GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

It seems to me that Julia Kristeva was on to something important in her Lacanian-Maoist synthesis in the 60s and 70s, a synthesis predicated upon the notion that desire “pulverizes” what Kristeva called the “thetic”—essentially the kind of meaning packaged in propositions, or declarative sentences. The truth is that, strictly speaking, desire cannot coincide with meaning: the purer the desire, the more any interference with that desire must be destroyed, intellectually and physically, if possible. Desire cannot tolerate an independent reality within which the object might embed itself and thereby resist possession. And by possession, I mean absolute, unquestioned, permanent possession—which is what desire aims at. To put it in grammatical terms, desire involves the object issuing imperatives to the subject—come and get me; be who you can be once you have me; protect me from all others, etc.—but insofar as the object then resists possession, or breaks the promises implicit in its beckoning, the subject is reduced to issuing imperatives to the object, with all those commands reducible to some version of “remain exactly what or who you were in that instant when you first drew my attention to you.” These commands are impotent, and their impotence appears as the object’s situation at the intersection of a range of imperatives: the object is calling forth other suitors, and they in turn are (more successfully) commanding the object, making one or more of them its more authentic owner.

Meaning, indeed, in the sense of confirming a community of sign-users sharing a world of objects, cannot be articulated under such conditions—where Kristeva goes wrong, of course, is in valorizing this state of affairs as some kind of primordial freedom that will overturn the bourgeois order and institute utopia. In other words, she completely ignores the violence constitutive of the desiring condition, or justifies that violence as a salutary destructive force. Kristeva herself came to realize this soon enough. What interests me in all this is thinking through the transition from the grammar of desire to the grammar of resentment, which is the process of meaning constitution. This instant when the world appears as a grid of intersecting, multiplying and intensifying imperatives seems to me to be where we can locate the interrogative. The interrogative is a prolonged imperative, which is to say an imperative that understands it may not be obeyed. Questions acknowledge the opacity of the other: if I ask you your name, or where some object is, I assume that my desire will be better satisfied by giving you a choice than by demanding you disclose your identity or produce the object immediately. I need something in your possession that only you can provide. The question introduces resentment into the field of desire, because the question manifests not only the subject’s resentment at being denied immediate access to some desired object but also the subject’s conversion of the field of imperatives into a field of resentments, symmetrical to one’s own. And the question is answered, or “settled,” once the object demanded is secure as a sign in the field of semblances, or “reality.” Questions with no real answer are (leaving aside rhetorical questions, which are essentially exclamations) intensified imperatives that tear at the fabric of reality, as exemplified in the well known joke, “when did you stop beating your wife”?

Meaning, then, is the maintenance of the field of semblances, that is, the condition where all signs are objects and all objects signs, in varying degrees and articulations. Once even something so trivial as a piece of food (where there is plenty) becomes only food and not at all a sign of some mode of sharing, meaning collapses; once even the most abstract or stylized articulation of signs can no longer be “inhabited”—converted into a set of practices—the same thing happens. But the way we get through the question to the settlement of the field of semblances is, it seems to me, through the evolution of the imperative. When the desiring subject makes demands upon the resistant object, the demand that the object remain ever fresh, ever enticing, and ever yielding leads to madness—or to another demand, for further imperatives guiding the subject in possessing the object. These imperatives are invocations, and result in new imperatives from the center proposing self-reformation that might make one worthy of the object, or capable of displacing rivals. The invocation is the mediation that makes the question possible, because only the invocation can bring resentment into play, as the invocation already concedes the need for mediation.

There are plenty of satisfied desires and, even more, desires whose instigation, pursuit and fulfillment has created moral and ethical goods. Must these be less intense, “neutered,” inauthentic desires? It is better to say that they are desires constructed in such a way as to receive the blessing of the resentment of the center. They are desires turned towards the signness of their object, their opening onto infinity—a surrender of absolute possession and the complete displacement of rivals in the name of the continual hearkening of the center to one’s invocations. Such desires are not directed at a single consummation, but at something more sustained, something requiring a rule governed space wherein the object of desire can be continually augmented rather than diminished through enjoyment. If the iterated imperative becomes invocation, the iterated invocation—the invocation that draws in an ever wider circle of desires—becomes rule. This transformation as well, though, must take place through the intermediaries whose invocations collide and converge with the subject’s—that is, through events settled by the emergence of new sets of tacit and overt rule following. But all this is just to say that desire can be converted into love: the imperative to support the freedom and signifying power of the object.

The most basic form of rule following is language itself, in the form of grammar. The rules of grammar vary widely across languages, even if we could at least find exclamations, imperatives and declaratives in all of them—and nouns, verbs and adjectives, keeping in mind, though, that distinguishing individual words, much less word-types, might be problematic in societies without writing. The diversity in rules of grammar as well as in the specific forms taken by other social and cultural rules, along with the possibility of anthropological generalizations and, more pragmatically, translation, suggests that language evolution is driven by the grammar of desire and resentment—which are also both given to broad generalization while being highly contingent in their articulations. We could say, though, that rules come into existence simultaneously with mistakes—the first rule would be ruling something out, straightening some “deviation.” That rule, then, would be the work of resentment, the resentment of the center, however limitedly conceived, resentment countering some use of language taken (or mistaken) to provide an opening to, or to be a sign of, unregulated and unlimited desire—in this case conducted through an improper invocation.

The resentful grammarian’s stance might be mistaken in what it takes to be mistaken, but it is correct in intuiting the specter of unlimited desire in grammatical anomalies, improprieties and infelicities. Nobody makes grammatical errors in the idiom within which they learned to speak—errors are made in some linguistic community one is trying to enter. They are the visible results of failed attempts at imitation, of attempts to speak from the center, and thus they stand out as markers of mimetic desire. Anyone can see that the desire on display in the solecism is potentially unlimited and so the resentment (the resentment of the center towards attempts to mock and subvert that center) countering it must be unyielding. There is so much that is arbitrary in grammatical rules and so much for which there is no substitute for prolonged immersion in the culture of the linguistic group in question—especially if we expand our notion of “grammar” to include rules governing propriety of phrasing, intonation, acceptable degrees of repetition and redundancy, rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, widely used clichés and commonplaces, and any other conventions aiding reciprocal intelligibility—that mistakes easily serve as markers of the fragility of the community. (Last year, in my writing class, we looked at a student paper written by an English as a second language speaker. It was easy enough to understand what she was trying to say, but it would also be easy enough to find, in a single paragraph, at least a dozen mistakes that would be unthinkable coming from even the most mediocre elememtary school graduate native speaker. Even more, it was easy to notice how “irrational” many of the violated rules were, which is to say how little obeying those rules contributed to conveying the meaning of the sentence. Not surprisingly, those are often the rules whose violation is the most distracting: no information is conveyed by having verbs in the third person singular conjugated with an ending s—why “he walks” instead of “he walk,” as long as we are keeping the pronoun?—but the error here is grating to the ear of the Standard English speaker. I doubt that more than one or two of the students experienced my sense of what a house of cards the entire structure of grammatical regulation is.)

