Anthropoetics

Author: staceymeeker

  • The Persistence of Anti-Semitism

    The other day yet another white supremacist went on a rampage, killing five people of five different nationalities: Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese, African-American, and … Jewish. Which led me to reflect once again on the strange exemplarity of the Jews.

    It is not by way of complaint that I refer to an anomaly that is inevitably ignored or dismissed rather than reflected on. Jews do not benefit from affirmative action programs for disadvantaged minorities; they are not considered a “minority” at all, merely a Euro-American ethnic group like Poles or Italians. In mainstream American society, Jews today feel more threatened by intermarriage than prejudice. Yet among those who see as their mission to maintain the purity of the white (Caucasian? Aryan?) race, the chief target remains, even after the Holocaust, not “people of color” but the Jews, the masters and beneficiaries of ZOG (Zionist Occupied Government).

    The superficial explanation for this obsession is that it is a historical holdover from European antisemitism and in particular from Nazism. Yet the skinheads and their brethren are not–as were, for example, the Old Leftists–beholden to European philosophies. The proof that antisemitism is essential to these movements is that there is not to my knowledge a single white supremacy group that does not practice it. If whiteness is the ideal and “mongrelization” the problem, there are plenty of people of non-European ancestry to hate; why remain obsessed with a group of highly assimilated Caucasians? There is something more here than mere slavery to tradition.

    In Chronicle 155 I attempted to explain the peculiar virulence of modern antisemitism as a reflection of the decentered structure of market society. Karl Marx’s On the Jewish Question designates the Jew as the central figure of capitalism. Now that Marx’s “scientific socialism” has been discredited, we can understand better than a century ago that the Jew is fingered as the central figure of capitalism precisely because there is no central figure of capitalism. The myth of the “international Jewish conspiracy” as an all-encompassing explanation of the behavior of the market is all the more enticing because there is no rival explanation: the free market is “inexplicable,” and the importance of the Jew to our homegrown white supremacists is a corollary of this fact.

    The subsumption of racial and ethnic minorities into a Jewish-directed conspiracy is an extension of the same paranoid logic. The civil rights era, and especially that of affirmative action, generated great resentment among less fortunate whites. That the Jews have never directly benefited from the racial preferences they have supported politically only proves that they are secretly profiting from them. The Turner Diaries, the neo-Nazi cult novel discussed in Chronicle 90, portrays the Jew as controlling animal-like Blacks (a model guaranteed to turn Blacks into antisemites) in a racial variant on the old idea that Bolshevism was a plot of Jewish bankers. In this manner, the threats to the lower middle class from above and below, from the unpredictable outcomes of the market and from the emergence of new ethnic forces, may be explained with a single word.

    Yet this explanation is still too historically contingent to exhaust the anthropological significance of antisemitism. The figure of the Jew as the “subject” of the capitalist market is too restrictive both in scope–the Jew is seen as dominating culture as well as the marketplace–and in historical depth. Not only has antisemitism been, at least since the Crusades, a constant feature of the Christian West, but the modern market is not a historical contingency but a highly stable institution that evolves by progressively freeing originary human reciprocity from the restrictions of pre-industrial economies.

    The traditional justification for anti-Judaism indicts the stubborn Jewish refusal to accept the Christian intuition of the humanity of the sacred center. For the Jew, man is made in God’s image, but there is no specific image for that to be. Christianity proclaims itself the historical revelation of the originary truth of human reciprocity, the unity of theology and anthropology. The Jew is a reproach to the Christian because he shares this truth but has no pretensions of living it as an apocalypse.

    To live as a Christian is to gain the world in practice by turning away from it in theory. Economic exchange can free itself from the ritual order only as an exchange among free spirits who know the center of the circle as well as the periphery. Hence it is really no surprise that it was Christians, not Jews, who created capitalism. The market is modeled on the decentered reciprocity of the Kingdom of God, whereas the Jewish liberation from the ritual center never overrides the ethical concerns of the community.

    In the Biblical understanding of the originary scene revealed to Moses in Exodus 3, the sign that remains after the consumption of the central being is to be used not for the imperative recalling of the scene but for its declarative universalization. God’s name is not “Jehovah” but “I am that I am.” Yet this declarative, objective God retains a privileged relationship with this particular people. Even if we forget God’s specific promises to Israel, we cannot put out of mind the superiority of a people constituted by the warrant to conceive all experience, and particularly the worst, as God’s message to itself alone.

    What then of the Christian revelation? To reprise my argument in Science and Faith, Jesus’ admonitions to love one another, to put away our sacrifices and reconcile ourselves with our brother are already part of the Jewish tradition. What is radically new is Paul’s understanding of the sacred centrality of the persecuted, the revelation of Jesus’ divinity on the road to Damascus. Where the Jews had understood that the real center is inhabited by the Being of the sign, the Christians realized that this Being was generated, and could be generated anew, by an act interpretable as a victimization. To expel the other is to sacralize him; if we would be free of this mimetic idolatry, we must accept the mediation of the one who was expelled for revealing this mechanism. But this imperative is compelling only to the persecutor, not to the indifferent. If he who, like Saul of Tarsus, is obsessed with expelling Jesus, can find solace only through conversion, this is not true of those who do not share this obsession.

    What Saul/Paul discovers is that to persecute is to adore in the mode of mimetic rivalry. It is in this same mode that the Jew is persecuted by the anti-Semite, who is protected from conversion to the worship of this Jew by the historical specificity of the Pauline revelation that makes him already the worshiper of a Jew. The anti-Semite compels the Jew to enter the infernal circle of rivalry and persecution in order to reenact his own Christian conversion: he is the new Paul, and the Jew is the Saul he used to be.

    This analysis suggests that antisemitism intensifies in the bourgeois era because it is at this point in history that persecution, which grants significance, comes to be preferable to indifference. The Romantic prefers (imaginary) martyrdom to anonymity, as witness not to his God but to himself. This is the era of individualism, but also of nationalism. If Rousseau’s Rêveries d’un promeneur solitaire is the key text of Romantic neo-martyrdom, Du contrat social defines the terms of nationalist–and socialist–mythology: the “masses” enter political circulation by pledging their allegiance to an avatar of Rousseau’s “general will.” At this point the Jew’s indifference to Jesus is no longer a veil covering his guilt for the Crucifixion; it is itself the ultimate persecution. To opt out of the theater of national life is ipso facto to operate in a hidden realm of conspiracy. The Jew is the ultimate dandy whose detachment from society–in principle, regardless of fact–is the sign of his omnipotence. The anthropological meaning of anti-Semitism may be expressed in terms of the market, but only insofar as the lesson of the modern market is itself understood as a transhistorical revelation concerning human exchange. The Jew is designated the “subject” of the market because, faithful to the empty center revealed by the burning bush, he remains in principle indifferent to the objects–whether of persecution or adoration–that he finds there.

    It took the Holocaust to remind us that real persecution is indeed worse than indifference. The succeeding half-century has been dominated by the denunciation of persecutors by minority victims, a global affirmative action from which the Jews, unsurprisingly, have benefited little. Now, at the moment when Jesus’ status as a white man has run afoul of newer identities, those who see the white race as itself a victim are obsessed less with other races than with the corrosion of racial identity itself by the Jews’ “anesthetic” indifference.

    Monotheism means being able to claim that everything that happens is God’s message to us. Enraged at the Jews’ monotheistic equanimity in defeat and disaster, the Nazis hoped to inflict on them a catastrophe so great that it could not be understood as the message of God to his people. Nearly sixty years later, we are only beginning to come to grips with the implications of considering the Holocaust as just such a message. Meanwhile, the Nazis’ latter-day disciples, more pathetic than fearsome, although capable of real violence, see themselves as a last line of defense against the Jewish centerlessness that presides over the world of human exchange. However similar to theirs is the conspiratorial mindlessness of the anti-market anarchists of Washington State and Washington DC, we may at least be thankful that the effigies they burn are not those of the Elders of Zion.

  • Locke’s Little Bang

    In Chronicle 176 I spoke of Hobbes’s infamous picture of the “state of nature” in which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” as the beginning of the originary anthropological thinking that defines the Enlightenment. For the first time, a scene of origin for human society was formulated in strictly human terms.

    Yet Hobbes’s authoritarian solution to the mimetic rivalry he observes so sharply has received little support from the political thinkers who have succeeded him. Those such as Joseph de Maistre who, like Hobbes, support the sovereign’s absolute power, tend to found it on a divine, not to say sacrificial, basis rather than deriving it from a strictly anthropological model. Hobbes’s jaundiced view of natural man makes him the bad boy of the Enlightenment, just as Machiavelli was the bad boy of the Renaissance–the one cynically revealing the means of power, the other just as cynically theorizing its necessity.

    Where Hobbes is incisive, Locke is prudently ambiguous; where Hobbes is rigorous, Locke is pragmatic. Hence, to quote Peter Laslett‘s introduction to the latter’s Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge, 1960):

    [Hobbes] was the greatest of all the meta-political writers, those who refine and analyse political language and elaborate axioms into axiologies. For this reason his influence on thought about politics has been enormous, but his purchase over what men do politically has been negligible…. (89-90)

    [Two Treatises] contained just that ingredient which Leviathan lacked–policy; statement of guidance of what men will accept, respond to and pursue . . . (91)

    In keeping with these comments, Locke’s state of nature is very different from Hobbes’s: its affirmation of humanity’s originary non-conflictivity is the direct ancestor of Rousseau’s more elaborate and anthropologically grounded attempts to demonstrate that “man is good, men are bad.” Locke’s enormous influence on the theory and practice of liberal democracy demonstrates that his vision of our originary state is not only more flattering to us than Hobbes’s but more politically pragmatic. On Hobbes’s anthropology could be built only tyranny; as Laslett points out (90), Hobbes’s failure as a political (as opposed to a philosophical) “realist” is revealed by the fact that he actually thought Leviathan would serve, as Locke’s Treatises would in fact, as a basis for political action.

