Anthropoetics

Author: staceymeeker

  • Digital Humanity III: The Scene and the Laboratory

    The oxymoron “digital humanities” embodies what is perhaps the fundamental human problem of our age, one that GA can hopefully help us to formulate with a modicum of supplementary clarity. What C. P. Snow called back in 1959 the problem of the “two cultures” has evolved into a stratification in which the firstness that drives cultural innovation is increasingly located on the digital side of the barrier. But DH does not simply crown the triumph of the digital over the humanistic; it has redeeming cultural features that can hopefully allow global civilization to transcend the victimary resentment that currently motivates so much of its political and cultural activity.

    At the most superficial level, DH reflects the obvious fact that today the activities of production and commentary on the cultural works that are the concern of humanists involve the use of digital computers. Thus we compose and archive texts online, we search them, we scan printed text into digital files; and we can compile data about these documents and analyze it with software, just as we do with other data. But in doing this, we open the door to reducing the signs of language to numbers. This begins superficially with ASCII codes, but it is unclear where it ends; suppose all of human language, all of human experience, could be formulated in algorithms, reduced, that is, to complex forms of counting?

    As I pointed out in Chronicle 477, associating the humanities with the digital takes us back to the origin of the human in the “digital” act of separating the significant/sacred from the insignificant/profane. The tension (fear, irritation, excitement) implicit in the term DH comes from that between the humanistic opposition sacred/profane with its secular-esthetic variants and the binary difference 1/0 that is the starting point of mathematics.

    When we consider the originary sign as designating/representing the sacred central object from the “humanistic” perspective, what is significant/sacred is infinitely rich and precious, and no representation can fully do justice to it. As the unique central object is by this very fact a placeholder of uniqueness on the human scene, any other object can come to share its unique status and prompt us to explore its significance. In contrast, if we confine the sign’s “meaning” to the mere gesture of designation itself, reducing the significance that it confers to a single bit of information, we can abstract from its specific designatum and simply designate objects in turn irrespective of their individual qualities. This permits us to count them: one, two… And once one begins to count things, the rest of mathematics follows.

    The history of the interactions of language and mathematics, meaning and counting, has gone through many phases since ancient times, notably the beginnings of modern science in the Renaissance, when mathematical formulas were first applied to experimental data, and the secularization of the Enlightenment, which dethroned sacred scripture and its anthropological intuition as a source of knowledge about the natural world. What is new in the era of DH is the emergence of artificial intelligence, the use of mathematical techniques to simulate the kind of reasoning that had previously been done with language rather than numbers. This process involves creating algorithms to digitize decision-making processes that had formerly relied on human intuition to evaluate alternatives.

    For example, although chess is an objective exercise, the quality of human players depends not only on their capacity for pattern retention and manipulation but on their intuition of the board that allows them to choose which variations to follow. Computers play chess using brute force (although they have their own, cruder ways of pruning trees of useless moves). Humans think; computers just calculate. But in the end what counts is the result, and in the case of chess, that result has been settled in favor of the computer.

    The advent of DH-AI poses to us a question never faced before: what in the human, if anything, is not digitizable or simply, programmable. In the previous Chronicle (487) I mentioned poetry as an example of a creative activity that strikes us as “too human” to be imitated by a computer. Yet I have seen output from poetry programs that is arguably of at least the quality of most of the poems published today. Indeed, my impression is that AI has exercised on the arts a not-quite-conscious mimetic attraction. Where one might expect artists of various kinds to avoid producing works that could appear to be the result of an algorithm rather than a human soul, the contemporary arts often seem to go in the opposite direction, reducing human specificity to our unique ability to make arbitrary esthetic decisions (“this urinal / this boulder will be shown as an artwork”). Which certainly affirms the (free) human as wholly other than a (mechanical) computer, but which paradoxically is the easiest kind of decision process to simulate on a computer: for Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, just substitute a random number.

    If the output of the human-scenic-sacred can be simulated without the experience of transcendence (except in the humans who produced the computers in the first place; but they would be analogous to the “watchmaker” God of the Enlightenment, not the living God of genuine religion), then even if the operation of the human mind is not at all comparable to that of a digital computer, we could not avoid the feeling of being reduced to an epiphenomenon, a discovery procedure for robots, all human religion and language and art just devices to get us to the point where all we have accomplished with representation since the origin can be analyzed as the output of digital algorithms. The extreme forms of the victimary that we witness in our era, from anti-Western Islamist barbarism to racial and sexual resentment to climate hysteria may perhaps best be understood as symptoms of an apocalyptic fear of the “end of the human.”

    We may define scientism as the postulation that the human brain is “nothing more than” a computer; a “scientism-ist”—I will abbreviate these words as s-ism and s-ist, (interesting that the term scientism seems deliberately designed to prevent its advocates from having a name)—is someone who denies in principle not the originary hypothesis itself but its very relevance. An s-ist is a Platonist who believes that mathematics “exists” in our absence, and that all that we do and think can in principle (and presumably will fairly soon—the latest date for Kurzweil’s “Singularity” appears to be 2045) be understood in terms of numerical algorithms. The paradoxical aspect of language that, for example, Kieran Stewart emphasized in his examination of the compatibility of GA with the theories of Mircea Eliade in the last Anthropoetics, or in Sartre, the néant that separates the subject from the object of his representation, or in Derrida’s terms defers (diffère) the choice of the sign that designates the referent—all this is dismissed as window dressing. If all phenomena in the universe are reducible to input-output operations expressible in mathematical equations, then the paradox inherent in the fact that humans alone have been able to discover these equations cannot be given any special weight without putting the entire edifice in question.

    Let me present this point in all its nudity. GA postulates that the human comes into being by means of the deferral of violence through representation. In denying the irreducibility of human representation, s-ism is effectively claiming that violence—”instinct” if you like, horizontality as opposed to verticality—is all there is, but that nature’s “violence” itself, through Darwinian evolution alone, is able to maintain the human social order in equilibrium just as a natural ecology does—as animals do, for example, through the instinctual inhibition of aggressive behavior before a more powerful adversary. The existence of representation in its various guises would be of interest only as a tool for manipulating the algorithms of “nature” to improve production, health, etc., but without being ontologically different from the instinctual reactions of animals. Chomsky’s famous victory in his debate with Skinner would have been effectively reversed.

    Expressed in this fashion, scientism might seem coextensive with worldly realism; can one reject s-ism without relying on the supernatural? But rational thought is not limited to the algorithmic. GA provides an intellectual basis for those who don’t want to kick the human upstairs but consider that our very dependence on the transcendental is what makes us human. The transcendental is revealed on the scene of representation. This scene has so far not been conceived as an object for computer simulation, although if GA one day leaks out of the GASC, this may eventually be attempted. But the scene of representation concentrates in itself the untotalizable reality of human desire. In a word, a digital device that could fully simulate this totality would, indeed, be human.

    Although monotheism could be discovered only once, every attempt to understand the One God repeats this discovery; that is what we mean by an act of faith. The concentration of all meaning in a unique being is the antithesis of the one-bit meaning embodied in counting. God’s refusal of a (non-declarative) name should be understood as a critique of “names” in general; no particular use of language is meaningful in itself, but depends ultimately on the unknowable and undecidable complexity of the scene that forms around its center. The Saussurian notion of the paradigm central to Derrida’s concept of différance must be referred to its ontological basis in the scene of representation. It is not enough to say that “language is a system of differences” in which every individual term depends on the whole; the “whole” of language is not a given totality to be divided up, but the virtual totality of meaning concentrated in the sacred center of the scene that defers the potential violence of the periphery.

    It would be a mystical exaggeration to claim that every use of language is a revelatory equivalent of the originary event. We should say, rather, that every use of representation is experienced on a continuum between revelation and counting, the experience of the sacred and the mere gesture of designation, or simply: humanities and the digital. Art, which provokes the esthetic oscillation between the sign and its (imaginary) referent, is the institution whose purpose is to recall to us outside the ritual context the root of our shared representations in the originary sacred, to show us that we all contain within ourselves the means to experience revelation.

    Reflection on the digital makes us realize by contrast the non-algorithmic complexity of our reaction to a work of art. One relates to an artwork as to a Subject; whence film criticism’s insistence on the director as the auteur, despite the undoubtedly collective nature of film production. But film should also teach us that, precisely, a “Subject” is not coextensive with a human individual; the originary Subject was collective and scenic, and we are all as individuals reflections of this scenic collectivity, a fact that Girard’s term “interdividual” reflects, though I think rather one-sidedly, by appearing to deny individuality altogether.

    The revelations of art and religion are irreducible to the digital because they are open-ended. The turning-back-upon-itself that transforms the originary gesture of appropriation into a form and thence into a sign that communicates to the others the transcendent status of the central object cannot be reduced to the transmission of so many bits of information. (It is a mistake to think of the first sign as simply pointing; pointing is more like counting, something done once the “mutual shared attention” established by the first sign has been achieved.) The sign-as-form is meant to model and draw attention to its referent’s numinousness that makes its appropriation unthinkable. In the dynamic of the scenic configuration the precise “meaning” of the central object cannot be fixed as so to speak the “dictionary definition” of the sign. I have called the first sign the “name-of-God” to make clear that there is no limit to the ideas and emotions that may be invested in the central object, whose position at the center of the scene delimited by the deferred desires of the participants is what “defines” it constantly anew throughout the scenic experience, which is always at least virtually collective. What is essential is not the “meaning” of the central object but the effectiveness of the scenic configuration in deferring collective violence.

    The scene may usefully be contrasted with the laboratory, a thought-category associated with the legendary French epistemologist Gaston Bachelard. A laboratory is a controlled environment where the number of parameters to be measured in a particular experiment is reduced to a minimum. The laboratory is the privileged realm of the digital, where counting takes place; on the scene, in contrast, there is no way to limit the circulation of meanings, even when there is but a single spectator before an artwork.

    Does this guarantee that s-ism is refuted, that computer simulation can never equal or excel the creativity of human representation? Computers were invented in my own lifetime. Imagine ten, one hundred lifetimes into the computer age (and imagine, if we can, that we haven’t destroyed ourselves during this time); can we be certain that HAL-27 or HAL-1382 won’t be able to relive all human history and simulate the human scene in all its richness, that Andrew Bartlett’s impossible human won’t have become fully human, not to say superhuman?

    Here speculation becomes useless. But we should recall how we distinguish genuine art and revelation from human simulations. Distinguishing good from bad art involves an intuition of authenticity, a term Heidegger defined in terms of being-for-death, but for which GA gives us a much more concrete criterion: authentic humanity is what appears on the originary scene (where one faces death, and chooses deferral and life) and on every subsequent scenic/cultural experience that recalls the originary experience of the sacred. The authentic experience of the scene is never a simple repetition, just as no authentic work of art merely recycles old formulas.

    Society depends on mimesis, paradoxically, always producing something new. The reciprocity of the moral model depends on the constant renewal of firstness. Firstness always arouses resentment, and I have already suggested that the current disquieting intensity of victimary trends is linked to the growing dominance of digital as opposed to “humanistic” firstness in our era. But this is the moment at which to recall our earlier insight that DH, whatever else it may be, is a refuge from victimocracy.

    Faith in humanity is faith that the common world of linguistic reciprocity, of cultural unity, can be maintained. And if we have come to an era where this unity breaks down over the differential ability of some, aided by whatever “privilege,” to operate in the digital world, then the digital itself must be called upon to fix the problem, and not merely by insisting on the “diversity” of its workforce.

    In this context, we should think of DH as more than merely an academic activity, but as a central participant in the broad cultural movement of our society. In particular, a frequent concern of DH is the phenomenon of “computer-generated art.” But such activity is not limited to AI computers programmed to write poetry or paint masterpieces. Its chief manifestation is in the exponential enhancement of individual and crowd-based representations to be shared, argued over, abandoned, and recycled—the world of Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and Instagram and Meerkat and newer apps those of my generation haven’t yet heard of—in a word, the Internet, the One Medium that is perhaps best understood, to pastiche an old Apple slogan, as the sacred for the rest of us. For it is just when the digital risks dividing humanity into castes of creators and drudges that it at the same time opens up to vast sectors of the public the possibility of participating in new forms of esthetic creation—forms that many DH projects have indeed focused on. The number of people making and posting videos, photographs, blogs, tweets, and what have you, increases by an order of magnitude every few years. The educational potential of such things as video games for acclimatizing the young to digital learning and creativity is only beginning to be tapped.

    If DH and the digital world as a whole can provide us via such para-humanistic enterprises the means to love each other a little better, we will have all the revelatory material we need to preserve our civilization from the barbarism and apocalyptic destruction that unchecked resentment risks provoking. And if on top of this, as I still believe, humans remain able to create true art in the traditional sense—universal, revelatory, originary-scene-restoring—so much the better.

    DH and Violence: A Footnote

    The Girardian question to GA is always: “But where is the scapegoat?” Since DH’s attempted reduction of the human to the algorithmic removes specifically human violence from the equation, taking for granted that “violence” in the sense of “nature red in tooth and claw” can handle itself through animal defense mechanisms to which human representation adds nothing ontologically new, we would do well to unpack GA’s notion of “the deferral of violence” that might otherwise be accused of sweeping violence under the rug.

    In speaking of the scene of representation as in principle irreducible to digital analysis, I described it as non-totalizable, as the locus of an unpredictable set of interactions that maintain the numinousness of the center and prevent immediate appropriation and conflict. But this deferral of violence is, in the originary event and in principle in all successor events, only temporary. The originary deferral is succeeded by the sparagmos in which the central object becomes the focus of the controlled violence of sacrifice, the “scapegoat” in Girardian terms, and (a key element not in Girard) supplies the community with nourishment. In the artwork that “imitates” the scene, this violence remains in the realm of the imagination, whether directly in tragedy or indirectly in comedy, which always involves some form of sacrifice or expulsion.

    In both the digital and the GA model, we may say with Girard that violence expels violence, that Satan drives out Satan, but in the latter case this action, key to human survival, is dependent on the scene of representation, which we access primarily through the deferring signs of language, whereas an algorithmic analysis of human behavior simply understands language as one more “instinctive” phenomenon, a “code” like the DNA embodied in living matter. This is indeed the key point of contention between GA and “s-ism,” and to the extent that DH deals only with algorithmic aspects of culture, it can be associated with s-ism, although in principle passively, since insistence on ideas such as “free will is a myth” or “the mind functions like a digital computer” is hardly within its purview.

    To the extent that DH is indeed a refuge from the victimary thinking that dominates the academy today, it is precisely in its refusal to understand cultural works within a paradigm that assigns to a predetermined “oppressor,” whom we might just as well call the work’s “scapegoat,” responsibility for the violence suffered by the “victim.” In such analysis the sacrificial mechanism of the work is projected onto the social reality within which it was created, effectively denouncing the Aristotelian “catharsis of pity and terror” as a mask for oppression.

    Just stepping back to investigate some aspect of how paintings, narrative plots, or musical sequences operate on their audience, what patterns of words, notes, or images they employ, is an act of deferral that, even within an overall victimary framework, would be a step in the right direction. And most DH work that I have seen avoids imposing such a framework, since it is the analytic detail that is truly “digital.” Just within the context of literary/cultural study, this is a “deferral of violence” that we should appreciate.

