Anthropoetics

Author: staceymeeker

  • Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Pre-Darwinian Structuralism

    The beginnings of full-fledged market society in the early part of the nineteenth century coincided with and were so to speak emblematized by a new systematization of linguistic knowledge. Wilhelm von Humboldt’s posthumous 1836 Ueber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaus und seinen Einfluß auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts [The Diversity of Human Language-Structure and Its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind], published most recently in translation as On Language (Cambridge, 1988; all references here are to this edition), was intended as a theoretical introduction to Humboldt’s incomplete magnum opus on the ancient Kawi language of Java. Humboldt’s work grounds comparative language study in a pre-Darwinian linguistic structuralism.

    Parallels between various Indo-European languages, including Sanskrit, had been noted as far back as the 16th century (see Daniel Droixhe, De l’origine du langage aux langues du monde : études sur les XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, Tübingen: G. Narr, 1987). In 1786, William Jones’s third “Anniversary Discourse” to the Asiatic Society sketched a first picture of the Indo-European family tree as a whole. Languages could no longer be cast into vague categories such as Rousseau’s “northern/southern”; their historical relationships were beginning to be analyzed in detail. The establishment of the Indo-European tree in turn inspired interest in languages outside it: what other trees would it be necessary to construct? how many families, how many types of languages were there? Of the growing number of students of language in the first half of the nineteenth century, Humboldt was the one most deeply concerned with these questions. Fluent in a dozen languages, he is said to have studied over three hundred. Although Humboldt’s philosophy of language is filled with romantic mist, his work in classifying languages into families and above all in creating a general linguistic typology (agglutinating, incorporating, isolating, inflected) shows him to be no longer a philosophe and already a professional linguist.

    In the later part of the nineteenth century, under the influence of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), such disciplined social scientists as Durkheim and Tylor (not to speak of Marx and Engels) would classify cultural phenomena in terms of their closeness to the “origin,” albeit generally in the absence of hypotheses of origin as such. Written at an earlier time, Humboldt’s work exhibits a flowering of synchronic dominance that would be reasserted by Saussure only well after the turn of the twentieth century. This post-Darwinian turn away from historicism, suspected of racism or at any rate of “Eurocentrism” avant la lettre, produced a more rigorous structuralism than Humboldt’s, one purged of the value-judgments that had made his variety, as we shall see, the intellectual basis of the Aryan “race” theory proposed by Max Müller, whose virulent offshoots contributed to the discredit of historicism.

    Humboldt’s structuralism is the result of the vast accumulation of empirical knowledge that separates him from his eighteenth-century precursors. The more one knows about languages in the concrete, the more obvious is the barrier between the origin of language and its present state, and the more obvious as well, the difference in kind between concrete descriptions of language forms and families and unverifiable speculations about language origin. It is this dichotomy that underlies Humboldt’s statement, itself wholly speculative, that:

    Language, indeed, arises from a depth of human nature which everywhere forbids us to regard it as a true product and creation of peoples. It possesses an autonomy that visibly declares itself to us, though inexplicable in its nature, and, seen from this aspect, is no production of activity, but an involuntary emanation of the spirit, no work of nations, but a gift fallen to them by their inner destiny. . . . It is no empty play upon words if we speak of language as arising in autonomy solely from itself and divinely free, but of languages as bound and dependent on the nations to which they belong. (sec 2, p. 24)

    Rather than seek the path from language to languages, from the “involuntary emanation of the spirit” to the empirically known “work of nations,” Humboldt insists on their incommensurability, not because has less insight than Condillac, but because he has much more knowledge, which he can articulate in a way qualitatively more concrete and verifiable than any discussion of language’s roots in the “depth of human nature” could possibly be. Humboldt’s refusal to speculate on the origin of this “spirit” is the beginning of the negative form of minimalism that will be reflected by the Académie des Sciences’ famous 1866 ban on such speculations.

    The chief difficulty encountered by the modern reader of Humboldt’s treatise is in following its train of thought. Where a contemporary comparatist such as Joseph Greenberg is content with outlining diverse linguistic structures in order to argue for one or another configuration of one or another linguistic tree, Humboldt wants his typology to tell a “story” that is nevertheless not strictly chronological. The breadth of linguistic knowledge that takes him far beyond the Indo-European and the related Semitic family makes him–quite rightly–wary of postulating any kind of historical progression from one family of languages to another:

    One might certainly suppose . . . a gradual progression [from the Chinese to the Sanskrit/Indo-European languages]. But if we truly feel the nature of language as such, and of these two in particular, if we reach the point of fusion between thought and sound in both, we discover there the outgoing creative principle of their differing organization. At that stage, abandoning the possibility of a gradual development of one from the other, we shall accord to each its own basis in the spirit of the race, and only within the general trend of linguistic evolution, and thus ideally only, will regard them as stages in a successful construction of language. (sec. 4, p. 32)

    Humboldt posits an “evolution,” a set of “stages in a successful construction of language,” but this evolution is “ideal” rather than historical. The relation between Chinese and Sanskrit is not one of linear filiation but of differentially successful offshoots from a common stem, like that between Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens. If Chinese were an earlier stage of Sanskrit, we could assume its speakers could evolve into speakers of the “more successfully” articulated tongue. But they are not; they incarnate a different, and inferior, creative principle, one that has its own unique virtues and capacities but can never acquire the higher ones of the superior linguistic-national stock.

    The clarity and precision of language gain through the habit of expressing enlarged and refined ideas . . . But this whole progress of improved language-making can only go on within the limits prescribed to it by the original design of the language. A nation can make a more imperfect language into a tool for the production of ideas to which it would not have given the original incentive, but cannot remove the inner restrictions which have once been deeply embedded therein. To that extent even the highest elaboration remains ineffective. (sec. 4, p. 34; emphasis here and elsewhere is the author’s)

    Thus Humboldt’s justified disinclination to present a scheme of linear evolution leads directly (via Müller’s “Aryan invasion” theory) to the linguistically grounded racialism that would become so important later in the century.

    Given his comparativist preoccupations, it is unsurprising that Humboldt has little to say about the ultimate origin of language. He associates language with “sociality” by means of a causal link reminiscent of Condillac, to which he adds the Herderian idea of language as free reflection (“mental cultivation”):

    The individual man is always connected with a whole, with that of his nation, of the race to which the latter belongs . . . His life is necessarily tied to sociality . . . In the merely vegetative existence, as it were, of man on the soil, the individual’s need for assistance drives him to combine with others, and calls for understanding through language, so that common undertakings may be possible. But mental cultivation, even in the loneliest seclusion of temperament, is equally possible only through language, and the latter requires to be directed to an external being that understands it. . . . Man thereby at once discovers that around him there are beings having the same inner needs . . . For the intimation of a totality, and the endeavour towards it, are given immediately with the sense of individuality . . . (sec. 6, p. 41)

    Language for Humboldt is, famously, not a product but an activity, not Ergon but Energeia (sec. 8, p. 49), whence its affinity with sound, which “streams outward from the heart’s depths (sec. 9, p. 55).” Language is essentially social, and linguistic exchange requires the reproduction in the interlocutor of the thought-processes encoded in the speaker’s utterance. But once this has been established, Humboldt finds himself obliged to deny the very words he had previously used to explain the origin of this exchange. The following passage is clearly aimed at Condillac:

    Even the beginning of language should not be thought restricted to so meagre a stock of words as is commonly supposed when, instead of seeking its inception in the original summons to free human sociality, we attribute it primarily to the need for mutual assistance, and project mankind into an imagined state of nature. . . Man is not so needy, and to render assistance, unarticulated sounds would have sufficed. Even in its beginnings, language is human throughout. . . Words well up freely from the breast, without necessity or intent, and there may well have been no wandering horde in any desert that did not already have its own songs. (sec. 9, p. 60)

    The same “mutual assistance” that produced sociality in the earlier passage is now shown to be insufficient to determine human language; calls for help could be handled at a pre-human level. Language (again echoing Herder) is a “free” activity; yet to define this freedom, Humboldt finds himself obliged to deny not merely “necessity” but “intent.” No doubt these are familiar quandaries that the previous century’s speculations could not resolve; what is new here is the author’s lack of real concern with resolving them. The originary hypotheses of the past are inadequate because they construct only a protolanguage, whereas, as Humboldt observes, “even the languages of so-called savages, who would have . . . to come closer to such a state of nature (ibid.)” are always already articulated. As for the origin of the “sound-form” within which this articulation takes place, it is dismissed in a gesture that Durkheim will repeat at the beginning of the following century with respect to religion:

    The creation [of a sound-form], if it is to be a true and complete one, could hold good only of the original invention of language, and thus of a situation that we do not know about, but only presuppose as a necessary hypothesis. (sec. 10, p. 76)

    No conceivable hypothesis can take us from the “original invention of language” to the creation of a (specific) sound-form. Humboldt the structuralist sees language as a “totality”; but there is no point that can serve as the origin of all the dynamic totalities that humanity has generated from the struggle between innere Sprachform and external sound-substance. (The only way of reconciling the specific and the general is to postulate an articulated Ursprache from which all languages would be derived. This ancient idea, revived in more recent times notably by Morris Swadesh [The Origin and Diversification of Language, 1971] and some tenants of the “Nostratic” hypothesis, is incompatible with Humboldt’s empirically driven but “ideal”–i.e., Platonic–hierarchical classification system.)

    Articulated language is always already differentiating and differentiated. To go beyond the variety of “sound-forms” to the common human fact of language itself can be done only by hypothesizing a moment prior to articulation that is the origin of the difference that constitutes it. This hypothetical moment had haunted the speculations of the previous century and would return near the end of the following one; Humboldt’s still inchoate linguistic science derives its professional self-consciousness from its expulsion.

  • Paris in the Springtime

    The Institut d’Etudes Politiques, better known as Sciences Po, is the most central of the Grandes Ecoles where the French governmental and administrative elite are educated, or, as the French say, “formed.” The mathematically inclined prefer Polytechnique, artists, L’Ecole des Beaux Arts, academics, L’Ecole Normale Supérieure, but Sciences Po is the gateway to most high-level careers in politics, journalism, management, and public service. Thanks to the persistence and persuasiveness of Maxime Cenzi, a student at Sciences Po and a passionné of GA, I was invited to Paris in late March to participate in the so-called “grands O[raux] de Sciences Po” at which several speakers debate a selected topic, in this case, la mondialisation (see Chronicle 227).

