Author: staceymeeker

The Question of Transcendence: An Update

I am currently in the preliminary stages of a project that will address the question raised by the current wave of anti-religion books and the replies they have received from the faithful. Now that I’ve read a few works in both categories, I am able to provide an update. At this point I will not address the specific points raised in these works. Although eventually I will have to respond to their chief arguments, such as they are, my readings confirm my conviction that no one conceives which I shall call the question of transcendence in anything like the same terms as GA.

As might be expected, although the common assumptions of both sides exclude consideration of the originary hypothesis, the arguments in defense of the transcendental are more congenial to it. As a rule, those who attack religion assume that the universe can be understood as composed entirely of matter and that the human does not put into question this overall materialist ontology. The a priori exclusion of a transcendental realm, which reduces representations to forms of matter associated with other forms, more complex but not ontologically different from the strands of DNA that are “expressed” in bodily traits or functions, makes the construction of a hypothetical originary scene a waste of time. In contrast, for those who defend God or the “spiritual,” the originary hypothesis can be understood as a minimal reading of a scene of creation, and even if the defense drifts off into the cosmos, the human battleground remains the essential one. What these defenders do not do, however, is propose a minimal hypothesis of their own. Either they accept in some sense a specific religion’s account of creation or, more commonly, they avoid discussing origin altogether, since the “spiritual realm” is simply assumed to exist independently of humanity. Neuroscientist Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary’s The Spiritual Brain (HarperSanFrancisco 2007) is the best example I have seen of this kind of argumentation. This book’s claims for “spirituality” are not in real contradiction with the principles of GA, but there is no expressed concern for restricting these claims to the domain of anthropology.

Of the atheists’ various theories of how religion came into existence, the most serious are founded on evolutionary psychology. If religion is widespread despite its costliness in time and energy (not to speak of its absurdity, criminality, imbecility, etc.), it must somehow be adaptive, so we may assume there exist for its central traits genes, or brain modules, or complexes of “memes”–unless religious activity is merely a “spandrel,” an indirect consequence of genuinely adaptive traits, such as our love for stories. As for what might make religion adaptive, perhaps the best guess is that it satisfies our (or our children’s) tendency to attribute intention to ostensible agents, whether truly animate or not, including the dead, whose agental status we tend to prolong as their bodies decay. Aside from the pseudo-scientific vocabulary, most of these arguments are not measurably more sophisticated than the 19^th-century figure of “primitive man” bowing down to the god of the thunderstorm. In perhaps the most serious of these explorations, Daniel Dennett’s insufferably long-winded Breaking the Spell (Viking 2006), the set of possibly useful analogies with which the author begins his investigation includes such things as our excessive fondness for sugar and behavior influenced by parasites. The idea that a complex institution bound up with the whole of human culture can be approached by means of such analogies is a category error of astounding intellectual arrogance. Concerning those works that dispense with both diatribes and evolutionary speculations and limit themselves to philosophical demonstrations of the Impossibility or merely the Improbability of God– the titles of two collections of philosophical essays–they commit a less dramatic version of the same category error by discussing the God-concept independently of its necessarily anthropological context.

Beyond Voltairean religion-bashing that has no bearing on the question of transcendence, the bottom line of the atheistic side’s arguments is that what we know about matter and its organization gives no evidence of a creator-designer, that is, a world-creating mind gifted with intentionality. Everything from the big bang to the emergence of life to that of humanity can be reasonably attributed to matter’s self-organizing properties, as manifested in particular in the Darwinian evolution of life.

My claim is that this line of argument is simply irrelevant. It fails to address the real question at stake, which should not be posed–by either side–in terms of the existence or non-existence of a “designer.” Religion is about the human, and God’s existence in realms not inhabited by humanity is of at most allegorical significance. Christianity makes this explicit with John’s “In the beginning was the word,” rewriting what was already strongly implicit in the Genesis original, where God creates the universe with language. Speculating on what God was or was not doing at the big bang, or whether he created just one universe or a zillion alternative ones (to respect the “anthropic principle”) is the contemporary equivalent of counting angels on pinheads. As for the “proofs” of God’s impossibility or improbability, it suffices to say that if God exists, he is no doubt capable of arranging things as he likes, including dealing with the logical impossibility of being at once omnipotent and omniscient. To suggest, as some do, that if God really existed, he would almost certainly have made the world differently reflects the cosmological arrogance that scientists display whenever they forget that to present quantum indeterminacy and the decomposition of matter into quarks as the definitive ontology is to declare the end of (scientific) history.

This is not to suggest that, given the inability of science to pronounce definitively on the nature of the universe, we should take the “agnostic” position that we simply “don’t know” whether God exists. What we need is an altogether different perspective, an anthropological perspective.

Preliminary to any attempt to offer an understanding of the qualia of experience or of the operation of the will, an anthropological hypothesis of human origin must provide a plausible framework within which transcendent phenomena can be conceived as emerging within a worldly situation. Hence the anthropology founded on the originary hypothesis sets as its first order of priority to conceive a minimal scenario for the emergence of the transcendental realm in an originary event.

Given the minimality of its founding hypothesis, GA need not concern itself with the existence of a “spiritual” universe beyond the realm of words and meaning. The sole, because minimal, form of transcendence necessary for our purposes is that of representation itself. That the use of words does not immediately suggest a transcendental reality is a product of the practical extension of language to reality, the “secularization” that began with the first word, which is an expression of both worship/interdiction and of practical desire, designating an object whose universally agreed on desirability makes it interdicted as a whole but all the more desirable in its parts.

This line of reasoning allows us to approach the thorny problem of “free will.” However animals understand their “voluntary” acts, they cannot reflect on them as we do, representing to themselves alternative future states that they may or may not choose to bring about. The minimal explanation for the internal scene of consciousness on which we play out our intentions, giving us the capacity to represent them and consequently to modify them, is that it derives from the first humans’ memory of the originary human scene. The emission of the sign is an act of will that cannot be reduced to the modes of animal decision-making; the sign is not merely a gesture but a representation, emitted as possessing a meaning or intention irreducible to the gesture itself. The externality of its meaning to the sign/gesture itself is realized in actu within the group, and the meaning retained in the internal “lexicon” of the participants is that of the experience of the group membership as a whole reacting to the sign as designating/interdicting its object.

Our possession of representations is the central feature of what we call our “consciousness.” Animals have intentions and make calculations, but they lack a “theory of mind” that allows them to understand and predict not merely the actions but the intentions of other beings. As Richard van Oort has pointed out, based on Michael Tomasello’s studies of chimpanzees, even the highest animals, although clearly able to react to the intentions of others (as a prey animal avoids its predators), are unable to attribute intention to their fellows, for example, in teaching/learning a new technique. From this we may conclude that these creatures lack a theory of their own mind and cannot attribute intention to themselves. Humans acquire an intuitive grasp of others’ and their own intentionality through the shared use of representations. Unlike the tool-like actions of chimpanzees, speech acts are intrinsically intentional–intentionality is all they are. We are able to guess each other’s intentions because they can in principle be formulated in language.

A familiar point against the materialist denial of human specificity is that a robot or computer has no internal mental state. Computers use signs, but they are our signs; to the computer, they are so many bytes–in fact, there is no “to the computer” at all. As Beauregard and others point out, the claim that our mind is nothing but the activity of our brain is an act of faith, not a scientific truth. What the originary hypothesis adds to this debate is to clarify what it is that humans share with respect to the use of representations: their creators’ originary and subsequently virtual community. The individual brain does not “contain” the representations it uses; it borrows them from a communal source to which they always remain attached. It is their dependence on the human community that distinguishes the signs of language from the indexical signs employed by our animal forebears. Whereas animals’ signaling systems are rooted in individual, genetically inherited behavior patterns that have been refined by evolution to arouse the appropriate reaction in their fellows, requiring at best some postnatal training, humans invent, use, and modify language in a collective setting. Each use of a word or symbol takes place before this virtual community, whose members’ mutual recognition as fellow language-users is ultimately dependent on a shared sense of the sacred. The virtual presence of the human community generates the scenic space within which we become conscious of ourselves.

The arguments given above do little more than summarize, with some added refinements, ideas I first put forth on this subject in 1981 in The Origin of Language. I am prepared to continue repeating and refining these same ideas–in dialogue with the handful of free spirits who take them seriously–while I am able to think at all.

So long as the two sides in the public debate agree to disagree about “the existence of God,” there will be no progress. It is only when both sides come to accept the fact that–as I think Derrida realized in his last years (see Chronicle 340)– the distance between the faith of the possessor of human language and that of the believer in sacred revelation is vanishingly small, that the understanding of what these two “believers” have in common can become the focus of a way of thinking about the human that will finally be worthy to be called anthropology.

March 30, 2008
A New Mode of Being

Although language and the other forms of human representation are now recognized as unique in the animal kingdom, exploration of the specifically anthropological ontology characteristic of the linguistic sign is a virtual monopoly of generative anthropology, which hypothesizes that the transcendent status of the sign emerges in an originary event through the collective deferral of appetitive behavior. Saussure’s analysis of the sign as consisting of the communally shared relation between signifiant and signifié respects its ontological specificity more clearly than Peirce’s potentially unending chain of interpretants, but neither of these two pioneers of semiology attempted to understand language and its emergence as an anthropological phenomenon.

There is nothing mystical about claiming that the sign has a different ontology from the elements of the real world. A sign is not a thing; it is a complex of things and the relations among them, mediated by the community that exchanges them. Human language and other forms of representation exemplify a new mode of being discontinuous with earlier forms of communication and organization. Were all sign-users to vanish, this ontology would vanish with them, and the sign-traces left behind would become mere worldly objects–although their discovery by a future sign-user could restore them to their particular status.

The apparent similarity of the semiotic type-token relationship to that, for example, of the genotype and phenotype of a given species seems obvious only because we use language to describe it. Each horse is an individual, not a token in the sense that the last word of this sentence is a token of the word “horse.” A genotype is an ideal construction to which each individual member of the species Equus caballus corresponds only approximately; a word-type is manifest in each token of a given word. And nothing in the natural world is analogous to the translatability of the type horse into that of Pferd or cheval while retaining essentially the same conceptual extension.

The inadequacy of social science’s ontology of language is revealed most strikingly in the naïve attempts to associate the emergence of language with a mutant “language gene” that can only be expressed–in this case, literally–when the mutation occurs at least twice in a particular group. (A “God gene” has also made its appearance.) The requirement of plural mutations is a particularly egregious consequence of the failure to distinguish between a human community of language users and a prehuman collectivity. The focus on the individual’s genetic makeup even when dealing with the self-evidently collective phenomenon of language reflects the limits of natural science’s materialist ontology.

Similarly, although human groups have been examined systematically at least since the days of Durkheim, the dependence of human communities on the exchange of symbolic representations is taken for granted rather than becoming an object of reflection in its own right. The notion of “human community” seems at first glance unproblematic, yet, like language, religion, and all phenomena of representation, it exists only through the mediation of the reciprocal exchange of signs around what was at the origin a sacred center. This scenic configuration exists as a virtual scene of representation in the imagination of every human being, which, when actualized, becomes the template of an event, a memorable experience that offers a potential occasion for the exchange of signs.

A human community is not a worldly object but a set of members and the relations between them as mediated by the representations they exchange and the things they exchange through the mediation of these representations. Although there are obvious parallels in the mass behavior of human and animal collectivities, the animal pack, whether of ants, birds, lions, or apes, is held together only by the affinities of its individual members for the others; it has no sense of its own cohesion as a community. The set of micro-relationships that make up an alpha-beta hierarchy suffices to maintain social cohesion even among the highest animals and to preserve it from one generation to the next. The human communal organization that emerges from the originary event reflects the breakdown of the alpha-beta system; the human community, symmetrically arrayed around a sacred center, becomes aware of itself through the reciprocal exchange of representations of that center. What Durkheim calls the “solidarity” of the group that is reinforced by ritual is each member’s awareness of the shared possibility of this reciprocal exchange.

Human communication is symbolic where the nonhuman remains indexical. Animal subgroups are defined by physiological traits, including signals; human subgroups, by shared representations. Not only is our sharing of signs irreducible to prehuman modes of sharing, but Kant’s transhuman category of “rational being” is gratuitous. No logic based on our own practice can permit us to claim that “rationality” is a universal possibility generalizable beyond the human. Even if sign-using beings exist elsewhere in the universe, we have no reason to assume that their sign-systems and the nature of the communities they found are analogous to ours.

Enlightenment ontology has no place for the uniquely human category of symbolic representation. The more difficult question is not why there is a mode of being unique to the human but how it could come about that this uniqueness might be one day denied. This is part and parcel of the problem of thinking the sacred. Religious representations refer explicitly to the sacred, and the theological discourse that interprets them thinks the sacred on that basis, but to think the sacred outside of sacred dogma–the attempt to do so is at least implicitly at the core of what we call “anthropology”–is a problematic task, perhaps ultimately an impossible one.

What makes it impossible to think the sacred in philosophical or metaphysical terms is that it inheres in a collective scenic context and that its effect is not “portable” outside that context–in contrast with the esthetic, which retains its charge between the collective and the individual scenes of representation. The ostensive that points to the sacred is a communal, not an individual one. I can show you an object that is worshiped, but I cannot show its worshipfulness; the sacred cannot be grasped either in the object or in my private or mystical experience of it. Durkheim describes the functioning of sacred objects and rites but he cannot help us to understand the constitution or being of the sacred in the absence of a plausible generative scheme–the construction of which he considered incompatible with positive science–of how the sacred came into being, along with language and other forms of representation.

How did a given society come to project itself onto sacred figures and discourses that impose a communal ethic on individuals whose short-term individual interests run counter to moral reciprocity, even if they benefit from it in the long term? The problem of the social order is a version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, where cooperation is the best strategy taken collectively, but not individually. (Indeed, the needs of any collectivity are subject to such reasoning. If too many plants grow in a given area, they all suffer; some must be “persuaded” to sacrifice themselves for the common good. But the selfish interests of the members of a human community are controlled by communal representations rather than through the evolutionary emergence of stereotyped behavior.) The dogmatic irrationality of sacred discourse is sometimes evoked (for example, by Rodney Stark) as means of overcoming the Prisoner’s Dilemma; defectors are less likely when the price of admission includes professing belief in highly implausible narratives. But once again, sacred discourse is not a simple product of natural selection; it can only be explained by a generative scheme. The specific “irrationalities” of sacred discourse must be given a plausible origin in the configuration of the originary event. It is the ostensive nature of the originary sign that gives the sacred its “irrational” referentiality. An ostensive sign points at something; it cannot point to a signified or idea. If humans like to tell stories, it is because the originary referent of the sign was not an abstract notion but a particular being whose presence in the sacred center, necessary in the abstract, is contingent in its specificity as the center of this event. The meaning or signified is inherent in the structure of the sign, but it is not sufficient to motivate its origin; at the origin of the sign as meant is the sign as referring.

Language makes no formal distinction among its referents between objects of interest in the everyday world and the object of “interest” that gave rise to the originary transformation of the deferred appetitive gesture into a sign. The ultimately spurious dichotomy between “believers” and “unbelievers” depends on the inherent impossibility of distinguishing the sacred from the significant. The religious rituals that impose this distinction reflect its fragility rather than its ontological evidence. In valorizing the distinction, the believer affirms that the social cohesion brought about by the sacred cannot be attributed to the members of the community and their “interests” alone, that the common object of desire that inspired the exchange of signs was only a place-holder for a Being, desire for whom is the newborn desire for community itself. For his part, the non-believer takes all this for granted; because the human community and its various modes of representation have obvious utility, they need not be explained by anything other than natural selection.

Before the emergence of the scientific attitude in the early modern era, coincident with the rise of the market, atheism of this sort was inconceivable; the only alternatives to faith were skepticism or admission of ignorance. Not that the birth of the scientific attitude is coeval with a new, post-sacred explanation of the human; it signals rather that a sacred explanation is no longer necessary now that the marketplace provides the model of a self-sustaining human institution that liberates the individual to focus on the conquest of the natural world. Descartes’ God is not required to guarantee the sanctity of the human community, only the coincidence of the thinking mind’s internal scene with the external universe. The exchange of signs among such minds no longer presupposes explicit universal acknowledgement of the sacred otherness of its originary source.

Reflection on the transcendental ontology of the human is equally absent from the current dialogue de sourds over religion and atheism. The debaters are too comfortable taking pot-shots at each other from positions fortified since the Enlightenment to explore the minimal common ground cleared by the originary hypothesis.

The debate’s new horizon is the avoidance of global apocalypse. The long-term catastrophes predicted by the new religion of Global Warming are benign distractions compared with the increasingly plausible threat of imminent annihilation at our own hands. Under these circumstances, the neo-Voltairean discourse of a Sam Harris or a Christopher Hitchens bespeaks a desperate urgency. The common-sense solution for murderous religious fanaticism is to eliminate the religious traditions that breed it. Nor can one retort that atheists Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot have outkilled Bin Laden by many orders of magnitude; their massacres too were justified by “faith.”

The proper reply is rather that the human community, born in the transcendence of the individual appetites of its members, cannot simply renounce its potential to obey even a suicidal sacred imperative. The solution, if solution there be, lies in insisting neither on the universal sameness of human desire nor on the equivalent multiplicity of its embodiments, but on the difference between those embodied desires that tend to preserve the global human community and those that tend to destroy it. The fault line does not lie between religion and atheism, or even between reason and fanaticism, but between the modern market system and the traditional “Maussian” world, whose fierce resentment of modernity has bred in some a will to annihilation. If it is too late to turn back the clock and leave the Umma to its own devices, neither is there anything to be gained by declaring religion refuted by natural science. Such a proposition can only confirm the intuition shared by saints and jihadists alike that Western civilization is not so much evolved beyond its sacred origins as ignorantly or perversely determined to deny them.

The originary hypothesis will not dissuade the jihadists. But this does not mean that its significance is merely “theoretical.” Although the difficulty with which the hypothesis finds adherents is not a sufficient condition of its long-term validity, in our consumption-driven world it is no doubt a necessary one. As an originary theory of the human, generative anthropology provides a critical understanding of the other originary theories that we call religions. We work to promote this understanding in the hope that the grandchildren of the jihadists, and our own, may be brought to accept it as the minimal foundation of a global human community.

March 2, 2008
Universal Anthropology

Although the members of every racial/ethnic/sexual minority belong in the first place to “the human race,” in today’s era of identity politics, affirmations of universal humanity are viewed with suspicion. The multiculturalist critique of universal anthropology argues that since every culture or language is a particular culture or language, any so-called cultural universal is either a vapid abstraction or an unwarranted extrapolation from a specific cultural experience in which the “majority culture” erects its own ethical (religious, political, esthetic,…) practices into universals. Since the lived experience that is the source of our intuitions about the human is determined by our membership in particular groups, the species-wide anthropology appropriate to the natural science of evolution is deemed irrelevant to the human science of culture. This distinction is reflected in the characteristic division of academic anthropology departments into physical and cultural anthropology. But the multiculturalist argument is not simply that any universal model fails to respect the essence of cultural specificity, which is that it can only be defined against other specificities. The field of cultural difference is not conceived as a uniform plane. Multiculturalism takes as its primary model of difference the asymmetric distinction between Western cultures and those of the West’s former colonies and dependencies. To apply a universal model to both a “subaltern” culture and that of its former colonizer is condemned as an act of imperialist bad faith.

Generative anthropology’s counterargument is that a heuristic theoretical construct is necessary to mediate between the necessary specificity of cultural experience, the mere multiplication of which cannot suffice to found a universal notion of culture, and the claim implicit in the very word anthropology that behind the variations of individual cultures lies a single logos of the human that explains the universality of all our moral intuitions, the intertranslatability of all our languages, the mutual comprehensibility of all our customs.

It is customary to claim that morality is “socially constructed” while at the same time castigating Western society for imposing its own values on others, oblivious to the fact that this very critique takes for granted a transcultural morality. Only a hypothesis of common origin gives us a basis for applying moral values transculturally. At the same time, it is only once we have defined an originary model of moral reciprocity that we can begin to understand how this model is transmuted into the ethical rules that operate both within and between individual societies. Rather than singling out the West for failing to live up to “its own” moral values, we should judge all human actions by the same moral values. Only when we have leveled the moral playing field can we evaluate every human interaction, whether a Western act of conquest or a precolonial rite, by a universal criterion that takes into consideration the ethical constraints on morality and gives us a means of judging when moral progress is being made and when it is not. The originary hypothesis guarantees the intuition of moral equality that underlies victimary resentment, but without privileging this resentment over the ethical reality it denounces. The moral critique of an national or political ethic cannot take the place of, but should rather proceed from, the analysis of the operations of the overall exchange system in which this ethic inheres. Although the resentment aroused by a violation of our fundamental moral intuition of reciprocity drives us to discover and denounce examples of non-reciprocity in human relations, resentment, which makes moral condemnation an end in itself, does not provide a useful basis for explaining the social function of this non-reciprocity.

With respect to the originary hypothesis, it is important to distinguish between the particularity of the originary event conceived in its concrete reality and the minimal claims of the hypothesis concerning what must have happened. The premise that a sign was emitted abstracts from the specific qualities of this sign and a fortiori from the determination of which features of the physical signifier were selected as significant. A minimal hypothesis of origin reduces to a minimum the traits conducive to the rememoration and repetition of the sign. Once we accept the presupposition that acts marked by the uniquely human process of representation are events and that the very notion of event implies that a “first event” must have occurred, any hypothetical scenario we use to lend the hypothesis plausibility will exceed this minimal requirement in unknowable ways. A scenario that describes more than it must without our being able to determine exactly the location of the excess is one way of defining a heuristic hypothesis. To go beyond the logical minimum in order to impress the hypothetical scene on our own and our readers’ imagination is to accept that whatever actually occurred contained much detail not recuperable by the culture (including language) that formed around it. To abstract from the concrete detail of the first and of any human culture is in no way to deny the necessary reality of the particulars one abstracts from.

One detail in particular of the originary scenario poses a quandary. To construct an all-male model of the originary scene, however plausible this may be given both the masculine quasi-monopoly on intraspecific violence and the dominant role played by males in all societies before our own, is to court the accusation of justifying male dominance. Yet if we deny the pertinence of gender to the hypothesis and refer to the originary community in non-sexual terms, we may equally well be accused of dissimulating the fact of this dominance. The solution to this dilemma, intellectually if not always practically, lies in the notion of firstness, a category first applied to the originary context by Adam Katz. The hypothesis that only males were present at the originary scene of language has no bearing on women’s capacity to use language or participate in all forms of social interaction, hence on their moral equality with men. On the contrary, the hypothesis of male firstness provides a cultural (and not simply “sociobiological”) explanation for the near-universal exclusion of women from many of these activities, an exclusion that has ended only very recently in Western societies and continues to this day in traditional societies.

No doubt the most vexed of all examples of firstness is that of the Jews, whose historical priority in the invention/discovery of the uniqueness of sacred Being has earned them centuries of resentment and much worse. Monotheism is a parsimonious doctrine founded on an intuition of anthropological universality–that we are all descended from one scene. The “one God” of the Jews is not their God but everyone’s. Yet even if the Hebrew God lacks a name by which “his” people can call on him, their historical association with this revelation cannot be forgotten. To accept the historical prestige of firstness without attributing to it a claim of ontological superiority is tantamount to accepting the analogous intuition of the uniqueness of the human scene that is the foundation of generative anthropology.

Given that the lesson of the sign is the deferral of appetitive appropriation and the danger of violence that it poses, the question arises as to how the deferral of the originary scene, reenacted in ritual, was first extended to long-term “Maussian” exchanges, notably those related to kinship, whose structures, like those of human language, are wholly cultural rather than elaborations of preexisting animal systems. Considering all human exchange to be mediated by the sacred center established in the originary event, how does sacred deferral insert itself between the parties to what once were animal interactions so that the configuration established in this event may evolve into a complex set of kinship relations? We should not expect to derive the kinship systems we find today directly from the minimal terms of the hypothesis; just as we know of no “primitive” languages, so we know of no “primitive” societies. It is nonetheless important to indicate a plausible path between the originary scene and the kinship system.

In his groundbreaking The Symbolic Species (Norton, 1997), Terrence Deacon hypothesizes that symbolic representation itself originated in the domain of kinship. The protohuman males who absented themselves for long periods to hunt for food needed to establish a permanent bond with their females in order to be assured that the offspring to whom they brought nourishment were really their own. But this hypothesis fails to define an originary event in which symbolic signification could emerge.

According to the originary hypothesis, emission of the sign is both an act of interdiction and an act of exchange. My own supposition that this emission was followed by the sparagmos of the central object is already a step beyond minimality for the purpose of offering a plausible scenario for dividing up this appetitive object after the old alpha-beta hierarchy has been overthrown. The acquisition of comparable or exchangeable parts of the object is far from the “exchange of women,” yet it obeys the same principle of symmetrical distribution. The most parsimonious supposition is that human societies would apply to other objects of desire the violence-deferring configuration discovered in the originary scene.

The establishment of a kinship system regulated by marriage laws, or negatively, by the “incest prohibition,” is surely not an immediate consequence of the originary event. Exogamy of any kind requires the identification of subgroups within a larger community. We may assume that after the emergence of multiple human communities, whether as a result of the splitting apart of the originary community or of its imitation by other groups of protohumans, the evolution of language and ritual permitted–perhaps only with the appearance of modern homo sapiens–the accretion of smaller groups into second-level societies, whose organization around the “totems” characteristic of the member communities establishes a secondary level of exchange beyond that of the “equal” portions of the originary event. This second-level organization would be the likely source of exogamy and kinship systems. Beyond the specifics, on which we can only speculate, lies the essential feature of human culture generated by the sign, that of simultaneous interdiction (of the whole) and exchange/equal division (of the parts).

The originary hypothesis is not a grid whose imposition on historical reality reduces the variety of human culture to the repetition of the “same” human scene and thereby forecloses empirical research. Generative anthropology presupposes that human culture is a reflection mediated by the sacred on the human itself, and therefore always in some sense a “theory of origin.” The configuration or “template” of human interaction that is the substance of the originary hypothesis underlies the variety of cultural activities but does not predict them.

From the perspective of the originary hypothesis, history consists of a series of experiments in social organization that begins with the originary event. The two fundamental models of human exchange are the near-instantaneous reciprocal exchange of signs and the deferred exchange of things. In traditional societies and even in the highest civilizations before the Renaissance, the dominant form of exchange remained the “Maussian” mode in which each transfer is part of an in principle endless circulation of “gifts”: goods, services, and people (the “exchange of women”). Market transactions, in contrast, extend the short-term interaction characteristic of the sign to the exchange of goods and services. The market’s rise to dominance beginning in the Early Modern era brought about the revolution in economic and political organization that gave birth to the modern “Western” social order.

If thus far the analysis of historical phenomena in the light of the originary hypothesis has occurred most often in the Humanities, this is because, in contrast with the entropy-ridden manifolds of real life, the unified imaginary universes generated by religious representations and works of art–works of “culture” in the narrow sense–are in the broadest sense homologous with the human universe as a whole, the single “community of man.” This suggests that as our increasingly global civilization–”culture” in the broad sense–attempts to construct such a community in all its complexity, the hypothesis that all things human derive from a single event should prove increasingly productive beyond the humanistic sphere.

February 17, 2008
A New Way of Thinking

How does Heidegger come to speak of Being? “Being” is in the first place a word, an element of language that cannot be understood before one understands what language is. But what does it mean to “understand what language is”? Both historical and synchronic linguistics have made great progress over the past century, but what language is can only be formulated in anthropological, indeed, in anthropogenic terms. Language cannot be considered as one biological attribute among others. The most unambiguous empirical differentiating sign of the human, language must be understood as the fundamental element of human ontology as well, lest we reduce the fact that we are the only creatures who ask the question of Being to an epiphenomenon. Unlike nonhuman systems of communication, language exists in history, and like history, language is a phenomenon whose birth defines the moment at which humans began to exist. The simple intuition that philosophical entities or “Ideas” such as Being, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful are in the first place words, so that their conceptual content can become a subject of discussion only once we have established what language is, is the foundation of generative anthropology. The novelty of these arguments to most readers confirms that generative anthropology is indeed a new way of thinking.

There are three accepted ways of thinking about the human. The oldest and most traditional is the religious or theological, which takes its point of departure from sacred doctrine and in the case of the “higher religions,” from a sacred text or texts. Bracketing the question of their sacred status, these doctrines provide hypotheses of origin, or more generally,anthropologies in which the essence of the human may be laid out in some detail, particularly in its ethical dimension.

The second way of thinking about the human is the philosophical or metaphysical. In its systematic form, metaphysics dates from Plato, who built his ontology on the givenness of the declarative sentence or proposition, that is, of mature language detached from its roots in originary, ostensive language. Since the late nineteenth century, traditional metaphysics, which follows Plato in positing its fundamental ontology a priori, has been succeeded by phenomenology, which extends Cartesian doubt to the totality of empirical knowledge, so that the individual, whose certitude is limited to the contents of his consciousness, elaborates what we would call his own anthropology on the basis of intuition and introspective evidence. Phenomenology denies a basis in psychology and more generally in any physical substrate; it is concerned with the contents of consciousness, not with the emotional or neurological mechanisms that are the internal yet still worldly correlates of these contents.

As Heidegger’s title (Being and Time) implies and Sartre’s subtitle (Essay in Phenomenological Ontology) makes explicit, phenomenology is a springboard to ontology. For if our mental contents are our only source of knowledge, then, the empirical truths of the Understanding (Verstand) being bracketed, only the transcendental truths of Reason (Vernunft) remain. Similarly to traditional metaphysics, what phenomenology both in its original form and in the many avatars that have followed fails to take into account is that the transcendental relationship between the phenomenon of consciousness and its physical/psychological correlates, including the possibility of bracketing thus entailed, is a product of human representation. There is a foundational homology between the relationship of the signified/meaning of a word to its referent, on the one hand, and on the other, the relationship of the phenomenon of consciousness to its worldly correlates. I bracket the world in reflecting on the phenomena of my consciousness just as I bracket the world while reading a novel.

Yet it is no accident that the phenomenological age has also been the age of Freud. In limiting one’s purview to the contents of consciousness, one necessarily raises the possibility that these contents are dependent on “unconscious” processes, whether one attributes these processes to the biological substrate of the human psyche or to the “bad faith” of consciousness itself. Freud’s anthropology, despite his valiant attempt at a quasi-historical “scene of origin” for these unconscious processes in Totem and Taboo, is founded on an ontology in which communal phenomena, language in particular, are reduced to their manifestations in the individual. Jung’s “collective unconscious,” the best known attempt to introduce collective contents into Freudian discourse, ignores the reciprocity of collective experience and reduces the community to a set of “unconsciously” linked individuals. Once more, representation provides the explicative model; whatever mystery lies in Jungian symbols reflects the fact that although language is used by individuals, its meaning is a collective reality. Jung’s attribution of these symbols to an ultimately biological “unconscious” rather than to the ritual cultures that created them reflects the pervasiveness of the individual-centered phenomenological mode of thought.

The third way of thinking about the human is the scientific; hypotheses about the human are proposed and empirical data are sought in order to either corroborate or disconfirm them. This is the founding model of the science taught in university departments of anthropology. However, anthropology, particularly in the United States, has been increasingly wary of universal theories of the human. The field is dominated by a multiculturalist ideology that insists on the equivalent value of all cultures and refuses to place them on an evolutionary scale. This effort at cultural neutrality reveals its naivety by its ready transformation into its opposite. To posit the equivalence of all cultures is to imply that those cultures that are more successful than others have no legitimate reason for their success, which is thereby exposed as illegitimate. Multiculturalism embodies an inverted scale of value that confers the highest moral value on the least successful cultures, considering those of the formerly colonized world as more worthy than the Western industrial society to which the anthropologists themselves belong. This combination of the condemnation of Western society with uncritical sympathy for its “victims” can be blamed for much of the ugliest behavior in the world today.

The evolution of academic anthropology demonstrates the impossibility of studying the human as a natural phenomenon. The gathering and classification of empirical data does not lend itself to the production of general theories. Anthropology’s abdication of its ostensible responsibility to formulate universal hypotheses about the human is not simply a passive consequence of the victimary politicization of academic thought. It is naïve to assume that we can insulate the study of the human from our moral intuition. We need not even evoke the colonial context of nineteenth-century ethnography or the European racism to which Boas’s anti-evolutionism was largely a reaction. These tendencies are themselves reflections of the fact that, just as philosophers are naïve in speaking of “Being” without recognizing the dependency of their thought on the historically constituted realm of human language, so anthropologists are naïve in defending tribal cultures against industrial cultures without recognizing that the moral intuition that drives and sustains this defense is itself a human trait dependent on language and sharing with it a common origin.

