GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

A marginalist politics begins with the observation that any situation can be reduced to a binary:  do a or b.  Even there are, in principle, many choices, as soon as you inch closer to one the world splits into that or not-that—and you are always inching.  Self-reflection upon any situation reduces itself to such binary—I am this, not that, here, not there, etc.  Similarly, the binary situation immediately confronted is the product of a long series of bifurcations—my choice is now a or b, because previous choices have eliminated c, d, e, and so on.  This binarism derives from the binary on the originary scene:  to continue reaching for the central object  (to pursue the mimetic path of least resistance) or to imitate the newly formed sign and withhold one’s grasp.  Since the right choice was made on the scene, it is impossible for us not to think of ourselves as making the right choice now:  even if I egregiously violate the terms of the scene I am on I will reconstruct another scene upon which no such violation took place—yes, I cheated, but everyone cheats; or, my situation was different than others’; or that was wrong but it wasn’t really who I am, etc.  And if I fully confess my inexcusable violation, I can only do that because I am now on some other scene, whose terms I can represent my choice to confess (rather than further dissimulate) as confirming.  Indeed, I can reconstruct any scene, any time, on the spot, reconfiguring the binary choice, from say, cheating/not cheating to maintaining the harmony of the scene/disrupting the scene by letting my cheating be discovered.  But binary there will always be.

 

Each binary retrojects the series of bifurcations it has emerged out of—if I now determine that effecting change by peaceful means is impossible, I reference and construct a history in which violence has been rejected many times, and earlier choices in which violence didn’t even appear as one of the alternatives, and so the current choice is the distillation of that entire series of resentments (resentment is itself essentially binary—he shouldn’t be there, I should, or someone else more deserving, but first of all him or not-him).  Criteria for choosing one way or another are always embedded in the binary situation, but only become explicit after the fact, once the act has disclosed the scene I am on now. I have “inched” before I realize I have done so.  Leading up to the event, the criteria are tacit—I will feel at a certain point that I can’t go on the old way anymore, but trying to explain why I now, all of a sudden, feel that way, could only lead me to reference some other experience whose roots would be tacit—say, for the first time I noticed how demoralized my fellow citizens seem to be, but what changed among my fellow citizens or in my own attentiveness that led me to notice that?  There is some threshold that has been crossed—from beaten down but not hopeless to thoroughly demoralized—that I detect before I am able to explain how I detected it.  I could, of course, be wrong, in which case I didn’t “really’ detect it—but realizing that I was wrong must also be an event articulated through a binary point wherein I located that threshold elsewhere, which in turn confirms the possibility of such a threshold, or the real threshold which was concealed behind the one I imagine and has now achieved such a threshold of presence as to be revealed to me.  And continuing in my wrongness will simply exemplify that threshold in my own failure to observe it.  There must always be such thresholds—for there to be a scene is for the scene to be capable of collapse into the desires and resentments it has deferred; and for it to contain the resources to transition into a new scene that extends the prevailing sign.  And, of course, noticing a threshold is part of my being on a scene as well—I am drawn along with others pointing to that threshold, or my identification of that threshold is part of my recoil from others, who seem to me unwilling to notice something, even something they and I know not. 

 

The politics that follows from marginalism is the creation of new binary “forks” out of any situation.  On the one hand, of course any course of action produces new “forks” in the road all by itself; on the other hand, though, one can either continually narrow the area in which forkings become possible, or one can widen the area, increasing the visibility of the series of choices embedded in any event.  Even if one chooses violence, schism, or secession, for example, one can fight or sever ties in such a way as preserve conditions for a possible peace and for others to register their own choices in ways that may lead more quickly to a cessation of violence or new associations.  The premium, in other words, is on practicing freedom in such a way as to invite others to do the same; to make the consequences of choices as visible as possible, because this is the best way of placing the full range of available resentments on display, and putting that full range on display is the best way of inviting everyone to propose ways of channeling those resentments in the interests of the center. 

 

Now, we have two questions:  first, how to describe these bifurcations, or choices; second, how to describe the threshold in which we are suspended, infinitesimally, before each one?  My answer is with originary grammar.  The basic structure of the declarative sentence, the topic/comment relationship Gans works with in The Origin of Language, is the record of such a completed choice, or branching off:  the topic, deriving ultimately from a name, represents the object of a demand, or a proposed replacement for such an object, a demand that, through some possible series of concatenations (refusals and counter-demands), could lead to the unraveling of the signs constituting the community; the comment, meanwhile, places the topic beyond reach, at least for the present, embedding it in some reality that resists our imperatives.  So, a choice has been made to defer imperatives and a further choice has been made to defer imperatives in this particular way—as opposed to some other sentence which, presumably, would have been more likely to inflame rather than quell the upsurge in “demand” (perhaps by dangling the topic in front of some part of the audience, rather than removing it from the reach of all).  A discourse, then, is the articulation of a whole series of such choices and, of course, with political documents, especially founding ones, people will argue over every single sentence, every single word and punctuation mark.  The grammar of the sentence, furthermore, iterates the “grammar” of the originary scene, where my choice to imitate the aborted gesture rather than the gesture itself is “predicated” upon everyone else doing the same—in that case, using grammatical terms to structure the scene for us, the one aborting his gesture give us the “topic” and those who imitate him in turn are “commenting.”  Similarly, “understanding” a sentence means knowing how to restore or maintain a proper relation between declaratives and imperatives:  where and how to match the declarative with a symmetrical declarative, where and how to take the declarative as an occasion to reframe the imperative.  So, the relation between a sentence and succeeding sentences is itself one between “topic” and “comment.”

 

Complying, for now, with traditional grammar, we can reduce all sentence types to four:  the declarative, the interrogative, the imperative and the exclamatory.  The exclamatory is what I propose to represent the ostensive on the grammatical level, so the entire sequence from ostensive to declarative can be represented grammatically, and each sentence analyzed as some articulation of all types.  What a beautiful day!  How I love you!  These are the prototypical exclamations, and I think we could usefully annex to the exclamation on one side what would ordinarily be classified as interjections (oh my God!), and on the other side what might be classified as ostensive or deictic references (in declarative sentences)—there it is!  That’s it!  It’s a boy!  The exclamation calls the attention of the interlocutor to some present object and both embodies and proposes some attitude attached to attending to that object.  In that case, “thank you,” “I promise” and other “ostensive” (in the originary sense) expressions can join the category as well.

 

Each kind of sentence has a range of possible responses and extensions built in:  the declarative can lead to other declaratives, it can transition imperceptibly into imperatives (the door is still open… ok, I’ll get it), it can call forth questions and exclamations, and we could analyze any discourse in terms of which possibilities get actualized.  Imperatives get obeyed, more or less precisely, more or less sincerely, or they are refused, with greater or less power; imperatives transition into interrogatives, and we could trace any interrogative back to an imperative that has been prolonged, suspended, and converted into a more or less open field.  The grammar of the exclamation is to evoke a matching exclamation:  Yes!  And I you! So it is…  And, of course, one sentence type can easily stand in for others:  “you’re kidding!” is often an exclamation masked as a declarative, while “are you out of your mind?” is one masked as an interrogative—and in each case the masking is possible because the expressions are impossible if taken literally.  It also seems to me that the exclamation has a special relationship to the first person, the imperative and interrogative (more obviously) to the second person, and the declarative to the third person.  I won’t explore this now, but Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy has an analysis of the differences, which can best be called “grammatical,” between the statements “I love you,” “you love her,” and “she loves him” that transcend the fact that all happen to be, formally, declarative sentences.  In my terms, the disclosure “I love you” functions much more like an exclamation, calling for a matching or symmetrical response confirming the shared reality; “you love her” is as impertinent and intrusive as any unauthorized imperative, and translates easily into “admit it, already”; while “she loves him” is the only properly declarative of the three, with its topic’s presumed distance from either of the interlocutors. 

