We can concentrate all the modern, liberal freedoms and rights into the right to own property: that is, the granting of exclusive use to that which cannot be used without depriving others of its use. If you have the right to property, you can obviously say whatever you like on your property, and others can listen to what you have to say on theirs. The same goes for worship. If you have property, you can exchange parts or products of that property with the parts and products others offer from their own property. Needless to say, you can possess firearms on your property, if you genuinely have a right to it. And property owners can invite others to assemble on each others’ property all they like, along with pooling their resources to buy or rent more property for larger assemblies.

I’m leaving out the rights specifically granted against the state (to a jury trial, against unreasonable search and seizure, self-incrimination, etc.) because I am determined to think property outside of the state, so as to look forward to the possibility of a libertarian order (the way there is through what I go back and forth between calling a “marginalist” and an “exodian” politics). If one does so, one also discovers that the supposedly natural rights to speech and religion become redundant and meaningless, even unnecessary causes of conflict—if I can refuse to allow anyone I choose onto my property, I can obviously refuse to let someone speak there, which means that the right to free speech has no one obliged to defend it.

Who, for that matter, defends property rights, if we can no longer count on the state to do that either? On the one hand, each property owner defends his own property; but without any shared respect for one another’s property, reified in recognized legal titles, this would just be Hobbes’s war of all against all. The real answer must be that the various property owners respect one another’s property and have recourse to agreed upon judicial or other mediating institutions in settling disputes. These institutions, along with the private security and insurance companies individuals would surely hire would simply be other uses of property, services offered on the market.

We would, though, have to account for the possibility that someone might surrender one’s right to the acknowledgement of one’s property rights on the part of other owners. This seems to me highly problematic. Let’s take an extreme case: someone who tortures his children, keeps slaves, murders kidnap victims, etc., on his property. Of course, we can easily say that he is violating their property rights, with the body being the most unshareable thing around and therefore the most basic form of property—fine, then: we have impeccable theoretical language with which to condemn in no uncertain terms such doings. Still: who, exactly, enters the house, saves the victims, and renders the perpetrator harmless? And on what grounds? Who has the “right”? (I am now, I suppose, introducing the neo-conservative snake into the libertarian garden.)

There would have to be some combined formal and informal means by which other property owners would, first consider, then discuss, and finally decide, to withdraw their support for that property owner. They might, before forcibly intervening, draw up charges and invite the individual to answer them, proposing a forum for the purpose. Then, finally, they would decide to act—and so inform that individual’s insurer and security agency: it would be made clear to the insurer that this individual was about to become a very bad risk, and to the security agency that it was about to lose some other customers if it insisted on retaining this client, if it was a security agency shared by others in the community; or it was about to be met with overwhelming force by the combined security agencies of those determined upon the “invasion.”

Needless to say, such a system would be open to all kinds of abuses (although I don’t see why more so than any other system)—right now, though, I just want to satisfy myself that we can imagine it. The kind of solution proposed above implies—once we start walking it back to less extreme cases—that the society of property owners can, in principle, judge that another’s misuse of his or her property can endanger the system of property itself, even indirectly (the abuse of one’s child, for example, doesn’t seem to have any impact on others’ property—but it is abhorrent enough to bring the entire principle of autonomy in disrepute, if the will and means can’t be summoned to abolish such a condition). Which uses of property pose such a danger would necessarily become a very common and lively topic of discussion in a libertarian community—much of the “politics” of such a community would be so comprised. Everyone would be acutely aware of the dangers of any precedent.

What follows is that each property owner would have an interest in signaling to the society that he is using his property properly, in putting forth the signs indicating uses that are productive for all. At the same time, each property owner would have to construct those signs, since the meaning of one or another architectural or landscaping “gesture” would change over time. In other words, each property owner would be teaching and learning from all the others how to be a better property owner—each would be trying to control the relevant precedents and create best suited to ensure the recognition one needs. I wouldn’t assume that in a libertarian order each individual would suffer perpetual anxiety concerning the possibility of losing the community’s sanction—such an order couldn’t survive if this question was constantly raised about most of the owners. But it might happen often enough regarding some of them—and it seems to me that such a community, so reliant upon the self-reliance of all its members, would have a very low tolerance for behaviors that strained the norms of the society. (I get the sense that some libertarians—perhaps the College Libertarian variety—believe that libertarianism means you can smoke a joint in the morning, visit a prostitute in the afternoon and go to a casino in the evening, without ever becoming a junkie, a pervert or a gambler. You might do all that, but the effects would be evident in your behavior, and no one would be obliged to give you a job, rent or sell you a home, provide you with security or insurance, or let you on their property.) Everyone would have to be clear about what he thought a “real” property owner was, and how he was embodying that ideal type. Especially since even the surveillance and communication devices we have now, let alone what might be invented in the coming decades, already mean that without the state in between us all, life would be transparent beyond our present imaginings. As David Brin argued more than a decade ago in his Transparent Society, liberty and privacy are parting ways: each of us will have all kinds of ways of attaining information about anyone else, and we will each have strong reasons to attend not only to signs we “give” to others, but those we “give off,” to use Erving Goffman’s terms.

