GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

A few months ago I saw a student wearing a t-shirt with the words “Us vs. Them” on solid background (I don’t remember the color of the shirt or the lettering). It seems to me an example of minimalist brilliance. It first of all must be read ironically, as criticizing all the ultimately “arbitrary” divisions in the world, all which would reduce to this single, “irrational” or “primordial” gesture of demonizing some other. But such a critique proves too much—if that is, indeed, what we are doing all the time, isn’t the implication that we can’t do otherwise? Even more, what else is the wearer of the t-shirt herself (it was a young woman) doing other than constructing an “us” (those aware of the arbitrariness of conflicts) and “them” (those who actually believe in the causes of the conflicts)? I think we can work with the assumption that the irony is meant to bounce back upon the wearer of the shirt in this way, but that doesn’t end things: there is still some marginal difference between the one who stays completely and uncritically invested in his community’s battles and the one capable of stepping back, however momentarily and provisionally, and attaining a more anthropological insight into the sources of those battles. In that case, the second “us vs. them,” that of the anthropologists vs. the merely mimetic human, which is in fact a division within each of us rather than between some of us and others, interferes, however weakly, with the rush toward the center—it is, that is, a kind of originary gesture, all the more meaningful for acknowledging its own implication in the anthropological truth it reveals.

An idiom is this articulation of group membership, the sharing of a sacred center, and its anthropological “surplus,” or awareness that the signs designating that center might be otherwise and in fact are otherwise, having their equivalents in every other group. The preservation of an idiom, moreover, depends upon sharpening the differences between equivalents rather than ironing them out—the attempt to create more general signs that would smooth out idiomatic differences is really just the process of creating new groups, albeit ones that claim to speak (and may do so more or less meaningfully) in the name of, say, “humanity.” One sign of an autonomous idiom is the proliferation of individual styles, as the idiom becomes rich enough to gather influences from a range of other idioms as a way of enhancing its own distinctiveness—a very good example is the copious wealth of Renaissance English, with its avaricious devouring of Latin, Italian and French influence, its engagement with the emergent sciences, and the problems of translating the Bible, establishing national unity and devising a specifically Anglican form of Christianity.

There are three ways in which human beings share things: we can divide them literally and materially; we can exchange them through a gift economy; we can exchange them on the market through the universal medium of money. Historically, we have moved, unevenly, from the first to the last, but just as Eric Gans acknowledged recently that the gift economy still pervades our market one, we should further acknowledge that we are never done, once and for all, with any of these economic systems. A family sitting down for dinner will cut up a single piece of meat and distribute sections to each member, according to some convention or the urgency of individual requests (no problem if there is enough, but possible problems if there isn’t); a group of college kids will pass around the bong, each taking one “hit” (if people still do this); a baseball team gives each batter a certain number of hits during batting practice (and this may be done on the basis of equal number of chances or need), and so on. As Gans noted, if you invite me to dinner this Friday night, I’m expected to invite you, not Saturday night (which would make it look too much like a payback, or like I’m trying to free myself of an onerous obligation) but, perhaps, next Friday night—but gift exchanges go well beyond this into emotional, cultural and intellectual areas of existence: where else but in a gift economy does my writing of this blog entry belong, as the only exchange I can hope for is a comment, a reference on some other blog, or a more general diffusion of my ideas? Within any large company, for that matter, employee survival and advancement depends largely upon the effective calculation of whom and how much one should gift—helping someone else develop an idea, taking someone else’s place when they’re sick, doing a bit of overtime for the boss, etc.

If material division, gift economy and market all co-exist, it stands to reason that some kind of healthy co-existence is possible and necessary, along with more unhealthy varieties, in which one economy interferes with the workings of another. Indeed, what is socialist economics other than an imposition of the economy of material division upon the market and gift economies, treating the total social product as if it were one big “piece” and distributing it according to some notion of need or desert? Less crudely, Keynsian economics does this by expanding the money supply, which Mises saw as benefiting those who received the money first, and principle which can be applied to all forms of government regulation, which favor, or direct money towards, those currently best equipped to comply with them and hence gain advantage over their competitors. Gifting introduces firstness into economics, as primitive egalitarian division depends upon some kind of ritual principle (even in the modern examples I gave above, where the solidarity of the group is foremost)—someone has to give the gift first and impose an obligation on others, an obligation which can be accepted and converted into a new mode of firstness with greater or lesser grace. The modes of firstness developed within the gift economy are too intense and unstable, and ultimately give way to “Big Man” modes of social organization and tributary mode of social distribution, with the genuine market emerging on the margins of despotic empires and corroding their authority. The “Big Man” is, for that matter, still and always will be, with us, and the return to the more primary, “authentic” and “rational” strict division or allocation by need, along with the central bureaucratic authority needed to make that happen, are, in the market context, resentful parodies of the more genuine firstness finally created in the form of the entrepreneur, who creates new desires and thereby transforms the social division of labor, but does so by submitting himself to consumer “sovereignty.” I think we can assume that this resentful counter-firstness, or secondness, will be a permanent feature of free societies.

The violation of the norms of primitive division produces defilement within the community, and the only response is expulsion and/or some form of ritual purgation—the more modern and less destructive form of this is embarrassment, and which I have situated within what I call originary mistakenness. Within the gift economy and the hierarchies that begin to emerge within it, we start to see honor and shame as governing principles—honor and shame are the only ways of enforcing group norms and the authority of the Big Man without legal sanctions and an impersonal governing authority. As we know, the more interiorizing and individualizing concepts of sin and guilt come later, but we are never rid of defilement, honor and shame either. It is fascinating to note how regularly polemicists against the horrors following from Islamic notions of honor and shame (in particular in the form of violence against women) appeal to the honor of their readers as citizens of a democratic society and attempt to shame them out of their passivity—as with the various economies, the problem is always one of articulation and conversion, rather than the elimination of previous cultural forms. An enormous amount of destruction has resulted from attempts to utterly eliminate more primitive norms, and by now we should be able to see that a purely “enlightened” or “modern” notion of reason or rights has nothing to replace them with in the vast majority of everyday social settings. Indeed, how much of contemporary politics is driven by the sense of defilement, shame and honor on the part of the “enlightened” as they seek to impose their own idiom on the rest of us?

