Author: staceymeeker

 

1. Optimists are irritated by pessimists who condemn the present as a fall from the past. But to criticize the pessimists is to condemn at least one class of people as inferior to those of the past, since for the optimist, the pessimists of the past had more to complain about.
2. Popular culture is commonly pessimistic. Everything is going wrong, things keep getting worse. This is absurd and self-indulgent. But isn’t this absurd self-indulgence a demonstration that things are indeed getting worse?
3. Thus the optimist must say “things are getting better; you (who have gotten worse) are an aberration.” Aberrations like you can flourish only because things have become so good. But this implies that the better things become, the more people enjoy finding that things have gotten worse. This expresses a far more pessimistic vision of the human condition than that of the pessimist, who believes our complaints are justified by bad conditions.
4. The optimist and the pessimist express attitudes, fundamental anthropological postures. The pessimist plays the originary central role of the victim. We say he does this to avoid blame for his failures and to gain our sympathy. But averting the resentment of others is the most critical human problem–not the most fundamental problem of human beings, who like any animals must eat and reproduce, but the most critical problem of the human, of the creature who defers violence through representation.
5. The dichotomy optimism vs. pessimism is a product of the emergence of the model of market exchange as a challenge to the ritual vision of society. Voltaire‘s famous critique of optimism in Candide attacks Leibniz‘ theodicy–whose “optimism” is in fact a translation of market-inspired openness into transcendental terms–on behalf of bourgeois realism. Candide and his friends at the end of the story, who cultivate their garden and sell its produce on the open market, have rejected optimism, but they are not pessimists: they are open to the never fully predictable verdict of the marketplace.
6. The optimist is a variety of pessimist–just as Kojève defines the bourgeois in Hegelian terms not as a master but as a freed slave. The bourgeois is optimistic because he has left the ritual world of persecutors and victims for the world of exchange.
7. Both optimism and pessimism are about the market, which means that neither can be contained within the market. A bear is no more a pessimist than a bull: he can sell his stock and get rich if he guesses right. The optimist and the pessimist argue whether the market system as a whole, no alternative to which appears to exist, is compatible with moral reciprocity.
8. The Romantic culture of the nineteenth century rejects both Leibniz and Voltaire; it defends the cultural-victimary model against the encroachment of the modern exchange system. It sides with popular culture, which has always been deeply pessimistic because it is based on a permanent state of resentment. The bourgeois believer in progress, who belongs neither to the intellectual aristocracy nor to the people, is derided as a Philistine. The most crucial intellectual effort of the nineteenth century, that of Marxism, is devoted to reducing the new exchange model to the old ritual model, modernizing victimization as exploitation.
9. Today’s intellectuals share the pessimism of the Romantics, but they no longer believe in high culture as a vehicle for the transcendence of individual resentment. Instead, they not only side with the people, they have joined them: PC also stands for popular culture.
10. The adherents of the old high culture now defend market society against the purveyors of the ritual-cultural model. They have become optimists not because they view the world positively, but because they view cultural pessimism negatively, being unable to profit from the victimary role that the postmodern era defines in collective terms. We should call them neo-optimists.
11. The pessimist resents–personalizes, demonizes–the state of things; the neo-optimist resents the fellow humans who profit from this demonization. In the face of the former’s ritual attitude, the latter is tempted to forgo aprioristic value-judgments on the state of things and rely on the market’s self-determination. This “Voltairean” position now finds itself opposed not to optimism but to pessimism.
12. The saint is without resentment, or rather, always alert to its danger. He is therefore neither a pessimist nor an optimist. He loves both and seeks to wean them from their resentment. He tells the pessimist: if things are so bad, work to make them better; to the optimist: if you think things are getting better, do something to prove it.
13. The idea of sainthood implies the possibility of a personal intuition of God’s will, or in human terms, of an ability to judge the state of things objectively according to the model of moral reciprocity. The saint is he who has no need of the marketplace to tell him how to act. But the truths about the human revealed in the marketplace are unknowable a priori. The saint does not take himself for God–that would be just the opposite of sainthood. So the saint forbears to judge the state of things in general; he does so only in concrete situations that offend his moral sense. But when he puts his residual resentment in the service of defending victims, he must residually resent as well the recipients of his defense; otherwise, he becomes a fellow-traveler of the pessimists.
14. The pragmatist seeks to identify the dangers of violence that face the social order. But he has no better measure than his own moral intuition, which tells him what kinds of human difference are intolerable. The point at which transcendental values prevail over the pragmatic is itself pragmatically determined. But the sign that accomplished our originary pragmatic deferral of violence did so as the signifier of a transcendental Being. The pragmatist acts before the same horizon as the saint.
15. At the end of history, there will be neither optimists nor pessimists; we will stop caring about the future, because all human violence will have been abolished. But this can occur only with the abolition of our enemy, us. More even than socialism, the end of history is potentially the bloodiest utopia of all. Far better that we remain divided between optimists and pessimists.

The most significant of generational watersheds may well fall between the prewar generation and that of the baby-boomers. It separates those of us whose primary experience of resentment is individual from those who suffer injustice by gender, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. But only retrospective contrast with the boomers makes me refer to my–nameless–generation. For me, resentment is personal. Even when I find myself victimized as a member of a group, my reaction is that my victimizers have done me a personal injustice in not recognizing my distinction from all other members of this group.

 Collective resentment easily overpowers individual resentment; yet only the latter stimulates original, or originary, thoughts. The opposition between personal and collective resentment parallels that between high and popular culture, and the ambiguities of the latter distinction reflect those of the first. The solitary romantic hero becomes a figure of popular culture when his solitude is no longer a spontaneous reaction to the bourgeois world but is not yet debunked as a form of mimetic desire. The popular-romantic hero is solitary like everyone else, just as the participant in today’s youth culture is, much less self-consciously, an uncompromising rebel like everyone else. Only the spirit who, like Flaubert, denounces romantic cliches as cliches, abandons the collective expression of resentment for his own.

