GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

All human existence is an exchange with the center. The first message from the center is to defer appropriation, a message “heard” by all participants on the scene. Once deferral has been effected, the means of the deferral (the sign) can be deployed in new circumstances, to defer new conflicts. The originary center is still the ultimate reference point: we can defer violence in this new situation because we remember (memory is embedded in the sign of) the originary scene. The original “message” is therefore somewhat dimmed, but also different, because more specific, tailored to serve this new act of deferral. Many billions of scenes later, the number of scenes a particular act of deferral must be imagined to ping off makes the origin and retrieval correspondingly more distant and more complex. The center is always saying “defer appropriation,” but appropriation of what, in the face of what potential violence, constructing what frame enabling eventual appropriation—in those details we can find lots of devils.

The answers to these questions can’t be self-evident, but we can’t exactly “argue” about them either. On what grounds could one say that we must do X because that follows from the originary scene and all its subsequent permutations? What would count as a “logical” case, or relevant “facts”? We would be better off trying to understand why people have believed shamans and prophets when they claimed to speak God’s word (and why we, even today, could say that sometimes they really were doing something like that, and sometimes less so). Thinking in terms of paradigm shifts in the sciences would also be more helpful, because that would enable us to keep in mind that what is important is not a point-by-point refutation, but a very close look at the most anomalous of the anomalies. I wouldn’t say that deciding things by the force of the better argument is fraudulent, just that for decisions to genuinely be made that way requires an enormous amount of good faith and prior agreement on all sides. If we agree on 99% of things, we could argue productively over the last 1%.

As always, I want to emphasize that I am not presenting locating and articulating an imperative from the center that we could trace back to the originary scene as one way of making decisions as opposed to others—rather, this is what we do anyway, so we should get clearer about it. If you accept that someone has made a compelling enough argument or disseminated a powerful enough meme that you should change your mind, you have conferred authority upon a particular tradition of determining what counts as “compelling,” “powerful,” or “convincing,” and that tradition is a transformation of some previous tradition, which articulated assumptions (virtual ostensives) regarding the relation between authority and reference, and so on, all the way back to the beginning. You are always conferring and responding to authority, which doesn’t mean you always just do or believe what someone more powerful tells you to; rather, it means that have sought out or been provided by someone else who sought out, the authority that has been maintained because it has “packaged” ostensives and imperatives together in such a way as to maintain the continuity of the center.

The center speaks through everyone and it speaks by maximum paradoxicality. In a sense it would be truer to say that humans construct the center “in their own image,” but saying that would lead instantly to the imperative to decide, together, how we want to construct the center, and that question would contain in itself a complete falsification. We can’t disenchant ourselves in that way—“man,” pure and simple, doesn’t exist, and certainly not as the collective maker of the center. We might, like Descartes, believe we can cleanse ourselves of all prior beliefs, but we certainly can’t cleanse ourselves of the language in which we do the cleansing—we can’t stop believing in language, which always refers us back to the center. We can’t think ourselves out of this fundamental paradox, that we create the language by which we are created—we must think with the paradox. It may be best to say we speak along with the center. We try to make explicit a paradox that everyone is involved in implicitly.

The problem is how to inhabit the most anomalous anomaly—that is where the deferral capacities of the center you help surround are most strained, and new methods are called for. If a group has been able to avoid conflict by dividing up land a particular way, then if the group conquers new land, or some members of the group bring new land into cultivation, that agreement must now be “applied” to the new conditions. This will involve some revision, and some abstraction from the previously successful agreement. But it will generate new conflicts as well: something that made the previous agreement seem “just” will not be repeated here. Someone who was included last time will be excluded here. The judgements of the central authority will seem less grounded, more tenuous; secondary authorities might feel a need to “supplement” him. The decisions made will be increasingly anomalous—that is, they will not fit into the system that has been constructed. If the group is not to unravel, someone will have to propose a new agreement, and they will have to do so in the right way—a way that acknowledges the central authority’s power as judge. It will be necessary to be both more abstract (extracting from the original agreement something that can be applied in a new way here) and more concrete (contributing to a specific, consequential, decision). Some kind of “leap” is necessary—that’s what “prophecy,” as well as “intuition” and “genius” is about. It will most likely involve the invention of a new social or legal category, one that will be shown to have been “always already” applicable.

But I don’t want to use words like “prophecy,” “intuition” and “genius” because that space of thinking and decision is what needs to be theorized in terms of hearing the center. if I find myself in the space between some imperative and its fulfillment, then I fill that space by oscillating between some possible implementation of the instruction and some necessary limitation in its utterance. I thereby make myself, as much as I can, within that situation, an extension of the will or intention behind the command. The more I separate myself from the command the more I give myself over to it. Everyone else is doing the same thing, or something different, even the opposite—shirking, defecting or sabotaging. The center speaks through them as well. Maybe they think you’re the saboteur. At this point, the center needs to speak in declaratives. Articulate maximum agreement with maximum disagreement. Maximum agreement: there is a center, and we all respond to it, otherwise how do words and sentences mean and how do we know what they mean—at the very least, your enemy assumes you can understand the epithets he hurls at you. If there’s a center—even if someone wants to call it “principles,” or “maxims of action,” or better habits—something toward which one orients oneself, then it’s impossible to turn away from that center, and all you could accomplish in trying to do so is show its wealth through your own poverty. We then need not fear maximum disagreement, even among friends and allies: there is always some virtual ostensive we see, some mediated command we obey, differently.

