GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

A sign is the deferral of violence. The first sign deferred imminent violence; subsequent signs may also do so, or they may defer intimations of merely possible violence, raising the threshold of what would count as a cause for violence. And not just violence in in general, but mimetically driven violence that would, if undeferred, consume all. So, in choosing our signs, we aim at deferring the possibility of some violence that will, in almost all cases, not erupt on the scene upon which we cast the sign—we are hypothesizing at several or many steps removed. In developing high level concepts, for example, we hope to defer forms of violence that threaten under conditions we can’t even imagine at present.

Once a human has taken over the center, the most feared form of violence is scapegoating frenzy directed towards that central figure, and so that must be prevented; still, it must happen sometimes, and its consequences could be more or less destructive; so, rituals and institutions and their linguistic underpinnings must also provide for less destructive consequences. Once we are post-sacrificial and anyone can become a center and hence a target of centralizing violence, the most compelling form of violence—that which holds some marked individual responsible for some imminent catastrophe—is also the kind that must be deferred. Force will, of course, have to be used against enemies and criminals, but only force that maintains the centered ordinality or orderly hierarchy.

What we are always talking about then, however directly or indirectly, is whether some person who has been singled out, named, is being prepped for or disqualified from sacrificial violence. Our linguistic intuition always enables us to tell the difference: either we are loading excess guilt onto the individual, placing him below the threshold at which norms regulating the use of force are activated, perhaps because time is of the essence or the regular forms could not do justice to the singularity of this guilt; or, we are constructing reasons not to proceed against the individual, conferring upon him motives and embedding him in conditions that not only stay our hand but lead us to shape the surroundings so that forms of authority are invoked and reinforced.  These contending possibilities are not only in our language, they are our language. The conferral of an unhindered chain of imperatives upon a central authority is a result of the ascendancy of the moral imperative over the transgressive temptation: the more our language is saturated with ways of naming the impossible victim, the less it can consider centralized violence against the central figure without whom a cessation of violence is unthinkable.

Always naming impossible victims is the most moral way of speaking and writing; such a practice eventually entails naming ways of determining when, where and how the impossible victim is to be named. But, of course, the chains of command are never quite unbroken, and the temptation of transgression can never be eliminated—in fact, it is always encroaching. So, in naming impossible victims we entrain the naming of those persons as possible victims—such an implication is part of the same language in which we name the impossibility of their victimization, because deferral only makes sense if shaded by mimetic crisis. So, the possibility and impossibility of victimization must be made foreground and background of each other, parenthetical references, subordinate clauses, absolute and prepositional phrased within the sentences where the other is named. Representing both poles in their interdependence is the way in which the impossibility of victimization is represented. The representation of the temptation of transgression within the impossibilization of victimization is originary satire.

We are always presenting, at different levels of explicitness and awareness, hypotheses regarding the desires and resentments informing others’ actions. This also means we read others’ representations of ourselves as hypotheses regarding our own desires and resentments. But if we can say this, doesn’t it follow that we should always make our respective hypotheses more explicit, and be more aware of them? Note that I just drew an imperative from a declarative, or a prescriptive from a descriptive: if this is what we are always, already, doing, then we should do it explicitly and knowingly. This is essentially what it means to see declaratives as studies of the ostensive-imperative world, aimed at producing more possible ostensives.

But perhaps making more explicit our respective hypotheses regarding one another’s “mimology” interferes with the imperative to defer resentments. After all, at least sometimes, there is no better way of inflaming resentments than naming them. So, here we have a case of competing imperatives, both them with fairly firm “pedigrees.” They must both be preserved—that’s an even older imperative. There might be lots of ways of making my own and the other’s respective mimological hypotheses more explicit, and some of them might generate more uncontrollable forms of resentment than others; also, not all forms of resentment are equally enduring, or convert equally readily into violence. So, we aim at maximum explicitness articulated with minimal incitement to direct violence. We don’t want to drive the other into a blind fury; we want give him a new name, and part of that new name is “observer of the old names to which he belonged.” So, this means maximum separation from the old name, with minimal separation from the space of naming itself—the more confrontational one might be, the more the confrontation should be situated within an arena in which there is a shared distinction between fair and foul play.

This maximizing and minimizing is the realm of the thought experiment, which is the arena within which our mimological hypotheses are played out. If I’ve made the other’s hypothesis a bit more explicit than it was before, where can I find in his own language a way of making it yet more explicit? This imperative-interrogative articulation implies that there is something obfuscating his hypothesis. This something is some disavowed agency, displaced onto some supplementary representation. In the pre-literate, ritual world, this supplementary representation would be of a sacred agent—when I struck him, the god of rage, or whoever, filled my breast and guided my hand, etc. A ritual response would then be the proper recompense. In the literate world, following the “second revelation” (somewhat parallel to the “second revelation” of the Big Man), these disavowed agencies and supplementary representations are provided by the disciplines. These include concepts of freedom and responsibility that come primarily from legal discourse—the concepts needed to determine how to convict and punish once “blood prices” are no longer the means of settling disputes become “internalized” or, I would say, incorporated into our respective namings of each other.

Since the disciplines are ways of making sense of imperatives coming from the center, it is precisely this relation to the center that is obfuscated. So, let’s say someone commits a crime and confesses, taking full responsibility. Well, that’s better than having recourse to another discipline, like psychiatry, and claiming “temporary insanity,” or whatever, because at least in this case there is an openness to self-inspection. But locating the source of one’s actions in oneself is a denial of the mimetic nature of those actions, and this concealment is sure to show up in the confession itself. Somewhere in there we will find some slippage from being free of a desire to do wrong to being possessed by that desire. Here’s a place to introduce competing hypotheses, via a satiric thought experiment: something happened within that slippage that you don’t want to or can’t see. Wouldn’t part of taking responsibility be hypothesizing how you came to construct your responsibility as you did? In confessing, you heed an imperative from the center. Let’s first lay that out, in whatever moral, theological and legalistic language you have at your disposal. Then let’s see if we can hypothesize regarding the origin of those concepts in your own representation of your actions. I don’t mean empirical origins (“my father first taught me about guilt when I was 6 years old…”); I mean their origins in this very discourse—what in your story and self-accounting would leave you desiring or fearing violence towards or from others without the introduction of those concepts? Here is where we can represent an obscured resentment maximally while leaving minimal pathways toward acting on that resentment because we have strengthened our mutual adherence to the imperative to name oneself as the doer of this deed. There will be some supplementary concept here that, if we repeat it enough times, in sufficiently different contexts, will help us bring its origins to light. If we get rid of, for example, the “freedom/determinism” binary we can find a previously obscured imperative from the center.

