Author: staceymeeker

In the study of culture, a short span of time can sometimes make a big difference. If I had set out to write a survey of artistically ambitious movies six or seven years ago, my article would no doubt have been heavily skewed towards a discussion of otherness, undecidability, belatedness and ironic regress–in short, towards the devices and ways of knowing normally associated with postmodernism. As examples, I might have singled out movies like David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train (1989), Lars von Trier’s Europa (1990), Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991) or the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink (1991). And, had I ventured a glance into the future, I would almost certainly have predicted that the ironic perspective, deferred identifications and metaphysical pessimism of these films would continue on seamlessly into an endless posthistorical future. Beginning sometime in the mid-to-late 1990s, however, a massive sea change in the subject matter and focus of independently made movies began to take place. These movies, which all bore the imprint of sophisticated auteur sensibility, began to do unusual things. They started treating themes of identity, reconciliation, and belief. They forced viewers to identify with single-minded characters and their sacrificial, redemptive acts. And, as if all this were not enough, they began to set up dramatically staged, emotionally moving denouements. As milestones in this development you could cite productions like Lars von Trier’s Idiots (1997) and Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration (1998); Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog (1999); Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (1999); and, in mainstream cinema, the Oscar-winning American Beauty (1999). Before the year 2000, it might still have been possible to write off this sort of movie as a sentimental aberration. Since then, however, dozens of important and striking films have appeared that follow this same threefold pattern. Indeed, it has become increasingly hard to find serious movies wholly committed to postmodernist themes and strategies, and it is becoming increasingly hard to apply poststructuralist theory in a positive way to the new type of film.

Several years ago, in an attempt to wend my way out of postmodernism, I set forth the notion of performatism, which can be thought of as an application of Eric Gans’s generative anthropology. Regular readers of Anthropoetics need hardly be reminded of GA’s basic premise, which is that all culture begins with the emission of a simple (ostensive) sign formed by spontaneous agreement between two or more protohumans caught up in a situation of mimetic rivalry. The emission of the ostensive sign creates an originary, sacral word, the name-of-God, which defers violence and lays the foundation for all later human culture. The root idea behind performatism is that in recent years, as a reaction to postmodern culture, there has been a massive shift of attention back to ostensive signs, as well as to the dense or opaque subjects using them and the scenes of transcendence around them. Instead of being swept away in a sea of duplicitous, unreliable signs, viewers are now “framed”–forced to identify with a central, often sacrificial figure (in drama) or with unexpected, constructed modes of reconciliation (in comedy). Although this sort of involuntary identification sounds terribly conventional–Hollywood movies, after all, have been doing something similar for years–in practice it is anything but. The forced focus on the simple, irrefutable truth of ostensive signs, on annoyingly dense or opaque characters, and on incredible acts of transcendence bores or irritates mainstream moviegoers accustomed to the easy identifications offered by Hollywood genres. Conversely, postmodern viewers tend to write off performatist films as “banal,” “trite,” or “melodramatic” for not engaging in the intellectual ludism and ironic regress expected of postmodern discourse.

When talking about movies systematically in any way, you are usually faced at some point with the choice between mainstream Hollywood productions and so-called art movies. As it turned out, the nature of my topic–epoch-making artistic innovation–didn’t allow for much leeway. Hollywood undeniably turns out innovative movies, but for the most part tends to sugarcoat the themes and devices I’m interested in (Tom Hanks movies like Forrest Gump, Cast Away, and The Green Mile are a case in point). The main problem with art movies, by contrast, is accessibility. Not being a festival-hopping professional critic, I decided to concentrate on European movies and North American independent productions that are readily available on video or DVD. For comparison’s sake, though, I’ve included in my collection at least one bona fide mainstream Hollywood movie, David Fincher’s Panic Room. I’ve also avoided treating the hard-to-get Russian and Czech movies which are my normal stock in trade, the one exception being Aleksandr Rogozhkin’s Kukushka (The Cuckoo); readers interested in a discussion of performatism in Czech cinema may refer to Eshelman 2002.

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The best way to describe the shift from postmodernism to performatism is to start with the notion of the frame. This refers less to the term used by Derrida in his The Truth in Painting (1987) than to the American sociologist Erving Goffman’s “frame analysis,” which studies ritualized microsituations, or frames, in everyday life. Like Derrida, Goffman places a premium on the meta-analysis of disruptions and permutations in such frames, for which some think him cynical. However, unlike Derrida, Goffman also makes very clear that human interaction is rooted in a “common focus on a physical scene of action” prior to language (Collins 1988, 51). For Goffman, language is always anchored in some way in such scenes by means of indexical or deictic signs (“that there,” “this here,” etc.) not immediately applicable to other situations. And, unlike the Derridean concept, which begins and ends with a notion of frame-as-paradox, Goffman’s approach is generative and originary: he suggests the existence of “primary frameworks,” out of which develop still further, more complex frames or modulations of those frames. Especially interesting from the perspective of GA is that the primary frameworks, which allow us to ascribe a basic meaning to things, include an explicit sacral dimension–the “astounding complex,” which serves to determine whether things have a supernatural origin (Goffman 1974, 28-30). Other primary frameworks relate to “stunts,” “flubs,” “fortuitousness,” and the potentially embarrassing “tension” between social norms and bodily functions (Goffman 1974, 28-39). The frameworks help us decide, for example, whether the quick upward flip of someone’s right arm is a religious blessing, a move in sport, an accident, or a natural reflex. Goffman’s frames, in other words, are more than just accidental, transient incisions in the stream of human discourse. In fact, you could say that they are anchored in reality in a way comparable to Gans’s notion of the originary scene, which is based on a spontaneous agreement to defer mimetic rivalry through the emission of an ostensive sign (also a kind of index sign pointing to a concrete, present thing and surrounded by a frame of social consensus). Taken this way, the ostensive scene would provide the originary ground missing from Goffman’s theory, which does not try to explain how the the “astounding complex” came about in the first place, or why it is even a primus inter pares within its own category.(1) Conversely, Goffman’s theory and observations serve to remind us that ritual and sacrality continue to play a key role in everyday behavior.

While it would probably be possible to describe performatist works of art using the entire range of Goffman’s categories, I do not wish to do so here. For one, I am not trying to found a sociology of narrative fiction. For another, Goffman’s own terminology draws heavily on theatrical and fictional metaphors that create a kind of undecidable continuity between reality and fiction (in this sense Goffman is still very much rooted in postmodern thinking). Instead, in keeping with the minimalist ethic proposed by Gans, I suggest we can reduce the kinds of frame necessary for a description of any work of narrative art to three types: primary (or ostensive) frames; intermediate frames; and outer (or work) frames.

Primary or ostensive frames are analogous to the originary ostensive scene in that they create a constructed or artificial proximity to things, people, or simple physical acts. As with the original ostensive scene, they can be thought of as having both an anthropological and a transcendent or divine motivation. In their anthropological guise they form by more-or-less spontaneous agreement among characters and tend to be unstable. When the two lovers in Patrice Chéreau’s Intimacy meet to copulate without exchanging words, they create precisely this kind of scene in an erotic, human mode. When Amélie (in the eponymous movie) “plays God” by returning a small box of toys to the lonely man who as a child once hid them away, then she creates a revelatory scene which is accepted by the man as an everyday miracle. When the seven unfortunate characters in the science-fiction thriller Cube wake up for no good reason in a very large and extremely dangerous labyrinth of interconnected boxes, this theist scene challenges them to act in an ethically coherent way to get out. The frame itself remains an ineffable origin, as if God-given; the characters in it show their humanity–or lack of it–in trying to overcome its lethal traps.

The thing-related closure experienced in such primary scenes acts as a ground for the rest of the plot. To work, the constructed ur-scene must be confirmed somewhere else on the higher, authorial level of the outer frame (I will return to this in the discussion further below). If this occurs, it enables the protagonists and ourselves to experience such scenes as part of a greater, transcendent frame, and thus as ethical, beautiful, or sublime. Beauty and sublimity are constructed, for example, when Ricky Fitts deifies a white plastic bag in American Beauty, and a kind of ethical beauty is generated when Amélie sets up her little traps in which people “discover” small objects that bring happiness to them. One of the most poignant such ethical moments, in Lars von Trier’s Idiots, involves two Hell’s Angels, an exposed penis and an act of urination–you have to see it to believe it.(2) Depending on theme and plot, however, many other variations are possible, including suspense and comedy. In David Fincher’s slick Hollywood production Panic Room, for example, the primary frame is a trap, with the designer of the safe room trying to break back into his own creation. In Spike Jonze’s brilliant, bizarre comedy Being John Malkovich, the primary frame–John Malkovich himself–is patently absurd, as are the transcendent principles governing its usage.

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Primary frames in themselves do not necessarily lead to greater realism, and certainly not to any sort of authenticity. The sex practiced by the breathless, physically rather ordinary couple in Intimacy may appear “realistic” to us against the background of dreamily filmed sex scenes. However, there is nothing particularly authentic or natural about their trysts, which are based on a kind of contractual agreement which dissolves as the movie goes on. Similarly, there is nothing intrinsically authentic about the digitalized movie of a plastic bag whipping around in the wind in American Beauty or about Amélie’s little pranks, which take place in an idealized Montmartre and are based on well-meant deceit. Artistic ostensivity involves a performance that creates ethical beauty or sublimity and occludes meaning. However, this is possible only because of a “fit” between an inner scene and a higher, authorial will that causes that ethical beauty or sublimity to occur, or that meaning to be shut out. There is nothing at all authentic about this spontaneous agreement, and indeed it is always accompanied by resentful suspicion that someone is benefiting from it more than he or she should. Performatist art tries to frame and contain this resentment, to create scenes or constructs in which viewers or peripheral characters can identify with a central, often sacrificial experience to the point where they can benefit from it themselves. The point of performatism is not to restore the dogmatic authority of the center, but rather to return, if only temporarily, to the originary scene as way of restoring to culture the originary experience of love, beauty and reconciliation.

I cannot emphasize enough that this “return” to the originary scene is an artificially arranged journey subject to ironic twists and turns of its own. One of the most effective and moving attempts to portray a lengthy sojourn in ostensivity is the Russian movie Kukushka (The Cuckoo), which, unfortunately, has not been widely distributed in the West. In Kukushka, the circumstances of the Russo-Finnish war in 1944 throw together three people who don’t understand one another’s language: a young Lapp woman whose husband is lost in the war, a Russian officer (who has been betrayed to the secret police by a trusted underling), and a Finnish sniper fighting for the Germans (who have betrayed him). Unable to explain the nuances of their political and personal plight to the others, all have to make do with purely ostensive means of communication (dubbed-in oral translations allow us to understand what the Finnish and Lapp characters are actually saying). Trying to demonstrate to the Russian that he is a former student and not a Nazi, for example, the Finn helplessly yells at him using the only Russian words that he knows: “Tolstoy–War and Peace! Dostoevsky–The Idiot!” Not surprisingly, this sort of ostensive communication doesn’t lead to any natural sort of rapprochement. In fact, just before he learns the war is over the Russian grievously wounds the Finn, who he thinks is a convinced Nazi. The movie vividly demonstrates the multiple ironies that arise when we, as creatures of semiotic complexity and nuance, are forced to return to direct, non-narrative modes of communication. The movie could have chosen to make a shambles out of this irony: instead, it presents us with a happy ending based on feeling and being rather than on knowing. At the movie’s conclusion, the young Lapp woman tells her two twin sons (who could have been fathered by either the Finn or the Russian) an idealized–and false–version of who their fathers were and how they got along. This falsification isn’t intentional: the Lapp woman simply never did understand the things that happened out of her immediate line of sight and that were “explained” to her in Finnish or Russian. None of the three characters, in fact, will ever understand exactly what happened to them in the ostensive situation; all, however, are able to overcome the resentment and rivalry inherent in it. As viewers, we know that the characters lack this understanding, but we identify with their ability to transcend all the same. The postmodern moment of knowing is contained in the aesthetic gesture of the movie; it is simply not intended to be the last word.

Just how the resentment arising out of a primary or ostensive scene is dealt with in narrative is a problem of intermediate frames. In analogy to Gans’s typology of language, you might say that intermediate frames form the declarative language of performatist narrative: they involve abstraction, individuation, imagination, contradiction, complexity, and so on. In short, they are the stuff of which human conflict (and plots) are made. Intermediate frames “compete” in a certain sense with the primary frames established by or around key characters. Examples of a fatal competition would be that between the Samurai frame of Ghost Dog in the eponymous movie and the Mafia frame of his “master” Louie. Through Ghost Dog’s self-sacrifice at the end of the movie, however, it is clear that the competition is one-sided. Although the Mafia code triumphs in a purely physical sense, Ghost Dog’s samurai ethos is successfully carried over to a little girl, who will presumably continue the struggle in a non-violent, more spiritualized way. This sort of struggle is even more intense in Cube, where six differently “framed” characters–an architect, an escape artist, a policeman, an autist, etc.–help and hinder one another trying to get out of an enormous, inexplicable labyrinth. The beneficiary of this process is person with the simplest frame, the autist Kazan, who at the same time represents a new, minimal origin. Once more, it is absolutely imperative that the inner frame “lock” into the outer one, creating a coherent event or denouement within the work in question.

When postmodernists misinterpret performatist works it is almost always because they think that there is only kind of legitimate frame: the intermediate one. This corresponds, in effect, to the Derridian notion of frame: it is that which mediates between inside and out while being reducible to neither.(3) The irreducible frame (a.k.a. différance, pharmakon, hymen, trace, gramme etc.) becomes the focal point of interest, even though (or, more likely, exactly because) it itself does not represent anything in particular and fails to bring about the closure it seems to promise. Performatist works of art, of course, also allow contradictory and/or deceptive intermediate frames to develop. However, if the work is to remain performatist, such frames must always be locked into a kind of full nelson between the primary and the outer frame, which do represent binding ethical and aesthetic positions within the world of the narrative. The existence of such a basic narrative “lock” or “fit” between outside and in is the crucial element defining a performatist work, and, from a postmodernist point of view, its most disturbing and unacceptable feature. (4)

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Outer frames (or work frames) give performatist works their peculiar unpostmodern fit or feel. The outer frame deliberately creates a monolithic point of view forcing the viewer back “into” the work (in this sense you could say that the movie itself becomes one giant ostensive sign which the viewer must accept or reject in one fell swoop). Instead of constantly intertwining the inner space of the work with the endless outer space of the context, as Derrida prescribes, the outer frame drives a wedge between the work and its context: it forces us, at least temporarily, to perceive the outer space as a blank, transcendent Beyond, and it forces us to focus back in on and privilege certain objects, acts, or persons in the work. The outer frame, in short, creates the temporarily binding conditions that cause mundane objects, acts, or people to become beautiful or ethical, sanctified or sublime. For example, the famous white plastic bag in American Beauty that Ricky Fitts thinks is beautiful would not appear so to us if it did not turn up again in the outer frame of the movie narrated by the now deified Lester Burnham. Similarly, in Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark you would not give a hoot about a half-blind Czech factory worker, her money troubles, or her passion for schmaltzy musicals if she did not sacrifice herself in such an ostentatious and “fitting” way at the end of the movie (she foregoes the money needed for her defense so that it may be used for her son’s eye operation).

