GABlog

What I called in my previous post (Political Syntax I) “mythical” declaratives I am now going to call “naive” declaratives; what I called there “legal” declaratives, I am now calling “normative” declaratives.  Here are the slightly revised definitions:  the naive sentence presents as its center a fulfilled imperative; the normative sentence presents as its center a distinction between an imperative violating the sanctity of the center and one affirming the center. (The change from “legal” to “normative,” unlike the one from “mythical” to “naive,” is more than cosmetic, but only slightly so:  the normative sentence, by distinguishing acceptable from unacceptable imperatives, does not yet accomplish but lays the necessary groundwork for the reciprocal convertibility of imperatives and declaratives.)  In either case, order is placed in a whirlpool of “untotalizable” imperatives by placing one name next to another so as to, first, distract attention from the target of the imperative crisis and, second, to produce a object (or entry into the field of semblances) that, in effect, involves the dissolution of the entire imperative arena. 

We can distinguish between the uttered sentence and the intelligible sentence: this distinction would exist for both speaker and listener (the speaker as hearing her own sentence, the listener as repeating it for himself), but it does presuppose that differentiation.    The uttered sentence wants to create distance from the imperative arena, or space between any of the imperatives and their (disastrous) enforcement; the intelligible sentence has embedded within it an imperative directing the listener regarding to the new mode of appropriation indicated by the unfamiliar alignment of familiar terms. The naive sentence orders the listener to repeat it when called upon to do so (when intimations of the imperative crisis appear) and thereby situate the fulfilled imperative as a center or “eddy” within the field of semblances; the normative sentence orders the listener to issue, obey, and testify to the fulfillment of, imperatives that confirm the capacity of the declarative to continue to prompt such obedience to that and “similar” imperatives. 

A statement of fact would present a fulfilled imperative as its center by offering ostensive verification of the reality proposed by said imperative, the imperative which has subordinated (such is the wager of the sentence, its constitutive “fiction”) and transformed the others:  here, the object demanded has been made available.  This ostensive verification is offered by the speaker, who stands in for the ultimate availability (its availability, that is, an an entry point into the field of semblances) of the desired object or an approved equivalent, and must be shared by the listener.  Similarly, in a simple narrative (”he/bear”–i.e., he found the bear) presents such a transcendence–out of the swirl of imperatives (find the bear, kill the bear, run from the bear…) a seamless “accomplishment” or “victory” (or, for that matter, a defeat, which would in its way similarly cancel and hence “fulfill” the imperative) is attributed to an agent. 

Meanwhile, normative sentences would be judgments, whether moral or esthetic:  x/good, x/bad, Godagainst/x, etc.  Another way of judging the object, or of promising it for possession, is thereby implicitly or explicitly indexed negatively:  this speaker, at least, will not assent to those other characterizations.  The rejected imperatives can be left aside in the imperative arena from which the interlocutors have escaped, and, meanwhile, some content has been added to the sacred center.  The normative declarative ensures that the distinction it draws will have to be drawn repeatedly, which means that the imperatives it authorizes will have to return to the declarative which, in an a priori manner, clears the ground of competing imperatives.  Such declaratives might have primarily ritual focus until, in a fully developed legal order, they become the property of each individual, thereby achieving full declarative/imperative convertibility.

The completion of the taxonomy I am proposing requires a third sentence type:  the generative.  The generative sentence emerges out of the distinctions between and within the naive and normative sentences, respectively.  Whether or not we want to call a given sentence naive or normative can only be determined through the utterence of another sentence, which must itself be naive or normative; indeed, such a classification would only be valuable insofar as creating such sentences distinguishing between sentences were itself an intrinsic component of language use.  Furthermore, whether or not a given sentence is naive or normative itself depends upon the articulation of that sentence within a larger discursive and cultural ”syntax”–”the dog is brown” might seem like a simple, “naive” statement of fact (and, in our terms, a representation of a fulfilled imperative:  here is the brown–not black–dog you asked for; or a brown dog which is better than the black one you asked for and should have been your demand; or anyway a dog, which is more important than the color, even though I remembered what you asked for, etc.) but not if the dog has been presented for sacrifice within a ritual system in which brown has been designated “unclean” (so, the sentence would be normative insofar as the imperative in question has not been fulfilled, which is to say, ostensively verified as completed, and first of all “certified” as calling for fulfillment). What makes a sentence generative is that it occupies the boundary between naive and normative, where the naive merely presupposes that the normative question is settled and the normative unsettles the naive, and thereby calls for more sentences.

The purpose of the generative sentence is to generative new ostensives; it is intelligible under the condition that one witnesses to the interdependency of naive and normative; more precisely, that one sees, testifies to, the judgment required for the “fact” to be acknowledged and/or the facts that one now sees underlay the judgment.  We might say that naive sentences represent a victory or defeat, allows one imperative, that is, to emerge definitively as the strongest or central one, reducing all others to vassalage.  The normative declarative, meanwhile, seeks to spread victory and defeat around–somebody wins in the court case or in the determination of the qualifications of an object offered for sacrifice, but the structure of the sentence makes it, more often than not, a qualified victory; and, anyway, it is always the “system,” above all, that wins:  the imperative is “certified” to the extent that it confirms a declarative that is, in turn, now even more capable of producing new imperatives.  The generative declarative resides in the intermediate zone both the naive and the normative declarative must forget:  the mutually cancelling imperatives that get linearized in the naive declarative and those imperatives that show up “in between” the declarative and imperative in the normative ones.  I must order myself to follow orders; I must see myself seeing the object; and adherence to the declarative extends to infinity the delay in the implementation of the imperative it would authorize–such are the paradoxes that are a source of energy for the generative declarative and such paradoxical states are what the generative sentence “measures”.  The way out of such double binds is to generate new ostensives, pointing to new possible worlds, or new centers in the field of semblances, in which those ostensives would be embedded.  They accomplish this either by decentering the distinction at the center of a normative sentence by juxtaposing it to a naive sentence upon which it would, hypothetically, depend; or, vice versa, by decentering a naive sentence (finding a wedge between different possible impositions of a factual statement or narrative on the imperative arena) by juxtaposing it with a normative sentence the acceptance of which would have (hypothetically) enabled the ostensive verification of the naive sentence in the first place.  How did you order yourself to acknowledge that fact; where are you repeating what is in fact a judgment as a “given” linchpin of some reality–these are the kinds of questions the generative declarative has us inhabit.

As an example of such a declarative I will present (slightly revised) a thought experiment I have used a couple of times.  At the start of the Israeli incursion into Gaza following the kidnapping of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit I proposed the following:  the Israeli government should offer Israeli citizenship to any Palestinian who offers useful intelligence on the location of Shalit or the identity of those holding him.  The purpose of such a thought experiment or “generative declarative,” is to generate meaning; not to accurately categorize a world of objects or make a moral distinction, but to make visible (ostensively) what would, without the linguistic reality, not only not be visible but not even exist.  In testing how much of a pull the promise of Israeli citizenship would exercise on Palestinians weighing the risks and examining their own consciences and prospects regarding such a radical break with their community, the Israelis would effectively surface and make available for measurment certain crucial faultlines in Palestinian society; in testing whether Israelis (who would also, of course, have to approve of the idea) could offer inclusion to those with nothing to offer but an intrinsically dubious solidarity in a moment of distress, trust their own institutions to make such solidarity genuine and lasting, and, not incidentally, subtley shift the condition of inclusion in the Jewish State, would likewise yield valuable information about the potentialities of Israeli society (and it would even let us see whether the Israeli Left might be willing to adopt a strategy of eliciting dissent on the Palestinian side to match its own dissent, rather than displaying such dissent through the appeasement of internationally approved Palestinian elites).   In more “grammatical” terms, the possibility of competing self-imposed imperatives (in effect, incommensurable realities) is provided to (or forced upon) the Palestinians; while for the Israelis a new, commonly held field of imperatives (defend Palestinian dissidents) might become possible.  As a thought experiment, what is interesting is not only the likely consequences of implementing such a proposal, but disclosing the conditions that make it “discussable” or not–who would say what about it and what would that lead us to say about them?  In other words, we are interested less in a proposal, much less a “programme,” than in creating a little center of political discourse, an “eddy,” if you will, within the swirling pools of semblances.  Very literally:  what kinds of sentences, obeying what syntax, become possible now?  Once we have, in other words, displaced a normative sentence (something like, “the Palestinians should return their captive” or “the Israelis must do everything in their power to rescue him”; or, more broadly, “the Palestinians must negotiate in good faith” or “the Israelis must grant the Palestinians their right to self-determination”) by representing to ourselves some way in which such sentences might be aligned with imperatives and ostensives, or reconciled with each other, many other sentences in which, for example, observations of Palestinian and Israeli behaviors might take on new normative dimensions, and normative judgments lead us to, say, seek out what might be promising exceptions, become possible.

Let’s return to the originary structure of the declarative as the deferral of the impossible imperative and the transcendence of originary nihilism.  Pursuing a grammatical analysis further, our focus would be on the kinds of imperatives that might induce such a crisis along with the ways in which the initial declarative would attract, mimic and deflect them; and what new imperatives, freed from impossibility and nihilism, would the declarative open a space for?  We would, I would suggest, be looking for demands for a particular kind of loyalty or (to speak grammatically) ostensive (to cite Othello, “ocular”) proof that one unhestitatingly complies with imperatives.  In other words, the source of the imperative crisis would be located in the absence of such proof and the irremediability of the crisis in the impossibility of the proof one demands; as I said in the first installment of this series on Political Syntax, the only proof that could now be accepted in the wake of such a crisis is the kind of complete saturation of the imperative space by the subject of the demand that could never be satisfying enough.  The thought experiment, then, iterates the double bind constitutive of the originary declarative, which changes the subject and proposes new, potentially shared, imperatives.

