GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

(For those who would like to comment on the GABlog specifically, I have set up reddit page: https://www.reddit.com/r/GABlog/comments/6kukdg/debts_and_deferences/)

David Graeber’s Debt: the First 5,000 Years adds a few decisive nails to the coffin of liberal economics and politics. Liberal economists imagine money and markets emerging out of barter; typically, they cannot show that anything like this ever happened, any more than social contract theorists can find an instance where that fictional event ever happened. Villager A doesn’t have too many chickens, while villager B has too many potatoes, and so A and B exchange chickens for potatoes; villagers C, D, E… n do not get in on the game, so that a certain point all the bartering gets too confusing so all must agree on a currency into which all values can be converted. All of this is ahistorical nonsense. Markets have historically been created and managed by states, for the purpose of maintaining ritual and military institutions. A fully marketized order, meanwhile, involves the violent disruption of personal and moral economies of credit (largely conducted without currency or calculation) and their replacement by debt regimes in which all of an individual’s possessions and the individual him/herself are alienable.  Traditional debt regimes, in which economies are always moral economies, presuppose the inclusion of everyone within the system—debts never completely expropriate the debtors. The market economy has everyone treating everyone else as outside of the system of obligations, as a potential adversary.

Graeber distinguishes between three forms of social organization. First, what he calls “communist,” using the definition from the Communist Manifesto, “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Graeber sees this as a kind of originary form of social relations, which we all live according to for much of our everyday lives—such a relation treats the world as a single, eternal, object/environment to which everyone contributes and from which everyone receives indiscriminately (if you’ve ever held open a door for elderly woman, you acted like a communist). The second form of social organization is “exchange,” in which things are seen as commensurable. The third form is “hierarchy,” in which there is no commensurability between objects and individuals, and obligations are set by precedent. The exchange relation is really the focus of Graeber’s book. He traces the disembedding of exchange relations from “communist” ones and this seems to take place through the intervention of hierarchy. Kings need armies, and so they need to pay their soldiers, so they produce coins in order to do so; those soldiers need to spend the money somewhere so tradesmen surround the military. Kings need to tax their subjects, so some way of measuring wealth becomes necessary; taxes can be set high enough so that subjects have to go into debt, which in turn makes it easier to appropriate their property. We need currency in order to pay such “antagonistic” debts. Now, part of what makes Graeber’s discussion especially interesting (in a way, it’s the starting point of his discussion) is the perplexing fact that not only is debt generally and unthinkably taken to be a moral question (“we must repay our debts,” everyone must get what is due him”) but that moral thinking more generally seems to operate primarily with a vocabulary drawn from that of debt (God has given us all kinds of things and we in turn are deeply obliged to Him; we seek redemption from the slavery of sin, etc.).

Graeber’s intention is primarily to debunk this language of debt, which he examines in a sustained way in his chapter on “Primordial Debt.” He discusses sacrifice, and makes the very interesting observation that in some conditions the main form of currency (the representation of value into which exchangeable objects can be converted) is some object or objects (like cattle) that are most commonly used for sacrifice. For Graeber, the moral discourse of debt is irrational, and the standard of rationality seems to come from “communist” morality. For Graeber, the communists he discusses are much more rational than those of us besotted by debt-talk, who imagine all kinds of unpayable and even unimaginable debts (with God, for example, who couldn’t possibly need anything from us) rather than simply recognizing the basic fact of our interdependence. It would complicate Graeber’s argument to acknowledge that some form of exchange, or debt, not to mention hierarchy, is constitutive of the communist community as well. (Graeber doesn’t see “communism,” “exchange” and “hierarchy” as different kinds of social orders, but as moral economies that co-exist within a single order—still, it’s clear that social orders are distinguished by the predominance of one over the others, and that the egalitarian communities from which Graeber draws his critiques of pathological exchange orders are the more reliable repositories of communist morality.) He focuses on intra-communal relations, not their relation to the sacred center (their ritual order), so the possibility that the notion of debt is indeed primordial, preceding the origin of human inequality, doesn’t arise. This makes it easy for him to ridicule the notion, that some researchers purport to see as fundamental in the ancient Middle East and India, that existence itself is a form of indebtedness, as a kind of state ideology, contending that rather than seeing these theological claims as supposing a (ridiculous!) “infinite” debt, we should rather interpret

