Author: staceymeeker

If generative anthropology is indeed a better way to think about the human, then it should be able to shed light on contemporary moral controversies on issues such as homosexuality, assisted suicide, or genetic engineering. This does not mean that GA should come down on one side or another of these debates, but that it should clarify the positions of both sides, revealing them to be anthropological hypotheses rather than conflicting affirmations of moral absolutes.

Abortion is the most politically potent of these controversies because it has the greatest anthropological significance. What is at stake in the pro-choice vs pro-life opposition is the very nature of the most fundamental of our differences, the difference between men and women.

 How should this difference be understood from the standpoint of originary anthropology? There are two types of relations with others: external and internal. Men can only relate to others externally, as beings physically separated from oneself. Womanhood may be defined as the capacity for another kind of relation with another, one that we may call internal otherness. The pregnant woman has within her body a potential human being. We may call it the internal other because it has a human identity different from that of the mother.

According to the originary hypothesis, the birth of human language took place in order to defer mimetic conflict among external others. I have assumed the participants in the originary scene of language to be men because it is male externality that tends to mimetic rivalry and violence, not the peaceful relation of internal otherness. Because women and children do not stand essentially in a relationship of mimetic rivalry, they do not need language in order to avert conflict. Cultural logic reflects the logic of natural selection; the biological investment in female internality is incompatible with destructive violence.  Richard van Oort dealt with the hypothetical absence of women from the originary scene of language in Chronicle 14; this is not my subject here.

But the abortion issue forces us to reflect on the origin of culture because the participants in the abortion debate are the two parties to the relation of internal otherness: the woman and the fetus. Woman and fetus has nothing of the warmth of mother and child; the internal relation is only potentially a fully human interaction.

Any reader of the Gospels knows that Jesus constantly evokes the image of the child. The child is not simply a picture of innocence; he exemplifies the inability to function unaided in the world. The Latin infans, as we have heard many times, means unspeaking: the infant is one incapable of speech. Many ritual societies have practiced infanticide, where the child’s inability to speak justifies its exclusion from humanity.  Christian morality, the doctrine of universal reciprocity, of what I have called omnicentricity, is concerned with maximally extending the category of the human. The child obliges us to take the extra step in its direction. Its humanity is still potential; we must solicit it, making up from our own supply what it still lacks. This is a relationship devoid of mimetic rivalry. The Gospels propose a universal relation of internal otherness, a community modeled on the nurturing relation of mother and child.

 Thus the category of the fully human is extended downward to the most hapless and helpless members of our species, from publicans and sinners to the child, and from the child to the yet unborn. With this in mind, it is easy to understand why the Catholic Church and other traditional Christians are opposed to abortion.

But on the other side of the relation of internal otherness is the pregnant woman. Human culture is constituted by external relations. Women have historically not been granted full access to the culture constituted by these relations because of the internal relation that they alone maintain. But in one of the critical developments of the postmodern age, women have been able successfully to claim this access. Now that human conflicts can no longer be settled by the use of maximal violence in war, the sex defined by its exclusive externality can no longer claim cultural dominance: humanity is no longer man.

Women’s problems in external relations are peripheral; the physical or even mental differences consonant with internality do not prevent women from interacting with external others. It is even possible to place men and women on an equal footing with regard to child-raising, granting paternity leaves along with maternity leaves. Whether or not this is “natural” in the long term, it is a demonstration that women can no longer be denied full participation in human culture.

But the regulation of internal relations is another story. Once the child is born, the father can give it its bottle, but only the mother can nourish it in the womb. When the state mandates external relations, they are fungible; a father is required to provide child support, not to care for the child himself. But a pregnant woman cannot delegate someone else to care for her child.  Internal otherness is scandalous because it is a biological relation that has at the same time been culturally imposed. To extend the category of full humanity to women, this imposition cannot be maintained.

 The simplest solution is to consider all human relations as external; the woman’s relationship to the fetus is therefore not a human relation, but that of a human being to an alien being within her body. Whence the analogy sometimes heard in extreme cases between the fetus and a parasite or a tumor. But to make internal otherness the equivalent of disease is to deny the specificity of womanhood and its contribution to the human, culturally as well as biologically. The more reflective pro-choice position is that, in order that women be fully integrated into human culture, they must have the right to choose to exercise this specificity: the right to abortion is better understood as the freedom to choose to bear a child, to participate in the relation of internal otherness.

Seen in this light, the gap between the two sides is remarkably narrow. No one sees abortion as a good thing; no one wants a woman to bear a child she hates. In the ideal–and most frequent–case, pro-choice and pro-life are one: the woman chooses to bear her child.

Why do all but the most extreme pro-lifers make an exception for children of rape and incest? The logic of these exceptions is that the woman forced to bear a child under these conditions has been humiliated beyond a humanly acceptable point; she is being treated as a biological vessel. Under such conditions, internal otherness is no longer a human relation. The preservation of the child’s humanity is the equivalent of the mother’s expulsion from humanity.

But even in this extreme case, having the right to terminate the pregnancy need not mean exercising it. The free choice to bear the child is an act of love that transcends the resentment against its father. One thing the abortion debate has taught us is that abortion need not be an act of resentment, but that the free choice to bear a child is an act of love.