Continuing the analysis of the syntax of the thought experiment, we can see that the topic of the sentence (Israel) is clearly in an asymmetrical relation to the other party (the comment concerns possible action toward that party)–it is, further, the site of impossible imperatives, and perhaps the focal point of the most intense nihilism in the world today.  These conditions would then be central to political syntax, which is not to say that it would be meaningless to ask the Palestinians to change their behavior, simply that the Palestinians have relatively few ways available to them of modifying Israeli behavior, and that in fairly predictable ways–in which case, declaratives placing the Palestinians at the center would simply be less generative.  The asymmetry we noted on the declarative scene, in which the imperatives come to single out some individual, is reproduced here.  We then look for the greatest disproportion between the size of the gesture we are proposing and its potential effects, and we situate that disproportion at what seems to be the site of the greatest crisis.  (Hopefully, it’s needless to say that these are all heuristic criteria, meant to generate many declaratives, not simply the “right” one).  We try to contrive a possible topic/comment reversal (in which the comment points to some action or presently absent capacity of the more dependent party that would be required to make the declarative fully intelligible–some supplemental fact that would make the adoption of the norm attributed to the agent visible and contingent; some norm that would have to be adopted or enhanced so as to effectively “cover” the field of facts) that might be inscribed in the declarative, while realizing that such a reversal depends upon some unilateral act on the part of the more powerful party that establishes a zone of symmetry, which would be the first step toward a possible reversal.  The effect of the thought experiment we are examining is to introduce difference into the more “compact” community while simulating a point of unity in the more powerful, pluralistic one; the reversal, though, would simultaneously indicate a new mode of unity for the former (on liberal terms) and a new difference (a new criteria for citizenship) for the latter.  And so one generates the comments:  one “absorbs” by mimicking the charge that Israeli tramples on the rights of Palestinians while deflecting that charge by framing Israeli’s dereliction as a failure to help individual Palestinians who might wish to express dissent from their own authoritarian regime.  At the same time, the demand of Israelis that the state keep faith with each and every individual who willingly offers up his or her life for it (a demand whose “impossibility” lies in part with the tension with the international demand that Israel respect Palestinian rights but also in other political and military considerations–for example, that one can’t simply let a few kidnappers determine every time you go to war) but in an innovation that communicates both a desire to de-escalate the conflict and a readiness to escalate in the name of innocents on all sides.  In grammatical terms, the field of imperative-declarative convertibilities would be “jostled” and made available for reworking on both sides.

To take another issue, linked in a different way to questions of obedience and disobedience on the tracks leading back and forth between imperatives and declaratives, I have devised a few thought experiments addressing illegal migration to and residence in the United States.  This issue has revealed, in recent years, an enormous gap between elites and popular opinion:  while the elite position, from the right to left, with few exceptions, has been to favor some kind of “path to citizenship” for illegals, opinion polls (confirmed by the enormous resistance in the Summer of 2007 to the proposed “Comprehensive Reform”) show at least 2/3 of the American people want the laws on the books enforced before we do anything else.  There is surely some truth in the analyses suggesting that while the elites (business interests, ethnic lobbies, political parties fighting for Hispanic votes, transnationalists) gain all the benefits from an uninterrupted flow of illegal migrants, everyday citizens bear all the burdens and costs (the drain on services, increased crime, environmental and property damage, especially in border communities, etc.).  Still, there is something more at work in the fact that the actions presumably favored, unequivocally, by a substantial majority of Americans have never even been seriously initiated, much less carried through.  We never see polls asking people, for example, whether they would like to see their neighbors, who have lived alongside them for a decade, have steady jobs, pay taxes (fill in the rest of the details yourself), simply dragged off, along with their American-born children; or whether they would like to see priests in Churches offering sanctuary to illegals arrested for obstruction, federal forces move into cities who are (presumably, at least according to some reasonable construal, illegally) educating and treating medically illegals and their children, with the ensuing conflicts with local law enforcement and political establishment, and many other predictable scenes any of us could call to mind.  In other words, the elites might simply see the unpredictable results of following through seriously on a demand for enforcement, with some of that unpredictability being that those calling most loudly for enforcement now might be most disgusted by what they see when it is actually done. (To be fair to the enforcement-first position, they claim that this is not what they want to happen, nor what would in fact happen–they claim that serious enforcement in the more egregious cases–like criminals –along with a refusal of benefits and stricter control of the border would lead to a situation where illegals start to leave on their on their own, following which attrition we could speak about what do to with those who remain.  To be fair to their critics, though, the actual terms, “enforcement first,” can’t preclude more brutal outcomes.) Here, in other words, is a field rife with impossible imperatives, and as a result there is virtually no common “object” we are all “pointing” to–and, not coincidentally, it is a field where references to the letter of the law are especially unhelpful, at least if one wants to understand what might actually follow from one’s acts, and to hypothesize regarding which imperatives will find translation into declaratives and which will fail to do so, thereby initiating the formation of new imperatives more in conformity with perceived normative declaratives and transforming the entire field.

But for those of us who see the contemporary global political scene as one organized in terms of a conflict between adherents of “international law” on the one hand and those devoted to a republican, constitutionalist nation-state and a world order increasingly friendly to that regime, on the other, the offense to sovereignty in uninterrupted illegal migration cannot be ignored.  International law is very rich in declaratives (the great pantheon of human rights documents) and ostensives (”look at that!”; “look at that!”–everything, rightly viewed, yields some kind of outrage), while being decidedly poor in operational imperatives (no one is actually authorized to suppress violations of international human rights laws–unless it be precisely those more powerful nation-states that body of law hopes to subvert) and can only acquire them by grafting itself parasitically onto the legal systems of the nation-states (the EU project might constitute a slight exception, but I doubt it, and anyway that would be a digression here) through, say, a new “right” for migrants.  So, one thing worth remembering about a situation made up of impossible demands is that it may be equally impossible to withdraw the demands–one has to think and act some way out of the situation, one can’t simply erase it. 

So, here are the thought experiments which, for me, address this originarily nihilistic condition:

1)  Give citizenship to all illegals who offer evidence that would help shut down the “coyote” migrant smuggling networks.

2)  Give citizenship to all illegals who can find (what are determined to be) reliable American sponsers, who will testify convincingly to their good character and offer some kind of “bond” for their good behavior.

3)  And, more “comprehensively”:  allow anyone (minus declared enemies of the U.S., criminals, and health risks) to enter the U.S. on, say, a two year visa, allowing them to work and study.  The visa will be renewable at incrementally lengthened intervals, on the condition that the visa holder prove he/she is employed (or studying at an approved academic institution), crime free, and not associated with radical politics; otherwise, the individual is instantly deported and remains ineligible to apply for a visa for, say, ten years. 

The first of these thought experiments is clearly modelled on my Israeli-Palestinian thought experiment;  the burden of a shift in policy places the asymmetrically stronger party at the center; while the syntax calls for the establishment of a zone of symmetry and possible reversal (a new center, in which America would honor and unconditionally include the Other) based on reciprocity.  The second shares some similarities with this structure as well, extending the logic or syntax to a wider field.  At the same time, a rather different syntax is in play here, because the parties involved are not only “Americans” and “foreigners” but the American disputants themselves:  we could read this declarative as placing at the center those Americans demanding enforcement (as the asymmetrically stronger party), willing to accede to the demands of those calling for amnesty for illegals, but on the condition that pro-amnesty Americans put their money where their mouth is by “vouching” for one or more of those whose continued presence they insist upon.  (For those who would argue that there is a sense in which the pro-amnesty elites are in fact stronger, I would answer that the thought experiment implicitly rights that imbalance as well, by envisaging a plausible scenario in which defense of the rule of law would in fact regain its deserved pre-eminence; a scenario that requires wider divisions within the elites).  At the same time, of course, the possible process of reciprocity between Americans and migrants described in the first thought experiment kicks in as well.  And who knows how many “enforcement first” conservatives will jump at the chance to combine charity to individuals with a restoration of the rule of law?

We find a similar syntax in the third one at yet a higher level of generality.  We just keep shifting the time frame and the proposed dramatis personae.  The boundary established here is between the American regime, as a whole, and the world as, essentially, a repository of potential immigrants; the assumption is that our present quandary derives from the failure, so far, to frame the issue this way on a policy level (while, ideologically, it has been framed this way for many for quite a while).  Instead of demanding individual, sharply defined, acts of reciprocity from individuals, as is appropriate in a crisis, a more general, leisurely arrived at policy hopes to avoid such crises in the first place by building the logic of reciprocity into the system.  The center, again, is asymmetrically positioned in relation to those who call for the comment or predication, and so the declarative characteristically seeks to formulate an act of openness and generosity on that side along with specifically delineated, verifiable, conditions fulfilled on an individual level on the other side.  The impossible imperative (everyone demands their right to come to America and, once here, to stay; and, even more broadly, everyone demands a “piece” of America–one sees complaints, quite often and taken quite seriously, that is is unjust that American elections are so consequential across the global and yet only Americans are allowed to vote in them) is mimicked with the qualification, it’s now up to each and everyone of you to see if you can make it on our terms, that is, the terms that made you want a “piece” of us in the first place.

The political syntax of metaphysical liberalism substantializes “human” and “equal” in terms that enables the latter to predicate the former (like the possession of the “property” of ”reason”):  such a syntax leads either to the cynicism that results from finding no ostensives that can verify the description, or the radicalism of demanding an overhaul of the world so that one does.  The political syntax of originary liberalism iterates the establishment of islands of equality out of a sea of differences and presents those islands as models.  The thought experiments I have presented have “firstness” built into them–they all require that someone go first in order to activate the sequence.  This, too, is intrinsic to the political syntax I am presenting, because firstness is the preliminary experience of catastrophic asymmetry, while that experience, and its paradoxical asymmetrical placement of the one undergoing it relative to others, is also the first move toward its rectification.  The originary declarative takes us from an intensifying focal point, a center of convergence, and iterates the movement on the originary scene through which the central object is transformed into a repellant force as a result of the emission of the sign; the innovation of the sentence is the simultaneity of representation and enactment, in which the sign itself becomes the (re)center(ing) that it represents.  If the naive and normative declaratives seek to mimic the originary scene itself from the outside (presupposing–narrating and affirming–its completion, the former in possession, projected or real, of the object, the latter in the derivation of a reliable rule from it) the generative declarative undertakes the riskier project of entering the scene in its contingency.

The enactment and representation of this movement “otherwise” (than the reality proposed by the impossible imperative) then provides us with the grammar of an originary modern politics.  Everyone is going first (even those who deny it), enacting (even by rejecting) the freedom to represent the movement from one center to another, that other being the one you are presently occupying as a”comment” upon some central “topic” and an emergent ”topic” to be “commented” upon.  The political question is how to make that new center transportable and enduring, and the only way to do that is to induce others to iterate one’s own gesture (to, paradoxically, imitate you in their own firstness) and establish “precedents.”  Such a politics aims at producing a particular kind of declarative in the observer, an expanded form of the “judgment” I presented in my previous post as the exemplary declarative.  The kind of declarative we would like to inspire, to inhabit, so to speak, is one which minimizes our action, both in the sense of marginalizing it against the background of a much vaster field of semblances and in the sense of reducing it to its “materiality,” whatever makes it distinct, irreplaceable and iterable–in this way, the judging declarative participates in the repairing of asymmetries intiated by my acting on “principle” (on/as a generative declarative).