The inherent paradox of the social or human sciences comes to a head in the domain of fundamental anthropology, where the ability to generalize from specific empirical cases cannot suffice to found an autonomous science. But the same is true for the more narrowly focused human sciences. In the case of linguistics, for example, the triumphs of generative grammar in reducing a vast manifold of data to a manageable set of hypotheses stand in contrast to the superficiality of the various theories of language origin, none of which provides a fundamental understanding of the nature of language as a human phenomenon. An analogous contrast might be drawn between Noam Chomsky’s linguistic genius and the pathology of his political–which are really his anthropological–views.

What makes generative anthropology a new way of thinking is that its point of departure is a hypothesis concerning not the evolution of some feature of humanity but of the origin of the human as such. Such a hypothesis cannot be “scientific” in the generally accepted sense of the term; it is an a priori that postulates at the origin of the human a non-reproducible singularity, an event. The specific configuration of this event is of secondary importance; when we say that generative anthropology is founded on the originary hypothesis, the only necessary feature of this hypothesis is that there be one.

Yet this requirement is more constraining than first appears. What is lacking in the various hypotheses that have been offered for the emergence of genus Homo and of its specific traits such as erect posture, opposable thumb, tool use, or language itself, is an appreciation for the rupture that the use of representations, symbolic signs in Peirce’s terminology, effects with respect to all that has gone before. The fact that humans live in societies the simplest of which possesses a rich and varied fund of representations inspires students of language origin to conceive the passage from no representations to one representation as merely one stage like any other in the gradual emergence, in the course of hundreds of millennia, of the complex human cultures we know today. This way of thinking applies to the birth of human language Zeno’s paradox of the heap: a single grain is not a heap; if one keeps adding grains of sand, at some point there is a heap, yet there is no point at which adding a single grain can be said to change the status of the ensemble. But in contrast with the first grain of sand, the first sign of language is something never previously encountered. No gradual passage is possible from a “horizontal” world without representation to one to which the “vertical” dimension of representation has been added. Once there is a single symbolic sign, there is language, and the passage from one sign to the thousands of signs in mature languages is trivial in comparison to that between no signs and the first sign. In The Scenic Imagination I analyze a few of the many misguided attempts to finesse this transition.

What makes generative anthropology a new way of thinking is its recognition of the communal nature of representation and of the necessity for a hypothetical event to explain its beginnings. The necessary distinction between scientific and religious discourse makes it appear absurd to suggest that the human began in a punctual scene, yet this is the only adequate conceptualization of the origin of human representation. For every human use of representation is indeed an event, a historically unique moment that transforms the human universe and that can be not simply “remembered” but represented in its turn; the beginning of this discrete series of human events is the first event.

Of the three accepted ways of thinking outlined above, only the religious offers a version of such an event. For those who seek an alternative theory of human origin to those of creationists and “intelligent design” theorists whose hypotheses are founded, overtly or covertly, on dogmatic beliefs, the only valid alternative is the postulation of an originary event of the human, defined as the user of representations–the new way of thinking embodied in the originary hypothesis.

January 27, 2008
Make Me Laugh

In tragedy, it is easy to distinguish the two forms of mediation or identification experienced by the spectator. On the one hand, as a rule we want the hero to fulfill his desires or in any case to remain alive; on the other, we accept the necessity of the “unhappy ending” dictated by the plot. We identify with the hero’s desires only because we are aware they cannot be fulfilled; it is the intention of the esthetic Subject, who is responsible before the society for which he creates, that presides over the universe of the play.

In comedy, however, things are less clear. The comic hero’s desires, which at first may have appeared unrealizable, are satisfied; his wishes and the Subject’s obligations to esthetic form are in harmony, albeit nearly always with a nuance of irony. The favor shown by the Subject of the work to the designs of his protagonist is a “miracle,” or in less exalted terms, a category error. Depending on the degree of irony that accompanies this gift, its accomplishment makes us, grosso modo, either laugh or smile. This distinction separates the two fundamental varieties of the comic: romantic comedy, focused on the couple who lives “happily ever after” (the more sociologically focused French version is “they lived happily and had many children“), and humorous comedy that makes us laugh. These varieties are not mutually exclusive; romantic comedies often contain moments of humor, sometimes at the expense of characters whose role is to parody the romance of the “serious” protagonists, as for example in the plays of Marivaux.

Yet laughter is a short-term, smiling a long-term phenomenon. One can sustain a romance for the standard cultural-ritual length of 60 minutes or more, but a joke can scarcely last more than a minute or two. Humorous sketches, plays, films, or novels include a series of separate laughs that build on or repeat each other.

On the one hand, we have the miraculous conjunction of the protagonist’s desires with the intention of the Subject as the voice of the community; on the other, a demonstration of the Subject’s ability to conclude a narrative on a level that transcends its imagined worldly correlate. What links the two is the sense of empowerment that the transcendent Subject transmits to the imaginary world it creates; the resentment generated by desire can be transcended either by an askesis through which the spectator’s emotional attachment to the characters is “sublimated” within the communal solidarity mediated by the narrative Subject, or by nothing more consequential than a linguistic short-circuit.

Le rire est le propre de l’homme

Laughter is a physiological phenomenon with its roots in ape behavior that can be provoked by non-verbal stimuli such as tickling or more simply, by the contagion of other laughter. In contrast, humor cannot exist without representation. Humor is an esthetic phenomenon that generates in its audience an oscillation between the humorous representation and (imagined) reality; we return to the representation to confirm or modify our imagination. This movement becomes humorous when we cannot construct an imaginary reality from the representation alone but only by taking into account the transcendent status of the Subject’s intention with respect to the manifest content of the representation itself. The comic affords the most immediate example of what we might call the “Gödelian” nature of the esthetic sign, the transcendent status of its Subject’s intention with respect to any meaning determined through a formal (that is, feedbackless) analysis of its textual content.

The joke, the minimal expression of the comic, is also the minimal form of esthetic experience. It is curious that since Bergson’s Du rire and Freud’s Der Witz at the turn of the twentieth century, the comic has been virtually ignored by major thinkers and literary theoreticians. A partial explanation may be that the comic is subversive of both modernist esthetic elitism and the victimary political agenda that has dominated cultural reflection during the postmodern era.

Let us begin with a minimal joke, a “one-liner”:

Did you hear about the guy whose left side was cut off? He’s all right now.

This can only be a joke; if someone, even a fictional character, really had his “left side cut off,” it would surely be described in other terms. Like all jokes, this one can be divided into a setup and a punch line that disturbs the expected course of the discourse. Because this is a pun, often considered the least legitimate of jokes, the punch line turns on the alternate interpretation of a word or phrase; here, the meaning of the idiom “all right” conflicts with the literal and contextually relevant spatial reading of the words. The pain of having to rethink the pivotal locution is reflected in the familiar groan that greets puns, as opposed to jokes that spread their paradoxical effect over the entire narrative. For example:

A man goes to a psychiatrist. The doctor says, “You’re crazy.” The man says, “I want a second opinion!” “Okay, you’re ugly too!”

Here the play on “second opinion” isn’t a pun; it inserts the same referential expression in two different discursive (rather than merely lexicographic) series. The difference is apparent from the fact that the pun comes at the end of the preceding joke as the punch line, whereas here it’s not the term “second opinion” but the source and nature of the second opinion provided that are incongruous, demonstrating that the literal meaning of the term is not confined by the convention that would seem to restrict its reference to a second physician.

In either case, the course of the joke involves two narrative series, the anticipated straightforward continuation of the first part (which may not be apparent, but which we anticipate as best we can), and the one realized in the punch line. Humor foregrounds the oscillatory attention to representations and their imagined referents that is characteristic of the esthetic attitude. The punchline is both anticipated (we know there will be one) and surprising (we don’t anticipate this one); we quite literally expect the unexpected. The first part of the story, left to itself, would not justify our esthetic attention; it could only serve to communicate factual information. To stop the joke before the punchline is to leave the hearer unsatisfied, not merely because he has not heard a joke, but because he has heard nothing worth hearing. (To drag the narrative out into an elaborate tale with no justifying conclusion is a variety of joke in itself, the “shaggy dog” story.) The words that lead up to the punchline are, in Sartre’s crude yet useful distinction, transparent rather than opaque. We imagine that they will not force us to return to the text/speaker to grasp their meaning, as their abstract nature (“a man,” “the guy”) makes especially clear.

The tragic/comic spectator’s identification with the desires of the protagonist is subordinated to his submission to the intention of the Subject that will/will not allow for their realization. These categories are prima facie psychological; they presuppose identification with not one but two fellow humans–the character and the storyteller–in whose place we can imagine ourselves. In the joke, the psychological conflict is concentrated in a single moment, perhaps a single word; the narrative contrasts the “character’s” worldly perspective with its intentional transcendence by the narrator (who does not usually, but certainly may, identify with this or another diegetic personage), a transcendence that we know is coming, but not how.

No reader of Freud’s Der Witz will fail to note the presence of an aggressive element in both examples above: the first man is cut in half and the second is doubly insulted. Discussion of Freud’s theory of the comic must be left for another time, but this element of violence, most obviously in tragedy but in fact in all cultural works, finds its source in the sparagmos that awaits the central figure in the originary event.

The first joke describes the “miracle” of someone who loses half his body and yet remains “all right.” We are reminded of the myth recounted by Girard (after Raymond Firth) in which the god is driven to the edge of a cliff, but instead of falling to his death, flies away. In the joke, instead of a supernatural power, the victim relies on the doubling of the logical consequence of the amputation (“all right”=without a left) by a common idiom (“all right”=in good health) that plausibly follows an announcement of illness or injury. The effectiveness of the joke is enhanced by the fact that “right” meaning healthy is not a mere homonym but is close to the original meaning of which the spatial “right” is a derivative; the right side is morally “right” in contrast with the left or “sinister” side. By sacrificing his left side as he could not in the real world, the protagonist has rid himself of everything sinister and can be declared “all right”; the act of aggression that chops off half his body has no fatal consequences. It is this verbal annulment that permits the violence to happen, just as in works of popular culture, violence is justified as retribution for the evil deeds of the “villain.”

The obvious reading recounts the miraculous recovery; the context-faithful literal pun implies the lesser miracle that one can survive after losing half one’s anatomy. On the one hand, there is narrative, temporal closure; on the other, a logical closure evacuates this closure, as we see from the final “now”: whereas in the first case, convalescence would take some time, in the second, “now” is merely the present that immediately follows the past action.

Having heard the joke, we understand the point as the forced rereading of “all right.” We accept this as the intention of the Subject, putting an end to our sympathy for the “victim,” just as we must abandon our hopes for Oedipus or Hamlet in adhering to the author-Subject’s intention. The joke foregrounds the return of the audience to the sign because we cannot follow the story to its conclusion in our imagination as we would a typical narrative, where we experience the constraint of the Subject more subtly through the direction it gives to the constantly accumulating narration, with our imagined fulfillments as tangents to the curve of the storyline rather than, as here, as annulled by the story’s sudden passage to another plane.

I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman where the Self Help section was; she said if she told me it would defeat the purpose.

Here the joke turns not on any ambiguity in the words themselves but in the scope of the expression “Self Help.” The narrator wants to find a book that will help him to “help himself” improve his life. Being able to find a given section in a bookstore would not normally come under the scope of this improvement, but the saleswoman, rather than providing the expected information about the store, decides to initiate self-help then and there.

There is a way of reading this narrative as a parable rather than a joke; make the saleswoman into a Zen master and Self Help into self-mastery and we have a ready-made koan. In order to take it as a joke, the lost opportunity to get to the Self Help section for the purpose of helping oneself must be considered, independently of any pedagogical effect, as a simple pragmatic paradox. If our hero needs a book to help himself, then he may also need to be guided to the place where he can purchase one. The saleswoman’s answer, in the guise of not “defeating the purpose,” in fact does so, foregrounding the tension between the Subject’s story and the normal anticipation of closure from the first part of the narrative; the punchline expression makes explicit the otherwise unclear paradox implicit in the woman’s intention. Once more the protagonist suffers. At the conclusion of the narrative, not only has he failed, but the saleswoman’s reasoning implies that success is impossible; were anyone to point him to the Self Help section, the purpose of his quest would be defeated in advance.

Whereas the Subject’s own words provided the paradox in the case of the man who lost his left side, here the protagonist’s tormentor is a character in the story who stands in a position of mastery. In either case, the story begins with an unambiguous depiction of an imaginary human reality in which we can identify, and identify with, the interests of the protagonist, and ends with the demonstration that the narrative cannot be counted on to realize or even address this goal, since the mastery of the Subject operates on the transcendent plane of representation rather than within imaginary reality. I think this is what Lacan is trying to tell us in his distinction between the “imaginary” and the “symbolic.”

To analyze a joke as an impersonal text is to miss the interpersonal relation that is at the heart of the comic effect as well as all other varieties of the esthetic. If we would understand humanity’s craving for art, from the one-liner and the whistled tune to the Ring of the Niebelungs and A la recherche du temps perdu, it is the security of an imaginary world wholly dominated by a single intentional Subject.

There is nothing in a joke of the jouissance the “text” is purported to provoke in the reader who is at the same time its re-creator. We need not deny the possibility of such pleasures to affirm the universality of the relation between the esthetic Subject and its audience on which they depend. The lie of anarchism is that it is our primary, “natural” state, when the very etymology of the word demonstrates the contrary. The most obvious thing jokes teach us is that the position of the cultural spectator–one that most of us assume on a daily basis–is one of acceptance of mastery.

But this acceptance is not a permanent abandonment of transcendence. Whether or not we engage in artistic creation on a professional level, we all take our turn in the Subject’s position. That we enjoy laughing does not require that we renounce making others laugh.

December 30, 2007
Ecriture and the Deferral of Violence

Quels qu’aient été le moment et les circonstances de son apparition dans l’échelle de la vie animale, le langage n’a pu naître que tout d’un coup. Les choses n’ont pas pu se mettre à signifier progressivement. A la suite d’une transformation dont l’étude ne relève pas des sciences sociales, mais de la biologie et de la psychologie, un passage s’est effectué, d’un stade où rien n’avait de sens, à un autre où tout en possédait. [Claude Lévi-Strauss – Introduction à l’œuvre de Marcel Mauss]
(Que la biologie et la psychologie puissent rendre compte de cette rupture, c’est ce qui nous paraît plus que problématique.) [Jacques Derrida – De la grammatologie, p. 177]
[Whatever might have been the moment and the circumstances of its appearance on the scale of animal life, language could only have been born all at once. Things could not have begun to signify progressively. Following a transformation whose study does not belong to the social sciences, but to biology and psychology, a passage was effected from a stage where nothing had meaning to another where everything did.

(That biology and psychology could account for this rupture seems to us more than problematic.)]
Lévi-Strauss’ punctualism is a historical extrapolation of Saussurean structuralism; because language is a system of interdependent differences, it could only have emerged all at once. Yet this instantaneous emergence is not an event; it provides no time for a scene of différance. According to the originary hypothesis, the punctual emergence of language is not only compatible with différance but implied by it; the sign’s deferral of violence could take place only as an event, a historical moment possessing a memorable and repeatable internal temporality. The contradiction inherent in the punctual non-event is the Achilles’ heel of structuralism. Because structures can mutate but not emerge from non-structure, they are “born” fully formed yet have no moment of birth, more precisely, no human moment.

Derrida rightly finds unconvincing Lévi-Strauss’ appeal to “biology and psychology.” How can culture emerge in a non-cultural event? How can the first appearance of symbolic representation not be representable? Yet beyond this parenthetical doubt, Derrida does not comment on this passage; he cites it to show that in claiming that writing appeared punctually (a notion Derrida bizarrely qualifies as “epigenetic”), Lévi-Strauss is merely reprising an earlier statement about language itself. Derrida is not shy of relying on empirical gradualism in insisting that what he will later call “writing in the colloquial sense” must have emerged gradually and laboriously (“l’apparition de l’écriture qui a été au contraire laborieuse, progressive, différenciée dans ses étapes [the appearance of writing that was, on the contrary, laborious, progressive, differentiated by stages],” 185), and, he claims (without citing a reference), as a tool for preserving genealogies (182) rather than, as is generally assumed, an accounting device for recording quantities of commodities. Yet with respect to écriture in the broader sense in which it is equivalent to language in general, Derrida affirms that “Il y a écriture dès que le nom propre est raturé dans un système, . . . il y a ‘sujet’ dès que cette oblitération du propre se produit, c’est-à-dire dès l’apparaître du propre et dès le premier matin du langage [there is writing as soon as the proper name is effaced in a system, . . . there is a ‘subject’ as soon as this obliteration of the proper takes place, that is, from the moment of the appearance of the proper and from the first morning of language]” (159)–a premier matin that cannot well have been the product of a “laborious and progressive” evolution, yet whose reality as an event is never entertained.

Derrida’s critique of Lévi-Strauss might have been leveled at Saussure; the system of language (la langue) is a stable tissue of differences that differ without différance. Derrida’s critique of Saussure and his school never makes this point explicitly, but it is a corollary of his assertion that

la prétendue dérivation de l’écriture, si réelle et si massive qu’elle soit, n’a été possible qu’a une condition: que le langage “originel”, “naturel”, etc., n’ait jamais existé, qu’il n’ait jamais été intact, intouché par l’écriture, qu’il ait toujours été lui-même une écriture. Archi-écriture dont nous voulons ici indiquer la nécessité et dessiner le nouveau concept; et que nous ne continuons à appeler écriture que parce qu’elle communique essentiellement avec le concept vulgaire de l’écriture (82-83).

[The so-called derivation of writing, as real and massive as it may be, has only been possible on one condition: that language as “originary,” “natural”, etc., has never existed, that it has never been intact, untouched by writing, that it has always itself been writing. Arche-writing, a new concept we wish to outline and whose necessity we indicate here, and which we continue to call writing only because it communicates essentially with the vulgar concept of writing.]
Archi-écriture is later described as “mouvement de la différance [movement of différance]” (88), which is itself equated with “La (trace) pure”:

L’apparaître et le fonctionnement de la différence supposent une synthèse originaire qu’aucune simplicité absolue ne précède. Telle serait donc la trace originaire. Sans une rétention dans l’unité minimale de l’expérience temporelle, sans une trace retenant l’autre comme autre dans le même, aucune différence ne ferait son œuvre et aucun sens n’apparaîtrait. Il ne s’agit donc pas ici d’une différence constituée mais, avant toute détermination de contenu, du mouvement pure qui produit la différence. La trace (pure) est la différance (91-92). [italics the author’s]
[The appearance and functioning of difference presuppose an originary synthesis that no absolute simplicity precedes. Such would then be the originary trace. Without retention in the minimal unity of temporal experience, without a trace retaining the other as other within the same, no difference would operate and no meaning would appear. What is in question here is therefore not a constituted difference but, before any determination of content, the pure movement that produces difference. The (pure) trace is différance.]
Thus Saussure’s signified or “image psychique” cannot be understood as a “réalité interne copiant une réalité externe [internal reality copying an external reality]” (94). Derrida’s conclusion is that:

La trace est en effet l’origine absolue du sens en général. Ce qui revient à dire, encore une fois, qu’il n’y a pas d’origine absolue du sens en général. La trace est la différance qui ouvre l’apparaître et la signification. Articulant le vivant sur le non-vivant en général, origine de toute répétition, origine de l’idéalité, elle n’est pas plus idéale qui réelle, pas plus intelligible que sensible, pas plus une signification transparente qu’une énergie opaque et aucun concept de la métaphysique ne peut la décrire (95). [italics the author’s]
[The trace is in effect the absolute origin of meaning in general. Which comes down to saying, once more, that there is no absolute origin of meaning in general. The trace is différance that opens appearance and signification. Articulating the living upon the non-living in general, origin of all repetition, origin of ideality, it is no more ideal than real, no more intelligible than perceptible, no more a transparent signification than an opaque energy andno concept of metaphysics can describe it.]
The association of repetition and ideality not with humanity but with life in general effaces the specifically human nature of language. Derrida includes the story of human “writing” within a series of “programs” that go back to the first living organisms and can be understood only on the basis of “le concept le plus général de gramme [the most general concept of gramme/program/ inscription]” (125). This fundamental concept must be understood before we can understand the difference between the “programs” that sustain the life of an amoeba and the ones human beings create in language; it is a natural category independent of any notion of the origin of meaning, that is, of human language and the historicity it founds. Whatever the specificity of human écriture, it is unproblematically included within the broader scope of this concept. The contrast with generative anthropology is instructive. From the standpoint of the originary hypothesis, human representation is not a simple broadening of a prior category of gramme. If, indeed, representation is neither “intelligible” or “sensible,” a mode of neither “internal” nor “external” experience, then its inclusion within this broader category not only defers consideration of its specificity but evades the crucial epistemological question of how conceptual thought, by which we think this and all other categories, became possible. The fact that we have no difficulty in principle in conceiving the structure of DNA or the patterns of amoeba behavior only makes it all the clearer that the general concept of (pro)gramme cannot help us solve the mystery of human thinking itself.

The elusiveness of the “trace” that is the origin of meaning is due to the fact that whereas a trace is, in Peirce’s terminology, an indexical rather than a symbolic sign, the Deriddean arche-trace is the trace of what is already a representation, something that will be repeated rather than simply reproduced in response to the same stimuli that previously produced it. But to conclude from its secondarity that the trace has no beginning is to remain in the conceptual vacuum of metaphysics, where concepts operate within individual minds whose interaction is of secondary importance because these minds are constituted from the outset as repositories of concepts or Ideas. Once we understand the origin of language as an event, we need no longer evoke a mythical self-presence to describe the mutual presence of the participants mediated by the central object of desire as referent of the sign. The deferral of violence by the sign minimally requires only the difference between the “vertical” act of emitting the sign and all other, “horizontal,” behavior. This difference is inherently dynamic because it distinguishes a new mode of behavior that has a positive effect on the potential survival of the group that generates it. Originary difference is always already différance, and the historical dynamism of différance suffices to generate–in stages stretched over hundreds of thousands of years–the complex differential structure of mature language.

Derrida’s subordination of the symbolic trace to the gramme evacuates human specificity in favor of an updated dialectics of nature. Derrida is only justified in assimilating human language to écriture because human language uniquely installs, in Sartre’s terminology, the néant of différance in the heart of the en-soi of natural experience. Différance is not mere structuration; its differentiation is the trace not of natural occurrences of appetite and aggression but of the deferral of violence.

To understand more clearly why Derrida misses this point, let us turn to a nearby passage of De la grammatologie.

C’est l’ethnologue qui viole un espace virginal si sûrement connoté par la scène d’un jeu et d’un jeu de petites filles. . . .

Donc la simple présence du voyeur est un viol. Viol pur d’abord: un étranger silencieux assiste, immobile, à un jeu de petites filles. Que l’une d’elles ait “frappé” une “camarade”, ce n’est pas encore un vraie violence. Aucune intégrité n’a été entamée. La violence n’apparaît qu’au moment où l’on peut ouvrir à l’effraction l’intimité des noms propres. (166)

[It is the ethnologist who violates a virginal space so unambiguously connoted by the scene of a game, a game of little girls. . . .

Thus the simple presence of the voyeur is a violation. Pure violation at first: a silent stranger is present, immobile, at a game of little girls. That one of them may have “struck” her “comrade” is not yet real violence. No integrity has been breached. Violence appears only at the moment when the intimacy of proper names can be opened up to penetration.]
In The Ethics of Criticism (Cornell, 1988), Tobin Siebers remarked on the perversity of a vision that finds violence everywhere but in the sole attested act of real violence in the entire book. If a slap doesn’t violate one’s “integrity,” would a blow with a fist? a machete? Derrida’s blindness to the ethical monstrosity of this position lets us glimpse the profundity of postmodern nihilism.

One might object that Derrida is only echoing in free indirect discourse the position of Lévi-Strauss, whose account of his guilt for having violated the innocence of the girls’ play never refers to the slap as an act of violence. Perhaps; but Derrida does not contradict Lévi-Strauss on this point. To quote Siebers’ discussion of this passage, “a certain moment arrives when parodic imitation merges with its object; especially in those instances where the device advances Derrida’s own position, we should not hesitate to strip away the exaggeration and to read a passage seriously” (86). Even if we assume that the scare quotes comment ironically on Lévi-Strauss’ failure to address the similarity between the girl’s act of physical violence and his own act of cultural violence, both Derrida and Lévi-Strauss fail to observe the deferral of violence that the exchange of words, be it the revelation of “proper names”–which the play of différance makes always already “improper”–represents in relation to the slap. The survival of human society depends on the gradient of violence between action and representation, beginning with the first sign that defers the potential conflict over the central object.

Derrida’s equation of language with violence through its operation of deferral is the most perversely insightful variant of the postmodern critique of the human, whose roots lie in the violence of the Holocaust. The vulgar notion of deconstruction as a critique of the “binary oppositions” that subordinate black to white, female to male, and so on, finds its founding confirmation in the Aryan-Semite “binary” and its consequences. From its inception in Barthes’ Degré zero de l’écriture (1953), the process of écriture has been associated with violence. The first words of the book describe Hébert’s use of blasphemy to connote revolutionary authenticity, and its most fully developed example is that of Stalinist rhetoric. Ecriture is the deferred, unpresent reality behind the “phallogocentric” usurpation of the center that presents itself as revealed truth–a usurpation whose “subject” plays the same role in Derrida’s discourse as the sinister clerics in Nietzsche’s account of the origin of Christianity. For Derrida, the founding myth of metaphysics is the myth of the speaker’s self-presence in his voice that guarantees the presence of reality in the (verbal) sign. Saussure’s arbitraire du signifiant does not suffice to expel the naturalness of the relationship of sign to referent because the sign-system, which appears all at once fully formed, is in effect a second nature.

Yet, as we have seen, for Derrida the différance that deconstructs this myth is not radically associated with the human; nature, or life at any rate, is always already inhabited by the gramme. What is uniquely human is not écriture but the myth of its absence, a myth that includes not merely discourses of religious and political authority but those of science.

S’il est vrai, comme nous le croyons en effet, que l’écriture ne se pense pas hors de l’horizon de la violence intersubjective, y a-t-il quelque chose, fût-ce la science, qui y échappe radicalement ? Y a-t-il une connaissance et surtout un langage, scientifique ou non, qu’on pourrait dire à la fois étranger à l’écriture et à la violence ? Si l’on répond par la négative, ce que nous faisons, . . . s’il faut lier la violence à l’écriture, l’écriture apparaît bien avant l’écriture au sens étroit: déjà dans la différance ou archi-écriture qui ouvre la parole elle-même. (185-86)

[If it is true, as we in fact believe, that writing cannot be thought outside the horizon of intersubjective violence, is there something, be it science, that radically escapes this violence? Is there a knowledge and above all a language, scientific or not, that we could call foreign to both writing and violence? If one answers in the negative, as we do, . . . if violence must be linked to writing, then writing makes its appearance well before writing in the narrow sense: already in the différance or arche-writing that opens speech itself.]
To affirm the necessary violence of language is akin to the paradoxical statement that all statements in a given language are false; with what criterion of truth does one judge this or another “violent” assertion? No doubt, as Gregory Bateson observed, every usage of language modifies the world it represents and in this sense does violence to it. This is not, however, the kind of violence Derrida appears to have in mind. The postmodern critique of the intersubjective violence of writing, Derrida’s included, is focused on denouncing its myths of innocence rather than praising its capacity for creative destruction. The moral utopia at the heart of language, which Derrida fails to see as itself a product of linguistic deferral, remains the unexamined touchstone of this critique, which rejects the notion of culturally revealed presence without repudiating the metaphysical perspective that it sustains. Derrida’s never makes clear whether the horizon de la violence intersubjective preexists language, is a byproduct of language, or is coeval with language. When we “link violence to writing,” is there a direction of causality or are the two somehow codetermined? These questions cannot be answered without proposing a hypothetical real origin.

To Saussure’s langue as a stable, atemporally constituted system of differences, Derrida opposes a model of language as écriture inhabited by the dynamism of différance. But dynamism without an origin is an inertial movement indistinguishable from stasis. We cannot understand, even in strictly Darwinian terms, the adaptive function of language without explaining how and why the deferral of meaning that constitutes écriture ever got started. For this purpose, what is deferred cannot be an always-already paradigmatic choice within language, but an appropriative choice in a proto-human world. The breakdown of animal order stimulates the discovery/invention of the linguistic sign through whose mediation the clash of individual appropriative acts can be transmuted into a shared, collective one and the meaningless object of individual appetite transfigured into the sacred being of communal desire. Rather than condemning “myths of presence” as occultations of deferral in the service of oppression, it is more conducive to our self-knowledge to conceive human history as a process in which experience of the various modes of social organization enriches our understanding of the scene on which this presence is enacted with ever more explicit revelations of the deferral that has been “always already” implicit in it.

December 2, 2007
Transcendence and Cultural Will

For generative anthropology, the unique human capacity for transcendence, access to a domain of non-material beings (ideas, signs, gods), arises in the originary event as a means to defer mimetic violence. Language is no less transcendental than the sacred, and signification, as the most accessible mode of transcendence, provides a model for sacralization. One might think this obvious, given the clear analogy between linguistic signs and sacred beings. But the originary deferral of violence lets reflection on language and the sacred go their separate ways; the analogy between the sacred and the significant seems irrelevant to the linguist parsing a sentence, the philosopher analyzing the varieties of reference, or the theologian conducting the exegesis of a sacred text.

The first linguistic sign represents a common object of desire. The object is “meaningful” because it is desirable; we already attend to it. But the form of the originary signifying operation is paradoxical: although the more intense one’s attraction to an object, the more immediately one craves possession of it, here the intensity of desire is such as to make possession impossible. At the origin, this paradoxical relationship between desire and accessibility defines the sacred, but it also defines the significant; what is significant is that object the common desire for which renders it inaccessible. That which in isolation I imagine myself as possessing is in the communal context protected by its sacred status as the focus of all desires.

In contrast, the signified is not an object of desire, but an “idea” or internal image no longer attached to the object that originally inspired it; it is an independent categorical entity. When we think about the object that had been represented by the sign, our thought remains mediated by the sign; it no longer involves a perceptual trace of the (absent) object, but the atemporal idea of it. Yet the memory of the object-as-present retains a transcendental relationship to the sign that represents it, including the signified/idea that is indissoluble from the signifier/verbal-gestural sign. After the central object, which can be devoured in part but not possessed whole, is torn into “equal” portions in the sparagmos, the signified of the sign as idea recalls but cannot replace the referential object itself. The sacred is the supplément of this process, what in the object exceeds the sign but for that very reason cannot be possessed, the excess of what the sign designates as an ostensive utterance over what it represents as an element of the lexicon. What is shared through the sign’s reciprocal communication is the profane meaning of the object, not its sacred being.

The properties of the sacred are those of language, but as if they existed independently of language. The sign is “immortal” because it is a formal rather than a real object; the gods are immortal not as the ideational signifieds of the sign but as referents that embody the meaning of the sign as though there were no need for ideas. The sign refers to God even as it points to whatever specific object of collective desire first inspired it. The animal is eaten, the sign remains; what it represents is not merely this animal, nor even this species of animal, but the-being-that-can-only-be-referred-to-by-the-sign. If this is all we need to know of this Being, then it is one and unfigurable. The notion of the unfigurable One God reflects the understanding that the sacred has nothing in common with worldly objects, save referentiality itself.

When God reveals himself to Moses at the burning bush in Exodus 3, he gives his name as a declarative sentence, “ehyeh asher ehyeh,” “I am that/what I am.” A name is the occasion for a vocative calling upon a god to present himself in a given situation, whether by ritual or magic. The god who cannot be called upon, who presents himself in the context of a sacrificial ritual (the burning bush) in which the sacrifice is not consumed, reflects a more parsimonious conception of the originary scene than the sacrificial gods who preceded him. If the originary scene is one, then the multiple gods who derive from it constitute a pseudo-plurality lacking an ontological basis, like words in different languages with the same meaning. The single sacred configuration in all cultures implies a single god for all cultures. This intuition reflects the historical experience of cultural plurality, one available only after the consolidation of the archaic Near Eastern empires and attractive only to a people whose conquests in the name of their god have been few.