    But it should also remind us that “violence” in the sense that we understand it as heirs to Girard and beyond him, to the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, is not accessible within the paradigms of DH. Of course the category of “violence” can be included in a DH analysis as well as anywhere else, but the notion of a breakdown of categorial distinctions into a “primordial” disorder (Girard’s crise sacrificielle) from which order must be restored cannot be understood in digital terms. (The characteristic violence of video games that enact in the most extreme form the resentment-purging formulas of popular culture illustrates the insensitivity of the digital world to the problematic relationship between violence and human culture; violence/aggression is treated merely as a “drive,” and the more it can be satisfied, the better.)

    The notion of the originary event presupposes a chaotic “time of troubles” following the breakdown of the animal pecking-order hierarchy from which the proto-human community learns to escape via the discovery/invention of the sign’s scene-creating deferral of violence. But whereas we can propose a minimal model of the originary event focused on the sacralized central object of desire on the scene of representation, one that concludes in the controlled sacrificial violence of the sparagmos, no such model can usefully be constructed for the chaos that preceded the event; its chaotic nature is precisely what makes it irreducible to a model. This is the “singularity” from which the human emerges and that poses the ultimate (albeit not necessarily insuperable) obstacle to the digital simulation of the human. Neither the crise nor its resolution can be understood as algorithmic; only once the scenic deferral of violence has been established can the scene be used as a laboratory where counting becomes possible.

    (added May 28, 2015)

  • Digital Humanity II

    In perusing several issues of the Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ), I soon discovered that the articles it contains, as opposed to the engaging presentations of DH research at the Creating Knowledge symposium described in Chronicle 483, are not addressed to readers concerned with the cultural meaning of literature and the other arts. They are of technical interest to other digital humanists, to whom they provide specialized descriptions of methods and techniques of data analysis, or advice on such activities as curating digital collections. Most of the research described in DHQ seems deliberately to avoid arousing questions of interpretation, let alone seeking new perspectives on works or genres likely to be familiar to the reader. Nor is there any attempt to impose criteria of significance on the esthetic phenomena selected for study, which seem rather to be chosen deliberately for their distance from anything resembling canonical status, except when it is simply a question of archiving and cataloguing established texts.

    DH in its present state appears to combine various practical but conceptually narrow procedures for archiving, searching, and visualizing various kinds of data with analyses that are more exercises in the application of digital techniques than significant contributions to the study of the arts. In short, DH, before it can prove itself a necessary component of literary and artistic study, is working on establishing itself as a disciplinary community, a essential formation that Bruno Latour among others has studied and Adam Katz has theorized in the GA context. Universities are of course made up of such communities, organized in programs, departments, and faculties, and we can imagine that DH will follow the lead of Comparative Literature, which at UCLA and many other places began as an interdepartmental program, here perhaps less under the aegis of the English Department than elsewhere, and only after several decades became a department. UCLA already has an interdepartmental minor in DH; a major would be the next stage, then departmental status. The latter is not yet on the horizon, but time will tell.

    A breakdown of the last four issues of DHQ into categories shows that of 18 articles (you’ve heard of Big Data; this is little data), 11 are focused on techniques, whether of archiving (5), data mining (2), or digital display (“remediation”) (4), and offer no attempt at analysis, although they are all in one way or another creating tools and materials for analysis; two deal with “DH theory” in the self-consciously earnest and jargonesque manner one expects in “new” fields—a more in-depth analysis than this one would engage notably with James Smithies’ ambitious attempt in “Digital Humanities, Postfoundationalism, Postindustrial Culture” (DHQ 8, 1, 2014) to see DH as implying a “post-foundationalist” epistemology, that is, one that brackets ontology and sees only correlations; one reports on the interesting online phenomenon of “long reading”; one describes the novelist J. Coetzee’s early interest in computational stylistics, although without drawing any but the vaguest relationship to his novels, and finally, three can be called substantive analyses, one of the language used in the Dutch parliament after WWII that reveals connections between postwar and Nazi-occupation attitudes, and two of artistic works. But even these last are of small interest to humanists: one is the analysis of a novel that might just as easily be placed in the “techniques” section since it focuses far more on its technique of XML markup than on any conclusions about the work, and one compares the vocabulary of ten contemporary female Japanese pop singers.

    Yet Franco Moretti’s analyses in Distance Learning, particularly the cybernetically sophisticated graphic analysis of character-clusters in Hamlet, show that when the application of digital methods is motivated by a prior concern with such cultural phenomena as literary form, DH work can bear directly on our understanding of literature, and by extension, other esthetic genres. In Moretti’s study of the titles of English novels, the point was to examine the inaugural and necessarily superficial interface between the novels and their public, and the analysis of the diminishing length of the titles, but also of the kinds of words used in them, is in effect a study of anticipatory literary reception: what kind of title, given the changing circumstances in which a book is offered to its potential public, is most likely to make an 18th-century reader order the book from a bookseller-printer (in which case a long title serves as a kind of prospectus) or a 19th– century one pick it out on the shelf of a lending library or bookstore (in which case a short, provocative title is preferable)? Such material would indeed enrich or complement more traditional literature programs, even in the absence of special courses on digital technique.

    The simplest way to look at DH is that it applies social-science methods to a new set of data: that extracted from the contents of and reactions to works of art. (Historical data too, but I think we can agree with UCLA that for our purposes history is a social science rather than a humanities department.) And this activity, however marginal its results, is at the very least a tribute to the anthropological centrality of these cultural phenomena. Even at its most superficial, DH cannot content itself with as the French say numerizing arbitrary aspects of artworks. Even the most trivial digital analysis, such as a study of vocabulary or sentence length, has as its intention an improved understanding of the structures of artworks and their effect on their audience. This in turn implies that the esthetic practices thus analyzed are of (anthropological) interest “in themselves,” that they are correlated with generalizable human individual and collective behaviors.

    To insist on this may seem to belabor the obvious. But contrast, for example, a typical piece of victimary criticism that reduces a given work to the mythical embodiment of hegemonic dominance, or in exceptional cases, a rebellion against it. The operation of the esthetic in such cases is simply taken for granted as a means for the communication of propaganda. Art, in this critical context, is a “given” medium of communication, like the declarative proposition for metaphysics, except that where the proposition is understood as transparent to, indeed, identical with its “meaning,” art is a non-propositional and therefore “irrational” means of persuasion that can be used for good as well as evil but in either case points to no transcendent, sacred, originary realm. Victimary revelation is in essence an unmasking of esthetic techniques that seek to pass off the stereotypes of “late capitalism” or its earlier equivalents as objective in order to seduce deluded readers to accept the world’s oppressive state as “natural.” From the victimary perspective, the need for criticism, in short, is to separate the artistic spectator from the spell of the esthetic in order that he/she realize the political message that is in fact being conveyed. (If the message is “correct,” then the reader is permitted to return to the esthetic hookah without remorse).

    To generalize from this admittedly small but presumably typical sample of DH activity, most of these authors seem to be more digitalists than humanists, and therefore in humanities terms are shooting rather low. They might want to gradually raise their sights to aim at artworks and genres of real significance. Above all, there should be an awareness in the DH community that even without fussing about which works should enter the “canon,” artworks are simply not of equal significance, and treating them as such blinds the researcher, digital or not, to the profoundly human criteria that makes different works perform different cultural functions, and that makes some works, or families of works, more culturally significant than others.

    But the medium is the (postfoundationalist?) message, one might answer: numerical methods operate the same way on masterpieces and on trash, and there is not only no obvious way to use digital methods to make distinctions of quality, but the implicit ethic of DH militates against any such invidious comparisons. There is a quietly subversive side to DH that, rather than deconstructing artworks’ supposedly oppressive political subtext, simply refuses to valorize the works themselves over the graphs and tables that describe them, and ultimately views art and its digital analysis as merely two different modes of data production.

    Thus DH might take us from a paranoically obsessive anthropological model of oppressor and victim to a refusal to countenance any anthropological model at all. Which allows a transition to a related subject; what if computers could generate the art as well as the data for its analysis?

    A computer generating art creates an output that falls in the category that Andrew Bartlett has defined with the paradoxical expression impossible-human. (Mad Scientist, Impossible Human, Davies, 2014.) A computer-generated painting or poem is impossible-human in the same sense as the speech of Frankenstein’s monster: a human-like output of signs but from a source created by a human rather than organically developing as one.

    This wake-up call may serve as an incentive to those who truly take pride in their art to make sure their work cannot be confused with that of a computer, or as has been tried in the visual realm, of a monkey or a little child. And yet how can we be sure that we will continue to remain on top of the heap? The world of chess, with its tournaments and championships, goes on, yet where is the romance when everyone knows that today and presumably forever hence, the world’s best chess players are computer programs? How can we deny that chess is thereby reduced from a kind of minor art to a feat, like competing at multiplying numbers in one’s head, or a sport like weightlifting, where it is irrelevant that an elephant or a forklift can outperform us?

    We can accept defeat in a game, even the “royal game,” but in art itself? The visual arts have surely been degraded (although their prices have not) by the proliferation of machine-aided design; Warhol’s art is in essence an ironic rehumanization of the industrial, a bit more creative but of the same ilk as Duchamp’s Fontaine urinal, where placement on the scene of representation, as with so much “conceptual” or “installation” art today, is close to being the whole point. Literature, the most conceptual of the arts, will no doubt be the last to go. Will it? Must it?

    I have never paid much attention to those who hope to live “forever,” or who expect cyborgs to take over the universe. But as a subject for discussion in a group where I am a generation or more older than the rest, it does seem useful to speculate about the possible demise of the human as we know it. Andrew’s book, which ends with Blade Runner, a film made in 1982, in the pre-internet, pre-cell-phone, pre-social media era (the year after the appearance of The Origin of Language), still confidently affirms the ontological validity of the originary-scenic human as opposed to the human-created pseudo-human. Now art, like religion, is exclusive to the human scene, and art, unlike religion, demonstrates through our reaction to it the reality of the scene—is so to speak a “proof of the existence of God,” for one who truly understands the originary hypothesis. If a machine can imitate not just the junk art of humans who take their origin for granted or think they can/should deny it, but real art whose creator seeks the immortality of signs that demonstrate their worthiness to remain, then our unique ontological status will no longer be assured.

    Let me insist on the positive side of this challenge; machines can easily enough imitate art that pastiches the products of machines, even the mind-machine spewing forth “automatic writing.” But what if we rise to the challenge and produce genuine art unafraid to seek greatness, and still not outdo the cyborgs? This fear is another consequence of the phenomenon to which I referred in Chronicle 484, that of the digitization of human labor. When symbol-manipulation becomes the most significant source of human productivity, then it is by no means clear that the moral model of reciprocal symbolic exchange can be maintained. Given that the symbol manipulations of mathematical models abstract from the originary scenic sacred of humanity, turning sacred-profane into 1-0, and given that some humans are more proficient with these abstract symbols than others, as well as in dealing with the machines we have created to manipulate these symbols, thereby trivializing the common linguistic space of human cultural communication (can anyone say this is not occurring?), how can we be assured that these machines cannot be taught to simulate the products in the sign-world of our already degraded experience of sacred transcendence? The material of art, like that of natural science, is wholly in the realm of signs. That the signs that grant us a hint of the sacred have no similar effect on a machine cannot in principle prevent that machine from learning new ways to create that effect. All of human history makes us want to claim that the transcendent space between sacred and profane is unbreachable, but whatever we conceive to be the difference between God and Humanity, there is no obvious ontological difference between a poem written by a human poet and one created by a computer program.

    Gloom and doom is one way of describing such speculation, but it also defines a clarifying moment, perhaps at the end of the era of the human… or perhaps not. In any event, even given the inexorability of Moore’s Law, this is a problem that will not yet be faced by my generation. You who are younger will surely have to deal with it in some form (as they say about aging, consider the alternative!)—if only to discover that it is illusory.

    Let me leave you with a hopefully consoling idea: Just as chatbots can pass the Turing test by pretending to understand speech, so similar mechanisms can “pretend” to compose poetry and stories. But real art, like real thought, involves genuine cognition, not just its easily reproducible side-effects: manipulation of ideas, in other words, not just of templates that superficially resemble ideas. Thus the impossible-human output must not merely give the outward appearance of thought, but actually embody its intricacy and texture. That would not mean the computer was “thinking,” but that it would be able to elaborate ideas and answer questions about them.

    Thus the art we would have it demonstrate would not be the kind of prose/poetry common today, much of which indeed reads as though a computer generated it, but poetry, or prose, that embodies complex thought. Let’s see a computer write poems and stories about… the originary hypothesis! Indeed, this line of thinking suggests that we should analyze more concretely how our esthetic criteria are related to the revelatory model of which the hypothetical originary event provides the minimal model. At least in this manner we will be able to tell whether we are indeed going to keep ahead of our software, or whether the impossible-human is about to become a possibility.

    To conclude this series, I hope to put together some speculations on what strikes me as the soft underbelly of natural scientism: the current state of the “digital” understanding that science provides of the universe. My impression is that as physics progresses, its ultimate quest to provide a “theory of everything” gets farther away, and that the effort to explain currently known complexities only leads to the discovery of further complexities. Yet one still hears expressions of crude Laplacian faith that if we just knew the position of all those particles… ergo, “free will” is a myth! I will see if I can flesh out these ideas for a forthcoming Chronicle.

  • Arabella, The Female Quixote: Beauty in Mediation

    This piece was originally written for a French publication, but although the novel it concerns was twice translated into French in the 18th century, it is unknown in France today. Trevor Merrill kindly translated my text into English, and having tweaked it a bit, I offer it here as a change of pace from GA-DH material—and a plug for my choice as the most delightful novel ever.

    Charlotte Lennox’s novels are all of respectable quality, but even Euphemia, composed toward the end of her life from memories of her youth spent in America, is far from equaling her second effort, The Female Quixote; or The Adventures of Arabella (1752) composed when Lennox, whose year of birth is shrouded in mystery, was in her mid-twenties. (Lennox’s younger contemporary Fanny Burney also did her best work before the age of thirty.) That The Female Quixote was reprinted by Oxford’s World Classics in 1989 and by Penguin in 2007 owes less to its unique qualities than to a focus on gender that makes little distinction between first- and third-rate “women’s fiction.”

    In the introduction to the Oxford Edition, Margaret Doody sets forth the thesis that the French pastoral and historical romances of the 17th century, notably the interminable novels of Mademoiselle de Scudéry, translations of which were popular in England with both sexes, were particularly attractive to women because they empowered them as equals to men. This equality held not only in the realm of authorship, but within a chivalrous universe where women’s authority, derived from the tradition of courtly love, was effectively superior to that of men.

