recounts
the history of the fall of México-Tenochtitlán. Such colonial-era
books, although penned by Mestiza and Indigenous writers, initially provided
the dominant narratives of Aztec history as seen and authorized by Spanish
imperial eyes; juxtaposed images of Aztec pictography, the Spanish-Iberian
alphabet, and an alphabetized Náhuatl weave a narrative of the
imposed transformation of Indigenous writing practices and cultures. The
codex was thus becoming a technology of psychological violence, a tool
to colonize Amerindian memory.
Of particular interest to writing specialists is the illustration of coexisting
and conflicting inscription systems in a single text. Pictographs juxtaposed
with Náhuatl and Castilian reflect competing rationalities and
histories; a palimpsest of divergent traditions and ideologies where a
Tlaquilo Cosmos and Ibero-Christian world converge. More than hybrid expressions
of cultural dichotomies, the codices are fractured enunciations in response
to colonial relations of power that disfigure the Amerindian literate
world as a "barbarian" exterior to a "civilized" Occidental
center. These textual admixtures work to destabilize the idea of the Western
letter as a naturalized and valorized element of written communication
while calling into question the integrity of Western distinctions between
"orality," "writing," "image," and "painting":
in other words, the term "writing" must embrace both discursive
and non-discursive language forms if we are to legitimate and create histories
for these codices.
During the first three generations after Cortez' invasion of México,
pictographic image writing remained strong between both Indigenous and
Mestiza writers, yet Western scholarship has traditionally focused on
the subjugation and erasure of Aztec agency during the colonial sixteenth
century. Contemporary re-readings from Cora Lagos and Elizabeth Hill Boone,
however, seek new translations by emphasizing the power and validity of
pictographic writing independent of and separate from the accompanying
alphabet script. We must begin to "read" the pictorial image,
Lagos argues, as the nexus, the common space where information is established
and authenticated; "it is in the image more than in the writing where
the contact between cultures is performed" (86).
From this framework, we can cultivate an understanding of a present-day
codex emergence, the 2000 Codex Espangliensis: From Columbus to the Border
Patrol, perhaps the most revisionist codex ever assembled, and one that
directly addresses current forms of dominant Western historical narratives.
Here, the authors tell a story of civilizing missions, colonial conquests,
and rhetorical heterogeneity using poetic Spanglish, Chiconics, Aztec
pictography, 20th century Mexican iconography, and transnational corporate
imagery to weave yet another retelling of history. This time, in 1492
Noctli Europzin Tezpoca, an Aztec sailor, departs from the port of Minatitlan
aboard a small flotilla. Eventually, Tezpoca discovers a new continent,
and proceeds to name it "Europzin" after himself. In November
1512, Aztec soldiers begin their conquest of Europzin in the name of the
"Lord of Cross-Cultural Misunderstanding." The reversal of Europe
and Amerindia in the Codex Espangliensis's telling of world history works
to dislodge the integrity of the Civilizing Mission as it has operated
in the past and is still understood today.
The alphabetic script in Codex Espangliensis intersects various texts
from performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, whose publications
combine cyberculture and Chicano/Latino art. Numerous panels of the codex
include references to his 1996 The New World Border, "a kind of post-Mexican
literary hypertext" (ii). Throughout Border and Codex Espangliensis,
Gómez-Peña references the collapse of "three-worlds"
theory, the post-1955 Bandung Conference mapping of global social space.
The breakdown of the opposition between First and Second worlds, with
the disintegration of the Soviet Union, makes it possible to imagine beyond
the production of the Third World and to define post-national modes of
collective identity in the transfrontera contact zone. From New World
Border, Gómez-Peña argues that the "old colonial hierarchy
of First World/Third World" is being supplanted by "the more
pertinent notion of the Fourth World," explained as the "conceptual
place where the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas meet with the deterritorialized
peoples, the immigrants, and the exiles" (7). Readers of the codex
are confronted with transnational flows of cultures and persons in the
"Fourth World," spaces where the binary between Indigenous "noble
savages" and Mestiza "ignoble savages" is undermined.
