GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

Victimary discourse has its own critique of metaphysics, which I would translate into originary thinking as follows.  Victimary discourse is fundamentally anti-mimetic:  mimesis leads inexorably to violence, and victimary discourse has faith neither in Girard’s Christian transcendence of the scapegoat nor a transcendent sign such as that posited in Eric Gans’ originary scene–the latter, in particular, could be no more than a “cover-up” of the originary violence enacted behind and constitutive of the scene.  The primacy of the declarative sentence would, for such a stance, be abhored for its internalization of mimesis:  the possibility, constitutive of the declarative, that a “fictional” world could “imitate” the “real” one.  Such representation as imitation occludes the originary violence and even if the more sophisticated victimary thinker recognizes that the occlusion of violence is simultaneously an at least minimal mitigation of that violence, we can no longer accept that trade-off in good faith:  even at the possible price of our own destruction, the forgetting that we have forgotten the originary violence must be resisted. 

It also follows, then, that victimary discourse is just as terrified of the originary ostensive as metaphysics.  Indeed, victimary discourse is a kind of heretical, parasitical, sectarian breakaway formation, ever engaged in its shadow boxing with metaphysics.  It wouldn’t be quite right to characterize the victimary as “anti-declarative” (they are not about to boycott the sentence), but it does insist on “staining” the “mirror” of the ideal or fictional world of the declarative, which claims to represent “nature.”  A sentence can be stained in many ways.  Perhaps most obvious is Derrida’s Heideggerean (but quickly abandoned) placing of especially complicit words (above all, the copula) “under erasure.”  And there are the compulsory, ubiquitous scare quotes (I just found it impossible to summarize victimary discourse without a whole series of them.).  Almost as common, and for my purposes here more interesting, is what we might call the obligatory negation familiar to any reader of either “high” academic theory or cultural and postcolonial studies:  locutions like “of course, I don’t mean to suggest…”; “this shouldn’t be taken to support…”; “for readers who wish to implicate my discourse in the common sense, this would be misread as…”, etc.  These obligatory negations go well beyond the normal anticipation of misunderstandings and questions and exhibit markedly pathological features:  if the declarative makes an absent object present as a sign, the obligatory negation, itself, of course, a declarative of an especially strident type, makes absent an object which one fears is present–the sign itself, which would absorb one, overwhelming all resistance, into the dreaded center.

In that case, it is worth considering whether we can distinguish between more or less healthy declarative forms, between victimary ones and those of the center.  Would more directly political and substantive declaratives like, say, “Capitalism is exploitation” and “America is racist” share an identifiable structure with the obligatory negation, that of a kind of self-cancelling declarative?  Could we, in contrast, identify a structure common to “conservative” (or, really, classically liberal or conventionally patriotic) declaratives, like “the free market is the best means for producing wealth” and “America is a good society”? A declarative of the center would include in its formulation a common and ever receding horizon, while the victimary declarative would fix our attention on a rapidly approaching, even if never quite arriving, catastrophic object.

I do think it is possible, and would propose as a kind of proof text a famous declarative of Churchill’s (the brilliance of which I have heard Eric Gans remark upon):  “democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried.”  This statement might serve us as a kind of template:  any statement that can be translated into this form passes muster as a declarative of the center, and those which can’t are deemed victimary.  Churchill’s declarative is genuinely originary because it stands in the midst of while simultaneously transcending competing and potentially deadly terms.  You can only attack it by proposing another, better, form of government, which the statement implicitly invites you to attempt, but in so doing have you not demanded a place to speak within the existing democratic order?  So:  “the free market is the worst way of producing wealth except for all the others that have been tried.”  That works perfectly well:  one need not idealize the market, and this formulation openly invites us to focus on its flaws, inequities, occasional destructiveness and corrosive effects on benign traditions.  In the end, none of these claims detracts from the market’s superiority; in fact, any other form of wealth production or distribution you can try will be drawn back into the market, and we can wait patiently for that confirmation.  And:  “America is an awful society, except when compared to most of the others, real or possible, one could imagine.”  That seems to me to hold up pretty well, and Chruchill himself even had a version:  “Americans will always do the right thing, after they have tried everything else.”

