Logos, deconstruction-writing, ideology and the false social … 1 Logos, deconstruction-writing, ideology and the false social construction of meaning and representation of the “other” from the perspective of John 1:1 Gavin P Hendricks Department of New Testament and Early Christian Studies, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa Abstract This article focuses primarily on meaning and representation of the “other”. The collective memory of primarily oral cultures about the ways in which knowledge about them was collected, classified and then represented in various ways to the West, and seen through the eyes of the West, and then mirrored back again to those that had been colonised, remains imperative in the discursive discourse of the “other”. Smith refers to this process as a Western discourse about the “other” which is supported by institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery (bewitchment of imperial language), doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles. This process has worked partly because of the constant interchange between the scholarly and the imaginative (false consciousness - or sophistry) construction of ideas about primary oral cultures. 1 The whole idea of the “other” is linguistically and ideologically constituted by the West and can be seen as a social construct which is in need of deconstruction. In this example, the “other” has been provided with a name, a face and a particular identity, and is represented by the indigenous people. According to Boemher, a post-colonial theorist who refers to the colonised as the colonial “other” or simply the “other,” the concept of the “other” is built on the ideas of inter alia Hegel and Sartre who signify it as that which is unfamiliar to the dominant subjectivity or which is against the authority of the dominant class. 2 Introduction In keeping with my article of “Deconstruction-writing, ideology and the false social construction of meaning and representation of the ‘other’, from the perspective of John 1:1”, there is a need for a paradigmatic shift from the historical tradition of Logos which is perceived as a transmission to an orality perceived speech communication. The diachronic description of the Logos-hymn in the context of the Prologue of John's Gospel can be of little help in relation to oral cultures. Critical analyses of the Logos hymn have helped scholars to strip away the textual layers of the Logos tradition and to discover an oral community underneath the written text. For Bultmann (1971) this was a Christian oral community under the Roman and Jewish oppression during Jesus Galilean ministry. The diachronic description and interpretive interest of Logos in John 1v1 has resulted in several problems in understanding and interpreting the discourse of oral cultures. The historical critical method commences at a certain point in history and advances along a chronological continuum. Oral cultures rely strongly on memory to keep the traditions and cultural norms alive through cultural and religious performances of the oral socio-cultural archive of indigenous knowledges, for instance through rituals, songs, poetry, hymns and storytelling. This is clearly reflected in the ancient Palestinian cultural ethnic setting. According to Kelber (1990), the Gospel of John was read logocentrically or orally. Hearers and readers let themseves be guided by the narrative dynamic to move from the plural logoi (words) to the singular understanding of the Logos in the narrative text. The written text and the incarnate Logos needed to be understood normatively and they served as trans-textual realities. The written text was thus not to be taken with ultimate seriousness. This is hard to comprehend in the grammatological age which has come to view language and literature as closed systems. Kelber observes that Western literary history has only recently begun to view writing as an end in itself. What used to matter in 1 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous people (London:Biddles Ltd, 1999), 2. 2 Elleke Boemher, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 21.