Author: staceymeeker

This issue contains four articles derived from presentations at our highly successful joint GASC-COV&R-JGA (Japan Girard Association) conference in Tokyo in July, and an article by Adam Katz, who didn’t make it to Tokyo. The Japan conference idea was originally the brainchild of my former colleague and Anthropoetics contributor Herbert Plutschow, who after retirement from UCLA’s Asian Languages and Cultures Department had become a dean at Josai International University in Japan. Sadly, Herb died suddenly from a heart attack before his idea could come to fruition, but our joint conference was in part a monument to his memory.

What I find particularly impressive about this issue is that all five contributors engage with GA at a fundamental level rather than merely attempt to “apply” it to a text or other cultural artifact. Our group may be small, but its ideas are alive and well!

Two of the articles deal with cultural phenomena that go beyond the textual. Ian Dennis uses the occasion of a roadside memorial to ask the fundamental question of how the anthropological structure of tragedy can be applied to the “tragedies” of daily life. Matthew Taylor‘s discussion of the troubling phenomenon of Japanese recluses contrasts the relevance of GA with that of Girardian “MT” in dealing with such social issues. Edmond Wright‘s subtle and witty article on the Summum Bonum moves analytic philosophy one more step closer to GA. Andrew Bartlett‘s powerful piece on Apocalypse makes a strong argument for originary thinking, with a number of citations to back up his analysis. And Adam Katz‘s article on antisemitism links “the Jewish question” to Adam’s preoccupation with linguistic constructs and the “errors” through which they evolve in a most original fashion.

About Our Contributors

Andrew Bartlett teaches academic writing and literary criticism at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, British Columbia, Canada.  He has published poems, book reviews, articles on Joseph Conrad and Cormac McCarthy, and essays in generative anthropology.  He is an active member of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion and president of GASC, the Generative Anthropology Society and Conference.  His interpretation of the Frankenstein myth in the light of the originary hypothesis, Mad Scientist, Impossible Human, is a book forthcoming from Davies Group Publishers.  He lives in Vancouver with his partner Joanne and their West Highland terrier, Ceilidgh.

Ian Dennis is Professor of English at the University of Ottawa, and was the Chief Organiser of the 2009 GA Conference there. He is Secretary-Treasurer of the Generative Anthropology Society and Conference (GASC). He is the author of four novels, of the Girardian study Nationalism and Desire in Early Historical Fiction (Macmillan 1997), and of Lord Byron and the History of Desire (Delaware 2009), a work of literary criticism making substantial use of both Mimetic Theory and Generative Anthropology.

Adam Katz is the editor of The Originary Hypothesis: A Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry, a recently published collection of essays on Generative Anthropology. He teaches writing at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, and is presently at work on a new book on and in originary thinking tentatively titled Beginnings in the Middle: Originary Grammar, Remembering Firstness and Retrieving the Ostensive in Modern Semiosis.

Matthew Taylor is Professor of English at Kinjo Gakuin University in Nagoya, Japan. He teaches courses in English as a Foreign Language (EFL), academic writing, teacher training, and culture. He has written and presented on EFL pedagogy, literature, and mimetic theory. He has co-authored textbooks for EFL students, including two for academic writing (Cengage Learning) and one for oral communication skills (Macmillan Languagehouse). His previous articles for Anthropoetics explored mimetic elements in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and the phenomenon of social isolation in Japan. The article for the present issue further explores the latter topic.

Edmond Wright holds degrees in English and philosophy and a doctorate in philosophy. He is a member of the Board of Social Theory of the International Sociological Association, and was sometime a Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for the Advanced Study of the Social Sciences, Uppsala.  He has edited The Ironic Discourse (Poetics Today, 4, 1983), New Representationalisms: Essays in the Philosophy of Perception (Avebury, 1993), Faith and the Real (Paragraph, 24, 2001), and The Case for Qualia (MIT Press, forthcoming, May 2008), and has co-edited with his wife Elizabeth The Zizek Reader, (Blackwell, 1999) and is author of Narrative, Perception, Language, and Faith (Macmillan, 2005).  Over sixty articles of his have appeared in the philosophical journals.  He has also published two volumes of poetry.

I recently came across an essay by Renate Stendhal, who has written an excellent photobiography of Gertrude Stein, in Tikkun Magazine, “Why the Witch-Hunt Against Gertrude Stein?” Stendhal examines the recent kerfuffle over the White House’s inclusion of Stein in its official statement on Jewish Heritage Month. Stendhal details the campaign by the New York State Assemblyman Dov Hilkind, celebrity attorney Alan Dershowitz and others to represent Stein’s experience in Vichy France during WWII as evidence of Nazi and fascist sympathies and collaborationism. Stendhal’s essay disposes of these accusations decisively, and I’m not interested in reiterating the argument here—to take just one example, an obviously ironic suggestion in an interview in the late 30s that Hitler be given the Nobel Peace Prize has been ludicrously inflated into the assertion that Stein “campaigned” for Hitler to be given the prize. The real question is, why engage in these bouts of what is nothing other than what traditional Judaism calls lashon-hara, the evil tongue, or malicious slandering, especially of one’s compatriots?

These mini-civil wars, destructive of ancient Israel and transcended by Rabbinic Judaism, seem to be endemic to secular Judaism—I would bet that some historian will someday (if not, unknown to me, already) uncover something of the kind in the Trotskyist-Stalinist battles of 30s, and that is what we see in the formerly liberal and leftist neo-conservatives as they battle those Jewish leftists they left behind. Dov Hilkind is an orthodox Jew and Dershowitz is still a liberal democrat, but that’s beside the point—I am referring to a polemical style, one especially in evidence when issues of Israel and anti-semitism are foregrounded, which is lingua franca across the spectrum. As someone politically sympathetic to the participants in this style, and even perhaps given to it at times myself, I am occasionally shocked by its ruthlessness and desire for excommunication. (Maybe it goes back to Spinoza’s expulsion from the Amsterdam Jewish community. Or the polemics against idolatry in the Old Testament.) I would prefer to think that someone saw the opportunity for a cheap shot at the Obama Administration, but the animus toward the ambiguously Jewish like Stein seems to me the primary motivation. Look at how self-appointed representatives of the Jewish community write about Hannah Arendt, to this day—it’s as if Eichmann in Jerusalem was published yesterday, the hatred is still white hot. It is the hatred you have for one who has broken a sacred covenant and, even more, exposed the tenuousness of those covenants tying one to the “others.”

Pierre Manent, in “City, Church, Empire, Nation,” in the latest issue of City Journal (a neo-connish publication) examines the origins of modernity in the search for the “authoritative word” which had been lost in the Christian world due to the growing gap between Christian saying and the actual doing in the world (a gap most vividly brought to the surface by Machiavelli), what he calls “an unmanageable gap between speech and action.” This desire is not specific to pre-modern Europe, even if the otherworldly nature of medieval Christianity in tension with emergent economies made it especially pressing. So, if “[t]he regimes that we call “totalitarian” are those capable of bringing together the most unbridled and terrible action with the most pedantic ideological and linguistic orthodoxy,” that testifies to the urgency of this need fpr authority as well as its historical character. Presumably, there can be a “manageable” gap between word and deed, because there is always some gap, insofar as the word emerges as a deferral of the deed. But the deferral is itself the first deed, and the desire to close that gap is nothing other than the originary and constitutive desire for a scene, the only reality we as humans can know. How is it possible to live without experiencing some regular connection between the explicit and the tacit, between the declaratives one issues throughout the day and the ostensives and imperatives grounding one in tangible realities?

We create those tangible realities through agreements, hundreds and thousands of them, tacit and explicit, every day, and pathologies like Jew hatred and lashon-hara amongst supposed brothers and sisters are signs that the agreements are breaking down. Perhaps it’s the otherworldliness and increasingly ramshackle metaphysics and theologies of “democracy” and “rights” that now open the gap between word and deed to increasingly intolerable levels. Accusing one another of breaking faith in the agreements is the least likely way to restore them—such accusations are further proof that, as Arendt argued, the thread tying us to tradition, that is, to publicly known (if mythological) agreements, has been cut. It might be best to start acknowledging that Western civilization, as a unique and especially productive cultural form, predicated upon a paradoxical imperial anti-imperialism, has simply reached its limits. There is no need for resentment here, no need to blame Western civilization for the ills of the world, or indict its enemies, or demand affirmations of faith in its superiority, just as there is no need to blame Newtonian physics for reaching the limits of the paradigm it initiated. Rather, we can start to look for the elements of a new paradigm, which is admittedly far more difficult in the case of civilizations than sciences, but we can have a general idea of where to look: our constitution as signifying beings, as bearers of signs rather than as represented and representing through the transparency of signs. The sanctity of the individual as the limit beyond which signs cannot penetrate was always bound to be qualified by hedges and dodges, and the notion of individual “sacrifice” to be vulgarized and ultimately parodied. The sanctity of linguistic innovation or, more minimally, linguistic slippage, may be more durable, insofar as it does nothing more than remind us of the vulnerability of joint attention to violent efforts at imposing a singular focus.

The minimalism of the originary hypothesis can be evoked in these broader moral and political contexts. It may be better to set aside the “big” questions, like equality vs. liberty, faith vs. reason, liberty vs. authority, the beautiful vs. the sublime, etc. Better for some inquiries, at any rate. We can simply ask, where do we see instances of joint attention? All the time, no doubt, but what does it look like? We can deviate from jointness by either allowing ourselves to be distracted away from what others are looking at or through fixation, in which we attend to something to the point where we are unable to show others what we see. We can roll all of what we call “morality” into the simple obligation to sustain the jointness of attention, which also means, in an expression that I can’t make sound less trivial, just keeping things interesting.

Hostage taking, even in its form of giving ourselves over as hostages, is unavoidably violent—the trick will be to allow such self-sacrifice to those who feel it as a vocation, to allow as much of hostage taking as we will still continue to need, to provide due attention to those who will feel compelled to synecdochize themselves for others—while keeping only the due attention, that limited to those vocations. The problem of sustaining jointness is an esthetic but ultimately pedagogical one—it is the problem of creating out of ourselves and the scenes in which we participate little plays that “catch the conscience”: obstacles to completing activities that don’t annoy but redirect attention just enough so that it can dwell on our voluntary convergence upon those activities.

The best way of doing this is through the creation of idioms out of errors: mistakes, or those iterations of the sign that disrupt attention toward the center can be taken as occasions for excluding those who pollute the scene of joint attention or as testimony to the desire for jointness. The former leads to ridicule, denunciation and failing grades (all of which are, no doubt, within certain rigorously defined contexts, or local paradigms, necessary); the latter lead to the renewal of signs and the invention of means for affirming jointness. Stein’s own work is rich in examples of this kind of move, but I’ll give an especially pertinent example cited by Stendhal in her refutation of the vicious charges against Stein, in this case regarding her project of translating for an American audience Marshal Petain’s speeches:

When the Vichy Régime chose Pétain as prime minister, Stein hoped—naively, blindly—that he would guarantee France’s protection from Nazi Germany and recognition from America. This view was shared by the American Department of State. At the Time of Stein’s translation project, Vichy France was not (yet) at war with America; in Pétain’s Unoccupied Zone, the Zone Libre, where Gertrude and Alice’s country house was located, American Jews lived freely, especially if—like Gertrude and eventually Alice—they were over sixty-five years old. Charles Glass points out that no Americans were interned in the Unoccupied Zone. Stein’s hope for Pétain’s France was encouraged when, according to Rogers, “the Franco-American Committee . . . asked her to translate for her compatriots Marshal Pétain’s messages.” If Stein acted out of her concern for France, it is still a puzzle how she felt about the repressive content of these speeches, the fascist and anti-Semitic tendencies in some of Pétain’s “messages.”

Even Barbara Will is baffled. She doesn’t know what to make of the translation, because Stein didn’t really do it. She hand-wrote a draft of some thirty speeches dated from 1939 to 1940, in a language that renders them unreadable. As we know from computer gobbledygook, word-by-word translations don’t make sense; they are a joke. But that is exactly what Stein did. Here is one of many examples Will gives: “’Ils se méprendront les uns et les autres’ — a speech denouncing Pétain’s critics – is translated “But they are mistaken the ones and the others.”

Will ponders that perhaps Stein had such an admiration for the old man that every word of his had to be honored in and of itself. Maybe Stein wasn’t fluent in French, some commentators have proposed. She had spent almost four decades in France and had written and published in French. Others have wondered about her English proficiency. Stein, the recent bestselling author of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, certainly was able to write straight-forward English. One is tempted to speculate in the same manner Will does, but in the opposite direction. What if Stein found the content absurd but was fascinated by the language, the archaic French tonality of the old soldier that could only be rendered as some hermetic prose-poetry?

Barbara Will ponders ungenerously, attributing the unintelligibility of Stein’s translations to blind hero worship of an old fascist collaborator; Renate Stendhal’s more generous reading sees Stein as mistaking Petain’s writing and becoming more interested in the violations of the rules of translation and genre upon which she found herself embarked. Stendhal is herself a bit upset at this project of Stein’s, so she includes in her hypothesis the assumption that Stein “found the content absurd,” but this assumption is really unnecessary—what matters is that, regardless of her feelings for Petain’s politics, the drift into a new mode of potentially joint attention is more engaging.

There is a kind of minimal Gnosticism in Stein’s absolute valorization of the present, and her “lowering of the threshold of significance”(1) such that everything becomes equally meaningful might be less violent than the faith and hope of more mainstream Western discourses. We always know something—lots of things, in fact—even if what we know in a given case is that Petain’s speeches can become “hermetic prose poems” when translated over-literally into English. Even false claims manifest some knowledge: if I claim “you are the devil,” I at least know that certain appearances of and around you can be pieced together in such a way, and from a certain perspective, and within such a situation, as to project something demonic. Even if my fever passes and I realize you are, as you always were, my good friend (that is to say, I know that now), that other knowledge need not be rejected. And such knowledge, like any knowledge, can only be acquired through the determined closing off of all areas of reality that might interfere with that piecing together upon which I am engaged that constitutes joint attention; areas of reality that might be more productively opened as my ongoing learning process continues to lower further the threshold of significance lowered by the attention paid to my latest representation. Hope and faith try to make a ritualized version of some scene real; a minimal Gnosticism just names the event and invites others to make the name fit. (As an experiment, if you eliminate in a particular discourse all uses of terms like “hope” and “faith,” along with related terms like “believe,” perhaps even ones further afield like “assume”—you will be left with stark and limited assertions of knowledge, such as “there is only x as far as the eye can see with the sliver of some new thing we might call ‘y’ that suggests an already diminishing likelihood of some ‘z’”)

So, we always know and are always mistaken; this duality derives from the plurality of the originary scene where each can only know the other’s gesture by exaggerating it in some way, and can only recognize one’s own gesture in the other’s exaggeration. There is no exaggeration, as the term makes no sense outside of some normalized frame of reference, while it is precisely such a frame of reference that is created on the originary scene; and, yet, there is exaggeration or ostentation because part of one’s knowledge of the scene is the possibility that it will dissolve momentarily—that possibility of imminent dissolution is the measure or frame of reference against which the exaggeration, stylization or ostentation occurs. We can, following Stein, assert that only the living and not destruction are interesting, and that might be a natural stance, but it also involves giving significance to, further lowering the level of signification to register, those living things threatened with or obscured by destruction. In fact, only the living and peace-giving can be meaningful, and if we grant meaning to destruction we end up granting to destruction and evil creative potentials they cannot possess. When we know something, then, what it is we know is the significance of which thing must have its profile raised so as to lower the general threshold of significance, which thing we must attend to so that we can attend from it in turn to our shared attention.

It is the mistake, or anomaly if you like, that discloses the endangered reality whose profile must be raised, because in the mistake the constitution of the rules governing any scene by the sheer desire for the shared ostensive is revealed. The thing to be attended to is the idiom constructed out of the mistake, the affirmation of the desire informing the scene. If we keep raising the profile of endangered realities, our lives would get more eventful and more idiosyncratic—meaning would get made out of less and less; while at the same time our culture would get less scenic, insofar as the closure required for the scenic imagination is more effectively deferred. To an outside observer (like most of us now towards this largely hypothetical cultural development), such beings seem unspeakably trivial, concerned, maybe, with forms of greeting and leave-taking, shows of appreciation and deprecation, esthetic arrangements drawing attention to the normally neglected, fascinated by strata of agreement and agreeability. But while there is no guarantee, there is also no reason why this sensibility cannot support a readiness to defend itself against those impatient for definitive closure, even if more through subversion, mockery, withdrawal of cooperation and instigation of deconstructive elements than outright opposition. (If we had such a culture right now we would simply withdraw our embassies from the Arab and Muslim world—more or less—and expel theirs from our country, along with anyone overtly sympathetic to Islamic-sponsored violence, post more blasphemous YouTube videos to drive them crazy and encourage self-doubt—and this, of course, would mean that we’d be willing to take the hit in higher oil—and other—prices, while getting to our own drilling.)