I don’t think it works at all, though, for our prototypical victimary statements.  The singling out of a uniquely virulent perpetrator doesn’t allow for it:  “capitalism is an excellent mode of distribution, until you have seen all the others”: “America is a land of racial equality, until you have seen the others”–the statements lose all of their sense in the translation.  (A more decent, big government liberalism fares better, I think:  “a vigorous public sphere and expansive government intervention in the economy is the worst way of remedying the excesses of the market, except for all the others that have been tried.”  This lacks the near-axiomatic status of our pro-market statement, but it at least invites a civil and reasonable attempt at falsification, an attempt which is by no means assured of success.) 

This pathological form, then, could be further defined by the lack of almost any boundary between declarative, imperative and ostensive in victimary discourse:  to say, “America is racist,” is to command speaker and listener alike to demolish American racism by “any means necessary” and, further, to find and point out ostentatiously all instances (especially the most hidden and therefore insidious instances) of racism wherever one turns.  “Capitalism is exploitation” likewise compels one to devote oneself to denouncing all apparently non-exploitative aspects of capitalism as “ideological” mechanisms, concealing the true nature of the mode of production.  If metaphysics hopes, by asserting the primacy of the declarative, to maintain some semblance of stability in the wild worlds of ostensives and imperatives by situating them within legitimately procedural and deliberative forms, victimary discourse is a veritable control freak–the declarative must include all possible imperatives and ostensives that might flow from it.  The declarative of the center, meanwhile, is content to let us view and consider all other alternatives, secure in the knowledge that the inexhaustibility of the sign in its latest incarnation, and the irreducible event-fulness and freedom constitutive of human existence, will ultimately provide us with the slack and guidance we need to find our way back to the “least worst.”  The only imperative inherently attached to declaratives of the center is the one commanding us to be ready to see and hear, in the middle of our most tempting resentments, signs that what seems to us the worst might really be least worse, which would simultanously be signs pointing us toward the way in which we might make it lesser still.

Adam Katz

Metaphysics is the assumption of the primacy of declarative sentence.  What is the source of this assumption; and what is our concern with it?  Is it simply that metaphysics is wrong in its occlusion of the primacy of the ostensive, or are there ethical stakes involved?  Gans has observed that the denial of the ostensive in metaphysics (the mode of thought of post-ritual order) may have been necessary to distance that order from the charged nature of the ostensive; perhaps the ostensive becomes “charged” once the recognition emerges that there is no way of satasifactorily arbitrating between mutually exclusive ones.  In that case, is it equally, or even more, necessary now not to place too much pressure on the declarative “order”?  Do we enter dangerous territory when we engage in the deconstruction or dismantling of Western metaphysics–a pedestrian academic exercise these days, I know, but does that mean we have accounted for the broader social consequences?  Or, on the contrary, are such exercises doomed to remain esoteric and ineffectual:  if declarative freedom, our freedom to determine together the nature of the imperatives by which we will be bound, is constitutive of liberal democracy, then isn’t liberal democracy the apotheosis of metaphysics, insofar as it attributes ruling force to the declarative?  And what, exactly, leaving aside the claims of philosophical purity, would be one’s objection to that?

(What follows will be in large part a reading of Eric Gans’ account of the emergence of the declarative sentence through transformations in the ostensive and imperative forms in his The Origin of Language.  It would, it seems to me, be tedious in this forum to “account” for my reading.  I will leave it to my readers to note which parts of Gans’ analysis I am addressing, which neglecting, what I am adding or revising, and what, perhaps, I am simply misreading.)

The ostensive names the central object and thereby constitutes it as sacred Being.  Once one object has been thus designated and thereby preserved as the ritual center of the emergent community, the same mode of signification can be applied to the naming of other objects–we should imagine that instances of imminent mimetic crisis will still provide the motive for such gestures, but the instances would become less urgent, more “routine,” as the gestures involved come to mediate more and more practices.   Once the sacred “buffalo” has been named in an event that saves/creates the community, the more “profane” “rabbit” can be pursued by two or more hunters in a more coordinated manner than would otherwise be possible.  As a stock of names thus accumulates, the appearance of what Gans calls the “inappropriate” ostensive, emitted in the absence of the object, being accepted as an imperative to produce the object (again, accepted as a way of deferring conflict), becomes increasingly probable.  It would seem that the “successful” imperative is less likely to take place with regard to the object of some pursuit, which could not be readily produced upon demand, than with some implement of the hunt (or equivalent activity) which could have already been named in one of the less high stakes events I just referred to–like, say, a spear.

