Author: staceymeeker

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.

I met Wolfgang Iser when I was a doctoral student at the University of California, Irvine from 1996 to 2002. By this time, Iser had long been established as a major figure in literary theory. Together with Murray Krieger, Jacques Derrida, François Lyotard, and J. Hillis Miller, he helped establish Irvine’s reputation as the place to go if you wanted to do theory.

In 1996, when I arrived in Irvine, I wanted to do theory. But the theory I wanted to do was anthropological rather than deconstructive or political. Earlier, while in Canada at the University of Victoria where I got both my BA and MA degrees, I had become interested in Eric Gans’s notion of generative anthropology. Although I wasn’t really aware of it at the time, this put me at odds with the main critical developments of the 1990s. After deconstruction swept through literature departments in the 1980s, criticism in the 1990s had become more overtly political and victimary in its orientation. Irvine was probably one of the few places where you could still do “high” theory without also grinding your victimary axe in favor of one or another “subaltern” class.

Iser certainly wasn’t keen on the politicization of literature. He believed that the aesthetic was distinct from conscious or unconscious political agendas, and his later work in particular was concerned with attempting to see the aesthetic in broadly anthropological rather than narrowly political terms. Even more remarkable, at least to me, was the fact that Iser was familiar with generative anthropology. I recall referring to Gans’s work tentatively during my first office hour with him in early 1997. We had been discussing Roman Ingarden and John Searle. I suggested that Gans’s definition of metaphysics, as that mode of thought based on the assumption that the declarative sentence is the fundamental linguistic form, in fact described Ingarden and Searle pretty well. To my astonishment, Iser shot back, “Yes, of course. I agree with Gans.” The rest of the hour we spend discussing generative anthropology. I couldn’t believe my good fortune.

I spent many subsequent hours in Iser’s office. Our conversations ranged far and wide, but they always returned to a single theme. This concerned the nature of the aesthetic. Coming from Germany, where he had studied with the likes of Hans Georg Gadamer and Karl Jaspers, Iser was intimately familiar with the continental philosophical tradition, and his early work was influenced by phenomenology, particularly the work of Edmund Husserl’s student, Roman Ingarden. But during his last years, when I knew him, Iser had become more interested by frameworks less tied to the Cartesian subject. Cybernetics and systems theory were particular favorites.

Iser felt that these “cybernetic” approaches represented more accurately the human situation. A favorite line of his was, “We live, but we do not know what it means to live. So we invent.” I believe he was paraphrasing Samuel Beckett. In any case, what he meant by this was that humans are defined by their desire to know, to bridge the gap between living and knowing, between sensory experience and the displacement of experience in collective forms of representation. Iser regarded literature as a self-conscious attempt to bridge this gap. In fact, this was how he defined literature. In literature, humans invented temporary or exploratory answers to the fundamental questions of human life. But the exploratory nature of fiction was not something to be regretted, or contrasted negatively with the ontological certainties of science or metaphysics. On the contrary, it was a source of cultural renewal because it reflected the peculiarity of the human situation. We live in the space of a permanent deferral of reality. For Iser, this space or “gap,” as he preferred to call it, defined humanity. Hence his emphasis on the interminable nature of aesthetic invention among humans.

I was never altogether satisfied with this “anthropological” definition of literature. Aside from being tremendously abstract, I felt that it tended to privilege the aesthetic at the expense of other anthropological categories. Surely the aesthetic was inseparable from symbolic representation, the defining feature of the human? Iser was inclined to agree, but he shied away from proposing anything as concrete as an originary hypothesis to explain the origin of symbols.

For example, in one of his seminars we read the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, whom Iser interpreted in cybernetic terms. I can still remember him stabbing his finger on the page of his copy of The Interpretation of Cultures while quoting Geertz’s line about man being the “unfinished animal.” For Iser, this constituted evidence, from a nonliterary source, of Beckett’s dictum about humanity always seeking to extend itself. Geertz’s notion of cultural interpretation, in which humanity is defined by the interaction between inner experience and external representation, appealed to Iser because it seemed to pinpoint the generativity of the gap between subject and object, between inner experience and the outside world.

Iser preferred the abstraction of cybernetics to the anthropological concreteness of interpretive systems like psychoanalysis or cultural materialism. In this respect, Gans’s originary hypothesis was also suspect because, like Freud in Totem and Taboo, he insisted on the concreteness of the system’s founding metaphors. The originary participants surround an object that maintains their attention while simultaneously repelling their appropriative gestures. Iser felt that such a hypothesis must ultimately betray the aesthetic ends of humanity. If the human were defined by its capacity to extend itself imaginatively, then any attempt to hypothesize the origin of this capacity must itself eventually fall victim to its own definition. For what is the originary hypothesis if not another attempt to imagine what it means to be human?

You can see how this leads to a paradox when it comes to assessing the relative merits of generative anthropology. On the one hand, Iser admired the hypothesis as a discovery procedure. On the other, he was skeptical of its all-encompassing scope, which he interpreted as dangerously courting historical and narrative closure. For once the originary hypothesis had been formulated, it had to be stuck to. And this was to risk turning the discovery procedure into a myth, a substitute for reality rather than a self-conscious fiction. Iser never agreed with Gans that symbolic representation originated as a deferral of mimetic conflict. This was to concede too much to the metaphor of center and periphery. Even if Gans stressed the heuristic nature of the hypothesis, the risk was always that he, or one his disciples, would becomes so fascinated by the elegance of the theory that it would come to be interpreted as a reality.

Iser himself resisted discipleship, and more than once he cautioned me against identifying too closely with Gans’s way of seeing things. Curiously, in this sense Iser was, to use a phrase invented by Gans to describe himself, also something of a “Bronx romantic.” Reflecting back on our conversations, I would explain his preference for abstraction over anthropological concreteness as a consequence of his strong attachment to the aesthetic tradition. He believed in the autonomy of the critic and he feared the dedifferentiation of discipleship. I don’t think he ever really believed in the “minimal method” of generative anthropology as a genuine alternative to more traditional forms of critical influence. Indeed, it was precisely for this reason that Iser was so hard on René Girard, whom he regarded as the ultimate myth-builder. Whereas Gans was at least self-conscious about the heuristic and fictional status of his central hypothesis, Girard claimed his hypothesis to be an empirical reality. In this sense, Iser shared the general deconstructive skepticism toward all originary scenarios.

But Iser was also suspicious of deconstruction, and I’m sure this was because of its capacity to collect disciples, especially at Irvine. One of the funnier moments I remember from his seminars (which were always electrifying in their well timed digressions–another of Iser’s favorite lines was Laurence Sterne’s “the digressions are the sunshine”) was when he recalled a conference on deconstruction held at Irvine some years earlier. He described how an eager disciple had asked Derrida the inevitable question, “Yes, but what is deconstruction?” Derrida’s reply, Iser recalls, was simple. “Deconstruction is an event.” Iser thought this was a marvelous response, but he couldn’t help remarking on the context. “I mean,” he added mischievously, “this was the politburo of deconstruction.” The comment was not a criticism of Derrida, whose answer Iser appreciated precisely for its refusal to offer a straightforward formula. It was a criticism of discipleship. Iser resisted collecting disciples, and I think this resistance was motivated by his belief that criticism was a deeply personal venture in which you had to learn to stand on your own two feet.

Iser clearly knew how to do that. He was an extraordinary man whose intellect was among the most agile I have ever seen. Though he was always personally attentive and generous to his friends and colleagues, he was a fiercely independent thinker who sought to define his own terrain rather than follow others.

May his example continue to inspire us all.

Introduction

Generative Anthropology is the most promising form of cultural studies today. Those who read Anthropoetics already know this, even if what they do travels under different disciplinary names. The contribution of Generative Anthropology to knowledge about culture as such–its varieties, its structures, its histories, its genesis–rivals that of Cultural Studies in its halcyon years (in the Anglo-American world, a period from about 1972-1985). The interrelationship between the two fields–Generative Anthropology and Cultural Studies–and the light they shed on each other’s practices form the subject matter of this essay.

We cannot ignore the stark institutional differences in the way the two fields are situated. On the one hand, Generative Anthropology is a concentrated research network with highly motivated scholars from a variety of disciplines and nations. On the other, Cultural Studies is now a massive but diffuse “area” (often including further vagaries like “Media studies”) sustained by strong institutional entrenchment. In consequence, Cultural Studies’ proud boast of foundational “interdisciplinarity” has been undermined by its own institutional departmental status. If many people from outside the university now equate the humanities as a whole with Cultural Studies, we should not imagine that such institutional success is indicative of intellectual success in the usual terms of depth, value, or discovery. Cultural Studies is often criticized: some such attacks take aim at the apparent incoherence of the key theoretical precepts of Cultural Studies and from outside the university, pointed questions are now being asked about the worth of the entire field of the humanities–with Cultural Studies being taken as the example of what may have gone wrong.(1) Such critiques have some value, but our approach will, for the most part, begin anew. We inquire, as if for the first time, into what it is that Cultural Studies is, and what it purports to do.

1. What is Cultural Studies?

Despite its institutional ubiquity, Cultural Studies has a readily apparent contradiction at its core. It is characterized by an inverse relationship of explicit definitional clarity on the one hand, and tacit adherence to strict protocols of textual practice on the other. These things may not always be stated clearly, but they are readily and widely discernible. For instance, Lawrence Grossberg, a leading Cultural Studies scholar, after telling us that Cultural Studies is inherently “embedded, descriptive, and historically and contextually specific,” then states that there are concepts which constitute “a history of real achievements that is now part of the cultural studies tradition” (8).

Grossberg’s is far from an isolated example of what might best be called definitional reticence. In its starkest form we find this taken to outlandish extremes. Here is Chris Barker in Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice (2000):

I maintain that the term ‘cultural studies’ has no referent to which we can point. Rather, cultural studies is constituted by the language game of cultural studies. The theoretical terms developed and deployed by persons calling their work cultural studies is what cultural studies ‘is.’ (4)

The comments are both breath-taking and hypocritical in the extreme. If we set aside Barker’s position precisely because it is so extreme, we can nevertheless observe a certain cageyness in scholars with more serious theoretical pedigrees. Witness an even more recent work, by one of the field’s leading intellectuals. The book is Cultural Studies: A Critical Introduction (2005). In it, Simon During tells us that Cultural Studies addresses all culture in the form of cultural “texts” (which can be anything at all), and that in place of the old disciplinary ways, a more rewarding response would be to say that cultural studies is united . . . by dual impulses which are vaguer than a method: a will to interpret the culture within the protocols of academic knowledge . . . as well as a (potential) drive to connect with everyday life as lived outside the academy. (During 2005: 8-9)

More rewarding? This is an economy of foundational intellectual rewards and penalties, of impulses, of drives, and perhaps, of will.(2) But then as During takes even stranger turns, we see the word “defined” brought into play:

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the fallback position on defining cultural studies is nominalist: cultural studies is just what names itself as, and is recognised as, cultural studies. But we don’t have to be so minimalist: I would point to two further features which help characterise the field. . . . The first characteristic feature of cultural studies is that it is an engaged field of study. . . . The second ideal feature of cultural studies . . . is that it ought to be self-reflective. (9-10)(3)

The first thing to note is that the “fallback” position, as phrased by During, is only vaguely “nominalist”; what is offered, rather, is a circular definition–akin to Barker’s–in which Cultural Studies is whatever we happen to be doing at the moment. (It is only nominalist in the naïve sense that giving something a name actually constitutes its identity–a position, as far as we’re aware, few serious nominalists would accept.) In any event, During himself does not appear to accept that this is how Cultural Studies should be defined. He says, rather, that Cultural Studies is characterized by engagement (in the sense of the intellectuel engagé) and self-reflectivity, in the tradition, presumably, of Cliffordian postmodern anthropology; though perhaps he refers to the endless quasi-theorisations of this kind concerning what Cultural Studies itself might be (cf. 14, where During calls it “obsessive”). After this, he notes the alignment between the enterprise university’s desire to free up programs of study and Cultural Studies’ desire for interdisciplinarity (14-16). Definitional reticence extends also to the index of the book where we note that the word “definition” is not used at all; instead, it has an entry called “characterization of” Cultural Studies.

But reticence of this kind is duplicitous. If we press further with this analysis, we find a field in which the equivalents of the intellectual wink-wink take the place of actual argument. During, almost despite himself, has offered two different kinds of definition. Both are problematic, corresponding as they do to the intensional and extensional moments of his “characterization” of Cultural Studies. To start with, it bears saying that in his quasi-intensional “characterization,” During’s “nominalism” possesses the virtue of helping us to avoid hypostatizing an abstract term like “Cultural Studies”: figuring it as some kind of concrete object or substance. It is true, albeit banal, that there can be no “cultural studies” if it is not named and recognized as such. But to suggest that Cultural Studies (as Barker actually does) can simply be equated with self-appellation and recognition doesn’t seem to possess much more intellectual merit than falsely hypostatizing it. Self-appellation and disciplinary recognition stand in relation to other forms of self-appellation and disciplinary recognition. In this respect, disciplines stand in certain relations to other disciplines and analysis always proceeds according to defined textual practices. Furthermore, for a discipline supposedly sensitive to power relations, During seems unaware that “naming” something Cultural Studies is not simply a performative act open to anyone. That is to say, like other performatives (such as pronouncing someone “husband and wife” or sentencing someone to life imprisonment), naming something “cultural studies” is predicated on a certain institutional privilege. Finally, During’s quasi-intensionalist characterization of Cultural Studies quickly fails because of its vacuity. To suggest that cultural studies is simply a name for what cultural studiers do–perhaps even a kind of shorthand for the sum of all specific instances of Cultural Studies activity–at least possess merit insofar as it recognizes that there is no Cultural Studies apart from specific cases of intellectual activity; but neither can there be intellectual activity which is not a definite kind of activity.

In asking what kind of activity Cultural Studies might be, we encounter new issues. The inadequacies of the During’s characterization emerge in a new way. As we mentioned, During offers a couple of extensional characterizations of Cultural Studies. These concern the engaged nature of the field and its capacity for reflexivity. However, these “characterizations” are deeply inadequate to what they purport to describe. Indeed, given the vacuity of his original formulation, the extensional list–of just two features–verge on absurdity. One might just as well apply the two criteria (engagement and reflection) to the organisational processes of an Episcopal Cake Raffle, the annual meetings of the Fabian society, and serious training for a cricket final. The AGM of a major corporation seeking to address the social dimensions of its charter would also fit During’s categories. Perhaps the most peculiar and yet characteristic problem of this book’s approach–and the approach taken by other scholars in that field–is the apparent refusal to explicitly circumscribe the field. As Schwartz, a vehement critic of Cultural Studies, says, and as we must note in advance, our very demand will lead to the retort that “we just don’t get it; that for reasons that we have no right to know, cultural studies is indefinable” (104).(4) We concur with Schwartz in his view–if not his tone. The Cultural Studies position is not sustainable; Schwartz obviously does not accept it, and neither do we.

The absence of proper definition is hardly acceptable. The name, of course, should supply a clue. Presumably, Cultural Studies would exist to develop hypotheses or knowledges about culture and the human, and then, to enhance understanding of particular cultures, including our own. Some might of course contend that Cultural Studies does do this. After all, Cultural Studies would be so-called to reflect the fact that it is a field of study that looks at cultures (hence the plural name). But in Cultural Studies (1993), yet another primer for luckless undergraduates, Fred Inglis writes that the plural is in the name, “cultural studies,” because

“studies” are provisional, flexible, mobile. . . . Those who conduct and learn from “studies” are to have the attributes of mind and qualities of heart and temper to go with this. They honour the plurality of perspectives, relish the varieties of intellectual experience, acknowledge the location and uncertainty of old knowledge itself. (227)

In this respect, we see all too blatantly what Schwartz means by his claim that contrary to the supposed non-definability of Cultural Studies, the “cultural studies doers themselves, for want of a better term, do have a relatively clear idea of what does and does not count as work in cultural studies . . . the very looseness of the discipline provides an invincible, yet ultimately question-begging defense against any criticism of the discipline’s premises” (104-05). We also see in this account the residual claim that–in During’s terms–there is a stance, or an order of engagement.

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2. The Framing of Cultural Studies and of Generative Anthropology

An obvious aspect of research in any field is the narrative of its emergence in relation to surrounding fields of study. Rather less obvious, though, is the fact that this story of emergence itself changes as the field reaches maturity–or indeed, in partial obsolescence, becomes in its turn the cornerstone of a subsequent kind of inquiry. Alasdair Macintyre has made this point in relation to entire blocks or paradigms of knowledge (“Epistemological Crises” 453-72). But it seems to be true on many levels. Just as the English “Lake” poets were subsequently situated within a much wider field of Romantic analysis, so too do fields of inquiry–even entire fields like psychology and phenomenology–undergo transformations in the way they are conceived, and in the way they are seen as having come about historically.

This does not mean that earlier versions of the history of a field were inaccurate, or untrue in their own terms. What it does entail, however, is seeing how we might gain from stepping back a little, and relating a given field to others, doing so in a way that makes sense of it in a new light. In this defined sense, then, we contend that both Generative Anthropology and Cultural Studies are movements that can very usefully be traced from intellectual traditions of the 1940s, and that both have appurtenances with much earlier ideas too. Even more remarkably, however, the origins of both movements lie outside the humanities as it was then conceived–and perhaps, as it is now conceived too. Put simply, in terms of their views of culture, both fields developed out of a fold between anthropology and communication. Cultural Studies, as we will see later, also laid claim to a “political” orientation, and in the next sections we will consider this claim in a little more detail.

Where Cultural Studies in its earliest (and finest, if not most characteristic) incarnation grew from the axis that joins linguistics (Jakobson, Hjelmslev) to anthropology (Lévi-Strauss), producing a third, the analysis of cultural myths (Barthes) in order to serve a political end then seen as inevitable (as we will trace below), Generative Anthropology’s “prehistorical” axis is embodied by an anthropologist who was also a cyberneticist at the same time–Gregory Bateson. In Bateson, we find the double bind, the analysis of mimetic structures between groups (symmetrical Schismogenesis), and the idea of an “ecology of mind” which explored–among other things–the fact that not all causalities in the socio-cultural domain are linearly defined. Unlike Cultural Studies, Generative Anthropology came into existence in the absence of an overarching political set of ends, and existed as an intellectual pursuit devised entirely to make sense of what it means to be a human being.(5)

In the subsequent years, unlike the contorted formation that is now Cultural Studies (whose trajectory we now leave to the next section), Generative Anthropology has developed intellectual clarity and intensity since Bateson’s essays began appearing in the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, we now must point out what we are quite sure some readers are already thinking: Bateson’s temporal precedence is only visible retrospectively: his Steps to an Ecology of Mind only appeared in 1972, by which time the seminal works of René Girard on violence, the sacred, and the scapegoat had already independently appeared. If we emphasize–perhaps over-emphasize–the symmetry of Bateson’s early works with aspects of early Generative Anthropology, it’s because Girard’s place has been already well-acknowledged. In any case, the point here is not “who came first”; it is rather, the terms and conditions for an emerging field to make sense as it gathered force and support.

The key intuitions of Generative Anthropology were undoubtedly espoused in Girard’s works, but often in a local and case-by-case way. Unlike Bateson’s work, which ranged across a variety of preoccupations that did not always coexist easily with the field of what we now call Generative Anthropology, Girard’s early literary work is a concentrated oeuvre that, from the 1960s onwards, offered sustained analysis of the logics of mimesis in a variety of cultural frameworks. To many who read them at the time, however, his case-work, though unusual, seemed to fit–initially at least–into existing paradigms of analysis (as in the famous exchange with Jacques Derrida on the relationship between representation and violence). In addition, in the form in which Girard presented them, they did not initially appear to open up a field of study beyond the signal insights concerning mimesis in particular situations, howsoever important these might be. Again, though, looking at how this field developed as a field–and telling this story in all its appropriate retrospectivity–Girard’s work has subsequently inspired a range of scholars, from economics to psychology, from theology to literature–as, in a halting and piecemeal fashion, individuals extrapolated insights from Girard’s work to create a framework for their own particular inquiries (Fleming 152-7).

In treating Girard, we have touched on the work of Jacques Derrida. He too has a role–although a strange one–in the foundation of Generative Anthropology. In this regard, it is the intersection of Husserlian phenomenology and Derrida’s subsequent exploration of this to its very limits that takes him to the terrain of the generative anthropological commentary on origins. In brief, what Derrida devised as “deconstruction” is, in its most important sense, an extension of Edmund Husserl’s transcendental reduction. When Derrida performed this task, his innovation was to turn it not only onto Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, but to do so in such a way as to inquire into the very terms of (the phenomenological) reduction itself. What he found was astonishing: the most originary conceptual operation was the delay or deferral that happened just at the point of closure, when the “system” was about to find its ground. Later, as Gans contends, in Of Grammatology Derrida applied this deconstructive logic to the idea of the origin–although he always held it to the accounts he was analyzing (in this case, most convincingly of a trio of writers, the work of Rousseau). But Gans remarks of this that “all the theory of writing, of the supplement, of deferral, is in effect a theory of the originary event” (1997: 7). Indeed, theorists of the “always already” like Derrida, Gans believes, “think they have found our thinking’s fatal weakness, when in fact they have found the source of its strength. . . . man will ever remain the paradoxical animal, not least because today the very name of ‘man’ has become unsayable” (7-8). Elsewhere, he is even more blunt: the moment of originary deferral is the sign of the advent of the human, and is the originary event–and it is ultimately to Derrida’s credit that he discovers this, even if he does so in reverse. Strangely then, in the list of founding moments of Generative Anthropology–at least in the dimension of originary thinking that is so pervasive in it–Derrida plays as constructive a role as the Marxist thinkers, Louis Althusser and the Frankfurt School, did in the establishment of Cultural Studies. For anyone who doubts the generative anthropological argument about the points of greatest cultural irreducibility, they can as well turn to Derrida for orientation as to Generative Anthropology. The difference is that where Derrida sees it as proof that cultural origins cannot be arrived at, Gans (and we would argue, Girard himself) sees the crucial moment of deferral itself as the sign of the origin.

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For this encounter to take place on the terms we have just described, however, a field had already to have taken shape–and so it had. This came with Gans’s attempt to give form to Generative Anthropology’s epistemological foundations, to situate (and to limit excessive reliance on) certain empirical (or rather, empiricist) assumptions, and to supply the entire apparatus with an overt and openly available hypothesizing structure. This has taken over twenty years, from the Origin of Language (1981) and the End of Culture (1985) onwards. Most importantly–and here we deliberately situate the achievement in relation to landmark essays by C. S. Peirce in his collected papers (semiotics) and the Cours written up by students of Ferdinand de Saussure (semiology)–Gans gave the nascent field a name, generative anthropology. Where semiotics took a half century to find a body of scholars willing to take up Saussure’s quixotic challenge to construe a science that would “one day exist” and that indeed “deserved” to exist, Gans has not just performed the naming task, but has also done much of the epistemological groundwork needed for it to take shape.

Let us be very clear about this: just as semiotics could have been many things, the fact that Generative Anthropology has a name, an orientation, and a basis is a liberating fact, not one that restricts scholarship and dialogue. It is not just a matter of the hypotheses being open to challenge and amendment, it is rather that it models studies of culture that each time must be constructed afresh. Mimesis might be a general and generative principle, but its operation will be different in every cultural framework, and the varieties of study that may be conducted with the elegant postulates of Generative Anthropology are almost endless. We will demonstrate this nearer the end of the essay, by tracing a little of the exciting and burgeoning literature of generative culture study–but this brings us to the last of the things we wish to identify as features of Generative Anthropology.

The most remarkable thing that has emerged over the period we have identified as that of the emergence of Generative Anthropology is what we have been calling breadth. By this word, we mean the wealth of writings that cover all aspects of social, political, and cultural history. Few in the 1970s would have imagined that a few ideas–that cultures have origins, and all human culture has an origin, that mimesis is an observable aspect of humans today, and, in different ways and logics, always has been, that narratives and myths are amenable to analysis in ways that can unlock the things they conceal, even many years later–could furnish such an extraordinary array of writings. We by no means claim that all, or even most, of these writers thought of themselves as generative anthropologists. What we are attempting, again, is a kind of retrospective genetics of a field; others would, of course, see things differently. Even so, let us illustrate rather what has become possible in critical analysis in the last two decades by noting the diversity of work by Michel Serres (where Girardian insights into cause and effect, into narrative and myth, and into mimesis in general play a major, if unstated role), Robert Hamerton-Kelly and Stephen Gardner (both of whom trace the terrifying logics of crowd-mimesis, but Gardner’s Myths of Freedom also reveals the limits to our understanding of “freedom” itself), and more recently, Pierre Saint-Amand’s devastating critique of Enlightenment self-conceptions in The Laws of Hostility: Politics, Violence, and the Enlightenment. Interestingly too, we find forays into the terrain that is often associated with Cultural Studies, this time by the leading figures in the field: Gans on the aesthetic of piercing (“The Body Sacrificial,” 2000) and Girard’s musings on terrorism and on anorexia nervosa.

3. Re-reading the Foundations of Cultural Studies

We have noted already that Cultural Studies is unwilling to define its terrain, its methods and leading concepts, or even the significance of its findings. In commencing our own account, then, we are fully aware that we are doing something that Cultural Studies scholars are either unwilling–or unable–to do: that is, to locate the field in a disciplinary sense. To locate Cultural Studies in a disciplinary sense, we intend mainly to rely upon Georg von Wright’s Explanation and Understanding (1971), a work written, so far as we know, without any interest one way or the other in Cultural Studies. Von Wright argued that there were two axes along which research knowledge is arranged. Along one axis, the Erklären tradition, we find emphasis on empirical work that seeks to explain data. This he called a Galilean impulse, although he dates it from antiquity (2). Along the other axis, the Verstehen tradition, he aligns hermeneutic and teleological work that sought to understand what things meant. This he called the Aristotelian impulse, although again, it is not confined to antiquity (2-3). The semiotician, Alec McHoul(6) has suggested that the core of this opposition can be further divided–so that as well as having an opposition between explanation of empirical data and the hermeneutic work of understanding them, we can cross-map onto this an opposition between kinds of research that seek laws (nomothetic work) and those kinds that explore particulars (idiographic work). It is certainly true that there is a traditional association between nomothetics and explanation on the one hand, and idiographic research and understanding on the other. But the dual axis allows us to chart Cultural Studies even more precisely than a simple opposition does.

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Nomothetic

Idiographic

(Axes based on McHoul’s rendering of Von Wright) (see note 6).

When we look at Cultural Studies in this way, we find that much contemporary work in the field, even that which looks at programmes that run on national television, is locatable at the extreme idiographic/Verstehen end of the picture. Yet when it comes to work grounded in linguistics, as in the semiotics of social messages, the nomothetic/Erklären aspect is much more prominent. But there are further motivating aspects to Cultural Studies texts. In Schwartz’s somewhat bitter words, there seems to be a need for a “critical leftist rhetoric of ‘progressivism’, ‘activism’, and ‘intervention’ . . . [all of which] is a clearly a necessary and perhaps even a sufficient condition for having one’s work accepted as work in cultural studies” (104).(7) This motivating structure becomes very problematic in recent Cultural Studies, precisely because it is to be found in work which is otherwise at the Verstehen/idiographic end of the spectrum; this in turn requires that the explaining/nomothetic “laws” that impel certain sorts of readings have to be concealed by increasingly elaborate protocols of writing. These concern the imperative that During and others still identify as characterizing the field–the “engaged” aspect of Cultural Studies.