This kind of thinking mostly involves converting imperatives into declaratives: “I had to do this” becomes “this other was blocking me from the center,” which in turn issues new imperatives like “discover a center such that it must have been acknowledging both of you equally, in however different ways.” The declaratives one constructs in the process lead one all the way back to the originary scene, where one in fact places oneself and one’s interlocutors; and all the way forward into the future, as one provides the linguistic material or “samples” that can be used in as yet unimaginable ways to defer unanticipated forms of violence. Your own gesture always borrows from another, to whom you attribute the first one—the more your own gesture is “really” first, the more it will confer firstness on the other. This is the position on the originary scene. The more you represent or adumbrate the resentments potentially generating by this present gesture of yours, along with counter-resentments and possible donations of these resentments to the center in the form of new mediations that would redirect our resenting attention from each other to a new mode of distribution (beyond our control) of the center, the more your discourse takes on futurity.

This is no longer classical prose because insofar as we are all on the same scene it is the scene of writing, which is a singular scene by virtue of being a mere generator of other possible scenes towards which we all take up some relation by the way of the imperatives we hear on this one. As we turn descriptives into prescriptives, the scene is distributed. In the end we are all shaping a collaborative project, not of representing reality, but of deferring mimetic violence as far into the future as possible (a lot of reality does need to get represented for this to take). And so the imperative is to become ever more explicit about this, and in such a way as to advance the collaborative project itself. We must always have recourse to the most direct, explicit, and rigorous thinking of desire, resentment, and the center that we have, which is to say the strongest GA we can make is imperative. But if we’re also going to be using GA to make other discourses more rigorous by eliciting their own discourses of the center, then once we’ve eliminated disavowed agencies and supplementary concepts there would be no difference between GA and all other discourses. We would all be engaged, in infinitely various ways, in the study of our constitutive relation to the center. Our satirical thought experiments would always be necessary because our cleaving to the imperatives from the center that have so far named us will always interfere with hearing a more minimal version of that absolute imperative, but those satirical thought experiments would take the place of the disciplines. That, at least is the project, which is to be made indistinguishable from our language.

We can describe, in the most immediate and accessible way, this project as the determining and revealing of the meaning of words. This means the retrieval of words from their disciplinary appropriations (their passage through the nominalizations constituting the metalanguage of literacy) and their emplacement within centered ordinality. The question is, how would a given word be used within sentences and discourses that present the hierarchy dictated by the center named by those sentences and discourses? You could say that determining the meaning of words is the formalism of language: what a word like “action” means is the way it is used by someone capable of action, or of commanding action, or of abstaining from action in order to distinguish one mode of action from another, ultimately for the sake of those yet to make decisions. What a word means, that is, is how it is used by someone authorized by the “situation,” which is to say, some center, to use it. And even someone expelled from the center is authorized to name the terms of that expulsion. This also means that becoming a student of meaning entails becoming authorized to use the words you study, which means founding a scene of their use, before you can know whether others will join you there.

Any center is fit out with a link to the origin—therein lies its power. Even more, any center is itself an origin, an ever emergent origin. Any use of a sign entrains the entire history of sign use and any articulation of joint attention iterates the originary scene. Sometimes, due to semiotic and bureaucratic drift, the origin needs to be retrieved, but that just means a particular element or moment of the scene has replaced the scene as a whole. The most likely “culprit” is the deceleratory moment of the scene, when all the participants conform their respective gestures to the norm that has emerged on the scene. This “settling in” would be the most memorable part of the scene, and the one that would be confirmed and conformed to even more precisely in ritual. We regularly have recourse to this element of the scene—even in the course of some innovation or disruption much of the scene must be held steady as a kind of “control” so that the novelty can stand out by contrast. When engaged in the “producers desire” to remember the origin this need for control is forgotten, and only the resistance of others on the scene can establish limits to the unfamiliar gesture.

Whatever or whoever is at any center succeeds in a direct line to the central object on the originary scene. The most mediocre president of a fourth-rate country carries this lineage; for that matter, so does a bored substitute teacher in a classroom in a failing urban school. Everyone looks to the center to determine what to do, even if what to do is to defy or ridicule the center, because the central figure is telling you, in not so many words, that he has not inhabited or impersonated the resources the center provides for exercising the power of deferral. If the figure occupying the immediate center allows the baton passed from the object on the originary scene to drop, all those present on the scene are obliged either to prop up that center or turn to a new one. If the central figure can’t or won’t issue those commands that will tie this scene to the history of scenes so as to provide those present with the roles or masks they need to organize themselves ordinally around the center, they will treat the central figure as a negative indicator pointing to the commands that should have been uttered, that have been uttered under “analogous” conditions, that can be obeyed even without having been uttered. Once someone is placed in a position where he has to lead or clog things up, those he is responsible for can build their own little centers around the clog or treat him as if he is leading—whether either approach turns out to be subversive or galvanizing will depend upon the response of the potential leader, or the emergence of a new one.

