Anthropoetics

Author: staceymeeker

  • The Rhetoric of God

    We have all heard hypocrites invoke God to guarantee their selfish ends. In such cases, it is easy to take the superficial Nietzschean view of God as simply a rhetorical trick by means of which the weak can wrest power from the strong. By disguising my own will to power as the expression of God’s all-powerful will, I deal myself a card that trumps any human value.

    The grain of truth in this analysis does no discredit to religion; on the contrary, the association of God with persuasion through language provides an insight into the anthropological reality of both God and language. God and the sign of human language are inseparable; there is no reduction of God to language that is not at the same time the subordination of language to God. The flagrant weakness of Nietzsche’s analysis–which has done no harm to its popularity–is that, like all Enlightenment thinking about religion, it begs the question of separating ontology from pragmatics, truth from usefulness. If “we” are gullible enough to accept the rhetorical appeal to God, must there not be something inherent in the human use of language that makes us gullible in this way? Why and how did we acquire this gullibility? Those clever priests who used religion to usurp power from their physical superiors must have had some reason to believe that their ruse would be successful.

    Religious traditions are justly preoccupied with experiences of revelation that give historical specificity to God as the Being named by the originary sign. Rituals continually reproduce the public scene of mimetic crisis in which religion originated and whose memory must be preserved for religion to remain alive. In this scene, the polarization of mimetic desire in the center prevents appropriation and thereby defers the rivalrous hostility among the participants. But the modern world, where collective life is more nostalgia than reality, makes us skeptical of serious, let alone critical, public manifestations of desire. We look back to them as the originary crucible of our own humanity, but we no longer find in them the source of our productivity. For the originary deferral of public violence also originated the possibility of private economic activity in which the individual temporarily detaches himself from the community in order to produce goods capable of acquiring value within it. Modernity is nothing but the society that results from the domination of this operation and its regulation through the free market. In such circumstances, creativity is, if not a purely individual activity, a definitely private one; the exceptions to this rule, like sports events or rock concerts, can excite public passions only because of their reassuring marginality.

    In these circumstances, God’s presence among humans appears to be essentially a matter for the individual consciousness or “conscience.” The Cartesian moment is a key step toward recognizing the originary constitution of the self through the generation of the sign as “name of God,” but it also lends itself, via the Enlightenment “misreading” of the cogito, to the false consciousness of the self as an autonomous entity whose dependency on human interaction is merely incidental. Even theLacanian “return” to a language-constituted self takes place within the biological ambit of Freudianism, from which the human collectivity (except in the forgotten pages of Totem and Taboo) is altogether absent; the “father” imposes language on the “son,” but there is no concern for the obvious fact that this process could not have originated in the nuclear family. With or without Lacan, the modern self tends to understand God (see Chronicle 118) either as an external “anthropomorphic” being to whom I relate as to a father or king, or, in a more modern vein, as a purely “spiritual” presence within myself. These twin visions of God, apparently so different, are ultimately the same. Both depend but fail to acknowledge their dependency on the deferral of violence that sacred Being inaugurates at the origin of the human–inaugurates as the human. Both symmetrically situate Me before God, the “internal” or “external” nature of whose presence is wholly indeterminate. (The whole point of phenomenology was to do away with this kind of inside-outside distinction; no one considers God to be internal the way a toothache is internal.)

    It is no doubt a mistake to see this as a falling-away from revealed truth, the abandonment of a religious Golden Age. The collective origin of the sacred is and has always been successful precisely insofar as it is hidden; for each participant, to see only the central Being is to be preserved from the potentially deadly rivalry of the others. The hiddenness of this collective origin is itself originary; it only appears to increase with the “decline of public man” because the evolution of the exchange system provokes in us a sensitivity to the difference between the public and private spheres unavailable to our ancestors. The premodern individual defines himself in the sacrificial repetition of the originary scene; his lack of a “private” identity makes him less capable of insight into the founding role of human mimesis than his skeptical modern counterpart. No doubt the Enlightenment was, as Eric Voegelin claims, an era of “gnostic” excess, but it is a prerequisite to originary thinking.

    How then can we further our understanding of our collective origin under modern conditions? It is for this purpose that I am suggesting that we understand God neither as Being nor even as Language (whether the divine Logos or the fetishized postmodern version), but as rhetoric. The one experience of God no one can avoid is the use of his name in conversation. Believe or not, the rhetoric of God is difficult to refute. The appeal to the transcendental avoids the interpersonal rivalries of this world. What I take from you to give to God I do not give to myself. In order to reject my impersonal reference to God’s will, you must descend to the personal level and accuse me of “bad faith.”

    To affirm belief is to affirm what lies beyond language. If René Girard is less concerned than some with the identity of human origin and human language, it is because he believes in a Being beyond language. But for believer and unbeliever alike, God is accessible only through the signs by means of which he persuades us of his presence. Tartuffery aside, there are moments marked by crisis and death in which even the “unbeliever” commonly makes use of these signs, moments ranging from the proverbial foxhole (see “The Unique Source of Religion and Morality,” Anthropoetics I, 1) to wholly personal crises. At a funeral or at the bedside of a dying relative or friend, one need not be a believer to comfort a bereaved party with a reference to God’s will or to his loving care for the deceased.

    The experience that inspired this Chronicle is the yet more paradoxical case of one who does not habitually make use of divine rhetoric, but is drawn to do so, so to speak involuntarily, in circumstances of great personal significance. One way to describe Generative Anthropology is as an exploration of the minimal conditions of dialogue between “believers” and “unbelievers”–of bringing the anthropology that is religion into the orbit of secular reflection. Hence it is of great interest to me to witness the “presence of God” in my own discourse. What else, indeed, is revelation? The difference between this purely linguistic presence and the great revelations of Moses before the burning bush or Saul/Paul on the road to Damascus–in both of which God manifests himself only through language–is one not of substance but of expression. These public displays, like the visions of the resurrected Christ described in the Gospels, depend on an intimate contact between the public and the private scenes of representation that in the modern era language alone preserves.

    Rather than define the difference between “believer” and “unbeliever” as a matter of belief, we may define it in terms of rhetoric: the first habitually uses, where the second does not, the rhetoric of God. That when we find ourselves in “foxholes”–whether of death or of life, of resentment or of love–we all tend to pronounce the name of God suggests that, in extreme moments, believers and unbelievers share a common understanding of what it is to be human. Where they differ is not in their fundamental ontology but in their pragmatic sense of the value of ritual.

    The Judeo-Christian tradition is the most powerful historical locus of desacralization, but all religion is in conflict with its ritual. Ritual is the “supplement” that demonstrates its own lack; it is a reproduction that seeks to renew for its participants the experience of absolute originality. The believer nevertheless affirms the social efficacy of ritual and of its linguistic variant, the rhetoric of God. By talking of God, he hopes to bring us closer together in our otherness from him. What belongs to God is neither yours nor mine; we have no need to fight over it. Christians share the sign of the Cross that Jesus suffered for us so that we have no need to inflict it on each other. This revelation of nonagression gives cause for celebration. The churches that are growing today–not only within Christianity–are those that insist less on renewing the originary crisis than on celebrating their divine protection from it. Evangelical ecstasy is not the ecstasy of sacrifice, but that of healing.

    The unbeliever is suspicious of ritual’s disconnection from the world of profane creativity: if he disdains to profit from the rhetoric of God in everyday life, he will not make use of it in the temporary community of a church. In him Judeo-Christian iconoclasm is pushed to its limit, the commandment not to take the name of God in vain applied with the greatest rigor. When he does pronounce this name, he reproduces the surprise and the rhetorical impact of its originary use.

    To defer the name of God can be the most barren of spiritual acts. But it can also be the the most profound. This deferral is the last word of Christianity and of all religion–the most subtle form of the rhetoric of God.

     

  • The Moral Contradiction of Liberalism

    There may be other Chronicles on this subject. Much more could be said of the Bronx Romantic‘s disillusionment with liberalism.

    The academic, especially in the humanities, swims in a sea of liberalism. I too was a liberal once–we all were. There nevertheless exists a recognizable, if small, school of “neoconservatives” who have abandoned the liberalism of their parents and their youth. American liberalism as we know it is a product of the Depression; its politics of compassion was meant to provide a safety net for those unable to cope with the crises of the market system. Hence the original impetus of Rooseveltian liberalism is to promote the egalitarian moral ideal in market society as equality not of results but of opportunity. But what has not been sufficiently appreciated is that, like the Romantic utopianism derided by Marx, liberalism cannot perpetuate itself beyond its founding generation without this original intention becoming a source of “perverse incentives.” An act of compassion can promote the general welfare only when it is unanticipated by its recipients. As soon as its gift becomes an “entitlement,” it perverts the unspoken presupposition of liberalism that aid is a temporary boost designed to get its recipients back on their feet so that they may continue functioning within the market system, except when they are unequivocally incapable of doing so for reasons congenital or environmental.

    The neoconservative reaction against liberalism is not simply the result of my generation’s natural aging process; it is a reaction to the degradation of the liberal ideal. Indeed, those of my parents’ generation remained to the end unrepentant Rooseveltian liberals in a world where Rooseveltian liberalism was no longer conceivable. The neoconservative has lived through and registered the postmodern triumph of the victimary, a triumph facilitated by but ultimately incompatible with liberalism. Rush Limbaugh may not be a subtle thinker, but he has a firm grasp of the essence of post-Rooseveltian liberalism. For Limbaugh, the liberal’s promotion of real or symbolic equality for his social inferiors is in the first place a quest for moral superiority in relation to his peers. But what Limbaugh misses is that this sense of superiority is not merely a source of self-satisfaction but an epistemological guarantee. The sense that one is, however homeopathically, sacrificing what is generally considered to be one’s self-interest has become the sole proof of the rightness of one’s deed. Putting the victimary other’s needs above my own may or may not be its own reward, but it is its own justification, whether or not the other is really helped by my gesture.

