Author: staceymeeker

We live in an age that is highly skeptical about the possibility of epochal change. Although there is a widely held feeling that postmodern irony is démodé and that poststructuralist theory has run its course, there is little or no interest in inquiring whether current culture might be shifting into a new, as yet undefined aesthetic mode requiring an entirely different theoretical treatment. Thus while recent books bemoan “the theory mess” (Rapaport 2001) or muse about what might come “after theory” (Eagleton 2004) they don’t offer much of a positive, programmatic alternative. This attitude, it might be added, isn’t limited to die-hard postmodernists. Even such prominent critics of poststructuralist theory as Walter Benn Michaels in America (2004) and Boris Groys in Germany (2000) don’t try to outline what culture might look like after the end of posthistory.(2) And, as readers of this journal hardly need be reminded, Eric Gans and myself are practically the only two critics who have tried to name and define the new postmillennial or performatist epoch in a systematic way.

Part of the disinterest in defining the nascent epoch has to do with the stringent way that scholars now address any event or utterance laying claim to be something “new.” Today, whoever attempts to define the New is practically required to consider its endless, uncontrollable and open implication in the Already Existing every single step of the way. Derrida, in an essay devoted to the irksome problem of historical “isms,” leaves no doubt as to the alternatives at hand. Either you offer up a “static and taxonomic tabularization” (1990, 65) of the new in divesting yourself of the old, which hardly seems very promising, or you give yourself over to the field of an “introjective multiplicity” that corresponds “neither to a linear and temporal order of succession, nor to the order of a juxtaposing simultaneity” (1990, 69). This being said and done, the whole business of defining a paradigm shift pretty much takes care of itself. The new dissipates in the endless gyre and gimble of a discourse allowing no innovation that its rigorous metaphysical critique has not already touched on and placed under erasure from the start.

Rather than bemoan Derrida’s self-serving demand that history be discussed solely in terms that would make it forever posthistorical, we need to ask how we can go about defining epochal change in the most parsimonious and rigorous manner. In semiotic terms, the simplest and most fundamental way of doing this is to key in on two mutually exclusive concepts of sign. The first such concept includes the object in its notion of the sign; the second leaves it out. Regarding postmodernism there is little doubt about its semiotic preference. The object is always exterior to the sign, which is the sole, albeit belated means of gaining knowledge of the world around us (the triumph of virtuality in postmodernism and of belatedness in poststructuralism are the most salient expressions of this attitude).

Traditionally, this sort of sign is called dualist: there is always a split between sign and thing. Given this attitude, poststructuralists consider monist sign concepts, which treat the object and the sign as a unity, to be just so much hokum–a self-deluding “metaphysics” whose intellectual history has for all serious purposes already come to an end. Not surprisingly, poststructuralists have fundamental difficulties accepting newly developing monist positions. For the radical monist theories of Eric Gans, Walter Benn Michaels, and the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk aren’t just a correction or modification of postmodern culture, they’re its historical nemesis: they would reintroduce that element of difference into our cultural life that would ultimately make postmodernist dualism into something specifically historical–and historically expendable. Perhaps understandably, the theoretical project of radical monism has made little headway in academia, where poststructuralism and its offshoots have many eloquent and influential supporters. By contrast, the basic strategies of the monist aesthetic–closing works of art, striving for unity, ordering space and projecting belief onto characters and objects–have been appearing with increasing frequency and force in literature, film, and architecture without attracting the slightest bit of interest in academia. In the long run, the theoretical project of endlessly fine-tuning poststructuralism by injecting more ideology, more gender, or more history into it is in very real danger of missing out completely on the aesthetic and semiotic shift to monism now going on around it.

Perhaps the most graphic way of demonstrating just how this shift has taken place is to take two similar works from each side of the epochal divide and compare them according to the basic semiotic features noted above. Often, this kind of comparative work is like comparing apples and oranges; unless you’re dealing with an outright parody, it’s unusual to find works that share the same formal features but implement them in two completely contrary ways. In this case, though, I’ve come across two texts which are so close in theme and details of plot that they invite comparison under what are almost laboratory conditions. The works I have in mind here are Ali Smith’s novelHotel World (2001) and the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk’s short story “The Hotel Capital” (“Numery,” orig. 1989, cited according to 2000).

Both texts use exactly the same gimmick–the fancy international hotel as an allegory of global capitalism–but treat it in two completely divergent ways conforming respectively to the norms of postmodernism and performatism.(3) Smith, who did Ph.D.-level work in English literature, makes ample use of what looks like Foucauldian and Butlerian premises to set up a gender-sensitive victimary scenario. Tokarczuk, who was trained as a psychologist, deliberately follows in the Jungian (and by extension, Kantian) tradition, assigning an inspirational, unifying role to projections of an individual subject; in her treatment of spirituality, time, and space she also draws on the work of Mircea Eliade. Hotel World shows how helpless, decentered subjects accidentally and unintentionally come together to–unsuccessfully–resist the hegemonic order around them. “Hotel Capital,” by contrast, describes how a tutelary, distinctly Jungian type of subject intervenes in that order from within to invest it with spiritual value. As is always the case in performatist works, Tokarczuk’s story offers you a real choice. If you’re still in the postmodern mode, you’ll deconstruct the narrator’s projections in the twinkling of an eye and cast the story aside. If you do decide to go along with the narrator, though, you’ll enter into a whole, aesthetically mediated identification with those projections–and become a performatist so to speak by default.

2

To round out my discussion, I’d also like to treat briefly two other critiques of global capitalism in performatist works. To this end I’ll touch on Arundhati Roy’s postcolonial classic The God of Small Things (orig. 1996), which shows how a Kantian ideal of the beautiful can be used to frame radical individual resistance to caste restrictions and the encroachments of global culture. And I’ll provide a quick wrap-up of the young Czech writer Miloš Urban’s untranslated Sevenchurch (Sedmikostelí, 1999), which offers a sublime, characteristically Central European aesthetic of terror in answer to the resentment arising out of globalization.

Hotel World

On the surface, Ali Smith’s Hotel World is concerned with the accidental death of a young hotel worker named Sara Wilby, whose name (Wilby–“will be”) is already resonant with deferred potential. Sara, who has just taken on a job as chambermaid in the chain Global Hotels, bets a co-worker that she can stuff herself into the hotel’s dumbwaiter. Immediately after she performs this feat, however, the elevator cable tears, sending the dumbwaiter and Sara crashing down to the bottom of the shaft.

The fatal occurrence along with its attendant circumstances is recounted in six stylistically very different narrative sections. Although in the novel five striking individuals dominate each section–they are, in order of appearance, the victim herself, the hotel’s receptionist, a homeless woman, a female journalist, and Sara’s sister–our identification with these figures is constantly being disturbed, undermined, or sabotaged entirely. Thus in her narration, the dead accident victim appears as a ghost who visits first its family, then its own body in the grave. So that no one might get the idea of taking the heroine’s existence in the hereafter all too seriously, the ghost occasionally emits a “o-oo-oo” sound–just like in the comics.

This authorial ironization of characters’ discourse applies no less to the living. The reader’s identification with the younger sister’s anger and grief is undermined by the complete lack of punctuation marks in the chapter narrated by her. Her intensively experienced emotional reaction is overwritten, as it were, by a kind of discursive dysfunctionality whose only source can be that of the author (since no teenager, no matter how grief-stricken, would leave out every last single punctuation mark in her own writing). The suffering of the homeless, tubercular Else is similarly marked by defective language: when begging, her speech is reduced to almost incomprehensible fragments like “Spr sm chn” (“spare some change”).

These and other plays with script and language show the author to be a proficient, remote administrator of that dysfunctionality and defectiveness which otherwise weighs heavily upon her characters. By contrast, the only figure in the novel who is able to write, speak, and act in a conventional way is mercilessly exposed as a fraud. The person in question is a female journalist who befriends the homeless, disoriented Else while staying at the hotel for a night. The character, aptly named Penny, quickly proves herself to be everything promised by her name. Having written out a large check to Else she has second thoughts about it later in the night and has it cancelled–thus neatly exposing her own magnanimity as an empty, vain projection. The author doesn’t want her character (or us) to buy into an identification with Else; she wants to inscribe herself literally and directly in the dysfunctionality, alterity, and suffering of her characters–a contact that, however, never cleaves to one person for very long. Like the ghost, the bodiless, preternaturally weightless author moves effortlessly through her own book, haunting now one, now the other character.

By contrast, the author’s treatment of space and order is easy to pin down ideologically. At times, in fact, the book reads as if the author had cribbed straight out of Judith Butler or Michel Foucault. The hotel is a spatial trap, a panoptic surveillance center in which the employees are strictly monitored and punished according to need. Loopholes in this hegemonic matrix arise only by accident–as when the omnipresent surveillance cameras fail to work shortly after Sara’s accident. The characters in the novel, who are equipped with a quasi natural, spontaneous ability to resist à la Judith Butler, make immediate use of these flubs. Thus Lise, the mentally disturbed receptionist, takes advantage of the camera failure to sneak homeless Else into a luxury suite. Else, who is traumatized by enclosed spaces to begin with–some Christian missionaries once tried to convert her inside a locked room–soon flees, but forgets to turn off the bathwater, causing a small deluge. The damage is, however, quickly repaired and the costs fobbed off on an innocent chambermaid.

As this turn of plot suggests, resistance is both pointless and useless. It can occur only in the involuntary playing out of one’s own dysfunctionality but not as a goal-oriented, willful act. Instead, we are encouraged to imagine the possibility of such resistance from a higher, constantly shifting vantage point. The authorially mediated metaperspective allows us to experience ironic schadenfreude over the small flood caused by Else and Lise even as we realize its accidental, inconsequential character.

In view of the close connection between space and power, Sara’s accidental death in the innermost, “dumbest” and most confining space of the hotel carries a certain ideological weight after all. Sara’s accidental death and the barely concealed spatial violence emanating from the hotel form a contingency relationship suggesting that something like this need not take place but very well can. Sara’s senseless, accidental, death-by-wager–the embodiment of the aleatory per se–exposes the reified essence of the hotel as a whole: its omnipresent structural violence asserts itself even in the case of pure chance. Later on, Sara’s sister will smash a hole in the wall of the hastily bricked up shaft and throw an alarm clock into it so that she may experience the time span between Sara’s life and death by herself. By contrast, the hotel tempts its visitors with a false temporality, a false experience of transcendence: the hotel’s brochure indeed promises that “a transcendent time is waiting to be had by all” (181).

That time is not transcendent, but instead depends on spatial restrictions and contractual obligations is demonstrated vividly in the last part of the novel. Sara’s unrequited love for the salesgirl in a watch repair shop is answered–but only belatedly and in a mode of permanent deferral. The salesgirl, who had only fleetingly taken note of the pining Sara and who knows nothing of her death, intuitively realizes her affection ex post facto and–disregarding all regulations–puts on the watch Sara had brought in for repair. Love, then, is possible after all: you love without knowing the other, without wanting to do so, and without having to invest your desire in a bothersome interpersonal projection. Although the salesgirl’s wearing of the wrist watch marks a double reconciliation–it is a symbolic act both of loving and of remembrance–this moment can ultimately only be enjoyed from the cool, epistemologically remote vantage point of the authorial metaposition–a position that undermines all lasting identifications and does not stay attached to individual figures or positions for any length of time.

At the very beginning of the novel the ghostly Sara begged the reader to “time me”–to measure her time so that she doesn’t disappear in différance, in the endlessly receding, arbitrary conditionality of language. This “timing”–the translation of fluid temporality into fixed spatiality–is achieved formally as soon as the salesgirl puts on Sara’s wristwatch. Yet even this unwitting act of remembrance threatens to go awry. On the book’s last page we find once more the lines that the ghost, who is becoming ever more forgetful, uttered in the book’s beginning chapter:

Remember you must live.
Remember you most love.
Remainder you mist leaf. (30, 237)

3

This tossed salad of signifiers is followed by the ghost’s howl, which ends and simultaneously opens the book. The voice of the ever-fainter-growing Other forms the alpha and omega of the novel as a whole: the hereafter appears as the mirror image of a dysfunctional here and now rather than as a transcendent shore of salvation. Indeed, the ghost and the author turn out to be effects of the same persistent mechanism that holds forth the possibility of transcendence while in the final analysis always allowing it to fall flat. In terms of reader response, this mechanism is at the end passed on to the reader, who by way of a semi-comprehensible half-insult (“remainder you mist leaf”) is encouraged to take part, albeit belatedly, in an unending ring-around-the-rosy of misdirected resistance and yearning.

The subject representations, epistemological figures and authorial strategies in Hotel World are neither especially surprising nor likely to plunge anyone into a spell of critical brooding on literary technique. The pre-programmed alterity and deficient subjectivity of the main characters, the radical undecidability of the spatial, temporal and causal relations, the author’s superior, infinitely receding play with figures of lack–these are all typical, well-established procedures of postmodernism. One feature that seems characteristic of late postmodernism is the author’s curious will to transcendence and love. These metaphysically loaded moments are however always presented as belated or deferred; they never threaten to become present or real to us. Thus the author can preside over ideal figures of classical metaphysics without endangering the critical posture of her novel as a whole.

This turn to metaphysical, indeed, rather sentimental themes from the standpoint of a constantly moving, epistemologically unassailable metaposition exposes the unenviable dilemma of late postmodernism. For in the process of showing her own superiority in questions of epistemology the author’s dependence on traditional projections of unity–on love, reconciliation and transcendence–becomes ever more evident. The uncanny ability of the author to be everywhere and nowhere in her own book contrasts directly with a yearning for unity and presence–a yearning that is conjured up only to be dispersed once more through the author’s own epistemological or linguistic interventions.

As Hotel World graphically demonstrates, late postmodernism is caught in a self-made trap. Whoever presents herself as epistemologically invulnerable falls into an empty, indeed, ghostly game of hide-and-seek with the reader and with herself; whoever foregoes this sort of epistemological critique in favor of metaphysical ideals becomes a purveyor of simple-minded, if not downright fraudulent projections. Since there is no immanent way out of this endless loop-the-loop, poststructuralist critics and literary scholars have long been in agreement that postmodernism will never end; it will simply refine and multiply self-ironic strategies for acknowledging belatedness and producing deferral. We are fated, it would seem, to shuttle endlessly between the poles of metaphysical wishful thinking and the merciless epistemological critique of the very same.

“The Hotel Capital”

That things can be done entirely differently is demonstrated by Olga Tokarczuk’s story “The Hotel Capital” (orig. 1989; cited according to 2000). Using motifs very similar to Hotel World, Tokarczuk arrives at a specifically monist, no longer postmodern perspective on the sign, space, and the world in general.

At first it could seem as if “Hotel Capital” is even more zealous in its critique of capitalism than is Hotel World. Apart from its transparently symbolic name, the hotel is flatly described in the very first line as being “only for the rich” (35). Like Sara Wilby, the heroine and first-person narrator is a lowly chambermaid and, moreover, a nameless foreigner. As in Hotel World, the Hotel Capital exerts an omnipresent, deforming force on the main character. In fact, as soon as the heroine puts on her uniform, she foregoes her own subjective sense of self: “I take off my exotic language, my strange name, my sense of humour, my face lines, my taste for food not appreciated here, my memory of small events […]” (35). In keeping with the fatal event related in Hotel World, the heroine is overcome by a feeling of existential angst when riding the cramped service elevator to her work–she is afraid “lest the lift should stop and I should stay here forever, enclosed like a bacterium inside the body of the Hotel Capital” (36). Finally, we even encounter a small flood in one of the rooms which, as in Hotel World, temporarily disrupts order in the hotel without washing it away entirely.

The postmodern reader now expecting to be initiated into a subaltern victim’s chronicle of alienation and otherness will be sorely disappointed. In spite of the superficial similarities with the ambience of Hotel World, “Hotel Capital” proposes completely different semiotic and spatial relations aimed at promoting unity, order, and belief. In particular, space appears as the guarantor of a whole, intimate, indeed sacral ambience which can be experienced only within the confines of the otherwise worldly hotel.

This spatially determined sacral experience can be thought of as a sphere in the sense used by Peter Sloterdijk. Sloterdijk calls the sphere an “aspirated commune” (2000, 17 ff), a protected interior space that allows intimacy, sensuality, and social cohesiveness to develop at all in the first place. As historians of religion like Mircea Eliade confirm, the origins of this interior experience are primal. Accordingly, the creation of closed, centered spaces must be viewed not as a metaphysical ploy but as an attempt to make space livable to begin with: “If the world is to be lived in, it must be founded–and no world can come to birth in the chaos of the homogeneity and relativity of profane space” (Eliade 1987, 22(4)). According to Eliade, this is “not a matter of theoretical speculation, but of a primary religious experience that precedes all reflection on the world” (1987, 21). Because it is essential to founding life the primal space is always placed in the middle of the world and displays a vertical, hierarchical structure that literally and figuratively opens up to the transcendent world of the gods (1987, 63).

Now, the claim that there once existed an originary, pre-reflexive, hierarchically arranged space with a built-in escape hatch to the heavens does not present much of a challenge for a poststructuralist or postmodern appropriation. Inasmuch as this kind of pre-reflexive, originary world is anchored in discourse it can always be conceived of as a double, irreducible act of inclusion and exclusion, whereby the poststructuralist would always be sure to let the excluded and chaotic outer world receive its just due. Apart from this, an originary space can only be experienced again by way of simulation, which is to say in belated act which simultaneously undermines and outdoes the original.

This act of appropriation will encounter serious resistance only when the sense of spatial intimacy is put on as a performance with aesthetic means. In such a case the text will be presented as a closed space, which, by exerting one-sided pressure on the observer, gives him or her an unambiguous choice between an inside (going along with the work) or an outside (going against the work). This kind of performatist work is not mere discourse or simulation, but rather imposes the closed conditions of the sacral, originary space on the observer by aesthetic means. We are dealing here, then, with the fusion of a privileged aesthetic space in the Kantian sense with a rather un-Kantian attitude that you might describe as ritualistic, dogmatic, or compulsive.(5)

4

It goes without saying that this forced aesthetic experience does not suspend the possibility of critical reflection. No one today can actually return to a sacral or ritual experience of interiority, no one can (or wants to) completely shut out the vibrant hurly-burly of exterior space. The possibility of deceit and fraud thus still lingers in every performative act of framing–but precisely as a possibility, and not as a preordained, epistemologically guaranteed result, as in postmodernism. Readers, in other words, now have a real choice. If this kind of aesthetically mediated inner space remains more or less intact we will be dealing with a performatist monism; if it mixes uncontrollably with exterior space we will fall back into the endlessly undecidable convolutions of postmodernism.

But let us return now to “Hotel Capital.” If the space of the hotel is a sphere in Sloterdijk’s sense, then it is by no means an idyllic inner sanctum. The sacrally aspirated hotel room–no less so than in Hotel World–is unavoidably exposed to the pressures exerted by globalization and global capitalism. As the narrator herself remarks, the room is a “four-cornered, prostituted space” that gives itself to anyone who is willing to pay for it (37). The space of the hotel, whose sacral, protective function is constantly being emphasized by the narrator, is in the secularized world itself helpless and exposed. Space requires an agent who would, as it were, clean up the spiritual and metaphysical mess brought into it by the hotel’s guests. Precisely this active, theist role is filled out by the narrator/chambermaid, who intervenes in a life-affirming way in the half-public, half-intimate sphere of the guests. Having temporarily laid aside her subjective personality, she settles into the invisible realm that is neither outside nor in and intervenes from there in interior space–a transcendental subject with a theist mission and a human face.