    I won’t go into much detail concerning the “debate” except to note that the French, often thought of as exemplars of exquisite politeness, are more accurately characterized by a somewhat different cultural trait that locally goes by the name of goujaterie. My ideas seemed to go over well enough with the audience, but there wasn’t much time to develop them since the first speaker (whom I gallantly refrain from naming) took far more than her allotted time to say extremely little, and the others, both politicians, were more concerned with scoring points against each other than engaging in anthro-philosophical reflection. With all today’s fascination for things American, an étranger is still welcomed with difficulty into le débat franco-français [the Franco-French debate]. It was nonetheless a stimulating experience, one surely few of my countrymen have had, to address the future elite of France from the podium of the main amphitheater of this supremely Gallic institution.

    More fulfilling was the talk on GA I gave at Sciences Po two days later, to a small but committed audience. This may well be the first time I have ever given a full-length exposition of the ideas of Generative Anthropology in French; my GA seminars at UCLA have always been held in English. The experience recalled to me that French is my language of predilection, and gave me all the more the feeling of being a French thinker exiled in my native country.

    When I go to Paris I walk for kilometers on end. Paris is a pretty small city, only 105 k2 (Los Angeles is 1200) and with the exception of those dull left-bank arrondissements like the 15th, you can find something of interest in almost any street. (My shopping recommendation for this trip is the Dépôt-Vente du 17e, 109 rue de Courcelles, Métro Place Péreire.) Even when I take the Metro one way, I usually walk the other.

    I feel at home in Paris–far more so for many years than in my native New York. But this is not a “natural” phenomenon; I could well say that I have arranged my life precisely so that I can feel at home in Paris. My stepdaughter lives there with her family; so does her grandmother (my ex-mother-in-law)–my French family as it were. For someone who didn’t visit France until after obtaining his PhD, its capital’s hometown status is made, not born.

    Becoming a student of French was both the most intelligent and the dumbest thing I have done in my life. I doubt if I shall ever have the luxury of knowing which, although the current evolution of the profession seems to be trying to drop me a hint. Obtaining this second cultural identity was not merely a triumph over the obvious difficulties but a real inner liberation. It represents neither a denial of my American origins nor a simple pose. Many, no doubt most, of my dearest and most intimate relationships over a lifetime have been conducted in French.

    This still doesn’t tell me whether I did the right thing in taking up this “field.” To say that it has grown less receptive to my way of thinking is true but largely irrelevant, more alibi than demonstration. Although I once committed a faux pas by indicating to my (female) Dean that I preferred the “old boy” system of the past to what we have now, I was never, God forbid, an “old boy” myself. As in that Aesop fable where an animal stuck in the mud doesn’t let a friend brush away the flies because they would only be replaced by more bloodthirsty ones, I simply found the old-boy bloodsuckers less ravenous than those of our era. (Though the figure is ill-chosen, since it’s not the old boys or girls who do the sucking.)

    Clearly the needs of the academic market with respect to such things as language professors are more symbolic than real. Their most important function is arguably to provide a model of the well-oiled circulation of academic ideas. Outsiders such as I find it easy to mock these ideas, whose value is not measured by their correspondence to reality but by the degree to which they are adapted to this circulation. It is not therefore without interest that the Darwin-Gresham mechanism that dominates academic life selects inexorably for the victimary. The ideas that circulate best are those that defend victims against oppressors, ideas that may be repeated ad nauseam without our having the right even to find them boring, let alone false or irrelevant. Such considerations, no doubt, are only vaguely relevant in the hard sciences, and as a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science one would think I should have gone into one of those. But I never really enjoyed science and I don’t think I am particularly gifted for it, or even for mathematics, at least on the level required to make an original contribution. It’s the human that fascinates me, but, alas, the human is where the idea market, at its current (and future?) level of maturity, seems able to operate only in unselfconscious victimary language.

    The French are a bit less victimary than Americans; they still retain a “republican” rather than “democratic” sense of their polity, even if on social issues like gun control, abortion, the death penalty, or universal health insurance (not such a bad thing), they stand far to the left of the American center. We may let people have guns, but we also let them wear religious dress to class; we may execute minority murderers, but we also admit minority students to schools on a priority basis. For the moment, at least, the French don’t believe in hyphenated (and privilege-graded) identities; one wonders if this is national character or merely the equivalent of the French lag in such areas as computing and venture capitalism. At Sciences Po, the key French elite educational institution, a new policy will admit some students this year from schools in “disfavored” areas, bypassing the normal entrance examination…

    Well, I’m too old to worry about such things. Finding an audience for GA among the brightest young people of France is reward enough. As I told them, whether the lecture hall be full or empty, there is no substitute for the originary hypothesis. If people prefer the authority of Kant or Aristotle on moral matters to the construction of a generative model of morality, there’s nothing to do but await the slice of Ockham’s razor. Meanwhile, victimary thinking seem to be evolving toward ever firmer denial that the human species is morally superior to others. This evolution corroborates my position that the success of victimary discourse is not dependent on the existence of victims, but it makes ever more remote the likelihood of that Ockham shave. Perhaps the survival of our species requires this self-righteous false modesty–motivated, needless to say, less by love for other-specied creatures than by the need to one-up the fellow-specied Philistine down the street. Perhaps this hecatomb of human self-awareness will even “save the planet”…

    As that arch-Frenchman Pascal said:

    L’homme n’est qu’un roseau, le plus faible de la nature; mais c’est un roseau pensant. . . . Mais quand l’univers l’écraserait, l’homme serait encore plus noble que ce qui le tue . . . Toute notre dignité consiste donc en la pensée. . . . Travaillons donc à bien penser: voilà le principe de la morale. [Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he’s a thinking reed. . . . But if the universe should crush him, man is still nobler than what kills him . . . All our dignity consists therefore in thought. . . . Let us therefore work at thinking well; voilà the principle of moral reflection.]

    And voilà a cultural ideal this old hérisson [hedgehog] can relate to. So let’s hear it for croissants and café au lait and Paris in the springtime.

  • Victimary Thinking Forever?

    I suggested in Chronicle 224 that we are leaving the victimary postmodern era and entering a “post-millennial” era of non-victimary dialogue. What seems more likely is that we are leaving the acute form of the victimary for the chronic, the heroic for the banal. Both formulations refer to the damping of violence through dialogue, but the nuance is crucial, since it distinguishes what amounts to a utopian absence of hostility–and utopias are ever dangerous–from an endemic state of suspicion–the ère du soupçon detected by Nathalie Sarraute some forty-odd years ago.

    If there is a single explanation for GA’s relative obscurity (despite the yearly doubling of our website volume), it is its incompatibility with victimary thinking. Although certain radical modes have subsided, victimary discourse has become so endemic in our intellectual and cultural life that only in such contexts as this is it possible to speak of it with (relative) impunity. I have no desire to give offense to those who gain privilege and power by asserting their own–or their clientele’s–victimary status. The temptations to do so are too great; in the absence of either the reality check of the natural sciences or the constraint of an authoritarian ideology, the “soft” sector of the academy is bound to be driven by the “winner take all” principle characteristic of the global marketplace. Contrary to intuition, there is little room for controversy in the soft intellectual world, where victimary discourse is the lingua franca, and where any deviation from it is discouraged if not punished, and a principled stand against it cannot be recognized as such. To claim that one simply wishes to treat everyone equally is taken as a defense of “white male” privilege, even in the mouth of a principled black man like UC Regent Ward Connerly.

    Yet this academic discourse is clearly more abject than the human relations that accompany it. In my experience, relations between the races and the sexes in the United States have never been more reciprocal and equitable. Should this not count as proof that victimary discourse facilitates improvement of relations between unequally powerful groups, that legitimizing the expression of resentment is the least violent means of discharging this resentment and engaging the dialogue of reciprocity?

    Here is a hypothesis to focus the mind: Victimary thinking is the post-millennial replacement for utopianism. When we lack a blueprint for changing the world, only resentment can tell us what to change, and among the competing resentments, those with the most collective force are fittest for survival. This explains why, upon the collapse of apocalyptic utopianism, intellectual discourse, far from submitting to the criteria of market-driven rationality, denounces this rationality at every turn as perpetuating “domination,” “hegemony,” “patriarchy,” “exploitation,” “under-representation,” etc. No market success goes unsuspected by this discourse–except its own.

    Whether or not the fact that a certain group stands lower than another according to some criterion is scandalous in itself, the effort to correct the imbalance offers an outlet for the resentful energies formerly applied to utopianism. The market system welcomes these energies, which have nothing like the destructive force of the twentieth-century utopias. Affirmative action in its various guises is an indefinitely ongoing project that legitimizes an empowering victimary rhetoric. Even where no political progress is made–and some usually is–to denounce the patriarchy is to play a trump card when the opponent with all his aces is trumpless.

    I shall illustrate the hold of victimary discourse on the academy by examining a recent work by J. Hillis Miller, a distinguished professor of English and Comparative Literature at UC Irvine. In an essay on “the transnational university” in Black Holes (Stanford, 1999), Miller, quoting with approval Bill Readings’ The University in Ruins (Harvard, 1996), reflects on the replacement of the “university of an idea” with the “university of excellence.” The latter criterion, as Miller and, presumably, Readings point out, is tautologically oriented to the marketplace, since “excellence,” at least as my Dean and her superiors view it, is simply a synonym for “marketability”: what is excellent is what those “in the field” consider excellent. Excellence in the Humanities, as in physics and medicine, corresponds to objective achievement, an objective achievement in the Humanities being one that is recognized by an objectively large number of people.