    Back in the late sixties, I was a tardy member of SDS just before it entered the (Weather) underground. As a radical, I thought of liberals as hypocrites, incapable of following to the end the logic of their moral ideas; later I realized that the New Left was but a bloodier form of liberalism. The essence of both is the conviction that the results of historical human interaction, in particular those of the market system, are morally inferior to the models constructed by their individual moral judgment. Instead of taking the system of human exchange as a source of ethical truth, the liberal sees it as a necessary evil. He respects the radical’s faith in socialism, but considers humanity to be “not good enough” for the lofty socialist ideal, as though an ethical idea could be both valid and inapplicable at the same time. His is Hegel’s schöne Seele, the beautiful soul unreconciled to human reality.

    The central affirmation of GA is that our faith in our moral intuition is ultimately a faith in the moral model generated at man’s historical origin. The resentful sense of injustice that provides the energy for our drive toward moral equality is a unique product of human language and culture that has no counterpart anywhere else in the natural universe. The liberal’s self-effacement before the Other implies an ontology in which the human alone, by virtue of its use of representation, has access to the transcendental moral realm.

    Yet as an heir of the Enlightenment, the liberal prefers to deny any essential difference between man and animal, even between man and Turing machine. The Enlightenment idea that we need not believe in any historically revealed truth but can place our faith in the instrumentalism of natural science is expressed in E. O. Wilson‘s sociobiology or Steven Pinker‘s evolutionary psychology. (Please see Chronicle 135.) Whatever the value of studying either bonobos or artificial intelligence, what liberals seek in these investigations are the means to disprove any claim of human uniqueness. Their hostility to the divine guarantees offered to this uniqueness in the Western religious tradition suggests the mimetic origin of their desire. This denial of human difference was not an original component of liberalism. It reflects the postmodern exacerbation of the contradiction inherent within all human society between each individual’s absolute and certain link to the originary generation of transcendence and his relative and error-prone relationship to historical human exchange. Both morality and market exchange are products of the originary scene of representation. In its inability to bear the post-Holocaust tension between them, liberalism subjects the historically human to a moral critique beyond history.

    Liberal ethical thought contains a blatant contradiction. The liberal is a disciple of Nietzsche who believes that there is no qualitative difference between the human and the natural, and that God’s election of man is a man-made myth. In the latter’s view, the ideas of God and morality were successfully imposed by a weak but clever priesthood on strong but unsophisticated warriors. But although the authority of the Genealogy of Morals is in high demand in today’s academic marketplace, even the most Nietzschean academic liberal writes not to affirm his “will to power” but, on the contrary, to denounce all such wills in the name of a victimary version of equalitarian morality. Nietzsche was anything but PC; he was, on the contrary, the true father of Nazism, not because he endorsed antisemitism, which he abhorred, but because he denied the validity of our equalitarian moral intuition–the very intuition that his “followers” today unreflectively deploy as an all-purpose weapon against “patriarchy,” “phallogocentrism,” “eurocentrism,” “orientalism,” and what have you. Liberals are Nietzscheans in ethics, but Christians in morality: they apply “genealogy” to the former to the greater glory of the latter.

    Conservatives, in contrast, generally believe in the qualitative human difference guaranteed by God’s creation of man “in his own image.” Although some of those who have turned away from liberalism wholeheartedly accept this religious view, I think GA’s minimalism is more congenial to the neoconservative spirit. The originary hypothesis makes no postulations of supernatural powers; it “believes” only in the simultaneous emergence of God and man, the human and the sacred, the minimal conditions for which it seeks to define. The great spiritual need of our time is to bridge the gap between the historical particularism of revealed religions and the liberal-positivist denial of the central problematic of all religion: the deferral of mimetic violence. The genuine humility of which peace is made does not consist in setting ourselves on the same level as chimpanzees or dolphins, but in understanding the precariousness of the chance for self-understanding that our potential for mimetic violence has given our species, and that its danger to our survival obliges us to take.

     

  • The End of Literature and the Beginning of Literary History

    This summer New Literary History will publish an article by Anthropoetics collaborator Richard van Oort on GA and esthetic phenomenology. In conjunction with this, the editor has kindly asked me to contribute an exposition of GA as a branch of critical theory. Whence these preliminary reflections on literary history.

    * * * * *
    Literary history is an unfashionable concept today because it no longer has an interesting story to tell. (The exception is the new nations of the third world; scholarly interest in the cultures of these countries reflects their constructive vitality as well as, or rather as a result of, their victimary “post-colonial” status.) At the turn of the twentieth century, the now-forgotten Ferdinand Brunetière‘s Darwinian thesis on the “evolution of genres” had a certain plausibility. In 1960, when I began graduate study, French literature was still a vigorous, ongoing phenomenon. Today more novels are produced than ever, but if the French public continues to read them, French professors almost never do, and no one sees the French novel or any other genre as “evolving.” The postmodern cultural universe is averse to literary history, not because today’s literary productions are inferior to those of the past, but because we forbear to provide this history with material by crowning our contemporaries as masters. Culture is in the first place the assignment of roles with the ultimate goal of deferring violence through representation, and as hierarchies dissolve, so does that of the high culture.

    This dissolution reflects the victimary sensibilities that have been released into the postmodern cultural atmosphere; as continuing battles over the “canon” demonstrate, victimary thinking attacks cultural hierarchy more insistently–and more successfully–than political hierarchy. Behind the facile denunciations of the “patriarchy” of the past, it is the potential cultural hegemons of the present that one wishes to hold at bay. The literary world is fractionalized into genres produced by specialists whose expertise we can admire without having to set them above us as universal spirits. The same is true in the theoretical sphere: humanists willingly bow down to the authority-figures of psychoanalysis because “clinical” experience makes them external rather than internal to the sphere inhabited by their worshipers. It is easier to sacrifice to foreign gods than to risk elevating someone too much like ourselves.

    But if literary history as the history of literature has become unfashionable, as the assertion of the literarity of history it is so fashionable as to have become invisible. At our recent graduate student conference, when an undergraduate speaker referred to the xenophobic discourse of the French Front National, an academically innocent questioner wondered if there was not indeed some point in Le Pen‘s insistence that Arab and African immigrants were taking jobs away from native Frenchmen. At this point, my antiquated sensibilities anticipated a hostile reaction from the young but amazingly professional lecturer. But she elegantly side-stepped the question: I am neither sociologist nor economist, she said; I concern myself with discourses, not realities. Behind the diplomacy of this reply lies the scarcely questioned conviction that history is in the first place the history of discourses, such that the language of Le Pen, like that of Hitler, is best understood in relation not to its social but to its discursive context. Whatever its purportedly specific justifications, racism remains racism and is as such condemnable. This incident is one more confirmation that the Holocaust is the defining event of postmodernity. We tend to forget that since the late nineteenth century, it had been perfectly acceptable for respectable people to declare themselves antisemites. That this is no longer possible is (however little help it may be to the Jews) a genuine postmodern accomplishment that we should bear in mind when we complain about the proliferation of victimary discourses.

    Postmodernity is dominated by “literary history” precisely because, having rejected the hierarchy of the esthetic center, it can no longer boast a “literature.” If we suspect the history of facts because we see facts as secondary to the discourses that organize them, the source of this model is not some vague fin-de-siècle malaise but our historical experience of the discourse of victimization. It is no doubt significant that France suffers from high unemployment while maintaining the highest level of immigration of any European country, just as it is significant that Germany in the Weimar years suffered from ruinous inflation; but the Holocaust shows that these facts remain less important by an order of magnitude than the return of modern-day political discourse to the archaic language of demonization. Inflation, unemployment, and immigration can be lived with, however painful they may be; the enactment of sacrificial expulsion on the scale of Auschwitz cannot.

    Because the Holocaust is important not as a contingency but as a significant potentiality, not to say a necessity, of Western civilization, literary history becomes the history of the victimizing discourses not just of Hitler and Le Pen but of the “patriarchal” West as a whole. The oppositional “subaltern discourses” now being unearthed have so far been treated in a different light, but the window of victimary opportunity, which saw the end of such institutions of ascriptive hierarchy as colonialism, segregation, and apartheid, is now in the process of closing. The current critique of affirmative action corresponds to the realization that the discourses of the dominated are no less sacrificial than those of their erstwhile dominators, and often more so. Today’s more positive trend is to concern oneself with the cultures of the “borderlands” where the two discourses interact; this is a salutary development, whether it originates as an attempt to save or to expunge the victimary perspective.

    To treat political and historical discourse as the matter of history is not to show contempt for reality, but to assert that the originary structures of the human reveal themselves less clearly in the realities of social difference and the events they generate than in the ideologies with which we attempt to justify them. The high art of “literature” criticized the violence of sacrifice from within what remained a sacrificial structure; sacrificial violence was necessary because social difference was necessary. If we are no longer willing to allow the esthetic scene to subsist unchallenged, it is because the revelation that has proceeded from this scene is incompatible with our continued submission to it–a submission that ended with Auschwitz. The resentment that refuses to accept heroes of any kind finds its historical justification in the cautionary tale of Nazism: The Triumph of the Will is the West’s last serious artwork. The Christian “abolition of religion” ultimately leads to that of art as well; the self-creating individuality of Western market society can subsist only in the absence of a strong central figure.