    In contrast, the new realism that appears in the mid-eighteenth century English novel with Richardson and emerges in the woman’s novel with Eliza Haywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751), submits women to the authority of the patriarchy. For Doody the female novelist and reader of Lennox’s era had thus to choose between an outdated fantastic paradise and a modern realistic Hell. But this jaundiced view forgets that the female Bildungsroman that Haywood inaugurated lives on in the eternally popular novels of Jane Austen, who has no difficulty convincing her reader that, despite women’s formally inferior status, married couples can indeed experience genuine mutual happiness—as, at the end of The Female Quixote, do Arabella and her faithful Glanville.

    The Female Quixote will disconcert the reader who expects a gender-bended version of Cervantes’ classic. What Lennox found in the quixotic formula was the secret of creating a uniquely delightful heroine whose folly paradoxically serves to guarantee the extraordinary attractiveness that author and characters unanimously attribute to her, including even her jealous cousin (and Glanville’s sister) Charlotte—who shares the author’s first name.

    The charm of Lennox’s novel is in the first place verbal. In the works of Scudéry and others that nourish Arabella’s imagination, a magic spell is cast by the exotic sonorities of the names of legendary warriors and princesses: Oroondates, Philidaspes, Mandana, Cleomedon, Artemisa, Artamenes, Melisintha… an effect amusingly increased by the era’s typographical conventions, which the modern editions have wisely chosen to maintain, according to which all Nouns are capitalized and all proper nouns are in Italics.  

    Whereas Quixote’s illusions tend to center on objects that demand heroic action: armies to defeat, giants to slay, damsels to protect…, Arabella’s are almost entirely passive, the fantasies of an orphan heiress of eighteen who dreams of giving herself, after long trials, to the equivalent of an Alexander or an Artaban. It is only in the ninth and final Part of the novel that, taking as her model Clelia, who jumped into the Tiber “to preserve herself from Violation by the impious Sextus,” Arabella leaps into the Thames and tries to swim across it, an act which, by putting her life in danger, leads to the denouement in which she is obliged to renounce her “madness.” Up to that point, Arabella had suffered only psychologically from her illusions, which had led her to ascribe to the men around her incongruously heroic roles and obligations dictated by the chivalric laws that govern her novels. Whereas Quixote’s effect on those around him is to create an ambiguity between the everyday world and the world of chivalry, encouraging Sancho and others to take part in his game partly in mimetic sympathy and partly in mockery (as the Duke and Duchess do, sometimes with cruel humor, in the second part), Arabella’s illusions remain wholly her own, although several of the men she attracts attempt to humor her extravagant demands.

    If Quixote’s fantasies at once attract and repel us, Arabella’s story encourages us to focus our fantasies on her. Unlike Sir George, who is attracted as much by her fortune as by her person, and who pretends to share her “madness” the better to seduce her, her cousin and fiancé Glanville plays along with her simply because he adores her. His unshakable devotion despite all he endures for her sake seems to provide us with ever-new proofs of her worthiness. This paradox is accentuated in Sir George’s shrewd reply (V, 4) to Glanville’s accusation that he is cultivating Arabella’s whims to make sport of her: “You do Lady Bella a much greater Injury than I do . . . by supposing she can ever be an Object of Ridicule and Contempt.” George, because he loves Arabella less purely than Glanville, sees her with enough objectivity to understand that she really needs no defense, for “the Singularity of her Manners is far less disagreeable than the lighter Follies of most of her Sex.” George, in sum, finds Arabella’s eccentricities as charming as we do.

    Not for nothing does Lennox constantly insist on her heroine’s physical and moral perfections, on the beauty of her face, body, and voice, on the grace that marks her every movement and gesture, on the finesse of her intelligence and wit, on the tenderness of her heart despite her obligatory “cruelty” toward her suitors—a tenderness that Glanville witnesses at the outset in her caring treatment of her father when he falls off his horse in I, 10 and during his last illness, in II, 1. Nor are Arabella’s extravagant demands dictated by personal pride or vanity. She would oblige her admirers to live in a world where all women deserve the same deference as herself, but where she alone realizes this—and seems to us worthy of it.

    Cervantes created the modern novel by demonstrating that in order to generate narrative interest in our disenchanted world, the novelist must apply to it the heroic formulae of medieval romance. Since these formulae belong to a world that cannot be inhabited by the novel’s protagonist, his actions are determined by what René Girard calls in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel  “external mediation”—for the Don, that of Amadis of Gaul—which surrounds these actions with a sacred aura. Even those who do not share the hero’s madness are tempted by the possibility of inhabiting this mediation-enchanted universe without having to pay the price. But Arabella’s mimetic behavior exercises on the reader a much more direct seduction. Whereas it is the Don’s second-hand illusions alone that influence us to see sheep as soldiers and a peasant girl as a princess, Arabella’s hyperbolic exigencies are guaranteed by the beauty (and wealth) that make her the most objectively desirable person in the novel.

    The power of the narrative premise of a Quixote embodied in a beautiful woman is such that Lennox can virtually do nothing to jeopardize her authority over us, even in the most dubious episodes—the one, for example, in which Arabella strangely imagines that Sir Charles, her fiancé Glanville’s father and her uncle (by marriage), is himself in love with her. This “psychoanalytic” turn is unsettling; Arabella seems to have become like Molière’s Bélise, seeing lovers everywhere. But that, albeit without amorous intent, Sir Charles is touched by Arabella’s beauty is never in doubt. In their very first encounter, Charles contemplates Arabella “with as much Admiration as his Son, though with less Passion” (II, 3), and he later calls her “the finest Woman I ever saw in my Life” (VIII, 1). Nor are the other characters to whom Arabella ascribes fanciful qualities—the best example being Edward, the gardener’s assistant, who gets himself beaten and then banished for having stolen carp from the chateau’s pond, and whom she persists in taking for a “man of quality” who has disguised himself as a servant with the intent of carrying her off—in any way transfigured by her fantasies. Arabella’s madness, rather than adding to the attractiveness of those she submits to the laws of her Scuderian world, only enhances her own.

    That, unlike Quixote’s illusions, Arabella’s are never contagious within the world of the novel only makes the contagion in the reader’s mind all the stronger. In the novel’s last book, Sir George comes up with a grand stratagem to steal Arabella away from Glanville. Having hired an actress to play the role of Cynecia, Princess of Gaul, he arranges to put her in Arabella’s path, then has her complain of the infidelity of her lover Ariamenes, who has shamefully deserted her. Next, observing Glanville in the vicinity, the “princess” pretends that he is Ariamenes, a lie Arabella would find it unpardonably discourteous to disbelieve. Although we know that this must be a ruse hatched by Sir George, and that such extreme measures must eventually lead to a fatal confrontation of Arabella’s illusions with reality, we enjoy for the moment the fantasy that the false princess is a real one—that Arabella has finally by some miracle been allowed to inhabit the fairytale world where she feels so much at home.

    The novel’s most delicious moment is Book VI, almost entirely devoted to the autobiographical narrative of Sir George, who declares himself the scion of a previously unknown line of “kings of Kent.” George, who hopes to win Arabella’s heart by pretending to truly participate in her imaginary world, claims to have courted, after a pretty milkmaid, two illustrious princesses, the first of whom, Sydimiris, he meets only after having waged a nearly victorious solo battle against five hundred (!) soldiers of her brother, Prince Marcomire. Sir George tells his story to a public that includes Glanville, Sir Charles, and Charlotte as well as Arabella, and the savor of the ironic reflections that Charles directs at the storyteller comes from the fact that, apart from our heroine, nobody is expected to believe a single word. Arabella’s credulity adds an air of enchantment to what is after all a wholly plausible conversation among wealthy and cultivated people in which one of them amuses himself by pastiching the gallant novels of the previous century, with which Sir George shows himself to be enviably familiar.

    Our fascination for Arabella is nourished by the paradox that makes us appreciate Sir George’s effort to think up a story that will please her even as we come to understand that no narrative of this kind could have a chance of touching her. For George cannot address even the most chaste and discreet words of love to Arabella without violating the absolute fidelity he owes to the princesses whose love he claims to have won. Accordingly, George’s tale elicits from her not admiration but increasingly critical reproaches culminating in a severe condemnation. When he attempts to exculpate himself by asserting that he only gave up searching for Philonice after years of unsparing effort, Arabella scornfully condemns him for the lack of delicacy that has allowed him to remain living after such a blow.

    What Sir George’s narrative teaches us is that Arabella is impermeable to seduction. Her “external mediators,” the princesses of Mlle de Scudéry, protect her from all temptation by “bad desire.” And given her own desirability, Arabella’s quixotic system is clearly of practical value. It both obliges a true lover to prove his affection by persevering with very little encouragement, and protects her against temptation by a liaison or a hasty marriage. We might even interpret—as does Professor Doody after a fashion—Arabella’s mistaken suspicions of masculine desire, such as those with regard to Sir Charles or Edward, as symptoms of a submerged libido that might otherwise risk endangering her virtue. Conversely, when she realizes that she feels, in spite of herself, a growing tenderness for Glanville, we are certain that it is an authentic affection that responds to the real love of her good cousin.

    But the value of Arabella’s “madness” is not merely negative. By freeing her from the “internal mediation” of the world that surrounds her, it liberates in her an originality that in a later age might have made her a queen of industry. Rather than following the fashion of the day, Arabella adapts her modes of dress from what she imagines to be the styles of the eras in which her novels take place. As early as the second chapter, the author points out the “Singularity” of her dress in which “all the Beauties of her Neck and Shape were set off to the greatest Advantage.” (Here and elsewhere, Lennox makes it clear that Arabella is not merely beautiful but sexy.) Later, when in VII, 7, a dressmaker acknowledges that she is incapable of imagining the appearance of the dress worn by Julia, Emperor Augustus’ daughter, Arabella has the dress made to order by her servants according to her own specifications.

    Rather than lament with Professor Doody Arabella’s loss of “agency” when at the novel’s conclusion she renounces her illusions and accepts Glanville’s hand in marriage, we have no reason to believe that she has resigned either her independence of mind or her creativity. One could even go so far as to imagine, in accord with the Girardian notion of novelistic “conversion,” that in abandoning her illusions even as she understands how they contributed to her unique personal distinction, Arabella would qualify at the end of the novel to become a novelist herself—no doubt by writing works closer to those of Cervantes than of Mademoiselle de Scudéry.

    And despite the inevitably artificial nature of the heroine’s “cure” in the novel’s penultimate chapter under the influence of a doctor of the church, whose lessons closely resemble the ideas of the famous lexicographer Samuel Johnson, we have no reason not to believe fully in the authenticity of the love shared by the couple that she forms with her long-suffering cousin. Sir George, the deceiver deceived, courted Charlotte Glanville, who had concealed herself beneath Arabella’s veil… but let us leave to Charlotte Lennox the honor of concluding her novel:

    Sir George, entangled in his own Artifices, saw himself under a Necessity of confirming the Promises he had made to Miss Glanville during his Fit of Penitence, and was accordingly married to that young Lady, at the same time that Mr. Glanville and Arabella were united.

    We choose, reader, to express this Circumstance, though the same, in different Words, as well to avoid Repetition, as to intimate that the first mentioned Pair were indeed only married in the common Acceptation of the Word, that is, they were privileged to join Fortunes, Equipages, Titles, and Expense; while Mr. Glanville and Arabella were united, as well in these, as in every Virtue and laudable Affection of the Mind.

    This uniquely delightful tale, full of the verve of youth, places Charlotte Lennox among the true masters—or mistresses—of her art. More than any other novel I know, The Female Quixote makes me wish that its heroine could descend like Galatea from its pages to grace our gray reality.

  • GA, NWT: A Pep Talk

    Since the ninth edition of the Generative Anthropology Summer Conference is coming up, I thought I’d try to articulate as convincingly as I can why I have retained my faith in GA for over thirty-five years, and why I think you should too.

    My last book, published by Davies, bore the title A New Way of Thinking. Calling your ideas a “new way of thinking” (NWT) might be compared to writing an autobiography entitled The Genius. Yet GA truly is a new way of thinking, one whose surface, given our limited numbers and resources, we have only begun to scratch. Since The Origin of Language (TOOL) appeared in 1981, much work has been done in the domain of “cognitive science,” about which some of my readers are far better informed than I. But I do not believe that there is anything essential to change in TOOL, any more than in Science and Faith, written only a few years later, which Adam Katz is in the process of republishing in his new Noesis “Deferrals and Disciplines” series. The fundamental idea of GA, that of a minimal, scenic anthropology founded on the deferral of violence through representation, is still valid, and until the rest of the intellectual world recognizes its validity, its inhabitants will continue to turn around in circles, expending time and energy in sterile and futile battles between believers and atheists, philosophers and neuroscientists, never grasping the scenic essence of human thought and of humanity itself.

    Why then has our theory, which has been out there since 1981 and has generated 20 years of Anthropoetics and nearly 500 Chronicles of Love and Resentment, not caught on with the educated public? Because, as the aforementioned title makes clear, it is truly a new way of thinking, meaning that no one beyond our little group has a professional interest in its survival.

    GA is not linguistics, nor philosophy, nor “anthropology” in the departmental sense, nor theology either—although it is fully compatible with the positive achievements of all of them, and particularly compatible with the anthropological content of religion. The Enlightenment shift from “analog” to digital has led us to forget that the religious view in which the sacred scene was the true source of knowledge long had plausibility on its side, and still retains a core of truth. This is a point I have made many times a propos of the anthropological kernel at the heart of the otherwise nonsensical theories of Creationism and Intelligent Design, which recognize that the emergence of the human from the natural world is not something that can be explained in “natural,” including Darwinian, terms.

    The greatest lesson that I learned from René Girard was to take religion, which is scenic, as a fundamental source of anthropological knowledge—and to be skeptical of the anthropology implicit in philosophy, which is not. The Girardian, scenic component of GA alone allows its Derridean element of deferral to reveal its implicit anthropological content. Yet one cannot call Girard’s “mimetic theory”—a term that I doubt he himself invented and that I think misstates his achievement by seeking to assimilate it to the vocabulary of social science (one might say that generative anthropology does the same, except that the incongruity of its two terms suggests something a bit more problematic)—a full-fledged new anthropology or “new way of thinking.” The human is the scenic animal, but he (or she, although there were probably no women present at the originary scene—then again, if it took place in Africa, there were no white males there either) is also the speaking animal, and it is not enough, for it is still an act of faith, to subsume the issue of language under that of sacrifice by quoting John’s “In the beginning was the Logos.” Jesus could only be the Word because, when he appeared on earth, humans had already learned to use words, and I think one can hypothesize an origin for words on the basis of a less historically specific act of faith than Christianity.

    Traditional religious and philosophical anthropologies have produced in recent years powerful critiques of scientism, the attempt to reduce the human to the biological, and more recently, to the cybernetic. Last year’s GASC keynote speaker, Raymond Tallis, has written many sharp and humorous essays on this subject, as well as proposing a theory of the human hand-as-pointer that seems, as far as it goes, quite compatible with GA’s theory of originary language. And in Victoria, there was a moment when Tallis seemed to see GA as a valid extension of his ideas into a full-fledged conception of the human. But Tallis is a philosopher, and GA is not philosophy; it is as incompatible with metaphysics as it is with scientism. Indeed, the positive understanding of the human embodied in philosophy is so thin that, as those who attended the 2013 meeting at UCLA will recall, in order to combat Darwinist reductionism, Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos (Oxford, 2012) suggested enriching its ontology with the crypto-theological notion of teleology, not seeing that this only returns us to the debate, yet more sterile than that between cognitive philosophy and cognitive neuroscience, between “science” and “religion.” Indeed, Nagel’s introduction of teleology as an answer to Darwinism is nothing more than a shamefaced version of Creationism.

