GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

Anyone familiar with TV crime shows knows how pervasive the figure of the serial killer has become in American popular culture, and how stereotyped—there is the imputed traumatic foundation of the killer’s addiction to violence, there are the idiosyncratic and extremely regular habits, the fixed idea of grievance, the ideal victim, and so on. And, of course, the serial killer is invariably brilliant and omni-competent—a scientist and artist (and performance artist, as they carefully manage their public image and the police investigation itself—and escape artist—no prison seems capable of holding them). Serial killers are a good match for serially produced entertainment (create an intriguing killer and your season writes itself), but their popularity, even their mythical status, lies, ultimately, in their implications for mimesis, and what we might see as a postmodern crisis in cultural mimetic modeling.

The show Dexter makes this relation between serial killers and mimesis very clear. The titular character is a serial killer who works for the Miami PD as a blood spatter expert, and whose victims are themselves serial killers. Dexter is compelled to kill, he is presented as completely addicted to the thrill of the hunt and the procedures he has invented and perfected for stalking and killing his prey, but he has harnessed this compulsion to the doing of justice—thanks to his adoptive father, a police officer, he has trained himself in the norms of the super hero, another still pervasive mythical figure in American popular culture, who sacrifices all to fight evil and protect the innocent.

It has become extremely difficult to imagine such dedication to the good in contemporary culture as anything other than the result of a pathological compulsion subjected to equally pathological self-control, and Dexter simply takes this cynicism or relativism to its ultimate conclusion. But what interests me more about Dexter is the way the show insists on the “inhuman” character of its protagonist—Dexter simply doesn’t feel what others feel. He is, emotionally, but also ethically, autistic, experiencing nothing outside of his compulsion and the rules he has created for managing it. But he must always interact with others, first of all at work and with his sister, but later on with his wife, her children and their new baby. And each interaction brings with it the problem: how would a normal person comport himself here? What you and I know tacitly—how to respond to a greeting, how to recognize when and why someone resents us, how to acknowledge a gesture, whether people around you are tense or relaxed, etc.—Dexter has to negotiate through induction, guesswork and trial and error. Everyday life becomes a never ending series of strategy sessions. At the same time, though, Dexter is very good at strategizing, and to that extent knows the semiotics of everyday life better than anyone else.

We might imagine this form of pathology as an instance of lastness on the originary scene. If we imagine that the scene takes shape through the de-escalation the dangerous mimetic rivalry, then each person must not only watch the others closely but must “identify” with them—that is, each must anticipate the effects one’s own presentation of the gesture will have on each other’s oscillation between gesture and grasping; and, if one must thus anticipate, one must also experience, virtually, the other’s response. But if we further imagine that the scene has taken shape before all have emitted the sign, then we have a certain number for whom the scene is presented as a fait accompli, and against whom the others would now be organized enough to prevent by force from approaching the central object. For the last, the sign is objective but has no subjective component—he sees that it works, but it doesn’t work for him. He therefore sees enough to make it work for him, in the sense of to his advantage, without being “taken in” by it, because the sign must, furthermore, appear to him as an illusion that the others buy into out of their own fear—a fear he has also not experienced. At the same time, he would harbor a resentment unmoored to any desire for the object—he did, indeed, desire the object like all the others, but his resentment has never passed through the resentment of the center, and his resentment is therefore directed at the entire scene. It would be a resentment that produces the desire to prove to everyone that the sense of safety and mutual trust they have acquired through the sign is a deadly fraud.

At any rate, under such conditions, when the iconic bases of self-evidency utterly sever one person from others, the only way to hold things together is through elaborate and inevitably idiosyncratic rules. These rules can be shared and taught, explicitly and tacitly, but it will never be possible to refer them back to some shared nature outside of those rules and the spaces they regulate. Dexter, and the serial killer as icon, are obviously extreme examples, but it does seem to me that as victimary culture has come to be virtually the only public culture we have, and as victimary culture has itself become an elaborate set of often arcane, constantly changing and mutually incompatible rules, Dexter provides a helpful hypothesis of contemporary conditions, as long as we understand that, just as Dexter comes, in his own way to “love” his wife and child, and to enact and at least minimally experience the responsibilities that come with his new role, our lives within uprooted regulatory conditions are just as authentic as any other once habits and tacit knowing of our way around sets in. It just may be, though, that they never set in all the way.

This may be the postmodern condition, but it also seems to me the modern one: ultimately we are capable of learning how to mark and unmark one another’s gestures, but the process has become more abstract and less iconic; or, to use Peirce’s term for abstract iconicity, our relations have become diagrammatic. We have always (to draw upon the title of Eric Gans’s talk at the latest GA conference) been modern in the sense that modernity is placing things in-between us, or multiplying mediations, means and middles, but there is a tension between that process and the shared central object that crises refer us back to—I don’t know when the decisive point would have been passed, but by now the claim that the things we place in the middle are proxies for, pieces of, or likenesses to that shared object are rarely tenable. At this point, the things we place between us, at least culturally (the technological middle is another discussion), are improvised attempts to unmark oneself, which is to say aborted and simulated attacks on oneself that others might translate into their own terms. In that case, we are always engaging one another across these improvised zones whose borders must be subject to increasingly explicit negotiations.

I’m sure a lot of people like this and a lot of people don’t, but if I’m right it is just becoming the reality and a couple of generations down the line people will speak much more directly about the norms and rules governing everyday interactions than they do now—a TV show like The Office, most of whose comic situations are generated by the mismatch of rules to situations on an individual or collective level, points in this direct, and so did Seinfeld a while back. It also seems to me that my students are never so comfortable as when they have a very clear set of rules to follow, and they don’t concern themselves so much with the rationale or legitimacy of the rules. Students of the type that were so common in my youth—romantic strivers for authenticity and full of resentment towards all rules—seem to be an almost extinct species. They show up once in a while but stand out like sore thumbs. And the increasingly exposed and interconnected nature of individuality facilitated by social networking like Facebook and texting pushes things in the same direction, towards elaborate, ever changing and idiosyncratic intersecting rules. (I think that such a condition may make the desire for overarching bureaucratic regulation more intense—if only someone could just set and enforce the rules once and for all!—while subverting all actual attempts in that direction.)

You can be comfortable talking about “content” only when questions of “form” have been settled. The referential bias of metaphysical discourse, which insists upon the transparency of language and hence the possibility of and therefore responsibility to represent reality (human nature, fact, ideas, feelings—everything resisting complete semiotic representation) in unambiguous, accurate and consensual ways is an understandable attempt to promote deliberately established disciplinary discourses over ordinary speech situations and, further, to raise the qualifications for entering sanctioned disciplinary spaces. Such a bias may have been necessary for the integration of writing and then print into social communicative processes, for the creation of universities and the emergence of modern science and politics. But do I really need to cite all the reasons why such a bias is no longer sustainable—it is enough to recognize that while in some areas (like, say, best sellers read by beach goers) traditional representational forms still sell, attentiveness to forms, rules, conventions, and the various possible modifications, mistakes, convergences and so on that they entail prevails in most of the more emergent modes of communication. Young people can still often be startlingly literalistic and sincere—I don’t mean to suggest that we are seeing the world populated by savvy cynics. But they are literalistic and sincere in their relation to a particular set of rules circulating in a given space.