Postmodernists, by contrast, tend to think of outer frames as either instruments of hegemonic repression or supplemental frippery that can be ignored at will. This applies to anyone, for example, who thinks American Beauty is nothing more than a scathing deconstruction of American middle-class life. If you believe this, you will also believe that the frame represented by the deified narrator is little more than an odd device that helps wrap up the social criticism practiced within the movie (interestingly enough, if you do so, you will be taking the position Derrida ascribed to Kant in The Truth in Painting, that is, you will write off the sacralizing frame as a mere ornament). Performatist outer frames always do something to a viewer, and this performance–at least temporarily–resists being sucked up in the infinite regress of discourse so crucial to postmodernism. In keeping with Goffman and Gans, you could say that the outer frame (in its “lock” with the inner one) makes the work itself into a scene to which the viewer or reader reacts in a cult-like, ritualistic way. The scene or frame of the performatist work “buys time” for viewers to plunge back into the scene and be affected by it once more, rather than leading them out into an endless tangle of spatial and temporal traces from which there is no return.

Ultimately, of course, the performatist outer frame is not impermeable or inviolable. Performatist works, in fact, are probably no less rich in citations and allusions than any others (a notable example is The Man Who Wasn’t There, which draws heavily and obviously on noir classics like Murder, My Lovely and Double Indemnity). Also, the rigid outer frame cannot and should not be exempted from ideological and metaphysical critiques. As a general rule of thumb, though, the more closed and restrictive the narrative outer frame, the more performatist it will “feel” to the viewer, and the greater will be its aesthetic-ritualistic impact. In this sense performatist movies tend towards the “closed” type of film described by Leo Braudy (1976, 44-51). In such movies, as Braudy suggests, “plot and pattern seem imposed from above,” (48) and the viewer has the feeling of being entrapped and manipulated. However, unlike the rather malevolent atmosphere projected in the movies of Braudy’s “closed” directors like Hitchcock and Lang, performatist films use rigid outer frames to suggest the existence of a redeeming transcendency, of a purifying Beyond outside the film. When the exposed and humiliated child-abusing patriarch in Vinterberg’s The Celebration voluntarily leaves the family gathering to exit forever into the blinding glare of the morning sun, then this is just such a redemptive ending. The toppled patriarch has now become the scapegoat of the family collective; his expulsion from the group is not just an act of belated justice, but also one of sacralization in the sense used by Girard (1987, 48-49). The evil patriarch will become a Danish family deity; he will be transported into a realm of “white” myth from which the regrouped collective will continue to derive solace and inner strength from having defeated him. Here, a poststructuralist might object that the collective is simply whitewashing a trauma in order to preserve the paternal, phallic order. Indeed, as Derrida likes to say, there is no way of preventing anyone from taking this kind of stance. However, such a viewer will have missed the point of the movie, which is to make us identify with the ability of a lifelong victim to transcend his victimary status in a way that is also productive for the community around him. The performatist work shows how it feels to be a victim of incest, and it shows how a corrupted social frame can be rejuvenated in order to accommodate what evidently remains a very basic problem of human interaction. This rejuvenation, in turn, can only be done by framing–by artificially focusing in on–the victim’s debasement, which is revealed and ritually reenacted before the eyes of all. In The Celebration, Christian’s revelation of his own victimization causes him to be temporarily expelled from the group, thus offering himself as a scapegoat–but also as a medium of redemption for the family, who tacitly aided and abetted the father. By contrast, in Derrida’s way of thinking, which transforms everything from defloration to the threat of nuclear war into an endless skein of discursive paradoxes, the victim’s psychological and physical plight is never made the focus of a centered identification. Instead, victims are compensated with a privileged, elusive position allowing them to act as the critical, incontrovertible Other of whatever hegemonic force happens to be weighing down on them. In a Derridean world, Christian’s victimary experience would have been intellectualized and sublimated in a network of decentered sign relations rather than played out again in a simplistic and rather obvious ritual; the Derridean dynamic would never allow a performance or scene which you could identify with directly.

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Performatism also has “open” films. However, these are constructed differently than postmodern conundrums or the sort of cinematic waltzes through reality described by Siegfried Kracauer. Examples of fairly open performatist films would be the Norwegian comedy Elling, Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich, and Tom Tykwer’s The Princess and the Warrior. Elling‘s hero, a self-proclaimed “mother’s son,” must be pulled out of a closet by the police after his dominating mother dies. Cast out of a mental institution into the world, he gradually acquires the ability to overcome the spatial and social frames confining him. In the end, he walks the city streets at night–still a “mother’s son,” as he says, but now also an unknown urban poet (he publishes by placing his poetry in miniature frames–boxes of sauerkraut that he buys and returns to the supermarket). Elling has transcended the series of closed institutional spaces confining him, yet still remains true to the kernel of his own closed-in self, which is the result of an imposed matriarchal order and not an authentic state of being or knowledge. In Being John Malkovich the openness is rooted in the absurd outer frame of the movie, which suggests that human “vessels” can be occupied by other people, thus allowing them to live forever. At the end, a new vessel–a little girl–is ogled by the old vessel–John Malkovich–and the film gives us to understand that the framing process will be continued on ad infinitum. And, in Tykwer’s The Princess and the Warrior, the two main characters, having successfully fled from a sanatorium where the “Princess” works, escape to a cottage facing out onto the vast, sublime expanse of an open, unmarked body of water–itself a larger incarnation of the life-saving pond into which the two lovers leapt from the hospital rooftop. This kind of leap into transcendence is even more pronounced (or overdone, as the case may be) in Tykwer’s Heaven, in which the two fleeing protagonists hijack a police helicopter and literally disappear into the sky. Openness in Tykwer’s movies is practically identical with the experience of sublimity, of a transcendent, unfathomable limit.

Openness can also result from ambivalence in the outer frame (not to be confused with undecidability, which as an aesthetic device rubs your nose in the fact that you can never definitively know what is going on in a movie’s plot). Intimacy doesn’t really end happily–the two lovers Claire and Jay part forever–but it seems clear that Jay, whose jealousy and curiosity destroyed the silent relationship, has actually fallen in love with Claire; their last meeting is “consecrated,” as it were, by the near presence of the gay French bartender Ian, who is the only person in the movie with a positive attitude toward human relationships (earlier on, when Jay cynically “confesses” that he meets a woman just to copulate with her in silence, Ian earnestly replies that “it’s not often you come across somebody who wants the same thing”). It’s not clear what will happen to the protagonists–hence the openness–but the movie does suggest that it is possible to love, even if the realization comes belatedly.

In theological terms, you could think of the shift from postmodernism to performatism as one from a radically deist notion of the world to a radically theist one. Regarding film, this theological subtext must be taken quite literally. This is because the most incisive and comprehensive postmodern theory of film, that of Gilles Deleuze (1986 and 1989, orig. 1983 and 1985), is based on an entirely conscious use of the deist metaphysics developed by Leibniz and continued later by Bergson. In this tradition, the notion of a personal God is replaced by a dynamic, constantly shifting relation between parts and a whole. By definition, the whole represents a virtual field of possibility that the parts actualize in their own dynamic, individual ways. Leibniz, whose frame of reference is purely metaphysical, calls the virtual whole “God” and the parts “monads.” For Bergson the virtual whole becomes Time; for Deleuze, “cinema” or “meta-cinema.” Unlike his predecessors, Deleuze considers the parts to be fairly arbitrary; they can be just about anything that is physically set off from the never-ending flow of energy coursing through the world. Deleuze, for example, treats “frames” (mise en scène), “shots,” “images,” and even “faces” in pretty much the same way that Leibniz speaks of monads. Each part actualizes the virtual whole of the movie (or the virtual whole of all movies); at the same time, the virtual whole is constituted by the specific inner dynamic of the image unfolding within it. The part, which represents a certain segment of movement through the whole, is defined by the whole, while the whole, in its virtual plenitude, eludes anything but partial, constantly shifting perceptions of what it might be in toto. Deleuzian concepts reverberate with this radically relational, decentered logic, which is meant to cut through our spatially fixed concepts and tap into the virtual, open Whole of relations around them–much in the same way that Bergson wants us to cut through our spatially fixed concepts in the durée and tap into a rather static, diffuse kind of virtual Time (in reality the simultaneity of all dynamic, immanent relations, or the deist God).

The point here is not to belittle Deleuze’s theory, which is a brilliantly conceived work of applied philosophy and a useful tool for thinking about movies. Film is a fluid and temporal medium, and practically no theorist today–let alone practitioner–would want to return to an aesthetic based on still photography or the ironclad type of montage practiced by Eisenstein. However, I think we have to realize that the flowing, endlessly open, deist world of postmodern film effectively described by Deleuze is now being exposed to strategies of framing, centering, and ordering that are comparable to those found in theist cosmologies.(5) In short, filmmakers are beginning to impose closed, monistically organized narrative frames on what is by nature a moving, fluid medium. Rather than being based on abstract or impersonal part/whole relationships, fictional worlds are now shown to be set in a world that appears to have been “framed” or formed by a personal creator, who may appear explicitly or implicitly. Also, within this framed world, characters tend to act like personal creators in their relations with other people. Worlds constructed in this way become ethical by definition (whether subjects really act ethically in that world is another matter–deceit is always possible). What is important, however, is no longer the relation of a part to a whole, but rather of one framed subject to another framed subject within the greater frame of the narrative world–a situation that is specifically ethical and aesthetic in the way used by Kant, and specifically anthropological in the way used by Gans.(6) Performatism, you could say, seeks to restore a space where transcendence, goodness, and beauty can be experienced vicariously, by identifying with fictional ostensive scenes (inner frames) and with the possibility of transcendence as such (outer frames). In this kind of “framed” art, we can all appreciate and be moved by incredible events even if we “know better”–that is, even if we know they don’t apply in the practical world.

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The problem of framing is closely tied to that of the subject. Once more, it is useful to draw on Goffman to build a bridge between postmodernism and performatism. At first, Goffman’s subject might appear to be postmodern–the mere effect of a multitude of overlapping and conflicting frames not reducible to one single kernel or core. However, the “Goffperson” is never so consumed by the discourse it uses so much as to lose all sense of orientation or decorum (Collins 1988, 59-60). As Goffman nicely says at the beginning of Frame Analysis, “all the world is not a stage” (1974, 1). Just because we slip in and out of complex sets of overlapping roles doesn’t mean that we get hopelessly lost in them, or that fact and fiction are really equivalent, or that the possibility that something can be fabricated means that our everyday faith in it must be vitiated. Our ability to find a firm “footing” or “anchoring” (Goffman’s term) in social interaction is possible because, unlike the poststructuralists, Goffman also sees social frames in a ritual, sacral dimension (cf. Goffman 1967, esp. 47-95, “The Nature of Deference and Demeanor”). This is rather different from a commonsense, namby-pamby trust in convention, which a poststructuralist would have no problem confirming as a fact of social life. Indeed, Goffman, following Durkheim, goes so far as to say that social interaction hinges on a tacit agreement in everyday interactions to deify individual subjects: “Many gods have been done away with, but the individual himself stubbornly remains as a deity of considerable importance” (Goffman 1967, 95). In other words, society is held together by individual subjects using frames in a way that both enhance their own “holy” status and uphold the decorum necessary to allow others to do the same.(7)

This mutual respect for the sanctity of the individual can be made into a element of plot, even in rather unconventional, violent situations. In Panic Room, for example, the theist creator of the saferoom Burnham, played by Forest Whitaker, is driven by a double dose of resentment: he resents Meg’s having a three-story Manhattan townhouse–the loot from a messy divorce–and he needs the millions hidden in the panic room to resolve a nasty custody battle of his own. After successfully getting into the room, however, his respect for the human object of desire (the child in the custody case, equivalent to his own) causes him to aid Meg’s daughter, to whom he administers a badly needed insulin shot. Ultimately, Burnham will shoot the evil, faceless Raoul to save both mother and daughter; at the end of the movie, the cornered burglar stands with arms spread, Christ-like, as 22 million dollars in ill-gotten bank deeds flutter away in the wind. The rather more cynical and complex Cube is less sanguine about how human nature reacts in a closed, threatening frame. At the end of the movie, only the resentment-free autist Kazan manages to get out of the Cube, with all the other characters either falling prey to their own hubris or to resentful rivalry. The movie suggests that an act of transcendence–escaping the Cube–can come about only through a transpersonal mixture of rivalry and cooperation, of intentionality and disinterestedness. The movie ends by deifying a new, “simple” origin represented by a cowed, stuttering character who fears the color red–the color of blood–above all else. And, as in The Celebration and The Man Who Wasn’t There, the hero stumbles out into a blinding white light suggesting the infinite openness and sublimity of experience beyond the outer work frame. The deification of the subject, though hardly noticed in everyday life, is now being brought to the forefront in narrative arts like the cinema.

The performatist subject, like Goffman’s, is a constructed or framed one. Unlike Goffman’s facile and highly adaptive social actor, however, performatist heroes and heroines are, at least at the beginning of their development, locked into a tight “fit” with a single, set frame. These fits can be more or less self-imposed, as in Idiots, Ghost Dog, and American Beauty or, as more usually seems to be the case, involuntary, as in Amélie, Elling, The Celebration, Being John Malkovich, The Man Who Wasn’t There, The Princess and the Warrior, Dancer in the Dark, The Cider House Rules, Panic Room,Cube… In these movies it is up to the subject to transcend the constraining frame in some way, often with the aid of “fortuitous” happenings suggesting the handiwork of a theistic creator (i.e., an omnipotent but unreliable author intervening at odd times in the plot). Almost always, the framed subject is forced to become a theist creator itself, though always in a vulnerable, peculiarly human way. Conversely, it is possible for theist creators to “fall” into a personal, vulnerable mode. Panic Room, for one, uses these ironic switches very effectively to create suspense. At first, the weak, seemingly powerless mother and daughter reside in the powerful center frame, with the designer of the safe room helplessly trying to get in; the roles of weak and strong switch back and forth as the film progresses. As it turns out, the true objects of identification in the movie aren’t the victims–the edgy, vengeful Jodie Foster character Meg and her know-it-all daughter–but the theist burglar Burnham, who combines the languid spirituality of Forest Whitaker’s Ghost Dog persona with the involuntary self-sacrifice carried out by Burnham’s namesake in American Beauty. By the end of the movie, everyone left alive has been redeemed through the Forest Whitaker character, albeit indirectly. Meg’s unfaithful husband gets badly beaten up (by Burnham’s unwanted accomplice Raoul) while trying to help her, and Meg and her daughter, seated on a Central Park bench, begin to look for an apartment suited more to their modest living needs than to draining the bank account of her battered ex-husband.

