GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

Substituting the notion of “sovereign equality” for “equality of outcome” would complete the articulation of liberty and equality I argued for in “The Mistake of Liberal Democracy,” and clarify the implications of their severing by liberal democracy. An obvious question regarding my claim for the indivisibility of freedom and equality is, “Could you really claim that Bill Gates and a homeless person are unequal in no meaningful way, as long as they could both be said to be playing under the same rules?” It’s a good question, and my first answer is the unsatisfactory for many “yes, that is precisely what I am claiming”; but I can also give a more satisfactory (to many) answer: “no, they are unequal in a meaningful way, and the meaning given to that way comes from the belief that there should be some general power superintending and weighing all resentments so as to ensure they don’t obfuscate the resentment of the center.” That superintending power is the sovereign power, which is coeval with freedom and in constant tension with it. Sovereign power stakes its claim where equaliberty demands too much rigor from its participants, and that there are many such sites our current crisis testifies. Sovereign equality, then, is public recognition of each one’s resentments, displacing the general adoption of the resentment of the center. And if one were to say that, in effect, Bill Gates plays on a different field and according to a different set of rules from the homeless person, that would be true, but largely due to the massive sovereign incursions into freedom, bought by the wealthy who felt that competition had outlived its usefulness once they had won, but also sanctioned by the claims of sovereign equality.

For anyone interested, I have a new blogging locale, on the Zombies Contentions blog (under Adam K). It’s more directly political, with only a hint of GA (but perhaps I’ll be able to thicken the hints as I go).

Anyway, here’s the link, for anyone who’s interested:

http://ckmac.com/thewholething/

I fell a bit behind in my reading of the Chronicles of Love & Resentment, and so I just got to the extraordinarily interesting Chronicle # 388, “Ecriture from Barthes to GA,” and wanted to make this brief comment on one small part of the essay:

The sacred is not a mysterious, otherworldly quality; it measures the human community’s sense of the danger posed to it by the mimetic desire aroused by different phenomena. What we call secularization is the process whereby these dangers come to be assessed within their concrete historical context rather than by reference to originary history as preserved in religious traditions. Pace the militant defenders of atheism, the progress of secularization over the past three centuries is far from having demonstrated the ability of modern societies to provide a rational basis for these assessments.

The difference between the sacred and secular is presented in very minimal terms here, to the disadvantage of the secular, because, presumably, the “concrete historical context” doesn’t provide the measure of danger that originary history does. That would be why modern societies have been unable to “demonstrate the ability” to rationally assess mimetic dangers—and, if they can’t do it “rationally,” than how? This seems to me a contention that is remarkable, rich in implications, and irrefutable. But I would like to probe it a bit further. First of all, “concrete historical context” doesn’t seem to me to be establishing the necessary sacred/secular distinction here, because such “contexts” must themselves be the result of secularization. In other words, it’s not as if there was previously a choice between assessing dangers in terms of an originary history or of concrete historical contexts, and only now did people choose the concrete context as their reference point. Furthermore, Gans here speaks in the idiom of modern secularization itself, which is perhaps inevitable but without some mitigation this idiom will not help us with our risk assessments. What I have in mind is the very general character of the narrative of secularization implicit here, while the only real process of secularization we can point to is the one issuing from the break with a very specific originary history, that provided by Christianity. Concrete historical contexts are produced because this particular “religious tradition” came to be seen, on its own terms, as producing scapegoats—the various “heretics” that emerged once Europe emerged (in large part thanks to Christianity itself) as a more bourgeois, inquisitive, urban society later in the Middle Ages. Since these heresies, when capable of defending themselves, could produce no new consensus, but only civil war, the only way of making mimetic dangers present was through the construction of a system of signs with the human subject (like Jesus, without the divine origin) as its origin—the human subject can in this way present itself as the sign of deferral of sacred violence, the creation of new Christs in the name of deferring violence carried out in the name of Christ. Modernity is then driven by the replacement of one constitutive human figure, around which “concrete historical contexts” constellate, after another—from the elevated (heroic scientists, artists, liberators and philosophers) to degraded (the various class, racial, sexual, and other others of the victimary period).

