GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

The more deferral of desire leads to prestige and wealth, the more civilized the community. The result is a infinitely extendable chain of actions leading to measurable results: in the degree zero of civilization, you eat what you gather or catch, you wear what you make, you sleep where you make a bed for yourself. This immediacy of result can be individual or collective—we eat what we catch, etc. Divisions of labor are the first steps towards civilization: one group hunts, another group cooks, then all eat. The chain continues to grow: one group raises the livestock, another slaughters it, another distributes it, others cook it, etc. And we know how it ends up: with a market society, in which no one knows what anybody else is doing, how the food got on your plate, how the clothes got into the store, how the transistors got into your iphone, and so on. This process allows for larger communities and more connections between communities, both developments dependent on the suppression of violence, first of all within communities: as long as each of us is focused on no one getting a bigger piece of an item on which all have equal claim, we will all insist on being present through the entire process. Civilization implies a faith that the end result of distribution will be roughly fair, but without anyone being able to say for sure (or even being able to say for sure what “fair” means).

The continually extended chain generates two contradictory and complementary desires. The first, directly civilizing, desire, is to conceal the chain. To take an example from Norbert Elias that I have used before, if eating the food in a separate location from where it has been prepared is a civilizational advance (just as is preparing it in a different location than where it has been slaughtered), then a marker of one’s awareness of this advance would be keeping the preparation out of sight. Food preparation, and, even more, the slaughterhouse, becomes “disgusting.” There is no doubt that the civilized individual of today finds sights and smells completely unbearable that our ancestors would not have even noticed (including, for example, the myriad body odors we make sure to conceal). We can see how whole systems of manners and discourses comprised of euphemisms arise out of the civilizational hiding: in one place (say, the dinner table) you don’t do or say anything that might be a reminder of what is done in another place (the field, the workplace, the bathroom, the bedroom, etc.). Of course, this would exclude much of human life from dinner table conversation, but it does leave accounts of encounters and conversations that don’t rely on the specifics of these other settings (say, a discussion one had with a co-worker about a restaurant or movie) and, at least as important, all kinds of indirect references to the forbidden topics. The acrobatics of such indirect references, making the references in a way that distinguishes those initiated into civilization from the novice, is what makes one a “polite” and “civilized” dinner companion.” You might think this is a parody of the decadent aristocracy of the 18th century, but I think if you pay close attention to how people (at least those who are not very close friends, or people intensely engaged on a common enterprise) speak at shared meals today, you will see that the same constraints are in place.

This desire for concealment of the conditions of civilization generates the contrary desire to expose them. This counter-desire emerges from a couple of sources. First, there is the imposition of the originary moral model on the civilizational scene. Civilization is predicated upon a particularly refined model of the moral reciprocity of the originary scene, but for that very reason is destined to violate it in many respects. Somewhere in that long chain of actions that has led to the dinner being on our table is an injustice. Some underpaid farm worker picked those berries, some sweatshop worker stitched that beautiful dress, etc. That worker is “here,” but not here—it seems morally relevant, maybe even imperative, to make their presence felt. Civilizational distancing generates the appearance and certainly quite a bit of the reality of “hypocrisy”—proclaiming one’s adherence to the highest standards of moral reciprocity while relying upon practices that transduce those standards. A related imperative is to take responsibility for the results of one’s actions, a desire that motivated anti-civilizational thinkers like Thoreau, who wanted to build his own house, make his own clothes, grow his own food, simply so that he could account and be accountable for it all. Here, again, anxiety about the terms of the morality of the scene is involved: precisely as a civilized person, with an awareness of the intricate consequences of one’s actions, one wants to be able testify to those consequences.

The second, and perhaps more important desire (and infusing the moral imperatives), derives from the simple fact that what has been hidden away becomes fascinating for that very reason. Such concealment is drawn into the moral arena insofar as it is reasonable, even if wrong, to assume that things are hidden because people with an interest in doing so have hidden them, but the feeling that one is “off-center,” alienated, purposeless, anomic, precedes morality insofar as it derives from an intuition that unsettled violence lies within both the social order and the individuals it has created. In synthesizing these moral imperatives and undirected intimations of disorder, civilization creates sensationalism and sentimentalism: sensationalism being a premonition that seeing what others, presumably for no good reason, want to keep hidden, will yield some inarticulate revelation; and sentimentalism the determination to impose the narrative of the civilized individual on people living in less civilized conditions. I once saw an interview with Gayatri Spivak where she chastised global do-gooders trying to do away with child labor in the underdeveloped world by asserting that the reaction on the part of most of the child laborers themselves is “why do they want to take away my job?” Maybe Spivak was herself flouting the civilizational assumptions of her leftist academic interviewer (this used to be, at least, one of her favorite pastimes), but she had a very good point. Until very recently, children have always worked, and the very notion of childhood as a protected space of play and learning is a product of the civilized order that, it may very well be, only a period during which the productivity of entire populations is significantly increased will establish. Sentimentalizing the efforts and sufferings of people trying to get there will not do them any good. At any rate, it seems that there is a clear order here: first one sensationalizes (generates outrage) and then one sentimentalizes (persuades us that the problem has been solved and we can avert our eyes again).

Sensationalism and sentimentalism are, of course the most prominent markers of “popular culture,” and popular culture is nothing if not a mode of concealment (of the tangle of resentments and deferrals pop culture represents as battles between good and evil), bringing us full circle. Civilization is an ongoing game of hide and seek, with the same people involved in overlapping modes of exposure and concealment. Today’s campus sexual culture, at least as administratively represented, is as perfect an example as one could hope for: with the installation of “affirmative consent” (“yes means yes”) as the new criterion for determining the “legitimacy” of a sexual encounter, each physical piece of the sexual puzzle, all that would have not long ago been unspeakable in “mixed company” (where the partners touch each other, what manner of touch, in what order, etc., logically, at least, requiring the precision and detail of a porn flick or medical examination) must be explicitly stated; on the other hand, all the tacit understandings of the erotic encounter, the hints, the suggestions, the hesitations, the play—all of that must be whited out as markers of a barbaric inequality between the sexes. I think the insatiable desire for “transparency” in government is similarly complemented by a code of silence regarding the basic dispositional components of social order (could you imagine a politician today running [much less governing] on the “populist” platform of straightforwardly and unapologetically supporting law abiding citizens, with a right to be in this country, who follow moral traditions, defer gratification, work and pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits—against those who don’t fit those criteria? As recently as Ronald Reagan, that was possible—but if you listen carefully to even the most conservative politicians today, you will see that they speak a very different language, one formed so as to say as little as possible about what people actually do with their lives). We could probably establish a precise law here: for every exposure there is an equal and opposite concealment. It is the task of high culture to take us inside the civilizing process (to expose those hidden chains of action) while remembering that exposure itself is just another link in that chain, exercising its own concealments, invariably in the interest of self-exemption from the difficulties and incommensurabilities of civilization through advocacy of the moralizing simplicities of one part of it.

