Anthropoetics

Author: staceymeeker

  • The Origin of Language II: Scientific Perspectives

    As everyone who studies the subject knows, the origin of language was banished from the arena of scientific debate by the French Academy of Sciences in 1866. When I published The Origin of Language in 1981, there were still only a handful of works on the subject. Today there are dozens of books and thousands of articles. The Language Origins Society or LOS will hold its fifteenth annual meeting this year. Language origin study has become an interdisciplinary subfield of the human sciences.

    There are other examples of enduring interdisciplinary specialties. But because the origin of language is a special subject, its colonization by the social and biological sciences holds a special significance. As the late Jan Wind, a founder of LOS, affirmed a few years ago, “The question [of the origin of language] had until recently mainly been tackled by students of the humanities, unfortunately without much progress. Only during the last few decades some progress has been achieved, mainly as a result of the sciences having contributed their share” (Language in the Würm Glaciation, ed. Udo Figge; Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1995, p. 183). The withdrawal of language origin from the purview of humanistic thinking follows a long line of similar withdrawals, of which the most notable occurred in the Renaissance when sunspots became visible in Galileo‘s telescope. But whereas, “anthropic principle” or not, the line between cosmology and anthropology is easy to draw, that between humanistic and scientific anthropology is the archetype of all untraceable boundaries. Whatever the existence of the human mind might be able to tell us about cosmology, to treat the cosmos as the product of a human-like “will” is not the way to find out about it. Humanity itself being part of the cosmos, the “enlightened” argument arises that anthropomorphic explanations even of human phenomena are inappropriate. Just as the Genesis creation stories cannot help astronomers to explain the birth of the solar system, so, this line of reasoning goes, humanistic speculations on the origin and essence of the human are of no use to serious students of the subject.

    The prevailing scientific view is that language is an “instinct” (Steven Pinker), an involuntary mechanism like walking (Derek Bickerton) that evolved in the same manner as all other such mechanisms. Our eye or our spleen is a simple product of biological evolution; to believe our language “organ” is any different is a relic of cultural anthropomorphism on a par with believing that the universe was created in six days. Humanists who concoct originary hypotheses are a latter-day version of the theologians who sought to deduce the functioning of everything in the universe from theological first principles.

    As for why the overwhelming majority of the language users throughout history and even today have not been isolated individuals for whom language-based thought serves primarily to rehearse practical activities but members of communities whose most intense experiences of speech, as well as of other forms of representation, take place in the context of collective religious rites, the question always remains unanswered, even though the proofs that a given prehistoric variety of Homo possesses language are always provided by ritual-related materials such as burial goods or cave paintings. One sometimes finds references to religion: for example, “[Religions] give us a sense that all is not completely beyond our frail control, that via prayer and ritual we have recourse to mechanisms that will allow us to ensure that life will proceed in a tolerably benign way” (Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language; Harvard, 1996, p. 103). But no one bothers to explain why, when language appears, these reassuring mechanisms always come with it. Presumably the problem has been, if not solved, then laid to rest long ago; there is a curious unstated indulgence of nineteenth-century explanations of religion among scientists who would never dream of citing someone like Max Müller as an authority on the origin of language. Religion is the Achilles’ heel of positive anthropology, not because true believers cannot accept this anthropology, but because this anthropology cannot explain the existence of true believers.

    Derek Bickerton’s Language and Human Behavior (Washington, 1995), originally a series of lectures given at the University of Washington in 1992, is perhaps the most coherent and thoughtful synthesis of scientific thought on the origin, evolution, and functioning of human language. Bickerton is one of few who understand that (1) whatever the neurological status of language today, it cannot have emerged as a gradual adaptation of prehuman signal systems but constitutes a radical new development; and (2) language cannot be explained as a superior tool of cognition generated by our steadily increasing intelligence–rather, this intelligence is a product of human language. Hence Bickerton recognizes that the emergence of language in what he calls the “magic moment” poses a problem, one for which he has no very likely solution. His hypothesis that language first arose as a means for “exchange of information about food sources” (p. 56) is no more plausible than any other gradualist-utilitarian hypothesis of origin, and solves no better than they the conundrum that he himself describes so clearly: “[F]ew have thought about much about the most crucial features of the magic moment: how the hearers knew that it was a meaningful utterance and knew how to respond appropriately” (p. 54).

    Where Bickerton goes wrong is in his refusal to view language as primarily a means of communication although its birth, as we see, can only be imagined in a communicative context. Language is indeed a system of representation, but the locus of representation is not in the first place within the individual but among the members of the linguistic community. The only plausible answer to the question of how one could begin to speak without potential hearers—a question that those who explain language as a product of genetic mutation find particularly delicate—is supplied by the originary hypothesis. The generation of the “vertical” world of signs from the “horizontal” world of appetitive relations is only conceivable in a collective, scenic context.

    (Soit dit en passant, I also differ with Bickerton’s strict dichotomy between weakly syntactic “protolanguage” and true Chomskian language–a “Rubicon” whose crossing he goes so far as to explain as the result of a “single [genetic] mutation” (Language and Species [Chicago, 1990], p. 190)! On this point, I find far more plausible the gestural explanation of the origin and evolution of syntax offered by Armstrong, Stokoe, and Wilcox in Gesture and the Nature of Language (Cambridge, 1995). As I pointed out in Chronicle 166–following Philip Lieberman in Eve Spoke (Norton, 1998)–the virtual absence of progress in the Oldowan and Acheulian stone tool industries need not reflect, as Bickerton seems to think, a qualitatively lower level of language competence; my hypothesis is that language was reserved for sacred rather than “profane” everyday activities.)

    Professional linguists like Bickerton are rightly suspicious of “cultural” theories of the origin of language whose airy phrases float far above the subject. But GA is not a “cultural” theory any more than it is a theory of natural science. Originary thinking is irreducible to the subject-object dichotomy of classical metaphysics, either in its positive mode as the basis of the natural and human sciences or in its paradoxical mode as the unthinkable foundation of cultural self-analysis; it offers an explanation for the emergence of both.

    The fact that communication can take place without representation does not imply that representation is born independently of communication. The point is to explain why non-representational communication became insufficient and why representational communication offered a solution. But this cannot be done if human language is conceived as the autonomous activity of biologically independent individuals. To claim that the human is a communal reality and that the meaning of a word does not exist within the individual brain but in the context of a linguistic community does not imply that language emerges from a mystical entity like the “collective unconscious,” nor that a hypostatized Language is the real agent of our speech. No doubt, whether or not it is useful to speak of a “language organ,” a “language instinct,” or a “Language Acquisition Device,” the individual user of language must learn to process both incoming and outgoing utterances on his own. But the origin of this operation, and its most urgent task, cannot be understood in terms of the Subject-Object relationship of the individual to his environment, or even in terms of the communication among subjects concerning this environment. It is only comprehensible as a means of mediation of the mimetic desire of the subjects themselves, an instrument of “the deferral of violence through representation.” Only thus, in empirical terms, can we explain the common birth of language and the sacred.

    Why do social scientists react with such hostility to the hypothesis that language originates as a means of deferring intrahuman violence rather than as a means of facilitating hunting, scavenging, or tool-making? The simplest answer is that improving the interface between the species and its environment is the typical biological enhancement of reproductive fitness, whereas preventing its self-destruction is not. Other animals have communication systems that operate to reduce intraspecific violence (e.g., submission and mating rituals), but these are always dealt with separately from the ostensibly more language-like signal systems that provide information about the environment. It seems disproportionate that so rich and complex a tool of communication as human language could derive from a mere conflict-avoidance mechanism. In any case, the specific occasion for our “stumbling” onto language is the least preoccupying of the problems raised by language origin, since it gives so little insight into the complexities of syntax, and of the body and brain that generate it, on which the energies of the paleolinguistic community are focused. That it might provide a special insight into the nature of human society is dismissed as an irrelevancy.

    In The Origin of Language, I proposed a nascent dichotomy in originary language between the “formal” and the “institutional,” between language proper and ritual, or simply “culture.” This dichotomy eerily anticipates the functional division between students of language and students of culture, between linguists and their allies in physical anthropology, neurophysiology, psychology, primatology on the one hand and humanists and cultural anthropologists on the other. The search for the origin of language along the two branches of this dichotomy leads away from the locus of their original unity. As the second group turns away from the problem, declaring that in principle it has no solution, the first studies language in isolation from human culture as if it were a biological organ rather than an instrument of reciprocal communication.

    Bickerton explains, I think quite cogently, the origin of human self-consciousness by the emergence, as the result of language, of areas in the brain that can be detached from the immediate task at hand to engage in “off-line” reflection on the “on-line” processes going on in other areas. The language user can reflect on his own “instinctive” activity; the human plans how to catch tomorrow the mammoth that eluded him yesterday while the cat, or even the chimpanzee, thinks only about the rat it is chasing. But this freedom conferred on the human brain by language is not, as it is described, that of isolated individuals. Language and thought can be acquired only through mimetic interaction with others, with all the difficulties and dangers it occasions. There are few more convincing demonstrations of the need for originary thinking than the fact that the finest minds investigating the origin of language within the tradition of empirical science find themselves limited to such impoverished and unrealistic visions of humanity’s mental landscape.

     

     

  • Back to the Origin of Language

    It is both easy and hard to believe that my first book of Generative Anthropology was written over twenty years ago, before the term itself was invented: The Origin of Language (TOOL), published by UC Press in 1981, was written mostly in 1978. Now I have returned to the origin of language, which has been on the back burner since that time. Much has been written on the subject since then, virtually none of which takes TOOL’s analyses, let alone its general perspective, into account. The reason is clear: writers on the origin of language are linguists, paleontologists, primatologists, sometimes psychologists and philosophers, and I am none of these things, nor did I make an effort in TOOL to speak a language that any of these groups could recognize as relevant to their concerns. This time I intend to deal explicitly and at length with competing arguments and relevant data. The passage of years makes all the more urgent my attempt to bridge the gap between the humanities and the social sciences by demonstrating the power of the paradoxical thinking characteristic of the former in the liminal domain of language origin so important to the latter.

    The point of the originary hypothesis is not to present a particular scenario for the origin of language, but to propose the necessity of a public scene of origin, of an event that originates the function of human language to memorialize events. The origin of language is also the origin of religion, art, in a word, “culture,” and gradualist hypotheses or those that begin from private, local communications have even less plausibility in explaining the public scene of human culture than that of language.

