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First Person, Second Person, Same Person: Narrative as EpistemologyAuthor(s): Mieke BalSource: New Literary History, Vol. 24, No. 2, Reconsiderations (Spring, 1993), pp. 293-320Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/469408

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First Person, Second Person, Same Person:

Narrative As Epistemology

Mieke Bal

I. Introduction

L ET ME START with two statements about description. "Tran-

scription is always also description," writes anthropologist Jo-hannes Fabian in his seminal Power and Performance;1and

continuing this idea, philosopher and historian of art Hubert Dam-

isch writes: "Describing, in this sense, is always already narrating"in his equally seminal L'originede la perspective.2Something seems to

be the matter, epistemologically speaking, with description. Joiningthe one statement to the other, something seems to be a contami-

nation that infects "pure" neutral rendering with the taint of nar-

rativity. Fabian takes description as already implicated in this process,but warns that even transcription is "always part of a process of

interpretation and translation" (P 110).What else can a historical, philosophical, erudite treatise on linear

perspective, and its origin in Italian art (history), have in common

with a critical-anthropological study of a proverb and a theatrical

performance based on it, in Shaba, Zaire? What could make it worth

analyzing the common elements in two so diverse scholarly texts,neither of which is on narrative nor is a narrative in any common-

sense definition? Both are products of academic work, of "new art

history" and of "critical anthropology" respectively; both, that is,stand in the tradition of contemporary, "progressive" knowledge

production.Let me briefly tell these two stories. One evening at dinner, Fabian

heard the expression, probably proverbial, le pouvoir se mange entier

(power is eaten whole). Trying to find out what the proverb means

in the Shaba culture, he asked people, and one day (second episode)he asked a group of theater actors who were his friends. After an

intense session of brainstorming, the group decided to work uptheir next play around the saying. Fabian was present at preparations,rehearsals, and performance, considering that what happened is the

best possible form of modern ethnography: the construction of

New LiteraryHistory, 1993, 24: 293-320



NEW LITERARY HISTORY

knowledge about a culture with the people and through collective

research and discovery. The real performance of the actors becomes

an allegory of the idea of performance as an epistemic model forethnography.

Damisch's pursuit of knowledge concerns the origin of perspectiveas well as of the thinking about perspective-perspective as a dis-

course-and proceeds on an equally "democratic" base. He providesclose readings of the treatises on perspectives, the experiments that

led to what can only be anachronistically called its "discovery," and

of three paintings, constructed as a group, which he studies in

relation to one another in order to understand the origin of per-

spective through the transformations in its use.Both of these books address up front the basic epistemological

problem of their discipline and, I contend, of the humanities and

the social sciences in general. For Fabian, that problem is to account

not only for knowledge as a product but for its production in an

epistemic situation where power inequality has made the discipline'straditional paradigms virtually useless. For Damisch, the problem is

the paradox of historical search for an origin. To avoid mythification,

origin must be seen through a double predicament. It presupposes

a beginning which must be revolutionary in order to be perceived,yet must be absorbed in a tradition in order to measure its revo-

lutionary impact; an absorption which requires that tradition to

ignore the event which it acknowledges as its origin (L 79).The rationale for my choice of discussing these texts is the

relevance to them of, and their relevance for, a third text: a phil-

osophical analysis of epistemological problems in relation to feminist

theory, Lorraine Code's 1991 What Can She Know?3 That relevance

is best seen when one realizes that both case studies grew out of a

search for an epistemology through which the subjective status ofthe objects the writers sought to understand could be done more

justice. Both books grew out of an impatience, as Damisch put it

in his first sentence, with the epistemological modes current in their

respective areas, anthropology and history; an impatience, also, which

gives the books an autobiographical slant.

Johannes Fabian is a well-known critical anthropologist: his Time

and the Other4 is perhaps the single most important text of the

movement of anthropologists impatient with and thoroughly sus-

picious of the colonialist legacy that subtends their field. His recentPower and Performance,the text under discussion in this paper, givesthe lie to those who become skeptical of what they consider the

overcritical mood of the relentless critique of ethnography; to those

who tend to conclude from Fabian's critical work that there is no

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NARRATIVE AS EPISTEMOLOGY

way one can do it right. Here, the same author who would never

be satisfied with the well-meaning attempts at democratic and non-

exploitative ethnographies is showing his hand. And whatever elsethis seminal study may also be, it remains true to the discursive

habits of ethnography: it is a narrative text. A complex, multilayeredand intricate one indeed, telling the multiple stories of his own

discoveries of ethnographic facts as well as of methodology, mixed

with those of the discussions and rehearsals, interlarded with stories

about each of the participants in the project as well as of populartheater in Shaba. Complex, yes, but a narrative no less. And since

it offers an in-depth exploration of ways of pursuing knowledge,

the embedding part of the narrative is self-reflexive.In addition to being a philosopher, Damisch is primarily an art

historian, and as such a teller of tales too. His masterful Theorie du

nuage5 (Theory of the Cloud) was as pathbreaking as Fabian's Time

and the Other. In that book he took clouds to be, as he formulates

it in his later study on perspective, "emblems of what perspectiveexcludes from its order . . . while also of the logic on which it is

based and which gives it coherence" (L 297). Moreover, his topic is

the search for an origin, and states as much in its title, and that

topic promises a text that is at least doubly narrative: as story oforigin and as story of the search for that origin. His impatiencealso concerned his fellow historians and their simplistic concep-tion of what kind of narratives history ought to construct.6 Hence,this study, too, presents a complex narrative with a self-reflexive

dimension.

Both studies represent an object lying rigorously outside the subjectof inquiry: a discursive habit of a different people in terms of

cultural identity and location, the people of Shaba in Zaire, in the

one case, a different discursive apparatus in terms of time, inrenaissance Italy, in the other. Both are explicitly engaged in over-

coming the object status this "third personhood" entails. Fabian's

intention "to explore the meanings of 'le pouvoir se mange entier'

and to do this following a 'method' that works as an ethnographywith, not of, the Groupe Mufwankolo" (P 55) echoes Damisch's

search for "an analysis which would be less about a painting than

it would have to reckon with it" (L 240). And there, too, lies their

relevance for the kind of inquiry Lorraine Code proposes, into the

relationships between subject and object of knowledge whose pos-

sibility emerges when the traditional objectivism's self-evidence is

suspended.Thus at first sight, in terms of narratology and seen from the

perspective of the object of study, both narratives can be seen as

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primarily "third-person narratives," including the tensions inherent

in that discursive mode. But both authors struggle with precisely

that dimension of their professional discourses: the false neutralitysufficiently challenged by contemporary epistemology as it translates

into a narrative told in the third person, with an invisible narrator

and a nonidentified focalizer. First, they turn their texts around,and the self-reflexive side of the studies involves the first personin their quest. The neutral, distant narrator becomes part of the

exploration, so that the embedding narrative is written in the first

person.Where Damisch opens his preface with the statement of his

impatience, Fabian espouses the conventions of realist fiction whenhe opens his first chapter thus: "On the evening of June 17, 1986,in the midst of a relatively short stint of field work in Lubumbashi,the capital of the mining region of Shaba in Zaire, I was writing

up the day's events when I made a discovery" (P 3). Placing the

events to follow in a specific time frame, himself as the story'snarrator in specific circumstances, and the first event of the fabula

to come as the potentially spectacular interruption of a durative

occupation: it could be practically any novel. His identity as a self-

reflexive narrator represented as writing specifies the discourse, asit suggests a modernist aesthetic.

