“The Signification of Silence” Revisited: African American Art and Hermeneutics

Abstract

In this chapter I argue that African American art is one of the most productive sites for excavating the “archaic” in African American consciousness. It is only in this sense that African American art can function as “text.” Perhaps we should substitute the term “site” instead. “Archaism,” according to Long, “is predicated on the priority of something already there, something given. This ‘something’ may be the bodily perceptions, as it is for Alfred North Whitehead and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, or a primal vision of aesthetic form, as it is for the artist” (my emphasis).¹

Historical memory is aided by a hermeneutic of the archaic in two ways. In the first instance, a hermeneutic of the archaic raises the problem of the constitution of the subject in the process of knowing. If it is the aim of historical knowledge to understand behavior and objects as well as ideas, the interpreting subject must be pushed back to a level of consciousness commensurate with the forms that the subject wishes to understand. This is the radical empirical level of meaning which is expressed in the forms of history. I understand, for example, Eliade’s notion of religious symbolism as an expression of this primary pre-reflective experience.

The technical character of modern cultural life tends to dim this level of experience. We are able to be authentically and legitimately concerned with experience on this level as it is obscured in the “languages” of modernity—history, ethnology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, and so on. To prevent this level of experience from being subjected too quickly to the dogmatic categories of contemporaneity, we should try to understand it in culture and history where it is expressed as great cultural symbols. It is here that the history of religions plays an important part. In the premodern cultures, this symbolism has received a definitive expression. (Charles H. Long, Significations, p. 49)