    There is a constitutive difference between humanistic and social science thinking, one that in “all other” cases corresponds logically to a difference in subject matter, but that comes to a head on the particular subject of the origin of language. Social science thinking is empirical; it must formulate concrete hypotheses that facts can falsify. Humanistic thinking, on the contrary, is concerned in the first place with the production of ethically meaningful discourse; this is true whether one is analyzing a poem or defining “the human” in originary terms. Such thinking resists immediate falsifiability by data because its function is to provide a reasonably stable basis for human interaction. Such, for example, are the texts of revealed religion, the chief locus of humanistic thinking throughout the centuries. An example of an intermediate form of thought is political theory, which purports to advise us on the best system of social organization. Such thinking is not falsifiable in the Popperian sense since it seeks to impose an order, not simply to observe one. Yet political theories are falsifiable by human behavior in the long term, as most people today consider “socialism” to have been.

    To the extent that the science of human origin is concerned with concrete data, its hypotheses are drastically modified from year to year as new fossils and artifacts are discovered. This is as it should be in the empirical domain. But our general understanding of the human cannot simply wait until all the facts are in; the sparse prehistoric data amount to little weighed against all we have learned from human history. That the paradoxical structure of mimesis provides the basis of human culture is revealed throughout this history, and if our contemporaries have been loath to recognize it, their reluctance is unlikely to be greatly affected by the results of further paleontological research.

    But although Generative Anthropology is primarily concerned with the ethical consequences of the originary hypothesis per se rather than with any version of its “minimal” realization, if we wish GA’s scenario of the origin of language to be taken as something other than an imaginary atemporal model like the “social contract” or John Rawls’s “original position,” we must be willing to situate it, however tentatively, in the context of the current understanding of human and linguistic prehistory.

    This poses to originary thinking (at least) the following empirical questions:

    1. At what stage of the evolution of the genus Homo did language arise?
    2. What kind of communication system corresponded to the tool-making of Homo erectus, neanderthalensis, and early sapiens? Is it useful to postulate lower levels of human language prior to the origin of “modern” humanity?
    3. Since prehumans, on the model of contemporary apes and (especially) monkeys, must have had a considerable vocabulary of signals, how if at all was this material integrated into the sign-system of language proper?
    4. By what mechanism did the originary sign give birth to a full-fledged phonetic system characterized by “double articulation” of morphemes and phonemes?

    On the basis of my research so far, here are some preliminary answers to these questions:

    1. At what stage of the evolution of the genus Homo did language arise?

    Although I have always avoided pronouncing on this question in my books, in Chronicle No. 52 (July 27, 1996), I suggested that the origin coincided with the cultural “take-off” that began around 35-50 TYA (thousand years ago). I no longer consider this a minimal hypothesis. Studies of the human vocal tract (see Philip Lieberman, Eve Spoke; Norton, 1998) would seem to indicate that the earliest modern humans of 100-150 TYA were already “designed” for speech, with the lowered larynx and extended pharynx of today. The selection of these features is difficult to explain in the absence of true human language. More fundamentally, the minimal event of the origin of language should not be presented as the flowering of a complete human culture, but as its first moment, one that would have led to the selection for the vocal traits of modern humans. Such an event must therefore have occurred at some time before 150 or 200 TYA.

    In my earlier thinking on this subject, I was influenced by the line of thought exemplified by William Noble & Iain Davidson in Human Evolution, Language and Mind (Cambridge, 1996), who note the lack before about 50 TYA of creativity and planning of the sort that would suggest the presence of language. But further reflection shows that this argument, based on the cognitive function of language, should be rejected as metaphysical. For GA, language is in the first place a means not of knowing the world but of deferring intrahuman violence. What in TOOL I called the “formal” system of language and the “institutional” system of ritual were no doubt for a long time barely distinguishable; the fossil record (ritual burials date back at least 100,000 years) corroborates GA’s hypothesis by suggesting that some degree of religious culture existed among even the earliest users of language. Early language conceived as possessing an exclusively ritual or “religious” function could well have coexisted with the highly stable technologies of the Paleolithic.

    This historical minimalism only increases the cognitive impact of the originary hypothesis. All the literature on the origin of language begs the question of its origin by presenting it as advantageous for survival, despite the large brain, lengthy infancy, and inefficient vocal tract it requires. Aside from gradualist non-explanations of the emergence of language in the wake of human cognitive development, no one has formulated a plausible hypothesis of the birth of language, let alone for its coincidence with religion, which (in the guise of “symbolic activity”) is nonetheless, ironically enough, the sole archaeological criterion for the presence of language. Only the hypothesis that this origin resulted from a crisis of mimetic desire explains the generation of “transcendence” from “immanence” that uniquely defines the human.

    In this perspective, the cultural “take-off” of 50 TYA—a highly relative term, cultural evolution henceforth being measured in thousands of years rather than tens of thousands—would best be explained by the emergence of what I called in TOOL “linguistic universality,” the taken-for-granted characteristic of mature language that “everything” can be spoken about, a development that would put language to work–replacing the old “instinctive” signal system–in everyday practical activities. For the moment it is difficult to speculate on the specific causes for this technological and artistic acceleration.

    2. What kind of communication system corresponded to the tool-making of Homo erectus, neanderthalensis, and early sapiens? Is it useful to postulate lower levels of human language prior to the origin of “modern” humanity?

    Whatever kind of language the tool-making practiced by erectus requires, what is significant about it is rather that the weapons produced (little evidence of which is available) make plausible the originary moment of “mimetic crisis.” If the early emergence hypothesis presented above is correct, the Neanderthals were descendants of the originary scene and must have had some level of human language and culture. For example, they appear to have buried their dead, although this may have been in imitation of homo sapiens.

    3. Since prehumans, on the model of contemporary apes and (especially) monkeys, must have had a considerable vocabulary of signals, how if at all was this material integrated into the sign-system of language proper?

    The words of language, like signals, are part of a communication system, but words are also objects of reflection linked to concrete, event-related memories. The human ostensive “lion” is superficially analogous to an ape’s emission of a lion-call, but neither the emitter nor the receiver of the call can refer in its memory to a sign, a signifier-cum-signified.

    The principle of the word, as opposed to the signal, is the deferral of appetitive activity. The one tells us to follow our instinct to devour or to flee, the other, on the contrary, tells us not to act on our desire. Since these two functions are diametrically opposed, it is difficult to assume that signals were simply taken into the language. I think rather that the early stages of language coexisted with an extensive signal system; words, at that time, would have been rare and sacred.

    4. By what mechanism does the originary sign give birth to a full-fledged phonetic system characterized by “double articulation” of morphemes and phonemes?

    This is the most speculative of the four questions. The articulation of sounds could, of course, have already been present in the signal system; language differs from signal by the signifier-signified distinction, not the articulation of the signifier. But this seems far-fetched; an exchange of signals as rapid and articulated as language would, following the “looks like a duck” criterion, simply be language.

    My hypothesis is that the articulation of different sounds preceded rather than followed the multiplication of meanings. The original “vocabulary” would be a set of variations on the “name-of-God” that is its first element. From this incantatory glossolalia–typical of prayer even in the “higher” religions–different meanings could come to be associated with different variants. This provides an origin for the system of “minimal pairs” that distinguish words today. The entire phonetic system need not spring up full-blown; it can be generated through varying the constitutive elements of the originary sign.

    Over the next few months I will be seeking further means of fleshing out the originary hypothesis by reference to empirical data; my goal is to produce a book about the origin of language that neither the specialists in the social sciences nor the “theoreticians” in the humanities will be able to ignore. When my research has progressed a bit further, I intend to publish a bibliography of language origin on the Anthropoetics site to which all will be invited to contribute. I would also ask readers of these Chronicles to challenge the originary hypothesis and any auxiliary hypotheses I present here or elsewhere as strongly as they can, and to point out to me any materials that they believe might falsify it.

     

     

  • The Marx-Freud Alliance

    Lately I have been making a serious effort to understand why, nearly forty years after Girard‘s Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque and twenty after my The Origin of Language, the mimetic triangle and its cultural implications remain so little known, while hundreds of academics continue to pay tribute to the Oedipus complex and its derivatives. In previous columns (see Chronicles 115 and 125) I have remarked on the contemporary propensity to phallus-worship–a resentful idolatry whose believer delights in watching the organ deflate. But however defective the Freudian paradigm may be as originary anthropology, its heuristic value is demonstrated on a daily basis.

    An example in my own academic field of nineteenth-century French is the highly respected study Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France (Harvard, 1989; henceforth FIR) by Charles Bernheimer, who, sadly, died last year of pancreatic cancer. The commodification of female sexuality is associated throughout the century, from Parent-Duchâtelet (author of a groundbreaking 1836 study on Parisian prostitution) to Zola and Huysmans, with figures of decay and degeneration; the prostitute is viewed as a sanitary instrument of purgation and fantasized as a dangerous vessel of contamination. FIR shows how the exaltation of the masculine world of art depends on the degradation of female sexuality into a form of exchange-value. Although everyone knows that Balzac, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Zola, and others often wrote about prostitutes, Bernheimer reveals prostitution to be at the narrative core of their work. Contemporary feminism has sensitized him to expressions of dehumanizing contempt and fear of women, and of sexuality itself as associated with women, that scholars once simply took for granted.

    In order to make these points, Bernheimer makes use of a double intellectual strategy, all the more significant for never being presented nor perhaps even reflected on as such. On one hand, the exchange of woman’s sexual favors is used as a discrediting “figure of ill repute” for market society (“capitalism”) itself. On the other, male attitudes toward women are explained by reference to Freud’s theory of sexuality, particularly fetishism and the “castration complex.”

    FIR reveals, in other words, the living reality of the old alliance between Marx and Freud that writers like Herbert Marcuse once hoped to transform into a theoretical synthesis. The construction of this synthesis has been abandoned on the highest levels of “theory”–although the last few books of Fredric Jameson, the United States’ most eminent living Marxist, probably contain more Freudian (and Lacanian) vocabulary than Marxian. As FIR illustrates, however, this theoretical neglect simply reflects the fact that, on the level of “practical criticism,” the matter is tacitly taken as settled: Marxian-cum-Freudian deconstruction of the “phallic” bourgeois-patriarchal Subject is the critical lingua franca of our era. The theme of prostitution, a relation both sexual and commercial–the archetype of “commodity fetishism”–offers an exemplary validation of this alliance.