But between a realist, neutral narrator and a modernist first

person, the problem of the status of the object of narration remains

as yet to be examined. In the case of epistemological narratives,the issue becomes that of the subjective status of the object of

inquiry. Both authors make that status an important element in

their experimental narrative. Fabian sets up a situation in which

the object, cultural knowledge, is not studied but constructed on

the spot, by and with and through the cultural group under in-

vestigation, as well as conducting that investigation. This is preciselythe discovery alluded to: that ethnographic knowledge is not simplya dialogue, let alone a neat and clean third-person narrative, but

a performance. Damisch, whose object is not a cultural group but

a cultural discourse, sets up a specific enunciation of perspective as

his interlocutor: the group of three anonymous, renaissance, "ur-

binate," perspectival city views, the most famous of which is The

Ideal City at Urbino. Both scholars take the second person as the

core of their examination, and both make action, process, performancethe core of their knowledge. Both perform formal experiments to

inscribe this second personhood of their object as well as the per-formative dynamic into the narrative, which thereby becomes ex-

perimental, complex, and theoretically at least, a second-person

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narrative. Both books, then, are semantically "third-person," syn-

tactically "first-person," and present attempts to achieve pragmatically

a "second-person" narrative.This intrication of a project of critical epistemology, a narrative

which inscribes the second person, and the centrality of performance,struck me as significant, and especially so in light of recent devel-

opments in epistemological theory as they relate to narrative. To

sum these up too briefly: the epistemological notion of objectivetruth and impersonal knowledge is bound up with the narratologicalnotions of "third-person narrative," external and invisible narrator,and neutral representation. But if we realize that the Cartesian cogito

which sustains the objective epistemology is itself a mininarrative inthe first person, we don't even need Descartes's personal expressionsof anxiety to realize that this conception of knowledge is inherently

contradictory.7 Indeed, the Cartesian principles are all bound upwith subjectivity and defined in terms of the individual subject: the

basis of knowledge is one indubitable thing to which all other

knowledge is systematically related; hence, to which it is relative;"indubitable" presupposes a subject of possible doubt; reason is

common to and alike in all knowers; yet the quest for knowledge

is undertaken separately by each rational being who is therebyunassisted by the senses and uses the same method. Where the

subject of inquiry is so emphatically and contradictorily both fore-

grounded and neutralized, one might well associate this epistemo-

logical ideal with what Philippe Lejeune analyzes as "autobiographyin the third person."8

In her fascinating inquiry into the conditions of knowledge and

the problem of access to knowledge for some of those rational beingswho are apparently a little less fit to be such a subject of inquiry,

Lorraine Code challenges, among many other things, the overrulingprimacy of objectivity and the paradigmatic status of physics as the

ideal model of knowledge. The two are, of course, related. The

attractions of physics are deceptive: they consist in providing the

illusion that knowledge can always be analyzed in observational

"simples" (W 139). She proposes instead to give primacy to inter-

subjectivity ("a conception of cognitive agency for which intersub-

jectivity is primary and 'human nature' is ineluctably social" [W 72])and to give paradigm status to the difficult and complex episte-

mological project of knowing otherpeople. Central in her analysis ofthe knowing subject is Annette Baier's concept of secondpersonhood,and the model for the mode of inquiry she proposes is friendship.

Since the terms offered for reflection are strikingly close to those

put to use by Fabian and Damisch, it comes as no surprise that the

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discursive consequences of Code's theoretical position seem to apply

quite specifically to the texts produced by these two "field" scholars.

And narrativity is the locus of these consequences. In the wake ofher critique of physics as paradigm, Code scornfully suggests that

there are narrative reasons why epistemology values simplicity:"Clean, uncluttered analyses are valued more highly than rich,

multifacted, but messy and ambiguous narratives" (W 169). This

remark strongly suggests that there is a relation between narrative

form and epistemological competence; between the ability to handle

complex knowledge and to tell and read complex stories as much

as between cleanliness and simplicity. In other words, if Code is

right here, as I think she is, then narrative theory and analysis havea lot to offer in the important area of reflection on what it is and

how it is we can know. And since the academic endeavor as a whole

is very much invested in those questions, there is an opportunityfor humanists to contribute to the foundations of academic, intel-

lectual life that I would hate to miss.

One caveat is already called for, however. Code's remark sounds

convincing not only because, on a symbolic-logical level, it is easyto imagine how it can be right, and on the level of indexicality,

how nonsimplistic analyses would require complex narratives as theiraccounts, but also because it suggests a resemblance between complex

knowledge and messy narrative modes. In semiotic terms, the sym-bolic and indexical relationships of signification are reinforced byan iconic one. And although there are very good reasons to believe

that complexity and messiness are valuable as well as contiguous,the iconicity in question is not one of them. Indeed, such a coin-

cidence between content and form, such formal congruence, partakesof a profoundly mimetic impulse that makes us tend to think that

there is a virtue in such iconicity in itself. I would like to keepdistrust toward such iconism along with an interest in the connection

itself.

This paper, then, presents an examination of epistemologicaladventures in the three areas in which I have been particularlyinterested since I started to work on narrative: anthropology, art

history, and feminist theory. This allows me, incidentally, to presentthe three best books in these three areas I have read in years. Each

of them not only discuss paradigms of knowledge, but also constitute

these. Hence, if I eventually have some critical remarks to make,the reader is asked to bear in mind that those are quibbles, perhapsinevitable reservations, which stand out the more emphatically asthese studies are such exemplary texts which only my unease withthe term prevents from calling masterpieces. To speak with Lorraine

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Code's preferred model: I will engage these paradigms of knowledge

according to the mode of friendship, not the adversarial mode.

I will discuss the potential of narrative as epistemology as well asthe problems a narrative epistemology might incur by confrontingviews of narrative in these three studies, eventually in relation to

time and "person." These two aspects of narrative, it turns out,have a tremendous impact on the very possibility of reliable and

responsible knowledge. The coincidence that both Fabian and Dam-

isch find their inquiries to converge in the notion of performanceas an alternative to dominating, exploitative, and asymmetrical modes

of knowledge requires an examination of the implications of that

concept in relation to the narrative aspects just mentioned. But asI said before, coincidence itself, with its leaning toward mimesis,will benefit from my continuous doubt.

II. Narrative and Epistemology

Let me first explore some incidental and less incidental connections

between narrative and epistemology as these studies display them.

Code's first concern is to break away from the dichotomy between

objectivism and relativism, and given my own inclination to deploredichotomies, I was already interested right there. As it happens,her view mediates between the two opposites by virtue of narrativity.Here is her definition of relativism: "Broadly speaking, epistemo-

logical relativists hold that knowledge, truth, or even 'reality' can

be understood only in relation to particular sets of cultural or social

circumstances, to a theoretical framework, a specifiable range of

perspectives, a conceptual scheme, or a form of life" (W 2). While

not endorsing a stark construal of relativism, nor the equation of

epistemological with conceptual relativism, she mentions as major

advantages of a moderate epistemological relativism the fact that it

"is one of the more obvious means of avoiding reductive explanations,in terms of drastically simplified paradigms of knowledge, monolithic

explanatory modes, or privileged, decontextualized positions" as well

as the "stringent accountability requirements" it entails (W 3). And

these remarks nicely sum up the ambitions of both Fabian and, less

explicitly, Damisch. Both go out of their way to avoid decontex-

tualized reporting, and they do so by experimenting with narrativestructure. One of the aspects of the theoretical framework and the

conceptual schemes, as well as, in Fabian's case, the "ways of life"

of Code's definition, is later explicated as narrative. Code even

makes narrative the core of her "epistemic responsibility."9She argues

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that the moderate relativism she advocates entails an increased

relevance of narrative: "once epistemologists recognize the locat-

edness of all cognitive activity in the projects and constructions ofspecifically positioned subjects, then the relevance of narrative will

be apparent as an epistemological resource" (W 170), and she adds

that the model of the Cartesian knower as neutral and not positionedhas worked to obscure that significance of narrative.