The simplest description of what separates God as the referent of the originary sign from its signified is his will. The central object’s inappropriability, its withdrawal from the world of human appetite is the core of this interdictive will by which the sacred center defers the potential conflict inherent in human desire. In the relationship between the originary sign and its interdicted referent, the freely chosen emission of the sign is an act of submission to this central will. The sign is the name-of-God; its emission obeys the will-of-God. The participants in the originary scene do not choose their god, but they choose to submit to him.

This center-periphery configuration is that of all cultural phenomena. Whether they be religious activities dictated by the will of God or those we attribute to the will of an artist, whether we participate in these phenomena actively or passively, participation requires that we submit ourselves to an alien will. The same applies to the informal and even the internal narratives of everyday life. Whether I tell a story to others or to myself, I take the part of the sacred will that interdicts appropriation and become “God in his universe,” just as nineteenth-century novelists claimed to do.

Postmodernism challenges the anthropological basis for these assertions. Affirmations of the necessity of a central authority are condemned as authoritarian myths by a deconstructive anthropology that defines the human as the passive locus of an impersonal circulation of signifiers independent of any will, human or divine. Such an anthropology can tolerate an ontogeny of language, such as Lacan’s metapsychology provides in its fashion, but not an evolutionary history and certainly not a scene of origin.

It has often been noted that this “rhizomatic” centerless circulation of signs is approximated by certain parts of the Internet. Yet, to the extent that this circulation constructs an authorless discourse, it is governed by the objective criteria of accuracy in conveying information and eloquence in conveying opinion rather than endless “play.” The various branches of the ever-expanding global Wikipedia provide a case in point; to collaborate in this enterprise, one must provide accurate information, that is, signifiers fully attached to their signifieds so that they may be verified against their purported referents. (If we can’t attribute a meaning to a proposition, we can’t verify it empirically.) The same is true of the “intertextual” blogosphere; in nearly all cases, blogs that attract readers provide either objective information, expert judgment, or political confirmation. Nor do the exceptions correspond to semiotic utopia; if a blog or any other writing that lacks informational or polemical value is to appeal to readers, it must offer them an esthetic experience, that is, one of submission to the will of the author.

Authorial discourses, including statements of postmodern ideology, continue to be produced and consumed. The theoretical reduction of culture to intertextual play cannot mask the undiminished functionality of submission to the subject of discourse. Such submission is neither servile nor passive; it requires that the reader identify with or grosso modo imitate the discursive Subject, at the same time as in a fictional or historical narrative work he establishes a secondary identification, dependent on the first, with the subjective intentions of the characters. This oscillating double identification defines the esthetic experience of narrative.

The postmodern revolt against authority rediscovers in confused form the originary anteriority of the peripheral subject to the constituted center. But it ignores the fact that the individual before the existence of the center is not yet a subject; his appetite, mimetically enhanced, is not yet desire. Humanity is born from the sign in relation to whose originary referent it is always second. What the gesture of representation represents is outside and ontologically prior to it, however tortuous the relationship between the real object at the center of the circle and the eventual idea of the unique God that expresses the quintessence (although not the totality) of this relationship.

Humanity has a beginning but no defined end. It is normal for us to seek ways of liberating ourselves from the originary circle of the scene of representation; the story of this liberation is history itself. And concomitant with attempts at revolt are realizations of the fundamental parameters of what is being revolted against. The destructive movement is best understood as a discovery procedure that obeys the model of resentment by attacking the very structure within and against which it defines itself. The result of this procedure is unthinkable within the old paradigm, but very unlikely to correspond to the expectations of the revolutionaries.

Whence my demurral at Barthes’ conception of textual jouissance and the utopia it is designed to underwrite. This notion is developed schematically in the essay “De l’oeuvre au texte” (Revue d’esthétique 24, 1971) and fragmentarily elaborated in the author’s first deliberately “textual” book, Le plaisir du texte (Seuil, 1973). What kind of satisfaction Barthes himself obtained from “texts” is not a matter for debate, but it is a fallacy, whether or not strategically planned, to found an ontology on an emotion so dubiously shareable. We legitimately invoke fear of violence as what incites the first humans to produce the sign because all higher mammals exhibit such fear, whose evolutionary value is obvious. In Barthes’ article there is slippage from the expression of an ideological preference for “texts” over “works” to the affirmation of a new variety of esthetic pleasure. Here one needs an argument, not an appeal to emotional or transemotional satisfaction. It is noteworthy that even in the book, Barthes mentions few works and cites almost no specific texts. Jouissance is presumably provoked by the capacity of a given text to participate in jeu or “play” with a virtual infinity of others. But we can read only particular texts. As soon as we specify a text, we turn it into a “work.” Conversely, a text is a work conceived as no longer subordinate to the will of its author–a will that we are nonetheless obliged to reconstruct for ourselves in order to understand it. It is this deliberate refusal of understanding–we might call it “overstanding”–rather than any specific qualities of the text itself that provides Barthes with jouissance. Indeed, Barthes’ exposition suggests that what really procures jouissance is less a real or even imagined intertextual experience than the idea of the unbounded potentiality of intertextual experience.

Like the sublime in relation to the beautiful, jouissance contrasts with plaisir as a cultural emotion that does away with human intersubjectivity. If we delight in such emotions, it is because they remind us that our intersubjective relations with a human other, including our submission to the subject of discourse, must pass through the mediation of the sacred. Humans did not become subjects through everyday interactions. But the sublime, as described by Kant, is more crushing than liberating, more painful than pleasurable. Similarly, the liberation from the will of the author that Barthes designates as jouissance is in effect submission to a greater power. The impersonal mechanism of circulating signifiers is a postmodern figure of the sacred, just as the notion of intertextuality is a reminder of the transcendental mediation that presides over all intersubjective relationships.

We need not believe in Barthes’ utopia to agree that this postmodern insight brings to narrative (in contrast to the mischief it has wrought in the domain of the plastic arts, where the marketplace makes it possible to enshrine postmodern resentment as itself the artwork) the benefit of a new level of self-consciousness. The narrative subject is obliged to distinguish himself from the naïve storyteller of popular culture as one aware, and aware that his reader is aware, that his authority derives from a greater power. Postmodern resentment of central authority ends up by demanding from this authority a new degree of self-knowledge to justify its role. Which is, in the last analysis, what the resentful subject always really demands from the central authority he claims he would abolish, but without which he knows despite himself that he could not exist.

November 4, 2007
The Religion of Impending Disaster

On peut dire les choses les plus opposées au sujet de l’époque que nous vivons, et elles sont également vraies. C’est la plus exaltante et c’est la plus effrayante. Il nous faut penser à la fois l’éventualité de la catastrophe et la responsabilité peut-être cosmique qui échoit à l’humanité pour l’éviter.

[One can say the most contradictory things about the era in which we live, and they are all equally true. That fact is itself the most exalting and the most frightening thing. We must reflect at the same time on the possibility of catastrophe and the responsibility, of possibly cosmic importance, that humanity bears to avert it.]
Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Petite métaphysique des tsunamis, p. 14

Ever since human beings have been on earth, we have been faced with violence and disaster, disaster more obviously than violence, violence more significantly than disaster. And representation has always been, was born, in crisis. For if it weren’t for violence, we wouldn’t have crises, and if we didn’t have crises we wouldn’t need representation: we’d still be a bunch of relatively peaceful apes. Humanity may be simply and unambiguously defined as the only species that is itself the greatest threat to its own existence, and representation is our unique means of deferring this threat.

It will escape no one that the word “disaster” literally means something ill-starred, which is to say that its provenance is extra-terrestrial, or less hyperbolically, extra-human, yet fated rather than simply accidental. A disaster is something that befalls us. In contrast to “disaster,” “violence” suggests a human agent, one who exercises force (vis) against or violates another. The contrast between these two terms suggests that if today we face a “crisis of representation,” it is the result of their conflation.

Natural disasters are traditionally represented, whether by victims or observers, as punishments visited by the divinity on wicked or simply neglectful humans: as an example, it suffices to mention the Flood. Disasters, in short, are traditionally seen not as natural phenomena but as acts of divine violence. But to consider disaster as a punishment for human misdeeds, which are always in one way or another acts of violence, is tantamount to saying that our own violence threatens us only through the mediation of the gods. Disasters encourage us to represent our violence as directed toward the gods rather than our fellows. Thus the traditional response to disaster is to expiate this violence, on occasion by sacrificing to the gods some of our fellow humans.

By the same token, traditional anthropological intuition saw natural disaster rather than human violence as the typical threat to our survival. When Vico wanted to explain our fear of the gods, he evoked the banal disaster of the thunderstorm; Vico explained this inordinate fear of storms by the “fact” that, all the water having left the heavens during the Flood, there were no storms for centuries afterward, so that the first creatures to witness thunder were altogether unprepared for the experience. Or we may take the example of the philologist Max Müller, the only thinker of the nineteenth century to consistently link the origin of language to that of religion. As he describes this origin, “man,” a generic but essentially singular human, first becomes aware of, and is driven to represent, a divinity when he is faced with the magnificent power of the sun. It was left to Durkheim to point out that there would be no moment at which one of our ancestors could have been surprised by something he sees every day—whether before or after the Flood.

The hypothesis of a collective scenic origin of the fundamental characteristics—as opposed to higher forms of organization—of Homo sapiens was to my knowledge first presented in detail by Sigmund Freud in the Oedipal father-murder scene in Totem and Taboo (1913). Yet the degree of humanity of the primal “horde” that preceded this murder is not altogether clear. Should we assume that it possessed language and some kind of kinship terminology, or was the horde essentially a society of apes? In any case, Freud’s intuition of a founding event was never developed further by either Freud himself or his disciples—a sign that its purpose was understood as justifying the originary status of the Oedipus complex rather than offering a parsimonious model of human genesis. It is nevertheless a significant indication, along with the work of Durkheim, who considered theories of origin to be an improper subject for science, of an anthropocentric trend in anthropology, one that would first become truly generative with the work of our mutual friend and mentor René Girard.

Even today, mainstream social science and everyday common sense continue to refuse the parsimoniousness of generative anthropocentrism and prefer to see humanity as having evolved, like all other creatures, in response to its natural environment. What is all the more curious is that this tendency remains unaltered despite the sea-change following World War II in the valence given to human specificity. Whereas Müller saw a vast ontological gulf between a human being and a mere ape, to speak of “mere apes” today might provoke a PETA demonstration. Yet, in both cases, the specifically human, whether of supreme consequence or a mere detail, is understood to derive from our encounter with nature. For Müller’s “man,” the sight of the sun reveals the capacities for language and religion inherent in his “immortal soul”; today, humanity is thought to have differentiated itself only gradually from our primate cousins, of whose underlying similarity to us we are constantly reminded. A few years ago, the language origin scholar Derek Bickerton refuted those who derived our acquisition of language from the needs of interaction in a complex social environment with the argument that ape societies likewise are highly organized, yet do without language. I would only add on Bickerton’s behalf that what really distinguishes human from ape society is not its complexity but its susceptibility to self-destructive violence.

Why do we prefer as a general rule to understand humanity as a solution to a natural rather than a human problem? To answer this question, we must refer to generative anthropology’s hypothetical originary scene, in which a group of protohumans surrounding an object of their mimetically intensified appetite defer their potentially violent conflict through the conversion of their abortive acts of appropriation into a sign that each can reproduce at will and exchange reciprocally with his fellows. For the participants gathered around the central object who emit and exchange among themselves this first “symbolic” sign, the sacred is absolutely other than themselves; the sign that designates it is the name-of-God. The human desire focused on the center, whose conflict is deferred by the emission of the sign, sees its object transfigured into a transcendental being external to humanity; whether sacred transcendence is a reality temporarily incarnate in the object or a formal object whose invention permits the survival of the human group is a question we are not required to answer. Precisely because originary humanity is “anthropological,” it is not anthropocentric.

The power of gods, whether singular or plural, first appears to inhere in the objects that arouse our (positive or negative) desire. But even the understanding embodied in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim “Abrahamic” religions that there is one God for all humanity and that the power over nature that we attribute to Him is subordinate to his concern for us does not lead us to understand the emergence of the human as the solution to a (proto)human problem. The good Christian Müller’s image of a singular being (“man”) confronted with nature is the apparently most parsimonious way of translating the biblical creation story into a scientific hypothesis of anthropogenesis. Because God is by definition in charge from the beginning, humanity’s internal problems have always already been solved, if only for the first time. We begin in Eden, not because we indulge the childish dream of a golden age, but because the very existence of humanity requires that a protohuman community will have deferred the threat of internal violence long enough to permit the human individual—”man”—to come into being. In ritual the community celebrates the central divinity’s deferral of its own potential violence, but this communal expression of what Durkheim called “solidarity” is contingent on the subordination of the community to the divinity. To understand explicitly that our very existence as humans depends on the uncomfortable fact that we are our own worst enemies is an idea that only exposure to the worst of human violence has allowed to emerge.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, God does not anthropomorphically exercise his power over nature for his own satisfaction. Even when it extends to stopping the sun in the sky, this power is oriented to human needs. Disasters are God’s punishments; their absence signifies his favor. The attribution of natural powers to God humanizes the entire universe that surrounds us, making all the forces of nature concur in the deferral of human violence. That the deferral of violence within a given community may involve the exercise of violence against another community has been a fact of human life since the beginning. Our species has not ceased to be its own worst enemy, but each human community maintains its own viability by deferring its internal violence. We incur disaster when we disobey God’s law, which interdicts violence within the community (“thou shalt not kill”) and asks us to pay homage to the divinity who enforces this interdiction. The assertion that we inhabit a theodicy in which natural disasters are God’s punishments brings them under our potential control; we have only to obey God’s laws to avoid them. If we restrain human violence, God will restrain natural violence.

But the progress of economic and cultural exchange in early modern Europe made affirmations of faith in God’s providence increasingly unviable. The 1755 Lisbon earthquake played in the Enlightenment a role not dissimilar to that played by the Holocaust in the postmodern era. Human interaction with nature in the age of Descartes had become too regular and predictable for a sudden disaster to appear as motivated by an ultimate concern for human welfare. Instead, disaster served as a liberating force. Lisbon reminded us that such things happen, but not that they happen particularly often or that our lives are more than marginally affected by them. (An earthquake in Paris might have provoked a different reaction.) The Lisbon earthquake, which may have killed as many as 100,000 people, was by no means the worst disaster of the modern era, but because it happened at the right moment, it came to exemplify the failure of traditional theodicy in a way that the Black Plague, which killed 20,000,000 in Europe alone, could not do. And once the extension of God’s power to nature was placed in doubt, his power to defer the violence internal to human communities was no longer assured. Whether we call it atheism or deism, the Enlightenment attitude toward the sacred was a diminution of the institutionalized religious attitudes that preceded it. This was a first version of anthropocentrism, one that included notably the first autonomous exercises of what I call the “scenic imagination,” in which the social order and even language were conceived as products of a wholly human interaction. The most familiar expression of the Enlightenment scenic imagination is the “social contract.”

The possibility of a world without God depended on the human capacity to do what God and the gods had really done for humanity, which is to say, protect us not from natural disasters but from human violence. The growth of the market exchange system, with its notion of the transaction complete in itself, in contrast with the “Maussian” system of gift exchange characteristic of traditional societies, gave the impetus to the idea that human individuals could regulate their own interactions without need for a divine mediator.

With respect to the question that concerns us here, we may consider the nearly two centuries that separate Lisbon from Auschwitz as grosso modo an age of optimism. The French Revolution was followed by the Restoration and the appearance of a new age of faith, but political violence was no longer restrained by common religious belief. The revolutions from 1789 on were not, like peasant revolts, respectful of the “god-given” social hierarchy. Revolutionary violence was the final conflict meant to destroy the old order and bring about a world where human violence would be permanently deferred. For Communists, Fascists, and Nazis, the source of violence was declared to reside not in fallen human nature but in groups who had usurped the birthright of all, whether necessarily (reflecting the immature state of “production-relations”) or diabolically (via the “International Jewish Conspiracy”). In all cases, including the relatively less violent Fascism of Italy, these stigmatized groups were seen as owing their dominance to the unjust manipulation of market exchange and its political equivalent, “parliamentarianism.”

The utopian ideal of these revolutionary societies was a self-regulating economic and moral equilibrium of exchange, an ideal that conflated the market with the gift exchange of traditional society. The autonomous market, in other words, was already a virtual utopia, save that it had to be cleansed of those who corrupted it. This is obvious in the case of Fascism. Communism, of course, claims just the opposite: the Socialist paradise will have nothing to do with the market, in which supposedly equal transactions mask the quiet violence exercised by the owners of the means of production over the producers of value. In carrying out “from each according to his ability,…” the socialist exchange system generates no resentment because, in Marx’s words, “society regulates the general production”—demonstrating that in the absence of “capital,” the myriad market-like transactions of modern industrial society can be magically organized into a harmonious system that allows the individual to contribute to the “general production” by following his own bent: hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, and engaging in “criticism” in the evening. The roots of socialism are directly traceable to the bourgeois marketplace—as Marx would have been the first to admit.

If Lisbon was essentially a liberating experience, the idea that humanity could settle its own problems was dealt a deathblow by the events of the twentieth century that culminated in Auschwitz. Clearly the real problem in the world wasn’t the fetters of superstition but the potential for violence inherent in the human soul—a violence from which God had been supposed to provide us protection. Just when we thought that we could do without God, we discovered that we needed him, but that he couldn’t help us. Natural disasters could be understood and accepted as providing in a Durkheimian sense means for reinforcing human solidarity. To Lisbon one could answer that God lets his rain fall on the just as on the unjust. Auschwitz was another matter altogether.

The postmodern era is, grosso modo, a reaction to Auschwitz. Humanity is still obliged to fend for itself, but it is no longer a question of celebrating this independence. Instead, the human scene of representation, the source of human Being, is felt to be irremediably impure; its existence, however inescapable, is morally unacceptable and must be unendingly deconstructed. The dream of postmodern culture is to retain the human circle while doing away with its center, a geometric impossibility whose paradoxicality is nowhere revealed more clearly than in Deleuze-Guattari’s Anti-Oedipe, where what must be killed is the very idea of killing the father. In the Oedipal myth, human violence is focused on eliminating the monstrous being in the center of things, whereas for Deleuze-Guattari the center itself is a monstrosity that must be… eliminated.

This situation has not unsurprisingly produced a variety of religious responses; the decline of religion in Europe and the non-reproduction of much of its native population; the revival of Christianity in the US and parts of the third world as an affirmation of Being in reaction to postmodern nihilism; and the rise of a newly militant Islam posing as the defender of traditional society, with its piety and cruelty, against modernity and its godlessness, and above all against the Jews, who unaccountably continue to assert their “firstness” as the discoverers of the One God when they were supposed to have been exterminated. Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial takes Deleuze’s denial of Oedipus one step further; we must kill the center of postmodern culture that consists in the Nazi killing of the Jews. The danger this presents to Western and indeed, to global civilization need not be elaborated on here.

It is under these circumstances that the “Westernized” part of the globe has given birth to a new religious phenomenon, which I will for simplicity’s sake call a new religion, that grants us a privileged understanding of how the sacred operates without the need to postulate the existence of supernatural beings of any kind. I am referring to the belief system whose most visible spokesman was recently honored with the Nobel Peace Prize, the religion that currently takes global warming for its theme but that may more generally be called the religion of impending disaster.

The credo of the global warming believer consists of four propositions: (1) absent human intervention, world temperatures will continue to rise significantly for many decades, perhaps centuries to come; (2) this increase in temperatures poses a significant threat to human civilization; (3) human activity is responsible for a significant part, if not the totality, of this increase; and (4) human efforts can significantly contain or reverse the increase.

Let me at least attempt to forestall any political reaction, whether positive or, more likely, negative to these remarks. Although a nonbeliever, or at best, an agnostic, I am not a climatologist and therefore am not qualified to participate in the scientific debate over the global warming phenomenon. Nor do I intend to deride either Mr. Gore or his followers; indeed, I found particularly offensive a recent LA Times editorial that interpreted the prize as more a repudiation of George Bush than a reward for the laureate’s own accomplishments. My point is this: here we have a collective attitude that operates according to the configuration of the sacred, that at times makes use of its vocabulary, and yet that presents itself and indeed can be understood as a rational calculation about the future. That there is an investment of the sacred in this phenomenon is not independent of, nor does it originate in, but it is guaranteed by global warming’s scientific bona fides. What most strikes me in both believers and nonbelievers in global warming is how much they want to believe or disbelieve—so much that it is virtually impossible to discuss the issue objectively. It is the perfect issue for dividing the left, who dream of conflating the human and the natural, from the right, who like to keep them separate. In a word, the left believes in “science” and the right believes in anthropology—although many of them call it “religion.”

The religion of impending disaster has taken on many forms in recent decades, beginning in the 1970s with the “club of Rome” predictions of “limits to growth” and Paul Ehrlich’s “population bomb.” These predictions were embarrassingly false, but Karl Popper, following David Hume, reminds us that just because the sun rises every day is no proof it will rise tomorrow. Nor is it a simple matter of “they’ll never learn,” any more than each stock bubble is a simple repetition of the last one. We do learn from our mistakes, but never enough to keep from turning the learning into the occasion for a new mistake. And that’s because we don’t know in advance that it’s a mistake. Nor do I know in advance that belief in global warming is unjustified. The important thing for the purposes of this discussion is what this belief accomplishes; its hypothetical nature is a precious source of understanding of the phenomenon of religion in general.

Religion is about faith, and faith is about supporting a hypothesis—making a bet. To believe in global warming is to bet on the veracity of a set of hypotheses. More specifically, the kind of faith that deserves even metaphorically to be called a religion is one that is focused on deferring the violence that threatens to destroy the human community. Indeed, the belief in global warming and the catastrophes it is presumed to entail makes explicit that the deferral of violence is the primary object of faith, a truth masked in traditional religion by the mediation of supernatural powers. Global warming is like a divine punishment for our sins of excess energy consumption—sins against “Gaia,” if you like, but the divinization is altogether optional because the punishment is the wholly natural consequence of these sins. Global warming is comparable to the self-generated sufferings of a drug addict rather than the externally inflicted punishment of a murderer, except that, as its name implies, it takes place on a global scale, and its cure, assuming this is even possible, will preoccupy all of humanity for decades, not to say centuries, to come.

But this emphasis on the deferral of external violence is not the only, nor even the principal deferral effected by the belief in global warming. Its most important feature is that it provides its believers with an externally-directed goal that can in principle defer human violence. Violence and disaster—même combat. By turning our desires away from what might be thought more pressing dangers—Osama with an H-bomb—toward reduced energy expenditure, we work for the benefit of humanity as a whole. More precisely, by focusing our efforts on global warming, we not only diminish its effects, but we also demonstrate the possibility of action toward a goal that can in principle be shared by all—Osama reducing his “carbon footprint.” Like the “Aranda” religious rituals described by Durkheim, the global warming praxis serves to promote solidarity. But where traditional religions, however “universal,” have concrete historical roots that, involuntarily or not, exclude others, the science-driven behavior demanded by the fight against global warming obeys no such constraints. It would not be an outrageous exaggeration to claim that global warming is the first global religion—which makes its principal spokesman, independently of all politics, a perfectly fitting candidate for the Peace Prize.

The religion of impending disaster transforms the nature-centered apotropaic rites of “paganism” into rational, goal-directed activity. Instead of sacrificing an animal to appease Neptune or Apollo, one rides a bike to work to lower one’s gasoline consumption. The nonbeliever may scoff, but this activity makes a fully rational appeal to natural forces. Nor is global warming comparable to the Enlightenment-derived secular religions of Communism and its Fascist antithesis, whose worship of unaided human powers leads inevitably to their concentration in a quasi-deified Supreme Leader. Al Gore is closer in spirit to Jesus or the Buddha than to Stalin or Mussolini.

Is the sea level really fated to rise twenty feet? (At its present rate of 3mm per year, this will take place in about 2000 years.) There are moments when the religion of global warming overreaches itself into apocalyptic fantasy not all that different from cultist predictions of the end of the world. One might say in their defense that these extreme possibilities are evoked to dramatize the urgency of conversion. Yet these apocalyptic tendencies reveal in this new embodiment of the sacred a potentially fatal flaw.

The traditional objects of faith are, ultimately, hypotheses concerning the divinely approved forms of human interaction; such hypotheses can be discredited only by the failure of the faithful to maintain a viable society. This is equally true of political religions such as Communism; had Khrushchev really “buried us” under Communist productivity, it would have been the USSR who won the Cold War without firing a shot. In contrast, faith in global warming is adherence to a scientific hypothesis independent of human activity, even if it concerns this activity as an important parameter. This makes global warming vulnerable to disconfirmation independently of the benefits the fight against it may confer on global human society. If next week or next decade the climatologists revise their models of climate change, the common goal that was to have preserved us from the selfish incentives of the Prisoner’s Dilemma will vanish. If they do not, bringing climate change within acceptable limits would have the same result.

One wonders what, if any, impending disaster might then be found to take its place. Or perhaps by that time our global society will have evolved to the point, described not long ago with rash optimism as “the end of history,” where the give and take of political and economic exchange in an increasingly global civilization will become and remain sufficiently challenging to allow humanity to defer its undiminished potential for violent self-annihilation.

October 28, 2007
Use and Perception of Violence: A Girardian Approach to Asymmetric Warfare
This essay is based on a paper that I presented at a conference (1) organised by the Ministry of Defence of the Netherlands on the “moral dimension of asymmetric warfare.” It combines René Girard’s theses on societal violence with the latest analyses of those modern conflicts which strategists call “asymmetric.” The Western military may find in Girardian anthropology an explanation for the accrued difficulty that they meet in their missions on modern battlefields. The application of René Girard’s theses to modern warfare provides anthropologists with further evidence of the validity of these theses. More broadly, this essay challenges the relativism that has developed in Western society over the last three centuries.

1 Introduction

In any case, my interest had been abstract, concerned with the theory and philosophy of warfare especially from the metaphysic side. Now, in the field everything had been concrete, particularly the tiresome problem of Medina; and to distract myself from that I began to recall suitable maxims on the conduct of modern, scientific war. But they would not fit, and it worried me.
T. E. Lawrence (2)

Whereas, in the past, Western armed forces tended to see international humanitarian law (like the Geneva conventions) as a constraint that prevented them from defeating their adversaries, they are now noticing that compliance with humanitarian law (and even with moral standards higher than the minimum granted by humanitarian law) is not only of legal or moral, but of strategic significance. Soldiers of several Western countries are therefore specifically trained in solving ethical dilemmas (3), which, in this respect, places armed forces ahead of most other employers.

The views expressed in this essay confirm the strategic importance of ethics and morals in modern conflicts. The “moral dimension” is not just one of the aspects of asymmetric warfare (an epiphenomenon that–whatever importance it is lent–remains secondary to the operations conducted on the battlefield). It is also the very core of asymmetry, the stumbling block that Western armed forces (and states) keep underestimating and over which, consequently, they keep tripping. However, it is not in morals or ethics (as such) or in law (as such) that lies the key to asymmetry, but in the specificity of the values current in Western society. Thus this essay is not based on morals, but rather on axiology, which can be defined as the descriptive and factual study of values.

I will attempt to answer three questions: What is asymmetry? Why are asymmetric strategies successful? How can asymmetry be reduced? After working out the notion of asymmetry (2), we will try to find in the Western axiological reality the reason why asymmetric strategies work (3). On this basis, we will be in a position to discuss some measures likely to reduce asymmetry (4).

2 Asymmetry

2.1 Introduction

Western thought on strategy is traditionally governed by a logic of capability. The evolution of armament and strategy has been dominated by the following pattern: penetration by offensive means (sword, arrow, spear, shell, etc.) has dictated the resistance to be put up by defensive means (breast-plate, shield, armour, ramparts, etc.) and, in return, the resistance of defensive means has led to the development of more powerful offensive means.

Our history of war has been dictated by the capability of armament, not only in terms of quantity, but also of quality: the effectiveness of a weapon system depends as much on its technical capabilities as on the doctrine of its engagement. Possession of better weapons has never been considered the only key to success. When Swiss peasants massacred the Austrian cavalry in Morgarten in 1315, the logic of capability could explain that the knowledge and use of the terrain had been the decisive factor in favour of the Swiss, and that cavalry, as seen again in Agincourt in 1415, is vulnerable when it cannot develop its speed in a massive, frontal, charge. Also, the logic of capability easily explains that Goliath was killed by David because he underestimated his skill at the sling (the psychological element, which is not unknown to strategists, influences the capability of the combatants) and because of the advantage conferred by a throwing weapon.

Western armed forces are confronted nowadays with situations which may look similar but are governed by a different logic. Let us consider for instance the duel (of which we all have been a witness one time or the other by watching television) between, on one side, a modern Israeli tank, fit for a fight against a fire-and-forget third-generation anti-tank guided missile, and, on the other side, a Palestinian teenager with a stone in his hand. The great novelty in the history of war is that the outcome of this duel does not depend on a logic of capability. The teenager cannot destroy or even damage the tank and he can hardly hurt any of the crew in the tank. On the other side, the crew in the tank have various means to kill or injure the teenager or they could have him arrested, but what ever they decide to do, they are likely to lose the duel. And, if they kill the teenager (which would be the best solution in terms of capability), Israel is more likely to lose the war in which it is involved.

The term “asymmetric warfare” appeared around 1993 (4). It spread rapidly within the world of strategic analysis, and from there into the media. But in spite of its unquestionable popularity, its meaning is still obscure. In a reality as protean and unstable as war–as in any irregular shape–it is easier to see asymmetries than symmetries. Any straight line indeed that goes through an irregular shape constitutes one of this shape’s axes of asymmetry. All these possible asymmetries can be sorted by their relevance: some must be random or based on contingent observations, whereas other are more telling. We are looking for the most telling theory of asymmetry, the one, in Popperian terms, “which best holds its own in competition with other theories ; the one which, by natural selection, proves itself the fittest to survive”(5).

2.2 Traditional approaches to asymmetry

Traditional approaches (6) to asymmetry are mainly based on the old Western logic of capability. Some of these approaches focus on the disparity in the means engaged by the belligerents (“asymmetry in means”). The idea is that the weaker party, knowing that it would not weather a frontal clash, avoids direct confrontation and concentrates its efforts on actions mainly based on surprise and directed against soft targets. For instance, the insurrectionary adversary takes cover in inhabited zones, mixing with the population, and organises opportunistic attacks against targets that appear momentarily accessible (for instance, a patrol).

Other approaches put special emphasis on the nature of the belligerents. Modern conflicts–as far as they interest Western countries–set usually regular forces against irregular forces (“asymmetry in identities”). While regular forces are characterised by a transparent structure (uniform, hierarchy, weaponry), irregular forces are by nature extremely evanescent. It is normally difficult to know whether an individual is a member of the population or of the troops. Most combatants are part-time combatants: they take part in the fights more or less spontaneously (it can happen that the insurrectional force themselves do not know their members), on a more or less regular basis, and spend the rest of the time as ordinary members of their social community. As the question arises from this evanescence as to whether or not international conventions should (and can in practice) be applied to irregular forces, some analysts point out that insurrectional forces are more likely to use unfair methods without being bothered for so doing (fair vs unfair methods–“legal asymmetry”).

A disparity in interests can also be detected. The idea is that, in a modern conflict between a Western state and another regular or irregular force, what is at stake does not involve any of the vital interests of the Western state. This means that the Western state will not be willing to win at any price, whereas the weaker party is more likely to be driven on by its interest, or even by despair. For instance, in 1993, the United States hurriedly left Somalia after 18 of its rangers were killed in an attack at Mogadishu, which raises some questions about the American interest in having an armed presence in Somalia.

These traditional approaches to asymmetry are not lacking in common sense and are based on sound observation. But their explanatory power is not particularly striking. As already suggested by the examples given above, the asymmetry in means is not new, and the history of war is to a great extent the history of asymmetric means (colonial or indigenous wars, peasant uprisings). To avoid the strengths of the enemy and to strike him where he is unprepared is simply one of the first principles in warfare, as already taught by Sun Tzu. Similarly, the use of cunning or unfair methods is not new (“all warfare is based on deception”(7)–Sun Tzu ; “inter arma enim silent leges“(8)–Cicero) and deciding whether dropping sticks of bombs on Hamburg, Vietnam or Baghdad is fair or unfair probably depends on one’s location. The main question which remains unanswered is why asymmetry was previously not considered as big a problem as it seems nowadays. It is worth remembering indeed that most conquests of the Western colonial nations were happening in conditions that should be called asymmetric following the traditional strategists. But these asymmetric conditions did not prevent expeditionary forces from fighting successfully and from coming back home covered in glory. There is a crucial point that traditional strategic analysis is missing.

