Author: staceymeeker

In the summer of 1995, I devoted the seventh of these Chronicles (the second most popular of all) to the phenomenon of body piercing. Recently, Tobin Siebers asked me to contribute a chapter on the subject to a book he is editing on Art and the Body. I thought it would be useful to devote another column to piercing, if only to try out a few of the ideas I expect to develop more fully in the book chapter.

All the “research” for Chronicle 7 was done on the WWW, and the same has been true this time. The Internet is not only more interactive and up-to-date than printed matter, it is the appropriate medium for an anarchic, “underground” activity like body piercing or, more broadly, “body modification” (BM). The Body Modification Ezine or BME is the best and most thorough of a number of highly professional and elaborate Web sites and publications devoted to the subject. The Almost Complete Body Piercing Links List contains at last update over 1100 links–including, I am proud to say, my Chronicle 7. BM ranges over a gamut from tattoos to castration; here I shall confine my remarks to piercing, its “middle of the road” and most characteristic form. [Note on 11/30/2009: After eleven years, the two external links above no longer function. A reader and fellow researcher, Ms. Taryn Carmody, has proposed as a replacement the informative link http://www.fragrancex.com/Fragrance-Information/the-history-of-body-modification-around-the-world.html .]

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In Chronicle 7, I considered BM in terms of the two fundamental parameters of modern consumption: as sacrificial and as semiotic. Like all consumption, but more explicitly than most, BM acquires its sacred aura through sacrifice; like all consumption, but more explicitly than most, BM conveys a “message.” This time around, I would like to explore a second level of approximation, that of the interactive context of the message that BM conveys through the sacrifice of part of one’s being. In contrast with the mid-level addressee of mainstream acts of consumption, BM characteristically focuses on the two extreme interlocutors of the modern citizen-consumer: the most intimate, one’s actual or potential sexual partner, and the most general, society as a whole. The erotic and the political, then, or, as some wag once put it, the public and the pubic.

Piercing eroticism

Lists of reasons are an affront to GA’s credo of intellectual parsimony. Whenever people allege five different reasons for some activity, there is a way of understanding all five as aspects of some more general “reason.” To say that X gets pierced because he wants to make a statement, Y because he thinks it looks nice, Z because it enhances his sexual pleasure, is fine at the level of the user survey, but it should be a basis for, not a substitute for, analytic reflection.

Many accounts of pierces, not limited to those in explicitly erogenous zones, refer to enhanced sexual pleasure as the motivation for, and a result of, the pierce. Sexuality is “physical” but, as its metaphoric generalization suggests, “sexiness” is inextricably bound up with the semiotic motivations of desire. Piercing stimulates nerve endings and, in certain places, the jewelry is in constant contact with erectile tissue. But these auxiliary benefits of piercing become available only once it has become possible to consider one’s body as a zone of “modificational” activity. Once it becomes thinkable to pierce holes in and hang rings from anywhere on my body, it is a foregone conclusion that these things will be done in such a way as to enhance erotic sensations, just as, once it is permissible to write about anything or display pictures of anything, it is inevitable that writing and displaying will be used for the same end.

The erotics of body piercing include the physical enhancement of pleasure, but this very possibility is itself a “spiritual” enhancement, a sign of the piercer’s freedom to act so as to enhance his pleasure. It is this sign that, in turn, appeals to those whom the piercer wishes to attract. The non-piercer is drawn to the piercer as to a possessor of Being. As a result, the pierced erotic couple, once formed, tends to assert its exclusivity, deriding non-piercers as inferior sexual partners.

Sometime in the year of 1997 a rabbit [participant in the newsgroup Rec.Arts.Bodyart] posted to the newsgroup about how disgusting kissing someone without a tongue piercing is once used to the adorned appendage. “You might as well just lick a slug,” stated dextra. (Queen Spako’s Slug Patch)

The pierce possesses the mark of difference, which is, needless to say in our post-deconstructive era, a supplement to the mark of a lack–the ring in the pierced hole. The erotic motivation of piercing is the intimate end of the spectrum of its relationship with desire in general. To encounter a metal ring in an intimate part of the other’s anatomy is to be reminded of the other’s sacrificial self-mastery in the very act of sexual self-abandonment. At such a moment, the ring/pierce is not a signifier in a paradigm but, like all sacrificial gestures, a self-confirming or “autoprobatory” sign that distinguishes its wearer absolutely from the non-pierced as the initiate is distinguished from the profane. This confirmation of absolute distinction can carry a powerful erotic charge.

Piercing politics

The erotics of piercing are very real, and no doubt principally dictate its progress or decline. Piercing will disappear when young people no longer find it sexually exciting, not because it functions exclusively as an aphrodisiac, but because any sign of the individually desirable is realized most concretely on the sexual plane. To be chosen as a sexual partner is to demonstrate one’s desirability the way our genes like best, by acquiring opportunity to exercise one’s “reproductive fitness.”

But the “statement” piercing makes to one’s potential sexual partners is also delivered to society as a whole. And here we encounter the curious contrast between the infinite variety of erotics and the banal finitude of politics. As the market exchange system stimulates the generation of increasingly more means for oppositional self-expression, the political content of this expression conveys increasingly less information. The body-piercer stands, in principle, in opposition to the strait-laced bourgeois “establishment,” but an establishment that permits him to pierce as it permits him so many other things is a difficult target for his criticism. The piercer’s antibourgeois paranoia and environmental outrage are rarely the fruit of much information or reflection.

The “hate tribe” Wendy says, is a name for people throughout the world who hate all aspects of this fucked up society, and express their frustration by hurting themselves, apparently adopting Nietzsche’s adage, “That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.” She refers to scarification as “battle scars” of the tribe. (Interview with a piercer, IN THE FLESH vol 1 issue 2)

For Chico State senior, Kristie Ford, piercing her body has been a simple way for her to make a statement about herself. Ford, who has had her nose, nipple, bellybutton, and ears pierced, said that she did it because she wanted to be different.

“I’m not like everyone else and I don’t want to be,” Ford said. “For me, piercing is a way that I can say to people, ‘I don’t care what you think; fuck the establishment.’”
([California State College at Chico] Orion Online)

The more body-piercers and other members of what used to be called the “counterculture” are obsessed by their own cultural activity, the less energy they have to devote to political matters. The poverty of their political statements reflects the unfocused nature of their resentment, which in turn forestalls any concrete political activity. There is a hidden complicity between the market system and its detractors.

The ideological content of adolescent revolt has become all the less political with socialism’s retreat to a bastion manned by a few tenured professors. But I do not find it a bad thing that the energy of this revolt is expended almost entirely on the personal plane. These slogans about the environment and the establishment have been around for a while, and their sterility has not prevented them from swallowing up a good deal of potentially productive energy. In contrast, acts of body modification add real information to the world. These anarchically mimetic individual activities of self-creation are what make the market system function, not just in the obvious sense, by providing new opportunities for purveyors of piercing operations and jewelry, but in the deeper one of enriching the unpredictable dialogue among members of society.

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Practitioners of BM often call themselves “modern primitives,” a term coined by BM guru Fakir Musafar and popularized in 1989 with the publication of Modern primitives : an investigation of contemporary adornment & ritual (San Francisco, CA : Re/Search Publications), and many web sites make reference to BM’s association with tribal societies. Ritual piercing, tattooing, and scarification are indeed common initiatory practices whose relative absence in modern industrial society, like that of so many things, makes it the exception rather than the rule in human history. It is easy to dismiss renewal of interest in these practices as a return to primitive sacrificial religion. But everything depends on their ethical content. The sacrifices one imposes on oneself are not comparable to those imposed by the social order. BM is comparable to the “humiliation of the flesh” practiced by mystics. Its practices are true acts of deferral, as their erotic value attests: all askesis is ultimately Girard’s “ascèse pour le désir,” whether the desire in question be worldly or celestial.

There is a further point to make about the body modifiers’ insistence on their primitive roots. The modern market system, as I pointed out recently in Chronicle 124, avoids wherever possible offering its goods to consumers as nothing but fungible commodities. Goods sold on the market acquire an aura of supplementary value from their association with the sacred exterior of the market. The goods circulated by the exchange system are figures of the sacred center inaccessible to exchange. In modern society, the primitive is a transcultural figure of the sacred, just as “nature” is.

The Romantics began the modern cult of the primitive by processing it into symbols, souvenirs, and tourist attractions. The smile with which we greet these nineteenth-century innovations today reflects the danger of banalization that always haunts the market’s assimilation of the sacred; the aura, once it reaches the mass market, is an aura no more. One area little explored outside of marketing manuals and corporate offices is that of the means of creating what Pierre Bourdieu called in a famous but condescendingly banal study “la distinction.” None of the product-signs of consumer society is a mere token; each seeks to connote distinction, whether it be as proof of the expense of energy, wisdom or, more predictably, wealth. Jean Baudrillard’s idea of consumption as the creation of meanings is only useful if we understand that all meanings are differential and distinctive; all are attempts at appropriating the unappropriable Being of the center.

The ethnological associations of BM make it a particularly potent source of la distinction. Whereas the return to nature is easily banalized into “organic food,” “natural wood finish,” “Amazon rain-forest ice cream,” and so on, in BM, the primitive imposes a supplementary, sacrificial cost: the “product-sign” must be irreversibly inscribed on the body. Instead of returning to “nature,” one returns to a state of culture in which ritual is more violent because higher forms of deferral have not yet evolved. The sacred aura of primitive ritual lends BM a staying power lacking in mere fetishes of the natural.

The forms of sacrificial culture cannot simply be assimilated to market transactions; they must be experienced “in the flesh.” No doubt this is true of other forms of consumption, such as tourism, sports, or “fitness.” “Body modification” is itself the goal of many mainstream activities, from exercise to plastic surgery. But BM’s distinction lies in making explicit the semiotic character of inscription on the body. Even the avid weight-lifter who practices “body sculpture” is inscribing on his body only the physiological effects of his exercise. His esthetic is one of instrumental effort, whereas, in foregrounding the gratuitousness of the inscribed sign, the pierced or tattooed becomes a witness to the radical “uselessness” of cultural meaning–a martyr to l’art-pour-l’art.

That BM furnishes us with a compelling model of the creation of significance in postmodern times is demonstrated above all by an unexpected feature that I dealt with in my earlier Chronicle: its generation of narrative. The WWW sites devoted to BM contain countless narratives of ordinary people’s piercing experiences: their fears, physical sensations, health problems, erotic and social concerns. These narratives, short or long, sloppily or carefully written, amateurishly or professionally formatted, form a genre not simply reducible to the banality of My Home Page. Each recounts a unique experience of significance, a peak on the curve of life. Piercing is something that nearly anyone can afford, that requires no particular talent or heroic character, yet that reveals a certain courage, undecidably physical and moral–the courage to suffer the pain of the body’s dissolution with the confidence that the body will survive and master its undoing.