    If the postmodern era’s victimary sensibility is the product of the Holocaust and its discrediting of the esthetic image, its postliterary culture reflects its unstoppable democratization–its generation, through the proliferation of meaning-bearing consumer goods, of the means to ever-greater reciprocity. The end of literature is the beginning of literary history because the postmodern, postliterary world is one in which our imagination no longer shields us from the presence of the Other who generates discourse and is generated by it. There are still authors and readers, but there are no longer characters. Our history will henceforth be the tale not of legendary figures but of ourselves.

     

  • Consumption as Production

    Perhaps the most remarkable retailing trend of the past few years has been the rise of semi-wholesale stores such as Smart & Final, Home Depot, or Office Depot that sell to both small businesses and the general public. Ostensibly it is the promise of lower prices that lures customers to these emporia. But a neglected factor in their success is the retail customer’s special thrill at shopping, whether or not at wholesale prices, in the same store and in the same quantities as the professionals. Those large boxes of condiments and meat patties purchased at Smart & Final make the consumer imagine that he isn’t merely consuming but “producing”: that he is a retailer buying in quantity and reselling in consumable amounts to himself. Similarly, we are attracted to “professional quality” tools and gadgets of all kinds, including small trucks and “off-road” vehicles driven around cities at huge premiums in cost and operating expenses by those who wish to imagine themselves engaged in the productive activities for which these vehicles were presumably intended. If, in the case of highly differentiated products, we professionalize consumption itself by acquiring a yuppie connoisseurship in wines, clothes, furniture, and restaurants, in that of simple commodities, we like to give ourselves the means to imagine consumption as production. (Buying fine wines by the case combines the two tendencies.) This marginal erosion of the distinction between these two economic opposites tells us something precious about the market system, and about human exchange in general.

    If paleontology has taught us one thing about human origin, it is that we must abandon the myth of homo faber. Protohumans had tools for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years before the advent of human language, their technology evolving at a glacial pace incompatible with event-driven cultural temporality. The Acheulian fisherman using a scraper is mentally far more advanced than the chimpanzee stripping a stick to poke for ants, but his problem-solving intelligence still does not reflect back upon itself. It is the event-nature of the scene of language that makes it possible to oppose production to consumption. Our originary production is the sign; our originary consumption is the sparagmos; the first defers, the second releases appetite. To produce is, in the first place, to defer consumption; conversely, consumption in the human sense exists only as the obverse of production. We produce the edible victim for the sparagmos only after we have produced the sign, that is, converted our gesture of consumption into a supplementary act of representation. Production generates peace by deferring appetite; consumption satisfies appetite but brings us to the brink of war. Whence our predilection for performing the latter while conceiving it as the former.

    It might be objected that this is not true of traditional, aristocratic society, nor of its prolongation into the nineteenth century, with its dandy and snob victims of romantic ennui. Romantics are amateurs, not professionals; even when they produce, they prefer to see themselves as consuming. The dandy doesn’t shop at Smart & Final, nor anywhere else–shopping is for servants.

    The aristocratic master of violence is incapable of understanding culture as “the deferral of violence through representation.” If the point of production is to generate peace, he subsists in a permanent state of war. Aristocratic militarism reflects the sharp dichotomy between agricultural production and exchange. The activities of tilling the soil and those of distributing its products are too divergent to sustain more than a trace of primitive egalitarianism. Yet the master’s originary model is the big-man of old, who first learned to profit from his surplus production to control the ritual center. Contrary to appearances, the noble is in the first place a producer, not a consumer. Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, with its relegation of production to the slave, is not originary. Recognition is not first given to him who inspires fear for one’s life, but to him who provides divine abundance. The separation of this provision from the physical labor of its production is a secondary phenomenon.

    The modern dandy who disdains work does not really condemn production, for production is in the first place not making but exchange. His contempt for work was shared by the Athenian democrat as well as the medieval aristocrat. In agricultural societies, the “producer” in the social sense, which is the primary human sense, is not the laborer but the noble who appropriates and redistributes the product of his labor. Although Hannah Arendt’s category of “action” is biased toward the political, it hints at the primacy of ethics–the priority of interaction with humans over interaction with nature.

    That different moments of history have different ethics is no argument for ethical relativism. Just as science and technology progress, so does ethical awareness, even if the “sentimental” reaction to this progress is at times more violent than the “naive” violence it replaces. The turn from aristocratic dandyism to a fascination with the “professional” reflects a deepened anthropological understanding. If constituted hierarchies have every reason to forget their source in the big-man’s supplementary labor, the market-system reestablishes the prestige, not of Marx’s undifferentiated “labor-power,” but of professional qualification. As a general rule, we produce one thing but consume many things. We are professional in one narrow area and amateur in all others. The dream of consumption as production allows us to retain our source of income while remaining able to imagine ourselves as “Renaissance men,” as significant producers in every sphere.

    I have noted more than once in these Chronicles that modern market society attaches to its products wherever it can a supplementary sign of sacrality, a proof that the merchandise it is selling us was not really meant for the marketplace: “The priceless always costs a little more.” But this sacred aura is paradoxically shared by the professional who devotes all his efforts to the marketplace. The professional, to borrow Alexander Kojève’s terminology, is the “freed slave” of bourgeois society who understands how to extract human value from the world better than his former master. The cult of professionalism respects one who brings measurable value to human interaction. When I use my “professional strength” cleaner, I imagine that in cleaning my house I am performing a marketable task, just as does the boy shooting baskets in his Michael Jordan athletic shoes.

    As I pointed out a propos of The Full Monty, there is no hard-and-fast distinction in mature market society between the activities of production and those of consumption; it all depends on what the public is willing to pay for. Emma Bovary anticipates this trend, as her story anticipates so many other aspects of contemporary consumer society. When, still a faithful wife, she hesitates to embark on her fatal horseback ride with Rodolphe, it was the prospect of purchasing a riding-costume that convinced her–l’amazone la décida. But if nineteenth-century Emma had only one place to shop–the boutique of “draper” Lheureux–today you’re likely to find her counterpart at Office Depot or Staples, buying office supplies for her home office.  

     

  • Mind and Brain

    Few philosophical controversies better illustrate the French expression dialogue de sourds [dialogue of the deaf] than the “mind-brain problem.” The two camps are typically represented in the April 6 Weekly Standard review by Stephen Barr of Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, Edmund O. Wilson‘s latest sociobiological treatise. In one corner, we have either the hard-headed scientist, Wilson or Steven Pinker, or the scientiste, the humanistic adept of scientism, say, Daniel Dennett. In the other, we have someone like the WS reviewer, who finds his adversary wanting, but proposes no rational alternative beyond metaphysical dualism in which the source of the second, non-material kind of reality is never explained. Such veiled appeals to the supernatural appropriately call forth Aesop’s well-known moral: “the gods help those who help themselves.” Theories are not “truths” but models; the complaint that a theory explains some things but not everything is valid only as a preliminary to a more inclusive theory.

    In a world that can no longer accept the historical particularism of religious thought, “mind” is presumably the last obstacle in the path of the all-conquering juggernaut of biological reductionism. An optical instrument can measure the wavelength of the color red far more precisely than you or I, but it can’t have the “experience of red” that defines us as having a “mind.” How many times, in how many ways have we heard this argument? John Searle‘s improved version, if I recall correctly, compares a computer translating English into Chinese to a room full of people mechanically placing and ordering signs in accordance with programmed instructions, with no one knowing the sense of all of the signs so as to be able to understand the result. No doubt the computer lacks our experience of language, but a subjective description of the difference between computers and people will not save us from objective bio-reductionism. A minimal definition of the specificity of the human should not be concerned with uncommunicable entities like the “experience of red” or even the “experience of language.”

    Although it is not apparent at first glance, the mind-brain controversy is a pseudo-empirical variant of the controversy over the “existence of God”, in which the idea of “existence,” which refers to worldly realities, is applied to the Being that stands behind the “other-worldly” realities that are the signs of language. There is no “other world” where the Ideas pass before the fire that projects their shadows on the wall of the cave. Signs are ideal entities that don’t “exist” at all. That such entities are not “natural” does not make them “supernatural,” which is only a mystified variety of “natural.” Signs are not things but relations within a network of human communication. The idea of the linguistic sign is the most inexpressible of all ideas because it is the simplest–the minimal idea. Which means that we should attempt to minimize the language with which we describe it, not create a whole new ontology sitting up there in the sky.

    As Wittgenstein enjoyed noting, “experience” is a funny category. Whether I call out or say I’m hurting, not even Bill Clinton can “feel my pain.” You can never know what I feel; for example, you can never know how it feels to me to see the color red. Maybe when I see red I have exactly the same visual experience that you have when you see blue. But whatever my experience, I can communicate either color to you with a sign. Although signs are learned individually by individual minds, they don’t subsist in these minds, but in the sphere of their communication. The point of the sign isn’t to convey my or your experience, but to permit us to communicate about what is important to the linguistic community. We accept the verdict of the dictionary because we see it as the spokesman for this community; even when we disagree with it, it’s not because of what the word “means to us” but because of our perception of its common meaning.