2.3 Asymmetric Warfare or the Victor Defeated (Jacques Baud)

The more destruction I see, the stronger I get. -Yasser Arafat

Jacques Baud’s theories, as set out in La Guerre asymétrique ou la défaite du vainqueur [Asymmetric Warfare or the Victor Defeated], are based on a strategic, overall view of warfare. They stand out from anything that has ever been written on asymmetry and are the only ones that justify the argument that asymmetric conflict should be considered a new type of conflict, and one to which strategists should apply a new way of thinking, a new logic.

2.3.1 The notions of “space of operations” “battle space” and “human space”

Jacques Baud notices that security questions, formerly confined to the “battlefield,” have spread offshoots out of the tridimensional space and that they fill nowadays a space not only physical, a space which he calls the “space of operations.”

This extension from the battlefield to the space of operations can be followed historically. Wars until the beginning of the 20th century were fought in the topographic space (land and sea), to which the airspace was added during the first world war. Topographic space and airspace make up the tridimensional space, in which actions are conducted physically. During the second world war the space of operations extended to the ether (or electromagnetic space), which is the domain of electronic warfare, and it comprises now also cyberspace, where digital information circulates, and infospace, where opinions are manipulated. Finally, whereas all previous extensions of the space of operations had been mere consequences of technical progress, the conflicts that followed the second World War suddenly revealed the importance of the human space, the knowledge of which has become the key to understanding any modern conflict.(9)

Jacques Baud defines the human space as the space of human life and action, with its cultural, social, economic, moral and political dimensions, where networks are woven, loyalties and hierarchies disputed and opinion and determination forged. It is the space in which political action takes shape and violence develops.(10)

The space of operations is divided into six battle spaces that are all governed by their own rules: topographic space, airspace, electromagnetic space, cyberspace, infospace, and human space. Although each of these battle spaces may be singled out to allow analysis, they form a continuum and are interdependent. An action carried out in one of the battle spaces can have an impact on any of the other battle spaces. This is how the “blunder” of a soldier, although committed in the topographic space in the execution of a tactical routine mission, is immediately relayed at strategic level through the infospace and becomes a strategic problem which may require a response from the highest political level.(11)

2.3.2 The essence of asymmetry

Whereas traditional strategic analysts see asymmetry in the disparity in means or identity of the belligerents, Jacques Baud considers that modern conflicts are asymmetric because the belligerents do not set their objectives in the same battle space.

Classic wars were symmetric because the objectives of both parties were set in the same battle spaces: topographic space, airspace and electromagnetic space. A modern, high intensity conflict between two (groups of) Western states would probably be symmetric as both states would set their objectives in all of the six battle spaces. In any case, Western forces are still trained to fight in wars in which both parties struggle for superiority in the same battle spaces.

Modern conflicts show a very different picture. Whereas the institutional party (Western state on its own behalf or on behalf of the United Nations) still sets its main objectives in the traditional battle spaces (topographic space, airspace, electromagnetic space), the insurrectional force sets its main objectives in the infospace and the human space.

One of the first asymmetric wars was the Vietnam war, which saw the United States deploy a technology without precedent and obtain convincing tactical results in South Vietnam (topographic space, airspace, electromagnetic space), while the Soviet Union and China were waging a background war in the Western world (infospace, human space), in accordance with the overall notion of war developed by Marxist-Leninist ideology (12). As pointed out by some analysts, “while the Americans had real success on Indochinese territory, North Vietnam (with the help of the Soviet Union and China) mobilised Western public opinion and achieved success in Europe and on the American university campuses.”(13) A similar observation (although not based on asymmetry) is made by Rupert Smith about the fight of the French against the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale: winning the battle in military terms did not prevent the French from losing Algeria (14). What distinguishes asymmetric from symmetric wars is that in asymmetric wars the outcome of the fighting on the battlefield is not the decisive element.

According to Jacques Baud, Western armed forces are prevented by their ethnocentrism and the long tradition of their logic of capability from understanding the logic of their adversaries: “While classic wars are built around a power struggle, with strategic objectives of material nature (conquest of territory or destruction of the adversary), asymmetric conflicts take their shape from another way of running wars, with strategic objectives of immaterial nature and with an emphasis on legitimacy”(15). Western armed forces are therefore at risk of misunderstanding what is really at stake for their adversaries.

Jacques Baud points out in this respect that in non Western cultures, the notion of victory does not necessarily involve crushing one’s adversary. In some Islamic societies for instance, victory is rather linked with the act of resisting than with the outcome of a fight. In particular, meeting death in the defence of Islam elevates the individual. Accepting such death is neither a defeat nor a desertion, but an act of courage directed to a higher objective of spiritual nature: the martyr (shaheed) goes to heaven and because his choice reflects the values of his community, his family is shown respect (16). Such ideas may sound irrelevant from a Western perspective, but it is a mistake on the part of strategists to ignore this reality. This is how, far from improving their situation, the Israeli defence force weakens it every time one of their snipers eliminates a Palestinian riot leader. Thinking in terms of capability, they believe that their enemy is weaker now that it has lost one man (the justification being that an eliminated riot leader is no longer able to commit a suicide attack). But in reality they help their enemy grow stronger by creating martyrs and giving a meaning to the fight of the young Palestinians (17). Similar strategic situations can occur when Western forces are facing non violent movements (according to Gandhi, “there is no such thing as defeat in non-violence”(18)) or the adepts of philosophies that place honour higher than life (the philosophy of the Samurais, according to which “honour comes first,”(19) without any doubt inspired the Japanese kamikaze pilots during the second World War).

The strict distinction between peace and war, which is known in the Western world, is foreign to other strategic traditions. In the Western world, war is still considered the continuation of politics by other means (Clausewitz). These words are not only one of the favourite quotations of Western strategists, they have also–as they focus on means–an important impact on our security. On the one hand, they imply that anything imposed by the West on other countries with means other than weapons is deemed to be peaceful in spite of the cultural damage that may be caused to foreign identities. On the other hand, any violent attack on Western interests is deemed to be a war if an armed response should be possible. This is how (a) the attack of 9/11 was called an “act of war,” (b) any aircraft after 9/11 was–logically (if a war is defined by the means used)–upgraded to the status of a weapon of mass destruction, and (c) the only conceivable answer to the attacks appeared to be to send troops to Afghanistan and Iraq.

The response of Western states to terrorism, according to Jacques Baud, leads to asymmetric conflicts because terrorism does not have a purpose of destruction. Terrorists do not set their objectives in the topographic space and airspace, where Western countries inevitably choose to confront them. The destruction of symbolic buildings and the killing of civilians are tragically real, but they have no tactical significance: it is not about weakening the adversary in terms of capability. Jacques Baud writes that “despite every indication to the contrary, asymmetric strategies do not set themselves the objective to maximise violence, but to deliver a pain ‘just sufficient’ to provoke an ‘over-reaction,’ by playing on image and emotional impact. Thus, the fight can be brought into another space than the field in which action takes place.”(20) What matters in modern asymmetric conflicts is not the military engagement that takes place on the battlefield, but the ability to exploit such military engagement in the human space. It is in the human space therefore, and no longer on the battlefield, that modern wars are won or lost.

Let us consider some sequences from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to illustrate Jacques Baud’s theory. On 28 March 2003, an Iraqi officer wearing civilian clothes killed in a suicide bombing four American soldiers who were patrolling not far from Najaf. This suicide attack, which was among the first of a still ongoing series, left the troops very nervous and led them to take no chances. Three days after the attack, American soldiers shot dead “at least” (so the media) seven Iraqi civilians whose vehicle had failed to stop at a checkpoint (21). On 19 November 2005 in Haditha, a roadside bomb went off under a Humvee and killed or injured American soldiers. For reasons still unknown, American soldiers who had survived the attack entered nearby houses and killed several civilians. A very similar situation happened on 4 March 2007 in Jalalabad (Afghanistan) when US soldiers killed 12 civilians (including children and elderly people). None of these situations would have been even mentioned in the international media were it not for the massacre of civilians. What reveals the asymmetry of these situations is not the suicide bombing by an officer in civilian clothes, or the use of roadside bombs in inhabited zones. It is the fact that the loss at tactical level of American soldiers is of lesser strategic significance than the killing of civilians. In Najaf, Haditha and Jalalabad, what leads the United States to defeat is not the loss of its soldiers, but the fact that its soldiers killed civilians (22).

One may ask whether or not provocation corresponds to a conscious strategy of the irregular forces confronting a regular force: beyond the losses caused by their attacks, do the strategists of irregular forces really want to trigger indiscriminate reactions by the regular forces? On the one hand, the answer to this question may seem irrelevant: whether the provocation is conscious or not, this possibly unintentional “strategy” is effective and very dangerous for the regular forces. To be more precise: the strategic situation is dangerous, because regular and irregular forces are not on equal footing in terms of public expectations. On the other hand, however, if public opinion knew that the provocation is conscious and part of a strategy that aims at causing victims among the civil population, the image of the belligerents could change, to the advantage of the regular forces.

The practice of driving the regular forces to committing blunders is too widespread and too successful to be considered accidental. Based on Jacques Baud’s model, my understanding of asymmetric conflicts is that from anti-globalisation demonstrations to terrorism, those who challenge the strong are in pursuit of the right balance between the weakness necessary to become the favourite of Western public opinion and the weakness tolerated in non-Western traditions or anarchist circles. The aim of asymmetric strategies is to provoke the violence that will allow the challenger to be seen as a victim in Western public opinion and as a hero in his own reference system. And so we attain the following balance: the greater the violence provoked, the stronger the position of the challenger. Yasser Arafat was perfectly right when he stated in May 2002 among the ruins of Ramallah: “The more destruction I see, the stronger I get.” Let us now see what this model achieves when applied to reality.

2.3.3 Anti-globalisation demonstrations (Geneva 2003)

Anti-globalisation demonstrations all belong to a global, long-term scheme. The following observations are based on the demonstrations held in Geneva in June 2003 during the G8 Summit of Evian.

To begin with, the various protest forces within the demonstration grouping should be distinguished from each other. I will classify them according to their tolerance of violence:
- Peaceful demonstrators rejecting categorically any recourse to violence as a means of communication. They show their support for a cause merely by their presence. They respect the law and comply with the injunctions of the police forces.
- Agitators cultivating ambiguity about their tolerance of violence. They tend to conceive freedom of expression as inseparable from the exercise of a power of nuisance (23). They are often at the head of, or militate actively for, left wing contestation movements (24).
- Rioting demonstrators taking advantage of the gathering and the climate of protest occasioned by the demonstration to commit acts of vandalism. The pleasure of committing acts of violence against possessions (or people) overcomes possible ideological considerations.
Anti-globalisation protest strategy is based on a self-feeding process that can be broken down into two stages: the creation of antagonism followed by the provocation and exploitation of violence.

From the organising stage of an anti-globalisation demonstration onwards, the agitators endeavour to establish the idea of antagonism between the police forces and the peaceful demonstrators. In Geneva, the planning of the operation was overshadowed by the memories of Seattle (WTO ministerial conference in 1999), Göteborg (UE Summit in June 2001), and Genoa (G8 Summit in July 2001), which prompted the government to be careful: the presence of rioting demonstrators appeared very likely. Even though no one could seriously believe that the police forces would be given the mission to prevent peaceful demonstrators from demonstrating (but on the contrary would allow them to demonstrate by protecting them against the rioting demonstrators), the agitators who had been included in the planning of security as leaders of protest movements asked for a “de-escalation of the police security operation”(25). They issued statements of concern about the police forces exerting repressive force on the peaceful demonstrators, put in place a legal unit to assist the peaceful demonstrators who would be victims of police violence and, to emphasise the gravity of the threat, recalled “the police violence that had accompanied the summit in 2001 in Italy and led to the death of young demonstrator Carlo Giuliani”(26). The objective of such reasoning was obviously to make the peaceful demonstrators believe that anyone of them was at risk of being killed by the police forces. But Carlo Giuliani, who was shot by a police officer acting in self-defence, does not qualify as a peaceful demonstrator under our (or any other reasonable) definition (27). After the G8 summit of Evian (and the riots in Geneva), an activist of Attac Neuchâtel, by the name Tomaso, was convicted on a charge of rioting. According to the police, Tomaso had admitted his taking part in a riot: “First he contested the facts. But when he was confronted with the amateur video in which he is to be seen in action, he finally admitted the obvious.”(28) After Tomaso’s conviction on the base of clear evidence, Attac Neuchâtel argued that the notion of riot is a “notion that legally does not mean anything” (“riot” is however the heading of section 260 of the Swiss Criminal Code) and that the judgment endangered the freedom of expression of all peaceful demonstrators, who were urged to sign a call for protest (29). This is how the agitators try, with some success, to give credence in the long run to the idea that the police forces (and the state) are opposed to the peaceful demonstrators. Police forces become thus the visible symbol for this enemy that anti-globalisation ideology has such difficulty identifying.

The climate thus created is propitious for the asymmetric strategy itself. Provoking violence with subtlety requires borderline situations the occurrence of which must be ensured in the early stages of planning, a time that already reveals “the ambiguous positions of the demonstrators [read: agitators]: they proclaim that they do not want to carry out any violent actions nor to enter security areas, but Mr. de Marcellus [read: an agitator] mentions actions of civil disobedience intending to disturb if not to prevent, on Swiss territory, the smooth functioning of the Summit. . . . Agreeing on unequivocal rules will be difficult.”(30) Most interestingly, Micheline Spoerri (31) noticed acts of provocation during the encounters of the police forces with the demonstration grouping: “No distraction is allowed, for I know that it is not over. I have the very unpleasant feeling to be facing, among the crowd of demonstrators, leaders who have decided to drive the police to committing a mistake, to keep playing their dangerous games.”(32) “The FSL [for Forum Social lémanique ; read: the agitators] persist in their destabilising activities. Throughout the day, their decision to demonstrate in defiance of the demonstration ban holds my Department spellbound. They threaten to gather here, then somewhere else. In the middle of the afternoon, a few individuals spurred on by bad intentions want to spread disorder and provoke a tragedy at any price.”(33)

Provocation, in Geneva, did not bear fruit. We will try to analyse later the reasons for this. But the act of provocation itself reveals the ambiguity of the agitators’ position on the matter of violence. It helps understand that the reason why the agitators accept the presence of rioting demonstrators in the allegedly peaceful demonstrations that they organise is that they need them. Only rioting demonstrators are able to efficiently provoke police violence, this violence which gives its full meaning to the fight of anti-globalisation protesters and which allows them to feed their mythology. The most surprising fact is that, once injured or killed, rioting demonstrators are considered martyrs to a cause they have never supported: non-violence (34). Why indeed do the agitators, who proclaim themselves non-violent, not disassociate themselves from the “Carlo Giuliani” or “Tomaso” method, and why do they insist on having these people considered peaceful demonstrators? The agitators’ skill at exploiting violence in their favour regardless of the facts is simply prodigious.

From a strategic point of view, it is essential to understand that the police forces have a threefold relationship with the anti-globalisation demonstrators: a partnership and relationship of protection with the peaceful demonstrators, the relationship of an asymmetric conflict with the agitators, and the relationship of a symmetric conflict with the rioting demonstrators.

The task of the police forces is to protect persons and goods. Rioting demonstrators devote themselves to the pleasure of breaking and setting fire to shop windows and cars and of threatening the life and health of persons (members of the police forces, but also the occupants of the buildings set alight and passersby caught in street violence). The agitators wish to provoke the violence that will give a meaning to their fight. The difficulty of the task of the police forces lies in the fact that if they want to fulfil their tactical mission (which is to protect persons and goods), they have to resort to force and are likely in so doing–even though in self-defence–to hurt people (rioting demonstrators, possibly peaceful demonstrators or passersby). Now, the announcement of a serious injury or of a casualty triggers in the human space (media, public opinion, political world) a wave of reactions that questions the whole police system and puts the police forces in a situation of strategic defeat. If an injury or casualty occurs, the agitators are triumphant because they had forecast that the police forces would commit such acts of violence. And it is far from the fun of the rioting demonstrators and from the work of the police forces, in the human space, a place for emotions, that the agitators reap the fruits of their machinations, putting on airs of apostles of non-violence and stating vigorously that they will not give up their fight. Experience shows that they forget very easily the true violent nature of their martyrs.

If provocation does not work, as was the case in Geneva, the outcome for the agitators is less brilliant: “As the days went by, the Forum Social lémanique (FSL) lost their credibility; the population had understood that one should not confuse freedom of expression . . . with the will to impose one’s views at the risk of other people’s lives.”(35) However, the strategic defeat of the agitators is in close connection with the symmetric defeat of the police forces (as they let considerable damage be caused without intervening).

2.3.4 Israeli intervention against Hizballah on Lebanese territory (July-August 2006)

Analysts looking into the recent intervention of the Israeli defence force on Lebanese territory, after Hizballah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers, confine generally their analyses to observations of tactical nature. The notion of asymmetry (in its traditional sense) is used to point out the disparity in the technology of the opposing forces and in the nature of the belligerents (Hizballah not being a state, which leads to an “asymmetry in identities”). The usefulness of high tech armed forces is reappraised after the Israeli defence force seemed unable to get rid of an adversary poorly equipped by comparison. This approach is interesting as it has the merit of highlighting a deadlock. However, it does not allow to understand what led Israel and Tsahal into deadlock, nor how the deadlock could be broken.

Let us apply Jacques Baud’s model and ask ourselves where the asymmetry of this conflict really lies. The mission of the Israeli defence force (as portrayed by the media) was of tactical nature: it was about hitting the capacity of Hizballah on Lebanese territory so as permanently to prevent it from threatening Israel. The mission was a purely military one (whatever the nature of the adversary, regular force or independent militia). Hizballah fought against the Israeli defence force following an initial gambit which obviously did not aim at having control over the territory (it was not about holding any place), but which aimed at inflicting losses on the Israeli defence force whenever possible. Adopted by a lightly armed force without armoured troops nor air support, this tactic corresponded rather to a necessity than a real choice. However, nothing asymmetric so far.

I consider that Hizballah set its strategic objectives in three distinct parts of the human space: Lebanese public opinion, Arabic (and more widely Muslim) public opinion, and Western public opinion. The objectives of Hizballah were brilliantly achieved and this success was no accident.

In Lebanon, the conflict allowed Hizballah to stand out as the only force able to oppose Israel and to defend the national territory against a foreign incursion. It is beyond doubt that this conflict will help Hizballah strengthen its political position at national level. Reports at the beginning of September 2006 confirmed already its increasing popularity, whereas the legitimacy of the national government has been increasingly questioned henceforth. In this respect, the increased presence of the United Nations itself seems to prove the government’s inability to govern without the support of the West (which is one of Hizballah’s major points).

In the Arabic and Muslim world, Hizballah emerges as the heroic movement that not only resists the oppressor (Israel, and, by cultural extension, America), but is able to hold the enemy in check. The foreign supporters of Hizballah, in particular Syria and Iran, will not forget their protégé.

But it is in Western public opinion that Hizballah dragged Tsahal to defeat, by attracting Israel into a war which would necessarily cause casualties. On this terrain, the bombing of Cana (29 July 2006), with an initial toll of 56 dead later reduced to 28, half of which were children, was probably terminal to Israel, in spite of Hizballah’s low popularity rating in Western societies. This incident was abundantly commented on in international opinion and very efficiently advertised by Hizballah itself (36). The dissatisfaction of Israeli public opinion with the conduct of the war (but not with its principle) seems to have played a determining role in the decision of giving up the fighting. Weakened on the international scene, Israel faced after the war internal tensions,(37) which have probably contributed to the unprecedented judicial difficulties encountered in the meantime by some of its ministers.

The victory of Hizballah did not owe much to classical military skills, but was only possible because, in the human space (Western public opinion), killing a civilian is strategically more harmful than losing a soldier. Was the kidnapping of these two Israeli soldiers a conscious provocation? What respective parts do strategy and luck play in this conflict that brought such success to Hizballah? Hassan Nasrallah stated on 27 August 2006 that his party would not have captured the Israeli soldiers, had it known that this action would lead to a “war of such scale“(38). But could he pretend anything different? I consider that even if the provocation was not conscious, the outcome of the conflict does not owe anything to luck, but only to the configuration of the human space, which, in our time and for reasons that we will try understanding, makes impossible any military solution to the problem that Hizballah represents for Israel.

2.3.5 Anomaly in the Western human space

Since the second World War, Westerners no longer tolerate manifestations of power. . . . People consider any aggressive behaviour an insult and any aggressor some sort of lunatic.
Anatoli Karpov (39)

If human space is the space where regular forces win or lose modern conflicts, its understanding becomes as important as ballistics and any other traditional military discipline. Western pluralist society is the huge sound box that echoes and spreads any information from the battlefield. And it is in this highly charged human space, in which every blunder provokes an uproar, that the outcome of war hangs in balance. When a Palestinian teenager is facing an Israeli tank with a stone in his hand, does anyone in the Western world want that the teenager be killed?

It is not on the battlefield that things have changed. What has changed is that, since the Vietnam War, the Western citizen is sitting in his TV lounge and looking at the battlefield, thanks to technical innovations, but also–above all–thanks to the freedom of the press, the freedom of opinion, and the freedom of speech. The involvement of population leads to apply to war the standards of Western democracy and to judge war by these standards. The multiplicity of legitimate interests (which is the meaning of pluralism) has weakened as never before the “reasons of state,” a concept which after being the key to so many conquests and the excuse for so many crimes, has now become almost ineffective.

Just after the withdrawal of the Israeli troops from Lebanese territory, the predominant sentiment in Israeli opinion was that Israel would have won if the army had been allowed to “pulverise Hizballah”(40). This assessment is crucial and it applies to any asymmetric conflict: Western armed forces have the capability (on the battlefield), but they are not allowed (in the human space), to pulverise their adversaries.

Jacques Baud notices the existence of this problem in the human space of Western societies, as can be seen in the following passages: “Communication, information and the sharp eye of the media condition to a large extent the way of conducting wars. . . . The real “asymmetry” is a result of the evolution in society and its standards rather than in fighting methods.”(41) “The war capabilities exist, but our reluctance to make use of them is the real obstacle. . . . In Western democratic societies, the legitimacy of action cannot be ignored and tends to prevail over the effectiveness of the operations, whereas it could be more easily manipulated in the past.”(42) “The real difference with modern conflicts is that wars took place far from the concerns of Western public opinion. . . . The response from military forces or from the forces of law and order was not restricted by public opinion.”(43)

After working out the notion of asymmetry and before examining the question as to how Western countries should reduce asymmetry, let us now determine why asymmetric strategies are successful at all.

3 Western values: the axiological roots of asymmetric warfare

Asymmetric strategies owe their success to the configuration of the human space and in particular to the topography of the world of values (or axiological world). This is why knowing the axiological terrain is as important as knowing the tridimensional space.

3.1 Discovering the relief of the axiological world

Values are fashionable. The “moral crisis” or “ethical crisis” is mentioned as a cause–at least a partial one–for any social problem, whereas the frantic creation of “codes of ethics” and “ethical committees” seems to confirm the rumour of a “return of ethics.” Is this abundant talking about values only a “probably aborted attempt at taking over in words what has really been lost in the minds”(44)? That values should be defended by committees and codified in sacred texts cannot speak for their vigour. The importance that values have acquired in contemporary thought and speech is a sign of a time axiologically confused.

Western society has the image of the world of values which its intellectual tools are able to capture. This is why the “moral crisis” is first of all a crisis of rationality. Unlike natural sciences (which have repudiated since the early decades of the 20th century the inheritance of Hume and his disciples), human sciences still have not freed themselves from the trap that subjectivism had set for them. Whereas natural sciences owe their undeniable success to the rediscovery of the notion of truth (45) and to the achievements of an “epistemology without a knowing subject”(46), human sciences still broadly reject the idea of objective existence of reality, of truth as correspondence to the facts, and of the ability of man to discover reality.

The main stream of all who speak about values still profess that “value judgments are subjective”(47) and that they cannot therefore be the subject of any critical (scientific (48)) discussion nor any comparison. Such presupposition necessarily tends to favour the idea that all values are equivalent, as it rules out any distinction, classification, or ranking. And this is how, persuaded that all values are the same, our society sees the world of values as a totally flat landscape. Which explains plainly why, confused, it is struggling for points of reference: flat landscapes do not offer any points of reference.

This illusory picture of a uniformly flat landscape became still clearer and thus more deceptive when Communism collapsed in Europe. Following the Hegelian and Marxist dialectic, according to which historical progress is the predetermined result of a fight between ideologies, Francis Fukuyama announced that with the end of the Cold War humanity had reached a definitive consensus on liberal democracy and he proclaimed, as early as 1989, the End of History (49). This thesis was broadly disseminated and extremely well received in the mentality of the 1990’s. It was granted–in this time’s compulsory optimism–that “the Open Society [had] no more enemies that could be taken seriously. Its victory [was] complete, total”(50), as Peter Gross put it. This author, however, who mentions Karl Popper’s “Open Society,” should have noticed that he was committing that same mistake of Hegel and Marx (and so many others) as is denounced precisely in The Open Society and Its Enemies[first published 1945], the second volume of which is entitled The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx and the Aftermath. According to Karl Popper himself, the belief in historical destiny is sheer superstition and the prediction of the course of history cannot be based on any scientific or other rational method (51). Recent history has not falsified this theory.

The attacks of 9/11 projected a new oblique light on the world of values and under the influence of this light the world of values revealed its relief, much more uneven than Western society would have thought. Even more than the mere facts, their interpretation by the Western mind reveals, in its axiocentrism, the rifts which opened in our perception of the world. Contrary to what the Western perspective might suggest and proving the first analyses wrong, the perpetrators of the attacks on 9/11 in New York and Washington (and on 11 March 2004 in Madrid and 7 July 2005 in London): (a) were not lacking in resources or social perspectives, even by Western standards, (b) had not been pressured into acting through threats against their families, and (c) nothing indicates that their families received money (52).

The choices made by suicide bombers clearly obey other criteria than those usual in our society. They express other priorities and reflect other values. It is very tempting for the Western mind to disqualify the values of suicide bombers. Indeed, the Western mind is very fond of the even landscape of which it thinks the world of values consists. And in order to preserve this even landscape, Western society prefers to throw suicide bombers altogether out of the world of values saying that they have no values and ranking them, at best, among the nihilists.

But other surprises–of lesser amplitude–have crumpled the smooth surface of our axiological landscape. Although less extreme than the suicide bomber’s attitude, these surprises may be more unsettling since they do not lead as easily to the disqualification of the values that they disclose. These surprises relate on the one hand to the integration of Muslim population in Western (essentially European) countries: a considerable part of the Muslim population of Western countries would prefer to live under sharia law (53); Muslim intellectuals considered moderate stand up for the application of sharia law (54); wearing ostentatious signs of religious belonging, or attendance at physical education are questions often raised in every school. And on the other hand, these surprises undermine the confidence of the West as to the aspirations of other peoples: against all expectations, Hamas won the Palestinian elections on 25 January 2006 (55). The “post-Christian” attitude of abandoning any religious feeling and judging everything in terms of individualism, hedonism, and wealth is obviously not appealing to other cultures.

These events give rise to questions in a Western society convinced that its model is the only possible one and that every person should necessarily want to subscribe to it. This questioning hits Western society right in the heart of its convictions, in the heart of what it has been thinking for so long was not worth worrying about: what is the origin of Western secular values? what is the foundation of democracy? what is the place of religion in society and state? These questions challenge the values of our society and shake up all our intellectual habits.

Uneven though I see the relief of the axiological world, I do not believe that this relief will necessarily lead to a clash of civilisations. But it is unfortunately likely to do so if the Western mind keeps denying the relief and therefore keeps omitting to explore the world of values. This knowledge, in any event, is necessary for strategic analysis.

3.2 Axiology and the concept of “value”

Most philosophers who write about values are obsessed with the metaphysical question of the origin of values (56) to such extent that values seem to have no proper existence but only to depend upon their origin. This attitude makes any debate on values impossible, because the origin of values is probably the ultimate question (and, thus, not the first to be dealt with) as far as ethics or morals is concerned, the metaphysical question that defies rational criticism and escapes prehension by science (57). I consider it necessary to proclaim the independence of values and to free the notion of value from any metaphysical or moral presupposition. For any such presupposition (be it religious, lay, philosophical, or atheistic) is likely to hinder the rational discussion of values and the exploration of the axiological world. There is a truth about morals as there is a truth about all reality. But my approach does not aim–for this is not necessary–at comparing the morality of axiological systems, or at determining on what view of the world axiological systems may be based, but only at observing whether axiological systems differ from each other and if so, in what extent. Let us try, on this basis, to define the notion of value.

My proposition is as follows: a value is a criterion for decision-making (58). Values organise themselves into autonomous axiological systems (one may also speak of axiological profiles) that can be either individual or social, and that cover all the decisions that one has the possibility to make. As there is no decision without freedom, values are the expression of our freedom. The notion of value is not restricted to big decisions, nor to a few areas that seem particularly important: any criterion, in any decision, is a value.

To give an example, let us consider the selection of a car, a decision that calls for many criteria, which individually and in connection with each other will probably vary according to the person (or group) making the decision. Criteria can be aesthetics (shape / colour), safety, price (purchase and resale value / consumption of petrol), environment, performance, social image, driver comfort, etc. If we hear (mere supposition) that white cars, more visible, are less implicated in accidents than dark cars, the “trivial” criterion of aesthetics may come into conflict with the more “noble” criterion of safety. Conflicts of this kind illustrate why there should be no distinction between “weekday values” and “Sunday values”: all values compete in the same league.

Our values come into the picture on the one hand when we make decisions (of any kind) and on the other hand when we judge our own decisions. Even though passing judgment on one’s decision is as such also a decision, it is useful to distinguish between our acts and our judging of our own acts, because there can be a tension between what we do (or what we have done) and what we think that we should do or should have done. Two individuals committing the same act (making the same decision) have not the same axiological profile in respect of this act (decision) if one of them regrets the act (decision) while the other one feels comfortable with it.

This tension reveals the conflicts of conscience or, more prosaically, the fragile areas of an axiological system. It is not necessary to determine, in this essay, how exactly this tension should be taken into account while determining the axiological profile of an individual or a group. But suffice it now to say that this tension within an axiological system corresponds to a real fact that may have an impact when decisions are made in defence matters.

3.3 Characteristic features of the Western axiological system (René Girard)

I myself would have put a bomb in a restaurant if it brought us further along the road. Afterwards I would draw the balance–so many women, so many children; and so far along the road. But Christians–and yours is a Christian society–Christians may not draw the balance.
John Le Carré (59)

Having introduced our notion of “value,” let us proceed to underline some characteristic features of the Western axiological system. I have emphasised previously, in the observations that Jacques Baud makes on the role of Western public opinion and media, some sentences to which we should now turn our attention:

Communication, information and the sharp eye of the media condition to a large extent the way of conducting wars. . . . The real “asymmetry” is a result of the evolution in society and its standards rather than in fighting methods. . . The war capabilities exist, but our reluctance to make use of them is the real obstacle. . . . In Western democratic societies, the legitimacy of action cannot be ignored and tends to prevail over the effectiveness of the operations. . . . Wars took place far from the concerns of Western public opinion. . . . The response from military forces or from the forces of law and order was not restricted by public opinion.

These sentences lead us to the very heart of the problem of asymmetry. The fact that the centre of gravity of warfare toppled into the human space has no doubt been made possible by technological innovation (which allows the live broadcasting of information) and by a political system (which stands for freedom of the press, freedom of opinion and freedom of speech), but it has been caused by an axiological system the specificity of which needs discovering. There is in Western values something new that prevents Western countries from winning wars as they did before.

Why does the sharp eye of the media condition the conduct of war? Why are we reluctant to use our weapons? Why does public opinion restrict the response from our armed forces? The fact that civil society is informed on its own does not provide any satisfactory answer. Indeed, looking at one’s own armed forces crushing their enemies and demonstrating their superiority is not necessarily depressing.

There is no need to look far (around us or back in history), if we want to find societies that delight in the sight of violence: in many countries public executions and mutilations still draw the crowds by the thousand and are broadcast on television. This reality was ours not very long ago. Why has societal violence directed against a defenceless or weak individual ceased to be a public celebration in Western societies and become a sight the very idea of which sickens us?

To address this question, I will turn to anthropologist René Girard, whose work, unequalled as to its powers of explanation, cannot be left aside by anyone interested in societal violence. René Girard examines in particular how literature and myths deal with violence. Here is a brief summary of his thought.

