GABlog

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 now not to place too much pressure on the declarative “order”?  Do we enter dangerous territory when we engage in the deconstruction or dismantling of Western metaphysics–a pedestrian academic exercise these days, I know, but does that mean we have accounted for the broader social consequences?  Or, on the contrary, are such exercises doomed to remain esoteric and ineffectual:  if declarative freedom, our freedom to determine together the nature of the imperatives by which we will be bound, is constitutive of liberal democracy, then isn’t liberal democracy the apotheosis of metaphysics, insofar as it attributes ruling force to the declarative?  And what, exactly, leaving aside the claims of philosophical purity, would be one’s objection to that?

(What follows will be in large part a reading of Eric Gans’ account of the emergence of the declarative sentence through transformations in the ostensive and imperative forms in his The Origin of Language.  It would, it seems to me, be tedious in this forum to “account” for my reading.  I will leave it to my readers to note which parts of Gans’ analysis I am addressing, which neglecting, what I am adding or revising, and what, perhaps, I am simply misreading.)

The ostensive names the central object and thereby constitutes it as sacred Being.  Once one object has been thus designated and thereby preserved as the ritual center of the emergent community, the same mode of signification can be applied to the naming of other objects–we should imagine that instances of imminent mimetic crisis will still provide the motive for such gestures, but the instances would become less urgent, more “routine,” as the gestures involved come to mediate more and more practices.   Once the sacred “buffalo” has been named in an event that saves/creates the community, the more “profane” “rabbit” can be pursued by two or more hunters in a more coordinated manner than would otherwise be possible.  As a stock of names thus accumulates, the appearance of what Gans calls the “inappropriate” ostensive, emitted in the absence of the object, being accepted as an imperative to produce the object (again, accepted as a way of deferring conflict), becomes increasingly probable.  It would seem that the “successful” imperative is less likely to take place with regard to the object of some pursuit, which could not be readily produced upon demand, than with some implement of the hunt (or equivalent activity) which could have already been named in one of the less high stakes events I just referred to–like, say, a spear.

Finally, we would have, as a reply to an “inappropriate” imperative (in some situation in which the object cannot be produced), the “negative ostesnive,” in which the name of the object is simply repeated, deferring the anticipated response to the unfulfilled imperative.  If this response is accepted (if the demand is not pursued to the point of crisis), the negative ostensive becomes the germ of the declarative, since it “refers” to the absence of the object.  For the negative ostensive to become a genuine declarative (with what Gans calls here a relation between “topic” and “comment”), something must be said “about” the topic, or object in question.  This something must come from the stock of names or nominals already generated by the community of sign users.  What is the nature of the comment upon the topic in such a situation?  The negative ostensive, which sometimes works, hasn’t worked in this instance:  the absence of the object must be presented in some more “persuasive” way.  I would suggest that the comment must involve more than representing the absence of the object as a proximal presence–that is, it must be more than “spear over there” or “spear home”, because such a response would likely exacerbate rather than quell the crisis by intensifying the demand that the object be retrieved and produced. 

The more likely name to be introduced in lieu of the failure of the negative ostensive, I propose, is the Name-of-God, of the originary, sacred object.  The Name-of-God does more than designate a particular object; it communicates the repulsive force of the center and, I would hypothesize, this repulsive force would be needed to enable the leap into a new linguistic form predicated upon the object’s absence and its replacement by the presence of the linguistic form itself.  The object’s absence is substituted for by God’s presence.  So, the first declarative would be something like “God (here)/(not) spear.”  “God/spear” would call for the same response on the part of the “imperator” as the Name-of-God effected for all the participants on the originary scene.  The iteration of this linguistic form for other objects would then be generalizable along the lines of “God presences otherwise than as_______” The verb form would first of all name God’s presencing here, and could then be applied to all other forms of “presencing.”  Other objects could be inserted into this formal structure, as originally took place with ostensive.

