GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

Two speeches given the same day in response to the shootings in Tucson; one, by all accounts, brilliant, Presidential, conciliatory, the other, by most accounts, petty, small minded and self-serving. And I don’t find too much to object to in President Obama’s platitudinous remarks. But, in each speech there is a certain logical tension worth exploring. Obama says, in the line that has probably received the most attention:

“And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their death helps usher in more civility in our public discourse, let us remember it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy — it did not — but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to the challenges of our nation in a way that would make them proud.”

A more civil and honest discourse—either civility and honesty are complementary (if not synonymous) or we would have to choose one over the other, in some cases. The context makes it clear, I think, that Obama would prefer civility, or a particular understanding of civility, over honesty:

“we can question each other’s ideas without questioning each other’s love of country and that our task, working together, is to constantly widen the circle of our concern so that we bequeath the American Dream to future generations.”

So, questions about others’ patriotism are declared out of bounds, even if we honestly come by them. Widening our circle of concern is to be preferred over, say clarifying and performing more diligently our existing duties and obligations, even if we honestly believe that too many people have widened their circle of concern so as to infringe upon others’ rights to determine the boundaries of their own “circle.” We are to “expand our moral imaginations” and “sharpen our instincts for empathy,” even if we think it’s enough to be moral, love our friends and families, and follow, intelligently, the rules of a spontaneous market order.

President Obama wants to tell us how to think, feel, and act—we must “thrive together,” as the t-shirt distributed at the speech he gave exhorts. Sarah Palin, meanwhile, unequivocally chooses honesty over civility: “Public discourse and debate isn’t a sign of crisis, but of our enduring strength. It is part of why America is exceptional”:

“No one should be deterred from speaking up and speaking out in peaceful dissent, and we certainly must not be deterred by those who embrace evil and call it good. And we will not be stopped from celebrating the greatness of our country and our foundational freedoms by those who mock its greatness by being intolerant of differing opinion and seeking to muzzle dissent with shrill cries of imagined insults.”

This is an extremely defiant repudiation (or “refudiation,” if we like) of the entire left wing argument regarding the sources of violence such as we saw in Tucson, an argument affirmed in general by Obama even if he rejected, at least implicitly, the more obscene particulars that have dominated the media. Obama wants more speech rules, more guardrails; Palin wants more arguments, more debates, more primaries. Her only rule for “civility” is the founding liberal one: “we must condemn violence if our Republic is to endure.”

There are opposing anthropologies here. For Obama, speech and violence lie in a continuum, and only carefully composed and tightly monitored speech can be removed from a vicious circle of speech in which marking others in virtually any way intiates the descent into scapegoating itself. “Civility” is the name of the process by which elites do the monitoring. For Palin, speech, vigorous, unregulated, “passionate” speech, unafraid of being “mocked” by the guardians of “civility,” is the antidote to violence. Indeed, it may be that the more the speech draws upon metaphors from violence, the more it models the transcendence of violence: “As I said while campaigning for others last March in Arizona during a very heated primary race, ‘We know violence isn’t the answer. When we ‘take up our arms’, we’re talking about our vote’.”

Palin’s speech reaches its logical paradox in its reference to the assault or, as she says, “blood libel” directed against her:

“Acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own. They begin and end with the criminals who commit them, not collectively with all the citizens of a state, not with those who listen to talk radio, not with maps of swing districts used by both sides of the aisle, not with law-abiding citizens who respectfully exercise their First Amendment rights at campaign rallies, not with those who proudly voted in the last election…But, especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.”

Well now, how, one might ask, can Palin say that acts of violence begin and end in themselves while, in the very next breath, accusing her opponents of inciting violence? The answer may lie in some implicit distinction between “monstrous” and more “ordinary” forms of criminality, in which case Palin is making a very local point about this particular incident, not about the relation between words and deeds more generally. But that wouldn’t be very helpful—would she then be saying that the Left’s argument about uncivil discourse might hold in other cases? It may be that Palin doesn’t yet have a way of talking about what is central to the kinds of verbal attacks directed most recently against her, but which we can easily recognize as those of White Guilt. Palin, for the Left, represents all that is unmarked in American society—she must be marked. Her argumentative strategy is to recognize this marking, but doing so in the same terms her opponents are using leaves her open to the charge that she also sees “incivility” as a “danger,” and in that case is not better than the Left insofar as she defines “incivility” as partisan attacks against her. Why isn’t blaming the shootings in Tucson on Palin just as “metaphorical” and therefore harmless as asserting that you want citizens to be “armed and dangerous” when they confront their elected officials with facts and arguments? Why isn’t it even beneficial, and to be celebrated as any other discourse driven by what Palin calls our “imperfect passions”? In other words, Palin seems to be tempted (as I think she has at other times) to play along with the Left’s massive inflation of the notion of “incitement” (along with “defamation” and other once strictly legal terms) which has culminated in contemporary hate speech laws.

At this point, the only answer is to look at her much criticized use of the term “blood libel,” and realize that we have a simple question of fact here. Was it a blood libel, or not? If she was accused of having innocent blood on her hands, then there’s the line at which discourse threatens to pass over into violence, because accusing someone of thereby stepping outside of the boundaries of legality and non-violence does lead to the conclusion that only answering the guilty in kind can restore those boundaries. Scapegoating should not be criminalized, but it is wrong; and, Palin would implicitly be asserting, we can recognize it if we are being “honest” (although perhaps not if we are merely worried about being “civil”). Is someone really dishonest enough to say that calling Obama a “socialist,” or that the health care law is “job-killing,” or even questioning Obama’s place of birth or religion, does the same—that is, accuse him of having innocent blood on his hands? I’m sure the answer is “yes”—and that’s a good starting point for vigorous debate that would still eschew the “dueling pistols” Palin refers to in mocking the nostalgia for more civil days. In fact, focusing arguments on what counts as scapegoating, and striving for a minimal account of the same, would provide for an ongoing inquiry into and performance of, “imperfect passion.”

Addendum, 1/15

It seems to me the concluding argument here can be clarified by applying the distinction between metaphor and reference to political discourse.  Whatever plausibility the argument against “heated” rhetoric has derives from the sense that violent metaphors (shooting, killing, targeting, blowing up, attacking, etc., etc.) in political speech have some correlation and, therefore, at least possible causal relationship to actual violence.  I can make my position simpler by saying, as I think is already implicit in my post, that I believe there is no such correlation, much less causation:  zero.  In fact, as I suggested as well, it is more likely that, as I think Palin implies, the relation can be reversed:  the transformation of words denoting violence into metaphors referring to political competition defers political violence, by making the political arena a richer and freer “combat zone.”  That is, you don’t need to step outside of it in order to express your “imperfect passions.” 

