GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

“It is not enough to say, as the French do, that their nation was taken unawares. Nations and women are not forgiven the unguarded hour in which the first adventurer who came along could violate them. Such turns of speech do not solve the riddle but only formulate it differently. It remains to be explained how a nation of thirty-six millions can be surprised and delivered without resistance into captivity by three knights of industry. “
Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Replace “French” with “Americans,” “thirty six with three hundred million,” and “three knights of industry” with “the leadership of the Democratic Party,” and Marx’s commentary serves as a perfect epitaph for the American social order, as we have known it.
Americans, as far as I can tell, voted the Republicans out of power because they were tired of such a demonized representative class—and so they voted into power the ones who had been demonizing them. Anyone can say they didn’t realize the Democrats would wreak such destruction, but, really—who did you think they were? Anyone can say they thought Obama was moderate, calm, intellectually cool, with well-creased pants; but no one ever explained what led to such assumptions, beyond his seemingly natural haughtiness and a few phrases repeated a few times in absolutely formulaic manner during the 2008 campaign. Enough people thought this adventurer was a savior, and we will not be forgiven for delivering our birthright into his captivity. Even worse, 2008 was a vanity election, perhaps the first one in American history: in the middle of an assault on democracy and liberalism by jihadist terrorism, in the midst of a global financial crisis, on the brink of an equally global entitlements debacle—enough Americans thought it was a good time for a “historic” President; that is, thought it was a good time to trivialize the electoral process to the same extent as the Academy Awards, where every year some “marginalized” group or issue must be represented. I doubt such a delusional fantasy can be forgiven.
The fight against “Obamacare” is just getting started—there is a large popular movement ready to do battle, and the Republican party has become increasingly laser-like in its focus on this catastrophe. Despite the claim that health care bills “can’t” be repealed, the claim is obviously false—this is a hybrid, confused, maybe impossible law to implement, its provisions don’t kick in for years, while the taxes appropriated start immediately; the Republican party seems poised to make huge gains in November’s election; it is vulnerable on various constitutional grounds and can be resisted in myriad ways by states and individuals alike.
And yet, at the end of the day, the American people elected the Democrats and Obama. There’s no point to being “pessimistic” about the struggle against American socialism, but only a deep sickness or, to use a word associated with one of Obama’s predecessors, “malaise,” can account for that—a very deep desire to check out of history, to set up one’s own schedule of “significant” events (2008, the first black President; 2016, the first woman; 2024, the first gay; perhaps by 2032 we can get back to electing real Presidents again). I’ve seen little discussion of this facet of our contemporary crisis—it seems to me extremely difficult to uproot such fantasy worlds (9/11, in the end, seems to have simply reinforced it), and even a substantial minority (I would guess about 35% involved in or sympathetic to the Tea Party movement) trying to return us to reality can be easily scapegoated if that basic desire remains entrenched. Nor is that minority itself free of some of those fantasies—much of the Tea Party movement seems to want a return to the normal welfare state of a few years ago, but I believe that any swing in that direction will go well beyond its mark, towards something we have thought little about: freedom. Who is not terrified of that at this point?

UPDATE:  I notice that William Kristol has also used Marx’s text to describe the “farce” of Obamacare:  http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/eighteenth-brumaire-barack-obama.  Interestingly, he doesn’t cite the words I use as an epigraph to this post.  Kristol is an endearingly persistent optimist.

Substituting the notion of “sovereign equality” for “equality of outcome” would complete the articulation of liberty and equality I argued for in “The Mistake of Liberal Democracy,” and clarify the implications of their severing by liberal democracy. An obvious question regarding my claim for the indivisibility of freedom and equality is, “Could you really claim that Bill Gates and a homeless person are unequal in no meaningful way, as long as they could both be said to be playing under the same rules?” It’s a good question, and my first answer is the unsatisfactory for many “yes, that is precisely what I am claiming”; but I can also give a more satisfactory (to many) answer: “no, they are unequal in a meaningful way, and the meaning given to that way comes from the belief that there should be some general power superintending and weighing all resentments so as to ensure they don’t obfuscate the resentment of the center.” That superintending power is the sovereign power, which is coeval with freedom and in constant tension with it. Sovereign power stakes its claim where equaliberty demands too much rigor from its participants, and that there are many such sites our current crisis testifies. Sovereign equality, then, is public recognition of each one’s resentments, displacing the general adoption of the resentment of the center. And if one were to say that, in effect, Bill Gates plays on a different field and according to a different set of rules from the homeless person, that would be true, but largely due to the massive sovereign incursions into freedom, bought by the wealthy who felt that competition had outlived its usefulness once they had won, but also sanctioned by the claims of sovereign equality.