Finally, we would have, as a reply to an “inappropriate” imperative (in some situation in which the object cannot be produced), the “negative ostesnive,” in which the name of the object is simply repeated, deferring the anticipated response to the unfulfilled imperative.  If this response is accepted (if the demand is not pursued to the point of crisis), the negative ostensive becomes the germ of the declarative, since it “refers” to the absence of the object.  For the negative ostensive to become a genuine declarative (with what Gans calls here a relation between “topic” and “comment”), something must be said “about” the topic, or object in question.  This something must come from the stock of names or nominals already generated by the community of sign users.  What is the nature of the comment upon the topic in such a situation?  The negative ostensive, which sometimes works, hasn’t worked in this instance:  the absence of the object must be presented in some more “persuasive” way.  I would suggest that the comment must involve more than representing the absence of the object as a proximal presence–that is, it must be more than “spear over there” or “spear home”, because such a response would likely exacerbate rather than quell the crisis by intensifying the demand that the object be retrieved and produced. 

The more likely name to be introduced in lieu of the failure of the negative ostensive, I propose, is the Name-of-God, of the originary, sacred object.  The Name-of-God does more than designate a particular object; it communicates the repulsive force of the center and, I would hypothesize, this repulsive force would be needed to enable the leap into a new linguistic form predicated upon the object’s absence and its replacement by the presence of the linguistic form itself.  The object’s absence is substituted for by God’s presence.  So, the first declarative would be something like “God (here)/(not) spear.”  “God/spear” would call for the same response on the part of the “imperator” as the Name-of-God effected for all the participants on the originary scene.  The iteration of this linguistic form for other objects would then be generalizable along the lines of “God presences otherwise than as_______” The verb form would first of all name God’s presencing here, and could then be applied to all other forms of “presencing.”  Other objects could be inserted into this formal structure, as originally took place with ostensive.

If God presences otherwise than as ______, then He presences as the sentence itself, insofar as it “makes sense” or is “understood.”  If the listener thus accepts the sentence (he doesn’t pursue his demand), then he has accepted the speaker’s “invitation” to see the presencing of God in other declaratives which will be as fleeting as the one just heard, which vanished in the instant in which it was “understood.”  This “invitation,” moreover, must be accepted by the listener as an internalized imperative now directed toward himself, a directive to be prepared to treat the next declarative ostensively, as pointing to a new form of sacred Being (an “otherwise” form of God’s presencing).  Insofar as it defers the impossible imperative, or perhaps colliding imperatives, by thus internalizing and redirecting the imperative form toward a new kind of ostensive gesture, the declarative transcends but also includes these lower linguistic forms.  So, for the listener (which includes the speaker as well as listener to his own sentence), each declarative (in its internal iteration, its “making sense”) would have the general form (which could be “diagrammed”) of:  “Present yourself before the space where God’s otherwise presencing will be revealed.”  In turn, the increasing range of application of the declarative would increase the range of possible imperatives and the compelxity of various interactions between imperatives and their “softened” form,  interrogatives; which would, then, push the declarative form to unfold more of its potential.

The problem with the primacy of the declarative in metaphysics is that it reduces all meaning to the distinction between true and false, or (a softer version) substantial/acccidental.  The verification conditions can never be made commensurate with the statement to be judged, though:  in the end, one has to “see” the object whose reality is to be ascertained, and no rule can account for what would count as doing so.  In the political context, this leads us to endless arguments over incommensurable models of the social.  The problem here is not that the arguments are endless; rather, it is that the models of the social in question are not only incommensurable with each other but with the forms of power articulated so as to “realize” one or the other.  On this point, Richard Rorty is right when he points out that, say, John Rawls’ model of originary equality, while apparently meant to authorize a version of the modern Western welfare state could just as easily be used to justify an extreme libertarian argument–one simply needs to contend that it is the unlimited workings of the free market and expanding individual freedom vis a vis that state that will improve the conditions of the least well off.

Even better! one might respond:  that’s precisely what makes it a viable model–it allows for a range of legitimate arguments while excluding the extremes destructive of the liberal order (although, whether one could find a way to use Rawls to justify fascism, apartheid, or communism perhaps remains to be seen; or, rather, depends upon forms of interpretive ingenuity we haven’t yet seen). But leave aside the creeping cynicism of such an approach (once one knows that it is only “my” Rawls that enables me to argue for my pet project, can I continue to make the argument in good faith? [what role does “good faith” argumentation play in liberal democracy?]).  Even more problematic is its mind numbing monotony–how long does it take before one has figured out every possible move in public, gladitorial-style contests over the re-application of the favored models?    