this list [of escalating debts] as a subtle way of saying that the only way of “freeing oneself” from the debt was not literally repaying debts, but rather showing that these debts do not exist because one is not in fact separate to begin with, and hence that the very notion of canceling the debt, and achieving a separate, autonomous existence, was ridiculous from the start. Or even that the very presumption of positing oneself as separate from humanity or the cosmos, so much so that one can enter into one-to-one dealings with it, is itself the crime that can be answered only by death. Our guilt is not due to the fact that we cannot repay our debt to the universe. Our guilt is our presumption in thinking of ourselves as being in any sense an equivalent to Everything Else that Exists or Has Ever Existed, so as to be able to conceive of such a debt in the first place. (68)

Contrary to his normal procedure, though, Graeber doesn’t show that anyone, other than a present-day anarchist or communist, actually has interpreted these notions in this way. It’s understandable that Graber would want to insist upon an originary debt-free condition, since the only other way out of the violence endemic to impersonalized debt relations would be through hierarchy. Interestingly, Graeber points out that ancient and more recent pre-modern history is replete with revolts against the expropriating consequences of debt, where there is an implicit equality between debtor and creditor (insofar as they engage in exchange), but almost none against caste systems and slavery, and I would add far fewer against monarchy, or military hierarchies, where social distinctions are non-negotiable and beyond appeal—but doesn’t pursue the implications of this observation.

Graeber makes an argument intimately related to one of Marx’s central ones, and it is an argument that must be conceded. What, exactly, makes it possible to exchange one object with any other; what makes the objects commensurable? The objects must be abstracted from the network of relations in which they are embedded, and by “abstracted” Graeber means “violently ripped out.” This analysis, like Marx’s of “abstract labor,” implicates exchange and debt in sacrifice by focusing on the most exchangeable of all objects: human beings. Early forms of exchange between communities and families involved replacing people, and therefore establishing their value (as represented by other objects): brides, slaves, murder victims, and so on. Although Graeber doesn’t speak in these terms, the implication is that hostage taking is central to the earliest forms of exchange. (It is not clear to me whether, for Graeber, or in reality for that matter, the more localized and personalized forms of “credit” Graeber valorizes precede and are distorted by the pathological, hostage taking forms or, on the contrary, the personalized forms are reforms and curtailments of hostage taking, under a new mode of the sacred and new mode of sovereignty. I find myself assuming the latter is the case, since the establishment by sovereigns of markets must have always involved some violent abstraction, and early forms of exchange between tribes, families and communities must have always presupposed the possibility of violent escalation.) Now, as I argued in my post on sacral kingship, for human beings to have this extremely high “value,” it must be possible to place them at the center—which means that the center must have already been expropriated by the “Big Man” and eventually permanently occupied by the sacral king. Again, we see the inseparability of “humanization” and human sacrifice. Humanity cannot be the highest value without humans being the most valuable exchangeable and sacrificable object. Graeber is right to associate this economy of hostages with the honor culture, which he especially dislikes, seeing one’s honor as being defined by the stripping of another’s. Flinching at the brutality of such systems, especially when one would be unable to imagine a credible alternative under those conditions, is a serious analytical failure—honor culture must not only have suppressed forms of violence endemic to relations within and between more communist orders, but any replacement of honor culture must defer some critical mode of violence that can be recognized as communally destructive within such societies. And this kind of recognition comes, to quote Marx, under conditions not of one’s choosing.

