Writing, law and power

Against approaches that wish to present writing as an instrument of power against the illiterate, one that consolidates the power of those in power, we proposed seeing in it rather a dimension of possibility that protects the people's rights against states. In oral culture, especially in feudal systems, the tyranny that emerges when whoever has the strength gets his own word accepted as he wishes has no limit or measure, and cannot even be put into writing. As Abdurrahim Karakoç says, just as love is not written on paper, the oppression lived through words between two unequal people is not written on paper either, and no one calls it to account.

Perhaps from time to time poems and folk songs carry resistance against such feudal oppression to the level of an epic, and show those who open their ears and listen the possibility of a different truth, but these epics do not constitute a legal protection, and until they are carried to that level the word of the oppressive and despotic lord continues to make his subjects live his darkness as if it were truth.

Law, written law and its institutionalized form, however it may appear to some heterodox approaches, in the final analysis constitutes a support that provides the governed with protection against the ruler. Şerif Mardin's reading of the ulema and the Sharia in Islamic history has been quite instructive precisely from this angle. Against the generally accepted academic approach in which everyone sees the ulema and the Sharia, and even Orthodox jurisprudence, as serving to protect the palace's power and interests, Şerif Mardin on the contrary drew attention to the function of the ulema that protected the people's rights more. The ulema and law with a written basis reminded in particular that the ruler's power is not unlimited and where he should stop with regard to his subjects. Even people who had no share in written culture could, thanks to this, find a refuge for themselves in writing.

With this refuge function of writing as the record of law, there appears of course a contradiction to be overcome among the approaches that have recently claimed that the text is entirely at the mercy of the reader. For saying that the text has no fixed meaning in itself, that it is ultimately the reader who gives it its meaning, also turns interpreting the text into a matter of power.

It means that whoever has the strength, his reading of the text will be valid. In that case the text is nothing; what is essential is again the word, and the word about a particular text or by way of it again becomes the word of power. The priority Derrida gave to writing came from the idea that writing is sheltered from the power relations that make themselves felt during speech, and that the reader, freed from the power relations during speech, can read the text away from this pressure.

Yet when we render the text so passive, when we bring the reader to the fore more than necessary, this time no final or firm precaution can be put forward against the text's being instrumentalized by power relations. Ultimately power relations, as everywhere, come into play in the face of writing, too, in deciding what the interpretation of the writing will be.

In fact what Roland Barthes meant by "The Death of the Author" also pointed to the process that leaves the text entirely to the reader's initiative. From the moment it is written, the text has left the author's initiative. Its being revived again is possible not by the author's decision but by the decision, personality, capacity, horizon, imagination and intention of the person who reads it. In that case every text stands there like a lifeless object, but it is the reader who will give it vitality.

And since the reader interprets the text as he "wishes," what the reader understands and how he understands it now gains importance rather than what the author meant. From the moment it makes this discovery, postmodern literature has declared the death of the author. Just like the declaration of the "death of God" by thinking that how God is conceived matters more than what God is. Thus, owing to the parallel between the theme of the "death of God" and the theme of the death of the author, the metaphor of the author's divinity finds its final point.

Yet although the reader's position and decision in the face of the text are important for bringing the text to life, the text is not as passive in the face of the reader as is supposed. The text, too, as an actor, puts forth its own action owing to the worldliness of the word. In his famous article titled "The World, the Text, and the Critic," Edward Said relates that from the moment he noticed the literalist approach of the Andalusian philosopher Ibn Hazm, an important new path opened up in his thinking on the vitality of the text.

Ibn Hazm here explains at length that, although no text gives up its quality of conveying its own meaning, the Quran in particular, with its own distinctive features, never leaves the reader free as to what he should understand. The Quran is not just a written text; as a text that from the day it was revealed has been continuously read, recited (qur'an-ized) without ever lacking its performance as word, it never leaves the reader free to understand what he reads "as he likes." Because the person who reads the Quran not only reads but also listens to what he reads. In the recited text, the word that comes out of the mouth is also listened to with the ear, as if it were being read to him by someone else, so that the text is realized as a word that addresses him.

Meanwhile, when it comes to the reader's interpretation, does this phrase "understanding as he likes" not also reveal a deliberate flippancy, indifference and ill intention in approaching the text? In fact this phrase does not reflect the situation or the reality of any ordinary reader approaching a text. No sincere reader tries to read the text he reads in order to "understand it as he likes." On the contrary, the reader's first and ultimate aim is to try to grasp what the author meant; whether he succeeds in this, and why and to what extent he succeeds or fails, can be asked, but no sincere reader knowingly and willingly seeks to understand meaning in the text he reads as he likes. We are not, of course, talking about reading without knowing oneself and what one is doing.