GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

Since it seems obvious to speak about liberalism as a derogation from a period of more secure and legitimate authority, it follows that we have had secure, absolutist rule, have somehow lost it, and must now try to get it back. But, of course, the further back you go in seeking the causes or crucial events in this derogation, the more it becomes clear that power has never been completely secure, there has never been an unqualified shared relation to the center and that even moments of good rule within teleologically articulated social orders contained the “seeds” of degeneration. One of the fascinating and instructive things about Graeber and Sahlins’s On Kings is just how varied the forms of kingship have been, and how obviously flawed each and every one of them. But what is equally evident in any historical survey is that there is always a center, and the fact that people accepted even such bizarre arrangements as some of the “divine” kingships Graeber discusses, where, for example, it may be necessary for the king to periodically carry out random massacres so that his people will know that he is alive, is if anything a demonstration of the unintelligibility of any social order without a center. Even a horrible center is better than trying to imagine its absence. In that case, we can reverse our perspective and replace any lingering nostalgia for ideal kingdoms of the past and see ourselves as participating in the single project that encompasses all of humanity, the revelation of the commands of the center. All previous relations to the center can be studied for their accomplishments and failures, and, more importantly than either, the possible terms and forms of a community’s relation to its center that each reveals.

The originary relation to the center is, of course, that of the hypothesized originary scene, in which mimetic desire generates the mimetic fear that issues in the issuing of the sign modeled on the central object’s vulnerability and power to impose restraint. We resent the center for imposing restraint, while that resentment itself enhances the center’s constraining power, as it locks our attention on it, making it the source of meaning, of augurs of life, prosperity and death. In the most radical act in human history, the Big Man acts on this resentment of the center, appropriates the center, and becomes himself the object of resentment and source of life and meaning. There are no rules regarding how this relationship is to be played out, and the resentments and counter-resentments between center and periphery, and along the periphery itself, could not be mapped out in advance. All of the rich panoply of forms of rule explored by Graeber and Sahlins can easily be analyzed in terms of a particular trajectory taken by some field of resentments around the center—they realize something like this on one level, as Graeber periodically points out how relevant Girard’s theory of scapegoating is to so many of the arrangements he studies, while, of course, keeping his anarchist hopes alive by asserting that Girard’s theory is ultimately all wrong.

Those on the periphery model themselves on the center—so, in primitive communities with a sacred, ritual center the members of the community will participate in and inhabit (or be inhabited by) the mythological figures generated out of their ritual relation to the center. When a human comes to occupy the center, the members of the community model themselves on that, and come to see themselves as potential occupants of the, or, and this is crucial, somecenter. This is what the “individual” is: a center, and a possible center. To be an individual is to imagine vectors of attention directed toward oneself, and to imagine oneself arranging those vectors, drawing in some, deflecting others. The Axial Age acquisitions, which exposed the incompatibility of mass sacrifice with civilized order, aim at spreading centrality throughout the social order. Everyone must see him or herself as a center, and so everyone must be enabled to do so in a way that preserves a social and moral center. We can say that liberal and romantic forms of individuality were attempts to do this; we can also say they were disastrous attempts, because they set the individual against the social center, as if the individual could only stand out against the norm, thereby creating a social order predicated upon reciprocally hostile and centripetal centers. But the romantic individual, as Gans shows through his studies of romanticism, especially through the figure of Rousseau, is also trying to imitate Jesus, by displaying in his own person the universal hostility a universal benevolence toward all humankind inevitably brings upon one. The problem with the romantic individual is really that he wants to monopolize this attention, to exploit it politically and on the market. The moral use of attention centered upon the self is to display the possibilities for converting resentment into love, in which case one may accept, deflect, or reverse the slings and arrows, but in any case will do so in such a way that the one slinging and shooting sees and displays, if not the arbitrariness, at least the over-determination of his show of resentment. In this way, one converts one’s centrality into a moral and esthetic sign precisely by making space for other centers.

The more individuals turn themselves into such moral and esthetic signs, the more aligned they will be with the social center, and the entire system of “works” that ultimately signify that center. One thing that really enrages the liberal and especially romantic individual is the fact that an entire world consisting of institutions and technological imperatives pre-exist the individual and are essentially indifferent to his existence. This massive reality diminishes even the fantasy of killing and replacing the king, because it would all still be in place; and, if one intensifies one’s fantasy so as to demolish it all, what would be the point of being king? Part of the purpose of building up that imperative order is to ensure, in a world of spreading centrality, that the social center is clearly distinct from any individual one. The resentment toward the humanized center is thereby transformed into resentment toward the dehumanized or reified apparatuses supporting that center. This resentment is more easily converted into love, because it provides for a wealth of positions of responsibility tending to the apparatus. You can resent the one who got promoted over you, you can resent the boss who keeps screwing everything up, you can resent the fact that your sector of the economy is neglected despite the evident importance of the work done there, but all these resentments are made intelligible and acceptable insofar as they are framed as attempts to improve the system. Your resentment may be overwhelming your concern for clarifying the center, which is to say you might be wrong in your criticism, but you must, to maintain the level of centrality to which you have become accustomed, stand ready to be corrected in those criticisms (which means being willing to accept the centrality of others). A well ordered system would encourage these developments, while cutting off recourse to more desperate attempts to assert centrality, through attention grabbing acts of violence, for example.

