Morpheus - Revista Eletrônica em Ciências Humanas - Ano 09, número 14, 2012
ISSN 1676-2924
THE DOCUMENT AND POWER: AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF WRITING1
Lídia Silva de Freitas - UFF
Doctorate in Information Science, University of São Paulo (USP), 2001
Department of Information Science – Fluminense Federal University (UFF)
Information Science Postgraduation Program – UFF
Rua Prof. Lara Vilela, 126, Ingá, Niterói, RJ
[email protected]
ABSTRACT: This article presents the construction of a research topic and the results to date of
a study that is part of a current debate in the field of Information Science, involving the
delimitation of its core subject matter: information – in its varied concepts – or the document – in
its materiality, as part of the institutional order and engenderer of social effects (Frohmann).
This study, of a theoretical-conceptual nature, tests the concept/hypothesis of the mode of
accreditation and social distribution of knowledge (savoir), grounded in Pierre Nora’s distinction
between memory societies and history societies. It analyzes the constitution, functioning and
imaginary representations of writing, as a landmark and pillar of historical – or archive –
societies, and lays the foundations of the document in processes of legitimation, authority and
regimes of truth. This study looks for for the bases for the persistence of the document in the
dominant processes of accreditation and social distribution of knowledge (savoir) – and power –
in the western world, and thus contributes to enriching this important discussion within the field.
It also demonstrates the progress made in research through the theoretical-conceptual
contributions of the French school of discourse analysis, which restores the material and
historical dimension of meaning, dispelling the illusion of the transparency of language – the
basis of the information effect (evidence) and the founding myth of the information field.
Key terms: Epistemology of Information Science; Written culture; Memory and the Document.
INTRODUCTION
Leading authors within the field of Information Science (hereafter referred to as IS) have
underscored the continuing central role and primacy of the document in the social practices that
are predominantly termed ‘informational’ in the specialised literature, thus generating a debate
surrounding the core material of this field.
The focus on documentation and documentary procedures as an object of reflection, by such
authors as Bernd Frohmann, Ronald Day and others, is accompanied by critical analyses of the
historical and discursive construction of the present prominence of information, along with the
technological changes this has involved, such as those of Mattelart (2001), Finlay (1986) and
Roszak (1986). These last two authors, in the mid-1980s, analyzed the excessive discursive
importance given to the notion, regarding it as
a conceptual void, ready to be filled with
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imprecise meanings.
Frohmann (2004b), supported by the analyses of Numberg (1996)2, and recognizing that much
of the strength and authority pertaining to the notion of information derives from its ambiguities
and contradictions, shifts the focus of the question from ‘what is information?’ to ‘how is the
impression of information constituted?’, drawing attention in his analysis to the reification of
notions historically developed as a direct result of the very social practices of organization of
document forms.
Notwithstanding the background of IS as a disciplinary field and its historical and institutional
reasons to inflate ‘information’3 (DAY, 2001; FROHMANN, 2004a; CAPURRO; HJORLAND,
2007; and FREITAS, 2003), the document continues to be the beginning and the end of
theoretical and practical processes of this field, because it involves devices of legitimation –
institutional or historical means of aggregating authorship (FOUCAULT, 2002).
Frohmann (2004a) emphasizes writing, and the whole apparatus surrounding it, as the source
of the generative and formative power of the document, which does not lie within the content
that may be recorded (cf. FROHMANN, 2004a, p.150). Placing the statements in the
institutional order, he states: A text does not belong to the scriptures because its content is holy;
rather, its content is holy because it belongs to the scriptures (p.153). He also points out the
dual materiality of the document: in addition to institutional engagement – subject to interinstitutional migration, such as in the textual relationship between academia and the judicial
arena – it blends social and public statements and practices, due to its power to generate
effects (FROHMANN, 2008).
Approaching the document as a basic effect of the social functioning of writing – the intersection
between inscription and institution – it is seen that that it does not communicate anything that is
independent of itself: the document is the fact, or, rather, it is the act. It is institutive,
institutionalized, formal, legitimated. As Le Goff (1984) points out; “the document is the product
of a power center. [...] it is the testimony of a polyvalent power and, at the same time, creates
it.”
It is believed that analysis of the historical and social functioning of writing will shed some light
on the reason for the tenacious centrality of the document, despite the equally persistent
discourses by certain branches of IS attempting to knock it off its pedestal. This study,
therefore, joins the efforts to elucidate, by means of the historical and social functioning of
writing, documentary practices that are frequently stabilized and “invisibilized” by IS itself.