Civilizational hide and seek is bound up with all questions of ethics and politics. The concept of “progress” implies that we will always find more areas of barbarism and savagery hidden within civilization, that these areas must be brought into the light, which is to say sensationalized and sentimentalized so that they can be reformed on familiar terms. And “progress” is intrinsically bound up with civilization—but this also means that there is something mechanical and compulsive about our insistence on progress: rather than accept that the barbaric must civilize themselves and that the civilized can do no more than offer incentives to do so (and protect themselves and their civilization in the meantime), the civilized seem unable to refrain from remaking any instance of barbarism in their sight in their own image; which also implies they cannot refrain from seeing anything that does not conform to their own image as barbaric. (Not to digress, but the supposed “relativism” of the Left is really an absolutism towards those elements of its own society it considers “barbaric”—the Left doesn’t really care about Islam or “Muslim extremism” one way or another—it cares about exposing the barbaric belligerence and backward racism of the nearer enemy.) This is all part of the dialectic of exposure and concealment: the civilized automatically, involuntarily, recoil from the slightest barbaric blot, while also being irresistibly attracted to uncovering/projecting them so as to bury them more irretrievably. I will refrain, for now, from explaining leftist, victimary, politics in these terms, but it can very easily and extensively be done (and the emergent right-wing “counter-counter-cultural” politics found on websites like Beitbart, PJMedia and Frontpage, have also seeped themselves in sensationalism, in a tit-for-tat manner). A responsible politics of civilization, then, must resist sensationalism and sentimentalism while inevitably entering the game of hide and seek. This involves transgressing boundaries (differentiations), like, for example, between “art” and “life,” or “domestic” and “foreign” issues, but doing so in order to restore or replace those boundaries. Transgression involves exposure, bringing something that usually remains unseen into a space predicated upon its exclusion: in doing so, one obeys the imperative issuing from the moral order but also the need to refresh our ostensives (the underlying attraction of sensationalism and sentimentalism), to see new things in new ways, to replace dead signs with ones that can represent emergent resentments; restoring boundaries refrains from using the violation of moral order that has been spotted behind some wall as a battering ram to demolish other, presumably equally “hypocritical” boundaries. The restored or renewed boundary, then, must provide a way of arranging the newly revealed ostensives so as to make all those who accept that boundary more likely to detect that species of moral disorder. (But the bigger question, today, as I suggested in the previous post, is how to convince people to take up the burden of civilization in the first case. We all resent civilization because it is demanding and frustrating, and its benefits are evident only to those equipped to grasp them analytically—why not allow oneself to be overcome with those resentments and seek out those increasingly available pleasures indulgence in which disqualify you from an order in which you may not fit, and which may not even admit you?)

Once you begin retrieving the concept of “civilization” as a core concept of social thought you start to suspect that most of the theoretical discussions of civilization, and many of the more interesting ones, come from those opposed to civilization. (There are exceptions, of course, but outright defenders of civilization tend to not want to look too closely at how the sausage has been made, vitiating their analyses.) I have come across the work of the anti-civilization thinker John Zerzan. Zerzan defines “civilization” very broadly, it seems to me, including any social order above the most primitive, egalitarian, hunter-gatherer communities. He also gets at the heart of civilization in deferral of desire and the division of labor. He even considers the invention of language to be destructive, introducing the abstract, distancing, thought that makes the road to civilization possible, if not inevitable. Zerzan is uncompromising, and therefore clarifying in his attack on civilization, to the point of contending that its much to be desired demolition, and the emergence of a “future primitive,” is possible, and something worth working towards.

Civilization, for Zerzan, is alienation, inequality and violence. Each step along the way in the civilizing process involved new innovations imposed upon an enslaved majority by an expropriating minority. As for what kind of human existence preceded civilization, that can be summed up in terms of “presence” (the very experience metaphysics has sought out and imagined, artists have tried to recreate, and ordinary humans try to recapture through sex, drugs, and other time-suspending absorbing activities). Prior to civilization, there really was Eden: food was plentiful and easily obtainable, conflict was minimal, desire never needed to be deferred, time was non-existent, and each individual was thoroughly in the present moment at all times. Interestingly, Zerzan contends that the first use of language was probably to lie. He mobilizes copious anthropological evidence in what seem to me selective ways, but the more important question is whether, from an originary perspective, we have any reason to dispute his claims; and, following up on that question, would it make any difference to a civilizing politics which I would assume, in some minimal form, to be shared by all originary thinkers?

My answer to the first question is “no.” Nothing in the originary hypothesis is affected by the anti-civilization creed. The originary hypothesis assumes an increase in the mimetic proclivities of the advanced hominid that was our immediate predecessor. This corresponds with the account given by Merlin Donald in his Origins of the Modern Mind. We assume this mode of existence was ended by the originary event, but it may very well be that it was, for the most part, Edenic. With the increase in mimetic capacity and activity must have come increased conflict, but maybe the order maintained by the alpha male was fairly benign, and violence was a rare occurrence. Moreover, the very increase in mimetic activity would have cast an entirely new light on the world, made it come alive as it never had before—the desire of everyone around you multiplying your own might have given objects a kind of halo. This transitional period (of course, calling it “transitional’ already presupposes the inevitability of its demise, but on what grounds?—perhaps pre-humans lived like this for longer than we have lived as humans) might have been one best characterized by perpetual delight.

The originary hypothesis assumes an event in which the general convergence upon the central object injected a new kind of fear into the proto-human community, but it does not assume (or at least it need not) that this fear was justified. Indeed, as I have argued previously (in the post, “The Violent Imaginary”), it is hardly likely that the struggle over the central object would have led to a melee resulting in the death of most of the population. It would certainly break up well before that happened, probably with minimal injury, reinstating the rule of the alpha (I suspect Zerzan would reject the assumption of the need for an alpha—maybe in a plentiful environment there wouldn’t be much need for one). The implication would be that the originary sign was a brilliant solution to a problem that didn’t exist. The reign of earthly delights need never have come to an end (at least by the species’ own hands). If we take this analysis one step further, and consider that the sign might very well have been discovered in an even less consequential (for the group as a whole, at least) encounter by just a couple or a few members, and then brought back to and “imposed” on the rest (something which is much more obviously true with the later emergence of big and ever bigger men, and probably with monotheism and metaphysics as well), then the correspondence between the anti-civilizational argument and the originary hypothesis is complete—and without the least harm or distortion done to either. The originary hypothesis could take on the anti-civilizational argument without modification of either that argument or itself.

No obvious implications for either ethics or the theory of history follow from this. One could argue that humanity is the result of a mistake, or a long series of mistakes, without concluding that those mistakes could be corrected, or could have been (deliberately) avoided in the first place, or that the alternative pathways our species might have taken wouldn’t have consisted of more devastating mistakes or vulnerabilities. We live and think under the authority of the sign, and can’t imagine living and thinking otherwise. But we might have the memory of earthly delight inscribed in our language (language in the broadest sense, including gesture and shared feelings—issues that Rene Harrison started to raise for us at our recent conference), even if that might be a mistaken memory as well, constituted by the resentment of the central object on the originary scene. Resentment of civilization, with the deferrals and discipline it demands, would draw heavily on this originary memory, as would the apparently inextricable utopian fantasies that resentment generates. As I argued in the first of these posts on civilization, the basic principle of civilization, that deferral yields returns in increments proportionate to the deferral, is itself an article of faith that may be often or rarely true—it is hard to imagine what the “metrics” would be by which we could settle this question. It’s easy to see why someone might want to go back rather than continue to trudge forward, seeing such “trudgery” as rather MacBethean: “I am in blood/Stepped so far that, should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as to go o’er.” We arrive at an incommensurability here: any argument I might make for “going o’er” would only be convincing for someone already steeped in the hope of receiving the bounty of civilization—some who finds returning to be less tedious will consider such hopes to be nothing more than an ideological scam, meant to keep the masses slaving away. We could say going back is unrealistic, but that is becoming the weakest of arguments—who among us could with any confidence predict the shape of the world 50 years from today? We don’t know what’s “realistic” and what’s not. Those who would like to go back think our current civilization is unsustainable—I couldn’t, in good faith, try to refute them.