Parallel to the distinctions I have just explored, historians of literacy like Eric Havelock, Walter Ong and David Olson (Tom Bertonneau, well known to those familiar with GA, has written some excellent essays developing these arguments) have described the invention and spread of writing as a watershed in human consciousness and therefore society. To sum up the point succinctly, what writing makes possible is, first, an understanding of first of language but ultimately reality as something which can be broken down into ever smaller parts (words, syllables, phonemes; molecules, atoms, quarks…); second, a coherent, linear and therefore causal representation of events (one of which follows another just like one word, one sentence, one page is seen to follow the other); third, the distinction between (deceptive) appearance and essence which founds epistemology (and between signifier and signified which founds linguistics, as particular signs can be seen as windows to particular sounds and meanings). In this case, even more than in the others, it is clear that any healthy social and intellectual order will find ways of articulating these elements, rather than trying to privilege one over the other—the ways of thinking made possible by writing are, of course, to be preserved, disseminated and enhanced, but who would want to argue that we are not, nevertheless, thoroughly immersed in orality through much of our existence—an orality that has, of course, been shaped by our history of literacy, but which shapes the latter in turn and, in fact, makes it possible in the first place: in the end, even when we read silently to ourselves we are experiencing the words as sounds.

This account of language, though, is far from complete without taking into account gesture as well. We assume that the first sign was a gesture, which means that it was iconic or self-evident—not only are we just as immersed in gesturality as we are in orality (orality is itself unthinkable without gestures), but gesturality, in the broader sense of the alignment of human bodies with each other, is itself embedded in the physical structures in which we house ourselves and provide access to one another. Gesturality is also embedded in language in some very fundamental ways—most obviously in deictics, but more subtly in our prepositions: we can’t use language which means we can’t think without being inside or outside, above or below, before or behind, near or far, etc., etc. These terms all derive from fundamental spatial orientations, and however abstract prepositions become, I would defy any to suggest where else they could come from; and, those of us familiar with GA in particular should be aware of the importance of words like “above,” inside,” central,” and so on in installing a basically scenic human reality within language. Even beyond that, it’s very probable that most if not all words can be traced back to basic experiential distinctions between well and ill, large and small, strong and weak, straight and bent, and so on. The gestural or iconic elements of language pervade writing as well as speech (as the innovative writer Ronald Sukenick once remarked, if you change the traditional Gutenbergian make up of the written page people go berserk—what is, then, the iconicity of that homogenous line of print going predictably from top to bottom of page after page?), and the explosion of new media over the past century should be accounted for as a resurgence of gesturality as well as orality within a world presumably conquered by the printed word.

Going even further into a specifically originary idiom, the ostensive, imperative and interrogative elements of language are built into declarative culture—I would say no declarative could make sense that didn’t accommodate its conversion into imperatives and ostensives via a series of gradations—in a sense, what else could any statement mean other than some version of “attend to this and that will be brought to your attention”? Obviously such formulations can become extremely complex—after that is brought to your attention you will in turn need to attend to the other thing, and so on, and a very simple sentence may map out such a string of attending to each other’s attending to. An originary “parsing” of a sentence would be breaking it down into the various ostensives and imperatives it might contain, such as the indications, promises, oaths, prayers, and hypotheses (questions) embedded within it.

My plan, finally, is to treat the notion of “rights,” or the word “right” as a thread going through all these fields. “Right” is a modern notion (more precisely, perhaps, its spread maps the transition of medieval to modern life), but it registers and translates the insistence upon respect and access that constitutes any idiom; “right” began its career as a narrow political concept, but now pervades the language—it is quite common to assert, for example, that “you have no right to speak to me like that,” in which “right” has collapsed back into a more colloquial notion of “honor”; rights are generally asserted in declarative form (we hold these rights to be self-evident) but have a strong imperative and ostensive component—they forbid all kinds of encroachments, and reveal an inviolable integrity; and, to return to the starting point of my discussion of the “right of the idiom,” the integration of rights within a legal and political system presupposes the existence of writing, at least for the keeping of records and forging of agreements, while sustaining a respect for rights as something other than markers of bureaucratic power requires the convertibility of rights (or “rights”) within the gift economy (where claims will be deeply rooted in orality and gesturality) into rights within a market economy. This last point is especially important politically: only in this way can we imagine the transformation of those countries with stunted (or worse) market systems succeeding within the global market and, I would say, only in that way will be able to think through the extraordinarily complicated issues of property rights in an information economy that furthermore transforms much that has been natural (like our DNA) into information that could be traded and used.

Idioms distribute rights internally—to speak within an idiom is to have a place to speak within it, and therefore a right to that place; and speakers of idioms insist upon their rights as speakers of that idiom within other idioms. This formulation brings us up against the dilemma Jean-Francois Lyotard called the “differend,” wherein the two parties to a dispute occupy incommensurable idioms and the decision therefore will be made in an idiom alien to at least one of them. One example he gave, not very surprisingly, was that of indigenous land rights claims within a modern settler colonial society, like those of North America or Australia. The native can’t produce a land deed or any proof of occupation or ownership—the myths which account for their belonging to the land (the very notion of “belonging” to the land) are “inadmissible” within a modern court of law. There seems to me no reason why a modern legal system can’t address such issues in a way similar to Hernando de Soto’s proposal for legalizing the informal property held by migrants to the margins of so many of the world’s great cities—give credibility to the oral traditions and actual circuits of exchange visible within the community in question. A right, in the end, is others granting you an unmarked position within their idiom, and the way you do that is acknowledging that you might be marked or “markable” in ways analogous to the one asserting the right, making that common markedness a center of joint attention and thereby unmarking it.