    There is surely much to be learned from the study of philosophy, yet it is useless as a source of insight into originary anthropology. For even at its most anti-metaphysical, it is still metaphysics, and this because it fails to understand what metaphysics is, or at any rate, takes for granted, that is, that language is transparent to “thought,” and that consequently the declarative sentence/proposition is a given whose discovery by humans, not to speak of its “origin,” is irrelevant to the truth-seeking purpose of philosophy. Thus philosophers begin from “first principles” that have no anthropological basis. The “scenic imagination” I once wrote a book about, and that consists in imagining scenic origins for human institutions, played a certain role in Western thought from the beginnings of the Enlightenment on—as the title puts it, from Hobbes to Freud—but was never more than a philosophical byway. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is metaphysics’ reductio ad absurdum, affirming, to translate the author’s famous dictum into our own terms, that “of that of which we cannot speak in declarative sentences, we must be silent.” One of my ever-postponed projects has been to analyze in depth Wittgenstein’s later Philosophical Investigations, where he privileges the imperative over the declarative in discussions of the “language games” we play in performing practical tasks. (The idea of the ostensive as it functions in sacred ritual and its origin would have been too much.)

    In any event, a more rigorous philosophy-like development of GA would surely revolutionize the study of what might still continue to be called philosophy. Similarly, the field of linguistics would no doubt benefit from an effort to assimilate the principles of GA, not necessarily by following the schema developed in TOOL, but by recognizing the fundamental necessity of a generative approach to the forms of language rather than merely the productions of already-established linguistic rules or paradigms.

    I was tempted in composing this little pep talk to list some other areas in which the originary hypothesis might help humanity to understand itself. But on reflection, I think it best to let things develop without making an attempt to guide or even anticipate their development. It is no accident that GA began in the domain of French studies; Girard (and Derrida), however much they differ, are products of a French cultural intelligentsia less technical and hierarchical than the German (compare, as I do favorably, Sartre to Heidegger), more concretely engaged in political and religious issues—a domain to which I hope to have added an element of Jewish-Bronxian naivete. Nor is it an accident that the practitioners of GA are almost exclusively teachers of literature; it is in the verbal-esthetic domain, less rigorous and earthbound than reality-based studies, that new ideas can be tested on objects that are both accessible to everyone’s intuition yet sufficiently imbued with sacrality to define the otherness of a given historical moment. Although philosophers, classicists, students of the visual arts, even an occasional “real” anthropologist have contributed to our work, the bulk of our active membership remains in English and Comparative Literature departments.

    We all have heard of, and have sometimes been, the professor who when attendance is bad berates the students who show up for the absence of the others. I honestly think we’re doing OK. Of course I’d like to see GA get more publicity and more recognition, but great ideas must mature slowly, and we’ve all seen much too much of the kind of intellectual sensationalism that appeals to resentment more than love and mimetic game-playing more than authentic communication. I’m very grateful to the members of the GASC and the readers of these Chronicles, however few or many you may be, for taking these ideas seriously in full awareness that, unlike more fashionably resentful ones, they do not promise to grease your path to academic success. But I do think that despite the victimary trends of recent years, there remains in today’s university, in the US and in the rest of the civilized world, enough intellectual or “academic” freedom to make the further exploration of these ideas possible.

    As those who have read my online Girardian Origins of GA can attest, my very creation of GA was the outcome of failure, which I at times would like to think of as resulting from the deliberate calculations of my preternaturally wise unconscious, the qui perd gagne of Sartre’s analysis of Flaubert, but which Ockham’s razor tells me was just failure. Felix culpa, I think I can say, to see what some of you are doing with and to the ideas of GA in the forthcoming issue (20, 2) of Anthropoetics, which contains the work of three new contributors (two from Australia). This single issue constitutes in itself a persuasive argument that our NWT indeed has something to teach the world.

    I’m not going to say that GA is the “definitive” solution to the question of human origin, but I think I can say quite “definitively” after 35 years that any such solution must involve something pretty close to the originary hypothesis, the origin of the sign on the human scene.

    I will reserve for another Chronicle the question of whether it useful to point out, as I hinted at in Chronicle 484, that numbers too, like words, are human signs; they help us measure the universe, but are not “out there” in it. Yet whether GA can provide insights into the epistemology of the natural sciences, the scientists themselves must ultimately determine.

    What we can know, and know that we can know, is that our representations are the products of the human scene, and that their inherent ethic demands that they be used to defer the destruction of the species that invented them. The purpose of our way of thinking is to implement that ethic. Nothing I have learned in the past thirty-five years has given me any reason to doubt GA’s vast potential for rethinking every aspect of what we call the human, in the service of humanity’s continued quest to postpone its threatening but still less than inevitable apocalypse.

  • The Moral Model and the Scandal of the Secular Sign

    The complexity of the title of this Chronicle is sufficient indication that it does not represent a fully matured idea, but one of those intuitions it seemed useful to follow as a way of understanding, perhaps before it is too late, what has so demoralized the defenders of “Western Civilization.”

    Clearly something has changed on the American Left. If the Republican Party has had difficulty in asserting itself despite the extraordinary endorsement it received in last November’s election, it is because it has not changed its fundamental attitude to the political scene, domestic or foreign, whereas its Democratic opponents have become far more radical.

    I would like to avoid polemics here as much as possible, and to remain on an “anthropological” level. We must consider that any arguments to the effect that my political views, as opposed to those I disagree with, are more consonant with the originary constitution of humanity, must be, however true or false, secondary to the fact that both sides of the debate derive from central moments of the originary scene.

    How can we explain the increased acrimony of the political debate, with its intensifying expressions of mutual contempt (again, my view of which side is more guilty need not detain us here)? The two sides represent the two imperatives born in the originary event, imperatives not simply symmetrical but both equally necessary: reciprocity and firstness. The first sign could only have operated successfully if the proto-mimetic-desire of these proto-humans made them capable of imitating (rather than turning against) the one or more individuals who first thought to abort their appropriative gestures and conceive them as “meaningful” in themselves, as possessing a form. I will always be grateful to Adam Katz for introducing into GA the notion of firstness. But the destiny of the firstness of the originary sign is to dissolve itself in the collective reciprocity of its exchange, the “moral model” that is the universal, as opposed to the particular, realization of originary humanity. Not everyone can be, or must be, first; but everyone has to participate in reciprocity, everyone must be “moral.” A firstness that fails to lead to this universal exchange is not firstness at all, but an aberration that risks provoking, in Girardian terms, “emissary” violence.

    Firstness is an essential component of the human, but it is never simply a factor of stability; it inevitably has the potential for generating resentment. If we speak of “right” and “left” in all more or less democratic polities since the French Revolution, it is because with the decline of ritual-based agricultural societies, the bourgeois era sets up an unending tension between the freedom of individual achievers and the rights of the public as a whole: “freedom” and “equality,” liberté and égalité, which the French revolutionaries tried to resolve in a Hegelian synthesis with the collective fraternité that ended their famous slogan. But “fraternity” is merely a sentiment; it is the task of liberal-democratic institutions to work out the conditions of political debate that will lead to maximal harmony, or in less Durkheimian terms, minimal conflict—a task to which they are not always equal.

    There is nothing new or controversial here, save perhaps in the simplicity with which the originary hypothesis allows us to understand these fundamental aspects of the human collectivity.

    What GA suggests is that the present acrimony reflects an increased tension between these two imperatives. The point of this Chronicle is to propose that the Left’s increasingly radical impatience with elements of order that promote firstness and therefore enter into tension with the principle of reciprocity, which, as we have seen, is the more fundamental and collectively unproblematic of the two principles, reflects the increasing disconnect between the fundamental equality of all before language and representation generally and the differential skills with signs and representation that define success in an increasingly “digital” society.

    The society that creates the “digital humanities” is the society that not only produces the famous widening gap between rich and poor, but more specifically, that offers no obvious path for the less digitally gifted to close this gap. However much residual racism may exist within (white) police forces, the most fundamental cause for the black resentment so much in the news recently is the “digital divide,” for which, whatever its plausibility, the only tolerable explanation is some form of victimization.

    The victimary model of society was born in the Holocaust, but its particularly American version, as Peter Goldman recently reminded me, is marked by our unique history of slavery and segregation. This model’s recent evolution is the product of the two phases of the Civil Rights struggle: the end of de jure discrimination, and the redefinition of “disparate impact” as de facto discrimination. There is no reason to assume that this is likely to change in the near future. It has been pointed out that whatever Obama’s symbolic importance for the African-American community, which I have always taken quite seriously, his administration has not been marked by any improvement in this community’s economic fortunes, let alone a reduction of its >70% illegitimacy rate—which, as Charles Murray pointed out in Coming Apart, the white working class, for similar reasons, seems destined to imitate.

    The human is the digital, as I pointed out in my first discussion of Digital Humanities (DH) in Chronicle 477. Thus a world dependent on particular digital skills, as opposed to manual labor, poses a permanent moral question in a way that earlier social systems did not. Hierarchies of priests/scribes atop a vast world of peasants may be tyrannical, and are certainly far more unequal than modern societies, but their inequalities were so clearly “Rawlsian,” justified by the needs of the social order as a whole, that they were rarely challenged; “peasant revolts” were safety valves rather than real contestations of the social order. The signs manipulated by these scribes, even when commercially motivated, were still part of the world of the sacred, or to put it differently, of the human world, the world as it exists for us.

    It is very significant that even at its height, Greek antiquity did not apply mathematics to the empirical study of nature. Perhaps we can explain this by the prevalence of slavery, but another way of understanding it is that the world of signs could “humanize” nature by naming its parts and observable phenomena, but the construction of mathematizable models that would permit devising experiments to determine the “laws of nature,” and from there, the development of modern technology, was inconceivable. The world of symbolic representation made nature part of the world of humanity, and only very slowly, through the astronomical gadgets of the middle ages and the gradual liberation of urban society from the official sacred of the Church, did the “Copernican revolution” become possible, and with it, technology and modern industry. The Enlightenment is properly understood as a paradigm shift in the primary use of signs from sacred to secular, from the human to the natural, and from the mythical-narrative-iconic to the digital.

    Yet in the early phases of the bourgeois or “capitalist” era, Marx’s labor theory of value demonstrated that physical work could still credibly be considered the basis of the political economy, even if it was now labor in factories and mines rather than in the fields. For Marx, “brain workers” were parasites on the laborer’s “surplus value.” Today, work with signs has in many instances replaced much or all physical labor; those with the appropriate skills are able to program machines to perform an increasing percentage of the former laborers’ tasks. But at the point where the labor theory of value is no longer tenable, it becomes increasingly difficult to justify the socio-economic order to those whose contribution to it has become marginal when it exists at all. Language must then be found to translate the limitations of those unskilled in digital techniques into marks of oppression.

    One could argue that the increased attention on campuses, and eventually in the wider society, on micro-aggressions and the like are ways of emphasizing the universality not of human difference per se but of ascriptive-group difference, that is, of the likelihood that what appears to be individual merit is really membership in privileged classes, the “white” majority and its allies, who maintain their dominance by subtly confining other groups to inferior status. From the standpoint of traditional common sense, this is an absurdity, but from that of originary morality, it simply imposes the moral model in a context where traditional norms of “fairness” are no longer producing movement in the right direction.

    The growing hostility and incomprehension between the two sides is easily enough understood as reflecting the growing inadequacy in the digital age of the traditional liberal-democratic behavioral norms established by the originally dominant ethnic group. These norms are not supposed to do more than demonstrate adherence to social normality, while career advancement in a world where all obey them is presumed to reflect individual “merit.” In the past this system worked more or less well to improve lives at all levels, albeit with considerably more disadvantages for blacks than other ethnic groups, as well as for women in “men’s work.” But in the pre-Holocaust era not only were such irregularities in the practice of fairness not considered serious defects in the system, but—and here is the new element I think it necessary to introduce—the traditional idea of “labor” still obtained, according to which “real work” created value and mere “paperwork” was an unavoidable excrescence on value creation.

    It is only marginally a coincidence that the digital era proper was born in the battle against the Axis; the digital computer was created by Turing, von Neumann and Co. in the heat of battle. Which is to say in other terms that the Nazis, who had some of the world’s best scientists, had not yet grasped the central socio-economic feature of what we can now call the postmodern, which is the domination of the world of the sign over the processes of material production. Firstness, after all, is the domain of the (arbitrary) sign, and therefore, in Nazi terms, of “the Jew.” For the “Master Race” is not first like the first user of a sign; it is ontologically superior, a higher, more sacred form of being. The fascist dream reattaches cultural signs to their sacred context, as though a world of increasingly digital sign-manipulation could be retained within a system of social compactness symbolized by the fascist sheaf. Eliminating the Jews was “shooting the messenger,” what in less horrible circumstances could be called a “category error.”

    No doubt it is impossible to deduce the emergence of cyberspace from the defeat of the Axis powers and the post-Holocaust demise of de jure caste relations, but the overall connection seems clear enough. Postwar prosperity “lifted all boats,” and the computerization of work proceeded only slowly; again not coincidentally, this was the period Thomas Piketty in his 2014 best-seller Capital in the 21st Century sees as an exception to the dominance of the equation r>g that expresses in his system the widening gap between the fortunes of capital and labor, or as we might put it, the secular-digital and the sacred-analog. But at a certain point digitization began to pick up speed, and its ultimate trajectory became visible; the manipulation of signs became not the secondary but increasingly the primary component of industrial production, save in a few areas (such as the extractive industries—those, not coincidentally, specifically demonized in the other component of the Left’s new belief-system, of which I will speak below).

    In a sign-oriented system of production, unskilled and even semi-skilled labor lose their value. Motor skills, basic intelligence, and the kind of training that allows someone to work on an assembly line are no longer the entry conditions of a decent living. Murray’s Losing Ground, cited above, limits its discussion of the effect of this development to the white working class precisely to avoid confusing it with the racial problems that have received such attention in the contemporary political marketplace. The comi-tragic conflicts that play out on campuses over racial micro-aggressions are ways of dealing symbolically with the caste/class divergence between the digitally skilled and the rest. For whether it be attributed to “privilege” or native ability, this divergence is fundamental. The secularized world aligns socio-economic success with the ability to manipulate signs, no longer as a sacred art, but as a matter of mental circuitry generating practical results. No doubt society can tolerate this form of inequality as it has tolerated caste distinctions in the past, but this one, because it touches on the fundamental human characteristic of equality before the sign, an equality formerly violated only with sacred sanction, has the effect of rendering increasingly irrational or “symbolic” the political battles it inspires. The moral model is compatible with individual differences in symbolic intelligence, but for these differences to become the chief determinants of worldly success undermines the general confidence that all human beings share the equal moral status defined at the outset by the universal ability to reciprocally exchange the originary sign.