There is an anarcho-primitivist politics, and it is global. It overlaps with the left, and with victimary politics, but is irreducible to it. It is probably more intransigent than the victimary, which operates exclusively on civilized terrain (and would make no sense otherwise), while also capable of doing less harm at the moment. It is probably evident from my discussion that I am far more sympathetic to anarcho-primitivism than I am to the vindictive bio-politics of the victimary (anarcho-primitivists would presumably consider me, a civilized drone trudging along, as much a victim as anyone else), even though I am well aware that the former is capable of violent outbursts—Zerzan is supportive of the Unabomber, Ted Kacynski, (he has published his manifesto, anyway). But more important to me than any of that is the possibility that a kind of aura of a pre-violent mimetic garden of earthly delights is a part of our basic constitution as sign using but also biological beings. This would be a pre-human feeling (with, probably, many shades of feeling) that is part of what makes us human. It seems to me that such a concept would illuminate a great many anthropological issues, such as our vulnerability to various addictions, what Freud called the “death drive,” what Julia Kristeva once called “jouissance,” fantasies of immersion in a thoroughly natural or thoroughly technological environment (or a natural environment thoroughly technologized), the “Question of Being,” a “cratylian” feeling about the fit of words to their meanings, the feeling of being “in” love, the Garden of Eden story (in all its variants across cultures) and perhaps much else. It may very well be that in our use of signs we are really doing nothing more than attempting to approximate and correspond to the “continuous present” (to use Gertrude Stein’s term—for which she was indebted to William James, who was in turn indebted to Charles Sanders Peirce) of delight. Our tacit knowledge of how to arrive at the equipoise between converging desires might rely upon our originary memories of delight, in a place where things shone forth, lit up by desires cascading back and forth.

This raises one more issue for originary thinking. If we can trace a resentment toward civilization back to the emergence of the sign, we can also trace it forward as a resentment renewed and sedimented with each forced march to more civilized conditions. It’s easy enough to imagine what destruction must have been wrought on small primitive communities in the construction of the ancient empires; the Bible provides us with some clues regarding what it must have taken to root out those inveterate tendencies toward “idol worship.” The wars and pacification of honor communities in the creation of the absolute monarchies of early modern Europe are also well known; nor does there seem to me any reason to believe that the modern market order was embraced by the agricultural communities swept into it. At each point along the way the vanguardist “firstness” of the pioneers of a new set of constraints required the expenditure of vast quantities of disciplinary force. Again, nothing obvious follows from all this civilizational overkill (which may, in fact, have been necessary)—I remain firmly in favor of trudging forward and resisting those who want to pull us back. But, in ways and with consequences we couldn’t wholly account for, each and every one of us “remembers” all this. Those of us committed to the civilizing process might keep this in mind instead of wondering why the civilizing project that seems to us so obvious rarely goes according to plan. Perhaps the civilizing process must find ways to indulge originary memory—maybe that will turn out to be the civilizing contribution made by hedonistic modern art.

In particular the last paragraph and the discussion of what might be involved in programming a computer to write novels (a very engaging question which I have decided, for now at least, to keep very minimal), but a few other things as well:

Pressure on the category of the “human” comes from two directions, what we might call the “analytic” and the “synthetic.” What I mean by the “analytic” dismantling of the human is our capability and propensity to break the human down into a set of probabilities, with ever more subtle gradations: physically, we are all aggregations of DNA manifesting itself through interactions with an environment whose effects we are rapidly acquiring knowledge over—it will soon be, if it isn’t already, to treat a single individual as the predictable result of a history of activity, diet, genetic predispositions, places of residence, etc., and as a body whose future is equally predictable, given the known, and to some extent chosen, variables. This analytical dismantling is analogous to the replacement, in the digital humanities, of the individual text or art object with the database search as the object of inquiry: a particular text, or, for that matter, a particular sentence, is nothing more than the winnowing out of all the other possibilities generated by the preceding history of all cultural texts and practices. By the “synthetic” “remantling” of the human I mean our growing ability to engineer the body, first of all prosthetically, through the replacement of natural limbs and organs that have been damaged or lost, but, more consequentially, through the creation of new capabilities, through drugs, hormones, surgeries and, eventually, the prompting, manipulating and stimulating of the body’s own natural processes.

These two processes converge, as greater analytic prowess opens up new synthetic possibilities, while new synthetic inventions pose new analytic questions. Also, our deconstructive inheritance enables us to see that such developments reveal, not some unprecedented encroachment on a human domain that was once known and secure, but a more originary prosthetic being that constitutes us as human—with the first prosthesis being the human sign. Still, it may be that the “always already” deconstructive gesture serves as a kind of narcotic, comforting us with the assurance that what seems unprecedented has always already been with us. Maybe this time really is different, and something fundamentally human is at stake. At the very least, we have a definition of the human that allows us to test the hypothesis: does the advent of “transhumanism,” or the commitment to a fundamentally improved humanity (the ability to run a two minute mile, to live 300 years, to score 350 on an IQ test, etc.) through technological and medical advances render obsolete the originary understanding of the human as that species that poses a greater threat to itself than is posed to it by any external danger? Does a posthumanism theoretical perspective, which works to undermine the traditional conceptual boundaries separating individual from society, human from technology, and culture from nature, obviate the need for that understanding?

Answering these questions will simultaneously enable us to bring the concepts of technology and nature into originary thinking more thoroughly than we have so far. I would suggest the following hypothesis as an initial approach: the originary gesture aims at separating us from “Nature” and simultaneously takes “Nature” as a model for doing so. The separation from Nature is the creation of non-instinctual desire and of a community that transcends the animal pecking order. This we are all familiar with. The imitation of Nature is less explored, and more tacit. I don’t refer mainly to tribal rituals associating the members of the tribe with a totem animal, but to the much more pervasive adoption of natural constraints in the construction of tools, dwellings, weapons and, although this would require further exploration, the sounds and rhythms of human speech and the structures of human gesture and posture. Indeed, where else could early humans have derived models for these activities if not the natural world around them?

At the same time, such a concept of “Nature” could only have emerged much later, under civilized conditions. Like Jewish monotheism, or Western metaphysics (of which it is a part), the concept of “Nature” implies a thoroughly “declarative” culture, that is, a culture in which the declarative sentence is taken as the primary linguistic form. The history of the concept of “Nature” is obviously extraordinarily complicated, and I am not qualified to provide an authoritative survey—I will just venture some thoughts of some of its uses most pertinent to the question of the “Human.” It seems to me that a very productive way of understanding the valence of “Nature” as a cultural concept is as denoting a realm, in which humans participate, that is free of desire (that’s why imitating Nature would be a way of transcending desire). The separation of “Nature” as a non-desiring sphere of inquiry was obviously necessary for the emergence of the physical sciences, but just as importance is the notion of “Nature” in Stoic thinking, or the pastoral tradition, as a simple field of human activity enveloped by custom, tradition, and simple virtues, embedded in the natural world, and free of the “artificial” desires created by civilization. Even the “nastier” concept of Nature introduced by Hobbes is really more the basis of a calculus of social order, and hence a pacifying abstraction from actual social desires and rivalries.