Fourth World multiple temporalities furthermore compel the reader to reside
in the early 21st century era of late global capitalism while simultaneously
inhabiting the Spanish colonial sixteenth century. We are thus confronted
with an invitation to "read backward," to consider both pre-Columbian
and colonial forms of prenational territorialization as well as forward
to think about newly emerging frontiers and regional logics that revise
dominant historical narratives. Transnational corporate imagery of the
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Disney, and telecommunications
reside along savage depictions of "barbarian" Mexicans, Mestiza/os,
and First Nation's Peoples. On one panel, cannibal Aztecs are seen distributing
body parts of Disney's principle animated character, Mickey Mouse, thereby
critiquing both Civilization/Barbarianism and Development/Modernization
under the banner of global colonialism across the México/United
States transfrontera contact zone.
For years after the United States Congress passed NAFTA in 1993, debates
about the treaty provoked rhetorics of border crossing and crisis. Legacies
of these debates form a thread of images throughout Codex Espangliensis
with blurred distinctions between "free trade art" and "free
art." Thomas Foster, in "Cyber-Aztecs and Cholo-Punks,"
suggests that NAFTA represents both a misfortune and a new opportunity
|
The rhetorical
work of Codex Espangliensis therefore highlights the futility of clearly
distinguishing between assimilationalist transcultural forms and resistant
ones. On one hand, the rhetoric of border crossing can be a subversive
and critical act. On the other, such articulations can be exploitive,
whether emerging from the political right or the left.8
In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha writes of "the danger that
the mimetic contents of a discourse will conceal the fact that the hegemonic
structures of power are maintained in a position of authority through
a 'shift in vocabulary'" (241-2). The Codex warns of such a shift
in diction from geographical colonialism to cultural imperialism, from
Cortez to Free Trade, from "Columbus to the Border Patrol,"
a shift that maintains power structures through a veiled rhetoric of popular
culture and advertising. Critically reading such colonial power provokes
what Clair Fox identifies as a "global border consciousness,"
a strategic departure from the site-specific concept of the México/United
States borderlands. Gómez-Peña mirrors such a shift to globalize
the border when he acknowledges: "the border is no longer located
at any fixed geopolitical site. I carry the border with me, and I find
new borders wherever I go" (New World Border 5).
Also in this fractured narrative, "illustration/annotation"
merge in dialogic negotiation between dissonant literacies and divergent
reading practices. Here, new modes of Mexican-Amerindian rhetorical historiography
imply new ways to interpret history, rhetoric and composition, thereby
having substantial implications for both historians and writing students.
When in history did "America" become literate, literary, and
rhetorical? When did "writing" begin in North America? According
to whose measuring stick? What counts as writing and what does it mean
to be "literate?" What does it mean to be "civilized?"
In the context of these crucial questions, historians of writing might
read codex technology as a "new" vantage point to rethink the
relationship between supposedly expanding notions of literacy, composition,
rhetoric and Mexican-Amerindian image writing. The codices evidence precisely
what the dominant historical imaginary erases and what the field of Rhetoric
and Composition lacks: co-evolutionary or parallel histories of writing,
rhetoric, and rational thought in the Americas.
Rethinking rhetoric and writing from Mexican-Amerindian textual legacies
advances a more constructive understanding of parallel writing systems
and rationalities in America, yet such thinking also promotes a critical
intervention in the politics of writing instruction in the present. Such
an intervention might involve departing from the colonial matrix and denouncing
dominant alphacentric narratives of writing-or perhaps facing the reality
that writing specialists today may need to look far beyond the myths of
a Greco-Roman horizon toward its challenges and mutations on a global
scale. In this sense, any consideration of Mexican-Amerindian subalterns
as active and central historical agents in the planetary narrative of
the historiography of writing motivates a decided departure from the field's
hermeneutical gaze.
Works Cited
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2 vols. New Brunswick: NJ: Rutgers UP, 1987.
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
Boone Hill, Elizabeth. Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of
the Aztecs and Mixtecs. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000.