One of the more extraordinary histories of institutional change has been the progressive incorporation of the activist stance of Marxism into otherwise quite pedestrian analysis. This seemed to happen in stages. Part of the history was French–the critique of Sartre was foundational in the work of Roland Barthes; less oppositional though was the role of Louis Althusser, whose emphasis on Marx’s “last instance” created the space of deferral needed for there to arise a strong interest in cultural practices. A key idea here was the exploration of the way subjects are interpellated or “hailed” by texts (something Derrida was to explore rather more rigorously later in his own works). Althusser also offered new topographies for critical analysis–with his theory of ideological state apparatuses and their relationship to what he called repressive state apparatuses. At this time too, the works of the Frankfurt School were at first absorbed and then, in the transition to the British version of Cultural Studies, critiqued. Adorno and Horkheimer’s furious attack on mass culture in the US was then stood on its head, and the analysis of “everyday life” (a term poorly but widely appropriated from Michel de Certeau) and popular culture came to take its place. The rhetoric of change, agency, and political rebellion was retained. Sometimes, as in the nascent feminist and postcolonial analyses then emerging, this stance could be justified. But more commonly, the activist rhetoric was just that–rhetoric. On the above map, we see Cultural Studies migrating from general cultural analysis in the direction of interpretative/idiographic analysis. But also, we see the attempt to inflect both kinds of analysis with an effort to code the work “politically.” Hence, it seems, the contortions of contemporary Cultural Studies, as idiographic analysts work to general rules that have progressively been submerged under the layer of protocols. This explains the exasperation of those like Schwartz who smell a rat in the refusal of the Cultural Studies intellectual to name his or her precepts.

The notion of deferral is usually associated with the work of Jacques Derrida. Yet in the history of Cultural Studies, it was the “last instance” manoeuvre by Louis Althusser which opened the space for a writing practice that was at once avowedly engaged (to return to that key word of Simon During’s), and yet was never engaged in anything more than its own writing. From a generative anthropological point of view, however, there was at root a sound intuition at work: if the class (etc.) war could be postponed, then actual conflict need never break out. The fact that the writing-work conducted during the postponement never actually contributed to anything could be read as seeing it as having done very little harm. Nonetheless, there would surely be value in the attempt to grasp all the meaning of all those attempts to impose deferral-as-a-way-of-life on the entire humanities. In France, of course, beyond the works of Althusser and of Derrida, we had the absurdities of claims to ever more minutely local analysis–as epitomized by the attacks of Jean-François Lyotard on the putative terrors of totalizing theory, Frankfurt School style.

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Meanwhile, Cultural Studies began its migration across the channel and, eventually, the Atlantic. We need to pay attention to this geographical shift–from a defensible Barthesian semiotics in the direction of a rather less defensible Birmingham school project, the one that founded Cultural Studies as such. For reasons of space, we have limited ourselves to three key areas of past strength that need to be considered: its object, its depth, its interdisciplinary range.

First, whatever its current form may display (with all the distortions of government grants, mass dissemination in humanities departments, and the accompanying entrenchment of a Cultural Studies ceiling on what can and cannot be counted as work in the humanities), early Cultural Studies did once direct its energies upon the thing its title implies: the study of culture. This happened in three phases. Let us begin with a moment that precedes its emergence as a field–the linguistic study of literary texts (such as was practised by Prague School linguists Roman Jakobson and Jan Mukarovsky) on the one hand, and the analysis of the conditions of culture from an economic perspective, as conducted by Marxists like Althusser of course, but also, the Frankfurt School writers, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin. When literary scholars with anthropological ambitions like Roland Barthes reinvented semiology, the first and most important moment of Cultural Studies came into being. It was not, it is true, called Cultural Studies in those days, but from the late 1940s to the mid 1960s, this tradition developed powerful analyses of myth, of narrative, and of culture. But by the end of the 1960s, French poststructuralism had emerged, and again it was Roland Barthes who, with customary panache, lent it the promise of style in his bizarrely beautiful analysis of Balzac’s Sarrasine in the supposedly post-structural and even post-metatextual work, S/Z. Barthes, of course, did this work well after the work of Derrida and Foucault had begun appearing. This work on its own represented a breaking free of the strictures of Marxism, but these re-emerged in another form when Cultural Studies gained both its name and a discourse of self-foundation in Birmingham. Graeme Turner remarks of this situation that

the benefits of structuralism and semiotics were taken up. . . . They were particularly influential, for instance, in film and television studies in Britain. . . . Nowhere were these approaches more enthusiastically taken up than in the developing British tradition of ‘cultural studies’ in the 1970s. To a great extent, the protocols that we now make use of within media textual analysis were derived from this tradition. Cultural studies is usually identified with the work of Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall at the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) from the mid-1960s. . . . This definition has been dominated by two main interests over the years: the analysis of the cultural production of ‘everyday life’–the inquiry into the processes, practices and pleasures of popular culture–and the analysis of the media’s role in the cultural construction of everyday life. (222)

This was the heyday of Cultural Studies, but in retrospect, it was also the time when it lost its way entirely. By the early 1980s, the two patterns Turner identified had indeed taken hold, but under the influence of what Charles Taylor, in a hallmark essay on varieties of equality, has rightly called a “politics of recognition.” This was the third and terminal phase of Cultural Studies, in which the problematisation of everyday life gave way to what might best be called a “politics of personal identity.” The contradictions underpinning the field now became apparent to anyone who cared to look. In this respect, these emerge most strongly in the terrain of what became known as “identity politics.” Both words are problematic, and the phrase, as Charles Taylor ably points out, denotes a variety of liberatory politics that is linked to Hegelian notions of the subject–and of recognition. The Cultural Studies scholars proceeded blithely to contend a quite extreme version of this “politics,” so that membership groups were seen as incommensurable. But at the same time, by the very act of their own analyses, they posited a shared common ground (see Ricoeur 56). The contradiction was that “political” Cultural Studies severed itself for the first time from concrete politics; unlike the (Marxist) radical politics that preceded it, identity politics insisted on the radical incommensurability of different conceptions of knowledge–including notions of “justice”–knowledge which is invariably assumed/required in order to mobilize political claims in concrete historico-political domains. For a time, the energy of new voices (psychoanalytic, postcolonial, post-feminist) on the one hand, and the work of establishing protocols for what was emerging as a major draw-card for undergraduate degree programs in media and Cultural Studies on the other, helped keep the field alive. But ossification had set in by the later 1980s, and today the field is still largely in the form it took twenty years ago. Where in each of its three phases, it contributed something to the study of culture, its attenuated twilight yields little of value beyond essays and books wondering what can be done–or increasingly as we are doing here–when or how it will be subsumed by another field.

The second powerful aspect of Cultural Studies is that it once had genuine historical range. We need not be detained long by this, as we have covered the key foundational aspects of Cultural Studies already. But it bears emphasizing that we have disregarded the official narratives of Cultural Studies in favour of our own. For instance, we have treated the Frankfurt School as one of the founding aspects of Cultural Studies. While their critique of culture-as-industry is often attacked in what we see as ritual fashion in Cultural Studies analysis, these attacks themselves rely on Adorno and Horkheimer’s contention that culture be examined structurally and in terms of social and economic import rather than merely in terms of taste. What is true of the Frankfurt School is true elsewhere too: Cultural Studies has depth by the fact that its cornerstones have such historical range: beyond the Frankfurt School, there was semiotics of course, but also the interpretative skills, however disavowed, of F.R. Leavis, the symptomatologies of psychoanalytic traditions of neo-Freudians like Lacan, and so on.

Third, Cultural Studies really was once interdisciplinary and international. As we have seen, the early stages of this began with work in France in linguistics, literature, and anthropology. But the work of communications and media studies in the US and England, and even the input of scholars in German literary hermeneutics like Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser lent particular projects a context–and in so doing, made of the context of Cultural Studies a rich, if at times bewildering, weave. Like gantries round a rocket, however, these things have fallen away one by one. Now Cultural Studies is an enclosed department, and it is practised in the academy in ways that suggest anything but innovation or interest. The once international contributions were carried a little further by postcolonial writings, but this too has dried up as people saw through a Western autocritique. As we remarked elsewhere, this revealed the self-serving chivalry of practices where white or Western critics embark on the rescue of the others not so much for the others’ sakes, but rather, in order that they might themselves be rescued. The upshot of all this is that Cultural Studies has returned, in a disciplinary sense, to what we have seen as the bolt-hole of only the most limited form of humanities research: from times when Cultural Studies embarked on adventurous–and at times foolhardy–empirical or nomothetic research, we now find it for the most part snugly tucked up in the idiographic and Verstehen burrow in which particular “popular” texts are examined according to protocols that, in their complexity, would not be out of place in a medieval royal court.

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4. Generative Anthropology

What lessons, if any, can generative anthropologists learn from all this? And is there anything at all worth appropriating from the moribund hulk that casts its shadow across the entire humanities shoreline? A brief set of comparative observations will suffice to clarify the picture.

Like Cultural Studies, Generative Anthropology does not adhere to traditional disciplinary forms. Unlike Cultural Studies, though, it is its own discipline–or perhaps, demands a certain kind of discipline. Part of this is due to the happy fact that the wealth of work generated by René Girard has been re-situated by Eric Gans in a clearly defined set of epistemological frames. The overt rendering of founding hypotheses, even if they were subsequently to be modified, has marked the field in such a way that to step entirely outside them would be simply to be doing something else (which, we hasten to add, is not in itself a problem: Generative Anthropology, unlike Cultural Studies, is not a jealous god). Perhaps the only indispensable hypothesis of Generative Anthropology is that there has to be one. In other words, where the interdisiplinarity of Cultural Studies gave way to what one of our colleagues amusingly termed a “megadiscipline” (in which we can also hear the echo of that other carnivorous word–monodiscipline), the paradox of Generative Anthropology is quite different: its writers come from a variety of disciplines, but in order to participate in this dialogue, we all subscribe to a few shared hypotheses–to a discipline, in other words. The discipline itself is heuristic–it is only deployed because of what it yields in analysis, in propositions, and in value. And these propositions can, of course, be questioned. In other words, Generative Anthropology is less interdiscipline than it is a new discipline that traverses existing fields of research.

Perhaps Cultural Studies collapsed because of the failure of Marxism not just as a programme of social change (that collapsed in the 1920s), but as a worthwhile critique and critical programme. Even in the scintillating works of Barthes, where one variety of deterministic Marxism is brushed aside, we see it implicit as a usurping third level behind myth. In the now unread texts of the Birmingham school, where so much ink was spilt on subtle capitalist manipulation of truth and knowledge, Marxism is again the often overt foundation. In this respect, Generative Anthropology has no such intellectual baggage to jettison. We hope that in importing back into the field its hidden appurtenances (Bateson, for instance) we have shown how singular and strong the basis of study is. Even were we, if we went back far enough, to track studies into the origin of language in nineteenth century philology, we would find there the questions, but not the methods, of modern Generative Anthropology. In other words, where the works of Derrida and Foucault eventually rendered Cultural Studies incoherent because of the inability of the field to deal with the challenge they posed, Gans’s response to Derrida has strengthened the foundation of Generative Anthropology, not blurred or confused it. In addition, even before responding to Derrida, Gans had already drawn the requisite lesson from the failure of numerous grand projects of foundation in the nineteenth century. Unlike Cultural Studies, whose response to such failure is to say “let us not really say anything about anyone else, or even eventually ourselves,” Gans was to argue for the small empirical footprint, so that what is said is a) ventured with a small chance of being overturned and b) is proposed as a positive, but c) vulnerable body of knowledge.

5. New Fields of Cultural Research in the Humanities

We have, thus far, been working to a topography that is familiar to Cultural Studies scholarship. It is time now, though, to map Generative Anthropology in terms of a redefined field of humanities. Generative Anthropology throws a profound new light on the shape of all the humanities, and on their place in wider social inquiry. So let us begin with a schematic outline of what this might look like, before renewing our comparative analysis of Generative Anthropology with Cultural Studies (albeit, this time, in a more applied sense). We can simply list these domains as follows:

• Generative anthropology is a form of “first” humanities. It is so in the sense that it inquires into the foundations of human culture, and the horizon of the human itself.


• a. The origin of language. This field is not specific to the humanities, but within the humanities in the last half-century, the most important scholarship in this area has come from Generative Anthropology.


• b. The origin of culture. Generative Anthropology makes the claim that this is coeval with the origin of language, and the horizon of the human.


• c. The nature of the human horizon. By seeking to specify what the original of human culture might look like, Generative Anthropology proposes hypotheses about the nature of the human in general. This aspect might hold, strangely, even if the first two sections needed further qualification–since the evidential aspect of Generative Anthropology is a posteriori in nature.


• Generative anthropology is a field of exemplary methodological inquiry. Working with analytic philosophical idioms, it nevertheless hypothesizes on concrete human moments of genesis, offering thereby a series of heuristic tools that are themselves able to be scrutinized and questioned.


• d. Foundational hypothesizing is new to the modern humanities, although as we have seen, it has antecedents in past philosophies of language and culture.


• e. Generative anthropology makes provisional claims. Responding to poststructural questioning of the status of grand systems, generative anthropologists put the hypothesis in question rather than avoiding large questions that the humanities could–and should–address.


• Generative anthropology is a true anthropology. Generative Anthropology develops exemplary analyses of the human which reveal insights into general human processes.


• f. Humans are mimetic. The idea that human culture is founded on mimetic behaviours is not merely a hypothesis with consequences for origins, but also an insight into human anthropology today.


• g. Myths do bear signs of the origin of cultural formations. Myths of foundation have been ably explored by René Girard in particular to show structural patterns of culture.


• Generative anthropology offers a field of secondary hypothesizing. This can, and has, made contributions to a number of specific fields that relate to those of Cultural Studies (though scholars in the latter fields, so far as we can tell, remain unaware of them).


• a. The history of western culture can be described in terms of generative analysis. Gans’s analyses of the stages of the West (classical, neo-classical, Romantic, modern) are one example of how history can be analysed in anthropological terms.


• b. The modern world can be analysed using the tools of generative anthropology. The phenomena of anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, and even the significance of the Holocaust have been widely analysed in all fields of modern inquiry. Yet some of the profoundest insights into such “political” questions–as well as questions of terrorism and jihad–have come from Generative Anthropology because it alone reveals the anthropological dimensions of the supposedly purely political or economic or religious question at hand. Modern culture is replete not just with a posteriori evidence for founding hypotheses, but with popular cultural questions. Generative anthropologists have tackled questions as diverse as anorexia and body piercing–and while other fields have also shed light on these areas (this is, after all, the stamping ground of Cultural Studies), the potential of this field is only now just beginning to be realized.

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We do not have the space to outline the relationship of all these fields to the greater body of Cultural Studies legacy. We have explored some of the methodological and foundational questions elsewhere.(8) Instead, we confine ourselves, for illustrative purposes, to a comparison of the more shriveled practices of Cultural Studies scholarship today with the first forays of Generative Anthropology into what might be called the same terrain. This is what we have identified as the domain of the secondary hypothesis.

6. Secondary Hypotheses and a New Cultural Studies

Within the field of Generative Anthropology, for reasons that we will touch on when we conclude the present essay, the originary event and the scene that frames it have been much discussed in this journal. Indeed, as our earlier work makes plain, we regard this as what marks this field off from others. But the area of obvious overlap with Cultural Studies, one that is a significant field of research in its own right is the arena of the secondary hypothesis. Secondary hypotheses are an inevitable consequence of the hypothesizing method of Generative Anthropology: as we have seen, the originary hypothesis itself works with a posteriori evidence; it does not take much of a leap to apply the same kind of process of hypothesizing to cultural formations whose origins can be postulated with even more certainty as a result of the existence of a considerable historical record.

Let us speak plainly. We hold that the secondary hypothesis (above) is the basis of a new Cultural Studies, and as sketched in the previous section (under heading 4, but consistent with the other three sections) that it is so on the very terrains of extant Cultural Studies in at least these three ways: a) by using the new versions of the mimetic theorem; b) just as the “human” arose in its totality as an originary event, the same thing is true of other cultural formations and types, and; c) anthropoetics, as an ensemble of ideas, is very well placed to make observations on contemporary cultural practices. Let us make a few observations on each of these aspects.

First, then, if we recall that what defines the human is used to explain the originary horizon of culture, it can be turned to further account in more “local” cultural analysis too. That is, the mimetic intuitions of Bateson and Girard (indeed, of Aristotle and Plato, or of modern psychology) can be used to make ad hoc (or better) analyses at a variety of levels of human behavior. Girard’s intuitions about the relationship of myth and narrative also have methodological force at this level.

Second, all cultural formations have points of genesis. Unlike the moment of foundation of the entire horizon of the human, there is a wealth of empirical data for many of these structures. Yet as useful as this is, Gans’s work allows us to formulate ideas along the same lines as the originary hypotheses: to create a small empirical footprint, and to provide the maximum explanatory power from it. His Origin of Language is, in its explorations of the history of the West, just such a project.

Third, Generative Anthropology can, even if not credited or charged with the role, carry out the work that Cultural Studies now fails to do. It can analyze culture. This new form of culture-study can take over many of the areas once handled by Cultural Studies (the aspect we wish to trace in more detail in the rest of this essay).

But before we do this, we should offer a few words on the loss some might feel ensues if the “political” brief of Cultural Studies is utterly abandoned. Many people within Cultural Studies feel that scholarship should engage itself with issues that are critical in the world of politics and culture. What, they might ask, does Gans’s work have to do with the world of political relationships (or, in the next section, with that of popular culture)? As Generative Anthropology is only a nascent field, it is difficult for us to frame a full response to this line of inquiry. The first and most obvious point to make is the one that Marshall McLuhan made all those years ago in the course of an interpretation of Julian Benda’s Trahison des clercs. Wrongly attributing to Benda the view that the role of the scribe is to be rebellious, he then made the entirely valid point that today’s “angry young man” is tomorrow’s authority figure. Cultural Studies may once have been a “politically” challenging enterprise (though we do not ourselves accept this view); it is anything but an “interrogation” of modern social values. Indeed, generative anthropologists could, with little effort, show how the practices of Cultural Studies are dominated by the same mimetic patterns of disavowal of the centre as in all fields that actually do have power. Second, though, cultural studies’ derision of figures like F. R. Leavis and Matthew Arnold for presuming to instruct in moral values proved premature: nowhere indeed could the instruction in values be more strident than in that proselytizing field–it is just that the values were different from those that went before. What, after all, would “political” or “resistant” mean if it were not to do with values?

Perhaps the best way to grasp the promise of Generative Anthropology in the field of cultural analysis is to take up some actual examples of works done by Gans and others in this field. In this regard, at least two varieties of work that already exist are powerfully suggestive of where Generative Anthropology might progress in coming years. The first body of work concerns the question of Israel and Judaism; the second the nature of popular culture.

7. The Meaning of Anti-Semitism: A Two-fold Excursion

Gans’s approach to Judaism and the West are closely related. This is especially true if we take account of his observations on America itself. But we cannot make sense of any of these analyses if we do not first consider his analysis of the importance of the Holocaust for both cultural formations.

If we bear in mind that Gans’s work–like that of Girard–is based on an inquiry into mimetic appropriation on the one hand, and mechanisms of victimage on the other, then it is not surprising that the Holocaust plays a large–if at times unstated–role in Gans’s analyses. Gans analyses the significance of the Holocaust, to understand it not merely as a historical event, but as something that has profound anthropological significance. The Holocaust in this respect has two important temporally determined dimensions.

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First, at the time, the Holocaust in itself might be the exemplary case of victim-creation and scapegoating, but it is so in such a way that the very limits of representation themselves are transgressed. The consequences are profound indeed. In a move with which we very much concur, Gans makes the Holocaust foundational of the “postmodern” cultural idiom we now inhabit. As he puts it in Signs of Paradox,

the Holocaust is about a human violence that exceeds and discredits the scene of culture. So long as the scene of representation wholly contains the violence that is perpetrated upon it, we remain within the domain of the esthetic. Evil . . . follows the model of the sparagmos in its destruction of the worldly correlate of the scene of representation; it is the irreversible de-figuration of the figure. We may then understand absolute evil as an evil so great that it has no figure whatsoever. (163)

Later in the same work, in seeking to grasp what it is that makes the concentration camp so horrific, he suggests that they represent an order of “scenelessness” for the “first time in history” (164). Crucially, the mass murder was not intended to be exemplary, let alone sacrificial, in its operation; rather, it was an attempt at utter purgation (164). Gans remarks–perhaps somewhat hopefully–that we should see the Holocaust as a warning against utopias of all kinds.

He is quick to point out, however, that our interpretation of the Holocaust is still inadequate. Second, then, the aftermath of the Holocaust has witnessed an extraordinary–perhaps unprecedented–form of victimary resurgence:

The effect of this one-sided model of persecution has been to precipitate a postmodern victimary revolution in which stigmatized ethnic, sexual, and social groups of all kinds have denounced their victimization at the hands of the dominant majority. Colonial peoples and American blacks have been followed by women, homosexuals, the handicapped, even the “angry white male.” Groups are granted victimary status to the extent that they can plausibly claim to have served as discriminatory figures (165)

In his essay devoted entirely to this topic, “The Holocaust and the Victimary Revolution,” Gans puts it in language that is so stark that it defamiliarises the ways in which such things are usually discussed. Contending that anti-Semitism is still a strong motivating force of Western culture, he then says

No, the Jews have not shortchanged the world; through the Holocaust they have given it something that compensates for the temporary guarantee they have received against anti-Semitism. I will call this compensation “the victimary.” It took Jews thousands of years of persecution to attain the level of victimization that would reveal the cultural centrality of the victim’s role. What Jesus began as an individual, the Jews finally accomplished en masse. (125)

In this passage, Gans stands the usual ways of speaking about the matter on their head: the Holocaust becomes not just a Nazi crime (which it also was), but also, an event that has had profound anthropological reverberations that are rarely specified.

Once we understand the role of the Holocaust in Gans’s conception of culture, we are then in a position to evaluate his approach to Judaism and the US today. This he has detailed in a carefully written Chronicle of Love and Resentment under the heading of “Antisemitism and Anti-Americanism.” As in the earlier works, he remarks of the Jews’ “paradoxical” historical situation that

the Jews’ humility before God cannot but be experienced by others as a transcendental arrogance. The New Testament and the Koran stand in an unavoidably mimetic relation to the Hebrew Tanach . . . the Jews’ continued presence is an eternal reminder that all monotheism derives from, and therefore still is, worship of their God. (2003)

Introduction

Raymond Williams says that “praxis is practice informed by theory and also, though less emphatically, theory informed by practice, as distinct both from practice uninformed by or unconcerned with theory and from theory which remains theory and is not put to the test of practice. In effect it is a word intended to unite theory . . .with the strongest sense of practical (but not conventional or customary) activity: practice as action.”(1) This paper will take as its theoretical departure point the belief that action, or practice, is encompassed by the realm of the moral–from an originary standpoint more specifically. Eric Gans distinguishes the moral from the ethical in noting that the “moral imposes an absolute and universal obligation whereas the ethical involves the weighing of historically specific principles.”(2) Furthermore, Geoffrey Galt Harpham defines the moral as a subset existing within the broader category of the ethical. While the ethical “places imperatives, principles, [and] alternatives on a balanced scale,” morality represents “a particular moment of ethics, when all but one of the available alternatives are excluded.”(3) We might say that morality corresponds to specific action, the ethical, to broad deliberation. Inherent in such a dichotomy is also an active/passive distinction: the ethical is a thing more passive in nature, the moral is active–that is, any action informed by our theoretical speculations: the moral as praxis. This active/passive dichotomy will be useful to us in trying to distinguish what constitutes the ethical in, say, speech. When do our words, for example, simply reflect a passive ethical negotiation? When do they constitute direct ontological action?

First, I will try to clarify an otherwise muddled notion of activity and passivity in the work of Walter Benjamin, in particular, his article, The Storyteller. By foregrounding the discussion of his work against the backdrop of originary thinking, I hope to isolate an originary reality behind Benjamin’s lament–that is, his lament as a harbinger to what Eric Gans calls the “postmodern esthetic.” Second, in an attempt to understand the raised ethical ramifications of this “postmodern esthetic,” I will look at the work of Stanley Cavell, who, in response to what he believes is Austin’s “skimping in [his] treatment of the passions,”(4) extends Austin’s discussion on the perlocutionary effect of words to include what he calls the “passionate utterance.”(5) I will argue that the originary realization of the primacy of text over narration undermines the work of Benjamin’s storyteller. Thus, a modern-day lack of meaningful narrative makes the ethical ramifications of the perlocutionary utterance of critical interest to those who find themselves immersed firmly within the realities of a postmodern esthetic/ethic.

Narrativity and Textuality

In The Storyteller, Walter Benjamin laments the loss of one who is capable of “tell[ing] a tale properly,” adding that what we lose are not stories per se, but, in our inability to tell them, “the ability to exchange experiences,”(6) the value of which, subsequently, “has fallen.”(7) The worth of such experiences is no longer assigned by the storyteller’s imagination, for example, but rather, by the accuracy of his “information.”(8) Where a storyteller’s authenticity once originated in his ability to remain faithful to a tale passed on to him from previous generations, now, his subject matter must appear “understandable in itself”:(9)

While the [storyteller] was inclined to borrow from the miraculous, it is indispensable for information to sound plausible. Because of this[,] [information] proves incompatible with the spirit of storytelling. If the art of storytelling has become rare, the dissemination of information has had a decisive share in this state of affairs.(10)Thus “[s]trategic experience” is undermined by “tactical warfare . . . economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power.”(11) “Prompt verifiability”(12) ensures an asymmetric relationship of how one might experience life against how one believes it should be lived. One hegemonic narrative (say of tactical warfare) undermines the ability of a given individual to convey strategic experience “passed on from mouth to mouth,”(13) unique to a certain geography, say, and spanning generations. “The storyteller takes what he tells from experience–his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale.”(14) Furthermore, storytellers have “an orientation toward practical interests” predicated on passing “counsel.”(15) Yet the difference between the storyteller’s counsel and “useful” information is that the latter can only lay claim to verifiability while the former is rooted in lived experience.

[T]he nature of every real story . . . [is that] it contains, openly or covertly, something useful. The usefulness may, in one case, consist in a moral; in another, in some practical advice; in a third, in a proverb or a maxim. In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers. But if today “having counsel” is beginning to have an old-fashioned ring, this is because the communicability of experience is decreasing. In consequence we have no counsel either for ourselves or for others. After all, counsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is just unfolding.(16)

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The onus for narrative now, we might say, is to pass along credible information–a story of experience that seeks validity not by exploiting unique cultural precursors, but rather, by appealing to supra-specific worldly verifiability. The scandal of being unable to claim stories as one’s own has also reduced our ability to “exchange experiences,”(17) thereby reducing their value and removing the esthetic power of storytelling in our lives.

The power of the storyteller’s narrative can be derived from a distinction made by Eric Gans between narrativity and textuality. Indeed, Gans’s distinction begins at the origin of language itself. Thus, let us briefly touch upon his version of praxis. We must not forget (nor is Gans shy in reminding us) that his version of the origin of language is completely hypothetical, what one might call a thought experiment carried to its extreme.(18) The geography of this hypothetical scene presupposes a periphery of protohumans surrounding a central object, one of appetitive desire. Invoking an artifice of appetitive mimesis, Gans has it that each member of the first community of protohumans surrounding the object of, say, a hunt (Gans uses the example of a bison), defers his individual appetite for the complete appropriation of the central object not for the sake of communal survival per se, but rather, for the sake of individual survival that can only be guaranteed if the resentment of the community at large is kept at bay. That is, any individual dash for the central object will necessarily result in chaos, what Girard calls “the first mimetic crisis.”(19)

[A]t the moment of crisis, the strength of the [individual] appetitive drive has been increased by appetitive mimesis, the propensity to imitate one’s fellows in their choice of an object of appropriation . . . all hands reach out for the object; but at the same time, each is deterred from appropriating it by the sight of all the others reaching in the same direction. The “fearful symmetry” makes it impossible for any one participant to defy the others and pursue the gesture to its conclusion. The centre of the circle appears to possess a repellent, sacred force that prevents its occupation by the members of the group, that converts the gesture of appropriation into a gesture of designation, that is, into an ostensive sign. Thus the [first] sign arises as an aborted gesture of appropriation that comes to designate the object rather than attempting to capture it.(20)Aesthetic contemplation first arises for (and is unique to) man as a result of aborted appetite. Language does not precede the first act of awareness, but rather, defers the unique moment of originary appetite (which seeks complete satisfaction), transforming it into human desire–necessarily deferred. Because individual human survival can be guaranteed only with the survival of the community, humans are unique in that “the central problem of survival is posed by the relations within the species itself rather than those with the external world.”(21)

The performance of the first ostensive sign constitutes originary ritual, the pragmatic function of which is to recreate the originary scene post-facto; through repetition, the reality of originary deferral in the name of human survival is continually hammered home.(22) In thinking about ritual, Gans reminds us that [t]he irrational element of a ritual is constituted by the excess of its ethical structures over the needs of practical reality. . . . It is important to note that we can speak of “irrationality” only because ritual indeed does possess a conceptual content. This content is not yet thematic, as is the case in theoretical discourse. In order to make it thematic, so that it can take on a truth-value and be judged as to its rationality, it must be interpreted.(23) At this point, aesthetic contemplation simply is, and is unquestioned. The lack of thematic content is not testament to the ontological reality of the first ostensive sign, but rather, to a lack of contrast with any other rival ritual Others. Ritual is interpretation, certainly; however, the truth of ritual, at this stage, is accepted a priori.