Capurro and Hjorland (2007), like other IS authors, point out what they describe as “neglect” [on
the part of IS] of the concepts of text and documents, on the one hand, and meaning (or
semantics), on the other” (p.182). Tackling the political-cultural and linguistic basis of the
development and uses of writing in the analysis of social practices with documents (Frohmann,
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2004b) help fill some of these gaps.
This study, which uses Foucaultian archaeological analysis (FOUCAULT, 1997, summarized in
FREITAS, 2003), looks at the social and historical functioning of writing that form the centrality
of the document in the diversified processes of legitimization of knowledge, production of truth,
and allocation of rights and duties in their dense relations with the production and reproduction
of power of various orders – political, cultural, economic – within western society. It analyzes the
range of institutional relations, social and economic processes and social uses of writing in their
articulations with knowledge4 (savoir) and imaginary representations of the theme, which also
articulate with its establishment – whether autochthonous or imposed – and in different social
formations on which we can access narratives and analyses.
Similarly, linguistic, anthropological and historiographical studies are used to obtain the
theoretical and empirical bases for the approach to the research topic.
In this article, in addition to the theoretical underpinning of the proposed research and the
conceptual formulation tested over the course of the study, we also present some results
relating to the linguistic approach – particularly through the lense of the French school of
Discourse Analysis – to the relation between writing, the socio-historical process of
grammatization and its repercussions on the construction of the information effect.
THEMATIZING THE OBJECT OF INFORMATION SCIENCE
When Capurro and Hjorland (2007), in their already classical review of the literature on the
concept of information, originally published in the 2003 ARIST, analyze the meaning of
information in the expression ‘information retrieval’, which they regard as “possibly one of the
most important terms in the field known as IS”, they recognize that it is “closely connected to
document/text retrieval” (2007, p. 179). They illustrate their point by citing van Rijsbergen:
‘Information retrieval’ is a wide, often loosely-defined term [...]
Unfortunately, the word ‘information’ can be very misleading. [...] In fact,
in many cases, one can adequately describe the kind of retrieval by
simply substituting ‘document’ for ‘information’. [...] A perfectly
straightforward definition along these lines is given by Lancaster:
‘Information retrieval is the term conventionally, though somewhat
inaccurately, applied to the type of activity discussed in this volume. An
information retrieval system does not inform [...] the user on the subject
of his inquiry. It merely informs on the existence (or non-existence) and
whereabouts of documents relating to his request.’ (VAN RIJSBERGEN,
19795).
Capurro and Hjorland, pursuing the debate, affirm that:
Although some researchers have fantasized about eliminating the
concept of document/text and simply storing or retrieving the facts or
“information” contained therein, it is our opinion that IR [Information
Retrieval] usually means document retrieval and not fact retrieval.
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(CAPURRO; HJORLAND, 2007, p. 180).
Though some IS authors cite uses that, unlike those of the academic community, may dispense
with source references and require direct access to the data or ‘facts’ themselves, such as by
business analysts, journalists and technical specialists – consolidating the positivist illusion of
equivalence between information/fact/truth –, they end up expunging, even for those
professional uses, the forms of institutional legitimacy and authority involved in the
establishment of evidence in western culture.6
Looking beyond the kind of object that is dealt with by information retrieval systems, one could
ask: how is the document established at the core of the social and historical processes dealt
with herein and of the networks of legitimacy and beliefs that perpetuate its symbolic and
institutional power, notwithstanding all the efforts put into its effacement? Which processes lend
to this situation becoming invisible and establish the imaginary of information/fact? Everything
points to writing and the corollary of its social uses. This study will focus on the subject’s own
opacity as a constitutive element of its ‘naturalization’ and cultural hegemony.
THE POWER OF THE DOCUMENT: WRITING + INSTITUTION
In his classic revision of the literature on the concept of memory, Le Goff (1984), in
addressing the historical origins of writing, follows up the different paths indicated by the
varied and often conflicting theories on the subject. These can be simplified into two
axes, which can be described as:
a) knowledge arising from the need to assist the cerebral memory, when this is no longer
able to cope with the growing amount of socially useful knowledge; or
b) the result of a struggle over the social memory when, in the event of a social rupture,
there is no longer a consensus regarding knowledge and/or the narratives that are socially
significant and/or reliable.
