ORIGINARY THINKING - Elements of Generative Anthropology

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Originary Thinking

ORIGINARY THINKING Elements of Generative Anthropology

Eric Gans Thomas J. Bala Library

TRENT UNIVERSITY ■PETERBOROUGH, ONTARIO

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

1993

Vs)

Ol O-v V

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 1993 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States of America CIP data are at the end of the book

Contents

Preface vii 1 part one:

Introduction i Originary Analysis

2

The Anthropological Idea of God 31

3

Morality and Ethics 45

4

A Generative Taxonomy of Speech-Acts 62

5

The Origin of Fiction 86

6

Narrativity and Textuality 100

part two:

Esthetic History

7

Originary Esthetics 117

8

High Art and the Classical Esthetic 132

9

The Neoclassical Esthetic 150

10

The Romantic Esthetic 164

11

The Modernist Esthetic 188

12

The Postmodern Esthetic 207 Index 223

Preface

I n The Origin of Language (1981), I first formulated the hypothesis that human language and the species that uses it originated in an event, a memorable scene of origin. The End of Culture (1985) and Science and Faith (1990) explored the cultural and religious consequences of this hypothesis. Originary Thinking pursues this exploration in the areas of religion, ethics, philosophy of language, theory of discourse, and esthetics; it provides a general introduction to the domain that has come to be called "generative anthropology." To previous expositions of the theory, it adds two new elements: (1) an explicit methodology—"originary analy¬ sis"—for rethinking fundamental human categories such as lan¬ guage, desire, and the sacred as elements of the originary scene; and (2) an outline of esthetic history that turns to the advantage of theoretical discourse Aristotle's dictum that poetry is more philo¬ sophical than history. The ethical is the supreme human dimension, and what makes it human is its dependence on self-reflective thought. In the face of the fragmentation of knowledge among academic specializations and the proliferation of ethnic and group rivalries, our most press¬ ing ethical and intellectual need—one not being met by the cur¬ rently fashionable victimary discourses—is to recall our unity as a species. Originary thinking means making the effort to conceive the human in universal terms. Those who emphasize not merely the cultural differences that separate us but the impossibility of rationally discussing them challenge us to renew our understand¬ ing of the common scene of significance that underlies and gives

viii

PREFACE

meaning to these very differences. Active dialogue with our origin was traditionally the province of religion. We must renew this originary dialogue on a more universal basis than religion can provide, for it is the only conversation in which all of humanity can take part. The originary hypothesis is not a technical question to be de¬ bated among specialists. It matters to all of us whether language emerged consciously or unconsciously, suddenly or gradually, on a single public scene or in the dispersed context of intimacy. If hu¬ man self-consciousness were absent at the origin of language, it could never be acquired later. The contrary hypothesis may please those who consider human self-consciousness to be an illusion; but this hypothesis is disproved by the very self-consciousness shown by its promoters. An originary anthropology must account for its own historical emergence. In Hegel's system, this emergence takes place as the flight of Minerva's owl at the end of history. But Hegel's account leads to a contradiction. The underlying function of human culture is the avoidance of conflict through the deferral of resentment. This aim cannot be pursued directly. Instead, culture brings about deferral through the creation of significant differences. A theory of culture that explains the identity behind these differences will consequently arouse the resentment of those who define them¬ selves by them. The more totalizing the theory, the greater the resentment that will be mobilized against it. This was the fate of the original "end of history." Hegel's dialectic, although conversant with slaves as well as masters, had no answer to resentment. The nihilistic passion of the Dostoevskian underground man shattered the crystal palace of Hegelian rationality. The lesson to be learned is that truly originary thinking does not equate its own emergence with the end of history. In the context of a worldwide exchange system creating ever more degrees of free¬ dom, no theory can predict its own success or failure in the mar¬ ketplace. Our anthropology, in affirming the ultimate necessity of the market, predicts, not its own triumph, but its own undecid¬ ability. It is this prediction alone that is the test of its (undemonstrable) truth, the truth of a theory that denies historical closure. This is the anthropological equivalent of Godel's theorem, which denies the closure of arithmetic.