Of course, blessed with consciousness, we are destined to apply scrutiny. Discussing the ritual function of myth, Richard van Oort reminds us that “the reception of myth differs from the reception of mythical content” and that “the audience of the former is not so much a spectator as a participant.”(24) Describing the nature of the classical aesthete, van Oort tells us that the myths that preceded him, as ritual, were concerned more with integrating “the individual into the collective life of the community” than in “tell[ing] fictions that may be contemplated whenever it is convenient for the individual to do so.”(25) Here, of course, ritual is not out of line with the agenda of Benjamin’s storyteller–that is, as a means of providing the community with counsel via cultural heritage rather than verifiable truths.(26) However, the Greeks’ scenic re-presentation of that very same mythical content on the stage divorced man from an active participation of ritual based on an aesthetic emanating from the centre in favour of passive contemplation of the nature of the ritual content while situated firmly on the periphery. While the “Greeks were the first to institute an aesthetic distinct from the ritual scenes which preceded them,”(27) the relative lack of a ritual Other negated any questioning of the classical protagonist’s occupation of the ritual centre. Eventually, with the rise of modernity (van Oort here is referring to the Renaissance), the question of “What should be represented on stage?” was posed anew. The neoclassicists, thus, were the “first to recognize, as a condition of their aesthetic project, their historical distance from their aesthetic precursors. . . . Hence the inevitable quarrel between ancient and modern.”(28)

The undermining of participatory ritual for the sake of passive contemplation of the scenic content essentially characterizes the ancient/modern split (i.e., the application of passive ethical scrutiny to active ritual function). We can see, indeed, that however we choose to define our stages of “progress,” our application of scrutiny to that which occupies the centre, what Gans calls our (gradual) “liberation from the sacred”(29) is inherently hostile to Benjamin’s notion of experience, encouraging passive speculation at the expense of active ritual life. Furthermore, the type of scrutiny we are now applying (in our present age of hyper-intellection) no longer presupposes the existence of something capable of occupying the centre, but questions the entire ritual/scenic structure itself. Yet Benjamin is sympathetic to the anthropological necessity of such desacralization when he says:

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The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out. This, however, is a process that has been going on for a long time. And nothing would be more fatuous than to want to see in it merely a “symptom of decay,” let alone a “modern” symptom. It is, rather, only a concomitant symptom of the secular productive forces of history, a concomitant that has quite gradually removed narrative from the realm of living speech and at the same time is making it possible to see new beauty in what is vanishing.(30)This takes us to the final phase of revelation, what Gans calls “the postmodern esthetic,”(31) marked by the realization of the primacy of text over narration: “To claim that narratives are first of all texts is to state a profound anthropological truth.”(32) After the first moment of contemplation, the subsequent performance of the aborted gesture of appropriation (though the use of signs) is narrative, that is, used to describe the “story” of our (mis)appropriation.(33) Temporality, though, exists prior to signification, on the periphery: “The narrative element is provided by the presignifying temporality of the gesture, that is, by what has been abolished by its conversion into a sign.”(34) The “fearful symmetry” described earlier negates “an internal temporal sequence of moving-toward and capturing the object,”(35) which can “legitimately be broken down into a series of subordinate acts. . . . The gesture of appropriation has a beginning and an end.”(36) The moment of “fearful symmetry,” however, becomes an aborted gesture of appropriation the moment the peripheral narrative is converted into “textual” abortion (i.e., an abortion of time).

The first aborted gesture, then, is straddled on both sides by the temporal, a peripheral temporality prior and a central temporality following: “The textual moment is the moment of revelation in which time is suspended and the sign itself replaces worldly action. But this moment could only have been preserved because in the following–[central] narrative–moment, the sign was interpreted as a model of worldly action.”(37) Narrative is reestablished with the onset of generation (i.e., the narrative of interpretation), that is, generation out of and describing the atemporal quality of the first aborted gesture of appropriation: “The text is primordial because the existence of the sign depends on the abolition of the temporal connection between the practical gesture and its object.”(38)However, any subsequent interpretation of the textual moment necessarily depends on an “extended temporality that so readily attaches [itself] to narrative.”(39) The sign as the simultaneous foil of temporality and upon which the following narrativity depends, then, occupies a detemporalized zone.

Having established the primacy of texts over narration, what can we say to Benjamin’s storyteller? If, as Gans reminds us, the “text is not narrative [and if all narratives are first of all texts], so the reasoning goes, then it [text] has no beginning.”(40) Thus any story of origin that posits a beginning is necessarily misleading. Does the primacy of text abolish (the pragmatic function of) narrative completely? While the moment of aesthetic contemplation is atemporal, our ability to frame our relation to it can only occur through narrative.(41) Recounting our experiences can only occur as a temporal project. The difference between textuality and narrativity is one that pits atemporal passive contemplation of the sacred against the temporal activity of ritual, respectively. Yet Gans also reminds us that “[t]he hubris of textualism lies in claiming that text’s construal as narrative is necessarily deluded. Human temporality results by turning texts into narratives, and the return to the text is only of value if a new narrative can be extracted from it.”(42) The textual is meaningless if we lack the ability to act (i.e., construct narratives) in the name of it. Perhaps this is the true source of Benjamin’s lament–not so much a lack of experience (as ends), but rather, a lack of counsel (means) capable of moving, rather than instructing, us to action.(43) Immersed as we are in the textual, a call to action is lacking.

Benjamin is well aware of a tension between textuality and narrativity when he reminds us that the novelist cannot take up the slack left by the storyteller. “What can be handed on orally, the wealth of the epic, is of a different kind from what constitutes the stock in trade of the novel . . . it neither comes from oral tradition nor goes into it. . . . This distinguishes it from storytelling in particular.”(44)Furthermore, Benjamin reminds us that the novel can exist in book form only and must be produced in isolation.(45) Rather than opening up the space of esthetic contemplation in the hopes that the reader will be counseled to act, the novelist must “carry the incommensurable to extremes in the representations of human life.”(46) In so doing, “the novel gives evidence of the profound perplexity of the living.”(47) A novel seeks not to counsel its reader to action, but to offer him/her the ability to contemplate the numerous ethical possibilities it raises.

When the Egyptian king Psammenitus had been beaten and captured by the Persian king Cambyses, Cambyses was bent on humbling his prisoner. He gave orders to place Psammenitus on the road along which the Persian triumphal procession was to pass. And he further arranged that the prisoner should see his daughter pass by as a maid going to the well with her pitcher. While all the Egyptians were lamenting and bewailing this spectacle, Psammenitus stood alone, mute and motionless, his eyes fixed on the ground; and when presently he saw his son, who was being taken along in the procession to be executed, he likewise remained unmoved. But when afterwards he recognized one of his servant, an old, impoverished man, in the ranks of the prisoners, he beat his fists against his head and gave all the signs of deepest mourning.(48)

Having set out relevant conceptual material, Benjamin proceeds to highlight relevant thematic interpretation:

From this story it may be seen what the nature of true storytelling is. The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time. Thus Montaigne referred to this Egyptian king and asked himself why he mourned only when he caught sight of his servant. Montaigne answers: “Since he was already overfull of grief, it took only the smallest increase for it to burst through its dams.” Thus Montaigne. But one could also say: The king is not moved by the fate of those of royal blood, for it is his own fate. Or: We are moved by much on the stage that does not move us in real life; to the king, this servant is only an actor. Or: Great grief is pent up and breaks forth only with relaxation. Seeing this servant was the relaxation. Herodotus offers no explanations. His report is the driest. That is why this story from ancient Egypt is still capable after thousands of years of arousing astonishment and thoughtfulness. It resembles the seeds of grain which have lain for centuries in the chambers of the pyramids shut up air-tight and have retained their germinative power to this day.(49)

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The passive contemplation that follows the storyteller’s tale and precedes subsequent ritual action ensures that the listener of a story is moved to act in accordance with culturally specific absolutes. On the other hand, the passive contemplation associated with speculation (in, say, a novel, or even on the stage) can only instruct a reader on how to carefully weigh a myriad of “historically specific principles.” The novelist (or playwright) is unable to “counsel others” as he is “himself uncounseled.”(50) The storyteller’s narrative provides one absolute and a myriad of interpretations; to act subsequently is an imitation of lived experience in the light of a chosen interpretation. A novelist, on the other hand, offers a myriad of textual possibilities whose agenda is not to move his reader to action, but rather, to prolong the moment of aesthetic/ethical contemplation. All the reader can expect from the novelist is a sort of guidance at best–but not counsel.

Yet if praxis is doing, can we say that narration is action, or simply its necessary precursor? This question is critical in isolating the nature of Benjamin’s lament. It seems that a storyteller’s counsel necessitates action, which, in turn, allows us to engage in meaningful experience. But the reality of the postmodern esthetic is that we are mired within a passive state of metaphysical contemplation that can lead to action certainly (or is itself the best sort of action we can hope for), but of the sort unanchored to any meaningful notion of the sacred. Benjamin, we might say, in writing The Storyteller, seeks to redact the parameters of the sacred (i.e., the realm of narrativity) for the sake of reclaiming meaningful ritual action unencumbered by an excess of passive ethical speculation. But as we have already noted a trajectory of esthetic desacralization, the critical question becomes: is this possible? Will an indulgence in theoretical passivity usher in a new version of the sacred, or simply undermine any attempt at re-sacralization before it begins?(51)

Activity and Passivity

Equating active ritual to convention (that is, convention established through narrative and, we would hope, tied to some notion of the sacred), Cavell’s critique of Austin begins with a dissymmetry in terms of truth value that Austin belies when he makes a distinction between locutionary and illocutionary utterances:

We are given the locutionary act (saying something meaningful [i.e. that can be assigned a truth value]), the famous illocutionary act (what is done in saying something [essentially Austin’s performative utterance]), and the perlocutionary act (what is done by saying something [by, say, an ‘Other’]).”(52)The ternary distinction introduced by Austin is not done in the spirit of exploring perlocutionary utterance per se, but rather to “fasten on[to] the second, illocutionary act and contrast it with the other two.”(53) Here is precisely where Cavell takes issue with Austin’s program. For Austin reminds us that the performative (illocutionary) utterance can be “neither true nor false”(54) in the way we think about the descriptive, assertive, or constative gestures of speech.(55) Rather, illocutionary utterances are tied to conditions that fasten them to categories of “felicity or infelicity” rather than to “truth or falsity.”(56) Yet the dissymmetry of truth or falsity on the one hand versus felicity and infelicity on the other raises the question of which sorts of utterances are worthy of philosophical interest. Is philosophy inherently more concerned only with that which can be assigned a truth, rather than a felicitous, value? Yet Austin later “claim[s] that truth (truth itself, so to speak) is to be understood precisely as a dimension of what he calls the criticism of speech.”(57)But in raising the spectre of the performative, criticism proper, it could be argued, is concerned not solely with speech, but also, with “action more generally.”(58) The conditions Austin outlines for the performative are not done solely to distinguish them from categories of truth and falsity, but rather, to bring them closer to such categories, rather than relegate them to being simply “nonsense” statements.(59) Though Austin may sincerely want to “prepare the ground on which to bring . . . the philosophical concern with truth down to size”(60) (that is, by clearly outlining conditions upon which we can ascertain, if not the truth value of illocutionary utterances, then, at the very least, their felicitousness), an acceptance of felicity over truth value is, to Cavell, an “avoiding [of] . . . the issue of passion or expression in speech.”(61)

The philosophical stakes seem so disproportionate: the dimension of the felicitous turns merely–does it not?–on human conventions, whereas the dimension of truth invokes our fundamental relation to, or knowledge of, whatever there is, human or otherwise.(62)If the gestures implied by speech make them less intelligible in terms of strict categories of truth and falsity, then it is not for the philosopher to minimize the ambiguity of such speech by denying originary intent and playing up, say, the conditions of their felicity. To do so is to characterize (or to doggedly try to characterize) speech as something much more in line with describing action rather than expressing desire. Cavell’s critique of Austin raises the limitations of Austin’s program and “question[s] a theory of language that pictures speech as at heart a matter of action and only incidentally as a matter of articulating and hence expressing desire.”(63)

The problem of language as merely a descriptor of reality versus language as a vehicle of expression goes back to the pre-declarative ostensive stage of linguistic origin. Gans defines the originary linguistic form as the “ostensive, which names a present object.”(64) Furthermore, “[t]he originary use of the ostensive takes place in a collective scene where each participant designates the central object-referent to fellow participants at the periphery.”(65) Yet Gans also makes a key distinction between the “indicative” and the “designative” ostensives.(66) Beginning first with the indicative, Gans notes that

[a] typical example is the cry of “Fire!” addressed by the first observer of the phenomenon to no one in particular, which is to say, to everyone within hearing; the first hearers are expected to repeat the cry until all concerned are made aware of the danger. Under such circumstances, the significance of the designatum is considered to take precedence over all else in the situation. Hence the question as to whether such an ostensive is “performative” or “constative” is meaningless. The indicative ostensive creates a model of present-experience-as-significant that, whether or not it suggests any specific behavior to the interlocutor (as the cry of “Fire!” is likely to do), is in any case presumed to effect a transformation of the latter’s awareness of immediate reality. There is no “performance” here in the sense of an irreversible transformation of the real world, but neither is there merely the acknowledgement of an already existing reality. The performance effected by the ostensive is that of proposing a model of significant experience.(67)

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The indicative ostensive is unconcerned with strict categories of truth value. Indeed, at this stage, such categories are meaningless, for the cry of fire could not have been elicited without the worldly presence of the object in the first place. As noted earlier, the concept of fire is not yet thematic (we are not talking about ourselves talking about fire), but either significant or insignificant: “A cry such as ‘Fire!’ does not appear to modify the world to which it refers. The fire is a fire whether or not anyone refers to it. . . . We do not create the fire-ness of the fire by naming it.”(68) The purpose of the first ostensive is merely to describe, rather than to transform, the surrounding reality. The subsequent communal acceptance of the danger of the fire does not transform the fire into something real (from the unreal), but transfigures it as something worthy of significance; the integration of this new ostensive into the scene of communal recognition presupposes a very real threat which the fire poses to the community at large. Such integration, of course, is not guaranteed:

It goes without saying that this model [i.e., of the indicative ostensive], once tested against the reality experienced by the interlocutor, need not continue to be accepted, but may be rejected as inappropriate–for example, if one decides that there is in fact no danger from fire at all.(69)The pragmatic function of the indicative ostensive is to bestow significance upon an object in the real world. Truth and falsity are not at stake. What appears to us via perception is granted significant status by the speaker of the ostensive. The validity of his claim, which requires communal mediation for communal significance, does not require communal mediation to be ‘true’ (or untrue, for that matter).(70)

Where the indicative ostensive is concerned with significance, the designative ostensive is concerned with representation, “within which [is] to be found in particular Austin’s original performatives: expressions such as “I now pronounce you man and wife.”(71) In the case of the indicative ostensive, “[t]he passage through the scene does not transform the object fire; it leaves it be as nature while designating it in the terms of culture.”(72) The designative, however, differs fundamentally in that, say, marriage, transform[s] [its] object [i.e., a man and wife] because these acts are appurtenances of culture, wholly dependent on the scene of representation for their being as well as for their meaning. Such designative ostensives enact anew the communal accord in meaning, and without at least a vestigial communal scene they are meaningless; this accord is only implicit in the cry of “Fire!”(73)Whereas the indicative ostensive was concerned with making significant real world objects, “[r]epresentation [via first the designative ostensive] . . . creates a set of cultural realities that contrast with natural realities.”(74) Though it may be useful to think of indicative ostensives as preceding the designative ones, the key difference is not a temporal, but a functional one.(75) We might say that the scope of the indicative ostensive, in simply naming some real world object (thereby transfiguring reality), is essentially a passive gesture. The designative ostensive, on the other hand, in seeking to represent an appurtenance of culture that exists solely in the imagination subsequently transforms reality; it is entirely active. Interpreting the gesture of marriage to its conclusion requires verifying its validity by analyzing it (and subsequent utterances) against our thematic understanding of the scene itself. Austin, only willing to grant the scene the power to make such a gesture “felicitous,” is himself undermining the pragmatic function of ritual as secondary to that of the first indicative ostensive, trying desperately to assign a value of truth to the designative (we might say, from an originary standpoint) that binds it to natural rather than cultural realities. The subsequent philosophical implication, however, is a denial of culture, what Cavell calls an “avoidance” of the passional side of speech. Positing Cavell’s passive/active dichotomy against Gans’s indicative/designative one, we can make clear the anthropological origins of Cavell’s disappointment with Austin. Gans himself notes that “it is an all too typical mistake of our enlightened age to suppose that, once . . . rituals have been appropriately secularized, we are at liberty to understand them without reference to their religious origins.”(76) Where Cavell appeals to a greater emphasis on passions, Gans, analogously, champions the “religious” side of speech.

What makes the indicative act immediately understandable to philosophers, whereas the consecrating designative retains a residue of mystery, is that the first, but not the second, function of the ostensive appears reconcilable with the metaphysical, deanthropologized version of the scene of representation that philosophy has inhabited since Plato.(77)Language does not act merely as a passive descriptor of reality, but rather, perhaps more often than not, wholly transforms our surrounding realities. The theoretical endgame for philosophers such as Austin comes in trying to occupy a “deanthropologized” zone of speech criticism, where everything we do (including speech) correlates to objects in reality. But to relegate strong principles of truth/falsity to the indicative and seemingly weaker ones of felicity/infelicity to the designative is to set up a dissymmetry in language that undercuts the importance of language as a mechanism that acts to defer human desire first, and only secondly as a means of naming objects (or actions) in the real world.

From a pragmatic standpoint, this first ostensive designation, anterior to the category of “truth value,” is more indubitably true than any succeeding utterance, which could no longer be made to bear the burden of permitting humanity’s very existence.(78)Gans further reminds us that “truth requires declarative sentences.”(79) In the hypothetical scene, the first “fictional” declarative results not from the speaker’s disingenuousness, but rather, in his attempt to defer the originary desire of the previous speaker’s utterance of the ostensive away from the scene. That is, Speaker A utters the first ostensive sign away from the scene not as a means of making significant that which exists before him, but rather, in anticipation that his utterance will “realize in the world the content of the imaginary scene,”(80)–that which he, and the listener he is addressing, have already agreed upon as being significant. His utterance is now an imperative command, as opposed to a designative ostensive. Speaker B, knowing that the simple utterance of, say, “Hammer!” will not guarantee its actualization, responds in kind, with a predicative attachment:

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The interlocutor becomes aware that there is no hammer available. He He notes, in other words, the noncorrespondence between the reality before him and the desired presence expressed by the imperative. Yet the speaker’s words require him to produce the hammer nonetheless; he cannot merely ignore the imperative in the same way that he might have ignored an inappropriate ostensive. Instead, he must attempt to communicate the absence of the hammer to his interlocutor, who might otherwise be inclined to take drastic measures. When the locutee of the imperative responds with “Hammer–no,” the noncorrespondence becomes itself the object of an utterance. One must, to understand this utterance, imagine a hammer, but imagine it as absent, that is, as present in an imaginary scene but not in reality.(81)Truth, as the correspondence of the ostensive to reality, can only arise once we have had the opportunity to consider the noncorrespondence of an ostensive utterance away from the scene (as an imperative command)–that is, once we have had the opportunity to consider its falsity in the form of the first declarative sentence, uttered “not for the purpose of deliberately misleading its hearer”(82); rather, “the declarative model is in principle verifiable, although only after a delay that may be of help to its speaker.”(83) The predicative attachment introduces into the cosmos an element of temporality, whereby an utterance no longer conforms to an immediately present reality, but only to a possible reality that may or may not be verified in time: “Fiction can only arise when the intermediate stage of predication has been inserted between the imaginary construction of the linguistic referent and its worldly verification.”(84) Temporality, then, has everything to do with truth, and is first established communally with the onset of narrativity. Austin’s outlining of his performative conditions, however, is an attempt to detemporalize language that we may ascertain a truth value much more in line with the pragmatic function of the first indicative ostensive–that is, as a passive descriptor of real world phenomena.(85) Yet fiction can only occur when the interim between utterance and real world verification is delayed. Austin seeks to end this delay by articulating his conditions of the successful functioning of the performative at the outset. But without this delay, the idea of the performative as being “untrue,” or even “infelicitous” is meaningless; yet we know that performatives can be uttered nonsensically (or, more precisely, infelicitously). Hence, performatives are beyond the scope of the indicative and instead, placed in the category of the designative–as appurtenances of culture rather than descriptors of reality–to be executed and verified in time. Holding performatives up to seemingly static conditions that mark their felicity/infelicity, or truth/falsity, or what have you, is misleading. These conditions presuppose the static existence of something that needs be described, rather than something that, in order to be “true,” needs be verified within a scene of representation.

But what if an utterance is made less in the hope of reaffirming the existence of the scene and more in the hope of expressing desire–unbeknownst to the speaker (or anyone else)? To hold such an utterance up to performative (or what have you) conditions, then, would be to deny the speaker’s intent. With that in mind, let us look at what Cavell adds to Austin, by outlining first the conditions for what Cavell calls the successful functioning of the “passionate utterance,”(86) a series analogous to Austin’s conditions for the successful functioning of the performative:

Austin’s Illocutionary Condition 1: There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect . . . to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances.

Analogous Perlocutionary Condition 1: There is no accepted conventional procedure and effect [what Cavell later calls “the absence of ritual assurance”(87)]. The speaker is on his or her own to create the desired effect . . .

Austin’s Illoc 2: The particular persons and circumstances must be appropriate for the invocation of the procedure.

Analogous Perloc 2a: (In the absence of an accepted conventional procedure, there are no antecedently specified persons. Appropriateness is to be decided in each case; it is at issue in each. I am not invoking a procedure but inviting an exchange. Hence:) I must declare myself (explicitly or implicitly) to have standing with you (be appropriate) in the given case.

Analogous Perloc 2b: I therewith single you out (as appropriate) in the given case.

Austin’s Illoc 3 (together with Illoc 4): The procedure must be executed by all participants both correctly and

Austin’s Illoc 4: Completely. (Illoc 3 and 4 have no analogues for perlocutionary acts, there being no antecedent procedure in effect.)

Austin’s Illoc 5 (together with Illoc 6): Where, as often, the procedure is designed for use by persons having certain thoughts or feelings, or for the inauguration of certain consequential conduct on the part of any participant, then a person participating in and so invoking the procedure must in fact have those thoughts or feelings, and the participants must intend so to conduct themselves and further

Austin’s Illoc 6: Must actually so conduct themselves subsequently. (The setting or staging of my perlocutionary invocation, or provocation, or confrontation, backed by no conventional procedure, is grounded in my being moved to speak, hence to speak in, or out of, passion, whose capacities for lucidity and opacity leave the genuineness of motive always vulnerable to criticism. With that in mind:)

Analogous Perloc 5a: In speaking from my passion I must actually be suffering the passion (evincing, expressing, not to say displaying it–though this may go undeciphered, perhaps willfully, by the other), in order rightfully to

Analogous Perloc 5b: Demand from you a response in kind, one you are in turn moved to offer, and moreover

Analogous Perloc 6: Now. (88)

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By “inviting an exchange,” rather than “invoking procedure,” Cavell is temporalizing a project that Austin otherwise sought to fixate–that is, he is inviting us to imagine the noncorrespondence of passion with, well, anything preceding it, in the real world or otherwise. Though procedures as well as exchanges occur in time, in the former case, “[t]he procedure must be executed by all participants both correctly and . . . completely.” Correspondence of the performative utterance to reality can be achieved through later verification. The temporal project has an end. However, in the case of passionate exchange, no prior means of verification exist. Indeed, Cavell notes that the “appropriateness” of the passionate “is to be decided in each case,” and is “at issue” in each case. Where the performative functions successfully against certain conventional ritual, the passionate is such simply because it occurs away from ritual convention altogether. We might say that the “lie” (or infelicity) of convention has been exposed when the speaker makes a passionate demand: a “lie” that can only be overturned by the (metaphysical) reality of desire confirmed–confirmed that is, by a response, in kind, on the part of the listener. We might further say that the passionate exchange hearkens back to a pre-declarative originary exchange that seeks out significance away from the scene altogether rather than verification within an established scene of representation and/or against accepted natural realities.(89) We might also say: a passionate utterance wants to become a designative one–to have its antecedent affect signified and eventually verified within a scene, though any ritual means of doing so are lacking. The passionate utterance, then, is much more in line with the pragmatic function of the indicative ostensive and as such, is atemporal. Where Austin sought to fixate a temporal element in speech by giving us the criteria against which to judge the successful functioning of the performative: Cavell understands that because the passionate exchange requires immediate signification of the speaker’s desire rather than later verification of its truth, such utterances are, at heart, atemporal. The speaker demands a response from his locutee that she is necessarily not instructed, but moved to offer, and furthermore (thus quashing the temporal), now. Austin denies temporality for the sake of verification where Cavell embraces atemporality for the sake of signification. Austin’s theoretical action is designed to reclaim the power of the passive descriptor in language while Cavell’s insistence of some measure of theoretical passivity is designed to assert the power of desire in causing action.

Sartre and Moral Responsibility

Cavell’s passionate utterance exacts a greater ethical rather than moral burden on the individual speaker; the passionate exists not in the realm of his/her action, but in that of his/her passive contemplation. Indeed, the speaker is on “his or her own to create the desired effect.” The “desired effect” acts to legitimize the antecedent affect; its function is not one of description but of acknowledgement, of making significant (as opposed to real) the passions of the speaker. Indeed, because our passions exist in the mind only, what we are forced to consider now is a moral responsibility tied to ethical criteria necessarily unseen or unperceived in the physical sense–yet not so in the metaphysical sense.

The absurdity of such a proposition, however, is apparent in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, particularly, his short paper on “Existentialism.” Where Cavell expressed a disappointment with the “skimping” by Austin of the passions, let me here express a similar misgiving–that is, with Sartre’s denial of passion altogether: “The existentialist does not believe in the power of passion. He will never regard a grand passion as a destructive torrent upon which a man is swept into certain actions as by fate, and which, therefore, is an excuse for them. He thinks that man is responsible for his passion.”(90) So vociferous is Sartre in his condemnation of passivity that even one whom we might consider a coward cannot escape the burden of responsibility for his own cowardice. “[T]he existentialist, when he portrays a coward, shows him as responsible for his cowardice. He is not like that on account of a cowardly heart or lungs or cerebrum, he has not become like that through his physiological organism; he is like that because he has made himself into cowardly actions.”(91) The idea of an individual acting cowardly, but in ignorance of his cowardice, is a notion entirely foreign to Sartre’s version of responsibility. Indeed, “man himself interprets the sign as he chooses,”(92) an interpretation, to be sure, that can only be made manifest via action, for “what produces cowardice is the act of giving up or giving way; and a temperament is not an action.”(93) Such responsibility, Sartre notes, is cause for anguish:

First, what do we mean by anguish? The existentialist frankly states that man is in anguish. His meaning is as follows: When a man commits himself to anything, fully realizing that he is not only choosing what he will be, but is thereby at the same time a legislator deciding for the whole of mankind–in such a moment man cannot escape from the sense of complete and profound responsibility.(94)In this case, the significance of the sign is guaranteed first of all in the mind of the speaker, who seeks not acknowledgment from an Other, but verification against Kant’s categorical imperative. The burden of responsibility is in the speaker’s actions, but not his thought–for only his action can redeem his thought. With Cavell’s passionate utterance, on the other hand, the burden of responsibility does not end merely with the speaker’s utterance, but with the subsequent response/gesture of the locutee. Of course, Cavell, like Sartre, places the entire burden on the individual speaker when he says that “the speaker is on his or her own to create the desired effect.” With Sartre, the speaker’s action belies his own interpretation of the sign; in Cavell’s case, the locutee’s interpretation of the speaker’s desire belies the speaker’s passivity. In the former case, the speaker takes on the burden of the responsibility for his own interpretation of the sign. In the latter, the speaker demands to be interpreted by his locutee. With whom does the greater ethical burden lay–speaker or addressee?