The central event that separates the modern era from the postmodern is the Holocaust. The Nazi persecution of the Jews enshrined a victimary model that was applied in the years following World War II to a variety of unequal collective relationships, notably colonialism, which disappeared far more swiftly than anyone expected, and American racial discrimination, which was eliminated de jure by the mid-60s. These successes reinforced the prestige of the victimary model, which is only now coming into question, notably in the delegitimation of affirmative action.

The victimary model that emerged from the Holocaust was strictly collective, subsuming the individual victim within an objectively defined or ascriptive group. The Holocaust was not a sui generis phenomenon that changed the direction of history, but a climactic event that punctuated a change already under way. The feasibility of this uniquely systematic persecution implies that, beyond the blame for concrete disasters such as Germany’s loss of World War I, the people-defined-as-an-individual–the Jew– was made to pay the price for the end of the era of individuality itself. Modern market society was reaching the point at which personal uniqueness would have to define itself within instead of outside the market; Nazi antisemitism was a desperate attempt to arrest this development.

The early consumer society of conspicuous consumption put a premium on quantitative excess, in dialectical correspondence with the excesses of the modernist imagination. The high culture of modernism seeks the most original expression of the most originary sense of the human, one by definition hostile to the bourgeois limitations of the market. At the same time, the rise of political antisemitism focuses blame for the contradictions of capitalism on the particular group who, having refused the figure of the Mediator, is fantasized to be the secret master of the mediations of the market. The idea of the Jews as both a faceless mass and an individualized set of conspirators, each performing his specific task for the good of all–and the ruin of all others–makes the Jew the sole successful negotiator of the transition from individual to collective identity, and consequently the primary victim of the transition from individual to collective resentment.

One of the more endearingly pathological expressions of this transition is Herbert Marcuse‘s now-forgotten One-Dimensional Man, published in 1964, just in time to foment the Great Revolt of 1968. Marcuse complains that, in the USSR as in the USA, the Establishment has so seduced the population with tawdry wish-fulfillments that the other-dimensional revolutionary spirit has been killed off. This operation is particularly egregious in the cultural-intellectual sphere, where radical ideas are granted what he calls repressive tolerance, meaning that people are kept too busy with movies and sex to pay any attention to them. Here the old ideal of the free individual receives its final defense against the temptations of consumer society to which it is fast succumbing. The real horror of repressive tolerance is that it relocates individual self-definition within the marketplace. The economic failure of socialism was not yet apparent in 1964, but its ethical failure, and its eventual collapse, were prefigured in Marcuse’s bizarre assimilation of the Soviet system to an abstractly defined consumerism.

 

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The generation that has grown up since WW II feels its resentments collectively. It learns to do this in adolescence, when, as Marcuse–or Alan Bloom–might have put it, it is seduced by the youth culture that originated with rock’n’roll in the mid-50s into identifying itself as an oppressed collectivity excluded from adult society.

As adults, members of this generation differentiate themselves in exquisite detail through the refinements of the marketplace; their lives are consumed in learning what to buy and where to buy it. But in the absence of the spiritual individuality provided by personal resentment, the central core of their self lacks cultural content; it is limited to the physical body.

 Whence the obsessive concern with hygiene that has led to the demonization of secondary smoke. An unreasoning fear of physical invasion by disease factors incites this ecology-minded generation to scandalous wastefulness. The very people who proudly recycle throw out food at the least chance of spoilage, use armfuls of paper products to clean the slightest mess, generate obscene quantities of laundry and dirty dishes. Many refuse to flush public toilets lest they come in contact with alien bacteria; leaving behind unpleasant sights and smells is as nothing to the chance of contagion. This excessive fear of “germs” reflects a weakened sense of the self as a naked body that can be protected from death only by a constant consumption of goods and energy.

But by uncanny analogy with the naked bodies who entered the gas chambers, this body denuded of culture bears nonetheless the sign of a collective identity. The Holocaust taught succeeding generations that our cultural identity emerges not from our soul but from our body; our body is what others can see, and kill. The White guilt-obsessed yuppie and the minority activist share this same vision of the self, because they react to the same defining event.

Sometimes I wonder if generative anthropology is not a pre-war individualist’s last-ditch effort to define the world for himself before the alphas and betas of our Brave New World can get to it… But the human is fated to think about itself, and fundamental anthropological reflection can only be carried out by a form of thought that situates the manifold data of cultural life within the single focus of the individual mind.

 

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To be continued…

The current debate about Darwinism might surprise someone who thought that only obscurantists still resisted the theory of evolution. In its most general, that is, cosmological, sense, this theory requires only that the universe consist of stuff capable of varying degrees of organization over time: under these conditions, the “fittest” organizations will tend to survive. Cosmologists willing to entertain the unprovable hypothesis of the plurality of universes because they find “miraculous” that ours is so nearly at the critical density suffer from a profound naivete; the moment when reality becomes miraculous is the one in which one’s theory has been falsified. If this is the only universe of which we can have knowledge, then our models must set the probability of its being created to one; naivete would be the mother of discovery only if data from other universes were somehow obtainable.

In the specific domain of living organisms, Darwinism adds a single critical condition to the quasi-tautology of the survival of the fittest (== the survivors): the distinction between genotype and phenotype, between a relatively stable and limited “code” and the mortal creatures that “express” it. (Cosmological Darwinism implies at least the possibility of such a code, since nothing in principle prevents the varying degrees of organization from reaching the level where self-replication is possible.) Although Darwin knew nothing of genetics, the genotype-phenotype distinction is as fundamental to Darwinism as it is incompatible with Lamarckianism (the inheritance of acquired characteristics). The notion of natural selection in the life-world implies this distinction so strongly that it may serve as the very definition of life. Even if in the first living creatures, the minimal realization of the code (the gene) is coextensive with its expression (the living organism), these “naked genes” would have to perform the two essentially different functions of assimilating matter and energy to build new copies of themselves and of reading the instructions for this building. They would thus be phenotypes of themselves, and selection pressure would inevitably lead to coding the construction of organs external to the code itself.

