Author: staceymeeker

A couple of people have expressed surprise that the only reference in these Chronicles to the Heaven’s Gate incident has been an oblique remark at the end of Chronicle 87 (on Herostratus). My first reaction was that I had nothing to add to all the obvious remarks either pitying and/or condemning the suicides, or showing sympathy for their “spiritual quest.” But I think my very reluctance reflects a feature of the incident that is worthy, if not of commentary, then of metacommentary.

The obvious reaction has been to condemn the mass suicide as monstrously deluded. Not only was the group’s theology embarrassingly naive, but, after all, what worse thing could a cult do to people than kill them? Similar incidents in France have met with unanimous opprobrium in the press. Yet the first-level responses to the suicides have been condemned in turn by more sophisticated commentators; Doug Collins pointed out to me a couple of articles in the April 21 New Republic that may serve as examples.

Anthony Steel‘s piece on p. 25 is exemplary of the genre. Steel defends the Gaters with increasing sympathy, calling them “this ardent group of gentle souls who came together to seek fulfillment” and empathizing with “the millions who see something of their own unfulfilled longings in these searchers.” But we should not forget that the article began by attacking the “extraordinary response” of the media, “bristling with self-righteous denunciation” yet rarely seeking to understand the horrified fascination that led these journalists, “as if they feared contamination,” “to distance themselves as far as possible from the group’s professed beliefs.” For Steel, these beliefs are not “particularly unique or bizarre” but “firmly rooted in Christian theology.” Like other sophisticates, Steel points out the parallels between the Gaters and the early Christians, some of whom practiced self-castration, as well as with earlier American millenarian groups like the Shakers. After all, is there really a difference between believing in a space-ship behind Hale-Bopp and believing that a communion wafer is the body of Christ? Etc., etc.

On p. 42, Leon Wieseltier, in a somewhat lighter vein, is equally dismissive of his fellow plumitifs; after expressing his own dismay at the “kitsch” of Gatist theology, he takes on a quartet of previous commentators on the event: a reporter, a science fiction writer, a liberal, a conservative–none of whom, needless to say, has grasped the essence of the situation, since “what all these commentators were trying to elide was the reality of the hunger of the soul.” Kitsch or not, these people had acted “for a spiritual objective,” and at the end, Wieseltier, after showing sympathy for castration (“Why not subdue the body, when the body is an idol?”) concludes that, although the group’s answers may have been wrong, at least they had asked “the right questions.”

 

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What then is my take on all this? Let’s say my take is determined by my meta-take. I note that, unlike natural disasters or feats of heroism or even Tiger Woods winning the Masters, this incident, rather than bringing us together as a community to deplore or celebrate, sets us against one another. I can’t recall having seen a single commentary on the affair–and my own is surely no exception–that isn’t an exercise in one-upmanship of one kind or another, either directly at the expense of the thirty-nine or more obliquely at that of some predecessor taxed with naivete or insensitivity.

Why is this so? Because, whatever spiritual values may have motivated the Gaters to suicide, their final gesture of turning their backs on the world–our world–can only be interpreted from our standpoint as the ultimate act of dandyism. The dandy, as Baudelaire was well aware, was a kind of worldly ascetic whose motto was nihil admirari, which, properly understood, means “never find anything interesting.” The dandy has found the definitive solution to the problem of mimetic desire: he feels, or in any case he expresses, no desire whatever. As a result, because he envies and imitates no one, all envy and imitate him: our petty pleasures turn to ashes at the sight of one wholly indifferent to them.

Dandyism to the point of suicide is dandyism with a vengeance. Either to condemn or to defend the Gaters is to appropriate a spiritual reality that excludes us. These people did not ask for our approbation. As far as they were concerned, it is we who are the deluded fools and spiritual failures. Hence, crazy or not, the thirty-nine provoke resentment on the part of those whose values have been rejected, whose mediation has been denied. The more naive–or we might say, the less neurotic–express this resentment through the familiar inversion of contempt, like the fox who finds the grapes out of reach. They retort in kind, forgetting that, in such exchanges, the second move (“So’s yer old man!” “Et ta soeur!”) is never very convincing. The more sophisticated, finding inversion too crude, take up the Gaters’ cause against the benighted rest of us, which gives them the opportunity to display by contrast their religious learning and spiritual refinement. But there is a word for those who take the dandy as their model without becoming dandies themselves: they are called snobs. The dandy, deluded or not, pays his dues; the snob does not. He is content to wrap himself in the dandy’s mantle in order to upstage his own less spiritual neighbors.

The spiritual value of an act for the larger community is best understood by observing its actual effect on this community. In the present case, the effect has been clearly negative. This mass suicide, whatever satisfaction it may have given its participants, has added resentment to the world rather than love. No one with more than a superficial understanding of Christianity can assimilate this deed to the imitatio Christi of martyrdom. The Crucifixion is a submission to human violence for the purpose of exposing and rejecting this violence. Jesus gave his life out of love for common humanity, not out of disdain for this world. No doubt Christianity has generated its share of Gnostic heresies, but, precisely, it condemns them as heresies because they are not expressions of its revelatory essence. The squabbling journalistic one-upmanship the Gaters’ suicide has inspired reflects not our awe before a great spiritual conquest but our resentment of what we interpret malgré nous as a hostile act.

Spirituality is nothing more than the rising to the surface of the underlying function of all cultural phenomena. No single act can put an end to violence, but to offer one’s life in this effort is to accede to the divinity of the originary victim. The horizon of Jesus’ death is the turning-away from the sacred center toward the human periphery and the reciprocity of human love. If we would salvage some spiritual value from the thirty-nine suicides, we should let our pity and envy of their communal solidarity inspire us to give our love to those who still share the world with us.

There are few subjects that cry out for originary thinking as much as the relationship between religion and cosmology. The other evening I chanced on a National Public Radio (NPR) discussion about whether God just created the universe or whether he “intervenes” in it, making use of quantum uncertainties to avoid breaking the “laws of nature.” Well, I thought, it’s a good thing he planned for those uncertainties when he made the laws in the first place; I guess that’s why he’s God and we’re not. The sheer idiocy of this line of thinking suggests that a version of the uncertainty principle indeed applies to the relation between scientific and religious cosmology: as one becomes more precise, the other becomes more inane.

One would think that if religion had learned one thing from the development of science since the Renaissance, it is that it should get out of the cosmology business. But the Enlightenment rupture between religion and anthropological reflection has led to a regression in religious self-consciousness. The religious population itself seems increasingly divided between moderates whose creed differs little from that of secular humanism and radicals whose beliefs fly in the face of scientific rationality–and common sense. Tertullian’s credo quia absurdum, which originally applied in a strictly interactive, anthropological context–what is absurd is that the abject figure of the Crucified is the Son of God–is now understood without paradox, let alone irony, as requiring us to deny the results of human reasoning about the natural world. Meanwhile, the anointed scholars of religion are no more capable than the believers of articulating religion with science; anthropologically tone-deaf, they mindlessly conflate the human with the natural sciences. The received wisdom, as dutifully echoed on the NPR broadcast, is that although science and religion talk about the same things, they move along separate paths and can never come into conflict. Hostility in the past was regrettable; its persistence in the present is unnecessary. Originary thinking alone seems able to understand that although religion can tell us nothing of interest about cosmology, it has a great deal more to teach us about fundamental anthropology than the positive social sciences.

Only if we consider God strictly in relation to the human can we pose the question of his intervention in the universe in useful terms. We are sign-using creatures and we understand transcendent Being through our understanding of language. For this purpose, if Gödel’s theorem at least provides a suggestive analogy, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is useless. If God is the being that defers mimetic conflict among humans, then his intervention is never independent of human will. In the simplest case, a group on the edge of conflict that prays for peace achieves its wish by the very harmony of its prayer: by the very act of representing the same inaccessible locus of desire they achieve temporary participation in sacred being. God cannot, or will not, protect us from natural disasters, but he is always ready to help us confront our greatest danger, which is ourselves.

 

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But is there not a problem of free will–God’s and ours? Can we deny the Laplacian intuition that tells us that each instant of the universe wholly determines the next? Are the molecules that make up the human body somehow liberated from physical necessity? Or is it quantum uncertainty that allows us to choose between good and evil?