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I began these columns, and gave them their title, as an attempt to affirm love over resentment. But a glance at the news should convince anyone that it is resentment rather than love that makes the world go ’round. There is no need to list the slaughters that take place daily, and which from the Holocaust to Rwanda-Burundi to Bosnia to Wednesday’s suicide bombing in Sri Lanka are primarily motivated by resentment. The classical model of violence is found in La Fontaine‘s Le loup et l’agneau, where the wolf claims the lamb is muddying the water simply as a pretext for eating him. Today we understand these matters better. The killers are not motivated by a cynical desire to further their self-interest by fabricating grievances against their victims. The truth is just the opposite: it is not self-interest that disguises itself as a sense of injustice, but a sense of injustice that teaches people their “self-interest.” The resentment comes first; profiting from it comes later, if at all–suicide bombers profit little from their work. Nor does resentment usually result in massacres; they are but the tip of the iceberg.

 And how often are the examples of “love” in the news nothing but resentment in disguise? Celebrity marriages, Di‘s or Clinton‘s adulteries are pretexts for Schadenfreude. At best the public self can shower pity on some pathetic figure–a child who needs a new kidney, a whale lost in a river–that even we can feel superior to.

Yet these visible phenomena give a distorted view of our social reality. Precisely because they involve the media-mediated center of our public scene of representation, they cannot reveal the decentralized, omnicentric relations of love that dominate our lives, that hold our world together just a bit more than the force of resentment tears it apart. We live in a world where public recognition is increasingly depreciated, where in order to maintain oneself in the center of public attention one must increasingly display victimary rather than heroic qualities. If our society lacks heroes, it is because we are not disposed to hero-worship. The apparent exceptions only confirm the rule.  Colin Powell receives general admiration, not simply “because of his race,” but because his race supplies the victimary element that permits us to admire him. What athlete today inspires the worshipful affection that surrounded a Babe Ruth or a Joe Louis in their day? Perhaps Magic Johnson, with his little-boy cheerfulness, especially now that he has become HIV-positive. Sports reporting incites us rather to envy athletes’ salaries than to admire their athletic accomplishments.

The pursuit of fame will continue to tempt us, but as demography makes it increasingly more difficult to attain, the force of mimetic rivalry will assure that the famous are increasingly less heroic. This phenomenon trickles down from the center of the public stage into the various subordinate arenas within which we operate. The heavies in my own little corner of the academic world exercise power under cover of victimary disguises. Like so many little Trotskys, they mask their ruthlessness with a passion for the oppressed. Yet more ominously, they are networkers who can only occupy the center in a crowd.

The spate of talk-shows where people bare the seamy side of their souls and bodies for Warhol‘s fifteen minutes is a caricature of our desire for fame, and has often been denounced as such. But we should look at it from the other side. The fleeting fame granted by these people’s unsavory sex lives is a sign that it is fame itself, not those who pathetically court it, that is no longer a viable option. There is too much resentment in the public arena for it to be able to measure our true value. We must conclude that in our advanced market society, the desire for public visibility that has always been the driving force of human achievement is in the process of losing its attractiveness.

One symbolic indication of the decline of the motivating value of the public scene is the recent tendency of politicians leaving Washington to spend more time with their family. We need not believe in the sincerity of all these declarations to see in them a meaningful trend. The politician may be leaving to use his acquired contacts in a well-paid consultantship or to write a celebrity book; but his declaration that his family is the most important thing in his life pays homage to the life-styles of those who will never be on prime-time news.

One is only l’homme (or la femme) du ressentiment for as long as one accepts the verdict of the public scene. Once we realize that the high level of resentment that surrounds it makes the scene itself an unattractive place, we learn to put aside our dreams of celebrity and devote ourselves to doing our jobs as well as we can and to caring for those who really matter in our lives.

To sum it all up in an image: television is the key locus of the public scene today, and it is impossible to behave authentically on television. The Heideggerian idea of authenticity is dangerous enough for its death not to appear as a good thing. But perhaps it is a good thing in a way I had not anticipated.

Authenticity can be salvaged as an ideal if it respects the human marketplace without however being dependent on public acclaim. The marketplace itself has always operated this way. One does not seek immediate satisfaction in the market; one defers satisfaction and invests one’s capital in the hope of establishing a local or even universal monopoly. Today we think of this capital less as money than as education, experience, time spent creating something the market will be forced to appreciate. To win in the market is less to win today than to anticipate its movements tomorrow.

In the long run, we will all be dead, as Keynes put it. But it is when we are dead that we can afford to be famous. All the clownishness and victimary posturing are unnecessary after death. Death is the only dignified means of attaining victimary status.

It used to be fairly common to hear of creating for posterity; Stendhal, writing in the 1830s, used to speak about being read in 1880, or even in 1930. Today, how many people speak about being read in 2090? The word posterity makes most people smile.

 Rira bien qui rira le dernier, as Rameau’s nephew used to say: he who laughs last laughs best.

Can we still create masterpieces? Culture is everywhere, but great artworks seem to be things of the past.

The reason is not that our artists or writers have become less proficient. Why should our current artists have less native talent than their historical predecessors? What they really lack is faith. To compose masterpieces, one must first believe in them. Today we no longer believe in masterpieces, because we have no desire to admire those who produce them. It is the growth of democracy, and concomitantly, of resentment, that eliminates the need for great art.

 Masterpieces are monuments, centers of desire and resentment that obstruct the flow of goods and signs. It is because our general esthetic level is so high that we can afford to do without masterpieces. Automobiles, magazines, furniture, storefronts – we live in a world of stylishness. If Los Angeles is a more stylish place than most, the accouterments of daily life in most places in the industrialized world are increasingly on a comparable level of quality. The societies that produced great art knew degrees of social distinction that exist today only in the most backward countries. It is the democratic esthetic of daily life that has replaced the esthetic focus on the unique masterpiece, just as the omnicentric world in which all are worthy of respect and love is supposed to replace the old social hierarchies.