The same paradoxicality applies from act to act, carried out by the same actor—in trying to obey the command of the center as that command is embedded in its precedents and through the dispossession it requires, my just previous attempt completely failed, and is thoroughly marked by shirking, defecting and sabotage; but that shirking, defecting and sabotage can only be seen because it all clarifies the command one failed to obey, and in my ongoing obedience I will target the inclinations and distractions that issued in the failure. Of course, if someone else accuses me of defection, I will have to agree completely while asking for the imperatives the center his own obedience to which enables him to identify me as an anomaly issues. And what center is that center on the periphery of? He follows the imperative to seek the truth, or maybe to advance equality; he then follows some tradition of sorting out truth from falsehood, of exposing “artificial” inequality as it obscures “natural” equality. But is there not something anomalous in taking the leading role in fighting inequality—surely, to fight it even more effectively, there are all kinds of “privileges” you would have to claim. Now we might be able to reach agreement on how to study the kinds of privileges that might be necessary to advance anything. What falsehoods does he have to leave unexposed to isolate the little truth upon which he has decided to expend his current energies; maybe we could agree on some terms of study regarding the said and unsaid, the explicit and the tacit. The center speaks as we find failures in successes, new problems in solutions, and then answers to old questions in those failures and problems.

The purest paradoxes may be the paradoxes of self-reference, that is, sentences that refer back to themselves in a way that makes them simultaneously true and false. The one I prefer to use is the liar’s paradox, originally the Cretan liar’s paradox because, even though it has been subsequently tightened by logicians in order to make it airtight, in its original form it sounds very much like something we can imagine someone saying, for very intelligible reasons—that is, it doesn’t come across as an artificial construct. “Cretans are all liars,” said by a Cretan, can very readily be understood, for example, as a Cretan ratting out his fellow Cretans in order to curry favor with whoever, for the moment, is in charge of the Cretans—don’t trust them; rather, trust me, because I know them so well. And, indeed, who could know that Cretans are all liars better than another Cretan? Of course, it could also be a decent Cretan in despair, expressing his hopelessness of the state of Crete, and accepting his own implication in its degradation. Or a Cretan trying to wake up his fellow Cretans—don’t you see you’re all drowning in your lies—I can tell you this because I’m poisoned by them as well. There’s always something paradoxical in an individual speaking for a group, because any such speaking for is an attempt to change the group in some way by posing as a mere description. But there’s no way a group could speak, or an outsider could speak about a group without hearing members of the group speak of it. But any listener must suspect the speaker of describing his group either to cover himself with its luster or distinguish himself favorably from it. But the same is true when one just speaks of oneself.

But if we know this, we can present ourselves, as individuals or members of groups, as paradoxes. What makes you a member of a group is that any time someone addresses you they do so on both levels: as an individual and a member, a center and a fluctuating probability. I don’t mean in some specific social category; I mean as the type of person capable of being addressed in a particular way—capable of answering a certain question, obeying a specific imperative, adding to a particular discourse. To have the center speak through you is to enact a self-referential paradox of accepting your membership in the linguistically constructed group by attributing, implicitly or explicitly, qualities to that group at odds with what you actually say. To take a simple example, let’s say someone concludes a discourse directed towards you with an aggressive “so what do you think about that!?,” thereby constructing you as a member of some hypothetical group that would be offended, or stymied, or angered by what has just been said. If your response is in the vein of “well, here’s what Ithink about that,” i.e., one accepting of the challenge, while in fact derailing, or parodying, or neutralizing the prospective confrontation by distinguishing one’s “I-ness,” then you have enacted the self-referential paradox: yes, I’m a _______, and (as you say) ________’s always _________ (even while maybe I don’t quite…). The words, your gesturing, your posture, and/or you use of a particular media, all fitted to the scene, will be the center speaking, saying “transform this into a deferring rather than “horde-ing” center.”

Words like “spirituality,” “religiosity,” “faith” and so on, insofar as they refer to something, refer to a dwelling within and refusal to suppress the constitutive paradox of the human. That paradox emerges with the originary event: the (newly) humans on the scene point to, name and thereby create the central figure that was already there, already a compelling and repelling substantial being—in which case, naming it is just recognizing it for what it is. It is paradoxicality that can never be “proven” or reduced to any particular ostensive sign, because it is ostensivity itself. (For GA, this is the truth implicit in Heidegger’s ontological-ontic distinction.) Paradoxicality is the non-material reality theists are always arguing with atheists about, and if there is to be some kind of dialogue between the different faiths, it would far better be constructed around the assumption that there are various ways of dwelling within the founding paradox than around some general notion of “humanity,” “nature,” “transcendence” or “morality.”