This study is based on the second hypothesis, since, historically speaking, writing has only
arisen in societies that are divided into social strata or classes, where it constitutes "triumphal
monuments" to the narratives of the victors. Authors such as Furtado (1995) are intrigued by the
apparent paradox of a ‘communication technology’ like writing dividing mankind more than it
draws them together. This perception does not surprise authors such as Goldberg (1990)7, who
states: “[w]herever we look, in every period, social stratification presides over the history of
literacy.”
Breaking with the approach to writing as a simple communication instrument, Cardona (1994)8
states:
In those cultures that possess at least one form of writing, it has been
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shown that one cannot consider that writing as simply an instrument for
conveying messages, like a truck is used to transport a load of hay. On
the contrary, the phenomenon of writing [...] manifests itself as a matrix
of social significations, a background for symbolic creations.
(CARDONA, 1994, p.10)
This notion clashes with the evolutionistic approach, which considers the advent of writing as
constituting some kind of natural "stage" of generic " human society", as can be found in the
evolucionist and universalizing discourses that predominate in what is known as the sociology
of literacy.
All these civilizations – the Sumerians, Egyptians, Hittites and Chinese –
were literate, in as much as their great administrative and technological
advances were indisputably connected to the creation of a system of
writing. (GOODY; WATT, 2006, p. 25)
Literacy, in general, and the press, in particular, establish a written
record as the known data against which other interpretations may be
compared. Writing created a fixed, original and objective “text”; the press
placed this text in millions of hands. (OLSON, 1995, p. 165)
[...] without writing, human consciousness cannot achieve its fuller
potentials, cannot produce other beautiful and powerful creations. In this
sense, orality needs to produce and is destined to produce writing. [...]
There is hardly an oral culture or a predominantly oral culture left in the
world that is not somehow aware of the vast complex of powers [that
are] forever inaccessible without literacy. This awareness is agony for
persons [who are] rooted in primary orality [...] lack of introspectivity, of
analytic prowess, of concern with the will, as such, of a sense of
difference between past and future – [are] characteristics of the psyche
in oral cultures, not only in the past, but even today. The effects of oral
states of consciousness are bizarre to the literate mind [...]. (ONG, 1998,
pp.23 and 40, Portuguese ed.).
The
explanatory
amalgam
established
between
writing,
evolution,
rationality,
truth,
corroboration and the writing of history – always under the causal aegis of the first – is quite
clear in classic sociological studies on writing and literacy. This field of study emerged in the
early 1960s, in the works of McLuhan – The Gutenberg Galaxy, Lévi-Strauss – “La Pensée
Sauvage (The Savage Mind), both published in 1962, Goody & Watt – The Consequences of
Literacy, and Havelock – Preface to Plato, both published in 1963. Havelock considered that
this simultaneous output in four different countries (Canada, France, the UK and the USA) was
a response to the rapid dissemination, in the west, of communication technology based on
orality. According to the author, these works were “followed by a veritable wave.” (HAVELOCK,
1995; GALVÃO; BATISTA, 2006).
The tendency to credit isolated changes, particularly ‘technological’ ones, as a ‘causal factor’
behind social transformation, besides obscuring the complex processes of interrelation between
the different analytical strata involved in the historical changes in social formations, has the
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added ‘benefit’ of reinforcing and strengthening the evolutionist myth: the advent of writing
made possible... More than analysis on the social and historical dynamics of writing and its
overlapping with the social and cultural sphere, this kind of work frequently becomes a
‘specimen’, a manifestation of these same functioning: put into practice and reproduction. Thus,
they perform and amplify the control and discourse delimitation procedures studied by Foucault
(1996). Much of this literature, in working upon the myth of written evidence and proof –
“information fixity” – contributes to the transmutation of written text into ‘document’, expediting
the Western objectifying and universalizing projects, as underscored by Frohmann (2004a).
CONCEPTUAL FORMULATION: SOURCES AND OFFSHOOTS
I can now formulate the concept/hypothesis to be tested and verified over the course of this
study, which may provisionally be described – rather than named – as mode of accreditation
and social distribution of knowledge (savoir). Its formulation is based on Pierre Nora’s distinction
between what he termed memory societies and history societies9.
Memory, which he qualifies as ‘true memory’, is collectively experienced, without breaking with
the present; it is affective, rooted in concrete reality, and it functions as a support to cultural
continuity between the past, which is perpetually updated, and the present. In history societies,
the breaking down of the consensus leads to a prosthetic memory – the production of historical
narratives based on records, documents and monuments, tangible supports to an archival
memory, lacking means of memory, that rely on forms of sociability based on orality, myth and
rite. In Nora’s analysis, the historical narrative has become an institution, with claims of
rationality, to break with the mutations of the memory dynamic: set against memory and its
functioning. History is, therefore, a ‘rational’ edifice, disruption and estrangement, a rendering of
the past.