    Movements like feminism, postcolonialism, gay studies, by resituating in the domains of gender, race, et. al. Marx’s binary opposition of capitalist and proletarian, tend not only to ignore the difference between individual and collective motivations but to obscure the more fundamental point of Marxism as a doctrine of revolution. The Marxist demystification of capitalist economic relations was intended to generate a revolutionary consciousness that would lead to the abolition of these relations. In contrast, post-Marxist modes of demystification operate wholly in the world of discourse, through innuendo; the mere exhibition of unequal relations that contravene what I would call the originary ethic of reciprocity suffices to condemn them. In books like FIR, the reader is presented with a series of discourses about woman in general and the prostitute in particular that we are obliged to denounce as “chauvinistic,” “patriarchal,” “misogynistic,” in association with a “bourgeois ideology” that we are consequently required to denounce in its turn. The reproachful condemnation of the fantasmatic pictures of commodified woman’s devouring sexuality, touching not merely decadents such as Huysmans but Freud’s teacher Charcot, is extended to commodities in general, just as the brothel client’s attitudes are assimilated to bourgeois ideology. Condemnation of prostitution becomes condemnation of bourgeois society in general. But the author is not content to condemn male power over women by analogy and in conjunction with the capitalist’s power over the proletariat: the ideology of the “patriarchy” is not understood as the expression of its will-to-power but as the male’s reaction to castration anxiety, which he projects in a sacrificial mode (the words “sacrifice” and “scapegoat,” but not the name Girard, figure in the book) onto the woman’s “castrated” genital organ.

    As Freudian readings go, these are among the best; always sensitive to the nuance of individual texts or artworks, Bernheimer is not Flaubert’s Pécuchet for whom “everything became a (castrated?) phallus.” Yet, despite its insights, this is the criticism of Hegel’s “beautiful soul”: lacking a credible revolutionary utopia, Bernheimer condemns bourgeois society as immoral without proposing how things might have been different. As an extreme example, he reports (p. 236) in a vaguely indignant tone that it was proposed at one time to make it a crime to knowingly transmit a sexual disease, comparing this proposed law to similar laws today that forbid the knowing transmission of AIDS. Should such laws then be abolished? or is it merely that their “victimization” of AIDS sufferers marks them as deserving of our moral disapprobation?

    In the alliance between “Marx” as the denouncer of capitalist exploitation and “Freud” as the demystifier of male pretensions to the phallus, the Marxian element condemns the bourgeois social order, presumably in terms of a historical dialectic, while the Freudian, by asserting the transhistorical permanence of male castration anxiety projected onto the female, guarantees the relevance of this condemnation even in the absence of such a dialectic.

    Where the Marx-Freud alliance sexualizes the historical, we would do better to historicize the sexual. Is it not nascent consumer society rather than an eternal castration anxiety that generates the anxieties these authors express in images of castration? Isn’t the source of these horrific images of female sexuality more simply explained by the resentment of the desirer toward the desired other, intensified in this era by its mediation through a “rationalized” exchange system that facilitated the purchase of sexual favors by upper-class males (and also allowed courtesans to acquire considerable wealth by manipulating their market position)? Instead of looking down one’s nose at the benighted and hypocritical nineteenth-century bourgeois, it would be a far more useful, if no doubt more difficult, enterprise to explain the sexual tensions of the era in terms of the conflicting demands of private family life, the public world of market production, and the ever more dynamic intermediate activity of consumption. For example, as Bernheimer notes following Alain Corbin, the common brothel of the early part of the century gives way, on the one hand, to specialized–high “value-added”–brothels for the rich, but on the other, to brasseries à femme where the purely commercial aspect of prostitution is mitigated by “romance.” In either case, the simple commodification of sexuality gives way to more highly mediated forms. But such mediations evolve in tandem with the phenomenon of conjugal love, the modern history of which also begins in this period.

    The problems of constructing modern market society–the society from within whose safety retroactive social critics express their facile indignation toward its forbears–cannot be understood in terms of the simplistic binarism of dominators and dominated, bad guys and good guys (or gals). Only when the resentful energy that still animates our cultural criticism–and Bernheimer’s book is one of the more distinguished achievements of this criticism–has been converted into a sympathetic curiosity toward our own social order will the really interesting questions about the interplay within it of public and private, commercial and sexual relations be asked and answered.

    In the ten years that separate us from FIR’s date of publication–the USSR still existed then–gender relations have grown less strained, and a male writer about prostitution would probably not feel himself obliged, as Bernheimer does in his introduction, to agonize about his own complicity with the male fantasies that he studies as narrative mechanisms rather than reflections of a brutal patriarchal reality, nor constantly to repeat terms like “sexist,” “chauvinist,” “patriarchal” to forestall the reader from being seduced by these fantasies. But the Marx-Freud alliance is still alive and well.

    Forgetting about Marx for the moment, what makes Freud’s theory of desire so much more attractive than Girard’s? FIR answers this question very simply: its sexual essentialism gives it a prefabricated semantics where Girard has only a syntax–a “nature” where Girard has only “culture.” Notions such as castration complex, fetishism, and voyeurism derive from a set of fantasies, as much Freud’s (and Bernheimer’s) as those of his patients, focused on the genitalia. The “natural” physical manifestation of sexual difference is substituted for the social reality of sexuality in its historical context. Were I not averse to victimary terminology, I would not hesitate to qualify the definition of women (and of men) in terms of the phallus and its castrated lack as “sexist.” Feminists have, needless to say, preceded me in this denunciation, but without ever entertaining the possibility of simply detaching the mimetic element of Freud’s theory of desire from its genital-centered essentialism. The function of this essentialism, in Bernheimer’s book as in many far less distinguished works, is to permit the denunciation of certain desires–those of the bourgeoisie, of consumer society in general–as perverse and unnatural by analogy with Freud’s distinction between normal genital desires and their “fetishistic” or “voyeuristic” perversions.

    In a word, what Freud provides contemporary criticism is ultimately the same thing that, as we saw in last week’s Chronicle 164, Margaret Mead‘s very un-Freudian picture of Samoa provided a simpler era: a guarantee of the romantic-revolutionary denunciation of market society as “unnatural.” Should we really be surprised that academic intellectuals prefer to theorize their resentment of the bourgeois social order rather than the mechanisms through which this resentment is generated–and subsidized?

     

     

  • Is Anthropology Empirical

    I was recently asked to review The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999), the latest book by Derek Freeman, the New Zealand ethnologist who made his reputation with an earlier (1983) book that punctured the myth of Margaret Mead’s trouble-free Samoan adolescence, setting off the “Mead-Freeman controversy.” Reading the literature that surrounds the controversy, particularly Mead’s classic Coming of Age in Samoa itself, leads me to reflect on the degree to which anthropology is or is not an empirical science.

    What we learn from studying less advanced cultures is clearly not independent of the fundamental anthropology that we bring to bear on them. Freeman is surely right to point out that as a disciple of Franz Boas, Mead sought confirmation of Boas’s cultural relativism by finding in Samoan adolescents an exception to the “rule,” advanced by biological determinists such as G. Stanley Hall (author of a major 1904 study), that adolescence was necessarily a period of turmoil. In Karl Popper’s terms, the existence of even a single exception would “falsify” this rule (just as the existence of one black swan would falsify the hypothesis “swans are white”) and thereby lend corroboration to the view that humans are raw material molded by culture.

    Obviously the nature/nurture controversy is a matter of degree; no one can deny the constraints imposed by biology. Thus the question arises as to exactly on what terrain the battle was contested. What points can be scored against biological determinism by the study of a particular culture? Even if we suppose that Mead invented her picture of Samoa out of whole cloth, it remains useful to examine what claims she makes for it. What Mead sought in Samoa as proof of the Boasian doctrine of cultural determinism was neither the infinite variety of custom nor an exception to a biological “rule” in any rigorous sense, but the one thing that no culture can supply: a world of conflict-free desire.

    What has made Coming of Age in Samoa the most widely-read ethnological study ever written is that Mead offers the lay reader the guarantee of academic science that there exists a land where adolescent sexuality, more specifically, adolescent female sexuality, is without conflict. Not coincidentally, this paradise of sexually available female adolescents is the dominant setting for pornography. These nubile girls on whom every culture, Samoan or other, depends for its self-reproduction and thus for its survival are the privileged objects of sexual desire, defended as such against unauthorized males by both external and internal restraints. Among the latter, we find the valorization of virginity instilled in Samoa by both Christian pastors and native tradition. But the most tenacious obstacle to free sexuality even in the absence of societal controls is the woman’s own “narcissistic” resistance to the man’s desire generated by her awareness of her desirability. Mead’s extraordinary success reflects the fact that she makes Samoa the objective correlative of an erotic dream: young female sexuality endlessly offering itself to male desire without ever becoming caught up in the infernal dialectic of all desire, not even to speak of the danger of conception. This is the “innocence” that four generations of readers have found in Mead’s account of Samoan adolescence.

    In this erotic version of the société commencée of Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, desires come into existence only to be immediately satisfied, reborn, and satisfied again in an unending blissful cycle. Despite the author’s express recognition of the advantage of advanced civilization’s “recognition of many possible ways of life” over the “one way of life” of Samoa (247-48), Coming of Age in Samoa has been a major source of reinforcement for the Rousseauian myth of the natural harmony of desire, along with its uglier corollary, the blank check offered to resentment against “unnatural” modernity in general and market society in particular. Although professional ethnologists have taken Mead’s work less seriously than the general public, its enormous popular success has nonetheless influenced academic anthropology in the direction not merely of cultural relativism but of the active mistrust of Western civilization that continues to pervade the softer social sciences.

    Thus Mead’s contribution to the “nature/nurture” controversy was her “discovery” of conflict-free desire. And this, empirical data aside, is also the central focus of my objection to her work: desire is conflictive by its very nature. But although readers of these Chronicles are unlikely to find this objection particularly controversial, it contravenes the core rules of ethnological research. My claim that there is no conflict-free society is not based on an exhaustive study of human cultures; it is not based on any study at all. If the human itself is defined by the deferral of mimetic conflict through representation then clearly no human society can ever simply abolish such conflict.

    “But then,” the reply might be, “wouldn’t your hypothesis be disproved by a society where there is truly no conflict, just as the white swan theory would be disproved by the existence of a black swan? If GA isn’t falsifiable, then it’s just an ideology, not a rational, scientific theory.”