Despite his ridicule of theologies of “infinite” and “existential” debt Graeber implicitly concedes that that development of these (critical) modes of thought in the “Axial Age” (800 BC to 600AD) of the great ancient empires led to the diminishment and ultimately elimination of the most egregious practices of mass slavery and human sacrifice of those empires. Once debt is conceived in infinite, existential terms, defining one’s relation to the sacred, then it is the assumption that debts can be settled through the exchange of hostages that becomes vulnerable to irony, ridicule and denunciation. Whether it’s “rational” (according to what tradition of rationality? Developed how—by reference to what system of exchange?) is completely irrelevant to the ethical advance that Graeber sees from the Axial to the Middle Ages (600-1450 AD), an advance we must see as a result of the gradual assimilation of the transcendent forms of the sacred of Buddhism, Christianity and Islam. The sacral king is the earliest form of absolutism: the sacral king is the cynosure of the order, the mediator between divine and human, and also for this reason a possible sacrifice—the first form of human sacrifice. The ancient emperors retain this sacrality in an extended form (they cannot be violated under any conditions), but since they remove themselves from the position of sacrificial victim, they are sacrificed to, not sacrificed. The ancient empires were regimes of expanded sacrifice, or hostage taking, in which the abstraction and redistribution of individuals was routinely used to settle accounts. This accounts for the moral state of the axial empires that Graeber deplores, and which led to the more metaphorical and spiritual forms of sacrifice that provided for the moral revolution which restored a more reciprocal economy, based upon embedded debt networks, personal credit rather than currency, in the Middle Ages.

We can now focus on the relation between hostage taking, or the violent extraction of humans from relations of “communism,” “exchange” and “hierarchy” that define them, and sovereignty. The forms of holiness inherited from the Axial Age dissenters invalidate hostage taking: each human being has a unique relation to the divine, so humans can no longer be treated as commensurable with one another. Rather than a possible sacrifice or receiver of sacrifice, the sovereign’s role is now to suppress sacrifice. To sacrifice a human requires that all the attention of the community converge on the sacrificial figure. He or she must be seen as the repository of all desires and resentments, the origin of some proliferating criminality or plague, the cause of dashed hopes. The post-axial sovereign ensures that such attention can only be organized on the terms of the sovereign. Hostage taking implies an honor system, and the suppression of sacrifice means the suppression of the honor system, which is to say the vendetta. The sovereign must settle accounts between groups and individuals in such a way that grievances are satisfied sufficiently so as to make recourse to the vendetta unthinkable. Sovereignty must reach into and shape the social order so as to block the emergence of power centers interested in restoring the honor system. This means a system of deferences that interpose between the convergent attention of the many and any individual the question, “what would the sovereign do (and have me do)”? Which further means that the sovereign construct a justice system that disseminates answers to those questions broadly and clearly, verbally and through institutionalized practices. When our attention converges on an individual—a celebrity, an infamous criminal or defendant, the victim of a Twitter mob—we may insult, ridicule, taunt, ostracize, but will stop short of appropriating the sovereign’s prerogative to imprison or kill. At a certain point, our attention converges on those who seem more likely than us to appropriate that prerogative (to organize a lynch mob, for example).

This gradual incorporation of the norms of axial age transcendence into Middle Ages governance accounts for the moral, political and even economic and technological advances steadily gained in medieval Europe (I’m not going to try and include parallel developments in the Islamic world, India and China). But insofar as these terms of transcendence inform the state, they can be invoked against the state, especially when they are embodied in a powerful institution with sacral imperial pretensions of its own. It is, after all, possible to concede that central power should be exercised absolutely while still insisting that the occupant of that central power be subject to replacement. Any specific argument along these lines will be marked by inconsistencies, but so will arguments for sovereign determined succession. And the criteria for replacement will most likely derive from the transcendent terms that are embedded in the sovereign itself. It’s then a few steps to modern democracy, which insists on institutionalizing a system of replacement so that his temporary hold on power will always be present in the mind of the sovereign. It’s then barely a step at all to propose that counters to sovereign action be built into sovereignty itself, in the form of “checks and balances.” But this makes the modern executive perilously close to becoming a sacrificial object again—not just in the once and for all manner in which the absolutist monarchs were sacrificed to inaugurate the modern age, but as a routine, almost ritualized matter. To refer again to my post on sacral kingship, I am arguing for an understanding of modern history as the ongoing attempt to create a satisfactory replacement for sacral kingship—sovereignty as a non-sacrificial center of attention that, even more, deflects towards itself all other potentially sacrificial centers of attention.

