GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

We know that we can reach agreements with people, because we all the time act in accord with others’ tacit and explicit consent. We know that there must be some explicit dimension to our agreements with others—each of us must know that each is letting the other pass on the street, sticking to our respective places on line, etc. We also know that however explicit our agreements—even in the most elaborately constructed and sophisticated contract—there is a tacit dimension which makes it possible for us to understand what we have agreed to explicitly.

From this self-evident knowledge, I would further propose that we are led to seek the basis of our agreements when our explicit agreements become problematic in some way and that when that happens the best place to look for those foundations is in those tacit understandings, rather than, say, in concepts like natural law, natural right, and so on. The fact that we have agreed reveals us to be the kind of people capable of reaching and maintaining, to the extent that we do, those agreements. We are people with certain common needs, which those agreements tried to meet, with some kind of shared past and language which enabled us to meet and shape the agreement, and with certain capacities which our adherence to those agreements and responsibility to the exigencies consequent upon them have placed on display. We are also people with a certain relation to each other—we have agreed so far and no further, we have shored up and repaired the agreement where it has frayed in particular ways, we have let slip this or that obligation, kept an eye on each other in some particular way, and so on.

Further: a social theory starting from these minimal particulars can enable us to look forward: a thriving community will be one which can construct meta-agreements allowing for consensual revision or discarding of existing explicit agreements; which can allow for tacit agreements to become explicit in such a way as to enrich the existing body of explicit agreements while simultaneously re-sedimenting new layers of tacit agreement; and that can generalize existing agreements so as to welcome outsiders without diluting what we might call the “density of the tacit” embedded in the current world of contract and covenants. Instead, then, of talking about imaginary constructs like “progress,” we can study the visible forms of communication and cooperation in terms of the degree to which they reveal forms of rooted openness.

Judaism, and Christianity after it, is rooted in the repudiation of human sacrifice. Human sacrifice enters history with the asymmetric gift relationship established by the Big Man become tyrant become emperor/god: the Big Man gathers the resentment of the community upon himself, and can therefore be the “emissary victim” for the community; the Big Man continues to stand in for or represent the community, but the bigger he gets the less likely he is to allow himself to be victimized, in which case substitutes need to be sought; once it becomes possible to supply substitute victims (what kind of conceptual leap and what kind of event must have been necessary for this transformation?), the appetite for victims will expand. The power of the empire will be devoted to seizing victims, which introduces war on a massive scale (the conquest and incorporation of entire communities and even smaller empires) and then slavery as a utilitarian by-product. The one God, the God whose name is the declarative sentence, calls for the repudiation, at least in principle, of this entire system, and it seems to me it does so on the following grounds: first, an observation of history (and it is succession of empires and emperors, the dramas of their successes and failures, their over-reachings and usurpations that is, first of all, “history,” i.e., a discernable pattern to events) teaches us that kings come and go while the king who is greater than all kings, the God greater than all gods, endures and gives sustenance to those who hold fast to Him despite conquest and defeat; second, what they hold fast to is a rejection of scapegoating, of the arbitrariness of victimage, in the name of law and the truth—a wrongdoer can be punished, but only insofar as he violates a pre-existing law and is known to have done what he has been accused of. The hubris, the haughtiness, which leads inevitably to the fall of the great, is rooted in this endless search for victims, this belief that arbitrary deaths can feed the life of the community, of which the victimizer himself ultimately becomes a victim.

We know that the social contract theories of the origin of the state are liberal myths—the state, in its origins, was the empire, with its subjugation of all communities and, actually or potentially, all individuals, to a common center, which in turn required a large bureaucratic apparatus, infrastructure, massive armed force, and a transcendental gift relationship between center and margins: the emperor gives life to the people who must in turn be ready to give their possessions and if necessary their lives to the emperor. Along the way, empires came to depend upon legal structures providing regularity and predictability in managing the relations between center and margins, which in turn would secrete minimal notions of fairness and mythologies of cosmic order which the earthly empire mirrored: the monotheistic religions drew upon, while polemicizing against, the more enlightened versions of imperial mythology. All subsequent states, including our liberal democratic ones, are carved out of the ancient transnational empires, through a variety of processes: national liberation, which replaces a large, distant imperial order with one closer to home and therefore easier to confront and control; the creation of norms and contracts, enforced through threat (quite often acted on) of rebellion and/or regicide, making leaders accountable to the ruled; and, finally, the actual staffing of the state apparatus through participatory selection processes. (This last development, and I am sure the others as well to some extent, drew upon modes of accountability already available, indeed in more robust forms, in smaller, more primitive communities, such as selection of leaders by lot, the gathering of supporters ready to wage war behind contending leaders, and so on.)

What hasn’t changed is the relation between politics and history, which is to say the establishment of the state as a stage upon which the destiny of the nation is performed before a critical audience. How else could we account for the celebration of Obama’s election as some kind of triumph over our racist past if the political arena was, far from the neutral, problem-solving technocratic arena imagined by progressives, or, for that matter, the issue-oriented, debate-club style with an ideally informed public fantasized by another version of liberalism, if the political arena were not still imagined in basically dramaturgic terms? But dramaturgic means: still sacrificial. Through Obama we will transcend our racism, either through his willing self-sacrifice to the still powerful forces of racism or through his summoning of our “better angels” to deliver us from racism once and for all; or his sacrifice will be in vain and we will descend once more to our racist roots. These are, of course, the leftist versions, reiterating once more the leftist contradiction between heightening the historical contradictions toward the decisive confrontation and transcending the irrational passions, grounded in unjust social relations, that have driven history. On the conservative side, there are certainly dramatic constructions in play as well—overcoming the usurper, restoring the constitutional order and the transparency of rule by the people after the century long Progressive transgression. The conservative script (I’ll let others decide whether my own bias interferes with my analysis here) seems to me a more contained, less apocalyptic, and therefore less sacrificial one, but it is vulnerable to the objection that there is no true Constitutional order to be restored.