    Animals too have “experiences” and we may claim if we like that they have “minds.” But as Descartes’ cogito ergo sum suggests, the core of the mind-brain controversy is the sign. The self-conscious self is the sign-using self; we become conscious of our selves only when we can talk about them, and we talk about them in the first place to others. The yuppie who defines himself through his consumption of objects available to all is the heir of the self that constructs itself from language available to all. When we speak with Sartre of a “prereflexive cogito,” we lose sight of the essential connection between human self-consciousness and language. The human self is a user of signs in a community of like selves, with all the uncertainty that such an individual-collective entity suggests. Yet the arrogant dismissal of this truth by the overweening bourgeois Self should nonetheless not lead us, however understandably, to affirm that we have no selves at all.

    The brain as an organ cannot account for the mind because “mind” is not something physical contained within the brain, even the brains of the entire population. It is a virtual, interpersonal reality that subsists in human culture and in which we participate. Our certitude that we are thinking beings is not illusory; but the instruments of our thought are signs that we share with others and that have no meaning outside of this interaction. To use words, or any other form of representation, is to participate virtually in the communal scene of representation. We each have our own thoughts but, in contrast with an emotion, there is nothing “private” about a thought.

    Computers can now beat grandmasters at chess; can they be taught to “talk”? can they really “think”? can they at some point acquire self-consciousness? Emotions have a reassuringly physiological component. Fear makes our skin contract and activates our sweat glands; for a “cyborg” to have a comparable reaction, it would have to have a mammal-like nervous system, at which point its distinction from a human would truly start to become problematic. But what about thinking? To the extent that thinking is the formal manipulation of symbols, computers can indeed “think” much faster and better than we do. But that is not what we mean by “thinking.” To think is not simply to perform logical operations; it is to seek to represent what in our experience, whether of the natural or of the human world, has not yet been satisfactorily represented. What is human in thinking is not “the experience of thinking” but, on the contrary, the reduction of experience to thought, to language. This is not a task a computer can perform in any but a trivial sense.

    The much misunderstood cogito offers a minimal example. A computer can easily be programmed to deduce “I think, therefore I am”; it suffices that its data base contain the notion that only existing things can perform such tasks as thinking. To think implies existence; only an existent being can think; I am thinking, therefore I am, QED. But that is not the point of the cogito. It is that I understand my own existence only insofar as I conceive thoughts, representations in principle shared by others. My being, in other words, is not wholly contained in myself, but implies the existence of a human community. It is the implicit existence of this community that explains the apparent non sequitur in which Descartes asserts, following the cogito, that God is too good to provide him with senses that will betray him in the normal course of events. Had this idea occurred to Descartes before the reduction to the cogito, it would have saved him a good deal of trouble; if God is worthy of confidence, then there is no urgent need to doubt the evidence of our senses. Why then was this idea not previously available? Because the kernel of the self’s certitude of being is in fact a demonstration that the individual mind knows itself only in language, through the virtual mediation of the community of which God is the guarantor. If God were unreliable, the community would not exist, nor would the enunciator of the cogito.

    The mysteries of philosophy aka metaphysics stem from its insistence on understanding its “clear and distinct” ideas as though they were givens in themselves accessible to the isolated individual instead of the derivative products of a collective revelatory event. Because metaphysics denies the ostensive source of language, it cannot conceive how language was born or how it continues to function. Nor, by the same token, can the scientistes, who have fetishized the objective scene of metaphysics into a reductionist dogma.

    If all human brains were destroyed, the word “tree” would have no more meaning for any creature. But this does not mean that the meaning of the word “tree” subsists in a set of individual brains; it belongs to a virtual communal sphere of signs and meanings. To affirm that this sphere cannot be reduced to the material world is not to countenance supernatural beings. On the contrary, it is positivism that needs either to embrace or condemn the “supernatural” because it is unable to comprehend the anthropological function of the sign. The danger in dealing with the transcendental is that we cannot talk about it without substantializing it. The intellectual ethic consonant with the reduction of the violent arbitrariness of the sacrificial consists neither in seeking a new formulation that would avoid this danger nor in denying the transcendental and its danger altogether, but in minimalizing it.

    We need not reject the intuition that tells us that computers lack “mind,” but it should be understood as a consequence of the fact that computers are, for the moment at least, unacquainted with mimetic desire and its potentially violent consequences. What programmers do about the “experience of red” doesn’t bother me; I’ll begin to be concerned when they learn how to program resentment. As any reader of science fiction knows, cyborgs are a pretty resentful bunch.

     

  • The Sign, the Thing, and Titanic (Guest Chronicler: Matthew Schneider)

    Next Wednesday is the 86th anniversary of the sinking of the British passenger liner R.M.S. Titanic. This year, the nation’s attention will be more intensely focused on this grim remembrance than it has for the last 84 years or so because of the runaway success of James Cameron‘s Titanic, a 3 1/2 hour fictionalization of the disaster. For the last four months the world has been gripped by Titanic fever: in March the film won 11 Academy Awards, tying the record set by Ben-Hur (1959) for most awards to a single movie. Earlier this week I heard a news report that an Australian woman has seen the film 100 times, and plans to keep returning to her neighborhood cinema until she reaches 150 showings. Purportedly the most expensive film ever made, Titanic is also the biggest money-maker ever: by the time the totals from foreign markets and video sales are all in, the film is projected to earn more than $1.2 billion.

    Every year has its movie megablockbusters, of course, but the reaction Titanic has met with is of a different magnitude than the hoopla stirred by the big films of the past few years such as Jurassic Park and Independence Day. The moviegoing public’s immediate and overwhelming response to Titanic leads one to suspect that the film somehow touches on the originary themes that these columns seek to explicate. Does GA have something to tell us about the origins of Titanic hysteria? What roles do love and resentment play in this film, now touted as the Gone with the Wind of the second half of the twentieth century?

    If pressed to account for it, film-industry insiders would probably attribute the success of Titanic to Cameron’s having infused a traditional Hollywood “epic” with a 1990s sensibility–no easy task, since ours is an era in which epic grandeur is inevitably viewed with suspicion. There is some truth to this assessment, but as I hope to show, it only hints–if you’ll pardon the pun–at the film’s deeper, originary dimensions. By cinematic standards, the film can be called an epic by virtue primarily of its length–194 minutes. Cameron also amplifies the event’s Odyssean echoes by setting the story of the sinking within a frame, in which a Titanic survivor named Rose recounts the disaster for a group of modern-day treasure hunters attempting to salvage a priceless necklace from the wreck. Rose’s is a classic love story–classic in the sense that she’s at the center of a love triangle. The competition for Rose is not, however, between equals; and in this respect Cameron updates the classic triangular configuration by infusing it with what contemporary academics like to call “issues of gender and class.” Rose defiantly smokes cigarettes and amuses herself by spitting off the side of the ship, thereby announcing herself a proto-feminist. At one corner of the love triangle stands her fiancé Cal, who embodies all the evils of patriarchy: when a waiter asks for Rose’s dinner order, Cal orders for her. At the other corner is Jack, an egalitarian bohemian, whose human authenticity is evinced by his confusion at the plethora of silverware with which he is confronted in the first-class dining salon.

    The point of this and many of the film’s stark juxtapositions of the ship’s two worlds–the stilted, sterile confines of first-class staterooms and promenades and the warm, violent confines of steerage–is to guarantee that the story has a certain kind of relevance for today’s moviegoer. In previous cinematic depictions of the Titanic disaster, the story’s relevance for its audience lay in its unquestionable capability to stir the tragic emotions of pity and fear. Perhaps spooked by reports of young people laughing at Schindler’s List, Cameron seems less confident of his audience’s ability to forge a mimetic identification with women in Victorian gowns and men in evening clothes than was the director of A Night to Remember (1953). Cameron’s solution to this problem is to evoke love for the protagonists via negativa: we are asked to love and pity Rose and Jack because everything around them, including the ship itself, is hateful. Its hatefulness, however, is not solely derived from the technological hubris that Titanic‘s builders manifested in calling the ship “unsinkable.” Cameron’s Titanic shows its hubris primarily in the human realm: consistent with the venerable literary trope of ship as microcosm of society, on this Titanic manners, refinement, and technological and architectural ostentation are the signs of what our culture views as unforgivable sins, classist and sexist oppression. For Cameron, the great ship sinks not because it symbolizes man’s overreaching, but because it is a floating anti-egalitarian institution. In interviews, Cameron has called Titanic “a cautionary tale.” To a much greater extent than in previous films based on the disaster, however, Cameron portrays the ship as itself a kind of villain, a wrongdoer who must be sacrificed in the name of progress and the common good.

    As readers of this column know, however, lurking in even the most outwardly justifiable sacrifice is always some pity for the victim; originary analysis sees this pity as a source of at least one of the varieties of love. At the film’s climax, Cameron’s Titanic pathetically groans and writhes like a wounded animal in its death throes; and, unlike other film treatments of the disaster, this one does not avert its gaze from horrible scope of the disaster. After the ship slips beneath the surface, the camera slowly pulls back to a panoramic view of the thousand or so life-jacketed people who will shortly die of exposure in the near-freezing water. Seemingly despite Cameron’s intentions, Titanic embodies the ambivalence that inevitably clings to all sacrifices, in which the demands of justice collide with the tragic emotions of pity and fear, emotions which are only a step away from love.