According to René Girard, the chief identifying characteristic of human beings is “mimetic desire,” and the chief identifying characteristic of human societies is the “mimetic cycle.” The coexistence of mimetic desires leads to rivalry between individuals and to increasing tensions within society. At the point where, because of these tensions, society is on the verge of exploding, a “victim mechanism” sets off and a unity gradually takes shape against a single victim who is identified as a cause of scandal and lynched. This murder pacifies society as the former rivals make up: they are convinced that they have been delivered from the cause of their troubles. And a new cycle begins. The victim mechanism is the regulator of violence in human societies. It is to this mechanism that human societies owe their (relative and temporary–but actually their only) stability and peace.

René Girard says that all myths are rooted in, and aim at lending weight to, the belief that the victim chosen is really guilty and that the victim–according to the myths–therefore deserves death. In a striking contrast to all myths, the Bible (essentially the accounts of the Passion, but also passages from the Old Testament) on the one hand reveals the innocence of the victim and on the other hand denounces and explains the victim mechanism. It cannot be over-emphasised that the Bible does explain–in terms which have proved anthropologically significant–the mechanism of human societal violence. The Bible states–as a revolutionary theory of man–that human societies release their inner tensions by accusing and killing victims that in reality are innocent. Through this new perspective, the Bible (Old and New Testaments) has caused a modification in the relationship between human society and its victims. This is not without consequences.

Since the victim mechanism has been revealed and denounced as untruthful by the Bible, it has lost a great deal of its regulating power: people no more believe so easily in the guilt of their victims. As a consequence, human societies influenced by the Bible are no more able to pacify themselves by the killing of victims and they are no longer protected–as well as they were before–by the victim mechanism.

It is a fact that Western societies care–like no other society–for the individuals that threaten them: marginalised and weak persons, and even criminals. Such behaviour on the part of a human society, unprecedented in history, is an “anthropological first”(60). Western society is the most preoccupied by victims of any society in history. For the first time in history, the level of mutual aid accorded to emerging countries has become a source of prestige for nations (61). Nothing should be more important than a human being. This explains why the “reasons of state” no longer matter: cohesion cannot be reached at the expense of an innocent victim and we cannot kill anyone for the common good. “Collateral damage” is no longer an excuse for killing civilians. A soldier is no longer just a tiny cog in our war machine. These are new values, as the criteria for decision-making have changed. Western society does not accept the benefits of violence.

René Girard says about this weakness of Western societies: “The gradual loosening of various centers of cultural isolation began in the Middle Ages and has now led into what we call ‘globalization,’ which in my view is only secondarily an economic phenomenon. The true engine of progress is the slow decomposition of the closed worlds rooted in victim mechanisms. This is the force that destroyed archaic societies and henceforth dismantles the ones replacing them, the nations we call ‘modern.’”(62) “The knowledge we have acquired about our violence, thanks to our religious tradition, does not put an end to scapegoating but weakens it enough to reduce its effectiveness more and more. This is the true reason why apocalyptic destruction threatens us.”(63)

It is obvious that the increasing refusal of our society to reap the benefits of the sacrifice of human beings is the cause of the success of asymmetric strategies. In this respect, René Girard makes an absolutely striking comment on a passage of St Paul’s letter to the Colossians (“[Jesus Christ] has stripped the sovereignties and the ruling forces, and paraded them in public, behind him in his triumphal procession”–Col. 2, 14-15). René Girard writes: “In the triumph of a victorious [Roman] general the humiliating display of those who are conquered is only a consequence of the victory achieved, whereas in the case of the Cross this display is the victory itself ; it is the unveiling of the violent origin of culture. The powers are not put on display because they are defeated, but they are defeated because they are put on display.”(64) This last sentence could have been written by Jacques Baud and it offers an exact description of what is happening in any asymmetric conflict: the powers are defeated because they are put on display. It is in Jesus’ footsteps that warfare in the Western world has evolved from the mark of Cain to the sign of the Cross. A part of the Lebanese population may believe that it is Hizballah that protected them against the Israeli defence force. But in reality, they were protected by the memory of Jesus in the conscience of the West.

It is indeed by killing victims that Western armed forces lose the wars in which they are involved, because Western public opinion does not accept the benefits of violence. This feature is the expression of a fundamental part of the values of Western society. When strategists choose to ignore it, they lose their war. This is why the greatest challenge of our time is to define how to defend a society that refuses to owe anything to violence.

Attempts at curing Western society from its apparent weakness have already been made. As René Girard admits, not he but Nietzsche was the first to understand the difference between the collective violence of the rituals and myths (that Nietzsche called Dionysos) and the violence of the Passion of Jesus: “While Dionysos approves and organizes the lynching of the single victim, Jesus and the Gospels disapprove.”(65) Nietzsche also understood that the Christian ban on sacrifice leaves human societies vulnerable and that “to avoid degenerating, societies must get rid of humans who are waste, who hinder and weigh them down”(66). It is not surprising that National Socialism and Communism, both of which openly proclaimed their belief in, and were actually based on, human sacrifice, had Nietzsche among their spiritual fathers. Both these systems were primarily based on a refusal of Christian values. Now as before, the West is free to accept or reject its Christian heritage.

3.4 The denial of Western specificity and its consequences

All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers, but they could not afford to encourage any illusion that tended to impair military efficiency. So long as defeat meant the loss of independence, or some other result generally held to be undesirable, the precautions against defeat had to be serious. Physical facts could not be ignored. In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four.
George Orwell (67)

Western societies are unable to admit the uniqueness of their own values, because the Western world has lost the awareness of the Christian origin of its values (68). Enlightenment seems to be at the root of this problem. Enlightenment, which is commonly seen as the liberation of Western thought from the yoke of religion (or at least from the restrictions on freedom that may have been imposed by ecclesiastical authorities), was driven rather by anticlericalism than by the wish to reject Christian values. Anticlericalism principally endeavoured to make the Church redundant (69), which could best be achieved by minimising the role played by Christian teaching in the emergence of the values of the Enlightenment. It accomplished this minimisation by translating Christian teaching into secular language and by trying to find new foundations for this teaching in the universal principles of human nature or human reason. This move had two main consequences: on the one hand, the values hijacked by the Enlightenment are drifting away from their source and appear in some respect weakened in Western society (which is no good news in terms of human rights), and, on the other hand, the West believes that its values (held to be based not on any religion but on human nature or reason) are universal and that the rest of the world must necessarily adhere to them.

The achievement of so-called rationalism was to make it impossible for anyone wanting to avoid an accusation of superstition ever to refer to religion, whereas thinkers like Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) or above all Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536), both of whom no one will dare to accuse of being key figures of dark-age obscurantism, had without any doubt understood and accepted the Christian specificity of the European intellectual tradition (70). In reality, Western intellectuals have never freed themselves from Christian values, whether they spent their lives rejecting them (as did Nietzsche and his followers), contested their origin (which was the case of the so-called rationalists and naturalists), or tried to prove–but without admitting their Christian faith and without any reference to Christian religion–that Christian teaching was not incompatible with reason. This last attitude led Immanuel Kant to translate Mt 7, 12 (Golden Rule) into his categorical imperative. The constant role of Christian religion in European thought is best given account of in Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, Michael Burleigh’s recent historical research into the relationship of religion and state in Europe,(71) and in the panorama of English thought offered by Maurice Cowling’s Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England(72).

What is the part of Christian legacy in the Habeas Corpus Act (1679) and above all in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1789)? Is it an accident that the societies that adopted these texts were of Christian tradition? If the values carried by these texts are inherent in nature or human reason, why do these texts remain without (written or oral) equivalent in any other culture? Why did these values remain unknown, for instance, to the Aztec or Babylonian civilisations?

Bearing in mind René Girard’s theses, we should be able to see that the principal aim of a document like the European Convention on Human Rights (and the other regional human rights instruments) is to prevent innocent persons from being condemned, which is ensured in particular by statutory provisions that should curb the mimetic outburst of anger and violence that lies in the nature of man and leads society to sentence people even if they are not guilty. In René Girard’s view, to which I subscribe, the due process of law is a product of biblical tradition: it is about undoing a mimetic cycle, just as this proverbial first stone was prevented–against human law–from being cast at a victim.

We can find, in this anxiety to protect the inviolable core of human personality, the foundations of democracy. It is only from an organisational point of view that democracy is about bringing opposite opinions to an agreement (with a simple or qualified majority). The heart of democracy, however, and the aim of human rights, are to protect the individual before whom a unanimous community remembers that it should kill no one and finds itself regretting not to have provided for any exception. The civilisation of human rights is based on the daring bet that the individual must be protected against the community. Democracy is not axiologically neutral ; it presupposes an axiological profile that has not been found so far in any society of non-biblical tradition. This is the reason why democracy cannot be exported as easily as Western society would like it.

The idea of protecting the individual in any circumstances is probably related to the vision of man that necessarily develops in a religion whose god tells his creatures: “Whatever you did to one of these least brothers of mine, you did it to me” (Mt 25, 40). Around the forgiveness granted to sinners, and around sentences (central and unanimously considered central) like “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another” (Jn 13, 34); “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you” (Mt 5, 43-44); “Do to others whatever you would have them do to you” (Mt 7, 12), a society has emerged, though not without difficulty, that tries to protect the human against the bloodthirstiness of idols. It is obvious that these principles have never been totally respected and that they have often served the ideology of the moment (73). But it would certainly be wrong to consider that the Western world has kept repeating and remembering these principles without being affected by them. And even though these principles have never been really observed, they have never left the Western conscience, which leads us to the axiological tension areas. Christians do not always forgive, but they know that they should forgive. Thus, the Bible did not prevent the crusades from happening (to answer an objection likely to be raised), but it condemns them unequivocally (74). Hatred has not disappeared, but it no longer passes as a sacred duty. Violence condemns itself under the banner of Christianity. Can this be said of any other religion? The influence of Christian values throughout human history is a subject largely ignored by modern historians of ideas.

Because they all relate to the protection of victims, the values that underpin the civilisation of human rights show the unmistakable mark of Christianity. However, Western thought is far from rediscovering its Christian roots. Official history (as it is taught in most European schools) is still essentially anticlerical (in particular anti-Catholic) and the public doctrine of all Western countries is still living under the influence of the Enlightenment. The Global Ethic Foundation (Stiftung Weltethos)(75) is one of the private entities that embody this official and authorised public doctrine.

The Global Ethic Foundation is based on “the idea that the religions of the world can make a contribution to the peace of humankind only if they reflect on those elements of an ethic which they already have in common: on a fundamental consensus on binding values, irrevocable standards and personal attitudes”(76).

The Foundation was created on the initiative of Hans Küng, a Catholic theologian. His first intentions have taken the form of the Declaration Toward a Global Ethic (the Declaration)(77). This text is described as a reflection of the “fundamental consensus on binding values” reached by the religions of the world assembled as a Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago in 1993.

The Declaration is obviously based on Christian values and it follows otherwise the current Western streams, such as environmental awareness. In particular, it refers expressly and specifically by name (but without mentioning its source) to the “Golden Rule” (Mt 7, 12 ; Lk 6, 31): “We must treat others as we wish others to treat us.” Surprisingly, Hans Küng, together with Angela Rinn-Maurer, another Christian theologian, undertook in 2005 a Christian interpretation (under a title amounting to “Global Ethic–a Christian reading”) of the Declaration in order to assess whether or not the Declaration is compatible with Christian teaching (78). The result, as one would have guessed, is positive: “Our analysis showed that the Global Ethic may without difficulty find a foundation in Christian teaching.”(79) It would probably be more accurate to admit that the Global Ethic actually is based on Christian values, rather than considering it the other way round and constructing an artificial justification.

This interpretation from a Christian point of view is the first step of a further project in which representatives of other religions are encouraged to take part. Each religion should examine its compatibility with the Global Ethic: “It would be desirable if this project could be carried on with representatives of other religions.”(80) Islam seems to be particularly aimed at: “The work ‘Global Ethic–a Muslim reading’ for instance would be of great help to all Muslims who despise violence and commit themselves to an Islam compatible with human rights.”(81) As for the Muslims who would not be convinced, their situation is simple: they have to be ignored for “fanatics of any sort will never be convinced by reasoning.”(82)

The error of this approach is rooted in the entrenched idea that every text (whether religious or not) may be interpreted in any possible way and that all interpretations are equal and only depend on the reader’s perception. This idea is wrong. And even if we admit it as correct, it remains that the interpreting process is more or less straightforward or arduous depending on the meaning to be given to the text: when it comes to deliver the message hoped for by the reader, some texts speak freely, whereas other texts may need to undergo specific treatments such as drastic cuts.

The Global Ethic’s connection with Christian teaching is not of the same nature as its connection with Muslim teaching (to stick to the example chosen by Angela Rinn-Maurer). For coming to an agreement between the Global Ethic and Christian teaching does not require any particular step other than mentioning the principles of non-violence, truth, respect for the individual that represent the core (and not some atypical understanding) of Christian teaching. Whereas Jesus Christ, the crucified god, is not the central figure of Islam. So bringing the Global Ethic to an agreement with the Quran will not be as straightforward a task as with the Bible.

Hans Küng and Angela Rinn-Maurer ask Muslims to carry out what lawyers call a “conform interpretation” of the Quran. The conform interpretation consists in choosing from several possible interpretations of a text the interpretation that conforms to a provision of higher rank (83). It is certainly possible that some verses of the Quran can provide the basis for the ideas of non-violence, respect of the individual and peace in the sense of the Global Ethic. It is not necessary to determine whether or not these principles are central in Islam, because the main difficulty arises from the approach itself, which consists in favouring an interpretation (whether “mainstream” or “progressive”) according to its compatibility with a norm outside the Quran (84) (and of clearly biblical inspiration). A Muslim who refuses this compliance assessment of the Quran with the Global Ethic is not necessarily a fanatic, but may be just a believer.

The dialogue between the religions (and between the various axiological systems) is absolutely necessary and desirable, and it cannot be conducted on such an asymmetric basis as laid by the Global Ethic so far. For this basis (probably unintentionally) establishes Christian values as the model to look up to, failure to comply with which on the part of other axiological systems renders those systems at risk of being disqualified as “fanatical.” Respecting differences presupposes differences. The Global Ethic is an attempt, based on moral presuppositions, at denying the differences and at depriving those called to dialogue of their identity. Tolerance according to the Global Ethic is mere indifference–which literally means inability to distinguish.

Hans Küng’s book Islam: Past, Present and Future does not seem to have been particularly welcomed by Muslim communities and scholars in Europe. Abdal-Hakim Murad, a leading British Islamic scholar, writes in a review (85) that “the recurrent errors will make this book useless to historians of ideas” and that “professional Islamicists are likely to recoil from the book because of its huge crop of factual errors.” Abdal-Hakim Murad even puts forward an explanation for these many errors: “All this zealous Islamophilia is no doubt driven in part by Küng’s ‘global ethic’ agenda.” This casts some doubts on the Global Ethic’s intellectual honesty.

The other side of the problem is that, by playing down the part of Christian tradition in the Western way of dealing with violence, the Global Ethic Foundation contributes to further misunderstanding as to the origin of Western values. If non-violence should be preferred to violence, let us beware of underestimating the difficulty of the task. Rather than emphasising that, like all societies, Western society has resorted and still does resort to violence (which is true–although Western society is still less violent than any other society), let us change the angle and consider that Western society, in spite of a religious tradition that condemned violence, has experienced great difficulty in opposing the reign of violence. If we consider it this way, we may understand that abandoning the reference to Christian teaching is not likely to make the future any better.

Far from being approved of as a sign of open-mindedness, the denial of Western uniqueness is more and more seen as a cause of tensions in international relationships. The presence of international organisations or non-governmental organisations (all of which aim at imposing Western values) is often perceived as a destructive interference in foreign axiological systems. In some cases, Western organisations even take advantage of natural disasters to force on emerging countries social changes which would not be accepted in normal circumstances. Six months after the earthquake that killed 100,000 in Pakistan in October 2005, a newspaper reported that “since [the earthquake], these regions under the control of warlords and closed to humanitarian organisations and to the UN had to open. ‘They had no choice. We had to help them after the tragedy. Winter was coming,’ said Ted Itani, Head of Operations for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. According to many humanitarians, who tell it without cynicism, ‘the earthquake was a chance for women.’”(86) No doubt, but the slogan “they had no choice” will never be a suitable, let alone sustainable, basis for democracy or for the emergence of freedom. According to Samuel Huntington, “the concept of a universal civilization helps justify Western cultural dominance of other societies and the need for those societies to ape Western practices and institutions. Universalism is the ideology of the West for confrontations with non-Western cultures. . . . The non-Wests see as Western what the West sees as universal.”(87)

This question is not only of philosophical interest, it is also of strategic significance. Jacques Baud writes that Western states and institutions underestimate the destructive potential of Western values and principles and that this lack of consideration for the values of other people exacerbates international tensions: “Paradoxically, while the West reads in the attacks of 9/11 the necessity of struggling against poverty and of getting more involved in the Third World, it is probably a message diametrically opposed that terrorism is trying to get across. To put it clearly, it is not about sharing our wealth [richesses], but about respecting the “wealth” [richesses] of others. The word wealth [richesses] must not only be understood in its material sense, but also and above all in its immaterial dimensions like identity and culture. . . . By refusing–voluntarily or not–to listen to these messages, Western societies get themselves in an asymmetric situation. . . . We do not hesitate to shake up age-old traditions to obtain tangible and immediate results. With their will to help in matters they consider essential, Western societies upset more fundamental balances and generate, often without knowing it, fatal humiliations. We should not stop helping, but try to help in harmony with local cultures.”(88) The umma, the community of all Muslims, feels under attack. This is why Islamic terrorists see their fight as defensive, and enjoy support from Muslim populations. This feeling of being attacked is justified, because the umma is under constant axiological attack. Not so much under attack by the Christian as by the predominantly godless and pagan West. There will be no successful counter-terrorism without understanding that the concerns of the Muslims are serious and genuine.

The West has been ignoring and denying for three centuries the specificity and the Christian origin of its values. This doctrine which bans any reference to religion from the public space may still thrive on all stages on which speech and action do not need to be based on reality. But there is one stage on which it is now showing its limits: modern warfare reveals that Western values (in particular the rejection of violence) keep Western armed forces from fighting successfully whereas René Girard’s anthropology reveals the link between this rejection of violence (which is the characteristic feature of the civilisation of human rights) and the biblical tradition of Western civilisation.

It is a fact that our ignorance and denial are cause of both war and defeat. In a recent interview of General Sir Richard Dannatt (“A Very Honest General“) published by the Daily Mail (89), the Chief of the General Staff of the British Army openly expressed his concern that Islamist violence might be related to the spiritual vacuum and the decline in Christian values in the United Kingdom. He said that Britain had always been embedded in Christian values and that drifting away from these values could not be seen as a positive evolution. That a general (and not, say, the then Prime Minister Tony Blair, who on or about the same date was holding a speech for the Global Ethic Foundation) should make such statements is symptomatic of the situation of the West. As asserted by General Dannatt in the same interview, it is about truth and the Daily Mail did not fail to emphasise the contrast between the soldier’s concern about, and the politicians’ fear of, truth. That the military are more concerned with the truth than the politicians is not an accident. George Orwell recognised very accurately that military efficiency is the stumbling block over which any untruthful ideology finally collapses because “in philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two [may] make five, but when one [is] designing a gun or an aeroplane they [have] to make four”(90).

4 Reducing asymmetry

4.1 Introduction

It is in the field of values, rather than on the battlefield, that asymmetry reveals itself, and therefore asymmetric warfare, as we know it nowadays, is by far not only a military problem. Security issues should be addressed in advance of the emergence of a crisis, which is possible by paying attention to the axiological friction and impacts that are likely to happen every time Western society gets in contact with other cultures. It is not about impeding exchanges, but about understanding what exchanges involve for all parties and to what extent they might have an axiological influence.

Such axiological awareness must become a part of a strategic system aimed at preventing conflicts. Any Western influence, in particular Western aid programmes, are likely to disrupt local axiological balances because they entail an artificial and extraneous dimension. No help from anyone in any circumstances is unanimously welcome, and so any help will be seen, for whatever reason, as an attack by at least a part of the population to be helped. Every aid programme should determine thoroughly what resistance, whether expressed or latent, it is likely to be confronted by. In fact, most aid programmes do not show any consideration for the axiological systems in which they intervene and have a moralising, patronising, and tyrannical conception of aid. Putting an end to such tyranny and arrogance would prove an excellent counter-terrorism measure and protect Western interests much more efficiently than any military means.

Military means, however, are the area to which I will limit my study as to how asymmetry should be reduced. According to the current axiological situation, the perception of violence in Western public opinion represents a constraint that strategists cannot ignore nor eliminate. In a world in which killing a civilian is strategically more harmful to Western position than losing a soldier, the face of war is very likely, if not compelled, to change. Not respecting international law (as the reflection of Western values) during an asymmetric conflict on the pretext that the adversary does not respect it either, must necessarily lead Western armed forces to defeat, for mere axiological reasons and irrespective of any moral consideration.

Indeed, Western public opinion (as a social group) would not accept to give its approval and support to an attitude corresponding to a betrayal of its values. Such betrayal, if finally accepted, would be located in these fragile areas of the axiological system where acts and conscience collide with each other. At the individual level, this situation is likely to provoke psychological troubles with the soldiers taking part in the exactions concerned.

For the time being, I estimate that only a nuclear attack on a Western city could, momentarily, cause a major change in the Western axiological system and justify in Western public opinion a corresponding indiscriminate response. The future could, as well, bring a modification to the perception of violence in Western society; violence indeed is said to find better acceptance among young people than was the case in previous generations. This may be linked with the increasing secularisation, or rather paganisation, of Western society and schools in particular.

My axiological analysis of the current Western world outlines two axes along which asymmetry could be reduced. On the one hand, war nowadays is a means by which Western countries have more to lose than to win. In such conditions, it seems essential to raise the threshold of war (4.2). On the other hand, at a time at which conflicts are won or lost in the TV lounge of the average citizen, Western countries should endeavour intelligently to promote the empathy of their public opinion with their armed forces (4.3).

Each of the measures envisaged should be understood as a way to improve the position of Western armed forces on the axiological front. None of these measures is meant to lead to a guaranteed success. The notion of guarantee, however, does not exist in strategy. It is only about changing some parameters in order to increase the probability of success, to enhance the propensity of a situation to turn out propitiously.

4.2 Raising the threshold of war
4.2.1 On the notion of “war”
The term “war” is used more for its emotional charge and its rousing function than for the reality that it refers to. What is war on terror, or economic warfare (91)? No one would deny nowadays that the interests of a state are not only played out on the battlefield. And even though security issues are not only the military’s or the police’s business, it seems the notion of “war” entails some axiological specificities which deserve the use of an exclusive term.

What distinguishes war from any other form of relationship is that in a war a human society accepts (making a choice that reveals its values) the risk to the lives of its soldiers without considering that killing its soldiers should necessarily be a crime. In a war, the life of a soldier, as such, is not protected by law. It is a different matter, for instance, for a police operation, because killing a police officer is a crime.

It seems obvious in that light that war must remain something important, because protecting human life is definitely one of the real concerns of Western society, one of its highest values. This means that the decision as to whether or not a war should be started or joined in is an important one, which must involve the highest interests of a nation. Considering that the United States hurriedly left Somalia after eighteen of its rangers were killed in Mogadishu in 1993, one may ask whether the decision that led to this American intervention really met the conditions axiologically necessary for deserving the term of war. Many conflicts that are casually called wars do not qualify as wars from an axiological point of view. As a rule of thumb, Western countries should refrain from taking part in conflicts in which the inevitable casualties caused by blunders are deemed to be axiologically higher ranked than what is at stake on the battlefield. I would like to return to the demonstrations held in Geneva in June 2003 on the occasion of the G8 Summit in Evian.

The victory won by the police forces against the agitators was based on an axiological choice made by the government (92): the priority was to avoid any serious injury and casualty, whatever might happen. In consequence, material damage was to be accepted as soon as preventing it from happening could cause a serious injury (or worse) to anyone. This axiological choice led to frustrating situations for the police forces, who were seen abandoning their positions as soon as a clash with rioting demonstrators was likely to happen. But it was clearly in accordance with the values of Western society current in Geneva. The police forces, for axiological reasons, did not engage in the conflict ; this is why the agitators lost their battle; but this is probably also why so much material damage was caused. The solution for this material damage has not been satisfactory, because although many rioting demonstrators have since been prosecuted, the damages were paid by the French Republic as organiser of the Summit. But the way in which rioting demonstrators were prosecuted is nevertheless interesting and could prove quite effective if conducted on a more consequent and broader basis: shortly after the demonstrations, the police asked the population of Geneva to provide them with any pictures or videotapes made during the demonstrations. Non-violent solutions to violence exist: the application of law is an asymmetric approach to violence that consists in letting the rioters be the stronger in the street and defeating them in criminal and civil courts. The application of law is–and must remain–the civilised way of dealing with violence. Suitable laws exist, at least, at the national level.

This leads us back to armed conflicts. In addition to questioning the appropriateness of armed interventions, I consider that the kind of situations that the United States and its allies have encountered in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that Israel has experienced in Lebanon, could be avoided if the international community was prepared to adapt the rules of conflict resolution to the current geopolitical situation.

4.2.2 Adapting international law to the geopolitical situation

In 1900, the world consisted of 46 independent states; there were 200 in 1998, whereas 500 ethnic minorities had had their right of self-determination recognised under the United Nations Charter (93). Many a tension nowadays takes an international dimension only because the area where it develops escapes–in fact–the sovereignty of the state of which it is–officially and legally–a part. What happens generally is that the state from whose territory violence is organised either is not in a position to react (failed state), or tolerates or encourages more or less actively the activities carried out on its territory (rogue state).

The response to this international violence is an interventionist one: the state threatened by illegal activities intervenes in the failed or rogue state, with the United Nations if possible, and without the United Nations if considered necessary. The means engaged are often military, although the task (in its nature, if not in its scale) resembles rather a police operation.

Law should not give priority to fiction over the facts whenever the facts are clearly established. The notion of the state should not be a mere abstraction, nor only a vehicle of emotion. This is probably, as far as international law is concerned, the lesson to be drawn from the recent intervention of the Israeli defence force against Hizballah on Lebanese territory.

Lebanon, a member of the United Nations, tolerates on its territory (or is unable to put an end to) the presence and the activities of Hizballah, the final aim of which is the destruction of Israel, another member of the United Nations. This simple fact should allow, if not automatically lead to, the questioning of the Lebanese government by the United Nations and the setting of a time limit within which the problem, which affects international security, is to be settled.

The situation with failed states and rogue states raises questions about the responsibility and legitimacy of their governments, the responsibility of their populations, and, in the final analysis, about their sovereignty. In a state such as Lebanon (par excellence “lebanised”), there exists an excessive discrepancy between the formal sovereignty recognised and protected by the United Nations and the sovereignty that the organs of the state are actually in a position to exercise. It seems indeed that Hizballah does not limit itself to being one of the parties in the Lebanese political arena but has taken the place of the Lebanese State in a considerable part of the country, apparently to the satisfaction of the population concerned. It is a mistake on the part of the international community to ignore such an important protagonist.

The United Nations should adopt an organic and dynamic view of the world and establish criteria by which to assess the actual sovereignty of the states: to whom does the population pay taxes (or any similar contribution), who is in charge of the fundamental tasks of the State (security, infrastructure, judicial system, education, public health, etc.)? On the basis of such criteria, interventions should be possible in the early stages of a confrontation.

In the case of South Lebanon, it does not seem impossible with regard to such criteria that Hizballah is actually more sovereign than Lebanon itself, without any constitutional justification (such as could be the case in a federal state). South Lebanon can be isolated as a pocket of sovereignty which escapes the Lebanese national sovereignty and causes serious concern for the regional security. It plays an independent role on the international stage, and therefore deserves and cannot refuse an independent status.

When Israel intervenes against Hizballah on Lebanese territory, there exists in the protection that Lebanon is currently entitled to draw from international law something that resembles an abuse of process. As it seems, Lebanon lost its sovereignty over South Lebanon a long time ago. To say in such circumstances that Israel violates Lebanon’s sovereignty by entering South Lebanese territory is not far from being an abstraction. The situation is all the more embarrassing since it is probably because of the weakness of the Lebanese government that Hizballah is in a position to pose a threat to Israel.

This is not about determining liabilities, but about highlighting that the notions of state and sovereignty are detached from reality. The current model of the United Nations is based on old balances rooted in the will of the Western nation-states. Many countries had their boundaries arbitrarily drawn on a map with a ruler and a pencil. These boundaries made “sense” as long as Western states had an interest in these countries and accepted to resort to strength to defend or help defend their boundaries. The reason why so many countries are dissolving now is that the West is no longer competing with Communism for world domination and has therefore lost interest in these countries. The will on the basis of which these boundaries were drawn has ceased to exist.

Populations must therefore be encouraged to wake up to the challenge of sovereignty and the United Nations should develop new instruments to accompany, where deemed necessary by the relevant populations, the transition from the old artificial boundaries to new boundaries based on natural and sound principles. Such transition will not eradicate violence, but it is likely to reduce violence, as it will lead to new natural balances and permit the resolution, in many parts of the world, of old and artificial imbalances. For the time being, the categories of international law, as well as most interventions of the United Nations, have rather often than not the effect of helping maintain imbalances and do not solve, but worsen in the long run, every security problem.

4.2.3 Deterrence and flexibility: questioning professionalisation

What is the point of having all this army if we don’t use it?
Madeleine Albright

As far as military planning is concerned, the security of Western states depends on a twofold balance:
- The balance, on the one hand, between use and perception of violence. The perception of violence by Western public opinion is the arbiter of modern conflicts. Using violence without being assured that it will be supported by Western society is a dead-end situation.
- The balance, on the other hand, between keeping an important military strength and being moderate in its use. As pointed out by the classical approaches to asymmetry, it is the imbalance between the respective strength of the belligerents that compels insurgent forces to “asymmetric” strategies and to be content with low-intensity conflicts. If the Western states stop being clearly superior in strength, the old high-intensity, classical conflicts are likely to make their comeback.
The crucial element of this twofold balance (and the key to security) is the rediscovery by Western society of the notion of usefulness applied to defence. For it is indeed about maintaining very important military means and, simultaneously, not using them. The way in which West European countries give up their defence in the name of fashionable ideologies (like pacifism or Revolution in Military Affairs) is usually justified with the idea that it would be possible, if necessary, to adapt the military means quantitatively to the current situation. This idea is wrong, and leads inevitably first to war and then to defeat. This is because any country that starts buying weapons and developing its armed forces during a crisis contributes to the escalation of international tension and precipitates the outbreak of a war for which it is not ready.

It is not impossible that some Western states feel compelled, because of the mentality of their public opinions and political elites, to use their military means in order to prevent them from being considered useless and having their budget cut. This may explain why some military interventions do not meet the axiological criteria of war as defined previously. “What is the point of having all this army if we don’t use it?”(94) The same situation is likely to happen at the level of the United Nations: if one considers the number of troops that some states maintain almost permanently in their UN contingents, it seems very likely that these missions are vital to maintaining their armed forces. Such situations are likely to give rise to conflicts of interests that the United Nations has probably no possibility to control. In particular, they may probably extend the military presence of the United Nations (which is considered Western in many parts of the world) without this presence being axiologically appropriate.

Contrary to the general trend towards professionalisation, I consider that the system best adapted to the current strategic situation is the militia. The main advantage of this system is that it offers an optimal correlation between the strength available (militia forces are numerous), the strength necessary (high flexibility according to the situation) and the strength tolerated by public opinion. The militia system is based on a wise conception of usefulness in security matters because it accepts by nature that armed forces are not only useful when they are fighting. At the axiological level, the militia system allows the balance between use and perception of violence to be maintained, because mobilising all or part of the forces requires the situation to be considered serious within the population to which the militia belongs. In this respect, if war remains something serious, there is no reason why a state and a society should refuse to appoint the best of their citizens to its conduct. The best citizens, as already pointed out by Machiavelli (95) and as is probably still true today, are not necessarily those who decide on a military career. This brings us to the question of empathy.

4.3 Promoting empathy

The Western citizen sitting in his TV lounge has become one of the key figures of any modern strategic situation. One of the most effective means of reducing asymmetry is to bring the axiological profile of the armed forces into line with the axiological profile of the Western citizen.

