GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

say a few words about the Supreme Court’s recent decision upholding “Obamacare”? I’m somewhat detached from it, more so than I would have expected, since I though the Court would overturn the law—I’m as surprised as anyone that it was Chief Justice Roberts who not only cast the deciding vote but did so in a decision that is convoluted enough to be a Borges story, a work of conceptual art or, more simply, a joke (and not a bad one, at that). He actually gave me a new way to think about the word “tax,” which one doesn’t expect from a Supreme Court ruling. So, the government can’t impose a mandate requiring you to buy a product, but they can fine you for not buying that product, as long as that fine is considered a “tax”; nor does the fine or penalty actually have to be called a tax in order to be a tax—indeed, those who passed the law can have, and can continue to, vociferously insist that it is not a tax. I would not be at all surprised if a new lawsuit charging that the “tax” is invalid because it didn’t originate in the House of Representatives were to be rejected, again in a decision authored by Justice Roberts, on the grounds that, for the purpose of this new lawsuit, it was not, in a fact a tax. In other words, what we might actually have here is a “nonce” tax.

And there’s even more! There is a trap for Democrats and, more broadly, the Left built into the decision: Roberts agreed with the dissenters that the Commerce Clause would not have permitted the mandate, hence, presumably, embedding some limits upon federal over-reach. But, one might say (and I would agree with one on this), that over-reach can continue, as long as Congress just says it is introducing new taxes. But there’s the brilliantly laid trap!—the whole point is to tax without admitting you are doing so.

There’s also a trap for Republicans, who have gotten themselves a bit entangled in their eagerness to rid us of this monstrosity—they began by insisting that the mandate was, in fact a new tax (this insistence lay behind the famous interview wherein George Stephanopolous pressed the President on precisely this question) but, then, for the sake of the lawsuit, were quite happy to deny its “taxness” in finding the quickest route to its overturn; and, now, seem thrilled to take the Supreme Court (which did decide wrongly, didn’t it?) at its word and run against this enormous new tax of Obama’s. This game might not end well either.

I am grateful to the Chief Justice, though, and not only due to my love of word play, self-reflexivity and arbitrary constraints in writing—in trying to decide for myself whether it is, indeed, “fairly possible” to see the mandate as a tax I had to construct the following, intriguing, analogy (which I assume Roberts himself relied upon). The government provides all kinds of tax breaks for activities it would prefer us to engage in more of: having children, winter-proofing our homes, sending our kids to college, and, really, God knows what else. So, in that case, why can’t we say that the government is taxing those who don’t have children, don’t winter-proof, don’t send kids to college, etc.; or, if we want to follow the Mobius Strip around the other side, that the government is “mandating” having children and all the rest? Sure, we can define “tax” and “mandate” in such a way as to answer these questions, but does anyone really believe in such fixed definitions anymore?

In other words, Roberts’ final trap is for us—all of us who have accepted the continual growth of government and its extension into every area of life, every choice we make, bribing, blackmailing and manipulating us at every turn, with our approval. And I think he knows it. Roberts has written a little postmodern play, in which the audience has to perform the denouement. That’s not such a bad legacy.

My reading of the event of 9/11 was that it would either lead to the abolition of victimary discourse or accelerate the unraveling of American and Western society. My reasoning was that the only viable response to the unlimited victimary claims inherent in the attack was to defend the victims of the victims, which could in turn only be done in the name of liberal principles. In this way, victimary discourse would be exposed and discredited as the greatest producer of victims of them all, while the credibility of a more classical version of liberal principles would be restored.

This possibility ended with the election of a Democratic congress in 2006 and this was further confirmed by the election of Barack Obama in 2008. So, I had the second possibility to consider: unraveling. The election of Obama, our first hologram-American president, was a bizarre event, one that will intrigue historians: a majority of Americans opted for a kind of vague racial absolution and the fantasy that our international and domestic furies could be appeased through a symbolic repudiation of President Bush, and this at a time when there were actually somewhat serious issues on the table. I think there is quite a bit of regret about this now, but, as Marx said, “Nations and women are not forgiven the unguarded hour in which the first adventurer who came along could violate them.” If we could forgive Marx’s sexism, I think the point holds: America has repudiated its responsibilities as a guarantor of a liberal world order, which has led, on the one hand, to a metastization of victimary thinking and, on the other hand, to the Tea Party movement, which I see as wholly salutary but also completely uninterested in American leadership.

