GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

In his Chronicle of Love & Resentment No. 531 (January 14, 2017), “Paradox and the Sacred,” Eric Gans reminded us of the centrality of paradox to all things human. Mimetic structures are themselves paradoxical: the model becomes the rival. All representational systems, all representations, are paradoxical—we construct the reality we refer to by conferring a significance it wouldn’t have in itself and yet which must precede us. For Gans, the paradoxicality of representation is tied up with representation’s constitutively ethical character—we represent in order to defer violence, which means we must at least allude to, as a possibility, that violence. In speaking about things in the world, we refer, directly or indirectly, to the shared attention that makes it possible for us to think about things in the first place. Even more, Gans takes the further step of identifying culture with the reconciliation of communities to the “paradoxical nature of the human.” In that case, we can proceed, in the interests of conceptual economy, to view all cultural forms as means of embedding the paradox of the human in the materials of specific human traditions, for the purpose of sustaining those traditions as modes of deferral.

Paradox is constitutive of power and sovereignty as well, a point of supreme importance for absolutism. Power is located at the center—whoever occupies the center is powerful. If we attend to some object that is both attractive and repellent (a source of desire and therefore danger), that object exercises power over us (it holds us in place, first of all). The power of the object is exercised by proxy by whoever has brought it to the attention of others in its specifically powerful form; whoever does this has disciplined himself sufficiently to see the object in a way others haven’t—as a novel source of power, rather than an appetitive object. This is what, in my previous post, I called “centered ordinality”—someone “re-presents” the object in a new way and that new way of addressing it is transmitted, shaped and “standardized” as it is appropriated by the group. In a primitive community (this is a way of defining “primitive community”) this power cannot be monopolized or formalized—it is seized and exercised opportunistically and provisionally, e.g., by shamans, or whoever is best or bravest at something in a given situation. Eventually though (and this is a way of defining “civilization,” or at least its precondition), the center is occupied by an individual who has been first enough times or enough ways to embody a more generalized pre-eminence: priest, warrior, elder all in one. Paradox, meanwhile, not only presupposes a center but generates centrality: insofar as, to follow Gans, the founding paradox is the self-inclusion of the representation itself in what it represents, the elaboration of a paradox is something like the continual generation of eccentric circles.

The paradox of power is that it is possessed insofar as others acknowledge that possession as preceding their acknowledgement. Power is both a priori and provisional, a location and its occupant. To imagine overthrowing the occupant is to magnify the location; attacking the location involves criminalizing the occupant and mythologizing the champion who would do the deed. We could all imagine the acts that would cause the possessor of central power to lose that power: he leaves undefended what he has pledged to defend, has transgressed the rituals he is anointed to preside over, he fails the community over and over in times of crisis, etc. We could imagine that none of this would make any difference in a community that maintains faith in the leader: his leaving the community undefended is a long term strategy for routing the enemy, or a way of saving the souls of the community members by sacrificing their bodies; his violation of ritual is a higher form of obedience to divine instructions; his failures are really those of the community, who must “redouble” their faith in their master, and so on. In this case, the community may cease to exist, as they would likely be conquered and enslaved, dispersed or massacred—and yet, they would leave deposits of new forms of paradoxical thinking that might yield fruit in a more complex order: sometimes bodily suffering must be undergone for the sake of the “spirit,” sometimes rituals do need to be renewed, sometimes short term failures need to be seen as necessary for long term success, and sometimes the members must confer the very strength they attribute to the leader. These fairly commonsensical maxims are embodiments of paradox—it’s not too hard to imagine communities for whom “no pain, no gain,” for us a tired cliché, would be astonishing and nonsensical.

We could also imagine that these failures and transgressions of the leader would be viewed more “realistically,” and the leader viewed in comparative terms alongside others who might do the job better—an “assistant,” or rival, or leader of some neighboring tribe or nearby empire. In this case, the group’s “faith” in their leader would be less “perfect” than in our previous example: they would be seeing the leader as occupying a position that transcends him, rather than identifying him with the position. On one level, this seems like the more mature and enlightened approach, and it would certainly prevent the suicidal behavior of the “naïve” community—at the same time, though, this approach implies a kind of ethics of suspicion of any leader, and could easily lead to the attribution of faults where none are to be found, leaving the community vulnerable to unscrupulous rivals of the leader, demagoguery, etc. This more “skeptical” approach to power would leave its residue in now familiar maxims as well, in this case regarding the abuses of power, the perils of ambition, and so on—but also to analyses and fantasies of a deeper form of power that can create a form of surface power radically different than the one we so resent. The more power we see flowing to and from the center, the more we see ourselves as constituents of power, essential and marginal, entitled and unworthy.

A “high” culture is one with a high tolerance for sustained paradoxicality, from which tolerance flows all of the intellectual insights that make moral, esthetic and historical knowledge possible: we are all sinners and yet/therefore we might all be saved; we are nothing and we are the jewel of creation; in terrible, soul-crushing defeats we find the seeds of future victories; in present victories lie the seeds of future defeats; the seemingly insignificant can be of great moment and what consumes us now might be forgotten tomorrow; and so on. Only central power makes this tolerance possible: we might hate, fear and even despise the sovereign, but we will only attain self-mastery by interposing between ourselves and any action predicated upon those feelings an awareness of everything the sovereign must know that we don’t and can’t, of the consequences of others, ultimately everyone, acting upon similar feelings, of the fact that all of us who hate, fear and despise the king do so for what will ultimately be incommensurable reasons, and so on. The more we imagine lapses and defects in sovereign power the more anticipated consequences of seeking to exploit those lapses and defects lead us to self-cancelling efforts aimed at supplementing them by contextualizing and recuperating their consequences within our own spheres of activity. If we do so effectively and properly, they will have turned out not to be lapses and defects after all. We donate our resentment to the center, so to speak. Only such an attitude toward central power allows for the social scene as a whole to be made present before one. As soon as you throw in your lot with those dividing power, who must present sovereign power as limited and parochial, and must therefore project some imaginary mode of sovereignty to be realized in a more perfect future, in which all the partial and scattered views somehow totalize themselves, you initiate a catastrophic lowering of tolerance for paradoxicality and hence of high culture. Insisting that the integrity of your particular position is an essential element of some body of knowledge to be collected impersonally and revealed in the indeterminate future leads you self-sanctify that activity and therefore to cultivate intolerance toward paradox.

