Author: staceymeeker

There are only a few brief mentions of Lord Byron in the foundational texts of generative anthropology. Yet he is, surely, a person of considerable interest: his age’s greatest celebrity, a virtuoso of postures, the grandest early “heir of Rousseau’s legacy of the victimary self.”(1) He was also a considerable poet and cultural critic, an astute and self-aware artist who discovered and exploited productive new applications of the principle of nil admirari–demonstrating indifference to desire as a means of attracting it–and then came to grasp the price, or ironies, of such strategies. His maturest poetry provided such recognitions, but also modeled–or deliberately proffered in open exchange–a practice or indeed “posture”(2) exceptionally effective in the developing market whose processes he was supremely well positioned to explore.

It’s the mature phase of Byron’s development we’ll explore here–to ask, among other things, how well it corresponds to some of the language Eric Gans has used to talk about the Romantic ironist. For example, that he “is a masochist: his proof of being is furnished by suffering.”(3) There is much suffering throughout Byron’s poetry–it made him indeed. Rousseau’s epochal claim that he had “the celebrity of his misfortunes”(4) was never sustained so effectively as by the young English poet who casually tossed a manuscript of verses about his recent travels onto the desk of the London publisher John Murray and then, a few months later in March 1812, “awoke to find himself famous”–in his own famous phrase about fame, incessantly cited ever since. (Byron did not seek fame! He awoke, and lo.) It was not an exaggeration: he became, and remained for much of the century and beyond, one of the world’s best-known, most thought-about and imitated human beings. He vied with Napoleon. The poem in question, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, quite well justifies Matthew Arnold’s later sneer about Byron trailing “the pageant of his bleeding heart” across Europe,(5) and was quickly followed by other works–such as “The Giaour” (1813), “The Corsair” (1814) and certain self-pitying lyrics on the subject of his marital separation in 1816–to which a “masochistic” tinge can with equal fairness be attributed.

All these poems all sold exceedingly well. But they do not, in the view of most readers, constitute full-blown examples of Romantic Irony. The “Byronic Hero” they present is sated, disgusted, disillusioned. He has suffered, beyond the capacity of his readers, and now views all desire–but theirs of course most particularly–with a cold eye. He scorns objects they would die for: in Albania the Childe looks with bored contempt upon an impossibly exotic panoply of “slaves, eunuchs, soldiers, guests, and santons” (2.56)(6) and so forth, after having pointed out that he is almost the first tourist of any kind ever to have seen them (Byron’s own not implausible claim, in fact). He rebuffs every human comfort with fierce superiority: “Soothe not–mock not my distress!”(7) cries the Giaour. (Any soothing would be a mockery–an attack on his power–but Byron is far from confronting the implications of this yet.) There are, perhaps, a few hints of an incipient irony–in the structural device that doubles a bemused narrator and the suffering protagonist in Childe Harold, for example–but they are inconsistently worked out. And likewise through the murk occasionally flickers a piercing, high-toned sincerity–the tragic residue of titanic aspiration–but this simply serves to authenticate the prevailing lassitude. A brazen, entirely unironic, indeed almost triumphal note is everywhere: what you want, I care nothing for. I’ve had it–’twas nothing. Nor do I even notice, let alone enjoy, your resultant desire of me.

Even so, Byron did seem to recognise an instability in his relationship with his subjected readers. Or, he came to sense the ways in which the market for him was being conditioned by his own success. In any case, he adapted, remaining a step ahead of expectations. In 1816 he exiled himself from England under a cloud of scandalous notoriety clearly intensified by resentment of his previous power. This flight, predictably, left the obsessive attention of his audience undiminished–if anything it was enhanced. His response to the changed nature of his relationship to his public was crafted through a sequence of works, but with his acknowledged masterpiece, Don Juan (the first cantos of which reached English readers in 1819 and which continued until his death in 1824), something quite new emerged. This poem too was exceedingly popular, and Byron’s martyrdom to the seemingly hopeless cause of national liberty in Greece then fused the two aspects of his fascinatingly paradoxical persona–darkly fatal hero and wittily superficial ironist–more or less permanently in the public imagination.

Don Juan does not do away with the Byronic Hero and his victimary tactics, but it does ironize him, and them. This is widely accepted. Our argument here will be that it does so in a particular way, which Gans’s conceptualization of irony can help us grasp. Briefly, what is ironized is modelling itself; the poem makes self-conscious and thus vulnerable the representation of a hitherto imperiously indifferent self whose power to create a “local monopoly”(8)–Gans’s term for identity: none too local, perhaps, in Byron’s case–the poem now openly acknowledges. Experiencing the height of marketability, as he had, no doubt helped Byron grasp that revelation of the paradoxicality of desire which is a crucial result of the shift away from pre-modern forms of its control. However he may have figured to himself his own historical moment, he clearly saw the new powers and dangers involved in the aesthetic representation of the self to an audience for whom selfhood itself was a central and increasingly contingent desideratum. He adopted his own kind of Romantic Irony as a means both to prolong his own centrality and to limit its perils. He thus sought–perhaps we can assess with how much success–an aesthetic-ethical solution not just to his own problem as celebrity, or that of the artist generally, but indeed potentially to that of any other self in the market world. He innovated in the use of such irony both to disarm and defer resentment and, to the degree this succeeded, to open up a productive, mutually beneficial exchange with his audience, or with parts of it at least. This ongoing exchange we will propose to call an “alliance,” and try to place in its context in the modern world.

The best way to begin is probably through close analysis of a representative passage from Don Juan. In principle, the entire work–long and diverse as it is–might be shown to operate in similar ways, but we will choose a much discussed passage from Canto 16, acknowledging as we do that it is by no means the only option. The stanzas in question describe Lady Adeline Amundeville, one of the aristocratic Englishwomen circling around the fascinating foreigner Juan in the poem’s later cantos. Juan himself, incidentally, is one of the prime foci for its pervasive ironies. The heroically autonomous seducer of recent legend–Mozart’s Don Giovanni had only just arrived on the British stage(9)–is in Byron’s putative protagonist reduced to a quite ordinary, albeit handsome young man, to whom things happen: he is shipwrecked, sold into slavery, drafted into the Russian army, and into the bed of the lascivious Empress Catherine. Above all, while he exhibits the ordinary hormonal proclivities of his sex and age, he is essentially passive in matters erotic–the women seduce him. If there is a Byronic Hero in the poem, he (or increasingly, she) is distributed amongst other characters, including Lady Adeline and the narrator himself. In England on a diplomatic mission for the Russian monarch, the Don gazes at his feverishly charismatic high-society hostess:

… Juan, when he cast a glance
On Adeline while playing her grand rôle,
Which she went through as though it were a dance,
Betraying only now and then her soul
By a look scarce perceptibly askance
(Of weariness or scorn), began to feel
Some doubt how much of Adeline was real;

    97

So well she acted, all and every part
By turns–with that vivacious versatility,
Which many people take for want of heart.
They err–’tis merely what is called mobility,*
A thing of temperament and not of art,
Though seeming so, from its supposed facility;
And false — though true; for surely they’re sincerest,
Who are strongly acted on by what is nearest. (16.96-97)

Byron then provides a footnote to the central term.

*In French, ‘mobilité’. I am not sure that mobility is English, but it is expressive of a quality which rather belongs to other climates, though it is sometimes seen to a great extent in our own. It may be defined as an excessive susceptibility of immediate impressions–at the same time without losing the past; and is, though sometimes apparently useful to the possessor, a most painful and unhappy attribute.

To the seasoned reader–namely, almost every living reader of the day–the stanzas and note are richly coded reminders: not just of the victimhood, but of the restlessness, the social centrality merely played at and, in a clever hint in the note, the essential foreignness of this character (English opinion was still rather aghast that their national poet was disporting himself in such dubious continental locales as Venice). In short, from the start Lady Adeline’s predicament has widely been assumed to be Byron’s own, and the term “mobility” was then and is still now deployed in assessments of the particular genius of both poet and poem. It is a judgement slyly prompted, and undercut, by Byron himself. Mobility, as we shall see, is not irony. And Byron is in this crucial respect much more the adept than his putative fictional double.

Lady Adeline, clearly, is a new version of that Byronic Hero, who has suffered, indeed is trapped in the suffering occasioned by the disability of her superior sensitivity. “Weariness and scorn” are the badges of all her predecessors. For such a one the godless, centerless universe permits nothing better, is itself ultimately no more than a stage for the putative subjection of the sensitive self to the crassly importunate desires of others. In a familiar turn, those desires, even in her immunity to them, seem to poison every other possibility, even being, even reality. (The classic complaint: I behave in this fundamentally insincere, unreal way because “they” make me, or “society” does.) This is the commonest sense, for this most social of the great Romantic poets, in which “the world’s failure to meet the [Romantic] ironist’s expectations becomes proof of his victimary centrality,”(10) as Gans puts it. One is left, that is, with only the heroic self–a self unsatisfied but heroically capable of satisfaction, and thus still heroically indifferent to the satisfactions adequate to others, the lesser folk.

And many parts of Don Juan do wax eloquent on the “waste and empty clime” (7.2) which mediated desire has created, its disappointments thus vehicles for the narrator’s transcendence. Such “Byronism”–which never entirely leaves his tactical repertoire–has sometimes been called by more exalted names, though. For example, a “humanist celebration of man’s endurance and defiance of his metaphysical limitations.”(11) We can defy the desires of others! This will be celebrated. Byron apparently felt that such defiance remained an important means of adapting to the market world–an indispensable part of one’s posture. It is perhaps not so unreasonable a notion. And he was certainly alive to the intense discomforts of that world, even as he nowhere implies there are viable alternatives to it.

Of course a major proposition to be derived from Byron’s career in toto–by us, but also by him–is that such autonomy is not what it claims. No one is free of mediated desire, and Byron’s poems in the years preceding Don Juan have been making this point with increasing self-consciousness and sophistication. When Gans says that the Romantic ironist “is aware of the non-originality of worldly desire”(12) he certainly describes the later Byron.

Irony, in Signs of Paradox, is

The expression, necessarily indirect, of the fragility of the absolute or “vertical” formal difference inaugurated by the sign with respect to its source, the relative or “horizontal” difference in the real world between the subject and the object of desire–ultimately between the eater and the potentially eaten.(13)

It is also “a reproach directed at the originary project of language.”(14) And as irony tends to put into question the formal structure which defers violence, it is “potentially tragic.”

Irony is an “expression.” But it is also an event, which cannot be said to have occurred without it being understood as such, as irony, by an audience.(15) An expression of fragility affects the relationship between the one emitting it and his or her audience. Irony, even more fundamental than the esthetic, is, like it, “oscillatory.” The ironic event of Don Juan, then, shall we say, is an oscillation in the consciousness of a human subject, an individual reader,(16) purposely provoked by the behavior–the representations–of a human model, Byron. Recognition of irony, indeed, is itself a subjection. The subject is fascinated by the model’s intentions, by an apparent oscillation in the model’s desires.

“He who hesitates,” as James Thurber once charmingly wrote (anticipating originary analysis), “is sometimes saved.”(17) The model, who at least appears to oscillate, is protected–if not definitively saved–because his subjects, attempting to imitate him, also oscillate, between imagined satisfaction and anguished hollowness. Or, as one might also put it, between being (like) Byron and being his dupe, between insincerity and sincerity or, for that matter–since Byron is sometimes desirably sincere–between the betrayal of desire and its concealment, between warm and cool; the expert ironist makes his subjects oscillate, doubt, hesitate. Irony may, as Gans says, “make explicit the resentment that is at the heart of all language.”(18) But when the language effect ironized is the model’s own centrality, the result for the audience may be more disarming. Subjects, feeling the ironic effect, remembering it even after it is over, may admire the skill that held them in suspension, that held their attention and held off their resentment. Their object of desire, in short, may become a modeling which is also not a modeling, and this object they contemplate in an aesthetic mode. Their object of desire may become the posture of the narrative persona, which is at once that of the familiar Byronic hero, and an ironized, self-conscious parody of it. Don Juan‘s irony has a consistent and specific focus: the fragility of the difference between one particular kind of sign–that of a self-represented victimary persona–and its source, its self-aware and unheroic emitter.

Can the quality, the effectiveness of a specific instance of irony be said to inhere in the degree to which it appears to allow the ironist-model to shuttle rapidly, but manageably, between indifference and desire, even seemingly between the model and subject positions? By contrast, mobility, at least as Lady Adeline exhibits it, is an unmanaged flight from one subjection to the next, the hope apparently being that its very rapidity and brilliancy will attract the desires of others by communicating a kind of desperately superior apathy. It seems a fond hope, at least here in the “English Cantos,” where Byron most fully realizes his paradoxical ambition to be the great Romantic satirist–or satirist of Romanticism–a Pope or Dryden for the age of Wordsworth and, well, Byron.

In fact, desire is inherently unmanageable–this the ironist implicitly admits, this is the experiential ground of the fragility Gans speaks of. But the paradoxical acknowledgment of desire’s uncontrollability appears, at least to the audience, to rob it of some crucial element of its force. (To say, I am helpless before desire–Wilde’s “I can resist everything but temptation” comes to mind–is much cooler than boasting that I am immune to it. Even as we may rightly agree with the remark in principle.) To vaunt this partial immunity, this coolness, is of course to lose it. We are familiar with the way irony, tipping over into pride in itself, can turn sour and unsatisfactory. Bitterness, sarcasm, buffoonery, smugness, self-pity–these are among the holes into which the delicate virtues of irony can fall and be lost. Such culpably inexpert management, like impoliteness as opposed to mere gauche manners, betrays an insufficient underlying sincerity, an insufficient humility in the face of desire, thus betrays desire, and thus loses its audience.

The pivotal, unresolvable word in stanza 97 is surely “surely” (.”..for surely they’re sincerest, / Who are strongly acted on by what is nearest”). “Surely” is a performative, an “ostensive”; a word (ostensibly) designed to nudge what is not-sure into what is accepted as sure, without any other evidence than the raw, mimetic appeal of the speaker’s own ingratiatingly overt desire that we do. It speaks, that is, directly to the reader’s desires, drawing attention, in the current instance, to the rhetorical aspect of what has up to this moment in the text been description, of a condition and of an error made by other people. Now the question becomes: are you, reader, making the same error? Surely not. Surely you are more like me. Surely you are not trying to empty out Adeline’s identity (or mine!) by accusing her behavior of being “art,” which is to say, a detectable strategy for influencing us, a betrayed desire. Because, really, it is not so: it is in this sense that mobility is “false”–it is not what it seems, it is not an attempt to demonstrate a cool superiority to desire. We say false “though true” because mobility does betray desire, just not the way other people erroneously believe. It isfalse, in this sense, in that it seems to attempt to fly past desire, but is really caught up inextricably in desire’s toils. It is a false falseness, therefore true. And surely anyone so helplessly sincere is to be pitied for her lack of cool!

But “surely”–as a function of its very overtness–also reminds us that we, we and Byron together, are being deliberately paradoxical. We say “surely” as a covert admission that we are not sure. It is thus something of a joke, a joke only partly at the expense of those other people who are in fact impressed by Adeline despite themselves. Are we really to pity this socially brilliant woman, the center of so much attention, whose sustained success is capped by intermittent expressions of her bored contempt for the effect she produces in us? Oh my, but it’s lonely at the top! Surely this Adeline person is actually trouncing us, by having it all, having the social effect of cool indifference, and yet also the victimary ethical superiority of her helpless (unintentional) sincerity. And surely one has to laugh, both at the way she has pulled it off and at the way, pivoting on that depthless qualifier, Byron coyly gestures at this recognition, the way we and he together can see how it works, on us as much as on others. And if we are alert to the possibilities, we also catch the irony of the deliberate parallel between Adeline and the Byron who has decoded her, because isn’t what she has achieved in her circle exactly what the Byronic Hero of yore achieved in his own cultural moment? And don’t we smile the more to see how Byron is both making this play for our sympathy (as more obviously in the note) and wittily acknowledging that he is doing so, thus altering its emotive power?

And yet, is she, or Byron, really happy? One could go on. Explaining irony is like explaining a joke.(19) Enough, perhaps, to say that this ironical account of the true nature of Adeline’s (and Byron’s) fascination, their vivacious versatility, very nearly holds in suspension both 1) their resentable desirability with its attendant (“genuine”!) pang of pity, and 2) a decoding of its intended effect on us that can only provoke a smile of amusement. Yes, surely such people are, in their way, “sincere,” since you put it that way. Or, thus, very nearly: are not we too like this, poor us, and yet isn’t saying so such humbug, such an amusingly naked play for sympathy? Or: how beautiful and sad is the transitoriness of feelings, and even more beautiful and sad to be their slave, and yet perhaps there is nothing more–except, possibly, the superiority of just this recognition, this anchoring ironical perception of what such people as Adeline (and Byron) pay, for all their beauty, for not being able to stand back from desire and sincerity the way we can. This is a pleasingly mild tragic scenario, shall we say, that temporarily purges not so much fear and pity as a nagging anxiety that one might be missing something, or that one might not be quite so fascinatingly self-contained as are people like Adeline (and Byron). And indeed, this reassurance is borne out admirably in the subsequent stanzas which expatiate on the ultimate insubstantiality of the achievements of mobile people. Sad, beautiful, but not, alas, thank goodness, me–not all of me. We both desire them, and smile at their desires and our own. “Surely” also means, that is, an acknowledgment both of Adeline’s helplessness, and that of the reader who can feel the justice of the observation. To admit it is to manage it–or to be more precise, to manage the audience’s response, their otherwise potentially resentful reaction to the degree of superiority to desire which the ironical manner communicates to them.

Byron is the ironist, though, not the reader. This he manages by being alternately within and beyond the process he ironizes. We only imitate him in this regard, and if he is really ironizing himself to himself as a subjected audience we can never distinguish this operation from a “mere” rhetoric modeling an oscillation of sincerity and insincerity. But this alternation, of course, is not a stable identity–this much we can tell, through our own only intermittently resentful response to it–and the management of desire is neither freedom from it nor its gratification. To accept desire in this way, without letting oneself fully pursue its offered rewards, is a kind of self-denial, an admission of defeat, perhaps indeed a masochism. Or perhaps … a high-art opting for the asceticism of the sign–in this case, the sign of a detected and ironized modeling. The sparagmatic satisfactions over which this is preferred are the rewards of represented victimhood: the centrality conferred by the unironized modeling of suffering, as offered in unalloyed form by the earlier representations of the Byronic Hero. Popular art will continue its celebration of this simpler form of heroism, long after the rather naïve poems that first purveyed it have dropped out of common reading. It will presumably feel that the pleasures of mere imagined heroic victimary autonomy (rebels ever without causes) outweigh or can turn to account the resentment of subjects unable or unwilling to make use of that modeling. But Don Juan sees more deeply into the implications of such a bargain.

The problem and the power of the artwork, Gans argues, is that “our relationship” with it “is a modality of unreciprocated mediation,” or what René Girard calls “external mediation,”(20) and that, let us add, Samuel Taylor Coleridge memorably figured as a circle of fear round the airy dome-builder of “Kubla Khan.”

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Such a modality can only be safe from resentment as long as the creator of the artwork really does remain out of range of rivalry. Once it becomes clear, as it was becoming clear by Byron’s day, that the “authority of the author is only human” he or she both becomes “vulnerable to attack” and seems to take on ever-increasing power, as “resentment of the central figure … reinforces its domination.”(21) Representations of self, and these are Byron’s stock in trade as well as the most useful, most productive thing he can provide a hungry market, can be expected to be especially potent generators of what Girard calls metaphysical desire, and Gans includes under the general term resentment. Even more than with other kinds of fiction, readers may feel subjected to the model’s willful manipulations of their desires, especially as their fascination intensifies.

For all that it can be coy or undecidable, however, in a crucial respect Byronic irony is a revealing, the opposite of the haughty withdrawal from mimetic exchange performed by the Byronic Hero. It is the contrary of what Gans speaks of as a “rhetoric of mastery,”(22) the most potent expression of which must be silence. Irony concedes the interest of the author in his or her influence on the audience–at least the audience that “gets” and is intended to “get” the irony. It’s a potentially expensive concession, but only thus can the ironist lift the veil even slightly from the mechanisms of desire, or in Gans’s terms, “preside…over [his] own deconstruction.”(23) Such a revealing says to its audience: this poem is actually about our relationship, and about the role my will plays in that relationship, and about how you detect me in my attempts to control your desires. And yet, and thus, we continue! Such irony permits us to pay our tax of attention and desire to the poet, and almost simultaneously receive our (partial) refund of his own betrayed subjection to us, his gesture to our power, and to our cleverness for catching him out, for decoding his intentions, his willfulness.

The critic Jane Stabler interestingly brings the terms “chance” or “risk” into her discussion of Byron’s relation to his audience. He came to accept “the chance element in the reader’s reception of his work” and “developed a mode that was capable of wooing, including and discarding readers” while it “gradually incorporated risk as part of the digressive texture of his reading.”(24) This acceptance of risk is woven into the ironies of the poem, offered consciously to readers’ awareness. On the one hand, he risks being misunderstood, rejected (not purchased!), even becoming the object of direct or indirect violence for his failed attempts to impose upon his readers. But on the other, his readers may detect his acceptance of risk, of an indeterminate relationship with them. Deliberately courted risk, an irony at the expense of rhetorical intention, interrupts direct authorial power.

Such a strategy, in the hands of a master like Byron, makes allies of readers, or of some of them. Jerome McGann, the poet’s most important twentieth-century critic, calls Don Juan his “conversational alliance with his age.”(25) Many readers, both at the time and since, have experienced the poem’s narrative persona not as a usurper or monopolist of victimary centrality, but as a boon companion. This is, surely, a somewhat surprising outcome of the Romantic Irony described in Signs of Paradox. The fault lines are interesting, of course. Some readers detested both poet and poem–these readers tended to be the self-appointed defenders of ritual culture against the market which so lionized a poetic Lord who ought to have known better than heed it, as these readers would have us know they themselves do not. But even so resentful a critic as William Hazlitt, the violence of whose animosity towards Byron’s earlier self-representations as victim can barely be contained, found himself disarmed by Don Juan‘s irony: “You laugh and are surprised that anyone should turn round and travestie himself.”(26)

We may define an alliance as the mutual but limited–limited in degree, or temporally limited–suspension of mimetic rivalry between two or more persons. This would tend to distinguish the alliance offered in Don Juan from the “care” provided to the weaker reader that Gans depicts as a feature of the Romantic Esthetic. Works of this Esthetic, he argues, do not empower or give their readers voice, but depict themselves caring for them in an explicitly hierarchical relation. It is this hierarchy that Byronic irony disables. The knowledge and modeling offered by the poem certainly do suggest that “superior understanding of the postritual world” which Gans identifies as the “qualification” which enables the more novelistic Romantics to assume their dominance.(27) But Byron ironizes his understanding (implying we both share it), and himself (as alternately model and subject). He offers choices–the poem is actually a celebration of market choice, not the grim revelation of cosmic indeterminacy that the critical truism takes it to be. We at different times “pick and chuse” not just our attitude to its narrator, but its very language and metaphors. One of its most characteristic figures is the mock-heroic or ironized epic catalogue. The shopping list. At the end of the first canto Byron announces to his “gentle reader / And still gentler purchaser” that if he or she buys this first installment, he’ll produce more. If not, he’ll desist. And in fact, he does abide by the results of this market testing. This certainly does Romantic Irony’s famous work of undercutting the pretensions of language to “transcend reality.” But it is not the mockery of Baudelairean brotherhood, hypocrites all.(28) Or, if Byron is our Virgil, guiding us through the inferno and purgatorio of market society–it has no heaven–our deference to him is not so desperate or abject as Dante’s to his model.

In short, it seems that in Don Juan one finds explicitly thematized, and ironized, that which Gans calls “the constitutive hypocrisy of Romanticism,” its self-interested opposition in principle to the market. Byron ironizes his own pose as “ontologically prior to the collectivity,”(29) at least the collectivity of our alliance.

The simplest way to describe the alliance in question doubtless is to say that it encompasses those who do “get” the irony, or at least think they do. Some people won’t or don’t, and of course we establish our identities and our separate peace by excluding them, in the immemorial fashion whose most intense form we call scapegoating. But the irony of Don Juan, though often sharp, does seem minimally, or perhaps it is optimally exclusive. The ironic tone is pervasive, slipping from the obvious to the highly esoteric, but its ubiquity can serve to establish a bond of knowingness with those readers who do not reject it outright. It is not necessary to “get” the details of every ironic nuance in order to feel included, to enjoy the feeling of amused superiority, the sense of delicious incongruity about almost everything–and with this feeling, share the “prestige”(30) of which Gans rightly speaks. This effect, this inclusiveness, is also aided by the broadness of much of the irony:

I’m a plain man, and in a single station,
But–Oh! Ye lords of ladies intellectual,
Inform us truly, have they not hen-peck’d you all? (1.22)

This is very easy to grasp. No one is less a plain man than his Lordship, and his “single station” was the product of the most scandalous sexual outrage of the day. And what rhyming for the supposedly Great Poet! Its obviousness humbles the ironist, makes him desirably vulnerable. Once the reader accepts the basic ironical procedure of the poem (and inducements are offered early), the feeling that one is being duped (or “cared for”) is much less likely to develop.

You know by now what I get: I get to be Byron, with all the proceeds. I get to live in your eye as Byron–I get with some plausibility to imagine myself living in your eye. What do you get? A number of things. A contagious attitude of superiority, or call it freedom, or irony. Practical things, too. Examples of how to be better than just Byronic, or anti-Byronic. Examples of how to hate, to love, to believe, to doubt, to be indignant, to recognize cant and scorn it, to look straight at things. Several ways of doing each, from which to pick and choose.

And the best, most crucial knowledge: discrimination, a modern guide to true taste, to the operation of the market. Who would, after all, want to go into it blind, without some such ally? He helps us not make fools of ourselves. And to say this is also to claim a more comprehensive and less deluded vision of the human condition. If reading Don Juan makes us feel worldly, it may also go some distance to making us so.

All this knowledge, obtainable elsewhere, in Don Juan is guaranteed by the terms of our alliance. We can trust it, even know it, because we trust it is not being used to impose on us, as its ironic designation as “commonplace” constantly reminds us. (Byron called his poem “a mere airy and fantastic basis / To build up common things with commonplaces” 14.7).

Is our alliance with Byron some sort of consumer fantasy, an unfree fixation on celebrity? Gans, among others, identifies celebrities as the “sacred figures” of the market era, in the sense that they are conceded possession of the old ritual center, as a hedge against the more troublesome calls on our desires from our neighbors and rivals.(31) But such concessions are selective and provisional, and plummets from celebrity are as constant as their creation–if these are our gods, they are far from immortal. Resentment, even hatred does reach them, soon or late. The Byron of Don Juan, while he is still an avatar of the semi-fallen celebrity of 1812, has also survived his sacredness long enough to be able to reflect upon, ironize, indeed parody its original representations. His esthetic skills enable him to change the terms of the alliance as he changes his representations of the desirable self. No doubt any alliance with such a figure does move its participants some distance towards holy dread, and in the modern world some such relaxation of rivalrous desire is probably necessary or at any rate inevitable. “We cannot simply go without sacrality,” claims Gans.(32) But the narrator of Don Juan draws us on past worship. His irony constantly reminds us of the fragility of his own centrality, of his status as an object of esthetic contemplation or of resentment. He is not a human sacrifice, nor is he a true external mediator, even if part of our pleasure in him is linked to the fact that he is further from plausible rivalry than most models, even most dead ones. His dimension, linked by literary alliance to us, scaled by irony but still perceptible, becomes indeed an inspiriting promise of human potentiality. One can be so clever, so strong, so free of other models. So scoffing and humane. But this is only one option, and he is only one option. Irony constantly offers implicit alternatives: he abandons centrality as quickly as he assumes it–a trick, a knack, that can only be pinned down in actual practice. His authority is only an effect, obtainable in open exchange, to be redeployed as needed and useful.

The characterization of his practice and posture developed above perhaps puts Byron historically in the second generation of Romantics, as Gans has defined it, well ahead, one may note, of the continental figures upon whom he exerted such incalculable influence — Baudelaire, Nietzsche, et al. It makes of him an originary anthropologist.(33) But one must also presume, from the continued strength of his market position (for the infinitely imitated persona as well as for the greatest of his poems) that features of this posture have proven of unusual usefulness in a de-ritualizing world, well beyond those of most of his generational peers. And one might guess that the feature that has mattered most is precisely the posture’s notably un-Romantic acceptance — through irony — of the operation of the market itself.

Even without Byron, in our paradoxical desire for a centrality that our betrayal of that desire would deny us, we knew we were suffering. But in the end he models a plausible way to respond to the situation, to manage it. Evidently enough this is a form of the “deferral of violence” central to the originary hypothesis–Byron’s posture is a significant ethical innovation. Irony is essential to it because irony replicates and enables us to deal with the open paradoxicality of market desire, and by extension with the vastness of simultaneously designated desires which the market urges upon us. If we are not to go crazy from too much choice, we need means to organize and make hierarchical our imagination. Irony is such a means, as it creates a space of indifference and relativity, a crucial, oscillatory moment of freedom which falls neither into desperate affirmation nor into equally desperate rejection, into neither desire nor counter-desire. It offers a moment of peace in which more carelessly to decide, indeed, to live. If we are not to be emptied out entirely we need some of the superiority (to our many models) offered by irony. For everyone’s sake: because if we have to buy it all, we really can buy none of it. Without irony our resentments will not re-circulate as productive or emulative energy, and our exclusion from identity will become unbearable–the precondition for violence. Irony–this comes close to the core meaning of Don Juan–thus makes generosity, commerce, admiration, all human value possible in the market world. We cannot all be Byron–a circle has only one center–but if, following his own lead, we can ironize his victimary claims upon our attention, ironize his fragility itself, and thus our own, we may resist killing him, or trying to destroy the market that brought him to us. We may even treat him with compassion, or love. As others, in turn, in exchange, may treat the ever-fragile Byron in us.