    Seeing this point made at the start of his essay gave me hope that Miller would bring new insight to the Humanities’ increasing slavery to the academic marketplace. Alas, Miller’s essay is perceptive in every area but the one that counts, the political analysis of the university in general and the Humanities in particular. I can accept the linguistic PC (she for he, United States for American, Chicano and Chicana…) as a sign of respect for (victimized) Others; I can even abide the hook-line-and-sinker acceptance of the race/class/gender cliché that considers “United States” culture the expression of the self-interest of heterosexual white males (a category whose inclusiveness would have shocked those who not so long ago barred Catholics and Jews from their society). These ideological choices have no direct bearing on the accuracy of the author’s analysis. The real problem is that this analysis is based on a wholly misleading picture of the Humanities in our universities today.

    If a picture is worth a thousand words, an example might be worth a hundred. As evidence for his position that the university, now that the Cold War has ended, is becoming dominated by private corporations, Miller quotes (p. 55) University of California President Atkinson re the university’s role in preparing students for the “global marketplace.” (Shades of Clark Kerr’s “multiversity” and the 1964 Free Speech Movement.) Now it so happens that, just last month, I and my colleagues received a memo from this same President Atkinson about a well-funded program he was instituting for the purpose of including more “underrepresented minorities” on the faculty. At UCLA, the largest item in the Chancellor’s budget this year is funding for committees on “Gender Equity,” on which I have already reported in Chronicle 219.

    I am happy to stipulate, as the lawyers say, that these and other similar initiatives are fully justified, and that race-based affirmative action, currently illegal in California, is nonetheless a good thing to be promoted by all means possible. My objection to Miller’s analysis is simply one of fact. As Miller insightfully affirms in reference to every cultural postulation other than this one, using terms like “hegemonic” to refer to white male culture is a performative rather than constative use of language: it creates the category it assigns. All’s fair in love and war, but please don’t tell me that the present evolution of the Humanities displays subordination to corporate practices and the hegemony of the white male. The “cultural studies” world is the mother of all academic marketplaces, in which those who would defend “subaltern” voices against the hegemony of international corporations are handsomely funded, largely if indirectly by these very same corporations. I think of myself as having something to say on a good number of subjects. My last invitation to a Humanities conference dates from 1992. In contrast, there are those who attend such conferences every month. I will let you guess the level of white-male hegemony in the areas of study most of them focus on.

    Sadly but understandably, those such as Professor Miller to whom the profession has given little personal cause for resentment cannot help us to take an objective view of the victimary culture in which we operate. This is, therefore, a task I am assigning myself over the next year or two, insh’Allah, as an late friend of mine was wont to say. I, at least, am aware of my own resentment, and aware that it is my own, not that of a group, whether mine or someone else’s, of which I have made myself a representative. I don’t even represent lower-middle-class heterosexual Jewish males born in the Bronx in 1941, few of whom share my political views, let alone my intellectual perspective (most have remained Yankee fans, however). Independently of both the vast majority of “United States” academic humanists from the Bronx and elsewhere, who continue to echo victimary resentments with uncritical vehemence, and the conservative minority whose analysis is largely limited to the denunciation of the preceding–and who have their own, albeit more limited, funding sources and self-congratulatory conferences–I propose, on the basis of the originary hypothesis, to study the evolution of victimary thinking and to construct a model of its operation. With nothing to lose but my Anthropoetics budget of $0 per annum, I can afford to be as unbiased as they come.

    My personal stake in this investigation is my hope, as a participant in the “Judeo-Christian tradition,” to transcend through understanding my resentment of these phenomena. Victimary thinking is a powerful ethical epistemology whose force in the emerging global society we should not underestimate. Implicit in our end of history that does not put an end to history is the perpetuation of victimary thinking as the constitutive principle of post-millennial politics. If the post-millennial is a useful category to oppose to the postmodern, it cannot be because it marks the end of victimary thinking; such an “end” is just as utopian as the “end of history.”

    What utopias and dystopias have in common, and may therefore be considered essential to utopianism regardless of its valence, is that in either case people have a place and know their place. In a utopia, they like this place. In a dystopia, some may hate their place and not all may accept it, but they know it because their masters accept and defendtheirs. If our world is neither utopia nor dystopia, and depends for its survival on the deferral of both, it is because no one is secure in his position; all of us are real or potential subjects and objects of victimary resentment and vulnerable therefore to the inevitable expressions of this resentment.

    It is essential to victimary thinking to claim we are truly living in a dystopia; but in what kind of dystopia is this claim itself tolerated and even echoed by the so-called oppressors? The only true utopians left are the neo-Nazis, who maintain their “Aryan” dream in defiance of public sentiment. Which proves once again that if victimary thinking is bad, utopianism is a lot worse. What makes post-millennial victimary discourse effective is that it continues to circulate and transform itself rather than stagnating and fermenting into a monstrous ideology. The expression of resentment within the political process and its dominant position in the academy may best be thought of as means for accelerating this circulation. Just as in Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, private (or group) resentments enhance the public exchange system. Whether or not this must indefinitely remain the case is the crucial question for one who would model the operation of victimary thinking in our era.

  • We are all generative anthropologists now

    Twenty-odd years of originary thinking have given me ample occasion to reflect on the resistance it encounters among academics. Personal equations aside, the basis for this resistance would seem to be that, in our time at least, the production of (publishable) research is not visibly furthered by a mode of thinking whose function is to provide a minimal basis for all more specific thought about the human. If everyone could get together and agree on a common ground for such thought, generative anthropology would be the only possible choice, but, even if we grant this less than modest proposition, the fact is that “everyone” isn’t going to get together: the intellectual marketplace, like the economic one, functions through individual exchanges that only incrementally modify the network as a whole. This is not to deny that such a common ground must be found, but to suggest that the sense of its necessity too must propagate incrementally through the network.

    The aim of last year’s studies on the modern history of the question of language origin (roughly, Chronicles 175-198) was to demonstrate that, in approaching this issue, thinkers both before and after the great divide that separates twentieth-century science from eighteenth-century speculation end up proposing, albeit in an unconscious, irresolute fashion, versions of what I call the originary hypothesis.

    The transitional nineteenth-century is generally barren in this area, as witness the oft-quoted 1866 declaration of the French Académie des Sciences that hypotheses concerning the origin of language would no longer be entertained. The turn from language to languages is best exemplified by Wilhelm von Humboldt–the subject of a forthcoming Chronicle. For Humboldt, who tried to learn every known language, the focal point of the anthropological study of language is no longer, as for his precursor Herder, the hypothetical diachronic interface between the prelinguistic and the linguistic state, but the empirically accessible synchronic differences of form between language families. In this turn, if not in his models for linguistic analysis, Humboldt anticipates the structural linguistics of Saussure. No doubt Humboldt, whose four categories of agglutinating, incorporating, isolating, and inflected languages are still used today, considered the last type–best exemplified by Sanskrit–superior to the others, but even this “Aryan” quasi-racism should be associated with the synchronic turn of his thought: although nineteenth-century historicism is often linked to colonialism and “orientalism,” the fundamental thrust of racialism is not to distinguish among different stages of development but among different kinds of beings.

    A demonstration of the necessity of the originary hypothesis may appear chimerical to those who consider that “real research,” pursued in the absence of any such hypothesis, is closing in on what is for them the essence of the matter–the description of the present state and evolutionary development of the linguistic processes in the brain. But despite the vast scientific progress since the Enlightenment, this scientism suffers from a materialist fallacy that, on the specific point of language origin–and therefore on that of the essence of the human as such–recalls Descartes’ location of the soul’s action on the body in the pineal gland, or Gall’s proposal, mocked by Hegel, to divine our mental abilities from the shape of our skulls.

    Whether in the era of pre-scientific speculation or in that of empirical research, outside of Generative Anthropology, models of the origin of language rely without exception on an originary hypothesis that remains unaware of itself. The individual studies presented in the earlier Chronicles have noted this fact. The thematization of the originary hypothesis is not a product of technological advances, nor is its relationship to earlier hypotheses of language origin comparable to that between Newton and Aristotle or Einstein and Newton. This thematization depends rather on the historical, which is to say, the ethical experience of postmodernity, the ultimate revelation of which is the impossibility of avoiding the model of exchange as the basis for human relations. It openly avows the leap that attends the creation of the sign-world and seeks to minimize this leap without denying it. To refuse to formulate such a hypothesis is either to deny the discontinuity between animal and human or to subordinate it to the greater discontinuity between human and God.

    The originary hypothesis is equally impatient with either the secular or religious refusal; conversely, it tolerates equally well secular or religious expression. Its difficulty with religious thought is not the appeal to transcendence as such but the non-minimal nature of this appeal. Since humans may be shown to exist and God or gods cannot, a secular hypothesis of origin might seem “more minimal” than a religious one. But the hypothesis of human origin is not a question that may be posed from outside the human experience; and within that experience, the transcendent Being personified in the Judeo-Christian tradition as God is not detachable from the communal guarantee that makes language and other representational forms possible. We need not “believe in God,” not even “in the foxholes,” to be aware of this dependency.

    There is clearly much to be gained, on both sides, by denying the symmetry of the human and the sacred, by either setting God prior to humanity or humanity prior to God–or, like the churchgoing scientist, doing both at once. Setting aside the first choice for the moment, the second has obvious immediate advantages for empirical research. To understand the sacred as a mere artifact allows one to explore its social usefulness while ignoring it as a causal factor. It then becomes possible to draw analogies between animal and human communication while “bracketing” the gap between human representation and its animal precursors. This research could no doubt be carried out, and one day no doubt will be, within the framework of the originary hypothesis; but at its present stage, that empirical scientists’ own hypotheses can be demolished on a priori “philosophical”–read minimal anthropological–grounds, seems irrelevant to their, if not to our, concerns.

    Yet in the long term, the truth can never be irrelevant. If indeed language is a social process generated not by some new configuration of the individual brain but by the interaction of a group, then not only can the origin of language not be presented directly in terms of biological evolution, but language as such must be understood as a process of interaction between human beings rather than as a set of connections within an individual brain. The attempts of Derek Bickerton or the far more anthropologically aware Terrence Deacon to model a possible origin for language are not innocent footnote speculations “supplementary” to the serious material. The very awkwardness of these speculations, their throwaway nature, betrays both the necessity of acknowledging the question and the inadequacy of the less than rigorous answers suggested.