To maintain high culture in the midst of a lowering culture, then, is to increase tolerance for paradox. Gentle, absolutist persuasion can consist of injecting little and yet lethal doses of paradox into paradox-intolerant strains of thinking. The liberals, leftists and progressivists, i.e., the anarchists, believe firmly in their own implicit version of an absolutist sovereignty, one that would smite with a flourish of righteousness the representatives, even dimly aware, of right order. That they are so certain about who is inside and who is outside, who is “decent” and who is a “Nazi,” without ever being able to identify the source of this certainty, is the great paradox of totalitarian anarchism. But how do you imagine the tiny particle of your own activity adds up to a future with fewer Nazis and more decent, tolerant people like you? If you can imagine it there must be an order that allows you to predict the outcomes of your activities—what is that order, then, and how is it sustained—how does your activity sustain, rather than erode it? If you can’t imagine it, why do what you do? Is there anything more than the tautology that lots of people doing what I do will lead to a lot more people doing what we do? There’s nothing more here than a virality necessarily oblivious to the paradoxes it produces in abundance—and full of hatred towards those who expose them.

Language is the best example of how, in Michael Polanyi’s words, “we know more than we can say.” Most of our linguistic knowledge is tacit, and the semantic distinctions built into the myriad grammatical constructions we know we know not how represent ages of thought and practice so that, to the extent we could credit an individual for this or that innovation, we could only do so by identifying a tiny wrinkle within a massive, ever-changing system. Moreover, language frames reality for us, with each language doing so distinctly, with translation a far more complex matter than it appears. Anna Wierzbicka, in a series of books in the ethno-linguistic tradition on the way modern English constructs reality, shows that entire semantic domains, organized around words like “fair,” “sense” (“sensible,” “good sense,” “common sense,” etc.), and “experience” are without equivalents in other languages (Wierzbicka traces all of these semantic domains to the empiricist revolution summed up and popularized by John Locke). In an analysis that uncannily and no doubt unintentionally parallels critiques by Alexander Dugin and others of an Anglo-centric world view imposed imperialistically on the rest of the world, Wierzbicka shows how the emergence of English as the global commercial, scientific and communicative lingua franca displaces native ways of thinking and presupposes without basis the universality of these specifically Anglo concepts (when someone says that “we learn from experience,” he is speaking Lockean English, or “Lockese,” not making a universal claim about the human condition). At the same time, Wierzbicka claims very convincingly, based on empirical (another untranslatable Anglo concept) evidence (there’s another), that we can identify what she (and her colleagues) calls a “Natural Semantic Metalanguage”—a group of words, numbering no more than 200 or so, that we can find in all languages (so far). Wierzbicka uses this NSM to provide a method of translating concepts from one language to another, in what might serve as a kind of Star Trekian universal translator or virtual linguistic UN (far more benign and efficient than the actual one).

Still, while calling the NSM vocabulary “semantic primes” Wierzbicka does not claim that the NSM constitutes the actual original language that humans spoke before Babel—such a claim would presuppose some kind of universal cognitive apparatus that somehow pre-existed language, and where would such an apparatus come from? It’s far more likely that the NSM is a sediment of words/concepts that would have started off far richer and more idiosyncratic but ultimately got worn or pared down (“bleached”) through usage to words/concepts like “say,” “think,” “happen,” “see,” etc. The best proof of this is the absence of any word for “God” or “sacred” in the NSM, since language is inconceivable without such a word. It must be that the various words for “God” and “sacred” never shed the residue of the ritual practices and occasions in which they have been embedded to become identifiable as the “same” word across languages according to Wierzbicka’s exacting standards. It is impossible to imagine language originating with propositions, even the seemingly simplest ones, like “food over there,” because there is no way to construct a plausible scene in which one person could say something like that and be understood when saying it for the first time. Language, as Eric Gans has shown, could only have originated as an ostensive sign, pointing to a desired object in order to renounce direct, unilateral appropriation of that object—in such an event, we can imagine all participants on the scene repeating the sign and “understanding” (the term is somewhat anachronistic here) it to refer to this most desired and yet/therefore forbidden object. Such an ostensive sign must remain untranslatable (while being iterable) since it only means something when and where it is produced publicly.