I don’t pretend to have the latest word on quantum theory, but my anthropological intuition is good enough to tell me that whether or not it can one day be reconciled with common sense, it will never tell us anything about either God or the problem of free will. The entrance of God into human affairs, or of man into divine, that marks the origin of the human was not a revolution in physics. God is our name for the Being whose naming permits us to survive by deferring conflict. Our own religious tradition emphasizes God’s ability to create with language. In the tohu-bohu of originary chaos, by saying “let there be light” he creates the differentiating force of light. “Intervention” occurs here as the differentiation of the undifferentiated. This is not far from the originary hypothesis, for which the first human word, the name-of-God, by differentiating the central object as significant from the insignificant world around it, defers conflict among those who enunciate it. The divine intervenes to defer mimetic conflict by transforming an object of appropriation into a referent of sacred meaning. The sacredness of the object makes the sign meaningful; the meaningfulness of the sign makes the object sacred. But the sign is meaningful only because its enunciation is free; the sign is no longer enacted as an unthought index pointing to the object, but mindfully, as a representation of the object.

The freedom of linguistic consciousness, the model for all other freedoms, violates no laws of either modern or classical physics. What does it mean, after all, to say I lift my arm “voluntarily”? In order to make this judgment, I have to think about my act, which is also to say, think about not performing it; otherwise, it is no more “voluntary” than the similar movement of a lizard or an amoeba. But the real point of calling my movement voluntary is not simply that I deliberate whether to make it or not, but that in doing so, I can take into consideration other thoughts about it, such as yours. Thus the simplest definition of a “voluntary” act is one which, if I know you have predicted me to perform it, I can choose not to carry out. Without the scene of representation that defines the human, you cannot think the unfreedom, the determinedness of my act; but by the same token, my access in principle to this scene defines my freedom to act in defiance of any such determination.

Our first demonstration of God’s freedom is his utterance of the word that creates the primordial difference from which all others derive. This difference exists here on earth, but it is guaranteed transcendentally. Freedom is the link between the vertical world and the horizontal one, the world of signs and the world of things, and this link cannot be expressed within the world of things alone. The materialist denies the freedom of the thing-world along with the independence of the sign-world; but his denial is suspect because it is expressed in freely emitted signs rather than “emanating” involuntarily from the material reality whose sole reality it affirms. This does not mean that there is a “spirit world” that intervenes physically in this one. The dualism of originary thinking is not metaphysical, as though the physical universe held the sign in its entrails from the beginning, but historical: the human creates and is created by the sign in order to defer its own self-destruction.

In attempting to discover whether we act “freely” or “deterministically,” we beg the question if we limit our model of action to the physical world. We can create models of determinism; we cannot create a model of freedom, or rather, a model of freedom is precisely what arises when a deterministic model is represented to its subject, who is then free to subvert it. God “intervenes” in this model as the originary guarantee of representation as such.

Generative anthropology is no fideism; it constructs a model of the emergence of the sacred in and with the human. But that the first word is the name-of-God tells us that significance is not a product of disinterested contemplation, but exists to defer the violence of crisis. I can refuse to countenance God’s intervention in my everyday affairs, and tax with credulity the believer in the efficacy of prayer, but I cannot purge the human of its potentiality for mimetic crisis to which sacred deferral is the originary solution. The interventions of the transcendent in the immanent, whether as freedom or as divinity, are ungraspable by physical models that cannot account for the effect of our knowledge of the model on the behavior we are modeling. In one case, this is because we have the luxury of doing the opposite of what was predicted of us; in the other, it is because, in the face of mimetic crisis, we lack the luxury to detach our desire from the object that simultaneously arouses and defers it.

The Enlightenment God who just winds up the world and walks away, leaving us to wonder whether he comes back once in a while to adjust the escapement, is as deluded a picture of the sacred as humanity has ever produced. It is easy to understand why it is contested by religious visions, less sophisticated but more profound; what is harder to fathom is why the general consciousness of the NPR class has not progressed beyond it.

The other day I picked up a survey of social-science religious theory entitled Seven Theories of Religion (Daniel Pals, Oxford U.P., 1996); published twenty-four years after La violence et le sacré, it does not even have Girard in its index. I take this as a sign of the unique power and danger of these ideas. Averting danger, after all, is what the sacred is all about; however stultifying its consequences, ignorance does this a lot more gently than burning at the stake.

No. 87: Saturday, April 5, 1997

The aspiring youth that fired the Ephesian dome
Outlives in fame the pious fool that raised it.
Colley Cibber: Richard III, act iii. sc. 1.

Äußerstes Herostratentum. – Es könnte Herostrate geben, welche den eignen Tempel anzündeten, in dem ihre Bilder verehrt werden. [Ultimate Herostratism: There might be Herostratuses who would set fire to the temple where their own images are worshipped.] Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

They say that in 356 B.C., Herostratus, in order to insure his immortal fame, burned down the great temple of Diana (Artemision) at Ephesus, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. This is a major date in the history of resentment. To understand its relevance for our times, we should imagine the prosperous Ionian seaport as an early model of the “good society,” and Herostratus himself as in no way oppressed or victimized. In contrast to Achilles‘ wrath (menis) over his slighting by Agamemnon, the very first word of the Iliad and of the high secular culture it inaugurates, Herostratus’ resentment is not disguised as a titanic rivalry. Perhaps he did have a rival, or more than one, but it is no accident that we have not learned of them. For Herostratus knew that his life would be the subject of no biographies, that he would be remembered for one act and one act alone.

The legend tells us that in the attempt to obliterate his dangerous example, the city authorities forbade on penalty of death to pronounce his name. Yet the effort was as futile as its paradoxical structure leads us to expect: to forbid us to pronounce a name is ipso facto not merely to pronounce it but to write it. Verba volant, scripta manent; our post-Derridean understanding of language makes clear that expulsion from illusory presence can only be purchased at the price of a very real supplement of absence. What has immortalized Herostratus is not his deed itself but the impotent interdiction to which it gave rise; to name is both to expel and to preserve–in a word, to sacralize. The persistence of this name is the negative of that experienced in Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, where he discovers that to persecute Jesus is to participate in his immortality.

Herostratus is remembered as the one society wants to forget. His act is a sacrilege, but its irrevocable effect is to render the sacred irrelevant. It is the emblematic event of secular society, the revelation of a potential for disorder that must henceforth be controlled by other than sacred means. At the same time, it reestablishes the sacred at the horizon of the worldly. Herostratus is not protesting distributional injustice but the inherent disequilibrium of the human condition that provides us with an infinity in signs and a finitude of things; as Lamartine put it, man is Borné dans son destin, infini dans ses voeux  [limited in destiny, infinite in desire]. We possess the sign of the sacred because we must be refused the sacred Being itself. To destroy the mediation between the transcendental world and our own is to substitute oneself for it as its sign, and thereby to attain the immortality that belongs to the sign-world alone, that of the name Herostratus.

Or perhaps Herostratus never existed. That the temple is said to have burned down on the very day of the birth of Alexander the Great makes this attribution suspect; perhaps Alexander’s achievement–the beginning of the end for the ancient temple-centered city-state–has been conflated with an accidental catastrophe in an apocryphal deed. But in either case, Herostratus names a newly discovered possibility for constituting the human subject.

Sardanapalus is said to have burned down his palace out of disgust with his mortal finitude. Such figures have traditionally illustrated the misery of the human condition; they are well suited to the late medieval danse macabre. Herostratus’ act does not express the infinite ennui of the aristocrat whose awareness of mortality corrupts his worldly pleasures. Those who have known grandeur in their lifetime cannot measure his deed’s existential purity. From the anonymity of the respectable middle class, he rises in one stroke above the human condition. Sardanapalus was indifferent to the immortality of his name; a king is recorded in history however his life ends. Having known all boredoms, including the boredom of fame, his act was no shot at immortality but an expression of nihilism in the face of the impossible passage from immanence to transcendence. Because he has not had the luxury of boredom, Herostratus understands the joy as well as the limits of “immortality”: to be remembered by human society against its will.

 

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Is it not remarkable that no one in history has equaled, let alone improved on, Herostratus’ example? We have had assassinations of kings and presidents, terrorist attacks on buildings and airplanes, massacres of millions; but he alone is remembered for destroying the central sacred locus of his society. The world of the marketplace is no longer guaranteed by a temple. Burning down the New York Stock Exchange would scarcely register on the seismograph of the global economy.

Thus the protagonist of Sartre’s short story Erostrate is a pathetic figure who, seeking immortality via the Surrealist recipe of descendre dans la rue et tirer au hasard dans la foule [go down into the street and shoot at random into the crowd], is arrested before he can even get off a shot. But the canonical modern treatment is that of Dostoevsky. Readers of the Notes From Underground– the first and best loved book of my adolescence–meet a white-collar version of Herostratus: the petty bureaucrat who “clanks his sword” to impress his clients with his authority, and who, in the Crystal Palace of rational perfection, stands up for “two plus two equals five.”