The need, amongst history societies – or, as I prefer to call them, archival societies – for
corroboration and crystalization, even though based on the illusion of a language whose
meanings are fixed, derives from the asymmetry of social relations.
In this conceptual construction, I adopt the term mode with the intention of embracing the
functioning of a certain cultural stratum within a broad range of historical situations of different
social formations that can effectively be subdivided according to the degree of formality of the
institutions connected to the forms of accreditation and social distribution of knowledge (savoir)
or, in other words, according to the creation of commonly accepted or valorized evidence and its
forms of transmission and apportionment.
If the functioning of social memory are inevitably selective, mediated by practices dedicated to
symbolic (re)production and institutionalised, it is important to distinguish the social formations
qualitatively, according to the formal or informal nature of these institutions. Formalization is a
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symptom of a breaking down of the social consensus and is an indication of its regulatory
nature and the control it exerts, through coercion. It also implies an institutive power, which in
turn implies an instituting power (COSTA, 1997), in addition to a corresponding expropriation or
devaluation of other knowledge, which thereby becomes desinstitutionalized. Such knowledge
(savoir) is stripped of its legitimacy, replaced by knowledge (connaissance) that is selected and
regulated by institutions that, with the power that has been conceded to them, become their
legitimate guardians – retaining a monopoly over legitimacy (ALBUQUERQUE10, 1978, apud
COSTA, 1997).
I have also chosen the generic term knowledge (savoir) to embrace different selection,
accreditation and cultural apportionment regimes, of which knowledge (connaissance) is an
exemplar (FOUCAULT, 1974, p. 9-2011).
Having established written records and their aggregations thus, as landmarks in the politics of
memory, one might also articulate some correlated and constitutive political and symbolic sideeffects: the establishing of exclusive (and exclusory) systems of legitimacy for written text; forms
of social distribution of the knowledge of register; the invention of knowledge (connaissance) as
the legitimate form of knowledge; written law as a mark of a breaking of the consensus; the
advent of a knowledge (connaissance) narrative about the past based on written records; the
advent of ‘book-based’ religions; and the setting up and “patrimonialization” of documentary
stockpiles: archives as institutions for the accumulation and safekeeping of transactions and
narrative records of a probatory nature and a source for consultation; the establishment of
practices and knowledge (connaissance) to regulate the custody, and the organization and
circulation of archival records as the device for discourse control.
The accumulation of documentary forms is essential for the social functioning of fixing
statements in documentary form – along with the illusion of fixing meaning. Nora (1993) says
that true memory, metamorphosed in history, gives way to an archival memory, leading to a
frantic amassing of immense material stocks of that which we are unable to remember, which
will be referred to herein as archives. Their functioning as a significant historical device (Souza,
1996) requires that the records satisfy the criterion of ‘archivability’: “they must be submitted to
the care of those who are competent to question or defend them, to keep them safe and tended
to” (Ricoeur, 2000, p.213). Such processes, like those mentioned previously, have historically
led to the production of technical, theoretical-conceptual and epistemological knowledge.
The concept of archive outlined by Pêcheux in 1982 – “the field of available documents
pertaining to a particular topic” (PÊCHEUX, 1994, p.57) – is expanded by Guilhaumou and
Maldidier, who, grounded in Foucault, include in the notion their ordering and meaning:
Let us not be deceived by its nature: it is not the set of texts left by a
society, some raw material from which we can apprehend the social
structures or the unfolding of events; it is nothing more than the
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institutional framework that allows us to preserve the vestiges, a nonrandom device that constitutes well-defined images, in the sense that
each archival device establishes its own order [...] the archive somehow
‘displays’ a certain meaning. (GUILHAUMOU; MAUDIDIER, 1994)
However, the concept that is herein understood as capable of representing the set of
functioning of the Archive – its media, its knowledge (connaissance) and even its forms of
accreditation – is that developed by Derrida (2001), which, in addition to the aforementioned
features, embraces both writing and reading/interpretation as constitutive of its social and
historical effects, involving what I refer to herein as the information effect.
[...] the archive, as printing, writing, prosthesis, or hypomnesic technique
in general, is not the only place for [storing] and conserving an
archivable content of the past, which would exist in any case, such that,
without the archive, one still believes that it was, or will have been. No,
the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the
structure of the archivable content, even in its very coming into existence
and in its relationship to the future. The act of storing not only produces,
but also registers the event. It is also our political experience of the
media which we call information (DERRIDA, 2001, p. 29).