The postmodern reader secretly hoping for the first-person narrator to be ironically dismantled in the course of the story will wait in vain. Indeed, in narratological terms much the opposite takes place: the first-person narrator acquires distinctly authorial characteristics. In lieu of direct antagonists–as a rule the heroine tidies up in empty rooms–the story appears as a series of quasi-philosophical meditations on space and the people in it; in lieu of disruptive hints from the author we are forced to identify with the heroine and her space-friendly value judgments. From the normative postmodern point of view it is of course always possible to reject this authorially supported mindset as blind self-deception. If you do so, though, you’ll stumble into a narrative trap. For either you enter into the closed space of the work or you remain outside it. The work frame changes from a place of undecidability to a place of decision–quite contrary to the normative precepts of postmodernism. The act of reading reproduces the simultaneously compulsive and comforting quality of the fictive inner space.

This experience of spatially mediated pleasure (Kant’s Wohlgefallen) must be understood perfomatively or as a gesture and not discursively or conceptually. Although we may be in disagreement with individual meanings or arguments in the work, we must nonetheless accept it as a whole. The reader is suspended–half voluntarily, half by way of force–in an aesthetically mediated no-man’s land which can only be conceived of or experienced under the given conditions of the aesthetic frame. This spatially determined pleasure is accompanied in turn by a practically idiot-proof, compulsory mechanism that arrests the restless, hypercritical spirit of the postmodern reader long enough until she is able to identify with what is going on in the work’s interior space. If the obstinate reader balks at this, then she will remain where she belongs: namely on the outside. Thus once more–with a little dogmatic help–we arrive at the restoration of what Kant calls necessary aesthetic pleasure [notwendiges Wohlgefallen].(6)

Loading the Kantian frame with dogmatic and archaic means of enforcement leads to the inevitable question as to whether we are foregoing hard-earned achievements of the Enlightenment by doing so. This fear can be disarmed with a paradoxical reference. For the archaic force exerted on us in performatism allows us to occupy precisely that transcendental position which is generally regarded as typical of the Enlightenment (but which has lost its “punch” due to a hyperrationalistic critique of metaphysics and unbounded pleasure in boundary transgression). This paradox is ultimately possible only in an aesthetic, secularized context and not in a ritual or dogmatic one. Moreover, in terms of cultural history it is only conceivable after modernism and postmodernism, as a reaction to their programmatic skepticism of enlightenment and metaphysics. “Hotel Capital,” for its part, avoids an absolute relapse into pre-Enlightenment gullibility by allowing the transcendental subjectivity of the heroine to manifest itself in the form of a negotiable role or performance.

In this case, the performance manifests itself in the resacralization and reaesthetization of what at first seems to be purely practical terms of employment. When starting work the heroine puts on a quasi-sacral uni–form which cloaks a conciliatory, spatially limited monism; as soon as she takes off her work clothes she returns to a personal, “interested” attitude commensurate with the needs of daily life. The heroine’s space-friendly attitude is based on a simple contractual agreement: it is not an authentic, natural or originary state.

As a result, the usual deconstructive strategies for undermining “metaphysics” meet with little or no resistance. The story is well aware of its own constructedness; it raises no claim to propounding an original or ultimate truth. Indeed, the strict sense of order that applies inside the hotel evaporates as soon as the heroine is outside of it. This can be seen in the only scene not taking place within the hotel. From a hotel window the heroine has spotted a Scotsman playing a bagpipe for money; she muses to herself that he can’t be real since he’s going about it with too much zeal. At the end of the story, after she leaves the hotel, this suspicion is confirmed: the Scotsman takes off his kilt and puts on a pair of stylishly tattered jeans. When the heroine remarks that she already knew he was just pretending, he smiles at her mysteriously and winks (in the Polish original this last glance is a shade more obtrusive: it reads “robi do mnie oko”–literally, “he does an eye into me”). The visual penetration which the heroine shortly before experienced as unbearable when she was being ogled by one of the hotel guests is not made into an issue here–for this is also where the text ends and hence also the possibility of delving further into the false Scotsman’s secrets.

Within the hotel we find a spatially conditioned metaphysical order that travelers take advantage of in different ways. The metaphysical ideal of the hotel room is approached most closely by a Japanese husband and wife who leave behind practically no traces–those indispensable poststructuralist bearers of alterity. Their room, remarks the narrator, “gives the impression of not being occupied at all.” (39) There are no objects left lying around by mistake, no personal traces, not even an odor. And when the chambermaid cleans up, she “create[s] more disorder than they would make in a month.” (39) The only communication between the order-loving Japanese and the order-upholding chambermaid takes place through the tip that the couple leaves behind in a neat stack on their pillow. The coins, however, are not for the chambermaid but for the room itself:

So when they leave the tip it is not for me but for the room, for its silent continuance in the world, for its constancy amid the inexplicable inconstancy. . . . The two coins left on the pillow preserve the illusion that such rooms exist even when nobody looks at them. The two coins dispel our only essential fear–that the world exists only in the act of seeing and there is nothing beyond this. (40)The economy of this gift is transcendental and self-confirming: it represents the sacral opposite of the “prostituted” room and makes the room seem like a “small temple” (40). On the other hand, though, the relationship as a whole remains impersonal and cool. The chambermaid is familiar only with “the immaterial shape of the footprints left in the abandoned sandals” (40); conversely, for the Japanese guests she remains without a body and face. Communication and value exchange don’t take place through tattered words or marks (“spr sm chn”) but through shared attitudes toward space and the objects in it. The scene with the tip simply acknowledges the latent dualism of this dialectical relationship. The more spiritual and complete the relationship to the absent guests, the more the relationship of the individual to material reality is placed in doubt.

5

The opposite of the Japanese are the “young Americans,” the bearers of imperial disorder. This disorder has no true metaphysical valence of its own but is rather a “thoughtless, stupid mess” (literally bałagan–a kind of Slavic Punch and Judy show) in which “there is no rhyme or reason” (44). This lack of order–quite in keeping with a Baudrillardian scenario–is circulated by the media and intensified ad infinitum. The absent young Americans leave their TV on to CNN, and CNN assures the chambermaid that the world exists and is full of young Americans. The imperial arrogance of the young Americans and their “inattentiveness to the present” (45) is countered by the chambermaid’s recurring to their common corporeal mortality: “I clean around roughly, as if afraid of destroying these relics of the transitoriness of the people who live here” (45). This isn’t ironic schadenfreude but rather existential insight into a shared fear of death–a fear that the chambermaid in this case doesn’t want to assuage entirely. Later, however, in the room of the dying old Swede whose body absorbs all odors from without, the chambermaid will deliberately leave behind a sweaty, vital whiff of her own self. In a way that is “conspiratorial, respiratory and inspirational,” as Sloterdijk writes (2000, 40), the chambermaid tries to forge a “dyadic union” (2000, 42) in interior space that will set both human frailty and human arrogance to rights.

The chambermaid’s job differs, however, from Sloterdijk’s in one important respect. Whereas Sloterdijk is trying to reconstruct historically the “morpho-immunological” spheres (2000, 46) and “foams”(7) that he considers indispensable for the development of human culture per se, the chambermaid faces a much more immediate problem. Her task is, namely, to restore that state of interior intimacy that can be experienced only through a monetary transaction and away from home–the genteel, introspective spatial phenomenology of a Bachelard doesn’t work well in the “prostituted” ambience of the Hotel Capital. And that is why the chambermaid proceeds in such a deliberate way, so to speak in accordance with an authorially approved metaphysical work code.(8) If you want to clean up after postmodernism (or even sweep it away entirely) then you must, as the heroine says, do so with deliberation: you must first frame scattered traces of alienation so that modest inspirational measures can take hold in the first place.

Given the rigid spatial order of “Hotel Capital” it is justified to pose the question of theodicy, which is to say the question of evil and the responsibility which spiritualized space bears for it. (In Hotel World the answer is clear: the spatial order is the sufficient, but not necessary condition of evil.) True to the tradition of metaphysical optimism in which Tokarczuk’s story follows, evil doesn’t appear as a principle sui generis but rather as disorder or as a falling away from spirituality.

The first kind of disorder–that of the “young Americans”–is childish. It corresponds to a lack of consciousness and humility in regard to the world that the young Americans dominate. The second kind of disorder, by contrast, is spatial: it resides in the vast expansiveness of the hotel (and, by extension, the world as a whole). The hotel has a mysterious tract called the “squar” which is designed for long-term guests and has a confusing layout; it is labyrinthine, convoluted, spiraled, and dark: “Something strange happens to space here. Space does not like spiral stairs, chimneys and wells. It tends to degenerate into labyrinths.” (51) The tangled, invaginated layout of the hotel building appears as a flaw offending against the anthropomorphic space’s supposedly natural love of order (once more something hardly in keeping with the architectonic norms of postmodernism). It’s easy in deconstructive terms to get all worked up about this simple tautology, but it’s harder to ignore it within the framework of the story–unless, of course, you are prepared to take upon yourself the stigma of disorder as a matter of principle.

The third variant of disorder is no less anthropomorphic than the others. Its point of departure is a self-willed, mischievous room bearing the number 229; its “Kabbalistic sum” is said to equal the number thirteen, which “is a number of excess and trickery.” (47) This room has an appropriately subversive effect on visitors: “I suspect that one night here is enough to get them trapped, to bring unquiet dreams, to hold them a little longer, to bring out desires and overturn carefully laid plans.” (47) The minor inundation mentioned earlier also had its origin in this room, which induces an intensified sense of corporeality and narcissistic self-alienation in the chambermaid: “The room encloses me within itself, cradles me. It is a most tender if non-physical caress, this embrace which only a closed space can give you.” (48) And:

I feel distinctly that my body exists. . . . I am aware of my skin, conscious that it’s alive and breathing, that it has its own scent, and I can feel my hair where it touches my ears. I like then to get up and look at myself in the mirror which never spares me a surprise. Is this me? Really me? (48)Were the narrator not being caressed by the room around her one could suppose that Lacan and his mirror stage were lurking somewhere in the wings. For the corporeal and narcissistic feeling of insecurity experienced by the chambermaid is further intensified by the gaze of a guest that severs the chambermaid’s metaphysical bond with the space around her. Thus “the established [literally: eternal] order is inverted. My cleaning is no longer omnipotent, it becomes emptied of meaning” (49).

It could at first seem that the presence of the unashamedly gazing guest shatters the Apollonian dream space of the chambermaid and revives precisely that patriarchal order that in Hotel World could only be overcome temporarily by accident and through deceit. Yet here, too, space and the metaphysical service code offer a way out. As soon as the chambermaid leaves the room she is able to recuperate in that very depth of space which was the death of Sara Wilby: “I . . . stop in front of the banister separating a stairwell two or three storeys high. I look down and see only the ground floor from here. And–as usual–not a soul about. . . .] This is the best relaxation: to look down to where everything becomes progressively smaller and more distant, less clear, more illusory” (50). The spatial haven of the theist perspective has been restored–but with a built-in personal or human dimension of self-deception.

If the solidarity among subalterns in Hotel World is characterized by a fleeting, Nietzschean love for pure strangers, then in “Hotel Capital” it reveals itself to be genetic, object-oriented and monist. The justification for this is provided by the Castilian laundryman Pedro, who resembles a bearded missionary and who draws on an originary history of language and etymology to make his point. When people “in times of old” were wandering across Europe and Asia they carried their languages with them “like banners. They formed great families, although they did not know each other; only the words were permanent” (41). Pedro “pulls out the roots from words as if stoning cherries,” and those listening to his lecture slowly realize that they all “spoke the same language long ago” (41). Although this doesn’t quite apply to everyone–the narrator is (unjustifiably) afraid to ask about her own Polish language, and a woman from Nigeria “pretends not to understand,” everyone wants to take cover under the “dark swirling cloud of prehistory”(9) (41) that Pedro stretches over their heads. This emblematic, genetic concept of language has a direct counterpart in the Swedish Bible that the narrator finds in the room of the dying Swede:

I cannot understand anything and yet all seems so familiar. A red bookmark marks the Book of Ecclesiastes. I run my eye along the page and I have the impression that I am beginning to understand it. First individual words and then whole phrases float out of memory and mix with the print. “That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requires that which is past.” [The Polish Bible translation is much more emphatic; the last phrase reads: “And God will restore that which is past.” R.E.] (53-54)6

These are, as the narrator remarks, “the most mysterious words of the Holy Book” (54). The foreign words behave like small hollow objects into which human memory breathes spiritual life; through her ritually mediated reading the narrator experiences the possibility of an originary, linguistic and sacral unity in the sense of Mircea Eliade’s illud tempus. In Eric Gans’s terminology, this understanding of language is also ostensive. This reading is neither a hermeneutic exegesis nor an act of inscribing oneself in an always already existing network of signs. Rather, it is a ritual making-present of a prehistorical moment in which the sign is experienced as object-related, but also as conflict-resolving and divine: as a performance.

The Politics of Space and Beauty: “The Hotel Capital” and The God of Small Things

At this point, it is justified to ask about the political implications of “The Hotel Capital.” Tokarczuk’s depiction of a monolithic world order is in many respects no less critical than Smith’s. However, unlike the no-win world of spontaneous, mindless resistance depicted in Hotel World, Tokarczuk assumes the possibility of resacralizing and re-aestheticizing capitalism from within–a strategy that the alterity-loving theoreticians of postcolonialism may slowly have to get used to themselves. For whoever wants to construct positive regional or individual identity under the conditions of an all-encompassing global capitalism will practically be forced to create closed spaces inside that order in which desirable values of some kind congeal into more or less coherent form–the “chutneyfication of history,” as Mita Banerjee (2002) has aptly called it.(10)

Thus a postideological, regionally oriented book like Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things seeks to transcend oppression, discrimination and loss of identity by welding a genetic and erotic originary bond (incest between siblings), by sensually amalgamating words and languages (English and Malayalam) and by plotting the erotic union of two loving individuals across caste boundaries.(11) The same focus on intimate aesthetic bonding is no less apparent in her political writings, which can hardly be accused of fostering sympathy for capitalism. In her well-known polemic “The End of Imagination,” Roy even goes so far as to suggest that beauty, which is usually high up on anyone’s list of essentialist taboos, is the direct answer to the threat posed by the Indian Bomb:

There is beauty yet in this brutal, damaged world of ours. Hidden, fierce, immense. Beauty that is uniquely ours and beauty that we have received with grace from others, enhanced, reinvented and made our own. We have to seek it out, nurture it, love it. Making bombs will only destroy us. (Roy 1998)Roy performs in practice what Tobin Siebers has suggested in theory when he links Kant’s notion of beauty with otherness and with an explicitly political notion of shared affect:

Beauty arrives at political form by virtue of the shared experience of affect. The vision of the beautiful object is also a vision of a beautiful “we” because it compels individuals to expose private feelings to the judgment of other people while at the same time imagining them as members of an affective community that shares common goals and objects. (1998, 48)The effect of beauty’s conceptually inexplicable otherness is thus to create a new, potentially reconciliatory set towards “thingness” in its most positive and pleasing manifestation.

In a postideological world beauty can, as Roy vividly demonstrates, become that positively charged other that is uniquely suited to combating an economically unshakeable but “ugly” political order. This is no doubt also the reason why Roy (who is not a religious believer) deliberately spiritualizes her aesthetic credo. Seen this way, the “God of small things” is none other than the God of beauty, which in Kantian terms has a modest or human scale and applies to the intrinsic qualities of things rather than to interchangeable, subjective characteristics assigned to them after the fact. Kant’s equating of beauty with smallness makes possible the confluence of the human and the transcendent in terms still acceptable to secular individuals.

Since “Hotel Capital” was written before the actual advent of capitalism in Poland and because Tokarczuk has since then addressed historical and psychological rather than topical themes, it’s not as easy to pigeonhole her politically as it is Roy.(12) All in all, though, Tokarczuk remains a good deal more comfortable with closed space and capitalism than does Roy, whose plot stresses boundary transgression,(13) and whose politics are in conventional terms left-wing. Also, unlike Roy, whose chutney-like mix of Malayalam and Anglo-American culture is still very much a thing of her own making, Tokarczuk comes from a Central European culture steeped in venerable literary traditions and an acute sense of national history; she has plenty of time and opportunity to seek out the closed spaces in it in which to cast out her projections. Although not exactly an apology for globalism, her story suggests the possibility of a spatial accommodation with the capitalist world order that would probably be foreign to Roy.

Sevenchurch

This kind of inner accommodation does not, however, apply to all Central European writers addressing their respective countries’ sudden re-immersion in capitalism. In the following discussion I would like to touch briefly on another book from post-Communist Europe that also stresses space and order but which presents them expressly in terms of the sublime.

The work in question is Miloš Urban’s Sevenchurch. A Gothic Novel of Prague (1999),(14) whose basic plot motif is the struggle for control over post-postmodern space and form. Echoing an old theme of Czech culture, the book sets the Gothic style of the Czech high Middle Ages against the Baroque of the Counterreformation, whose onset coincided with the long-term loss of Czech national sovereignty. The main protagonists of Sevenchurch are all enthusiastic, not to say fanatical admirers of the Gothic and detractors of the Baroque, whose ornamental bombast and playful superficiality are clearly reminiscent of postmodernism. The Gothic, by contrast, is declared to be the only epoch at all capable of realizing architectonic transcendence:

The Gothic architects were the only ones to resist the dictates of antiquity; they came up with a style that did the impossible: it realized the victory of spirit over matter in human dwellings. In all preceding and following epochs exactly the opposite was the case. (64)The hero and narrator of the novel, a failed history student and ex-policeman named Švach, is gradually initiated into the plans of a mysterious sect that seeks to roll back democracy in favor of a medieval regime. As the leader of the sect declares:

Monarchy is a thousand times better than democracy. Democracy is dynamic and quick-moving, it reckons with the permanent growth of everything possible and impossible, it thrives on a cult of innovation. How monstrous! How erroneous! How against the order of the universe! By worshiping enlightenment, prosperity and functionality this loudmouthed democracy has taken us to where we are now–the end of Western humanity. (300)7

These tirades are embedded in a detective story emphasizing the sublime, “gothic” side of the narrator-hero’s perspective as he uncovers ever new atrocities and eavesdrops on ominous sexual practices (part of this, incidentally, takes place in the corridors of a dark, labyrinthine hotel). After the zenith of sublime terror has been achieved–the hero is subjected to a fake execution–we find out that the sect has already achieved its goal. Švach, who has now become a faithful disciple of the group, informs us that the center of Prague has been cut off from the surrounding world and is being ruled according to the cruel dictates of the “wonderful, beatific 14th century” (326).

As in “Hotel Capital,” Sevenchurch forces a spatially defined monist order upon the reader. However, this now occurs using the specific means of what might be called the archaic sublime. In his novel Urban carries out that “rollback” of the Enlightenment that Tokarczuk suggests only in passing. This odd novelistic performance is neither ideological in nature–the real-life Urban is not a monarchist–nor can it be explained as an exercise in infinite postmodern regress. You could, I suppose, argue that the backwards-directed plot is simply a ploy meant to expose a weak hero to arbitrary manipulation by an infinitely receding author (the hero’s name “Švach,” which means “weak” in German, might support this). Problematic about this however is that there is no immediate possibility of regress behind the Medieval scenario; there is no mise en abyme into which the author nonchalantly plunges after having left the reader holding the bag (what Ali Smith does in Hotel World). Rather, we are confronted with a setup or frame similar to that in “Hotel Capital.” The point is not that we actually identify with the sect’s claims about Gothic style, but that we more or less involuntarily assume a position of terrified awe vis-à-vis the text. Upon finishing the book, we are transfixed and stunned by its representation of the victory of a whole, monist order without necessarily agreeing with its actual content.(15)

The text, in other words, carries out what might be called a performative gesture. The reader is forced to assume a unified attitude that is only possible within the framework of the given work; assuming this attitude is in turn what allows an aesthetically rewarding reading to occur in the first place. We ourselves remain in an aesthetically defined, sublime space that exposes us alternately to waves of pleasure and terror and keeps us from making practical ideological or conceptual judgments. If we did try to make such judgments nonetheless, we would merely conclude that this sublime vantage point allowing us to obliterate the Enlightenment at one stroke is guaranteed by the aesthetic principles of precisely that Enlightenment for which that stroke is intended.

