GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

I don’t have many good things to say about Woody Allen. For about 35 years now (starting with “Manhattan”) he has, with very few exceptions, in what seems to me the most embarrassingly self-occluded manner, exposed to the world in his films his creepy fantasies of beautiful young women falling in love with him. And there is far more, including his apologias for evil, which Eric Gans has dissected in a couple of Chronicles.

But what is far more disturbing even than Woody Allen is the victimary theology that insists on faith that we must believe unreservedly in whosoever presents him or (especially) herself as a victim of sexual violence. You would think that after the Tawana Brawley, McMartin preschool and Duke Lacrosse team hoaxes the hold of this pillar of victimary theology would be somewhat weakened; but you would be wrong, as any glance at discussions online of Dylan Farrow’s accusations of Allen demonstrate.

Everyone knows that accusations are only accusations, that they need to be vetted according to specified procedures, that even if in public judgments a strict presumption of innocence is not necessary, at least some skepticism and modesty regarding what can be known is called for. Everyone, in short, knows that people can lie, forget and misremember. But at the same time they don’t know it, because knowing it would “reinforce conditions under which victims fear to come forward with their stories,” “protect the perpetrator,” or something along those lines.

I wonder how many people have thought through this logic to its totalitarian conclusions. Should Brawley’s story have been questioned? Or the accuser of the Duke lacrosse players? If so, when would it have been acceptable to start doing so? If at some point—say, in conducting an investigation regarding the possibility of a criminal prosecution—it does become acceptable to point to non-corroborating evidence, why? Why not at an earlier point, then? What does it mean to conduct an investigation in which a questioning of the complainant’s story is prohibited? Is the point, perhaps, that mere criminal prosecutions are too this-worldly to address the transcendent horror of the victimary condition? The logic of faith in the self-proclaimed victim is that nothing but a perpetual, unremitting hounding of the presumed perpetrator, his expulsion from public life and the ruination of his private life, will suffice. Let’s call it “unctuous totalitarianism.”

Furthermore, the theology of the victim further compels us to accept the victim’s definition of her victimization; even more, to identify this victimization in the very asymmetry “positioning” her in relation to a world of victimizers. Sexual abuse of children is a criminal offense that must defined in specific ways, but faith in the victim can hardly rest content with such a narrow, juridical frame. The law itself, in demanding that the victim recount her victimization, that she be “credible,” that she endure cross-examination and perhaps hostile media representations, just means that she is victimized again, and her deepest injury left unacknowledged.

This passion yet relies upon the juridical frame—we are not yet at the point where random women are accusing random men of being the Gestapo of the patriarchy (largely, perhaps, because hard-core members of the victimary cult are still a small minority, however far its penumbras reach). But the juridical frame, with an ever expanding body of ever more amorphous sexual harassment law, is stretching prodigiously, and even that may not contain the craving for unqualified recognition of absolute harm inherent in the theology of the victim.

Of course, the victim, in accepting saint-like status, turns herself over to the same victimary church, implicitly agreeing to undergo a perpetual process of “healing” and exemplifying the universal condition of trauma. Just as it is now dogma in the addiction industry that once an addict, always an addict, and that a single beer will send the addict back into the death spiral of self-abandon, the dogma of sexual abuse is that the trauma last forever and that trauma and one’s struggle to transcend it forever defines the core of one’s being. (Another, not obviously related dogma, that homosexuals are born homosexuals and remain so through out their lives, with all attempts to change that transparent, and vicious, frauds, serves a related purpose: as the Eagle’s song, “Hotel California” has it, you can check out of the victimary condition, but you can never leave.) I suppose if there is a victimary end game, it would have to be the world as universal sanatorium in which we are all each other’s infection and each other’s nurse. The oppressors are welcome if they acknowledge that they, to, are victims of the racist patriarchy, and stand unqualifiedly with the victims—in reading over quite a few comment threads on stories dealing with the Farrow letter, I have seen many men cleansing and redeeming themselves in this manner. They must also take the lead in purging the irredeemable—the stream of abuse directed toward non-believers (those who don’t think that, with all his flaws, this sounds like something Allen would do; or those who balance Farrow’s claims with evidence of Mia Farrow’s introduction of various dysfunctions into her children’s lives; or those insisting on a proper juridical framing of the claims; or simply those who say we can’t know for sure) is unrestrained.