    But there is yet another way in which love enters into Cameron’s retelling of the sinking of Titanic, one in which mimesis also plays a crucial part and in which lies the real source of the film’s appeal. By making Titanic– again, supposedly the most expensive movie in history–Cameron realized the dream of every American boy who, introduced via the movies to the high drama and cosmic ironies of the great ship’s construction and demise, saved his weekly allowance, bought Revell’s 1/350th scale model of the RMS Titanic, built it, and sank it in the bathtub. Given the amount of pre-release publicity surrounding the making of this film, the success of a tie-in book chronicling Titanic‘s production, and the flimsiness of the love plot, one suspects that all Cameron really wanted from this film was to do again, but on a titanic scale, what he had done as a boy: build the largest and most detailed model of the Titanic ever, and then sink it. And this is, in fact, precisely what he did. Its extraordinarily high budget notwithstanding, there is comparatively little special-effects magic in Titanic: though the film employs its share of computer animation and other, more established tricks of the trade, its astonishing verisimilitude is almost entirely created by its set, a floating 9/10ths scale model of the ship itself that Cameron built next to a sleepy Mexican beach town. When Rose and Jack amble along the promenade deck, the background that recedes into the distance isn’t an illusion created by blue-screen projection, matte photography, or mirrors. The ship looks big because it is big. Having built it, Cameron then destroyed this “set” during the filming of the sinking sequences, as the lovingly faithful reproductions of the ship’s interiors were flooded one by one. The Revell model, which when I bought it cost $4.95, clearly wasn’t enough for James Cameron. He has earned this one-time model kit builder’s admiration–an admiration not unmixed with envy–for persuading others to finance the most elaborate and expensive modeling project the world has ever seen.

    I have commented several times on some of the differences between Cameron’s Titanic and previous representations of this memorable story. Finally, though, the difference between Cameron’s film and the others lies in the degree to which this director has followed what we might call the originary imperative to minimize representational deferral, to transcend the sign and become the thing itself. In Poetics Aristotle wrote that “the habit of imitating is congenital to human beings from childhood (actually man differs from the other animals in that he is the most imitative and learns his first lessons through imitation).” The other kind of love that Titanic expresses is the love of imitation itself, the source of the child’s seemingly boundless fascination with the miniaturized world of dolls and toy trucks. From the standpoint of GA, the sexiness of its stars–the teenage heartthrob appeal of Leonardo Di Caprio, for instance–alone cannot explain Titanic‘s appeal and staying power.

    My point is not to denigrate Titanic or those who, perhaps for the first time, have been touched by what happened on that cold April night 86 years ago. As Cameron reminded the viewers of the Academy Awards ceremony, behind his film and its phenomenal success is an actuality of unfathomable horror–more than 1500 people lost their lives. The pathos alone of that actuality is insufficient, however, to account for the film’s success; the secret of its appeal lies in the potent mix of love and resentment–the titanic forces that emerge in the event of human origin–that Titanic manages to evoke.

     

  • The Full Monty

    A successful film, especially a successful low-budget film, is always more than the film itself; we are forced to interpret such films not as self-enclosed artworks, but as cultural events. Unanticipated popularity reminds the remaining connoisseurs of well-wrought urns that all cultural activity, public or private, takes place as an event on the scene of representation. We should not need a specialized “esthetic of reception” to sensitize us to the interactive nature of art of all kinds.

    The Full Monty, a low-budget British “ethnic” film, was the sleeper of the 1997 season. Its success suggests some new revelation, as is almost too obvious in a film whose title refers to the most elemental kind of revelation. But nothing is in fact revealed. As a curious coincidence, I saw the film just after reading Jean Baudrillard‘s book On Seduction, where he rejects the critique of our culture’s phallocentrism by affirming that what the French call “the feminine”–not to be confused with the female–is and always has enjoyed sexual dominance. According to the inevitable genital metaphor, feminine sexuality is constant and confidently assumed, whereas its masculine counterpart affirms itself in an unstable striving that cannot be maintained. (Of course, the metaphor can be made to imply just the opposite, as has traditionally been the case; the explanation of human relations through the interactions of our sex organs can only be carried out a posteriori.)

    The originality of The Full Monty is in its good-humored acceptance of the dominance of “the feminine” as a new, inverted starting point for male empowerment. In contrast to facile inversions of the Xena Warrior Princess variety that, in subordinating the male, resentfully reinforce unawares the dominance of “the masculine” (for, pace Lucy Lawless, women remain smaller and weaker than men), here the world would seem to have truly come full circle. Men having been rendered impotent, they can reestablish their public status and, presumably, their breadwinner role by engaging in a form of sexual display traditionally reserved to women. But whereas the “nothingness” of the woman’s genitals is the very core of her erotic power, that of her male counterpart is a comic deflation of the erotic in general. That the male organ is as much “nothing” as the female at the same time confirms and demystifies the Lacanian view of the Phallus as the unrealizable Penis-Ideal. The Full Monty is the reductio ad absurdum of the modern myth that human desire is sexual before it is mimetic.

    Flaubert’s Madame Bovary was revolutionary in its time, not for centering its universe around a woman, but for incarnating a “feminine” world-view. Emma herself is more “masculine” than the world secreted by Flaubert’s style, with its reliance on repetition and cliché. Critics always remark that her desires are copied from romantic novels, but Flaubert’s point is that all desires are, so to speak, copied from romantic novels; his originality was to develop a novelistic vision in which this is revealed, not as an exception, but as an inevitability. The other side of the coin, which critics have neglected, is that in Emma’s world the desires found in these novels can be expressed, if not satisfied, in the world of consumption. Emma’s death, we should recall, is caused by bankruptcy, not heartbreak. Her second lover, Léon, was himself an object of consumption, and had her funds not run out, Emma would no doubt have replaced him by a third. This is still a world in which Emma, not Léon, is shown taking off her clothes, but it is already one in which the model of the male producer has been replaced by that of the female consumer.

    Unlike Balzac or Dickens, Flaubert never takes the world of work seriously. His is a world of consumption, not production, which somehow takes place despite the utter incapacity of any of the characters to produce anything. This world’s “successes,” notably M. Homais who receives la croix d’honneur in the last words of the novel, are schoolboy caricatures of adults, incarnations of the resentment of one who has no clue of how economic value is created. But at least they have the outward appearance and appurtenances of productivity. This trace of “realism” in the good old Lukacsian sense is no longer honored by the hyper-Flaubertian model of the world provided by The Full Monty, in which there is no productivity whatsoever. The only people we see actually producing anything are the steelworkers in the publicity clip that begins the film and that sets its tone by antithesis. Those were the days of manly toil in the fabrication of the manliest of metals. Today, the steel mills are deserted, and their only function is as a repository of girders to filch, as in the opening scene of the story–from steel mills to steal mills, so to speak.

    For the rest, nearly all the people we see working are government bureaucrats: the police and the welfare employees distributing the dole. When one of the male characters does find a job, it is as a security guard in one of those megastores that combine Safeway with Walmart. This suggests a corollary economic observation. We see our guard, a worker in the most unproductive of professions, walking through well-stocked aisles of practically everything. Clearly the point is that while production seems to have disappeared, consumption is doing very well. Sheffield may have lost its steel mills, but it is by no means unprosperous. It is only the heroes of the film, chronically unemployed former steel workers, who are shown as suffering. And for them too, security guard positions no doubt beckon for those willing to take them. Watching others consume is a serious occupation, however painful for former producers. Is it the women who work? Certainly they have money to spend, in the store and at the strip club. But we are not asked to concern ourselves with their source of income. The dominance of the “feminine” is displayed by the inversion of the “masculine” world of hard physical labor into a world dominated by consumption. The strip club is the former workmen’s clubhouse and, in one significant scene, what had been a men’s room is inspected with a conquering air by a group of women, one of whom pulls down her pants and pretends to urinate in modo virili.

    The title of the film refers to the decision of the male strippers not to end with a G-string but to go “the full Monty.” Thus “the full Monty” means, in effect, nothing, the nothing that they will strip down to. The once-redoubtable revelation of the phallus is now understood in purely negative terms: “fullness” is that of the clothing to be removed, not that of the thing itself. When the former foreman, the oldest of the group, worries that, as in a past experience on the beach, he might get a “stiffie,” the others suggest thoughts to help avoid this eventuality. But we understand that this is an old-fashioned concern, a relic of the patriarchy; the phallus is by now so far from the penis that we can scarcely imagine our heroes, confronted by their aggressively cheering audience, in a state of erection. Indeed, whereas their performance was anticipated to be a simple inversion of female stripping, with male performers and a female audience, the actual audience for their show is mixed. There is no real difference any more between the sexes, just between their reversed “positions.” In contrast with the old opposition between (dominant) male producers and (subordinate) female consumers, we now have the opposition between (dominant) female consumers and (subordinate) male self-displayers. One can make money and even, like the chief protagonist (played by Robert Carlyle), become an acceptable father to one’s son, if one learns to go “the full Monty” in accepting this new set of roles. Whereas in the past, female display was part of the standard sexual ritual–we have all learned by now that women’s prominent breasts were selected as an advertisement of sexual suitability–now males display their non-masculinity, which paradoxically has become a new equivalent of sexual, or at least social, suitability. Playing the traditional “feminine” role has become the sign of accession to the new consumer-dominated society, where production has been replaced by comic-sacrificial self-display.

    The unmanned world of The Full Monty is not exactly a dystopia. In fact, it is more of a utopia, as worlds with happy endings usually are. The end of the era of “man’s work” is depicted as an era of prosperity with no work at all. The only obstacle to participation in this prosperity, the film tells us, is refusal to go The Full Monty, to abandon all reserve toward this society’s “feminine” values. Instead of the “masculine” domination of culture by nature, we are asked to believe in a world in which the only physical nature we need deal with is our own. Yet however much we may want to believe with Baudrillard that the modern market system no longer allows for any distinction between reality and simulation, the only way to have consumption is to have production. I hate to sound like a neo-Marxist, but I wonder if there is not some connection between this emasculated vision of modern society and an economic neocolonialism that does its manufacturing either in third-world countries or in factories peopled by third-world immigrants.