The importance of narrative because of its capacity to map po-sitioned subjects in relation to knowledge does not entail a facile

rejection of all standards of objectivity. On the contrary, as Code

rightly argues, while on the one hand, "often, objectivity requires

taking subjectivity into account" (W 31), on the other denying thatthere are objective social realities "would obliterate the purpose of

feminist political projects" (W 45). Rather, the subjectivities involved

in the interactions that especially humanists and social scientists

study are objectifiable precisely because they can be related to, made

relative to, and positioned within narrative conceived as a mobile,

dynamic, conceptual scheme.

As I mentioned before, Code's competitor for paradigm status to

supersede physics is "knowing other people," and although she

doesn't name any academic discipline, it seems obvious that an-thropology at its best could be the privileged discipline, with narrative

as its central mode. That the history of anthropology has not

particularly yielded such status stems from the bond between knowl-

edge in the objectivist mode and domination as a political practice.But revised in this direction-and such a revision is well under way,with Fabian as one of its leaders-Fabian's study could then be a

paradigm within the paradigm. Knowing other people-which, for

Code, is best seen as based on the model of friendship-has features

that clearly demonstrate why narrative is such an important resourcefor it, and all of these features are prominently at work in Fabian's

book: such knowledge is not achieved at once, instead it develops;it is open to interpretation at different levels; it admits of degrees;it changes; subject and object positions in the process of knowledgeconstruction are reversible; it is a never-accomplished constant proc-ess; "the 'more-or-lessness' of this knowledge constantly affirms the

need to reserve and revise judgement" (W 37-38). This last feature

points at the need for self-reflection as part of the epistemic endeavor

itself.The relevance of narrative as a resource is not limited to its use

in documents and reports; the process of knowledge construction,which both Fabian and Damisch like to call performance, is narrativein nature on all scores. The events that constitute the process

300




producing knowledge do not exist outside the narrative accounts

of them, which construct the knowledge by representing the events.

Moreover, the knowledge-claimants position themselves within arange of what Code calls "discursive possibilities which she may

accept, criticize, or challenge" (W 122), thus constructing yet another

performative context which does not admit reduction to simplesand separation of discovery, justification, and report.

Damisch paradoxically demonstrates the pervasive relevance of

narrative in his resistance to it when he writes: "That a paintingcannot be narrated is-as you noticed in the beginning-a kind of

scandal in a culture so massively informed by philology as ours" (L

239). Later on I will revert to the odd bracketed clause in the secondperson, but for now I wish to remark that this statement is noticeable

by its inherent contradiction: The Origin of Perspectiveis precisely a

narrative of paintings, but of paintings as actions, taking the pro-

gressive form literally; "scandal"implies a story and, indeed, Damisch

proceeds to devote the rest of his book to the narrative of the three

paintings he has selected. A narrative more narrative than those

constructed by his fellow historians he so generously despises, for

it tells the story of the paintings' performance, including various

characters, events, focalizers, and even narrators. His "epistemologyof the group" precisely turns three isolated and perhaps static

paintings into a set of characters among whom events-essentiallyrelative transformations-take place.'?

Code's central critique of the traditional Cartesian subject of

knowledge challenges the individualism inherent in that tradition.

She sharply denounces the blatant tension between the autonomous,

pure, and unique subject of objective knowledge and the reduction

of people who are "objects" of study to "cases" or "types" (W 21).

Distinguishing autonomy from individualism (W 78), she emphasizesthe impossibility even to conceive of subjects as individuals inde-

pendent from the senses, the social structures, and other people.In an argument strikingly convergent with that put forward by

linguist Emile Benveniste, she convincingly suggests that "persons

essentially are second persons" (W 82), meaning that the dependencyon caretakers and other people makes personhood in isolation

impossible. Language alone, the very language knowledge is so

heavily contingent upon, proves it. Similarly, Benveniste claimed

that the first-person pronoun that produces linguistic subjectivitycan only be semantically filled by a second person acknowledgingand eventually reversing it. And that is the very reason why for

him the pronoun, not the concrete noun, is the essence of language;deixis, not reference. It is this dependency on others that constitutes

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the scandal, the stumbling block, of orthodox epistemology; and

hence it is the traces of that grafted status of the knowing subject

that must be erased (W 172). Thus formulated, the problems andtensions within this epistemology resemble that of "third-person"narrative in the realist tradition, where subjective traces of narratorial

intervention must often be erased, but must at any rate not be

explicitly responding to an implied second person thanks to whose

curiosity, antagonism, or interest the narratorial "I" can constitute

itself. Solicitation by the second person crucially defines first per-sonhood; and therefore the latter must hide behind impossible third

personhood; just as in visual representation, the allusion to per-

spective rather than the full embodiment of it-though an incon-spicuous allusion-works to both stage and hide the subject."

Fabian and Damisch are quite outspoken in their "second per-sonhood" and thereby constitute themselves as ironic, self-aware,

perhaps postmodern narrators. They do that in several manners,of which more shortly, one of which is to struggle with the very

textuality they need in order to perform their knowledge. I have

already quoted Damisch's resistance to narrative, and Fabian's chap-ter title "Interlude: The Missing Text" points to a similar problem.

In it he discusses the different conceptions and genres of textualitycurrently debated in anthropology, such as the equation of culture

and text,'2 or the experimental practice of literary genres in eth-

nography,'3 or the literary analysis of ethnographic texts.14 But these

are conceptions of textuality that do not affect his work, his per-formance, in writing this book. Then he begins to explore the

predicament of the texts on which ethnographers base their writing:field work notes, documents, recordings, protocols. The tremendous

problem of makingtext to which the chapter's title negatively alludes

ends up being the text we are reading, which enables Fabian to come

up with the following irony: "Never before did I have the chance

to witness and document text production in such detail. But there

is no hope ever to come up with a definitive text of the play" (P

91). The irony bites itself in the tail when we realize that it is

precisely the story of that irony that we are reading. For Fabian

does narrate not so much the production of the text as his docu-

mentation of that production. Narrative as a mode entails that

inevitably metanarrative position: Fabian cannot perform (his role

in) the collective construction of knowledge by a number of different

subjects/characters without being the narrator-focalizer of the storyof that construction. As a consequence, in spite of the above quo-tation, what he comes up with is neither the text of the play nor

the text of the text production but, first, a wonderfully clever

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structural representation of his focalization of the production of

the former through the latter: the transitions from discussion to

plot design to play-making on the one hand, and the gradual reversalof the respective amounts of talking and of acting on the other.15

To understand how this paradox is bound up with narrative on

more than an anecdotal level, it can be compared to Damisch's

analysis of linear perspective in terms reminiscent of narratological

typologies of narrative situations. Formulating the hypothesis that

perspective provided painters with a network of indexical signs

equivalent to the system of enunciation in language, he demonstrates

various possibilities of relating to the "law" of perspective, each of

them equally narrative. Either one obeys or ignores the law, inwhich cases two narrative situations are unambiguously represented.Or one only puts in a sign or two of it, not necessarily coherent

among themselves, just enough to make the "law" work: to make

it appear to be assumed, endorsed by the viewer. This is how

perspective, even within the practice of painting, is a discourse: it

can be intertextually signified without being obeyed and yet it will

be read. This would be as close as one gets to "third-person" narrative

with an invisible narrator. Or a painting can refer to the model,

but only to deny it. Damisch demonstrates this with Raphael's Extasisof Saint Cecilia,where perspective is heavily signified yet not obeyed.'6Such a denial can work like a self-ironical statement. Damisch rightlyadds that, rather than undermining or invalidating it, such a denial

reaffirms the system.This latter situation can be compared to Fabian's predicament of

irony upon irony, when his denial of his narrative competence in

fact affirms it, and my guess is that he knows it. The struggle with

text-making is a struggle for the ability to answer Damisch's very

pointed question, "S'il y a histoire, de quoi est-elle l'histoire?" (L12; If there is history, of what is it the history?). And this questionis, I like to think, the meeting-point of narrative and epistemology.