Everyone would also be able to realize that resentment against the system of property, whether it takes the form of hatred towards the biggest property owners, or indignation at the exclusionary norms of associations of property owners, should be pre-empted to the greatest extent possible. Libertarian logic will not head off the rampages of the propertyless once the reach a certain critical mass—only a restored and enlarged gift economy, in its specifically modern form—gifts to strangers, without any possibility of reciprocity—can accomplish that. All kinds of philanthropic activities would be undertaken in a successful libertarian order, and each one would have the stamp of its founder(s) and given a specific meaning, for society at large and its beneficiaries. “Giving back” to a community which has given you something is always a “reading” of that community, a commemoration, a hypothesis about future possibilities—all unilateral acts of pedagogy.
For these reasons, the attitude of each member toward all the others would be fundamentally pedagogical, albeit in a reciprocal way: you teach me something and I teach you something, not only explicitly, much less pedantically, but through every use of my property I make evident to others. Even more, though, since such a society would be in a constant state of innovation, and no one could count on tenure, we would all be going back to school all the time: not necessarily formal schooling (who would care about degrees in such an order—you would just want to know what someone could do), but various kinds of tutoring, mentoring and apprenticeship relations.

Once the state gets out of the way, then, and we are left only with ourselves and fellow owners, we would have to be far more aware of the ways we show each other things all the time—at each encounter, I would say. And showing is the fundamental pedagogical gesture: first of all, showing another the meaning of what lies embedded, unnoticed, in their own practices and habits (best of through some modification in your own attitude that directs the other’s attention back at himself). It seems to me to follow, if I’m not just grossly blinded by my own professional interests here, that a generally pedagogical attitude, one that gets each of us thinking about how others read us, and one that seeks to refer actions to possible consequences in the reactions of others, would, in turn, be conducive to the gradual prioritization of property rights in our public discourse. Teaching and learning—showing, pointing—is the most basic element of any iteration of the originary scene upon which we find ourselves, even if part of a successful lesson is enabling the learner to see that, in the end, he has taught himself and can therefore now teach in turn. So, I much prefer pedagogy to, say, “dialogue” or “communication,” much less “solidarity” or “compassion,” as the proper mode of engagement for free men and women.

I read the comic pages every day because they contain the best writing and art in the newspaper, but I have to take issue with journalist Roland Hedley in Saturday’s Doonesbury, who, in his interview with Ron Paul, claims that the ideal of libertarian government is “pure utopianism.” Actually, libertarianism is the only form of government that isn’t utopian. The modern Western democracies, including America’s, try to create an ideal society. Libertarianism is content with maximizing individual freedom, protecting private property, and defending against foreign aggression. What’s utopian about Ron Paul’s proposals is not his libertarianism but his foreign policy isolationism, which is naïve regarding our enemies in the world.

In Nathanael West’s 1939 novel The Day of the Locust, he poses the serious question, whether modern society is capable of deferring the violence that it provokes. Describing a mob scene at a Hollywood movie premiere , he writes,

Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.

The ensuing riot scene in West’s novel, as well as the protagonist’s painting-in-progress titled “The Burning of Los Angeles” suggest that West is not optimistic about the fate of America, exemplified here by Hollywood. The anthropological insight of the passage above is first of all that their violence is provoked specifically by representation (as opposed to simply things, facts, or any particular state of events), and especially the mass media. He also points out that ” Nothing can ever be violent enough” to satisfy the desires of the mob. The expectations raised by consumer society are so grandiose that no satisfaction, within its own terms, is possible. West is an acute psychologist of group dynamics, and various scenes in his novel demonstrate a fine understanding of desire as mimetic, that is, competitive.

West’s novel provides us with one of the best models for understanding Occupy Wall Street and other leftist movements. First of all, their (admittedly inchoate) desires are created by the mass media, which is dedicated to finding “scandals” everywhere. Second, that no reform can possibly satisfy their demands. This becomes virtually conscious with OWS, whose members admit that their purpose is primarily “occupation” or protest itself, rather than any particular reform. Third, that political correctness is essentially a competition for the moral high ground. As we saw in Zuccotti Park, PC has a tendency to fragment, because any particular position is subject to a more radical critique, and one’s PC “credentials” are likewise vulnerable to attack. It’s not an overstatement to say that national and international politics have become largely a battle for the moral high ground. How and why this is so deserves further consideration.

This segment from the Daily Show records how the Zuccotti Park occupation was geographically divided by class into “uptown” and “downtown”; a division exemplified by the split between those who owned iPads and those who didn’t. When the TV journalist challenged one of the Protesters to share his iPad2 with those on the other side of the Park, he affably refused, saying that his iPad was a “personal possession,” and that he was only opposed to “private property.” (See 4:40 of the video) The show also discovered that the OWS leaders were holding their decision-making meetings in the lobby of the Deutsche Bank! away from the hoi polloi. The segment demonstrates nicely that the OWS movement is essentially elitist, despite its socialist facade. Who has the leisure to spend months camping out (with expensive camping gear) in the park  except modern aristocrats? The socialist opposition to private property, apart from its moral self-righteousness, is really only the desire to appropriate the private property of others. When my students start proclaiming the justice of socialism, I can only wonder, where are the angels who will govern and inhabit this utopia? (I was informed that the state will “wither away,” magically leaving no need for government.)  Are we really willing to trust the government to distribute wealth fairly and produce an “ideal society”? Who will get to decide what exactly constitutes the “ideal”? And who will pay for it? The latest issue of The New Criterion has an important article by Kevin D. Williamson (“Everybody Gets Rich”) in which he comments:

The welfare state isn’t a very good buy. The average Social Security benefit runs just over $1,100 a month—peanuts, hardly enough to keep you in cut-rate butter once your median rent of more than $800 has been paid. For that, you’re taxed 12 percent of your take- home pay. Compare that to this: A married couple, each earning the minimum wage, investing only 10 percent of their earnings at a modest 7 percent return, retires with an annual income of more than $100,000 a year—even if they never touch the $1.5 million principle they’ll leave to their children. President George W. Bush was mocked for calling his proposal to cultivate such minimum-wage millionaires the “Ownership Society,” but it was the most important initiative of his presidency.

And even the entitlement system we have now is unsustainable for more than a few more years at most. Ultimately, people vote their self-interest. Government union employees and welfare recipients will vote Democratic because they hope to benefit financially. But that’s actually short-sighted, because our attempt to create an ideal society of wealth and equality is leading us to a financial crisis of epic proportions. Read Williamson’s article. Government exists to protect our liberty, not to enslave us to a socialist pipe-dream that’s more elitist than the aristocracy we left behind in Britain so many years ago.

The problem with liberalism as it exists today and political correctness in particular is that it truly is a slippery slope. As Eric Gans has pointed out, there’s no conceivable reform that could satisfy the OWS protesters. And it’s the same with multiculturalism, feminism, animal rights, environmentalism, and gay rights. The great advances we have made in the last 50 years have only resulted in more discontent and escalated demands. Modern liberalism is an existential condition that will suffer no remedy. Samuel Beckett’s comment about the “syndrome known as life” applies well:

“I greatly fear,” said Wylie, “that the syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation. For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse. The horse leech’s daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum cannot vary.”

The OWS movement has staked its existence on the issue of inequality of wealth, as evidenced by the “we are the 99%” slogan. The issue of equality goes very deep; the most powerful political movements of the modern era are based on the rhetoric of equality. Indeed, our sense of equality is originary and constitutive of human consciousness as mediated by language. We have a virtually instinctive sense of reciprocity; when our contribution is not reciprocated, we do not need anyone to teach us to feel upset. Eric Gans is the first thinker to place a solid anthropological foundation under this basic human intuition, by recourse to his originary hypothesis.

A 30-something member of my family suggests that OWS is a generational movement, but it is supported by many of the older generation, including, notably, the leaders of the Democratic Party including President Obama, even if they don’t themselves camp out in the public square. The differences between the two political parties have thus perhaps never been so starkly set out. The Democrats have become the party of the government redistribution of wealth, while the Republicans still believe in the free market (“capitalism” in the idiom of OWS) as a valid means for the production and just distribution of wealth.

The Democrats have quite explicitly defined themselves as the defenders of Medicare and Social Security—which no one can deny are forms of welfare, a redistribution, moreover, which generally benefits the more wealthy at the expense of the less wealthy—as well as public employee unions and union “rights,” large and powerful special interest groups which have cannily skewed the government budget process and burdened our children with debt for generations to come.

The pernicious influence of public employee unions upon the political process makes the lobbying efforts of large corporations look amateurish. Public employee unions are by definition monopolies, and the union fees which are automatically deducted from each employee’s payroll check serve to feed a huge political machine. Those public employees who negotiate with the public employee unions have no incentive to drive a hard bargain, since the government has no bottom line of profit to worry about, and the ability to tax is virtually unlimited.

The Democrats also position themselves as the thoughtful and educated party who care about the environment and the rights of minorities. One thing the Democrats cannot do is claim any larger economic benefit to their program, since unemployment has remained high despite the enormous power Obama wielded during his term, especially the first two years.

Yet unemployment is and should be the main issue of this campaign, since it is the direct result of the government redistribution of wealth, not only by Democrats but also Republicans more eager for re-election than for making hard choices that require time to bear fruit.

The problem is that the government does not itself produce wealth; it can create a limited number of jobs; but such job growth is not sustainable, not efficient in actually producing anything, and must be paid for by the taxpayers. All the government can really do, economically, is to take money from one pocket and put it in another, or borrow against younger generations and ransom our future to the foreign nations who are our largest creditors. Economic growth is created by people and businesses which produce items or services for consumption. The government’s role in this process is to protect private property and prevent monopolies.

The Government must also, of course, protect individual rights; and this is what the OWS movement has staked its claim upon. Rights lead us into the realm of justice. For OWS, inequality is prima facie evidence of injustice. But equality of rights, it bears repeating, is not the same thing as equality of outcomes; inequality of wealth is in fact no evidence of injustice. When the Government intervenes in order to redistribute wealth it violates its own “prime directive,” which is to protect private property. By breaching this essential function, it actually discourages the creation of jobs and wealth. Until America is willing to make some hard choices that may be painful for a great variety of special interest groups, then job growth will suffer.