In that case, to return to the example I conclude with, the difference between holding Palin responsible for murder, and calling Obama a Muslim, is that the former makes a referential claim, one which could presumably be proven or disproved evidentially or through a demonstrable causal chain; the latter, meanwhile, as a question of faith and therefore, in American public discourse, an inherently “internal” and private issue, is subject to neither proof nor disproof.  Therefore, however vicious the intention behind the claim, however much an attempt to make Obama appear the usurping alien, the claim that Obama is a Muslim functions more as a metaphor than an accusation.  The only thing that would change if one were to make the metaphorical dimension explicit and say, for example, “it’s like we had a Muslim President,” or, as Rush Limbaugh already does, calling him “Imam Obama,” would be a loss of the sense that he is concealing his true faith.  But, while I am no expert in “Obama is a Muslim” political culture, it seems to me that this element, the years long deception which would have to be involved, and which would make Obama’s Muslimness truly scandalous, never seems to be the emphasis.  This is why the “charge” against Obama is subject to ideological revision in a way that the charge against Palin isn’t—one could say, how great it is that we have our first “Muslim President” (just as Clinton was our first “black President”) in a way that one could never say, “it’s great that Palin is a murderer.” (Indeed, other than of dishonesty, of what, exactly, would one be “accusing” Obama the Muslim of?)  So, aside from the extremely relevant fact that no major media outlet or elected official has made this claim (unlike the blood libel on Palin), the respective allegations are qualitatively different from one another.  Even if Obama were a Muslim, or if he really wasn’t born in the U.S., the proper response would still be voting him out of office or, at most, impeaching him; if Palin has been inciting murder, and in a way that makes her untouchable legally, the commensurate responses are very different.

Only after reading Eric Gans’s recent Chronicle (#403, “Heuristic Necessity”) did the obvious relevance of Gans’s definition of God as that word whose signified and referent are indistinguishable to originary linguistics and grammar strike me. But, then, since, as Gans also notes elsewhere, ultimately every word (but also, then, sentence, discourse, etc.) is the name of God, then the indistinguishability of signified and referent is definitive or constitutive of meaning as such. This indistinguishability applies, in other words, to ostensivity—which is when our pointing to something, or directing attention to something, right here and now, is what we “mean”—and all meaning is ostensive insofar as it’s impossible to imagine gesturing, speaking or writing without wanting to direct someone’s attention from one’s gesture, speech or text to something else.

The distinguishability of signified and referent, then, poses the real problem. That distinction must have been necessary for sign use to have moved beyond the ostensive or to create the “portable” and “reassemblable” ostensives that we could say constitute semiosis. My solution to that problem explains, for me, why Gans’s definition of God didn’t connect with my linguistic and grammatical thinking until just now—I haven’t really been using the traditional linguistic terms of “signifier/signified” and “referent.” First, I worked on developing a way of talking about language drawn exclusively from the succession of emergences of the ostensive, imperative, interrogative and declarative speech forms; more recently, I have been trying out ways of using the notion of unmarked/marked derived from the Prague School of linguistics, and to assimilate that distinction to the more originary one of norm/mistake. But we can articulate these various distinctions through another one I have worked with on occasion: that between the exchange of signs between participants upon a scene and the exchange of signs between a participant upon one scene and another, a “stranger” to the scene to whom one presents the results of the scene: I call the first scene the scene of presencing and the other the scene of representation. The best example of the scene of representation would be summary, which generally serves the purpose of providing another what they need to know so as to save them the trouble of reading the text itself.

These two scenes (and a third, constitutive scene that articulates them) are folded into the originary scene itself, insofar as that scene must involve the initial forming of the sign and the iterated circulation of the formed sign, and it is this doubled scene that then mediates the transition to the sparagmos: in the sparagmos the imminently chaotic devouring of the object threatens to overwhelm the agreement established by the shared sign, a tendency which can be mitigated only by the repetition of the sign throughout the consumption of the object at every indication of overreach on the part of a neighbor. In this case, the participants in the sparagmos are essentially summarizing the scene to each other. It is this latter use of the sign that distinguishes the signified from the referent: the signified, in other words, is the sign in its capacity to articulate a scene by composing the elements of an emerging scene on the model of and out of the remains of previous scenes; the sign as referent directs one’s attention to an object upon a scene already in place. The signified is the object as deferring and powerful; the referent is the object as available for orderly appropriation.

When we “understand” each other, what happens, then, is that the signified and referent coincide for us—if I say “it’s late,” you understand me insofar as you acknowledge my reference to this particular lateness, the one that, say, conveys a shared sense that whatever we have been doing has proven to be more important than something else we had planned to do, and has therefore carried us away, resituated and redefined us, etc., and in a way we can realize right here and now. To the extent that signified and referent don’t coincide, our understandings are overlapping and, of course, that is always the case, even while the overlap implies a zone of coincidence. Your remark points out the “lateness” to me and then I might make a remark that shows I have observed that particular lateness and that establishes a site of “joint attention,” or “disciplinary inquiry,” or “presencing”—or, what I will try calling an “anythisness agreement.” At the same time the “lateness” is not quite the same, at exactly the same time, for both of us, but we now have some sense of how to identify that signified/referent, how to look for it, how to conjure it: the imperative steps in to supplement the ostensive, as the object now tells us how to go about tracking, appropriating and preserving it, and we tell the object to appear before us. These imperatives, emerging from the ostensive, become the rules, or grammar, of the object and the convergences and divergences of the object as signified and referent—rules are imperatives marked by ostensivity. Part of this grammar is the prolongation of the imperatives into interrogatives, as the object doesn’t appear as commanded, and we fail to obey the object, and as we command the object to renew its commands, and extend and mitigate our demands upon it, these interrogatives take on the declarative form of hypotheses—all declaratives, indeed, are intrinsically hypotheticals.

Now, I would like to overlay the vocabulary of “markedness” on this succession of speech forms. Just as I think Gans’s analysis of the succession of speech forms opens up so far unimagined areas of inquiry into grammar, it seems to me that setting the unmarked/marked distinction upon the originary scene helps us to use that distinction to tie together various cultural, semiotic, social and anthropological levels. The unmarked is what you attend from to the marked—it is the water the fish swims in, pervasive, normal, and unattended to. But the originary hypothesis shows, I think, that only through a very extreme form of marking could unmarkedness emerge: first of all, the central object is marked as desirable, as we attend to it from everyone else’s approach to it; this markedness then spreads to the other participants on the scene, as we attend from the object to these obstacles to our possession of it. Markedness, first of all, then, has the meaning of targeted, and targeted for destruction. In attending back and forth from object to rivals, the hesitation or gesture is put forth, and we now attend from the sign (unmarking the sign-giver, first of all oneself) to the object, from which we can now attend to the shared cessation constituting the scene, thereby unmarking the object. What is now marked is any break from “protocol,” that is, any slide from gesture back into grasping, including any mistake indicating such a slide—and as I suggested before, the transition back into appropriation is mediated by the “referential” sign, assuring each other that one is taking only one’s share and warning each other to do the same. Everyone can now attend from the sign to transgressions which confirm it, so the marked now becomes the abnormal, anomalous, transgressive, idiosyncratic. (This, by the way, is why the politics of White Guilt—indelibly marking the unmarked, as in “white male knowledge”—will have so many unanticipated consequences: the unmarking of “knowledge” and, indeed, those European males who constructed the term along with it, saved us all from much worse forms of violence than is represented by the imposition of an unmarked, and extendible, “knowledge.” Once “knowledge,” “truth,” “justice,” “reality” and so on are irremediably marked we will find a catastrophic decline in our ability to talk about all kinds of things.) Subsequently, the unmarked/marked distinction can itself be unmarked, in this case de-escalated, so as to become a means of generated the distinctions needed by the signifying system—phonetic distinctions, word-type distinctions, tense distinctions, etc., etc. And this can all happen without the originary distinction being overturned—even now, as much as ever, being marked is being placed in some kind of danger.