If God presences otherwise than as ______, then He presences as the sentence itself, insofar as it “makes sense” or is “understood.”  If the listener thus accepts the sentence (he doesn’t pursue his demand), then he has accepted the speaker’s “invitation” to see the presencing of God in other declaratives which will be as fleeting as the one just heard, which vanished in the instant in which it was “understood.”  This “invitation,” moreover, must be accepted by the listener as an internalized imperative now directed toward himself, a directive to be prepared to treat the next declarative ostensively, as pointing to a new form of sacred Being (an “otherwise” form of God’s presencing).  Insofar as it defers the impossible imperative, or perhaps colliding imperatives, by thus internalizing and redirecting the imperative form toward a new kind of ostensive gesture, the declarative transcends but also includes these lower linguistic forms.  So, for the listener (which includes the speaker as well as listener to his own sentence), each declarative (in its internal iteration, its “making sense”) would have the general form (which could be “diagrammed”) of:  “Present yourself before the space where God’s otherwise presencing will be revealed.”  In turn, the increasing range of application of the declarative would increase the range of possible imperatives and the compelxity of various interactions between imperatives and their “softened” form,  interrogatives; which would, then, push the declarative form to unfold more of its potential.

The problem with the primacy of the declarative in metaphysics is that it reduces all meaning to the distinction between true and false, or (a softer version) substantial/acccidental.  The verification conditions can never be made commensurate with the statement to be judged, though:  in the end, one has to “see” the object whose reality is to be ascertained, and no rule can account for what would count as doing so.  In the political context, this leads us to endless arguments over incommensurable models of the social.  The problem here is not that the arguments are endless; rather, it is that the models of the social in question are not only incommensurable with each other but with the forms of power articulated so as to “realize” one or the other.  On this point, Richard Rorty is right when he points out that, say, John Rawls’ model of originary equality, while apparently meant to authorize a version of the modern Western welfare state could just as easily be used to justify an extreme libertarian argument–one simply needs to contend that it is the unlimited workings of the free market and expanding individual freedom vis a vis that state that will improve the conditions of the least well off.

Even better! one might respond:  that’s precisely what makes it a viable model–it allows for a range of legitimate arguments while excluding the extremes destructive of the liberal order (although, whether one could find a way to use Rawls to justify fascism, apartheid, or communism perhaps remains to be seen; or, rather, depends upon forms of interpretive ingenuity we haven’t yet seen). But leave aside the creeping cynicism of such an approach (once one knows that it is only “my” Rawls that enables me to argue for my pet project, can I continue to make the argument in good faith? [what role does "good faith" argumentation play in liberal democracy?]).  Even more problematic is its mind numbing monotony–how long does it take before one has figured out every possible move in public, gladitorial-style contests over the re-application of the favored models?    

The possibility of treating the declarative sentence ostensively, as a calling into being of a world centered upon ourselves as sign-producers and renewers of sacrality is what makes Gans’ fourth, “discursive,” freedom, possible.  The most powerful declarative would be the one capable of the most varied searches for ways of placing oneself before the space in which God’s otherwise presencing will be revealed.  Such a declarative will enact or embody such a search, which is perhaps simply a way of reminding ourselves that when and where one makes a declarative statement matters.  “All men are created equal” is not always equally charged–it matters whether the one saying it is placing his freedom and life on the line in doing so. (How else could we ever know what such a phrase really meant?)

The freest declarative, then, will be the one that places itself at the intersection of “unreasonable” (impossible) imperatives, demanding that those issuing the imperative either enforce that demand in the face of the speaker’s refusal (a refusal on the grounds that its implementation would close the space of God’s otherwise presencing or, more simply, the space in which successive declaratives could be issued) or echo the “universal” principle (universal because allowing for unlimited iterations) which has, in that case, demonstrably inhibited one’s will to enforce. 