I’ll make a final, perhaps predictable observation. The political equivalent of the church of our child of sexual abuse is the international cult of Palestine, for whom the most horrific actions are merely proof of how all-encompassingly horrific Israeli oppression must be—who would strap a bomb to a teenager and send him or her into a crowd of civilians to self-detonate except for those who have be traumatized beyond all reason themselves? But if all they can do is act out their trauma in escalatory ways, how can they then be considered negotiating partners capable of concessions and respect for agreements they have reached?

There is no way to stand outside of these discourses without sounding callous, as I’m sure I do here. I think it’s important to resist the usual qualifications people making arguments similar to mine usually feel compelled to introduce—that, yes, sexual abuse of children is horrible, that it takes place far too often, that we must oppose it wherever we see it, that in this case Dylan Farrow may indeed be telling the truth, etc. To run through these qualifications (even though I suppose I just did it) is to concede the point that rejecting victimary arguments unconditionally renders one suspect. I would like to argue that victimary arguments are terrible for actual victims because they encourage people to define themselves in terms of insults and injuries received, which is to say in terms of resentments. But, like the argument some conservatives will always try to make that leftist policies are worse for blacks than for anyone else, trapping them in dependency and dysfunction, I don’t believe these arguments can stick now. The victimary has to run its course, and there’s no way of knowing when, if, or how it will exhaust itself. Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address seems to me more prescient than ever:

“Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

Victimary thinking is based on the conviction that if there were a God He would will it that all the wealth produced through any asymmetrical relation whatsoever be sunk, and that whatever looks to us like a humiliating experience in the past must be repaid by equivalent humiliation in contemporary coin.

I understand that there is a spy movie in which one of the spies is codenamed “Hedgehog” and his fellow spies ask, “what does Hedgehog know?” If anyone knows the movie, please share the title with us.

I have a printed copy of the Anthropoetics motto webpage on my office door: “The fox knows many things, the hedgehog, one big thing,” with a photo of a cute European hedgehog. http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/hogb.html

Visitors often ask about the motto: what does it mean? What is the “one big thing?” Depending on who is asking, and what mood I’m in, I might say something about the ancient Greek origin of the saying and Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay on it, or something about Generative Anthropology, or I might just try to say something funny. When people ask what the hedgehog knows, I’m tempted to say, “the deferral of violence through representation,” but that phrase doesn’t have any meaning for most people, so I usually say something about Generative Anthropology’s focus on the origin of the language. The importance of asking that question is, in one sense, what hedgehog knows.

In my view, the fox is superficial, obsessively collecting details without understanding the larger meaning. The hedgehog is not necessarily a “big picture” thinker, but he knows one thing for sure, he stays with that one thing, and he builds on it slowly to construct something more lasting.

The relationship between the fox and the hedgehog is an interesting issue. The hedgehog, of course, by simply curling up into a ball is able to defeat the fox in all his cunning. But many people don’t see that the hedgehog is really any better or smarter than the fox. And the hedgehog certainly can’t afford to ignore all the data that has been so cunningly collected by the fox. So I think the best answer to the question, “what does hedgehog know?” is “one thing more than the fox.” In other words, the hedgehog knows everything the fox knows, but he puts a foundation or cornerstone under it, so that it all coheres into a meaningful whole.

I have always been dissatisfied with the use of the term “ostensive” to designate the originary sign. Yes, the sign is ostensive—it involves, necessarily, some kind of pointing—but it is not only ostensive and, more importantly, “ostensive” is a commonly used concept in linguistics and cognitive psychology and in those contexts has a much more narrow meaning. “Ostensive” in those contexts means pointing to an object under conditions where sign users already know what it means to point, and in discussions of language in particular it gives the misleading impression that the originary hypothesis is vulnerable to the critique of Augustine’s model of language learning advanced by Wittgenstein in the opening pages of his Philosophical Investigations. The distinction Wittgenstein makes there, between language as designation of objects, and language as following a set of mostly tacitly understood rules is foundational for contemporary thinking about language and much else. The term “ostensive” makes it sound like GA is on the wrong side of this divide when in fact we are most certainly not: that signs only make sense on a “scene,” within an “event,” means that central to sign use is the configuring of complex scenes and events, whose ultimate constitution lies beyond the comprehension of any participant. Language is a tacit, open-ended, rule governed activity for GA no less than for any Wittgensteinian derived mode of reflection or inquiry. We just insist that the rules have an origin in the urgency with which human beings must defer the ever-present potentiality of violence.

