Author: staceymeeker

One could write a history, beginning in the Enlightenment, of the models of elementary human interaction, from Hobbes’ war of all against all through Rousseau’s pity, Hegel’s master and slave, Marx’s economic exchange, to Girard’s mimetic ambivalence. In the originary scene hypothesized by GA, the fundamental human relation is our common mediation through the central figure designated by the sign. In the previous Chronicle we saw how the perceived violation of the equal/reciprocal terms of this mediation led to resentment. Justice was presented as a norm that is only made thematic by the resentment aroused when it is violated. Does this comprise an adequate “theory of justice”?

The obvious criticism of basing the sense of justice on resentment is that it seems to become amoral; one resentment is as good as another. As analyzed in Chronicle 221, the sense of justice is composed of two elements: in the first place, the internalized model of reciprocal linguistic exchange, or the “moral model,” and, in the second, the representation of a violation of this model. Epistemologically, we become aware of the moral model as a norm only when we represent its violation to ourselves. The question then becomes how we justify our resentment as the reaction to a real violation of this model. How, in other terms, do we distinguish justified from unjustified resentment?

There is no simple answer to this question because, as the recent election diatribes remind us, there is no objective standpoint from which resentment can be judged outside of the intuitions of those who potentially or really experience it. We seek impartial judges and juries who have no stake in the resentments of a given case, but we can only understand resentments by identifying with them, that is, by making them imaginarily our own. There is no algorithmic theory of justice that can adjudicate conflicting resentments by tossing the unjustified ones out of court.

John Rawls‘s Theory of [distributive] Justice offers a model for calculating, through a procedure akin to what GA calls “originary analysis,” the relative justice of differentiated social arrangements. The premise is that any difference in fortunes must be justified by a benefit to the group as a whole such that we would accept it in the so-called “original position,” in which we are unaware of the position we would ultimately occupy in the society. Rawls has defended his model with great scrupulousness through several editions of his book and other discussions and writings, conscientiously modifying it in response to objections. If we can use his model to arrive at useful results in a concrete situation, so much the better, but this model can make no anthropological claim (for example, that the equality of distribution in the originary event is the basis of our sense of justice). It could only do so by relinquishing its raison-d’être, the not merely implausible but deliberately paradoxical disparity between the postulated uniformity of the participants in the “original position” and the specialized socio-economic structure into which they are to be integrated.

We can decide what is just in a given case more easily that what is justice itself. Justice, as opposed to its worldly adjectival counterpart, is a metaphysical concept that typifies Socrates’ quest for the Idea. Indeed, we might consider the idea of justice as the paradigmatic case for the impossibility of a constructive definition. If justice takes as its model the originary reciprocity of linguistic exchange, then any deviation from this model is a scandal (a potential source of violence), and any rectification is an ad hoc attempt at restoring equilibrium rather than the output of a preexisting algorithm. A “just” action is an a posteriori attempt at righting in-justice rather than the realization of a pre-given norm. In the general case, equilibrium cannot be restored by simply reversing the timeline.

For example, if I commit a murder, the traditional punishment is that I be put to death on the principle of “an eye for an eye.” But many reject this very symmetry, equating capital punishment with legal murder, a “cruel and unusual punishment” that demeans state power. I am not responsive to this argument, but its popularity makes clear that there is no objective procedure for restoring equilibrium after a murder has been committed; the disequilibrium caused by the murder cannot be measured in any simple way. Our intuition that murder is wrong because it destroys this equilibrium is powerful, but the intuition that suggests the appropriate punishment, even if equally powerful, is not directly linked to originary peace; on the contrary, it urges reciprocal violence. Even if we evoke the evolutionary adaptivity of the intuition behind the death penalty, all this tells us is that it worked in the long term, not that it was the most just or even the most efficient solution.

Judges apply laws; in less formal circumstances, we try to “balance things out.” My sense of this balancing–which would be an interesting object for empirical research–is that it follows two rules of thumb that reflect the two kinds of reciprocity in the originary scene. On the one hand, with objects (I use this term in its broadest possible sense) not previously attributed, we attempt to divide them equally: if children are fighting over candy or a new toy, we attempt to divide access to it equally, whether by turns, sharing, or division. On the other, when an object already belongs to someone, we assert property rights (which are not incompatible with temporary sharing): if Johnny takes Mary’s pencil, we have him return it, then (perhaps) ask her if he may borrow it. Thus, on the one hand, we implement the originary reciprocity that precedes sharing of the central object, and, on the other, we insist on respect for the portions already distributed. We all participate in both the “democracy” of linguistic exchange and the “republic” of material exchange, where reciprocity is mediated by “scarcity” and its concomitant hierarchies. The latter case involves a notion of private property that some would say is culture-bound. But even hunter-gatherers have individual possessions, and, at the limit, there must always be a point at which an object becomes one’s “private property” if one is to be able to use it–say, eat it–at all.

Resentment enters this model when injustice is done: when Johnny takes Mary’s pencil or Jane refuses to let Dick share the new scooter. Such resentments may be equated with a sense of injustice; righting the wrong will satisfy them. But what if Johnny has no pencil of his own and Mary has five of them? The question of distributive justice cannot in practical cases be resolved through procedures such as the utilitarian calculus or Rawls’s “veil of ignorance”; who is to say whether the possible world in which Johnny has as many pencils as Mary would be a better world for all? In the local universe comprising Johnny and Mary, equal distribution might satisfy Johnny but would enrage Mary, who can’t be expected to give pencils to all her pencil-less friends. And because desire is mimetic, as Hobbes recognizes, even if Johnny has his own pencil, he might well find Mary’s more attractive (and she, his).

There is no obvious way to eliminate or satisfy such resentments. Where premodern societies “purge” them through ritual, including such auxiliaries as popular art and carnival, modern societies increasingly recycle them into the system as the energy of ambition. The question for us is whether we experience these “unjustified” resentments in the same way as the others. Does our resentment engine itself operate differently, or does the difference come entirely from without, from the never completely internalized judgments of our “superego”?

The originary model suggests that all resentment is essentially the same. The desire to justify “illegitimate” resentment leads to revolutions: we declare Mary’s extra pencils, perhaps even her first, as the illegitimate rewards of privilege. On the other end of the spectrum, just as love exists only as a constant transcendence of our natural state of resentment, so “good sportsmanship” exists only as a constant transcendence of our natural state of sore loser. Our very admiration for the former trait reflects our understanding that it denies our real feelings; underneath, we always resent inferiority, but the good sport pretends not to feel this resentment out of respect for his fellows.

We may conclude that resentment and the sense of injustice comprise the same complex of idea and feeling, but since the latter explicitly refers to a concept, its expression makes a claim on communal reality that the expression of resentment does not. In the event that his claim of injustice is denied by the community, the resenter learns that similar claims are illegitimate and becomes less likely to make them in the future.

Practical justice applies our prior and posterior rules of equality in consonance with the consensus in a given community. Even though the overarching model of justice is the originary moral model, it cannot apply to concrete situations as the template of a static utopia but only as the horizon of a movement toward greater reciprocity. That all concepts of justice share this horizon allows us to agree, more or less, on the direction in which the social order should move. Contrary to those who despair of the possibility of cohesion in our increasingly diverse culture, I think the path of history, and in particular the success of liberal democracies, demonstrates that these societies are increasingly united on ethical issues.

For example, contrary to what one commonly hears, recent controversies on abortion and homosexuality should be seen as signs of greater moral integration rather than less. In the past, abortion was a crime, but it was sought despite its criminality, and despite “pro-life” beliefs, by many who felt it necessary; homosexual acts took place in a similar atmosphere. Recent developments have made controversies, that is, dialogues, out of closed worlds that once were reconciled only in hypocritical silence. If the woman who has an abortion must deny it in polite society, she is accepting consensus only at the expense of dialogue, in a moral version of what Durkheim called “mechanical solidarity” in contrast to the “organic solidarity” of exchange in which these controversies exist today.

If there is a real danger to this solidarity, it comes from the resentment less of the morally than of the economically disaffected both within our society and, more crucially, in the increasingly Islamic “Third World.” Integrating the economically less successful nations into some kind of global exchange-system may well be the challenge of the new century and of the new millennium.

Although the perceptive reader of these Chronicles may detect here and there faint traces of resentment, the Index reveals that I haven’t dealt explicitly with the subject for over three years. It’s time the Chronicles took another look at this concept that supplies 49% (some would say 99%) of their inspiration.

Whatever the anecdotal evidence of animal revenge, resentment is a peculiarly human phenomenon. At first glance, re-sentiment (the French ressentiment was Nietzsche’s version) appears to be an emotion. But strictly speaking, an emotion is a physiologically correlated psychological state. Sadness, joy, and anger are emotions, roughly equivalent to those found in other mammals, who all share the layer of the brain called the “limbic system” (see Thomas Lewis et al., A General Theory of Love, Random House, 2000). Resentment is inevitably associated with emotion: it makes us angry, sad, or both. But its specific causality within the human condition is irreducible to mere emotion.

Resentment has always been misunderstood. The pejorative connotation of the term gives it the appearance of a mimetically exaggerated appetite, equivalent to the “deadly sin” of envy. But envy is a looser term than resentment. Envy moves from (1) the scandalous revelation of the other’s asymmetry to (2) the exterior indication or “fetish” of this asymmetry; it displaces onto the object the desire that resentment focuses on the rival. Envy is defined as coveting the possessions of others, as in the Tenth Commandment, in contrast to jealousy, which, closer to avarice, is the obsession with one’s own possessions. But, significantly, in common usage, the object of jealousy has become that traditionally appropriate to envy. I am less likely to say “I envy my rival” than “I am jealous of him.” It would be more accurate to say that I am jealous of my lover, but this feeling is more commonly expressed as a “state of mind” without an object: “I am jealous.” (“I envy you” is, in contrast, an expression of praise, an indirect acknowledgement of your high status.) The attraction of the term “jealousy” demonstrates the exteriority of the object (2) to the fundamental human relation (1). Through this displacement, my desire for the object makes it seem as if already mine; by calling my envy “jealousy,” I imaginarily appropriate my rival’s possession.

Resentment, unlike envy, is concerned with the rival, not the object. As opposed to appetites and emotions, or to such mixed categories as the “sins,” resentment cannot be separated from the scene on which self and other appear. Unassimilable to an object-relation, it is not an internal state but a collective or, in Durkheim’s vocabulary, a “social” relation. In the hypothetical originary scene, with the sacred object at the center of a circle, resentment may be defined as our (potential) reaction to a violation of the equidistance of the participants on the periphery from the center. The difficulty is to articulate this “reaction.” In my early reflections on the subject (in The End of Culture), I hypothesized that resentment was limited to hierarchical societies, which consecrate this asymmetry as rank. Hunter-gatherers have equal status at the ritual feast, whereas the fellah is as nothing to the Pharaoh. This dependence on social consecration is too restrictive; the potential for resentment must be conceived as present from the outset. But this too poses certain problems.

The equalitarian configuration of the originary scene would never have arisen without the mimetic rivalry that precludes any participant, even the heretofore “alpha” individual, from occupying a privileged position. Yet we cannot call the participant’s reaction to a violation of symmetry “resentment,” because resentment depends on the representation of difference. Where difference is present from the start, is in the relation between periphery and sacred center. Transcendent status does not inhere in the central being a priori; it must be conferred on it, and in participating in this conferral, the individual participant is obliged to renounce any prior possibility of a “horizontal” relationship with the object. I called the reaction to this renunciation originary resentment, humanity’s primordial temptation with respect to the sacred, as exemplified in the Western religious tradition by Satan‘s rivalry with God and Adam’s Fall. The point of this concept was to serve as an originary model for resentment between those on the periphery: the scandal of my absolute inferiority to the center must precede that of my relative inferiority to my rival, since what I feel as “inferiority” is a relation of significance, in contrast to the pecking-order rivalries of the animal world. Yet it is easy to misunderstand this concept as “metaphysical” rather than minimal, and it is unnecessary to my argument here.