    To those who seek the secret of language in the brain, I propose as a thought-experiment that, since religion and language emerge simultaneously, one seek the secret of religion in the brain as well. Perhaps there is a region in the brain (in the “right brain,” no doubt) devoted to religious concepts. Whatever the results of neurological research concerning language, clearly the neurological evolution leading to the doubly articulated languages we know is a consequence of the birth of language, not its cause. But this simple fact, even if admitted, is masked by the elaborateness and complexity of this evolution, whereas our common God-concepts (what corresponds in the linguistic domain to the intellectual structures of theology is not language but linguistic philosophy) show no apparent dependence on evolving brain structures. Language, which I called in The Origin of Language “formal” representation, requires a minimal expenditure of energy. Its representation of the (originally sacred) world has adaptive consequences that drive the joint evolution of language and the brain; Deacon points out that in the course of this evolution, the brain and language adapt to each other. Religion, in contrast, is “institutional”; its representations do not interact freely with the world and we have therefore no adaptive interest in increasing their throughput. On the contrary, the cost (Bataille’s dépense) of ritual is a benefit, since the energy we thus expend is diverted from mimetic violence. But the fact that several hundred thousand years of human evolution have apparently not created a religion area in the brain comparable to those of Broca and Wernicke for language–and that we feel no need to seek such a region–sheds light on the fundamental question of where we should situate our “competence,” to use Chomsky’s term, in either language or religion.

    Both religion and language are, minimally, forms of representation. Precisely because the object of religious worship, however “primitive,” is Being rather than beings, it must be designated by a sign that persists as the correlative of Being in the absence of the being that first gave rise to both sign and correlative. This generative reasoning relegates to subordinate status the question of where the sacred sign resides in the brain. In the originary scene, an associative or “indexical” sign–the “abortive gesture of appropriation”–acquires a “symbolic” value. Language originates as the generation of a new communally recognized connection, independent of the built-in call system (comparable to laughter rather than speech), yet no mere private Pavlovian association.

    This argument, so difficult to accept with regard to language, where syntactical issues loom so large, is rejected only out of inertial prejudice in the domain of the sacred. The often-proposed idea that a genetic mutation led to the emergence of speech is a category error, but one less flagrantly absurd than the idea that such a mutation gave rise to the concept of God. (Imagine the thrill of one day discovering the God gene.)

    Today’s empirically driven reflection on these subjects is unconcerned with the internal logic of its hypotheses; the all-important goal is to formulate research programs–and obtain funds–for the systematic collection of information. This is a reality of the academic practice of science, whose general effectiveness in providing benefits to humanity it would be churlish to ignore. In the “early modern” past, however, there was no research establishment focused on work-creation, only a set of individual thinkers. It is among these thinkers that the encounter with the logic of the originary hypothesis can best be tested. The continued reliance of those who today style themselves philosophers on the Enlightenment moral reasoning that culminates in Kant, not to speak of that of Plato and Aristotle, demonstrates that since early modern times, at most incremental progress has been made in grounding the fundamental principles of human relations. These Enlightenment thinkers, whose ideas are still felt to be alive today, remain the sole interlocutors willing, tacitly to be sure, to discuss with us the question of human origin.

    But beyond the dialogue with texts, my real interlocutors will be those in whom this writing will arouse the long-repressed intuition that the origin of language and religion must be thought because it is at the root of human thinking. No doubt humanity has all of human time to assimilate the logic of its origin, but the time is coming when we will need to guarantee the continuation of this time itself through the admission that we all hold this logic in common.

  • Film Realism

    Like it or not, film is the basic narrative form of our time, a position it achieved with the establishment of the feature film toward the end of WWI and consolidated in the sound era. Film’s images stimulate our imagination more strongly than words in a book. Today, few people ever get excited about a novel; few people never get excited about a movie. Although film is doubly fictive in that the images aren’t really moving and their substance itself is staged, our brains cannot process the series of still photographs as anything other than real-world movement. In more culturally relevant terms, in comparison to the words of a novel, the authenticity of the film image requires of us less deference to their author. The film auteur chooses his images, but he shows them to us rather than forcing us to reconstruct them from his prose. The unspoken motivation behind the nineteenth-century drive to reproduce sound and image is the desire to liberate representation from the triangular relationship with the Other-Subject.

    I proposed in Chronicle 225 to define realism as deviation from–better, deferral of–the Standard Narrative Model (SNM) in whose action the “master” wagers his life. This definition is of historical value in capturing the literary focus on bourgeois characters–ordinary people–that begins in the eighteenth century and becomes dominant in the nineteenth. But the simplest, perhaps the best, definition of realism is simply as looking real. The objects we constitute in our imagination from realistic representations can be counted on–or so we think–to behave like real objects. This constitution is very different when it begins from photographs rather than words. Language becomes realistic by conveying believable information; we give credibility to detailed, apparently coherent descriptions, to specialized jargons recorded by novelists from Balzac to Zola and beyond. For our paleolithically evolved brains, a photographic image is realistic until proved otherwise.

    This mental imperative can be exploited in two ways, giving rise to the Lumière-Méliès dichotomy with which cinema history begins. On the one hand, reconstituting real movement on screen creates the illusion that one is really witnessing it: the train entering the station will crush the movie audience! On the other, by manipulating the series of images, one can create a realistic illusion of traveling to the moon or, more simply, of taking off one’s head and tossing it in the air. (Méliès, we recall, began as a magician.) But because film fantasy is parasitic on the mechanism of perception in a way that literary fantasy is not, I incline to the idea, elaborated most famously by André Bazin, that the vocation of film is realism; regardless of what is done with them afterward, its images are consecrations of a real, and specifically human, world.

    Film’s fundamental realism is anterior to our judgment of the plausibility or possibility of the action. A science-fiction film is realistic because our first reaction to what we see on the screen is to accept it as faithful to reality. That this acceptance is historically conditioned–neither rear-projected scenes of the road behind actors driving cars nor New York City scenes shot in a studio’s back lot convince us today as they did fifty years ago–only reinforces my point; more sophisticated techniques sensitize us to small clues of unreality (the flatness of the projected image, the lack of open perspectives of city life) that were less noticeable before these techniques evolved. As we grow more sophisticated, we require images ever more indistinguishable from those of real life.

    What does film’s realism imply about filmic content? If the novel is an apparently amorphous literary genre whose only obvious quality is a certain length, film would seem to be yet more abstractly determined by its medium alone. Yet for reasons that cannot be dismissed as merely commercial, twenty years after its inception, film had acquired its standard “feature” format of 70-120 minutes, one whose dominance became more definitive with the coming of sound, and all but absolute with television’s relegation to the archives of the serial, the newsreel, and the “short subject.” When one visits a movie theater today, one almost always sees only a feature film and advertisements (“trailers”) for more of same. Film length is more rigorously fixed by a whole degree of magnitude than novel length. Novels range from about 30 K to over 1 M words; a full-length film is too short at an hour and over the limit at four.

    The novel’s length, which, however vaguely defined, exceeds that of the (short) story, lets us defer the inevitable death of the story it is telling and to live with the protagonist in a human time that is more than the ultimate moment–Racine’s dernière fois–that reveals his fate. This living-with makes the novel the privileged esthetic vehicle of adaptation to the world of market exchange. Human culture has been focused from the beginning on the deferral of mimetic desire; only in the modern world does my desire, in imitation and contradiction of others’, become the principal motor of my action. The novel supplies a temporal context to the story of desire gained or lost that lets us learn its lessons along with the protagonist. Not all novels end with the renunciation by which Girard defines the form in Mensonge…, but the novel’s length makes it a model of the relationship between lived experience and life as a whole, whose end is willy nilly that of the time that lends desire significance.

    After the coming of sound there were, most notably in France (Pagnol, Guitry), energetic defenders of film’s kinship with theater. A novel is normally read alone, whereas film and theater are spectacles. One can make a play into a movie by just filming a performance; both spectacles last about the same amount of time. Nonetheless, Eisenstein–comparing Griffith to Dickens–claimed for film a special affinity with the novel. With the exception of those modernist works–Proust, Joyce, Musil– that test the limits of realism’s extension of time, most novels lend themselves so naturally to film that we consider reading and watching esthetically equivalent experiences. This is all the more curious because we may very well be aware, while watching the film, of exactly how much of the novel has been eliminated. As I recall, Zinnemann’s film of Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal combines two episodes and eliminates one altogether, yet it sticks in one’s mind far better than the book.

    A play, precisely because it is performed by real people, cannot be realistic. It is either a tragedy where the principals live on the edge of sacrifice, a melodrama that shortens tragedy’s heroic cloak to accommodate the bourgeois, or a comedy that gets laughs from burlesquing the other genres. To see real people as people other than themselves requires a leap of faith that derives its energy from the sacred roots of drama. This dramatic core explains why, even more than painting has abandoned “photographic” depiction, theatrical decors and costumes in the film era have renounced the attempt at illusion. (This was not so before cinema, when theaters featured live animals on stage and shipwrecks in artificial seas.) Our acquaintance with Oedipus in our two hours with him is identical with the revelation of his fate; this acquaintance is tragedy itself. Yet an even shorter time spent in the movie theater provides an experience of novel-like realism because film looks real. Film concentrates the effet de réel that novels create over time into the same time-frame as a play–the time of spectacle.

    This suggests that we may characterize film as realistic spectacle. Movies are full of violence and death; not only westerns, police stories, thrillers, martial arts, sci-fi, but almost every masterpiece. What great French film does not contain a murder?–Grand Illusion, Daybreak, Breathless, Jules et Jim, Hiroshima mon amour… (Yet think of the cinematic illumination of “ordinary lives” in a film like La maman et la putain or the works of Eric Rohmer.) Film realism domesticates the sacrificial ethos of the SNM, just as the fantasy built on this realism devalues it. The characters in film are flesh and blood like you and me; their death, like ours, is inexplicable. But because this death is only an image, we can indulge in fantasies of resuscitation or, alternatively, of the infinite carnage that video games and Schwartzenegger films have made familiar.