RESULTS TO DATE – REFLEXIONS IN COURSE: WRITING AND LINGUISTIC CONTROL
UNDER THE CONDITIONS OF PRODUCTION OF INFORMATION DISCOURSE
Through Discourse Theory, we look for the conditions for the production of what I refer to as
information/fact discourse, first of all from the analysis and history of the processes of
grammatization
(Auroux,
1992);
then
from
the
processes
of
language
determination/disambiguation/objetification, by controlling meaning (Haroche, 1992); and the
examination of the distinction between oral and written discourse (Gallo, 1992). These
approaches, together with an understanding of the constitution of the information effect, will aid
the denaturalization and opacification12 of the objects, practices, theories, methodologies and
products of the information field.
In a book that condenses his reflections on the course taken by linguistic knowledge, following
prolonged historical study, Auroux sustains two main hypotheses: (a) that writing is one of the
factors necessary for the advent of metalinguistic knowledge; and (b) that the process of
“grammatization”13 has profoundly changed the ecology of human communication, and provided
the western world with a medium for knowledge/domination over the other world cultures. With
regard to the first hypothesis, he observes that in the history of oral cultures, there is no ‘true
metalinguistic knowledge’, i.e. the knowledge that commands the manipulation that can be
carried out on the language. The etymology of the word ‘grammar’ already denotes: gramma or
letter (cf. p.19).
On the other hand, Auroux does not establish a strict causal relationship between writing and
grammatical knowledge. Though he agrees with Goody that the emergence of this knowledge
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depends on “ratio scipta” (written reason), he points to varied social and historical factors
involved in the process of grammatization. He suggests the European Renaissance as the
turning point in this process, which led to large-scale compiling of dictionaries and grammars of
the known languages – particularly Amerindian – along with the European vernaculars,
standardized according to the Greco-Latin tradition. He describes, with varying emphasis, the
political and economic factors that lay the foundations for a new policy of internal and external
linguistic expansion, within the context of mercantilism: access to a language of administration,
culture and holy scriptures; global exploration and military expeditions, with the establishment of
trade and political relations; colonization; the organization of a literary language; and the advent
of the printing press. The author presents data that show not only the historical concomitance of
the grammatization of the languages in the ‘known world’, but also its coincidence with the
appearance of logical treatises which, through articulations that I establish with the text of
Haroche (1992), will be taken up again later in this text.
Auroux underscores the effects of what he calls the ‘second techno-linguistic revolution’ – the
first being the advent of writing:
Each new language integrated within the network of linguistic
knowledge, just like each new region on the European cartographers’
maps, will increase the effectiveness of that network and its imbalance,
in favor of a single region of the world. (p. 35) [...] Communication
spaces/times are established [with the grammatization of the
languages], whose dimensions and homogeneity have no common
yardstick against what may be found in an oral society, that is to say, a
society without grammar. [...] In the same way that the roads, canals,
railways and airfields modify our landscape and our modes of transport,
grammatization has profoundly altered the ecology of communication
and the condition of the human linguistic heritage. [...] The less
“instrumentalized” languages were, for this reason, more vulnerable to
“language death”, whether voluntary or not. (AUROUX, 1992, p. 70.
Author’s boldface.)
Haroche (1992) also addresses grammar-related issues, but for different reasons than those
indicated by Auroux. Unlike other writers on Discourse Analysis, Auroux, focusing on the
constitution of the subject in its historicity, is not content with the generic affirmations of an
“interpellation of the individual as subject” or of their “subjection by the ideology” or even that
the “the subject is an effect of the discourse”. In the text being analyzed, Haroche seeks, in the
concrete relations of the subject with the language, “within the very syntactic mechanisms, the
effects of interpellation and subjection” (p. 180). Her analytic focus is on the transition from
medieval religious subject to bourgeois legal subject and her analytic object – though only
occasionally mentioned in the text – is the transformations in the social and historical
functioning of written language. She analyzes the transformation from the Letter, as a “closed
and enveloping sign of the mnemonic ritual [of religion in the Middle Ages]” to Letters,
represented as an “open, combinable, rational sign, an ‘object of choice’ and arrangement on
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the part of the subject” in bourgeois society (p. 70).