If Americans are to be more interested in saving themselves from unceasing governmental encroachments upon their lives and predations upon their livings than in protecting Europe from Russia, Taiwan and Japan from China, Israel from the Muslim world, etc., then we will see devolutions across the board—those countries, communities and individuals best able to free themselves from victimary thnking will have a chance of flourishing, but in forms and articulations we can’t anticipate now. Since there will be unchecked tyrannies and terrorist producing failed societies the world will continue to be interested in us, so our present desire to unshackle ourselves from responsibility for it will likely be revealed as a fantasy, but this will lead us to one of two possibilities: either surrender to victimary thinking on a global scale (we will take orders from the UN or some other representation of the “international community”); or we will simply target our enemies, large and small, and adopt the principle: we will feel free to hold anyone who expresses a desire to harm us responsible for all actual attempts to harm us (which would represent a repudiation of victimary thinking, if without much enlargement of ethical capabilities).

How will it all turn out? Who knows? I prefer to take the theoretical perspective, which sees all this as interesting, with the most interesting question always “What is really happening?” How do we get a view of things that isn’t just a litany of the various ways people are out there conforming to and—much more often—violating our expectations and desires? How do we wrench ourselves outside of the limitations imposed by our resentments? Maybe by sharpening those resentments and shaking off the habits of thought which normalize them—that way, at least, a possibility worth exploring or using as a measure might crystallize. I think a good place to begin is with a radical simplification—the complexities can always be let back in as we go. Here’s the simplification: victimary thinking is a heretical form of liberal democratic ideology; liberal democratic ideology is just a heretical form of Christianity; while Christianity is itself a Jewish heresy. What is Judaism, in that case? The displacement of universal empire by the Big Man with the universal empire of God, another, and the true, single center from which we are all equidistant. The impotent prophetic discourse of Jeremiah, Isaiah, et al is still the way we think today, whether we are denouncing the 1% or Big Government for interfering with our right to stand in direct relation to God and/or the egalitarian community. Modern society provides no way out of the perpetual resentment toward some illegitimate higher authority which has always already usurped the rights which supposedly ground it.

The concluding simplification: victimary discourse marks the exhaustion of what we can call the “anti-haughty” revelations. The last time as farce, after all. I will, then, simply disregard victimary discourse, no matter how powerful it is or is yet to become: it is not interesting, because either it will emerge triumphant, in which case all our thinking and social practice will end up on new, presently unthinkable terrain; or, it is, however ferocious, in its final thrashings about, in which case why not re-orient ourselves to whatever remains outside of it. This helps me to take a step toward resolving my ambivalence toward the anti-semitism project I had embarked upon, as he has mentioned a few times, with Eric Gans. It has recently struck me, and I had this intuition confirmed by Philip Reiff’s Fellow Teachers, that, if the basic archetypes of anti-semitism were created by the early Christians, then they were in fact created by Jews—non-Jewish Jews, to use Isaac Deustcher’s term. But weren’t those early Christians simply continuing an internal Jewish accusation advanced by the Hebrew prophets, targeting the vast majority of their fellow Jews for insufficient fidelity to their vocation to testify to the one God—for giving in to the imperial temptations (such as, for example, preferring to fight for corrupt kingdoms over exemplary exile).