What is on trial now is that modern confection of Politics as the Center Stage upon which the Drama of the People’s Self-Liberation is Enacted. Local communities resisted empire because the asymmetrical gift relationship with the imperial center became onerous, but extracting concessions from, which is to say, entering agreements with and creating reciprocal obligations with the center had the effect of giving the people a share in the crimes and follies of empire. The only other choice would have been to withdraw altogether from the imperial order, which would have led to extinction, one way or another—so, there was really no choice. Indeed, though libertarians will dispute it, I consider it quite likely that commerce could only have expanded under the protection of empire and, even more, that modern science and technology could not have developed outside of the cosmological picture generated by the imperial incorporations of Christianity. Still, the distribution of responsibility between rulers and ruled has never been worked out, which is why war was transformed from an affair of monarchical and aristocratic elites, with restricted ends and carefully constructed rules (even if, of course, civilian populations in the way often suffered) to exterminatory assaults upon civilian targets (in World War II)—after all, from a democratic perspective, shouldn’t we hold the people responsible for the policies of their rulers (and even if the Nazis usurped power from the democratic state, the people must have been complicit in that usurpation, and hence still guilty) and assume that they can affect them?

Another very serious problem has not been solved and, unlike the problem of democratic war, this one has not even been addressed by the modern political machines. The ancient resentment between rulers and ruled has never been resolved—one reason for this is that the contending elites have an interest in keeping this resentment going insofar as each wants to represent itself as the popular party; but an equally important reason is that institutional separation between rulers and ruled is almost as stark as ever—we really do have a “ruling class” of Washington governmental and media elites and the corporate elites tied up with and favored by them. This resentment is stoked in a paradoxical way: by continually ratcheting up the asymmetrical gift relation between rulers and ruled, which is to say by extending more and more government largesse. The people resentfully assert on this on the assumption that the rulers live at their expense and this is just payback; the rulers give it through partisan competition but also through fear, never far from the minds of the rich and the politicians during the long period of Communist global terror, and, going even further back, the roots of the civilizing empires in slavery and conquest, of popular uprisings or some kind of leftist or rightest putsch; even more, such largesse must be concealed under democratic forms so as to include the middle class—so, while our finances would probably be in better shape with straightforward redistributions from, say, the top 1/3 to the bottom 1/5, it becomes politically necessary to insist that the entitlement programs are really social “insurance” so that we only get back what we paid in.

In this way, the government grows in power by capitulating to public demands, while the public can remain in an infantile state of rebellion, with “grass roots” partisans on each side exposing the dirty deals of the other, as the government becomes more powerful. The most binding long-term explicit agreements are more and more made by government bureaucrats amongst themselves and with their clients, with mere, and increasingly formulaic, ratification by the people; and these explicit agreements are more and more distant from the tacit agreements formed in companies, institutions and communities, which remain much closer to their traditional character: each is responsible for self and family, individuals who can be relied upon are trusted and rewarded, breaches in trust are scandals, good will is presupposed in most interactions, etc. Victimary thinking, and its apotheosis in the hysteric swell of support for Obama as transcendent figure in 2008, while an authentic religious response to the event of the Holocaust, in its hostility to the normal (re-coded as a source of unthinkable violence) has been redirected towards the effort to bring our tacit agreements and arrangements into alignment with those constructed at the top, but such attempts are becoming increasingly strained, to the point of desperation. At the same time, those more local attachments, grounded in an unself-conscious “oikophilia,” have no other external orientation beyond the central political stage while that stage has alienated itself from those local, familiar “affections.”

The rule for discourse under a democratic regime (and by “democratic,” I mean the resentment against everything imperial except for what is constitutive of the imperial: a single center from which each is equidistant) is that every agent and interest be represented as equal in relation to a presumed center; to put it another way, no one’s resentment is to be left out or left unbalanced by a complementary resentment. This process of balancing resentments holds for any community, but in the implicitly unlimited democratic community (which by now extends well beyond the nation via international human rights law, institutions and activism, incorporated into diplomatic discourse) in which the repudiated yet rights bestowing center must be distanced ever further, the balancing, increasingly, is driven by the most formulaic of explicit agreements (as if one’s feelings towards, say, same sex marriage, should be determined by the latest finding on civil rights law by a particular court), with no attention to the tacit realm. There have always been and still are many things (peoples, vocations, habits, dispositions) that democratic discourse cannot deal well with, and Jews are among them, and whatever can’t be framed in democratic terms must be framed in “meta-democratic terms,” as a usurpation of the center—perhaps foundational, perhaps salvational, but ultimately totalitarian, as the center, whenever evoked, must enforce the equidistance from itself. Anti-semitism, then, places Jews at the center—not, though, at the center of a centerless market society as Eric Gans once argued, but at the evacuated center of a democratic society that has constituted itself through its resentment towards imagined attempts to re-occupy that center.

Anti-semitism, in other words, is a “meta-democratic” discourse: it represents what cannot be balanced out within the chain of equivalences within democratic discourse but yet what is required to account for the uni-directional change metaphysical thinking requires: the evacuated and hated center (that from which we have liberated ourselves, which should only give, but yet insists on taking). The best way to identify anti-semitism, I think, is simply to look at how someone speaks about Jews and Israel—what is important is not the degree of hostility expressed, or whether Israel is singled out among nations, but whether in that discourse Israel or the Jews is the only agent. If someone is telling a story and Israel or the Jews is the only actor, with all other figures represented as passive victims or dupes, then we have an anti-semitic discourse. What “the Jews,” “Israel,” “Zionism” or, now less often, “neo-conservatism” is then being used to explain is why the resentments don’t all balance out, with the people thereby made collectively aware of its real interests and general will. There is really an imperial order, more hideous and insidious than any that has previously existed, even in the imagination, and that makes us all equal, but as slaves. It is such a discourse that makes interaction with Jews unthinkable, and their elimination correspondingly thinkable, because Jews operate on a different plane than everyone: getting rid of the Jews will restore the people. And this holds true for thoroughly undemocratic regimes like Nazi Germany and the contemporary Arab and Muslim dictatorships, which even more than liberal democratic regimes insist upon the homogeneity of the people’s will and the treachery implicit in any deviation from it. As modern societies, at least politically (insofar as any country needs a presentable government), these are totalitarian democracies (as was Communism). (The supposedly hopeful admonition that the solution to the problems of democracy is more democracy suggests, in this context, a continual expansion of the most formulaic terms of explicit agreement to every single area of life—an expansion which, of course, will always encounter obstacles, which will always be some kind of unregulated initiative, and which must be named and targeted.)