Mid-nineteenth century Russia was anything but a place of universal prosperity, but its very distance from the horizon of market society allowed Dostoevsky to pose the “existential” problem of modernity in all its clarity, more acutely, because more interactively, even than Kierkegaard faced with Hegel’s end of history. The existential problem is really a market problem, a problem of self-marketing. Let us stipulate, as the lawyers say, that everything is perfectly rational, and all talents are rewarded at their true market value. Then one whose rewards are mediocre is obliged to conclude, not that society oppresses or victimizes him, as two centuries of revolutionary rhetoric have accustomed him to hear, but simply that he is mediocre, and that his knowledge of his mediocrity, which in Aristotle’s ethic would be man’s highest wisdom (aurea mediocritas is the Latin for it), offers him no prospect of transcending his condition. It is this combination of “perfect” self-knowledge and imperfect marketability that generates the Herostratus figure. The more he realizes how justly the “rational” social order evaluates him, the greater his resentment against humanity and the cosmos in which it operates. Alfred Jarry’s turn-of-the-century horrid-comic Père Ubu (Ubu roi, 1896) becomes “king of Poland” by acting out infantile-bourgeois fantasies of mayhem (“à la trappe”) that prefigure the real horrors perpetrated by politicized resentment in the coming century.

The more rationalized the world economy, the greater the winner-take-all gaps between the truly successful and the rest, and the more resentment consumerist messages arouse in those with no reasonable hope of success. The optimist will note that Western market society has not followed the Social Darwinist model that seemed inevitable in the nineteenth century. The missing feedback loop between Marx’s pauperized proletariat and the consumer society explains why the socialist dream has crumbled before the (relative) prosperity of advanced market economies. But as soon as barriers between classes are removed (i.e., between middle-class and working-class), others rise to replace them (i.e., between yuppie and middle-class). Market society levels distinctions only to produce new distinctions; this is the interactive basis of Marx’s vision of “capitalism” as constantly compelled to destroy and create itself anew.

Utopians believe that this process can be stabilized, that some model of the “good society” can be approached, if not achieved. But the marketplace cannot multiply signs of distinction as it can material satisfactions, and the more “fairly” these signs are distributed on the basis of ability or achievement, the more intolerable it is for those who fail to obtain them. In an unfair world, the absence of worldly distinction may be proof of a higher moral standard; the fairer the world becomes, the less this stance can be maintained. Utopia generates dystopia. The only alternative is to burn down the temple.

 Herostratus was an individualist, a loner, someone a pre-baby-boomer like myself can identify with. The victimary thinking of the postwar era neglects the resentment of the individual human-who-would-be-God to concentrate on the collective sense of injustice. But collective resentment, even when its motivations are similar, differs from individual resentment by the fact that on its local scene of operation, the resentful group is in the majority. Herostratus is alone against the world; the victimary collectivity oppressed by the World Out There focuses its resentment on scapegoats either real (Jews have been a long-time favorite) or figurative (burning Uncle Sam in effigy). Suicidal terrorists and the like act in a very different spirit from our Ephesian hero: their glory comes from their support group, not from the society as a whole malgré elle.

Yet the mobilization of group resentments in turn intensifies individual resentment. The more our victimary collectives are compensated, the more our Herostratuses become frustrated. The disgruntled petty bureaucrat a.k.a. postal worker takes an AK-47 to his local fast-food outlet in a last-ditch try for the Guinness Book of World Records by blowing away as many people as possible (usually including himself).

But there is another solution. Herostratic individuals sometimes give up their stance of one against all to form a community whose gods recognize them alone. These groups act in the opposite manner from terrorists: ignoring the larger society, they reestablish the lost relationship between humanity and the Order of the Universe. Some, impatient to cut all ties with an imperfect world, even hasten their departure via UFO for the transcendental Kingdom to which they truly belong. In such cases, the temple they destroy is their earthly selves.

 

A couple of Chronicles ago, I referred to the technological progression from nineteenth-century panoramas and magic lanterns to modern film (and recordings). With each generation, our ability to reproduce the feel of reality increases. Cinema adds sound, color, deep focus, wide screens, computer simulations… Films like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Jurassic Park perform the Promethean feat of peopling human reality with the products of our reconstructive imagination or our childlike fantasy.

The point of originary analysis is to situate this “natural” human tendency in the scene of human origin. The minimal linguistic sign designating the central object contrasts with the reproduction of the scene as a whole in ritual. Minimal or formal representation is mediated by our understanding of the sign as standing for its referent–an understanding that reflects the sign’s origin in an aborted gesture of appropriation of its unappropriable object. But the formal ostensive sign that represents the central object in its presence is inadequate to substitute for it in a reproduction of the scene. The absent object is “supplemented” by material elements that reproduce something of the sensuous effect of the originary crisis. The temporal-peripheral elements of music and dance recreate, as Girard has remarked, the rhythm of the agon, the “fearful symmetry” of the potential conflict that must be deferred. Ritual also includes synchronic representation of the central being itself in drawing, mask, statue. However formalized, these are material figures, not pure signs. They are, to use C. S. Peirce’s term, iconic, resembling their referent in more or less detail.

But the creation of photography leads us to question the simplicity of the iconic category of signs. As Peirce himself observed, despite appearances, a photograph is not an icon, a man-made attempt at resemblance, but an index or “natural” sign, a trace produced by mechanical means. The distinction is not between two degrees of precision or detail, but two qualitatively different types of signs. This gives us an insight into the horizon of realism: it is not to reproduce the “real,” the phenomenal stuff of human experience, with utmost accuracy, but to do so independently of human desire. This realist horizon defines the heroic tale of the high-cultural artist who learns painstakingly to copy the nuances of appearance by deferring or “sublimating” his own desiring relationship to the object.

A horizon is not a goal but an incentive; its attainment is not a realization but a transformation. The invention of photography, the first means of mechanical reproduction, gives the artist’s tale an unexpected subjective twist that inaugurates the age of modernism. The modernist abandons the realism of shared experience for the incarnation of his own “pre-cultural” vision of Being; rather than sacrifice his desire, he sacrifices himself to his desire. This is a clever coda to the high-artistic narrative, but a dead end nonetheless. The horizon of iconic resemblance was “natural” resemblance–the ever-inaccessible phenomenon in itself. But once technology allows us to preserve an indexical trace of the object, this transcendental frontier of human effort becomes a banally mechanical reality; the sacrificial framework of artistic askesis is evacuated. Like John Henry fighting the steam drill, the heroic artist must give way to a device to which the human concept of heroism is inapplicable.

In prephotographic times, the indexical sign was a relic: Veronica’s veil or the Shroud of Turin as opposed to a mere image. Walter Benjamin’s famous discussion of the loss of aura misses the essential point that the mechanical reproduction of the referent’s own trace is the direct heir to the sacred aura of the object itself. Because it preserves a trace of its object, a photograph has more aura than a painting. We daydream for hours before artless old snapshots; they are precious relics of a time lost. Paintings, however valuable, evoke not a real but an imaginary world; they are traces, not of reality, but of human intention.

Yet photography, while ruining the heroic project of iconic realism, cannot occupy its esthetic terrain. The photograph tells the story of its object with no need for formalization beyond the framing of the scene. But the story that it tells is true; there is no such thing as fiction photography. I can draw a picture of a Biblical heroine or a Greek goddess, but I can’t take her picture. Which is to say that photography, although it destroys the artist’s narrative of askesis, does not disturb the fundamental iconicity of art itself.

What makes photographic fiction impossible is precisely what gives the photograph its aura: its indexicality. The heroic tale of the artist is incarnate in the artwork. The neo-Marxist notion (developed most notably by Pierre Macherey) that the “bourgeois” artwork disguises or represses its process of production is just an inversion of the silly socialist utopia where, in the absence of exploitation, reality corresponds with desire. The value of the artwork comes from the care that went into its production–a feature that Heidegger, for one, clearly recognized. That there isn’t a lot of paint left slopped around as a trace of earlier stages of production doesn’t mean that the production process has been repressed, merely that it’s been treated as a means to a (socially acceptable) end. The opposite idea, as illustrated by the process art of the recently deceased Willem de Kooning, was anticipated in 1832 in Balzac’s prophetic “Le chef-d’oeuvre inconnu,” but as folly rather than art. I hope you will forgive this old dix-neuviémiste for siding with Balzac.

A photograph can be set up with care, can be a kind of documentary artwork, but its fictional transformation can’t embody the heroic deferral of desire that generates esthetic oscillation between the sign and an imaginary reality wholly dependent on it. The esthetic of the photograph is generated by the oscillation between the trace and an absent reality, which is a very different thing. A photograph may arguably be viewed as a portrait with the intentionality of the artist en moins, but the photograph of a model in costume that purported to be a historical or mythical scene would be ludicrous. It is the aura of this woman you find in the photograph, not that of Cleopatra or Diana. The photographer has not won through heroic askesis the right to transfigure her. He has not generated the transcendent from the immanent, merely added some superficial detail to the immanent before recording its trace. What in painting is the pathos of the iconic representation of the (necessarily) absent becomes in such photography the equivalent of a faked relic.