    My answer is that, of course, GA would be “falsified” if there existed a society without conflict, just as evolution would be falsified if God were observed creating a new species, or the laws of chemistry would be falsified if one mixed hydrogen and oxygen and obtained gold. The point is that scientists don’t waste their time (i.e., don’t get grants for) setting up experiments to observe hydrogen and oxygen turning into gold, even if from a Popperian standpoint the fact that the mixture has always produced water until now is no proof that this will be the case on the next occasion. (Popper’s example is the possibility of the sun not rising tomorrow.) Chemical knowledge allows us to reject such an experiment as a waste of time. That anthropological knowledge has apparently not advanced far enough to qualify the search for conflict-free societies in the same manner is not something that GA should be blamed for.

    Although in anthropology, as in every domain of empirical study, there is need for a fundamental theory to precede data collection, the general view is that we have an overabundance of speculative theories about the human in relation to our empirical data. First religious and then secular thought (metaphysics) have reflected exhaustively over the centuries on “the proper study of mankind,” not to speak of the theorizing of several generations of social scientists. For well over a century, speculative thinkers like Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger have been declaring their speculations something other than metaphysics or even than philosophy; scientists are understandably wary of new ways of thinking that make similarly untestable claims. But as a consequence of this suspicion of speculation, anthropology has lost the vocation of human unity that alone justifies its name. On the one hand, we study material cultures behavioristically, from without; on the other, we describe symbolic cultures from within. If physical anthropology permits itself to make general statements about biological humanity, cultural anthropology forbears to understand its subject-matter in terms of overall human qualities, let alone to see “higher” cultures as the fulfillment of the aims of “lower” cultures. The task of explaining human historicity–without which we cannot explain human history–is abandoned to crude forms of Darwinian speculation indifferent to the essential difference between biological evolution and cultural “evolution,” between genes and “memes.”

    GA attempts to provide a minimal theory that will permit empirical anthropology to avoid absurd projects like the search for a conflict-free society. As I have often had occasion to emphasize in these Chronicles, the elaboration of such a theory is not unscientific simply because it does not focus on testing its falsifiability.

    Let us take as an example the foundation of GA: Girard’s model of mimetic desire. No one can deny that the mimetic (and potentially conflictive) nature of desire is corroborated by a vast amount of data in which the mediator of the desire is overt or can be revealed unambiguously. But neither a “triangular” mediator nor mimetic conflict is an overt component of every desire. In such a case, the mimetic theory of desire becomes vulnerable to the same critique that Popper leveled against psychoanalysis. Once desire is defined in terms of an “unconscious”–whether the Freudian unconscious or what might be called the “Girardian unconsciousness” of the mediator, it becomes undetectable by what are normally considered empirical methods. (It is nevertheless surprising that no one seems to have ever taken the trouble to test Freud’s assertions using normal scientific procedures. It is at least conceivable to construct tests of the components of the “Oedipus complex,” for example by comparing children brought up in different types of family structures. I speak here from ignorance, but I assume that had such tests been performed, their results would have become common knowledge.)

    Overt imitation of a mediator of the sort that would be testable through observation or interrogation corresponds to Girard’s category of external mediation, whereas the typically modern form of internal mediation falls under the category of the unverifiable “unconscious.” This allows for a useful distinction between Girard’s original model and that of GA. Girard’s original idea is that the internal mediator is an identifiable individual of the sort he discovers in novels like Dostoevsky’s The Eternal Husband. But from a minimalist standpoint, the mediation of desire does not require the presence of a specific mediator; the fundamental structure of mediation is that of mimesis in the Aristotelian sense: the objects of our desire are mediated through their representations. The point is not to suggest formalistically that a certain form of representation generates desire, but rather that the essential human category of representation permits desire to be generated prior to the formation of any specific human “triangle.” In this sense, representation is the constituent factor of the market; advertising only thematizes this relationship.

    Thus the invisible element of our model of desire that makes the behaviorist reject it as unfalsifiable is nothing so elaborate as the Freudian unconscious; it is simply the human capacity for representation–in its minimal form, for language. (It is to Lacan’s credit to have redefined the Freudian mediations of desire in terms of language, although without seeing that this definition undermines the Freudian ontogenesis of desire.) Theories of the human that take representation into account not simply as a “behavior” but as a fundamental constituent of desire cannot be falsified in the normal sense of the term. To say, when A desires B, that A’s desire is mediated by a representation of B is not testable in any simple manner. There is no way to remove all representation of B in order to test the hypothesis, since precisely representation is not limited to some formal procedure of designation but can be accomplished by any sign that the desiring subject encounters on his scene of representation.

    We may understand Mead’s utopia of unproblematic desire as a vision of human society within which the genesis and continued function of language and culture as means for deferring mimetic conflict are wholly forgotten. This utopian deproblematization of language is the very condition that makes anthropological description falsifiable and, therefore, “scientific.” This is corroborated by the fact that Freeman’s more nuanced description of Samoa, although surely more realistic than Mead’s, does not make the connection between the elements of conflict it refers to and the human use of representation any more than hers. It is because of this that Freeman can “empirically” discover conflict in Samoan society as a biological rather than a cultural necessity.

    The conclusion would seem to be that “scientific” anthropology as it is presently constituted must choose between cultural utopianism and biological realism, that a critical understanding of mimetic desire necessarily evades it. Only when anthropological controversies no longer rage over the existence or nonexistence of societies without conflict will GA’s reinterpretations of the empirical data, however persuasive, be accepted as scientifically relevant.

     

     

  • Deconstructing the Subject

    I have just finished teaching the French Department’s introductory “theory” course this quarter. It began with the usual suspects, from Saussure and Lévi-Strauss through Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan to Kristeva and Irigaray, but the last two weeks were a bit different. One was an introduction to postcolonial theory, with the kind assistance of my colleague Françoise Lionnet; the other was an introduction to René Girard. Rereading Girard is always an enlightening experience; I expect to say more about this in a future column. Here, I shall concentrate on what all these discourses have in common: the critique or deconstruction of the “Subject.”

    Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Althusser, Irigaray may differ in many ways, but their discourses have a common plot: that of undermining the pretensions of the “Subject”–self-contained, self-present, self-important, white, male, patriarchal, phallogocentric, solar, Western, father, author, creator, master. Girard too deconstructs the human subject by revealing it to be founded on the justificatory myths of emissary violence. As for postcolonial theory, it combines a neo-Marxist attack on the Western Subject with a tentative model of global dialogue that redefines subjectivity as reciprocity rather than resented domination. Rather than criticize postcolonialism’s victimary tendency, it is better to encourage the dialogic bent that distinguishes it from the elite discourses of the European left and makes it more open to generative thinking.

    There is a resentfulness about “theory”‘s critique of the Subject even in its most abstract moments that betrays its political origin. Whether at its most subtle in Derrida or its most delirious in Deleuze-Guattari‘s Anti-Oedipe, the critique reflects the same frustrated agenda. All these writers, from the hyperdogmatic Althusser to the décontracté Baudrillard, are reacting to the failure of socialist utopia that is the defining truth (as the Holocaust is the founding event) of postmodernity. The insistent critique of the tyranny of the Subject hides the fact, obvious in any clear depiction of political and economic realities, that the market system is the least, not the most, centralized of exchange systems, the one that generates the most widely diffused resentment precisely because it is the one least adapted to the focusing of all love and hate on a central sacred figure. The verbal abuse directed at an abstraction reflects “theory”‘s frustrated lack of a real villain. In its victimary forthrightness, postcolonial thought comes closer to revealing this than the rhetorical contortions of the “theorists.”

    The more abstract the argument, the more the political message becomes insidious and allusive, but this message is always the same. Foucault’s hallucinatory vision of the market-system in the guise of Bentham’s panopticon says it all: capitalist modernity is a prison more confining than all the tyrannies of the past. This is not a thesis that can withstand open examination, but it is a powerful channeler of resentment. It explains better than any purely intellectual argument why the great names of “French theory” are who they are–and why Girard’s is not among them. Theory is the deferral of the truth that, whatever its flaws, the market system is the only viable modern social order. It expresses the frustration of a critique of capitalism that has no alternative to provide. I am pleased to note that postcolonial theory has taken to reproaching Foucault for the passivity with which he constructs his model of “power” as everywhere and nowhere, located in no center that can be attacked. (I am not sure what center the postcolonialists should be attacking, but their critique is valid nonetheless.) All these deconstructions that remain “in the margin” of the system they denounce are, in their very abstruseness, expressions of the failure of socialist revolution to overthrow the phallic father once and for all. This is true even of Althusser, whose Stalinist dogmatism coexists with the evacuation of the Hegelian-Marxist dialectic. To be “interpellated” by Althusser’s “ideology” is the same as to be “spoken” by a Foucauldian “discourse”: there is no opening to viable political action in either case.

    This is not to say that “French theory,” as some on the Right would like to think, is mere empty ratiocination. Just as the frustrated romantic utopianism of 1848 gave rise to the last great outpouring of literary creation in the postromantic and early modernist periods, so the prolongation of this frustration after World War II inspired a newly profound understanding of the anthropological underpinnings of the individual human Subject, who never really exists except in interaction with a human community. The deconstruction of the individual subject is an avowal of the mutually mediated nature of human desire. To claim that no central Subject is the supreme Author-Creator of the Work of Art or the self-present originator of the discourse by which we classify human reality is to take the first steps in the direction of the mimetic theory of desire and of Generative Anthropology, which has never concealed its debt to the Derridean notion of différance/ deferral. Dispensing with the concealment of failed political hopes behind the resentful rhetoric, Girard’s deconstruction reveals the hidden underpinnings not of the spurious construction of the logocentric father but of the necessary constitution of the human in general. There is no undercurrent of resentment in Girard’s text–save on the immediate level, toward his “theoretical” rivals. His anthropology contains no “bad guy” that we love and hate and cannot do without; the violence he reveals as our own cannot be denounced as that of some ill-defined Other. It is ours, and yet we are able to comprehend it and, in part, overcome it by means of the anthropological understanding expressed in Christianity–as well as, I would add, in the generally ignored and disdained historical follow-up to Christianity, the market system in its mature, “consumerist” phase.

    The great anthropological intuition of deconstruction is that the supplément and différance that “Rousseau” or “Saussure” as spokesmen for Western metaphysics attempt to ignore must be brought to light within metaphysics itself. But Derrida is too prudent to accept the existence of a premetaphysical form of thought such as Heidegger, the originator of deconstruction, finds in the pre-Socratics. In recent years, Derrida has ventured into the domain of religious thought, but he remains tone-deaf to religion because he conceives its discourse as indistinguishable from that of metaphysics. Metaphysics operates by declarative logic, whereas religious discourse is founded on ostensive revelation. The examination of the discourse of revelation leads not to an endlessly regressive series of discourses, but to the concrete experience of the origin of language.