More precisely, proposing a common markedness is to propose a mistakenness that contaminates you both and through you the entire community, even world. Mistakenness implies the violation of some rule, which can be a tacit one. Let’s say that a “rule” is a boundary between a field of ostensives and a field of imperatives—you do these things and you see those things; the doing with an eye to that particular revelation and the observance contingent upon the faithful fulfillment of the prescribed act. (I suppose we might think of this like opening a box in which sunlight enters in a particular angle at a particular time of day and produces a very specific shadow or reflection.) Failing to follow the rule leads means you obey an imperative but see something unrecognizable; or you see something that seems unmoored from any imperative that might have placed you before it. Such mistakenness marks you as a dangerous site of infinite desire—after all, the channeling of imperatives and ostensives into one another is aimed at checking desires which can’t be contained within the ritual space. Unmarking the other involves finding a way to ostensively verify the imperative they have presented themselves as following, or supplying the imperative which might account for the ostensive they have presented. Marking yourself, meanwhile, or implicating yourself in mistakenness, involves providing some ostensive sign that one of the imperatives you habitually obey has proven inadequate to this instance. It is always possible to do this, because we are always mistaken and we can always see this if we widen our sense of the scene a bit. And this approach will work with enemies as well as friends, or potential friends—to see the other as mistaken is not to eliminate the idioms of guilt or shame; to see oneself as mistaken is not to surrender one’s power of judgment—rather, mistakenness gives the other the right to speak openly of the imperatives they follow and gives you the right to present your imperatives before them. Addressing a jihadist as the “infidel” of their discourse, or a rebellious “dhimmi,” while inviting them to convert to what for them is the religious other, for example, might contain more possibilities than the legal and political terms we are currently working with. In other words, it is still us vs. them, but with that minimal anthropological surplus.

Below is the paper I read today at the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism’s conference on Modernity.” It was a rather interesting conference, which I will perhaps feel moved to comment on at some point. For, now, though, I’d like to state the central conclusion I arrived at from the proceedings. There are now two terms in play, each seeking to name the source of global violence and possible breakdown: “anti-semitism” and “Islamophobia.” For reasons I will perhaps expand upon, I am convinced that these two concepts cannot co-exist–one will disappear or be significantly marginalized, and one will at least have the chance to organize a new mode of politics. I hope that “anti-semitism” is the survivor, since it names something real and the concept might help us advance the cause of civilization. But I wouldn’t bet on its chances. At any rate, I would suggest that the fate of the opposed terms will serve a a clear index of where things are headed in the years ahead.

Anyway, here’s the paper:

Anti-Semitism and the Victimary Era

Adam Katz
Quinnipiac University

In this paper I will offer an account of contemporary anti-semitism in terms of Eric Gans’s “originary hypothesis” regarding the origin of language and culture. The originary hypothesis extends and revises Rene Girard’s analysis of mimetic rivalry: according to the originary hypothesis, the first sign emerged in a single event, a mimetic crisis in which the (proto) human group arrested their common and self-destructive convergence upon a common object by putting forward what Gans calls an “aborted gesture of appropriation.” Representation, then, is the deferral of violence, as is, therefore, all of culture. History is the ongoing process of preserving and, where necessary and possible, replacing such means of deferral (languages, rituals, beliefs, moralities, art, and so on) which are intrinsically fragile and under constant threat from mimetic desire, rivalry and violence.

In a series of books, beginning with The Origin of Language in 1980, through The End of History, Science and Faith, and Signs of Paradox, to mention a few, and his on-line column, Chronicles of Love and Resentment on his Anthropoetics website, Gans’s “new way of thinking” has developed an account of history according to which the market system, and now the world market system, best realizes the reciprocity achieved on the originary scene. History is the liberation of humanity from attachment and “enslavement” to the singular object on the originary scene towards the universal exchange of objects within the market system. It is in the context of the market system that Gans first situates anti-semitism:

The Jew is not in some undefined sense a scapegoat for the larger society’s frustrations. He serves as a model of the inexistent and unfigurable center of the market system… the Jew, having rejected the incarnation, incarnates the truly unincarnable—mediation… In the postritual world of market exchange, the Jew is a paradoxical construction who regulates the self-regulating market, who fixes the prices determined by the interaction of supply and demand; we must eliminate him to gain control over this “inhuman” mechanism. (Chronicle 74, 1997)

Gans’s allusion to the Jews’ rejection of the incarnation already suggests that the suitability of the Jews for such a “model” of the unfigurable center of the market has roots that precede modernity. Anti-semitism, for Gans, is ultimately predicated upon the paradox of the Jewish discovery of monotheism: the Judaic revelation presented knowledge of a single God beyond the means of control of totemic religions and a single humanity whose knowledge of God is most profoundly revealed in the reciprocal relations between humans; at the same time, this very revelation is granted to a single people, “chosen” to work out before the world the implications of this understanding of the divine. The spread of monotheism, already inscribed in its universalistic origin, could hardly take place other than through resentment towards those who both gave this God to humanity and “selfishly” claimed an exclusive relation to Him.

What Gans calls Jewish “narrative monotheism” lays the groundwork for the eventual emergence of the modern market not only by de-fetishizing local totems but by separating faith in God and the obligation to follow the law from the national power and success of the Jewish people. If the defeats and even destruction of the nation are given meaning by demands and promises that transcend those temporal events, then moral meaning can be found in the contingencies of history, rather than the maintenance of a closed ritual space. But this contribution of Judaism to modernity collides with the more specifically Christian contribution or, rather, the revision of Christianity constitutive of modernity. According to Gans, “[w]here Jews had understood that the real center was inhabited by the Being of the sign, the Christians realized that this Being was generated, and could be generated anew, by an act interpretable as a victimization.” In other words, while Jewish victimization was already a sign of Jewish chosenness, this was a burden borne by Jews alone; for Christianity, the persecution of Jesus is imitable and identification with it the source of salvation. But this also meant that Christianity provides the model for anti-semitism: “[t]he anti-semite compels the Jew to enter the infernal circle of rivalry and persecution in order to reenact his own Christian conversion: he is the new Paul, and the Jew is the Saul he used to be.” (Chronicle #207)