Hence photography, the mechanical making-present of the horizon of mimetic art, does not itself intrude upon art’s “heroic tale,” although it forces a change of plot. No one could have anticipated that showing a lot of photographs in quick succession would produce something altogether different. What Lumière may not have realized, Méliès and the rest of film history took advantage of: the cinema was not limited to documentation, it could represent fictions. The ascetic care-as-deferral unrealizable in the photograph could be realized in cinematic narrative as in any classical narrative form. A photograph is like a painting, yet it cannot replace it in its esthetic function; cinema has no such limits.

Although film is just as indexical as still photography, filming the false Diana makes of her an actress if anything more believable than one on stage. Cinema’s temporality allows an unfolding of the caring askesis short-circuited in the photograph. If we extend the temporality of the photograph, we see the model put on and take off her costume. Cinema defers this insertion of the actress in our own life-world; the world beyond this image is another image from the world of fiction, an image we understand as intended by the players, actors and director alike in “heroic” deferral of their own worldly desire. We react to film actors as we do to live actors; in this sense, cinema is always “filmed theater”–whereas photography conveys at best a theatrical moment–Sarah Bernhardt as Lorenzaccio.

We can now understand cinema’s particular contribution to realism. As a derivative of photography, film is indexical, it aspires to the feel of reality. But like literary, dramatic, or pictorial narrative, and unlike still photography, the cinema is not bound by historical reality; its content possesses the freedom of art to represent what it at the same time creates.

Revolutions in narrative, like the French New Novel, come and go, revealing only that there can be no real revolution in the age-old sacrificial narrative structure. Since the beginning, revolutions in cinematic technique have been subordinated to this structure rather than the reverse. Those not too obtrusive, like color and wide-screen, become new standards for narrative cinema; novelties that distract from narrative, like 3-D and cinerama, quickly fade. The same will no doubt be true of next century’s animated holograms and whatever innovations the distant future reserves. The only way cinematic technique could transform narrative would be in the form of virtual reality that abolishes its ascetic, sacrificial structure altogether to provide visceral (no doubt largely sexual) wish-fulfillment. But so long as human society exists, it is inconceivable that the possibility of such satisfaction would put an end to traditional narrative, the temporal mode of our unceasingly renewed deferral of violence through representation.

My friend and fellow Anthropoetics board member Matt Schneider had an interesting take on the first OJ trial, the outcome of which he predicted from the beginning. As he saw it, the acquittal wasn’t so much a matter of race as of moral flaccidity: in the absence of an unimpeachable eye witness, we do not dare judge someone guilty of an act he baldly denies having committed.

O. J. Simpson, who is capable of denying under oath that he wears his own shoes, is clearly a special case. But the current occupants of the White House make use of the same technique. Whatever the accusation, the rule is never to admit guilt. Next to Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon, the most reviled of American presidents, is clearly an outdated model. Nixon belongs in those 30s crime films where the criminal admits and pays for his criminality, not in the 90s variety where, if he smiles nicely, he gets away with the girl and the loot. The contrast makes us realize that our confidence in the other’s guilt depends, even in the absence of confession, on what we perceive as the traces of a guilty conscience. The reason why the general public remains supportive of Clinton despite the daily scandals is not our oft-cited cynicism, but our inability to discern in him any such traces. This was already true in 1992. No one really believes that Clinton didn’t have an affair with Gennifer Flowers, or that he didn’t expose himself to Paula Jones. Not his denial, but his utter lack of guilt for these acts paralyzes the accuser. As a journalist remarked recently, when Nixon lied, we could see beads of sweat on his upper lip, but nothing can put beads of sweat on Clinton’s–or on OJ’s–upper lip. Conservatives blame the liberal press for neglecting or playing down these scandals, but the press is surely more critical than the public itself.

My point is not to score political points against the president, but to expand on Matt’s original insight. It is not uncommon for thinkers on the right to denounce the current state of public morality as corrupt, even to the point of questioning the legitimacy of the American “regime” to govern. But such denunciations are so constant throughout history ancient and modern that they are of little use in revealing real historical watersheds. Ritual is always already in decline, and each new stage of decline seems to guarantee the collapse of the social order. Occasionally, however, social orders do collapse. We cannot afford to neglect our Cassandras; they cry wolf many times, but the wolf does come eventually.

 

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Lying has always been an option of representation. Where verification is in principle impossible–for example, in accounts of revelation–we cannot speak of truth and lying, only of a genuine or spurious revelatory experience. Even when the speaker seems to be making up his revelation as he goes along, we can only judge it on its moral content, not its form: language is always potentially divinely inspired. One might consider reports of revelation as a negligible function of language. But the link between language and transcendence is originary and indelible. Metaphysics, by turning its back on the ostensive or revelatory source of language, has made possible the empirical sciences of nature. But it can never comprehend or eliminate the spiritual dimension of linguistic usage without which language itself would never have come into being. Language is our everyday model of transcendence, and we cannot affirm that the transcendental realm is a hypostasis of language with any more confidence than we can claim that language is a gift of the transcendental.

When David Koresh (remember him?) claimed to be a messenger of God, he wasn’t lying any more than Jesus was lying. That the “truth” of his word was the basis of a community, however pathological, should remind us that the creation of community through the deferral of violence is the originary function of language. Jesus’ superiority to Koresh was that of his doctrine and example for this purpose. A religious doctrine is like a hypothesis; it is never false in itself, only in comparison to a truer one.

When we lie, we are aware of the truth, which is to say, of the possibility of its being formulated in discourse by ourselves or others. When we reach the stage of denial, we refuse to recognize this possibility. At that point, it is useless to ask whether we “know the truth”; true or not, it is something we cannot permit to be formulated. To the extent that factual evidence of this truth is available, denial is irrational; but many facts are known only to ourselves and for all practical purposes inaccessible to others. One of the problems of contemporary public life is that facts which would meet this criterion in normal circumstances no longer do so. Thus deeds we deny because we classify them as deniable may be unexpectedly revealed by a curious reporter or a disaffected former confidant. Where Clinton has innovated is in continuing to maintain denial even after the revelation has been made.

The traditional source of conscience is God, the transcendental Being who guarantees the meaning of our words in their originary function of deferring violence. The proof that this guarantee is not altogether defunct even in the age of “the death of God” is given by the relative success of lie-detection. Freudians attribute our fear of lying to the Superego or Name of the Father, which is inexplicably implemented–albeit often defectively–even in the children of single mothers. But like all attempts to understand culture through individual psychology, psychoanalysis never tells us where the Superego came from in the first place. (Freud’s own pioneering attempt at originary anthropology in Totem and Taboo has been generally ignored.)

Has the sacrality of language been lost? Has lying become as natural as telling the truth? The conservative critics who make this claim should realize that its implications are anything but conservative. To assert that the fundamental traits of human character are subject to corruption is to espouse the radicalism of Rousseau, who historicized the Fall of Man by teaching that we are corrupted by the social order. The real burden of the moral critique is sacrificial: to point a finger at the group that has perverted the general consciousness. In this vein, Commentary’s March 1997 issue contains an entertaining diatribe by David Gelernter against the intellectuals. I shudder just a bit to see a Jewish journal attacking the–cosmopolitan?–intellectuals. No, if we have all really become antinomians and liars to boot, there is nothing to blame but the originary constitution of humanity.

But rather than proposing that we kill ourselves off and start over, I prefer to think that the extension of denial to everyday political life–thus far, at least where the president is concerned, in relatively minor matters–is not a new norm but a temporary aberration, an extreme swing of the pendulum. It is at just the point where public discourse becomes indistinguishable from fiction that the transcendental guarantee of discourse becomes visible. The current return to traditional values of family and church is not merely a reaction against the age of denial, but a direct consequence of it. Faith in the inventor of a discourse independent of facts is, like romantic love in the late Middle Ages, a prefiguration of faith in a transcendent source of all discourse.

The consciencelessness peculiar to our times is a consequence of the postmodern proliferation of victimary discourse, a phenomenon guaranteed by the Holocaust that put an end to the arrogance of modernism. Victimary discourse makes resentment an absolute guarantee: if I feel I am a victim of injustice, then I am. Whether justified or not, any accusation, by putting me in the place of the victim, is ipso facto victimization. In these circumstances, denial is the victim’s righteous defense against his persecutor. Performing the victimary role with conviction is a skill that Clinton has mastered much better than OJ.