But this is so precisely because that question does not bear a

simple answer. For Fabian's predicament is precisely that the pro-duction of the knowledge he wants to narrate is a performance in

which he is an actor, and as I will argue later, in some way he is

its hero. His is, as I said before, a "first-person" narrative, auto-

biographical from the beginning. He needs to act in the text which

he therefore cannot write up, for performance precludes narrativein the "third person." Of what is he writing the history? Of himself

writing the history of himself writing the history of. ... Instead

of providing a simple answer to his own question, Damisch's whole

book develops the complex answer which, in the case of the origin

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of perspective, doubles up the subject of inquiry. He writes much

later in the book a sentence that displays the difficulty in its very

structure: "But there are various ways of conducting a narrative. . . which does not necessarily imply the a priori construction of

a scene, and even less the production-even if strictly for the sake

of demonstration-of an apparatus (dispositif)where representation,in the modern sense of the word, would be asked to reflect itself

in its operation, and simultaneously in its constitutive reference to

the position of the subject" (L 364). If the discourse here seems to

become hopelessly entangled in its subordinate clauses and double

negatives, it is, I think, because Damisch is describing as well as

demonstrating here how difficult it is to be entangled in the "first-person" narrator's position of a performance that stages that nar-

rator. The days of Brecht and the epic theater are long gone, and

so is Freud's mystic writing pad; and what remains is the impossibilityof answering the question "Of what is it the history?" upon the

scene of writing.17 The acceptance and handling of that contradictory

entanglement may well be, at the same time, the crucial relevance

of narrative for epistemology.

III. Facing Domination

Earlier on in this paper I quoted a statement from Code which

suggested that cleanliness, or at least neatness, had a lot to do with

the preference for physics as the paradigm of knowledge, togetherwith the resistance to narrative, subjectivity and, as some episte-

mological texts suggest, women as subjects of knowledge. Indeed,Wilhelm Von Humboldt's judgment that "their [women's] nature

also contains a lack or a failing of analytic capacity which draws astrict line of demarcation between ego and world; therefore, theywill not come as close to the ultimate investigation of truth as man"18

may have been replaced with more sophisticated versions of the

same, and I wouldn't wish to suggest that women have always and

everywhere been excluded from knowledge. But the particular in-

terest of this text remains in the reason alleged for that exclusion,and to which the word "messy"in Code's statement responds. Indeed,feminists have amply demonstrated the vested interest of a "male-

stream" view in the securing of boundaries, of countries as well asbodies and intellectual territories. And the projection of the violation

of those cherished boundaries onto those subjects who, accordingto a biological iconism, are subject to it speaks of the conceptualand emotional confusion underlying gynophobia. The confusion of

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subject and object, only too well known, which underlies this phobia

happens to be a powerful ideologeme, or even an ideological code,

serving many purposes, and we will encounter it once more in thepresent inquiry.'9 This is one reason why a subject-oriented nar-

ratology can be helpful.2?The investment in boundaries-here you have a subjective, emo-

tional motivation for objectivity-Code suggested, enhances the need

for observational simples as the basic unit of knowledge. General

epistemology thus partakes of another specific ideological code, that

of the accumulative principle in the name of which many scholars

claim that objects consist of the sum of their parts. This principle

hampered the development of semantics until the advent of discourseanalysis, for example. As a third participant in this ideological cluster,we might count dualism, not only the most basic structure of Western

thought but also the all-but-exclusive mode of academic argumen-tation. Here yet again the structure lives off the artificial and often

unwarranted isolation of well-delimited (boundaries!) claims and

arguments. The mode produces less than maximally good reasoning,as Janice Moulton, who came up with the concept of adversarial

mode of argumentation, argues, since it excludes both complications

of the issue when taken in context and plural approaches to it.21Given the need for sharp opposition and delimitation that the mode

demonstrates, it is structurally complicitous with objectivism, which

depends on equally strong distinctions. In other words, the subject-

object distinction of objectivism is structurally similar to, and con-

tiguous with, the self-other distinction of the adversarial mode. And

since it uses the model of war for the peaceful activity of intellectual

work, what it also betrays is the intricate relationship between

knowledge, aggression, and domination.

Indeed, it has been sufficiently demonstrated, by Evelyn Fox Kellerand others, that the sharp division between subject and object which

encourages adversarial attitudes is predicated upon the implicitnotion that the goal of knowledge is "to produce the ability to

control, manipulate, and predict the behavior of its objects" (W

139).22 The obvious question, then, becomes, What are the stakes,and why are these so high as to entice well-meaning, serious, and

self-confident scholars to cling to a model so contaminated by

objectionable impulses? Keller looks at psychoanalytic theory for an

answer, and she makes her case with much force. But within the

present inquiry such answers tend to beg the question. If strongboundaries provide emotional comfort, and if that is so especiallyfor subjects who need that comfort most, the cultural,representationalforms that scheme takes remain to be interpreted.

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Damisch provides an element for an answer in his analysis of

perspective as just such a device for demarcation. He has a keen

sense of the issue when he writes: "In order for the things in thisworld to become objects for perception, the subject must take distance

from itself. ... But that movement, even in its slight theatricality,remains subjected to the law which is the law of representation: the

distance the subject takes in relation to the object . . . allows him

to escape to the immediately lived experience; but he can onlydiscover that he is implicated, irremediably so, in the spectacle which

takes its truth from that very implication" (L 345). This implicat-edness which is the very essence of the system of perspective as

well as its motivation helps Damisch to understand the "differencewithin" perspective as illusion, bound up with realism but not with

reality, a provider of the illusion, precisely, of original subjectivity.

Ironically, the subject who needs to see its origin mirrored in the

system of perspective, "that subject which is considered 'dominating'since it appears to be established in a position of domination is

tenuously established [ne tient qu'a un fill" (L 354).

Domination, then, is not a political background of representationalrealism but its product. Yet at the same time that product is illu-

sionary, imaginary. Much earlier, Damisch had quoted Merleau-Ponty, who equated such a mode of vision with domination, illusion

("the invention of a dominated world" [L 46]), and adulthood, and

then he had continued: "A vision in the first person, coherent,

mastered, and which would imply as its condition the position of

a subject who can eventually claim it as his, as his property, as his

representation" (L 46). In addition to the ideological problematicthis statement implies, there is one confusing epistemological detail

here, which is related to one we saw earlier without stopping to

consider it. The juxtaposition of "his property" and "his represen-tation" points again to a confusion of subject and object, if not to

a mechanism of projection. If the visual field encourages subjects-adults, according to Merleau-Ponty-to take hold of the objects in

that field, to deploy the gaze, if we think of Norman Bryson'sdistinction between gaze and glance,3 they might tend to consider

it their property. This would place an urgency on the debate about

pornography, for example. But what about the ambiguous phrase"his representation" (sa representation):Does it mean the represen-

tation of which he is the object or the representation he performs,through the illusionary mirroring provided by the deceptive opticalstructure of perspective? If so, the fantasy of adult vision as a first-

person narrative foregrounds the ambiguity of precisely that notion.

For we have seen that perspective, with its smooth if illusionary

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effect of the real, works precisely because it both inscribes and

effaces the subject of vision.

But the fundamental confusion that underlies the equation ofspeech and the look in a speech-act-oriented theory of vision is

precisely that same illusionary origin Damisch's entire book works

to explain, yet reaffirms in this theoretical moment. For the subjectof vision is not the subject of painting but its addressee. First person,second person? Are these, in effect, the same person, and what

would the consequences of such a conflation be for epistemologyin general, for Damisch's writing style, and for Fabian's project of

a critical, communicative, dialogic, performative anthropology? The

question is relevant in the light of the obvious struggle both writersare engaged in, which is a struggle explicitly to do away with

domination by doing justice to the second person.