If not “ostensive,” then what? Well, the originary sign is also iconic—it represents because it is “similar” to the act of appropriation it aborts; it also, in its completion, imitates the object (qua God) itself in urging that renunciation. But it is also not just iconic, because “iconic” as some of the same problems as “ostensive”—what counts as “resemblance” is itself culture bound and therefore can’t unproblematically account for the origin of culture. The originary sign is iconic and ostensive, because it is constitutive—that is, it establishes the very conditions under which iconic and ostensive signs are possible; but it does so ostensively and iconically. So, we need all three of these concepts to grasp the originary sign in all its paradoxicality. Fortunately, there is much overlap between the three words, making a portmanteau possible. “Icon” contains the “con” with which “constitutive” begins, and “constitutive” contains the “st” near the beginning of “ostensive” (with an “o” separated from the “st” by a rather unobtrusive “n”), allowing us to compose the following: the “iconstitensive” sign. (The “ut,” as far as I can determine, does not comprise part of the root of “constitute,” so we can lose it.) The stuttering “ostensive” one might hear in “iconstitensive” reflects, we might say, the hesitation that is also an essential ingredient of the originary sign, and one can hear all three words in this new one out of many without that new word being unduly difficult to pronounce, it seems to me.

Violent Imaginaries

Perhaps it has occurred to other members of the GA discipline that the negative pole of the event issuing in the originary sign, that is, the collapse of the proto-human community into universal, chaotic violence, is extremely implausible. In other words, even if we assume the most heightened mimetic fervor, it’s hard to see how the violence consequent upon the breakdown of the animal pecking order could actually lead anywhere near the violent death of all members of the community. How could they all tear each other apart limb from limb? They would exhaust themselves well before such a result. At most, such a breakdown in the hierarchical order would lead to some serious injuries, maybe a death or two, followed by a perhaps more fragile restoration of the pecking order.

What is extremely plausible, though, is that such an all-consuming storm of violence is what that breakdown would look like to the members of the proto-human group—and that it would need to look that way in order prompt the invention of the sign. In other words, the intuition or, perhaps, unconscious, constituting the sign is not a reasonable expectation of devastating violence but a violent imaginary. An imaginary gives rise to fantasies, but it is not the same thing. A helpful way to think of the concept “imaginary” is through R.G. Collingwood’s definition of “imagination.” Collingwood gives the following example: suppose you are looking from a window out on a lawn with a wall that one cannot see beyond. You will have no difficulty “imagining” the continuation of that lawn beyond the wall—in that case, “imagination” is the continuation or completion of what one perceives. In that case, though, imagination must make perception possible in the first place: I can only see the field of grass as a “lawn” insofar as I can see it as bounded, as a whole in itself and a part of larger wholes. This constitutive capacity of the imagination is an “imaginary,” a supplement to perception that makes meaningful perception possible. Needless to say, the imaginary need not be true—in the case of Collingwood’s example, the lawn may not, in fact, extend beyond the wall.

The violent imaginary on the originary works in the same way—as soon as the beginnings of this new form of confrontation becomes visible to the participants on the scene, those participants must continue and complete it—“must” in the sense that that is what an advanced, highly mimetic animal would do. And this continuation and completion would be, not an attempt at an accurate portrayal, but a sharpening of what is new in this configuration. What is new is the absence of discernable limits on the confrontation, readily imaginable as an uncontrolled, accelerating melee, with no exterior. It is, then, this violent imaginary that is both revealed and concealed in the sign—the symmetry of the shared sign on the scene must match the negative symmetry of the unbounded imagined violence. We can even assume that the form of the sign is shaped by its complementary violent imaginary—the sign would be effective to the extent that it conveys everyone’s awareness of the extreme “thought experiment” implicit in the violent imaginary.