What the Democrats are banking on is that virtually everyone today belongs to a special interest group that benefits from government spending. But we have apparently reached the tipping point in our economic evolution, when Government intervention becomes ever-more-clearly counter-productive, benefiting a disproportionate few at the expense of the productive many. This is the irony of OWS; the redistributive policies they advocate can only produce further economic stagnation and suffering.

I should clarify that I am not opposed to welfare as such. An economically and morally advanced society like the US has an obligation to help its citizens from abject poverty and suffering. The vast majority of government largesse, however, does not fall into that category. Attempts to help the so-called disadvantaged encourage not only corruption, they also end by “enabling,” to use the language of psychology, the behavior or condition they are designed to change.

Politics is the establishment of an arena in which actors compete perpetually, but with distinctly marked victories and defeats determining the power to make and implement laws, before a qualified audience (qualified in the sense of allowed seats in the arena, so to speak, and in the sense of being the arbiter of victory), and without violence. The space in which politics is set is sacred, in being both commonly held and inviolable—state houses, houses of presidents, public squares, etc. Sovereignty is the defense of the line qualifying the actors and audience. Politics can be distinguished from rule, or tyranny, by the competitive nature of the struggle and the actor-audience relation. Politics is most effective when the actors represent cleavages within the audience and reflect upon the meta- or constitutive rules governing the political space itself. Politics evokes other spaces or stages where members of the audience who consider themselves insufficiently represented can impinge upon or even swamp the central political space, as in civil disobedience and protest; the central political space can be overturned by revolution, which aims at instituting a new space; or destroyed by mobs, consumed by hatred towards any center. Politics presupposes the estrangement among social members and groups created by a market economy, while also drawing upon pre-political constituencies (and, therefore, gift economies) which, under pre-political conditions, might have resorted to other forms of score-settling.
My question is, do we need any or all of this? Politics provides a center for a market society that generates no center of its own—is that center a needed supplement or an obstacle to the free development of the market order? Politics provides representation to ethnic groups, economic groups, religious groups that might otherwise be unable to negotiate with each other over social rules of interaction—does politics, then, provide a necessary safety valve for resentments felt by these groups, or does it maintain them and their reciprocal antagonisms in an artificial way? Have we committed some unpardonable sin condemning us to French Revolution re-enactments in perpetuity? What are the issues that everyone in some more or less arbitrarily delineated territory all have to discuss in such a way that even the disappointed can ratify the final decision made? Can we be sure there are any such issues, or does the central political institution itself generate them? Does, or can, politics even work this way anymore: does politics effectively aggregate the beliefs and assumptions embedded in various social divisions so that the majority of citizens can imagine their views and interests are addressed? If not, is the weakness of politics endemic to the institution, either in general, or at this point in history; or is this ineffectiveness something that can be fixed? Obviously no answer to these questions will in itself recommend a particular course of action—even if one concludes that politics should be abolished, that wouldn’t tell one what to do next—for one thing, you would then have to ask whether we “can” do what we “should” or even “must.” At any rate, pursuing these questions should have some diagnostic value.
We could better formulate these questions by asking what kinds of spaces analogous to the political one a completely voluntaristic order would generate, and how they would parallel and differ from political spaces. Maybe I should consider it ominous that Marx’s observation that we should aim at making it so that social evolution no longer requires political revolution, on the one hand, and Trotsky’s Promethean portrait of a communist order in his Literature and Revolution seem to me helpful guidelines here, but I don’t. Trotsky, answering Nietzsche’s charge that communism would level all individuals to the egalitarianism of farm animals contended that, among other things, citizens of a communist society will stage heated, society-wide debates over systems of pedagogy—in a fully marketized order, in which we choose our own security service, our own insurance company, our own means of seeing to our children’s instruction, the legal forms of our own neighborhoods, so that titanic arguments over education, environmental, labor, foreign policy, etc., policies are irrelevant, then “social evolution” would likely involve things like demonstrations of different pedagogic methods and different methods of inquiry into all manner of things which would be made fully public for the sake of inviting people to sign up. The only difference between my approach and Trotsky’s is that he doesn’t say how the decisions about which systems are to be favored will be implemented and how people are to choose while I can assign such decisions and choices to the marketplace.
More challenging than the claim that we need to continue having such tedious discussions over the rules to be followed by unaccountable bureaucracies is the civic republican, Aristotlean argument that, due to our nature as social and political beings, we need to discuss in common the nature of the things we have in common (of course, this notion of politics is also the most distanced from and least descriptive of our current political institutions and habits). This is the same critique that worries about the market as enclosing each of us within private worlds, with our own TV shows, video games, two children and one dog, etc.—what else, other than politics, extricates us from these closed worlds and enables us to resist the tendency to view others as only strangers of more or less utilitarian value?
