GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

An always accessible starting place for disclosing imperatives from the center is whatever you happen to be looking at, talking about, or thinking about at the moment. If you are looking at something, your attention is bringing some feature of the foreground into focus against some background; if you’re speaking, your sentences have referents, however abstract they might be. The remotest ancestor of either is the object on the originary scene, which came into view as an object because it was desired, because the group refrained from appropriating it, and because they all indicated to each other that they were doing so. Even a casual glance at something or a trivial reference is marked by the history of deferral and discipline initiated on the originary scene. Let’s stay focused on the intrinsically public use of language: any time you say something about something, you bring to attention some feature, element, use or context of that thing that had not been noticed previously. Even if all you do is completely agree with what someone else just said you are adding to the “interestingness” of the object in question, which means you are consolidating its centrality.

I want originary thinking to be a form of moral reasoning, one presupposing nothing but center, origin and deferral, without reliance on any particular creed of tradition of thought—or, more precisely, beyond such reliance, at the point where you can no longer rely on the “belief system” because it doesn’t apply in an unequivocal way in the case before you. One still solicits the intellectual resources of the traditions enabling one to think, but in a way none of those traditions would completely authorize. It is in such margins that moral reflection takes place. To practice such reflection means being able to start anywhere, including, as I just suggested, whatever you happen to be talking or thinking about right now, or whatever you find yourself gazing at. Referring to something implicates one in an attentional space: you’re adding to the attentional “load” of something other have been, are, or might be talking about. This means you’ve set up something that elicits desire and restraint—there’s something someone might want to do with or to whatever you’re referring to but there’s also something holding us back from doing so, at least enough for us to talk about it.

So, whatever it is you’d like to talk about, you can begin thinking by asking why you want to talk about it. The first response likely to come to mind, for most of us most of the time, will be something like: it’s important! People need to see the truth! These responses might be accurate, but less accurate than “other people are looking at something else,” or “other people are looking at this thing in a different way” and “I want to provide a new look.” You may be right, they may be wrong, you may be substantive and they may be trivial, but you are both facing the same center, insofar as you are in some way referring to the same thing. The most fundamentally moral act, I am assuming, is to sustain linguistic presence by keeping that shared center in view. That doesn’t mean you are obliged to keep a useless and banal conversation going—it might mean startling the other participants in the conversation with something provocative or vulgar; it might mean walking demonstratively away from that conversation. That would just mean you determined that it was the conversation itself that was destroying linguistic presence, by taking for granted an increasingly diffuse center, one that couldn’t be sustained under scrutiny (if other people, or other kind of people, entered the conversation). A new center would then be created, one way or the other, but you wouldn’t be the one helping sustain it, so you would be failing, morally. So, you create a new center: you shocking everyone, you walking away, etc. Such an act falls outside of the boundaries of determination of truth/falsity, but it is undeniably meaningful. And meaningfulness precedes truth claims—you could say lots of true things that are meaningless.

So, in everything you do or say you are making assessments of the status of the most proximal center: here’s what it needs to keep it strong, it can’t be strengthened or protected and so a radical shift in attention is necessary, etc. If you then represent to yourself what you have said or done (no one can be completely present to himself in any speech or action, so explicit self-questioning—why did I do that? is necessary here), you will reveal another, more distal center. That center was always there—you were attending fromit tothe more proximal center (I am using Michael Polanyi’s terms here) and you cannot notice the ground on which you stand when noticing something else. So, now this new center comes into view. The introduction of metalanguage, incidentally, serves the purpose of shutting down the inquiry at the emergence of a particular center—that center then provides the terms on which you assess your actions on the more proximal scenes. So, if you regret walking away from the conversation because that was “rude,” you have installed a metalanguage of etiquette, derived from a more distal center (the norms of a particular community, to be applied in certain social settings) that sets the limits for your actions in relation to the more proximal center. (Of course, “rudeness” always needs to be interpreted, and, exceptions being the plague of any metalanguage, you can always save the metalanguage by invoking a “decision” here as well. If this anomaly troubles you, you either shut it down and carry out what you judge to be the most widely accepted course of action, or you open it up, which returns us to the continuing inquiry.)

If your attentions on the more proximal scene reveal a crisis at the center of the more distal one, the process of inquiry continues. You realize that not only was this specific conversation essentially dead, but so are lots of others that, until recently, you were taking pretty seriously. I think that my efforts to shed light on neutralizing metalanguages and the “patron theory of politics” converge here, because the crisis of the center will always, I think, prove to be a crisis of the metalanguage imposed by defenders of that center, and the crisis is caused by the exploitation of the legitimacy of that metalanguage by specific interests. These may very well be interests sincerely devoted to the metalanguage: no doubt those who use the concepts of a putatively neutral social science to advance the cause of “social justice” consider themselves the truest sociologists, anthropologists, economists, and so on. You can try to make the center hold by defending the metalanguage but, like insufficient doses of antibiotics, that just makes the “infection” (its partisan “misuse”) subtler and more tenacious. The metalanguage is the anomaly, and therefore the crisis, not its distortions.

“Norms” are really imperatives, and that is what the center issues. “Don’t be rude” conflicts with “dump these BSers.” There’s no universally applicable imperative telling you how to choose which one to obey, but if you refrain from rudeness does the imperative to dump the BSers fade away or become more insistent? If you dump the BSers, are you haunted by echoes of the imperative to be polite? The answer to these questions won’t prove anything yet, but we can pursue the matter further. If the obeyed imperative squashes its competitor, there’s nothing more to think about. Maybe there’s nothing more to think about, and the decision was the right one; maybe you’ve decided to stop thinking, in which case the subdued imperative will act up again eventually. (Perhaps a psychopath is someone who never hears competing imperatives.) If the two continue to co-exist post-decision, then can one imperative, or its successor in a new situation, be incorporated within the other? Maybe you can obey the imperative to be polite while finding subtle ways to interfere with the BS; maybe you can obey the imperative to dump the BSers while obeying the imperative that precedes that to be polite: the imperative to establish and follow rules of sociability. You provoke, or you walk away, and you take advantage of the paralysis or outrage thereby induced to clear the air and reset the norms.