4.3.1 Axiological drawbacks of professionalisation

It can be asserted with no major risk that the axiological profile of Western professional soldiers is different from the axiological profile represented by Western public opinion. On the one hand, indeed, deciding on a military career certainly goes against the tide of the modern way of life and of the values of Western societies. On the other hand, the life of professional soldiers is detached from many of the concerns of the average citizen: their world is a very particular, closed one, and not very representative of Western society.

In consequence, professional soldiers cannot be in a good position to perceive, when they are carrying out a mission, what will be considered acceptable or unacceptable by Western society. Yet, the ability to comply with the expectations of public opinion is crucial because the image of Western troops is affected not only when massacres (or other unlawful acts) are perpetrated, but also when soldiers adopt a behaviour that, without being unlawful or immoral, is simply inappropriate by the standards of Western public opinion. Anyone is able to learn international law in a theory room, but only a group of civilians can foresee the reaction of public opinion.

When American soldiers listen to heavy metal while shooting at Iraqi soldiers or comment on their experience of war as they would about their last video game, they run counter to Western public opinion. This is not about determining whether, legally or morally, the attitude of these soldiers is reprehensible or not. It is a mere question of compliance with an axiological profile. Something rather indefinite will make public opinion feel ill at ease. People will see in this attitude some sort of disrespect for the Iraqi soldiers (who are in addition badly equipped) and even for war. And when, after public opinion has already been made an uncomfortable witness in this way, there arrives the scandal of Abu Ghraib, all axiologically negative impressions combine into a single picture: Abu Ghraib becomes the necessary and natural complement of heavy metal, and vice versa. Similarly, nobody in the media knew (and even cared) whether the German soldiers who posed with a skull in Afghanistan had committed a crime in doing so, but disapproval was vehement and unanimous.

The problem of compliance with public opinion seems to be getting worse as military careers are losing their attraction. Professional forces experience increasing difficulty in attracting people representative of public opinion. In this respect again, a militia seems to be more appropriate,(96) as its members are by nature (if the system is based on conscription) representative of public opinion. It is surprising, however, that many recruiting campaigns aim consciously at the lower classes of society or overemphasise the “adventure” side of military life. Adventure is certainly the last thing that members of armed forces should be looking for, and adventurers are the last kind of people armed forces need nowadays. The world has changed; the modern battlefield is off limits to Rambos and cowboys.

4.3.2 Discipline on the axiological front

Military discipline is a necessity of combat. The discovery of the axiological terrain will necessarily lead strategists to develop a discipline focused on the image of the armed forces in public opinion. Manoeuvering in the human space needs axiological discipline, just as the success of many an ambush is based on fire discipline.

It seems essential that armed forces should develop a new sensibility centred on their image and that this image should be protected by the laws of the Western states. The image of the armed forces is as important as the condition of their equipment (which is protected by legal provisions): armed forces whose image is sullied are no more fit for combat. The United States has lost its current wars–and probably the next two or three–in places like Abu Ghraib, Haditha, and Guantanamo.

The best way to improve one’s image is to improve one’s behaviour. Huge efforts are necessary already at internal level: there is a general military tendency to avoid disciplinary procedures and to “solve problems” in a more informal way. The idea that resorting to disciplinary procedures is a sign of weakness or failure on the part of a commander is widespread and leads to punitive measures that are based not on legality but on humiliation. The pictures of Abu Ghraib may have cost the United States a war, even though, in the final analysis, they remain very far from the worst that can be done to an enemy. Many humiliating measures (such as would be considered harassment or mobbing under employment law) ordered as unofficial punishment (in place of a due disciplinary procedure) or self-organised within the troop itself and more or less tolerated or simply ignored by the hierarchy, are relatively close to the pictures of Abu Ghraib. Why should an enemy be better treated than the punching-bag of the platoon? Disciplinary procedures must be played down and considered the normal way of dealing with disciplinary problems.

The question as to how soldiers should behave within their troop and in their interactions with the outer world must become a part of their training, and it must be regulated (with the sanction of disciplinary and criminal law) according to the current axiological situation. This axiological training is due to vary, in particular, according to the places where the armed forces intervene.

Regardless of their moral conceptions and legal knowledge, soldiers must be trained to think about the axiological dimension and impact of any act they intend to carry out. This axiological awareness must become a reflex as prompt as any reflex necessary for a fighter to survive. Acquiring such a reflex does not require a high moral standard or a particularly accurate legal knowledge. The uproars caused by blunders are not about a Kantian vs utilitarian approach to ethics, but about lapses from the normal behaviour expected from an average, decent citizen (which a soldier should try to remain). The only judge at strategic level is public opinion, and this is the reason why it is not necessary (and maybe even not desirable) that the average soldier should be more of a philosopher than the average citizen.

The soldiers’ behaviour plays a major part as well in the potential welcome that the occupying troops may meet among the population. For obvious reasons, the population is in general ill-disposed towards the occupying forces, but it would be wrong to believe that a population can be perfectly unanimous in this feeling. If the occupying forces are well behaved (according to the local axiological system), they are likely to arouse some kind of respect and their good behaviour will be noticed and reported. Those in the population that are not particularly happy about their own society may consider collaborating with the occupying forces. But if the occupying forces behave in a dishonourable way (by local standards), even those who do not feel particularly sorry for their own country being occupied will be ashamed of being friendly towards them and will refrain from expressing any positive comment. The behaviour of the troops is probably the first step in this famous fight for hearts and minds, which is based on nothing tangible (97).

4.3.3 Communication: occupying the human space

Armed forces and police forces must be aware that they manoeuvre in the human space. The human space (in particular the axiological terrain) can and should be exploited like any other terrain. No terrain can be exploited but by accepting its constraints and its reality. As far as communication is concerned, the requirement of truth is a constraint in Western society and therefore any information given must be true to be effective (98).

I will distinguish between two aspects of communication: a “negative” aspect, consisting in counteracting or thwarting the communication of the adversary by depriving the adversary of the information it needs (4.3.3.1) and a “positive” aspect, consisting in taking the initiative so as to break the asymmetric adversary’s monopoly on the human space (4.3.3.2).

4.3.3.1 Counter-communication: anticipating impacts

Armed forces and police forces should pay better attention to the communication and propaganda of their adversaries. They would be in a position to understand what kind of axiological pictures their adversary is profiting from, which would enable them to avoid delivering such pictures. A great deal of unfavourable information is produced by the armed forces and police forces themselves.

This matter and the question of behaviour as addressed previously (from the angle of discipline) overlap partially. We will look now into the question of behaviour from the angle of the communication strategy of the adversary, or of third parties that are more or less involved in the conflict, more or less hostile, and that are likely to play a role in the human space (such as the pacifist wing of Western public opinion, NGOs, etc.). It is essential that the armed forces should listen to, and take into account, the messages expressed by those who have an interest in giving a bad image of the armed forces.

Before the Iraq War started, local propaganda in Iraq and propaganda from the rest of the Arab world made every effort to depict the American soldier as a godless barbarian, the product of a decadent civilisation, in short, the exact opposite of the local axiological profile. At the same time, an important part of Western public opinion (in Europe but also in the United States) expressed the view that the war to come was simply an expedition of warmongers. It is likely that the behaviour of the American armed forces–in addition to making useless the success obtained on the battlefield–has confirmed the information that had been given about them by their military and political adversaries. The scandal of Abu Ghraib alone shows that the reputational risk has not been taken seriously and that the United States has underestimated the readiness of Western public opinion to listen to what victims have to say.

This applies also to police forces. I have previously pointed out, in my analysis of anti-globalisation demonstrations, how the agitators endeavour to lend weight to the idea of an antagonism between the police forces and the peaceful demonstrators. Police forces should therefore refrain from any behaviour likely to give credence to the idea of such antagonism. Now, when peaceful demonstrators are standing in front of several ranks of police officers all equipped with their “Robocop” riot outfits (probably designed to impress the adversary–which is already a problem), they will easily notice that the police forces look indeed hostile to them. The police forces appear exactly as their adversaries wanted them to appear: inhuman and ready for violence. No photographer can help taking a picture of this so visible opposition between the frailty of the peaceful demonstrator and the implacable harshness of the forces of law and order. Such images are extremely harmful because they heighten the asymmetry: before any clash takes place, the police forces are in the role of the aggressor and do their best to remind everyone of George Orwell’s “boot stamping on a human face.”

4.3.3.2 Breaking the adversary’s monopoly on emotions

Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt
Publius Vergilius Maro (99)

“Robocop” outfits are obviously necessary in some situations. But in these situations, police forces would be well-advised to communicate the reasons which have led them to adopt these particular means of protection. The interpretation of such a decision should not be left to chance, let alone to the adversary. And the fact that the reasons may seem obvious should never make the police forces save the cost of an explicit statement. If the police forces do not say that it is the presence of rioting demonstrators that causes them to wear their riot outfits, nobody (and certainly not the agitators) will do this for them. Because of their passivity, the police forces–who are on duty precisely to protect democracy and the right to demonstrate–take on the role of the liberticidal force that the agitators try to impose on them.

Occupying the human space should be a reflex whenever armed forces or police forces intervene. Their situation is far from being hopeless; they have all resources needed to play a very decent role in the human space. In particular, soldiers are animated by a sense of duty that is not unanimously yet often admired in our individualistic societies. But success in the human space probably requires an evolution of the mentalities among armed forces and police forces: in order to align oneself with a public opinion that tends to favour David over Goliath, it is necessary to play on one’s weakness. Just as no orchestra can totally cover the human voice (that will still be audible, whatever the sound level of the instruments), a machine will never win any battle in the human space.

Acknowledgements

This essay is the temporary result of an independent and experimental inquiry into the relation between Western values and some current strategic problems. I am grateful for the interest that many people have expressed in this unusual subject. I feel particularly indebted to Anthropoetics for publishing this essay and making it thus available to a wider range of readers, and also to:
- Mr Hugh Walters and the other Conspirators of Downside School (UK), amongst whom I first developed and discussed the theses set out in this essay,
- Mr Ted van Baarda and Mrs Desirée Verweij (both Faculty of Military Sciences, The Netherlands), at whose invitation I presented at a conference of the Dutch Ministry of Defence (see note 1 below) the paper that served as a basis for this essay,
- Mr René Girard, who was the first reader of the paper presented in Amsterdam, as well as the other readers (friends, fellow lawyers and fellow officers) from whose comments the text has benefited, in particular Mr Rory Campbell and Ms Christine Hannant, and
- Orbis Books for allowing me to quote from René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Col Jacques Baud, from his book La Guerre asymétrique ou la défaite du vainqueur, Mrs Micheline Spoerri and Editions Slatkine, from Micheline Spoerri, Genève, juin 2003… un G8 pas comme les autres, and Mr Hans Küng, from the website of the Global Ethic Foundation (Stiftung Weltethos).
Notes

1. Conference on “The moral dimension of asymmetrical warfare” organised by the Faculty of Military Sciences and the Ministry of Defence of the Netherlands (Amsterdam, 4-6 October 2006). (back)

2. Thomas Edward Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Jonathan Cape, London, privately printed 1926, First published for general circulation 1935, p. 188. (back)

3. See, e.g., Th. A. Van Baarda / D.E.M. Verweij (editors), Military Ethics: The Dutch Approach, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Leiden 2006. (back)

4. According to Jacques Baud, La Guerre asymétrique ou la défaite du vainqueur, Editions du Rocher, Monaco 2003, p. 85. (back)

5. Karl Raimund Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Hutchinson & Co (Publishers) Ltd, London 1959, p. 108 [first published 1934 ; original title: Logik der Forschung]. (back)

6. See, for instance, Gary Eason, “From David and Goliath onwards, asymmetric warfare is not a new concept,” BBC News Online, Tuesday, 1 April 2003 at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2904103.stm [state on 31 October 2007] (back)

7. Sun Tzu, The Art of War. (back)

8. Based on Cicero, Marcus Tullius, Pro Milone [first published 52 BC]: “Silent enim leges inter arma.” (back)

9. Baud, op. cit., pp. 32 and 97. (back)

10. Ibid, p. 33. (back)

11. Ibid, pp. 33-34. (back)

12. Ibid, pp. 98-99. (back)

13. Ibid, p. 95. (back)

14. Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force, Penguin Books, London 2006, pp. 245-248 [first published 2005]. (back)

15. Baud, op. cit., p. 101. See also Lawrence, op. cit., p. 189: “I began to drum out the aim in war. The books gave it pat–the destruction of the armed forces of the enemy by the one process–battle. Victory could be purchased only by blood. This was a hard saying for us. As the Arabs had no organised forces, a Turkish Foch would have no aim? The Arabs would not endure casualties. How would our Clausewitz buy his victory?” (back)

16. In an interview given to CNN in February 2006 (and broadcast on 23 August 2006), Malika el Aroud, the widow of one of the suicide bombers who killed Ahmed Shah Massoud on 9 September 2001, describes how the families in Osama bin Laden’s clan, far from offering their condolences, congratulated her for her husband’s actions. (back)

17. Baud, op. cit., pp. 102-103. (back)

18. Gandhi, Non-violence in Peace and War, Navajivan Publishing House, Ahmedabad 1948, vol. 1, p. 111. (back)

19. From Hagakure (17^th century), quoted in: Rinaldo Massi, Bushido: La voie des samouraïs, 3rd edition, translated from Italian into French by Philippe Baillet, Edition Pardès, Puiseaux 1987, p. 17.(back)

20. Baud, op. cit., p. 96. (back)

21. See Eason, op. cit. (back)

22. In the national public opinions of belligerent countries, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, the situation is seen from a different angle, as the population tends (but there are many exceptions) to identify with the national troops rather than the foreign civilians, which is perfectly understandable. These public opinions oppose war because their soldiers are killed. It is this opposition (not the fighting) that leads to the end of the war and to defeat. Again, this shows that the human value of a soldier is more important than his or her tactical value. (back)

23. See Morjane Baba, Guérilla kit. Nouvelles ruses et techniques de la lutte anticapitaliste, Editions La Découverte, Paris 2003. However, the notion of “civil disobedience” as developed in the French speaking world by José Bové, includes requirements with which most agitators do not bother to comply (José Bové / Gilles Luneau, Pour la désobéissance civique, Editions La Découverte, Paris 2004, pp. 161-162). (back)

24. The influence of Marxist materialistic ideology, according to which a doctrine must materialise in praxis (failing which it is considered mere petit bourgeois hypocrisy), is obvious. (back)

25. Micheline Spoerri, Genève, juin 2003… Un G8 pas comme les autres, Editions Slatkine, Geneva 2006, p. 58. (back)

26. Extract from a document published on the website of Attac Switzerland shortly before the G8 Summit of Evian http://www.suisse.attac.org/Contre-l-expropriation-des-peuples [state on 31 October 2007] (back)

27. For pictures of Carlo Giuliani trying to throw a fire extinguisher at police officers, see: http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/free/genova/pics3a.htm [state on 31 October 2007] (back)

28. Extract from a statement of the Geneva police, as quoted in Le Courrier on 30 July 2003. (back)

29. Statement of Attac Neuchâtel dated 16 May 2005 http://www.suisse.attac.org/Condamnation-des-participant-e-s-a [state on 31 October 2007] (back)

30. Spoerri, op. cit., pp. 58-59. (back)

31. Micheline Spoerri is a former member of the Government of the Republic and Canton of Geneva. She was in charge of the Department for Justice, Police and Security in 2003. (back)

32. Spoerri, op. cit., p. 127. (back)

33. Ibid, pp. 131-132. (back)

34. Wikipedia depicts Carlo Giuliani as a symbol for the victims of police abuse (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Giuliani) and reveals that several squares have been renamed after the name of Carlo Giuliani, such as the “Carlo-Giuliani Platz” in Bern [state on 31 October 2007]. (back)

35. Spoerri, op. cit., p. 128. (back)

36. Article published in Le Temps on 9 August 2006: “Les images du Liban: une guerre dans la guerre.” (back)

37. Israel’s position seems to be torn between the public opinion of Western Europe and its own public opinion. See Tim McGirk, “The End of Invincibility,” in Time, 4 September 2006, pp. 20-21. (back)

38. AFP Agency despatch dated 27 August 2006. (back)

39. Anatoli Karpov / Jean-François Phelizon, Psychologie de la bataille, Editions Economica, Paris 2004, p. 94. (back)

40. Time, September 4, 2006, pp. 20-21. (back)

41. Baud, op. cit., p. 95. (back)

42. Ibid, op. cit., p. 159. (back)

43. Ibid, op. cit., p. 94. (back)

44. Gabriel Marcel, Les Hommes contre l’humain, Editions Universitaires, Paris 1992, p. 96 [First published 1956]. (back)

45. Popper writes on Alfred Tarski’s truth theory: “Tarski’s theory, as you all know, and as he stressed first, is a rehabilitation and an elaboration of the classical theory that truth is correspondence to the facts.” (Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1972, p. 323). (back)

46. This is the title of one of the chapters of Popper’s Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1972. (back)

47. Read, on this subject: Hilary Putnam, Fait/Valeur: la fin d’un dogme et autres essais, Editions de l’éclat, Paris-Tel-Aviv 2004, pp. 11 sq. [First published 2002; original title: The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy, and other essays]. (back)

48. In the meaning science is given by Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Hutchinson & Co (Publishers) Ltd, London 1959 [first published 1934; original title: Logik der Forschung]. (back)

49. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History,” The National Interest, 16 (Summer 1989), Washington 1989, pp. 3–18. (back)

50. Peter Gross, Die Multioptionsgesellschaft, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1994, p. 14. (back)

51. Such is the central thesis of Karl Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism, first published 1957. (back)

52. One of the analyses of the CIA was that Osama bin Laden could have given very substantial amounts of money to the families of the kamikaze, as stated for instance by Hersh Seymour, Dommages collatéraux, Editions Gallimard, Paris 2006, p. 154 [First published 2004 ; original title: Chain of Command]. As it seems, the families of suicide bombers can find in the sacrifice of their relative a source of pride and honour. In an interview given to CNN in February 2006 (and broadcast on 23 August 2006), Malika el Aroud, the widow of one of the suicide bombers who killed Ahmed Shah Massoud on 9 September 2001, explained that being the widow of a martyr was the “pinnacle in Islam” (an attitude which she personally seemed to disapprove of). Immediately after her husband’s death, during her stay in Osama bin Laden’s clan in Afghanistan, Malika el Aroud, who was born in Marocco but grew up in Belgium and is a Belgian citizen, received a letter from bin Laden which contained the very reasonable amount of US$500. (back)

53. In particular, a survey in the UK revealed in Autumn 2006 that forty per cent of Muslims between 16 and 24 would prefer to live under sharia law in Britain. (back)

54. Hani Ramadan, who had been teaching French for fifteen years in a state school in Geneva, published in Le Monde on 10 September 2002 a letter to the editor with the title “La Charia incomprise” (“Sharia misunderstood” or “Sharia not understood”). This document justifies, on a religious basis, the legitimacy of a religious law. As such, this position is perfectly unchallengeable and indisputable. However, this letter caused a scandal. Hani Ramadan was suspended as a teacher by the cantonal government of Geneva, a sanction that was revoked by the Administrative Court of the Canton of Geneva, the appeal authority. (back)

55. This surprise, widely considered an upheaval in the media, led the United States and the European Union to reduce their financial aid to the Palestinian Authority. (back)

56. See Hume, An Inquiry into the Principles of Morals [first published 1751]; Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral [first published 1887]. (back)

57. On the notion of science, see Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery. (back)

58. In French: “Une valeur est un critère de décision.” and in German: “Ein Wert ist ein Entscheidungskriterium.” (back)

59. John Le Carré, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, Pan Books Ltd, London 1964 [first published 1963], p. 134. The statement is from East German intelligence officer Fiedler, one of the main characters of the novel. Fiedler wants to understand the philosophy of his Western counterpart, British intelligence officer Leamas. Whereas Fiedler clearly sees himself as a Communist, Leamas considers himself to be “nothing” as far as philosophical streams are concerned. It is Fiedler who knows that Leamas is a Christian, and that Christian teaching (unlike communist ideology) does not provide any support for the killing of innocent people. Leamas would like to dismiss this idea and to deny any Christian influence on the West. But all he finds to say is: “For Christ’s sake.” (back)

60. René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Gracewing, Leominster 2001, p. 166 [first published 1999; original title: Je vois Satan tomber comme l’éclair]. (back)

61. Girard, op. cit., p. 161. (back)

62. Ibid, pp. 165-166. (back)

63. Ibid, p. 184. (back)

64. Ibid, p. 143. (back)

65. Ibid, pp. 171-172. (back)

66. Ibid, p. 174 (back)

67. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth 1954 [first published 1949], p. 159. (back)

68. Such is namely the opinion of Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Archbishop of Westminster: “Europe today is a place which wants the fruits of faith, and subconsciously adheres to the values of our Christian tradition, yet too often ignores the roots ; it wants the values and the priorities of faith without the covenant relationship with God which is its true source. In his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict tackles this unconscious forgetting, reminding us that love is engineered, as it were, to seek the divine, and must always be replenished from its source. He quotes Pope Gregory the Great in his Pastoral Rule that the good pastor must be rooted in contemplation, for only in this way can he take upon himself the needs of others and make them his own. How long can a river last without rainfall?” Sermon preached at Downside Abbey Church on St Gregory’s Day (13 March 2006) by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor ; at: http://www.downside.co.uk/abbey/homilies_archive.html [state on 31 October 2007] (back)

69. Read, on this subject, the chapter on the Great Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov [first published 1880; in Russian]. (back)

70. See Erasmus, Querela Pacis undique Gentium ejectae prostigataeque [first published 1517]: “How can it be that Christ’s doctrine, infinitely superior to the teachings of nature, could not persuade those who confess it, of this unique truth that it preaches ahead of all others, I mean peace and mutual benevolence?” (back)

71. Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics in Europe, from the French Revolution to the Great War, HarperCollins, London 2005. (back)

72. Maurice Cowling, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England; Volume I (1980); Volume II: Assaults (1985); Volume III: Accomodations (2001); Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. (back)

73. See, for a critical analysis of a Christian defence of Marxism: Jacques Ellul, L’idéologie marxiste chrétienne, Editions du Centurion, Paris 1979. (back)

74. The question of interpretation will be tackled later on. (back)

75. http://www.weltethos.org (back)

76. Global Ethic Foundation, History of the Foundation, at: http://www.weltethos.org/dat_eng/st_1_e.htm [state on 31 October 2007] (back)

77. http://www.weltethos.org/pdf_decl/Decl_english.pdf [state on 31 October 2007] (back)

78. Hans Küng / Angela Rinn-Maurer, Weltethos christlich verstanden, Herder Verlag, Freiburg-im-Breisgau 2005. (back)

79. “Dabei zeigte sich, dass das Weltethos sehr wohl christlich begründet werden kann.” Rinn-Maurer Angela, “Zeit zum Aufwachen. Warum wir ein Weltethos in christlicher Sprache brauchen,” in: Zeitzeichen, Evangelische Kommentare zu Religion und Gesellschaft, June 2006, at: http://www.weltethos.org/00–home/zeit-zum-aufwachen.htm [state on 31 October 2007]. (back)

80. “Es wäre wünschenswert, wenn sich dieses neue Projekt mit Vertretern anderer Religionen fortführen ließe.” Rinn-Maurer, loc. cit. (back)

81. “Jedoch wäre zum Beispiel das Werk “Weltethos–muslimisch verstanden” eine große Hilfe für alle Muslime, die Gewalt verachten und sich dafür einsetzen, dass der Islam und die Menschenrechte miteinander vereinbar sind.” Rinn-Maurer, loc. cit. (back)

82. “Fanatiker jeder Couleur werden sich nie von Argumenten überzeugen lassen.” Rinn-Maurer, loc. cit. (back)

83. A national law is interpreted in accordance with the national constitution, or in accordance with a provision of Community law. (back)

84. The Quran has in Islam a far greater significance than the Bible within Christianity. The Quran has, as a book, a sacred character of such a nature as cannot be compared with the respect that Christians show to their Bible. (back)

85. The Catholic Herald, 18 May 2007, p. 15. (back)

86. From an article published six months after the Earthquake in North Pakistan (8 October 2005, 100,000 victims) by La Liberté, 25 April 2006. (back)

87. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Simon & Schuster, New York 1996, p. 66. (back)

88. Baud, op. cit., pp. 154-158. (back)

89. Sarah Sands, “A Very Honest General,” in Daily Mail, 13 October 2006. (back)

90. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth 1954 [first published 1949], p. 159. (back)

91. See Jean Pichot-Duclos, Les Guerres secrètes de la mondialisation: guerre économique, guerre de l’information, guerre terroriste, Editions Lavauzelle, Panazol 2002; Christian Harbulot / Didier Lucas (editors), La guerre cognitive: L’arme de la connaissance, Editions Lavauzelle, Panazol 2002; Liang Qiao / Wang Xiangsui, La Guerre hors limites, Editions Payot et Rivages, Paris 2003 [First published 1999 ; in Chinese]. (back)

92. Spoerri, op. cit. (back)

93. Jean Pichot-Duclos, Les Guerres secrètes de la mondialisation, Editions Lavauzelle, Panazol 2002, pp. 19 sq. (back)

94. These words from former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright are quoted by Rupert Smith, op. cit., p. 311. (back)

95. See on this subject: Machiavelli, Dell’Arte della Guerra [first published 1521]. (back)

96. On the superiority of militia, see: Machiavelli, Dell’Arte della Guerra [first published 1521] and Bernard Wicht, L’idée de milice et le modèle suisse dans la pensée de Machiavel, Editions L’Age d’Homme, Lausanne 1995. (back)

97. “And how would the Turks defend all that [140,000 square miles]? No doubt by a trenchline across the bottom, if we came like an army with banners ; but suppose we were (as we might be) an influence, an idea, a thing intangible, invulnerable, without front nor back, drifting about like a gas? Armies were like plants, immobile, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head. We might be a vapour, blowing where we listed. Our kingdoms lay in each man’s mind; and as we wanted nothing material to live on, so we might offer nothing material to the killing.” (Lawrence, op. cit., p. 192) (back)

98. Manipulating information or reporting through interested third parties does probably not pay off in the long run. NBC, which broadcast impressive pictures of the first Gulf War and laudatory comments on new American weapons, was owned by General Electric, one of the first suppliers of the American armed forces. See Bernard Wicht, L’OTAN attaque ! La nouvelle donne stratégique, Georg Editeur, Geneva 1999, p. 42. (back)

99. “Tears flow at the sight of the world and human destiny touches one’s heart.” Said by Aeneas to his friend Achatus when discovering in their Carthaginian exile a painting of the Trojan war that they have just lost (Maro Publius Vergilius, Aeneid, book 1, verse 462 [first published between 29 and 19 BC]). (back)
October 1, 2007
Performatism in Art

Anyone following the international art scene for the last ten years or so will have no trouble identifying developments that are difficult to reconcile with the practice and theory of postmodern art.(1)These include a renewed interest in beauty and the discipline of aesthetics, a new seriousness or lack of manifest irony, a renascence of painting (as opposed to performance art and installations) as well as a tendency towards projecting unity and totality in works of art. As in other branches of culture, however, no critic and no artist up to now has been willing to connect the dots, as it were, to form the picture of a whole epoch that is opposed to postmodernism and that is gradually beginning to replace it. In the follow remarks I would like to show that art–no less than literature, philosophy, film, and architecture–has entered into a stage that can best be understood using the monist, no longer poststructuralist or postmodern concepts of performatism.

Within this limited space it is not possible to provide anything resembling an exhaustive, step-by-step description of how performatism took hold in the world of art. To keep the discussion to the point, I’ve limited myself to five well-known artists working in three different kinds of media: Vanessa Beecroft in performance art, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Demand in photography, and Neo Rauch and Tim Eitel in painting. All the artists are important figures in their fields; all belong to a generation that came to prominence in the mid-to-late 1990’s. These artists, in spite of their seeming diversity, are not pursuing idiosyncratic, unrelated styles or concepts, and they are not merely new twists in the endlessly unfolding field of postmodernism. Rather, they are part of a broader pattern of innovation that is entirely in keeping with the move towards monism in the other arts as well as in theory.

Before I start describing performatism in art, a few additional explanations are in order. In the hypothetical originary scene as described by Eric Gans (cf. 1993, 1-27), there are three basic positions that may be taken in regard to the ostensive sign, which arises in intuitive mutual agreement between two or more heretofore speechless protohumans and as yet has no signified or meaning. If the thing is perceived as blocking access to the transcendent, reconciliatory power of the sign, the result is the sacral, or religion. Alternately, if the sign is perceived resentfully, as blocking access to or obscuring the material thing, the result is the political, or a grab for power that nonetheless still has to “go through” the sign to get what it wants (the various neo-Nietzschean schemes common to poststructuralism would reduce the sign to this function alone). Finally, when attention oscillates between the closed unity of sign and thing, this creates a sense of distance that allows us to experience the sign-thing relation as beautiful.

The result is a concept of art corresponding in many regards to the definition advanced by Kant in his Critique of Judgment: the aesthetic is below the threshold of concept (ohne Begriff), without interest (interesselos), necessary (notwendig), and is pleasing (erzeugt Wohlgefallen).(2) Unlike the original Kantian model, however, this scenario is impervious to the kind of deconstruction practiced by Derrida in his chapter on Kant in The Truth in Painting (Derrida 1987, 83-118), which exposes the contradictions arising when Kant tries to separate “pure,” disinterested beauty from the impure, practical concepts that are needed to mediate it. In the case of the ostensive sign, by contrast, all three basic modes–the sacral, the political, and the aesthetic–are rooted in the originary relation between sign and thing and are prior to concept; the disinterested aesthetic sign is not any “purer” than the interested approaches to the sign beside it and is not compromised by exposure to concept.(3) This trinitarian division of labor is crucial to explaining how performatist art maneuvers through the Scylla of high modernist Kantianism and the Charybdis of postmodern, neo-Nietzschean irony to found a truly new monist mode of representing reality.

There is now a broad consensus among art critics that high modernist, non-representational art fits in well with the basic precepts of Kantianism (as filtered through the writings of formalist critics like Clement Greenberg).(4) Modernist art operates below the threshold of concept, abjures practicality, strives for a self-referential, formal purity and, if it is good, imposes itself necessarily on the viewer’s intuition. Through this self-referential search for purity, modernist art may be said to strive for a semiotic unity of artist, work, and viewer. This kind of art, which reached its apogee in the Abstract Expressionism of the early 1950’s, was swept away in the 1960’s by what most critics now refer to as postmodern art, or, as the case may be, anti-art. This art is beholden to ironic conceptuality, constantly undercuts the boundaries between art and practice, uses disgusting objects to discredit the notion of essential, thing-bound beauty, and, by virtue of its unrelenting irony, forces the viewer out into a vast contextual expanse from which there is no returning to a pure, unmediated appreciation of the artwork at hand. The philosophical roots of this kind of concept or performance art are Hegelian (its conceptual Inhaltsästhetik is directly opposed to Kantian Formästhetik) and Nietzschean, in the sense that the artists are constantly trying to smash through our conceptual illusions by representing them ironically in deliberately flawed or repellant works of anti-art. The semiotics of postmodern art are indisputably dualist: value and meaning accrue to things after the fact, by virtue of their position in a particular context.

This sweeping displacement of a monist sign and value system by a dualist one would seem to confirm the dichotomous notion of art history championed by Heinrich Wölfflin and his followers. Moreover, it suggests that the course of art history might one day be renewed by a direction diametrically opposed to the semiotic dualism, insistent irony, and ludic conceptualism of postmodernism. Unfortunately, although at least some art critics are becoming aware that the “triumph of anti-art” (McEvilley 2005) has turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory, there has been no attempt to conceive of the new, pro-art trend in positive epochal terms. Thus, even when a shrewd critic like Boris Groys is able to conceptualize the new, he is unable or unwilling to link that conceptualization with contemporary artistic practice.(5) Similarly, a mainstream critic like Arthur C. Danto, who moved from rejection of anti-art to grudging acceptance and appreciation, is now once more edging towards a Kantian position: in a recent series of lectures he concluded that beauty is an anthropological constant and “one of the values that defines what a fully human life means” (Danto 2003, 15). Unfortunately, Danto is still unable to part with a specifically Hegelian approach to art that he links with the analysis of “embodied meaning”(6)–which is to say that art or art appreciation remains in his view a conceptual rather than an intuitive endeavor (in the Kantian sense). My own approach takes exactly the opposite tack. To understand the present epochal shift in art we must, I believe, jettison entirely the notion of concept and return to a specifically intuitive notion of art that is nonetheless distinct from modernist formalism or traditional Kantianism.