    My intellectual instincts draw me to Hobbes as the great early modern exponent of the anthropology of mediated desire. In Hobbes’s model, men are naturally in a state of mimetic crisis from which they are spared only by renouncing their sovereignty to a central authority. The sharpness of Hobbes’s vision of mimetic rivalry and violence is unsurpassed before the nineteenth century. Hobbes sees human relations as dominated by an unceasing rivalry in which appetite and its satisfaction play no independent role and value is conferred entirely by relative supremacy–that is, where the political wholly dominates the economic. Hobbes is well aware that the possession of language that sets us apart from the animals is directly correlated with the instability of any natural hierarchy; it is because we represent our social context to ourselves that we cannot abide finding ourselves in an inferior position and that we are consequently obliged to strike first even if we would sincerely prefer not to fight at all. Hobbes’s state of nature is one great game of Prisoners’ Dilemma in which no one has any reason not to defect.

    Hobbes’s world, so close to that of Dostoevsky’s novels as described in Mensonge romantique, has obvious affinities with GA. Locke’s anthropology, in contrast, seems at first glance both less originary and less coherent. For Locke, man in the state of nature already enjoys the essential advantage that central authority confers in Hobbes’s universe: liberation from the state of mimetic crisis. Locke expresses this in theological terms:

    The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. For men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker, all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order and about his business, they are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another’s pleasure. . . . Every one as he is bound to preserve himself, and not to quit his station willfully, so by the like reason when his own preservation comes not in competition, ought he, as much as he can, to preserve the rest of mankind . . . (Second Treatise, sec. 6)

    It would be hard to find a clearer expression of the function of the sacred in deferring mimetic violence. Because we are God‘s workmanship, we are not merely obliged to avoid harming our fellows, but we are on the whole able to do so. Thus where Hobbes sees the war of “every man against every man,” Locke is concerned only to point out that every man in the state of nature has the power to enforce the law of nature, for example, by putting a murderer to death. Violence in Locke’s as opposed to Hobbes’s state of nature is local and reversible rather than universal and contagious.

    Why then do men subject themselves to governments? When Locke comes to answer this question, his state of nature sounds at first glance like Hobbes’s:

    For all being kings as much as [a given man], every man his equal, and the greater part no strict observers of equity and justice, the enjoyment of the property he has in this state [of nature] is very unsafe, very unsecure. This makes him willing to quit a condition which, however free, is full of fears and continual dangers . . . and . . . to join in society with others . . . for the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties and estates, which I call by the general name, property. (sec. 123)

    This sounds like Hobbes, but it is in fact very far from Hobbes. Fear and danger are punctual rather than general, and this because they come from persons who may be egoistic (“no strict observers of equity”) but not mimetic. In Locke’s world, the desiring self is never naked as in Hobbes’s: it is always clothed in property. Locke’s subsumption of even our “lives” and “liberties” under the category of property protects the desiring self from Hobbes’s naked triangularity by assuring this self’s externality to all its objects of desire, including its own living body. It is, in a word, a soul present in its nakedness only to God. Or in anthropological terms, the mimetic crisis is over, the sacred Being has been established, in advance of Locke’s state of nature.

    In Locke, renunciation of power to central authority takes place in a “little bang” rather than the big bang of Hobbes’s Leviathan. What is required of government is a set of established laws, impartial judges to apply it, and an executive to enforce it–a tripartite division that is the outline of our system of governance (secs. 124-26). But we need obey government only insofar as it promotes the “common good” (sec. 131). Just as we never lose sight of natural appetite for the sake of mimetic rivalry, so we never renounce the promotion of our appetitive welfare for the sake of a central institution.

    For Hobbes, the transition from the state of nature to that of organized government is too absolute to be understandable as a historical boundary. It is rather a thought-experiment: if there were no government, we would fall into such a condition. On this point, Rousseau will claim that Hobbes inserts into the state of nature excessive human desires that exist only in society. Locke’s state of nature, in contrast, is the model, if not of a historical state, then of a proto-historical one. To those who object that the state of nature never existed, Locke describes in some detail how government might have evolved out of patriarchal power in the family. Locke’s state of nature, unlike Hobbes’s, is meant to be plausible, which means above all livable. Hobbes’s universal war would lead to extinction since total preoccupation with mimetic desire leaves no energy for the satisfaction of essential appetites. In Locke, we are protected from this eventuality by our property; even the murderer who takes my life seeks to remove an external obstacle to obtaining my possessions, not the internal obstacle of my desire itself.

    Since Locke’s state of nature already presupposes our equality under God not as a mere piety but as a guarantee of potential cooperation, it might be asked how Locke’s model can enter into dialogue with originary thinking. In Hobbes, the passage from the state of nature to that of government is the transformation of a purely theoretical but unlivable state to a livable one, analogously to the originary emergence of representation as a means for deferring mimetic crisis. But although one can tease out of Hobbes more easily than Locke the connection between human language, religion, and mimetic crisis, neither proposes a scenario of human or language origin, a development that must await Condillac.

    Hobbes’s state of nature, like what Girard calls mimetic crisis, goes beyond the minimalism of originary thinking in requiring a long-term rather than short-term abandonment of the appetitive for the sake of the “metaphysical.” Hobbes’s and Girard’s models end with the focusing of all attention on the central being, whether as submission or assassination. What is missing from both is the return to the appetitive after the sparagmos that divides up the consumable central object.

    In contrast, Locke integrates the appetitive into the cultural. Property, he insists, already exists in the state of nature: we make natural objects our own through our labor. In contrast with the Ricardo-Marx labor theory of value, Locke defines labor as agency rather than physical effort; the turfs one’s servant cuts are one’s property as much as those one cuts oneself (ibid., sec. 28). It is precisely this concept of agency that defines what we may call in the broadest sense the bourgeois self. Instead of concerning myself with my neighbor’s property, I act to enhance my own, beginning with my own God-given life and energy. Such a position may at first appear naively to deny the power of mimetic desire that Hobbes so lucidly recognized. But the anthropological superiority of the Lockean to the Hobbesian model has been borne out by history. The triumph of liberal democracy is founded on the deferral of mimetic desire through economic activity. It is only those societies where market society has not succeeded that are dominated by Hobbesian problems and solutions.

    No doubt Locke fails to address directly the threat of mimetic crisis, but this refusal is an act less of denial than of reticence. My desire and your desire may well have mimetic origins; “ultimately” we may well desire nothing but each other’s desire. But like Keynes’s long term in which we will all be dead, our ultimate desire is irrelevant to our concrete existence. Locke’s model of liberal government guarantees our property rights as the most effective means of turning us away from our rivals toward desire-objects that are in principle our own and not those of another. The bourgeois world functions by privileging the parallel movement of desire over its rivalrous convergence.

    The twentieth century taught us the truth of Churchill’s quip that democracy is the worst form of government with the exception of all the others. The only solution to the problems of our democratic exchange society is more democracy and more exchange, and the only useful debate is over the relative weight to give each of the two in a given circumstance. The dialogue of democracy is a debate among Lockeans in which Hobbes serves only to designate the outer limits. No anthropology can afford to ignore history’s most successful model of human interaction.

  • Originary and Evolutionary Esthetics

    I have claimed more than once in these Chronicles and elsewhere that the emergence of humanity cannot be understood simply in terms of the theory of evolution, and that “creation science,” whatever its absurdities, has a single point to make: the origin of the human, as defined by our use of language, must be understood not merely as a process but as an event. The origin of language, however prepared by genetic evolution, cannot be explained by genetic mutation alone; the emergence of language is itself a cultural mutation that subsequently becomes the basis for new adaptations, including the mental and physical elements of our linguistic capacity.

    My recent reading in the not uncontroversial field of evolutionary psychology (see Chronicles 201 & 203) offers new hope that a viable interface is possible between GA and evolutionary theory. Most attempts by psychologists and anthropologists to explain the phenomena of human culture in Darwinian terms only demonstrate for all to see that, lacking an adequate anthropology, empirical science cannot formulate a valid research program about human behavior. (A recent example: A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion by Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer [MIT Press] claims that men have been selected for a specific adaptation to commit rape.) But if the concept of evolutionary adaptation is not directly applicable to the forms of language and culture, it does offer some clues as to the sort of content that these forms will tend to include.

    It is perhaps in the domain of esthetics that is most amenable to fruitful dialogue between event-thinking and process-thinking. An esthetic experience may be understood both as the result of a process that generates a particular “esthetic effect” and as a memorable event in the life of its subject, unique in more than the trivial sense in which every life experience is unique. More particularly, the experience of art is generated and strongly structured by a process internal to the individual artwork that may be understood as a mechanism deliberately designed to provoke in its audience the experience of a new event.

    Whereas, according to the originary hypothesis, this event derives its form from the originary event, the fundamental content of art as of all cultural mechanisms is supplied by objects of precultural appetite. Ritual sacrifice predominantly involves large edible animals because these are the most concentrated forms of nourishment; the predominant motive force in narratives is sexual desire, whose biological importance needs no demonstration. Less obviously, evolutionary psychologists hypothesize an esthetic of landscapes that reflects their attractiveness as habitats for our species in its formative stage in the Pleistocene. Gordon Orians and Judith Heerwagen in “Evolved Responses to Landscapes” (in Barkow/Cosmides/Tooby, The Adapted Mind, Oxford UP, 1992: 555-79) provide a plausible evolutionary model for our topographic tastes: we tend to find attractive savanna-like scenes that offer potential food but especially “prospect” and “refuge,” which afford us the ability to see without being seen.