So, the way to reconcile competing imperatives issued by differing centers is to listen for an imperative from a center preceding and founding both. How do we do that if we’re not anthropologists and historians rolled into one, with a history of morality readily available for direct application? You disclose the more absolute imperative by trying to find a way to obey both the imperative to be polite and the imperative to expose BS, i.e., be candid. This requires some abstraction from both: being candid and being polite both take on various forms, even within the same normative system, and some of those forms must overlap. Imitation and practice are both important here: reflection can’t answer this question by itself. When you’ve successfully mastered politeness after fulfilling its imperatives a few thousand times, and have mastered (for most, perhaps, less completely) candor, after fulfilling its imperatives perhaps a few hundred (dozen, for the timid) times, you have some scripts to work with. What modification of the gesture or commonplace you’ve executed countless times would allow some candor in? And then some more? What modification of the careless, free speaking, outrageous lout you’ve successfully performed could be modified to allow for a compelling gesture of politeness? It is by carrying out such experiments that you will find the more absolute imperative, and that imperative will come to compete with other more absolute ones in the course of your moral education.

Seeking out the more absolute, which is a conversion of the more originary, imperative is equally a forward looking act. The problem is not just to synthesize politeness and candor; it is to do so within the existing imperative architecture. Scientific inquiry and technological advances are fields in which moral problems are tested out and moral education conducted. How can that politeness/candor articulation be achieved in the process of civilizing some of that architecture? Of course I have in mind the internet and social media, as means of and metaphors useful for redescribing human interactions. But even far more familiar inventions, like cars and air travel, have possible moral dimensions that have been unexplored. All of these features of the modern landscape will be liberal by default if they’re not seen as screens upon which moral questions are projected. What counts as politeness on the roads—where is the place for candor in traffic? Maybe the possibilities for both are drastically reduced—but rather than fantasizing their disappearance, the imperatives we would advance for acting in and thinking about these fields would be aimed at creating new possibilities, new spaces where the problem of articulating candor and politeness (just one example, of course) could be enacted. Because we want new opportunities to enact them, because acting as moral being represents the most ancient of imperatives. Looking for such chances is what we do when we point to or refer to any thing in particular. Here, working our way back to the originary imperative coincides with hearing the imperatives of the sovereign center. All of the technological apparatus, the imperative architecture, is in the service of the sovereign center, creating networks connecting the center to the various peripheries. The mode of inquiry here is homologous to the one I have been describing, as one navigates the competing imperatives of the traffic system, the google system, the financial system, and so on, articulating, for example, the tremendous pressures to conform to norms, manners, clichés, down to the slightest gesture, with the equally imperious compulsion to differentiate and market oneself. So, one tries out various ways of marketing oneself as a version of conformity that turns conforming into a sign of hierarchically ordered centers.

A recent essay in The New Atlantis, “Saving Science,” by Daniel Sarewitz, makes the important argument that the goals of scientific disciplines cannot be set by the disciplines themselves, which therefore inevitably meet some externally determined need. The most obvious examples are state sponsored weapons, infrastructural and space-oriented projects, but campaigns for developing vaccines and cures also apply. The free play of inquiry itself, scientists just following the most intriguing and challenging questions raised in the course of inquiry itself would lead, Sarewtiz notes… nowhere. This is obviously true for softer disciplines, like the human sciences as well, which generally meet some less precisely defined imperative to improve modes of civilizational maintenance, social control and surveillance.

The disciplines have their deepest origins in ritual, myth, priestcraft, magic, and the traditional arts, crafts and labor techniques. We could distinguish between these practices within a still largely undifferentiated society in terms of their respective distance from the sacred center. Indeed, different distances from the center, which involve the creation of new, mediating centers, seems a likely origin for social differentiation itself. In Originary Thinking, Eric Gans, in distinguishing between morality (grounded in the equality of those spread around the center) and ethics (norms specific to some practice), hypothesizes that the origin of freedom is away from the center, for example in those hunting or gathering for food. For now, I’m more interested in the differing distances from the center than the specific question Gans deals with here. It’s a very interesting question, after all: if language was originally a strictly ritual affair, serving to mediate the relations between the group on what is ultimately a scene of distribution and consumption, what would be going on elsewhere, in particular in the more “productive” activities? We could easily imagine that for a while, at least, such activities would proceed as before, without the intervention of language.

At a certain point, sign use would enter the productive sphere, for the same reason it entered the human group in the first place: to defer violence. In this case, though, we can assume the forms of potential violence deferred would be lower stakes than those commemorated on the originary scene: say, a challenge not so much to the leader of the expedition himself but to a particular decision—he is leading the group in one way, an underling sees more potential in a different direction. This might ultimately come to blows, or worse, but in a fairly coherent group with shared goals, that’s unlikely—still, the availability of language would be a useful way to settle the dispute. Gans also suggests in The Origin of Language, in examining the succession of speech forms, that innovation is more likely at the margins than at the center, and this would be a confirmation of that intuition. For hunters out for days, chasing dangerous and elusive prey, a high degree of improvisation must be allowed for, far more than would ever be permissible on the ritual scene, and so communicative capacities would improve correspondingly. Still, once these hunters brought their kill back to the community and placed it at the center, they would bow down, intone the requisite chant and follow the established process of distribution and consumption like anyone else.