So, Nature is something we seek to return to and restore; but Nature can also be the means of doing so, as the laws of nature discovered through science, mediated through the natural order of liberty established by the free market, leads to the technological transformations in nature that make prosperity possible. Up until fairly recently, it could be argued that all this was in accord with human nature: human nature as rational, as desiring, as toolmaking, as trading. The fully civilized order would then be the fully natural one as well. But it has proven impossible to keep the unnatural out. The primal victimary critique is of the notion of human nature, and for a very good reason: once you define human beings in terms of what they are or have (rationality, free choice, what have you), you provide a basis for excluding or conditioning the belonging of vast swathes of perhaps merely apparent humans from or to the class: those who are less rational, slavishly bound up with traditions or more instinctual desires, and so on. Once one accepts the perspective of the ontologically conditional human, it is the very positing of the human that becomes an unnatural, partisan, coup–d’etat—but against what, if not a more natural nature, posited as a truer equality in a more tight-knit community, in which rights and obligations are indistinguishable. In that case, those who have seized the category of human nature torment and dispossess those living genuinely human lives, closer to nature.

Let’s begin with where transhumanism and posthumanism agree—that this vein of thinking, predicated upon a fixed and definable human nature, supported by a metaphysics that sought to turn agreement about nature into a way of deflecting disagreements among humans, has run its course, with the further implication that the category of the “human” is, indeed, historical, contingent and contested. That still leaves open the question of whether the category can be abolished, though—historical, contingent and contested institutions as well as categories can persist precisely by virtue of being those things; and there must be some reason why the category changes in meaning and cultural positioning, and is struggled over, rather than simply dropped. I would return us to our originary definition of the human as the species that poses a danger greater to itself than any external threat, which is tied to our understanding of the human as the being that defers violence through representation. I think this definition survives posthuman questioning, and is in fact better suited to a more “emergent” sense of the human as never quite completed (a human “condition,” as Arendt had it, rather than a “nature”) than to a traditional notion of the human as a being with a fully installed nature, outfitted with a presumably impenetrable armor of rights. The danger that we face is never entirely predictable, the forms of representation needed to defer it never certain, and our capacity to find the means to discover the needed signs is always in doubt. What we are as humans is never “there”—all our signs could be rendered inoperative in one moment in the face of some unprecedented humanly generated threat. Of course, if that were to happen, all the boundary questions regarding the human and its others would also cease.

Transhumanism sees itself as extending the Enlightenment tradition. Once illegitimate, unnatural forms of domination have been eliminated, human beings can get to work addressing the externally imposed dangers and ills of humanity: producing sufficient food, fortifying shelter, curing diseases, and so on. All of these activities presuppose a human nature to be protected and enhanced: it is interesting, for example, that while we have for some time had the capacity to enhance eyesight to a remarkable extent, that capacity has been reserved for the laboratory and the observatory—no one seems to have considered offering, or demanding, eyeglasses or contact lenses providing even 20-5 vision for everyday use. But there’s no reason to assume that such things won’t be offered and demanded, and ultimately to be implanted in the eye, perhaps at an early age. There is no fixed line between the “natural” desire to remove an evident deformity like a cleft lip and the “artificial” one to make one’s lips look more like an admired movie star. Or between extending life in the sense of enabling us to live much longer with heart disease or curing cancer, and slowing or even reversing the molecular process of aging. Or developing a cure for Alzheimer’s, whether through neurologic advances or brain prosthetics, and providing the average person the ability to memorize Homer’s poems in one reading. Is there a certain point at which we would no longer be human? Only, we could say as originary thinkers, if such developments were to remove desire and resentment from our relations to each other, and it seems easy enough to imagine all kinds of ways in which the effects might be just the opposite—not only because the satisfaction of these desires would proceed at uneven pace, or because the desires might vary so widely, or even because even the most perfectly satisfied desires will be riddled with unanticipated side effects, but above all because the meaning of such transformations and their implications for questions of reciprocity will never be settled.

Similar questions are raised by the issue of Artificial Intelligence, addressed by Eric Gans in his recent Chronicle of Love & Resentment on the Digital Humanities. There is very little we can’t imagine programming computers to do: playing chess, of course, but why not writing novels or poetry, about any subject and in any form or genre one chooses? Certainly there will be computers capable of passing various versions of the Turing test. In the process, as Jaron Lanier, Jean-Pierre Dupuy and others have pointed out, we are likely to come to view our own mental processes and even emotional states in terms of computation, as the most advanced models in cognitive science already propose. Indeed, isn’t any declarative sentence a little algorithm, generating a finite series of differentially probable utterances by excluding (through negation and replacement) an infinity of other sentences that might, in a hierarchy of probabilities, have been uttered at that moment? At the very least, one can see the theoretical gains in seeing things this way.

But a funny thing happens on the way to the singularity. If we could imagine computers writing great poetry, we should consider it a matter of course that they could do something much simpler, something you really only need to be able to speak two languages to accomplish: translation. And yet they can’t do this, as anyone who witnessed the earlier hilarious attempts of google translate can testify. Or, at least, they couldn’t, when working according to a strictly computational model—that is, if you replace all the words, in the source language, one by one with words from the target language. Even allowing for grammar correct, which a computer can, of course, do, we end up with a mess—there is no way of accounting for the enormous variety and unpredictability of idioms in every language. But now it can be done. The way to solve the problem of computer translation is to amass an enormous database of existing translations (say, English to Italian)—then, for every phrase or sentence in the source text, the computer can search all the ways it has been translated previously, and then be programmed to choose from among various (presumably not that many) alternatives.

It seems to me that programming a computer to write novels, at least, would follow a similar, albeit far more complex, process: one would have to treat novels as “translations”—but of what? Other novels, for one thing. All forms of social texts, for another. A translation into what? Other novels would be translated into a different field of discourse: perhaps a historical field (translating a 19th century novel into 21st century social discourse), but perhaps a different field within the totality of contemporaneous discourse (a novel set in a psychiatric institution into one set on a beachfront resort); while social discourse would be translated into novelistic discourse, or “novelish”—or a dialect of novelish, of which there are many. Protocols would have to be established for translating (say) some segment of 19th century social discourse into some segment of 21st century, and a version of 19th century novelish into a version of 21st. This would involve determining rules for establishing equivalencies between these different fields of discourse: a chunk of 19th century political journalism into a chunk of 21st century (if we even choose to assume that these categories are equivalent, just because they both have the phrase “political journalism” in them). “Novelish” would have to be defined in terms of vocabulary and grammar, but also in terms of plot and character “codes,” perhaps involving the creation of templates that could serve as “attractors” for chunks of discourse. And the two different levels of translation would have to be articulated according to some rule.