    The environment

    Beyond human victimology, the other, perhaps yet more salient aspect of the victimary mindset is concern for the environment, which has in the past decade or so been dominated by the fear of “climate change.” No one believes that we should not do our best to conserve natural resources, avoid polluting the air and water, etc. But those who claim that climate change is the most serious problem facing humanity today are, I believe, making a claim less natural-scientific than anthropological. The issue has been so politicized, indeed, so sacralized, that there is really no way for the layperson, or perhaps even for the scientists themselves, to obtain more than the vaguest idea of the relative probabilities associated with it—which is in a sense the whole quasi-religious point of the anti-“climate change” campaign, obliging skeptics to take its “scientific” basis on faith, and at the same time stigmatizing its “denial” as the equivalent of believing the earth is only 6000 years old.

    For whatever the dangers to which the human generation of carbon dioxide and other products of industrial heat-production may one day subject us, and however wise it may be to be prudent about such matters even in the absence of anything like hard evidence, one thing is clear from the anthropological standpoint: if we all believed that “climate change” were indeed the most urgent problem facing humanity, then the challenges presented by the modern age to human solidarity would be sharply diminished. Imagine if North and South Korea, India and Pakistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia, Russia and ISIS, Israel and Hamas, Turks and Armenians, all agreed that this was the problem to which their best efforts must be devoted…

    And at the very least, any actions we take on behalf of “the environment” contribute to human solidarity by being virtuous in themselves, having no other than positive results. Thus even I—more, in point of fact, than my mostly liberal neighbors—”religiously” take out the recycling once a week, even though I remain skeptical as to the real savings in energy and time accomplished by holding onto glass and paper rather than dumping them in the landfill. I do hope my efforts over the years have saved humanity a bit of energy and salvaged some materials that would otherwise have to be mined or otherwise produced from scratch, but I wouldn’t really be surprised to learn that humanity would have been better off if I had simply tossed it all in the garbage.

    As in all such cases, the real point of the “debate” between Right and Left is undecidable, given the layers of symbolic action that encumber it. Admitting that if we all agreed that saving the environment were our principal concern, we would be less rivalrous in our other activities, part of the frustration that leads the Left to speak of the Right in dehumanizing terms stems from the scandal of seeing people whose concern for seeking firstness in some domain of economic reality blinds them to the “obvious” virtue of seeking a common goal. One important way to define such a goal is to define Nature as humanity’s—but above all, Western, industrialized humanity’s—victim, and to therefore be suspicious a priori of any activity that appears to transform it irreversibly, even if such things as the depletion of oil reserves are no longer genuine objects of concern. Here we have no need to accuse ourselves and others of racism and sexism, merely of the sinfulness of desiring beings. To deny climate change is, so to speak, to share the arrogance of Lucifer’s revolt against the divine order of things.

    The moral model inscribed in the human psyche is a structure of what might be called imperative anthropology. Which is to say that its incontrovertible moral “rightness” makes it impossible to disprove its critiques of “disparate impact.” No doubt the overall notion of moral equality is compatible with a differential ability to handle the manipulation of signs, which has been the case for as long as human society has existed. But in modern societies where the manipulation of signs has been divorced from the sacred realm to which it was once confined and become the basis for most forms of social success, any group divergence suggests that some groups possess this ability definitively more than others, and hence are closer to the sacred center of the human scene, which in secular terms is experienced as an unjustifiable “privilege.” In the effort, praiseworthy in itself, to counter this temptation, claiming that members of other groups are victims of micro-aggressions is merely a way of evening the score. If this is indeed true, and can be said to reflect the wrongs of past history, then we need not face the stickier question of how to improve the relative skills of the less successful sign-manipulators. At a second degree, the same need to stigmatize micro-aggressors arises in the case of “triggers” that either traumatize members of victim groups or desensitize members of the hegemonic group to their micro-aggressive tendencies. Reading Huckleberry Finn without appropriate warnings (or perhaps at all) might produce the impression that the “n-word” is an acceptable form of speech. On the surface these are infuriating obstacles to everyday interaction, but given that any inequality on the scene of representation can be blamed on the social order—indeed, on humanity—as a whole, they remind us to preserve the moral imperative of sign-related equality.

    No doubt there is more to these tensions than I have expressed here, but this Chronicle’s focus on the anthropological category of the sign and its unique status is something that GA is uniquely able to articulate. The correlation between the transfer, beginning in the late Renaissance, of sign-manipulation from the sacred world to the secular one of mathematical models that permit the technological and scientific manipulation of nature is no secret, but we can understand it in a new light in the context of the originary hypothesis.

    Digital humanity, in a word, is a far more powerful concept than the digital humanists have so far been able to grasp, although it validates their deepest intuition in as yet inchoately explored ways. For as my previous Chronicle suggested, DH is at the very least an effort to take Western Civilization out of its victimary rut.

  • Digital Humanities at UCLA

    On Wednesday evening, April 8, Stacey and I attended a presentation at the campus research library by the UCLA Center for the Digital Humanities (CDH) entitled Creating Knowledge, Creating Bridges. It was both largely predictable and surprisingly appealing. The CDH director, Professor Willeke Wendrich, by formation an Egyptologist, put together a remarkably well organized program that featured, after some introductory remarks by her and the Dean, a series of six project presentations, each delivered jointly by a professor and a student. This program, involving thirteen persons, was scheduled to end at 7 PM, and for the first time in memory, it ended at 7 PM. With a single exception, the students were either current undergraduates or recent BA recipients, not the senior graduate students one would expect to find working with a professor on a research project. Several of those who had graduated spoke with enthusiasm of how the DH program had given them an important leg up for computer-oriented jobs.

    Most surprisingly, the institution-affirming atmosphere of this tightly controlled program appeared to be truly spontaneous. UCLA, despite some of the negative stories that have appeared about it recently, is not North Korea. Indeed, what I found most heartening was the confirmation of the speculation in my earlier column that DH is indeed a refuge from victimary politics. Throughout the entire hour there was not one word about race, gender, sexual orientation, or “social justice.” None of the projects had any evident political component, left or right. I could not help feeling that this fact itself contributed to the warmth that pervaded the room. At last a group of university Humanities people could get together to share their work without flagellating their White Guilt and keeping track of micro-aggressions. That my former department was not represented either among the presenters or in the audience did not surprise me.

    After the presentations, the audience was invited for the second hour of the event to sip wine and eat snacks while examining the six presented projects along with eight others in the “pods,” with large computer screens set up to be shared by groups of interested parties, that were the previous head librarian’s proudest creation. We were able to chat with several of the presenters and others involved in these projects. Only a few had a connection to literature; as might be expected, most of them dealt with matters more easily rendered by images and other types of mapping.

    One project analyzed tweets along with other media activity to “take the pulse” of news events such as the Egyptian “Arab Spring” or the Japanese tsunami. A couple of the literary ones showed graphics of relationships between writers (one illustrated the translations of Goethe’s Werther) or of somewhat arbitrarily chosen textual elements, such as references to the aural or visual senses. One displayed a data-base created while doing research for a book that recalled to me the database I set up (which still exists) when I was working on my Carole Landis project, including searchable scans of texts—in this case from Spanish writings on sexuality in the early 20th century, in mine, in 1940s movie magazines. Otherwise, a professor of art history was working on the basis of archaeological evidence to reconstruct medieval buildings in Paris; Prof Wendrich herself had created an online encyclopedia of Egyptology; another project mapped out areas where ancient Inca sculptures of specific gods were found in Peru; another sought to construct a walk-through computer model of ancient Rome along the lines of an earlier model of Athens developed at UCLA. All in all, it was one of the most pleasant academic events we had attended on campus.

    The reader will have noticed that what provoked my enthusiasm was less the content of the presentations and projects than the atmosphere of free interaction between faculty and students. As an old humanist, my instinctive reaction to DH had been negative, or at the very least, skeptical. I saw DH a bit cynically as a promising source of grant money—humanists know how hard it is to obtain funds for traditional research projects. In contrast to the New Criticism generation that dominated the profession in my schooldays, whose critics knew both literature and literary history in depth and had a sharp sense of the nuances of individual texts, when the practitioners of DH read texts at all it is via the “Distant Reading” recommended in the well-known work of that title by Franco Moretti (Verso, 2013), where the point is to skim through large numbers of mostly “non-canonical” works in search of some plot or style element that may then become the basis of a data set and illustrated in a graph: for example, Moretti’s study of 7,000 novel titles that shows how titles got shorter from the 18th to the 19th century and how different parts of speech, articles, etc., were used in them. Only a couple of the exhibits at the DH demonstration were even that “textual.”

    Yet I am happy to say that this meeting converted me into a supporter of DH as a pedagogical approach. In DH, students and faculty, who deal with the collection and analysis of data rather than “readings” of texts, start at the same level, the professor’s authority being demonstrated solely in knowledge of objective techniques rather than in relatively intangible “wisdom.” Thanks to computers, the humanities are finally able to share in the hands-on concreteness of the sciences. And since, unlike the sciences where this has been going on for a while, the emphasis was on the newness of the digital methods themselves, the projects were chosen perhaps less for their intrinsic scholarly interest than for the ease with which they lent themselves to the generation of attractive displays.

    This atmosphere of confidence and energy, not arrogant about its accomplishments but cheerfully optimistic about future possibilities, contrasted so sharply with the dreariness of the “traditional” modern-victimary or antiquarian humanities lecture, that any observer would find it difficult not to see DH as “the future of the field.” Students would have to learn elsewhere to decipher the poems of Mallarmé or the ravings of King Lear, but even there they could certainly pick up a few pointers from the structural comparisons limned in “distant readings” a la Moretti.

    What this suggests is that even as students continue, perhaps to a lesser degree, to receive a traditional formation in the humanities, the energy in the field will be increasingly siphoned off in the digital direction. The idea of imbibing wisdom from an older and wiser professor can survive in an era of increasingly rapid technological change, not to speak of victimary suspicion, only if the professor’s superior knowledge is concretely and unambiguously demonstrable. I would have no trouble teaching the French language because the student could see that I can speak it; the same goes for the facts and techniques that constitute the objective subject matter in all fields. But when it comes to the interpretation of texts, where there is no “right” answer but where the student is expected to bow to the professor’s superior knowledge of the work’s esthetic and historical context, passivity cannot, as when learning a language or technique, be immediately supplanted by activity. Hearing the professor’s interpretation, one can only begin to understand it and attempt to reproduce it, or at best to argue with it on its own terms. Today, the kind of patience this requires is in short supply, whereas the fast-evolving computer era increasingly provides opportunities for the kind of exciting interaction that we witnessed the other evening.

    This is not to say that some students of the traditional sort will not remain, but they will be increasingly seen as antiquarians—unless their field of study is, as has become the rule in my ex-department and in many “language” departments, strongly victimary, often with a post-colonial emphasis. For the victimary too in its way allows the student an immediate bond with the faculty member, albeit of less purity than that procured by working together on a digital project. Those who agree to share victimary resentment and/or the White Guilt that its vicarious adoption assuages are prima facie equals; the professor cannot teach righteous indignation.

    The once-exciting literary field has reached the point where, after decades of deconstruction, traditional interpretations of texts, and newer interpretations that would perhaps more lucidly seek in works of literature and art anthropological truth, have lost much of their attractiveness. They depend, after all, on a “hegemonic” conception of culture: they celebrate its firstness, and through the “priesthood” of the professoriate, transmit it to students, whereas the victimary, like the digital, rejects firstness and is consequently more conducive to communitarian attitudes. But if we must choose between these two ways of deconstructing the humanities in order to provide the new generation with anthropological insight, it is certainly preferable to see literary works broken down into data rather than reconfigured as documents of race and gender oppression. As I suggested in Chronicle 477 (“Digital Humanity”), returning the humanities to their sub-structural components to seek correlations that might otherwise go unnoticed is not at all unfaithful to the originally wonder-inspiring phenomenon of art, and of representation generally.

    The originary analysis of a work of art is an attempt to grasp its anthropological significance. Like victimary thinking, GA too derives from la différance, through which it generates the order of human love rather than the anarchy of resentment. No doubt GA cannot expect to emerge victorious over its evil twin in the foreseeable future. Yet rather than resign ourselves to the triumph of the victimary, I think we can find in DH, in its refusal of political a priori (or at worst, a facile “Marxism” that sees modern culture in the light of “capitalism”) and its interest in obtaining results, a source of hope. No digital “results” concerning the esthetic, however trivial, should offend us. On the contrary, to the extent that our hypothesis is true, whatever objective truths are discovered about art can only enrich, in unanticipated ways, our understanding of how art in all its manifestations reproduces, by the familiar oscillation between sign and imaginary referent, the originary constitution of the scene of representation.

    This is the second of the Chronicles intended as a basis for discussion at the forthcoming High Point GA Summer Conference. I have also been examining in detail the research produced by DH, using (at Stacey’s recommendation) the articles in the online Digital Humanities Quarterly (http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/) as a representative sample. I don’t think I’ll put my results a la Moretti in chart form, but I do intend to embody the conclusions I draw from this examination in another Chronicle to conclude this series.

  • Biddy the Hedgehog, RIP

    On March 1, hundreds of thousands of Instagram viewers mourned the death of a pygmy African hedgehog named Biddy whose owners, better known as his “parents,” had made him an international celebrity, although the word “celebrity” is too People Magazine to be associated with Biddy. Last year, in Chronicle 470, “Bear Theory,” I attempted to describe the special charm of the creatures on whom we mimetically bestow a human personality, and who as a result become sufficiently both dependent on us and independent of us for us to love them. With pets, the situation is somewhat different; as we care for and observe them, we try to explain their personalities in our own terms, but attributing human-like thoughts and feelings to animals, as some pet owners are wont to do, steps over the line and is less playful than silly. Yet Biddy, in himself a rather simple creature surely less intellectually gifted than a dog or even a cat, won the hearts of millions in a role that transcended his animal existence.

    The genius of Biddy was in his mode of presentation. His “parents” (there really is no more appropriate term), inhabitants of Oregon, took him around to scenic sites, mostly in the mountains, and let him roam about in little “Biddeos,” or took carefully posed shots of him, often hand-held, against natural or monumental backdrops. This fine camera work was inevitably accompanied by short, witty messages from Biddy himself, in an already-established genre that we might call Twitter humor: you don’t have much room, so you put the punchline in a hashtag. Rob Lowe does this skillfully in National Review, and recently my friend Trevor showed me a generally hilarious rendering of the 175 letters of Les liaisons dangereuses called Dangerous Tweets: one per letter.

    If we step back from Biddyworld, we know that this little hedgehog didn’t really compose those messages—don’t we? But where then did they come from? Or, if you like, who really was Biddy? Was he nothing but that little hedgehog? Or was he not rather a paradoxical entity whose worldly presence was indeed that of the hedgehog but who was magically gifted with human language through the love of his “parents,” channeling, as we say nowadays for evoked spirits, what the little guy would have thought had he been, not human, but a hedgehog with a human spirit.