For anyone interested, I have a new blogging locale, on the Zombies Contentions blog (under Adam K). It’s more directly political, with only a hint of GA (but perhaps I’ll be able to thicken the hints as I go).

Anyway, here’s the link, for anyone who’s interested:

http://ckmac.com/thewholething/

Dear Colleagues,

The deadline for paper submissions for the 4th Annual Generative Anthropology Summer Conference (GASC 2010) has been extended to March 15th. We still have room in the program, and we encourage all interested parties to submit an abstract or panel proposal. The theme this year is “The Anthropology of Modernity: the Sacred, Science, and Aesthetics.” The conference will take place on June 24th-26th at Westminster College and Brigham Young University.

The conference this year is shaping up to be a very exciting event, with Keynotes from Prof. Vincent Pecora from the University of Utah and Prof. Eric Gans from UCLA. We are meeting this year in Salt Lake City, Utah, nestled up against the beautiful Wasatch mountains. Accommodations are available on campus at Westminster College for very reasonable rates, or there are nearby hotels that also have affordable rooms. Please see our website for more information:

http://people.westminstercollege.edu/faculty/pgoldman/GASC_2010/index.html

We look forward to hearing from you and hopefully seeing you at the conference!

~Peter

I fell a bit behind in my reading of the Chronicles of Love & Resentment, and so I just got to the extraordinarily interesting Chronicle # 388, “Ecriture from Barthes to GA,” and wanted to make this brief comment on one small part of the essay:

The sacred is not a mysterious, otherworldly quality; it measures the human community’s sense of the danger posed to it by the mimetic desire aroused by different phenomena. What we call secularization is the process whereby these dangers come to be assessed within their concrete historical context rather than by reference to originary history as preserved in religious traditions. Pace the militant defenders of atheism, the progress of secularization over the past three centuries is far from having demonstrated the ability of modern societies to provide a rational basis for these assessments.

The difference between the sacred and secular is presented in very minimal terms here, to the disadvantage of the secular, because, presumably, the “concrete historical context” doesn’t provide the measure of danger that originary history does. That would be why modern societies have been unable to “demonstrate the ability” to rationally assess mimetic dangers—and, if they can’t do it “rationally,” than how? This seems to me a contention that is remarkable, rich in implications, and irrefutable. But I would like to probe it a bit further. First of all, “concrete historical context” doesn’t seem to me to be establishing the necessary sacred/secular distinction here, because such “contexts” must themselves be the result of secularization. In other words, it’s not as if there was previously a choice between assessing dangers in terms of an originary history or of concrete historical contexts, and only now did people choose the concrete context as their reference point. Furthermore, Gans here speaks in the idiom of modern secularization itself, which is perhaps inevitable but without some mitigation this idiom will not help us with our risk assessments. What I have in mind is the very general character of the narrative of secularization implicit here, while the only real process of secularization we can point to is the one issuing from the break with a very specific originary history, that provided by Christianity. Concrete historical contexts are produced because this particular “religious tradition” came to be seen, on its own terms, as producing scapegoats—the various “heretics” that emerged once Europe emerged (in large part thanks to Christianity itself) as a more bourgeois, inquisitive, urban society later in the Middle Ages. Since these heresies, when capable of defending themselves, could produce no new consensus, but only civil war, the only way of making mimetic dangers present was through the construction of a system of signs with the human subject (like Jesus, without the divine origin) as its origin—the human subject can in this way present itself as the sign of deferral of sacred violence, the creation of new Christs in the name of deferring violence carried out in the name of Christ. Modernity is then driven by the replacement of one constitutive human figure, around which “concrete historical contexts” constellate, after another—from the elevated (heroic scientists, artists, liberators and philosophers) to degraded (the various class, racial, sexual, and other others of the victimary period).

The linguistic turn comes into its own as a possible ideological replacement for these humanisms when the violence committed in the name of all these figures in succession leads to the deferral of the human figure itself; and the only way of doing that is by presenting the human as constituted by something else; language, a self-contained system that couldn’t have come before but doesn’t in any clear way seem to have come from humans. This is what makes possible the originary hypothesis: in its initial—scientistic, anthropological and ultimately victimary political—incarnations, the linguistic turn forbid any originary scene even more than previous modes of thought, as the originary is itself perceived as the source of violence—no mode of originarity other than those grounded in some human figure seems possible, and those have all been exhausted; but the insistence on language as a self-contained system is also what made it possible to think its origin: in considering language as a self-contained system constituted by its own internal relations, it is counter-productive to presuppose some pre-existing “content”—in this way lots of very mystifying ways of thinking about the origin of language (as a mere extension and improvement of indexical signs) are cleared away and it now becomes possible to think about language as such emerging all at once in an event.