This densely layered process, however it would ultimately be worked out, would require that multiple operations be applied recursively to the discourses drawn upon, meaning that every problem we solve along the way generates new problems, each decision branches off into multiple other decisions—the composer of such a text, computer or human, would need to articulate, through a series of constraints, a hierarchy of algorithms that would furthermore, be constantly “learning” and hence rearranging the entire series. At each point along the way we would find decisions that would necessarily be made more randomly if made by the computer, which would mean that the human composer would, by definition be “better”—unless, that is, we prefer the random decisions because they are more distant from the commonplaces and clichés that even the best writers cannot completely free themselves of—but in that case, it would be better for some reader, with a certain understanding and experience of the relation between familiarity and novelty in language and narrative.

What this means is that the googlization of the world, were it to reduce all objects and texts to search prompts to discover what that object or text was “translating” or transforming would not be in the slightest bit dehumanizing in any way that matters to our originary understanding of the human. There are infinite ways to derive target texts from source texts through a search process, and that process in turn will keep revising itself recursively. Each search decision is deeply embedded in body, history, biography, discipline and community. And any search will still be a discovery procedure for the signs that will defer, in however mediated a way, that potentially cataclysmic violence that will still be at the origin of our species.

Still, this notion of the sign as a prompt for a database search has ramifications for our understanding of the originary sign, which we would see now more as a constraint on future iterations, bearing the marks of the asymmetries and symmetries of its production than a single meaning apprehended by all: an emergent event rather than a completed state. What I mean can be illustrated by Johanna Drucker’s account of the sign understood materially:

Material conditions provide an inscriptional base, a score, a point of departure, a provocation, from which a work is produced as an event. The materiality of the system, no matter how stable, bears only a probabilistic relation to the event of production, which always occurs only in real time and is distinct in each instance.
… In each case, the performance constructs meaning as a result of engagement, the text is performed, rather than received. Materiality provokes the performance, and this is true whether we are talking about the workings of distributed systems in which resistance, voltage, and allocation of resources perform in accord with other processes and decisions, or whether we are referring to the reading of a poem.

I take the materiality of the sign, in Drucker’s sense, to suggest that we think of the originary gesture as a mark, mnemotechnic and prosthetic, on the natural world, including humans as part of that world. The effect of this mark on nature is to begin the process of transforming it into the materials for signs, tools, ritual objects, arenas and meals. Each new sign is constrained by the aggregation of previous markings, while inflecting the existing constraints, only thereby making it possible to see them as constraints. A constraint is a mapping of Nature, somewhere on the continuum between almost completely arbitrary imposition on one side and a nearly perfect iteration of a constraint imposed by Nature, on the other. Constraints, then, are an originary engagement with Nature, from which we are never quite extricated and in which we are never quite immersed, much like a preliminary search term, yet to undergo refinement.

I finished it much more quickly than I anticipated, so, here’s my paper (with a very slight, but significant change in the title) for this year’s conference at High Point. If you all read it in advance, I can dispense with the actual reading at the conference, and we could just talk about it. Or, for that matter, if anyone wants to start arguing about it, maybe it’ll turn out that I have some revisions to do. Anyway, here it is:

Pressure on the category of the “human” comes from two directions, what we might call the “analytic” and the “synthetic.” What I mean by the “analytic” dismantling of the human is our capability and propensity to break the human down into a set of probabilities, with ever more subtle gradations: physically, we are all aggregations of DNA manifesting itself through interactions with an environment whose effects we are rapidly acquiring knowledge over—it will soon be, if it isn’t already, to treat a single individual as the predictable result of a history of activity, diet, genetic predispositions, places of residence, etc., and as a body whose future is equally predictable, given the known, and to some extent chosen, variables. This analytical dismantling is analogous to the replacement, in the digital humanities, of the individual text or art object with the database search as the object of inquiry: a particular text, or, for that matter, a particular sentence, is nothing more than the winnowing out of all the other possibilities generated by the preceding history of all cultural texts and practices. By the “synthetic” “remantling” of the human I mean our growing ability to engineer the body, first of all prosthetically, through the replacement of natural limbs and organs that have been damaged or lost, but, more consequentially, through the creation of new capabilities, through drugs, hormones, surgeries and, eventually, the prompting, manipulating and stimulating of the body’s own natural processes.

These two processes converge, as greater analytic prowess opens up new synthetic possibilities, while new synthetic inventions pose new analytic questions. Also, our deconstructive inheritance enables us to see that such developments reveal, not some unprecedented encroachment on a human domain that was once known and secure, but a more originary prosthetic being that constitutes us as human—with the first prosthesis being the human sign. Still, it may be that the “always already” deconstructive gesture serves as a kind of narcotic, comforting us with the assurance that what seems unprecedented has always already been with us. Maybe this time really is different, and something fundamentally human is at stake. At the very least, we have a definition of the human that allows us to test the hypothesis: does the advent of “transhumanism,” or the commitment to a fundamentally improved humanity (the ability to run a two minute mile, to live 300 years, to score 350 on an IQ test, etc.) through technological and medical advances render obsolete the originary understanding of the human as that species that poses a greater threat to itself than is posed to it by any external danger? Does a posthumanism theoretical perspective, which works to undermine the traditional conceptual boundaries separating individual from society, human from technology, and culture from nature, obviate the need for that understanding?

Answering these question will simultaneously enable us to bring the concepts of technology and nature into originary thinking more thoroughly than we have so far. I would suggest the following hypothesis as an initial approach: the originary gesture aims at separating us from “Nature” and simultaneously takes “Nature” as a model for doing so. The separation from Nature is the creation of non-instinctual desire and of a community that transcends the animal pecking order. This we are all familiar with. The imitation of Nature is less explored, and more tacit. I don’t refer mainly to tribal rituals associating the members of the tribe with a totem animal, but to the much more pervasive adoption of natural constraints in the construction of tools, dwellings, weapons and, although this would require further exploration, the sounds and rhythms of human speech and the structures of human gesture and posture. Indeed, where else could early humans have derived models for these activities if not the natural world around them?

At the same time, such a concept of “Nature” could only have emerged much later, under civilized conditions. Like Jewish monotheism, or Western metaphysics (of which it is a part), the concept of “Nature” implies a thoroughly “declarative” culture, that is, a culture in which the declarative sentence is taken as the primary linguistic form. The history of the concept of “Nature” is obviously extraordinarily complicated, and I am not qualified to provide an authoritative survey—I will venture some thoughts of some of its uses most pertinent to the question of the “Human.” It seems to me that a very productive way of understanding the valence of “Nature” as a cultural concept is as denoting a realm free of desire. The separation of “Nature” as a non-desiring sphere of inquiry was obviously necessary for the emergence of the physical sciences, but just as importance is the notion of “Nature” in Stoic thinking, or the pastoral tradition, as a simple field of human activity enveloped by custom, tradition, and simple virtues, embedded in the natural world, and free of the “artificial” desires created by civilization.

“Nature” also, for Hobbes in particular, took on a very different sense of a kind of elemental, untamed, destructive, but also pre-social (and therefore really also pre-human) desire, one that needs the strong arm of the state to be turned towards productive enterprises. Even here, though, Nature is the source of rights and the basis of a contractual order, so it is not surprising to see Natural Right take on a much more benign meaning in Western, especially Anglo-American thought, one that is much closer to the Stoic understanding: a basis for testing and checking the powers and legitimacy of government, in terms of whether it exceeds its mandate to oversee the natural workings of natural liberty; or a more malevolent understanding, in Romantic revolutionary thought, as the basis for overturning social order in the name of a return to the natural rights which had been obscured and transgressed.