All in all, the performance in Sevenchurch allows us to assume the cognitive position of a terrorist without having to share his or her practical interests. This sublime or terrorist monism comprises a necessary counterpart to the monolithic capitalist world order, whose metaphysical destruction must take place all at once in order to be truly gratifying (we will recall that in the Butlerian ambience of Hotel World the unshakeable hegemony of global capitalism is expressly confirmed: resistance takes place only partially, in a mode of murky, haphazard solidarity among victims). Rather than wallowing in a victimary mode, Sevenchurch employs a “high” aesthetic that allows you to let off your resentment all at once in an act of sublime projection and identification. And, needless to say, it leaves behind more than enough irony, allusion, and loose ends to keep further interpretations alive. The Gothic ideal propounded by the sect, for example, contains elements both of Communist internationalism and of Czech national ideology and appears to mock the nostalgic yearning for both.

Conclusion

These examples suggest that the switch to a radical monist, postmillennial or performatist kind of consciousness is not exactly going to cause writers or other artists to burst out in hosannas to global capitalism. What it does mean, though, is that the thing that Eric Gans calls victimary politics (of which Hotel World is a prime example) is going to grow increasingly outmoded as an aesthetic device. In part, this is due to the ubiquity of victimary argumentation itself. The ironic act of displaying your political impotence on the one hand and flaunting your epistemological superiority on the other has by now become an entirely predictable exercise even for those who agree with its political aims. However, the rise of radical monism also appears to meet a real cultural need to create spatially discrete identities or performances within global capitalism that would enable forms of totalized or holistic resistance to it.

Using the examples I have discussed here as a rough guide, you could speak of a “right,” a “left” and a sublime or “terrorist” path to this goal. The “right” method is not uncritical of capitalism. However, it tries to work within it by creating inspirational projections in its inner space (by aspirating what Sloterdijk calls spheres or foams–whole pockets of belief, faith, truth etc.). The “left” strategy corresponds roughly to the attempt to amalgamate variegated otherness into an appealing, tasteful object of cultural identity (a nice hot chutney, so to speak). This strategy seems particularly appropriate to postcolonial writers, as it would allow them to reify attributes from their own cultures that are at the same time universally binding or “necessary” for others to enjoy in the Kantian sense. Finally, the “terrorist” alternative suggests the possibility of a total critique of capitalism that takes place in the mode of “as if.” The terrorist aesthete will play va banque with the sublime possibility of a radical monist alternative to capitalism, postmodern society or Western culture per se(16) (although this doesn’t mean that we must now be on the lookout for a novel by Osama bin Laden).

Summing up, the performatist works by Tokarczuk, Roy and Urban can all be subsumed under the broader umbrella of what might be called “anthropological Kantianism.” In the new literature, Kantian notions of subjectivity and aesthetic judgment are being applied–sometimes quite consciously–to topical problems relating to the role of individuals and cultures in the era of global capitalism. In the process, these Kantian notions have been modified and adapted to a new, specifically monist mindset that runs counter to Kant’s original (and possibly also misinterpreted) dualism of mind and matter.(17) The innovative crux of this adaptation lies in what I call the performance.(18) The author knows there is a split between mind and matter (or some other basic duality), but nonetheless forces us to identify with the possibility of transcending it per formam–by passing with our mind’s eye and with our bodily emotions through form. The “reward” for engaging in this formally mediated identification or projection is an aesthetic, performatist pleasure which transcends the dualism of cognitive vs. physical; the “punishment” for dismantling that projection is to live in the epistemologically correct but joyless state of knowing that is postmodernism. In performatism, aesthetics trumps epistemology. Art is a privileged place where secular individuals will once again be able to experience transcendence, albeit only under limited, artificial conditions.

There is little doubt that the most appropriate philosophical, psychological, and sociological sources for dealing with this “closed” situation with its specific, positive projections can be found in the Kantian tradition. Reclaiming this long line of Western thought for performatism/postmillennialism is a project that must, however, remain reserved for further studies.

8

Discipline and Disciples in Originary Thinking

It makes sense to think of the emergence of originary thinking as an event much like the one upon the retrieval of which it is predicated. In fact, it seems to me evident that its founder sees it in precisely this way: “The unique event in which the verticality of human language emerges from the horizontal world of appetite is a moment of liberation reenacted in every subsequent act of representation. We must think our uniqueness that until now only religion has articulated” (Signs of Paradox, Acknowledgements Page). From Gans’ contention in The End of Culture that the Human Sciences must now take the place occupied by high culture(1) to this endorsement of a scenic self-reflexivity the responsibility of Originary Thinking to participate in and facilitate the process it analyzes has been consistently asserted and adopted.

As a sign itself, originary thinking would in that case be a gesture of renunciation of the victimary stance Eric Gans posits as the center of the postmodern era.(2) What makes originary thinking possible, then, is precisely the mimetic crisis induced by victimary thought and it is such a gesture that simultaneously (as in the originary scene itself) enables originary thinking to signify the emergent theoretical and cultural practices that have been neglected by those for whom the victimary constitutes the horizon of thought: practices I would sum up under the title “generative,” to suggest the linking of self-reflexivity, internal relations, immanent growth and hypothesis posing in, to name just a few, evolutionary thought, pragmatism, AI, and even the internet phenomenon of “blogging.”

Of course, as Generative Anthropology knows well, such claims to originality make any discipline itself a target of resentment. It is only due to originary thinking’s marginality within the highly polemical realms of both academic and popular culture that such resentment has thus far been inconsequential.(3) So far, it is primarily those genuinely interested in GA who have taken an interest in it. Part of the strength of originary thinking, of course, is that it is able to account for such resentment and turn responses to its own emergence into part of its object of inquiry, which is what makes it intrinsically disciplinary. By “discipline,” I don’t mean an organized, institutionalized site of inquiry, characterized by specific methods and rules of inquiry. Prior to that must be the community of inquirers itself, with a common focus on a single object, with no other concern than to progressively define that object and sharpen that focus, to devise a vocabulary capable of describing because drawn from the object, and to establish a history of the discipline whereby the deepening relationship to the object becomes a series of actions within the disciplinary space. To put it another way, a discipline is a scene of inquiry and a sign of the larger community; its ruthless inquiry into the very structures the community would prefer to ignore is motivated by the obligation to find within the community the means of preserving it in the face of some crisis.

I would suggest that such a conception of disciplinarity can be drawn from the range of world-historical disciplines available to us: from the Rabbinic sages who wrote the Talmud and the Athenian academy to the American founding fathers, and on to Marxist political parties, psychoanalysis, and the various modernist and postmodernist movements in the arts. In each case, the constitution of the discipline entails both a proliferation of signs within the discipline (as each theoretical stance signifies a particular articulation of the discipline) and the discipline itself becomes a sign of the broader society wherein the originary scene is simulated. “External” discourses are translated into “internal” ones; the very resistance of the outside world confirms the diagnosis constitutive of the discipline; and a politics of the discipline emerges involving solidarity with those social developments that render the world intelligible in terms of the discipline and thereby facilitate the discipline’s convergence with normative structures. Disciplines are radical thought-experiments brought into confrontation with events–that ongoing (and yet always renewable) confrontation is what accounts for their generativity.

Disciplines are, of course, also notorious for the pathologies of betrayal (“splits”), the persecution of “heretics,” the disintegration into cultism, and in those rare cases of the discipline in power (at least in modern society), the consequences are well known. Insofar as disciplines simulate and reenact the originary scene, the possibility that the discipline will reenact rather than resolve mimetic crises is of course perpetual. Generative Anthropology is exceptional in its awareness of such possibilities and hence in its capability to “immunize” itself against them–ultimately, one might say that the ability of the GA discipline to transcend the fate of previous disciplines is a kind of test of its central claim: the inexhaustibility of the originary scene. In this essay I will attempt to deepen GA’s confrontation with the post-millennial founding event, 9/11. First, though, I will suggest a way of advancing such intra-disciplinary arguments. I will propose a single “amendment” to Eric Gans’ conception of the originary scene: the emission of the originary sign, the gesture of renunciation enacted in the moment when mimetic crisis threatens the existence of the community itself in a generalized paroxysm of violence, is enacted by a single individual in midst of the crisis, and the other members of the proto-community in turn imitate and thereby register and confirm that sign as a sign. On its own terms, it seems to me that this sharpens precisely the elements of the originary scene that originary thinking puts to work, as I hope to show through a brief analysis of one description of the scene, this one from Originary Thinking:

. . . a circle of protohumans, possibly after a successful hunt, surround an appetitively attractive object, for example, the body of a large animal. Such an object is potentially a focus of conflict, since the appetites of all are directed to something that cannot belong to all… at the moment of crisis, the strength of the appetitive drive has been increased by appetitive mimesis, the propensity to imitate one’s fellows in their choice of an object of appropriation, to such a point that the dominance hierarchy can no longer counteract the symmetry of the situation… Hence, in violation of the dominance hierarchy, 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’ of the situation makes it impossible for any one participant to defy the others and pursue the gesture to its conclusion. The center 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 sign arises as an aborted gesture of appropriation that comes to designate the object rather than attempting to capture it. The sign is an economical substitute for its inaccessible referent. Things are scarce and consequently objects of potential contention; signs are abundant because they can be reproduced at will. (8-9)

2

The equality or symmetry of the situation must be what enables each of the participants to imagine the consequences of pursuing the gesture to its conclusion: if I take hold of the object the one next to me will do the same (because that’s what I will do if he grabs it first) and–even more important–at some point someone will not only grab along with me but actively and violently interfere with my attempt at appropriation because, again, that’s precisely what I will do if in danger of being excluded from the circle. But we can’t assign such foresight to the members of the group–obviously, the representational capacities for imagining such a scenario don’t exist yet. But then what makes the symmetry fearful, if not that somewhere in the group the violence has already begun, that is, that the ostensive sign wards off a mimetic contagion in process? In this case the aborted gesture becomes a sign in distinction from this contagion. While the aborted gesture might conceivably be made by several, even all of the participants, the necessary distinction from the process of contagion suggests that somewhere this distinction will be sharper, and that if the sign qua sign emerges someplace within the scene it is economical to assume that imitation of that singular gesture is more likely than a simultaneous discovery of its efficacy. And this need not violate the symmetry and reciprocity so central to the scene if we keep in mind, as I think is already implicit in Gans’ account, that the originary sign is already a somewhat modified imitation of the not-yet-signs (the reaching hands) to which it is a response. I believe my amendment accentuates the form/content, or appetitive/representational distinction constitutive of the emergence of the sign by making the form itself part of the originary sign’s efficacy: the distinction between the sign of renunciation and (what is now) the sign of contagion is what draws attention to the originary sign.

I want to stress that my aim is not to “correct” Gans’ version. Rather, I am proposing a form for arguments within GA, suggesting that we assume that disagreements can ultimately traced back to hypothetical modifications of the originary scene, while maintaining the criterion of parsimoniouness. That is, it provides a vocabulary for intra-disciplinary disagreements: what will count as the sign capable of reversing tendencies toward mimetic contagion can only be determined after the event (as Gans often says, the fate of originary thinking must be left to the market) but of course, the act of singling out one type of sign as a “candidate” (like Raoul Eshelman’s “performatism”(4)) is simultaneously a contribution to this determination, especially since it is itself necessarily an imitation of that mode of signifying.

More specifically, my amendment aims at framing a discussion of originary thinking as the privileged source of 9/11 thought, that is, thinking predicated on the designation of 9/11 as an epochal shift, rendering entire regions of accepted discourse irrelevant and requiring new modes of thought. I will unfold the implications of my amendment as I proceed, but I will begin by singling out one: the need not only to account for the permanence of evil in terms of the originary scene, but to account as well for the emergence of capacities to detect it. Hence, the rather provocative term “Amalek” in my title: Amalek being, of course, according to the Hebrew Bible, the eternal enemy of Israel, as well as the first to attack (from behind, singling out women and children) the Israelities in the desert following the exodus, and coming to signifying a kind of unmotivated, “pure” antagonism. We can account for “Amalek” not merely as unrestrained mimetic contagion, but as the concealment of mimetic contagion through the imitation of signs of renunciation (which is to say, every attack is a sneak attack). And I will finally suggest that insisting on the permanence of Amalek is in fact the best way to deter and defer it.(5)

It is, as Gans has argued, victimary thought that is the primary (ideological) “victim” of 9/11, and Gans’ analysis of terrorism (and the related question of Islamic anti-semitism) has been an inquiry into the bankruptcy of victimary thought–but also, of course, into the intensified circulation of resentments as a result of globalization. I will try to adhere to the rigorous standards Gans has laid down for such a discussion: we must “put ourselves in the place of those who want to kill us . . . to affirm through this encounter the unity of the human and the primacy of moral reciprocity” while recognizing that we are engaged in a war with an implacable enemy whose (not implausible) victory “would be a nightmare for all but a few of its few survivors” (Chronicle 293). Furthermore, “the unanimous rejection of terrorism need not imply an obsession with punishing its perpetrators. It can become the basis for a genuine, if minimal, global fraternity based on the understanding, at last explicitly realized in the public sphere, that the basic function of the exchange of representations that is human culture is the deferral of violence” (Chronicle 253).

Gans approaches the problem of global terrorism from both ends: the means chosen, and the significance of those means, as well as the strategic and political goal of the leadership of groups like al Qaeda. In his most recent analysis, Gans places the possibility of terrorism in the originary scene itself: “The human is founded on the deferral of satisfaction, that is, the suspension of life. Were we wholly immersed in the life-world, we would not be human. The various forms of sacrifice, including the jihadi’s self-sacrifice, pay homage to this originary configuration” (Chronicle 293). “The terrorist returns from exchange to sacrifice; from the marketplace, in which he is implicated insofar as he can act only from within the system he is attempting to destroy, to the originary deferral of desire that founds human culture. Death alone can guarantee the terrorist’s denial of exchange, and as a result of this denial, makes his action more effective, severing the final ties of shared self-interest between the killer and his potential victims.” The suicide terrorist represents a “renunciation without compensation of our most fundamental appetite–the “instinct of self-preservation”–in the service of transcendence: in a word, theism, in contrast with the deferral of appetite in the service of peaceful exchange: in a word, humanism.”

In this case, terrorism need not be–as Lee Harris argues–a means to some end: it might very well be an “end in itself.” Gans recognizes that today’s terrorism goes well beyond the more strategic terrorism, relying upon “white guilt,” an unwillingness to accept casualties, and a recognition that the stakes were very limited for the First World targets: “Terrorists no longer act in the service of a proto-state that awaits only decolonization to emerge. . . As the terrorist’s political aims become more nebulous, he focuses more on killing now than building later; the farther he gets from creating a state, the greater his interest in acquiring weapons ‘of mass destruction’ previously reserved for states–and the more crucial it becomes to take preemptive action to keep these weapons out of his hands” (Chronicle 292). Finally, Gans briefly touches on another possibility (which his discussions of antisemitism also raise, implicitly)–that contemporary terrorism has a contagious character, capable of becoming a pole of attraction for dispersed “social movements highly antagonistic but bereft of an alternative to the market system: on the one hand, he mentions that “[a] terrorist International is in the process of forming, one that extends well beyond the Islamic limits of al Qaeda, drawn together by common resentment of the West and its market driven prosperity” (Chronicle 293); elsewhere, he alludes to the “farcical protest movement that has now turned its sights from the WTO to our anticipated ‘racist war’” (Chronicle 247).

At the same time, interestingly, Gans attributes to the Islamicist terrorists not only a “coherent world view,” but a less self-contradictory and utopian goal than Communism and Nazism: “The destruction of the world market system that the twin towers symbolized would return us to a pre-industrial world that the Islamicists would find far less threatening than ours and where they would stand a good chance of imposing their religious views. Providing we convert to Islam, we would all have a place in this world; unlike the Nazis, Islamicists are not racially exclusionary. Nor is their social ideal unrealizable: something like it exists in many places and it has many adherents around the world. . . If the whole world were reduced to their level and no such supplies were available, most would die, but those remaining might well find stability in something like a Taliban-ruled existence” (Chronicle 247).

3

I would like to try to distinguish these claims in terms of the necessity with which they follow from an originary analysis of the situation. First, Gans’ situation of terrorism within the “theism” of the originary scene of course ranks “highest”–like any other human possibility, suicidal terrorism must derive from the elements of the scene. The most contingent of Gans’ claims, meanwhile, is the goal he attributes to the Islamicists, which he asserts again in a very recent Chronicle: “Islamic terrorism does not seek to liberate ‘indigenous forces’ kept at bay by imperialist control in order to create a new society; its goal is to produce a chaos so violent that it can be tamed only by the imposition of the Sharia at the hands of Taliban-like gangs, not as a stricter way of regulating economic relations but as a substitute for them” (Chronicle 293). Clearly the key is in the final, italicized passage: Gans’ claim here is consistent with the way in which he places Islamicist terrorism on the originary scene, as a radical appropriation of the sacrificial, transcendent, theistic elements of that scene against its humanist, worldly, “exchangist” elements. Still, Gans here is assuming a continuity along the chain of command which may not exist, which we couldn’t prove (even based on explicit statements from the jihadists themselves) and which we might want to resist precisely in the name of affirming the unity of the human: it is essential that we allow for some (even infinitesimal) mixture of the “humanist” into the process of selecting jihad as one’s “vocation” or “destiny” in order to recognize that even the purest jihadist motivation is recirculated after the fact into the process of exchange (as celebrity, for example, in the Palestinian territories). Only in this way could one think of engaging the phenomenon in a way that respects the essential humanness of the motivations of its agents, even to the extent of taking this mixture of motivations as a reminder of the ultimate need to link the humanist to the theist in contemporary culture. In this way we can more scrupulously isolate the dimension of the sacred from other elements of jihadism that we can unreservedly deplore and attack.

In which case, originary thinking and generative anthropology gain far more, as a discipline, by examining and testing a full range of explanations of contemporary Islamic terrorism and the responses to it, of which I mention what seem to me to be the most productive models:

• Islamic terrorism is part of a struggle for power within the Islamic world: the purpose, in the wake of the stalling of the several decades long attempt to take power in Islamic countries, is to shift the terms of the game by provoking massive American retaliation which will in turn discredit pro-American regimes and facilitate the taking of power by Islamicists. On this account, the U.S. is first of all an actor within the Arab and Muslim worlds, involved in an intracivilizational civil war. (Between the Islamists and whom? “Moderate” pro-American governments? Proponents of liberal democracy?–which complicates things, of course, because this side doesn’t quite exist, we must act on the faith that our actions will create it).