We can run paradoxicality through all of our grammatical categories: the paradox of the ostensive is, as just mentioned, that we refer to something created by and yet pre-existing our referring to it; of the imperative, that the asymmetry of the command relation is reversed with the dependence of the one issuing the imperative on the one fulfilling it; of the declarative, that we must renounce ostensives (all “irritable reaching after fact”) in order to make a new world of ostensives possible. A paradox is any sentence that puts forward a claim or rule to which it is itself the exception, but any sentence and any discourse paradoxically refers to, talks about, a world created by and therefore always running in advance of and behind the sentence or discourse itself. We can formulate the paradoxicality of the declarative as follows: if you try to compose a perfectly clear sentence, that is, a sentence that will be understood in the same way by everyone who hears or reads it, that is, a sentence in response to which everyone will say or do the same thing, the best way to do that is by using the most repeated words and phrases, in the most repeated collocations, in the most repeated grammatical forms, in their most stereotyped uses. This means that you are completely reliant upon a received version of the world presumed to be shared by everyone, conveyed through linguistic means the use of which is characterized by the same unanimity. And that is, indeed, the “vocation” of the declarative sentence: that is how you undo an imperative by embedding its target in a world perfectly constructed so as to cancel it.

But sustaining this clarity requires continually selecting the features of represented scenes that will ensure unanimity, which means imagining the witnesses on that scene, their means of representation, the traditions enabling them to see what they see as they see it. It means placing yourself on the scene, with all that you have witnessed and all who have witnessed you, your conceptual framework and those conceptual frameworks it has modified. That is, it means joining your potential readers in a disciplinary space continued in one’s own discourse, rendering that discourse intelligible not to everyone, but to those who can follow your trail and continue reconstructing the scene. Implicit, though, in the constitution of any disciplinary space is the possibility that anyone can enter and transform it so that eventually, conceivably, everyone might enter it and what it presents would become perfectly “clear.” In producing a discourse, we keep generating this paradox, where the clarity and idiosyncrasy of the discourse oscillate for the hearers or readers of the discourse. The more you seek absolute clarity, the more you approximate complete idiosyncrasy; the more precise, micrological and self-reflexive, the more you anticipate a possible universal scene.

So, trying to say something everyone will understand leads to saying nothing, which nobody really understands because it’s what everyone already presumes they know; trying, then, to make something understood leads to saying something that someone might, someday, in some manner, understand in some yet-to-be-determined sense. We oscillate between the already said and what might turn out to have been said. The virtual scene generated by classic prose through its supplementation of a presumed speech situation can be seen as an attempt to suppress this paradox, while disciplinarity can be seen as an attempt to open it up. Any disciplinarity in the human sciences must start from mimetic theory because the starting point of mimetic theory is that we are all doing what we have seen others do but cannot acknowledge it to ourselves in action—even the most convinced mimetic theorist must believe in his own freedom, that he has “decided” to do whatever he is to do. Trying to figure out whom you’re really imitating in what you’re about to do would be paralyzing; it might be that such paralysis is a condition for a freer act because you would have to realize that your imitation will get the original wrong in some way; that is, not quite be an imitation.

The declarative originates in the representation of a reality immune to an imperative. The “task” of the declarative sentence, then, is to fortify reality against imperatives—in each case a specific imperative, or field of imperatives, that presents a danger because it is both pressing and impossible for those charged with fulfilling it. If your boss says that he wants the inventory done in an hour, and you reply that there are only three employees available, that might be sufficient to repel the imperative—OK, you can have 3 hours, then. Maybe not, in which case you would have to make it clear to your boss that three employees simply can’t do that work in an hour—maybe your boss doesn’t really know what he’s doing and has to have explained to him what taking inventory actually entails, and how long it would have to take to do each and every one of the acts involved in “doing inventory.” In so doing, you construct a “discourse” filled with virtual ostensives (you “point to” maximum employee capability, to the number of shelves and an estimated number of objects on them, and so on) but each ostensive generates a counter imperative of its own, coming from “reality,” which can only be disobeyed at one’s peril. You would be attempting to make reality immune to the boss’s imperative, but all of these imperatives would not be very commanding if the boss wasn’t already subject to another, higher, one, which seems obvious but isn’t: don’t command people to do the impossible; or, don’t issue unfulfillable commands. Reality’s commands gain their force from this ethical one, which is grounded in the nature of the imperative itself, which is meant to be fulfilled.

So, where is the paradox in “there’s only 3 of us,” or in the more extended discourse regarding the elements of inventory and the estimated extent of this specific inventory? “There’s only 3 of us” seems perfectly clear but, really, only if the statement was answering the question, “how many are you?”; in this case, it’s only clear insofar as the boss knows why three is grossly insufficient; the further elaboration meanwhile, makes things clearer by referring to the realities behind the reference to “only 3,” but insofar as the boss needs to be informed of this reality he can only take the employee’s word for it, which means he has no way of distinguishing between an accurate portrayal of the situation and a clever employee saying exactly what he needs to say to get the desired and predictable response from the boss. Whether the statement is clear or not is undecidable, or yet-to-be decided, but whenever it will be decided will be too late and all those references will have lost their meaning. This asymmetry in both power and knowledge could end disastrously (well, unpleasantly, at least) unless a kind of reciprocity is established: the boss modifies his power to acknowledge the employee’s knowledge and the employ frames his knowledge to acknowledge the boss’s power.