Jewish firstness, its self-understanding through founding agreements, is further bound up with the injunction to “inscribe these words on your heart”—this metaphor of interior writing, which we see in the natural law theories of early modernity, articulates the permanency of the written word with the disciplining of the soul to obedience. The more written-on the soul becomes, the more responsible one becomes to take that writing to “heart.” While the metaphor, as David Carr shows in his Writing on the Tablets of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature, precedes ancient Israel’s systems of writing and education, going back to the Egyptian and Mesopotamian systems, what is new in Judaism is the conclusion Brian Rotman points to in Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts and Distributed Human Being: “[i]f prosody is absent from a voice, then the bearer of such a voice is unknowable in an auditory sense as an individual, as a speaking being among others. . . . Thus it is with the alphabetic God who exists and ‘speaks” only as a voiceless writer. Short of invoking a plurality of indistinguishable and interchangeable speakers (like identical atoms or mathematical units), a toneless voice can only invoke a singularity, a one-and-only, self-identical entity comparable to nothing outside of itself; a monobeing who is not merely one of a kind but is its kind” (121-2). Perhaps Israel’s location on the margin of ancient empire, along with the transience of its own imperial and (especially) ritual institutions, enabled it to take this final step in constructing and worshiping that monobeing, and in construing morality as the construction of the inner self, or the conscience, as the inscription of not merely the words of tradition but of that one-and-only on one’s own inner constitution. This was a forward looking metaphor insofar as writing in ancient Israel, as in ancient Greece, Mesopotamia, and Egypt would have first of all involved a means of and therefore would have been secondary to the oral recitation and memorization of canonical texts. The injunction to inscribe the words of the one-and-only on the heart would seem to go beyond memorization to a kind of individual being capable of tonalizing without infringing upon the toneless voice of God, making it transportable, and hence of shaping individual action beyond traditional strictures. The prophetic polemics against legalisms and ritual obedience devoid of inner intention that were so central to defining the exemplarity of Israel suggest that preserving, revering, even ingesting the written word led to the decisive displacement of the ancient imperial cosmologies by attacking any Israelite practices reminiscent of them. Such an inscribed being would revel in its ability to make and adhere to agreements of all kinds, and would mark its distinctiveness, or holiness, as a people, in such terms.

At the same time, though, once that thread connecting us to the monobeing’s self-revelation is cut, we might find ourselves with the alternative Rotman posits: with the written word as evoking a “plurality of indistinguishable and interchangeable speakers,” perhaps inscribed one on top of the other, palimpsest style, on our hearts. Such a model would certainly conform better to contemporary electronic communications systems, and carry with it the equally powerful injunction to allow for as many voices as we can bear (and to strive to learn to bear more) without trying to reduce their toneless anonymity to familiar polemics. The question would then always be, which voice needs to be allowed to come through unfiltered so as to preserve this general anonymity, to prevent all the other voices from identifying themselves by drowning out this one? Maybe the name of this plurality of voices is “everyone be anyone,” but there are certainly innumerable other possibilities. And maybe that flip side of the Jewish model of God, thought, and conscience will take us all out of the system of anti-Semitism as we simply act on the agreements we must already have made rather than demanding compliance with an ultimately dubitable interpretation of some explicit one.

David Gelernter, in The Muse in the Machine: Computerizing the Poetry of Human Thought, proposes that we think about human thought as lying on a spectrum from “low focus” to “high focus.” Along the spectrum lie different modes of attention, and making use of Michael Polanyi’s distinction between “attending from” and “attending to,” we can say that low focus thinking lowers the boundary between the “from” and the “to,” while high focus thinking raises and reinforces the barrier. When the barrier is high—when we work rigorously, abstractly, theoretically—we maintain our focus on one central object or question, and reduce all other objects and questions to a subsidiary role, interesting only insofar as they enhance our attention to that central object. We could say that we construct an impermeable scene, with nowhere to look but at that central object. When the barrier is low, then the thing I was just attending from might now turn into that which I attend to, in which cases relations between lines of thought become metaphorical and affective rather than logical. Here, we might say that we have created less a scene than a thoroughfare across scenes, with no a priori relation between those scenes, as an object, however marginal, on one scene can be the pretext for the evocation of another.

There must always be a spectrum of thought from low to high focus, but the advent of writing makes the high focus end much higher, and so we can safely associate cultures in which low focus thinking is valued with orality and those where it is denigrated or ignored with literacy. The declarative sentence scopes or blends two scenes (which neither speaker nor hearer need have personally witnessed) onto a single scene, the scene of utterance, and is therefore the place where the spectrum is created: the two scoped or blended scenes or inputs can shed their original features in as tight a focus as the most urgent ostensive; or the declarative whole can dissolve back into the multiplicity of scenes. With writing the declarative sentence is made the object of inquiry and elevated so as to present itself as exemplary of language as such, leading to an enormous effort in tightening the declarative scene and preventing its collapse back into its elements. Jewish culture, meanwhile, has valued low focus in a way that Western rationalism has not (in large part through a textual mysticism), but insofar as monotheism has joined the mainstream of world culture through Greek-inflected Christianity, the “toneless” voice of the “one-and-only” has tended to participate in stifling the lower focus side of the spectrum. If a shift might be afoot from “I am that I am” to “everyone be someone,” that is, from that one toneless voice to an infinity of voices, then a tolerance, even desire, for the lower focus would result.

The reason I advance this argument by way of Gelernter’s book is that he provides us with an astonishing analysis of an extremely opaque (that is, low focus) and seemingly marginal story in the Bible that helps me to tie this concluding concern into my early discussion of Judaism, anti-semitism and anti-anti-semitism as a kind of cycle of hostage taking.

The story is in Exodus 4:24-26, and here it is, in Gelernter’s translation:

It happened on the road, at an overnight stopping place, that the Lord met him [Moses] and tried to kill him. But Tzipporah took a flint, cut off her son’s foreskin and touched it to his feet; she said “You are my bloody bridegroom!” And he withdrew from him. That was when she said “bloody bridegroom” with respect to circumcision. (165)

Gelernter shows that we can only make sense of this story by allowing ourselves to follow a nightmare logic of moods and associations, organized around Moses’s return to Egypt, where he faces the unresolved issue of his being a wanted man. Gelernter also makes a very plausible case that we are to assume that Moses has never told his wife or Midianite in-laws that he is in fact a Hebrew and not an Egyptian (this would, for one thing, account for his son not yet having been circumcised). The crime he committed in Egypt is likely to be revealed, and so is his hitherto concealed identity, and so it makes sense that Moses would imagine that God is coming to kill him just as God would soon come to kill the Pharaoh’s first-born son. Indeed, Gelernter reminds us, in Exodus the Jews are referred to as God’s first-born son, and “[f]irst-borns are forfeit before the Lord” (170, italics Gelernter’s). Circumcision is the symbolic redemption of the first-born Jewish son, in place of his sacrifice. This is not Gelernter’s conclusion, but I would say that through circumcision Jews redeem themselves from the human sacrifice that would otherwise be demanded in a culture consumed with hostage taking, transferring the two roles of hostage taker and redeemer to God. (Maybe this helps to explain another, so far minor manifestation of contemporary anti-Semitism: the mania for outlawing circumcision.)

I posed the problem of knowledge: how to determine which voice among the innumerable ones we access through texts, through any text, we should raise the profile of so as to keep all the voices interchangeable. A voice, I would say, onto which we can project a blend akin to the blend this one small part of the Exodus story, in Gelernter’s reading, projects onto God: hostage taker, killer, redeemer. As we lower the threshold of significance (in which writing and now electronic media aid greatly), the blends will be of lower stakes and the event ever deferred, so perhaps we get annoyance, nuisance, and pleasure as the qualities borne by a particular voice asking that its profile be raised. We know that we have directed our attention to those features of the voice that might be taken as annoying, even a nuisance, and that we turn our attention yet another way so as to find it, nevertheless, somewhat pleasurable—thereby opening up a low focus channel for finding other things to be annoying, a nuisance, and pleasurable in new ways. Indeed, anything can partake of all of these qualities. And then things barely signify at different thresholds of attentiveness, articulated in ways that register only through carefully formed acts of attention.

And when the time comes to raise the level of significance again, maybe we will be able to treat those who would take us hostage through such blends as voices among innumerable ones that we single out as a point of attention so as to ensure that everyone can continue to be anyone. Maybe the language of escalation and crisis is all used up (maybe that’s why 9/11 never really became representable in American culture) and it will never be “1938” again—and maybe a more horizontal rhetoric in dealing with, say, the Iranian nuclear program will work better. Maybe if we note that the program is an unpleasant nuisance, then a disturbance, one we find unsettling, and still can’t quite turn away from, we would actually act in a manner proportionate to the words and do what one does with disturbing, unsettling nuisances that don’t go away—but, then, get interesting, a chance to try something out. The world won’t come to an end if the Iranians get the bomb, or even if they use it; but by the same token, it won’t come to an end if we find the shortest and most decisive way to make sure they don’t get it. If we have to focus on the Iranians because they constitute a threat, we would want to focus on them in such a way that the upsurge in attention we must direct their way gets dissipated as soon as possible. I certainly don’t know how, exactly, but it might involve taking up positions within their language, inside their attentive space, as infidels, as unruly dhimmis, as rogue interpreters of the Koran. In other words, figure out ways of spreading their attention out, so that the entire situation becomes one of language learning all around.

We can never redeem ourselves from hostage taking altogether—the very attempt to do so generates new spates of hostage takers alert to the slightest sign of vulnerability; and the creation of spaces free of hostage taking, which is to say spaces where relationships can be formed and broken at any time and on any pretext or even none whatsoever, requires a willingness to stand in place in cases where those spaces attract the resentment of others. Anyone can, though, rather than delivering oneself to the most available taker, discover what one has become hostage to simply by following, through its linguistic turns, the line of potentially joint attention to the minimally distinguishable anonymous voice, until one finds oneself with a set of commitments, a mode of inquiry, and a sense of rights and duties to some others. Maybe what Charles Sanders Peirce called “musement,” or idle curiosity, or a pataphysical study of the unique and exceptional, or devotional meditation and prayer, or simple tinkering, is the best guide. And anyone can be curious about the boundary between the normal and the anomalous, the taken-as and the mistaken.

The Scene

On Carling Avenue, in Ottawa, just west of Woodrofe, in the grassed median, is a small wooden erection, half-collapsed, possibly but not certainly a cross, the remains of something floral—perhaps plastic—and of a brown and yellow teddy-bear. In short, a “makeshift” or “roadside memorial.” I go by it regularly, and am watching it gradually disintegrate. More than once someone riding at my side has murmured “tragic.” Doubtless expressions that include the same word are voiced in the privacy of other passing cars.

Genre or Experience

Tragedy has been said by various commentators to have died, but people do continue to use the word and its cognates. What is the status of the term now? Is it a debased or dying analogy, or a category error? As Susan Sontag long ago pointed out, to ask such questions is a form of social or cultural critique.(1) Are we asking then if a human capacity the term once invoked has likewise been diluted or dispersed? Given the apparent seriousness of the contexts in which people—in all apparent sincerity—sometimes deploy it, would it be fair to claim this? On the other hand, might an attempt to retain it be a mere expression of self-righteousness, a resentful claiming of its authority for the naive language user, the non-elite, as it clearly has been with such left-wing defenders as Raymond Williams and, more recently, Terry Eagleton?(2) In the context of such all-encompassing struggles for centrality, for identity, perhaps some human response, once evoked by tragedy, really has been left behind.

Whatever it now signifies, however, it does seem anthropologically dubious to ignore such a pervasive usage. Current users of the word clearly and often do aspire to reflect sentiments more significant (to them) than those conveyed by a dead metaphor, or a watered-down banality. At the same time, it would certainly be rash to ignore a debate which has, at the least, made problematic the present status of the dramatic genre. This paper will approach the matter by firstly seeing it as a question about a contemporary experience, rather than about the form of the representation which evoked that experience. It will then bring its findings to a comparison with the experience apparently generated by the ancient form, through different phases of its history, in order to estimate a degree of cultural change or continuity. This will be attempted through an originary analysis of a response to one recent memorial to—representation of—a putatively tragic death.

GA on the History of Tragic Representations

It might seem that Generative Anthropology has already narrated the death of tragedy, in ways not entirely inconsistent with those offered, for example, by George Steiner in his well-known book of 1961. Eric Gans has described this event in several different ways. The audience of classical tragedy, for example, “identified with the centrality [it] resented and [was] alienated from the centrality it desired. . the protagonist’s suffering [was] experienced as the price of worldly centrality” and indeed tragedy could only emerge in a society that has developed a hierarchical organisation, or retains it. “Oedipus was the object of both resentment and admiration among the Thebans” and the audience was “both relieved and saddened by his downfall. These emotions [were] not simply correlated to ‘pity’ and ‘terror.’ The crux posed by Aristotle’s famous sentence results from the fact that the two emotions are not really on the same plane of esthetic experience. What terrifies us is that resentment—our own resentment—has succeeded; we pity its victim. But in the act of pity, the fallen protagonist is no longer an object of resentment; he is a human being like ourselves.”(3)

The ethical lesson of tragedy in this period was therefore ne quid nimis, which is familiarly “moderation in all things” but that Gans makes, “avoid centrality.” You do not want to be there. But this lesson changes with history, and with it the genre, so that the Romantic-era “equivalent of tragedy is not the . . chastisement of a tyrant but the victimization of a superior individual, who is in at least unconscious complicity with the operation.” What Romantic tragedy—or call it melodrama—teaches is the “the infinite value of self-centred subjectivity. .[which] at any price can never be sold too dear in the marketplace.” You want the centre, and here’s how to get it.(4)

More recently Gans has written that “until the postmodern era, Western culture had always maintained the subordination of the ethical paradox to the fundamental paradox of the human. Tragedy, and the literary modes that derive from it, are structured by this subordination. . . The ‘end of tragedy,’ which so troubled the early romantics, corresponds to the beginning of the denial of the transcendent status of the primary human paradox over the second. When the human comes to be defined exclusively in terms of the oppression of one group by another, the problematizing of esthetic resolution is a symptom of this critical, albeit historically productive, anthropological misunderstanding.”(5)

Or, more simply, the “automatic exclusion of the self from the centre,” which for Gans is finally fundamental to tragedy, “could not survive the coming of Christianity, with its foregrounding of the moral equality of all.”(6)

Tragedy and Tragic Effect

These and other useful conceptualizations locate what is crucial to tragedy in the experience of the audience. Or perhaps more precisely, in a suite of experiences—resentment, desire, fear, pity, even paradoxicality itself—undergone by the audience. The formal requirements—which were much more central to Aristotle’s definition—are largely reduced to a configuration of centre and periphery, with a representation of suffering taking place in the former, and the defining experience occurring in the latter, albeit mediated by the presence of other actors on the centralizing stage. Historical change need not be reflected in alterations of this formal structure. The human being in the centre always suffers, and indeed Romantic and post-Romantic tragedy may strive to preserve the prestigious ancient forms. But the Romantic audience has a different experience, draws a different lesson. Antigone or Cassandra are undoubtedly superior individuals, and a Romantic or a fortiori a postmodern audience somehow able to watch them go to their deaths on a classical stage would surely think of them as victims. Doubtless playwrights in either era facilitate—teach—these responses, but their intentions are not the determinant factor. The intended lesson may not be taken. What makes melodrama or tragedy takes place in the audience.

A “suite of experiences” we might for present purposes call the tragic effect. This Gans more generally refers to as an “aesthetic effect,” and indeed “the true scene of aesthetic value is not the public stage but the individual scene of representation.”(7) But the question we pursue here requires us to try to isolate a specifically tragic mode of this effect. Even if it is true that for the classical audience “the notion of a ‘real-life tragedy’ would be inconceivable,”(8) this is a question of form or content, and not of effect. Is there an effect which may be common to classical and contemporary audiences? Is it possible, to put it another way, to distinguish a tragic aesthetic effect from a melodramatic one, and ask if the former can or still does occur here and now?

To locate the tragic effect in audience experience has already implied the possibility of different audience responses to the same forms. We gestured this way just now, when we imagined post-moderns admiring Antigone. The functional unanimity of the originary scene—it only is a scene for those who stay to gaze and repeat, who become human—must also be an aspect of its uniqueness. Never again would it necessarily be unanimous: on subsequent occasions, even under the powerful compulsions of ritual, even if a now-human being cannot choose but understand the sign, can never be indifferent to it, it is in principle possible for him or her not to imitate it, to ignore it and draw away, even perhaps to resent not the sacred centre but the call to imitate its designation. Even if this is vanishingly rare and difficult at first—as hard as it still is to resist the contagious passion of an enveloping mob—it is a measure of cultural history that it becomes increasingly easy, and that the available responses multiply. Till at last, in a market, one must take one’s tragedies, as one takes one’s sacralities, where one finds them, “disseminated,” optional, evanescent. But even the claim of the partisans of classical tragedy that the Athenian theatre encapsulated an entire and admirably unified community is surely a sentimental exaggeration. Did no one stay home? Did no one’s mind wander? Did no one fail to desire, identify or resent? So, inversely, may we not ask if the tragic effect remains possible in an individual response to a representation consensually judged non-tragic, in a broadly anti-tragic age?