The Jews can be imagined on this “other” plane because the tensions between Jews as a people, Judaism as a religion, and Jews as an ethnic group; between actual Jews and the Jews of the Christian and Muslim theological imaginary (and the Jews of the Western literary and philosophical imagination more broadly), have not been resolved, not any more that the tensions between ruler and ruled I discussed earlier, and not any more for Jews themselves than for others. Here, I’ll make the point that I am simply supplementing, and not at all trying to replace, Eric Gans’s analysis of anti-semitism as resentment of firstness: most specifically, resentment at the Jews for discovering/inventing the One God, while resisting and exempting themselves from the Christian and Muslim universalizations of that discovery/invention; more broadly, though, as initiators of and within the European market economy and modern political and cultural institutions; even more, as pioneering, through the socialist and communist movements, the critique and dismantling of that modern, market society before a majority of citizens, even in the West, had had a chance to acclimatize themselves to it. The simple addition is that Jews must be resented within democracy, or any polity predicated upon a general will implicit in each citizen and recoverable through either through unfettered dialogue amongst the citizens or through revolutionary events, just as much as they must be resented within Christian and Muslim polities. Democracy cannot assimilate the Jews because it cannot assimilate firstness which, by definition, upsets the established balance of resentments and initiates some new form of agreement, something one can “sign on” to without prior permission or authorization. “The Jews” will always be a serviceable answer to the question, “why don’t the people see their way clear to their own best interests,” and that will always be the question of democratic discourse because that discourse presupposes that only the usurped center can interfere with our convergence upon shared understanding of our common interests. Democratese, in other words, is intelligible under the assumption that, presented with the relevant facts and freed from whatever ideological manipulations blind them, everyone would say what I am saying now.

I would conclude, then, that opposing anti-semitism within democratic discourse is a futile exercise: you can’t refute it, because the absence of evidence of Jewish control and manipulation is, of course, the best evidence of it. By now, charges of anti-semitism have been pre-emptively marked as disingenuous attempts to silence critics of Israel, and therefore more proof of Jewish manipulation, control, malevolence, etc. We can no longer assume some “mainstream” protocol by which well intentioned people recognize anti-semitism and shun it—the post-War victimary discourses which enabled the establishment of such a protocol have mutated into the most virulent source of anti-semitism, in the resentment of those whose victimary centrality has always already been pre-empted by the Jews. But, I think, it might be just as well to have less coded and more overt expressions of resentment, especially since those codes have constrained the speech of us Jews and those philo-semites who do and might stand with us, as taboos on “singling” out elements of Jewish singularity, for good and ill, have impinged upon all discourse.

It’s silly to tell other people what they should say, but my own preference is for speaking bluntly, as a Jew, about Jewish accomplishments as well as Jewish blunders and instances of genuine irresponsibility within modern Jewish history, such as the rush into the Communist movements, especially in Europe, especially in Eastern Europe, and especially in the Bolshevik revolution—movements which could never have gained the power they did without massive Jewish participation. Yes, Jews were oppressed under Czarism, indeed Czarist Russia was a dead end for Jews, they saw Communism as a liberation, etc.—but enough of such rationalizations! This is a key pathology of democratic discourse—any wrongdoing of which I am accused must be traced back to a wrong done to me so as to even things out, and I imagine the hope of many Jews was that tracing the ultimate wrong to the “ruling class” oppressors would mean it wouldn’t be traced back to them—but why not just acknowledge the wrong, assess the damage, repudiate the sources in one’s own experience that were evidenced in these events, rethink and create new practices? Yuri Slezkine, in “The Jewish Century,” traces the modern Jewish trajectory along three lines: Communism, with its fullest expression in the USSR; Zionism, leading, of course, to Israel; and the “therapeutic state” which he asserts Jews created in 20th century America—with this latest perhaps the furthest reaching, intellectually and socially, of them all. We can afford to reject the Communism, and Leftism more generally, while embracing Zionism and the flourishing of Judaism and Jewish culture, along with the remarkable example of a free, market society under construction in Israel, and untangling the complex legacies of the “therapeutic,” which I believe has done more good than harm in contributing to the self-understanding of modern society. In other words, there are many good reasons to be disgusted, to renounce and condemn anti-semitism, and I don’t say that Jewish repudiation of Leftism is a precondition of such responses; I do say, though, that Jews and their defenders will only be able to engage this battle fully through such a repudiation, which will enable us to frankly acknowledge our admittedly outsized contribution to the world and make the perhaps unsatisfying but undoubtedly true claim that we are more sinned against than sinning—but, in the end, who wants to keep score? We are strong enough to do this, and not simply adopt a victimized stance in relation to anti-semitism.

To return to social theory: the basic social model bequeathed by Judaism is one of a covenant formed through the revelation of a divinity external to any social center; implicit in this model is a law, both oral (given in the event of revelation itself and transmitted pedagogically and in practice) and written (with simulated reluctance, because the law can account for the dispersal of the people and the cutting of threads of tradition insofar as we supplement these losses with the sacralization of the very language in which the revelation took place); implicit in the law—actual statutes, governing everyday life and ethical experience, debated and implemented by specialists but visible to all—or Halacha, are the store of examples, embodied in stories, high and low, tragic and comic, constantly undergoing revision and accreting commentary, or Aggadah, in which the kind of people who discovered/invented, expanded, exemplified and violated the laws can be disclosed along with the kind of world in which such people would have been born, grown and struggled. Implicit in all of the above is a people capable of living in a world of strangers, of switching back and forth between explicit and tacit, extending the benefit of God and the Law to those who wish it while defending themselves against those who don’t—at any rate, there is never any social relation outside of some covenant, some mutual pledging, some willingness to be taken hostage or stand in for one’s fellow. This is pretty much the social model I proposed at the opening, which means we can now answer Marx’s implicit accusation and say, yes, we want to make all of society Jewish, and this is what it means.