    Attempting to define more closely the nature of Biddy’s persona offers an opportune moment to reflect on the varieties of our attribution of personhood. We must distinguish, at least, between (1) human selves (2) fictional characters (3) bears (4) Biddy.

    —A “human self” uses language in the first person, as I am doing now. No doubt in writing I take on a “persona,” which in some cases (not mine, I hope) can be quite artificial, but in any event, I am directly responsible for what I say, as is not true in the other cases; if I make a claim in a Chronicle, you have a right to be annoyed if it is incorrect or unsubstantiated.

    —Fictional characters are another fairly straightforward type of persona. We’ve all heard and read enough stories to distinguish between first- and third- (and the occasional second-) person narratives, and although much theorizing can be done here, it’s not very relevant to Biddy; you wouldn’t be reading this if Biddy were a character like Mickey Mouse or (say) the little hedgehogs in The Wind in the Willows that we find in Badger’s house eating porridge (whereas in real life badgers are the most dangerous predators of hedgehogs).

    —More complex and far less explored are what I call bears, “plush” or “stuffed animals,” the commercial availability of which is generally traced to Teddy Roosevelt’s bear spared on a hunt. To this category we might attach that of dolls, which differ from the latter historically, physically, and by their presumed human character. You wouldn’t speak of a hedgehog “doll,” unless it were dressed up as a human. Dolls, even if they have soft clothing, are traditionally hard, made of porcelain and more recently, of plastic/hard rubber. You can caress a doll, but like a baby, not like a dog or cat, who are (at least in most cases) furry. Years ago, one would have called bears a variety of doll, an extension of the soft, or “rag” doll (cf Little House on the Prairie), but today I think it’s clear that the dominance has switched. For one thing, dolls have traditionally been associated with little girls and their “maternal” behavior, and I don’t have to insist on how “cis-genderism” is regarded today.

    I have already done a Chronicle on bears; here I would only insist on the category’s broadly extensible character, so that one can think of almost anything as a bear (perhaps even a doll). Bears are generally soft and cuddly, but that is not essential. Once one begins to treat something as a bear, it takes on whatever bear qualities are available to the imagination. Bears embody real personalities, and while all their human content comes from their human custodians, they are not “fictional” since they are not figures in a story being created for third parties. (One can of course tell such stories about them, but that’s not what bears are for.)

    But let’s get back to Biddy. Biddy was certainly a pet, but his persona was more like that of a bear. Unlike typical cat or dog “speech”—for example, the many New Yorker cartoons that show what the dog is really thinking—there’s little focus in his Instagram posts on getting the reader to appreciate the specific way an animal would think. The fact of Biddy’s being of a rather exotic species, cute but never cloyingly so, apparently self-reliant and not exploitative of his “parents,” allowed them to create for him a persona analogous to that of a little boy—my wife thought, around ten. I can say as a bear aficionado that Biddy’s personality was not far at all from those of several of our own little hedgehogs and armadillos. But the difference is, of course, that Biddy was a real, live hedgehog. In this, as we shall see, was his glory and his tragedy.

    The fact that Biddy became a celebrity, attracting many comments and establishing a worldwide dialogue with fans, is not to be neglected in our sense of sorrow; the end of Biddy is so to speak the end of an institution. But we shouldn’t put the cart before the horse. Only the most stupidly cynical would imagine that Biddy’s “parents” created his persona in order to win fame and fortune. I have recently noted the horrors of the Internet as a scapegoating medium, and anyone who dares to tweet knows that the least drop of blood in the Twitterwater will bring out the sharks, but the crowd-speak collective has its upside; far less problematically than the various dating/mating sites, Biddy demonstrated the Internet’s potential for sharing love.

    We’ve all seen, or at least heard about, the zillions of YouTube cat videos and even hedgehog videos that are cute and harmless but ultimately cloying and dehumanizing, in that the animal is presented as either trying and not quite succeeding at being “human,” or else showing that whatever our desires and expectations, he/she really doesn’t care to be human. Biddy, on the other hand, and it is in this that he shows his true bear qualities, is just a person, as though someone forgot to tell him that no, hedgehogs aren’t persons, only people are persons. Although this is certainly true in the “natural” world, what Biddy shows us, or I should say, reminds us of, because we all know this, is that “we” don’t live in a “natural” world. We live in a world of signs, of culture, and in that world, hedgehogs, bears, and dolls, not to speak of Hamlet, Achilles, and my personal favorite, Arabella (“the female Quixote”), are perfectly welcome.

    Now of course the idea of a hedgehog acting, not like a hedgehog-acting-like-a-little-boy, but simply in the spirit of a little boy, is not something that would occur to a hedgehog; hedgehogs don’t “act like…,” they just act. What was special about Biddy was that his actions never seemed to be rehearsed or selected for their ironic commentary on how similar/different we all are, but were simply his own, and the clever comments that his “parents” appended to them were those that a small hedgehog might make if he had the mind of a clever little boy. We all knew that Biddy himself could not have had such thoughts, yet rather than being imposed on him, they always seemed rather a gift, of the sort a fairy godmother might grant to a little hedgehog she particularly loved, allowing him to participate fully in the human world instead of merely supplying it with cuteness and spectacle in exchange for food and lodging.

    What we loved in Biddy was a reflection of his parents’ love for him, a love that surely involved every normal aspect of care and concern for a pet—including, clearly, heroic efforts toward the end of his life to help him survive—but in his case had in addition, whether he “appreciated it” or not—could a hedgehog “appreciate” anything but the kind of care and affection he might have received from other hedgehogs?—the love of a parent for a child, of an adult for one of the same species who will eventually become one himself.

    Of course this was limited in scope; one couldn’t teach Biddy to talk, for example. Indeed, I doubt if his parents taught Biddy anything; it’s not that aspect of child-rearing they seemed to enjoy. Biddy was like a little schoolboy, but one always on vacation. We enjoyed his travels, not at all like those of the gnome in Amélie (the Jeunet world is more hospitable to rats than to hedgehogs), but like those of our little (grand)son who cares enough, or rather, who is well-bred enough (kids don’t do these things spontaneously) to send us a postcard from places where we ourselves would like to go.

    Alas, bears are functionally immortal (though losing one is genuinely traumatic); pygmy hedgehogs are not. One can tolerate a dog or cat dying after twelve or fifteen years; these little guys only last about four. Which is fine for, say, a typical hamster, but not for a little hedgehog with the persona of a little boy. The tragedy of Biddy, not for himself but for us, was that in order to truly integrate into his own life the consciousness he expressed and came to embody, he would have had to live something comparable to a human life span. Yet since he could clearly never “grow up,” a longer life would not have worked either; another few years, and the drama of the little hedgehog facing the world would have lost its edge. Imagine, for example, Biddy the Turtle remaining a little boy for 100 years; this would be less endearing than the plot for a horror movie. Better to burn out than rust out.

    Be that as it may, Biddy’s living out his four-year life cycle produced in his fans the kind of wrenching sensation that might have occurred back in the 1930s if Shirley Temple had died of a childhood disease. There was nothing in his little-boy persona that reflected the four-year limit of his worldly existence. This was not a failing of his parents; any hint of Biddy’s mortality would have been maudlin and wholly out of character. He had to be a brave little fellow to the end, when they came up with the memorial hashtag #runstronglittlebuddy.

    Our tragedy, finally, as people who gave a little piece of our heart to Biddy, is that he is gone, and we mourn him as we would a little boy who died too young. Mourning for the little guy is all the more real in that, unlike a dog playing “Lassie,” he cannot be replaced. We would not stand for Biddy II, and “son of Biddy” would be worse than incongruous. His parents must have realized this when they decided last year to give him a “sister”: a little dog. Another hedgehog would only have undercut his uniqueness; a successor hedgehog would have been a betrayal. Not of Biddy himself, of course, who might have enjoyed playing with another of his species, or mating with a female thereof. But Biddy had a role to play in our human world. I certainly hope he enjoyed it; no one will every play it again.

    There will never be another Biddy, but the future, Internet and all, surely holds new ways of associating a human persona with a real animal. Meanwhile, there must be lots of new cat videos on YouTube. I wish Biddy were here to tell us what he thinks of them.

    Appendix: Two Sonnets for Biddy

    I

    Biddy’s a tiny hedgehog
    his folks hold in their hand
    their trips throughout the land
    on Biddeos they log
    he’s cute but never helpless
    his little hedgehog brain
    explores each new terrain
    secure in care that’s selfless

    Biddy is no mere pet
    this hedgie’s special charm
    comes from a love so warm
    that we never forget
    that Biddy’s folks and he
    are but one family

          October 2013

    II

    Biddy the hedgehog for two years
    made people happy just to look
    at him—his human family took
    a thousand trips where he appears
    in videos and photos posed
    to show a hedgehog resolute
    frolicsome gentle witty cute
    inquisitive and well-disposed

    His folks let Biddy share their soul
    a little guy who on his own
    would live a hedgehog life alone
    their love made him part of the whole
    and he became our little friend
    whose life of love will never end

           February-March 2015

  • GA and the Media

    One of the insistent themes of deconstruction in its earliest phase was the medium of communication. Although the paradoxically presented “non-concept” of différance that defined écriture was in effect medium-independent, Derrida emphasized that in contrast to the metaphysical emphasis on “natural” speech (and the consequence, which metaphysics and even its critics left unmentioned, that language as such is taken for granted as the “natural” medium of thought: cogito, ergo…), language is typified rather by the technical, late, “distant” phenomenon of writing. This early emphasis on the techné of communication has vastly proliferated in the age of the “digital humanities,” where traditional literary and artistic genres are supplemented and mashed up with new ones. To quote the collective volume Digital_Humanities (Anne Burdick et al, MIT Press, 2012, p. 24),

    The digital environment offers expanded possibilities for exploring multiple approaches to what constitutes knowledge and what methods qualify as valid for its production. This implies that the 8-page essay and the 25-page research paper will have to make room for the game design, the multi-player narrative, the video mash-up, the online exhibit and other new forms and formats as pedagogical exercises.

    I will attempt to deal with this aspect of “media” in a future Chronicle, recognizing that there is no a priori means to demonstrate that any given media genre cannot be made to convey cognitive content. Indeed, the questioning of the traditional modes of such content is very much a part of the “digital humanities,” both as academic propaganda and as esthetic reality.

    But what interests me here is a much simpler question for which genres are of interest only insofar as they are instruments of (mass) communication. My tentative thesis is that the kind of thought that seems to me (us?) necessary in these times of victimary hysteria and resentful fanaticism is just the kind (ours?) that is incompatible with the current organization of the media in the public sphere, and that this fact, whether “divine plan,” “ruse of reason,” effect of chance or internally deducible necessity, is one to which we as the custodians of GA, which includes the heritage of Girard but also of deconstruction detached from its political biases, need to devote some serious reflection.

    It adds weight to this assessment to include “mimetic theory” in its purview. No doubt the Girardian world has many advantages over GA, notably the financing of Peter Thiel’s Imitatio, and Girard’s own well-deserved prestige. But we may set aside these advantages for the moment, given that the intellectual media pay very little attention to “mimetic theory” either—and much of the attention it does receive reflects less its strengths as a fundamental anthropology than its ambivalent attitude toward the “victim” that allows many (most?) Girardians to take the victimary side in current political debates. Yet this complicity has not succeeded in making the theory of the scapegoat an important part of today’s intellectual conversation.

    We should be cautious about taking local political events for revelatory signs of secular truths. But let us indulge in a bit of speculation in this vein. The 2014 election showed that at every level but the presidential, the American public is more hostile to the victimary ideology of the Left than at any time since before the Depression, over 80 years ago. So decisive a political victory should permit the victors to make clear the real point of contention between the two sides. This would seem to suggest that the time is ripe for the open denunciation of this ideology, not as “PC” or as “faith in big government” but as victimary thinking, indeed as victimocracy. Yet not only have the president and his party been able to blithely dismiss the Republican victory as inconsequential (“had a good night”), but the Republicans/conservatives themselves, those who presumably defend firstness as a necessary complement to equality, have been unable to articulate an alternative strategy to the Democrats’: is raising the minimum wage acceptable within limits? should Obama’s amnesty-like actions on immigration be fought or merely complained about? can such things as the disintegration of “the Black family” that Moynihan complained of fifty years ago or so even be mentioned in relation to questions of crime and policing? should we send troops to the Middle East in more than symbolic numbers? is there a viable less bureaucratic alternative to Obamacare? It’s not even clear how strong among Republicans is the will to rebuild the military whose budget and manpower Obama has drastically cut back.

    The only forthright opposition to the victimary as such is that of a courageous polemical fringe, exemplified by such figures as Mark Steyn and David Horowitz in FrontPage Magazine, with no visible influence on “respectable” conservative politicians. And these writers are concerned rather to denounce the victimocracy than examine its historical roots. David P. Goldman (“Spengler”) is the pundit that comes closest to a long-term analytic perspective, and he clearly has a fine grasp of world history. But there is no place in the media for a critique of the victimary from a radically reconceived anthropological standpoint such as Girard and GA represent.

    When in a recent Chronicle (474) entitled “Blaming the Victim” I reproached conservatives for not speaking of the victimary, one of my readers quite correctly pointed out that they don’t do this for fear of being accused of… blaming the victim. Which is but another way of saying that victimary thought is now accepted as incontrovertible ethical truth, ever expanding to new frontiers (micro-aggression, transgenderism), no deviation from which in its current state can be tolerated. Thus victimary policies can be criticized only tactically, which is often to say, hypocritically, hypocrisy being (dixit La Rochefoucauld) the homage that vice pays to virtue. The Right, in a word, accepts the Left’s monopoly of virtue. Which helps explain why since its rout in the election, its Left’s insufferable tone of moral superiority, from Obama and the (New) New Republic on down, has only increased. One hears the campus-created term “PC” less often in recent years: the Left’s values have been assimilated to good manners, the basic conventions of human interaction.

    In all my discussions of victimary thinking, I have emphasized the ethical trauma of the Holocaust as the key event of WWII; by providing a model of “absolute” oppression in which cruelty to victims is replaced by the industrial processing of “vermin,” it cast discredit on all de jure systems of discriminatory classification, from colonialism to racial segregation in the South, and inspired movements to end differential attitudes accepted since time immemorial in the domain of sexual identity and orientation. This is all familiar to us; but it all depends on another consequence of WWII that I have not previously mentioned because it was taken for granted, and has only become part of our consciousness now that its effects are ending: that of the postwar Pax Americana and its stabilizing effect on the world order. This effect, I would argue, was perturbed only secondarily by the Cold War, however frightening it appeared at the time.

    It has often been noted with irony and/or regret that since its victory in WWII, the United States has not felt the need to fight to the end and win a single major war, neither in Korea (stalemate), Vietnam (loss), Iraq or Afghanistan (no need for explanations here). At best we drove Saddam out of Kuwait and Milosevic out of Kosovo, and intervened with modest results in small countries in the Western Hemisphere (Granada, Panama, Haiti…) The principal conclusion that we drew from WWII was that, by necessity, it would be the last World War. Our Cold War fears of WWIII were real but abstract; the apocalyptic Dr Strangelove, for example, is in retrospect a strangely benign satire, far less vicious than the diatribes commonly heard on campuses and elsewhere against those who defended the West’s position in Vietnam and later, in Iraq.