 

I plan to return to this extremely rich field of speculation, of course, but my point here is that thresholds and bifurcations in the social world can best be registered grammatically.  A while back, after mentioning to a friend of mine (with whom, for reasons that will become evident, I rarely stray into political discussions) my admiration for Frederick Kagan (the main intellectual architect of the so-called “Surge” in Iraq in 2007), he responded in the following manner:  “if you think it’s ok to send kids to war while you stay safe.”  Now, the argument here, such as it is, doesn’t interest me much—it’s the standard “chicken-hawk” accusation (although, incidentally, the infelicity of so many of the Left’s insults—from “chicken hawk,” which is of course an actual bird that eats chickens, not a chicken that pretends to be a hawk; to the idiotic title of Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11”—“9/11,” needless to say, can’t be a temperature, and the reference to a book on book burning is oddly connected to a political crisis which had little to do with censorship, etc.; to the current slur, “teabagger,” which “plays” with remarkable clumsiness on “tea party,” while for indiscernible reasons associating those protestors with practitioners of an obscure sexual, usually homosexual, I have heard, practice—would be fascinating subject to study:  in other words, what does it say that the Left can’t really work with language, that it seems to rely on a deeply embedded system of allusions that couldn’t really be articulated explicitly if they tried?).  What do we make of the grammar, though, which I take to be very typical?  On the one hand, it could be a subordinate clause, the with main “I could see admiring him..” elided, but that doesn’t really work since no one actually contemplating such admiration would phrase its precondition in this way; you could say that the subordinate clause comments ironically on the main one, but the accusation is too thick, leaden and literalistic to qualify as “ironic.”  The expression strikes me, rather, as an exclamation, but one that can’t present itself as one to an interlocutor who won’t “match” it (to a fellow leftist it would be easy enough to just say something like “sending more kids off to get killed!” at the mention of Kagan’s name).  Which is to say that it’s a founding exclamation that can’t really take on public, “declarative” form.  Nor can it lead to any imperative:  “what a beautiful day!” leads naturally into “let’s go out and enjoy it!” or “get out and play!”; “sending kids off to die!” can only lead to an imperative like “let’s stop it!,” but to whom is that imperative addressed, outside of a quasi-ritualized sphere in which it is associated with constant affirmations, dedications, oaths, etc., to “do something”?  So, in the masking and grammatical isolation of this particular phrase, its self-cornering, we can identify the shape and position of a corresponding configuration of resentments.  Which is not to say (obviously!) that such resentments, expressed in such mangled grammatical forms, can’t be highly successful politically—that too would be subject to grammatical analysis.  And so would, or could, any counter-analysis to my own.  I think such an approach is much more promising than either “logical,” “rhetorical,” or “ideological” modes of analysis.

 

So, at the point of any bifurcation stands an exclamation, expressing a revelation of some new reality and its attendant possibilities; then comes the imperative, determining which path to take; followed by the inflection of the imperative into interrogatives, probing the various by-ways of the path; and by the time the declarative comes along, the choice has already been made and the speaker is in the process of inscribing that choice in reality.  Of course, how the choice gets inscribed in reality is extremely important—indeed, it is an intrinsic element of reality itself and lays the groundwork for upcoming bifurcations.  I would even say that the declarative sentence essentially articulates a series of exclamations and imperatives, presents them after the event of their interference in reality, and thereby packages, preserves and re-circulates what would otherwise have been lost in the event itself.  When we argue about a text, we are arguing about what it is asking us to wonder at and what it is telling us to do.

 

“White guilt is the guilt of the unmarked toward the marked.”  I confess that there is a lot in this definition of Gans’s that I haven’t sufficiently attended to in my own thinking on White Guilt—in particular, the notion of being either marked or unmarked, and the relation between the two.  To be marked is to be identified as a potential victim, as someone who could be violated with impunity or whose violation may even be the subject of an imperative.  In principle, one could be marked either from “above” or from “below”—indeed, if scapegoating originally targeted the “Big Man,” then marking was originally a source of privileges as well as victimage, presumably in some equilibrium. How, then, did victimage become exclusively associated with the “lower orders,” even though we still scapegoat our Big Men and Women (celebrities, political and business leaders) all the time?  I think the answer lies in the way we have managed to defer scapegoating, and make it less deadly when it occurs, in the modern world.  Rather than ritual rules for marking scapegoats, we have devised juridical, administrative and medical procedures for determining who is to be marked.  On the one hand, then, the “higher” orders are far better able to avail themselves of these processes of deferral, which in turn tend to add stigma to the lower orders, who are likely to look “guilty,” “sick,” or “unauthorized” in all kinds of ways.  On the other hand, these procedures make the powerful more predictable and therefore less frightening (indeed, rhetorical attacks on the powerful are celebrated, without necessarily having much effect), while the powerless or excluded, attended to anxiously in all kinds of ways by our institutions, appear even more mysterious and potentially disruptive.

 

The scapegoating of the powerless, then, was a result of the modern attempt to unmark everyone—an attempt which paradoxically made the resulting marks all the more indelible.  It’s probably a lot harder to resist being marked with “a genetic and environmental propensity to criminal behavior” then the charge of poisoning wells.  At least one could disprove the latter—who, though, could so remake the “science” involved in the former as to invalidate the label?  The guilt towards the marked thus reflects the realization that any of us could be marked, and that this modern form of deferral could engulf modern society in more hideous forms of violence than we have known.  The form taken by this guilt is, interestingly, not to continue the thankless and hopeless task of a general unmarking (perhaps we should use the term “bleaching” to describe the goal of a “color-blind” society); rather, it is to seek to establish an orthodox, ritualized system of marking, in which markers of exclusion are both tabooed and assiduously collected and in turn reversed into markers of privilege—the easily parodied and inevitably rough attempts to arrive at a hierarchy of victimage is the result.  The consequent scapegoating of the gift of firstness which, in a sense, restores the old scapegoating of the powerful to its originary position, reflects the realization that the capacity for freedom, for starting over, continually threatens to undo what has become a system of insurance (chock-full of mandates, naturally), of reciprocal indemnification from risk:  we have almost, in the minds of those self-appointed to construct the rituals of White Guilt, arrived at a new social contract everyone could sign onto (the unmarked are ready to follow the new rules of marking and the marked are willing to accept the payment of victimary blackmail in exchange for a relief from their infinite demands), and only the permanence of the capacity for freedom and responsibility threatens to undermine all that labor.

 

The only solution is to mark everyone, over and over again.  Not by some kind of essential characteristic (race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc.) but by their idioms.  Jean-Francois Lyotard’s definition of the differend as a claim or contention expressed in the idiom of only one of the interlocutors is of great value to us today.  Lyotard yoked this notion to victimary imperatives, but he also knew that it exceeded such easily formulated asymmetries.  Idioms are what resist translation—they require that you enter the grammar of another, the characteristic way in which they articulate exclamations, imperatives, interrogatives and declaratives.  But the mistranslations of idioms are just as interesting, and increasingly common in a world made up of niche markets that overlap one another in thousands of ways.  “You hit that one out of the park!” is perfectly intelligible to anyone familiar with baseball; I can barely imagine what it would sound like to someone who isn’t, or how it would get iterated further and further away from its point of origin.  Idiomatic marking would both enter others’ idioms and mistranslate, or inflect, or, simply, mistake them—make the explicit the imperative implicit in someone’s declarative (by obeying or disobeying it), supply the exclamation missing in someone’s imperative, or the line of questioning that might have led from the embrace of an imperative to its declarative, doxic, forms (and do so by exclaiming, by questioning), render a demand in the declarative form of its fulfillment, etc.    Everybody is vulnerable in this way, but not too vulnerable, and in ways that are not easily predictable or controlled; idiomatic marking would also allow for new forms of generosity, as idioms can just as easily be interpreted “up” as “down.” 

 

The problem with this, as other radical proposals, is who wants to go first?  On the one hand, what I am describing already happens all the time—it’s a large part of the way in which friends and family relate to each other:  teasing one another about each one’s idiosyncrasies, but in such a way as to make those idiosyncrasies a source of love as well as resentment.  But it rarely happens outside of such safe spaces and, indeed, would have to take on very different forms in public life.  It seems to me that the rise of the “Tea Party” movement and Sarah Palin will give us a chance to see what that might look like—a commentary which I recently read (one hostile to Palin’s influence with the Republican Party) said (I’m quoting from memory) that the Republicans “need someone familiar with all the B.S. of politics, which Palin speaks like a tourist carrying around a phrase book.”  This gets both sides of the equation right:  contemporary political discourse is all “B.S.”—does anyone really believe that phrases like “he’s going to move to the center, pick up some moderates, and then shore up his base in time for the next election” mean anything anymore?  And Palin does, indeed, try to speak it, with an intensified sincerity that exposes it as a patchwork of empty phrases, while at the same time generating the elements of a new idiom.  And as much as anything else, Obama’s unspeakably boring (except, I imagine, to listeners of NPR) fluency in a particular set of “progressive” commonplaces is likely to sink his Presidency.