We are entering an unpretentious age, in which the only pretense is not to have one. The only affirmation we are allowed to make–and I think we are tiring of it–is of our status as victims. The point of PC is to head off criticism by apologizing in advance for any self-affirmations one might inadvertently commit.

Does this mean that we must be pessimistic toward the future of art, that we are fated to mediocrity? Not necessarily.

Before about 1800, the arrogance of artists was limited to their professional setting. The creators who had flourished in the Italian Renaissance saw themselves as men of discovery and progress, more as scientists than as incarnations of genius. The romantic artist was the first to consider himself gifted with prophetic insight. In the sense in which we still use the term, his were the first masterpieces; he was the first to think of artworks, his own or those of his predecessors, as possessing a transcendent value beyond all worldly objects. The romantic artist thought himself the successor of the religious leaders of the past–Moses, Mohammed, even Jesus.

It is easy to mock the romantic’s naive arrogance. My favorite quote in this vein (as my students know all too well) is from Victor Hugo‘s preface to his greatest poetry collection, Les contemplations. (Known here mostly for Les misérables, Hugo is best remembered in France as a poet, the uncontested leader of the romantic school.):  “… quand je parle de moi, je parle de vous. Insensé qui crois que je ne suis pas toi!”  — “When I speak of myself, I speak of you; senseless one who think I am not you!” The poet talks of himself, but he speaks for us all. He need not ask us for our permission. As the hyperbole shows, Hugo’s reader has begun to resist the artist’s genius–Les contemplations is romantic poetry published in the postromantic era. But Baudelaire, and his successor Mallarmé, had visions of the artist’s role yet more exalted than Hugo’s.  Mallarmé no longer spoke for the bourgeois reader; the artist had become, as for Heidegger, a guardian of being.

 It is easy to mock; but these artists had a point. With the decline of the old ritual society after the French Revolution, the nineteenth-century artist supplied not only insights into the human condition, but a vision of the social order that was not available elsewhere. It was Balzac who revealed the social atmosphere of early capitalism; it was Flaubert who uncovered the structures of desire that underlie what we call consumer society. Esthetic creation was the leading anthropological discovery procedure of the time. This is no longer true in the postmodern era; the horrors of the twentieth century have taught us to be wary of revelations of human truth in images.

Today, we no longer desire masterpieces. But we can still enjoy art. The popular arts are more vigorous than those of the waning “high culture,” but elements of the latter gain vigor from imitating the forms, and more fundamentally, the unpretentiousness of the former. The broad success of, for example, minimalist music–which has rejuvenated opera, a form not long ago considered a nineteenth-century relic–stems not from its imitation of specific themes or techniques of popular music but from its renunciation of avant-garde incomprehensibility.

Hence although we are truly at the “end of culture,” if the latter be understood in the romantic sense as the source of our ultimate revelations about ourselves, we are also entering an era extremely rich in culture, understood more modestly as entertainment that defers our resentments until we are ready to recycle them within our productive lives.

This more modest role for art does not mean that the art of the present need be of modest quality. When Bach was composing, he thought of himself as a top professional–closer to an engineer‘s self-image than that of an artist. Nor did Mozart see himself very differently. It was with Beethoven that the composer took on the figure of transcendent genius. Today’s composers have come full circle and returned to the modesty of Bach rather than the flamboyance of Beethoven. They could do a lot worse.  Bach never wrote masterpieces, no doubt, but he did produce the Saint Matthew’s Passion.

Blaise Pascal, who lived at a time when mathematics was beginning its qualitative advance beyond the Greeks in modeling the real world, was the last great mathematician who was also a great thinker in the Continental tradition. (This qualification avoids arguments over whether, say, Bertrand Russell was a “great thinker.”) My article in the first issue of Anthropoetics dealt with his most fascinating mathematico-philosophical construction, the pari or wager on the existence of God, an application of the theory of probability to the question of faith.

 A less spectacular but comparably fascinating construction is that of the honnête homme. This term is difficult to translate, since the notion of honnêteté, although related to that of honesty, is focused differently, closer to its roots in the aristocratic notion of honor.  Honesty is a kind of neutrality; to be honest is to tell the truth, to let reality reveal itself without tampering with it. The French version applies this trait to social behavior rather than truth-telling, just as Continental philosophy applies its insights to human behavior in general rather than limiting them to the analysis of propositions. The honnête homme is not a truth-teller, but one who does “the right thing.” But Pascal’s definition of this character is more elegant.

Les gens universels ne sont appelés ni poètes, ni géomètres, etc.; mais ils sont tout cela, et juges de tous ceux-là. On ne les devine point. Ils parleront de ce qu’on parlait quand ils sont entrés. On ne s’aperçoit point en eux d’une qualité plutôt que d’une autre, hors de la nécessité de la mettre en usage; mais alors on s’en souvient […] Il faut qu’on n’en puisse [dire], ni : “Il est mathématicien,” ni “prédicateur” […] mais “il est honnête homme.” Cette qualité universelle me plaît seule.

Universal people are not called poets or geometers; but they are both, and judges of both. One doesn’t notice them (or: one cannot second-guess them). They will talk about whatever was being talked about when they came in. One doesn’t notice in them one talent rather than another, except when there is need to make use of it; but then one remembers it […]

One should not be able to say either “He is a mathematician” or “a preacher” […] but “He is an honnête homme.” Only this universal quality pleases me.

 The honnête homme will talk about whatever subject was under discussion when he entered the room. How different from either the star, who monopolizes the group’s attention, or the romantic hero, who attracts attention by the counter-strategy of turning his back on the group and basking in his own sublime individuality. The honnête homme is a minimalist model of social interaction. 