What makes the consequences of the “always already” divided sovereignty of medieval Christianity even more destructive is the possibility of re-“abstracting” individuals from their social networks of obligation and reciprocity. The breaking up of the honor system, which gives the individual a direct relation to the sovereign, makes this abstraction a site of power struggles—the source of the high-low vs. the middle power blocs. I’m not going to work through Graeber’s complex discussion of the rise of modernity, but he associates the rise of “capitalism” with a massive new abstraction of individuals—not so much as human hostages (although Graeber foregrounds the importance of world conquest and slavery by the West to this process) but as potential capitalists who see the world completely in terms of exchange. This self-capitalization respects the transcendent axial terms because in self-capitalizing, the subject is self-sacrificing through labor, discipline, and the exclusion or reduction of whole domains of what have always been considered essential human experiences. The asceticism of the capitalist subject is certainly in the Christian tradition. As long as this type of subject is privileged, the unification and securing of power is impossible—the self-sacrificing individuals will always be eager clients for sowers of dissension and division. The modern market is a product of power as much as markets ever were, with modern capitalists, as Graber argues, the descendants of the military adventurers of the early modern age—but, by setting markets against the state, liberalism makes the market a multiplier and intensifier of divided power. If liberalism does not directly restore, it always incites and ultimately relies on the return of the honor system—leftism is the institutionalization and infinitely varied refinment of the vendetta. So, absolutism demands the re-embedding of individuals into “communistic,” “exchange” and “hierarchical” orders, but on terms that preclude reversion to the honor system and preserve the mass literacy and numeracy presupposed, if not quite accomplished, by contemporary social orders.

To an extent, absolutists stand with some elements of the contemporary left, those that still have abolishing the capitalist world order on their agenda—at the very least, we can notice some of the same things deliberately ignored by liberals. There are actually a very few, and those very feeble (in power and intellectual acuity), among the left that have kept their eye on replacing the metastasized systems of exchange that have swallowed up all human relations and made us all hostage to globalizing economic, political and media regimes. Transnational human rights regimes and climate fanaticism, to take two examples (both providing legal and moral bases for “political correctness” and supply chains from transnational economic entities to your humble social justice warrior) tie the left irreversibly to capitalism. Blackmailing corporations and other large institutions, along with infiltrating the permanent state (which ensures the blackmailing will work), pretty much defines the left at this point.  No one is more calculating and exchange oriented than they are. And those on the left who wish to return to class, economic inequality and socialist transformation are completely unwilling to challenge the splintering of the leftist project along identity lines.

Graeber, to his credit, says little about the prospects of the left, refusing to feed his readership false optimism. To his discredit, while insisting on the permanence of the “communistic” dimension of human experience (we could hardly rid ourselves of it if we wished), and devoting the bulk of his attention to distinguishing productive from pathological modes of exchange, he says very little, especially by way of proposing new ways of thinking, about the “hierarchical” dimension. He concedes its necessity, but never offers even the most qualified praise for responsible uses of hierarchy, much less a rigorous distinction between positive and negative forms. I have to assume that, as a confirmed leftist speaking mostly to other leftists (Graeber has been an important figure in the “anti-globalization” movement [the ones who smashed up Seattle back in antiquity, i.e., 1999] which, insofar as it still exists, has become the alt-right movement). We, of course, have no such scruples—quite to the contrary! The articulation of “communism,” “exchange” and “hierarchy” can probably be incorporated very nicely into absolutism. The most originary manifestation of hierarchy is naming: to name another being is to establish an origin and destiny, and thereby constitute it, bring it into existence. Delegating is itself a form of naming. Naming is performative, like christening a ship or marrying a couple, activities that manifest the most basic social traditions. In a sense, that is what a tradition entails—a reciprocally constituting system of names.

The political formalism instituted by Moldbug is also a form of naming—anonymous, and therefore apparently spontaneous powers are incorporated and made subordinate to the sovereign through naming. The media are propaganda agencies of some power center or another—the blogger Sundance at the Conservative Treehouse asserts that the CIA leaks to the Washington Post and the FBI to the New York Times. No doubt we could create a more comprehensive map of affiliations. In the interests of transparency, we should not only have such a map but it should be used to centralize the information policy of the regime. Every piece of information comes from some specific place in the chain of command. That means all information purveyors are named by the sovereign. Moving beyond this specific example, we can see that sovereign naming prevents the abstraction of individuals in a way that conforms to a dynamic social order. Something new—a new enterprise, an invention—comes out of something existing, something with a name, and is itself named as soon as it comes to the attention of the sovereign (and the sovereign keeps getting better at noticing and assessing novel phenomena).