The problem with Kant’s categorical imperative is that, like Austin after him, Kant seeks to end worldly delay by beginning with strong deductive principles which will guarantee future verification; anything that cannot be verified, from a moral standpoint at least, becomes morally unsound. The individual is free to interpret the sign in his own image, but that image is necessarily projected onto the world at large. The gradient flows in the opposite direction in the case of the passionate exchange. The surrounding reality projects an image onto the individual, perhaps moves him. Yet in order to be affected by the world in the way his passions are suggesting, it is imperative that he get an Other to acknowledge, that is, make significant, that to which he seeks to grant central status: In the case of performative utterance, failures to identify the correct procedures are characteristically reparable: the purser should not have undertaken to marry us, but here is the captain; you may successfully refuse to acknowledge that you had seriously accepted the offer of a bet beyond your means, but it had better not happen again . . . Our future is at issue, but the way back, or forward, is not lost. Whereas failure to have singled you out appropriately in passionate utterance characteristically puts the future of our relationship, as part of my sense of my identity, or of my existence, more radically at stake.(95)

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Perhaps if desire is unseen, or unperceivable, it is unfair to load any sort of burden, ethical or moral, upon a locutee. Yet because we are talking about an exchange occurring at a pre-declarative stage, whereby both parties are equally in the dark in terms of verification, the question of who carries what sort of ethical burden is pertinent. I seek not to answer this question here, but merely to raise its relevance when thinking about ethical/moral responsibility. If transcendence is based on the knowledge of the ritual constraints we operate under, in both speech and action, then the perlocutionary ramifications of speech are relevant because “to know what perlocutionary acts I am liable for ‘bringing off’ is part of knowing what I am doing and saying, or am capable of knowing and saying”(96)–a liability, we might say, entirely ethical and dependent, perhaps, on our prior knowledge and exploitation of cultural rather than natural realities.

If the ‘truth’ of the ethical is one based not on verification but acknowledgment (i.e., signification), then how far are we committed to entertain, say, a passionate demand that we would otherwise find wholly out of line with our own moral sensibilities or even, with accepted empirical verification?–remember, the passionate is beyond the realm of verification–or, at the very least, the possibility of verification is at issue. Sartre would respond by saying that to deny oneself is the greatest moral crime. Yet to cling tenaciously to the categorical imperative is, essentially, to deny Others. Thus the burden of the ethical is primarily a negotiation, with an active assertion of self and the denial of an Other on one end (perhaps a hubristic act), against the complete passive acceptance of an Other and the denial of self at the other, with the existences (significances) of both the speaker and addressee at stake.

Conclusion

In the spirit of Benjamin’s lament, what we seek, intuitively perhaps, is a strong central referent upon which we can establish meaningful narrative able to successfully mediate our ritual doings. The originary textual moment, existing anterior to any sort of thematic speculation, was wholly moral, imposing a central tyranny upon the first members of the human community at the periphery. It was this tyranny that Benjamin’s storyteller was able to exploit; not for the sake of tyrannizing the community per se, but for the sake of moving them to perform the customary rituals necessary for their inclusion into society at large. Such rituals were concerned less with “truth” than with instilling in the citizenry an appreciation of the sacred for the sake of communal survival. This movement, rather than instruction, to action, was, for Benjamin, an essential element of his version of experience; and while such rituals were temporal (i.e., they had a beginning and an end), they were designed primarily to remind members of the human community of the first atemporal textual moment of aborted appetite. Now, our move towards desacralization has come full circle, so to speak, with the postmodern realization “that narratives are first of all texts,”(97) that the temporal is first of all atemporal. Passive contemplation of active ritual has led us to believe that somehow, all cultural narratives are delusional. Thus we seek refuge not by indulging in the temporal retellings/reminders of the first textual moment; we deny such “cultural” realities and place our faith in narratives (such as Austin’s conditions) that play up “natural” ones instead. Yet where Gans and Cavell embrace an element of atemporality in speech, Austin’s “narrative” attempts to detemporalize language. That is, Austin attempts to have a concept of “truth” and atemporality simultaneously. Gans, in reminding us that “truth requires declarative sentences,” understands that any statement that seeks verification can only do so in (with) time. To downplay temporality, then, as a vital factor in describing what is “real,” (as Austin desperately tries to do) is to undermine the fact that that which seeks verification can only gain verification within a scene of representation over time. To “detemporalize” language is to try to hold declarative utterances accountable to natural rather than cultural realities that exist atemporally. Yet any declarative sentence (performative or otherwise) must be held accountable to culture–as it can only be verified within a scene of representation.

However, an atemporal element in language can exist. But to atemporalize language would be to understand that significance is the issue, not verification. This is certainly the case with the indicative ostensive. The passionate, rather than natural, realities are what drive such a pre-declarative utterance; passions move an individual to chose an event/occurrence in his/her surroundings as significant (rather than ‘true’) in the first place. What he/she seeks afterwards is acknowledgement by an Other of his/her passions. Because the idea is to bring that which exists outside of a scene of representation into existence, we must now consider the ethical burden of acknowledgement on the part of a listener who is moved to speak in reaction to the speaker’s passionate utterance. (What, for example, might be the consequences of the listener’s silence?) What is at stake is the sacred, a sacred that–increasingly, it seems–can exist only in a minimal scene of acknowledgment consisting of two people. Van Oort’s dictum is reversed: rather than narrative integrating the individual into the active ritual life of the community, esthetic/ethical contemplation of the passions seems to necessitate the creation of a scene when it proves convenient for the individual(s) to do so. The move away from the sacred, from the moral to the ethical, from activity to passivity, has placed a greater burden on speech; faced with an empty centre, we now look to speech to somehow establish the speaker’s passive desire (the passionate utterance) and also, whatever subsequent moral action (acknowledgement) is required on the part of the listener. The goal, nonetheless, is still to create a narrative from our textual moment–to have the sacred move an Other to action. The passionate utterance (and its successful acknowledgement) may be the only means we now have of reclaiming the sacred in our lives–through the active and conscious construction of a “deluded” narrative (scene) by two people.

The relation of significance, then, to natural rather than cultural realities is pertinent. Signification is not an attempt to describe “what is” absolutely in the real world, but rather, to describe a portion of “what is” as being significant. Nor does “making significant” by any means exhaust the realm of “what is” or “what exists” in the “natural world.” Rather, to make significant is to designate something in terms of culture. Hence our relation to the natural–along with the conventional–world only makes sense in relation to culture. Our description of the atemporal passionate utterance only makes sense when we talk about the subsequent narrative acknowledgement that occurs in time and makes (or attempts to make) the first atemporal indicative ostensive a temporal designative one. Activity only makes sense out of passivity. A call to passion is, essentially, a call to action.

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Though we may perform all sorts of actions nowadays, lacking a sacred centre, none of these acts will allow us to reclaim Benjaminian experience as mediated by a strong central referent. Our actions now are the result of passive speculation of what is “true” rather than of what is significant/sacred (and activity, we might say–of the type we are moved to offer, of the type we seek to reclaim–is dependent on the sacred, of making (or, of having had made) significant). Although we began with the first aborted gesture, which was atemporal and textual, the succeeding narrativity was predicated on truth statements that could be verified in time; our ritual acts had a beginning and an end. But now, mired within a postmodern ethical reality of passivity, how do we go about reclaiming action? How do we find the sacred? No doubt the realm of the sacred has shrunk; but the originary narrative does not quash the category of the sacred, but makes us more aware of our passions as they exist in relation to an empty centre. Drowning now in the ethical–rather than the moral–moment, it becomes difficult to act without feeling some measure of “deconstructive” dread. By looking to “conditions” as a means of guiding us through the postmodern ethical morass, critics like Austin seek to whittle down the ambiguity behind speech by describing the conditions of its successful functioning; this, however, is essentially an exercise in describing the nature of the scene of representation itself–that is, of constructing a narrative capable of describing accurately how/why certain utterances work the way they do. Austin’s narrative does not make the utterances any more “true” or “untrue.” He simply describes the cultural realities behind their successful functioning–trying desperately to pass them off as natural ones.

Austin’s theoretical action is designed to pacify speech by holding our utterances accountable to “truth” and “verification.” Yet any “truth” must be verified in time. What Cavell raises in response to Austin is the existence of atemporal passion (passivity), which, according to Gans, is necessarily in the realm of the predeclarative (i.e., the ostensive); temporal performance (action) is in that of the designative. Austin erroneously tries to place performative action, somehow, in the realm of the pre-declarative–in an atemporal and deanthropologized scene of representation where language acts primarily as a passive descriptor of what “there is,” and only secondarily as a means of expressing desire.

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Notes

1. His emphasis; see Raymond Williams, Keywords (New York: Oxford UP, 1976), 268. (back) 2. See Eric Gans, Originary Thinking (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993), 45. (back) 3. See Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s essay, “Ethics,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study. Eds. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 397. (back) 4. See Stanley Cavell, Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (Cambridge: Harvard Belknap Press, 2005), 157. (back) 5. Ibid., 5. (back) 6. See Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on Nikolai Leskov,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Shocken, 1968), 83. (back) 7. Ibid., 83-84 (back) 8. Ibid., 89. (back) 9. Ibid. (back) 10. Ibid. (back) 11. Ibid., 84. (back) 12. Ibid., 89. (back) 13. Ibid., 84. (back) 14. Ibid., 87. (back) 15. Ibid., 86. (back) 16. Ibid. (back) 17. Ibid., 83. (back) 18. Gans, 47. (back) 19. See René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1977). (back) 20. His emphasis; Gans, 8-9. (back) 21. Ibid., 2. Gans has it that the alpha-beta pecking order, which serves to defer violence in the animal kingdom, is beyond the evolutionary (physical) realities of the protohuman. Even the strongest Alpha-male within the species cannot hope to challenge another Alpha-male from without. Indeed, what distinguishes the protohuman from other animals, and abets in his survival, is his propensity to engage in mimesis. For Gans, then, what allowed man to make the leap to consciousness is precisely his mimetic faculty: “[T]he protohuman was a primate that had become, so to speak, too mimetic to remain an animal” (8). Mimesis, then, is both man’s best hope for survival and his principal threat of extinction–the bane of his existence, if you will. (back) 22. For a complete discussion of ritual on the originary scene, see Chapter 5 of Originary Thinking entitled, “The Origin of Fiction,” pp. 86-99. (back) 23. His emphasis; see Eric Gans, The End of Culture: Toward a Generative Anthropology (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 131. (back) 24. His emphasis; see Richard van Oort, “The Idea of the Modern.” New Literary History 37.2 (2006), 324. Also: Nicholas Lobkowicz reminds us that the Greek word for theory (θεωбία) also means “spectator at games.” See Nicholas Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice: History of a Concept From Aristotle to Marx (London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967), 6. (back) 25. Ibid. (back) 26. Nowadays, we do not experience information, for example, as participants. Empiricism, it could be argued, necessitates that we are all, first and foremost, spectators. (back)

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27. van Oort, 324. (back) 28. Ibid. (back) 29. Gans, Originary Thinking, 22. (back) 30. My emphasis; Benjamin, “Storyteller,” 87. (back) 31. My emphasis; see Chapter 12 of Originary Thinking, entitled “The Postmodern Esthetic,” pp. 207-219. (back) 32. Gans, Originary Thinking, 102. (back) 33. Gans notes a distinction between narrative which exists at the periphery only, and that which emerges from the centre: “In order that the [peripheral] temporal movement be reestablished as narrative [after the first aborted gesture of appropriation], the atemporality of the sign must be transcended through the creation of a new temporality that emerges not from the human periphery but from the sacred center” (my emphasis; Ibid., 105). This, for Gans, is the birth of textuality. (back) 34. Ibid., 105. (back) 35. Ibid. (back) 36. Ibid., 104. One could reasonably argue that because consciousness has yet to materialize in the cosmos, the concept of time, at this stage, is premature. Certainly, Gans is not talking about a time that can be, or is, perceived. The sense in which Gans subjects the protohuman to a “presignifying temporality” is done in the same spirit one would go about describing the biological happenings of any animal. But Gans also notes that “[t]he lesson of the scene is that the precultural narrativity of the gesture can only be transformed into true narrative once it has been abolished and transcended through the detemporalization of the sign” (my emphasis, 105). In either case, certainly, we are applying a concept of temporality ipso facto. This does little to discredit the veracity of Gans’s hypothesis, which is, to be sure, a hypothesis after all. (back) 37. Ibid., 106. (back) 38. Ibid., 105. (back) 39. Ibid., 113. (back) 40. Ibid., 109. (back) 41. More thoroughly: “The sign is always in the first place a text to be interpreted as a narrative. Language in itself is not narration. To consider it as such is the ‘innocent’ error of metaphysics. No doubt discourse generally follows a narrative order: it tells a story. But this temporal order would be inconceivable without the prior deferral of the prehuman temporal order in the originary event. The narrative sequence that is first reproduced in ritual and then in (mature) language is an attempt to fill the gap between the suspended temporality of signification and practical time, to naturalize language, the original function of which was to defer appetite, by transforming it into a model for appetitively goal-directed activity. This primal narrative succeeds only because we understand language from the beginning as text to interpret; our experience of language always seeks to transcend the frustration of the aborted prehuman project of appropriation. The text, which is the abolition of prehuman temporality, becomes the narrative model of human temporality” (108). (back) 42. Ibid., 112. You may argue here that by asserting, simultaneously, an inevitable process of desacralization and an anthropological necessity for narrative, generative anthropology has hung us out to dry–for if narrative only makes sense on the basis of the first textual moment, narrative is necessarily on a path to its own destruction in telling a tale of desacralization. Yet Gans is brave enough to accept, and think through, the full responsibilities of originary thinking. For what is originary analysis if not “essentially narrative” (10)! Indeed, by posing generative anthropology as a “minimal ethic” (47), Gans seeks not to indulge in human diversity, but rather, to isolate a common and fundamental anthropology (necessarily narrative). In this way, GA is essentially reductive (46). “The role of generative anthropology is to provide an opening through which human historical experience can enter the anthropological sphere of the originary event. We must provide not a rewriting of history itself but a basis for dialogue between the different moments of history, a dialogue mediated by our common human experience of origin” (21). (back) 43. Ritual action, of course, may very well be a conflation of means and ends (i.e. experience as doing, and not the result of doing). (back) 44. Benjamin, “Storyteller,” 87. (back) 45. Ibid. (back) 46. Ibid. (back)

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47. Ibid. (back) 48. Ibid., 89-90. (back) 49. Ibid., 90. (back) 50. Ibid., 87. (back) 51. In this regard, according to Martin Jay, anyhow, Benjamin is optimistic: “The resulting poverty of experience, Benjamin warned, meant a new variety of barbarism, which involves much more than the individual; it suggests as well the exhaustion of culture itself. / But where there is such a collapse, Benjamin defiantly if somewhat desperately asserted, there is also a new opportunity. ‘For what does poverty of experience do for the barbarian? It forces him to start from scratch; to make a new start; to make a little go a long way; to begin with a little and build up further, looking neither left nor right.’” See Martin Jay, Songs of Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 330-31. (back) 52. His emphasis; Cavell, Philosophy, 169. (back) 53. Austin qtd. in Cavell, Philosophy, 170. (back) 54. Ibid., 158 (back) 55. Ibid., 159. (back) 56. Ibid., 158. (back) 57. Ibid., 159. (back) 58. Ibid. (back) 59. Ibid., 158. (back) 60. Ibid., 159. (back) 61. Ibid., 163. (back) 62. Ibid., 159. (back) 63. Ibid. (back) 64. His italics; Gans, Originary Thinking, 64. (back) 65. Ibid. (back) 66. Ibid., 65, 66. (back) 67. My emphasis; Ibid., 66. (back) 68. Ibid. (back) 69. Ibid. (back) 70. Even the first declarative sentence, uttered in the absence of real-world object, does not originate in the service of falsity, but rather, in the anticipation that such an utterance will lead to the reproduction of the worldly object away from the scene. “What is re-presented by the scenic imagination is endowed with significance, and for that very reason, transfigured. In the first moment of this transfiguration, when the only intelligible difference is that between center and periphery, no distinction can be made between truth and fiction.” See Chapter 5 of Originary Thinking entitled “The Origin of Fiction,” pp. 86-99. (back) 71. Ibid., 66. (back) 72. Ibid. (back) 73. Ibid., 66-67. (back) 74. Ibid. 67. (back)

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75. Indeed, in the case of indication, survival is not necessarily at stake, whereas with the first designative sign, survival is necessarily at stake. The temporal element occurring with the utterance of the designative ostensive away from the scene introduces an element of temporality, which, to be sure, must be deferred. Yet the stakes of this sort of deferral are far less grave than of the sort occurring within the eternal present of the ritual scene: “For Heidegger, a human being conscious of death is alone with time, the bringer of death; hence Heidegger makes time the primary object of our resentment. But the source of individuality is the communal locus of the originary event. If the human being is the animal for which death is significant, this is because human death is experienced not as the effect of the impersonal natural force of time, but as the potential result of the hostile actions of fellow humans.” Gans, Originary Thinking, 19. (back) 76. Gans, Originary Thinking, 68. (back) 77. Ibid. (back) 78. Ibid., 87. You may argue that we are not here talking about the designative, but the indicative. Yet the “first ostensive designation” (rather than indication) is such because it is necessarily accepted by the community at large; the first designation depends on a scene of representation that cannot, at this point, be questioned in terms of truth value; this is not necessarily the case with the indicative. (back) 79. Ibid. (back) 80. Ibid., 88. (back) 81. Ibid., 89-90. (back) 82. Ibid., 88. (back) 83. Ibid., 88. (back) 84. Ibid., 87. (back) 85. Lining up Gans’s version of truth with Austin’s, we are at an impasse. Gans’s version has the first indicative ostensive “anterior” to the category of truth value, and requires “declarative sentences.” Such sentences, i.e., in the form of the designative, for Austin, can only be “felicitous” at best. Gans has truth dependent on the scene of representation while Austin seeks to transcend it–a hubristic act, certainly, in that everything we know about the world arises from our metaphysical quest to make significant, rather than a metaphysical quest designed to hold speech accountable to all that there “is.” All that can be assigned a truth-value is necessarily performative–that is, all utterances that can be qualified as “true” (in any meaningful way) operate within a scene of representation, under conditions that make them true. The “truth” of Gans’s originary narrative simply exploits the power of human intuition vis-à-vis narrativity and textuality; as a “fundamental anthropology,” it seeks out no real-world verification. See Originary Thinking, pp. 9-13. (back) 86. The passionate/perlocutionary distinction may only be one of degree–both are passive, both demand action (or speech) on the part of an Other. The goal of perlocutionary utterance is to make something happen in the real world: if I say, “It’s hot!” in order to get you to open the window, the ethical ramifications are low; only my homeostasis is at stake. Though the goal of the passionate utterance is virtually the same, the stakes are far graver: the burden of the passionate is not merely to make something happen, but also, to make myself exist. C.f.: “[I]llocutionary acts are bound up with effects; and these are all distinct from the producing of effects which is characteristic of the perlocutionary act.” See J. L. Austin, How to do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1962), 117 (Lecture IX in particular). We might further say that the perlocutionary is concerned with producing effects, the passionate with producing (or making significant) affect. (back) 14 87. Cavell, Philosophy, 189. (back) 88. His emphasis; Ibid., 181-82. (back) 89. On the originary scene, for example, an individual is moved to make an utterance at the sight of fire, before the fire has been signified within the scene itself. (back) 90. Sartre, 3. (back) 91. Ibid., 8. (back) 92. Ibid., 6. (back) 93. Ibid., 8. (back) 94. Ibid., 3-4. (back) 95. Cavell, Philosophy, 184. (back) 96. His emphasis; Ibid., 174. (back) 97. See Note 32. (back) * * *

I would like to thank Stephen Pender, whose generosity and good faith have given me the courage to explore areas of inquiry I might have otherwise believed beyond my limits.  And, as always, my deepest thanks to Richard van Oort and Eric Gans, whose sincere encouragement and support continue to surprise me.

June 1, 2007

Continued from Part One: An Introduction

1 In Parts Two and Three of our analysis of the Frankenstein myth, our task will be a literary analysis of the source-text of its core story: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). While putting to work the idea of originary science we formulated in Part One, the remainder of this tripartite investigation will attempt to explain the imaginative power and prescience of Shelley’s achievement, taking positions amidst the jostling crowd of commentators on the text, positions informed by generative anthropology. Part Three, to appear in a later issue of Anthropoetics, will focus on the tragic life and non-career of the Monster, generally considered the most readable part of the novel, while qualifying the “tragic” attribution by resisting the fashion of casting the Monster as a victim whose side we must wholly take for political reasons. Our focus in Part Two will be Victor Frankenstein, his story mostly up until the monster is made: his education, his unique discovery, his animation of the Creature. Our goal is to restore the figurality of the mad scientist to Victor in the context of the tension between anthropology and cosmology, and that between religious humility and scientific knowledge, as these may be formulated anew by originary thinking. After describing the interpretive approach to be taken, three sections of textual analysis will follow. The first argues that Shelley’s representation of Frankenstein’s education legitimates our casting him anew as a scientist playing God. In the second, my thesis is that the problem of firstness in atheistic cosmological discovery emerges in Victor’s obliviously mock-Pauline, simultaneously humble and imperious, account of his discovering the “secret of life.” In the third section, our focus is Mary Shelley’s intuition of the analogy between the event structure of religious revelation and that of scientific discovery. The temptation to turn Frankenstein into a scapegoat is to be resisted; we should instead recognize Mary Shelley’s insight into mad science as the extreme perversion of originary science. The mad scientist performs the representation of the cosmological object artificially cut off from human mediation, in the mode of a maximal desacralization and a minimal exchangeability–the very opposite of minimal or originary science. Meanwhile, there can be no utopian return to originary science. We should concede the goodness of that desire to know the object legitimated by modern science and by freedom of exchange in market society.

Two Directions in Approaching the Book and Its Author

2 Witness the fame of this one book Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818).(1) As a result of its publication, Mary Shelley was never quite recognized as her own woman: she never got out from under the umbrella hovering over her head that identified her as “the author of Frankenstein,” nor did she manage to escape a second perpetually hovering umbrella that identified her to the British public as the mistress (then second wife) of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Percy Shelley, scholars agree, provided the real-life model for the fictional Victor Frankenstein (Williams 181; Small 100-102, 112, 120). Apart from his putting on display his vaulting ambition, provoking atheism,(2) and shoddy treatment of the strangely loyal Mary, he also produced some great English romantic poetry, which Mary edited painstakingly over a long period of years as his widow (Williams 159-80). There is not, to her credit, much evidence that Mary Shelley deeply resented either of the umbrellas (although her husband’s spousal waywardness tried her patience to its outer limits.) Any “poor Mary” sympathizers can take satisfaction in the fact that the one smash success of the great poet’s wife came to overshadow anything written by the critically revered husband. Everybody knows who Frankenstein is, but Alastor? Epipsychidion? Queen Mab? From the novel’s inception, there has been an uninterrupted Frankenstein industry. London’s first theatrical version went onstage within a few years of the novel’s appearance; the history of Frankenstein scripts and productions spans the nineteenth century.(3) The twentieth century abounds with Frankenstein movies, comic books, imitations and spin-offs. Over the last two decades, in keeping with the tendency to “open up” the canon of English literature and in response to the oversized Frankenstein industry, specialists have created a Mary Shelley industry. Well-edited reprints of her post-Frankenstein novels have been made available as affordable paperbacks; Mary Shelley scholars have rescued her from entrapment under the two umbrellas (“she wrote that little Gothic number”; “she edited her husband’s verse”). This revisionist scholarship argues for the cultural value of the entire oeuvre of Mary Shelley, including her travel writing, correspondence, shorter tales, and miscellaneous cultural criticism (Schor 2003). Our approach is old-fashioned to the extent that it celebrates only her achievement as the author of Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus.

3 The collective decision to let Mary Shelley’s novel pass as significant thanks to the verdict of history (to which I consented in Part One of this study) must be qualified: significance as myth is not equivalent to perfection as artwork. Frankenstein‘s literary value may be questioned on the basis of an observation of a certain vulgarity on its textual surface, a vulgarity that good taste might find taxing, if not exasperating. It has established itself neither as perfectly popular (horror fans are a minority) nor as perfectly high art (that insinuation of vulgarity). Judged as an esthetic object with respect to the pleasures of meditation on its textuality rather than the satisfactions of its most graphic episodes, Mary Shelley’s famous text must be described as flawed. Frankenstein lacks the compact density and restrained maturity of the representative texts of the high tradition of the English novel, which themselves owe something essential to Gothic forebears, as Joseph Weisenfarth shows in Gothic Manners and the Classic English Novel (1985). If we examine Frankenstein alongside Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847), George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1860), or Charles Dickens’Great Expectations (1861), its awkwardness, indiscipline, and excess are exposed. Mary Shelley’s neo-gothic prose style had no influence on later English fiction. Consider, by way of an invidious but revealing contrast, the mimetic impact of the style of Jane Austen. Keeping our focus on Frankenstein as the source of a modern myth, we will continue to seek the significance of the text in the territory marked out by its story as opposed to its discourse. We approach it more as a work that opens up macrohistorical anthropological questions about the power of natural science and the resentment of modern science than as a poetic enigma closed in upon itself with the opacity of the microhistorical.

4 But we must take a position in the midst of the tremendous mass or mess of scholarship and commentary on the text. In a searching, judicious monograph on the novel, David Ketterer intimates that there are two basic directions one can take in approaching the text of Frankenstein.

But Frankenstein is patently open-ended. Whatever resolution may be projected lies beyond the bounds of that fictional world. The final image of a figure “lost in darkness and distance” is of a figure engulfed by the unknown. And such a figure dramatizes the reader’s predicament. Unlike [Percy Bysshe] Shelley, Mary [Shelley] has no philosophical answers. What she presents in Frankenstein, at the cost of a certain narrative incoherence, is a spectrum of possibilities . . . a philosophical appreciation of the sliding relationships between the Self and the Other. (104)(4)

The “open-ended” quality of Frankenstein, we agree with Ketterer, cannot be denied; it would be pure vanity to announce (like Victor) one’s discovery of the one key to unlock the mysteries and dissolve the paradoxes of the text. There are ways in which we simply cannot know Mary Shelley or Victor Frankenstein or the Monster; blackouts, blank spaces, gaps, dead ends make it impossible to answer certain fundamental questions about their relationships definitively. Adding responsively to Ketterer, I submit that the absence from the text of “philosophical answers” and the compensating presence of a “philosophical appreciation” might be better framed in the context of a struggle between anthropological or religious intuition on the one hand (that which Mary Shelley appreciates); and dogmatic revolutionary atheism on the other (that which Percy Shelley affirms as “answers”). The recognition that a certain spirit of religious humility pervading Frankenstein helps explain its enduring appeal does not demean Mary Shelley’s achievement. Ketterer’s allusion to a “spectrum of possibilities” and his image of “sliding relationships” are useful to us even more in helping us to take a critical position on the crowded stock market floor of commentary on the novel. It is now a commonplace to accuse the mad-scientist interpretation of Frankenstein of being a commonplace (e.g., Kincaid 33). But my contention is that the power of the mad scientist myth has not yet been sufficiently explained, at least not sufficiently in light of the anthropological idea of God entailed by the originary hypothesis. The elucidation of an esthetic work that reveals an enduring moral intuition does not condemn us to mere moralizing, nor need such an elucidation, when given its anthropological basis, have recourse to moralistic judgments. My approach will be a somewhat unfashionable literalizing approach, different from the psychoanalytic allegorizing approaches that have dominated interpretation of the text. This literalizing approach will paradoxically breathe new life into the God-human “allegory” by situating it in the context of a minimal hypothesis of human origin, that, as we saw in Part One, itself illuminates the ineradicable tension between the verifiable natural science humans do and the transcendent religious beliefs they persistently hold.(5)

5 Let me explain this distinction between allegorizing and literalizing. If the studious iconoclastic reader must be split, to lift a phrase from Jacques Derrida, between “the two dimensions of the letter, allegory and literality,”(6) then we might say that such a reader has two directions to take depending on which end of the spectrum the reader slides toward: an allegorically compelled or a literalistically attentive reading of the surface of Shelley’s text. Let us grant the assumption that the relationship between Victor and the Monster, creator and Creature, human and meta-human, is the central agon in the story. The allegorizing direction, practiced to dazzling effect by critics of the psychoanalytic variety, privileges the doppelganger myth, the myth of the double, as the structural bedrock of the story (see Ketterer 56-65). It results in a sliding toward the “Self” inasmuch as it aims to minimize the differences between Victor and his Creature, seeing them as two halves of a psychic unity. It assumes the appropriateness of classifying the text as a novel-romance in Northrop Frye’s scheme, the romance as substantive being granted priority over any adjectival novelty of content (including the novelty of Victor as scientist). In this approach, the text is deciphered as the transcription of an apocalyptic dream of one mind rather than analyzed as a journalizing report of experiences grasped intersubjectively by corroborating narrators, Mary Shelley included. One consequence of the doppelganger approach is that the text will not merit classification as a founding classic of the new genre of Science Fiction. It belongs in the territory of Gothic romance instead.(7) As the troubled account of one big bad dream, the allegorized text presents a narrative the content of which is an evil unreality: its content is taken to be “unreal” in that readers need never feel genuinely threatened that it will be realized in their external world.