The consequence of this privileging of victimization and identification with it as a moral model is clarified by Gans’s account of the role of Romanticism in the development of the modern market. Gans speaks of the “constitutive hypocrisy of Romanticism,” wherein the Romantic individual performs his rejection of the market system and proclaims his persecution by all those situated within that system only in order, ultimately, to create a compelling self capable of circulating effectively within the market. In abiding tension with this individualistic gesture is the formation of nationalism along analogous lines, through the martyrdom of the nation and its heroes at the hands of its oppressors; oppressors that are, of course, simultaneously mimetic models. So, Gans argues,

anti-Semitism intensifies in the bourgeois era because it is at this point in history that persecution, which grants significance, comes to be preferable to indifference… At this point the Jews indifference to Jesus is no longer a veil covering his guilt for the Crucifixion; it is itself the ultimate persecution. To opt out of the theater of national life is ipso facto to operate in the hidden realm of conspiracy. The Jew is the ultimate dandy whose detachment from society—in principle, regardless of fact—is the sign of his omnipotence. The anthropological meaning of anti-Semitism may be expressed in terms of the market, but only insofar as the lesson of the modern market is itself understood as a transhistorical revelation concerning human exchange. The Jew is designated the “subject” of the market because, faithful to the empty center revealed by the burning bush, he remains in principle indifferent to the object—whether of persecution or adoration—that he finds there. (Chronicle #207)

The fury of the Nazi’s assault against the Jews gathered together all these threads of the anti-market revolt within a desperate attempt to displace the primacy of the Jews and “falsify” their narrative: “[e]nraged at the Jews’ monotheistic equanimity in defeat and disaster, the Nazis hoped to inflict on them a catastrophe so great that it could not be understood as a message of God to His people.”

The ultimately omnicidal potential for human violence revealed by the Holocaust introduces something new into this equation. The Holocaust marks the beginning of the victimary era, in which we are now living. The virulent hatred of the Nazis towards the Jews drew the world into a cataclysmic struggle, the like of which we will not survive again in the nuclear age. The eschewing of such hatred must be the center of the new system of deferral constructed after the war: whatever “looks like” the Nazi-Jew relation must be uncompromisingly proscribed. This, of course, creates an incentive to make one’s own grievance fit that model: post-colonial, anti-racist, feminist, environmentalist and so on struggles are all cast in terms of the perpetrator/victim/bystander configuration extracted from the Holocaust.

The Jews are once again placed in a paradoxical position. First of all, the response on the part of the Jews to the consequences of their utter defenselessness in the Holocaust is to create and, with growing unanimity, support a Jewish nation-state. But the nation-state, with its ethnic exclusivity, preparedness for belligerency and narrow self-interest, is one of those things that “looks” very much “like” Nazism. Second, the victimary principle can only be universalized if the Jewish monopoly on Holocaust guilt is broken—the best way to do so is to present the Jews as oppressors, at least just like the rest of us, at worst uniquely so, insofar they have exploited the world’s guilt so as to perpetuate the very conditions that enabled their own victimization, only this time at the expense of others. Finally, then, the emergence of a new victim, the Palestinians, the victim of the Jews, completes the victimary metaphysics first set in motion by the essentially theological response to the Holocaust. The victimary system, then, depends upon this new, expanded anti-semitism, in which the Jews are scapegoated for the crimes of the West as well as for the intensifying resentments toward the West, coming now, in particular, from the most bitter if not the oldest of those resentments: that of Islam.

It was the Israeli victory in the 1967 war that made it possible to maneuver the Jews, ideologically, out of the victimized and into the victimizer position. But this maneuvering might have gone no further than the kind standard anti-colonial critique applied to the US in Vietnam or the European powers without the increasing abandonment of nationality on the part of Western Europeans and the rise of radical Islam. In this context, as Gans says, we are, first of all,

struck by the similarity between medieval and modern Christian antisemitism. In both cases, the Jew is accused of remaining behind in the “old” Israel rather than entering the New Israel of Christianity. It is by this suspicious archaism that he betrays his immoral preference for honoring the historical memory of his monotheistic discovery over its inherent promise of universality. Whether well-poisoner or Protocol-worshiper, the Jew is accused of refusing to “love his [non-Jewish] neighbor” as himself. (Chronicle #301)

Earlier, I suggested that we could attribute to the modern market a “Jewish” and a “Christian” component: the former being the location of meaning in one’s “patient” action within history and the latter in the processes of individual singularization of the player on the market. It would, in that case, be the “Jewish” component that insists upon the regularization of exchange by the rule of law within what would inevitably a national framework—which is to say the same paradox of universality and exclusivity long associated with the Jewish place in the world. Only the U.S. has fully embraced this paradox and the burdens it implies, which accounts for not only the alliance between the US and Israel, but that of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism. In that case, the contemporary European attempt to transcend nationality is not so much a rejection of the modern market in the manner of Nazi and Communist totalitarianism as it is a rejection of one of the critical elements of the market, the nation-state under the rule of law, and an evasion of the paradoxes and resentments involved in the articulation of nationality and the world market.

With the most politically influential currents of contemporary Islam, meanwhile, we do most emphatically see a rejection of the market. Gans sees Islam, in its origins and today, as the monotheism of an “excluded majority,” forged out of resentment against the first monotheism and the prevailing, dominant one: “the Hebrews discovered monotheism as the source of communal harmony independent of political power; the Muslims discovered it as a means for mobilizing the margins of the decaying imperial provinces to overpower them” (Chronicle 301, “Anti-Semitism from a Judeocentric Perspective I”). Hence the Islamic notion of the “uncreated Koran,” a direct rebuke to the potential for interpretation and supersessionism (“distortion”) built into the Jewish and Christian scriptures. Today, though, this resentment places Muslims at the margins of the global market, which they cannot avoid, and, indeed, through the oil producing states participate in substantially, but in such a way as to minimize the transformations in the division of labor that would reflect genuine cultural and ethical integration. The identification of Jews with the Subject controlling the uncontrollable marketplace inherited from modern Western anti-Semitism is in a sense radicalized in the Muslim world, which can create a political identity against the market itself from the outside. In the course of an analysis of a 2004 speech by former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, Gans contrasts modern European anti-Semitism, which sees itself as occupying the same world as the Jews, with

Mahathir’s world [where], on the contrary, the Jews occupy a different world from us, and their hidden domination of that world is that the root of that world’s open domination of Islam. By setting up the Jews as the all-powerful enemy, he is encouraging Muslims to forget their military and economic inferiority to the West and focus on the infinitesimal number of their “real” masters. The only thing our billions need in order to vanquish these few million Jews is a collective will to power. (Chronicle #302)