Now, I would like to use this more expanded analysis of centrality, or centered ordinality, than I have yet given, to solve another problem I have been working on in these posts. That is the problem of the (meta)linguistic boundary, the boundary between using language and directing attention to the use of language. I am hypothesizing that the specific kind of metalanguage that emerged through writing, as a part of the emergence of “classic prose” as the ideal form of discourse, is the source of the “metaphysics” that pretty much all post-medieval thinkers have been trying to dismantle, and for good reason—regardless of how aware any of these thinkers may have been to this dimension of the problem, “metaphysics,” or the assumption of the primacy of the declarative sentence, represents a permanent imperium in imperiothat irremediably hinders attempts to construct centered orders. The power of metaphysics lies in the assumption that certain truths stand outside of the centered order, and can therefore be used as a standard to judge any such order. This shifts sovereignty from the occupant of the social center to whoever makes the most compelling claim to represent the superior metaphysical order, whether that order is called “God’s will,” “human nature,” the “laws of nature,” the “laws of the market,” or anything else. So, the problem, in equal parts moral, political and spiritual, is to have a way of commenting on uses of language that feeds back into the centered order, that clarifies the center itself, and draws out its commands, rather than setting up an external standard.

The way I have framed the question is in terms of the metalinguistic dimension of natural semantic primes like “think,” “want,” “know,” “say,” “good” and so on. These words seem exclusively words used to refer directly to things in the world, in particular, human activity. “Consider,” for example, is metalinguistic because it tells us about how someone is “thinking,” and is therefore an implicit commentary on the use of “think.” The metaphysical reading of such words is to posit an essential reality in which they represent an internal or transcendent quality or activity of which the word is a secondary reflection—but this is just a case of commentary or “mention” overriding use, which in the case of all these words is far more variegated than any essence posited could suggest. But the simplest way of eliciting the metalinguistic dimension of any word or, more precisely, any utterance, is by deploying it as a comment on a previous use of language. When one person responds to something said by another, the metalinguistic element of the reply lies in the way that response singles out, accentuates, draws attention to, some elements of the previous utterance rather than others.

Left at that, we could see this as an endless sequence of responses which, for no discernable reason, highlight some feature or another of the previous utterance. But it’s not left at this, because any response is seeking to maintain linguistic presence, and that will determine the nature of the response and the commentary on the previous utterance. And the way to maintain linguistic presence is by showing the previous utterance in its relation to the center, or some center, a center to which the new utterance also claims some relation. On the originary scene, whoever first emitted the sign couldn’t have quite known what he was doing until others iterated (responded to and commented on) his sign; even more, his own sign could not have been anything more than a more formalized version of another’s more instinctive hesitation—the non-instinctive hesitation is a “reading” of the instinctive variety in relation to a shared center. So, when I respond to another’s utterance, I see them in a relation to the center, which I can share, while in seeing them (while they don’t see themselves), I attend to something new in that relation to center, making that my relation to it. We develop abstract concepts around which disciplinary spaces can be constructed in this way by putting some words to a specialized use, for the purposes of that disciplinary space, in drawing attention to uses of language in relation to a particular center.

So, the primarily “useful” primes become metalinguistic, or their metalinguistic dimension is elicited, when we think about thinking, or want to want, or know about knowing, or say things about the things we say. We can, in each utterance we hear, imagine or hypothesize what that utterance is responding to, how the words it is using, the way it is piecing together chunks of language, are themselves implicitly commenting on another utterance. Here we can conduct all kinds of thought experiments, in which we imagine two or more utterances identical in every way but one (perhaps some subtle difference in tone or context), and that difference would comprise the point of creation of the shared center in which the utterances participate. All of our disciplines, even those in the physical sciences, operate this way, because they are all predicated upon revising existing hypotheses and the paradigms enabling them. We can be aware that this is all we are doing, and that this is quite enough. The center wants us to enter some proximate field of utterances and generate a new shared center, one that reveals something not yet visible in the center enabling the utterance. The shared project of ordering our centers therefore has its linguistic grounding, which means its grounding in meaning, and in thinking and knowing—a grounding with no ground other than the inquiry into the center itself.

When we speak about the absolutism of central power, the point is less that whatever the occupant of the center says goes (so that if something he says doesn’t go he must have said the wrong thing, but in that case was he really occupying the center?) than that no one can imagine anything happening without reference to the center. If I want to do something, I imagine the conditions under which the central power will allow or support it—if I think in terms of how I can do it by evading central power, I am still thinking of the center as a general constraint that must structure my thinking. If I want to bring about some social change, whatever form of cooperation with others I hope to organize, I ultimately assume the change must be channeled through the center, even if that means changing its occupant or even trying to occupy it myself. The center as referent and constraint on meaning is implicit in all of our uses of language—if the role of the center in a particular instance is not obvious, it is necessary to invent it. The centered nature of reality is what provides us with the general imperative to support a centered ordinality, which is to say an order in which the articulation of power from the center through the ranks it establishes is rendered transparent and consistent.