    From a biological standpoint, this kind of esthetic sense is a refinement of the tropism that makes amoebas move toward solutions possessing the requisite pH. The amoeba need not exercise “judgment”; its tropism is defined by a single equation computed by the amoeba’s perception system–in Kantian terms, the tropism is not “without a concept.” Conversely, we call our own judgment “esthetic” because the field of perception that occasions it is too complex and the set of evaluative criteria too vague to permit of simple conceptualization. The attractive-landscape hypothesis offers an evolutionary basis for the “judgment without a concept” of Kantian esthetics. Clearly our judgment will be quicker and more decisive if it doesn’t require us to reason, that is, to compare in our minds a given landscape with a series of landscape-images variously suited for human habitation or exploration. Among Pleistocene hunters moving through the terrain, the ability to decide correctly without reflection which direction to follow is certainly likely to affect evolutionary selection, in the same way as the ability to choose correctly at a sniff or nibble which foods to eat. It is no coincidence that the notion of taste has been from the beginning associated with the esthetic. If our taste in food has practical use, so does, or did, our taste in scenery.

    Taking the evolutionary hypothesis a step farther, the Kantian distinction between the “beautiful” and the “sublime” would appear to distinguish respectively scenes that we desire to enter and scenes that we wish only to contemplate–”prospect” being a major feature of the evolutionary esthetic. Thus we may not need to link the sublime to the sacred in order to explain our otherwise seemingly gratuitous interest in mountains and waterfalls; perhaps adaptive value can be found in our “tropism” toward places from which such phenomena may be viewed.

    How is this biological notion of the esthetic to be articulated with the phenomena of art?  That we use the same language to speak of beautiful landscapes and beautiful paintings strongly implies that our taste for the latter in some sense derives from taste for the former. Evolutionary psychology furnishes this much justification for Kantian esthetics’ primary focus on natural beauty, but it seems even less ready than Kant to tackle the crucial question of the articulation of the natural esthetic with the cultural.

    One of the hoariest clichés of esthetics offers a simple means of distinguishing between the beauty of nature and that of art: the idea, which goes back at least to Aristotle’s Poetics, that objects that would frighten or repel us in the real world (Aristotle mentions “vile animals and cadavers”) elicit our praise as subjects of an artwork. Contemporary shock art, whatever its other virtues, allows us to refine this assertion. Whereas the classical examples, typically pictures of wild beasts, were more fearful than repugnant, an important trend in the plastic arts makes a cult of ugliness and repulsion, using excrement, menstrual blood, and other excretions with the apparent aim of demonstrating that the esthetic can only be defined in opposition to our biological tastes.  Ever since the romantics determined to épater le bourgeois, art has been increasingly opposed, not, as was often claimed, to the “useful,” but to the naturally or naively beautiful, to the kind of objects that natural selection would seemingly direct us to choose.

    No doubt, in its ostentatious protesting-too-much, painting with excrement only affirms the ultimate bondage of art to the natural esthetic. Mondrianesque abstraction was far more liberating in reducing this esthetic to its bare bones of pattern and rhythm. Abstraction is in keeping with the nature of our perceptive system; our inviting landscapes are built up from patterns of edges and shapes. These reactions against the natural esthetic may be interpreted historically, manifestos to the contrary, as enlargements rather than denials of the canon of natural/classical beauty. But the most significant point made by the anti-naturalism of modern art is in the domain of form rather than content: to emphasize the mediation of the esthetic sign. This emphasis on form is most crucial in the plastic arts, where an artwork that copies the appearance of its subject-matter risks being reduced to a mere example of “mechanical reproduction.” Whereas the classical admirers of trompe-l’oeil were satisfied to understand representation as reproduction, modern art, reflecting a deeper insight into culture’s source in human interaction, understands representation as creative in a primary rather than secondary sense. Whatever its excesses, the modernist anti-mimetic revolt in the plastic arts, with its parallel rebellion against tonality in music, reminds us that the sign of art is never a mere trigger for the natural esthetic.

    The oscillation between the esthetic sign and its imaginary referent mediates between human culture and the natural esthetic. The latter tells us which landscape or sexual partner is likely to promote our evolutionary fortunes; if our perception includes a moment of “esthetic judgment,” it cannot be detached from the practical use to which it will be put. The referent of the sign, in contrast, is by that very reference cut off from the world of practical reality. Even when the ostensive sign picks out an object in the real world, that object is thereby detached from the surrounding world of appetitive relations. Here the oscillation between sign and referent is in its simplest state; the referent exists in reality, but its contemplation is dependent on the sign to frame it as an object of esthetic experience, to detach it as solely significant from the rest of its visual environment.

    We may assume that a potentially significant object will have already been detected as such by our precultural perception system and even that it will have received an esthetic valence, just like the landscape evaluated by our natural esthetic judgment. The framing effect of the sign results, according to the originary hypothesis, from the sacralization of the object through the convergence of the desires of the community; it is prerequisite not to perception itself but to the exclusive focusing of attention characteristic of esthetic contemplation. Thus the sign provides a “supplement” to the natural esthetic interest aroused by the object, with the consequence that the visual field, instead of being composed of a set of diversely interesting objects, is restructured as a central object on which all attention is concentrated and a background from which all interest has been withdrawn. But the interest focused on this object is no longer preliminary to appropriative or exploratory action. Mediation by the sign is tantamount to withdrawal from the world of appetite into that of “disinterested” contemplation. Culture reinforces the relative dispositions of the natural esthetic with the absolute significance borne by the sign.

    Although this articulation of natural and cultural esthetics strikes me as reasonable, the question this discussion raises in my mind, and perhaps in that of the reader, is whether evolutionary esthetics has really added anything new to the dialogue between Kantian esthetics on the one hand and originary thinking on the other. Why indeed was landscape chosen in The Adapted Mind to illustrate the natural esthetic? If, for example, female beauty had been selected instead (see, for example, Nancy Etcoff, Survival of the Prettiest,  Doubleday, 1999), it would be obvious without any discussion of esthetics that men are attracted to those women who show, always according to the criteria of the Pleistocene, the greatest likelihood of enhancing their reproductive fitness. (It has never been clear to me why that old misogynist Schopenhauer has been given credit for the all but tautological observation that our criteria of female beauty correspond to evidence of this likelihood.) There would be no need to allege an esthetic sense independent of appetite simply in order to affirm that our judgment in such matters is based on “apperception” without the need for reasoning.

    In the case of landscape, however, our preference appears to our intuition as disinterested in the Kantian sense because, unlike our nomadic ancestors, we are unlikely to follow it to a practical end. (Within this framework, our choice of “esthetic” vacation sites would seem to lie half way between a practical and a purely esthetic decision.) Because we admire landscapes in a contemplative mode that does not appear strongly connected to an even virtual praxis, it becomes of interest to show that this mode has roots in practical action of the kind that drove the evolution of our genotype. But I find no compelling reason to consider such contemplation as constituting a separate “esthetic” category. The esthetic only acquires its specificity, that is, its independence from appetitive praxis, on the communal scene of representation where the danger of mimetic desire forces us to contemplate the sacred and the beautiful. Evolutionary biology can arguably refine our understanding of the appetites that lie behind human culture, but only originary anthropology offers explanations of the forms of desire that this culture constructs.

  • The Novelistic Attitude

    As we begin the third millennium, it seems clear that the novel has relinquished to film its role as the dominant narrative form. This is increasingly the case even in those emerging countries where the novel would appear to remain a viable means of creating communal consciousness. We tend to tell the story of the novel as the triumph, consecrated in the nineteenth century, of the fictive imagination over public spectacle; we would do better to understand the dominance of fiction over spectacle as a romantic and post-romantic interlude.

    Not that theatricality disappeared in the nineteenth century. On the contrary, as cultural historians such as Vanessa Schwartz (Spectacular Realities, California 1998) and Paul Metzner (Crescendo of the Virtuoso, California 1998) have pointed out, it is precisely this period that witnessed the emergence of modern popular spectacle and, with it, the modern notion of celebrity. In turn, the ubiquity of this spectacle provoked the literary reaction that led through post-romanticism to modernism. As principal heir to the post-romantic l’art pour l’art that culminated in Mallarmé’s combination of hermeticism and ironic consumerism, modernism aims at creating a spectacle for the elite that would defeat the popular at its own game. But whereas late nineteenth-century literature remained centered on the solitary genres of poetry and the novel–the individual nature of creation was perhaps the one dogma Mallarmé held in common with Zola–modernism tends to be collective (e.g., the Surrealists) and anti-narrative (e.g., Valéry). The greatest modern novelists belong less to modernism than to the extremes of the post-romantic; this explains why the questions posed by Joyce, Kafka, and Proust to the limits of the novelist’s communion with his reader did not lead, as with Scott or Balzac a century earlier, to an enlargement of the possibilities of the genre, but to their exhaustion.

    If the figure of the romantic poet/artist is a tired cliché, it is because his example was accessible with only minor adjustments to the young men of the early bourgeois era. Frédéric Moreau, shown in the opening scene of Flaubert’s L’éducation sentimentale carrying an artist’s album and a guitar, typifies the pretensions of the jeunesse romantique. Any reasonably educated bourgeois can write a few verses or sketch a scene. The novelist’s role is different. The nineteenth-century realist novel, as opposed to the classical roman d’analyse, requires too much prolonged, concentrated effort to be within reach of the youthful amateur.