    Understood as realistic spectacle, film need not and, indeed, cannot seek the suspension of time that is the ideal of the novel. Cinematic time is suspended within time. Film is a series of representations whose content is nonetheless processed by our senses as lived reality. The very impermanence of its images that defines film’s realism is what preserves these images of human time from decay. But after the first flush of novelty, the mere fact of filming is not sufficient to guarantee film’s consecration of reality–whence the early demise of the Lumière 50-second documentary. What a movie shows us cannot be more real than what we see from our window, but unless we have something like Jimmy Stewart’s view in Rear Window, we won’t continue to watch. This suggests why the greatest films, those that capture the form’s foundational tension, are either “spiritual” works that pay homage to the sacrificial reality they display, such as Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Dreyer’s Joan, or Bresson’s Condamné à mort, or “theatrical” ones that play on the discordance that film alone captures between spectacle and its flesh-and-blood basis, as do Renoir’s Rules of the Game and Carné’s Children of Paradise.

  • La mondialisation

    In Chronicle 209, I proposed the term post-millennial to describe the era now emerging from the victimary shadow of post-WWII postmodernism. (To the same end, but from a very different point of departure, Raoul Eshelman proposes the term performatism in his article in Anthropoetics VI, 2.) But the most common term used to describe this era is one that less clearly designates a break with the postmodern or indeed with the  industrial era: globalization–in French, la mondialisation. Globalization/mondialisation is one of the most insistent buzzwords of the past few years, so much so that I am in the process of preparing a (French) talk on it. This Chronicle is a preliminary reflection on the subject, beginning with the words themselves.

    Mondialisation recalls phenomenology’s world of experience, the “in-the-worldness” of Heidegger‘s Dasein, literally, “being-there,” the term by which he designates the human’s spatio-temporal situatedness (see Chronicle 226). Mondialisation is the coming-together in a single world of the insular human worlds of not so long ago. But we would not speak of mondialisation if we did not inhabit a globe, a surface on which continued expansion from a given origin is fated to close in upon itself while transforming the planar structure of center and periphery into a network of decentered nodes. If the pre-globalized world may be thought of as a conglomerate of circles each with its own center, the global network as a whole has a single center maximally distant from the surface. Humanity returns to its originary condition of a single world with a single center of transcendence, but one whose singleness reflects its maximal virtuality–its minimality.

    In Things hidden…, Girard saw the beginning of la mondialisation in the potential of nuclear arms for world-wide violence. The human world is brought together by the unthinkable possibility of its annihilation, bringing full circle the spread of humanity through the world made possible by the originary deferral of violence. Yet the one world created by weapons of mass destruction is chimerical; it remains an abstraction so long as the weapons are not used and would vanish as soon as they were. The Cold-War era seemed to have suspended la mondialisation indefinitely-–a powerful illusion that goes far to explain the overreaction at its end. Only after 1989 did we understand that beneath the apparently static configuration of “two world systems,” the final conflict between the world market system and its centrally planned alternative was drawing to a close. The impossibility of military conflict that seemed to make the stand-off eternal blinded us to the decisive nature of the economic competition that would transform the abstract community of mutual deterrence into a world of economic and cultural exchange.

    Many find this development disturbing. Rousseau is the patron of those who increasingly communicate about the evils of increased communication. For Rousseau, human intercourse inevitably spreads the contagion of mimetic desire, generating the vanity and oppression endemic to “society.” His political solution for the modern world reflects this mistrust of exchange. One seeks in vain in The Social Contract any reference to debate or dialogue, even in the legislative system, which devolves upon a–singular or collective–”legislator,” just as sovereignty is the province of the “sovereign” who expresses the “general will.”

    But where, consistently with his preference for originary simplicity, Rousseau attacked the proliferation of desire-objects made possible by the development of the “sciences and arts,” the anti-mondialistes accuse mondialisation of leading to universal sameness. The unfettered exchange of goods and desires, following the “winner-take-all” nature of expanding markets, results in a deadening worldwide uniformity, with a Holiday Inn at every airport and a MacDonald’s on every square. For example:

    . . . what is happening is the destruction of traditional culture . . . the flattening of cultural variations in the face of the pervasive model of economic well-being. Although these changes would not take place unless local people in some sense wanted them, this fact does not settle the question whether it is a good or bad thing. . . . It is for many a deeply worrying feature of the modern world that insufficient value is placed on cultural diversity . . . If then we recognize that people have a right to cultural diversity, what is happening in the name of ‘development’ is simply undermining this right.
    Nigel Dower, “Human Rights, Global Ethics and Globalization” in Globalization and Europe (London: Pinter, 1998), p. 121

    This anti-imperialist defense of localism uses an imperialistic frame of reference, complete with (post?-)colonial disdain for “what [third-world] people (think they) want” (ibid). Aside from the fact that few things are more valued today than “insufficiently valued” cultural diversity, the kind of diversity that pre-industrial cultures are here granted a “right” to can be appreciated only by the cosmopolitan traveler. Such “diversity” is really a traditional sameness that must be preserved by refusing to give the population “what they (think they) want.” Instead, the point has been made, notably by the ethnologist James Clifford, that the introduction of Western modes of consumption and cultural creation does not eliminate the local ones, but leads to interaction and interpenetration both locally and globally: Chinese jazz, French rap, California-Thai restaurants.

    Another synonym for globalization is the “end of history,” announced by Francis Fukuyama in a famous 1989 article celebrating the triumph of liberal democracy over Soviet socialism. This Hegelian term has an unfortunately apocalyptic resonance, as though human time had run into a brick wall. On the contrary, the end of the history that prevented mondialisation was inevitable only in the sense that it was the ethically inevitable equilibrium state of the one world’s interacting human desires–the outcome that, from the post-Hegelian perspective of history as indefinite opening rather than closure, we are bound not simply to accept but to choose. In this perspective, liberal democracy is less a specific form of political organization than the social configuration that imposes the minimal constraint on human exchange by making the exchange of representations (politics) a means for facilitating the exchange of things (economics). In comparison with pre-modern systems of ritual redistribution or even with Athenian democracy, where the economic was, on the contrary, an instrument of the political, liberal democracy maximizes the dynamic of moral reciprocity that is the originary accompaniment to the deferral of violence.

    Mondialisation cannot be imposed by the West or even by the laws of economics; it can only progress as the resultant of the free choices of its eventual beneficiaries. In this sense mondialisation is dialogic rather than “dialectical” in the Hegelian-Marxist sense; the conflicting elements of world culture are not “lifted up and transcended” [Aufgehoben] in a final synthesis but continually transform themselves as increasingly equal partners in exchange. And because mondialisation is integration into a world rather than simply a global economy, we cannot hope to stand outside the process and grasp it as a whole.

    The most valuable indicator of the cultural opacity or “thickness” that mondialisation must integrate is not the state of international trade but that of religion. The Enlightenment desire to reduce each religion to the doctrine of reciprocal morality common to all religions has been with us for 250 years or so, yet religions remain nearly as specific as ever, and despite various noble efforts at ecumenism, recent growth in world religions has disproportionately occurred in the least ecumenical sects of each.

    Religion is based on the unjustifiable leap of faith from worldly fact to transcendental meaning that is also the modus operandi of the “arbitrary” linguistic signifier. The flaw in the Enlightenment view is in taking the flat, rational world of metaphysics as self-contained, whereas this world could only come into being, and only continue to be regenerated, through the constant reaffirmation and transcendence of anthropological particularity.

    The irrational particularism that makes dialogic reconciliation among religious traditions so difficult is no mere residue of pre-modern times; it is a reminder of the fundamental human truth preserved by religion, one that can never be wholly absorbed by even the best functioning, most egalitarian exchange system because it is the foundation of that system. Religion’s lesson for mondialisation is that there will always be difference within the world because there is at the center of the human a difference between eternal signs and temporal things.

    To see our Earth as one network of nodes around a minimally present center is to envision humanity’s maximally creative state of dynamic equilibrium. The most significant movement in this direction so far is, arguably, the ongoing unification of Europe, a transformation whose revolutionary nature may be measured by its lack of drama. Banality is the guarantee of the success of mondialisation, whether on the scale of a continent or of the entire world. It marks the end of history as macrohistorical spectacle and the beginning of the indefinitely dense microhistory in which every individual’s life is inscribed.

  • On Being and Time

    Marina Ludwigs is proposing a dissertation at UC Irvine that will explore both Generative Anthropology and Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (SZ) [Being and Time] as joint bases for an anthropology of narrative. Reading and discussing her proposal recalled to me that, although few readers may be aware of it, Heidegger’s ontology of Dasein (lit. “being-there”: the human as existent) is an important source of GA. I share, and have been inspired by, Heidegger’s impatience with ontic or empirical explanations of the human. A number of chapters of Originary Thinking and Signs of Paradox–on being, thinking, signification–were attempts to redirect Heidegger’s “ontological turn” toward GA. The present Chronicle only scratches the surface of Heidegger’s seminal text as an indication of the wealth of anthropological riches that originary analysis may uncover there. (All quotes are from the standard 1960 Niemeyer edition; translations are mine–with a little help from the French translation.)

    The great unsolved problem of the phenomenological method is its essential solipsism, which is no mere methodological problem. Phenomenology assumes, given that we can have no direct experience of any other mind, that the individual mind must generate its own ontology and that of the world on the basis of its “existential” experience in this world. For Husserl, other people have no special status among the variously-structured objects of one’s mental universe. I assume they have minds like my own, but they need not be taken into account in my investigation of my own mental processes. Heidegger, unlike Husserl, recognizes the existence not merely of other individuals but of being-with [Mitsein] and coexistence [Mitdasein]. But for Heidegger as for Rousseau, the effect of society as a collectivity is not to lead us to Being but to tempt us with loss of self in the mimetic crowd–das Man: “people,” no one in particular–which expresses “its” opinions in impersonal talk [Gerede]. No path in Heidegger’s philosophy leads, as in Durkheim, from the social group to the sacred and Being itself.

    Originary thinking adds to phenomenological introspection the “empirical” knowledge, crystallized in language, of the communal nature of human reality. The originary hypothesis takes us minimally outside ourselves in a collective scene that provides a common basis for the scenes of representation we all experience within our separate minds but on whose essential identity we rely when we engage in phenomenological reflection. The originary scene is not empirically given; its postulation of communal rather than individual reality can be expressed only in hypothetical terms. But this minimal postulation of a common scene allows us to model the cultural, or what Durkheim called the “social” essence of humanity. Heidegger precedes GA in pointing out the limits of empirical anthropology, but where GA situates the co-emergence of the human and of sacred Being in an ethical event, Heidegger defines the human in relation to Being alone. The ontolatry of the later writings and even his pseudo-Nietzschean glorification of Nazism can be traced to this ethical lacuna.