I think this critique of the market and privatization can be turned back by saying that the concerns adduced are less the result of the generalization of the market economy and more the result of the efforts made by the state to, on a generous reading, cushion the effects of that economy on all, and especially the most vulnerable, members of society. By introducing social security, universal education, socialized medicine, environmental, safety and labor regulation and so on, the state pre-empted efforts, already under way, to address these needs within civil society. If the citizens of a market society had to establish their own mutual aid societies, buy into private companies ascertaining the safety of consumer objects, deal with pollution as a property violation to be adjudicated in local courts, determine what form of education would best prepare their children to grow up and do all this themselves—well, then, it seems to me that we would have a great deal to do with each other and would be very far from isolated in impermeable private worlds. We wouldn’t have to argue about “education policy” because we could send our children to whatever school we wanted, but I would still be very interested in knowing what goes on in your school, probably much more so than I would be now because I could easily shift my children over to it. And your school would advertise its virtues, invite third party assessors in, offer free trial semesters, and so on—and we would establish newspapers, newsletters, webpages and so on discussing the virtues of the various schools, the pedagogical theories they employ, whether or not they favor one or another way of teaching history or biology, and so on. We would have to understand more about education than standardized test scores, since there would be no one to impose those, and institutions of higher education and employers might be more interested in finding out what students can actually show they know. And the discussions would extend far beyond the particular location—someone half a continent, or half a world away could get very interested in the pedagogical experiments we are engaged in. This would clearly be a better school of public virtue than what we have now.
So, what, if anything, would be lost of what we now think about as the “national community”? Is the drama of social life somehow vitiated? To put it more bluntly, is there anything to die for in such arrangements, and, if not, would that be intolerable? Is there some mode of freedom intrinsic to public life that would be lost forever? All these things, or our sense of these things, seem to me to be dependent upon a mandatory central stage, one which we are all obliged to attend to—one that makes decisions out of which we cannot opt out, passes laws we are obliged to obey, sends young people off to fight for all of us, etc. Such a mandatory central scene is modeled on the ecumenical empire: a central scene which flattens out or contains gift economies and local big men by giving all sites and ultimately all individuals a symmetrical relation to the administrative and symbolic center. If such a scene has a genuine nation as its content, why need we worry: all the overlapping institutions and exchanges which replace it will be imbued with the same national substance as the state, only with greater spontaneity. And if it doesn’t, then why should we be concerned lest some other communal content come to fill up the space? Because something will fill it up: exchanging knowledge of different schools and educational strategies, different ways of arranging for sickness and retirement, shared norms for the management of property in particular areas, plus everything we already have (clubs, children sports leagues, block parties, yard sales, parades, etc.) will certainly be given shared symbolic forms. And when, without the police and army to protect us, we have to arm ourselves and negotiate together with various security agencies (whom, we might insist, employ members of our community who will fight out of love and not as mercenaries), it will, in some as yet unknowable sense, be our homeland. Overlapping spaces will replace concentrated, centralizing ones, but the relationships they generate might be even denser.
Indeed, the notion of “overlapping,” which finds powerful expression in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, as well as in Michael Polanyi’s conception of scientific knowledge, provides a model of reality that undermines the imperial and metaphysical models organized around the experiential terms of inclusion/exclusion and transcendence/mundaneness. The center of one scene might provide the audience on the margin of another scene; being higher and having the broader view might not provide knowledge of the junctions between different scenes, which might be where the real action is. Anyone could have knowledge of and influence on others anywhere, but only as the signs of those other places or your own activity ripple through a whole series of mediating scenes. The traditional notion of dialogue, as a model for thinking and citizenship, also presupposes an enclosure—we might jettison that in favor of more unpredictable modes of communication, like Derrida’s dissemination or Jesus’s sowing of seeds; we might imagine our connectedness more along the lines of the children’s game of “telephone,” interested less in being understood and addressed directly than in the surprising twists and peregrinations taken by our words and actions as they pass through overlapping spaces. Such a conception need not be naïve or utopian at all—having a dense network of antennae sensitive to viral and parasitical elements identifiable by their demand that we all participate on their mandatory scene, should make us quick in detecting and forceful in meeting threats.