As I suggested in my previous post, then, desire threatens to reduce the entire composition of the community to a disarticulated assemblage of gestures and “pieces” of language. The more that is invested in the particular forms of such composition, the more challenging the desire, which is also to say the more subversive cultural power to be accessed by divesting from the grammatical order. I neither valorize nor denounce such subversive power, as it can be used for either nihilistic and Gnostic purposes or for the ends of esthetic and cultural renewal—the difference, it seems to me, most often lies in what kind of resentment lays claim to exploiting the desire detectable in the mistake: whether the subversion places the desire it is drawing upon in opposition to some scapegoated form of normal resentment, or the cultural agent in question simply carries out his or her project in the spirit of playfulness, experimentation and workmanship, leaving the leading forces of resentment to recoup and reconfigure the results as they will. In the former case, the resentment is toward the very composition of the normal, while in the latter case the resentment is directed towards the margins and therefore the overreach of the normal, acting in the interest of the emergence of new idioms, with new expressive powers, which might otherwise never have come into existence.

So, as desire—the desires of new members of the community, including those new entrants into our culture we so carelessly and ceaselessly generate within our families—in wave after wave pulverizes the language (usually in very localized ways), we can point to the most entrenched form taken by the imperative as both the most resistant to and most complicitous with this ongoing erosion—habit. Habits are those rules that have become so tacit that it requires special acts of attention to notice their very existence. Habits are idiosyncratic sets of orders we give ourselves and rules we set for ourselves, while at the same time intersecting with the habits of others in myriad ways—the modes of intersection are themselves habitual. Habits are both scandalously libertine (the special pleasures of that afternoon walk in one’s favorite place, of that coffee with newspaper in the morning…are indescribable) and strangely ascetic (our habits preserve us from all kinds of temptations, which, as violations of the habit, appear to be taboo). And habits are deeply rooted in language—language is unthinkable without it (I know just how habitual some of the stylistic gestures I have made in the last couple of sentences are—the parallelism of “scandalously libertine” and “strangely ascetic,” with the accompanying parenthetical remark in each case, the short sentence connected by the dash to the quasi exclamatory intensification of the statement, etc.) The most profound cultural innovations are ones that work on the level of these and other habits.

Regulated habits of linguistic innovation then becomes a—I would like to say the most—ethical stance in today’s victimary world. One way of thinking of becoming a practitioner of such regulated innovation is consider oneself an anthropologist at one remove from the mimetic crises and holy wars going on around one—at one remove precisely so as to be able to simulate esthetically the contending and evolving imperatives and rules at stake in such crises and battles but without being drawn in. You can’t innovate while in the midst of a struggle for your life, soul, or sanity, but you also can’t innovate without giving idiomatic expression to such struggles. It seems to be plausible to hypothesize that the first signifier on the originary scene was not himself in hand to hand combat with his rival, because withdrawal from the battle could hardly be meaningful in that case—it would simply be surrender to the animal higher in the pecking order. Much more likely, it seems to me, is that the first signifier saw the deadly combat begin somewhere at the margins of the scene (the signifier, then, is on the margin of the battle) and it was his refusal to enter the field of combat (his visible resistance to the impulse common to all to rush in) that was meaningful. Similarly, it seems to me productive to assume that the declarative sentence, emerging out of the negative ostensive and also various combinations of ostensives and imperatives, and imperatives with counter-imperatives, was generally the work of interested “bystanders” and mediators in disputes—and, probably, usually not the most contentious and dangerous disputes, but first of all those given to mediation (while bearing a family resemblance to the more ferocious ones), thereby creating the cultural forms capable of being transferred to more central concerns. Of course, one might say that this little, marginalist, argument on the priority of linguistic inventiveness is just a self-congratulatory account of the way I see myself shaping my own habits at present, so by all means factor that into account in assessing the argument.

To imitate is to take imperatives from the actions or another—this first of all must be taken in a very literal and local sense: you see the other smashing a coconut with a stone and you are told by that to “do this.” This kind of imitation of individual moves would lead to local rather than cataclysmic conflicts.

I understand the anachronistic, anthropomorphic nature of my vocabulary here: I am describing imitation in terms of imperatives before there are any, but any vocabulary that would enable us to “enter” the process of imitation would be anachronistic and anthropomorphic.

Imitation becomes more dangerous when it involves taking the other’s activity as a rule—that is, in Michael Polyani’s terms, when you attend from his moves to the intended result of those moves. In this case, action aims at some kind of privileged access to the object.

At this point, then, one attends from the model’s attention to the object to the object as attended to by the model, but insofar as you see the model you don’t see the object and insofar as you see the object the model must be eliminated from the scene. So, there are conflicting imperatives: do this (move toward the object); look at that (eye the object)—but this second imperative, precisely in proportion to the model’s interest, would better be formulated as look at me.

The question then concerns the relative power of the imperatives issuing from the model and the object, respectively—once the desire for the object, the imperative to model oneself on its possession, attains ascendancy, the imperative to destroy the other follows, since one can only imagine such possession if the other no longer exists. To destroy the other’s relation to the object is to enter the entirety of his relation to the object, to inhabit his tacit and explicit tendency toward the object.

When the destruction of the other proves more difficult then imagined, one returns to the object for another imperative, elucidating the first one; the imperative returned is now in the form of a rule: keep the other away from the object, the object commands you, but in imitating the issuer of this command you become the guardian of the object and must obey that same command yourself: keep the other away as you yourself refrain from seeking to possess the object—imitate the issuer of this command, the presence superintending the object, and preserve the object as that presence does.

Now this attitude of deferral and solicitude towards the object can be imitated, as the other members of the group attend from the power of the presence guarding the object transmitted to the bearing of the first signifier—but here, imitation is insufficient, because the gap between what you attend to and the range of moves you could attend to from that cannot be closed; each must iterate the gesture, apply the rule to the infinitesimal; i.e., find a way to signify that they have signed on to the gesture.

These relations between immediate imitation and mediated imitation, between imitation and iteration, and between imperative and rule, are permanent features of the human condition. Even in the most mediated mimetic relations, say, where I model my scholarly activity on a teacher’s, and must therefore have studied the style in which that model poses questions, pursues lines of inquiry, distinguishes implicitly between more and less important observations, etc., there will be those occasions where I ask myself, in trying to solve some very specific problem or address a very specific challenge, “what would x do,” right here and now—as if all distance were abolished and we occupied the same frame. (Perhaps it is precisely at those moments, when one thoroughly incorporates one’s teacher, that one leaves a bit more of that teacher behind—with all the possible violence that implies, or simulates.) However playfully I treat my model, taking it as an occasion for all kinds of inventive iterations across various genres and social domains, in the end I must be able to line up what I am doing with something my model could have been observed doing in a one-to-one manner—that is, I am still imitating. And, however sophisticated a set of rules, and however complex the interaction between their tacit and explicit dimensions, in the end rules are only rules if they issue imperatives when needed—the rules “tell” me that this one is allowed to stay and that one must go.

At the same time, more advanced forms of mediated imitation, iteration, and regulation have transformed what will count as immediate imitation, imitation, and imperatives, respectively. The judge’s order that someone be removed from the courtroom for unruly behavior can be issued in the simplest imperative imaginable (“remove him!”), but that simplicity relies upon the extraordinary complexity of court procedures, understandings of acceptable behavior in civilized settings, the rule of law, and so on. We can recognize the attempts of a graduate student to mimic the stylistic features of an eminent theorist as a very naïve, even comical instance of imitation, but at the same time it’s obviously very different than scratching yourself because someone else itches (and we might as well remember that we still imitate on that level as well).