The author points to the indissociability of the capitalist “Letter” and “the very feasibility of the
contract, of the exchanging of goods, enable[ing] monetary circulation”, “marking the
predominance of language” (p.70) – in written form, I would like to emphasize. It is the
establishment of writing – “in its explicit form, determinate and fixed”, controllable, against the
subject – “site of all restrictions, ambiguity, falsehoods, and contradictions” (p. 98).
By taking the historical analysis of grammatization to the level of the constitution of the subject,
Haroche shows her political design to be the control of meaning and, consequently, of
interpretation.
The grammar ideal would therefore be one of completeness, part of an
ideal of the subject who is master of his own words, thus definitively
constituted as a legal subject (p.13) [...] Juridical practices thus work
silently in the history of grammar. A specific figure of subjectivity takes
form under its influence: the subject is individualized, isolated, held
responsible in grammar and in discourse. (p. 23) [...] determination is an
effect inscribed at the heart of grammar, a form of coercion, a demand
for order, but also a privilege, accessible to some, denied to the majority,
which is the very privilege of interpretation. (HAROCHE, 1992, p. 26)
The search for determination in discourse, through formalization and textual constructions,
requires grammarians to develop an authentic theory of disambiguation (p. 101), controlling the
meaning in writing and creating the literality effect: the illusion of representing the “idea clearly
and distinctly, detached from context” (p. 99). Note that parallel to the process of
individualization, attributing responsibility to the subject thus autonomized, there is a juridical
ideology of administrative centralization, connected to the establishment of the state apparatus,
defined by the “imposing of literality”, and banishing the implicit and indetermination (p.189).
And so that there is no doubt as to the intelligence of said decrees, we
wish, indeed command, that they be prepared and written so clearly that
there can be no ambiguity whatsoever, nor uncertainty, nor room for
interpretation.” (Mandate of Villers-Cotterets, 1539, apud HAROCHE,
1992, p. 86)
The constitution of the subject responsible for his or her own decisions, the construction of
literality, notably through control of the written language, and the apparent transparency of the
references, consolidates the separation of subject and object: the constitution of objectivity. In
relation to this theme, Haroche gauges that following the post-medieval “opening up” to rights
and knowledge, allowing curiosity and the “right to know”, there came a new closure: the
precision of the technique brought a new subjection, “characterized by rigorousness and the
cypher” (p. 84), consolidating the previously mentioned Foucaultian analysis of the “hostile”
separation of subject and object. This consolidation very much involves the identity, indicated by
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Pêcheux (1995), between juridical operators and logical mechanisms. On this issue, I articulate
the text by Auroux (1992) – who demonstrates the historical concomitance of grammatization
and the advent of logical treatises – with that of Haroche, who draws attention to the fact that, in
logic itself, there is something prescriptive, normative, coercive, in short - juridical, which
contributes to the construction of the object in isolation from the subject. The writer emphasizes
the “law” in the law and in science as an indicator of this relationship, which she describes as
“constitutive simulation”.
Gallo (1992), in a text that addresses the functioning of what he terms Written Discourse (WD)
and Oral Discourse (OD), calls attention to the fact that “circularity is produced whenever one
musters the ‘evidence of things’, because the evidence is always a construction” (p. 110). The
circularity of power between document and institution, analyzed by Le Goff (2005) and
mentioned previously herein, is also discussed in the work of Gallo (1992, p. 33), from the
discursive angle: the “dominion of circularity” in institutionalized, written speech ensures and
legitimizes itself, thereby safeguarding the institution from which it originates.
Furthermore, Gallo (1992), contributing towards the study of the textuality of the document –
which I consider to embrace both bureaucratic and academic-scientific documents – in
constructing the effect of objectivity, brings to his analysis the discursive typology defined by
Orlandi (1996)14. She demonstrates how WD, like authoritarian discourse, but unlike ludic or
polemical discourse, produces the evidence effect by means of the illusion of completeness and
closure. The ‘ending’ is a ‘closing’
–
always arbitrary – which, through meaning effects
regulated by the history of the subject and by the materiality of the text, appears to be ‘unique’
and ‘absolute’ (p. 104). The writer emphasizes that the ‘closing’, despite being just one of the
many possible, “produces for the text an effect of sole meaning, through the ideological effect
produced by the ‘institution’ where the text is inscribed: an effect that makes the ‘multiple’
appear as ‘one’ and the ‘ambiguous’ appear to be ‘transparent’”.