It’s addictive,” [UCLA undergraduate Helen] Chang whispered. “It’s a rush.” (UCLA Daily Bruin 11/15/95)

Just as BM’s erotic potency is real, so is its narrative potency. By making the sacrificial significance of ritual and its supplementary mythic narrative accessible to the average adolescent, BM promises to last well into the new millennium.

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Rereading Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique the other day, I was struck by the emphasis on methodological rigor. Linguistics was to offer the example of a true, “hard” science among the human sciences. Saussure casts out the diachrony of speech (la parole) and the longer-term diachrony of linguistic evolution in order to construct a synchronic “system of differences,” the structure of language (la langue) at a given moment. Saussure’s langue is not truly a synchronic cut in diachronic history; it is a model within which the internal temporality of language itself–that of the syntagm–is cut off from its normal prolongation in historical time. Aside from a few clichés, there are no sentences in la langue, only sentence-patterns, but the internal temporality of these patterns is not contiguous with the real time of human action.

The idea that all cultural systems, on the example of language, can be modeled by synchronic structures is what became known as “structuralism,” a term that now recalls a bygone era. Influenced more by the phonologist Nicolas Troubetzkoy than by Saussure himself, Claude Lévi-Strauss believed that all cultural practices from body-painting and village topography to myths and marriage-patterns could be derived from a highly schematic cultural unconscious that enjoyed far fewer degrees of freedom than we naively think we possess.

In today’s post-structuralist climate, it is hard to recapture the enthusiastic scientism of that era. If, at the time, a certain minimalism was the rage, today’s world thirsts for signs of difference. These cultural needs are reflected in our intellectual constructions in ways not always perceptible and never overtly present in the arguments used in their defense.

Even more radically than structuralism, GA is a minimalist way of thinking, but those who would tar it with the same brush fail to understand the connection between a minimal set of preconditions and a maximal freedom of evolution. The simpler the original model, the more freely it can develop. What is wrong with structuralism is not its minimalism; it is that it is not minimal enough. Instead of beginning from a single event and a single sign, the structuralist paradigm refuses to “begin” anywhere. Lévi-Strauss’s symbolic unconscious may be simple, but it remains multiple, and that synchronic multiplicity prevents it from having a history.

A system of “pure differences” has no point of origin. But in that case, the temporal, syntagmatic or narrative operations of the system itself, which Lévi-Strauss understands as working through social contradictions to restore an easily disturbed ethical equilibrium, can no longer be described. In order for the system to function in time, it must be subject to time. A synchronic model cannot capture, even as a first approximation, the operation of such a system. However universal the system and however local its instantiation, instantiation and system influence each other, just as a tiny planet has a measurable effect on the gravitational field of the star it orbits. To declare the star fixed with respect to the planet is an innocent operation, because it merely simplifies physical relationships; in contrast, to declare our culture fixed with respect to our historical problems makes it impossible to understand how our culture arises and evolves in response to these problems.

The familiar post-structuralist critique of Derridean deconstruction assimilates structuralism to Platonism as exemplary of “logocentrism,” a term that may best be translated as “the regime of the declarative sentence.” A structure is a synchronic system of differences, but difference is also, “at the same time,” deferral. The selection of one member of a paradigm cannot be understood synchronically because it implies the deferral / differentiation (différance) of the selected member from the others.

Deconstruction is de l’anthropologie qui s’ignore [anthropology unaware of itself]. The crucial object of différance is not meaning but mimetic violence. By putting the minimal human necessity of deferring this violence at the origin of the sign, we see that it is not the differential paradigm or “structure” but the sign itself that is always already an agent of deferral. The “present” of the logos is deferral itself, the deferral of real action. This is an argument I have made most recently in Signs of Paradox (1997).

Is there a better scientific paradigm than that of structuralism? Let us assume for the purpose of argument that the deconstructive critique can be subsumed within that of generative anthropology, which proposes a minimal hypothesis for the genesis of “structure.” How then shall we answer the fundamental question of human science: is the construction of a scientific paradigm of the human possible? If not, what could be the status of the affirmation that human science is “impossible”? After all, “positive” social science departments are flourishing; it is rather the “deconstructive” humanities, and the intellectual life they foster, that are threatened with extenuation.

The intellectual and the scientist

There is no shortage of social scientists; it is the humanist intellectual that is in danger. A decade ago, Russell Jacoby lamented the passing of The Last [American] Intellectuals (Basic Books, 1987), who were never in any case more than pale imitations of the French. In a brilliant analysis of the phenomenon, Agonies of the Intellectual (Nebraska, 1992), Allan Stoekl of Pennsylvania State University traces the intellectual’s conflictive relationship with social science to the seminal figure of Emile Durkheim, the founder of modern social science as well as an influential public figure who conceived the “sociologist” as the secular priest of modern society.

The “intellectual” is a paradoxical personage, half scientific truth-teller, half prophet. Unlike the ordinary political commentator or ideologue, he claims to found his socio-political recommendations on a privileged knowledge of the human, not to say of Being itself. Because Durkheim combined the scientist’s Enlightenment faith in reason with an optimistic vision of the amenability of the sacred to rational control, he was able to affirm the compatibility of both roles. Through analysis of the mechanisms of primitive religion, the sociologist learns the role of the sacred in the social order; he then applies that understanding to the creation of a secular religion in modern society. The paradox inherent in the attempt to control the sacred through rational means, to obtain an “ostensive” effect through the logic of the declarative, was not apparent to Durkheim, although the irrational forces of modern society were revealed to him in the horrors of World War I, in which he lost his son.

For Durkheim, religion is a dynamic expression of social solidarity; it is ambivalently and, ultimately, self-contradictorily both a declarative “constatation” and an ostensive revelation. Structuralism, in contrast, refuses to deal with sacrality as an ostensive phenomenon. Sacred myths do not reveal truths; they convert the system’s logical contradictions into narrative metamorphoses. From the structuralist’s atemporal perspective, the transformations wrought by mythical narratives are reversible; these narratives are understood as exchange systems, like the exchange of women in “elementary kinship structures.” No doubt this “misunderstands” the sacred, but it provides a model of it that is scientific in that it implies neither kinship with it nor an attempted application of it.

The structuralist has no agenda for the “good society”; he merely observes and models. His goal, as announced in various places by Lévi-Strauss, is to reduce the apparent complexity of social forms to its lowest terms, and his faith is that these terms are low indeed, that the number of parameters that determine the structures of human communication is very small.

Although it is never stated as such, the program implicit in such research is that of control. The structuralist seeks “objective” knowledge of the structures that determine human signifying practices in the implicit hope of controlling these practices. No doubt his thought-processes too are subject to these same structures; but his specialist’s knowledge of their “unconscious” influence allows him access to hidden resemblances among phenomena that appear different, and therefore to causal relations that escape the uninitiated. And since the structuralist’s notion of exchange is that of a closed system, he has no theory to explain how his own clearly valuable knowledge can be transmitted to–and discounted in–the larger society.

This quandary demonstrates the deficiency of structuralism. If there is indeed a finite, simple set of “structures” that explains all human phenomena, the system of significant differences we have constructed on the basis of our “misreading” of these structures cannot survive our knowledge of them. But the notion that any “true” model of the human cultural system can drastically reduce the information in it is absurd. We use these “false” differences to construct meanings; to know the structural underpinnings of the differences cannot reduce them to the underpinnings; it merely reveals that the underpinnings are not sufficient to explain the differences. One could make this point through a reading of Lévi-Strauss’s own analyses of myths in Mythologiques and elsewhere; but the illogic is inherent in structuralism itself, in its implication that the scientist can ultimately dictate “true” significations to the lay population.

This discussion confirms the legitimacy of the deconstructive position with respect to structuralism. Deconstruction’s critique is not scientific; it does not propose a new model to replace the structuralist model it “deconstructs.” But structuralism is not simply an inaccurate model that can be superseded only by a more accurate one; it is an “infinitely” inaccurate model whose moral consequence if carried out as a program would be the breakdown of the system of differences that constitutes the social order.

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Between the paradox of the intellectual and the sinister implications of the structuralist-scientist, there is a third position: that of minimal anthropology, or GA. GA is not “scientific” in the sense of providing a falsifiable empirical model. It does not attempt to reduce the complexity of human phenomena to a simple set of structures. No doubt every individual phenomenon of culture has “the same” structure because it is derived from the same source, the originary emergence of the sign as the means to “defer violence through representation.” But it cannot rely on its mere “structure” to be operative; each cultural phenomenon must reproduce not merely the structure but the effect of the originary sign in generating meaning anew.

As we observe the generation of meaning and learn how it is structured, we become needy of a new generation for the next time. The understanding of the mechanisms of culture is incrementally, not radically reductive. Our conceptualization of the mechanisms of human interaction that have been represented (shown, not told) in the cultural work is part of the overall cultural movement that drives innovation. But even when it is in the vanguard of this movement, to “understand” culture is not to learn to manipulate its procedures of creation; it is rather to consume it and thereby to encourage the creation of new products that we cannot yet understand.

The exchange system that subtends the model of GA is the open-ended system of the free market rather than the closed one of structuralism. Georges Bataille’s idea of “general” exchange that gets such play today among intellectuals was based on a disastrously romantic notion of the sacrificial as unrecuperated dépense [expense]. The entre-deux-guerres fascination with renewing the sacrificial was purged along with Nazism, which showed us what the modern sacrificial is really like. Yet Bataille’s underlying intuition is worthy of retention. Culture operates not with a restrained but with an open, “general” exchange system even if, surprise of surprises, it is not human sacrifice or the potlatch but the despised capitalist marketplace that maximally realizes this openness. When the intellectual class has become able to assimilate this fact, it will be able to appreciate the claims and achievements of GA.

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I doubt that academic humanism’s current obsession with Freudian vocabulary will redound to its credit in future generations. The substitution of “Phallus” for “Being” in presumably respectable scholarly discourse will surely strike our heirs as aberrant. Everyone quotes Lacan’s line that “the unconscious is structured like a language” but, in truth, our theoreticians act as though the unconscious were structured like a religion–a religion of phallus-worship inherent in the human psyche. Chassez l’inconscient collectif, il revient au galop. [If you chase away the collective unconscious, it just comes galloping back.]