Resentment is the imitation of the central presence, the enactment of the rule that is derived from the object in the midst of the failure to clear the field for desire. I know that Gans situates resentment subsequent to the issuance of the sign, viewing resentment as that of the desiring subject whose access to the object has been barred. There is, certainly, resentment at that instant, but for the sign itself to be issued and iterated by the other members of the group each must not only refrain from appropriation but ascertain that all others are doing so likewise—and I don’t see another disposition with which one could thus surveil the others aside from resentment; and I don’t see where this disposition could be acquired other than by imitating the presence who, rather than beckoning one to come and take, is now insisting that if all can’t partake, none can. The first sign institutes this resenting disposition. Since resentment also imitates some model, the sequence of modifications of imitation from immediate through to iteration, and from imperative to regulation, applies here as well: I resent the guy who looks like he’s looking to take my seat on the bus even though I saw it first; I resent the politician who exploits some gray area in the constitutional order to implement a policy that will undermine freedom; I am angry with myself for cutting some corner in my personal relations or intellectual work, even if no one else will ever know about it; I feel compelled to clarify some conceptual distinction which I have noticed in another thinker—in all these cases, I am resenting with the resentment of the center. And insofar as I resent the barred access to the object by the center itself, even that is the resentment of the center: my desire must be more “justified” (more urgent, more deserved, more intensely felt, etc.) than the others’.

Desire could be in “error,” I suppose (obviously it is of the nature of mimesis that we often choose objects that are unattainable or illusory, that cause us more harm than good, that are dissatisfying once we obtain them, etc.), but only as observed by the resenting subject who can see the delusions of desire as a result of the unfairness of the world, or one’s own lack of luck, or as a deserved result of foolishness or selfishness, etc. In itself, desire is just what it is, the imperative power bestowed upon an object through and in proportion to its possession by some actual or possible normative rival (or rivals). In the end, it’s not all that interesting. (Perhaps unfortunately, desire is even less interesting when it is carefully channeled, properly mediated, and leads to real enjoyment—but who knows, maybe that’s just a Romantic prejudice.) Resentment, on the other hand, can be misplaced and misdirected in all kinds of ways, as measured and judged by other more mature (or sometimes even just different) forms of resentment. It is extraordinarily difficult to distinguish between resentment that is genuinely of the center and resentment that is a mask and tool of desire—especially since, given the imitative nature of resentment, even resentments of the center generate new desires and rivalries that pervert their origin. This is just another way of saying that I am much more interested in the composition of the scene than in the mimetic crisis impelling its emergence.

Not only must the first signifier compose something new, but the other members of the group who successively repeat it must do so as well, and their task may be the more difficult one. The first signifier need not know what he is doing: he aborts his gesture of appropriation, which is to say he stops or hesitates. Those who come after must show that they know what he “meant”—that is, they must construct his gesture as sign: the aborted gesture becomes the gesture of aborted appropriation. The third must somehow even out the discrepancies between the first and the second, and the fourth must strike the average or norm that is emerging, and so on. These emergent humans already had a repertoire of primate gestures (and grunts, and so on)—that entire repertoire must have been available to convey the resentment of the central presence, with each element necessarily put to some use, perhaps the exact opposite of the one it had previously. There is already a preliminary combination, or grammar, but the norm or rule that is coming into being could just as easily be described as a series of mistakes, of the gesture mis-taken over and over, since none could know what their gesture would look like to the others. The constant would be a rough equidistance between the members and between the members as the object; but the variables would be whatever motions each discovered to ensure their fellows that they would maintain those distances—but also step in to insist the others did so as well.

Not all mistakes are iterations, but all iterations look something like mistakes. Iteration involves applying the rule to the infinitesimal: for example, if I’m imitating someone’s style, or following the rules, tacit and overt, constitutive of that style, when I make a tacit rule overt; or apply an overt rule to a portion of the discourse that resists what I take to be the distinctive markers of the style; or turn a style of writing into a style of living—then, I am iterating. Iteration is applying the rule to the unseen boundaries within which the rule operates. Indeed, whether an iteration will work, or take, or turn out to have been a mistake, can only be known after the fact—maybe at an indeterminate distance from the fact. The prerequisite of an iteration is positing the equidistance of all the elements and materials on the scene from each other—that is, no combination is ruled out in advance. This is what Gertrude Stein attempted, first on the level of events, emotions, actions, and so on, in her earlier, more representationalist writings (and through her later, autobiographical ones); and then, in later, more innovative ones, with the linguistic materials themselves. And the second move in the iteration is the presentation of a combination that will serve as a rule, while still keeping the elements and materials in their evenly distributed state.

In this case models can be treated as absolute, as they must be if they are remain models—they are the source of all imperatives and rules. And one could strive to be a model, based upon the productivity of the rules one proposes. But there is no need to destroy such models—they create space rather than monopolizing scarce space. To the extent that the rules, procedures, moves, and so on necessarily produce different results with each user, there is really nothing to attack, or to feel contained by. All we would need to “sacrifice” is the belief that our models are models because they imitate a higher, more real reality. In looking for models to iterate, I can deliberately choose those which seem most alien to my own talents and habits; or I can choose a high cultural model and derive rules for the production of popular cultural object from it, or vice versa; I can choose a model based on its most despised or neglected attributes; I can treat a tragic model comically or a comic model tragically; I can rewrite a text reversing the relative proportions of all of its nouns; the possibilities, needless to say, are inexhaustible, and anyone could do and teach these moves with always surprising, often amusing, and almost invariably instructive results. This is play, but very serious play—such play generates idioms, and the proliferation of idioms is what is most likely to save us today. The resentment of the center would then be directed towards any attempt to make us all—or any two of us, for that matter—derive the same imperatives from the same names.

Classicism is the imperative to refer one’s work to a model; not just any model, but the best model, which represents the heights of human excellence, which is to say a more permanent human reality (human reality, moreover, as embedded in a natural and divine order). Romanticism is the imperative to reject the authority of any particular model, because any model would be finite and therefore arbitrarily close off actual and potential areas of experience and discovery. I would like to inscribe marginalism in the complementary antinomies each position must confront: classicism must impute the imperatives of reality to its models in order to produce its own semiotic authority; while the romantic gesture of overthrowing models must be compulsively repeated, which in turn establishes the most tyrannical of all models. Marginalism finds in the model an imperative instituting the rule one will already have been following, thereby turning the model into a constitutive, inexhaustible, source of rules.

We follow one model rather than another because it directs us toward the acquisition of a more attractive object. This is a bit circular, though, because how else could we come to know objects, and distinguish between their respective attractions, without models? One model replaces another by offering us a model that is more attractive, even on the terms of our previous model—that’s how we know. A healthy relation to models, then, always places the object in the center, so that some criteria for judging the pedagogical relationship can be generated. But if the object in question is finite and indivisible, the mimetic relationship reaches its limits in the mutual desire for possession. So the object in the center must be infinite and indivisible—in which case it can’t be possessed in any stable way and relies upon one’s acceptance as a model by others, that is, upon one being taken as issuing imperatives that give way to a rule. This is the way the “possession” of attributes like “honor,” “goodness,” and “respect” is established.