Economism has always been associated with reductionism—in the case of Marxism with the assumption that all social and cultural practices could be read directly off of the class position of the agents, or a particular moment in the development of the productive forces, disregarding the mediation of politics and ideology and so on. Similar critiques are easy to make and are therefore often made of what is often derisively referred to as “free market fundamentalism”—a decontextualized, one size fits all, academic application of theories that arrogantly ignore local conditions like bribery networks—and so on. The extension of a single conceptual framework to reality need not empty already active descriptions of their meanings, though—theory can dwell in and enrich the terms already in play and suggest new uses for them. Economic terms, in particular, are economical: there is always scarcity, no matter how much we have, an insight reflecting the mimetic and constitutive nature of desire. Economies are always economies of attention: we exchange signs, like glances in the romantic cliché, and the point of exchanging signs is to sustain joint attention in a human world where the alternative to joint attention is not, ultimately, mutual indifference, but violence. If mutual indifference concerns us, it is because the other’s attentions are not brought within the purview of my own, thereby depriving the world I inhabit of some of resources it needs to keep some space, populated by meaningful objects, in between us.

The problem with economism is when one economy is proposed as the model for all others, as when one analyzes the gift economy or the primitive egalitarian economy in terms developed to account for an advanced market economy—terms like self-interest and calculation. We similarly reduce reality when we assume that, in actuality, the more advanced economy subsumes the others—such reductionisms ultimately prove violent, because the continuing reality of other economies appears as a threat to one’s social order and, perhaps even worse, one’s theoretical model. There are many economies and they supplement and supplant each other in many ways. Aside from the ones I just mentioned, there is the Big Man economy, eventuating in the imperial economy, in which the margins pay tribute to the center which, in turn, paves the way for all sites within the imperial economy to turn toward the center. I think that today’s nation-state inhabits the vocabulary of the imperial economy in its more fully developed, but also decadent, ecumenical form, in which the central power represents a form of universalism in which all margins are invited to join, so long as they render their local economies innocuous. More precisely, the modern nation-state is situated in between the ecumenical economy and the Judaic resentment of that economy, a resentment which reconstructs that ecumenical economy as one under the sovereignty of God and looking forward to world conquest of the spiritual rather than territorial kind.

The Judaic economy is a gift economy internally and a market economy externally. The ecumenical economy involves a gift economy between center and margins, while allowing for the emergence of market relations among the margins—most simply, in such ways as coining money and ensuring the safe and easy passage of merchants. Jewish law enacts within the Jewish community the donation of the world by God to humans, and donation of the torah by God to the Jews, and of Jews to humanity. This last gift is knowledge of our common human descent from a single act of creation, knowledge which ultimately dissolves—not all at once, but potentially from the start—all boundaries to exchange between strangers, the antithesis to the gift economy, which operates among friends and rivals. Nations are powerful, meaningful, resilient and lasting to the extent they mediate in their inner and outer relations to these different economies.

It is clear that we can’t survive without an active and, in a sense, unsurpassable, gift economy. If the world is not simply given before we parcel it out and calculate the value of the rest, all that parceling and calculating is baseless, and reduces to sheer power. Within Lockean theory, the wealthy man deserves his wealth by virtue of having labored, organized the labor of others, showed more shrewdness and determination within a free system in which everyone else had the opportunity to join; in reality, if the wealthy man doesn’t know and show that he has been given more than he deserves and give to others in acknowledgement of that awareness, others will not respect and protect his property—he may as well have stolen it.

At the risk of over-generalizing, it seems to me that modernity—or, its most effective propagators—got something terribly wrong here. From the start, the emergent market economy was opposed to the gift economy, including its more specifically moral component, organized around the concept of honor. These more local and differentiated economies were to be extirpated. There may have been very understandable reasons for this approach, at least in practice: those local communities were likely those where practices which, from a citified, market-oriented perspective could only appear abhorrent, were most concentrated—where one found the most unjustifiable forms of inequality, superstition, and so on. I think the larger reason, though, is that, due to the fact that the gift economy had, due to the relatively advanced state of European, Christian social development, been incorporated within a new imperial and ecumenical economy—it was that imperial and ecumenical economy that was both the target and the model for the European secular revolutionaries, and they could only see the still vital (it’s still vital, for that matter) gift economy as a subordinate bulwark of those reactionary forces. Michel Foucault was right to say that the French Revolution took the absolutist monarchy it destroyed as its model, setting up the same kind of center-margin relationship (and De Tocqueville saw it in essentially the same way). (The Anglo countries tried a different, if also flawed, path to modernity, but it seems to me clear which model has had the momentum over the past three quarters of a century.) Indeed, the entire panoply of modern rights is composed of demands made upon the center, in the form of the state, to both protect citizens from each other and to restrain itself. The balance between the acquisition of the power needed to protect us from each other (and, increasingly, ourselves) and self-restraint in the use of that power was always a chimera, and in the meantime we have deprived ourselves of less fantastic and less resentful means of exploring the ways in which we would like to engage, converse, exchange, decide jointly, allow the other to lead, watch each other and be watched, and leave each other alone.

The only way that I can see to begin to restore the givenness of reality is to cease speaking in imperialese and ecumenicalese. Get into the habit of imagining solutions to problems through the clarification of private property rather than increasingly complex citizen-state relations; and of realizing that the state itself can be considered a bit of private property, held through some combination of conquest, delegation and, above all, the economy of the protection racket (which, to be fair, likely do often protect). It is very good to speak in terms of rights, but rights we can trace to a source in agreements we have made and realities we have tacitly accepted. I am suggesting that we learn to speak in ways so as to set in motion the withering away of the state. I completely reject the leftist resentment of most radical libertarians, who hurl charges of imperialism, oppression, atrocities, etc. at the U.S. government (and indirectly its complacent citizens) as readily and recklessly as Noam Chomsky. What I reject is the assumption, again, shared with the left, that the world would be a peaceful and harmonious place without us going around rearranging it to our liking. It’s not enough for Ron Paul to say that our foreign policy has become incoherent and often un-Constitutional and that it’s time for us to withdraw and address our own crises while letting others leave their dependency upon us behind—I might agree with that, if only out of the resentful desire to let the anti-Americans throughout the world get what they say they want. No—the Paulites need to claim that the only reason we have been in so many conflicts is because of our own illicit desire to meddle in the affairs of, dominate and exploit others—we get what we have coming, or, in the leftist vernacular used by Obama’s spiritual advisor, we shouldn’t be surprised if our chickens come home to roost. In the leftist resentment of the Paulites there is obviously a very attractive utopianism, this one based on the U.S. Constitution—the fear, I believe, is that if the world is simply full of evil or even just people with opposing interests, and as the most powerful player in that world we can’t help but be drawn into it, supporting some against others and thereby inciting the enmity of those others; in that case, we will never be able to come home once and for all and restore our constitutional order. If we are the guilty party, the snake in the garden, then restoration is solely in our hands.