Clearly, we need a radical break with victimary culture, which exacerbates what I have called “meta-democratic” discourse, has no intrinsic limits and in the near future might make basic economic activity and the maintenance of social peace problematic. Since the last radical break with victimary culture was that effected by the Nazis, people will understandably be cautious. I think that only the sacralization of agreements, tacit and explicit, will suffice—even unfair agreements, agreements entered into rashly, agreements undermined by changes in the conditions which first underlay them, agreements we have discovered we must have made in order to cooperate as we do now—a fetishization of agreements, and engagements which foreground what we must have already agreed upon simply to make the engagement possible. This would not replace a “victim” culture with a “victor” culture, but with a culture which privileges those who stick with commitments they have made and offer themselves as examples of the agreements we must have made simply in order to make sense of the example. The fight against anti-semitism might put forth those elements of Judaism that represent the human as subject to agreements already made, those yet to be made, and those we are to discover we have always already made. In seeking ceaselessly to covenant with our fellow men and women we earn the right to make explicit the covenant with God whose promise underlay that quest in the first place—even if we are at the point where we can eliminate the name “God,” if need be, and just treat every word as containing a solemn agreement with whomever cares to repeat, embody or mistake it.

It seems to me that the desire for fame and the corresponding resentment towards others for one’s anonymity that Eric Gans identified as “the fundamental human value” and the source of the “radical evil” motivating the mass murderers of our time must, in turn, be rooted in more originary desires. Interesting, Gans doesn’t posit an opposing form of the desire for fame—rather, he contrasts that desire with moral responsibility and human solidarity. But there is a very clear contrast with the radical evil, demonic desire for fame, and one that I think would have been foremost in the minds of practically every person up until a couple of hundred years ago at most, and that David Goldmann (the online “Spengler”) places at the center of his political analyses: the desire for the soul’s immortality. The motivation for resisting the temptation to do evil has, historically, been the fear of eternal punishment and the hope of eternal reward. The desires circulating around celebrity are a substitute for that fear and hope—the tawdriness of much celebrity and the periodic outbursts of this radical evil might suggest that this substitute is a pathological one, but I would agree with Gans that it is very difficult to tell for sure—aside from Gans’s reasoning in his “Aurora and ‘Radical Evil’” (Chronicle #428), there is no lack of atheists out there who will recount to us all the blood that has been spilled on behalf of behalf of this or that favored version of immortalization. Maybe the costs of celebrification are lower. But there have been other alternatives to the orthodox modes of immortalization in modern times: living forever in the nation one belongs to, in great works and, perhaps, most accessibly, in ones descendants—all of these modes, indeed, long co-existed with belief in eternal damnation and salvation, while being capable of existing without such belief. The first two are certainly of receding credibility, having been associated with violence (of nationalism, war, the megalomania of the tyrant), while few are capable of unambiguously benevolent great works (like curing diseases). And families are smaller, more individuals are without them, tensions between the generations make the pleasures of seeing one’s self carried on in the next generation more problematic. If immortality is a basic need for we sign users, whence can we reasonably hope to receive it?

We certainly don’t need to be nostalgic for presumably more certain guarantees of immortality: the promises of the Church and other religious authorities in this regard were clearly extravagant and, fortunately, so were the threats. People must have always noticed, regardless of whether they would discuss or reflect upon it, that no one could really know about any of these things one way or another. Furthermore, nations dissolve and leave the stage of history; family lines die out; with very few exceptions, great works change their meaning over time, as no one has any way of knowing whether he will end up a Herostratus or, say, a… well, who—would anyone like to venture to name an individual whose legacy has been received with enduring and unambiguous adoration?

All that endures is language, and whoso would seek out immortality today would best do so therein. Indeed, as Gans has argued on many occasions, the eternity of the sign is the model for all our other understandings of immortality. So why not cut right to the chase? The only guarantee of immortality is some discernable, irreversible change to the language—we need only think in terms of some minimal shift, a “style,” which one cannot help but have, and of which one can, with only a slight introduction of self-reflexivity, identify the markers. This really is a sure thing, because even if one, near the end of one’s life, were to discover that one’s style was completely derivative, even parasitic upon some precursor or mere repetition of the deadening formulas of everyday life and common sense—well, even carrying a copied style forward into new domains constitutes something new, and the latest iteration of the formulaic or commonplace communicates something extra, whether it be a charming naivete or unwitting parody. Of course we are lowering the bar here—we surrender the power to direct sinners netherward, to nominate heroes to adore and villains to abominate. But styles are subject to judgment as well, and a kind of posthumous punishment, and all the paradoxes of faith are activated here as well—it is precisely the most scrupulous, those who attend to their style, those who seek to bound up style with substance, to familiarize themselves with so as to distinguish themselves from a range of styles, who will be most tortured with the fear of the irrelevance, harmfulness, or fraudulence of their contribution to the language, while those who just absorbed some off the shelf style that “worked” for them will exhibit that style most blithely (and, who knows, maybe with greater approval). But this just means that such judgments are out of our hand, as they should be—our inability to force the issue, to ensure that our style enter the language in a particular way, or ripple out with ascertainable effects, signifies the absence of violence from this form of immortalization. At the same time, though, we could always reasonable hope that some little bit of our style, especially now that we can record and make universally available the most trivial of our experiments in style, will resonate sufficiently, even if in a mediated or marginal way, with some, a few, down the road, perhaps even so much that someone will take the time to find their way back to the “original.” And since it would be like that person is conversing with us, it is also like I or anyone else is conversing with that person right now. Perhaps that is, or can be, immortality enough.

say a few words about the Supreme Court’s recent decision upholding “Obamacare”? I’m somewhat detached from it, more so than I would have expected, since I though the Court would overturn the law—I’m as surprised as anyone that it was Chief Justice Roberts who not only cast the deciding vote but did so in a decision that is convoluted enough to be a Borges story, a work of conceptual art or, more simply, a joke (and not a bad one, at that). He actually gave me a new way to think about the word “tax,” which one doesn’t expect from a Supreme Court ruling. So, the government can’t impose a mandate requiring you to buy a product, but they can fine you for not buying that product, as long as that fine is considered a “tax”; nor does the fine or penalty actually have to be called a tax in order to be a tax—indeed, those who passed the law can have, and can continue to, vociferously insist that it is not a tax. I would not be at all surprised if a new lawsuit charging that the “tax” is invalid because it didn’t originate in the House of Representatives were to be rejected, again in a decision authored by Justice Roberts, on the grounds that, for the purpose of this new lawsuit, it was not, in a fact a tax. In other words, what we might actually have here is a “nonce” tax.