Features of the Tragic and Melodramatic Effects

What is crucial, in originary terms? Like other aesthetic effects, or events, the tragic effect may be expected to have two phases, “oscillations” perhaps but of potentially quite varied periods.(9) The phases are firstly an identification with, and thus resentment of the “worldly centrality” of another human being, and secondly a peace made with that resentment, in an indeterminate but temporary period of aesthetic satisfaction in the sign, which functions as a renunciation of desire for the centre. The passage from resentment to peace, in tragedy, is marked by some degree of recognition, on the part of the viewer, of the implication of his or her own desires in the creation of the centre and thus the suffering—the sacrificial suffering—of that human being. This is a moral recognition, involving the inalienable sense of human equality violated by the presence in the centre of the tragic hero, but recuperated in a pitying concern for him. The entire process involves, as Gans calls it, an “aesthetic resolution” or acceptance of the most fundamental paradox of human desire, that we desire what we do not desire, that worldly desire finds its complement in unworldly or virtual satisfaction in the sign, which is also a sacrifice of that desire. This resolution or effect is, however, like all aesthetic experience, unstable and temporary.

What, by contrast, is basic to the melodramatic aesthetic effect? It too has phases. Desire for and resentment of worldly centrality are here, however, more directly resolved into imagined satisfaction, a sparagmos. Rather than implicating desire in the sacrificial violence converging upon the centre, rather than of fleeing that centre, the melodramatic experience is of storming it on a wave of sentiment generated by the intuition of human moral equality. In effect rejecting the tragic-aesthetic resolution and its quietus, its peace, this experience ends not a with a pitying concern for another, one’s own victim, but with an identification with him or her or them—which thus engenders a self-pity, even if that may to variable degrees be displaced from the imagined self of those feeling it onto surrogates or clients or fellow-sufferers. Its investments are at any rate fundamentally ethical in character—urgently altruistic or self-indulgent or somewhere between as the case may be—seeking adjustments to social relations, a relocation or redistribution of centrality in the guise of a protest against any human occupation of it. As such, they almost invariably feature villainy and villains of some kind—that is, easily displaced pseudo-claimants on centrality—objects of a resentment, concomitant with self-pity, more readily and pleasurably gratified than that of the tragic effect. The melodramatic effect is also, however, unstable and temporary.

We may easily recognise, of course, a risk of question-begging here, in establishing definitions which may prove convenient to our argument. The previous two paragraphs are thus merely our best attempt to reflect established GA principles, the overall set of assumptions upon which the argument proceeds.

Makeshift Memorials as Melodramas

A certain scholarship has developed around makeshift memorials and similar “spontaneous” phenomena, but most of it has been concerned with reading into them the motives and purposes of those establishing them. This scholarship, although estimable at times, is thus compromised for present purposes by what a literary scholar would call the “intentional fallacy.” For example,

the introduction of one anthology of writings devoted to such memorials ascribes to their erectors a list of motives which include “marking locations,” “memorializing what happened,” “expressing grief and sorrow,” “precipitating new actions in the social and political sphere,” “protesting” and “asking for social change,” “seeking to understand what has happened,” “asking for responsibilities,” “managing in situ the emotional consequences of traumatic death,” and “making premature deaths . . meaningful.”(10) As this list suggests, the scholarship is somewhat prone, after it has talked about them as “coping mechanisms” and so forth, to conceive of the memorials as what one influential scholar of the subject has deemed, explicitly evoking J. L Austin, examples of “performativity.”(11) The general tenor of these analyses is to see the memorials primarily as expressions of resentment: protests against the behaviour of other people or institutions; separate, more “spontaneous,” “sincere” and “authentic” rivals to the established order of mourning performed by churches and governments; “democratic” and “local” resistance to an oppressive and unresponsive universality.(12) That is, many scholars read such memorials, starting from their humble and makeshift forms, as outcries against usurped centrality and attempts at reclamation thereof. As melodramas. This perspective is often quite reasonable, more especially with those memorials which explicitly thematize, for example, the evil of drunk driving. Such memorials certainly have their villains, and their class of victims, even where there is but a single death. They clearly intend to, and likely do evoke the melodramatic aesthetic effect in some of their viewers, some of the time. Indeed, their apparent motivation, through obviously mimetic means, doubtless contributes to this result. And even upon those who detect and resent the intention and its designs, the final effect is unlikely to be tragic.

The Ottawa Memorial’s Effect and On Whom

In the case of the memorial that is our focus, however, such an intention is not clearly to be seen. This is at least partly because the details and thematics of this memorial are, deliberately or not, obscure. One can be sure of very little. Is that indeed a cross? It might not be—the neighbourhood around the memorial is mixed, containing both recent immigrants and longer-term residents of many traditions. Does the teddy bear signify it was a child who died, or someone else, about whom comparably tender, familial sentiments are evoked? Could it have been put there by a child, the child’s own beloved possession, for a parent? The scholarship does help us to expect that, given an evolving genre or imitated practice, the latter is less likely. Was there one death, or more than one? Was it a car crash, or a car hitting a pedestrian? Was the memorial erected by surviving relatives or, partly or completely, by others? Such information, if it ever was part of the memorial, has been effaced, and it is in any case a place difficult of access in the middle of a busy road. Was there fault, was there a villain? Some scholars insist that even where there is no clear case articulated, the memorial-makers must be indicting the inadequacy of institutional efforts to protect public safety in our society.(13) This kind of projection of one’s own priorities, of course, is a peril of the intentional fallacy. In fact, there is practically no narrative here, and no identified villain. But one does enter into a created world, whose two certainties seem to be death, possibly the death of a child, and mourners who have erected the memorial. One is given few cues as to the effect one might appropriately experience. One can only observe that effect.

Of course, reader response criticism has its problems, too. Individual aesthetic effects are almost by definition variable and opaque, even when under the sway of the most masterful artists. As we noted above, there were probably some Greeks whom Sophocles left cold. It is something of a truism but worth noting yet again that most attempts to describe an aesthetic effect end up as descriptions instead of aesthetic tactics apparently intended to evoke it.

When an aesthetic effect or experience has explicitly been made the object of study, it has usually been that of the commentator, sometimes alone, but often impressionistically extended to others, even to a collective “we.” Occasionally this is bolstered by textual evidence, the specific testimony of others. Often the fame or canonical status of the art-object producing the putative effect is mustered in a more generalized support of an assumed experience of significance undergone by many. These manoeuvres are predicated, usually implicitly, on a human commonality, an appeal to which was a for time effective, but for historical reasons we shall not pursue here, now seems considerably less so.

By assuming the at least potential non-unanimity of any human experience around a centre of shared attention, with the crucial exception of the originary event itself, the present exploration has placed itself in a particular position with regard to this familiar crux. On the one hand, we affirm through the hypothesis of the originary event a common humanity, in that we assume, in every human experience, desire and resentment mediated by the sign. We insist that any response to a cultural sign can in principle be understood and described in these fundamental terms. But on the other, we launch ourselves into history, which we implicitly conceptualize as the ongoing generation of differences through the repetition of signs and the concomitant intensification of desire and making-inadequate of each given sign’s effect of pacification, its deferral of violence—providing the impulse and need for new signs. We expect such differences to arise, in the forms of signs and in the varieties of response to them. Conviction as to both human continuity and historical difference leaves us radically open to the possibility of understanding cultural events—representations and responses—wherever and whenever they occur. We resist either the historicist denial of the possibility of fundamental understanding or the ahistorical erasure of differences. We can also therefore hope to answer the limited but specific question we began with on the evidence of a single human experience at a given moment of time. We can do so provided we can indeed understand that experience in universal or originary terms, and that we can firmly link it to the aesthetic object in question, rather than to other influences. (That is, if our analysis can persuasively rule out such mediated effects as those produced by an attempt merely to be different from the existing scholarship on makeshift memorials, or to appear sincere, and so forth.)

Wherever the experience is that of the commentator him or herself, of course, any number of personal factors might seem to cry out for compensation. In my own case, my parenthood of a child of teddy-bear age would probably be foremost, to which might be added the bending of otherwise “normal” responses by a scholarly preoccupation with tragedy particular to someone writing a book on the subject. Still, any such factors are finally attributes of a human being, to whom the tragic effect may nonetheless occur.

Finally, though, the direct and specific causality of the effect by the specific aesthetic object under discussion probably cannot be sustained without recourse to readers’ own imagined responses, or at least the imagined plausibility of such responses in others. No single aesthetic object—as the proponents of “textuality” have of course been arguing for decades—operates fully in isolation. But nothing in our approach rules out cultural context—quite the opposite: we are interested in what happens in a specific here and now, with all that involves. But if the existence of tragic experience, somewhere at some time, is to be granted at all, those who thereby affirm some sense of what such an experience encompasses may surely take the further step of judging of its recurrence in a given instance, even by report if the report is to be trusted. Such a judgement need not assume its potential repetition, let alone its regularity or necessity in this or any subsequent context, evoked by this or any other aesthetic object.

Makeshift Memorial Aesthetics

Ought this or any makeshift memorial be thought of as a work of art at all? Again, happenstance must play a role. Something of a ritual may have accompanied its erection, making its functionality predominate over any invitation it might offer to aesthetic contemplation, at least at that time. And, it may once have communicated the same information a newspaper item might have done, a different but equally non-aesthetic priority. But for what remains on view now, its largely illegible signs, its recognisably funereal form, there is probably no better category. It has passed, as have many more famous monuments to the now-forgotten dead, into the domain of the aesthetic. Such works were doubtless intended to memorialize, as we may assume the Ottawa makeshift was also intended to do. But if we remember Pope Julius II or other such worthies, it is largely because of their patronage of the tomb-maker, Michelangelo. What we see and what we look at are Moses with the tablets, or the nude human forms of night and dawn.(14) In the case of the erection on Carling Avenue, the dead may indeed be brought to mind by some passers-by, family, neighbours, but to most its subject is anonymous.

Even so, we perhaps can call this ostensive art. Almost without narrative, it points, saying, here was a death, a child’s death. A close-to if not absolutely minimal art—perhaps this claim is not controversial. But can we align it with, enroll it amongst, works of the pre-eminent high art-form, tragedy? To continue in the logical path we have chosen, this too must be determined through its effect.

An Experience of the Memorial

What then are my experiences—do they rise to this level? Of course, often they do not. Sometimes I even forget to glance over, and recently, as I have begun to try to analyse it, my response has begun to dry up. I may have murdered whatever that response was to dissect it.

Still, it was intense enough, at times, to be remembered. If there were phases, they were passed through so rapidly as to seem almost instantaneous. But to slow them down, perhaps unnaturally, let us say, my attention is drawn, the first time I drive down this stretch of the Avenue. Of the accompanying resentment I can call out the traces of an irritation, a dismay, a shying from unwanted knowledge—a resistance to being forced to pay this tribute to another’s centrality. I can detail no articulated scepticism of my own, but can imagine it. A form of such scepticism might be to raise the question of taste. This is not Michelangelo, it is crappy, it is sentimental, maybe even disingenuous, a motivated attempt to assume the mantle of naivety. Or maybe it’s kitsch. If “kitsch is not a low but a middlebrow phenomenon, what someone else mistakes for high culture,”(15) to quote Gans again, perhaps this is the funereal equivalent of kitsch, a middlebrow—can one even say, middlehearted?—no, let us just fall back on the ever-useful bourgeois—attempt to project a culturally prestigious sincerity and emotion. After all, if not mass-produced this memorial, as the scholarship reminds us, follows a recent trend, resembles many others, is plainly imitative of other people’s responses to other deaths. Am I the victim here, of kitsch? For most who experience something as kitsch, the effect is surely a kind of embarrassment at someone else’s inability to hide their desires . (Some soi-disant connoisseurs self-consciously enough express their delight at the phenomenon, prize and collect it even. But this is a kind of pleasureful experience of superiority, unlikely in the present instance. No one collects kitschy expressions of human grief—one hopes not anyway.) Out of embarrassment—always the product of a too-importunate appeal to one’s own desires—arises a kind of defensive contempt for others’ obvious slavery to mimetic effects, to the hailings of a child-centred ideology for example, for their inability even in such an extremity to rise to universals, for their lack of dignity. This in turn might cascade into an equally defensive complaint at the way kitsch (somehow) debases or contaminates real aesthetics, or in this case, bypasses and empties out long-established forms of mourning, the established churches’ rituals or other forms of communal observance, and is thus a play for special attention, for identity, a kind of grotesque egotism, opposite to the more seemly case in which mourners submerge their sufferings into common, impersonal mechanisms. Again, this time in a negative way, such responses implicitly identify the memorial as melodrama. Kitsch is surely quite close to melodrama—melodrama that has been identified as such—at least in the generally accepted sense of the term melodrama.

But, for me, such resentful defences barely register, and vanish without trace. They are overcome, I think, by an intuitive conviction of great strength as to the authenticity of the memorial, the actuality of the death in question, testified to by the place itself by the roadway. I reject without consideration the possibility that the memorial is aspirational in any way—this is the beauty of its form to me, its uniformity with others of its kind, its lack of any markers of distinction, its minimality—and if this is a reading of authorial intention it is so only to a near-zero degree. I remain within its created world, the nakedness of that world, and under this temporary spell, quickly transcend my resentment of its authority over my attention.

How does this come about? There is indeed a phase of imaginative identification. For me, however, the identification is not with the already dead child—I assume a child, that is how indeed I “identify”—but with those other shadowy figures in this minimal drama, the parents. This core moment in the experience is almost unbearable, and cannot be long sustained. I wince. Theirs is a centrality from which I do not feel excluded . . because I do not want to be there. I pass onward to pity.

What, however, about a moral recognition of the implication of my own desires in the creation of the centre and thus an acceptance of the sacrificial suffering of the human being located there?

There is, at least, an occluded, even mysterious transfer of the intensity of desire into a feeling of culpability. I experience a feeling to the effect of “better you than me. . I still have my child,” and then a self-consciousness about doing so, a sentiment perhaps akin to what is spoken of as “survivor’s guilt.” This sequence leaves one, by much common testimony, “humbled.” By this I think we mean persuaded of ne quid nimis, set back, albeit temporarily, some little distance from our own selfish, that is, mimetic desires and resentments. In likewise common parlance, “it makes you think” or “it puts things in perspective.” This seems to me, at its dark, fatalistic heart, a pagan, not a Christian intuition. Archaic, even, primitive. Some sort of sacrificial exchange—you not me—seems to occur. It does not beautify me, it does not centralize me, this feeling, you not me. I would rather not even own it. But it is strong.

“You not me” implies interchangeability, the truest terror. It is thus the most intensely authentic expression of moral equality, beside which, in such a context, any expression of ethical care must seem defensive, even patronising, an evasion.

“The sacred centre is a dangerous place,” Gans reminds us. The danger at the centre is inseparable from the vulnerability of desiring, or loving. The more intense the desire, the more dangerous. But does this work here in an originary sense? Surely we are not going to appropriate each other’s children! Not usually, although it has been known to happen. And although we certainly do resent the centrality assumed by other parents—witness “my kid can beat up your honours’ student” bumper-stickers—if any blessing of centrality can seem not to be produced by the desires of others, the “natural” parent-child bond might be it. But if I am right to speak here of a tragic effect, then this exception cannot be granted: my case does rest on the assumption of a fiercely rivalrous dimension in this desire, as in any other, or even more so. If I am happy in and accepting of the joy of others in their children—if I love those children—this is an achievement of culture, of memorials including this one, a deferral of violence. There is no natural, communal, human parenting urge.

“Cultural knowledge of this danger,” Gans continues, “justifies the effort we make in learning to discipline our imagination to see the centre of desire as a place of absence rather than plenitude, of suffering rather than bliss. High culture teaches us to respect esthetic form not merely as a barrier to physical possession but as a deferral of even imaginary possession in the service of the eternal renewal of desire.”(16)

Cultural knowledge clearly does guide me in my response. Indeed, every ordinary person who passes this place and murmurs something about it being a tragedy is surely heir to a culture that has in its past Sophocles and Aeschylus, Shakespeare and Racine, even if we all swim now in an ocean of the melodramatic and victimary. However, no earlier art-work seems better suited than this one to teach me, at least, of the ultimate emptiness of victimary centrality. No, no, no, I do not want to be there. And from this sentiment, in my other phase of response, that “ultimate askesis” of which Gans also speaks, pity, the recognition of our fellow-human “as our Other and not as our Object.”(17)

Representation, Resentment, Tragedy

Has the analysis above expanded the field for the tragic effect so broadly as to lose all contact with Sophocles et al? Gans in several places makes the point that in a fundamental sense all representation is tragic. Its task is always to reconcile us, for some crucial interval, with the impossibility of our final or utter achievement of the centre. It conveys to us the terror of the desire—our desire—which has created that centre, and then made it impossible of achievement. Still, my own idea of resentment, as I have written elsewhere,(18) is that it is at bottom a question. Why can I not have my object of desire? Or, in the secondary ethical situation after the rise of the big man and human usurpation of centrality, why you and not me? Resentment is stilled, deferred, when the question, for the moment, in its context, is answered. I do not, cannot, want the centre occupied by this dead child or his or her parents. It is deserved. You did not choose it. It chose you. This is a very particular kind of answer, that perhaps only tragedy provides.

Some More Tentative Conclusions

Are representations like the makeshift memorial the minimal but still operative forms of tragedy in the postmodern era?