 

There is a space here for some rigor as well, though.  For those so interested, I would suggest the methods of the Oulipo literary group, the possible applications of which to public life have been so far unexplored (to my knowledge)—although there is the amusing homophonic bumper sticker, “Visualize Whirled Peas,” and perhaps others I’m forgetting.  I would love to see the results of the application of the N+7 method to one of Obama’s speeches—maybe I’ll do it myself.  Harry Mathews, the only American member of the group, has invented what he calls “perverbs”—statements created by attaching the second part of a proverb or maxim to the first part of another one.  So, for example, from the hybridization of “Too many cooks spoil the broth” and “Let the dead bury their dead,” we get “Too many cooks bury their dead.”  Mathews then writes a little story that makes sense of the new phrase, which leads to some hilarious results (how could we get from there being too many cooks to those cooks burying someone’s—the cook’s own?—dead, etc.?) but also suggests an excellent way to puncture and disable clichés and, in the process, transform them into the material for new idioms.  The Oulipo methods elevate form and rules over substance and thereby make it easy to see how much of “substance” is simply sedimented forms and rules.

 

Just for fun, let’s try something with this little snippet of President Obama’s speech to Congress on health care, given in September:

 

Well, the time for bickering is over. The time for games has passed. (Applause.) Now is the season for action. Now is when we must bring the best ideas of both parties together, and show the American people that we can still do what we were sent here to do. Now is the time to deliver on health care. Now is the time to deliver on health care.

 

I propose that we borrow another of Mathews’s ideas, his “Algorithm,” in which (I’m simplifying enormously) a particular word or phrase in each sentence is moved down to replace the word in that position in the next sentence.  In these remarks of Obama, the key word or phrase in each sentence seems to me to be the objects of auxiliary verbs and prepositions:  “bickering,” “games,” “action,” “bring,” “do,” and “deliver”—that’s where the real political distinctions are made.  So, let’s give it a try, making the necessary adjustments for grammatical correctness:

 

Well, the time for delivering is over.  The time for bickering has passed.  Now is the season for games.  Now is when we must act the best ideas of both parties and show the American people that we can still bring what we were sent here to bring.  Now is the time to do health care.  Now is the time to do health care. 

 

I will just say that this idiomatic marking seems to me truer than the original:  the time for delivering is certainly over; leaving the “bickering” sandwiched between the first and third sentences bring outs better what is menacing in that assertion; is it ever the season for games!; “acting” the best ideas is certainly as close as they are coming to any ideas; what, indeed, have they been sent to “bring,” and to whom? (and by now there are plenty of new idiomatic, in particular taunting and boasting, uses of “bring,” like “bring your best game”); and, who can deny they are “doing health care,” with all the rich idiomatic implications, often threatening, of “do”?   

 

Idiomatic markings are perfect for a de-centralized popular culture, and for an intelligent one.  A lot of blows will be struck, but very few of them deadly—Obama will survive even much more artfully done and politically biting algorithmic permutations of his discourse than the one I have produced.  But some of these permutations will turn out to be very memorable, even if we could never predict which ones in advance.  And what we might come to share, what might be a “game-changer,” what might “transcend partisanship” (or “game partisanship” and “transcend change”) is our participation is remaking and rejuvenating our common linguistic material.

All exchanges end symmetrically, but, once they are no longer bound by ritual, they must begin asymmetrically.  If the forms of the hunt are prescribed, along with the manner of distribution following the kill, or if the exchange of gifts is inscribed in tradition, then the danger of asymmetry is eliminated.  But when something that didn’t exist previously is brought into the marketplace, a breach in the existing division of labor is created:  things that had value before will have different values now and new values will be created; even more, new desires will be created.  Nobody desired a car before they existed, nobody desires now whatever will be the hottest product in 2025, and no one who is now at work creating that product is going to do so if he or she is concerned with meeting existing desires.  Of course, the one who brings the new product to market can’t know whether it will, in fact, create the corresponding desire nor, therefore, whether the breach in the division of labor has indeed been effected—that too is part of the asymmetry, but also the basis for converting the asymmetry into a new symmetry, wherein producer and consumer recognize each other.  Entrepreneurship is a mode of firstness.

According to the Austrian school of economics founded by Ludwig von Mises, the creation of money by the state (“fiat money”) benefits those who get it first, while disadvantaging those who receive it later on down the line.  This seems to me a very important insight. Obviously, the people who get the money first are the ones the government gives it to, very much like those first in on a Ponzi scheme, who get their money back and can therefore testify to the bona fides of the system to later entrants.  The same would hold true for any government intervention in the economy that benefits, intentionally or not, some players over others—for example, an environmental regulation that requires a conversion from a cheaper to a more expensive technology and thereby puts the smaller businessman out of business.  The government, in such a case, doesn’t exactly give money, but it channels money in a particular direction and, like in the cases where money is given directly, those who are able to make the conversion first have the advantage—not only are they, for a certain period, the only players, but, as partners with the government in the new regulatory regime, they can use their expertise, their role in stabilizing the market and their ability to mobilize external interests to help shape future regulation.  Such market interventions lead to misallocations of capital, but it is primarily the later entrants who will notice that, especially since regulation creates a captive market the limits of which will only be revealed later on.

The introduction of fiat money and regulatory regimes are responses to the asymmetry of exchange, felt above all in the disruptions of the existing social division of labor.  These responses are modes of secondness, aimed at restoring symmetry by drawing upon the resentments neglected by the primary entrepreneurial gesture. They are not the only possible forms of secondness—the establishment of contractual regimes and legislation aimed at interpreting contractual language and guiding judicial traditions can even out the scales when resentments start to threaten social order.  Either way, though, this secondness must itself be considered an economic fact, and any economic “laws” would have to include these secondary operations.  Insofar as money is the result of a form of deferral—a certain commodity, which originally has other uses, is set aside to serve as a means of exchange, and must therefore be removed from industrial use—and itself makes deferral possible (one accumulates money rather than consuming something now and hence gambles on or, if one like, displays faith in, the future), we could see money as the medium within which these contending tendencies take on a definite shape.  When I save or invest money, I am positioning myself within the evolving social division of labor; but I am also betting on the extent to which the government, and the resentments it channels and inflames, will use money for more immediate deferral purposes.  We can think about this on the model of “matching funds,” the principle grant-giving agencies often use to provide incentives to recipients to raise as much resources independently as possible.  When I invest, I can anticipate “matching funds” in the form of the investments and future consumption of others; or I can anticipate “matching funds” in the form of future devaluations which will lessen or eliminate my obligations.  We should be able to identify the limits within which the proportions of these respective expectations fluctuate within a given political economic regime, and account for the actions of economic agents, and the probable consequences of those actions, accordingly. 

We also have thirdness, though, the totality of dispositions that allow for the welcoming, circulation and modification of the transformations introduced by the entrepreneur.  All the forms taken by everyday resentments and desires comprise thirdness, and originary economic thinking should seek to put some order into this area as well. I would suggest three categories of thirdness:  common sense, habit, and idiosyncrasy.  Common sense is the ongoing checks and balances of immediate resentments, issuing in maxims of human nature or mimetic regularity.  Common sense leads us to establish some balance between spending and saving, short term and long term expenditure, desire and need, and so on.  Habits are far more compelling:  they result from self-issued imperatives aimed at compensating for some absence which end up comprising the tacit dimension of presence.  Habits are sustaining, but also virulent and automatic—habits, like Freud’s Id, have no reason to explain or justify themselves, or to attend to any reality.  Habits account for obstinacy and a strong sense of a continuous self; but they are also the source of addictions and fantasies.  Habits get installed through an instantaneous feeling of saturation associated with some experience, and are sustained through the possibility of repeating that feeling, recalling it on demand, and for that purpose obliviousness to the outside world (and ultimately even to the habit itself) is warranted.  The question to ask about habits is whether they are shaped so as to benefit from intersections with the habits of others:  if no, then habits are a source of dysfunction; if yes, habits invigorate and inflect common sense so as to produce a healthy idiosyncrasy—one’s own way of piecing an ultimately shared reality together.

There is no reason for originary economists to abstain from passing judgment on the various forms of thirdness.  I don’t see how one can deny that addictions to drugs, gambling and pornography are harmful to the economy in the long run, even if from a strictly “economic” perspective those expenditures (assuming the legalization of drugs, at least) are no different from money spent on vacations to the beach, bicycles, flat screen TVs, etc.  Addictions paralyze common sense by creating a fantasy world in which everything will turn around soon if one can just get that next fix.  At the same time there are lesser addictions, or related modes of euphoria that are better called “enthusiasms,” that can be highly productive:  we speak about political “junkies” who help keep the various resentments visible, “workaholics,” sports fans (“fanatics”), and so on.  The difference is that one wants to spread enthusiasms to others and can do so in the normal world, while addictions close one up in private nightmares.