The unmarked, or abstract sign, the “version” that has survived the norming process on the originary scene, and has received, so to speak, the full faith and backing of the central object, is the site for what I would call “everythatness agreements” upon the scene of representation: we move from “any,” or singularizing, to “every,” or spreading and eternalizing; and from “thisness,” or presence or firstness, to “thatness,” or reportage or secondness. Both dimensions are present whenever we use signs so as to make meaning, and they are present on the third, or constitutive scene, or semiotic use proper, where one or the other dimension is accentuated in constituting a field of semblances (the population of the world by object/signs). The third, or constitutive scene is where we use signs to make a difference by creating a new ostensive, and we do that by marking and then re-un-marking a particular use of an unmarked sign, thereby modifying the field of relationships between the marked and unmarked. To return to the succession of speech forms, we make meaning by turning an ostensive dimension of sign use into an imperative one (shifting register from an anticipated “I see” to “show me”), from imperative to interrogative (“look at this”—“where?”), and so on, or vice versa (treating declaratives as interrogatives and imperatives, etc.). In each case, one marks the unmarked, treating a portion of the scene assumed in any agreement or joint attention as defective, but ultimately not irreparable (even the most radical critique implies the possibility of some other scene, composed out of the elements—out of what else, after all?—of the present scene).

Markedness provides an excellent frame for conducting inquiry, not only because it allows us to travel from the phonetic way up to the highest cultural levels, but because it combines invariance (we all, all cultures, all individuals, make sense of things by (un)marking them, with plenty of striking cross-cultural similarities) and great variability: to take a simple example, in the word “nurse,” the feminine is unmarked; but that is just another way of saying that “nurse” is marked female. In other words, what is marked and unmarked depends upon the question being asked—meanwhile, even though this means the application of the terms requires judgment and involves disagreements and arguments (good things for any mode of inquiry), proof is often readily available in fairly convincing forms: we will never say “female nurse,” while “male nurse” is so commonplace as to be an easy punchline (especially since “nurse” also tends to be marked not only “female,” but “sexy female” in certain commonplace fantasies—which is why a markedly unattractive nurse also functions as an easy punchline). And, needless to say, all this can easily change rapidly, and undoubtedly already is doing so, as women become doctors in numbers almost equal to men and men (probably, but interestingly this change doesn’t seem so rapid) migrate into nursing in growing numbers.

Any mode of inquiry, then, unmarks some newly marked object, and singles out the rules according to which that object works as a “constituent element” of some structure at a particular level of inquiry. Again, it seems to me as if we can work completely within the terms of the successive emergence of the speech forms here, since the ostensive, the imperative, the interrogative and the declarative comprise distinctly different and complementary elements in the process of inquiry. An object becomes marked because it no longer works according to its normal rules, which means we can no longer attend from that object to others—our attention is now drawn, imperatively, towards the object, as we attend from the now failed rules of its operation within a system to the rules of its own constitution, from one of its constituent elements to another, and so on. We see what seems to still fit together—we command the object to compose itself in such a manner that we could against attend from it to other things—and what refuses our command leaves our command prolonged, hanging, so to speak, converting it into a question: what should be re-positioned so as to make things fit again?

All language is inquiry, and markedness allows us to see the stakes of the inquiry in a way that is made invisible in those spaces we have explicitly set aside and unmarked (made safe) for inquiry—an object that doesn’t work according to its normal rules, for example, might be a good friend or loved one, who is behaving “suspiciously” (to suspect someone is, obviously, to mark him or her). That person has so far acted as a sign for me, allowing me to attend from him or her to a range of other things in the world, a set of habits which the person is him or herself also a part of—that the person is unmarked doesn’t mean I neglect him or her, just that I can unproblematically enjoy the pleasures he or she brings me (and unproblematically soften and contextualize the pains). Once he or she becomes marked I will not be satisfied until I have succeeded to unmark her once again, by reducing the intrinsically anomalous “suspicious” behavior to some new set of rules, to which I can assign a formula (“she’s having trouble at work”) which identifies a new constituent element of a modified reality (the relation between home life and work has shifted) and which is in turn accommodated to a modified set of habits, which means I have unmarked him or her once more.

Terms like “constituent element,” “component part,” and “rules” are also, of course, both indeterminate enough to be used in many different ways and on every level of reality, and precise enough to produce the definitions and delimitations we need to hold the things in place long enough to get a good look at them. We seek clarification along these lines all the time (were you referring to x or y?) and often enough get it. I want to conclude by making another point, though, which is in fact what I wanted to get to all along. It seems to me that the mark or measure of a strong language and, by implication, a healthy culture and civilization, is that it allows for the simultaneous existence of varied and incommensurable “constituent elements” (identified within distinct idioms, each with its own “rights”). The mistake of modern scientism was to insist upon a single vocabulary to describe all of reality, which leads one to ruthlessly extirpate all other vocabularies, as they can only appear as obfuscating competitors. What I have in mind is a society in which we could analyze the psyche by, for example, breaking it down into “ego,” “id” and “superego,” or even a complex tree of stimuli and responses, without thereby disabling a word like “soul,” which would identify a “constituent element” within an integral structure every bit as real as “ego.” We would, then, be mature enough to live with “soul” being marked as unscientific in some discourses, while, say, “damaged soul” remains operative (unmarked) for marking certain sources of evil in other, moral and spiritual discourses. (The best example I have of such a richly plural and yet coherent linguistic reality, and which I hope to find a way of exploring in this connection, is the English of Tudor and Elizabethan England, the language of Tyndale, Cramner and Hooker, culminating, of course, in Shakespeare’s language and the King James Bible.) At this point, originary grammar comes into its own as a mode of cultural and social criticism, one which enables us to attend to the unmarked without feeling compelled to mark the unmarked permanently, in revenge for hiding itself. And, finally, the use of constraints or deliberately formulated rules so as to govern one’s own analytical discourse becomes a way of finding and generating new constituent elements, of shaking them loose, so to speak, from the unmarked formulas embracing us.

I will lay down a marker right away—for me, the main criterion for supporting a Presidential candidate is that he or she knows what the left is; anyone who thinks that a Republican president will be able to settle into the White House in 2013, put on the green eyeshades, and start balancing the budget in a sober, bipartisan manner is criminally naïve, and I don’t want anyone like that anywhere near the Presidency. Normal America and free America are at war with the Left, and anyone one who is not ready to fire back when fired at need not apply. Sarah Palin seems to know what the Left is, and none of her potential contenders seems to have a clue. At this moment, the ability to create and run a political and economic media empire is more pertinent to presidential aspirations than the ability to balance a budget with your bare hands, which you can hire someone to do anyway.