Let it suffice then to say that the peace-bringing symmetry of the originary configuration, as registered in the memory of the participants, makes them aware of any subsequent violation of the symmetry of that configuration. This awareness, which makes resentment possible, figures in the minimal constitution of the human, along with other effects of representation/signification such as the sacred, desire, and the esthetic. None of these phenomena can be given a merely physiological definition, not even desire, which too, as opposed to appetite, is dependent on the (collective and individual) representation of its object.

Resentment has at its core a scenic representation. Yet the already-noted pejorative nature of the term suggests that this representation is not normally identified with the concept of resentment. We rarely admit to resenting others; we observe resentment more readily in our enemies than in those with whose desires we identify. Its central importance in human history is obscured by this reluctance. What then is the conceptual content normally associated with the configuration I have analyzed as that of resentment? Let us say that I resent Bill Gates. The simple fact that he has more money than I doesn’t explain my resentment. I resent him only when I come to feel that this much is too much, more than he deserves. Bill Gates’s wealth, in other words, does me an injustice. (The same injustice may be done to others like me, perhaps to everyone; I may associate myself with them in my resentment, even feel resentment on their behalf, as political activists are wont to do.) The articulation of resentment as the “feeling of injustice” makes explicit its structure. Injustice is the core representation or idea of resentment, which gives rise to its feeling (anger, rage, depression…). We feel injustice if and only if we consider ourselves capable in principle–perhaps not in practical reality–of justifying this sentiment. To put it more precisely: to say we “feel injustice” at a given moment, whether justifiably or not in the broad scheme of things, is to say we think at that moment that (1) there is an objective criterion of justice, one that everyone must agree on, and (2) that this criterion has been violated in such a way that everyone is obliged to recognize the violation. (Those who refuse to recognize it are blinding themselves to truth.)

In contrast to theological or Kantian “imperatives,” the originary hypothesis provides an anthropological model for our intuition of (in)justice in the reciprocal exchange of the originary sign. Although advanced societies create differential access to certain signs, there is no hierarchy inherent in the sign, in language, itself. Even in the most rigid hierarchy, it always remains, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, “self-evident” to us that we are “created equal.” The originary hypothesis explains the universality of this intuition: it is inherent in human communication through representation. We are all equal in our common possession of language.

The egalitarian configuration of the originary scene provides the minimal model for the resentment we feel when our sense of justice is violated. We should be careful to distinguish this minimal intuition of (in)justice from the “idea of justice” about which we communicate and establish guidelines. We can trace the evolution of diké and dikaiosyné from Homer to Plato and beyond. But at bottom, there really is no such positive “sentiment” as a “sense of justice.” What we call our “sense of justice” refers to the egalitarian model or norm that we become conscious of only when we sense, or resent, that the originary configuration of equality has been violated.

To experience a feeling of injustice is, minimally, neither to suffer nor to be “oppressed”; it is (1) to imagine oneself in a symmetric configuration with another person or persons and (2) to experience the violation of this configuration. The feeling of injustice is inconceivable without inner, if not an outer, rage; its representational kernel is not a cognitive “structure.” Perception of the violation of the symmetrical configuration calls in principle for action to reestablish symmetry, and this call mobilizes the emotions. (I will leave it moot at this point whether it be useful to speak of the “adaptive value” of the emotional accompaniment to the representational core of resentment, not knowing how one could go about separating their respective genetic causality.) That the sense of injustice is mediated through representation does not mean that it is “imaginary.” It goes without saying that resentments come in all degrees of intensity; my sense of outraged symmetry is incomparably more intense in a public humiliation than when I read in the newspaper about someone who earns more money than I do.

Just as our model explains our rage at injustice, it explains the intermittent nature of our less critical resentments. We do not spend the whole day resenting Bill Gates; only when we begin to dwell on him do we come to resent him, because what we “dwell on” is precisely our symmetry with him. As all revolutionaries know, a sine qua non of revolutions is the generation, voluntary or involuntary, of an imaginary symmetrical configuration in which we situate ourselves alongside whoever it is we are supposed to rebel against. It is only when we conceive this model that our inferiority becomes a scandal and we suddenly realize that “we’re just as good as they are,” whether “they” be lords, kings, bosses, colonizers, males, whites, straights…

The fact that resentment requires a “realization” is by no means a denial of the universality of the human intuition of equality. On the contrary, the imaginary symmetry derived from the originary sharing of the sign, the minimal kernel of our resentment at inequality, remains latent within all humans regardless of power relations. In rigid hierarchies, where the inferior has virtually no chance of attaining equal status with the superior, there is little opportunity for imaginary comparison and, as a general rule, relatively little resentment of those of higher status, although it remains a permanent possibility. Resentment is likely to be stronger in situations of “rising expectations,” where status has become more fluid, at least in the imagination of those below. These are hypotheses for a serious history of resentment to confirm or modify.

Resentment depends on the internalization, that is, the imaginary representation, of a collective scene. The transmission of this scene from one generation to another takes place neither by explicit cultural communication nor via some obscure “collective unconscious”; it is language itself that transmits from generation to generation the symmetrical scene of human culture. The kind of neurological circuitry by which this scene is realized in the brain is something I am not qualified to speculate on, although I certainly hope that others will explore it. My argument is independent of this circuitry. It reaffirms the substance of the originary hypothesis, which is that phenomena such as resentment that are contingent on representation are most parsimoniously explained by situating them within our model of the originary scene of representation.

What resentment, even more clearly than desire, reveals about this scene is that it is not, as metaphysics would have it, a kind of screen or tabula rasa on which representations or ideas “appear.” It is in the first place a human configuration, and the attention paid to the center of the scene is dependent on the equal distance from it taken by the humans on the periphery. (This restates in originary, and negative, terms Durkheim’s intuition that our cognitive powers have their origin in “society.”) This dependency is demonstrated by the power of resentment to disrupt our disinterested contemplation of the center. As soon as I perceive my neighbor to have some privilege I lack, my attention can no longer focus on anything but his possession of that privilege. As this little Russian fable suggests, we are more concerned with the asymmetry itself than with its “enviable” cause:

God appears to a peasant and tells him, “You may have anything you desire, but whatever I give to you, I will give twice as much to your neighbor.” The peasant replies, “I would like you to put out one of my eyes.”

Georges Bataille’s L’érotisme (1957), more graphically titled in the English translation Death and Sensuality, is a sloppily constructed work, lacking rigor and even consistency. Yet it still remains the most serious attempt to integrate human sexuality into what may broadly be called Durkheimian anthropology. We should appreciate Bataille’s effort all the more today, when the sexual domain has become the near-exclusive preserve of “gender studies” that sees in sexual difference only the “socially constructed” domination of one sex by the other, and when anthropology itself has been largely reduced to a dust-storm of case studies.

No doubt the biological link between sexuality and death–asexual animals don’t die, they just divide–is a weak reed on which to hang a cultural theory. As Bataille well knew, only in human sexuality and attitudes toward death does awareness of this connection become a factor in determining behavior; whether this awareness is already implicit in life itself is a question for theology rather than science. But Bataille’s explorations of the link between the sexual, the violent, and the sacred, carried out with a far surer anthropological intuition than Freud’s, have not been improved upon, nor even revisited in a truly exploratory spirit. (Most books on Bataille are either sensationalist, hagiographical, or, most often, both.) It is curious that our “uninhibited” interest in sex has not made a dent in Bataille’s understanding of the fundamentally transgressive nature of human sexuality. Bataille’s critique of the anthropological passion for the incest taboo is one that forty-odd years of ethnological monographs have done nothing to dispel:

The interdict [interdit] that opposes sexual freedom in us is general, universal; particular interdictions are its variable aspects.

I am astonished to be the first to say this so clearly. It is banal to isolate a particular “interdict,” such as the prohibition of incest, which is only an “aspect,” and to seek its explanation wholly outside its universal basis, which is the formless and universal interdiction [interdit] of which sexuality is the object. (L’érotisme, p. 58; quotes are the author’s)

In the structuralist paradigm as developed by Lévi-Strauss in Les structures élémentaires de la parenté– whose limitations are dissected by Bataille in one of the sharpest chapters of his book–”incest” is simply the violation of marriage rules. Implicit in this binarism is that what is not a violation is legitimate and therefore unproblematic. Durkheim‘s ambiguous and never fully analyzed notion of the sacred is reduced to precisely what Durkheim insisted it could not be reduced to: the opposition between “right” and “wrong” sexual relations. But, as Bataille makes clear, sexual relations are always transgressive. Marriage as a rite of passage is not simply a permitted move in a game; it is the conferral of a right of transgression equivalent to the right to eat the (normally forbidden) totem animal at a ritual feast. The famous droit du seigneur under the authority of which the feudal lord deflowered his vassals’ brides was more a sacred duty than a lustful privilege: the first sexual act, in which blood would be spilled, was fraught with sacred danger.

Bataille’s theory of sexuality is not “new.” It is the oldest in Western culture, that expressed in Genesis by the association of sexual shame with original sin. Bataille’s remark that “the essence of eroticism is given in the inextricable association of sexual pleasure and interdiction” (119) was expressed more dramatically a century earlier by Baudelaire–writing after Sade–”l’unique et suprême volupté de l’amour gît dans la certitude de faire le mal” [the unique and supreme pleasure of love lies in the certitude of doing evil – author’s emphasis]; or, as Woody Allen put it more recently: “it isn’t sex unless it’s dirty.” Bataille’s accomplishment is to integrate this “reactionary” vision of sexuality into anthropological theory.

Although sexual desire, from the mimetic standpoint, would appear to be just one kind of desire among others, it is unique in its permanent association with transgression. Lust is only one of the seven deadly sins, but it alone designates a form of desire whose very nature is sinful, in contrast with gluttony or avarice which, as opposed to normal desires for food or goods, are obsessive desires for excess. Thinking about food and (arguably) other commodities is justifiable as being proportional to one’s need for them as means of survival, whereas the sexual imagination feeds on itself and can, unlike the others, lead to physiological discharge even in the absence of its object. Avarice and gluttony are what happens when food and worldly goods become sexy.