    By revealing the human and not merely conceptual violence that subtends the metaphysical world of “presence,” Girard allows us to reconstruct the origin that deconstruction forever defers. The deconstruction of metaphysics is not an end in itself; it has value only in the service of an anthropology, or to put it still more concretely, of an ethic. To understand the origin of culture and of language itself as an ethical phenomenon is a huge step beyond denouncing the constitutive illusion of a historically bound family of discourses. Originary thinking explains and comprehends deconstruction, whereas deconstruction can only try to explain away originary thinking as a futile attempt to explain the inexplicable. The Gospels tell us that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath; similarly, différance was made for humanity, not humanity for différance. To abandon one’s commitment to the human in reaction to the failure of a political dream is truly, in the hoariest cliché of Marxist rhetoric, to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

    As the foregoing makes clear, I am not dismayed by the decline of “theory” in favor of the less subtle thinking of cultural studies and postcolonial theory. These modes are, in the very assertiveness of their victimary politics, healthy developments that lead us out of a labyrinth of metaphysical abstraction into a landscape where real anthropological thinking becomes possible. Surely, one might object, the denunciation of “the West,” like the feminist attack on “the patriarchy,” is a project of the same ilk as the deconstruction of “the Subject.” But the openness of its political agenda revives the historical dialectic that had been stifled by the veiled and contorted language with which deconstruction and related discourses hide the inavowable demise of their own agenda. Third-world countries, after all, have real problems that demand real solutions; they cannot nourish themselves à la Foucault on the bittersweet opiate of failed socialism. Bringing the focus of “theory” back to human reality can only have a healthy long-term effect.

    The end of “theory” is the beginning of wisdom, which is to say, of ethics. Whatever the current readings of the ideological ticker tape, the most humanly useful anthropology will win out in the end. We all have a stake in hoping that the victory goes to the most inclusive and generous theory, for if we remain attached to the discourses of resentment, our fragile humankind is unlikely to be around for the start of the fourth millennium.

     

     

  • Failure of Mimetic Theory?

    I was recently asked to read a set of applications for a local postdoctoral fellowship on the theme “Sacred and Profane.” There were fifty-nine applicants in the modern period, recent and incipient PhDs in history, philosophy, literary and cultural studies, anthropology, and a smattering of other fields. These young people, most of whom come highly recommended from elite institutions, are a good sample of the academic leaders of the next generation. The assigned subject struck me as particularly welcome, given the characteristic neglect of the sacred dimension in the university–as the meager funding for the UCLA Center for the Study of Religion bears out. The congeniality of this subject to Generative Anthropology was surely the reason I was asked to read these applications in the first place.

    The sobering fact is that not a single one of the fifty-nine made any use of the constitutive ideas of GA. Not one referred in his project description to René Girard’s work on the sacred (it was mentioned once in a bibliography), although the usual names of “French theory,” from Bataille to Foucault and Derrida, were much in evidence. Nor were generative ideas presented under other rubrics. Scarcely anyone referred to Durkheim, and no one mentioned Frazer, Robertson Smith, Freud’s Totem and Taboo… The focus on the originary that informs every sacred rite and text was roundly ignored.

    When I pointed this out to the colleague in charge of administering these fellowships, he remarked that although Girard aroused some interest twenty years ago, no one any longer teaches this material–my own efforts being a negligible exception. Like deans, directors of academic Centers evaluate ideas the way stockbrokers evaluate companies, and mimetic theory was not showing a profit. Yet when I offered the explanation that its “weakness” was that, unlike feminism, post-colonial studies, or cultural studies generally, it did not express the resentment of a well-defined clientele, this explanation, obvious to any student of GA, caught him unawares. It is precisely because GA can explain the success of these other theories better than the theories themselves that it is unpopular. The mimetic theory of desire and the anthropology that has sprung from it are too powerful for their own good. Those who employ the rhetoric of justice cannot admit the resentment without which they would never have thought of justice.

    It is disheartening for a man of my relatively advanced age to discover after years of attempting to promote a great and widely ignored idea that this idea is already considered a thing of the past. We can accept that our modes of thought must be superseded by better ones; we would have it no other way. But the conceptions of GA are more powerful than the tired and underpowered ideas that hold the field. At best, thinkers like Bataille express awareness of the problematic relationship between violence and the sacred; they never articulate this relationship into a model. Or if Bataille is really better on the sacred than Girard, one would think it would be worth demonstrating. Our fellowship applicants find it more useful to our understanding of “sacred and profane” to confront Bataille with figures like Maurice Blanchot or Pierre Klossowski (author of Roberte ce soir) than with Girard; such are the privileges of “theory.”

    Standardization is indispensable for a large, complex enterprise, and the very connectivity that allows marginal activities like Anthropoetics and these Chronicles to survive on the Internet intensifies the contacts among academics and the attendant rigidity of their lingua franca. Just as programmers complain about the bugs in Windows 95, I complain about the bugs in the academy’s intellectual software. When persons who formerly saw each other at conventions twice a year attend conferences together twice a month, trying to revamp the language of intellectual communication becomes as impractical as rewriting Microsoft Word. The increasing dominance of the profession by the cruder forms of victimary thinking is a reflection less of the politics of its members than of the principle formulated decades ago by the legendary Mancur Olson: small determined groups organize, large diffuse groups do not. The trump card of the victimary is our fear of blackmail by those whose victimization we might be accused of perpetuating, and the most fearsome are those most willing to perturb the system to make themselves heard. The more squeaky the resentment, the more oil we pour on it. It would be indecent to point out that today’s academy rewards the champions of the world’s resentments far better than the representatives of their purported oppressors; it would be as though one were to complain of the disproportion between Jews and Nazis in chairs of Holocaust Studies.

    But after all the ironies have been savored, the fact remains that the ideas that this column exists to perpetuate are failing to reach the current generation of young scholars, and that whether one call these ideas Mimetic Theory, Fundamental Anthropology, Generative Anthropology, Girard, Gans, or whatever, they are not being practiced by sufficiently numerous and well-placed people to ensure their survival into the next generation. I hope by raising the issue to raise our own level of resentment so that we may become more active on behalf of our intellectual cause than in the past.

    While I am in so frank a mood, I will point out a key, perhaps predictable, weakness of our intellectual ambit: its lack of communal cohesion. That we know better than anyone that mimetic rivalry is a reality of life does not foreclose the possibility of intellectual solidarity. Nor does a propensity to becoming interested in the theory of this rivalry connote in some obvious way a rivalrous personality incapable of recognizing the merits of others. Yet it is rare that former students of Girard even bother to cite each other’s work, let alone attempt to build on it. A comparison in terms either of academic success or of mutual assistance between the students of Girard and those of Paul de Man would be embarrassing. Not only are Girard’s students reluctant to cite each other, they are not even likely to refer more than obliquely to their mentor, even when their work relies on and develops his ideas. I would like to see this situation change, in my own intellectual interest and in that of all of us. We should abandon the distorting tendency–in a world whose watchword is the denunciation of “the Subject”–to equate ideas with persons (“I use Foucault and a little Lacan”). Once we resolve to think in terms of ideas, we are then more ready to give credit to their creators, whatever their current market value.

    The failure of socialism has made Humanities departments the last refuge of the revolutionary intellectual whose function is to articulate the resentment of the oppressed. As the political expression of this resentment has been discredited, its cultural expression becomes the sole guarantee of the theories that exalt it. I do not deride this resentment; it is as justified as any other. Perhaps it can only be integrated into the modern (that is, Western) system of thought by the kind of mediations practiced by our victimary colleagues, who are amply rewarded for their services. But however valuable these services, they are not consonant with the spirit of institutions designed to provide knowledge of the human whose value is independent of the individual or group that articulates it.

    This is no doubt an unpropitious time to expect from the institutions and organizations of the Humanities openness to new ideas that conflict with their dominant political mindset. But this does not mean that individuals cannot be found within these institutions and organizations who are open to new and challenging ideas. A recent experience, as encouraging as the fellowship applications were depressing, was a recent visit, on Wolfgang Iser’s kind invitation, to his graduate seminar on cultural theories at the University of California, Irvine. The seminar had already read and discussed some of Girard’s and my books along with those of other theorists such as Geertz and Leroi-Gourhan. The dialogue went on for nearly three hours; rarely have I had so challenging and responsive an audience. Such an occasion gives proof that, given a chance to compete on an equal basis with other modes of thought, originary thinking can make a powerful impression on the minds of the next academic generation.

    Victimary ideas are the university equivalent of bilingual education; they serve above all the interests of their academic sponsors. The “dominated” both inside and outside the developed world will profit far more from acquiring and adapting to their needs the techniques of economic and political rationality than from learning new means to denounce the social order that created and, however imperfectly, practices these techniques. The best way to promote genuine equality among the peoples of the world is not to indulge and excuse unproductive expressions of resentment, but to work toward integration into the world exchange system on the level of ideas as well as of goods and services. As developments in less ideologically charged areas like popular music make clear, the result is not deadening “McDonaldization” but enriching cultural interaction. The Western-originated exchange system is not the adversary but the only competent agent of this interaction. Whatever its problems, they can only be resolved from within; the alternative is resentful isolation a la North Korea.

    Perhaps sooner than we think, we may expect a return to generative thinking, which American anthropology abandoned two generations ago for the relativistic Boasian culturalism that is the direct intellectual ancestor of the multi-culti of today. GA’s usefulness in facilitating intercultural dialogue will be recognized when the interested parties come to understand that to affirm the moral superiority of less over more successful individuals and societies is to offer them the same consolation that masters have traditionally provided their slaves.

     

  • Thinking Religion

    If any cultural phenomenon must be thought about it is religion, which is a name for the set of practices that have held human communities together throughout most of human time and space. Because religion and thinking about religion are inextricable yet not precisely identical, we distinguish between “etic” and “emic” ways of thinking, respectively external and internal to their object. Both are necessary modes of anthropological thought. The “etic” description of a religious rite is not objective if it fails to concern itself with the meaning of the objects and gestures it employs; to fail to treat them as representations is comparable to describing the sounds of language without considering their articulation and meaning. Conversely, the “emic” description of the same rite cannot confine itself to the private feelings and interpretations of its participants. All cultural practices define and sustain communities, and all human communities are essentially of the same nature. We should not shrink from applying to all social practices knowledge acquired either through ethnological study or through social experience of how human communities function–which does not imply imposing “our” way of life on others. As is increasingly the case, groups and societies once excluded from anthropological dialogue are having their own word to say; the etic / emic polarity is increasingly a difference of degree negotiated within different fractions of the “marketplace of ideas.”