The alternative to administering CPR to one or another brand of metaphysics is to treat all discourse as disciplinary, as fundamentally engaged in inquiry, which is to say, interested in generating ostensives that might spread. One way of approaching such a project is through conversations modeled on the work of thinkers like Ludwig Wittgenstein and JL Austin, which is to simply ask “what we mean when we say…” or “do we use that word in this way,” and so on—Wittgenstein’s notion of the “grammar” of a word, rather than its meaning, points the way: which verbs or prepositions does a particular word work with, in which situations does its use seem “odd,” and so on. Wittgenstein and Austin are still sparring with metaphysics, though, and are overwhelmingly interested in showing that the way language works in ordinary settings is at odds with the way it works in the artificial spaces of philosophy (and, I would say, the social sciences as well). This is still a worthy project, especially since metaphysics has penetrated ordinary discourse, especially when that discourse is compelled to enter unfamiliar terrain—if you listen to the way in which people use terms (I have students in mind here in particular) like “society,” “closeminded,” “opinion,” “diversity” and so on, you can see the residual functioning of metaphysics as a kind of socially congealing cant.

The approach I prefer is to create little ripples in language by constructing idioms out of the rules of grammar and language use itself. The anyown advances its rights by pressing such idioms and transforming the way anyone can talk about things. An idiom is created by identifying, within one form or medium, the constituent element of a lower form of medium: writing identifies a constituent element within speech, and speech within gesture (of course, we will have to talk about TV, film, computers, music, visual images, etc., but all of that will be so many variations of gesture/speech/writing articulations). When asked what something means, you can respond by working within the same system, putting forward more familiar elements as substitutes for the unfamiliar ones (like a dictionary definition which uses words you presumably understand to define words you don’t); ultimately, though, the guarantee of understanding is something that could be pointed to or grasped—showing something, or how to do something, or how one would say something. Declarative sentences are best explained in terms of what questions they might be answering, interrogatives in terms of what command or demand they extend, and so on.

The simplest way of creating idioms is by adding, subtracting or moving one element in a system, one element whose presence, absence or displacement transforms the system, which is to say permits a lower level to present itself within that system. We could talk about the ways in which we question, challenge and ridicule others in those terms—subtract the institutional position from which someone speaks and respond to what they say minus their authority, and a transformation of its meaning in ways unfavorable to the speaker is practically guaranteed. Institutional position and authority are essentially constitutive gestural elements, situating one person closer to the center or more “vertically” than another. I would propose idioms that generate one such rule, presented on the surface of the discourse, involving the addition or subtraction of (or the addition to or subtraction from) a particular “role” or “post” within that discourse (for example, some modification in a narrative function like “adversary,” or “audience”; or excluding a commonplace distinction like inside/outside); along with second rule that iconically represents the explicit rule within a lower or more tacit system, such as grammar, and then brings that tacit system into the discourse (say, a rule for converting a certain number of declaratives into interrogatives and interrogatives into imperatives, so as to represent the dialogue with authority concealed by declarative discourse; or the representation of the replacement of internal/external oppositions by configurations through the limitation of prepositions to, say, “about” and “around”); and, finally, a more arbitrary rule that reminds one of (that iconically represents) the generative capacity of the tension between the iconic and abstract within language itself. Richard Kostelanetz, for example, has poems made up of additions or subtractions of one letter to the previous word:

Booth Boot Boo
Bounce Ounce Once
Bramble Ramble Amble
Brat Bat At
Breaker Beaker Baker
Capon Capo Cap
Caret Care Car
Chair Hair Air

Kostelanetz is exploiting the existence of the letter as the constituent element of the writing system, and the interaction between that constituent element and other constituents at other levels, such as sound (with its complicated relation to letters) and word. In looking at (“reading” might not be the right word) Kostelanetz’s poems one learns to see words within words and sounds and meanings overlapping with each other, and the minimal element of the letter sending possible discourses in one direction or another. New categories would emerge—some words must contain lots of other words within them while I would imagine there are also quite a few upon which the operation wouldn’t work and are therefore something like “irreducible” elements themselves; or one might refine the rules to make it work—I can get from “would” to “old” by dropping two letters, for example—now, we would start to look for new rules so as to uncover words within words. (An enormous amount of political satire today works in such a way—slightly changing a spelling or the sound of a word, exploiting the orthography of someone’s name, or a pun—and I imagine it has always been that way.) The same goes for Kostelanetz’s “string poems,” in which the final letter, or final two, or three, letters of one word makes up the first, first two, or three letter of the next word: “stringfiveteranciderideafencerebrumblendivestablishmentertain…” This kind of poem iconically represents “overlapping” and teaches us to find the beginning of the next word, and, by implication, the beginning of the next utterance, in the one now coming to completion, and the prelude to what we are now saying in what just was or might have been said. More broadly, I would take it to iconically represent our broader social condition which, as Michael Polanyi argued regarding scientific discourses, and as is implicit in Wiggentstein’s notion of “family resemblances,” involves no broader commonality but overlappings and varying degrees of separation and levels of mediation with no totalization.

One can translate other discourses into the rule bound idiom you invent or you can simply write in that idiom, noticing what kind of work language does when you employ it in such generative terms and reconnecting the highest, declarative and discursive levels of language with their basis in gesture and spacing. This is a kind of work I am going to try, and I think the purpose is more to open up possibilities of composition for others to work out in more popular ways than to be a mode of discourse in its own right—just as the point of poetry is not to have everyone speak that way but to expand the metaphorical resources of language. Adding, replacing and subtracting constituent elements generates thresholds; generating thresholds leads to novelties; and novel signs provide new ways for people to compose themselves.

So, let’s try translating the final paragraph of my previous post—

If a politics of redemption is a defense of the rights of the anyown, then it is a defense of the right of the anyown to spend money as anyown sees fit; but, then, that must also be a right to use whatever form of money the participants in an exchange agree to. Regarding the right of the anyown, fiat money is the first expropriation. It’s hard to imagine the titanic struggle that would be required to overturn the regime of fiat money. But it might be much easier to imagine directing attention to all the favors and gestures that we will never know but might have been exchanged, all the means that might have been created, if not for the systematic expropriations that are only possible because of fiat money—because the government can take money away from productive citizens by creating more money to give as largesse to their favored constituents.

—according to the following rule: first, a subtraction of narrative elements; second, a translation of at least 2 complex sentences into sentences including an imperative; third, every sentence must include a word that adds or subtracts one letter from a word in the previous sentence (starting with the second sentence, of course).

A politics of redemption is a defense of the rights of the anyown, it is a defense of the right of the anyown to spend money as anyown sees fit, it is a right to use whatever form of money the participants in an exchange agree to. Expropriate using fiat money—that’s how you violate the right of the anyown, of us. The regime of fiat money is an overwhelming show of force. Direct attention to all the favors and gestures, don’t take your eyes off the disappeared means; resist the systematic expropriations of fiat money. Creating more money, taking money away from our productive citizens, giving largesse to favored constituents—that’s the fiat regime.

The how is through a show, use is taken from us, of threatens to take off, and your and our must collaborate; we now have a series of imperatives embedded in cumulating, quasi-ritualistic parallelisms. Against a background of conjurations, first of the politics of redemption and finally of its antithesis, orders are given one way and the other, the prominence of the shifters “your” and “our” represents the instability of the situation and the rapid movement between the occupation of different roles. It seems to me that reliance of the existing reality upon everyone’s or anyown’s will comes out more strongly in this revision. And we are now on the threshold of the creation of maxims for political thinking and action, through such means as grammatical inversions and the inversion of marked and unmarked. Fiat money expropriates use and makes violation right; attend to the disappeared means and the favored gestures will direct you. Whatever one thinks of such maxims, that fiat money turns justice upside-down is a “real” idea that we have arrived at; and so is the notion, however paradoxical, that if we look for the means of cooperation that state coercion has disappeared, we will discover new, favorable gestures that might be durable signs of resistance to that coercion.