All signs, and all of culture, then, would have to be constituted by some violent imaginary, one we could read negatively off of the signs of culture themselves. No human society, even in the midst of the most brutal war or total social breakdown, ever approaches “chaos”—society can be dissolved into clans, gangs, militias, tribes, but never into a “war of all against all.” Again, though, this doesn’t make the imaginary false—even in those gangs and clans, conflicts raise the specter of a breakdown of that order, and that breakdown, even for the most realistic, can only be viewed as a “breakdown” against the imagined background of “chaos.” And it is from such an imaginary that we derive our intuitions regarding the best way to ward off all consuming violence.

Perhaps such an originary theory of the unconscious can make psychoanalysis interesting for GA. Psychoanalysis has been swept, often derisively, from the stage of history, replaced by neurobiology, the cognitive sciences and more practical, localized forms of psychotherapy. Freud’s claims regarding the Oedipal Complex, castration fear, penis envy, etc., have been widely ridiculed as arbitrary and (Victorian) culture bound. Maybe. But at least Freud put desire, violence and deferral at the center of his psychology, and saw the central problem of humanity as relations between humans, rather than greater proficiency in the relations between humans and nature, or assuming the problem of reciprocity to already be solved. And Freud was also aware that the way we represent our experienced traumas to ourselves and others are related to those actual traumas only in very mediated ways—which is to say, he understood that reality is scenic, and the psychoanalytic session was one more scene or event in a long series of them leading us back to the original scene. If I am right to posit a violent imaginary as constitutive of any sign, than GA shares all this with psychoanalysis (including important post-Freudian figures like Lacan, Winnicott and Kristeva)—and not with what might be much more scientific, useful and, in their own domains, accurate representations of the human mind.

Reconstructing the constitutive violent imaginary through the continuing and completing of the scene by a sign would in turn enable the reconstruction of that sign so as to take more account of that violent imaginary. Bringing more of the violent imaginary into representation would not necessary quell the terror lurking within it, because such further elaboration of the representation would simply shift the terms of the violent imaginary. In other words, the violent imaginary can never be made fully conscious—as Freud realized, the patient who came in familiar with his works and proceeded to spill his guts about his passion for his mother and desire to kill his father had simply rearranged the unconscious material under a new repression. What can, perhaps, be done, though, is to invest the violent imaginary more fully in dialogue or disciplinary space established so as to examine it—in other words, the violent imaginary cannot be represented as such (we can’t paint a picture of it and look at it together) but it can be made the imaginary of the scene of representation itself, rather than of some represented scene. The value of this is to make our responses to each other direct, ostensive, framings of the violent imaginary that can provide suitable, matching signs, rather than explanations and diagnoses that subserve the power of the violent imaginary by keeping it out of our hands, so to speak, and rendering it, paradoxically, “fictional,” insofar as it has been made over some conventional narrative form.

Cultural analysis, in this case, would involve mapping the features of a representation onto some violent imaginary which is, to borrow Saussure’s image of the signifier/signified distinction, are like two sides of the same sheet of paper. One violent imaginary would be all in the group converging on the strongest member, and then the second strongest, and then the third, and so on. Another violent imaginary would involve all converging on the weakest, and then the second weakest, and so on. Another would have equally powerful subgroups facing off in an endless and increasingly bitter stalemate. And each of these imaginaries could be further modified by the positions one can occupy within them—seeing oneself as the third weakest in an imaginary in which the weakest is the target would be different than imagining oneself among the strongest in that scenario—one’s fear would be calibrated differently and ones responsibility and capacity to affect the scene assessed differently. And, then, the sign one puts forth would be correspondingly different, and we could read levels of confidence vs. diffidence, caution vs. recklessness, patience vs. panic, appeals to the entire group vs. appeals to more specialized constituencies, among other features of one’s sign, in these terms, reading them back to a hypothesized violent imaginary. Different violent imaginaries might map better onto particular historical events, and may thus provide us with a way of accounting from changes in historical interpretation. And cultural remediation would involve fleshing out and making more present those violent imaginaries, creating new positions within them and creating tactics and strategies for those positions available within and so as to further defer that violent imaginary.