IV. Second Person?

The concept of second personhood has, then, a triple allegiance.First, as presented by Code, it indicates the derivative status of

personhood; the fundamental impossibility to be, both psychologi-cally and socially, a person without the traces of the person's grafted

being. Second, as presented by Benveniste and subsequent theorists

in his vein, it indicates the reversible relationship of complementaritybetween first and second-person pronouns whose use produces

subjectivity and constitutes the essence of language precisely, Ben-

veniste says, because the pronouns do not refer.24 Note that both

these allegiances are defined negatively, undermining the humanist

individual who ruled over objective knowledge, the knowledge that

effectively had an "object." Third, then, it indicates the partner ofthe ethnographer and the historian, those persons, subjects, or

discourses formerly referred to as the "object" but now engaged in

the dialogue of the performance. To these second persons, the

scholars have a strong allegiance that is both epistemological and

political. But to avoid the traps of ethics in the overextended use

of the political, I will just use the former term. Narrative, as a

structural form and as a discursive posture, presents a unique placeto study the intertwinements of these three allegiances. In such an

analysis lies perhaps the most valuable epistemological contributionof narratology.

Narratology is the theory of narrative, and it provides tools for

analyzing narrative texts. A working definition of narrative may be

in order here, to avoid both overextending and needlessly restricting

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the concept. A narrative is an account, in any semiotic system, of

a subjectivized and often entirely or partly fictionalized series of

events. It involves a narrator-whether explicitly or implicitly self-referential, always a "first person"-a focalizer-the implied subjectwho "colors" the story-and a number of actors or agents of the

events. Narrative thus conceived is not confined to literary or, indeed,verbal narrative. It is a mode of semiotic behavior rather than a

finite set of objects. One aspect of that semiotic behavior is the one

under scrutiny here: the use of first, second, or third-persondiscourse.

This psychosocial, linguistic, and epistemological second person-

hood affects both parties, the "first person," subject of inquiry andwriting, as much as the second person, the interlocutors and fellow

inquirers in Fabian's case, and the historical "other" discourses in

Damisch's case. First and second-person positions are by definition

reversible, and one way to measure the success of this epistemic

style is precisely to examine the actual reversibility. From now on,I will treat these texts as literary narratives, worthy in themselves

of detailed analysis. And as happens in such cases, the analyst can

only point at a few exemplary features and details, not be com-

prehensive at all. In Fabian's case, the structural property of thetext I will focus on is the narrative structure of embedding and of

the representation of "characters." For Damisch, I will look at the

microstylistic feature of the use of grammatical "person," especiallyin the second part of the book. Throughout this analysis I will keep

connecting narrative structure and epistemic meaning.Fabian's beginning has been quoted already. It sets him up as a

first-person narrator-character, engaged in reporting events that can

be summarized as "his discovery." The story of the discovery is

gripping: at the punctual moment of the evening in 1986, thenarrator realized that the interpretive events around the proverb"power is eaten whole" constitute what he names "a new ethnog-

raphy." Thus the anecdote of the discovery attributed to the "I"

appears as a frame narrative, embedding a second narrative which

elaborates the circumstances of the discovery, the narrative of the

anecdote of being told the saying.The structure of embedding is important here. In the first-level

narrative, the narrator is the first person, and appropriately, he is

on his own. In the second-level narrative, the embedded one-butthe structure will not remain so neat-the narrator appears as a

second person, being told, by his Shaba interlocutors, something in

plain words that he does not understand, but upon which he needs

to act culturally "correctly." Like in Gide's Faux Monnayeurs (The

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Counterfeiters), he modernist quest for meaning begins here.

The second-level narrative of the quest for meaning of the saying

overflows into the first level when its provisional denouement rep-resents the shared ignorance of Shabans and expatriate ethnogra-

pher, resulting in the brainstorming session that is the starting pointof the experiment. Given the delicacy of the exchange, the inequalityof knowledge-even if they cannot interpret the saying, the inter-

locutors "know" it better than Fabian-the problem that it is the

first-person narrator who is telling both tales, and the intricate

narrative structure of the overall text, it is relevant to ask in which

direction that overflow ends up streaming.

But there is yet another level. Woven through this narration arereflections on ethnography. At first sight these are discursive in-

terludes, argumentative in mode, articulating an argument as distinct

from a narrative which represents a story. Yet they are in turn

narrativized as Fabian's personal quest for the best method duringthe past ten years. His cherished dialogic, communicative method

had given him pause already, he tells us, first because of its false

ethical suggestion of equality, hence its illusive righteousness, and

second because, epistemologically speaking, it does not enable one

to account for the productionof knowledge. Since the dialogic modelassumes that knowledge is shared, conveyed by those who have it-

the members of the culture being studied-to those who desire it-

the ethnographer-it begs the question of how the knowledge comes

about.25

Thus we have three levels so far: the punctual, first-person storyof the discovery; the story of the evening of the proverb dinner,continued during, say, a few weeks of search for meaning, endingin the group of actors who stage the saying, told in a first-second-

person dialogue with reversible positions; and the story, again inthe first person but with an implied second person-Fabian himself,at an earlier moment, as well as his fellow anthropologists-running

through ten years but interspersed with many "achronies."26

Fabian is an engaging narrator, and his text is so explicit in its

epistemic position, as well as overt in acting that position out, that

it takes a second look at the overall structure of the text to realize

a potential problem. A problem that, it is only fair to say, he could

hardly have avoided, and which by no means undermines his tre-

mendous accomplishment. Yet the problem is major: by virtue ofthe very narrative form, the second person cannot but be subor-

dinated to an extremely self-centered first person.Indeed the text as a whole mirrors the structure I just outlined

for the first few pages. Chapters 1 through 5 are primarily a first-

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person narration, embedding the multiple narratives characterized

as second-level-embedded, second-person narrative, and a laterally

connected, partly also second-level, first-person argumentative nar-rative with a strongly implied second person identical to the first

person. Fabian deploys many strategies, some of which are extremelyeffective, to empower the embedded second persons. Thus, for

example, in the third chapter he provides a short history of theater

in Shaba, and of the Mufwankolo group in particular, in which he

is careful to furnish, in footnotes, individualized life-histories for

all characters mentioned. While this would be a troublesome kind

of individualistic historiography in a Western context, here it serves

the emancipatory purpose of individualizing people so far mostlyseen as ahistorical "folk."

Chapters 6 through 13 constitute the ethnography proper. Here,the second persons-the group of Shaba actors-are the principal

speakers. Fabian is meticulous in doing his utmost to enable these

speakers. This part has, again, three forms. First, the text is tran-

scribed in Shaba Swahili. Second, the English translation follows,

symbolically in the second place. Third, both versions are providedwith helpful footnotes, clearly meant to be subservient to the en-

terprise of opening up the main, second-person text. This text is"second person" in two senses: it is the text produced by the second

persons, Fabian's interlocutors, and it is dialogical in kind itself,since it transcribes the dialogues that took place in the construction

of the play. In this part, the second persons remain in first position;in spite of the fact that the bulk of the transcribed recordings mightseem in need of an explanatory, interpretive, academic commentary,

relegating this commentary to footnotes is a rhetorical means of

effectively preserving the primary position for the Shabeans.