In my original formulation of performatism, I suggested that the prototypical performatist subject is dense or opaque. The former quality must not be taken too literally–performatist characters don’t necessarily have to be fools or play at being them. Performatist heroes and heroines are, however, almost invariably opaque, since their initial identity is the result of a too tight fit between their selves and a primary frame. Amélie, for example, is at first caught up in an isolated personal frame caused by her father’s mistaken diagnosis of a dangerous heart condition. Cissy, the “Princess” in Tykwer’s movie, practically grows up in the mental institution where her father is incarcerated and has trouble interacting with men in non-institutional settings. Homer Wells, of The Cider House Rules, who grows up in an orphanage, is a “creation” of the institute’s theistically inclined director, Dr. Larch, who named him and later trained him as a doctor in his own mold.

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As in Goffman’s frame analysis, the problems inherent in this “fit” between subject and frame usually become apparent only after something goes wrong with or within the frame–hence the great role played by theistically motivated “accidents,” which often have a liberating effect on the subjects inside. In the case of the Princess, it is a traffic accident which allows the Warrior to penetrate and literally breathe life into her by way of a tracheotomy–theist symbolism doesn’t get much more explicit than this. For Amélie it is the death of Lady Di, which through a series of small coincidences causes Amélie to step into the role of a benevolent theist prankster bringing happiness to others. The break can, however, be brought about willfully. Homer Wells, for example, leaves the orphanage and Dr. Larch after a conflict over abortion–an especially drastic and ethically controversial kind of theist intervention. After being faced with an serious ethical dilemma of his own in the outside world (he carries out an abortion on behalf of a woman impregnated by her father), Homer accepts his theist responsibility and returns to take over the role of the by now deceased Dr. Larch. With credentials faked by the good doctor, Homer becomes the new director of an institution devoted to turning out ever more opaque, constructed subjects. You don’t have to have studied poststructuralist rocket science to figure out that the whole theist, paternalistic order behind the orphanage is a giant, albeit benevolent, scam. In a typical performatist ploy, the movie affirms this deceit while at the same time forcing us to identify with its two theist heroes in spite of our better knowledge. In this way deconstruction is given its due–and at the same time defused for good. The point is not to know, but to identify with someone caught up in a frame that will always be generating intractable ethical problems.

In comedy, there are many ways of playing around with this sort of opaque character and its theist frame. In Being John Malkovich, the whole idea of a framed personality is carried ad absurdum by making John Malkovich himself into a “vessel” that can be entered for fifteen minutes at a time (at one point the hero and heroine charge $200 a shot for this). The point is not that the characters involved experience continually unfolding alterity or multifarious shifts in gender, as poststructuralist philosophy of self proposes. Rather, they enter into an artificial, opaque mode of being, a frame which allows them to transcend their own social position and/or gender in one fell swoop. Thus Maxine is able to have Lotte’s baby (conceived while the latter was in John Malkovich), and Craig, a talented but unsuccessful puppeteer, is able to manipulate John Malkovich while inside him, using Malkovich’s renown to make himself into the famous puppeteer Craig always wanted to be. The point is not that Lotte or Craig are experiencing otherness in an especially extravagant or subversive way; the point is that otherness can be appropriated by invading the “holy”–and whole–frame of someone else, in this case the hapless John Malkovich. You might call this a cynical version of the performatist or Goffmanian self: being involves role-playing or getting into an opaque frame in the present, within a certain time frame, and exploiting that frame to its utmost. Lotte, Craig and the others who inhabit John Malkovich do not really experience otherness in the way envisioned by someone like Judith Butler, that is, as a belated, constantly unfolding play with bits and pieces of gender having no natural, preordained configuration. Rather, the characters get to buy into a whole, though temporary, otherness by being John Malkovich for fifteen minutes at a time. The grotesque point of the movie is that people don’t revel in otherness for sheer pleasure or to escape some hegemonic dictate of society; instead, they want to control and inhabit others so that they may live forever as their own selves. Ideal selfness, in other words, consists in appropriating otherness (understood as someone else’s whole frame) for your own ends. Conversely, as the movie makes clear, you can’t achieve ideal selfness through oneness with yourself. When John Malkovich finally gets wind of what is going on and enters his own portal, he is aghast to find a world in which everyone is John Malkovich and in which “John Malkovich” is the only word spoken–a nightmarish world of asocial, redundant self-deification.(8) Being John Malkovich brilliantly parodies a basic, insoluble problem of theism: namely that as a theist creator, you need someone else in order to be yourself. Fashioning someone in your own likeness inevitably involves creating someone weaker than you and dependent on your own self (it is no accident that the hero is a puppeteer). Conversely, a character striving for deification will also attempt to mold others in his own image and manipulate them as much as possible according to his own needs. Much more reconciliatory, on the other hand, is the movie’s wildly dark suggestion that this kind of manipulation can be carried out by a collective (at the end, a group of genteel-looking elderly people enter the actor and proclaim: “we are John Malkovich!”). Actually, we don’t even mind this sort of appropriation, since John Malkovich, with his vaguely malevolent persona and his postmodern ability to slip into any role whatsoever, is the ideal vehicle for it: we do not mourn the “loss” of a personality that is opaque and infinitely adaptable to begin with.

It is probably too premature to make any sweeping claims about performatist cinematography. Its most memorable individual devices–jumpy use of hand-held cameras (the Dogma movies), black-and-white noir-style photography (The Man Who Wasn’t There), rhythmic use of fade-outs (Memento), etc.–are quite familiar in formal terms and are in themselves not enough to define an epochal shift. What does seem to hold true for most performatist cinematography is a double strategy that is “predicted” by the double nature of the originary frame: performatist movies can be said to anthropologize time-space relations on the one hand and to sacralize them on the other.

8

Just how this works becomes clearer when considered against the background of Deleuzian, deist cosmology. In the deist tradition everything in the world takes place on a single, immanent plane: psychomechanically defined impulses of energy on the one side are processed by psychomechanically defined consciousness on the other. Deleuze, for example, speaks of cinema as a “spiritual automaton” (1989, 263); the brain is for him “nothing but . . . an interval, a gap between an action and a reaction” (1986, 62). Our consciousness is a material extension of reality and reality a spiritual extension of our consciousness. The two are different expressions of the same thing, although by definition they are always somewhat out of sync–you are not what you perceive in the world and the world’s energy will always have flowed a bit farther down the line by the time your perception of it gels into a fixed concept. Rather than running after reality trying to paste cut-out concepts back onto it, deists try to bring the two disparate types of immanence to meet in the way they think best fits the metaphysical flux of the world, that is, in terms of time and relationality. Because this happy meeting of mind and world must still take place in the vulgar confines of space, this is easier said than done. Bergson, for example, rejects film as a mechanical deceit because his radical intuitivism rules out any positively defined semiotic mediation between mind and matter; for similar reasons he is unable to make any coherent statements about aesthetics or poetic method. Deleuze, by contrast, is a good deal more flexible on this point, arguing–quite plausibly–that consciousness and world can be thought of as converging in the medium of film (Deleuze 1986, 20). Because Deleuze thinks of film as either conveying something of the essence of fluid materiality (the “movement-image”(9)) or as the direct apprehension of time caused by the disruption of coherence and teleology (the “time-image”(10)), this leads to two basic types of movie, depending on what kind of image is emphasized. In discussing film’s historical development, Deleuze likes to speak of an “action-image” on one hand and a “crystal-image” on the other. Stripped to its barest essentials, the action-image can be thought of as a focal point capturing primary human emotions and the binary conflicts growing out of them; the latter, in turn, can unfold either in large, epic forms (as an integral) or in small, ethical ones (as a differential). The action-image and its many variants form the basis for the practices dominating pre-World War II narrative cinema. The crystal-image, by contrast, breaks away from the chronological, motivated representation of affect and conflict in order to tap into the virtual Whole of the world (Leibniz’s God and Bergson’s Time). This Whole is an endlessly open Other, the virtual, constantly unfolding totality of all moving relations. The “crystal-image” refracts and reflects, plays with sound and sensuality, causes characters to be “swallowed up” in non-localizable relations (Deleuze 1989, 41). Deleuze relates this quite convincingly to the techniques of postmodern cinema, beginning with postwar cinema in Italy and the French Nouvelle Vague of the 1960’s. There is no doubt that these concepts lead to very subtle and productive insights on film, and there is no doubt about their basic compatibility with postmodern and/or poststructuralist thought.

Unfortunately, Deleuze’s concepts have the same effect on cultural history as do all other basic strategies of postmodernism: they choke off any further attempt to describe cultural development above or beyond them. If you force the crystal-image still further, you will plunge even deeper into the depths of postmodernist virtuality; if you fall back on the action-image, you will be doing little more than ironically (or naively) citing tried-and-true techniques of pre-war cinema. As a matter of fact, if you stick with the concept of image as the filmic and metaphysical nexus between reality and consciousness, you will be condemned to shuttle back and forth endlessly between part and whole, as is the case in Deleuze’s deism. The point is not to rework the concept of image, but to start thinking of cinematography in terms of a human/theist perspective. There are indications that just such a change is occurring right now on the practical level in performatist cinema.

As suggested above, performatist cinema likes to approach the world in terms of fixed, boxed-in spaces and bought or apportioned time. This approach is neither a repetition nor a citation of grandpa’s narrative cinema, nor does it mark a return to the cookie-cutter type of montage common to the early days of film. Its focal point is once more the frame, which must be understood as a temporal, spatial or ethical limit imposed on someone. As outlined above, the frame itself may be thought of as being theist or sacral on the one hand and anthropological or human on the other. The theist side of the frame impinges on, crimps, or temporarily cuts off the continuous passage from one state of affairs to another in an authoritative way. Such frames are imposed from above or without and cannot be easily overcome or placed in doubt. They are, for the most part, onerous givens that–like theist cosmologies everywhere–subject the characters within them to severe tests of faith, courage, or perseverance. The flip, or inner, side of the sacral frames is that their constraining character sets off an impulse to transcend in the human characters locked up inside of them. The “bound” characters, in other words, react to their incarceration by trying to break out of, rework, or somehow overcome the frames confining them. The force exerted by the theist frame and the intensity of the human reactions to it materialize directly in plot and cinematographic technique. For in film we are simultaneously confronted with the impassive, fear-evoking authority of theist time-space and the emotional pathos of human time-space trying to overcome it. Perhaps the most effective allegory of this situation is Cube, in which the unforgiving theist space makes purely human time–the time before hunger and thirst are going to incapacitate the six would-be escapees–into the measure of all things. Whereas the deist space-time continuum provides consolation by letting you tap into the infinitely unfolding otherness of the world, theist space puts the heat on you, challenging you to use your own time to become like the higher, ineffable will that is bearing down on you from above.

9

One of the most striking examples of how temporal framing works in the new cinematography is the Coen Brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There. At first, the viewer might be inclined to see the movie as nothing more than a lengthy, ironic citation–the movie fastidiously imitates noir conventions both in its camera work and in its depiction of a criminal case unfolding in a Californian town of 1949. Although there are admittedly certain breaks and discrepancies within the movie’s period style, they do not interfere with our perception of it as a whole slice of time. (Real noir films, for example, never mixed science fiction and detective plots, as happens here, and the Production Code would not have allowed a young girl to make a sexually explicit pass at an older man, as happens between Birdie Abundas and Ed Crane, the hero. Neither device, however, represents a break with the paranoid ambience and sexual forthrightness common to noir.) The question remains, however, as to just how this slice of time acts upon us as viewers.

Given the similarities between The Man Who Wasn’t There and various other films of the Coen Brothers, you could, I suppose, make a case for the movie being a postmodern critique of 1950-ish American mores. The society in which Ed Crane lives is founded on politically incorrect norms clearly tailored to empowering white, male, Anglo-Saxon heterosexuals. Either you’re a real man, like Big Dave Brewster (who is killed by Ed), or a “pansy” like Creighton Tolliver (the traveling salesman killed by Big Dave). Sexually mature women like Ed’s wife Doris are defined by nylons, lace underwear, perfume and the like; “innocent” girls like Birdie Abundas wear bobby sox and v-neck sweaters. In terms of language the white, Anglo-Saxon culture sets the tone: Japanese are “Nips,” Germans “heinies,” and Italians “wops”; a Jewish lawyer and a fat Frenchman of color also don’t come off too well. These two hegemonic orders–the white, Anglo-Saxon one and the male, heterosexual one–meet ideally in the form of Big Dave Brewster, a ladies’ man who has made his reputation mowing down “Japs” in World War II.

As in their previous movies, the Coen brothers expose the grotesque inconsistencies and flagrant rule-bending peculiar to this order. Big Dave, for example, gladly dons an apron in order to spend some time washing dishes with his mistress, Ed’s wife Doris. Doris, who is herself of impeccable Italian lineage, hates “wops” and tries to assimilate as much as possible. The teenage girl, Birdie Abundas, proves to be anything but innocent. And, as a hired detective later discovers, Big Dave’s heroism in the war is a fabrication designed to further his business career.

If the Coens were really only concerned with exposing the falsity and hypocrisy of 1950s America or exhaustively citing noir norms, the movie would hardly be very memorable. What in fact makes the film remarkable is its focus on transcendence and the hero’s–and our–gradual realization that such a transcendence might be possible and desirable.

This can be better understood if you think of the whole movie as a temporal frame. We perceive this frame as a homogenous chunk of concrete time, rather than as the diffuse apprehension of virtual time peculiar to postmodernism (as an example of this you could take David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, which deliberately mixes up styles taken from the fifties, sixties and seventies to create a Deleuzian, vaguely paranoid feeling of a Time existing outside of space and chronology). In addition to being homogeneous, time in The Man Who Wasn’t There is also depicted as both historical and obsolete: details like the wearing of fedoras and the use of politically incorrect language mark it as irrevocably passé. This historicity creates in us a feeling of distance to the time frame: we, who neither wear fedoras nor verbally abuse minorities, can easily feel superior to it. This is theist time, which at first appears well-defined and set: like theist creators or authors we stand outside of it looking in. At first, theist time would seem to stand in simple contrast to Ed’s personal or human time, which is measured by the heads of hair he cuts and the inexorable, step-by-step unfolding of the plot. So far, these two types of time–the authorial and the personal–are part of standard narrative procedure and not in themselves noteworthy. What keeps The Man Who Wasn’t There from being just another remake of a noir “action-image” plot is the way we (and Ed) are made to reverse our apprehension of the two types of time. In the course of the movie, our feeling of temporal superiority to Ed gradually changes to one of identification, whereas Ed’s feeling of living incrementally gradually becomes more and more expansive and spiritual, until he disappears completely into the transcendental whiteness of the screen.