There has to be a center because humanity is constituted through joint attention, and attention must be attention toward something, and if attention is joint that something must be at the convergence of the respective lines of vision of the attenders. The only way this object of attention can be held in place is if it is desired by all of those attending upon it, and the only way it can be desired rather than appropriated is if its appropriation is proscribed; and the only way its appropriation can be proscribed is if the participants on the scene constitute this proscription by offering signs to each other that they will suspend any attempt to appropriate the object. The source of the sign(s) offered must be a reversal of the movement towards the object, and this reversal must result from the fear of violence produced by this novel, collective, unconstrained rush toward the object. Now, up until this point in our reconstruction of the originary event, there is in principle nothing that the participants on the scene couldn’t talk about and arrange deliberately among ourselves. That is, so far, there would be some justification in seeing the originary scene as a kind of social contract, if we were to set aside the problem of there not being any language in which the terms of the contract could be set. But we have left out one thing: precisely because there is no language within which a “negotiation” could take place, the injunction against appropriating the object can only come from the central object itself.

Now, one could take the atheist position and say that imagining the central object ordering everyone to stand down is a mere “illusion,” generated by the unspoken balancing of the “odds” and projection of motivations onto each other by the participants on the scene. Maybe one could map it out and mathematize it. But it’s an illusion that returns each time we use language and “understand” each other—the atheist can rationalize the scene in retrospect in terms of a parallelogram of forces, but he couldn’t show us how its participants could have done it then; he can also imagine that he’s rationalizing the world scene on which he acts today, but unless we make the completely  irrational assumption that everyone is rationalizing equally and simultaneously such rationalization is really just an attempt to marshal, or imagine marshaling, all of the scientific and technological capacities bound up with the very possibility of rationalizing in the attempt to destroy by force the “problem” of human meaning.

An illusion which cannot be filtered out of “reality” is not really an illusion—it is what Hannah Arendt called a “necessary appearance,” or what we could call an “imaginary.” In this case, a central imaginary—that is what we can’t think or speak without. All of culture is human beings placing things at the center, which is indistinguishable from being told what to place at the center by the center, and charting and narrating the movements of whatever is at the center. As I suggested in the previous post, we are always trying to get word from the center, no less when we generate complex genetic and psychological typologies than when we consult with demons and spirits. There is a continuity between magic and science and technology, as evidenced by the fact that the vanguard of each new scientific revolution accuses its predecessors of some variant or residue of “magical” or “mythological” thinking. This progressive relation to the center is what I have been calling “imperative culture,” or the “imperative order,” or “imperativity.” The center issues commands, commands with their origins in the injunction to suspend appropriation of the object on the originary scene; the participants on any cultural scene make requests of the center. These requests are often refused, and when that happens new cultural forms must be created: the request may have been refused because it was made improperly, which means that the center orders more formalized and supervised forms of petition; it may have been refused because the one making it was not worthy of having it granted, meaning that the center orders new modes of self-examination and purification—these are the ways in which resentment at the center’s refusals are made productive. The relation to the center is in this way refined, and the means of yet further refinement created.

It is not surprising that once human beings, that is, kings, start occupying the center, a similar process of trial and error would be required—in fact, not only have we, or, more precisely, no political leadership, yet completely solved this problem, we could see the centuries of liberal usurpations of the center as both another attempted solution and a hysterical avoidance of the problem itself. The more we see the incoherence of liberalism, the more problematic and interesting the modern order becomes, because the modern order has obviously seen scientific, intellectual and technological accomplishments that any post-liberal order would preserve, albeit in some revised manner. So, has the industrialization and post-industrialization, the massive wealth creation, of the West, and much of the rest of the world in its wake, been accomplished because of liberalism—in which case do we have to accept liberalism along with the technology and wealth, or reject both (and in that latter case, how, exactly)?; are the material developments in spite of liberalism, in which case we can just junk the liberalism and move on to a rational and beneficial harvesting of our growing powers (this seems a little too convenient); are these developments side effects of liberalism, partly rooted in, partly separate from, that political order (in which case a perhaps more complex surgical operation, which might transform the “patient” in unpredictable ways, might be needed)? All of these ways of framing the question, in the very positing of a “we,” are implicated in magical and mythological thinking, direct translations of our hopes and fears into requests of the center.

In sacred kingship, the king is the mediator between the community and the supernatural world, or the world created at the origin. He has to resolve the paradox of the center, that it both precedes “us” and is the depository of our desires and resentments. The sacred king is responsible for all aspects of the well-being of the community—he brings rain, he ensures adequate food supplies, protects against natural disasters, and so on. This means that these are all things we expect from the center. (The fact that we can still look out the window and say “oh, no, not rain again!” means that we still expect these things.) It makes sense to assume that sacred kings would have done what they could to supply what they could, and to turn their failures back onto the community. Furthermore, they would elevate their role from mediator to arbiter, if possible, creating the distinction (made by David Graeber) between “sacred” and “divine” kings: the divine kings “make themselves the equivalents of gods—arbitrary, all-powerful beings beyond human morality—through the use of arbitrary violence.” Graeber sees sacred kingship as a way of controlling for the effects of divine kingship, but there is no contradiction in noting that divine kingship would offer a way of transcending the limitations and dangers of sacred kingship.