This discussion is necessary because while I have been generating a new way of using the concept of the center within GA I have not sufficiently insisted on the fact that “origin” and “center” are complementary ways of referring to the constitution of the event. This can make it sound like central power stands and commands on its own, which comes close to sounding like an exercise of brute force, while in fact central power resides in the power of the origin. If we need to make the distinction between “power” and “authority” we can say that “power” draws upon the power of the origin while “authority” carries it forward and extends it. You need both—even mere drawing upon and preservation of the center implies at least some “extension.” Now we can speak of something equivalent to “legitimacy,” or the intrinsic relation between ostensive and imperative, as residing in the more specific origin of any community. The communist or liberal or revolutionary or usurpationist origin of the country where you find your obligations, then, cannot be “illegitimate.” What can be the case is that, because the origin of the existing mode of power has weakened or interrupted the line of origins, the commands issued by that central authority cannot be filled in or complemented in the act of obedience. There is always a gap between the imperative issued and the imperative obeyed, and that gap is filled in by complementing the imperative with the enabling imperatives preceding it. Those enabling imperatives don’t just confirm the authority of the commander (like asking the manager whether your supervisor can really have you do this) but provide essential information regarding how to do it.

Eric Gans has referred to the emergence of the Big Man, i.e., the “usurpation” of the center by a person, as a “second revelation.” I have been arguing that the development of literacy represents a similarly second revelation in relation to the oral/ritual world. Tying these two revelations together is the one Gans refers to as the monotheistic revelation, enacted for a single people via the Mosaic revelation and then for all humans in the Christian one. (As I usually do in these discussions, I’ll make the necessary but inadequate gesture towards equivalent developments in the East, in Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism and Buddhism.) This “post-sacrificial,” or “charismatic,” revelation of the “absolute imperative” (to defer rather than sacralize centralizing violence) is the revelation that completes that of the Big Man and that of literacy. What has happened is that we now have a center irreducible to the central authority who issues imperatives, a center with which we no longer have direct access to via “imperative exchange.” These enormous upheavals involved a radical break and alienation from the origin of specific groups, much less the origin of humanity, which as a consequence has to now be retrieved through practices enacting the heeding of the absolute imperative. Such practices require declarative formulation, because the remnants of those specific events (the revelation on Mt Sinai; the crucifixion) upon in which the absolute imperative was heard must be supplemented for communities (that is, all communities) which cannot live and sacrifice on the actual site of the revelation.

These practices are constructed through the naming of events of origin—more precisely, origins of a particular revelation of the absolute imperative (which is always revealing itself in new ways). A country, an institution, an organization, must have such an origin if the commands issued by its central authority are to be effectively obeyed. We can say that all individuals are named because all individuals are such sites of origin: when a new baby is born, we refrain from sacrificing it, certainly literally, but also in the sense of claiming to control or predict who that baby will become. If something changes, it retrieves or repudiates its origin, in the process creating a new one. Insofar as we are all centers, we are all events of origin, and named as such—not just our given name, although the importance of that never completely disappears, not just new names we adopt, titles, nicknames, and so on, but the declarative names people give us and we give, or try to give, ourselves: statements, descriptions, stories and so on—insofar as they single us out, they name us.

The center as named provides us with a way of rejecting familiar ways of speaking about “the society and the individual.” I would reject all talk of the “individual” within GA, as well as the concept of an “internal scene of representations” which Eric Gans uses to refer to a kind of privatized space we can trace back to the sparagmos. The individual is always constituted in relation to, which means hearing imperatives from, the center—everything that we do is in obedience to a command from the center. We can speak of a relation between the name-of-the-center and the centered name. We are nothing more than our names, beginning with the socially recognized name to be found on our driver’s license, paychecks, tax returns, diplomas, and so on, but, revolving around that name all the other names that refer to it more or less directly. What the “second revelation,” in the totality I just presented, means in these terms is a shift from a name of the center we can be named after to a name-of-the-center that can only be named in its namelessness. Naming, I am assuming, was originally a way of commemorating and affirming obligations to ancestors, who were worshipped; we are still often named after ancestors, but we don’t worship them and what we worship we don’t take as a source of names—rather, what we worship is the source of naming as an act.

At the same time, as Gans has pointed out on more than one occasion, every word is the Name-of-God. We have to take “every word” in the broadest possible sense here—a sentence can be the Name-of-God; indeed, the name of God in Exodusis, as Gans has often emphasized, a sentence. A book can be the name of God. Our individual names, then, are also the Name-of-God, but the Name-of-God as given within a particular historical stream, at a particular point within that stream. And names change, while referring to previous names when they do. I came across a quote from Richard Feyman recently: “knowing the name of something doesn’t mean you understand it.” Within its context, Feynman’s statement is obviously true, but I am arguing for a diametrically opposed way of thinking about it: if you don’t understand something, that just means that you don’t know its name—its “proper” name, its “real” name, or, if we want to be a little technical, its name in the event of naming. Coming to know or understand something is coming to name it in the disciplinary event of deciding it needs to be named, trying out different names, arriving at one, testing it, and so on. This is an event within which some unnamed object within a system of names becomes available for ostensive reference, and must be named in order to maintain the completeness of the system of names.

I think these formulations have important consequences. Not only do a whole set of pseudo-problems regarding the “individual,” his interiority, his identity, evaporate, or get resolved into the single, always asked, never conclusively answered question, “who are you,” but if all we have in a social order are names everything is part of the social order in a constitutive, originary manner from the very beginning. You are not in the world until you have entered through your name. The way we constitute and present ourselves as centers is through entering or inhabiting our names, projecting a possible new name for ourselves, repudiating an old or attributed one, among other possible acts. Even more, these formulations advance the mode of engagement I have been coming to propose through the concept of “originary satire.” Not always, but often, satire works through conflating individuals with their names, and with the satirist himself taking on a name so as to move through the system of names he has reduced the surrounding impersonations to. Satire is an attempt to further refine names until they position someone or something or some event on the originary scene, retrieved prior to the second revelation. That is, to refine the names until they name something on the scene at its most scenic, where the issue is in question, where the sign has not yet been normalized, and where our own naming therefore completes the scene. The satiric dimension within the esthetic is this moment of the scene at its most scenic, where we have what Gans once referred to as the “fearful symmetry” where each is at once potential victim and potential attacker, threatening and vulnerable simultaneously. The scene is completed simply by having a “critical mass” of participants see each other this way, because enough people seeing each other this way and showing that they see each other this way isthe sign. When we’re speaking with each other we’re really just naming each other and everything that makes us each other. Realizing this can make our discourse very ad hominem; but it could also make it very ad deum; at any rate, focusing exclusively on each other’s names as named by the unnamable Name-of-the-Center, which is itself nothing but the space opened up for receiving our names, would make us extremely ad centrum.