It is curious that in a world where, as Foucault pointed out, we pretend to repress sexuality while constantly talking about it, there are no anthropological models that can comfortably integrate such observations. Freud’s pansexualism uses the private to explain the public, elucidating the anthropological problem of sexuality by reference to the family drama. Recognizing that the causal sequence must originally have gone in the opposite direction, Freud devised in Totem and Taboo an originary model of sexual guilt: in the “horde,” where the “father” monopolizes all the women, the “sons” get together and kill him; but subsequently, their guilt for his murder prevents them from sharing the women they killed him to obtain–whence the interdiction of incest. The internalized father, later baptized the Superego, replaces the real father as a source of interdiction. But why? What mechanism could make the sons renounce the women in guilt unless they had internalized the father’s interdiction before the murder? Mimetic desire is the only conceivable answer: fear of mutual rivalry projected onto the dead father, whose rule maintained a Hobbesian peace. But if we posit the centrality of the mimetic, we can construct an originary hypothesis with no need for Freud’s “Oedipal” scenario. Freud was nonetheless on the right track in seeking a collective, scenic explanation for his model of sexuality,

Even Bataille, in his discussions (as opposed to his imitations) of Sade, never quite acknowledges the significance of the association of the latter’s “sadistic” philosophy with pornography. Sade is remembered neither as a great philosopher nor as a great pornographer, but because he was the first (only?) writer systematically to combine the two. This is something I would not dare to do here; but I shall attempt to discuss its anthropological implications. Primary among these, as suggested but never sharply formulated by Bataille, is that human sexuality is erotic precisely to the extent that it is tied to representation. It is not sufficient to say that sexuality is transgressive; transgression is possible only because the forbidden object is designated by a sign that retains its meaning in the absence of its object. What is lacking in the theory of transgression, as in all “metaphysical” theories of mimetic desire, not excluding Girard’s, is that the sign/interdiction is not a mere marker of mimetic desire but the implicit element of a scene by means of which the individual imagination participates in the mimetic universe of the collectivity.

How can we translate into anthropological terms Baudelaire’s idea that the only pleasure of love comes from doing evil? The sinfulness of murder is easy to understand in generative terms as a crude violation of human reciprocity. But Bataille’s demonstrations that sexuality is linked with death or his definition of the erotic as the loss of one’s individual being are less explanations than a posteriori justifications of the “dirtiness” of the sexual. As, in another domain, are those of Freud.

The principal difficulty confronting the originary analysis of human sexuality lies in the less than obvious relationship between the sexual scene and the originary scene of language. Many years ago, a student in my Generative Anthropology seminar constructed an originary scene that included sexual relations among the participants. As the famous ithyphallic Lascaux hunter (reproduced in a plate of L’érotisme) suggests, sexual excitement may well have been part of the hunting experience. This student’s attempt was brilliant and sustained, but it was ultimately unsuccessful. I think I understand now better than at the time what the problem was.

Before the emergence in the “little bang” of the scenic/representational complex we call the human, there were no scenes of collective significance. There were, however, sexual “scenes,” in the sense of moments of pleasure shared by couples. Whatever sexual rivalries were enacted in these scenes, they were not a threat to the animal social order, which, then as now, was structured by one-to-one relations rather than a one-to-many scenic configuration.

This is no longer the case in the context of the human scene of representation. The couple as a self-contained unit in which sexual pleasure is exchanged constitutes an “other scene” that rivals the community assembled around the sacred central object. This rivalry is not a mere structural homology but a mimetic relation. In particular, although language and other forms of representation can arise only in the communal group, they cannot help but be imported into the intimate world of the couple. It is here that we find the explanation for the two linked peculiarities of human sexuality: its transgressive nature and its dependence on representation.

The language of sexuality, unlike any other language, has a quasi-sacred charge; merely to hear or see sexual words is to be drawn into “impure” sexual excitation. This seems to suggest that sexual language is “sacred,” since, aside from sexual words, holy words (such as the name of God in Judaism) are the only ones we are forbidden to pronounce. But this use of the term “sacred” is too imprecise. Sexual vocabulary, as Sade would certainly have agreed, is Satanic rather than holy, nor can positive science deny anthropological significance to this distinction. Satan was God’s rival; sex’s link to Satanism is its rivalry with the communal sacred as a source of significance. The charge of sexual words comes from their role in the anti-ritual of sex. Not that this rivalry begins as intentional. (Its first cultural expression may well be Sapho’s line that the most “beautiful” thing is not an object of collective value but “what one loves.”) What threatens the social order is not the sexual couple’s deliberate defiance but the fact that their mutual desire “naturally” expresses itself in language. Just as the first sign signifies an object of collective desire, so the signs of the sexual vocabulary arise to designate objects of desire. In the couple, the “deferral of violence through representation” enhances sexual pleasure by inextricably expressing and generating its significance, just as the sign grants significance to the object of collective desire.

Bataille’s intuition that sex is always transgressive displaces the phenomenon of incest from the defining role assigned it by an earlier generation of anthropologists. Given that sexuality is a dangerous force that must be brought within the communal order, it follows that the institution of marriage as a social device to impose order on sexuality cannot be allowed to disrupt the preexisting familial relationships that are already part of this order. Before becoming a system of reciprocal “gifts” constituting the “exchange of women,” exogamy is the avoidance of contamination of family or clan by the sexuality of the new couple, whose license to exchange sexual favors between themselves precedes and founds the broader structure of sexual exchange.

Where does the orgiastic fit into this picture? Orgy is a feature of agricultural fertilization rituals but not of hunter-gather life, at least as we have evidence of it. I would assume that, like human sacrifice, orgy is the extreme form of a ritual structure rather than its originary form. In orgiastic rites, the community becomes, like the couple, a rival to its own order as realized in other rites. The most significant thing about orgy is what Sade knew so well, and what Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut tries rather ineptly to suggest: orgy is a limit implicit in all sexual relationships. Human sex “always already” both contaminates and is contaminated by the larger community. The couple, in using language, admits the community into its bed; the orgy is only a literal extension of the human sexual imagination. Human sexuality, be it orgiastic or intimate, is always accompanied by transgressive representations that are also representations of transgression. The couple’s flight from public view is therefore less a desire for intimacy than a fear of witnesses to this transgression. The orgy is the overcoming of this fear, which is one transgression more.

I doubt if those who have spent years teaching language to apes have attempted the following experiment: to place the animals in a situation that excites their sexual desires and observe any changes that take place in their use of symbols. I rather doubt such changes would occur. Yet only creatures like ourselves, who can appreciate pornography, can really be said to understand representation. Social science has something to learn from Georges Bataille, or even Woody Allen, concerning the minimal criteria of humanity.

The first part of the title is meant to dispel any suspicions either that I think that victimary thought is about to disappear or that I am unaware of the irony of “killing” the victim by declaring the end of the victimary era. It is certainly neither my hope nor my expectation that we will abandon the notion of (in)justice. What I am suggesting, however, is that we have gone beyond the point where justice can best be served by identifying success with persecution and failure with martyrdom.

The real challenge of emerging from victimary thinking is thinking from love rather than resentment. Love is not a synonym for (symbolic) masochism. I cringe every time I witness a male using “she” instead of “he,” vicariously experiencing his self-abnegatory submission to a force greater than himself, his desire to avoid blackmail, to get invited to conferences… but also his sense of righting a wrong, making up for past injustice, showing he is a good sport, adopting the Other’s pronoun as a small price to pay for a (white-male) privileged existence. . . But this is not my idea of how to convert resentment into love.

I think a far better model is to be found in our personal, as opposed to political or even professional, relations. Whatever Orwellian horrors PC has wrought in the public sphere, it is undeniable that private relations between men and women, and even across racial divides, have become more frank and reciprocal in recent years. No doubt victimary rhetoric and its backlash do invade these conversations, but I think that rather than infecting them, these rhetorics serve to immunize and thereby to preserve the space of intimate dialogue from the fall into politics.

The most significant feature of the transition from the Marxian model of inequality as the opposition between capital and labor to the gender/race/ethnicity/sexual orientation/abledness dichotomies of our era is one not usually remarked: the potential and real intimacy of the respective “oppressors” and “victims” under the new dispensation. The impersonal contractual relation of capitalist and worker is replaced by a complex of personal relations more characteristic of Gemeinschaft than Gesellschaft. This is clearest in the major transition in victimary thinking from class (and race in the civil-rights sense) to sex, a transition that Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) anticipated and helped, we might say, to engender. I recall from the 1968 era the women of the New Left beginning to spin off rooms of their own in which to raise the issue of their inferior status within the “revolutionary” cadres of the SDS or NUC. Instead of fighting the faceless Establishment, they were contesting their own marriages and love-relationships. It is my strong impression that this opening of discourse, however shrill it may have felt at first, has led to far more mutual understanding and reciprocity between men and women than in the past. Personal experience and observation both tell me that mutual respect and essential equality within couples has never been greater, perhaps never in history.

This gives some hope that, in the long term, the frictions now felt in the public sphere will similarly dissipate. Meanwhile, there is wisdom in letting the strongest resentments speak loudest, provided this takes place within our republican system of “checks and balances”–one designed for very different kinds of differences of opinion from those we experience today, yet, in its prudently abstract view of the mimetically desirous human condition, applicable to these as well.

As a result of its refusal to pronounce on the legitimacy of these resentments, GA is sometimes accused–whether “fairly” or not is not at issue–of doing no more than expressing less socially useful resentments of its, or my, own. There is an unavoidable ambivalence in a theory that purports to make the need to contain resentment’s potential violence the “motor of history.” Does such a theory “scapegoat” resentment? Or, on the contrary, does it justify and even glorify it? We seek a “theory of justice” chastened by the difficulty of extricating a core of injustice from the resentment that surrounds it.

Insofar as history has taught us a gross solution to this difficulty, it is to favor the market model over its “socialist” transcendence. Now, whether or not the market is indeed politically neutral, the rhetorics it generates surely are not. When Al Gore insists that he’s “fighting for you,” he is denying the market-system’s ability to render you your just deserts. Yet, in a broader conception of the market-system, Gore is a loyal servant of the Republic acting within its rules by offering his policies on the marketplace of political ideas that acts as a necessary counterweight to strictly economic exchange. This observation, however, resolves the issue only in part. On one hand–let’s call it the “right” hand–the resolve to act within the democratic system involves implicit acceptance that the other guy’s position is as legitimate as one’s own (something that, even in their least civil moments, the presidential debaters expressed by such language as “my opponent and I have a disagreement”). But, on the “left” hand, it is felt that the very idea that the market basically makes the right decisions and needs only minor correction is immoral. Forgetting about the fringe of the so-called “radical right,” Democrats are undeniably more self-righteous than Republicans. To agree with the Democrats is not to contest this judgment, but rather to accept as justified their self-righteous defense of the victims of the market-system.

One of those ’68 slogans was that when there’s a controversy, instead of coming down on one side or the other it’s better to “teach the conflict.” This poor man’s Hegelianism, hoping for rather than creating synthesis, shows a faith in the democratic process and in the openness of history than neither Hegel nor Fukuyama have demonstrated. In the lofty terms of the present discussion, this faith means recognizing that the paradoxical opposition between moralists and amoralists who agree to disagree within a context of moral neutrality is precisely the equilibrium position of mature democracy. We can understand this paradoxical structure by recalling the category of “transcendence” that the existentialists inherited from Hegel via Heidegger. The point is no longer some stable “synthesis,” but a going-beyond into an always unstable position outside, yet soon once again inside, the system. Liberal democracy, the diametrical opposite of Marcuse’s unidimensional dystopia, rather than expelling the outside, admits it inside. In so doing, no doubt, it is “coopting” it. But rather than destroying negativity, cooptation guarantees its renewal, ensuring that the outside will be constantly recreated by new people with new agendas rather than solidifying into a revolutionary “mass,” with consequences we can predict all too well.

Let me now apply these observations to two “current events”: the election crisis, and a recent experience in academia.