But victimary discourse is not permanently ingrained in our culture; it is on the defensive, and on the wane, within that very trend-setting intelligentsia that Gelernter fears. The most serious risk to the postmodern social order comes not from moral decline but from the uncontrolled spread of the means of violence to societies that define themselves by resentment of this order. We should be less concerned with the administration’s truthfulness about accepting foreign campaign contributions than with what accepting these contributions reveals about its attitude toward this risk.

 

In Leo Braudy‘s minor classic of film theory, The World in a Frame (1976), the author establishes a dichotomy within classical cinema: Renoir’s films are open, Lang’s and Hitchcock’s, closed. In one case, there is reality beyond the frame and the character’s presence within it is essentially conscious and voluntary, as are the symbolic meanings attached to objects and actions in the film. In the other, the film world is self-contained and the characters are trapped within it, its symbols imposed upon them unaware.

Braudy does not prolong this distinction beyond the era that began with the talkies and came to an end with the New Wave in France and the decline of the studio system–and of pre-war adult popular culture–in the US. The very technology of more recent cinema–color, wide screen–makes the old closed forms unthinkable, and in the twenty years since the book’s publication we have moved yet farther away from them. But the importance of this distinction in the formative years of the sound film makes us wonder both how it is to be articulated with the distinction between naturalism and formalism that is more traditional in both film practice (Lumière vs Méliès) and theory (Kracauer vs Arnheim), and what it tells us about film in contrast with other narrative forms such as the drama and the novel. Can these questions be approached via originary analysis?

 

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The object designated by the originary linguistic sign is external to the protohuman group; the sign gives it meaning and assimilates it within the newly created boundary of human culture. But as the physical object of desire is assimilated, its Being remains as a permanent guarantee of the sign. The process of physical assimilation fundamental to life is given a sacred or transcendental meaning. Culture will open the human community to the world outside as the locus of its desire, so that it may nourish itself–literally and spiritually–from inexhaustible Being.

Even the most rigid ritual must engage in an outward assimilating movement toward the world before it can return upon itself. That is, the form of the rite must assimilate a new content. The open work emphasizes the newness of this content, whereas the closed work emphasizes the immutability of the form that encloses it. The closed work operates as a self-contained and reversible model of the originary event, whereas the open work reproduces the irreversible gesture of assimilating the outside world to its sacrificial structure. This dichotomy is reminiscent of Nietzsche‘s famous opposition between the Dionysian and the Apollonian, which great tragic art must maintain in perfect tension at the double risk of either succumbing to the rigidity of form or dissolving in the anarchy of content.

But the tension between ritual closure and the assimilation of external reality finds expression not only within rites and artworks but in the fundamental institutions of human behavior. In the broadest sense, cultural systems emphasize closure, whereas economic systems are concerned with assimilation. The open/closed dichotomy is realized on the highest level in the opposition, familiar to readers of these Chronicles, between culture and the market.

These categories provide an originary basis for Braudy’s opposition, but they do not quite grasp its specificity. Certainly one might oppose open picaresque novels to closed Gothic novels, or claim that Balzac‘s writing is more open than Zola‘s, Dickens‘ than Hardy‘s. But these differences reflect chronological evolution rather than alternative formal possibilities. As particular to cinema as its mechanical mode of representation is the lateness of its history. Film is a postmodern art avant la lettre; created at a time when the other arts had matured and sprouted into modernism, it received at birth the multiple possibilities that they had worked through history to create. The full capacity of cinema emerges with the introduction of sound just after the great explosion of the modernist novel with Proust and Joyce. Not coincidentally, the coming of sound put an end to major experimental film-making and established the status of cinema as a popular art, liberating it from the constraint of historical tradition.

Neither cinema nor any other significant invention can be understood as a mere artifact of the autonomous evolution of technology. On the contrary, it is quite possible to understand cinema as an autonomous development of the art of narration in which technology is the servant of the esthetic. The early evolution of modern market society generated a nineteenth-century passion for increasingly convincing reproduction of experiential reality that produced not only photography but moving panoramas, magic lanterns, and increasingly elaborate stage sets that included live animals, cliffs and rivers, fires, floods, and explosions. This development is also reflected in the increasingly “cinematic” technique of the novel, which inspires Eisenstein to make his famous rapprochement of Dickens and Griffith.

Thus on the one hand, the lateness of film’s appearance gives it a “posthistorical” choice of narrative modes among all those previously developed–but on the other, this lateness is the culmination of an historical progression toward the increasingly information-rich representation of reality as we see it. The first, synchronic perspective gives the tension between form and content, formative and realistic cinema theory and practice–Lumière vs Méliès. The other, diachronic perspective is not one of increasing realism, Lumière triumphing over his rival, but rather one of increasing realisticity or effet de réel, a development equally as visible, if not more so, in fantasy as in the depiction of the everyday. The technical difference between King Kong and Jurassic Park measures the progress made from the 30s to the 90s in reproducing the feel of lived experience.

Now we can understand why the closed-open tension inherent in the esthetic in general becomes a dichotomy in cinema: because it reflects the necessity of accepting or rejecting the opening toward the world implicit in the technological progress of the art itself. But this opening is anything but a local feature of cinema. The choice between closed and open films reflects a fundamental dichotomy in our view of reality. During the period around World War II, the industrialized West went through the agony of the final conflict between the closed ritual-based and open market-based models of the social order–the last moment of the Renaissance. The high-cultural version of the closed film esthetic is the last-gasp theatrical neoclassicism of the 20s and 30s, when playwrights from Giraudoux, Cocteau, and Anouilh to O’Neill were rewriting Greek tragedy.

The closed film implies that cinema, although the product of technological progress, remains nonetheless confined within the old sacrificial structures, just as technological progress as a whole seems incapable of freeing humanity from these structures. From 1930 to 1959, the black and white sound film could not yet be accused of imposing a closed vision through arbitrary technological retrogression. But the closed frame that refuses to let our desire be drawn to objects beyond its borders is incompatible with postwar consumerism. The universalization of color (in TV as well as film) makes impossible the abstract shadow-world of the film noir and its closed predecessors. Modern market society moves too fast to permit the maintenance of closure in any but the most pathological forms of experience. There are claustrophobic films, but there are no more closed films in Braudy’s sense–films in which we cannot sense the wealth of sights and sounds of which the closed universe is willfully deprived.

 

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Originary analysis offers us a point of departure for research into esthetic problems, not by providing us with a technique for extracting the answer from an individual work, but by permitting us to construct our historical model of esthetic evolution on a minimally arbitrary foundation. GA does not allow us to dispense with history, but it permits us to factor out of it all but the categories indispensable to the task at hand.

 

 

Perhaps no periodical article since Francis Fukuyama‘s career-making piece on the “End of History” has aroused such widespread attention as George Soros‘ “The Capitalist Threat” in the February Atlantic Monthly. Self-made billionaire Soros sees a threat to his old master Karl Popper‘s postwar ideal of the open society in the growth of laissez-faire capitalism, both in the United States and in places like Russia where an anarchistic and gangster-ridden capitalisme sauvage has filled the gap left by the Soviet command economy.

I must express my admiration for Soros’ understanding of what he calls the “reflexivity” of human institutions. Unlike social scientists who try to pretend that their models are independent of the object they are studying, this successful businessman has derived from his experience of the market system the fundamental anthropological truth that all models of the human condition are paradoxical because they both must and cannot include themselves within the system they model. Soros shares GA‘s insistence on the generative nature of the human and its creations.

What then of the “threat”? Soros cannot be accused of hostility to the market principle. What he criticizes is an ideology that makes the market the sole arbiter of social policy; such an ideology, as he sees it, defeats the open-society ideal by condemning the economically weak and neglecting the infrastructure. As this argument is often put, our interest in the commons, including the safety net for the needy, follows the Prisoner’s Dilemma model: we are all better off if we all contribute to these causes, but no one has a marginal interest in contributing if the others don’t. Laissez-faire, on both the individual and the state level, makes us “unwilling to make any sacrifices for the common good (53).”

Soros’ point is to set the ideal of an open society in opposition, not merely to the totalitarian models that Popper had traced back to Plato‘s Republic, but to dogmatic belief in the infallibility of the market. No doubt such belief is unfounded; but it should be made clear that the dogmatism of the market is not merely more benign but on a different plane than the dogmatism that rejects the market. Where the latter poses the infallibility of a doctrine, which is really that of its omnipotent interpreters, market-worship emphasizes precisely the fallibility of human self-knowledge that Popper makes the foundation of the open society: since no one can know a priori the best allocation of resources, we must rely on the market to provide it. Dogmatic adherence to this reliance is dogmatic openness; by the same token, what corrects it is not more openness but partial closure. Soros himself hints at this toward the end of his essay by situating the open society midway between totalitarian despotism and anarchy.