But the attention to such intangible objects, including the ultimate intangible object, God or, perhaps more precisely, God’s blessing, leads us back to the model again. It is precisely in a civilized order, where the central objects are intangible and beyond the reach of ritualized practices, that models confront us as embodiments of abstract norms. This makes the inversion of the healthy relationship between object and model not complete (there are still plenty, and ever more, material goods out there), but inevitable. In other words, how can I know what it means to be a moral, God-fearing, compassionate, loyal, etc., individual, other than by following very closely the example set by those considered such? And following very closely means not only deriving my actions and attitudes from those I see erected as models, but seeking the approval of those models and the circles that have approved of them. Cultural pedagogy, in that case, involves the reversion of the proper relation between object and model: the models must direct attention from themselves to the intangible, invisible objects underpinning their legitimacy.

This is a complex maneuver, though, because the attention directed toward the model must first of all be used, and the rules emanating from that model reinforced and enforced in very literal ways. I think that one of the attractions of what are essentially enormously popular, millennial-style cults on the Left like Global Warmism and White Guilt is that they satisfy this need for an unproblematic, self-confident pedagogy. They tell you exactly what you have to say on every question, they model the appropriate modes of self-presentation in great detail, they provide a pantheon of heroes, they tell you exactly who the enemy is and how to confront and confound him. Responding to such true believers with the injunction to “think for yourself” is not very effective: alternative modes of thinking are a priori designated as bought and paid for by the oil companies, or mark one as a troglodytic denizen of “far right wing” caves.

A marginalist cultural pedagogy would present the rules founding an idiom. If there is one generalization I can venture regarding today’s “youth,” it is that they are allergic to lectures, in any context. Any insistence that, in order to believe one thing that you say they already have to believe something else you say is met with an iron wall of boredom and suspicion. The exceptions seem to me to be those who see their prospects in succeeding to positions in the dominant forms of victimary pedagogy in the arts, education, politics and media. Needless to say, no privileged or “classical” model of inquiry, creation, or accomplishment, has the slightest chance of surviving beyond very small and protected circles. At the same time, though, I don’t think young people today are particularly “romantic” either—they are very attuned to the demands made upon them and determined to follow the rules imposed, without necessarily “believing” in these demands or rules.

What perhaps can be provided by the pedagogue are minimal rules, practices and spaces that allow for the creation of idioms. Working on the production of such rules and practices directs our attention away from both model and object and toward the sign. The model uses signs to direct attention away from himself and toward a world of objects, but the elaboration of signs at a permanent distance from any particular configuration of those objects can become the center of attention. I don’t think there’s much value today in “dialogue,” either interpersonally or in the more cultural sense as postmodern liberalisms would have it—there is rarely any reason to assume that any two or more of us are really speaking about the same thing. What may be valuable is saying “why don’t you try this?” And this, of course, means you need to have something worth trying.

We can all generate things worth trying, minimal moves that, butterfly-effect like can have unknown reverberations through the world. We are all following and inventing rules, tacitly and explicitly, all the time; we are always following and inventing contradictory sets of rules; and we are always mistaking those rules in ways that we can occasionally notice. Cultural pedagogy authority can be used—it will always have enough capital for this—to present the rules that would account for the legitimacy of that mode of cultural authority. In politics, political entrepreneurs in a possible future in which avenues into public life can evade party filters (or in which parties themselves become different kinds of animals) could present a set of rules, grounded in basic imperatives (which your own experience would quickly teach you), regarding influencing public opinion, deal-making, compromise, the composition of legislation, and also the leveraging of firm principles in various pragmatic situations. In academic settings, in specific disciplinary sites, we can construct minimal rules regarding what counts as inquiry into language, history, biology, etc.

Pedagogy then involves putting students on the path to formulate their own idiosyncratic versions of these rules. For example, in the human sciences we can say that a basic move any scholar needs to be able to make is to take a word from one text or context and use it to describe something in another text or context. That’s a fundamental imperative: we recognize a scholar in the human sciences by the fluency with which they effect such transfers of meaning. Indeed, such work with signs reveals the basic object of the human sciences: the human being as source of signs. In that case, one can simply tell students they need to do that: take a text, and, say, use some word or phrase in that text to describe something happening someplace else in that text. One could multiply such imperatives and rules simply by looking at the kinds of things we do as thinkers: for example, one very common way in which we create new concepts is by placing “the” before an adjective (“the Good”). So, tell students that they have to place “the” before x adjectives in a particular text, and then use the resulting concept to describe something they see in the text, or something they are doing in reading the text. Never mind the results, for a while at least—you will get, obviously, mistakes, clumsiness, barbaric formulations rather than Platonic dialogues. But the mistakes, subjected to inquiry, can become the source of new idioms—what is important is that the invented concepts be expanded, multiplied, intertwined, and applied. As long as texts and ever-mutating rules are placed at the center, and students are obliged to assess and rework one another’s idioms, the things students are learning they can do with language will enable them to see the very odd things the texts we honor in the academy have done with language. (We can perhaps come to see how texts and artifacts “succeed” precisely by wrenching the present constellation of signs out of their habitual slots—something our fluency in such texts and artifacts blinds us to.)

Perhaps the culture as a whole is ready for such practices—the degree of self-reflexivity has so intensified that discussion, even in the most popular media, is increasingly about how something can be taken in one way or another. What are the rules one is following when one seeks fame in a particular manner or area of endeavor; what are the rules that underlie genuine excellence and accomplishment? Any consumer of popular culture can answer the first question in detailed and savvy ways. The second question, of course, is the harder one, but it’s not a fundamentally different one: real, lasting accomplishment is the result of discipline—discipline not just in the sense of managing passions and desires and establishing the habits that allow one to marginalize distractions (resentments that will lose their object tomorrow but can absorb all your energies today), but in the sense of exploring and inventing the rules of the activity and doing so along with others—competitors and collaborators—in unpredictable fields. What are the most basic things political organizers need to do? Reporters? Poets? There are a lot of ways of answering these questions, and each answer will yield different rules and then different idioms. Inventing catchy puns might be just as important, at this point, as crafting complex policy positions—and I don’t think this is a bad thing, as inventing catchy puns can not only be an equally demanding discipline but can do something far more valuable than policy positions, which is create channels of spontaneous exchange.

A marginalist politics begins with the observation that any situation can be reduced to a binary:  do a or b.  Even there are, in principle, many choices, as soon as you inch closer to one the world splits into that or not-that—and you are always inching.  Self-reflection upon any situation reduces itself to such binary—I am this, not that, here, not there, etc.  Similarly, the binary situation immediately confronted is the product of a long series of bifurcations—my choice is now a or b, because previous choices have eliminated c, d, e, and so on.  This binarism derives from the binary on the originary scene:  to continue reaching for the central object  (to pursue the mimetic path of least resistance) or to imitate the newly formed sign and withhold one’s grasp.  Since the right choice was made on the scene, it is impossible for us not to think of ourselves as making the right choice now:  even if I egregiously violate the terms of the scene I am on I will reconstruct another scene upon which no such violation took place—yes, I cheated, but everyone cheats; or, my situation was different than others’; or that was wrong but it wasn’t really who I am, etc.  And if I fully confess my inexcusable violation, I can only do that because I am now on some other scene, whose terms I can represent my choice to confess (rather than further dissimulate) as confirming.  Indeed, I can reconstruct any scene, any time, on the spot, reconfiguring the binary choice, from say, cheating/not cheating to maintaining the harmony of the scene/disrupting the scene by letting my cheating be discovered.  But binary there will always be.