The novelist Ronald Sukenick was aware of the techniques of the Oulipo literary group and incorporated some of them into his work fairly regularly, but he distanced himself from “strong” forms of Oulipo by, at least in my reading, deriving rules by marking features of narrative that attending to narrative made distinctive and by following and recursively accentuating the rules discoverable in one’s own mode of work. In other words, if you pay attention to your own writing and thinking, you can identify rules you seem to be following—habits and regular gestures—and make those rules explicit stakes in the discourse. The point of working with Oulipean methods, and developing new methods out of the rules of grammar, is ultimately to get to the point where your own thinking becomes the source of rules for transforming that thinking.

“Redeem” is word with intertwined economic, political and religious meanings: it means to buy back or to pay off; it means to make up for; it means to buy or recover a slave or hostage; and it means to be delivered from one’s state of sin. It’s easy to see that it’s essentially the same word, in slightly different meanings in each case—to retrieve something that has been lost through some kind of payment. It is very helpful, though, to see the relations in this single word between Christ’s suffering for the sake of fallen humanity and getting back your watch from the pawnshop. And we can bring in, as well, the concept of honor, when we consider, for example, the man who, after some cowardly or unconscionable act in his youth, redeems himself with some act of heroism later on, along with the political resonances of redemption from slavery or, more broadly, oppression. I’m going to see if it works for describing and hypothesizing the rights of the anyown, the figure I am presenting as the basis of political thinking: the bearer of ownership rights which are yet to be ascertained because, while manifest in the market economy, they are rooted in the realms of egalitarian distribution and the gift economy; and, because the assertion of anyown’s rights automatically reverberates through the rights economy, modifying the value of everything else, which entails the right to have access to a fair measure of values, economic political and cultural.

The most interesting of the libertarian thought experiments are those which hypothesize ways in which functions currently fulfilled by government, including the most basic and unquestioned ones, such as currency, infrastructure and defense, might be performed just as well, or better, by private enterprises. Any politics that seeks to chip away at the welfare state, first of all its excesses and most unsustainable elements, but ultimately the powers allotted to government which made the excesses possible in the first place, would find itself confronted with the question of how the functions lopped off from the government would be fulfilled. Some seem to me pretty easy: we don’t really need the Department of Education at all; some, obviously, like those dealing with poverty, sickness and old age are more difficult. Even the easy ones would be instructive, though—the abolition of the Department of Education would not eliminate the need to nationalize educational norms and practices, and in the return to educational localization we would no doubt see an enormous variety of educational practices but also all kinds of efforts at overlapping those practices, generalizing their lessons and establishing some conformity in accreditation (what happens when a family moves from Georgia to Ohio and the schools in Ohio have to determine the meaning of the credentials forwarded by the school in Georgia?). It seems to me very easy to imagine private agencies contracting with schools and school districts to establish such norms—such entrepreneurial ventures would provide an essential service, and one which could be very easily judged by the contractee: does the student from Georgia who should be an A student according to the norms established and overseen by that agency in fact perform at that level in her new school in Ohio?

Similarly with, say consumer protection agencies created, say, in the wake of the dismantling of the FDA. Companies which do their own testing would contract with producers, which would in turn advertise the approval they have been given; companies would provide different levels of guarantee, depending upon the product and the desire of the company (as a consumer you could buy only from companies that have achieved 98% safety level, but if you prefer cheapness to such elevated levels of inspection, you could go with 80%); competition would make sure that dirty deals between inspectors and companies are exposed quickly—this could easily work better than the current system of government inspection. At any rate, once such functions have been won back for the private, voluntary sector, we could speak of the “redemption” of expropriated state functions and their return to society. Private agencies would literally be buying back those functions, and politics would focus on forcing the state to allow them to do so.

“Redemption” might take on even more powerful meanings when it comes to, say, a community buying a river or woods back from the state and, rather than letting the EPA dictate their environmental needs, going ahead and suing the industry that has been polluting the area—property rights, rather than ecological fanaticism, would lead to the right balance between economic and environmental imperatives. Similarly, the houses in a run down, crime ridden neighborhood might be “redeemed” by members of the community, who would all become shareholders, lease and sell according to strict principles, hire private security agents and thereby establish rigorous community standards. And for those who fear the parceling off and selling of the public space and the consequent dystopian nightmare of corporate rule portrayed in every third Hollywood movie, it is well to keep in mind that the collected economic power of middle class Americans, especially in a far more free economy with very low taxes, would overwhelm the power of corporations and all the billionaires in the world (without even taking into account that all those middle class Americans are the consumers and workers those companies depend upon)—that power would just need to be harnessed toward the “redemption” of the poor, the polluted, the corrupt, the unsafe and so on.

I’ve dealt with these issues before, but what brings me back to them in these new terms is an essay I recently read, about the thousandth, I would guess, handwringing over new developments in the biological sciences and the “ethical” dilemmas they pose for “us.” What will “we” do about cloning, genetic engineering, and so on? I long ago stopped taking these arguments seriously because, really, there is no “we,” certainly not in the sense that there are “problems” we will “solve,” “discussions” we will have, etc., leading to decisions “we” will make, together. One person does something, whether it fits some pre-existing moral code or “discussion,” another person reacts, and a third person tries to reconcile the results. That’s the way things we work—after it’s over, speaking about what “we” have decided may serve as a useful shorthand. Biological innovation, if left to private initiative alone, might lead to… weapons for rogue states and terrorists—after all, companies will sell to the highest bidder, regardless of morality, won’t they? Well, not if they want to sell to others—but, just as important, why don’t those concerned buy out those weapons themselves or pay even more for antidotes or defenses against those weapons or, even better, redeem the countries ruled by rogue regimes or controlled by terrorists—endow organizations and institutions that will defend rights and provide sanctuary, and exploit corruption in those governments so as to protect what has been established. The tremendous asymmetry in power represented by the asymmetry in generated by free as opposed to enslaved societies would make all kinds of redemptive remedies possible. And, on the cultural level, if you don’t want a mosque at Ground Zero, put together a group that buys up the property in the area—each controversy will have its equivalent possibility, in each case requiring some ingenuity and creating new problems for the redemptive agency to address.

On the one hand, a politics of redemption would be all about money; on the other hand, the money itself would be about all kinds of things—it would be money put where people’s mouths are. If you’re worried about crime, contribute to a consortium dedicated to redeeming the neighborhoods which are its source—such consortiums will have weighted rules for voting, presumably, so the more you give, the more say you have. This would, on the face of it, give more power to the rich—but the rich would also have to put their money where their mouth is, and also where lots of other people are putting theirs—the rich would be mixed in with the rest. Second, a politics of redemption would draw upon people’s readiness to sacrifice, both time and money. The relations within these consortiums would be complex, based upon rules for decision making, division of labor and so on; and their relation to their redeemed properties would be even more complex, including, sometimes, the insistence on traditional hierarchies and ritualistic relationships and at other times experimentation.

The main role for government in this case would be to establish an arena in which the complicated contractual relations such an order would entail could be conducted with sufficient stability and reliability—I would say that much emphasis would shift to the civil courts, where most disagreements would be sorted out but just as important would be a criminal order, or a politics of redemption on the part of the state which would protect any individual’s right to leave any of the consortiums they have contracted with, as the biggest danger they would pose is new forms of privatized violence against individuals who have entered contracts touching upon important aspects of their lives. The cultural conditions for a politics of redemption would include powerful presumptions against state interventions in private matters, and so norms and laws regarding when such intervention is unavoidable would be a constant source of argument. This would, in a sense, throw us back into the same kind of arguments the US was having before the civil war, between the Democrat’s argument for “popular rule” and “diversity” in institutions and the Republican argument that equality and the universal enforcement of rights supersedes those principles. Maybe this is the one “eternal” argument of any modern republic.