So, Nature is something we seek to return to and restore; but Nature can also be the means of doing so, as the laws of nature discovered through science, mediated through the natural order of liberty established by the free market, leads to the technological transformations in nature that make prosperity possible. Up until fairly recently, it could be argued that all this was in accord with human nature: human nature as rational, as desiring, as toolmaking, as trading. But it has proven impossible to keep the unnatural out. The primal victimary critique is of precisely the notion of human nature, and for a very good reason: once you define human beings in terms of what they are or have (rationality, free choice, what have you), you provide a basis for excluding or conditioning the belonging of vast swathes of perhaps merely apparent humans to the class: those who are less rational or irrational, slavishly bound up with traditions or more instinctual desires, and so on. Once one accepts the perspective of the ontologically conditional human, it is the very positing that becomes an unnatural, partisan, coup–d’etat—but against what, if not a more natural nature, posited as a truer equality in a more tight-knit community, in which rights and obligations are indistinguishable. “The Europeans speak constantly of Man, but go around killing men wherever they find them,” as Aime Cesaire put it. Those who have seized the category of the human destroy those living genuinely human lives.

Let’s say we being with where transhumanism and posthumanism agree—that this vein of thinking, predicated upon a fixed and definable human nature, supported by a metaphysics that sought to turn agreement about nature into a way of deflecting disagremeents among humans, has run its course, with the further implication that the category of the “human” is, indeed, historical, contingent and contested. That still leaves open the question of whether the category can be abolished, though—historical, contingent and contested institutions as well as categories can persist precisely by virtue of being those things; and there must be some reason why the category changes in meaning and cultural positioning, and is struggled over, rather than simply dropped. I would return us to our definition of the human as the species that poses a danger greater to itself than any external threat, which is tied to our understanding of the human as the being that defers violence through representation. I think this definition survives posthuman questioning, and is in fact better suited to a more “emergent” sense of the human as never quite completed (a human “condition,” as Arendt had it, rather than a “nature”) than to a traditional notion of the human as a being with a fully installed nature, outfitted with a presumably impenetrable armor of rights. The danger that we face is never entirely predictable, the forms of representation needed to defer it never certain, and our capacity to find the means to discover the needed signs is always in doubt. What we are as humans is never “there”—all our signs could be rendered inoperative in one moment in the face of some unprecedented humanly generated threat. Of course, if that were to happen, all the boundary questions regarding the human and its others would also cease.

Transhumanism sees itself as extending the Enlightenment tradition. Once illegitimate, unnatural forms of domination have been eliminated, human beings can get to work addressing the externally imposed dangers and ills of humanity: producing sufficient food, fortifying shelter, curing diseases, and so on. All of these activities presuppose a human nature to be protected and enhanced: it is interesting, for example, that while we have for some time had the capacity to enhance eyesight to a remarkable extent, that capacity has been reserved for the laboratory and the observatory—no one seems to have considered offering, or demanding, eyeglasses or contact lenses providing even 20-5 vision for everyday use. But there’s no reason to assume that such things won’t be offered and demanded, and ultimately to be implanted in the eye, perhaps at an early age. There is no fixed line between the “natural” desire to remove an evident deformity like a cleft lip and the “artificial” one to make one’s lips look more like an admired movie star. Or between extending life in the sense of enabling us to live much longer with heart disease or curing cancer, and slowing or even reversing the molecular process of aging. Or developing a cure for Alzheimer’s, whether through neurologic advances or brain prosthetics, and providing the average person the ability to memorize Homer’s poems in one reading. Is there a certain point at which we would no longer be human? Only, we could say as originary thinkers, if such developments were to remove desire and resentment from our relations to each other, and it seems easy enough to imagine all kinds of ways in which the effects might be just the opposite.

Similar questions are raised by the issue of Artificial Intelligence, addressed by Eric Gans in a recent Chronicle of Love & Resentment. There is very little we can’t imagine programming computers to do: playing chess, of course, but why not writing novels or poetry, about any subject and in any form or genre one chooses? Certainly there will be computers capable of passing various versions of the Turing test. In the process, as Jaron Lanier has pointed out, we are likely to come to view our own mental processes and even emotional states in terms of computation, as the most advanced models in cognitive science already propose. Indeed, isn’t any declarative sentence a little algorithm, generating a finite series of differentially probable utterances by excluding (through negation and replacement) an infinity of other sentences that might, in a hierarchy of probabilities, have been uttered at that moment? At the very least, one can see the theoretical gains in seeing things this way.

But a funny thing happens on the way to the singularity. If we could imagine computers writing great poetry, we should consider it a matter of course that they could do something much simpler, something you really only need to be able to speak two languages to accomplish: translation. And yet they can’t do this, as anyone who witnessed the earlier hilarious attempts of google translate can testify. Or, at least, they couldn’t, when working according to a strictly computational model—that is, if you replace all the words, in the source language, one by one with words from the target language. Even allowing for grammar correct, which a computer can, of course, do, we end up with a mess—there is no way of accounting for the enormous variety and unpredictability of idioms in every language. But now it can be done. The way to solve the problem of computer translation is to amass an enormous database of existing translations (say, English to Italian)—then, for every phrase or sentence in the source text, the computer can search all the ways it has been translated previously, and then be programmed to choose from among various (presumably not that many) alternatives.

It seems to me that “teaching” a computer to write novels or poetry would follow a similar, albeit far more complex, process: one would have to identify iterable elements (of plot, character, trope, syntax, vocabulary, etc.), using, perhaps some of those old structuralist studies that no one reads any more and calculate the probabilities of any element being articulated with others, in particular orders and combinations, and so on. One could, further, at least with more recent databases, calculate the crossover between such literary, semantic, grammatical features of texts in the “target” text (the novel or poem) and varied source material (journals, newspapers, medical journals, memoirs, and so on). The difference from translation here is that one would also have to determine a desired level of variability between source and target material—the elements or, if you like, “memes,” from previous novels or poems and broader cultural reserves would need to be differentiated from their “average” usage: a metaphor used regularly in psychiatric discourse to describe the insane would have to undergo some transformation, in itself, or in its combination with other elements, in its placement in a poem or prose narrative. And, finally, while here as well composing would provide pleasures of its own, such a generator and arranger of texts would presumably have readers in mind, and, in fact, that would be his primary criteria in terms the degree of variability or difference the composed text should have. Could a computer determine which degree of homage, parody, surprise, familiarity, playful subversion of expected tropes, plot twists, and so on, is most likely to please that particular audience most in mind of an individual or collective human composer? Only, I think, if we imagine a LaPlacian demon that knows where all the atoms in the universe are at a single moment, plus all the thoughts in all the individual minds of possible human audiences. And, even then, as a member of that audience, the computer’s prediction of my response could not be as pleasing as a composer’s solicitation of my approval and admiration.

What this means is that the googlization of the world, were it to replace all objects and texts with search prompts, would not be in the slightest bit dehumanizing in any way that matters to our originary understanding of the human. There are infinite ways to conduct any search in response to a prompt, and that search in turn generates innumerable unprecedented search possibilities. And each search decision is deeply embedded in body, history, biography, discipline and community. And any search will still be a discovery procedure for the signs that will defer, in however mediated a way, that potentially cataclysmic violence that will still be at the origin of our species.