The linguistic turn comes into its own as a possible ideological replacement for these humanisms when the violence committed in the name of all these figures in succession leads to the deferral of the human figure itself; and the only way of doing that is by presenting the human as constituted by something else; language, a self-contained system that couldn’t have come before but doesn’t in any clear way seem to have come from humans. This is what makes possible the originary hypothesis: in its initial—scientistic, anthropological and ultimately victimary political—incarnations, the linguistic turn forbid any originary scene even more than previous modes of thought, as the originary is itself perceived as the source of violence—no mode of originarity other than those grounded in some human figure seems possible, and those have all been exhausted; but the insistence on language as a self-contained system is also what made it possible to think its origin: in considering language as a self-contained system constituted by its own internal relations, it is counter-productive to presuppose some pre-existing “content”—in this way lots of very mystifying ways of thinking about the origin of language (as a mere extension and improvement of indexical signs) are cleared away and it now becomes possible to think about language as such emerging all at once in an event.

Liberal democracy is constituted by the severing of equality and freedom, which become incommensurable “values” which need to be balanced and one of which must be given priority at any instant. This has been a serious, perhaps fatal error, because the balancing and prioritizing is inevitably done by the state, which develops an interest in privileging those forms of freedom that are as distant as possible from equality (like, say, transgressive sexual practices) and those forms of equality that have nothing to do with freedom (like, say, government run health care). Under such conditions, equality and freedom become pathological, and so does the state—any mode of freedom that threatens to trample on any mode of equality needs to be pruned, but that’s any mode of freedom, and the our sensitivity to the threat can only increase.

The notion that equality and freedom are competing values is false to the core. I defy anyone to name a mode of equality that can exist in the absence of freedom, or vice versa. At best, you could name the equality of the slave, or the invalid, or the incompetent—but that, of course, presupposes the absolutely inequality of the master, the therapist, the expert. If you are to speak freely and trade freely with whom, precisely, are you to do so, if not your equals? Liberal democracy, in this sense, is a new phenomenon, radically different than the constitutional liberalism it supplanted (while, of course, developing potentialities within its predecessor); nor does it exhaust the potentialities of freedom and equality—it is not a “higher” level or more “advanced” form of anything.

The only difference between equality and freedom is that equality tells us who is covered by the rules, who is protected by them, who is expected to play by them, who will support their enforcement if necessary, and who can be penalized by them. Freedom is whatever you can do within and with the rules. Rules emerge in any space where violence has been sufficiently deferred so that it can be kept out of mind, and they are as thick (exclusive and prescriptive) as they need to be in order to keep it out of mind. The thinner the rules, the more violence is proscribed implicitly, and the less the violation of any particular rule or action which is ambiguous under the existing rule-set will trigger broader contests over the rule-governed space as a whole—and, therefore, the more freedom. If I can barely hint at my disagreements with you without leading to a break of relations, our conversations will be to that extent unfree, and our equality constantly in question; if I can tell you that I think you are completely wrong and you can respond in kind and both of us end up remaking our views and deepening our friendship, we simply take our equality for granted and our conversation will be freer in proportion to that unconstrained assumption of equality. This structure holds for economic as well as political spaces, so the issue of public vs. private freedoms also seems to me to miss the point. Finally, the formulaic contrast between “equality of opportunity” and “equality of outcome” simply presupposes the split between freedom and equality—equality of opportunity is shared freedom, and so defending it is a rearguard maneuver against liberal democracy in the latter’s idiom.