And there’s even more! There is a trap for Democrats and, more broadly, the Left built into the decision: Roberts agreed with the dissenters that the Commerce Clause would not have permitted the mandate, hence, presumably, embedding some limits upon federal over-reach. But, one might say (and I would agree with one on this), that over-reach can continue, as long as Congress just says it is introducing new taxes. But there’s the brilliantly laid trap!—the whole point is to tax without admitting you are doing so.

There’s also a trap for Republicans, who have gotten themselves a bit entangled in their eagerness to rid us of this monstrosity—they began by insisting that the mandate was, in fact a new tax (this insistence lay behind the famous interview wherein George Stephanopolous pressed the President on precisely this question) but, then, for the sake of the lawsuit, were quite happy to deny its “taxness” in finding the quickest route to its overturn; and, now, seem thrilled to take the Supreme Court (which did decide wrongly, didn’t it?) at its word and run against this enormous new tax of Obama’s. This game might not end well either.

I am grateful to the Chief Justice, though, and not only due to my love of word play, self-reflexivity and arbitrary constraints in writing—in trying to decide for myself whether it is, indeed, “fairly possible” to see the mandate as a tax I had to construct the following, intriguing, analogy (which I assume Roberts himself relied upon). The government provides all kinds of tax breaks for activities it would prefer us to engage in more of: having children, winter-proofing our homes, sending our kids to college, and, really, God knows what else. So, in that case, why can’t we say that the government is taxing those who don’t have children, don’t winter-proof, don’t send kids to college, etc.; or, if we want to follow the Mobius Strip around the other side, that the government is “mandating” having children and all the rest? Sure, we can define “tax” and “mandate” in such a way as to answer these questions, but does anyone really believe in such fixed definitions anymore?

In other words, Roberts’ final trap is for us—all of us who have accepted the continual growth of government and its extension into every area of life, every choice we make, bribing, blackmailing and manipulating us at every turn, with our approval. And I think he knows it. Roberts has written a little postmodern play, in which the audience has to perform the denouement. That’s not such a bad legacy.

My reading of the event of 9/11 was that it would either lead to the abolition of victimary discourse or accelerate the unraveling of American and Western society. My reasoning was that the only viable response to the unlimited victimary claims inherent in the attack was to defend the victims of the victims, which could in turn only be done in the name of liberal principles. In this way, victimary discourse would be exposed and discredited as the greatest producer of victims of them all, while the credibility of a more classical version of liberal principles would be restored.

This possibility ended with the election of a Democratic congress in 2006 and this was further confirmed by the election of Barack Obama in 2008. So, I had the second possibility to consider: unraveling. The election of Obama, our first hologram-American president, was a bizarre event, one that will intrigue historians: a majority of Americans opted for a kind of vague racial absolution and the fantasy that our international and domestic furies could be appeased through a symbolic repudiation of President Bush, and this at a time when there were actually somewhat serious issues on the table. I think there is quite a bit of regret about this now, but, as Marx said, “Nations and women are not forgiven the unguarded hour in which the first adventurer who came along could violate them.” If we could forgive Marx’s sexism, I think the point holds: America has repudiated its responsibilities as a guarantor of a liberal world order, which has led, on the one hand, to a metastization of victimary thinking and, on the other hand, to the Tea Party movement, which I see as wholly salutary but also completely uninterested in American leadership.

If Americans are to be more interested in saving themselves from unceasing governmental encroachments upon their lives and predations upon their livings than in protecting Europe from Russia, Taiwan and Japan from China, Israel from the Muslim world, etc., then we will see devolutions across the board—those countries, communities and individuals best able to free themselves from victimary thnking will have a chance of flourishing, but in forms and articulations we can’t anticipate now. Since there will be unchecked tyrannies and terrorist producing failed societies the world will continue to be interested in us, so our present desire to unshackle ourselves from responsibility for it will likely be revealed as a fantasy, but this will lead us to one of two possibilities: either surrender to victimary thinking on a global scale (we will take orders from the UN or some other representation of the “international community”); or we will simply target our enemies, large and small, and adopt the principle: we will feel free to hold anyone who expresses a desire to harm us responsible for all actual attempts to harm us (which would represent a repudiation of victimary thinking, if without much enlargement of ethical capabilities).

How will it all turn out? Who knows? I prefer to take the theoretical perspective, which sees all this as interesting, with the most interesting question always “What is really happening?” How do we get a view of things that isn’t just a litany of the various ways people are out there conforming to and—much more often—violating our expectations and desires? How do we wrench ourselves outside of the limitations imposed by our resentments? Maybe by sharpening those resentments and shaking off the habits of thought which normalize them—that way, at least, a possibility worth exploring or using as a measure might crystallize. I think a good place to begin is with a radical simplification—the complexities can always be let back in as we go. Here’s the simplification: victimary thinking is a heretical form of liberal democratic ideology; liberal democratic ideology is just a heretical form of Christianity; while Christianity is itself a Jewish heresy. What is Judaism, in that case? The displacement of universal empire by the Big Man with the universal empire of God, another, and the true, single center from which we are all equidistant. The impotent prophetic discourse of Jeremiah, Isaiah, et al is still the way we think today, whether we are denouncing the 1% or Big Government for interfering with our right to stand in direct relation to God and/or the egalitarian community. Modern society provides no way out of the perpetual resentment toward some illegitimate higher authority which has always already usurped the rights which supposedly ground it.