---. "Introduction: Writing and Recorded Knowledge.' Writing Without
Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes. Ed. Elizabeth
Boone Hill and Walter Mignolo. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994. 3-26.
Dussel, Enrique. "Europe, Modernity, and Eurocentrism: The Semantic
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Foster, Thomas. "Cyber-Aztecs and Cholo-Punks: Guillermo Gómez-Peña's
Five Worlds Theory." PMLA 117.1 (2002): 43-67.
Fox, Clair. "The Portable Border: Site-Specifity, Art, and the U.s.-Mexico
Frontier." Social Text 12.4 (1994): 61-82.
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---. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges,
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Saldívar, José David. Border Matters: Remapping American
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Notes
1 Speculative Instruments by I.A. Richards (New York: Hartcort, 1955),
pp. 115-116.
2 See The Mathematical Theory of Communication by Claude Shannon and Warren
Weaver (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1949).
3 This claim is one of the main tenets in cultural studies, and it has
become a cornerstone of postmodern studies. It is perhaps the case that
my view of "text" is much broader, however, than even this.
"Text" is not just discursive; text is also non-discursive.
Therefore, text can not only be a photograph of a puppy; text can also
be the images and feelings read in an abstract expressionist painting
of a puppy as well.
4 "In all senses of the word, writing thus comprehends language.
Not that the word 'writing' has ceased to designate the signifier of the
signifier, but it appears, strange as it may seem, that 'signifier of
the signifier' no longer defines accidental doubling and fallen secondarity.
'Signifier of the signifier' describes on the contrary the movement of
language: in its origin, to be sure, but one can already suspect that
an origin whose structure can be expressed as 'signifier of the signifier'
conceals and erases itself in its own production" (7).
5 And here we are confronted with the epistemological double bind of any
so-called "alternative" rhetoric. Either Amerindian rhetorics
are so different from Greco-Roman ones that they cannot be considered
Rhetoric proper, or conversely, to be accepted, Amerindian rhetorics have
to become similar and assimilated to Western conceptualizations of Rhetorical
practices. Rhetoric, then, has become a trademark of the Western world
and a yardstick by which to measure the discursive products and effects
of other societies. While Rhetoric now belongs to the West, "alternative"
rhetorics are something that other societies might have as "objects"
to be studied by those who imagine themselves as intellectual decedents
of those who invented the idea of Rhetoric as well as those who invented
the academic field of Rhetoric and Composition. In either case, provincial
Western categories predetermine and fossilize the terms of debate. This
paper offers no quick resolution, but instead seeks to question how canonical
articulations of Rhetoric and Writing constitute a preferable alternative
to those emerging from its peripheries.
6 The groundbreaking thesis of Martin Bernal's controversial Black Athena
reveals the cradle of the Rhetorical tradition as a conceptual byproduct
of early 19th century Aryan-Germanic racism that made it rationally and
emotionally intolerable that Greece would have received its higher culture
from Africans and "Semites." The prevailing Aryan Model of history,
to use Ed Schiappa's vocabulary, is itself a "reconstruction,"
a fabrication premised upon the irrational cornerstone of the Western
European Enlightenment. In "Europe, Modernity, and Eurocentrism:
The Semantic Slippage of the Concept of Europe," Enrique Dussel understands
the uni-linear diachrony Greece>Rome>Europe as an extension of the
Aryan Model. This fiction navigates across the Atlantic to the Americas,
forming yet another continental East-West progression via Manifest Destiny.
7 Tlamatinime
are described as philosophers, women and men who studied "proper
discourse" (León-Portilla 73) at the conservatory called the
Calmécac.
8 In Border Matters, José David Saldívar argues that theoretical
abstractions such as "subaltern" "Fourth World," and
border crossing result in a shift to dematerialize the actual geography
and materiality of border (158). The problem with such rhetoric, Saldívar
warns, stems from cutting off the trope of the border from its lived experience
and therefore reproduces a detached logic of exaggeration and stereotyping.