Writing a National Colony: The Hostility of Inscription in the Ge ...

Where truth is inscribed and sanctioned in text, truth as “the thing itself ” disappears irrecoverably behind its linguistic arrangements, its conceptual filters, and its aesthetic orchestrations. In texts, then, political agendas invariably take the form of poetic intervention as style becomes the structuring agent of argument, foregrounding, deemphasizing, suppressing, shifting, and shaping meanings. In other words, truth becomes tantamount to rhetorical power.

Linguists have extensively theorized the relationship between language and what it says, and in going back, as it were, to language as a smaller constitutive unit of the text, I want to offer only the briefest of reviews here of their theories and how they relate to a theory of the host. Language, it has been observed, negotiates meaning in ways closely related to the ways in which texts, on a larger scale, negotiate doctrine, and we might infer from this relationship that the former is the prerequisite which determines the operations of the latter. Frawley, commenting upon the negotiated nature of meaning, succinctly posits that “texts are epistemological money” (31). This notion has been famously explicated by Jacques Derrida, based on Ferdinand de Saussure’s discussion of the exchange of signs. Saussure, Derrida argues in “White Mythology,” expresses the sign in Marxian terms as a linguistic commodity. In order to exchange items in meaningful ways, the items have to be dissimilar, and the value of the one is fixed by assigning it to the other. At the same time, in order to compare the two items to each other in the first place, the items need to have a degree of similarity (216). This means that the negotiation of meaning occurs exclusively within the differential relationship established between signs. The sign is informed by the cascade of meanings within its field of engagement, yet without recourse to an external referent that might fix its meaning absolutely.

Starting from the idea that meaning results from a structured exchange of signs among themselves, Derrida’s take on the metaphoricity of language posits—in an extended metaphor that itself disperses reductive referentiality—that language, by virtue of operating through signs, at once deviates from the truth (i.e., the irreducible “thing itself ”) and opens a space in which meaning can be produced.