    The individual mind begins by acquiring a language that comes to it from without. But this is not what Heidegger and Sartre call “falling” into a pre-given human reality. Our participation in the self-consciousness of Heidegger’s Dasein or Sartre’s pour-soi [for-itself] depends on our participation in a culture of shared representations at the center of which is language. Human consciousness without language or language without society is an ontological absurdity. We do not come to being-with-others from our individual experiences, we come to these experiences as a “withdrawal” from the originary communal scene. As Heidegger says, being-alone is a form of being-with. But Heidegger’s “being-with,” even in its “authentic” mode of free participation in a common project, cannot serve as a model for human culture, because it is not our primary relationship to Being: “But the expression ‘Dasein’ clearly shows that ‘first of all’ this being is unrelated to others” (SZ §26, p. 120). Nor does the discussion of language as “speech” [Rede] in §34 ever tell us the source of the language by which we “express ourselves” and “understand,” nor what precisely the relation is between my self-expression and the fact that it is formulated in a mode of communication to others. Indeed, in a rare note of modesty, Heidegger ends this section on language by recommending further “philosophical research” in this area.

    When Heidegger comes to analyzing the concrete use of language, in SZ as in his later works, he falls back on what is in effect a crude reflection-theory of signification: the truth of Being is revealed in language. For example, in §44a, he speaks of the relation between the sentence “The picture on the wall is hanging crooked” and the fact of the picture’s hanging crooked as an “uncovering” or “revelation” [Entdeckung] unmediated by “representations” [Vorstellungen]. By the latter, Heidegger refers to whatever empirical contents of my brain may be activated when I hear this particular sentence. But the notion of “revelation” does not tell us how we come to share, not empirical representations–a question that troubled Enlightenment empiricism from Locke on–but the Saussurian “signified” or concept that allows us to communicate with each other. “Uncovering,” like Heidegger’s many references to the Greek aletheia, truth as unveiling, points to a revelatory scene in which the empirical or “horizontal” world comes to be thought as Being by means of the sign. Language can “reveal” truth only because it was inaugurated as a means of sacred communication within the human community.

    A similar analysis may be given of Heidegger’s analysis of human temporality as defined by “being toward death.” Chronicle 224 expressed the idea that the source of our awareness of death-in-general is each participant’s deferral of “cultural” death at the hands of his fellows in the originary scene. The sacred and its cultural matrix are defined not by the simple transcendence of the human sphere but by transcendence on the plane of the sign originating from deferral on that of the real world. The worldly temporality within which the participants experience the scene, in contrast to their revelatory relationship with the sign, is one of deferral, deferral of violence but also of appetitive satisfaction. By means of this appetitive deferral we learn to distinguish the atemporal being of the sign from the time-bound being of the central object that the sign originally designates. We speak of the linguistic sign as atemporal, but in reference to the sacred we prefer the term immortal since the sacred is not merely the significant but the significant that reveals itself in the world. Any individual revelation of Being is necessarily mediated by the collective revelation that revealed/established sacred Being in the first place. The tribal shaman or the romantic poet visited by the divinity is a representative of a human community coeval with this divinity.

    Derrida’s différance, deferral-as-(significant)-difference, teaches us all we know about “human time.” As the postponement of appetitive satisfaction, deferral is the temporality of the Sartrean project, the projection of an intention into the future as a goal against which action will be measured. At the same time, as the averting of violent conflict and potential death, deferral is also the temporality of Heideggerian care [Sorge]. What Heidegger calls the “resoluteness” [Entschlossenheit] of Being-toward-death is not a simple category but a synthesis of these two moments of deferral in which the human temporality of the project, freed from the scene of its origin by the communal deferral of violence inaugurated by the scene itself, “remembers” its origin after having “forgotten” it in worldly activity–constituted not merely by “diversion” but also by economic exchange. Différance is inseparable from language and therefore from the human; but the language we derive from sacred interdiction and which, through the separation between sign and referent, permits the destruction of the central being to our appetitive benefit, allows us to consider our own death on the same model, as the separation of our worldly being from its “signified” or self/soul, and therefore as a thematic object of contemplation.

    This analysis helps us to grasp the socio-historical specificity hidden in what we usually call “authenticity,” being “genuinely oneself.”

    Dasein is genuinely [eigentlich] itself in the original solitariness of resoluteness that keeps silent and disposes itself to sustain anxiety [Angst]. Genuine being-oneself as keeping-silent does not indeed say “I-I” but “is” in silence the thrown being as which it genuinely can be. (SZ §64, p. 322-23; emphases the author’s)

    The genuine self is a speaking being that keeps silent lest it join the mimetic attraction of the crowd, whose distracting chatter [Gerede] separates the self from its “primitive and originary relations of being to the world, from being-with and from being-in itself” (§35, p. 170). But this contrast between silent being-in and -with and the voice of faceless Man is a romantic one, historically aroused by the recentering of society on the marketplace in the post-Revolutionary era. The language of mimesis can be opposed only to the language of mimesis deferred. There is no path from Being to the individual human mind that does not pass through the language of the human community that defines itself and is defined by the sacred.

    By aborting the appetitive gesture into a sign, we become capable of experiencing time independently of the events that fill it. Our experience of originary deferral explains what Heidegger calls our “ek-static” temporality: we experience not only the past and future but even the present as a standing-outside-our-immediate-existence-in-time. What is missing from Heidegger’s analysis of time-consciousness is reference to the linguistic sign or to representation as such. Although, for Heidegger, “representations” [Darstellungen] are mental images, of interest only to empirical psychology, yet to stand before the future, past, or present is only possible in the context of a shared system of representations, themselves experienced as invulnerable to temporal change, on which our notion of time depends. It is not enough to say that I “stand outside myself” in that moment. I represent to myself a given temporal state, not as a mere image or “representation” in Heidegger’s sense–which would reduce time-consciousness to a simple extension of the now: I feel fear now because I now experience the (past, present, future) image of X–but as a scene communicable in principle to my fellow humans because derived from the shared originary scene of representation.

    “Resolute” Dasein refuses the Pascalian divertissement [Abkehr, diversion] into which it falls when it lets itself be determined by any particular worldly goal. The existential project requires our constant free recommitment of ourselves to its worldly finitude. The specific goal of a given praxis is finite, yet its ultimate source of meaning is transcendent. The human can emerge only in relation to a sacred that it represents as the transcendental guarantee of its representations. The ethical function of the sacred is to defer human violence, but this deferral must be continually renewed; no ultimate or final peace is conceivable. Deferral of violence is our “ultimate” goal in the dynamic sense that it transcends any particular goal.

    To call this ultimate guarantee “Being” dehumanizes what is perhaps too human when we call it God; above all it founds the fallacious image of Being revealing itself to humanity on a scene of “its own” creation. Authentic Dasein cares for its being-toward-death in an ethical context because both being and death as the ultimate object of deferral were revealed in such a context. This is the kernel of the originary hypothesis as a minimal guarantee of the moral model of human reciprocity that Heidegger’s notion of Dasein allowed him at a crucial historical moment to deny. In anthropology, the ultimate argument is always ethical, even if it requires that we postulate for it a foundation beyond ethics.

  • Risking Death: Realism and the “Standard Narrative Model”

    In the previous Chronicle I referred to the insufficiently appreciated privilege granted to most of us of dying in bed at what used to be called a ripe old age. When I was young, 70 was considered such an age; today, if you don’t reach 80, your death is “premature.” Of course there are many areas of the world where life expectancy is far less, and quite a few where a natural death at any age cannot be taken for granted. But what about explorers, intelligence agents, test pilots, commandos, tightrope walkers, mountain climbers, suicide bombers, adventurers of all kinds who throw life expectancy to the winds?

    One way to deal with our inevitable mortality is to challenge it. Instead of waiting for the body’s decay, some prefer to make even their temporary survival a triumph. If one false move means certain death, then life’s continuation is not mere passive postponement of the end but skilled victory over it. And if one does make that false move, one dies of one’s own failure rather than universal entropy. Death, and its deferral, have become cultural experiences.

    Narratives of all kinds, which by their very nature grant their characters’ lives cultural significance, thrive on risk to these lives, whether deliberate or accidental. The life-or-death significance of the narrative content to the characters justifies a posteriori the life-or-death significance attributed to the story by the very fact of telling it. In real life, risking your life makes life imitate art; your life itself, rather than its products, becomes a source of significance, a model for others.

    Since I began studying literature, I have tried out many definitions of the term realism, none of them really adequate. Realism makes claims like Balzac’s “All is true!” or Zola’s assimilation of the novel to scientific experimentation. It is tempting to dismiss these objective claims in favor of Roland Barthes’ subjective effet de réel [reality effect]. But mere effect does not do justice to the realia in realist novels, which often contain lengthy, technically accurate descriptions of complex activities ranging from mining in Germinal to whaling in Moby Dick. When Dickens describes London or Balzac Paris, we assume the streets are on the map.

    The basis for the “reality effect” is contingency; one finds things in the text that have no obvious necessity for being there other than–one is supposed to believe–correspondence with historical reality. The notion is useful in reminding us that a novel isn’t really, as Stendhal ironically claimed it to be, “a mirror carried along a road,” but it doesn’t provide a very sharp historical criterion. All literature situates itself in relation to human reality, even when it takes place in some other galaxy. Does Don Quixote produce an effet de réel? How about La Chanson de Roland? The reality effect is in fact a narrative universal that varies with era and genre according to what contingencies are required in order to produce it. Barthes’ own example of a gratuitous reality effect, a barometer in Flaubert’s “Un coeur simple” [A Simple Heart] that has no apparent function in the narrative, is unconvincing; the barometer nicely connotes that just slightly futile bourgeois rationality the contrast of which with the peasant’s care and faith is the heart of the story. But the real point is why the barometer should lead us to speak of reality effect and realism when the Chanson de Roland‘s Halt sont li pui e li val tenebros [High are the hills and dark the valleys] does not. Aren’t these hills and valleys narrative props intended to give the impression, however conventional, of a contingent landscape, in the same way that Snoopy’s “dark and stormy night,” however symbolic, is in the first place a contingent weather pattern? Even when the formula is always the same, its function is not to satisfy ritual necessity but to depict worldly contingency; what varies is how much such depiction is needed. The specificity of “realism” must be found elsewhere.