The sentence On ne les devine point is particularly intriguing.  Deviner means to guess, but it’s not clear exactly what we can’t guess about them. Each of the two translations/interpretations makes a different point about anthropological minimalism.

We don’t notice them, we don’t guess that they are present. Not to be noticed is not to attract resentment. In Pascal‘s time, as in Proust‘s, the salons were little laboratories of sociability, interpersonal marketplaces with no function other than to position their participants in the community. Poets, geometers, and the like touted their wares at these sessions, seeking the approval of those who could further their careers. What Pascal–like Proust first a sociable, then a reclusive man (and some say, a homosexual) of profound anthropological intuition–seeks in these laboratories is the model of a harmonious society, a worldly counterpart of the Kingdom of God.

A society of poets or mathematicians each experts in their specialty alone corresponds much more closely to the model put forth by modern market society–as exemplified, say, by a university faculty. Faculties are divided into departments, and the latter into specializations, so that each may be an expert in his/her own domain. (Today, this “gentlemanly” structure has broken down under the pressures of mass demography; the networkers eschew both the traditional specialties and, even more, Pascal’s ideal of universality–they are specialists in diversity.) But what disturbs Pascal in specializations is that they are worn like uniforms, noticeable to all. His ideal individual would blend in with the crowd. In a society composed of such people, none would be more visible than any other.

But the other trait of the honnête homme, that expressed in the alternate translation of On ne les devine pas, is what gives this figure its intriguing paradoxicality. You can’t outguess or second-guess them; you can’t figure them out. They are, in other words, incarnations of the market itself, always more intelligent than any of its participants, since it discounts their intelligence by its very operation. This quality has sacred overtones. The honnête homme is, after all, a universal expert: a better poet than the poet, a better geometer than the geometer. You notice his talents only when you need them, but then… One thinks of the legendary heroes whose unknown abilities are revealed in crises, of the masked (hidden, unnoticed) Lone Ranger, or of bland  Clark Kent transformed by crisis into Superman…

In this version of the honnête homme, Pascal’s exemplary individual is equally unresented, because at the moment when his talents are needed, our attention is focused not on him but on the problem to be solved. No one questions Theseus‘ personal morals when he is slaying the Minotaur.

Yet when the crisis is over, we recall the previously unnoticed honnête homme, for his poetry, his geometry, whatever was required at the moment–and knowing he is neither poet nor geometer, we infer that he would equally have stood out had he been put to the test in another domain. But there is no better recipe than universal superiority for being universally resented. The honnête homme, the individual exemplar of the ideal society, is thus a paradoxical figure, the incarnation of Pascal’s vision of the paradoxical human condition, the only conceivable resolution of which we cannot know, but must wager on: divine, transcendent Grace.

The market, the locus of exchange, is the most general model of human interaction.  Conversations are markets, professions are markets: markets are everywhere human beings interact. Each brings his or her contribution for the evaluation of the whole. In a free market, no one has an exclusive right to make these evaluations; but even when someone does, we need not discard the market model: monopolies (e.g., of speech) and monopsonies (e.g., of listening and approving) exist in the conversational as well as the economic world. The economic market is not the basis of all our interactions, but the market model goes far beyond the economic.

Yet one cannot work in an academic environment very long without noticing the depth of the intelligentsia‘s hostility to the market. For example, one might describe the democratic political process as a political market where representatives of different constituencies try to determine the public interest by negotiating the resentments the economic market generates. But intellectuals do not habitually speak of politics this way; they disdain the market model and feel a more general repugnance for the marketplace itself.

 Culture against the market describes Western society since the Romantic period. Esthetes object to the reign of money: wealth does not guarantee good taste, neither individual wealth nor the aggregate wealth of the masses. But there is a more profound opposition between culture and the marketplace, an opposition that we can now begin to see as the central feature of our postmodern era.

Market and culture, the market model and the “scenic” model, are engaged in a struggle for dominance of human society in which the latter is giving way to the former. The future appears to lie with market-structured rather than scene-structured institutions.

 

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Here is an interesting indication of this, inspired by my family’s science-fiction-fantasy book store. Whether science fiction depicts the future, or fantasy a fabulous past, the social order is almost inevitably feudal. Whether the action is set in 10000 BC or in 100000 AD, the world is divided between evil lords and nice lords whose role is to defend humanity against the others. Yet with minor exceptions, there are no such lords today; the despots who reign over backward countries with pathological national cultures, North Korea or Iraq, are military putchists or their immediate descendants, not the strangely legitimate kings and emperors of the fantasy-world.

Whence comes this tacit agreement that industrial market society is a mere epiphenomenon of the feudal, pre-industrial social order? From culture’s hostility to the market. The literary imagination is loath to conceive market-oriented fantasies; its deepest desire is to flee the market. This was already the case in the Romantic era, when Voltaire‘s amusingly philosophical Persians and Chinese were replaced with passionate Corsicans and Spaniards. The farther a society was from capitalism, the more literogenic it was. The only change has been that today the distance is measured not in miles but in light-years.

Is culture agoraphobic (the real meaning of agora is marketplace) because the market constrains the freedom that culture celebrates? The truth is quite the opposite. It is the esthetic-cultural imagination that has a fondness for tyranny, because tyranny provides effective mimetic models, good shows. The market is not about shows, but about the organization of human efforts toward satisfying our desires and generating new ones, in the unceasing, and, we hope, unending effort to stay a step ahead of the resentments it generates. It is these resentments that the cultural sphere was supposed to purge (Aristotle‘s famous catharsis), but culture in the postmodern era, although ubiquitous, has largely been degraded to the adolescent acting-out of violent fantasies that (whatever the hype) little resemble life in a productive society. The modern adult no longer has a culture of his own; his culture is nostalgia, whether for the world of Bach or that of the Grateful Dead.