    What interests me here is a somewhat different distinction. On the one hand, we can reflect on religious practices from a generative standpoint as carrying out the fundamental cultural operation of deferring violence through representation. In this perspective, the heart of religion is ritual and we seek in it what Girard calls in Violence and the Sacred “the unity of all rites.” But it is also useful to classify the different aspects of the fuzzy set of religious practices and activities we empirically encounter in the real world. No doubt these practices all ultimately derive from the same source, but it is not without interest that they present themselves to common sense and its vocabulary as distinct, or at any rate as distinguishable.

    In a recent colloquium for the UCLA Center for the Study of Religion, which he directs, my colleague Scott Bartchy presented such an empirical view of religion, dividing its practices into six categories arranged in a circle:

     

    Right Action
    Rational Inquiry
    Ritual Performance
    Shamanic Meditation
    Mystical Quest
    Devotion

    My first reaction was impatience with this as with all pluralistic analyses of cultural phenomena. Generative thinking is minimalist: it derives the multiple from the singular. But there was something to be said for beginning from a set of categories empirically based on our sense of human differences. A way of thinking that respects the human as a whole cannot afford to dismiss our intuitive distinction between a set of ethical rules and a set of ritual practices, between a rabbi perusing the Talmud and a practitioner of Transcendental Meditation. Yet I was sure these pragmatic categories could be better articulated within the categories of GA. The goal would be to see all these phenomenologically different activities as moments of a single process.

    After giving the matter some thought, I found a way to articulate Scott’s categories in terms of the three types of utterances described in The Origin of Language: ostensive, imperative, declarative. Ritual and Shamanism may be associated with the ostensive (sacred presence), Mysticism and Devotion with the imperative (calling for/to sacred presence), and Rationalism and Right Action with the declarative (creating models of reality). This association reveals, as might be expected, a significant difference between those religious practices based on the elementary linguistic structures–the ostensive and the imperative–and those based on the declarative. Let us first subject these categories to a bit of originary analysis.

    The Ostensive Modes: Ritual and Shamanism

    With regard to the originary event, Scott’s circle is more than a metaphor. The circle of participants equidistant from the sacred center is the structure of the human scene of representation that is reproduced each time a crowd gathers around a street performer or the scene of an accident. Of the six categories, two concretely reproduce this structure: Ritual Performance and Shamanic Meditation. In Ritual, priests and officiants participate in a more or less scripted activity that reproduces, via a series of historical mediations, the originary scenic configuration. Ritual operates in a predictable manner; its generative effect is subordinated to the purpose of providing sacred reinforcement to an already-existing order. In Shamanism these priorities are reversed. If the priest, however privileged, belongs to the periphery of the circle, the shaman belongs to the center. This often sexually ambivalent figure reenacts the originary scene, recreating in himself the presence of the sacred being before a passive audience who may seek concrete benefits, such as healing, from the “medicine man”‘s action. As the mediator to the others of the force of mimetic desire concentrated in the center of the ritual circle, the shaman’s action is adapted to a particular crisis rather than, like ritual, serving to ward off future crises by lowering the general level of resentment.

    Shamanism, like all cultural practices, is always already becoming ritualized; the second time one visits the shaman, one can predict a little better what might happen. Shamanistic talent lies in impressing one’s audience with ever-new manifestations of sacred power. This is the kind of cultural ability we associate more with artists than priests, although the most predictable weekly church services generally involve elements of both long-term institutional variance (e.g., a set of Bible readings that repeat only once a year) and one-time originality (e.g., the sermon). Religion is about events; the shaman concentrates in himself the event-nature of religion. But his originality can only exist within a community whose order is guaranteed by the founding event that others can reenact in ritual.

    The Imperative Modes: Devotion and Mysticism

    The mystic who flees the collective ritual scene demonstrates the scene’s persistence within the individual mind. Even in the absence of others, he remains on the periphery of the circle, for our representation of the center is itself a reminder of collective desire. To be engaged in the Mystical Quest is to seek to comprehend this originary structure from within the self’s internalization of it, to qualify one’s peripheral self as capable of evoking the sacred center. The paradoxical object of the mystic’s quest is knowledge of God, that is, an ineffable union with the sacred center in which the center is nonetheless “knowable,” as though we could “know” in imperative language and without being able to communicate it to others.

    Devotion, in contrast, views the originary central presence as something that must be recalled by the communal imperative of the periphery. In distinction from ritual, Devotion does not employ a sacrificial placeholder for this presence, but seeks to invoke it through shared prayer and other activities that enact the periphery’s agreement as to the center’s sacredness.

    The Declarative Modes: Rationalism and Ethics

    As with mysticism, to engage in Rational Inquiry is to seek in one’s mind alone the mechanism of reason, but this time as a project fully communicable to others in declarative sentences. The rationalist understands that our minds are all formed by the same scene and are therefore bound to function in the same way. But we should not confuse the religious thinker with the metaphysician. Rational inquiry in the religious sphere begins from a revealed sacred text from whose ostensive origin it derives its declarative sentences and their logic. (The rationality of Lévi-Strauss’ pensée sauvage is not bound by such a text but, for that very reason, as soon as it becomes thought, e.g., classificatory thinking, it is no longer specifically religious.)

    Right Action belongs with the declarative not simply as a mode of religious practice–the enactment of holy law–but insofar as Right Action is the mode of any behavior toward another at which the sacred center is implicitly present as a mediator. A declarative utterance expresses my renunciation of the center as an object of desire, my willingness to share it through representation with my fellows. Renunciation of the center is the most important cultural gesture of all; the whole edifice of cultural representation, religious and profane, exists only to promote it. If we could have continued to perform without human culture the “right actions” necessary to our survival, we would never have become human.

    The four categories associated with the elementary linguistic structures all fall within the domain of what we normally consider as religious. Ritual, Shamanism, Mysticism, and Devotion are incomprehensible without reference to the sacred. Rational Inquiry and Right Action, in contrast, are not. They are associated with religion only when a connection has been made between ethical laws or logical arguments and a revealed text from which these laws or arguments derive. When revelation is no longer a living truth, religious reflection becomes metaphysics and God a construction like Aristotle’s “unmoved mover” rather than an object of worship. The declarative in the religious context is never independent of the ostensive from which it originarily emerged.

    If Scott’s categories correspond to the fundamental linguistic structures, why then are there six rather than three? In religion’s task of reconstituting the scene’s originary configuration, the point of departure may be either the sacred center or the profane periphery. The charismatic shaman differs from the unindividualized officiant of Ritual in that the first recreates the scene from the sacred center whereas the second stands in the center as the emissary of the periphery. All intermediate degrees of centralizing charisma are possible; a rabbi is not a priest, a high-church pastor is not an itinerant revivalist, Billy Graham is not David Koresh. Similarly, all degrees are possible between the prayer of Mysticism and that of Devotion, between the community that calls to God to reappear in its center and the individual who seeks the manifestation of this center for himself alone. Every participant in ritual can dream of becoming the sole focus of sacred revelation; every devotee can imagine himself in solitary communion with God.

    The two declarative modes are harder to connect because they are less well defined in the original schema. But if “rational inquiry” means the decipherment of the sacred text and “right action” the attempt to follow the precepts of such a text, they once again present a polarity between the scholarly representative of the community who interprets God’s law and the individual who realizes this law in action.

    Needless to say, these reflections cannot substitute for either the empirical study of religious practices or the elaboration of an originary theory of religion. The model they propose nonetheless suggests avenues for empirical research that would subject it to the ultimate test of falsification in the real world. If religious practices can indeed be associated with the elementary linguistic structures, it should be possible to find analogies in the evolution of these practices that would correspond to the movements discussed in The Origin of Language from the “inappropriate ostensive” to the imperative and from the failed imperative to the declarative. For example, as we move from ritual to devotion we organize our service around prayer that requests sacred presence rather than sacrificial manifestations of this presence; we observe this in Judaism in the passage from temple to synagogue, in Christianity at the time of the Reformation, in the birth of Buddhism in the context of Hinduism. Similarly, we should expect to find modes of transition from shamanism to mysticism and from mysticism and devotion to rationalism and law-based ethical practice; indeed, the latter transition is illustrated in the West by the whole process of “secularization” that culminates in the Enlightenment.

     

     

  • Michael Jordan’s Productive Resentment

    I entitled this series “Chronicles of Love and Resentment” because, however much we want to promote the values of love, we are all creatures of resentment. It is impossible to react to the resentment of others without expressing a resentment of one’s own that will in turn be resented at the risk of a spiral of mimetic violence. Yet the indifferentiated chaos of mimetic crisis is as unrealizable on earth as the Kingdom of God. Our mutual resentments, when properly focused, lead not to the breakdown of the social order but, on the contrary, to its more efficient functioning.

    A recent piece on Michael Jordan (“The Best: The Secret of Michael Jordan’s Greatness” by Jonathan Last in the January 25 National Standard) reproaches the media for concentrating on Jordan’s clean image rather than the quality that has made and kept him the greatest athlete of his time: his intense competitiveness. Jordan resents anyone whom he suspects of raising the least possibility of his not being considered the best. Last’s article cites an incident in which he played an outstanding game because he thought an opponent intended to show him up before his family, although the opponent probably had no idea Jordan’s family was attending the game. Yet Jordan’s resentfulness, although undoubtedly painful to his immediate adversaries, does not threaten the sport with mimetic crisis. On the contrary, by setting him above all other players, Jordan’s resentment has not only led to the improvement of his own game, not only encouraged other players to improve in emulation of him, but reduced resentment both in the NBA and in the society overall. Jordan’s superiority is such that he is no longer perceived as an equal competitor; from an internal mediator he becomes an external one, a basketball “god” who helps reconcile us to our lesser inferiorities to our neighbors. As Last’s article emphasizes, the immense value to sport and to world culture that derives from Jordan’s objective excellence is less the product of an extraordinary physical talent than of an immense resentment that, rather than seeking outlets in the sphere of consumption, channels its energies into improved performance. Few of us can dream of excelling in any field as Jordan has in his, but we can all learn from him to recycle our resentment into productive activity.