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.

The origin of the idea for the Generative Anthropology Thinking Event is no easy thing to pin down. I am tempted to trace the narrative far back in my personal history to the year I first read Rene Girard, in a graduate course on critical theory held at Dalhousie University in 1983-84, taught by the Paul De Man enthusiast Alan Kennedy. I could go back to my first hearing the confident, crystalline, conversational timbre of Gans’ voice in the knock-out essay “Sacred Text in Secular Culture,” included in the To Honor Rene Girard collection. I could go back to a letter from Andrew McKenna sent by snail mail, in which Andrew confirmed with an insider’s expertise that my impression of Gans’ high rank and intellectual power among the collaborators and developers of “mimetic theory” was an accurate one.

Nor would it be unreasonable to start with the way that Christopher Morrissey and I almost never met. In a college residence lobby waiting for an airport taxibus at the end of the 2002 COVR conference at Purdue University, when Chris told me he taught in Langley, I thought he was speaking of the Virginian site of the CIA. No, he was speaking of the Vancouver suburb that held the satellite campus of Kwantlen University College, where I was teaching composition. What a wonderful small world! When Chris’ curiosity about Gans (who’d spoken at the Purdue COVR) was joined to my hunger for conversation about Gans; when we later joined with Richard Van Oort, who just happened to be teaching at UBC, and Pablo Bandera, who just happened to be working as an engineer in Vancouver, thus was Sparagmos! born. Together we read almost all the major books Eric Gans had to that date written, along with some other texts. It needs to be asserted outright that I would never have gotten to the point of thinking I had some understanding of texts like Originary Thinking and Signs of Paradox without the patient help of these three men.

I believe it is much easier to “do” GA with other students of it that to do it alone. I have no quarrel with those who murmur that working through Gans’ work can be “difficult.” But the difficult is not the impossible. If one is not lazy and given to giving up easily; if one gets real help with it from people who have been doing it longer than one has (such as the help Richard Van Oort gave us); if one is constituted in the first place to have a certain determined, unembarrassed appetite for possible answers to the big questions about the human, one can eventually “get” the hypothesis of the originary scenic event and the heuristic of a minimal anthropology and begin to work with it. Sparagmos! proved to me the efficiency of the “reading group” model as a way to wrestle with Gans’ work. The birth of Sparagmos! might deserve therefore to be named as the “origin” of the idea for the Generative Anthropology Thinking Event, because without the help of Richard and Chris and Pablo, I may well never have stuck with the founding texts of originary thinking in a sustained enough manner to get to the point where I had the audacity to attempt to organize a conference about GA. It might also deserve to be named the origin of GATE because when I did begin to dream about a conference, I imagined GATE to some extent as the logical extension, enlargement and expansion of Sparagmos!…. a kind of annual internationalized Sparagmos!

These musings aside, and in the spirit of the observation that originary thinking has a certain predilection for the punctual, I will present, however, just one vibrant memory as the one that does finally dominate when I search for the moment at which GATE originated. The final banquet for the 2006 annual meeting of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion in Ottawa was held in the main hall of the Canadian Museum of Anthropology; the tables with their fine glasses and sparkling plates were spread out in the presence of huge, towering, magnificent totem poles of aboriginal peoples of the Pacific Northwest. It was a tremendously memorable place to have a banquet. Among the people sitting at my table were Peter Koper from Michigan, Peter Goldman from Utah, and Ian Dennis of Ottawa. Peter Goldman expressed his hope that Eric Gans would be attending the following year’s COVR meeting in Amsterdam. Peter Koper and I shared our disappointment that Eric Gans had not been on the programme at the Ottawa conference then coming to its end; we exchanged confidences about the difficulties we encountered and the pleasure we took in wrestling with Gans’ work. The steady engagement with Gans’ work of my friend Ian was well known to me. Chris Morrissey was at the same banquet sitting at a different table. There were others as well in the room who were doing GA, thinking GA, who would have been more than eager to have clocked some exclusive time conferring with Eric Gans and with each other on the bundle of concepts, practices, principles, attitudes, methods, directions, ideas and assumptions that had grown up in the light of the originary hypothesis and that had come to be known as GA. I knew this. But Eric Gans was not there; he had not been there. At my table, all four of us wished Eric Gans had been there. We shared our wish for some opportunity to get together with each other and with Eric Gans himself and “do” GA. After the violence of the single most victimary public “lecture” to which I have ever submitted my trembling-enraged self in my entire life, a veritable incoherent spraying of white-guilt-inducing rhetoric which (amazingly) got some standing ovations from some of the banquet attendees (my partner Joanne convinced me to stay in my chair only for the sake of seeing the Ukrainian folk dancers afterward), I left that conference somewhat dispirited.

Six or seven months later, however, in January 2007, having enjoyed the benefit of extended research time (part of an Education Leave) granted by Kwantlen University College, I had produced some work on the Frankenstein myth that had met with the approval of Adam Katz and then Eric Gans. I was by those miniature triumphs emboldened to ask Eric if he would come to Vancouver if I got half a dozen people to meet for a weekend of discussions and (perhaps) paper presentations. The alternative would have been the group’s meeting in Los Angeles, which would have made it more awkward for me to organize but which would have removed the embarrassment of the conference being based partly on the personal generosity of Eric. I had (at that time) no budget, no capital, no resources, and no institutional endorsement. One might well date the origin of GATE from the moment of Eric’s open-hearted promise to come to Vancouver with no guarantee of a substantial turnout.

Once Eric agreed to come to Vancouver, the Call for Papers went out, describing the event as a “participant-dependent” conference. Within two weeks, we had our minimum “six” people who were committed to attending–people coming from as far away as Connecticut and Ottawa, halfway across the continent. Within a few more weeks, we had endorsements from three offices Kwantlen University College. After a few more weeks, the number of people committed to giving papers had doubled to about a dozen. I was thrilled that a scholar of the stature of Eugene Webb had decided to attend and to contribute. By the end of June, an application for a Minor Research Grant from Kwantlen University College was successful; GATE was no longer strictly a “participant-dependent” event. The grant enabled us to fund two public lectures (one by Eric Gans and one by Eugene Webb), to do some advertising, and to provide some benefits to those participants who had invested travel dollars and registration fees and research-work time in the conference. The grant enabled us to celebrate in style, enjoying the space of beautiful meeting rooms on the fifth floor of the castle-like Iona Building at the Vancouver School of Theology on the UBC campus, rooms overlooking English Bay and the blue-green coast mountains of British Columbia.

I believe it is no boast to claim that the Generative Anthropology Thinking Event was a success. The contents of this special issue of Anthropoetics convey some of the reasons for that claim. I am proud of the writing and scholarship of the presenters. All of these papers have been revised and sharpened from the texts that were read at the conference. Adam Katz’s inventive piece introduces a sharp idea of originary “lastness” to complement that idea of “firstness” which has gained useful currency among practitioners of GA. Ian Dennis’ searching, subtle analysis of Byron’s ironic self-presentation in the market society of romantic-era England demonstrates the fit between GA and author-centered scholarship. (At the conference, Ian shared a session with Peter Goldman, who presented some of his work on James Joyce. The papers resonated together in fascinating ways, partly by inadvertently demonstrating the manner in which an originary analysis of authorial production will tend to include fine-tuned considerations of writer-audience relationships.) Peter Koper’s energetic analysis of judicial reason in Sophocles respectfully and persuasively challenges previous readings of Oedipus familiar to those of us interested in mimetic theory. Christopher Morrissey’s paper deserves recognition as the most seriously direct “challenge” to one of the secular temptations in GA, that which would reduce the reality of God to an idea of God. (From John Stuart Mill’s “Theism”: “…still the idea can only prove the idea, and not the objective fact…”). My own foray into similar territory, much less scholarly than Chris’s and more unabashedly a celebratory exploration of Gans’ thinking of God, may be taken to sit across from Chris’ work. Together they might figure as a guarantee that the kind of anthropological theology (or theological anthropology) inspired by Gans’ writing is anything but unidirectional. Last, I am grateful to Eric Gans for engaging with each of these revised papers in the closing piece of the volume; but I do beg all of you to read Eric’s responses last.

The clearest evidence of the success of GATE, however, may turn out to be not the contents of this present volume but the future real events which are devolving, all signs suggest, from GATE. The exchanges were so valuable to the conference participants, in terms both social and intellectual, that without any hesitation a number of us agreed we should do something like it again next year. A second GA event is now being planned for late June 2008 at Chapman University (in Orange, California), hosted by Matthew Schneider. We hope to meet in 2009 at the University of Ottawa, where Ian Dennis will be organizing. We may well dispose of the name “GATE,” which has gathered a little sticking power but which I would be happy to set free as a happy invulnerable orphan to wander in the crowds of lost acronyms. It does have a connotation of low-budget horror movies about the entrance to hell and the like. The fumbling of the acronymic football from GASE to GATE (nobody can ever accuse me of not having something of the naïf about my aura) is a goofy narrative at which I shall always laugh aloud.

I do hope that our numbers will double at the 2008 meeting. There were people who personally communicated to me their “regrets” at not being able to attend the Vancouver event, because I gave them so little lead time to make travel plans and research plans–including people from other continents. I hope that all those for whom my February 2007 invitation was too late may plan now to attend the second annual GA conference in California.

I wish to thank publicly the other human presences at the conference who each made big and favourable contributions: Eugene Webb, Richard Van Oort, Matthew Schneider, Amir Kahn, Christine Jones, Greg Nixon, Richard Watson, Douglas Collins, John Gay, Stacey Meeker, Clara Watson, Pablo Bandera, Joanne Horwood, Robert Fleming, Linda Schwartz, and Grant Allan. As for our debt to Eric Gans for giving us a new way to think about the human situation, it almost goes without saying. It was an honour for me to organize the Vancouver GA event, and it is now an honour for me to invite you to enjoy the essays contained in this special issue of Anthropoetics.

In a fairly recent Chronicle of Love & Resentment (326), “Return of the Sacred I–the Sacred and the Significant,” Eric Gans focuses on the distinction between the “sacred” and the “significant”: “the sacred cannot be reduced to the significant; if the two terms were synonymous, we would not need both.” The sacred “reproduc[es] the configuration of the originary event in a more or less formalized manner as ritual”; meanwhile, “language, in contrast, is typically a one-on-one phenomenon; as a self-contained gesture that has renounced any role in worldly action, the linguistic sign has no minimal energy requirement.” But the qualification, in a part of the passage referring to the sacred I omitted, that “The sacred tends to inhere in stable religious institutions” [emphasis on “tends to” mine], points to the possibility of a form of sacrality that need not inhere in ritual. Indeed, Gans concludes this Chronicle by presenting the significant less in contrast to the sacred than as a more minimal form of it:

From the institutional standpoint of ritual, this utterance [i.e., the Word of God] is constrained by the event as a whole, but from the formal standpoint of language, it is in principle a free act whose meaning is constrained by its situation in the event, so that the freedom to utter the sign outside its originary context does not entail the freedom to alter what it signifies. The sacred inheres in the “profane” use of language in the constraint of meaning that binds the sign independently of any ritual context. This minimal sacred inherent in the laws of language is too weak to support a god or a law of ritual sacrifice; it can guarantee only the most parsimonious of anthropologies.

Here, the scare quotes around “profane” seem to suggest that the use of the term is metaphorical, which is to say this marked usage is straining against the constraints of the situation in the speech event; and, if it is not altering what it signifies, “profane” must be another word for “sacred,” a euphemism which is necessary insofar as we associate the sacred exclusively with ritual. If we release the sacred from this association (if we change the situation), we can amplify the tension implicit in the use of “profane” so as to scrutinize what is directly below designated a “weak” sacrality, since the only measure of such weakness is that provided by the assumption of that very association. If we abandon that assumption, the strength of any mode of sacrality must reside in the strength of the “will that opposes the participants’ desire to possess the central object” (Chronicle 326). And there is no reason why the strength of that will must depend upon the presence of ritual.

Rather than viewing the significant as an attenuated form of the sacred, we can re-frame the issue by attributing “significance” to the sign and sacrality to the object. Both sign and object are constituted in terms of their material and immaterial dimensions. My hypothesis here will be that we can construct a chiastic relationship between sign and object, wherein the sign in its materiality points to the immaterial object while the sign in its immateriality renders the material object accessible. The material is what makes the sign a singular semblance; the immaterial is whatever makes it the “same” sign across its various uses. The more we attend to the sign’s distinctiveness and irreplaceability in a given scenic setting, the more its details appear dictated by the imitation of the repellant (immaterial) power of the object; the more we address it as iterable, the more we attend to the horizontal imitation of the users by each other and to their preparing (therefore) for the sparagmos of the (material) object. Gans, in Signs of Paradox points out that the “significance of the central object and its sacrality refer to different relationships: the object is sacred for resisting the gesture of appropriation, it is significant for demanding the gesture of representation” (107).(1) I am suggesting that the “demand” is made by the object as sacred and, even more, the “lineaments” of the sign are dictated by the central, sacred Being. Similarly, I am suggesting a slight modification in Gans’ observation that the “signified is the trace of the referent made by the absence of the sparagmos” (109). While Gans’ formulation would defer the arrival of the sign’s (immaterial) meaning until after the sparagmos, my own would suggest that the sparagmos itself only becomes possible due to the emergence of the immaterial signified: my reasoning here lies in the necessity that the sign must already be repeated on the originary scene and, as I will go on to suggest momentarily, this iteration of the sign should be seen as regulating the sparagmos as well.

On the originary scene, the sign is put forth by the first user; which it to say, when it is put forth it is not yet sign; it becomes a “little bit” more sign when it is imitated by the second and then third, and “more and more” all the way until the nth and final user. The use of quantitative terms here is inadequate but unavoidable and harmless as long as we recognize a threshold at which the sign is deliberately “enough” copied so as to take its “authority” from the newly immaterial object whose centrifugally repulsive force is now being imitated and conducted. The sign would become a recognizable material object in its own right once we could (and they did) conceivably distinguish between more and less effective iterations; and this material form would emerge simultaneously with the sacrality of the object. It is this recognizable, formed, sign that then facilitates a roughly equal division and consumption of the object; which is to say in its (the sign’s) unity, the recognizable sign provides a minimally abstract measure of divisibility allowing for an orderly consumption. We might think about this in terms of the members of the group repeating the sign in the course of consumption in both “defensive” and “aggressive” maneuvers aimed at determining the roughly fair share. In this case, the iteration and, we must assume, refinement of the physical form of the sign is completed once it provides this measure and thereby regulates, as an abstract “rule,” the activity of the group; and this activity re-materializes the object by making it available for consumption. Insofar as the sign provides such an abstract rule (once we know how, and what it means to, act upon or “implement” it), the sign has thereby been immaterialized.

This formulation is meant to address a serious problem we confront when we pursue the implications of my claim that the presence of the sacred cannot be diminished in any society: in a post-ritual order, what, exactly, is the “central object”? The whole point of moving past the ritual order would have been to transcend the limitations imposed upon our ability to defer violence within traditional forms: even the slightest weakening of the efficacy of the ritual would pose a deadly threat insofar as ritual breakdown would be immediately followed by a rush to the center and a general conflagration. In a post-ritual order, there are many objects and they are distributed through the market in a de-centralized manner; hence there is no center to converge upon; or, we have what Gans has called an “omni-centrism.” In that case, though, our own analysis becomes just as omni-centric. The value of the concept of omni-centrism is that we are attuned to the vast multiplicity of esthetic self-creations that defer violence in post-millennial culture; the limit of the concept is that originary thinking would logically have to concede that it is no more than another localized center, another form of self-creation. GA would dissolve, like Marxism presumably would have in a fully developed communist order, into the social order it has prophesied. Which would be fine, if such an order didn’t require—and if GA, as a thinking of the center, wasn’t uniquely qualified to offer—critical reflection capable of transcending the daily verdicts of the market.

I am willing to wager that such an order does require such reflection because unqualified omni-centrism would further mean that the participants in the market are incapable of defending it from those who would pool their individual resentments and would have none of the difficulties or compunctions of normal participants in organizing and directing their resentments against a single and clearly defined target—that target being the market itself, figured as a kind of central intelligence that unfairly distributes access to its products. I would suggest that this configuration is intrinsic not only to market society but also to the originary scene upon which, if we are to presuppose a first signifier, we must posit a last. This “last” user might be hypothesized as one or more who refused or did not have the chance to voluntarily accede to the emission of the sign, who submitted due to the combined force of the emergent community, to its imminent use, or as an automatic response to what appears to be the typical operation of the pre-human pecking order. For this subject, not only would the central object/intelligence appear to be an intrinsically unjust fraud, distributing benefits in accord with inscrutable and arbitrary norms, but also it would be more sharply perceived as intelligence, with each outcome seeming to be the result of self-interested calculation.

The anthropology of the “last” is that of Othello‘s Iago: humans are indeed equal, but in their determination to turn the constitutive biases of the system in their favor. That is, Iago, as well, is liberated by the market system. For the last, the center is nothing more than the combined force of the community operating under the aegis of the sacred center (which both makes its hypocrisy more outrageous and make individual members easier to gull) constitutive of the community. The center, then, is nothing more than rationalizing, calculating intelligence. The center’s claims to legitimacy therefore mask a distributive logic which can most effectively be manipulated by those capable of unmasking and thereby appropriating that mode of intelligence. This form of resentment, while it is the source of evil, provides us with insight into the form actually taken by the intelligence of the center. Since the resentment of the last(s) introduces rivalries amongst the participants on the scene (any of whom, after all, could turn out to be last and hence to be tempted by the short-cuts made available to lastness), the conductivity of the intelligence of the center would then be a product of the need to counter every claim of bias and fraud with claims and arrangements demonstrating that the system works to gradually de-link “pre-existing conditions” from outcomes. The paradox here is that both the market and constitutional government derive their superiority from the absence of any requirement that most citizens transcend the specific scenes upon which they stand and measure themselves. But that derivation of superiority is possible only if some will represent the intelligence of the center as a coherent institutional logic articulating spontaneity and complexity. And it is no more clear that the system is equipped to produce as many of such “guarantors” as might be needed, than it is clear that the conditions prior to the emission of the originary sign “produced” the capacity to emit it.

The lasts, by themselves, could not threaten society, except at the margins. It is the alliance of the lasts with the products of the ongoing crisis in firstness in the post-Christian West that constitutes at least one, and the more aggressive, tendency constitutive of modernity. My argument here is that delinking the distinction between sacred and secular, on the one hand, and between sacred and profane, on the other, will provide us with greater analytical power in distinguishing between the different trends and possibilities within modernity. Rather than sacred and secular, I would propose we distinguish between the liturgical and the secular, as different modes of sacrality conferring upon either God or humans respectively the generative power constitutive of a given institution or practice. The profane, as distinguished from the sacred, then, are “outstanding” desires and resentments: that is to say, those desires and resentments that can be normalized, or that remain within the prevailing cultural categories. Forms of sacrality, or hallowed sites, whether liturgical or secular in origin and character, would be the islands of transcendence framing and channeling those desires and resentments.

Modernity emerges out of the crisis of the unified Christian world of the late medieval period, so it would be most economical to assume that modernity would best be understood to consist of overlapping revisions of the Christian revelation. The Christian revelation, in Gans’ account, is that anyone who insistently asserts and represents the universalization of the mode of reciprocity implicit in the Judaic revelation of “God as the declarative sentence” will thereby bring upon himself universal antagonism. Jesus’s would be the sacrifice to end all sacrifices: insofar as we recognize our own complicity in the crucifixion we would recoil from our tendency to seek out scapegoats to account for social crises, thereby liberating our capacity to construct institutions which reinforce solidarity. While the maintenance of Christianity would seem to depend upon the willingness of some to step forward as martyrs, as representatives of Christ and as defenders of the faith, for most people it is enough to acknowledge the sacrifice only in ritualized forms. A Christian society, then, would not be one in which everyone takes up the cross and literally imitates Christ, but one in which the ever-present possibility of doing so is explicitly acknowledged and instances of actually doing so are honored and remembered.

Once the specific liturgical forms in which this acknowledgement is bound up can no longer defer the new forms of rivalry and violence attendant upon the emergence of increasingly independent political entities, two broad possibilities, I would suggest, present themselves. One would be to propose a sign positing a kind of “Church-Absolutist complex” as the source of conflict. All the forces coming together to initiate the modern world—the urban bourgeoisie, previously or potentially independent nations swallowed up by the early modern empires, freethinkers—would find their own internal differences minimized by such a sign pointing toward such a “complex” as the primary source of conflict. We now know even better than its creators did that the indictment of the absolutist monarch and the priest disseminating myths and lies as the twin villains against which the modern could define itself has had a staying power well beyond the life-span of that alliance: the Marxist notion of ideology as “false consciousness,” still prevalent in more careful formulations on the Left, essentially defines political absolutism and religious delusion as the Other of the Truth possessed by the rationalist subject, defined, tautologically, as one who is free from and sees through such myths.

Rather than simply jettisoning the Christian event, though, this would-be sceneless Enlightenment produces a parody of it: the founding, traumatic event of the anti-scenic Enlightenment is the martyrdom of that very rationalist subject, whose sacrifice is the central item on the indictment issued against the Church-Absolutist complex. We can trace a line of events, from Galileo’s persecution to the Inquisition and up until “McCarthyism,” which all share, in the imaginary of the potential victims at any rate, the same essential structure: freethinkers hunted down as heretics in the name of “order” but in fact serving as scapegoats frightening the masses in order to resolve some internal crisis on terms favorable to the powers that be. To put it in contemporary terms (terms, of course, largely shaped by such narratives), in recognizing our desire to lynch the freethinker, we accept our complicity in unjust hierarchies and outmoded mythologies. The Christian account sees such complicity as constitutive and beyond our power to eliminate within history. For the desacralizing Enlightenment, the martyrdom of the freethinker calls upon us to eliminate such structures once and for all; but by virtue of that call for elimination, it in fact entrenches such structures permanently because, as I just suggested, defining one’s own access to truth in terms of the Other’s distance from it presents an ever receding horizon. If my analysis here is correct, it would dramatically reduce the difference between the radical Enlightenment and the Romanticism invented by Rousseau, which also involves a kind of inverted version of the Christian scene in the sacrifice of the marginal individual by “society.”

The other possible remaking of the Christian scene would involve a retrieval of an Old Testament-inspired “political Hebraism”: a form of republicanism defined territorially and institutionally as a way of situating a people within a series of historical trials, each of which requires a return to the founding, prompting a new birth of freedom articulated in a restored covenant. The supplementation of the New with the Old Testament paradoxically allows Christianity to remain at the center of the social order precisely by not relying upon a direct imitation qua parodic subversion of the Christian event. In other words, without the burden of anti-Christian resentment, the general possibility of new institutional forms consecrated in events dedicated to freedom can be abstracted from the specific liturgical form in which such a possibility has been preserved and consequently applied to all activity, political, artistic, scientific, and so on. Instead of reinventing and parodying the crucifixion, a republican Enlightenment continues to bear witness to the singularity of the Christian revelation by creating the position of the guarantor who protects potential martyrs and tries to make such martyrdom unnecessary precisely by remaining alive to the possibility that it might take place anywhere, anytime, and in unanticipated forms, supplementing without subverting the Christian model. Inventing, refining and defending rules aimed at minimizing scapegoating would provide the opening for free exchange, free speech, free movement and private property at the center of the republican Enlightenment. We could write the history of modernity as that of the tension between these two forms, from the struggles of the English and Dutch against the Spanish Empire, to the British struggle for New World dominance over the French, to the American founding, up through the struggle against the 20^th century totalitarianisms and the presence of today’s divergent paths separating Europe and America.

This latter, originary, modernity allows for the proliferation of spaces where firstness, in forms of freedom that can then be packaged and distributed in the marketplace, is possible; while it is precisely such spaces that victimary discourses, made up of the combination and collectivization of Romanticism and radical Enlightenment, take to be ever more cleverly disguised, powerful and insidious forms of scapegoating. Originary modernity can defend the sacred center or what I have called here the intelligence of the center insofar as it takes that intelligence to be bound up in institutions—the global market and nationally based constitutional self-government—that can be modified and re-shaped as needed to account for new rivalries and resentments. But it is precisely this adaptability and flexibility that accelerates the victimary stampede.

If what most enrages, though, is precisely the impersonal workings of the “machinery” of the marketplace and government—because it is this impersonality that is taken as a threat to the integrity of the freethinker, the uniqueness of the romantic subject, which is to say, seen as a mere front perpetrating fraud upon the “lasts”—the affirmation of articulations of hallowed sites provides us with a response to the rage. Inherited from Christianity and Judaism, embedded in the marketplace and constitutional government alike, the sacrality becomes, through its extension beyond its liturgical origins, that of the individual, understand as a distinctive array of signs which can never exhaust that to which it refers. That is how we take ourselves, as self-representing individuals; and that is how we treat and devise institutions so as to address others, placing faith in the inexhaustibility of even the most apparently “conformist,” resentful or thoughtless individual, conferring upon them a sacrality which in turn increases the likelihood that they will demonstrate further signs of it. Our defense of any articulation of hallowed sites ultimately leads us to re-trace the process of minimization through which the Christian and Jewish revelations could be resituated on terms both irreducible to those revelations and capable of preparing us for new ones; conversely, even the most far flung or, for that matter, deliberately blasphemous or “pagan” sites of resistant self-fashioning could be shown to be unintelligible without the groundwork laid by those prior transformative revelations.

This secular sacrality ensures that we can transcend any possible disjunction between the sacred and the esthetic, and render unnecessary any narrative that would see the latter as coming to displace the former. If the public rituals affirming national faith and the valorization of open-ended exchange between producers and consumers are consecrations of liberty, then liberal democracy and all its attachments—free inquiry in the university, free association in the streets and on-line, freedom for a diversity of faiths, and so on—are all stances one converts to, every bit as much as one converts to Roman Catholicism or Islam. The response to anti-Western, anti-semitic victimary movements would then be what I would call “evangelicism,” which involves affirming and entering the global market in faiths and acting as a screen for the frustrated desire of the Other, demonstrating in one’s own person the internality of the obstacles to that desire, and presenting poles of mimetic attraction upon scenes representing its transcendence.

Meanwhile, insofar as the sacrality we honor no longer depends upon its being protected from “secularizing” influences, it no longer needs to be distanced from the esthetic, which can in turn be seen as essential to the conversion strategies of evangelicism. The complement of conversion is simply “seduction,” which offers up access to an object, predicated upon the desiring subject’s demonstrating mastery of the proper rules of deferral; an object, moreover, like all objects of desire, which undergoes transformation in its being pursued and coming into possession. Insofar as the transformation results from the contribution made by this very interaction to the desired object, the object is thereby enhanced rather than subtracted from—the object, in fact, turns out to be one’s own conversion, one’s occupation of the admired place and one’s consequent realization and willing acceptance that rather than providing closer access to the center, the object “possessed” intensifies one’s responsibility to demonstrate that such access is illusory and must remain so. In such a space, the last can be first and the first last. The new forms of deferral we need today involve setting in motion and taking responsibility for new chains of events which are nevertheless pointedly dependent for their completion upon those fellow sign-users who would have (and perhaps did) initially resist them.

Let’s return to the chiastic model I presented earlier. If what initiates any act of semiosis is the experience of the danger of mimetic rivalry, which is to say, an increase of doubt proportionate to faith in the efficacy of the sign in representing the object to all, or a diminishment of the object’s immateriality and proportionate increase in the scramble for material objects seeming to possess its force, the goal of that act of semiosis must be twofold. First, it must aim to restore the object’s immateriality, which is to say to make whatever specific, material object for which we are contending into a sign of the repulsive power of the center. Second, it must aim to create the object, in its materiality, anew—to provide for the production of more such objects, or to make the object divisible or sharable in some hitherto unimagined way. This new accessibility of the material object emerges along with the renewal of faith in immateriality of the sign, the immateriality of the sign as a rule regulating such access. Finally, though, this means that the new immateriality of the object, its renewal as a conduit of the intelligence of the center, resides in a new materiality of the sign, a new form of distinction, embodiment, enactment—a new style and norm which invites participation and an improvised iteration; a style and norm that draws attention to its own constitution as a dictation taken from the intelligence of the center.

“There is no way to refute the world of primary orality. All you can do is walk away from it.”
Walter Ong

I. Originary Moments of Representation

Rene Girard is well aware that the history of what once might have been called Western Civilization but which is now clearly world civilization has been marked by originary moments. Within Girard’s own schema, one decisive moment is “the imposition by the group on itself of a noninstinctive restraint that defers further violence and constitutes thereby the origin of all cultural ‘deferrals’ ” (Gans,Origin xi). In Girard’s hypothesis, the mechanism of this deferral is the ” ‘arbitrary’ designation of an emissary victim to whom is attributed a posteriori the ‘blame’ for the original crisis” (ibid.) that generated the tensions that the persecution of the scapegoat is intended to remove. Girard’s accumulation of evidence from history and anthropology is a persuasive demonstration that the tracks of this process, or the process itself, are visible at many levels of cultural development, from the primitive to the modern.