This interplay of theist and anthropological time takes place in several ways. Originally, Ed’s scheme to blackmail Big Dave in order to co-finance a dry-cleaning franchise (run by a homosexual traveling salesman) seems petty and emotionally almost unmotivated–he and Doris carry on what appears to be a marriage of convenience, and he isn’t all that perturbed by being two-timed (“I guess, somewhere, that pinched a little, too” [Coen & Coen 2001, 26]). Gradually, however, we discover that Ed’s attempts to escape his time frame are motivated by a vaguely felt kind of spiritual quest. Dry cleaning, which is touted with preacher-like fervor by Creighton Tolliver (“You heard me right, brother, ‘dry cleaning,’–wash without water, no suds, no tumble, no stress on the clothes” [Coen & Coen 2001, 12]), appears as the first step in a search for ways to achieve a spiritual cleansing not possible in the cramped social setting of the late 1940s. Here, our theistic superiority to Ed’s time frame helps provide a moment of involuntary identification: we know that dry cleaning is not a scam, just as we know that there is a way out of the 1940s-style mindset with its wops and pansies. We know, in other words, that we can transcend.(11) At the same time, the wall-to-wall noir cinematography causes us to experience 1940s-style temporality as an inescapable, sensual fact: as spectators, we are outside the time frame intellectually but in it emotionally and visually. This makes it possible for us to take Ed’s last words before he is executed entirely seriously, as the prophetic expression of a transcendent longing which may also be our own:

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The question posed at the end of the movie is not so much “who is Ed Crane?” but rather “who are we?” One, quite plausible answer might be that we are postmodernists. That would mean that we are stuck in an ironic bind of always already possessing partial knowledge about the conditions necessary for achieving transcendence but never quite being able to experience it ourselves. Taking this a step farther, you might argue that Ed Crane died for nothing. Had he lived to transcend his own time frame he would have wound up in ours, in which a premium is placed on ironic reflection rather than on the search for “things they don’t have words for here.” The movie, however, anticipates this argument and counters it using a split appeal to our theist and human ways of identifying with Ed. The crucial scene takes place in Doris’s cell (based on circumstantial evidence she has been falsely accused of murdering Big Dave). Her attorney, a cynical, money-hungry, obviously Jewish lawyer named Freddy Riedenschneider, suggests a defense based on his version of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle:

From our theist vantage point this sounds like a parody of postmodern sophistry, as also does Riedenschneider’s later defense of Ed (“He told them to look not at the facts but at the meaning of the facts, and then he said the facts had no meaning. It was a pretty good speech, and even had me going . . .” [Coen & Coen 2001, 100-101]). In terms of noir visual devices Riedenschneider is deliberately cast in a bad light: as he talks, he moves in and out of sunbeams flooding in starkly from above the cell; in the moment that he ends his speech he turns away from the light, his face utterly black and no longer visible. With Riedenschneider, the Coen brothers use the incarnation of an anti-Semitic stereotype to debunk the notion of posthistoire—i.e., the idea that “there is no ‘what happened.’” However, this kind of ad hominem argumentation remains completely acceptable because we experience it as having been set in a time frame we have transcended–thus proving that “something has happened” after all. Placed in the proper theist frame, any form of ugliness can become ethically good, aesthetically appealing, and sublime.

The noir cinematography in The Man Who Wasn’t There is quite obviously a gimmick–an effective, though one-time thing.(12) Gimmickry of this sort is not absolutely necessary, but it does seem to crop up frequently as a side-effect of performatist attempts to make transcendence visible and palpable. The most famous such gimmickry is, of course, enshrined in the Dogma 95 manifesto. Widely misunderstood in postmodern circles as a misguided attempt to return to authenticity, the Dogma 95 credo is really nothing more than a theist frame set up so that humans may transcend it or, alternately, so that theist moviemakers may be humbled by having to assume a crudely human perspective. Lars von Trier’s Idiots takes the latter route: until the very last scene of the movie, which makes everything fall into place, you may have felt yourself in the presence of an “idiotic,” literally unfocused director. In truth, of course, the sloppy camera work is a (tiring) gimmick setting you up for a carefully planned denouement deifying a meek heroine. The much more artful Celebration, by contrast, uses a break with the anthropological, hand-held camera perspective to suggest the possibility of transcendence: in one scene, oddly shot from a bathroom ceiling, we are suddenly shown a perspective that can only be that of Christian’s dead sister, whose suicide was the driving force behind the hero’s decision to confront his father (appropriately, Vinterberg “broke” the Dogma 95 vow of chastity and used a crane to make the shot). Gimmicks abound, too, in the other movies mentioned–the director of Amélie uses digital techniques to show the heroine’s heart pounding away in her chest when she falls in love, and the people who climb into the John Malkovich portal view the world through a slit at the top of the screen that represents his seeing-eye view. Taken together, these devices do not, of course, an epoch make. However, it is important to take them seriously as part of the performatist play with immanence and transcendence, with the theist and the human.

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One of the most radical exercises in performatist cinematography can be found in a movie that remains, when viewed as a whole, with at least one foot still firmly planted in postmodernism. This is Christopher Nolan’s Memento, by now something of a cult classic. The main conceit behind the film is that the hero, Leonard Shelby, is suffering from a memory disorder caused by a blow to the head received while he was trying to defend his wife, who he repeatedly states was raped and murdered. As a result, Leonard has only a short-term memory; he can remember his life before the attack, but forgets everything else after about fifteen minutes. The movie presents his basic story as a series of 22 slightly overlapping temporal frames or scenes documenting how he tries to seek revenge. This, however, is not all. Memento splits up into two times: Leonard’s stunted, framed time, and chronological time, which, in an act of theist willfulness, has been set to run backwards. The movie begins with the end of Leonard’s attempts to find and kill the murderer of his wife; as it progresses (backwards), frame by overlapping frame, we learn more and more about how Leonard’s final act of vengeance came about. The hero experiences a series of framed presences in terms of a dysfunctional human time, while we experience the accumulation of these presences in terms of both his time and a theist, authorial time. In the beginning, these two times are practically identical: in the first few scenes we are as confused as Leonard is as to what is going on. This feeling of absolute bewilderment caused by a cruelly limited frame forces the viewer, at least at first, into a close identification with the hero–we, too, experience an odd, frantic kind of need to overcome the frames confining us and to find out what the things around us mean. Gradually, however, a distinct split in experience and knowledge develops. For, as our theist time accumulates, we begin to realize that Leonard, who knows that he forgets things, has set himself up by writing (not very reliable) notes instructing himself what to do and whom to trust or avoid. The man he kills at the beginning of the movie, a corrupt cop named Teddy, is by all appearances probably not the murderer; he’s someone who tried to manipulate Leonard and whom Leonard decided to make the scapegoat for his wife’s murder. Leonard, who is stuck in a hellishly limited personal time, becomes the self-appointed executor of an impersonal vengeance that will always be seeking new victims or scapegoats. In a way, Leonard is the prototype of all participants in mimetic rivalry: he embodies a kind of minimal human consciousness programmed to seek revenge over and over again–the acts of vengeance being his performances, his way of transcending what he experiences as one, severely limited, time frame or present. This view of human consciousness, though limited and pessimistic, could at least be considered the ground of a primary, monist frame.(13) Nolan, however, complicates things by adding a second set of frames to his movie: he intersperses the backtracking color frames recounting the murder story with backtracking black-and-white frames in which Leonard recalls a character named Sammy Jankis, who suffers from the same mental condition as he. Without going into all the details, it will suffice to say that Sammy kills his diabetic wife without being aware of it and then falls apart; we seem him sitting in a mental institution–and for a split second we see in his place Leonard Shelby. A neurophysiological, monist origin becomes a psychoanalytical, double one: just as we think we are about to get the hang of Leonard Shelby’s original motive, we are told that he is, psychologically speaking, someone else. Whether or not this basic confusion about who Leonard is makes Memento a better movie is a matter of some debate.(14)Memento, however, remains interesting as a case study because the dividing line separating postmodernism from performatism runs right through it. As long as the frame has an ontological, anthropological ground it is performatist; as soon as the ground is made into a conundrum or double origin the frame becomes postmodern.

Memento reminds us that we are still in a transition period from postmodernism to performatism. There are movies that start off with a seemingly firm performatist premise but then fade back into postmodern murkiness, and there are movies that have a primary, “grounded” frame but hide it in what at first seems to be an undecidable tangle of double attributions. As an example of the first type of movie you could take David Fincher’s Fight Club, whose yuppie, Caspar-Milquetoast narrator (Edward Norton) teams up with a subversive and willfully cruel character named Tyler Durden (a slumming Brad Pitt). The two begin by founding a “fight club” devoted to bloody, bare-handed fisticuffs; eventually, the Brad Pitt character moves on to organize an urban prankster group called Project Mayhem (this is one movie that could not have been made after 9/11–it ends with two towers of an unnamed, ostensibly empty financial center collapsing into themselves after a bomb attack by the Project). The fight club and the prankster-like terror group are evidently meant to re-empower the raw-knuckled kind of masculinity that was repressed for so long by effeminate postmodern culture (this is the avowed intention of Chuck Palahniuk, who wrote the book on which the movie is based). Seen in terms of GA, though, the movie is naive: it would like to take us back to before the originary scene, to a state of pure, signless mimetic conflict in which resentment is purged through the application of brute force and not through signification (one of the rules of the Fight Club, in fact, is that you’re not allowed to talk about it). As in Memento, the movie ends by swatting us over the head with a postmodern red herring that it has been dragging through the plot the whole time: Tyler Durden, as it turns out, is the narrator’s evil alter ego. Although the narrator believes he has purged himself of Durden by the movie’s end, the last frame of the movie suggests that quite the opposite is true–Durden enjoyed splicing snippets of porno movies into family films to disturb viewers subliminally, and this is just what we see (though not quite subliminally) at the movie’s very end. The cruel prankster Durden, in other words, is still in control of the frame.

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By contrast, movies like David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and Alejandro Amenábar’s  Open Your Eyes (the Spanish movie on which Vanilla Sky is based) seem at first to offer us nothing more than a spectacular off-and-on between two undecidable, highly confusing perspectives. As Eric Gans has, however, shown in his Chronicle 269, one perspective in Mulholland Drive does turn out to be real–it acts as a psychological ground for the bizarre fantasy sequence with which the movie begins. Lynch’s movie, though still exuding postmodern paranoia, turns out to be devoted to a surprisingly unparanoid theme–that of unrequited love. Open Your Eyes also confronts us with the interplay of two seemingly undecidable perspectives: it concerns a handsome young Spaniard and his grotesquely disfigured alter ego, who continuously, and seemingly senselessly, replace one another as the film rolls along. Just before the confused hero (and the viewer) are about to give up in despair, the movie provides a watertight, reconciliatory explanation: the hero, it seems, has died, but a futuristic society has developed a process allowing him to dream his own life through again even in death. The disconcerting appearances of his disfigured self can be willed away in the next cycle of the dream, which begins with the hero jumping from a rooftop and landing unscathed below. The character, in other words, has the power to be both theist and human; he can frame his own life-after-death in the transcendent reality of the dream.

I don’t pretend to have described the transition from postmodernism to performatism in a comprehensive way. There are no doubt dozens of other contemporary movies that fit the performatist bill, and there are numerous films that in the early and mid-1990s were already edging away from postmodern themes–Eric Gans has noted this development in several of his Chronicles (see, for example, No. 42, “Tarantino Transcendence,” or No. 80, “Triangular Utopias”). However, I believe that the broadly drawn borderline of 1997-1999, which in my view marks the beginning of performatism, will hold up to further scrutiny. The thematic and cinematographic innovations introduced by the films in this period have not only caught on, but are also being constantly reapplied and renewed. As such, I have no doubt whatsoever that the performatist devices and themes just described will continue to develop in exciting new ways in the coming few years, even as the tried-and-true postmodern ones wither and fade. Much less easy to predict is when film critics and theorists will begin to jettison their increasingly unworkable poststructuralist concepts and begin to apply more fitting, monist ones to the new epoch. But that, of course, is where an already well-developed theory of performatism can lend a helping hand.

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1. Eric Gans, the Hypothesis, and the Humanities

Scholars in the human sciences (the arts, liberal thought, and the verstehen varieties of social sciences) are often called upon to supply new modes of thinking to meet the challenges of a post-Marxist, post-modern, even post-humanist world. A new cartography of methodological expectations and possibilities within the purview of these human sciences would now appear desirable. Never has the world of thought-about-thought been required to perform so much, and only rarely, regrettably, has it offered so little. An interesting exception to this is formed by a small group of thinkers inspired by the writing of René Girard and, among these, especially the author of Signs of Paradox, Eric Gans. At the outset of that work, drawing together threads of previous books and articles in the field of generative anthropology, Gans himself reflects on the humanities in the following way:

At one level the observation on disciplines may appear banal: what else, after all, would the human sciences be about? Perhaps one might venture that scholars in the humanities intermittently need reminding of this fact. But there is also a claim that the human itself has a definable and describable genesis, capable of being thought within the disciplinary matrix of the humanities. That is, for Gans, the origin and definition of what it actually is to be human centers on the moment language itself comes into being. By the standards of contemporary cultural theory it is a breathtaking hypothesis, one whose very boldness raises questions about the possibility of the hypothesis as such on the one hand, and what we colloquially might call its ethico-political dimensions on the other.

For some, the very attempt to theorize at this level of generality is out of step with the times, and affronts current intellectual habits. The boldness itself, however, has to do with both methodology and claims made. Each of these is enmeshed with a renewal of the form and promise of the hypothesis. Although not an explicit resource, in one sense the methodological dimension of Gans could be seen to stand in the tradition of the Husserlian reduction (and the Derridean deconstruction). The pursuit of the “scene of the human” is, if anything, a grander project than Husserl’s transcendental pursuit of eidetic objects, as in the important fragment titled “The Origin of Geometry.” More critically, the “tradition” exists as an underestimated influence of Husserl’s “reductive” method in Derrida’s own initial conceptions of deconstruction. A nascent form of deconstruction appears in an unstated form even in the book-length work about Husserl’s essay. In this work, and in Of Grammatology, the reduction appears within a negative, even prohibitional, idiom (whereby deconstruction pursues without anticipation of adequation the most irreducible moment or event or scene). The “reduction” reappears in Gans, especially in the Origin of Language and Signs of Paradox. In the process, though, a further shift of focus occurs: the Gansian version of analysis offers the promise of a hypothetical movement beyond, to a scene of “origin.”