Perhaps, stripped of its generic features, of its narrative, of its props, it does not much matter that the tragic in so general a sense has persisted, especially if only verifiable in a single instance. Our inquiry, after all, has been exceedingly sharply limited, certainly in the context of the grander conclusions of either literary historians or psychologists, or even by comparison to the more modest ideological projects of the memorial scholars. We have conceded that a single human experience does not certainly imply others, although we may also say it does allow for the possibility. Certainly, the experience described above is no spur to action, beyond the clinging ever more fiercely and fearfully to what we already have, aspiring to nothing beyond that. Calls to action are the domain, rightfully so, of melodrama, the melodrama of the victimary, but also, if I may so phrase it for my particular readership, the melodrama of the victims of the victimary, we who resent the centrality of the purveyors of victimhood. The great “realm of social action” as the leading critic of the genre, Robert Heilman, puts it,(19) of the purposeful, political and pragmatic, belongs with the sparagmos, and thus with melodrama. Nor should we underestimate the power, indeed the value of that genre, or its effect. Melodrama may fairly be said to have triumphed in its rivalry with its own formal, established Other, tragedy. “Under such banners militant,”(20) in Wordsworth’s phrase, the mind of man imagines, erects on its internal scene, multitudinous possibilities of progress.

But perhaps it is also true that where the tragic effect still occurs, in however limited a way, it does still involve an embrace rather than a denial of the primary moral paradox. This, in GA terms, is the special human capacity implicit in the survival of tragedy. In any such instance the centre is locally, temporarily recreated. Does this really occur on the periphery, a transaction in the market? I feel I have had no transaction with the dead child or parents—I have only borne witness and not to their suffering in particular, and not so as to confer any particular benefit upon them—although, who knows, perhaps they would disagree. At any rate, do certain still-shared desires actually, if minimally, work to recreate here the old, ritual centre? Is a tacit, virtual communality established, an invisible bond with other humans who feel the same way? Not the communality of activists, to be achieved by overthrowing others, though “local” to be sure, but with no determined boundaries—potentially universal. Even if we share little else, even a religion?

Finally, the degree to which my response has depended upon my belief in the actuality of this death makes me wonder if the tragic effect can now no longer be generated by any form of fiction. Is it in this sense that tragedy has died? Locating the tragic effect in the audience would seem to require the continuing possibility of fictional representations producing it for some if not all or even most viewers. An adult’s melodrama, for example, might be a child’s tragedy. Nonetheless, even there, such (naive?) audiences may have so fully suspended their disbelief as not to be experiencing fiction at all. Because all fictional suffering must apparently now seem motivated — even where it succeeds in extracting tears from the erstwhile devotee of high art. (Tears of self-pity are as sincere as any!) But this intuition or suspicion of a planned or rhetorical effect, this sense of its intentions, its motivation, remains to me the crucial sign of melodrama. Indeed, wherever one cannot transcend the intentional fallacy, so called, one is surely in the territory of melodrama. Where one apparently does, however briefly, transcend it—a necessary if not sufficient condition—can we say that the tragic effect is at least possible?

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green & pleasant Land.

-William Blake

We have all come across expressions of the summum bonum, “the highest good.” It has been what is believed or presumed to lie before us in eternity, the end of all ends, the goal of all desire, Bunyan’s “Celestial City,” the Zoroastrian walled garden of Paradise, the Judaic Garden of Eden, the Islamic “seventh heaven,” the Greek Elysium, the Buddhist Nirvana, the Norse Valhalla, Blake’s and Parry’s “Jerusalem,” “a green hill far away.”

For some it is the cessation of all longing: for others the highest happiness. There is a discrepancy here, for, if one thinks of becoming freed from all longing in the sense of having no motivation whatsoever, then one no longer has desires to pursue, but one can just as well conceive of being freed from all longing as the result of having all desires satisfied. One definition, derivable from Buddhism, indeed sees it as the highest happiness, but this, rather than being the achievement if all that one has longed for, is what results from active renunciation of that longing.

This final “Holy City” would seem to embody a perfect society based on the ultimate judgement of divine law, all words matched to all referents in purity of truth, all souls assigned to their appropriate place, even if, as in some religions, that place be an eternity in hell—which could be termed a summum malum. To ensure this balance of justice, the evil are seen as immortal as the good. Not all religions, of course, reserve an eternal place for the damned: Buddhism and Hinduism, for example, stage a series of new births in which the soul can purgatorially advance towards the ultimate purification.

The poetic impulse, deriving, as will be argued, from the nature of communication between differing human beings, has produced a wide range of mythical imaginings of this state of bliss. To take one example: seeing the holy place as a “green hill,” a citadel upon a mountain, or a heaven above the clouds employ the metaphors of height and light combined, with the connotations of a panoramic viewpoint, of a peak achieved after long and painful effort of climbing higher, of light as revealing all distinctions everywhere, exposing all concealments, thus sharing the deity’s omniscience.

Plato and Aristotle differ as regards the path to this highest good. For Plato, as for Socrates, the guide to it, implied in the assumption of godlike omniscience, is knowledge, knowledge of the rational and its systematic order. For Aristotle, mere knowledge as such was insufficient—it had to be braced with action, virtuous action in accordance with our engagement with ethical challenges in practice. But both projected knowledge and virtue are seen as aiming at a finally achievable Good for both citizen and city. Thomas Aquinas identified the final Good with God in whom every soul’s desires would find the happiness of satisfaction. Immanuel Kant interlocked the belief in God with a moral order that issued in a summum bonum. The Utilitarians identified it with the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Some modern economists view it as the putative goal of happiness for the Rational Individual.

Then there are political forms of it. Take the utopianism of the vulgar Marxists, or more degenerate forms such as evidenced by the stupor of the drunkards in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s satirical painting “The Land of Cockaigne,” or the extreme right-wing in Greece at the moment, calling their party “Golden Dawn,” or worse, Anders Breivik’s myth of a future Norway, racially pure.

What can such ethical analyses have to do with language? Does it not seem blasphemous to trace the holiest of aims to a feature of human communication? It seems to some as just another covert attempt at a reduction of the sacred by means of rational explanation, an Enlightenment ploy typical of the aggressive atheism that has emerged over the past decade? Worse, it looks as if such a claim lays itself open to the accusations of relativism and solipsism, and so can be summarily dismissed as covertly importing the anarchy of “postmodernism.”

My purpose here is to relate a hypothesis about language common to a wide range of thinkers.(1) It is also implicit in Michael Tomasello’s and Eric Gans’s insistence on the “joint attentional scene” requisite for language to come into being (Tomasello 2003; Gans 1995). I have already made plain the key features of this hypothesis in my two recent articles in Anthropoetics (Wright: 2008b, 2012), but to connect it to the theme of the summum bonum, let us take the sociologist Alfred Schutz’s formulation; it can be found in the first volume of his collected papers of 1962, entitled The Problem of Social Reality (Schutz: 1962, 11-12).

I should like to work towards it via a look at a claim of the philosopher Daniel Dennett, one of the aggressive atheists. It concerns a feature of evolutionary advance. Dennett describes what is called by biologists the “Baldwin Effect.” It arises from the fact that members of natural species have different “wirings,” as he puts it, in their responses to stimuli, and this is what allows a species to adjust to changes in the environment, for those with what subsequently turns out to be an inadequate set of criteria for the new circumstances die off. Dennett draws a little diagram of a pack of upright rods, each representing a species-member, with a group that tops all the others, with one particularly successful member out-topping them all (Dennett 1992: 186-8). What Dennett also acknowledges is that the environmental niche may change. However, what he does not make clear is that the successful group, made up of members each with a slightly different set of criteria, that were for a time responding adaptively to “an object” in the world outside them, are now winnowed out anew because that “object” is no longer what “it” was. So nature’s scheme is best described, not as selecting and holding to “given objects,” but, rather, allowing for the tracking of rewarding features of the continuum as they metamorphose. These features may obviously not respect any singularity that might be attributed by us to the original choice of any one of the group: after all, to give a specific example, after the passage of time some members of it remain alive because they had been identified as “prey” that had not previously been recognised as such, prey that had been insignificant in its numbers before the change but became so after it. This analysis is consonant with the German philosopher Siegfried Schmidt’s insistence that living beings are faced, in the Heraclitean flux of the real, with ever-changing processes rather than logically distinct entities (Schmidt 2007).

At any time, any species will present a fuzzy set of responses to external stimuli, so that one cannot speak of “one” object to which the species as a whole is tuned but rather of a number of overlapping ones constituting the perspective of each member of the species. When changes occur in the environmental niche, animals are severely limited in their ability to communicate such changes. Some higher animals are able to pass on new and valuable aspects of the world to others, such as those Japanese monkeys that discovered the pleasantness of dipping one’s food in the sea to enhance the taste, but, of course, it is not by using language that they have done so.

Now human beings in one sense are no different from animals in that they also gain by passing on updatings of the shifting world, but, in language, they have a much more evolutionarily efficient mode of doing it. It is plain that one talks only when one wishes to update other members of the species, when one thinks one has discovered that what has been taken to be one thing common to all as a guide to action has turned out not to be so (of course, there is no certainty in such a conviction). Or one asks a question, which is plainly a directing of the other onto the portion of the world about which one requires updating (or one gives or obeys a command, which is a way of obtaining action directly to produce change in such a portion). It has to be conceded that, exactly like other animals, we are faced, not with securely identified entities which will conveniently never unexpectedly change their entityhood or criterial qualities, but features of the continuum that cannot be depended upon to reward our desire, Schmidt’s processes that present subtly different versions of “themselves” to each observer. We have to try to track the changing sources of pleasure and pain so that they may be met with appropriate action.(2)

Note that this perceptual relativity is not to be equated with relativism: one can agree with Nietzsche that each of us has his or her own unique perspective on the real without that necessitating the imputation of a selfish distortion as tainting one’s private selection. The temptation to view our relativity as involving relativism arises out of what cannot be avoided, a needful strategy within communication that Alfred Schutz and the others thinkers mentioned in Footnote 1 have delineated for us.

Schutz discerned that the two participants in the minimal communication situation are taking it for granted that they have both focussed on the same area of concern, one that draws in the motivations of both of them (their fears, desires, pains, pleasures). There is an immediate oddity here for the would-be informant believes that he or she knows more than the hearer, from which it follows that, paradoxically, they are not focussing on precisely the same portion of the real. Indeed, the updating, if successful, may produce a complete abandonment of the boundaries of the putative single object, qualitatively or spatio-temporally. In the words of Dinnaga, a sixth-century Buddhist philosopher: “Even ‘this’ can be a case of mistaken identity” (quoted by Matilal: 1986, 332). David Woodruff Smith is a philosopher who has directed his attention to illusory situations, but it never occurs to him that the singularity of what is focused upon might be impugned; he believes, with his mentor Edmund Husserl, that there is always a “determinable x” in the real awaiting selection. It is true that for eachperson there is an apparently singular determinate x that is selected, but it is not true that it is the same for each (conjurors know this well) (Husserl: 1973, 72; Woodruff Smith: 1989). The “determinate x” is a creation of the pragmatically required mutual hypothesizing of singularity.

So, to spell out the Schutzian insight, for two partners in dialogue to obtain a rough-and-ready mutual fix on a portion of the real, a partial overlapping of their differing selections, they have to behave as if they have a perfect one. The psycholinguist Ragnar Rommetveit puts it thus: we “take a perfect intersubjectivity for granted in order to achieve a partial one” (Rommetveit 1978: 31). In Schutz’s own words it constitutes a “reciprocity of perspectives,” or “the idealization of the interchangeability of the standpoints,” the taking for granted that, if I were in your shoes, your standpoint would seem to be the same as mine, and you and I see “things” with the same typicality.

To delve deeper here we must ask what “reciprocity of perspectives” and “idealization of the interchangeability of standpoints” mean in this context. We might start with the word “standpoint.” What is a standpoint?—one’s inclination, bent, or bias, in other words, one’s current habit of intention, one’s desire, one’s motivation, one’s attitude with regard to forthcoming action. And what is Schutz therefore detecting in the situation of human communication? That the two participants mutually assume, that is, hypothesize together that their inclinations, intentions, attitudes as regards the portion of their sense-fields that they also take to be similarly attended to are, as regards this portion of the real, relevantly the same. The convergence of what each is attending to is presumed to be ideal—did not Schutz use the word “idealization” of the match of the two standpoints?

The phrase “reciprocity of perspectives” can be similarly analysed, where “perspective” can be taken to mean the same as “standpoint.” Do not both use the common metaphor of a physical place from which a particular view may be had?—as of two people together on a mountain observing the same landscape. The image also illustrates Tomasello’s and Gans’s phrase for this situation, the “joint attentional scene.”

Once this tentative superimposition of the differing selections from the real continuum has been thus pragmatically assumed, speakers, believing that they can update their hearers about the fuzzy overlap, proceed to add to it a predication that transforms it in some way, altering its supposedly agreed criteria of identification. This is strictly an a-logical move because it invades the perceiving of the agreed “focus” of their perspectives, proposing a substitution of the former “entity” with a version presumed to be superior as a guide to action.

An example is called for. Readers familiar with the theory may excuse my using one that I have employed before, largely because it illustrates how radical the updating can be while an apparent link to the original interpretation is preserved. It makes plain why a mutual hypothesis of common single reference is needed and why it does not actually exist. In the following scenario Speaker A knows that her view of a region of the real is different from that of Hearer B, yet both have to begin the statement with the assumption that they are talking about a single definable entity, knowable in the same way to both of them. They end up acknowledging that “it” was not singular.

Listen to this interchange. It takes place between two birdwatchers who are busily counting birds (bird-counting takes place regularly in Britain under the auspices of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds):

A: That bird you just counted.

B: Well, what about it?

A: It was two-and-a-bit leaves.

The advantage of two heads being better than one is well demonstrated by this little interchange. What was taken to be a single entity at the start ended up by being seen later as “two-and-a-bit.” A could not have brought B’s attention to the part of the real she was concerned about unless they had both behaved as if there were a singular referent, “the bird,” in front of them. The last line constitutes the transforming clue, the predication.

Worthwhile here examining is what is meant by the simple pronoun “it” in its two appearances in the dialogue, and then you will see how the language game is played. One can compare this mutual, hopeful projection of logical singularity to a catalyst in a chemical combination: it enables the process of improvement of reference to go through, but the projection of a coincidence of attention itself is unchanged by that process—so here for the birdwatchers, the idea of a common focus of attention moved easily on to help in the rearrangement of their purchase on the real—the “it” as “one” bird as the “common” focus becoming “two-and-a-bit” leaves as the “common” focus. Strict enumeration of the “entities” so selected from the continuum is obviously shown to be part of the interpretations and not of the continuum itself (for the theory of perception that is consonant with this analysis, see Wright 2008a, 341-66). That is why any statement partakes of the nature of a lie in containing a virtual contradiction of the initial mutual agreement (for a more detailed discussion of this paradoxical similarity see Wright on the Paradox of the Cretan Liar, 2005: 127-8).

The same sequence is discernible in actual games. To give an example. In chess when one player plays a gambit, to his opponent (he hopes) the move appears as a mistake, a lapse in defence; for the player who made the move he has tempted the opponent to make a self-defeating move (the word “gambit,” incidentally, comes from the late Latin cambiare “to exchange,” related to the word “change” itself).

It is also the pattern of a joke. In a joke the hearer is encouraged by clues to an opening context to attach a harmless meaning to some word or phrase; by the time the joke is over a countervailing clue will have been presented, preferably one which brings with it an emotional shock. Take one of the “100 funniest jokes heard at the 2012 Edinburgh Festival”:

When I die I want my remains to go to my iPod, my iPhone and my laptop. I want to be left to my own devices. (Gareth Richards)

Clearly the sequence that is ambiguated is “I want to be left to my own devices” in which two pairs of meanings centering on being left to, and my own devices are induced to deliver the key rival meanings of the whole statement. Both these phrases have clues which produce the rival meanings. For the former, [being left to], (a) the context of making a will, in which to leave to has the specific meaning of stating to whom the whole or parts of the legacy are to go; and (b) the context of expressing a wish of how one wants to be treated after a particular moment in one’s life, such that “wanting to be left to one’s own devices” has the meaning of wishing to be undisturbed, left alone, so that one can pursue a course of action entirely of one’s own choice. For the latter, [devices], (i) the context of gizmos is clearly indicated by the list ‘my iPod, my iPhone and my laptop”; and (ii) the context is one in which the speaker is stating his wishes about how he is to be treated by others after a particular moment, namely, to be left without any interference to choose which of his projects he prefers to act upon.

What gives the joke its power is, of course, the allusion to death and someone’s wishes about how his existence is to be regarded after it. This is a matter of solemn concern, which has, no doubt, occurred to many of us with its attendant sad feelings. The answer, that he, as the legacy itself, wants to be left to his gizmos, is what transforms this dark reminder to a lighthearted piece of nonsense, which, as nonsense, invites further imaginings—such as, since he has spent lengthy hours of fascinated enjoyment with his gizmos, he wants to return something to them for their kindness!

The match with Statement is clear: the hearer of the joke is forced to switch from familiar sad associations to a playful engagement with nonsense (for more on nonsense, see Wright 2005, 56-9), and, in so doing, moves from his first unthinking agreement with the speaker to a surprising second one, one that retains its sound-link with the first.

Now it is here that a hint of something relevant to the summum bonum makes itself felt. What is it really that they are both idealizing when they take up this imaginary focus of the Statement? One is immediately tempted to say the meaning and reference of their words. But we have said that utterances are made with the intention of updating the other, so his mutual hypothesis rides on the partners in dialogue acting as if their desires match and consequently their versions of “the entity”—the object or person or self.