The designation of the arbitrarily chosen victim to be a representation of the causes of whatever mimetic contagion happens to threaten a community presupposes, as Eric Gans points out, that a capacity for representation pre-exists the arbitrary choice. Hence Generative Anthropology’s fully empirical hypothesis. At its moment of origin in our prehistory — the evidence in such works as Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn offers a time frame consistent with its appearance in Africa — our primate species developed the capacity for representation of which the Girardian designation of the scapegoat is one historically ancient and empirically recoverable manifestation (by “recoverable” I mean “subject to demonstration” using archeological or other historical evidence). The moment described by Gans as the origin of representation will eventually make historical evidence possible but necessarily occurs before such evidence exists. This does not touch the fact that humans are differentiated by their capacity for representation and that this has to have had an origin. It is a persuasive claim that the scapegoating rituals that are recoverable were preceded by an unrecoverable “abortive gesture of appropriation” that turned an ostensive gesture into a representation of an individual intention that itself was able to be understood and reciprocated by a circle of witnesses. Gans discusses how the utility of such a gesture, hence its repetition, could produce increasing “sedimentation” of meaning in the gestures and establish them as representations in the distinctly human sense (Origin 59-67). Such gestures could indeed reduce conflict and re-organize communities around ritual behaviors with individuals on the periphery and the significant object, whether originally food or laterly another valuable, in the center, as the sacred. The origin of the taboo, which limits violence by controlling access to the significant/sacred, follows; but the taboo requires that representation be a fully developed capacity within the species, just as does scapegoating. Because representation as a mode of deferral would have enormous evolutionary advantages, selective pressure would favor brains that could engage in it, as such pressures still do. The relatively rapid appearance of big-brained homo sapiens would be the paleontological signature of the utility of representation in evolutionary terms, once that capacity begins to develop in a primate species.

Gans’s efforts to hypothesize the derivation of the core linguistic categories from the evolution of the ostensive into the imperative and interrogative is unique. His insistence that the formal/syntactical/logical elements of language arise simultaneously with and are inseparable from the intentional/communal/institutional elements that propose models of the world recognizes a fact that has seemed obvious to me throughout my career, although it is as far from the main currents of linguistics as are Girard’s uses of literature from New Criticism (Origin 29-42). Gans has successfully hypothesized the originary event when the capacity for using language as the vehicle for representation arose in our species, a capacity Girard’s schema takes for granted. Once humans developed a wide range of noninstinctive behavioral capacities, the absence of instinctive restraints made a noninstinctive means of controlling aggression essential. The widespread appearance of scapegoating and its reifications suggests that this particular use of representation is now genetically coded, at least partially. The first sacrifice/lynching is an originary event, in a sense, but it is a use of symbolism that arises in a much later and far more elaborate social context than the first abortive gesture of appropriation, an event that offers a new stability to a simple primate group. It is the utility of the primal event that generates the selective pressure to develop more elaborate rituals of deferral as cultures increase in the complexity that such rituals make possible.

II. Originary Insight in Literary Texts

One of the essential features of Rene Girard’s work is his rejection of primitivism and cultural relativism. Without creating foolish claims that proper thinking eliminates violence, he is aware that the sorts of scapegoating that go on in a modern office are different than the actual stoning to death of cripples. The first large scale project sponsored by The Royal Society in 1660 was an investigation of witchcraft that concluded, after ten years, that there was no such thing as witchcraft. The shift from magical to physical causes as explanations has been the principle achievement of science and has lessened the violence of scapegoating in parts of modern society. After summarizing two medieval European episodes of scapegoating, Girard acknowledges the change that science has created, as well as the ways in which science separated humanity from its past.

There was a time when no one could read even the distortions of persecution found in our own history. Finally we did learn. We can put a date to this achievement. It goes back to the beginning of the modern era and seems to constitute only the first stage in a process that has never really been interrupted but has been marking time for centuries because it lacked a truly fruitful direction that would stretch back to mythology. (Scapegoat 38)

Science is an originary phenomenon, however one chooses to date it. In this passage, Girard refers to the rise of science in the Sixteenth Century, but he is obviously aware of intellectual antecedents in other periods. His own important role, as implied in the “direction” mentioned in the last sentence of the passage, follows from his willingness to treat the texts of both early myth and literature as sources of authentically scientific information — information that is as much a resource for the project of demystification as the information provided by the physical sciences. Girard’s work offers a way of seeing ourselves as part of the same struggle, the struggle to manage the rivalrous mimetic violence, that has plagued all human communities. The struggle differs now because of the scale of population increases, the integration of populations, and the amount of energy our technology makes available to us; it differs also because the accumulated insights of our civilization have deprived much of the world of the innocently ignorant unanimity that makes primitive scapegoating fully effective.

Girard makes the literature of classical Athens and the New Testament central to his discussions of the nature of myth and ritual, as well as the sacrificial violence that they sometimes describe and sometimes mask. Girard is explicit in his claim: “the New Testament Gospels are the starting point for a new science or knowledge of humanity” (I See Satan xix); “The single victim mechanism only functions by means of the ignorance of those who keep it working” (ibid. 41). Jesus is innocent. Those united in the process of killing him are scapegoating an innocent who asks that they be forgiven because “they do not know what they are doing” (Scapegoat 111 [italics Girard’s]). The force of the Gospel “lies in its dimension of revelation” (ibid.). The revelation is an originary moment from which humanity can not go back. Echoing Simone Weil, Girard describes the Gospels as an anthropology whose utility does not require a theology based on the magical elements of the Gospels (Satan 44).

Girard also emphasizes that the literature of classical Athens, especially the plays of the Dionysia, mark an originary moment in human history. This literature is central to his literary anthropology because the plays were critical of the violence in the myths which convention required playwrights to use as the sources of their plots. Attic drama provides texts which analyze myth in processes that anticipate those of the Biblical interpreters. Why this happened is a question that Girard acknowledges but does not deal with at length in Violence and the Sacred:

In order for men to make discoveries about their own culture, codified rituals must give way to an agile mode of thinking that uses the same mechanisms as religion with a virtuosity that religion never approached. The cultural order itself must have begun to disintegrate, and the overflow of differences must have subsided–not so much, however, as to provoke a new outbreak of violence, which would in turn generate new differences. For reasons unknown to us, primitive societies never meet these conditions. When the cycle of violence begins, it also comes to an end with such rapidity that the opportunity for making major self-discoveries hardly exists. (237)

Girard has in mind here the “exceptionally far-ranging and drawn-out critical cycle” (ibid. 238) of modern Western society, but the habits of mind that he refers to have antecedents in Classical Athens.

The worship of Dionysis in Athens, which began as ritual dominated by song, dance, and sacrifice, developed a drama whose most important feature was the “agile mode of thinking” that is Girard’s focus when he works with tragedy. The cultural organization of Archaic Greek society began to disintegrate under the force of the Athenian enlightenment. By the end of the fifth century, myth is for Euripides no longer a religious artifact; it is a literary device to be used as he wished. In The Trojan Women, Euripides has Hecuba say to Helen “Aphrodite is the human lust named rightly” (989-990). When the playwright describes a goddess this way, as in effect a personified hormone, he is thinking for the modern world even if most of his countrymen are not and even if it is several thousand years before his view is shared by large numbers of people. There is enormous intellectual movement in the years between Aeschylus’s first surviving play (472) and Sophocles’s last play (c. 406).

Girard makes the flat claim that the analytical awareness of the arbitrariness of the choice of target for the accusation leveled against the innocent as a means of restoring unanimity to community (the scapegoat mechanism) is original to the Bible: “This sleight of hand [the scapegoat mechanism] remained hidden until the Jewish and Christian revelation” (Satan 44). That the Gospel’s anthropological originality is the clarity with which it exposes the nature of mimetic violence and the role of the pharmakos seems correct, but the presence of consciously analytical discussions of this mechanism in Attic drama suggests that the Greeks were up the to same sorts of analysis in the Fifth Century in Athens.

How conscious the Attic dramatists were of the sacrificial nature of mimetic violence is something that Girard seems to have underestimated. Speaking of the performances of the Dionysia as a whole, Girard writes:

Theater performances are also rooted in collective violence and are a form of ritual, though even more cleansed of violence than animal sacrifices. They are culturally richer than animal sacrifices since they are, at least indirectly, meditations on the origins of religion and culture as a whole. As such they are potential sources of knowledge, as Sandor Goodhart shows us in his Sacrificing Commentary. But the goal of tragedy is the same as sacrifice. It always aims at producing among the members of the community a ritual purification, the Aristotelian catharsis, which is an intellectualized or “sublimated” version of the original sacrificial effect. (Satan 78)

Girard here describes tragedy as a mode of deferral of violence. The terms “intellectualized” and “sublimated” carry a lot of weight. They point towards a major topic in the drama that is visible in the phrase from Euripides quoted above. Attic drama is an originary moment in the history of world culture precisely because of the ways in which it intellectualized the myths that were its vehicle. That the plays did this in the century before the work of Plato and Aristotle and did it in a popular civic institution in Athens gives them an importance in anthropological terms that is hard to overestimate.

Girard’s acknowledgment of Goodhart’s provocative reading of Oedipus Rex understates the issue. These plays are more than “potential sources of knowledge.” They are a decisive step in the movement away from mythic organizations of violence that is the feature of the modern world and there is a reason why this occurred in Greece when it did. The “agile mode of thinking” which recognizes that Aphrodite is a personification, the condition which primitive society never meets, is fully alphabetic “literacy.” Athens is apparently the first society in which a majority of the citizenry were literate, and it is the effects of literacy that open up the intellectualization that makes the plays a new means of deferral and embeds in them elements of logic which will shortly be much more fully dramatized by Plato and then systematized in Aristotle’s Organon. The evidence cited in the following section suggests that alphabetic literacy affects neurology and that it, like the abortive gesture of appropriation that establishes representation, is a cultural event that initiates a biological change.

III. The Originary Effects of Literacy

Eric Havelock’s Preface to Plato (1963) and Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy (1982) are texts which make the case for the decisive nature of literacy in the terms that I have in mind. There is general agreement that the Greek inclusion of letters for vowels in the Phoenician consonantal alphabet occurred in Ionia in the early eighth century. Barry Powell even argues that it is plausible to suggest that the addition of vowels was the work of one man who wanted to record Homer’s poems. Havelock is more concerned with the dates when most Athenian citizens achieved at least partial literacy in the new technology. He argues for late fifth century dates, perhaps as late as 425. Most scholars seem to argue for an earlier and more gradual development such that at least rudimentary literacy was widespread by mid-fifth century. ( “Literacy here refers only to free males in Athens; literacy among women and slaves is a more uncertain issue.)

Havelock attributes the rise of analysis in classical Greece to the stability of texts which allowed individual thinkers to study them and begin to develop critical analyses of traditional social patterns. Literacy itself is the source of the crisis of differentiation that is visible in Aristophanes’s The Clouds and in the early dialogues of Plato. Ong’s study of the effects of literacy explains the origin of Athenian analysis as a neurological development triggered by a cultural development. In a section of Orality and Literacy titled “Words Are Not Signs,” Ong takes issue with Derrida’s claim that ” ‘there is no linguistic sign before writing’ ” (Grammatology 14 quoted by Ong 75), insisting that a spoken word is indeed a linguistic representation but adding an observation that confirms Derrida’s emphasis on the written word, even when aspects of that emphasis are mistaken. Ong’s major thesis is that the brain processes words written with an alphabet (at all points when I refer to writing, I will mean alphabetic literacy) differently than spoken ones and differently than pictographic scripts: “What the reader is seeing on this page [the page of Ong’s text at which the reader is looking] are not real words but coded symbols whereby a properly informed human being can evoke in his or her own consciousness real words, in actual or imagined sound” (Ong 75).

Ong does not deal at length with the issues raised by Generative Anthropology with respect to the origins of spoken words, although nothing in his essay contradicts Gans’s view of spoken words as modes of representation with a fundamental utility based on their capacity to represent communal agreements to defer violence. Ong’s topic is the effects of and the utility of writing down the words. Words are noises processed by the human ear and, at least pre-electricity, noises made in the presence of a real person. Coding them into marks on a surface, marks that are processed by sight and often without the accompaniment of a person, introduces an additional level of abstraction into the already abstract process of representing ideas by noises. Because of this, “writing restructures consciousness” (ibid. 78). The complete Greek alphabet was a point of demarcation because the full representation of words as written artifacts allowed them to be totally detached from speech. Because a text remains in the scene of representation while being detached from interaction between people, what it says can become a content that simultaneously emphasizes the institutional element of language and emphasises the accuracy with which it represents the world, while functioning as a far more formal instrument for those developing or reading that content. Readers and writers could use and know far larger numbers of words than those in the everyday world of speech, and the activity of writing removed all the situational aids of speech, such as tone and gesture. This novelty placed enormous intellectual demands on writers, forcing them to bring to consciousness a myriad of issues that may be safely left to the unconscious in everyday speech. Ong reviews the body of research associated with Parry and others on the characteristics of oral formulaic language in non-literate cultures. Because mnemonic concerns dominate linguistic productions in the rituals of these societies, they emphasize repetition and they are extremely conservative. Because the spoken word is evanescent, it does not allow extended comparisons of statements in evidentiary ways. Because the spoken word appears in encounters between people, it is always potentially agonistic.

The most important implication of the research Ong cites is that written language changes the way brains work and in doing so makes writing a new mechanism of deferral, related to but fundamentally different from speech. Working in the 1930s, the Russian researcher A. R. Luria did work published in 1976 as Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations. Luria worked with populations in Uzbekistan who had never been exposed to the alphabet. He found that they could not perform even rudimentary operations of categorical thinking or logic. Given the series hammer, saw, log, hatchet, “illiterate subjects consistently thought of the group not in categorical terms (three tools, the log not a tool) but in terms of practical situations . . .” (Ong 51 citing Luria 56). The subjects offered narratives about how the tools could be used to work with the log without ever distinguishing the category tool from the log.

A related imitation was consistent when subjects were asked to make simple inferences. Told that the bears in the Far North were white and that Novaya Zembla was in the Far North, typical subjects could not tell what color the bears in Novaya Zembla were. The responses were again situational: ” ‘I don’t know. I’ve seen a black bear. I’ve never seen any others . . . ‘ ” (Ong 52 citing Luria 104). The illiterates, like the mythographers of Mycenaean Greece and other cultures, could tell stories and organized their consciousness in stories, but could not engage in analysis, the mentally agile thinking that is a trait of literate modernity. Additional work by Luria showed that subjects with even minimal literacy could engage in categorical thinking and make inferences in the ways that are truly described as the second nature of all who have become literate. Ong’s marshalling of evidence strikes me as an essential piece of equipment for Girardians seeking to come to terms with the fact that Athenian society was up to something new. It bears as well on the development of literacy on the other side of the Mediterranean, but the essential point is that the alphabet is a new source of deferral whose effects need to be explored in the context of Girard and Gan’s work.

I will carry the point further by reviewing Girard’s treatment of the Oedipus story and Oedipus Rex and then discussing Aeschylus’s The Eumenides, a play about which Girard says much less. In both cases I will emphasize the capacity for abstract thought at the center of each play.

IV. Originary Insight in Oedipus Rex

Girard’s use of the Oedipus story grounds even Freud. The family is the first location of mimesis, of the models and of the rivalries that are the focus of human experience. Hence the incest taboos whose universality drives from the necessity of limiting violent conflict within families based on sexual competition. Hence Aristotle’s advice that the most powerful tragedies involve relations within families. Hence the archetypal power of a story in which a man kills his father and marries his mother. (I gloss it not as a mapping of infant sexuality but as a representation of the worst thing a man can do.) That Oedipus’s actions are unintentional (he did not know what he was doing when he committed parricide and incest) parallels, although Girard does not note this, Jesus’s comment that his murderers did not know what they were doing. The Oedipus story is worth all of the attention it has received.

Girard begins his discussions of Oedipus Rex in Violence and the Sacred by associating tragedy with the irrationality of myth:

Men always find it distasteful to admit that the “reasons” on both sides of a dispute are equally valid–which is to say that violence operates without reason. Tragedy begins at that point where the illusion of impartiality, as well as the illusions of the adversaries collapses. For example, in Oedipus the King, Oedipus, Creon, and Tiresias are each in turn drawn into a conflict that each had thought to resolve in the role of impartial mediator. (46) [Girard’s emphasis]

This opens Girard’s focus on the arguments in the play between Oedipus, Tiresias, and Creon and the very original suggestion by Girard that Tiresias’s announcement that Oedipus is the murderer is not a truth but a mimetic falsehood offered to Oedipus (and Thebes) in retaliation for Oedipus’s own threats against the prophet. There is a plague in Thebes, a contagion that has created a crisis; Oedipus is no more guilty than anyone else. He is a party to an argument generated by the crisis, and the accusation against him is a mimetic artifact arising from the contagious panic of the moment, an atavistic designation of him as the arbitrarily chosen scapegoat. Oedipus is a paradigm of the process of designation because he is a cripple and a foreigner, a man marked by difference, and because he himself comes to believe the charge against him on the basis of mistaken uses of evidence.

Sandor Goodhart’s extensive discussion of this issue is based on the ambiguous use of singular and plural references to the robber(s) who killed Laius. Creon (at Sophocles 107) and the servant who is the sole survivor of the attack on Laius (at 122 and 716) report that Laius was killed by robbers. The Chorus reports an “old faint story” about robbers (292). Oedipus, once he fears that he is indeed the killer of Laius, sends for the servant to have him report on how many murderers there were. He is sure that a report of many murderers will acquit him, since when he killed a man at a place where three roads meet, he was alone. The servant who is the witness to the death of Laius never gives his report. By the end of the play, events have distracted Oedipus from his concern with the number of robbers, the evidence that would decide the question of parricide. Now, Oedipus is concerned instead with the question of who his father was. Goodhart argues that this means that Oedipus’s situation remains unclear. The crucial evidence that would convict him of parricide does not appear in the play. Hence his acceptance of his guilt at the end is not justified. Oedipus might indeed be an innocent scapegoat, and the topic of the play is not his heroic insistence on knowing the truth but a pre-modern representation of a postmodern error: the false belief that we know things we really do not know.

Girard and Goodhart, by suggesting that Oedipus is falsely accused, offer a reading that overturns many centuries of interpretation of the play. After citing Goodhart’s interpretation in The Scapegoat, Girard comments on Sophocles’s development of the myth of Oedipus: “Certainly, Sophocles suspects something, but he never goes as far in revealing the structural principle of the scapegoat as the Gospels or even the prophets. Greek culture forbids it. The myth does not burst in his hands and show its inner workings” (122). The myth of Oedipus is a persecution text; Sophocles intuits that it is, and he seems to resist the myth by offering a version of it with an innocent Oedipus. But Sophocles, according to Girard, is not clear about “the real problem, the representation of the myth as a whole and the system of persecution which has been shaken by the tragedy but not really subverted or made to appear false as in the Gospels” (ibid.).

I am not persuaded that Sophocles intended his audience to believe that Oedipus was innocent, or was placed in an ambiguous situation, for reasons ranging from foreshadowing that makes no sense if Oedipus is innocent to the comments about his parricide and incest in Oedipus at Colonus in which he says he did what the traditional story said he did. I will use another detail of Oedipus Rex as a route to a Girardian interpretation of the play that suggests three things: [1] Sophocles had more than a suspicion about the mechanism of mimetic persecution; [2] Sophocles does indeed expose it as false, although not in the same terms as the Gospel; [3] the precise mechanism of his exposure, the mechanism of deferral of persecution in the play, is reason.

My point of entry into this reading is Tiresias. He is a prophet. In an ancient literary convention, visible at many places in Homer and the drama, what a prophet says is true. Within the universe of the play, when Tiresias says Oedipus is the killer of Laius, that is the truth. In literary terms, Tiresias is a formal device. The audience knows the story and expects, once they hear about the plague and its cause, that Oedipus will learn the things he learns. Tiresias’s reluctant revelation is the first step in that process and one that Oedipus does not find persuasive. He accuses the prophet of being a quack in the employ of a conspirator and prepares to punish Creon. Girard’s description of Oedipus and Tirisias as doubles is a mis-reading. If the play were a myth they would be doubles, like the enemy brothers. But this is a piece of literature making uses of elements of myth to develop a theme. Tiresias is a prophet not a king, a formal device not a brother, a character in a story who is, by convention, the source of the truth. There is indeed an analysis of scapegoating in the play, but it does not involve Tiresias’s exposure of Oedipus’s history.

Oedipus’s first response to the news of his own situation, and to the crisis for him that it represents, is to blame someone else. The arbitrarily chosen and innocent focus of Oedipus’s accusation is Creon, who would become king if Oedipus were deposed. Oedipus accuses Creon of conspiring with a false prophet to attack him and sentences Creon to death. What is remarkable about the play is its portrayal of the process by which Oedipus moves beyond his first response, a paradigm of accusation that is the primitive response to the sacrificial crisis, to a modern and competent concern. After agreeing to ameliorate his sentence of death and merely send Creon into exile, Oedipus hears in Jocaste’s effort to reassure him (707-725) the first indication that he himself might indeed be the murderer. The rest of the play dramatizes his response to a fact. Laius was killed “at a place where three roads meet” (716) and Oedipus knows he has killed a man at such a place. Oedipus’s response to this fact is to acknowledge that it means he might be guilty. The subsequent action is a model of investigation and of the rational use of evidence to determine who is actually guilty. This turn to investigation and the presentation of evidence is an historic moment. It does not yet have the clarity of the Gospel’s focus on the innocent victim, but the play is an analysis of displacement, the mechanism by which individuals project their own guilt on to others, and it does offer a model of how such displacements can be overcome. In the terms of this essay, the play is a portrayal of a means of deferral of sacrificial violence. The means here is the rational analysis of evidence.

Goodhart and Girard are correct in attaching importance to the number of robbers. A fact, the fact that Oedipus killed a man at a place where three roads meet, brings his own behavior to consciousness. The question of guilt or innocence does depend on the number. A thing cannot both be and not be. The fundamental notion of contradiction which Aristotle will later systematize is here the issue that causes Oedipus to send for the servant and initiates the sequence of events later to persuade him of what his actual situation is. The servant appears; he gives evidence that convicts Oedipus; evidence is the issue even though, at the play’s frightening climax, it is not evidence about the number of robbers. That situation is a terrible one, in truth, and to the extent that Oedipus is Everyperson, the play enlarges that theme to the claim that none of us can escape the mistakes (Oedipus’s situation is a paradigm of a terrible mistake) that our human condition condemns us to. This is the theme of a great work of literature written by a highly literate man. Sophocles intentionally explodes the claim offered by myth that the source of the sacrificial crisis is the evil of the accused rival. The ultimate historical effect of this insight, like the effect of the Gospel, will be to defer some acts of violence. The mechanism by which the insight is confirmed is reason.

V. “Reasons” as Deferral in The Eumenides

The story of the Royal House of Argos was so riddled with violence that Aeschylus made it the basis of his great trilogy The Oresteia. That this is the only surviving intact trilogy may be blind luck. It may also reflect the efforts of copyists who agreed with later generations about its importance. The first two plays, Agamemnon and The Libation Bearers, follow closely the bloody episodes of the family history that were used to various effects by all three of the tragedians whose work survives. The third play guarantees that Aeschylus is an intellectual with a theme rather than a mythographer peering suspiciously into the past. The Eumenides creates an original ending to the history of Orestes that belongs in any discussion of violence.

The topic of the trilogy is the deferral of violence. The mechanism that Aeschylus is interested in is the legal system of Athens, most especially the Court of the Areopagos, the oldest court in Athens which, in 461, in a contested action, had been stripped of some of its jurisdictions by democrats who suspected the courts of having an oligarchic bias. The Oresteia is Aeschylus’s last work, staged in 458, two years before his death in 456. In the first two plays, the topic is killing and why people kill. The third play offers a resolution to the violence by portraying a fictional moment in Athenian history, the moment when Athene founds the Court of the Areopagos to adjudicate the guilt of Orestes, who has fled to Athens seeking help after the murder of his mother Clytemnestra. The plays are, on good evidence, a political editorial reminding Athens of the importance of its legal system at a time when that system had been under some attack. They are also, like Oedipus Rex, deeply moving meditations on human life. Cassandra’s speeches in the Agamemnon in the moments before she goes in to be murdered along with the King are matched by Shakespeare but by few others. Even so, a development that occurs in the third play is the most important feature of the trilogy: Aeschylus portrays logical argument as a means of deferring violence.

In the background of the plays is the ancient code, a triad that happens to be explicitly summarized in its entirety only in one place, Aeschylus’s The Suppliant Maidens. Beseeching the citizens of Argos, the maidens ask:

To strangers without grief
May they grant justice.–
May the gods who possess the city
Be honored by citizens well
With sacrificial laurel, ancestral.
For respect of one’s parents
Is third among laws
Written by Justice (792-70)

The obligation to honor strangers, the gods, and parents is a traditional code typical of tribal social organization in all non-literate societies. It serves (this can be over-emphasized) to limit conflict, protecting travelers, for example, and at least tending to limit conflict within families in situations where clans were the principal social unit. Such codes are conservative and typically inflexible. The mechanism of enforcement is revenge and this points to the mimetic component in them that makes for violent disaster when mimesis produces vendetta.

Here is Girard on the mechanism that is the topic of the plays in the Oresteia:

If one individual imitates another when the latter appropriates some object, the result cannot fail to be rivalry or conflict. . . . In human beings, the process rapidly tends toward interminable revenge, which should be defined in mimetic or imitative terms. (Double Business vii)

The Agamemnon and The Libation Bearers, in ways that are far more certain than anything that can be said about Oedipus Rex’s relation to an ancient myth of Oedipus, follow very closely the myth of the House of Atreus. Atreus and Thyestes are doubled brothers whose rivalry includes both the kingship of Argos and Atreus’s wife. Thyestes denies Atreus his share of power and seduces Atreus’s wife. Atreus’s revenge on his brother, tricking him into eating the flesh of his own children, is horrible, but mimetic. You harm me so I harm you. Thyestes curses Atreus but the effect of the curse skips a generation. Aegisthus, surviving son of Thyestes, cohabits with Clytemnestra while Agamemnon, son of Atreus, is at Troy. On Agamemnon’s return, Aegisthus helps Clytemnestra kill Agamemnon. He intends his revenge as appropriate compensation for the serving up of “that ghostly food” (1598), the flesh of his murdered siblings fed to Thyestes. Clytemnestra’s revenge is intended to pay for the violence done to her daughter Iphigenia, sacrificed by Agamemnon before he went to Troy. Cassandra, Agamemnon’s slave/concubine from Troy dies in the contagion in the household.

The Libation Bearers continues the paradigmatically mimetic killing. Aegisthus has revenged his father, honored him as the code requires, but the first play ends with the chorus asking “Oh, can Orestes live be somewhere in sunlight still?” (1646). The Libation Bearers opens with Orestes arriving at the tomb of his father. He lives. He too must kill, honoring his father by killing both Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. In the course of the play he does so. But the issue that Aeschylus has in mind is clearer in the second play. Agamemnon had been trapped in a way, by the curse on his father and by the need to lead the Greeks to Troy at the cost of his daughter’s life. Orestes is even more clearly trapped. To honor his father, he must kill his mother. Apollo has ordered him to do so and he himself will die if he does not commit matricide (269-305). The myth puts him in this dilemma. Aeschylus emphasizes it. The dilemma is a logical category, contradiction. To honor his father he must dishonor his mother. Contradiction prevents him from fulfilling the law that is the basis of deferral in Archaic culture.

These plays are not pacific. Killing is assumed to be appropriate in some situations (in the case of Aegistheus’s adultery and bloody acts, for example). The problem is the cycle of vendetta that traps individuals in cycles of killing that have no clear end. At the end of The Libation Bearers, Orestes, who thinks he is guiltless because he followed Apollo’s orders in killing his mother, looks up on the roof of the palace and sees the Furies, the ancient chthonic goddesses of vengeance. They have smelled the blood and come for him. He flees in terror. The play ends with a question from the chorus: “Where / is the end? Where shall the fury of fate / be stilled to sleep, be done with?” (1075-1076). Those questions reverberate through traditional culture.

Revenge, the threat of being killed by the relatives of the killer’s victim, is a mechanism of deferral, the mimetic nature of which is the source of its primitive utility and its limit. Mimetic violence, as Girard observed above, quickly engulfs people in situations where justice is no longer an issue, only blood. The representation of that loss in The Libation Bearers is the impossibility of Orestes resolving the dilemma posed for him by the Archaic code. The Eumenides, the completion of the trilogy, is Aeschylus’s decisive representation of Athens’ greatest gift to human civilization: the substitution of argument in public assemblies for actual combat and the substitution of victory in an election for the killing of an enemy. He is not equating tragedy with sacrifice. He is offering sacrifice as a tragedy and political analysis as a means of recovering from sacrificial violence.