Adam Katz

The most exemplary declarative probably issues from the ideal court when it simply declares what the law is:  “statute x violates the First Amendment”; “y has no standing to speak here”; “fact z is legally irrelevant”; etc.  Such sentences sustain a world comprised solely of utterances governed by rules of internal coherence; they are situated at the crossroads of demands that can only made commensurable within the legal system; and they correspond to the generative character of social reality (drawing upon precedents and leading to appeals, translating external conflicts into ones internal to the system).  The judge as umpire or arbiter ensures the “proper” alignment of deferred imperatives and imperative-ostensive articulations that goes into making a declarative order:  facts are only allowed into evidence if a “chain” of custody can be established ostensively at each point along the way, the reliability of testimony is rigorously allowed for, in part through the exclusion of testimony which is intrinsically below a certain threshold of reliability (”hearsay”), those facts must touch directly upon some violation which has been alleged, etc., etc.

The law itself is somewhat less exemplary as a declarative, insofar as any law verges on the imperative; nor, however, is the law a body of commands.  Whether we are speaking of general, constitutional laws, such as “The power of the executive will be vested in the President” or “homocide will be punished by…” or “a Department of Health Services is hereby established pursuant to” some previous statute requiring such a department for its activation, what laws do is authorize someone to issue imperatives within a restricted sphere of activity.  But wherein, exactly, does this “authorizing” lie?  The law doesn’t create the world of imperatives, even if it adds to it, prodigiously–it takes a prior world of imperative-ostensive articulations as given.  The law, as an independent reality, must emerge as a transcendence of some crisis in that world of articulations, a crisis in which the demand that others recognize the same ostensives as oneself becomes impossible.  The separation of the imperative and the judgment of its provenance and legitimacy is the result–this separation is “law.”

In my previous posts on “originary grammar,” I have posited a crisis of the imperative which I have called “originary nihilism”:  due to incompatability between imperatives and/or between imperatives which cannot be rescinded and a reality which cannot be adjusted to satisfy them, the interlocutors lose the common object which makes the completion of the imperative possible in the first place–the crisis gets to the point, in other words, where the crisis is intensifying while knowledge of what would count as its resolution recedes.  Now, I would like to add to this analysis the assumption that what the impossible imperative ultimately demands is the “total” presence of the one to whom the imperative is issued:  the more the imperative goes unfulfilled, the more the “will” and “good faith” of the one expected to carry it out becomes the issue, and the more the crisis-ridden demand swerves into one that the subject of the demand “saturate” the linguistic space with “proof” of his bona fides; but it is precisely such “proof” that is always impossible to provide in a satisfactory manner.

This analysis would link, loosely (as part of a long term process of consolidation), the emergence of the declarative with the emergence of the big man in the post-egalitarian community.  The declarative event, that is, preserves the memory of the imperative crisis which itself provided the first indication that a crisis of the community tended to single out some member as origin of that crisis.  Further, it seems reasonable to assume that the emission of the first declarative would not have been by the focus of the crisis, who would be too busy trying desperately to fulfill the impossible demand and would himself be “saturated” with the expectations flowing his way; rather, it would be some relatively unassociated member of the community who would place the term for the demanded object (or some object singled out among the swirling demands) next to a term for some other familiar element of the community’s common reality and redirect the group’s attention to the possible reality evoked by that articulation. If, as Eric Gans contends in his “Originary Narrative,” “narrative is the declarative reading of the originary sign,” the declarative is simultaneously the translation of the originary scene into a narrative, the movement from one center qua site of crisis to another center qua site of transcendence.  And this translation is necessarily a “misreading,” or at least a “mythical” reading, insofar as the declarative must locate the source of transcendence in the seamless continuity between the “struggles” of the subject of the impossible imperative and the ostensive verification by the group that the center has been restored as a result of those “struggles,” even if the “verification” can only be in the formation of the declarative “distraction” itself.  To put it otherwise, the fully originary declarative must align within a single vector all the criss-crossing imperatives:  one imperative must be represented as a response to another leading to some concluding fulfillment of an inner or outer demand.  At any rate, the division between storyteller and actor, king and shaman/priest, etc., is already implicit in the originary declarative, which is why I associate the emergence of the declarative with the emergence of the minimal conditions for the big man, which, again, need be nothing more than a recognition that crises tend to establish a “force field” in which attention gravitates toward a specific “responsible” member.

Such “mythical” declaratives constitute narratively an existing but incoherent (from m the new position required by the emission of the declarative) field of imperative-ostensive articulations, primarily by assimilating new articulations into that field.  What the law does is destroy the a priori ordering of imperatives that the declarative would initially help to establish and consolidate, so that “judgment” takes over at least some portion of the function of myth.  In transcending originary nihilism, the declarative is also modelling the intelligence of the center by enabling a mode of centering within what I would like to call the “field of semblances” opened up by the sign:  by “semblance,” I mean any thing that is simultaneously sign and object, something that can be localized, possessed and controlled, while at the same time it (in our very desire to localize, possess and control it) directs out attention elsewhere.  All objects and signs are semblances, but in varying, even widely varying proportions–all objects, that is, except the originary one which, as the source of all signs, always itself resides at least a little beyond signification.  At the same time, there is a certain “signness” that resides slightly beyond objecthood,” in our very freedom to issue new signs.  Any thing we might actually confront or point to in the world, though, is a semblance within the field of semblances, with absolute object and absolute sign serving as guarantees of some minimal coherence of the field.

The field of semblances requires, as I suggested, various centerings, nodal points (what Lacan called “points du caption”) that provide patterns and regularities within the field.  The declarative enables us to produce such centerings by registering the impossible demand, which could emerge at any point and, at least as important, could always be anticipated as a result of some shift in the field of imperative-ostensive articulations, and ordering such demands within a new, projected, reality.  Any sentence, any string of sentences, is modelling a new way of assembling semblances.  The declarative both imitates the chaos of demands it simulates an extrication from and models an appropriate scene upon which such demands would be neutralized because upon that scene the demands would be irrelevant, replaced by new, more manageable and interesting ones.  In such imitation and modeling lies, respectively, the “style” and “content” of the sentence.

So, laws don’t “tell” individuals not to do x or y–the law against murder does not command me, personally, not to commit murder; the laws of taxation do not command me to pay my taxes.  The law authorizes the chain of imperatives that would ultimately lead to my incarceration for murder or tax evasion.  But, again, “authorize” can’t simply mean to conjure up out of thin air–there have always been, since there have been imperatives, individuals whose suppression of certain activities at certain times and places would not be interfered with, and would in fact receive the necessary assistance.  What the law does is separate those authorized functions from specific “imperators,” i.e., those at the highest end of a chain of imperatives.  If the originary declarative establishes the conditions for the big man by interrupting and ordering the colliding imperatives directed at some proto-big man (or, rather some image, even a “negative” one, of a possible big man); which is to say, if the declarative emerges by speaking of the big man, or speaking the possibility of the big man into being (the declarative formally announces the possibility of a concentration of imperatives–and the line between being the target of the concentrated force of ordered imperatives and being the author of that force is an extremely thin one–precisely by deferring the consequences of the chaos of impossible imperatives)–the declarative order, by contrast, effects a transformation from the symbiosis of “imperator” and “declaimer” in the “mythical” declarative to the convertibility of the two positions into each other.

What this convertibility really entails is something as simple, but in a sense as astonishing, as some imperators being willing to act against others without thereby arrogating the entire imperative field for themselves.  (By “act against” [or, really, just to "act"] I mean produce a new ostensive sign available to emitter and audience that will “seal” or provide the “content” of a new declarative affirming that that new ostensive can be accommodated within the possible field of semblances opened up by a prior declarative–a prior declarative which in its turn requires these succeeding ones to provide its own, ostensive, content.)  How important this is is indicated by how difficult it must have been, what a tremendous event it must have required–even now, think of how difficult it is in the most liberal, law governed countries, to get the police or military to police their own.  And I don’t mean to refer merely to some “primitive” solidarity on the part of those (in David Grossman’s terms, the “sheepdogs”) entrusted to protect us (the “sheep”) from the “wolves.”  Rather, the “sheepdogs” are simply aware as the rest of us, ever tempted to confuse the protective growling of the sheepdog for the genuinely dangerous snarl of the wolf, are not, that a far higher threshold for initiating suspicion is absolutely necessary for the sheepdogs since a far higher degree of trust is required for such institutions to function.

The law, then, is precisely this point of convertibility between imperatives and declaratives.  A lawful imperative is one that can be “translated” into a declarative:  “bring that here” is, in other words, only lawful insofar as the linguistic and institutional conditions exist for translating it into something like “for commonly agreed upon purposes it its necessary that that object be moved from its present location to the one I am indicating; and, according to commonly accepted procedures, you are the one with the responsibility to effect that movement.”  While we couldn’t really speak of “lawful declaratives,” we could speak of responsible declaratives within a law governed field of semblances, and such declaratives would be those providing for the possibility of a subsequent declarative assimilating the imperative-ostensive content of the sentence in question:  “ultimate” responsibility would be determined by those (declaratively established) centers within the field of semblances where the imperative-ostensive articulations circulate.

Such “conversions” would always be problematic, and here is where politics would enter.  Leaving aside for now the political founding event that would have been required to bring a regime of laws into existence in the first place, we could say that within such a regime politics would be situated in between the ongoing processes of imperatives-converting-into-declaratives and declaratives-converting into imperative/ostensives. At any point along the way one could sever some link required for full convertibility.  A young man spray painting graffitti on the side of a school is seen by a policeman on patrol–does the policeman pursue relentlessly, using deadly force if necessary against the fleeing perpetrator; does he shrug, or perhaps smile, and let the boy run off; does he apprehend the boy, perhaps a little roughly, and get called up on abuse charges, while the graffitti is celebrated for its authenticity and cutting edge social commentary and its creator given a scholarship to art school from donations by citizens appalled at his treatment?  Any of these scenes, and many more in between, is compatible with the formal prohibition on defacing public property, and whichever is played out will provide us with far more information regarding the quality of the regime than the mere fact of that prohibition.  The lines of force go both ways here:  the declarative stating that vandalism is a wrong against the public gets rerouted along the way to the implementation of the imperative it authorizes; while the imperator must, in a split second, consider whether the imperative he is charged with enforcing can, under these conditions, undergo conversion to a declarative acceptable to himself and his future judges:  can he “justify” the risks of injury to himself, the perpetrator, and bystanders in a pusuit carried out to some degree of relentlessness; will any imaginable enforcement of his charge likely be translated into a widely shared declarative on the order of “this policeman is hereby deemed to have abused his position through the exercise of excessive force”?  And this even leaves aside the far from negligible fact that the policeman also has to “live with himself,” which is to say, carry out the translation from imperative to declarative and back again on his own private, perhaps idiosyncratic, moral terms.