• Islamic terrorism is, most fundamentally, intrinsically parasitic upon civilization–it relies upon Western consumer items and lifestyles for its own means of destruction, the Western media and Western public opinion to confirm its existence, the volatility of Western political cycles to register its effects, etc.–that is, the cycle of terror and reprisal is an end in itself. In this case, the last thing the Islamicists want is actual power (which might explain–but so might stupidity–the fact that provoking the U.S. seems to have set back fairly promising efforts to take power incrementally and covertly in Saudi Arabia and especially Pakistan, in which latter case they could have had access to nuclear weapons). According to this model, the signs we emit–including in our public debates, certainly monitored closely by terrorists and pro-terror media outlets like al-Jazeera–are crucial. What the Islamicists want, then, is spectacular effects that affirm their centrality. From this standpoint, Islamic terrorism is practically a material representation of internal Western divisions and pathologies.


• Islamic terror is a pathological, “heretical” outgrowth of a process that needs to be assessed on its own terms: an Islamic revival, which can be understood by analogy to the birth of Protestantism as a renewal of Christianity and European civilization (and which also was accompanied by extremely violent apocalyptic movements). In political terms, this would imply that the goals of the terrorists are exactly what they at times claim: to reinstate transnational forms of medieval Islamic rule (the Caliphate), recover lost territory, etc. This explanation, more than the others, leads us to focus on Islam more specifically, and not only its “distortion” by the terrorists: the resources of Islam for instituting genuine distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate forms of Islam is at stake.(6)

Part of the problem here is that there is not really much point to disputing these accounts (in addition to Gans’, also fairly widely shared), because they don’t contradict each other. First of all, from our perspective, they are consistent insofar as they can be taken to point to different levels on which we might organize our efforts, and different metrics we might use to assess our progress. Their consistency lies in the extent to which, according to each of these interpretations, Islamicist terrorism signifies the tension between our ability (and desire) to imagine the world as a single society and the necessity (and demand) that we see it as a plurality of societies. In each of the explanations I have just proposed, the relation between “internal” and “external” effects, strategic and symbolic actions, is undecidable: the determination to “restore” the Caliphate may appear to be an internal matter, with outsiders viewed as enemies in the traditional sense, but this determination is, of course, defined in terms of a series of “losses” and “humiliations” that must be avenged, and if vengeance can proceed independently of the proposed reconquest, well, that leads us to the claim that Islamicism is merely parasitical. Islamic terrorism may simply be interested in spectacular displays of resentment, but if a coherent pattern of surrender on the part of its First World victims emerges, it will perhaps take up some kind of strategic perspective. But of course, such a strategic perspective would itself be completely based on its agents’ calibration of psychological responses, which simply returns us to the spectacular display, which now becomes further proof of the imminence of the collapse of Western civilization, which leads. . . In other words, what makes these alternative explanations consistent from their perspective is that they all involve an assault on boundaries as such: it’s therefore impossible to say what it would mean for them to “choose” one goal or another. To return to the consistency of these goals from our perspective, the implication is that victory would entail resolving this boundary crisis through a restoration of boundaries: moral and ethical boundaries, but as these are embedded in a range of others: national/global, law/politics, civilian/military, war/peace, and so on.

If we then look for yardsticks measuring progress in the war against terrorism we can find them, simply, in the discovery of the relevant yardsticks themselves: that is, some kind of commensurability between culture and politics, in which, for example, the emergence of disputes within Islam would have some visible association with the emergence of new signs of movement within civil society, which would in turn have discernable links to changes in the behavior of states, etc. That we have no way of knowing what the terrorists “really” want, or whether Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are deadly enemies or dependable friends, or whether Iran is driven by traditional realpolitik considerations or fanatical Islamic ones; and furthermore, that all of these agents themselves may not be any more sure than we are; terrorism is both a symptom of these conditions and an attempt to maintain and exploit them. To this cul de sac of victimary discourse (escalating demands on the dominant coincide with an evacuation of responsibility of the “oppressed”) must be opposed a way of constituting those boundaries that in a post-metaphysical culture can no longer be taken as given.

4

The resistance to this new form of terrorism already begins on that same day, in the midst of the event itself. I am referring, of course, to the revolt of the passengers aboard UA Flight 93, but far more is relevant here than simply their remarkable bravery and sense of responsibility–not only their willingness to give their lives (they didn’t have any choice about that), but to find the resources for acting in their knowledge that their own “mission” must operate within the parameters of the suicidal one. First, it is precisely the most up-to-date products of market society (cell phones) that enabled the passengers on Flight 93 to gain the “intelligence” letting them know that this was no “normal” hijacking. Second, the passenger revolt represents a decisive break from the “normal” hijacking, in which the reasonable response is not to create any difficulties under the assumption that the hijackers themselves plan or at least hope to emerge alive. This sliver of a kind of social contract, predicated, more broadly, upon “white guilt” (the officially recommended attitude toward the “normal” hijacking is strikingly similar to the one adopted by the West toward terrorism pre-9/11–terrorism is a kind of “cost of production” of the expansion of the market), is thoroughly broken–which is why, incidentally, there is not the slightest chance that another 9/11 style attack could succeed, at least not in the U.S. The space the rebels generated through their actions suspended the passengers’ immersion in the life world every bit as much as that of the terrorists and is therefore a sign of the cancellation of the theist/humanist binary from which terrorism draws its strength.

In the qualitative transformation of the hijacking carried out by the terrorists we can clearly see the complicity of victimary discourse in our vulnerability: the airplanes could only be turned into weapons on the assumption of a kind of modus vivendi between terror and civilization guaranteed by the victimary. Likewise, it is in the break with victimary discourse–its cancellation–that we can locate the association between the passenger revolt and the originary scene. And the break with victimary discourse and its attendant white guilt represented here can be given a more specific historical designation. As Gans has often argued, the Holocaust is the “inaugural moment of the victimary era from which we are now emerging” (Chronicle 290). This is the case insofar as the reaction to the Holocaust led to a reading of all social relations in terms of relations between victims and perpetrators. But the reason the Holocaust came to be “applicable” in such strictly victimary terms is because, due to the highly advanced structure of German society, and its similarity to other Western societies, all of the putatively neutral institutions necessary for any advanced society were irredeemably contaminated: medicine and science, art, bureaucracy, education, mass media, and so on were all complicit and hence tainted. In other words, the power of the model deriving from “Auschwitz” is that it enables one to detect perpetrator-victim relationships in apparently innocuous and utterly familiar practices.

Even further: there is a third category that must be brought into any analysis of the Holocaust, as part of the triadic structure introduced, in particular, by Raul Hilberg (to whose analyses other canonical ones, such as Hannah Arendt’s, were indebted): the bystander.(7) “White guilt” is the guilt of the bystander, who benefits from the structure of domination by neither actively or consciously participating in it nor resisting it. Of course, this provides a compelling theoretical justification for terrorism (more so, perhaps, for the Western terrorist groups like Baader-Meinhoff or the Weather Underground): the bystander’s complicity is the support of the system and hence needs to be undermined; the bystander needs to be forced to take sides openly and explicitly. There is no innocent bystander. In that case, the revolt of Flight 93, insofar as it is preserved as an event and articulated as a sign countering mimetic contagion, dismantles the victim/perpetrator/bystander structure.

Terrorism might be defined, in originary terms, as the point at which the victimary becomes “contagious,” a site of mimetic crisis. In that case, if we are no longer to be “guilty bystanders” but rather “officeholders” in civilization, we must articulate some mode of dispelling victimary discourses and mimetic contagion simultaneously. One way of framing this problem is to ask what would it look like to dismiss immediately and unconditionally all arguments bearing the implicit or explicit threat that one’s actions will lead to, on the one hand, “instability” or “chaos,” or on the other hand, increased “hostility” or “hatred.” These are the types of arguments that are marked by the standard apologetics for the victimary and the penumbra of mimetic contagion. First of all, strictly speaking, such things as “chaos” and “instability” as such don’t exist in human affairs. One should be highly suspicious of an account of events that can’t be saturated by a concrete array of social actors–loyalties and para-institutions external or inimical to the control of the state and civil society might gain strength, but this is not “chaos”; regimes might be overturned rapidly, but this is only “instability” (or even unpredictability) from the standpoint of a very narrow set of prejudices. And whether one’s actions generate hostility and hatred rather than gratitude and emulation might be a commentary on those exhibiting such responses as much as on upon those actions themselves. Sometimes it is better that hostilities become apparent rather than remain latent, and that hatreds be made explicit and their possessors be compelled to “put their money where their mouth is.”

When we are caught trying to weigh the effects of awakening sleeping enemies against the risk of encouraging other enemies who see our alarm at the very hint of such effects, we have been asking the wrong questions within the wrong time frame. It is more useful to convert the responses to and echoes of our actions into indicators of the qualities of our present allies and of the potential for the solicitation of new allies (could not our new enemies be making some enemies of their own?). Beyond the emptiness of such arguments and warnings, however, is their use to intimidate, or rather, the willingness of those who make them to count on others to supply the force of intimidation that will camouflage their unsubstantiality. This becomes a real alliance (say, between the media, anti-war activists, and terrorists) insofar as all involved have the incentive to maximize signs of “instability,” “chaos,” “hostility,” and “hatred” and to undermine our ability to assess and exploit the strengths and weaknesses of our enemies, the only measure that gives any of these apparent effects any meaning. We have become immune to such viral discourses and behavior to the extent that we frame our actions so as to be predictable enough for our allies and too unpredictable for our enemies, in order to provide incentives for being the former and formulate criteria for identifying the latter. The more the effects of our actions provide useful feedback enabling us to articulate actions with ever more predictable effects, and the more we are able to identify “unpredictability” with specific enmities, the more we are on the “right track.” In order to devise such a rigorous approach, though, we must find not only the suicide terrorist on the originary scene, but the resistance to him/her as well.

My amendment to the originary scene, then, enables us to see that we are faced today with precisely the kind of situation I describe there, where we must find the signs capable of detecting and countering emergent mimetic contagion. And it therefore follows that the war against terrorism must itself be such a sign, in order to be successful–or rather, a series, an array of such signs. What I will go on to do now is try to locate and produce some of these signs by discussing two post-victimary thinkers within the framework of the originary scene. I will be seeking out nodes of dialogue between generative anthropology and these other tendencies, and in this way I will argue for the centrality of originary thinking in charting a course for high cultural seriousness and political responsibility in the wake of 9/11.

Forgetfulness and Ruthlessness

For Lee Harris, the lessons of 9/11 can be summed as follows: we have forgotten “that there has ever been a category of human experience called the enemy”:

That, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary. An enemy was just a friend we hadn’t done enough for yet. Or perhaps there had been a misunderstanding, or an oversight on our part–something that we could correct. (xii)

5

I bring Harris into the discussion for several reasons. First, his analytical response to 9/11 and its consequences has been among the most innovative and widely discussed and in my view, one of the most profound. Second, his discussion meets GA on common ground: like Gans, Harris seeks the meaning of our political, moral and intellectual vocabulary in originary experiences and events, and makes constant use of thought-experiments aimed at reconstructing such experiences and events. And like Gans, Harris shows a strong interest in the efforts of Enlightenment thinkers (especially Hegel) to construct idealized versions of origins, implicitly denouncing the postmodern (victimary) proscription of the search for origins. Finally, Harris presents a strong challenge to generative anthropology: a question on which Gans often seems ambiguous or uncertain, that is, the limits, at any given moment (and hence the need for cultural resources to prepare us for those moments) on the extension of market relations (the conversion of asymmetries into formal symmetries which make negotiation possible) as a way of deferring violence.(8) Harris’ view is clear and compelling on this point: not only will the “enemy” always be a relevant “category” of experience, but the very attempt to imagine otherwise–that is, to imagine we only need open new positions on the marketplace–strengthens and incites the enemies of civilization.

The first two chapters of Harris’ Civilization and its Enemies: The Next Stage of Historyare based on what are probably his most widely read and provocative essays–“Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology” and “Our World Historical Gamble.” In the first of these essays, Harris argues that the 9/11 attacks were not, strictly speaking, acts of war, at least not Clausewitzian war in which each side uses coercion to bend the other to their will, in which case each must make its identity and aims known to the other: “We are fighting an enemy who has no strategic purpose in anything he does, whose actions have significance only in terms of his own fantasy ideology” (17). By “fantasy ideology,” Harris means symbolic action that takes place on a public stage but whose meaning is only accessible to the actor and his/her chosen audience, while those outside of this circle serve only as props:

9/11 was not an act of Clausewitzian terror–that is to say, terror used as a strategic weapon for the sake of its psychologically debilitating effect on the American people. It was a symbolic drama, a great ritual demonstrating the power of Allah, a pageant designed to convey a message not to the American people but to the Arab world. Smaller-scale followup acts would have had no glamour, and it was glamour–and grandiosity–that Al-Qaeda was seeking in its targets. (15)

Harris, though, does not address the source and power of this fantasy ideology in this chapter, except to suggest that it involves a “compensation” for “shortcomings” (6), and appeals to “certain groups [that] do not seem to have the knack for a realistic appraisal of themselves” (8)–and that it’s “absurd” to look for “root causes” in “poverty, lack of education, lack of democracy, and so forth” (15), or in our own actions or policies. These explanations, along with conclusions regarding an adequate response, come in the next chapter, “Our World Historical Gamble.”

Here, Harris contends that we are, in the post-9/11 world, confronted with a world-historical crisis, in which an “epoch in which all the relevant actors in an international conflict were playing by the same basic rules” (23) is being replaced. Our current concepts, such as “realpolitik,” “self-determination,” or “international law and institutions,” have become irrelevant–because one relevant side is no longer playing by the rules. Furthermore, “This collapse of the well-ordered liberal system has come about exclusively from the side of the Islamic world. No other party has contributed to it” (25).

This refusal of reality on the part of the Islamic world is a result of one factor intrinsic to the Islamic world and one embedded in the broader liberal internationalist system of sovereignty. Drawing upon Marx, and the connection he drew between the labor put into the production of the material basis of culture and the responsibility one is therefore led to take for that culture, Harris contends that the enormous petroleum wealth available to the Islamic world means that “If we look at the source of Arab wealth, we find nothing that the Arabs created for themselves. Wealth has come to them by magic, much as in a story from The Arabian Nights, and it allows them to live in a feudal fantasyland.” The unintended consequence, then, of the West’s policy of “not robbing other societies of their natural resources simply because it possessed the military might to do so,” has been “the prodigious funding of fantasists who are thereby enabled to pursue their demented agendas unencumbered by any realistic calculation of the risks or cost of their actions” (27).

From the perspective of broader international arrangements, meanwhile, Harris points to another unintended consequence, this time resulting from the universalization of the system of sovereignty. While “classical sovereignty” required the actual ability to rule over a particular territory, the post-colonial concept of universal self-determination leads to a superficially similar but really radically different concept, “what might best be called the honorific concept of the state” (29): the state is now “an entity called into being by the formal recognition of the international community” (30). Such an honorific state no longer needs to be struggled for, built, and maintained, taking into account risks, necessary compromises, the constant threat of annihilation: as an a priori “right,” one can take any action in asserting one’s sovereignty with the assurance that, not only will its international recognition not be withdrawn, but counter-acts will be viewed as assaults on one’s rights. The connection between “fantasy ideology” and “honorific sovereignty” as two modalities of mimetic contagion is easy enough to see–not surprisingly Harris uses the Palestinians as an example here. And the response Harris proposes to counter the enormously destructive potential of this “fantasy ideology” wedded to “honorific sovereignty” is the assertion, on the part of the only power capable of asserting it, the United States, of “neo-sovereignty”: “America, in short, must use its power, unilaterally if need be, to destroy and remove any group of people who are deliberately and consciously following a policy of ruthlessness, whether this group is a state against another state, a state against its own people, or an Al-Qaeda-like organization” (108).

The introduction of the category of “ruthlessness” here brings us to the deeper anthropological foundations of Harris’ argument. According to Harris, it is precisely civilization’s transcendence of ruthlessness (that is, the willingness to kill and be killed for some “claim” one has “staked”) that makes it particularly vulnerable to it: in fact, the more civilized a society becomes, the more distant it is from its own ruthless origins, and the more likely to forget those origins, and therefore, paradoxically, the more vulnerable to the ruthless:

People who have been trained in the practice of civility, and who find it second nature, will be reluctant to challenge the conduct of another on the ground that he is lacking in civility. The ruthless party therefore knows that he will be able to push very far before a break point is openly acknowledged. Because once the break point is acknowledged, all bets are off and you can no longer be sure of the next step.

Before the break point, the civil party thinks that the ruthless party can be accommodated to civilized standards by means of patience and forbearance, much in the same way that we might try to domesticate a feral animal. We are convinced that we will bring him around. We attribute his ruthlessness to some defect in his psychology. Perhaps he has an inferiority complex and is acting out with us. Perhaps we are an authority figure, and he is rebelling against us . . . We may blame ruthlessness on someone’s religion or culture or economic status. We never dream of identifying it for what it is–a strategy that works. (66)

6

And Harris’ conclusion is that “[t]here can never be an end to history. In a world in which everyone has accepted liberal values, the practice of ruthlessness will amply reward those who still practice it–so amply that it is sheer utopianism to expect no one to seize the opportunity when it offers itself” (67). And of course, the logic of Harris’ argument is that the spread of liberal values, or in GA’s terms, the ongoing secularization and de-ritualization of culture, offers more and more opportunities.

Harris traces the transcendence of ruthlessness (but also, in Hegelian terms, its “sublation,” and in perhaps Heideggerian terms, our forgetfulness of it) in civilization to ancient Sparta. According to Harris, “Sparta was the place where men first cured themselves of their addiction to lethal violence within their own community” (81). Focusing on their brutality, arbitrariness, and self-consciously unnatural forms of child rearing and discipline, Harris contends that Sparta was the first society to transcend forms of loyalty dependent upon biology. And it did so by transforming the only spontaneously emerging mode of loyalty other than the family, the boy’s gang, into the team principle. The boy’s gang, grounded in a ruthlessness inimical to any form of social order, was liberated from the family and made into “a permanent and self-reproducing organism” (87) by harnessing its ruthlessness for use against the community’s enemies, “while controlling it in such a way that it would pose no danger to the society itself. The mechanism by which this was done was the invention of the team” (87).

Going back even further, and drawing upon Hegel and his narrative of the struggle for recognition, Harris finds the same structure in the invention of property, even though “[w]e must be careful in using the word property, for in fact what we are really talking about, when a group makes a claim to territory, is something on the order of the gang’s turf, or the Greek polis, or the Roman patria . . . a team has staked its claim to this piece of territory and . . . is prepared to defend it against any who would challenge this claim. Here, also, in embryo, is that principle of civic freedom–the freedom of the team not to live as the servants or slaves of someone else–that is the first and most fundamental of all senses of freedom” (173). All that distinguishes the “team” from the “gang,” what makes the one the foundation and the other the enemy of civilization, is that the former directs its ruthlessness to external enemies (and revises its notion of freedom and its code of honor accordingly) while the latter directs its ruthlessness toward the subversion of the internal order. It is easy enough to see why civilized people would want to forget this, and why Harris considers such forgetting our worst mistake today. And the reason, aside from its predominant power, Harris considers the U.S. the only counter to terroristic ruthlessness (the ruthlessness of the boy’s gang gone global) is that in its capitalistic and Protestant origins, the U.S. represents the “team spirit” in an exemplary manner (this in fact explains its overwhelming power). (I will mention briefly the important modifications introduced into the “team principle” by the Romans: first, the reconciliation of the team principle with that of the family; second, a team “cosmopolitanism”–which Harris contrasts to contemporary liberal cosmopolitanism–which involves the universalization of the team principle. For Harris, these modifications give the team principle a stability and endurance it never attained with the Greeks.)