Violence against humans and violence against the natural world and everything in it are of a piece—it is only fairly recently that the distinction between the two could even be made. The readiest solution to sacred kingship is, then, divine violence. The imperatives issued by those on the human side of the imperative order start to become more imperious: people can start to say to “gods” and “natural” beings, “do this!” And watching very closely to see whether they obey. And, further, watching very closely for what the audience seems to accept as “obedience”—or, more precisely, what the audience can be induced or made to accept. Andrew Bartlett, an orginary thinker of the GA school (see also his Mad Scientist, Impossible Human) locates the origins of science on the originary scene in the possibility of handling one part of the originary object as a part separate from the whole, and that is what happens in the growing autonomy of the imperative order:  imperatives need no longer be issued to the center itself, but to its “messengers” and “agents.” The specialization of a few members of the community in the acquisition of such knowledge is the beginning of the disciplines, and the delegation of such powers by the king is the beginning of imperial kingship. This is the road towards the struggle for sovereignty.

So, there is a dialect between the center through which violence must ultimately circulate and the disciplines, which give, revise, and suggest compound “meanings” granted to anything and everything in the world (everything that has been loosened from sacred kingship). Technology itself, as I think Heidegger was suggesting, is itself a way of conferring upon or summoning forth meaning from nature and human capacities. For those of us in the disciplines, who if anything want even less than the pittance of power allotted us in liberal democracies that means engaging in the kinds of disputes that can only be settled by resetting attention to a lower threshold. When we think or speak we are always on a scene, or a possible scene—but all scenes are really only possible ones. None of us has created the language we use, and even if we speak to ourselves, the self we speak to is not identical to the one who listens—but it’s also very easy to forget this, since the most readily available means of assertion (I think, I believe, I am sure, etc.) give credit to the assumption that we are each of the original source of what we say.

There is no “world scene,” which is an Enlightenment fantasy, but it is possible to see all of us—“we” language users—as embarked, in all our overlapping and spread out disciplinary spaces, on a collaborative project to refine further our instructions from the center. The architecture of each discipline is a construction of a meaningful “piece” or “dimension” of reality—we undertake the construction by seeking out the failed imperatives we have issued to the center of our space, and replacing them with ones whose meaning we can now test. Imagining goals, causes and regularities, and then finding ways to test their viability is the process of participating in the disciplines. One thing that centralizing power does is widen the scope of possible disciplinary inquiries—centralizing power mobilizes collective forms of action, and demands and receives new forms of material force, and therefore provides new areas of inquiry for students of those activities and of power itself. It may very well be, then, that a form of power like liberalism, which is simultaneously centralizing and centripetal, would give a huge impetus to various disciplinary inquiries; and it is also not surprising that those inquiries vary widely in quality and sustainability. Liberalism is a kind of weird, swirling sprawl that sucks everything towards an abyss at the center. But anywhere within that sprawl one can try and slow things, redirect attention, and look at some failed pleas to the center that haven’t even been noticed as such.

All discourse is the representation of imperative exchanges in declarative, ultimately narrative and paradoxical, form. Myths explain rituals, but they’re not the cause of the ritual—the cause of the ritual is the recreation of the scene to make the central being present, and revisions of ritual are responses to some failure of the central being to appear. The new ritual changes the request, the question and the conditions of the answer: if we do this the being will appear, and the appearance of the being will take this form. Ultimately, if the appearance of the being is evidenced in the petitioner’s ability to find that presence in his own ability to defer some desire, we have reached the point of minimal ritual—ritual as continuous inspections of increasingly refined habits. This can then take the form of a narrative of some kind of intellectual and psychological self-transformation. Disciplinary spaces can arrive at the point where they essentially report on the efficacy and results of practices that maintain this minimal and continuous presence. This minimal and continuous presence is to be maintained within spaces where presence is less minimal and continuous—it is to keep working on these spaces, producing practices that with minimal input maximally increase the presence of central being. This kind of practice is what I have been examining in the last couple of posts in my proposals for the deconstruction of metalanguage, which is really a kind of mythological or magical discourse. All metalinguistic terms can be reduced to some scenic version of think, say, feel, or know, and these words can in turn be reduced to imperatives to draw new instructions from the center.