Still, this notion of the sign as a prompt for a database search has ramifications for our understanding of the originary sign, which we would see now more as a constraint on future iterations, bearing the marks of the asymmetries and symmetries of its production than a single meaning apprehended by all: an emergent event rather than a completed state. What I mean can be illustrated by Johanna Drucker’s account of the sign understood materially:

Material conditions provide an inscriptional base, a score, a point of departure, a provocation, from which a work is produced as an event. The materiality of the system, no matter how stable, bears only a probabilistic relation to the event of production, which always occurs only in real time and is distinct in each instance.
… In each case, the performance constructs meaning as a result of engagement, the text is performed, rather than received. Materiality provokes the performance, and this is true whether we are talking about the workings of distributed systems in which resistance, voltage, and allocation of resources perform in accord with other processes and decisions, or whether we are referring to the reading of a poem.

I take the materiality of the sign, in Drucker’s sense, to suggest that we think of the originary gesture as a mark, mnemotechnic and prosthetic, on the natural world, including humans as part of that world. The effect of this mark on nature is to begin the process of transforming it into the materials for signs, tools, ritual objects, arenas and meals. Each new sign is constrained by the aggregation of previous markings, while inflecting the existing constraints. A constraint brings some configurations to the foreground while leaving others in the background; each performance of a semiotic configuration somewhat changes the distributions of foregrounding and backgrounding. Each redistribution locks us into a particular location along the human/non-human continuum, which we can only see as a location from within a new location, a new spread of possibilities wherein we can only be certain of the unrefined search term we bring to it.

The basis for critiques of civilization (in general or in any particular incarnation) has always been “nature.” Conventions and culture, if not ritually prescribed, could be other than what they are, and are therefore time bound and contingent, but nature is what is always true, and what we discover through reason, rather than via tradition. If we can know what is natural, we can judge the civilized order, its customs and conventions, in terms of how closely they correspond to nature. Nature is simple, essential, enduring, intelligible, universal; civilization is given to artificiality, fashion, vanity, sophistication. Nature is a newly discovered post-ritual sign; civilization remains mired in rivalry and the compulsion to attain distinction.

Of course, “nature” is itself a category of civilization, a way of deferring the new conflicts the civilized order generates. It emerges because civilized citizens are more or less dimly aware of the radical transformation, the deferrals and disciplines, that made civilization possible and distinguished civilized orders so dramatically from barbaric and savage ones: it is this absolute distinction between civilization and everything that preceded it that produces the blanket category of “nature.” Due to the leisure afforded a class of thinkers, relatively freed from ritual imperatives and material need, and their capacity to survey a range of uncivilized orders (to record them, discuss them, interview them, collect “samples”), it becomes “natural” to inquire into the many similarities and differences observed, and to generalize regarding what they all might have in common. Precisely for this reason civilized orders are able to convince themselves that they are, or could be, arranged more in correspondence with nature than the more primitive and seemingly irrational and arbitrary social orders—while also being equally capable of convincing themselves that they might try to model themselves on the simplicity, courage, strength and other virtues of the uncivilized.

The role of “Nature” during the civilizing process is a regulatory one, rather than a foundational one. “Civility” didn’t need so much to be justified or explained as protected from the excesses inherent in this as yet untested mode of social life—satires of civility (marking its deviation from nature) are part of civility. With modernity, and the forgetting of the civilizing process, “Nature” is presented as the basis of social order, the source of rights and legitimation, including the principle of a revolutionary re-founding if the existing order were discovered to be opposed to nature, or usurping the natural rights upon which its legitimacy depends. The assertion of individual natural rights was first deployed against the monarchies of Europe, but, since they have no intrinsic limiting principle, the notion of natural rights is a way of generating and directing resentment toward any government seen to be tyrannical in any sense.

The modern notion of “Nature” implies equality before a sovereign center, which is posited as constituted by what it in fact constitutes: the assertion of natural rights only makes sense as a polemic against some central figure that has always already expropriated them. The many antinomies of this structural assumption have been exhaustively explored, in what has perhaps been the greatest service provided by “postmodern” social and political theory. The more natural rights are presumed to constrain the sovereign center, the more sovereignty constructs, shapes, redefines, analyzes and recomposes, those minimal rights (to property, self-protection, movement, speech, worship, etc.) into “components” of a policed social order. The ludicrous notions of a “compelling state interest,” or “rational test”—self-evidently arbitrary concepts established as standards the government must meet (and, through the courts, decides whether it is meeting) in limiting some natural right—make this fairly obvious. Even more, as the natural and social sciences develop and become increasingly central to social life, the “nature” founding society becomes one to be manipulated through those sciences—diagnosis and prescription easily replace persuasion as the constituents of political discourse, as we continue to install the therapeutic order Philip Rieff analyzed decades ago. Here’s a prediction, which exemplifies the inversion of natural rights that is simultaneously its culmination: we will see, perhaps within a decade, children removed from religious homes deemed “unhealthy” and “abusive” because children are being taught the “homophobic” lessons of their parents and tradition, and transferred to same sex “married” couples whose equal right to raise children will thereby be vindicated. The current legal and political strategy of many conservatives, to argue against “relativistic” leftist politics through recourse to “natural rights” is futile because the various components of natural rights can be pulverized and recombined at will—the grotesque notion of a “protected class” (making it, presumably, open season on everyone else) both contradicts and corresponds to “natural right.” At the extreme, if the citizen’s rights are defined in terms of a pre-social nature, their expression can be reduced to pre-social venues (you can believe and say what you like as long as no one is around to see or hear or be offended by you—it can even be generously granted that you probably can’t help yourself), with violations of such strictures resulting in one’s removal from society. (All that is coming from “above”—we have known for a long time that, from “below,” any assault on customs and conventions can be justified in the name restoring some natural right or freedom.)

I have been arguing in recent posts that the only possible anti-victimary politics today would involve setting aside all these modern concepts and debates and simply arguing for civilization against barbaric and savage recrudescence. Civilization does not require a notion of universal right, much less endless cynical and acrobatic reinterpretations of supposedly fundamental and self-evident rights. A politics of civilization can focus on the praxis of individuals constitutive of the institutions and practices to which all must habituate themselves. In a university you treat everyone as a scholar and teacher; in business you treat everyone as a competent practitioner of their specialty; in economic transactions you include your partners in a zone of trust constitutive of a voluntary exchange; in neighborhood you treat everyone as—a neighbor. In some cases, specific institutions or spaces will want to codify what such treatment entails, always keeping in mind that such codification indicates, not a heightened moral awareness, but an attempt to defer potential or actual conflict (and hence a weakening of the consensus upon which the shared practice depends). Such conflict might be necessary to make it possible to see others in unaccustomed ways (and might indeed lead to higher moral awareness), but the point is always to expand and improve the civilized order that the excluded are, after all, demanding entrance to—the inclusion of new participants should be an occasion to re-fortify civilized institutions, to subordinate grievances to norm-governed work. Civilization depends upon deferral to the judgment of the “third person” I have discussed in recent posts, and it depends upon every individual inculcating the attitudes, dispositions and mentalities of the “third person,” and the desire to be take as such a person by others.