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I don’t think Darwinists like Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) or Daniel Dennett (Darwin’s Dangerous Idea) would be unhappy with these remarks, which do not trivialize, let alone put into question, the idea of biological evolution. But if there is still a debate over evolution, it reflects something contemporary apologists of Darwin are not really capable of dealing with: the origin of the human–a subject on which, rightly considered, the Bible has more to say than The Origin of Species.

Not that originary thinking has an interest in what Dennett calls in his slightly cutesy style skyhooks, intrusions of dei ex machina to explain the emergence of human language and culture. Nothing in GA contradicts the Darwinian concept of evolution. But the problem isn’t that evolution is “false,” or even that it doesn’t in the most general sense “imply” the emergence of language, just as it implied the origin of life. Why should creatures constructed according to the genetic code not eventually become able to represent the world in codes of their own? But even if we assume that the survival value of internal neuronal representations will be enhanced under a plausible set of circumstances by the elaboration of external representations or signs, the question that should interest us most as humans, and which indeed has traditionally interested humanity–which massively participates in religion, not philosophy or positive science–is what this plausible set of circumstances might be. The difference between GA and the various Darwinisms is in the way it defines this question. Our own minimal model of the origin of language cannot be of a different nature from that of the first speakers themselves; human origin is historically continuous with the human present. The memorability of the sign without which language cannot be said to exist requires the condensation into the “signified” of a model of the scene in which the sign emerged. Religion deals with the reconstitution of this scene; it formulates minimal models of the human. This fundamental human task–the object of originary thinking–cannot be framed by positive anthropology as it is currently constituted.

One of the most highly regarded recent works on the origin of language, Derek Bickerton‘s Roots of Language, develops a theory of cognitive evolution that limits discussion of the actual origin of speech to a speculative footnote about what the author calls “crossing the Rubicon.” The treatment of this subject by Chomsky and his followers is more perverse still, as though the most important evolutionary development since life itself were a more or less accidental byproduct of the physical evolution of the brain. No doubt positive science can only take on problems it can solve. But to treat the very essence of the human as an unaskable question is to make naive creationism a respectable alternative to rational thought.

 A new epoch in anthropology begins with René Girard‘s insight that the crucial problem of our species is to defer the violence latent in our mimetic intelligence; linguistic structures evolve within the cultural environment defined by this deferral. The primary function of language is and has always been to defer mimetic conflict, not to deal cognitively with the environment.

The originary hypothesis is not incompatible either with synchronic linguistics or with the attempt to trace the evolution of the language-acquisition device that human infants clearly possess. It suggests to positive linguistics new avenues of research–testing in children the ostensive-imperative-declarative sequence discussed in The Origin of Language, or examining the specific traits of the ritual use of language. But its most important effect is to sensitivize us to the untranscendable paradoxicality of the human. The paradoxical structures of the esthetic and the sacred cannot be reduced to Turing machines either now or at the beginning of human time. We should neither despair of our inability to know ourselves nor glory in our infinite unknowability; our role is to add another turn to the spiral that brings us ever closer to the unreachable horizon of perfect self-knowledge.

Generative anthropology is neither simplistically scientific nor humanistic; it problematizes the frontier between the two. It is neither positive science nor cultural hermeneutic nor religion, open or concealed. It is the grandchild of metaphysics that tries to expel violence from language and the rebellious child of deconstruction that misunderstands language as violence. Is its practice conducive to the ultimate unity of positive, textual, religious, and metaphysical anthropologies? We need not speculate on the consequences of a hypothesis beyond what is necessary to persuade ourselves to explore it.

The cinema constantly reminds us of the enduring role of gangsters in our popular culture. The other day I saw Casino, a drawn-out remake of Goodfellas, where Joe Pesci reprises his now-classic exemplification of ruthless violence. Physical violence exercised by one human being on another affects us because we can easily identify with both victim and perpetrator; we play at being the latter as a defense against seeing ourselves in the place of the former. But what fascinates in the phenomenon of gangsterism is its plausibility as a mode of social organization. Watching films like The Godfather, we find ourselves in a world where a small number of ruthless, well-organized conspirators are able to bend peaceful, productive individuals like ourselves to their will. The striking images of our vulnerability to the mob secretly present in our midst make us realize the fragility of our everyday world. These images are part of popular rather than high culture; the moment of crisis they evoke is not that of individual decision but of mass panic. With the intriguing exception of Pulp Fiction, none of these films turns on an individual decision for good or evil; they portray an alternate world that we can react to only en masse, whether in affirmation or revulsion.

Reflecting on gangsterism as a model of the social order, one realizes that many societies operate under something very like gangland rule.  Hitler‘s or Lenin-Stalin‘s terror tactics are hardly redeemed by their dependence on ideology. So-called guerilla groups like the Sendero Luminoso or the recently newsworthy Tupac Amaru are little more than criminal bands who use revolution as a fig-leaf for extortion and drug-dealing. The Maffia itself was once a Sicilian national liberation movement, but the mystique of its American branch depends on its indifference to any ostensibly redeeming political goal. For gangsterism as a social model is not quite an end in itself; as soon as it aspires to power, in the form of the totalitarian police state, it cannot function without recreating the sacred as a political ideology.

This ideology may be as elaborate as Marxism–or as simple as antisemitism. For the antisemite, the Jews are far more dangerous than the Mafia, because the “violence” they are presumed to exercise is invisible. One can imagine other conspiratorial groups seeking to control the world–cf. Robert Ludlum or the James Bond films– but the Jews are the group of choice, the only one accused seriously and persistently on a large scale. Even countries like Japan, where Jews are virtually unknown, regularly reprint the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

 

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Explanations of antisemitism that start with the idea, developed in Jean-Paul Sartre‘s Réflexions sur la question juive  (1947), that the Jews are arbitrarily chosen scapegoats defined only by their Otherness to the persecuting majority, miss the essential point that it is the historical exemplarity of the Jews, the refusers of the human Mediator, that explains the phenomenon of antisemitism, not the reverse. The world offers plenty of genocidal hatreds and actual genocides to choose from, but the role of the Jews is unique, and this uniqueness makes antisemitism an inevitable temptation. We owe this understanding to the unusual respite obtained by the Holocaust, which now appears to be coming to an end.