How about this as a fantasy of our future? With the expansion of electronic communications, the marketplace and society in general become increasingly responsive to, and interactive with, the desires of the general public–the basest as well as the noblest desires. Individuals are concerned more with creating their own esthetic identity from ethnic and other components than with passively consuming the products of culture creators. Wars continue to flare up and be settled tentatively by international agencies. Ecological crises come to a head and are deferred by the application of new technologies. Over the long haul, individual freedom increases, the population is better educated, careers become more fulfilling, information processing allows us to treat things more and more like signs. Human beings live, and love, and die, with richer, more varied lives–yet they are no happier than before, still resenting chances missed more than appreciating blessings received, still hoping that the ever-expanding marketplace will offer their children opportunities they were denied…

 Ah, but how boring! Let’s rather imagine the thrill of rescuing Princess Leia from the clutches of Darth Vader…

 

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I’d like to use this first column of the year to tell my readers why they should be interested in generative anthropology.

Although the most spectacular element of originary thinking is the notion that the human is born in an originary scene, the importance of the scene is as the locus for the self-conscious emergence of human significance or transcendence. Whatever unconscious and imperceptible developments may have prepared the way for humanity, the human is characterized by the conscious use of signs.

 GA is a rethinking of the human as a single category of being characterized by transcendence and modeled by the use of signs. In all the essential aspects of culture there is a second level of reality that models the first.  Language is the most fundamental human institution, but the others, religion, art, morality and ethics, as well as such non-institutionalized features of human interaction as desire, love, and resentment, are likewise transcendental in nature.

This vision of the unity of the human experience permits an enormous simplification of the models by which we understand ourselves. In particular, it allows us to understand such apparently disparate concepts as God, immortality, the beautiful/sublime, the good, by reference to the simple, explicit, and familiar model of the linguistic sign.

Use of language involves two levels of being. On the one hand, there is the world to which the sign refers, on the other, the world in which the sign itself subsists. In the simplest model of language, a sign refers to a thing. But whereas signs and things are both material objects, the use of one to refer to the other adds a new category of meanings to the prehuman epistemology of appetite. For although signs are things like anything else, they do not signify as things, but as tokens of a universal model. When I pronounce or write the word tree, I have created a “thing,” but the word tree itself is not a thing, since the existence of a word is independent of any specific instance of it.

And just as the word tree is not a thing, neither is the meaning of the word. Trees are perishable material objects, but the meaning tree is not. This meaning is what Ferdinand de Saussure called the signified of the sign.

The two essential characteristics of the human sign are thus type-token reproducibility and meaningfulness, the subsistence of their meaning beyond the concrete referential universe. Any description of the originary scene of language must account for these features, although the need for such an accounting has not been generally understood. The persistence of meaning as it emerges in this scene is the model for all cultural phenomena. God’s and our soul’s immortality, and, even more directly, the transcendent status of Plato‘s Ideas, may be understood on the model of the meanings of language. When Plato speaks of the Good, he is referring to the commonly accepted meaning of the word, and his social optimism–that no one willingly does evil, that true knowledge necessarily produces a conflict-free social order–stems from his extrapolation from this common acceptance of the word and its meaning to the common acceptance of social norms.

Let us consider the more interesting case of the soul’s immortality.

In Christian doctrine, the notion of immortality is one of the eternal presence of the whole of one’s existence. (James Williams‘ recent messages to the GAlist have developed this perspective.) In mainstream Buddhism, as I understand it, the ideal is seemingly the opposite: to lose all earthly ties and become one with the Universal. But both models of the afterlife are readily understandable, and mutually opposable, in terms of the linguistic model suggested above.

In the Christian case, all the material elements of our lives, especially our morally significant interactions with others, are preserved as though they had the same status as meanings. When we seek to do something meaningful, we hope to transcend the materiality of our act to make a permanent contribution to humanity, to preserve our good name (see Column No. 15 for an earlier state of this discussion). Thus the “Western” approach to immortality is to make every act significant, meaningful, to forget nothing and to preserve everything, lest some infinitesimal contribution to the course of human events be lost.

The “Eastern” view is closer to this than first appears. The soul’s need to attain the domain of permanent significance is expressed in the language of liberation rather than in that of constructive achievement. Worldly appetite ties us to the impermanent; to accede to the domain of pure meaningfulness, we must free ourselves from our worldly attachments. In this perspective, the essence of our worldly activity is not interaction with others, but material appetite. But what is valued in both cases is what produced the peaceful resolution of the originary scene of language: the renunciation of material appetite as the potential source of mimetic conflict and its replacement by the meaningful sign. In one case, the worldly becomes meaningful; in the other, meaningfulness leaves the worldly behind–but in both cases, the meaningful stands in relation to the worldly as the Saussurean signified stands to the word’s material referent.

If you can follow this line of thinking, then you have understood the essence of generative anthropology.

Simplicity is the greatest of intellectual virtues. It is enshrined in the principle of minimality, also known as Ockham’s razor after the 14th century English philosopher William of Ockham: mental entities should not be multiplied without necessity. There are an infinite number of possible theoretical models for a given set of observations; all other things being equal, the simplest is the best.