Although we are ignorant about many things that we must leave to the market–which is nothing more than a mechanism for calculating the resultant of human value-judgments–those corrections that Soros would have us bring to the process are based not on economic ignorance but on moral belief. When we take a stand about income distribution or welfare, we are not tempering doctrinaire arrogance with humility, but tempering doctrinaire submission to the dictates of the market with an affirmation of moral values.

No doubt the ultimate effect of this assertion is pragmatic. The good society is the only livable society; the moral model of human reciprocity is not derived from some vaporous ideal, but repeats the originary reciprocity of which we are reminded every time we use language. But like religious belief, moral principles are pragmatic only because they go beyond the pragmatic in any narrow sense; it is because we are willing to subordinate material value to moral value that we can create material value in confidence. This solution to the Prisoner’s Dilemma is the foundation of the human itself; and Soros is again close to GA‘s understanding of human paradoxicality in his insistence that the faith that sustains these values is a sign not of our “perfect knowledge” but of the contrary. The ultimate foundation of the open society is the “arbitrary” moral closure that creates the human community. It is only with respect to the survival of this closure in the virtual human community of today that openness has value.

I have sympathy for Soros’ emphasis on the economy rather than the government, the private over the public sector, which stands in contrast to standard liberal political theory. Nonetheless, as Soros never seems to realize, his argument is about politics, not economics. Attuned to the paradoxical reflexivity of human institutions, he fails to note the paradoxical relationship between closure and openness in the laissez-faire ideology he attacks, and therefore gives short shrift to the political institutions within which this relationship is worked out. As a critic pointed out on a recent talk show, reliance on the market follows the pendulum model of most ideological trends–or of the stock market. Market thinking, having retreated under the assault of governmental intervention from the 1930s through the 70s, has only recently begun to recapture some of its old terrain, and the momentum is now in the laissez-faire direction. As a warning lest the pendulum swing too far, Soros’ message makes its point; but it does not help us to rethink the articulation between the political and economic spheres in modern market society.

The political sector acts as a self-conscious check on the “blind” forces of the market. It dictates outcomes that are not the resultant of material desires but of a priori moral judgments. Because these are factors of closure rather than openness, the ideal of the open society is best served by assuring that these judgments too are subject to the open-ended interaction of a market-like process. Representative democracy creates a political market parallel with the economic market, in which outcomes must be negotiated even where “absolute” moral values are at stake. Even where such values seem irreconcilable, as for example in the abortion debate, workable compromises are reached and evolve over time.

An element of self-conscious moral closure is indispensable to maintaining the optimum of social openness. Open-ended economic circulation thrives on the conversion of resentment into economic energy, but sometimes–in Prisoner’s Dilemma cases–this conversion cannot be made directly, but must be mediated by the political process. What must not be forgotten is that expanding and broadening the possibilities of human reciprocity through economic circulation, not instituting an a priori model of “social justice,” is the end of democratic political activity. Democracy’s superiority is that it minimizes political intervention in the market process by the optimizing effect of negotiation. We all have the same fundamental moral intuitions, although our interests and perceptions are different. The democratic process tests the commonality of these intuitions better than any other by reproducing originary chaos and resolution in a representational framework.

The political sector would like to see itself as imposing moral criteria on the amorality of the marketplace, but what it really does is to negotiate our various resentments toward the outcome of market processes. The potential corruption of this sector by economic forces that the Democratic fund-raising scandals are recalling to our attention only gives us one more reason not to exalt the moral stance of the political over the economic. Like all social systems, liberal democracy spawns utopian models of how it should work, but the important thing is that is does work more or less adequately. Not only does corruption generate resentments of its own, as a look at the headlines makes clear, but it cannot prevent the political expression of other, more fundamental resentments within the body politic.

The current vogue for laissez-faire solutions is typical of the pendular fluctuations of the ideological marketplace. But the more fundamental point is that democratic institutions are optimal in the long run for controlling the amplitude of this pendulum. Soros’ exhortation is not a critique of liberal democracy but a political gesture within it.

 

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These remarks apply less directly to the problems of Russian and (briefly) East Asian capitalism raised in the article. But whether or not Soros’ criticism of the West for its failure to mount a Marshall Plan for Russia is valid, the Russian robber capitalists are not comparable to the robber barons of the Gilded Age; they operate in a society whose political institutions are not only too weak to control economic activities but too weak to maintain social order. Kidnapping, murder, and extortion are not features of the classical market system even in its worst excesses. Economic gangsterism may be inevitable after years of centralized planning, but laissez-faire ideology is no more relevant to it than Marxism is to Peruvian guerilla movements.

In such circumstances, a strong central authority may do more than a weak democracy to impose the rule of law prerequisite to the market system; post-Pinochet Chile is now the envy of Latin America. But can free markets remain compatible in the long term with political repression? It is often suggested that, in the more communally confident East Asian environment, the Prisoner’s Dilemma can be solved with less need for the negotiation of resentments. Yet this truism is thrown in doubt by the vulnerability of Asian democracies like South Korea and even Japan to politically influential mass demonstrations, a phenomenon unknown in the United States since the end of the Vietnam War. At the other extreme, China’s political elite can most likely only maintain control over an expanding market sector by drifting toward a variety of National Socialism fed by resentment against the West. Not the excesses of laissez-faire but an unstable combination of third-world resentment and market-driven prosperity is potentially the most dangerous trend in the world today.

The recent superior performance of the market-oriented US to the European welfare-state, as demonstrated by a simple comparison of growth and unemployment rates, suggests that, in the debate over the open society, the burden of proof still lies with those who would impose restrictions on the marketplace. But I agree wholeheartedly with Soros’ final point that, after 200 years of Enlightenment arrogance, “[t]he time is ripe for developing a conceptual framework based on our fallibility (58).” Soros has affirmed the propitiousness of generative anthropology.

Humanities professors have so long considered artworks as objects for academic study that we tend to forget the naturalness of interpretation. Tear a couple of us away from our word processors and send us to the movies, and chances are we’ll begin discussing the film as soon as we exit the theater, and may prolong our conversation for hours thereafter. One of the superiorities of film and theater–long considered the highest literary art–over the novel is that they are experienced collectively. Nineteenth-century novels were often read aloud en famille; today’s electronic media have taken the place of these readings not because we are less “literate” than our grandparents, but because they allow us to share far more information with a potentially far greater set of Others. The tawdriest piece of news allows us to participate in an implicit dialogue with millions of interlocutors. There is no way to separate off my intrinsic interest in, say, the latest O.J. verdict from my knowledge that everyone else is interested in the same information. Culture defers violence through representation only when the latter is–explicitly or implicitly–shared.

But we do not interpret all narratives in the same manner. The difference between the O.J. story and the film is that the latter has a well-defined text and a subject to whom we can attribute responsibility for it. The conversation begins in either case with the binary question of whether we “liked” the verdict or the movie, but the second offers a clear referent for our like or dislike, however collective film authorship may be. (Film buffs attribute the film to the director-auteur, but the general public in its wisdom just attributes the film to an unnamed intention.) In both real and fictional events, our judgment bears not on the fictional but the real, which means, in the latter case, the creator rather than his creations. Hence our esthetic judgment of the film is independent of our moral judgment of its characters; it bears rather on how satisfactorily we feel the outcome realizes this judgment. In the simplest cases, this means defeat for the bad guy and success for the good guy. Professional academic criticism has not traditionally dealt with such works, which generate less talk about poetic justice than about special effects. We acknowledge their fulfillment of culture’s fundamental purpose in the simplest way possible, as the deferral of violence through the representation… of violence.

The good guy-bad guy film lacks high-cultural value because it is sacrificial– it makes binary distinctions between good and evil beings in order to expel the latter. In these works, crisis turns our complex world into an atavistically ritualistic one; the only freedom is in the technique–how the hero will defeat his enemies. It is no accident that the social order depicted in popular fantasy and science fiction, whether set in the future or the past, almost inevitably lacks democratic institutions. The sacrificial model of human behavior is a more primitive ethic than our own; only after Christianity unmasks the arbitrary mechanism of sacrifice does the West evolve the open-ended structure of the modern exchange system. The sacrificial betrays itself by its failure to accept the reversibility of the roles of victim and victimizer. In a good guy-bad guy flick, the bad guys are presumably the victimizers. But in the esthetic economy of the story, it is they who are sacrificed so that the world may be once again fit to live in.