Although there were once many Jewish gangsters, the gangster image is associated not with Jews but with Italians (and lately with the Black inner-city gangsta). The gangster is a romantic figure because his violence, although generally latent, remains close to the surface; he manipulates reality through immediate control of life and death. In contrast, the Jew, in the typical stereotype, manipulates the world through the most abstract of social mediations–money.  The Jew does not engage in violence; he relies on the state to enforce his claims. This is his weakness, one exploited in antisemitic scenarios from Marlowe and Shakespeare to Der Jude Süss. Once the good citizens become aware of the Jew‘s secret manipulations, they can easily be rid of him. He survives only through the ignorance of the guardians of the social order, who fail to see that he is an exception to the social contract, a parasite on the body politic.

 The Jew is not in some undefined sense a scapegoat for the larger society’s frustrations. He serves as a model of the inexistent and unfigurable center of the market system. The gangster, a representative of past immediacy, is a living reproach to the mediated world of the market; the Jew, having rejected the Incarnation, incarnates the truly unincarnatable–mediation itself. Gangsters short-circuit the mediations of market society, extorting, as Pesci does in Casino, money from those who seek to conquer the world through the marketplace, but whose reliance on the intrinsic peacefulness of the market leads them to forget the human potential for violence that underlies all social organization.

When the antisemite calls the Jew a monster, he tempts us to return the accusation upon the accuser. But sacrificial thinking, even in its victimary inversion, remains within the world of ritual violence. If the horror inflicted by history’s most virulent embodiment of gangsterism on the powerless Jews has served any historical purpose, it should have taught us the danger inherent in sacrificial categories that regress from the reality of the market system. In the postritual world of market exchange, the Jew is a paradoxical construction who regulates the self-regulating market, who fixes the prices determined by the interaction of supply and demand; we must eliminate him to gain control over this “inhuman” mechanism. But the only ways to exercise this control are either to abandon the mechanism altogether and run the economy from the center, creating in the name of Socialism what Marx himself called oriental despotism, or to empower a ruthless political entity to extort from the market what it desires. In either case, we have replaced the Jew with the gangster.

Casino, like Goodfellas, is a story of the Italian Mafia seen through the eyes of an outsider, who survives while true believer Pesci is destroyed by the real masters of the violence he thought he controlled. But the new twist is that the outsider is a Jew, who outlives not only Pesci but the demise of Mafia control over the Las Vegas casinos. The car bomb Rothstein-De Niro survives can, with a little imagination, be likened to the Holocaust; chastened, the Jewish spirit of the market lives on in the professional gambler, the eternal outsmarter of the odds. Some might read this as a story of Jewish success, or at least of Jewish survival; I wonder if it isn’t an updated version of the Jew, the uncanny manipulator of mediations, the monstrous soul of the soulless market.

Mimesis makes a solitary animal behave differently in the company of his fellows. But the collective context of animal ritual–for example, sexual combat in the mating season–never reaches the point of creating a public scene. The human is born in such a scene, which creates/reflects a structural difference between the hitherto non-critical “private” lives of the members of the group and their nascent communal life-in-crisis. In the scene itself, the members play both the public role of actor and the private one of spectator. In hierarchical society, these roles are separated; social functions are defined by their distance from the sacred center as locus of both power and sacrifice.

The tension between private and public informs the culture of market society. The novel is a story of private lives whose desires are not directly oriented to the unique center of public attention. At first, mediation between the characters’ private world and the public world of meaning is a function of their role in the production process. The evolving market system generates a secondary system of meanings that allow consumers to express their social being as publicly accessible “messages.” But the proliferation of individual messages that extends market society toward the horizon of omnicentricity proceeds in tandem with the increased centralization of media-mediated centers of attention. The technological facilitation of communication creates ever more broadly-based competition for these centers–a feature of the winner take all society– at the same time as the messages generated by individual life-choices are increasingly diversified. The result is to exacerbate the public-private tension beyond the point where it can be mediated, as in the nineteenth-century novel, by the revelation of exemplary “private” characters to the reading public. The private citizen’s resentment can no longer be purged by the esthetic according to the formula of the classical high culture. All that remains are the de-individualizing pleasures of mass culture.

 

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But as old forms of mediation decline, others emerge. What I would like to examine here is a new kind of mediation between private and public exemplified by these very Chronicles that you are reading.

Are these columns public or private? Measured by their accessibility, WWW pages are the most public documents of all. Millions of computer users all over the world can download them at the click of a mouse, at most by typing in a URL. No best-seller could be this accessible; unlimited free access is incompatible with market value.

 Yet with respect to scenic presence, the role of even the most popular Internet sites is very modest. In the winner-take-all society, small-scale initiatives have little chance in the competition for public attention. The technology that permits me to operate this site with no demands on UCLA’s generosity beyond a computer and server space also allows everyone over the age of ten to have his personal home page bearing his photograph and a listing of his favorite rock CDs. The proliferation of Internet information reestablishes the indifferentiation of crisis, where the only criteria for decision are the most critical: sex and violence. In contrast, the capital and labor costs of even a modest journal of opinion, greater by several degrees of magnitude, provide a preliminary guarantee of professionalism. Someone looking for quality intellectual fare has a far better chance to find it by subscribing to The New Republic than by clicking on an Internet newsletter.

But winner-take-all pressures distort the criteria of the intellectual marketplace. Theory is supposed to be minimally charismatic; it creates models of desire by arousing the least desire possible. Yet as public attention becomes increasingly precious, increasingly less deferral is available for this procedure. Intelligence is invested in short-term rather than long-term goals, in seeking solutions with les moyens du bord rather than engaging in a process of radical reformulation. Academic publishing has always been separate from that of the mainstream, but only in order to preserve the needs of specialized branches of knowledge from the requirements of the mass market. Because the purview of originary thinking, on the contrary, is the human as a whole, it lacks a built-in clientele; its books are as ill-suited to being reviewed in learned periodicals as in the commercial press.