In her analysis of the production of evidence in WD, Gallo acknowledges that historically, in
societies where writing has obtained hegemony over orality, this has come about through a
linguistic variety worked upon by a formal grammatical metalanguage that builds a dominion of
objectivity. “This explains the long process, beginning in the Middle Ages, of adding to a
determinate linguistic variety the power of Writing: a power that is able to institute a single
meaning, true and full.” (GALLO, 1992, p. 49). On the other hand, orality – and even its
transcription – will maintain its status of illegitimate form: multiple and unfinished meanings. The
WD text institutes the ‘norm’ and the ‘model’, and not the other way round, as pedagogical
discourse – the focus of her analysis – leads us to believe (p. 108).
Another important aspect studied by Gallo relates to the ‘principle of authorship’, from which is
derived – in the imagination and in the law... – the discursive effect of the unity of the text. The
author, occupying this position, in the form of the identity and of the ‘I’, is situated at the origin of
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the textuality, as analyzed in Foucault, limiting and opposing chance in discourse.15 “The very
unity of the text is a discursive effect deriving from the principle of authorship.” (ORLANDI &
GUIMARÃES, 199316, apud GALLO, 1992).
FINAL CONSIDERATIONS
Given that this is a report on the partial results of an ongoing study, one can do little more, at
this time, than mention some of the issues that are raised by analysis of the cited texts.
First of all, I emphasize the weakening of the relations of “causality” defended by so-called
literacy sociologists. The historical data compiled and pondered by Auroux do not merely
overturn, but ‘explode’ the traditionally established articulations between writing, forms of
rationality, and the management of social memory, introducing social and historical factors that
place the metalinguistic knowledge/regulation of writing within the political and administrative
contours of an authentic internal and external language policy.
Bringing the analyses of Haroche into our reflections, we find the objectification of referents –
“literality of the state” – and its counterpart, the constitution of the legal subject of the bourgeois
state, to be conditions for the discursive construction of ‘information’. By addressing the
functioning of written language and its syntactic and lexical controls, discourse theory makes it
possible to reconstruct the historical and political conditions that institute the document and
information as important factors in the construction of the evidence effect in the social mode of
accreditation, alongside the complete opacification of these processes by the psychoideological bias17 of the constitution of autonomous, responsible subjects in logic and in law. In
other words: the social and historical processes of constructing institutionalized speech –
notably by means of the document, in its legal and, especially, symbolic efficaciousness –
naturalize and invisibilize these processes and produce the illusion of the transparency of its
artifacts and ‘informational contents’, which are equally inputs of the institutional relations of
power. The basis of the power of the document (institutional realm), becomes invisible through
the reification of the written record, which, in its turn, is made invisible by the over-reification of
the imaginary of information: the information/fact effect. These successive covering layers
involved in the hegemonization of the functioning of the Archive, as a device, imply the
constitution of the imaginary representation of information, together with the constitution of the
legal subject itself.
Analysis of the textuality of the document - its linguistic materiality, which, along with other
materialities that are subject to diplomatic, paleographic and other analyses, clearly does not
exhaust the possibilities of its characterization. The very concept of document, which was
previously guided mainly by its institutional or authorial ‘authenticity’ in relation to the ‘truth’, has
been challenged by historiographical schools that have not only abandoned the ingenuous and
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formalist posture towards the document, but consider as such everything that is adopted as a
source for the construction of historical narratives (LE GOFF, 2005; FEBVRE, undated;
ROUSSO, 1996). Despite the recognition of the connection between textuality and
discursiveness, the broadening of the concept of document points to its position as discursive
effect, enveloped in webs of meaning established in enunciative situations that are institutionally
marked. In this study, it is considered that a (discursive) concept of document could emerge
from the cross matching of definitions formulated by the disciplinary fields that focus on it, such
as Documentation, Information Science, Diplomatics, History and even Law, as well as the
analysis of manuals and rules of administrative and academic/scientific writing. But this is a path
yet to be travelled.
If one thinks about the Archive as a device, embracing all social practices with documents,
including theoretical practices, one ascertains that the founding myth of the information field
merges with the founding myths of western civilization itself – Archive societies.
Gallo’s (1992) approach to the circularity of the processes of constructing evidence and their
possible disruption under criticism, will serve as ‘closure’ for these reflections, and a possible
opening for others. Discourse analysis, which restores the material and historical dimension of
meaning, breaking with the illusion of the transparency of language – foundation of the
information/evidence effect and founding myth of the information field, can help to break that
circularity. And from outside the circle, perhaps it will be possible to observe how this field has
been participating – by action or omission – in the very functioning of the Archive as a device.