The Husserlian provenance enables us to see the Gansian and Derridean analyses as branchings of a similar “methodological” tree, but with very different trajectories and performances. Indeed, much as Derrida developed his deconstructionist approach out of a critique of Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry,” a parallel can be made with the appurtenances, even genesis, of Gans’s own originary hypothesis. For Gans himself, the work of Girard is crucial to this “project.” When we turn back to Girard, however, we find this interesting acknowledgement–and explanation of the significance–of the origin of his variety of analysis. In response to a question as to why he had termed his variety of anthropology a “transcendental anthropology,” he replied

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This clearly is the terrain of Gans’s originary hypothesis, and indeed, generative anthropology. The repeated ritual exists as a trace-reminder of a past event; the originary hypothesis is a “reconstruction” directed at understanding the nature, history, and structure of its emergence and ongoing significance.

In welcoming the renewal of this variety of hypothesis, we see a special value and purchase for it within the domain of the human sciences. Beyond the above account, its features are readily described. It is above all parsimonious, “minimal” to use Gans’s preferred designation. Second, though, and partly because of this first feature, it is readily graspable and is therefore easily communicated. Whether one designates this as communicative efficacy or epistemological simplicity is a matter of emphasis. What emerges from this second feature of the Gans-style hypothesis is that it is simple enough to afford great explanatory power, or more precisely, it maximizes explanation relative to the extent of theoretical postulates. Third, this explanatory force can only happen, however, if the hypothesis is proposed in a certain knowing and above all,tentative, idiom. Its explanations will be provisional. But this then leads to the final defining feature of the renewed hypothesis. It is vulnerable. As it is simple enough to generate enormous explanation and even greater discussion, it can also be criticized (although we should read this epistemological vulnerability in a certain way, as will be discussed shortly).(1)

This essay, then, is not simply about Gans’s specific hypothesis, but about a new version of the hypothesis per se. What follows is gathered by our attempt to explain its nature and to indicate its ethico-political place. We begin, in fact, with Derrida’s insight in Of Grammatology that, despite his good intentions, Lévi-Strauss’s rejection of his predecessors was based on participation in ethnocentric and even Romantic conceptions of otherness grounded in Rousseau. Yet Tobin Siebers, in his perceptive work The Ethics of Criticism, has shown that in many pragmatic regards, there is little reason to prefer the later account. Clearly some critical facility is needed, especially when Siebers goes on to suggest that Derrida’s reading “over the shoulder of Lévi-Strauss’s shoulder” in the deconstructionist idiom itself leads to Rousseauism. There is, as we shall see, a world of difference between the “first anthropologists [who] placed themselves among ‘primitives’ in a ‘missionary’ capacity” (92), the devout, at least in his belief of the anti-ethnocentrism of his project, but still guilt-ridden Lévi-Strauss (92), and the questionable ethical dimensions of Derrida’s own attack on Lévi-Strauss’s double standards (83, 93). This difficult terrain is one we seek less to resolve than to view as the theoretical backdrop to our own ethically framed proposals.

Siebers is correct in his identification of a half-century of a certain “ethical attempt to prohibit the unjust treatment of other peoples” (92). For us, one of the more striking areas of failure of these attempts (structural anthropology, deconstruction) lies in their procedural operations within a framework of “prohibitory thinking” (cf. 92). Within this context of prohibitionism, Siebers finds deep homologies: Lévi-Strauss prohibits Rousseauism for its attempt at Western self-grounding in an ethical hypothesis of nature (94); Derrida, a “disciple of Rousseau at his most radical” condemns Lévi-Strauss for his false gesture of humility that disavows and yet claims the center (97).

Such ethical prohibitionism appears to be grounded in a chivalric model under whose logics a Western or highly Westernized critic “rescues” a marginalized figure and, thereby, rescues him or herself. In his Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Girard remarks on the long-standing nature of the tendency:

The latest prohibitory form of this long-standing violent intellectuality indicates appurtenances with even earlier moralistic codes of behavior. So perhaps we cannot do otherwise. But we can at least try. In this respect, we can add to Girard’s observation the following comments by Serres on the “judgmental” idiom of inquiry that has been the model of humanities scholarship in general. Serres’s criticism-about-criticism is that it is very often modeled on juridical idioms, setting itself up as arbiter of propositions:

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Ensnared in a mode of discourse that is itself simultaneously somewhat juridical and paranoid of judgment, Serres probably overstates the prospect for moving away from habits of judgment, for everyday life calls upon us to do it at each turn. But in our view, there is a need for an emphasis on approaches that are enabling, that afford the possibility of saying new things, of responding in ways that are heuristic and positive. In this respect, the subsequent critic has often been a figure who admonishes, a judge if not a cleric. We are not, in our view, so much “admonishing” or even disputing the earlier writers, as we are seeking a new theatre of conversation, one that occurs in the knowledge of what has gone before, but which does not seek to take place by refutation alone.

Our approach, it is true, would stand in very direct contrast to contemporary practices within the humanities (but not beyond). That is, the current courtroom tendencies lead to complex theoretical edifices on the one hand, or more often, even more complexly “anti-theoretical theory” on the other. Works of the former kind, like the baroque and bizarrely beautiful Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Fredric Jameson, or of the latter, Derrida’s own Of Grammatology, may hold our affections as scholars, but seem to have little force in a world they seek, with increasingly complex maneuvers, to explain (in the former case) or refuse to explain (in the latter). One might observe, somewhat controversially with Girard, that “faith in the progress of knowledge has been replaced by faith in the progress of ignorance”; one might also hope then “that this second faith will prove to be as unfounded as the first one was” (“Theory and its Terrors” 236).

If our views are accepted, even provisionally, it is not so much a question of such writers being “wrong” as it is of the need–and desire–for a new theatre of conversation. Writing after Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, after Jameson, after Girard and Gans too for that matter, involves no requirement for negating “judgment” and prohibition. On the contrary, we write in the knowledge of the achievements of these writers. What we call for is a new way of conversing. In this respect, Gans himself has remarked of his “originary hypothesis” that we can

The minimal hypothesis, on the other hand, with tremendous explanatory force and vulnerabilities written across its front door, has in our view an ethico-political value even as an heuristic device that the more cumbersome theories cannot match. This essay, then, is an appeal for a new kind of scholarship, a new kind of “conversation.”

A word on what follows. We open our analysis with two discussions of the discipline of anthropology. The first discussion sketches: an inter-relationship between the originary hypothesis we find in all of Gans’s work since the Origin of Language; the possibilities, problems, and prospects of a “secondary” field of hypotheses (outlined in tantalizing detail in the End of Culture); and the traditional postmodern critiques of the discipline that have arisen since the mid-eighties. If some of this involves criticism not just of the Cliffordesque tradition, but also of Gans’s own analyses at this point in time, the purpose of this section is to illustrate how, in our view, Gans is right to envision a terrain of originary and secondary hypothesizing. After establishing the nature of the Gansian promise, we then seek to turn these insights upon the writing-work of anthropology itself, the discipline par excellence of disavowal of the center, of emphatic marginality. We do this in a discussion of the scene of the writing lesson in Of Grammatology. In addition, we consider a complex join between disciplinarily “traditional” (albeit narrowly-defined and conventionally understood) anthropology, its structuralist critique and development, Derridean deconstruction, and Gansian generative anthropology. Expanding upon the communicational and ethical dimensions of this “scene,” we explore the issue of the scene itself as a theoretical formation that both links and distinguishes the works of Gans and Girard on the one hand, and Derrida on the other. From this discussion, we take up key “scenes” and “hypotheses” as they are handled by Gans, especially the work on mimesis, language, and the human. We conclude with some observations on the orthodox dread of hypothesizing, of the possibility of knowing, or even of straying beyond certain protocols of language.

2. Anthropology as Discipline

One year after the death of the great collaborator, Frederick Engels wrote and published his best known work, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and State(1884). But it is not the thought of the great critic and comrade that pervades this work. Instead, it is that of the all-but-forgotten anthropologist Lewis Morgan whose studies in anthropology and the ethnographic recording of other cultures form the basis of Engels’ incisive slice through civilization and capitalism in that book-length essay. So taken with Morgan’s work is Engels that he actually concludes with “Morgan’s verdict on civilization”:

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As we stand in the confusing proliferation of cultural and social formations, there is no disputing the need for study. Morgan is right to acknowledge this bewilderment, and in many regards his discipline’s highest promise was the systematic understanding of the criss-crossing of who and what we are, whence we came, and perhaps where we might one day be going. Beyond these “Enlightenment” sorts of claims, the discipline finds its deepest realization in projects like Engels’, where, on the basis of its learning, prospects for political and economic justice are outlined. Small wonder then that the work of anthropology is useful to both critical and speculative thought, no matter which culture we stand within.

But we must proceed carefully now, as we seek not to be restricted by a still newer wave of anthropological auto-critique. We too must view anthropology in its contexts of emergence: that is, we too can say that it was framed and engendered by an imperial order, and that Lewis Morgan was part of this context. Augmenting the early historical legacy was the ongoing practice of twentieth century anthropology-as-discipline that in its ever more specialized incarnations produced “alterity expertise” in the name of science. This clearly cannot stand. Nor did it. By the mid-eighties, writers like James Clifford applied post-structural critiques to the issues of knowledge and discipline to such an extent that every story was seen as partial, every knowledge as limited.

Taken at the letter, this self-proscription in retrospect seems absurd, an Inquisition-like farce of textual protocols, preventing any kind of effective criticism (the work of Engels, for instance, would have been impossible in such a terrain). So in many ways it was. Perhaps, though, we need to remember the wellspring of the objection before condemning the condemnation. Even before the chic Clifford “classic-postmodern” version of anthropology, we had plain objections like this appearing:

Note the ingredients here: first, the anthropologists are emissaries of a cultural formation that does not respect the people they study; second, they travel among marginal peoples in order to produce foundational works for their own cultures; third, their works do not usually help the peoples studied; fourth, their works are usually factually wrong. We will shortly consider these remarks, both in relation to the discipline (this section) and in relation to the constitution of epistemological fields (next section).

The very first thing we need to do is note a schism between this variety of postcolonial writing and that of the Clifford-style anthropologists. Where Clifford will insist that all knowledges are partial, limited, and, in the case of Western writing, ethnocentric, Jiménez, on the contrary, insists that there is such a thing as a “false” account, and by implication, therefore, the possibility of a “true” account. For those who have been oppressed by others (Western or otherwise), there is no doubt about the positive fact of the oppression, the deceitfulness or stupidity of the misrepresentations, and so on. In the upside down world of postcolonial studies, it seems, the only place to find attempts to record positive cultural accounts is in the realm of the ex-colonized. We can be quite sure that whenever we encounter monikers like “partial knowledge,” “decentring,” or even “ethnocentrism” we have patronage under a new name. That is, the disavowing performance comes from the same Western center that produced the original oppression. The most unfortunate consequence of this self-sanctifying dance of disavowal is that the very possibility of talking about material cultural form and transformation in cultures other than one’s own has receded. In tandem with this, in an age of profound migration and transformation, we witness the retreat of humanities and social science scholars from anything that might be seen as an “other.” The possibility that hypotheses can as a matter of course be respectfully ventured in a pluralistic academy, cross-argued and thought through, seems to have been replaced by elaborate protocols of self-abnegation and sterilization lest anything of import be said.

There were of course clear historical reasons for the conceptual “retreat.” It bears saying that we do not wish to throw the achievements of “postmodern anthropology” out with the bathwater of its rule-driven axiomatics and prohibition. Some time ago, we read with great amusement Terry Eagleton’s furious attack on Gayatri Spivak and postcolonial writing in general. We certainly agree with him that much “postmodern” and “postcolonial” writing comprises a “flamboyant theoretical avant-gardism [that conceals] a rather modest political agenda” (4). The same of course can be said for much of his own Marxist theory. But in both his and the case he describes, we would prefer to situate rather than eliminate these important moments in cultural theory. For us, be it Spivak and Bhabha or Clifford and Johannes Fabian, we find valuable critiques of practice. And returning to the above cited passage which precedes the advent of postmodern anthropology as such, we do not have to deny the possibility of cultural exchange and commentary to make this very basic observation about Jiménez’s remarks: every one of his objections to anthropology-as-practiced has a particular historical validity. Today, within a Hellenic-style imperium dominated by the modern democratic Alexander, there remain broad structural impediments to scholarly reciprocities (the difference between a Fijian studying the behavior of stockbrokers and a New Yorker doing fieldwork in Kadavu). But these are not insurmountable, especially if–in light of the above–the study is conducted within the purview of a critical framework, if the marginal work is understood as epistemological in character, if the results are shared, and if there are sufficient local anthropologists to generate self-knowledges that can be tallied with the outsiders’ claims.

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In the welter of self-condemnation and apparent disavowal, a series of remarkable achievements have been eclipsed, and could even be lost. Let us note these achievements. First, the mono-discourse of the Anglo-American academy has been pluralized. Writers like Homi Bhabha are as important as writers like Fredric Jameson, and even if Bhabha has made a science of writing from the margins, this does not mean that he is a marginal writer. Second, there are now indigenous and local anthropologists; anthropological knowledge is not ridiculous and wrong (and any European who produces a text filled with errors will discover this sooner rather than later). Third, the ground and need for a philosophically “secondary” anthropology based upon something like an “originary” field of hypothesis and thence axiom-devising generative anthropology is now clear. But this latter field still hangs in the balance, and awaits its fullest potentials.