So, we are engaging politically when we produce declaratives that generate regions in the field of lawful semblances that might interfere with declarative-imperative-declarative convertibilities.  Legal declaratives (general prohibitions and licenses, whether formalized by law or not) create a space in which the carrying out of imperatives is supplemented by third party ostensive verification; political declaratives propose imperative fields that serve primarily to generate new ostensives, which is to say, show us something new regarding the imperatives people are ready and able to fulfill, refuse and resist (with refusal and resistance being nothing more than the issuance to oneself of an unauthorized imperative, but one more fully convertible–within the field of semblances centered in oneself, at any rate–with legal declaratives). 

Adam Katz

Assume, as per the Girardian account of human origin, that there can be no originary scene without a scapegoat; further assume, contra Girard, that the crucifixion of Jesus was just one more in a long series of scapegoatings, resolving nothing but rather making the process even more insidious because the victim in this case openly asks for it; and, finally, assume that all of the modern social forms that claim to transcend scapegoating, like the nation state, individual rights and liberties, the modern market, etc., are themselves simply extensions and concealments of the now global, unified process of scapegoating (the nation produces the despised minority, the market the exploited poor, individual rights the culturally othered, etc.).  Add to this the immeasurable means of destruction available within this system, and the recent demise of the only possible (because sceneless) alternative to scenic liberty, and you have the ideology of the contemporary Left.  If you believe all these things, where do you look for political salvation, or at least relief–how, if nothing else, do you throw up some roadblocks to the stampede?  Your mission must be to prevent any scene from arriving at closure.  Scapegoating requires some “mark” be attributed to the scapegoat–the more that mark singles out the scapegoat as an object of attention, and as dangerous or subversive in some way to the community, the more it would set in motion the stampede.  What you must do is prevent any mark from taking shape.  You can recognize, in theory, that individuals and even members of groups (at the very least, voluntarily formed groups) might accumulate and call for marks for perfectly legitimate reasons; but overshadowing that abstract recognition is the deeper knowledge that the distinction between legitimate markings and scapegoating will ultimately be made by the same communal mechanism as would orchestrate any scapegoating, so, for all practical purposes, the distinction is irrelevant; even worse, it must be attacked as a distraction, one that the leaders of mobs (the ones with the torches) will predictably deploy.  You must simply reject any marking–wherever some marking is starting to take shape, you must foreground whatever in the potentially marked group resists such marking.  At the same time, there is one exception to your absolute opposition to marking: it is essential that you mark the unmarked markers. Marking the “white” markers, as you have learned from bitter experience, is a question of both sheer survival and justice (they will destroy you if given half a chance; and they deserve it–now all will be marked and a version of original sin put in place); even more, you must do so pre-emptively, because they are experts and it comes naturally to them, while you have to keep reminding yourself to be tough enough. Doing whatever is required to prevent the consolidation of any “mark,” along with the seemingly contradictory task of marking up the putative markers; inventing entire disciplines and political movements dedicated to nothing more than the invention of ways to disrupt “marking” and bring those responsible into ill repute–this is all of the activity of the contemporary Left–they do nothing else.

That is certainly enough to keep them very busy, though–it may be necessary to represent the “marked-up” as “resistant” to being marked, as challenging the stereotpye through the formation of their own “agency”; but, then, that “resistant” agency can itself become part of the “mark-up” (the group in question is violent, unruly, or untrustworthy), in which case it becomes necessary to deny that the “group” in question exists in any determinate form (it is just a product of the “marking” itself); it may be necessary to discover all kinds of facts that have been ignored in the process of marking that group and simply repeating them whenever you get the chance–but it might also be necessary to produce wholly fictional versions of the group, which can always be justifable on anti-marking grounds. And there can be all kinds of interesting debates about whether marking proceeds along lines of some kind of material interest or is “constitutive”; over which groups are genuinely in danger of being marked (how about veterans?), the various gradations and combinations of markings, and so on.

It is important to analyze the Left on two levels.  First, as a mode of sacrality, a religion:  in this case, the Left could be seen to be worshipping the actual or prospective victim of the normal and we could trace a line from the original victims of the Left (free thinking intellectuals and democrats persecuted by the Church and Absolutist regimes) through the emergence of the “masses” in the Western countries, victims of the gigantic “sparagmos” of the Industrial Revolution, through to women and, especially, the Third World, in the wake of the post-Leninist turn in revolutionary socialism toward oppressed nations as stand-ins for the disappointing Western proletariat.  At an earlier, more “heroic” stage, the Left claimed a project of social transformation in socialisms which, in originary terms, we could simply define as the fantasy of abolishing scenes altogether in our collective subsumption under natural-technological processes; with the collapse of this project, though, the Left is really a death-cult:  the victims of the normal must continually be slaughtered, actually and symbolically, in order for the normal order to be forever marred, forever guilty, incomplete, in need of absolution.

This does not mean that the Left has no political form, of course:  politically, the various currents of the Left have merged into a “transnational progressivism,” in which a post-national international law, with its legitimating roots in the post-War Nuremberg Trials and associated legal innovations, buttressed by the equally transnational, adversarial media and academic establishments, progessively neturalizes all the elements of national and cultural life that might conceivably restart the clash of private and public interests which (on this account) led to the catastrophe of the two world wars (the founding, traumatic scene of modern scapegoating).  But such a world would be intrinsically static, which is to say the telos of transnational progressivism is as much a fantasy as socialism; insofar as the Left is a movement, which is to say, moves–responds to and generates events–it is currently the Global Intifada, an unsteady but sufficiently coherent conjoining of violence and threats of violence which for the most part stays just below the threshold needed to trigger massive retaliation (mostly Muslim, but drawing in the remnants of the socialist Left, e.g., Venezuala); and the ongoing, mobile international war crimes tribunal/class action lawsuit conducted by the elite media human rights groups, NGOs and educational institutions throughout the West.

What this means is that we in the West are in a state of civil war:  that is, a struggle between opposing forces or factions within the same society who recognize incommensurable sovereigns.  There are those of us who recognize the sovereignty of the U.S. Constitution, and those of us who recognize the sovereignty of international post-Nuremberg law. (I apologize for the American-centric character of my argument; am I so wrong in my assumption, though, that if the United States doesn’t remain on the constitutional side in this civil war, it won’t matter very much what anyone else does?) This condition is disguised by the exaggerated, even cult-like, obeisances the Left pays to the Constitution; but the Consitution they adore is not one that would be recognizable to anyone reading the actual text, along with the debates over its ratification, and with the post-Civil War amendments particularly in mind–rather, it is a Constitution which, over the past half century or so has been reshaped along transnational progressive lines, aimed at liquidating intermediate levels of authority between the sovereign state and the sovereign individual (who is therefore defined more and more against local communities, traditional norms and public opinion) and (more recently) subordinating American policy to international actors and agendas. 

One naturally hestitates to use the term “civil war” not merely because it implies a degree of hostility and division few would wish to concede, but for the more empriical reason that it doesn’t look like a civil war:  no one can really picture “reds” and “blues” facing off in military or physical confrontation.  But, here, the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci (an important forerunner of the contemporary Left)’s distinction between a “War of Maneuver” and a “War of Position” is helpful:  a war of maneuver is when one actually destroys or dislodges the enemy from some position they hold; the war of position is the struggle to occupy those positions which would give one an insuperable advantage once we get to the war of maneuver.  And, of course, if one gains such an advantage, there will be no “actual” war.  In that case, winning the war of position is enough, especially if it is won (as wars of position tend to be) gradually, even imperceptibly, and by subtly “re-inscribing” the positions everyone already occupies so that the war appears to be (even to some of those waging it) merely needed reform of an antiquated set of relationships–in that case, only when one looks back after it is over, or finds out that some customary act is suddenly forbidden, some commonsensical sentiment suddenly unintelligible, does one see the real relation between victor, victim, and spoils.  It is impossible to go for too long without realizing one is in a war of maneuver; but in an intelligently executed war of position, one can indeed be unaware, giving an enormous advantage to those waging it coherently and determinedly.

Just as it is fairly easy to identify the enemy in this global civil war of position, it is easy to identify the means and goal of struggle:  the latter, the restoration where necessary and protection where still possible of commensurability between acts and consequences; which commensurability is the sole guarantee of freedom; the former, the defeat of our “victims” through the defense of their victims, a strategy that works equally well against our jihadist enemies as against our Leftist ones (really, anyone can play:  for example, in harping on the racial disparity in those imprisoned for violent crimes, isn’t one obscuring the racial–and gender!–disparity in the victims of those crimes?).  “All” that needs to be worked out is the proper mode of doing so in each case, on the battlefield, in knowledge, in the media, the law, diplomacy, and so on. 

One thing we are certainly learning these days is how high are the demands of a free order, and how powerful the desire to submit, already, if we can just have stability, if we can just be allowed to ignore prattle about health care proposals rather than having to hear about threats and destruction.  (I, at least, start to look back and wonder:  would we have won World War II if the USSR had not been attacked by Nazi Germany, bringing both Stalin and our own domestic Left onto our side?; would our steadfastness in the Cold War have survived one more “hot” episode on the order of Korea or Vietnam?)

Where are we now?  The one bright spot is Iraq, which contains all the pertinent components of the war, in both its “civil” and “foreign” dimensions:  we are defeating a powerful form of Islam (after having defeated one of the leading practitoners of a newly resurgent–as in Russia–form of “big man” tyrannical rule) by turning its victims against it and are in the process of creating a new, hopefully responsible member of the community of nation states; a member which we have good grounds to think will be jealoius of its sovereignty, suspicious of the intentions of their “Arab brothers” and international caretaker institutions like the UN, and positively hostile to the calls to join the jihad.  Everywhere else there is backtracking and an abandonment of positions, sometimes hard won ones, as in Bush’s complete reversal on the Israeli-Palestinian front.  The general dysfunctionality of our governing institutions, brought to the surface in the demands placed upon them by this new war, have not been addressed at all–the CIA and State Department continue to set their own foreign policy untrammelled, even unmolested; and in 2009, the Democrats, a diminishingly respectable front for the global death cult, might very well control Congress and the Presidency.  And, understandably, no one wants to think too closely about what all this means.  Even Republicans, even the Bush Administration, are staying miles away from compelling new evidence that there were, in fact, chemical and biological weapon stockpiles in Iraq in 2003, which were transported over to Syria and buried (and later, in the chaos of the invasion, removed) in Iraq–just challenging the prevailing narrative (”there were no WMDS!”) seems to require too much energy, to involve too much risk.  In my view the already small number of people who could take the slightest interest in what I am saying here is certainly shrinking daily.