Some Girardians have been tempted by the indecisiveness of the presidential vote to assimilate elections to arbitrary and/or sacrificial operations. I don’t think Girard‘s anthropological achievement is honored by attempts to decide “who is the scapegoat/victim” in a democratic election. The function of human institutions is not to disguise their victimary basis so that only the possessors of the gnostic secret disseminated by COV&R can penetrate their “deep structure” and find the hidden victim. All gnosticism shows a lack of respect for human history, and for humanity itself. (No doubt ultimate criteria are lacking; it may be, as Voegelin thought, that it is the whole modern experiment, emphatically including democracy, that is irredeemably gnostic. If this is so, an awful lot of people are going to die violent deaths before the world can be brought back to its pre-industrial senses.) Elective office, that great Athenian invention, is surely an ethical improvement on either dictatorship or anarchy, let alone human sacrifice. But when the system fails to work properly, not because of glitches but simply because the decision required from it falls within its natural margin of error, we are suddenly faced with the revelation that all systems are ultimately arbitrary–the point being, we should not forget, to make the arbitrariness as “ultimate” as possible.

The most profound revelation of the election is to remind us of something we all know but would rather forget about: the impossibility of neutrality. There are no “honest brokers” because there is no one without a preference; none of those who claim this role have enough credibility to be trusted by those whom their decision will harm. Each side has its legal arguments, as lawyers are wont to create, none clearly superior to the other’s. In the end, what really counts for each side is who wins. Each appeal to our sense of fairness is predicated on second-guessing the results of that fairness: on the one hand, respect the objectivity of the process, stop the recounts… and choose Bush, on the other, allow each voice to be heard, continue the recounts… and elect Gore. The objective observer is suddenly faced with the realization that he is incapable of rendering an objective decision. But at this point, instead of talking about arbitrarily chosen victims, we should begin counting our blessings. For the difference between the two possible outcomes is not all that great; as I said in the election Chronicle, the intensity of the debate is proportional to its narrowness. An appropriate parallel, one that Bush might appreciate, is with the World Series: we rooted passionately for one team or the other, yet victory or defeat didn’t make all that much difference. We should be happy that we can draw this parallel, which is only now beginning to apply to French elections, and certainly didn’t apply to the battles under the Weimar Republic between the Communists and the Nazis.

As for academic life: the other day, I attended a meeting of the UCLA Academic Senate, a body that prides itself in being the most powerful in the state university system that gives more power than any other to its faculty. On the agenda was the report of a committee appointed by the Administration to study “gender equity.” The substance of the report was that, measured by numbers of female graduate students and PhDs in various fields, women were “under-utilized” on campus and that new hiring, as well as promotions, should take this into account.

I had to endure the self-righteousness of several highly successful representatives of a self-declared victimary group, speaking loudly into the mike, cheerfully confident of their position, in a context that permitted no opposition nor more than the most timid doubt concerning the quality of their statistics, which were based entirely on attendance at or graduation from a postgraduate institution and (as one brave soul pointed out) lacked any measure of the prestige of the institution, let alone of the qualifications of the individual graduates for university teaching positions.

This prompted me, if only in compensation for the times I had sat through more distasteful meetings in silence, to make a few cautionary observations about the euphemism of “gender equity”–after which, following one (male) speaker’s enthusiastic reference to the “good will” of the group, the meeting was adjourned.

I reflected afterward not simply on whether I had “made a difference” (surely not) but on what point I had really wanted to make. Although my own Department is blissfully gynocentric, there may well be “underutilization” in others. And, in any case, can one really claim that the unpleasantness of privileging “oppressed” groups outweighs the social value of “diversity,” even if presumably objective criteria of achievement must be bent just a bit? It is not, after all, a question of hiring incompetents, merely those whom we might have rated second (or fifth) but about whom, on second thought, and with some financial encouragement from the Dean, we might be willing to change our minds, presumably otherwise conditioned to choosing candidates “who look like ourselves.”

This situation presents, as the intelligent reader will have already surmised, a variant of the paradox discussed above. The Left takes a moral stance against the institutional status quo, but on a higher level demonstrates its faith in the fairness of the institution by asking it to validate this stance without abandoning its “objective” policies. We aren’t asked (heaven forfend) to set quotas, merely to promote “diversity.” The Best Candidate will be hired, but it will just happen (more often than in the past) to be someone of the “underutilized” gender. After all, State law prohibits consideration of gender in hiring.

The important difference between the two variants, of course, is that, on the national scene, the moralistic left and the complacent right are evenly matched, whereas on the gender equity issue everyone in the Senate is on the same side. The Girardian who finds elections equivalent to drawing straws to see who will be eaten should surely leap at the chance to assimilate this unanimous group to a lynch mob. But there is no one to lynch, not even those White Males whose retirement is being anxiously awaited. Having dared to speak in skepticism, I was neither stoned nor even hissed, merely politely ignored.

My conclusion is that there is a wisdom in the institutions of democracy, where ideas are exchanged as well as goods, that surpasses that of its members. What need is there for me to deny the ultimate judiciousness of greasing the squeakier wheel? “Gender equity” need not imply, as I feared for a moment, an inexorable political pressure that will not cease until 51% of the faculty are female; it is a means for relieving the excess resentment on the part of a group whose numbers have been increasing rather more slowly than their “rising expectations.” This process will generate a compensatory resentment in males; I need not act on this by anticipation, but may rest assured that the resentments will eventually even themselves out. This has already begun to occur in the general public, with a result that California, and the UC Board of Regents, have banned affirmative action. (I cannot help but applaud this result–Ward Connerly is someone I greatly admire–yet when I see how little these results are respected within the university, how strongly it is committed to circumventing the law in the name of “diversity,” I wonder if the latter ban was not premature.)

These reflections lead me to feel justified in treating burning questions of injustice as conflicting resentments. The beauty of our system is precisely that it neither forces us (Republicans) to accept the equation between resentment and injustice, nor does it prevent us (Democrats) from doing so.

Such reflections do not, however, answer the more apocalyptic complaints of those who see the world on a global scale not as composed of kleptocracies gradually moving toward democratic prosperity but of poor countries being bled by the rich. I’ll try to say something about this in a forthcoming Chronicle.

One hindrance to GA’s popularity way back in the 20^th century was its tendency to arouse resentment. This is itself a convincing argument in its favor, but only for someone who already accepts its premises. In a misguided moment of academic optimism, I once applied for a grant for a project on Resentment. After my proposal was duly rejected, I requested the comments of the grant committee. Aside from one brave soul who had defended the project, the comments expressed righteous indignation… that I dared to equate righteous indignation with resentment.

A while ago (see Chronicles 208 & 209), I attempted to distinguish between the postmodern and a new post-millennial era, inaugurated respectively by the Holocaust and the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is easy to understand why the victimary thinking of the postmodern age was inhospitable to yet fascinated by Girard’s anthropology of the scapegoat. If the model for all unequal relations is that of the Nazis and the Jews, it is obscene to postulate that human society depends from the outset on such relations. At the same time, it is a very short step from positing our dependency on victims to proclaiming, in good victimary fashion, our guilt for their persecution.

The post-millennial age has reluctantly abandoned socialism; what evidence do we have for thinking it is abandoning victimary thinking as well? Is there any sign that such thinking is becoming less functional in the contemporary world?

One not merely symbolic measure of this functionality is conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. In historical terms, Israel is a direct product of the Holocaust. At its founding in 1948, it had the sympathy of the titular leader of the world’s victimary forces (the USSR was the first country to recognize Israel), but this sympathy was quickly lost when it unobligingly won several wars against its invading neighbors.

The Holocaust was “the end” of traditional Western antisemitism; the creation and survival of Israel during the postmodern era drew on this sentiment. Conversely, the revival of antisemitism after this “end,” particularly among Moslems and those in their sphere of influence, including many African-Americans, reflects the instability of the victimary position. Prior to WWII, people were proud to call themselves antisemites: antisemitism was a self-confidently indignant defense against the presumably all-powerful Jew (see Chronicle 155). Since the war, antisemitism no longer dares speak its name; it operates both by calling into question the Jews’ victimary credentials through Holocaust denial, and, pointing to the Palestinian situation, condemning Zionism as a form of “fascism.”

As the living guarantees of this condemnation, the Palestinians are called upon to present themselves as exemplary victims. Many witnesses have remarked on the joy of martyrdom manifested, for example, at the funerals of young protesters; throwing stones at armed soldiers risks and is in fact designed to invite deadly retaliation, generating in the process new martyrs for the cause. World reaction is divided, but it is far harder for the friends of Israel to denounce the Palestinian martyrdom as self-inflicted when the bodies lie in full sight than for her enemies to denounce the “excessive violence” of the Israeli retaliation, whatever the provocation.

We may say that the post-millennial era succeeds the postmodern when victimary thinking loses its usefulness as a means of judging institutions, when it no longer makes sense to distinguish between victims and persecutors. There have always been intractable political conflicts; the crucial question is whether these are limited and sui generis or local examples of a more general conflict that they may eventually ignite. There are many cases in which opposing nationalities make near-symmetrical claims: Cyprus, Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, the former territories of Yugoslavia. It is no accident that these are all restricted conflicts with relatively little effect on the international economy. In the really significant conflicts of our day, the relations between the two sides, and the mutual accusations they give rise to, are far less symmetrical: they oppose modern, democratic societies to those of the “third world.”

The greatest triumph of postwar victimary epistemology was in demonstrating that colonialism and apartheid could be abolished without shattering the social order. It forced on the world the conclusion that overtly unequal institutions, offensive not merely to those subjected to them but to the universal human intuition of equality, are ipso facto unjust institutions; or, in more historical terms, that the ethical awareness consonant with our present level of information sharing and economic development makes it inconceivable that the offense of these institutions to the originary principle of reciprocal dialogue could be outweighed by positive factors, say, in the economic sphere. In contrast, the de facto domination of industrial over pre-industrial societies offers no clear venue for victimary thought. If the poor countries are “victims” of the rich, how is this victimization to be ended or compensated? More crucially, is this approach to the question really the most effective way to make poor countries richer?

The specifics of the Israeli-Palestinian situation allow us to sharpen our analysis. Here the first-world vs third-world opposition is complicated by territorial and religious factors. Whatever the ancient claims of the Jews to the land, the Palestinians can always point to their recent collective presence. Whatever the Jews’ pre- and post-Holocaust justification for Zionism, the Palestinians can present themselves as innocent victims of its demographic imperative. Just as the unilateral destruction of the Jews in Europe imposed the victimary paradigm in the postmodern era, so the undecidable status of the Jews in the Middle East provides a model for the dilemmas of the post-millennial. Can it be a coincidence that the ultimate ambivalence of the role of the Jews as the Other of Western civilization is revealed at just the moment when it is becoming necessary to construct, on the basis of the Western and related “first-world” economies, a non-exclusionary global civilization?

If victimary thinking is outdated, on the basis of what paradigm are the conflicting claims of Arabs and Jews to be adjudicated? The apparent lesson of the peace process whose fragility we have seen is that victimary claims are unbounded and that both parties to a dialogue must ultimately renounce them. There are no relative victims; the binary structure of sacrifice is unsuitable for negotiation.

The non-punitive end of apartheid, including amnesty for most of its enforcers, might be cited as a counterexample. But whatever compromises the black majority has made with the white minority in South Africa, it was never required to renounce its condemnation of apartheid. Conversely, the enforcers of apartheid may not have been punished, but they were not allow to retain any justification for their doctrine. Nor would a South African solution appease the Palestinians; in their eyes, not unequal treatment but the very presence of the Jews on “their” land constitutes victimization.