 

Each binary retrojects the series of bifurcations it has emerged out of—if I now determine that effecting change by peaceful means is impossible, I reference and construct a history in which violence has been rejected many times, and earlier choices in which violence didn’t even appear as one of the alternatives, and so the current choice is the distillation of that entire series of resentments (resentment is itself essentially binary—he shouldn’t be there, I should, or someone else more deserving, but first of all him or not-him).  Criteria for choosing one way or another are always embedded in the binary situation, but only become explicit after the fact, once the act has disclosed the scene I am on now. I have “inched” before I realize I have done so.  Leading up to the event, the criteria are tacit—I will feel at a certain point that I can’t go on the old way anymore, but trying to explain why I now, all of a sudden, feel that way, could only lead me to reference some other experience whose roots would be tacit—say, for the first time I noticed how demoralized my fellow citizens seem to be, but what changed among my fellow citizens or in my own attentiveness that led me to notice that?  There is some threshold that has been crossed—from beaten down but not hopeless to thoroughly demoralized—that I detect before I am able to explain how I detected it.  I could, of course, be wrong, in which case I didn’t “really’ detect it—but realizing that I was wrong must also be an event articulated through a binary point wherein I located that threshold elsewhere, which in turn confirms the possibility of such a threshold, or the real threshold which was concealed behind the one I imagine and has now achieved such a threshold of presence as to be revealed to me.  And continuing in my wrongness will simply exemplify that threshold in my own failure to observe it.  There must always be such thresholds—for there to be a scene is for the scene to be capable of collapse into the desires and resentments it has deferred; and for it to contain the resources to transition into a new scene that extends the prevailing sign.  And, of course, noticing a threshold is part of my being on a scene as well—I am drawn along with others pointing to that threshold, or my identification of that threshold is part of my recoil from others, who seem to me unwilling to notice something, even something they and I know not. 

 

The politics that follows from marginalism is the creation of new binary “forks” out of any situation.  On the one hand, of course any course of action produces new “forks” in the road all by itself; on the other hand, though, one can either continually narrow the area in which forkings become possible, or one can widen the area, increasing the visibility of the series of choices embedded in any event.  Even if one chooses violence, schism, or secession, for example, one can fight or sever ties in such a way as preserve conditions for a possible peace and for others to register their own choices in ways that may lead more quickly to a cessation of violence or new associations.  The premium, in other words, is on practicing freedom in such a way as to invite others to do the same; to make the consequences of choices as visible as possible, because this is the best way of placing the full range of available resentments on display, and putting that full range on display is the best way of inviting everyone to propose ways of channeling those resentments in the interests of the center. 

 

Now, we have two questions:  first, how to describe these bifurcations, or choices; second, how to describe the threshold in which we are suspended, infinitesimally, before each one?  My answer is with originary grammar.  The basic structure of the declarative sentence, the topic/comment relationship Gans works with in The Origin of Language, is the record of such a completed choice, or branching off:  the topic, deriving ultimately from a name, represents the object of a demand, or a proposed replacement for such an object, a demand that, through some possible series of concatenations (refusals and counter-demands), could lead to the unraveling of the signs constituting the community; the comment, meanwhile, places the topic beyond reach, at least for the present, embedding it in some reality that resists our imperatives.  So, a choice has been made to defer imperatives and a further choice has been made to defer imperatives in this particular way—as opposed to some other sentence which, presumably, would have been more likely to inflame rather than quell the upsurge in “demand” (perhaps by dangling the topic in front of some part of the audience, rather than removing it from the reach of all).  A discourse, then, is the articulation of a whole series of such choices and, of course, with political documents, especially founding ones, people will argue over every single sentence, every single word and punctuation mark.  The grammar of the sentence, furthermore, iterates the “grammar” of the originary scene, where my choice to imitate the aborted gesture rather than the gesture itself is “predicated” upon everyone else doing the same—in that case, using grammatical terms to structure the scene for us, the one aborting his gesture give us the “topic” and those who imitate him in turn are “commenting.”  Similarly, “understanding” a sentence means knowing how to restore or maintain a proper relation between declaratives and imperatives:  where and how to match the declarative with a symmetrical declarative, where and how to take the declarative as an occasion to reframe the imperative.  So, the relation between a sentence and succeeding sentences is itself one between “topic” and “comment.”

 

Complying, for now, with traditional grammar, we can reduce all sentence types to four:  the declarative, the interrogative, the imperative and the exclamatory.  The exclamatory is what I propose to represent the ostensive on the grammatical level, so the entire sequence from ostensive to declarative can be represented grammatically, and each sentence analyzed as some articulation of all types.  What a beautiful day!  How I love you!  These are the prototypical exclamations, and I think we could usefully annex to the exclamation on one side what would ordinarily be classified as interjections (oh my God!), and on the other side what might be classified as ostensive or deictic references (in declarative sentences)—there it is!  That’s it!  It’s a boy!  The exclamation calls the attention of the interlocutor to some present object and both embodies and proposes some attitude attached to attending to that object.  In that case, “thank you,” “I promise” and other “ostensive” (in the originary sense) expressions can join the category as well.

 

Each kind of sentence has a range of possible responses and extensions built in:  the declarative can lead to other declaratives, it can transition imperceptibly into imperatives (the door is still open… ok, I’ll get it), it can call forth questions and exclamations, and we could analyze any discourse in terms of which possibilities get actualized.  Imperatives get obeyed, more or less precisely, more or less sincerely, or they are refused, with greater or less power; imperatives transition into interrogatives, and we could trace any interrogative back to an imperative that has been prolonged, suspended, and converted into a more or less open field.  The grammar of the exclamation is to evoke a matching exclamation:  Yes!  And I you! So it is…  And, of course, one sentence type can easily stand in for others:  “you’re kidding!” is often an exclamation masked as a declarative, while “are you out of your mind?” is one masked as an interrogative—and in each case the masking is possible because the expressions are impossible if taken literally.  It also seems to me that the exclamation has a special relationship to the first person, the imperative and interrogative (more obviously) to the second person, and the declarative to the third person.  I won’t explore this now, but Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy has an analysis of the differences, which can best be called “grammatical,” between the statements “I love you,” “you love her,” and “she loves him” that transcend the fact that all happen to be, formally, declarative sentences.  In my terms, the disclosure “I love you” functions much more like an exclamation, calling for a matching or symmetrical response confirming the shared reality; “you love her” is as impertinent and intrusive as any unauthorized imperative, and translates easily into “admit it, already”; while “she loves him” is the only properly declarative of the three, with its topic’s presumed distance from either of the interlocutors. 