6 Correlative to the lack in readers of any feeling of genuine threat, this demystifying approach tends toward not privileging the scientist role of Victor but rather dismissing his science as pseudo-science. It resists connecting Victor to the context of the experimental science of the eighteenth century. It attempts, nevertheless, to impose reason on the irrationalism of the text: it presents hypotheses about the origins of the extreme deviation from normal psychological development represented by Victor Frankenstein. These hypotheses aim to specify the origins of the defective interactions between Victor and the family he neglects, the Creature he abandons, the fiancée to whose erotic attractions he remains indifferent, and the public world with which he fails to engage in productive economic exchange. The origins of the defective relationships may be located “inside” the novel in the psychological dynamics of the fictional Frankenstein family, “outside” the novel in Mary Shelley’s family dynamics, or between the two realms in their interplay. Meanwhile, the approach casts the Monster as less an autonomous entity than a supplementary projection of Victor’s being. At the extreme, it may be suggested that the fictional action is something that Robert Walton, the outermost storyteller in the three-ringed structure of embedded narratives, has literally dreamed or dreamed up. Ketterer hints that one may wonder whether Walton might not have invented the epistolary narrative as an excuse for returning home to his boring sister Margaret with his tail (tale) between his legs, having failed to achieve his dream of being the first man to touch the North Pole (103). In any case, the Monster is considered less an object made partly by modern science than the psychic result of some familial process or societal defect to which Victor Frankenstein’s pursuit of “science” is more or less epiphenomenal.

7 Paul Sherwin has accurately described the way this tendency discounts the wider social world represented in the novel, specifically in terms of the damage it does to our appreciation of the Monster as part, or rather (ironically) one condemned never to be part, of the external sphere of the not-Victor.

Of course, given the sophisticated rhetorical techniques of the psychoanalytic arsenal, there is nothing to prevent critics from remaking the Creature in whatever image they wish, from transforming any presence into an absence or any absence into a presence as they see fit. Critics can thereby preserve the coherence of a reading, but in so doing they sacrifice too much. For the Creature’s story is something finer than just another version of, or a sentimental recoil from, Frankenstein’s, and the Creature himself is Frankenstein‘s great, or original turn on tradition, a disturbingly uncanny literal figuration that ought to rouse the critical faculties to act. (889)(8)

We agree with Sherwin that the Monster constitutes a paradoxical “literal figuration” and cuts an “original turn on tradition,” standing forth as striking new content. However, the allegorizing approach tends to put scenes in the novel under interpretive pressure so as to yield significations attached to the context of the authorial-biographical “Mary Shelley”–attached to figures on the plane of her microhistorical relationships with Percy Shelley, her radical philosopher father William Godwin (himself a political novelist), her pioneering feminist mother Mary Wollstonecraft, or even her early-dead infant child. This network of relationships certainly offers important fascinations, especially as part of the history of English romantic writing. But the doppelganger premise usually takes us toward some purported discovery about the exemplary victimization of Mary Shelley in her particular time and place; then by way of analogies made with that situated fact, the text is promoted as culturally significant to readers situated later in human history who are called to share in the resentment of her proposed victimization (or the victimization of a group with whom she harbored or failed to harbor sympathies). Our literalizing approach claims, by contrast, that to explain the wider impact of the core story in Frankenstein as a source of modern myth, we need a model that judiciously reaches beyond the biographical and the authorial domains, to which the psychoanalytic model, trapped inside poor Mary’s mind or inside Victor’s as an analogue of hers, must keep returning us (no matter how elegant the intertextual forays).(9) The doppelganger approach tends to produce readings of the sort that Paisley Livingston calls “megaphone criticism”: the job of the critic is to speak the “message” of the text more loud and clear than the text itself speaks it (Literary Knowledge 233-42). In the arena of this critical practice, the message of the text will be something about the evils of the bourgeois family, capitalist patriarchy, the British class system, masculinist science, or some combination of these or like malicious institutions. A stunning diversity of indictments is made possible.Frankenstein is notorious for seeming able to mean almost anything, depending on the particular inflection one’s subcultural resentment happens to take and the ideological scalpel one has sharpened. But our approach inclines toward the belief that, to explain the wider impact of the core story of Frankenstein, we need a model of inquiry that casts a less immediately politicizing net.

8 Our approach will be to read the events and existents, the contents of the fictional world of Frankenstein as “literally” as possible, meaning primarily to privilege resolutely the “literal” otherness of the Monster made possible by the mad scientist playing God. I suggest that the best respect we can pay Mary Shelley’s imagination is to resist reducing the Monster she created to a symptom of personal experiences, either hers or Victor’s. While curiously keeping an eye on the microhistorical scholarship but refusing the compulsion to submit to its politicizing invidiousness, I will attempt to articulate instead the culturally universal implications of the Monster and mad scientist as mythic figures. It is certainly paradoxical that a literalizing approach is required to get at the specificity of the myth; it is a testimony to the domination of psychoanalytic allegory in literary interpretation in recent decades. My analysis will struggle to situate its hypotheses on the borderline between the anthropological and the cosmological, rather than that between the psychological self and its (internalized) others. Without denying the presence in the text of characterological absurdities, deficiencies, inconsistencies, and pathologies, I contend for the validity of proceeding as if these may be deciphered as figures of an objectively disordered social world. The disorder in that social world is something which has modern experimental science sticking to it as context. Modern science neither begins with nor belongs to any one person.

9 For us, it is appropriate to classify the text as a romance-novel in Northrop Frye’s scheme, with the novel half of the phrase granted the substantive weight. We uphold the opinion of the Monster-character himself, who insists that there is a painful separate reality in his ugliness as concrete fact in his fictional world. We proceed on the assumption that the text contains the dreams of the mad scientist character, rather than proceeding enamored with the mystery of such dreams themselves being identical with the text-as-container. We isolate the dream of the mad scientist as a relatively autonomous strand of signifiers. The mad scientist may be held responsible because it is not all going on in his head. To believe otherwise is to grant him moral immunity despite the consequences of his fantasy.

10 For us, the status that several critics wish to accord Frankenstein as a founding work of Science Fiction (see Clayton, Marcus, Stableford, Vasbinder, Ziolkowski) is a status appropriately bestowed. An assumption of the determinative force of the abnormality of Victor Frankenstein’s psyche or family background downplays his science: the mad scientist is mad, it is implied, for all sorts of personal reasons not having to do primarily with modern scientific practice. But we confront the reader with the problem of Frankenstein’s scientist role by foregrounding his scientific failure, precisely as it is incarnated in the Creature’s ugliness. The Creature is used in an experiment; he is an experiment. For us, Victor Frankenstein as scientific actor threatens things that might happen outside the story in our real world, in a manner analogous to the way the science in the story causes the peremptory killing of bystanders. The problem of Frankenstein himself is taken less as one of an individual aberrant fantasy and more as a problem of the general possibilities opened up by modern science for relations between humanity and its Other, a problem of moral obligation that confronts us regardless of whether the model by which we explain that Other is primarily cosmological or theological.(10) The scientific method, experimental science, continues apart from Victor; this peculiar Victor is meaningful, ultimately, not in himself but only as a scientist. Anyone in like circumstances is likewise free to experiment or not. Many psychoanalyzable childhoods might lead to similar situations. The naïve mad scientist reading may not be so naïve after all, not so common a place to stake out.

Victor Frankenstein as Modern Scientist, as Mad Scientist

11 Perhaps surprisingly, there is debate in the academic criticism on Mary Shelley’s text about whether it is revealing, or the extent to which it is appropriate, to describe Victor Frankenstein as a scientist.(11) My first response is that it seems to me the attribution is by no means an extravagant one. A useful contribution to Frankenstein scholarship is the concise but informative volume by Samuel Holmes Vasbinder, Scientific Attitudes in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1984). Vasbinder demonstrates that to categorize Victor Frankenstein as a modern scientist dovetails smoothly with a great deal of textual allusion and information: “criticism has generally concentrated on the moral fable . . . and has ignored the problem of science as a side issue. . . . [But] Frankenstein must be evaluated in an entirely new light as an early work of this genre [of speculative fiction]” (83). The book merits a quick summarizing. Pricked by James Rieger’s dismissal of the science in Mary Shelley`s novel as “souped-up alchemy,” Vasbinder proves that Mary Shelley herself knew about contemporary developments in electricity, chemistry, anatomical dissection, the manufacture of automata, the study of feral children, and other fields. He details her acquaintance with proto-evolutionary speculation by natural philosophers such as Erasmus Darwin about the mysterious bridge between inanimate and animate matter. He argues that to place Victor’s experiment under the sign of “alchemy” is to misread the facts of the text that show Victor rejecting alchemical procedures for observation, inductive reasoning, and repeatable testing as it had been practiced and institutionalized in the marketplace of ideas by scores of British scientists throughout the eighteenth century.(12)At least inasmuch as modern science is experimental science,(13) Victor Frankenstein fits the description of a modern scientist.

12 A second point is the intriguing fact that the tiny minority of critics who propose qualifications to the moral condemnation of Victor Frankenstein also happen to privilege his role as scientist. They form a significant unorthodox party in the mass of interpreters who wish to send Victor to the guillotine straightaway for his unmitigated villainy. Certain edges in Victor’s career become sharply visible if we concede that Mary Shelley may have been imagining a promising young scientist who, somewhat tragically, loses his integrity when he carries to its gruesome conclusion a very trying but new and, in some respects, courageously conceived, experiment. That is the basic shape of Vasbinder’s qualified defense of Victor, which resembles that of Jane Goodall’s argument in a very different scholarly investigation of Victor as the victim of a Calvinist reprobate’s conscience. Theodore Ziolkowski makes a similar case that Victor’s personality degenerates during the ardors of the experimental process and breaks irreparably at the moment of technological success. The intuition shared by such atypical “defenses” of Victor grasps the significance of the radical discontinuity between the scientist’s experience before the decisive experiment and his experience after it: that is, they grasp the significance of the irreversibility of what I will be designating as “scientific revelation.” In their willingness to suspend moral judgment of Frankenstein by giving due weight to the specificity of his ambition as scientific, rather than as a symptom of something else, they open up the possibility that a minimal psychological explanation of Victor’s moral perversity may be that he worked himself into something like a nervous breakdown when creating the Monster. The real question may be why postmodern criticism seems tendentiously opposed to finding such a proposal valuable, even for exploratory purposes. Frankenstein’s goal is knowledge of the cosmological object alone. To that goal, he sacrifices all other interests with a single-mindedness that does not need to be explained exclusively in terms of Oedipal, familial, neurotic or “bourgeois” complexes. The madness of the mad scientist is his idolatry of science at the expense of all other forms of human experience (the sacred, the esthetic, the economic, the erotic). It is nothing more than that idolatry; it is terrifying enough in its being simply that idolatry.

13 I must specify what is textually at stake in the decision to take the latter approach, at stake in terms of separateness between the scientist and his universe-disturbing “creation.” A few non-trivial concessions must be made. It is certainly possible for the question of the “literal” reality of the Monster to become a little like the question of the reality of the ghost in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Just as the reality of the ghost of the victim father in Hamlet is questionable, just as Prince Hamlet’s will to believe in its reality is unquestionably nourished by his resentment of Claudius-in-the-usurped-center, so one may make the argument that the Monster partakes of a dubious ontological status.(14) As the doppelganger interpreters love to point out, we might wonder whether Victor himself perhaps murdered Ernest and Justine, Elizabeth and Clerval; we might wonder whether the murders are performed as the working out of a neurotic resentment and the monster is a kind of fantastic externalization or hallucination by means of which Victor, stuffed with hatred of his benighted family for various unowned reasons, excuses himself. None of the violence done to his family (so implies this notion) has its genetic cause in the desire to do science in itself. The pseudo-public science is an incidental means to much more profound private or perverse ends. It is pointed out that the existence of the Monster as experimental result is itself barely verified according to the demands of correspondence truth: only Walton’s end-of-text account of his face-to-face meeting with the Creature corroborates Victor’s tale. The skeptic argues that Walton was seduced by Victor into some form of hallucinatory collusion. The Monster seems not to exist apart from Victor, just as Victor seems not to exist apart from the Monster. The observation is frequently made that Victor Frankenstein cannot rid himself of the Monster in the way that an obsessional paranoid cannot rid himself of the object of his paranoid obsession. The Monster appears like a voyeuristic psychic jack-in-the-box at all the most embarrassing, humiliating moments in Victor’s idiotically evasive and procrastinating itinerary. I concede that Mary Shelley leads us to notice their existential inseparability with such outrageous coincidences. I concede that in his envy and hatred of Frankenstein, the Monster sado-masochistically prolongs his own misery.(15)

14 The doppelganger reading makes it possible even for the Creature’s ugliness to be read as an externalized aspect of Victor’s internal life.(16) Such a reading at its most morally ironic makes that ugliness into a spurious legitimation for what Francois Flahaut, in a provoking volume of anti-monotheistic philosophical anthropology that takes Frankenstein as its springboard, calls “the omnipotence of the solitary.” Flahaut’s formulation is representative of the doppelganger approach in the way it ironically ends up accusing the Monster rather than Frankenstein of “playing God”: omnipotence is an attribute of the imperviously Divine. It is true that the peculiar form of centrality the Monster claims does depend on the cruelty of his circumstances, circumstances to which Victor cannot claim to be subject; if suffering alone is omnipotent centrality, then the Monster beats Victor in the competition. But Flahaut’s ironization proceeds, I would submit, only at the price of weakening our grasp of the text’s dramatization of a problem that follows from the rise of modern atheistic science.

15 The mythic content of Mary Shelley’s text can be isolated only by reading against the formal seductions that invite us to see it all as a nightmare contained by psychic allegory. We are free to sacrifice the difference between Victor and the Creature by insisting on their fundamental unity as speakers of victimary rhetoric, but we do so at the expense of our grasp of Victor as a mad scientist. My proposal is only that the anthropological intuition of the text inheres at least as much in the mythic content of the story as it does in its exemplariness as a specimen of romantic form.(17) None of the concessions I made above does away with the brute fact of the Creature’s ugliness. To the Monster himself “inside” the world of Shelley’s text, his ugliness as a unique, concrete source of suffering is a circumstance imposed upon him without his consent. It is not coincidental that a set of valuable scholarly interpretations that focus on the Creature’s ugliness tend not to follow the doppelganger approach exclusively (Bowerbank; Dutoit; Gigante; Juengel). Whatever the Monster does with that ugliness or despite that ugliness, there is a cost in clarity when one dissolves the difference between the Monster-made-ugly and the maker-who-makes-him-ugly, however intimate their interactions.(18)

16 Certainly, as modern people we all “play God” in the sense of aspiring to personhood, taking the originary Person as our model for the power to say “no” to others in the minimal act of freedom, our model for the power to exercise willful intentions and perform creative acts, to withdraw ourselves from the scene and otherwise produce exchangeable signs and things. It does not follow from the generic universalization of “playing God” in modernity, however, that all forms of personhood are equally praiseworthy or appropriate (as imitations of the divine originary Person). That is why it makes moral sense to respect the difference between the Monster and the mad scientist. Certainly, the modern romantic self is a descendant both of the originary scientist (whose role we outlined in Part One of this study) and of the usurpationist big man in nascent hierarchical culture, both of whom in their own ways imitated the God of the center, but without threatening the stability of human-Divine difference. The originary scientist presented no threat because, on the contrary, as we established in Part One, the first risk-takers to bring substitute objects to the ritual scene must have been bound by the strictest necessity to minimize the difference between the original sacred object and the secondary substituted object. The most morally egalitarian science, that of primitive culture, is the least ethically unsettling way to get object knowledge; its bears little resemblance to modern science and its practical results are (from our point of view) rather unspectacular. Nor were the Pharaohs and kings of the archaic empires who declared themselves demi-gods and gods presenting a threat to the community: on the contrary, in the context of economic surplus, they took the risky initiative of stabilizing hierarchical society with their self-deifying declarations.(19) Who plays God in modern market society? Not all modern science is destabilizing in the way that mad science is, but all mad science is modern science because it presupposes the self-centralizing romantic self in opposition to the market itself. The polar opposition between originary science and mad science becomes an historical possibility only in the context of the revelations of the romantic esthetic.(20) The classical Prometheus served humankind. The neoclassical esthetic has divine authority equivocally “elect” its privileged usurpers and sacrificial victims: Faust elects Mephistopheles as Mephistopheles chooses Faust. By contrast, Frankenstein is working willfully on his own. The romantic modern Victor Frankenstein paradoxically detaches himself from all models of immaterial transcendence in the very act of severing himself from any “responsibility” of a Divine type, even from any moral obligation to account rationally for the results of his experimental decisions. His freedom to play God, he uses to destroy rather than create human community. In this model of romantic madness, “playing God,” an anthropologically meaningful accusation, suggests a human being carrying on as if the human could be “God,” that is, as if the concept of God were empty and the usurpation of the sacred center a risk-free operation. It might be useful to rethink revolutionary atheism as a kind of idiotic rejection of risk.(21) The relevant paradox in the ancient wisdom of the prohibition against playing God may be formulated as that of the imitation of the Inimitable: God must be imitated in the minimal way of the originary scientist if human culture is to begin, but God neither can nor should be imitated in the maximal way of the mad scientist if culture is to survive. The necessary imitation of God must be our constantly renewed opening to freedom, but disaster follows if the human being aims to annihilate the Inimitable Divine at our shared origin.

17 The problem of modern science is that it makes mad science a real possibility. It does so because modern science possesses the unique historical power to get a hold of the practical means to understand the cosmological object and make things out of it, in such a way that a threatened result is the maximal desacralization of “Nature” and the minimal exchangeability of its consumed, handled fragments in the sphere of economic exchange. Modern science makes the aim of complete God-likeness, where God is misconceived as the great cosmological Puppeteer pulling the string of the Laws of Nature,(22) appear both achievable and desirable to certain human aspirants. Modern science is the form of knowledge that threatens to destroy culture by blocking the possibility of voluntary exchange. It brings things to the community that the community in its religious and moral solidarity violently believes it does not want and vociferously claims it does not need (and in these beliefs and claims, the “community” will often eventually change its mind). But mad science is a subculture in modern science because it dismisses the sense of threat as mere religious stupidity. Mad science proceeds as if knowledge of the cosmological object alone counts, as if anthropological truth (religious, esthetic, and economic considerations) are epiphenomenal to the knowability of the cosmological “facts” or “Laws” or “necessities.” Mad science is a form of epistemological tyranny in which cosmology wishes to enslave anthropology.(23) The horror represented by Victor Frankenstein as mad scientist is the horror of such a petty but spectacularly malign tyrant.

18 It is not enough to observe that Victor and the Monster are both “romantic.” It is one thing to observe the truth that all modern selves hypocritically seek victimary status (claiming to be victims of the centerless society that refuses to grant their value from the outset) even as they prepare themselves inadvertently by means of such self-centralizing egotism for life and career in market society.(24) But it is quite a different thing to argue that all modern selves enter the market in “objective” terms equally free to choose such victimary status. Mary Shelley’s myth presents the morally stressful case in which the victim is born, not made; Frankenstein’s Monster is a born, made victim. Yes, the Monster himself “plays God” in the way any modern agent must play God, in the sense that as romantic victim he enjoys the privilege of being even more a victim than Victor, his victimary rhetoric reaching wishing-well depths that make Victor’s speechifying sound wading-pool shallow by comparison. But not all victimization is equally a result of voluntary self-centralization. The Creature is unfree in a way that Victor is not: “Freedom must rather be understood as the possibility of realizing one’s desire within the social structure–it being kept in mind that desire is always desire for significance” (EC 156). His inalterable ugliness excludes him from participating in the production of value. The Monster is the paradoxical incarnation of a speaking subject who can never become human flesh, an anti-Christian sacrifice whose very being is predicated on an absolutely minimal participation in the human community as one who is free to exchange only the threat of destroying that community with the fearful flight of its representatives.(25) That otherness of the Monster is the point of the ontological obstacle to assimilation with the human imposed by his ugliness. Thus, in proportion as we de-literalize the Monster’s otherness from Victor, we discount the significance of Victor as the scientist who fails in his attempt to make the human: the monster is not human. The madness of Frankenstein’s science is that it does nothing to promote the exchangeability of things: the scandal of the Monster is the impossibility of his ever participating in human society, the impossibility even of his saying a meaningful “no” to it.(26) The need of the human sign to complete itself in the appetitive satisfaction of the exchange of things connects to the meaning of the Monster’s suffering: he is free to speak of his desire to belong to the human community, but damned for all time only to speak of it–apart from destroying a few victims along the way.

19 Let us return to the formulation of originary science that we proposed in Part One of this study: originary science is the performance of the sign in the mode of a minimal desacralization and a maximal exchangeability. Frankenstein inverts (and perverts) this formula to almost amoral perfection: he performs the sign in the mode of a maximal desacralization and a minimal exchangeability. The monster can only exchange words, not things. The Monster incarnates the sign as signification of an object (himself the object) bizarrely divorced from any possibility of creating economic value. He incarnates meaning paradoxically deprived of human purpose; he incarnates Being–artificial human being–paradoxically deprived of any possibility of human centrality. The science of the mad scientist, therefore, spectacularly desacralizes everything it can–everything except the value of scientific knowledge for its own sake, knowledge aspiring to pure representation without roots in sacred, esthetic, economic or erotic experience. Frankenstein desacralizes the bodies of the dead people and animals that he uses as raw material for the piecing-together of the body of the Creature. Frankenstein casts aside social ties, not paying the debts of honor he owes his family and friends and fellow citizens, others vulnerable to his work. Frankenstein despises all the “supernatural” agencies dear to some forms of religious faith: the humility that the naïve majority feels toward either a Creator of the cosmos, or the Cosmos itself, as something external to the human, is a humility Frankenstein makes it a fine art never to feel. Mad science is knowledge of the cosmos detached from and forgetful of the moment in which the peace-oriented gesture of originary science was performed. Let us recall the risk of danger from the community that obliged the originary scientist to substitute one sacred object for another with great caution, in the fear of not satisfying the community’s expectation that the difference between one sacred image and the next be kept minimal. By contrast, mad science is knowledge of the cosmological object severed from any obligation to imitate the scenic moment of the substitution of one sacred thing for another. Those who perform scientific representation of the object ought to situate themselves on the human scene of representation where the cosmological object is never merely cosmological; otherwise, science imitates the (moral) indifference of the Inimitable, pretending not to belong to human community in the way only its transcendental Other can be other to the human community. The mad scientist is the human who pretends to be God by evacuating the scene of representation of everything except“science.” But there is no humanity without something sacred, something beautiful, something valuable, something erotic. Knowledge of the cosmological object alone without these is no knowledge worth having–unless, of course, one wishes to play at being, to be, God.

Alchemical Dreams, Modern Methods: the Education of Victor Frankenstein

20 Frankenstein is not by any stretch a “likable” hero; one’s patience as reader is tested at almost every turn in his monologues. Few characters in the history of English fiction match him for inexhaustibility of egocentricity, which is entirely appropriate given his role as the original modern madman playing God. The reader who has gotten through the novel once is certain on re-reading that the young sailor Walton who takes the emaciated Victor on board his ice-bound Arctic ship and re-animates him (another of Shelley’s ironies) is deluded in his first impressions: “all he does appears to spring solely from the interest he instinctively takes in the welfare of those who surround him” (60). Not so: Victor’s professions of care for the “welfare of those who surround him” are contradicted by his recklessly self-centralizing performances everywhere.

21 And yet, in keeping with that very self-centralizing, Victor engages in some retrospective self-analysis that provides a context for his scientific pursuits, admitting at least once that the causes of his character are difficult to identify.(27) He tells Walton that his earliest memories of himself suggest an orientation toward universal de-masking: “The world was to me a secret, which I desired to discover; to her [Elizabeth] it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own” (1.1.66). Interpreters frequently seize upon the former half of this antithesis in isolation, but it is most revealing when its difference from the latter half is teased out. The angelic Elizabeth is not resentful of the vacated center on the scene of representation, not resentful of the mystery of the “world” as natural object; fiction satisfies her and her imagination is pleased by the promise of esthetic experience alone, as if consumption were not a consideration. Hers is a quietly and fantastically non-sacrificial way of carrying on. In her long-suffering feminine virtue, Elizabeth embodies the sacred attitude to the object taken to its self-denying extreme: she will never compete to appropriate the center that Victor claims for himself. Her self-effacing performance must remain excruciating to watch for anyone except the most confirmed anti-feminist.

22 By contrast, the quasi-demonic Victor cannot bear the possibility that the “world” might be to him as well a “vacancy”; any vacancy is to him a hidden occupant waiting to be pointed out, any appearance an illusory transparency masking an invisible presence. The central object of the natural “world” is a mask to be removed or torn away so as to reveal a “secret” to be possessed. Secrecy is the withholding of valuable information; Victor resents the erotic self-withholding element in the sacred central object. He resents it to such an extent that he can only imagine possessing it in the act of destroying it, or destroying it in the act of possessing it (a secret loses its value in proportion as it is shared; its value is one with its being withheld).(28) The real Elizabeth herself never becomes an object of his erotic interest: she, poor metonymic body never embraced, has no secrets to compare with those of the “world.”(29)

23 In keeping with his desire for universal de-masking, Victor describes himself as a scientist.(30) He manages to insinuate, however, that his fatal attachment to science is the result of two events for which he is not to be blamed: first, the injection of the malign influence of books of alchemy, which induced in him the desire to create living from dead matter and produce a homunculus; second, the failures of his father and adoptive sister, which failed to save him by preventing him from reading those books. That we can detect these mimetic rivalries in Victor’s account of his paradisiacal childhood gives the lie to his fantastic Margaret-Mead-like claim that their home life during his adolescence was conflict-free.(31) His childhood experience leads, he suggests, to his “fatal” obsession, that which we are now able to name his obsession with using modern science to play God.

24 The first crisis follows from the malign influence of reading material. Permitted total liberty to pursue whatever studies he likes, young Victor falls in love with the hermetic works of certain important Renaissance alchemists: Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Albertus Magnus. Now what Victor does not himself explicitly include in his storytelling to Walton but what Mary Shelley would have known and what scholars have established as “context” is the following: these alchemists sought not only to transmute base metals into gold, but sought two other ends as well. First, they sought the famed “elixir of life” which becomes an object of scientific desire to Victor as well, who daydreams: “if I could banish disease from the human frame, and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!” (1.1.69). It is a short distance from the elixir of life to Victor’s galvanic “secret of life.”(32) Second, the alchemists sought to usurp the powers of the monotheistic God of Biblical creation by re-making the human through scientific experiment: they sought the occult techniques whereby they could bring into concrete existence by means of chemical operations the miniature artificial human named the homunculus. The alchemists are Victor’s mimetic models not for the means but for the end of his experiments as modern scientist: his models for the desire to play God.(33) Mary Shelley intuits a continuity between the occult hubris of the alchemists and the hubris that may abuse the wonderful power of experimental science. The vanity of playing God the creator remains the same, whether performed in the name of the pseudo-science of alchemy or the modern science of chemistry.