We are not free, autonomous centers of moral and intellectual activity; nor are we talking apes, whose behavior can be explained by its adaptability to evolutionary pressures, which have caused certain traits to be selected for. We are beings bound to the center: everything that we say, think or do is homage to the center. If there is a logic to history it is a very uneven one: we are all working to bring all of the centers, from the mundane references we make daily, to the authorities we obey and commands we convey to others, to the divine beings we worship, to the originary event itself, into alignment. The logic is uneven because it follows the path of the linguistic presence that is constantly threatened and constantly retrieved. The first imperative was an inappropriate ostensive: someone named an object without realizing it wasn’t there, and another member of the community retrieved it, so as to “make good” on the sign. A new form is thereby created. We can assume all cultural creation proceeds this way, a little bit sideways as one is sent astray by a mistake, and then forward as a new iterable form is produced. The ostensive sign is transformed by the introduction of the imperative, both projectively and retroactively: the ostensive sign, from then on, not only creates linguistic presence in the actual presence of some object, but is the source of new imperatives; meanwhile, the interdiction on the originary scene on appropriation of the central object can now be seen as having an “imperatival” quality to it. This also involves some abstraction from the originary object and scene: the central locus, which subsists beyond the consumption of the object, is somewhat less bound to the form of that object. It now receives imperatives along with issuing them, and is therefore increasingly defined by this dialogue with the community, what I have been calling an “imperative exchange.”

The question, as always, is what is the center telling us to do? Answering that question was once the shaman’s job, then the prophet’s, but the academics and intellectuals who have succeeded them are far less credible (there always seemed to be more false prophets than true, anyway). A very interesting essay by Marshall Sahlins, “The Original Political Society” (in the new book he co-edited with David Graeber, On Kings) challenges the notion of the egalitarian primitive community. Such communities were (and are), in fact, extremely hierarchical—it’s just that the hierarchy includes lots of non-human actors. Ancestors, animals, various gods and spirits (“metapersons”) all play roles in governing the community, and they do so in an extremely domineering and terrifying way. Sahlins sees himself as disproving Durkheim’s claim that the supernatural figures that populate the collective imagination of primitive peoples are “merely” projections of and means of consolidating the actual social relations within the group. He makes the point that the metapersonal governing “elites” in these communities have far more complex structures than the communities themselves, and include lots of positions and rules that have no equivalents within the community itself. I’m not sure this really proves what Sahlins claims (there’s no reason an interpretation or projection of social relations couldn’t be more complex than a straightforward description of them would be), but it provides a very good example of what we might consider the axiom of the sufficient center: human societies will discover/invent the centers they need in order to generate the command structure necessary to control resentment. If two young men are about to fight, I might stop them by saying “your late, sainted, mother would be ashamed of you!”—insofar as I succeed in conjuring up the late mother of one of the combatants I have invoked a center capable of issuing imperatives. For a whole society, I would need lots of mothers, fathers, other relatives, forces of nature, animals from whom the group claims to have descended, and so on, to impose the necessary measure of shame.

The sainted mother, then, who is “ventriloquized” by the peacemaker, represents a center (she serves to redirect attention, leading to the deferral of violence); and she does so by in turn referencing previous centers, which can also be invoked, if the need grows greater. (She was a stalwart at Church, she had sainted grandparents herself.) So, what the center says to us, what it commands, depends upon what kind of violence needs to be deferred in the present, and what kind of inherited resources are available (do we have a God who said, “Blessed are the Peacemakers”?). But discovering what the center wants is easier in an emergency situation (even if compliance requires more courage); finding ways to channel it for the sake of serious thinking, in the midst of complex situations that nevertheless require decision after decision to be made on schedule, is something else. It becomes an epistemological question. An epistemological question must frame an imperative, leading to an ostensive: do this in order to see that. The relation between language and metalanguage, which I have been working with in recent posts, can be put to epistemological use. I have been focusing on writing as a metalanguage, the first fully explicit metalanguage, as in representing speech writing must inquire into what, exactly, constitutes speech. But, just as David Olson points out that the features of language revealed by metalanguage were already part of language, the possibility of metalanguage must also have been internal to language, which means that something like the language/metalanguage distinction goes back to the origin of language. The repetition of the first sign issued was a commentary on that sign, selecting and singling out certain features as opposed to others. This is simply a reminder that language is self-reflexive and recursive, which is part of its paradoxical nature. The language/metalanguage distinction and relation is one particularly important instance of the differential repetition constitutive of language.

Only in the fully developed metalanguage that Olson identifies with the assessment of prose (which he, in turn finds most characteristically exemplified in “classic prose,” which seeks to reproduce the scene which the writer purports to witness), though, could we grasp the epistemological implications of metalinguistic awareness. Metalinguistic terms, for Olson, tell us nothing about the practices involved in producing the text; I’ve been treating that observation as implying that canonical metalinguistic terms are unable to generate operable imperatives. Perhaps the most widely used metalinguistic term for referring to writing is “clarity.” Writing (and, then, speaking) can be clear or unclear. This makes perfect sense on the terms of classic prose, which aims at providing an unobstructed view of a scene, reduced to its essentials. The addition of details which don’t help make the scene one upon which everyone would presumably see the same thing reduces the clarity of the writing, speaking or thinking; likewise with the absence of details required to make the scene a “complete” one. If we read enough prose, we know what we think is clear or unclear—no matter how certain we are of our own judgment, though, telling someone to “be clearer” is perfectly useless. He thought he was being clear. Now, if you tell someone that he has to give us more information about a particular figure in his narrative because otherwise we can’t know why he acts as he does at a certain point, that could be turned into an imperative, although still a limited one: what, exactly, needs to be known? You could tell him, but then you usurp the position of writer. In other words, the imperative that follows from even a more specific observation is still something like “read my mind.” You’re simply telling someone to assimilate you as a model, but without already being you, how is that supposed to work? This kind of empty or meaningless metalanguage silences the center, putting established models and their guardians in its place.