    What I am suggesting is that the victimary “time of troubles” that began with the Vietnam war protests in the 1960s and that has for better or worse demolished our early postwar sense of normality (cf Charles Murray’s Losing Ground), has relied, in its ever-more-radical effort to expiate Western civilization’s firstness by denying its legitimacy, on a foundational confidence that this dominant status could not truly be threatened. This is the attitude of the spoiled child who throws a tantrum knowing that its parents will never punish it severely for its naughtiness. Indeed, for anyone who has observed for the past few decades child-rearing among the educated classes, the parallel between individual and collective experience is obvious, even to the demographic consequences in both cases of sacrificing future generations to present satisfactions, whether those of the West’s overall condition of (relative) peace and prosperity, or of the bourgeois family’s concentrated attentions on its one or two “boutique children.”

    Victory over the Axis in the last possible total war had the exhilarating feel of entering the kingdom of heaven, and the Cold War with its crises and local wars never really put the feeling in doubt. Of course the Cold War’s peaceful and victorious conclusion could not have been predicted, and until the middle of the Reagan administration most people assumed it would go on indefinitely as “peaceful competition” with a few minor conflicts in the margins, but that only goes to show how stabilizing it was and how marginally it threatened the Pax Americana. Nor should we forget that Soviet Marxism was a wholly Western mode of thought that shared with “capitalism” the belief that human progress depended on economic and technological progress; the conflict between the two main victors of WWII was a family quarrel rather than a battle to the death between alien powers.

    My error in imagining that 9/11 would awaken the West to the dangers of its victimary obsession, which has only increased since that time, no doubt reflected my unexamined presupposition that the signs of breakdown of the Pax Americana, of weakness in Daddy’s protection in the family structure, would lead to a more mature acceptance of the benefits of Western democracy and thereby to a diminution of victimary passion. I should have realized that it would have the opposite effect; once one has pledged one’s faith to the victimary paradigm, the only solution to its problems is more, not less victimary behavior, just as welfare states can only solve the problem of dependency through ever more transfer payments. The point is that the confidence in Daddy that makes us anxious to demonstrate contempt for our “privilege” is of a piece with the cowardice that leads us, when Daddy no longer inspires confidence, to insist to his former “victims” that we had always hated our now-former privilege and should not therefore be punished for it.

    This point came up in 2010 during a discussion between Adam Katz and me in Chronicle 400 about the relative importance of fear and White Guilt in our submissive behavior toward terrorists. I claimed that such things as the Western phobia of “Islamophobia” that leads us after each Islamic atrocity to apologize in advance for the “backlash” that never seems to occur was motivated by a desire to acquire insurance for the future, as when Swedish “Minister of Democracy” Jens Orback said back in 2006: “We must be open and tolerant toward Islam and the Muslims because when we become a minority, they will be so toward us” (see Chronicle 337). Adam, in contrast, saw these acts as directed essentially to gaining the approval of the Western “hegemonic” population.

    But the real point is that these two attitudes are mutually reinforcing. The child who disrespects Daddy knowing that Daddy will protect him anyway and the child who disrespects Daddy to show the local bully that he’s really on his side are very much the same person. Neither is the old-fashioned child who uses Daddy’s power to assert power in his own right—not a lovely role, but one that demonstrates a healthy respect for firstness.

    White Guilt is an attempt to assure victory by playing on both sides at the same time, denying the necessity of firstness while profiting from it, seeking to atone for superiority by apotropaic symbolic gestures. But these gestures are only functionally symbolic. The victimary is a religion that denies its religious nature. Since the dawn of the modern world, revolutionary hostility to organized religion has led to substituting a “secular” religion in its place, starting in 1794 with Robespierre’s Culte de l’Etre suprême. But as a form of religious activity, the victimary much more assiduously and self-consciously than the various sects of Marxism avoids any hint of transcendent absolution even as we denounce our own privilege and especially that of the “racists” and “sexists” among us. Victimary lynching is not an organized rite, on the contrary, its “sincerity” depends on it being wholly spontaneous and unestheticized, self-organizing content without prior form—like Girard’s emissary victimage. As the Sacco case described in Chronicle 480 shows (but also those of Donald Sterling, or Brendan Eich, or Larry Summers), to maintain their bona fides, the lynch mobs who inflict real penalties on deviants do not allow them (in contrast to the Catholic Inquisition or Communist “reeducation”) to expiate their guilt and rejoin their victimary accusers. The indelible stain of “privilege” bespeaks a psychologized variant of nineteenth-century racialism.

    All content and no form; this returns us to the question of the media. Twitter, as in the case of poor Ms Sacco, is the medium of choice for the denunciation of privilege because its 140-character limit is focused on spontaneous content at the expense of prior reflection and analysis. The point is that if you have to engage in argument, your soul has not wholly absorbed the victimary truth, which should always be intuitively apparent. The administration’s ever-increasing contempt for legal formalities (Hillary’s mail, anyone?) that has led Mark Steyn to speak of the US under Obama as a “banana republic” reflects the Left’s increasing impatience with hesitation to recognize and act on victimary truths of any kind, including “climate change”—a number of scientific “deniers” of which were recently proposed for investigation by a Democratic congressman.

    Victimary thought has introduced all kinds of neologisms in recent years, many ending in –phobia. But these are labels rather than concepts; their “structure” is simply that of returning the implicit expulsion they denounce against their original perpetrators. Deconstruction was the master-concept of all these, and it suffices to compare Derrida’s pregnant notion of différance with Islamophobia, transphobia, cis-genderism and the like to trace the march of the victimary through our era’s intellectual life.

    What can save the West? Just to ask this question suggests that traditional political-science justifications for liberal democracy have become impotent. I have been writing perhaps a bit obsessively about ISIS, but not only does a greater threat come from Iran and its proxies in the Middle East, but on the world scale, the West is threatened commercially and no doubt in the near future militarily by China as well as by the spoiler role played by Putin in reestablishing Russian hegemony in the territories of the former Soviet empire. Who in 1989-91 would have dreamt that twenty-odd years later Russia would annex Crimea, occupy eastern Ukraine and parts of Georgia, and begin to threaten the Baltic states?

    What seems to be taking place is a contradiction between Francis Fukuyama’s still unimpeachable conclusion that liberal democracy is the “end of history” for socio-political systems in the domains of technological innovation, freedom of thought and association, health and life expectancy, and in every other aspect of the quality of human life, and the increasingly obtrusive fact that the West’s indubitable superiorities are no longer clearly correlated with the will to defend itself against the parasitic forces that profit from its technology to threaten its social hegemony. Western colonialism, like it or not, was clearly the spreading of a higher civilization among less successful ones, and its overall results were more positive than negative. But the spread of Islamic jihad, Russian adventurism, and even the more civilized threat of Chinese hegemony are less comparable to the Roman colonization of Gaul than to the sacking of Rome by the Visigoths.

    While doing our best to promote GA’s essentially positive view of Western civilization, our urgent task is, beyond polemics, to understand the attraction of victimary thinking as well as of radical Islam and/or antisemitism for the members of Western societies. The primary context of this attraction is the decline in the West of Judeo-Christian religion. One thing we have certainly learned from the “media” in our time is that whereas “nothing is sacred” in Judeo-Christian religion, the two “religions” that threaten the West, victimocracy and radical Islam, have been much more effective in retaining their sacrality.

    It seems to me that our key task for the future is deepening the connection between GA and the biblical religions, which is to say, pursuing the work begun by Girard to integrate the Judeo-Christian anthropological foundations of the West with its “Greek” technological rationalism. The spate of rather silly “atheism” books of a few years ago was in its way a valuable wake-up call. Western religion cannot simply fade away; it must renew itself, failing which it will be replaced by the far cruder belief-systems we are struggling against today.

    For the moment, we cannot do better than take “Spengler” at his word in How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too) (Regnery, 2011), that the example of Israel, nationally and demographically, represents today, for all its flaws, the best hope for humankind. If it can survive the (hopefully temporary) American withdrawal from international leadership and the ominous possibility of an Iranian bomb, the Hebrew/Jewish people may once more justify the faith of those who claimed millennia ago that its firstness would make it “a light unto the nations.”

    After all, as Girard knows better than anyone, to really know the Bible is to know mimetic theory and Generative Anthropology. We are merely its explicators. Those who would advance the human science of anthropology can progress only by building on the revelations of our predecessors. But we need to do more to persuade others that these revelations provide us with truths of science as well as of faith.

  • Victimary Theology

    As Western civilization’s hold on the world becomes more uncertain, victimary thinking, the propensity to consider every human interaction as a confrontation between an oppressor and a victim, increasingly dominates the Western intellectual class with the unexamined fervor of religious dogma. Driven by White Guilt, the victimary is essentially oikophobic, an expression of hostility to one’s own national and civilizational traditions, and a mode of repentance for them.

    The worst sin the victimary commit is against their own kind. Their White Guilt can be assuaged only by denouncing their own “privilege” and above all, punishing the slightest deviation from the norm of victimary abjectness in other members of the “majority.” Such behavior differs little in spirit from the Wahhabi imposition of Sharia. If caricaturing “The Prophet” makes one worthy of death, making even the most ambiguously “racist” allusion, for example, to the African origin of HIV, can lose you your job.

    The recent misfortunes of Justine Sacco, as cruel as those of the heroine of the Marquis de Sade’s Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu, were described in detail by Jon Ronson in “Feeding Frenzy,” in the February 15 New York Times Magazine. Before leaving on a trip to Africa, Ms. Sacco tweeted “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” Her point, which she explained to Ronson, and which should be obvious to anyone, was not to affirm, but to mock, the idea that her “white privilege” would protect her from disease. Nevertheless, although only 170 followers initially received her tweet, one or more of them was so offended that they retweeted it to others; the retweets snowballed, and by the time she got off the plane 11 hours later, she had lost her job and acquired the status, which she has apparently retained, of a “racist” Internet pariah.

    It is no doubt a small source of hope that the case of Ms. Sacco was seen as sobering enough to merit a sympathetic account in the classic liberal “journal of record.” Yet Ronson could only explain her mass “shaming” as the result of a “desire for approval” among the mutually congratulating shamers. His elision of the specific source of this desire in victimary theology, the White Guilt that her original tweet, alas too obliquely, sought to assuage, uncannily resembles the Administration’s refusal to recognize the comparably theological motivation of the more physical violence carried out by the organization it persists in calling “ISIL.”

    For years I have been following with alarm the increasing virulence of the victimary phenomenon that originated in the postwar reaction to the Holocaust. Slavery was an age-old institution, today still part of the social order in the Middle East, and massacres too were nothing new, but this systematic eradication of a population was qualitatively different, and the difference reflected the fact that its victims were the Jews, the unique subjects of historical hatred for their firstness. The Jews had suffered for centuries under Christianity for their role as God’s chosen people, a privilege presumably forfeited in punishment for their “hard-necked” refusal of Jesus’ divinity. But now Hitler decided that Jewish suffering served no useful purpose; rather than bear before Christians the stigma of the “wandering Jew,” the Jews should simply be exterminated. This new, absolute mode of oppression was the source of a new, absolute concept of the victim that, among other things, inspired René Girard to seek in the original inspiration of Christianity the source of a new anthropology.

    The victimary has increasingly taken on the attributes of a new theology by espousing an ontology that separates humans into distinct groups that only a supernatural force can bring together: an inverted chosen people of ontologically innocent victims and a sinful “majority” who can at best resist the “privilege” that carries in itself the guilt of oppression. Thus the sin of racism is less discovered than posited as ever-present within the “white” soul. The increasingly popular notion of micro-aggression makes clear that what is important is not the effect of these “aggressions” on their “victims” (although this is by no means the tone of the analyses produced by the proponents of this terminology) but their revelation of traces of racist sinfulness in the souls of the perpetrators. This ineradicable “privilege” characteristic of whites is in principle absent from the souls of other races; blacks, as one still hears a half-century after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, cannot by definition be guilty of racism—just as Palestinian “freedom fighters,” whatever atrocities they commit, cannot be guilty of crimes against Jews.

    But the crime of “white privilege,” the local reflection of the overarching and ultimately determining crime of “the West,” has nothing essentially racial about it. It is the crime of firstness. Racial concepts arose in the nineteenth century to explain the vastly different state of civilization on the different continents—one that no amount of honest sympathy for pre-modern cultures can deny. For the environmental causality of Montesquieu’s “climates” they substituted a differential anthropological explanation by the gross characteristics of the different “races.” This was, as we know, science in name only, but the falseness of its biological essentialism in no way reduced the qualitative differences between European civilization and those of most of what became the “colonial” world.

    As the fate of The Bell Curve illustrates, any attempt at scientific analysis of differences between human groups, even when it avoids any suggestion that these differences confer a differential moral status, runs up against insuperable moral difficulties. All human beings are part of the human species created by the first sign, founded on the moral equality of all participants, early or late, in language. Some societies, and some groups and individuals within them, display the differential superiority that following Adam Katz I have been calling firstness, the implicit promise of which is that what the first discover or invent will eventually be spread, as was language and culture generally, over the entire population. But total fulfillment of this promise is inevitably deferred. And for the space of this deferral to be preserved requires the members of the “West” or the “majority” to repress any affirmation of their civilizational firstness, such affirmations being seen in our post-Holocaust era as denials of moral reciprocity and thereby of the implicit compact that makes us all human. Yet there is a fine line between respecting the moral equality of all and denying that of one’s own “privileged” group in deference to their “victims.”

    Sinners as we all are, a philosophy that purports to find sin only among those whose civilization has proved itself superior in every measurable sense is monstrous. In the guise of maintaining the moral equality of all humans, it denies the value of the firstness that endows human mimesis with the unique creativity that permitted humanity to survive in the first place.

    And in particular, it denies the national project of the “first nation,” the Jews. The ostensibly paradoxical complicity between a victimary philosophy that excoriates those who hesitate to wholeheartedly affirm “marriage equality” or to accept that human beings with penises can declare themselves female and use what were formerly women’s toilets, and a social movement that observes the sexual mores of the 7th century Arabian desert, is most simply explicable as an alliance against the Hebrew roots of Western civilization. This is not, I would insist, a wholly negative opposition. Islam is not simply the antithesis of Judeo-Christian Western civilization; it is in its own way, even in its most radical forms, an attempt to preserve its practical achievements by eliminating from it all trace of historical firstness. Thus Islam presents itself not as the “fulfillment” of these earlier religions but as their original, authentic form; dhimmis are “really” misguided Muslims who, unlike the “pagans” of other religions, have adopted distorted versions of the true religion that is Islam.