The concluding chapter is, again, written in the first person. Thistext has a metaposition in relation to the second part as well as the

first, while it is also a continuation of the argumentative interludes

in the beginning. The second person of this third part is clearlythe "Western" anthropologist. Thus a formulation like the followingstrikes me as out of tune with the careful narrative-epistemological

strategies of the first and second parts: "First, it is wrong to assume

that the Zairean 'folk' . .. live only in the present and, as folk are

said to do, only worry about forms of power and oppression as

they exist now" (P 286). Whereas this passage pointedly opposesmistaken and yet tenacious prejudices, and therefore is obviously

very useful, it cannot help but state the "truth" about Shaba Zaireanswho are thus relegated to third personhood. And this happens in

the terms, albeit bracketed, of the Western oppressive heritage. And

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I don't mean just the use of the term "folk" but, more insidiously,the very fact that the passage responds to a judgment couched in

the categories of Western philosophy: time, present, history.From the vantage point of this final part, then, the text can be

seen in the light of Lejeune's analysis of autobiography in the third

person: "Dialogue. Now the aim is not to construct but to destroya

point of view toward oneself. The dialogue is presented as a responseto a discourse already expressed but which must be reconstituted

for purposes of refutation. This earlier discourse will be reenacted

so that it can be answered. In the framework of an autobiographicaltext presented as such, a fictive trial is therefore reproduced; pros-

ecution and defense are set up and allowed to speak. Of course,the discussion soon favors the autobiographer, who gradually allows

his true image to emerge victorious."27

And indeed as a consequence of the tripartite structure of this

book, one may want to look again at the ways the second personhas been staged in this complex narrative. Embedded in a masterful

and masterly first-person narrative, the Shaba actors end up servingthe interest of substantiating Fabian's discovery. This discovery,moreover, concerned less the knowledge produced about the Shaba

insights into power, than Fabian's insights into his discipline. Self-reflection, however indispensable, sometimes courts self-centered-

ness. And whether this danger becomes a serious threat dependson the interplay between first and second personhood. In this case,the narrative structure of the text, both globally and in detail as

analyzed for the beginning, suggests that the second person has

been subsumed under the first, thereby losing if not its alterity at

least its power to put that alterity first. And as we will see shortly,this subsumption is reinforced because it also takes another form-

that of mimeticism, already alluded to in the beginning of this papera propos of Code's messy narratives fit for complex ideas. But let

me turn to Damisch's narrative first.

The dubious status of the second person becomes far more blatant

in Damisch's case. Whereas he theorizes second personhood through-out his book as part of the problem (the "object") he is analyzing,

epistemologically he limits it to a rhetorical strategy which he imitates

from the ancient treatises he studies. This book is explicitly divided

into three sections. While the entire book carries along, in paralleland intertwinement, the epistemological debate addressed to thewriter's fellow historians with the analysis of the history of per-

spective, this discussion receives primary focus in the first part,

following up on the initially stated "impatience." This first partelaborates Damisch's challenging view that perspective is a discursive

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apparatus of enunciation (L 38) based not on the fit but on the

mismatch between geometrical and symbolic point of origin (L 56).

It is that mismatch that produces visual subjectivity.The second part engages the ancient treatises and their writers

as the second person. These second persons become first personsin a real sense in the long, often full, quotations-equivalent to

Fabian's second part with the full Shabean texts. These fragmentsare quite thoroughly interpreted and addressed, from the point of

view of the modern scholar, who thereby acts as the second person

responding to first persons.It is the third part which is both the most important and presents

the most problematic version of second personhood. It contains theactual analyses of the three perspectival paintings in relation to one

another. Here the author elaborates the epistemology of the groupa la Levi-Strauss, but then historicized through further comparisons,most notably with Van Eyck's Arnolfini Weddingand Velaquez's Las

Meninas, up to Picasso's response to the latter.

Much to this reader's surprise, this third part opens with the use

of the second grammatical person, which we already saw in an

earlier quote. The tone changes, the narrator seems to raise his

sleeves to go really to work, and here is how he justifies the rhetoricalshift: "And now, this painting. This painting that you know better

than anyone: which forces me, at this juncture, to call upon your

testimony and to shift-according to a device frequently used in

the old treatises-from I to you, and from one discursive regime to

another, to an explicitly dialogic one" (L 157). The "you" comes upat the moment that the narrator begins to tell the story of his own

engagement with this painting. The rest of the paragraph further

explains the point of this device. Not only does the narrator wish

to pay homage by imitating them to the discursive habits of theancient writers, his previous second persons. Also, he intends the

pronominal form to signal that "one cannot just put such a paintingat one's disposal as one wishes, and like a random object or doc-

ument" (L 157). This paragraph is followed by a page and a half

of description, in the third person, of the painting presumably as

I/you see it. As he will warn us later, in the passage I quoted at

the beginning, description is always already narrative, and in fact

this description of a still painting without any figures or movement

is a masterpiece of narrativized description. What it narrativizes isprecisely perspective: "an urban site fixed within a perspective which

unfolds before the eye the symmetrical fan of its vanishing lines" (L157; my emphasis).

If we take the use of the second person at the letter, the "you"

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is called upon as a witness who is thereby authorized as an expert:"this painting you know better than anyone." This expert is then

the focalizer of the description to follow, so that the description notonly narrativizes perspective and the eye before which it unfolds,but first and foremost-on a higher narrative level-the expertwitness focalizing it. And this second-person expert is Damisch,dissociated from the first-person narrator to gain more authority.

The use of the second person varies greatly, to the point of

inconsistency. Sometimes the status of "you" as the expert directingthe writing subject "I" is made more explicit, as in "If you insisted

that we exposed this thesis in some detail, it is because it has been

so badly received" (L 180). At other times the identity of "I" and"you" is emphasized on an emotional basis: "the only question which

matters to us, after all, to you as to myself" (L 182). But if the

split between first and second person can be thought to signify the

different functions of narrator and focalizer/expert witness, at other

moments these two functions are conflated so as to evacuate the

point of the linguistic game: "There is still a problem you have

already mentioned once or twice" (L 249), where "you"incongruouslyis the writing subject/narrator. In the end, it seems "you" and "I"

overlap completely: they have not only the same identity-the sameperson in the psychosocial sense-but also the same function, the

same linguistic person. What, then, is the point of the game, one

may well ask?

The connotative effects of this rhetorical strategy are varied, and

do not always overlap with the narrator's stated intention. To assess

these it is imperative to take into account the other part of the

device, which is the use of a third person. This third person is not

the painting/"object" but the contradicteurs.By this term the narrator

sets up as diegetic characters in the wake of the rhetorical traditionof which he is writing both the analysis and a pastiche, the implied

opponents who were present from the beginning, namely his fellow

historians. These characters appear rather late in the day, as Damisch

frankly admits (L 385). But what interests me in that appearanceis the rationale they are in charge of offering for the pronominal

game as a whole. For Damisch introduces an explicit "third person"with an epistemological aim. No more than Fabian, but for altogetherdifferent reasons, is he content with the mere dialogical form of

writing: "As if dialogue did not suffice to give the debate its truedimension, and one had to appeal to a third person to put it in

perspective" (L 385).In an explanation presented on the mode of fictionality ("as if")

and in a strongly visual vocabulary, the narrator justifies his use of

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pronouns in a combination of a truth claim ("true dimension"), a

move of distancing (now the third person is called upon as a witness),

and a mimetic act (perspective on perspective).The effect of the pronominal game stands out most strongly when

the three grammatical characters appear on stage together, as hap-

pens, for example, on page 386: "But one/I [on] can respond

differently to the objection attributed to the contradicteuran objection

you are far from taking lightly." The structure is clearly mobilized

for a defensive purpose. The depersonalized first person (on) is

going to refute an objection he came up with in the first place but

which he attributes to his third person; the second person, the

expert/authority, is said to take the objection extremely seriously sothat the third person has to be satisfied. But since the first personcomes up with the objection, we must conclude that the third persontoo is identical to him.