 

I plan to return to this extremely rich field of speculation, of course, but my point here is that thresholds and bifurcations in the social world can best be registered grammatically.  A while back, after mentioning to a friend of mine (with whom, for reasons that will become evident, I rarely stray into political discussions) my admiration for Frederick Kagan (the main intellectual architect of the so-called “Surge” in Iraq in 2007), he responded in the following manner:  “if you think it’s ok to send kids to war while you stay safe.”  Now, the argument here, such as it is, doesn’t interest me much—it’s the standard “chicken-hawk” accusation (although, incidentally, the infelicity of so many of the Left’s insults—from “chicken hawk,” which is of course an actual bird that eats chickens, not a chicken that pretends to be a hawk; to the idiotic title of Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11”—“9/11,” needless to say, can’t be a temperature, and the reference to a book on book burning is oddly connected to a political crisis which had little to do with censorship, etc.; to the current slur, “teabagger,” which “plays” with remarkable clumsiness on “tea party,” while for indiscernible reasons associating those protestors with practitioners of an obscure sexual, usually homosexual, I have heard, practice—would be fascinating subject to study:  in other words, what does it say that the Left can’t really work with language, that it seems to rely on a deeply embedded system of allusions that couldn’t really be articulated explicitly if they tried?).  What do we make of the grammar, though, which I take to be very typical?  On the one hand, it could be a subordinate clause, the with main “I could see admiring him..” elided, but that doesn’t really work since no one actually contemplating such admiration would phrase its precondition in this way; you could say that the subordinate clause comments ironically on the main one, but the accusation is too thick, leaden and literalistic to qualify as “ironic.”  The expression strikes me, rather, as an exclamation, but one that can’t present itself as one to an interlocutor who won’t “match” it (to a fellow leftist it would be easy enough to just say something like “sending more kids off to get killed!” at the mention of Kagan’s name).  Which is to say that it’s a founding exclamation that can’t really take on public, “declarative” form.  Nor can it lead to any imperative:  “what a beautiful day!” leads naturally into “let’s go out and enjoy it!” or “get out and play!”; “sending kids off to die!” can only lead to an imperative like “let’s stop it!,” but to whom is that imperative addressed, outside of a quasi-ritualized sphere in which it is associated with constant affirmations, dedications, oaths, etc., to “do something”?  So, in the masking and grammatical isolation of this particular phrase, its self-cornering, we can identify the shape and position of a corresponding configuration of resentments.  Which is not to say (obviously!) that such resentments, expressed in such mangled grammatical forms, can’t be highly successful politically—that too would be subject to grammatical analysis.  And so would, or could, any counter-analysis to my own.  I think such an approach is much more promising than either “logical,” “rhetorical,” or “ideological” modes of analysis.

 

So, at the point of any bifurcation stands an exclamation, expressing a revelation of some new reality and its attendant possibilities; then comes the imperative, determining which path to take; followed by the inflection of the imperative into interrogatives, probing the various by-ways of the path; and by the time the declarative comes along, the choice has already been made and the speaker is in the process of inscribing that choice in reality.  Of course, how the choice gets inscribed in reality is extremely important—indeed, it is an intrinsic element of reality itself and lays the groundwork for upcoming bifurcations.  I would even say that the declarative sentence essentially articulates a series of exclamations and imperatives, presents them after the event of their interference in reality, and thereby packages, preserves and re-circulates what would otherwise have been lost in the event itself.  When we argue about a text, we are arguing about what it is asking us to wonder at and what it is telling us to do.

 

“White guilt is the guilt of the unmarked toward the marked.”  I confess that there is a lot in this definition of Gans’s that I haven’t sufficiently attended to in my own thinking on White Guilt—in particular, the notion of being either marked or unmarked, and the relation between the two.  To be marked is to be identified as a potential victim, as someone who could be violated with impunity or whose violation may even be the subject of an imperative.  In principle, one could be marked either from “above” or from “below”—indeed, if scapegoating originally targeted the “Big Man,” then marking was originally a source of privileges as well as victimage, presumably in some equilibrium. How, then, did victimage become exclusively associated with the “lower orders,” even though we still scapegoat our Big Men and Women (celebrities, political and business leaders) all the time?  I think the answer lies in the way we have managed to defer scapegoating, and make it less deadly when it occurs, in the modern world.  Rather than ritual rules for marking scapegoats, we have devised juridical, administrative and medical procedures for determining who is to be marked.  On the one hand, then, the “higher” orders are far better able to avail themselves of these processes of deferral, which in turn tend to add stigma to the lower orders, who are likely to look “guilty,” “sick,” or “unauthorized” in all kinds of ways.  On the other hand, these procedures make the powerful more predictable and therefore less frightening (indeed, rhetorical attacks on the powerful are celebrated, without necessarily having much effect), while the powerless or excluded, attended to anxiously in all kinds of ways by our institutions, appear even more mysterious and potentially disruptive.

 

The scapegoating of the powerless, then, was a result of the modern attempt to unmark everyone—an attempt which paradoxically made the resulting marks all the more indelible.  It’s probably a lot harder to resist being marked with “a genetic and environmental propensity to criminal behavior” then the charge of poisoning wells.  At least one could disprove the latter—who, though, could so remake the “science” involved in the former as to invalidate the label?  The guilt towards the marked thus reflects the realization that any of us could be marked, and that this modern form of deferral could engulf modern society in more hideous forms of violence than we have known.  The form taken by this guilt is, interestingly, not to continue the thankless and hopeless task of a general unmarking (perhaps we should use the term “bleaching” to describe the goal of a “color-blind” society); rather, it is to seek to establish an orthodox, ritualized system of marking, in which markers of exclusion are both tabooed and assiduously collected and in turn reversed into markers of privilege—the easily parodied and inevitably rough attempts to arrive at a hierarchy of victimage is the result.  The consequent scapegoating of the gift of firstness which, in a sense, restores the old scapegoating of the powerful to its originary position, reflects the realization that the capacity for freedom, for starting over, continually threatens to undo what has become a system of insurance (chock-full of mandates, naturally), of reciprocal indemnification from risk:  we have almost, in the minds of those self-appointed to construct the rituals of White Guilt, arrived at a new social contract everyone could sign onto (the unmarked are ready to follow the new rules of marking and the marked are willing to accept the payment of victimary blackmail in exchange for a relief from their infinite demands), and only the permanence of the capacity for freedom and responsibility threatens to undermine all that labor.

 

The only solution is to mark everyone, over and over again.  Not by some kind of essential characteristic (race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc.) but by their idioms.  Jean-Francois Lyotard’s definition of the differend as a claim or contention expressed in the idiom of only one of the interlocutors is of great value to us today.  Lyotard yoked this notion to victimary imperatives, but he also knew that it exceeded such easily formulated asymmetries.  Idioms are what resist translation—they require that you enter the grammar of another, the characteristic way in which they articulate exclamations, imperatives, interrogatives and declaratives.  But the mistranslations of idioms are just as interesting, and increasingly common in a world made up of niche markets that overlap one another in thousands of ways.  “You hit that one out of the park!” is perfectly intelligible to anyone familiar with baseball; I can barely imagine what it would sound like to someone who isn’t, or how it would get iterated further and further away from its point of origin.  Idiomatic marking would both enter others’ idioms and mistranslate, or inflect, or, simply, mistake them—make the explicit the imperative implicit in someone’s declarative (by obeying or disobeying it), supply the exclamation missing in someone’s imperative, or the line of questioning that might have led from the embrace of an imperative to its declarative, doxic, forms (and do so by exclaiming, by questioning), render a demand in the declarative form of its fulfillment, etc.    Everybody is vulnerable in this way, but not too vulnerable, and in ways that are not easily predictable or controlled; idiomatic marking would also allow for new forms of generosity, as idioms can just as easily be interpreted “up” as “down.” 