All disciplinary activity, then, no matter how seemingly impractical, unsupervised and free, is at bottom aware that something needs to be brought back to the center. We should see this constraint as a condition of disciplinary activity, not a restriction imposed on what would otherwise be a “purer” form of activity. Let’s say the hunters forget that they need to bring back food for the rest, or decide not to care—their “study” of their prey leads them to get interested in other, non-prey animals, then in the prey of those animals, whose migratory habits then become interesting, and so the band decides to follow them for a while, and so on. They would really be following one distraction after another, rather than being engaged in any sort of inquiry. In fact, the surrounding environmental penumbra of the prey animal does become “interesting” in all kinds of ways, but always in ways related to the primary task of understanding that animal’s habits and its relation to the community. The more curious hunters might in fact be the ones contributing most to the mythical center emanating from the sacrificial center, supplying reports of the animal in its natural habitat that in turn become stories of the animal as progenitor and creator of the human group itself, which stories in turn might be made more practical use of in subsequent hunts.

The very fact that an inquiry is an inquiry into something, that is to say, it has a center, is a mark of its reliance upon an external center. The inquiry then does, indeed, take on its own dynamics: Sarewitz, hoping that the dependence of science on externally produced needs and institutions will make science more “democratically” accountable describes at great length the pressure brought to bear on cancer researchers by cancer survival activist groups; it doesn’t seem to me, though, that these specific vectors of pressure contributed much to actually finding a cure (which, needless to say, we still don’t have, regardless of the constant setting of “deadlines” for one). How, exactly, external agencies are to assess the progress of the disciplines is itself a disciplinary question, one that the most powerful and aggressive interest group is no more likely to have an answer to than anyone else. Of course, JFK’s imperative to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade turned out to be remarkably precise—but how many other examples of this kind are there? Maybe JFK’s was just a lucky guess. Under the pressures of wartime, when those setting the goals have powerful incentives to set realistic ones, such mandates and initiatives (like the  Manhattan Project) can succeed, while once the setting of mandates gets opened up to the democratic process it becomes a way of grabbing for resources and elbowing out competitors. And strictly technical projects are more likely to succeed than more vaguely defined social engineering ones, etc. It may be that most, it may be that all, of the art or science of governing is learning how to set, assess and enforce constraints on the disciplines. This provides yet another reason for the placement of skunkworkers within the disciplines.

Work within the disciplines, then, must oscillate between distancing from and approaching the constraint set by the center. A new discovery regarding DNA transmission in cell reproduction might be pursued, not knowing where it will lead, and you might put together a new team of people fascinated by the problem of DNA transmission, even if they’re utterly uninterested in curing cancer, on the job; in the end, though, a decision must be made regarding whether this particular path is leading anywhere, “anywhere” as defined by the originating mission of that disciplinary space. Of course, promising, but aborted work done in this discipline might turn out to be highly useful for some other discipline, addressing some other problem. At each point along the way decisions have to made, decisions often productive of much resentment, as those utterly fascinated by that form of DNA transmission and furious at the philistine SOB who squashed the project, or those in the general public imagining that this was the way to a miracle cure can attest. (A healthy society would be one that generated primarily these kinds of resentment.) Within each disciplinary space there is a primus, and the sovereign center must generate within itself disciplinary spaces for assessing the decisions made within the disciplines.

There is only one political principle or axiom worth anything, and that’s because it is converted into an anti-political axiom when adhered to: if you give someone the responsibility to carry out some task or function, you must give them the power they need to do it. It’s difficult, but possible to imagine forms of democracy that accord with this insistence, at least for a while; it’s impossible to imagine any form of liberalism that does. Liberalism compulsively undercuts any form of delegated responsibility—even one as simple as “maintain public order” must be subject to “checks and balances,” “oversight,” “review,” etc., at every level and at every moment. That liberal societies function at all is due to the fact that most of any social order is run non-liberally, liberalism being wholly parasitic on established civilizational forms. (The question of the survivability of liberal societies therefore comes down to the question of whether the parasitosis can be kept at merely chronic levels)

The converse of the axiom, that someone with power must be loaded up with corresponding responsibilities, while true, is not as primary a principle. Power may have to accede to its responsibilities, it may precede and discover them, power precedes any delegation, and is always at least somewhat in excess of any responsibilities. Fixing power with its responsibilities is a result of the apotropaic tendency of subjects at least as much as the acceptance of responsibility by power. But whether it’s a superior delegating power or an inferior requesting uses of that power, built into the delegation or request is a responsibility to supply the power needed to see it through. The establishment of the commensurability of responsibility and power is the constraint establishing the disciplines of the human sciences. That’s what those of us doing sociology, theology, anthropology, psychology, literary studies, etc., are all engaged in: finding ways to “read,” in practical terms, the gap between the social center and that center’s embedment in in attentional centers throughout the social order. And to read it in such a way as to close it. This means reading the center in terms of centrality; and the relation between center and centrality is in the ways of thinking, speaking and acting amongst the subjects needed to establish commensurability. Inquiring into the practices that would streamline the imperative exchange (orders and requests) between ruler and subjects is transcendental inquiry. Even in the physical sciences, some project set by the center, whether it be creating a new weapons system or curing a disease, is the enabling background of disciplinary work.

When you study something human, the purpose is to see something in what people are doing that they themselves don’t see. They are actors, you are a spectator; they embarked on a trajectory in their action that can retrospectively be constructed narratively—the spectator can see the beginning in terms of the end, which the actor couldn’t have known, the spectator can try out different beginnings and ends so as to see different events and actors in a different light, the spectator can move back and forth between macro and micro levels in a way the actor couldn’t, and so on. You can construct a narrative that would be recognizable to the actor as a richer account of what he took himself to be doing; or, you can construct a narrative that would represent the actor to himself in alienating terms. How you approach the task will depend upon how the actors and events you are studying serves as a center from which you hope to extract imperatives. The disciplinary space is where we argue over these questions and construct such a center, and you have a disciplinary space when enough of these decisions have been made so that those within the discipline can readily generate new questions while those outside of the discipline would essentially be guessing if they tried.