For the metaphysical supporter of liberal democracy, our arguments over the election of representatives and the laws they then make and enforce is all there is.  Those who violate or fail to enforce laws, those who take responsibility for deploying the power they have been delegated in unauthorized ways to meet unprecedented circumstances, those who fail to adhere to the rules of public discourse (argumentation following an accepted or “certified” model of the social) are simply unintelligible or worse.  A metaphysical liberal can easily accept the results of the civil rights movement after the fact (the results conform to a very recognizable model); would his liberalism have given him the moral grounding for supporting it when doing so would earn him the opprobrium of neighbors, co-workers and family?  Setting aside my own thinking on the matter, while those conservatives who take an “enforcement first” stance on illegal immigration have an impeccable theoretical stance (who could be against enforcing the law–if you want more immigrants, change the law accordingly) they miss, it seems to me, this “ostensive” dimension to freedom:  how will people respond when they are asked to turn in their neighbors and co-workers, or when they are asked to enforce laws requiring them to round up and deport entire families?  Neither the conservative imperative nor the liberal declarative is enough to account for our politics, on the boundary between the victimary on one side deliberately determined forms of reciprocity on the other.  Metaphysical liberalism doesn’t want to change the nature of imperatives; it wants to ensure their legitimacy and hence certainty.  A post-metaphysical, generative liberalism would embed imperatives in structures of transparency and accountability that produce new imperatives by checking others, placing each of us on both sides of the imperative in as “equally” distributed manner as possible; modelling the social in novel forms of solidarity, responsibility and reciprocity, rather than applying a model of the social.

All freedom is ostensive in the simple sense that freedom has to mean that no one knows what I am going to say or do next–if I am either predictable or controlled I am not free.  But “no one” has to include myself–I also must not know what I am going to say or do until I hear or see it (if I could know, others could too).  So, such freedom involves a perpetual readiness to hear and see something one has never seen and heard before; something astonishing and unprecedented, new forms of God’s otherwise presencing.  Such freedom can by no means be reduced to the political, but politically its consequence is that those who embrace such a freedom are our greatest and maybe only surety against all totalitarianisms–and the terror of such freedom on the part of any one who would like to see our imperatives obeyed unconditionally means that we will never have seen the last of the totalitarian imperative.

Adam Katz

To speak of “imperative freedom” as “freedom from another’s intention,” which is to say, Isaiah Berlin’s “negative freedom,” interestingly sets up a line separating two ways of thinking about freedom.  The corresponding, “positive” freedom, according to Gans’s account in Chronicle #348, would presumably be that of the sadist, who has the capacity to impose his imperative will upon others.  In that case, while the pre-existence of the primary, ostensive, freedom, implying the existence of others’ intentions at least potentially at odds with one’s own, makes the sadistic temptation permanent, our reliance upon the communal nature of that primary freedom nevertheless serves to check that temptation by “strictly regulating the exercise of imperative freedom.”

The means of checking imperativity in pre-modern societies is through ritual and gift-exchange; in modernity this becomes a new kind of problem.  Here it is deliberation, or “declarative freedom,” “the freedom to help choose the imperatives by which one will be governed,” that provides the necessary check.  Slavery, tyranny and torture are the forms of imperativity unchecked; still, the emergence of declarative and, even more, “discursive freedom,” continually set the bar higher regarding what will count as these unchecked forms of imperativity.

Gans returns to ostensive freedom in his concluding paragraph, where that freedom “to intend an object in principle generates for each member of society the discursive freedom to become an object of intention”;  the human capacity to direct sustained attention toward some object ultimately becomes the capacity to become, simultaneously, that very object but also a sign directing attention to other likewise self-constituting objects.  It would make sense to assume that the capacity to produce such “personal artworks” oneself coincides with the capacity to appreciate and encourage it in others.