How do we devise and apply new names? Like Graeber’s “communism,” this practice is part of our most elementary relations to the world and each other. To point to something that hasn’t been noticed is to name it, even if only as “today’s hamburger,” as opposed to all the other hamburgers we’ve all eaten previously. Sovereign naming produces new centers of attention that direct our attention back to the sovereign’s naming capacity. Here’s a way to think about how “naming” as a form of thinking and speaking happens. Gertrude Stein had a habit of naming the chapters in her books. One reads through Chapters 1-6 and then the next chapter is “Chapter 3.” This arrests one attention and directs it toward the meta-critical dimension of books, to things we don’t ordinarily notice. After one has read a lot of books, one notices patterns—so, a “typical” novel might have, say 15 chapters, and the different chapters develop a certain character, or “feel,” because of the formulas of novel writing. So, in a 15 chapter book, chapter 7 has a “turning point” or “climax,” and when the reader gets to Chapter 7 such an expectation is implicit. One notices these patterns and forgets them, as we simply plug new books into the formula. But if there is a character or feel to “Chapter 7,” then other chapters can be Chapter 7-ish, say, in a book that reworks the formulae. You can let the reader notice the subversion of the formula, or you can explicitly identify the upcoming chapter as, “really,” Chapter 7, even if it comes after Chapter 2 and before Chapter 3. Whatever is better for writers, it is better for authority to explicitly name the “emergent property,” and to do so, also explicitly, in the only way one can—tropologically, that is, by violating some linguistic rule or expectation, using a word in a “wrong” way that is now made “right” by its authoritative application. Sovereign naming is thus the ostensive dimension of social order, which allows for a coherent array of imperatives and therefore a clarified chain of command. Of course, subjects will themselves get into the habit of naming, of making explicit their relations to each other, their obligations and expectations, and also their disappointments and amendments of those relations. We would have the means to resist our “abstraction” by deferring to one another’s names.

There are two kinds of moral innovations: one, upward, in which more distance is created between desire and appropriation; and the other, downward, in which that distance is shrunken by the violation of some prohibition with impunity (the innovation lies in the intimation of unlimited possibility, which mimics the generation of human possibility by the originary act of deferral). The great “axial age” moral innovations upward took place during the period of manuscript culture, where writing (and alphabetic writing, in particular, at least in the West) had been invented and was in use among a scribal elite and/or a small reading public sharing rare texts—manuscript culture was still deeply embedded in orality (texts were used to facilitate oration, or memorization), while making it possible to memorialize oral scenes and confer upon them the prestige and permanence of the written word—it is telling that the figures of Moses and the Hebrew prophets, Socrates, Confucius, Jesus and the Buddha are all very often situated within “quiet” scenes, dialogues with a few participants, or God, bordering on and often entering a silent inner dialogue with(in) the self. Words are inscribed in one’s heart, and can be recited exactly as they were originally said as many times as desired, enhancing the sacrality of those particular words, enabling the construction of communities devoted to their preservation and effectuation.

Print culture (McLuhan’s “Gutenberg Galaxy”) spreads the results of manuscript culture far more widely, while introducing the capacity and compulsion to fragment and reassemble, and therefore criticize, parody, and re-contextualize those results. Manuscript culture strives to approximate writing not just to speech, but to speech between co-participants in discussions over what is worthy to be preserved; print culture strives to make speech more like writing—normative, widely intelligible, uniform. (Part of the prodigious fertility of the Renaissance period lies in the interplay of the norms of manuscript and print culture, and of expanding literacy and the more varied layers of orality brought within the orbit of the written word.) Certainty, rather than proximity to the origin, becomes the primary value of reason, actions start to seek out widespread publicity rather than recognition as an enduring model, and thought aims at material transformation rather than contemplation. This transformation involves significant moral innovations, in particular those associated with rigors of life in the modern marketplace: punctuality, frugality, patience, politeness, respect for rules, large scale coordination, etc., along with a much less widely shared, but at least generally valued, fearlessness before the unknown and untried. It has also abetted new and unprecedentedly brutal forms of violence and empire, as control from the center was eased considerably, and made difficult to resist by the increasing specialization at the margins.