What I suggested instead is the imperative to distinguish metalanguage from language in one’s discourse. You can always do this, and you can always do more of it because you keep generating the distinction. And it’s always productive, because you can always bring out more implicit features of your thinking, which is certainly one of the primary activities “thinking” refers to. Now, metalanguage in Olson’s sense is anything that tells you, implicitly or explicitly, how to imagine or judge a representation of events whose meaning would have been unequivocal had you been on the scene reproduced by the prose. All of those words that are essentially more specialized versions of “think,” “say” or “know” (“consider,” “examine,” “explain,” “imply,” “conclude,” “extrapolate,” and dozens if not hundreds of others) are metalinguistic. In the more expanded version I’m proposing, I’d like to push the line all the way back, to the semantic primes themselves: think, say, know, want, and so on. The metaphysical view of these terms, derived from the metalinguistic inquiry into the declarative sentence, is that there is something in us, an activity, that, once we identify and study it, we can call “thinking,” knowing,” or “wanting.” In other words, we just apply the name to something already there. There’s something there, of course, insofar as we repeat and vary phrases and sentences to ourselves, and that activity issues in things that we say, but to assume that we have a word, “think,” and that therefore there must be something inside us that “thinking” refers to, and so we can isolate, define, study and improve that activity is to create a false problem—a problem, moreover, created by the metaphysical assumption that the declarative is the primary linguistic form. “Think” is a word that is used in a lot of different ways, many of which have nothing to do with any reference to a mental activity occurring somewhere “in” us. If I ask someone, “what do you think of that?,” I’m not asking him to articulate the cognitive processes at work in his mind when he is confronted with “that.”

So, if “think” is, not so much metalanguage, as possessed of a metalinguistic dimension, in what, exactly, does that consist? First of all, it consists in the limits of using “think” as an imperative. You can tell someone to think in general, or to think about something; you can’t command someone to think specific thoughts, though. If he thought the thoughts you told him to think he wouldn’t really be thinking them. So, when we say someone is thinking we are saying we would expect him to say something different than anyone else would. When I ask someone what he thinks of something, I’m asking him to say something only he would say about it. So, when I speak about thinking, I’m really thinking about speaking. And I’m not thinking about knowing, because if we all know something, we would all say the same thing. But there is something happening when someone is asked to say something only he could say that we don’t have words for, even though it’s undoubtedly taking place in language. So, “think” is metalinguistic insofar as it refers to and assesses that process (if I ask someone what they think about something and they say exactly the same thing as someone else I’ll be disappointed—I might tell him he’s not really thinking) but without providing an operable imperative for advancing it. The way, then, of displaying the distinction or boundary between language and metalanguage in thinking, then, is to refer to some of that silent playing and working with received chunks of language that made it possible to say what only you would say, and to mention the word “think” as part and also not part of that process. Asking someone to think is asking them to be a center that iterates the originary center, and one can ask oneself to think and thereby let the center speak through you.

The discourse of the center must work its way through one, some, or all of us—someone has to speak for the center. Anyone can ask the center for something, and as soon as you do, you intuit that the center must require something from you in exchange. Help me pass this exam, God, and I promise I’ll never go out drinking the day before an exam again. If you convert this relationship into declarative form, there’s a problem: “God helps unprepared exam takers pass on the condition that they prepare themselves in the future.” The problem is, that if we present this as a statement that is true every time we say it, the preparation would never have to take place, and so it can’t be true. The declarative includes both real presents, the exam-taker’s future preparation and God’s bountiful act now in the same linguistic (which is to say, “portable”) present, in which case they have to coincide “logically,” and they can’t be made to do so without paradoxical remainder. The statement is logical in general but illogical for any individual case because the subsequent preparation could be endlessly deferred—that is, the statement would generate imperatives (don’t prepare) that cancel the ostensive base of the imperative (God helps). The imperative of declarative construction is to bring ostensives and imperatives into alignment: imperatives are issued by some ostensive, and lead us back to one. The declarative constructs a scene upon which we observe some entity in a relation to some center (approaching it, retreating, violating it, protecting it from another…), and scenic rules apply, so two incommensurable relations to the center cannot be envisioned simultaneously. (Of course, a sentence like “God helps those who don’t help themselves” could be uttered as an absurdist or caustic riposte to the commonplace, but it then makes sense as a comment on that commonplace, which is to say it shifts our attention to a different possible scene, one peopled by those overly familiar with “God helps those who help themselves.”)