I can’t see it as a coincidence that the 19th and 20th century world struggles similarly had a substantial intra-Jewish component. I wonder whether it could be shown that those intense and intimate battles between Stalinists and Trotskyists in Jewish neighborhoods in 1930s Brooklyn looked something like those battles, 2,000 years earlier, between the Jewish “Christists” and those who would create Talmudic Judaism. One victimary reviewer on the Amazon.com page for Reiff’s Life Among the Deathworks refers to Reiff’s “heady admixture mixture of preening Jewish narcissism” and it seems to me that he/she both has a point and is the point: anti-semitism involves the assumption that Jews believe they have a monopoly on exemption from capitulation to the imperial, civilized, order, we must all submit to. But I don’t think that anti-semitism is the belief that Jews believe this, especially since the dialectic of arguments over anti-semitism of necessity point out the uniqueness of the Jews as a target and this uniqueness can easily be taken to imply some kind of monopoly of the aforementioned kind. It only becomes anti-semitism when this presumed monopoly is taken to signify a Jewish plot to establish a more inclusive and horrific empire than any that has yet existed.

At any rate, the point is that we might simply be feeding anti-semitism by directing attention to it so insistently—what might happen if we leave the after-effects of all those internecine Jewish wars behind and let the unproductive spin their wheels? Israel can be a testing ground for this possibility, because in Israel Jews can focus on recreating Judaism, by picking and choosing and reconstructing from among its enormous riches, treating the global opprobrium towards and ostracism of Israel as a mere nuisance, while going about covenanting with all those who prefer relations with a thriving, advanced society over the pleasures of joining in the sacrifices of the victimary Palestinians.

So, what, then, outside of all prophet and metaphysical frames, is happening now? Reiff’s own prophetic discourse identifies the “therapeutic” as the replacement of the faith in founding interdicts which has taken us this far. He thereby identifies something central to all the historical and cultural “posts,” but I don’t see the therapeutic in as threatening terms as does Reiff. He claims that the therapeutic does away with all interdicts by not only giving us permission to transgress them but by setting us against them as an illegitimate authority, inimical to our spontaneous freedom. In this case, I’m not sure if the victimary is mode of the therapeutic or vice versa; or, on the contrary, the victimary has taken its force from the vacuum left open by the rise of the therapeutic, insofar as the victimary is nothing if not interdicts, albeit unevenly applied.

But there are always interdicts, insofar as we continue to speak—after all, we don’t engage in continuous orgies and lynchings. So where, and what, are they? How enforced, and revised in practice? To what extent are we living on borrowed capital, drawing upon the habits of renunciation and deferral created by faiths in which we no longer believe, as opposed to new, as yet unnamed signs, creating new, perhaps more idiosyncratic sacralities? Much of what is valuable in contemporary thinking—Gregory Bateson and his followers come to mind—is indebted to a kind of therapeutism: the notion of a double bind, which is certainly consistent with the originary hypothesis and a source of Gans’s thinking about the paradoxes intrinsic to the originary scene, derives from interpretations of therapeutic situations. And there are powerful interdictions built into the “interactionist” standpoint deriving from Bateson: to see our speech as saturated with paradox is to identify and seek to minimize the basic sources of violence and not just out of fear but so as to free ourselves to think and create.

Even the insistence that one not confuse the “map” with the “territory” reflects perhaps the most ancient interdictions, against idolatry, and taking the name of the Lord in vain. We can now know that any map is in the territory, and not just an imperfect, tentative representation of it; even more, the map is nothing more than our analysis and composition of the territory from within. We model the territory as we take a step in one direction rather than another; we receive feedback; and we revise the map in taking another step. Google now does this at the speed of light, more or less. At any time on the Yahoo homepage there is a list of the top ten searches at that moment; sometimes, the top entry drops off the list in a couple of minutes. In this economics of attention, anomalies and mistakes stand out—those things that are so bad that they’re good, for example. Standing out is one thing—being incorporated into a new, more or less evanescent, idiom, is another. It’s easy to see the ways in which this happens—a particular image is repeated over and over, in subtly and drastically different ways; a particular phrase or sentence is repeated over and over, with a single word replaced each time, or a different referent, or the context rendering it slightly more or less ironic. Anyone can do it—anyone can be taught to (or maybe just learn) to do it.