But this religion is uniformly practiced in denial. The “phallogocentric” West is the bogey-man of the world, and feminist thinkers from Luce Irigaray to Jane Gallop make reputations from the resentful deconstruction of Lacanian phallicity–it being apparently unthinkable that some feminine thinker might simply abandon the whole androcentric system of psychoanalysis and start afresh.

Yet the news over the past few weeks has been something of a revelation: far from being, as I had thought, an academic deviation, phallus-worship is alive and well in the “real world,” in Washington, D.C. and beyond. With the news of his alleged affair, the President’s approval rating has risen, particularly among women who have reacted far more favorably than men. Tut-tutting aside, Clinton’s part in the Lewinsky affair is one of phallic virility. As Stacey Meeker pointed out to me, had we been reading that, like Proust’s Baron Charlus, Clinton let his intern whip him while chained to a bed, or that, like Marv Albert, he lost his toupee to her in the heat of passion, public reaction would be very different. But oral sex under the alleged conditions is a secularized form of phallus-worship; the presidential kneepads are instruments of piety.

We cannot separate the resentful phallus-worship practiced in the obscurity of our literature departments from the more affirmative kind manifested in the White House. But they need not be seen as signs of the “moral decline” that a certain kind of conservative thinker enjoys–and profits from–bemoaning. In my corner of the world, at least, there is little evidence that we are reliving the fate of Sodom & Gomorrah. Young couples today appear more rather than less inclined to fidelity than those of my generation. Certainly among UCLA graduate students–the next generation’s secret trend-setters–the prevalence of long-term over short-term sexual relationships has risen dramatically over the past twenty years.

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Let me attempt a different explanation. The two most significant historical developments of the past half century are (1) the failure of socialism, including “national socialism,” and (2) the end of total war. On the one hand, the utopian alternatives to the market system have been shown to be without value; on the other, the chief means by which societies have always competed has been rendered unusable.

Can it be a coincidence that these two components of the “end of history” have occurred in tandem? We arrive at the one “final” social system just at the moment when it is no longer possible to contest a war between two competing systems. Just when it appeared that the Cold War would last forever and that neither capitalism nor socialism would ever be able to demonstrate its superiority, the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union dissolved. The coincidence of phallic theory in the academy and phallic practice in the White House help us to understand this conjunction.

1. Why is theory today so bound up with phallic mythology? What we call “theory” is the final avatar of Enlightenment rationalism. Theory expresses the intellectual’s resentment against a social order dominated by “irrational” forces, whether those of religion or those of the market, that his mastery of discursive rationality–of “metaphysics”–does not permit him to control.

Freud was no leftist, nor Lacan either, but however justified the repression of infantile sexuality by the needs of “civilization,” however inevitable the passage from the “imaginary” to the “symbolic,” psychoanalysis can be read as telling a story of desire that was once “natural” and has subsequently been repressed. Lacan’s notion of mediated desire is not all that far from Girard’s and may even be considered one of its sources; yet the ontogenetic definition of a prelinguistic “imaginary” stage on which language is imposed in the form of paternal interdiction inverts the phylogenetic model in which human desire first comes into being mediated by the sign. The positing of a prepaternal stage of desire where the mother “has” the phallus creates a space for the contestation of the “phallogocentric” paternalism of the symbolic order–and for the Lacanian-feminist phallic antireligion.

Nostalgia for a repressed true self is the psychological counterpart of utopia. Now that the bankruptcy of our century’s political utopias has thrown us back on the mercies of the hated market system, “theory” clings to the psychoanalytic utopia as the only one available.

2. The end of war means the end of the most significant public testing ground of virility. Human mimetic violence is exercised principally by males, whose competition is unrestrained by the need to bear and nurture children. Male aggressivity provides the minimal impetus for language; the male potential for violence can only be restrained by culture, “the deferral of violence through representation.” But in the absence of warfare, virility becomes exclusively sexual. It is often held against President Clinton that he evaded the Vietnam draft. But this is no reason to take him for a coward. From Achilles to George Bush, (the youngest American pilot in WW II, I believe) our leaders proved themselves, really or symbolically, on the field of battle. By the time of the Vietnam war, whatever the individual motivations of those who served and those who managed not to, the age of battlefield heroism was at an end. Clinton is the first president from the post-World War II generation, the first world leader of a new era in which “heroic” masculinity best expresses itself through submission on presidential kneepads.

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The postmodern era is one in which the great competitions are no more. We will have neither the “final conflict” on the battlefield nor the undecidable conflict of the Cold War. The voices of opposition have not been silenced; they are more voluble than ever. But they are voices of resentment that seek to undermine a system on which they admit their dependency. Within modern market society, the chief model for oppositional activity is no longer war but “love,” the “battle of the sexes.” As our central authority figure becomes an object of phallus worship, those who would contest authority are driven to the feminist rewriting of the phallocentric myths of Freud and Lacan.

Under these circumstances, GA’s emphasis on violence in human etiology might seem old-fashioned. But just as it is the excess of our means of violence that makes war impossible, so it is the excess of our means for the deferral of violence that makes “socialism” impossible. We have weapons too powerful to use and a system of consumption too elaborate to abandon; in either case, the outcome would be chaos. Nuclear devastation is easy to imagine; but think of the violence in our cities if our supermarkets were stocked like those in the old USSR. The common element of violence, potential and deferred, links the two conditions of postmodernity and the two versions of postmodern sexuality.

That we can now turn from the battlefield to the far less bloody battle of the sexes is good news indeed. But let us not forget that humanity remains, as it probably always will, the primary threat to its own survival.

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At the end of last week’s column, I suggested that more could be said about the relationship between market society and liberal democracy. Since I have been dealing with these matters elsewhere, it seemed useful to defer the originary analysis of “presidential kneepads” and the like in order to develop some less topical reflections.

1. The Minimal Market Model

Evolution is a minimal model of change in the biological domain. Seventy-odd years after the Scopes trial, the idea still seems to be sufficiently under attack to arouse spirited defenses, of which Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995) is an impressive recent example. But when I hear spirited defenses of the theory of evolution, I always want to say, “yes, but what are you really defending?” The evolutionary model in itself, independently of the details of the genetic mechanism about which Darwin himself knew nothing, is something akin to tautological in the historical sphere. In a system with sufficient complexity to generate self-reproducing organisms, reproduction cannot be perfect, and when forms change, those that remain are by definition better adapted than those that don’t. The minimal explanation for the current state of these forms is “evolutionary”; any other theory requires the intervention of external, not to say supernatural, forces. That Darwinian theory fails to explain the specificity of the human, a point that I have made many times in these Chronicles and elsewhere, by no means implies that it is “refuted.” It is not false to call human culture “adaptive”; but to conceive its adaptivity according to the same model as the form of a shark’s fin or even a chimpanzee’s call is simply to remain on the wrong level of generality, to make one’s hypothesis too strong by a whole degree of magnitude. On this another day.

Similarly, the market is a “minimal model” of human interaction. All interactions from the originary event on down may be considered “exchanges,” all decisions, evaluations of “utility.” The choice to consider every human interaction in market terms implies nothing falsifiable about social reality. Yet the choice itself, to the extent that it is not merely a speculative but a practical act, has a considerable influence on social reality. Ethical interactions, be they acts of punishment or reward, love or hostility, may be represented in market terms without distortion; but the degree to which such representations filter out from the “etic” sphere of the theoretician to contaminate the “emic” social world itself has profound implications for the nature of the interactions they model. And needless to say, the invasion of the “real world” by these concepts is itself dependent on their market value.

One of the difficulties in applying the market model to human interaction is that it has until now been left to economists, who are not concerned with human paradox. However paradoxical the desire that the market generates for a given article of mass-produced uniqueness, from a strictly economic standpoint, there is only “demand.” But from a generative-anthropological perspective, the paradoxical “supplement” of these desires measures the market’s success in purging our resentment of its violence and recycling its energy into the exchange system. At the horizon–which is a theoretical limit and not a utopia–desire would be reduced to pure mimetic paradox and circulate at infinite speed, and all occasions for mimetic conflict would be instantly evaluated, compensated, and dissolved in the market.

2. The Priceless Always Costs a Little More

At the first level of approximation, the market is a virtual locus of exchange within which prices are communicated with “perfect knowledge.” Its elements are “exchange values,” which are tautologically equivalent to prices. But we don’t generally buy something because we find its exchange value favorable and intend to resell it; we buy it to use, and our purchase depends on the “utility” we expect to get from it. Thus when we’re hungry, we may pay a premium price at a 7-11 for a loaf of bread, but we’ll wait for a sale at Lucky’s if we already have a few loaves in the freezer. Consumer products have a “use-value” as well as an exchange-value, but so do producer’s goods for whoever uses them. Use-value is not necessarily based on “subjective” considerations; my purchase of a new machine for my factory depends on the same kinds of considerations as that of the loaf of bread: I’d be forced to accept a higher price if my old machine breaks down than if I’m merely buying in anticipation of future expansion.

But although “use-value” may be more personal than exchange-value, it is not sufficiently interactive to reveal the paradoxical nature of desire. The term smacks of Utilitarianism–the model, traceable to Jeremy Bentham, that would explain human behavior according to a “calculus” of utilities. The notion of use-value or utility cannot address the role of the object of consumption as a sign of collective desire. This is a domain that not only has not been sufficiently theorized, but that can never be sufficiently theorized. The consumption-sign cannot be reduced to a calculus because the sign has value only insofar as it exceeds any calculus, as it makes a sacred “revelation.”

This is the limitation of Jean Baudrillard’s semantic analysis of the “product-sign.” Although is useful to talk about the synchronic structure of product-signs at a given moment, it is impossible to construct a model of consumption based on such a structure because the value of product-signs is far more dependent than that of words on their diachronic situation. Language is a “mature,” consumption an “originary” mode of signification. Only a few slang words like “groovy” come in and go out of style; most words (“tree” for example) evolve only through broad, slow phonetic changes. In the world of consumption, on the contrary, obsolescence is the rule rather than the exception. The point of consumption is not, like mature language, to create a model of a relatively stable significant reality but, like language at its origin, to situate oneself on the cusp where significance is created. The consumer’s “message” is more like a fashion collection than a discourse: last year’s collection is not this year’s; each component must be constantly revalued. This endless circulation is not generated by the manufacturers’ cynical desire to sell new products, even if they profit from the circulation and encourage it; it reflects the fact that desire is “ostensive” rather than declarative, revelatory rather than constative.