What we call high art is the product of a civilization in the process of transcending the sacrificial–the civilization that has endured, roughly speaking, from Homer‘s time to our own. Sacrifice is not eliminated, but the designation of the victim becomes problematic. Instead of taking the side of the good guy-sacrificer against the bad guy-victim, we are made to identify with the victim-protagonist himself, to share his hamartia or “tragic flaw.” Our interpretive conversation centers on the justification this “flaw” provides for his unhappy end. Was Oedipus‘ downfall caused by his secret desire for his mother? his violent temper? his intellectual hubris in thinking he could solve all riddles as he had that of the Sphinx? his pride in affirming that he alone could save the city from plague? Or was it the fault of his parents who had left him for dead? or of a society in crisis seeking a scapegoat? Our answers are as much theories of human culture–anthropologies–as readings of Sophocles’ play. They can never be definitive; form can never be justified by content. This is the paradox of representation. Form emerges from content in crisis; its truth cannot be formulated in the peaceful propositions of metaphysics.

And thus high culture, however self-consciously ironic and paradoxical, remains bound by sacrificial structure. Aristotle’s common-sense division of dramatic works into beginning, middle and end masks the point that the end is also the end of the characters themselves. The content-world of the esthetic work is confined, as the performance of a rite is confined, within physical and/or temporal limits. These limits stand in contrast to the sacred immortality, or eternal significance, that the rite is meant to commemorate; in the strictest sense, as iconoclastic religions like Judaism and Islam recognize, there is no such thing as religious art.

This suggests that art is a secular substitute for ritual, a form of entertainment. The fictional character, be he Hamlet or an extra blown away in an Arnold epic, is just an imaginary version of the sacrificial victim. The ritual defers our resentment for a while; so does the esthetic work. In the old days, it also deferred our hunger–the victim was eaten; but hunger, more inevitably even than resentment, cannot be expelled, only deferred. Church services are held weekly; we see a new movie every weekend.

But the historical experiment in high culture intended the artwork as more than expendable entertainment. Its characters and its world were to possess “eternal” esthetic value, to take the place of the sacred Being itself, not merely its sacrificial representatives. The esthetic effect on the individual spectator became, at first implicitly, then overtly, a guarantee of the artwork’s transhistorical value; its beauty was not imposed on us by the community, but experienced freely. Like most cults, the apogee of the cult of the esthetic occurred shortly before its end, in the late nineteenth-century movement of l’art pour l’art. Our professorial role as interpreters of texts is founded on that era’s belief that art is the source of the most profound anthropological intuitions. In contrast to religious hermeneutic, esthetic interpretation is founded not on doctrinal tradition but on our own experience of the texts. It is, in other words, a direct extension of the “natural” interpretative activity I referred to above.

 

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What has gone wrong with this process? What has made us flee the futility of interpretation for the security of the historical and the documentary? And why have we lost all embarrassment before the sacrificial so long as its victimary inversion appeals to our vaguely defined post-colonial guilt? Why in the world of contemporary humanism is Mongo Beti suddenly more marketable than Balzac, Chinua Achebe than Dickens?

Deconstruction was the last great, or not-so-great, movement of textual interpretation. It is a critique of textual violence, of the text’s binary decisiveness (as Girard reminds us, decidere, to decide, originally meant to cut off, sc. the victim’s head). The deconstruction of the literary text exposes the arbitrary expulsion on which its formal closure is based. This is the theoretical undoing of high culture that corresponds to its ethical bankruptcy. High culture is based on the idea that although sacrifice must be maintained, sharing in it and talking about it defers its violence indefinitely. The unending dialogue over the impossible justification for Oedipus’ or Hamlet’s fate renders the victim/hero “immortal” and so compensates for the sacrifice he has endured. But the silence of the Holocaust undoes, deconstructs the Heideggerian bavardage (Geplapper) of the literary-academic world.

So today we reject Western high culture’s subtleties for the frank resentment of the peuple toward the classes possédantes, or that of the ex-colonial toward his erstwhile master. Behind the posturing of PC is a healthy recognition that all culture is sacrificial. But once we recognize this, we can no longer expect the esthetic to guarantee our anthropological intuitions. Art can no longer furnish the basis of its own interpretation; the humanist’s analysis of the text as well-wrought urn gives way to one grounded in human science. Yet it is not without consequence whether this science be founded on the myths of anti-Western resentment or on a minimal hypothesis of our common origin.

This Valentine’s Day column is about a new vision of love.

Can it be a coincidence that the last two French films I’ve seen, French Twist (Gazon maudit) and Café au lait (Métisse) end with the transformation of the traditionally tragic or melodramatic love triangle into a triangular utopia? At the end of Mathieu Kassovitz‘ film, the café au lait heroine, who has just given birth to a child, is flanked symmetrically by her black-Moslem and white-Jewish lovers (the latter played by Kassovitz himself), either of whom might be the father (cleverly, we hear the baby cry but it is not shown). After many fights and squabbles, the two men have become the best of friends, linked by their common bond to their mistress. Josiane Balasko‘s film is more complex. The triangle again has an attractive woman at the center, but the other two spaces are filled by her (formerly unfaithful) husband and her lesbian lover (played by Balasko herself). In order to cement the triangle, the lover gets the husband to give her a child, so that all three pairings in the triangle are represented. What is more, the film forbears to end on the obvious triangular shot avec bébé, but shows the husband making friends with a male homosexual, suggesting the next step in a utopian expansion.

The two works that can be said to inaugurate the triangular utopia are, on the literary front, Marguerite Duras‘ masterpiece Le ravissement [ravishing/ecstasy] de Lol V. Stein (1964), and in the cinema, Truffaut‘s Jules et Jim (1961). Duras’ achievement is the more profound. Lol, jilted by her fiance on the night of her engagement, forms a new triangle by seducing the lover of an old friend who had witnessed her earlier discomfiture. Lol’s aim is not to break up this couple, but keep it together under her control. Duras teaches us something new about the triangle of mimetic desire: that the position of the rejected woman, the excluded other, is the most stable and lucid, the position of the novelist herself–an idea sketched out in her 1962 short novel 10:30 on a Summer Night (Dix heures et demie du soir en été). But Lol’s triangle is not yet a utopia; the three parties cannot form a community. The lover cannot share with his mistress his strange passion for Lol; the only stable configuration has lover and mistress together in bed and Lol secretly watching (over) them through the window. At the end of the novel, Lol falls asleep in this situation, having reached final contentment, but her satisfaction depends on the mimetic tension of the two others.

In Jules et Jim, we are a step closer to the utopian pattern of the woman loved by two friends, but the whole point of the film is that the configuration is interminably, and terminally, unstable. The series of separations and reconciliations, including notably Catherine’s failed attempt to have a child by Jim (while married to Jules), comes to an end when, following the trio’s chance reunion at a movie theater showing newsreels of Nazi bookburning, the heroine drives with Jim off the end of a ruined bridge. The murder-suicide demonstrates that the triangular community cannot survive an intensification of public violence; Catherine seems to fear that, galvanized by the spectacle, the two men–as so often occurs in 1930s French films–will band together to exclude her.

But today the triangle has become the summum bonum to which the action tends. Café au lait does this in all simplicity, as though all the triangular tragedies of history, from Adam, Eve, and the snake through Oedipus and Hamlet to Molly, Dedalus, and Bloom, had missed the point. At the outset, the black and white lovers are not merely rivals, they despise each other ethnically and socially, but they find communion in their common love. Kassovitz’s film does not show us how the obvious non-father of the invisible baby will retain symmetry with his rival, or how sexual relations will be organized in the new “family.” French Twist is much more explicit: it not only finds a way to link the two odd ends of the triangle but even suggests its future extension. This resembles the philosophy of “free love” we may remember from the first Emmanuelle  (taken from a two-volume novel that contained far more “philosophy” than pornography); but the latter required a full-fledged conversion experience, whereas now the utopia seems able to extend itself by effortless contagion like the community of aliens in Invasion of the Body-Snatchers.

In the good old days of l’amour courtois, the love of a woman–Dante’s Beatrice is the most glorious example–was a model of the love of God. Yet if we both love God, you and I do not fight, but commune. This makes one wonder why the triangular utopia has not seriously tempted us until now. Surely the answer is that the social order until now has depended on stable families on the one hand and stable social institutions on the other. These arrangements see the triangle as a threat; not only must men pair off with women, they must also “pair off” with each other, join together to avert the danger of woman-inspired mimetic rivalry. This is an obsessive theme in French films of the 1930s, from A nous la liberté to La grande illusion. At the (revised) end of Duvivier’s La belle équipe (1936), husband and lover jointly reject the femme fatale and walk off arm in arm. In the atmosphere of pre-war crisis, male bonding is more important than family bonding, survival comes before reproduction. I think this explains the notorious misogyny of these films better than the usual generalizations about patriarchy, which implies not hostility toward women but their benign subordination to the paterfamilias, as was at least superficially the case in most Hollywood films of the era.