According to a new pedagogical technique, called “flipping the classroom,” instead of using class time to provide the educational content (the lecture) with out of class time (homework) used to fulfill some assignment aimed at reinforcing what was heard in class, students learn more from providing the lecture online, so that students can listen to it at home and class tome then used to raise questions and probe the student’s understandings. I have seen the same approach proposed for the academic conference, where it seems to me to make even more sense: instead of sitting and listening to a complex paper, which one can hardly process and formulate pertinent questions for on the spot, with a meager 10-15 minutes left for discussion, why not post the papers in advance so that they can be read and the conference time used for more advanced and productive discussions? At any rate, I thought I would give it a try, and I invite others to do the same in this space, or to begin any discussions now, to be continued at the conference. Of course, I don’t preclude the possibility of further revisions, but here it is, in what seems to me a pretty much finished form:

Attentionality and Originary Ethics
Adam Katz
However paradoxical it may seem, I venture to suggest that our age threatens one day to appear in the history of human culture as marked by the most dramatic and difficult trial of all, the discovery of and training in the meaning of the ‘simplest’ acts of existence: seeing, listening, speaking, reading – the acts which relate men to their works, and to those works thrown in their faces, their “absences of works.”
Louis Althusser, Reading Capital, 1968

“In all the years in which I have attempted to explain GA in writing and in speech, I have tended to place the major emphasis on representation, and in particular on “formal representation” or language. One of the points I have insisted on is that human language is qualitatively different from animal “languages”; the researches and insights of such as Terrence Deacon have essentially ended the debate on this point. But it follows from my very “definition” of the human as the species that poses a greater problem to its own survival than the totality of forces outside the human community that the primary transformation of the proto-human into the human was ethical. Language and more broadly, representation emerged, per the originary hypothesis, to defer conflict, not to provide a cognitive or ratiocinative tool. But in the configuration of the originary event, the moral model of the reciprocal exchange of the sign is just as indubitably unique a human creation as language, and indeed more essential to the success of the event—and to the consequent emergence of our species. The urgent need that the event fulfills is to find a model of behavior that can defer violence within a community for which one-on-one animal hierarchy no longer provides an adequate solution.” Eric Gans Chronicle 431, “Originary Ethics.”
The distinction Gans posits here, between the sign as a formal representation of a transcendent object, on the one hand, and the sign as a result or manifestation of reciprocity seems to me one that the originary hypothesis itself transcends. In other words, “formal representation” is itself ethical, is indeed the origin and resource of any ethics, so that ethics cannot be thought outside of it. At the same time, formal representation cannot be thought outside of ethics, since the “formality” of the representation lies in the shared attention it effects, and in this shared attention lies any ethics. In shared, or joint attention, is the fundamental equality that constitutes the human. All the resources we need for thinking about ethics lie in joint attention, in our ability to point to something, and approaching ethics in this way might enable use to create more minimal, more pared down, ethical vocabularies.
To start with, if we can fold moral reciprocity into the shared attention constitutive of the scene, couldn’t we say that what is immoral and a denial of reciprocity is whatever interrupts that shared attention? There are two ways shared attention can be interrupted: first, through some kind of distraction; second, through some kind of fixation. Distraction (distracting others; allowing oneself to be distracted) tears us away from the scene of joint attention and thereby demands a renewed, necessarily risky effort to redirect attention in the object—that is, distraction raises the threshold of significance; fixation involves tearing oneself away from the scene and, ultimately, turning the other participants into objects of rather than participants in, that singular attention. Both distraction and fixation abort the scene, but both are also complementary possibilities of the originary structure of joint attention: the actuality or fear of distraction favors the formation of fixations. If we consider that anyone enters a scene by following a line of attention—by looking at what someone else is looking it and deferring appropriation as the other does in order to continue looking—one has not fully joined the scene until that line of attention has passed through oneself, and has been seen to do so. In other words, attention is not joint until all the participants show, through signs, that they are letting the object be so as to see what it has to show—in which case, each participant must be inspected, so to speak, or credentialized, by having the sign they put forth validated. For one’s joining of the line of attention to become evident and thereby accepted as legitimate, that attention must first land on oneself making oneself its object—in other words, each new participant on the scene represents a potential interruption of shared attentional frame. At this crucial point upon which one’s entry into the scene depends, one can only avoid becoming a distraction