The most direct way to explain how this new monism works in art is to recur once more to the notion of the double frame, which consists of two interlocking parts: the primary or inner frame (the ostensive sign) and the outer frame, or work frame. My basic assumption–confirmed by observations in other media–suggests that contemporary artists have intuitively or unconsciously turned to latter-day variants of the ostensive sign to avoid the endless regress and increasingly strained ironies of classic postmodernism, and that they place an outside frame–an ironclad clamp or lock–around that sign to insure that its aesthetic efficacy remains unbroken.

As such, the new epoch may best be defined as the becoming-conscious of the ostensive, which up to now existed as a latent, but unrecognized force in all culture.(7) The teleological closure resulting therefrom–the notion that the originary semiotic scene has reached its historical fulfillment in the present epoch–is unavoidable, since it is not possible to think outside history and anticipate what the next epoch is going to be without having gone through this one first. In this sense history always appears to have ended, since it is not possible to view history from an ahistorical, transcendental perspective.

As noted above, the ostensive sign or inner frame can be experienced in three ways: as sacred, as political, and as aesthetic. The aesthetic is not a separate, pristine realm of its own, but arises when someone takes advantage of a modality offered by the sign in its most basic state. As soon as you step back to regard the sign as it oscillates between being a sign and being a thing, you automatically lose interest in instrumentalizing it for material or sacral ends. For this reason beauty in performatism has no intrinsic formal properties except that of closure; it arises in a reflexive, intuitive distance to the ostensive sign, which is nothing more than a closed mental frame that has been placed around a thing and a signifier. Performatist beauty is not an essence, but is constructed in the intuitively experienced distance to a closed inner frame encompassing an undecidable relation between a sign and a thing.

This postmetaphysical, relational notion of beauty-as-closure is diametrically opposed to the modernist notion that beauty can be achieved by eliminating representation, promoting flatness (Greenberg) or otherwise purging the art work of “extraneous” devices. At the same time, this concept of the aesthetic is no longer postmodern in the sense that it accords the aesthetic a discrete status of its own, rather than treating it merely in terms of a conceptually or ideologically guided, anti-artistic grab for power. In performatism, then, beauty exists necessarily, but it is a “weak,” constructed beauty whose only formal property is that of closure.(8)

The second crucial element of the performatist concept of art is that of the outer frame.(9) The outer frame creates a discrete inner space within a context and–in direct opposition to postmodern practice–forcibly cuts that space off from the surrounding context and from what may variously be described as conceptuality or discourse. The result is a curious expansion of the intuitive minimal space marked by the ostensive sign to some selected part of reality at the expense of discourse and concept–a move that is deeply inexplicable to a postmodernist and deeply pleasing–in the sense of Wohlgefallen–to an performatist. In performatist art, the lock between outer and inner frame creates a field of artistically imposed intuition which causes viewers to align themselves with that intuition in a specific way–in a performance. This forcible manipulation of the viewer within the bounds of an intuitively constructed, closed, and categorically organized artificial field is the central device of performatist art.

Inasmuch as the outer frame is forcibly imposed from without, it may be experienced as the sublime, intimidating product of a higher, powerful will. This distinctly authorial or theist effect stands in direct opposition to the deism of postmodern art, in which the authorial position recedes in a endless mise-en-abyme of undecidable, catch-me-if-you-can irony. In performatist art, the result is what might be called a will to beauty rather than to power, or what I have elsewhere called “Kant with a club” (Eshelman 2005/2006, 2). Although there is no preexisting metaphysical guarantee that beauty or sublimity can be achieved, the entire work is nonetheless “set” towards achieving those effects, and coerces the viewer into receiving them.

Just how do these abstractions translate into concrete works of art? In the following analyses I’ll try to show how double framing works in visual terms, and how certain characteristic themes and devices of performatism are realized in contemporary performance art, painting, and photography. My observations, incidentally, are often in agreement with those made by art critics writing without any theoretical agenda and with the self-assessments of the artists themselves. The crucial problem as I see it is not so much to recognize individual devices as to point out that artists working in completely different media are involved in a larger epochal shift involving not just other artists, but also writers, filmmakers, architects, and philosophers.

Performatist Performance Art: Vanessa Beecroft

Performatism was originally not conceived with art in mind, hence the odd-sounding collocation in the heading above. However, since performance art has become almost entirely synonymous with the anti-art of postmodernism,(10) it seems necessary to point out that there is a performatist performance art, too.

The most striking representative of a no longer postmodern performance artist that I have been able to find is Vanessa Beecroft.(11) Superficially, Beecroft’s performances bear all the trappings of “classic” performance art: they are offensive or merely titillating to many people in the general public, they don’t involve any particular skill in the way they’re set up, and they raise doubts as to whether what she is doing is really “art.”(12) Also, Beecroft’s mildly scandalous public behavior and well-publicized personal problems help round off the image of the performance artist as eccentric exhibitionist (see Thurman 2003), and her performatively enacted themes, which include femininity, voyeurism, and power relations, seem to place her squarely in the mainstream of postmodern discourse.

Beecroft’s performances all follow one basic formula, with occasional exceptions and minor variations. A group comprised of one sex (almost always female (13)) are presented to the public in a closed space to which public access can be tightly regulated (usually a gallery, a museum, or, more recently, upscale fashion stores). Depending on the plan of the performance, the women range from entirely nude to entirely clothed; Beecroft also employs body paint, wigs, makeup, and the like to alter and unify their appearance. In addition, the performers are given instructions that effectively keep them from performing on their own. Often they are told to stand phalanx-style for about an hour, after which they are free to assume any position they want, as long as they don’t move too quickly or interact with the audience. The performers are normally not allowed to speak, so that the performance remains entirely visual. The performances are in addition rather long–about 2-3 hours–and, by all accounts, physically and mentally strenuous for the performers. The artist herself does not participate in any of the performances and is often not even present when they are put on.

Given the well-known details of Beecroft’s personal life–she suffers, or suffered, in any case, from an obsession with eating–it is tempting to explain her art as an attempt to work off gender-related pressure exerted by a male-dominated society. In fact, this victimary posture marked Beecroft’s very first impromptu performance in Milan in 1993, where spontaneously engaged performers were meant to interact with a diary recording her obsessive eating habits (see Kellein 2004, 123-124). Accordingly, there has been no shortage of attempts to interpret her art as a statement on gender and/or link her with postmodern artists like Cindy Sherman who deliberately scramble conventional markers of masculinity and femininity in order to demonstrate the belatedness and constructedness of gender.

If Beecroft’s art demonstrates anything, though, it is not the constructedness of gender, but the constructedness of sex. In fact, proceeding from the givens of her performances, it is impossible to draw any direct conclusions about gender whatsoever. This creates problems for poststructuralist and/or feminist interpreters like Christine Ross (2006), who in her extensive treatment of Beecroft speaks of a “preoccupation with homogenized body images and standardized ideals of femininity” (2006, 54) and of the “persistence of a desire to be feminine” (2006, 60). In the logic of late postmodernism, the position of not having an identifiable gender (i.e., being reduced to the female sex) is simply itself another standardized gender role; there is literally nothing prior to gender. It seems hardly necessary to add that the result is a totalizing discourse oblivious to its own exclusion of the human body as a source of originary significance.

In truth, the only thing you can say for sure about Beecroft’s nude women is that they’re women, and not men or perhaps hermaphrodites, and the only thing you can say about her fully clothed men in U.S. military uniforms is that their gender orientation–whatever it may happen to be–is entirely opaque. What Beecroft’s performances do is to drastically cut off the performers (and herself) from whatever social and sexual roles they might happen to have in real life. The space of the performance is a specifically aesthetic frame constructed around the originary sign of the human body and excluding, as much as possible, the social context that normally affects or “genders” our perception of that body. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the outer frame excludes everything, and it doesn’t suggest that the inner frame around the body is constructed in an entirely natural way.

Two examples should suffice to demonstrate this. Although the outer frame or work frame of Beecroft’s performance eliminates most markers of social origin, there are, as a rule, always traces of outside socialization and style–the most notable example being the sailors’ uniforms or various fashion accessories that the performers (who are often professional models) are made to wear. Where they do appear, the outside traces are, however,made uni-form, so that it becomes essentially impossible to “perform” gender heterogeneously in the way that someone like Judith Butler conceives it. Secondly, the body, as the inner frame of Beecroft’s performances, has nothing essentially natural about it. It is an originary construct particular to the performance and exists as an origin only within the confines of the work frame itself. Thus, even the presumably natural color of pubic hair is rendered opaque in that performance where Beecroft has the models appear with shaven pudenda and blonde wigs (VB 46). Wigs, paint, hats, and cloth strips (in the Pontisister project (14)) all demonstrate the constructedness of the origin or inner frame, even as the outer frame shuts out context and its endlessly shifting ironies that would cause that origin to dissipate in discourse.

Of course, it’s always possible to disregard the discreteness and particularity of the double frame and suggest, as one German art critic did, that a performance of women clad only in pantyhose (VB 55) would have turned out completely differently had it been put on in the gritty Turkish quarter of Berlin rather than in the genteel ambience of the Tiergarten district, where Mies van der Rohe’s New National Gallery is located (Pfütze 2005, 271). This sort of criticism remains, however,entirely external to the performance itself, which is reduced to little more than a device for producing different effects in different contexts (something that, incidentally, applies indiscriminately to all works of art–and to everything else, for that matter).

It has also been argued that the real driving force behind Beecroft’s art is her anorexic-bulemic condition and depressive tendencies, which are supposedly played out indirectly by the performers. This focus on pathology, which has been developed systematically by Christine Ross, is, however, not especially compelling. While it is undoubtedly true that the obsessiveness of the artist is forcibly projected onto the performers, and while it is also true that the givens of the performance make them tired and uncomfortable, it is not especially clear why the net result is a discourse of depression. The reason for this curious diagnosis lies in Ross’s definition of depression as a “dimensional state” (Ross 2006, 68) rather than as a category. Although Ross concedes that Beecroft’s performers “cannot be designated depressed” (2006, 61) and are not “represented in a state of pathological depression” (2006, 61), she nonetheless maintains that they “enact key scientific symptoms of depressive disorders” (2006, 63). In Ross’s typically poststructuralist thinking, “being depressed” is a shifting set of external symptoms rather than a categorical state that you are “in” (baring oneself in public in a group is presumably the last thing a clinically depressed person would want to do). However, being “in” something–the closed work of art–is precisely the situation of Beecroft’s performers.(15) Postmodern criticism of this type is still possible, as these examples show, but it is unable to grasp these performatist performances in positive terms or–what is even more telling–to get inside of them at all.

When you do get inside the performance–and you have to do so to appreciate it fully–you are exposed to a specifically authorial or theist will. This opaque, genderless will confronts viewers with a uniquely constructed originary situation for which there is no concept–no norms or previously established rules of conduct.(16) As Dave Hickey notes, “in these tableaux [i.e., in the performances] we are denied both the privacy of contemplating a representation and the intimacy of participating in a real encounter” (Hickey 2000, 7). In effect, the frame of the performance forces both male and female viewers to oscillate between a direct, physical appreciation of the women and the spontaneous search for a socially acceptable attitude within the frame that is not offensive or threatening to others. This intuitive impetus, in conjunction with the particular givens of the performance, creates a specifically aesthetic experience, rather than an erotic or merely social one. In daily life, this sort of thing occurs only when we are confronted with what Erving Goffman calls “breaking frame,” which is to say a massive breach of protocol in conventional, normed situations.(17) In Beecroft’s art, by contrast, the “break” is internalized and becomes an aesthetic paradox: it acts as an autonomous norm forcing us intuitively and spontaneously to work out norms of our own that are binding only in one particular context.(18) This context, in turn, forces pleasure upon us but–not least because of its paradoxical construction–is unable to deliver that pleasure in full. What is at stake here is not the “failure” of this project (which in epistemological terms is a foregone conclusion) but the communal success of the intuitive acts of individuation resulting from it. The participants, in other words, spontaneously form an originary, aesthetically organized community underneath the threshold of concept, and the performers achieve a kind of minimal individuation in spite of–or perhaps precisely because of–their isolation from discourse.

Beecroft’s intuitive, categorically organized experience is not a belated effect of discourse or a set of pathological symptoms created under laboratory conditions, as Ross would have it. Rather, it is the direct Other of discursive experience and its immediate, implacable rival. This lack of discursivity has not been lost on postmodern artists like Vaginal Davis, who has put on queer burlesque send-ups of Beecroft’s performances that supply the “missing” dimension of gender as well as stage a pornographic return to the real (for a lengthier discussion of this see Doyle 2006, 121-140). However, these supplements remain entirely external to Beecroft’s performances and only serve to underscore their position beneath the threshold of postmodern discourse.

The results of Beecroft’s performances are, as noted above, aesthetically ambivalent. Although there is a distinct, almost classical will to beauty in force (the focus on the nude body), the interplay and oscillation between personal pleasure and spontaneously constructed role-playing vis-à-vis others keeps a “pure,” classically Kantian apprehension of beauty from arising (the kind of intuitive appreciation that Greenberg was looking for when assessing abstract painting). The aesthetic, in other words, is confirmed in Gans’s sense as an originary anthropological construct and not as an ineffable a priori essence. This constructedness is, incidentally, also apparent in the categorical set-up of many of Beecroft’s performances: hair color (sometimes augmented by brightly colored wigs) and various ornaments are used to create simple, usually color-coded categories within the performances. The result is a kind of primitive Kantianism–one might call it Kant with a fright wig–that imposes half-natural, half-artificial aesthetic categories on viewers’ intuition.

It might be added, however, that there are certain crucial differences between Beecroft’s constructs and Kant’s original concept of the aesthetic. In Kantian thought the categories (quantity, quality, relation, modality) form a bridge between intuitive empirical experience (which is pre-conceptual) and the understanding (which is conceptual); the categories are simply “there” a priori and are not subjected to any further critique within Kant’s own system (cf. § 9 and 10 in The Critique of Pure Reason, A 70 / B95 ff.). In Beecroft and the other artists I will be discussing, the categories seem to emerge spontaneously out of the intuitively experienced material, which, however, has been organized beforehand by a theist artist whose motives are always personal and hence subject to some kind of further critique. This theist manipulation is foreign to Kant, whose thinking is explicitly deist (see in particular A 675/ B703 in The Critique of Pure Reason).

Finally, Beecroft may be said to incorporate both the ostensive and imperative mode in Gans’s sense into her art.(19) This, I think, is the best way of explaining her interest not just in scantily clad women, but also in uniformed, rigidly posed sailors. As she herself notes of her performances with sailors, “I wanted to see how . . . military rules of conduct rub off on aesthetics” (Kellein 2004, 129). The sailors, no less than the women, appear here beneath the threshold of concept: in the closed space of the museum they impose an imperative order on spectators, albeit in an autonomous, non-practical way that visitors would otherwise not be able to experience. The perhaps legitimate objection that Beecroft is avoiding an ideological critique of the military by limiting herself to a specifically aesthetic venue is, however, based in its most extreme form on a notion of art that regards any autonomous and intuitive personal experience (be it of order or of anything else) as a sham to begin with. It is, however, precisely within this imposed free space of autonomous selfhood that the aesthetic moment resides, and it seems that after many years of being effaced and dissipated in postmodernism it is making a comeback of epochal dimensions.

Performatist Photography: Andreas Gursky’s Aesthetic Theism

It is no understatement to describe the changes that have occurred in art photography over the last 15 years as dramatic. Like the anti-art of postmodernism, photography of the 1970’s and 80’s delighted in freakish, unattractive themes and a seemingly amateurish mise en scène of its material. The striking, disturbing images of Lee Friedlander, Annie Leibowitz, Nan Goldin, and Diane Arbus, to name just a few, may be taken as tokens of this general tendency. In Germany, postmodern photography found an original incarnation in the influential work of Hilla and Bernd Becher.(20) The Bechers specialized in pictures of peripheral, unattractive industrial objects like water towers, winding towers of coal mines, or grain silos, all of which were photographed in the same, deadpan way from the same position against flat gray skies. Taken alone, the pictures don’t beautify the formal elements of their quotidian subject matter (the way Edward Weston squeezed formal beauty out of curvaceous bell peppers). Taken together, though, they form a discourse documenting the fascinating endless differences in the visual language of functional architecture. Given the heritage of German photography, it was also evident that the Bechers were doing for industrial capitalism what August Sander once did for people with his Stammmappen(21); they were creating a kind of systematic register documenting individual types. The pictures also acquired an added poignancy because many of these industrial objects were falling into disuse or being torn down; the pictures came to document the slow decline of an entire industrial region. The photographer was in any case no longer a creative individual taking artsy pictures of odd or perhaps even beautiful objects, but a kind of performance-artist-with-a-lens organizing and presenting us a deliberately drab visual discourse with socially critical implications.(22)

This discursive, anti-aesthetic approach was given a more explicit ideological spin by Thomas Struth, a pupil of the Bechers, who in his Unconscious Places (1987) photographed cities in the early morning to look as if they were entirely unlived in, if not to say unlivable. It is no accident that the vanishing lines in some of his bleak urban scenes lead towards distant, diminutive church spires, which seem unable to compensate in iconic terms for the desolation that the receding perspective is coldly thrusting toward them. The dour irony of this and similar projects by Becher pupils (23) made one of the richest countries in the world appear economically stagnant and spiritually barren. The point is not, of course, whether this pictorial analysis was true in strict empirical terms. It did, however, reflect a widespread disaffection among intellectuals with what was perceived as a repressive state and a self-satisfied, morally indifferent postwar society.

All this began to change sometime in the mid-to-late 1990’s. In hindsight it seems obvious that two separate developments worked together. First, postmodernist anti-art was beginning to exhaust what seemed like an unlimited plurality of possibilities for sawing off the branch upon which it was sitting. Although there was no dearth of concepts to subvert, the ironic gesture involved in doing so was becoming increasingly predictable and easy to duplicate. While conceptual art didn’t simply disappear overnight, there has been a noticeable tendency–particularly in Germany–towards the “classic” medium of painting and away from jumbled installations and crudely provocative performance art. Secondly, the rapid, revolutionary switch to a market economy in Eastern European countries and the globalization process in general made capitalism–whatever one happened to think of it in political terms–into a universal, inescapable economic and cultural reality.(24)

The results of both these developments converge in the photography of the West German Andreas Gursky (b. 1955). Gursky, who was originally a student of the Bechers, began by making photos aimed at humdrum subjects and steeped in the dualist irony of postmodernism. His Bochum, University (Bochum, Uni 1988, reproduced in Gursky 1995), for example, shows a university terrace with a massive, honeycombed, poured-concrete roof that blocks off our view of the sky. A few students stand scattered beneath the roof engrossed in reading or conversation, with a natural panorama of fields and forest faintly visible in the background haze. Another work from this period, Ratingen (1984, in Gursky 1995), shows a park forest road marked with two parallel red-and-white circular traffic signs signaling “no entry” to vehicles; a few visitors stand scattered around the entry path to the forest, perhaps preparing to leave or preparing to enter. The “message” in both cases is hard to miss. In Ratingen, the arbitrary, doubled cultural sign (a simulacrum of itself) acts as a barrier to a nature that acquires its “natural,” privileged position precisely by virtue of the sign; the photograph confronts us visually with the undecidable duality that lies at the core of all postmodernist thought. In Bochum University, the roof protects us–perhaps overly so–from nature while at the same time interdicting our access to the transcendent openness of the sky.(25) Humans are indeed present in both cases, but they seem randomly positioned and pursue no particular goals. Nature, for its part, appears as a hazy promise in the background–so to speak under erasure, both there and not there. When taken together, Gursky’s two photographs cut us off vertically from transcendent experience and horizontally from a natural one: the photographs thrust us back into the condition of endless, undecidable immanence that is postmodernism.

Other early Gursky photos, however, project an openness and a hint of transcendent experience lacking in those of his postmodern contemporaries. The most notable example is his 1989 color photograph of a Ruhr Valley bridge (Ruhrtal), which may be said to mark symbolically the gateway out of postmodernism and into performatism. The photo shows a tiny human figure beneath a tall highway bridge that forms a dark diagonal band running across the top of the picture from left to right. The miniscule figure is framed by the two tall, slender pillars of the bridge and the grass embankment on which he is standing; in the background there is a flat gray Becher-like sky. The dynamic, diagonally inclined bridge, though, is more than just another inert industrial object waiting to be visually archived; the open expanse of flat gray sky (which takes up most of the picture) is more than just a neutral backdrop, and the human figure–evidently a fisherman–seems to be caught in a state of open potentiality rather than one of ironic undecidability.(26) Ruhrtal doesn’t contain any of Gursky’s later trademark techniques or motifs–the eagle-eye perspective, the digital manipulation, or the brightly colored matrices of things, buildings, and people. However, the picture’s evident lack of critical irony and its optimistic opening up of space foreshadow the direction his no-longer postmodern aesthetic would take in the future.

In the more recent analyses and appreciations of Gursky’s work there is a broadly held feeling that Gursky is something other than postmodern (and certainly no longer compatible with the aesthetic championed by the Bechers). However, this feeling is seldom expressed in a resolute way, and is invariably couched in terms applying well to Gursky’s art but not to anyone else’s. In the following remarks I would like to set forth a thumbnail sketch of Gursky’s art that will allow us to place him not in some sort of differentially defined individual niche after postmodernism, but in the broad context of the epochal shift that is performatism.

My starting point is the double frame, which is to say the lock between a theist, authorial perspective and a personal, human one. Gursky’s pictures are normally taken from “on high” and because of this create the effect of sublime distance to their objects. Gursky himself speaks of an “extra-planetary” perspective (as quoted in Pfab 1998, no pagination) and notes that he is interested in humans as a “species” in their environment and not as individuals (Gursky 1988, IX). This theist perspective, which overwhelms the senses more than it pleases them, keeps his pictures from descending into the uncritical celebration practiced by commercial photography. The first immediate effect of his photography is thus to totalize the things or activities we see within a large, but highly selective frame. This sublime totalization, however, can only function as a whole because it is confirmed by categorical order existing at a lower, human level. Gursky himself puts it like this:

You never notice arbitrary details in my work. On a formal level, countless interrelated micro and macrostructures are woven together, determined by an overall organisational principle. A closed microcosm which, thanks to my distanced attitude towards my subject, allows the viewer to recognise the hinges that hold the system together. (Gursky 1988, VIII)

Due to the high resolution of the pictures (and also to digital manipulation) this sublime, theist perspective is anchored in sharply defined, digitally manipulated images that practically force us as viewers to focus on small individual things and their formal, ordered relationships–in short, to experience beauty.(27) The eagle’s-eye view, in conjunction with high resolution, an often unnaturally deep field of focus, and brightly colored, enigmatically ordered forms encourages us to work out intuitive categories of order which, when synthesized in our mind’s eye, confirm the original totality confronting us in the first place. Here, too, the effect is Kantian in the special performatist sense I have been using all along. As Gursky says, “the history of art seems to possess a generally valid formal vocabulary which we use again and again” (Gursky 1998). On must add, however, this formal vocabulary is not entirely “natural” or a priori but is imposed on the viewer through a totalizing, highly selective gaze and through digital manipulation. In this pixelated Kantianism, nature and art are framed by a theist artist in such a way as to be indistinguishable–and we wind up believing in this unity whether we want to or not.

This unity can also be seen in Gursky’s photo of a landfill (Ohne Titel XIII, 2002) and of one of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings (Ohne Titel VI, 1997), which are simply different versions of the same thing caught in different stages of constructedness. The drips are a kind of garbage that Pollock deliberately placed on canvas to form random but beautiful patterns; the garbage in the landfill forms beautiful patterns partly by chance, partly through digital manipulation by Gursky. As in all performatist art, these larger frames or totalized unities are nothing more than giant-size versions of the original ostensive sign, which is that place where nature (the thing) and culture (the sign) are intuitively framed for the first time through spontaneous, mutual agreement and form a communal, divinely charged field deferring conflict. Gursky’s specific feat is to position himself on the outside of the frame, as it were, as a quasi-divine being with a totalizing perspective that at the same time allows individual access to categorically mediated, beautiful thingness. The price of this aesthetic theism is, however, that we are never absolutely sure what is real and what has been digitally manipulated–and usually have no way of knowing if the artist doesn’t tell us. The net result, as in all performatism, is to create an artificially framed aesthetic field that we believe in even though we are aware of the artificial, manipulative conditions behind it.

This aesthetic theism also causes Gursky’s photographs to radiate a metaphysical optimism that is entirely alien to postmodernism. This is most evident in the way Gursky presents space. In the postmodern photographs of Ruff and Struth, space–even outside, presumably open space–is presented as claustrophobic (typical examples are Ruff’s Haus Nr. 8 III (28) or Struth’s Shinju-ku [Skyscrapers], reproduced in Struth 2002, 35). In Gursky’s art, the opposite is true. Even when Gursky in Copan (2002) photographs essentially the same thing as Struth does in Shinju-ku (the massive facades of ugly high-rise buildings), the variegated colors and ordered patterns in Gursky’s facades work to dematerialize their oppressive volume.(29) In Gursky’s work, in fact, even the most closed and oppressive inner space imaginable–that of a jail in Stateville, Illinois (2002)–appears radiant and open; light shines through the outside windows of each cell into the inner courtyard, from whose center the picture was taken. In Foucauldian terms, this panoptic perspective would at first seem to make the photographer (and ourselves) complicit in the prison’s confining, punitive function. This centering, however, can be interpreted in quite another way: it allows us to apprehend the possibility of universal redemption for the inhabitants of the cells, who appear framed by miniscule cubes of light. The principle of spatial transcendence realized in the earlier Ruhrtal (the tiny figure surrounded by a large open frame) is now repeated a hundredfold in more constricted circumstances–but with an optimistic refraction of light suggesting the possibility of individual transcendence.

The inevitable question arises as to whether Gursky would not do better subjecting globalization to an ironic pictorial critique of the sort developed by Ruff, Struth, and others and also employed by Gursky in some of his early work. These ironic techniques, as noted above, include strategies of exposing the conceptual dualities conditioning our “natural” vision and of “returning to the real”–photographing depopulated, constricted space so as to suggest oppression and spiritual emptiness. Although it is no doubt possible to employ these and similar techniques in a critique of global capitalism, it would prevent us from ever capturing globalization pictorially in its own terms, as a total phenomenon. If global capitalism really is as spiritually empty, ugly, arbitrary, and claustrophobic as the postmodern critique maintains, then it is fair to ask how it managed to unfold such a world-encompassing, universal dynamic in the first place. This question, I believe, finds a more convincing answer in Gursky’s method than in Ruff’s or Struth’s. For in Gursky’s photography we experience the totalizing, dynamic, overwhelming effect peculiar to globalization itself. While not “critical” in the postmodern sense that requires us to take the position of a peripheral victim, Gursky’s work forces us to experience a distinct sort of ambivalence regarding the activities or things portrayed. Because totalization imposes beauty and order on us, and because we remain aware of this circumstance in spite of our enjoying its details, we are also encouraged to develop an intuitive resistance towards it. This resistance operates not through concept, but through the apprehension of categorical equivalencies arising between different totalities. Taken together, the pictures of the Kuwaiti stock exchange, the North Korean mass assemblies, and Vietnamese basket-weaving factory (and, of course, all of Gursky’s other photos relating to global society) form a categorical assemblage of totalities whose imagery could be reapplied in a potentially critical, discursive way to the reality around us. The fact that Gursky doesn’t express this criticism himself in words is less his problem than our own. The point is, however, that an effective critique of globalization must first apprehend the dynamics of globalization itself in order to counter that dynamic in an effective way. In this regard the type of art pioneered by Gursky may indeed play an instrumental role in future critiques of globalization that move beyond the neo-Nietzschean, localized positions typical of postmodernism and prescribed by poststructuralism.

Thomas Demand: Bracketing the Real

Perhaps the most unusual and inimitable performatist photographer of today is the German Thomas Demand, who was originally trained as a sculptor. Demand first painstakingly recreates scenes (usually interiors) out of folded paper and cardboard on a 1-to-1 scale, then photographs them with a large-format camera or films them (the model is destroyed after the picture is taken). The large-scale pictures are in turn displayed without frames in laminated Plexiglass on patterned backgrounds, giving the impression of being direct incisions in the wall.

From the performatist point of view, Demand’s technique may be said to radically reduce photography to an experience of theist willpower and originary, categorical intuition. This claim may at first seem curious because Demand draws heavily on familiar media images relating to juicy, discourse-laden subjects like brutal crimes, corrupt politics, and dramatic historical events–typical examples being his Tunnel (a film moving through a life-size facsimile of the tunnel in which Lady Diana died); Corridor (depicting the hallway where the mass murderer Jeffrey Dahmer lived); or Office (showing a looted office of the Stasi, the East German state security service). Indeed, the standard postmodern way of describing Demand’s pictures is in terms of the absent things that they purport to represent: they are said, for example, to “capture moments that refer to a greater event, a before and after.” (Gaensheimer 2004, 70). Seen from this epistemological perspective, the visually stunning, large-format pictures are mainly there to make us conscious of a lack: “Demand’s Bathroom [a picture relating to a notorious German political scandal] points to the evasions and ultimately to the failure of photography’s attempts to understand the violence behind the apparent ambiguity of political life” (Marcoci 2005, no pagination).

However, upon examining these photographs more closely–it would perhaps be better to say intuitively–it becomes apparent that we can derive them from media images only through descriptions of their titles, which function in much the same way that the inscriptio and subscriptio did in Baroque emblems: they ascribe meaning to what is otherwise an inexplicably constructed, rather arbitrary looking scene. If you didn’t have the subscriptio provided by Demand in his interviews, Lady Di’s tunnel could be anyone’s tunnel, Jeffrey Dahmer’s corridor anyone’s corridor, and the looted Stasi office anyone’s act of vandalism anywhere. Demand’s constructive technique evidently disturbs the causal connection leading from reality to the photograph so much that it must be artificially supplemented with outside discourse (even the generic titles, which in conventional terms are indisputably part of the photograph’s presentation, don’t help much in figuring out what his pictures are about).(30) The inevitable poststructuralist objection–that Demand’s supplementary outside explanations are as much a part of the photograph as its supposedly discrete inner space–makes sense in epistemological, but not in performative terms. Why spend months painstakingly constructing and photographing a “traceless” scene in order to expose your own creation as a failure with a few short remarks? Here as elsewhere, the point is not that Demand is “reinscribing” already existing discursive reality; he’s creating a new reality of his own and reprojecting it categorically onto the consciousness of his viewers.

Demand’s photographs, in short, create discrete aesthetic spaces accessible primarily, if not exclusively, to intuition; like Beecroft’s performances, they are far enough below the threshold of concept that they must be reconnected to the practical world around them artificially. If anything, the photographs act as indices not of reality, but of categorical experience: the tunnel is a scene prefiguring all threats emanating from tunnels, the corridor is any lonely person’s corridor, the looted office any retributive act of destruction. Demand isn’t providing us with failed representations forcing their failure upon us after the fact; instead, he’s supplying us with a set of ostensive aesthetic categories that can be used by us a priori to construct or approach quotidian reality anew. This category art is, in effect, the opposite of, and successor to, the concept art that has dominated our aesthetic experience for the last thirty years or so.

My assessment of Demand’s art as a positive act of creation is not alone. As Michael Fried has pointed out in an important recent article in Artforum, Demand’s photographs aren’t about lack or failure; they’re about imposing the intention of the artist on the spectator. As Fried writes, Demand tries

to replace the original scene of evidentiary traces and marks of human use–the historical world in all its layeredness and compositeness–with images of sheer authorial intention, as through the very bizarreness of the fact that the scenes and objects in the photographs, despite their initial appearance of quotidian “reality,” have all been constructed by the artist throws into conceptual relief the determining force (also the inscrutability, one might say the opacity) of the intention behind it. (Fried 2005, 202)

Translated into the epochal terminology of performatism, you could say that the theist artist Demand occludes discourse on the level of the sign-object or inner frame by depriving it of all but the most minimal features necessary to make it identifiable as a real-world object. For the viewer, the only adequate way of approaching these constructed minimal objects is, nolens volens, through intuition.