The origin of the aesthetic lies in the oscillation of the participant on the originary scene’s attention between the sign (the aborted gesture of appropriation) put forth by the other, on the one hand, and the central object, on the other. The sign barring access to the object enhances the desirability of that object, while the object, lacking meaning without the sign, directs the attention back to the “well formed” sign. So, wherein lies the aesthetic, then? In the object, which is turned into something like an image of itself; or, in the sign, which presents deferral as an attractive model, and constitutes the first body image? It must be in the oscillation itself—in some object of desire as seen through the gesture, which is to say the constitution of the scene, which makes it an “formal” rather than “material” object. So, historically, works of art have mostly been of potentially desirable, or even potentially repellent, things in the world, rather than (directly) of the others who mediate our relation to it—but the work of art presents this object as so mediated—i.e., as socially protected and inaccessible in some way, as opposed to the object it might be representing.

Eric Gans speaks of the history of aesthetics as the history of the incorporation of the scene of representation within the work of art itself. This history commences once aesthetics is distinguished from ritual. So, the earliest secular artworks, like Greek tragedy, do not represent the scene of representation at all—in a manner minimally (but very importantly) distinguished from ritual, the audience participates in the resentment toward the central figure, a resentment that is “purged” by identification with that figure’s suffering. What interests me here is that art, as an immersive experience is, like ritual, institutionally separated from the rest of life. This is because the social hierarchy that makes one, but not others, of intrinsic interest, is taken for granted. Once other centers emerge in a post-sacrificial order, the work of art must include peripheral figures within the work, even if the focus remains, as in Shakespeare’s tragedies, on the “Big Men.” This involves obvious forms of self-references like the play-within-the-play, but also figures and scenes within the play (like plebeians expressing resentment towards their superiors) that comment on the events involving the Big Men.

I think we can see this as a broader process of undoing the ontological separation between the work of art and the social world of the audience experiencing it. Once the voices of those similar to the audience are represented within the play, why not the audience itself? Why shouldn’t the participation of the audience be the play? It may be considered an astonishing testament to the institutional power of artistic representation that not only did it take so long for the idea to emerge that the creative primacy of the artist is ultimately a mere adjunct to the experience of the “recipient,” but that this idea has still not moved much beyond the artistic “avant-garde” margins to more mainstream or officially sanctioned works. The pleasure of transcending resentment by subordinating ourselves to the “domination” of the artist is certainly part of the resistance to an aesthetics that would be nothing more than minimal shifts in attention producing maximum oscillation between the created scene and other scenes.

The broader problem, though, is that trying to undo the life/art boundary requires that the practices of “life” that resist participation in “art” must be represented; and those artistic conventions that “segregate” the audience from the work must also be represented. Otherwise, how would we know we were transgressing a boundary? But these must be critical representations, of conventional “complacency” that wishes to be “spoon-fed” artistic pleasure, on the one hand, and traditions of representation that “condescend” to and “manipulate” a “passive” audience. Taking on the art/life boundary is asymmetrical warfare, i.e., terrorism, which is always snuffed out in the end. This has always been the dilemma of the avant-garde which always, amusingly enough, saw itself as bringing art to the “people.” Even with much more pacific and patient approaches, moves towards abolishing the art/life boundary will always involve moves that reconstitute it.

That just means, though, that this paradoxical relation between the institutionalized scene of art and the other scenes that art scene must itself stage would be transferred to the domain of everyday practices. The paradoxical telos of the aesthetic is to make all of life aesthetic. Or, rather, since all of our practices already have an aesthetic dimension, this telos is to open up “everyday life” to artistic creativity. The romantic and modernist utopian vision was that everyone would become an artist, once freed of inhibiting conventions; an absolutist approach, more modest, is that everyone would take an interest in noticing and enhancing the aesthetic dimension of those conventions. It follows from the formalist maxim that all relations of power and authority be made explicit and named that the norms and conventions governing all areas of life would likewise be made explicit and named, and naming is best embedded in a memorable act—and, making acts memorable is part of what art is for.

Such daily aesthetic activity would be intensely interactive: just like on the originary scene itself, we would all be imitating and “inflecting” one another’s signs. Now, if the aesthetic includes the oscillation between sign and object, the recognition of the formality of the sign (which is to say, its iterability and therefore imitability) must take place on the periphery itself, horizontally between the participants on the scene. If we ask, how would the sign “coalesce” into a final shape in the reciprocal gazes cast around on the scene, I think the answer is that it would emerge out of another oscillation which each participant would see in the others: an oscillation between vulnerability and threat. The tension between these opposing attitudes on the scene is what would paralyze everyone sufficiently to arrest the progress towards the central object. This pre-aesthetic oscillation is what would break down the pecking order and require some new means of preventing conflict.

This pre-representation of the other as equally and alternately vulnerable and threatening is what I have called “originary satire,” and posited as the initial moment of the aesthetic. Think of what would be involved in representing everyone this way—in drawing out everything monstrous, dangerous, vicious and menacing about them, while simultaneously finding everything pathetic, impotent, desperate and cowardly. Some rather remarkable, if ultimately static, characterizations would be possible, especially since presenting oneself as a threat can be seen as a way of concealing or compensating for vulnerability, while at times there can be nothing more threatening than a vulnerable, “cornered” animal. If we all saw each other exclusively like this, human life together would be impossible, and an art work that stopped at this pre-moral satire would be incapable of any real closure—I wonder if that is why Wyndham Lewis’s satires often seem awkward, somewhat arbitrary and unfinished, as he claimed to be aiming at such a non-moral satire. So, aesthetic practice must proceed from what is really the most egalitarian practice of representation imaginable back to the center, and the “asymmetry” of placing someone or something at the center and projecting the oscillation of threat and vulnerability onto that individual. Eventually, the figure’s vulnerability is concentrated in high culture, and its threatening character in popular, and then mass, culture where we identify, as Gans says somewhere, with one or a few good guys killing lots of bad guys.