This and other examples suggest that, in contrast to the relative stability of the cold-war era, the post-millennial age may well be a “time of troubles.” However crude it may be, the victimary criterion is relatively objective; the elimination of overt institutional domination brings clear ethical progress as well as social stability. Now that only the hard cases remain–including such things as the oppression of women and minorities in “third-world” countries that themselves claim victimary status–the idea that an appeal to the overarching principle of reciprocal justice can settle all disputes is no longer tenable. This does not mean that we must resign ourselves to the uncontrollable violence of these conflicts; on the contrary, vigilance is required to prevent them from igniting a global conflagration. In the international sphere as well as the domestic, the greatest danger is utopianism. Just as we have had to renounce our dreams of socialism as the solution to conflict within individual societies, so are we forced to renounce the idea that to resolve international disputes it suffices to “take the side of the victim.”

Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity as the religion of resentment makes him the prophet of the modern rejection of victimary thinking. The irony is that what made the victimary thought of the postwar era far more radical than the expressions of national and class resentment in Nietzsche’s own day was the reaction to the horrors brought about by the Nazis’ not altogether unfaithful adaptation of Nietzschean thought. The “superman” who stands above the petty conflicts of the mutually resentful is no more than a pernicious and self-serving mask for the man of resentment. (This is a pervasive theme of the various dramatizations of the Leopold-Loeb murder, such as Hitchcock’s Rope.) If there were indeed a superman, he would not consider himself such, nor would he need Nietzsche’s philosophy to come into being; he would live like Jesus (not Nietzsche’s Zarathustra) in the assurance that his kingdom is not of this world. We do not want to be supermen; perhaps we can be artists remaking in our image a world where information transfer in the service of the imagination increasingly trumps material constraints. But where does this leave us with respect to the political problems of the post-millennial era?

The cure for the failure of socialist utopia was relatively simple. As soon as one realizes that exchange is fundamental to human relations, one learns to focus one’s hopes for human betterment within the market system rather than on working for its destruction. To the extent that socialism hangs on as a form of government, it becomes, as in China or even Cuba (where participation in the global economy consists in reopening the fleshpots of old Havana to dollar tourism), an authoritarian accompaniment to the market system rather than a substitute for it. The “end of history” consecrates the realization that the stable system within which the human social order can continue to evolve has already been found.

The analogous solution to first-third world conflict in general and Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular is to be found in the global economic system, whose beginnings not surprisingly provoke violent reactions among the diehards of victimary thinking, the remnants of the sixties’ New Left. Can the global economy integrate the societies of the Middle East that have so far been unable to contribute anything to it but raw materials? Can we tell the Palestinians to stop hating the Israelis and start writing software?

For what it’s worth, I think the answer is a qualified “yes.” If there is any possibility of peace in the Holy Land, it will come via the economic rather than the political process. Which is to say that the goal of the political process should be to separate the two sides and to “economize” their relationship as much as possible until better days become conceivable.

The great symbolic point of contention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the one that has apparently blown the peace process apart, is sovereignty over Jerusalem. This controversy is an exemplary case for the abandonment of victimary logic. Jerusalem is and always has been the holy city of the Jews. If it has significance for Islam and Christianity, it is only as a derivative of this prior sacred status. Christianity aside, Islam has holier cities, over which it exercises complete control, forbidding non-Moslems even to enter them. (Imagine if the Jews suggested running Jerusalem the way the Moslems run Mecca.) Israel acquired sovereignty over the Old City only after the 1967 war in which Israel was invaded by its neighbors–the original model of one side throwing stones and the other shooting back. Under Jordanian rule, we should not forget, synagogues and Jewish holy places were trashed, and no Jewish access to the latter, including the Western Wall, was permitted. This contrasts sharply with the access and control Israel has granted to Moslems at the Dome of the Rock.

As an ultimate gesture to the victimary logic of the peace process, Barak made an offer that no Israeli government had dared openly even to discuss: sharing sovereignty over Jerusalem with the Palestinians. Because the Palestinians were the “original” inhabitants, because they had lost land and been occupied by Israeli forces, because, in a word, they could make a case for being considered victims of Israel, the appropriate solution seemed to be to give them a share of the Holy City while requiring nothing from them in return but peace, meaning an end to stone-throwing and presumably to resentment.

As we saw, it didn’t work out that way. The style, if not the substance, of Barak’s offer offended Palestinian sensibilities, particularly those of Arafat. The crude but effective victimary technique of throwing stones and getting the Israelis to shoot back was used to destroy the viability of Barak’s offer. Part of this may justifiably be put down to Arafat’s manipulation of the Palestinian “street,” but the latter was no mere passive puppet. Clearly all the Israeli concessions of the peace process, including this last one, had done nothing to allay the seething rage displayed in the Ramallah lynchings. On the contrary, the evidence suggests that the nearness of the day on which this rage would have to be abandoned made peace increasingly intolerable.

This only apparently paradoxical process reveals an underside of victimary logic that is observable elsewhere in the aftermath of its postwar triumphs. Most post-colonial societies are still just that, dominated politically by resentment against their former masters and the developed world in general, mired in political and economic backwardness. With regard to the Middle East, it has often been remarked that the enthusiasm of the crowds for yelling “death to the Jews!” and burning the American flag is proportional to their utter lack of any other means of expressing oppositional political sentiments. It’s a lot safer to burn Uncle Sam in effigy than Uncle Saddam.

This does not imply that the victimary epistemology that led to the victories of the civil rights and colonial liberation movements was in error. What it does mean is that elimination of de jure differences that directly violate our intuition of human equality only sharpens collective awareness of any remaining de facto differences and the resentment that accompanies it, generating continued appeals to victimary logic that fuel a symmetrical backlash of their own. The victimary dies hard, and its potential for provoking conflict can be defused only by the gradual and always imperfect abandonment of resentment by both the former “victims” and their former “oppressors.” Just as the “final conflict” of socialist utopia was a lie, so is the hope given out by victimary thinking that eliminating an oppressive institution suffices to remove the resentment it produced. Still more pernicious is the converse notion that the remaining resentments of the former victims are in themselves proof of continuing oppression.

We should be wary of giving further nourishment to victimary thinking. Israel’s retention of control over Jerusalem while permitting the birth of a Palestinian state would put an end to the current peace process without mutual affection but hopefully without full-scale combat. By rejecting victimary logic, the Israelis would take us a step further beyond an era dominated by the epistemology of the victim. The coming times may well be more unsettled than those we have known since WWII, but if we manage to avoid blowing ourselves up, we will emerge from them with a clearer understanding of humanity–with a better anthropology.

As the Middle East slips back into Intifada mode, I thought I’d say something before it’s too late about the current election campaign.

One feature of American politics that Europeans have a difficult time understanding is the extreme significance in two-party democracy of appeals to the “center.” This encourages our presidential campaigns to become personality contests centered on the least informed and least concerned voters. Although not all swing voters are ignorant and indifferent, they surely average a lot more so than those who are ideologically committed to one side or the other. Barring the extremes of Goldwater or McGovern, you are voting less for an individual than for a party representing a set of general principles that you hope to see translated into legislation, foreign policy, and–increasingly crucial in our litigious age–judicial appointments.

The democratic process, designed by the intellectuals of the 18^th century, was not designed to please those of our own day. (I’m not a big fan of William Buckley, but I certainly agree with his preference for being governed by the first thousand names in the Boston phone book rather than by the Harvard faculty.) Universal suffrage is a reality only when the politicians must appeal to each individual voter, and the great mass of undecided force them to do this far better than the well-organized and focused factions of either side who put up the money for the campaign.

This being said, some thoughts on the election.

Gore has always repelled me. His maudlin exploitation of family tragedies in past elections (not this one; the focus groups must have dissuaded him) discredits him in my eyes far more than Clinton’s sexual adventures. Telling us he created the Internet and inspired Love Story or listened as a child to union songs not yet written is not much better. (Shades of Hillary Clinton’s claim that she was named for Edmund Hillary although she was born before he climbed Mt. Everest.) On the other side of the ledger, Bush’s naming Jesus as his favorite political philosopher–without telling us a thing about Jesus’ “political philosophy”–is a bit much. (My favorite political philosopher is Hobbes, if only for the phrase “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”) Yet I guess the real importance of Jesus’ political philosophy isn’t what one can say about it in a debate, but what one does to implement it. Sanctimoniousness aside, WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?) is a pretty good rule of thumb.

Isn’t this personality rather than ideology? Yes, but the personality-watchers have a point. The crucial problems of the post-millennial age are not likely to be finding the best tax cut plan or the best way of “saving” Social Security. We must prepare ourselves for unpredictable world crises and perhaps domestic ones as well. Terrorists are getting smarter and the resentment that fuels them is getting no weaker. Voters are not ill-advised to observe these potential “leaders of the Free World” for indications of who would perform better in a crisis.

In such circumstances, I’d rather have a modest guy who knows how to make decisions but is willing to take advice than someone obsessed with his self-image to the point of inventing outlandish and easily refuted fictions. As to the question of how I would vote if the character traits of the candidates were reversed, my answer is that Republicans are just not like that–not even Newt Gingrich, with all his self-importance.

In the old days, Democrats weren’t like that either. No political figure is a bigger hero in my eyes than Harry Truman. Even my K.C. Republican in-laws have a grudging respect for the guy. (Truman’s Independence, MO is a suburb of Kansas City.) Neither Gore nor Bush have the grass-roots quality of this middle-class soldier, haberdasher, and small-town politician, the guy who said “the buck stops here” and fired that old blowhard Douglas MacArthur, not to speak of desegregating the military and recognizing Israel. Yet if you subject both of them to the Truman test, I think you’d know which one to vote for. No doubt Gore’s “fighting for you” echoes Truman’s rhetoric and his marriage seems as solid as that of Harry and Bess, but can you picture Truman pleading that he’s “his own man”? Bush, whatever his limitations, doesn’t have that kind of problem.

Let me not belabor this point, and, instead, attempt to define what is at stake in this election beyond the conflict of personalities and even of parties.

The disappearance of the serious third-party challenges of the past two elections corresponds to the decline of the “third way” between liberalism (in its American sense) and conservatism. Perot’s success was that of a process-oriented positivist in opposition to what he credibly labeled interest-group-centered ideologies. One way to interpret this is as a last political statement of the “middle class,” the people who (used to) shop at Sears and drink twenty-five-cent coffee. Today the candidates of the major parties have reassured their bases and are seeking the votes of the people in the middle, but being in the middle doesn’t make them a middle class. The fact that Gore, in his populist tirades, uses the term “middle-class” as a synonym for “lower-income,” signifies only that the very sense of a middle has been lost. Not that long ago, it was clear to the members of the middle class both who was above them and who below–and not just the “underclass.”

Does this mean our society is becoming more polarized? More “diverse”? I’ll just say that anyone who believes that exchange is the essential human activity can’t really be upset about the revival of a marginally more adversarial politics. Yet I would note the difference between the conflict today and that of a generation or two ago, in the days of the New and Old Left.

Although the term “socialism” is not incapable of making a comeback, the model incarnated by the USSR is dead; the people who once swore by it are now busy denouncing our Cold-War bullying of our feeble adversary. Smashing the “capitalist” social order has become a marginal stance and will likely remain so in the foreseeable future. The most extreme rhetoric on either side of the present divide is not likely to lead to violence à la 1968 or even to large-scale disaffection from the political process. It should not be forgotten that, during the Vietnam War, the Left considered socialism the superior system not only in Vietnam but also in the United States (ideally without abolishing parliamentary democracy), nor that they were convinced that socialist states would eventually surpass capitalist ones in productivity as well as social justice. Back in the 1930s, needless to say, the Left’s positions were even more extreme.