What the disciplinary space brings into view is the relation between margin and center—a strong theory enables us to oscillate between the actions taking place on the margin (actors engaging one another) and the center that is apparent only through the interactions of those seeking to protect or usurp it. Ultimately, even the most self-aware and intelligent actor—even the analyst himself if he were the actor—must allow his mimetic engagements with other actors to obscure the relation to the center revealed in their interaction. Here, disciplinary inquiry must be ruthless: all words and gestures and other signs that direct the actors’ attention toward one another must be replaced with a discourse that systematically reads the interactions as signs of the center, as an iteration of the originary scene that simultaneously iterates previous iterations after which there was no turning back. After your inquiry there should also be no turning back, because the center will have revealed a new imperative to introduce a new gradient of deferral, replacing some potential future resentment with a sign pointing out something new in the world.

If the metalanguage of literacy is both the equivalent and the vehicle of the imperium in imperio, the ethical practice that follows is reducing the metalinguistic dimension of language to its most minimal, which is the necessity that any use of language reference, iterate and modify some other use. The minimal metalanguage would simply be showing rather than concealing this dependence on differential repetition. Now it is possible to articulate the (meta)linguistic problem with the thought of the center. The way to do this is to address a problem in centered thinking that I have alluded to (and somewhat more) on a few occasions (it could hardly be completely avoided) but have not addressed directly and in a sustained way: the distinction and relation between the desired and ultimately consumed central object, and the subsisting center, which remains in the memory and praxis of the group subsequent to the event itself. It is the imagined central object, or, to borrow Jacques Lacan’s orthographic practice, the Object, that is the target of the group’s resentment and the source of its newly discovered/created communal being.

We can imagine a very minimal difference between the two, for starters. We could hypothesize that the sign issued on the originary scene would guide the group through its consumption of the object (the sparagmos) by serving, in that frenzied feast, to maintain sufficient order so as to prevent a new violent outbreak. Once the meal is completed, the participants might just walk away and return to their pre-human hominid existence—it’s possible that the scene was forgotten many times before it finally “took.” What would have made it “take” would have been, I would suggest, a final issuance of the sign, gesturing toward the inedible remains of the animal, which would have completed or “closed” or “sealed” the event as an event. More of a metonymy than a metaphor, this representation of the continuity of the relation between margin and center would have inscribed the sign in the group’s memory. Nothing might change in their everyday interactions for a while, but every fresh kill would re-ignite the same mimetic crisis and call forth the remembered sign. The Object, or centrality beyond center, would be nothing more than this memory and the maintenance of the unity of the repeated event.

And we can imagine a maximal difference between the two. When the tiniest object, event, or gesture can take on enormous, maybe even world-historical significance, we have the maximal difference between the center, some point on which attention converges, and centrality, or the capacities and supports that articulate that point along with numerous others to a distant social center. Let’s take, for example, the question much discussed on the American right, whether the Iran “deal” is, in fact, a “deal,” and, if so, between which entities—the Obama Administration and Ayatollah Khamenei, or the United States and Iran. In the end, there is something we could look at, physically direct our attention towards: specific language in a document, the actual signatures of specific, well known people—signatures that could be “authenticated” by handwriting experts (who have themselves been “certified” by experts at “recognized” institutions, etc.). But the fact that people (and it would be carefully selected people) would look carefully at such things is due to the various international political protocols and domestic legal traditions and practices in the US and Iran and that would make such looking meaningful. The object here is some scribbles on a piece of paper; the Object is the alignment of power that follows the ascertaining of international “legitimacy,” which in turn references an entire history of “legitimacy.”

It’s clear that the maximal difference between center and centrality, object and Object, is the mark of a more civilized order. We can also see all the potential for degeneration and de-civilization in this distance. This potential lies in the possibility of making the abstracted norms sites of power struggle. Linguistic metalanguage (beginning, it can’t be stressed enough, with writing and the creation of alphabets, grammar, and diacritical marks) results from the study of language and represents the linguistic elements required for a workable writing system. In the process it shapes language—for example, a literate population will speak in more standardized and grammatically correct sentences than a non-literate population. (A non-literate population won’t even understand what a grammatical error is.) For subsequent metalanguages, predicated upon print culture and literacy, like philosophy, literature, and eventually the social sciences, such features as correct grammar and the logic developed out of it also seem to be “in” language, and therefore in the language users themselves: they come to “naturally” represent these cognitive “skills” and “capacities” as “in” the individual (like Chomsky’s Language Acquisition Device, somehow planted in the brain). As a result, that such features are dependent on language can be forgotten, and cognition can be spoken of as if language were just an incidental means of representing cognitive activity already going on. Within the disciplinary and empowered metalanguages, then, the objects of thought and praxis are constructs of the metalanguage itself.

The metalanguages acquire their power by representing and enframing human and social “attributes.” History and tradition are displaced from the scene, even in the disciplines devoted to their study: what ends up getting studied is the development of the attributes of the human that the disciplinary metalanguages have singled out and made available for study and transformation. This is the equivalent of the imperium in imperio: a vast body of disciplinary knowledge that Power cannot help but draw upon and use to frame its own means and ends. We have a center, then, that obscures centrality—you could say I’m putting Heidegger’s notion of the “forgetting of Being” in originary and absolutist terms. The center is now whatever can be attended to—defined, treated, assessed, categorized, manipulated—by disciplinary metalanguages. There is no centrality because those disciplinary metalanguages cannot attend to themselves, which is to say their origins. Sociology cannot say why there is such a thing as society; psychology why there is a “psyche” or mind; linguistics why there is language; anthropology why there is Man, or men; economics why there is exchange and money, and so on. A simulated “human being” is projected onto a screen as a placeholder for the attributes identified by the discipline.