But none of that matters very much. No more can sense of our world be made by assuming that the state can serve as a stable center holding us in place at the margins. There is no deliberation among citizens, which is then refined within our governing institutions, issuing in legislation serving clear, if controversial purposes, and putting forth transparent means for doing so. There are, rather, negotiations among the various cannibals of the common wealth—special interests constituted by the regulatory bodies of the state which in turn lobby to turn those regulatory bodies ever so slightly in their favor; a media machinery for spotlighting crises which require yet more state intervention; and citizens confronted with the choice between the promise of greater security now (and the implicit threat of greater insecurity) in exchange for less freedom later. Laws are no longer laws, but palimpsests of calculations by political parties, political donors, bureaucracies and lawyers—laws are designed to keep them all in business, the only business which is good right now. That’s the bureaucratic economy. The rights of citizens entail the ability to attach ourselves to one or another interest and have our complaint embedded in yet another regulatory layer. We could see all this as a deviation from the basic principles of liberal democracy, or a constitutional republic, but these pathologies could also be seen to follow, with great probability, from the reciprocal resentment between state and citizen built into the modern notion of rights.

For me, the first presupposition, something of an intellectual revolution for me, is that nothing done by the state needs to be done by the state—either it doesn’t need to be done at all, or it can be done by a private agency, hired by clients, or run by its stockholders. Social security and health coverage can be turned over to insurance agencies; defense and policing to private security firms, in conjunction with the insurance agencies. Hans Hermann-Hoppe lays all this out pretty well. I, at least, find the task of re-imagining state functions, especially the most entrenched ones, as privatized services, intellectually invigorating. For me, the hardest question has been what will replace the need we have for public displays, on a vast scale, of heroism, tragedy, responsibility or, more generally, representation—the need to see our collective relations to each other acted out in a coherent space, to be more than just strangers to each other. The need to have something we can call “history.” But, it seems to me that the answer here lies in what Jacques Godbout, whose World of the Gift has helped me to draw a lot of my thinking on these issues together, refers to as the “gift to strangers” he finds characteristic of the career of the gift in modernity. The traditional, or archaic, gift, excludes strangers; the market economy connected strangers, which is why the carriers of the market were strangers to all. But in modernity we gift to strangers all the time, through charity, blood and organ donation—even, as George Gilder argued thirty years ago in Wealth and Poverty, entrepreneurialism can be seen as a gift to others, one which one can never assume in advance will be reciprocated. In a post a while back I explored what I called a “politics of redemption,” drawing upon the notion of redeeming, or buying others from slavery. This politics of redemption, in turn, seems to me to overlap the “exodian” politics I have argued for more recently, in which one buys out one’s owner (the state, the ultimate owner of us all) and thereby lays the precedent for buying out others, redeeming them from less free communities. Seeing our social relations as a sum of gifts made to friends circling and encircled by gifts made to strangers generates a world that is given, but that must be accepted by each in his or her own manner. The extraordinary innovation of the modern market, the ability to benefit from exchanges with billions of strangers, need be impaired by this not one bit. Since there is no “logic” behind it, the politics and culture of redemption might leave us with no more History (the desire for which seems to entail a desire for its end), but with lots of little, less brutal, but nevertheless very engaging histories.

Most radically, at least for me, is the acknowledgement that such a world is a fundamentally pedagogical one. Both metaphysics and modernity, it seems to me, are highly suspicious of an originary, constitutive pedagogy, preferring the mania for equality in speech while the overt hierarchy of the pedagogical relationship is confined within institutions dedicated to a narrow understanding of “instruction.” But we are only equal in speech insofar as inequalities rotate—if I show you something now, that might enable you to show me something in turn. There is no act of communication that doesn’t involve such showing, and waiting your turn, and the at least momentary inequality it entails. Pedagogy generates economies of attention: it is the act of directing someone’s attention to what they have been attending from. It can be a tennis coach showing the novice something in his stroke that he wouldn’t have noticed otherwise, attending, as he normally does, from the racquet to the ball; it can be a critical theorist showing a colleague how the concepts they attend from to the portion of reality concerning them at the moment closes out other, potentially more interesting, ways of parceling out reality. Pedagogy is what preserves scarce joint attention as it lapses, takes on more participants, or shades into renewed appropriative desire. It is the gift of the scene itself, a scene the teacher establishes, or carves out of another, shaken, scene—and which the teacher in turn enters, with unknown results (what Freud called “counter-transference” is operative here, as our own tacit ways of knowing, what we attend from, might be exposed as well). Teaching is always a gift to a stranger, even if the teacher and student are close friends, because we are meeting on a yet to be generated scene of joint attention, and on that scene we will become different from what we are. Learning is to incur a debt that can only be paid forward, to other strangers, even if one of those strangers is the teacher himself. The pedagogical relationship points outward to what Charles Sanders Peirce called the “unlimited community,” as each practice learned is mistaken and modified along the way, and our faith that one’s contribution to the world of signs that will support human life indefinitely is as justified as it is unverifiable.