PREFACE

IX

As is already apparent, originary thinking is no stranger to para¬ dox. Yet the exposition that follows eschews the paradoxical ecritme so popular in recent times. Ethically responsible thought, today as at the origin of humanity, is willing to constrain its use of representations in order to facilitate our common grasp of what they represent. I would like to express my appreciation to all those who have taken an active interest in generative anthropology and who have encour¬ aged and stimulated the reflections that make up this work. I refer especially to Douglas Collins, Andrew McKenna, Tobin Siebers, and the participants in my seminars at UCLA: Thomas Bertonneau, Thomas Haeussler, Christopher Juzwiak, Kenneth Mayers, and Matthew Schneider. To them, and to the future of originary thinking, this book is dedicated. E.G.

Originary Thinking

CHAPTER

Introduction

anthropology, the study of the human, is that it is undertaken by human beings them¬ selves. * Knowledge of the human is, in its essence, self-knowledge. The first task of a critical anthropology, an anthropology capable of justifying its own existence, must therefore be to explain why the need for self-knowledge is an essential attribute of humanity. The answer to the ontological question "What is the human?" depends on the answer to the pragmatic question "Why is it necessary for humans to know themselves?" We can construct no theory of the human that is not grounded on the human necessity that motivates our construction; humans would not exist as self-understanding beings if such understanding were not necessary to their existence. An anthropology founded on this pragmatic basis cannot deduce its principles from a metaphysical realm of pure knowledge. The logic of the human requirement of self-knowledge is only under¬ standable as that of a historical being, a species that began here and not there because it was here that the need for self-knowledge first arose. An anthropology that concerns itself with the here of this beginning must begin with the generation of the human from its origin in the nonhuman; it must be, in other words, a generative The

peculiarity

of

anthropology. In order to construct its hypothesis of human origin, this anthro* Frequent reference will be made to my previous books in the domains of esthetics and generative anthropology: Essais d’esthetique paradoxale (Paris: Gallimard, 1977); The Origin of Language (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); The End of Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985b and Science and Faith (Savage, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991)-

2

INTRODUCTION

pology requires a criterion of the human that will permit us to determine when the origin has in fact taken place. Language is the privileged formal criterion of humanity. But the construction of the scene of origin of the human being as a language-user must moti¬ vate the definition of the human being as the user of language. The simple equation "humanity = language" hypostatizes the institu¬ tion of language over against humanity itself as its creator and beneficiary. Such exclusive reference to an institution, even if it be the minimal one of language, distracts us from the ethical impera¬ tive that presides over the anthropological enterprise. Language is a formal object only because it is in the first place the indispensable form of human interaction. Language is an instrument of knowl¬ edge in general only because it is in the first place the instrument of a self-knowledge crucial to the community in which it was first used. Because the origin of language must be justified, not merely posited, the minimal act of humanity is best described not as "human using language," but as a prehuman creature becoming human by using language in a situation where this use is inevita¬ ble—that is, one to which the creature can adapt only by means of the acquisition of language. And the fact that the interaction be¬ tween the members of the protohuman community comes to be mediated by a self-contained form that can be abstracted from the situation of its use suggests that the crucial factor in this situation, the factor that gave rise to language, is the dangerous immediacy of this very interaction. The most parsimonious definition of the species that emerges from such a situation is this: humanity is the species for which the central problem of survival is posed by the relations within the species itself rather than those with the external world. Humanity is the species that is its own chief problem. The criterion imposed by this definition is that of an essentially self-determined domain of interaction—in a word, the ethical. Human beings are language¬ using animals because they are ethical animals; only a central concern with intraspecific interaction can explain the invention/ discovery of language. But it would be a mistake to interpret the requirement of parsimony as dictating that the hypothetical origin of language take place in the absence of the other fundamental characteristics of humanity. An originary hypothesis must con-