All languages are different, then, because they have all developed their unique ways of articulating centers and peripheries in myriad ways. Language is first of all about inter-human relations, not relations between things, but relations between humans require that objects stand in between us as centers around which we congregate. Language quickly comes to generate its own centers, as meaning is attributed in increasingly less urgent situations. To learn a language is to master a system of comprehending bodies and concepts in relations to each other—relations between “inside” and “outside,” “part’ and “whole,” “high” and “low,” “life” and “death,” human and other, and so on. We can sum this mapping of reality through social relations as “centered ordinality” (I mean no mathematical reference here): in any event , someone goes first, and being first means indicating the center around which activity will revolve, someone must go second (confirming and “standardizing” the initial gesture), third, and so on (although I suspect that once we get past the third we will see diminishing analytical returns—we can place lots of people in the “third” category—and can just conclude the order with “last”). Centered ordinality accounts for hierarchically ordered and yet reciprocal social relations (the first must attend to the second, who is attending to the first, and so on), whether those manifested in consensually recognized pre-eminence in informal settings, or in complex and organized institutions.

Needless to say, you can’t “disprove” a language—you can’t show, for example, that English “misunderstands” the relationships between bodies and objects, even if, of course, that understanding will be at odds with scientific ones. We develop more specialized discourses (akin to dialects) within languages all the time, though, because disputes over the meanings of words lead to meta-linguistic discussions requiring the reworking of domains of language, and disputes over the meanings of words follow from interaction between different communities and discourses. Such metalanguages derive from remembrances of the originary scene, in which the centering ordinality of the originary scene can be used as a model for confronting some present disorder within the community. Philosophy is among the oldest such meta-linguistic discourse, beginning with Plato and returning with the logical positivists, Wittgenstein, deconstruction and others to the examination of what and how words mean. Philosophy goes wrong insofar as it considers itself to be correcting language rather than elucidating and extrapolating from the knowledge already accumulated there—as Gans has pointed it, in doing so, philosophy presupposes that concepts can be understood outside of language. To consider yourself outside of language is to consider yourself outside of traditions. When we “prove” things, we do so within and on the terms of a particular discourse, the institutional organization of which is a “discipline.” So much argumentation, political and otherwise, is wasted time because they take place across discourses with incommensurable rules for determining relevance and truth—and even those within a particular discipline can never be completely aware of the rules they “play” by.

What we can do, and which might be more useful than insisting on a specific meta-language that would provide for universally agreed upon forms of adjudication of truth claims (a kind of philosophical version of the “rule of law”), is enter and learn to speak one another’s languages. As mimetic beings, we already do this as a matter of course, both in everyday life and in heated political discussions, where we see the right and left regularly “appropriate” the other’s terms and use them against their enemy. Indeed, the left regularly advances through the right’s attempts to turn words like “equality,” “liberty,” “racism,” etc. against the left, thereby making the words common coin. Learning to speak the other’s language does not imply compromise or reconciliation, although it could be an understated way of approaching these goals—it could just as easily be a means of emptying or undermining the other’s language through implicit satire, parody, and exhaustion. Making the other’s words useless, or useful in unanticipated and undesired ways is far more effective than trying to prove those words, or statements using them, to be false. This “multilingualism” does not reject two very valuable linguistic strategies of traditionalists and conservatives: first, tracing the history of words, very often transformed in modernity, so as to recover their prior, ideally original meanings; and, second, dismantling the seeming obviousness and permanence of widely used terms by pointing to specific moments when they were invented or radically transformed. Political language learning would draw heavily upon such strategies, only not merely to “debunk” or buttress an esoteric political discourse (which are fine, as far as they go) but to interfere with and redirect those words in their current circulation.

The “better” or “truer” political discourse, then, would not be the one best able to withstand some arbitrarily determined logical or empirical scrutiny—“logic” is only a way of manipulating terms you already have, without accounting for why you have them; while no one has ever come anywhere near devising a means of empirically determining the truth of a political discourse—no one would even be able to coherently say what counts as a correct “prediction” in human events (what would count as a “control group”?). The truer discourse is the one that can generate new forms of reference within existing discourses, and enact paradigm shifts within those discourses. In the process, whatever discourse you started from is transformed as well—as you “hack” other discourses your own is getting hacked as well, and it will emerge from the process stronger or weaker, but certainly different. And the way you know you need to transition to a new linguistic paradigm is that you come across one that answers or at least formulates questions that the linguistic order in which you are presently steeped cannot, while indicating an inarticulate need to do so.

My own meta-linguistic starting point is Eric Gans’s originary hypothesis on language origin, grounded in its own tradition of Rene Girard’s mimetic theory, itself grounded in and transformative of the sociological discipline organized around the work of Emile Durkheim and modern novelistic traditions among others (and the broader Christian tradition)—a tradition that is always renewed and within which new progenitors can be “recruited.” The originary hypothesis is a genuine hypothesis on how language emerged out of non-language, and therefore how humans emerged out of pre-humans—this empirical dimension, while making an unfalsifiable claim (we could obviously never obtain evidence of the event in which language was invented/discovered), is to be taken literally and seriously—but we can also see it as an answer to a very basic, inevitable question—why do words “mean”? What are we doing when we utter or hear a sentence? We imitate an absent someone who resisted being swallowed up in his present by abstaining from the object of desire that pulled others in, making them all the same, and therefore unavailable for imitation—only language can make an absent someone present and thereby enable us to resist the mimetic, centripetal pull that would render us identical and therefore mute. All the words and sentences and discourses that have come down to us have been transmitted, remembered and commemorated, by those who, however minimally, created “presents.”