    This is not the way Friedrich Nietzsche or his critic Max Scheler saw what the former was the first to describe with the French term ressentiment. For these philosophers, resentment was sterile hatred generated by another’s superiority. In this view, Michael Jordan should be the last person to feel resentment; we should all be resentful of him. Nietzsche’s great idea, scandalously insightful yet not really true, is that the Christian priest and his Jewish predecessor are archetypal men of resentment whose relation to the noble pagan warriors they eventually subjugated is analogous to the opposition, drawn by other thinkers of the same era, of the naive, generous Aryans to the weak but crafty Semites. The turning point of Western history occurs when the priests, by making the pagans feel ashamed of their own superiority, foist upon them humility and self-abasement. No explanation is provided of how this could have come about; the power of Nietzsche’s “genealogy” lies precisely in its dismissal of either historical or moral explanations in favor of a cynical cui bono (“Who profits?”) to which he opposes the romantic myth of the “transvaluation of all values” by the man who stands “beyond good and evil.” Nietzsche would never have developed this argument had he known the purposes to which it would be put both by the Nazis and in the postmodern era.

    Nietzsche’s resentful Christian priests are physically weak, but they are diabolically clever. Max Scheler wanted to set the record straight: resentment is sterile and impotent and Christians are not resentful. Comparing Jesus to a medieval knight, Scheler scorns the masses whose resentment drives political movements. Yet Scheler fears the potential power of such movements. If l’homme du ressentiment is powerless, why are the philosophers who put him on the map so obsessed by his danger to the social order?

    The ambivalence of their analyses reflects their failure to understand resentment as a form of deferral mediated by representation. Its first moment is to stand back from the scene of one’s exclusion and contemplate oneself as its victim. The man of resentment appears as not only impotent but perverse; rather than counter the other’s superiority he seems to wallow in his discomfiture. Hamlet, the archetypal man of resentment for the modern era, delights in the scene of his impotence as much as he suffers from it, both hating and identifying with his uncle (see Chronicles 141). Hamlet is an aristocrat, not a bourgeois practitioner of “primitive accumulation” deferring the gratification of his desires in the interest of a long-term goal–he is not, for example, engaged in a long-term plot to kill Claudius that might misfire if he acted more promptly. On the contrary, his attempts at strategy provoke his enemies to violence–the play that reveals Claudius’ guilt to Hamlet also reveals Hamlet’s suspicions to Claudius–whereas his own acts of violence are without exception precipitous and reactive.

    It is in the absence of any rational connection between the deferral and the accomplishment of his goal that Hamlet exemplifies the modern man of resentment; he lives not for the goal but for the desire itself, which exists only insofar as it remains unrealized. But this is exactly the point: resentment provides a model of deferral that can be made to be productive despite itself. The conditions of market society that grow up around it exploit its potential productivity independently of the subject’s willpower. The consumer is not simply incited to express his resentment against social reality–say by attending a punk rock concert–but persuaded to dispel the energy of this resentment in an indefinite series of compensatory purchases. Emma Bovary can once again serve as our example: fed up with her husband and disillusioned of her chances at leaving Yonville, she multiplies her purchases of clothes, knick-knacks, art materials… Is she “expressing” her resentment? Or is she learning to focus not on the Paris she cannot have but on the images of Paris she can create within her own life?

    Is resentment a “good thing”? The example of Jordan allows us to answer this question in a more equitable fashion than Nietzsche or Scheler. Resentment is the negative moment of mimetic desire in which one sees one’s other-model-rival closer to the center of the scene than oneself. The scandal that fuels resentment is denial of our equidistance from the sacred center, as guaranteed by our originary equality in language. In its simplest form, resentment is a social “instinct” that protects us against unequal treatment, just as our biological instinct makes us pull our hand back from a fire. When someone tries to push ahead of us in line, our “instinctive” reaction is not to let him in. But since the origin of hierarchical society, this same mechanism can be adapted to more creative ends. Michael Jordan is not resentful of unequal treatment; his resentment is aroused by any hint of challenge to his superiority. We admire him not for this resentment itself, but for channeling its energy into his work with such ferocity that he has been able to maintain this superiority for over a decade on the basketball court, while acting as a decent human being outside it.

    But Jordan’s “work” itself is not really productive. Only in consumer society do we have both the leisure and the need to admire athletes with whom, unlike the Greeks, we have no prospect or interest in competing. We do not encounter Jordan in the context of our own competitions, but in those whose significance we merely “consume.” Yet it is not enough to say that we are Bovarys, not Jordans. The meanings we construct as consumers are potential sources of enrichment for our productive lives. The chain of mediations is longer in some cases than in others, but it goes in the same direction.

    Nietzsche might well have admired Jordan’s resentful pride as he admired that of Achilles, but he would not have called it resentment. My insistence on the term is not, however, an arbitrary matter of definition. The point is that there is no fundamental distinction between the resentment of Nietzsche’s priests or Scheler’s impotent failures on the one hand and that of Jordan and Achilles on the other, nor between either and that of the Hamlets and Bovarys in between. The political history of our nearly completed century is demonstration enough that fundamental human equality must be pushed back one more level than Nietzsche’s anti-Christian critique allowed it. Separating people into the heroic and the resentful, the authentic and the inauthentic, is a prelude to genocide.

    Resentment is not something we can abolish. It is inherent in the human condition and just as indispensable to our functioning in society as our biological instincts are to our bodily existence. Our love for our fellows is not a state of effortless beatitude but a continual conquest and refocusing of resentment. We need not model our behavior on Michael Jordan’s intimidation of his opponents, but we can all emulate his readiness to be scandalized that others might see us as less than what we can make ourselves become.

     

     

  • Socratic GA

    In a comment on Chronicle 157 (“The Voice of Authority”), Don Socha observed that the historical model for the thinker who stands “outside of the authority of specialization” and emphasizes the ethical over the technical is Socrates. In his dual existence as a real person and a personage in Plato’s dialogues, Socrates is the founder of the Western philosophical or metaphysical tradition that privileges the declarative sentence, which presents an objective model of reality, over the imperative and ostensive forms that interact directly with the real world (see “Plato and the Birth of Conceptual Thought” in Anthropoetics II, 2).

    Socrates confronts us with the apparent illogicality of declaring an action to be good in an individual circumstance without being able to define what “good” is. On hearing someone say that X acted courageously or that Y’s decision was just, he would ask the speaker to help him define Courage or Justice. Why was this search for the general idea behind particular cases felt to be a danger to Athenian religion and morals? Socrates’ interlocutors may have been intellectually lazy but they were not lazy intellectuals; they were good citizens who relied on culturally accepted models of ethical action. The ostensive definition of courage and justice through examples was the affirmation of a traditional, ritual-based ethic. To seek a universal or “declarative” definition is to undermine the authority of these examples and of the social order they sustain.

    Plato seeks to vindicate his master by establishing, independently of ostensive religious revelation, the conflict-deferring force of the sign. Plato’s designation of the Idea as the object of Socrates’ quest prefigures GA’s dictum that culture is “the deferral of violence through representation.” That A and B both seek “the good” is no proof, despite the Platonic Socrates’ repeated assertions, that what is good for B is also good for A. The Idea of the Good is nothing more than the signified or meaning of the signifier “good”; that we share the word does not imply that a common good exists. But Plato’s intuition, which leads him to elaborate in The Republic a model of the “good society,” can be justified anthropologically if we understand the linguistic sign as in the first place a means of deferring conflict. The notion that we can all commune in the Idea of the Good in the literal sense of founding our community on it is Plato’s attempt to relocate the sacred central object of desire within the world of language.

    There is no evidence that Socrates thought that such a relocation was possible, let alone that he envisaged a Republic where the Good could become the transparent basis of the social order. Socrates invented a method of criticism; Plato converted the dialogues into discourses and made possible the edification of metaphysical thought. GA avoids the dichotomy of construction and deconstruction inherent in the metaphysical enterprise. Generative thinking is progressive and inclusive. It does not begin by teaching us that “we know nothing” in order to construct a new edifice on a foundation of originary intuition. It affirms rather that this intuition is already at the basis of what we are doing now, that no possible social alienation can obliterate the originary model of reciprocity that inheres in our common use of language.

    What role can GA play in today’s agora? If Socrates set himself the task of refuting the smug moral certitudes of his contemporaries, what faces us today is an equally smug lack of moral certitude. Today’s interlocutor does not propose traditional examples of courage or justice from which the philosopher can extract the Idea; he denies the existence of the Idea by claiming that each society’s concepts of courage or justice are unique and incomparable. Where Socrates showed that the existence of different examples implies that they all derive from a single Idea, our task is to show that the existence of different Ideas implies that they all derive from a single example.

    Everyone knows that we must control our tendency to rivalrous or mimetic violence. Everyone is also interested in the origin of the mimetic phenomenon of human language. To engage in “originary thinking,” that is, to create a minimal model of our origin consonant with the subsequent history of human culture, is to think the connection between these two forms of mimesis: the creature that uses language evolved from creatures that did not because language was a revolutionary new means for deferring violence.

    There are two dominant points of view on the subject of human origins: those who prefer the Bible to Darwin and those who prefer Darwin to the Bible. Either we attribute the specialness of humans to God’s unfathomable will, or we deny it altogether. The believers are right to insist that human evolution is irreducible to its biological component. But my idea of a living faith is one that doesn’t fall back on the lazy cliche of “God’s will” but seeks to understand its purposes.

    II
    When Princess Diana died, I was moved to try to explain why it is that so many people identify with celebrities who possess far more wealth and fame than they. This identification would be inexplicable if it were simply a one-on-one relationship, but it is not. One identifies with Princess Di as a weapon against more immediate rivals. The lady next door has a diamond ring, but it’s not as big as Princess Di’s. You may be smarter than I, but Einstein is smarter than you. Although motivated by resentment rather than charity, compensatory identification with celebrities performs the socially useful function of reducing the overall intensity of mimetic rivalry.

    Identification with a distant, superior figure was not always confined to our superficial and voluntary relationship with celebrities. When kings and emperors ruled, their central position made them both loved and hated, indeed, beyond being loved or hated in the normal sense of the term. As a super-celebrity, the king acted as society’s mediator, diverting to himself the rivalrous tensions between its members. The ruler was the last worldly hope of the downtrodden; the victim of injustice would typically refuse against all reason to believe that the Tsar, or even Stalin, could have had any part in his misfortune. Generative Anthropology teaches us that this diversionary role is not a fortuitous benefit of kingship but the fundamental structure of the social order. Although lacking any power over our lives, the modern celebrity, like the rulers of the past, diverts toward the center the rivalrous energies of the periphery.