And the main role for a politics of redemption today is the joint task of evacuating those areas of government which would need to give way for a politics of redemption, and creating the preliminary or embryonic forms of such a politics, ready to fill the vacuums that will be created given either a favorable political environment or fiscal collapse. There is no need to create utopian maps of a fully libertarian order; the idea, rather, would be to target places where the state is failing and voluntary approaches could be tried. As the Left has always done, it is also useful to test the boundaries and antinomies of the existing legal order, through creative forms of disobedience. And it seems to me that, contrary to the favored arguments of the political class, we want to see much more money in politics—unregulated money, anonymous money, money that will prevent the political class or the media from ever dreaming they can again obtain a monopoly on “legitimate” public discourse.

Another way of speaking about the center-margin relation constitutive of originary thinking is in terms of the “in-between”—what is in the center is in between us. The shift in terms provides for a shift in focus—the center attracts attention, while what is in between us directs our attention toward each other. Arendt placed great importance on such “in-betweens,” and the destructiveness of any politics that seeks to eliminate them and place us “face to face” with each other without mediation—an example she gave was the table around which we sit at a meeting. The table serves various purposes—we write on it, lean on it, put our coffee on it, etc.—but beyond all that it separates and relates us to each other. If the table disappeared, there is a sense in which we would be more “naked,” more vulnerable, more self-conscious, and less capable of sharing some “public thing.” It would be strange to think about the table as sacred, though, even though it seems to serve a very similar purpose (of course stories, perhaps apocryphal, about stalled diplomatic processes resulting from disagreements about the size and shape of tables suggest that the table can take on a kind of sacrality). Even more, the notion of an in-between, and the related notion of the “middle” (it is the middle class that has prevented class war between rich and poor in Western societies), suggests the even more subordinate category of the “means.” God surely isn’t a means to some other end—but, we can see how He is, in fact—we use God to prevent us from tearing each other apart.

The in-between or the middle seems to me to direct our attention to the scene in a different way, perhaps later on than the centralization of the object, but I’m not sure: the object becomes the center of attention as the concentration of our accumulating desires—at that point, we are all marking the object by grasping for it. With the issuance of the sign/gesture, that center of attention is converted into a repellent force—we attend from the sign to the object as the “authorization” of the sign. Also, though, we attend from the authorizing object to one another—everyone on the scene is now in some state of grasping/withholding in the light of the center. But the center here has become the in-between or the middle, insofar as we are not looking at it but has it has become unmarked (untouchable) it allows us to see and mark or unmark as the case demands each of our fellows (each of whom is a little bit more tending to grasp or to withhold). It may be that the center represents the experience of the sacred, the certainty and security it provides as we contemplate it, while the middle authorizes the creation of means—first of all, new ways of mediating between persons, but also, increasing, those new ways become means of transforming our tools and physical environment so as to keep placing us in new configurations with each other.

Money is as extreme a “mean” as you can find—it serves only to mediate exchanges; and yet, it makes sense, as Marx and many before and after him have remarked, to see money as “sacred”—the difference from Marx is that there’s no need to see anything obscene about this. Money is a sacred means—saving it is honorable, wasting it is disgraceful, spending it wisely is an obligation and placing it in the middle of some scene casts light on everyone there—and giving your money to some shared purpose, either a purpose you also supervise the fulfillment of, or one you remain anonymously aloof from, or one which you preside over as a public benefactor, is a mode of transcendence. A politics of redemption is a politics of devotion but no donation could ever be complete without concrete acts of exchanging favors and gestures, which such a politics makes a space for.

If a politics of redemption is a defense of the rights of the anyown, then it is a defense of the right of the anyown to spend money as anyown sees fit; but, then, that must also be a right to use whatever form of money the participants in an exchange agree to. Regarding the right of the anyown, fiat money is the first expropriation. It’s hard to imagine the titanic struggle that would be required to overturn the regime of fiat money. But it might be much easier to imagine directing attention to all the favors and gestures that we will never know but might have been exchanged, all the means that might have been created, if not for the systematic expropriations that are only possible because of fiat money—because the government can take money away from productive citizens by creating more money to give as largesse to their favored constituents.

When we speak about the “arbitrariness” of the sign, someone usually hastens to add that what is meant by that is, of course, its conventionality. “Arbitrary” is the right word, though, for what is assumed: that the sounds we make in speaking the languages we speak could just as easily be any other sounds, with the evidence of this being the obvious fact that words for the same things are different in all the languages, not to mention the enormous differences in grammar. The more you think about it, though, the more problematic the claim is—how in the world could we imagine everyone in a community agreeing to confer meaning upon a particular sound that in itself has nothing to do with the meaning it bears? The political implications of “arbitrariness,” which we rightly associate with tyranny, are therefore relevant here: if the sign is indeed arbitrary, it could only be because it was imposed upon everyone by some oppressor. In this assumption about the sign, then, we can see the trajectory from Lockean social contract theory (Locke was a firm believer in the arbitrariness of the sign) to the contemporary Left—the arbitrariness of the sign, starting with medieval nominalism, and, indeed social contract theory itself, were weapons against the assumptions about natural social order and natural law constitutive of Western Christendom. The arbitrariness of the sign is liberalism in linguistics and, in the end, liberalism (in the classical sense) has shown itself to share enough genetic material with the Leftism that succeeded it so as to leave it almost devoid of antibodies to fight the Leftist infection.

There is another liberalism, another Enlightenment, and another way of thinking about social agreement, though, which has been severely marginalized by the line leading from Locke through Hume and then Kant and Hegel (even the individualism of John Stuart Mill is ultimately derived from the German romanticism he imbibed through Coleridge). This other liberalism starts from the common sense philosophy of Thomas Reid, and can be followed through the American pragmatism of, at least, Charles Sanders Peirce, and is then strongly represented in the 20th century (in very different ways) by Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Michael Polanyi. The basic assumption shared by all of these thinkers is that we know far more than we know we know; that is, our knowledge is to a great extent, to use Polyani’s term, tacit—and not merely because we haven’t yet brought it up to consciousness, but constitutively so. As the novelist Ronald Sukenick once wrote, “the more we know the less we know”—not only because knowledge continually opens up new vistas of possible knowledge, but more importantly because the ways we know what we know cannot be made part of the knowledge we make present to ourselves. Any “language game,” disciplinary space, or idiom takes a grant deal for granted in addressing itself to a particular, emergent corner of reality; if it tries to bring that taken for granted bedrock into sight (and we do this all the time) it can only do so in terms of everything else that is still taken for granted, included some new things that enabled us to turn toward this new corner. Do you know for sure that you are at this moment present on the planet earth, that you are surrounded by building, streets, other people, etc.? “Know” is a very strange word to use here, which is not to say that we can’t really be sure—rather, what would be taken as “proof” that we are on the planet earth, surrounded by all those things? What would be better proof of this reality than the reality itself, as Wittgenstein liked to say? The question of how we know we are here, that we are ourselves, that we have bodies, that our senses integrate us into our surroundings, etc., is a very artificial one, but it’s that kind of question that modernity (and the dominant strand of liberalism) started with—most explicitly in Descartes, but Locke’s empiricism is ultimately no less corrosive of such self-evidency, as Hume revealed and Reid so forcefully demonstrated.