Minimal thinking cannot be popular thinking. The less it need offer a concrete object of desire, the more deeply it can understand the deferral of desire. Experience and reflection have led me to the conclusion that this enterprise is best nurtured and brought to maturity in the semi-public domain of the Internet.  GA can prepare its paradigm shift protected by a non-charismatic medium whose full public accessibility keeps always open the pathway of integration into the public dialogue.

Our generation appears to have reached the limits of the strategy that seeks to abolish sacrificial centrality by espousing the cause of the victim only to reverse the roles of victim and sacrificer. As a result, Western society, together with the less successful ones of the third world, increasingly turns back to sacrificial forms of religion as indispensable means for understanding humanity-in-crisis. In contrast, the originary hypothesis reformulates the common horizon of human thought, religious and secular, as the deferral of the potential violence of human mimesis; its one-word message is decentralization. But in order to further the human aim it enunciates, this new content must be enunciated in a new form. Charisma cannot be denounced from a charismatic center. Or more precisely, the degree to which the center can be denounced depends on the degree to which its denunciation can avoid reestablishing a new center.

There is no fully decentered place of enunciation. But I think the Internet offers a new and unpredicted level of non-authoritarian reciprocity. Recently a subscriber to the GAlist suggested that we all abandon our personal email identities and just exchange our ideas through anonymous texts. Whether or not such an idea can or should be implemented, its very suggestion is in the non-charismatic spirit of both GA and the Internet, where our email addresses, even when they contain our “real” names, are no more than monikers. Viewed from cyberspace, the hierarchy of public and private, with its heroes and hero-worshipers, fascinating stars and mesmerized fans, belongs to a primitive stage of culture.

Most talk about God is childishly anthropomorphic: God is pretty much like us, except that he is immortal, omniscient, etc. This lends credence to the facile Freudian idea that God the father is just a projection of one’s real father. The semi-facetious denunciation of patriarchy as phallogocentric expresses the anthropological truth of Freudianism: as a Lacano-Derridean might put it, the logos supplements the absence of the phallus. But seeking God through sexual difference maintains the naive fiction that since we can understand the sacred only in human terms, we must seek it within the limits of individual experience.

A current example of the persistence of religious anthropomorphism is Jack Miles‘ God: A Biography, which was awarded this year’s Pulitzer Prize in its category. I will always be grateful to Miles, who as a former editor at the University of California Press was not only instrumental in publishing The Origin of Language and its sequel The End of Culture, but devised the term generative anthropology for what I had intended to qualify by the Gallicism “genetic.” Miles’s own picture of God is generative enough, but his model, neither originary anthropology nor psychoanalysis, is that of developmental psychology: God, like us, learns from experience. Perhaps there is no simpler way of understanding the emergence within the Judeo-Christian tradition of the understanding of mimetic desire that Girard refers to as things hidden since the foundation of the world. But this is hardly minimal thinking in our sense of the term. If we attribute to God a human psychology from the outset, we will never understand the emergence in the world of either God or humanity.

 The most telling critique of the naive attitude toward God is that it fails to examine his role as subject of language. The Bible tells us that God created the world with words. The anthropomorphic vision of God is advanced to a higher level when God is no longer merely the object of the biographical narrative but its subject as well. To tell God’s story in Miles’s sense is to subordinate one’s own discourse to a sacred text, the divine provenance of which is accepted on faith.

But how do we know what it means to be, like God, the subject of a discourse of creation? As Gustave Flaubert wrote at the age of fourteen in the epilogue to an early story: “Ecrire! oh! écrire, c’est s’emparer du monde, de ses préjugés, de ses vertus et le résumer dans un livre… [to write is to take hold of the world, its prejudices, its virtues and sum it all up in a book]”; and in a more famous passage from a letter of March 1857, “L’artiste doit être dans son oeuvre comme Dieu dans la création, invisible et tout-puissant[;] qu’on le sente partout, mais qu’on ne le voie pas [The artist must be in his work like God in creation, invisible and omnipotent; we should feel him everywhere, but not see him].” Which is to say that in the nineteenth century, perhaps even today, the most culturally powerful way to model the discursive creativity of God is to write a novel.

Novels are not normally about God; but that is just the point. If all we can know about God is anthropomorphic, then the way to know him best is to choose humanity as the subject of our story. The novelist creates a world through language. His experience tells us much about the possibilities of the Being whom we understand as having created humanity through language.

In the first place, it tells us about the limits imposed by narrative form. One might think that the interest of telling a good story is irrelevant to the ontology of creation through discourse. But culture is one. The Being that stands behind the originary sign also stands behind the cultural elaboration of this sign. If a novel is esthetically satisfying to us, its discourse must fulfill the same function as the sign, the deferral of violence. The novel must contain within itself the paradoxical self-generation of the originary scene–it must give esthetic pleasure. The only difference is that in the novel, as in any artwork, the esthetic oscillation between sign and imaginary reality must maintain itself on its own, in the absence of even ritualized violence. Literary discourse must create an imaginary world within which the internalized conflict we call resentment is deferred. This is Aristotle‘s catharsis of the passions.

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In attempting to understand the world as God’s creation, we encounter the so-called problem of evil: how can an all-powerful and benevolent God allow evil to exist? In originary terms: how can the humanity that preserves itself in the originary scene through the invention of the sign continue to experience conflict? If the sign’s power to defer conflict is operative in this scene, why does it not forever remove all obstacles to the fulfillment of our desires?

There are those naive enough to consider the existence of evil as proof of God’s nonexistence. Events like the Lisbon earthquake in the 18th century and the Holocaust fifty years ago have provoked such thoughts; Woody Allen‘s film Crimes and Misdemeanors, as I pointed out in a recent column, suggests that Allen has been traumatized by it. But the mature view is that evil is part of a plan whose benevolence we must take on faith since it transcends our power of understanding.

Our best model for God’s understanding of human history is the storyteller’s understanding of his story. Although the relationship between an unknowable transcendent plan and its worldly implementation derives from that between signs and objects in general, it is more closely modeled by the relationship between a story’s author and its characters. The characters cannot know the outcome that the author knows from the outset because they exist respectively on the different levels of content and form. The homology between God’s creation and the novelist’s is neither miraculous nor fortuitous; it brings together two types of cultural agency made possible by the originary emergence of the sign. The strength of originary thinking is that it is able to reveal the central unity behind this and other cultural homologies.