What writing represents are scenes and events of language, not “language” itself. Along with writing, scenes and events of pedagogy are constructed—a text comes prepared to serve as the source of new texts, oral and written. A text is always a pretext. Language learning is lifelong—entering a new disciplinary space is learning a new language. The way you learn a language is to repeat what speakers of that language say, get it wrong a lot of times, and finally start to get it right. To use a word mistakenly is to overlay one rule or imagined context with another—the word, phrase, sentence or discourse you are using works in some other context you are familiar with, and you assumed that context could be transposed onto the one shared by speakers of that language. Language comes in chunks that are transportable—we’re using the same words and expressions as English language speakers have been for centuries, often in very similar ways—but also very site specific: bits of language are shaped for specific uses.

In the relation between the mistake and the accepted use lies the relation between center and centrality. “Mistake” is a very broad concept: the way a lot of philosophers use the word “object” would be mistaken in a lot of ordinary situations. It would make the users in those situations laugh, just as philosophers might laugh at an untutored use of the word. It is in such instances that we demonstrate to ourselves that language is in its shared use, not in the things and qualities in the world it purports to refer to. There is reference, but we refer, language doesn’t. So, the language/metalanguage distinction is displaced by the center/centrality relation, which presents as the differing degrees and modes of mistakenness identified by a group of users. Not all mistakes are equal, which is to say not all of them are equally revelatory of the centrality of the center. Some mistakes point more pointedly to the origins of the use of a particular “chunk” wherein centrality is obscured by a new center.

There’s no need to advocate that people deliberately make mistakes (if you do it deliberately, is it still a mistake?). It will happen whenever we press on those points in a discourse where the discourse seems to hang together by an equivalence between an “attribute” or “quality” and a metalinguistic concept. If you try to dislodge such concepts from their representational relation to an inner substance, you cannot but use them mistakenly. I certainly am advocating lots of “wild” theorizing, with abductions and hypotheses too big for the “data set” they draw upon. But also innovative writing, in particular writing that infiltrates the standard forms and disciplines, revealing their bureaucratic origins and ends, along with the modes of inquiry they’ve made impossible. The only inescapable absolutes are centers and origins.

Can originary disciplinary spaces founded on mistakenness, eschewing imperium in imperioambitions, provide useful knowledge, to the center or anyone else? The knowledge gained in such spaces is both knowing that and knowing how, above all, knowing how to enter various spaces and be useful within them. Schools and universities would be more explicitly what they already are, training camps preparing the young to act and improvise within the constraints set up by the articulated social hierarchy. The metalanguage of literacy installs a new imagined possibility, one which would be inconceivable prior to writing: that everyone could, eventually, be led to agree—potentially, on everything. If there is a single reality represented by language, and through the perfection of logical and empirical methods every single claim could be deemed to be either in agreement or disagreement with reality, then there is nothing preventing us from producing a complete map of reality and having that map already here, in potential, contained in the most advanced methods but also in every human mind or soul. But even two people saying exactly the same thing are not completely in agreement, because one says it after the other, or they say it in different contexts, or in response to different questions or exigencies, and with different audiences, different consequences and implications. The physical sciences approximate the production of universally agreed upon statements most closely, which is why the social sciences are so tempted to promote those sciences, at least nominally, as models.

The striving toward universal agreement is propelled by the development of declarative culture as the negation of imperative and ostensive cultures. This is the imperium in imperioof proceduralism, which likewise imagines the possibility of a world completely mapped by declarative sentences—in the case of proceduralism, explicit agreements and regulations promulgated by authorities who are authorized to do so by other explicit agreements or regulations. The fantasy is that the imperative order will be erased, or that we will all be induced to participate in the fiction that that is the case (that inducement would be the only remaining imperative). Even the insistence that one agree with oneself, from moment to moment, from one topic to another, interferes with the effort to hear older imperatives from the center. Declarative culture will always have the tendency toward metalinguistic imperialism, but also opens the possibility of infra-language, a term used by Bruno Latour: “language used by analysts to help them become more attentive to the actor’s own dully developed metalanguage, a reflexive account of what they are saying.” There will always be metalanguage in literate cultures, and the use of infralanguage is to take metalanguage from outside the discourse it regulates and have it circulate within that discourse. The compulsion to agree reflects a desire for anonymous discourse, to say what anyone could and should say; but only someone can point to the center. The Object, the Center, Centrality is indicated in the difference between metalanguage and infralanguage, where the object framed by metalanguage is given an infralinguistic and infradisciplinary originary structure: we see that at one point that thing provided for the organization of a new form of attention.

Equality simply means the same, in some respect. If you see equality as a value in itself, there’s no reason not to make people equal in more and more respects. Making people equal in more and more respects means uncovering inequality (difference) in previously overlooked respects. This process need never end because people who have been made the same in some respect can, by virtue of that construction of sameness, turn out to have been made different in some new respect.

But (and this is quite elementary) sameness implies some form of measurement so that the objects in question can be reduced to that measure. All things are equal insofar as they have mass, and can measured by a scale, or length, insofar as they can be measured by a ruler. Then, of course, some things are heavier and longer than others, with the Procrustean solutions implicit in the decision to measure in the first place. In social terms, this entails reduction to a single center. Members of a club are equal insofar as they are members of a club, and subject to a set of by-laws and whoever enforces those by-laws. Members of a modern state are equal insofar as they are all directly subject to the state, and the laws it governs by.