If the “law of diminishing returns” is not the agricultural “law” that Malthus perhaps assumed, we can certainly recoup it as a law of mimesis, and therefore an economic law as well.  Models get exhausted after a while, and we could probably in most cases trace a pretty predictable path from initial responses, such as astonishment, to a new model, to uncritical emulation, to attempts at reproduction, vulgarization, and all the way to parody and disgust.  This is certainly the case for modifications in the social division of labor, which must, it seems to me, inevitably lead to “crises of overproduction”—how can one discover that the public is saturated with jeeps, or new homes, or teen vampire movies without making too many of them and seeing them go unpurchased?  Contrary to the Marxist account, though, if left to run their course, there is no need for such crises to be generalized.  But until the model is exhausted there is little choice but to act as if it is inexhaustible, and it probably seems more inexhaustible than ever precisely at the moment of exhaustion, when everyone is rushing to squeeze the last bit of juice out of it. And nowhere is this more true than in the financial sector, where it has become especially difficult to distinguish genuine innovations in enhancing the circulation of money and the efficiency of its allocation from ways of more efficiently implicating the government in matching the funds one has advanced.  GM at least knows that somewhere along the line they need to sell cars; but can’t Goldman Sachs focus its attention upon positioning itself favorably for the next influx of fiat money into the economy?  And, finally, the acceleration of the law of diminishing terms in the financial sector of the political economy of the welfare/regulatory state feeds upon and encourages addictions lower down the food chain, as otherwise normal people get lost in fantasies of acquiring fantastic wealth merely by mortgaging themselves up to the hilt in a series of homes they will never live in.

It seems to me we can trace property back to two separate sources, division and conquest.  The first is more originary—there must already be an equal division on the originary scene of the common object.  I don’t mean that everyone gets an equal piece—I mean that everyone gets enough so that their resentments and desires don’t override the peaceful settlement, and each one calculates that the chances of getting yet a little bit more at the expense of one’s neighbor are less than the chances that the attempt will result in the neighbor getting a bit more at one’s own expense—and that’s all equality can ever really mean, anyway.  And we always see this happening in any situation where people must live and cooperate together—people who share the same office at work, members of the same family, outfielders on a baseball team, riders in a jammed subway car, etc., all carve out a kind of “property” regime for themselves, a regime that would ultimately lead to formalized separation into parcels and the possibility of exchange.  But from very early on the possibility of simply taking property from weaker parties—individuals and groups—must have presented itself, and the necessary adjustments in the ruling signs and rituals rather easily made.  And with the “Big Man” model of social organization, property as conquest and expropriation is explicitly sacralized as the foundation of culture.  I think that these more egalitarian and hierarchical modes of property will always contend with each other in civilized societies, and one can’t simply privilege the egalitarian version:  when a new corporation comes to a small town and buys up a company that employs much of the population and goes on to lay half of them off in the name of modernization, it looks a lot like conquest and devastation, but it may be absolutely necessary and ultimately the right thing even for the town itself.  But the people of the town might also most effectively see to their own future by fighting against attempts by their local or state government to help the predatory corporation along—such a fight would display cognizance of the consequences of economic decline (the setting in of all kinds of addictions) and in doing so help to defer those consequences, even if they lose the immediate battle.

So, originary political economy can help us to distinguish addictions from enthusiasms; the firstness of entrepreneurial initiative from the anti-firstness of fiat money and granting through regulation property rights in the existing social division of labor; the exhaustion of an economic model from its illusory inexhaustibility; the spontaneous cooperation undergirding property rights from the right of conquest—and, in this case, we can acknowledge that the latter will ultimately depend upon the former, since even the most arrogant conqueror must depend on his officers and enlisted personnel to divide and share duties and rewards, and even upon the conquered to cooperate in the sustaining of life.  Politically, this would involve trying to restrict governmental activity to providing rules for ongoing interactions; rules that the participants in those interactions would recognize as representations of evolved shared habits; and rules directed toward places where the “grey areas” and ambiguities inevitable in existing spontaneously evolved habits have created contentions that at least the most significant players realize can’t be settled internally.  Perhaps a helpful formulation would go as follows:  what, as an elected official, are you doing to make yourself less necessary to the transactions comprising the social order?  Or:  what are you doing that would make you replaceable by pretty much anyone, or at least any normal idiosyncratic, in whom enthusiasms crowd out addictions and are tempered by common sense, and who can refrain from treating public office as a feudal privilege?  These kinds of questions would ultimately lead to an argument for term limits, for elected officials and bureaucrats alike—this is perhaps the most egregious broken promise of the “revolutionary” Republican “class” of 1994, and perhaps a new class of Republicans can rise to power by reaffirming that promise and then either hold power or make it irrelevant whether they do or not by keeping it.  We might learn to think differently about laws and reforms if we had to tailor them to a regular rotation of public officials, who would therefore tend to be more normal people:  normal people who might have more incoherent views at the margin, who might make more mistakes and be more easily taken in by well prepared lobbyists, but who would also be much less likely to vote for 1,900 page long bills and therefore may be less tempting prey for those same lobbyists.

The originary hypothesis can yield for us a phenomenology and poetics of everyday life, and perhaps it can even do so in a manner respectful of reality, which is to say that doesn’t complain about the ways in which people don’t correspond to one or another “model” we have arbitrarily established for them.  Now, the sentence I just wrote is a manifestation of resentment (that doesn’t mean I’m taking it back!)—my description of my resentment would be that it is a counter-resentment to the resentment of elites bent on “improving” their fellow humans, i.e., making them more like the improver.  But, of course, we’d all like to say our resentments are mere “counter”-resentments, evening out the scales that have been placed out of balance by some previously manifested resentment.  And, fortunately, we can all say that, and we would all be right, because all resentments are countering another one, and resentment is nothing more than the imperative to even something out, to give something its “due.”  The sentence I just wrote, for example, is a resentful attempt to counter any resentment that claims to transcend resentment, and it anticipates its vulnerability to the same charge because, indeed, that charge will also always be both true and false:  Every resentment, insofar as it is given shape, does represent, in however small or imaginary a space, an infinitesimal balancing out that sustains some presence and to that extent can be shared and “transcendent.”

 

If we can speak of resentment as an “evening out,” creating “planes” along which other resentments can be lain, then we can also speak about “common sense” as a kind of calculus of resentment—each of us has to figure out ways of “fitting” our resentments within a present configuration that always threatens, however implicitly or distantly, to exclude our own.  One of the (in my view) great, and still neglected (toward what and whom is that resentment directed?), modern Western philosophies, is the “common sense” thinking founded by Thomas Reid and sustained and transmuted by American pragmatism (at least Peirce—who at times referred to pragmatism as “critical commonsensism”—and James), the ordinary language philosophy of Wittgenstein and Cavell, and the “personal knowledge” or “tacit dimension” of Michael Polanyi. Reid’s common sense philosophy was arguably the philosophical foundation for the Declaration of Independence’s assertion of “self-evident” truths, because that is, indeed, Reid’s central claim:  that our fundamental modes of experiential access to reality are grounded in axioms that cannot be denied, or even questioned, without thereby undermining the experiential basis we would need to question those axioms in the first place.  So, for example, one couldn’t deny that we can understand each other when we speak, because, before whom is that denial made?  Clearly someone assumed capable of understanding it.  And, even referring to the endless litany of actual misunderstandings assumes that we know what it would mean for us not to misunderstand each other.  We can understand such axiomatic access to reality (which Reid assumed couldn’t be explained, just accepted), which Eric Gans in Science and Faith refers to as “auto-probatory” (something which could not be said without having had the experience it refers to) in terms of the articulation of resentments embedded in language.  Indeed, resentment itself is the most immediate auto-probatory experience—everyone has experienced resentment, and everyone can acknowledge anyone else’s resentment (however odd the object of that resentment might appear) and to deny this would be to affirm it because denying one’s participation in the universal experience of resentment would be the most transparently resentful stance imaginable.

 

So, we can account for every scene in terms of the interactions between various calculi of resentment—I resent A because he got the job I wanted last year but B outwardly at least admires A (shares some of his resentments) and I can’t bear to have both B and A resenting me so I moderate my resentment toward A into a mild irony that can be recalibrated depending on the possibility of B no longer caring about maintaining appearances, or some C coming along who could absorb some of the resentment directed towards me, or who may take A’s job making it possible for my resentment towards A to be converted to a shared resentment towards C, etc.  Involved in all of this is a profound, and largely tacit, anthropological knowledge which manifests itself in all the maxims of everyday life that we all iterate constantly, and which are all pragmatic ways of measuring degrees and distinguishing modalities of resentment:  “give him an inch, he’ll take a mile,” “what goes around comes around,” etc.  Some of us, at least, resent the “clichés,” as there is always some felt sense that they conceal a more differentiated reality that we might attain privileged access to, and that is also true (and also very easily converted into a set of maxims/clichés), but I believe there are very few concrete interactions between individuals that don’t require the buffering mechanism of these anthropological maxims; or, in compensation, the creation of new ones. 