The conservative Right is by definition without utopian dreams, so without the downside of world-class disillusionments. (The Radical Right, truly represented not by Pat Robertson but by Hitler and his residual worshipers, is really much closer to the Left, notably in its disdain for the democratic process.) Republicans are far less inclined than Democrats to dream of replacing the market system with something else. Although the real base of the Republicans is in small, not “big” business, there is little clientele for withdrawal from either global or domestic exchange. The polarization of political styles between the parties, reflecting the polarization of the interest groups that support them, suggests not so much divergence on the issues as broad general agreement that permits more intense debate on the margins. This extends even to foreign policy. The fact that the Democrats have in the last few years become more activist in this area than the Republicans only underscores the lack of any fundamental disagreement on aims. Not very long ago the idea of “projecting American power” was viewed with horror by mainstream liberals; today the difference comes down to the Democrats’ marginally greater propensity for “idealism” and marginally inferior attention to the nuances of diplomatic gravitas (viz. the recent shots of Mme Albright reviewing North Korean troops with KJI).

No member of a university department is unaware of the difference between large differences of opinion and intense ones; no reader of Girard–or Dostoevsky– can be unaware that the two often vary in inverse proportion. Faculty members who have all their intellectual prejudices in common engage in impassioned conflicts over an appointment or an exam result. This sort of thing may be unhealthy in a small group, but it is not such a bad thing in the national political forum of so large, wealthy, powerful, and diverse (without quotes) a country as the USA. The more debate there is in the center of things, the better the nation will prepare itself for both the prolongation of the current prosperity in certain areas and its inevitable cessation in others. (The relative lack of debate on foreign policy, on the other hand, strikes me as rather a good thing.) It may be true that neither candidate in this election has been able to articulate, save perhaps in one area (see below), a distinctive political position–as opposed to associating himself with distinctive political symbols–but in today’s context, one’s starting position is less important than one’s contribution to the effectiveness of the political process through engaging debate and negotiating solutions.

While I am in this somewhat platitudinous vein, let me add a few words on the best-articulated issue of this campaign: that of public education. Like millions of other public school graduates of earlier times, I find it hard to relate to the horror stories about the K-12 world: drugs, guns, stopped-up toilets, terrorized teachers, disrupted classrooms. In my experience, not all that much learning went on in the old schools–I could tell a different kind of horror story, even about classes at the Bronx High School of Science–but the baby-sitting was at worst a mode of “socialization” that made us eager to absorb more concentrated doses of information at a later date.

We can forget the “cultural” explanations: the “decline of civic values,” porno on the Internet, “bowling alone,” raves, rap, road rage, whatever. Durkheim worried about suicide and anomie over a century ago and we’re still going strong. The problem of creating “solidarity” in the modern exchange-system should not, in my view, be approached from the Rousseauian standpoint of opposing what is “natural” to humanity to the excesses of modernity. By replacing the sacred by the “natural,” Rousseau created the key modern variant of that hoariest of cultural modes: telling us how much better things were in the old days. (The sign is always greater, “older,” than its referents; this is true already of the originary sign and its referent.) It is easy to repeat the Ur-cliché all the while brandishing statistics and sounding very à la page. But it always comes down to saying: “in the past, whatever innovations we permitted, there were still some basic human values that remained untouched. But now etc. etc. etc.” The only people who bother to defend modernity against this ancient diatribe are a few bohemian esthetes–unless it takes an anti-PC tack by seeming to condemn the practices of a “subaltern” group, at which point the academic masses hasten to insist, in what they fail to realize is an echo of old Durkheim himself, on the “social construction” of all values: who are we to condemn the Other’s culture? To this in turn respond the evolutionary psychologists… but at this point the debate has become too esoteric for our purposes.

How do I propose to avoid this overly-trodden path? By rejecting the Rousseauian premise along with its pseudo-Durkheimian antithesis. Things aren’t just getting worse, but it does matter if they do. I would rather begin from the assumptions that human societies all show about the same level of concern for our biological (“natural”) needs and that any ongoing society demonstrates by its very survival that it maintains a sufficient level of cohesion (“solidarity”). Along with Rousseau, Gibbon is the secret model for our apocalyptic thinkers, but the barbarians are not at the gates: they are watching our TV reruns.

Once we exorcise the apocalyptic temptation we can address the real issue, not whether American, Western, or global society is falling apart, but what kind of equilibrium it is adopting and how we can–assuming “we” agree–inflect this equilibrium. American society works pretty well with porn on the Internet and obscene rap songs; if we want to change this, it isn’t because we’re afraid of social chaos (hard to make a case for this at current crime rates) but because, like the late Steve Allen, we don’t like the kind of social stability that includes such things.

Enter the public education system, dominated by teachers’ (and their unions’) desire for “professionalization.” Just try to get a permanent position in a public school and you’ll soon discover that two PhDs and forty years of university teaching experience are mere chaff to the grain of Ed Courses and “supervised” teaching. Now the Ed courses of today, in spirit even more than matter, distill the most imbecilic strain of PC, which defines respect for human equality as refusing to do anything that risks generating a perception of invidious differences. In plain English, the worst thing is to make anyone (except those in the “majority”) feel “inferior.” Not that I’m convinced it’s really so terrible to put off reality until college–the US has by everyone’s agreement the world’s best universities. But along with plain old incompetence (arguably greater than in the past, now that the old teacher pool of intelligent young women has moved upmarket), Ed-School PC is surely the single most obvious factor in our K-12 problem. If I had to listen to the sort of inane gender-ethnic propaganda that passes for history and culture in the schools, I’d blast those rap records too; maybe I’d start cutting a few myself. These expressions of naked resentment are an inevitable reaction to the “nice” NEA-approved resentments against the “patriarchy,” “dead white males,” “Western civilization,” and the rest.

Solutions? Vouchers are a possibility; for starters, you can guess which candidate the NEA likes better.

George Sivertson informs me that on a TV debate this week, Ben Stein used the proverb of the Hedgehog and the Fox to champion Bush over his “foxy” opponent. I’m happy to give one big vote to someone who knows One Big Thing.

I have always been a Yankee fan. My first baseball memories are from the 1949 pennant race, listening on the radio to the final two-game series with the Red Sox; the Yanks came in a game down and had to win both. It was the prelude to five straight series victories.

The Yankees have been in the Bronx since 1923, yet no one has ever dreamt of calling them the Bronx Yankees. In the old days, the Bronx didn’t even have its own post office; it still doesn’t have its own team. The Bronx Romantic roots for the most powerful dynasty in American sports without being able to identify with it as his home team the way Brooklynites used to identify with the Dodgers. Because my girl friend was a Dodger fan, we made a few two-hour subway treks out to Ebbets Field, which had an altogether different feel from pin-striped Yankee Stadium. I could understand how a Bronx girl could be a Dodger fan. They truly were a home team–but it wasn’t my home.

I also absorbed in my younger days a good deal of baseball lore, stories and stats about those old-time players, Cy Young and Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson and Honus Wagner, dozens more. But what remains in my mind of all this is more memory than information. I wouldn’t fare well on a quiz show and never bring the subject up in conversation. It is something that belongs to me, but not something I possess.

The Bronx Yankee fan has faith in a team, housed in his borough, that will never be his own.

In order to affirm the universal human truth as something beyond the human, faith asks us to affirm the truth of a particular discourse as a precondition of our humanity. GA too defines the human by a linguistic affirmation, independently of its specific content. This abstraction is the earmark of the Bronx Romantic.

What makes the Bronx Romantic a man of faith is an intense need for “meaning in life,” for generating a sacred narrative about himself in which the intuition of meaningfulness takes the place of religious dogma. Mere ambition has no attraction for him; he can be satisfied only with immortality. Living every moment in the solar gaze of transcendence, he tends to neglect anything so banal as facts.

In symmetrical opposition to this faith is the cult of the factoid. Where the Romantic strains his brain to focus on an infinitely meaningful kernel, the factoid master, a man of faith no less than he, is memorizing encyclopedias. Factoids are those superficial facts, not merely known but talked about, that we also call trivia. What is trivial, however, is not the names of the kings of France or the capitals of the fifty states, but the fact of knowing them–the trivial advantage over the ordinary guy who has to look them up in a reference book–that scores points for the factoid master in the eternal game of one-upmanship. However much the master is resented, he is respected; trivial or not, he knows who won the Oscar for best supporting actress in 1942 (Teresa Wright for Mrs Miniver) and you don’t.

We are all experts in something; what makes our expertise, professional or amateur, something other than trivial reflects the fact that it is specialized. You can memorize French kings or capitals without having the faintest idea how Boise differs from Denver or Louis XVI from Charles the Bald. A specialist of French history or American geography possesses a rich fund of knowledge culled from extensive research; trivia are found in almanacs and the Guinness Book of World Records. No knowledge can become trivia until it has been made available to the general public in such a book. A fact becomes a factoid when the excitement of discovering it is replaced by that of knowing it before your neighbor.

True trivia mastery is attained only when one has a set of factoids appropriate for every conversational context. The fund of knowledge required employs much time and many synapses. GA, in contrast, offers a minimal set of ideas it claims to be relevant to any human situation. Like the factoid master, the generative anthropologist provokes resentment, but for just the opposite reason. The one has too many stories to tell, the other too few; both are suspected of holding a faith that puts them outside the normal range of human conversation.

It is a mistake to think of faith as confined within the traditional scope of religious rhetoric. Belief in “life after death,” in heaven, hell, or purgatory, is a sign of faith rather than its substance. Whatever we may think about the hereafter, most people behave in this world in such a way as to give meaning to their existence, be it though career ambition or love, not to speak of the subordinate goals that make each day a series of minor tragedies and comedies. Outside the realm of pure terror and pain where one thinks only of survival–and even there–the goals we set for ourselves are based on a faith inseparable from human culture and its representations. Human aspirations, dependent on our possession of language, are incommensurable with the aims of survival and reproduction that we share with animals. Nor can they be understood if language is understood merely as a tool for the manipulation of the environment.

Bronx Romanticism and the factoid cult are two forms of the life of faith. What separates the Romantic from the trivia master is what separated Protestant from Catholic in the Reformation: salvation through faith versus salvation through works. Works too are demonstrations of faith, in the Jewish religion even more than the Catholic. But there is an important difference between a conception of faith that privileges these demonstrations and one that views them as contingent manifestations of a prior state of grace. One says, “by knowing important facts and communicating them to you, I participate along with you in an absolute sense of significance.” The other, “our shared absolute sense of significance is demonstrated by my not having to know any facts.” The factoid master performs good works by placing his trivia in conversation. He knows that you too could look them up in the almanac, but the fact that a beggar could get a job does not diminish the sanctity of alms. The minimalist Romantic, on the other hand, disdains mere local utility; he contributes his sublime ideas to humanity as a whole.

GA is my way of justifying Bronx Romanticism to those born far from Yankee Stadium. Its minimalism locates the priority of form over content, of faith over works, of hedgehog over fox, at the very origin of humanity. The sense of dispossession from the positive world of facts that leads me to find refuge in transcendence and abstraction can be vindicated only if this intuition is the right one after all, the generative principle of the human, the missing link between positive science and humanistic faith.

The theory of the “little bang” expresses my faith that my own experience of significance is universal, that my need to communicate some significant truth to the world is inherited from the origin of human representation. My intuition tells me that this same need to participate in significance drives everyone else as well; it is inseparable from our participation in language and in human collectivities whose primary need is to protect themselves from internal violence.