Damisch needs three persons, he claims, because the debate needs

to be put into perspective. Perspective, on the other hand, is preciselycharacterized by the deceptive illusions of true, neutral, objective-in other words, "third-person"-representation of the world. Yet it

works so effectively because at the same time it provides the viewer

with a position as the first person who "owns" that world. As Damischbrilliantly points out, perspective sets up the elision of the subject-

tenuously inscribed already-in the viewpoint which is seen as the

origin of subjectivity. And that elision is signified as apostrophe(L

402), enforcing a second person subsumed within the first personwho otherwise would remain unsustained.

Thus the rhetoric of this third part resembles, mimes, its cognitivecontent. This is never spoken out but alluded to, tongue-in-cheek,if only by the juxtaposition of passages about the one and the other.

But another congruence is more explicitly stated. Toward the endof the book Damisch seems deeply gratified when he is able to

suggest that the three points involved in perspective-the viewpoint,the vanishing point, and the distance point-correspond to three

locations: here, there, and yonder. A bit later he then writes that

perspective as a paradigm, as a model that projects, does more than

pose the other in front of the subject as always already there before

him; it also introduces a "third person" (un tiers). What emanates

is a triangular visual regime that corresponds to the Lacanian (law

of the) father who comes to break the untenable duality of motherand child, wherein the mother cannot be the other because the

third person is needed. This is, it sometimes appears, also the law

of the excluded middle, the principle of dualism.

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V. The Seduction of Mimeticism

Why is it that this argument is more than persuasive-almostirresistible? I have already alluded to one troublesome feature in

both these books, also present here and there in Code's: the

occurrence of congruence, of a mimeticism. This happens on manylevels, and first of all on the level of overall structure. Fabian

proposes performance as a method of ethnography "with" the

people described, and as if by chance the object, occasion, event

to be studied is a performance, in a sense that makes the method

appear more "real" than the narrative structure suggests it is.

Damisch uses a triangular rhetoric which substantiates, and issubstantiated by, his theory of triangular perspective, and only if

taken seriously-as "not a game"-does the rhetoric alert us to

the potential collapse of third and second person into first-justlike in perspective. The mimetic impulse, once noticed, is pervasivein both texts. Fabian writes, for example: "It occurred to me that

the group's work-giving form to everyday experience in the

urban-industrial world of Shaba and thereby making it possibleto reflect and comment on it-was not in essence different from

my own groping for an ethnography of work and language" (P42). And these coincidences also happen within the actors' own

lives: "their own progress from childhood to mature age coincides

with the emergence of popular theater as a childrens' entertainment

and its development to present levels of virtuosity and mass appeal"(P 43). Formulations to this effect are many: "It is also an interestingdocument about 'documentation'" (P 50n. 24): the Zaireans talk

like Europeans about Zaireans (P 69); within the play, "the ideaof mediation and the risk of corruption were expressed dramatically

by locating the most serious threat to the chief's power in thecorruptness of the notables, his intermediaries" (P 282).

Once one is alerted to this tendency to present analogies, and to

present them as positive in and of themselves, it becomes clear that

coincidences of histories may well be an added attraction of coeval-

ness, so strongly argued for in Timeand the Other.Sometimes it even

seems as though the performance circles around one great epis-

temological goal: to become an allegory of "good" scholarship. The

terms of scholarship are used to describe the play: "the more direct

threat . . . caused by partiality and distortion when it comes to

interpreting" (P 282), whereas "power must be based on true knowl-

edge and supported by people of integrity" (P 282). Hence not onlyis the group's performance an allegory of the ethnographer's ar-

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gument for performance as method, but the very content of the

play allegorizes the scholar whose discovery, after all, it is called to

illustrate.Damisch's mimeticisms have been pointed out already. He too

suggests an allegorical identification when he defines painting, his

"second person" par excellence, as something "qui donne a penser"(which makes you stop and think) (P 289)-just like philosophers.In remarks like these, he forgets the differenceof painting his whole

book tries to found, and makes painting be a bit too much like

language. This is, I contend, why he is unable to see, in this otherwise

extraordinarily clever argument, that the speech act theory of paint-

ing is ultimately a language-centered analogy; a product of themimetic impulse.

Since this analogy is extremely common in the semiotic analysisof visual art in the line of Benveniste, especially in the work of

Louis Marin, it seems useful to spell the problem out.28 In its

simplest form, this analogy is untenable for two reasons. It conflates

different modes of perception without examining the implicationsof that conflation-thinking and seeing; speaking is hardly an actof perception-and it conflates different subject positions in relation

to acts. Visually representing, not seeing, would be the act parallelto speaking.29 Because of this problem, that confusion ruins Dam-

isch's argument and doubles up his rhetorical mixture of personsunder his own identity. For the point (pun intended) of perspectiveis precisely that very confusion, but then in the other direction. If

it elides the subject under apostrophe, the second person wins out.

And rightly so: if enunciation can be a model for perspectival

painting, then the viewer acts, but as addressee. Far from "speak-

ing"-the painting does that-the viewer acts, possibly but not nec-

essarily actively, as second person. And that might well be intolerablefor the "you," that fake second but in fact authorized first person,who knows the Urbinate painting better than anyone.

VI. Conclusion

But Fabian also writes a propos of theater in Shaba that "mimesis

had opened a battle ground" (P 56), and if that is so, then it may

also be one within these texts. A battleground, that is, where astruggle is fought between two contradictory impulses: to construct

knowledge in an engagement with the other, and to subordinatethat other once more. That battleground can host fierce struggleswhen the issue is "knowledge of other people" on the model of

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friendship yet narrativized in a first/third person narrative, albeit

sophisticated and dynamic. For narrative as well as epistemology is

overdetermined by its traditions and histories, one of which is thecentral position of the knower/narrator.

The analysis presented here is not meant as a review of the

respective merits and flaws of these studies. If it came to evaluating,the apparently greater success of Fabian over Damisch could simplybe attributed to the difference between contemporary and historical

objects of inquiry, and between linguistically accessible and mute

interlocutors. Damisch ultimately does not have a second person,one could object to my criticism. Yes he does, I would argue: himself.

Precisely because his narrative game enables him to deny his ownsecondariness in the face of the paintings as well as the treatises,he can get away with ignoring the paintings' first personhood.

Conversely, Fabian's dialogue, more "real" because he can reallytalk with the Zairean actors, is, epistemologically speaking, no less

a sham. From his positionality as a narrator, he struggles with his

ignorance, and that positionality enables him to ask questions in

order to alleviate that ignorance. That is not necessarily the same

as producing (his) knowledge with them. To put the cards on the

table with still more explicitness: if you look to blame, I am notsure I would blame either Damisch or Fabian. As White, Kellner,and Ankersmit have argued for history writing, the shape of the

story you tell determines what knowledge you produce. The result

of the above analysis partly converges with this notion, but partlyalso complicates it. For the shape-the dialogue, the performance-could not overrule the mode: narrative.

In the face of the narrative mode, "friendship" may be a goodmodel only to the extent that it elaborates and refines what the

antagonistic mode of argumentation simplifies and obscures. Takentoo literally, or at face value, to use Damisch's visual vocabulary, it

obscures the dissymmetry that allows the second person to "be

disappeared" yet again. Damisch's beautiful analogy between the

three points involved in perspective and the three grammatical

persons involved in narrative, and the three locations involved in

spatial organization, could do, by way of caution, with yet another

triangle. I am referring to Gayatri Spivak's distinction between self,

self-consolidating other, and absolute other, translated by John Bar-

rell as "this, that, and the other."30This absolute other seems implied,feared, and then cast out by Damisch's dramatization of the "third

person" as a projection of an opposition he is still able to master.

Second personhood, in all three senses distinguished above and

integrated as they are in narrative, can easily become self-consoli-

317




dating ("that" helping the first person along). This cautionary note

leaves unchallenged the need for self-reflection. A self-reflection

which partakes of a project that is political as much as epistemologicalrequires a sharp analysis, not only of intentions and methods, but,more importantly given the pragmatic nature of language, of nar-

rative. Narrative, as it turns out, not surprisingly, is telling.

UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM

NOTES

1 Johannes Fabian, Power and Performance:EthnographicExplorations hroughProverbial

Wisdom and Theater in Shaba, Zaire (Madison, Wis., 1990), p. 110; hereafter cited in

text as P.

2 Hubert Damisch, L'originede la perspective(Paris, 1987), p. 239; hereafter cited

in text as L. Here and elsewhere, unless stated otherwise, translations are my own.

3 Lorraine Code, What Can SheKnow?FeministTheoryand the Constructionof Knowledge(Ithaca, N.Y., 1991), p. 139; hereafter cited in text as W.

4 Johannes Fabian, Timeand the Other: How AnthropologyMakes its Object New York,

1983).5 Hubert Damisch, Theoriedu nuage: Pour une nouvelle histoire de l'art (Paris, 1972).6

The narrative natureof

historiography has been the object of analysis for a longtime now, since Hayden White began to explore the rhetoric of history writing (see

Hayden White, Metahistory:The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-CenturyEurope[Baltimore, 1973]). Recent analyses of interest in this area include Hans Kellner,

Language and Historical Representation:Gettingthe StoryCrooked Madison, Wis., 1990)and F. R. Ankersmit, Narrative Logic: A SemanticAnalysis of the Historian'sLanguage

(The Hague, 1983). While these studies offer useful insights into the problematicsof representation in history, they pursue a goal altogether different from mine.

From my perspective it is problematic that they tend to lack a specific conceptionof narrative as well as an epistemology against which to measure the consequencesof their findings.

7 For an analysis of Descartes's anxieties and the way these informed his episte-mology, see Annette Baier, "Cartesian Persons," in her Postures of the Mind: Essayson Mind and Morals (Minneapolis, 1985), pp. 74-92. On the influence of languageon Descartes's thought, see Alasdair Maclntyre, "Epistemological Crises, Dramatic

Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science," The Monist, 60 (1977), 453-72. For the

feminist implications of this typical mode of thinking, see Susan Bordo, The Flightto Objectivity: ssays n Cartesianism nd Culture(Albany, N.Y., 1987) and "The Cartesian

Masculinization of Thought," Signs, 11 (1986), 439-56.

8 Philippe Lejeune, "Autobiography in the Third Person," tr. Annette and Edward

Tomarken, New Literary History, 9 (1977), 27-50. Lejeune writes of Rousseau, that

exemplary first-person writer's autobiography in the third person, "He gives us a

lesson in objectivity" (45).9 The allusion is to Lorraine Code, EpistemicResponsibility Hanover, N.H., 1987).10 The "epistemology of the group" clearly shows structuralist tendencies, and

sometimes even the formulations recall Claude Levi-Strauss, especially The Raw andthe Cooked:Introductionto a Science of MythologyI, tr. John and Doreen Weightman(New York, 1969). For an analysis of Levi-Strauss's concepts and method used there,

318




see Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human

Sciences," in Writingand Difference, tr. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1978), pp. 278-93.

11 I hesitate to propose this analogy, for reasons I will later expose. I do not

believe it is right to equate the subject of speech with the subject of the look, but

this is as yet another problem of second personhood.12 See Clifford Geertz, The Interpretationof Cultures(New York, 1973).13 See George Marcus and Dick Cushman, "Ethnographies as Texts," Annual Review

of Anthropology,11 (1982), 25-69.

14 See Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography,ed. James Clifford

and George E. Marcus (Berkeley, 1986).15 See Fabian, Power and Performance,tables on pp. 93 and 94.

16 Raphael, The Extasis of Saint Cecilia, ca. 1515-16; Bologna, Pinacoteca nazionale.

See L, pp. 38-40.

17 The allusions are toSigmund

Freud's short text "A NoteUpon

aMystic Writing-Pad" (1924), The Standard Edition of the CompletePsychologicalWorksof Sigmund Freud,

ed. and tr. James Strachey (London, 1953-74), XIX, 227-32, and Derrida's com-

mentary "Freud and the Scene of Writing," in Writing and Difference, pp. 196-32.

These allusions are not just playful; both texts deal with the difficulty of writingand reading that Fabian is contending with.

18 Humanist without Portfolio: An Anthology of the Writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt,ed. Marianne Cowan (Detroit, 1963), p. 349, quoted by Code, What Can She Know?,

p. 10.

19 The term ideologeme s borrowed from Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious:

Narrative as a SociallySymbolicAct (Ithaca, N.Y., 1981). Ernst van Alphen has theorized

ideology as a code rather than a semantic unit (Ernst van Alphen, Bang voor schennis?Inleiding in de ideologiekritiek Utrecht, 1987]).

20 See Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theoryof Narrative, tr. Christine

van Boheemen (Toronto, 1985), for a textbook version of such a theory, and "Narrative

Subjectivity," in On Story-Telling:Essays in Narratology, ed. David Jobling (Sonoma,

Calif., 1991), pp. 146-70, for a discussion of the importance of the subjectivitynetwork.

21 See Janice Moulton, "A Paradigm of Philosophy: The Adversary Method," in

Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka, DiscoveringReality: FeministPerspectiveson

Epistemology,Metaphysics,Methodology, nd Philosophyof Science(The Netherlands, 1983),

pp. 149-64.

22 See Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflectionson Gender and Science (New Haven, 1985).23 Norman Bryson, Visionand Painting: TheLogicof the Gaze(London, 1983); further

theorized in Mieke Bal, Reading "Rembrandt": eyondthe Word-ImageOpposition(New

York, 1991), ch. 4.

24 Emile Benveniste, "Subjectivity in Language," tr. Mary Elizabeth Meek, in Critical

TheorySince 1965, ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle (Tallahassee, Fla., 1986), p.730.

25 This problem is connected to that, addressed by Geertz, in his distinction between

experience-near and experience-distance concepts (Clifford Geertz, "From the Native's

Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding" in his Local

Knowledge:FurtherEssaysin InterpretiveAnthropology New York, 1983], pp. 55-70) as

well as to that, discussed by Turner, of the question when and to what extent themembers of the culture are the most adequate informants (Victor Turner, The Forest

of Symbols:Aspects of Ndembu Ritual [Ithaca, N.Y. 1967], p. 38). In Time and the Other,ch. 2 ("Our Time, Their Time, No Time: Coevalness Denied," pp. 37-69), Fabian

adds a third problem, the illusion of coevalness dialogism implies, whereas the writingof ethnographies undermines that coevalness.

319



320 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

26 Genette's term for bits of narrative that cannot be placed chronologically. See

Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse:An Essay in Method, tr. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca,

N.Y., 1980), pp. 40, 84.

27 Lejeune, "Autobiography in the Third Person," p. 44.

28 See Louis Marin, "The Iconic Text and the Theory of Enunciation: Luca

Signorelli at Loreto (Circa 1479-1484)," tr. Lionel Duisit, New LiteraryHistory, 14

(1983), 553-96, and his "Towards a Theory of Reading in the Visual Arts: Poussin's

The Arcadian Shepherds," n Calligram: Essays in the New Art Historyfrom France, ed.

Norman Bryson (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 63-90.

29 For a more detailed critique of the analogy, see my Reading "Rembrandt," p.270-72.

30 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Overdeterminations of Imperialism: David Och-

terlony and the Rance of Sirmoor," Europe and Its Others, 1 (1985), 131, quoted in

John Barrell, The Infection of Thomas de Quincy:A Psychopathology f the Empire (NewHaven, 1991), p. 10.

I am grateful to Norman Bryson, Robert Caserio, Dominick LaCapra, and Ellen

Spolsky for critical remarks on an earlier version of this paper.

bal-naratology as epistemology

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