I have been writing much lately of mistakenness as constitutive of our linguistic and therefore social being, but it is equally true that there can be no mistakenness without certainty. I can only be mistaken in my articulation of an English sentence because I am certain that I am speaking English, not Chinese. If I’m completely out of place or out of line, it can only because there is indubitably a place or line to be out of. Mistakes disrupt a scene because there is a scene to be disrupted, and we are certain that it has been disrupted and while we can’t be certain that it will be restored, we can be certain about scenicity, without which there would be no mistakes. My argument has been that rather than evidence of the fragility of our worlds, mistakenness can be treated as evidence of its solidity. Assuming the arbitrariness of the sign intensifies the sense of fragility—if our common use of signs has just been imposed through some kind of force, human or natural, and, therefore, must continually be re-imposed, then of course deviation is dangerous. (For leftists, meanwhile, the consequence is that the arbitrariness of the sign encourages one to see reality as “constructed,” and hence infinitely malleable, in particular by those best at managing signs.) If signs, though, have an irreducibly iconic dimension, an iconic dimension that pervades every level of language, including semantics and grammar, then we just need to uncover the iconic meaning of a given mistake so as to bring it back within a reformed linguistic fold.

Isaiah Berlin, in his study of the determinist theories of history that undergirded socialist and communist politics in particular, made the point that you simply can’t remove the terms referring to human intentionality and, therefore, responsibility, from social and political discourse without making it impossible to refer to anything intelligibly at all. “He killed them” can’t be the same kind of statement as, nor can it be assimilated to, “e=mc2” or “historical development is determined by the force of production.” It’s not just that such ways of talking are immoral or unjust; rather, it’s that they are not really “ways of talking” at all, and therefore can’t sustain themselves without inventing all kinds of crazy agents (like “history” and “society”) which perform “actions” which no one has ever seen and or would recognize if they saw them. As originary thinkers, we can now say that this is because declarative, propositional meaning is rooted in the ostensive and imperative domains. We notice mistakes, in fact, because we can notice that our attention has been misdirected, which in turn reminds us that our attention is always being directed by everything we experience in reality.

The iconicity of meaning can be traced back to the gesture. The originary sign had to be gesture—it couldn’t be imagined as a sound, or a line drawn on the ground. Gesture is embedded in what we call “context,” that catch-all phrase we use when we reach the limits of our capacity to describe why something means how and when it does. A joke’s funniness might depend upon one of the listeners being where he is, and not a couple of steps to the left—that’s the kind of “contextual” effect we sum up with the phrase “you had to be there.” Gestures are also self-evident, in the sense that unlike propositional discourse, they cannot be replaced by their definition or explanation because they require the entirety of their “context.” The self-evidency of gestures also means that any normal human, initiated into any linguistic system whatsoever, would be able to make sense, on a gestural level, of the actions of any other human, from any other linguistic system—at least insofar as the gestures of the other are directed toward herself. On the most basic level, even though the meaning of gestures of course varies widely across cultures, we could recognize signs of aggression or good will directed towards ourself, even if those signs could also be used to deceive us.

Self-evidency, though, provides no support for Enlightenment optimism regarding universal communicability and amity. Indeed, self-evidency is also what radically divides us. The members of another culture who deceive me by exploiting my awareness of the meaning of their signs of peace are able to do so because within their own gestural system, inaccessible to me, they can signify that this naïve hick is ripe for the plucking. That is, to act in concert against me they need no dark conspiracy, no secret agreement—they know each other, and they know when one of them is welcoming an other with an excessiveness that communicates irony to them but not to me; they know how to follow each other’s lead in ways that I won’t figure out until it is too late, they know that anyone who might object to their scheme is far away at the moment, and so on. Of course, once they are through with me, I will be able to understand what they have done, if I am still around to do so. All self-evidency “proves” is that any attempt to impose a common idiom will generate idiomatic sub-systems resistant to control, understanding, or even detection.

What we can do is enhance and elaborate upon overlapping idioms and habits so as to create broader spaces of attenuated self-evidency—the fact that we can do so is what makes human equality self-evident, even while the attenuation of iconicity is what introduces what is called (by Michael Tomasello, among others) the drift toward the arbitrariness of the sign. The self-evidence of human equality lies in our ability to complement the inclusive drift toward arbitrariness with new modes of iconicity, within language and in our social relations. It is such a process that has brought us from the egalitarian distribution of the most primitive communities to the more expansive gift economy and ultimately to the market economy where the need for a single measure for value leads us to the relatively arbitrary universal equivalent of the precious metals—and, yet, what could be more iconic than gold, signifying wealth? (The arbitrariness of fiat currency, meanwhile, is arbitrary in the bad sense—it measures nothing but the will of the central banker.) It is also such a process through which we can try and move conflicts from the category of exterminationist opposition to war with rules and some notion of honor; from war to arbitration—or from criminality to civil law, and from civil law to friendly disagreements settled informally. And we can engage in such civilizing processes without succumbing to the delusion that any of these categories will ever disappear once and for all.

People only support icons, not arbitrary signs—an argument in favor of human equality in general is meaningless; what can be meaningful is a particular example of human equality at stake. (Which is why we will never get past the “distractions” and focus on the “real issues”; but, there’s no need to worry because the real issues get addressed, always imperfectly and so as to produce new, and equally real, issues, through the distractions.) And icons can be incommensurable with each other, which is why there will always be conflict. Successful icons are those that provide a new ground for the struggle between icons, and those icons will have the character of rules in relation to the lower level ones; or, more precisely, they will embody the kind of deferral and intellectual flexibility associated with rule following behavior, while still being exemplified by individuals acting alone and together. How can we support egalitarian distribution in sites like the family or other institutions devoted to close bonding and comradeship, while ensuring that any individual within that compact group is free to enter the market society; how can the norms of honor and shame needed to produce individuals ready to protect market societies from the enemies they will always produce in abundance, without nurturing fatal resistance to market society within its very bosom—the answer to such questions will always come, if they do come, in the form of some representative of a provisional, partial solution.

But let’s come back to the obvious: “dog” is “perro” in Spanish and “calev” in Hebrew; ergo, the word can’t have any intrinsic relation to the referent—the sign is arbitrary, case closed. Things must look this way for the linguist, with single systems of language, and the amazing diversity of the world’s languages, laid out in front of them; and to the naïve language user, compelled by such examples to take the linguistic perspective. The fact that when a speaker of English says “dog” it rather self-evidently refers to the animal in question, that “doggy” seems to “fit” the specific animal we feel affectionately towards, seems to be a pretty slim counter-argument. But there could never have been a point at which the word “dog” was imposed upon an acquiescent community of language users; the word was always firmly embedded with all the other words in the English language, and the languages English in turn evolved from, and if there was a first time the word’s ancestor was used (there must have been, right?—we are committed to at least that assumption), then it was used in such a way as to best ensure its referential capacity and memorability; or, if the choice was random, if it worked, it was remembered in such a way as to do so. And there never could have been a time when it exited that orbit of self-evidency. The systematicity of language—the fact that words don’t stand alone, but take on their “value” from all their interrelationships with other words (so, “dog” takes on its meanings from its distinction from “cat” and “mouse” on the one hand, from “wolf” and “fox” on the other, and from more specific terms like “poodle” and “German Shepherd” on yet another)—makes the point even stronger—at no time was any word or “lexical unit” outside of the linguistic world experienced as a whole, a linguistic world itself always in direct contact with the real one, via the ostensives and imperatives which embed us in that world—and, anyway, the sound symbolism of language can be every bit as complex as the semantic and grammatical systems: we can assume here as well, not a one-to-one correspondence between single sounds and dictionary-style meanings, but overlapping and interconnected connotations, which in turn interact with semantics and grammar in various ways. To address the argument for arbitrariness head on, the claim that linguistic signs would imitate, in their formal character (the articulation of sounds comprising them) those things they refer to or those events they aim at generating doesn’t imply that there should be only one language—why wouldn’t there by as many ways as “interpreting” what “sounds like” “dog” as there are ways of interpreting any complex text? It would be better to speak of a drift towards abstraction, rather than toward arbitrariness: the sign is abstract, even the first one, which had to be normed in such a way as to supplement its self-evidence from the very beginning precisely because there was no single way of conveying the intent to cease and desist. But even in this case the abstractions we speak of are marked by the drift, by the disciplinary spaces that have constructed them: in other words, abstraction involves accentuation and abbreviation, which is necessitated by the entrance of outsiders for whom the particular version of the sign current is not self-evident while at the same time making the sign even more difficult for the next outsider to grasp. The abstraction of the sign, then represents the disciplinary space (the shared inquiry into how to modify the sign so as to fit it for its new purpose) iconically, creating privileged and typical (unmarked) users, enabling the sign to attain self-evidency throughout the community.