    The Islamic denial of historical firstness offers a religious guarantee to the White Guilt that obsesses the victimary West. More than any other firstness, it is that of the Jews that it denies. Antisemitism in its virulent form had been Christian, not Muslim, for the latter religion, unlike the former, is not obsessed by historical anteriority. But this truth of the past has been superseded in the era of the Jewish State. It may be true that Muslim antisemitism has borrowed its iconography from Europe, that Hitler influenced the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini during his reign—although there is evidence for the claim that the chief influence was in the other direction, and that Hitler’s decision to kill the Jews rather than merely expel them was the result of the Mufti’s hostility to the Zionist implantation in Palestine. (See, for example, http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/ Article.aspx/7056#.VO6y6i4sBAM) In any event, what we now call Islamic “antisemitism” is something quite other than the antisemitism that arose in the 19th century when Christian anti-Judaism morphed into secular hatred for the “international Jewish conspiracy.” What Muslims hate today in Jews is not the historical firstness of their religion, but their firstness as the only truly modern society in today’s Middle East, a phenomenon the Muslims can only explain as a form of Western “colonialism.” Through an irony of history, today Jewish-Hebrew firstness impresses itself with a vengeance on the Islamic world that originally drew strength from its ability to escape its religious embodiment.

    Once Israel came into existence, Jews were no longer tolerated anywhere in the Muslim Middle East (Morocco is a partial exception, Persian Iran, curiously, another). Their membership in the Jewish nation made them Israelis by default, members of a rival Caliphate to that which the Islamic State now aspires to become. The vicarious participation of Europeans in Islam’s hostility toward Israel is an expression of their own White Guilt that “incidentally” allows them to rid themselves of the guilt for the Holocaust that led to victimary thinking in the first place—whence their fondness for outlandish comparisons of Israelis to Nazis, comparisons for which the Arabs have at least the excuse of (very loosely) analogous humiliations.

    Generative anthropology offers its hypothesis as an intellectual justification for both the moral model of reciprocity that is at the core of our ethical sense and for the necessity of accepting and learning from firstness—an essential yet oft-neglected element of what Girard’s disciples call “mimetic theory.” As they know, human mimesis is more dangerous than its animal version, but because of the human invention of deferral, representation, language, it is also infinitely more inventive. Human progress is built on the certainty that some “disciples” at least, unlike those depicted by the novelists studied in Girard’s Mensonge romantique, will not be content with merely aping their masters’ desires.

    Even had the Crusaders 800 years ago been as crudely barbaric as ISIS, that would still provide an argument in favor of a society in advance of its enemy by eight centuries. Recognizing our common propensity for sin is one thing, refusing to recognize that some societies are preferable to others is another. Colonialism was marred by many abuses, but it was neither a wholly cynical nor a wholly maleficent enterprise. The resentment of post-colonial “subalterns,” however much it compels our sympathy, should not be the sole criterion by which to audit the balance-sheet of European colonization. Firstness should be asserted with humility and caution, but it must be asserted; some ideas are better than others, and some social systems are better than others—even if their methods cannot always be applied directly in other places. (And one can make an argument that if George W. Bush had acted with more civilizational self-confidence in Iraq and imposed military order on the civilian population as soon as he had defeated Saddam’s army, the country might well have been stabilized far more effectively, and with far less bloodshed—an accomplishment that could not easily have been undone, as his was, by his successor.)

    Victimary thinking, like all dogmas, is a way of maintaining a social order—in particular, of working to mitigate its inevitable tension with the fundamental reciprocity of the moral model. Asserting the universal validity of this model in a world of vast differences of wealth and access to modern technology means finding a way to justify the social order without destroying it, and the victimary seems in the West as good a way as any: just feel guilty and indignantly suppress any suggestion that Western society is an example to the world rather than seething with racial and sexual injustice, and things can go on as they are.

    But there are real resentments out there, much deeper than those within American society, and the pacifying virtues of victimary theology will not suffice to defend our civilization against those who, from envy of its advantages, are willing to give their lives to destroy it. There are times when we have to get on our high horse and fight for the benefits that the freedom of innovation of Western liberal democracy, “capitalism” in a word, has allowed us to achieve.

    Even with its victimary hysteria, the West, and the United States within the West, are still far better places to be than those ruled by the resentment they arouse, and the West’s victimary critics know this as well as anyone. But it is a mistake to think that our comfortable world can maintain its superiority forever by affecting to treat itself with moral contempt. At some point along this path, a critical mass of people, Muslims and (ex-)Christians and Jews, will come to find the barbarous sincerity of Salafism preferable to the West’s victimary hypocrisy. If this does come to pass, I only hope I shall no longer be alive at that moment.

  • What is language for, anyway? (part 3)

    The idea that religion is a functional component of human society is well known to evolutionary psychologists such as Pascal Boyer and religious sociologists such as Rodney Stark. Although none of these social scientists would dream of accepting GA’s (or René Girard’s) originary hypothesis, they recognize that the “irrational” aspects of religious discourse, taking “rationality” in a logical-positivist sense, are highly functional in bringing people together and cementing their loyalties through collective and individual ritual acts and interdictions, keeping away free riders by rigid and onerous requirements of professed belief and behavior, and generally by requiring serious commitment as the price for the benefits of community solidarity. Stark points out, for example, that Christian communities tended to fare better than others during plagues because their members cared for each other even at the risk of infection rather than leaving sick but potentially curable members to die—a human version of what population biologists call “group selection.”

    Given that serious social scientists offer grounds for affirming religion’s usefulness, in contrast with the spate of popular books a few years ago denouncing religion in what can only be called Voltairean terms, one might think that nothing more needed be said in its defense. But from the standpoint of GA, which emphasizes the derivation of the rational language of the declarative sentence from simpler utterance forms, and ultimately from the more fundamental human need for deferring violence, there are further points to be made that might hopefully serve to bring believers and non-believers a step closer to each other.

    The rational claim that, for the reasons stated above, religious discourse is useful because of its very irrationality, cannot avoid an element of demystification. Explaining to a believer in the Virgin Birth or in the Mormon doctrine that American Indians are the Lost Tribes of Israel that his belief has sociological value in maintaining the solidarity of his community, or that it has psychological value in tapping unconscious mental-emotional resources, nevertheless treats this belief in the rational context of scientific discourse as a delusion.

    While respecting the distinction between rational and religious discourse, GA puts the question in a new light by denying the metaphysical principle that the enunciation of true propositions is the primordial function of language. Thus rather than beginning from the standpoint that language is “naturally” rational and that the supernatural affirmations of religion require, so to speak, “strict scrutiny” to make sure that social benefits outweigh deviation from empirical truth, we begin from the hypothesis that the originary purpose of language is to defer violence by making/discovering as sacred the objects of common desire, or in secular terms, situating them on the scene of representation where their appropriation is deferred.

    But we would claim not only that this theoretical position about language origin is implicit in religious discourse itself, but that certain variants of religious discourse are not merely compatible with but actually conducive to the development of rational discourse alongside it. The development of logical and scientific reasoning, which as we know was above all successful at first among the Greek philosophers and later in the Christian West (not to deny the achievements of Islamic astronomers or Indian mathematicians), has until recently taken place superficially in conflict but more broadly in symbiosis with religious discourse. In particular, the insistence on the miraculous that is far more central to Christianity than to the other “Abrahamic” religions (and as far as I can tell, to Buddhism and Hinduism and their variants), where founding narratives are understood more as parables or even myths than as supernatural events, is paradoxically associated with the one society that gave birth to modern science. Just as Max Weber theorized that the quest for personal salvation characteristic of the Protestant Reformation was homologous to the “spirit of capitalism,” so it is likely that the paradoxical fideism of Western Christianity, both Protestant and Catholic, made it more congenial to the emergence of the hypothetical constructions of empirical science in the early modern era than, for example, Islam as practiced in the Ottoman Empire at the moment when its economic and military power made it competitive with the great nations of Europe.

    I would venture to say that the Christian insistence on credo quia absurdum, on Virgin Birth and Resurrection, on scandal to the Jews, folly to the pagans, all of which derive from the “category error” of Anselm’s Cur deus homo, God’s taking on a human persona—in a word, Christianity’s insistence on faith beyond reason—can be understood, setting aside all considerations of substantive truth in allegorical, anagogical, etc. form, as in the first place a reminder of the originary purpose of language: the avoidance of conflict through deferral of appropriation and the institution of the sign as a mutual promise of solidarity. The originary act of faith in this promise, the first moral act, precedes hope of appetitive reward, and can be said to serve as a model for the hypothetical nature of scientific discourse as well. As Jacques Derrida eventually realized, language itself is based on faith. (See “Frère Jacques,” Chronicle 340.) Whence Girard’s achievement in making Christian faith the source of a fundamental, pre-metaphysical anthropology. (Whether or not the admixture of a Jewish element was necessary in order to adapt Girard’s theory to the existence of language as a logos not simply assimilable to Jesus is not my subject here.)

    My point is not to “bridge the gap” between rational discourse based on empirical and confirmable observation and faith in Christian or other doctrine; these are indeed two different usages of language, even if the persistence of paradox, or the Gödelian incompletion of infinite logical systems, suggest the limits of rationality (and who knows, to examine from the layperson’s perspective the bizarre doctrines of modern physics, to what extent they are simply difficult to grasp without the requisite mathematical training and to what extent they conceal their own forms of paradox). No, the Virgin Birth and e=mc2 cannot be made part of the same discourse. But that the former is more fundamental to language than the latter is an anthropological fact that the post-Enlightenment world tends too easy to forget. Faith in the “absurd” is, not least, a lesson in the originary nature of language, that, put in everyday human terms, might be expressed as: “language must discover/invent a sacred to ensure peaceful communication before it can express propositional truths,” or more simply, “worldly facts are less fundamental than human love.”

    Religious faith teaches us about the use of language; but it should also teach us about language itself. The philosopher of science Bruno Latour’s Jubiler (Seuil, 2002), in which he insists eloquently that religious discourse cannot be judged according to rational-analytic criteria—using as a notable analogy to religious language the clearly ostensive example of a declaration of love—nevertheless fails to define a formal pre-declarative basis within language itself for the distinctions he so respectfully draws. This lacuna is one more residue of the faith in propositional language that lies at the foundation of Parmenidean-Platonic metaphysics. If one takes for granted that language is essentially, as in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, a collection of declarative sentences, along with an occasional “defective” imperative or “interjection” (the closest standard grammar comes to recognizing the existence of the ostensive), then religious discourse will always be understood in one way or another as “myth.” But once one realizes that language could only have emerged from animal communication as a new way of dealing with a problem of collective order that had become insoluble, and that the declarative sentence is a complex structure that could not have been the originary means of solving this problem, one is prepared for an, if not the originary hypothesis, and in consequence, to grasp the originary importance of the ostensive.

    That we cannot empirically verify the most crucial statements of religious discourse is hardly surprising. But it is worthwhile reflecting that not only is “belief in Jesus’ birth from a virgin” a lesson in originary thinking that forces the believer to accept an idea that can have no empirical foundation, that must be accepted first and then its “referent” sought in the various aspects of one’s experience, but such belief is also a lesson in originary linguistics. What religious discourse teaches us in the domain of language is that declaratives are not originary and that their roots lie in ostensives. For whether one have faith or not, one must realize that the affirmation of the Virgin Birth is not a “proposition” in the rational sense, but the translation of the ostensive presence of the sacred into propositional terms, an expression of the paradox that is inherent in any postulation of significance. We can calmly affirm, “the cat is on the mat” because other uses of representation have bought us a time of deferral that grants us the tranquility to dispassionately inspect our surroundings. But in the originary utterance that paid the price for this peace, the cat would be the divinity re-presented by the sign, and the mat, the sacred scene of its representation and sacrifice.

    A note on blasphemy

    Since religious language is in rational terms “absurd,” a secular culture, one founded on the primacy of rational discourse, cannot reasonably forbid modes of discourse that point up this absurdity, however jejune or vulgar these affirmations may appear to neutral parties and however offensive to believers. Whatever else modern society allows or forbids, it cannot forbid blasphemy, whether against traditional religions, as is today enforced virtually exclusively in Muslim countries, or against political cults such as that practiced in North Korea or Cuba.

    Many European countries, notably Germany, have laws forbidding Holocaust denial or antisemitic statements. Speaking personally, to these laws, whatever their historical justification, I prefer the American First Amendment. But whatever one’s objections to them, they are not, as polemicists sometimes claim, selective blasphemy laws whose existence demonstrates that some people are more equal than others. Holocaust denial itself deserves to be called an “article of faith” in an antisemitic cult, but to call “belief” in the reality of the Holocaust a religious doctrine is to deny the rational domain altogether. (Jean-François Lyotard points out in Le différend what might be called the anti-ostensivity of Robert Faurisson’s claim that the gas chambers never functioned: only the victims could give evidence of their functioning and they, of course…)

    As for antisemitism, the interesting thing about it is that it is a hatred not of the Jewish religion but of Jews. And if one ask, what is it about Jews that arouses this secular hostility, it is not their affinity for supernatural beliefs of the sort mocked by Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, and Hitchens, but what I have called their firstness, their primary relationship to sacred text, and as the inventors of “monotheism,” which is also, and perhaps primarily, monotextualism, to the very idea of the Sacred Text itself. The “scandalous” genius of Christianity, in deliberately insisting on its absurd faith, is among other things a “supplementary” compensation for the simpler, more originary faith of the Jews in the One God and the (consequently) universal moral truths enunciated in the language associated with him, at first in oral form but more quickly than elsewhere in antiquity in a broadly accessible written tradition.

    Blasphemy, insulting God’s name, is listed as a capital crime in Leviticus 24, but God’s naming himself as ehyeh asher ehyeh in Exodus 3 is not simply the silencing of his “proper” name but its denial, making such insult impossible and blasphemy against the Hebrew-discovered One God, effectively nugatory. On the one hand, the One God has no name and cannot therefore be called names. On the other, to deny the One God is effectively to deny God altogether, and the resulting discourse would be not blasphemous, but simply atheistic. The consequent invulnerability of the first that lets him discover this is one more way of explaining the intensity of the age-old historical resentment of antisemitism.

    Christianity has historically been much more sensitive to the idea of blasphemy, and one might expect that the burden of Christian faith that we have been discussing would make Christian authorities more sensitive than Jewish ones to details of dogma. And as a means of expressing hostility to Christianity, the desecration of Christian images has flourished in the West from the French Revolution to Piss Christ. But when all is said and done, the Crucifixion is already the ultimate desecration; what Saul/Paul found out on the road to Damascus was that insulting Christ is just a way of worshiping him. Christian faith, in sum, need have no fear of blasphemy.

    Islam, in contrast, has very little dogma. Its hypersensitivity to blasphemy is one with its denial of historical filiation with the older religions from which its traditions derive, a denial whose anti-historicism has been vastly intensified in reaction to the modern era that the Christians and Jews have created. Muslim theocrats who assert the Koran’s timelessness cannot mediate, as can Jews and Christians, between their sacred text and the truly atemporal discourse of scientific reason. This suggests that it is only with the demise of Muslim blasphemy laws and a renewed effort at such mediation that the Islamic world will become integrated into the global world of modernity.