25 Victor evades responsibility by blaming his father for not warning him off these books with sufficient violence. Alphonse, one day noticing the tomes by Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Albertus Magnus lying about the house in Geneva, labels them “sad trash” (1.1.68). He does not scold, censor, or reprimand his son; the remark is barely more than a mild evaluation, the expression of a market preference. No ritual paternal authority is exercised. But pathological resentment will sense injustice where there is no real deprivation: the old Victor betrays the fact that this tiny ripple in the stream of perfect family harmony was traumatizing to his thin-skinned young self. Victor’s argument is that he may never have ended up making the monster if only his father had “talked” to him, as they say in our time on television family drama (“Can we talk?”). Notice the implication of blame in the following retrospective observation made to Walton: “It is even possible, that the train of my ideas would never have received the fatal impulse that led to my ruin. But the cursory glance my father had taken of my volume by no means assured me that he was acquainted with its contents; and I continued to read with the greatest avidity” (1.1.68). Victor is asserting here nothing less than that he was justified to have believed back then that his father was lying: the “cursory glance” was interpreted as evidence that Alphonse was only pretending to know the “contents” of the books of alchemy (it “by no means assured” the boy of the father’s authority). The imagined lie–his father is claiming to have read a book of secrets he has not truly read–therefore, we are to understand, innocently permitted the continuation of his fantasies of becoming an alchemist. Young Victor cashes in the value of his biological father’s judgment for an extended lease on his relation with the fantastic alchemical stepfathers. Young Victor simply cannot bear the conflict between that fantasy and the reality of concrete paternal disapproval. This taking refuge from the real in the fantastic hints at the mad scientist’s perpetual flight away from real human exchange toward something else. Looking back, old Victor posits a vacuum of negligence to justify his supposedly unintentional usurpation of the imaginary centrality that he still, during his death-bed narration to Walton, refuses to cede.

26 The blaming of nearby Elizabeth is next. She does not escape an insinuation concerning what she might have done to save Victor from his fate. His secrecy was not his fault, he suggests. She should have taken an interest where she took none, just as his father should have been more explicit about whether or not he had actually read Agrippa.

. . . and although I wanted to communicate these secret stores of knowledge to my father, yet his indefinite censure of my favorite Agrippa always withheld me. I disclosed my discoveries to Elizabeth, therefore, under a promise of strict secrecy; but she did not interest herself in the subject, and I was left by her to pursue my studies alone. (1.1.68)

The “indefinite censure” of his father combines with the lack of “interest in the subject” shown by Elizabeth to create the conditions in which Victor is “left by her… alone”: the very liberty to read whatever he pleased, which only a few moments before he claimed as the hallmark of his domestic education’s perfection, is here insinuated to be a form of paternal and sibling neglect that failed to restrict him as it should have. The man who has abused the freedom he was given blames those who gave the freedom, evading responsibility for his later science.(34)

27 Even when Victor is forced by the experimental demonstrations of his father to devalue alchemy and respect modern science, he persists in his allegiance to Cornelius Agrippa and the rest by not performing any studies in chemistry. He would rather resent those who seem to disapprove of his belief in the dreams of the alchemist. After an incident in which Victor is fascinated by an oak tree blasted to smithereens by a random bolt of lightning, his father does one day take an active paternal role. Imitating the famous Benjamin Franklin, Alphonse Frankenstein flies a kite in a lightning storm so that the natural power of electricity can be demystified for his son, shown to be controllable rather than the unpredictable handiwork of spirits in the sky. Victor claims that his father’s intervention at that point overthrew once and for all the prestige of Cornelius Agrippa and company in his mind (1.2.70). But the claim is contradicted by subsequent evidence. The models for playing God the creator are the models he will never cast off. A little later, having submitted to another bit of fatherly advice with sullen reluctance, Victor attends a lecture on modern chemistry, the chemistry that has superseded the pseudo-science of alchemy. The old Victor fails to conceal the fact that the young Victor was a little like the classic lazy student: he reports that he came away “disgusted” from this lecture because he found it incomprehensible; but he was bound to found it incomprehensible, given that (according to his own offhand admission) he knew nothing of the subject before attending because he missed the whole series of lectures except the final one, the only one he attended (1.2.70). One is reminded of the student who shows up during the last week of the semester to ask what he has missed.

28 Much interpretive ink has been spilled on the dramatic antithesis between the ugly, squat, and gruff M. Krempe as opposed to the elegant, suave, and mellifluous M. Waldman, the two professors of chemistry who become Victor’s models of desire at the University of Ingolstadt, where he goes after his mother dies unexpectedly. We completely miss Mary Shelley’s wry joke if we fail to see that Victor’s antithesis has no basis in objective reality–that the only difference between the professors is subjective, an effect of Victor’s desire to be flattered. The two professors differ only in the degree of leeway they give to Victor’s desire to play God, not in the content of their scientific practices or beliefs. Waldman inflates the vanity that Krempe deflates. Victor introduces himself first to Krempe; when Krempe learns Victor has studied the alchemists with intensity, Krempe bluntly insults him for having wasted his time on outdated nonsense and gives him a new reading list (1.2.74-75). (One remembers how traumatized Victor was by his father’s quietly casual “sad trash” remark [1.2.68]; there is no wonder then that his recollections of Krempe, given the latter’s bluntness, are particularly venomous). But Waldman too gives Victor a new reading list; Waldman too clearly asserts that the methods of modern science are not assimilable to the methods of alchemy. Neither professor approves of alchemy; neither professor practices alchemy, neither professor will teach Victor alchemy, even though Victor still prefers alchemy to modern science.(35) Nor is the contrastive structure of the portraits the result only of a prejudice based on the professors’ different manners of self-presentation, although Victor does spell out in resentful detail the ugliness of Krempe, indulging the systematic physiognomic prejudices that inform all of the novel (see the analysis of the novel’s physiognomic determinism by Scott Juengel). The difference is only that whereas Krempe deflates it, Waldman flatters Victor’s desire to play God by positing a continuity of intention between alchemy and modern chemistry: “‘They [the alchemists] had left to us, as an easier task, to give new names, and arrange in connected classifications, the facts which they in a great degree had been the instruments of bringing to light. The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind’” (1.2.76-77) [emphasis added]. Under the influence of this serpentine reasoning, Victor will be more intent on proving himself a “man of genius” than intent on avoiding “erroneous direction.” Waldman sacrifices the unkind truth to polite flattery: “genius” directed to falsehood rather than truth is not genius but something else. Scientific genius is not self-justifying: the objects intended by scientific representation are both tested against the cosmological evidence (the object itself) and assimilated or not by the human community’s capacity for exchanging them.

29 In the decisive lecture that does irreversibly adjust Victor’s attitude into one favorable to experimental science, Waldman describes modern science in rousing terms as, paradoxically, a form of almost magical control of nature, different from alchemy only in the reliability of its methods and in the illusion of its mundane quality.

“But these [modern] philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pour over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature, and shew how she works in her hiding places. They ascend into the heavens; they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its shadows.”

I departed highly pleased with the professor and his lecture, and paid him a visit the same evening. (1.2.76)

Waldman makes the connection for Victor that no model of desire has yet made: modern science can indeed give one control over the natural world; it has the goal that alchemy had, the scientist-empowering alteration of the self-withholding cosmological object. This is a revelation to Victor because it shows him that one may in fact use modern chemistry to pursue ends that may be assimilated to those of ancient alchemy. The methods of modern chemistry differ, but modern chemistry permits intentions on the scale of playing God (finding the elixir of life, creating the humanoid homunculus). At the University of Ingolstadt, Victor certainly does not unlearn his infatuation with the dreams of the alchemists, but he does learn new techniques for discovering the laws of natural processes and so controlling them. That is what justifies our calling him a “modern scientist.”

Scientific Discovery, Firstness, and Dangerous Isolation

30 Narratives of the real-world history of scientific progress, especially but not only when they follow the “heroic” model, are punctuated by events that take the form of an irreversible world-changing revelation (see Rescher 64, 74; Stempel 64; Toulmin, “Construal” 101). One thinks of the hagiography of Isaac Newton’s mathematization of gravity, Einstein and his vision with the twin trains, Watson and Crick “cracking” the code of DNA.(36) Sacred religious revelation meets its modern rival in secularizing scientific revelation: God reveals the Divine Otherworldly self to the religious inquirer, but to the scientific atheist it is plain deity-devoid Nature that reveals the truth about the cosmological object, something in this world that reveals a truth about this world. The problem of modern atheistic science is that the revelations of the “object alone” of Nature must not appear to have any transcendental (divinely or humanly mediated) source.(37) The object that modern scientific discovery uncovers is itself less an object than a process, a way of signifying the object that hopes to find that the object hides no acting transcendental Other, no supernatural agent conceivable in anthropomorphic form or as human-like intentionality. For the materialist scientist–and the popular mind that takes the mythic figure of Frankenstein as frightening in his reductive materialism is not mistaken–the matter of Nature must be passive, the cosmological object must be evacuated of Divine agency, and the repeatability of the experimental discovery must be kept in the grasp of human control or human understanding. The human control is the “evidence” for the death of God and the legitimacy of the human playing God.(38) The repeatability, exchangeability, and verifiable comprehensibility of experimental findings or theoretical constructions are essential to modern science. The scientific method is democratic in that, unlike the necessarily localized sacred and the impossible-to-coerce esthetic, the scientific must be indifferently accessible to all those who would practice it: “Implicit in the idea of science is the notion that not only its results but its method are objectively reproducible. Science is wholly democratic; there are greater scientists and lesser ones, but no one can claim to do science in a way no one else can” (EC 89-90). In ritual culture, it is primarily Divine truth as revealed by God to humanity that has sacred value on the scene of religious exchange; in modern culture, it is mostly scientific truth as revealed by scientific practice taking hold of Nature that has exchangeable value in the marketplace of ideas and things.

31 Where God has been expelled by the threat or apparent success of triumphant scientific materialism, the atheistic scientist is vulnerable to the resentment of the still-believing majority. Modern science in its undeniable power throws into relief the fundamental modernizing difference itself, that between ritual exchange and market exchange, between subservience to old knowledge preserved by the sacred (“familiar” truths) and pursuit of new knowledge discovered by science (“shocking” truths). Our horrified response as readers to the utter uselessness and valuelessness of Frankenstein’s invented Monster corresponds to our impossible demand that science evaluate its results before offering them for inspection or consumption, our demand that it guarantee in advance that its results be useful or beautiful.(39) For the utopian believer in the ideal purity of the ecological object, who sees most modern science as mad science (the rape of nature, the disenchantment of the planet), modern science risks too much the maximal desacralization of the object. Thus we witness the deep resentment of vaccinations, evolutionary theory, nuclear weaponry, genetic engineering, pharmacological therapy; the list is a long one. For the utopian hoper, modern science seems also to minimize peripheral exchangeability. Witness the public resentment of alleged corporate concentration of scientific expertise, public resentment of the alleged non-reciprocal amorality of science, public resentment of the figure of the imaginary amoral scientist, one not to be laughed at but rather feared.(40)

32 Because God seems to have gone away, the scientist untroubled by God’s exit attracts resentment. In modern market society, the scientist who makes a valuable discovery finds himself in that uncomfortable first place where he has separated himself from other members of the human community as the usurper of the sacred center. The scientific discoverer is the recipient of cosmological truth, in a world where God has abandoned the cosmos to let it be merely a passive set of indifferently self-revealing structures of Nature. What understandably follows in the still-believing larger society is fear and resentment of the scientific usurper. There is organized suspicion of professional expertise; there are public demands for codes of professional ethics to mediate between scientific experts and the public. These historical and social facts prove the “objective” authority of science more unequivocally than the most sophisticated epistemological arguments about the metaphysics of absolute truth (see, for example, Morgenthau).

33 What can the scientist do for self-protection? By technologizing an item of cosmological truth, converting it into a product, into consumable goods, the scientific discoverer can contribute to the social order that either contains or expels him. The differential information revealed in or by the god-less cosmos may then be absorbed and circulated as potential goodness and truth that has “been there” all along “in Nature,” for the information once revealed becomes, if valuable on the market, exchangeable, renewable–as does the value of any revelation, anthropological or cosmological, in human history. It can belong to a majority of us. If the differential information has no market value, it will fall into neglect, be forgotten, and turn to dust like the idols of the immemorial past. Modern science in this sense is the history of many cosmologically revelatory moments on a par with the anthropological revelations of religion. Originary science, by contrast, in its being bound fast to religious imperatives, is that form of inquiry practiced during the modestly pragmatic, unthreatening prehistory of natural science.

34 There is another perspective on this drama, however. The mythic figure of the individual scientific discoverer threatening to terrorize the helpless non-experts in market society with his explosive, sacrilegious, blasphemous research findings is a little unreal. No cosmological revelation takes root in collective memory unless it has taken place on the scene of human representation. The sparagmos inaugurates the category of economic value. Any scientific discovery that endures–heir to the sparagmatic violence that makes immediate hands-on contact with the object, rather than keeping it at the great distance demanded by sacred prohibition–will have economic value that endures.(41) Mad science as the extremity and perversion of modern science is the form of representation of the object that threatens to destroy the foundations of economic value, to produce self-destructively the apocalyptic product that will shut the market down, annihilating the human requirement that the divisible portions of the cosmological object be exchangeable. Mad science desacralizes its object in such a way that a majority of people do not want to “buy it.”

35 In Victor Frankenstein’s discovery of the “secret of life,” even though it is vaguely described, Mary Shelley gives us materials for thinking about the unstable analogy between religious revelation and scientific discovery (here renamed scientific revelation in an effort to be provokingly theistic). The first set of materials appears in the segment of Frankenstein that narrates that event in the text which functions like the discovery of a Law of Nature or the formulation of a unique theoretical insight: Victor’s research success in finding the “secret of generation.” The narration of this discovery contains signs of Mary Shelley’s intuition of what we now name the tension between “pure” and “applied” research. (The paradoxical animation of the Monster, we will consider below.) The passage between discovery of the secret and the practical implementation of it, its technological application in the building the Monster, marks a difference of which Victor himself is conscious: the move from testing the secret as a unique Law of nature to proving its maximal representation in the Creature makes him pause.(42) But even in his remembering of the pure discovery of cosmological truth, there is a contradiction between the humility implied by his saying he almost did not discover the “secret of life” and the ambition implied by his saying that he went through terrible exertions to discover it. The note of humility is sounded in the sentences reporting that after “two years” of study in Ingolstadt, as he tells Walton, he made “some discoveries in the improvement of some chemical instruments, which procured [him] great esteem at the university” (1.3.78). The value of that esteem seems exhausted when his education in chemistry as such is complete.

When I had arrived at this point, and had become as well acquainted with the theory and practice of natural philosophy as depended on the lessons of any of the professors at Ingolstadt, my residence there being no longer conducive to my improvements, I thought of returning to my friends and my native town, when an incident happened that protracted my stay. (1.3.78) [emphasis added]

The “incident” is the discovery. The crisis point reached prior to it, is that of a flattening equality (humiliating for Victor) with one’s mimetic models, the unstable point at which positive mimesis of submission to a superior is no longer possible and negative competition looms as a possibility. Imagine: Frankenstein (at least he says) just about gives it up. He is almost forced to return home to Alphonse and Elizabeth as one whose contribution to chemistry is only that of a technician’s tinkering, almost ready to leave University as a “‘petty experimentalist’” rather than a “‘man of science’” (1.2.77), to use the terms of M. Waldman’s invidious opposition.(43) It is a radical understatement for Victor to assert “an incident happened that protracted my stay,” given the tremendous consequences of that “incident” and the prolonged extent (months, years) of the “stay.” The real ambitiousness is betrayed a little later: “After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter” (1.3.80). It seems that an “incident that happen[s]” in the passive mode of egalitarian self-effacement may at the same time be the result of “incredible labour and fatigue” in the active mode of ambitious usurpation. Whatever Victor must do to build and animate the monster, it is clear that in order to discover the “secret” in the first place he must have worked with dead animal and human flesh. Further, it is strongly suggested in the context of the blasted oak and the kite-flying and other hints that he used electricity. Mary Shelley knew about current public experiments with the “animation” by electrocution of dead flesh, as performed by Joseph Priestley, Luigi Galvani and others (Vasbinder 89). We would contend nevertheless that inasmuch as this stage of Frankenstein’s research is removed from the making of the humanoid, to call it “pure” is not a misattribution: knowing the facts about how nature works and making the technological product are separable.

36 We should perhaps not be surprised that Victor describes the “pure discovery” in language reminiscent of Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus.

I paused, examining and analysing all the minutiae of causation, as exemplified in the change from life to death, and death to life, until from the midst of this darkness a sudden light broke in upon me–a light so brilliant and wondrous, yet so simple, that while I became dizzy with the prospect which it illustrated, I was surprised that among so many men of genius, who had directed their enquiries toward the same science, that I alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret. (1.3.79-80)

Although this passage is describing the discovery of the theory preparatory to the much more spectacular animation of the Monster, it is still loaded. Consider the difference between the a-figural spiritual revelation of the resurrected Christ in Saul’s conversion experience on the road to Damascus,(44) and the unredeemed, non-resurrected, dead disfigured flesh on the laboratory table of Victor’s scene of revelation. Notice that this event takes a form which recalls the resentment-vulnerable firstness of the initial sign-user on the originary scene, itself the minimal model of the scientific usurper. The quality of Victor’s experience rests in a liminal space between the involuntary “election” of the tragic hero typical of the neoclassical esthetic (“I was surprised that… I alone should be reserved”) and the self-centralization typical of the romantic esthetic (he dubs himself one of the “men of genius” without blinking at the irony we see from outside). Therefore, the “light” that breaks in upon Frankenstein the apostle of atheistic modernity when he discovers the “secret of generation,” is the light that makes him feel unique “among so many men of genius” and makes him feel that he has been “reserved” to make the discovery. Frankenstein becomes “dizzy with the prospect which it illustrated” not because of any pious feelings of religious awe for the cosmos as God’s handiwork; on the contrary, he is dizzy because the information will (he hopes) make him famous among men and powerful as the cartoon demi-god of the new “species” he wishes to create.(45) His elation returns us to our formula binding desacralization of the object to exchangeability of the object: the moment the sacred “secret” emerges, the scientist experiences its human value primarily as projected exchangeable economic value–as a projected measure of the scientist’s human prestige, quantified on a social scale of praise and glory (and, in many nonfictional cases, a scale of good old financial profit). Frankenstein, meanwhile, gives little thought to how other people might respond to his fathering a new species on the planet, even if a little thought would show him the impracticality and perversity of such an experimental design; but as we have established, the expert in cosmological science (or chemistry) may well be deeply naïve in matters of religious necessity (or anthropology). Victor represents the naiveté of such experts to spectacular effect.

37 Frankenstein’s education and temperament do not outfit him to take the “secret” onto the public scene and share it with others. To some extent, Mary Shelley is providing in Victor’s total self-isolation a sociological and psychological explanation for the evil that Victor will do in his making of the monster. She nods to the cultural determinism of her father William Godwin and her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, the idea that the malleable materials of youth are molded by upbringing and environment into the less changeable shape of the adult: the permissiveness of Victor’s upbringing, for example, gave him lots of practice in taking liberties, making it easier for him to take liberties with the uncreated monster.(46) In originary terms, however, we would restore Victor to his core status as the scientific usurper of divine centrality. For us, his self-isolation acts out the failure of his scientific approach to begin to minimize the desacralization that his pure research discovery makes into a technological possibility. Originary analysis would emphasize Victor’s withdrawal from the scene of human exchange (public or domestic) as a vain attempt to get outside human mediation. The result of Victor’s education, in combination with his inexplicable and remorseless egocentricity, is that he expels all human ties except the one he has always treasured: the tie to the alchemists who modeled his desire to create the homunculus gigantic. His competition with his professors, his indifference to his family and fiancée, even his weird failure to consider what things will be like for the humanoid he is making, all these may be subordinated without loss of significance to the anthropological model of the originary scientist gone modern and mad: the model of the usurper who has failed to preserve in originary memory the experience of the scene.

38 Let us not brush off the anthropological implications of the originary isolation of the mad scientist at his moment of discovery. He has not simply gone out to bring something back to us; he has gone way out on his own, turned his back on us, left us behind, and forgotten us altogether. He must do so in order to go the way of the mad. Moreau’s island laboratory as imagined by Wells, R.U.R.’s remote factory as imagined by Capek, Tyrell’s corporate pyramid as visualized in Blade Runner–all the descendants of Victor Frankenstein follow the model of this “inhuman” aloofness. In no small measure, the horror we feel at the perversity of Frankenstein’s self-made isolation both when he creates the monster and later when he maintains obstinate secrecy even as it kills innocent people, is horror at the total absence of any institutional presences in his fictional world that might check his liberty or require him to engage in exchange before the construction of the monster. Whatever happens in later nineteenth-century English novels, the novel and the police do not coincide here. Scientific inquiry for the good requires, before it can flourish, democratic political institutions and economic institutions that support free market exchange, including regulatory institutions (Eric Cohen 786-87; Fuller 52-53; Frankel 929-30; Morgenthau 1402-04). It is only in exchange that is at least minimally controlled (remember “unconsciously controlled anarchy”) that the successful pursuit of the truth in and of Nature can be valued and the products thereby made possible, exchanged. But the centerless model of exchange characteristic of modernity is vulnerable.(47) Modern science throws into stark relief the inseparability of our society’s ethical flourishing and the instrumental effectiveness of those public institutions regulating knowledge exchange. We experience that ethical flourishing or weakening first as human individuals, not as professional members of such public institutions. That is, the power of science as detachable from the experience of the sacred makes visible to us the peculiar vulnerability of both the market in economic goods and the market in political ideas, their vulnerability as institutions assigned the task of absorbing the effects of scientific knowledge, the task of recycling the resentments created by modern science.

39 It is not coincidental that the market in economic goods and in political ideas also relies on the advice of experts, on statistics, on think tanks, on committees, on polls and elections (elections themselves might be seen as a form of knowledge production). Constitutional democracy is rational in this sense; it owes a massive debt to modern science. The institutional prestige of science makes Science a little like “God” in our situation, its power either to do harm or to provide benefits experienced as a kind of inscrutable Omnipotence. In the postmodern West, despite a minority of irrationalist and anarchist detractors,(48) “science” has become the name of the unacknowledged Legislator of objectivity that modern institutions as such are assumed to be respecting, the shared valuation of objectivity functioning as the tacit guarantee of fairness, justice, progress and other values dependent upon public faith in “objectivity” for their negotiation in the public sphere. The problem of modern science is that we its users must resent its mysterious central power, in proportion as we desire its benefits without conceding its priority to our desire. Institutional science is prior to our desire in that it gets resented as the sacred Deity used to be resented; indeed, ironically, science far too frequently gets resented in the name of the resurrected archaic sacred. If we do concede the priority of the scientific to our desire, if we concede that we do desire to know the “objective” truth about how the whole unknowable sociopolitical organism (or machine or system or order) is doing, then we lessen our resentment of science a little precisely by thematizing it a little. Diligent reflection on the anthropological significance of Frankenstein, far from encouraging resentment of science, should encourage us to untangle the truth from the lies in the myth of the indifferent, elite, insidious mad scientist we may unthinkingly hate. Science has become sacred to modernity, but modernity seems reluctant to accept its sacrality–just as Victor Frankenstein must have his monster animated but fails to accept it once it is.

Paradoxical Animation: The Event Structure of Scientific Revelation

40 Frankenstein’s animation of the creature is itself a scene of originary representation, an ironic recasting of the moment in which humanity and its transcendental Other came into being together. The mad scientist comes into being together with the artificial humanity of his Monster. Recall that it was only the originary memory of the scene that kept the “unconsciously controlled anarchy” of the sparagmos from obliterating the memory of sacred and esthetic experience and returning us to animality. Recall that the originary science practiced by the first usurper in ritual showed respect for sacred and esthetic imperatives; the originary scientist, out of a wish for self-preservation and preservation of the community, brought onto the scene a new object bearing only a minimal difference from the first sacred object as recalled by image-in-memory. Now consider the modern science of Victor Frankenstein, and the object he intends to bring to the scene of human representation. If any communal mediation other than the model of the alchemists were to interfere, Victor would begin to think about what he is doing. He would begin to ask himself why he is putting animal and human body parts together, why he is building a creature eight feet tall; what value Alphonse or Elizabeth might assign his project; what he might do with the animate thing once it does come to life. He asks none of these ethical questions; his only questions are how to make the chemical experiment work and whether it will.

41 The most familiar narrative transition in Mary Shelley’s text–the graphic animation of the monster, the sine qua non of every Frankenstein movie–is also one of the most difficult transitions to interpret. There will be no understanding of what is it at stake in the moral failure of Frankenstein unless we get outside the victimary mode of interpretation, with its rather exclusive focus on the parental abandonment model of Victor’s evildoing. If we observe the universality of the repulsion inspired by the creature’s ugliness and consider some ontological complications of that universality, we may step outside this dominant trend to some extent. Given the failures of Victor, we are sorely tempted to assimilate our disgust and fear to the resentment of the Monster, Victor’s manufactured victim; we are tempted to take the Monster’s side one-sidedly. But let us not. In an essay which first appeared in the Norton Critical edition of Frankenstein (1996), Lawrence Lipking aptly summarizes the tendency of victimary interpreters: “when they look at Frankenstein’s creation, they no longer see a Monster, as earlier generations did; they now see a Creature. And other aspects of that creation, (for instance, Victor Frankenstein’s genius) they do not see at all” (317). The victimary reading leans toward a total refusal to grant any value to Victor Frankenstein’s effort and success (“genius”) as an experimental scientist. It leads to assessments of the novel’s thematic content such as the following.

Shelley implicitly endorses a redemptive alternative to Frankenstein’s egotistical attempt to penetrate and manipulate nature. This is an ethic of care that would sympathize with and protect all beings, that would live in beneficial co-operation with Nature, and that would bring about social reform not through a violent French-style revolution but rather through peaceful, gradual evolution. Such an ideal flickers in the happy domesticity of the loving DeLacey family. (Mellor 23–24)

This way of taking sides against Victor and for the innocent artificial human misses much and distorts more. All the characters in the novel (as in most novels) are “egotistical,” the Monster included; one cannot live in market society without being “egotistical.” It is either morally suspect or conceptually empty to claim that “all beings” deserve protection and sympathy. Anyway, it is the lighthearted lover of sensibility Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy, not the brooding Mary Shelley, who bequeathed us the model of “all beings deserving protection and sympathy” with his picture of the war-wounded Uncle Toby letting the housefly go free out the parlour window. Mary Shelley is rather more sympathetic with violent revolution than this passage suggests (Clemit 30). It seems odd to speak of “bringing about” an “evolution” (unless we are thinking about human genetic engineering, but this critic is thinking about the non-Promethean opposite). The DeLacey family, for their part, mistreat the creature with a hostility as theatrical as that of the abandonment that Frankenstein performs. Their microcosmic idyll cannot bear the burden of a social ethic, even if only by “flickering” it across our eyes.

42 One place to begin a more temperate analysis of Victor Frankenstein’s moral failure is in consideration of the clue in the novel’s subtitle, the Modern Prometheus: it is on one reading an oxymoron, “modern” contradicting “Prometheus.” Reading it aloud, if we place the emphasis on the “Prometheus,” the phrase foregrounds Victor at the expense of his surroundings: it might imply that Victor is courageous, defiant of the anyway-absent gods in an admirable way. But we might also believe Shelley wanted us to place the emphasis on “modern”–the modern Prometheus. Spoken thus, the phrase emphasizes the historical context, the frame of the modern time containing the figure of usurpation within. With this emphasis comes the ironic hint that the “modern” context might lead us to reject as inappropriate the anti-democratic exceptionalism of Promethean desire. Modern Prometheanism would be awkward, anti-social heroics impossible for others to admire without resentment. The modern Prometheus cannot be a real demigod. As modern people, we should agree not to try to be demigods. As we have established, Victor’s ambition (as distinct from his method) is not “modern” but alchemical, occult. Furthermore, Prometheus means “forethought” or “thinking ahead,” as the theologian Ted Peters points out in his definition of “Promethean freedom,” the form of freedom least compatible with religious humility.(49) Victor Frankenstein will totally lack forethought, will be without forethought; he will not count, therefore, as a genuine Prometheus but only as a blunderer, a mad scientist, all power and no wisdom, all incalculable danger and no certain benefit. Men could share fire, but they cannot without self-destruction share the means to make artificial humans.