The possibility of treating the declarative sentence ostensively, as a calling into being of a world centered upon ourselves as sign-producers and renewers of sacrality is what makes Gans’ fourth, “discursive,” freedom, possible.  The most powerful declarative would be the one capable of the most varied searches for ways of placing oneself before the space in which God’s otherwise presencing will be revealed.  Such a declarative will enact or embody such a search, which is perhaps simply a way of reminding ourselves that when and where one makes a declarative statement matters.  “All men are created equal” is not always equally charged–it matters whether the one saying it is placing his freedom and life on the line in doing so. (How else could we ever know what such a phrase really meant?)

The freest declarative, then, will be the one that places itself at the intersection of “unreasonable” (impossible) imperatives, demanding that those issuing the imperative either enforce that demand in the face of the speaker’s refusal (a refusal on the grounds that its implementation would close the space of God’s otherwise presencing or, more simply, the space in which successive declaratives could be issued) or echo the “universal” principle (universal because allowing for unlimited iterations) which has, in that case, demonstrably inhibited one’s will to enforce. 

For the metaphysical supporter of liberal democracy, our arguments over the election of representatives and the laws they then make and enforce is all there is.  Those who violate or fail to enforce laws, those who take responsibility for deploying the power they have been delegated in unauthorized ways to meet unprecedented circumstances, those who fail to adhere to the rules of public discourse (argumentation following an accepted or “certified” model of the social) are simply unintelligible or worse.  A metaphysical liberal can easily accept the results of the civil rights movement after the fact (the results conform to a very recognizable model); would his liberalism have given him the moral grounding for supporting it when doing so would earn him the opprobrium of neighbors, co-workers and family?  Setting aside my own thinking on the matter, while those conservatives who take an “enforcement first” stance on illegal immigration have an impeccable theoretical stance (who could be against enforcing the law–if you want more immigrants, change the law accordingly) they miss, it seems to me, this “ostensive” dimension to freedom:  how will people respond when they are asked to turn in their neighbors and co-workers, or when they are asked to enforce laws requiring them to round up and deport entire families?  Neither the conservative imperative nor the liberal declarative is enough to account for our politics, on the boundary between the victimary on one side deliberately determined forms of reciprocity on the other.  Metaphysical liberalism doesn’t want to change the nature of imperatives; it wants to ensure their legitimacy and hence certainty.  A post-metaphysical, generative liberalism would embed imperatives in structures of transparency and accountability that produce new imperatives by checking others, placing each of us on both sides of the imperative in as “equally” distributed manner as possible; modelling the social in novel forms of solidarity, responsibility and reciprocity, rather than applying a model of the social.

All freedom is ostensive in the simple sense that freedom has to mean that no one knows what I am going to say or do next–if I am either predictable or controlled I am not free.  But “no one” has to include myself–I also must not know what I am going to say or do until I hear or see it (if I could know, others could too).  So, such freedom involves a perpetual readiness to hear and see something one has never seen and heard before; something astonishing and unprecedented, new forms of God’s otherwise presencing.  Such freedom can by no means be reduced to the political, but politically its consequence is that those who embrace such a freedom are our greatest and maybe only surety against all totalitarianisms–and the terror of such freedom on the part of any one who would like to see our imperatives obeyed unconditionally means that we will never have seen the last of the totalitarian imperative.

Adam Katz

To speak of “imperative freedom” as “freedom from another’s intention,” which is to say, Isaiah Berlin’s “negative freedom,” interestingly sets up a line separating two ways of thinking about freedom.  The corresponding, “positive” freedom, according to Gans’s account in Chronicle #348, would presumably be that of the sadist, who has the capacity to impose his imperative will upon others.  In that case, while the pre-existence of the primary, ostensive, freedom, implying the existence of others’ intentions at least potentially at odds with one’s own, makes the sadistic temptation permanent, our reliance upon the communal nature of that primary freedom nevertheless serves to check that temptation by “strictly regulating the exercise of imperative freedom.”

The means of checking imperativity in pre-modern societies is through ritual and gift-exchange; in modernity this becomes a new kind of problem.  Here it is deliberation, or “declarative freedom,” “the freedom to help choose the imperatives by which one will be governed,” that provides the necessary check.  Slavery, tyranny and torture are the forms of imperativity unchecked; still, the emergence of declarative and, even more, “discursive freedom,” continually set the bar higher regarding what will count as these unchecked forms of imperativity.