Religious people will tell you that you “really” believe in God even if you deny it. The person of faith can conceive of others only through the mediation of faith; he translates the other’s self-concept into the terms of his own. Although this is not an argument for any particular faith, it argues the truth of faith as such, the minimal truth that the originary hypothesis seeks to capture.

Watching the World Series (I need not tell you which team the Bronx Romantic roots for) reminds me that nothing is more serious than the cultural games that have allowed us humans to survive in the first place. In the broadest sense, a game, whether ritualized or free-form, is any activity in which a shared significance in a meaningful goal or activity distracts us from the Hobbesian war of all against all. A memorable example of this deferral is the closing scene of the 1966 film The Naked Prey, starring Cornel Wilde as a “white hunter” captured by a warlike tribe and given a head start to be hunted like prey. Wilde survives through cunning, killing a number of his pursuers in the process. At the end, he reaches the safety of a colonial outpost. As they give up the pursuit, his remaining pursuers, whose companions he has killed, nevertheless bid him a warm farewell. He has shared the premise of their “game” and this mutual understanding has subordinated the deadly violence of this game to the fundamental human gesture of representation.

Just as one can use games to act upon the world outside–Dale Carnegie increasing steel production by inciting competition among shifts, automobile racing leading to engine improvements, better video for better video games–we can often understand our worldly actions on the model of a game. We speak of the “race” to colonize the New World or to put a man on the moon. The importance of game theory in today’s economic and political theorizing needs no demonstration here.

I used to think there was a race to discover the origin of language, on the analogy of the “missing link” that paleontologists once thought would solve the Darwinian problem of the origin of man. Today, as research continues and knowledge accumulates, people vie for specific prizes–today’s biggest will be for describing how language operates in the brain–but no one is going for the $64,000,000 question, the origin of the human as such. Like President Clinton questioning the definition of “is,” we are unwilling to define humanity specifically enough to conceive of an event of origin.

I think I have already answered the $64,000,000 question, but I’m not waiting for the check to arrive. The originary hypothesis wins by default a game no one else is playing. This sheds light on the postmodern era in which GA originated, without telling exactly how it will fare in the post-millennial age now beginning. Some Bronx Romantic had to make it his destiny to play the game, both heroic and cowardly, that no one else cared or dared to play: it’s lonely out there on the court, but if nobody else is playing you can’t lose. I am mindful of the fact that this description of events puts me at the very center of the world’s intellectual history. But as Doug Collins has been telling me for years, the center is just where you don’t want to be. Once it was dangerous but thrilling; today it is deserted, or so they say.

We cannot understand what game we are playing when we investigate the origin of language unless we examine the origin of the question itself. The “history of ideas,” of the answers offered over the centuries to the great questions, precludes providing more satisfactory answers than those it discusses; it rather implies that the question cannot be answered at all and that we are really concerned only with the “socially constructed” historical responses it has provoked. Yet to grasp effectively the implications of Hobbes’s or Rousseau’s theories of language is to establish their relationship to a more mature theory, just as an effective appreciation of Galileo’s physics requires its insertion into Newton’s, not to say Einstein’s. The historical insight we can obtain from Enlightenment theories of the origin of language is directly proportional to the anthropological insight of our own theory. This suggests that we read the thinkers of the Enlightenment in the light of the originary hypothesis.

Our vastly greater store of data–ethnological, linguistic, neurological, evolutionary–is not our sole advantage over these thinkers. The canard that the originary hypothesis offers only a social-contract explanation of the origin of language has at least the virtue of reminding us that nothing essential in Generative Anthropology was unavailable to the Enlightenment merely because of its less advanced state of technical knowledge. Nor do we need to know more about human nature than Hobbes or Cervantes to understand the centrality to society of what Girard would later call mimetic desire. What makes it possible for us to conceive a fundamental anthropology unavailable to the thinkers of the Enlightenment is a product not of our technical experience but of our ethical experience. It is what we have learned from history rather than what we have learned in the laboratory that allows us a more synthetic view of the human than our predecessors. History is our anthropological laboratory–a point missed by those who regret that we cannot turn back the clock to observe tribal life in all its glory.

Why, for example, is Hobbes, despite his interest in the relation between language and thought, not concerned to formulate an originary hypothesis that would associate the contractual birth of the social order with the birth of language? My thesis is that, despite all Hobbes had experienced of mimetic violence and of the urgent need to prevent its spread, it was only after World War II that it became possible to conceive of the human condition as absolutely dependent on the deferral of violence. A generative, mimetic anthropology was only conceivable once we had the experience not merely of a society in danger of dissolution but of humanity itself in danger of destruction. What defines the postwar, “postmodern” period is both the magnitude of the danger posed by violence in the nuclear era, which makes its deferral an absolute necessity, and a renewed awareness of the sacrificial component of culture, comparable but on a vaster scale with the insight into sacrifice that Joseph de Maistre won from the experience of the execution of Louis XVI. The model of the Holocaust justified and continues to justify the revolt of the victims, even anti-Semitic “victims,” in the postwar era. The most powerful political force in this period has been the guarantee afforded to victimary resentment. Victimary thinking translates any more or less systematic difference in worldly success into an absolute difference between the sacrificed and their sacrificers. As a result, overt structures of domination such as colonialism, apartheid, and racial segregation lost their claim to de jure status and were effectively ended; subsequently, physical handicaps, gender, ethnicity, and “sexual orientation” have become sources of victimary status and, to various degrees, the privileges that accompany it.

The victimary thinking that has dominated the political wisdom of the postwar era both hides and reveals its anthropological underpinnings. Although Girard’s anthropology takes sacrifice too seriously to make it popular among victimary thinkers, its fundamental insight derives from victimage as the fundamental human solution to the conflict engendered by mimetic desire. A point that most readers of Violence and the Sacred failed to grasp was that Girard’s understanding of the sacrificial solution to human violence presupposed that it had been superseded–only later would we discover by what. Nor is this the Rousseauian paradox of human culture’s always-already supersession of the state of nature; the overcoming of sacrifice is a historical phenomenon that Girard would later situate in the Mosaic and Christian revelations.

Hobbes created a model of the origin of social order as a remedy for an anarchic state of nature rather than a model of the origin of the human out of pre-human nature. Evolutionary considerations aside, the inhabitants of Hobbes’s state of nature must already be human because both their mutual hostility and its contractual solution are dependent on representation. Nor would Hobbes have thought to present contractual government as an improvement on a sacrificial stage of human society, which it would, on the contrary, risk resembling too much.

Nature hath made men so equal, in the faculties of the body, and mind, as that though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body or of quicker mind than another, yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger with himself.

For such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty or more eloquent or more learned, yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves . . . But this proveth rather that men are in that point equal, than unequal. For there is not ordinarily a greater sign of the equal distribution of any thing than that everyman is contented with his share.

From this equality of ability ariseth equality of hope in the attaining of our ends. And therefore if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies. (Leviathan, I, xiii)

Hobbes implicitly recognizes that our capacity for representation both makes us equal in potential violence and generates our propensity to envy. Affirming with dry irony our equality in “wisdom,” Hobbes suggests that what matters is the equality of our representations of ourselves: each can imagine himself in the other’s place. Yet neither here or elsewhere does he draw the originary and seemingly obvious connection between the symmetrical operations of representation both in fomenting and in deferring conflict.

Let us reexamine the remarkable sequence in Part I, Chapters iii-iv of Leviathan that I referred to in Chronicle 176. At the end of Chapter iii (“Of the Consequence or Train of Imaginations”), Hobbes points out that since “whatsoever we imagine is finite,” we cannot imagine anything infinite. It follows that our use of the name of God is “not to make us conceive him, for he is incomprehensible . . . but that we may honour him.”

In the following chapter (“Of Speech”), with no explicit link between the passages, Hobbes describes language as the gift of God to mankind. (“The first author of speech was God himself, that instructed Adam how to name such creatures as he presented to his sight . . .”) Language is described as granting humanity the possibility of mutual understanding that distinguishes us from the beasts:

But the most noble and profitable invention of all other, was that of speech, consisting of names or appellations, and their connexion; whereby men register their thoughts, recall them when they are past; and also declare them one to another for mutual utility and conversation; without which, there had been amongst men, neither commonwealth, nor society, nor contract nor peace, no more than amongst lions, bears, and wolves. (I, iv)

The dissymmetry between these two references to God and human language displays the limits of Hobbes’s “originary thinking,” and, indeed, of that of the Enlightenment as a whole. From the standpoint of the originary hypothesis, the gift of language and the conception of the sacred are two views of the same event. The originary sign is an ostensive pointing to the sacred center; it is from the outset the bearer of sacrality and its emission, a primordial act of worship. It is through this common gesture that we experience the gift of language “for mutual utility” as permitting us to establish “contract” and “peace.”

In presenting language as the mark of the human, Hobbes expels from the human sphere the violence that language is said to protect us from; lions, bears, and wolves are innocent of the egalitarian human envy presented in Chapter xiii as the source of our own “natural” violence. This expulsion permits Hobbes to treat signification as an instrumental function accorded us by a preexistent deity. If we follow the flow of his text from one chapter to the next, the sign’s incapacity to represent its “infinite” object makes it an act of worship and only as the object of this act does God grant the sign to us. But this analysis is implicit, “textual” rather than thematic. The act of worship generates God in Hobbes’s text, not in his ontology.

The political context of the new anthropology of the Enlightenment, intended to provide a basis for the early modern state, makes it easy to overlook the significance of the social contract as an anthropological model. For Hobbes, the contract is not a historical phenomenon but an a posteriori justification for authoritarian rule. Yet both the violence and the “contract” that defers it are moments of the originary scene of language. The asymmetrical sovereignty of Leviathan only extends to a human monarch the sacred difference of the center.

The political aim of securing and preserving order in an emerging bourgeois economy is incompatible with an originary model in which order is coeval with equality. No historical system of governance can be justified by a model that situates the deferral of human violence at the origin of the human itself. As we shall see, even Rousseau, who opened the door to anthropology proper by his ontological demotion of the social and who saw language more as a source of mimetic conflict than of its resolution, remained wedded to a concept of a human “state of nature” to which, for better or worse, order can be brought only from without.

Why should anyone do a crossword puzzle? At best, you wind up with the answer you could find in the back of the book or in next week’s magazine. But it’s just because there is an answer that you do it. As on multiple-choice exams, you seek not The Truth but the answer you imagine the puzzle-maker/examiner/deity had in mind.

American crosswords rarely get past the content of the words. French puzzles recognize linguistic form (the signifiant) to the point of playing on multiple meanings and homonyms, scrambling a word or inverting its direction. I find those of Robert Scipion in the Nouvel Observateur the most intellectually satisfying of the genre. But the most ingenious crossworders are the British, who work on a grid in which only about half the letters cross, sparing them the need to fill it out with silly crossword-puzzle words. The text of the clue contains both a straightforward definition of the keyword and a cryptic allusion to the anagrammatic tricks by means of which it can alternatively be constructed. It is like a detective story in miniature. (No accident, of course, that the Brits also invented the whodunit. Did Agatha Christie do crossword puzzles?) A relatively straightforward example: Mocked, put out and ran away outside (7) = FLOUTED (out with fled outside it; mocked is the straight definition).

These examples of “national character” reflect the different relationships between the cultural elite and the society as a whole. American puzzles are democratic, lowest-common-denominator–common knowledge plus a crossword-puzzle dictionary. I have seen some less-than-scintillating local imitations of British puzzles; should we anticipate a conversion to European sophistication analogous to the Starbucks phenomenon? Among the Euros, there is an interesting distinction is between French and British elitism. The French have a courtly culture where wit is the highest value; the British are given to schooled ingenuity. A Frenchman would consider it beneath his dignity to play childish games like putting “out” inside “fled,” but British culture from Dickens to Harry Potter has focused on ingenious children. (What used to be called the “classics” were tales for pre-adolescents–not The Red and the Black but David Copperfield, not Penguin Island but Treasure Island.)