Analytic philosophers of the 20^th century have drawn attention to a peculiar fact about intention and meaning. Joel Feinberg has called it “the Accordion Effect”:

This well-known feature of our language, whereby a man’s actions can be described as narrowly or as broadly as we please, I propose to call the “accordion effect,” because an act, like the folding musical instrument, can be squeezed down to a minimum or else stretched out. (Feinberg 1964: 146)

To give an example. For example, you decide to stop working and have a cup of tea. The action is not only describable by saying that you were thirsty, for your choice of tea is a reflection of your being fond of that drink, and perhaps of your being English or Indian. But one could add that without the drink you would not be in so good a state for going on with your work, nor can one deny that it contributes to your state of health and state of mind, and that without that health you would not be able to continue with all your deeper intentions, perhaps today the writing of a novel which is to highlight the unsatisfactory conditions of people condemned to the underclass, and also to bring them to political notice just before an election, which brings in your intentions vis-à-vis the society you are a member of, etc., etc.

Feinberg gives part of the answer to the questions surrounding this odd feature of language in that almost unnoticed little interjection “as we please.” The accordion is stretched out by our providing wider and wider explanations of the intentional context. But there is a question that Feinberg did not ask: Is there the assumption that there is some one fixed fully open position, which, although a few of the bellow pleats are tattered, still represents a “totality” of understanding which touches the world securely at its fully extended edges?

In spite of their temptation to see the real as created by language, when it is only our selections from the real that are in part guided by the real, the perfect singularity of any entity can be seen to be only a mirage of this final agreement, which is itself delusory, since, because of the inescapable perceptual relativity, there can be no merging of all our desires that would find focus on or locus in some “one” thing, self or person. After all, in our analysis of the linguistic dyad, did not we accept that each is only taking for granted that they each have picked out the very same distinct “referent”? What is certain is that we are choosing from the real; existence is still there within our familiar perceivings, and, equally undeniably, immediate within our very sensations. Sensation is real experience, regardless of what “perceptions” it or may not be divided up into in the service of motivation.(3)

What does stubbornly exist is the sensing itself, the flux of sensory experience. ‘We” become sharply aware of this non-objectified experience precisely when another observer updates “our” objectifying; “one” undergoes a sudden surprise which enforces a re-ordering of a perception, which amounts to a change of selfhood, a redirection of motivation. There is no solipsism in this, no relativism—on the contrary, “one” is pitchforked into another “one” altogether in an instant of ethical transformation. “One” is thus compelled in spite of “one’s” earlier self to admit to:

(i) the existence of the ever-present external non-objectified real which has produced the variations in “one’s” sensory experiences;

(ii) the existence of those sensory experiences-as-experiences regardless of what interpretations we cast upon them;

(iii) the existence of the other agent who has brought about this change;

(iv) the inescapable tentativeness of “one’s” self-construction; and

(v) the reality of the motivation experiences-as-experiences both before and after their transformation.

“One” is like Pip hearing Magwitch’s revelation.

We thus sense the real but know only our mutually evolved hypothetical “entities,” which, as nets, we routinely throw over the real so often that we take them for real. However, our mutually agreed objects and persons can suddenly betray us when the real breaks into these cosily habitual understandings, those that Melvin Pollner has called the deliverances of “mundane reason” (Pollner 1987). Existence and objectivity philosophically come apart. It is hubristic to believe that all one has selected from the real is fully known, and that all one’s language-partners know it the same way.

What has this to do with our present topic? Well, since the two participants in the dialogue were apparently idealizing the identity of their understandings, how far down—and one can add, how far forward in time—does the imagining of this purported, hypothetical, indeed, fictive perfect match of intentions go? It’s obvious that our knowledge of the other is limited and so one cannot by any means imagine all the distal hopes and fears of our interlocutor—in addition, we cannot see into the future; there soon comes a point where our plain ignorance of the other and the world produces a vague boundary beyond which there is no reliable evidence to support the notion of a harmony of intentions.

This vagueness demands more than a complacent trust. Since the generality of the argument must embrace the possibility of a mismatch of intentions, perhaps to the point of a comic or tragic disparity of them, every utterance is open to the sudden discovery of a clash of desires, one completely unexpected since “an idealization of the interchangeability of standpoints” was being employed by each, however habitually. Great expectations, as in Charles Dickens’s novel, are liable to being disappointed. One can generalize further—all statements are in this are to be compared with stories. Perception, because of the action of others upon it, is a matter of narrative.

It is essential to see that a mere blind trust is worthless: it can only disguise our own self-regarding belief in the accuracy of our own interpretations. Nevertheless, we are severely tempted to believe that, in spite of undiscerned consequences of possible new implications in our words, our intentions and those of the people around us do finally come together in some ultimate pulling out of the accordion of shared intention—a summum bonum in which all dissension is shown to be hidden agreement.

It is not surprising then that if, for example, the entity of a nation is instituted through the imagination, as Cornelius Castoriadis has argued, producing “imagined communities” as Benedict Anderson describes them, expressions of a summum bonum for the nation and its citizens are valuable and not uncommon (Castoriadis 1987; Anderson 1991). But this does not take away their imaginary nature. What is preserved is the performance of that fiction by those who are aware that it is a fiction. What is imagined does not exist objectively, but a faith-based acting-out of that collaborative drama does have an existence and extension through time, one that sometimes is apparently in tune with the real, sometimes disturbingly inadequate.

It is exactly like a play on stage in that what is represented does not exist, but the play-as-a-play does have a historical reality apart from what is being played. Another way of putting it is to say that what is imagined does not exist but the process of imagining itself does. In the extraordinarily intricate and subtle interplay of neurons within the heads of the collaborators so imagining within the drama—dramatic or social—must be a real material base for its creation, which makes it in principle, if not in act, explicable by science. And that imagining relies on a faith that goes beyond the present interpretation of the utterance, and that faith can only prove itself by accepting a special set of demands.

If faith and not blind trust is to be our principle of knowing, what must be squarely faced up to are the following possible implications:

(1) that the hoped-for harmony of wills in the imagined summum bonum can be shown to be out of key with the real outside the language presumed so far to be common to all speakers;

(2) that, consequently, it is out of key with the real imaginings of each speaker, which have their bases in the real, in spite of all the promises and sworn commitments so far made;

(3) that the agreements both in short-term aims and in the farthest summum bonum can no longer be hypothesized in a secure “taking for granted”—to put it plainly, because the granting, a renunciation of opposition, is plainly revealed to be only taken for , that renunciation being only a hypothesis which makes the hypothesis indeed “an idealization of reciprocity”(compare the use of the phrase in “I tookthe entrance to the mansion for the left turn”);

(4) that the whole apparatus of counting existing “entities” in the real, common both to the moral aspects of our social and individual behaviour and to our knowings of self and others, also to the bases of objectivity in science (at the core of which mathematics is believed by many of us to lie) is rendered uncertain, in Ernst von Glasersfeld’s phrase, only “viable until further notice” (Glasersfeld 1984: 25).

(5) that this argument, as was feared at the start, seems to conclude with the dismissal of all truth and objectivity, all moral universals, to a realm of fiction, and, hence, betrays itself to be no more than a version of subjective idealism.

In the worst case, are the partners in dialogue thus to be left with an irresolvable war of wills? Has the anarchy which those who feared that the relativity was only a mask for relativism warned us against now burst out from within this specious argument? We should have to admit that there can be no such perfect “reciprocity,” no merging of all our desires that would find focus on some “ one thing, self or person,” no summum bonum. Even God, often characterized as “the One,” is here presented only as a valuable myth.

This is the very obstacle that opponents of social constructivism are sure they have detected inside the theory, and yet it is in his very place that their stance reveals itself as unethical.This refutation of their position has not as yet been answered.(4)

This ceases to be a surprise when the full consequences of the Schutzian pact are brought into the open. The key to understanding lies in the co-signatories to the pact fully acknowledging that radical conflicts of interpretation can ensue even when they have entered into the “idealization of reciprocity.” It was necessarily implied in the insistence earlier that faith and not blind trust was implicit in the agreement. A way of making this clear is to recognize what is really required when taking part in a game—and the language-game is no different. The game must be played seriously.

This paradox is easily demonstrated. Take a group of children playing “The Federation against the Borg,” their play inspired by Star Trek: The Next Generation. One child acting as a Borg is to be brought down by a “phazer-on-kill”; however, as soon as this happens to him, he refuses to fall down and bursts into tears. His companions in the game cry “We’re not playing—you won’t be dead!”—and justifiably, as he has obviously stopped playing. In a dramatic play you are not suddenly to step out of your part because the “plot” does not favour you. We think it comic for the poet John Clare who, while watching the Trial Scene in The Merchant of Venice in a performance in Peterborough, jumped up from his seat when Portia accused Shylock and shouted “You villain! You murderous villain!” It parallels the story of the Southerner in the States who actually ran up onto the stage to stop Othello murdering Desdemona. They were both taking the scenes as literally true.

This marks the difference between faith and blind trust in the idealization of reciprocity. When, subsequent to their initial agreement in speech, a mismatch in reference occurs between users, then the partners in language are faced with a comic or tragic outcome. The resolution of the clash depends crucially on how the original pact was regarded: the person who relied on blind trust will immediately believe that he has been betrayed. In the comic situation he will not find the ambiguity funny, but, significantly, refuse to compromise, that is, to accept the minor sacrifice that is required of him: witness Molière’s Alceste in Le Misanthrope. In the last scene of the play, Alceste, although all misunderstandings are now out in the open, will not accept the comic correction, even at the price of losing his beloved. In the tragic situation he will believe that he has been deliberately “played false,” as we say, refusing to sacrifice any of his commitment in the pact.

But what of those who have great affection for each other, who love each other? Then the challenge to their faith—which never really expected an advance towards a summum bonum—but only played that expectation, that hope—will now face up to the sacrifice demanded.(5) Of course, the faith does not necessarily imply a complete abandonment of will, for both should be willing to yield up some degree of what they each value. It will be the task of all involved to find a resolution that gives place to their hopes, although that may not be possible. Selfless martyrhood is not the inevitable outcome, but, if it were to be so, the “martyr” would not be expecting “a reward in heaven” but only the hope that his or her example would contribute to the future happiness of the language community. One has to add that, as with some of those who took the place of others in the Auschwitz gas-chambers, their personal heroism may never be known, only, hopefully, the fact that such selfless acts took place.

It is vital to keep in mind the fact that neither in this scenario took the pact literally, but were aware from the start that absolute agreement was played. Faith contains nothing of a hope of personal reassurance, only an aesthetic, one might call it a spiritualconfidence—without sliding into occult credulity.

One aspect of the theory that should aid in the acceptance of this dark conclusion is its presentation of the Self as no more than a social construction. We need others to talk to us in order to bring us into being, and, once established in childhood and youth, to maintain our sense of self. There is no unique self which is beyond transformation, its desires guaranteed by some metaphysical law of the universe.

So those who laud a pure “sincerity,” an undeviating “loyalty,” the fixity of “their word,” will have to accept that, in a true faith, such ideals are to be played, not believed.

Similarly, all those poetic projections of a summum bonum must be seriously entered into without any final commitment to the literal meaning of their tropes. We have to make appeal to our poetic nature—to our poets, novelists, composers, musicians, dancers, actors, costume designers, pageant organizers, painters, sculptors, architects, to render the drama of our social life a glorious fiction to aid us in our faith. We must engage in narrative transformations of all kinds, adhering to these performances without any trace of belief, but with faithful courage in the face of inevitable risk. The trouble in the past has been that, in taking the myths literally, the would-be religious, like John Clare in the theatre, were not playing.

As Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode” makes plain in spite of its author, the glimpse of the summum bonum which we believed that we caught in childhood, has to be firmly regrounded in real play as we grow older, learning from the children who know how to do it; that what we imagined in childhood so intensely can be replayed again with the same vividness as a genuinely imagined “splendour in the grass”; and, as he emphasized himself, the wonder is awakened at its freshest when we feel

. . . those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realized

in other words, when the real invades “the shades of the prison-house.”

* * *

I began my talk in Tokyo with the playing of a recording of the last verse of Parry’s choral setting of William Blake’s “Jerusalem,” a glorious evocation in religious terms of a summum bonum of English patriotism. Then at the close I played, in sharp contrast, a current popular song which, on one level, accepts the non-existence of a summum bonum promised by a romantic relationship (the “place far away” mentioned in the second line), but on another level, as expressed in the music of the passionate and poignant refrain, asserts its imagined value in spite of the loss. It is called in a bold paradox, appropriately for our topic here, “Forever is Over.” The singers are a pop group called “The Saturdays.”

I was caught in a place far away
From the light
What I saw I couldn’t face
So I closed my eyes
Wish I could turn back the page
Re-write my point of view
Save all the time you waste
(got to get gone, gone)
Don’t let it escalate
Don’t fight, it’s just no use
There’s nothing left to say
Got to get gone, gone, gone
Forever is over
And my heart’s not gonna fight
Forever is over
And I’m no longer afraid
Cuz if I don’t get out now
I may never escape
Your power is fading away
And I’m getting so stuck to the place
I belong
Forever is over
Over, over, over, over, over . . .

The Unknown Citizen

Before the East Japan earthquake and tsunami and their aftermath overwhelmed the national consciousness of Japan in 2011, the expression “muen shakai” (literally “no-relationship society”) had begun to appear in the media as an umbrella term for emerging forms of social isolation. A bleak NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) documentary with that title aired in 2010. It presented a handful of cases in some detail and captured the texture of life among the aging and disconnected. The paradigmatic example was “muen shi” (solitary death), in which people died unnoticed, their bodies undiscovered for days or weeks or longer, and no known family or acquaintances to claim the remains, take care of the personal effects, or handle the funeral or interment. An occupation called tokushu seisou gyousha (“special cleaning people”) had come into existence with the specific task of clearing out the belongings of the deceased from their vacant living quarters, while the ashes of the dead were interred at Buddhist temples at government expense.

The invisible deaths implied invisible lives: people spending years or even decades with weak or nonexistent ties to any family, friends, or neighbors, getting by with the minimum human interaction required to work, shop, or attend to their needs. Muen shakai will seem especially striking in a country known (and not too long ago) for its filial piety and strong social ties. Yet the well-known facts of demographic decline in Japan, as well as other less-known indicators such as the expanding number of single person households, suggest that something like muen shakai—whatever new terminology evolves to describe it—will come to permeate more and more of society. That is, Japan is not just a rapidly graying society but in some ways a rapidly disconnecting one, with an increasing percentage of the population that is not just old but living an extremely isolated existence into old age and until death.

W. H. Auden’s indictment of society in “The Unknown Citizen” seems almost quaint by comparison. Written as a parodic epitaph, Auden’s poem famously describes an anonymous man whose dignity has been erased in the sterile, all-encompassing bureaucracy of the modern state. It concludes:

Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard. (28-29)

Measured against the real-life subjects in the NHK documentary, however, Auden’s fictional Citizen possesses an embarrassment of social riches: He “was popular with his mates and liked a drink” (13), and “was married and added five children to the population” (25). Presumably, the Unknown Citizen died surrounded by family and had a relatively well attended funeral, as well as a headstone in a cemetery. The “unknown” man, in other words, is relatively well known; he dies with a level of social connectedness far exceeding that of the invisible souls inhabiting Japan’s muen shakai, who are characteristically without a spouse, children, or even marginally close acquaintances. Furthermore, the “faceless bureaucracy” of Japan, rather than effacing the dignity and worth of the deceased in the case of muen shi, is the only remaining entity that makes an effort to retrieve whatever might remain of either.

Muen shakai merits attention, not just for sake of understanding Japan, but for the sake of understanding the future in general, since much of the rest of the world is facing similar demographic realities, or will sometime within the next several decades. Beyond the numbers, muen shakai indicates the texture of life that may begin to prevail in a graying world if social bonds also unravel. Mimetic theory (MT) will be useful and even indispensable in analyzing such social trends. In practice, however, mimetic theory seems wedded to a particular kind of psychosocial relation and a particular kind of eschatological vision, alternating between extreme cataclysmic rivalry on the one hand, and absolute transformative pacifism on the other. Generative anthropology (GA), for its part, largely rejects such apocalyptic thinking in favor of guarded optimism about the future, where the generation of difference stays one step ahead of the backlog of resentment.

A future characterized by demographic decline and social isolation is a scenario that challenges the projections of MT and GA. In the case of MT, muen shakai suggests that not all disordered relations are conflictual, and that civilization might end with a whimper rather than a bang. In the case of GA, muen shakai suggests that the exchange system might be debilitating, even in the most highly developed of consumer cultures, if its “human capital” is not supported and regenerated. However, these are not deficiencies but rather lacunae in the two “mimetic anthropologies,” gaps which exist not from any fundamental deficiency in core assumptions but simply because neither MT nor GA is in the habit of looking at these kinds of problems. If there is a deeper theoretical concern, it is that MT and GA lack a positive anthropology. Human good must mean more, as muen shakai emphatically demonstrates, than simply the absence of conflict.

These issues can be canvassed here only in a very broad way, but it is hoped that some contours emerge which might deepen the perspectives of MT and GA. The next section briefly overviews muen shakai and associated trends. The third section outlines some of the challenges that such trends present for MT and GA. The fourth section engages some of these challenges, particularly from the perspective of MT, to show what muen shakai might mean in mimetic terms. The final section underscores the need for both MT and GA to flesh out the idea of positive mimesis. I briefly consider efforts in that direction and note an unexpected convergence between MT and GA.