But leaving that aside, Palin, and the Palin phenomenon are intrinsically interesting—there seems to be widespread agreement on that, at any rate. She, in her public persona, seems to me an almost perfect complement to Barack Obama, and the Obama phenomenon—she seems destined to be his nemesis, a role she seems to relish and which she plays very well. I think an Obama v. Palin race in 2012 would dramatize all the post-Bush, indeed, all the post-9/11 conflicts; even more, it would finally bring the entire Progressive Era in our politics, dating back to the turn of the 20th century, on the stage—and I think this would be both very healthy and incredibly exciting. We desperately need such a polarization now, and it would be nice to deal a blow to the illusions of the “fiscally conservative, socially liberal center” of the country. I don’t doubt that there are many Americans, maybe, depending upon definitions, a majority, who can be described as “fiscally conservative, socially liberal”; nor do I doubt that in a certain sense they are the “center,” picking and suturing together the least antagonistic items of both right and left. It’s an empty center, though, and a campaign that showed as much by forcing the “centrists” to choose would be healthy as well—if you support the kind of judicially driven federal government needed to push through and sustain the “socially liberal” agenda, than you can forget about fiscal conservatism. Fiscal conservatism would mean federalism and expanded property rights, both of which, as the politically savvy know, mean death to “social liberalism,” i.e., abortion on demand, gay marriage and religion out of the public sphere. And I might as well also say that I can’t say the word “gravitas” without, at the very least, smiling. I think that things are going to get rough, especially if the prerogatives of those plugged into the victimary public arena are even mentioned, much less trespassed upon—we need someone whose first instinct isn’t to placate the New York Times.

Even leaving Palin aside for the moment, it seems to me (I would be surprised if no one else has used the analogy) that the Tea Party movement is equivalent to a kind of Constitutional Reformation. The liberal judiciary, like the Catholic Church, has been, for the past 80 years, interpreting the holy text for the rest of us, and according to arcane and esoteric methods that ordinary citizens can’t penetrate. If you were to ask a member of the priesthood what the Constitution said about x or y, they would gesture towards piles of unintelligible commentary which it takes many years of training to navigate. Terms like “the Commerce Clause” have taken on a magical significance, changing the citizens property’s into the state’s. The Tea Partiers have simply insisted on reading the document for themselves (unfortunately there was no way of forbidding its translation into the vernacular). But the analogy extends further—just like the return to the biblical text itself, and an insistence on the individual’s right to interpret it himself, has led to more Protestant Churches than anyone can count (unless someone actually has counted them), so will the opening of the Constitution lead to many different, and often idiosyncratic, versions of the same. Not that many—the Constitution is a lot shorter and simpler than the Bible, and there is a tradition of rational argumentation and precedents prior to its appropriation by the advocates of the Living Constitution—but quite a few more than I imagine most originalists imagine. (Maybe they do imagine it and don’t mind—I certainly hope so.) There is plenty of room for idiosyncrasy, in other words, in this return to the real center, the founding events of the nation, just as there is plenty of idiosyncrasy in Sarah Palin, who also deliberately roots herself in that very center. It is this combination or “simultaneity” of centrality and idiosyncrasy, of the general “any” and the singular “one-y,” that I have in mind when I use the term “anyown.”

This mixture of the originary and idiosyncratic is best found, I think, in one of our most basic rights as Americans, the right to bear arms—number two, right after speech and religion, but arguably more fundamental, since how could we protect those rights without the right to bear arms? (I know, the order of the amendments was not meant to imply any order of rank—and yet they do often seem to be ranked this way.) And yet, as far as I know the right to bear arms holds a comparable rank in no other national or international charter of rights—it is a distinctively American “universal” right. The centrality of the right to bear arms can be traced back to founding liberal theorists like Hobbes, who considered the right to protect your own life prior to, and unaffected by, your obligations to the state, but for this very reason it is very difficult to integrate it coherently with the more peaceably exercised rights which we expect the state to guarantee for us. Indeed, the main rationale, at least among its most fervent defenders, of the right to individual ownership of firearms, is precisely that it turns the citizen into an effective barrier to the establishment of a tyranny. How, though, can the state protect such a right unambivalently, since there can be no pre-established or agreed upon rules for what, exactly, would constitute that tipping at which legitimate government turns into tyranny? The best or most convenient definition, I suppose, would be the point at which the government starts rounding up all the guns; but such an action might indicate that, for the government, the tipping point at which citizen vigilance becomes rebellion, has been reached.

Also, would anyone want to say there is no limit to the right to bear arms? I can own a pistol, a shotgun, a machine gun—how about a basement full of dynamite? Anti-aircraft missiles? What about the first billionaire who decides he wants his own nuclear warhead? If the real purpose of the right to bear arms is to deter tyrannical tendencies in government, wouldn’t we insist that citizens arm themselves in a manner commensurate with the power of the contemporary state—the contemporary American state? After all, what good would even “assault weapons” be against the tanks rolling into New Jersey and the planes strafing Manhattan? You could say that other rights have their limits in the infringement upon the rights of others—so, my right to free speech doesn’t permit to stand in front of my neighbor’s house with a bullhorn berating him for his leftist politics. But what is the equivalent here? My stockpile disturbs no one, and by the time my basement full of explosives violates your private property rights by blowing up the block on which both our houses stand, it will do you little good to sue me.

But there is another way of interpreting the right to bear arms that preserves its idiosyncratic centrality. The government can’t be everywhere to protect everyone, and we wouldn’t want it to be; where it can’t be, armed citizens can, and can serve, while protecting themselves, as a kind of informal militia or posse, making it clear to criminals that they are safe to commit their crimes nowhere. This implies complementarity between government and people and, at its outer limits, a near merger of the former into the latter. The deterrence of tyranny can itself thereby be pre-empted by the shared obligation to secure the order whose breaches provide the very invitation needed by the tyrant to exceed constitutional boundaries. The right to bear arms in this way involves the citizen in the preservation of ordered liberty, and can be detached from that utopian resentment implicit in indiscriminate “anti-government” sentiments. At the same time, though, the boundaries separating vigilance, vigilantism and criminality are not always bright and clear, and will take different shapes across and within communities, based as they must be upon shared tacit understandings with overlap with other understandings and constantly require adjustment. The more deeply rooted the right, the more inadequate the merely legal attempts to adjudicate it, i.e., the more idiosyncratic.

Anyway, here is Palin’s forceful and borderline incoherent response to Barbara Bush’s patrician cruelty (“I once sat down next to her. Thought she was beautiful. She seems to love it in Alaska. I hope she stays there”) which not only wishes Palin out of Presidential politics but out of public discourse altogether:

“I don’t want to sort of concede that we have to get used to this kind of thing because I think the majority of Americans don’t want to put up with the blue bloods — and I say it with all due respect because I love the Bushes — but the blue bloods who want to pick and choose their winners instead of allowing competition to pick and choose the winners.”
She then invoked the economic crisis to explain her point.
“They [blue bloods] kind of do some of this with the economic policies that were in place that got us into these economic woeful times, too,” Palin said. “So I don’t know if that kind of stuff is planned out but it is what it is. We deal with it, and we forge ahead and we keep doing what we’re doing.”