Harris, of course, offers no account of the origins of religion, much less of language–in a word, no account of the transcendent. That need not prevent us from placing him in the originary scene, though. For starters, for Harris, the team might be seen as supplanting the “Big Man” Gans discusses in The End of Culture and appropriating the sacred, unchanging object at the center. But what is by now a familiar story–the (until very recently) rare but crucial historical instances in which freedom successfully counter-posed itself to tyranny–takes on another dimension here. The same is true for another well known fact–the association of Greek democracy and Roman republicanism with belligerence and imperialism. Harris’ analysis, reframed in originary terms, suggests that the team’s redirection of internal to external aggression might plausibly lead to the internal faculty that enables any community to compare itself with or measure itself against other communities–in other words, the institution of mimetic relations between communities that would be a source of dynamism for those communities that institutionalize the “team” (and of course, of the globalization of the market and resentment). So, the spread of the team concept in the modern world intensifies mimetic rivalry between societies, which might in turn account both for the conflicts implicit in the emergent assumption that global society is singular, and for that assumption itself.

At the same time, all of this seems to distance the team from the originary scene, where the main concern is the transcendence of internal violence. Here I would return to my “amendment,” now functioning as a dialogic node, which suggests a dialectical relationship between mimetic contagion and the peace giving sign in the originary scene. If we could see the emergence of the team principle as a response to a later crisis that threatens, in some specific community, the work of signification and culture, the resources for such a response must already be available. We can then see the struggle between civilization and its enemies as a re-enactment of the originary scene insofar as the originary scene must include a “first among equals,” a primary signifier who places himself between the group and the object–in other words, the primary signifier makes himself into a security for the community against a threat that can be later become a model for representations of external enemies. And this primary signifier must become (instantaneously) a more compelling object of imitation than any in the amorphous contagion. The reason it would become more compelling, finally, is that it draws its power from the central object, thereby introducing a boundary (center/margin) and a form that promises to outlast the de-formative and de-toured rush to appropriation. The conversion of the gang into the team is, then, implicit in the initial “rollback” of mimetic contagion that becomes part of the capacity for signification without even being remembered or marked. Even more, the “team” is an exemplary form of the process by which the mimetic becomes generative: each member must act in strict conformity with the others while expanding the range of possibilities open to them; each member becomes increasingly predictable precisely by making unprecedented moves.

Finally, for an account asserting the centrality of the United States, Harris has very little to say about the market, and its current developments, including the rise of consumerism. One might conclude that he sees such developments as elements of the forgetfulness that has made us so vulnerable–consumerism certainly distances us significantly (and this of course is a major stake claimed by GA) from any need to stake a claim. At the very least, Harris would have to insist that the team, and all the virtues associated with it, and in particular those institutions still characterized by a controlling team spirit or code of honor must in turn be honored and protected in the name of a liberal order. And we might say that the relation between such a claim and the process of market expansion and the proliferation of an aesthetics of simulation constitutes a rather important research program for generative anthropology.

I am using Harris, in part, as a sign of a range of generative trends in post 9/11 thought, trends represented, to mention, just a few names, by Victor Davis Hanson’s analyses of the “Western way of war” and his application of these analyses to the U.S. war on terrorism, columnists like Ralph Peters and Mark Steyn, and bloggers such as “Belmont Club” and “USS Clueless.” Such thinkers are supportive of an aggressive and unapologetic approach to the war on terror and can be characterized, very broadly, as neo-conservative, in the sense of recovering a mimetic anthropological understanding against liberal utopianism: mimetic in the sense of understanding human activity as signs that reciprocally and in aggregate constitute a scene. Actions are best described as setting up and responding to incentives, reframing a situation in order to explore alternate paths, re-directing the rules and exploiting the antinomies governing the situation out of which the actions emerge, restoring and modeling boundaries that have been undermined by contagion, and so on. There is something “classical” in this approach: we have not and will not transcend the “low” motivations of humankind (greed, envy, intimidation of the weaker, the willingness to be a “free rider,” etc.), demanding eternal vigilance in protecting and expanding the dominion of the “high” (civility, virtue, high culture, patriotism, personal responsibility, historical continuity, discipline, military strength, etc.)

7

They are pragmatic in the sense of viewing actions as embodied hypotheses to be tested, and their mimeticism and pragmatism involves an implicit, universalistic ethic: the criteria for judging practices and cultures is the extent to which those practices and cultures embed discovery procedures, the means by which the assumptions underlying practices can be rendered visible and inspected. They view the contemporary West as divided between innovative risk takers and the increasingly risk averse, with the former, under contemporary conditions, being those shaping reality and the latter inevitably seeking to evade it. And they all, implicitly at least, adopt an “ironic” representation of evil. What I mean by this can be explained by returning to Harris, in whose discussion we can detect the suggestion that an unconditional readiness on the part of agents of civilization to employ ruthless means is precisely what will make it least likely that they will be necessary (but then, in turn, that the need will be forgotten again). Assuming the ineradicability of evil makes it more likely that evil will appear only in traces that redirect us back to the originary scene, an originary scene in which the first-among-equals sign neutralizes emergent mimetic contagion.

Of course, the legitimate fear here, and one which lends a great deal of power to victimary logics, is that the distinction between the “gang” and the “team” can become indeterminate, especially under conditions where mimetic models of action reach their limits. Mutually Assured Destruction, or nuclear deterrence, was such a situation, in which a hyper-mimetic model could only (and was only meant to) paralyze everyone involved. What difference would it make if a nuclear war were initiated in the “team” or “gang” spirit? One could plausibly understand the Bush administration’s insistence on its rights to preemption as a determination to prevent the emergence of such conditions again: in other words, the maintenance of conditions for a mimetic understanding of reality is itself an ethical imperative in the post-9/11 world. And the obverse would be that while the condition of hyper-mimeticism that led to the stigmatizing of any even implicitly aggressive stance toward tyrannical regimes was ideal for the emergence of anti-colonial terrorism, the failure to restore (and the absence of any visible attempt at or interest in restoring) mimetic conditions has been ideal for the new Islamic terrorism.

The legitimate concern behind much anti-Americanism, though, is that the enormous discrepancy between American power and any conceivable rival, or even combination of rivals, is so vast that the assertion of that power will itself undermine the conditions for rendering relationships increasingly mimetic. A mimetic thought which is simultaneously generative (and mimetic thought which considers its own possibility as a result of an inexhaustible event, i.e., which doesn’t simply take its own scenic conditions as given, is necessarily generative) can transform this into a productive hypothesis that neutralizes resentment, however. Legitimate “checks and balances” on American power would embed American actions in a series of visible and measurably incentives, revisable but predictable rules, reasonably clearly marked boundaries, carefully calibrated responses and consequences, discovery procedures. This can’t be done in an a priori manner, however, through the establishment of international institutions whose authoritativeness we must essentially take at their own word. In fact, at this point, such institutions cannot be anything more than expressions of resentment toward American power, deferring action and insisting upon moral equivalences in direct proportion to America’s willingness to act upon moral claims. Instead, smaller scale, molar actions that rigorously mimic, anticipate and reframe American actions should be developed. For example, why did no Western liberals or leftists, during the (lengthy) lead up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, think to publicize the names of as many Iraqi dissident individuals and groups as possible? Such an initiative would challenge the Saddam Hussein government to “preempt” the American preemption by allowing such individuals and groups (with international inspectors provided access) to emerge from hiding, organize openly, and publish freely. Such a move would, in effect, transform American military preparations into the instrument of a human rights oriented policy. Or failing that (as, of course, would most likely be the case), it would legitimate such groups and/or individuals as “watchdogs” holding the U.S. to its promise of democratic transformation in Iraq.

Reciprocal Transparency

As a guide to thinking through such an practice, which is just as necessary for the U.S. as the rest of the world, I will propose David Brin’s The Transparent Society. Brin’s book can be seen as an extended thought experiment based on the (very strong) possibility that global society will become increasingly transparent in the simple sense that as a consequence of enhanced surveillance and informational technologies it will become possible to know just about anything about anyone; or conversely, it will become impossible to prevent anyone from knowing anything they want about you. Brin explicitly counters the multitude of technophilic and technophobic screeds available, though, in his explicit and sustained interest in the basic anthropological issues at stake and his method of re-formulating metaphysical binaries as paradoxes with (paradoxically) pragmatic resolutions.

Significantly, Brin’s first move is to challenge victimary articulations of the (somewhat disingenuous) question he poses in his subtitle: “Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?” He identifies “two opposing traits that appear in countless other modern privacy disputes:

One party believes that another group is inherently dangerous, and that its potential to do harm is exacerbated by secrecy. Therefore, accountability must be forced upon that group through enhanced flow of information.
The other party argues that some good will be threatened by heightened candor, and hence wants the proposed data flow shut down. (19)

Or more broadly: “Whenever a conflict arises between privacy and accountability, people demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else” (12). When it comes to powerful institutions (such as governments for the right, or corporations for the left) or suspect individuals, people demand openness and free-flowing information; when it comes to themselves, people demand an ever expanding zone of privacy, or more precisely, secrecy.

As opposed to the constant generation of hyper-mimetic scenarios wherein “they are far more powerful than me and therefore all means must be used to restrain them even if, due to their enormous power, I can never count on any means being enough (or them even being my means and not theirs), therefore leading to the need for more means…”; Brin proposes reciprocal transparency. This proposal, simple enough, involves finding in the conditions conducive to paranoid scenarios (decentralized and enhanced technological capacities which produce, in columnist Thomas Friedman’s term, “super-empowered individuals” who are likely to see existing institutions as existing to thwart them) the means to combat them. So, for example, if one is worried about the possibility that the police will place cameras in public places, trace one’s activities over the Internet, gather potentially compromising information with increasing ease, and so on, the answer is not to call for arcane and complicated, and ultimately unenforceable regulations to prevent all this. Rather the answer is to turn the spotlight back in the other direction: why not cameras in prisons, in police interrogation rooms, with a hook-up to the Internet, why not work to increase information flow from the “watchers” as well? This might, according to Brin, also give those super-empowered individuals whom he refers to as “social T-cells” (“independent-minded persons… driven by pumped-up egos to the point where their most devout goal is to find and reveal some terrible mistake or nefarious scheme” [135]) a vocation that will serve to recirculate resentment back into the system.

8

Brin’s arguments would clearly have the effect of accelerating tendencies towards virtualization in contemporary culture: the more we are looking at each other the more we take for granted that we are being looked at and therefore the more we self-consciously represent ourselves within frames, genres, narratives… that already have well-known effects; and the more we do that, the more we become functions circulating through such sign systems. Aside from overwhelmingly stressing the positive aspects of each of us presenting ourselves as a sign, which he insists will lead us to emphasize differences and uniqueness, Brin argues that tendencies toward virtuality, precisely because they make various kinds of falsification possible, even easy, almost irresistible, will lead us to focus more carefully on basic elements of human interaction, such as trust, reliability, and reputation: if you have no way of knowing if a photograph has been doctored or a data trail fabricated, all you really have is the trust you are able to place in the person who published or disseminated the information, the trust she is able to place in the person who submitted it, that he is able to place in the person who first recorded it, and so on.

In other words, the emergence of transparency clarifies and turns into an immediate, pragmatic issue what have emerged as anthropological universals. One such universal, which I would argue can be traced back to the relation between the sign and the appetitive on the originary scene, is the relation between virtuality and what we can call, drawing upon the American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, “indexicality“–a sign signifying through direct connection to its referent, literally pointing to something, the ultimate form of verification. Both sides of the equation draw upon increases in individual power and autonomy–we are able to see and directly inspect more than ever, and our implication in a diverse range of fabricated scenarios becomes denser than ever–while transparency also enhances the possibilities of articulating the two sides.

Another such universal is Brin’s articulation of power and accountability. Of course, power comes before accountability, which Brin sees as a device of the neo-West in its emergence in the struggle against tyranny. However, an understanding of accountability as a restoration of the equality and reciprocity of the originary scene complicates this apparent temporal order and enables us to see the relation between power and accountability as generative. So, instead of viewing power as something to be restrained, and accountability as the means of doing so, Brin proposes a dialectic relation between them: we need to attach accountability to power in order to correct, redirect and ultimately enhance it, while devising the means for holding individuals and various power centers accountable itself generates new modes of power, which in turn need to have accountability “attached,” etc. To return to my “amendment” of the originary scene, the hypothesis we might take from Brin’s discussion is that the originary scene finally “takes” or “works” precisely when the confrontation between the first individual (the primary, first-among-equals signifier) to present his gesture and the emergent mimetic contagion is converted into a “staggered” chain of imitations of that gesture which is only complete when that first individual repeats it (in a slightly modified form), hence accomplishing the following: its stabilization as a sign with a determinate form; the re-integration of that individual back into the scene as just one more member imitating the sign; while the precedent of transparency is the need for each person to inspect all the others and present their sign clearly in return. In effect, visibly inspecting everyone else’s gesture is itself part of the gesture.

It should already be clear from my account that Brin’s account is an optimistic, forward-looking one: he is a cultural evolutionist, viewing the contemporary “neo-West” as the heir to the most advanced and successful cultural accomplishments and capacities of human history. For Brin, the “neo-West,” while on one level corresponding to “all the world’s constitutional democracies” (336) on another, more important level, refers to “a shared cultural outlook based on individualism, eccentricity, and suspicion of authority,” which operates in “fluid zones” not necessarily conforming to national boundaries. He also tends to view the “neo-West” in predominantly political terms, as freedom, tracing a thread connecting the neo-West to “a few other brief oases of relative liberty–the Icelandic Althing, some Italian city-states, the Iroquois Confederacy, and perhaps a couple of bright moments during the Roman Republic, or the Baghdad Caliphate–surrounded by vast eras when the social pyramid in every land was dominated by conspiracies of privilege” (17–I should mention that Athenian democracy, conspicuously absent from this list, has already been–prominently–mentioned by Brin).

The emergence of the “neo” West is now breaking down the last remaining “conspiracies of privilege,” understood, again, in consistently non-victimary terms (i.e.,it is not the victim’s standpoint that is privileged, but the standpoint that emerges from a competing power center). What interests Brin the most is not power reversals, real and imaginary, but the loss of authority of what we might call cultural “middle-men”: publishers, educational institutions, the media, bureaucracies, in favor of “a century of aficionados,” self-taught experts in every field under the sun, self-authorizing reporters and investigators into political and corporate malfeasance, new sites for the dissemination of information (the phenomenon of blogging, which came about years after Brin’s book, is a perfect example):

A few decades from now there will be ten billion people on the planet, and computers as sophisticated as today’s mainframes will be cheaper than transistor radios. If this combination does not lead to war and chaos, then it will surely result in a world where countless men and women swarm the dataways in search of something special to do–some pursuit outside the normal range, to make each one feel just a little bit extraordinary. Through the Internet, we may be seeing the start of a great exploration aimed outward in every conceivable direction of interest or curiosity. An expedition to the limits of what we are, and what we might become. (49)

If this combination does not lead to war and chaos–if we revise this so that it reads in order to prevent this combination from leading to war and chaos, we can see that Brin is working with anthropological presuppositions readily integrated into originary thinking: the circulation of signs is no longer enough, we must each of us become signs, signifiers of difference that generate more differences rather than claiming a new center.(9)

I have stressed Brin’s political focus in order to continue developing a line of questioning for originary thinking that I raised in a previous essay in Anthropoetics(10) and in my discussion of Harris: how, within the framework of generative anthropology do we take into account the reality of collective obligations and loyalties, and public actions, insofar as these are not reducible to the unfolding of originary ethic of universal reciprocity on a aesthetic level? How do we account for politics other than as a branch of the market? Part of what I am suggesting is a rejection, on Gans’s part, of the need to or possibility of thinking politics in terms of the originary scene is due, I think, to the fact that there is something irreducibly ritualistic in politics. Or to be more precise, the terrain of politics is always ritualistic. Even the most democratic polities require their citizens to follow ritualistic scripts (and allow for the revision of those scripts only in accord with another meta-script). Certain elements of the founding scene of the polity remain intact. This is irreducibly so due to the fact that part of the purpose of politics is to defend the boundary between inside and outside: if such boundaries are necessary and (to put the same question in another way) there are intrinsic limits to de-ritualization (insofar as articulations of power and accountability require indexicality, precedents, an a priori frame rendering action meaningful in specific ways) then a specific field of politics must be defined.(11) An originary or generative politics, in that case, would be one in which the founding scene of the polity is maintained in its integrity but as a sign of the originary scene–as opposed to either a resentful, idolizing negation of the originary scene or an equally resentful pseudo-universalism that rejects all scenes as “particularistic.”

9

Politics, to put it differently, is the explicit recognition of the contingency, indeed fragility, of the originary scene. Unlike the formal, infinitely transferable and recyclable sign, politics requires that if a founding scene is to be replaced, it must be exchanged for one equally “dense,” or rich in indices. Unlike ritual, though, founding scenes can be deliberately replaced. It is precisely in such interregna, then, that openings for mimetic contagion, ruthlessness, tyranny, and so on, proliferate: in the interregnum, it is very difficult to tell whether widely accepted, innocuous, even essential concepts (like “sovereignty,” “human rights,” “international law,” “stability,” etc.) are covers for agencies of calculating resentment. Indeed, what else but such a crisis could instigate retrievals of the originary sign? Under such conditions, the articulation of boundaries that distinguish and relate the originary scene and the founding event of a given community become the occasion for re-constituting the boundaries articulating power and accountability, virtuality and indexicality, and others that necessarily follow. The very rarity of self-consciously free institutions, as opposed to the kind of long-term continuity and visible evolution of exchange relations, has perhaps helped to make the political so marginal to originary thinking (except for when it can be assimilated to exchange). But insofar as, at least, certain dramatic leaps in cultural evolution require that we account for those internal agencies within any community that stand as security for the boundary between inside and outside, we must account for the political in ways that enhance our understanding of the originary scene and the ultimate derivation of all enduring cultural categories from it.

Brin’s approach, uniting the paradoxical and pragmatic at each stage, furthermore addresses the more individualized process of making distinctions within culture. His political framework leads Brin to privilege, unequivocally, freedom over privacy: freedom is the privileged concept because if we lose our freedom we will have no way of protecting our privacy anyway, while as long as we have our freedom we might be able to devise some collective means for preserving a zone of privacy. What this would entail, within the framework of “mutually assured surveillance,” is the evolution, this time deliberately and openly, of cultural norms regarding leaving one another alone–even more, this will engage all of us in anthropological inquiries regarding the central and essential as opposed to apparent and secondary “goods” of privacy (and other categories):  what human need, exactly, does our desire for privacy meet? Without a political framework, though, such distinctions would become far more arbitrary, and it would prove impossible to formulate the virtuality/indexicality or power/accountability nexuses that transform metaphysical binaries into resolvable pragmatic paradoxes.

Not surprisingly, Brin responded to 9/11 with a commentary both pragmatic and inspiring, both patriotic and universalistic. Applying one of his central arguments in The Transparent Society, debunking the assumption that there must be a tradeoff between security and freedom, and one of his privileged icons, the engaged “aficionado” or “social T-cell,” Brin focuses on the fact that common people “armed” with the inventions and values characteristic of our civilization performed far better than hierarchical official institutions or “experts”:

• Most of the video we saw on 9/11 was taken by private citizens, a potentially crucial element in future emergencies.
• Private cell phones spread the word quicker than official media.
• Swarms of volunteers descended on the disaster sites. Overwhelmed local officials quickly dropped their everyday concerns about liability or professional status, in order to use all willing hands.
• As rumors, hoaxes and conspiracy theories spread, the role of debunking falsehoods fell almost entirely on private web sites.
• Most important of all–the sole actions taken that day to effectively thwart terror were achieved by individuals aboard United Airlines Flight 93, armed with intelligence and communication tools–and a mandate–completely outside official channels.
• …
• Am I suggesting that common citizens take over the harsh job of retribution from the Armed Forces? Or the role of intelligence agencies in ferreting out terrorist cells? Or the responsibility of government and corporations to act in order to keep people safe? Of course not!
• What I am saying is that events on 9/11 point to a trend of ever-enhancing roles for citizens in 21^st Century society–the exact opposite tendency from what we observed for the last few generations, during which professionals took over the management of great swathes of daily life, especially the reduction of danger.