Solving puzzles provides you with the more-than-personal satisfaction of having seen through the author’s mystifications and penetrated the opacity of the world of signs. For a moment, you feel that human minds can be transparent to each other. (This is the charm of detective stories as well, with the added point that what we divine in the other’s mind is a project of violence.) Yet finally the only understanding you achieve in the process of doing a crossword puzzle is of how to do crossword puzzles.

I sometimes do jigsaw puzzles too. These are so time-consumingly guilt-inducing that I don’t dare risk the temptation at home, reserving them for family trips to Kansas City , where the living-room table has been adapted for this purpose. A friend recently made an extension board to accommodate increasingly larger puzzles: first 1000, now 2000 pieces. Jigsaws demonstrate that the intentionality to which the puzzler responds need not descend into detail. A crossword is composed word by word by a Scipion or Margaret Farrar; a jigsaw puzzle is just chosen by someone for its pleasing appearance and stamped out on a cutting board. Yet our struggle to find the right piece is a search for the triumph of order over chaos that activates the same social instincts as other types of puzzles.

Jigsaws make up in the esthetic realm what they lack in shared wit. A filled-in crossword makes no prettier a picture than an empty one, but consider the almost-finished jigsaw: the missing pieces are gaping holes in a totality, begging to be filled. The jigsaw-maker is indifferent to the details of découpage, but he assures the puzzler that all those little pieces can be brought together in a finished product, a complete form revealing a complete content.

It’s hard not to participate in a jigsaw puzzle. The purely cumulative nature of the activity invites cooperation; if I add a piece to your puzzle, I can’ t possibly be frustrating your effort. Their extended topography makes jigsaw puzzles the most communal form of puzzling, but an unfinished crossword similarly invites participation. Whoever you are, you are part of the community whose purpose is to find that answer or fill that hole. Yet the satisfactions of puzzling are incommunicable to non-participants. There is no crossword- or jigsaw-puzzle-solving narrative. Imagine how a friend would enjoy the story of how you solved a jigsaw puzzle: “I looked through all the normal shaped pieces until I found one with a thin bottom tab with a wide and pointy left side and a dot of white on the lower right edge. It was still a bit too wide on the bottom tab, so. . . The next piece I found was. . .”

It’s hard for me to resist a puzzle of any kind: crosswords, jigsaws, cryptograms, logic problems, magazine quizzes, even those inane word-search puzzles. But more than any of these I enjoy computer programming. Writing a program offers all the stimulation of puzzling outside the confines of someone else’s mind. The solution does not accompany the problem; it has to be invented step by step. (Hacking in its new, sinister sense of seeking to crack a security system is too much like doing a crossword puzzle.)

The puzzle-like interactivity in computer programming makes debugging a program even more enjoyable than writing it. I tend to abandon good, dull programming practice (writing small, easily verified routines and combining them) and rush through the whole project to the point where it works more or less but there are still all sorts of errors in the code. Then you can run it and see whether you get “run-time” error messages or the output isn’t what you wanted from your input. It’s like a crossword where you can test your entries and learn from your mistakes. Once in a while, you get that special high from a program that runs perfectly the first time.

When my colleague Sara Melzer first introduced me to the 4 mHz Kaypro 10, I couldn’t wait to learn Basic. The little I had seen about programming fascinated me; as an ex-math major, I couldn’t understand how you could write “x = x + 1”. The instruction “print” (no longer used in the graphics era) also mystified me; why did they keep “printing” the thing on every line? Whence the unforgettable feeling of empowerment when I got my first program to “print” a pattern of green letters on the little black screen

It went something like:

10 for i=1 to 19
20 print tab(1+3*abs(10-i));
30 for j=1 to 10-abs(10-i)
40 print “blurk “;
50 next
60 print
70 next

The output:

                           blurk 
                        blurk blurk 
                     blurk blurk blurk 
                  blurk blurk blurk blurk
               blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk 
            blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk
         blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk
      blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk
   blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk
blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk 
   blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk
      blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk
         blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk 
            blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk 
               blurk blurk blurk blurk blurk 
                  blurk blurk blurk blurk 
                     blurk blurk blurk 
                        blurk blurk 
                           blurk 

My main programming activity in the 8-bit era was system utilities in Z80 assembly language–for example, a keyboard macro system using the Esc key on a keyboard lacking either function keys or Alt–but my favorite programming projects were the games I wrote in Basic, my “native” computer language. Back around 1985 I wrote a computer vs user domino game that, ported to Java, still [no longer in 2018] pursues its existence at www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/french/faculty/gans/java/domino.htm, where it gets more hits than the entire rest of the French Department. My most recent project in this vein was a VB improvement on the Windows solitaire FreeCell: see www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/french/faculty/gans/java/home.html for details.

The most popular microcomputer language in those days was MBasic, “M” standing for Microsoft, at the time a small outfit whose sole product was, I believe, that Basic compiler, including an Apple version on the Motorola 6502. Each line had a number. Full-screen editing had not yet arrived; you retyped any lines you needed to change and the interpreter would reinsert them for you in numerical order (type “l” for a listing). With all the advances since in hardware and software, I have never known a more user-friendly programming environment than good old MBasic, where you could write your program and just type “run” to see how it worked, modifying it line by line until you got it right. To exit the interpreter, you used the old mainframe command system. In CP/M, you usually rebooted after each program. A little Basic joke was to do this by typing call mom; the call command would call the routine at the address given in the following variable, and since you hadn’t defined mom, it would be set to 0, the address of the CP/M “warm boot” routine.

Visual Basic is pretty friendly too, but first you have to get past all those forms and controls and get used to event-driven programming. The old programs always kept moving; if they awaited input, there was a location in the program where they ran in place while waiting for it. When I ported my old CP/M games to MS-DOS (the next stage in the triumph of the “M”) I incorporated a mouse, a Mac-like luxury in the DOS era. You played by clicking on a “card” (implemented first as [2h] or [Ks], then–in color!–as [2♥] or [K♦]), and after each play the program came back to the same spot. Even the first version of Java dominoes incorporated a waiting loop. It took me a long time to realize that a program doesn’t have to be doing anything; it can just wait for input. The Bronx Romantic finds it particularly hard to believe that you can just stay there and do nothing, his own existence having made him so much more familiar with turning around in a loop.

There’s not enough vocabulary for jigsaw puzzles, but there’s too much for computer programming. I have learned the hard way that nothing is more boring to spouses, friends, and assorted acquaintances than explaining how a program works. Does anyone care what a “pointer” is, that C-derived languages are case sensitive, don’t initialize variables, and their arrays begin with 0, while Basic isn’t, do, and its arrays begin with 1, that DOS strings used to be terminated with “$” before they became like UNIX strings terminated by 0–binary 0, not the letter “0”? Can anyone appreciate this old routine to convert binary hex numbers to ASCII without jumps–here in 8080 code, but it still works on a Pentium :

Starting with:                6                    12
adi 90 (adds 90)             96                   102
daa (gets rid of the 100s)   96                     2 (carries the "1")
aci 40 (add 40 with carry)  136                    43 (adds 41)
daa (as above)               36 = "6"              43 = "C" (12 in hexadecimal)

Numbers are from C and letters are from Basic: the numbers begin with Hex 30=”0″, whereas the letters begin with Hex 41=”A”. To get around this, adding 90 followed by daa, which stands for “Decimal Adjust for Addition,” adds an extra carry to the letters while treating the step from Hex 39 to Hex 40 as a single (“decimal”) digit, so that 9 becomes Hex 39= “9” while 10 adds the carry to get to Hex 41= “A”.

Have I really made you care about aci 40 and daa? What about dad sp and pchl? Or nop, “no operation,” the hacker’s favorite instruction, used to patch over a test for the password or license he doesn’t have. An instrument without cultural resonance, the jargon of current and bygone assembly language still gives me the thrill of the exotic, perhaps because I learned it relatively late in life. I used to have a Honda Civic DX with the license plate XORDXDX–get it?

Computer culture

In a time when people are writing books to demonstrate that computers will soon be smarter than we are, does programming reflect a desire to join with them against us? We never stop playing the game of problem and solution whereas computers, like Visual Basic programs, just stand there and wait until one of us provides them with input. No doubt anything we can understand about ourselves can be programmed into a computer. Just as the word processor “wants to” go to the next line when you type beyond the margin or the program in a guided missile “wants to” follow its moving target, computers of 2050 or 2100 (can we even begin to imagine the computers of 2200? of 3000?) will be programmed to “want to” play tennis, make love, what have you. But this lends no credence to the horror stories about computers taking over the world. The learning modules that will make computers “superior” to us will be of our own design. The idea that computers will keep secrets from their users and scheme together to replace them is just one more paranoid fantasy on the model of alien invasions, one more distraction from our real worst danger, which is ourselves. You can program resentment on a computer, but you can’t make a computer resentful. I’ll take HAL over Saddam anytime.

Of all human creations, computers are the most insistent indicators of progress. They have shown the most rapid sustained improvement of any human creation; doubling in every aspect of performance something like every eighteen months over a span of twenty years or so, they give us a taste of a future in which the material aspects of life will increasingly be controlled by the transfer of information. Rather than seeing humanity defeated by its own creation, we are witnessing the expansion of the semiotic human feedback mechanism to the material world as a whole. Computers have brought the whole world together, the developed part of it at any rate. The early confraternity of computer freaks has expanded and diversified into the majority who use email, handle a little word-processing, and surf the Internet; the nerds who know the best websites, how to change margins and recalculate spreadsheets; the geeks who can write, say, card games in Visual Basic; and the supergeeks who still call themselves hackers, stay up all night drinking Mountain Dew, and who know enough about interrupts and the Windows API to break into security systems.

Despite all the inventions of the Middle Ages and Renaissance–gunpowder, the compass, clocks, printing–the men of the eighteenth century still saw themselves as Greeks and Romans. The industrial nineteenth century showed that human history was not merely “perfectible” but open-ended and irreversible. Now the information era has made the reality of this irreversibility–improvement and obsolescence–an object of immediate experience. Purchasing a computer or any information-processing device is like changing dollars in a land of runaway inflation; buy in the morning and you’re sorry you didn’t wait till afternoon.

In contrast with the ever-improving hardware, programming is relatively conservative. The major operating systems, DOS-Windows, UNIX-Linux, even the Mac OS, have all been around for over fifteen years. A Visual Basic program today is still recognizably a Basic program, just as a C++ or Java program is still recognizably a C program with semicolons and matching braces. And the Intel Pentium II-III assembler code that underlies the objects and methods of the latest languages derives with few changes–and still with daa–from the good old 8080, just as those new Mac chips descend from the 6502. 32-bit EAX just extends AX, which extended the 8-bit “accumulator” A . And if the strange academic languages like Forth and Snobol seem to have disappeared, generation-old Cobol and Fortran programs are still running.

That my domino game has survived the transition from CP/M to Windows 2000, from 4 mHz to 1 gHz, from Microsoft Basic to Microsoft omnipotens, allows me a not-quite-Proustian sense of defeating time. Writing a computer program is solving a puzzle to which no prior solution existed. Isn’t that true as well of the originary hypothesis?