Muen Shakai and Demographic Trends

Though the term muen shakai is new, this is not the first time social isolation has come into the national spotlight in Japan, and I have had occasion to discuss it in a previous article for Anthropoetics. At that time (the millennial decade) the focus of media attention was on social withdrawal among a much younger cohort, reaching particularly exaggerated forms in “school refusal” (children who stopped attending school, typically because of social fears), NEET (young people Not in Employment, Education or Training) and most particularly “hikikomori” (literally “pull inside”), shut-ins, predominantly young men or male teenagers, who refused to leave their homes for months or years, and sometimes even barricaded themselves in a particular room.

Muen shi (solitary death) is paradigmatic in the same way that hikikomori were in the previous decade; both reflect in concentrated form a broader social problem, the fact that human bonds are not just fraying or weakening but disappearing. Many people are disengaging from the fundamental roles that define their place in the community: spouse, parent, neighbor, employee, co-worker, friend, student, classmate, child (since some hikikomori are attempting to end the relationship even with their own parents, though they live in the same house). The dissociation from these roles is taking place not as a transition to different roles, but as a process of retraction, an abdication of all social roles, an elimination of as many human relationships as possible, and a reduction of social presence until hardly any remains.

For those who die alone and untended, this disengagement process has clearly been in operation over a number of years, but unlike hikikomori, they have been functioning people, able to live (that is, without dependency), work, and otherwise attend to their basic needs. On the one hand, this is an “improvement” over the helpless and dependent state of the hikikomori, but on the other (since hikikomori are young, can and do recover, and have some kind of familial support) muen shi represents arguably the more disturbing development: a functional but extreme human isolation emerging as a norm. Yet there is little to indicate that this trend will reverse itself, and much to suggest that it will accelerate.

Japan’s demographic decline is now well known in broad outline. Projections for the total population by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research show a downward plunge, even with the more optimistic assumptions about fertility:

2010: 128 million

2060: 94.6 million

2110: 59 million (17, 38)

If this trend holds, the population will be less than half what it is now in less than 100 years. Japan’s fertility rate (hovering around 1.3) is among the very lowest in the world (Eberstadt, Douthat). At the same time, the percentage of people over 65 is the highest in the world. It was 23.3% in 2011 and is projected to increase to 38.8% by 2050 (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Statistics). That is, well over a third of the population will be over 65 by mid-century.

This development (koureika, or “high age trend”) is problematized by the low birth rate (shoushika, or “fewer children trend”). More children are needed, among other things to grow up, enter the labor force and contribute to the social safety net for the increasing numbers of retirees. However, as fewer children have been born, fewer workers have been supporting more and more retirees. In 1990 there were about six workers for every retiree. The ratio fell to about four to one in 2000 and about three to one in 2010. By 2025 (that is, a little more than ten years from now) about two workers will be supporting each retiree, and the projection for mid-century is about 1.3 workers (Fogarty, Dale).

Modern societies simply have no experience managing their entitlements under these kinds of conditions, and we cannot really conceive of what it will be like, even with the rosiest of economic scenarios. Clearly, a good course for Japan would be to allow more immigration for the sake of demographic balance. But as manufacturing declines in the economic downturn, further hobbled by the unfavorable exchange rate and competition with other Asian nations, growth industries in Japan are increasingly limited to the health care sector, involving care for the elderly; it is in this field that young workers from other countries have most often been sought recently. This is becoming one of a limited number of careers options available to many young Japanese workers as well. Important as the work is, it is not a sector that promises to produce anything for the country or for upcoming generations. Realistically, the optimal scenario for Japan is not future growth, but carefully managed decline. Young people may thus have a difficult time believing in the future or summoning up enough optimism to start their own families.

Muen shakai connects with different but related statistics: the number of people who live, or will live, alone. This is of course the base living condition from which the “no-relationship society” develops. In 2005 the number of single person households was 29.5%, almost exactly equal to the percentage of households of married couples with children (and increasingly, just one child) (29.9%). In 2010 the number of single person households had risen to 31.2%, and in 2030 it is expected to rise to 37.4% (with a corresponding drop to 21.9% in the number of households with a child or children) (Nishioka et al 41). That is, in less than 20 years, well over one third of households will be single person households (“tanshinsetai“) while well under a fourth will have any children.

Thus, the basic conditions behind social isolation (the graying society and the single person household) are not going away and can be expected to be exacerbated. Yet, though the trends described here are “Japanese trends,” and though there are certainly features of muen shakai peculiar to Japan, they should not be taken as characterizing Japan itself. Japan is still a vibrant and dynamic culture, struggling in mostly humane ways with its emerging demographic problems. These particular problems themselves are not unique to Japan, and in many ways simply mirror in advance the conditions that will be arising in many other nations.

Recent articles in the US (for instance, Martin Bayne and Jane Gross) have begun to ponder with dread the twin problems of aging and isolation looming ahead for the boomer generation. Among industrialized nations, European countries, the US, Korea and China show broadly similar demographic trends (OECD, McCardle). And there is a growing realization that the “graying” of society is encroaching upon the developing world as well (Saunders, Longman). Thus, the swelling of the aging population, and the almost inevitable problems that arise when the elderly can no longer rely on a protective web of familial support, can be considered a general global trend and not just a problem of Japan or of the industrialized democracies. This is what the world begins to look like when its “human capital” begins to evaporate.

Implications for Mimetic Theory and Generative Anthropology

A phenomenon like muen shakai presents, to put it mildly, some interpretive challenges for mimetic theory and generative anthropology, both of which see humans as being interpersonally constituted and driven by mimesis. Muen shakai does not conform in any obvious way to a mimetic understanding and could, at least on the surface, call into question the validity of mimesis itself. What, from a mimetic point of view, are we to make of a social existence that consists of a lack of a social existence? What can we conclude about human lives devoid of interpersonal conflict, but also of any beneficial human connection? And finally, considering particularly the apocalyptic focus of MT and in Girard himself in his recent Battling to the End, how might we comprehend that the world is threatened as much by a “whimper” as it is by a bang?

To dramatize these questions, consider the life of a person representative of those depicted in the NHK documentary. We will call this person Mr. Sano. He is in his mid 60s and lives alone in a small apartment in an urban area of Japan. He has been divorced for many years, has no children or friends, does not know his neighbors, and has not contacted anyone in his family for decades. His employer barely speaks to him but knows him as a sad, silent man. Because he neglects getting regular medical check-ups, he collapses in his home from what would otherwise be a very manageable medical condition, and dies because no first responders are aware of his existence. His body is not discovered for several weeks. After some effort by local authorities, a few members of Mr. Sano’s family are successfully contacted, but none want anything to do with the matter. No-one will take charge of Mr. Sano’s remains or personal effects, or see to the funeral or interment. A tokushu seisou gyousha (“special cleaning”) crew is engaged to clear out Mr. Sano’s living quarters. The local government arranges to have his remains interred at a temple. Some of its priests offer occasional prayers in a small structure housing the remains of Mr. Sano and others like him.

The problem with MT is that, from the standpoint of MT, this could plausibly be considered a good outcome. There is no apparent mimetic conflict in Mr. Sano’s life—or if there was, it has been resolved peacefully. There are no escalating conflicts, no doubling rivalries, and no acts of violence. Further, if we generalize Mr. Sano’s state to the fate of the globe we can envisage a world full of people dying quietly in their homes, and humanity coming to a gentle close, with no frenzied mimetic crisis and cataclysmic Armageddon of the sort so often discussed in mimetic theory.

Of course, MT scholars would deplore the conditions of Mr. Sano’s life, but probably on the basis of compassion and accumulated ethics, not on the basis of the moral framework of MT itself. The challenge for MT is not simply to account for how and why Mr. Sano’s sad, crippling, disordered life may have developed in this way, but to define what exactly it is that is disordered about it. That ultimately means that MT needs to define a positive good, not just as an absence of violence, but as something that makes human life worth living, human relations worth having, or humanity worth preserving. (MT’s efforts in that direction will be discussed later.) Undoubtedly that must seem obvious, not to say sanctimonious, but the muen shakai trend shows that it may not be quite as obvious as it seems. A growing plurality of humanity is choosing to opt out of all human relationships. They do not need to be persuaded not to fight, but they do need to be persuaded that human relationships are worth the bother at all.

GA has an advantage in defining human good because, as the name “generative” implies, it takes from the beginning an inherent interest not just in human violence but in human flourishing. Yet from the standpoint of GA, we might also be hard pressed to discover anything specific to object to in Mr. Sano’s life above. By almost any account, Japan represents a spectacularly successful development of the exchange system, an outstanding example of the modern, secular state. Mr. Sano has been a productive member in it, and has both benefited and contributed to this highly developed market economy. He appears to have successfully occupied the center of his private scene, and if there was resentment, his life reflects a more or less successful resolution to it. Auden’s words return to resonate: “Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.”

In the end, GA is faced with the same challenge here as MT, which is to define human good as a positive and not just as the lack of a negative (violence, resentment), but GA’s focus on the exchange system intensifies this problem, because muen shakai demonstrates (as I hope to suggest in more detail below) how the modern exchange system can be a victim of its own success. Extreme social isolation develops to some extent because it is materially possible; as soon as people can eliminate human relationships (or so I would assert), many will. This leads in turn to the demographic question, since isolated people will, by detaching themselves from human relationships, obviously also detach themselves from the reproductive process.

In my view, generative anthropology (and for that matter MT as well) can no longer take it for granted that humans need to be generated for there to be an anthropology. The exchange of signs requires people to exchange signs with. The exchange of goods requires people to exchange goods with. The burgeoning crisis of a “relation-less” society is closely connected with the burgeoning demographic crisis, the childless society. Thus, the problem of defining human good mimetically extends beyond the question of what is the “good” of human relations, to what is the good of extending humans themselves into the next generation.

A central axiom of GA is that humans are, in Eric Gans’ words “the species that itself poses the greatest danger for its own survival.”(1) The danger is of course violence, but there is another way that humanity threatens its own survival: by not reproducing. This is the basis of the imperative of evolutionary theory from the organism-eye-view: eat, survive, reproduce. MT could be said to focus its anthropology on the survival question: humans need to survive the ever present threat of violence. GA is one step ahead of MT, insofar as it recognizes that humans also have to eat; the distribution of food amongst mimetically charged humans is a nontrivial matter. However, neither MT nor GA has incorporated the problem of human generation into their overall anthropologies.

Perhaps it is assumed that this is a biological problem, and not a particular matter of concern for either MT or GA. Men and women, like the birds and the bees, will presumably keep doing what they do, and children will result. However, this is no longer an unarguable assumption, and if the archaic fertility cults are any indication, neither was it in the distant past. It is an anthropological and not just biological issue. From a mimetic point of view, the problem of male-female relations may not simply be that sexual rivals might kill each other, but that men and women will fail to get along, and the community will fail to regenerate. The mere lack of violence will not in itself regenerate a culture. To put it more provocatively, ancient fertility cults and evolutionary theory know what MT and GA apparently do not: humans must reproduce for humanity to survive.

This is a problematic assertion in a number of ways, many of which will be discussed later. And to be fair, MT implicitly acknowledges the issue; the “unitive” function of scapegoating and the sacrificial order no doubt includes the strengthening of male-female relations, with the specific goal of sex and regeneration.(2) Fertility cults, after all, are sacrificial. In other words, sacrificial violence is (among other things) an aphrodisiac and fertility drug.

The post-sacrificial ethos is another matter. To repeat the point: human beings can now simply opt out. Even while functioning in the modern market system, they can choose not to reproduce and indeed, will increasingly choose to do so. They can choose to be alone and limit any human interaction at all, and will increasingly choose to do so. I would assert that the triumph of the market system, which means the triumph of the post-sacrificial order, makes solitary life not only possible, but, increasingly, preferable. This could be the age of homo solitarius. One can live and die alone, quietly and peacefully, apparently untroubled by any mimetic entanglements.

Muen Shakai and Mimesis

Against the objection that mimesis fails to account for muen shakai, it can argued that mimesis does in fact account for it, and in a number of ways. They are outlined below. All are revealing, and I think most are at the very least partially valid. The problem may indeed be that they explain too much, and that they cannot all be right at the same time. At any rate, the mimetic accounts of muen shakai sort themselves roughly into three broad explanations, which overlap in several ways: 1) the generalization of violence, 2) the generalization of scapegoating, and 3) internal mediation and the post-sacrificial order.

The Generalization of Violence

It can be argued from the mimetic point of view that muen shakai is precisely a kind of violence, an ongoing interpersonal conflict. The outward manifestation of placidity is entirely superficial and (in terms of my exercise above with Mr. Sano) quite misleading. The isolation of recluses has undoubtedly been shaped by a history of interpersonal friction and conflict. The very structure of this kind of social detachment carries in it the shape of these past conflicts: a turning inward and away from some other, or more precisely a long string of others. On this subject, I have had occasion to quote Gil Bailie, whose observation in his lecture series The Gift of Self is important enough to quote again in full:

[T]he hysteric is one who is being influenced by another, who resents and rebels against the influence. And the hysteric has two arch ways of warding off this influence. One is to become autistic, in a sense—an emotional dissociation. So the hysteric goes blank as a way of trying to ward off the influence. And the other [way] is histrionics, to ‘act out,’ to try to exorcise the other, and to demonstrate that the hysteric is, in fact, the real subject. . . . Hysteria is clearly the self pathologically entangled with another.

Bailie’s insight is very useful, and (if we transpose the Freudian vocabulary) clearly puts the phenomenon of social isolation within the purview of mimetic theory. This is the basis for a model in which interpersonal aggravation (that is, internal mediation) can lead either to conflict, or to withdrawal. The main problem with Bailie’s observation is that it should be so rare in Girard studies; for Bailie himself it comes as an incidental observation toward the end of a long lecture series (itself rather hard to obtain). Yet the “emotional dissociation” Bailey outlines can hardly be considered rare in the world. It is likely as at least as common as the more agitated struggles characteristically analyzed in mimetic theory.

The sparse treatment in mimetic theory does not indicate a theoretical deficiency as such, but rather an incomplete focus. Girardians are simply not in the habit of looking at things like introversion and isolation, preponderantly focused as they are on overt conflict and violence. An important corrective to this customary focus on “bad” (conflictual) mimesis has been the increasing attention of some Girard scholars to “good” (non-conflictual) mimesis (to be discussed later). However, muen shakai and similar phenomena fail to fall into either category and could be considered “bad good mimesis”—a putatively non-violent mimesis that is nonetheless clearly disordered.

But the case for social isolation being a form of violence is further strengthened by its affinity to suicide. Extreme social isolation could arguably be considered one step away from suicide, which has been associated with the muen shakai phenomenon. The NHK documentary discussed above opens with a scene of the crew on a police boat in Tokyo Bay preparing to pull the body of an older male, almost certainly a suicide, out of the water. This is a routine operation, and identification of the bodies often proves to be impossible. These nameless and faceless suicides (mostly men) could be thought to be more representative of muen shakai than the solitary deaths described earlier.(3)

Yet one problem of generalizing violence in the ways sketched above—of including muen shakai under an overall rubric of violence—is that it universalizes violence in a way that may be unhelpful not only in understanding social isolation, but in understanding violence itself. Is it useful for every problem in human relations, including the lack of human relations at all, to be defined as violence? In Popperian terms, if violence can be invoked for everything, how can it be invoked for anything? The very term loses definition, and as a consequence mimesis itself may become somewhat less compelling. I have had the experience of intelligent interlocutors resisting mimetic theory for exactly this reason: it over-defines violence in its otherwise compelling interpersonal psychology, and they won’t accept that, for instance, to be upset by someone is to experience some kind of “violence.” This problem also emerges in the generalization of scapegoating.

The Generalization of Scapegoating

An equally strong if not stronger case can be made for looking at muen shakai as a form of scapegoating. The pulling away from human relations that is manifested in extreme social isolation must certainly be, in most cases, a self-exclusion which is either clearly a direct response to scapegoating, or less directly, a kind of internalization of the dynamics of scapegoating. In the first case, the scapegoating can be very real indeed, especially in younger cases. Hikikomori, who are mostly young male shut-ins, often develop their condition as a result of bullying at school (Jones). Bullying has also been directly implicated in a wave of suicides among children that have rocked the nation recently (Hongo).

As for older people who are representative of muen shakai, they could be considered “scapegoats” in the more indirect sense of being gradually abandoned by society. Alternately (and this is my own view), there may be the “internalized” scapegoating mentioned above; one might withdraw from human contact because one finds it oppressive. That is, the subjects have not been abandoned or driven into isolation so much as they have chosen it. This accords, at least, with my incidental observation over the past few decades. Many people are shutting down socially because they feel harassed by human relationships and social expectations. They do not want to be asked about their lives or have to explain themselves to others. It invites invidious comparison and disdain, and it may very well be used against them out of their hearing. People insinuate themselves into your life, make you feel bad or inadequate, and badmouth you to others; it’s better to keep your distance. Whether such fears are ever articulated as such, they may figure strongly into social isolation, especially as it develops over a long period, and may go some way toward explaining in particular gradual estrangement among family members.