Thus, the “moral equality” which Larry Seidentop (Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism) sees as having been introduced by the gradual reshaping of the Western social order through the middle ages by the Catholic Church cannot be sustained in a post-Christian world where the only shared center is the state. The moral equality of Christians is equal in relation to God. Everyone deserves moral consideration as a member or potential member of the Church and child of God, not as a bare “human being.” Let’s frame this in Girardian terms: the Christian revelation discredits scapegoating and human sacrifice by displaying what we can anachronistically call the “bad faith” of such means of maintaining social stability. The selection, as an object of violence, of someone stigmatized in some way, follows not from any genuine knowledge of social relations or divine-human relations, but the logic of mimetic rivalry and crisis. So, from now on, violence against individuals is proscribed, because intrinsically tainted by scapegoating tendencies, while those who engage in violence can be prevented and punished, but only according to rules designed to ensure that such prevention and punishment is free of traces of mimetically motivated hostility. So, everyone is equal in being accorded such protection from mimetically motivated violence.

But what of citizens of a liberal order which knows not Christianity, or sees Christianity as part of the order that needed to be smashed for that liberal order to emerge? What if shared protection from mimetically motivated violence is itself productive of a form of inequality insofar as some members of the social order seem to navigate the system established by that proscription better than others? On what grounds can a member of “civil society” claim that the right to disable, hunt down, indelibly mark members of the “privileged” group is any less valid than the right to be given a fair trial? If equality is now equality in relation to the state as central power, and the state itself is driven by the imperative to ensure that more citizens, and more aspects of their life, are equalized, the benefit of the doubt will always be given to whomever can claim to have uncovered a previously neglected, and therefore all the more scandalous, form of inequality—even if it’s just some feature of social life that hasn’t been subject to any regulation up until now, or even some new form of life generated by the latest equalization campaign.

So far, we have the basic right-left configuration in liberal social orders. The left finds some new inequality, remedy for which it appeals to the state in the prescribed terms; the right, meanwhile, defends the existing form of equality against this new discovery. The best strategy the right can think of within this order is to try and counter leftist encroachments by claiming that those encroachments will in fact create new forms of inequality: so, the equalization of income promised by the welfare state makes blacks more unequal by undermining black family structures, or mass Muslim immigration will lead to a renewed persecution of homosexuals. But these stopgaps can’t work very well because the right always positions itself so as to erect or resurrect some discredited form of inequality: the bourgeois family form that blacks supposedly need oppresses “sexual minorities,” the warning against Muslims is Islamophobic, etc. It is always only a matter of time before the state realizes its equalizing power is aggrandized by recognizing the new form of equality.

If the state is exhaustive of social centrality, or, more precisely, if a state dedicated to liberal equality, as the successor and eviscerator of Christian moral equality is exhaustive, this problem cannot be solved. Perhaps restoring or recreating a divine center to which the sovereign would be subject would solve it, but only by recreating the old problem of a “real” sovereign to which the actual sovereign must be subject, thereby opening a space for other powers claiming to speak for the real sovereign. But let’s say, with Andrew Willard Jones, that the problem is with the concept of “sovereignty” itself, with its assumption of an original violence, ready to break out as soon as social control is lifted, and therefore the need for an ultimate, unquestioned source of law and order. The mimetically motivated violence targeted by Girard is not a Hobbesian war of all against all, it is an all against one which only works if a kind of intellectual dishonesty is shared by all: the lie of scapegoating and human sacrifice is that the sacrality lies in the victim rather than in the terror of a center that no longer defers, whose power of deferral is overridden by the sameness, the equality of mimetic desire.

The social center is the monarch, or, perhaps, we can say the primus. Someone has to occupy the center because all attention converges on the center, so an occupant who can turn back that convergence is indispensable to social order. By the time resentful attention has all converged upon the center, it is too late, so resentful attention must be dispersed through localized centers—establishing and constraining these centers is the highest priority of the primus. This involves the differentiation of forms of attention: a craftsman’s resentment over a perceived degradation in the social status of his profession over the last generation will not readily join in a common cause with the philosopher resentful over his latest opus not receiving what he considers its due appreciation. But, of course, this means that the craftsman must be a genuine craftsman, the philosopher a genuine philosopher (the priest a real priest, the teacher a real teacher, and so on), or, more precisely, that we can measure any particular practitioner against the standard established by the tradition of that practice. In that case, there is a kind of equality among craftsman and aspiring craftsman, which is enforced within the discipline and sanctioned by the primus, who insists that the standards of craftsmanship be maintained, and a kind of equality amongst the various orders insofar as all have constraints imposed by the primus. There is a lot of what we could call “equality” here, but they are different forms of equality incommensurable to each other. Resentment can never converge toward a single target, like the rich/white/straight/cis/male who is the virtual and permanent antithesis of equality. A non-sovereign center would restore a “middle,” not of social status and estates (at least not necessarily—I don’t mean to exclude anything) but of diverse modes of deferral and discipline.

But how can the primus assess the effectiveness of his constraints? The weakness in the order I am describing is that the primus is dependent upon the primus among craftsmen, the primus among academics, the primus among scientists, and so on, and the equality provided by the standards of each practice or discipline can just as readily be used to set in motion the process of uncovering inequalities as demands for equality within a liberal order. Aside from the politicizing of the disciplines, if the disciplines are governed by nothing more than a top-down mode of authority, it is hard to see how the primus could prevent more commonplace forms of corruption, like cronyism, bribery and so on. And entrenched forms of power that only simulate adherence to the traditions grounding their authority must in turn attempt to influence the social primus as well.

The only solution for this problem I can think of is for the primus to have eyes and ears within every discipline and institution. These eyes and ears must be agents simultaneously loyal to the primus and to the practice of the discipline in question—“equally” loyal to both, in fact, or, better, refusing any distinction between the two loyalties. They are equal amongst themselves in relation to the primus, and participate in the form of equality constitutive of the discipline. They are normal participants in the discipline, and if the discipline and its practices proceed in accord with its own center, the object or aim that elicits the capacities the discipline is established so as to elicit, no one need know they are there, and they need never do more than issue occasional, perfunctory reports to the primus—if that.