It’s possible to construct a declarative version of the imperative exchange that squelches the dialogue with the center, by either taking God out of it or reducing God to a metalinguistic verification of “sincerity” or synonym for “reality”—something like “if I prepare for exams I will pass them,” or “God wants me to prepare for exams,” or “if I prepare, God will make sure I pass”—that’s what we’d end with if the exam-taker’s promise is kept and no further imperative exchanges on this topic are necessary. If this individual prepares for and succeeds on all future exams, and exam-like tasks, he may very forget the imperative exchange that made it all possible, and in that case he is no longer listening to the center. But there will be more “tests” and various conditions of “unreadiness” for them, and unless I lock myself into the pretense that I am perpetually prepared I will have to keep asking the center to advance me some capacity that will supplement my unreadiness. Passing one test makes the next one more consequential, its contours less discernable, and the reward less calculable. This process proceeds through repeated apparently failed imperative exchanges, and a series of revisions of declarative versions making a “present” out of the terms of the imperative exchange. If I keep returning to and abstracting from the center, I head towards the creation of requests to the center that are simultaneously their own answers. We will still hear the center imperfectly after all this, even if we all help each other extract the most enduring declarative forms by serving as centers for one another. But we can keep refining our power to hearken and heed.

http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap2302/2302katz/

The word “cant” has two meanings, which are distinct but have an important area of overlap: on the one hand, “hypocritical and sanctimonious talk, typically of a moral, religious, or political nature”; on the other hand, “denoting a phrase or catchword temporarily current or in fashion.” One can be hypocritical without being fashionable, and vice versa, but being fashionably sanctimonious and sanctimoniously fashionable involves occupying a specifically liberal linguistic zone. Fluently employing the latest argot, imposed and enforced by an elite, becomes the marker of morality. “Cant” is a particular form of metalanguage. Metalanguage turns language itself into an object of inquiry, even on the most basic level: children learning the alphabet are studying language. Once we have metalanguage, pointing to the uses of language becomes a normal part of language use. The boundary between language and metalanguage then becomes one more of different uses than of separable regions of language. So, there’s no sense in which language is more real than metalanguage; and metalanguage is just as much a use of language as any other: it directs attention to uses of language, while language directs our attention to the centered world, but language is itself part of the centered world. Metalanguage is the pedagogical dimension within language, which means that the primary sin of metalanguage is assessing uses of language without issuing operable imperatives: assessments of the language use of others devoid of operable imperatives is the way I would define “cant.”

The most useless imperative is one that tells you to do what you already thought you were doing, like your writing teacher or editor making the marginal note “be clear!” or “unclear!” on your text. Presumably, you thought you were being clear, so what we have here is the case of an imperative masking a declarative: “be clear!” really means “I’m the kind of person who knows what clarity entails, and you’re not.” It seems to me that a great deal of the language we use in discussing writing and thinking falls into this category: attributing “richness,” “insight into human nature,” “a deep exploration of emotional life,” etc., to a novel, for example, are all, for the most part meaningless, i.e., cant—think about what it would mean to command someone to “improve your insight into human nature.” This is just way of saying that the labels we apply to the novels we approve of we refuse to apply to this novel. Any use of the word “deep” will fall into this category (“go deeper!”). Another excellent example is “critical,” which is very popular these days, especially in the form of “critical thinking.” David Olson claims that the more advanced literacy enabled by the metalanguage surrounding “classic prose” allows its possessors to “think critically,” but he doesn’t seem to consider that this just applies one term within the metalanguage to other terms.

“Critical” at least has a real philosophical genealogy, going back, of course, to Kant’s Critiques, and then working its way through Marx to the Frankfurt School. But while I’m certainly not going to try and make this argument here (or, most likely, anywhere else), I will still suggest that maybe Kant and the others are not doing much more than expanding the possible uses of the metalanguage built into literacy. Philosophy, or metaphysics, which, as Gans has pointed out, takes the declarative sentence as the primary or prototypical form of language, is metalanguage on metalanguage. But philosophy can also involve awareness of this. Whenever you use one concept, you use a word within a particular system of words, and that concept therefore depends upon all the other concepts (words) within that system; and, for that matter, within other systems as well. When you use a concept, all this is not present in your mind, so it’s easy to fall into the illusion that in using the word you are simply referring directly to something out there in the world. The “critical” standpoint is there to remind you that it can only refer indirectly to something out there in the world.

But it’s still futile to urge a “critical” attitude upon someone, to tell someone to “be more critical,” either in general or towards something in particular. These are really just ways of calling someone stupid, or telling them to shut up and listen to you. “Being critical” requires that one be part of a disciplinary space that takes as its center of attention the “foundational” concepts of another discipline—and this is possible because anomalies in the various uses of those concepts have already become evident. As a metalanguage attached to a form of literacy, it is meaningless. Which is to say, it is cant. So, what wouldn’t be cant? Metalanguage that issues operable imperatives—imperatives whose successful completion could be “authenticated” by anyone familiar with the imperative itself. These would be imperatives whose completion would be as easy to judge as an imperative like “pass the salt.” If the salt makes its way from the person asked to pass it to the person making the request, imperative accomplished! If we think about metalinguistic imperatives in a pedagogical context, such a “meaningful” imperative might be something like “identify all of the words in this text that refer to something in the world and all the words that refer to something in the text itself.” This would be asking students to distinguish between linguistic and metalinguistic elements in the text. The assignment would surface differing tacit assumptions regarding the significance of the elements of the text, but it would be situated within a shared ostensive field in which we could keep lowering the threshold at which phenomena can be attended to. And the student would gain far more from this seemingly simple and basic assignment than from the best-intentioned request to read “critically,” or “logically,” or “deeply,” or “carefully,” or with an eye to “themes,” images,” “evidence,” “characters,” etc. Once we direct our attention to the uses of language and metalanguage the ground of all inquiry in the “human sciences” shifts. The culling of cant follows from this shift.