    A characterization I find tempting is that realism deliberately deals with subjects that the reader would rather not know about. (Why do I have to read about this? – Because it’s real!) This is certainly the thrust of the Goncourt brothers’ preface to Germinie Lacerteux, their most famous novel, which explains that although the reader would rather not hear about the protagonist’s sordid life, in a democratic society all deserve access to narrative. Balzac had expressed a desire to disturb his complacent reader in the introductory passage of Le père Goriot that includes (in English) “All is true!” To claim that the criterion of the reality effect is unpleasant surprise not only reflects a rhetorical tendency of realism, but by shifting the focus from an ill-defined “effect” to the fundamental interaction between writer and reader, brings us closer to its anthropological core. Yet the transformation of the contingent into the irritating remains within the sphere of individual subjective reaction.

    The problem of defining realism may be restated as that of deciding what to oppose it to: Romanticism? Classicism? fantasy? Let us begin by defining the standard narrative model (SNM) as a story in which the protagonist and perhaps other characters risk their lives. (We may define “risking one’s life” as engaging in some activity that involves an explicit and substantial risk–at least to the reader/spectator–of leading by a fairly short causal chain to death.) The SNM encompasses epic narrative as well as adventure tales of all kinds; it also allows for a mock-heroic version in which, like Don Q, the character thinks he is engaging in life-threatening activity when he really isn’t. We then define a realist narrative as one that does not obey the SNM.

    Realism is focused on “ordinary people” who hope to die of old age. Like all cultural modes, that of realism should be understood as at the same time a historical contingency and an anthropological type. Historically, realism is a bourgeois mode, one appropriate to what Alexandre Kojève called the “freed slave,” referring to the master-slave dialectic in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, where the slave is one who accepts to live under another’s mastery rather than risk his life to defend his own. The bourgeois is a slave in refusing to risk his life, but he has been freed by the exchange-system from the ordeal of face-to-face rivalry. He neither fights the Other nor recognizes his mastery; they engage in exchange-relations, mediated by contracts for goods and services. If such a person can become a narrative protagonist, then everyday life may be said to have significance. I shall return to Hegel’s master and slave below.

    The bourgeois doesn’t risk his life, but he invests it, and any investment is something of a gamble. He may not be likely to fall from a cliff or be eaten by wild animals, but he runs the risk of financial loss, ultimately of bankruptcy. Bankruptcy is a sign for death throughout Balzac’s novels and in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary as well, where Emma commits suicide only when she runs out of money. (In contrast, Flaubert’s mature masterpiece, Sentimental education, turns narrative itself into a defense against bankruptcy.) The equation of bankruptcy with death is the sign of a realism still in thrall to the SNM, since the key institution of bourgeois economy, the “limited risk” corporation / Société À Risque Limité, is designed precisely to prevent loss of a given investment from destroying all one’s wealth, let alone one’s life. A novel that follows the realist ethos does not end with violent death; it recounts a “slice of life.” And because everyone, every day, risks his life in the sense of spending irretrievable time, the realist denial of the SNM aspires to a temporality so stretched out as to appear infinite. Proust’s “infinite” narrative and Joyce’s 600-page Dublin day mark the limits of European realism.

    A few lesser novels adhere to the realist ethos, but most compromise with the SNM by portraying their characters’ lives as inadvertently fortune- and life-destroying. The reason that most readers find Zola’s few working-class novels not only better but more typical than the numerous others dealing with the bourgeoisie is that limited lives are more easily assimilated to the SNM: economic fatality substitutes for tragic fatality. If, in Hegelian terms, the bourgeois is a freed slave, the worker is a partially reenslaved bourgeois who, in the nineteenth century at least, is forced to accept life-threatening conditions as a price of survival. The worker-protagonists of L’assommoir and Germinal risk their lives not to give them meaning but simply in order to preserve them. It would be interesting to examine in this light the socio-historical implications of other high and popular syntheses of realism and the SNM, such as detective stories and thrillers that depict policemen, detectives, spies, military personnel, and so on performing acts that are ambivalently bourgeois-professional duties and life-risking affirmations of mastery.

    Hegel’s master-slave dialectic may be read as his originary scene of human self-consciousness. Kojève’s focus on this scene and its implicit theory of desire inspired the neo-Hegelianism that flourished in France in the 1930s and 40s. Hegel’s combat between masters is analogous to that in pre-human society between the alpha animal and his potential challenger. In both cases, real or threatened violence settles the question without the “absolute” deferral provided by the sign. (The value of this process for animal societies is that the violence is restricted to a few individuals and usually not fatal.) Although Hegel’s master fights to be “recognized” by his adversary, his desire cannot be met; only one master will survive combat, and the slave’s recognition is inadequate. The master wants to be recognized by another master, unafraid to risk his life in combat, who freely renounces his own mastery. Such a person is inconceivable in Hegelian terms. But in our originary model, recognition is given not to a human master but to the sacred, the desired, mediating element not in competition with the participants. It is the recognition given the sacred that provides the originary model for the Hegelian dream of mastery; the master wants to be recognized as the equivalent of a god. By restricting the conflict to the interaction of two signless egos, Hegel excludes the possibility that both candidates for mastery might renounce their conflict and in that gesture of deferral become self-consciously human, capable of thematizing the mastery that they had previously contested.

    Despite its inadequacy as an originary model, Hegel’s dialectic sheds light on the distinction between realism and the SNM: risking one’s life for mastery is not simply affirming superiority over others but seeking to usurp the place of the sacred that is the birthplace of meaning. To risk one’s life is to act as though sacred deferral of violence were not a necessity of human existence. The consequence of such action may be portrayed either as the tragic reiteration of this founding necessity or as its comic transcendence; in either case, the SNM situates its protagonists in the sacred center of the social order. Realism, in its refusal to take for granted this rapprochement of the human to the divine, tells the story of Hegel’s slave who, unlike his master, is aware of the real-world human value of deferral. What makes realism realistic is its acceptance of human limitation. We may extract from the Hegel-Kojève model the sociological insight that the advent of the modern exchange system makes it possible both to extend and to challenge the SNM by depicting a praxis that incarnates human deferral rather than divine violence.

  • Thoughts for a Dying Millennium

    Few arguments are more tedious than the one between partisans of the two possible ends of the millennium. After the more obvious end on December 31, 1999, we can all agree that January 1, 2001 erases the old millennium for good, and with it, the tedium of the subject. Since in 2001 I turn sixty, this is an appropriate moment for reflection on death, which a sixty-year-old can no longer ignore but need not yet try to forget.

    We daily fill our brains with data, print, audio, video; the brain decays and nothing remains of its contents. What we leave behind is what we have stored on paper and on disk, in libraries and on servers. But look in the library at those yellowing books; and what will a century do to pages on the Internet–these Chronicles, for instance? We think of our descendants: but how much of self remains in genetic material constantly diluted? Bataille knew that sex and death put the individual out of place.

    Death is everyone’s foxhole. Our sense of mortality, born in the fear of collective violence, has a life of its own; the deferral of collective violence is not the suspension of death.

    If the operative force in the originary scene were simply fear of the potential violence of one’s fellows, it would be no more than animal fear, to which centrifugal flight rather than centripetal concentration is the normal response. Animal fear of death through violence is not humanity’s unique anticipation of death.

    Humanity and the sacred are coeval. To say that the originary participants “project” the violence of their own mimetic conflict onto the central object of the scene suggests that humanity creates the sacred. But we should avoid deciding this priority. The human comes into being when and only when its central cognitive agency and means of communication are alienated from it to a sacred center that has power of life and death over the newly instituted community. In the scene, the fear of mimetic violence diminishes when the gesture of appropriation is aborted and becomes a sign. The referent of the sign cannot be appropriated by a participant on penalty of death, a penalty that does not proceed from the rival appropriative gestures of the others but from the sacred center itself. The center remains as the signified of the sign after the being that inhabited it has been divided among the participants and the real-world scene abandoned–and the fear of death remains along with it. The sacred is still taboo and the death penalty, permanently in force.

    Animal fear is dependent on circumstance, ephemeral and intermittent. Once it has been transmuted into human fear, it is permanent; it is part of the signification of the violence-deferring sign. The sacred is fearsome because it concentrates within itself the potential violence of the community. This violence is not responsible for the body’s natural decay and death. But “natural death” is a sophisticated notion. It is no mere cliché that in tribal societies everyone dies for a “cultural” reason. What is minimally human is that we possess a concept of our death that transcends animal fear, a concept whose germ is the originary sacred.

    The historical path from the tribal notion of “cultural” death to our own biological one deserves to be studied from an originary perspective. The cultural explanation of death has not altogether disappeared; health panics reveal a deep desire to blame death on culture rather than nature. But where is “culture” in my own apprehension of biological decay?

    My father died suddenly after checking himself into the hospital with mild chest pains. My mother called me a few hours before her death to complain of being kept waiting to be sent home from the hospital. Like the victims at Pompei or the dancers drawn into the medieval dance of death, neither took proper leave of their worldly possessions. When I return from the store with a new gadget or piece of clothing, a gallon of liquid soap or a package of 75 shop towels, I think of the scarcely-worn clothes and gadgets and the stocks of quantity purchases I had to pack or throw or give away when I cleaned out their condominium in Florida. Or I make plans to do little things and worry less about living to do them than about their irrelevance to my ultimate purpose. Pascal observed 350 years ago that we seek distraction from mortality, too weak to spend our days paying off the wager of our ephemeral lives against a small but finite possibility of eternal salvation.