The concluding simplification: victimary discourse marks the exhaustion of what we can call the “anti-haughty” revelations. The last time as farce, after all. I will, then, simply disregard victimary discourse, no matter how powerful it is or is yet to become: it is not interesting, because either it will emerge triumphant, in which case all our thinking and social practice will end up on new, presently unthinkable terrain; or, it is, however ferocious, in its final thrashings about, in which case why not re-orient ourselves to whatever remains outside of it. This helps me to take a step toward resolving my ambivalence toward the anti-semitism project I had embarked upon, as he has mentioned a few times, with Eric Gans. It has recently struck me, and I had this intuition confirmed by Philip Reiff’s Fellow Teachers, that, if the basic archetypes of anti-semitism were created by the early Christians, then they were in fact created by Jews—non-Jewish Jews, to use Isaac Deustcher’s term. But weren’t those early Christians simply continuing an internal Jewish accusation advanced by the Hebrew prophets, targeting the vast majority of their fellow Jews for insufficient fidelity to their vocation to testify to the one God—for giving in to the imperial temptations (such as, for example, preferring to fight for corrupt kingdoms over exemplary exile).

I can’t see it as a coincidence that the 19th and 20th century world struggles similarly had a substantial intra-Jewish component. I wonder whether it could be shown that those intense and intimate battles between Stalinists and Trotskyists in Jewish neighborhoods in 1930s Brooklyn looked something like those battles, 2,000 years earlier, between the Jewish “Christists” and those who would create Talmudic Judaism. One victimary reviewer on the Amazon.com page for Reiff’s Life Among the Deathworks refers to Reiff’s “heady admixture mixture of preening Jewish narcissism” and it seems to me that he/she both has a point and is the point: anti-semitism involves the assumption that Jews believe they have a monopoly on exemption from capitulation to the imperial, civilized, order, we must all submit to. But I don’t think that anti-semitism is the belief that Jews believe this, especially since the dialectic of arguments over anti-semitism of necessity point out the uniqueness of the Jews as a target and this uniqueness can easily be taken to imply some kind of monopoly of the aforementioned kind. It only becomes anti-semitism when this presumed monopoly is taken to signify a Jewish plot to establish a more inclusive and horrific empire than any that has yet existed.

At any rate, the point is that we might simply be feeding anti-semitism by directing attention to it so insistently—what might happen if we leave the after-effects of all those internecine Jewish wars behind and let the unproductive spin their wheels? Israel can be a testing ground for this possibility, because in Israel Jews can focus on recreating Judaism, by picking and choosing and reconstructing from among its enormous riches, treating the global opprobrium towards and ostracism of Israel as a mere nuisance, while going about covenanting with all those who prefer relations with a thriving, advanced society over the pleasures of joining in the sacrifices of the victimary Palestinians.

So, what, then, outside of all prophet and metaphysical frames, is happening now? Reiff’s own prophetic discourse identifies the “therapeutic” as the replacement of the faith in founding interdicts which has taken us this far. He thereby identifies something central to all the historical and cultural “posts,” but I don’t see the therapeutic in as threatening terms as does Reiff. He claims that the therapeutic does away with all interdicts by not only giving us permission to transgress them but by setting us against them as an illegitimate authority, inimical to our spontaneous freedom. In this case, I’m not sure if the victimary is mode of the therapeutic or vice versa; or, on the contrary, the victimary has taken its force from the vacuum left open by the rise of the therapeutic, insofar as the victimary is nothing if not interdicts, albeit unevenly applied.

But there are always interdicts, insofar as we continue to speak—after all, we don’t engage in continuous orgies and lynchings. So where, and what, are they? How enforced, and revised in practice? To what extent are we living on borrowed capital, drawing upon the habits of renunciation and deferral created by faiths in which we no longer believe, as opposed to new, as yet unnamed signs, creating new, perhaps more idiosyncratic sacralities? Much of what is valuable in contemporary thinking—Gregory Bateson and his followers come to mind—is indebted to a kind of therapeutism: the notion of a double bind, which is certainly consistent with the originary hypothesis and a source of Gans’s thinking about the paradoxes intrinsic to the originary scene, derives from interpretations of therapeutic situations. And there are powerful interdictions built into the “interactionist” standpoint deriving from Bateson: to see our speech as saturated with paradox is to identify and seek to minimize the basic sources of violence and not just out of fear but so as to free ourselves to think and create.

Even the insistence that one not confuse the “map” with the “territory” reflects perhaps the most ancient interdictions, against idolatry, and taking the name of the Lord in vain. We can now know that any map is in the territory, and not just an imperfect, tentative representation of it; even more, the map is nothing more than our analysis and composition of the territory from within. We model the territory as we take a step in one direction rather than another; we receive feedback; and we revise the map in taking another step. Google now does this at the speed of light, more or less. At any time on the Yahoo homepage there is a list of the top ten searches at that moment; sometimes, the top entry drops off the list in a couple of minutes. In this economics of attention, anomalies and mistakes stand out—those things that are so bad that they’re good, for example. Standing out is one thing—being incorporated into a new, more or less evanescent, idiom, is another. It’s easy to see the ways in which this happens—a particular image is repeated over and over, in subtly and drastically different ways; a particular phrase or sentence is repeated over and over, with a single word replaced each time, or a different referent, or the context rendering it slightly more or less ironic. Anyone can do it—anyone can be taught to (or maybe just learn) to do it.

As far as I can tell, that’s what is happening outside of the metaphysical, prophetic and imperial frames: the analysis and composition of mistakes and anomalies into new idioms and grammars. New rules, without any meta-rules, are difficult to follow and violations are hard to assess but precisely the lack of meta-rules makes it urgent to try and follow them to the letter, so people make lots of mistakes but just keep going, tacitly revising the rules, with the boundary between insistence upon compliance and authentification of compliance difficult to discern. In that case, there is no more room for metaphysical mapping or prophetic hysteria. I naturally think this development supports my own hopes for a far more minimal social order, with all institutions ultimately reducible to explicit agreements with equally explicit modes of accountability. Everything get ironized, post-ironized and de-ironized fairly quickly through this process of analysis and composition, leading to the kind of skepticism, transparency and pluralism that keeps any authority within very strict limits. But I could be wrong—maybe such play depends upon a complacent belief in the stability of what exists (politicians come and go, recessions, come and go, etc., but nothing can ever really change, can it?). My guess is that such play is inevitable once we realize we don’t share the same map and accept that we never will—that all we can do is follow one another’s lead and make up the details and patch together the shared terms as we go. Some, perhaps a remnant, could then rebuild around the prohibition on presuming a shared model without the creation of some joint attention. Such a prohibition can be enforced with minimal resentment because you can always simply treat any such presumption as erroneous, so as to open up a new play-space. At any rate, this new period of transparencies and overlappings is what I would like to be interested in right now, however marginal it might be.