INTRODUCTION

3

struct a plausible account of the origin of all that is essentially human—including the sacred, the esthetic, desire, and resent¬ ment—simultaneously with that of language. The claim that it is the problematic nature of a collective life constantly threatened by intraspecific violence that makes human¬ ity into the inventor of language, art, and religion is a hypothesis, not a logical certainty. The articulation of the ethical definition of humanity with the institutional criterion provided by language provides the distinctive ethos of the anthropology that will be developed here. Since every individual poses a potential threat to the existence of the human community, the renunciation of violence by each of its individual members is the constantly renewed foundation of this community. But so long as the necessity for this renunciation is apparent only in situations of crisis—that is, in situations that reproduce the pattern of the event in which language came into being—it is the central focus of the crisis rather than the conflict¬ ing human desires at its periphery that will be experienced as both its cause and its solution. This is the source of the historical denial, or "forgetting," of the primacy of the ethical. The self-contained ethical definition of the human is rejected in favor of determina¬ tion by transcendental or immanent factors. Only the final decline of the transcendental eschatology that had persisted from primitive ritual through Christianity to Marxism forces us at last to recog¬ nize the continued dominance of the ethical. Old forms die out and new ones are born, but humanity remains the species that is its own greatest problem. The generative nature of the anthropology we construct is only a function of its return to the ethical. The elaboration of a theory of origin is of value only as a means of raising ourselves to a higher level of ethical self-understanding.

The Originary Hypothesis The origin of humanity never ceases to fascinate us, as a contin¬ uous stream of books and articles makes clear. The general public takes for granted the existence of such an origin and assumes that the science of paleontology is coming ever nearer to discovering it. Conversely, sophisticated students of the humanities contend that to entertain the concept of human origin is in itself proof of intel-

4

INTRODUCTION

lectual immaturity. We are given to understand that (i) the models furnished by the philosophical tradition are naively "logocentric," that is, they presuppose the logos the origin of which they are attempting to explain, and (a) any attempt to create a model inde¬ pendent of this tradition is yet more naive, since our very thought processes are shaped by it. Perhaps. The objections of philosophical nihilism cannot be answered on their own terms. Intellectual prog¬ ress has always been made by "naively" cutting Gordian knots. The demonstration that philosophers and even social scientists have always misunderstood the originary conditions of human emer¬ gence is rather an encouragement for the advancement of new theories than an a priori demonstration that such theories cannot possibly succeed. The origin of humanity is not a mathematical aporia like the squaring of the circle. The empirical necessity of a well-defined human origin is clear enough to lend a suspicion of irrationality to those who cate¬ gorically deny it. The universe, life, and all other species are pre¬ sumed to have come into being at some specific time and place. Humanity cannot have evolved imperceptibly from some other form, nor does it exist from all eternity. It has recently been hypoth¬ esized by students of human genetics that all humans are the descendants of a single "Eve",-* if this admittedly controversial hypothesis is true, then the familiar models of a gradual transition from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens are definitively falsified. What gives rise to the denial of human origin is not the simple fact of origin per se, but the particular uniqueness of human origin. In the Genesis narrative, the creation of man is the culminating goal of God's creation of the universe. The most important feature of the biblical account is not its naive anthropocentrism, but its dramatic form: the creation of humanity takes place as an event. *See Michael Brown, The Search for Eve (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), and the debate in Scientific American 266, no. 4 (Apr. 1992), which opposes Allan Wilson and Rebecca Cann, "The Recent African Genesis of Humans," to Alan Thorne and Milford Wolpoff, "The Multiregional Evolution of Humans." It should be emphasized that although "recent genesis" nicely corroborates the small-group scenario of the originary hypothesis, this hypothesis is by no means dependent on such corroboration. The continuous mixture of genes required by the "multiregional" model is fully compatible with a unique cul¬ tural origin of the human. The originary hypothesis implies that the genetic differentiation of Homo sapiens should result from the new selection criteria inaugurated by the use of language; whatever the evolutionary pattern, genetic changes must follow rather than lead the emergence of cultural phenomena.

