Ocular Hegemony, the Archon’s House and Archival Ecology:
A short reflection on the concepts behind “The Water Lily,” 2024
Ocular hegemony is a concept introduced by Rebecca Schneider in “Performance Remains,” an article examining the association of performance with disappearance in contemporary art theory. Schneider argues that treating performance as “being of” disappearance is revelatory of an attitude towards time keeping, history, archiving which favors the visual, the object, the so-called tangible. The written archive, shrouded in the lexicon of the reliable, is based on these interconnected notions: that a performance does not create knowledge and that a body does not house, retain or pass on knowledge, and that history is a collection of static and immortalized, archetypified objects which belong to the past and make the world legible. Ocular hegemony, deeply intertwined with the logic of the archive, is rooted in the Western entitlement to a legible, transparent world. In this context, to know means to interact with visual objects which both confirm the “disappearing” nature of the live, and present themselves as its survivors, defying time and death. This logic - these objects - give us a retroactive rendering of history as that which remains. They obscure forms of knowledge making and transmission which are housed in the body and in the present, including performance, ritual, oral story-telling and many more. They also posit that what is not visible is not tangible, does not represent a remains, a testimony.
The weaponization of ocular hegemony - and ocularcentrism - at the service of colonialism and cultural violence permeates European cultural institutions and collections. The ruins, the spoils, the loot, the treasure, the sample, the specimen, the treaty, the contract - these are the objects that cultural institutions use to tell stories, to shape narratives and feed histories. They are meticulously and painstakingly preserved as the designated witnesses of the events chosen to tell these stories. In his entry for Patterned Grounds: Entanglements of Nature and Culture, Miles Ogborn gives us an insight into the ecology of these archival objects, the ecosystems that form despite physical and epistemic efforts to isolate them as discrete and neutral entities which live in the world of fact and truth, far away from what is alive and what is in time, in constant respiration and actualization. The immobilization of time, the prevention of decay, the prevention of biological transformation, is a question of epistemic and financial capital. The objects necessary to tell stories foundational to nation states in particular are subject to this securitization; the promise of their constant visibility, their undamaged visual existence through time which might be called upon at will as long as these processes are financed. Ogborn points out that memory as object, in this case, memory as paper, is anything but separate from the present, an immortalized piece of the past. Despite efforts to immobilize it, preserve it, memory as paper is in fact in constant transformation in that it is in constant negotiation with, according to Ogborn, “heat, light and, most of all, water.” Paper changes color, texture, expands and shrinks like a lung, can host humidity seeking micro-organisms and the insects that feed on them. On the non-human scale, these remains are alive and ever-evolving.
In her article Rebecca Schneider looks at the etymology of the word archive and gives us the concept of the Archon, the leader, the patriarch. According to Schneider, the “Greek root of the word archive refers to the Archon’s house (...).” The logic of ocular hegemony, of a visible, material memory is based on a specific social but also physical architecture - memory is housed, it belongs to the patriarch and sits immobile inside. There is a parallel to be drawn here with the processes of physical archival protection described by Ogborn. In order to combat humidity, fungi, book lice, various institutions, libraries, schools use a range of methods to make the paper archives uninhabitable. He conceptualizes these processes as a desertification, a desiccation of the archive. The archive, the Archon’s house is a desert, inhospitable to life, to living, breathing narration, to the re-arrangement of the biology of memory. In this context archiving represents a simultaneous killing and immortalizing of memory - in order for an object to be inserted into the archive it must stop being alive, being in transformation. Only then can it be preserved, suspended in time as the survivor of that death, of the past it was chosen to narrate across and against time. In thinking about the interspecies connections that unavoidably form inside and throughout the material, paper archive, the small scale resistance to the immortalization of memory, how can we revive the biome of the written archive? What strategies can we use to re-configure the architecture of the written medium of memory? How can we escape the Archon’s house and think of memory as a jungle rather than a desert?
I am a visual artist but mostly consider myself a writer. I have always loved words and what they can be allowed to do. I have always found great satisfaction in the puzzle of expression, in finding the words that might most closely describe, communicate what I mean. English is not my first language but it is the one I use every day. It is my language for academia and research, for complex thoughts and romantic love. For the past year I have tried to analyze and take apart the connections between these realities. To understand the link between my desire of precision and eloquence and my attachment to the English language, and the way it was taught to me. I realized that both were formatted for me by my education and by the very nature of the English language which, much like my native tongue, was developed as a tool for the subjugation of people and land. Grappling with the concept of linguistic imperialism in efforts to decolonize my language and my attitude towards language has radically changed the way I approach writing. I started to research and take inspiration from authors who invent ways to manipulate this language as resistance to it, as re-appropriation, as world-building, as imagination. I turned to science fiction, critical fabulation, nonsense and creole literature as modes of sense-making which actively and radically disrupt the various institutionalized constructions of the English language. While trying to remember and make clear my position as privileged outsider to the direct effects of linguistic imperialism, I attempt to unearth and dissect it in my writing practice.
A recent story I wrote, and am still working on, explores the lexicon of wildlife preservation and its role in the deliberate displacement of knowledge and value which underpins the functioning of this industry.
“The Water Lily” follows the movements of a Rwandan water lily specimen that was extracted from its natural habitat, brought to Germany and declared endangered which prompted a series of processes around the plant to not only keep it alive but to make it reproduce in artificial environments. The story offers to look at the language that is used to describe and justify the extraction of this plant from Western Rwanda and proposes to look critically at how value is created along the chain of events that follows this extraction. I choose to narrate this story from the point of view of another species, the tongue-eating louse which is considered a parasite. By imagining this voice as the witness of the preservation industry, I also attempt to provide a critique of the Euro-cultural and colonial imaginary of wildlife. Nomenclature, categorization, typification are tools of linguistic imperialism in that they reduce living, extremely diverse and complex beings into archetypes - literally the one from which others are made, immortal originals - easy for the digestion of the Western cogito, as Ogborn puts it.
As a writer, someone who is very attached to words and language as vehicles for (non)sense and meaning making, I want to find a way to create written records which escape the constructions of linguistic imperialism and which question colonial imaginaries and language. Is this possible in light of the position of the written word as material archive in the consolidation of Western ocular hegemony? Can the written story still challenge the understanding of memory and history as static? Or is it already inherent to the logic of the archive as expounded by Schneider and Ogborn? To attempt an argument by which the written story can tend towards a form of resistance while acknowledging its collaboration with some of the core principles of the archival logic, I call upon Édouard Glissant’s concept of opacity. In Poetics of Relation Edouard Glissant writes about the right to opacity, the right of all people to remain unintelligible on any imposed scale of measure. This position stands in clear opposition to the claims to ocular hegemony of the Western “I.” It purports that illegibility, opacity, can be a form of resistance to this demand that the world, its living and non-living subjects be made knowable and digestible to the eye. I propose that tending to opacity, incorporating linguistic elements which do not fit into academic standards of sense-making or the institutionalized logics of the English language, might allow for a re-configuration of the architecture behind the written medium as record keeper.