At least one form of modernity, and arguably the dominant form, the one in which the winners in the marketplace become indistinguishable from the state players who determine winners in the marketplace, is driven by a hatred of the given. The given, first of all, in the sense of what is, what is simply there, what remains after all theory, analysis, experimentation, transformation, construction and production. You can listen to progressives rage against any suggestion that some differences, including those that generate inequalities, might simply be there, and, for that matter, be no big deal; and that all the attempts to eradicate said differences might just shift the pieces around on the board a bit, with some resentment added to the mix. The progressives and leftists will rage against such suggestions, but I’m not sure that much of the right, or most conservatives are any different—at the very least, they are extremely anxious to inoculate themselves against any suggestion that all differences can be rendered irrelevant and all inequalities removed. We see such a rage against the given both in the desire to make every single aspect of life a partisan political question and every topic a subject of some polemic, and in the tendency to try and eliminate risk and mistake, or at the very least to inflate the consequences of risk and mistakes to the benefit of those whose job it is to detect and uncover them. The old communist (I think) slogan, “Nothing is accidental,” covers all this. (In other words, I am endorsing, without saying how much, Heidegger’s complaint that the tendency of modernity is to turn everything and everyone into “standing reserve.”)

But given just as much in the sense of what has been given, that is, reality and everything in it as a gift. The two senses are really one—data is an array of gifts. A gift economy in the strict sense might spiral out of the egalitarian distribution on the originary scene, but it’s on the scene already in the form of the gift of life and peace given by the God object to the newly human community. When we divide amongst ourselves, we are merely dividing the gifts of God. When we give gifts, we are imitating God, when we accept gifts we are honoring God and freedom is really nothing more than the capacity to reject or accept any particular gift—just as language is, ultimately listening, sifting through a lot of noise and ordering the given, and then passing along, as faithfully as we can, what we have heard. Even the market economy can be conceptualized as a mere adjunct to the gift economy, as the entrepreneur first of all packages up his gifts for strangers, each of whom asymmetrically returns a bit of the gift of continued existence as a producer.

For the leftist intellectual, the fact that something is “taken for granted” by “everyone” is about as certain proof as you can have that the idea or claim in question is both wrong and pernicious. Even while we need not go that far, where else would thinking depart from if the not sense that what is “merely” given is unsatisfactory? But if you set yourself in opposition to the “granted” or “given,” the alternative is to trust only what you have “taken,” or, in more theoretical terms, “appropriated.” Even for Locke, only what one has appropriated through labor is genuinely one’s own “property.” But the powers with which you are able to “appropriate” must have been “given,” your proximity to the land and materials must have been given (even if you had to move quite a ways it was still in reach, as proven by the fact that you got there), the land’s own productive powers and the “laws of nature” enabling you to transform nature were all given, and so on. Even more, the work done by previous generations, and the unintended consequences of your own work and your collaboration with others is constantly adding new givens as quickly as you can make the givens takings. And in the end, your property is only yours because others grant it, as long as you take theirs for granted as well.

What, then, is so terrifying about all this? Whence the desire for a completely “constructed” reality, in which we can determine who put every piece in place, when and where? The gift economy, in the narrow sense studied by Marcel Mauss, and the honor society (with its vendettas and sacrifice) needed to be transcended, and the elaboration of the market economy which first took shape on it margins, was clearly the path of least resistance to doing so. But the market order didn’t, as it could have, present itself as a supplement to, and “appropriate” the language of, the gift economy—for example, by describing itself as a way of extending the gift relationship to strangers and by giving its increasingly asymmetrical forms more institutionalized recognition. At a certain point the advocates of the market order, if not its actual participants, set themselves against the gift economy, seeing it as an enemy to be uprooted. It seems to me that the best explanation is the alliance of the new, vulnerable, but potentially revolutionary market order with the absolutist state—the imperial state, in other words, which is really nothing more than a permanently asymmetrical gift relationship (is there anything more “given” for us today than the state?). Gift economies proliferate centers of power and diverse local relationships, formal and informal, which interfere with the state’s need to give each individual a single, unobstructed relationship with the state, the giver of all things necessary and the recipient of the obedience of the subject. The participants on the market could provide the formal arguments for the equality of the citizen and the rights to be protected by the state through the force of law; and the state could provide the market participant with unfettered and protected access to the domain it controlled. Once each imperial order finds itself in competition with all the others, an irreversible dynamic is set in place.

Thinking outside of the terror of the given means thinking in terms of plurality and incommensurability—or, in more grammatical terms, idioms. But it also means dropping the resentment towards totalizing discourses central to deconstruction and postmodernism—in the end, the totalizing discourses are also idioms, from which anyone might learn something (just like the state is ultimately just an increasingly inept giver and claimant of donations). If I kick a ball straight ahead past the other players, and I happen to be on a soccer field, I’m advancing the ball downfield; if I’m on a basketball court, it’s a violation and my team gives up the ball. Likewise in reverse: bouncing the ball down court is fine in basketball and a violation in soccer. The exact same physical movement has radically opposed meanings in the two settings. That’s all that “incommensurability” means. It doesn’t mean that if I play either soccer or basketball I can never play the other; it doesn’t mean that there aren’t skills that transfer from one sport to the other, or that observations you might make regarding, say, team play, in one or the other won’t provide insights into the other sport; it doesn’t even mean that one sport can’t be better than the other according to a particular scale of values: if you want a sport that maximizes jumping ability, then basketball is better. All “incommensurability” means is that you can’t play basketball and soccer at the same time; and that if you are going to play “sports,” it is going to be one of those sports or another—there is no sport in itself, or idea of sport, even though we might very well be able to construct a definition of “sport” that would distinguish it from, say, “crafts,” “musical performance” and other activities.(Indeed, I will do something like that in a moment, as a move in the theory game.) It’s just that one couldn’t play the definition.