In this way, originary thinking can be seen as a way of making language work, or doing things with words, recalling language to its originary function of deferring violence. As I have suggested in previous posts, the intrusion of the Big Man into history, replacing the ritual center with the sovereign center, introduced a breach in the human community and, we can now say, language, by creating permanent hierarchies and therefore specialties—once there is a sovereign there is, at the very least, something like “official” discourse (a metalanguage on the discourses regarding the sovereign center), distinct from “popular” discourse.” All “high” culture—philosophy, theology, literature, etc.—works to repair this breach so we can reap its benefits: high culture remembers the originary scene by generating centered ordinalities implicit, but not necessarily recognized, in existing hierarchies. It’s a search for the worthiest predecessors as they are sedimented within language. Wierzbicka’s Natural Semantic Metalanguage, which should be seen as genuinely philosophical, provides a means, for the patient, of translating between all languages and identifying where such translations are needed. The metalanguage of originary thinking is a means of entering any discourse and “practicing” it as an articulation of hierarchies and reciprocities at the peak of which can be posited a position for the one who will be worthiest of imitation in the creation of an extended and continuous present.

The political hypothesis I derive from this tradition, in intersection with the absolutist tradition in politics, is that all discourse is in search of a secure sovereign center. The traditionalist who bewails the absence of traditional norms and the chaos of contemporary morality and the anarchist who celebrates the endless dispersal of practices, attitudes and “memes” share the same search. The traditionalist might be looking for the hidden king while the anarchist believes that with sufficient centrifugal force a shared elemental humanity will rule through tacit consensus, but each imagines a center—the anarchist must imagine some source of imperatives that warns members of his (or xir) utopia against selfish acts that infringe on the rights of others, and that source must be unitary and consistent—and, it must be embodied by someone, even a “provisional” sovereign, who would point out when one has crossed a line. In learning the language of others, the absolutist generates a new referent, the absolute sovereign, that enables whatever can cohere in that other discourse to cohere. In this way we effect a confluence of traditions, into the absolutist one. The most productive form of political discussion, after all, would be one that starts with the hypothesis of all of us partisans laying down our arms, imagines one person with the power to adjudicate all disputes, and then proceeds to clarify how he might do that. Further questions follow from that opening hypothesis: Which institutions would actually exist without political partisanship? What disputes would emerge within them? How would the metalanguages of those institutions undertake to resolve those disputes? At what point would the sovereign intervene, and how might the function of the institution, and all the differentiations within it, be restored? We are already inclined to such discussions when we talk about “issues”—should X be legal or illegal? Should we have more or less of Y? Such discussions are usually nonsensical, because they invariably neglect the myriad mediations that deflect a “policy position” from its initial formulation (we must have X) through its translation into legalese, its modification by all the special interests, its implementation by bureaucracies with their own interests and conflicts, in a social environment different than the one in which the policy was first formulated—that is, they neglect the reality of divided power. Such discussions only make sense on the assumption of a sovereign who can ensure that what he orders is commensurate with what is actually done—which would mean the sovereign’s orders are, and are limited to those that can be, converted directly into acts carried out by those positioned to do so. The same is true of more abstract concerns about culture and morality—how do we change such things? Well, either we talk a lot about it and hope for the best—or we imagine someone in power who can, for example, eliminate foundations that fund the propagation of new sexual moralities, or instruct schools to privilege the normal (which they would probably do without instruction if left alone by outside troublemakers)—in other words, in our talk we model a centered ordinality that makes sense of chatter that just serves to justify goldbricking. If humanity is, most fundamentally, centered ordinality (and thereby generative of fractal networks of centered ordinality) then all language is most fundamentally interested in identifying the center and aligning it with all the ordinal orders.

Formalist reactionary theory addresses the problem of divided, insecure and therefore incalculable power by proposing that all players in the social field be given, explicitly, “title” to the power they in fact exercise. So, the New York Times would be granted, say, the portfolio for communications, in which position they would oversee the Washington Post and the major networks, each of whom would in turn have lesser portfolios (perhaps they wouldn’t even need Senate approval); Harvard would be granted the education ministry, Chase Manhattan would run the treasury, and so on. This would eliminate in a stroke the fraudulent public/private distinction by acknowledging that power exercised is, simply, power. The very impracticality of this proposal makes it very useful as a thought experiment. The media and bankers “possess” the power they do in part because they are not officially sanctioned—being labeled the official state media would be the kiss of death for any media institution, even if we all know that that is pretty much what the major media institutions have been, almost explicitly so for the past 8 years. The same would be true for banks, universities, corporations, and so on. The power exercised by these institutions is, in fact, in flux, and therefore difficult to “entitle,”because they in turn delegate power to those they depend on (in the end, we can choose whether to read the Times or the Post, we can bank at a small credit union or buy gold, we can go to the state university rather than Harvard, etc.), which also means that in the end power does reside on some kind of genuine authority and excellence and Harvard can degrade its brand for only so long before its graduates no longer get the highest paying jobs in the most prestigious institutions and therefore people stop applying to go there. And officially designating these institutions as “official” would, under present conditions, accelerate the process of decline by encouraging complacency and arrogance.

It is the very paradox of effective power relying upon not being recognized as such that is made evident by “formalism” as a thought experiment. All forms of power under liberalism depend upon the musical chairs game of power—no one ever really does anything on their own authority. Even elected officials claim to act only in the name of the people, or defense of the constitution, or the rule of law. If any of these institutions were compelled to act in the name of the power they actually command they could no longer do much of what they do. This is because they all act in the name of undermining the power putatively unjustly exercised by others—each one purports to defend the people, the constitution, the law, the truth, etc., against some presumably illegitimate power. The media keeps an eye on the politicians and corporations, the government keeps an eye on the corporations and “usurpers” within other institutions, the schools teach you to be suspicious of everyone except for those telling you to be suspicious, the corporations liberate you from your confinements. None of them can be held accountable, except in the most indirect ways, with the seeming exception of the politicians—but even they have figured out a way of evading accountability by rotating out of official power into unofficial power as lobbyists and corporate executives. There are a lot of checks, but the only balance could come from a commitment to reciprocal relations within constrained institutions, and such commitment is discouraged by the ongoing subversion that meets the short-term interests of liberal institutions.