 

It is very important that resentment keep getting circulated like this because the alternative is the truly deadly resentment against reality as such that is characteristic of Gnosticism.  In more linguistic terms, we might see Gnosticism as an uncompromising abhorrence of maxims, of any sign that conceals or moderates rather than fully embodying the infinitely differentiated reality that we all intuit in our “best” or most “intense” moments.  This global resentment can’t be countered by more local ones—rather, it can only be dissolved by the most fundamental of all ostensive dispositions, gratitude.  A sheer gratitude for reality neutralizes resentment towards reality, and is therefore also a critical component of common sense.  The syntactic form that corresponds to the ostensive is, I would say, the exclamation:  “what a lovely day!” expresses that originary sense of gratitude as does “how awful!” because the latter expression equally presupposes some non-awful condition that allows us all to immediately recognize how awful the one indicated is.  And, of course, “thank you!” is an exemplary exclamation, one which simply does what it says, and does it only in that specific instance.  I wonder whether one might say that Gnostics are likely to find the exclamation (and above all thanking) especially obnoxious, in its call for immediate assent and suspension of any “critical” sense of, or suspicion towards reality.

 

If common sense is composed out of a symmetrical adjustment of resentments grounded in gratitude toward reality and manifested in maxims, then we can point to something universally “self-evident” in common sense.  Clearly, the arrangement and dispersal of resentments will vary from place to place and time to time, sometimes widely, sometimes so much so as to be incommensurable.  But we have and can devise maxims to account for these variations and to adjust for them, and this may be an expression of faith, but I am certain that anyone would be able to piece together a workable sense of a configuration of resentments bounded by gratitude wherever they go.  Anthropologists do it with “primitive” societies, and members of those societies are able to do it when they wind up in ours.  We can’t know in advance what will count as abuse or a violation of norms, but we know that something will; the same goes with expressions of affection, vows, promises, and so on. 

 

I am borrowing a bit from Hannah Arendt in this discussion, and one of Arendt’s concerns regarding common sense in the modern world was that it can be obliterated by ideology and, at the most extreme, totalitarianism—manifestations of that resentment toward reality I just associated with Gnosticism.  Common sense is strikingly unable to defend itself against charges that it is “naïve,” “irrational,” “hide-bound,” “unthinking,” “complacent,” and, of course, today all that also means “racist,” sexist,” “homophobic,” “fascist” and so on.  The only defense common sense has is that of the hedgehog, although in a somewhat (but not completely?) different context than that in which that creature stands in as a mascot for GA:  all common sense can do is roll itself up in a ball and let its needles protect it from the ideological foxes.  The “needles” are its maxims, and the most privileged and central of those maxims are what we call “principles.”

 

Here is Friedrich Hayek on principles:

 

“From the insight that the benefits of civilization rest on the use of more knowledge than can be used in any deliberately concerted effort, it follows that it is not in our power to build a desirable society by simply putting together the particular elements that by themselves appear desirable. Though probably all beneficial improvements must be piecemeal, if the separate steps are not guided by a body of coherent principles, the outcome is likely to be a suppression of individual freedom.

The reason for this is very simple though not generally understood. Since the value of freedom rests on the opportunities it provides for unforeseen and unpredictable actions, we will rarely know what we lose through a particular restriction of freedom. Any such restriction, any coercion other than the enforcement of general rules, will aim at the achievement of some foreseeable particular result, but what is prevented by it will usually not be known. The direct effects of any interference with the market order will be near and clearly visible in most cases, while the more indirect and remote effects will mostly be unknown and will therefore be disregarded. We shall never be aware of all the costs of achieving particular results by such interference.

And so, when we decide each issue solely on what appears to be its individual merits, we always overestimate the advantages of central direction. Our choice will regularly appear to be one between a certain known and tangible gain and the mere probability of the prevention of some unknown beneficial action by unknown persons. If the choice between freedom and coercion is thus treated as a matter of expediency, freedom is bound to be sacrificed in almost every instance. As in the particular instance we hardly ever know what would be the consequences of allowing people to make their own choice, to make the decision in each instance depending only on the foreseeable particular results must lead to the progressive destruction of freedom. There are probably few restrictions on freedom which could not be justified on the ground that we do not know the particular loss it will cause.

That freedom can be preserved only if it is treated as a supreme principle which must not be sacrificed for particular advantages was fully understood by the leading liberal thinkers of the nineteenth century, one of whom (B. Constant) described liberalism as “the system of principles.” Such also is the burden of the warnings concerning “What is Seen and What is Not Seen in Political Economy” (F. Bastiat) and of the “pragmatism that contrary to intentions of its representatives inexorably leads to socialism” (C. Menger).

All these warnings were, however, thrown to the wind, and the progressive discarding of principles and the increasing determination during the last hundred years to proceed pragmatically is one of the most important innovations in social and economic policy. That we should foreswear all principles of “isms” in order to achieve greater mastery over our fate is even now proclaimed as the new wisdom of our age. Applying to each task the “social techniques” most appropriate to its solution, unfettered by any dogmatic belief, seems to some the only manner of proceeding worthy of a rational and scientific age. “Ideologies,” i.e., sets of principles, have become generally as unpopular as they have always been with aspiring dictators such as Napoleon or Karl Marx, the two men who gave the word its modern derogatory meaning.

If I am not mistaken this fashionable contempt for “ideology,” or for all general principles or “isms,” is a characteristic attitude of the disillusioned socialists who, because they have been forced by the inherent contradictions of their own ideology to discard it, have concluded that all ideologies must be erroneous and that in order to be rational one must do without one. But to be guided only, as they imagine it to be possible, by explicit particular purposes which one consciously accepts, and to reject all general values whose conduciveness to particular desirable results cannot be demonstrated (or to be guided only by what Max Weber called “purposive rationality”) is an impossibility. Though admittedly, ideology is something which cannot be “proved” (or demonstrated to be true), it may well be something whose widespread acceptance is the indispensible condition for most of the particular things we strive for.

Those self-styled modern “realists” have only contempt for the old-fashioned reminder that if one starts unsystematically to interfere with the spontaneous order of the market there is no practicable halting point, and that it is therefore necessary to choose between alternative systems. They are pleased to think that by proceeding experimentally and therefore “scientifically” they will succeed in fitting together in piecemeal fashion a desirable order by choosing for each particular desired result what science shows them to be the most appropriate means of achieving it. “

I’ll just mention that the contempt for “ideology” here is for “ideology” in a different sense than that in which Arendt sees the danger for common sense—Arendt sees ideologies as “scientific,” totalizing explanations that claim to account for a guide all human affairs, and that mark those outside its terms as “retrograde” and ultimately superfluous.  Leaving that aside, the respective arguments of the two great anti-victimary thinkers converge.  Common sense can only protect itself by defending, “unreasonably,” its maxims:  “keep your nose out my business,” “live and let live,” and, more politically, “there’s no such thing as a free lunch,” to mention a few.  If you tell me that you need to mind my business, just this once, because there’s emergency, I might be able to see the immediate benefit or necessity, but I will never know what I have lost by letting you do so—I won’t know, first of all, what immediate solutions I might have improvised on my own and, more importantly, what capacities and possibilities I will have surrendered by losing the habit of minding my own business.  Similarly, we will never know what we have lost by letting our fear of unemployment or a credit freeze lead us to give politicians the right to determine terms of trade, to benefit one market competitor over others, to regulate the internal operations if businesses, and so on.

The relevance of this discussion to, say, the current health care debates, is obvious.  Sarah Palin’s warning about “death panels” was simply the stance of common sense:  if the state takes more control of health care, then the state will end up making more and more life and death decisions for us, to the point of determining whether saving or improving one’s life fits a cost-benefit analysis established by experts.  The defenders of Obamacare, meanwhile claim to be guided by “purposeful rationality,” and to “proceed experimentally” (if you don’t want the “public option,” we’ll try “co-ops”!), realizing, some consciously, others partially, others not at all, that the more the state interferes in the workings of a particular segment of the “spontaneous order of the market,” the more any future “problems” will automatically be framed so that only the state (and its experts) can have the “solutions.”  “Death panels” is just a common sense way of compressing this understanding into maxims—and I, for one, couldn’t care less what the Democratic legislators (or, really, some combination of their aides, lobbyists, assorted activist groups, etc.) really “meant” when they put a particular provision in the 1,000 page long bill (a provision that will, later on, be interpreted by one of their experts).  And we don’t know what innovations in the complex relations between patients/consumers, care givers, insurance companies, medical technology, etc., will not take place because of this dramatic shift towards central planning.