INTRODUCTION

5

An event is not simply an occurrence; it is an occurrence signifi¬ cant for a mind. This is the key feature of human origin that is unacceptable to those who contest it. Because the rest of divine creation is presented in event-form as well, it is easy to forget that human origin is the source of the founding religious intuition. It is human origin that provides the model for the origin of natural phenomena, which are understood to arise as if already existing in the context of human culture. The myth of creation by a transcen¬ dent God forecloses the need to determine the mind for whom the originary event took place. But if we renounce the myth, then the mind for whom the event of human origin was significant can only be the human mind. And the human mind can only have recog¬ nized and preserved the meaning of the first of the "arbitrary" signs of language if it received this meaning in a collective act suffi¬ ciently memorable for the members of the collectivity to recall it. The origin of humanity is distinguished from that of any other species by the fact that its differential criterion is cultural rather than biological. Even if we accept Chomsky's hypothesis that mod¬ ern human beings are born with a "language-acquisition device" (and it is difficult not to entertain some form of this hypothesis), we cannot define the origin of language as the biological reality of the appearance of this innate device. Humans cannot have developed the inborn capacity to use language in its mature form unless such capacity had selective value; and this could only have been the case if language of a more primitive kind was already in use. At the moment of the emergence of language, it is scarcely credible that a language-acquisition mechanism was running in place, waiting to be applied. The difference between a biological and a cultural origin is the difference between the fuzzy time-span of isolation and genetic differentiation and the clean break produced by an event. But an¬ thropological theories of human origin have tended to interpret this difference in the opposite sense, by prolonging rather than contracting the time-span during which Homo sapiens remains in a state of inchoate emergence. The gap between our hominid ances¬ tors and human beings reflects more than the "missing links" in the fossil record; this is a gap that not even an ideally complete paleontology could conceivably fill. For even if we could trace the complete evolutionary record of the emergence of the organs of speech, just as with Chomsky's LAD, the first act of human lan-

6

INTRODUCTION

guage must have been performed by creatures who had no specific biological preparation for it. The "gap" or "missing link" is neither in the physical-biological nor in the cultural realm, but between them. The human-cultural domain is irreducible to the categories by means of which we understand the behavior of even the most advanced subhuman species. To be sure, anthropology's acknowledgment of the gap is superior to creation myth's transcendental leap over it; acknowl¬ edgment is itself a form of understanding, albeit a purely negative one. The deniers of human origin, who posit the intellectual neces¬ sity of the gap (humanity, or at any rate language, has "always already" come into being), are more sophisticated, but hardly more helpful. The gap can be filled constructively only by an originary hypothesis. The emergence of a language-using creature cannot be explained, as it customarily has been, by a tacit appeal to an elan vital that continuously drives evolution to produce ever more highly inte¬ grated forms. This emergence implies rather the crisis and failure of previously effective mechanisms of communication and repre¬ sentation. The commonly repeated idea that human language emerged gradually from preexistent forms of animal communica¬ tion denies rather than bridges the gap of human specificity. The self-modifying nature of language and its diversity give clear enough proof that it has no roots in hard-wired animal communica¬ tion. The origin of words is clearly ad hoc. Some students of language origin, like Morris Swadesh and the creators of the "Nostratic" hypothesis, lend implicit or explicit support to the idea of a unique origin for all human language.* No doubt their demonstrations are far from unassailable. But if we really consider the origin of language as the origin of a new species, it is intellectually irresponsible to entertain the notion that this origin occurred at more than one place and time, an affront to the principle of monogenesis that would not be tolerated in the case of any other species. It is the cultural nature of human origin that gives such a hypothesis the appearance of reasonableness, whereas the reality is just the opposite: if it is absurd that ordinary biolog* Swadesh's ideas are found in his The Origin and Diversification of Lan¬ guage (London: Routledge &. Kegan Paul, 1972); for the Nostratic hypothesis, see Vitalij V. Shevoroshkin and T. L. Markey, eds., Typology, Relationship, and Time (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Karoma, 1986).