This intuition, however, is not indeterminate or up to the individual position taken by the viewer, as is the case in what Fried calls minimalism or literalism. Instead, Demand’s inner frames are imposed on viewers through the opaque will of the theist artist; the viewer experiences the whole of the work as an uneasy mixture of beauty, uncanniness, sublimity, and discursivity (which is tacked on, as it were, as an afterthought by the imperfectly theist artist confirming the existence of a world outside his own creative scene (31)). This “ontological project” as Fried (2005, 202) calls it, radically reverses the entire program of postmodernism. We are no longer dealing with an anti-image demonstrating the failure of the visual sign to represent reality, but with a unique, originary construct that relocates the apprehension of reality in a “divine” aesthetic act uniting creator, object, and viewer. And, if we inject the notion of category into Fried’s analysis, the will of the artist can be integrated intuitively into the consciousness of the viewer and projected back out again onto the real world. My only real complaint about Fried’s analysis is that he doesn’t go far enough: he explicitly leaves the question of an epochal shift open. This is a gap that can easily be filled, however, by reference to a theory of performatism.

Performatist Painting

Arthur C. Danto’s After the End of Art (1995) ends with a discussion of the end of original style in postmodern painting. In his remarks on the American Russel Connor and on the Russian emigré duo Komar and Melamid, Danto notes that the task of the artist is no longer to paint in any new style (since everything has presumably already been tried out) but to ironically juxtapose already known, mutually exclusive codes. The result is a comic art practiced by what might best be described as highly gifted pranksters; in the case of Komar and Melamid, for example, the performance surrounding the work of art (“America’s Most Wanted”(32)) is more important than the work itself. Faced with the imminent dissolution of art into what looks like a running series of practical jokes, Danto retreats to an essentialist, above-the-fray Hegelian position affirming the continued existence of art in different historical settings. Art, which is always “about something” and always “embodies meaning” (1995, 195) no matter how mundane or trivial its subject matter may be, can do so in completely different ways under completely different historical conditions, in accordance with the prevailing zeitgeist. Although Danto several times invokes the name of Heinrich Wölfflin–the scholar virtually synonymous with an epochal concept of art history–he understandably makes no attempt to speculate on how and when the end of art could actually end. Art in 2005 will no doubt be completely different from what we imagine it today, he continues, but the main thing is that it will still be identifiable as art (1995, 199).

Some 12 years later, the situation in art has indeed changed in a way that would hardly have been imaginable in 1995. There has been a massive resurgence of paintings that are no longer comic, ironic, or composed entirely of self-conscious citations of other styles. The most talked-about younger artists are painters or photographers rather than performance artists, and the art they have been producing has a feel to it that is not readily captured using the terminology of postmodernism. This development has, of course, not been lost on art critics, who have begun to use heretofore suspect words like “ontology,” “immediacy,” “beauty,” or “totality” to describe the new works in a positive way. Obviously, I have no quarrel with these assessments. However, I would insist that the changes they describe must be treated as epochal in nature, and not simply as incremental innovations or yet another new proof of postmodernism’s sheer endless mutability.

This epochal perspective is Hegelian in the sense that it assumes that art can be said to progress in diametrically opposed leaps and bounds, and that certain types of art can appear only in certain times or epochs. It is, however, non-Hegelian in the sense that the motor of this progress is located in a basic, insoluble conflict between semiotic monism and semiotic dualism and not in the zeitgeist, in shifts in concept or style, or in a particular mode of argumentation “accidentally” always favoring one side of the equation. In this regard there can be no end of history in the Hegelian and/or postmodern sense. The seeming “triumph” of one semiotic mode over the other invariably causes its methods to congeal into conventional norms that in time would choke off the free space that makes art what it is. The only way out of this trap is to break with normative convention as it stands and adopt the position of its semiotic Other. The problem we are facing today is that art has intuitively taken this step some time ago but art criticism has not. It is still caught up in a discourse that can only conceive of art in terms of differential shifts within the Same, but not in terms of a leap towards an intuitively experienced unity of artist, work, and observer that transpires on the level of the sign and not on the level of concept. The case of Danto shows that even a moderate Hegelian with a soft spot for Kant isn’t going to get us out of this posthistorical bind. For to do so, we are all going to have to in some way become neo-neo-Kantians and semiotic monists–at least until that posture, too, exhausts its creative and analytical possibilities.

Closed and Open Horizons: Bulatov, Gursky, and Eitel

The most direct way to describe the shift to monism in painting (and in painterly photography) is to show how a certain conceptualist motif is cut off from concept and forced to float in the intuitively perceived and categorically defined free space of the performatist frame.

My starting point is the work of Erik Bulatov, one of the most important Russian conceptualist painters of the 70’s and 80’s. Like the other conceptualists, Bulatov used techniques comparable to those of Western pop-art, but with a uniquely Soviet point of reference. His perhaps most well-known painting, Horizon (Gorizont, 1971-72), seems at first to be done entirely in the pseudo-naturalist style of Socialist Realism: it depicts a group of fully clothed people on a beach walking away from the viewer towards the ocean horizon on a bright sunny day. A closer look reveals that the canvas is divided into four horizontal stripes of kitschy, highly saturated color: the yellow sand of the beach, the dark blue of the water, an abstract, broad red band where the horizon should normally be, and the cerulean blue of the sky. For those familiar with Soviet symbols, the red band blocking the horizon is not just an abstraction, but is also the ribbon attached to the Order of Lenin, one of the highest honors bestowed in the Soviet Union. As Groys has pointed out in his Total Art of Stalinism (1992), Bulatov is echoing a theme of Nietzsche’s (who likens the death of God to wiping out the horizon) as well as staging an undecidable struggle between Socialist Realism, modernism, and official Soviet power: in competing for power with Socialist Realism, modernist abstraction itself becomes indistinguishable from an official insignia of power.(33) The painting, in effect, exposes previous art movements as a will to power and power as a will to art. Using a by now familiar ploy of postmodern conceptualism, the artist occupies a liminal, shifting position that is parasitic on the discourses he is using without being reducible to any one of them.

Groys would, however, come to realize in his later essay Unter Verdacht [Under Suspicion, 2000] that the uncanny elusiveness and unaccountability of the postmodern artist eventually works to revive the notion of subjectivity itself. Since the artist has the unique power to renew value in the cultural archive, he or she inevitably comes to be regarded as the bearer of some sort of transcendent secret, even if–or precisely because–the artist’s main message is that there is no secret.(34) The result is what Groys calls a “submedial subject,” who operates with consistent success below the level of concept and who, because of that, attracts our envy and suspicion.

Because Groys remains rooted in postmodern skepticism, he is unwilling to assign the submedial subject anything more the role of a Loki–a deceitful, vaguely malevolent prankster-god. This is, once more, entirely in keeping with a specifically Nietzschean interpretation of the sign, which sees in it only the political and sacral:

Subjectivity is always only the subjectivity of the other, who is assumed to be behind its surface. Subjectivity is what appears to me suspicious about someone else, what scares me–it is what causes me to make lamentations and accusations, to assign responsibility, to struggle and protest–in short, to engage in politics. Only when a hidden God is assumed to be behind the image of the world does one feel moved to take a political stance. (Groys 2000, 30)

What Groys is unable to grasp is that the autonomous or submedial space inhabited by art may also create an affirmative, constructive projection of its own that can be imposed visually on others on its own terms.(35) In recent art, in fact, it’s possible to observe how painters working in the new monism have done just that. These artists use strategies that dampen or defuse suspicion and create positive visual projections within the artificially imposed, but internally free space of intuition.

These strategies are, first of all, evident in the “painterly” photos of Andreas Gursky already treated above. It is particularly interesting in this regard to see what Gursky does with the horizon motif used by Bulatov. This motif is, of course, not original to Bulatov himself. It directly cites Socialist Realist models like Aleksandr Dejneka’s Future Pilots (Budushchie lyotchiki, 1937) and indirectly the work of the German Romantic Caspar David Friedrich, who likes to place observers with their backs turned to us in front of radiant, horizontally organized seascapes or landscapes. In Friedrich’s typically Romantic projection, we are not only confronted by a sublime, numinous Nature, but we are also made to reflect on how others reflect on that Nature.

Gursky cites Friedrich’s landscapes in several photographs,(36) but the one most relevant for this discussion would seem to be Rhein II (Rhine II, 1999). Rhein II confronts us with a landscape that is no less spiritualized than Friedrich’s and no less artificial than Bulatov’s. The large-format photograph, which measures approximately 6 x 12 ft (208 x 387 cm), consists of seven horizontal stripes: a verdant shore at the bottom, a gray ribbon of road, more green shore, a gleaming, mercury-like band of wave-rippled water, a gray strip of shore, the green stripe of the far riverbank, and a flat, grayish-white sky above it. As in Bulatov’s painting, we have difficulty deciding whether the photo is entirely natural, though for different reasons. The neatly horizontal bands of land, water, and sky appear so perfectly composed as to be unreal, and critics have in fact associated the photograph with works by abstract artists like Barnett Newman and Agnes Martin (see, for example, Lütgens 1988, XVI). In Gursky’s case, however, the effect is not one of ironic undecidability but of a paradoxical unity prior to all concept; the viewer has little choice but to oscillate between these two potentialities imposed on them by the frame of the photo. The two undecidably fused poles of the natural and the artificial are in turn augmented and intensified by the other factors noted earlier: the sublime size of the picture; the set towards form and order; the imposition of categorical intuition on the viewer; and the possibility of transcending the frame of the individual picture and reapplying its givens to other works of art or to nature itself.

Unlike the work of Friedrich and Bulatov, there is no reflection on reflection in Gursky’s picture: nature, art, and the observer are all bound together in a framed unity that seems to transcend, rather than undercut, the individual premises upon which that unity is based. And, even if we are aware that Gursky manipulated this scene (37) (he digitally excised a factory that would probably have warmed the hearts of the Bechers), the effect of this epistemological insight on our appreciation of the photograph is nil. Like gender in Beecroft’s nude performances and media events in Demand’s architectonic photos, the building has simply been bracketed out of existence; it leaves no traces for us to interpret. We know it is out there somewhere, but have no way of connecting it to the photograph without the explicit intervention of the theist artist, who “positions” us along a particular phenomenological axis that in turn forces us to perceive the world anew. The “suspicious” Groysian viewer must either reject the painterly photo’s sublimity and beauty out of hand or try vainly to imagine something that isn’t there–the factory that would effectively reinscribe the picture in “the real,” and ultimately in a particular, identifiable context. Suspicion without concept is, however, nothing more than belief, and it is precisely that effect that the picture achieves: it converts skeptics into believers whether they like it or not.

Another variant of the horizon/observer motif can be found in the work of Tim Eitel (b. 1971), a German artist associated with the New Leipzig School. I am not sure whether Eitel is familiar with Bulatov, but many of his paintings appear to cite Friedrich’s romantic scenes: naturalistically depicted people with their backs turned towards us walk casually towards or stand in front of the horizon of a beach or field.(38) The effect achieved by Eitel lies somewhere between painting and snapshot photography, without, however, suggesting photorealism. Because Eitel uses very flat, rich expanses of monochrome paint in his depictions of nature, his pictures take on an abstract quality in spite of their patent realism. The major difference to Bulatov is that the coexistence of the natural and the abstract lacks any ironic tension whatsoever. Nature appears as an abstraction of the theist artist (who “improves” nature by making it more monochrome, saturated in color, and homogenous than it really is). At the same time, the monochrome abstraction is never allowed to dominate entirely: there is always just enough detail to keep it within the bounds of the mimetic.

This applies with no less intensity to the humans caught up in this aesthetically simplified and beautified space. Their own emotional state of mind remains enigmatic and opaque, either because they are turned away from us completely or because when they face us they seem entirely oblivious to the artist-observer.(39) Although not represented in photorealistic detail, the subjects always still evince slight traces of individual taste or character: a particular slouch, a certain kind of handbag, a sport jacket slung over the arm in a characteristic way. In this sense these figures are not stereotypes (as in Bulatov) or mere conduits of Romantic reflection on the sublime (as in Friedrich). Against the mimetic flatness of the surroundings they stand out as uniquely, albeit minimally, human. Eitel’s paintings of this sort in fact radiate an enticing, irresistible combination of the theist and the human. The observer is lured into their space by the theistically perfected depiction of nature and by the enigmatic opacity or closedness of the people within that nature–whereupon the aesthetic trap snaps shut: you yourself enter into the intuitive space of the painting whether you like it or not.

This theistically constructed unity of abstraction and realism is even more pointed in Eitel’s museum paintings, in which the naturalistic level of the observers seems to overlap with the abstract level of the paintings they are looking at. In Blue and Yellow (Blau und Gelb, 2002), as in Bulatov’s Horizon, an abstract stripe (of a black museum railing in the picture’s foreground) runs across the breadth of the canvas and appears at first glance to be on the same plane as the Mondrian painting behind it. However, the disruptive illusion disappears quickly when one notices that a human observer is standing between the artificial monochrome lines of the painting and the real, monochrome line of the railing. In Gans’s generative anthropology the human is defined precisely as the ability to distinguish between the real as mediated by the sign and the sign itself; in Blue and Yellow it is a human subject that allows us to make precisely this distinction in regard to a pictorial representation. Eitel’s museum paintings may thus best be described as performative, second-degree representations of the originary, paradoxical aesthetic situation. They create a visual outer frame that forces the observer to participate in the peculiarly human oscillation between signs and thingness that is represented in the inner frame of the painting; what is represented in the inner frame by the artist is performed by the viewer in the outer one. Painter, viewer, and painting all converge within the bounds of one closed frame.

A die-hard postmodernist would no doubt object that Eitel’s human figures are trapped helplessly between the representation of the real and the representation of the abstract. However, this sort of “suspicious” interpretation must pointedly ignore the placidly opaque demeanor of the subjects involved. Although in a certain sense they really are trapped in the aesthetic space between the real and the sign, they seem neither to enjoy nor to suffer from their predicament: they are suspended, as it were, in an ostensive, originary mode of complete potentiality and don’t appear to suffer unduly because of it.(40) The only way to “get behind” their opacity and “get back” to discourse would be to excise the human from the paintings entirely–a move that would, however, be external to the works themselves and that would, in essence, destroy them.

The Aesthetic Workshop of Neo Rauch

One of the main conceits of Russian conceptualism was that capitalism and socialism were essentially the same–both were equally unfree, but capitalism was simply materially better off, and hence less cognizant of its own illusions. As Bulatov himself recently put it, “In the West there is no freedom either, just its semblance. There’s no difference between Soviet and Western unfreedom. Genuine freedom is a rupture [proryv] running through social reality” (Bulatov 2006, 54). In this way of thinking (which is of course not all that much different from Western conceptualism) only the neo-Nietzschean artist has the power to subvert the illusions of both systems by enacting the kind of ironic conundrums described above, which force us to assume a position of otherness vis-à-vis prevailing codes and experience a liminal, tenuous kind of freedom within the cracks opening up in the dominant culture. The fall of communism, however, wasn’t just another reshuffling of already familiar concepts. The socio-economic system called capitalism became a universal reality, whereas its chief rival, communism, entered into the realm of the unreal–it simply ceased to exist as a physical entity.

The disappearance of their brand of conceptual “unfreedom” into an ontological black hole provoked different reactions among artists from the former Soviet bloc. While it’s not possible here to go into all individual variants, one can speak of three general tendencies. The first might be called art–or business–as usual. Bulatov, for example, continued to work in a similar fashion as before, for example, by placing diagonally receding three-dimensional slogans in front of natural backgrounds (a citation of a Russian avant-garde technique that is lost on most Westerners; see his Freedom is Freedom I [2000], depicted in Bulatov 2006, 52). As the critic Vladimir Tupitsyn (2007) has pointed out, these new paintings lack the ironic bite of Bulatov’s Soviet work; they appear more like flashy advertising images than the neo-Nietzschean commentary on capitalism they are no doubt intended to be.(41) Others, like Komar and Melamid, who emigrated earlier, had less problems adapting and, as noted above, became adept at turning Western marketing techniques into both tools and targets of their conceptual irony.

A second tendency is what Hal Foster (1996) has called “return to the real,” and which is often thought to be typical of postmodern art in the 1990’s. In the Russian context, this applies to anti-artists like Alexander Brener, Oleg Kulik, and the photographer Boris Mikhailovich. These artists seem at first glance to take the materiality of the art work literally; they destroy other people’s art works (Kulik), physically attack observers during performances (Brener), or present the real as abject and debased (Mikhailovich). This kind of art rubs our noses in the material existence of the real while conceptually confirming the impossibility (or undesirability) of actually ever appropriating it. In Groysian terms, these artists, driven by an intense, conceptually guided suspicion of the motives of art in general, deliberately try to destroy the materiality of art to “get at” its submedial or ontological source, which (as they are well aware) is reducible neither to materiality nor to conceptuality. Unfortunately, an art that can only approach the real by destroying it or highlighting its repellant character remains trapped forever in the dualism of late postmodernism, which derives a kind of perverse, endless pleasure from experiencing the proximity of the real on the one hand and the impossibility of ever appropriating it on the other. And indeed: the pro forma recognition of the real achieves nothing if the real cannot be experienced as a unity with the sign that represents it. Only this performatist, monist framing, which necessarily takes place below all concept, can in the long run renew today’s art.

There are, however, also specifically performatist, non-conceptual reactions to the disappearance of socialism. The best example of this can be seen in the work of Neo Rauch (b. 1960), who is a product of the academic East German art system and came to prominence only after the fall of Communism. Unlike the many East European artists who juxtapose two or more readily identifiable but incompatible cultural codes in a state of undecidable conceptual irony, Rauch has developed a representational mode of painting that operates entirely below the threshold of concept and cannot be reduced to an ironically conceived stand-off between Eastern and Western discourses.

Rauch’s work, however, also differs from the other performatist artists discussed above because he strives neither for thematic unity nor does he work with simple, intuitively recognizable categories that are “naturally” accepted by viewers. In fact, his paintings seem to do precisely the opposite: they contain a plethora of irritatingly incongruous figures, styles, actions, colors, and objects. A typical (comparatively simple) example is Pfad (The Path, 2003, reproduced in Rauch 2004, 5), which contains three garishly colored, out-of-scale figures (two male, one female) that look like they have been pasted onto a monochrome, half-finished blue background. On this background we see a path leading up to a modernist house on a hill; oddly standing trees, a basket of mushrooms and what looks like an agave plant border the path, which is marked by a multi-colored logo reading “Path.” The figures carry odd objects, including a shiny green serpent-like staff, a purse, a pair of branch clippers, and a liquid-looking green knapsack. Two yellow tubular bars, placed in a triangular formation and having no apparent function, seem to merge with the woman’s blouse. The figures are expressionless and seem intent on doing something–it is just not clear just what. The one male figure wears a long, split-tailed coat that might be from the 19^th century; the other is dressed like a worker, and the woman in a 1950’s style dress and blouse. There is no unity of time or place, and there is no sense that all this has been achieved through the synthetic vision of the subconscious (as is the case in true surrealism). More specifically, we have the apprehension of a distinctly theist, “outside” artist who inserts things into a frame (hence the collage-like figures) and who hasn’t entirely completed the work at hand.

Although the different styles used by Rauch can be traced back to such sources as comic books, East German propaganda art, surrealism, and modernism, they don’t compete with one another for dominance the way they do in conceptualism. The reason for this is that Rauch’s paintings are devoid of any narrative and conceptual purposefulness. This quality, which has been noted by numerous commentators, is formulated most forcefully by Bernhart Schwenk, who stresses the self-referential qualities of Rauch’s paintings:

Neo Rauch is no teller of tales, even if he works with narrative elements and motifs. Rather, his pictures are still-lifes, symbols of picture-making; he creates, as it were, an emblemology of painting. To experience his pictures thus, the observer must free himself or herself from the compulsion to read a story into them, from the urge to decipher their meaning. . . . If the observer succeeds in avoiding this trap, the pictures reveal a broad and variegated visual code. Although springing from personal and historical experience, they are self-sufficient creations, metaphorical constellations. They create an exterior framework for a more profound content whose significance stretches far beyond the bounds of art. (Schwenk, 2000, 25)

In performatist terms, Rauch can be said to create a peculiar inner space that generates neither meaning nor narrative but rather only aesthetic “work” on the part of the observer; it is only this magical, purposeless task that can transcend the jumbled and incongruous givens of the painting. The net effect is that of aesthetic hard labor. The observer is encouraged to work; however, this effort takes place in a purposeless space using signs that have minimal discursive meaning and minimal ties to reality. This type of labor radicalizes the categorical procedures of performatist art discussed earlier by creating what seem to be idiosyncratic categories and by denying unity at the thematic level. The result is a complex, “saturated” kind of categorical intuition that makes the outside world of discourse seem drab by comparison. Moreover, this inner world becomes the place where history, which has imploded and ceased to develop in both discursive and real terms, is intuitively restarted through the exertions forced upon us by Rauch’s art. Rather than dwelling in endless, belated irony, the theist artist tries to restart time using the meaningless but nonetheless somehow significant fragments of the past and the subconscious to create a perpetually active present. Because it is not anchored in any particular discourse, it allows both Ossis and Wessis–East and West Germans alike–to take part in it on an equal footing. The result is a unified East-West aesthetic consciousness that would not be possible in mere discourse.

Concluding Remarks

Performatism in art is not a programmatic movement,(42) a style, or a moral posture; it does not derive its legitimacy from postmodernism being “bad,” “immoral,” or “arbitrary.” Rather, performatism marks a positive, specifically historical, across-the-board shift to monism in different media and in works of art having otherwise little or nothing in common in the way of subject matter, motifs, or technique. The problem is not so much that contemporary critics have failed to grasp the innovative achievements of individual artists or works of art. There are, as we have seen, numerous perceptive, trenchant analyses of the new, no longer postmodern aesthetic, and there is a widespread feeling that postmodernism is, for better or worse, on its way out. Nonetheless, critics are still loath to take the next logical step and treat these innovations as part of an historical epoch that is irreducible both to postmodernism and to any one of the old monisms like classicism, neo-Kantianism, or the Apollonian. The reasons for this hesitation are in human and institutional terms entirely understandable. For the only way to understand the new epoch from within–from its own position–is to jettison practically everything that critics have accumulated up to now in the way of analytical and theoretical tools and start again from scratch within the new monist mindset. Unfortunately, there is no way to get around this specifically historical, self-transcending kind of performance. Any reapplication of postmodern concepts to explain postmodernism’s historical Other will simply result in a further reification of postmodernism.

Whether the tag “performatism” will ever be adopted as a name for the nascent epoch is, of course, impossible to say; in a certain sense it is not crucial to my project. However, there can be little doubt that the things described by performatism–the authorial or theist perspective, the artificial, forced construction of unities, the use of categories rather than concepts, and the set to unified, ostensive signs–are right now the main sources of innovation in contemporary culture and will remain so for some time. What is needed now most in the world of art criticism is a peculiar conflation of Wölfflinian and Nietzschean virtues: the ability to think in historical, epochal dichotomies and the courage to smash through accustomed patterns of discourse and reenter history via the new monism.

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Notes

1. This article is a slightly revised version of Chapter 6 of Eshelman 2008. The chapter appears courtesy of The Davies Group, www.thedaviesgrouppublishers.com (back)

2. Gans treats the Kantian affinity of his own theory in Gans 2004, 335-353. The original Kantian concepts are summarized in Critique of Judgment, § 22. (back)

3. For more on this see Eshelman 2007, 59-82, esp. 60-64. (back)

4. See, for example, McEvilley 2005, esp. Chapter 1, 15-35 or Danto 1995, 61-78. (back)

5. For a critical discussion see Eshelman 2008, 164-168. (back)

6. See Danto 2003, in particular the chapter “Three Ways to Look at Art,” 12-142. (back)

7. For more on this see the historical outline of the ostensive in Gans 1993, esp. Chapters 7-12. (back)

8. This distinguishes it from the structuralist tendency to privilege the sign as icon and the poststructuralist tendency to privilege the sign as index. For more on this distinction see Eshelman 2007, 61-64. (back)

9. For more on the concept of framing in performatism see Eshelman 2008, 2-8. (back)

10. For a detailed study of performance art in postmodernism see McEvilley 2005. (back)

11. A complete pictorial overview of her performances and other projects can be found at www.vanessabeecroft.com (back)

12. As reflected, for example, in the skeptical review of her Performance 55 in Pfütze 2005. (back)

13. Notable exceptions were VB 39 and 42, which used fully clothed U.S. sailors who had the approval of their commanding officers to participate. (back)

14. Which consists of a black woman covered with evenly spaced vertical white cloth strips against a horizontal black-and-white striped background and a white woman covered with evenly spaced, vertical black cloth strips against a horizontal black-and-white-striped background. “Natural” race, in other words, merges with the artificial black-and-white pattern constructed by the artist. (back)

15. Ross eventually does identify Beecroft’s performances with a closed situation–namely with the aesthetic simulation of a clinical experiment: “What we have here is the perfect replica of a scientific laboratory in which subjects are asked to take part in an experiment that will test their reactions and coping abilities to a specific stressful life event” (2006, 80). As Ross quite correctly notes, the performers react to the stress situation by gradually giving up their uniform poses and affirming their own personal identities (2006, 82). This is precisely the goal of all theist narratives: individuation (and in ideal cases transcendence) is achieved by reacting freely to the force exerted by an outer “divinely” imposed frame (for more on this see Eshelman 2008, 19-21). (back)

16. Beecroft, who appears to have no philosophical pretensions, consciously operates beneath the threshold of concept: “What I like about the performances is the live event, the moment where you don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s a question of formalizing an idea without having it appear conceptually” (Kellein 2004, 130) [my translation from the German]). (back)

17. As documented in Goffman 1986 esp. Chapter 10, “Breaking Frame,” 345-377. (back)

18. This sort of deliberate frame breaking can incidentally also be found as a plot device in performatist narratives, most notably in the Dogma movie Idiots (discussed in Eshelman 2008, 14-15). There is, of course, also some real-life frame breaking in Beecroft’s performances when spectators try to communicate with the models, provoke them, or take off their own clothes (as described in Pfütze 2005). Just how difficult it is to actually break the frame from within is documented in Doyle 2006, 133-135. Three members of a feminist art collective, the “Toxic Titties,” surrepticiously signed up to perform in one of Beecroft’s most notorious nude performances (VB 46 at the Gagosian gallery in Los Angeles). Although seething with anger at the uncomfortable and demeaning circumstances of the performance, the three “victims” were unable to do anything about it. As one member of the collective later wrote, “I realized I was powerless in this situation. My silent anger was easily subsumed by the artwork. No one could tell my anger was my own and not a possible instruction from the artist. Despite all my intentions, I had sold my body and my voice” (cited in Doyle 2006, 135). (back)

19. In Gans’s generative linguistics the imperative is the second basic linguistic form arising out of the ostensive (the imperative is, like the ostensive, still pre-conceptual, but is directed at an absent, rather than a present, object). This relation is developed at length in Gans 1981. (back)

20. A representative English-language edition is Bernd and Hilla Becher 2005. The influence of the Bechers on German photography in general and Gursky in particular is documented in Galassi 2001.(back)

21. A systematic catalogue documenting basic human types in hundreds, if not thousands, of photographs. For more on Sander see Kramer 1980. (back)

22. The Bechers were presumably not trying to send a direct political message. However, the pictures were made around the same time that heavy industry in the Ruhr Valley, and in particular coal mining, was starting to lose its central role in the German economy, and they reflect a strong popular identification of Ruhr valley residents with the legacy of heavy industry. (This identification is so powerful even today that it has proven politically impossible to close down the highly unprofitable coal-mining industry, which the German government is committed to subsidize until the year 2018.)(back)

23. In his series Interieurs, for example, another Becher student, Thomas Ruff, did to petty-bourgeois interiors what Struth did to urban exteriors: he photographed them in a way that made them look entirely desolate. For examples see Ruff 2001. (back)

24. The crushing global dominance of capitalism has made Marxism into a kind of theory of internationalist localism in which the highest virtue is indigenous resistance to capitalism’s homogenizing force. In art criticism, this position is propounded most eloquently by Julian Stallabrass (2004), esp. “The New World Order,” 29-72. (back)

25. This massive constriction of both vertical and horizontal space is a feature encountered time and time again in the work of Struth and Ruff and fits in well with the Nietzschean motif of “wiping out the horizon” that will be encountered again further below (see the discussion further below). (back)

26. Critics seem to agree on the optimistic outlook of the photo. Marie Luise Syring (1998, no pagination) describes the human figure as being “between heaven and earth, alone and yet surrounded by protective architecture, small and yet not lost.” Greg Hilty (1995, 15) goes even farther: he says the bridge “resembles a giant Japanese Shinto gate which frames the otherwise diminutive human subject. The man is miniscule, but potentially heroic; the image is minimal and mundane, but suggests a nodal point of infinite perspectives. (back)

27. This manipulative grounding of the sublime in beauty avoids the metaphysical problems arising in Kant’s own argumentation when he defines the sublime as immeasurable and incomparable–and is then forced to introduce terms of comparison into his argument all the same. For a critique of this see Derrida 1987, esp. the section “The Colossal,” 119-148. (back)

28. In Thomas Ruff. Fotografien 1979 – heute [no pagination]. (back)

29. Gursky’s treatment of space has a direct parallel in performatist architecture’s techniques of dematerialization and transparency; for more on this see Eshelman 2008. (back)

30. A good way of testing this is to go through a (previously unknown) collection of Demand’s photographs and try to figure out just what media event they are about. My own personal identification quotient is around zero, although Bathroom (citing a very well-known German magazine image from the 1980’s) seemed vaguely familiar when I first saw it. (back)

31. For examples of the visual representation of imperfect theism in architecture see also Eshelman 2008, Chapter 4, 117-160. (back)

32. The painting was produced by carrying out a market analysis of what people like in a painting (colors, abstraction vs. representation) and then combining those wishes somewhat incongruously in a picture. The result is a painting done in the style of what appears to be the Hudson River school and containing, among other things, a large expanse of blue sky, George Washington, and a herd of deer. (back)

33. See his analysis in the chapter “The Lost Horizon” in Groys 1992, 81-83. Groys’s (and the conceptualists’) basic thesis is that the utopian striving of modernism was always eminently political and hence also complicit in the totalitarian “total work of art” of Stalinism. (back)

34. See Groys 2000, esp. the section “Der submediale Raum,” 27-116 as well as the discussion in Eshelman 2008, 164-168. (back)

35. If it would not hopelessly confuse the issue it would be tempting to label this position Apollonian. In Nietzsche’s own words, Apollonian form is enjoyed with a “direct understanding”; “all shapes speak to us”; “there is nothing indifferent or superfluous,” even as “the sense of its status as appearance still shimmers through” (Nietzsche 200, 20). Performatism, however, is no less reducible to a Nietzschean position than is, say, postmodernism, and the musical synthesis of the Apollonian and Dionysian envisioned by Nietzsche is nowhere in hearing range. (back)

36. Lynne Cooke (1998, no pagination), among others, has noted the connection between Friedrich’s Mönch am Meer and Gursky’s Düsseldorf Flughafen. (back)

37. See his remarks in Gursky 1988, IX. (back)

38. For examples see Stegmann 2004. (back)

39. This is also in contradistinction to Edward Hopper’s pictures of urban, isolated humans. Eitel’s pictures lack the material volume and existential gravitas of Hopper’s objects and people; they are emotionally “flat” without being stereotypes. Similarly, Eitel’s paintings completely lack the feelings of distrust and malignancy that characterize the portraits of the Belgian Luc Tuymans, who in this regard remains a characteristically “Groysian,” postmodern painter of suspicion. (back)

40. The demeanor of Eitel’s human subjects is strikingly similar to that of participants in Beecroft’s performances, who are made to adopt neutral facial expressions while oscillating between the uncomfortable physical reality of the performance and its artificial, semiotic gesture. For a discussion of opaque subjectivity as one of the basic characteristics of performatism see Eshelman 2008, 8-13.(back)

41. Tupitsyn suggests that after emigrating Bulatov entered into “a state of tranquility . . . with zero-degree alienation” (2007, 244) and that “his paintings [after 1990] were eligible for look-alike contests with promotional posters, sightseeing ads, and other ‘life-celebrating’ items” (276). (back)

42. Although performatism was not intended as an artistic program, at least one piece of art work has been inspired by it. Using Apple’s text-to-speech software, an American artist living in Thailand, Dane Larsen, has created Performatist Piece with Embedded Text. Physically, the piece consists of a black plastic pot filled with raw cotton with an MP3 player inside. Using the text-to-speech software, Larsen set up the MP3 player to read the my original essay on performatism (“Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism” at anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0602/perform.htm). The software’s distortion of the original text results in a kind of semi-comprehensible speech emanating “magically” from the cotton. The video of the performance can be viewed on Larsen’s blog at: http://nofolete.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2007-01-12T13%3A33%3A00%2B07%3A00&max-results=50 (back)

October 1, 2007