Human life is like that, which means that the originary hypothesis demonstrates both the singular origin and the irreducible plurality of human being. As Hannah Arendt once said, in summarizing a key idea of Augustine’s, there was a beginning so that man would be a beginner. One can only identify beginnings after the fact—what makes you most likely to be first is not remaining tense on the starting line waiting for the gun to go off—that will only lead to more false starts; what makes one more likely to be first is a devotion to other beginnings, which come to one as a gift and which you would like to pass down, undefiled, to others, ultimately strangers. Revering beginnings rather than pre-empting or forcing ends is post-millennial thinking. According to Bernard Suits, “playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles,” which would mean that playing a game is simulating the originary event, wherein the sign was created as an “unnecessary obstacle” (to simply taking the object) that everyone voluntarily accepts as a necessary mediation. The game, of course, must also involve a forgetting of the origin, since the obstacle is at the same time very necessary. We necessarily create unnecessary obstacles in order to make the necessity as minimal as possible—which is to say, to move things along from prisoners’ dilemmas to elaborately rule governed interactions to freely entered and exited conversations and improvisations which reveal something new in the participants.

An entry point into what I have taken to calling “marginalist,” “exodian” and, now, “secessionist” thinking is integrating “rights” into specific centerless games (with, if necessary, referees) which define those moves which place you inside or outside of the game—rather than locating rights in the human being as such. This reduction is only possible if every game takes place on a particular piece of property with a generally recognized owner, and if the players are allowed to use their own currency. In relation to the state, then, politics today should work towards more precise definitions and protections of property and freedom from imposed state issued currency (there would be no need to try and overthrow the state—free currency would take care of its withering away, and if I’m wrong about that it must be because the state that would remain would be perfectly benign). Beyond this, though, this thinking beyond metaphysics also takes us beyond monotheism, which is itself bound up with resentment towards empire, essentially the defining the individual’s relationship to the salvational God as that which transcends the relationship between the individual and the imperial center; and history as the gradual, universal revelation of that God through the successive pride and fall of the empires. (I don’t mind making myself ridiculous by declaring the obsolescence of monotheism—my only concern is that the declaration could be taken to involve or encourage the slightest resentment towards believers.) This certainly doesn’t imply atheism, polytheism or paganism. It implies, rather, a God of the gifts—whatever, after all of our makings and takings, turns out to simply be there and something we could share with others, is a divine gift. Whether it’s always the same God, whether we could imagine His characteristics, whether he has plans for us (other than living up to and sharing His gifts)—those seem to me questions that might be taken up by those who wish to play the theology game, and who might gift the rest of us with helpful insights.

The game analogy is limited because games are closed off from reality in a way that reality never can be. We’re never playing quite the same game in reality, almost as if my basketball interferes with your soccer. But in any scene we can converge, or can imagine ourselves converging, upon clear sentences. At any moment, I can and implicitly do hypothesize an utterance-gesture-posture complex that will obtain a desired, if only dimly imagined, response—I will piece together the complex that is most likely to elicit that response. When it doesn’t, I adjust my desire and recalibrate my signifying, while everyone else does the same. The process can only continue given the assumption that sign and interpretation could coincide—even though, even if I imagine such a coincidence in advance, it would never be identical to what I would recognize after the fact as one. The movie cliché of two people looking into each others’ eyes and realizing simultaneously that they are in love is a model of this experience, which never really happens but is the presupposition of all that does.

The version of this experience at the level of the declarative is the clear sentence. The clear sentence (I am claiming that this is what we really mean by “clarity”) is one that is exhausted by its truth function. That is, once you have decided, to the satisfaction of all concerned, that a sentence is true or false, the sentence can be discarded—to the extent that it’s clear. The way we make a sentence more clear is by situating each of its elements securely within the truth function: “that dog is mine” is clear insofar as we have a consensus on what a dog is, on the concept of ownership and what would validate it in our cultural context, and on whether we referring to the same dog. But, of course, there is, in principle, no end to the layers of implicit claims and assumptions that might require the ostensive verification that must be obtained or stipulated to for the sentence to be made clear: an agreement on what a dog is on one level might turn into a disagreement on another level, and that other level might become relevant for the context in which the truth function of the sentence needs to be determined; we might have different conventions for pointing at something; our concepts of ownership might turn out to have significant incompatibilities, and so on—moreover, clarifying one term in the sentence might obscure another.

So, to return to the game analogy, we would have to imagine that I could be playing basketball and you soccer, with enough common elements in the two games so that with sufficient good will and willingness to overlook anomalies it would only be in event of an egregious discrepancy that we would ever notice it—and such events would be rapidly transformed into an mere accident, one that we now know how to avoid in the future. But what if we don’t want to—what if we actually come to like this basketball-soccer hybrid we have discovered ourselves to be playing? If we prefer to circle around and keep revising a provisional set of rules and have the discipline and mutual regard to overlook the momentary unfair advantages such an activity will always be giving one side or the other?
To return to language, this would mean that our desire for clarity need not be abandoned, but that it could be accented or punctuated by the networks of diverging idioms revealed precisely by that insistence on clarity (it is only the insistence on clarity that would lead us to explore the different possible understandings of “dog” and “mine”). With Godelian undecidability, there is a statement that is true but cannot be proven within the system, and the system depends upon such a truth. With the undecidability or incommensurability I am proposing, whichever truth we set ourselves to secure within the system of the sentence pries open different systems pivoted upon that truth. The act of taking—taking something to be the case, taking each other to be symmetrical to one’s self—unveils a world of givens: different definitions of dog, of property, of proper pointing out. And, these givens need not have been “in” any of us, or “suppressed” in the name of communication—they may not have existed outside our convergence on the clear sentence, but there they are now. We can work our way analytically to such presents lying and waiting in our presuppositions; or, we can take to producing them directly by, instead of repelling grammatically incorrect sentences, taking those parts of the sentence that have no grammatical place idiomatically so as to fill the needed grammatical slot, thereby opening up a whole new “grammar” for the word(s) in question.

The deliberate production of givens out of our takings—that is what the civilizational openness we need to survive now depends upon.