What about our emerging electronic and, especially, transparent and algorithmic culture? The intensified culture of celebrity and publicity thereby generated most obviously privileges the transgressive over the continent, the brash and boastful over the modest—the invisibility of the virtues of manuscript culture is intensified by the demand that everything be made visible, literal and blatant. The brazenness and self-exemption from morality print made available to the inventors and adventurers of the modern period are now available to anyone, and it is hard to see any reason why one should display even the most minimal patience. Most people, whether they realize it or not, assume that every individual is a god unto him (or her) self. At the same time, practical learning and participation are strongly encouraged, and can curb the excesses of self-idolatry. I will return to the question of the actual and possible upward innovations native to our now native culture.

Let’s imagine, as a conceptual baseline, a near absolute mimeticism. That is, imagine that every desire is immediately and comprehensively expressed in posture, gesture and word, and every posture, gesture and word is in turn immediately and comprehensively responded to by whomever it is directed towards, and whoever witnesses it. Such an order would involve constant mimetic contagion and hence aggression and violence; it could build no institutions and have no learning. Not exactly none, though, because insofar as it is a human community, the mimeticism could only be near absolute—our barely human community is at least able to restore if not maintain order through the emergence of spontaneous forms of unanimity, in which mimeticism is transformed momentarily into a stabilizing force, directed at more or less arbitrarily chosen targets of discipline and punishment (a very Girardian model, but I don’t assume that actual scapegoating, in the sense of human sacrifice, is necessarily the primary institution).

Something of this absolute mimeticism still resides in every human, and we still respond automatically to a smile or frown, a hint of aggression, a subtle offer of reconciliation, etc. But, of course, these spontaneous reactions are already highly mediated, as there would be no “hints” or “subtle offers” in the originary human community I have hypothesized—everything would be directly out in the open. The point of the originary barely human model is to provide us with a way of measuring moral innovation. The first step beyond near absolute mimeticism would have to be someone not responding immediately, repeating the originary hesitation, allowing an aggressor to have his way, while signaling (and having that signal received) that he will not continue to have his way indefinitely. Upward moral innovations are always of this kind: a new hesitation, but one that organizes posture, gesture and word together in a new way so as to present an imitable mode of hesitation. And downward moral innovations recognize the fragility of such ascents, and recover and display against them the sheer power of a more direct action-reaction cycle. We could see human history as the fluctuation and dueling of upward and downward innovations.

So, what replaces, in the upward moral innovation, the direct, automatic, spontaneous, full and commensurate response to an other’s expression of desire or resentment? It would be trivial to say, “an indirect response,” as that would beg the question—we must imagine, then, an equally direct, automatic, spontaneous, full and commensurate response, but to the other’s expression of desire or resentment as a sign, rather than appropriative act. A sign is, in the first instance, a truncated act; to treat the other’s act as a sign is to treat it as a truncated version of a larger act, an act that entails consequences signified even if not materialized in the act itself. Treating an act as such an exemplary sign involves an audience other than the actor himself—the third person we now assume on the scene is part of the shaping of the act, one that the potential respondent, but not the actor, accounts for in his response. The act would set in motion a chain of consequences that would require for its closure the intervention of the third and perhaps other parties; that future closure is what makes it possible to treat the act as a sign. Treating the act as a sign is an attempt to obtain the closure without the consequences. And in turn, the respondent becomes an exemplary sign.