    The novel exemplifies the creativity of the isolated individual, Balzac or Flaubert alone at his writing desk. During the age of the novel, from roughly 1830 to 1960, cultural energy was focused on the self-creation of the individual under the guidance of the singular author-creator. If the crowd communes in spectacle, the cultured self can only join the community once he has first asserted his capacity to create significance unaided. Each individual is the bearer of the originary source of significance, and it is only because of this that bourgeois society can function as a whole

    Now that the novel has declined and the high-cultural novel all but disappeared from the first-world cultural equation, it is easy to see the purely representational yet personified spectacle of cinema as a synthesis of the purely representational novel and the personified spectacle of theater. But what was most significant about the novel has not survived its supersession: the novel was a factor not merely of adjustment but of subversion. In contrast to the poet/artist, the novelist is openly a middle-class entrepreneur, capitalizing his talent and profiting from its exploitation (think Dickens or Zola). Yet the novelist also represents a point of resistance to market activity; his solitary labors of the imagination contrast with the utilitarian practices of the bourgeoisie.

    The novelist is at the same time isolated from the world and fascinated by it. Unlike the romantic self-regard that enhances one’s human capital in preparation for entry into bourgeois life, these attitudes of detachment and vicarious participation can only help us survive life’s disillusions. Balzac’s romantic realism is only superficially an encouragement to market success; Flaubert’s post-romantic disillusion is clearly an apology for worldly failure.  Within the rhythm of bourgeois life, the novel is designed for a private experience of reading that consoles the private self after its daily buffeting in the marketplace.

    Unlike the poet, the novelist is not a model to be emulated; he is a transcendent figure, a secular priest, an association that Balzac provoked with his monk’s robe and that Flaubert never ceased to flaunt in his correspondence. This priestly function gives the novelist access to a truth that the reader as ordinary bourgeois can see only through his eyes: Girard‘s vérité romanesque, the revelation of the vanity of worldly desire from the transcendent vantage point of pure representation. As opposed to the popular novel whose romantic heroes are still served up for identification today, the “literary” novel ends unhappily or at best ironically. The reader plunges into these tragic depths protected by the diver’s bell of the novelist’s extra-worldly subjectivity.

    The novelistic stance of refusing the world in order to grasp the world, naively assimilated by Balzac and Zola to that of the scientist, is in reality a sacrificial one that redeems the vanity of the worldly desire it denounces. This existential relation to the sacred is not possible in cinema. The “experimental” films made in the equivalent of cork-lined rooms have only technical or cult interest. The spirituality of cinema reflects that of the world itself, viewed with utmost seriousness; it has no place for the irony of the novelistic gaze. Where Dreyer shows us the Passion of Falconetti-Joan of Arc, Proust’s literary agony allows us to delight in the self-delusions of Charlus and Mme Verdurin.

    The age of the novel is that of a short-lived bourgeois idealism. The novel serves as a guarantee for my faith that by sacrificing my own life to art I too could create an immortal work. It is the loss of this ideal consolation for worldly failure that explains the postmodern urge to monumentalize lives before they are complete in any sense. From Emma Bovary to Erin Brockovich, the protagonist has evolved from a figure of pity redeemed by Flaubert to a figure of envy consecrated by Julia Roberts.

    What has passed away is not the novel but the novelistic attitude, that of the self who accepts lack of control over the world in exchange for the privilege of living within it detached from its values, observing it, at least in principle, as if it were material for a novel. Although this attitude is not incompatible with worldly success, it is difficult to reconcile with the corporate lifestyle. The novelistic withdrawal from the marketplace is conducive to success within it only so long as it reflects the secret desire of those entering a world that does not yet offer a full complement of means for expressing personal uniqueness. With the passing of this immature stage of market society, there is no longer need for a transcendental vision to oppose to that of the marketplace itself.

    What dies with the novelistic attitude is not personal creativity but the ideal of its virtual existence in the isolated individual. The world of the film-maker, to draw the pertinent comparison, is far more egocentric but also far less solitary than that of the novelist. The latter can avenge himself on the world with pen or word-processor; the former must bend a whole team of people to his will and find financing in the bargain. The film-maker, however introspective, must be at least minimally gregarious and manipulative or his film will not get made. And if, at the bottom line, the novelist knows he can always find a place to withdraw to, even from failure as a (public) novelist, the film-maker must live with the terrible knowledge that if he can’t make his film, he has no recourse of any kind–other than to write a novel.

    Because the Bronx, that urban Valley of the Dinosaurs, maintained nineteenth-century cultural modes long after they had perished elsewhere, my generation is perhaps the last to have known the novelistic attitude. Today we all take our cue from the film-maker in realizing that human creativity, like the human society it nourishes, is an interactive enterprise.

     

  • Originary Thinking, Cognitive Science, and Religion

    I’ve been reading a lot about “modules” lately. Many people postulate a language module; I haven’t heard of any who postulate a religion module. The one useful point I have seen made by cognitive psychology about the objects of religious belief is that, whether in non-Western cultures or in our own, they contain elements that are “unnatural,” counter-intuitive, while at the same time obeying universal psychological intuitions about how minds work. (See Pascal Boyer, “Cognitive constraints on cultural representations: Natural ontologies and religious ideas,” in Mapping the mind, ed. Lawrence Hirschfeld and Susan Gelman, Cambridge UP, 1994.) Whatever modular thinking’s other virtues, it restores some measure of common sense about human universality, allowing us to trust instead of apologizing for our “Western” intuitions. (Not to speak of the fact that, whatever its intentions, admiring the “naturalness” of religious beliefs in other cultures resuscitates Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s notion of “pre-logical” primitive mentality.)

    No doubt Durkheim’s sacred-profane opposition presents the “unnaturalness” of religion more elegantly and with a far more cogent explanation of its communal function than Boyer’s idea that “certain combinations of intuitive [i.e., anthropomorphic psychology] and counterintuitive [i.e., supernatural physical existence] claims constitute a cognitive optimum” (406). Yet the insistence on the universal counter-intuitiveness of religious belief is a step in the right direction, one particularly welcome given the far more critical eye cast on universals of human behavior in our era as compared with that of Durkheim.

    Boyer’s example is the Fang belief in ghosts or bekong. The Fang ghost is presumed to have a mind like ours but in addition is gifted with qualities such as non-mortality (the bekong are, roughly speaking, the souls of the dead) immateriality, invisibility, the capacity of instantaneous displacement, and most significantly, the power to inflict illness on those guilty of the violation of ritual prohibitions (398). The ghosts are anything but “natural” beings; their unnaturalness is inseparable from their cultural significance.

    The cognitive psychologist sees the unnaturalness of beings gifted with superhuman attributes, but fails to derive from this a theory of the “unnatural” that includes language or even the sacred in Durkheim’s terms. Instead, he focuses on the “cultural survival” (406) of religious ideas, not for the community that practices them, but in and for themselves. This is very close to Dawkins‘ notion of the meme or cultural fragment that survives by reproducing itself in the members of a culture; “unnatural” ideas survive because the cognitive dissonance they generate makes them harder to forget than common-sense ideas.

    Boyer is well aware that only a few such “unnatural” ideas become the dominant representations of an entire community:

    In any cultural environment, indefinitely many religious representations are constantly created and communicated. Only some of them, however, have the potential to support both imaginative scenarios and intuitive inferences. These are the ones that combine a rich intuitive base, with all its inferential potential, and a limited series of violations of intuitive theories, which are attention-demanding. Because of these characteristics, such assumptions are more likely than other assumptions to be easily acquired, memorized, and transmitted. It should not be surprising, therefore, that they constitute the most recurrent aspects of religious systems. (407)

    Yet this near-tautological language tells us nothing about how religious ideas are generated and how they function. Nor is the solution to be found through examining the ideas in themselves. The survival of religious ideas is inseparable from that of the human communities that generate them–in the first place, from that of the human species that alone can formulate ideas in language. Rousseau’s brilliant intuition that in the earliest language men would be called “giants,” and even the common Enlightenment idea (most often associated with Vico) that the earliest language was poetry rather than prose, still have much to teach those who think they can generalize about our “representations” without concerning themselves with why we create representations in the first place.

    It is not enough, however, to point out in the language of the history of ideas the weaknesses of such contributions as this to the scientific study of religion. For the emergence of these analyses is precisely a sign that the old metaphysics that still dominates theoretical discussion in the humanities and the softer social sciences is reaching the end of its usefulness. As I suggested in Chronicle 201, the most useful or “dialectical” alternative to the biological model of the human in the light of the cognitive-evolutionary critique of the “Standard Social Science Model” (SSSM) is a humanistic, that is, a generative, anthropology. The “two cultures” may become more likely to listen to each other as the intellectual buffer of a culture- but not event-based anthropology becomes increasingly less available. For whether or not mental modularity is the answer, the cognitivist critique of the conception of cultures as arbitrary and irreducible absolutes can at best be deflected, not refuted.

    Most of the supernatural qualities of the Fang ghosts, as of all religious beings are, as I have pointed out on many occasions, those of the linguistic sign. Signs too are non-mortal, immaterial (as types), rapidly transmitted. But in addition to the transcendent status of the sign with relation to its worldly referents, the supernatural also expresses the transcendent status of the sacred being in relation to its worshipers. The first relation is formal; it may be described in a geometrical metaphor as a “vertical” supplement to the “horizontal” world of appetite. The second relation is ethical; interactions among humans are mediated by sacred interdiction, and both the rules of practical ethics that govern societies and the model of reciprocity that founds our moral intuition derive from it.

    What then of religion, the traditional guardian of the notion of the event-based nature of the human? If GA, as a rigorous form of anthropological thought, stands on the humanistic side of the frontier between the humanities and the sciences, it cannot be said to be situated between religion and something else. The individual religions are not likely to experience a need for the minimal shared core that originary thinking provides until their own mutual dialogue has advanced far beyond its current “interfaith” level. Rather than being in dialogue with religion, I see GA rather as the (unelected) representative of religion to the scientific community. Here once more we follow in the footsteps of Durkheim, with the difference that the cognitive value of religion in originary thinking does not begin with the unexplained dichotomy of sacred and profane but with a motivating event. As a result, our “science of religion,” unlike that of Durkheim, is able to integrate the core intuition of religion itself. Durkheim writes about religious classification as (still) a nineteenth-century anthropologist analyzing the religion of “primitives” and (already) a structuralist modeling a human world without events. Durkheim claims that religion is the source of science, but he relies for the scientific status of his own discourse on the metaphysical foreclosure of the event and of the ostensive utterance-form associated with it. The central intellectual task of GA, if it can be described in one sentence, is to demystify this separation by articulating it in anthropological terms.