The opening scene of The Eumenides is set at the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi. Orestes has fled there seeking help from the god whose order made him a matricide. The Furies have followed him there, seeking his blood. They are asleep when Apollo appears and instructs Orestes to travel to Athens. (I will only note in passing the social and dramaturgical skill of this move, which places the scene of the rest of the play above and behind the audience sitting in the theatre on the south slope of the Acropolis.) There in “Pallas’ citadel” he will “find those who will judge this case and words to say that will have magic in their figures” (79;81-82). Orestes takes this advice. The Furies, awakened by Clytemnestra’s ghost, are enraged that Apollo has helped Orestes escape but the god is unafraid and unimpressed. He knows what they represent; he tells them to leave; they belong where “heads are lopped and eyes gouged out, throats cut, and by the spoil of sex [castration] the glory of young boys is defeated, where mutilation lives, and stoning, and the long moan of tortured men spiked underneath the spine and stuck on pales” (186-190). This is precisely Girardian language; the Furies are ancient personifications of the cruelty of persecution, but the language comes from a Fifth Century Athenian. “Magic words” will be the antidote to the ritual implacability of their vengeance. The first of these follows immediately, when Apollo asks the Furies why, if they pursue matricides, they do not also pursue women who murder their husbands. The Furies have an answer: husband and wife are not blood relatives. But Apollo is not comforted. Married love is “guarded by right of nature” (217-218). This claim that they contradict themselves when they claim to serve justice is the first argument in the play.

The next scene is the temple of Athene on the Acropolis. The Furies have caught up with Orestes there and hear him petition the Goddess of Wisdom who is the Patron Goddess of Athens. He asks her to come and “without work of her spear” (289) to rescue him. The mechanism of the rescue will be non-violent because it will involve argument. The Furies, enraged, sing a magical binding song and recite their prerogatives: “we have authority; we hold / memory of evil; we are stern / nor can men’s pleadings bend us” (382-384). They are, they insist, beyond any form of argument. Only the fact of a deed matters. Blood for blood in mimetic symmetry. But this insistence will be challenged in the course of the play.

In what must have been an impressive moment, Athene enters. She orders all to be respectful and queries the Furies. Was the man under duress? Was the homicide, in effect, justifiable? The Furies only care that Orestes will not swear he did not kill. Athene insists this is “only half the argument” (428). This insistence marks the second analytical moment in the play. The Furies tell her to decide whether Orestes should be punished, but Athene will not do it alone. “This matter is too big for any mortal man who thinks he can judge it. Even I have not the right to analyze cases of murder where wrath’s edge is sharp. . .” (470-473). She announces that she will create a jury to do so, founding the court of the Areopagos “into all time to come” (484). Aeschylus has a remarkably clear anthropology here. Any single judge condemning a murderer risks triggering another episode of retaliation. To break the cycle, decisions must be by a group. But this is still not a guarantee that the group will not just stone an arbitrarily chosen victim or a mimetic double. The new mode of deferral will propose such a safeguard.

Convening the trial, Athene calls for all the populace to be assembled. One of the sources of justice is transparency in the process. The trial will be public and the jurors have sworn to be just. The polis will watch. The first arguments are between the Furies and Orestes. Then Apollo assumes the defense. The scene is relatively short. Some of the topics are troublesome to modern audiences. Apollo’s argument that matricide does not create blood guilt because “the parent is he who mounts” (660) and because mothers are just containers of the father’s seed is standard Athenian sexual physiology; it is accounted for by the fact that Athenians could see semen but had no microscopes available to discover the female contribution to procreation. Nevertheless, it is so perversely wrong as to be hard to stomach, even though it is in the same league as the Furies’s comment about wives who murder husbands.

However unsatisfactory the details of the arguments in the trial are, the fact that they are there makes this text an originary moment in our civilization. Athens’s democracy had been in place since 510. The Council of 500 was a representative body. The Assembly was a pure democracy. The court system was extensive, familiar, and by modern standards rough. There was no central public mechanism for prosecution or defense. Prosecution and defense, especially early in the century, were individual matters. The procedures were subject to abuse and were abused. Athenian civic ethics expected that citizens would do what they could to harm enemies, so many cases were personal punitive efforts. Plaintiffs were themselves subject to punishment if they could not win a minimum number of votes in a case. This enforced minimum was a limit on frivolous or patently dishonest cases, but even so, justice was not always the issue in trials.

What was at issue, and what is portrayed in The Eumenides, extremely carefully, and by explicit contrast with the violence in the first two plays of the trilogy, is that the trials were substitutes for, and hence deferrals of, violence. Some decades later, the academic discipline of rhetoric will develop to train people to speak effectively in political contexts. The evaluation of reasonable arguments will become an academic skill, modeled first by the Socrates of Plato and then systematized by Aristotle. The Eumenides emerges at an early stage in these processes. Some Athenians citizens are literate in 458. The abstract analytical resources that literacy makes available have appeared in the city to a degree that is hard to estimate but which, on the evidence of the play, will be recognizable to the audience of the Dionysia.

Approximately 80 years later, Plato did not respect the logical capabilities of Athenian juries. However rough their thought processes were c. 399, they must have been rougher in the first half of the Fifth Century. The rudimentary dramatic representation of analysis in the trial scenes of The Eumenides can be accounted for in those terms, or, more simply, in the playwright’s disinclination to bother much with verisimilitude when he had ideas he wanted to present. What is important about it is its representation of the use of proto-logic as a means of deferral. The reciprocal revenges of primitive cycles of violence make no allowance for circumstance: “men’s pleadings do not bend us.” Literacy, Wisdom, Athene, Athens–all change that. Pleadings bend a literate mind and a group of literate men, a jury, listening together to reasons, have the capacity, however imperfect, to use logic, modeled in the play by claims of contradiction, to evaluate the justice of the Furies’s questionable claims that violence is necessary. The Furies call their arguments their “arrows” (676). The adversaries in a trial are enemies, but the weapons are words. Death may result, but logic at this point enters our literature as a means of deferral of violent death. Juries will still convict and kill people in most cultures lucky enough to have juries, but Girard acknowledges that actually guilty people, at least in Greek culture, are not scapegoats.

The analysis of evidence and the reasoning modeled by Oedipus Rex and the Eumenides are processes that non-literate societies are not capable of. They are processes the emergence of which marks a threshold that, once crossed, opens a new possibility for civilization. It is not the possibility envisioned in the Gospel, but it is close to the one created by our own adversarial legal system, which defers violence/punishment or acquittal until after a process of deferral based on reasons. We have walked away from the Furies.

This issue displays our journal’s cosmopolitanism by featuring two new and two regular contributors, each from a different country not including the USA. Andrew Bartlett, the organizer of last summer’s GATE conference in Vancouver, concludes his three-part series on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, once more demonstrating his ability to ferret out fundamental anthropological themes in works of science fiction. Raoul Eshelman‘s article, his sixth for Anthropoetics, adds the visual arts to literature, film, and architecture as sources for performatism, the post-postmodern esthetic he has discovered and analyzed. Raphaël Baeriswyl persuasively brings a Girardian perspective to bear on the subject of asymmetric warfare, which may well be this century’s thorniest political problem. And I am especially happy to welcome an old friend, the distinguished philosopher of science Jean-Pierre Dupuy, to our list of contributors with an article containing some alarming conclusions concerning the ever greater threat of global catastrophe.

About Our Contributors

Raphaël Baeriswyl was born in 1975 in Lausanne, Switzerland. In civilian life, he is a lawyer at the Geneva Bar and specialises in banking law, asset (in particular aircraft) finance and commercial litigation. As an officer in the Swiss armed forces, he served in the mountain infantry and the cycling troops and is now an investigating judge in a military court. His main interests and research areas are logic and strategy, epistemology of social sciences, and axiology (descriptive and factual study of values).

Andrew Bartlett lives in Vancouver and teaches composition and literary analysis at Kwantlen University College in Surrey, British Columbia. He has attended several meetings of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion.  He organized the Generative Anthropology Thinking Event in Vancouver (July 2007).  He is working on a book-length study in applied GA, Playing God the Creator: Science Fictions of the Artificial Human.

Jean-Pierre Dupuy is Professor of Social and Political Philosophy at the École Polytechnique, Paris, Professor (1/3rd time) of French and Political Science at Stanford University, and a member of Académie Française des Technologies. His latest books in English are On the Origins of Cognitive Science. The Mechanization of the Mind –  (Princeton University Press, 2000; The MIT Press, 2008) and Self-Deception and Paradoxes of Rationality, (C.S.L.I. Publications, Stanford University, 1998); in French, La Panique, (Les empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2003), Pour un catastrophisme éclairé, (Seuil, 2002), Avions-nous oublié le mal? Penser la politique après le 11 septembre, (Bayard, 2002), Petite métaphysique des tsunamis, (Seuil, 2005), and Retour de Tchernobyl, (Seuil, 2006). He is currently engaged in research on the antinomies of Reason at the age of rational choice theory, analytic philosophy, and cognitive science; the ethics of nuclear deterrence and preemptive war; the philosophy of risk and uncertainty; and the philosophical underpinnings and the future societal and ethical impacts of the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science.

Raoul Eshelman (Ph.D. University of Constance 1988, Habilitation Hamburg 1995) is a Slavist and Comparatist specializing in modern and postmodern literature. He is presently teaching at the Dept. of Slavic Literatures at the University of Munich. His book Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism will appear in 2008 as a publication of the Davies Group.

I. Being-as-First-Known as Species-Specifically Human Cognition

What we think about, and why we think it, is an open matter; but this very openness is understandable only in the context of its origin.
Eric Gans(1)

Neither a particular concept nor a particular object, being-as-first-known [ens ut primum cognitum] is the intellectual light or clearing within which mere objects of perception, which as such consist in their relations to us as knowers, are transformed even within the objective order into transcendental things – that is to say, those features of the environment, whether or not objectified, which exercise and participate in an existence in their own right apart from our perceptions and derived from the same source, whatever that might be, on which the physical universe as a whole depends.
John Deely(2)

The first clearing occurred on the scene at the originary event. The originary appetitive object was transformed into a transcendental thing. For the first time, it was known as existing apart from the appetition of the proto-hominids. This transcendental consciousness was a consciousness of God, but of God as known before the Fall. The Fall is the theological term I use to precisely designate the anthropological event of the original human choice to initiate the first sparagmos; as Generative Anthropology (GA) has seen, the Fall is from the exchange of the sign on the originary scene to the sparagmos, i.e., to the origin of the communal meal.(3) This original human choice was quintessentially human because the very choice presupposes cognition of the originary scene.

To be sure, as it is so cognized today, the source of transcendental existence was cognized in the originary event as that upon which the physical universe as a whole was dependent, i.e., an ultimate source independent of all individual appetite. Yet at the originary event, this cognition was not merely of a source of existence (“whatever that might be,” as our finite reason must confess, ignorant of that source’s essence while unavoidably dependent on its existence for our own existence). Indeed, it was a cognition of this same God known in rational faith as the source of all existence (the “whatever that might be”) yet here, at the originary event, it was both cognized as the transcendent object of communal desire and known concretely and objectively as the formal condition of man’s very communal constitution and the ultimate perfective unity actually possible for human nature. Without God, “we” would not be a “we.” The political animal is such (i.e., political and social) only as a member of the originary “Kingdom of God.”

After the Fall, God was no longer the first-known of human cognition. He receded behind “being-as-first-known” (ens ut primum cognitum): a Thomistic phrase that we may abbreviate with Heideggerian capital-“B” Being. Being-as-first-known is the pre-theoretical ground of all our human cognition, irreducible to anything else in subsequent cognition.(4) Being, as Heidegger well knew, is not God; for when God becomes Being, He is made into an idol.(5) Being-as-first-known names our current post-lapsarian epistemological state, which means that cognition now is no longer perceptually aware of God as the source of communal human nature as it was thus perceptually aware on the originary scene (properly speaking, this originary fullness of perception is what “firstness” is, as I will explain later).(6) Instead, “God” at most is the rational appellation given by the political animal (a.k.a., man) to the ostensive source of all existence. But in post-lapsarian practice, this name is consistently misapplied (in all humanly religious thought) to the (usually material) object at the center of communal desire. That is, God is known to fallen man only through a sparagmos. Before the Fall, God was consciously known on the originary scene as the real, actual source of human scenic community (for which the aborted gesture of appropriation was a sign). After the Fall, the communal meal, not God, must alone bear this meaning. The remembered meal enters the relation of signification by representing the mind-independent, objective existence of the appetitive object even after it is consumed. It thinks a god exists instead of God. It thereby forgets Being and begins to think beings, in the characteristically post-lapsarian human manner: within the ontological difference, as before the Fall, yet now also forgetting that God is the source of Being.

On this basis, then, I argue against Chapter 7 of Signs of Paradox and maintain that anthropology has indeed not overcome metaphysics. Gans rightly observes, “There are times when we cannot rely on our experience because it is not the source of the being of what we experience.”(7) “The return to Being from the preoccupation with beings is a return to originary scenicity”;(8) “real thinking … is about Being rather than beings”;(9) “Empirical anthropology rests on a generative foundation. … the ‘fall’ from Being into beings is originary”;(10) “Being becomes beings in the sparagmos.”(11) But to my mind Gans is wrong to see anthropology as ultimately prior to philosophy and metaphysics. He alleges, “Metaphysical thought … cannot conceive originary being”; for “thinking is a deconstructive search”; “thinking is the antisparagmos that reunites the object’s scattered remains, recomposing Being from beings.”(12) The reason this is an error (of GA overstating its case) is because true metaphysical thought does not make “the concept of being” into “an atemporally stable locus.”(13) For Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, being-as-first-known is not a concept, and therefore Aristotelian-Thomism names Being’s pre-theoretical irreducibility as primum cognitum, “first-known.” The dynamism of pure act is the source of being which, as Aristotle observed, is “said in many ways.” In other words, “an atemporally stable locus” names only a univocal conception of Being. The famous Thomistic “analogy of being,” however, maintains that Being cannot be named in an irreducible univocal sense; because it is irreducibly transcendental, it can only be “said in many ways.”(14) Incidentally, it is for this reason that Heidegger’s deconstruction of metaphysics fails to deconstruct Thomistic metaphysics.(15)

II. The Ontological Difference and a Univocal Originary Scene

Beings depend on Dasein for their being. Without the fissure in the night of being, or in Heidegger’s preferred metaphor, the clearing (Lichtung) of being, which is Dasein, beings could not appear as beings. … Things are not independent of Dasein, but neither are they projections of Dasein. They are only for Dasein, but they are as non-Dasein.
Sean McGrath(16)

Of course only as long as Dasein is (that is, only as long as an understanding of being is ontically possible), ‘is there’ Being [‘gibt es‘ Sein]. When Dasein does not exist, ‘independence’ ‘is’ not either, nor ‘is’ the ‘in-itself’. … In such a case it cannot be said that entities are, nor can it be said that they are not. But now, as long as there is an understanding of Being and therefore an understanding of [objective] presence-at-hand, it can indeed be said that in this case entities will still continue to be.
Martin Heidegger(17)

Only the human being can cognize being-as-first-known. Only the human intellect has Being as its formal object. Other animals have objective worlds that are species-specific, yet what is irreducibly primary in their worlds is not being as such (it is rather some species-specific objective ordering of perception, developed in evolution, that confers that species’ unique adaptive advantage in the environment).(18) But the objective world of the human is scenic. The originary scene conferred language as our species-specifically human adaptive advantage.(19) Yet the ontological difference (between Being and beings) within which human language moves is what, in our post-lapsarian state, permits us to forget that God is the source of Being. If we think the ontological difference at all, we tend to conceive of Being in a univocal way. Even if we think the originary scene, we tend to conceive of Being in a univocal way as the mental projection of representation accomplished by originary signification. The reason for this tendency is that, in our fall from the originary scene, God is no longer directly known in human perceptual awareness as the source of originary Being. On the originary scene, He was. He was directly beheld by the intellect to be the source of the originary scene that the sign had brought into perceptual awareness; but after the Fall, discursive thought was then substituted for this direct vision. And the only way to see the truth of this today is to think the originary scene with the help of metaphysics. Otherwise we will reduce the originary event to something less than what it first was.

There are suggestive parallels between GA’s scenic event and Heidegger’s Ereignis event. Both GA and Heidegger claim to have achieved a non-metaphysical kind of “originary” or “primordial” thinking. I argue that both GA and Heidegger are mistaken inasmuch as they fall into a univocal anthropological conception of Being. Sean McGrath has recently commented on this shortcoming in Heidegger’s anthropological analysis of Dasein. McGrath has observed well how human cognition is the “fissure in the night of being” that Heidegger describes as “the clearing of being”: i.e., that only for humans is being the formal object of cognition. Only with us is the being of something an issue within our object-world. Only for humans can beings be conceived of as mind-independent in their transcendental existence; for only humans have access to the clearing that is our mind-dependent object-world in which being is first known as the irreducibly first, formal object of our cognition. Horses don’t make wills or rail against injustice on the other side of the planet; they cannot linguistically conceive of the possibility that some things do exist on, independently of their cognition of them, or that these things could be otherwise.

Heidegger’s “phenomenology for the Godforsaken,” with its hidden theological agenda (laid bare by McGrath in his path-breaking book), willfully shuts off in advance any access to natural theology’s analogical reasoning. As McGrath suggests, this is due not just to the Lutheran but especially to the Scotistic influence on Heidegger,(20) an influence which ultimately saddles him with a univocal conception of Being. The approach of GA, however, holds more promise in that its account of the originary scene can be reconciled with a proper understanding of the analogy of being given in “being as first known” (ens ut primum cognitum). The danger with GA is that its thinking could remain fallen even when it thinks the originary scene. The danger would be that it too, like Heidegger’s “event” (the event of the “It gives” in which Being temporally gives itself to beings), cannot think behind the Being of beings to the source of Being (“whatever that might be,”(21) as Deely puts it) because GA’s thinking of the ontological difference maintains its post-lapsarian bias to think Being as univocal, i.e., having only one meaning. For GA, this one meaning is the purely anthropological meaning of the pre-sparagmatic Being of the appetitive object recognized by the human community as first known linguistically as the common object of desire, as first mediated by the sign. For Heidegger, this one meaning of Being is the univocal (because purely temporal and finite) Being that (as Gans puts it) “can ‘reveal’ or ‘hide’ itself because it resides in a locus that can be pointed to.”(22) But metaphysics can think the originary scene such that we will neither forget transcendent, analogically-known Being as what human cognition knows as first known, nor will we forget the reality of God as pure act who is known as the source of Being-as-first-known, a reality that humanity only once originally and immediately perceived (i.e., before the Fall). To exemplify how a metaphysical thinking of the originary scene can approach the problem of original sin, I turn now to Hans Urs von Balthasar’s discussion of human cognition both before and after the Fall.

III. Originary Cognition of God and Analogical “Firstness” on the Originary Scene

God is present as the unfelt fullness, as fullness in the void. In paradise God was the primum notum (in faith, not in sight), both quoad nos and in se [the first thing known, both with respect to us and in himself]. Today he is the primum notum only in se, no longer quoad nos. Abstraction and the indifference of the will are not eliminated; they remain the form in which and by way of which faith’s immediacy and concreteness have to actualize themselves.
Hans Urs von Balthasar(23)

I initially explored this problem in my chapter in The Originary Hypothesis (edited by Adam Katz), “Epigenetic Evolution of the Immaterial Intellect on the Originary Scene.”(24) I argue there that GA’s understanding of the originary scene is perfectly compatible with a traditional metaphysical analysis that approaches the problem of hominization in terms of potency, act, and the implied doctrine of fourfold causality correlative with the temporal evolution of dynamic, changing natural units interacting in the environment.(25) I wish to make the further point here that this kind of metaphysical analysis is required to rescue GA from the nominalist conclusions that must be drawn by GA if GA fails to repudiate a univocal conception of Being. For example, Gans writes that the metaphysical thinking of Being is nothing but “the forgetting of the ostensive movement toward the center”(26) because Being has a purely anthropological meaning. But while we can agree with Heidegger than man is the only animal for whom Being appears in the species-specific object-world given by language,(27) this does not mean that the anthropological understanding of how “God exists” (viz., as the ground of society) is ultimately prior to the metaphysical understanding of how “God exists” (as pure act, ipsum esse subsistens, the source of Being). This would be to make the mistake of not distinguishing firstness in terms of its primary meaning as given on the originary scene. Firstness is not primarily the temporal event of an ape (let us call him Adam) who emits the first sign.(28) Prior to that experienced temporal priority is the ontological priority of the “It gives” (es gibt, as Heidegger would say)(29) that gives Being on the originary scene. Adam couldn’t be the (temporally) first sign-emitter if he didn’t first (ontologically) exist, i.e., physically exist. This physical existence of Adam is not an anthropological anachronism, as if it were merely retrojected by metaphysics into the originary scene by a mistaken maneuver of thought, a kind of category mistake that has failed at originary thinking. In fact, we cannot think the originary scene without first recognizing how the being of things before the scene is first semiotically enfolded into the scene (which enfolding, I observe, is “firstness” in its primary meaning).(30) Only after the fall from the originary scene is the confusion about Being and beings rampant and the forgetting of God as the source of Being the subsequent inheritance of our species (an epigenetic cognitional debility impacting in no small way on intellect and will).

To think the giving of this primary meaning of “firstness,” let me pursue my argument by commenting on the treatment of original sin by Hans Urs von Balthasar in The Christian and Anxiety. There Balthasar’s response (and frank tribute) to Kierkegaard makes reference to Heidegger’s “ontological difference” in a critique that clarifies how original sin is to be understood metaphysically. His discussion is highly abstract, but this permits me (given knowledge of GA’s originary scene) to supplement it with concrete examples of that which he speaks. In doing so, I hope to make clear how original sin stands in relation to the originary event’s “intuition of being.”(31) The first human “intuition of being,” I maintain, beheld God as the source of Being with a kind of immediate perceptual awareness (this is the ontological “firstness” concerning which Adam’s temporally first gesture is logically derivative).(32) Only after the Fall does our “intuition of being” fail to perceive God in the direct awareness first given at hominization.(33) For after the Fall our “intuition of being” is reliant solely on the irreducible experience of Being-as-first-known as what structures our species-specific object-world.

In the third chapter of The Christian and Anxiety on the essence of anxiety, Balthasar explains how Being enters the clearing of the scene; that is, Being is what makes possible in human thought the connection of a universal essence to a particular thing. The possibilities unleashed by this quintessentially human mode of existential cognition induce a kind of “vertigo” or “anxiety” as the human mind becomes aware of the absolute transcendence of Being (absolute because it is never an object; for it is always already what is irreducibly primary in cognition) and the utter contingency of the multifarious varieties of beings given in perception.(34) Note how the scene of cognition (inherited from the originary scene) is described: “The mind needs to have within itself a stage that is empty…”(35) The awareness of the emptiness of the empty stage (the “clearing” to which cognition of being-as-first-known opens the human) is awareness of the “yawning gulf in the midst of transcendence and the contingency manifested therein…”: “Being is not a category or a concept; it is that by which the mind, letting go of everything, must itself be apprehended in order to comprehend something.”(36) The mind comprehends beings because Being apprehends the mind (i.e., the mind is captivated by the scenic intellectual power of the originary scene).

Paradoxically, Being differentiates beings by giving them their manifold existences, yet it is thereby itself indifferent to cognition, since cognition is unable to differentiate Being itself.(37) This means that contingency can never be fully surmounted because the intelligible necessity of existents can never be exhaustively derived from Being itself; conversely, Being itself cannot be dismissed as a chimerical concept, as if the positivism of existents were the only reality, because without the actuality of Being that grounds human cognition (Being-as-first-known) there would never be any positive knowledge of beings in the first place.(38) Thus the abstraction that belongs to cognition can never be satiated, at one end, since Being is irreducible to differentiation (i.e., transcendent); nor, at the other end, can the will ever be satiated by attaining this or that being, since the contingency those beings manifest always falls short of the state of the will’s indifference before Being (i.e., cognition can always ask itself whether the contingency attained was ever really “… worth the effort expended”).(39) Balthasar describes well how the maturing child becomes aware of this vertigo proper to human cognition; for example, for this child, no toy can ever fully satisfy the promise of the transcendent that she was opened up to by the wonder which she first caught sight of in play with toys.(40)The human being living in the ontological difference is opened up by Being to the abstraction of the intellect, and to the indifference of the will, both of which we experience standing in the clearing before all beings.(41)

The modes of abstraction and indifference of the will, which Balthasar has described thus in terms of the openness and the anxiety concomitant with living in the ontological difference, are not totally consequent on the Fall, because “the ontological difference is by necessity the very expression of creatureliness itself, whatever state the creature may be,”(42) i.e., a pre- or post-lapsarian state. Hence, before the Fall, the human creature is characterized by openness alone: man’s openness to the ontological difference (i.e., knowing that beings are not Being, viz., that beings have a source in Being).(43) But, after the Fall, man is characterized by openness and anxiety (and this is what is named by “the theological truth of the fall into sin”).(44)

Balthasar describes God as primum notum (“first known”) before the Fall, yet only so known within the ontological difference:(45) “We are not saying that Adam saw God face to face … [but that] the space within Adam that became a place of emptiness and indifferent freedom through the withdrawal of the divine presence … [became so because] God, though not seen face to face, [originally for Adam] is the most present, most concrete reality, whence all that is substantial in the world receives its equally certain and unquestionable rightness, obviousness, and nameability.”(46) This is what it means for God to “walk and talk” with Adam “in the evening breeze of paradise”: i.e., God before the Fall is still “invisible, yet as tangible and all-pervasive as the wind,”(47) says Balthasar, explaining the metaphor in Genesis.(48) Thus Adam, in addition to having, to a certain (pre-lapsarian) degree, the abstraction and indifference of the will that characterizes discursive thought, also has an intuition of Being, “an intuitive thinking ability, which one would have to understand less as ‘infused knowledge’ [given by grace] than as a [natural] knowledge arising from the concrete life of faith in God.”(49) Balthasar describes in this way the originary openness without the anxiety, yet which had the cognitional potential to become an openness with post-lapsarian anxiety:

Since Adam is a creature, the dimension between the universal and the particular, between the existent and Being, subsists for him, too. But no void yawns between either of these tensions, because both the universal and the particular, both the existent and Being itself are for him transparent toward God, who, standing beyond both of them, grants that he may be known in both.(50)

This is the transparency of “the evening breeze”: “In him we live, and move, and have our being.”(51)

To try my hand at another suggestive metaphor, I would say: think of, not just the breeze, but also the sky, as a metaphor for the clearing of Being. After the Fall, human cognition sees a sky, an object-world something like what our eye sees when it looks to the night sky: the stars, the bright points of light, are beings; the blackness, the void in between, is Being. We navigate the world in which we live by this ontological difference. How we chart our course is a matter of abstraction (Polaris represents the North) and of indifference of will (in the night of Being, we choose to set sail through the dark, either here or there, off into the unknown). But before the Fall, the difference was as night is to day. In pre-lapsarian paradise, the sky was lit up by the fullness of Being itself and in the full light of its clearing the world in which we lived was seen in the full measure of its rightness: the sparagmos had not occurred; resentment had not brought on the darkness. Thus God Himself was manifest, in the way that the sun shines in the bright and clear, fully lit sky of day. The sky was not defined by the absence of the sun, by the absence of God in the darkness of Being. Instead we lived and moved in the light of the day. To be sure, faith knew the sun as the source of the daylight, but of course, as faith, could not gaze directly upon it; instead, it knew God as the source of the light of Being that lights up all beings (just as we too know the sun as the source of the light of day and yet do not gaze directly into it).

For Adam it was obvious: God is not Being, but rather the source of Being, and neither God nor Being are to be confused with beings. This hard-won metaphysical insight of Aristotle and St. Thomas is not contradicted by the originary scene; rather it precisely describes the structure of the broad daylight (“the clearing”) of the originary event, which is still with us today, even in all our night-darkened cognition. Moreover, the nominalist temptation for GA is to discount the actuality of daylight, to deny the actuality of Being and yet affirm the actuality of beings.(52) Yet, in this regard, the theological doctrine is monitory and serves to re-illuminate for the human intellect a basic truth: Were the reality of Being to be denied as essential to the scene, this would in turn render the event of the scene itself into nothing but an empty nominalism, a fiction of the mind, with no Being beyond the being of the mind. But the being of the human mind is not “firstness” itself. The “firstness” that the mind came to know in the originary event was not created ex nihilo by the projection of its own communal self. It was, rather, the “firstness” of Being itself eventuating, creating man in the open light of day in which God’s existence is obvious. Only today, if we give in to the nominalist temptation, do we dare to think that there is no sun, no God as source of the Being of beings. Yet such is our temptation, given the sun’s absence on the other side of the world of the dark night. God is present, even though we are tempted by thinking to think he is absent.

