GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

Here is my proposal for that International Conference on Anti-semitism I mentioned on the GAlist a while back. We’ll see what they make of it.

This paper will offer an account of contemporary anti-semitism in terms of Eric Gans’s “originary hypothesis” regarding the origin of language and culture. The originary hypothesis extends and revises Rene Girard’s analysis of mimetic and rivalry: according to the originary hypothesis, the first sign emerged in a single event, a mimetic crisis in which the (proto) human group arrested their common and self-destructive convergence upon a common object by putting forward what Gans calls a “gesture of aborted appropriation.” Representation, then, is the deferral of violence, as is, therefore, all of culture. History is the ongoing process of preserving and, where necessary and possible, replacing such means of deferral (languages, rituals, beliefs, moralities, art, and so on) which are intrinsically fragile and under constant threat from mimetic desire, rivalry and violence.

“Generative Anthropology” (the mode of thought based upon the originary hypothesis) provides us with two ways of thinking about anti-semitism. First, the kind of anti-semitism which ultimately led to the Holocaust is predicated upon the paradox of the Jewish discovery of monotheism: the Judaic revelation presented knowledge of a single God beyond the means of control of totemic religions and a single humanity whose knowledge of God is most profoundly revealed in the reciprocal relations between humans; at the same time, this very revelation is granted to a single people, “chosen” to work out before the world the implications of this understanding of the divine. The spread of monotheism, already inscribed in its universalistic origin, could hardly take place other than through resentment towards those who both gave this God to humanity and “selfishly” claimed an exclusive relation to Him. This resentment, evident in both Christianity and Islam, is modified in modernity, which completely separates the divinized individual from his/her bond with God: the Jewish “principle,” in this case, is what binds humans to tradition and their narrow ethnicities and outmoded loyalties. Finally, the reaction against modernity (and especially those radical reactions that reject Christianity as well) removes the exemption for individuals enacted by the modern contempt for the Jewish people: it is the Jewish principle of universal morality and individual freedom that has corrupted and dissolved all legitimate forms of community and authority, while Jewish “exclusiveness” turns this process into a deliberate conspiracy against the “nations.”

The ultimately omnicidal potential for human violence revealed by the Holocaust introduces something new into this equation. The Holocaust marks the beginning of the victimary era, in which we are now living. The virulent hatred of the Nazis towards the Jews drew the world into a cataclysmic struggle, the like of which we will not survive again in the nuclear age. The eschewing of such hatred must be the center of the new system of deferral constructed after the war: whatever “looks like” the Nazi-Jew relation must be uncompromisingly proscribed. This, of course, creates an incentive to make one’s own grievance fit that model: post-colonial, anti-racist, feminist, environmentalist and so on struggles are all cast in terms of the perpetrator/victim/bystander configuration extracted from the Holocaust. The Jews are once again placed in a paradoxical position. First of all, the response on the part of the Jews to the consequences of their utter defenselessness in the Holocaust is to create and, with growing unanimity, support a Jewish nation-state. But the nation-state, with its ethnic exclusivity and narrow self-interest, is one of those things that “looks” very much “like” Nazism. Second, the victimary principle can only be universalized if the Jewish monopoly on Holocaust guilt is broken—the best way to do so is to present the Jews as oppressors, at least just like the rest of us, at worst uniquely so, insofar they have exploited the world’s guilt so as to perpetuate the very conditions enabling their own victimization. Finally, then, the emergence of a new victim, the Palestinians, the victim of the Jews, completes the victimary metaphysics first set in motion by the response to the Holocaust. The victimary system, then, depends upon this new, expanded anti-semitism, in which the Jews are scapegoated for the crimes of the West as well as for the intensifying resentments toward the West, coming now, in particular, from the most bitter if not the oldest of those resentments: that of Islam.

The originary hypothesis suggests that, on the originary scene of language creation, someone had to have gone first, that is, renounced, and have been seen to renounce, his appropriative relation to the object. This position, the position of “the Jew” (we are not speaking about actual Jews here, even if arguably this configuration enters into Jewish self-representations as well), is intermittently admired and imitated—but more often hated. Only a renewed, and now global, acceptance of “firstness” could enable us to transcend the increasingly irrational anti-semitism that now plagues even a country as traditionally reasonable and liberal as the UK.