I feel a strong need for a name for the politics of this marginalized liberal tradition, and the word “liberal” is not worth fighting over any more—especially since you’d have to fight the leftists who still use the term, the rightists who won’t give up on using the term to describe the leftists, and the libertarians who are very interesting but ineffectual semi-anarchists. The term I have been using on and off, “marginalism,” isn’t bad, but it sounds vaguely “oppositional,” and suggests an reactivel rather than comprehensive politics. I would like to derive a name from the rereading of “arbitrariness” I am proposing here, which sees the arbitrariness of the sign as a kind of secondary iconicity, a commitment to the iconicity of the sign that realizes that we can only rely upon the icons generated through the scenes we constitute. Icons lose their primary self-evidency when outsiders who don’t use the sign properly, because it isn’t self-evident to them, having their own self-evident semiotic system, and because ensuring the self-evidency of the sign to the primary community has made it idiosyncratic, or idiomatic. It is precisely this idiosyncrasy or idiomaticity that is, simultaneously and paradoxically, the ground of self-evidence: the shaped, complexly marked nature of the idiomatic sign is what makes it learnable through immersion in the scene. Common sense is, in turn, the meeting ground of these idioms, the discovery of overlappings.

I have thought about “plurality,” not in the sense of a diversity of ideas and lifestyles (pluralism) but in the sense of fundamental incommensurabilities in any community which tempt to violence but can facilitate rather than interfere with living together. I want the sense of “sampling” that Charles Sanders Peirce associates with inquiry (any knowledge is knowledge of the relation between the proportions in a sample and the proportions in a whole)—the notion one can derive from the icon (not necessarily Peirce’s) of a continuous sampling of possibilities in any event (when you try something the first time what’s the proportion of visible supporters and opponents; and then the second, third and fourth times?) can ultimately lead to the conclusion that the generation of samples is itself the event. Politics in this case is about thinking and knowledge, but not knowledge which then guides politics—instead, the politics generates knowledge which can only be used within political action, as the provisional articulation of our tacit knowing. Alongside of “sampling,” I considered “a politics of proportion,” which shares with “sampling” the relation between parts and the whole, while including the word “portion,” which reminds us of politics’ relation to dividing and sharing in some “equal” manner, and suggests a notion of politics as balancing and inclusive while still being interested, inevitably, in one’s “portion.” But “plurality” seems like a way of describing politics from the outside, from within thinking, and sampling is too “experimental,” by itself, suggesting the progressive sense of a “scientific” politics; “proportion” has the same problems, while another idea, “partiality,” or particularity,” evoke partisanship and identity politics rather than the notion of a whole that not only exceeds but can only be grasped through the parts which we are.

What I have for now, and will try out, is the neologistic (according to Merriam-Webster, neologism is either “a new word, expression or usage” or “a meaningless word coined by a psychotic”) “anyownnness”—any, or “one-y,” evokes (for me, via Gertrude Stein) singularity but also plurality, since anyone is as any as anyone else; “own” replaces “one” (which is redundant here anyway), and can suggest one’s property, one’s ownership of oneself prior to and as a basis for property, the opacity of any’s “ownness” to others; I hope it can suggest that one’s ownness, one’s singularity and property, is (“constitutively”) bound up with that of others, hence maintaining the notions of proportionality, sampling—and marginality, in the specifically economic sense, i.e., that infinitesimal point at which one’s (or anyone’s) “weight” on a particular “scale” tips that scale in the opposing direction. A politics of anyownness, or of the anyown, then, is a politics of motivatedness: nothing is arbitrary, nothing is simply imposed, everything is exemplary and abstract, anyone can be the marginal representative of idiomatic common sense.

So, Next: The right of the anyown

We all know about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (and if you don’t, you can google it)—it’s really Whorf, who was a student of Sapir’s and greatly expanded a couple of much more tentative suggestions from Sapir regarding the relations between language, thought and culture, who is responsible for the notion that grammatical structures influence thought and culture to the extent that incommensurability arises between different languages, and through them those ways of thinking and culture. Contemporary linguists seem to treat Whorf’s hypothesis as a kind of piñata, as if to see who can smash it most decisively, and it’s easy to see how vulnerable the once thrilling idea was: supposedly, the Hopi had no grammatical means of distinguishing tenses, and therefore, rather than sharply distinguishing, as we linearly minded Westerners do, between past, present and future, they see reality as an ongoing “process”—a perspective which, Whorf went on to claim, made their way of thinking marvelously compatible with the space-time of relativity theory. Linguists, I think, like the fun you can have with this, drawing upon their knowledge of the remarkable diversity of grammatical structures and peculiarities of the world’s languages to suggest various bizarre cultural and intellectual forms by way of refuting Whorf. I can play too: English verbs have no future tense—we “normally” use “will” as an auxiliary with the verb we wish to place in the future but we also often place a time designator in a regular present tense sentence to indicate futurity (I arrive tomorrow; I’m going to be there soon; we meet at 7, etc.)—so English speakers must be incapable of thinking coherently about the future: we are, depending upon your cultural tastes, doomed to be improvident wastrels, or happy-go-lucky live for the present types. But, of course, you can reverse all this, and say that precisely because we have no future tense, complacency about the future is forbidden us—we are more mindful of the various ways the future impends upon the present because we must devise all kinds of novel ways of referring to it. Or, how about the fact that in English the present tense doesn’t really refer to the present, that is, to something that is happening right now—at this moment, I do not “write” this sentence, I “am writing” it—that is, we use the present continuous. So, are English speakers more conscious of the incomplete nature of the present, or of the distinction between things we do habitually and what we are doing at the moment? Where would go to even begin to explore such “hypotheses”? While a science fiction writer might be able to do wonders with this kind of thing, it doesn’t take us, as cultural theorists, very far.