As far as I can tell, that’s what is happening outside of the metaphysical, prophetic and imperial frames: the analysis and composition of mistakes and anomalies into new idioms and grammars. New rules, without any meta-rules, are difficult to follow and violations are hard to assess but precisely the lack of meta-rules makes it urgent to try and follow them to the letter, so people make lots of mistakes but just keep going, tacitly revising the rules, with the boundary between insistence upon compliance and authentification of compliance difficult to discern. In that case, there is no more room for metaphysical mapping or prophetic hysteria. I naturally think this development supports my own hopes for a far more minimal social order, with all institutions ultimately reducible to explicit agreements with equally explicit modes of accountability. Everything get ironized, post-ironized and de-ironized fairly quickly through this process of analysis and composition, leading to the kind of skepticism, transparency and pluralism that keeps any authority within very strict limits. But I could be wrong—maybe such play depends upon a complacent belief in the stability of what exists (politicians come and go, recessions, come and go, etc., but nothing can ever really change, can it?). My guess is that such play is inevitable once we realize we don’t share the same map and accept that we never will—that all we can do is follow one another’s lead and make up the details and patch together the shared terms as we go. Some, perhaps a remnant, could then rebuild around the prohibition on presuming a shared model without the creation of some joint attention. Such a prohibition can be enforced with minimal resentment because you can always simply treat any such presumption as erroneous, so as to open up a new play-space. At any rate, this new period of transparencies and overlappings is what I would like to be interested in right now, however marginal it might be.

At least one form of modernity, and arguably the dominant form, the one in which the winners in the marketplace become indistinguishable from the state players who determine winners in the marketplace, is driven by a hatred of the given. The given, first of all, in the sense of what is, what is simply there, what remains after all theory, analysis, experimentation, transformation, construction and production. You can listen to progressives rage against any suggestion that some differences, including those that generate inequalities, might simply be there, and, for that matter, be no big deal; and that all the attempts to eradicate said differences might just shift the pieces around on the board a bit, with some resentment added to the mix. The progressives and leftists will rage against such suggestions, but I’m not sure that much of the right, or most conservatives are any different—at the very least, they are extremely anxious to inoculate themselves against any suggestion that all differences can be rendered irrelevant and all inequalities removed. We see such a rage against the given both in the desire to make every single aspect of life a partisan political question and every topic a subject of some polemic, and in the tendency to try and eliminate risk and mistake, or at the very least to inflate the consequences of risk and mistakes to the benefit of those whose job it is to detect and uncover them. The old communist (I think) slogan, “Nothing is accidental,” covers all this. (In other words, I am endorsing, without saying how much, Heidegger’s complaint that the tendency of modernity is to turn everything and everyone into “standing reserve.”)

But given just as much in the sense of what has been given, that is, reality and everything in it as a gift. The two senses are really one—data is an array of gifts. A gift economy in the strict sense might spiral out of the egalitarian distribution on the originary scene, but it’s on the scene already in the form of the gift of life and peace given by the God object to the newly human community. When we divide amongst ourselves, we are merely dividing the gifts of God. When we give gifts, we are imitating God, when we accept gifts we are honoring God and freedom is really nothing more than the capacity to reject or accept any particular gift—just as language is, ultimately listening, sifting through a lot of noise and ordering the given, and then passing along, as faithfully as we can, what we have heard. Even the market economy can be conceptualized as a mere adjunct to the gift economy, as the entrepreneur first of all packages up his gifts for strangers, each of whom asymmetrically returns a bit of the gift of continued existence as a producer.

For the leftist intellectual, the fact that something is “taken for granted” by “everyone” is about as certain proof as you can have that the idea or claim in question is both wrong and pernicious. Even while we need not go that far, where else would thinking depart from if the not sense that what is “merely” given is unsatisfactory? But if you set yourself in opposition to the “granted” or “given,” the alternative is to trust only what you have “taken,” or, in more theoretical terms, “appropriated.” Even for Locke, only what one has appropriated through labor is genuinely one’s own “property.” But the powers with which you are able to “appropriate” must have been “given,” your proximity to the land and materials must have been given (even if you had to move quite a ways it was still in reach, as proven by the fact that you got there), the land’s own productive powers and the “laws of nature” enabling you to transform nature were all given, and so on. Even more, the work done by previous generations, and the unintended consequences of your own work and your collaboration with others is constantly adding new givens as quickly as you can make the givens takings. And in the end, your property is only yours because others grant it, as long as you take theirs for granted as well.