    All culture makes the utopian claim to provide human experience with meaning on the model of its unique operation: the deferral of violence through representation. In the tragic tradition, the protagonist’s life receives meaning from its encounter with the human propensity to mimetic violence. Now we have come full circle, and we dream of a culture so powerful that it can generate not only peace but economic value from the enactment of its own denial, as though it sufficed to take off one’s clothes to be transported back to the plenitude of Eden.

    The final shot does not dwell on the dancers. It shows them from behind as they reveal their nakedness, but gives us no time to savor their triumph or hear the cheers of the crowd. The genius of the film is to cut off the action before we begin to ask ourselves whether we too want to see the nothingness of what they are displaying to the audience–which would oblige us to ask ourselves who is triumphing over whom. The myth of The Full Monty is not that of the infinite value of our naked selves, but the equally utopian construction that attributes infinite value to the revelation of our valuelessness.

     

  • Our Oral Culture

    The postwar revision of the traditional relationship between speech and writing was inaugurated by Roland Barthes’ Le degré zéro de l’écriture [Writing Degree Zero] (1953), which first gave prominence to the term écriture, defined in opposition to style as an impersonal and so to speak unconscious set of language elements that presuppose without affirming a certain vision of the world. (One tends to forget that Barthes’ primary example of écriture was the langue de bois of Stalinism.) “Style” was, in spirit if not in practice, and however ironic the etymology, oral. The writer’s style expressed the presence of “l’homme même” [the man himself] whereas écriture was always an absence. In Le degré zéro, Barthes seeks the reduction of this absent power to the “zero degree” (as maximally approached by the dead-pan writing of Camus’ The Stranger), but it is the power that centrally preoccupies him.

    Fifteen years later, Jacques Derrida‘s De la grammatologie (1968) presents writing, in opposition to speech, as the heretofore-rejected and now-to-be-favored model of language. Speech fosters the illusion of self-presence and mastery of the logos, whereas writing openly displays its deferring, supplementary nature. For this reason, Western metaphysics from its inauguration with Plato through its modern rewriting by Rousseau to its transformation into the exemplary human science by Saussure has always “expelled” writing, relegating it to the role of a mere auxiliary to speech. The prestige of The Book, Bible, Koran or other, is as recorded speech, not as writing per se. Barthes in his later Plaisir du texte (1973) reflects, in a less rigorous discursive mode, the enhanced prestige of what he now calls the “scriptible” or “writeable” as opposed to the readable / lisible. The readable provides a passive pleasure, the esthetic analogue to the security of the illusory presence that Derrida attributes to metaphysics. But the scriptible, the “writerly,” procures jouissance, orgasm/ ecstasy; its self-aware non-correspondence with any prior reality invites the reader to construct its meaning for himself.

    Turning the tables on unexamined certitudes like “phallogocentrism” is the very soul of rhetoric, the “art of persuasion,” which functions by arousing our resentment against what it presents as a heretofore unchallenged usurpation of central authority. The championing of writing over speech exemplifies as well the duplicity that has always been associated with rhetoric. As one condemns the illegitimate centrality of the adversary in order to legitimate one’s own centralizing claim, the pretense of modesty is de rigueur, to wit, Shakespeare’s Antony: “I am no orator, as Brutus is.” But when the attack is a universal denial of the illegitimate centrality of rhetoric–speech–itself, rhetorical duplicity becomes properly foundational, a substitute for originary paradox. Différance may differ “unspeakably” from différence, but the term was in fact first promulgated in a speech (Derrida’s lecture on la différance to the Collège de philosophie). The postmodern attack on the logos and its “subject” has been accompanied by, not to say driven by, a drastic increase in the orality of the academic culture within which it has flourished–particularly that of the US, where deconstruction has remained since the early 70s far more influential than in France.

    What do I mean by “orality”? I need only cite the familiar adage that describes today’s academic world far better than the naive–and largely obsolete–”publish or perish”: “it’s not what you know, it’s whom you know” (or “who you know,” in the non-academic version). “What you know” = writing; “whom you know” = speech. As the Humanities job market continues to stagnate in conjunction with a still-expanding pool of candidates, the pressure to engage in personal networking is ever more inexorable. Today’s graduate students are far more active in the profession than the junior faculty–indeed, any faculty–a generation ago. When I chaired my department in the early 80s, my junior colleagues helped me to put on a yearly one-day colloquium. Now our graduate students all by themselves put on a yearly three-day colloquium. With such a beginning to one’s career, it is easy to imagine life on the professional summit. Successful academics may attend a dozen or more prestigious conferences a year, invitations to which are obtained not through the solitary labor of écriture but face to face and phone to phone. The link between the domination of the Humanities by a “media elite” and the critique of the self-present subject of the logos can hardly be coincidental.

    In saying this, I imply no conspiracy. The “death of the subject” that the promotion of writing over speech implies reflects the general evolution of the mature market system. Claims of central authority polarize resentment and block the circulation of discourses through which the exchange system functions. To promote writing over speech undercuts the authority of the center. Yet the center is still there. The relationship between the audience and the central speaker at an academic lecture is the same as it was at the beginning of hierarchical society: one person speaks, all others are silent. Those who make their reputations as participants in conferences have renounced none of their privileges by denying the authority of their own presence. On the contrary, to claim authority is to lose it; if one needs to claim it, one does not have it. To deny it is the true proof that one has it.

    But to denounce the phallogocentric authority of speech is to renounce anthropological understanding of the communication that speech, or writing for that matter, effects. Language is fetishized, set up as an independent force. Those who smile knowingly at Marx’s denunciation of the liberal bourgeoisie for pretending that its universalist morality was more than a mask for class-bound self-interest listen approvingly to speakers who denounce the pretensions of speech. Although language speaks through the speaker, he or she gets the honorarium.

    The speaker’s “presence” is not an artifact of metaphysics; it is an originary anthropological reality. But the notion of logocentric presence conflates two distinct elements of the originary scene: the externally observed presence of the central being, which is the effect of its sacred inaccessibility, and the “self-presence” of the emitters of the sign, which is not self-absorption but presence to the central object that it designates. The self-presence of speech is self-alienation; I am “present to myself” only in the sense that the sign as the name-of-God expresses my ecstatic dispossession by the Being to which it refers. It is just this ostensive ecstasy that is suppressed by metaphysics in the name of the harmony-bringing Idea.

    Derrida’s own visit to UCLA a few years ago was a media event; people who had no idea of his writings sought out the presence of the Great Thinker. Such phenomena can only be explained by an anthropological rather than metaphysical model of presence. The speaker’s presence before the community permits the deferral of violence. The central locus from which he speaks is undecidably that of the victim and that of the divinity to whom the victim is sacrificed. To occupy that locus is to risk the horror of the sparagmos in the hope of furnishing the community with the goods for the feast. The speaker, like the “big-man” at the origin of hierarchical society, is the originary provider of the sacrifice who is thereby authorized to speak in the name of the divinity.

    To stand before an audience is always to usurp the place of the divinity and its victim. In order to seek the audience’s indulgence for this usurpation, one claims to speak only from the margin of the “logocentric” scene. The audience is to focus its hostile energy on the real central locus of phallic power and forget the speaker’s presence on the periphery. Everything is done to prevent us from noticing that, as soon as one begins to speak, the scene shifts and recenters on the speaker. The Freudian fantasy of killing the Father is enacted once again to the benefit of the Son.

    One does not give speeches to oneself; the speaker’s potency does not derive from solipsistic self-presence but from presence to the community. The illusion of self-presence that Derrida sees as the essential blind spot of metaphysics is the originary cultural illusion: the illusion of unmediated subject-object interaction. It is a variant formulation of the constitutive “illusion” of the sacred center: the existence of sacred Being independent of human desire and representation. As in those countless fantasy movies (The Fifth Dimension is a recent example) in which one must place a number of stones in a circle in order to make the divinity appear, the power of the center can manifest itself only in the peripheral presence of human desire.

    Derrida’s notion of différance or deferral relies on Saussure’s notion that the sign only signifies through its difference from other signs, that it cannot itself point to its worldly referent. But différance is prior to the Saussurean differentiation of signs; it is its cause rather than its effect. The primary difference of the sign is its difference in kind from its object. The word defers the thing and, in that space of deferral, generates the thing’s transcendent Being. I cannot be “present” to my speech, not because my word’s meaning is deferred by other words, but because my word’s meaning is constituted by deferral itself. The separation of the sign from its referent would be a merely worldly separation, like that of the appetitive gesture of appropriation from its intended object, did it not generate the ontological separation between the object itself and its transcendental Idea or signified. Once the sign has been emitted, the referent is no longer merely a thing; it is inhabited by its difference from Itself. It can be destroyed and eaten as a victim now that the “real” object of desire is no longer present in this world.

    All language is “writing,” deferral of central, present Being. But charismatic speech never claims central authority for itself. On the contrary, the speaker is our leader (Duce, Führer) who effects our Exodus to the Promised Land by liberating us from the illegitimate usurpation of the scenic center, be it by Pharaoh, “The International Jew,” or the phallogocentric patriarchy.