But originary satire would need to become part of the telos of the aesthetic in the kind of formalist integration of art into life I proposed above. It takes very little to frame another as vulnerable or threatening—in fact, we do it all the time, when we calculate advantages and try to neutralize the aggression of others. Representations in daily life that construct the oscillation between the two would institute a genuine model of deferral, though. “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” and “what is hateful to you do not unto another” were revolutionary moral advances at the time of their invention, but if you look at them took carefully they are thin, inconsistent, and capable of all kinds of cynical applications. What if others like what is hateful to me? I suppose we could move to the meta level and say, well, in that case, treat the maxim in a more complex manner and figure out is analogous, for the other, to what is hateful to you. At that point, though, we need another maxim. “When you see the other as threatening, imagine how he might be vulnerable; when he seems vulnerable, look for what might make him a threat” would be a much better source of moral reflection, as it would enable us to identify the role we play in constituting the other as victim or victimizer.

If originary satire is to provide our preliminary aesthetic framing of the other, we would then construct ourselves and others as centers so as to elicit signs of threat and vulnerability in the other, and continue our construction of these modes of centeredness so as to have what is threatening and vulnerable in us “match” that which we find in others. The other might be threatening physically, emotionally, or intellectually, which means that I present a vulnerability to that particular threat along with a threat of my targeting what I perceive as the other’s vulnerability, should he or she in fact prove a threat. It’s in both sides mutual interest to proceed in this way, which preserves the symmetry needed for interaction along with the difference needed for the generation of new signs. It would be a learning process, involving trial and error and constant revision. As we proceed in our interaction, we build trust by coming to constitute one another’s centrality primarily in terms of the other’s vulnerability, and to satirize one another less. Relapses are always possible, of course. (By the way, I don’t see this reciprocity exclusively in terms of modern social orders—I think that egalitarian hunting and gathering communities are probably extremely satirical in their dealings with each other.)

The aesthetic practice of everyday life involves, to use that phrase from Gans’s The Origin of Language, “lowering the threshold of significance.” We can always uncover new layers of threateningness and vulnerability, and potential layers, hypothetical layers, and so on. The aesthetic practices of everyday life would provide representations with at least a trace of this pre-aesthetic representation, resolving the oscillation into a center based on one pole or the other—resolving the oscillation this way more or less, depending upon how much originary satire can be borne in a given setting. The practice of non-moral satire, which aims at an elemental humanness, not simply to hurt and ridicule the other (because, if done right, the practitioner doesn’t escape either), but to represent the most basic materials of any moral order, would be an extremely important thing to teach children at an early age. It would discipline some of the cruelty and terrors to which children are liable and vulnerable; even more important, it would inoculate them strongly against taking their resentments in a socially transformative direction, since bred into them would be the knowledge that these human fundaments can’t be transformed.

The relation between “art” and “life,” then, would be bridged by the reciprocal satire of artist and audience. Any scene becomes an artistic scene insofar as it includes another scene as audience and co-creator, and which turns the artist into a sometime spectator as well—in the end, maybe we can’t tell the difference between one and the other, leaving us with pure oscillation. Social media and “meme-ing” already enact this kind of satirical oscillation, as bits and pieces of language are constantly taken out of their context and used to create other contexts in which anyone might have uttered those words. Imagine B, C, D, E and so on saying this X which A just said—this is an infinitely replicable form, which reveals something threatening/vulnerable about those we can’t imagine saying just as much as it does about those we can. Of course, the lack of any need for start-up funding is crucial here; and, of course, this also makes the “memers” highly vulnerable to the vagaries of leftist political ratcheting within the various platforms. But the “dial” on boundary abolishing originary satire can be turned up or down. If we think about artistic practices as shaping cultural participants, providing them with language and making them better language learners within the disciplines, originary satire should provide us with ways of thinking about dissemination and infiltration, which requires working just below the threshold at which the cultural censors are programmed to detect transgression.

In formalist terms, the left is the cadres of militants levied by those elites interested in furthering the power directly exercised by the state over the individual, by undermining intermediate power centers. Power over individuals can always be further centralized: the state can arrest you for all manner of crimes, including crimes generated by your interactions with the state, and can surveil you for a wide range of purposes—but it can’t yet tell you what to eat for breakfast. It would be very easy to show how each leftist advance enables the state to single out something new for attention in each individual.

It still needs to be explained, though, how those agents interested in more direct state power over the individual go about mobilizing the masses they need, or, for that matter, why they want this centralization. Regarding the latter, there might be all kinds of reasons: corporations want to open up markets, which might require breaking up local monopolies and regulatory and tax regimes; for those within the state apparatus itself, it might be felt necessary for making uniform rules of operation across the country, and eliminating various logjams created by the diverse and often confused local prerogatives. In each case, some kind of resentment towards central authority is involved, ultimately for not being central and authoritative enough, as proven by the fact that one can challenge, revise and circumvent it in these very ways.

But the “low” is not simply bribed, even if there is also some of that going on—leftism is always a racket, among other things. But extortion rackets must also depend upon resentment: information can be used against someone because the dissemination of that information would change the way others interact with that person, and that depends upon the social norms dictating the grounds on which we resent. The left establishes rackets at vulnerable “choke points” in the social field of resentments—sites where attempts have been made to minimize resentments, and where the levers for exacerbating them also therefore exist. To say that those resentments subjected to minimization efforts were themselves ginned up by previous centripetal movements would be true, but ultimately leads us to an infinite regress if we can’t assume an originary form of resentment that sets the whole machinery in motion.