and potential source of fixation in others by doubling that attention back on oneself by joining it, becoming a sign and hence invisible, insofar as others are redirected back to the scene through you. In that case, you will have shown others that the line of attention passes through your own eyes; unless, of course, your self-referentiality simply intensifies your distractiveness. Whether a distraction has taken place will depend upon whether those attended to or, in Louis Althusser’s term, “interpellated,” as potential objects of resentment or desire can restore the line of attention by incorporating the interruption into the scene’s founding sign. I would call this the “loop” in the line of attention, and undergoing this looping is what I would call “ostentation,” which is where ethical being is located. Whether one can undergo or go through the loop depends upon the group’s ability to see you as restoring the line of attention as well as your ability to do so—ethics involves both ostentation and conferring a completed ostentation upon others, or the conversion of attentionality into intentionality. And this means that whether one has distracted or patched together the continuity of the line of attention, or fixated or proactively identified a break in that line can only be known in the aftermath on a new, converted scene of joint attention.
We keep the line of attention going by language learning—every loop in the line of attention involves an encounter of idioms. While it would be absurd to say that each of us speaks our own language, I think it makes perfect sense to say that at the margins we all differ in the emergent idioms we speak and that it at such margins that real ethical questions emerge: when I think I’m following your discourse and taking the next “logical step” but you think I am falsifying your most basic intuitions then a difference in language has emerged. Michael Tomasello, along with many others has made the argument that we learn language not as collections of single words with discrete meaning that then get combined in sentences, or as a series of grammatical rules applied to single instances of language use, but as pre-packaged chunks of discourse—phrases, formulas, commonplaces—that we can repeat appropriately insofar as we occupy scenes of joint attention with our elders. (I remember, for example, when I was very young, hearing “next door neighbor” as “neck store neighbor,” without it impairing my understanding of the phrase at all. Why should “neck store” refer to “proximal”? Who knows? How many other phrases couldn’t be made sense of through a strict following of the literal meaning of the words? If asked, perhaps I could have come up with an improvised etymology—I certainly would have believed one told to me.) Over time our language base extends through discovering iterable patterns in and analogies with those chunks, noticing similar contexts, mixing chunks, exchanging elements of the chunks we are familiar with, and so on. This process never ends, continuing, say, for we academics, when we read the sentences of one thinker through the sentences we have assimilated from another. We can identify patterns because we can arrange center-margin relations on scenes and still recognize them as the “same” scene (when I am done speaking and someone else takes “center stage,” it will still be the “same” scene); and we can identify analogies because the materials of one scene can be “plugged into” other scenes. Iterating (repeating differently) chunks, patterns and analogies, that is, is the ways we follow the sometimes bumpy line of attention.
The ethical stance is not so much learning the language of the other, or teaching the other one’s own language, because “language” is not a static entity that can stand still long enough for it to be the same language once it has been learned as it was when it began being taught. Rather, ethics involves learning the emergent language that arises at the margin or rough edges of the convergent idioms. Joint attention is always liable to lapse, prey to distraction and fixation, must always be checked and re-engaged—when we mistake ourselves and each other we realize that we have not been attending to the same thing after all, and our recourse is to attend to what we normally attend from: language. We have to check our use of words and expressions, to inform one another that I meant this word in that sense, or that I meant it figuratively or ironically rather than literally, or that I was alluding to what I thought was a common reference, or even just to pronounce the same word with a slightly different emphasis so as to distinguish it from a homonym, and so on. And from there attention can perhaps be redirected back to some signified. Explaining and justifying our actions to each other—the traditional content of ethics—is itself such an engagement with signs (our actions and bodies along with words) that threaten to fray some shared attention.
A useful model for the mode of ethical thinking I am proposing is the transference relation in therapeutic situations, in which the therapist allows himself to be interpellated by the patient, who projects upon the therapist scenes that have nothing to do with the therapist, transforming the therapist into a screen upon which repressed fantasies can be displayed and made available for analysis. While, as Philip Rieff has argued, the “triumph of the therapeutic” has eroded moral discourse by undermining the balance of interdictions and remissions constitutive of traditional culture, tipping the balance decisively toward remissiveness (the therapist is always trying to help the patient liberate himself from some social inculcated inhibition) the therapist’s own position comes with a strict set of ethics, one deriving from the ethics of disinterest and transcendence cultivated in the monotheistic and scientific traditions. To the extent that we are all, if not therapists to each other, inevitably objects of transference for each other, then transference provides a way of describing the way through and out the loop of attention issuing in ostentation.