To talk about rights, and distribution, wealth and markets, participation in universal exchange, etc., outside of the defense of the fundaments of civilized order, tends to undermine that order. There can be no universal reciprocity because there is no global scene—even if there can be global spectacles. Exchange can only take place among participants on a scene, established and governed by a shared sign—to grant full membership on a scene without accession to that sign is to make the scene hostage to the marginal grievance, or the grievance that needs to be appeased to make whole the fantasy of a scene that could map the territory controlled by the sovereign. The originary scene bequeaths to us not an ever more inclusive scene, but infinite scenes, overlapping and articulated in infinite and always provisional ways—moral advances, always fragile, come through new ways of mediating between scenes that were previously incommensurable. Even the free market presupposes a civilized order, and then becomes a marker of that order insofar as it represents a mode of exchange no Big Man could usurp. But defenses, in principle, of the free market that would undermine the basics of civilized order (like the demand for a free market in labor that would allow unlimited immigrants from less civilized countries, unvetted by the civilized order, to enter the country) must themselves be resisted, if not through centralized state power than by communities organized through schools, neighborhoods, businesses, main streets, hospitals, social services, etc.—i.e., by the bulwarks of a civilized order.

So, what is a politics of civilization? It is, I think a politics of flouting civilization. I take the notion of “flouting” from the philosopher of language Paul Grice, who developed the notion of “maxims of conversation”—what originary thinkers could really consider an ethics of the declarative sentence. Insofar as we speak to each other, we presuppose certain shared obligations (the “cooperative principle”): what you say will be true, it will be relevant, it will be sufficient (you will give no more and no less information than is necessary). These are more constitutive than descriptive—much, perhaps most, actual conversation proceeds in violation of these maxims. But that’s the point—it is precisely through meaningful violations, or flouting, of the maxims, that meaning is generated (through what Grice calls “implicatures”). So, if you ask me how Jim’s new job at Wall Street is going, and I say, “terrific—he should be able to stay out of jail for at least another few years,” I am flouting the cooperative principle in several ways: I have given no reason to believe Jim has committed a crime, or is planning to do so, so the information I am giving is irrelevant and perhaps false, nor am I providing you with the information you requested which, according to convention, would concern itself with whether Jim is satisfied with his salary and working conditions, has been promoted in a timely manner, is respected by his co-workers, etc. But, I am giving you all that information and more if we share some empirical and ethical assumptions about what it means to “work on Wall Street”—that it involves activity that has lately involved well publicized criminal (or presumed criminal) activity, or that others, or the interlocutors themselves, believe much of that activity should be criminalized—and some shared assumptions about Jim (that he himself seems primed for such activity, or, perhaps, is an exception, an honest man, and that is why he should avoid jail in the hypothetical scene we must jointly construct, in order to remove Jim from it, in which Wall Street employment is a fast track to a prison cell). The more such assumptions we share, the more my flippant statement is telling you about not only whether Jim is fitting in at his Wall Street firm, but what such “fitting in” entails and, by implication, what we should think about Jim.

Likewise, very little civilized behavior is actually comprised of individuals directly presenting themselves as the disinterested “third person”—we are all much more likely to refer to pretensions to objectivity, broadmindedness, and altruism ironically and disparagingly even, or especially, when we ourselves could be seen as entertaining such pretensions, or if we are acting in a way that would earn us such a description. A respected judge will, if adequately self-aware, gesture towards the feebleness of his attempts to meet what are also admittedly inadequately understood norms. Indeed, there wouldn’t be that much for us to talk about otherwise—if we didn’t question one another’s and our own credentials as civilized beings in innumerable ways. Civilized beings very often mean what they say, but in very indirect ways, intelligible only to those schooled in such indirection, which is to say, other civilized beings. Modesty, almost by definition, flouts the cooperative principle, but no trait is more attractive in a conversationalist; similarly, the most civilized beings are those who gesture to all the ways in which they are not.

In other words, most of civilized behavior consists in flouting civilization. Civilization is the continuous work of distancing our interactions from the possibility of violent combustion, and that means concealing all kinds of impulses, reactions, and desires that present a visible pathway to the feared violence. All the things that we hide, and would be utterly humiliated to have uncovered, and that pre-civilized orders are untroubled by—to take a most obvious example, what we do in the bathroom—aim at maintaining the needed degree of distance and compartmentalization. And we don’t talk about these things, other than with people we are very close to (even then…) or doctors. The simplest way of flouting civilization is to stage the collapsing of these distances, which is what most of our jokes, entertainment and art are about. Most of the radical, avant-garde art of the past century has been a sustained flouting of civilized conventions of private and public life. (Even the modest judge of the previous paragraph lets his defenses down, makes himself vulnerable, invites attack—thereby testing the civility of others on the scene.) All this is healthy—as with Grice’s implicatures, such flouting makes visible the norms we are flouting, tests them, stretches them, gives them a workout, provides them with new applications, abstracts from them, reminds us of what we have forgotten, teaches us to navigate them, and reinforces the deeply embedded assumptions underlying the principles of cooperation we adhere to.

But civilization has its enemies as well. The jihadis at war with us are not flouting. The Left, for some time, perhaps to some extent since there has been a Left, is doing something other and more than flouting (and this is true of some of the avant-garde as well, which overlaps significantly with the left—but the more an individual’s concerns are artistic, even if the goal to abolish art, the less he or she is an enemy of civilization). The whole business of a politics of civilization, then, is to distinguish flouting from enmity—or, more precisely, to treat all transgressions of civilized principles of cooperation, to the extent possible, as flouting one could participate in. Where it becomes impossible—where we can’t imagine a joke that would follow up on the one just made, or an artistic innovation that would deepen the implications of a previous one, or a style of personal appearance that could signal reciprocity with some new one that seems offensive—then we have intuited the boundary between flouting and enmity. On the other side of the boundary we find either the utopian/totalitarian desire to engineer the center of a global scene or, more prosaically, the vendetta—indeed, the former usually “presents” as the latter. It is worth considering the extent to which the Left is one long vendetta against civilization, nursing a grudge against each and every injury inflicted by the civilizing process. In a vendetta, one doesn’t really want to destroy the other side—one just wants to even the score. But since there are no scoreboards or referees, the compulsion to even the score can easily lead to mutual destruction. Vendettas can be deflected and thereby treated as mere “flouting,” but only if one is familiar with and ready to deploy all the means of civilization, which comes down, as my previous post argued, to delaying and reconfiguring the paths back and forth between declarative and ostensive.

De-naturizing discourse on civilization can make it possible for “nature” to subside as a political category, retreating, perhaps, to one of its more innocuous meanings (which can nevertheless do some heavy duty ethical work): “natural” as unstrained, in sync with one’s setting, familiar enough with conventions and trusting enough in one’s fellows to play around a bit with both, in accord with what one’s habits and history have prepared one for, without pretense or self-coercion, happy to share whatever attention one receives or one has cultivated. A thoroughly civilized nature, in other words. Of course, appreciation of the awkwardness of the learner, and admiration for that of the innovator are intrinsic to a civilized disposition, but a sense of naturalness is what enables us to tell when something has actually been learned, or an innovation has actually “took” (or is that “taken”?).