 The nineteenth-century novel in particular incarnates an ambition to provide a “total” picture of its time. This vision of the novel is most closely associated with Honoré de Balzac; but Balzac’s decision to include all his major works in a single Comédie Humaine reflects the discovery that although the novel in general terms was a model of the creation, a single novel structured by an individual human biography could not accomplish this task. Another French writer, Marcel Proust, found both the solution and the reductio ad absurdum of this conundrum by combining the subject of the novel with its object: the content of Proust’s unique novel A la recherche du temps perdu generates its formal subject. The novel is, in short, God’s autobiography. Miles could not follow this model because no sacred text, let alone the Bible, could have furnished his material; the only examples are literary. But we can read every other novel in the light of Proust’s unique experiment.

Proust’s self-generating novel, as his critics love to point out, doesn’t really generate itself at all, since the protagonist as novelist cannot be shown, only told about. But this shows us the relationship between the novel’s temporality and its constitution of the creative subject. When we talk about God anthropomorphically, we understand his motivations in terms of local human time, since for him to interact with us, he must operate within our temporal limitations even if his own understanding and capacity for action are instantaneous. (Similarly, Superman can only communicate with the inhabitants of Metropolis if he slows down to their speed.) But we have no simple anthropomorphic idea of the spiritual component of God’s time, what Heidegger referred to under the rubric of Ekstasis, our projection of ourselves in time. The horizon of our action lies beyond the immediate moment in which we act; even the present as present for us is a projection. This is a structure of transcendence that language makes possible. The practical use of Plato’s Ideas, emphasized in Aristotle’s Forms, is in our projects of creation. The mental Form of a chair is the basis from which I construct a chair out of “formless” matter.

But God does not experience the temporality of human praxis; he can produce all the chairs he likes in no time at all. How then can we understand the project that presides over God’s otherwise incomprehensible acts? Proust’s novel suggests that God’s purpose is his own revelation in human time, that is, the constitution in human time of the divine subject. The totalizing project of A la recherche is no less than the acquisition of immortality, the recuperation of every second lost in living within the timeless universe of meaning. If its necessary incompleteness testifies to our inability to create a perfect model of divine consciousness, the explicit nature of its quest for transcendence makes our esthetic pleasure in its achievement a model of the act of faith in God. For the difference between believer and nonbeliever is no more than the decision to attribute to God as reality the perfection that we can experience only as the horizon of our action. The believer begs the question of Anselm‘s ontological proof that the most perfect being must possess the “perfection” of existence.

Whether or not we believe in God’s existence, we cannot expect to experience the foundations of this existence in worldly terms more convincingly than in the novel. For originary thinking, theology is vanishingly close to anthropology: when literature talks about the human, it is also talking about God.

 

I

The depth of general resentment may be measured by most people’s willing identification with the violent centrality of popular culture.  Mel Gibson‘s self-directed performance in Braveheart is a particularly egregious example; combining any figures of mastery and martyrdom he could get his hands on, from Moses and Napoleon to Jesus, Gibson was rewarded with an Oscar for offering us an invitation to hero-worship.

 Still more crudely sacrificial figures abound, faceless or individualized figures of evil whose sole raison-d’être is to justify their undoing. Within the category of exploitation films targeting youth, Blacks, women, etc., all members of the “dominant” (adult, white, male…) group are obligatorily portrayed as monsters. The other day I tried to watch Trust (Hal Hartley, 1991), a well-regarded film about the odd couple formed by a pregnant high-school dropout and a nerd-genius young man. In the 30 minutes I was able to stand, unfeeling father #1 dies of heart attack after becoming enraged at learning of pregnancy; unfeeling football-playing boyfriend–an apprentice adult–refuses to marry pregnant sweetheart because it would upset college plans; unfeeling mother coldly accuses daughter of murder at father’s funeral and throws her out of house; unfeeling supervisor forces sensitive young man to repair shoddy electronic equipment–after which sensitive young man sticks supervisor’s head in a vise and walks off the job; sadistic father #2 brutalizes son after making him clean the already-clean bathroom several times; crazy woman on bench tells girl of the horrible boredom of her marriage; repulsive storekeeper tries to take sexual advantage of (underage) girl when she tries to buy beer. This material is as steeped in resentment as anything the Nazis or the Weather Underground could conceive; it is praised for its sensitivity to a female character who is shown slapping–and indirectly killing–one man (her father who slapped her first) and sticking a lighted cigarette into the eye of another (the storekeeper who was forcing her to undress).

Every artwork incarnates an anthropology. The more it is founded on the unproblematic discharge of resentment, the more sacrificial the anthropology. Thus we should be able to judge a society by the sacrificiality of its art. The Frankfurt school condemned modern bourgeois society for attempting to distract the people from their quest for socialist utopia with the resentful satisfactions of mass art; but Adorno u.s.w. never disentangle ethical truth from esthetic distinction. Our own critique makes no reference to the suspiciously snobbish notion of esthetic sensibility. The only sensibility that I have referred to here is ethical. An artwork that flatters our resentment raises rather than lowers the level of sacrificial violence in its vicinity.

Today’s critique of violence in the media, focused on content without concern for narrative structure, expresses in its mindless way the fundamental relationship between culture and violence: because violence is contagious, it is spread by its very presence. The mindlessness is itself the product of the violence of our dominant popular culture; once the latter becomes a barely disguised expression of resentment, we can forget about the niceties of narrative structure. No doubt this kind of critique overlooks the culture’s most egregious moral lapses, the twin evils of hero-worship and demonization in Braveheart and the like, which inhere not in violence per se but in the way its portrayal is justified. But we don’t notice these lapses because we’re not really following the story, just being borne along by the figures of violence. In condemning a work as pornographic, one doesn’t care how the sex acts fit into the plot.