    Everyone talks about the human need for stories; it is not yet generally understood that the need for stories is a need for events. Events are what stories are made up of. By postulating an originary event, GA does not create a new myth, but rather makes clear the minimal presupposition of human culture that thrives on events. Events cannot derive imperceptibly from non-events; there must be a “first” event because events by definition are noticed. Different cultures there certainly are, but they all share the same eventfulness and are therefore most parsimoniously derived, lacking evidence to the contrary, from a single originary scene. (Pace some critics of GA, a multiplicity of originary scenes would by no means disconfirm the originary hypothesis, but merely complicate its historical articulation: did the originary communities born in the diverse scenes combine? Were the descendants of all but one such community eventually eliminated–in which case there would be only one originary scene for us?…)

    How then should we explain the “cognitive optimum” that Boyer finds in the Fang ghost stories? The counter-intuitive element that makes these and all religious tales memorable is not explicable simply as a story-telling device; it is an imaginative means of representing the transcendental basis of storytelling itself. But the transcendental does not emerge from thin air. For the sacred object to become the source of the Being or signified that stands behind the sign, it must be destroyed in the sparagmos. The birth of the sign as told in the originary story is consequent on the death and transfiguration of the object that was the originary center of desire, the death and transfiguration that lies at the root of sacrificial myths and of those stories that prolong and interpret them. It is not by chance that the Fang “ghosts” originate as the souls of the dead.

    What generates the “cognitive optimum,” the balance between ordinary human psychology and the transcendence of human physical limitations, is not some undefined “limited series of violations” but the tension between the vulnerability of the originary object-referent to the violence of human desire and the persistence of its peace-bringing significant Being–life after death. The supernatural is bound to be “attention-demanding” because it reproduces the very source of human attention to the sign. This is a lesson that cognitive science can learn from Generative Anthropology.

  • GA and Esthetics: Ideas for a Research Program

    The faith of GA, as I attempted to explain in Chronicle 200, is that all thinking is “really” originary thinking. Such an assertion, if it is not to be mere rhetoric, should be followed by at least some indication that its content is of some value for the thinking-that-is-really-GA-but-doesn’t-know-it-yet that it purports to enlighten, that those engaged in humanistic/anthropological research will find explicit awareness of and reference to the originary hypothesis to be to their intellectual–if not academic–advantage.

    My readings in the scientific literature have convinced me that humanistic studies can retain their significance only by taking on a more rigorous character, but that this rigor cannot be attained through social-science empiricism, even modified in the direction of biological modularity. On the contrary, the most rigorous, or perhaps I should say minimally unrigorous, way to deal with the phenomena of culture created by the speculative freedom of human representation is to trace these phenomena back to their minimal source in the hypothetical originary event in which representation first emerged.

    Our unique capacity to construct fictional worlds is founded on our unique capacity to experience-and-recall events. A “science of culture” would take this capacity and its products as its object. Of the many historical manifestations it might study, humanists lay claim to the most extensive and intricately structured “data set,” the world of literature and the arts that they alone have the knowledge and training to analyze. Humanistic modes of interpretation would enrich the science of culture by exploring what in each individual artwork reproduces the event-nature of human origin.

    In the hypothetical originary scene, the experience of avoidance and fascination that we call the sacred is not simply a relation between the individual participant and the central object; its crucial element is the emission of the sign that communicates this experience to the others in the group. The sacred experience is one of representation-as-a-substitute-for-appropriation, but once we have represented-instead-of-appropriating, we are less likely to think of appropriating and more of representing. The sacred can be kept alive only by renewing the experience of its birth, regenerating the collective mimetic tension that valorized the sacred object in the first place. This necessary renewal is the function served by culture.

    How, on this definition, does the necessity of culture imply that of art? Why is it not sufficient to reproduce the scene of crisis in sacrificial ritual? Why does the originary scene give rise not merely to a formal process of signification (the sign signifies the sacred being) and an institutional process of reproduction (the ritual scene reproduces the originary scene) but an esthetic process in which both the sign and its scenic referent are present? This question offers subject-matter for a GA research program on two levels.

    The first is that of esthetic theory. The philosophy of art in antiquity and more particularly the study of the effects of art in the early modern era that led to Baumgarten’s Esthetics and Kant’s Critique of [the Power of] Judgment has much to reveal about how this intermediary domain has been (mis)conceived within Western metaphysics. Kant’s famous notion of the judgment of taste as being “universal without a concept” acquires new meaning in the light of our definition of conceptual-metaphysical thought as that which posits the declarative-logical “proposition” rather than the ostensive as the minimal utterance-form. The experience of “the beautiful” remains in Kant’s system within the intermediary realm of the judgment, which normally assigns a sign-idea to a sensory experience, without ever subsuming its experience under any given concept. But Kant does not see the dependence of the esthetic on representation; his “judgment without a concept” is no more than a suggestively paradoxical union of uniqueness and universality (cf. “unity in diversity”) detached from the generative context of human history. Because originary thinking encounters the sign before its signified becomes a “concept,” it can explain the anthropological function of this “intermediary” state in which both sign and imaginary referent are held in the mind simultaneously, or, more precisely, in a state of oscillation.

    As the two elements of signification, the ancestors of Saussure’s signifier and signified, the originary sign and its sacred referent are not merely “associated” in the traditional behaviorist sense but linked in a new kind of relationship that we call signification. We experience signification as an asymmetrical binary relation of sign and meaning in which the thought of one calls up the thought of the other. We say that the originary sign represents its referent because perception of the sign provokes (real or imaginary) perception of the central object, but perception of this object as significant requires in turn continual reinforcement through perception of the sign.

    In an ostensive utterance where sign and referent are both present to the participants, this oscillation may be actualized as a physical movement. When the sign is used in the absence of its object, this oscillatory movement is transferred to the imagination. The sign conjures up an image of the object that, whatever real experiences may have contributed to it, is not an independent trace of worldly experience but one dependent on the sign. Let us recall that the primary function of the sign is not to increase our knowledge of the world but to maintain peace within the community by sacralizing an object of potential mimetic conflict. The esthetic moment of oscillation is the process through which investment of energy in emitting the sign replaces the impossible praxis of appropriating the object. The sign not merely signifies its object but engages with it in a dynamic process of becoming-significant. The collective discharge of mimetic tension in ritual sacrifice depends on the esthetic reinforcement of the sacralizing-signifying link between sign and referent in the individual participants.

    This analysis might be taken to suggest that the esthetic is the truly essential, dynamic moment of the generative process of culture and that the sacred is no more than its static residue. But we must be careful not to apply to the human in general the valorization of the dynamic over the static characteristic of modern market society. The “esthetic” central object does not survive the scene; all that remains is the signification-relation that associates the sign as name-of-God with sacred Being. As the basis of communal order, the sacred cannot be constantly put to the test of esthetic judgment. That this is indeed the effect of esthetic experience is substantiated by the hostility of sacred institutions to “secular” art. But to say that the sacred is put into question by esthetic experience is tantamount to saying that it was through esthetic experience that it was generated in the first place.

    The second level of our research program is that of the empirical examination of esthetic experience. Humans obtain enjoyment from stories and may reasonably be said to have a need for them; all cultures engage in storytelling, from the level of communally accepted myth to that of ephemeral gossip. Positive anthropology finds it easy to conceive adaptive functions for storytelling just as it does for language. The paleoanthropologist who explains the emergence of language as a means to communicate the location of food sources can similarly explain storytelling as a means to communicate useful knowledge about both natural and social reality. In contrast, if we derive language minimalistically from the sign emitted to defer mimetic conflict, we must maintain a similar minimalism with respect to narrative.

    As I attempted to show in “Originary Narrative” (https://anthropoetics.org/journal/ap-vol-3/ap0302/narrative/ originary narrative is the story of the emission of the sign as the genesis of signification, the becoming-sacred/meaningful of the central object. Telling a story is not a simple matter of finding a referent and then using a sign to represent or recall it. The significance that we find at the end of the story has been generated in the course of the story. No story can offer a logical demonstration of the significance of its object, but some stories are more successful than others at maintaining the reader/hearer in a state of oscillation between sign and (imaginary) referent. In a successful narrative, just as in the plastic arts–where, however, the temporality of esthetic reception is less explicitly structured–we are continually motivated to return to the work to replenish our imagination. The source of this motivation is not necessarily “suspense,” although the latter is certainly a frequent component of successful narratives.

    Significance is something that each narrative must generate anew, not reproduce. A story, whatever its basis in fact, is not a contingent representation of something that exists but a generative representation of an imaginary and therefore “fictional” referent. Narratives are the means by which we renew our contact with the originary function of language. This is the grain of truth in the romantic paranoia that opposes literary language, and the sphere of art in general, to the “disenchanted” discourse of the modern, secular, rationalized world, as though the two domains were not interdependent.

    The generation of significance through narrative is prior to the conceptual or metaphysical use of language and does not therefore depend on it. In contrast to narrative, conceptual discourse, which includes the logical and the scientific, describes  what is in principle already there; it does not bring it into being. Yet because all human language comes from the same generative root, the contrast between the two forms of discourse can never be made absolute; no language is purely conceptual or “positive,” particularly not that of the sphere of human science.