Now all these positive transformations are actually weakened by a claim based tenuously in postmodern thought that all cultures exist somehow on the same level, that there are no grounds for comparative understanding. We wish to illustrate this claim by looking first at the possibility of an “Engels today,” before taking up the most problematic of Gans’s own texts to explain where we stand. We begin with Engels. Let us imagine that Morgan had situated his work and culture vis-à-vis those he studied, that he had a clear sense of how his marginality was significant to the European center, that he worked not just for Britain, but also for those he studied. And let us imagine a modern-day Engels taking up this work, and using it to think about the historical genesis of the family, its role in a swath of world history, its ongoing role in contemporary analogues as well as and especially in his own society. Surely this project would be as valuable today as it was when it was first generated. Even if Morgan’s work was flawed, Engels’ analysis was used by colonized peoples themselves to dream of social and economic change; it is a historical fact that Marxism–that Western thing–did reach across the divides, and it did so at least partly because of its ability to think about and beyond the hegemonic culture, to think in terms of this culture’s genesis, and to think of other systems of distribution and knowing. Thus we can say with confidence that the potential for an anthropology grounded in reciprocities of knowledge as well as in a speculative order of history such as that which Engels (and even Morgan himself) deployed is conceivable. And if we would have questioned even and especially in its time the absurdities of the Marxist utopias and futures, we would still accept the value of their empirical and communicational ethics of provisionality; these values would appear to us to be obvious. For this reason, Marx and Engels themselves were, in our view, generative anthropologists. Marx’s more systematic reflections on philosophy and political economy–contained, for instance, in works like Toward a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and The German Ideology–are predicated on a highly specific philosophical anthropology: a materialist ontology of the human as homo faber. Not only that, but in their full dimension as writers, their generative anthropological aspect remains the only noteworthy feature of value in their wide range of social and cultural studies.

This brings us to the particularities of the relationship between generative anthropology and the discipline of anthropology (in the next section we discuss the general significance of anthropology-as-avowed-margin-space and its writing practices). To proceed, we wish to take up two works, Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other and Gans’s End of Culture. Time and the Other attacks the refusal of “coevalness” by Western anthropology. That is, Fabian condemns the tendency to situate the “primitive” other as the Western self’s historical antecedent (“their present is our past”). He shows how the spatio-temporal displacement worked seamlessly and self-confirmingly for all, and through all, the early anthropologists in whose hands cultural hierarchization occurred in and through totalizing cultural descriptions situated in the bubbles of time and space. For Fabian, neither “political Space, nor political Time” are “natural resources” (144). Fabian singles out for special treatment the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss whose taxonomies of culture would seem to avoid this charge. Fabian is strangely insistent that Lévi-Strauss, in his displacement of the category to a taxonomic spatializing practice, still predicates selfhood on the other in the same way. For Fabian, Lévi-Strauss is determined to preserve certain anthropological habits, like fieldwork, in order to guarantee a distinction between “the anthropologist [and] the historian” and accomplishing “the scientific feat of reducing that concrete world [of the other] to its most general and universal principles” (61). He concludes that structuralism itself is part of the habit of Western ethnocentric classification, “never . . . just a neutral classificatory act, but a powerful rhetorical figure” (63).

Now despite everything he finds, Fabian tells us he believes the discipline of anthropology will and should continue to exist. But his conception of how it might so exist is very strange. Fabian (like Lévi-Strauss) posits a continuing anthropology, founded on somehow meeting in the “same time.” At first, the aim seems reasonable, even modest. But this idea could be the most colonizing idea of all: it involves flattening out all cultural time for an axiomatic face-to-face that is itself a culture-specific hallucination. And even within that purview (as fiction from Cervantes through Joyce to Robert Dessaix has shown), consciousness and time exist in a complex weave in which the enablement of imaginary meeting points is part and parcel of knowing. This is true even at the most banal level of commentary: how, indeed, can Fabian himself “talk to” Lévi-Strauss’s account when the latter occurred in another cultural framework, answering different critical questions, and so on? Such apparently ridiculous questions pose rather more difficulty for Fabian’s utopianist pronouncements on time and the other. But perhaps the most problematic aspect of the entire work concerns his vision for the future. Fabian’s mystifying final throwaway lines for the future of the discipline would have anthropological theory-work (after Foucault) not just understood, but actually deployed as a series of practices that are somehow operationally equivalent to the practices of the society or group being engaged. The exchange, he says, will be “frontal,” the “relationships must be on the same plane” (164). Knowledge will no longer entail abstracting our “general knowledge from [their] concrete experience” because in order to claim that a particular social group is the reality and “our conceptualizations the theory, one must keep standing anthropology on its head” (165). In the final sentence of the book, he goes so far as to argue that

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In these pages, Fabian offers anthropology that sort of reflexivity that has become a popular ritual–an anthropology that never leaves the Derrida and Foucault-protected library of evil anthropological white uncles and aunties, Malinowski, Mead, Lévi-Strauss et al.

Gans clearly occupies an unpopular position in relation to these serried ranks of librarian-guardians. We wish to take up his most direct (and extreme) form of engagement with this debate in order to show that even if some claims would be better rephrased or qualified, there remains a terrain worthy of hypothesis. In the End of Culture, Gans remarks of these habits:

Given that Gans wrote against the background of debates we have outlined above, these lines seem cavalier. But it does not mean they are wrong. In fact, we can now see that he is right to seek to avoid the reciprocal resentments that characterized these arguments, and his insistence that we need to understand not just technical and military prowess, but also, the astonishing array of Western modernity as a cultural formation is absolutely sustainable.

But this is not all he says. His use of the word “higher” requires a unilineal hierarchy of some sort. When Gans says that they must “in some sense” be “higher,” he is quite explicit in his meaning:

In this regard, it bears noting that he departs from Girard’s work, which, in its more explicitly Christian framing, is preferable. This part of the End of Culture, like many of the tutor-texts of Derrida’s (which purport to operate within the secular realm but lapse into theologism) seeks to make its arguments on secular and philosophical terrain. Unlike many such texts, of course, Gans has framed his analyses as minimal hypotheses, and if all he were saying had to do with the fact of one culture’s survival “after” another, a relation of temporal subsequence (with all the issues that might involve), the Darwinian aspect would not attract our attention in this way. But for us the fact of survival does not “explain” anything other than the ability to survive. Gans’s deployment of the Darwinian “null hypothesis” in this instance entails considerable equivocation of the term “success” which permits something of a conflation of one pole of its etymological meaning (temporal succession) with the pole concerned with the evaluation of moral perspicacity. Of course, the problem is not that this case cannot be made for the ethical desirability of a certain Judeo-Christian ethic (however much the Roman Empire evinced–or failed to evince–this ethic)–nor is it a position that the authors necessarily disavow. It’s simply that “survival of the fittest” does not provide the intellectual resources for such an assertion. The conceptual repertoire to which Gans has availed himself here will not supply the axiological schema he desires without some enormous metaphorical displacement. It’s not that the two senses (of ethical and evolutionary “success”) fail to exhibit a perfectly isomorphic relationship–that the movement between senses is a too pronounced for a “useful” equivocation; nor is it necessarily that this equivocation is not signaled by Gans. It’s that these two senses of “success,” in many important respects, are actually the inverse of each other. A central problem with any account for cultural change via a recourse to underspecified notions of the “survival of the fittest” is that cultures themselves unfailingly break the most fundamental law of genetics: that acquired characteristics cannot be inherited.(2)

Ultimately, though, we believe that elsewhere in Gans’s own work (even elsewhere in this very book) we find the best rejoinder to the position he proposes at this point. For us, the Gansian hypothesis is always plural. That is, sites of cultural emergence are always scenic, and hence plural. No sense can be made of Greek geometrical achievement without the backdrop of the achievement itself: the previous Egyptian mathematics, the Babylonians, and so on. For us, at this secondary level of speculation, the counter-hypothesis would concern the radical imbrication of cultures. In the world today there are no cultures that exist in discontinuity with others. This includes what might best be called the “modern primitive” societies (the first adjective alerts us to the fact that the second is a deeply modern value). So when he says that there exist “today groups of men whose culture has progressed little since Palaeolithic times” (146), we see no reason to concur (and this from experience). But the claim is linked to the Darwinian “null hypothesis” cited above. In this scheme of things, Gans adds his own unique twist, by displacing the development to the field of ethics; thus, “ethical evolution is the most fundamental, most nearly continuous factor in social evolution” (148). It also bears saying, that one has to wonder what happened to those “chief modes of competition” of “social evolution”: “economic, and above all, military criteria” (The End of Culture 147). Then, when Gans goes on to suggest that Rome “finally succumbed to more primitive competition because it lacked competition on its own level” (148), he seems to be moving to admit a notion of radical cultural plurality. But this too is overarched by the wider ethical progress that he argues in any event took place.(3)

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Now if we have questioned the mix of Darwin and ethics, seeking instead other bases for hypothesizing, the situation is a little different with Gans’s attempts to explain the Western self. We are relegating rather than denying the value of such hypotheses entirely: we agree that there is a place for an inquiry into the West on its own terms or, put differently, a tracing of emergence of “our values from others.” But this would be a parochial variety of analysis, even in this spectacular case. A far more difficult variety of analysis has to do with radical plurality, such that when a scene is sketched historically, the principal work involves the outlining of backgrounds, what Gans calls scenes. Anthropologists, like philosophers, have always underestimated how much culture travels, and how ingenious our ancestors were in their travels. If Gans is right to suggest that the current “one world imbrication” is unprecedented, the phenomenon of imbricated worlds is the way the world has always been. Where some, like Derrida, see this always already plural structure as the endpoint of a deconstruction, however, we believe on the contrary that this is no more than a beginning.

This, we believe, is what the Gansian a posteriori variety of secondary hypotheses could offer. And this is why, even if we disagree with Gans’s estimation of the state of cultures today or in times past (a question of anthropology in the limited sense), we nevertheless find common cause with this framing of the level of the inquiry.(4) That is, like Gans’s version of the field, “our” anthropology would ask: against which specific scene did this representational schema emerge? Where did this ethics, utterly new under the sun (new precisely by virtue of its relationship to all that stands around it, before it, after it) come from? When, like Girard, Gans insists that culture itself is “primarily not a celebration of order but a response to disorder” (26), we get the wellspring of a general form of historical hypothesizing.

So there still remains the need for something like a positive grammatology, much of which–we contend–would be consistent with what Gans has called generative anthropology. That is, we seek a terrain for communicational hypothesis that can offer minimal scenes for analysis. In seeking this, some might fear the resurgence of an old ethnocentrism. But this need not be so. We have seen that even under the British imperial formation, the works of anthropologists like Morgan and others were deployed by Frederick Engels in an effort to explain and to change the world. Gans may not appear a likely successor to writers like Engels or Nietzsche. In our view, however, the unstated principle that guides the communicational ethics we have been outlining for the vulnerable and parsimonious Gansian hypothesis in the applied field of anthropology-as-discipline is simple: let us better understand Morgan’s “bewildering” world (be it of property-rights or whichever general inquiry) and thereby make it a better place for all of its inhabitants.

3. Margin Work: The Meaning of Anthropological Writing

Anthropologists have, as we have seen, been themselves the subject of anthropological scrutiny. Jiménez’s angry remark that “During the four years in which I have lived among many anthropologists, I have seen very clearly that in reality they use the information they collect from us to write books and in this way achieve fame and money. They have made us the objects of their studies, but we cannot share in the results” (71). The claim may appear far-fetched. What is the nature of the fame that an anthropological hack-writer can glean from the presentation of a paper at a conference of peers? What is the money that attaches to an academic position in the face of the triumphs of sports stars (or internet whiz-kids for that matter)? On this level, the fear is misplaced. And yet, the experience of being studied is part of a very serious and much more insidious process than these objections can counter. It has to do with the nature and meaning of marginality itself.

In this regard, even after all the critiques, we still must pose a very difficult question: can we do other than think from the margins? Derrida is surely more correct than even he realized when, in that extraordinary meditation on presence and the ear, the essay on the “Tympan” which opens the collection titled Margins of Philosophy, he takes up the very issue of making (philosophical) sense:

If making sense is always at the price of the marginalized other–including those replete texts of the margins always treated as if blank and yet themselves the actual condition of the supposedly mainstream sense–then the idea emerges that the margin is nearly always constitutive of the center.

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Perhaps these thoughts about the margin are not as controversial as they seemed when they first appeared. In the strangely errant criss-crossings of the works of Girard, Derrida, and Gans, the role of marginality is a recurring theoretical motif. The major thing that joins Derrida’s analysis with the work of Gans and Girard is the idea that the marginalized, the excluded, and the periphery are actual conditions of sense. In each of the three writers’ work, a scene of representation is at stake. Gans, following Girard, sees it as no less than the exigent co-occurrence of the origin of the human and of language. Derrida calls it writing-in-general, arche-writing. The treatments are not identical, of course, and neither are they directed to equivalent ends. But all see a link between violence and its relationship to representation.(5) Even for Derrida, writing at its most irreducible (which includes oral systems of proper names and kinship) is linked to violence. For all three writers, this violence isn’t derivative, but is constitutive of the whole scene. And this is why it is not just anthropology-the-discipline that we must cover, but its inherited conception of writing.

So it is that we begin with writing and other lessons. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s account of the Nambikwara comprises a series of meditations that emerge out of reflections on South American antiquity. His “Writing Lesson” is a poignant description of the exchange of values and the relations of power between a European colonial culture and a South American indigenous one. The account of the Nambikwara chief seeking to imitate the anthropologist’s writing activity depicts a scene in which the knowing European seeks, for reasons of sensitivity, not to offend his counterpart:

To start with, could Lévi-Strauss and Derrida both have missed something here?(6) It seems unlikely from the account itself. But let us recall the logics of this scene-as-writing. To start with, the account was written by the anthropologist. And if we recall that the anthropologist was himself disturbed by what he had instigated, perhaps he missed the possibility that the chief was himself playing a joke of his own, leading the anthropologist on. Irrespective of this particular case, the double possibility in this scene is a common one: the foreign and empowered anthropologist takes earnest notes on a scene (or asks questions) that provoke that variety of resisting humor that is grounded in resentment of an occupying force.

But let us imagine that Lévi-Strauss’s account is modally correct. Anyone reading this passage can feel the uneasiness permeating the writing. The deception being perpetrated is but one aspect of the imbalance in relations of power and understanding. If the overt level of Lévi-Strauss’s text documents his fear that a wonderful oral culture was fading before his eyes, there are other, deeper anxieties here at work. But let us begin with what the words tell us. That is, by Lévi-Strauss’s overt account, the writing lesson is evidence of a tragic passage and a record of a loss. Already, then, two levels of writing lesson are emerging clearly. The first is the lesson to the chief given by the anthropologist. The second is the lesson to the West that Lévi-Strauss feels his lesson teaches him. But this then leads to a third lesson, the one Derrida wants to teach us, using Lévi-Strauss’s own account. This lesson is different in kind from the first two. Applying, indeed, to an extent actually devising, the strategy of deconstruction, he argues that far from Lévi-Strauss mounting an effective critique of Western influence, instead, he was in these “in many respects remarkable; very fine pages” (103) actually complicit with and part of a wider Western ethnocentrism which always reads its others as “nature,” so as to efface its own hegemonic assertion of selfhood. So an “epistemological phonologism” based upon a linguistic and metaphysical phonologism is as much at work in Lévi-Strauss as it was in those he appeared to criticize. The “deconstruction” which, in the preceding discussion of Saussure, appears initially as a revealing of tension between stated intent and what is done is therefore applicable to Lévi-Strauss, despite the writer’s apparent and oft-stated good intentions. This writing lesson needs little qualification: ethnocentrism–even blatant racism–is often embedded in discourse, no matter what the intentions of the writers. The further lesson Derrida proffers, that the priority given to voice-based significance by Lévi-Strauss can be displaced, is useful as far as it goes. The graphic systems Derrida gleans from the account given by Lévi-Strauss can be shown to be more originary than the speech Lévi-Strauss goes on to posit as pure presence. Perhaps Derrida’s own unstated axiom is that any claim of communicational adequation would lapse into metaphysical logocentrism or even theology. We do not know, for the trajectory of the inquiry entails the inhabiting and interrogation of texts like Lévi-Strauss’s which participate in the hierarchy of subordination implicit in Western thought.