Consumer goods are products of mass consumption, but for that very reason, they seek the aura of uniqueness by imitating handicrafts and, more generally, by appropriating signs of the sacred from the ritual distribution system that preceded the market era. Circulation within the modern exchange system depends on the assimilation and recirculation of the very signs of what resists circulation. (As Thomas Frank points out in his recent The Conquest of Cool, this resistance may be quite explicit; an important phenomenon of marketing since the 1960s is the “commodification of discontent”: selling people signs of their disaffection from the very system that sells them.) Some have taken this to imply that the system is living on borrowed time, that when we use up the signs of our ritual past, we will have nothing more to sell. I think not. These signs are continually recycled and enriched; the sacred of the past contaminates the objects of the present, just as the sacred has always done.

3. The “Ultimateness” of the Market

Nothing is more utopian than the claim to put an end to utopian thought. All thought about the future is utopian, since it implies of necessity that the categories with which to think the future are available in the present. This is tautologically so, regardless of the sophistication with which we anticipate future categories of thought. To think about the future implies that we have reached the “end of history.” But to translate this unformed virtuality into historically specific terms by asserting that liberal market society is the “final” social form smacks of the most arrogant, or naive, utopianism.

GA is not Fukuyamism. My point about market society is not that it is the definitive form chosen from an infinite set of possible forms, but that it is the minimal or most general model chosen from a finite set of models. For example, we may consider tyranny, monarchy, oligarchy not, as Aristotle does, as a set of mutually exclusive categories that form a “structure,” but as cases of limited circulation of power within a minimally constrained model of general circulation. And the same is true for the economy. Earlier systems of distribution too are “markets,” as are the restricted subsystems of our own day. These systems differ in their smaller number of “degrees of freedom”–a term I use here metaphorically but which could presumably be approximated by mathematical methods.

In this perspective, the “ultimate” nature of liberal democracy is not an attribute of any particular aspect of contemporary institutions–elections, legislatures, stock markets…–but reflects the fact that this system alone openly realizes, in both senses of the term, the fundamental nature of the market or exchange model. This realization is not merely a matter for theoreticians; it brings with it political and economic consequences. But because the market model is already minimally constrained, these consequences cannot render the model itself inadequate; they only modify its parameters. The accelerating confluence of words and things in the postmodern market breaks down barriers of thought that cannot be erected anew; future systems of thought will not be able to avoid providing a generative model of their divergence from a common origin.

The market model is neither tragic nor triumphalist; it is “realistic.” The human is a system for generating the deferral of conflict, not either happy or tragic endings. The human exchange system does not merely reshuffle the same elements; from the first and ever thereafter, it creates meaning by incarnating, capturing, and consuming–sacrificing, in a word–its sacred Other. All earlier models of human behavior have either been centered on this Other as though we could understand “its” intentions on the analogy of our own, or have–the “Enlightenment” view–elected to ignore it altogether. A generative anthropology is one that accepts the obligation to construct a model of the human and its transcendental Other with the materials made available within human interaction alone.

The Romantic critique of the market, as formulated by antibourgeois writers like Théophile Gautier in the 1830s, is that it ignores the transcendental realm in its unique preoccupation with the generation of material “utility.” But the consumer era has shown us that, on the contrary, the market is a collective mechanism for incarnating the sacred objects of collective desire in consumable products. Market exchange is the minimally violent mode of sacrifice, of accomplishing “the deferral of violence through representation.” To adopt the market as our fundamental model of human interaction is to take a qualitative step toward creating a generative theory of the human, a minimal anthropology.

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(With my apologies to David Rapoport and his colleagues in the Department of Political Science.)

The term political economy suggests that the fundamental social articulation is that between the political and the economic, the exercise of power and the distribution of economic goods and services. From Marx’s materialist standpoint, which has much to recommend it, politics is the servant of economics; the power-structure is determined by the mode of production. GA proposes that, although material consumption is the sine qua non of social life, the most fundamental human problem is not economic but political–the destructive potential of mimetic desire. Man is his own worst enemy, and human culture comes into being not as a means to increase material productivity, but to prevent mimetic violence from destroying the potential producers. Although economics–the satisfaction of appetite–is the fundamental process, it is dependent on politics; until we have been humanized by différance, we cannot tend to our animal needs.

As a result, the originary hypothesis begins not with material consumption but with the deferral of consumption under the threat of potential violence. The sign as exchanged among the participants of the originary scene is a means of insuring that no individual, not even the “alpha” in the prehuman pecking order, will be able to appropriate the central object for himself. But once the sign has been exchanged, the sacred center, by the very fact that the sign protects it from appropriation, no longer risks arousing mutually destructive violence; it has become approachable. Whence the sparagmos or tearing-apart of the object that is the originary form of distribution.

The originary reciprocal exchange of signs is the source of our model of moral equality. But this should not be taken to mean that the originary community constituted by this exchange is a lost paradise. History is not driven by a desire to return to the womb. The reciprocity of the originary community has only a single degree of freedom. Each individual renounces through the reciprocal exchange of signs the center that can only be appropriated by the group “equally” through the reciprocal exchange of things. Pre-agricultural societies maintain this reciprocity, which dictates elaborate systems of gift-giving and “the exchange of women.” But the center remains sacred; no subsequent decision as to its apportionment can do more than reaffirm the originary renouncement.

Hierarchical society is born after the invention of sedentary agriculture, when an individual who generates a surplus realizes that he may thereby usurp the function of the sacred center, a discovery that in The End of Culture I attributed to the “big-man.” The first wave of hierarchical societies culminates in the great archaic empires–in the West, Egypt and the various Mesopotamian kingdoms–where the god-king’s occupation of the ritual center extends the tribal big-man’s usurpation. Whatever the inefficiencies and brutalities of theocratic rule, it offered a genuine decision-making apparatus for the distribution of the economic surplus where the original system could at best devise ritual mechanisms of waste, such as the Kwakiutl potlatch so dear to Georges Bataille. Rousseauian sentiments to the contrary, the “equality” of modern democracy has nothing in common with that of primitive society–nothing, that is, that has not been mediated by the archaic usurpation of the center.

The first democracy arose in Athens when the remnants of the palace hierarchy inherited from the Mycenaean era had become unable to maintain order among the small independent producers who composed the backbone of the population. The focus of Solon’s reforms in the early 6th century BC was the abolition of the debts and “feudal” obligations that bound the individual citizens to their noble superiors. The citizens were empowered to choose their own leaders; dialogue and negotiation took the place of theocratic dictates and hierarchy became the free choice of the community.

Solon’s reforms mobilized the citizens for external conquest, not economic take-off. They strengthened the Athenian military forces, particularly the navy, in order to assure Athens’ dominance over its colonies and tributary states. Athenian democracy, like later Roman republicanism, paid for itself militarily rather than economically. The liberation of the Athenian population from economic dependency that was the basis for its political freedom generated a need for slaves to do the work that in other societies was accomplished by unfree peasants (e.g., Sparta’s helots); the freedom of the Athenian citizenry was paid for by the subjection of foreign populations.

The small producers who made up the majority of the electorate were empowered to make decisions in the “originary” context of reciprocal dialogue, but because the economy was not itself empowered by a similar model, the immense mobilization of civic energy to which we still pay tribute was invested in cultural and military, but rarely in strictly economic projects–there was indeed no conception of “economic investment.” Although productive labor was not held in contempt, the sheer quantity of political activity–voting, lot-drawing, judging, ostracizing–in this direct democracy was an obstacle to work. Athens could not maintain its military edge, and after the defeat by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War (404 BC), its heroic era was over.

* * * * *Ancient democracy failed because it was politics-driven. The resource-allocation system had changed from a ritual hierarchy to an electorate of free citizens without liberating the economic sphere as such. In modern liberal democracy, the free market provides for reciprocal exchange in the economic sphere to complement that in the political sphere. The result is the institutional articulation of the originary balance between politics and economics: political institutions have their raison-d’être not in themselves, but in the maintenance of a “civil society” of economic production and consumption.

Modern democracy differs from Athenian democracy not merely in its representative structure, but because it presides over a society in which economic rather than political activity is foregrounded. The proportion of human energy devoted to politics in the United States, whether at its creation or today, is incomparably smaller than in ancient Athens. Although nascent American democracy, like its Athenian predecessor, was dependent on slavery, its subsequent history, punctuated by the Civil War, showed this atavistic mode of production to be incompatible with modern democracy rather than indispensable to it.

Just as democracy makes the originary reciprocal exchange of signs the basis for the negotiation of political decisions, so in the market, the “equal” division of the sacrificial victim becomes the basis for the negotiation of economic values. The market presupposes the accumulation of property and consequent differences of wealth, just as the political process presupposes the accumulation of influence and consequent differences of power.

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Economic exchange did not await the coming of the bourgeoisie. It is not easy to understand in what way the marketplaces of the “free market” differ from those of the past. As a result, we tend to subordinate the innovation in human relations brought about by the free market to that effected by the technological progress that the market in fact inspired: we speak not of the “market revolution” but of the “industrial revolution.”

My experience in purchasing souvenirs from the Arab vendors in the shuk or souk in Jerusalem gave me a useful insight into the premodern market . These vendors have no fixed or even posted prices. The Western tourist, especially the American, is offered at first an outrageous price, say, $200 for a cotton dress. On refusal, the price comes down sharply to $20 or $15. A little experience taught me that not only does the seller offer no fixed price, but the buyer can command pretty much any price he likes. It suffices to name one’s figure and to continue to stick to it as the vendor makes successively lower offers. I didn’t experiment with deliberately absurd prices, but those I set were always eventually accepted.

But the interaction would become increasingly unpleasant. As the price got lower, the vendor’s attitude changed from obsequious to grave to downright hostile, and when the purchase was finally made, he would turn away in disgust. I abandoned my technique out of an uncomfortable feeling that I was subverting the vendors’ culture of negotiation by exploiting a loophole that authentic participants disdained. Both parties were expected to bargain; holding to a fixed price was not interacting appropriately with my adversary.

In this kind of market, the vendor sets the price of each item interactively. The lower the price you want, the more you have to work for it, and the more uncomfortable you are made to feel. It is as though the vendor concentrated in himself a collective sacrificial energy. Ultimately you could have the goods for free, but you would be lynched on leaving the stall.

From the standpoint of the free market, what is wrong with this form of bargaining is that it confuses politics with economics. Instead of fluctuating around a “fair price” determinable by objective calculation of market conditions, the price is the object of a contest of wills and implied threats–a contest of power. To find the price is not to seek the intersection of the supply and demand curves for the product, but that of the two parties’ “negotiation curves”: the point at which the one is unable to endure the signs of the other’s potential for (individual and collective) violence. I could subvert the system without penalty as a tourist in a policed marketplace, but not in a society where the seller’s relatives might avenge his humiliation.