The Bushes are blue bloods (ok, so far, so good), but she still loves them—nothing wrong with blue bloods except for when they try to “pick and choose their winners.” Palin has a response to Bush here, but she has cut and pasted into that response her own political “idiom” of the moment—a very helpful idiom, which has put into practice the excellent idea of changing the terms of Republican politics through primary challenges. The idiom doesn’t really work so well here, though, because wouldn’t the Bushes saying who they prefer for President be part of that open, competitive process? After all, that helps those who respect or despise the Bushes sort out their own views of the candidates. But Palin doesn’t want to come out and suggest that Barbara Bush is a spiteful old shrew, representing the retrograde wing of the party, and I think she has imposed upon herself the kind of discipline which ensures that you don’t say anything in response to new situations which has been “piloted,” so we see the limits of her repertory here. The connection to “these economic woeful times” (as I’ve mentioned before, Palin’s grammatical choices can be fascinating—recently, she responded to a reporter trying to spring a question on her at a book signing with something like “can’t we get that good enthusiasm” back, in this case using a favorite adjective of hers with a favorite noun with which that adjective just happens not to go) is even more of a reach, but, paradoxically, she is getting at something here because there is a real connection between the “elites” (what Angelo Codevilla calls the “Ruling Class”) and the kinds of political-economic machinations that led to the Wall Street meltdown. Palin knows this, and has posted cogently on it on her Facebook page, but what I think we can see in this instance is an imperfect intuition regarding how to stitch together the various arguments, slogans and commonplaces at her disposal—especially since in this case getting too explicit would also be getting far more polemical regarding the Republican “establishment” than Palin wants, and can just barely avoid (which means that she is also very aware of the political boundaries she is operating within). We see this all the time with Palin, and it’s why she can, in fact, look stupid sometimes—she doesn’t know how to weave all the clichés together in a seamless manner as do most politicians operating at her level of exposure. But that’s also a way of saying she’s not very good at saying nothing. And in that way, more than any other, she is more grounded than anyone or anyown else in the emergent idiosyncratic center.

Anyone familiar with TV crime shows knows how pervasive the figure of the serial killer has become in American popular culture, and how stereotyped—there is the imputed traumatic foundation of the killer’s addiction to violence, there are the idiosyncratic and extremely regular habits, the fixed idea of grievance, the ideal victim, and so on. And, of course, the serial killer is invariably brilliant and omni-competent—a scientist and artist (and performance artist, as they carefully manage their public image and the police investigation itself—and escape artist—no prison seems capable of holding them). Serial killers are a good match for serially produced entertainment (create an intriguing killer and your season writes itself), but their popularity, even their mythical status, lies, ultimately, in their implications for mimesis, and what we might see as a postmodern crisis in cultural mimetic modeling.

The show Dexter makes this relation between serial killers and mimesis very clear. The titular character is a serial killer who works for the Miami PD as a blood spatter expert, and whose victims are themselves serial killers. Dexter is compelled to kill, he is presented as completely addicted to the thrill of the hunt and the procedures he has invented and perfected for stalking and killing his prey, but he has harnessed this compulsion to the doing of justice—thanks to his adoptive father, a police officer, he has trained himself in the norms of the super hero, another still pervasive mythical figure in American popular culture, who sacrifices all to fight evil and protect the innocent.

It has become extremely difficult to imagine such dedication to the good in contemporary culture as anything other than the result of a pathological compulsion subjected to equally pathological self-control, and Dexter simply takes this cynicism or relativism to its ultimate conclusion. But what interests me more about Dexter is the way the show insists on the “inhuman” character of its protagonist—Dexter simply doesn’t feel what others feel. He is, emotionally, but also ethically, autistic, experiencing nothing outside of his compulsion and the rules he has created for managing it. But he must always interact with others, first of all at work and with his sister, but later on with his wife, her children and their new baby. And each interaction brings with it the problem: how would a normal person comport himself here? What you and I know tacitly—how to respond to a greeting, how to recognize when and why someone resents us, how to acknowledge a gesture, whether people around you are tense or relaxed, etc.—Dexter has to negotiate through induction, guesswork and trial and error. Everyday life becomes a never ending series of strategy sessions. At the same time, though, Dexter is very good at strategizing, and to that extent knows the semiotics of everyday life better than anyone else.

We might imagine this form of pathology as an instance of lastness on the originary scene. If we imagine that the scene takes shape through the de-escalation the dangerous mimetic rivalry, then each person must not only watch the others closely but must “identify” with them—that is, each must anticipate the effects one’s own presentation of the gesture will have on each other’s oscillation between gesture and grasping; and, if one must thus anticipate, one must also experience, virtually, the other’s response. But if we further imagine that the scene has taken shape before all have emitted the sign, then we have a certain number for whom the scene is presented as a fait accompli, and against whom the others would now be organized enough to prevent by force from approaching the central object. For the last, the sign is objective but has no subjective component—he sees that it works, but it doesn’t work for him. He therefore sees enough to make it work for him, in the sense of to his advantage, without being “taken in” by it, because the sign must, furthermore, appear to him as an illusion that the others buy into out of their own fear—a fear he has also not experienced. At the same time, he would harbor a resentment unmoored to any desire for the object—he did, indeed, desire the object like all the others, but his resentment has never passed through the resentment of the center, and his resentment is therefore directed at the entire scene. It would be a resentment that produces the desire to prove to everyone that the sense of safety and mutual trust they have acquired through the sign is a deadly fraud.

At any rate, under such conditions, when the iconic bases of self-evidency utterly sever one person from others, the only way to hold things together is through elaborate and inevitably idiosyncratic rules. These rules can be shared and taught, explicitly and tacitly, but it will never be possible to refer them back to some shared nature outside of those rules and the spaces they regulate. Dexter, and the serial killer as icon, are obviously extreme examples, but it does seem to me that as victimary culture has come to be virtually the only public culture we have, and as victimary culture has itself become an elaborate set of often arcane, constantly changing and mutually incompatible rules, Dexter provides a helpful hypothesis of contemporary conditions, as long as we understand that, just as Dexter comes, in his own way to “love” his wife and child, and to enact and at least minimally experience the responsibilities that come with his new role, our lives within uprooted regulatory conditions are just as authentic as any other once habits and tacit knowing of our way around sets in. It just may be, though, that they never set in all the way.

This may be the postmodern condition, but it also seems to me the modern one: ultimately we are capable of learning how to mark and unmark one another’s gestures, but the process has become more abstract and less iconic; or, to use Peirce’s term for abstract iconicity, our relations have become diagrammatic. We have always (to draw upon the title of Eric Gans’s talk at the latest GA conference) been modern in the sense that modernity is placing things in-between us, or multiplying mediations, means and middles, but there is a tension between that process and the shared central object that crises refer us back to—I don’t know when the decisive point would have been passed, but by now the claim that the things we place in the middle are proxies for, pieces of, or likenesses to that shared object are rarely tenable. At this point, the things we place between us, at least culturally (the technological middle is another discussion), are improvised attempts to unmark oneself, which is to say aborted and simulated attacks on oneself that others might translate into their own terms. In that case, we are always engaging one another across these improvised zones whose borders must be subject to increasingly explicit negotiations.