INTRODUCTION

7

ical speciation should take place twice for the same species, it is even less reasonable to assume this for a cultural speciation that requires not a statistically improbable genetic mutation, but a memorable collective event. The originary hypothesis is not a logical necessity. It is, however, a necessary consequence of the assumption that human beings can understand—that is, construct a motivated account of—their own origin as the possessors of language. Those who reject out of hand the notion of origin reject the very possibility of such an under¬ standing. But there are many in the scientific camp who refuse to entertain an originary hypothesis, not because human origin is in principle beyond comprehension, but because such a "speculative" hypothesis cannot be falsified by the evidence. This is a method¬ ological objection grounded on the principle that, for the scientific method, ontology has no reality independent of methodology. But to take this position is to forget that every methodology is founded, implicitly or explicitly, on an ontology. A new ontology must be allowed the chance to generate its own methodology. If there is any plausibility whatever in the hypothesis that humanity originated in an event, then the true spirit of the scientific method is to follow this hypothesis wherever it leads, even if—or especially if—the resulting science embodies a new conception of verification and falsification.

The Originary Event Once we attempt to understand the origin of human beings as language-users, we commit ourselves to the construction of a plau¬ sible model of the hypothetical event in which the use of language first began. In accord with the principle of parsimony, we must assume that language first emerged in a situation where its emer¬ gence was necessary. This means that language must have permit¬ ted the protohuman group within which it arose to survive a crisis that it could not have surmounted by the (animal) means pre¬ viously at its disposal. This crisis must have been one internal to the group, in which (as per our ethical definition of the human) the principal danger to the group's continued existence is posed by its members themselves. With these considerations in mind, we may conceive the origi¬ nary event as follows: a circle of protohumans, possibly after a

INTRODUCTION

successful hunt, surround an appetitively attractive object, for ex¬ ample, the body of a large animal. Such an object is potentially a focus of conflict, since the appetites of all are directed to something that cannot belong to all. As is the case with all higher animals, there exists within the group a dominance hierarchy that normally functions to prevent this kind of conflict. Such hierarchies operate not in relation to the group as a whole, but on a one-on-one basis; an individual may challenge the alpha animal for supremacy, but there is within the group neither collective dominance nor collective violence. But at the moment of crisis, the strength of the appetitive drive has been increased by appetitive mimesis, the propensity to imi¬ tate one's fellows in their choice of an object of appropriation, to such a point that the dominance hierarchy can no longer coun¬ teract the symmetry of the situation. Mimesis is the fundamental means of learning at every level of the animal kingdom: animal behavior, when not wholly stereotyped, is learned chiefly by imita¬ tion, which is clearly more efficient than trial-and-error innova¬ tion. Mimesis is the basis of higher intelligence. We are familiar with the mimetic behavior of primates, but Aristotle already con¬ sidered man to be the most mimetic animal. This suggests that the protohuman was a primate that had become, so to speak, too mi¬ metic to remain an animal.* Hence, in violation of the dominance hierarchy, all hands reach out for the object; but at the same time each is deterred from appropriating it by the sight of all the others reaching in the same direction. The "fearful symmetry" of the situation makes it impos¬ sible for any one participant to defy the others and pursue the gesture to its conclusion. The center of the circle appears to possess a repellent, sacred force that prevents its occupation by the mem*We owe the renewal of our understanding of mimesis to the work of Rene Girard, who rediscovered the critical, inherently conflictive nature of a category of action that had previously been viewed, following Aristotle's Poetics, as an unproblematic source of esthetic pleasure. The discussion of mimetic desire and conflict is central to all of Girard's major works, notably Mensonge romantique et verite romanesque (Paris: Grasset, 1961; in English, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel [Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965]), La violence et le sacre (Paris: Grasset, 1972; in English, Violence and the Sacred [Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977]), and Des choses cachees depuis la fondation du monde (Paris: Grasset, 1978; in English, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987]).