But language must be bound up with thought and culture, and we must be able to describe thought and cultural with linguistic and semiotic vocabularies—what else are thought and culture comprised of if not words, sentences and signs? You won’t get anywhere exploring these relationships if you are focused on what obsessed liberal intellectuals from the turn against imperialism and the (re)discovery of native peoples early in the 20th century (itself a victimary development of Romantic theories of nationality and ethnicity) until today: asymmetrical differences between cultures. But how about differences within languages? Any idiom creates a new way of thinking, a way of thinking possible only within that idiom—until the idiom is normalized and made readily convertible into other elements within the language. In other words, the point is not the inherent properties of language; rather, it is, first, the possibilities for invention inherent in language, and the certainty that new desires, resentments and loves will demand new idioms of expression; and second, the incessant change undergone by language, which normalizes idioms and idiomizes norms, thereby creating new resources for expression. Slang words like “cool” (amazingly still going strong) and “groovy” (hermetically sealed within the idioms of the 60s and very early 70s, and incapable of revival due to the demise of the technology it was predicated upon) are obvious examples: for at least a cultural moment, in a particular cultural space, these words enabled people to say, and therefore think, something that couldn’t be said or thought any other way. But then they become subject to mockery (“groovy” is more likely to make people think of The Brady Bunch than of Woodstock) and extension (“cool” seems to me to have become, in many instances, more or less synonymous with “OK”), and easily translated into other terms. At this point, there’s nothing you could say or think with “cool” that couldn’t be said or thought more inventively or nimbly in many other ways; and you couldn’t speak or think with “groovy” at all.

Once we say that idioms provide a new way for thinking, we can say the reverse: to create a new way of thinking is to construct an idiom. Ethically and intellectually, this would mean that my obligation in some new situation is to construct an idiom adequate to it: a means of mediating the articulation of desire and resentment especially threatening in that situation. Idioms construct habits: the best idioms what Peirce called the “deliberately formed, self-analyzing habit.” Idioms and habits refine and direct resentments: let’s say that you decide, in a particularly tense social setting that you can’t avoid, that you will counter every expression of hostility you encounter by restating it in literal, atonal indicative sentences: in other words, you will “translate” rude imperatives, hostile rhetorical questions, interjections, sarcasm, etc., into something like: I understand that you would like to take a break now. That would be an idiom—it would get noted, ridiculed, admired, imitated (perhaps involuntarily), revised, elaborated, and so on—others would have to respond to it in some way, leading to further developments within the idiom. They may want to speak with you about your idiom—can your idiom handle that conversation? Will you draw them in or will they draw you out? It may not work—it may send resentments spiraling out of control by appearing robotic, or deeply sarcastic itself—but then some other idiom will, or nothing will (some situations are beyond saving). The point is that you would be thinking in terms of inventing and experimenting with idioms, with rules that could be at least tacitly recognized. The more deliberately you construct idioms, the more attentive you become to potential materials for such construction: accidents, mistakes, surprises, on the one hand; places where communication and amity seem to be breaking down on the other. After a while an inventory of possible idioms evolves, and the ability to improvise, to redefine an idiom in the middle of things, emerges.

In fact, I have been experimenting with such an “indicative” idiom for a while—I first discovered its ancestor many years ago, in a situation where I had to provide academically acceptable answers in a highly politicized and hostile (and, for me, rather high stakes) setting—what I discovered is, no matter how snide and sarcastic your questioners are, in the end they need to ask a question; you can then carve out that question out of the fog of vicious innuendo, restate it, and answer it. A primitive version of the idiom has helped me often since, but lately I have been working on systematizing it: writing without interrogatives or imperatives, or even disguised imperatives like those lurking within words like “should,” “must,” and so on. This forces you to, then, rewrite a sentence like “we should do that” in a way that commits you to representing an actual event: not doing that will likely involve us in the following difficulties. We can try out other rules, perhaps in controlled ways: staying within the present tense leads us to fold all consequences into their present possibility; eliminating conjunctions takes away additive and oppositional habits of thought; or, eliminating conjunctions turns additive thinking into a search for degrees and thresholds; such elimination simultaneously tends to make opposites mere differences. And every few paragraphs, or according to some other division, suspend all the rules (why not?), because you must let go on occasion and you create a veritable carnival of forbidden terms.

I have referred in previous posts, a couple of times already, to one of Marshall McLuhan’s axioms that I find compelling: the content of any medium is another medium. Meanwhile, a reading of G.A. Well’s The Origin of Language: Aspects of the Discussion from Condillac to Wundt (a book I happened to come across in a used bookstore) crystallized for me the assumption that a meaningful world of ostensive gestures must have preceded speech (I am still thinking about whether one can imagine imperatives and even declaratives emerging within a purely gestural world, but for now I am assuming a realm of ostensivity). Language is, then, primarily iconic, as gestures would mostly be, as was the first gesture, aborted actions; and, then, exaggerated actions, simulated actions responding to other simulated actions, and so on. From the beginning, though, we can assume a drift toward the arbitrary, as there are always many ways of conveying an incomplete action, and gestures would take shape in accord with the habits of a community, and groups within communities—outsiders would not be able to treat them as self-evident and would need to be taught how to use the signs. There is even an irreducible element of arbitrariness on the originary scene itself, as the sign that prevails will be the one that works, not necessarily the one that is closest to a Platonic ideal of a gesture of aborted appropriation.

If human beings are deliberately and increasingly skillfully imitating each other in meaningful ways—ways that create new shared objects and means of appropriating and distributing them—then it seems to me reasonable to assume they will be imitating other things in the world as well. Once we admit this assumption, then all those ridiculous theories of the origin or language that have long ago been dismissed, from onomatopoeia, to imitating the cries of animals or the blowing of the wind, to stylized cries of pain and pleasure, become a lot more plausible—as the origin of speech within an already existing gestural world. The sounds that ultimately get combined into words would also, then, have iconic roots, which would support arguments for “phonosemantics,” or “sound symbolism”—the argument made most audaciously by Margaret Magnus (http://www.trismegistos.com/MagicalLetterPage/) that the meaning of words is tied to their sounds. Sounds would initially be made to accentuate a gesture, and then to supplement it when the gesture could not be seen—aiming, then, at the same effect as the gesture. In that case, the content of speech is gesture, just as the content of writing is speech. Speech would take over vast domains of human communication first covered by gesture, while at the same time incorporating, embedding itself within and expanding the realm of gesture—and, in the end, only being meaningful in terms of gesture. By gesture, I mean all the ways human beings coordinate with each other spatially—architecture is gesture, the fact that we face each other when we talk, and generally stand a few feet apart and never, say, three inches apart (unless we are lovers)—all this, and much more, is gesture. Speech is always about the possibility that we could have something in front of us that we could orient ourselves towards together.

But what is the relation between form and content other than one of inquiry—in the sense that the “content” of the originary scene is the repellent power of the object, and the “formal” gesture is eliciting that power, which is to say seeking it out, distinguishing it from everything else in the world, and “measuring” and “broadcasting” its effects. Roman Jakobson makes the argument upon which I am modeling this one: he contends (like David Olsen) that the invention of writing reified speech and “language,” turning it into an object of inquiry—in the case of alphabetical writing, an inquiry into which were the smallest representable “units” of language. Jakobson then suggests that this linguistic “atomism” was the source of the scientific atomism that predominated in Greek philosophy—if language, why couldn’t anything be subdivided into it most minimal units? For Olsen, the problem of writing is to supplement all the elements of speech that make understanding possible—gesture, of course, but also intonation and other elements of the speech situation. So, whole new vocabularies emerge as a result of writing—a word like “assume,” for example, as in “he assumed they were lying” would be unnecessary in speech, because there would be other ways of showing someone’s attitude in reporting their speech in a spoken manner—most obviously, imitating the way they spoke (in a questioning manner, say). The word “assume,” then, like a word such as “suggest,” are the means and results of an inquiry into linguistic interaction that is prompted by the invention of writing. Speech, then, is likewise a mode of inquiry into gesture, as gesture is itself a mode of inquiry into “elemental” desires and resentments.