43 One of the difficult-to-grasp implications of the universality of the fear of the Monster’s ugliness, a fear shared by all characters including the Monster himself, including the Monster himself, also helps us temper our response to Victor’s failure. The universality implies that, however we might judge Victor for not recognizing the ugliness of the Monster before animation, we are not free to blame him for fearing the Monster after the moment of animation. We must not confuse the moral question of responding to the animated Monster with the moral question of looking upon the un-animated Monster, precisely because the latter is not yet a monster. That is, the question of why Victor does not foresee the ugliness becomes less pressing in proportion as we recognize that the text compels us as readers to admit we would react to the animated Monster with totally unfair loathing, just as Victor and all others inside the novel do, in any case. What goes on after the moment of animation is in effect irrelevant to the mystery of the lack of foresight.

44 There is no doubt Mary Shelley designs things such that we are expected to feel sympathy for the abandoned living wretch; indeed, we must feel it to begin reflecting on the ways the Creature’s suffering marks out significant ontological boundaries delineating “the human.” But I also contend that Mary Shelley deliberately blocks that sympathetic response, deliberately frustrates it, exposing in advance its futile hypocrisy. Shelley demands that we sacrifice any self-elevating illusion that we could have acted other than Walton, Victor, or the cottagers if we were in their places when confronted with the animated monster. The ugliness of the animated Monster is the concrete barrier that guarantees his being not-quite-human, his ontological otherness. The myth requires that he be at least as terrifying as he is pitiable, if not more terrifying than pitiable. The point is that Frankenstein does not succeed in creating a human creature. The proof of this is the way we are expected to respond to the monster as visual figure, perceptual content. Human characters and human readers, at a visceral, animal, appetitive level, as well as at the representational level of the esthetic and erotic, supported by libido but mediated by the sign, are condemned to find the Creature horrifying. He is not one of us. George Levine wisely notices that “the monster’s isolation derives not so much from his actions as from his hideousness” (11). Indeed, there is no action the Monster can perform that will remove his ugliness and make him into a human: that is the horror of his made situation. Denise Gigante, in a valuable study of the ugliness idea as a philosophical enigma, correctly argues that “the text demands that we recognize his deformity as the precondition of the text’s ethical concerns and the occasion for the narrative itself” (355) [emphasis added]. From the ineradicable ugliness of the Monster, all the sufferings of the Monster follow. Had he been handsome, Victor could have abandoned him and his independent resources would have been sufficient to permit his self-integration into human community. Our responses to his ugliness are not the results of mere “prejudice,” a “social construction” as one hears almost everything called these days.(50) Although it is an exasperating conflict between responses, we must face his ugliness and reject him, even as we witness his sufferings and wish we could embrace him. But we cannot; he is too ugly. That is the point Mary Shelley is trying to make with the universality of the fear. Once we concede this, we lose something in moral superiority to the human characters inside the fictional world who loathe him with their paradoxically egalitarian injustice, but we also gain something in ethical understanding, understanding both of Victor’s abandonment of the animated creature and of his failure to foresee the ugliness before the animation.

45 Hindsight is perfect; it is helpful to recall the formula “the anticipation of retrospection is the master trope of narrative” (Brooks, Design). But if we are to judge Victor Frankenstein for failing to foresee the Monster’s ugliness, we must be careful not to judge him in contradiction to the very impossibility of advance hindsight which constitutes part of our human identity with him (as opposed to our difference from the artificial human, the victim partly of that impossibility). We must sacrifice our desire for moral superiority in the face of–ironically–the cold scientific fact. The event-structure of scientific revelation must inspire our hesitation before the temptation to perform a total condemnation of Victor’s decision to animate the inanimate. The irreversibility of the effect of the animation, like the irreversibility of any scientific discovery about the incredible and never-before-grasped cosmological truth, makes the new information appear to have always been available. But the meaning of the revelation as event implies, on the contrary, that the new information is made available only in the event, with the event, by means of the event. That feature of the cosmological object which is revealed appears always to have existed, but prior to the revelation of its existence, there was no way of knowing it. Up until the moment of the animation of the Monster, Frankenstein does not know: he imagines, believes, predicts, but does not know. He has looked but he has not been able to touch. Frankenstein’s animation of the monster is an originary scene on which Frankenstein plays God: just as God and humanity are revealed to each other at once in the originary event, just as we cannot know God without tearing apart the object that revealed him in the originary event, so is the evil done by Frankenstein coeval with the animation of the monster, the human necessity of the monster’s abandonment one with its animation into horrific moving ugliness. Before that moment, the ugliness of the monster has not been completely revealed and Victor has not successfully performed the one and only scientific experiment that makes him famous, makes him the founding model of the mad scientist. Almost every Frankenstein movie ever made shows an understanding of this.

46 Mary Shelley has intuited the identity between the event structure of religious revelations of “sacred” truths about the human community and the event structure of scientific revelations of cosmological truths about a God-evacuated Nature. Our formulation derives from the emphases of originary analysis, but Roslynn Haynes comes close to it in her list of the ways in which Shelley’s work “pre-empted many of the philosophical and psychological considerations that have subsequently been recognized and inextricably linked to scientific research.” Haynes’ second “consideration” is this.

[Mary Shelley’s] chief purpose… is to explore the ethical consequences of the success of Frankenstein’s experiment. In scientific terms, the creation of the Monster is a brilliant achievement; yet Frankenstein’s horror begins at the precise moment when the creature opens its eye, the moment when for the first time Frankenstein himself is no longer in control of his experiment. His creation is autonomous and cannot be uncreated any more than the results of scientific research can be unlearned, or the contents of Pandora’s Box be recaptured. Hence, paradoxically, it is at the moment of his anticipated triumph that Frankenstein qua scientist first realizes his inadequacy. (97) [emphasis to last sentence added].(51)

The problem of modern science is that it has the power to violently expose the vulnerability of the cosmological object, which vulnerability becomes an ethical problem because it opens up to us the anthropological truth of our total responsibility for the knowledge of the cosmos we have, the cosmos we intend as significant. Given the effectiveness of the scientific method, and given the democratic context of the dissemination of technological goods in market exchange, humans only have other humans to blame for the effects of such shocking revelations of cosmological truth as we witness in the animation of Frankenstein’s Monster. Having only other humans to blame–our triumph is one with our inadequacy to the cosmological object–we cannot help but miss the now-defunct, then-infinitely-valuable blame-ability of the transcendental Divine. Therefore, because we miss God, instead of blaming a pre-human God for making the cosmos such as we find it is, we blame the scientist for revealing the very thing “God” or the absence of God has permitted the scientist to reveal. The materialist prohibition against blaming God for the way the cosmos has been made (materialism explains nature partly with Laws of nature that need no divine legislator) explains why we as readers work so hard to find satisfying ways to blame Frankenstein: because his revelation, a revelation of the scandalous freedom he possesses to go ahead and make the dead material thing into a living Monster, forecloses the possibility of our blaming God in the traditional way for such seemingly total evil. We have only this human scientific usurper to blame (unless we exercise the democratic courage to blame ourselves for not having paid any attention to the strange fellow). I repeat that there is a concrete ground that makes our desire to blame understandable: I do not wish to de-legitimate our sympathy for the creature, even though it is futile and hypocritical (and as morally meaningful as many other such futile hypocrisies). The painful horror for the monster, as a user of human language capable of experiencing resentment and desire, is that his non-human being legitimates his feeling that he should be free to participate in the human economy; but the mad scientist’s failure of foresight has condemned him to cosmological object status, as a permanently disqualified “thing” lurking on the edges of the human scene of representation and exchange.(52) However, even though Victor’s failed experiment is based on the de-humanizing error of thinking that a human being can be “made” a cosmological object alone and off-stage from the scene of community, the truth of the experiment in its fullness can be revealed only in the event. This impossibility of total scientific foresight, with its destabilizing implications for ethical certainty, may be the most disturbing anthropological truth about modern science that Frankenstein reveals.

47 It is frustrating not to be permitted to condemn Victor Frankenstein for not seeing the ugliness of the monster in advance.(53) If we cannot without hypocrisy condemn Victor’s parental abandonment of the creature after it has been animated, surely, we protest, we can tax him for setting up the project in the first place, not making reasonable predictions even despite his isolation. His total isolation, as we have established, is a necessary ingredient of his amoral success. It is a deeply moral desire to drive back Frankenstein’s evildoing to an identifiable cause, a first move, a fixed marker of criminality: we want to make the Monster the same as us, equal to us. But the Monster is an artificial human. Mary Shelley, I suggest, would lead us away from the luxury of the resentment that would simply condemn Victor by allowing us to flatter ourselves that there is nothing of us in his terrible error. We desire in our modernity to know the object. The “catastrophe” of the Monster’s animation cannot be grasped by any set of logical propositions: like the originary event itself, Victor’s production is not reducible to a metaphysical assertion or a set of sentences. Something happens that lets us see and know something totally new, and abstracting from the event can never quite capture its ostensive force as the revelation of the new. Frankenstein’s doing reveals the problem of modern science: the impossibility of total scientific foresight, in the context of the power of modern science to produce cosmological effects, has destabilizing implications for ethical certainty.

48 It is worth keeping in mind that Victor is an unreliable narrator; at the time of the animation, he was doubtless in a much worse state than even his distress-rich description based on memories years afterward suggests. In all his accounts of the build-up to the animation, Victor describes himself as having lost all mental and spiritual contact with everything but the one object alone of animating the creature. He desired nothing but the success of the experimental application, the technological triumph. But unanimated, the creature is nothing, only a test case, data that has not been put through the computer. The fire has not been made from scratch for the first time, the new weapon has not been fired for the first time, the gene has not been spliced for the first time, the medicine has not been taken for the first time. There is a certain injustice in demanding that Frankenstein fear the monster before the monster has been animated because the unanimated monster is not, strictly speaking, to be feared. That is (ironically) the scientific view. What is there to be afraid of before the monster is animated? The monster, before animation, is a mere mass of dead body parts.(54) Up until the moment that the experiment succeeds, we have no certainty: it very well may not work. Up until the moment that the experiment succeeds, nothing decisive has been revealed. Frankenstein does use the word “ugly” to describe the Monster’s appearance prior to its animation. But what we should grasp in his confession is the assumption he makes that Walton will take for granted, as he does, the before/after dichotomy of revelation and the way that it qualifies his vulnerability to moral blame:

Oh! No mortal could support the horror of that countenance. A mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch. I had gazed on him when unfinished; he was ugly then; but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived. (1.4.86) [emphasis added].

It is the event, the animation, the muscles and joints becoming capable of motion, which makes all the irreversible historical difference.(55) Later, when the now-independent Creature confronts him and Victor tries his futile best to do his moral duty and respect its desire for a female companion, he structures the verbal account of his mixed feelings in the same terms: his moral sense is overcome by instinctive repulsion at the creature’s anti-erotic power, because the motion of the Monster annihilates its claim to human reciprocity: “His words had a strange effect upon me. I compassionated him, and sometimes felt a wish to console him; but when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened, and my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred. I tried to stifle these sensations” (2.9.171) [emphasis added]. Mary Shelley is hoping that we will admit we would have felt the same way. To protest that we are better than Victor, no, we would have been nice to the poor monster, or to interpret the text as if that were the truth, is to indulge a victimary fantasy.

49 In the animation scene, Mary Shelley shows us the disturbing link between the event structure of scientific revelation and religious revelation. Scientific revelation, to happen, does not require the immediate response or co-presence of the human community any more than the originary scientist’s initial acquisition outside the ritual scene of new substitutionary objects to return to the scene requires it. The mad scientist might have help from others, just as Frankenstein has his alchemists and professors and manufacturers of equipment, but the truth he discovers is a cosmological truth and its “technological” implementation may be carried out without social or communal approval. The memorability of Mary Shelley’s scene hinges on the intuitive economy with which it graphically links the human playing God to God creating the human. And yet the scene of the animation-creation of Frankenstein’s Monster is originary in its unique indifference to the paradoxically expelled communal sense. It is as if Victor never intends anyway to return to the scene of exchange with what he is about to do. It is a scene on which it is foolish to fear inanimate matter. The matter remains inanimate right up until the transfiguring instant that the scientist takes the place of God and succeeds. The irreversible ugliness of the Creature can never be revealed until the creature is animated. Divine creativity (God makes humans) and scientific revelation (we may create artificial humans!) are one. Animation and revelation are one: the moment in which man succeeds in playing God is the moment in which the artificial human, itself an impossibility, is born. The moments are inseparable. The artificial human is a God-deposing monstrosity because its presence as the result of a scientific “creativity” founded on the willful forgetting of all ideas of God–including our hypothetical idea of the uniqueness of human origin, our anthropological idea of God–does something irreversibly violent. The presence of the artificial human obliterates the structure of the originary scene on which the real human community and God emerged together. Instead of the sacred central object in the center that none of us as humans may appropriate, all of us aborting our gestures of appropriation, we have a mad scientist alone and the tortured object of his maximally desacralizing, minimally exchangeable gesture. It is an exchangeable gesture because we want to know: that is (good) modern science. But we do not want to know what the mad scientist does, and so the mad scientist becomes a mythic scapegoat of modern culture.

50 The mad scientist is impervious to our ethical anxieties, anxieties of which we should not feel ashamed, because this scientist exercises only a cosmological imagination, an imagination that has excluded considerations religious, esthetic, economic and erotic. To make a human being, for Frankenstein, is only a matter of “bestowing life.” Once the monster is revealed, yes, he recognizes its ugliness; but then it is too late. It comes with the form of all revelations, in their irreversibility, that they entail some kind of knowledge that is “too late”; but the revelations of the mad scientist entail the most incalculable consequences imaginable that may be noted in shorthand by the phrase “too late.” Mad science brings desacralizing objects to the community that it can never “take back” and put outside the community again (gunpowder, vaccinations, heart transplants, nuclear bombs, birth control pills, test-tube babies, fertility drugs, cloned frogs, sheep-goats: fill in the blank with whatever technological product you fear most). It is appropriate that the violence of the originary sparagmos is written on the Monster’s hideous face, that which we cannot bear to look upon, the object we have destroyed in getting to know it. The once-dead thing, now a monstrous living Creature, will become the walking embodiment of almost-significant human being degraded into insignificant animality, waste matter, undesirable, ungraspable–the cosmological object alone as a disfigured victim assigned no value and permitted no meaningful part in human history. (We will try to do some justice to the Monster’s own story in Part Three of this study.)

51 When Frankenstein isolates himself and builds the monster in his self-torturing madness, he is concentrating exclusively on the “object alone” and paradoxically forgetting the human mediation on the scene without which his “object” cannot have or create value. One implication of the originary hypothesis, as I have suggested, is that the “object alone” is an anthropological impossibility–in the sense that it is impossible to remove the cosmological object from the scene of representation, that is to say, from the triangular scenicity of paradoxical representation. The originary memory that sustains the human is the memory of the whole scene, including the “unconscious” memory of mediation through which alone the object might come to have value. Victor’s self-imposed isolation, his dangerous solitude, is a symbol we need to re-vision, to see in the light of the moral tension between a cosmology indifferent to anthropology and an anthropology that should no longer refuse to be intimidated by cosmology. We need to see the symbol of the mad scientist’s willful self-isolation in the light of the ethical tension between maximally desacralizing atheistic science and minimal religious faith in the prior necessity of human community. Mary Shelley is not simply following Gothic convention or playing psychologist in making the first mad scientist do his work in willful solitude. She is intuiting an anthropological truth about relations between knowledge and exchange. The truth is that to the extent that the scientific worker who intends to bring a new object to the scene of human exchange, either the ritual scene or the modern market, somehow forgets the scene itself and focuses obsessively and exclusively on the object, to that very extent does the usurper risk bringing into the community an object devoid of any potential sacred, esthetic, or economic value. Therefore, as the novel dramatizes this truth, the closer Frankenstein gets to the moment of paradoxical animation, the moment of playing God, the less is he thinking about human community and the exchangeability of the object he is producing. He is not thinking but “doing his head in,” emptying his mind of human thought. Such emptying is hard work; it is no easy thing to practice dehumanization: “Although I possessed the capacity of bestowing animation, yet to prepare a frame for the reception of it, with all its intricacies of fibres, muscles, and veins, still remained a work of inconceivable difficulty and labour” (1.3.81); “Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay?” (1.3.82) [emphasis added]. The self-centralizing romantic esthetic, with its “displaced theology of creative genius” (Fleming and Carroll) vastly increases the probability that such community-endangering risks will be taken. Originary memory means “taking into memory the context along with the sign”: that means taking into memory other humans’ signifying gestures. All cognition is cognition of the center; all originary value is value measured at the center; but to imagine oneself occupying the center in splendid isolation while denying the mediation of the periphery is God-damning anti-human madness, not originary thinking.

52 Furthermore, Victor’s failure after the experiment to learn from his mistakes anything about himself or God (indeed, he regresses into an inchoate, curse-making spiritualism) will reveal a truth of “hard” modern science: any sacralizing representation of the God-indifferent-to-humanity of ritual religion may now meet its match in a scientific representation of the human-indifferent-to-God of scientific usurpation. It is a scandal that God lets Victor get away with it: in playing God successfully, Victor proves that in his world, God is either dead or so passive that he might as well be dead.(56)Mary Shelley gives us Anselm’s ontological proof reversed and perverted: the imperfect human being by the very force of his aspiring, violent defiance of imperfection, “proves” the absence, which is to say the manifest indifference, of any Other Being who might put a stop to his impious interventions in the cosmos, including interventions that annihilate the sacred figure of the human body and annihilate the sacred value of the human being. The disfigurations manifest in the monster’s ugliness and the impossibility of his participating in social exchange are the very archetype of such interventions; the monster in Shelley’s myth suffers all too terribly from them, misbegotten as erotic and social potential, ugly and expelled.(57) Frankenstein is to the monster as Satan is to Job.(58)The mad scientist playing God actually only imitates Satan. We notice in passing that the entrance of the imperious ecological Yahweh in Job is conspicuously missing from Frankenstein.(59)

53 However, we reject the knowledge-benefit of Victor’s exposure of the truth about the very God he ignores only at the cost of rejecting our modernity. To put the mad scientist’s inversion of the ontological proof in originary terms, Frankenstein heralds the capacity for disfiguration and maximal evil that modern science makes possible; but at the same time his science reveals the ethical necessity that we conceive of the God at the origin of humanity (if we wish not to go mad in our atheistic modernity) as an afigural Being whose very minimality and inaccessibility to disfiguration is the guarantee of the Being’s capacity to outlast that evil which, done by humans playing God, has the means to destroy God in the act of denying God. The anthropological idea of God proposes that God and the human are coeval: to “destroy” God would be to destroy the human. Such an afigural God can find advocacy only in a minimally conceived anthropological idea, as the valuable, exchangeable object of faith in a scientific hypothesis. Therefore, ironically, in the end, anthropological science may put “hard” cosmological science back where it belongs: a knowledge of the sacred Being at the origin of the human, even in its hypothetical minimality, must become paradoxically sacred to desacralizing science, unless modern cosmological science wishes to risk being its own undoing. That is, anti-human cosmology–the doctrinaire defense of a cosmos imagined as indifferent to the human so as to legitimate an amorality respecting human being, suffering, identity–anti-human cosmology must submit itself to anthropology. Cosmology must submit to anthropology. The threatening container “cosmology” must be contained by the “anthropology” that refuses to be contained, scientific representation acknowledging its originary status as “merely human” representation so that it can continue to be representation performed by humans and for humans on the uniquely human scene of representation. There is only one scene of representation: it is the human scene, on which appears not the cosmological object alone but the object humans intend, and intend only by differing from their Divine Other. God as the unfigurable guarantee of the human, and the human community alone, meet and come into being together, opening themselves up to the cosmos, as the cosmological result of originary (paradoxical) representation. This is not the “anthropic principle”; it is originary thinking about cosmological science. The human is ethical, not cosmological; the object intended by the human must be intended as an ethical, exchangeable object, not merely “known” as a cosmological object. If it is the destiny of modern science to pursue the cosmological object alone, then modern science destroys itself just as Frankenstein destroys himself in the animation of the Monster.

54 Having said all this against modern mad science, I would remind the reader that the counter-intuitive portion of my thesis has been that we should not at all indulge a generalized resentment against modern science. We should not resent even the fantastic figure of Victor Frankenstein without a minimal reserve of self-reflexive hesitation; to neglect that hesitation would be to deny our participation in the “constitutive hypocrisy of romanticism”: pretending to hate the market in scientific ideas and goods does not permit us to escape the technological world we inhabit. All mad science is modern science, but not all modern science need be mad science. We must pay proper respect to the astonishing fact (for example) that the monster himself, in the final scene of Shelley’s novel, blesses the memory of Victor after having destroyed him.(60) Condemning Victor in ever more elegant ways–and the temptation to condemn him is impossible to resist–makes it difficult to grasp the event of his mythic self-production. If we wish to stretch our understanding of Shelley’s myth to the limit, we will shake hands with the first mad scientist in an acknowledgment of his success in having created the artificial human, without withdrawing our complaint that his performance represented evil in action. The toughest question is always the one about when and why mad science becomes a necessary evil. Just as in the originary sparagmos the first human society managed to contain the evil of private resentment in originary memory of the good, so in our response to Frankenstein we might aim to contain the evil represented by Victor (who is after all, thank God, only a fiction), rather than letting our resentment of him block our open-minded grasp of the meaning of his disastrous venturing forth.

55 My argument has included the proposal that we cannot expel from our society and economy the risks involved in the process of modern scientific discovery–or the scandal of the appearance of Divine indifference inherent to modern scientific revelation–without disowning the freedom to take responsibility for the historical situation of our state-of-knowledge. Modernity, including modern science, bequeaths us that freedom to take responsibility as one of its founding principles.(61) Where religion would forbid us from touching the cosmological object as sacred, originary and modern science both invite us to handle it and find substitutes for it. Therefore, we should notice that the one thing Victor Frankenstein himself “proves” by means of his experimental success is the liberty of romantic selfhood that accompanies modernity: human self-centralization and Divine Self-withdrawal are one.(62) Whatever we take away from the idea of God in getting to know the truth about the Nature over which God once presided, we may give back to God in the form of a new and far more difficult, “scientific,” way of knowing God, through a minimal hypothesis of the anthropological idea of God.

56 Victor Frankenstein as fantastic figure represents the scientist determined to double the origin of humankind in the creation of an artificial human. Victor Frankenstein as “realistic” figure represents the scientific atheism that rejects any obligation to remember the transcendental Other we shared at the cosmological event of our unique human origin. That Frankenstein learned nothing from his error, and that his real-world imitators in the camp of scientific atheism even today persist in their angry or serene obliviousness to the event structure of scientific revelation, certainly does not mean that we who grasp Frankenstein’s story are forbidden to learn from his anti-example. His anti-example teaches the anthropological truth that playing God by trying to re-produce, to re-make, to double the unique cosmological and historical event of human origin, is an impossibility. It will never happen, because it only had to happen once. (Nor should we forget the mystery that it did not have to happen at all. We did it: together with God, we named God, who had to be named, whom we had to name in becoming human.)(63) We should celebrate that “once” rather than condemning ourselves to the restless misconception, the vain dream, that for some obscure “romantic” reason we must do it again. The real human does not need any artificial human other. We do not need to make monsters, nor do we need to make perfect human beings. We can begin by being ourselves, human.(64) God our Other was with us at the beginning, so we do not need to play God in the mode of being God. We should learn the lesson of Frankenstein.

René Girard’s mimetic theory has sometimes been criticized for being unrealistic in its implications for human ontogeny.(1) More precisely, it can be argued that mimetic rivalry, if it is really as fundamental as Girard maintains, would be far more evident among young children, who are universally recognized to be “imitation machines.” If children learn by imitation, why are they not constantly fighting among themselves, as Girard’s theory predicts? We all know the proverbial story of the children in the nursery who reach for the same toy despite the fact that there are many other toys in the room. But has anybody actually tested for mimetic rivalry among children? And what age group are we talking about? Do prelinguistic infants compete mimetically? When do children “ironize” centers of attention, like Hamlet at his uncle’s court, or Tom Sawyer whitewashing his aunt’s fence?

In what follows, I take a closer look at the role of imitation in human ontogeny. Much of what I say relies on Michael Tomasello’s work.(2) Tomasello is a well known comparative psychologist at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, and he has done a great deal of empirical research on children and nonhuman primates such as chimpanzees. My remarks will draw mainly on his account of imitation and cultural learning in his book, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (1999). In this book, Tomasello provides a fascinating picture of how children, beginning at about nine months of age, acquire higher cognitive functions, including eventually language, mathematics, and music. Tomasello’s main interest, however, is not in the later period of cultural development, when children acquire advanced and culturally variable skills like long division or algebra. Rather, he is interested in what is universal in childhood development. His particular focus is therefore on the period just prior to the child’s first birthday, when the child begins to engage with adults in what he calls “scenes of joint attention.” Students of generative anthropology may be surprised to learn that Tomasello’s theory of cognitive development is very close in spirit to Gans’s reflections on the elementary linguistic forms (the ostensive and imperative).(3) What Tomasello calls the joint attentional scene is the ontogenetic analogue of what Gans calls the originary ostensive scene.

Tomasello’s Anthropology

Tomasello begins by asking why it is that, despite our close genetic relationship to chimpanzees, we are nonetheless so different from them. Unlike chimpanzee societies, human societies are complex, and they make use of complex symbolic and material artifacts. Tomasello argues that we cannot explain this difference in purely biological terms because: “there simply has not been enough time for normal processes of biological evolution involving genetic variation and natural selection to have created, one by one, each of the cognitive skills necessary for modern humans to invent and maintain complex tool-use industries and technologies, complex forms of symbolic communication and representation, and complex social organizations and institutions” (2). Tomasello believes there is “only one possible solution” (4). This solution involves reducing the multiple differences between humans and chimps to one essential difference. Unlike chimps or other animals, humans are able to build on culture cumulatively.

In arguing for a fundamental constitutive difference between humans and chimpanzees, Tomasello separates himself from most primatologists and evolutionary biologists, who tend to define human culture in continuity with animal examples of what the science writer Richard Dawkins calls “the extended phenotype.” For example, birdsong can be regarded as a particularly ingenious way for transmitting bird genes. Young birds learn mating songs by imitating their parents; they do not emit them naturally or spontaneously. Likewise, chimpanzees can be said to acquire culture by imitating the tool-making and tool-using skills of their parents. Tomasello argues that such definitions of culture fail to grasp the key to specifically human culture, which is the ability to build upon culture recursively. Tomasello calls this the “ratchet effect” (37). What he means by this is that human cultural artifacts are not simply passed down unchanged from generation to generation, like the songs of a particular bird species, or the tools of the chimpanzee. They are intentionally modified by the users themselves. More specifically and more interestingly, Tomasello argues that humans participate in a collective attentional scene, the history of which stretches back to the very first scene of collective human attention. Chimps make termiting sticks as they have always made termiting sticks, but the human capacity for symbolic representation has, for better or worse, enabled the spear to evolve from pointed stick to nuclear warhead.

The skeptic may counter that this is always the case with evolution. Things tend to get more complex, as competition forces organisms and cultures to specialize into particular environmental and cultural niches. But Tomasello’s point is not just that human culture is more complex, but that this complexity is built into the process of cultural transmission. Among humans, culture is modified at a rate that transcends, by several orders of magnitude, the mechanisms available to biological evolution. The rapid pace of human cultural evolution suggests that we are dealing with qualitatively different mechanisms of evolutionary change. Since humans differ very little from other primates in terms of their biology, the difference must lie in the particular mechanism used by humans to transmit culture. For Tomasello, our capacity to transmit and modify culture intersubjectively–that is, within the shared space or scene of collective attention–is what separates us from other social animals, including most notably our closest living genetic relative, the chimpanzee.