If these agents, let’s call them “skunkworkers” in a bit of a misnomer, detect derogations in the disciplines, they first of all work within existing channels in order to remedy them. That is, they first of all leverage their own “rights” within the institution to correct its course. Having exhausted all such means, they report to the primus with suggestions regarding personnel changes and revisions of the founding constraint of the discipline. Sometimes the skunkworkers will be known as such by their co-workers; sometimes they will be undercover—different situations call for different approaches. Sometimes the skunkworkers’ proposals will be rejected by the primus; sometimes the primus will see the skunkworker as the source of the problem, and someone so relied upon must be severely punished in that case (sometimes the primus will be wrong, sometimes the skunkworker will genuinely fail, or even “go bad”). The skunkworker accepts this risk as part of his higher form of loyalty.

The skunkworkers would set the moral tone of the social order: they are the bearers of the moral center informing, but not conflicting with or presuming to judge, the social center occupied by the primus. Everyone would wonder whether this or that co-worker were or might be a skunkworker—like any form of social control, this might sometimes be frightening, but the fear of being accused wrongly by a skunkworker would be proportional to a broader breakdown in social and moral order. The only solution would be for the primus to recruit new skunkworkers, perhaps to spy on the existing ones or, in the most extreme cases, for the skunkworkers who remain committed to disciplinary excellence to shift their allegiance to a new primus. If order is well-maintained, the skunkworkers whill be admired and imitated, and everyone would aspire to be a kind of apprentice skunkworker. And that, indeed, is how skunkworkers would be selected in the first place.

The skunkworker is also the form taken by the continuity between our present order and a future one governed by the articulation of primus and skunkworker. What the skunkworker does is what we can all do, in whatever discipline or institution we are placed: we can all represent the originary structure of the discipline and expose distortions and corruptions, even if there’s not really anyone to expose them to. The exposure must be expected to create the audience for it. In doing so, we assume, on the one hand, maximal continuity between the present order, no matter how bad things may be, and a genuine centered ordinality—we operate under the assumption that all that’s really necessary is for everyone to clarify the terms of the disciplines, and that such clarification is a simple matter given than those terms are immanent in the discipline itself, once all extrinsic considerations (power, prestige, wealth, etc.) are “controlled for.” We also assume, on the other hand, that we are perpetually dissolving concentrations of resentment towards the center, simply by proposing new disciplinary practices and the incorporation of currently undisciplined practices within disciplinary ones. All people need is a compelling center, and all people need that, and so we counter all attempts at equalization by contributing to the construction of a center that would render such skirmishes irrelevant. Rather than erecting one center after another (whether political, intellectual or spiritual) to control the going astray of the previous center, we have the center of last resort (the primus) and the delegated powers of deferral that, all together, are “equal” in their actual composition of the power of the primus.

It’s not long in any dispute before one side or another enlists the rules on his side: logical rules, rules of evidence, a theoretical method, rules of fair play, rules of the particular discursive space or discipline, precedent, etc. The disagreement gets to the point, that is, where you realize that there must be something you agree on in order for the disagreement to make any sense; but the hope is that you can invoke the rules in order to have yourself declared, by some putatively impartial and sovereign agency, the winner. You implicitly concede power to decide the issue to an imagined logician, or arbiter, or judge, on the model of the civilized man ceasing to pursue his vendetta and allow a court of law to determine the issue. This is the right thing to do in a civilized order, but is highly destructive when applied to thinking and speaking. Even if your debating opponent can marshal superior facts and logic and refutes your claims in a way you cannot respond to, you’d really be a fool to concede and change your mind. After all, all the other person is proving is that they are better at logic, have gathered more information (or deploy it more skillfully), and have perhaps honed their arguments over the course of more such contests than you have. What it doesn’t prove is that they are right and you are wrong. It’s a good idea to be highly suspicious of anyone who thinks you should accept that it does prove this. Maybe someone who agrees with you but with greater logical and argumentative skill will make your opponent look the fool. Why not assume he’s out there?

A discussion, a conversation, a space of inquiry, has its own center and therefore its own order. Part of that order is a particular logic, a particular way of identifying, vetting and organizing “facts,” testing “truth-claims” and so on. What people within that order should want is to make the disciplinary space better, which means making everyone within the space better. Of course, it might also mean excluding people from the space and welcoming newcomers in. It may also involve, and must, if one wants a first class disciplinary space, testing the “method” against that of overlapping spaces, perhaps through staged encounters, various forms of “devil’s advocacy,” or infiltration of other spaces. But the originary structure of the space must trump any externally imposed methodological standard. (That standard ultimately derives from some other space, that constructed it for its own purposes.) The originary structure of the space is the question or problem it is concerned with that no one else is (if some other space is concerned with exactly the same question or problem, you should join forces and amalgamate—if that proves impossible, then, setting aside purely personal motivations that vitiate the space, what has been proven is that it’s not exactly the same question or problem). Abandoning a disciplinary space before all its possibilities have been exhausted, merely because its hypotheses have more apparent weight against them than for them, is the intellectual equivalent of selling your soul to the devil.

This intellectual equivalent of the imperium in imperiois the law of the declarative sentence. The law of the declarative sentence is that any declarative sentence, in order to be considered “acceptable,” must be capable of being disassembled and reassembled by other declarative sentences in a reciprocally inclusive way. So, take, for example, a sentence like “All men must obey the law.” There is an entity, “man.” This entity includes all the single entities we call “men.” There is a difference between a single being and the category to which it belongs. The single beings belong to a category because they are the same in some way. Men are the same in that they are able to obey the law. To obey means to perform an act dictated by another. The law dictates obedience to general forms of actions. Men are therefore the same in being capable of conforming to general forms of actions. This is why all men should obey the law. Etc. This could be done better, and certainly far more comprehensively—but never comprehensively enough. One would still have to establish, in declarative form, the meaning of words like “entity,” “being,” “single,” “category,” “same,” etc. No matter how far you go, it would all be perfectly circular, with everything being defined in terms of everything else. And the introduction of “facts” doesn’t change things, because the existence and significance of facts can only be established in the same way, by “grounding” general categories in other general categories and specific “observations” in general categories. “I saw a tall man yesterday” means I frame an event in terms of the categories of “I” “see,” “tall,” etc.