Culling cant means distinguishing between meaningful and meaningless metalanguages. Meaningful metalanguage issues imperatives for attending to normal language use that are operable, that produce ostensive results that reset attention; meaningless metalanguage issues imperatives that are nothing but double-binds—they ask you to have already mastered the model that you are being measured against. The culling of cant allows us to formulate the political goals of anti-liberalism and absolutism more comprehensively: what we want is meaningful order. Meaningful order means that institutions and positions have the power and capacity to perform the functions allocated to them, and that they do so. So, when we speak of a “university,” for example, we would have a shared use of the term that corresponds to how the participants in the university see their inheritance of and obligations to that institution. This corresponds to the rendering explicit of power hierarchies, chains of command and responsibility proposed by political formalism. Meaningless metalanguage always stands ready to be used to advance political conflicts within any institution, whether it asserts that students should be turned into “critical thinkers,” or “well-rounded individuals” or guardians of civilization or masters of civic and sacred knowledge. The most meaningful metalanguage is one that keeps attending to the distinction between language and metalanguage.

Disciplines are organized on the boundary between language and metalanguage—there are many such boundaries, and therefore many disciplines. Language directs our attention to “the world,” but what this really means is that it attests to the presence of a center and the transparency of the scene constituting it. Metalanguage directs our attention to language, which is to say to the scene of language, which has in some respect become opaque, endangering linguistic presence. In this case, the imperative is a metalanguage in relation to the ostensive and the declarative a metalanguage in relation to the imperative. There’s something metalinguistic in asking someone to repeat himself because you didn’t quite get what he said, and deliberate mimicry is probably one of the oldest forms of metalanguage. So it’s not as if an expropriating metalanguage snuck up on an innocent language—language must have always lent itself to being metasized. But literacy represents a threshold because metalanguage no longer needs to share a scene with primary language, and specialists in metalanguage and the power it provides become a permanent feature of the social landscape.

So, the boundary between language and metalanguage iterates the oscillation between center and the scene on which the center is made to appear. Meaningful metalanguage engages in this oscillation without falling into either the “naivete” of forgetting about the scene or the “cynicism” of seeing the center as a fabrication of the scene. That statement itself comes close to meaningless metalanguage by advocating for an “attitude” which the advocate presumably already exemplifies—hence his qualifications for advocating for it. (“Balancing” statements—“we must neither go too far nor try too little…” tend to be the most meaningless samples of metalanguage.) But we can issue imperatives from that metalinguistic statement—the discipline is a scene with a center of attention, and what makes the discipline disciplinary is that anything you say about the object at the center is simultaneously something you say about the history of the discipline. If sociology is a genuine discipline, it is because within sociology everything someone says about “society” is simultaneously something said about the history of inquiries into society, while such inquiries are in fact part of society—even more, society itself is nothing more than inquiries into its own constitution, even when carried out by the most “naively” accepted rituals.

Similarly, to exercise power is to treat everything in the space wherein power is exercised as effects and examples of that exercise of power. To exercise power is to have one’s imperatives obeyed, which means that power as inquiry is interested in the form, effects and ramifications of imperatives. Power involves a kind of reductionism, an interest in the world only insofar as it can be treated as transformable through imperatives. Discourse on power is metalanguage inquiring into the scenes upon which power is exercised, into the scenic conditions under which imperatives will be completed or will be revealed as meaningless. Imperatives are always part of an exchange of imperatives, albeit an asymmetrical exchange: the commander commands, while the subordinates request, even implicitly in their manner of obeying, that he keep widening his view of the “extension” of the imperatives he issues into a broader field of consequences. As you think forward into a longer chain of ramifications issuing from your imperatives, you also think back to older, more originary imperatives that you have been obeying all along, and can now obey more attentively. Discourse on power shows this larger field to be implicit in even the most immediate and trivial command, imploring the commander to bring such metaconcerns into the framing of the imperatives he issues. This leaves no room for cant.

Cant is a linguistic form of imperium in imperio. So are all uses of language that don’t generate operable imperatives, which is to say, something equivalent to “look at this” or “show the difference between…” And there’s no better place to begin than the practice one is presently engaged in, which is bound to have a meaningless metalanguage ready to be circulated within the language it regulates. How clear is the demand for clarity, how critical the insistence of critical thinking? What rules is the journalist defending the rule of law following? Metalanguage purports to have its own autonomous existence, based on its system of internal references—it is fanatical about setting the rules for proper speech, and rules for proper speech are rules for acceptable representation, and rules for acceptable representation will command power to represent some nature or essence known only to initiates into the metalanguage. Asking metalanguage to represent its own distinction within language restores the center by paving the imperative-ostensive path to it. The test of a meaningful metalanguage is that it can indicate the possible sign that would necessitate the transformation of the metalanguage.