INTRODUCTION

9

bers of the group, that converts the gesture of appropriation into a gesture of designation, that is, into an ostensive sign. Thus the sign arises as an aborted gesture of appropriation that comes to desig¬ nate the object rather than attempting to capture it. The sign is an economical substitute for its inaccessible referent. Things are scarce and consequently objects of potential contention; signs are abundant because they can be reproduced at will. But it also follows from the parsimony of the hypothesis that the peace brought about by the deferral of appetitive satisfaction through the sign must ultimately lead to increased appetitive satis¬ faction for the participants; in order for a new conflict-deferring mechanism to survive, it must provide a more successful outcome than the old. We must therefore assume that the appropriation of the central object takes place, after its deferral by the linguistic sign, no longer within the "instinctual" order defined by the preex¬ isting hierarchy, but in a human community defined by the sym¬ metrical and reciprocal conditions of the sign's emission. Every participant's sign is equivalent to every other, but this equivalence is not a natural fact: it is a cultural fact that the participants themselves at the same time create and become aware of. Similarly, the appropriation of the central object must proceed through com¬ munal attention to and awareness of the establishment of equiva¬ lence. The object must be equally divided among the participants. This is the foundation of the communal system of exchange, of the material economy. The new linguistic reciprocity is translated into material terms as the principle of equivalent value.

Origin ary Analysis The originary hypothesis per se—that human language, and with it, humanity itself, came into being in an event—has a higher logical status than this or any other particular version of the origi¬ nary scene. Yet the hypothesis can only become functional through the articulation of the separate moments of this scene. The purpose of this articulation is not to arrive at a ne varietur "true" version of the event, but to explore the fundamental phenomena of human interaction from the perspective of their origin. The originary hy¬ pothesis is in the first place a heuristic. The operation of originary analysis begins not with a global

IO

INTRODUCTION

picture of the originary event but with a fundamental category of the human, such as desire, exchange, art, religion, or morality, the origin of which concerns us. We must construct a plausible model of the "moment" within the event in which the particular category is constituted. An explicit connection is thus drawn between the specific understanding we seek and a general theory of the human. The epistemological principle behind this procedure is that the most powerful understanding results from the maximal isolation from the empirically historical. This is not without resemblance to Husserl's procedure of "bracketing." But this origmary phenome¬ nology seeks not timeless essences but models that are intrin¬ sically temporal. The originary hypothesis allows us to reconstruct the historicity of the human condition without losing ourselves in historical empiricism. Originary analysis is essentially narrative,- we understand a hu¬ man phenomenon by attempting to tell the story of its emergence. This does not mean that all history is contained in the originary scene in a kind of universal preformation. But for any category to be considered an essential attribute of the human, it must be con¬ ceived as present at the outset, since otherwise human beings were able to exist without it. The list of these essential categories need not be fixed once and for all; but when we decide to change it, we are changing our theory of the human, our anthropology. In the sense in which we use the word, "anthropology" is best preceded by the indefinite article. The horizon of origmary analysis is not "an¬ thropology, the science of the human" but an anthropology, a the¬ ory of the human for the specifics of which the analyst must accept historical responsibility. The procedure of originary analysis thus outlined is the method¬ ological consequence of the human ontology inherent in the origi¬ nary hypothesis. Just as the procedure itself is not without resem¬ blance to the epoche of phenomenology, so its anteriority to the specific sciences of human behavior recalls Husserl's claim that a phenomenology based on intuited essences can constitute a first science to which all the specific "regional" sciences are subordi¬ nate. But the scope of generative anthropology is not all-inclusive. Only the categories of human culture may usefully be subjected to originary analysis, not those by means of which we seek to under¬ stand the natural universe.