An economy dominated by interactions of this type could not become independent of the political system. In such a society, my power-relations with the vendor would be just a tiny element of the political hierarchy. A rich or influential buyer would get a better price, or no price at all. The market’s distribution of resources could not become an independent source of economic information.

In liberating economic exchange from “politics,” the free market reciprocally liberates the political system from responsibility for economic distribution. The result is a democratic political system conceived not, as in Athens, as a substitute for the old central system of ritual redistribution, but as a means to maintain the conditions–peace and security, rule of law, economic infrastructure–under which a “civil society” ordered by market exchange may flourish.

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The democratic process requires that the large majority of citizens have, as it is often put, “a stake in the system.” But this “stake” is best measured not by a certain level of economic success but by the capability of creating an individual “message” of identity through consumption of products offered on the market. No aspect of “capitalism” has been so bitterly denounced by the intelligentsia as “consumer society”; yet the ability to express one’s political disaffection from the liberal democratic system via an economic transaction within the system is a measure of its stability. What Herbert Marcuse a generation ago called its “repressive tolerance” is its insurance against the horrors of centralized political control.

In the scene of human origin, the key moment is the “political” exchange of signs, but the ultimate goal is the “economic” distribution of the body of the sacred victim, which incarnates the meaning of the sign in materially assimilable form. When we can produce economic goods in such quantity and variety that they function more like the sign that defers mimetic violence than the object that incites it, the average citizen need not contest through the political agon what he can obtain through the peaceful reciprocity of the marketplace. The “deferral of violence through representation” that is the function of human culture need no longer defer the pleasures of consumption as well. As a result, the political, like the cultural, comes to be just another sector of the universal dialogue among the citizenry.

What some see as the degradation of the political process–recent events indeed make this sentiment difficult to avoid–is more significantly its democratization. The rigorous separation of politics from economics, word from thing, sacred from profane, is “elitist” even before it generates an elite; the dialectization of these differences in the social dialogue, along with that of class and ethnic differences, is a guarantee of social stability. Each gets to define and display to others “esthetically” through the medium of consumption a personal identity, a personal piece of the universal sacred. It is surely noteworthy that, whether or not we have reached the “end of history,” the most virulent anti-Western ideologies today, unlike that of the Bolsheviks of old, promise less rather than more economic productivity. Today’s resentful revolutionaries, like the peasant in the Russian tale, are happy to lose one eye provided that their neighbor lose both.

* * * * *Much remains to be said about the relationship between the stability of modern democracy and the nature of social conversation in consumer society. I hope to return to this subject in future Chronicles.

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In the second of these “personal” columns, Chronicle 113, I related the minimalism of GA to the minimalism of the Bronx itself, with its status as a way-station between (for my generation) the Lower East Side and Scarsdale or Beverly Hills. What I called in that Chronicle my attraction rather to “the structure of transcendence itself than to any possible worldly incarnation of it” is expressed perhaps yet more profoundly in a persistent–and perverse–personal trait: amateurism.

As a beginning student of French literature, I was struck by a key sentence in Chateaubriand’s René (1802):

Il fallut quitter le le toit paternel, devenu l’héritage de mon frère. […] Arrêté à l’entrée des voies trompeuses de la vie, je les considérais l’une après l’autre, sans m’y oser engager.

I had to leave my father’s house, which had become my brother’s inheritance [after their father’s death]…
Paused at the entrance to the deceitful paths of life, I contemplated each one in turn, without daring to start out on it.

The image of the “entrée des voies trompeuses” suggests a central intersection or rond-point from which they all diverge, like the avenues around L’Etoile. The deceitfulness is not that of any given path, but of their general condition: once it is chosen, you must abandon the others. To pause at the “entrance,” in contrast, is to retain the possibility of choosing any of them and thereby to make the “latent” choice of all. To remain at this universal intersection is to remain within the unity of childhood while at the same time grasping the variety of options open to the adult.

This is the configuration of adolescence, conceived as an extended moment of transition and apprenticeship. Beyond the author’s own experience of exile, René’s new cultural-psychological attitude reflects and reacts to the beginning of post-Revolutionary bourgeois society. The young man–and today the young woman as well–can no longer pass in a moment of sexual initiation from childhood to adulthood; he must acquire a profession, a qualification with which to enter the marketplace. If there is one thing that the members of market society share, it is their prolonged and therefore “Romantic” adolescence.

In this context, maturity may be defined as abandonment of the transitional space of adolescence and successful advancement along one of the “voies trompeuses.” Maturity is the normal goal of adolescence, but for the Romantic, it constitutes a horizon that one never wants to reach, a spiritual death one seeks to defer until the end. According as we reject or accept the Romantic’s perspective, we will choose very different professions. In the first case, serious contact with the “real world” is of the essence; at best, we may hope to retire early and enjoy a second adolescence before it’s too late. But in the second, we choose our professional activity with an eye to preserving adolescent openness as fully as possible; Professional life must remain maximally amateurish. The amateur does not stand inactive at the center of René’s metaphor, but although he takes a few steps along one or several of the voies, he never goes far enough to lose sight of their common intersection.

The Romantic ideal is to make one’s profession simply equivalent to the deferral of maturity. This originally meant becoming an “artist.” But in today’s world, dominated by the “youth culture” Chateaubriand already anticipated in horror, adolescent self-expression can only compete in the marketplace dressed up in all sorts of ritual trappings–in a word, it too has been professionalized. In our culture, the surest way to defer maturity indefinitely is to remain in the institution par excellence of adolescent universality, the university. A professor is someone who has never left school, who refers to everything outside academic life as “the real world.”

The academy too is professionalized, but in some domains more than others. One’s choice of field must be made with the end of minimizing the danger of moving too far along one of the voies to remain in contact with their unique origin. The question is not whether one can do without knowledge and discipline. The intellectual amateur is not a primitive; there is no “natural” way of thinking. But one must seek a mode of thought that can remain productive without being particularized into a technique or “methodology.”

The problem posed by the professionalization of thought was first raised in Plato’s critique of the Sophists. For Plato, the legitimate professionals are the artisans, the shoemakers and carpenters who employ technical knowledge for the instrumental end of manipulating the natural world. But human interaction is not an instrumental activity, and the art of rhetoric that seeks to manipulate this interaction is not a true profession but a means of deceiving others. To professionalize human dialogue is to treat others as instruments. The true philosopher, like Socrates, has no “profession.”

Every field of study, including philosophy itself, risks professionalization as either a technology or, what is worse, a mode of rhetoric. Of the fields not technical in their essence, that is, in the domain of what may be broadly called the Humanities, there is, or was, in French perhaps the least pressure to become a technologist of either critical “methodology” or a narrow field of specialization. French culture is universalist, more concerned with principles than with concrete details, and this is reflected in the modes of scholarship it favors. It is no accident that the theory of mimetic desire was born in the context of French Studies.

GA’s minimality insures that it is minimally professionalizable. No doubt transformation into a marketable technique is a danger that must continually be deferred, but GA as a “permanent revolution” in thought seeks to make this deferral as effective and as renewable as possible. No formulation of the originary hypothesis can ever be definitive. Nor can there ever be a well-defined body of knowledge that can provide its context. An originary theory of the human can neither ignore any given aspect of the human nor become dependent on it.

The Bronx Romantic is drawn to amateurism because he preserves the most radical Romantic intuition: that life is adolescence and maturity is death. In order to remain at the originary center, he must vigilantly resist the seductions of professional life. In this respect, it is no doubt fortunate that the professionalism of today’s academy is so different from what I encountered at the beginning of my career thirty-odd years ago. In those days, the profession was small and expanding, jobs were easy to come by, and status was obtained through seniority and publication, that is, by doing one’s work. Today the profession is large and contracting, jobs are difficult to obtain, and status is a function of networking and trendiness, which is to say, it must be fought for as a value in itself. This situation, however disheartening for new entrants in the field, is the fulfillment of the Bronx Romantic’s dream: it makes full absorption in professional life impossible.

The true amateur never sells his soul to the crowd. He theorizes the operations of the collective and the sacrificial with all the generosity of which he is capable, but he forbears to submit to the judgment of the marketplace. The more we respect the market as the determiner of value, the more vigilantly we must resist its judgment as to our understanding of it. The truth of the market at any given moment is never what the market at that moment wants to hear.

The power of the Romantic attitude lies in permitting us to assimilate the contours of our individual life to the originary unity of the human. This is a unity that is always virtual and can never be actualized. Professional thinkers who propose a unitary explanation of the human, such as the successive generations of Darwinists represented today by the school of “evolutionary psychology,” inevitably fail to grasp the paradox inherent in reducing the human invention/discovery of the transcendent realm of the sign to the model of natural adaptation. But the Bronx Romantic remains faithful to the intuition that if one is to understand how humanity and its culture might have come into being, one must not stray far from the central singularity from which all roads diverge.

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I have not been a regular viewer of a TV series since I watched I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners as a little boy, but I will admit to being something of a fan of Seinfeld. Although this year’s episodes give clear evidence of decline (of which below), the show has operated throughout its existence on a level unmatched by other supposedly sophisticated sitcoms, including the to my mind vastly overrated Frasier.

Seinfeld has just two axioms (dixit co-creator Larry David): no hugs and no growth–an absence of either synchronic or diachronic sentimentality. Sentimentality is the creation of unanimity through “sentiment” or desire. This unanimity derives, as we know from Girard, from that of the sacrificers before the victim. But what we call the “sentimental” in Judeo-Christian society appears insidiously in the guise of the unanimous defense of the victim. The sentimental calls us together to commune in a virtual utopia in which violence is simply unthinkable, and those who practice it, essentially inhuman. The sentimental indignantly expels violence, forgetting that human violence is really nothing more than this expulsion.

Popular culture, in contrast to high culture, is unencumbered with scruples concerning the sacrificial and its variant, the sentimental. To be “popular” is to be of the people, the mass, to espouse its collective wisdom and prejudice, not to identify with the sufferings of the unique center. High culture prepares the “elite” to assume responsibility for the sacrificial totality; popular culture refuses this responsibility on the ground that the “people” in hierarchical societies are not responsible for what takes place at the center and share little if at all in its benefits.