The self-exclusion of isolated people can be plausibly said to have the structure of scapegoating, both externally (by virtue of their isolation) or internally (by virtue of feeling psychologically oppressed by others). Are the social recluses of muen shakai the hidden scapegoats of society? Over-generalizing scapegoating to explain social isolation may be problematic in the same way that over-generalizing about violence was above. If everyone is being scapegoated, even when they voluntarily shut out human relationships, what practical value does scapegoating have as an account of human behavior or society? Yet, intuitively, this seems more of a pedantic quibble than in the previous case with the over-generalization of violence. While social isolation may not manifest any obvious violent or conflictual aspect (since there are no people present with whom to have conflicts), it nearly always possesses the structure of exclusion, even when it is self-exclusion.

The fact that people might choose scapegoating for themselves (in the form of social isolation) needs to be accounted for. One possibility (which to my knowledge has not been addressed in mimetic studies) is that the material cost of scapegoating, at least in the form of social exclusion, is markedly diminished in a desacralized market society. This point emerges indirectly in one of Lafcadio Hearn’s works, when he tries to convey to early 20^th century readers the severity of expulsion in the Edo period (premodern Japan):

In former years the man expelled from his native place by the communal will—cast out from his home, his clan, his occupation—found himself face to face with misery absolute. In another community there would be no place for him, unless he happened to have relatives there; and these would be obliged to consult with local authorities, and also with the officials in the fugitive’s native place, before venturing to harbouring him. No stranger was suffered to settle in another district without official permission . . . . A banished man was homeless and friendless. (96-97)

. . . banishment signified hunger, solitude, and privation unspeakable. For be it remembered that the legal existence of the individual, at that period, ceased entirely outside of his relation to the family and to the commune. Everybody lived and worked for some household; every household for some clan; outside of the household, and the related aggregation of households, there was no life to be lived—except the life of criminals, beggars, and pariahs. Save with official permission, one could not even become a Buddhist monk. The very outcastes—such as the Eta classes—formed self-governing communities, with traditions of their own, and would not voluntarily accept strangers. So the banished man was most often doomed to become a hinin, —one of that wretched class of wandering pariahs who were officially termed “non-men,” and lived by beggary, or by the exercise of some vulgar profession, such as that of ambulant musician/or mountebank. (98-99)

In an archaic and pre-modern context, exclusion from society held the threat of extreme social and material deprivation that Lafcadio Hearn describes. In a still more primitive context, where Girard’s work on cultural foundations is relevant, exclusion from the community meant almost certain death. As I usually mention when trying to explain Girard’s scapegoat thesis, a person driven out of an archaic community could not simply find a different job, rent an apartment on the other side of town, or seek provisions in a convenience store further down the street. This is in fact a standard explanatory device to explain Girard’s theory, since the severity of expulsion is less easy to grasp in the modern world.

However, the very thing that makes it difficult for modern people to grasp the severity of expulsion—the relative ease with which one can provide for oneself—could also be turned around to explain why some people may no longer dread it as much, and may in fact choose to “expel” themselves. The social and material conditions of post-sacrificial culture have substantially altered the cultural compact. One no longer has to “go along to get along.”

Internal Mediation and the Post-Sacrificial Order

For MT and to a large extent GA, the Judeo-Christian revelation is thought to have decisively overturned the sacrificial ethos (though this is not the descriptive vocabulary of GA), and the effects, however indirect and uneven, have permeated the globe, both for better and for worse. Gil Bailie (Violence Unveiled) and James Alison (The Joy of Being Wrong) have presented some of the more compelling elaborations of this aspect of MT at the cultural level. There may be plenty of frantic scapegoating in our world now, but there is no longer any “sacrifice” in the sense of a culturally legitimate bloodletting that draws society together and sustains authority, or long term cultural viability. (Totalitarian regimes, notably those of the fascist variety which explicitly invoke the sacred, can be considered a series of last gasps rather than counter evidence.) We are living in a post-sacrificial order. We are in this sense “post-cultural.”

“Internal mediation” comes to predominate in this post-sacrificial world, which means that as differences maintained by the sacred collapse, people rub up against each other more and more antagonistically in their personal spheres. This is the subject of most of Girard’s brilliant literary analyses (though much of that work was done before Girard had developed the sacred element of MT) and in general one of his most consistent observations about modernity.(4) This cultural development is conceived very differently in GA, as the collapse of the sacred center into the private scene, and mediation is not essentially or intrinsically disordered.(5) But this gives MT a certain advantage when it comes to muen shakai because MT expects and predicts psychosocial disorder in the post-sacrificial world. Muen shakai can thus be seen as a characteristic interpersonal distortion. It is the result of the unrelenting exacerbation of mimetic desire in our ethos. Instead of struggling with the other (as do most of the subjects of Girard’s work), the subject gives up the fight and retreats into him- or herself. This process is summarized very well in the earlier quote by Gil Bailie.

Another, cruder way to put it is that if society had a really good scapegoat, people would get along better. Psychosocial disorders like extreme social isolation would be much less likely to develop because the “we feeling” of sacrificial culture would permeate society, and the everyday frustrations and aggravations that now drive people into isolation could be discharged through sacrifice. Some support for this view might come from recent events. The earthquake and tsunami were a wrenching disaster but also generated a certain sacred aura, and along with it, a feeling of unity and purpose. The tragedy drew the country together. The discussion of muen shakai ceased immediately after the disaster took place, which is to be expected, but the discussion has not been renewed. The disaster could be said to have unified the country, at least for a time, and caused the Japanese to believe afresh in themselves and in their nation. Thus, the disaster could serve as a reminder of the way sacrifice used to renew culture and solidify social relations.

I think that the “post-sacrificial” account above is a fair extrapolation from mimetic theory, that it is at least partially true, and that internal mediation certainly presents the best psychological framework for approaching most types of social isolation. At the same time, I am unsure how to properly assess the sacred component. It seems suspiciously convenient that I am able to invoke scapegoating (profane) to explain social isolation in one breath (in the previous section), then invoke the lack of scapegoating (sacred) to explain it in the next (the paragraph above)—though this is precisely the kind of interpretive discrimination that many scholars think gives MT its great subtlety and explanatory power.

A bigger problem (and GA thinkers might agree) is that it is very difficult in MT to conceive of a non-disordered counterpart to muen shakai, unless it is religious and almost impossibly idealistic. That is, though extreme social isolation must be the result of disordered mediation, there can be no wholesome reintegration into society in the categories of MT because group harmony must by definition be tainted with sacrificial violence. Unless the recluse converts and demonstrates a radical personal transformation, we must look suspiciously (at least in theory) at his or her social rehabilitation. Here yet again, MT explains too much too plausibly and in too many ways on the one hand (therefore making itself unfalsifiable in the Popperian sense), and offers no realistic alternative to disorder on the other, because it has not sufficiently developed a positive anthropology of the human person, unless it is abstractly spiritual and fantastically idealistic. This is overstated and unfair, but lays out some of the terms for the search for positive mimesis, which does in fact occupy a number of Girardian thinkers and will be our final consideration.

Toward a “Generative Mimesis”?

I have been stressing the need for both MT and GA to develop a positive anthropology, spurred by two observations. 1) Human good (as muen shakai demonstrates) must be more than the mere absence of violence. 2) Human reproduction (as the demographic crisis demonstrates) cannot be taken for granted and ultimately has to be taken into account in any consideration of the human good. There has to be a reason to go on living, a reason to have relationships with others, and a reason to continue to have human beings who can have relationships with others. If there is none, then isolated people are essentially doing the right thing in removing themselves from the sordid process, and (if the idea catches on sufficiently) bringing the human story to a merciful and peaceful end.

Positive Mimesis and the Originary Scene

Of course, it is unfair to speak of GA as not having a “positive anthropology” since (in its own view) it has always been premised on the positive and does not define humanity in terms of an originary injustice.(6) Likewise, it is unfair to speak of “positive mimesis” as if no-one in MT had considered it. Girard himself has emphasized it in several scattered (though unelaborated) comments, most notably in the well-known interview with Rebecca Adams. Adams herself has gone on to develop the idea of positive or loving mimesis, as have James Alison, Raymund Schwager, Petra Steinmair-Pösel, Martha Reineke, and Pablo Bandera. Most treatments of positive mimesis are anchored in theology, and Steinmair-Pösel’s essay contains probably the most usefully compact review of that work.

Christian theology demands a primary good from which evil is a derivative distortion with no independent being, hence the theoretical impetus of Christian Girardians to get beyond the violence and disorder of mimesis. There must be a primary good, otherwise one is led to a dark, pessimistic demiurge as creator, to a Manichean position where good and evil are equal, or to a monistic “Star Wars” theology in which mimesis is like “the force,” a neutral power with a dark side and light side. Good and evil cannot have equal ontological weight, and in fact evil, since it is a negation, should not have any ontological weight at all. In Steinmair-Pösel’s words, “One of the most frequent objections to mimetic theory is that Girard ontologizes violence and that the problem of conflicts and violence is given too much significance within the theory” (1). In addressing that issue, Bandera (as part of a critique of GA to be discussed further below) outlines positive mimesis as follows:

. . . mimetic theory maintains that there is a positive dimension to mimetic desire. In fact, while mimetic relations usually become rivalistic, especially on a social or cultural scale, there is nothing inherently negative about mimetic desire itself. There is a difference between mimetic desire, which is a fundamental characteristic of humanity, and mimetic rivalry, which is the unfortunate usual outcome of most human relationships. To put it in more concrete terms, positive mimetic desire is more properly called love. (19)

I had hoped to avoid the originary questions that so divide MT and GA, but questions of human good lead inexorably to questions of ultimate good and thus, for MT and GA, originary good. Unexpectedly, when the dust settles, there may be much more common ground between MT and GA here, on this question of originary goodness, than in the divisive issue of whether scapegoating is constitutive of the originary event. This is because MT scholars are themselves forced to push beyond scapegoating, whether it is a split second before it in the case of James Alison (who posits that the first scapegoaters had a latent moral choice to identify with the victim and not to engage in scapegoating) (253-256), or back to “the creation of the human person opened toward the divine” in Petra Steinmair-Pösel’s study (2-3).

Christian Girardians are impelled to locate a good prior to scapegoating because they need to know, if good is primary, how human goodness can possibly make any human sense. That is, humans had to realize something right before there was something wrong. It is not just that things were good prior to humans knowing anything about it, in their newly emerged post-scapegoating consciousness; the first humans had to have at least some consciousness of good prior to scapegoating, which also means (though this is an unintended consequence of the search for “positive mimesis”) that there had to be a specifically human consciousness preceding scapegoating.

It must be noted in passing that this paper, focused on social problems in a largely non-Christian country, has drifted into the categories of Christian theology. This is not because there is no relevance with regard to Japanese religion (a highly complex synthesis of Shintoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism, existing within a highly secularized culture, and which also includes influential Christian elements). It is because the discussion has of necessity moved into the specific interpretive problems of MT, which is deeply informed by Judeo-Christian premises. Yet, to the extent that Japan is a very “secularized” nation, these premises could be said to apply, since (at least according to mimetic theory) secularism is part of the process of “desacralization” resulting from the Judeo-Christian revelation as outlined in the previous section. These terms are not above challenge, by any means, but they are the terms, for better or worse, by which mimetic theory usually works out its anthropology.

In fact, the exchange between Pablo Bandera and Richard van Oort regarding MT and GA reflects the divide between religious and secular assumptions. Yet the exchange is useful precisely for the way a positive anthropology begins to emerge between them, if not fully defined, at least as a kernel that can be defined. In asserting that positive, non-rivalistic mimesis is more fundamental and therefore more primary, Bandera seems to think an advantage is gained for MT over GA. By insisting on an originary good, MT can claim to have discovered love first, as non-rivalrous mimesis, while (to Bandera) GA can only discover it later, after violence is averted, and then ever after as an accommodation to resentment. However, Richard van Oort protests:

I confess, when I first read Bandera’s suggestion that generative anthropology has no room for positive mimesis, I was truly astonished. What could be more positive than the deferral of violence through representation? I also find Bandera’s criticism rather illogical in the context of his own argument. After spending considerable time criticizing generative anthropology for not being sufficiently attentive to the violence of the mimetic crisis, Bandera then turns around and criticizes the theory for not being sufficiently positive in its conception of mimesis! (198)

But one reason van Oort may have been blind-sided is that Bandera is (I suspect) using secular language while proceeding in theological terms. As explained, Christian Girardians (or secular Girardians who think within a Christian framework) need to define a primary good in mimetic desire—and this is apart from any dispute that might exist with GA. In this regard MT has discovered something “more positive than the deferral of violence” (in van Oort’s words): non-rivalrous mimesis. Bandera might argue that van Oort has just conceded the point, by admitting above that “the deferral of violence” is key, and thereby admitting that in GA originary consciousness is framed in negative possibility, not the positive of beneficent mimesis.(7)

GA thinkers will be unmoved by this; they do not seek to explain the mystery of good or evil per se, but the mystery of how human beings could conceive of something called good and evil; to some extent the discourse has passed into mutual incomprehensibility. Nevertheless, though MT may indeed have an advantage here (at least theologically) in positing positive mimesis before resentment, it has now conceded a rather substantial point: positive mimesis had to have preceded scapegoating. The center of the debate has thus shifted into GA’s territory, through MT’s new insistence that emergent humans had to be aware of a primary good, at least to some extent, prior to scapegoating.

For me, this is like watching theoretical astrophysicists arguing over the finer nanoseconds of the big bang. Each counterclaim clarifies the issue. First, MT emphatically claims originary violence, against GA’s claim of originary peace. Then MT claims originary good, which must predate GA’s originary resentment. But in claiming such an originary good, MT has admitted that scapegoating is not a sufficient explanation for human emergence. Though I may be naïve, I see this back and forth as suggesting ultimately a kind of convergence between MT and GA, because both MT and GA agree now that human consciousness had to have been present in some form prior to scapegoating.

Positive Mimesis and Human Generation

Where neither MT nor GA has pushed the discussion of positive mimesis is toward the question of human generation, though Jean-Michel Oughourlian proposed what he calls a “Universal Mimesis”: “mimesis is imitation in space, repetition in time, and reproduction in the species” (4). Is human reproduction simply a biological function, beyond mimetic desire, or is it tied up with the goodness of mimetic desire, to love? Or, to put it in a way perhaps only an intellectual could not understand, does love have anything to do with making babies?

It would be easy to think it does not, considering how often love, including Eros, comes up in MT and GA, and how very rarely does procreation. At times, GA’s emphasis on erotic reciprocity as the optimal model for positive mimesis may seem little more than a theoretically advanced version of the proposition, “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”(8) But in fact, here too there is an unexpected convergence between GA and MT in the search for positive mimesis, and one that might lead to a mimetic anthropology that encompasses (but is not limited to) human generation.

Of course, the humanistic orientation of MT and GA militates against any gross reduction of human relations to reproductive output. However, Martha J. Reineke, synthesizing a number of thinkers including Rebecca Adams, discusses both “mothering” and “fathering” in relation to loving mimesis (90-91). There are ways of thinking about human “generation” in this non-biological sense. This is not necessarily straying from the demographic problem at hand, because worrisome fertility rates (whether in Japan or elsewhere) are less cause than they are effect. Isolated people are finding less reason to have any relations at all, much less biologically fecund relations. A positive orientation toward child-bearing or parenthood is likely to be a secondary effect that would arise out of positive human interaction in general. The demographic crash is in this sense a mimetic problem that needs a mimetic solution.

But if we extend the pattern of love, co-creation, and procreation to mimetic relations, we might discover something that is less than a gross biological reduction, and more than mere metaphor. Rather than equating making love with making babies, we could envision an anthropology in which “making love,” in the sense of positive interaction, generates, not specifically babies, but more fundamentally, beneficial effects. For instance, instead of the classic mimetic triangle with subject and model oriented through each other toward an object, we might have subject and model oriented toward each other—perhaps in the manner Rebecca Adams proposes, desiring one another’s subjectivity—and actually generating or producing an object (a beneficial effect, word, deed, etc.).(9)

As noted, Adams’ thinking is surprisingly close that of Eric Gans, specifically his occasional focus on the erotic.(10) And after all, Gans does not stress the erotic because he wants to promote “eroticism,” but because he wants positive mimesis to be realistic, beyond the abstract and utopian concept of “brotherly love.” Yet putting Adams’ and Gans’ thinking together, it may be possible to extend both toward a “generative” version of the mimetic triangle. The third point of the triangle would issue forth from the positive mimetic relationship, rather than being an object of contention (negative mimesis) or mere renunciation (positive mimesis, but defined in the negative). This is in line with the Trinitarian element that emerges in discussions of positive mimesis.(11) “Love” would actually issue forth from the relation.

“Good mimesis” should perhaps be pressed in this direction, in the direction not just of “positive mimesis” (characterizing the relation) but of “fertile mimesis” or “generative mimesis” (characterizing its productive nature, the fruit of the relationship). In this model, mimetic relations “bear fruit” in the broadest sense of generating good (and not just being good). Christian theology explicitly extends biological reproduction in this way. The Incarnation is to be patterned in us, not specifically through making babies, but quite specifically through conceiving and giving birth to good through cooperation with grace—in a very literal sense bearing Christ in the world as an act of love toward God.