I’ve got a new post over at zombies contentions, if anyone’s interested.

The relations between the gift, the informal, and the formal, capitalist economy can bear a bit more discussion. It is not quite right to call the informal economy a gift economy—transactions will be carried out regularly with money, often the currency used in the larger society, I would imagine, but there’s no need to assume informal exchanges would be restricted to that currency (other, currencies, maybe more secure international currencies might be used). There is also, probably, a good deal of barter and exchange of services. What is most important to de Sotos, though, is that what is possessed in the marginal, informal economy is legal title to possessions, many of which are held illegally, such as a house built without a title, violating zoning regulations, on state land. Not only can such possessions not be a source of capital—it can’t be used as collateral for a loan, for example—but the owner’s continued possession of them relies upon the personal knowledge of that owner by others in the community. Everyone knows who owns that house, those tools or stock of materials, who sets up shop on that corner, etc. It is this reliance upon reciprocal personal recognition that seems to me to root the informal economy in the gift economy. As a transitional, or hybrid, form, the informal economy could be seen, as I argued in the previous post, as exemplary of the need to root rights in idioms of local recognition. In order to give legal title to the vast wealth held in the informal economy, one would have to, as, indeed, de Sotos and his collaborators have done, go through the neighborhoods in question and not only note this house, this shop, this vehicle, but to speak with the inhabitants to find out who owns what, and therefore to gauge their reliability, assess their own conflicting interests, the norms, resentments and sense of justice; all of which would, in turn, be rooted in local histories and events within the memories of most witnesses. In turn, all that knowledge, all those resentments, those tacit norms, are articulated and made public, subject to a new kind of scrutiny which might both respect and alienate it as a set of idioms. And here we can see a bridge between the gift and money economies.