    It is the achievement of deconstruction to have grasped this point in reading philosophical and culture-theoretical “texts” as being of a kind with works of the literary imagination. The deconstructive critique of metaphysics has much in common with that of originary thinking. Its crucial weakness lies in its failure to criticize the principal unspoken pretension of metaphysical discourse: that language itself is metaphysical, a proposition implicit in the term “logocentrism.” Language is indeed logocentric; but the mutual dependence of logos and center expressed by this term is precisely what demonstrates the essential lateness, the anthropological modesty, of metaphysics.  This demonstration should encourage us to pursue the analysis of narratives and other “texts” as so many historical examples of originary thinking.

  • GA and Not-So-Social Science

    Today the Humanities appear to be drifting in the direction of the social sciences. Textual analysis becomes every day less like biblical hermeneutics and more like archival research–when it doesn’t resemble the presentation of a brief at the Nurenberg Trials. Cultural documents are examined less as sources of universal enlightenment and more as historical evidence, sometimes incriminating, sometimes disculpatory.

    An interesting side-effect of this “sociological turn” has been a renewal of interest in Durkheim, whose hedgehog status (see Chronicle 198) reflects his insistence on the unity and independence of the “social.” Durkheim is a key ancestor of GA. Indeed, Girard’s mimetic theory of social organization may be described as a synthesis of Durkheim’s “realist” notion of the social with his rival Gabriel Tarde’s nominalism. Durkheim views society as a transcendent entity that dominates its individual participants; Tarde emphasizes the mimetic structure of human interaction. Durkheim rejected Tarde’s notion of imitation as dependent on the prior existence of the social order whose structures it was meant to explain; Tarde reproached Durkheim with hypostatizing society as a kind of Platonic Idea independent of the individuals that compose it. Girard achieves a creative Aufhebung by making the social itself the product of “imitation” or mimesis in both its positive and negative aspects, which Tarde recognized under the term “opposition.”

    But the very hedgehog qualities that made Durkheim instrumental in imposing the idea of “social science” within the academic and intellectual worlds explain why he is not in favor in the social sciences today. In anthropology the triumph has gone rather to Franz Boas, theorist of the cultural tabula rasa and advocate avant la lettre of “thick” cultural description; Durkheim’s universalism seems hopelessly restrictive, not to say Eurocentric. The failure of humanists to challenge cultural relativism when they are not its enthusiastic partisans makes me wonder whether their tips of the hat to Durkheim are more than gestures of symbolic appropriation. Are humanists making a serious effort to resume Durkheim’s agenda, or are they just putting a “scientific” label on their nostalgia for the sacred?

    Either way, it should come as a surprise to most humanists that, although in the context of twentieth-century anthropology Durkheim is at the antipodes of someone like Clifford Geertz, the critique of the “standard social science model” (SSSM) associated with the school of evolutionary psychology considers Geertz as Durkheim’s disciple. (See The Adapted Mind [Oxford, 1992], especially the introductory chapter by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, who edited the volume along with Jerome Barkow.) We cannot blame either Durkheim or the evolutionists for this bizarre filiation, although we can certainly blame more recent anthropologists for failing to refine Durkheim’s notion of the social–or to recognize GA as a decisive step in this refinement.

    What makes Geertz a disciple of Durkheim? For the latter, social facts are irreducible to the facts of individual psychology (this was the heart of his polemic with Tarde). Durkheim sought to establish laws of social action as well as an increasingly religion-centered generative scheme of social organization, whereas Geertz seeks neither laws nor scheme. But once the “social” has been declared an autonomous entity detached from the specific mechanisms of the individual human psyche, it is a short step to the Boasian claim that the human being is a mere cipher wholly determined in all his behaviors by the specific society of which he is a member. Once the specific mental constitution of the human individual has been declared irrelevant to the constitution of “society,” there is no longer any reason to emphasize the unity of society rather than its diversity and, conversely, the noblest reasons for emphasizing the latter over the former.

    Can we then follow the path of Durkheim without arriving at Geertz? Originary thinking answers this question with an unqualified “yes.” The originary hypothesis anchors the “social” in the mimetic psychology of human individuals and their interaction; it explains why there is a “society” in the Durkheimian sense of something more than a collection of individuals linked by one-on-one or small-group relationships.

    The evolutionist critique has the potential for drastically modifying the anthropological landscape within which we operate, in a direction I believe quite favorable to originary thinking. Assuming that this critique eventually succeeds in discrediting the SSSM (whose intellectual vacuity has been no secret in these quarters), what will remain is a biology-based anthropology on the one hand–and humanistic studies on the other. Despite the evolutionists’ use of vocabulary such as “machines” to describe human beings and “epidemiology” to describe cultural diffusion, these are no more than hopeful heuristic metaphors. However salutary it may be to reject the dogma of cultural relativism and to examine cultural phenomena as products of evolution-driven adaptations, evolutionary analysis is not yet ready to take the place of the interpretative study of texts.

    The relativistic social science model that has lately become so attractive to humanists as an alternative to moribund traditional models of “high culture” can no longer serve them when it is losing validity in its own domain. This suggests that, just as biological adaptationism proposes a yardstick to judge and classify the efficiency of human behaviors, an analogous evaluative tendency will reemerge in humanistic studies, if only to explain the persistence of certain cultural works (e.g., Shakespeare’s plays, but also folksongs) beyond their immediate historical context. More importantly, it implies that new and more rigorous models will be required to mediate between the cultural and the biological. The “Integrated Causal Model” (ICM) proposed by the evolutionists must respect the specificity of the human just as much as that of living as opposed to inanimate matter. The originary hypothesis as a minimal explanation of this specificity is far more at home in the more rigorous context of the ICM than it ever was in the dogmatic gradualism-relativism of the SSSM.

    The only way to defend the validity of Durkheim’s concept of society in a context redefined by the evolutionary critique is to offer a model of its generation out of the interactions of its individual members. The constitution of human society as something more than a population of mutually fertile individuals and even than the “social” groups found among our primate cousins is most parsimoniously explained as the result of an event commemorated by a representational sign. If humans are unique in their possession of a “language module,” the originary hypothesis offers an explanation of how this module first appeared as an adaptation to increased mimetic tensions within the proto-human group.

    But it also explains why the social is more than the sum of its constituent modules. The presence in all cultures, concomitantly with language, of the ritual enactment of mimetic phenomena suggests the existence among humans of a particular propensity to mimesis already remarked by Aristotle, a propensity that may be described in modular terms as a focused adaptation, but one that at the same time leads to the “dialectical” transcendence of the narrowness of the modular in general. It is the very domain-general form of language that we call metaphysics that permits us to formulate scientific theories, including, in particular, the modular theory as a refutation of the domain-general view of language. But modularity and universality in language are not mutually exclusive. The generative critique of metaphysics as a set of declarative sentences (“propositions”) that denies its historical roots in the ostensive has much in common with the evolutionary critique of the SSSM as a history-denying theory of language and thought.

    Although the evolutionists convincingly confute the relativist-descriptive anthropology founded on the Boasian rejection of human nature, which they explain as a noble but wrong-headed reaction against colonialism and eugenics, their failure so far to persuade the more humanistically oriented sector of the social science community cannot wholly be laid at the door of the latter’s fuzzy-headed dogmatism. Whatever the weakness of the domain-general learning-oriented psychology of the SSSM, it reflects, however crudely, an awareness that humans differ from animals in their possession of a formal system of information processing that permits what Derek Bickerton calls the “off-line” manipulation of ideas. However modular its operation within the brain, such a system is qualitatively different from the sensory and signal-based information-processing systems available to animals. Although the human system can only physically exist in individual brains, it can function only in the context of culturally shared meanings that is Durkheim’s “society.”

    If our language modules are beneficial adaptations to anything, it is not to our internal information-processing needs, but to the communication of information to others in the context of these culturally shared meanings. The parsimony of the originary event as the origin of these shared meanings contrasts with the conjectural complexity of hypotheses, such as the one referred to in Chronicle 200, that attempt to model the generation of such meanings through one-on-one interactions. The minimality of the originary hypothesis is the antithesis of the SSSM’s minimalistic depiction of the brain as a tabula rasa of non-dedicated neurons that leaves it to the “environment” to define the parameters of human nature.

    I hope to explore in future Chronicles further implications of the evolutionist critique and its potential effects on both the narrowly academic and broadly intellectual contexts of the originary hypothesis.

     

     

  • Minimal Faith: The Human as Event

    In “The Unique Source of Religion and Morality” (Anthropoetics, I, 1), I explained religious faith by the WWII dictum that “there are no atheists in the foxholes”: that one calls on God at the moment of life-threatening violence because our very idea of the sacred was born in the context of life-threatening violence. There being no atheists in foxholes, those who would stimulate our faith strive to convince us that we are indeed in a foxhole rather than in the marquise’s salon. Hence Pascal describes humanity as a collection of prisoners in chains awaiting their turn as they see their fellows led out to execution. Anything that distracts us from what Heidegger would later call our “being-toward-death” is mere divertissement.

    The principal component of this diversion, in our time far more generally than in Pascal’s (when the vast majority of the population were critically concerned with the material necessities of life), is vanity, or put less moralistically, the desire for recognition. Although history abounds in examples of courage and other virtues, by definition we lack examples of non-recognition; tales of unrecognized genius are bogus, since we only hear the tale once the genius has been recognized. To renounce vanity is thus to renounce worldly recognition sans exemple. The one form of suffering that even the Crucifixion fails to prepare us for is anonymity.

    Because we possess a world of shared representations that are not material but formal, we are free to conceive the individual soul that houses a unique set of these representations as immortal. The Buddhist, in contrast to the Judeo-Christian, emphasizes the dissolution of the individual soul in the universality of the representations that compose it and with regard to which individual identity and desire are mere illusion. What both cases have in common is not survival but “immortality,” in the sense of access to the transtemporal realm exemplified in human experience by the sign.