What, then, is so terrifying about all this? Whence the desire for a completely “constructed” reality, in which we can determine who put every piece in place, when and where? The gift economy, in the narrow sense studied by Marcel Mauss, and the honor society (with its vendettas and sacrifice) needed to be transcended, and the elaboration of the market economy which first took shape on it margins, was clearly the path of least resistance to doing so. But the market order didn’t, as it could have, present itself as a supplement to, and “appropriate” the language of, the gift economy—for example, by describing itself as a way of extending the gift relationship to strangers and by giving its increasingly asymmetrical forms more institutionalized recognition. At a certain point the advocates of the market order, if not its actual participants, set themselves against the gift economy, seeing it as an enemy to be uprooted. It seems to me that the best explanation is the alliance of the new, vulnerable, but potentially revolutionary market order with the absolutist state—the imperial state, in other words, which is really nothing more than a permanently asymmetrical gift relationship (is there anything more “given” for us today than the state?). Gift economies proliferate centers of power and diverse local relationships, formal and informal, which interfere with the state’s need to give each individual a single, unobstructed relationship with the state, the giver of all things necessary and the recipient of the obedience of the subject. The participants on the market could provide the formal arguments for the equality of the citizen and the rights to be protected by the state through the force of law; and the state could provide the market participant with unfettered and protected access to the domain it controlled. Once each imperial order finds itself in competition with all the others, an irreversible dynamic is set in place.

Thinking outside of the terror of the given means thinking in terms of plurality and incommensurability—or, in more grammatical terms, idioms. But it also means dropping the resentment towards totalizing discourses central to deconstruction and postmodernism—in the end, the totalizing discourses are also idioms, from which anyone might learn something (just like the state is ultimately just an increasingly inept giver and claimant of donations). If I kick a ball straight ahead past the other players, and I happen to be on a soccer field, I’m advancing the ball downfield; if I’m on a basketball court, it’s a violation and my team gives up the ball. Likewise in reverse: bouncing the ball down court is fine in basketball and a violation in soccer. The exact same physical movement has radically opposed meanings in the two settings. That’s all that “incommensurability” means. It doesn’t mean that if I play either soccer or basketball I can never play the other; it doesn’t mean that there aren’t skills that transfer from one sport to the other, or that observations you might make regarding, say, team play, in one or the other won’t provide insights into the other sport; it doesn’t even mean that one sport can’t be better than the other according to a particular scale of values: if you want a sport that maximizes jumping ability, then basketball is better. All “incommensurability” means is that you can’t play basketball and soccer at the same time; and that if you are going to play “sports,” it is going to be one of those sports or another—there is no sport in itself, or idea of sport, even though we might very well be able to construct a definition of “sport” that would distinguish it from, say, “crafts,” “musical performance” and other activities.(Indeed, I will do something like that in a moment, as a move in the theory game.) It’s just that one couldn’t play the definition.

Human life is like that, which means that the originary hypothesis demonstrates both the singular origin and the irreducible plurality of human being. As Hannah Arendt once said, in summarizing a key idea of Augustine’s, there was a beginning so that man would be a beginner. One can only identify beginnings after the fact—what makes you most likely to be first is not remaining tense on the starting line waiting for the gun to go off—that will only lead to more false starts; what makes one more likely to be first is a devotion to other beginnings, which come to one as a gift and which you would like to pass down, undefiled, to others, ultimately strangers. Revering beginnings rather than pre-empting or forcing ends is post-millennial thinking. According to Bernard Suits, “playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles,” which would mean that playing a game is simulating the originary event, wherein the sign was created as an “unnecessary obstacle” (to simply taking the object) that everyone voluntarily accepts as a necessary mediation. The game, of course, must also involve a forgetting of the origin, since the obstacle is at the same time very necessary. We necessarily create unnecessary obstacles in order to make the necessity as minimal as possible—which is to say, to move things along from prisoners’ dilemmas to elaborately rule governed interactions to freely entered and exited conversations and improvisations which reveal something new in the participants.