 

II

The task of the postmodern era is to create a post-sacrificial, post-charismatic culture. The other day I attended an expository talk on nature writing as a contemporary form of spirituality–something Markus Müller astutely called Rousseau without resentment. Following Thoreau, who created a uniquely American form of resentment, the return to a sense of place is a way of spreading ourselves out, deferring our concentration on a single center. The ecological model, in contrast with the central model of the consumer society of which it is a growing part, tells us to substitute natural for man-made differentiation. From connoisseurs of wine and clothes, we should become connoisseurs of rocks and flowers; for sale at sustainable prices, they nicely express our disdain for the marketplace. The talk concluded with a poem by a woman who tells of stopping to listen to some mockingbirds–but like Robert Frost, who can’t watch the woods fill up with snow without pointing out that his neighbor is too bourgeois to do so, she noted at the outset that by listening to the birds, she was neglecting some other obligation. I imagined myself in her place, arriving a half-hour late to class because mockingbirds, unlike students, are figures of the Spirit.

Now that environmental writing is becoming big business, one wonders when the community of nature-worshipers will reach the critical mass at which the initiate’s beatific sense of superiority to others (the New Age definition of spirituality) dissolves in the agon of internal competition. At that point, one hopes, the postmodern flight from anthropology, of which this is but one of many examples, will be revealed as just one more of the deferrals inherent in anthropology. Knowledge cannot be sidestepped indefinitely; lucidity always wins out in the end.

 

III

I suppose we should prefer desert landscapes to the mayhem on the TV screen, but the most powerful cultural medium of our time is neither of these, but the one we are currently sharing. All process and no substance, no medium to be the message, the Internet eliminates authority from emission and stasis from reception. It is no accident that originary thinking has found an audience on the Net.  No more masterpieces was the cry of the modernist avant-garde, but the structure of the art-show centralizes whatever is shown there; showing “non-masterpiece” art is only a yet more scandalous variety of charismatic communication. The Internet, on the other hand, is anti-charismatic; no heroes on the WWW. For what is certainly the first time in history, the most powerful ideas can come to maturity without arousing a distorting attraction to the sacrificial center. Which is only to say that, for the first time, thinking about the origin of this center is truly possible.

The originary hypothesis is situated at the frontier of the humanities–the world of meaning–and the human sciences–the world of facts, at the point where transcendental meaningfulness emerges within the immanent world of appetite. The ethic of the originary scene is indifferently divine and human, coerced and free. The ethical imperative implicit in our hypothesis commands us to create within ourselves the intuitive equivalent of the outcome of this collective scene: the deferral of violence through representation.

The emergence of the human is the emergence of the transcendental in the life-world. By making this origin an object of hypothesis rather than dogma, we take a great ethical step. Seen in the context of their historical evolution, religious revelations are themselves hypotheses, in their way even minimal hypotheses. The act of faith quia absurdum reproduces within the individual imagination the originary state of crisis; its urgency reminds us that the worldly peace brought about by the deferral of violence depends upon the permanence of the transcendental Being that preserves the meaning of the sign. But faith does more than that; it affirms that our participation in this Being allows us an existential escape from the biological mortality that, pace Genesis, is not a consequence but a precondition of our resentfulness. The deferral of the originary crisis among human beings by means of the sign is the source of religious transcendentalism, the notion that the atemporal domain of meaning is a world that we can in some sense eternally inhabit.

 The originary hypothesis, which takes our historical point of departure seriously, but minimally, is the basis for a minimal human ethic that implies the critical suspension of the otherworldly. In contrast, positive thought that elides the historicity of human origin can propose no ethical principle other than biological necessity.

The ethical imperative implicit in the originary hypothesis is that we must minimize the historical specificity of the moment of origin, as expressed in the supplementary existential content of the sacred Being that preserves the meaning of the originary sign. We may formulate this ethic as follows: act in such a way as to make it indifferent whether, at the moment of origin, God created man or man created God.

This formula has in common with the doctrines of the higher religions the virtue of being interpretable on many levels. On the simplest–I hope to deal with others in future columns–it cautions against the two extremes characterized by Corneille’s Polyeucte, who seeks martyrdom in anticipation of eternal bliss, and Plato’s Callicles, who anticipates Nietzsche in interpreting ethical laws as the weak’s means of duping the strong. The unbeliever must act as though God will punish his sins; the believer, as though no God will reward his virtues.

 

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How does this ethic compare with René Girard‘s interpretation of Christian morality, which tells us to minimize the sacrificiality of our conduct, to act so as to create as little victimage as possible? Sacrifice, the interpretation of God’s will as the lynching of a scapegoat, is exposed and rejected in the Passion. The God who lets his rain fall on the just as on the unjust will not intervene in the world either to punish evil or to reward good. Only the human community, by choosing love over resentment, can bring about peace on earth.

This vision of Christianity goes a long way toward the minimality of the originary hypothesis. A God who refuses to intervene in human affairs is no longer very different from the hypothetical Being that guarantees the meaning generated by the originary sign. The remaining difference is the assimilation of natural to human crisis that makes the Being who masters human violence equally the master of the natural violence of death. For the man on the street, the afterlife is what religion is all about. A hypothesis cannot promise its adherents the resurrection of the body or even, in anything like an existential sense, the eternity of the soul.

But are these dogmatic elements not mere aids to belief rather than the substance of belief; are they not expressions of the originary hypothesis in a different vocabulary?

I think not. Religious anthropomorphism guides our intuition along a different path than minimal thinking. We all share in Jesus’ death, but Christ’s glorious resurrection can only be promised us. The application to the human body of the transcendence provided by the sign is the last refuge of the sacred cosmology that extends to the heavens the powers of a Being whose only proven domain of action is the human community. A minimalist ethic must recalculate the payoff of Pascal’s pari: we wager not on an eternity of existential bliss, but on sharing in the transcendent atemporality of human meaning.

The next step beyond religion is not the abolition of religion, but a new way of thinking that preserves the historical specificity of religious revelation while not itself participating in this specificity. Because the intuition of the originary scene is not divine revelation but hypothesis, it has no charismatic power. No doubt originary thinking, like Christianity, will gradually work out in history the lesson of its original revelation; but its origin, unlike that of Christianity, is a truly minimal event, Deriddean rather than Girardian, with no reality beyond its written trace. The ethic implicit in the originary hypothesis is to repeat on every occasion the minimality of this event–in practical terms, to suspect and reduce the signs of centrality. This is an esthetic more anti-heroic still than that of Christ on the cross–the protagonist’s ultimate humiliation is to become invisible.