    But wait, my reader may say, the aim of the writer of these lines is no different: to lead us from the Egypt of deconstruction to the Promised Land of Generative Anthropology. No doubt. But rather than deny the communicative presence of discourse as a metaphysical claim, we should concern ourselves to minimize it as an anthropological reality. It is sacrificial violence that is our real original sin, and that we must always do our best to minimize. The net-surfers who read these words are in a far better position to defend themselves against this violence than those who participate in the academic equivalent of the sacrificial feast.

     

  • What is an Author?

    Michel Foucault’s essay “What is an Author?” has been one of his most widely read pieces since its appearance in Josué Harari’s Textual Strategies (Cornell, 1979), and it was as such that I recently encountered it in my department’s introductory literary theory course. Through what in another vocabulary we might call its “deconstruction” of the concept of “author,” this essay signals a sea-change in the way in which we read and interpret texts. Roughly speaking, instead of understanding the text as an emanation of the author’s unitary intention, we are to situate it in the context of the “discursive practices” of its time, which allow certain things to be said, certain “subject-positions” to be maintained, among which is the historically determined “author-function.” Foucault, unlike Derrida, does not seek to tease out of the self-contradictions of these practices the paradoxical cultural mechanism that lies behind them; he is not a fundamental anthropologist. His intention is less to propose a new way of reading than to articulate an epochal change that is already taking place. But lest this reference to intention might appear to challenge his thesis–or to reveal the naivete of my own habits of reading–I will not pursue this line of argument. Surely a theoretical metatext need not follow the same rules, or be read by the same method, as the texts to whose reading it refers. The question as to whether Foucault is indeed the “author” of this essay may be dismissed as perverse, since his text expounds a clear, logical idea that may be read like any discourse on method.

    Or does it?

    True to his historical method, Foucault notes the dichotomization of the unitary notion of authorship as authority in early modern Europe. In the place of the old indiscriminate guarantee given by the author as “father” of his text, different criteria are henceforth appropriate to different families of texts. On the one hand, scientific discourse stands or falls by its internal logic; on the other, literary discourse bears the imprint not merely of authority but of the author’s unique creative intuition. We should note that Foucault’s exclusively discursive orientation leads him to omit from consideration the most fundamental category of textual authority: that of the witness, whose authority comes not from subjective but from objective experience. Memoirs of people involved in historically important or simply unusual events always find an audience. These authors have authority because they were where we were not; however banal the form of their texts, their content prevents them from being reduced to the mere intertextual play of discourses. Foucault’s notion of “discourse” tends to make us forget that discourses not merely take up positions but also convey information.

    The Greeks too had known texts sustained by logic alone; the proofs in Euclid‘s Elements did not depend on their “father”‘s authority. But in modern scientific discourse, not merely the constructions of mathematics and logic but the real world became subject to the rigor of the scientific method. Consequently, texts that did not follow this method had to be guaranteed not by their author’s mere authority but by his personal vision. Instead of being transmitted “authoritatively” from God to the reader by the intermediary of the author, the text became the reflection of a personal revelation that he alone was able to put into words.

    It is this personalized view of authorship that flourished in the Romantic era and that Foucault sees today as coming to an end. The author remains, to be sure, an indispensable legal persona who owns the economic rights to his text and stands responsible for it before the law. What is new is that this external relationship of possession is no longer deemed to correspond unproblematically to the authorial subject position within the text. Whatever the author’s legal status as its creator, and however the “implied author” may trumpet his authorial identity (today, such trumpeting would probably be perceived as ironic), the text is understood not as a unitary emanation of a unique intention, but as an “intertextual” matrix of pre-existent discourses woven together, to use the familiar text = tissue metaphor, according to discursive practices over whose overt and implicit rules no individual has more than marginal control.

    What is at stake here is but another moment of the eternal dialectic between the world of signs and the world of things, les mots et les choses. Foucault’s argument would no doubt have been clearer had he posed the problem in originary terms. Instead, his text is inextricably both a revelation about sign-systems in general and a revelation about our historical self-consciousness of these systems. Its factual, indeed, authoritative tone–no doubt the secret of its popularity–implies an irreversible passage from illusion to reality: the romantic notion of the author is a myth and our current anti-authorialism, a demystifying step toward the truth. Yet at the same time, the periodization of “épistémès” in the absence of any transhistorical truth-criterion implies that we are simply witnessing the passage from one arbitrary mode to another. The “death of the author” is one more revelation that the sign never reveals the thing, the map is never the territory; but this very disillusion is itself no revelation of ultimate truth, merely another illusion like the others. This paradoxical mode of thought is far more clearly articulated by Derrida, who always remains in the margins of the same phallogo-metaphysical center, albeit at the cost of Foucault’s attention to historical specificity. Only GA, it seems, is able to synthesize the universal and the historical by beginning at the minimal origin of both.

    Should Foucault’s article then be read, in the mode of de Man‘s “blindness and insight,” as exemplifying the text’s blindness to its own laws of composition, as failing to situate its own revelations within the conceptual framework it establishes? But as de Man was wont to say of “texts,” as opposed to mere chains of arguments, Foucault’s essay contains within itself the sign of its own author’s ironic understanding of the paradox implicit in its composition.

    In the final section of his essay, Foucault introduces a new category of author, neither the impersonal author of a scientific discourse, who holds no authority outside of the logic and empirical accuracy of the text itself, nor the “personal” author of a literary discourse, whose only authority is his unique subjective experience of reality. This new category is that of the “founders of discursivity”–the French fondateurs de discursivité is no more euphonious. Foucault considers only two thinkers worthy of this designation: Marx and Freud. Not only have these writers created new “paradigms” but, as is not the case for the creators of Thomas Kuhn’s “scientific revolutions,” their followers are forced to continually “return to the origin” to reevaluate their own founding works. A new development of psychoanalysis is not merely a new development of ideas originated by Freud–it implies and requires a new reading of Freud’s works themselves. And (to a lesser extent today than in 1979, when massive state apparatuses were still devoted to their study) this is also true of the works of Marx.

    Constant rereading and reinterpreting were required by the old “authorities” as well, both literary (Homer, Shakespeare…) and philosophical (Plato, Hegel…). What is new is the scientific pretension of these new “discursivities,” which purport, to paraphrase Marx’s own famous words, not merely to speculate about the world, but to (permit us to) change it. The modern “discursivities” are, as Karl Popper and his disciples have pointed out, invulnerable to “falsification” but, unlike religions, to which they are often disparagingly compared, they provide reasonably coherent explanations of human experience without recourse to transcendental entities. In a word, they are anthropologies.

    Foucault presents this new category in a matter-of-fact manner, as though merely acquainting us with one more historical wrinkle in the concept of authorship, and then goes on to reach this Nathalie Sarraute-like conclusion:

    We would no longer hear the questions that have been rehashed for so long: “Who really spoke? […] With what authenticity or originality?” […] Instead, there would be other questions, like these: “What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? […] And behind all these questions, we would hear hardly anything but the stirring of an indifference: “What difference does it make who is speaking?” (p. 160)

    But within the category of “founders of discursivity,” it certainly does make a difference who is speaking. Marx and Freud are only two exceptions, but they are human, not divine; if they can “found discursivities,” then so can others. If a given thinker’s work is not a “discursivity,” is this inherent in the work itself, or an artifact of its reception? The thinker in question can only keep developing his ideas in hope that others will find it worth their while to prolong them. As he continues to write, he conducts himself as though he too were a “founder of discursivity.”

    It is well and good that we henceforth be expected to read discourses without recourse to the naive notion of authorship as existing equivalently and unproblematically on both sides of the barrier between reality and representation. The textual paradigm in which the author is “the same” within and outside the text is no longer acceptable. But in the case of “founders of discursivity,” what exactly does it mean that we must return to their works as the ultimate ground of each new theoretical development? What is it in “their” discourse that is not replaceable by any combination of other discourses? These are not poets whose esthetic intuition brings together unforgettable combinations of signifiers.

    It is clearly their impact not just on academic thought but on thought in general that caused Foucault to single out Marx and Freud. Their texts are traces by means of which we witness, not a historical event, but an intellectual revelation. Heidegger, Hegel, even Nietzsche, whatever their influence on professional and semi-professional intellectuals, have not deeply touched the general population and have not, therefore, transformed beyond recognition the way we think about ourselves. Darwin, however controversial he remains, founded not a “discursivity” but a branch of the natural sciences.

    The intellectual revelation, like the religious revelation, is important not in its content alone. In either case, the vision revealed by the founder has an irreversible effect on our self-conception–our anthropology. It is a unique experience of thought, not because it reflects a subjective intuition that cannot be duplicated, but because it has so affected the categories by which we think that we can no longer put ourselves in the place of the founder as he wrote his text. His words are endowed with special prestige because they not merely reflect but themselves constitute a historical event; as we read them, we experience the founding link between the world of ideas and the world of reality. As in the originary scene, the sign is the “trace” of the event, but this trace is itself the event.

    The “discursivities” are not bound by the regional limits of the human sciences; their generativity is that of the scene of representation itself. Both Marx’s contrast between infra- and superstructure and Freud’s more subtle and convoluted opposition between the conscious and the unconscious purport to reveal to us the hidden, originary nature of our relationship to the objects of our (material or sexual) desire. The founder’s intuition is that of a fundamental anthropology, a conception of the human. If every writer is a potential “founder of discursivity,” then no writer’s work can be reduced to the mere interplay of discourses held together by an “author-function.”