This is done through satire. I don’t mean a tension diluting joke, or a self-deprecating quip. I mean each performing a response to the typical expectations coming from the other—the boss showing that he knows he might be read as the typical slave-driving bully and the employee showing he knows he might be read as a lazy smart-ass. It becomes a satire they perform together. While in the end someone has to be right about how many conscientious employees to takes how much time to do inventory, the two will get closer to being right together through satire than serious, reasoned discussion. This is even the case if we assume that both are completely devoted to the “mission” of the company and know each other (as well as such things can be known) to be sincere in their desire to do things properly. Unless they’re already in complete agreement (in which case, they wouldn’t be discussing it), their disagreements will involve some kind of oscillation between “typical” responses that are expected to “work,” on the one hand, and what could only be known by someone “inside” the situation. The asymmetries remain, and would be better maintained by being performed.

Is a good ruler a satirist, then? Must ruling be solemn? (How does a good ruler engage the constitutive paradox?) The awe of sacralized power kings could once rely on may not ever be restored. The ruler is always staging things, and if the bloom of sacrality is off the king, those stagings can’t all be pageants. I will propose, hypothetically (hypotheticalism being part of the declarative form of paradoxicality), that if paradoxicality is to replace, because it is the real essence of, the transcendent, then the stage set by the ruler will have to be a satirical one. The more power I have, the more I depend upon the knowledge, faith and mutual trust of all of you; the more you seek out knowledge, transcendent foundations and reciprocities amongst all of you, the more you rely on my power being unquestioned. The ruler’s power remains unquestioned because there are better questions to ask, and that can only be asked if that power is unquestioned. The declarative paradox is performed as inquiry into the imperative one: all the things that can happen between the time the ruler relays a command originally issued from within the most ancient origins and the time that command is obeyed and completed by all the individuals at all the social “capillaries” where the details of the command need to be worked out. Here is the source of high comedy, low comedy, subtle humor, friendly joking, and the knowledge coming from all this will be worth more than that produced by the contemporary social sciences, which are all constituted by the denial of the declarative paradox. They all believe in the clear statement, which anyone who follows the correct method will agree with and act upon in accord with all of the implications contained therein. The yet-to-be-grasped sentence is just a meaningless one. Once the model of the physical sciences is rejected for the human ones, what does “knowledge” mean? Certainly not predictability, because of all the millions of possible “causes” of any event, how are we supposed to determine the precise “effect” of each of them? (Especially since our very knowledge of what has gone into the event is part of, if not the event itself, then the event of understanding.) To the extent that we can do something like that, it will be in very circumscribed situations, and hardly applicable to others. Knowledge really means surfacing and performing the anthropological form of the event.

I’ve suggested in previous posts and in my Anthropoeticsessay that the most important staging carried out by the ruler is that involved in providing for his own successor. The entire social order would be both involved in and represented by such staging. The entire society would be a school for the tutoring of rulers, who would go through a very carefully prepared and “stereotyped” selection process: they would have to prove their capability to rule while and by renouncing any desire to do so. Shows of hypocrisy and self-delusion would separate the wannabees, however intelligent, capable and courageous they might be, from the real deal. Satire is the medium in which such a winnowing out would be enacted, and for the satire to be trustworthy the ruler would have to be on the stage as well. I’m not talking about Nixon going on Laugh-In, or presidents and candidates going on SNL—the ruler will be the one choosing his successor, so he is inevitably implicated in the selection process, which will reveal his strengths and weaknesses as well. We can’t worship paradoxicality, but we can acknowledge it as something we will never completely master, intellectually and practically, while never being able to rid ourselves of it, either—but paradoxicality can never become the basis of an imperium in imperio, either, because it provides no model for ruling, just a model for staging it.

If declarative sentences are inquiries into imperatives, it is also through declarative sentences that we engage in inquiries into declarative sentences. We can hypothetically construct any sentence as asking, regarding a particular imperative, what are the conditions of its fulfillment? An inquiry into declaratives would, then, address the question, how might we simultaneously hypothesize the conditions of fulfillment of imperatives that are preconditions of or consequences of, some primary imperative? To say, “John is not here,” is to answer (most likely) the actual or anticipated question, “is John here?”; to answer that question with “I haven’t heard from John since last night” is to broaden the scope of the questions one is answering—one provides information not only regarding John’s whereabouts but an expected follow-up question regarding my usefulness as a source for tracking John’s movements. The sentence is, correspondingly, significantly more complex.