    But from the practice of “sacrificial kingships” to our current affinity for presidential scandal, the place of the throne is also the place of the sacrificial altar; the central figure is a powerless victim as much as the holder of power. At the origin, sacred victim and sacred divinity are alternate faces of a single Being. The most significant of all ethical evolutions is the one that leads from identification with the community’s sacrificial power vested in its ruler to identification with the victim as the originary mediator of this power. Although elements of the demystification of sacrifice are present in all the higher religions, notably in Buddhism with its doctrine of withdrawal from the world of violent desire, the Judeo-Christian tradition’s moral analysis is more precise–as witness the “globalization” of the Western exchange system. The most profound intuition of Christianity is that the power of kings–and of celebrities–derives from the community’s focusing of its mimetic violence on the sacrificial victim. But to implement this intuition in social institutions is a lengthy and still incomplete historical process.

    A key moment of this process occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century; the developed countries of Europe began to evolve into “consumer societies” where the goods one purchased were no longer mere proofs of wealth (“conspicuous consumption”) but conveyed “messages” about one’s posture toward the world. A society that extends to the majority of its population the possibility of defining themselves through the exchange system is incompatible with unselfconscious assertions of material superiority. The classical wisdom of the “golden mean” and “nothing in excess” (a wisdom accompanied, we should not forget, by sacrifices to various deities) was no longer sufficient to moderate the resentment generated by success. In order to maintain the circulation of the desire for self-worth that sustains consumer society, success in that society is subordinated to the compassionate attention focused on those–ethnic groups, animal species, even geological systems–that can with more or less credibility be considered its “victims.” By speaking of victims, one affects to assimilate modern society to the ritual cultures of the past that fall under the Judeo-Christian antisacrificial critique. In consumer society’s division of labor, this ideological operation is the province of the “new class” of academics and “helping professions,” while those directly concerned with productivity tolerate the anticapitalist ideologues as part of the price of doing society’s business.

    As the exchange system reaches ever higher levels of reciprocity, it becomes increasingly important to defer the resentment it generates by presenting it as a source of disequilibrium, a world of persecutors and victims. To devalue a priori the object of our worldly ambitions by denouncing our ethnocentrism or even our “speciesism” not only protects us against the danger of success; it is itself a part of this success, a posture that demonstrates our moral worth. Let us consider two resentful people. The first consoles himself with the thought that if his neighbor has a big car, Michael Jackson’s limo is bigger. But he keeps this thought to himself; it is too openly resentful. The second, on the contrary, openly accuses his neighbor of despoiling the planet’s resources by using too much gasoline. Nietzsche was the first to see that the second is the cleverer of the two; in our society, he is almost certainly the better educated and better off. Moral indignation against his neighbor permits him to enjoy his own car in good conscience. Instead of seeking compensation through identification, he transfers the focus of competition from accumulating material wealth to denying complicity with the system that provides it.

    But just as the insights of GA reflect the experience of consumer society, the further evolution of this social order both presupposes and generates ever higher levels of anthropological awareness. Our task is to make originary thinking accessible to a wider audience as an antidote to victimary thinking and its corollary moral relativism. The moral revolution that produced the democratic marketplace as a solution to the rigid hierarchies of ritual society is founded on the same originary revelation of human reciprocity that inspires the marketplace’s critics. All cultures, however diverse in detail, diverge from a common root and are constantly reminded of this root by their use of language. Just as all human languages are too similar not to derive from a common source, the same is true of human societies. Rather than “What is courage?” and “What is justice?” our new Socrates should ask his interlocutor to consider what originary conditions might account for the fact that human beings holding apparently incompatible concepts of justice and courage can and do enter into dialogue with one another.

     

     

  • Impeachment

    Few indeed predicted that after the moderate disaster of the 1998 elections, the narrow Republican majority in the House would hold firm in passing an impeachment resolution against President Clinton. And although it seems unlikely that the Senate will vote to remove Clinton from office, the issue has been infused with a new seriousness. The success of the impeachment effort has for the moment deepened the gulf between Left and Right: as conservatives congratulate the Republicans on their unexpected toughness in the face of popular opinion, liberals accuse them of everything from insanity to treason. The New Republic coverage of the impeachment contains some of the most partisan rhetoric I have seen in that moderate journal; conservative publications, on the other hand, not only unanimously support the impeachment but speak ominously of the moral decline reflected in the general public’s loyalty to the president.

    We stand at the intersection of two apparently contradictory trends. On the one hand, the resignations of Joint Chiefs and House Speaker nominees on the basis of revelations of distant adulteries give evidence of a growing “puritanism.” On the other, the ever-increasing explicitness of sexual discourse betrays increase in “licentiousness.” We have the word of Larry Flynt that he and Kenneth Starr should switch jobs, because Flynt can buy sexual confessions more cheaply whereas Starr has been more effective in making the stuff of pornography available to the general public. The two trends are not really opposite at all. They reach their common limit when, discourse having come to include every sexual act we have performed, no one can withstand public scrutiny. What is being maximized under these contradictory names is our mimetic fascination with and resentment of each other’s pleasures.

    The claim of moral decline is inseparable from the topos of the “golden age” or the “good old days” inherent in culture’s deferral of violence. All representation creates a utopia of lost presence. The originary “presence” of the central object on the scene of language is experienced as its absence from the world of appropriation; this pattern is repeated throughout history. The distinctions that defer mimetic conflict are never as absolute as the differences of the past; the ethic they define is looser, less dignified. Dignity is a quality of ritual hierarchy; it does not comport well with the unpredictable interactions of history’s movement toward equality.

    The ambivalence of our moral relationship to the past may be made clearer by comparing Clinton with two Democratic predecessors: John F. Kennedy and Harry S. Truman. One need not be an apologist for Clinton’s disgraceful behavior with Monica Lewinsky to find it an improvement over the steady stream of prostitutes brought into the White House to fuel Kennedy’s sexual urges. These unpublicized commercial transactions had none of the ambiguous sentimentality of Clinton’s affair; the women had no incentive to reveal these experiences and would no doubt have suffered had they done so. Some would say that this historical evolution represents a decline in public morality; Kennedy’s improper activities were kept out of the public view whereas today one can’t let one’s children watch the news. I think rather that indignity is the price we pay for a higher level of reciprocity in human relations. What makes the aristocratic Kennedy-prostitute relation more dignified than the messy Clinton-Lewinsky one is that the latter pair are on a footing of greater equality. That Kennedy’s womanizing is never mentioned in the same breath with Clinton’s only reflects the vestigial respect for sacred difference that is the basis of all nostalgia.

    In contrast to Kennedy’s White House whoring, Harry Truman’s upright and unpretentious lifestyle is probably what most people associate with the “good old days.” One cannot imagine old Harry, who wrote love-letters to his wife for sixty years, responding to some intern’s thong underwear. Both Truman and Clinton, as opposed to the wealthy Kennedy, are men of the people, but the man from Hope cuts a poor figure beside the man from Independence.

    Yet we must allow that the temptations set before the contemporary “man of the people” are far more varied and insidious than those available to one of Truman’s generation. However much we may admire Truman’s conjugal fidelity, we need models of behavior that resist and overcome these temptations rather than simply antedating them. It is a sign of humility and not merely of fecklessness that we are chary of casting the first stone. Our outrage at Clinton’s conduct is tempered by a sense that moral indignation is more often indicative of hypocrisy than purity. To laugh at Lewinsky jokes is to experience the ambiguous morality of the witness of sexual guilt. Those who accuse Kenneth Starr of pursuing Clinton as a means of expressing his fantasies while at the same time denying them are condemning less Starr than themselves.

    Moral debates of this sort are ultimately about human survival. Nostalgia for order is not mere narcissism; we resist the breakdown of old differences lest it lead to the breakdown of the social order itself in a Hobbesian war of all against all. What I would call the “generative” view sees the historical dissolution of differences as reducing rather than increasing resentment. Through the consumer activities scorned or neglected by the nostalgics the fall of formal barriers creates more difference than it destroys; rigid hierarchies give way to nuanced distinctions created by individuals themselves through the countless choices that make up their lifestyle. Yet one can recognize the benefits of consumer society and nonetheless express doubt as to its survivability. The spread of “weapons of mass destruction” is an inevitable corollary of the postmodern expansion of consumer choice. Harry Truman, whose lifestyle harked back to simpler days, also marked the limit of our future; he was and hopefully will remain the only person to order the use of nuclear weapons.

    The only lesson of history is to avoid the end of history. The progress of human culture is, pace our sociobiologists, not a blind Darwinian evolution but the development of ever more efficient means of deferring mimetic violence. And among those means is the one we are about to see implemented in Washington.

    The founders of the American republic were astute anthropologists in their own right who recognized the need for procedures to generate unanimity when parties or factions cannot agree. Where it is impossible to reach through compromise a single political judgment, the mechanisms of democracy implement unity on a second level; to settle an issue by counting votes is to refound communal unity by affirming our “equal” descent from our common scene of origin.

    I think it was fidelity to this intuition rather than pressure from the demonized “right wing” that led moderate House Republicans to support impeachment as an apt means for resolving the current dispute. A judicial decision is based in principle on the evidence alone; a political vote frankly reflects ideological differences. Because the trial that follows impeachment is decided by a body of elected officials, it partakes of both the judicial and political processes. Overwhelming evidence of crime would trump political division, but Clinton’s is an exemplary impeachment in that the evidence is not of this sort. The vagueness of the constitutional “high crimes and misdemeanors” is the product not of the founders’ negligence but of their sagacity. There is no set of objective rules to follow in deciding whether Clinton’s acts fall within this category. The two-thirds majority required to convict falls in between the unanimity of a criminal jury and the simple majority of everyday politics. Even if a majority of senators vote to convict and the president nonetheless goes free, the mechanism of judgment itself will have a pacifying effect.

    This leads me to the paradoxical conclusion that, although Clinton’s offenses are not serious enough to merit impeachment, carrying the process to its conclusion is a useful affirmation of the health of our political and national life. The fact that despite the partisan motivation of the trial the Senate has been able to reach unanimous agreement on at least its preliminary phases suggests that the cure for the salaciousness as well as the divisiveness that encumbered the news throughout 1998 is not to short-circuit the impeachment process but to carry it to its conclusion. What we need the trial to purge is less Clinton’s own disreputable risk-taking (please see Chronicle 151) than our own psychodramatic identification with it. We cannot recapture the simple dignity of Harry Truman, but we can hope for the maturity to enjoy the benefits of modern consumerism and the accompanying “sexual revolution” without losing our ability to distinguish right from wrong.