IV. The Nominalist Temptation: To Think “God” is Only a Word

So, permitting ourselves some indulgent empirical speculation, let us suppose that a small group of prehumans (let’s call them group A) are roaming the African savanna 2.5 million years ago. They stumble on a group of hyenas who have made a fresh kill of antelope. They scare off the hyenas with rocks and sticks and screaming and such. Surrounding the kill they approach the bleeding gobs of fur and meat. But then, each sees the others’ appropriative gesture, and each hesitates for a moment. Each individual perceives the other’s gesture in a paradoxical oscillation between the central object and the peripheral aborted gestures of the others. Lo! the aborted gesture of appropriation is transformed into a sign: the deferral of mimetic conflict through representation. After this hesitation, the ‘division’ of the kill follows in the ensuing sparagmos. But this sparagmos is forever haunted by the memory of the sign, which demonstrated to each individual that his relationship to the central appetitive object is mediated by the other’s desire. Henceforth each individual will be unable to appropriate the central object without realizing that he is participating in a social act that is mediated by the other’s desire.
Richard van Oort(53)

Our post-lapsarian state renders us unable to see beyond the Being of GA’s anthropology to God without the help of metaphysics (which, as Benedict Ashley has observed, is better termed today meta-science,(54) the critical self-awareness of human thought by which it reflects on the possibility and actuality of all that is). Metaphysics’ preamble to faith is indispensable because of the dispensation under which we live : viz., that Being, not God, is what we know first after the Fall (for which reason, the role of divine revelation, in which God gratuitously gives what He wills, stands over and above the bare minimum of what is indispensable with respect to human reason: and revelation stands not opposed, but rather works to counteract the species-specific downward “gravitational” tendencies bequeathed by the Fall; for example, in both affirming the reality of the “firstness” of the Paradise event and the reality of our debilitating disinheritance, intellectually and volitionally, after the Fall).

The sunny day is the original state of innocence in the ontological difference. The starry night is the post-lapsarian state of anxiety, our current fallen state of living in the ontological difference with God absent to direct perception. Our post-lapsarian natural inheritance to henceforth know God naturally by relying solely on abstraction was inaugurated by the achievement of originary thinking on the scene; there too, indifference of the will oscillated between sign and referent (for indifference of the will is the generated originary esthetic pleasure humans have in contemplating the sign and its referent).(55) The Fall was triggered by the originary resentment that then and ever after tempts us to appropriate the center.(56) The nominalist temptation today is to say that God was not present to Adam before the Fall, to say that God was an imaginary scenic presence, entirely conjured in his sacred being by society’s mediation. (“All that God is is our name for the giver of the event of the sacred communal meal.”) To affirm that He really was present is to affirm “firstness” in its primary meaning and to avoid misunderstanding “firstness” by way of a derivative, analogous sense (whether temporal or mental or otherwise). Because either the originary event happened, or it did not. If it did, and if we have the minimal faith — the purely natural faith, accessible to unaided reason — that it did, then this event of being had to have had its source in God — “whatever that might be.” We know that He Who Is exists because we have cognitional access to the firstness of the originary Event, es gibt: It Gives the essence of man. True, an ape aborted a gesture of appropriation, and contributed that much; “but existence is always on loan from God and cannot be borrowed elsewhere.”(57) And existence is not just a word, a nominalist flatus vocis (noise signifying nothing real): it is an event; nay, it is the originary event that gives all, now as then. Yes, there is a human dimension onto this event that cognizes it species-specifically, i.e., with the imaginary, the scenic, the mind-dependent; but for all that, the event is no less shot through with the clearing and the lighting, a filament and strand of the mind-independently real God,(58) for it was on the originary scene that man in all innocence saw the unveiling of the supremely real, the source of all actuality (scenic and otherwise), the God Who Is, and who, yes indeed, might still be thought today semiotically: i.e., knowable only in the darkened-night semiotic web by which man navigates the ontological difference. For the human is able to understand not only the mind-dependent (like every other animal with an object-world) but also the mind-independent (which the human alone knows in its existence as either woven into the web or, analogously, as that which stands behind it sustaining it as a source).(59)

Gans writes, “The deepest mystery of metaphysics is its repression or forgetting of the relation between the Being of the scene, to which religion attributes personhood as God, and the metaphysical scene-as-such on which objects present themselves to our ‘objective’ contemplation.”(60) As I have argued, however, true religion and true metaphysics does not confuse God with Being (only fallen religion makes Being into an idol, forgetting the source of Being, the “It gives” [es gibt] of the actual event behind Being). Thus it would be better to say that “the deepest mystery of original sin is its repression or forgetting of the relation between the Being of the [originary] scene” and the post-lapsarian metaphysical scene-as-such (for which Being is now first known), the post-lapsarian irreducible “intuition of being” that constitutes our species-specific object-world. Absent divine intervention (or better: in conjunction with it, nature offering itself up to the gratuity of grace), metaphysics is indispensable for originary thinking about our redemption from original sin. Because if God truly exists, then anthropology has to abandon the nominalist temptation and to think semiotically. It would then be underway to truly thinking theology.

My thesis in this investigation is that the anthropological idea of God may be of interest and might possess value for both believers and nonbelievers, theists and atheists, precisely because it will satisfy neither. I assume that an initial moment of intellectual dissatisfaction can be followed by a grasp of satisfying new paradigms, that thinking is “an effort rather than a pleasure.”(1) Thinking people for whom the anthropological idea of God might prove helpful may well not be able to set aside their resistance to its oddity long enough to enjoy the possibilities for new thinking that it opens. In one corner, imagine (for example) a certain type of scientific materialist atheist who never grows weary of attacking belief in God as unsophisticated, immature, or stupid (see Sam Harris; Eagleton on Dawkins). In the other corner, imagine a certain type of devout religious believer who stands grimly unwilling to grant modern science the epistemological authority it seems to have earned even despite the reality that the “the objectives that characterize science as the thing it is” include epistemological self-limitation (Rescher 246).(2) To the extent that the representatives in each corner bind themselves to dogmatic integrity, no idea however potent will move them. The dogmatic by definition is that cast of mind which resents any appeal that it try out new thinking (even by way of hypothesis), whether the appeal offers a new object of faith or a new truth of reason. The dogmatic (we might say) expels the hypothetical. My audience consists of those puzzled by people who would refuse to reflect even momentarily on the possibility of an anthropological idea of God; it consists of those who witness the dialogues of the deaf between “religious believers” and “secular atheists” with alternating resignation and impatience. I note in passing that the founder of generative anthropology has declared as one of his priorities the hope of providing something like a new language that might mediate between science and faith in a hypothetical “enterprise of reconciliation” (OT 41): “Perhaps the deepest motivation for Generative Anthropology is the need to raise the level of our discourse about the existence of God” (“Does God Exist?”; see also SF 14-15).

I propose to develop this thesis by exploring three affirmations of the Divine Being proposed by the anthropological idea of God, in relation to the ways that those affirmations might be related to positions of religious believers and secular atheists in turn. I will, however, first offer, as a friendly extra for the non-initiate, preparatory to the exposition of the anthropological idea of God, a quick exposition of the originary event. The affirmations and their respective exfoliations will follow.(3)

Why the “generative” in generative anthropology? It is an anthropology based on a hypothesis about the specific set of circumstances that might or must have generated the emergence of humankind from its nearest animal ancestors. Generative anthropology takes representation, specifically human language, as the essential component of the human; it proposes, boldly challenging the ruling wisdom of ascetic Darwinian evolutionary gradualism, the punctualist thesis that human language emerged in an event. An event consists of the transition from one set of circumstances to another. Likewise, an event requires a scene: it must happen somewhere, in some place. GA is scenic anthropology: because it takes linguistic representation, the reciprocal exchange of signs, to be the essence of the human, its peculiar preoccupation is with the hypothetical place that it calls the scene of representation. This is the hypothetical scene on which human language originated and on which human language continues to be used. The scene of representation is that place in which a hypothesized generative set of circumstances produced the event of originary signification. Generative anthropology proposes that human beings are best understood not as grammatical subjects of propositional truth alone, afloat in a metaphysical universe of context-free falsifiable claims, but rather as anthropological entities acting in a historically identifiable scenic context, aware of each other and aware of central objects of desire and resentment and aware of the signs they are using. For generative anthropology, human culture is one, and culture is scenic.(4)

Why “minimal” anthropology, as we frequently hear the adjective repeated–whence the obsession with minimal thinking? The originary hypothesis describes in minimal terms the set of circumstances (again, the event) that generated human beings from our animal ancestry as those which led to the abortive gesture of appropriation which came to be remembered as the first human sign. Its pursuit of minimality reflects its adherence to the scientific principle that “mysteries should not be multiplied beyond necessity” (OL 1). If the human is one, it is now as it was then. A specific set of circumstances, an event, when described, is best described, if one wishes to aspire to science rather than myth-making or fictionalizing, in minimal terms. Information gathered for the mere sake of gathering can impede understanding, block hypothesis formation, and distract one from the work of proposing a model for the explanation of the very empirical observations one is collecting. The mere accumulation of data, the collection of examples, and the thick description of particulars do not in themselves make an anthropology. A minimal, generative anthropology is interested in the minimal conditions for the generation of the human from the pre-human in a scenic event: the human after all is “the only animal for whom collectively remembered scenes, or events, exist” (SF 7).

Here is a quick re-sketching of the generative set of circumstances proposed by the originary hypothesis. Our protohuman ancestors are hominoid creatures who possess a highly developed social order (as many primates studied by contemporary ethology have); they exhibit a noticeable degree of social co-operation in (for example) the hunt; they use tools; they use indexical signs, as many animal species do. But they are also more intensely mimetic than any other primate species. Their being more intensely mimetic than any other species on earth means that they have a heightened capacity for mutual imitation which leads them into “violent” intraspecific competition for objects of appetite; this rivalrous competition is so extremely intense, it frequently threatens to destroy the group.

Imagine the scene of a group of these our hypermimetic proto-human ancestors surrounding an object of appetite. Imagine them pointing at that object of appetite in gestures of appropriation, moving toward it. Imagine a certain equality of aggressive, mutually reinforcing imitation–as they point toward the object, they are aware of each other pointing toward the object, and aware of the object. They are aware of each other being aware of the object. But this mere pointing is not yet the human sign. This is still only indexical reference, not paradoxical ostensive symbolizing. The object is just a food object and the animals pointing at the object are “aware” of the object only as an object of appetite. This is almost the “abortive gesture of appropriation” that marks the passage from the human to the non-human, but it is missing the abortiveness. It is not quite a human sign yet because at any instant, one of the animals in the violence-threatened dominance order may break the mimetic competition and appropriate the object all to himself. The pecking order, the dominance hierarchy, will then re-establish itself and do the best it can, via the forms of “instinctual” restraint, to preserve the existence of this hominoid group.

The first use of the human sign, by contrast, happens when, in the midst of extremely intense mimetic crisis, one of those hominoids making indexical gestures of appropriation aborts his gesture of appropriation and becomes aware of his gesture of appropriation as a thing in itself. For this hominoid, the gesture has become, paradoxically, a thing in itself. The sign has become a thing in itself, even though it is not really the thing. The gestures and sounds themselves become–however fleetingly–objects of the creature’s attention. The abortive gesture of appropriation has deferred the creature’s violence, however momentarily. The first user of the human sign, because he is aware of the sign as a thing in itself, intends his gesture. He is aware that he is using a sign as an intentional thing-in-itself. His abortive gesture of appropriation represents his intention not to appropriate the central object. But this awareness of the sign as a thing-in-itself produces a new form of awareness of the object: the object is now significant, made so by the sign. He is aware not only of the object of appetite, but aware of the object as differentially significant, as something which his intention not to appropriate, as represented in his abortive gesture of appropriation, is making significant on a scene of representation. The central object is not merely being pointed at, it is now being signified: it has become at once the first object of non-instinctual attention (the first significant object) and the first object of intentional non-appropriation. All this happens in an instant.

But to stop there would be misleading, even inaccurate. The first human sign user alone can not and does not create human language: the human sign emerges only in a communal context. Strictly speaking, if no other hominoid in the group imitates the first, if no other second (third, fourth) grasps the invisible intention not to appropriate of the original sign user, the group will not be changed, nor will humanity have emerged.(5) The sign will not “take”: the human emerges as a community or it does not emerge at all.(6) Other members of the proto-human group must notice this first sign-user’s abortive gesture of appropriation; they must imitate the sign as a gesture intending not to appropriate the central object, making their own abortive gestures of appropriation. However brief and fleeting this shared discovery/invention of the sign might have been, the users of the sign, after the violently appetite-satisfying consumption of the food object, remember the use of the sign. Its transfiguration of the object offers each of them, in an originary form of esthetic pleasure, momentary relief from the violence of mimetic competition (relief from the violence of their resentment of the central object’s absolute inaccessibility, relief from the violence of their enduring the absolutely unsatisfiable desire for it). They have experienced the freedom to represent the thing, the freedom to choose representation of the thing as different from the thing itself; and that experience of the event of scenic representation has been memorable. After having consumed the object, the group of humans, the originary human community, together remembers the scenic event, the temporarily peace-bringing effect of the mimetically induced human sign. An event, by definition, must be memorable. The sign gives the originary human community access to a new level of being–the level of the shared communal event, the being of that which is collectively memorable.(7)

Why is this event memorable? It is memorable because in the violent intensity of mimetic competition for the object, the shared sign defers violence through representation. The central object has become something different from a mere object of appetite or instinctual attention. It remains that, but it is now more than that. The central object occupies a new level of being. It has been transfigured. Once it has been represented, it has become an object of desire (as distinct from appetite): each member of the community desires it all the more, precisely because no one can possess it to one’s self as long as the ostensive sign defers everyone’s appropriative violence at once. Once represented, what was the object of appetite becomes an object of communal human resentment: all in the community on the periphery attribute to the central object an intentional self-withholding equivalent to their own intentional uses of the sign. What the nascent human beings now share, what now makes them “equal” to each other in the originary community, is their access to the exchangeable ostensive sign as a means of deferring violence through representation. Just as their use of the sign defers both their violent appropriation and consumption of the central desire-object and their violence toward each other, so too does that central desire object seem now to possess its own transfigured power of agency, to be resisting their desire for consumption of it in a new way. The central object toward which all were reaching and which all refrained from appropriating is the firstsacred object revelatory of the central Being, because it is the object of communally universal desire and communally universal resentment. The level of being created by the originary sign is that of the Being of the sacred and significant. The category of the sacred, however, is not the idea of God. It is undifferentiated. One can conceive of many sacred objects that one need not identify with God. The central sacred object itself is no more God than the pyramid is ancient Egypt or the sleeping body is the soul of the beloved.

We are now prepared to consider originary thinking’s anthropological idea of God. Here are two passages from the relevant chapter in Originary Thinking (1993).

This revelation can only be understood, and this from the very beginning, as God’s appearance rather than his subsistence in the [particular physical] being in question. For the idea of God is the idea of what subsists in the physical being’s absence, and this supratemporal subsistence of the scenic center with respect to the presence of the temporal being that fills it is a direct consequence of the originary experience of representation. [….] The sign can only designate what occupies the center of the scene, and the being of this center, the center-as-being, is what we call God. If this is true for us now, it must have been true from the beginning, for there is no point at which God, however he may have been understood through the mediation of figural representations, could have been understood as less than this. (38) [emphasis added]

And a second:

Use of the sign creates the scene as much as the scene provokes the sign. [….] Some subsistent signified must be defined to which the sign as such can universally refer. This signified, conceived not as a mental construct but as a being, is what we call God.

God is the central locus of the scene of representation conceived as a being. This being does not reveal itself as such; it is revealed only in the figure of whatever occupies this locus in the originary scene. God and human are born simultaneously from this scene; this is the immediate consequence of the hypothesis. (40)

If I were to choose one sentence from these passages to encapsulate the anthropological idea of God, it would be: “God is the central locus of the scene of representation conceived as a being” (40). This formulation sounds so abstract that the experimental scientist smelling of laboratory chemicals might shrug it off as a philosophical irrelevance, while the theologian brushing from his shoulders dust from library books about Yahweh, Jesus, or Buddha, might complain of its austere impersonality. Nevertheless, I contend that in the context of the wider literature of the founding texts of GA it is no stretch to venture the assertion that the being of this God may be affirmed as Being. Gans has written that “the originary hypothesis does not require us to believe in God because it does not presuppose the anteriority of the sacred to the human” (“Does God”). Yes; but meanwhile, however, the hypothesis invites us to believe in a God whose minimal Being for us becomes indispensable with the emergence of the human. The anthropological idea of God creates a space in which we may “believe in” God even while believing “in modern science” without reservation, hesitation, or embarrassment. The being of this God may be affirmed as that of a formally and paradoxically necessary Being; as that of an afigural Being; and as that of a Being whose sensed presence is inseparable from the ever-renewed process of human love. According to the anthropological idea of God, where and as humans love each other, God is.

This God may be affirmed as a formally necessary being. By “formally necessary,” I mean both that the human sign cannot come into operation without the collective belief in this being; and, equally, the collective belief itself is a formal necessity of the originary event that GA proposes. Generative anthropology’s hypothesis of language origin is a formal theory of representation. In the originary use of the sign, the human community owes its coherence to a shared memory of the Being who comes to be understood (much, much later in historical time) under the name of God.(8) What prevents the event we have described from happening just once but not again? The working of “significant memory.” In the process of using ostensive symbolic reference to recall the sacred central object, our first ancestors came to understand the central locus of the scene itself as being occupied by a Being separable from the particular object that revealed it: “As the center of the scene remains after its occupant has been dismembered in the sparagmos, so the sign remains that refers to it. On this hypothesis, the being we call ‘God’ is the permanently subsisting signified of the originary sign, the being whose permanence corresponds to the permanence of the sign itself” (“Why Do We”). It is only that invisible being, the Being understood to have been revealed by the (now destroyed-and-consumed) sacred, beautiful, or desirable object in the center, which deserves to be named God. The invisibility of the sacred Being may be considered an effect of the invisibility of the intentionality of the first sign-user.(9)

The formal necessity of the Being who deserves the name-of-God derives from the fact that the paradoxical relationship between sign and object, between peripheral sign-user and sacred central object, is the relationship that itself generates the mimetic intentionality which distinguishes human representation from animal sign-systems. The transfiguration of the central object of appetite into a sacred object resented and desired, and the subsequent remembering of the Being who subsists in the central locus in the absence of the consumed central food object, are real-world effects that could not possibly have followed from any property of the food object alone. The immanent object of appetite, as revelatory figure of divine being, may be perceived; but the Being of the sacred center itself is imperceptible by definition because its being, on a new level, is the effect of the object being intended as the transcendental signified of the sign-users’ abortive gestures. The transfiguration and being-remembered of the central locus conceived as a Being are effects of the particular set of circumstances that moved our proto-human ancestors onto the level and scene of human being, and yet our ancestors chose to be so moved. That event-choice instantiates the originary paradox of the cosmic necessity of human freedom from the cosmos.

Let us pause over the originary paradoxical truth of the coeval emergence of God and the human. The scenic set of “deterministic” circumstances and the hair’s-breadth space in which there was the “free will” to use the sign must be described together, as a formal paradox. The originary event was a paradoxical situtation, a situation of crisis in which (I repeat myself), were we to view it from the outside, we could not perceptually distinguish the purposeful from the accidental. We freely chose to use the sign; we had no choice but either to use the sign or never to have become human. In our humanness we are never outside this scene of the deferral of violence through representation; we remain inside it; we are its heirs.(10) To claim that the event might never have happened is to tell a truth; but to tell that truth is equally only a way of acknowledging our awareness that it has in fact happened. Why resent the scandal of the possibility that it may never have happened,(11) when the originary event has in fact “always already” happened, as our awareness of the scandal in itself tells us? (12) The intentionality we exercise in proposing the originary hypothesis itself is one with the intentionality of our earliest human ancestors who deferred their violence in their shared performance of the name-of-God.

Similarly, to claim that our originary freedom to choose the sign and so name God depended on or resulted from a particular set of chance-evolved “random” cosmological circumstances is no more demeaning to us as humans than it demeans the cosmos to say that we are the only species able to represent it. The scientist who says this “paradoxical formal necessity” of God makes God an irrelevance is one who wishes to reduce God to something other than the paradoxical, transcendental Other of the human; such a scientist wants to confine the being of God to the space of the grammatical subject of a proposition that can be falsified, verified, tested, disproved. He wants God to be a “thing” either on or off the scene of representation. But God is the One without whom there would have been no remembered scene in the first place. God is “the central locus of the scene of representation conceived as a being.” The point is to recognize that the being of God can not be so grasped, as if God were a perceptible entity on the same level with a sasquatch, a unicorn, the ghost of one’s grandmother or the angel on one’s shoulder. Any truth of faith must be an ostensive truth, and the truth of God’s being is that of an invisible intentionality the verification of the existence of which is by definition inaccessible to “logic and evidence” alone.(13)

Meanwhile, the religious believer who says this “paradoxical formal necessity” reduces God to an epiphenomenon of language refuses in a diffferent resistance GA’s offer of a minimal common ground between belief and nonbelief. For originary thinking invites us not at all to condescend to God as a mere epiphenomenon of language, but rather to recognize God as the One whose name is that of the very Being without belief in whom human language, and humanity itself, would never have come to be. We had to name God; God had to be for us, even if we now enjoy the freedom to leave God behind. The invisible Being named by the name-of-God was, is, will be, and always will have been the originary transcendental Other of the human community. The human sign operates its intentional effects on the basis of a faith in that level of being unique to the human sign, the level of the meaningful; if the day ever comes when the human has been reduced to the utterly meaningless, that day will be one in which we have witnessed the total disappearance of human faith in the sign as a shared meaningful gesture. Equivalent to such a total disappearance of faith in representation would be not the universality of the denial that God “exists,” but (something worse) the universal denial of the very possibility of the transcendental intentionality of the human sign, of which God was the first signified. I am inviting the religious believer to notice the way that it would be inappropriately demeaning for God to be anything less than, or anyone Other than, the unique Being whose inaccessible, inimitable centrality on the scene of representation makes possible the meaningfulness of human language.(14) The atheist who fears and wishes to avoid human servility to God can likewise find meeting ground here with the believer who fears and wishes to avoid human denigration of God in the space opened up by our anthropological idea: in the light of the originary hypothesis, to affirm that the being of God is formally necessary is no more to make the human shamefully dependent on God than to make God dependent on the human.

The being of this God may be affirmed as that of an afigural Being. In its minimality, generative anthropology owes much to the Mosaic revelation in particular as the first revelation of the monotheistic God. As Gans claims, the “primary figure” of Judaism is Exodus, withdrawal: “God withdraws from the figural, which is also the sacrificial” (SP 152). When Yahweh announces to Moses his name in the form of a declarative sentence, Yahweh rejects all possibility of being assimilated to any particular figurable entity: “God’s withdrawal in Exodus from the figure itself signifies the revelation that the basis of human scenicity is not figural, that it inheres in the circular–minimally, triangular–structure of mimesis” (SP 109). The afigurality of God is the guarantee of Divine Being’s never being rivalled by another, for anything figurable can be the rival of a substitute figure. Nothing and nobody can substitute for the God whose one unique presence creates the human; God must be without rivals. The radical iconoclasm of Jewish narrative monotheism affirms the absolute difference between God and the human, the absolute difference between the Being who subsists as the occupant of the unfigurable sacred center and the human sign-users on the periphery of the scene of representation who seek to find the appropriate name for this Being, only to discover, at the limit, the refusal of the Being to be named anything other than God the unfigurable.(15)

This afigurality of the minimal notion of God proposed by generative anthropology seems to impose on the Western religious believer, especially those of us unpractised in “mystical thought” and attached to imagining the personhood of God, certain constraints which may initially feel uncomfortably ascetic.(16) For all anthropomorphic images attached to God, all human qualities ascribed to God by metaphorical slippage or esthetic indulgence, in the context of the minimality of the anthropological idea of God need to be delicately and respectfully set aside for a time.(17) Generative anthropology is far from hostile to the essential human need for esthetic pleasure (an understatement!), but equally it invites us to distinguish between the rigorously enforced communal austerity of sacred experience and the freer pleasures of the esthetic experience, with its oscillation between the recognized inviolability of the central object and its (pleasurable) imaginary possession. The esthetic is an effect that cannot be coerced (OT 122-23), which characteristic itself presupposes its freedom from the institutional constraints that generate the experience of the sacred. The afigurality of the Being proposed by the anthropological idea of God is one with the minimality of GA’s description of the essential components of the human as those able to be conveyed in the description of one event. If we wish to entertain the anthropological idea of God, we will need to detach ourselves from the numberless colourful, vivid idols we are tempted to place in the sacred center. The anthropological idea of God is certainly not one of a sky-occupying deity; it is not an idea of, to borrow some phrases from Errol Harris, “a kind of omnipresent ghost, who arranges natural objects and directs natural events independent or in spite of scientific laws, or some supernatural potentate able to punish men when they sin and reward them when they are virtuous, protect them when they are threatened and comfort them when they are in distress” (47). Local fundamentalisms are politely requested to consider suspending some of their esthetic pleasures so as to permit themselves the opportunity to profit, however tentatively, from the bracing effect of trying to grasp the exchangeable universal of the minimal anthropological idea of God. The idea is not a constitutional common denominator in which all religious people must believe. Rather, it is the non-violent presupposition of the presence of the Being who guarantees the exchangeability of human signs that itself enables dialogue about plural objects of belief.

Meanwhile, the liberal theologies that go through epistemological contortions designed to find room for a God of the Gaps to “intervene” in human history–whether via notions of GDA (general divine action) or SDA (special divine action), notions of God as the ultimate mathematical planner or of God the designer of cosmological evolution who ensures that the human species somehow fulfills a purpose cancelling out the “waste, chance, and pain” that atheistic Darwinians rub our faces in with sadistic glee–such liberal theologies find a friendly challenge here. For the anthropological idea of God quietly sets aside the dilemma of what we ought to do with the vast eons of cosmic activity prior to the emergence of the human. It permits us to affirm the being that God is, but this Being is a God who is for us even to the extent that he simply may not have existed before we (of the human community) did. Or we might as well say that if God did exist before we did, what he was “doing” then really does not matter to us as humans. The rocks and the glaciers, the protoplasm and the dinosaurs have no need of God as we do. The believer need not necessarily find this coeval emergence of God and the human an insult to God. A little reflection opens the possibility that the anthropological idea of God, on the contrary, increases our intimacy with the being of God and unites God with us in ways hitherto impossible for a God trapped in metaphysical theology needlessly preoccupied, perhaps vainly preoccupied, with the unanswerable question of the ethical meaningfulness of the existence of gravity and galaxies and gases, microbes and nanoseconds and quarks. None of these need God, nor need they be thought of as calling upon God so that they might exist. Only we humans came into being by calling upon the Being whose Otherness was memorable enough to bring us together in remembering its goodness, beauty, power and the like. Only we need God in our human way.

Nor does saying that God and the human are coeval imply that our originary ancestors intended to make up God, like the cynical priests of resentful Enlightenment fantasy against whom Voltaire directed his imperative écraser l’infame. The anthropological idea of God proposes rather that our ancestors intended the formally necessary affirmation of the being of God, which is something quite different from making up a fiction for our convenience. Indeed, there was nothing convenient in our naming of God: at the moment of originary mimetic crisis, we were–paradoxically–just as much bound by the necessity of naming God as we were suddenly presented with the freedom to name God or not. The paradox might be put thus: in exercising the freedom to speak the name-of-God, we were doing what was necessary for us to become human. God comes into being for us as we become human. Therefore, we may enjoy the truth of our common minimal human faith in saying that God at the origin did not coerce us into naming his divine Being, but neither was that naming possible without its having had to be God alone whom we must have found worthy to be so named. The anthropological idea of God is not an argument that a God who existed before we humans did made us in such a way that we had no choice but to make him up, victims of Freud’s necessary illusion or Marx’s stupefying opium smoke. Rather, the anthropological idea of God proposes that humanity was “made” in a unique event which could not have come about without the presence of a Being understood by the originary human community as a Being whom we would have to name God because of Its difference from us, as the One revealed by our intention not to destroy the central object of desire and resentment by which the being is revealed, but rather to signify the object (and thus reveal the Divine Being who alone makes the object into an object of human attention).

The being whom we name God is the Other of humanity in the sense that our experience of transcendence (as modelled by our experience of the sign) is most minimally described as the experience of the subsistent central Being on the scene of representation whose minimal presence makes the maximal difference between the human coming into existence or not. The afigurality of the God of humanity dovetails properly with the minimality of generative anthropology.

What implications does the afigurality of the minimal God whose being is affirmed by generative anthropology have for atheistic cosmology? On the one hand, the atheist will have to give up the very same thing the idolatrous believer must give up: a preoccupation with idols themselves. It is a fact worth noticing that the cartoon idols, anthropomorphic divinities and “supernatural” agents dear to naïve religious believers are just as dear to atheistic iconoclasts: the intensity of attachment to the central object as figure is equal in each case to that of the other. The difference is only that the believer wishes the sacred figure to be kept securely intact for serene contemplation while the atheist wishes the figure to remain eternally available for repeated episodes of pleasurable demolition: “resentment of the divinity outlasts faith in it” (SP 68-69). On the other hand, the atheist is presented with a polite invitation here. We ask that the atheist concede only that “the process of [the] forgetting” of the idea of God (OT 42), which process has been going on since the very dawn of human history (when humans began to realize via the plurality of signifiers that the persistence of the scene of representation itself did not require the presence of the sacred central being in a single incarnation), is a process that “can never be concluded” (OT 42). The atheist must always remain “someone who rejects belief in God, not someone for whom the very concept is empty” (OT 43).