Yet again, this (though it is purely exploratory and speculative) represents a convergence with GA. It is because the generative model here (minus the Incarnation and grace) lines up with the dynamic terms of GA, wherein humans, in their first moment as humans, collectively “birth” a sign and thereafter all signs.(12) For me, this opens up space to talk realistically about “positive mimesis” and “brotherly love” in ways that GA thinkers might accept. To put it another way, in the “universal mimesis” proposed by Jean-Michel Oughourlian above (“imitation in space, repetition in time, and reproduction in the species”) “reproduction” could be extended as well to acts, words, gestures, relationships, collaborations, and the like. These too are imitated in space, repeated in time, and reproduced among others.

An example of this in the Japanese context might be the classic sempai-kohai relation which is still widely honored among young people. The sempai-kohai relation is essentially the external mediation of junior members in a group (kohai) by senior members (sempai). Kohai in their turn pass knowledge and values down to the next group of kohai when their time comes. For Girard, the latent conflict in such master-disciple relations is the most salient feature. But—and here the approach of generative anthropology shows its strength—is it not more salient that a master-disciple relation can exist at all? This is another instance in which GA appears to be somewhat ahead of the game because it starts with a human community that peacefully exchanges gestures and generates good.

In light of this discussion, the aberration of muen shakai may come into sharper relief. It is the complete, or nearly complete, elimination of good mimesis. The “universal mimesis” that Oughourlian proposes is denied. There is no imitation (in space), repetition (in time), or reproduction (in the species). It is not that isolated people are unlikely to have children (many people could arguably do more good without children) but that they do not “pass themselves on” in any way. This is the tragic distortion of the lost souls of muen shakai: neither they nor we can experience the generation of good that would come from their participation in common life. We are bereft of them, and of the good that could come from them, and from our interaction from them.

Closing Words

There is no need to attempt a shallow reconciliation between MT and GA that involves either surrendering its core principles. Both theoretical communities are able to function quite well on their own. At the same time, there is no need to exaggerate differences when MT and GA are actually moving in the same direction. By admitting that scapegoating is not the ultimate point of human origin in its search for positive mimesis, MT has opened up considerable space to work out its anthropology on parallel tracks with GA, rather than in contention. If a “generative” model of positive mimesis were pursued, even more commonality might be discovered. The cumulative efforts, even in friendly rivalry, might help to create a positive vision for humanity that accords with what is most human about us. Of course, this will not solve the world’s demographic problems, or the related problems of social isolation, but it might give us a good reason to solve them.

Acknowledgements

This paper developed through presentations, first at the 2010 meeting of the Japan Girard Association (under the title “Every Man an Island?”), and then (under the present title) at the July 2012 meeting of the Generative Anthropology Society and Conference jointly held in Tokyo with the Japan Girard Association and the Colloquium on Violence and Religion. The insightful comments of participants at both meetings have greatly informed the final product. I am also thankful for the advice of Michael Cholewinski, the help of my wife Emi in tracking social trends in Japan, and the continual guidance and encouragement of Eric Gans.

One of the many principles that generative anthropology shares with mimetic theory is a conviction that the dismissive expulsions of religious language performed by analytical philosophy will not do. Religious language deserves respect as a source of anthropological truth; it offers models through which we can understand those “otherworldly characteristics of language” that provide experiences of transcendence. So we might ask then, what kind of “becoming-language” is described by that subset of religious narratives (along with their secular derivatives) that we call the apocalyptic? What “otherworldly characteristic of language” is incarnated by such texts?(1) Pressured to suggest an answer, I would offer this as a minimal formula for apocalyptic narrative: the future is now.

The future is now. But how so? A future must be later, not now. That which will be happening cannot be assimilated to that which is happening. Nevertheless, much apocalyptic narrative is captured by the future is now. Apocalyptic narratives tend to contain the figure of a messenger who has visited a future world. The messenger has witnessed the total destruction of the current social arrangements we blithely believe will be permanent. Not so: our present is ephemeral, our future punishing. The messenger has returned to share with us rich reports of the violence-ravaged landscape, city, or planet that he has visited. We can include science fictions in the apocalyptic, from the restrained fantasies of H. G. Wells to the recent spate of Hollywood movies that aim to shame us with the imminence of ecological collapse. (2) When it is a story of alien intruders from outer space, there is no human going ahead and coming back, just the visitation of a party-crasher who has arrived at humankind’s front door. In a way, the space aliens are the worst. With the visionary, at least you can roll your eyes, nudge your neighbour, and murmur words like too far-fetched… too extreme. But it is difficult to debate with aliens from outer space. They possess an imperiously self-evident authority.

The figure of a future-sent messenger and the paradox of a collapsed temporality are essential, but they are not enough. For the true apocalyptic, one must have violence: the violent future is now. An imaginary future emptied of or free from violence is a utopia. The apocalyptic might promise a utopia, but only after the violent bits. When you do the apocalyptic, you’re definitely in for it. Trouble, big trouble, approaches. If the future does not terrify by its violence, then the vision does not quite count as apocalyptic.

Apocalyptic is no mere blip on the computer screens of cultural history; it is close to being a human universal. Personally, I spooned it up the with the porridge my mother made me for breakfast, and the apocalyptic suffused my soul when I stood or sat beside my father in church on Sunday mornings, saying the Lord’s Prayer or absorbing sermons. If I appear to joke a little about its oddity in this discourse, I mean no disrespect. To my mind, the violence of God (or the violence God lets humans alone to do to each other) makes irony needful. Originary thinking is not apocalyptic thinking. Whereas René Girard embraces a certain form of the apocalyptic, Eric Gans distances himself from that which he understands it to be.(3) Let me ask, then, where would the moment of apocalyptic experience be in the originary event that generative anthropology takes as a model for understanding human scenic action? A suggestion: the moment of the apocalyptic is the instant when the sign anticipates… the violent consumption of the object.

The exchange of signs anticipates the violent consumption of the central object. Apocalyptic thinking limits those who do it exclusively to anticipation. The sign gets stuck. It anticipates; that is all. Expectation is all. Because everyone will be affected by violent consumption, apocalyptic consciousness is the experience of a moralizing equality. All are to be terrified equally by nuclear war, by catastrophic climate change, by the global pandemic of an airborne virus knocking us down and eating us up like crows eat toast, or the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven. This moralistic levelling links the apocalyptic to the victimary: as the all-consuming future will victimize all, those who refuse to fear it persecute those who do; or those who do fear it will experience righteous vengeance against the sinfully impious who feel no fear of future judgment. Apocalyptic thinking takes as its model the exchange of signs divorced from the exchange of things: we anticipate consumption, but we do not consume. If we are exchanging nothing but signs in anticipation of global disaster, the moral high ground gets very crowded very quickly. Or to change metaphors, we might say the overcrowded lifeboats of the equally terrorized soon sink, because everyone is leaping off the Titanic hours before the iceberg hits. The apocalyptic never really works. If the majority do it, witness Nazi apocalyptic or the Gulag. If a minority do it, witness Jimmy Jones or Waco.

The apocalyptic mind purchases the success of its devotion to anticipation of violent consumption at a high price. The price is submission to an ethic of purported nonviolence that disconnects the apocalyptic practitioner from the profane world of economic and political history.<(4) In the purity of its anticipatory sign-exchange, apocalyptic thinking does not move from signs to things.(5) It will not sacrifice the purely moral anticipation of an absolute future to the relativizing political necessity of an impure economic present.(6) From that immobility grows the pious contempt of those people in apocalyptic movements for the fools and sinners who carry on getting and spending in towns and cities. The members of truly apocalyptic sects—Quakers, Mennonites, Congregationalists, or those among my ancestors who were Anabaptists—they separate themselves from the religious mainstream. Those who exchange apocalyptic signs in pure anticipation limit their interest and restrain their investment in the so-called real world. (7) One understands there is no reason to wish for part of the cultural center, because one anticipates the violent destruction of the cultural center. As for those Christian congregants who belong to a Roman Catholic or a Lutheran or Anglican community—they can have no idea, really, of the radical protestant apocalyptic. For the Roman Catholic, the Lutheran, the Anglican? They are state churches that have made their historical beds with Caesar for centuries. State church from the apocalyptic perspective must be an oxymoron, revealing a compromise that has lessened the intensity of expectation.(8)

***

Having teased out some of the effects of anticipation itself, now I would emphasize that which is anticipated: the violent consumption of the central object. Consumption ends anticipation, though; so anticipated and real consumption cannot meet. Moreover, that the consumption will be violent is another reason to anticipate without intending to participate in it. For the apocalyptic mind, any thought of real consumption carries the tempting sensation of too-pleasant consumption too close for comfort. Violent consumption is sin; pleasure in the things of this world is impurity. No human consumption can be nonviolent: the apocalyptic is victimary, because even surviving is sinful; even just to walk around breathing is sinful, until you have been saved. The apocalyptic thinker anticipates, wishes for, and judges present humankind against a moral utopia. The utopia is one where no human does violence to any object, in which the exchange of signs gets transmuted into a perfectly reciprocal exchange of things.(9) But that utopia comes later, after the violence, so here and now pleasure is sacrificed to deferred post-violence satisfaction. That sacrifice of the here-and-now pleasure explains why asceticism, fasting, meditation, prayerful sojourns in the desert and contortions of self-punishing discipline contribute to apocalyptic drama. Theology? The apocalyptic theological instant is one of paranoia: God judges humankind now and finds humankind wanting: humankind is not up to standard because victimary morality dictates that one do no violence to consumable objects and that one exhibit no desire to consume things in this world.(10)

What about history, retrospection? No refuge there. The apocalyptic instant anticipates; it takes no interest in the past. It reduces the economic past to nothing but the violent consumption of the earth’s resources and the oppression of the poor by the rich, the slave by the free, or the rest by the West, or all of that. It reduces the political past to nothing but a parade of tyrants and buffoons. Ideas of human action ennobled by tragedy are considered delusional in the last instance.(11) And for mimetic theory at its most apocalyptic, human action is reducible to mindless violence (scapegoating). Human history for the apocalyptic mind does not signify in itself. Historical events count only as the indicators, precursors, and types of things to be revealed in their fullness later. That which counts is that which one anticipates; nothing else really does. And the ultimate powerlessness of humans to change anything in history will be revealed as having been the truth about humans from the origin.

Those who do generative anthropology observe that mimetic theory defines humans not in the first place by their use of language, but by their violence: collective murder happens first, non-instinctual attention second. The originary humans hesitate to notice the victim only after they have (in a panic) killed it. Something is revealed in an instant of peace; the violence experienced is sacred. In mimetic theory, the acquisition of language is for humans a kind of accidental by-product or side-effect of violence; one must wonder, actually, why human language is needful at all in mimetic theory, let alone where it comes from.(12) Or perhaps one should say that for mimetic theory the signs of language are nothing but traces of human violence. (Notice how different that is from saying that the signs of language are the deferral of human violence). The only event in Girard’s originary scene is a one-way revelation of violence, from God to humans, the revelation by God to humans of human violence. Humankind notices nothing without God’s intervention; the human exchange of signs is either stuck anticipation or a mindless after-effect.

Now I agree that Girard’s discovery of the Biblical God who has nothing to do with violence is a wonderful event. It constitutes an unveiling of anthropological truth that all humans, or Christians at least, should understand and share.(13) But I cannot help but finding myself disagreeing with Girard insofar as his hypothesis implies that we are reduced to a certain passivity in our encounter with God, such that our being called to name the revealed truth is worth next to nothing. Our signs only anticipate what God willreveal, without giving access to a blessed reality in the here-and-now. In apocalyptic thinking of the mimetic theory variety, the thing that humans do best and most is language-less violence to the innumerable victims that represent God. The revelation of the Divine Self in the crucified Jesus is one with the revelation to humans of their violence to each other and everything they can get their sinful hands on. (One might wonder—why did God make us so fundamentally violent in the first place, just so that he could reveal to us the horror? What was his point? But never mind.)

The founding event in mimetic theory is not an event at all. It is not an event because it is nothing in which we can imagine ourselves having participated as language-using humans. If the originary victim in mimetic theory causes non-instinctual attention, humans are caused by that figure of violence. Humans do not choose to represent it. Humans do not give the victim any sacred name. We could not have known at all what we had done in the first place, because we would not have had a common word with which to remember the event.(14) In mimetic theory, humans blunder more or less gradually (for the origin of language in Girard’s model is gradualist) onto, into, the stages of their own stupefying, infinitely stupid violence. By contrast, originary thinking defines human beings in the first place by their mindful exchange of abortive gestures of appropriation. Certainly, the violent desire to appropriate the central object circulates; certainly, the supra-animal violence of the sparagmos will be more terrible than animal feeding precisely because it will have been represented and remembered. But it will always have happened in the space of deferral created by the exchange of signs; and that space of deferral is given by the shared Being in and of the sacred center.

The originary hypothesis offers a minimal model for understanding that which a human event is and does. It makes sense to think of God as a Being present at the center of human events. We come to understand God as a sacred Person in the scenic center who expects not just to be consumed but to be named, who must be named, from the beginning. Generative anthropology’s model of the event does not limit consumption to being nothing but mindless scapegoating: it is not mindless violence because we have already named the object. The point to be made about human violence as distinct from animal aggression is that humans know something of what they do. The phrase “animal violence” is nonsensical, for animals have no shared sacred centers to violate. Our possession of language defines our violence; our violence does not define our language. Animal violence alone says nothing. Like nature, violence is mute. It does not signify. We as language-using humans signify, by naming sacred centers; sacred centers signify, in revealing their Being to us by demanding, calling us to name them.(15)

Originary thinking agrees deeply with mimetic theory on many points. Just as mimetic theory takes as the crucial problematic of human interaction the containment of historical human violence, so does originary theory.(16) Originary thinking does not deny the horror in the glory and horror of the human. For us, the Christian revelation is the revelation of the victimary status of the central object. Originary thinking, furthermore, agrees with mimetic theory in its privileging of the idea that the Christian model of moral omnicentricity had world-changing effects; it agrees that the Christian revelation changed human reality for the better.(17) However, in Science and Faith: The Anthropology of Revelation (1990), Eric Gans makes the point that the Christian revelation is not ultimately just the revelation of a moral teaching impossible for humans to practice, though it is that.(18) Additionally, more differentially, it is the revelation of a person—the person, Jesus—who mediates between the impossibly nonviolent moral utopia of the Kingdom he proclaimed and the real possibility of a community of believers who share faith in his forgiveness. Paul understands that Jesus forgives humankind’s inevitable failure to make the utopia Jesus himself preached appear here and now on earth. To do nothing but anticipate violent consumption is not to anticipate forgiveness for that which will be remembered with the name we already exchange. Trying out originary analysis on the sacred texts of Christian culture demonstrates that the Christian revelation need not be confined to apocalyptic anticipation.

Anyway, originary thinking presupposes that the exchange of signs anticipating violent consumption of the central object will not do as a model for understanding Divine action or human events. Neither at the origin nor today do humans experience language as either nothing but the anticipation of violent consumption (so we must strive for nonviolent moral utopia), or nothing but a side-effect of violent consumption (so we are damned by the scapegoating violence buried beneath every human interaction).(19) The divine Presence of the God who loves us is not revealed by the unnamed body alone of the victimized object. In the beginning was the Word does not mean in the beginning was the victimized flesh alone that the Word became afterward and nobody knows how. The sacred text In the beginning was the Word(20) means that from the very beginning, the excess of violence that defines the human is one with the freedom and responsibility of humans to name the beings that have suffered that violence.

God’s revelation to humankind is the revelation of a space of deferral and differentiation in which God will intervene not once and for all in a single apocalypse, but continuously in every revelatory human event. God is the central locus of the scene of representation conceived as a Being, a Being who confers value on the smallest human exchanges, on the smallest historical human differences. Maybe that is what is meant in the verse about God counting every sparrow.(21) What if it were possible, as the beautifully passionate discourse of James Alison (a theologian strongly influenced by Girard) proves it is possible, to believe in God liking us—not loving us with the portentous obligations thereby implied, but just liking us—as our most loyal, easy, intimate friends do?(22)

Originary thinking resists the apocalyptic fantasy of a nonviolent moral utopia, knowing the invidious realities of millenarian resentment such fantasies create.(23) Nothing compels us to believe that the fullness of God’s revelation to humankind, whether of His own violence (the fundamentalist apocalypse) or of totalizing human violence (Girard’s model), is the ultimate revelation, a terrifying spectacle to make us cringe.(24) God does not stand in our way, forcing us to anticipate, but blocking, violent consumption. From the beginning, God has given away the Divine center; God has given way. God gives way, and the way God gives is the way of human-Divine interactions in history.

Whereas apocalyptic thinking attaches itself to a perfect violent world to come, originary thinking attaches itself to the imperfectly violent world that has always been since the beginning. It is the God of this world who loves humans as they are, even despite their violence. And how do we, mainstream humans as opposed to apocalyptic separatists, produce historical change? We do violence to the earth, planting crops and taming animals, digging minerals and diverting rivers, kissing and missing, loving and losing, trying and failing, making and breaking. We produce and consume. We exchange words and things. With each exchange, with each historical event and revelation, we may learn and come to know a little bit more about the Divine, for whatever has occupied the scenic center in human events has inherited a bit of the Divine from the beginning.(25) Inspired by originary thinking, therefore, one might pursue a faith in God as the suffering One who, rather than threatening perpetually to reveal once and for all the end of economic history, is always promising to give it a new beginning.(26) Maybe we should let go of the future is now. Maybe the truth is… that the present (where God is) is the only future worth hoping for.