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Now Derrida’s contribution to this field is obviously important for another reason. His Grammatology is unique for its treatment of anthropology as part and parcel of a wider philosophical formation (rather, than as is usually the case, an attempt by writers critical of anthropology to draw in links to philosophical frameworks). For, as works like David Goldberg’s Racist Culture have repeatedly pointed out, there is a join between disciplines like anthropology and “Western” knowledge itself. The difference is that Derrida is one of the few writers in the philosophical tradition to take the work of mainstream anthropology seriously enough to use it as a theoretico-critical lynchpin. But as Gans and Girard have repeatedly pointed out, we need to be wary of any writing that claims the space of the margins. This is not a comment on Derrida in particular. He, after all, is the one who showed that, in the case of Lévi-Strauss, a knight-advocate of the margins can actually, by all his chivalric codes, be a self-serving, even if at time unwitting, representative of the realm.

What is at stake is something wider. Perhaps the very process of knowing is a simultaneous act of pretending or somehow staging margins in order to repeatedly define new centers (what were structuralism and deconstruction if not formations of the center?). The margins are important for good and obvious reasons. For as John Romm’s wonderful little book on the interrelationship of ancient Greek speculative geography, fiction, and knowledge, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought remarks:

In this work, Romm shows how a variety of textual genres (from geography to fictional fantasy) produced a stable sense of center by positing outlandish and extraordinary other-worldly margins in the fast flowing River of Ocean in which it was held that islands of paradise and other non-quotidian anti-realities “existed.” Physical space sufficed to hold everything from antichthon with counter-balancing continents and all the assorted flora and fauna of nightmare and fantasy alike. Sometimes–as with Plato’s Atlantis–the spatial displacement occurred in tandem with a displacement in time (a golden age, when soils, and the peoples who lived on them, were contrastively better). These were imagined physical displacements and as such, they allowed this thought to take place.

But where do we find ourselves now? Are we not far from anthropology, the discipline?

We are. We will not even speculate about a join between the ancient Greek conception of “anthropology” and more modern and Western notions. And yet Romm’s words offer us this challenge: what are the distinct spatial and temporal displacements of anthropology, how have they worked, and how are we to view them in relation to generative anthropology? Romm suggests that only by defining the “edges” of what we call “our” world can we be sure about what we think are our “centers.” Let us look again at what anthropologists do. Let us recall the specter of Malinowski in his tent in PNG. What is he actually doing there? Or Lévi-Strauss, the savior, in South American hinterlands–what is he doing? They are doing margin-work, they are literally drawing the boundaries Romm described.

Their margin-work has to do with the knowledge-system. That is, while they produce texts about and from margins, their work is actually constitutive of the center. But is Derrida exempt from this? What is he doing? On one level, of course, he is simply doing the same thing as we are: he seeks to show the importance of the margin. But this is not all he is doing. In the account of the Nambikwara, Derrida seems to write about writing; in the book bearing the title Margins of Philosophy, Derrida’s margins often seem to concern the edges of pages or the footnotes to texts. But very few have missed the applicability to the theatres of alienation and marginalization more generally. Lest the point be missed by dint of sheer obviousness: Malinowski, Lévi-Strauss, and Derrida were not just important thinkers in their time, but were (for want of a better word) utterly paradigmatic thinkers of their respective times and sites. In this regard, Gans and Girard have a somewhat different status. Yet perhaps what makes Gans and Girard threatening is their direct thematisation of the marginal as the privileged route to knowledge (an inversion of the archetypal Whiggish view of history) in a (post) Christian culture. But their modes of expressing this are not isomorphic to the contents they theorize: although both are marginal, neither offers their own subject position as corroborating the veracity of their thinking. That is, they refuse a central, if implicit, imperative: It is not enough to analyze the margins: we are supposed to pretend to that same very status “ourselves.” All this marks generative and fundamental anthropology off from most of their antecedents, including structural anthropology and deconstruction. But it does not yet let us see how it relates to “traditional” anthropological margin-work as such.

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Let us try to draw these two discussions of anthropology to a close. We have explored the link between generative anthropology and anthropology in particular on the one hand, and the way this relates to general issues of marginality on the other. We saw to start with that, in Time and the Other, Fabian has raised valid issues that go to the heart of anthropological hypothesizing. Yet we also found that the response from generative anthropological inquiry called for a new, and less judicial idiom of assessment: in this regard, there is nothing whatsoever wrong with an inquiry into the genesis of one’s own socio-cultural ethical formation so long as that inquiry does not think it is the only one worthy of pursuit under the sun. And we have seen that in the chain of negations from Rousseau onwards, there is no privileged place to stand. In fact, the principle of theoretical coeval moralizing, or even of the Derridean trace (or whichever device) does not guarantee writerly ethics any more than Rousseau’s or Lévi-Strauss’s good intentions did. Deconstruction, one angry respondent pointed out to one of us in a “third world” context, like structural anthropology, could in certain hands be another tool of colonial disempowerment, bamboozlement, and sophistry, just as surely as semiotics or even in his time the functionalist Malinowski inscriber of the Trobriands. In this regard, there is little to divide the practitioners of postmodern anthropology from those of structural anthropology, or we might allow in advance, generative anthropology.

But we believe we have also found that the development of hypotheses of this Gansian kind is far more courageous and useful an activity than the fence-building work of postmodern anthropology. That is, whatever its merits (and we have seen many), texts like Fabian’s not only works to prohibit the conceptual apparatuses of the bad old discipline, but also, they attack any sort of positive or generalizing inquiry, including presumably, generative anthropology. And this brings us to the more general formation of hypotheses. In privileging epistemological proscription over prescription, Fabian participates in a certain mob heuristic whose mode has been well captured by Girard:

In fact, if Fabian never quite allows himself to say the words, the idea that new learning could take place seems to have evaporated, for there is nothing at all written to guide the anthropologist seeking to engage in a fieldwork practice that occurred “coevally”–that is, in the same time, frontally. He carefully avoids any kind of claim to positive information on the one hand and, like so many other writers on the topic, he conflates and rejects categories of generality and universality. But can Fabian do these things? For things do happen in the world; they happen all the time, little banal ordinary things–like our lives–that are in every sense of the word “positive.” To contend otherwise is probably ridiculous. It is, of course true that there are worthy questions and problems of description and explanation, but this does not mean that the things and events don’t exist, still less that work on actual practices should simply be proscribed because it is informed by a guiding or even provisionally totalizing theoretical orientation. For us, on the contrary, when Fabian like so many others, lashes out at any effort to abstract general information from concrete experience, he stands on extremely vulnerable ground (164); apart from anything else, the directive to eschew generality is a general imperative of the most restrictive kind. The movement from concrete particulars to more general levels is an extremely valuable and powerful process, and is one hardly confined to anthropology or the university. While generalizing can (and historically has) been associated with universalizing tendencies (the view that this is the way it always has and ought to have been), it need not be so, and often is not so. We would contend, as Gans contends when he thinks about what language itself is in Signs of Paradox, that not only is language a positive existent, but also, there is no society on earth that does not deploy generalizing tendencies, for these are the grounds of any kind of collective knowability.

* * *

We have engaged with anthropology-as-discipline in order to indicate how, on the one hand, this most problematically ethnocentric and racially grounded discipline in history has like all fields of knowledge disavowed the center, finding (a) “true self” in the margins. In the same movement, however, we have suggested that it can be linked with wider philosophical tendencies that include most obviously the imbricated fields of structuralism and deconstruction. Ironically, then, Girard and Gans stand provisionally aside from these problems mainly because they see the fold of marginality itself as constitutive of thought, as its founding condition. But when we see writers like Fabian not only venturing the auto-critique of the ethnocentrism of anthropology, but also in their practice denying any sort of positive or general inquiry, we would like to join, provisionally at least, Gans and Girard on what seems to have become the farthest shore. In the discussions which follow, on the scene and then, its place in relation to the hypothesis, we would like to indicate why we have taken this position.

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4. The Scene, the Hypothesis and “Positive” Knowledge

For us, Gans’s most important contribution to the rethinking of the hypothesis lies in the way he thinks about the scene. We have seen already that he believes there are different orders of hypothesis. We have outlined our response to these, and even if we believe aspects of the actual secondary hypothesis need modifying, we have argued that Gans has opened a decisive new vista. The originary hypothetical domain is an anthropology of thought itself: it concerns the inquiry into the very question of what it is to be human. In this terrain, Gans’s most brilliant excursions have actually been proposed by the use of the scene. But if it is still under-theorized, he has also re-opened doors long slammed shut on specific anthropological historicizing by thinking of these as secondary order hypotheses. Without recourse to the scene, we have already tried to indicate how these hypotheses might work, might actually be made operational. But to go any further, we must now take up the question of the scene, its types, and the resultant varieties of hypotheses.

To start with, for Gans, a scene is more important than a theory (Signs 6). So it is that we open with an edifice. The “tent” (skene) or modest wooden hut from which actors could emerge, defined a backdrop, painted perhaps with an appropriate “scene,” against which the action of the play could take place. “Scene” in English, as in French, has an etymological derivation from ancient Greek, the nature of which the following account makes clear:

The scene in this picture, creates the three dimensional space before it. It is one of those curious ironies of history that the modern theatrical concept of the scene does not include the backdrop (even though the idea of a scene in colloquial usage retains the original sense of a background view). This space, while viewed, is positive. But what about when we “recall” or otherwise imagine it? Given its ethno-specific formations, can we say that what we construct within it “exists”? And if so, how?

Now Gans is hardly the first to use the term this way. Derrida, and Girard also deploy the “scene.” All three writers presuppose the concrete three-dimensionality of that humble “tent” at the rear of the stage. Of the three writers, only Gans is clear about what, in theoretical terms, he means by the term:

Played out before the ancient Greek scene was the drama which, for Aristotle consisted of certain essential elements (in the case of tragedy, plot, character, diction, thought and so on), as well as in many cases, the three unities of place, time, and action. In the theatre of scenic thought, Gans also offers a minimal version of the scene: he identifies the essential constituents as eventness (6), a plural/public siting (18), an apodictically available hypothesizability (14), and of course, the three-dimensionality of a place, a world, such as we find on the Greek stage. In sum, about the scene as such, there is little dispute between the three writers. Motivating all three is the complex ethical demand of the contemporary critical situation we have (following Siebers) already outlined.

What appears to distinguish Derrida’s version of the scene is that for him, all scenes are either always already inherited, or if there are origins, we cannot know what they are. That is, a scene is always a site of inheritance traffic:

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But let us trace this more carefully. Derrida here is attacking an illustrative scene, an important adjunct to Freud’s intriguingly framed “speculations.” On stage Derrida insists, are characters Freud sees as irrelevant, but which disturb at least the picture he seeks to paint. For Derrida indeed, the speculation on a scene of origin that Freud seeks to proffer, is itself problematic, for it finds itself always, even in its exemplifications, in uncontrollable scenes of inheritance. Now it is certainly true that Freud is “interested in this theatre as barely as possible” (371). But this is as it should be, not just for the illustration to the speculation, but also for the speculations themselves. For as Derrida himself is well aware, this is a brilliant and suggestive excursion, projecting, hypothesizing, legating, inheriting, philosophizing. In this regard, the only criticism we would seek to venture of Freud’s approach is that there is at times a lack of clarity about the status of particular claims made, something that Derrida uses to undermine the entire edifice. But if the psychologico-philosophical scenes are not shown rigorously, they are, in our view, for the most part proposed in the hypothetico-speculative idiom appropriate to the emerging fields we envisage Gans as having opened.

But there is something else. These scenes are not originary in nature. They are secondary hypotheses. That is to say, they involve situations which are inherently palimpsestic in nature. Derrida appears to believe that the entire speculation is entirely negated by dint of mere expansion of the palimpsest. So while all three writers acknowledge apodictic dimensions to the scene, for Derrida, this is a negative claim: for him scenes are always so interpenetrative that any given scene of writing will always already be a scene of inheritance and, therefore, boundless. This allows him the liberty of disrupting the scene-work and hypothesizing Freud performs for the reader. He feels free to insert characters Freud has left out back onto the stage, to move the sets around, to change the lighting. And after he has done so, we see something else . . . Socrates, an image from Matthew Paris from medieval Europe, Edgar Allan Poe, a post office. But these too are scenes. We see all of them, we see them as insertions, as transformations, but we see them above all else, as counter-hypotheses with a positive force of their own. It is an intriguing twist of the Derridean pursuit of irreducibility, even if this is always so as to show a scene of inheritance in a claimed scene of origin. And yet Freud does not posit an origin at this point. In this regard, Derrida’s deployment of the scene of inheritance against the Freudian speculative-hypothetical scene leaves him strangely in the “same” scene.

For what Gans has shown is that hypotheses developed out of this variety of scene will inevitably exist in a plurality (we have ourselves seen the consequences in the discussions of anthropology above). But a mish-mash of plurality is not a scene. Rather, the scene is a product of the actively apodictically oriented subsequent analyst sketching the minimal requirements needed to give a hypothesis life. If Freud’s “Pleasure Principle” essay were reframed as a Gansian scene (and it is already very close), it would be no objection at all to point to other figures in the palimpsest (and further resulting hypotheses). That is to miss the point entirely. Instead, what matters about Freud’s essay is that it still speaks to us, despite Derrida’s “refutation.”

About the originary scene and the resulting originary hypothesis, we need add very little to what Gans himself has said. Obviously Derrida does not accept it as a possibility. Yet even in this regard, we observe Richard van Oort who in this journal has gone so far as to argue that

In our view, a scene of origin, proposed hypothetically, allows thought to take place. This is so in the case of the originary hypothesis which allows Gans his unprecedented anthropology of thought in general. But even if one does not accept this vista, it is also true in the less lofty sites of anthropology wherein we find new ways of speaking about the world, its prospects, its past, and its myriad of futures. Therein lies its promise.