Uncertain power equals uncertain accountability. The NY Times, Chase Manhattan, Harvard, etc., strictly speaking don’t owe anybody anything—they can pick and choose the imperative they wish to obey at any moment, whether that imperative is some demand from a constituency, or stakeholders, or some principle of civic virtue, or emergency. (They have to be concerned with the law, of course, but as liberalism progresses, there is less and less reason to assume that the oversight and interventions of law enforcement concern actions that violate the core functions and responsibilities of the institutions themselves.) They will obey the imperative that increases their power relative to other institutions, which is accomplished by off-loading inconvenient consequences onto other institutions. A relative monopoly on power is acquired by instituting rules that you can impose on others but don’t need to play by yourself. Whenever anyone “critiques” these institutions, they are first of all demanding that the rules according to which they operate be made explicit and consistent; and, second, that those institutions play according to those rules. (The more radical critiques find even transparent and consistent adherence to the rules to be in violation of some meta-rule treasured by the critic, but even they have to convey such critiques through what the Frankfurt School called the “immanent critique” of existing institutions.) Such critiques, though, invariably end up seeking recourse by demanding some other, equally unaccountable institution, enforce the rules—why, after all, should any institution answer to critiques on its own terms? So, such critiques just accelerate the recirculation and unmooring of power.

Still, it is always very instructive to see these largely tacit rules get exposed, either by their open transgression or some other kind of breakdown. News organizations take it as a firmly established rule, for example, that they are immune from all the things they can do to you. They can investigate you, ask your college roommate or childhood best friend about your various proclivities; if you get on their radar screen, they can stalk you and stake out your house—but if someone publicizes the address of a reporter who does all these things they treat that as a virtual act of terrorism. The measure of their power is their ability to enforce the rule—they, in fact, cannot stop an online mob from showering a reporter with hostile emails and tweets, or even from organizing protests in front of their house, or following them around taking pictures all day long, etc.— but the media organization will probably be able to sustain this “exchange” far longer, and turn up the heat more intensely, then any of their targets. And if they can’t, that is just a sign that they have lost their power, and another institution will surely fill the vacuum. We already have long and more or less coherent set of rules for banks, universities, corporations, government, and so on, for their interactions with its clients or customers and between the institution and others. Consider various ways of breaking those rules to the advantage of those subject to the institution, along with the likely consequences of doing so, and you will have a measure of the power of the institution.

All relations are unequal—even in a simple, everyday conversation, one party sets the tone or influences the choice of topic more than the other; even if this changes in the course of the conversation, all that means is that the inequalities of the relationship are changing. What makes even the most unequal relationship reciprocal and therefore symmetrical is the sharing of rules. Now, to imagine a set of rules is to imagine a mode of sovereignty—someone who would, even if in the last instance, adjudicate in the case of disputes. Liberal politics likes to imagine that the last instance never comes, which entails leveraging the undecidability of any determination regarding the rules—from the liberal perspective, the more those who must decide upon the rules can be made subject to the rules, thereby establishing another adjudicator who can in turn be subject to dispute, ad infinitum, the better. This endless process enables to power to operate unnamed and unaccountably. Reactionary politics wants the levels of adjudication all named up. The more we know who adjudicates where, the better.

We might call the reactionary approach an attempt to make the map approximate the territory. Gregory Bateson’s admonition, issued in 1972, that “the map is not the territory,” rightly reminds us that we should not forget the constructed, historical and constitutive dimension of our conceptual orderings of reality. The Wikipedia page on “Map-Territory relation” helpfully connects Bateson’s maxim with Borges’s reductio ad absurdam of the attempt to match map to territory in his story “On Exactitude in Science”: “In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guild drew a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, coinciding point for point with it.” The attempt to codify every single power relation would look something like that—not just king-lord-serf, with perhaps a couple of other gradations in between but, if we were genuinely to start from scratch, an infinitely detailed and minute set of titles and prescriptions.

First of all, I put “liberal democracy” in scare quotes because I would like to defy anyone to give it a clear definition, and one that applies across the range of countries currently included under the label. (I have been trying—not that hard, admittedly—to discover when the term “liberal democracy” started to be used. The Wikipedia entry traces its “origins” to the “18^th century Enlightenment” but says nothing about when the phrase itself appeared.) A constitution (or “constitutional order”) which limits the power of government and ensures basic rights plus regular elections for at least national offices would, I suppose, do as a definition (although some people would want to throw “free market” into the mix). So, the Netherlands just convicted the leader of a major political party of “incitement to discriminate.” Is the Netherlands a liberal democracy? Bridget Bardot has been convicted, I think, 5 times for speech crimes against Islam for criticizing the way they slaughter animals. Is France a liberal democracy? Anyone will find it easy to multiply the examples, undermining the whole notion of “limited government” and “guaranteed rights.” We don’t even need examples: as soon as you guarantee a series of vague, abstract rights you will immediately proceed to generate exceptions. You have whatever rights the government doesn’t find it urgent to violate at the moment. You’ll be able to call it a “liberal democracy” as long as the government has a high threshold for “urgency” (and that will be because its elites are able to rotate in power without one section seeking to supplant another) but not a second longer.

