Post-Modern Ethnography:
From Document of the Occult
to Occult Document
First Voice: Context
The paper that follows this introduction is part of a group of
essays written at various times and in response to various influences.
None the less , each essay anticipates, alludes to, builds on, or presupposes
the others. Each deals in one way or another with discourse and
rhetoric, and each characterizes the tension between the possible
worlds of commonsense and the impossible worlds of science and
politics. Together they tell how the rhetorical modes of ethics (ethos),
science (eidos), and politics (pathos) are sensorial allegories whose root
metaphors "saying/hearing," "seeing/showing," "doing/acting" respectively
create the discourses of value, representation, and work. All
of the essays speak of the ethnographic contextualization of the rhetorics
of science and politics and tell how the rhetoric of ethnography is
neither scientific nor political, but is, as the prefix ethno- implies,
ethical. They also speak of the suffix - graphy in reminder of the fact
that ethnography itself is contextualized by a technology of written
communication.
Neither part of the search for universal knowledge, nor an instrument
for the suppression/emancipation of peoples, nor just another
mode of discourse on a par with those of science and politics, ethnography
is instead a superordinate discourse to which all other discourses
are relativized and in which they find their meaning and jus tification.
Ethnography's superordination is the consequence of its
"imperfection." Neither self-perfecting in the manner of scientific discourse
nor totalizing in the manner of political discourse, it is defined
neither by a reflexive attention to its own rules nor by the performative
instrumentality of those rules. Defined neither by form nor by relation
to an external object, it produces no idealizations of form and
performance, no fictionalized realities or realities fictionalized. Its
transcendence is not that of a meta - language — of a language superior
by means of its greater perfection of form — nor that of a unity created
by synthesis and sublation, nor of praxis and practical application.
Transcendent then, neither by theory nor by practice, nor by
their synthesis, it describes no knowledge and produces no action. It
transcends instead by evoking what cannot be known discursively or
performed perfectly, though all know it as if discursively and perform
it as if perfectly.