Gans focuses more on the global Muslim “umma” in these reflections I am working with, than Muslims living within the Western countries, but following the line of his argument one could suggest that the convergence of this mutated form of Islamic anti-semitism and the revival of anti-Semitism in the West along with the consolidation of White Guilt is creating a particularly intractable new strain. As Gans says, the anti-Israel contingent in the West doesn’t distribute copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion but they respect the right of Muslims to do so. We might say that the Western Left plays the role of defense attorney to Islamic terrorism: it doesn’t approve, but it is determined to see that the accused receive due process. “International law,” as the latest supersessionist project of the West thereby becomes a vehicle for this new brand of anti-semitism: as reflected in the Goldstone Report in particular, postcolonial, postmodern international law can readily be interpreted in such a way as to render any conceivable form of Israeli self-defense illegitimate; how else can we translate this project than in terms of a simple imperative: die!

The conclusion, I think, is that we cannot effectively address this emergent anti-semitism without addressing the pathologies surrounding the global market. On the one hand, the form taken on the marketplace by what Gans calls Jewish “firstness” is that of the centrality of the entrepreneur, who organizes capital, introduces a new division of labor and creates new desires. Despite claims of consumer supremacy, one source of the mysteriousness of the market’s workings is precisely that new products enter the market before anyone has been asking for, or has even thought of them—tales of consumer manipulation take on their plausibility from this fact. Similarly, the solicitation of investment capital, from the outside, inevitably looks conspiratorial, especially when heavily regulated markets require political maneuvering before new projects can get off the ground. We can see exploitative and deceptive entrepreneurial practices as exceptions to the rule in a fundamentally beneficial market process; or we can see the honest worker and consumer as, a priori, the victims of malevolent and unaccountable market players: which perspective we adopt will determine the way we think about regulating economic institutions, and only a fundamentally benevolent view will make it possible to accept the basic asymmetry between producers and consumers, capital and labor, and resist the search for scapegoats for our disappointments in the market.

Second, though, as I suggested earlier, Jewish firstness is represented by a willingness to endure historical contingency, adhere to the moral law (even if no one else does), and ask for no recognition or “proof” of election. I should make it clear that even if this possible relation between law, morality and history was invented by the Jews, it can, of course, be adopted by anyone (as, for example, in “American Exceptionalism”). At any rate, this form of firstness takes the form of an embrace of normalcy—not at the expense of eccentricity, innovativeness or otherness in general, but certainly as a rejection of the a priori victimary stance which artificially inflates the value of alterity. The location of cultural exemplars among the upholders of everyday middle class values and common sense patriotism, and the social prioritization of such values might prove even more difficult than rehabilitating the figure of the entrepreneur. Without such a cultural turn in which we come to see entrepreneurialism and normalcy as the modes of deferral they are rather than as exploitation and indifference to the other, though, anti-semitism will continue to attract and direct the resentments generated by the world market.

Disciplinary spaces are both open and closed: when you just enter a disciplinary space, a space with a real focus, an evolved vocabulary, and means—both explicit and tacit—for rerouting the attentions of the others within the space; when you just enter such a a space you don’t really know what’s going on. Even more, you read it in terms of what you do know. At the same time, if it’s a genuine disciplinary space, it provides various transitional terms that both de-familiarize what you thought you understood about the shared attentionality demanded and provide you with the means to participate in disciplinary events. We can formulate this inside/outside relationship as follows: the probability that anyone will iterate signs put forward within the discipline approach 100% the more they have entered the disciplinary space and randomness the further they are outside of it. We can think about it this way: imagine standing in front of a contained representation, like a painting or photograph, with someone else—you could conduct your discussion almost completely in deictics or shifters, that is, “look at that”; “how close would you say this is supposed to be to that?”; “do you mean him or her?”, etc. You, with your eyes on the same thing, can be completely mutually intelligible to each other; anyone without their eyes on this scene could not even begin to make sense of your conversation. That’s what a discipline is—we all know we are looking at the same thing, and can proceed from there. At the same time, we can welcome others into the scene, and welcome the new perspective they bring with it; and, even more, we have to continually refresh and check our sense that we are, indeed, looking at the same thing. Within a discipline, it becomes especially evident when we are not, as we believed, looking at the same thing: the deictics lose their referential power.

We can contrast disciplinary discourse with what I called, in the previous post, “crowded” (and crowding) discourse—that is, partisan discourse organized around gaining access to the state’s power to protect and divide property. Those inside one crowd and (of necessity) outside the other, understand equally well, but in the opposite manner, what goes on inside the other crowd. In other words, those on the left understand “Obama is a socialist” just as well as those on the right; those on the right understand “Palin is a fraudulent woman” just as well as those on the left—in both cases, the meaning of the statement is saturated, and marks an entire field along with the oppositions that constitute that field. It’s as if each crowd has a map that overlaps perfectly with the other crowd’s map, but with all of the places named differently. This has nothing to do with right or wrong, and I’m not claiming that political opponents are morally equivalent with each other—the war against Nazism worked this way, and the struggle against communism even more so, and while this insight into mimetic modeling can help is to identify excesses and distortions that can be curtailed and ameliorated, there is still a substantial difference between democracy and totalitarianism.

I would like to define language as the from which we attend to each other’s attending to. I am using the idiom of Michael Polanyi’s understanding of tacit knowledge, more specifically his The Tacit Dimension. According to Polanyi, we are always attending from one thing to something else, with the thing we are attending to that of which we are aware—what we attend from is essentially invisible. He gives the example of using a stick to stay in contact with the wall in trying to find your way out of a dark place—you are aware of the wall, not the stick. Of course, if the stick breaks, you will become aware of it—but that just means you will be attending from something to the stick—perhaps from your hand, which you now touch the end of the stick with, in order to determine how much of it remains.