(http://www.futurist.com/portal/future_trends/david_brin_empowerment.htm)

Now this account, of course, explicitly leaves out the application of Brin’s principles in those areas where traditional hierarchies and norms of secrecy might be central to the “harsh job of retribution.” And this might be a rather large exception to concede. But let’s use Brin’s approach to speculate regarding an issue that bridges the gap between the reign of the victimary and the post-millennial: racial or ethnic profiling. Civil rights activists in the U.S. moved seamlessly (and preemptively) from their objections to the racial profiling of African Americans to placing the ethnic(?)/religious(?) profiling of Arabs and Muslims under the same taboo (from “Driving while Black” to “Flying while Arab”). Leaving aside the appropriateness of the analogy, the problem here is real: the application of social-scientific knowledge to crime or terrorism prevention (which must involve reaching probabilistic conclusions regarding the association of certain categories of people with certain classes of activities) does at least have the potential to infringe upon assumptions of universal equality and the presumption of innocence.

The obvious response, though, is that it is not only thoroughly irresponsible to refuse to use any knowledge that can enhance public safety, but that it’s impossible to do so: even without statistics, “profiling” is part of making judgments and decisions on a commonsensical level. The victimary clearly reaches its limits at the point where, to be scrupulous, a police officer would have to erase from their mind the memory of having responded to a dozen robberies in one neighborhood as opposed to one or two in another. And objections become even more absurd once we realize that part of the increase in transparency is the use of such profiling everywhere (as anyone who has brought a book on amazon.com, and then received suggestions regarding “other books you might like” knows–and this example further suggests that, rather than contradicting individualizing tendencies, profiling is part of them). What Brin enables us to see, though, is that this double-bind need not be zero-sum game. It can just as easily lead to new forms of (inevitably asymmetric) dialogue, as public disclosure leads to further transparency (self-examination, debate) within communities; the use of mechanisms of transparency to enforce the boundary between surveillance and questioning, on the one hand, and unnecessary harassment and unjust arrest and prosecution on the other; and the ongoing probing of the necessarily fallible “categories” themselves, often, most likely, to be initiated by those they single out. In other words, “profiling” is just one part of the larger process, burdensome as well as liberating, of everyone becoming a sign.

Also, if we draw upon Harris’ argument, Brin’s approach enables us to formulate a strategy and a demand in confrontation with our enemies: we are trying to make them transparent (their money flows, their political links to various states and intelligence services, the gradations between ideological expressions of sympathy, more or less subtle, and the actual conspirators and actors, etc.) and we insist, as a definition of victory, that the societies from which Islamic terrorism emerges render themselves transparent. In other words, Brin enables us to formulate demands for democratic transformation and support for civilizing tendencies in pragmatic terms: the biggest problem with societies that, in Harris’ terms, remain addicted to internal violence, is that there is no way for outsiders to make reasonable guesses about what they might do next.

10

An Excursus on Charles Sanders Peirce

I have already identified the trends represented by the writers I am discussing as pragmatic, suggesting that this deepens their commonality with GA–and I have already started making use of Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics. I would like to make this connection more rigorously and provide a basis for concluding my discussion by briefly arguing for making Peirce more “canonical” within originary thinking. Gans compares Peirce and Saussure from the standpoint of GA in Signs of Paradox, finding that Peirce is only able to grasp the horizontal (sign-referent relations) while Saussure “sees in the sign nothing but verticality” (14). Their limitations are in that case complementary but it seems to me that we can see, and for very good reasons (above all that verticality is what is really distinctive to the sign), a strong preference on Gans’s part for Saussure. But I would like to make a case for appropriating Peirce’s semiotics more forcefully, for a couple of reasons: first, Peirce’s semiotics is much more amenable to a scenic understanding of language than Saussure’s and second, Peirce’s icon/index/symbol ternary might be made to correspond rather closely to Gans’s tracing of the development of language from the ostensive, to the imperative and finally the declarative.(12) On the face of it, the icon, a sign that represents through its resemblance to its object, is very different from the ostensive gesture: “resemblance” must come at a much later stage of development. If we align Peirce’s semiotic ternary with his distinction of three modes of being, Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness, though, new possibilities emerge.

Firstness is direct feeling, sheer presence of some quality before it can be separated from the thing or event experienced: “a state, which is in its entirety in every moment of time as long as it endures” (82); Secondness, a relation, or collision, between two separate objects, the element of change, struggle, “vicissitude” (88); and Thirdness is the regulated interchange between mind and world, or one might say, the generation of new and expanded Firstness/Secondness relationships and relationships between relationships. Now, it’s clear enough that indexicality is aligned with secondness, and the symbol with Thirdness (since the symbol, i.e., the conventional sign, takes on its meaning through its predictability and repeatability in new relationships), but the alignment of icon, which seems to presuppose two separate objects, one of which resembles the other, with Firstness, seems less clear. But if we consider that Firstness and Secondness can only be retroactively and hypothetically distinguished from within the symbolic, and must be simultaneously present as implicit preconditions of any signification, then the iconic sign is simply the way Firstness appears to another (and therefore oneself as other, as “spectator” of one’s own experience) in the only way that it can appear to another–as indexed by the individual experiencing Firstness: in exactly the same way as any person emitting the ostensive gesture both has an unprecedented relationship to the object and represents that relationship to the others (with the representation ultimately being the relationship). The first person, the primary signifier, emitting the sign is, then, the first iconic sign, “resembling” a particular relationship to the object (renunciation). There are two implications that follow, both, in my view, highly productive for originary thinking: first, the emitter of any sign is simultaneously an iconic sign, in its indexical relationship to both object and audience, lending consistency to the sign actually emitted. In other words, the first sign, and any sign, only “works,” or “holds together,” because the individual emitting it is “backing” it: in addition to the meaning of any sign is signified the “trustworthiness” of the person emitting it. Second, this “recruitment” of Peirce enables us to strengthen the claim that any sign is intrinsically hypothetical, since the iconic sign for Peirce is the source of hypotheses.(13)

I am working my way to the conclusion, first, that originary thinking’s lesson for 9/11 thought is that the process of rendering every individual’s activity self-reflexively iconic must be deepened and accelerated; and second, that a properly generative theory of politics lies in conceptualizing specifically public modes of iconic activity or more precisely, iconic activity indexed by power/accountability articulations. In order to work my way there, and then to a more directly political conclusion, I would first like to address a necessarily post-sacrificial dimension to 9/11 thought: we must, that is, have the conceptual resources to see enemies as enemies, to focus, when necessary (and to know when it is necessary) on precisely that quality that makes them enemies; we must devise thought experiments regarding which “stake” claimed by another would make them 100% irreconcilable, “Amalek,” which further requires presupposing that the enemy is, as Harris argues, a permanent category of human experience. And at the same time–as a result of that uncompromising designation–we must devise ways of acting as if, or representing the possibility that, the enemy we confront today might be the last one ever, ultimately both a source of anthropological knowledge and self-knowledge and at the same time a narrowly technical problem. Imposing this double-bind upon ourselves requires that we resist signs of unity that measure the value of actions according to the accumulation of sanctified victims. And this requires a secular sacrality, which itself must be the foundation of a mimetic ethics that is capable, ethically and epistemologically, of detecting and resisting evidence of what I have been calling a hyper-mimeticism: mimetic crisis under contemporary conditions, where the strict adherence to a mimetic ethics can result in the incommensurability of virtuality and indexicality, power and accountability, because the technological capabilities for responding antagonistically to the other outstrip the temporal frame needed to assess feedback regarding the effects of previous responses, so that actions and counter-actions can only be “modeled” in the absence of “indices.” The most obvious example, of course, is deterrence, or the Mutually Assured Destruction policy that maintained the cold War equilibrium. Under such conditions principles such as proportionality of response become a bad joke: once the first move is made all the following moves are essentially arbitrary. I am suggesting that U.S. preeminence provides us with the unique opportunity to prevent the emergence of the symmetry between great powers that leads inexorably to hyper-mimeticism. And these conditions in turn provide an “umbrella” under which genuine international norms might emerge on the ground.

The Sacred in a Post-Sacrificial Era

Let’s return to Gans’s claim regarding the theistic underpinnings of the suicide bomber, suggesting that we might, in particular in the interests of confronting even (or especially) such phenomena in the light of human reciprocity, view such acts as a mode of resistance to the prevailing humanism of a fully developed market society. My response was, essentially, that we then must take this a step further. First of all, suicide bombing can plausibly be viewed as a reduction of the humanistic to the theistic, but nevertheless as an articulation of the two: the suicide bomber is a sign of such resistance and as such eminently exchangeable. The example I gave earlier was the transformation of suicide bombers into celebrities in the Palestinian territories; one could just as easily mention Osama Bin Laden t-shirts, or the slick sensationalistic techniques of al-Jazeera. Part of my purpose here is to suggest how “normal” much of the process of production of suicide bombers is: in it we see very familiar elements such as peer pressure, concern over one’s family’s financial situation, a desire for revenge, to be idolized, and so on. Certainly, GA as much as any other mode of thought makes us skeptical of claims to absolutely resist the market, and ready to see such claims as a mode of preparation for participation in the market.(14)

Clearly, though, such preparation is not what is happening here–this articulation of the theistic and the humanistic has to be understood differently. The theistic is genuinely privileged here, but in a way that is inseparable from a parasitic, destructive relationship to the humanistic. The point is not to remove oneself from exchange, or even to open up spaces where such removal would be possible, or even to engage the circuits of exchange in a minimal manner indispensable to the carrying out of practical projects; rather, it is to demonstrate that the means and products of the exchange system can be diverted to purposes inimical to that system. This is to introduce doubt into every act of exchange and signification, and without iconic representatives backing signs it is difficult to see what the limits to the vulnerability of the exchange system might be. So, to take Gans’s point yet further, shouldn’t we take from this insight into our own system provided by global terrorism the suggestion that perhaps another way of articulating the theistic and the humanistic must be the antidote–one in which the theistic, the vertical, is openly made generative through the horizontal, the proliferation of signs?

11

I am not referring to a religious revival (to the further instrumentalization of religion). To return once again to my “amendment” to the originary scene, if the scene is only complete once the sign returns to the primary signifier who imitates it and thereby certifies its repeatability, that is, if the scene is marked by its contingency, then we have a model of the scene’s problematic emergence through the becoming-(iconic) sign of the primary signifier and that signifier’s re-immersion in the community. This articulation of the scene, however, implies that mimetic contagion has an opening to deploy apparently innocuous signs before anyone could tell the difference. It is precisely in this moment–what becomes, in the completed sign, borrowing from Peirce, an “infinitesimal instant”–between “emission” and “re-immersion” that the sign is vulnerable to “ruthless” appropriations claiming to represent the community as an aggregate of resentments.

As I suggested earlier in my discussion of Peirce, the iconic sign can be seen as an iteration of the ostensive. This is the case insofar as it represents the simultaneous existence of the sign for all of its users. One way in which we might understand this is by representing the iconic primary signifier as erasing, with common consent, the infinitesimal instant between emission and re-immersion: in other words, an implicit assertion that the emergent confrontation with mimetic contagion never happened, everyone gestured at exactly the same time. I would go so far as to suggest that it is impossible to avoid this way of representing the scene altogether–under normal conditions, such a representation would serve the same purpose as the originary sign itself, so condemning its “hypocrisy” is obviously beside the point.

The other way of representing the iconic sign’s iteration of the ostensive, however, is as simultaneously representing the gap between emitter and receiver, producer and consumer. This would involve an overtly self-reflexive dimension that also explicitly calls upon the receiver to summon up the faith necessary to retrieve, preserve, and enhance that sign: to be converted into an iconic sign oneself. This is a secular form of sacrality to which, in my experience at least, certain postmodern and innovative fiction writers have borne the most effective testimony.(15) And it provides us with a criterion for maintaining, if not separate domains, at least (and in my view, better) a distinction between high cultural and popular cultural elements. If historically, as Gans has said, while popular culture allows us to identify with the lynch mob high culture allies us with the victims and hence installs a universal mode of reciprocity, we could perhaps, within a post-sacrificial frame, “amend” that as follows: popular culture reminds us that we all participated in the originary scene, while high culture reminds us that the scene has not yet quite been completed and it’s up to us.

What I will call the “flattened” originary scene (we all signified, literally, at the exact same moment) is true enough and good enough for the vast majority of social encounters. What we might call the “rippled” scene (staggered imitation and “return to the sender” of the not-yet-just-becoming sign), which I will identify, perhaps not surprisingly, with the disciplinary scene, becomes prominent under more critical circumstances. Only the rippled scene has a mechanism of transformation that can feed off of and feed back into everyday “flat” exchanges. Even more, at this point in history there is no reason why we can’t successfully promote friendly relations between inhabitants of the two scenes (and of course, all of us reside, at different times, on both scenes). Rather than a critical, “demystifying,” missionary approach to the flattened scene, we can operate under the faith that from even the flattest sign traces of the sacred origins of signification can be recovered and articulated.

Still, that operation must actually be carried out, and in consciousness of the fact that the flattened scene has forgotten what is remembered by the ruthless–the originary confrontation with mimetic contagion. And for this we need an generative theory of judgment: judgment both in the sense that we need to be capable of making the distinction between mimetic contagion and the flattened scene that has forgotten it, and in the broader prudential sense that it’s not always equally urgent to insist upon the distinction. If the flattened scene is true enough and good enough most of the time, it is obviously in those cases where it is not true enough or good enough where something is at stake. An iconic reading of cultural phenomena–reading everything as if it were an exemplary and self-aware re-enactment of the originary scene–will be gently satirical in ways that in a postmodern culture actually enhance and re-circulate in the harmless flattened scene, while at the same time functioning as a ruthless exposure of disguised attempts to implode such scenes. Highlighting the way in which jihadism has generated a mode of cultural circulation that has further debased beyond recognition even the worst elements of American popular culture enables us to dismantle uncompromisingly its theistic claims while confronting them forcefully with our own claim to the sacred.

I began this essay expressing a hope to contribute to originary thinking as a discipline and have arrived at a central tenet of 9/11 thought: represent oneself and everyone else iconically, and help to create the conditions under which individuals can circulate qua, and texts, practices and institutions can be indexed by, iconic signs. This involves a restoration of the mimetic scene as an organizing principle of civilization but without external (i.e., metaphysical) representations of that scene: rather, representations of any scene are themselves constitutive of another scene: a disciplinary scene interested in the playful contemplation of signs which is simultaneously the deliberate retrieval of their scene of production. And it precisely on that disciplinary scene, the highest development of the originary scene, because it emerges out of mimetic crisis, and the need of the community for signs that are simultaneously truthful and conciliatory, when signs become “problematic,” that everyone appears immediately as a sign.

I am, that is, suggesting the interdependency of two types of civilizing activity: the enhanced capability to take a “disinterested interest” in signs–of any kind, because the interest anyway transforms them–with an attentiveness to signs of mimetic contagion, and a willingness to ruthlessly present oneself as an icon of civilization in confronting them. What this implies on a more practical level is an explicit recognition that it is precisely the spread and networking of unsanctioned (“amateurish”) activities carried out, ultimately, for the sheer love of inventiveness, improvisation, self-display, experimentation, discovery… that are the greatest source of economic, political, and military power deployed against our enemies (and perhaps, the greatest source of impatience with victimary discourses). And what might help tie together all the new ways of producing, transmitting, inhabiting, and articulating signs is what we could call the “scenic imagination”: constituting one scene is a way of testing a hypothesis generated on a previous scene, while the description of one’s action on that scene becomes a sign around which a new scene constellates, with that scene generating a new hypothesis…

Such a mode of thought directly confronts the main ally of today’s leading agents of mimetic contagion, what I will call the “human rights world picture.” This is the world picture painted by those embedded in the perpetrator/victim/bystander model of social relations: epistemological privilege is guaranteed to the serial victims of the normal. I mean, here, “normal” in both its senses: as the stabilized result of the vast interplay of mimetic interactions that ultimately narrow down plausible stances to a limited few, and as the valorization of such results (that is, the usually implicit insistence that it’s not simply a statistical average) as an ethical standard. The enormously successful project of post-WWII victimary discourse has been (as we can see in the demonized portrayals of “the 50s” or “suburbia” in virtually any Hollywood movie) to portray the normal as an array of hidden (and therefore all the more violent) assaults on “difference.” Of course, as Brin argues, this has been a necessary project insofar as it “indoctrinates” us with the very productive idea that we can only be individuals insofar as we are unique and suspicious of authority.

12

And we should also acknowledge that the human rights world picture is plausible insofar as we accept what was itself plausible under the “hyper-mimetic” conditions of the Cold War: that the vast destructive capacity of nuclear weapons meant that mimeticism itself (modeling one’s actions on one’s rival) would inevitably lead to unspeakable violence and hence needed to be “pre-empted.” We can, that is, locate the victimary on the originary scene as well, with its aim being to make permanent the “emergency” that instigates the originary gesture–that is, to make the gesture, with all its riskiness and generativity, unnecessary, and hence (insofar as it is after all presented) itself complicit in the violence it simply renders more “invisible.” The problem, of course, is that the “picture” (like any state of perpetual emergency) is completely circular and inherently unfalsifiable and parasitical: according to its antinomic logic, the more egalitarian assumptions on race, gender, sexuality… prevail on the “surface,” the more deeply hidden and hence dangerous the violence must be. (Or in what is essentially an inverted version of the same logic, only by maintaining and intensifying “resistance” can these gains be protected against the McCarthyist hordes just waiting for their opportunity to squash all differences). Meanwhile, it needs to be said that the deferral of violence may look like, but is actually quite different from, the paralysis of representative institutions. And it is only in the form of such a paralysis (taken to its logical conclusion, every word or gesture would have to be cleansed of its victimary consequences prior to being expressed, but that would in turn require an impermeable set of rules governing such cleanliness, and rules that assure us of the spotlessness of the rules, etc.) that victimary discourses could actually be institutionalized.

And the more hidden and insidious the normative, the more pervasive and unmoored the inevitable “resistances” must be as well, which is why the human rights world picture is a perfect ally of agencies of mimetic contagion: such agencies must exist, after all, and perversely, the more arbitrary the better. Demands coming from some assignable source that might be adjudicated in some transparent manner would only lead the “resistance” to justify, against its will, the “status quo”: demands would be limited, therefore assuming that the system is basically legitimate after all. Hence we have the parodic scenario of enemies who almost seem to want to go out of their way to prove themselves evil, even in the most hackneyed, Saturday morning cartoon sense, along with “dissidents” in our own society who must airbrush ever larger portions of reality in order to avoid denouncing them unequivocally. The hyperbolic extremism of even liberal anti-war partisans is clear on this point–it is not enough to say Bush has made mistakes, has gone too far, or has been deceptive (all of which would leave open the question of whether he did some things right, was less deceitful on certain points, etc.): he must be the “worst” President ever, incapable of uttering an honest sentence, conducting “the most disastrous foreign policy in 200 years,” “trampling on civil rights,” “destroying the Constitution,” and so on. Such language is necessary to avoid facing the fact (paradoxically for the proponents of difference) that there are others out there, with their own interests and reasons, and they are also shaping the reality which we are also responding to–these others are not mere props for staging a postmodern critique.