There are two ways of thinking about the “elemental” form of resentment animating the left. First, it’s a product of social and economic inequality: serfs resent lords because the lords have land, wealth and power and the serfs don’t; a wage laborer resents a corporate executive because the executive has far more money and perks, etc. I don’t think this provides a powerful mode of analysis, for the simple reason that these inequalities are constant, while shows of resentment are intermittent; furthermore, there is no clear correlation between “amount” of resentment (assuming there was some way of measuring that) and the degree of inequality—Bill Gates only recently ceded his position of the world’s richest man, but has never been a particularly intense target of either the right or the left. It may be that we will one day find a perfect correspondence between elite funding of specific resistance foundations and the manifestation of political activity along those specific lines, in which case the elites would be impeccable puppet-masters and there wouldn’t even be any way of distinguishing between more and less active modes of resentment. I’m going to assume that elite funding is more like seeding than recruiting—it is widespread and long-term, and no foundation thinks in terms of generating a protest of this size with this specific legislative impact on a regular basis, even if opportunities like that arise. So, the question of what form the basic mode of resentment of the lows takes is a real one.

The other way of conceptualizing the resentment of the lows is as a response to perceived violations of the trust dependents and subordinates must have for those with authority over them. This would mean that, even with the original victim group of the Western left, the working class, whose grievances seemed mostly focused on wealth inequality (not according to Marx, though), class resentment was more focused on the tyranny of employers and managers, and the broader encroachments upon traditional ways of life (and authority) on which the state and capitalists jointly engaged. While, even on strictly logical terms, there’s no reason to see some equation between degree of inequality and degree of resentment (does my resentment of my richer neighbor automatically go up another 10% when he gets a raise that extends the gap between our respective salaries another 10%?), when it comes to misuse of authority we can assume a direct “production” of resentment. Here, the relation is virtually axiomatic: however my level of moral maturity might enable me to process it, I can’t help but notice and therefore resent the injury done when agreed upon (tacitly or explicitly) rules are violated to another’s advantage and my disadvantage. The very form of interaction and cooperation is harmed in this way, and I have to respond by either exhibiting or disavowing resentment, and doesn’t require that I look into something far outside of my everyday sphere of activity (like average executive salaries).

So, this means that when the highs target the lows for mobilization, they will, insofar as they are effective, focus on breaches in trust and derelictions of duty indicating a failure of authority. This is important to keep in mind, because it means that insofar the resentments motivating the lows can be taken as legitimate—as is no doubt often the case—what the assuagement of those genuine resentments really requires is the restoration of stable and well-founded authority, rather than pay-offs (which mostly go to the leaders). Re-establishing authority detaches leftist foot soldiers from the left’s officer class, as the latter live off of perpetual resentment and therefore develop Big Scene theories guaranteeing its perpetuity—it is here that we see the “struggle” framed in terms of equality vs. inequality, because that opposition can never be resolved. But it also gives us a way of studying leftist propaganda, by sorting out the appeal to perceived failures of authority (including of course, attempts to raise the bar for the due performance of authority in such a way that failure is included in the very definition) along with the way such appeals are plugged into perpetual struggle models. So, if the Black Lives Matter protestor is genuinely interested in the institutions of policing and incarceration, there is a basis for discussion; once this gets framed in terms of “systemic racism,” there no longer is.

Meanwhile, insofar as the right is the “middle,” we can define that more precisely as well. The middle is those with an interest in preserving workable modes of authority within intelligible chains of command. Of course, what counts as a “workable” or “legitimate” mode or exercise of authority is not self-evident, but if you’re on the left the burden of proof is on those defending authority and if you’re on the right the burden is on those challenging it. But this focus on one’s relation to authority helps us to see all kinds of overlapping and possible shifts in position—so, for example, a black man, insofar as he is interested in patriarchal and parental authority in the home, is part of the middle; insofar as he focuses on himself as a potential victim of police violence, he is “low.” In these grey areas, then, is where we can expect to see all the ideological warfare and pedagogical activity taking place. This field is not infinitely elastic, of course—one reason why it has become open season on white men is that is very difficult to figure them as “low,” in part because most white men will themselves resist such an identification. Some alt-right activity is in fact a series of acrobatic efforts to slide white men into the low position, but since alt-right politics largely involves signaling against other low-designees, and you become low by joining more than by elbowing out others, this will probably prove impossible. White men are forced to take up the mantle of the middle, which in turn becomes part of the bill of indictment against them.

The Middle, then, is a kind of anomalous position. It doesn’t fit into the structure of incentives liberals have built, which is why leftists are always frustrated by the fact that the middle seems more concerned about things like abortion and gay rights than acquiring free medical care from the government. The constant bombardment of the middle (which can almost be a definition of liberal modernity) is multi-layered: the New Deal was really an attempt to erode the middle by bringing them into the welfare state, and European countries have proceeded much further along this path, making their middles correspondingly more flaccid. Sexual and cultural revolution, the cult of the criminal, and other measures, are far more obvious assaults. The middle persists, in part because it’s still not quite possible to abolish the material difference between lives of the middle and lives of the low—but this is itself because once you let yourself go low, you’re very unlikely to sustain the basic discipline needed to organize your life, even with government support. So, the horror of becoming low keeps people on the middle path—but this still wouldn’t maintain the middle, because the real incentive here is to give some “high” enough of what he needs to extend you support (i.e., keep you employed) while signaling along with the highs for the low. So, within the frame of liberal incentives, the prototypical middle would be a minimally competent, lazy worker within the safest regions of the corporate or public world, while presenting as hating this fellow middles not only in explicit statements but in manners, tastes, personal associations, and so on. So, why isn’t there nothing but the wealthy and powerful on one side, those who live off of grievances on the other side, and the guy I just described in the middle? (Of course, this would map out quite a bit of the contemporary world—but far from all of it.)