This kind of declarative self-reflexivity is intrinsic to language, and there’s no doubt such sentences are common in oral cultures. More abstract and sustained inquiries into the possibilities of declarative sentences are only possible in a literate culture, though. The very concept of a “sentence” is only possible in a literate culture, which can isolate the sentence as a unit of speech, settle upon rules for using them properly, and devise various stylistic alternatives for their deployment. In a literate culture, then, the range of imperatives, and imperative chains, that can be accounted for intellectually increases dramatically. So, if “where is John?” is a “softened” version of “show me John,” what the declarative allows for here is an avoidance of the violence likely to follow from one insisting, through sheer lack of linguistic resources, that John be produced immediately. Likewise, the more complex “I haven’t heard from John since last night” allows me to demonstrate that I am sympathetic to your attempt to locate John, thereby forestalling, for example, your concluding that I’m lying and commencing a search of my premises or some more violent approach. Of course, I could be lying about when I heard from John, but my answer already sets up a relation between two different scenes, so if you want to further challenge me you might have to implicate other witnesses or imagine possible scenarios. Again, this allows for deferral.

If I say, “like you, I haven’t heard from him since last night,” I introduce yet another scene. This is essentially what declarative and cultural complex entails: being able to keep various scenes, past, present and future, completed and still ongoing, within our power to change and beyond our power, etc., suspended simultaneously and interdependently. When we’re talking, reading or writing, or thinking, this is what we are doing it about: whether each of those scenes holds together, and whether each scene supplies what some other scene requires for it to hold together. Each of these scenes has an ostensive-imperative articulation at its center: the “like you” in the hypothetical sentence above imagines a scene upon which I received information that I think is true regarding your latest contact with John (if I haven’t heard this from you, I’m presupposing another scene in which someone found this out from you in order to convey it to me; and, either way, another scene upon which you heard from John). Upon that scene, John was referenced (a “simulated” ostensive sign), and this reference carried along with it an imperative to find out more about John’s whereabouts. If you now tell me that I’m misinformed, and you haven’t heard from John for days, something happens to the entire structure of interdependent scenes, even if it’s not obvious what.

Now, there must be a dialectic relation between a discursive order that allows for the articulation of all these suspended and delayed scenes and a power structure that allows for predictable suspensions and delays. I don’t think there’s any point to trying to determine empirical correspondences between intellectual complexity and social order: in the midst of a social breakdown, one lone scholar, with a good library or excellent memory, can lock himself away and write an extremely intricate history of the decline of that social order. The real point, though, is that in doing so, that scholar presupposes and embeds in his history the possibility of a social order that would allow for a series of suspensions and delays that would have indefinitely deferred that social breakdown. Even if the history presents the social breakdown as inevitable, it presupposes the possibility of something that will break down, but hasn’t yet; or, the possibility of another order less affected by the very vulnerabilities the “inevitablist” history has shown. We can’t imagine dispersion through interconnection without presupposing a center. If I am going to figure out whether it matters that the scenic series that led me to say “like you” has collapsed, I can only do so by assuming a shared “(disciplinary”) inquiry into John’s whereabouts (all our sentences and questions are leading us back to the imperative to enable us to ostensively refer to John), even if part of that inquiry might now include a subsidiary inquiry into whether some of those who should be helping locate John are in fact interfering with the search.

A large part of the stupidity of liberalism is that we are forbidden to speak as if we are all looking for something together. In my hypothetical scenario, the more we look for John, following the imperative to find him, the more we must involve prior imperatives that are the sources of this one—the imperative that we remain a family, or a group of friends, or a community; in that case, the ostensive sign we issue upon finding John would be a new sign as well as revealing and confirming that older imperative. Behind that imperative, of course, are even older ones: preserve your family, friendships and community, care for others, etc. And even older ones: don’t transgress that the transgression of which will lead to resentments we haven’t the institutional terms to frame. (Or: err in favor of fulfilling your obligations.) The denser and more overlapping these reciprocal horizontal relations the more there must be a center that makes violence (or, at least, open-ended violence that can’t be stemmed) a distant resort when they are tested or frayed. The relationship between margin and center is reciprocal: the more the security of the center can be taken for granted, the less we need to invoke it in our horizontal relations. Declarative order introduces what N.N. Taleb calls “antifragility” by articulating a structure of suspended and delayed scenes that presupposes, while invoking as minimally as possible, an absolute center. (If every interaction leads to someone saying “I’m gonna call the cops,” then we’re living in a social order where the cops aren’t much help.)

The overt and institutionalized study of the declarative sentence is the origin of all the media, themselves extensions and simulations of the originary scene. New media represent scenes enacted in other media, and one way in which that can be done is by using the capabilities of the new media to supplement the meanings lost from the older media. So, to use my prototypical example from David Olson regarding the representation of a speech situation in writing, rather than reporting what the other said in a hesitant or insistent voice, one notes that the other said it “cautiously” or “insistently.” Whatever is lost in the previous medium one tries to replace in the new medium. Part of the method of supplementation is representing the scene of representation itself in terms of the older, or even oldest medium—so, the writer, broadcaster, or actor writes or speaks directly to you, the reader, listener or viewer, insinuating himself into your living room—all of the machinery of the medium, all of which differentiates that medium from a speech situation, are mobilized so as to produce the illusion or “feel” of one. The result is a vast simplification of the scene, and a collapse of all the suspensions and delays. One must obey the order to enter an illusory scene in order to participate in the medium. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, if the ruling center makes creating and managing such illusions central to its own governing strategies.