    This does not imply that we should forget all we have learned about the separation between words and things and go back to reading texts as emanations of a transcendental authorial intention. But the fact remains that, at the origin of the discourses or “discursivities” that we really care about, we seek, despite all caveats, something very much like this intention–a moment of equivalence between experience and signification, between word and imaginary thing, that we cannot reproduce without returning to the event in which it originated. We remain curious of authors’ lives because we are grateful for any clue that can relate worldly experience to the construction of a new cultural paradigm. The ostensive human presence that we expel from discourse as écriture returns as the experience of foundation. Conversely, the more we see a text as a mere tissue of preexistent discourses, the less it means to us, and the more we are led to deconstruct it to the point at which we encounter the founding intuitions of the discourses from which its different strands are derived. At this point, we become once again witnesses to the trace of a human experience that we respect enough to seek the reality behind it.

    But we do nothing else even in our everyday communications. Our most banal words attempt to convey an experience of emerging signification. Believers and unbelievers alike bear witness to the faith inherited from our originary ancestors that all revelatory experiences are mutually communicable, that all renew the pacifying effect of the originary sign. However incommensurable the “author-function” may be from any worldly interaction, both author and reader know each other to be, not “functions,” but human beings. What we are primarily linked to and separated from by the deferring mediation exercised by all signifying practices is not “language” or even God, but each other.

     

  • The Erotic

    In last week’s column, I touched on the question of the erotic content of the practice of body piercing. This week I would like to reexamine the question of the erotic from the standpoint of originary thinking. I say “reexamine” because my latest book, Signs of Paradox, contains a chapter on “two psychoanalytic concepts,” the erotic and the unconscious. From a strictly generative standpoint, this chapter strays in the direction of empiricism; but such “straying” is the very modus operandi of the erotic and cannot be avoided in the discussion of the subject. The minimalism of originary thinking encounters the erotic as a “temptation” that it cannot encompass but only refer to obliquely. The erotic is recalcitrant to originary theory, for the very reason that the purpose of cultural deferral is to permit it.

    We can construct a simple model of originary “triangular” or mimetic desire, but we cannot use it to predict the worldly operations of desire. My desire is mediated, in the general case, by the expressions of desire I encounter; I desire what others desire. But there is an additional component in desire, one that becomes dominant in sexual relationships, in which the desire-object itself serves as mediator. We call this component the “erotic.” Its role is clearest when this “object” is a human being, but even inert objects carry an erotic charge insofar as they may be said to figure the human Other’s self-mediation. It is the existence of this erotic component, with respect to which the search for an “originary” mediator is futile, that makes the construction of a predictive model of triangular desire impossible.

    In this conception, it is not quite accurate to say that the erotic is to the sexual as culture is to nature. If we take sexual appetite as given, what transforms this appetite into desire is the mediation of our appetite through representation. But the object of my sexual desire, however her desirability may be enhanced for me by the desires of others (to simplify matters, I will assume the until-now culturally dominant “he/I” desires “her”), does not become an erotic object until she herself reflects this desire, that is, when she shows me that she finds herself desirable, that she desires her own desirability. Erotic desire is desire for an Other whom we conceive as sharing, indeed, inaugurating, our own desire.

     Les filles au miroir

    Lesbos, terre des nuits chaudes et langoureuses,
    Qui font qu’à leurs miroirs, stérile volupté!
    Les filles aux yeux creux, de leur corps amoureuses,
    Caressent les fruits mûrs de leur nubilité…

    Charles Baudelaire – “Lesbos,” Les fleurs du mal, 1857 (one of the six condemned poems)

    [Lesbos, land of hot and languorous nights
    That incite, sterile sensuality! before their mirrors
    The hollow-eyed girls, in love with their bodies
    To caress the ripe fruits of their nubility…]

    The original title of Charles Baudelaire‘s Les fleurs du mal, arguably the most significant volume of lyric poetry of modern times, was Les lesbiennes. The first modern poet was he who dared connect the eroticism of the male spectator of female homosexuality with the Sapphic origin of lyric poetry. The condemnation of the two “lesbian” poems of the original 1857 edition illustrates the danger of an eroticism potent enough to transcend the specifics of sexual roles. In the second half of the nineteenth century, lyric poetry constitutes itself as a radical anthropological discovery principle through an act of faith in Sappho’s originary lyric consciousness. Only at the turn of the century, after Baudelaire’s doubling of this consciousness and its internal absence from without as itself an object of desire could Renée Vivien translate Baudelaire’s “Sapphic” vision into straightforward lesbian love-poetry.

    Baudelaire teaches us that man is attracted to female “narcissism,” not as emptiness is to fullness, but as the desirer of the different is to the desirer of the same. The girls caressing their “fruits mûrs” before their mirror are exemplary erotic figures in the very plurality that attests to their individual lack of Being. The space between the woman and her mirror image is the same abyss of desire as in male (auto)eroticism, but it lies between her and her own image.

    Because the erotic Other is her own mediator, she appears at first glance to inhabit a utopia of self-absorption. Freud’s theory of narcissism is based on this illusory self-sufficiency, which Girard (Des choses cachées… p. 391ff) denounces as a myth. Yet this myth of psychoanalysis is not faithful to eroticism itself. The “narcissistic” erotic object does not appear to the subject as self-sufficiently enclosed within herself; on the contrary, she is still more alienated in her desire for herself than I am in desiring her. I can at least hope to approach the object of my desire, whereas she has already approached hers to the maximum–to the closest point at which she can make out her image in the mirror. The mirror is a locus of jouissance because it is in the first place one of anxiety–that of the old queen awaiting with horror the wrinkle that will end her tenure as “the fairest one of all.”

    The myth of Narcissus who, far from inhabiting a utopia of desire, suffers until his metamorphosis a nightmarish fate comparable to that of Tantalus, reveals that the “narcissistic” self is not whole but divided. Its desire for its own reflection / representation can never be satisfied. What arouses erotic desire in the subject is not the other’s wholeness, but its relocation of desiring alienation to the abyss between itself and its own image.

    This discussion might seem to imply that Girard’s mimetic critique of the psychoanalytic model of desire attacks only a secondary component–the internal mechanism of “narcissism”–while leaving intact the Other’s self-sufficiency, not, to be sure, in the sense that she is satisfied in her desire, but in the sense that, at least, she is the sole source of the image that is her object of desire. But the image in the mirror, like all such “supplementary” doublings, reveals the flaw in this perfect complementarity. The woman loves in her image the desires, potential and real, that it attracts from without. Her self-love is not self-determined, but an appeal to public mediation–why else need she look in the mirror? The autoerotic island of the erotic mediator floats on the sea of diffuse mediations through which the world attributes to each object its value for desire. Although Freud’s remarks about the attractive woman’s “narcissism” do not constitute a wholly satisfactory theoretical model, they are not altogether without foundation. The attractive woman does “narcissistically” contemplate her own image; what draws her back to her mirror is her astonishment at being “herself” this figure of beauty to which numberless admirers have given value.

    Hence, just as the young woman caressing her fruits mûrs in the mirror is the exemplary object of erotic desire, an ugly woman admiring herself in the mirror is an object of fear and loathing or, at best, of comedy. To the very extent that her “unjustified” desire produces nevertheless a mimetic effect, we turn away in horror, just as the “homophobe” turns from the expression of male homosexual desire. This turning-away pays homage to the mimetic temptation of desire, but by the same token it thematizes our resistance to it. The degree of this resistance is a measure of our “sanity” in sharing the desires of the community. But because the erotic figure is herself our mediator, our need for the Being she incarnates may lead us to follow her beyond the values of common desire. Erotic “perversion” becomes a tribute paid by the sexual to the originary operation of desire: the generation of sacred significance.

    As Bernini’s famous statue of Saint Theresa reminds us, religious ecstasy and erotic ecstasy can take much the same form. How then shall we distinguish between eroticism and religion, eros and agapé? Erotic desire, as we have seen, is based on the reduction of the triangle of mediated desire to a relationship between desiring Self and desired Other in which the latter serves as both object and mediator. God as the originary mediator of all desire is surely the mediator of my desire for his Being.

    The Other of erotic desire loves herself as representation, as the imaginarily timeless image in the mirror. In the religious case, we attribute to God himself the timelessness of representation; the separation between God and “himself” into which the erotic imagination can insert itself is figured by the sacrificial figure, who is the originary designatum of the sign but not the bearer of its Being. God’s internal self-separation is realized theologically in the Trinity, which includes the Incarnation within the godhead itself.

    Christianity does not want our love for the Son to be erotic; the figure of appetite is conjured homeopathically through the communion wafer. But once it becomes possible to see Jesus as exemplifying the despairing desire for his own immortal essence that Lamartine extended to all mankind in his line “L’homme est un dieu tombé qui se souvient des cieux” [Man is a fallen god who remembers the heavens], it becomes conceivable that his mediation might mobilize the energy of sexual desire as well. The “sublimation” of eros into agapé occurs at the point where the object of the mediating Other’s own (self-)desire is understood not as a physical image of the desirable but an immortal “soul.”

    From the converse, spiritual, perspective, the erotic appears as a strategic short-circuiting of self-relationship: to love significance in one’s body rather than one’s soul. It is no accident that in Baudelaire’s poem, as in eroticism generally, this short-circuiting is in the first place the act of the mediating Other. Were the male subject’s sexual appetite sufficient unto itself, it would not require erotic supplementation. The whole demonology of female sexual desire finds its place here, from medieval “misogyny” to the vampiric fatal woman of the Decadence.