In this context, I would like to conclude on a cruder political level, with a defense of the invasion of Iraq and the removal of the Saddam Hussein regime as an act calculated to restore the proper relations between the mimetic and the generative. (At the very least, it can and should be supported and its logic extended on these grounds.) In contrast with the grotesque caricatures of the anti-war movement (which still, as Michael Moore’s botched “Fahrenheit 9/11” demonstrates, hasn’t arrived at, and perhaps doesn’t really want, a coherent narrative), the problem with Operation Iraqi Freedom is precisely that it is too multi-layered and multi-purposed (which is why the tendency–exaggerated, but real–on the part of the Administration to reduce it to “WMD” was such a mistake). In fact, the unquestioned assumption (itself an indicator of the power of the human rights world picture) that war can only be justified either in terms of direct, immediate self-defense (the enemy at the shores) or as an exceptional, “prosecutorial” exercise with unqualified transnational backing has rendered us completely unequipped to even discuss war in the necessary terms. Operation Iraqi Freedom completed the first Gulf War and also intervened progressively on the side of the forces representing a decent future for the Arab and Muslim worlds. It removed a primary grievance of the terrorists (the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia) by adopting an offensive stance toward jihadist forces. It represented a step forward in humanitarian warfare by demonstrating the possibility of targeting the central agencies of a tyrannical regime and largely sparing the civilian population and refuted the assertion (a recruitment draw of Islamic terrorists, and in fact, a core point in their analysis of their enemy) that Americans can only fight “from above.” It retrieves the age-old distinction between republics and tyrannies (a crucial element in a mimetic culture) by placing the burden of proof on the tyrannical (and secretive) Iraqi state while re-establishing the civilian/military distinction undermined by “total war,” anti-colonial wars, nuclear deterrence, and now global terrorism. It has widened the scope of the war on terrorism beyond the narrowly legalistic by making our victory reliant upon the freely chosen solidarity of the peoples of the region. Finally, it has presented the adherents of the human rights world picture with a rock solid reality that comes as close as possible to giving their assumptions a testable quality: the “picture” would maintain some epistemological and ethical viability if its adherents could find a way to sincerely support the construction of a stable, democratic Iraq consistent with their denunciation of the illegitimacy of American actions. (So far, I haven’t even seen the attempt made.) Overall, the invasion of Iraq substitutes real scenes (with dramatis personae whose interactions can be charted, measured, placed within a narrative) for virtual ones (the Jew-neo-conservative controlled imperialist Halliburtonian U.S. against… who, exactly?). As Lee Harris suggests, and to use Peircean language, it introduces “actuality” into the situation: “A two-sided consciousness of effort and resistance” (Buchler 76).(16)

The missing link in Bush Administration policy has been the failure to incorporate the icon I discussed early on (and this was in fact a failure to trust what was apparently Bush’s own original intuition, which led him to make “let’s roll” his initial catch-phrase for the war he announced), and on which Brin focuses his discussion: the heroism of Flight 93, and its implications regarding a more self-reflexive and self-reliant citizenry that can itself be integrated as factor into the war, and whose ongoing transformation is in fact part of the war. But the work of universalizing modes of iconic self-reflexivity programmed to be allergic to mimetic contagion is the work of culture as much as politics. A 9/11 thought must aim at facilitating readings of contemporary texts and institutions that find in them (or expose them as lacking) secularized traces of the originary sign: a sacrality that is simultaneously generative, that turns the retrieval of the originary sign into new centers around which new scenes will constellate. And my contribution to such a thought, I hope, has been a commentary on (or in) originary thinking that strengthens its core assumptions by showing them to be indispensable to post-9/11 disciplinary spaces. I have tried, in this commentary, to introduce the following questions, and to some extent perhaps disagreements, into originary thinking:

• as a question of method, the need to “inflect” by retroactively positing a subordinate process of differentiation within (culminating in the homogeneity of) the originary scene in order to articulate a testable thesis within generative anthropology;


• an attempt to raise the “profile” of politics, as iconic actions indexing power/accountability and virtuality/indexicality articulations, as an authentic element of the scene of representation


• to help render, as Gans suggests in The End of Culture, the human sciences genuinely effective as the new “high culture” by formulating the question of generative anthropology’s disciplinarity, and to do so in terms derivable from the originary scene.

13

Any consideration of consumer society has to begin with recognizing its enormous success, including the exponential expansion of the middle-class and the extension of mass-produced cultural products in global markets. Yet despite its practical success, consumer society, and the market economy that makes it possible, has never been without its critics. The paradox here is that an economic system dedicated to fulfilling desire still generates substantial dissatisfaction, even from those who benefit the most from this system.

Modern critiques of consumerism and the mass media can be found in the recent popular movie The Truman Show (1998) and Nathanael West’s novel The Day of the Locust (1939). Both these works express, in very different ways, the cultural anxieties created by consumer society. But while The Day of the Locust offers us valuable insights into the problems posed by mass culture, The Truman Show gives a mythic perspective that fundamentally distorts our modern situation. I present here an anthropological analysis of consumer culture that will reveal the limitations of the neo-Marxist critique of consumerism expressed in The Truman Show. The Day of the Locust, on the other hand, poses the more serious question of whether consumer society is capable of containing the violent resentments that it generates, a question which the second half of this essay will consider at more length.

1. The Truman Show

While Marx criticized capitalism as an impersonal machine that consumes labor and then discards workers, the more recent criticism is that consumers are manipulated by huge corporations into buying an endless stream of trivial products that must be soon discarded when the next hyped item for consumption arrives. In this view, the freedom and prosperity we enjoy, incredible by almost any historical standard, are illusory, for we remain enslaved to multi-national corporations.

This critique of consumer society finds its paradigmatic allegorical expression in the popular movie The Truman Show. The main character, Truman Burbank, played by Jim Cary, lives literally in a giant bubble, a climate-controlled dome where every moment of his life in secretly filmed and broadcast as a reality show to a world-wide audience. Life in the bubble appears to Truman as free but is actually governed by the show’s producer Christof. Truman’s day-to-day life is in reality a series of advertisements: his friends and family (all actors of course) are constantly touting the benefits of various consumer products to the show’s audience while they simultaneously play their roles in Truman’s life. Truman believes that his desires are freely chosen, but in fact they are scripted, predetermined by the producer, including his choice of wife, career, friends, and so on. We find out, through a series of flashbacks, that as a teenager he met a woman Lauren who offers him the possibility of true love, but because she has not been scripted as his future wife, she is whisked off the show despite anything they can do. A more conventionally beautiful blonde named Meryl is chosen as his wife, but she only pretends to love him.

The movie portrays Truman’s discovery that a world outside his bubble exists, a world which the movie suggests is more authentic or “real,” free from the manipulations of Christof, the show’s producer, whose name suggests the biblical Antichrist. If Truman could only get outside the bubble, outside the mimetic manipulation of Christof, he could desire authentically, find his true love, and live a real, unmediated life. The movie ends with Truman leaving the dome, refusing the safe yet empty fantasy world offered by the producer.

The Truman Show is a modern Pilgrim’s Progress. In John Bunyan’s classic allegory, Christian, an everyman, discovers with the help of the Bible that he lives in the “City of Destruction” and is accordingly doomed. He must leave his friends and family and set out on the pilgrim pathway, where he encounters various obstacles, temptations, and setbacks. He perseveres, however, and finally arrives at the Heavenly City. The book ends with him crossing the “River of Death” and entering heaven. Likewise, Truman lives in a fool’s paradise until he discovers that his life is a mere sham. He sets out to leave his friends and family and encounters various obstacles; but he perseveres, and the movie ends with him stepping outside the dome to a brave new world of unmediated desire.

The movie has been universally interpreted as an allegory of the sinister influence of the media upon our lives. According to a website devoted to the movie, “It is a story that reveals an essential truth about what is happening to society in the 20^th century, . . . [i.e.] how the media and corporations have begun to surround us with a universe of illusions” (Sanes). In this reading, Truman Burbank is an everyman, a “true man,” analogous to each one of us. As the website puts it,

Thus does the movie offer us a metaphor for our own situation. The fake landscape Truman lives in is our own media landscape in which news, politics, advertising and public affairs are increasingly made up of theatrical illusions. Like our media landscape, it is convincing in its realism, with lifelike simulations and story lines, from the high-tech facsimile of a sun that benevolently beams down on Truman to the mock sincerity of the actor he mistakenly believes is his best friend. (Sanes)

In this allegory, “the producer-director of this stage-set world, who blocks Truman’s effort to escape, is the giant media companies, news organizations, and media politicians that have a stake in keeping us surrounded by falsehood, and are prepared to lure us with rewards as they block efforts at reforming the system” (Sanes).

If the movie is criticized at all, it is for being insufficiently radical in its critique of the mass media. René Girard’s theory of mediated desire, however, suggests a rather different interpretation. Truman thinks his desires are his own, but he discovers that in fact they are all mediated by his mimetic rival, Christof, the show’s producer, who is mythically demonized as virtually all powerful and evil, a tempter figure comparable to Milton’s Satan. (When Truman tries to escape the dome by boat, Christof ruthlessly risks Truman’s life in a terrible storm which almost drowns him.)

2

René Girard, in his seminal theory of mediated desire, argues that human desire (as distinct from mere appetite) is essentially imitative; that which we hold most private and personal, our desires, are not really our own: we imitate the desires of others. Put crudely, we want what others want, because they want it. Rather than a spontaneous expression of selfhood, desire is mediated by the model. The mediation of desire, however, remains generally unconscious; the stubbornly held belief that our desires are our own, and that the desired object or person is the key to our transcendent happiness, is what Girard call the mensonge romantique, the romantic lie or illusion. In Eric Gans’s analysis of this relationship, the repression of the mediation of desire is the origin of the so-called Freudian unconscious, not some repressed “event or fact” (Signs of Paradox 124). Rather than expressing our deeply held needs and wants, desire actually reflects our competitive and conflictual relationship with others; for this reason, desire is never really satisfied, as our mimetic relationship with others is an on-going given of our condition as social animals. Desire leads to conflict with the other, because the self and model both desire exclusive possession of the same object. Girard characterizes the desiring subject as the “disciple” and the mediator as the “model.” Describing the ambivalent relationship between disciple and model, he writes,

The impulse toward the [desired] object is ultimately an impulse toward the mediator; in internal mediation [i.e., the mediator belongs to same group or social sphere as the subject] this impulse is checked by the mediator himself since he desires, or perhaps possesses the object. Fascinated by his model, the disciple inevitable sees, in the mechanical obstacle which he puts in his way, proof of the ill will borne him. Far from declaring himself a faithful vassal, he thinks only of repudiating the bonds of mediation. But these bonds are stronger than ever, for the mediator’s apparent hostility does not diminish his prestige but instead augments it. . . . The subject is torn between two opposite feelings toward his model–the most submissive reverence and the most intense malice. This is the passion we call hatred.

Only someone who prevents us from satisfying a desire which he himself has inspired in us is truly an object of hatred. The person who hates first hates himself for the secret admiration concealed by his hatred. In an effort to hide this desperate admiration from others, and from himself, he no longer wants to see in his mediator anything but an obstacle. The secondary role of the mediator thus becomes primary, concealing his original function of a model scrupulously imitated.

Now the mediator is a shrewd and diabolical enemy; he tries to rob the subject of his most prized possessions; he obstinately thwarts his most legitimate ambitions. (10-11)

Since the mediator competes with the self for the same object or person, the model becomes an “obstacle,” a hated and feared rival who blocks the fulfillment of desire. Despite the hatred that emerges between self and rival, the self remains ambivalently attached to the rival, since it is he who gives value or “authenticity” to the self’s desires. The rival is akin to the “other” in psychoanalytic terminology. An “internal” mediator is essentially comparable to the self, but the self’s vanity requires that his desires remain authentic, his “own”; therefore the rival is often demonized as an all-powerful obstacle that blocks the paradise of fulfilled desire. This distorted version of the mediator is the portrayal of The Truman Show.

In The Truman Show, the original role of the mediator as model has been obscured, “concealing his original function of a model scrupulously imitated,” as Girard puts it. The movie rather begins with the premise that Christof, the mediator, is “a shrewd and diabolical enemy.” The movie therefore functions in exactly the opposite way from the realist novels of Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, and Dostoevsky, whose works form the original framework for Girard’s theory (see Deceit, Desire, and the Novel). These novels reveal the mystifications of mimetic desire; the reader is able to witness how and why the revered model is transformed into a “diabolical enemy.” At the end of these novels, the protagonist typically undergoes a quasi-religious conversion which creates a new and revelatory understanding of his past for both reader and protagonist.

The Truman Show recognizes on some level the anthropological truth that human desire is mediated, but the mediator of desire is mythicized as all-powerful and evil, rather than a human being similar to ourselves. Rather than accurately representing media influence, the movie misrepresents the media as the all-powerful controller of our desires. The portrayal of Christof reflects the distortions of mimetic rivalry rather than the actual power of the media in our lives.

Life outside the bubble is also mystified as the realm of authentic desire. Most readers of this journal will recognize that life outside the bubble is just as mythic as life inside. The movie’s fantasy is that we can somehow get outside the situation of mimetic desire. The movie therefore has to end before Truman actually faces the reality of life outside the bubble, or the movie would degenerate into either bathos or a simplistic fantasy world easily recognized as such. A charming fairy tale the movie may be, but not a serious critique of consumer society.

The disturbing part of the movie’s ideology is not its childish fantasy of being the universal center of attention, but the projection of responsibility onto a demonic other. Instead of helping people to take responsibility for their use of the media, the movie encourages a regressive projection of blame that evades the true issue.

The problem of mimetic rivalry is real, constitutive in fact of the human species. What distinguishes the human species is that the main threat to our existence is other humans, not the environment (Gans, OT 2). In Gans’s “originary hypothesis” language first emerged to mediate (and ameliorate) our relationship to other humans—not, as commonly thought, to mediate our relationship to the environment, that is, to describe the world. The threat of mimetic conflict is therefore ongoing as a function of the social nature of our existence. The potential for human violence must be continually deferred; this is the “work” of language (and by extension culture), its original, ethical function. All solutions to the problem of human violence are therefore temporary, since mimetic desire is the phoenix which is continually reborn from the ashes of satisfaction. Gans, therefore, rejects all utopian solutions, including those of the quasi-Marxist critics of the mass media.

Girard, in contrast, takes a religious perspective on the problem of human violence; in Girard’s view, the only answer to our dilemma is to make God or his incarnation our model of desire, to choose absolute love over sacrificial desire. This can be a satisfying solution at the level of the individual, but it doesn’t work at the level of society. Girard fails to recognize the constructive role of consumer products in ameliorating mimetic conflict, a point to which I will return.

The leftist critique of consumer society is based on a similar fantasy as The Truman Show. Christof, the show’s producer, is a Hollywood version of what Theodor Adorno calls the “culture industry.” He writes, “The more strongly the culture industry entrenches itself, the more it can do as it chooses with the needs of consumers: producing, controlling, disciplining them” (115). Consumers are completely passive in this model: “Capitalist production hems them in so tightly, in body and soul, that they unresistingly succumb to whatever is proffered to them” (Adorno 106). Just as in The Truman Show, Adorno seems to believe that if we could only get rid of these huge corporations, we could desire authentically and, hopefully, more tastefully. Certainly we would devote more money to the study of great literature, music, and art (as defined by Adorno and his colleagues). As Gans writes, “Esthetes object to the reign of money: wealth does not guarantee good taste, neither individual wealth nor the aggregate wealth of the masses” (Chronicles #25).

3

The neo-Marxist critique of consumerism depends upon a false distinction between authentic desire and the inauthentic desires created by a consumer culture. But what, we must ask, distinguishes between them? Most of the daily goods we take for granted in America, people living in third world countries manage to do quite well without. In fact, all of culture could be classified as superfluous. As Shakespeare pointed out long ago, culture is by definition that which exceeds “true need.” “Our basest beggars / Are in the poorest thing superfluous. / Allow not nature more than nature needs, / Man’s life is as cheap as beast’s” (King Lear 2.4.266-269). The superfluous is the essential when it comes to culture. But culture is superfluous only in the sense that the ethical is superfluous. What King Lear recognizes is that the existence of the human community may be humanly necessary but is not inevitable, “natural.” Culture, as the basis of civilization, is contingent upon our continual efforts to renew and reaffirm it. The human community is always in danger of extinction. This is the moral imperative that authorizes mass culture, however distasteful we may find its products.

What is at the root of the academic hostility to consumerism, the media, and the market in general? In part, as I’ve argued above, this hostility is based on the mystification of desire. Our vanity requires that our desires remain our own, even if we must demonize the rivals of corporate advertising. Contemporary psychoanalytic theory is in agreement with mimetic theory that the perceived integrity of our identity always requires an “other”; capitalism, consumerism, and the mass media are all versions of that “other” by which intellectuals often define and defend themselves.

Capitalism is an inevitable outgrowth of a free market. Gans points out that the market is not a thing, but the collective result of the individual decisions of all of its participants (Chronicles #8 and #34). “Reification” has become the bogeyman of recent literary theory, yet the reification of capitalism is still accepted without hesitation. There is no evil demiurge of capitalism, no “producer”: the system expresses the choices of individuals. When we criticize consumer society, what we are really criticizing is the consumer choices of our fellow citizens. At bottom, this is an aesthetic issue. The academic hostility to the market is fundamentally aesthetic. My point here is not original: Gans argues insightfully that “culture” is hostile to the market because traditional culture requires “effective mimetic models, good shows. The market is not about shows, but about the organization of human efforts toward satisfying our desires and generating new ones, in the unceasing, and, we hope, unending effort to stay a step ahead of the resentments it generates” (Chronicles #25).

Intellectuals want people to consume more tastefully, in ways closer to themselves. But this criticism misses the whole point of consumption, which is to distinguish oneself. We cannot all be the best, but we can each be different; this is the meaning of the modern valorization of self-expression, the omnipresent aestheticization of our existence.

Virtually every personal decision is on some level an aesthetic decision, from the clothes we wear, to the food we buy, to our choice of career. Our very identity is the subject of aesthetic self-fashioning. Our ability to be different, if not the best, is the key to modern culture. As Girard has pointed out, humans are essentially mimetic, which means competitive and conflictual. What each of us requires fundamentally is an arena in which we can successfully compete and be recognized as such. The aesthetic is one such arena available to virtually every modern individual. As it was recognized long ago, De gustibus, non est disputandum. In matters of taste there is no dispute. The primary ethical function of consumer society is to aestheticize our daily existence, thereby deferring the resentments created by social/economic inequalities.

Consumerism, and the mass culture that accompanies it, is a necessary evil of a mass democratic society. All societies require some structuring principle to prevent unrestrained conflict and competition. Past societies, ancient, medieval, and Renaissance, were structured along more hierarchical lines. One’s place in the hierarchy was maintained in part by sheer force, as exemplified by drastic punishments for minor thefts. Public, communal rituals and ceremonies were also effective in creating a powerful sense of divine awe for political and ecclesiastical authorities. But Protestant iconoclasm, in collaboration with Enlightenment rationality, has eroded our sense of “divine” authority. In modern democratic societies, power is relatively decentralized, and authority, always vulnerable to suspicion and resentment, is limited by market forces. As Adam Smith recognized, a free market incorporates widespread competition as a positive force, rather than limiting it by rigid hierarchical distinctions. The modern world defers the potential violence of unrestrained competition by allowing each person to create individual difference, which is to say, sacrality.