It is probably uncomfortable for most to speak of a “global civil war,” even one of “position”–everyone becomes a combatant, and such a characterization introduces the frightening possibility of the politicization of all areas of life.  It is precisely the “positional” dimension that makes this war different, though, since victory would involve a complex array of “re” and “de” politicizations–in certain areas, a properly political site would have to be liberated from law and morality; in others, perhaps exchange relations and “culture” (in the broadest sense of the proliferation and dissemination of models for living), what is called for is a liberation from politics; meanwhile, what is often at stake is the relation between political actors and spectators, or between politics in the sense of coercive state action and citizen activity.  The position I seem to have been coming to occupy is that of the analyst of discourse, in its most essential form, that of the sentence, both literally and as focusing our attention on the “syntax” of all practices–a position that, it seems to me, would at times be overtly and even hyperbolically political and at other times detached and ivory towerish; engaging the daily elements of cultural dialogue, but also high culture, “extreme” esthetic experiments and the realm of sheer possibility.  My hope, I suppose, is that simply going about our business as originary thinkers inquiring into the semiotics of reality will be the only global positioning system we require.

Of course, a war of position is simultaneously a deferral of war, but a deferral that creates an interim during which preparations proceed; and, from another angle, war is almost completely preparation–as the saying goes, amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics.  And amateurs talk “ideas” and “images,” while professional talk “models” and “narratives.”  The most suitable models and narratives in the middle of our preparatory period will be somewhat counter-intuitive and yet familiar enough; indeed, they will make us wonder what makes them, at least ever so slightly, counter-intuitive.  They will be retrieved and modified models:  the black conservative scapegotated by the “leaders” of his or her community while, in fact, recovering traditions of self-reliance developed under Jim Crow; the “infidel” who embodies a recognizable pattern of feminist awakening, who nevertheless makes “establishment” feminists extremely uneasy; the Muslim stepping forward in defense of a Christian neighbor in a nascent Arab democracy; veterans of the Afghan and Iraq wars stepping forward as a new generation of leaders, remaking both political parties and the media; etc.  All these narratives, to some extent, resist the force of accumulated demands made by partisans on all sides, at the very least the “demand” that one’s own narrative, especially the doomsday ones, prove true.  Such models and narratives are already circulating to some extent; the question for a “cultural politics” as well as a “cultural studies,” then, is what would need to change for any one of these narratives to undergo a quantum leap beyond the circle of those who presently cultivate it, to increase in circulation by an order of magnitude (from 1,000 to 10,000, 100,000 to 1,000,000, etc.)?  A precondition, at any rate, is a certain faith in “reality”:  when thinking about who is on the “side” in our “civil war” I am calling “constitutionalist,” aside from small cadres of intellectuals, pundits and activists, the answer is all of us, insofar as we buy and sell on the market, sustain basic norms of civility, insist on keeping violence and obscenity out of spaces whose sanctity we are charged to protect, try and get a little bit closer to the truth when it seems important to do so, measure ourselves against others and others against ourselves, seek out options short of scapegoating in dealing with those we oppose or hate, and so on.  And when we notice and begin to resent, in the name of those for whom we bear responsibiity, those who undermine these props of reality.  When we share such resentments with others, the defense of small things (minor commensurabilities, reciprocities and accountabilities) can snowball, just as the existence of a “democratic enough” Iraq will stick in the sides of the region’s tyrants and terrorists, and become, more and more, an inevitable point of reference and inspiration for its liberators.

In other words, both sides can play the game of a fully deliberate global war which, paradoxically, we will win by reducing its strictly military component:  victory for us would tend towards the narrowing of the confrontation to one between our armed people and theirs, with civilians refusing to act (and effectively assisted in this refusal) as shields; in this case, the war would be over very rapidly.  Getting to that point depends upon whether those intermediate figures who, while unarmed, call for our murder and destruction, will be deemed martyrs or criminals against humanity; and determining that denomination will be whoever gains the “high ground” in the post-Auschwitz political, legal and moral order indelibly stamped by the awareness that our fundamental categories of social life could readily render us complicit in the unthinkable, whether through commission or omission.  That high ground is the unconditional defense of individual freedom as irreducible point of origin and the insistence upon individual accountability as established through freely entered into covenants (the only thing that can genuinely bind up and conclude what a free individual sets in motion):  each point of that structure (freedom, accountability, covenant) is a fulcrum enabling us to overturn victimary revaluations as we hold each other accountable for holding our putative victims accountable for the freedom they deny others (through omission and comission) and the covenanting they consider impossible even as they remain parasitical upon every jot and tittle of the terms devised and agreed upon by those more courageous and generous than themselves.

Adam Katz

Continuing the line of inquiry intitated by Eric Gans’ Chronicle, “The Four Freedoms,” we can suggest that the three main linguistic forms correspond to three modes of political accountability.  The ostensive, to unquestioned fealty to a shared sacred center; the imperative to the rule of “big man” who runs society as what we might call, depending upon our tastes, a protection racket or a more or less benign paternalist order characterized by the unconditional compliance with privileged imperatives; and the declarative, of course, to an open, liberal order, in which no decision is legitimate until everyone has had their say.  All this is fairly uncontroversial.  What I would like to add, so as to make this a new discussion, is the hypothesis that the higher linguistic forms do not supersede the lower ones but, rather, articulate them in new spatial and temporal configurations.  So, the imperative clearly relies upon the ostensive in the sense that compliance must be confirmed:  I must be able to point, along with others, at the object produced or act carried out, in accord with the specifications implicit or explicit in the imperative.  Similarly, the declarative must include reformed or redirected imperatives and ostensives, and this is a rather more complex matter.

Let’s stick with the ostensive-imperative relation for a moment.  If I have given an order to a subordinate, I presumably know what it would mean for that order to be carried out–if I say the “report must be on my desk by 3″ I know how to tell time, have a clock available, know what desk is meant, and know what would count as an acceptably completed report; and, my subordinate knows all this as well.  Furthermore, I have some idea (perhaps increasingly vague as the work done to complete the report becomes more individualized) of where the subordinate should be at a particular point in the work, and there may be all kinds of good reasons for me to want to check on those intermediate points as well (everyone has heard horror stories about the intrusive means of surveillance that have become commonplace in the contemporary corporation).  The point is, not only does the imperative rely upon the ostensive for its verification, but it generates a whole series of new ones, that in turn complicate the imperative order itself.  The boss is checking on one thing (is the employee embezzling, or just lazy) and finds out something else (he is cheating on his wife) raising new questions about the employer-employee relationship and, in particular, the employer’s authority (it’s easy to say that employees should only be judged by their performance at work, but that already assumes a “declarative” model of justice rather than an imperative order in which the superior’s central concern is the condition of continuing to issue successful imperatives, in which case I may want to know if my employee is committing adultery and will therefore be brining all kinds of other issues into the workplace in ways I can reasonably predict even if the effects have not yet appeared). 

I want to suggest that the interaction between ostensive and imperative produces the possibility of something we might call “originary nihilism,” which is to say, a situation in which, due to colliding imperatives, or later imperatives that undermine the earlier ones, or subsidiary imperatives that don’t fit the central ones, there is no longer an “object” the parties involved can point to in order to verify compliance with the imperative.  I furthermore want to suggest that we need to hypothesize such a situation to account for the emergence of the declarative in the first place, which is to say that the declarative emerges as the deferral of the impossible imperative and the transcendence of originary nihilism.  The first “claim” made by the declarative (and here I am working with the basic topic/comment form proposed in The Origin of Language) is that things can be “otherwise” than proposed by the impossible imperative–which, interestingly, means that things can be both more “realistic” (the declarative offers something “possible”) and otherwise than could have been previously imagined.

I would like to minimize the kind of scene we would have to imagine to thus read the declarative as the result of an event, which is to say a leap to a condition which was not contained in the imperative, or its extension to the negative ostensive.  We would have to assume a crisis of the imperative, in which the incompatibility of the various imperatives offered in a given situation (either with each other, with reality, or with the established form of issuing and obeying imperatives) leads to the possibility of collective violence that no imperative, nor the rather weak negative ostensive, could prevent:  the “possibility” that is offered by the emission of the declarative is first of all of de-escalating the situation by listening to someone (and then another, and then another…) who is putting two familiar words together in an unfamiliar way.  So, a formulation like “spear/hut” would at the very least draw attention to itself and be iterable–if it gets repeated enough times perhaps someone runs back to the hut and the crisis is resolved; but before that could happen, the linguistic innovation itself has to become a new center of attention.  Insofar as it becomes a new center of attention, it can redirect the imperatives by presenting a new one, which redirection is a condition of “hearing” the declarative as an intelligible sign:  the imperative is to be ready for a new kind of object, one which can only be identified ostensively; that new object is the possibility of another sentence.  Simultaneously, the declarative reorders the existing imperative-ostensive nexus by extending the space between an imperative and the ostensives that will satisfy it, precisely by introducing the possibility of intermediate objects, creating in effect a whole world of possible objects, some of which happen to be “missing.”  We might say that metaphysics’ elevating of the declarative to the status of primary linguistic form relies upon displacing the generative dimension of the declarative (the creation of the next sentence as the ostensively idenitifed object) by the “packaging” dimension; this displacement reduces the world to a finite set of possible objects, all of which could, in principle, be made present.  Metaphysics effects this displacement by treating the infinite series of sentences as nothing more than so many containers of an essentially finite world of ideas. 

However we imagine such a “declarative event,” the validity of my analysis must rest upon the power with which it enables us to analyze actual sentences and discourses.  I believe this power is considerable.  To sketch out just a couple of possibilities, it enables us to account in a new way for Roman Jakobson’s famous axes of meaning, the axis of combination (metonymy) and the axis of selection (metaphor).  The generative force of the deferral of the impossible imperative accounts for the logic of combination:  the topic of the sentence is such an object, however mediated by the discourse in question, of an impossible imperative; the axis of combination (which types of “comments” can be attached to the topic) is determined by the need to represent that object otherwise than as demanded, as a newly possible object.  The axis of selection, meanwhile, or, which of all the possible comments (or, for that matter, which of all the possible names for the topic) belong (the “poetic” axis) is determined by the running deferral of the series of imperatives, produced by and running parallel to the construction of the declarative itself, that a particular kind of sentence be produced.  In other words, each declarative is split between the need to produce more, genuinely new sentences out of its own material and the need to produce materially available objects within an acceptable range of intermediation.  Sentences that last are the ones that defer “unreasonable” or impossible instances of this latter demand, which is equivalent to deferring the demand for immediately and transparently operationalizable statements, while incorporating the deferral of this demand itself into their construction.  More forgettable sentences are those which provide some information (readily verifiable and/or accessible ostensives) which then absorb the attention given to the sentence itself.  At any rate, each sentence should be decomposable into the external and internal impossible imperatives (the originary nihilism it responds to and the one it then must simulate) that are its constitutive elements; as well as into the new ostensive-imperative articulations that make it intelligible. 