I’m sure a lot of people like this and a lot of people don’t, but if I’m right it is just becoming the reality and a couple of generations down the line people will speak much more directly about the norms and rules governing everyday interactions than they do now—a TV show like The Office, most of whose comic situations are generated by the mismatch of rules to situations on an individual or collective level, points in this direct, and so did Seinfeld a while back. It also seems to me that my students are never so comfortable as when they have a very clear set of rules to follow, and they don’t concern themselves so much with the rationale or legitimacy of the rules. Students of the type that were so common in my youth—romantic strivers for authenticity and full of resentment towards all rules—seem to be an almost extinct species. They show up once in a while but stand out like sore thumbs. And the increasingly exposed and interconnected nature of individuality facilitated by social networking like Facebook and texting pushes things in the same direction, towards elaborate, ever changing and idiosyncratic intersecting rules. (I think that such a condition may make the desire for overarching bureaucratic regulation more intense—if only someone could just set and enforce the rules once and for all!—while subverting all actual attempts in that direction.)

You can be comfortable talking about “content” only when questions of “form” have been settled. The referential bias of metaphysical discourse, which insists upon the transparency of language and hence the possibility of and therefore responsibility to represent reality (human nature, fact, ideas, feelings—everything resisting complete semiotic representation) in unambiguous, accurate and consensual ways is an understandable attempt to promote deliberately established disciplinary discourses over ordinary speech situations and, further, to raise the qualifications for entering sanctioned disciplinary spaces. Such a bias may have been necessary for the integration of writing and then print into social communicative processes, for the creation of universities and the emergence of modern science and politics. But do I really need to cite all the reasons why such a bias is no longer sustainable—it is enough to recognize that while in some areas (like, say, best sellers read by beach goers) traditional representational forms still sell, attentiveness to forms, rules, conventions, and the various possible modifications, mistakes, convergences and so on that they entail prevails in most of the more emergent modes of communication. Young people can still often be startlingly literalistic and sincere—I don’t mean to suggest that we are seeing the world populated by savvy cynics. But they are literalistic and sincere in their relation to a particular set of rules circulating in a given space.

The alternative to administering CPR to one or another brand of metaphysics is to treat all discourse as disciplinary, as fundamentally engaged in inquiry, which is to say, interested in generating ostensives that might spread. One way of approaching such a project is through conversations modeled on the work of thinkers like Ludwig Wittgenstein and JL Austin, which is to simply ask “what we mean when we say…” or “do we use that word in this way,” and so on—Wittgenstein’s notion of the “grammar” of a word, rather than its meaning, points the way: which verbs or prepositions does a particular word work with, in which situations does its use seem “odd,” and so on. Wittgenstein and Austin are still sparring with metaphysics, though, and are overwhelmingly interested in showing that the way language works in ordinary settings is at odds with the way it works in the artificial spaces of philosophy (and, I would say, the social sciences as well). This is still a worthy project, especially since metaphysics has penetrated ordinary discourse, especially when that discourse is compelled to enter unfamiliar terrain—if you listen to the way in which people use terms (I have students in mind here in particular) like “society,” “closeminded,” “opinion,” “diversity” and so on, you can see the residual functioning of metaphysics as a kind of socially congealing cant.

The approach I prefer is to create little ripples in language by constructing idioms out of the rules of grammar and language use itself. The anyown advances its rights by pressing such idioms and transforming the way anyone can talk about things. An idiom is created by identifying, within one form or medium, the constituent element of a lower form of medium: writing identifies a constituent element within speech, and speech within gesture (of course, we will have to talk about TV, film, computers, music, visual images, etc., but all of that will be so many variations of gesture/speech/writing articulations). When asked what something means, you can respond by working within the same system, putting forward more familiar elements as substitutes for the unfamiliar ones (like a dictionary definition which uses words you presumably understand to define words you don’t); ultimately, though, the guarantee of understanding is something that could be pointed to or grasped—showing something, or how to do something, or how one would say something. Declarative sentences are best explained in terms of what questions they might be answering, interrogatives in terms of what command or demand they extend, and so on.

The simplest way of creating idioms is by adding, subtracting or moving one element in a system, one element whose presence, absence or displacement transforms the system, which is to say permits a lower level to present itself within that system. We could talk about the ways in which we question, challenge and ridicule others in those terms—subtract the institutional position from which someone speaks and respond to what they say minus their authority, and a transformation of its meaning in ways unfavorable to the speaker is practically guaranteed. Institutional position and authority are essentially constitutive gestural elements, situating one person closer to the center or more “vertically” than another. I would propose idioms that generate one such rule, presented on the surface of the discourse, involving the addition or subtraction of (or the addition to or subtraction from) a particular “role” or “post” within that discourse (for example, some modification in a narrative function like “adversary,” or “audience”; or excluding a commonplace distinction like inside/outside); along with second rule that iconically represents the explicit rule within a lower or more tacit system, such as grammar, and then brings that tacit system into the discourse (say, a rule for converting a certain number of declaratives into interrogatives and interrogatives into imperatives, so as to represent the dialogue with authority concealed by declarative discourse; or the representation of the replacement of internal/external oppositions by configurations through the limitation of prepositions to, say, “about” and “around”); and, finally, a more arbitrary rule that reminds one of (that iconically represents) the generative capacity of the tension between the iconic and abstract within language itself. Richard Kostelanetz, for example, has poems made up of additions or subtractions of one letter to the previous word:

Booth Boot Boo
Bounce Ounce Once
Bramble Ramble Amble
Brat Bat At
Breaker Beaker Baker
Capon Capo Cap
Caret Care Car
Chair Hair Air

Kostelanetz is exploiting the existence of the letter as the constituent element of the writing system, and the interaction between that constituent element and other constituents at other levels, such as sound (with its complicated relation to letters) and word. In looking at (“reading” might not be the right word) Kostelanetz’s poems one learns to see words within words and sounds and meanings overlapping with each other, and the minimal element of the letter sending possible discourses in one direction or another. New categories would emerge—some words must contain lots of other words within them while I would imagine there are also quite a few upon which the operation wouldn’t work and are therefore something like “irreducible” elements themselves; or one might refine the rules to make it work—I can get from “would” to “old” by dropping two letters, for example—now, we would start to look for new rules so as to uncover words within words. (An enormous amount of political satire today works in such a way—slightly changing a spelling or the sound of a word, exploiting the orthography of someone’s name, or a pun—and I imagine it has always been that way.) The same goes for Kostelanetz’s “string poems,” in which the final letter, or final two, or three, letters of one word makes up the first, first two, or three letter of the next word: “stringfiveteranciderideafencerebrumblendivestablishmentertain…” This kind of poem iconically represents “overlapping” and teaches us to find the beginning of the next word, and, by implication, the beginning of the next utterance, in the one now coming to completion, and the prelude to what we are now saying in what just was or might have been said. More broadly, I would take it to iconically represent our broader social condition which, as Michael Polanyi argued regarding scientific discourses, and as is implicit in Wiggentstein’s notion of “family resemblances,” involves no broader commonality but overlappings and varying degrees of separation and levels of mediation with no totalization.

One can translate other discourses into the rule bound idiom you invent or you can simply write in that idiom, noticing what kind of work language does when you employ it in such generative terms and reconnecting the highest, declarative and discursive levels of language with their basis in gesture and spacing. This is a kind of work I am going to try, and I think the purpose is more to open up possibilities of composition for others to work out in more popular ways than to be a mode of discourse in its own right—just as the point of poetry is not to have everyone speak that way but to expand the metaphorical resources of language. Adding, replacing and subtracting constituent elements generates thresholds; generating thresholds leads to novelties; and novel signs provide new ways for people to compose themselves.