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The essential innovation of generative anthropology is nothing other than the radical application of the principle of minimality. Instead of looking at the human empirically as a fuzzy collection of various traits, GA takes seriously attempts at definition like Aristotle’s zoon logon exon. Why, after all, even think of defining the human? Would anyone try to define a dog or an elephant? The human is subject to definition because it is not a mere empirical biological entity. For philosophy, unproblematically up to Kant, problematically thereafter, what I call the human was defined as Reason (Vernunft) or Spirit (Geist). Unlike philosophy, GA does not renounce the specificity of the human for the simplicity of the concept because it recognizes that the generation of entities like Reason or Spirit is anything but simple. The originary hypothesis conceives of the human in minimal terms as emerging from a single event in a prehuman world.

Ockham’s razor only operates when the explanatory goal is independent of the means to accomplish it. Intellectual simplicity is analogous to cost-effectiveness in the market. If greater efficiency allows me to sell for $1 a widget for which my competitor cannot charge less than $1.50, I will win away his customers because they have no reason to prefer his widget to mine. But in the cultural sphere, the virtue of simplicity is less unambiguous. Culture is not a matter of setting goals and then finding the most efficient way to reach them. The purpose of culture, from films to religious rites, is the deferral of violence, or in Pascal‘s term, le divertissement — diversion, entertainment. Even if all narratives perform essentially the same cultural function, one cannot argue that a short story is therefore preferable to a novel because it accomplishes this function more efficiently. On the contrary, our tendency is to value the novel more highly because it keeps us entertained longer. It takes a sophisticated reader to value a sonnet by Mallarmé as much as a 300-page novel.

Science is not supposed to be a cultural operation; its goal is to construct explanatory models, the simpler the better. But “theory,” the contemporary synonym for what I call anthropology, is a more problematic object. Is theory science or culture? I have spoken in these columns about the “spirit of the humanities” that respects the paradoxical generation of the human. But paradox is not normally considered to be simple; one might say, on the contrary, that paradox is another name for indefinite complexity.

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Generative anthropology may well be the first theory that claims maximal simplicity for a structure that it understands as paradoxical. It is the same simplicity of paradox that one finds in religious rhetoric, in statements like the recently discussed credo quia absurdum. The statement is pithy, its content paradoxical. But this is not theory, certainly not rigorous theory, any more than other sublime cultural moments are theory. GA is concerned with rigor, not pithiness; but a rigorously minimal model of the human must include the paradox from which the human emerged and which is reconstructed in every subsequent emergence of the human–in every meaningful human act.

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We may now explain the anomalous conjunction of GA’s minimal simplicity and the maximal resistance it tends to arouse.

The cloying self-righteousness of the politically correct should not prevent us from recognizing the significance of multiculturalism in contemporary society. The real point of multiculturalism is that culture is in itself a multiple activity. Since its point is to create complexity, it cannot be reduced to a fixed canon without losing its effectiveness; it must be continually renewed. Whether contemporary Western society can or should continue to pursue effectively the noble goals of the High Culture created by the Greeks is a controversial question–one we should probably answer in the negative. But High or low, culture must evolve or die. Multiculturalism offers a simple solution to the problem of cultural multiplicity: the more the merrier.

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This position looks as innocuous as the inclusion of different kinds of music in one’s record collection. But even the most frivolous culture contains an implicit anthropology; it is impossible wholly to separate culture from the theory of culture. As Pope put it, “the proper study of mankind is man,” where the word proper means not merely appropriate but characteristic. Humanity is properly understood as the species that studies itself. And thus it should not surprise us that not merely cultural but theoretical works might follow the cultural logic of multiplicity and deferral rather than the scientific one of explicative simplicity.

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Where does this leave generative anthropology? We cannot know the answer to this question a priori. Originary thinking must take its chances in the world. But as we practice it, we must recognize the possibility–perhaps a first in human history–that the most rigorous theory of the human might prove itself unacceptable, and even be forgotten, on the grounds of its insufficiency as a cultural phenomenon, of its untenable simplicity.

Why does it seem so natural for intellectuals to be liberals? A Marxist analysis might tell us that intellectuals’ distance from the productive infrastructure allows them to produce utopian ideas that justify the existence of a class incapable of producing anything else. But under the guise of unveiling the truth of the capitalist order, this analysis deprives us of any chance at understanding the general anthropological consequences of that order, which is denounced in true utopian fashion as merely a transitional aberration.

 Generative anthropology is often considered a conservative ideology because it rejects utopianism. Yet given the essential political symmetry of right and left, we must be suspicious of any doctrine that absolutely favors one side over the other. Market systems cannot operate that way; mimetic rivalry is the rule, and even the greatest differences are never essential, only temporary and strategic. Improbable as the thought may appear today, originary thinkers will inevitably find it appropriate some day to vote for the party of the left, although it will most likely bear little resemblance to the current Democratic party, whose disarray is measured by the refusal of its leaders to call themselves liberals.

Thus although for the moment GA‘s affinities are on the right, we should make only strategic alliances, not declarations of political faith. Our politics, like our anthropology, are governed by minimality. And even the superficial minimality of less government surely implies a more revelatory anthropology than the old New Deal model. Corporate welfare is neither very nice nor very necessary, but it is considerably more epiphenomenal to the Republican model than ordinary welfare is to the Democrat.  Conservatives, whatever their degree of hypocrisy, understand that a model of society in which the political market must increasingly correct the “injustices” of the economic market is ultimately unstable and unviable. Now that the Democrats too are speaking of balancing the budget, this basic point seems to be universally accepted. Deficit spending is not so much a matter of robbing our children as of robbing humanity of the chance to move toward a viable postindustrial social order. The self-correcting tendencies of the marketplace must be respected because they are the only conceivable basis for such an order. Politics will remain, but if we understand that it too is a market, one that is ancillary to the economic market and not the central institution of society, then we will put the symbolism of balancing the budget in its proper perspective.