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NOTES
1
Article presented at the “V Seminário Memória e Linguagem e I Seminário de Pesquisa em Documento
th
st
e Memória: materialidade e discurso”(5 Memory and Language Seminar and 1 Seminar on Research
into the Document and Memory: materiality and discourse), UNIRIO-UFF. It includes advances made in
the postdoctoral study developed along with the Postgraduation Program of the Social Anthropology,
Area of Linguistics, at the National Museum - UFRJ, presented at the “III Jornada de Análise do Discurso
rd
na Ciência da Informação” (3 Gathering on the Analysis of Discourse in Information Science), organized
by the Information Science Department of the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar).
2
NUMBERG, G. Farewell to the information age. In: NUMBERG, G. (ed.). The future of the book.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. p. 103-138. apud Frohmann (2004b).
3
Paraphrasing Frohmann (2004a).
4
“In Nietzsche, one finds a type of discourse that undertakes a historical analysis of the formation of the
subject itself, a historical analysis of the birth of a certain type of knowledge [savoir] – without ever
granting the preexistence of a subject of knowledge [connaissance].” (Foucault, 1974, p. 9-10)
“When I use the word knowledge (savoir), I do so in order to distinguish it from knowledge
(connaissance). The former is the process through which the subject finds himself modified by what he
knows, or rather by the labor performed in order to know. It is what permits the modification of the subject
and the construction of the object. Connaissance, however, is the process which permits the
multiplication of knowable objects, the development of their intelligibility, and the understanding of their
rationality, while the subject doing the investigation always remains the same”. “Colloqui con Foucault”
(1978). Interview with Duccio Trombadori (Italian). Trans. R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito as
Remarks on Marx (NY: Semiotext(e), 1991).
5
VAN RIJSBERGEN, C.J. Information retrieval. London: Butterworths, 1979. apud Capurro; Hjorland,
2007. Available at: http://ww.dcs.gis.ac.uk/keith/preface.html.
6
This illusion harks back to Pêcheux’s assessment that positivism, far from being an alternative or
methodological option, is the very functioning of the basic ideological effect of forming “evidence” in the
observer’s ‘direct access’ to the real.
7
GOLDBERG, J. Writing matter: from the hands of the English rennaissance. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1990,. p.47-8 apud Frohmann (2004b).
8
CARDONA, G.R. “Antropologia de la escritura (The anthropology of writing)”. Barcelona: Gedisa,
1994, p. 10. apud Gimeno Blay (1998).
9
These concepts were explained by Pierre Nora in the context of formulating his concept of sites of
memory.
10
ALBUQUERQUE, J.A.G. “Metáforas da desordem: o contexto social da doença mental (Metaphors
of disorder: the social context of mental illness)”. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1978. Apud Costa, 1997.
11
Based on NIETZSCHE, Frederich. W. A Gaia Ciência. In: _______ . Obras incompletas. São Paulo:
Nova Cultural, 1999. (Os Pensadores).
12
Understood as the desconstruction of the effect of evidence, of the illusion of transparency.
13
The author conceives grammatization as “the process that leads to the describing and instrumentalizing
of a language based on two basic technologies: grammar and the dictionary, which remain today the
pillars of our metalinguistic knowledge”. This is different to the older term “grammaticalization”, which was
once used by linguists to designate the fixing of a discursive procedure in the grammar of a language.
(AUROUX, 1992, pp. 65 and 95, note nº 12).
14
Gallo emphasizes that the typology shaped by Orlandi in “A linguagem e seu funcionamento
(Language and its functioning)” (Campinas: Pontes, 1996) refers to discourse, not to text. Discourse
Analysis does not treat the text as an object, but as the corpus for analysis, by means of which one can
achieve the conditions of production of discourse.
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15
An aspect pointed out by Gallo regarding juridical and administrative documents is still awaiting deeper
study. Citing Orlandi and Guimarães in “Discurso e Leitura (Discourse and Reading)” (1993), she writes:
“Decrees and contracts need signatories, not authors”.
16
ORLANDI, Eni P.; GUIMARÃES, Eduardo. “Unidade e dispersão: uma questão do texto e do sujeito
(Unity and dispersion: a matter of text and subject)”. In: _______. “Discurso e leitura (Discourse and
reading)”. São Paulo: Cortez, Campinas: Unicamp university press, 1993. apud Gallo, 1992.
17
‘Psycho-’ refers here to the psychoanalytical approach to the constitution of the subject, and not to the
psychology of the individual (based on Haroche, 1992). The term was chosen to indicate the processes of
subjectification via discursive memory and other basically unconscious mechanisms.
94