There are, then, two questions: first, how did the wedge between equality and freedom get installed and, second, how can it be removed? In answer to the first question, it seems to me the guilty parties are those modern elites who appointed themselves guardians of the newly proletarianized masses—the Social Democrats in Europe and the Progressives in the U.S. They assumed society would become unmanageable due to its material inequalities and the irrationalities of the market, and the only way to make it manageable would be to “thicken” the rules, i.e., dole out rights in separate parcels—a bit of equality here, a bit of freedom there. It was not very difficult to bring big business on board, as the new administrative state gave them a seat at the table and protects them from competition. Resistance was bribed and suppressed when necessary, and, to be fair, there was no interest in taking away more freedom than necessary—I suspect the mistake had a lot to do with the need to package constitutional government for export, but this history has been written many times and does not need recounting here.

The second question is the hard one. It is also unavoidable if you believe, as I do, that liberal democracy has reached its limits—it has run out of slush funds to buy off opposition, and I suspect its power of repression would be found wanting as well. But the vast majority has bought into it, and will not come anywhere near the sensible option of cutting its losses before it is much too late. The incentives and disincentives can’t be rewired in time and, indeed, who would do that? Who would know how?

The only answer I can think of now is to insist upon and embody the indivisibility of equality and freedom in all our actions. If someone wants to engage us with strict and all encompassing rules, and you find it nevertheless advantageous to enter the relationship, insist that they be bound to the letter of those rules as well, while perhaps trying to maximize freedom within them. Meanwhile, seek out those willing to take the risks in exchange for the pleasures of more minimal rules and expanded modes of freedom. Refuse as much as possible duplicitous situations, where the tacit rule book contradicts the explicit one, or where the status of the “referees” is unclear. Avoid rigged games and replace them with transparent ones whenever you can. Anyone can do these things privately and publicly—we can all identify, expose and denounce rigged games—rights without responsibilities and responsibilities without rights.

A portion of American conservatism has begun to think through the legacy of Progressivism—the audience of Glenn Beck and the followers of Ron Paul in particular, and this is by no means a marginal group. What I refuse to do (without necessarily accusing anyone) is to treat that legacy as monstrous, rather than mistaken, as requiring repudiation rather than correction. To do otherwise is make another, potentially disastrous mistake, and to indulge oneself in scapegoating. We have all indeed bought into liberal democracy, we are all invested—it wasn’t a mere few who foisted it upon us, nor was the history of the U.S. through the 20th century irrevocably “tainted”—the foreign policy views of the libertarians are as crazed as anything coming from the Left, and are stamped with the illicit pleasures of scapegoating, wherein the other side becomes more guilty and you more innocent, the more you look into matters. The victory over the two totalitarianisms was a remarkable accomplishment, and so was the creation of a vast middle class, and we wouldn’t be able to have this conversation without it.

We can also recognize the fantasy of an equality without freedom as an attitude derived from the originary scene—such a fantasy confuses desire with the resentment of the center so that one’s own deserts can continually be recalibrated to one’s own advantage. The best dissection of this fantasy I know interesting comes from Karl Marx, and his Critique of the Gotha Program (focusing on the defects of the first stage of communism):

But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only — for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.

In other words, the quest for equality of results requires the continual creation of new categories of victimization, of unfairness built into the nature of things. Human judgment measures according to a standard, but the standard (insofar as it’s not a sheer defense of some privilege or order) is an attempt to maintain the articulation of equality and freedom. The inhuman fantasy of an external canon of judgment (that will naturally come down on your side) is itself universally human, and the only way to defuse it is probably by spinning out its implication until it reaches its absurd logical conclusion. The problem is that we have come to let such fantasies govern our public life and dignified them with their own political category, to be “balanced” against another: “equality of outcome.”

The progression from defilement, to sin, to guilt serves an index of the progression from the ethical to the moral—that is, from imperatives issued by the center (and materialized in ritual forms) to imperatives issued to oneself, demanding reciprocity with one’s fellows. The defilement of the communal space occurs when some prohibition has been violated—the intention behind the violation is irrelevant (it could have been an accident, say spilling some liquid used in the ritual); the contamination or pollution must be cleansed, and this can also only be done through strictly prescribed ritual means. Meanwhile, one only sins when one deliberately violates some divine command, and one is only guilty when one can be judged (and judge oneself) according standards of probity that are shared but also internalized within each individual.