INTRODUCTION

II

No doubt these too, to the extent that we wish to consider them as fundamental categories of the human understanding, might be subjected to such analysis. But the resulting anthropology would commit its author to a fixed view of the natural world. Such a perspective was perhaps reasonable in Kant's or even in Husserl's time, but it is hardly so in ours. Humans certainly have hard-wired perceptual mechanisms, as even such a conventionalist esthetician as E. H. Gombrich has recognized. * But we no longer accept Kant's inclusion of Newtonian spatiotemporal relations among the found¬ ing categories of the understanding. The central limitation of any philosophy of science is precisely the uselessness of imposing any such a priori limits on our understanding of the natural world, including humanity itself insofar as it is a part of this world. Cul¬ tural phenomena, on the other hand, are incomprehensible with¬ out prior reflection on these limits of our understanding. It has become common among practitioners of both the human¬ ities and the social sciences to affirm that the nature-culture boundary is fundamentally undefinable. The two discourses, how¬ ever, locate this nonboundary at opposite extremes of the natureculture continuum. The humanists affirm that culture is every¬ where and the "referent" is as inaccessible as Kant's thing-in-itself; the scientists, that human activities may be analyzed by the same methods as natural phenomena, any methodological differences being comparable to those found within the domain of the natural sciences. In contrast to these one-sided alternatives, originary analysis replaces the abstract nature-culture opposition with the recon¬ struction of the originary event in as much detail as is necessary to specify the place of a given element. This operation incorporates all forms of behavior into an integrated view of the human rather than creating ad hoc, incompletely theorized, and reductive anthropolo¬ gies, such as those found in the various forms of sociobiology or of psychoanalytic theory. The minimal claim of any anthropology is that the level on which it operates is irreducible to those below it. The claim of generative anthropology is stronger: not only does anthropology merit its own place in what Jean Piaget called the "circle of the *See Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 3d ed. (London: Phaidon, 1968), and Art, Perception and Reality (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972.).

12

INTRODUCTION

sciences/'* but the difference between the anthropological and the nonanthropological is of a higher order than that between any two regional sciences. Indeed, this difference is constitutive of science in general, since only a self-knowing creature could have created natural science. The objective scene of scientific knowledge is in the first place not the scene of nature but the scene of human origin. The affirmation that all the human sciences fall within the an¬ thropological domain is no more than a tautology. The important question is to define the nature of the relationship between the general science of anthropology and the "regional" sciences of hu¬ man behavior. The operation of originary analysis provides a theo¬ retical point of departure for the study of any human activity by establishing the conditions of a dialogue with our origin concern¬ ing the activity in question. This originary dialogue provides a stable point of reference for the so-called hermeneutic circle by means of which the explanation of a human activity enters into dialogue with the performers of this activity. Through the inter¬ mediary of the originary hypothesis, the understanding we acquire of any particular region of human action contributes to our under¬ standing of humanity-in-general. Unlike the claim that all the human sciences are branches of anthropology, it is not quite a tautology to affirm that all essential human activities impinge upon the minimal concept of the human that we must include in our anthropology. The practitioners of the various human sciences tend to acquire, along with the empirical tools of their trade, a "professional deformation" that sees the human being in essence (or even in toto) as Homo economicus, Homo politicus, Homo aestheticus. . . . These one-sided visions can be given a synthetic meaning only by reference to an originary scene that unites them all. Originary analysis traces the emergence of each specific category within the hypothetical event that gave birth to all the fundamental categories of the human. The openness to synthetic, "humanistic" ideas that is charac¬ teristic of students of the arts, and particularly of literature, gives them a privileged role in the constitution of a fundamental anthro*See Piaget, Introduction a l’epistemologie genetique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950; in English, The Principles of Genetic Epistemology [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972]).

INTRODUCTION

13

pology. It is no accident that the lion's share of the theoretical reflection that has shaped the intellectual personality of the pres¬ ent generation has come from the humanities. The domination of literary theory by the psycho-socio-linguistic models of postwar nouvelle critique did not survive the pseudorevolution of 1968; since that time, it is rather literary or "textual" attitudes that have influenced, at times corrosively, the human sciences. But this turn¬ about, which has most often been placed under the sign of "deconstruction," is in its deepest sense anthropological. The aporias of the poststructuralist era derive from the paradox of the selfknowing anthropological mind.*