The other approach is to use the declarative capacity to articulate suspensions and delays to represent the suspensions and delays in the media and their institutions. Above, I tried to give a sense of how we could trace a particular imperative, interrogative or declarative, through a series of interdependent scenes—when we watch a movie, TV show, news broadcast, magazine article, etc., a similar, but far more complex process has in most cases occurred—a process probably a lot more interesting and illuminating than the media product itself. We don’t actually need to know what it was, but we do know that the talking head who spouts the day’s talking points has sat in the make-up chair for quite a while that morning, that he got his job because of some connection someone in his family has to someone in that media corporation, that he was herded through a particular journalistic career path by a familiar set of mentors and protectors to whom he is indebted, etc.—and all of this, really, is part of the meaning of whatever he says on the air. The more we describe what he says as entailing all of that (or as much of that as is necessary in a given situation to dissolve the smarmy illusion) the more we disable the supplementations that drape an ideological representation over an institutional one.

Every representation does need to posit some scene upon which all “receiving” the representation are virtually present. In a literate, mediatized order, this scene needs to be a doubled scene, though: the illusions generated by supplementarity must at least be gestured towards in order to construct a scene upon which participants watch the cobbling together of the illusory scene. As I’ve said before, much of this is the legacy of modernist and postmodernist aesthetics, of which contemporary absolutists can be the inheritors if they wish (or dare). A scene sustaining both unity and a maximum of cobbling together is a satirical scene. One place you can always start is with a sentence produced by the institutional, supplementalized representation and simply turn one of its words into a scene—a scene hidden by the representation. For example, institutions are always speaking in contemporary newspeak—the CIA, the FBI, the White House, the UN, etc., are always “saying” things. What are the scenes that go into and are concealed by these attributions? I’m not talking about doing counter-reporting here, uncovering the sources used, etc. (of course, it’s good that people do that—it’s just not what I’m talking about here). I’m talking about having fun, using our imaginations (as the novelist Ronald Sukenick said, if you don’t use your imagination, someone else will use it for you)—fill in gaps (thereby showing that they are gaps) with caricatures and the absurd. The model for this practice is the complex declarative sentence, which can always be made more complex, as something mentioned can always be defined, and then used, and then the conditions under which it has been defined can described, and the implications for the rest of the claims, implicit and explicit, made by the sentence of the various possible definitions explored, and some of those implicit claims made explicit, and the same done for the claims implicit in the newly explicit ones. In this way you represent the authoritative institutions as at least potentially following and defending the absolute imperative to defer.

Eric bases his Unified Field Theory on the Originary Hypothesis, which is so original that it has resisted assimilation to contemporary academic discourse, not to mention popular news or culture. We remain limited to a small corner of the internet (the Anthropoetics website) and our annual conferences. As Eric comments, Generative Anthropology doesn’t articulate the resentments of any particular interest group. It’s a sad comment on academia today that a persuasive theory with important consequences is not recognized because it affirms the value of “firstness” or merit. I read almost everyday about the “myth” of meritocracy. Eric points out that the genius of the left’s attack on “privilege” is that anyone can participate, no matter how successful, by simply acknowledging their “unmerited” position with an apotropaic gesture designed to ward off criticism. But anyone who is white and successful remains vulnerable to attack. Political Correctness benefits certain rhetorically-powerful interest groups, while allowing the current political and economic system to operate almost without check. Conservatives have not yet found an effective rhetoric to counter PC. Who can be against “social justice”? The problem is that PC actually functions counter to its stated goals.

Despite the claims of PC, America is still distinguished by its openness to innovation, talent, and merit of all kinds, irrespective of race, gender, or class. But there are real structural issues that have contributed to the large wealth inequalities in America today, issues that could be profitably addressed at the political level. But the current political climate actually prevents any such constructive efforts, because firstness must be denied.

The current political debate can be derived from the opposition of center and periphery on the Originary Scene. The periphery is defined by equality. Everyone is equal before the firstness of the center, and in the ability to make and exchange the sign. The originary hypothesis explains the fundamental moral intuition that everyone is equal in rights. Studies have demonstrated that children as young as two years old already have a sense of fairness and reciprocity.

The center of the Originary Scene, on the other hand, defends the rights of firstness. One who benefits the group deserves a reward for their work. PC wants to exclude firstness by claiming that any inequality in material situation can only be due to an oppression that denies fundamental equality. This is a Manichean world-view, in which all the benefits of civilization, because they are not distributed equally, become evidence for evil conspiracy. But rewarding merit is actually completely in accord with the principle of moral reciprocity. One is recompensed according to one’s contribution to the community.