    For faith as with all fundamental elements of culture, originary analysis provides a minimal model or structure of understanding: faith is the mode of shared representation. However much animal signals may be learned, animals have no signs whose reference must be taken on faith. The originary act of faith is the deferral of violence; in the originary scene, the participants must accept on faith both the meaning of the others’ aborted gesture and the others’ faith in the meaning of their own. Each soul is inhabited by the “immortal” originary representation of the central object of desire as the “name-of-God.”

    “Faith in one’s ideas” is not a common quality independent of the content of those ideas, whether they be the originary hypothesis or experiences of abduction by aliens. Although by definition faith can never wholly be justified by reason, the program that reason suggests to faith is its minimization–which is not to say its elimination. Positive empiricism does not do away with faith; it simply agrees, in the interest of achieving concrete “results,” not to concern itself with the faith that underlies the system of thought in which these results are expressed. That methodological considerations of this kind do not obviate the need for an originary hypothesis is the kernel of the hypothesis itself.

    The faith of originary thinking is that the indispensable basis for human thought is the emergence of the human in and as an event; the claim of the originary hypothesis is to minimize a explanatory leap between animal and human that cannot be eliminated. Faith in originary thinking is faith that there is really no other way of thinking than originary thinking. Recognition of this truth would be tantamount to bridging the gap between the humanities that conceive the originary and the social sciences that do the thinking.

    But the minimality of the originary hypothesis makes it poorly suited to an intellectual environment that requires cooperation among specialists in various disciplines. The old metaphysics can only be broken down by the slow work of empirical analysis for which this metaphysics itself provides the basis; even, or especially, the empirical discipline of anthropology resists an “anthropological” perspective. Disciplines are communities, and the first duty of a community is to protect its existence; this is a truth that GA puts too embarrassingly to the fore to make it congenial to any of these communities. Thus originary thinking can only flourish in the margins of today’s academy, or outside them altogether. Yet for its ideas to survive and prosper, they must be promoted by persons willing to anchor themselves in specific disciplines and conduct empirical research in the light of the originary hypothesis.

    On this point, some positive news from both ends of campus.

    First, the scientific: As I noted in Chronicle 168, Terrence Deacon’s explanation of the origin of language in The Symbolic Species (Norton, 1997), although not quite scenic, comes nonetheless far closer to the originary hypothesis than any previous account in the literature. Machiavellian Intelligence II (Cambridge, 1997) a follow-up volume to that discussed in Raymond Swing’s “Some Comments on Generative Anthropology” (Anthropoetics V, 2), provides further supporting material, less theoretically powerful but equally suggestive. In “Egalitarianism and Political Intelligence,” Christopher Boehm claims that the egalitarianism that distinguishes early human from primate society is based on the restriction of “alpha” males by a coalition that, unlike the fluctuating coalitions of ape societies, includes the entire human group: “Morality makes a radically egalitarian outcome possible for humans because morality involves a permanent coalition of an entire watchful community” (361). In “Social Intelligence and Language,” Esther Goody presents the origin of language as a social rather than simply cognitive phenomenon, one that permits cooperation through “shared meanings” (382) rather then “Machiavellian” deception.

    Perhaps needless to say, neither Boehm nor Goody concern themselves with modeling as an event the paradoxical process in which the transition between deception and cooperation, dominance and egalitarianism is accomplished. Rather than conceive the emergence of “shared meaning” in a scene, Goody (373) refers to a computer simulation that purports to generate sign-meaning relationships from lengthy series of one-on-one communications (50,000 to establish twelve signs, in the example given). Once again, human scientists draw from empirical data tentatively and in gradualistic form conclusions that follow directly from the originary hypothesis. The latter is nevertheless made to appear increasingly plausible as a working hypothesis for empirical research.

    On the humanistic side, as might be expected, corroboration is more nebulous. But it is surely not altogether coincidental that both UCLA and the University of Washington are holding colloquia this Spring–the latter quite a high-profile affair–on the subject of the Sacred and the Profane. There seems to be a clear trend in recent years toward acknowledging the centrality of the sacred to the domain of cultural study, if not of “cultural studies.”

    GA was articulated by humanists rather than human scientists, but it bears allegiance to neither domain. To rely on any professional grouping to give value to originary thinking would violate the very principle of minimality by which originary thinking is defined. The only group that can be the object of our minimal faith is humanity itself.

     

     

  • Clouzot’s Cruel Crow

    Le corbeau (The Raven or The Crow) is probably the most controversial film in French history. It was made in 1943, under the German occupation–and for a German-owned production company–by Henri-Georges Clouzot, best known in the US for Diaboliques and The Wages of Fear. To quote Evelyn Ehrlich‘s authoritative study of Vichy film, Cinema of Paradox (Columbia, 1985), “Of all the crimes committed by the film industry during the occupation, seemingly the most serious was having worked on Le Corbeau” (p. 176). Clouzot was banned from film-making after Liberation and did not complete another film until 1949; Pierre Fresnay and Ginette Leclerc, the film’s stars, were imprisoned.

    Both Left (Resistance) and Right (Vichy) agreed in finding Le corbeau demoralizing and “anti-French.” Even today, those who praise it speak of its darkness and cynicism, its jaundiced denial of moral certainty. Yet my impression is quite different. I see it as a film about trust and love, on the one hand, and the harsh but real necessity of moral judgment on the other. No film more forcefully denounces mob persecution and scapegoating, not to speak of the sinister practice, so notorious under the occupation, of informing on one’s neighbors through anonymous letters. Although not a propaganda piece for the Resistance, Le corbeau is an affirmation of humanistic values antithetical to those of the German occupiers and their Vichy collaborators.

    Le corbeau has many characteristics of a detective film. At the center of the story is a rash of anonymous letters signed “le corbeau,” the first of which accuse Dr. Germain (Fresnay), a physician-obstetrician suspected of being an abortionist because he cares more for the mother’s life than that of the child, of illicit relations with Laura, the attractive young wife of the old psychiatrist,Vorzet. The letters go on to reveal many secrets and denounce much dishonesty in the (medium-sized) town of St.-Robin. One brutally informs a young hospital patient that his cancer is fatal, whereupon he cuts his throat with a razor.

    Germain, perturbed by the accusations, spends a night with Denise (Leclerc), the sluttish occupant of the neighboring room (he is renting in a schoolhouse). Meanwhile, suspicions about the letters solidify around Marie Corbin, Laura Vorzet’s unattractive sister who is a nurse at the hospital. Clouzot films Marie’s flight through the empty crooked streets to her room with the techniques of German expressionism to create a powerful indictment of mob violence. Then a letter that appears after Marie is jailed demonstrates her innocence.

    Germain catches Denise writing him a corbeau letter to announce that she bears his child, and immediately suspects her of having written the others. But in the film’s most moving scene (and its only close-up), she asks him to find in her tearful eyes the truth that she is not le corbeau. Finally, it comes out that the first letter was written by Laura herself in an effort to seduce Germain, and all the others by Vorzet. Laura is carted off to a mental hospital in a scene reminiscent of a Gestapo abduction; the hospital suicide’s mother cuts Vorzet’s throat with her son’s razor. Germain and Denise decide to have their child and, we assume, will leave St.-Robin together.

    To read most descriptions of this film, one would never know that the story ends with, on the one hand, the punishment of those guilty of sending the letters and, on the other, the affirmation of life and love through the child awaited by the principals. Germain declares to Denise that he needs this child, that one should not refuse the future–and opens his window to hear children playing in the schoolyard, having closed it to shut out their noise in the couple’s first scene in the film. Even Clouzot’s fabled cynicism is not dark–nor is the lighting–but satiric and often humorous.

    The situation of Clouzot’s spectator is judiciously balanced. With respect to the satiric elements of the film–the mutual blackmail of the chief doctor and the bursar, the hypocritical storekeeper who abandons Germain for another doctor because of the letters, the postmaster taking for himself a corbeau letter addressed to his wife–we stand back ironically. But as regards the central question of discovering the author of the letters, we are put in the same position as the other characters, particularly Germain, and are induced to jump to the same conclusions. Rather than being terrorized along with the victim, as in a film noir, or repelled by the mob, as in Duvivier’s postwar Panique, we become part of the persecuting crowd. Yet there is no final lynching to pin on us. Like the good doctor, we learn that those he suspected were innocent. The guilty party, whom we presumably have not suspected, is indeed punished, but not by “us”; the mother, half-hidden by a veil, dons in the film’s final shot the black plumage of the Crow.

    In probably the best-known scene in the film, Vorzet confronts Germain in a schoolroom at night. Germain affirms his moral reprobation for the corbeau and declares his certitude in knowing right from wrong. Vorzet, accusing Germain of being just as contaminated by the letters as the rest of St.-Robin, counters with a little demonstration. The two doctors stand in front of a globe; the room is lit by a single bulb hanging from the ceiling. Vorzet pushes the light fixture so that it swings back and forth, casting its moving shadow on the globe (on which Europe is visible) as he claims that the boundary between good and evil is similarly unstable. When Germain tries to grab the bulb to stop its swinging, he burns his fingers, whereupon Vorzet announces that his demonstration is conclusive: moral truth cannot be grasped by mere mortals.

    This scene is inevitably cited by critics as a statement of Clouzot’s own views about life in general and collaboration in particular. Thus Ehrlich:

    The theme of the film is stated quite explicitly in a scene between Vorzet and Germain. [description of the lamp-swinging scene] The moral ambiguity which Vorzet verbalizes in this scene is certainly Clouzot’s. (p. 185)

    But the critics inevitably pass over the contrasting scene that follows.