If everything human can be found, albeit implicitly or potentially, on the originary scene, it follows that nothing found on the originary scene is ever lost. Defilement, or its possibility, is undoubtedly present on the originary scene: the sign has to be emitted “properly,” or recognizably, by all participants, and the failure to do so, even due to slowness or inadequate mimetic capacities, would pollute the scene, i.e., leave lurking unacceptable levels of menacing violence. It is easy to understand why Judaism, Christianity, and then modernity would want to eliminate all trace of the “irrationality” of defilement; but it should also be possible to understand that this approach hasn’t worked, and can be implicated in the worst violence of 20th century’s crisis of modernity.

Indeed, the investment by both Nazism and Communism in discourses of defilement might lead us to redouble our efforts to expunge its apparently indelible traces. We can recognize these traces in the tropes of “infection,” “pollution,” “contamination” and so on applied to both the race and class enemies of these regimes; and it would therefore be possible to reduce these regimes to a recrudescence of primitive, “compact” societies in revolt against the market order. But the power of White Guilt is also the power of defilement—otherwise, it would not have proven so “contagious” so as to “contaminate” even those (Western) countries at war with Nazism; nor would it continue to prove itself so impervious to attempts to direct attention back to more “rational” articulations of individual act, intent, and acknowledged social norms. I wouldn’t propose changing the name to “White Defilement,” but we could take the mysterious power of White Guilt to indicate that sinfulness and guilt are constructed with the materials of defilement, rather than replacing them.

A sense of defilement, of some derangement of the communal and even world order that implicates one even if you not only didn’t commit but resisted with all your might, is a perfectly proper response to the crime of genocide—it is denying that sense, then, that is “irrational.” The perceived irrationality of that sense of defilement lies in the practices through which we seek to ward off the dreaded derangement of being, what we have come to call the “slippery slope,” and which lead us to invest more and more in deferring ever more vague threats. But accusations of irrationality here presuppose the possibility of setting proper limits and guardrails, which can only be done through shared intuitions and in the course of events. The problem, then, lies in giving public expression to this defilement, which is only partially amenable to dialogue or negotiation.

I would suggest addressing this problem through another issue that I have written a lot about lately—error, in its simultaneous emergence with norm on the originary scene. The one who makes a spelling or grammatical mistake, or commits some solecism (or, for that matter, “misreads” a situation, “misunderstands” a text, “misses” a “hint,” and so on), is as “blameless” as the one who accidentally disrupts some ritual space; and the mistake evokes a very similar sense of unease and fragility—everyone around feels compelled to show that they would never make such a mistake, first of all by demonstrating some recognition of its mistakenness. I hypothesized in an earlier post that this is because the linguistic error is a sign of infinite desire: making a mistake exposes one as imitating what one doesn’t know how to imitate, and therefore what one doesn’t understand, and the only reason for doing so is an “empty” and insatiable desire to be included in the community. The possibility of granting entrance to one capable of merely adopting the required forms as means turns the norms of the community themselves into an object of desire, and possible possession, and they can therefore no longer serve as reliable means of mediation. In that case, defilement can be seen as originary mistakenness. (There is not an analogous noun for being in error; and the double meaning of “mistaken” also accords well with the incontinence of defilement.)

We can see the entire development of speech forms as a series of mistakes. The originary sign itself was a mistake, a gesture that abandoned its object part way, and was then accentuated, equally mistakenly, in response to the attention paid its anomalous abortion. The first imperative was an inappropriate ostensive; the first interrogative a prolonged, which is to say, botched imperative, diverted part way through by the uncertainty of its fulfillment; the first declarative, the negative ostensive, is, at the very least reactive, and could not have been based on any “rational” assumption of its success; the first articulation of two parts of speech (in my hypothesis) the mistaken application of an imperative (verb) to an object (name) under contention; finally, once those two “slots” are available and modify each other in some way, words and phrases can be converted by being mistakenly entered into them.