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Though one can disagree with Tomasello on the particulars of his theory–and I will look at some of those particulars in a moment–it seems hard to deny his general point that human culture is fundamentally different from animal culture. Yet the astonishing fact is that Tomasello’s position among scientists is anomalous. Why is this the case? Why do the vast majority of scientists appear so eager to deny or ignore the obvious differences between humans and nonhuman animals when it comes to symbolic phenomena such as culture and language? If I were forced to explain this curious fact, I would put it down to our natural inclination to identify with others. We can’t help but explain nonhuman behavior in human terms because that is how we interpret our own behavior. Humans have an irresistible urge to anthropomorphize the world, and this urge spreads to other animals who appear to behave like us in certain respects.

I realize that this is rather counterintuitive. Surely we can expect the scientists, of all people, to be more objective. But I’m afraid I can’t think of a better explanation. For a long time, we believed the whole cosmos operated in terms of human beliefs and desires. We seem to have gotten away from seeing our preoccupations mirrored in the rocks, trees, and stars. But it seems as though a residual element of this “cosmological anthropology” remains when we turn to animals, and in particular to our closest primate relative, the chimpanzee.

So what are we to do? Well, one thing we can do is listen to people like Tomasello. When it comes to comparing human societies with nonhuman primate societies, I think we have no better guide. His extensive knowledge of the literature in primatology, his own empirical research on chimpanzees and children, and above all his theoretical sophistication, make him an ideal guide for navigating the controversial subject of human origins.

Of Chimps and Children

On the basis of his empirical experiments with children and chimpanzees, Tomasello argues that children go through a “nine-month revolution.” This is when they adopt a cognitive perspective on the world unknown to chimps or other animals as they begin identifying with the intentions and attentions of others. Before nine months, children interact with adults dyadically, for example, by imitating facial expressions, or participating in “proto-conversations” or turn-taking rituals (e.g., peek-a-boo games). Students of Girard’s mimetic theory may wish to see this pre-nine-month phase as the “Girardian” stage of human ontogeny, when infants imitate adults directly without paying attention to the world outside the model. At around nine months, however, children begin to follow the attention of adults in order to attend to external objects. This is the basis of pointing gestures. Children begin to understand that adults are beings like themselves who have goals and plans toward objects (“intentions”), and they begin to identify with those intentions by following the gaze of adults and predicting the adult’s behavior on the basis of their perception of both the adult and the adult’s relationship toward external objects. Tomasello calls this the “scene of joint attention,” and he believes it to be the fundamental basis for specifically human forms of imitation and cultural transmission. We might call this the “Gansian” phase of human ontogeny, the discovery by the child that it is a participant in the general scene of human culture.

To get a flavor of Tomasello’s argument here, consider his analysis of the widely cited example of “culture” among a group of Japanese macaques. In the 1950s an individual named Imo was observed to wash her potatoes before eating them. Gradually the habit spread, first to Imo’s closest relatives, then among the other group members. After two years, about forty percent of the troop was observed to be industriously washing potatoes. The scientists interpreted this as an example of humanlike cultural transmission, because the group’s members appeared to be imitating Imo’s invention of potato washing. As it turns out, however, potato washing is not quite the cultural revolution in food preparation the scientists thought they had discovered. Other individuals in other troops quite separate from Imo’s have since been observed to do the same thing. Unsurprisingly, the displeasure of chewing on sand and grit appears to be something we share in common with monkeys, who frequently can be seen to engage in the perfectly natural practice of brushing the sand off their food before chewing it. The potato washing habit is therefore better explained as an extension of this natural brushing behavior. Given exposure to water and sandy potatoes, sooner or later the monkey will discover that washing the potato with water is a more effective sand-removing technique than simply brushing it. But the real clincher for Tomasello is the fact that the rate at which the habit of potato washing spread within Imo’s troop remained constant throughout the two-year observation period. If individuals really were imitating the behavior of their fellow macaques rather than relying on individual trial and error, one would expect the rate of transmission to increase dramatically as the number of potato washers increased. But this was not the case. Tomasello’s conclusion is that the macaques were not so much imitating Imo’s behavior as being led by her to favorable circumstances in which each individual could discover for itself the elegant beauty of potato washing. The fact that Imo’s closest relatives adopted the habit first is consistent with this hypothesis. As they foraged with Imo, they were the most likely members to be in the same vicinity of water and sandy potatoes. They therefore were also the first to discover, one by one and by individual trial and error, the handy trick of potato washing.

Tomasello calls this type of social learning emulative rather than imitative. The difference is that in emulative learning the disciple focuses not on the model’s particular behavior but on the objects with which the model is interacting. Chimpanzees, for instance, are very good at observing other chimpanzees interact with objects, but they do not then imitate the other’s behavior with respect to the objects involved. Rather, they are led to interact with the objects and discover for themselves the natural affordances of the particular objects attended to. For example, a young chimp may observe its mother crack a nut with a stone. It will then pick up a stone and discover that the stone makes a pretty good hammer. What the chimp has learned is not a particular behavior (the mother’s technique of nut cracking), but a fact about stones, and more precisely, a fact about the impact of stones on nuts. This is something that is learned by the chimp in its interaction with the stone and the nut, not by imitating its mother’s gesture toward the nut or stone. The chimp does not oscillate its attention between mother and the objects involved, in a conscious effort to reproduce her particular gesture. It therefore has not learned a new behavior by imitation. Hammering is something the chimp can do individually, given the natural affordances of the objects involved. Provided with a stone and a nut, and given the general primate capacity for grasping objects (Thank God for the opposable thumb!), the chimp discovers how to crack a nut. The behavior is emulative rather than imitative because, as Tomasello puts it, the chimp “focuses on the environmental events involved–the changes of state in the environment that the other produced–not on a conspecific’s behavior or behavioral strategy” (29).

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In order to test his theory that chimpanzee learning is emulative rather than imitative, Tomasello devised a series of ingenious experiments testing both two-year-old children and chimpanzees. The experiments involved getting the subjects to imitate the behavior of a model. Tomasello describes how the children almost always insisted on imitating the behavior of the model, no matter how bizarre or inefficient it was. For example, if the model switched on a light by using her head, so would the children. Or if the model used a tool in an extremely inefficient fashion to reach an object, the children would use the tool in the same inefficient manner, despite the fact that the natural affordances of the objects presented a much easier way to do the same task. The chimps, on the other hand, simply experimented with the objects no matter which way had been demonstrated to them beforehand. Evidently, the children were imitating the model whereas the chimps were attempting to emulate the outcome of the experiment independently of the model’s particular behavior. Whereas the children were focused on the model’s behavior toward the goal, the chimps were focused on the outcome of the experiment. The difference is important because it explains why chimpanzees have such great difficulty learning to use symbols. The ability to separate behavior from outcome is necessary before the model’s gesture toward the object can be transformed into a genuine symbol that designates or “means” the object. What Tomasello’s experiments strongly suggest is that children, but not chimps, are predisposed to focus on the model’s behavioral stance toward the object. They are entering into the model’s particular intentional stance toward the object.

Joint Attention

Key to Tomasello’s ideas about language acquisition among children is his hypothesis concerning the joint attentional scene. Before nine months, children interact with the world much as other primates interact with the world. That is, they are aware of the objects around them and of other individuals interacting with those objects, but they never enter into the other’s intentionality toward those objects. If a pre-nine-month-old child is playing with an object and an adult walks into the room and says, “Look, let’s play with this!” while holding out a toy car, the child may reach out and grab the car and start sucking on it, or manipulating it, or whatever, but it pays no attention to the adult’s intentions toward the toy. It pays attention either to the toy or to the adult, but not to the relationship between adult and toy. In other words, the child does not think to itself, “Oh, mommy wants to show me this new toy,” or even, “This person wants to show me this thing.” On the contrary, if Tomasello is right, it does not even “think” at all, at least not in the way an adult thinks, which according to Tomasello is an internalized version of the kind of joint attentional scenes children first experience at nine months. Thus, in grabbing the toy the pre-nine-month-old child does not look from mommy to toy and back to mommy again. The toy is simply another object to interact with, but it receives no further significance beyond the child’s own interest in it. Tomasello’s argument is that chimps never really go beyond this “egocentric” stage of understanding objects, which is why primatologists never observe chimps pointing in the wild. That is, they do not distinguish between my intention toward objects and your intention toward objects, so there is no point in trying to get you to pay attention to my attention toward the object. As far as chimps and pre-nine-month-old children are concerned, there is only the point of view of the self, into which all other perspectives are innocently absorbed.

At around nine months of age, however, children begin to engage in what Tomasello calls joint attentional scenes. Initially, this begins with simple checking on the attention of an adult in relation to an outside object, but it quickly evolves into gaze following, when the child looks from adult to where the adult is looking, and to acts of pointing, when the child tries to direct the attention of an adult to some external object. What Tomasello is keen to stress in this ontogenetic “revolution” is the fact that the scene is fundamentally triadic in structure: “Joint attentional scenes are social interactions in which the child and the adult are jointly attending to that third thing, for some reasonably extended length of time” (97). The child’s attention shifts between the adult and the object to which both adult and child are attending. In this collective sharing of attention toward a central object, Tomasello sees the roots of symbolic culture, including language, symbolic play, and ritual.

Joint attentional scenes, however, are not examples of language, at least not language in the sense usually intended by philosophers or linguists.(4) They are rather the minimal condition of language. On the other hand, nor are they simply perceptual events of the kind that nonhuman primates and other animals engage in. All animals, including of course all humans, perceive the world around them and are able, on the basis of those perceptions, to form sensory-motor representations that allow them to anticipate events in the world, including the actions of other conspecifics. However, these anticipations are still perceptually based, in the sense that they are individually learned image schemas or sensory-motor representations. To borrow a usage from the evolutionary anthropologist Terrence Deacon, these perceptual and sensory-motor representations are indexical. They are based on the capacity of all animals to form categories of perceptual events, including categories of communicative events, such as the widely publicized example of vervet monkey distress calls.(5)

The scene of joint attention is quite different. Indeed, Tomasello claims that it bridges the gap between perceptual representation (which we share with all animals) and language (which only we possess). What differentiates the joint attentional scene from language in the narrow sense employed by linguists is the fact that language “abstracts” from the scene to include only its most portable aspect, which is the symbol or word itself. On the other hand, what differentiates the joint attentional scene from perceptual events is that it includes “only a subset of the child’s perceptual world” (97). That is, the joint attentional scene focuses the child’s attention on a central object, against which all other perceptual objects and events become background or “periphery.”

Let me emphasize this difference between perceptual events and the joint attentional scene. Animals can of course focus their attention on discrete objects or events in the world, as when a cat tracks the movements of a mouse, or a chimp warily eyes the presence of a male rival. In the joint attentional scene, however, the child is not merely paying attention to the object, but to someone else’s attention toward the same object. In other words, the child grasps that the significance of the object is mediated by the attention of the other. It is this capacity to separate the other’s intention–his or her internally represented goal–from the perceptual reality of the object that distinguishes the joint attentional scene from otherwise superficially similar perceptual scenes. The child learns that the adult’s intention to the object is distinct from its own intention toward the same object. Moreover, in making this distinction between self and other, it lays the foundation for participating in an intentional relation that is truly collective or intersubjective, because in recognizing the difference between the other’s intentionality toward the object and the object itself, the child learns to take a perspective on the object distinct from its own. The child is now imitating a particular intentionality toward the object that is transposable to other scenes in which the object may appear. Tomasello calls this “role reversal imitation” (105) because it implies that the child is able to grasp that an adult’s intentional stance toward an object is something that can be adopted by the child itself. This is something we do all the time–indeed, whenever we use language. For example, suppose you tell me that the peculiar thing on your dining room table is a “grazza.” Later, when my wife walks in the room and makes a face while staring at the peculiar object on the table, I turn to her and say, “Oh, that’s a grazza.” I have not merely imitated the word, I have also reproduced your intentional stance toward it. That is, I have recreated the joint attentional scene by adopting your perspective, and this time I have reversed the roles because I am now instructing someone else, as you had instructed me before.

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A skeptic might object that these joint scenes of attention are not so very different from the attentional scenes other animals engage in. Animals are not rigidly tied to the same perceptual construal of a particular object. A tree may represent a number of different things. Depending on the context, it may represent an escape route, a nesting site, or the location of food. But Tomasello’s point is not that perceptual scenes are inflexible but that they are always tied to the natural affordances of the objects and that these affordances are discoverable by the individual’s dyadic interaction with the object. At no point does the chimp seek confirmation from another conspecific in order to see that the tree is a nesting site or an escape route or source of food. It can discover these things for itself. Furthermore, it is impossible for the tree to represent all these things at the same time. The chimp does not choose between different representations of the tree that it can hold in its mind simultaneously. Rather, the representation of the tree remains a function of the chimp’s particular goal, which is either to eat, escape, or sleep. As Tomasello says, “the animal is attending to different affordances of the environment depending on its goal” (126).

In the case of symbolic attention, however, the goal is not defined by the practical affordances of the environment, but by the attentions of both individuals in the attentional scene. When a child points to a tree, the goal is to secure the adult’s attention to the same object. And this is, in the end, what language does. It secures the other’s attention toward some external object or, in the case of declarative sentences, some external idea or “signified.” When it comes to specifically human cognitive functions, what is primary, as Emile Durkheim saw, is the social relation. It is the latter that mediates our more basic indexical perceptual and sensory-motor functions. The latter are basic functions that we share with all other animals. It is the mediation of these functions by the joint attentional scene that distinguishes human from animal cognition.

In a manner reminiscent of Deacon’s theory of symbolic reference, Tomasello argues that language emerges as a negation–or, in Hegelian terms, a transcendence–of more basic perceptual and sensory-motor representations. In order to construe an object in symbolic terms one must impose an intersubjective relation onto a perceptual relation. That is, one must enter into a joint attentional scene that can define the object “arbitrarily” in terms of each participant’s shared attention to the object. This creates an intersubjectively shared “space”–a period of deferral, if you like–between the two participants in which the object is “centralized” as the shared focus of attention. Rather than seeing the object as a function of my individual biological needs (e.g., as a place of rest, escape, or food), I see it as a function of your attention, which–as students of mimetic theory well know–may be in conflict with my own pragmatic designs on the object. Gans, following Durkheim and Girard, suggests that the originary act of symbolic designation is an act of sacralization. The designation of the object as sacred is not something that can be understood on the basis of the natural affordances of the object. On the contrary, it is an arbitrary imposition, in the sense that its “functionality” is given by the intersubjective relation itself. The object is now attended to as a function of the symbol used to designate it. As Tomasello points out, this is the basis for the perspectival nature of symbols. Language is used in order to get someone to attend to the world in a certain way. In designating an object symbolically, I first have to decide what symbol to use. For example, I could call a tree, that tree, the oak, the tree in my backyard, the monstrosity that blocks my sunlight, or any number of things. But how I choose to construe it is, in the end, always a function of how I think I can best get you to attend to it with me. That is, I choose between different symbols by simultaneously monitoring your attention to the object. This is in fact how children acquire language and this is also what we mean by imitation in the specifically human context. Symbols are “attention getters.” They are the tried and tested means passed down from previous generations of language users for participating in joint attentional scenes. “In imitatively learning a linguistic symbol from other persons,” Tomasello says, “I internalize not only their communicative intention (their intention to get me to share their attention) but also the specific perspective they have taken. As I use this symbol with other persons, I monitor their attentional deployment as a function of the symbols I produce as well, and so I have at my disposal both (a) the two real foci of self and communicative partner and (b) the other possible foci symbolized in other linguistic symbols that might potentially be used in this situation” (128). As this passage implies, Tomasello’s theory is aimed at explaining the ontogenetic pathways of the child’s entrance into the “mimetic triangle” of human culture.

Objects as Symbols

One thing I would like to emphasize in Tomasello’s account of human ontogeny is his view that the child’s symbolic interpretation of intentional objects follows, rather than precedes, the child’s acquisition of ostensive words in scenes of joint attention. At first, this might seem rather counterintuitive. We tend to think of words as horribly abstract whereas objects, even symbolic objects, are tangible and concrete. At least you can manipulate a toy car, even if it is “only” a representation, a model of the real thing. The word car, on the other hand, is by comparison a very abstract thing, little more than a puff of air or, in the case of writing, black dots on the page or computer screen.

But that is precisely the point. In order for the child to move from concrete perceptual and sensory-motor representations to abstract symbols, it needs to override all those perceptual and sensory-motor associations it has learned in the first nine months of its life. But this is a very hard thing to do if your raw material consists of graspable objects with all kinds of preexisting intentional and natural affordances. An interesting discovery of Tomasello’s experiments was that it is very hard for children under two to intentionally interpret a cup as a hat, or a pencil as a hammer, for example, by putting the cup on their heads, or hammering with the pencil. These symbolic interpretations are difficult for the child because the objects already possess clear cut intentional affordances. The cup is for drinking, the pencil for drawing. These more basic perceptual and sensory-motor representations tend to override the child’s relatively undeveloped capacity for symbolic association and metaphoric thinking.

In a particularly poignant experiment, Tomasello demonstrates how hard it is for children under two to interpret nonarbitrary objects in purely symbolic terms. Children aged eighteen to thirty-five months were asked to give the experimenter an object. In the first stage of the experiment, the experimenter simply asked for the object by name. All the children responded appropriately. In the second phase, the experimenter asked for the object by holding up a toy replica of the object (e.g., holding up a toy hammer in order to get the real hammer). Interestingly, the children under twenty-six months had extreme difficulty with this task. They reacted instead by reaching for the toy held up by the experimenter. Children over twenty-six months, however, had no difficulty interpreting the toy object symbolically as a request for the object represented. Tomasello suggests that the reason the task is so difficult is “that the younger children engaged with the toy object as a sensory-motor object,” and that this engagement prevented them from interpreting the object as a symbol of something else, namely, the real object the experimenter was requesting (86). This is an interesting finding because it suggests that symbolic iconicity, far from being a natural stepping stone toward language, is in fact something children grasp only once they have already mastered ostensive words (e.g., “Juice!” “Dog!” “Tree!” etc.). I interpret this as additional evidence that, phylogenetically speaking, we have no choice but to interpret the origin of language and culture as a radical break from preexisting animal forms of culture and communication. There is no shortcut from perceptually based modes of iconicity and indexicality to genuine symbols. The unbounded human capacity for metaphor and other forms of symbolic analogy begins with the “vertical” separation between the central object and the intersubjectively shared sign. The aborted gesture of appropriation that defers the indexical relation between subject and object is the “humble” beginning of humanity–the “little bang,” as Gans puts it.(6) The key ingredient of the originary scene is the minimal symbolic sign.

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Human Phylogeny and the Joint Attentional Scene

Before I conclude, I would like to make a small criticism of Tomasello’s account of human phylogeny. In general, I agree with most of what he says on this topic. I agree that evolutionary biologists, anthropologists, and psychologists have, by and large, neglected the “cultural” factor in human evolution. Instead, there has been too much emphasis on the genetic or biological side of things. Tomasello rightly disputes the simplification of this issue into an inflexible dichotomy between biology and culture. As he points out, the dichotomy doesn’t really exist. What “exists” are rather different ideas about history. There is phylogenetic time, which is the perspective of biological or genetic evolution. There is historical time, which is the perspective of human beings reflecting on their relationship to past culture and in particular to past ideas that other human beings have had about themselves and the world around them. And, finally, there is ontogenetic time, where biology and history each play an indispensable role in the formation of the human individual. Tomasello thinks that evolutionists have favored looking at human evolution in phylogenetic or biological terms because it just seems easier and more elegant. It is much simpler to posit a genetic event as the cause of something because genetic events are more manageable than cultural events, which tend to be rather messy and imprecise affairs. Hence the temptation to see human cognition in terms of a number of discrete “modules” that are genetically wired to produce different “types” or “categories” of cognition. So, following this line of argument, there must be separate cognitive modules for perceiving objects, for knowing persons, for recognizing number, for acquiring language, and so on and so on. Obviously, this sort of thinking is not very rigorous and it is easy to see how it can quickly get out of hand. Do we need a module for chess? What about the God gene?

Tomasello rightly cuts through the confusion implicit in this kind of thinking. His expertise on human ontogeny allows him to see that the cultural side of the story is really much more important than the typical evolutionist admits. This is what is so valuable about Tomasello’s account. He sees the importance of culture–the mediation of the child’s attention by the joint attentional scene–in changing the biological pathways of the child’s cognitive development, as it goes from perceiving the world much like other primates do, to seeing it in terms that only humans do. However, I have to point out that Tomasello doesn’t always follow his own advice. In his concluding section, after he criticizes the modular theorists for their ad hoc practice of explaining human cognition in terms of multiple discrete genetic events, he goes on to propose a genetic event of his own:

My attempt is to find a single biological adaptation with leverage, and thus I have alighted upon the hypothesis that human beings evolved a new way of identifying with and understanding conspecifics as intentional beings. We do not know the ecological pressures that might have favored such an adaptation, and we can hypothesize any number of adaptive advantages it might have conferred. My own view is that any one of many adaptive scenarios might have led to the same evolutionary outcome for human social cognition, because if an individual understands conspecifics as intentional beings for whatever reason–whether for purposes of cooperation or competition or social learning or whatever–this understanding will not then evaporate when that individual interacts with conspecifics in other circumstances. (204-5)

It’s too bad Tomasello doesn’t follow his own advice. Here he gets it exactly backwards. Understanding other conspecifics as intentional beings like oneself is not a “genetic event” because there is no conceivable reason why, genetically speaking, such an event should occur, as he himself admits. Or, to put the same point differently, there are so many reasons why the capacity to identify with others is beneficial from the perspective of those who already have it that the number of plausible originary scenarios is limitless. But the real issue is not the infinite number of scenarios we can imagine for causing individuals to identify with one another. It is the presence of the scene of identification itself, which takes place, as Tomasello elegantly shows, in the joint attentional scene between parent and child. It is the joint attentional scene that must be explained, not the “genetic” ability to identify with others. The “selection pressure” to see other beings like oneself is given by the structure of the (joint attentional) scene itself. The mimetic “pressure” to maintain attention on a central object that is also the center of attention of the other leads the subject to begin to identify with the other’s internal representation of the object, and vice versa. Tomasello’s detailed observations of young children provide empirical confirmation of this hypothesis. Where Tomasello trips up is when he translates his theory of human ontogeny into a hypothesis for a single genetic event in human phylogeny. But the joint attentional scene is irreducible to a genetic event. The origin of humanity is the first scene of joint attention, the minimal mimetic triangle of the originary hypothesis.

Conclusion

I began this essay by asking why it is that Girard’s mimetic theory has so little to say about human ontogeny despite the fact that children are “imitation machines.” I now wish to propose an answer. The reason is that Girard’s theory does not distinguish systematically between two kinds of imitation, imitation of a model and imitation of an object. For Girard, imitation is always ultimately imitation of someone else. This is why he associates the mimetic crisis with the loss of difference between subject and object. In a mimetic crisis, the rivals becomes so obsessed with each other that they no longer grasp that what they are designating is something external to both of them, the central object of the joint attentional scene. Girard’s idea of imitation is almost wholly based on this idea of dyadic imitation.

What Tomasello’s account suggests, however, is that dyadic imitation is a necessary ontogenetic step toward gaining access to the intentions of the other. This is a far more constructive notion of imitation. In paying attention to the behavior of the other, I am not merely imitating the other, but entering into the other’s perspective on the world. As Tomasello suggests, I am identifying with the other. But this identification would not be possible without the presence of a third element, which is the object to which we are both paying attention. In Signs of Paradox, Gans emphasizes the necessity of including the object as an indispensable third element in the mimetic relation, despite the fact that this seems to contradict Girard’s original idea of the mimetic crisis:

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Why should the intensification of mimesis lead the subject away from the other’s behavior toward the object to which it is directed? This movement reflects an internalization of the model’s motivation, the self’s closer assimilation to the other’s own reality. The more closely I imitate my model’s goal-directed action, the more I share the goal of this action, which is not located in the action itself but precisely in the external object. [. . .] Whence the apparent paradox that as imitation becomes more intense, it prefigures the triangular structure of human representation, focusing less on the model’s behavior and more on the object to which it is directed.(7)

Tomasello’s account of human ontogeny confirms Gans’s theory of imitation. The child learns to imitate not merely the external action of the other, but the other’s internal goal as well. The joint attentional scene is the basis for child’s acquisition of wholly abstract objects, such as the ideas or “signifieds” of declarative language.

In proposing that mimetic rivalry dissolves the mimetic triangle between self, other, and object, Girard reverses the passage from nature to culture, or, in Tomasello’s ontogenetic terms, from the infant who interprets the world much like other primates do, to the child who interprets the world symbolically in terms of the joint attentional scene. But this reversal is not really a reversal of the originary passage from nature to culture. It is a historical renewal of it. In the case of children, this historical renewal is experienced ontologically, in the sense that their identity as individuals is dependent upon their cognitive acquisition of culture, as they begin to participate in scenes of joint attention and internalize the mimetic configuration between self, other, and center of attention.

One can agree with Girard that too close a focus of attention on the other can lead to forms of mimetic rivalry that may become counterproductive. But Tomasello’s research suggests that imitation is in fact a far more flexible phenomenon than Girard acknowledges. The child’s identification with someone else is possible only once the child can engage in scenes of joint attention. But entry into the latter is also the source of an immense cultural productivity that can turn mimetic rivalry into any number of more “peaceful” solutions. Indeed, the conflict between self and other–for example, in the scenes of sibling rivalry examined by Girard in his analyses of literary and religious texts–frequently provides the motivation for constantly renewing the joint attentional scene, for instance, in an extended dialogue in which the interlocutors attempt to see the other’s point of view and vice versa. Tomasello cites research that young children who have siblings are more likely to identify with other points of view, because they have learned from an early age to engage in joint attentional scenes in which their desires have been in conflict with someone else’s. The joint attentional scene provides the opening to ultimately limitless forms of negotiation and deferral as participants seek to engage each other in their shared and–thanks to their status as co-equals in the scene–sharable perspectives on the world. The generativity of this scene is the core of Tomasello’s theory. His reflections on the ontogeny of this scene, as children are encouraged to participate in it by their parents, is a powerful example of originary thinking in the social sciences.

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This issue is dedicated to the memory of Wolfgang Iser, a world-renowned literary theorist and specialist in English literature, long one of the leading figures in the Konstanz school of criticism. As Richard van Oort‘s commemorative essay makes clear, Iser went well beyond reception theory to construct a literary anthropology having considerable affinities with GA, which Iser knew and respected while remaining skeptical about its founding hypothesis. Wolfgang Iser was a man of rare personal and intellectual generosity, and it is a source of pride that his last book, How to Do Theory (Blackwell, 2006), contains a chapter on GA.

The composition of this issue illustrates the importance that the British Commonwealth, and more specifically, Vancouver has assumed in the world of GA. Three of the articles in this issue come from the Vancouver group. Andrew Bartlett’s analysis of Victor Frankenstein and his monster is the second of a groundbreaking three-part series on Frankenstein and modern scientific revelation; the third part will appear in the Fall 2007 / Winter 2008 issue. Amir Khan, who as he tells us below was introduced to GA at UBC, offers for his second Anthropoetics article a reflection on the ineluctable “passionate” component of language that reflects the priority of the ostensive over the declarative. The first contribution in a number of years by Anthropoetics co-founder Richard van Oort deals with a fascinating confluence between originary thinking and the work of Michael Tomasello on the psychology of apes and children. Finally, Chris Fleming and John O’Carroll, our stalwart team from Down Under, audaciously propose GA as a superior replacement for Cultural Studies.

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.

Chris Fleming is Lecturer in the School of Humanities at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. His research interests include theatre and performance, the philosophy of science, and anthropology. His book, René Girard: Violence and Mimesis was published in 2004 by Polity Press.

John O’Carroll is Lecturer in the School of Social Science and Liberal Studies, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst NSW, Australia. His research interests lie in the area of the philosophy of communication, postcolonial theory, and Western epistemologies of landscapes (especially in Australia and the South Pacific). He has also taught at the University of the South Pacific (Fiji Laucala campus).

Amir Khan has taken to GA with the type of quasi-religious zeal that only ever materializes during the graduate years (or earlier); this being the case, he is still, very much, ‘wet behind the ears.’  He is currently finishing up a Creative MA thesis at the University of Windsor and is set to begin doctoral studies in January of 2008 at the University of Ottawa.

Richard van Oort, after two postdoctoral appointments at the University of British Columbia, is very happy to be returning to his alma mater, the University of Victoria, as Assistant Professor of English. Among other things, he will be teaching Shakespeare and Renaissance drama.