    Vorzet departs, leaving Germain in the room. As the lamp continues to swing, Clouzot signals the passage of time by fading in an image of the lamp having come to rest. We pan down to see Germain in the morning, having apparently spent the night asleep with his head on the teacher’s desk. He is awakened by the arrival of the suicide’s mother, who tells him that she now works as a cleaning-lady at the school, shows him her son’s razor, and informs him that she has a good idea of the identity of the corbeau but is waiting to be absolutely sure before taking action. Germain expresses shock, but she is unmoved.

    Thus the matching of the still lamp on the moving lamp reflects not only the passage of time but the transition from a world of relativism associated with Vorzet to a world of moral certitude exemplified by the mother. Germain seems to side with Vorzet, and in his subsequent remarks about the corbeau and the priority of the mother’s life over the child’s he takes a more measured position than previously. But when the film ends with the mother’s departure down the crooked street as Vorzet lies dead with his head on his desk beside an incomplete letter of the corbeau, we can hardly assert that the film itself is on Vorzet’s side. On the contrary, it shows us that only the mother’s brutal act could terminate the scourge of the corbeau, and that more delicate souls like Germain in fact depend upon such acts to maintain a moral order. If we situate the film within the ethical context defined by the German occupation of France, then if Vorzet’s ambivalence relativizes the guilt of collaboration, the mother’s act cannot but recall the deeds of the Resistance.

    An element in this complex film that fits less easily into this interpretation is the strange insistence on the sexuality of pubescent fourteen-year-old Rolande, Denise’s niece, whom one of the letters accuses Germain of seeking to make his mistress. But if this suggestion of sexual disorder reflects the paranoid world of the corbeau, in Rolande’s last appearance on screen she uses her nascent feminine wisdom to reassure Denise that Germain will not leave town without her. The lovers’ mature relationship takes over the sexual terrain from Rolande’s adolescent longings–as well as from Laura’s illicit desire for Germain that created the corbeau in the first place.

    The ambiguity that critics see in Le corbeau is not absent, but neither is it the film’s message. The refusal to judge offers a charitable vision of humanity where tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner, but the final word of the film is something else. We are offered visions of both Germain’s broadened humanity and the mother’s vengeful resolve. The first is more congenial, but the second ends the story. A corbeau, corbeau et demi.

    Vorzet (played to perfection by Pierre Larquey) is a seductive character, and his “demonstration” a convincing one; but as we learn from our earlier readiness, shared with the townsfolk, to condemn Marie Corbin, séduction n’est pas raison. The truth is not to be found in mere appearances, the film tells us, but in Denise’s eyes–and in the mother’s razor.

     

     

  • Emile Durkheim, Hedgehog (Language Origin in History X)

    For Durkheim, religion was in the first place a social phenomenon; he had little patience for discussions that focused a la William James on individual “religious experience.” But Durkheim’s aversion to subjectivism was also a judgment concerning religion’s originary function. If in the Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (see Chronicle 195), he criticized Max Müller‘s “naturism,” in an earlier essay, “Concerning the Definition of Religious Phenomena,” published in L’Année sociologique (II) in 1899 (in Durkheim and Religion, ed. W. S. F. Pickering, London: Routledge, 1975), he rejects the definition of religion in Müller’s Introduction to the Science of Religion as “a mental faculty or disposition which . . . enables man to apprehend the Infinite under different names and under varying disguises” (p. 76). On the contrary, Durkheim asserts, “[f]ar from seeing the supernatural everywhere, primitive man sees it nowhere.” The universe is wholly explicable to the “completely uncultivated mind” because it makes no distinction between its “inner states” and external nature. Only a scientific age can have a conception of a “natural order” to which the “Infinite” or supernatural may be opposed.

    This reasoning displays the superiority of Durkheim’s conception of the social, functional nature of religion to question-begging explanations on the model of Müller’s Infinite. At the same time, there is a curious contradiction in its articulation. In the first part of the essay, where it is a matter of refuting the Infinite, the “primitive” is said to inhabit an intellectual universe without objective contours, much like that described by Lévy-Bruhl in La mentalité primitive: “As his understanding is not yet formed, . . . it is with his imagination that he views the world. . . . The inner states which [the imagination] is fashioning . . . are made up of such insubstantial, plastic material, their contours are so blurred and wavering, that they are easily modified according to the whim of the subject” (Pickering, p. 78).

    Yet, later in the essay, the primitive is seen to participate in the familiar binary “division of things into sacred and profane, which is fundamental to all religious organization” (p. 90). Since this division, as Durkheim later explains, provides a basis for further classification, notably the division of the tribe into totemic clans: “these systemic classifications are the first we meet with in history, and . . . they have taken the forms of society as their framework.” (Elementary Forms, p. 169), Durkheim now seems to have rejected Lévy-Bruhl for Lévi-Strauss‘s La pensée sauvage.

    The coherence of Durkheim’s construction can be salvaged only if we follow his logic to its ultimate conclusion and make the sacred-profane distinction the foundation not merely of conceptual and classificatory thought but of all representation and of language itself. We may then take a more charitable view of the Infinite than Durkheim without betraying his insistence on the functional core of even the most superficially irrational religious practices. The Infinite, after all, is nothing but the sacred understood as the source of the “vertical” world of the sign that transcends the finite world of prehuman appetite.

    Durkheim’s theory of religion was not well received in his own time outside the circle of his disciples, a situation that is little changed today. An important contributory factor to this disfavor is his reliance on not altogether trustworthy second-hand data.  But the heart of the problem is Durkheim’s use of an empirical model of “elementary” religion, a choice which derives in turn from his desire to found a positive sociology rather than a minimal anthropology of religion. (Durkheim was hostile to the idea of seeking the origin of religion: “Like every human institution, religion did not commence anywhere. Therefore, all speculations of this sort are justly discredited; they can only consist in subjective and arbitrary constructions which are subject to no sort of control”; Elementary Forms, p. 20.) By insisting that his model of Australian totemism was exemplary of “elementary” religion and thus of religion tout court, Durkheim became vulnerable to a far more devastating criticism than the questioning of his data: he made his sociological model of religion dependent on a model of human social evolution that obligatorily passes through the stage of totemism as he describes it.

    There is an unacknowledged quality of Australian totemism, beyond its “primitive” nature, that explains Durkheim’s attraction to it: the “elementary” society must be compact and egalitarian so as to make the totem the center of the circular structure of the (originary) human scene. The egalitarian presence of the clan around the sacred totemic center transforms the worldly into the transcendental. This scenic self-presence of “society” in religious ritual is indispensable to the emergence of “concepts” or “representations,” if not of language as such. For Durkheim derives all conceptual thought from religion. Causality, for example, is first understood not in everyday experience, where there is nothing but a series of events, but through the encounter with sacred forces acting in the collective context of ritual:

    Let us bear in mind how the law of causality, which the imitative rites put into practice, was born. Being filled with one single preoccupation, the group assembles: if the species whose name it bears does not reproduce, it is a matter of concern to the whole clan. The common sentiment thus animating all the members is outwardly expressed by certain gestures . . . and after the ceremony has been performed, it happens that the desired result seems obtained. So an association arises between the idea of this result and that of the gestures preceding it . . . But since a social interest of the greatest importance is at stake, society cannot allow things to follow their own course . . . So it demands that this ceremony . . . be repeated every time that it is necessary . . . it imposes [the ritual gestures] as an obligation. Now they imply a certain definite state of mind which, in return, participates in this same obligatory character. To prescribe that one must imitate an animal or plant to make them reproduce, is equivalent to stating it as an axiom which is above all doubt, that like produces like. Opinion cannot allow men to deny this principle in theory without also allowing them to violate it in their conduct. So society imposes it . . . and thus the ritual precept is doubled by a logical precept which is only the intellectual aspect of the former. The authority of each is derived from the same source: society. (Elementary Forms 3.3.3, p. 410-11)

    For Durkheim, we pass from the prehuman level of “association” to the logical principle of causality by order of society (“society imposes it”). But this “imposition” can only be a verifiable fact where the society as a whole is present to itself in action. In the Conclusion, this point is made explicit:

    [S]ociety cannot make its influence felt unless it is in action, and it is not in action unless the individuals who compose it are assembled together and act in common. It is by common action that it takes consciousness of itself and realizes its position . . . Then it is action which dominates the religious life, because of the mere fact that it is society which is its source. (p. 465-66)

    The social cohesion that Durkheim thought he had found in totemic ritual is that of the originary hypothesis. By grounding his religious sociology on a minimal hypothesis rather than on empirical data contested in both accuracy and significance (is totemism really the center of Arunta religion?), Durkheim would evacuate the criticism leveled at his already outdated linear historicism.

    Durkheim thinks it is possible to work with concepts like “society” and “representation” positively or nominalistically, while at the same time insisting that the conceptual itself emerges, with infinite “realism,” within religious ritual. While seeking an empirical guarantee for the religious origin of concepts, he vigorously denies that concepts can be grounded in empirical reality.

    The religious realization of the social, evident among the Australians, can no longer be grasped in the modern world, where “we are going through a stage of transition and moral mediocrity” (p. 475). But the contrast between modern secular and primitive religious societies obscures the key methodological point that, in the absolute concentration that Durkheim requires of it, the social cannot be encountered empirically anywhere. The social as the source of the world of representation is conceivable only as the minimally, hypothetically human. The fact that the Arunta appear to exemplify some of Durkheim’s ideas about the originary function of the social does not relieve him of the need to provide a model of its genesis along with that of the common representations it exists to enforce.

    No doubt Durkheim would have been unwilling to abandon the empirical basis that he considered indispensable to the foundation of a science. But, precisely, the fundamental anthropology that he is practicing is not scientific in the usual sense of the word. It was not for nothing that W. E. H. Stanner (Pickering, p. 300) called Durkheim “the arch-hedgehog.” However loftily he dismisses the “speculative” question of the minimal constitution of society and representation, Durkheim’s sociology of religion is really Generative Anthropology avant la lettre.