 

The problem with this, as other radical proposals, is who wants to go first?  On the one hand, what I am describing already happens all the time—it’s a large part of the way in which friends and family relate to each other:  teasing one another about each one’s idiosyncrasies, but in such a way as to make those idiosyncrasies a source of love as well as resentment.  But it rarely happens outside of such safe spaces and, indeed, would have to take on very different forms in public life.  It seems to me that the rise of the “Tea Party” movement and Sarah Palin will give us a chance to see what that might look like—a commentary which I recently read (one hostile to Palin’s influence with the Republican Party) said (I’m quoting from memory) that the Republicans “need someone familiar with all the B.S. of politics, which Palin speaks like a tourist carrying around a phrase book.”  This gets both sides of the equation right:  contemporary political discourse is all “B.S.”—does anyone really believe that phrases like “he’s going to move to the center, pick up some moderates, and then shore up his base in time for the next election” mean anything anymore?  And Palin does, indeed, try to speak it, with an intensified sincerity that exposes it as a patchwork of empty phrases, while at the same time generating the elements of a new idiom.  And as much as anything else, Obama’s unspeakably boring (except, I imagine, to listeners of NPR) fluency in a particular set of “progressive” commonplaces is likely to sink his Presidency.

 

There is a space here for some rigor as well, though.  For those so interested, I would suggest the methods of the Oulipo literary group, the possible applications of which to public life have been so far unexplored (to my knowledge)—although there is the amusing homophonic bumper sticker, “Visualize Whirled Peas,” and perhaps others I’m forgetting.  I would love to see the results of the application of the N+7 method to one of Obama’s speeches—maybe I’ll do it myself.  Harry Mathews, the only American member of the group, has invented what he calls “perverbs”—statements created by attaching the second part of a proverb or maxim to the first part of another one.  So, for example, from the hybridization of “Too many cooks spoil the broth” and “Let the dead bury their dead,” we get “Too many cooks bury their dead.”  Mathews then writes a little story that makes sense of the new phrase, which leads to some hilarious results (how could we get from there being too many cooks to those cooks burying someone’s—the cook’s own?—dead, etc.?) but also suggests an excellent way to puncture and disable clichés and, in the process, transform them into the material for new idioms.  The Oulipo methods elevate form and rules over substance and thereby make it easy to see how much of “substance” is simply sedimented forms and rules.

 

Just for fun, let’s try something with this little snippet of President Obama’s speech to Congress on health care, given in September:

 

Well, the time for bickering is over. The time for games has passed. (Applause.) Now is the season for action. Now is when we must bring the best ideas of both parties together, and show the American people that we can still do what we were sent here to do. Now is the time to deliver on health care. Now is the time to deliver on health care.

 

I propose that we borrow another of Mathews’s ideas, his “Algorithm,” in which (I’m simplifying enormously) a particular word or phrase in each sentence is moved down to replace the word in that position in the next sentence.  In these remarks of Obama, the key word or phrase in each sentence seems to me to be the objects of auxiliary verbs and prepositions:  “bickering,” “games,” “action,” “bring,” “do,” and “deliver”—that’s where the real political distinctions are made.  So, let’s give it a try, making the necessary adjustments for grammatical correctness:

 

Well, the time for delivering is over.  The time for bickering has passed.  Now is the season for games.  Now is when we must act the best ideas of both parties and show the American people that we can still bring what we were sent here to bring.  Now is the time to do health care.  Now is the time to do health care. 

 

I will just say that this idiomatic marking seems to me truer than the original:  the time for delivering is certainly over; leaving the “bickering” sandwiched between the first and third sentences bring outs better what is menacing in that assertion; is it ever the season for games!; “acting” the best ideas is certainly as close as they are coming to any ideas; what, indeed, have they been sent to “bring,” and to whom? (and by now there are plenty of new idiomatic, in particular taunting and boasting, uses of “bring,” like “bring your best game”); and, who can deny they are “doing health care,” with all the rich idiomatic implications, often threatening, of “do”?   

 

Idiomatic markings are perfect for a de-centralized popular culture, and for an intelligent one.  A lot of blows will be struck, but very few of them deadly—Obama will survive even much more artfully done and politically biting algorithmic permutations of his discourse than the one I have produced.  But some of these permutations will turn out to be very memorable, even if we could never predict which ones in advance.  And what we might come to share, what might be a “game-changer,” what might “transcend partisanship” (or “game partisanship” and “transcend change”) is our participation is remaking and rejuvenating our common linguistic material.

All exchanges end symmetrically, but, once they are no longer bound by ritual, they must begin asymmetrically.  If the forms of the hunt are prescribed, along with the manner of distribution following the kill, or if the exchange of gifts is inscribed in tradition, then the danger of asymmetry is eliminated.  But when something that didn’t exist previously is brought into the marketplace, a breach in the existing division of labor is created:  things that had value before will have different values now and new values will be created; even more, new desires will be created.  Nobody desired a car before they existed, nobody desires now whatever will be the hottest product in 2025, and no one who is now at work creating that product is going to do so if he or she is concerned with meeting existing desires.  Of course, the one who brings the new product to market can’t know whether it will, in fact, create the corresponding desire nor, therefore, whether the breach in the division of labor has indeed been effected—that too is part of the asymmetry, but also the basis for converting the asymmetry into a new symmetry, wherein producer and consumer recognize each other.  Entrepreneurship is a mode of firstness.

According to the Austrian school of economics founded by Ludwig von Mises, the creation of money by the state (“fiat money”) benefits those who get it first, while disadvantaging those who receive it later on down the line.  This seems to me a very important insight. Obviously, the people who get the money first are the ones the government gives it to, very much like those first in on a Ponzi scheme, who get their money back and can therefore testify to the bona fides of the system to later entrants.  The same would hold true for any government intervention in the economy that benefits, intentionally or not, some players over others—for example, an environmental regulation that requires a conversion from a cheaper to a more expensive technology and thereby puts the smaller businessman out of business.  The government, in such a case, doesn’t exactly give money, but it channels money in a particular direction and, like in the cases where money is given directly, those who are able to make the conversion first have the advantage—not only are they, for a certain period, the only players, but, as partners with the government in the new regulatory regime, they can use their expertise, their role in stabilizing the market and their ability to mobilize external interests to help shape future regulation.  Such market interventions lead to misallocations of capital, but it is primarily the later entrants who will notice that, especially since regulation creates a captive market the limits of which will only be revealed later on.

The introduction of fiat money and regulatory regimes are responses to the asymmetry of exchange, felt above all in the disruptions of the existing social division of labor.  These responses are modes of secondness, aimed at restoring symmetry by drawing upon the resentments neglected by the primary entrepreneurial gesture. They are not the only possible forms of secondness—the establishment of contractual regimes and legislation aimed at interpreting contractual language and guiding judicial traditions can even out the scales when resentments start to threaten social order.  Either way, though, this secondness must itself be considered an economic fact, and any economic “laws” would have to include these secondary operations.  Insofar as money is the result of a form of deferral—a certain commodity, which originally has other uses, is set aside to serve as a means of exchange, and must therefore be removed from industrial use—and itself makes deferral possible (one accumulates money rather than consuming something now and hence gambles on or, if one like, displays faith in, the future), we could see money as the medium within which these contending tendencies take on a definite shape.  When I save or invest money, I am positioning myself within the evolving social division of labor; but I am also betting on the extent to which the government, and the resentments it channels and inflames, will use money for more immediate deferral purposes.  We can think about this on the model of “matching funds,” the principle grant-giving agencies often use to provide incentives to recipients to raise as much resources independently as possible.  When I invest, I can anticipate “matching funds” in the form of the investments and future consumption of others; or I can anticipate “matching funds” in the form of future devaluations which will lessen or eliminate my obligations.  We should be able to identify the limits within which the proportions of these respective expectations fluctuate within a given political economic regime, and account for the actions of economic agents, and the probable consequences of those actions, accordingly. 