Our higher education was and still is dominated by the high culture of early modern Europe, with its great creators imitating and in some cases surpassing high culture’s classical models. Politics aside, it is difficult to deny the superiority of these cultural forms as models for our own acculturation. Even as we denounce “elitism,” we recognize the need to raise the general public to the responsibility of the elite rather than to lower the high to the vulgarity of the mass.

But in the postmodern era following World War II–a time that is “postwar” in the global sense that, whatever its local conflicts, the world can no longer tolerate full-scale war–the balance of authenticity between popular and high culture has shifted. This is not a mere artifact of technology or the “media”: on the contrary, the media evolve in response to ethical developments. Today the high arts–painting, sculpture, concert music, opera, poetry and the like–are increasingly dependent on popular models for their renewal. There is more human truth and, indeed, more intellectual sophistication in an episode of Seinfeld than in most collections of contemporary poems. Between the high and the popular arts it is surely the latter, which offer not only fame and fortune but the possibility of real cultural impact, that today attract the greater talents.

The central preoccupation of culture since the end of the archaic empires has been the deferral of “sentimental” unanimity. This would explain the centrality of high culture from the Greeks to our own time in weaning us from sacrificial sentimentality. But if the unanimity of the sacrificial crowd is the essence of popular culture, how can popular culture come to be our main source of cultural enlightenment? The answer lies in the historicity of all cultural categories. There is no eternal Idea of “popular culture” any more than there is an immutable set of social castes. With the spread of high-cultural sophistication to broad segments of the population, the “popular” spirit that sees itself as cut off from the center and the “elite” spirit that would take responsibility for its sufferings become increasingly permeable to each other, and the “middlebrow” world of television becomes their melting-pot.

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Seinfeld is exemplary of this shift in relative authenticity between high and popular culture. No recent work of high culture has been nearly so effective at combating the sentimentality of the popular. As David Marc‘s fascinating studies Demographic Vistas and Comic Visions reveal, television is a very self-aware medium, and much successful television comedy is a pastiche (e.g.,Saturday Night Live) of “conventional”–read sentimental–television fare like soap operas and newscasts. (What could be more sentimental than the lugubrious tone of a newscaster announcing a disaster?) Seinfeld contains frequent spoofs of other TV series as well as movies. Its strength, however, lies not in parody but in the construction of a maximally unsentimental world.

Whether or not Seinfeld and David were aware, in creating their “series about nothing,” of Flaubert’s expressed desire to write “a novel about nothing,” in their success they have become Flaubert’s true successors. The novel/sitcom about nothing refuses to represent a center of interest; the stage, the formal center of attention, is a representational artifact, a seemingly inexplicable holdover from the days of ritual. The high-cultural equivalent of Seinfeld is the devaluation of dramatic time as a time of awaiting in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. But Beckett’s black comedy situates itself at the historical endpoint of the Western theatrical tradition. The stage on which the founding event is supposed to occur becomes an ironic locus of awaiting; this is the pastiche of a dying form. Hence Beckett’s “unsentimental” discourse cannot avoid being resentimentalized as an elegy for the theater. Beckett’s plays after Godot deal explicitly with this phenomenon: Endgame is an open deconstruction of Tragedy, and Happy Days converts the stage into something very like a place of ritual sacrifice.

Seinfeld, on the other hand, is unapocalyptic, even in relation to its genre; it makes no pretension of being “the last sitcom,” and it will surely not be. In contrast with the soap opera, with its ever-evolving cast of characters, the sitcom is a serial genre in which no real change takes place from week to week; the characters’ hopes and fears of dramatic change for better or worse are never realized. Stability is itself a value to be sentimentally celebrated, as the I Love Lucy genre always did. But Seinfeld eschews any sign of return to order; there is no well-defined order to return to. It is significant that although the action nearly always starts in Seinfeld’s apartment, the foursome virtually never find themselves there at the end.

The characters, as in the popular-sentimental tradition, inhabit a banal representation of a banal universe. But Seinfeld is the one situation comedy whose “situation” has dissolved all ties with the sentimental constitution of time by the institutions that preserve the social order, notably the family. A show such as Married With Children is unsentimental in its dialogues and story-lines, but the mere copresence of parents and children creates a configuration that gives meaning to time, and therefore implicitly consents to participate in the unanimous “yes” of the community. (The Simpsons, more ostensibly sentimental, is a more acute pastiche of the genre.)

In Seinfeld, the only significant parent-child relationship, that of George Costanza, is pointedly de-Oedipalized. George’s parents do nothing so violent as to disown him; they are simply indifferent to him, and to his prolongation of their genetic heritage. If we were to risk extending this observation to a “psychoanalysis” of the series as a whole, we would conclude that the characters’ lives mean “nothing” because their parents have not invested their own desire in their upbringing. In a world where parents are more concerned with their retirement leisure than with their children’s success, human interaction becomes a chaotic struggle for momentary recognition, a permanent cold war of all against all.

Although its characters live in the liberal milieu of New York‘s semi-intelligentsia–people like these have begun to dream of voting Republican only since Mayor Giuliani has cut the crime rate–the series treats PC as just another form of sentimentality. Even the most apparently virtuous collective causes are deconstructed into the product of resentful motives. When George finds himself obliged to play the role of neo-Nazi leader O’Brien, the only crowd violence we see on screen isn’t that of the latter’s followers but of the mob of liberal protesters. When Elaine takes a pregnant fortune teller to task for smoking (thereby preventing George from learning whether he should take a vacation trip), the satiric point isn’t that smoking during pregnancy is really OK but that, in the circumstances, Elaine’s remarks reflect not genuine human love but a resentful sense of superiority to the benighted–who just happen to belong to a lower social class. In an equal-opportunity putdown that may be television’s most daring antiracist gesture ever, the series has even shown a Black man boring Elaine with endless talk about George Washington Carver and the peanut.

Seinfeld‘s creators have a gut understanding of mimetic desire. Where Kramer is mimetic in blissful serenity, George is an heir to Dostoevsky’s Underground Man who becomes incapable of having sex with his girlfriend because he’s obsessed by another woman who treated him with contempt. The psychological base of Seinfeld’s deconstruction of sentimentality is that these characters are selfish not out of a sense of self, but from the lack of it.

The relationship of the four principals is entirely voluntary, unconnected with even the loose notion of an institutional center such as the bar in Cheers. Their stability, a formal necessity of the series, remains enigmatic on the plane of content, where the little community subsists on a ground of mutual betrayal. The frequent references to a common past are inevitably recriminations rather than reminiscences. Yet because the foursome must stay together, their unity becomes the object of our desire. The less sentimental their relations, the more we value their conjunction quand même as a sign of what can only be, in the absence of any other explanation, the purest, most disinterested love. This implicit love is the secret and the charm of the show’s cynicism; it remains transcendental because it can never be articulated or thematized in any way.

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Seinfeld has gone on for nine years. Although, on the lesser scale of the comic strip, serial stability can be maintained for decades and even for generations, this is not possible in a major creative endeavor. The end of Seinfeld is inherent in its project of deferral. Its lack of sentimentality is a means of deferring the creation of a sacrificial community. But sentimentality is not something one can simply eliminate. It is inherent in the formation of the community; it can be deferred, but it cannot be destroyed without destroying the cultural function of the work, which is after all to bring us together. However hard-headed its understanding of mimetic desire, the end of Seinfeld as of every other cultural phenomenon is the generation of love out of the transcendence of resentment. Its strength lies in its refusal to represent the love that it must generate. This attention to what I have called esthetic paradox was formerly the privilege of the high culture. The genius of Seinfeld is to have understood that, when wholly unmotivated by extraneous, i.e., institutional factors, the discontinuously stable community inherent in the sitcom format can itself become a model of this paradox. Seinfeld is the sitcom about nothing because it is the sitcom whose form, unmotivated by content, is at every moment a transcendental gift.

But, however unmotivated the community of its protagonists, the series’ very popularity fatally creates a motivated community among its spectators. Reading the recent articles on the series’ demise in Time and Newsweek, I was struck by the references to “named” episodes such as “The Rye” or “The Chinese Restaurant”–as though the world of Seinfeld watchers has found communion in a set of universally admitted preferences. The reader will excuse me if I find this less than appealing. The pleasure of Seinfeld is an individual experience to be shared with one’s special friends. Here is the one TV show that stands above the rest, that you and I, with our sophisticated esthetic tastes, may enjoy. Once this enjoyment has become just another of the banal unanimities that Time transmits weekly to its readers, it is indeed time for the show to leave the air.

This year’s episodes, having thrown off the restraint that formerly characterized the series, seem to be burning the bridges of plausibility that held the characters and their world together. But the real sense of this outlandishness is just the opposite. The resort to slapstick and the wild improbabilities of a paranoid world view reflect an unprecedented need to share the quiet desperation of the series’ protagonists with the outside world. (The recent “Thelma and Louise” scene between Kramer and a car salesman is a case in point.) This sharing reflects, within the series, the series’ own popularity. As the world has increasingly come to commune in the non-communing community of Seinfeld, Seinfeld itself cannot but increasingly mirror this contamination. How can Seinfeld continue to avoid sentimentality in a world that sentimentalizes over Seinfeld? The world of the nineties that the show depicts has become a world for which that very show has become the central cultural experience. This is too much for popular culture to absorb, too much even for the series’ considerable resources of self-reflectivity. Seinfeld has reached its end, and must come to an end.

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We have all participated in conversations among members of a certain group–family, racial, ethnic, sexual, what have you–that deal with the real and imagined foibles of the members of another. In such cases, even the most objective discussion ceases when a member of the discussed group enters the room, because the discussion has been predicated on his exclusion, not merely from the group at hand, but from the virtual community of discourse for whom the conversation is intended. Even the objective truths of such discourse–but it is no accident that such truths are the hardest to determine and/or to have accepted–are not uttered disinterestedly. When we speak negatively–or even “positively”–of another group, we affirm our solidarity by justifying their exclusion from our virtual community.

One might argue that the xenophobia commonly observed in private discourse does not disturb the public sphere; that, on the contrary, it is a lightning rod that serves to forestall public manifestations of intergroup hostility. Yet because our virtual discursive community is in principle the whole of humanity–all humans are mutually linked by language–exclusion from the virtual linguistic community is the equivalent of exclusion from humanity itself, in violation of our most fundamental moral intuition.

The PC phenomenon to which I have alluded many times in these Chronicles is a variant, however snobbish and self-serving, of our postwar/postmodern revulsion against such exclusion. Because exclusionary attitudes led to the exemplary phenomenon of the Holocaust, exclusion on whatever scale is suspect. Generalizations about the racial, sexual, ethnic “Other” become anathema. The postmodern imperative is that the universality of the virtual community be realized in every conversation. When Gentiles assemble, Jews are virtually present; when Whites get together, Blacks are there in spirit.