So, let’s try translating the final paragraph of my previous post—

If a politics of redemption is a defense of the rights of the anyown, then it is a defense of the right of the anyown to spend money as anyown sees fit; but, then, that must also be a right to use whatever form of money the participants in an exchange agree to. Regarding the right of the anyown, fiat money is the first expropriation. It’s hard to imagine the titanic struggle that would be required to overturn the regime of fiat money. But it might be much easier to imagine directing attention to all the favors and gestures that we will never know but might have been exchanged, all the means that might have been created, if not for the systematic expropriations that are only possible because of fiat money—because the government can take money away from productive citizens by creating more money to give as largesse to their favored constituents.

—according to the following rule: first, a subtraction of narrative elements; second, a translation of at least 2 complex sentences into sentences including an imperative; third, every sentence must include a word that adds or subtracts one letter from a word in the previous sentence (starting with the second sentence, of course).

A politics of redemption is a defense of the rights of the anyown, it is a defense of the right of the anyown to spend money as anyown sees fit, it is a right to use whatever form of money the participants in an exchange agree to. Expropriate using fiat money—that’s how you violate the right of the anyown, of us. The regime of fiat money is an overwhelming show of force. Direct attention to all the favors and gestures, don’t take your eyes off the disappeared means; resist the systematic expropriations of fiat money. Creating more money, taking money away from our productive citizens, giving largesse to favored constituents—that’s the fiat regime.

The how is through a show, use is taken from us, of threatens to take off, and your and our must collaborate; we now have a series of imperatives embedded in cumulating, quasi-ritualistic parallelisms. Against a background of conjurations, first of the politics of redemption and finally of its antithesis, orders are given one way and the other, the prominence of the shifters “your” and “our” represents the instability of the situation and the rapid movement between the occupation of different roles. It seems to me that reliance of the existing reality upon everyone’s or anyown’s will comes out more strongly in this revision. And we are now on the threshold of the creation of maxims for political thinking and action, through such means as grammatical inversions and the inversion of marked and unmarked. Fiat money expropriates use and makes violation right; attend to the disappeared means and the favored gestures will direct you. Whatever one thinks of such maxims, that fiat money turns justice upside-down is a “real” idea that we have arrived at; and so is the notion, however paradoxical, that if we look for the means of cooperation that state coercion has disappeared, we will discover new, favorable gestures that might be durable signs of resistance to that coercion.

The novelist Ronald Sukenick was aware of the techniques of the Oulipo literary group and incorporated some of them into his work fairly regularly, but he distanced himself from “strong” forms of Oulipo by, at least in my reading, deriving rules by marking features of narrative that attending to narrative made distinctive and by following and recursively accentuating the rules discoverable in one’s own mode of work. In other words, if you pay attention to your own writing and thinking, you can identify rules you seem to be following—habits and regular gestures—and make those rules explicit stakes in the discourse. The point of working with Oulipean methods, and developing new methods out of the rules of grammar, is ultimately to get to the point where your own thinking becomes the source of rules for transforming that thinking.

“Redeem” is word with intertwined economic, political and religious meanings: it means to buy back or to pay off; it means to make up for; it means to buy or recover a slave or hostage; and it means to be delivered from one’s state of sin. It’s easy to see that it’s essentially the same word, in slightly different meanings in each case—to retrieve something that has been lost through some kind of payment. It is very helpful, though, to see the relations in this single word between Christ’s suffering for the sake of fallen humanity and getting back your watch from the pawnshop. And we can bring in, as well, the concept of honor, when we consider, for example, the man who, after some cowardly or unconscionable act in his youth, redeems himself with some act of heroism later on, along with the political resonances of redemption from slavery or, more broadly, oppression. I’m going to see if it works for describing and hypothesizing the rights of the anyown, the figure I am presenting as the basis of political thinking: the bearer of ownership rights which are yet to be ascertained because, while manifest in the market economy, they are rooted in the realms of egalitarian distribution and the gift economy; and, because the assertion of anyown’s rights automatically reverberates through the rights economy, modifying the value of everything else, which entails the right to have access to a fair measure of values, economic political and cultural.

The most interesting of the libertarian thought experiments are those which hypothesize ways in which functions currently fulfilled by government, including the most basic and unquestioned ones, such as currency, infrastructure and defense, might be performed just as well, or better, by private enterprises. Any politics that seeks to chip away at the welfare state, first of all its excesses and most unsustainable elements, but ultimately the powers allotted to government which made the excesses possible in the first place, would find itself confronted with the question of how the functions lopped off from the government would be fulfilled. Some seem to me pretty easy: we don’t really need the Department of Education at all; some, obviously, like those dealing with poverty, sickness and old age are more difficult. Even the easy ones would be instructive, though—the abolition of the Department of Education would not eliminate the need to nationalize educational norms and practices, and in the return to educational localization we would no doubt see an enormous variety of educational practices but also all kinds of efforts at overlapping those practices, generalizing their lessons and establishing some conformity in accreditation (what happens when a family moves from Georgia to Ohio and the schools in Ohio have to determine the meaning of the credentials forwarded by the school in Georgia?). It seems to me very easy to imagine private agencies contracting with schools and school districts to establish such norms—such entrepreneurial ventures would provide an essential service, and one which could be very easily judged by the contractee: does the student from Georgia who should be an A student according to the norms established and overseen by that agency in fact perform at that level in her new school in Ohio?

Similarly with, say consumer protection agencies created, say, in the wake of the dismantling of the FDA. Companies which do their own testing would contract with producers, which would in turn advertise the approval they have been given; companies would provide different levels of guarantee, depending upon the product and the desire of the company (as a consumer you could buy only from companies that have achieved 98% safety level, but if you prefer cheapness to such elevated levels of inspection, you could go with 80%); competition would make sure that dirty deals between inspectors and companies are exposed quickly—this could easily work better than the current system of government inspection. At any rate, once such functions have been won back for the private, voluntary sector, we could speak of the “redemption” of expropriated state functions and their return to society. Private agencies would literally be buying back those functions, and politics would focus on forcing the state to allow them to do so.

“Redemption” might take on even more powerful meanings when it comes to, say, a community buying a river or woods back from the state and, rather than letting the EPA dictate their environmental needs, going ahead and suing the industry that has been polluting the area—property rights, rather than ecological fanaticism, would lead to the right balance between economic and environmental imperatives. Similarly, the houses in a run down, crime ridden neighborhood might be “redeemed” by members of the community, who would all become shareholders, lease and sell according to strict principles, hire private security agents and thereby establish rigorous community standards. And for those who fear the parceling off and selling of the public space and the consequent dystopian nightmare of corporate rule portrayed in every third Hollywood movie, it is well to keep in mind that the collected economic power of middle class Americans, especially in a far more free economy with very low taxes, would overwhelm the power of corporations and all the billionaires in the world (without even taking into account that all those middle class Americans are the consumers and workers those companies depend upon)—that power would just need to be harnessed toward the “redemption” of the poor, the polluted, the corrupt, the unsafe and so on.