By now there can be no doubt that the Occupy Wall Street movement represents the opening of a new strain of American terrorism. There’s no way of knowing how extensive, effective and destructive it will be, but OWS is promoting, very forcefully, the idea that no means are out of bounds if your demands aren’t met. I haven’t seen anyone, even among conservatives, devote any attention to the name chosen by this group or “protestors”—why “occupy”? I have to assume it’s an allusion to the tactics of the student movement of the 1960s, whereby one “occupied” the President of the University’s office until one’s nonsensical demands were met. Or until you got yourselves forcibly removed. The point is to leave your antagonists with only those two alternatives: capitulation or the use of force, with the latter revealing one’s intrinsic, if often so well concealed, fascistic nature. It’s a bizarre model for a society wide protest movement, because while a university is a strictly delineated institutional space, how do you “occupy” a city? Or even a street? Such a movement must both fizzle out and spiral out of control, simply because it can have no sense of what its objects or objectives are—it is both absolutist and utterly confused. And we see both fizzling and spiraling going on right now, but the example has been set and it will be iterated—the going underground characteristic of the student movement of the late 60s, whereby the SDS became the Weather Underground, is likely to happen now in a much quicker and more stereotyped way. The OWS participants already assume that they are in the posture typically assumed by anarchist and terrorist movements: representing a vast (99%) but quiescent majority against a deeply entrenched and cynical (1%) minority. Obviously no dialogue can take place among the oppressors, oppressed and somnolent—the sleepers must be woken up by provoking the minority and their lapdogs (the men with arms and badges) to commit spectacular acts of violence upon the vanguard. Etc. The removal of what James Taranto has been calling the “Obamavilles” from American cities will simply prove once again that mere protest is irrelevant (and forget about electoral politics, given the betrayal of Obama and the big city liberal mayors). There is no way of knowing whether OWS presages a wave of domestic terrorism, but there is no doubt that it provides a rationale and template for one.

I think this item is worth a little blog post. Indeed, that people spend their time doing things like this is what sustains my faith in humanity:

Oulipo for the masses! This video of Rick Perry, made by a website called Bad Lip Reading, was a big hit on the conservative website HotAir, where I found it, and understandably so. The “rule” apparently being followed here is, as far as I know, original, and inspired: turn off the sound and read the lips of the speaker as best you, as an amateur, can. Seeing people’s lips move must have something to do with the way we understand them when we are speaking face to face, but I have no idea what, and it’s hard to imagine how you would factor that into a theory of language or speech. In this case, the first sound you “see” must tilt the rest of your “reading” as you simultaneously watch the lips and try to articulate the “sounds” that keep coming into intelligible semantic and syntactic packages. Little islands of sense emerge (I’m bored by famine”; “I cannot wait for a medieval cookie”) that, like the sentences in a Gertrude Stein poem, sound like they might refer to some internal language, unknown idiom or private joke, and that we can get maybe half-way towards understanding. If you scrupulously balance actually looking at the lips with your attempt to compose, though, the sense will never coalesce beyond a certain point. Meanwhile, the same thing happens on the side of the listener: your own tacit insistence that lip movements match sounds (we all get distracted, at least a bit, I assume, by dubbing in foreign language movies) leads you to “see” Perry saying what the translation has him say (even though, obviously many other “readings” were possible) and to line up what he does say with his “character” with all kinds of ironic results (as when he asks the construction workers, in a moment aimed at highlighting his masculinity, to build him a doghouse). And it also seems to me that it gives you a fresh look at Perry’s gestural idiom, as his gestures, postures and movements are detached from the specific words that always subsume one’s gestural idiom.

I mentioned the video’s popularity at a conservative website where Perry is as popular as any of the other candidates or prospective candidates (excepting Palin, probably) for the Republican nomination to make the point that this is not just a way of making fun of Perry. How could it be—it’s not the kind of pointed, tendentious and (to me at least) tedious satire directed that way by Jon Stewart and others. We all know full well that any of us would come out this way if the same operation were carried out on a video in which we were figured. It might highlight vulnerabilities and incongruities in Perry’s character or campaign that one might not have noticed otherwise—it is a mode of inquiry, or a discovery procedure in that sense. But it might also show up potential strengths, and even moments of beauty that one would thereafter associate with Perry, as with the title of this post, a line which for me endearingly combines the down home informal, macho and fighter pilot elements of Perry’s persona.

I feel, then, a bit vindicated in my arguments for the anthropological and political importance of “originary mistakenness.” Maybe we will get to the point where no candidate for public office would even consider not having one of these made and where privately made versions will be obligatory on our facebook pages—where, that is, they become a kind of post-millennial signature, marking our shared dependence on linguistic indeterminacy.