The Middle is the anomaly liberalism can’t account for. It persists because almost everyone has had delegated to himself some form of authority (the middle actually extends very low—and very high) and it is very difficult to treat such delegations complete cynically. We could explain this in terms of such features of social life (in which liberalism is completely uninterested) like tradition and order, but that would just beg the question of what prevents those structures from completely collapsing. Someone has to run things, but why should anyone in particular see himself as the one who should do so? I think we have to see this as a question of language and meaning. When someone asks you, “what do you do?,” what do you sound like when you answer? You have to be able to say something that you don’t mind others repeating; that you don’t mind repeating to yourself. Insofar as the highs and lows must also do this, they must find ways of making themselves sound like the middle: they are fulfilling obligations and meeting responsibilities, they are transparent, and so on. The anomalous Middle is really the pipeline to the Center.  You can demonstrate this socially by extracting and representing the “middleism” that must structure the high and the low insofar that they institutionalize themselves. But you can’t justify this on liberal terms, so any demonstrations place you outside of liberalism. It is impossible to exaggerate how terrifying liberalism must find it that in its very heart there is an ineradicable alterity (to speak in the postmodern argot of a onetime high-low articulation). Further middlizing your demonstrations, which is to say making them more law and authority abiding, will be more, not less terrifying to liberalism. But this may be an ineffable terror, difficult to articulate and act on, and so maybe easier to alleviate, assuming one is ready to accept some slings and arrows—even more, assuming one can read those slings and arrows back to those firing them as desperate cries for a sustainable authoritative structure.

The maxim of the middle is, power should be made commensurate with responsibility. If someone has a job to do, he should be given every bit of power he needs to do it; if someone has power, the responsibility that power can sustain should be attributed to him. An entire way of reading the world and therefore engaging culture is implicit in this maxim. In every problem we look for a mismatch of power and responsibility—we rush to help someone with “too much” responsibility by supplying the needed power, and someone with “too much power” by laying the groundwork for appropriate exercises of responsibility. In every utterance we listen for the evasion or adoption of the responsibility implicit in the power of the utterance itself—if one fairly ordinary person depends a bit on what you have to say, then let your discourse be turned to the needs of that individual; if thousands hang on your every word, then choose your words so as to contribute to their education, to make them communicants, and pedagogues in their turn. Seek to make those with power more responsible, not less powerful, by sharing their presumed responsibilities; in trying to fulfill the responsibilities delegated to you, try to tap into unused and misdirected forms of power. Ultimately, everyone is of the middle, except for one man, whose own power and responsibility is indistinguishable from its middling distribution.

It is in the nature of the declarative to both supplant and appropriate the ostensive. The declarative comes into being by deferring some imperative and, first of all replacing it with the combination of an “operator of negation,” or prohibition on proceeding to act on the failed imperative, on the one hand, and a negative ostensive, representing the demanded object in absentia, on the other. The declarative creates a world full objects, which is to say a world of useful and desirable things that we observe and refer to without appropriating. The declarative is born in terror of the imperative and, by extension, the ostensive, the latter of which it produces a virtual version of. All developments of declarative culture involve further distancing and regulating access to imperatives and ostensives. This is the logic of “enlightenment”: all action is to be a result of the sheer accumulation of declaratives, providing such a complete account of the world, that anything one might do has already been so mapped out in advance as to not even require a “decision.”

But seeking to erase the “violent” ostensive-imperative world ends up creating a new, inverted, version of it. The more distant from the ostensive-imperative world the declarative moves, the more it becomes imperative to interpose new declarative layers in between declarative culture and the ostensives and imperatives that emerge unbidden and unanticipated in the course of social life. Replace actions with explanations whenever possible—but this only produces perverse actions, suppressing those who point out threats or try to solve problems directly, before they metastasize. This is the linguistic basis of liberalism, which becomes a generalizable possibility once the emergence of print culture creates an extensive disciplinary structure that tilts the balance, once and for all, towards the declarative and against the ostensive-imperative. A linguistic problem requires a linguistic solution or, more precisely, deferral. This is a question I have addressed in many ways, through the concept of “upclining” in one essay and more recently by proposing we think about subjectivity as the performance of paradoxes of self-reference, and the post-sacrificial, post-literate human being as “total sign.” The attempt here is to embed an ostensive dimension in the declarative in the form of a marker of the disciplinary space of attentionality that all the references made possible in the declarative depend upon. The “what” of your sentences should have, as its Mobius strip-like obverse, the “where,” “when,” and to and from “who(m)” of its utterance—not as biographical markers (I’m writing this on a porch in a farm house in Des Moines, September 32, 2016, 5:23 PM, etc.), but as a marker within the current state of language. We could think of this as an attempt to heal the oldest split within language.

This question can now be approached more precisely by drawing on my analysis of the implications of the “classic prose” that David Olson sees as prototypical of literacy. To review: Olson sees writing as representing reported speech, and identifies as the specific features of writing the supplementation of the words reported with a vocabulary designed so as to represent what cannot be represented directly in writing: tone, emphasis, bodily language—everything that can only be grasped ostensively. If I’m telling you that John says that “the enemy is on its way” and I don’t think John knows what he’s talking about I might repeat John’s words in an exaggeratedly mock-frightened tone. Since you can’t do this in writing, in conveying not only what John said but the meaning of what he said (a distinction that becomes intelligible only under literate conditions), which is to say, registering my own distance from John’s view, I might write “John claimed that he saw the enemy ready to attack.” The use of the word “claim” puts what John said in question—I make it clear that I’m not vouching for it. A substantial vocabulary serving the purpose of indicating all the possible relations the reporter of speech might have to the reported speech is developed—mastering this vocabulary is what is involved in becoming literate.