I have also applied McLuhan’s axiom to the elementary speech forms, and would like to update that account. An imperative, then, is a mode of inquiry into ostensivity—not only that, of course, because if you are issuing an imperative you do want the thing done (just as if you are writing you are writing about something and not just inquiring into the operations of speech)—but an imperative attends from the absence of the object to the possibility of its being made present. An imperative is also an inquiry into the effects of tone and gesture (it needs to be loud enough, but not too loud, “authoritative,” it’s better to be standing or leaning forward, but sitting back in a chair might be a way of testing the intangibles of authoritativeness as well…), all elements of ostensivity. Indeed, the imperative might be seen as inquiry into the iconicity of the person. And like any inquiry, it originated in some uncertainty regarding the object in question. Similarly, the interrogative is an inquiry into the imperative—it marks the unfilled character of some demand or command, and unmarks the possibility that it will be fulfilled; the question attends from the expectation of a demand supplied to the disappointment of that expectation, and then from the prolongation of that demand to some anticipated location in reality whence the reformed demand might yet be satisfied. Inquiry is a act of marking and unmarking—when we are converging on the object, the object is marked for destruction, but once the sign is issued we attend, first, from the sign to the object, unmarking the formal sign and sharing our marking of the object; and then, second, we attend from the object to each other, thereby unmarking the object (which is to say unmarking everyone’s defense of, resentment on behalf of, the object) and marking our own now evident, because naked, desire for the object and resentment toward the others. Signs are unmarked insofar as they single out portions of a reality than in turn marks as partial those singling out. Just as portions of reality can be marked by signs, signs can internally mark parts of themselves, which really involves marking some prior use of the sign while unmarking the sign itself. Sign use, language, is always inquiry insofar as it is always prompted by some portion of reality, and the signs which have zoned off that portion, having moved from an unmarked into a marked state, and the need to restore relation of (un)markedness.

The declarative, then, is an inquiry into the resolution of the state of uncertainty (and “patience”) unmarked by the question, marking its continuance and unmarking what would ultimately be the articulation of imperatives and ostensives that would resolve it. The sentence, then, unmarks whatever the question marks, a reality that exceeds the scope of the question: if this one were to move a bit this way, and the other a bit that way, and another were to look over there and promise not to move, etc., the uncertainty would be resolved—all those acts marked as uncertain by the question are unmarked as embedded in reality, as commanded by reality, in retrievable ostensive-imperative articulations; and the sentence can, in turn, mark and return to the domain of the question any of those articulations, which is to say, who observed and did what to make the event represented in the sentence and the event of the sentence itself possible. Inquiry, then, is the process of allowing anything on the scene to be marked or unmarked; representation is a solid state of un/markedness. The sentence articulates an event by mapping another event: where before there were increasingly marked (or potentially increasingly marked) convergences of desire and resentment, questions in danger of relapsing into commands, commands into the attempt to grab something, even if not what was originally desired, there is now an event with participants upon a scene everyone can identify and inhabit, however tacitly or indirectly. They can attend from their own scene of tribulated conversation to the scene presented by the sentence, and from the scene represented by the sentence to their own participation on the scene of speech, a participation now framed in terms of words that might match desires and resentments.

An idiom, then, creates a space of inquiry, and spaces of inquiry let things be, and suspend us in observance of those things; an idiom allows us to negotiate its own terms, guaranteeing that we will share the same space as we do so. The fleshing out of an idiom will entail its embodiment in gesture, speech and writing, and allow for certain norms regarding the issuing of ostensives and imperatives. The indicative idiom I have presented may be more weighted towards writing, but for that reason might have striking effects in speech situations; it might suggest minimal gesturality, but minimal gesturality might be maximal in its meaningfulness. Imperatives would be left largely implicit in such an idiom—an overt imperative would be heavily marked—but since the imperative space will be fulfilled one way or another, learning such an idiom would mean deducing imperatives from representations drained as much as possible of all resentments other than those directed against over-invested representations of reality. Above all (an indicative idiom would rule out phrases like “above all,” which tell—command—the communicant how much importance they “should” give to one claim over another) idioms inspire the invention of other idioms, in this case perhaps an imperative centered one that introduces equivocation into explicit imperatives.

A sign presents, bears with it, involves a scene; a sign also represents the results of a completed scene to those who weren’t on it. You might think about the difference between the working out of a shared sign on the spot, and the teaching of that sign to others, once a consensus on its shape and use has been decided upon. Each sign contains both dimensions, but in differing proportions. In presenting, in inquiry, the preliminary marking of the ultimately unmarked is enacted; in representing, that preliminary marking is unremarked upon, and the (un)markedness of the system and its elements appears ready made. The generation of idioms aims to tilt the proportion more towards presenting than is ordinarily the case, to mark more elements of language so as to make them available for future unmarkings.

Along with formalizing our own incessant idiom generation we can construe others in terms of their tacit idioms. Insofar as you can work with someone’s idioms, obeying and extending its rules, you have granted them a right to speak within a particular discursive space. There is no reason to tamper with the basic rights conveyed to us from Enlightenment politics and, in the U.S., the U.S. Constitution—free speech, free assembly, right to due process, to bear arms, and so on but rather than reducing all political discussions to these rights, which means they either get stretched and distorted or become irrelevant; and, rather than leaving talk of rights behind and allowing bureaucratic expansion to proceed by way of “non-ideological problem solving,” we can grant a kind of pragmatic, subsidiary right to idioms. Instead, for example, of a Supreme Court delivered “right to privacy” based upon a incoherent reading of the 4th Amendment with the penumbras of a couple of others thrown into the mix, why not recognize the idioms in which women speak with and about their relations with their doctors, bodies and intimates, and identify (and argue about identifying) some boundary beyond which laws shouldn’t pass—and then, rather than forbidding all laws that transgress that boundary, bring that argument into the debate over laws? We would then be using “right” in a more informal way, in the way you say to someone, “you have no right to speak to me like that!” (like what?: in some idiom, no doubt), but the use of the same word can ensure continuity with more “fundamental” uses of the concept. Such idiomatic uses of “rights” recall the origin of the term in the more medieval notion of “privileges,” which associates rights with honor within a gift and Big Man economy—and something like honor is what is usually involved when we say “you have no right to speak to me/treat me like that!” We can give linguistic if no legal heft to our intuitions that the media, for example, have no “right” to investigate the children or cousins of candidates for office, and we can embed impoverished contemporary shibboleths like “privacy” with articulations of right and obligation implicit in terms like “modesty,” “reticence,” “shame,” “respect” and other terms reflecting our tacit knowledge of social boundaries and the individual attitudes and aptitudes required to preserve them. There is a kind of extremism, found in some versions of libertarianism in particular, that sees other modes of exchange as competitors to the market mode, and it is that kind of extremism (reinforcing the leftist extremism that wants a reduction to a bureaucratic reinterpretation of “rights”) that wants to drive out all ways of adjudicating conflicts other than through “rights”—but a healthy free market would be based upon a healthy informal gift economy, and allow for transit back and forth between the two—and even encourage us to go back to the primitive egalitarian distribution found in families and other groupings (like sports teams, for example). People with a complex sense of “their own,” and with sophisticated idioms for parsing “ownness” will be all the better prepared to enter the global market economy.

Anyway, why “Sapir-Katz”? Partly for the symmetrical displacement of “Sapir-Whorf,” but that is only possible because Edward Sapir did, in fact, have a more subtle understanding of the relations between language, thought and culture than Whorf and has helped to suggest, for me, the possibility that the construction, through various means, of idiomatic shifts within the language provide new pathways for thought and culture. But that’s enough for now.

I’ve opened this post to discussion of Chronicles 399 & 400.

http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw399.htm