The survival of free citizens depends upon strict, unyielding, “dogmatic” adherence to the fundamental, common sense, maxims of a free society:  rewarding failure gets you more of it (no bailouts!); wealth results from production, not expenditure (no stimulus!); enemies are to be fought, allies supported (no appeasement!); rights are what you can do without government interference, not what the government gives you (health care is not a right!), and many more.  Notice how different these maxims are from, say “everyone should have health care” or “gay marriage is a right”—the maxims of freedom articulate power and accountability, the slogans of soft tyranny demand provisions and donations without recompense or corresponding responsibility.  Now, needless to say, our elected officials will very often go right ahead and do these things we insist they resist; occasionally, they will be right and responsible to do so (sometimes one really does have to allow for exceptions), and more than occasionally we will, “hypocritically,” re-elect them when they do so, whether they are right or not.  But none of that matters—politicians can corrupt themselves and our principles (they have risks and benefits to weigh, and we can’t expect them to have interests higher than their own professional survival, and when they do they also expect to take the hit for betraying principles in the name of our collective survival), and our principles will survive.  What our principles can’t survive is the failure of a solid majority of citizens to insist upon their application in undiluted form, spontaneously, reflexively, unambiguously and insistently.  And in that way, when our common sense enables us to see that their violation has been a bit more egregious than usual this time, so egregious that maybe common sense will no longer help us to navigate a new world of arbitrary regulations and authorities, that common sense can become revolutionary.

Common sense is the possession of the man in the middle—not the Big Man, with wealth or power, or those living on the margins of society.  The cultivation of common sense  requires you to confront limits regularly, but also that you have some capacity to shape and maneuver within those limits; it requires you to see the consequences of your actions, and not be able to project those consequences onto the “long term,” or lose them in the tangled webs of unintended consequences and intersecting intentions.  Maintaining your common sense when you get too high or too low calls for extra doses of discipline, and perhaps some continuity with a previous condition (such as friends and family who knew you when you were in the middle). 

In a less grave way then totalitarian rule, I wonder whether today’s victimary popular culture impairs common sense.  A critic whom I admire, James Bowman, writes often of the dominance of fantasy in today’s popular culture, and the way this dominance has seeped into public and political life.  Bowman finds it disturbing that even science fiction films like the recent Star Wars don’t feel obliged to play by the rules of the “reality” they construct for themselves; one might suggest that the Obama cult has been a result of this privileging of fantasy over reality.  The recent awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama is an example, something I wouldn’t have accepted as a premise for a Saturday Night Live skit, and yet it happened—the award committee has made a lot of mistakes (and worse) before, but this must be the first time the award was granted based on what the committee imagines all of us are imagining the recipient might accomplish (and perhaps it’s the first time a President was ever elected on a similar basis). 

It is also fascinating how the new fragmented media environment allows for large groups of people to see those on the other side though hand-picked fragments aimed at reducing them to familiar stereotypes, but the enduring political and economic institutions serve as a check here.  Indeed, the widespread opposition to Obamacare, whatever it actually is, suggests to me that when it comes to your own private sphere of existence, the skepticism and shrewdness we associate with common sense is still intact.  Still, I can’t help but see some fragility here, simply due to repeated violations of the common sense maxims I mentioned earlier, over many decades by now—so that it actually makes sense to a lot of people to say that the government wasting a trillion dollars will return us to prosperity.  A new reality has been constructed through the articulation of the welfare-warfare-regulatory-media-academic state (even though I think a good bit of the warfare part was necessary), and one while can’t just say that it’s an artificial reality, it is predicated upon the possibility of deferring payment and consequences indefinitely.  A Ponzi scheme is also real for the people first in, who do get paid.  Popular culture erodes common sense by valorizing Ponzi-scheme models of reality, including the valorization of esthetically appealing and successful (i.e., unpunished) criminals.

Still, it seems to me commonsensical to insist upon the self-evidence of optimism.  No matter how much I despair, no matter how unlikely it seems that a disastrous course will be arrested, the very articulation of that despair (even just to oneself) implies the possibility that it will reverberate with another.  And if with another, why not yet another?  If I bewail the coming fall of this civilization, that very complaint, precisely to the extent that it is true and prophetic, implies that the principles of civilization need not disappear along with this particular one—human beings have suffered such catastrophes and recovered and renewed, and they might do so again.  If I am speaking, even if I disavow any communication with any of my contemporaries, I implicitly assert the possibility with some kindred spirits yet to be born, maybe centuries hence, maybe mediated by layers of interlocutors and interpreters who understood me only partially, but enough to pass my words along—and why should that communication be any less valuable?  To put it simply, putting forth a sign entails faith in someone receiving and disseminating it in turn.  Anyone without such minimal optimism (itself a form of “gratitude”) would not bother to speak at all, and anyone who does speak while denying that minimal optimism is to that degree dishonest—indeed, culpably ungrateful—in his or her speaking.

 

 

The far Left and the Libertarian Right converge on the same enemy:  the unholy alliance of the State and Big Business.  On what victory in the struggle would mean they diverge:  the Left, of course, ultimately wants Big Business swallowed up in the rational and humanitarian State, while the Libertarians want the state abolished (they distinguish “state” from “government,” supporting a minimal version of the latter—there seems to be small anarchist contingent, though), in which case businesses might become big but not Big—they would assume their own risks and receive no protection, direct or indirect, from their competitors.  Marx had an explanation for this increasingly intricate and essential alliance:  the state never was anything other than a “general committee of the ruling class,” which under capitalism meant the protection of bourgeois private property; so, when capitalism moves into its more advanced stage, and must confront deadly new resentments (the proletariat) and dangers (the threat—and promise—of military competition between capitalist states) the state must itself expand so as to take on these tasks—and the “monopoly capitalists” will be happy to let them do so, even if they grouse occasionally.  And the libertarian explanation is… well, other than some vague references to our having forgotten our principles, it doesn’t seem to me they really have one—which would be why someone like Ron Paul exceeds even the most fevered Leftists in his conspiracy-mongering.  Someone must have made a dirty deal behind closed doors.

 

If entrepreneurs are essentially a predatory class, as I hypothesized in my “Hunters and Craftsmen” post, then the explanation is not that difficult.  Indeed, Libertarians are well aware, going back to Adam Smith, that any time businessmen get a chance to receive some privilege or monopoly from the state they grab it, the free market be damned.  Of course, entrepreneurs are a very peaceful predatory class, for the most part, and are themselves always vulnerable to expropriation—hence their alliance with the state is fruitful in many ways.  But predation within the peaceful space created by stable state power is still predation, and we must distinguish the small marketplaces that spring up when the division of labor has expanded enough so as to make everyone dependent upon others (even allowing for merchants to mediate between communities, including distant ones) and the power of money within a system of trade and ultimately a fully developed market system.  A baker or carpenter who brings his goods to market is still just a baker or carpenter, but moving capital around requires no “instinct of workmanship” at all.  The difference is between a stable division of labor and one that is in continual upheaval.

 

I hope I don’t need to, but just in case I hasten to add that there is no critique of capitalism or the market, or the entrepreneur here, neither explicit nor implicit.  “Predator” is just another way of speaking about the “Big Man”; without the Big Man, there would have been no way of centralizing resources needed to move humanity beyond the level of egalitarian hunter-gather tribes; civilization itself is predicated upon turning this predatory figure away from preying upon the weak of his own group toward defending that group against external predators (and this shift is predicated upon a truce between all the contending Big Men within the group); all I am adding is that the Big Man “function” continues to this day and that—this in my view reveals the Libertarian mindset, in all its provocative brilliance, to be utopian—we can’t imagine civilization without it.  For all our egalitarianism (which, I also hasten to add, is in its own way absolutely real, and a powerful check upon predation), there is almost never (I’m not sure I need the qualifier “almost”) a situation involving a group of people of any size that doesn’t generate a center of gravity—someone dominates the conversation; someone’s words or deed were more memorable afterwards; someone’s judgment was deferred to; someone had to make the “call,” and in the end someone did; someone had to be blamed, and they were, etc.  It may be paradoxical, but precisely in free associations, hierarchies, however informal and provisional, become indispensable. 