If we attend from language to each other’s attending to, we are attending from language not merely to some object of shared attention, and to others’ attending to that object, but to both: language always implies not only something we are or might be talking about but the others with whom one might be talking about it—the two are bound up inextricably. The implication of my description is that language is ordinarily invisible—we don’t notice ourselves speaking, we don’t think of ourselves as adding one word to another as we speak, much less as making sounds that we could “listen” to by bracketing their meanings. Except for when, as in the example of the stick, language doesn’t work—when a foreign accent forces you to focus carefully on the sounds of the words, or a grammatical mistake forces you to hypothetically reconstruct the other’s meaning, etc. That’s when we have to look at language, which we do, of course, with language. Metaphysics is the attempt to rectify language when such events force language into self-reflexive states so that we can continue to look through language; originary grammar tries to articulate looking at language and with language with looking through language.

We can articulate an account of the originary scene in the Polanyian terms I have just introduced with the theory of “markedness” first constructed by Roman Jakobson and by now a staple of much of contemporary linguistics. I will make markedness theory do a lot of work, but I will also use it in some idiosyncratic ways—as is necessary to make it fully compatible with the originary hypothesis. Jakobson intensified Saussure’s insistence on the constitution of language through a series of differences by arguing that these differences are, most fundamentally, asymmetrical binary oppositions: always an opposition between an unmarked and a marked element. This opposition already does quite a lot of work for Jakobson and his followers, enabling them to account for phonetic, grammatical, semantic and other relationships; it can easily be taken even further, as in Eric Gans’s definition of White Guilt, as the guilt of the unmarked toward the marked. As Gans’s definition suggests, to be “unmarked” is to be generic, the norm, the taken for granted, or, in Polanyi’s terms, the tacit, what one attends from. To take a couple of simple examples, the present tense in English is unmarked, the past is marked (we add endings to the word): you look for the word “love” in the dictionary, not the word “loved,” which presupposes that “love” is the normal form of the word and “loved” the modified form. To take another, more semantic example, we ask how “tall” someone is, not how “short” they are (someone is 5 feet tall, not 5 feet short)—“tall” is the unmarked term, which means that referring to someone as “5 feet short” would add more information, implying, for example, an ironic stance on the part of the speaker. It would, in other words, be drawing attention to the word chosen, in a way “he’s 5 feet tall” wouldn’t.

We can locate (un)markedness on the originary scene in the distinction between sacred center and profane periphery. Indeed, the center must be marked first of all, insofar as the participants in the event attend from the sign/gesture to the object; but the effect of this shared attention is to have everyone attend from the object as sacred to each and every one’s profane desire for the object, culminating in the regulated sparagmos. The sign, then, signifies doubly: it refers to the object, but also the Object (everyone else’s blocking of the object) as the possibility of a normative approach to the object. The sign simultaneously marks and unmarks the object and thereby constitutes the unmarked/marked distinction in the first place. All that remains to be done is to show how the subsequent development of language, from the ostensive, through the imperative and the interrogative to the declarative, through the development of grammatical categories and rules and so on, is nothing more than the application of this “method” discovered on the originary scene. Once we have a meaningful unit, meaningful units can be combined into new units; and that unit can itself be broken down into units, meaningless in themselves, but meaningful in new combinations—just as the gesture on the originary scene is “analyzed” in the attempt to imitate it “correctly.” In this way we would have an originary linguistics and (my preferred term) grammar, which is to say an originary way of thinking through all the possible relationships between linguistic elements, or all the ways we think through, at and with language.

In every sentence, even every word, one part is stressed in relation to another—we attend from the unstressed to the stressed; or, from the part that would ordinarily have been stressed to the part that is stressed this time. What is stressed in “I didn’t expect to see you here,” for example: the “I,” the “you,” or the “here”—or, perhaps, the “see” (maybe you were expecting a phone call). The stressed is marked, that part of the utterance that provides the most, or most pertinent, information—just as the center itself is empty or silent, while being an inexhaustible source of knowledge regarding attempts to obey, violate or modify its commands. The theory of (un)markedness in turn makes the issue of “deictics” especially important: deictics, or shifters, are those words which take on their meaning from other elements of the message or the speech situation—for example, “him” or “that” depend upon what has been referenced in a previous sentence, or someone present who can be pointed to. I doubt I am the first person to observe that we can identify a deictic element to just about every part of any utterance, which is to say that the meaning of any statement has a scenic component—at any rate, attending from the unmarked to the marked pervades every use of language, to the point where one could pretty effectively and thoroughly describe the meaning of any utterance just by following all the ways in which the unmarked, present in the scene or utterance, or implicit in our knowledge as language users, directs our attention to whatever it is the utterance would have us mark. Indeed, the point of any utterance could be described as follows: to preserve, modify and/or expand the realm of the unmarked by marking whatever most immediately demands others’ attention—because, as those familiar with the originary hypothesis know, whatever is marked is a potential source of rivalry, crisis and violence.

Distinguishing between the unmarked and the marked raises new questions—simply, unmarked and marked for whom, in what setting, according to what criteria, etc.? The distinction is always made in some event, on some scene, and must ultimately lead us to an ostensive gesture—this word, this act, is marked because it is set off from some norm in the following way; “distinctive,” or “distinguishing features,” to use Jakobson’s terms, can always be indicated. In other words, distinguishing between marked and unmarked takes place on a disciplinary scene, however rudimentary and tacit. Whereas Jakobson would, understandably enough, distinguish between the speech situation and the represented scene we can locate in any speech act, and identify the deictics in play accordingly (“someone was standing to the left of John” functions deictically on the represented scene, assuming John has been placed on that scene; “over there” functions deictically in the speech situation, but wouldn’t on the represented scene), I would approach that necessary distinction as follows: there is what can be identified on the disciplinary scene, or what I will also call the scene of presencing; and there is what can be represented by those on that disciplinary scene to those outside of it. What can be represented to those outside of a disciplinary scene are the results of that scene: what emerged in a continuous, spontaneous manner (the disciplinary scene always culiminates in and maximizes deictics—“look at that… now see what happens here… go back to that…) is now represented as completed, in a narrative or conceptual form.