Ostensive freedom doesn’t appear in Gans’s discussion of declarative freedom;  here a relationship between imperativity and declarativity alone is proposed.  Propositions can contend and re-combine with each other in all kinds of ways, but the actual medium by which declarativity checks imperativity is not clear:  we might come to an agreement regarding the choice of “imperatives by which [we] will be governed” but what ensures that we will indeed be thusly governed?  Do declaratives have some kind of inherent checking power?  Are those who issue imperatives somehow intrinsically checked, equipped as imperators to receive instructions regarding the limits of their own power, which is to say, always already declarative as well?

If the answer is “yes” to these questions, which is to say, if what constitutes the modern political order is the interdependency of imperative and declarative (if, say, we can only act on an imperative in good faith if we can manage to square it with or translate it into some declarative we might utter to ourself or another), then this must be so because ostensive freedom comes into play here as well.  Modern politics emerges as a result of a series of events in which the “excesses” of imperativity have been witnessed, recorded and commemorated publically.  These would be the modern founding events, sometimes events which, upon reflection, seem almost unbelievably trivial (like the Boston “Massacre”).  Such freedom would be the freedom to generate new public centers and spaces in which a new series of actions can take place.

Perhaps such a conception of political freedom would further give us a way of seeing imperativity in somewhat less charged terms than as, at best, a necessary evil.  As Gans says, imperativity is certainly associable with responsibility, but also in the more “positive” sense in which its limits can be strictly set in terms of what one must have complete or partial control over in order to be reasonably held responsible for the outcome of a particular process (what the U.S. Constitution refers to as “necessary and proper means”).  You can’t legitimately fire me for not getting copies of a given document to everyone attending the meeting by 4PM if you didn’t also give me “absolute” power over the copier between 2 and 3, etc.

Since such “legitimate” limits, which also empower responsible imperativity, can themselves only be determined scenically, through the application of the memory of “excesses” and their exemplary victims, such ostensivity must also be appropriable by the responsible agent herself:  acting responsibly with delegated powers is itself a form of freedom.  We would then have two, complementary, but potentially and often actually conflicting forms of modern freedom:  that of the responsible agent, the guarantor of the freedom of others under limits set by those others; and the agency of those who emerge from the “others” themselves, who witness and, when necessary, place themselves (as potential victims) at the center of those events which test the limits of responsibility.

Our victimary order is perhaps a result of some imbalance, or even severance of the connection, between these two modes of modern freedom:  we have become incapable of respecting the public freedom of the responsible guarantor.  It is hard to see how even the most robust exchange of declaratives can heal this divide.  Perhaps expansions of discursive freedoms will be helpful here:  less a “chastened” version of of the realm of freedom, discursive freedom might mark the end of our yearning for the end of history through supplementations that increasingly determine the actual shape of the public, political world.  Think, for example, of the boycott, that mixture of consumer freedom and freedom of speech that provides a thread linking the American Revolution (the Boston “Tea Party”) to the signature tactics of the Civil Rights movement.  Boycotts can be private or state-sponsered (as in current calls for sanctions against Iran); boycotts can easily emerge as sites of public dialogue (for every boycott one could imagine a possible counter-boycott); they require various levels of commitment and can aim for change at various levels or to varying degrees; they can flow into more directly political forms of activity, like fundraising or the marginalizing and isolating of “rogue” regimes.  Boycotts, further, as a form of renunciation of a given product or exchange partner, open a space into which new exchanges, perhaps of a gift-like character but at any rate more intensely charged that usual, can enter, staging for us the form of the event in which new signs are produced within a communal space.  Boycotts always have a dimension of ostensive freedom, in other words, and therefore perhaps provide us with ways to continue the transition from politics based upon exposing and denouncing residual forms of illegitimate imperativity to a politics predicated upon the invention of new modes of exchange.

Adam Katz

Chronicle 348 deals with the question of human freedom from the standpoint of the linguistic forms discussed in The Origin of Language (UC, 1981). It is available at http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw348.htm

-eric gans