An entry point into what I have taken to calling “marginalist,” “exodian” and, now, “secessionist” thinking is integrating “rights” into specific centerless games (with, if necessary, referees) which define those moves which place you inside or outside of the game—rather than locating rights in the human being as such. This reduction is only possible if every game takes place on a particular piece of property with a generally recognized owner, and if the players are allowed to use their own currency. In relation to the state, then, politics today should work towards more precise definitions and protections of property and freedom from imposed state issued currency (there would be no need to try and overthrow the state—free currency would take care of its withering away, and if I’m wrong about that it must be because the state that would remain would be perfectly benign). Beyond this, though, this thinking beyond metaphysics also takes us beyond monotheism, which is itself bound up with resentment towards empire, essentially the defining the individual’s relationship to the salvational God as that which transcends the relationship between the individual and the imperial center; and history as the gradual, universal revelation of that God through the successive pride and fall of the empires. (I don’t mind making myself ridiculous by declaring the obsolescence of monotheism—my only concern is that the declaration could be taken to involve or encourage the slightest resentment towards believers.) This certainly doesn’t imply atheism, polytheism or paganism. It implies, rather, a God of the gifts—whatever, after all of our makings and takings, turns out to simply be there and something we could share with others, is a divine gift. Whether it’s always the same God, whether we could imagine His characteristics, whether he has plans for us (other than living up to and sharing His gifts)—those seem to me questions that might be taken up by those who wish to play the theology game, and who might gift the rest of us with helpful insights.

The game analogy is limited because games are closed off from reality in a way that reality never can be. We’re never playing quite the same game in reality, almost as if my basketball interferes with your soccer. But in any scene we can converge, or can imagine ourselves converging, upon clear sentences. At any moment, I can and implicitly do hypothesize an utterance-gesture-posture complex that will obtain a desired, if only dimly imagined, response—I will piece together the complex that is most likely to elicit that response. When it doesn’t, I adjust my desire and recalibrate my signifying, while everyone else does the same. The process can only continue given the assumption that sign and interpretation could coincide—even though, even if I imagine such a coincidence in advance, it would never be identical to what I would recognize after the fact as one. The movie cliché of two people looking into each others’ eyes and realizing simultaneously that they are in love is a model of this experience, which never really happens but is the presupposition of all that does.

The version of this experience at the level of the declarative is the clear sentence. The clear sentence (I am claiming that this is what we really mean by “clarity”) is one that is exhausted by its truth function. That is, once you have decided, to the satisfaction of all concerned, that a sentence is true or false, the sentence can be discarded—to the extent that it’s clear. The way we make a sentence more clear is by situating each of its elements securely within the truth function: “that dog is mine” is clear insofar as we have a consensus on what a dog is, on the concept of ownership and what would validate it in our cultural context, and on whether we referring to the same dog. But, of course, there is, in principle, no end to the layers of implicit claims and assumptions that might require the ostensive verification that must be obtained or stipulated to for the sentence to be made clear: an agreement on what a dog is on one level might turn into a disagreement on another level, and that other level might become relevant for the context in which the truth function of the sentence needs to be determined; we might have different conventions for pointing at something; our concepts of ownership might turn out to have significant incompatibilities, and so on—moreover, clarifying one term in the sentence might obscure another.