In that case, the transferential relation restores the fraying joint attention, the center, by adopting the assumption that the interpellative attention paid one is essentially random, indicative of some crisis on the scene rather than revelatory regarding oneself. One first takes on responsibility by rendering oneself interchangeable with anyone else on the scene. This assertion of a very fundamental form of equality is ethical work, rather than a presupposition, involving the neutralization of any naturalized link between the source of attention and its object. The similarity between the scene of transference and the Girardian scapegoating scene is obvious, and the ethical stance I am describing seeks to centralize the same resentments Girard theorizes, with the difference that the transferential relation aims at restoring the center by recuperating the process of interpellation within a revised set of rules, or language games. So, while Girard’s model is complicated by the question of the actual guilt or responsibility of the target, that is not the case here: even if I am guilty as charged, my ethical obligation would be to minimize the attentional space my guilt takes up and toward the redirection of attention to the repairing of the joint attention I have myself broken—of course, a precondition of accomplishing that will likely be a full confession, acceptance of the normally imposed sanctions, and laying open my actions to further inspection by the community. In this way, the resentments aroused by the attention I have drawn on myself is less likely to be a distraction, continuing to fray the semiotic texture of the community, than a restoration and enrichment of the shared attentional space. The rule of such a practice of transference is that the more attention is directed towards me the less it is about me.
Jean Francois Lyotard introduced the concept of the differend, which he distinguishes from a “litigation” in that the litigants share a common language of negotiation and adjudication, while the differend involves a double injustice done to the “claimant” insofar as the language in which she would put forth her claim is incommensurable with the language of the respondent. Lyotard used as examples, predictably if appropriately, the Holocaust victim in the face of the Holocaust revisionist (who imposes a double-bind by treating the victim’s very survival as proof of the falsity of her claim) and the Aborigine subject to expropriation via the settler’s system of property which has no way of recognizing the native’s. There is no reason not to generalize the concept, though, to include the more radical transferential relation I am proposing, in which a deliberate incommensurability is introduced at the margins of divergent idioms so as to examine the limits of those idioms in relation to something outside each of them.
Differends are found in sentences that work incommensurably in different idioms. A sentence constructs a reality, immune to imperatives, by deferring other possible realities—realities that, in the judgment of the composer, would less effectively defer those imperatives (perhaps by falsifying or fragilizing reality so as to make it more compliant towards the imperatives; perhaps by constructing a reality so distanced as to not address the imperative at all). But one, or some, of those other possible realities would work just as well if we trace the deferred imperative back further to a longstanding, unfolding one, or up closer, to a more urgent one. A differend emerges when a speaker allows an interlocutor to join him in any of the realities, but only one, and in view of the others. Imagine that the same statement would be decisive proof of the speaker’s insanity, or of his surpassing wisdom, depending upon the frame (or would require urgent action, or infinite patience, depending upon the frame); and then imagine that one has to act on one or the other frame while acknowledging the undecidability between them. And then the other, likewise, keeps both frames in play while acting within one. Both participants would be generating and sustaining the threshold between the two frames—that is what I am proposing as an ethical model.
We create differends by learning the language that is other to everyone involved, which has the paradoxical result of restoring iconism to language. The declarative sentence takes on the iconism of the originary gesture, which means what it does, insofar as the differend constitutes not only the event represented by the sentence but the sentence as event—an event in which, rather than assuming a shared reality, the participants must stipulate to a provisional reality. Under such conditions, reality must be gathered together out of signs shaken loose from normalized reality so as to realign the relation between tacit and explicit. This realignment involves rendering all elements of the speech act—gesture, tone, sound/meaning correspondences, all the scenes trailing along the signs we bear with us, everything “chunked up” in any effort to keep up with the novelty of any speech act, everything that spills out when commonplace meets event, and everything banished by the doctrine of the arbitrariness of the sign—vouchers for the reality one attests and redeems. Language is what we attend from to each other’s attending to; language learning involves attending to what we have been attending from. Attending to the tacit knowing enabling any signification recuperates distractions by using them to break up the fixations that interfere with our attending to the overlapping margins of our idioms that make language learning possible.