For the debate between liberals and conservatives is ultimately a contest between politics and economics for the role of the dominant social model. This was not the case in the 19th century, when the right supported a ritual or religious model (still that of the so-called paleoconservatives and an important element of the appropriately-named religious right), the left a radically political (i.e., socialist) one, and the liberals, as their name suggests, the free market system. But after World War II, the old right essentially disappeared and liberals, without being socialists, came to believe in the primacy of the political model within market society. This is ultimately an untenable position; if one does not believe in the political model enough to want to do away with the market, then one cannot believe in the viability of open-ended political corrections to the market. Politics in a market system can only operate in the margins of the marketplace, not maintain itself as a continually expanding enterprise.

Liberals have told us for decades, let us say, since Keynes, that the political system should have not merely an ameliorative or “safety net” function, but a proactive one in dictating the course of the economy. But a market system is not simply a set of economic exchanges. As Professor Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago received the Nobel Prize this year for telling us, the market discounts the political information it receives as well as it does directly economic information. The notion that the government can fine-tune the economy presupposes that feedback into the system from knowledge of this fine-tuning activity is negligable. Only an elitist like Keynes–and most liberal theorists have been in this mold–could take the relative ignorance of the market participant for granted, as though he lived in Huxley‘s Brave New World, where the deltas could never fathom the thinking of the alphas.

 Generative anthropology is anything but a “conservative” doctrine; it is the most radical, the most liberating form of thinking conceivable. Our task in the political sphere is to promote those forces that best incarnate this kind of thinking. In certain periods, the most radical thinking is that of the Left, which expresses the resentment toward the social order of those least successful in the economic sphere, who are therefore most dependent on the political process. Left-wing thinking reminds us of the fundamental equality of all humans as users of language, of our drive toward a distributional equality that would correspond to our semiotic equality. At other times, it is the thought of the Right, which expresses the resentments of the more economically successful toward the redistributive operations of the political process, that is most radical in reminding us that human culture cannot be defined negatively by the goal of the removal of inequality, but only positively, by the generation of new degrees of freedom that dissolve the old hierarchies.

Yesterday, we might have been liberals; today, we are conservatives; tomorrow, we cannot know, because the bi-stability of left and right hides the transformations these groupings undergo. What we must remember is that our fundamental interest is not political but ethical: the promotion not of material equality but of omnicentricity, the condition in which each person is a center of significance for every other, so that in every interaction, love wins a triumph over resentment.

My undergraduate seminar on love ended in a peculiar way. About half way into the class, I distributed the usual student evaluation forms, then left the room while they were being filled out. When I returned some 15 minutes later, the students were gone; they had misunderstood me and thought class was over. This is the first time this has happened in over 25 years at UCLA.

Thus did fate prevent me from drawing conclusions about love from the books we read in the course, which ranged from Plato‘s indispensable Symposium to my favorite postwar French novel, Marguerite Duras‘s Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein. But I know readers of these Chronicles will understand any conclusions I might draw in the context of my overall view that the very essence of the human is to continue to evolve in all its aspects. There can be no final explanation of any aspect of the human, unless it is an aspect we are willing to part with, to return to “nature.” Thus, for example, we may wish to do without astrology and study the stars without immediate reference to ourselves (but newspaper columns make clear that astrology retains its cultural authority even if we no longer “believe in” it). But we would hardly want to do without love.

 Love is the quintessential human activity; the little world of the couple is directly analogous to the human world as a whole. For love remains alive only as long as it defies final explanations, as it retains an element of unpredictability. Cliché would have it that, as they come to know each other increasingly well over the years, couples necessarily “fall out of love,” while nonetheless continuing to love each other. But if love is truly the center of one’s life, then falling out of love is really the end of love. Successful couples are those who stay in love, whose love matures and changes its forms of expression, but remains as intense as ever. There need be no end to these changes; the more the couple have experienced together, the more material they have for the little dialogical games lovers never tire of playing with each other.

When skeptics ask how the open-endedness of generative anthropology is consistent with its formulation of an originary scene of language, we answer that love too begins with a scene–not necessarily the dramatic one of the coup de foudre, love at first sight, but the necessary moment of realization that one is indeed in love. At this point, the relationship is just beginning, yet its entire potential is latent in it. The couple discovers throughout their lives the possibilities that were inherent in this first moment, not because they were there preformed as early geneticists thought babies were in the egg, but because their potential for life’s interactions was already there. The richer the possibilities, the more creative and unpredictable the life that follows is likely to be. Potentiality is not preformation, but the disposition to creativity; it allows us to anticipate new degrees of freedom, not precisely what they will be.

 

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How do these observations fit in with the idea, expressed at the beginning of my course as well as in these columns, that the relation between those who love each other is best characterized as tenderness? What indeed is the link between tenderness and generative anthropology?

At the origin, the sign representing the central figure permits the participants to act without coming into conflict. Instead of a paradoxical situation that cannot be resolved without violence, emission of the sign is a behavior all can participate in. The central being as the mediator of this common activity of communication is consequently the recipient of a new form of attraction, which we may already call love. For we desire its presence without, for the moment at least, wishing to appropriate it for ourselves. Its being-there is our guarantee that the peaceful, violence-deferring exchange of signs between me and my fellows will continue.

 I cannot be said to feel tenderness for an object that stands against me as something invulnerable, inaccessible. But the central being is not a transcendental abstraction, but a real creature, and in that guise, it cannot remain invulnerable to our appetites. The sparagmos or rending-apart of the sacrificial victim is the fate of the material being that stands in the center; its sacredness cannot remain incarnate in it, but must be understood as residing permanently in a transcendental realm.