Gans returns to ostensive freedom in his concluding paragraph, where that freedom “to intend an object in principle generates for each member of society the discursive freedom to become an object of intention”;  the human capacity to direct sustained attention toward some object ultimately becomes the capacity to become, simultaneously, that very object but also a sign directing attention to other likewise self-constituting objects.  It would make sense to assume that the capacity to produce such “personal artworks” oneself coincides with the capacity to appreciate and encourage it in others.

Ostensive freedom doesn’t appear in Gans’s discussion of declarative freedom;  here a relationship between imperativity and declarativity alone is proposed.  Propositions can contend and re-combine with each other in all kinds of ways, but the actual medium by which declarativity checks imperativity is not clear:  we might come to an agreement regarding the choice of “imperatives by which [we] will be governed” but what ensures that we will indeed be thusly governed?  Do declaratives have some kind of inherent checking power?  Are those who issue imperatives somehow intrinsically checked, equipped as imperators to receive instructions regarding the limits of their own power, which is to say, always already declarative as well?

If the answer is “yes” to these questions, which is to say, if what constitutes the modern political order is the interdependency of imperative and declarative (if, say, we can only act on an imperative in good faith if we can manage to square it with or translate it into some declarative we might utter to ourself or another), then this must be so because ostensive freedom comes into play here as well.  Modern politics emerges as a result of a series of events in which the “excesses” of imperativity have been witnessed, recorded and commemorated publically.  These would be the modern founding events, sometimes events which, upon reflection, seem almost unbelievably trivial (like the Boston “Massacre”).  Such freedom would be the freedom to generate new public centers and spaces in which a new series of actions can take place.

Perhaps such a conception of political freedom would further give us a way of seeing imperativity in somewhat less charged terms than as, at best, a necessary evil.  As Gans says, imperativity is certainly associable with responsibility, but also in the more “positive” sense in which its limits can be strictly set in terms of what one must have complete or partial control over in order to be reasonably held responsible for the outcome of a particular process (what the U.S. Constitution refers to as “necessary and proper means”).  You can’t legitimately fire me for not getting copies of a given document to everyone attending the meeting by 4PM if you didn’t also give me “absolute” power over the copier between 2 and 3, etc.

Since such “legitimate” limits, which also empower responsible imperativity, can themselves only be determined scenically, through the application of the memory of “excesses” and their exemplary victims, such ostensivity must also be appropriable by the responsible agent herself:  acting responsibly with delegated powers is itself a form of freedom.  We would then have two, complementary, but potentially and often actually conflicting forms of modern freedom:  that of the responsible agent, the guarantor of the freedom of others under limits set by those others; and the agency of those who emerge from the “others” themselves, who witness and, when necessary, place themselves (as potential victims) at the center of those events which test the limits of responsibility.

Our victimary order is perhaps a result of some imbalance, or even severance of the connection, between these two modes of modern freedom:  we have become incapable of respecting the public freedom of the responsible guarantor.  It is hard to see how even the most robust exchange of declaratives can heal this divide.  Perhaps expansions of discursive freedoms will be helpful here:  less a “chastened” version of of the realm of freedom, discursive freedom might mark the end of our yearning for the end of history through supplementations that increasingly determine the actual shape of the public, political world.  Think, for example, of the boycott, that mixture of consumer freedom and freedom of speech that provides a thread linking the American Revolution (the Boston “Tea Party”) to the signature tactics of the Civil Rights movement.  Boycotts can be private or state-sponsered (as in current calls for sanctions against Iran); boycotts can easily emerge as sites of public dialogue (for every boycott one could imagine a possible counter-boycott); they require various levels of commitment and can aim for change at various levels or to varying degrees; they can flow into more directly political forms of activity, like fundraising or the marginalizing and isolating of “rogue” regimes.  Boycotts, further, as a form of renunciation of a given product or exchange partner, open a space into which new exchanges, perhaps of a gift-like character but at any rate more intensely charged that usual, can enter, staging for us the form of the event in which new signs are produced within a communal space.  Boycotts always have a dimension of ostensive freedom, in other words, and therefore perhaps provide us with ways to continue the transition from politics based upon exposing and denouncing residual forms of illegitimate imperativity to a politics predicated upon the invention of new modes of exchange.

Adam Katz

http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/8375/sec_id/8375

Plus, a brief mention here:

Secular Illusions

by Rebecca Bynum

http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/8727/sec_id/8727

http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=6808&sec_id=6808