To paraphrase Aime Ceasire, Western men and women speak all the time of freedom but never cease to stamp out freedom wherever they find it. The current rampage of the victimocracy is no accident—demands for freedom on the liberal and democratic models are really demands for revenge against those who one imagines have expropriated one’s freedom. But the first freedom is the freedom from one’s own desires and resentments, and only in the most extreme instances is the acquisition of such freedom not within one’s own grasp (one just has to stop grasping at something else); at the same time, such freedom is always provisional, always suffused with doubts, always needs to be recovered, and can have no external guarantees. Demands for economic and political freedom are only sustainable insofar as they aim at the space needed to practice and exemplify that first freedom. Has a single modern political theorist ever said that? Maybe—I haven’t read them all—but it’s certainly not any part of our liberal democratic commonsense—even the awareness one finds in thinkers like de Tocqueville and the American founders to the effect that moral responsibility must attend the individual freedom democracy unleashes see such responsibility as a concession to reality by enlightened self-interest—in other words, a more effective way of getting what one wants (or, in more theological terms, of imposing one’s own law on reality). (Only high manuscript culture, forged in self-adopted or embraced exilic relation to monstrous imperial orders and broader social decadence [by prophets, monks, small communities of teachers and disciples, self-lacerating disaffected elites], has ever understood this first freedom—which is no doubt the source of its continuing power today.)

Environmentalism admonishes us to shrink our “footprint”—they mean carbon, a trivial matter, but the metaphor is a nice one for thinking through the possible moral innovations enabled by the transparent and algorithmic. It does seem to me that a highly moral way of passing through this life is to leave only the slightest traces of footprints, i.e., identifying markers that can be definitively traced back to ones own intentions and efforts. Rather than clearly demarcated and strategically located footprints, better to do something to reveal the world as a world of signs, and oneself as just another one of the signs, one that has lowered the threshold of significance for yet to be revealed signs. Revealing the world to be a world of signs is to reveal the world as composed of truncated, fractured, fragmented actions unmoored from the desires and resentments that originally motivated them (a radical de-mimeticization) and arriving far away from their intended destinations. Even those bits and pieces of actions can be broken down further—excessive exposure to them would restore their wholeness and render them sentimental and sensationalistic, assimilating them to one or another “classical” model—as can the very act of breaking them down. This is not just a contemplative position within our transparent and algorithmic reality, in which everything already tends to get reduced to a gesture to everything else—it is always possible to withhold the mimetic response and represent the other’s act as an incomplete one and hence a sign, a sign of which one tacitly pledges to be the bearer. The algorithm makes it possible to project hypothetical transformations across unlimited, virtual fields—the fall of a sparrow can be aligned with various possible initial conditions to produce mappings far into the future and across vastly divergent causal chains, the point being to facilitate the reduction of any act to a fluctuating data point, and hence radically uncertain in its effects but maximally significant in its articulations with other signs. This moral innovation would install, there where mimetic culture presently is, liminal culture, a culture that continuously lowers the threshold at which we perceive, feel, and intuit emergent meanings. Old cultural forms like the maxim and the epigram might make a comeback, as such literary forms can be put on a t-shirt, a web page, or tattooed on one’s skin—but maxims and epigrams that subvert and invert some vapid or bullying slogan or public imperative.

Such a moral innovation would follow in the footprints of the print revolution, with its privileging of what Walter Benjamin called “mechanical reproduction”; but, well beyond that, it reaches back to the originary scene, where the sign was created through the truncation of an act, rendering it available for reproduction, segmentation and new articulations. Remembering forward, further de-mimeticization requires further specializations, specializations that lead, not to the mutilation of the individual but to participation in a culture of overlapping disciplinary spaces. Take, for example, the operative imperative for “Seinfeld,” “no hugging, no learning,” a slogan Eric Gans discusses in one of his Chronicles on the show. “Seinfeld” is often taken as accelerating a shift towards a more thoroughgoing irony in American popular culture, marking the point at which nothing is free from irony, i.e., the point of “cynicism.” And it is true that if you watch pre-Seinfeld sitcoms, even the “boundary pushing” ones like “All in the Family,” there is always some sentimental, preachy substratum to the humor—in the end, some things remain off-limits to laughter. To see this as a shift toward a general cultural cynicism is to miss the point, I think—it would make more sense to see this development as a form of social specialization. The point of a TV comedy is to make you laugh—it should be judged according to some measure of quality laughs per 23 minutes, not the “lessons” it teaches. Why would anyone turn on a TV show to learn about life or morality? If we really did so, that would be an alarming sign of cultural decay. You turn on a TV show (at least a comedy) to get something you couldn’t have otherwise: pieces of the world turned around so that situations that are not ordinarily funny become so. Once you realize that, attempts by the entertainment industry to tend to your character become ludicrous and insulting, and, anyway, the point of gesturing to moral pieties was always to avoid professional death by “controversy,” and was therefore always cynical itself—and, indeed, despite “Seinfeld” and all its would-be imitators, earnestness abounds in American culture. And specializing in comedy is very different than specializing in one stage in the production of pins, as it relies upon anthropological, historical and sociological intuitions—what is funny today is not what was funny 5 years ago, or, often, 5 days ago.