    A pain in your chest, a tingling in your head, a fit of constipation, a mole, and you ask “Is it now?” Where is culture in our constant vigilance toward the body’s decay? Perhaps we envy the societies where no one dies a natural death; ours is not among them. Even as we rail against second-hand smoke or pollution or global warming, we know that in the last analysis our death does not depend on human action.

    Anticipation of death is with us from the beginning, contained within the meaning of the sign from which all other signs proliferate. Knowledge of the profane world allows us to forget the sacred, but only because the sacred sign defers our self-destruction. For the moment, the sign has brought us peace; to die in bed at a decent age is a gift we forget to appreciate. Meanwhile, in the absence of world war, thousands continue to die the most culture-bound of deaths, and the world may be filling up once more with those who say with the young militant quoted in the paper the other day (LA Times, December 28, 2000, p. A12): “Jihad gives life purpose. Without it, we are useless.”

    We understandably take for granted the sacred protection against our own violence, and then that pain or tingle comes… We are sure no God is commanding us to die, but we say anyway a little prayer, to make sure we are in the right state of mind, caring toward our loved ones and forgiving to our enemies, so that we may be well remembered. What we fear most is not death but oblivion. The animal fear of death, transferred to the sacred center, returns to us in our “profane” lives as the fear of being forgotten.

    Let us resolve then to circulate more love than resentment in the world. The bleak solitude with our dying bodies that we hear so much about is as much a myth as blaming disease on witchcraft. It is in the human world, not in nature, that we either die alone or join in one of the many versions of the great recycling of souls. In affirming that the permanent significance of the sacred belongs to our temporary being, love, which won’t stop us from dying, shows itself stronger than death.

  • Art, High and Popular

    Not long ago, I received a feedback message from Scott Woodham asking me why I continued to insist on the distinction between high and popular art, particularly now that by my own admission “high” art is no longer a living phenomenon. Reflecting on this distinction and attempting to clarify its purpose led me to review some fundamental esthetic concepts of Generative Anthropology.

    What is it in us that reacts to art? It is sobering to think that such a fundamental question has never been answered satisfactorily. We are not even sure what to call the faculty involved in this reaction. It was already clear to the author of the Poetics that, as with resentment (discussed in Chronicles 221 and 222), the core of esthetic experience is a set of internal representations that arouse our emotions. It is no small challenge to our anthropological model to take advantage of the social and cultural experience of the past 2400 years to improve on Aristotle’s formulations.

    The originary source of esthetic pleasure, as of all cultural values, is the energy released by the deferral of violence through representation. The reproduction of this experience of deferral is the object of ritual. But ritual does not provide individual pleasure; it is a collective experience of solidarity. Art, in contrast, operates in the individual imagination, which has internalized the public scene of representation. We reenact within ourselves the passage from anxiety to peace that provides satisfaction to human desire, as opposed to the satiation of animal appetite. The originary interpersonal or ethical configuration comprises, minimally, the renunciation of immediate appetitive satisfaction to the benefit of the central being on whom the desires of the group are projected. The human equality of the scene, the origin of morality (the “moral model”) and of the distributional practices of hunter-gatherer societies, is necessarily mediated by the central figure. It is easy to lose sight of this mediation, absent from Rousseau’s reflections on the subject, in our admiration for primitive equality.

    In the originary scene and the cultural scenes derived from it, there is renunciation of the central whole followed by recuperation of a part: each individual’s portion of the sacred. Renunciation of the whole is a human necessity–indeed, it can be said to define the human. In the strict hierarchies of the archaic empires, dominated by a ritual redistribution system, this necessity is assented to by the general population only through the ritual system. The beginning of high esthetic culture corresponds to the decline of these empires and the rise of exchange-oriented Greek city-states. In these societies, the individual bears a complex relationship to the social hierarchy that Rawls’s “original position” is a latter-day attempt to theorize. On the one hand, he inevitably resents his position in the system as inferior to others (the general case) and/or potentially challenged by them. (The latter case is exemplified by Laius’ preemptive strike in exposing the infant Oedipus, designated by the oracle as usurper of his throne.) But, on the other hand, he is an active rather than passive participant in economic exchange and, in Athens, in the deliberations of the assembly as well. In such a social order, the necessity of renouncing the sacred center must be experienced by the individual citizen independently of the coercion of collective ritual. The esthetic educates desire to defer its demand for satisfaction. This voluntary deferral, like the internal restraint that Foucault condemns in Madness and Civilization, is not unsurprisingly analogous to that required by the secular exchange-system, most rigorously by the modern market-system.

    The Greek ideal of Paideia was an esthetic-centered educational philosophy. High culture implies a particular relation between esthetics and ethics, one that justifies the metaphor of “culture” itself. The cultured person is one who has learned his ethics from esthetic experience, as opposed to the merely learned person who knows artworks as worldly realities. High art educates or “cultures” us to renounce the whole of our desire for the benefit of participating in human society; whence our identification with the tragic hero, our surrogate in the forbidden desire for the center. This lesson is not imposed by coercive ritual authority but learned from within by the experience of the artwork, which inspires in us the intuition that the very representations in which it is conveyed reveal this necessity. This is the fundamental irony of all art, as discussed in the “Irony” chapter of Signs of Paradox.

    Popular art shares with high art the mechanism of deferred satisfaction, but outside or even at the expense of the social order. For popular art, the use of representation does not imply the necessity of distinguishing between the renounced whole and the achieved part. The spirit of the popular esthetic is nicely captured in the song that Alceste, Molière‘s misanthrope, recites as a counter to Oronte‘s precious sonnet:

    Si le roi m’avait donné
    Paris, sa grand’ville
    Je dirais au roi Henri
    Reprenez votre Paris!
    J’aime mieux ma mie, O gué!
    J’aime mieux ma mie!

    [If the king had given me
    Paris, his big city
    I would tell King Henry
    Take back your Paris!
    I prefer my gal, ohé!
    I prefer my gal!]

    This little song makes explicit the resentful comparison implicit in the popular esthetic. Its declaration of love’s superiority over the highest worldly values is sour grapes with a vengeance.

    Aristotle had a more directly ethical reading of the high-low dichotomy. Tragedy is high and comedy is low; in tragedy, our superiors are humbled, in comedy, people like us are made happy; as in Isaiah, the valleys are raised and the mountains laid low. Both comedy and tragedy depict essentially the same event: a Girardian “emissary murder” or sacrifice. Tragedy sees it from the standpoint of the victim, central and unique; comedy, from that of the crowd who rejoices in the victim’s peace-bringing downfall. In tragedy, the originary configuration is disguised by the hero’s assumption of responsibility for his own defeat, transforming the crowd into passive witnesses, a role actualized in the chorus. In comedy, it is the violence done to the victim that is disguised–minimized, but never eliminated. Comic violence reaches a near-tragic intensity in Molière’s dark comedies, Le misanthrope, where the humiliated hero leaves the stage followed by the group of potential consolers, and Dom Juan, where the protagonist is punished by the familiar, not quite believable, descent to Hell. But even in the “festive” comedies of Aristophanes, there is always a trace of sacrifice; what else is a feast if not a sacrifice?

    In tragedy, in order to succeed on the formal level in expelling/sacralizing the victim, we consent to fail on the level of content by identifying with the victim’s desires, implicitly admitting that the tragic victim is our victim whose suffering we require for our catharsis. The popular work never acknowledges this necessity; the protagonist’s sufferings are the fault of the “bad guys” who will get their comeuppance in the last reel. Like the high esthetic, the popular esthetic too is based on deferral. The Odyssey, as I pointed out in The End of Culture, offers a model for this kind of deferral: Odysseus, sitting disguised as a beggar in front of his own house, taking the suitors’ abuse, and preparing his revenge, far more brutal than any of the war-scenes of the Iliad. This contrasts with the ultimate expulsion of the tragic hero, but also with the transcendence of revenge that we find in the earlier epic, which ends with Achilles containing his rage and allowing Priam to visit the Achaean camp and reclaim Hector’s body.

    Tragedy makes us identify with the formal, not the worldly sources of the hero’s suffering. We are not ennobled but debased when we affect to cleanse ourselves by applauding as art the resentments of the “oppressed.” Indulging in guilt is no more a part of high culture than indulging in self-righteousness. The esthetic acceptance of formal necessity is not the equivalent of blaming ourselves for a crime that we could just as well not have committed. If our guilt is indeed justified, its cause should be corrected in the real world, not in an artwork.

    High art depends on our conviction that our essential limitations are those of human society, that the sufferings we require in the esthetic realm are compensations for our essential incapacity to satisfy our (mimetic) desire. The sacred thrill of great art is its enforcement of an anthropological sense of the inevitable. High art in this absolute sense is born in the West with Homer and includes the classical “canon” in all the arts. But in its binary opposition to popular art, the term “high” is anachronistic. High art stricto sensu is a creation of the nineteenth century, the age when industrialization and the growth of the middle classes made possible its unholy double, mass popular art. The historical configuration of the high-popular opposition makes explicit the relationship that had always existed between the individual’s role in the exchange-system and his ethical and esthetic sensibility. In the world of universal suffrage, the popular esthetic’s characteristic irresponsibility for the whole, which had been taken for granted in more hierarchical times, posed an ethical problem to the increasingly democratic social order. To enjoy the represented satisfaction of resentment was understandable in the powerless, less so among participants in the political process. The very possibility of the high-popular dichotomy suggests both the imperfection of society and the temporary impossibility of remedying this imperfection directly.

    It seems to me that in the domain of cultural analysis, our choice is between working with today’s doxa of throw-away hypotheses about art, religion, and other cultural forms and adopting a working hypothesis that can give form to historical research. The originary hypothesis explains the power of the work of art through the dependency of our cultural systems of representation on the center-periphery structure of the originary scene. This explanation, in turn, becomes a spur to the concrete historical analysis that fleshes out this abstract model.

    Natural-scientific research, for example, into the operations of the brain, will no doubt continue to reduce the space within which the originary hypothesis operates, but I cannot conceive that it will ever eliminate this space entirely. More than two centuries ago, “enlightened” thinkers declared the death of religion; a century ago, we heard of the “death of God.” Yet there are still quite a few churches around, and new ones being built. It is the height of arrogance to presume that the spiritual needs they minister to have no counterpart in the cognitive sphere.