But what would it mean to refrain from claiming that the very concept of God is empty? Why does generative anthropology ask the atheist to make this concession, ask the atheist not to insist on such an emptiness? The gesture of generative anthropology is to go beyond the declarative sentence to the ostensive gesture that founds human language, to propose for our reflection the originary ostensive gesture that determines the scenicity and eventfulness of human culture. It is certainly possible in the universe of purely philosophical discourse (of “metaphysics” as Gans defines it) to keep submitting “God” to the test as if God were just another thing in the universe that we can name or not name, another entity the existence of which we can verify or not verify. This is God as the subject of the human concept, God as a being subject to the form of the philosophical concept. But the point of the anthropological idea of God is to free us, and to free the idea of God, from the category error that consists precisely in failing to recognize the difference between the domain of the ostensive truth of faith (of which religion has been up until now the only guardian) and that of the declarative truth of reason (of which philosophy, including natural philosophy or modern science as we know it now, has been the champion).

Let us submit God to the test. Let us say: God exists. Let us say: God does not exist. (She loves me, she loves me not.) In forming these sentences, we step outside the scene of ostensive signification already, because we are imagining alternative models of the cosmos, one universe that includes a being called “God,” one universe that excludes the being called God. But the ostensive truth of faith, without the prior operations of which the declarative truth of reason never could have evolved, operates in a domain where one does not have the luxury to propose alternative models of the universe: “In times of crisis, God is present, not in some ineffable sense, but as the interlocutor of last resort. God is whoever is named by the name we call out in our panic” (“Unique Source” 51-52). The luxury of considering alternative models of the universe follows only from the advent of declarative language.

The invitation indirectly extended to positivist philosophy by way of this request for the sacrificial concession of the claim the very concept of God is empty may be described as an invitation to philosophy that it engage with anthropology by acknowledging the need, which belongs to philosophy as well after all, to find a hypothetical model that might explain the origin of the human language philosophy itself deploys with such admirable care and sophistication. “Language just evolved” explains nothing. Generative anthropology hypothesises the place of a paradoxical ostensive sign at the origin of human language, the sign that freely names the sacred Being because the sacred Being must be named. The suggestion is that before we can have imagined God not existing, we must have already affirmed that God is; nobody plays “she loves me, she loves me not,” unless he already has a meaningful “she” in mind. In minimal terms, the level of being called “the meaningful” must itself emerge before we can decide whether this or that particular proposition is true or not. Fiction is not a deformation of originary truth; on the contrary, “fiction is from the beginning the deferral of truth; one has no conceptual existence without the other” (SP 63).

The suggestion then takes the form of the question: what concept in the history of human belief can we find more meaningful than that of God? Where is the philosopher who, attacks on naïve idol worship aside, is complacently able to say that the very idea of God is totally meaningless? We can find such philosophers, certainly. They are around. But they are philosophers who seem apparently not to get it. They do not get that the meaningfulness of human signs in all their dazzling, amazing plurality may be taken to have its most economical originary type in the meaningfulness of the single idea of God.(18) Meaning is not empirical verifiability alone, nor is meaning confined to the falsifiable or to the correspondence truth of reason. Meaning is that experience of the deferral of violence through representation that we share by means of the human sign; what we share in intending the meaningful sign is not absolute proof of the “existence” of the being revealed by the intended object to which the sign refers, but rather the deferral of appropriative violence through the intentional representation of that object itself. Whether “God exists” or “God does not exist” is irrelevant to the question of whether the idea of God is meaningful: the Being who defers our violence through representation is the Being the respect of whom brings into existence the real possibility of our making the meaningful come into existence. An ontology of the human that seeks to reduce meaningful human experience to nothing except experience rationally linked to the pursuit of empirically verifiable correspondence truth, is truly a sacrificial ontology that makes Procrustes look like the Pillsbury Doughboy.

The primary characteristic of the sign is to create a new level of being. This level of being is the meaningful. As at once the most universal and (according to the originary hypothesis, the most minimal) human symbol of the meaningful, as the very gesture toward that sacred Other Being from which the human community differs minimally and in respect of which the human community finds its shared ability to name the meaningful, God is. This autoprobatory performance of the originary revelation of God holds true whether God “exists” or not, in that the meaningfulness of the idea of God (not to be confused with the “existence” of God as some figurable cosmological entity) is best placed beyond dispute. We will never be able to find perceptible evidence for the existence of God as an entity, in the same way that we will never be able to find perceptible evidence for our fellow humans’ intentions toward us. Behaviour is visible; verbal professions of intention are audible; but the intention itself is never empirically verifiable. She loves me; she loves me not. I must trust that my partner loves me if I am to believe that she loves me; if I must decide every instant of every day based on the available scientific evidence that my partner loves me, I do not believe in her love. We experience the truths of faith as revelations; we can not decide to believe them on the basis of evidence alone; if we do, they cease to be truths of faith. The ostensive truth of faith is the truth of autoprobatory revelation; by contrast, declarative truth is the truth of reason, of a hypothetical model of reality which may be tested against reality and found to correspond with it. The procedural verifications of correspondence truths are repeatable and partake of a public ritual character, but the ostensive truths of unique revelations are not open to be repeated in that way.

The relation of the intentionality of the human sign to its meaningful object and the transcendental being which the object reveals always remain invisible and must be taken on faith. This is the ostensive faith that founds the human community: the simplest model of our faith in each other as language users is our faith not in the verifiable existence but in the shareable meaningfulness of God. We all have some idea of who God is, whether we believe in the existence of God or not. This is why generative anthropology asks the atheist to make only the concession of aborting his movement toward the nihilistic violence of the revolutionary claim that the very concept of God is empty. The atheist need not suffer any humiliating concession to irrationality in what we ask. Nor will his freedom not to believe in God be violated. On the contrary, paradoxically, we are asking the atheist to recognize that the decision not to “believe in God” means something. Perhaps like originary verification, it points toward what is taken to be the hiding of “a definitive absence” (SP 62). Generative anthropology has no hesitation in granting to the atheist his freedom to deploy a theatrical insistence on the paradox of the real fictionality of God. It is just that the fictionality is real, and its reality meaningful.

The being of the God who may be affirmed by generative anthropology is (finally, third) that of a Being whose presence is inseparable from the process of human love. Here is one of Gans’ longer expositions of the set of hypotheses that move toward the formulation of an anthropological theology of Love.

If the first sign is the name-of-God, then God is significant difference itself. The love of God is not the worship of his superiority, but the willingness to accept [divine] difference, like the sexual difference of the beloved, as a source of mutuality. The sacred Being we call God is what remains when the central being desired by all and renounced by all is no more [having been consumed in the sparagmos]. We cannot understand this Being as love unless we replace the traditional substantive notion of God as a supernatural entity with the insight that what stands behind the significance of the central object is not a substance but an interaction. The Being that defers our violence through representation is no more than our act of deferral itself. (“God is Love”)

The skeptic or atheist might gleefully seize upon this passage as proof that generative anthropology, a “secular” mode of thought, releases us from all obligations to think about the personhood of God because the Being of God is our act of deferral itself, according to the hypothesis. Such deconstructive glee would be mistakenly premature, however. For the “act of deferral itself” includes, paradoxically, the originary naming of the Divine Being as a Person–however minimally–whose personhood is the originary nonhuman model for human personhood. A being is not necessarily a person; but the divine Being, insofar as that Being is one who may be described as loving humanity or giving of its Selfhood to humanity, must be described as a person.(19) Gans has repeatedly said that it is the vocation of originary thinking to do with hypothesis what religion has always done with myth: to encourage reflection on the necessarily evenemential quality of the origin of the human.

Perhaps it should not then come as a surprise that generative anthropology invites a respect for the human-divine difference in somewhat the same way that religion (including the “secularized” religions of scientific progress or socialist utopianism) requires the presupposition of an extra-human purposiveness in history: “Religion can do without gods, but it cannot do without a will whose subject stands outside the human community” (“Return of the Sacred I”). In keeping with the formal necessity of God and the afigurality of God, for generative anthropology, the first Person, the person of God, is not a human person: “God as the originary object of human love is also the originary person. But from the minimalist perspective… this originary person is not understood as human. Personhood is not in the first place characteristic of me, but of the sacred Other whose humanity is not primordial, as the romantico-existentialists would have us believe, but derived” (“Amo quia absurdum”) [emphasis added]. Originary personhood is Divine Personhood, but Divine Personhood is not human. On the contrary, the Personhood of originary Being is utterly inimitable in its otherness.

At the origin of the human, the central locus of the scene of representation conceived as a Being must be Other than the being of the humans on the periphery. It bears remembering that the central object which reveals the Being of God to us at the origin is a victimary object: we destroy that object which occupies the “nonhuman center” and our debt to this Being is infinite, can never be repaid.(20) But the forgiveness of this Being, like that of the God of the Judeo-Christian heritage, has no limit. The process of divine love will take on the character of a Self-giving by means of which the Divine Being even in its absolute “personal” otherness gives itself up only so that humans can become sacred centers one to another. (21) It is as if the Divine Being had only one “intention” in resisting our desires and our resentments, in being at the origin absolutely Other to us: its Divine intention as sacred person was that of a paradoxical willingness to be desacralized so as to maximize human freedom.(22) This originary divine “intervention” makes all the other interventions, from the perspective of generative anthropology, nonessential–which is not at all to imply that the originary event/intervention itself was anything less than essential to the beginning of the history of human interventions in the cosmos.(23) We learn in history to become significant to each other as human beings and thus to love each other as human persons only because at the origin we always “have had” (the implied consumption in having is not coincidental) the mystery of God our shared other as the source of our originary difference.

This is a Being who, at the horizon of an unreachable future, will neither demand nor require our worship: “The independently self-sufficient God who gives his substance in a one-way gift is not the God of love; such gifts arouse resentment. God-as-love is substantive being caught in the process of its generation from human desire” (“God is Love”). Substantive being so “caught” does not threaten us with the damnation of indebtedness so much as elude our grasp in the ephemerality of priceless revelations. The “gift” of this God, therefore, is not a debt we must feel guilty about never being able to repay; on the contrary, we can only “catch” this God experientially in the process of loving one another. We do not know human love as a pale, derived, trivial imitation of the love of God; rather, we know the love of God only as revealed by the love of other humans for us. We may think of God as the One who differs from all of us so that we may differ from one another in mutual care, deferring our resentment of one another. The deferral of violence and resentment that our shared difference from Divine Being made possible at the origin is one with the tenderness and care shown us by the people who have cared for us.

Human love is not simply care and tenderness for the other, however, but care and tenderness for the other ever renewed by the promise of the significance of that caring as something intended rather than a mere animal behaviour: “Love means treating another person as an unverifiable being, as something infinitely different from oneself. But not as an object on a pedestal; true love is not worship. Or rather, true worship is love; only sacrificial idols belong on pedestals” (“Love and Transcendence”). Love is not politicized compassion. Love is the deferral of resentment performed in imitation of the infinite openness to freely accepted obligation conferred by the model of the Self-giving of the one God.

It may seem strange to derive such a notion of Divine Love from a hypothesis about the origin of human language that appears so austerely minimal. We do well to notice, in the context of such a pause over appearances, that perhaps the most audacious feature of generative anthropology is the faith it displays in the ontological weight of human language: “God and the sign of human language are inseparable. There is no reduction of God to language that is not at the same time the subordination of language to God” (“Rhetoric”). In its fundamental claim that human language, the minimal core of culture, operates as the deferral of violence through representation, generative anthropology eschews apocalyptic modes of thinking. The apocalyptic is the dream of a final cleansing violence by which (perversely) God will do all the resentful work that belongs properly to humans alone. Apocalyptic modes of thinking believe in ultimate revelations, once-and-for-all revelations, revelations that suffice, that do it all, that finish the job, that give us everything we need to go ahead and conquer in the world of human conflict, even if by pacifying that world, epistemologically imperialistic and pragmatically self-assured as to the trouble-eradicating truth we possess. Generative anthropology has no such final confidence in something other than the human; its confidence is rather in the infinitely renewable resources of representation to defer conflict.

There is no ecological limit on the exchangeability, reproducibility, and power for goodness of the human sign; in this sense, the infinite availability and inexhaustibility of the resources of language (including all the resources of scientific representation) may be a source of joy to all of us, in the same way that faith in God’s omni-characteristics are a source of wonder to some of us. Generative anthropology is a way of thinking that invites us not to wax apocalyptic but, instead, even in the face of the manifest extremes of incalculable goodness and unanswerable evil on display in the historical record of human action, to try for a certain mindfully wary serenity. This wilful serenity should not be mistaken as a facile cheerfulness. As Saint Augustine split the command respecting the two thieves, generative anthropology neither presumes nor despairs regarding the destiny of humankind as to be damned or to be saved. What generative anthropology invites us to do, as we have seen, is to identify the human with the one minimal gesture that made us human in the first place: the abortive gesture of appropriation, intended as such and shared with one another. The cosmological mystery of the uniqueness of humankind is defined by the uniquely mysterious thing we do, the exchange of intentional signs that transfigure the objects of our sacralizing resentment, desire and consumptive distribution into things paradoxically immanent and transcendent at once. We exchange signs, and in doing so, we make the cosmos signify: we make the universe significant. (There may not be any other beings “out there” who make it significant in the way we do; but if not, we have no need to fear that possibility of their non-existence–because we have the minimal divine Being of our Other as revealed in the sacred central locus of the uniquely human scene of representation.) We may all affirm the presence of this God: “Language is always already non-presence; we have no quarrel on this point with Derrida. But unlike the presence of metaphysics, which subsists within the context of the declarative, ostensive presence is not conceivable as the presence of the sign alone” (SP 58).

“The fundamental model of human interaction is the reciprocal exchange of signs” (“Originary and Provisional”). But what are we doing when we exchange signs? We are deferring our intraspecific violence through representation; and this deferral of violence, as the vigilant exercise of a peace-making intention, is the minimal form of communal love. At the interpersonal level in private life, detached from the social scene, human love may be described as the deferral of resentment: rather than resenting our lover or child or friend for a failure to reciprocate a self-giving gesture, we defer that resentment in the faith that the gesture we have made will be returned in time. It is the work of the human sign precisely to create a temporality other than the temporality of our material existence. Our bodies die, our flesh is as grass, our corpses turn to dust and each of us is no more. There is certainly something tragic in this mortal animality of the human, in that it reminds us of the difference between the sign and the object, the timeless life which our uniquely human representations make us able to imagine, if not intend, and the timed life that ticks away with the impersonal movement of natural cycle, calendar and clock.

God is there and here in all this–in the exchanges we make, in the resentments we defer, in the representations we labour to share with one another. For what do we want God is love to mean? The invitation of generative anthropology is to entertain the paradoxical idea of a God whose minimal subsistence on the scene of representation accompanies our every exchange of signs as the basis of our linguistic faith–not a cosmological basis, as if God were an object or agency we might locate, but on the contrary as the sacred invisible crystallization of the anthropological basis of our shared faith in our mutual promises to get along with one another. God is the Being who by differing absolutely from us always in the first place, gives the Divine Substance to us as process, as “a source of mutuality” in the first place. In representing the sacred otherness of the one hypothetical Divine Being we can subsequently bring other objects of desire and interest onto the scene of representation as never-adequate but nonetheless-valuable substitutions for the originary revelation of that divine Being.

The absolute otherness of God in the originary necessity of his afigural being is one with the historical demystification of God as a being whose self-erasure and self-cancellation are not to be felt as a betrayal and abandonment of the human, but on the contrary, as a maximization of human freedom. For what do we want the sentence God is love to mean (again)? God is love does not mean God will kill our enemies, heal our sick loved ones, rescue us from misery and reward us with prosperity if we obey. God is neither a Being on our side against other people nor one with us against the terribly indifferent cosmos; rather, God is always “on the other side of” the transcendentalizing effect of the human sign. The being of God is that of the other Being whom our signs can represent for us but never be for us. As Gans has said many times, our experience of the sign is the model for our experience of the transcendental, which includes our experience of God.(24) The anthropological idea of God is that of the minimal being assumed to subsist between us as we exchange representations.

It is not improper to suggest that the personhood of this Being resembles that of a paradoxically passive but enabling Witness whose presence we need never “verify,” whose presence accompanies our moves of reciprocal interaction on the scene of representation.(25) But this Being, despite the minimality of its single originary “intervention,” makes the maximal difference of opening the possibility of linguistic faith, faith in the resources of language. Our minimal faith must be a faith in human language, because the human community is the unique community of those beings who use language. The minimality of the being of God is not to be feared: it is that minimal anthropological equality (in our never being God, but being able to think together about God, a process of thinking which can never be completed) which maximizes our freedom to become human. God “must be thought of as a being, even as a person” (OT 31); God subsists as the “central locus of the scene of representation conceived as a being” (OT 40). The value of shared respect for the Being of this locus as the Other of our intentional gestures is an anthropological truth that all humans and each human may share as a basis for the “fundamental mode of human interaction, the reciprocal exchange of signs.” The declarative truth that this Being may never be exhaustively or adequately thematized does not make the ostensive truth of the minimal Divine presence one iota the less wonderful.

We asked the atheist to concede that the process of the forgetting of the idea of God can never be concluded. A process of forgetting implies, in one of those numberless oxymoronic jewels Eric Gans has given to his readers, trying to forget something. But it is an odd thing to walk around trying to forget something. It implies a paradoxical remembering to forget. If we picture the perfect nonbeliever as one who always every moment of every day remembers to forget the idea of a paradoxical, afigural God-who-is-as-love, then we might picture the perfect believer as one who forgets to remember the freedom to forget the idea of God with equal constancy. But why make God a memory? God is the Being who is never “on our side” because the Divine is always on the other side of all human sides. The anthropological idea of God, precisely because it is a minimal idea of God, evokes the stillest, smallest voice within us, in our being as only human, a voice that keeps telling us, from the other side of potentially immanent and annihilation-threatening mimetic crisis: quiet–quiet–look at your signs of me–which will never be me–look at the others who like you make signs of me–exchange your signs.

God is Love for us who enables love among us. Why should we ever give away such a source of mutuality, a Being whose mystery is that of a minimality that makes the maximal difference between our never becoming human in the first place and our continuing to be human always? We are free to affirm that the process of the forgetting of the anthropological idea of God can never be concluded so long as we remain human, because the process of remembering the idea of God may never be concluded. Originary thinking, the shared exercising of originary memory, as long as the human persists, will never be concluded.

With thanks for his visit to Vancouver of August 9-12, 2007, I dedicate this essay to my brother Bruce Roy Bartlett.

About Our Contributors

Andrew Bartlett lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He teaches composition and literary analysis at Kwantlen University College in Surrey (a suburb of Vancouver). Kwantlen has granted him an Educational Leave for the 2006-2007 academic year so that he might work on a book-length manuscript, Playing God: Science Fictions of the Artificial Human, a project in applied GA. He has attended several annual meetings of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion, and participates in Sparagmos!, the Vancouver GA Group.

Ian Dennis is Associate Professor of English at the University of Ottawa. He is the author of four novels, and of a Girardian study, Nationalism and Desire in Early Historical Fiction (Macmillan 1997). His Lord Byron and the History of Desire is forthcoming with the University of Delaware Press, and he will host the third GA meeting in Ottawa in 2009.

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

Peter T. Koper is Professor of English at Central Michigan University, where he teaches writing and classics in translation. His writing includes previous essays in Anthropoetics and Contagion , as well as articles on topics in rhetoric, pedagogy, and the American tradition of writing about nature.

Christopher S. Morrissey (PGP email: Key ID 0x6DD0285F) is Assistant Professor of Latin Philosophy at Redeemer Pacific College, Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia. Currently his main research interest is in the logical treatises and natural science of Jean Poinsot’s commentaries on Aristotle. He has written Mirror of Princes, which focuses on evaluating, from an Aristotelian perspective, the evolution of statecraft as esthetically reflected in Greek tragedy and Shakespeare. Mirror of Princes applies the interdisciplinary semiotic work of René Girard (mimetic theory) and Eric Gans (generative anthropology) to Aristotle’s thought on politics and drama, in order to discern the evolutionary cultural context that shapes the generation of esthetic history. Morrissey is a semiotic Aristotelian Thomist of the variety defended by the Thomism of the “River Forest” school (Benedict M. Ashley, O.P., William A. Wallace, O.P., John Deely, etc.).

Eric Gans‘s CV may be found by clicking on his name below.

Introduction

1 In Part One of this study, our task was to construct a notion of originary science that would help us to account for the power of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) as the textual source of the mythical mad scientist who plays God by creating the artificial human. An idea of originary science was crystallized in its definition as “the sign deployed in a mode of minimal desacralization and maximal exchangeability,” within the context of ritual substitution of one valuable central object for another. In Part Two, we discovered that Mary Shelley’s character Victor Frankenstein as a representative of modern science at its least prudent and most dangerous reversed the religious spirit of humility before the community inherent to originary science: Frankenstein’s technological experiment in making an artificial human demonstrates scientific representation in the mode of maximal desacralization and minimal exchangeability. Nevertheless, we argued, in his desire to know the object, Frankenstein is characteristically, legitimately modern. If we recognize Mary Shelley’s grasp of the event structure of scientific revelation, then we will avoid an oversimplifying moral condemnation of Frankenstein’s failure to foresee the effects of the Creature’s animation into moving ugliness. In this final Part Three, our focus will be on the career of the Monster, specifically on the two “creation scenes” analogous to the paradoxical animation of the Monster we analyzed last time: first, the creation scene of the Monster’s failure to integrate into the DeLacey family; second, the creation scene of the abortive destruction of the Monster’s female companion. More exactly, these are mock-creation scenes. Only when Frankenstein animates the Monster is the “creation” literally successful. Self-creation for the Monster, damned to fail to enter human society and damned to fail to extort a mate from Frankenstein, must be ironically failed creation. Given that the mad scientist as only human will always fail to create (God-like) the human from purely cosmological materials, it is all the more to be expected that the artificial human will be condemned to the same impossibility. He cannot make what his maker could not.

2 We pursue the thesis in Part Three that, while sympathizing with the Monster in his misery, succumbing to the temptation to make of him mostly a “human” victim of Frankenstein’s will ironically “dehumanizes” him even more than Frankenstein himself always already has. The interactions of Victor and his Monster present a demonic parody of the Divine-human interaction in the moment of human origin as hypothesized by generative anthropology: instead of God opening up the human to the historical future by seeming the victimary object of scenic resentment and then being the sacred first Person of originary memory, a mad scientist playing God closes off the possibility of any economically satisfying future for the artificial human he has created. The power of Shelley’s myth lies in its intuition of the necessary evil of economic “violence”: our species identity is one with our ethical identity, but our ethical identity cannot exclude the risks involved with the discovery and invention of new objects, the cognitive risks of experimentation and technological application.

3 Frankenstein’s Monster is double in that he represents both the victimary status of the central cosmological object and the violent freedom of the human subject. As a figure of the abused cosmological object, the Monster speaks to us in the voice of all of non-human Nature that we “victimize” in perpetuating our species, the voice of that which we must consume (and must reject as our non-human Other as we consume it) if we are to survive as a species. In that, the Monster might be taken as an apt symbol for all human victims, a symbol for persecuted people or humans victimized by accidents of fate such as birth defects and hereditary diseases; and a symbol even for animal victims and our ecological home taken as a personified single object. The artificial human as victim of mad science symbolizes the allegedly victimized objects of all scientific representation in general. On the other hand, meanwhile, as a figure of the violent freedom of the human subject, the Monster speaks to us in the voice of a vengeful threat, the voice of an Other who demands a certain recognition, but a recognition frustratingly impossible for us as humans to give–unless, of course, we wish to risk species annihilation and dissolve the category of the human altogether. Although Frankenstein’s Monster, as we shall see, is not free to participate in the human economy of the exchange of valuable things, what freedom the Monster does have, he uses finally in part to wreak a morally suspect revenge on innocent bystanders in a kind of early romantic terrorism. The strangeness of the artificial human ought to compel us to resist reducing him to the figure of a specific political cause: the potency of the artificial human as a symbol consists precisely in its resistance to ontological assimilation to the real human. The artificial human functions as a symbol, not a mere simile subservient to political illustration. It is in his legitimation of personal revenge that the Monster loses his moral purity and victimary uniqueness.

On the Ugliness of the Monster

4 Let us recall (as we established in Part Two) that an analysis of the novel which moves in a literalizing direction, one that respects the objective difference between Frankenstein the maker and the living thing he makes, depends on our registering the universality of the repulsion inspired by the Monster and experienced equally by all the characters in the fictional world that Mary Shelley creates. The way that all humans in the novel “instinctively” flee the Monster, shocked and terrified by his hideousness, externally verifies his not-being-human. Those of us weaned on the many cinematic Frankenstein monsters, from Boris Karloff’s inarticulate giant to Robert DeNiro’s scarred outcast, need to expel such images from our heads. We need especially to erase from our minds (if possible) the square-headed, grrrr-ing, robotic giant with bolts in its neck immortalized by Karloff. For Mary Shelley’s Monster, the original, is neither a cartoon figure nor finally a human figure; there is nothing laughable about him, nor is there anything embraceable about him. The enigmatic, mummy-skinned, corpse-eyed figure that Mary Shelley proposes for our reflection, if we take some time to linger over him as she describes him, and to listen to his tale, will prove terrifyingly different from us. We look unwillingly upon a Monster who seems, paradoxically, human in all respects except the face that prohibits our interior conviction of equality with him. If we are not afraid, we are not paying attention to the text. Our fright depends upon the proximity of the Monster to us: except for his ugliness, he might pass for human. He has the resentment, desire, guilt, linguistic capacity, esthetic taste, religious yearning, erotic appetite, and economic capacity expected in a healthy human person. But the Monster manifests himself as not one of us.

5 Let us take a quick inventory of the Monster’s reports of his hostile contact with humans (setting aside those especially violent confrontations ending in the murder of Ernest, the framing of Justine the servant girl, the murder of Victor’s friend Henry Clerval, and the murder of Victor’s wife, Elizabeth). Having been abandoned by his maker, having stumbled into the forest and gradually gotten control of his sense perceptions, long before he has even learned to make fire or to speak, the Monster enters a small hut where an Old Man is getting his breakfast: “He turned on hearing a noise; and, perceiving me, shrieked loudly, and, quitting the hut, ran across the fields with a speed of which his debilitated form hardly appeared capable” (2.3.132).(1) His first meeting with a human consists almost wholly of the flight of the other and nothing else, no meeting at all. Next, the untutored creature is driven from a panic-stricken country village as a scapegoat: “I had hardly placed my foot within the door, before the children shrieked, and one of the women fainted. The whole village was roused; some fled, some attacked me, until, grievously bruised by stones and many other kind of missile weapons, I escaped to the open country” (2.3.132). When the Monster first perceives his disfigured face in a mirror of still water, he reports a sensation diametrically opposed to that contained in the equivalent moment of the Narcissus myth. He cannot love, but must hate his own reflection: “but how was I terrified . . . ! At first, I started back, unable to believe that it was indeed I who was reflected in the mirror; and when I became fully convinced that I was in reality the Monster that I am, I was filled with the bitterest sensations of despondence and mortification. Alas! I did not yet entirely know the fatal effects of this miserable deformity” (2.4.139). We shall consider in more detail below the way that he hopes against all probability that his ugliness will not destroy his chances at social participation, as he prepares himself for his crucial interview with the senior member of the DeLacey family: “I cherished hope, it is true; but it vanished, when I beheld my person reflected in water, or my shadow in the moon-shine, even as that frail image and inconstant shade” (2.7.156). After his first murder, the killing of the boy Ernest Frankenstein, the Monster contemplates a miniature portrait of Victor’s late mother that Ernest had been wearing around his neck. At this irreversible juncture–he has just sacrificed his moral innocence to the indulgence of a romantic delusion about the political efficacy of revenge–his resentment rapidly matures. The Monster identifies in his recollection the ground of that resentment explicitly as one of erotic deprivation: “I remembered that I was forever deprived of the delights that such beautiful creatures [as this human woman] could bestow; and that she whose resemblance I contemplated would, in regarding me, have changed that air of divine benignity to one expressive of disgust and affright” (2.8.167). I have presented this inventory of narrative instances to marshal resources against a temptation to which much criticism has succumbed: the temptation to discount the ontological implications of the universality of the human response to the Monster’s ugliness (e.g., Goodall 33; Bowerbank 426; Graham 67; Ziolkowski 43).(2) Our position resembles that of Thomas Dutoit when he writes: “the Monster’s face is opaque, a barrier to communication. It is impossible to see through the Monster’s face because it is impossible even to sustain a look at the Monster’s face. It is a face that is too horrible for human eyes” (853).

6 The corroborating report by Robert Walton of his confrontation with the Monster following the death of Victor Frankenstein contains the most extended description of the Monster’s face. Elsewhere in the text we have already learned that the Monster has white teeth, thin black lips, and the opaque, clouded eyes of a corpse; we know that the arteries and blood vessels beneath his skin are visible; eight feet tall, he was sewn together from various body parts, animal flesh conjoined to the human.(3) Frankenstein made him huge because from a technical point of view it was easier to work with big rather than small anatomical parts. Walton has told us that Frankenstein died only hours ago; now it is midnight on Walton’s ice-bound ship; he has been writing to his sister; he hears a cry and returns to Victor’s cabin. The account of the meeting that occurs there, written upon return to his cabin, constitutes the only instance of “writing to the moment” in the entire text.