Now, I would like to use this analysis of what I would call “originary grammar” to examine a problem posed by the “grammar” of politics in a free society.  David Brin’s (still) neglected The Transparent Society addressed a series of issues and leaves open one serious problem that I would now like to address “grammatically.”  Brin starts with the assumption that our society will continue to become more and more transparent–the means of observing others, with or without their permission, will continue to expand beyond the capacity of our current legal or moral systems or inhibitions to regulate–and this will be the case for government, private individuals, and institutions alike.  If someone down the block, or half-way across the world, really wants to know what goes on in your bedroom every night, they will soon be able to find out, if they can’t already.  Brin proposes that we meet this situation “proactively” by giving up on privacy as a core liberal value (which he anyway claims it never really was–liberty he considers the genuine core value, and completely detaches the two concepts) and making transparency reciprocal and linking it to expanded and revised norms of accountability:  on the one hand, we would all be well advised not to do anything our reputations couldn’t survive having broadcast to the world; on the other hand, we should raise the threshold of tolerance to include everything that any one of us is likely to be caught doing on some occasion or another.  Meanwhile, if we, as individuals, are to concede that we won’t be able to keep anything from the government, we should in turn impose the same expectations upon the government:  if the government will ultimately wrest the right (to match the already existing capacity) to know and see everything about us, we should have cameras in police stations and…here is where the argument gets problematic…and cabinet meetings?  special forces undercover operations?  When it comes to the police, Brin’s argument is unproblematic and enormously liberating–why not have cameras in interrogation rooms and police vehicles, why not post the evidence used in trials on the internet so it can be inspected by all?  The main effect would be to raise both the level of police and prosecutorial behavior along with public expectations of what these agencies can accomplish and what should be considered reasonable limits on their powers.  When it comes to national security secrets, though, especially those with thousands, perhaps millions of lives, and in extreme circumstances, even national existence, at stake, how can we concede?  But, even more to the point, what if it’s not up to us–if Brin is right, the capacity to place means of transmission anywhere, to break into any computer, will soon enough be available–maintaining a low threshold when it comes to classifying information may lead to a situation in which our enemies know more about what is going on than we do.

What is terrifying in Brin’s scenario is the dramatically increased possibility that anyone, any time, could be singled out as a scapegoat–the largely lost, and much regretted (and for good reasons) bourgeois norms of civility and reticence served to make it possible to present oneself publically in rule governed ways that enabled one to avoid the most likely marks of difference that could in turn make one a viable scapegoat.  In this case, reciprocal transparency serves as a theory of deterrence, ensuring that citizens and the police, as well as the citizens amongst themselves, have the goods on each other and will therefore limit scapegoating to those relatively rare instances where one could not be turned into a target oneself. The vast increase in visibility, in other words, opens up a vacuum in which new ostensives will rush to meet the supply of new desires and rivalries, and we would legitimately fear that time dishonored but convenient modes of deferral would fill that vacuum.  Brin addresses this argument by pointing precisely to our enhanced post-Christian suspicion of scapegoating mechanisms, admitting the possibility of the scenario I just outlined while asserting that the emergence of higher levels of restraint and tolerance is at least as likely.  And we can grant him that argument, at least for the sake of argument.

The larger problem, though, is that increased transparency would aid liberalism’s century long project of discrediting imperatives; or, to be (a little) fairer, imperatives that are not so engirded by declaratives legitimating in advance and checking after the fact that they are no longer, in any meaningful sense, imperatives.  Declaratives cannot in any way translate directly into action in the world, which is to say into imperative-ostensive articulations; only declaratives-with-built-in-imperatives sutured onto imperatives-with engrafted-declaratives can effect such action.  This suturing is the imperative I issue to myself and in turn obey, what we refer to colloquially as “putting your money where your mouth is”–declaratives that don’t lend themselves to placing a “bet” should be almost as suspicious as the use of sheer force or the assertion of naked will in social relations. 

So, how do we distinguish declaratives that lay down a bet from those that don’t?  If the sentence is founded on the transcendence of originary nihilism, then it completes this transcendence by calling upon us to restore the object of annihilation by defending it against the carriers of such nihilism.  The first duty of the declarative, its condition of intelligibility, then, is the creation of a possible object that exceeds or resists the grasp of those gripped by the impossible imperative. The world of possible objects generated by the declarative doesn’t map the world of actual objects; rather, it models ways of forming appropriative relations with actual objects.  The imperative to oneself that makes action possible involves singling out from the “fictional” declarative world a form of appropriation that might act on a proximal intermediate imperative-ostensive articulation.  The intermediate “command” given is to embody and shape that form.  Now, it is true that much action is carried out without these explicit thought process (one can even question whether our “decisions” are actually causally related to our actions or are merely the “foam” generated by the general swirl of activity that in the aftermath looks like an “act”); it is also true that we are faced with a problem that I would call “infinite ingress” here:  directing our attention toward an intermediate imperative-ostensive articulation that would enable the fulfillment of a larger one of which the one we are attending to is a component part implies that we can further direct our attention to the intermediate instances constitutive of the one we are presently attending to, and so on.  I would propose that originary grammar cuts through all these problems and questions by noting, first, that the problem of infinite ingress really includes the problem of the conscious component of action insofar as when we act we are necessarily attending to some imperative-ostensive articulation that inevitably carries along with a train of other, possible, ones; and that the possibility of attending from the one we are directly engaged in (even in “planning”) to the others that come into view as a result is nothing other than the source of those subsequent declaratives which will  retroactively represent the “decision” in a more complete way because it is the  center of a new, possible world.  The proliferation of the intermediate steps that lead to genuine action, in other words, is the generative source of the yet to be produced sentence as a possible object of the sentence currently in play. 

The metaphysical sentence represents a world in which something is missing.  Metaphysics assumes a world saturated by existing objects, material and immaterial, all of which objects can, in principle, be known or made present–if nothing is missing, where does the need for the sentence come from?  The “fictional” or possible world created by the declarative is thus turned into the measure of the actual world, and since the Good can be known propositionally, the fictional world in question is already populated by those who act according to knowledge of the Good (hence any new sentence could, in principle, be predicted by someone with complete knowledge of all possible logical and true sentences); since such knowledge is available, only a deficit of will explains one’s unwillingness to pursue or act on it; and since the will is determined directly by perception of the model presented by the Good, deficits of the will are made up for through a kind of forced viewing of the model from which one has so far inexplicably averted one’s vision (how could you not see it!). This is the double bind of metaphysical thinking, which thus stabilizes originary nihilism, by at least punishing or excluding those swept up in it, but the problem of the conversion of the declarative into suitable imperatives, the “operationalization” of the declarative, has not been solved.  The fantasy of metaphysics, in other words, in one of a self-governing republic of speakers of declaratives, one in which possible worlds are directly mapped onto the actual one with no intermediate space. Which means that the question of meaning has not been answered, because “meaning” is essentially responding to a sign by opening a new world.  Originary nihilism emerges in the field of intermediate imperative-ostensive articulations, and it can be transcended only by acting on that field. 

To return to Brin’s problem, the necessary zone of secrecy surrounding the fulfillment of those imperatives demanded by the defense of the center in those arenas where action cannot wait upon deliberation takes on a new appearance in the space created by transparency, or the vastly extended region of unregulated ostensives.  Defense against the encroachments of transparency upon the prerogatives of “executive energy” are converted into the call for “auxiliary” forces.  Dismantle or at least marginalize the State Department and CIA (for starters) and any other bracnh of the civil service with the will and capacity to distinguish its interests from the agenda of the administration in power.  Transform all the activites and operations carried out by such agencies into directly delegated missions assigned to diplomatic and intelligence teams directly or mediately accountable to the President.  Clear lines of delegation and accountability all down the line.  Secrets are protected, for as long as absolutely necessary, through dispatch and small group cohesion and loyalty–a team does one thing, it does it as economically as possible, and by the time anyone catches up and finds out what they are doing, they have already done it.  The men and women on such teams are outside the law and beyond the purview of public opinion for as long as they can stay there, which will hopefully be long enough to complete the mission, a mission the law might not sanction and public opinion might view with disgust; when exposure comes, they will knowingly face penalties and opprobrium, and they will be scapegoated by the public, or they will be honored, or, perhaps, allowed to remain anonymous so as to circulate onto new teams; the President will then stand by them or throw them under the bus, taking refuge in those acts carried out in pursuit of the mission that (and there will inevitably be such) went beyond its explicit mandate; the President him or herself will, in turn, be supported by the public and Congress or scapegoated as well; sub-cultures, publications, training sites, etc., will emerge to supply the demand for operatives; the media, “mainstream” and independent, will not surrender their independence, nor need anyone ask them to–let them find out what they can and let the auxiliary forces deceive, infiltrate and distract as they must (perhaps new attitudes within the media will emerge, according to which a willingness to eschew the attempt to reveal secrets will be exchanged for fuller access and accounts afterward).  Such as system, at the very least, would provide us with a continual stream of very valuable and reliable information regarding the health of our institutions and civil society.  These auxiliaries would “willingly” subject themselves to the most rigorous regime of imperatives imaginable, but will remain bounded on both sides by declaratives:  on the “front” end, by the fundamental principles of reciprocity constitutive of the order they are sworn to protect; on the “back” side, by the judgments and narratives produced by their fellow citizens and the world at large. 

A generative declarative, in that case, points toward an arena in which the terms of the declarative could be bound by such a regime of imperativity and retain its meaning. To put it more simply, a generative declarative implicitly proposes a mision on its own behalf and volunteers to go first.  I don’t mean that if one argues in favor of war, one should therefore be first at the nearest recruiting station–the criteria I am proposing are immanent to the series of sentences involved, which means “volunteering” to defend the terms of the new, possible, reality created by one’s sentences, and presenting that reality as one to be completed only by others’ sentences. The power of such sentences lies in their focus on, or “indwelling” in the generative intermediate terrain where the “infinite ingress” of possible imperative-ostensive articulations creates new realities, first of all in language, that can stay one step ahead of originary nihilism.