I would like to point out that firstness and egalitarianism actually depend upon each other. Egalitarianism is made possible only by firstness, the power of the center to defer conflict. The sacred center reduces everyone on the periphery to the same level. We are all equal before God. The firstness of the center is not reducible to the authority of the alpha male. He acts solely for self-benefit, even if, as Darwin pointed out, his domination indirectly benefits the species as a whole in the long run. But more importantly, no symbolic representation is involved with the alpha male’s position in the group. It was probably not the alpha male who invented the first sign, although he must have imitated the sign of others on the originary scene.

Firstness depends on egalitarianism, as the rights of the community, because a privileged position can be claimed and defended only in terms of its benefit to the group. When Obama said, “you didn’t build that,” he was attacking the privileges accorded to firstness, and ignoring that individuals who invest their lives in a business are rewarded freely according to their benefit to the community

Declarative sentences appear to be representations of a reality independent of the speakers, and they are that, indirectly; directly, though, declaratives are inquiries into imperatives. To put it even more narrowly: declaratives are attempts to determine the conditions under which imperatives can be obeyed and fulfilled. Intervening between the imperative and the declarative is the interrogative; an interrogative is a softened imperative, which is to say, an imperative coming to recognize that it might not be fulfilled, and therefore transitioning from a command to do something to a demand for information regarding the possibility of doing it.

From a practical, analytical, perspective, we can first determine what question a declarative sentence might be taken to be answering. In every case, there must be at least two possibilities: a question about the subject, or a question about the predicate. Everything else in a sentence addresses other possible questions. So, to take the hoary old analytic philosophy example, “the cat is on the mat” could be answering either “where is the cat” or “what is on the mat”? “The striped cat is on the mat” includes an answer to the question, “which cat”? These are all requests for information about the cat and/or mat. We should, then be able to treat these requests as “softened” forms of some command regarding cat or mat. Such a command will ultimately be hypothetical, but the hypothesis could be stronger or weaker. Most obviously, here, might be a standing command that the mat be left clean, or that pets be kept off of it; or a direct or anticipated command to produce the cat; or even just to look at my cat.

There is an immense variety of imperatives: commands from superiors, pleas from subordinates, prayers; imperatives that can be fulfilled immediately, imperatives that take time to fulfill, imperatives that are essentially permanent and can never be completely fulfilled (“love the Lord thy God”); single imperatives, imperatives that are one in a long chain, imperatives that, when finally fulfilled, might look very different than the outcome imagined by the original imperator. You can think about how much of everyday life is carried out through imperatives (“pass me the salt, please”), and could not be carried out otherwise. Imperatives involve some direct connection between at least two people; imperatives create a new reality, or fail to. Imperatives are somewhat uncomfortable to talk about, which is maybe why discourse and communications theorists so rarely do so—they always involve doing something under some kind of compulsion, even when it’s the compulsion of pity felt for the homeless man asking for money for a cup of coffee, and therefore seem to infringe on one’s “free will.” So, why do we obey most imperatives? That’s a question that could only be asked under the presumption that declarative discourse is the normal discursive form, and anything else a defective, distorted or abbreviated form of such discourse (as if asking someone to pass the salt is just a simpler way of saying something like “I would be happier if the salt were to be made to appear before me by someone seated presently at this table”). Asking why our presumptive response to imperatives is to obey them is like asking why we share a reality with other people.

A social science that focused solely on how imperatives work in all the varied social situations in which they are used would have an inexhaustible topic that leaves no area of human life unexamined. Furthermore, it would be a social science carved right out of everyday discourse because, as I began this post by stating, all declaratives are already studies of imperatives. Social theory that leads to something like “knowledge” will be one that takes us, through the interrogative route suggested above, through the entire network of imperatives until we get to starting point of each chain. We do things like shopping at a particular store, or buying a particular brand, because someone once told us to, and we obeyed—of course, we are often confronted with multiple imperatives, and we “choose” (a declarative concept) between them by tracing—imperfectly, intuitively—one of them back to a previous, or more comprehensive imperative that we obey (to save money, to balance our budget, to please someone else, to see to our health). To know a person is to know the imperatives governing his life, to hypothesize where they originated, and how they “snowballed” over the years. Similarly when we vote, or follow political events through particular media—we’ve been told, we are constantly being told, to do these things.

When we’re trying to piece together a “logical” discourse, what we’re really trying to do is make all the imperatives present to us consistent with each other. This is what “thinking,” that is, having one declarative sentence follow another with which it is in a reciprocally dependent relation, involves. Moral failures like hypocrisy and discrepancies between declared principles and actual practices are failures to make the imperatives we obey consistent with each other. A “good” society is simply one where imperatives issued and “heard” at various levels—imperatives issued by rulers and their delegates, and imperatives transmitted through traditions—are consistent with each other, where individuals are not constantly forced into double binds wherein they have to obey equally authoritative but incompatible imperatives.