Over him [the dead Victor Frankenstein] hung a form which I cannot find words to describe; gigantic in stature, yet uncouth and distorted in its proportions. As he hung over the coffin, his face was concealed by long locks of ragged hair; but one vast hand was extended, in colour and apparent texture like that of a mummy. When he heard the sound of my approach, he ceased to utter exclamations of grief and horror, and sprung towards the window. Never did I behold a vision so horrible as his face, of such loathsome, yet appalling hideousness. I shut my eyes involuntarily, and endeavoured to recollect what were my duties with regard to this destroyer. I called on him to stay.

He paused, looking on me with wonder; and, again turning towards the lifeless form of his creator, he seemed to forget my presence, and every feature seemed instigated by the wildest rage of some uncontrollable passion. (240)

Walton is unique in the world of the novel for being the only human without violent intent to call on the Monster to “stay”: that explains the Monster’s responding to his gesture of reciprocity by “looking on [Walton] with wonder.” Although showing courage and kindness in a way nobody else has, Walton must struggle with the overwhelming feeling of repulsion at the “horrible” face, its “loathsome . . . appalling hideousness.” The struggle at this moment between involuntary, instinctive repulsion and calculated, rational “duty” is identical to that Victor experienced when forcing himself to consider with justice the Monster’s demand of the making of a female companion (2.9.171). There is something fabulously excessive in the ugliness of the Monster, as if the fearsomeness of the originary sparagmos somehow has concretized bodily in the un-presentable face of this one mythic figure, a face on which more than once “every feature seem[s] instigated by the wildest rage of some uncontrollable passion.”(4)

7 The ugliness is almost enough to make us forget that Victor Frankenstein himself as a scientist fully intended the creation of a human being. Yet paradoxically, despite the hideousness to which Mr. Walton bears witness, despite the Monster’s barely contained “rage” of “uncontrollable passion”–which may hint at a residue of animality transferred to the Monster because of the animal flesh that contributes to his organic being(5)–of all the artificial humans we meet in retellings of the myth of the scientist playing God the creator, none is more human from the beginning than this unsurpassable romantic abortion of Mary Shelley. Her Monster is, except for his ugliness, more planned as a full human being than any of his literary descendants. A comparison with some of them illuminates the significance of the difference. Take, for example, the hybrid beast people of H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau. The Beast People are coerced into taking up human posture. They must be taught to speak human language and taught to chant “the Law” by violence of hypnosis; the Monster seeks language and moral reciprocity “naturally” on his own. The Beast People never learn to use fire (unlike the Monster), nor do they engage in economic production or exchange, outside of performing the forced labor Moreau extracts from them. When, after their murder of Dr. Moreau, they revert “naturally” to their animal shapes, losing speech and civility, the Beast People neither suffer nor protest. They never wanted membership in the human community in the first place: they were happy beasts. But the Monster desires such membership precisely because it is all he lacks as a would-be human. Whereas Moreau’s beast people are therefore tortured into a forcible half-humanity in the beginning, Frankenstein’s Monster is tortured in being cast out of human community from the beginning.

8 Take, for a second example, the robots of Karel Capek’s modernist drama, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). In total opposition to the Monster’s ugliness, the perfection of the robots’ cosmetic resemblance to humans is deceptively imperceptible: Capek’s android automata look identical to humans such that it can be impossible in some cases to tell them apart from us. But the androids are not designed to behave like humans or to demonstrate the human intentionality that the Monster possesses. On the contrary, the engineers at the Rossum robot factory intend their androids to lack emotion, lack esthetic judgment, lack economic desire, erotic appetite and the capacity to reproduce sexually. The robots’ becoming “human” interferes with plans as an undesired contingency, a result of secret tinkering with the original engineering design by a rogue member of the scientific team. For a third example, look to the human clones engineered for organ transplants in Michael Bay’s recent blockbuster action movie The Island. Although the clones are physiologically human, their memories are restrictively programmed and their desires engineered in Huxleyan Brave New World fashion such that they remain perpetual pre-pubescents, never experiencing adult sexual desire. The first clone to ask questions and to desire some form of escape from his restrictive environment, Nelson 6 Echo (played by Ewan MacGregor), gets called by his managerial enemy a “defective product.” Nelson 6 Echo is defective ironically in that his brain is growing into full humanness: he has memories, dreams, which seem to be genetic residue from his human counterpart out in the real world, the owner of the “insurance policy” that he concretizes. His acquisition of rebellious curiosity makes him a problem for the corporate villains running the clone factory. One could add other examples, but these suffice. The point is that in most versions of the Frankenstein myth, the artificial human begins to become human by a course of events not intended by the maker, by accident. But in Mary Shelley’s original source text, Victor Frankenstein intends the creation of a human; furthermore, Victor Frankenstein (unlike Dr. Moreau and the Rossum father and son) succeeds--except that the test creature is so ugly that his economic potential must be wasted. He cannot engage in economic exchange with other humans because they cannot bear to look upon him.

The Mock-Creation Scene of Failed Integration

9 It can never be emphasized enough that before the Monster confronts his maker and tells his tale, before Frankenstein himself is called to account, the Monster is rejected by humanity in the wider sense. He is rejected by people who know nothing of Frankenstein and have nothing to do with Frankenstein. Mary Shelley therefore hints that the reader, one of the “ordinary” people, would reject the Monster just as Victor does. The Monster confronts the DeLacey family and they reject him with theatrical violence. We are justified in calling the Monster’s interactions with the DeLacey family a “mock-creation scene” rivalrous to the paradoxical animation scene presided over by Victor Frankenstein and the manufactured body at least because, as many critics have noticed, Mary Shelley is carrying out an hypothetical imaginary narrative, a “thought experiment,” in which a human-like creature is brought forward to the boundary of social interaction without having been given any human care. The Creature has no “primary caregiver,” no mother or father, neither ape-parent like Tarzan nor wolf-parent like the feral child. Timothy Morton has alluded to the fact that Mary Shelley was “fascinated by one of anthropology’s founding myths, that of ‘first contact’ between humans from different cultures taking place upon a supposedly neutral ground” (264). Morton astutely suggests that Mary Shelley’s narrative is a “thought-experiment in which the Creature’s cultural environment is severely attenuated, a kind of laboratory condition: at one point, it is just a kennel, a pile of books, and an adjacent household” (264). Those suggestions go along with our notion that in his self-promoting attempts to bring about the situation that would permit the actualization of his potential for human exchange, the Monster executes his own creation scene–a tragic fiasco of failed integration. The scene has, as did Victor Frankenstein’s moment of animation scene, powerful resonances with the hypothetical originary event of generative anthropology.

10 The Monster’s ugliness is an unintended consequence of the experiment; Victor’s failure to foresee results in intense, unrelieved and irredeemable suffering for the Monster. When we retrace his solitary efforts in learning mobility, food gathering, self-preservation, language, and when we reflect on the gentle benevolence of his bringing firewood and clearing snow to lighten Felix DeLacey’s workload, we ought to perceive the contrast between his hopeful desire to belong to human society and Victor’s despairing obsession with separating himself from it. The Monster’s acting upon his wish to belong can confirm, however, only the impossibility of his ever succeeding: one who “deserves” to become human cannot become human. His maker has made it impossible. His non-humanity is a matter not of economic deprivation, of not getting the food and warmth necessary for physiological survival; it is, more significantly, a matter of being deprived altogether of access to a position of participation on the scene of human economic exchange. The Monster is not permitted to produce anything of human value for which he might receive an equivalent good in exchange.

11 We recall the completion of the originary event in the sparagmos and the exchange of things, the exchange of portions of the scared object: without some exchange of valuable things, there is no human scene; the human exchange of signs must complete itself in the exchange of things valuable to humans: “one cannot satisfy a hungry man with a picture of a steak” (Gans, Originary 119). The Monster is damned to experiencing the sociality of the human sign without ever wholly consuming a sacralized portion of the valuable object to which it might refer, precisely because as an artificial human, the completeness of his participation on the human scene is ruled out. Criticism has perhaps not sufficiently registered the significance attributed to the economic dimension of human activity in the vision of the human that Mary Shelley propounds in the Frankenstein myth. The prohibition against the Monster’s ever exercising the freedom to exchange things in reciprocity with “real” humans structures his fundamental deprivation. He can look but he cannot touch; he can watch the human family eating dinner from outside but he will never be invited inside. He can still “get by” on his own; but he does not want to stay on his own. Tragically, the delusion that his ugliness might somehow be discounted, set aside, compensated for, overcome, nourishes his “good desire” to integrate with the DeLacey family. His delusion is the same one that his victimary defenders to this day hang onto.(6) Furthermore, the Monster’s interactions with kind Old Man DeLacey (kind only because blind) reach their catastrophic end not at the point alone when the young man Felix intervenes brutally but also at the point when the Monster is asked who he is–when he is about to be required to tell his whole story. The telling of his whole story would have been disastrously alienating even for the blind man. The telling of his whole story would have required him to horrify the blind man even without inflicting upon him the visual experience of his external ugliness.

12 If we step back from the text a little, we will notice that the Monster’s elaborate, patient, highly self-conscious preparations leading up to his conversation with the blind man are preparations far more suspenseful and interesting than any of those contained in Victor’s account of his experiment. The visual apparatus of the electrocution into life of the Creature outdoes in spectacular interest the humble image of the Monster and old man sitting in chairs beside a fire. But the reader, as distinct from the moviegoer, engages much more intimately with the Monster’s gradual approach to his interview with DeLacey than with Victor’s design of the animation test. The Monster’s preparations are excruciating for us because we know in advance he will fail.

13 One of Mary Shelley’s intellectual models for the physiological and biological basis of the Creature’s mental formation may be found in Condillac’s Treatise on Sensations. As the Monster moves about the forest, having been abandoned by Victor, he learns to distinguish shapes and sounds, forms and perceptions. He recalls that earliest stage of conscious life as an experience of being something like an abandoned infant grotesquely trapped in a big adult body: “I was a poor, helpless, miserable wretch; I knew, and could distinguish, nothing; but, feeling pain invade me on all sides, I sat down and wept” (2.3.129). One difference between Mary Shelley’s hypothetical scene of originary human language acquisition and that imagined by Condillac is that her creature is not paired with another of his kind. With its very intuition that mimesis works in human competition and sharing, the motif of the “passion” shared by Condillac’s two isolated children who begin to interpret each other’s signifying gestures, as Gans points out, suggests Condillac’s own grasp of the necessity of mimetic paradox as the generative precondition of the first human ostensive sign.(7) Frankenstein’s Monster, by contrast, occupies a scene bereft of companionate interaction. Like a feral child, he engages in reciprocal exchange with no one. The situation in which he acquires human language has him observe from a distance other creatures who speak: he eavesdrops on the DeLacey family through a hole in their cottage wall, slowly but gradually associating words with things (2.4.137-38). He learns language much more quickly when the Arabian Safie, the lover of Felix DeLacey, joins the family and herself gets taught English as a second language: “Presently I found, by the frequent recurrence of one sound which the stranger repeated after them, that she was endeavouring to learn their language; and the idea instantly occurred to me, that I should make use of the same instructions to the same end” (2.5.143). The Creature remembers himself as such a keen student that he felt the vanity of mimetic competition, regardless of his competitor being unaware of his very existence: “My days were spent in close attention, that I might more speedily master the language; and I may boast that I improved more rapidly than the Arabian, who understood very little, and conversed in broken accents, whilst I comprehended and could imitate almost every word that was spoken” (2.5.144). Next, Mary Shelley places an abandoned sack containing three books in the Creature’s path, which he takes up and–here the threadbare plot contrivance collapses into total incredibility–learns to read without any assistance. The texts are Plutarch’s Lives, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. The Creature’s sense of interiority is produced more powerfully by the experience of eavesdropping on conversation combined with reading than by eavesdropping alone.

14 But why does the Monster wish so self-consciously to acquire language? What is the point of learning language? He wishes to belong to a community: he wishes to belong to others. There is Mary Shelley’s intuition of the fundamentally non-instrumental, mimetic nature of the human sign. The human sign as a thing exchanged intends the object of appetite as that which can be shared in the exchange of things; it intends the object as a significant thing with a potential economic value. The Monster does not want simply to stay alive, to survive as an animal, to feed and clothe and shelter himself. He hungers for the transcendental effect of sociality, which itself can never be “consumed” but only experienced as an effect of the mimetic interactivity of economic exchange. The Monster wants to participate in the human economy of the exchange of things as the guarantee of his belonging to the human community, even if only “marginally.”

15 Meanwhile, the Monster becomes an economic producer whose “gifts” to Felix will never be reciprocated. In secret, he works for the DeLacey family, gathering firewood and doing nighttime work in their fields. Among the first words he distinguishes are those that describe the cottagers’ gratitude for his secret acts of benevolence on their behalf: “I afterward found that these labors, performed by an invisible hand, greatly astonished them; and once or twice I heard them, on these occasions, utter the words, good spirit, wonderful; but I did not then understand the signification of those terms” (2.4.140). In his being this “invisible hand” helping out the poverty-embarrassed DeLaceys, the Creature’s growing acquisition of language is accompanied by a growing desire for economic participation. In this, Mary Shelley draws a contrast between the “good” fantasy, the socially-oriented fantasy of communal belonging of the Monster, and the isolationist, unimaginative obsession of Victory in his anti-social laboratory, whose “evil” fantasy cuts him off from human exchange. The mad scientist dreams only of creating the cosmological object alone, creating his own “species” as did God in omnipotence and omniscience; the artificial human dreams of belonging to the very species that his maker finds dissatisfying. Victor during his experiments must work with great intensity to de-humanize his intellect, forcibly to expel scenic intuition, whereas the Monster by contrast must work to humanize his raw mind, must struggle with determined patience to try to enter the human scene.

16 We may elaborate on this contrast by saying that Victor is sufficiently “evil” to despise the human in such a way that he believes in the desirability of creating a substitute for it, whereas the Monster is sufficiently good–even in goodness sustained by delusion–to worship the human in such a way that he believes in belonging to it, even against all odds. Here he describes the humble DeLacey family:

I looked upon them as superior beings, who would be the arbiters of my future destiny. I formed in my imagination a thousand pictures of presenting myself to them, and their reception of me. I imagined that they would be disgusted, until, by my gentle demeanor and conciliatory words, I should first win their favour, and afterwards their love. (2.4.140)

Retrospectively, the Monster mocks the vanity of his belief that his ugliness could ever have been effaced by his acts of generosity (his potential economic value) or by his use of human language (his minimal sacred equality as user of language): “I formed in my imagination . . . I imagined.” He had put his hope in language alone: he wanted to win human favor and human love by his words; his words are opposed to that ugliness which he fears will disgust the friends he would make. The use of human language comes up against the barrier of the non-human ugliness that separates him as a “marked” artificial being from the real humans with whom he wishes to participate in exchange. But while the Monster as creative agent puts his deluded faith in the minimal form of human representation, language, by contrast, as we have seen, the mad scientist puts his faith in a maximal form of representation: in laboratory science with its equipment, devices, instruments, literature, its heavy expensive cultural overhead. It is a powerful clue that after the Monster is animated, Frankenstein hates those “chemical instruments” that embody the aspirations of scientific representation; he hates packing up and unpacking them, concrete reminders of his delusion: “Ever since the fatal night, the end of my labours, and the beginning of my misfortunes, I had conceived a violent antipathy even to the name of natural science. When I was otherwise quite restored to health, the sight of a chemical instrument would renew all the agony of my nervous symptoms” (1.5.95). This difference between minimal linguistic representation and maximal institutional (scientific) representation also contributes to our victimary temptation to cast the Monster as wholly good and the modern scientist as wholly bad. The Monster’s moral innocence is seconded by the primitive simplicity of his cultural resources.(8)

17 Readers sympathetic to his plight experience growing dread as the Monster approaches the crucial interview: “The more I saw of them, the greater became my desire to claim their protection and kindness; my heart yearned to be loved and known by these amiable creatures; to see their sweet looks turned towards me with affection, was the utmost limit of my ambition. I dared not think that they would turn from me with disdain and horror. (2.7.156-57). His ineradicable ugliness–the absence of esthetic value, the presence of anti-erotic disfiguration–is the reality that will smash his fantasy to useless bits. The delusion persists: “I dared not think.” A variation of the initial scene of his creation is enacted: as Frankenstein spurned him at the moment of his “birth,” so will the DeLacey family, including the Old Man, spurn and abandon him.

18 The crisis occurs when the Monster makes his abortive attempt to gain a first human friend in an interview with the blind man. When the Creature does enter the DeLacey cottage, with the younger family members absent and the grandfather alone, his interview is fraught with a sense of finality and irreversibility. Here are the kindest words ever spoken by a human to the Monster: “‘If you will unreservedly confide to me the particulars of your tale, I perhaps may be of use in undeceiving them. I am blind, and cannot judge of your countenance, but there is something in your words which persuades me that you are sincere. I am poor, and in exile; but it will afford me true pleasure to be in any way serviceable to a human creature’” (2.7.159). But the Monster is already aware that he will almost certainly not pass as a human creature. The Old Man asks the question that brings the verbal exchange to the point of ostensive crisis: “‘May I know the names and residence of those friends?’” When the Monster gives the names and residence, he must say “you and your family” and “here in this place.” His polite circumlocutionary deception, his softened hypothesizing of a fictional situation happening there to them, will be collapsed into the real and concrete. The Monster’s discourse will be converted into dialogue; the ostensive presence will be tested for its immediate verifiability. Are you my friend? Here and now? The tragic mistiming of Felix’s return to the scene does not cause the failure of the Monster’s integration. Rather, the Monster fails before Felix returns: his “firmness” dissolves and words fail him.

I struggled vainly for firmness sufficient to answer him, but the effort destroyed all my remaining strength; I sank on the chair, and sobbed aloud. At that moment I heard the steps of my younger protectors. I had not a moment to lose; but, seizing the hand of the Old Man, I cried, “Now is the time!–save and protect me! You and your family are the friends whom I seek. Do not desert me in the hour of trial!”

“Great God!’ exclaimed the Old Man, “who are you?”

At that instant the cottage door opened, and Felix, Safie, and Agatha entered (2.7.160)

Although the blind grandfather cannot see the Creature’s ugliness, Shelley hints, the sobs–their pre-verbal violence, their bottomless depth–form an auditory perceptual substitute. The sobs of the Monster signify that he recognizes the necessary fictionality, the real impossibility of his social integration even before the return of Felix and the Monster’s hopeless (and arguably absurd) decision to play the victim and not fight back against Felix.(9) The Monster’s hideous ugliness is to human sight what his inconsolable sobbing is to human hearing: Old DeLacey is expressing horrified shock when he cries “‘Great God!’” Furthermore, the question that the Old Man asks–who are you?--is the very question that the Creature may not answer without horrifying the interlocutor by telling the tale of his artificial, non-human origin. The Creature has already asked it of himself many times, the most painful question of all: “And what was I? Of my creator and creation I was absolutely ignorant; but I knew that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property. I was, besides, endowed with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome; I was not even of the same nature as man” (2.5.145). Again: “From my earliest remembrance I had been as I then was in height and proportion. I had never yet seen a being resembling me, or who claimed any intercourse with me. What was I? The question again recurred, to be answered only with groans” (2.5.147). And again: “My person was hideous, and my stature gigantic: what did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them” (2.7.153). The Monster has no answers to these questions, because the figure of the mad scientist playing God–the only “answer” to the question of his cosmological origin–can never satisfy him or legitimate his participation in the human economy. The conversation with his human fantasy friend must end there or soon thereafter, regardless of the return of the predictably outraged Felix, a standard hero of little interest.

19 Old DeLacey’s cry of “Great God!” belongs to a set of such cries. The exclamation appears many times in the novel; in fact, the uses of the expression “Great God!” throughout Frankenstein amount to a curious theological residue in Mary Shelley’s atheistic discourse. It qualifies as one of the linguistic phenomena that Gans has analyzed as the “rhetoric of God”: nonbelievers (and believers) calling on God on appropriate occasions not in the mode of prayer but in the mode of unself-conscious recall of the originary sacred center that equalizes us as humans and links the one who exclaims to the naming of God on the originary scene. In Frankenstein, the phrase “Great God!” is deployed by Victor Frankenstein himself, by Walton, and by others, always at a moment of crisis in which the ostensive force of the Creature’s hideous body is being verbally countered. Thomas Dutoit in his deconstructive analysis of Frankenstein has noted this ostensive force of each use of the phrase.(10) All this supports my proposal that the blind man does not need to see the Creature’s ugliness inasmuch as he can hear the cause of the Creature’s despair in the Creature’s sobs. The Monster has learned the hard lesson that his Ugliness cannot be undone or overcome.

20 From here, it is a short distance to the Monster’s despairing vow to take revenge on his human creator and to force an alternative, the creation of a mate, a second member of his “species.” The DeLacey family leaves the neighborhood, never to return. The Monster decides to find Victor Frankenstein, whose scientific journal just happened to be in the pocket of the coat he put on when as a giant-sized mental infant he was stumbling away from Victor’s laboratory (another threadbare plot device connected to the motif of reading material) (2.7.155). The Monster decides to put to his creator an ultimatum: since human society is impossible for him, he must have created for him a mate, a second female Monster to be his companion: “I am alone, and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species, and have the same defects. This being you must create’” (2.8.168). And that ultimatum leads to the third and final creation scene of the novel.

Ultimatum and Abortion: Frankenstein Playing the Savior

21 The difference between Victor’s involuntary construction of the second Monster (the proposed female companion) and his original construction of the Monster to whose story we listen is, to a reader sympathetic to the Monster, one of the deeper sources of ironic pleasure in the text. We witness Frankenstein doing under duress the very same thing he did voluntarily in the first case: “During my first experiment, a kind of enthusiastic frenzy had blinded me to the horror of my employment; my mind was intently fixed on the sequel of my labour, and my eyes were shut to the horror of my proceedings. But now I went to it in cold blood, and my heart often sickened at the work of my hands” (3.2.189).(11) When the Monster confronts him on the Mer de Glace, following the murder of Ernest and the framing of Justine, during a family holiday in which Victor’s baffled father and fiancée are hoping to pull him from his habitual gloom, Victor chafes and resists and complains and moans for many reasons. But we ought to place the mimetic reason first: it is the character of the mad scientist playing God to possess an Olympian violence of temperament that can never bear with good grace a position of inferiority to anyone else. Given that the mad scientist resents the presence of the Divine as the basis of human interactivity, it is all the more to be expected that he will resent the necessity of interaction with other humans, and even more to be expected that he will resent being compelled to interact with the artificial human he has made.

22 By the time that the Monster has made his ultimatum and demanded that Victor construct for him a female companion, he has proved his superiority to the scientist: ethical superiority, physiological superiority. For the reader, too, the Monster is superior, his tale infinitely more engaging (despite his ugliness) than that of Victor alone. Who among us does not find the middle part of the Mary Shelley’s book the most enjoyable part to read? Even in the misery of his solitary damnation, the outcast is more “interesting” than the self-excusing, fuming figure Victor makes. The creator has been outdone in a big way by the creation; the creator in this case simply cannot bear the superiority of his creation. This inability, upon reflection, may remind us that the absolute afigural transcendence of the God of the Mosaic Revelation makes the strong opposite of the infuriated immanence of Victor as the human playing God but now having to “deal with” his creature. Henceforth, cornered by his creature, Frankenstein writhes, curses, faints, hates, swears revenge, calls on spirits, gets depressed, mystifies his family, explains nothing to them, curses, weeps, stares at the floor, lies in the boat in the middle of lake like Rousseau, staring at the sky, self-centralizing with a vengeance. But “everybody knows,” to quote a phrase from a song by Leonard Cohen: everybody knows by this point that Frankenstein has lost the fight, that Frankenstein of Geneva and the University of Ingolstadt, to use an uncompromising epithet popular among the market-wise young people of North America these days, is “a loser.”(12)

23 In terms of originary analysis, the major dialogue between Victor and the Monster that concludes with the ultimatum shocks the mad scientist with the form of memory exercised in the first place by the originary scientist: the originary memory of the scene of representation. In this confrontation, the mad scientist who played God is called to account, presented with the demand that he make amends for the evil done. The dead central object intended by the materialist cosmological imagination, once animated, reveals itself now as, unexpectedly, a Thing ironically outside and beyond the control of the cosmological imagination. Whatever result Frankenstein intended, the unintended consequence obtrudes itself upon him, cannot be escaped. The ethical and anthropological as embodied paradoxically by the non-human Monster now reveal themselves as modes of understanding more meaningful than the atheistically cosmological mode of understanding that the mad scientist playing God forgetfully privileged. This opposition between ethical demand and cosmological reductionism is boldly figured forth in the Monster’s “standing up” to Victor, despite his ugliness: the cosmological fact of his ugliness is overpowered (for the moment) by the ethical claim he makes as a human-like creature.(13) Glancing at the consequences of Victor’s mechanistic materialism and his failure to acknowledge the category errors in his project, we become conscious of the brutal way in which there is far more to the “secret of life” that the technique by which one might engineer the initial animation of an unanimated corpse.(14) Human life, to be human, requires social interactivity and scenic belonging: the human taken as an anthropological category is not identical to the human taken as a biological category or, as for Frankenstein, a chemical category. (“Biology” as a discipline named as such would not emerge until the nineteenth century). In keeping with his status as the original mad scientist, Victor Frankenstein would be on the side of those scientific rhetoricians in our era who nod toward the residual mystery attached to the question of the cosmological origin of natural life only with grudging resentment.(15)

24 We attended above to the suspense generated by the Monster’s preparations for his mock-creation interview scene with Old DeLacey. Let us consider likewise the stunning thoroughness of the dramatic reversals Mary Shelley stages in the preparation for the second Monster-construction scene. When the Monster tells Victor his story in the middle of the book, the once-all-powerful creator must sit like a punished child and listen, listen to the life story of the “child” he abandoned. The once-dead, now-animated central “object” demonstrates its bizarre marginal freedom, its subjectivity, in language. By now, the Monster has given up helping people in secret or openly; he travels alone at night, fearful of human beings despite his physical strength–fearful presumably because he feels their rejection as spiritually painful (2.8.164). By now, the Monster has only one plan, one proposal to make. Sitting Victor down to force him to listen means demonstrating to Victor that to treat the potentially human as mere unanimated matter with the ontological status of the cosmological object alone, as Victor did, is to do evil. The last time they “met,” they were not “meeting” at all: the Monster had been first a mass of dead flesh prepared for testing in a chemical experiment and then (briefly) a disgusting moving thing to be avoided at all costs. Now, mad scientist and artificial human are really “meeting,” and this Creature is telling his story, explaining his condition, proposing a truce for peaceful co-existence.

25 Meanwhile, Frankenstein hates to reciprocate the conversational gestures of the Monster because in doing so he can only be confessing that his (previously) cosmological imagination has now been forced into a position in which it must serve the ethical. Every tiny concession Frankenstein makes to the Monster implies a confession, a confession that he was “wrong” to have abandoned his experiment at the moment of its success, if not to have contemplated the technological achievement at all. Frankenstein’s fear of the Monster’s ugliness is only human; but the “only-human” condition of the human playing God captures the essential wrongness of the situation. The human scientist by playing God has created an impossible situation in which to be human necessarily means to reject the artificial near-human who arguably “deserves” to be included in the human community. Nor does Frankenstein willingly situate himself in the situation he himself created; he is always wriggling, writhing, evasively shrugging, side-stepping. Frankenstein would rather be tortured (and torture himself) than confess having done any “wrong.” The mad scientist hates to admit that he is mad, hates to concede he was ever misguided. His refusal of the possibility of repentance, his utter inability to distinguish between being humbled and being humiliated is a symptom of his madness. By sheer force of will, he ignores all the evidence that might lead him toward spiritual conversion, or simply taking a little blame.(16) In the words of Pamela Clemit, his “self-justifying confessional narrative collapses into unwitting self-condemnation” (34).

26 The event structure of scientific revelation entails that we lose our freedom to blame God (or another inexplicably supernatural agency) for that which we discover and invent; it entails the unspectacular truth that freedom generates responsibility. But Victor Frankenstein refuses responsibility. For it is one thing to admit one was mistaken because the consequences of one’s actions have caused suffering to oneself; it is another thing to apologize to one’s victim. Victor exercises eloquence in the elaboration of his own sufferings, but he never even remotely contemplates an apology to his victim. I have insisted that we as readers may not claim to be capable of having done any better than Frankenstein in our “instinctive” responses to the Monster’s hideousness, whether before or after the animation. I have argued that Frankenstein could not have foreseen the animated ugliness before animation, that he must have been repelled by the animated creature in its living hideousness. Without disowning either assertion, I would argue as well, however, that Frankenstein after the event is certainly free to interpret the event of the scientific revelation that his actions in near-total isolation brought about as his “responsibility.” The scientific revelation differs from the religious or divine revelation in that ethically, we are no longer free to blame God for revealing that which has been revealed. Such are the consequences of inhabiting a universe hypothetically emptied of all traces of the idea of God, the kind of universe Victor claims to inhabit when he brings to life the Monster. The objective-minded scientist may not, without ethical inconsistency, engineer the conditions for passive Nature to reveal herself and then refuse in splendid obliviousness (obliviousness to the scene of human representation) to claim responsibility for having actively roused Nature from “her” passive state. The scientific revelation reveals a truth about nature, but a truth revealed by humans, and therefore a humanly invented or discovered truth, as opposed to a divinely revealed truth. It is not that we can make of the cosmological object alone whatever we wish; it is that the only cosmological objects revealed to us are revealed to us on the human scene of scientific representation. Originary, modern, or mad, all scientific representation is representation performed by humans. The cosmological object intended by science will always have ethical implications for the human community, implications attached to the desacralization and exchangeability of real objects, implications for goodness and beauty, consumption and production. In his exchanges with the Monster he has made, Frankenstein absurdly attempts to occupy a position of blameless innocence absolutely above the production of such implications. We ought to feel free to be appalled by the vanity of his attempts.