Adam Katz

Here’s an extremely informative essay from the excellent Stanley Kurtz:

 http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/ID.1498/article_detail.asp

Adam Katz

The notion, put forward in Eric Gans’ latest Chronicle (349 http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw349.htm), that global warmism (as the latest and most succesful incarnation of the religion of impending disaster) is a viable global religion that might serve to defer conflict in a post-Auschwitz world is worth pursuing further.  First of all, the religion of impending disaster is surely an off-shoot of the quintessential post-Auschwitz religion, White Guilt. What marks White Guilt as post-Auschwitz is its direct representation of, human beings as precisely the kind of beings the originary hypothesis reveals them to be:  the greatest threat to their own survival.  White Guilt is extremely direct:  it provides a thorough itemization of human institutions and norms that we “know” threaten said destruction because we know the violence they have already caused; global warmism, meanwhile, mediates such destruction through inherently questionable scientific claims whose confirmation can, of course, only come in the future.  But “impending disaster” might very well supersede White Guilt if if can provide genuine solutions where WG can only exacerbate problems; its anthropological insight might be somewhat lesser if, in its ability reject the steady stream of human sacrifices WG depends upon, its anthropological instincts are superior.

The fact that contemporary ideologies seem to be coming closer to this basic originary insight (as opposed to the naivete about human goodness in both Enlightenment and Romantic discourses) raises another question: can human beings directly confront an acknowledgement that we are, essentially, the greatest threat to our own survival or would, paradoxically, a widespread acceptance of the originary hypothesis (or the closest “popular” approximation) undermine our capacity to display the saving signifying capacity that hypothesis discloses?  Even White Guilt, in the end, flinches decisively by reducing the threat to the scapegoated “dominant” group–but does that increase or mitigate its destructiveness?  How would a community of adherents to the originary hypothesis, confronting, intellectually, without any mythological or ideological interference, the primacy of their mimetic and hence potentially violent relations to each other, mediate their interrelationships?  It seems to me that the main problem here is the awareness that no particular sign of deferral can be given priority over other candidates, nothing that is simply there between us–to be modified and questioned, but still, first of all simply there.

The advantage of global warmism over WG would lie precisely in the fact that if new scientific advances could weaken the warming hypothesis, by the same token such advances could never decisively refute it; after all, yet further evidence could once again secure the higher probability of the events it predicts.  And if the “cultic” aspects of the religion have been sufficiently developed by the time the evidence starts to point against the hypothesis, that investment will itself weigh heavily in favor of maintaining it (”we are obviously making progress, why relax our guard now”?).  By the “cultic” or ritual aspects I mean nothing more invidious than Gans does in calling belief in global warming a religion:  the development of market niches and practices (inventions, fashions, etc.) that might fit the global economy rather well while calling for certain minimal “sacrifices” on the part of individuals; once the religion has become more accepted and less defensive it might become less dogmatic and therefore capable of accommodating, for example, Bjorn Lomborg’s suggestion that even if human-induced global warming is occurring, we might be better served by anticipating and countering its effects rather than trying to prevent it–in that case, a wide sphere of voluntary and compelled, large and small scale activities, all organized around the “race against time,” become conceivable; global warmism might co-exist peacefully with the world’s religions, which don’t seem to be intrinsically opposed to its hypothesis; finally, one could even imagine the integration of global warmism into the war on terror such that it comes to subsume it–terrorists and perhaps Islam itself might be designated enemies of humanity for distracting attention away from our salvation, and the drive to find other sources of fuel given divine sanction–perhaps the new religion will neutralize White Guilt and lead to its extinction.  Of course, in this final possibility lies new dangers:  who else might be thus designated enemy of humanity, even of the earth, and hence subject to annihilation?  What would the existence of a particular recalcitrant people weigh in the scales of the preservation of all life on earth?  Especially poor people, from countries with too much population increase, who demand too much economic growth…

The cult of global warmism need not crowd out other explorations of the sacred on the terms set by our post-Auschwitz, scientific world.  The limits of global warmism would lie in the weakness of its “ostensives”:  its rituals would probably be an unwieldy combination of fastidious specificity and uncertain meaning, enshrined in both informal norms and legal codes, involving overbearing social pressures for purposes whose fulfillment must be kept at a steady distance (why must I drive only this kind of car, for 5 and not 6 hours a week, etc.; who decides and how?  Surely salvation can’t be “in” the difference represented by that one hour).  It would generate new resentments accordingly, in often comic forms (as in the currently popular carbon “offsets,” amusingly comparable to the “indulgences” sold by corrupt popes to the rich in the middle ages; indeed, if I understand the complicated mechanism of offsets correctly, Al Gore buys them from himself).  And this weakness, in turn, points to the problem of precisely a universal, completely inclusive religion:  it must be totally bereft of events.  Perhaps this is why the proponents of global warmism seem so desperate to generate and, if necessary, fabricate, events:  an increase in hurricanes?–global warming!  Forest fires?–global warming!  The necessary gradualism of long term natural changes makes the temptation to “compress” these changes into the form of packagable events irresistible:  hence the scenes of polar bears slipping off of melting ice floes, the scare tactic of claiming we will need our scuba gear to visit New York a couple of decades down the road, and so on.  I suppose I am asking whether the “divinization is altogether optional”–at any rate, if our attention to global warming were to be “weighed” along with other threats to our well being on a “scale” based on a genuine calculation of risks and benefits, that is, if the rationalistic mentality were to be applied to our interest in global warming in addition to being channeled through that interest, it would no longer be a religion, which is to say without the “value-added” of faith its efficacy in deferring violence would be nil.

To return to my earlier question, even a community made up solely of generative anthropologists would find themselves in unanticipated conflicts due to their intersecting desires which take on their true meaning only in those intersections; this community would be as obliged as any other to invent/discover that “creative compromise” which would provide for a temporary, fragile, cessation of hostilities; and that compromise would always lean toward some “default” stance that is at least remnisicent of something that has worked in the past (even the very immediate past of slowing down the escalating confrontation enough so as to consider alternatives).  Desire and resentment, in other words, along with their transcendence, involve an irreducible opacity–the more we own what we have done the more we realize that there is something we can’t quite own.  What is interesting to consider here is whether the explicit awareness that this compromise comes from no one other than ourselves, along with the equally significant consciousness that no one of us can claim authorship, that some “spirit,” ultimately inexplicable beyond a certain point, came over us; whether this awareness of our paradoxical condition is conducive or harmful to survival.  At any rate, such explicitness seems to me to point to a very different form of holiness than that of impending disaster–and one upon which we might not want to place all our bets. What would be holy in that case would be a readiness to chance transparency, to take upon oneself the condition of the sign–of being increasingly “legible” in equal measure to oneself and others and thereby of exposing a basic fundament of inscrutability; of representing in one’s person the renewal of the originary scene in miniature by allowing oneself to be the product of others’ imaginaries while minimally distinguishing oneself from all of them; of setting in motion new chains of action whose ends one concedes the ability to anticipate; of finding eternal life and prefiguring it in others in the disappearance of everything that makes one substantial.

Shelby Steele, in an essay on Clarence Thomas’ autobiography in a recent National Review, declares that Thomas is “the freest black man in America… the first black American of his generation to become–openly and irrefutably–an individual.”  This new mode of “carefully evolved individuality,” which I tried to explore a couple of posts back, this “habit of thinking for himself,” is in turn certainly connected with Thomas’ willingness to be “crucified” or “sacrificed without repercussions” (i.e., for those conducting the sacrifice); Steele doesn’t say this, but I think that even Thomas’ continued sense of resentment regarding his treatment by paternalistic elites, his unwillingness to forget even as he transcends that treatment, contributes to his sharply delineated individuality, his determination to owe nothing, either material or ideal, to anybody who would presume to judge him.  If Thomas is, as Steele contends, now an “archetype that will inspire others,” one form of that inspiration involves his refusal to scapegoat others so as to defer the scapegoating directed at him, his apparent ability to reject the mental habit of defending stances that have been attacked with the panicked reflex of either “but that’s what _____ said!” or “but what about you!”–which is to say, a refusal to broaden the target that one has become, instead taking one’s own targeting  as an occasion to invite others to embark upon a retrieval of the origins of our mechanisms of deferral–in Thomas’ case, a highly principled Constitutional “originalism” that makes him a very solitary figure, even among the Court’s conservatives.  Thomas is aware that “originalism,” far from a mind-deadening traditionalist recitation of known and well digested truisms, is the highest form of reflection upon the events outside of our renewed participation in which we cannot even pretend to think.  It seems to me that we generative anthropologists can agree that whosover would be an individual, must be an originalist.

Adam Katz

I think all originary thinkers should be interested in this brilliant post by truepeers over at the Covenant Zone blog (I put in the permalink John provided in the comments to this entry for those who may have been confused by my linking to the blog itself–sorry for that):

http://covenantzone.blogspot.com/2007/10/gods-eternal-word-is-human-freedom.html

Adam Katz

To be a modern individual is to court, if only in the most distant, mild, or simulated way, the risk of being scapegoated.  This is the legacy of the Romantic stance invented by Rousseau, where, in a revision of the event of the crucifixion, the individual creates himself as a center of attention by claiming to be the victim of universal persecution; and successfully exploits both “defensive” and “offensive” responses to that claim as its confirmation.  However necessary and productive this stance may have been in the emergence of the individual on the modern market, it has clearly long since become pathological, starting with its appropriation by collective movements predicated upon their exclusion from the marketplace. 

If modernity is the expansion beyond the strictly liturgical realm of the Christian practice of imitating and witnessing for Jesus, the problem posed by the practice of drawing upon oneself that persecution lies in the formalization of that stance–the abstraction of the scapegoater/scapegoated relationship from any objective markers that the the scapegoat genuinely disseminates differences throughout society beyond the present capacity of the system of deferral to bear.  After all, once Jesus has exposed the arbitrariness of the scapegoat function, that function can no longer be arbitrary:  it is now he or she who confronts whosoever claims to be today’s “big man” with a broader mode of reciprocity and demands that society, and each individual, choose sides one way or the other.  The Rousseauian stance, then, would be less authentic–indeed, it would be a throwback to pre-Christian forms of scapegoating, with “markers” of the scapegoat disconnected from moral problematics–than that of he or she who risks scapegoating by speaking and acting openly in defense of others in danger of being scapegoated.