We therefore have a method of inquiry that can start anywhere, with any utterance, and follow through from there to an account of the entire imperative order. Any utterance that gets us thinking because it is anomalous in some way—or, more simply, we can see no way to either defy or fulfill it—can be the place where we stake out a disciplinary space; or, more precisely, make explicit an already implicit disciplinary space. This is an open-ended and endlessly recursive inquiry, because once you cut through a path of imperatives leading us to the sovereign’s activation of a traditional practice, you can see there were innumerable other paths that might have gotten you there. If we’re all agreed that we want to make imperatives consistent with each other, there is a broad basis of agreement within which all kinds of productive disagreements can be hosted. We can start with a single sentence, taken as a representative sample of a larger discourse, or with what seems to be patterns of sentences that all seem to be answering a related set of questions.

So, we work back through sentences, to the questions we take them to be answering, to the imperatives whose fulfillment depends upon the information sought by the questions. What could we do with the information provided in the sentences that we couldn’t do without that information—how is fulfilling a consistent stream of imperatives now more possible? We then work on declarative sentences that would test out possible attempts to obey those imperatives—i.e., thought experiments. The thought experiments reach forward in time—once those imperatives are fulfilled, or fail to be, what imperatives might follow?—and backward: what previous imperatives, successful or failed, are the ones under inspection successors or subsidiaries to? If we want to make imperatives consistent, we should start with inconsistent imperatives, and imagine scenes upon which someone might be confronted by them. Make the scene as difficult as possible: failure to obey both imperatives would be devastating, while the two imperatives are as incompatible as imaginable. Go back as far as possible into the past, and see if even such divergent imperatives might have a common ancestor; construct possible consequences, and imagine how they might nevertheless have a common destination.

A successful imperative yields a new ostensive. If I ask someone to pass the salt, once the salt is in my hands, the imperative has been completed. If I obey the command to love the Lord my God with all my might, I can put forth signs that I am doing so—the way I treat someone in a particular situation, my refraining from exploiting an opportunity in an unscrupulous manner, etc., might all be such signs—there is an ostensive component to all of them. The ostensive is the “eating” in which we find the “proof of the pudding.” This is the kind of thing a disciplinary space is interested in—what counts as a sign that an imperative has been completed? How do we distinguish genuine charity from a self-interested simulation of it? There can never be a universally applicable rule here, if for no other reason than because if there were a charlatan would learn how to meet all the “requirements” and carry out his fraud in a manner that we will have agreed to overlook. We have nothing but the thought experiment, hypothesizing regarding the imperative being obeyed and the possible ways of fulfilling and failing to fulfill it. We keep looking for slighter and slight differences—we learn to notice more and more differences, more ways in which the line between genuine charity and fakery might be drawn. We keep generating new ostensives, what we call concepts, because they are hypothetical ostensives telling us what to look for. Most imperatives will fall somewhere between “pass the salt” and “love the Lord thy God with all your might.”

In this post I am obeying the imperative to provide potential ostensives that might mark some of the distinctions I have made in articulating what I have been calling the “imperative order.” I write an account of the imperative order, and questions about how to follow the imperative to use this concept occur to me; trying to imagine ways of answering these questions lead me back to the imperative that lead me to that concept (or potential ostensive) in the first place: to develop theoretical alternatives to liberalism, which always leads us back to flaccid and useless voluntaristic concepts which don’t really provide potential ostensives (how does one prove oneself a “free individual”?). Further imperatives come embedded in generative anthropology, to generate a vocabulary of social theory completely made up of terms internal to the originary hypothesis; we could say these imperatives have been forwarded by earlier versions of myself, commanding my future theoretical self to take on this task, which itself iterates a broader imperative intrinsic to social theory itself—to generate a new theoretical vocabulary independent of “spontaneous” and “commonsensical” (“doxical”) thinking. But more recent imperatives within the human sciences, finding the field of potential ostensives generated by such meta-languages to be drying up have issued what might be a complementary imperative, to construct self-consistent vocabularies that can generate potential ostensives while remaining intra-linguistically within those spontaneous and commonsensical vocabularies (which, after all, also embed traditions that may not be exhausted), working reciprocally and pedagogically with them not as a sacrifice of rigor but precisely in order to be more rigorous—to extend the field of potential ostensives to include those anyone might see. The imperative to develop an originary grammar is a convergence of all these imperatives, because what could simultaneously be more intuitively accessible to any speaker of any language, and at the same time capable of prodigious abstraction, than the fact that we are always exchanging ostensives, imperatives, interrogatives and declaratives, and nothing else? And if we pursue this further, we will see that I, like everyone else, want my actions to be consistent with each other, want (follow the imperative) to “cleanse” myself of anthropomorphisms, of invented “faculties” that license my finding all of myself nowhere else than in myself—there are lots of post-literate imperatives here, which go back to a history of reading, and very often of trying to understanding very difficult texts by trying to figure out what they are “telling me to do.” (Reading a difficult literary or philosophical text as a list of instructions for reconstructing yourself is very instructive.) (And, of course, there may be imperatives of which one is sometimes more, sometimes less, aware, such as to do something difficult and even counter-intuitive, and which hasn’t been done before.) At a certain point, a particular path of inquiry becomes less compelling and more obscure (no one wants to know what I was reading in 1991, and how I was reading it), and most importantly, become less likely to lead us back to more ancestral and central imperatives.