27 Victor’s excuses take the form of those of the drunken driving street racer who, having hit and killed a harmless pedestrian and then run, claims that he is not responsible because he was drunk. It is not illegitimate to demand the mad scientist take responsibility for his paradoxically deliberate madness, just as we demand such a hit-and-run drunk driver take responsibility for his paradoxically deliberate irresponsibility in creating the conditions for his “accidental” murderousness. We noted in Part One that partial defenses of Victor Frankenstein privilege his status as scientist. True, Frankenstein is morally defensible in a minimal way only as a scientist. The defenses take forms roughly analogous to the drunk driver defense: Victor was noble up until the “failure of nerve” he suffered at the moment of animation (Vasbinder), or noble until the Calvinism-induced “moral panic” that attacked him at the moment of animation (Goodall), or noble until the failure of nerve that incapacitated him in that event (Ziolkowski). But the nervous breakdown, moral panic, and failure of nerve arguments themselves signify the mutually reinforcing cosmological impossibility and moral scandal of the human playing God in the mode of being God, of maximal desacralization and minimal exchangeability. Each argument is better subsumed by the minimal God-human and cosmological-anthropological oppositions that have been our focus. Originary guilt is the disposition that might even be said to incline us toward thematization of originary memory as the memory of the difference between the whole, untouchable sacred object of infinite inaccessibility and the dismembered, consumable, economic object of exchangeable value. Victor’s whole experiment required of him, as we have seen, the forceful expulsion of originary guilt from his deliberately self-dehumanized mind.(17)

28 In a desolate outpost on the Orkney Islands of West Scotland, Victor has managed against his will to stitch together the anatomical parts for the Monster’s female companion. All along throughout this journey to Scotland and during the preparatory procedures, he has been tormented by self-consciousness and disgust. Mary Shelley’s punitive irony should not be missed: all the thinking Victor did not do in the first case, having emptied his mind of ethical consideration and esthetic intuition, is thinking that he is forced to do in this second case. Under the Monster’s extortionist thumb, he is forced to be disgusted by the very things–blood, corpses, anatomical reconstruction, solitude–about which he had forced himself in the first creation not to feel any disgust, a disgust that might well have stopped him. The original construction was rushed, thoughtless, lubricated by enthusiasm, propelled by a desire to know the experimental outcome whatever the cost, to know the cosmological object alone; by contrast, this time it is slowed down, painfully thought-heavy, clogged by reluctance, obstructed by a total distaste for scientific practice itself. In fact, Victor becomes (ironically) superstitious and given to pagan magical invocations recited in vehement desperation.(18) We should register the severity of the situational reversal by which Mary Shelley humiliates her modern Prometheus, one lacking Promethean forethought, at this point. Victor in the Orkneys resembles the ancient Prometheus on his rock; he is having his liver gnawed daily by the eagle of disgusted self-consciousness, the very self-awareness that he lacked in his concentration on the “object alone” the first time around. Another way of reading the twist is to say that Victor is playing God against his will this time; he is forced to make God-like decisions that he does not wish to make. He no longer wishes to be the Supernatural Bio-ethicist that he should have tried to be during the first experiment.

29 Frankenstein pauses before he animates the companion female Monster. He reports to Walton in considerable reflective detail a series of five ethical considerations, a “train of reflection” (3.3.190) that made him hesitate before fulfilling the promise that the Monster extorted. Victor believes that he is running a risk incurred by not knowing in advance the Creature’s innate psychology: “I was now about to form another being, of whose dispositions I was alike ignorant; she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate” (3.3.190). We may well accuse Victor of self-serving memory alteration inasmuch as “alike ignorant” falsely suggests he in fact considered the possible “dispositions” of the first monster in advance, when in fact he did no such advance planning. Regardless, the risk now is a real one: the female creature will be her own self. Second, in a closely related move, Frankenstein now foresees the possibility that the female companion might refuse to be bound by promises made by the male Monster, contracts made without her consent. In meditating on purely potential beings in this manner, Frankenstein is doing what David Heyd calls “genethics” and is confronting “pure genesis” problems, asking the kinds of questions that the imagined Biblical God in Genesis must have asked before creating humankind. If one chooses to make a person under certain conditions, what consequences follow from the choice, given those conditions? The condition here is that of the female companion being bound by a promise that she herself did not make. Frankenstein correctly supposes this might be a moral problem: “He has sworn to quit the neighborhood of man, and hide himself in deserts; but she had not; and she, who in all probability was to become a thinking and reasonable animal, might refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation” (3.3.190). Those bioethicists who worry about the conditions for the first human clone (for example) take up such considerations: “but she had not” (emphasis added) reminds us of the ethical equivalent of the worry that the first human clone might wish that others had decided not to clone her, because clone-being might seem burdened with an excess of unfreedom.(19) Victor is correct to worry that the condition of absolute solitude to which the male Monster has agreed is, in fact, an extraordinarily restrictive one.

30 Third, Victor imagines a scenario opposite to the Monster’s imaginary scene of conjugal bliss and mutual affection: “They might even hate each other; the Creature who already lived loathed his own deformity, and might he not conceive an abhorrence when it came before his eyes in the female form?” (3.3.190). This hypothetical scenario might seem to be cynical special pleading, but we must give Frankenstein credit again for imagining the freedom of the female companion, and indeed, of the male Monster himself, to respond–as humans are free to do–in hate. Love is the deferral of resentment, but there can never be any cosmological guarantee that resentment will be deferred in a particular human situation. Once more, Victor fully imagines the very freedom of the artificial human that he failed to begin to imagine in the first case: the freedom of the artificial human.

31 A fourth consideration spells out the possible consequences of a separation between the monsters: “She might also turn with disgust from him to the superior beauty of man; she might quit him, and he is again alone, exasperated by the fresh provocation of being deserted by one of his own species” (3.3.190). The Monster might be resentful if the free female companion leaves him, abandons him; he would then have motivation anyway to destroy Victor’s family in vengeance for his dissatisfaction, making the scientist’s attempts at blackmailer accommodation pointless and useless after all. Notice the systematic quality of Victor’s ethical considerations. He is performing cost-benefit calculations, thinking in the fashion of William Godwin, the coolly rational philosopher father of Mary Shelley; indeed, he is thinking like a contemporary bioethicist.

32 However, the fifth and final ethical consideration decides Frankenstein against completing the deal. In this crucial consideration, species identity is one with ethical identity and cognitive capacity.

Even if they were to leave Europe and inhabit the deserts of the new world, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for which the daemon thirsted, would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated on the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. Had I a right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations? I had before been moved by the sophisms of the being I had created; I had been struck senseless by his fiendish threats; but now, for the first time, the wickedness of my promise burst upon me; I shuddered to think that future ages might curse me as their pest, whose selfishness had not hesitated to buy its own peace at the price perhaps of the existence of the whole human race. (3.3.190)

We recall here Frankenstein’s original dream of the “species” that would “bless” him as its “creator.”(20) Now, in this much more emotionally detached projection, we are as far as possible from that underthought dream. The perverse irony here is that Victor positions himself as the pre-emptive self-sacrificial savior of the whole human race, when the need for such saving never would have arisen had he alone in the first place not done the evil that created the necessity. This perverse irony attaches paradoxically to the most “moral” decision Victor makes. Our claim for the decisive weight of this fifth consideration is supported by the fact that it alone is repeated by Frankenstein twice later.

33 The first repetition occurs after the murder of Henry Clerval, the Monster’s first act of vengeance following Victor’s abortion-destruction of the female companion. Victor has been rescued from jail (the Monster also managed to frame him for the murder of Clerval) by his father Alphonse. He has been raving to his father in delusional fevers about being himself “guilty” for the deaths of Ernest, Justine, and Henry: “‘A thousand times would I have shed my own blood, drop by drop, to have saved their lives; but I could not, my father, indeed I could not sacrifice the whole human race’” (3.5.209). With the figure of “shed… blood” and the sacramental overtones in “drop by drop” and the verb “sacrifice” in the context of his heroically saving “the whole human race,” the unwitting substitution of Victor himself for the figure of Christ is no stretch. Mary Shelley has Victor follow the report of that memory with the more mundane memory: “The conclusion of this speech convinced my father that my ideas were deranged, and he instantly changed the subject of our conversation, and endeavoured to alter the course of my thoughts” (3.5.209). She does not want us to miss the joke: Victor in claiming messianic centrality and so “playing God” has gone so far in his delusional ravings that even his unflappable father appears to feel some embarrassment. On the second occasion in which he remembers having acted (so he believes) as pre-emptive savior of the whole human race, Victor is making his last death-bed statements to Walton, having decided his life’s conduct has not been blameworthy: “In a fit of enthusiastic madness, I created a rational creature, and was bound towards him, to assure, as far as was in my power, his happiness and well-being” (238). In a stunning but typical ellipsis, Victor says nothing about the fact that he did nothing in his power to assure that well-being in the first place. He leaves out any mention of the things he did not do in his “experimental frenzy.” He slides instead to the next sentence, to remark on the one thing he deliberately chose not to do, the animation of the companion creature. The sins of unthinking omission in the first step are ignored; the purported saintliness of the grand gesture of deliberate omission in the second case is highlighted, because having performed it satisfies his self-centralizing vanity: “This was my duty; but there was another still paramount to that. My duties to my fellow-creatures had greater claims on my attention, because they included a greater proportion of happiness or misery. Urged by this view, I refused, and did right in refusing, to create a companion for the first creature” (238). The irreconcilability of these duties may be for Frankenstein a source of death-bed moral self-approval. For the Monster, the irreconcilability is the cause of irredeemable uniqueness and aloneness.

34 The question of alternative courses of action remains: was there any other way Frankenstein might have protected his friends and family from the threatened vengeance of the Monster? It would not be hostile to Frankenstein’s own set of considerations for us to consider briefly the thought that his suicide could have solved the problem of the Monster’s blackmail. The topic of suicide forms part of the novel’s victimary rhetoric: Victor and the Monster both profess powerful wishes for self-annihilation from time to time. Suicide would shut the whole dance of death down in a flash. Absent Victor, the Monster would have no reason to make other humans suffer: the Monster takes his vengeful pleasure most sweetly in the pain of Victor alone, who made him ugly. The possibility of an efficient, pre-emptive suicide that would protect Elizabeth and Henry and all the others never occurs to Victor because his rhetoric of desire for self-annihilation is bogus. Charles Schug has perceived the damage done to the “savior” defense by Victor’s never owning up to the unglamorously limited scope of the Monster’s human targets: “for all practical purposes, Victor has failed his second duty as well as his first: once the Monster has eliminated all of the people Frankenstein held dear he is no longer a threat to ‘beings of [Frankenstein’s] own species.’ The Monster chooses from the very beginning to wreak revenge on his creator, not humankind at large. Frankenstein’s real duty was to William and Clerval and Elizabeth, not to his ‘species’ in general” (616) [emphasis added]. Like any full-blown first-generation romantic, Frankenstein will never exchange indulgence in the luxury of self-staged suffering for obedience to the human necessity of the deferral of resentment.(21) A calculated suicide, although it might have disarmed the Monster and saved his family and friends from becoming collateral damage, would, however, have also put an end to the resentment on which Frankenstein himself thrives. He appears incapable of experiencing any pleasure in the esthetic deferral of his resentment. As Richard Van Oort writes, “But Frankenstein’s death is hardly a ‘tragedy’ in the traditional sense; we are neither horrified nor cathartically purged by it. . . . We are more likely frustrated by Frankenstein’s massive ego. Not even death seems to bring humility to this egocentric character.” Frankenstein never regrets having destroyed the female companion, just as he never internalizes any responsibility for the suffering of the Monster that he made first.

35 The moment of the abortive destruction of the female Monster, after the animation of the Monster itself, is perhaps the most graphically horrific moment in the novel. The hallucinatory tendency of the text’s surface demonstrates itself in the Monster’s tendency to appear at the worst possible moments for Frankenstein; he appears again now, his face appearing in the window of the makeshift Orkney island laboratory, immediately following the mental activity that constituted Victor’s fifth ethical consideration of saving the whole human race from the apocalyptic threat of a rival species. The hideous face of the Monster, the ugliness, seems to tip the scales of ethical judgment for Victor: “As I looked on him… I thought with a sensation of madness on my promise of creating another like to him, and, trembling with passion, tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged. The wretch now saw me destroy the Creature on whose future existence he depended for happiness, and, with a howl of devilish despair and revenge, withdrew” (3.3.191). In another macabre scene staged that same night, Frankenstein must row a boat out onto the water and drop overboard the dismembered parts of the aborted companion thing. For once, he does not merely mope like Rousseau in the middle of the lake, but does some heavy lifting. Notice again the concentration in the one mad figure of Frankenstein alone that which should be in reality a shared activity, the sparagmos, the tearing apart of the object: Frankenstein’s is a criminal, solitary, non-communal rendering of the thing. The sober, self-aware deliberation in his disposal of the body parts (3.3.197) contrasts with the feverish, fearful all-night pacing in the courtyard that followed the animation of the original male Monster (1.4.86).

36 Despite all these considerations unfavorable to the mad scientist, it must be said that to condemn Frankenstein for not trusting the Monster or for not “sympathizing” sufficiently with him to complete the creation of the mate is nonetheless an oversimplification. The formal barrier which it required some work to tease out in our analysis of the event-structure of the animation is even more palpable at this final crisis. We understand that Frankenstein’s tearing-apart of the mate condemns the Monster to eternal solitude; our “sympathy” for him is therefore solicited. But it also damns Frankenstein himself to being nothing but the scientist he was when he animated the first Monster. Meanwhile, as Charles Schug suggests, “While the Monster gains sympathy, he does not establish unimpeachable credibility” (618). We sense that Frankenstein has never considered more carefully than he has in this instance the possible ethical consequences of an action; our intuition of the rightness of our reluctance to see the companion creature animated is confirmed in an identification with Frankenstein having become ethically reflective, however belatedly, inefficiently, and “unfairly.” Mary Shelley shows a certain ironic wisdom in making fear of the Monster’s sexually reproductive capacity the long-term, propositional or hypothetical form of our ostensive fear of his ugliness. We might sentimentally pity him in his solitude, but pragmatic common sense forces us to acknowledge that risking the possibility of sharing the planet with a whole population of his kind is not a desirable plan of action.(22)

37 We ought to fear the risk. We must keep the Monster at a distance. We must let him go, to never come back. Our previous fascination with the unhealthy “secret of life” in Frankenstein’s experimental asexual reproduction is here dispelled by a fresh confirmation of the priority of the healthy “secret of life,” as expressed in old-fashioned human sexually creative coupling. One recalls, as once more David Heyd in his discussion of “pure genesis problems” in genethics does, that the very first commandment of the Biblical God of Genesis for the newly created human being was not a commandment but a blessing placing economic value on human existence itself: “Be fruitful and multiply.” Nor are we wrong to fear the violence of the Monster. We cannot justify the Monster’s murder of Ernest and his framing of Justine, those acts which, committed before the ultimatum, cast a heat over it that understandably flames up easily into Victor’s resentment. The assertion that the Monster can be trusted to do no further harm if Victor complies and creates the mate would have been much more believable if the Monster had not exercised such violence in the name of “vengeance”: “no amount of misery can justify his murdering [Ernest] and his framing of Justine, a totally innocent bystander” (Schug 610). It would have made a great difference if the Monster’s request to Victor could have been cast in the form of a request rather than extortion. That originary thinking affirms the necessity of human resentment of the sacred center does not entail that originary thinking posits the legitimacy of an ethic of resentful extortionist revenge. The murder of Ernest and the framing of Justine are the key to the unity of Victor and his creation: neither mad scientist nor Monster is willing to assume responsibility for the death of these innocents. Mad scientist and Monster ultimately become one in their massive moral indifference to the wider human society: here we touch borders with the doppelganger approach from which we distanced ourselves in Part Two.

38 The Monster gains nothing and loses much moral credibility in his killing of Ernest and framing of Justine. The necessary evil of the violence required for human self-protection is one thing; the luxury of the violence performed to satisfy revenge is another. It may be easy to understand revenge, but it ought to be difficult to justify it.(23) The romanticism of the textual surface of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is at its most tedious in its excessive reliance on this overblown rhetoric of revenge, a rhetoric which both Monster and mad scientist maker enjoy without reservation. One of the implications of generative anthropology’s notion that “the inalienably reciprocal structure of linguistic communication lies at the core of our humanity” (Signs 151) might be that linguistic exchange is almost always to be preferred to the exchange of physically violent gestures, from gestures of the individually formed human fist to those of the collectively threatened military weapon. The victimary interpreters of Frankenstein, who side with the Monster against Victor, can do so only at the expense of legitimating an ethic of victimary revenge, and expelling from consideration, as well, that core of properly scientific courage that gives Victor a certain modern identity in which we have to claim a share, and which we may disown only by taking on instead a regressive moralizing piety disrespectful of the uniqueness of the structure of modern scientific revelation.

Mad Science and the Politicization of “Victims” of Science

39 The tragedy of the fantastic artificial human is precisely that he or she will not be human. We must keep the Monster at a distance. Victimary interpretations may sacrifice Victor to the Monster only by devaluing the unique power of modern scientific knowledge and by denying the risks inherent in the event-structure of scientific revelation. That which is revealed in the animation of the Monster does not need to be revealed a second time in the creation of his proposed mate: Victor is “right” to condemn the Monster to his solitary oneness. The ironic minimal “goodness” of Victor counts as an unintended consequence of his experiment. It is an ironic good that in playing God, he reveals (despite himself, to be sure) the structure of scientific revelation. Besides, he is already paying much of the cost of the consequences for us by providing such a valuable bad example. Do we need to beat him up any more than the Monster already has?

40 I will not be lingering, then, over the secondary revenges that follow the abortive destruction of the mate, including the murders of Henry Clerval and Elizabeth–who “exist fictionally on a sort of literary death row” (the apt phrase is Richard Van Oort’s). Nor will I analyse Victor’s brushes with the ineffectual law: the trial of Victor for murder (he is framed as Justine was framed) and his absurdly belated attempt, after the killing of his wife, to convince a Genevan magistrate of the Monster’s existence and rouse a posse to hunt it down and kill it. Nor will I reflect at length on the passages leading the Monster and Victor up to the North Pole. Paul Sherwin’s rendition of the absurd race of the “infernal couple” (Flahaut’s phrase) toward mutual self-destruction, although inflected by the allegorizing approach we have not taken, may cover that material for us: “As a recognizable human world recedes and the Creature becomes a progressively more enthralling superpower, Frankenstein joins in the frenetic dance of death that impels these mutually fascinated antagonists across the waste places of the earth. By now wholly the Creature’s creature, [Frankenstein] must be considered a florid psychotic, pursuing the naked form of his desire in a fantastic nowhere that is his own” (886). It is sufficient for our purposes to have registered that in the ethical reflections that Victor Frankenstein performs just prior to the tearing apart of the never-to-be-animated female monster, we witness the birth of a discourse something like that of bioethics a century and a half before the discipline proper is born in the Western world–one more testimony to the prophetic insight of Mary Shelley’s founding myth.

41 I have acknowledged more than once that the abject Monster deserves our sympathy. To remove from the whole text the moral ground of its victimary rhetoric is a surgery too drastic, in my view, to be worth the benefit of the historical distance thus gained. Feminist criticism has found the Monster’s story full of possibilities for meaningful comparison with the arbitrarily imposed sufferings of women, more particularly those of Mary Shelley herself and the women of her time (see Mellor; Jacobus; Moers; Graham). Frankenstein has been put to service in disability studies: “therapists, social workers and educators have used film versions of Frankenstein to stimulate discussion among the disabled” (Hoeveler 59). Other studies have shown the ways that the mythic Monster has been appropriated by conservative forces to satirize mob-sized democratic resentment and to mobilize fear of such putative entities as the monstrously rebellious Irish and the masses of the monstrously angry poor (Sterrenburg). Somewhat in the way that the effect of the esthetic can not be coerced, the arbitrary restriction of the possibilities for historical politicization of materials in this modern myth cannot succeed. These various appropriations of the figure of the Monster, from different political wings, may all be to the good. Just as Mary Shelley had the insight to represent in memorable images the power of modern science to do evil, she had the intuition to imagine the extremity of the situation of the victims of modern science at its most aggressively atheistic and amoral.

42 It is to be expected that inasmuch as scientific knowledge is successfully disenchanting and demystifying the cosmos, there will follow a commodification and politicizing of the “causes” of human suffering in body and mind–making resentments into exchangeable commodities (Fleming and Carroll).(24) Forms of suffering that were endowed with sacred significance in the context of a cosmology which included a God to give them direction and transcendental, otherworldly value were to lose their sacred purpose under pressure of “chemistry” and related forces; but we might wonder whether at least something of what was lost in sacred value would not be recuperated in market value. In a wholly “secular” world, elected legislators or military dictators, the political usurpers of sacred centrality, will be compelled to “play God,” inasmuch as they will be expected to do the work of making the meaning that God once made–legislating the institutional means to circulate the resentments created by what are taken to be institutionally caused forms of human suffering. It is no wonder that the assassination of a President or Prime Minister can only be experienced as a sacrificial crisis: the office cannot help but be sacred in democratic society. But the Monster’s suffering cannot be reduced to the inspiration of a political cause. His resentment is legitimate (paradoxically) precisely to the extent that it is not-human.

43 There is a potential for harm in exchanges of resentful accusations such as those in which the Monster and his mad scientist maker dizzyingly engage. Likewise, the modern economies of accusation and apology, outcry and reform, are seldom free from destructive hostility and self-righteousness. There is harm in the politicization of victimization, certainly, when a minimum of ethical civility is not respected–especially when we see jettisoned in self-righteous victimary frenzies the anthropological truth that utopian resentment aiming toward the imposition from above of a fixed state of originary morality inevitably creates its own monsters. It creates monsters to rival the first Monsters who created the now-politicized victims. It has been my argument in this three-part study that to cast Frankenstein’s Monster himself as a figure of such utopian resentment is a little perverse or inappropriate given that Mary Shelley’s whole original point is that the Monster represents no human group at all.

44 The Monster is forcibly prevented from ever entering human society. The conversion of the manifest rhetoric of the Monster into a metaphorical victimary politics does not respect the conspicuous deletions of content by which Mary Shelley discourages us from making such a conversion. Those deletions are to be experienced via the the lack of any explicit connection between the Monster and a specific human party, cause, camp, or agenda: the absence of the content itself invites us to let the Monster be himself, his own unique thing. Our eagerness–and we may all feel it–to ignore those deletions tells us more about our own resentments than it tells us about the anthropological wisdom implicit in Shelley’s text, made visible by originary analysis.

45 I have argued instead that the Monster’s resentment is uniquely legitimate inasmuch as it is uniquely non-human. To Walton at the end of the novel he declares: “Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings, who, pardoning my outward form, would love me” (242). It seems worthwhile to insist that the Monster is not one of us, even as we fully own that his never having been loved even a little is a terrible thing, a tragic result. The Monster is never embraced by another affectionate body, not once. The Monster is correct when he says he is worse off than Satan in Paradise Lost, that Satan had friends.(25) Even Victor Frankenstein (like Satan) had friends whom he was free to neglect and free to keep in the dark about the Monster’s dangerous proximity. If there is something that tempts us to ridicule such cries of self-pity, the temptation is there because the Monster was never human in the first place; but equally, there is something horrifying in such cries, because the Monster was almost human in the first place. Esther Schor may well be accurate in naming him “the loneliest character in the English novel” (1) and describing the novel as “the century’s most blistering critique of Romantic egotism” (2).

46 In all three parts of this study, I have been arguing that Mary Shelley’s first novel is most memorable for its mythic content. The textual source of the modern myth she created yields its meanings most forcefully when interpreted, by means of originary analysis, as the dramatization of the necessary evil of the human playing God in modern market society, where the visible authority of science (as opposed to religion) both must be acknowledged and is bound to be resented. In the agonistic conflict between Frankenstein and his Monster, we will understand more if we resent less. We understand more if we give up an exclusively moralizing condemnation of the mad scientist and instead identify ourselves with a minimal core of legitimate desire in Frankenstein, while also disassociating ourselves from the otherness of the Monster that might wrongly be taken to justify his violence against innocent bystanders. I have tried to demonstrate that the novel dramatizes with gusto the clash between two fantasies. At one pole, we witness an ill-advised modern scientific atheism that attempts to evacuate its cosmological imagination of “ethical” considerations, reducing the human to terms limited to chemical, mechanical, or instrumental categories (Frankenstein). At the other pole (the Monster’s contemporary defenders), we witness a victimary romanticism that loses legitimacy when it legitimates non-negotiable revenge, when it disowns the debt owed by modern market society to scientific revelation, and when it shows contempt for faith in “objective” scientific truth as the ultimate horizon of the exchange in scientific ideas (the knowable) and economic goods (the desirable). Does Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein really contain all these implications? Originary analysis helps explain its tremendous lasting power as a modern myth.

47 As heirs of this modern myth, we who study Shelley’s text will find that we hate to admit that we are like Frankenstein. If we already “believe in” modern science, then we may find it a little easier to admit we are a little like Frankenstein. All of us as humans believe in the primitive egalitarian morality of originary science, so it is easy to hate him from that standpoint. The more difficult task is perhaps a more urgent one. We might admit that, as modern people, we are like Frankenstein in that we want to know the truth about the natural object as it is in cosmological “objective” reality, without interference from God or gods or (even, at times) other people who get in the way for non-negotiable “faith community” reasons having nothing to do with the beneficial science we already have. “Religion” needs to remember the respect owed to “science”; that is, those of us who value the experience of the untouchable sacred object need to remember the respect owed to the pragmatic knowledge that brings consumable, exchangeable, and above all historically new objects to the scene of cultural exchange. The sacred has a history thanks only to science, to scientific change.

48 On the other hand, we hate to admit that we are like Frankenstein for the good reason that his error as mad scientist is an error that we know very well, given the revelations of Hiroshima and Auschwitz. Frankenstein’s mad science causes terrible dehumanizing damage: the desire for “objective” knowledge at its least wise indulges the delusion that it is humanly possible to reverse the priority of desire to cognition that anthropological wisdom would have us take into account.(26) One must always ask whether one really wants to know; we do ask the question, as individuals and as political collectivities. The defenders of the pursuit of scientific representation need to learn to concede (perhaps more rigorously and consistently) that it is always only paradoxical representation, as subject to the paradoxical as any other form of human representation is.

49 The problem of modern science is that we hate to admit our submission to it, our debt to it, but we cannot do without it and only as fools deny the technological benefits it gives us. The temptation to side exclusively with the Monster aligns itself with the victimary temptation to believe that all scientists are on the way to becoming mad scientists–a resentfully immature, untenable belief. At the same time, we who study Shelley’s text meet in the Monster a figure of seemingly infinite near-human suffering. And the novel’s prophetic warning consists in the figure of amoral science that Frankenstein as massively misled mad scientist, isolated and antisocial and incapable, himself represents. As Pamela Clemit has suggested, if we classify Frankenstein as the “first futuristic novel”–and I think we ought to accept that as one of the viable classifications–then it follows that thanks to Mary Shelley, “science fiction was inaugurated as a warning, not a promise, about the world of tomorrow” (84). Frankenstein as mad scientist represents the conviction that modern science as mad science threatens to produce forms of evil that originary science respectful of the communally held sacred could never have dreamed of producing. A little reflection on the future possibilities of biochemical or nuclear warfare, ecological devastation, pharmacological stupefaction, and human genetic engineering, reminds us of these once-never-dreamed-of possibilities for human evil. But a modern world without nuclear weapons, without heavy human footprints on the “environment,” without drugs of any sort, without some measure of medically engineered reproductive autonomy–such a world would no longer be “modern.” Primitivist fantasy gets us nowhere.

50 Originary violence, without which we would have never acquired any knowledge of the concrete central object in the first place, takes the form of an enactment of a necessary evil. For the hopeful idealist attached to utopia (we are all such to some degree),(27) modern science will always seem at best only a necessary evil. At the other extreme, however, at the extreme of those events that generated the postmodern esthetic, we find ourselves asking a legitimate question: how can we ever hope to contain the necessary evil that we fear will undo us as human beings? The answer of this study is a modestly pragmatic one, but perhaps worth making explicit all the same. We can ground our hope for the human future in doing what our first ancestors in the economic distribution of the sparagmos did, and what Mary Shelley has done for us so well: we can ground our hope by representing the object and the scene on which it appears to ourselves, by keeping the object and the necessary evil it inspires on the scene of representation, so as not to lose sight of the anthropological wisdom that alone will contain any “dangerous” cosmological truth. In a word, we should be cultivating originary memory as the guardian of science, preserving the value of the scientifically knowable unity-with-omnicentricity of “the human.” It is impossible to disentangle Victor Frankenstein’s mad desire to rival (desire to be) God the creator from his contemptuous rejection of the only-human. Because the Being of God and the human are coeval, we cannot do away with the one without doing away with the other.