We also have thirdness, though, the totality of dispositions that allow for the welcoming, circulation and modification of the transformations introduced by the entrepreneur.  All the forms taken by everyday resentments and desires comprise thirdness, and originary economic thinking should seek to put some order into this area as well. I would suggest three categories of thirdness:  common sense, habit, and idiosyncrasy.  Common sense is the ongoing checks and balances of immediate resentments, issuing in maxims of human nature or mimetic regularity.  Common sense leads us to establish some balance between spending and saving, short term and long term expenditure, desire and need, and so on.  Habits are far more compelling:  they result from self-issued imperatives aimed at compensating for some absence which end up comprising the tacit dimension of presence.  Habits are sustaining, but also virulent and automatic—habits, like Freud’s Id, have no reason to explain or justify themselves, or to attend to any reality.  Habits account for obstinacy and a strong sense of a continuous self; but they are also the source of addictions and fantasies.  Habits get installed through an instantaneous feeling of saturation associated with some experience, and are sustained through the possibility of repeating that feeling, recalling it on demand, and for that purpose obliviousness to the outside world (and ultimately even to the habit itself) is warranted.  The question to ask about habits is whether they are shaped so as to benefit from intersections with the habits of others:  if no, then habits are a source of dysfunction; if yes, habits invigorate and inflect common sense so as to produce a healthy idiosyncrasy—one’s own way of piecing an ultimately shared reality together.

There is no reason for originary economists to abstain from passing judgment on the various forms of thirdness.  I don’t see how one can deny that addictions to drugs, gambling and pornography are harmful to the economy in the long run, even if from a strictly “economic” perspective those expenditures (assuming the legalization of drugs, at least) are no different from money spent on vacations to the beach, bicycles, flat screen TVs, etc.  Addictions paralyze common sense by creating a fantasy world in which everything will turn around soon if one can just get that next fix.  At the same time there are lesser addictions, or related modes of euphoria that are better called “enthusiasms,” that can be highly productive:  we speak about political “junkies” who help keep the various resentments visible, “workaholics,” sports fans (“fanatics”), and so on.  The difference is that one wants to spread enthusiasms to others and can do so in the normal world, while addictions close one up in private nightmares.

If the “law of diminishing returns” is not the agricultural “law” that Malthus perhaps assumed, we can certainly recoup it as a law of mimesis, and therefore an economic law as well.  Models get exhausted after a while, and we could probably in most cases trace a pretty predictable path from initial responses, such as astonishment, to a new model, to uncritical emulation, to attempts at reproduction, vulgarization, and all the way to parody and disgust.  This is certainly the case for modifications in the social division of labor, which must, it seems to me, inevitably lead to “crises of overproduction”—how can one discover that the public is saturated with jeeps, or new homes, or teen vampire movies without making too many of them and seeing them go unpurchased?  Contrary to the Marxist account, though, if left to run their course, there is no need for such crises to be generalized.  But until the model is exhausted there is little choice but to act as if it is inexhaustible, and it probably seems more inexhaustible than ever precisely at the moment of exhaustion, when everyone is rushing to squeeze the last bit of juice out of it. And nowhere is this more true than in the financial sector, where it has become especially difficult to distinguish genuine innovations in enhancing the circulation of money and the efficiency of its allocation from ways of more efficiently implicating the government in matching the funds one has advanced.  GM at least knows that somewhere along the line they need to sell cars; but can’t Goldman Sachs focus its attention upon positioning itself favorably for the next influx of fiat money into the economy?  And, finally, the acceleration of the law of diminishing terms in the financial sector of the political economy of the welfare/regulatory state feeds upon and encourages addictions lower down the food chain, as otherwise normal people get lost in fantasies of acquiring fantastic wealth merely by mortgaging themselves up to the hilt in a series of homes they will never live in.

It seems to me we can trace property back to two separate sources, division and conquest.  The first is more originary—there must already be an equal division on the originary scene of the common object.  I don’t mean that everyone gets an equal piece—I mean that everyone gets enough so that their resentments and desires don’t override the peaceful settlement, and each one calculates that the chances of getting yet a little bit more at the expense of one’s neighbor are less than the chances that the attempt will result in the neighbor getting a bit more at one’s own expense—and that’s all equality can ever really mean, anyway.  And we always see this happening in any situation where people must live and cooperate together—people who share the same office at work, members of the same family, outfielders on a baseball team, riders in a jammed subway car, etc., all carve out a kind of “property” regime for themselves, a regime that would ultimately lead to formalized separation into parcels and the possibility of exchange.  But from very early on the possibility of simply taking property from weaker parties—individuals and groups—must have presented itself, and the necessary adjustments in the ruling signs and rituals rather easily made.  And with the “Big Man” model of social organization, property as conquest and expropriation is explicitly sacralized as the foundation of culture.  I think that these more egalitarian and hierarchical modes of property will always contend with each other in civilized societies, and one can’t simply privilege the egalitarian version:  when a new corporation comes to a small town and buys up a company that employs much of the population and goes on to lay half of them off in the name of modernization, it looks a lot like conquest and devastation, but it may be absolutely necessary and ultimately the right thing even for the town itself.  But the people of the town might also most effectively see to their own future by fighting against attempts by their local or state government to help the predatory corporation along—such a fight would display cognizance of the consequences of economic decline (the setting in of all kinds of addictions) and in doing so help to defer those consequences, even if they lose the immediate battle.

So, originary political economy can help us to distinguish addictions from enthusiasms; the firstness of entrepreneurial initiative from the anti-firstness of fiat money and granting through regulation property rights in the existing social division of labor; the exhaustion of an economic model from its illusory inexhaustibility; the spontaneous cooperation undergirding property rights from the right of conquest—and, in this case, we can acknowledge that the latter will ultimately depend upon the former, since even the most arrogant conqueror must depend on his officers and enlisted personnel to divide and share duties and rewards, and even upon the conquered to cooperate in the sustaining of life.  Politically, this would involve trying to restrict governmental activity to providing rules for ongoing interactions; rules that the participants in those interactions would recognize as representations of evolved shared habits; and rules directed toward places where the “grey areas” and ambiguities inevitable in existing spontaneously evolved habits have created contentions that at least the most significant players realize can’t be settled internally.  Perhaps a helpful formulation would go as follows:  what, as an elected official, are you doing to make yourself less necessary to the transactions comprising the social order?  Or:  what are you doing that would make you replaceable by pretty much anyone, or at least any normal idiosyncratic, in whom enthusiasms crowd out addictions and are tempered by common sense, and who can refrain from treating public office as a feudal privilege?  These kinds of questions would ultimately lead to an argument for term limits, for elected officials and bureaucrats alike—this is perhaps the most egregious broken promise of the “revolutionary” Republican “class” of 1994, and perhaps a new class of Republicans can rise to power by reaffirming that promise and then either hold power or make it irrelevant whether they do or not by keeping it.  We might learn to think differently about laws and reforms if we had to tailor them to a regular rotation of public officials, who would therefore tend to be more normal people:  normal people who might have more incoherent views at the margin, who might make more mistakes and be more easily taken in by well prepared lobbyists, but who would also be much less likely to vote for 1,900 page long bills and therefore may be less tempting prey for those same lobbyists.