I’ve dealt with these issues before, but what brings me back to them in these new terms is an essay I recently read, about the thousandth, I would guess, handwringing over new developments in the biological sciences and the “ethical” dilemmas they pose for “us.” What will “we” do about cloning, genetic engineering, and so on? I long ago stopped taking these arguments seriously because, really, there is no “we,” certainly not in the sense that there are “problems” we will “solve,” “discussions” we will have, etc., leading to decisions “we” will make, together. One person does something, whether it fits some pre-existing moral code or “discussion,” another person reacts, and a third person tries to reconcile the results. That’s the way things we work—after it’s over, speaking about what “we” have decided may serve as a useful shorthand. Biological innovation, if left to private initiative alone, might lead to… weapons for rogue states and terrorists—after all, companies will sell to the highest bidder, regardless of morality, won’t they? Well, not if they want to sell to others—but, just as important, why don’t those concerned buy out those weapons themselves or pay even more for antidotes or defenses against those weapons or, even better, redeem the countries ruled by rogue regimes or controlled by terrorists—endow organizations and institutions that will defend rights and provide sanctuary, and exploit corruption in those governments so as to protect what has been established. The tremendous asymmetry in power represented by the asymmetry in generated by free as opposed to enslaved societies would make all kinds of redemptive remedies possible. And, on the cultural level, if you don’t want a mosque at Ground Zero, put together a group that buys up the property in the area—each controversy will have its equivalent possibility, in each case requiring some ingenuity and creating new problems for the redemptive agency to address.

On the one hand, a politics of redemption would be all about money; on the other hand, the money itself would be about all kinds of things—it would be money put where people’s mouths are. If you’re worried about crime, contribute to a consortium dedicated to redeeming the neighborhoods which are its source—such consortiums will have weighted rules for voting, presumably, so the more you give, the more say you have. This would, on the face of it, give more power to the rich—but the rich would also have to put their money where their mouth is, and also where lots of other people are putting theirs—the rich would be mixed in with the rest. Second, a politics of redemption would draw upon people’s readiness to sacrifice, both time and money. The relations within these consortiums would be complex, based upon rules for decision making, division of labor and so on; and their relation to their redeemed properties would be even more complex, including, sometimes, the insistence on traditional hierarchies and ritualistic relationships and at other times experimentation.

The main role for government in this case would be to establish an arena in which the complicated contractual relations such an order would entail could be conducted with sufficient stability and reliability—I would say that much emphasis would shift to the civil courts, where most disagreements would be sorted out but just as important would be a criminal order, or a politics of redemption on the part of the state which would protect any individual’s right to leave any of the consortiums they have contracted with, as the biggest danger they would pose is new forms of privatized violence against individuals who have entered contracts touching upon important aspects of their lives. The cultural conditions for a politics of redemption would include powerful presumptions against state interventions in private matters, and so norms and laws regarding when such intervention is unavoidable would be a constant source of argument. This would, in a sense, throw us back into the same kind of arguments the US was having before the civil war, between the Democrat’s argument for “popular rule” and “diversity” in institutions and the Republican argument that equality and the universal enforcement of rights supersedes those principles. Maybe this is the one “eternal” argument of any modern republic.

And the main role for a politics of redemption today is the joint task of evacuating those areas of government which would need to give way for a politics of redemption, and creating the preliminary or embryonic forms of such a politics, ready to fill the vacuums that will be created given either a favorable political environment or fiscal collapse. There is no need to create utopian maps of a fully libertarian order; the idea, rather, would be to target places where the state is failing and voluntary approaches could be tried. As the Left has always done, it is also useful to test the boundaries and antinomies of the existing legal order, through creative forms of disobedience. And it seems to me that, contrary to the favored arguments of the political class, we want to see much more money in politics—unregulated money, anonymous money, money that will prevent the political class or the media from ever dreaming they can again obtain a monopoly on “legitimate” public discourse.

Another way of speaking about the center-margin relation constitutive of originary thinking is in terms of the “in-between”—what is in the center is in between us. The shift in terms provides for a shift in focus—the center attracts attention, while what is in between us directs our attention toward each other. Arendt placed great importance on such “in-betweens,” and the destructiveness of any politics that seeks to eliminate them and place us “face to face” with each other without mediation—an example she gave was the table around which we sit at a meeting. The table serves various purposes—we write on it, lean on it, put our coffee on it, etc.—but beyond all that it separates and relates us to each other. If the table disappeared, there is a sense in which we would be more “naked,” more vulnerable, more self-conscious, and less capable of sharing some “public thing.” It would be strange to think about the table as sacred, though, even though it seems to serve a very similar purpose (of course stories, perhaps apocryphal, about stalled diplomatic processes resulting from disagreements about the size and shape of tables suggest that the table can take on a kind of sacrality). Even more, the notion of an in-between, and the related notion of the “middle” (it is the middle class that has prevented class war between rich and poor in Western societies), suggests the even more subordinate category of the “means.” God surely isn’t a means to some other end—but, we can see how He is, in fact—we use God to prevent us from tearing each other apart.

The in-between or the middle seems to me to direct our attention to the scene in a different way, perhaps later on than the centralization of the object, but I’m not sure: the object becomes the center of attention as the concentration of our accumulating desires—at that point, we are all marking the object by grasping for it. With the issuance of the sign/gesture, that center of attention is converted into a repellent force—we attend from the sign to the object as the “authorization” of the sign. Also, though, we attend from the authorizing object to one another—everyone on the scene is now in some state of grasping/withholding in the light of the center. But the center here has become the in-between or the middle, insofar as we are not looking at it but has it has become unmarked (untouchable) it allows us to see and mark or unmark as the case demands each of our fellows (each of whom is a little bit more tending to grasp or to withhold). It may be that the center represents the experience of the sacred, the certainty and security it provides as we contemplate it, while the middle authorizes the creation of means—first of all, new ways of mediating between persons, but also, increasing, those new ways become means of transforming our tools and physical environment so as to keep placing us in new configurations with each other.

Money is as extreme a “mean” as you can find—it serves only to mediate exchanges; and yet, it makes sense, as Marx and many before and after him have remarked, to see money as “sacred”—the difference from Marx is that there’s no need to see anything obscene about this. Money is a sacred means—saving it is honorable, wasting it is disgraceful, spending it wisely is an obligation and placing it in the middle of some scene casts light on everyone there—and giving your money to some shared purpose, either a purpose you also supervise the fulfillment of, or one you remain anonymously aloof from, or one which you preside over as a public benefactor, is a mode of transcendence. A politics of redemption is a politics of devotion but no donation could ever be complete without concrete acts of exchanging favors and gestures, which such a politics makes a space for.

If a politics of redemption is a defense of the rights of the anyown, then it is a defense of the right of the anyown to spend money as anyown sees fit; but, then, that must also be a right to use whatever form of money the participants in an exchange agree to. Regarding the right of the anyown, fiat money is the first expropriation. It’s hard to imagine the titanic struggle that would be required to overturn the regime of fiat money. But it might be much easier to imagine directing attention to all the favors and gestures that we will never know but might have been exchanged, all the means that might have been created, if not for the systematic expropriations that are only possible because of fiat money—because the government can take money away from productive citizens by creating more money to give as largesse to their favored constituents.