Deictics introduce the marked/unmarked distinction into grammar, because some words, originally meant to accompany a gesture or direct our attention to something on some disciplinary scene, is now redirected so as to draw our attention to something else in the sentence. We attend from relative pronouns like “which” and “that” to a clause we are to place in relation to the previous one. Personal pronouns direct our attention toward someone who has previously been named and commented upon. As we transition or transform our relations from presencing to representational ones, verbal elements that were involved in constituting the scene by establishing symmetrical shared attention are turned to the purpose of reconstructing the scene by placing the names of participants on the scene and the character of events transpiring upon it into grammatical relations with each other.

The first declarative was an “answer” to an interrogative. This makes perfect sense because any sentence can be read as an answer to a question. Indeed, most sentences can be read as answers to multiple questions, questions implicit in other questions, questions asked by various, perhaps opposed, inquisitors, questions occurring to the speaker him/herself as he/she composes the sentence in response to another question, etc. Questions and types of questions repeat themselves over time, and language economizes—one very important thing grammar does is build types of answers so as to pre-empt a whole series of questions into the structure of the sentence itself. Conjugating verbs packs together the answer to the question what is done with the question who does it. In English, for example, the adjective almost invariably precedes the noun it modifies—on the one hand, we are deprived of a possible marker of style (maybe “hat red” would carry subtle, yet genuinely different connotations than “red hat”); on the other hand, we are saved from what might be an unworkable level of confusion regarding what is modifying what, thereby answering a potential question in advance. Grammatical rules, along with the vast number of linguistic formulas (of greeting, of marking agreement, of providing recognition, etc.) unmark vast swathes of language and can arouse great resentment when violated or mistaken—precisely because such violations open up questions, and through those questions, imperatives and contradictory imperatives thought to have been silenced. In all of these cases the same process is at work: words which once had scenic, presencing force, are turned into terms from which we attend to whatever the sentence and larger discourse would have us attend to. The linguist Guy Deutscher, in his excellent The Unfolding of Language, provides a fascinating analysis of the development of the word “going” into an auxiliary verb and ultimately into the phrase pronounced “gonna,” by now an independent grammatical marker (as Deutscher notes, we don’t say “I’m gonna the store”—“going to,” in its original sense of moving toward some destination, still exists, but separately from this other, evolved, form). Conjunctions and prepositions are evolved adjectives, which are in turn evolved from participles and language is dead metaphors all the way down. Ultimately language evokes and constitutes events and the participants thereon by naming and tracking them with specialized means of directing attention: when you represent a scene for someone who was not a participant, the only way of doing so effectively is by using or creating metaphors (say, an imperative become a verb become, via a participle, a condition) from which others can attend to their own disciplinary locales. We can articulate all of language out of ostensives become substantives, imperatives become verbs and decitics with all subsequent complications resulting from the new ability created by the declarative sentence to quell all questions (behind which lurk threatening imperatives) by referring them to a reality subject to its own imperatives which override those with which we presume to approach it.

Using Jakobson’s distinction between the axis of combination (the relations between words in a sentence, or grammar) and the axis of selection (the choice of one word over others that could go in its place, or semantics), we could say that the conventions of grammar allow us to mark a particular element of the sentence as that which the sentence is most significantly conveying: if I say “I am going home” I can emphasize the “I,” as in you might stay on, but not me; or the home, as in you might have some other destination in mind, but as for me, it’s home. The “I” or the “home,” then, is the marked element. At the same time, selecting “home” unmarks home in relation to, say, one’s address, or as opposed to “out of here,” both of which might be implicitly marked as mocking or excessively provocative. Finally, the one who hears the sentence, who, in Jakobson’s terms will “decode” it—but I prefer to describe language iconically, as a mapping, which the listener or reader navigates, or fails to navigate—will in turn iterate the act of (un)marking, in what he or she says, does, and doesn’t say or do (in the common tripartite division of the materials of linguistics, grammar, semantics and pragmatics, this final move is the pragmatics).

At any rate, to conclude this discussion, which I see has not yet gotten to either rights or idioms, our distinction between disciplinary spaces and crowded spaces, scenes of presencing and scenes of representation, can be determined not so much in terms of quantities of marked and unmarked elements as in the extent to which what is unmarked and marked is determined on the scene: more precisely, the more disciplinary, the more presencing, a scene, the more anything might be attended to just as easily as it can be attended from; the more crowdy, the more representational, the thicker the commonplaces and predictable phrases one need merely attend from; the more disciplinary, the more diverse the imperatives flowing from reality and the more intermixed they are with imperatives and interrogatives put, nevertheless, to reality; the more representational or metaphysical, the more unilateral, irresistible and univocal the imperatives flowing from reality. Which is really a way of repeating my first couple of paragraphs, and laying a little groundwork from really getting to the right of the idiom next time.

The elemental form of freedom is that of the discipline: a shared, inviolate and inexhaustible locus of attention. Sciences are disciplines, developing vocabularies and histories, and framing their objects so that another “layer” of understanding can always be sought. But so are congregations around some object of faith or communities of criticism around some esthetic object or domain. All that matters is the collaborative act of sustaining the centered attention, and the capacity of each in the discipline to contribute to new modes of attention on the part of the others. Even when we think to ourselves, we are participating in a discipline, whether it be the discipline of the varied voices in our mind, or the possible discipline of thinkers past and future with whom we engage. The discipline has its original on the originary scene, when we all stand in equipoise before the central object, and attend to the object along with one another’s attention to it.

The most basic political rights, then, are those associated with participation in the disciplines: speech, association, religion, press, etc. It becomes possible to assert such rights once the originary scene has divided into several scenes, each with its own disciplinary logic. The power of the several scenes will depend upon the power exercised by the ritual center, and the defense of the rights of the disciplines will depend upon the conversion of the imperative space tied to the ritual center into a declarative space, or a public discipline, concerned with identifying the nature of rights and the means of securing them. The emergence of talk of rights, then, will be connected to the right of each discipline to establish and sustain itself, and to publicize itself before others—and the insistence upon such rights will be modeled on the rights which emerge within any discipline, the rights involved in getting a communicable view of the central object.

