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

Ever more frequently, writing began to be produced that was not meant to last but that incorporated its own expiration date, as evidenced by the increased production of ephemera, including brochures, pamphlets, newspapers, broadsides, and flyers. This acceleration in the production and consumption of the written word precipitated a shift from the perception of writing as singular truth to single opinion.

William Frawley summarizes an argument taken from the field of linguistics when he ties truth to writing in his discussion of nontextuality, textuality, and intertextuality. He observes that the rapid departmentalization of knowledge into academic and scientific fields and subspecialties during the nineteenth century led to a plethora of writings and theories that took on, in his words, an “argued nature” (75): “Textuality results in subordinated, analytic knowledge and fragmentation into systems which debate each other’s legitimacy in the cause of doctrine” (53). In a cultural system of textuality, the negotiation of truth via inscription (as opposed to oral formats such as debate) “becomes a relative notion” (75) at the same time as the medium of text monopolizes the truth function. This does not mean that textuality negates the possibility of truth altogether. While truth in textuality is guaranteed and verified in writing and response, the multiplicity of arguments shares an agenda: the approximation of “doctrine” or a synthesized truth at the end of argument. In other words, in textuality an idealized indisputable truth supplants absolute truth. Consequently, the nineteenth-century naturalists’ inscriptions of nature can be read with Frawley’s concept of textuality as an argument or, to borrow a term from speech act theory, a proposition (Searle 225) that inscribes truth in the very act of writing.

In his self-reflective introduction to The Interpretation of Cultures, Clifford Geertz adds to Frawley’s skepticism the intriguing concept of the arbitrariness of systematic textualization. Describing the professional fieldwork procedure of modern academic ethnographers and anthropologists, Geertz notes as one of its greatest pitfalls the fact that—not unlike Freudian dream analysis—it consists in transforming observations into texts and then venturing to interpret those texts.