The sacred is transcendental, but its manifestation is in this being that I love, which has brought peace to the community. It is when I understand that what I love is impermanent, mortal like myself, that I feel tenderness; but I would not love it were it not the worldly presence of the sacred. It is this truth that is expressed in Christianity by the Incarnation of God in the person of the Son. But one need not be a Christian to be inspired by the union of meaningfulness and mortality in another human being to the tenderness of love.

 It is indeed tenderness that attunes me to my beloved’s mutability. The richness of experience is not an open-ended unfolding; life is finite. If mortality for the young is an abstraction, age allows us to experience it in detail well before the final moment. What we love in the Other is not mere variety, but a trajectory that cannot return to its earlier moments. Vigny’s line, already quoted here, Aimez ce que jamais vous ne verrez deux fois refers not merely to the person we love, but to every moment we have shared together. And it is this care for every moment of human existence as an element of the sacred that inspires the doctrine (so eloquently defended recently on the GAlist by James Williams) of resurrection.

 

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The early Christian theologian Tertullian, when asked how he could believe in a God who allowed himself to suffer the supreme humiliation of crucifixion, is said to have answered: Credo quia absurdum–I believe it because it is absurd.

This statement makes a central point, not just about Christianity, but about religion in general. Western intellectuals, heirs of the Enlightenment, are generally impatient with the “absurdities” of religion: virgin birth, resurrection, reincarnation, heaven and hell, all these seem transparent projections of our wishes and fears rather than testable hypotheses about reality. Nor does even the epistemological refinement of generative anthropology, which “brackets” the non-anthropological elements of theology, make it a more acceptable substitute for religious faith than the cruder anthropologies of the philosophes. Even the most satisfactory explanation of religious phenomena can only explain why they are effective, not explain away their effectiveness.

Conversely, the rationalized theologies that have been developed in the hope of converting intellectuals to religious faith have had little effect. To believe in reason is not to believe at all. God exists not to resolve intellectual dilemmas, but to help us in crises, that is, in predicaments to which no rational solution is apparent. If reason could prevail, there would be no crisis, and therefore no need for faith. Science and technology have provided means to reinterpret crises involving natural phenomena like disease and earthquakes, but the fundamental model of crisis is human, not natural, and after all the rational solutions have been exhausted and the threat of violence still looms, we need belief, not reason.

But this column is not really about religion, but about love.

Love is a form of faith. It is no coincidence that the word love, taken by itself, is assumed to refer to its most exalted form. Parents’ love for their children probably absorbs ten times as much energy as the romantic love we hear so much about, but we take our definition from the latter, not the former. This is because we understand that the most human form of love is that which is most absurd: most like faith and least like animal instinct. It is more absurd to love another with whom one has at first no family ties than to love those who share one’s genetic heritage. Romantic love has its social and biological functions, but it makes these functions dependent on its leap of faith.

Thus the truest love is not between persons whom everyone sees as ideally suited to each other. To love someone else is not to love oneself in the mirror. It is the difference of the other that we love, because we cannot ever comprehend it from within. We love the other in her or his unassimilable otherness. Each moment is a stab in the dark, a test of our faith that we will act in the interest of this person whose interests we are so far from understanding directly.

The infinite difference of the beloved teaches us in the human sphere the same lesson as our infinite difference from God. The Neo-Platonists of the Renaissance understood human love, such as that of Dante for Beatrice or Petrarch for Laura, as an intimation of immortality, a worldly prefiguration of divine love. But the secularizing force of history allows us to invert this hierarchy: love of God may be seen as a prefiguration of human love, not love of humanity in general, but of our Other, the one we love.

Love for an individual person cannot come first; the human is in the first place cultural, communal. God as the originary object of human love is also the originary person. But from the minimalist perspective of generative anthropology, this originary person is not understood as human. Personhood is not in the first place characteristic of me, but of the sacred Other whose humanity is not primordial, as our romantico-existentialists would have us believe, but derived. Like the equality of the sexes which a hasty feminism would situate at the origin, the humanity of the Other gains rather than loses by being deferred, by standing at the end rather than the beginning of history as a horizon that can never quite be attained because it can never be fully understood and defined.

What does it really mean to love another person absurdly, as the church father loved his crucified God? It means to attribute to that person, without the possibility of full understanding, and in the face of her/his demonstrated vulnerability, the infinite power, not to stay the sun or part the Red Sea, but to give meaning to my world. I cannot inhabit my beloved’s mind, see the world through her eyes. But through dialogue and observation, I can come to share with her a mutual world of meaning. What matters is not simply learning how she sees the world, but her knowing that my actions reflect my desire and effort for this learning.

But here is where human love shows itself superior to divine. The absurdity of human love cannot exist without reciprocation. To learn to share the other’s perceptions would be mere idolatry without the belief that s/he too is learning to share mine. The dialogue of words and acts that makes human love worthwhile–and in comparison with which, as Manon‘s lover the Chevalier des Grieux already knew, our dialogue with God is thin indeed–can only maintain itself if both partners share its absurd adventure.

The reciprocity of love is not something we can observe from without as a sterile symmetry. The central fact of my leap of faith is that I am loved in return, that each of us, in perhaps very different ways, serves as an extraworldly source of value to the other. It is the foundation of the intimate world within which we affirm our own significance in the face of the impersonal world of the marketplace–an affirmation without which the dynamic of market society itself could not operate.

But human love should not be seen as serving the marketplace any more than as serving God. It is as much the end of human existence as a means to the survival of our species. To rationalize it is to forget its roots in the originary leap of faith by which humanity constituted itself by transcending its “rational” appetitive goals. Love can function only thus:

Amo quia absurdum.

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