The sacred is what holds our joint attention and enables us to attend to each other’s attending to. The profane, then, is whatever can be used, consumed or destroyed in service to the sacred, on terms allowed by the sacred, or in violation of the sacred. All unfolding from the originary scene, then, results from mistakings of the boundary between sacred and profane and takings that inscribe the mistake within a new idiom or exclude it in accord with the existing norm. Politics emerges when the community has to do more inscribing than excluding. That’s when we would start speaking in terms of rights, sacralizing first of all groups and institutions (disciplines as a whole) but ultimately individuals, in their right to join and leave disciplines.

Property emerges out of the profane—it is the acquisition on the part of the discipline of the means to preserve the discipline, to serve the sacred at its center. I would suggest that the sign continues to be issued in the course of the sparagmos, as each participant presents it to the other whenever the other tries to grab more than his share: property is modeled on this relatively orderly but also competitive division of the object. With the emergence of property comes the asymmetry of the disciplines, an asymmetry which struggles over access to the public disciplinary space will seek to remedy or support. Hence the emergence of parties, which aim at guaranteed access to the state, and turn the spread of disciplinary discourse into the crowding of party discourse. In other words, disciplines disperse and distribute the individuals involved by placing them equidistant from the center; parties draw upon the interest of diverse property holders in access to the state and, on the model of the sparagmos, are concerned with drawing lines, taking parts and dividing to one’s advantage.

If one is political, there is no avoiding parties and partisanship, but one can establish disciplinary spaces at the margins of parties so as to place limits on crowding and make the public disciplinary space (parliament, congress) genuinely disciplinary itself. What these disciplinary spaces concern themselves with is the political consequence of whatever the disciplines from which they derive concern themselves with. Whatever can be presented as an object within a discipline can be a subject of rights: “nature” (or some portion thereof), things and technologies, the dead and the yet to be born, and more. I am proposing this kind of “rights talk” as a counter to the signal strategy of the Left, which is to supplant individual rights (the rights, as I am presenting them here, to participate in disciplines) with collective rights requiring expanded state activity and, ultimately, severe restrictions on individual rights. I am suggesting, in other words, a metaphorical rights talk, which calls upon citizens, not the state, to expand the range of sacred objects they wish to protect.

Trade itself develops modes of sacrality, and enterprise can be a mode of disciplinarity. At one extreme, economic innovation, as in the high tech firms in Silicon Valley, can be a thoroughly engaged intellectual and ethical enterprise; and economic exchange, especially when conducted at the margins of a given social order, can be so risky as to require explicit signs of trustworthiness on the part of the participants. Most often, though, economic activity conducted through private property is a kind of warfare on the existing social division of labor, and trade seeks and finds the protection of states and laws. I persist in calling the kinds of technological and organizational strategies and transformations we associate with firms like Microsoft and Wal-Mart “warfare” because their focus is not merely on providing a better and/or cheaper product, but upon undermining the competitor’s market position, for which purpose they will make use of any means available. I’m not making a moral point, in other words, just trying to develop the best description—and the tactics of the enemies and competitors of these firms, such as union organizing drives, “living wage” policies and anti-trust lawsuits are no less modes of warfare than any used by these firms themselves. Those who cannot develop their property within the existing division of labor will directly target weak links in that division of labor; those whose profits are tied to that division of labor will try to reinforce it and treat innovations as usurpation. The free market libertarian theorists are right to point to the monopolistic and rent seeking character of those who profit from the existing division of labor, and breaking up monopolies so that new connections can be places new practices beyond existing state control. The victors themselves, though, immediately seek out protection from and alliances with the state. Not only that, but transformations in the social division of labor imply shifts in desires and resentments as well, creating new modes of politics aimed at staging, framing and channeling those desires and resentments. This doesn’t imply any one to one relation between economic and cultural changes: for example, enhancements in medical technologies that enable intra-uterine treatment can make abortion more routine or more horrible. Here is where idioms of rights come into it: how will the rights of the unborn child be articulated with rights of inquiry of the scientist and right to confidentiality of the mother/patient?

The family is also best seen as an imperatival, normalizing space, protecting society from the consequences of sexual desires and appetites. But the pleasures of family life seem to me to coincide with its political significance: what the family, or familial love, teaches above all else, is resentment on behalf of the other. The child concerned with his or her parents’ dignity; the parent taking up the defense of his or her child against the school or some other establishment; the sibling waging mini-wars on behalf of, or providing tutorials on “life” to, sibling; or, for that matter, the parent or child siding with society, opportunistically or pedagogically, against the more narrow desire of the family member—all this offers a wide field for the nuanced and self-distancing exercise of broadly shared resentments that get played out in less complex forms in the workplace, in friendships and love affairs and in various institutions. A “pro-family” politics, one speaking on behalf of the “rights” of the family, should find ways to speak in these terms of what it is we wish to protect about families.

At any rate, the most fundamental right, the right to have rights, can be grounded in our capacity for language use and, more specifically, our ability to participate in disciplinary spaces, which are characterized by their distinctive idiom: a vocabulary, a set of commonplaces, a shared set of imperatives and so on. Those who can’t speak, who can’t participate in disciplines—those in “vegetative” states, the unborn, very small children, people with Alzheimer’s, etc.—can be represented within disciplines. Asserting the abstract human rights of people who can’t assert their own has not worked very well: it’s easy enough to claim that the person in a coma would have wanted to die (maybe it’s sometimes true), the rights of the unborn have seemed very faint compared to the demands of the fully fledged human mother, and attempts to humanize stem cells have had, at best, temporary successes. But perhaps when the speechless enter a discourse, generated by a discipline demonstrably interested in exploring their possible wants and imposing upon the rest of us a real presence, the contrast between such a discourse and others predicated upon the irrelevance of these figures (all sacrificial discourses which accept the disappearance of one for the benefit of others, or “society” as a whole) will succeed where arguments based on an abstract humanity, life or right has not.

In its own way, the rights of the idiom takes up sides with those transforming the existing division of labor. If we follow the imperative to minimize, the disciplinary events which shape us increasingly overlap while simultaneously differentiating. I would like to present this as a problem in originary grammar, but I will save that for the next post.

I’m up again at zombies contentions (a rewriting of my recent post here, without the theory). You can find your way, can’t you?