We could say that De Soto’s argument for formalizing the informal economy (see my discussion in the first installment of “The Right of the Idiom”) is an argument for integrating the gift economy into the money economy. It’s a bit more complex, though: the informal economy is not a pre-capitalist economic order “transcended” by capitalism; rather, it emerges on the margins of capitalism, in particular in the urban areas ruled by what De Soto calls the “bell jar,” or the legal order that applies to and protects only the property of the elites—the masses, in De Soto’s account, abandon the countryside and crowd into the cities as the market economy offers promise of a better life, a promise which is frustrated by the inadequate legal order. But, it might be better to say, as Gans did in his talk at the Ottawa conference last June (see Chronicle #376), that the gift economy is itself rather complex, and continues to exist within a capitalist economy. In that case, not everything need be monetized: even more, while just about anything can be, new gift economies will emerge in the way of each new conquest of capitalist legality.
It seems to me that there are some pretty important political consequences that follow. One devastating vulnerability of classical liberal political theory (that of Locke and his successors) is that it identifies the rights-bearing, property owning individual with the state of nature. We know, of course, that property ownership and the attendant rights are not pre-existing in nature, only to be “baptized” by the social contract. This fiction made what Hannah Arendt called the “right to have rights” excessively abstract and filled with contradictions. Political theory got caught up in endless debates over what, exactly, made human beings worthy of rights: was it reason? Was it productive labor? In that case, what about the rights of children, the disabled, the mentally ill? What about the rights of those whose labor does fit the model of productivity in Western society, as that of the Native Americans or Africans, who could therefore be dispossessed on the grounds that they don’t really “labor”? Moreover, the notion that property exists in a full blown form prior to the existence of government and law creates the sense that the government and the law are ultimately necessary evils, leading to the perpetual libertarian-anarchist fantasy of making them unnecessary—and the complementary fear and hatred of government, no matter how limited.
We could say, instead, that rights are rooted in one’s participation in a gift economy. One’s participation in a gift economy makes one, by definition, capable of entering the money, market economy, because the possibility of converting gifts into commodities is inherent in the juxtaposition of the two economies. In that case, the right to own property is a basic right, but one is not caught in the double bind of withholding such rights from anyone who doesn’t already own property in such a way as would be recognized by the capitalist legal system. Furthermore, everyone is involved in gift economies in some way, even the most disabled individual or a fetus, because any form of human life can be symbolized or represented, and the exchange of representations is the most basic form of the gift economy. Here I would propose a “right of the idiom”: anyone’s way into language and self-representation is distinctive, and in that case presentable in some way as a gift in some formal exchange with others. To put it another way, anyone who speaks can tell a joke, or laugh at one, in a way no one else can; or can be spoken about, and be a source of others’ desires and love—occupy a place in the world of signs, in short. I am not saying that idioms are intrinsically gifts—rather, in a modern society, in which the gift economy and the money economy exist side by side, any idiom could conceivably cross over the boundary and become property, and in that case it must have been (to use a Derridean idiom, it will have been) a gift in the first place. And, of course, if we root rights in the gift economy, on the margins and in the interstices of the market economy, we can also grant the right to remain within the gift economy and refuse entrance into the world of the market.
Rooting rights in the idioms circulating within the gift economy also allows us to address another blind spot of political economy: those pre-marketized relationships (education, family, neighborhood, etc.) and dispositions (loyalty, love, courage…) which must be pre-conditions of the market economy but have no place within economic thought itself. First of all, though, it raises some interesting questions regarding actors or beings also included within discursive or idiomatic circuits: what about animals? The planet? The dead? Future generations? They can all be imagined, and more vividly within a gift than a money economy, and hence can all become bearers of rights. But rights would be more or less metaphorical, more or less enforceable, to the extent that the representation of those rights could conceivably give way to self-representation at some point. So, it is possible imagine calling upon the law to defend the rights of a fetus, or someone in a coma; the rights of future generations can be defended politically, insofar as they will, we hope, come along, but no individual has been delegated responsibility for them; the rights of the dead might, perhaps, be defended culturally, in arguments against abandoning what they tested out and sacrificed for; animals, in a familiar argument, have the right not to suffer more than necessary, because we certainly know they can suffer, and so on. All of this would be endlessly discussed and debated, of course. I believe we could get much more specific in tying idioms to rights: who, for example, can issue binding imperatives upon us? The dead, I think, but not the planet. From whom can we imagine receiving an exclamation or ostensive (say, an exhortation): from future generations, I think, but not the planet, or animals. Who could be included in our prayers, on whose life could we swear an oath? Rights, in originary terms, are a modern mode of sacrality: some possible encroachment upon the existence, movement, well-being or freedom of others from which we forbear. There are many degrees and modes of such forbearance, and the way to understand our obligations to things and to people past and present is to look carefully at how we talk about them.
To return, then, to the economics of the non-marketized elements of life: what an originary political economy would study are the ways in which one or another mode of education or family or communal life, provide avenues back and forth between gift and money economies. A mode of life which provides the necessities of life outside of the market beyond some threshold to be identified would be inimical to a larger society based on rights. The group might have means of representing itself and thereby accessing rights, and individuals representing the group might have means of doing so as well, but their relations to each other would be largely outside of the economy of rights. That might be the way they prefer it, and that is their right. At the same time, though, we would be obliged to defend the rights of any individual within that group who stepped outside of the gift economy into the market, even if it’s a very small step. Gift economies might be very egalitarian but they also might be sites where strict hierarchies (“big men”) flourish; in a certain sense the big man and woman are constitutive of the family. We can defend a wide range of organization within the various gift economies, as long as we develop an agreement as to what would count as that “step” outside of it.
What I hope to contribute next (the blog, and intellectual exchange more generally, is ultimately most at home within the gift economy) is an way of talking about idioms in the way I have suggested above—how can we talk of the commands, the revelations, the prayers and oaths, the promises, and so on, that are formed within the gift economy but prepare us to enter the money economy and bear and respect rights? What kind of politics can help preserve these idiomatic preconditions on rights? And no consistent reader of this blog will be surprised when I suggest that the devastation wrought by victimary discourse lies largely in its assault upon these idioms, and upon gift economies (which interfere with bureaucracy) more generally.

Not much new here for GAniks, but here’s my latest post over at zombies contentions:

http://zombiecontentions.com/2010/04/18/how-about-victimary-progressivism/