As for the status of the hypothesis that results from this form of the scene, we can make a few observations. Its knowledge is provisional (such perhaps its violence). The scene-in-general for Gans, for Derrida, for Girard, comprises the event, a plurality, and a physical three-dimensionality. For Gans and Girard, it can be described minimally; for Derrida, it cannot.

Perhaps, though, it would be better to witness the hypothetical dimension that these scenes generate. In all these cases, the scenic is the hypothetical mode par excellence, as strange as that may appear to those habituated to Derrida’s easy usage of both the term “scene” and thereby what might best be called the approach. A scenic approach actually allows Derrida to counter-hypothesize while not appearing to do so. This because it forsakes poetics for dramaturgy. In Derrida’s hands, it gives rise to the disruptive “extra character” or “prop.” But it can also give witness to theory in a subjunctive mode. In the act of scenic imagining, “knowing” occurs outside the terrain of the declarative-positive or even contractually based if this, then that idiom of the conditional. In this respect, we agree with Victor Turner, who, following van Gennep, claims that performance necessarily invokes a register of communication concerned with possibility and hypothesis: the subjunctive operates with a logic of “‘if it were so,’ not ‘it is so’” (Turner 83).

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There will be those who see generative and fundamental anthropology as a nascent positivism. The kind of ressentiment provoked by figures such as Girard and Gans is well characterized by Thomas F. Bertonneau, who points out that positive knowledge appears as a conspiracy, “is tantamount to a plan for self-apotheosis” (Bertonneau 1996). To be sure, we can say that things happen (events), they happen in a dimension of inevitable eventness (événementialité), and this eventness only occurs because of the reflective and deferring quality of language. Yet, there is a crucial difference between the two “positive” knowledges being considered: where traditional positivism in its various forms assumes a conspicuously juridical function and is determined to set out in advance conditions for intelligibility (one thinks here of something like the Vienna Circle’s criteria of meaningfulness) the positive knowledge of Gans and Girard operates through a process of scenic supersession. One does not outflank rival explanations primarily through refutation or accruing purported anomalies, but by producing the best interpretation. (It is interesting to note that neither Girard nor Gans have produced aLanguage, Truth and Logic–or an Archaeology of Knowledge, for that matter). But, epistemologically speaking, this is not an additivity in the sense of psychoanalysis, which, when faced with anomalies that its (originally) parsimonious model couldn’t accommodate, simply added to its theoretical armature. This is a model of supersession that is always obliged to maximize its heuristic and hermeneutic plausibility in relation to its number and complexity of its presuppositions.

5. Machines for Crushing Butterflies

Many literature students will recall the brilliant and complex scholarly work of René Wellek, especially his Theory of Literature. It is one of those ironies of retrospect that the breadth and depth of scholarship in that work is rare in equivalent university primers in the human sciences today. When we consider how truly marginal this variety of inquiry has become, it seems bizarre that a work like this one was so fiercely attacked. Given the relatively minor status of such theorists in the contemporary scene, the ire they provoke seems at the least a little overblown. We both laughed heartily when we encountered Virgil Nemoianu’s remark about the way in which Wellek has been caricatured and reduced to a straw doll figure: “First, we are struck by the very oddness of the contentiousness. A relatively minor issue produces an enormously overblown reaction. A few eccentrics choose to play with form . . . and this causes harsh anger. Huge machineries are set up to smash harmless butterflies” (Nemoianu 42). So too have Girard and Gans been processed (the former more than the latter), despite the fact that their work exists as a series of serious questions about what passes as contemporary cultural theory.

In advocating for the new version of the hypothesis, one might imagine (and take stock of) the variety of contrivances invented to crush it. As was the case with Hayden White’s often-cited critique of Girard, these contrivances often deploy, quite paradoxically, concretely positivist assumptions and operate at a higher level of generality than the kind of theory at which they take offense. Noting the fact that cultural empiricists often desert their cultural empiricism at the point of evaluating rival theories, Girard notes the fact that the worth of a hypothesis–in this case, his–should not be decided a priori: “I find it distressing that many people condemn it or even sometimes applaud it with no reference to the data, as if its merit or lack of merit depended on some intrinsic virtue” (Girard 39).

As we have suggested, generative anthropology not only attempts to situate the ethical in a hypothetical scene of human origin, but attempts to enact this ethical imperative through its own theoretical operations. It is perhaps no exaggeration to suggest that the greatest hazard of minimal thinking, in this sense, is its very attempt to furnish knowledge; it is perhaps an irony that the hypothetical mode itself, which is inherently vulnerable, is read as the displaced representative of dogmatism. The resentment provoked by a form of thinking that claims the center for itself, even only provisionally, is out of step with current poetics of thinking. As Gil Bailie notes, about the only “sweeping theory that has recently found favor is one that holds that sweeping theories are no longer possible” (Violence Unveiled 5). Bailie’s statement is more than the expression of a simple ressentiment: it is an anthropological observation that suggests that the only way high levels of generality can now hold favor is through an explicit disavowal of what is implicitly endorsed; general claims cannot be directly confessed, despite their presence and persistence. Somehow this dis- or non-avowal presents itself to many as a kind of intellectual “freedom”; the very idea that cultural phenomena have foundations that are amenable to hypothetical specification is equated by the contemporary academy with “restriction.”

Perhaps stranger still, the contemporary humanities find no problem in drawing extensively on several of the grand theoretical schemes of the nineteenth century; the presence of a certain theoretical postmodernism has in no way dimmed our appetites for the thinking of Freud and Marx and–when circumstance deems it appropriate–Darwin; if anything, it has increased them. One could well understand some of the attractions. A dessicated Engels or a scholastic Marx, for instance–like a New Age religion–makes few real political (or spiritual) demands on us. In this sense, contemporary postmodern Marxists have lost more than the rigid epistemological hierarchy of base-superstructure. Marx’s aim of creating a revolutionary consciousness is no longer necessarily tied to the capacity for actualizing it; indeed, the revolutionary consciousness functions as a surrogate, a replacement, for the concrete social conditions which it originally attempted to actualize. A certain kind of postmodern Marx gives us the opportunity to denounce “the bourgeois” while simultaneously neither demanding any concrete shift in social relations nor that the theorist be subservient to Marx as “master.” Quite the contrary: drawing on theorists like Marx and Freud offers us the opportunity to reiterate their schemes–or rather, themes–while minimizing our ressentiment towards them as theorists.

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But herein lies the bad faith of the maneuver. There are very good reasons, as we observed above, for the demise of Marxism, even in the nineteenth century. But if we admitted its merits: a generative anthropological approach to human culture, politics, and economics, a positive desire to explain and to transform oppression, then it must also be said that postmodern Marxism has none of these. It does not seek to change anything, and has in fact explained and changed nothing. Like so much of the other criticism that it criticizes, it legitimates not so much the transhistorical relevance of a hypothesis, but a generic license to condemn, often coterminous with a playing out of a certain chivalric fantasy of justice, as already noted. With the qualifier “strategic essentialism,” any grand theoretical matrix can be wheeled in the service of “praxis,” which will allow us our scapegoats while simultaneously relieving us of the burden of theorizing injustices with any kind of rigor whatsoever.

It may be objected that we are ourselves deploying that same variety of straw doll scapegoating of harmless enemies that characterizes everything else we have described. But this is precisely not what we are doing: for Marxism was the only significant generative anthropological analytic of the twentieth century. In observing its failure to metamorphose into a genuinely positive generative anthropology characterized by an open hypothetical system, we are commenting on academic tendencies far wider than these texts of the Marxist-Baroque-bronze phase. We bear witness instead to a progression: after an initial burst of pre-Marxist “communist” political exchanges, the already vitriolic open system was closed down by Marx and Engels themselves via stratagems in the International and via a deluge of overblown “political economy” in the later works. But even at this stage, the claim of a positive and generative anthropology lived on. Only when the materials passed into the hands of the Marxists, from Lenin onwards, did positive science cloy into dogma. After its early and dramatic failure in the 1920s, the only real engines of Marxism were to be found in the West, where the thought took the form of increasingly prohibitionist protocols involving a dance of making reality appear to conform to a theory. One might well wonder at its extended bronze era. However, the tendency is not something localized (and Marxism was almost the only thing that looked like thought in the twentieth century). Instead, as we have already suggested, the prohibitionism itself has come to define thinking as such. Girard has remarked that

The elaborate protocols for making statements of any non-condemnatory variety or even of any positive kind have made, as Girard puts it, for the sense that “We hope to find refuge in some sort of intellectual regionalism, and perhaps to give up thought altogether” (441). Certainly, however admirable the bronze-wrought delicacy of late Marxism, it serves no purpose other than its own formation. These kinds of theories no longer attempt to describe a world. Their function rather would appear to be to compete with it. Jamesonian Marxism, for instance, stages a mimetic operation whereby the de-centered complexity of postmodern culture, with its manifold exits and entrances, its disorienting whirl of shifting preoccupations and manifest depthlessness, is replicated in the theoretical operation itself. The Bonaventure Hotel captures not simply postmodern culture, but Jameson’s whole theoretical project and practice; the theoretical analysis-contrivance is itself just as resistant to comprehension as the objects of its theoretical gaze; here we have another Borges-like scenario: the map competes with the territory for complexity and our interest. And after all is said and done, we find what Borges’ “extract” already described:

This is not to say that Jameson operates with no level of generality; it is merely that when the overarching presuppositions and theses of his analysis are made manifest, it becomes difficult to distinguish generality from banality. And as for the resulting prohibitions on any form of speculative or positive knowledges, we believe it time to mark a departure of sorts. False theoretical modesty–the avoidance of hypothesis–minimizes our resentment towards a theorist; adopting the postmodernist flight from the center towards the periphery, opting for content over form, for semantics over syntax, might ultimately be at least aesthetically pleasing, but this is no ultimate justification for continuing with it. As Gans puts it, “Postmodernism is aware of form because it no longer believes in it” (Signs 211). But this, in our view, will no longer do.

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Now despite all this, there is no real necessity to side with “the systematizers” over “postmodernists.” For instance, Andrew McKenna has very ably pointed out the kinds of theoretical resonances that exist between many of the theoretical preoccupations of Girard and Derrida; McKenna works to repeatedly emphasize the thematic concerns that reverberate between the two without playing them off against each other. Girard, too, has not been blind to homologies between his own and Derrida’s work. In “Origins: A View from the Literature,” Girard makes some comparisons between his own interpretation of mythical texts and Derrida’s grammatology. He argues that the deconstructive critique of origins is not at all incompatible with his own theory of cultural formation. Girard himself shows striking parallels between his reading of myth and Derrida’s “logic of the supplement.” The emergence of the scapegoat is coterminous with their depiction as an outsider or visitor who threatens the community and so is killed or driven away. In light of this, Girard indicates the supplementary logic at work: “If the community is in a position to be visited by someone, at the beginning of these myths, it must already exist. And yet it must not exist since, after the stranger is expelled, he is perceived as the god or divine ancestor without whom the community would not be what it is, or even would not be at all” (“Origins” 28).(7) In other words, although the community ostensibly precedes the scapegoat, ritual formation and the totemic system are attributable to them; the accidental emerges as an essential ground. This structure is also to be found in scapegoating in general: the outsider, the impure, marginal element, constitutes the mob’s internal cohesion, is central to it, in fact–it is the original “pillar of the community.”

The implication of Girard’s thesis is that the logic of the supplement is a source of knowledge, not its negation. Girard argues that in deconstruction, in struggle with its idealistic forebears (primarily German idealism and phenomenology) the uncovering of the logic of the supplement must necessarily serve a negative, apodictic function; but in ethnology, the logic of the supplement is actually a key to comprehension: ” . . . the same observation that looks like a curse to philosophy, seems like a blessing in mythology. In the rational context of philosophy, the supplement seems like disorder; in the irrational context of myth, it looks like a potential source of order” (“Origins” 30). It is not simply logical inconsistency that interests Girard, but the consistency of that inconsistency; inconsistencies are patterned. It would be a mistake, then, to miss the opportunity for this logic to furnish positive knowledge; to ignore this would be to remain subject to the production of a new universal scheme that is “still the child of rationalism in the sense that it contradicts its conception of reason only in the manner that this reason expects to be contradicted” (“Origins” 32).

Thus, for Girard (and Gans as well), the determination of “undecidability” in a text, the recognition that philosophy is polemos, even that it is in certain respects continuous with mythology, are not insights complete in themselves; they are starting points. To the contemporary mind, the idea that mythology has paradoxical and internally incoherent elements is banal; why should we remain satisfied with a comparable insight into certain kinds of theoretical discourse? In this sense, Derrida is right to critique the principle of identity always at work in Lévi-Strauss that renders all contradictions mute by assimilating them to a principle of identity–a theoretical operation that transposes all mythical systems as transparent modes of rational thought–but perhaps he errs equally in his insistence on the seeming singularity of these contradictions. The supplement isn’t simply the undoing of a text, but a hermeneutic key to seeing its systematic distortions.

So is it really the case that the preoccupations or even the provisional “conclusions” of Girard and Gans are not shared by other scholars in the Humanities, or is the real point of contention the fact that they present conclusions at all? As we have suggested, one of the chief virtues of Gansian “minimal thinking” is its ability to think the connections between epistemological rigor and communicative ethics, between parsimonious explanation and parsimonious communication, and then enact that reflection through its own critical practices. But this style of theory is, quite literally, on the margins in the contemporary academy.

Both Girard and Gans challenge through their theories the current mode of “scientific impartiality” favored in the Humanities: the refusal to hypothesize at all. The preponderance of academic conferences should not obscure from us the fact that the dominant ethical imperative of much contemporary scholarship is not one of reciprocity but of privacy; the logic seems to go: if no substantive hypothesis or concrete problematic of cultural formation is entertained, then there is no danger of this being imposed on others; in the absence of such a concrete problematic, there is (seemingly) nothing to impose. Hayden White’s critique of Girard reveals concerns about a theoretical project simultaneously too speculative and reductive. How else are we to make sense of the author of Metahistory and Tropics of Discourse enlisting a positivist criterion of meaning (falsification) in order to judge the worth of Girard’s project?

Resentment needs, in our view, to give way to sympathetic inquiry; and we have to be aware of the possibility that knowledge itself can become a kind of victim, subject to expulsion during times of cultural upheaval. Knowledge then becomes either one of the symptoms of a crisis or a casualty–a scapegoat or a “quasi-victim”–of the convulsions of social decay (Scapegoat 100). Such then is our challenge. We commend it to you.

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