When someone tells you that your argument is illogical or insufficiently “supported” by “evidence,” they are telling you that something is missing in these tacitly assumed self-referential declarative chains. And no doubt there is! That doesn’t change the fact that there’s something you’re trying to figure out. Proceduralism is a fraud in the disciplinary space no less than in the sovereign order. What you’re trying to figure out may be determined externally, say by the state gathering together a group of social theorists to generate proposals for a body of law, but it still will not be the case that you have competed your inquiry once you have finished following a set of methodological rules for conducting such an inquiry. As a disciplinary space, your inquiry has either split off from another entity that has become (in the opinion of the splitters) exhausted or sidetracked, having lost sight of its originary structure; or, it has emerged to pursue a new line of inquiry opened by what might still be a quite fertile field. What sustains the space is being faithful to its origin, and if disassembling and reassembling the declarative sentences out of which the discipline is composed is going to be helpful, it will be subordinate to that imperative.

What I am here calling the “law of the declarative sentence” is what I have also been calling “metalanguage” and “metaphysics.” It is a necessary function of language, to develop ways of assessing other uses of language, but the metalanguage of literacy, which also in a way creates the declarative sentence (insofar as it identifies it as such), is what has created a maximal metalanguage arrogating to itself the right to call up for inspection any and all uses of language. It is significant that the emergence of literacy coincides with the emergence of a literate class, in service to the state, which can only come into existence with a bureaucracy, which itself requires writing (there may be marginal exceptions). The metalanguage of literacy is an intellectual or ideological bulwark to the state, while also providing the material for decentering power by appealing to transcendent models to which the sovereign must adhere. The alternative, which is possible today, is a minimal metalanguage which serves uses of language within disciplinary spaces by distinguishing between those uses that are within and those without the disciplinary space. A minimal metalanguage would be used for saying things like “that’s not what we’re talking about” because “you’re assuming an answer to a question we are still asking,” or “you’re raising a question the answer to which our current inquiry is predicated upon (if that inquiry breaks down, that might be a time to raise that question again).” The minimal metalanguage, or the declarative consultant, helps out by identifying questions which have been “begged,” and formulating those questions.

A metalanguage can be minimal because it has one absolute presupposition: that there is an origin, an origin to the disciplinary space and to the field of inquiry it opens, and therefore also an origin to everything else, and that knowledge of anything is knowledge of its origin or, to minimize disputes at this point, its originary structure. The metalanguage prods us to stay within the originary structure, and to keep marginalizing and eliminating conceptual structures that don’t derive from that structure. To say there is an origin is tantamount to saying there is a center, because the center is what constitutes the origin. Declarative social theory, which includes most if not all modern, and probably quite a bit of ancient, theory, is committed to structures without origins and centers. Such theories constitute the “ideological superstructure” of the metalanguage of literacy. But “saying” there is an origin and center is beside the point—we couldn’t say anything in the first place if there weren’t. To assume an interlocutor can understand anything I say, to assume he even knows that I’m talking to him, is to assume a shared center. And to focus on winning debates before an imagined tribunal is to eschew inquiry into that shared center while taking it for granted and identifying it with its most readily available historical instantiation. Once you have won, then what? Try and use Power for mopping up?

The equality and brotherhood of all humanity is a destructive Enlightenment myth because it serves as an indiscriminate battering ram against any form of “discrimination”; but an understanding of humanity as a potential, and yet never to be realized, disciplinary space can have only productive effects. Whatever I am paying attention to I can point out to another—not everyone all at once, certainly not everyone with equal ease, maybe not some until other things have been pointed out, but there is no need to exclude any pedagogical possibility in advance. Think about when a scientist invites a layman to look into a microscope—the first question, from the layman will be “what am I looking at?” Knowing what you are looking at without being told is being inside the discipline, but everyone at some point had to have it pointed out. This disciplinary and pedagogical process is not necessarily a peaceful one: armies at war with each other establish a kind of disciplinary space, in the explicit and tacit rules of engagement they establish and the reciprocal process of imitation and learning they engage in—the mimetic rivalry this process might evoke could easily lead to escalation. But it’s also the only way the conflict can be brought to a decisive end, one in which both sides understand that it has to end and why. The disciplinary space in which the warriors, or their most disciplined representative, participate, will ultimately reveal potential consequences that will be unacceptable to all sides, relative to any possible aim sought; and it will reveal means of de-escalation and precise trade-offs that might satisfy, to some extent, the needs and honor of both sides. By comparison, a pacifist can only utter platitudes.

“Every man should defy the law.” This counter-intuitive, paradoxical, impossible claim might be far better to think with than the more easily supported “every man should obey the law.” Maybe “the” in “the law” should be taken literally, and we’re just referring to a single law here (and, yet, what holds for one could hold for all, couldn’t it?). Maybe there are ways of defying the law without the authorities even noticing (what could “defiance” mean, in that case)—maybe the injunction is to seek out such means of defiance, and maybe doing so would reveal various gray areas between law, obedience and enforcement. Maybe once enough men have defied some law, or all law, other men will have to intervene and defy other laws in order to counter that defiance and restore balance, and the law, once again—without the possibility of making sense of “every man should defy the law,” maybe obedience to the law would be merely mechanical and mindless and, therefore, a kind of defiance itself. Opening up such disciplinary spaces within disciplinary spaces is the antidote to the compulsion to construct disciplinary empires within empires.