But at least we have elections! In fact, not so much anymore. Leave aside all the usual discussions about the way choices available to the voters are managed oligarchically—that’s mostly done as a matter of course, through well-established channels, behind the scenes, and so as to leave a modicum of actual choice to the voters (although “Tweedledee and Tweedledum” complaints are perennial, and always at least 75% justified).  The 2016 election has transformed the electoral process itself, i.e., the actual counting and recording of votes, into just another arena of political battle. This has been in the making for a while—the Democrats contested the 2000 election, of course, and even, more abortively, the 2004 one; while some on the right (“birthers”) questioned Obama’s legitimacy and, closer to the mainstream, have been insisting (with very good reason) on the prevalence of voter fraud for years. In turn, the Democrats attack antifraud measures as “voter suppression,” and they can really go on about that. All this has been prepping the battlespace—each side gearing up to refuse to accept the results of an election. Now, these machinations have penetrated deeper into the system. Trump, of course, spoke of the “rigged” political process in a way that didn’t exclude, but didn’t necessarily highlight, manipulation of the actual process of collecting and counting the votes. The left has now taken the next step. First, they pushed, through the Green Party candidate Jill Stein (an obvious pawn of either the Clintons or forces behind the Clintons) a nonsensical recount. Second, they have fabricated the meme “the Russians hacked the election,” a meaningless phrase meant to scapegoat and delegitimate (a side note on the crazed anti-Russian hatred the left is now peddling: Russians are the perfect white hate objects: culturally conservative, isolationist, patriarchal, apparently still filled with unapologetically feminine beautiful women, indifferent to leftist emoting and, best of all, you don’t have to figure out a way to get 35% of their votes). Third, they are actually lobbying Republican electors who need to vote in order to officially confirm Trump’s victory, with their usual combination of high-minded platitudes (appeals to the “intent of the founders,” commercials with fake president Martin Sheen, etc.) and low-down skullduggery (attempts to intimidate and no doubt bribe the electors (Madonna’s pre-election promise should be much more manageable given the small number of electors who would need to flip)). The electors should at least be able to see the intelligence (ginned up by Obama’s political appointee John Brennan) regarding the “Russian hacking,” shouldn’t they? That would be quite a rule going forward—from now on, the electors must be apprised of all the intelligence regarding attempts by all actors, domestic and foreign, to influence the election. All of the attention of the political system would then shift focus to the selection of the electors, which no one has cared about in the slightest up until now (name one of the electors in your state), and contributing to “intelligence” regarding as many “hacking” agents as one can concoct. Perhaps a new reality show will result.

But there’s quite a bit more. Those on the left who see Trump’s victory as a coup are not completely wrong, and they have some support from the right—the Conservative Treehouse: The Last Refuge blog (more Tea Party than Alt-Right, and perhaps the best informed and most loyal pro-Trump site) has argued that Trump’s election does represent a kind of salubrious “soft coup,” arguing (far more complexly than I am here) that the Defense Department has executed a kind of secession from the other elements of the security regime, preserving a patriotic “America First” understanding of national security against the Obamaite (and beyond) corruption of the other elements of the security apparatus. Moreover, “white hats” within those other elements have rallied behind Trump, perhaps influencing the election in ways we are not aware of. No one has really explained James Comey’s reopening of the investigation into Clinton’s emails days before the election, and a kind of “soft-coup”-like pressure from with the FBI seems as plausible an explanation as any. We can’t know that much about all this maneuvering, but it does seem that different institutions within the government are ranging themselves against one another in an unprecedented way. (Let’s take it one step further—what if Putin really was trying to help Trump, in order to advance the “nationalist international” Clinton warned us of during the election—that would just indicate the emergence of one more player in the field and one global coalition to fight another. You can’t be a globalist and then complain about “outside interference”—what can be outside the globe?) One less-often noted characteristic of “liberal democracies” is that we take for granted that this is unthinkable, beyond inconsequential bureaucratic wrangling, and maybe a few discreet donations from Chinese billionaires. And this means that once we have to start thinking it, we are thinking outside of the bounds of liberal democracy. Hence the title of this post: you can only imagine yourself ensconced within a liberal democratic order to the extent that you don’t think about power. But once you start thinking about power, all the busyness of “liberal democracy”—we need to sharpen our arguments! We need to appeal to new voting blocs! We need to formulate policies that appeal across different social groups! We need to rebrand! We need to get our message out! We need funding for a new think tank! Etc., Etc.—seem like so many shadows on a cave wall. (And this is not even to address the revolt of the bureaucrats once Trump takes a scalpel to the various agencies—already, the EPA, like some snotty college president, is refusing to cooperate with the President-Elect and Congressional Democrats are offering support to those in the State Department ready to resist the new regime. Or the barely veiled threats behind the hysteria over “fake news,” or the ongoing anathematization of Trump voters and their preferred media. The disinformation campaign the intelligence agencies are running against Trump. And I had actually forgotten the post-election riots.)