The postmodern dream is to make our understanding of the triangular nature of desire the basis for neither tragedy nor comedy, but neo-romantic idyll. Since desire is always triangular, why not include the three parties in a permanent arrangement? Perhaps we could adjust to the institutional adjustments required, if only the triangle could become truly stable. But on this point Duras and Truffaut are wiser than Kassovitz. The structures created by desire are unstable by nature; once they stabilize, they lose the attractive force that maintains their integrity. As the concluding sequence of Balasko’s film suggests, these triangles tend to acquire new vertices. As one of two lovers of the same person, symmetry requires that I seek compensation elsewhere. The more I accept my rival’s access to my beloved, the less my desire will be confined within the triangular situation.

A less rosy view of the contemporary triangular utopia is found in Chantal Akerman‘s Night and Day  (1991). The film begins as an idyllic vision of a couple, but as it progresses, the woman comes to love another as well–a friend introduced to her by her taxi-driving lover, whose work leaves her to wander the Paris streets by night. At the end of the story, however, the woman drops both men; the last shot shows her striding off resolutely–presumably to find a job rather than a man to support her, as has been the case throughout the film. Akerman’s conclusion leads me to wonder whether the triangular utopia–where the woman at the center doesn’t work–isn’t just an adaptation to the middle-class axiom that today it takes two salaries to support a family. With two working “husbands,” a woman can stay home and bring up the kids.

 Yet we know now that all utopias are chimerical; no new social arrangement can conquer the paradox of desire. We can defer it, not expel it once and for all. Beyond the triangular utopias lies this dawning realization, as reflected in a slow swing of the social pendulum back to the traditional couple as the tried and true arrangement for transmitting our culture to the next generation.

The real utopia of love is the couple, but it is one that never reaches stasis. True love includes its mediator within itself; it is both unending seduction and perpetual adoration. Just a thought for Valentine’s Day.

Humanistic study is under threat today in our universities. With the decline of Europe-centered Western high culture, it is no longer clear why we need a host of separate departments named for the languages of middle-sized European states. No doubt these states and their interaction generated the modern market system that has now evolved into the much-feared global marketplace. But our historical respect for these mature national cultures cannot stand up to the politico-cultural pressure from others now in the process of creation or rapid evolution. In order to defend and preserve the humanities, we must make not a political but an intellectual argument for the study of the unique Western experiment in high culture. This requires that we theorize this concept in both its historical specificity and its anthropological generality; and this, in turn, can only be done by means of originary thinking.

Secular high culture has not exhausted its anthropological lessons for us, but we can no longer take these lessons for granted as a supplementary benefit of the study of canonical texts. We can only understand the uniqueness of our cultural experiment in relation to an originary model of esthetic experience. On the basis of such a model we can also begin to examine the cultural specificity of other civilizations (Indian, Persian, Chinese, Amerindian) and pre-state societies. I call this procedure originary analysis.

Originary analysis is not a methodology but a heuristic: a way of finding the anthropologically significant core of a text. Its single rule of thumb is to trace each category of one’s critical discourse to its root in the hypothesized originary event of language that inaugurates the deferral of violence through representation. To consider esthetic form as an end in itself, independently of its anthropological function, is mere idolatry. The ultimate model of every cultural operation is the originary emergence of the transcendent or “vertical” sign from the immanent or “horizontal” world of appetite. The end of cultural interpretation–providing a model of human desire as a means to defer violence–is no different from that of the cultural object it interprets.

Interpretation seeks to construct a cognitive or “reversible” model at the horizon of irreversible or revelatory esthetic experience. There are no fully “thematic” truths of the human for the same reason that there is no representation without paradox: the fact of formulating propositions about the human world modifies the world the proposition claimed to describe. Interpretation’s movement toward anthropological truth begins at the same moment to falsify it. We may not know whether God exists, but we know that paradox exists, which God’s existence alone could resolve.

We can only understand form in the context of more inclusive form. Originary analysis traces a given form back to a hypothetical model of the minimal and therefore most inclusive form of the human, the originary scene of language. The originary sign represents–designates and reproduces–and sanctifies–makes sacred and worships as already sacred–the communal object of desire, removing it from the arena of collective conflict. However intense appetites may have been before the emission of the sign, desire comes into being only with representation. The sign creates its object as object-of-desire at the same time as it re-presents it as always-already existing.

The relationship between form and content makes explicit the hierarchical relation of containment that is latent in the dichotomy of signifier and signified, signs and things, les mots et les choses. Form is our translation of Aristotle’s eidos, his praxis-oriented version of Plato’s idea. The word both doubles and contains the thing; on one hand, “chair” is a mere supplement to preexisting chairs, on the other, no chair can exist without Chair as its form. The easy positivist idea that language is just a more advanced version of DNA code fails to acknowledge that it is itself expressed in language but not in DNA code.

The domain of content is that of worldly desire, where we identify mimetically with an explicit or implicit human subject. But we also identify, in the realm of form, with the transcendental subject of the work, the “author,” whose goal is not to satisfy individual desire but to defer violence from the community. We can rely on our esthetic intuition to direct us to the crisis or crux in the content; but we must withdraw from this intuition to understand our formal identification with the work’s subject. The comic conjunction of form and content that satisfies both individual desire and community is a marvelous category error, a confusion of levels that makes us laugh. But the more profound lesson of desire is that the accomplishment of the form requires the tragic sacrifice of its worldly subject.

The artwork realizes as experience the paradox that otherwise might seem a plaything for philosophers. The heart of interpretation is examining how the work’s form is generated by its content, which generates the mimetic crisis out of which form emerges as its resolution. Tragedy requires the characters to suffer, but their suffering must not appear an arbitrary sacrifice imposed by the form; it must be motivated by the nature of their own desires. Yet no motivation of esthetic content can fully “justify,” or reinvent, esthetic form, which is always in the last analysis imposed by the communal complicity of author and audience. Hence Girard denounces tragedy as sacrificial, an act of arbitrary scapegoating. But its arbitrariness is that of the esthetic in general; the emergence of form from content is a leap of faith, just as is the originary emergence of the sign from the tension of potential mimetic conflict. We cannot deduce it; we can only tell stories about it. The minimal hypothesis of generative anthropology is an attempt to tell this story minimally as a hypothesis. (For Girard, the Passion is this minimal story: Christian faith or any other faith is belief in an originary hypothesis.)

Esthetic interpretation is the construction of an anthropology. Our reading of the artwork formulates an originary hypothesis because, to turn things around, the originary scene is the minimal model of all future scenes, narrated as the minimal model of all future stories. We tell the story so that we can experience once again how the sign can emerge from the thing, how the reality of appetite can take on the meaning of desire. But once the story is told, we think with and about it, as we began to think with and about the sign, in order to find in it a normative model of human conduct, an ethic, not out of our inherent “desire for self-knowledge,” but because of our crucial need to defer conflict. The first anthropology is ethics, and the first anthropological model is the originary symmetrical exchange of signs, the basis for reciprocal morality (“do unto others as you would have them do unto you”).

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There is currently only one widely-received theory that claims to find originary meaning in cultural productions: that of Freud, turned toward representation by Lacan, who replaces the oral-anal-genital by the imaginary and the symbolic. The popularity of Freudian hermeneutics reflects both our need for a generative model that relates cultural phenomena to the fundamentally, minimally human, and our discomfort with such models outside the realm of individual development. We so fear to condemn other cultures as more primitive than ours that we have all but renounced the original project of ethnology–the defining field of anthropology: to provide insights into the originary form of human culture. (Only paleontology maintains this project, because it begins from ethology rather than ethnology.) Hence we prefer the mirror stage to the primal horde.

But human language and culture were not created by babies. To defend the humanities is to hypothesize that the creations of Western high culture reflect a higher level of human self-consciousness than the works of ritual-bound societies, just as Western science reflects a deeper understanding of the natural world. The danger in the current fad for cultural studies is not that it teaches students about popular culture, but that it teaches them to ignore the historical distinction between popular culture and high culture.

The only way to justify the literary curriculum of departments of “language and literature” is to affirm its unique value for the construction of what we will increasingly be calling anthropological models. To humanists who feel alienated by the theoretical climate of generative anthropology, I suggest they try explicating a few poems in the theoretical climate of their local social science departments.

In the works of high culture, the paradoxical tension between form and content reveals itself in an ironic self-consciousness of humanity as an open, dynamic, decentralizing enterprise. If we are unable to articulate this self-consciousness with a fundamental understanding of the human, we can only pray that a future generation able to do so will one day resuscitate the study of the Humanities.