There has surely never been a time when the public scene of representation has been so discredited as today, even as it remains at the horizon of our accomplishments. Everyone seeks fame, yet there is no longer any legitimate way to be famous. The closest thing we have to a heroic figure in our public life is Colin Powell, whose minority status would have allowed him to occupy the center in the most unexclusionary way possible, but who turned down an excellent chance at the world’s most prestigious job out of a healthy distrust of centrality under any circumstances. Powell is heroic by the very fact of having refused to take the heroic position, of having accepted to disappoint his potential admirers. In an age of such heroism, we can begin to appreciate the virtues of an ethic of minimality.

The other evening I was given another chance to understand why I don’t like Woody Allen. His 1989 film Crimes and Misdemeanors follows two men–a successful ophthalmologist (Martin Landau), whose need to free himself from an obsessive mistress (the m-word is used in the film) leads him to have her whacked, and the inevitable, unbearable Allen character, a feckless documentary film maker who wants to leave his wife (who’s refused to sleep with him for several months) for another woman (Mia Farrow), but who learns at the end, to his humiliation, that his beloved has become the fiancee of his bête noire, an egregiously successful producer played by Alan Alda.

 In the final scene, the two protagonists meet at a wedding, and Landau, who has been racked by remorse over the murder, asks Allen if his story–which he tells in the third person–wouldn’t make a good film plot. Allen says yes, but only if the guilty lover makes the story tragic by confessing to the murder. Whereupon Landau, repeating the words of his gangster-connected brother who arranged the hit, tells Allen that he has seen too many Hollywood movies, that in the real world, people just get over their guilt and go on with their lives. Suddenly cured of the remorse that has been dogging him, he walks off arm in arm with his wife to plan their own daughter’s wedding, leaving the despairing Allen behind.

This film gives us all the expected insights into Allen’s character, including his curious habit, prophetic in the light of later revelations, of confiding his amorous dreams to a teen-aged girl. But I’ll let someone else psychoanalyze the guy. What struck me in this film is its treatment of religion.

 Before the murder, Landau is paralyzed with fear that his wife and family will find out about his mistress, whose hysterical threats to confront them are essential to the plot. His brother, not he, suggests the final solution, and only after further provocation does he agree to let it be carried out. Afterward, he sees childhood visions of his father studying the Torah, telling him of God’s omniscience. This sets up the key religious scene in the film. At a Passover Seder, a middle-aged woman rebukes another participant for reading the traditional Hebrew Haggadah, which tells the story of the Exodus. The Holocaust, she says, has shown that God doesn’t exist, that religion is arbitrary nonsense. When Landau, who is standing apart from the group at the table, inquires about the divine consequences of murder, he is told that there’s no such thing as divine punishment, that it’s up to the murderer whether he wants to feel guilty or not.

Allen deserves credit for avoiding the sacrificial cop-out of a junk film like Fatal Attraction that fully demonizes the character who must be eliminated. Here she is monster enough to make her murder seem necessary, but not enough to make it either legal or emotionally satisfying. The moral seems to be that all this God stuff is just a way of avoiding responsibility. As Landau’s brother tells him, people who live in the real world don’t have the luxury of believing in God. We return to a familiar shtick: the Jews conjured up God, the imaginary embodiment of the superego, in order to justify their notorious need to feel guilty. The film doesn’t exactly recommend murder, but if you do have to do it, there’s no point in tormenting yourself by evoking that phallogocentric paternal God who sees all and never forgets.

The Jews should get over their guilt trip: thus is the post-Holocaust never again that Israeli soldiers carry into battle transformed into a way of avoiding guilt for murder. The infantile understanding of religion reflected in this film is that of a Voltairean intelligentsia who inhabit a world devoid of what in last week’s column I called spirituality. For these people, religion is a set of comic-book tales about a super-hero called God. Their rational, analytic minds feel not the slightest indebtedness to religion–au contraire. That we share language and culture, that we intuit and communicate meanings, rationally or irrationally–what can this have to do with the figure who flame-engraved those tablets for Charlton Heston?

 

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The heritage I share with Woody Allen offers richer spiritual opportunities. The Jewish denial of incarnation that makes God unfigurable allows us a privileged insight–one that Derrida, for one, has profited from–into the fundamental connection between religion and language at the umbilical point of the human. As for God’s presumed disapproval of murder, the point isn’t that the bogey-man in the sky will get you, but that killing is a crime against the human-in-general only because it is in the first place a crime against the transcendental ground of the human-in-general–in a word, a sin. I’m not going to argue that the breakdown of religious community that turns God into Nobodaddy and guilt into a psychological hang-up makes us more likely to hire a hit man than in more pious times; the truth may be just the opposite. But this reduction of religion to infantile stereotypes, however tricked out in the pseudo-wisdom of the New York intellectual set, is a troubling sign of disequilibrium between mental and spiritual development.

One solution is to return to an obscurantist orthodoxy, or–the California approach–to invent an even more obscurantist orthodoxy. But there will presumably always exist those, believers as well as unbelievers, who want to understand. To these I would suggest that the road to understanding must take us back to the origin before it can lead us anywhere else. Believers and unbelievers don’t have to toss hoary cliches back and forth. Without pretending to the certitude of revealed truth, originary thinking constructs hypotheses to explain the attributes of God.

Am I decrying the decline of our culture into the religious infantility of Woody Allen? I have studied paradoxes too long to get caught up in what I will call the Cassandra paradox, a well-worn variation on that of Epimenides the Cretan. The latter, you may recall, used to say that all Cretans are liars; Cassandra cries incessantly that all Trojans are deluded. No, my point is just the opposite. Even the intelligentsia is growing up. Allen’s religious childishness makes his film seem dated only seven years after it was made.  GA may still be ahead of its time, but the world is gradually moving in our direction.