Regardless of what one thinks of Trump, the terror he evokes in the entire establishment or ruling class, national and global (even those Republicans now claiming to support Trump give the very strong impression of biding their time) is worth noting. They are ready to expose the ugly innards of the system (to force us to think about power) in order to block him, and that can’t have been an easy decision (maybe it was just impulsive). The most productive way to think now is in terms of order and disorder. The ruling class is sowing chaos, while Trump is assembling a team of “white hats” (almost all from the upper political, military and especially economic strata—no academics, no one promoted from within) is trying to establish order. Just about every pick for his cabinet and staff so far seem aimed at providing him with a strong hand within the governmental and corporate institutions that most need to be de-weaponized. An Exxon CEO friendly to Russia; a Labor Secretary very knowledgeable of the way the EEOC keeps the illegal immigration scam going; an EPA head seemingly prepared to create a hostile environment for climate change fanatics; an Attorney General with a long history of insisting the immigration law be enforced to the letter—all, except for the women in somewhat marginal roles, seemingly “Alpha” males, like Trump himself, designed to trigger panic in SJWs. We can assume he will choose a combative press secretary, perhaps from the right wing talk radio pantheon. Trump seems to be adopting a strategy of baiting the opposition so that he can disable them when they expose themselves (what we now call “trolling”). Our somewhat befuddled but no less dangerous for all that rulers seem to be ready to bring the house down in order to stop Trump, and he may have to be ready to do the same to stop them. Maybe we’ll still be having elections when this titanic battle is over, but everyone will have a much clearer sense of where the real power lies, and meta-electoral concerns will diminish interest in the actual results (the more you can convince elected officials that their power is contingent on all kinds of things that are in turn contingent upon you and yours, the less power they actually have). The central theme of this election will be the central theme of Trump’s presidency: sovereignty. Who rules? This decision, this bureaucratic act, this latest delivery of Somali “refugees”—is someone’s fingerprints actually on it, or do we have to go down the rabbit hole where lie in wait foundations, agencies, donors, corporations, foreign governments, etc., to figure out what’s going on? As Colm Gillis says in his The Exceptionally Decisive Carl Schmitt, “politics is the art of counting up to one.” For the forces of order, at least—for the furies of disorder, politics is the art of counting down to zero, that is, of representing order as the source of disorder. It’s a thankfully simple binary to work with, and not one that accommodates the favored and decrepit concepts of “liberal democracy” (“rights,” “due process,” “balance of power,” “rule of law,” etc., all weaponized beyond retrieval).

How do we recognize the truth? A statement refers to something in the world, and we look at (or for) the referent, and see whether it is there. Or, we look at the different parts of a statement, and see whether one part negates another part. If all the parts of a statement cohere, and we are able to find the referent in the world, then we can certify the truth of the statement. This works if we know how to identify the thing in the world that corresponds to the referent—but that, then, relies upon prior statements being taken as true, and upon my having taken on faith another pointing to a referent (lots of referents, before I had any idea what they were, or that they could be separated from the shared observation) and confirming that I have successfully pointed at it myself. There is a relation of faith, a pedagogical relation, and a disciplinary relation involved here. I’m already systematically involved with others before claims about truth become possible. Also, the (metaphysical) approach to truth we are considering works if we banish paradox from the realm of truth, since a paradox is where one part of the statement negates another part. But statements themselves rely upon a paradox: we all see the same thing in our common orientation to truth because we have already affirmed the same thing as a common orientation to truth (which required some kind of common orientation to truth). As Eric Gans points out, this means that ethics precedes cognition: we have deferred violence by representing the desired object and thereby letting it be; only then can we talk “about” the object, and say true or false things about it. The paradox is contained within the ethical dimension as well: the deferred object becomes all the more desirable the more barred from appropriation it is. The beginning of ethics and truth is looking at what the other is looking at and showing the other I am looking at it alongside him. This is an extremely complex maneuver: I must correctly identify what the other is looking at, I must realize I am looking at it because he is, and perhaps he because of I (or some third), I must be able to convey a sense of the worthiness of the object as a locus of attention, I must demonstrate to the other that I am looking along with him and that what I take myself to be looking at is the same thing he takes himself to be looking at. Pretty much all of culture, or the order of representations, operates so as to ensure a sufficiently high level of success in executing this maneuver. We certainly don’t need to be aware of all these elements of representation in executing successful representations (in fact it’s best to be aware of only what distinguishes this representation from others), but anyone at any time may be obliged to attend to more of the representational situation than usual.

To point at something, the same thing, together, is to confer a name on the thing. Before truth, before agreement and disagreement, before arguments, there are names. The first human word, on the originary scene, was “God”—the name of the object that saved and established the community by withdrawing itself from appetitive aggression. A name already preserves the memory of the object as pointed to in common—naming and memory are inextricably bound up with each other. This also means that memory is shared before it is private, personal, or internal. It further means that even when memory is private, personal or internal, it is still shared, as Maurice Halbwachs pointed out in On Collective Memory—the most private memories are composed out of language, public narratives and the imagined gazes of others. Names can be changed and disputed—this happens all the time and is a well-worn means of waging cultural and ideological warfare—but only some names, while we continue to rely on the unquestioned reliability of yet other names. You couldn’t speak while suspending or undermining the meaning of every word you are presently using to speak; but you also can’t know which might get undermined at any particular time.

We ordinarily think of names as words referring to unique individuals—as serving an ostensive function. But declarative sentences are a way of naming as well. I will refer, as I have done several times in recent posts, to Eric Gans’s analysis (most importantly in Science and Faith) of the name that God provides to Moses, I Am That I Am, as “the Name of God as the declarative sentence.” The point here is that to give your god a singular name is to make it possible to invoke God—to enter into what we could call an “imperative exchange” with your god, in which you can bind him to perform a favor for you in exchange for a favor you do Him. The imperative exchange is embedded in a sacrificial economy: the subject demands more and more of God, as each form of salvation brings another form into view, and so God correspondingly demands more in return: in the end, the most treasured possession, i.e., your first born. The God whose name is the declarative sentence breaks the imperative exchange and the sacrificial economy not by demanding less of His devotees but by demanding more: by demanding all of you, all the time. You are to dedicate your life to exposing and resisting the imperative exchange and disengaging from the sacrificial economy, with its endless vendettas and scapegoating.