So, we can “claim,” “assume,” “suggest,” “suppose,” “contend,” “argue,” “understand,” “imply,” and so on and these speech acts get nominalized into “claims,” “assumptions,” “suggestions,” “implications” and all the rest and these nouns come to exist within the disciplinary spaces within which we speak about thinking, reading, writing and other intellectual activities. Even “thought” is such a nominalization of the verb “think”—we can have “thoughts,” but there is also a whole world of “thought,” with its own history. Drawing upon Mark Turner and Francis-Noel Thomas’s notion of “classic prose,” Olson argues that the imperative writing is under is to construct a simulated scene upon which the writer and reader all stand—and we can see in this an extension of the declarative’s paradoxical suppression and appropriation of the ostensive-imperative realm. Classic prose is a manner of writing that enables the reader to see whatever is being described as if he were there. Olson recognizes this to be a “conceit,” i.e., a kind of fiction we adopt for the purpose of reading (Thomas and Turner of course recognize this as well), but doesn’t see any objections on those grounds. The disciplines, starting with philosophy, are in turn erected on the basis of these nominalizations, and we are left with a paradox: the neutralization of the ostensive-imperative world is carried out through a mode of writing that purports to be like a window, given you a “clear” view of the topic under discussion, as if you were present on the scene.

It seems to me that much if not all literature, or at least literary prose fiction, constitutes an ongoing satire of the disciplines—including literary fiction itself insofar as it becomes a discipline. My own proposal for engaging the disciplines by using the terms they apply to their domain of inquiry to their own space of inquiry is, in this sense, “literary.” It involves taking the nominalizations and turning them into verbs, and therefore imperatives, towards the end of bringing us all into the space of inquiry as both “objects” and “subjects.” This produces a scene of writing which interferes with the scene of presence represented by the writing. The paradox of declarative culture can therefore be represented within declarative culture. Once the scene of writing is established, any concept, any word, within the disciplinary discourse can be “meta-d” in this way. One could say that in infiltrating the language of the disciplines only or mainly the “most important” concepts should be addressed forcefully, but that’s “Big Scene” thinking: the most important concepts are not necessarily the ones the discipline itself thinks are most important—it might very well be something the discipline shunts off to one side and yet can’t seem to do without. This is something we can learn from deconstruction. Taking the discipline at its word regarding its own concepts leads to “debates” in which the discipline has a built in advantage—more lateral approaches even the playing field for the innovative.

On a grammatical level, this involves replacing nominalizations with verbs, in order to represent disciplinary specific concepts as signs of events. If the creation and subsequent uses of the concept can be seen as events, then the set of relations represented by the concept can also be reduced to an originary event form. Those new event forms, no doubt rich in verbs, will in turn become nominalized in a more extensive and de-familiarizing way than in the source material. Let’s take a concept within GA, like “resentment.” It’s easy to use the concept of resentment as a way of expressing resentment: accusing those you resent of being resentful allows for a perfectly exculpatory manifestation of resentment. But this means that in order to use the concept effectively, you must have deferred it: your discourse should provide signs that you withhold any resentment you might have for the resentful object of your analysis. How do you do that? You identify the center against which the resentment is directed: there is some rule which some central authority has pledged, implicitly or explicitly, to uphold, and has failed to do so. Even “horizontal” resentments derive from “vertical” ones, because it’s the role of the central authority to ensure groups don’t come into conflict with each other. If you resent horizontally, it’s because you see your object of resentment as the protégé of the “unfair” central power. Seeing resentment as resentment towards the center provides a way of exhibiting the non-resentful quality of your study of resentment, because you turn that study into a study of the center in which your own object of study, regardless of how “justified” or “unjustified” his resentment is, could conceivably join. In this way you, the inquirer/accuser can own your own resentment towards the center whose lapses enabled the other’s resentment, while converting your resentment into greater clarity regarding central imperatives.

So, I have brought the originary inquirer into the disciplinary space as both subject and object of the study of resentment. But notice the quotation marks I was compelled to place around “justified” and “unjustified.” This is a particularly difficult question in GA: how can we—even, can we—distinguish between justified and unjustified resentments? The concept itself seems trans-moral. The first resentment is toward the center on the originary scene, in response to the center barring access to the object itself. This resentment is both “unjustified” (because the center creates peace and the human through its prohibition) and completely unavoidable, and therefore justified. All subsequent resentment must therefore partake of this paradox. Some resentments will be suppressed because they make the existence of essential institutions (the purpose of which is to limit the consequences of resentment) problematic, but that doesn’t make them “wrong”—maybe a more comprehensive resentment towards the institutions themselves will turn out to be “justified” if it is possible to replace them with something “better.” What is “better”? Providing for the adjudication of a wider range of resentments, which can therefore be productive rather than being—or before they need to be—suppressed. The study of resentment that turns into a study of the center also turns into the attempt to derive from the center a way of determining the latitude to be allowed to different resentments, which must also, though, be a study of the means of transforming those resentments so that they can participate in the discourse of the center—by finding new ways of representing other resentful positions so that they can eventually participate in the discourse of the center by…

So, we begin with an attempt to “define” or characterize “resentment,” which leads us to a question regarding the relation of the one so attempting to his own resentment, which leads us into the paradoxical nature of resentment along with a means of discussing the pragmatics of sustaining and limiting that paradoxicality. We end up with complex nominalizations, like the discourse of the center, or something like “the reciprocal relation between donating one’s resentment to the center and the naming of resentments in the practice of converting them into donations of resentment to the center.” We could actually put a verb after the long noun phrase just quoted, and predicate various features and consequences of this “relation.” The ostensive within the declarative, in all the forms I mentioned earlier, are now in the fully paradoxicalized declarative itself. And the same process can be initiated with regard to any part of that noun phrase, including the by no means transparent concepts of “reciprocal” and “donate,” which themselves could be “verbalized” and reduced to originary event form and in turn re-nominalized as paradoxical articulations of center and margin. As Peirce asserted, all inquiries are inquiries into the meaning of “difficult words,” but, of course, what counts as a “difficult word” shifts as our attentions do. To return to a claim I made a few posts back (The Central Imaginary), the only real question we can have is whether, or in what way, to what extent, is an iterated sign the “same” sign as its previous iteration. The only way to answer this question is by reducing the sign to its scenic origins as the representation of those origins is embedded in the event forms of the different scenes upon which the sign was indeed iterated. If that’s all we ever do, knowing that and how that is all we ever do would have us threading the ostensive through the declarative as a matter of course.