Because, taken at face value, this is a wholly praiseworthy aim, one wonders why the very term “Politically Correct,” with its overtone of resentful impotence, ever came into being. But just as we have seen that our “love” for celebrities expresses in the first place our rivalry with our less illustrious fellows (see Chronicles 108 and 114), so our declared love for our fellow humans also risks serving as a sanctimonious weapon against our benighted neighbors. The fact that our virtual community should be open to persons of all colors does not prevent a Green’s expression of horror at his neighbor’s disparagement of Blues being construed as an attack on his fellow Greens.

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The victimary reaction that always sides with the outsider derives from the Christian exaltation of the victim, but Christianity is not altogether capable of eliminating its ethical ambivalence. Christianity reveals the constitutive power of the victim itself, as opposed to the divinity for which the victim is merely a stand-in. The Trinity, the linchpin of Christian theology, codifies the intuition of the son-victim as a “person”–essentially, a role– of the sacred rather than a mere sacrifice to it. In ethical terms, this means understanding that the victim is “closer to God” than his sacrificers, although one is supposed to love the latter as well.

Although there is no fixed limit to the insight available within a given ethical paradigm, at a certain point the articulations that express its revelatory substance come to be anticipated and “discounted” and thereby lose their usefulness in evaluating our choices. One might think that an ethic that privileges the victim is invulnerable to such “discounting,” since no one could willingly endure victimary suffering merely for the sake of ethical exemplarity–in other words, that the paradox of the crucified divinity is irreducible by the rationality of the social economy. But the development of market exchange indeed reduces the original paradox by carrying out the ever more richly articulated exteriorization of the Christian ethic in the world of consumption. The results of this process, Enlightenment rationalism and even “God is dead” theology, are reflections not of the failure of Christianity but of its success.

And so is the Holocaust. Its very horror is a tribute to the “civilized” state of its European perpetrators. Not only is modern antisemitism a reaction to the freeing of the Jews from earlier restrictions, but modern brutality, initiated in thought by Nietzsche and in deed by so many, is a panic reaction against the fear that in a culture without physical violence, the ignoble internalized violence of resentment will be a permanent and irredeemable state.

The great irony of today’s Left Nietzscheism is its demonstration of Christianity’s triumph over the prophet of Zarathustra. Postmodern victimary thinking merely produces another avatar of the Christianity that Nietzsche railed against. Nietzsche was anti-authoritarian; but the authority he hated was that of the sanctimonious, self-denying priest–someone, in short, with precisely the personality type of those who now denounce “phallogocentrism.” Nietzsche’s anti-victimary revolt has always “succeeded” by becoming a caricature of itself: first a barbaric racialist-“socialist” cult of the Superman, then an academic Phariseeism. Yet Christianity has not been able to solve the victimary problem. The recent recrudescence of fundamentalism reflects the impatience of traditional believers with what they perceive not inaccurately in the mainstream churches as the conflation of Christian reverence for the victim with political liberalism.

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Victimage is not simply exclusion. In the ritual scheme of things, victimage is a necessary operation. A victim is not a mere unfortunate, but one chosen to perform an essential religio-social function. When we consider someone excluded from the virtual community in this light, we see him as a scapegoat chased out into the desert with the community’s sins on his back. From this perspective, to condemn his expulsion is to condemn the arbitrariness of all sacrifice, to renew the work of Jesus.

The achievement of postmodern victimary thinking has been to insist on the inclusion in the virtual community of all those previously excluded. Men may no longer come together to condemn women, Whites to condemn Blacks, or vice versa; no dialogue is valid that does not take place in the virtual presence of all

Those who follow the victimary model view the establishment of a genuinely universal community of discourse as predicated on amends made by the oppressor to the oppressed, the persecutor to the victim. The most irritating sign of this first reaction to this universalization of the virtual community has been hypertrophic euphemism, the rejection of any communication from a “victimizing” to a “victimized” group that is not merely not insulting but unflattering.

But we can substitute for the negative model of victimage the positive one of virtual inclusion. According to this model, the one excluded from the community is not a scapegoat, but merely someone not yet accepted–not an exile, but a potential immigrant. No one is definitively excluded from our virtual linguistic community, but in some cases we are not yet sufficiently prepared for their arrival.

From a long-term perspective, PC and the victimary vision it reflects is no doubt but a short-term annoyance. The universalization of the virtual community of discourse is a necessary, positive development; it signifies the “final” triumph of Christian morality. As the novelty of this inclusiveness wears off, we have already made considerable progress toward a frank and clear-eyed questioning of the needs and demands of different groups. As intergroup tensions enter the dialogue that formerly could not be expressed, they purge themselves of their potential for violence. But the price of this pacification is that those who were previously excluded must renounce their claim to victimary status. Within the virtual community, there can be neither victims nor slaughterers, only equals engaged in reciprocal exchange.

Can we really doubt that men and women, Whites and Blacks, hetero- and homosexuals are able to talk about their differences and similarities more openly today than ever before? The strength of liberal democracy is not that it produces harmony, but that its dissonances are channeled away from physical violence into the sphere of representation–and from there into the marketplace. If we have faith–as most of PC’s opponents do–in the ever-expanding inclusive capacity of our social order, we should treat PC’s victimary rhetoric as an inevitable childhood illness rather than a potentially fatal disease.

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In my last Chronicle, I criticized Marcus Borg for reducing Jesus to a “spirit person” and neglecting his fundamental revelatory message: God is love. This week I would like to articulate this message with the minimal hypothesis of Generative Anthropology. How is the imperative of promoting the cause of love over that of resentment derived from the ethic incarnate in the originary sign? If the first sign is the Name-of-God, in what sense is it the sign of love?

We may rely on the experience of human sexual love. The eros-agape distinction is not primary. If we use the word “love” in both cases, it is because we feel the love of God and the love of one’s beloved to be variants of the same experience. Human love is not worship; but love of God is not “worship” either in the sense of the adulation of a superior being. Love defers resentment; where resentment suspects the other’s difference from me as greater proximity to the center of significance and, consequently, as a violation of the principle of human reciprocity, love experiences difference as “horizontal” equidistance from the center. In heterosexual love, this difference–vive la différence!– is the most fundamental biological one. The mutuality of sexual pleasure is a physiological guarantee that difference need not be a zero-sum game.

If the first sign is the Name-of-God, then God is significant difference itself. The love of God is not the worship of his superiority, but the willingness to accept his difference, like the sexual difference of the beloved, as a source of mutuality. The sacred Being we call God is what remains when the central being desired by all and renounced by all is no more. We cannot understand this Being as love unless we replace the traditional substantive notion of God as a supernatural entity with the insight that what stands behind the significance of the central object is not a substance at all but an interaction. The Being that defers our violence through representation is no more than our act of deferral itself.

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What is the place of representation in human love? The sine qua non of love is care; he who loves is he who cares for the other, not he who merely represents his love. To love is to sacrifice one’s time and energy for the beloved, one’s life if need be. To say “I love you” and subsequently turn one’s back on the other’s need is not to love. But neither can love be made to consist in the mere act of care. The act of love is inseparable from the promise it fulfills, and which the expression “I love you” conveys. To love is to be faithful to one’s promise, to care in fulfillment of the promise of care. But this necessary condition is not sufficient. I do not love if I act merely to fulfill my original promise. Love requires that I continually renew this promise “in my heart.” By the very fact of this renewal, the promise of love is broader than an obligation of worldly care; the continual renewal of my promise requires that I unceasingly defer the resentment engendered by my perception of the other as the beneficiary of this promise.

This analysis makes clear the difference between GA and René Girard’s “fundamental anthropology” concerning the nature of the deferral of originary violence. Girard attributes what I have been calling love’s deferral of resentment to the designation of a scapegoat as the object of communal violence. The scapegoat-God is first hated, then loved for his presumed role in provoking, then ending collective violence–ending it by being presumed to provoke it. In contrast to the gods of violence, Jesus Christ, the God of love, asks us to love each other in him, to defer mimetic violence not by sacrificing him, but by remembering his sacrifice by and to the old order. Christ substitutes for the scapegoat because he unveils and thereby deconstructs the sacrificial mechanism–this is, in effect, the archetype of historical “deconstruction.”

In Girard’s model, deconstructive knowledge of the scapegoat mechanism is fed back into the triangular structure of desire with which it is ostensibly incompatible. Here the paradoxicality of the relationship between representation and reality as both structural and historic, structural because historic, unengendered because engendered, returns upon the triangular model of desire and subverts it. The scapegoat is “cast out,” not from the community, but from the model of desire; little by little, Jesus’ message erodes sacrificial triangularity.

But the question of what remains cannot easily be answered. Just as Girard’s analysis of Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir in Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque [Deceit, Desire, and the Novel] suggests that Julien’s love for Mme de Rênal, in contrast with that for Mathilde de la Mole, is free from metaphysical desire without explaining how this is possible, so in his evocation of Christian agapé, Girard never provides an articulated model of love without mediation. The opposition in Mensonge between the transcendance verticale of religion and the ever-intensifying idolatry of internal mediation would appear to imply that unmediated love must set its mediator at an infinite distance. But Christ, in contrast with the Old-Testament idea of God, is precisely the mediator who insists on inhabiting the same world as the mediated.

The example of human sexual love usefully problematizes the question of mediation: in the dyad of lovers, there is no third party to expel. In a familiar vision of masculine love, the female qua spirit mediates herself qua flesh to male desire by displaying her “narcissistic” indifference to this desire. The man’s response in what used to be called, and still remains, the battle of the sexes requires him to practice what Girard calls l’ascèse pour le désir [askesis for the sake of desire], feigning indifference in order to make his desire itself the object of his rival’s desire. In Stendhal’s novel, Julien seduces a noble lady by sending her a set of prefabricated love-letters, then treats her with indifference. When the latter’s “narcissistic” mediation of her desirability fails because she is treated as undesirable, not only she but Mathilde find Julien irresistible.

This analysis does not provide a place for “true love.” Even if we eliminate gender asymmetry, to consider each lover as a subject mediating him/herself as object of desire is to dissolve the unity of God-as-love. To love the Other as mistress or master of his/her inaccessible body is to fall into idolatry, and the idol, as we know, is a sacrificial figure, a reification of violence. By analogy with Girard’s own polarity between the religion of love and that of violence, in order for human love to furnish a model of God-as-love, it must diminish the sacrificial, the idolatrous. This does not imply “spiritualizing” the body away, but rather investing with spirit its very desirability, so that the potential resentment inspired in each by the other’s self-possession is continually dispelled by the other’s gift of self. The self as subject exists apart from the other only in order to give up possession of itself as an object, that is, as a source of physical energy and of anything in any way appropriable. The promise of love is to perpetuate this process.