The declarative sentence is in the first instance an act of faith in the invisible. As Gans shows in The Origin of Language, the declarative emerges through the deferral of a demand for an object: the imperative is countered with a “negative ostensive” that “refers” to the object in its absence. The sentence works insofar as the interlocutors accept the present unavailability of the object and, in exchange, receive some information about the object—first of all that it’s not here, but, then, that it’s there, or that so-and-so is retrieving it, or that it doesn’t really exist in the manner you believe it to, etc. The declarative sentence was always the Name of God, as we can see if we consider that to make a claim about anything is to assume that some authority would, “in the long run,” be able to authenticate that claim, even if no such authority is actually available or imaginable in any concrete way. To utter a statement is to assume you and your interlocutors will be able to continue to speak and/or act in the way licensed by that statement (to look at something, to remedy some situation, to cease some activity), i.e., to understand it; to assume that is to assume something like a guardian of the shared understanding that allows for further discourse and action, i.e., God, even if He hasn’t been named yet and in a more conventional sense never will be. (It’s also worth pointing out here that in his inquiry into the genesis of grammar in The Origins of Human Communication, Michael Tomasello argues that the earliest declarative sentences—utterances beyond the imperative—concerned commentary on the reliability of other individuals as potential participants in common activity. That is, the earliest “vocation” of sentences was to establish reputation and authority—the very thing needed to authorize the sentence itself.)

All this is to fortify, not dismantle, the notion of truth. To speak the truth is to name God in the world in a way that deserves to be remembered. People properly disciplined away from the sacrificial economy and therefore toward what is resistant to our desires in the world would answer the question you are answering the same way you do. If we don’t want to speak of God we could speak (paradoxically) of “indirect ostensive authority.” The inherited metaphysical concept of truth that ultimately reaches its dead end in positivism eliminates the indirect ostensive authority and would have us focus exclusively on the clarity and indisputability of the reference, ignoring the question of how reference is possible. An originary understanding of truth includes the indirect ostensive authority in the utterance. All attempts to proclaim the truth do this—no one ever succeeds in subtracting from one’s utterance everything but the logically isolatable meanings of the words and sentences uttered; everyone relies upon internal and external echoes of other utterances, upon distinguishing marks of some relevant context, and even upon the sound-shape of language (patterns of sound, repetition, alliteration, rhyme, etc.), indeed, all features of language, written and spoken. Why pretend otherwise, then—a more multi-dimensional notion of truth would be more, not less, truthful, as it would more effectively gather its audience into a disciplinary space attending to the truth revealed there, rather than winnowing out non-specialists in accord with some institutionally determined method of presenting truth. And if something deserves to be remembered, you should do everything in your power to make it memorable.

Our intellectual exchanges, then, are attempts to retrieve and establish a shared hierarchy of names. R.G. Collingwood uses the term “dialectic” to refer to the process of converting disagreements into agreements. To refer to Reactionary Future’s recent “Monkey Shrieking Sophistry” post (while modifying the example), if I say that “capitalism” is an economic system based on private property and free economic exchange while you say that “capitalism” is a system of exploitation of wage labor, the disagreement may seem insuperable—how could we even be referring to the same thing? But there will be something on the margins of my definition that can be brought into alignment with something on the margins of your definition—if I can agree that exchanges between private property owners generate asymmetries in exchange, while you can agree to gradations in “propertylessness” and then we can at least achieve partial reciprocal translatability. If we can achieve partial, we can strive for more. Of course, new disagreements emerge as well—I might see gradations in propertylessness as a vindication of the capitalism system while you might see it as an impediment in the struggle against it, and hence to be undermined. (At a certain point, one of us will benefit more in cutting off the conversation.) Nevertheless, to achieve partial reciprocal translatability is to presuppose (name) indirect ostensive authority, and to assume indirect ostensive authority is to presuppose (leave open a space to name) a sovereign who is undivided to that extent at least. (That’s why one of us will cut off the discussion if the proportion between agreement and disagreement remains unfavorable to further dialectic—we will realize that we recognize different sovereigns. But to recognize the irreconcilability of sovereigns as an insuperable impediment to continued discourse is to acknowledge the need for undivided sovereignty. The system of names depends upon sovereignty and the hierarchies it oversees.) If there’s one shared human world that at least potentially contains all possible shared referents (we could never place an a priori ceiling on how much shared attention we could harvest), then undivided government that would prevent power struggles from multiplying disagreements at the expense of agreements is also possible. After all, the introduction of new power sources increases the interest in struggling over indirect ostensive authority and in subverting any shared and conclusive authority—it therefore aims at increasing the indeterminacy of language (it’s obviously no coincidence that theories asserting the indeterminacy of reference and undecidability of meaning proliferate as power multiplies (still, we can agree with deconstruction and other such theories regarding the interdependency of meaning and sovereignty)). It is therefore destructive of the most fundamental purpose of language, which is to Name God in the world, or preserve indirect ostensive authority. There will always be disagreements—they result from agreements—but we can come to agree that these disagreements are attempts to elicit further signs of indirect ostensive authority. The source of memorability is the enactment and display of this eliciting of agreement from disagreement. We can transcend resentments in a shared search for information from the sovereign center, or we can resentfully decenter authority and assail others’ efforts to affirm or restore it. We can work on ensuring that names become and remain part of the reality they name or, as nominalists, weaponize names in a war against shared reality.