 

Whenever such hierarchies are made quasi-permanent and ritualized, we have sovereignty.  And sovereignty is the opposite of freedom.  But we can’t do without sovereignty—it meets some very definite human needs, and is, in fact, what people usually mean when they speak about “human nature.”  Sovereignty provides identity, which is first of all self-sovereignty, and, again, is inimical to freedom, as identity is just another set of shackles.  Sovereignty also provides recognition, which is impossible if we, as free beings, transmute ourselves continually.  Sovereignty is the source of pride and honor.  It provides continuity, security and protection.  And in its communal function it stabilizes the volatile system of mimetic rivalry.  Sovereignty is involved in Isaiah Berlin’s “negative” as well as “positive” freedom—it is the answer to the question of “how far should rule extend” (up until it meets my private sovereignty) and of “who should rule” (those who allot me a piece of their sovereignty so as to help me ensure my own).   And property is the form of economic sovereignty.  Freedom (freedom “of presence,” to make a conceptual distinction), meanwhile, is the act and process of becoming sign, and that can’t be represented or guaranteed in sovereign terms. 

 

So, an originary political economy would study the intersection of freedom and sovereignty in the way each of us articulates the imperatives sent our way by every other one of us.  I think of the kind of simple account of the workings of the free market as both the best means of satisfying needs and as discovery procedure:  I have a certain amount of money, and I invest it in the raw materials and technology I need to produce a certain number of a particular kind of good, continually adjusting the price I ask until I have sold as many of them as I can within the period of time I can allow myself before I must reinvest or, perhaps, repay my creditors.  If I don’t manage to sell enough to recoup my original investment, or come close enough to reinvest, then I fail, we learn that there is insufficient demand for the product I was selling (there are enough of them out there already, or enough of a sufficiently close version, or it’s simply unneeded and unwanted), and someone else will invest in the technology I had used, ultimately putting it to better use.  There is no other way to find out what people want, or how resources should be allocated, than this one.

 

If I am successful, then I expanded, however slightly, the social division of labor; or, in more anthropological terms, social differentiation.  If consumers are buying my product because it is cheaper than what they have been buying, then resources are freed up to buy other products; if they are buying my product because it is superior technologically or esthetically, then whatever skill or knowledge went into the innovation I have introduced to the world has been affirmed as a source of value, and will inspire various iterations; and, of course, if they are buying it because it does something new, then work that was previously done privately and/or less efficiently is now embedded in the new division of labor, or wholly new faculties and desires have been created, and which are sure to lead to new demands and new innovations.  My interference in the existing social division of labor stimulates others to take advantage of the possible alignments now opened up, no less than the conquest of a part of a weakened state inspires other states to participate in re-dividing the state and redrawing existing borders—and this process could also be described in “law-like” terms.  The difference, and it is a big one, in economic conquest is less in the dispositions of the players than in the fact that social rather than physical terrain is at stake, and social terrain is both inexhaustible and subject to much more limited control.  (To extend the idea slightly, doesn’t advertising make perfect sense in these terms, as camouflage, bluff and feint, warnings to a population about to besieged, pronouncements on the current status of operations, announcements of new imperial projects, etc.?)

 

George Gilder argued in Wealth and Poverty that far from being selfish, we should see the entrepreneur as remarkably altruistic, giving his time, energy and resources to help others.  Ultimately, there may not be so much difference between this claim and Ayn Rand’s harangues on the virtues of selfishness.  They are both the dispositions of the sovereign, who does favors for whom he will do favors and ill to whom he disfavors.  With all the current talk about how much regulation we need and what kind, it seems obvious to me that regulation is almost always beside the point because any new innovation and the subsequent reorganization of the division of labor will render the existing rules obsolete.  Regulations are always attempts to fight the last war, and arguments in favor of more of them are almost invariable obscenely oblivious to the advantages of hindsight—everything that seems to us to be a cause of whatever crisis or scandal occupies us should, as all reasonable people can agree, have been outlawed.  It might be more useful to think of entrepreneurship as—as I believe many of them, in fact, do—a kind of war-making, maybe in conventional terms, with large, well-stocked armies with a long-term battle plan; maybe a kind of guerilla warfare; at times even a kind of terrorism.  The enemy varies—it may be those representing the existing division of labor, supported by state subsidies direct and indirect; or, it may be those instigating disruptions of the status quo—but I don’t see how one could deny that, in addition to producing, improving and disseminating their products, businesses spend quite a bit of time addressing the various fronts on which they fight:  labor, the state, or this or that agency, and their competitors.  (And even warriors, in the literal sense, must give quite a bit of attention to the production and distribution of goods, services, and the enforcement of the rights of various officials and “property” owners.)

 

If reasonable rules for waging war can’t be composed in the course of the battle itself, the various agreements forged going into and following battles (truces, alliances) can be enforced—that is, contracts.  There is even something a little irrational about this, as contracts must always presuppose a continuous state of affairs that makes their fulfillment possible, but promises to abide by such shared hypotheses, even or especially when realities emerge which undermine them, is ultimately far more rational because continuities can only be carved, to some extent arbitrarily, out of discontinuity.  In fact, all of the attention of government should be directed towards the strict enforcement of contracts, if only to give the signatories powerful incentives to construct their contracts carefully and make their reciprocal obligations as transparent as possible.  And this answers the question of how big the government should be:  as big as necessary to arbitrate effectively, indeed, unquestioningly, between the largest of the economic barons.  But not big enough to help anyone of them if they lose their fiefdom. 

 

Consumer sovereignty is a nice slogan but unsupportable as an empirical claim.  The relation between consumers and companies is analogous to that between voters and political parties:  the organizations propose, and the consumers and voters dispose.  (Or, more provocatively, between occupied populations and their conquerors, taking into account the desire for an extremely gentle occupation regime, including one that realzies the benefits of recruiting its administrators from the population itself.)  That is, the final purchase validates or invalidates a particular use of capital within a generally valid field; consumers regularly bring down empires, but the imperial system itself remains.  In case it’s necessary, I’ll make it clear that this is not a critique—I see no reason to assume that consumers (or voters) should weigh in any more heavily than this.  But the capacity to redirect the channels through which capital flows plays a very important role morally, and in providing the tacit rules under which the system operates.  It certainly makes a big difference whether the most unhealthy fast food restaurants or diversified, and increasingly tasty, health food alternatives prevail; or whether the main streets of medium-sized cities are littered with strip clubs.  Such redirections of capital in turn depend upon, and register, the degree of thriving of families, churches and other neighborhood institutions.  Indeed, I think those political movements likely to produce the most lasting effects will be those which focus on modifying consumer behavior, directly (through boycotts and savvy ad campaigns) and indirectly (by strengthening civil society).

 

The tension between the entrepreneur and the “craftsman” so evident in Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class lies, I think, in the way outlays of capital continually upend—indeed, have their very significance in upending—the existing division of labor.  Veblen associates the instinct for workmanship with knowledge of causal relations in nature (as opposed to the superstitious nature of the “predatory” classes), which makes sense, but equally important here are traditional methods and guild-style relations and an esthetic sense.  The most virulent opposition to capitalism has often come from those pushed out of their artisan status by mass production—much of the rhetoric, if not the reality, of anti-capitalist politics derives from this kind of complaint, with which it is easy enough to sympathize.  But knowledge of causal relation, that is, the application of science to production, has a more complex relationship to the entrepreneur.  For a long time, in Marxist circles, there were arguments regarding the long-term effects of capitalism on scientific “labor”—the most politically appealing argument was that scientists would increasingly be reduced to wage laborers and supervisors of wage laborers, with intensifying specialization making it impossible for them to protect their interests as a group or individuals, leaving perhaps a few very elite scientists who essentially join the “ruling class.”  And, certainly, scientists, and especially those responsible for important technological innovations, have been among the most important new members of the economic “aristocracy” over the past few decades.  But if traditional educational institutions are eroded (or continue in their present course of erosion), can the free market be counted on to produce the number of scientists and engineers needed to keep de- and re-stabilizing the division of labor?  The math and science proficiency of American students, and the increasing dependence of American companies upon foreigners for high-tech positions (while we seem to do just fine in producing all the lawyers we need) makes this a serious question.