All idioms are built upon the cornerstone of some mistake. If the mistaken is marked, then, and we unmark ourselves by enforcing the norm against the polluting mistake, then we mark ourselves by forced innovations that risk being mistaken and unmark others by constructing idioms around their mistakes. Originary mistakenness does not abolish the categories of sin, guilt and crime; rather, it undergirds those categories: we can abhore, fight against, and punish evil while acknowledging that at its source is a category mistake: somewhere along the line the sign was taken for reality in the fullness of desire, and the subsequent evil results from the demand that that illusory identity of sign and reality be restored. And we can return to that category error and make it the starting point of a new idiom.

Modernity is such a mistake: the founding of modernity was the application of the transcendence of scapegoating through Jesus to the elimination of oppression through the progress of humanity. This mistake requires not only inveterate hostility to Christianity but the unending search for historically relevant scapegoats to elevate as denunciations of everything sacrificial in humanity—in other words, for new sacrifices to cancel out the old. If there is a distinctive unease or defilement one feels as a modern, it is in not being an adequate potential sacrifice—which is to say, being unable to imagine a scene in which one’s death would have “meaning.” Victimary thinking in turn mistakes modernity as an extension and intensification of the Christian event, and a means for the uneven production of victims.

We can never be certain of understanding each other but we can be certain of misunderstanding each other—there will be mistakes in every exchange of signs. We can try and reduce the misunderstandings or we can make them productive—the problem with seeking to reduce them past a certain point is that the exchange of signs is hardly worth it because nothing new is being conveyed, so at that point, at the very least, it is better to make the misunderstandings more productive. We can do so by rejecting the dialogic model of discourse, with its concern for transparency and replacing it with a “regulatory” model of discourse in which I try to follow, refine and enhance the rules I take the other to be following. In this latter case transparency is supported by an irreducible opacity—the tacit rules and habits which are always embedded in discourses but can never be made explicit (except by following some other, largely tacit, rule for making rules and habit explicit). Mistakes, in this case, can be revelatory, as they put forward other rules, which can always be articulated in some way.

Dialogue and conversation—alternations of interrogatives and declaratives—are important and within their own sphere transformative; but they presume that we are free of defilement, that the contamination has been contained. The islands upon which that assumption could be safely made are rapidly shrinking. Regulatory or disciplinary discourse draws upon the more fundamental imperative-ostensive articulations. We make demands of our models and of our objects of desire: we demand that they instruct us in how to emulate and possess them. Such demands become prayers that are answered as we strive to become worthy of our models and objects of desire. Rules emerge in the ostensive disclosure of those signs of worthiness. These signs of worthiness (or worthlessness) appear in our own gestures and habits, to others, who see them against the background of abjection (our originary mistakenness) and adopt their own attitudes towards our models and objects. What anyone can do differently is minimalize and publicize the rules they follow, so as to increase generativity and make visible the consequences of any particular mistake.

An acknowledgement of our originary mistakenness would radically transform our attitude toward risk, and there is little today that is in more desperate need of transformation. It would be very easy to see White Guilt as an indemnification policy against the risks involved in resentments held by anyone not firmly invested in the existing system, and the increasing terror of risk of any kind can be seen across all our institutions to the point where it is nearly paralyzing us. The realization that everything is interconnected intensifies the fear that any mistake can bring everything down, but it could just as easily lead us to notice all kinds of redundancies and back-ups that are also part of our interconnectedness. The real threat to the market system is the desperate attempts to avoid its breakdown—I would go so far as to assert that no such thing would have happened if the government just stayed out of the financial meltdown in September 2008. Enormous amounts of wealth would have been lost, but before too long people would have been buying and selling, lending and borrowing, saving and investing again, perhaps first of all on the margins of the current system dominated by the alliances between the government regulators and the huge financial institutions. Accepting our originary mistakenness will eliminate the terror of contagion, contamination and defilement, in its contemporary form of various “domino theories,” which tell us if one crucial piece goes down it will bring everything else down with it. Even if it does, something will get up again, and we can put our energies into that inevitably risky something.