Since acting pre-emptively in defense of possible scapegoats leads to the construction of norms and institutions which would detect and defer such possibilities, the modern individual’s willingness to risk scapegoating would become increasingly mediated and the risk more widely distributed.  This might serve fairly well as a definition of “modern civilization.”  At the same time, this widened distribution increases the probability that the risks will never be serious; which is to say, it becomes increasingly difficult to describe them as “risks” at all:  the decent employee, law abiding citizen, good parent, etc., is, indeed, a product of a series of decisions, however buffered or unconsciously taken, to risk being the scapegoat, but the distance between our analytical appreciation of this fact and the actual experience of it is vast.  Hence not only the ever fresh temptation to take the Rousseauian shortcut to genuine individuality, but the ease with which that normal citizen can be scapegoated by the victimary claim that the normal is no more than a conspiracy to exclude. 

In that case, though, might not the victimary scapegoating return the normal citizen to his or her originary (modern) vocation as witness to the modern as the “secularization” of the Christian event?  The only problem with this formulation is that the victimary protest is a shell game insofar as those it scapegoats end up testifying, in their victimization, to the truth of the victimary.  The reason for this is Auschwitz theology, which has powerfully imprinted upon all contemporary events the inability of all the normal institutions to register the event of Auschwitz–not only did doctors, lawyers, bureaucrats, bourgeois citizens, etc., not resist, but they actively lent their skills, unthinkingly and in a sense, then, even more complicitly, to the industrialized slaughter.  There is enough truth to this intepretation of Auschwitz that the ranks of the bourgeoisie will produce no new universally accepted (or, we might say, non-ironic) martyrs until another event comes to supplant the Holocaust as the horizon of a new era.

There is nevertheless a central role for those of us who are more or less comfortably middle class and “protected” in the rejuvenation of modern individuality, and that role lies in the embrace, protection, and “privileging” of the genuinely new form of individuality emerging in our time:  that form represented by witnesses to non-modern cultures–whether those cultures be pre-modern, as much of the Islamic world, or (to awkwardly coin a phrase), “de-modernized,” as many impoverished, crime-ridden institution-poor communities, mostly populated by racial and ethnic minorities, in our inner cities.  Such witnesses, often scapegoated within their own communities as traitors and “Uncle Toms,” testify, as victims or at least targets of “our” victims, to the truth of modernity and, more specifically, to the devastation wrought by the White Guilt that encourages the substitution of limitless resentment for dialgoue and introspection.  Defending such “informants,” whether they be “dissident” African Americans like Clarence Thomas and Ward Connerly or ex-Muslim “infidels” like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, demands about as much courage as one is likely to be expected to demonstrate in the elite institutions of the academy and media.  And it also requires the challenging work of repairing the damage done by resentment to the always fragile institutions and norms of modernity–looking at the “Global Intifada” that wages war on the intersection of the free market and the nation-state that sustains modernity from the Islamic world (increasingly in alliance with the resentment of the Left) on one side and the transnational progressives (who hope to subordinate nations to an international law circularly defined as whatever the international lawyers and bureaucrats say it is) we can see how fragile and even improbable modernity remains.

This alliance, or covenant, between the middle and the informant, would allow us to propose the “marginal individual” as the unit of measurement for social and political thought.  I don’t mean “marginalized,” but, in a loose borrowing from marginal utility economic theory, that hypothetical individual whose consent will make or break any regime or policy.  The strength of Leftist social and political arguments lie solely in their ability to present typical victims of their opponents’ policies and preferred institutional forms as comprising the majority and hence above the necessary threshold; even an injured child whose parents own several cars and a 300,000$ home can be presented as a victim of the “failure” to adequately insure all citizens.  The marginal individual would be one who is representable simultaneously as a victim of and as newly liberated and responsible under a given policy–conservatives at their best have sought to define such a marginal individual in their arguments for, e.g., welfare reform and school vouchers–the victim cut off from government largess is empowered to join genuine associational forms which enable her to determine her own fate.  This marginal individual will always be the one who must break from the victimary cocoon/prison in which she is enclosed; and those of us defending her must be prepared to face opprobrium and ridicule with equanimity, knowing that the individuals we “promote” might always fall back into “non-modern” conditions or the victimary bubble.  Moral, political and civilizational progress could then be measured in terms of the lowering of the threshold at which the new mode of individuality can be “detected”; that is, the extent to which each successful substitution of “guarantor” for “victim” further increases the difficulty of victimary representations.

Adam Katz

Victimary discourse has its own critique of metaphysics, which I would translate into originary thinking as follows.  Victimary discourse is fundamentally anti-mimetic:  mimesis leads inexorably to violence, and victimary discourse has faith neither in Girard’s Christian transcendence of the scapegoat nor a transcendent sign such as that posited in Eric Gans’ originary scene–the latter, in particular, could be no more than a “cover-up” of the originary violence enacted behind and constitutive of the scene.  The primacy of the declarative sentence would, for such a stance, be abhored for its internalization of mimesis:  the possibility, constitutive of the declarative, that a “fictional” world could “imitate” the “real” one.  Such representation as imitation occludes the originary violence and even if the more sophisticated victimary thinker recognizes that the occlusion of violence is simultaneously an at least minimal mitigation of that violence, we can no longer accept that trade-off in good faith:  even at the possible price of our own destruction, the forgetting that we have forgotten the originary violence must be resisted. 

It also follows, then, that victimary discourse is just as terrified of the originary ostensive as metaphysics.  Indeed, victimary discourse is a kind of heretical, parasitical, sectarian breakaway formation, ever engaged in its shadow boxing with metaphysics.  It wouldn’t be quite right to characterize the victimary as “anti-declarative” (they are not about to boycott the sentence), but it does insist on “staining” the “mirror” of the ideal or fictional world of the declarative, which claims to represent “nature.”  A sentence can be stained in many ways.  Perhaps most obvious is Derrida’s Heideggerean (but quickly abandoned) placing of especially complicit words (above all, the copula) ”under erasure.”  And there are the compulsory, ubiquitous scare quotes (I just found it impossible to summarize victimary discourse without a whole series of them.).  Almost as common, and for my purposes here more interesting, is what we might call the obligatory negation familiar to any reader of either “high” academic theory or cultural and postcolonial studies:  locutions like “of course, I don’t mean to suggest…”; “this shouldn’t be taken to support…”; “for readers who wish to implicate my discourse in the common sense, this would be misread as…”, etc.  These obligatory negations go well beyond the normal anticipation of misunderstandings and questions and exhibit markedly pathological features:  if the declarative makes an absent object present as a sign, the obligatory negation, itself, of course, a declarative of an especially strident type, makes absent an object which one fears is present–the sign itself, which would absorb one, overwhelming all resistance, into the dreaded center.

In that case, it is worth considering whether we can distinguish between more or less healthy declarative forms, between victimary ones and those of the center.  Would more directly political and substantive declaratives like, say, “Capitalism is exploitation” and “America is racist” share an identifiable structure with the obligatory negation, that of a kind of self-cancelling declarative?  Could we, in contrast, identify a structure common to “conservative” (or, really, classically liberal or conventionally patriotic) declaratives, like “the free market is the best means for producing wealth” and “America is a good society”? A declarative of the center would include in its formulation a common and ever receding horizon, while the victimary declarative would fix our attention on a rapidly approaching, even if never quite arriving, catastrophic object.

I do think it is possible, and would propose as a kind of proof text a famous declarative of Churchill’s (the brilliance of which I have heard Eric Gans remark upon):  “democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried.”  This statement might serve us as a kind of template:  any statement that can be translated into this form passes muster as a declarative of the center, and those which can’t are deemed victimary.  Churchill’s declarative is genuinely originary because it stands in the midst of while simultaneously transcending competing and potentially deadly terms.  You can only attack it by proposing another, better, form of government, which the statement implicitly invites you to attempt, but in so doing have you not demanded a place to speak within the existing democratic order?  So:  “the free market is the worst way of producing wealth except for all the others that have been tried.”  That works perfectly well:  one need not idealize the market, and this formulation openly invites us to focus on its flaws, inequities, occasional destructiveness and corrosive effects on benign traditions.  In the end, none of these claims detracts from the market’s superiority; in fact, any other form of wealth production or distribution you can try will be drawn back into the market, and we can wait patiently for that confirmation.  And:  “America is an awful society, except when compared to most of the others, real or possible, one could imagine.”  That seems to me to hold up pretty well, and Chruchill himself even had a version:  “Americans will always do the right thing, after they have tried everything else.”

I don’t think it works at all, though, for our prototypical victimary statements.  The singling out of a uniquely virulent perpetrator doesn’t allow for it:  “capitalism is an excellent mode of distribution, until you have seen all the others”: “America is a land of racial equality, until you have seen the others”–the statements lose all of their sense in the translation.  (A more decent, big government liberalism fares better, I think:  “a vigorous public sphere and expansive government intervention in the economy is the worst way of remedying the excesses of the market, except for all the others that have been tried.”  This lacks the near-axiomatic status of our pro-market statement, but it at least invites a civil and reasonable attempt at falsification, an attempt which is by no means assured of success.) 

This pathological form, then, could be further defined by the lack of almost any boundary between declarative, imperative and ostensive in victimary discourse:  to say, “America is racist,” is to command speaker and listener alike to demolish American racism by “any means necessary” and, further, to find and point out ostentatiously all instances (especially the most hidden and therefore insidious instances) of racism wherever one turns.  “Capitalism is exploitation” likewise compels one to devote oneself to denouncing all apparently non-exploitative aspects of capitalism as ”ideological” mechanisms, concealing the true nature of the mode of production.  If metaphysics hopes, by asserting the primacy of the declarative, to maintain some semblance of stability in the wild worlds of ostensives and imperatives by situating them within legitimately procedural and deliberative forms, victimary discourse is a veritable control freak–the declarative must include all possible imperatives and ostensives that might flow from it.  The declarative of the center, meanwhile, is content to let us view and consider all other alternatives, secure in the knowledge that the inexhaustibility of the sign in its latest incarnation, and the irreducible event-fulness and freedom constitutive of human existence, will ultimately provide us with the slack and guidance we need to find our way back to the “least worst.”  The only imperative inherently attached to declaratives of the center is the one commanding us to be ready to see and hear, in the middle of our most tempting resentments, signs that what seems to us the worst might really be least worse, which would simultanously be signs pointing us toward the way in which we might make it lesser still.

Adam Katz

Metaphysics is the assumption of the primacy of declarative sentence.  What is the source of this assumption; and what is our concern with it?  Is it simply that metaphysics is wrong in its occlusion of the primacy of the ostensive, or are there ethical stakes involved?  Gans has observed that the denial of the ostensive in metaphysics (the mode of thought of post-ritual order) may have been necessary to distance that order from the charged nature of the ostensive; perhaps the ostensive becomes “charged” once the recognition emerges that there is no way of satasifactorily arbitrating between mutually exclusive ones.  In that case, is it equally, or even more, necessary