 

A good way to start to tie all these issues together is by reflecting upon another issue where the far Left and Libertarian right converge (and where I have come, conveniently, to agree with both)—the illegitimacy and need for abolition of intellectual property.  Intellectual property is a state granted monopoly over the uses others can make of their private property—the state can prohibit me from using my own printer and paper to copy something and distribute it, or to use my own raw materials of any kind to replicate a physical or chemical structure.  The argument against intellectual property is most potent in dealing with patents, I think, given how arbitrary the distinction between a real invention and some tweak of a method or process that is already well known is; it is most problematic, even distressing, in dealing with copyright, when we know very well who authored, painted or composed that original and irreplaceable novel, painting or symphony and it seems only just that they benefit financially from it.

 

Either way, I don’t see how intellectual property can possibly be maintained into the future:  can all personal computers be checked for illegal downloads?  Can we make China protect Disney’s copyrights?  Will India deny its poor knock-off medicines based on those created by American pharmaceuticals?  So, it may be better to speculate on a world without it.  This might be a good time to remind ourselves that the origin of creation lies in freedom, the kind of freedom that has its telos in the “discipline,” or a conversation aimed at soliciting revelations from some shared object or, in more anthropological terms, to make some object an inexhaustible source of signification.  This is done by iteration for its own sake, and I’ll update my definition of iteration here as obeying the imperative to apply the rule to the infinitesimal—that is, discovering what you are doing in some space where the making of rules and the interchange of tacit and explicit rules is generating transformations and applying the rules of what you are doing to some as yet tacit dimension of it.  So, for example, I realize that I organize my thinking into a certain pattern that I hadn’t recognized previously, or that has just emerged as distinct, and I apply the rule constitutive to that pattern to elements of my thinking that run in more established or random routines.

 

Inventions for use follow this logic, but are ultimately incidental to disciplinary habits and desires.  If authors and creators are denied the monopoly on the right to use their work for profit (a right more often exploited by entertainment and other corporations anyway, often at the expense of their hired creators), they might use their talents to invite people into unique disciplinary spaces that transcend the reproduction of an object.  That is, creation will become more pedagogical, organized around websites, public appearances, and other mediated events that take the created object as a changing center, one which the audience pays for the right to help change and witness in its successive metamorphoses.  New drugs might come to be invented in hospitals and other health care sites, and be administered as part of a total care experience; new technological innovations in other fields might also become embedded in a holistic set of service relations, as already seems to be happening with computers.  This denial of a state monopoly to the giant companies best able to exploit it might, in turn, lead to a push for the government to stay outside of the company-consumer relationship, which would now require constant and far more subtle fine-tuning and communication between the parties, irreducible to external regulation.  And the instinct for workmanship might revive as well in such integrated work environments, and the marginalist political activities like civil disobedience and boycotts take on more precise objects—supporting loved and needed “customized” institutions from state depredations.  (The laws against fraud, though, might get some creative workouts if more people think they can get away with claiming to be the producer or author of another’s work, as opposed to just using or disseminating it.)

 

So, perhaps we can locate a new political economic lawfulness in the degree of faith we find in our society and ourselves that creative activity unsanctioned, unprotected and uncredentialed by the predatory alliance of Big Business and the State (they’ve earned their capital letters!) can thereby generate even more creative activity and social and cultural good.  The less faith, the more government regulation, the more business takes on static, administrative, imperial roles; the more faith, the more sovereignty learns to embed itself in, rather than prey upon, freedom—and the more social health and prosperity.  We might even develop an appreciation for the contribution to this lawfulness made by the disciplines organized around the praxical study of risk, like hedge funds, and other inquirers into the myriad ways the miracle of making money out of money takes place.  (Yes, the warriors are themselves ultimately driven by freedom, their actions an adventure in exploration and hence a mode of inquiry.)  Such scouts in the world of economic warfare are among the most faithful in their own intuitions and abilities, and in the tacit rules of the system to sustain them—and they test out which battle plans are real, and which will dissolve upon contact with the enemy.  

 

Any functional sign must involve the following:

 

1)  The possibility of being a lie (I borrow this from Umberto Eco’s A Theory of Semiotics).  There are better ways of putting this, as “lie” presupposes a declarative, an assertion about something in the world independent of the person making the claim.  So, when I shake someone’s hand, I am not exactly telling the truth or lying; the affirmation or gesture precedes the proposition.  But in a sense I am—my handshake can be sincere, or I could be proffering my hand so as to disguise my irreconcilable enmity towards you.  The originary scene itself is, indeed, beyond truth and falsehood—that some central object is indicated is simply constitutive of the scene; to put it another way, no object, no convergence of attention, no scene, and therefore no lie.  But that being beyond truth and falsehood will never happen again, precisely because of the scene—any future gesture could be a deception.  And the deception could only work because of the absolute trust that must have prevailed on the originary scene because there, in the phrase I consider prior to the truth/lie binary, one and then each stood as surety for the presence of the object.  Every sign, to be meaningful, or to work, must have its audience presuppose someone to stand in surety for some material or immaterial object of the sign.  Not necessarily a referent, or even a signified, but the possibility of a gathering of attention around some “thereness” to attend to.

 

2)  A prayer to the central presence or intelligence.  A prayer is an imperative, however politely or supinely put, to the central intelligence—most elementarily, to save or protect the supplicant.  But this demand implies the duty to obey the center; so, the subsequent prayer or, really, continuation of this same one, is a demand that the central presence provide guidance in fulfilling a divine command.  This more articulate prayer recognizes a dominion under divine sovereignty, wherein the divine command must be shared, applied and interpreted.  In claiming the invocation as a condition of intelligibility, I am pointing to the regular, or grammatical element of semiotics.  Whatever the rules in any language or idiom, I must follow them; but what are rules other than the way a particular interplay of imperatives back and forth from the center has unwound?  If I am on the verge, say, of coveting something of my neighbor’s, and I hear God telling me not to, and I beseech God to give me guidance, and I discover a way of redirecting my attention so that I covet no more, a habit and therefore a preliminary grammar is in place.  If someone then trusts me enough to ask me to help them find the way in a similar circumstance, I can present my discovery, and they will have to implore God to help them find their own way, analogous to mine—and my grammar has been transmitted, which is what really makes it a grammar in the first place.  I don’t think it’s any different with things like word order, conjugation, inflection, etc., in words and sentences—they are all habits by which imperatives have been moderated and woven into a transactional fabric where they intersect with other, often contrary, imperatives.  The equivalent on the originary scene is each of us looking at all the rest of us and ascertaining that a rule of interaction supplanting the uncontrolled surge toward the center has emerged.  To put it simply:  conscientiously following the rules, including the construction of ideal or model modes of rule following, is a form of prayer and faith that the right or needful thing to do when the rules fall short will be made present to me.  And it is a reasonable faith, because when the rules fall short, the tacit rules undergirding the overt ones, which are the imperatives we have so thoroughly embedded as to have forgotten, and which have been  preserved in the overt ones, are there as back-up.

 

3)  A hypothesis regarding how my audience or interlocutor will respond to my sign.  This is my misreading of C.S. Peirce, whom I take to be claiming that the meaning of a sign is all of those consequences you can imagine following your issuance of the sign.  This hypothesis must be internal to the sign itself, it must emerge with the sign.  That is, I don’t hypothesize and then issue the sign, or issue the sign and then hypothesize (one could only hypothesize with signs, after all).  The hypothesis is the sign:  whatever presence needed to be filled (signs wouldn’t be issued if some presence did not need to be filled, because sheer absence can only mean terror and extinction, whether experienced on a personal or collective level), I first put forth my sign with an inchoate sense of attempting to fill it, and as the sign is composed, and I get glimpses of its reverberations and possible mistaking, it seems to be more or less likely to provide that space with presence, to indicate that the need was in fact other than I took it to be and so my sign must be redirected or to the extent possible withdrawn, or that the sign will require supplementation which it must somehow be composed so as to solicit, and so on.  The “proof” of this hypothetical element of the sign is that when I “understand” a sign, what someone tells me, I am aware that I have been inscribed within it, that it has anticipated me and that it requires something of me.  It is up to me to render it meaningful or meaningless—it has predicted, or bet, that I would make it real.

 

If we have no “human nature,” then, we can have, as Hannah Arendt (who contended that for us to claim to know our own nature would be like trying to leap over our own shadow) asserted, a human condition—a set of possibilities and limits, always distributed differentially across individuals and history.  We must guarantee, and demand guarantees of, reality; we must follow (and be followed by) rules, more or less “religiously,” and insist that others do so as well; and we must anticipate, speculate, project and hope, while interfering with such on the part of others.  At our best, we preserve, within our signs, these diverse vocations, and occasionally even repair the damage that is constantly done them through resentment of our humanness; at our worst, we arbitrarily assign one priority over the other, or even betray any or all of them.