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The lover is both active and passive, a self that gives itself. The independently self-sufficient God who gives his substance in a one-way gift is not the God of love; such gifts arouse resentment. God-as-love is substantive Being caught in the process of its generation from human desire. Indeed, to say that God “is” love is to reify the process that the rhetoric of the sentence “God is love” realizes. The equation expressed by the copula is in the general case “false” in that the two things it equates cannot be identical for us if they have different names. (This is true only of cultural phenomena; in an astronomical model, for example, it may be simply true that the “morning star” is identical to the “evening star.”) In the sentence “God is love,” we witness the generation of substance from process: God as a named “someone,” a substantive subject, a user of language, is equated with love, the essence of human interaction insofar as it cannot be reduced from process to substance. We may “deconstruct” the former to the latter, but the subversive glee that accompanies the operation fails to comprehend its incorporation “always-already” in the cultural construction that preceded it. (Paul de Man‘s version of deconstruction understood this ironic always-already, but only as an attribute of “texts,” thereby fetishizing textuality as an “unconscious” wiser than the culture within which it operates.)

If we understand the standing-against of Being as the institution of a hierarchy in which we can only re-present what is no longer present and remains substantively “elsewhere,” then love is not simply the cessation of rivalry among desirers and representers of this Being; the relationship between lovers each case assimilates the other to the desired Being itself. Our “realistic” age purports to understand the analogy between divine revelation and sexual ecstasy from the sexual perspective, but it can only be understood from the divine.

The gift of self in sexuality is only an exemplary moment of love, not its totality. The self as Being acknowledges its dependence on the desire of the other by acting at each moment to desacralize itself for the other. The implicit triangularity of desire is annulled in the confidence that it will be instantly reformed, creating a local sacred that perpetually abolishes itself and its attendant resentment. This operation implies “works” as well as “faith”: the other’s faith in my transcendence must be repaid within the world.

Which returns us to the sine qua non of love: the implicit promise of care. Love can never be exhausted by a specific promise. As the process by which Being is continually recycled into the desire from which it originated, it is the very faculty of promising, of being-there for the other. But thus defined, the faculty of love depends in turn on the “eternal” “self-identical” permanence of Being–on all the attributes inseparable from our idea of God.

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Jesus was a peasant–which tells us about his social class.

Clearly, he was brilliant. His use of language was remarkable and poetic, filled with images and stories. He had a metaphoric mind.

He was not an ascetic but world-affirming, with a zest for life.

There was a sociopolitical passion to him; like a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King Jr., he challenged the domination system of his day.

He was a religious ecstatic–a Jewish mystic, if you will–for whom God was an experiential reality. As such, he was also a healer. And there seems to have been a spiritual presence around him, like that reported of Saint Francis or the Dalai Lama.

And I suggest that as a figure of history, he was an ambiguous figure–you could experience him and conclude that he was insane, as his family did, or that he was simply eccentric, or that he was a dangerous threat–or you could conclude that he was filled with the Spirit of God.

Marcus Borg – The God We Never Knew, p. 90

The other day the UCLA Center for the Study of Religion sponsored a lecture by Marcus Borg, a member of the Jesus Seminar and the author of a number of well-regarded books about Jesus. Unsatisfied by the subjectivist orientation of the lecture, I took a look at Borg’s latest book, The God We Never Knew (HarperSanFrancisco 1997), which turned out to be the source of most of the lecture material, including the 164-word description of Jesus quoted above, originally prepared for a live television interview. The book is a sincere and, arguably, socially necessary attempt to make God meaningful for modern people skeptical of transcendental beings “out there.” But although it fleshed out what was sketchy in the talk and edited out the speaker’s distracting self-consciousness, it only confirmed my original impression. Borg develops his theology for our time without a word about the human reciprocity that religion in general and Christianity in particular exist to promote. His only ethical notion, presented as “God’s dream” for humanity, is “compassion,” a term that, as I have had occasion to observe in these Chronicles, tends to reflect an unfortunately non-reciprocal and politicized vision of human relations. Borg’s book provided just one more proof that it is the mensonge romantique [romantic lie] rather than the “supernatural” that poses the chief obstacle to a genuine anthropological understanding of religion.

Borg’s chief aim, with which I am not without sympathy, is to get beyond the image of God as a judgmental father-figure about whom we learn at second hand through religious texts, an anthropo- and andromorphic entity we imagine added to the beings we find in the world. Although Borg touches on it only incidentally, this religious supernaturalism is directly connected to the sacrificial, that is, to what the Judeo-Christian tradition is notable more than any other for having demystified and denounced. Thus his enterprise, in its initial inspiration, is consonant not only with the anti-sacrificial thrust of GA, but with the fundamental aim of Christianity itself. In this respect, although Borg himself seems to deny this, it is true to the original reforming spirit of the Lutheranism in which he was raised.

But Borg’s replacement for the sacrificial in the form of objective, external supernaturalism is… subjective, internal supernaturalism. After having rid ourselves of religious alienation in the form of an external authority-figure, we bring it back in the guise of internal “spiritual experience.” This God is emphatically not the “superego“–a term that Borg borrows unreflectively from Freud. Borg’s experience of God is not one of authority, le nom/non du père the Lacanians like to tell us about. It is rather an “ecstatic” one, such as those regularly experienced by shamans and mystics, and occasionally by ordinary folks like ourselves. In the absence of supernatural belief, Borg offers us psychological “experiences of the sacred.” But he fails to see that the psychological inversion of the institutional sacred is still a form of supernaturalism. It is always a question of “my relationship to God,” a dual relation between a human being and a non-human other in the absence of other humans. Because God’s otherness is non-human, it can only be attested in exceptional circumstances; whether we call them “other-worldly” or “ecstatic” is a secondary matter.

What is missing from this account of religion is what the word’s etymology so clearly requires: our relationship to other people, not in “compassion” but in love. I don’t know what the Jesus Seminar thinks of the authenticity of texts like “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12) or “Leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled with your brother” (Matthew 5:24), but what is truly unique about Christianity, although it exists in less lucid form in all religion, is its understanding that the Being of God is a mediating force that defers conflict among human beings. Borg seems constitutionally unable to conceive of human otherness; he reduces even Martin Buber’s conception of the “I-Thou” to a modality of the relationship between the isolated individual and “the world.”

Hence it should not surprise us that Borg’s picture of Jesus, however reverently intended, tells us nothing of what made him and his movement unique. It is entirely fitting that the description quoted above was composed in answer to a television personality’s question, “what it would have been like to be Jesus’ disciple.” Borg’s religious realism purges Jesus of fantastic attributes like virgin birth and bodily resurrection, but in their place provides nothing but the banal mediatic exceptionalism of one who is “brilliant,” speaks in poetic images, and has a “spiritual presence.” The appeal to the Dalai Lama–who has no personal doctrine, nor indeed an individual existence, since his name is a title–suggests that Borg expects, perhaps rightly, that his audience will find it easier to relate to the Tibetan’s pacified sacrificial charisma than Jesus’ moral message, which appears nowhere in the book: God is love, aimez-vous les uns les autres [love one another]. As for the reference to Martin Luther King, I can only imagine what that devout Christian would have thought not merely to hear himself, with all his sins, compared to Jesus, but to hear Jesus compared to him!

What makes Jesus one of the great figures of history are not the “spiritual” features that distinguish him from you and me, and ultimately make us resent him, but what he teaches us of our common humanity, what makes us want to love him and everyone else as both different from ourselves and yet our equals. No doubt Jesus “challenged the domination system” –an unfortunate term that washes out all tensions between the Jewish and Roman “dominators” in a binary opposition between the good oppressed and their evil oppressors. But our own century has surely taught us that political implementations of righteous anger against the social order in the attempt to realize God’s kingdom or some secular equivalent on earth are anything but productive of social justice. “Taking the side of the victim” in the Christian sense is far more than a political act of rebellion against “the system”: it is the concerted and never facile attempt to stand on the side of love against resentment, including the resentment of “the oppressed” that has fueled so many of history’s greatest horrors. The Holocaust that Borg so rightly treats as the worst of these was the act of Germans who fancied themselves “oppressed” by the Treaty of Versailles.

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However praiseworthy this author’s aims, his conception of religion in general and of Christianity in particular is untouched by any insight into the function of religion in the human community. If Borg’s Protestantism has the admirable quality of requiring him to establish his own radically individual relationship to God, it has the enormous flaw of detaching his relationship with God from its primary function–constantly emphasized by Jesus for whom he cares so much–in mediating his relationships with other human beings. I am sure Borg would himself put away his sacrifice to reconcile himself with his brother, but he fails to see that his deepest experience of the God who is love lies in this very reconciliation, not in “external” and “internal” mystical states and the other “varieties of religious experience.”

But perhaps the popularity of Borg’s writings and the visibility of the Jesus Seminar in which he is an active participant should give us pause. All but a happy few, most of whom can identify historically or personally with the mimetic theory of desire, would rather see themselves as subjects, however deconstituted, confronting objects, however deconstructed, than as participants in triangular relations of mediation. If this be a weakness, then it is a near-universal weakness. Perhaps religion exists precisely for those who could not otherwise shed their self-definition as autonomous subjects of desire, so that the truth of GA’s notion of God is demonstrated by its very incapacity to found an “irrational” belief system. The GA aficionado who finds Borg’s arguments inadequate would doubtless never believe in God anyway, whether in Borg’s or the fundamentalist’s terms.

Yet I cannot accept this reasoning as definitive. A theory too subtle for its time is not the same as a theory too intelligent for humanity in general. The former is “world-historical” in Hegel’s sense; the latter is not. The Enlightenment project, whose intellectual heirs we all are, arrogantly oversimplified the relation between religion and human knowledge. I think that Generative Anthropology is the first form of secular thought that does not share in this error.

This by no means implies that GA is passively accepting of religion; it implies just the opposite. The only way in which religious thinking can adapt itself to GA is to change radically. Not only the big daddy God of old-time religion, but the “feminine” spirit God of Borg cannot help but be radically transformed by a way of thinking that makes God’s revelations to man the bearers of not merely religious but anthropological truths. Whether the breakthrough be made by GA or some later equivalent, religion cannot forever keep its back turned to the insights of a minimalist anthropology founded on the mimetic theory of desire.

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