A similar development in higher education would be welcome, particularly in the humanities—rather than going to a literature or philosophy class in order to (at its best) enter the ongoing conversation over which works and ideas should be preserved, wouldn’t it be better for your literature or philosophy professor to provide you with a form of literacy, a way of working with language so as to generate new meanings out of existing ones that you could only with significantly greater labor and a lot of luck acquire for yourself? As with the specialist in generating laughter, the algorithmic (or what I coming to be called “digital”) humanities would enable the student to reveal new fields of signs as mutations of more familiar ones. On the level of scholarship, while mimetic theories ask what is “literature,” or “reason,” or “meaning,” or “humanity,” or “society,” and so on, liminal theories would ask, where is the boundary between all of these categories and whatever their “others” might be at a given moment—this kind of inquiry would also involve learning new modes of literacy, insofar as the boundaries are always shifting, in part as a result of the inquiries themselves. (In a sense, this would make all pedagogy and even all scholarship “remedial”—part of the problem with the traditional humanities, or at least an increasingly unavoidable part of the problem, is that students can’t really “read” Plato, Shakespeare, Joyce or any of the other “great books”—they can, at best, mimic their teacher’s reading of the texts as already read, which they must be insofar as they have already been designated “great.” Providing students with reading practices that would reveal these texts to them in their otherness, with all the messiness and stupidity that is sure to follow, might lead to something interesting, even if it’s not likely that many instructors will know what to do with it.)

I suppose this would mean that originary thinking is itself a new specialization, a discipline focused on revealing the consequences and implications of the maxim “representation is the deferral of violence.” Our project would be to show what difference this maxim makes in all of the disciplines with which ours does or could overlap. What does the originary hypothesis enable us to see that we wouldn’t otherwise? Does that mean that one doesn’t claim that the originary hypothesis is true, or gets us closer to the truth of human being than other ways of thinking? Well, to the extent that we are invested in or converted to originary thinking we have concluded that it is more revelatory than other ways of thinking available to us, which is pretty much synonymous with “truer”; but insofar as there is no neutral set of intellectual standards by which the relative truth of theories in the human sciences can be determined authoritatively, I would say we let the “long run” settle the question of truth and attend to our business of lowering the threshold of human things we can make new sense of.

To return to the concepts examined in my previous post (“Selfy”), it seems to me that the kind of disciplinary inquiry I am proposing as a moral innovation requires self-control, self-abolition and self-creation: the disciplinary self is a creation of the inquiry itself, much like the “narrator” of a novel, who is neither the author or a character (and where the narrator is a character, most obviously in first person narration, the reader posits another narrator behind the “I”), who exists only so long as the novel does, and is obliged to follow the rules of coherence and consistency constitutive of the narrative. Likewise, the disciplinary self is created by some boundary question or anomaly, and must remain the “same” insofar as questions raised must be answered or questioned in turn, and rigorous controls must be in place to ensure that the “real self” external to the inquiry, with its resentments and desires, does not interfere—even if those resentments and desires might (again, like the relation between author and narrator), properly treated, inform the disciplinary self. And into what does the disciplinary self inquire: well, among other things, the slippages within and between “identities,” a central cause of “threshold” questions in the modern world; and “personhood,” perhaps first of all the boundary between the constitutive fantasy of personhood (one’s own absolute erotic centrality) and its never completed reality of shared erotic centrality. (I refer, again, to my previous post, and in particular my reading of Andrew Bartlett’s originary analysis of personhood.)