So, to return to the game analogy, we would have to imagine that I could be playing basketball and you soccer, with enough common elements in the two games so that with sufficient good will and willingness to overlook anomalies it would only be in event of an egregious discrepancy that we would ever notice it—and such events would be rapidly transformed into an mere accident, one that we now know how to avoid in the future. But what if we don’t want to—what if we actually come to like this basketball-soccer hybrid we have discovered ourselves to be playing? If we prefer to circle around and keep revising a provisional set of rules and have the discipline and mutual regard to overlook the momentary unfair advantages such an activity will always be giving one side or the other?
To return to language, this would mean that our desire for clarity need not be abandoned, but that it could be accented or punctuated by the networks of diverging idioms revealed precisely by that insistence on clarity (it is only the insistence on clarity that would lead us to explore the different possible understandings of “dog” and “mine”). With Godelian undecidability, there is a statement that is true but cannot be proven within the system, and the system depends upon such a truth. With the undecidability or incommensurability I am proposing, whichever truth we set ourselves to secure within the system of the sentence pries open different systems pivoted upon that truth. The act of taking—taking something to be the case, taking each other to be symmetrical to one’s self—unveils a world of givens: different definitions of dog, of property, of proper pointing out. And, these givens need not have been “in” any of us, or “suppressed” in the name of communication—they may not have existed outside our convergence on the clear sentence, but there they are now. We can work our way analytically to such presents lying and waiting in our presuppositions; or, we can take to producing them directly by, instead of repelling grammatically incorrect sentences, taking those parts of the sentence that have no grammatical place idiomatically so as to fill the needed grammatical slot, thereby opening up a whole new “grammar” for the word(s) in question.

The deliberate production of givens out of our takings—that is what the civilizational openness we need to survive now depends upon.

According to Jacques Godbout, in his The World of the Gift, the distinctive form taken by the gift in the modern world is the gift to strangers—everything from philanthropies to blood and organ donations. The specifically modern gift, in other words, to quote the title of a bad movie, based on a good idea, from several years back, pays it “forward” instead of “back.” Rather than reciprocate directly, modern giving prefers acknowledging a gift by giving to someone else with the same needs or potential as that gift enabled one to realize in oneself. This helps avoid the competitive gift giving and compulsory reciprocations which leads the traditional gift economy into the debacle resulting in the seizure of power of the Big Man, who imposes an asymmetrical gift economy on everyone. And giving it forward may also provide the basis for supplanting the modern state behind which, however free and democratic the guise, the contours of the Big Man imposing not only his rule but his inevitability remain visible.

The modernity which has actually become dominant, and led in turn to the romantic and victimary reactions of postmodernism is the one which deployed the emergent market model of early modernity against the gift economy. The best way to bury the gift economy is to insist upon self-origination—anything in the past which has determined what one is now must be some gift demanding repayment; if we are all originators of ourselves, including the past we choose to acknowledge, then there are no gifts from the past—no one has paid forward to us. There are just nagging importunities and unjust exactions demanded by hysterical ghosts, and we must summon up the courage to reject those claims, and accept only those obligations we, like players on the market, have explicitly and voluntarily agreed to.

But history is no more than the gifts we accept from those who have come before—if we reject some it is because we have accepted others. The reason why we need to ground ourselves in some kind of gift economy stretching back in time is suggested by Hermann Lotze’s observation, cited by Walter Benjamin in his “Theses on History,” that “One of the most remarkable characteristics of human nature is, alongside so much selfishness in specific instances, the freedom from envy which the present displays toward the future.” I think this is absolutely true, and while it applies to the present’s attitude toward the past as well, it is especially remarkable in our attitude to the future, which we have every reason to believe will have be better than the present. We simply don’t share the same scene as other time periods, are incapable of desiring the same objects—we can therefore love those who came before and those who will come after unreservedly. We can also, therefore, accept the gifts from the past freely and give freely to those to come after us. And, finally, this gifting relationship across time periods is, as Benjamin goes on to say, an index which refers us to redemption: it is this continuum creating by the gift that enables us to stand back while everyone else is rushing towards the present object of desire and exemplify a possibility not immediately visible.

We could, much more modestly, see modernity as simply the condition in which our relations with strangers outweigh our relations with kin, friends and confederates. The market relation comes to the fore under such conditions, and helps to create them in the first place, because the exchange of commodities for money is ideally suited to maintain the relations between strangers. Modernity in this case would also mean many things we like to associate with it—an openness to the new, to differences, a pleasure in anonymity and privacy, and so on. But modernity in this sense would also allow for acknowledging the gifts we accept and pay forward to some of those strangers, gifts that often circulate centrifugally from more traditional gifts circulating among family and friends—like the use of family wealth to establish charitable foundations. The market and economy could then proceed in concordance with one another, each enriching the other. As soon as we find a way to displace the imperial/ecumenical Big State, which increasingly demands all gifts flow to and from it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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