If we are unique, then nobody can compete with us. The post-modern drive for diversity is built on this principle. We need as much diversity as possible to defuse the competition that threatens to destroy us. We advocate accepting each person as he or she is. Each person is special, unique, and uniquely valuable. It becomes imperative to believe this in a world without the sacral guarantees of religion. Girard underestimates the contribution of consumerism in deferring violence. The constructive function of consumerism is in facilitating individuation, or differentiation, apart from open conflict, which when unrestrained results in rigid hierarchies ruled by the most powerful and violent. Instead of killing others, we recognize their difference, asking them to recognize us in return. Consumer products, which enable this differentiation on a mass scale, are what make a mass society possible. To argue against a consumer society is to argue against a mass society. And to argue against a mass society is to dispute the legitimacy of the modern world as such.

In pragmatic terms, we don’t want to do away with our consumer society; we want to buy the things we want at the cheapest possible price. That’s why so much of the leftist criticism of the consumer society is hypocritical, since the critics themselves enjoy the fruits of this society. Furthermore, they don’t offer any realistic alternative. Corporations can and should be regulated, and of course they are already are. But these political corrections to the free market can be handled within our existing political framework. The advantage of our system is that it allows these kind of corrections to made peacefully, through political negotiation.

From an anthropological perspective, if we can truly understand the workings of mimetic desire, we can also rationally ameliorate its destructive potential. Of course, we can never completely step outside the mimetic circle, but realizing that we live within it can transform our social interactions. The postmodern era brings an increasingly widespread self-awareness of the mediated nature of desire, even apart from the influence of Girard’s mimetic theory. In fact, consumerism is often celebrated in the postmodern world, despite the efforts of humanities professors.

Recent critics, even on the left, have recognized that consumption is an active process. Michel de Certeau argues,

In reality, a rationalized, expansionist, centralized, spectacular and clamorous production is confronted by an entirely different kind of production, called “consumption” and characterized by its ruses, its fragmentation (the result of circumstances), its poaching, its clandestine nature, its tireless and quiet activity, in short by its quasi-invisibility, since it shows itself not in its own products (where would it place them?) but in an art of using those imposed upon it. (31)

There is an “art” or a “Practice of Everyday Life,” as Certeau puts it. While Certeau seems to romanticize consumption as potentially “subversive,” Jean Baudrillard sees it as more sinister, while still recognizing its active nature:

consumption is surely not that passive process of absorption and appropriation which is contrasted to the supposedly active mode of production, thus counterposing two oversimplified patterns of behavior (and of alienation). It has to be made clear from the outset that consumption is an active form of relationship (not only to objects, but also to society and to the world), a mode of systematic activity and global response which founds our entire cultural system. (199)

Baudrillard recognizes insightfully that consumerism is not really “about” acquiring physical objects, but rather making a positive, aesthetic statement to the world (see below). As a neo-Marxist, he characterizes both consumption and production as forms of “alienation,” but the historical failure of Marxist economics in the 20^th century places the burden of proof on him to offer a better system. Despite his hostility to the market, Baudrillard recognizes how consumerism transforms traditional expressions of social and economic competition:

That same ideology of competition which formerly, under the banner of ‘freedom,’ constituted the golden rule of production has now been transposed without restriction into the realm of consumption. Thanks to thousands of marginal distinctions and the often purely formal diffraction of a single product by means of conditioning, competition has become more aggravated on every plane, opening up the immense range of possibilities of a precarious freedom–indeed, of the ultimate freedom, namely the freedom to choose the objects which will distinguish one from other people. (182).

It is quite possible for each person to feel unique even though everyone is alike: all that is needed is a pattern of collective and mythological projection–in other words a model. (183-4)

Moreover, the ideology of competition is now giving way everywhere to a ‘philosophy’ of personal accomplishment. Society is better integrated, so instead of vying for possession of things, individuals seek self-fulfillment, independently of one another, through what they consume. The leitmotiv of discriminative competition has been replaced by that of personalization for all. (184)

Baudrillard recognizes that individualized consumption restructures the ideology of competition, the attempt to be the “best.” He emphasizes, however, the paradox that we distinguish ourselves by the consumption of mass produced products. But it is debatable that “everyone is alike,” as he puts it. On one level this is true, because we are all subject to mediated desire. But on another level, people really are different. Even something as seemingly trivial as the car we choose to drive is ethically significant to the extent that this choice is recognized as significant by others. What matters is not that all people are on some deep level unique, but that this system works to defer resentment and violence, even within the pressure cooker of a mass society. Baudrillard’s critique is founded on the utopian presupposition that freedom from mediated desire is possible.

From the perspective of Gans’s “Generative Anthropology,” the paradox of consumer society is the basic paradox of the sign. The same sign which defers desire by substituting for the desired object also stimulates desire, by making the represented object more attractive. The products we consume are all “signs” that both defer and stimulate desire. Because desire is mediated by the other, it can never be completely satisfied. When we achieve the object of our desire, we are often ambivalent or even resentful towards it because it fails to resolve the mimetic situation which created our initial desire (see Girard, DDN 88-89). Rather than recognizing that it is not the poor object’s fault, we tend to blame the object itself, discarding it in favor of some other object. The ultimate object of desire is to be the center of everyone else’s desire, but even this satisfaction is unstable, because once we achieve centrality, we immediately become the object of the others’ resentment and hostility.

The resentment felt towards the object is articulated at the origin of the human in the moment which Gans calls the “sparagmos” (Signs of Paradox 133-36). We destroy and consume the object, not out of simple appetite or even desire, but out of resentment towards its failure to deliver the promised transcendence. We consume the object, thereby destroying or sacrificing it. We cannot eliminate sacrifice, but we can make it more rational in expression. And consumerism is perhaps the most rational form of sacrifice.

2. The Day of the Locust

Nathanael West’s novel is addressed to the problems created by the mass media rather than consumption as such. If, however, we consider that the images and slogans of the mass media are themselves objects of consumption, then this novel indeed falls within the subject of this essay.

The question raised by West in this novel is whether the resentments created by consumer society can continue to be contained and deferred by the system which creates them. The paradox of the sign is exacerbated in modern society because signs are proliferated endlessly. A general cynicism, a disillusionment with the promise of transcendence emerges.

The Day of the Locust tells the story of a young artist, Tod Hackett, who comes to Hollywood to work as a set designer. The novel is rather picaresque in structure, narrating Tod’s various adventures with the outsiders and hangers-on of the movie industry, and taking us to a variety of Hollywood locations; it does come to a climax, however, in a riot that erupts at a Hollywood movie premiere and which provides the apocalypse promised by the novel’s title.

Hollywood as West describes it is a hodgepodge of cheap and tawdry appearances which hide an inner emptiness rather than corruption as such. The homes are an incongruous jumble of “Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these styles, “all composed of “plaster, lath, and paper” (61). The residents of Hollywood are similarly surreal:

A great many of the people wore sports clothes which were not really sports clothes. . . . The fat lady in the yachting cap was going shopping, not boating; the man in the Norfolk jacket and Tyrolean hat was returning, not from a mountain, but an insurance office; and the girl in slacks and sneaks with a bandana around her head had just left a switchboard, not a tennis court. (60)

The rococo homes and clothing, no matter how tasteless and absurd, reflect the basic human desire for romance and adventure, the need to transcend the mundane banality of everyday life; this desire however has assumed monstrous form due to the mediation of the movies and radio. As West comments in another novel,

Men have always fought their misery with dreams. Although dreams were once powerful, they have been made puerile by the movies, radio and newspapers. Among many betrayals, this one is the worst. (Miss Lonelyhearts 39)

5

In Day of the Locust, everyone is essentially an actor, and virtually everyone Tod comes into contact with is literally an aspiring actor or actress. Hollywood or mass culture deforms people into grotesque forms. Harry Greener, for example, an old vaudeville performer trying to adapt to Hollywood, is literally a face with no head:

Harry, like many actors, had very little back or top to his head. It was almost all face, like a mask, with deep furrows between the eyes, across the forehead and on either side of the nose and mouth, plowed there by years of broad grinning and heavy frowning. Because of them, he could never express anything either subtly or exactly. They wouldn’t permit degrees of feeling, only the furthest degree. (119)

As a result of mass culture, people are severely alienated, not so much from their environment, which they faithfully mirror, but from themselves as whole human beings. Homer Simpson, a middle-aged man directed by his doctor to retire to California for his health, is brilliantly described as disconnected assemblage of human parts:

He lay stretched out on the bed, collecting his senses and testing the different parts of his body. Every part was awake but his hands. They still slept. He was not surprised. They demanded special attention, had always demanded it. When he had been a child, he used to stick pins into them and once had even thrust them into a fire. Now he used only cold water.

He got out of bed in sections, like a poorly made automaton, and carried his hands into the bathroom. He turned on the cold water. When the basin was full, he plunged his hands in up to the wrists. They lay quietly on the bottom like a pair of strange aquatic animals. When they were thoroughly chilled and began to crawl about, he lifted them out and hid them in a towel. (82)

Tod, the protagonist, is the closest thing in the novel to a whole human being. He has compassion for others and seems capable of real love; but he is surrounded by a culture in which love is not really possible. As an artist, Tod tries to resist the allure of Hollywood, but he is finally caught up in it.

The foremost object of Tod’s desire is the 17-year old aspiring actress Faye Greener, who epitomizes the ephemeral glamour of Hollywood.

Tod grunted with annoyance as he turned to the photograph [of Faye]. In it she was wearing a harem costume, full turkish trousers, breastplates and a monkey jacket, and lay stretched out on a silken divan. One hand held a beer bottle and the other a pewter stein.

She was supposed to look drunk and she did, but not with alcohol. She lay stretched out on the divan with her arms and legs spread, as though welcoming a lover, and her lips were parted in a heavy sullen smile. She was supposed to look inviting, but the invitation wasn’t to pleasure. . . .

Her invitation wasn’t to pleasure, but to struggle, hard and sharp, closer to murder than to love. If you threw yourself on her, it would be like throwing yourself from the parapet of skyscraper. You would do it with a scream. You couldn’t expect to rise again. Your teeth would be driven into your skull likes nails into a pine board and your back would be broken. You wouldn’t even have time to sweat or close your eyes. . . .

If she would only let him, he would be glad to throw himself, no matter what the cost. But she wouldn’t have him. She didn’t love him and he couldn’t further her career. She wasn’t sentimental and she had no need of tenderness, even if he were capable of it. (67-68)

The men of the novel all compete for Faye’s favor in classic Girardian fashion, and they come to blows in two scenes (117, 170). Even though Tod understands the nature of Faye’s appeal, he is unable to govern his desire for her rationally. As the above description of Faye’s sexual “invitation” indicates, underneath Faye’s contrived appearance lies a curious violence, and the relationship between violence and mass culture can be considered as the main subject of the novel.

The problem with mass culture as described by West is that it consists of images and figures that promise everything, but which continually frustrate by their inability to deliver any satisfaction. Hollywood thus incites to violence, and the ending reflects the supposed inability of mass culture to defer the (desiring) violence that it feeds upon. West’s description of the crowd which gathers at a movie premiere makes this point explicit:

All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. Finally that day came. They could draw a weekly income of ten or fifteen dollars. Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges? Once there, they discover that sunshine isn’t enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. They don’t know what to do with their time. They haven’t the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure. . . .

Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing. (177-178)

The anthropological content of West’s novel is that he reveals the underlying violence of consumer desire. Desire is fraught with violence; this insight is not exactly new, but West applies it to a modern context in which this message is not always apparent. In the movie theater, at home watching TV, and so on, we feel ourselves insulated from the threat of violence. West warns us that the potential for violence remains real, hidden behind the images that surround us.

The unstated problem of The Day of the Locust is the lack of any sacred which would defer the violence of desire. West elaborates on this lack in his earlier novel, Miss Lonelyhearts, about a newspaper advice column writer. Miss Lonelyhearts (the only name given him in the novel) has an “ivory Christ” hanging on his wall, and he reads Father Zossima’s sermon on unconditional love from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Miss Lonelyhearts wants to offer this message to his readers, but he is unable to believe in it himself. Surrounded by absurd suffering undignified by any tragic pathos, he finds himself incapable of true faith. Miss Lonelyhearts lives in a modern world in which faith or love have become impossible. The very idea of absolute love is absurd and doomed to failure.

6

At the end of the novel, the protagonist seemingly undergoes a Dostoyevskian conversion in which he dedicates his life to God. In his first act of Christ-like love, he attempts to embrace a cripple: “He would embrace the cripple and the cripple would be made whole again, even as he, a spiritual cripple, had been made whole again” (57). But the attempt to express Father Zossima’s unconditional love ends only in more violence, as the cripple misinterprets the gesture and shoots him in a farcical struggle.Miss Lonelyhearts thus embodies the failure of religion to provide meaning and happiness in the modern world. This failure results in violence. The Day of the Locust continues West’s critique of modernity, but he turns from the failure of religion to the failure of art as a means of transcendence.

In traditional culture, high art teaches the deferral of desire as well as providing diversion: “to teach and delight” in classical aesthetics. But modern art, like Tod Hackett, has been prostituted to the movie industry. At best, serious art can only record the failure of mass culture, as Tod records “The Burning of Los Angeles” in the painting he works upon, and West records the same in The Day of the Locust. Mass culture exists on the model of pornography, much as Faye, as a figure for mass culture, attracts through her mediated sex appeal. As such, mass art teaches the wrong message, that desire can be satisfied. It makes the consumers impatient for more and more. At the same time, through the very repetition and juxtaposition of its messages, the promise of culture is revealed as empty because the ubiquitous images have lost their potency even as promise. West’s favorite technique is to juxtapose the various images of mass culture, thus revealing the arbitrary and illusory nature of cultural representation (see for example Tod’s surreal journey through a Hollywood movie lot, 130-35). As a result the consumer becomes jaded and cynical, impatient. The images which are meant to substitute for reality have lost their believability; at the same time, there is nothing to take their place. The main function of culture, to transcend the violence of desire, is thus frustrated.

West’s critique of modernity agrees in many respects with Girard’s. In Girard’s interpretation of Western history, the revelation of the Gospel text places humankind in a unique predicament. The Passion story confronts us with our own violence; we can no longer blame the sacrificial victim. The sacrificial mechanism can work only as long as it is disguised and mystified. According to Girard, “the effect of the gospel revelation will be made manifest through violence, through a sacrificial and cultural crisis whose radical effect must be unprecedented since there is no longer any sacralized victim to stand in the way of its consequences” (THSFW 203). In an increasingly secular world, without the protection afforded by myth and sacrificial religion, humans are in imminent danger of destroying themselves. Because of the Gospel revelation, we can no longer plausibly believe in the sacrificial myths that traditionally protect society from its own violence. We are forced to choose between “apocalypse now” or unconditional forgiveness. As Guy Lefort puts this point,

In a world where violence has been truly revealed and the victimage mechanisms have ceased to function, humans are confronted with a dilemma that is extraordinarily simple: either they renounce violence, or the incalculable violence that they set off risks annihilating them all, ‘as in the days of Noah’. (qtd. in Girard, THSFW 201).

For Girard, this situation constitutes the crisis, but also the challenge and opportunity of modernity.

The ending of The Day of the Locust presents a classic Girardian crisis of undifferentiation, complete with angry mob and scapegoat victim (Homer Simpson). A woman in the crowd claims that the riot began because “A pervert attacked a child,” and the crowd “agreed vehemently” (183). Ironically, this same group of people then goes on to demonstrate just how they perverted they themselves are, when one of the men takes advantage of the crunch to start groping a woman with the group’s approval. In other words, there is no meaningful difference between victim and crowd, just as in Girard’s description of the sacrificial crisis. The lack of any organized rituals of sacrifice in the modern world results in a crisis of undifferentiation which threatens the community with self-destruction. The main difference between Girard and West on the problem of modernity is that West does not apparently see Christian love as offering a viable solution.

It might be argued that West’s novel is anachronistic, since he wrote at the dawn of consumer society, in the late 30s, before the post-war economic boom. But in many ways, his novel is prescient; although consumerism delivers more now, it also promises more, so that dissatisfaction always stays one step ahead of satisfaction.

The most obvious problem with West’s critique is that consumerism marches on, becoming more and more efficient in both creating desires and recycling consumer discontent into more consumerism. Dissatisfaction is recycled back into the system as a positive force. There is no shortage of products available to express one’s dissatisfaction with consumerism. Like Marx, West failed to consider the efficiency of the free market.

But West’s point is not just that the system doesn’t work, but that it works in ways which should be rejected. Consumer culture focuses on appearances at the expense of inner reality, thus distorting people and making them into less-than-whole human beings. In some ways West’s critique hearkens back to the traditional distrust of appearances in favor of inner reality. The locus classicus of such criticism is Hamlet’s rejection of “seeming”:

Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not “seems.”
‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, good Mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected havior of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly. These indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play.
But I have that within which passes show;
These but the trappings and suits of woe. (1.2.76-86)

For Hamlet, then, the inner reality is incommensurable with any form of representation. No one can “pluck out the heart of [his] mystery” (3.2.364-5).

West goes beyond Shakespeare however, because in The Day of the Locust there is no inner reality with which to oppose the superficial appearances. The charge is that consumer culture focuses on appearances so drastically that inner reality is emptied out. There is no true substance to turn to. Even Tod’s ideals, or Miss Lonelyheart’s, are arguably self-delusions. People are deformed, incapable of love or faith, and capable only of violence, or at best an artificial life of romantic illusion, as we see in Faye’s romantic fantasies which seems to satisfy her (104-5). This is a charge which is more specific to the 20^th century and typical of literary modernism, as for example in T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. To make this point, however, West gives us, for the most part, caricatures rather than realistic characters. It’s not clear that modern individuals are really as bad as West makes them out to be. In any case, it’s not safe to generalize. The other problem is that this criticism assumes the existence of some prior golden age when people were whole and complete, which is not a safe assumption. The prosperity of the 20^th century arguably allows more freedom for love and faith.

7

The problem that West points to is real, but the solution is in this case would be worse than the problem, since any cure must trample on the freedom we rightly hold as our highest value. It’s not at all clear that there is any alternative to consumer society that would be more hospitable to morality and beauty, not to mention personal freedom.

3. Conclusion

West’s critique of mass culture shares the problem of the neo-Marxist critique: they both exaggerate the problems of mass culture, and they both implicitly assume that some viable, utopian alternative exists. The only alternative to consumerism is an oppressive government that drastically limits personal freedom, telling people what they should desire. Girard’s mimetic theory should alert us to the impossibility of regulating desire. The claim of The Truman Show that a free market enables a repressive regime of corporate media power is based on an unjustified distortion of media power. The products of consumer society are not always beautiful and elegant, but they effectively serve to differentiate individuals, enabling the human community to continue. Any political/economic system can be justified only as the lesser of two evils. Giving up utopian dreams is a sign of maturity that effectively forestalls the appeal of autocratic politics.

The anthropological problem posed by consumer society is, how can a society exist without an absolute sacred? In historical terms, modern society is anomalous. But the sacred has not disappeared; it has rather been integrated into the fabric of our culture, integrated so profoundly that we hardly recognize it as such. We don’t have any overarching, generally accepted, public sacred, but we do have a whole host of private sacreds. Each individual creates his or her own sense of the sacred, in part through consumer products. The great advantage of this system is that it differentiates people without the need for rigid hierarchies, thus maximizing personal freedom.