Religion as the Original Human Science The synthetic power of the originary hypothesis as a foundation for the human sciences is nowhere better illustrated than in its recep¬ tivity to the anthropological content of religion. Because religious thought extends to the natural world conditions that obtain only in the sphere of human culture, positive science tends to dismiss the cognitive significance of religion altogether. But religion is in real¬ ity the first human science, practicing through myths of origin a primitive form of originary analysis. Religion provides a discovery procedure that is of limited effectiveness in the natural domain, but quite powerful in that of the human. In the former, the specula¬ tions of the pre-Socratics had already eclipsed religious epistemol¬ ogy,- in the latter, it is unclear whether social science has done so even today. Although natural scientists from Newton to Hawking have re¬ ferred liberally to God, there is no place in science for the morethan-verbal association of the sacred with the phenomena of na¬ ture. It is all very well to affirm that "God does not play dice with the universe," or that his "mind" may be described by such and *The work of Jacques Derrida, the central figure of this period, is dominated by powerful if unavowed anthropological intuitions. Derridean concepts like deferral (differance), supplementation, and marginality can all be better under¬ stood in the context of the originary scene than in that of the ahistorical scene of metaphysics. Many uses of these terms will be found in the present volume. The anthropological subtext of deconstruction is touched on in my article "Differences," MLN 96, French Issue (Spring 1981): 792-808; see also Andrew McKenna, Violence and Difference (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992).

14

INTRODUCTION

such equations, but the subject of these and similar assertions is merely the metaphysical Cartesian idea of God as a guarantee of the correspondence in kind between man's general understanding of the world and its reality. The discovery procedure of religious explanation is the analogy between what is to be explained and the voluntary act of a divinity acting from human ("anthropomorphic") motives. Clearly the analogy between natural forces and human motivations is useless unless the forces under study (for example, animal drives) indeed bear some resemblance to these motivations. But this objection does not hold for the phenomena of human interaction. Myths of origin, with their etiological derivations of historical phenomena from the founding act(s) of the god(s), are versions of the originary hypothesis. They affirm the punctual historicity of a (divine) act as opposed to the long-term action of transindividual forces—demo¬ graphic, economic, or sociopsychological. It has been the role of the positive social sciences to stress the explicative value of these forces. But the place of these forces within a secular anthropology can only be justified—and religious intuition thereby transcended and evacuated—when their historical impingement on the interac¬ tive ethical core of the human has been rigorously determined. Meanwhile, religious intuition, by affirming in the absence of em¬ pirical proof the historical priority of the ethical, has served as a valuable discovery procedure. It is a common observation among those who have no other brief for religion that it is the "guardian of morality"; but what has permitted it to play this role is not its capacity for threatening the immoral with fire and brimstone, but its refusal to relinquish the originary intuition that the human community depends on the principles of morality for its very sur¬ vival. The productivity of religious thought in the anthropological domain will end only when human science has come to understand at least as well as religion has done the ethical difference between the natural and the human.* *This difference bears on the unfortunate battles between evolutionists and "creation scientists" concerning the origin of humanity. "Creation science" is no science at all, but its adherents have one point on their side: Genesis recognizes, where Darwinian theory does not, the origin of humanity as an event different in kind from the origin of other species. I develop these consider¬ ations in detail in Science and Faith.

INTRODUCTION

15

Origin ary Dialogue From the perspective of the originary hypothesis, every act of lan¬ guage is the historical descendant of the sign born in the originary event. The temporal continuity of the human is determined by a common cultural inheritance. But whereas the molecular struc¬ ture of inanimate objects and the genetic code of living creatures are open to inspection, the traces of our cultural inheritance are not. The hypothesis that sets out the source from which this heri¬ tage is derived cannot be confirmed or refuted by any empirical discovery. The originary hypothesis is not falsifiable in the same sense as are the hypotheses of the natural sciences. The only crite¬ rion by which it can be judged is the economy of the explanation it provides for historically verifiable phenomena. Originary analysis traces the categories of human interaction back to a time that precedes the emergence of these categories for the participants in the originary scene. This procedure provides these categories with an ontological basis that would otherwise be compromised by the "etic-emic" tension between the analyst's external view and that internal to the society studied. The catego¬ ries of human culture are forms of experience rather than forms of language; but the scene of origin in which the primary categories of human thought emerge offers the basic paradigm for the transfor¬ mation of categories of experience into categories of language. This problematic may best be illustrated with respect to the fundamental category of language itself. The event that we describe as the origin of language cannot have been so viewed by its partici¬ pants. Rather than understanding the origin of language as the telos of the originary event, the participants, in imminent danger of destructive conflict, must have performed the originary act of lin¬ guistic designation as though commanded by the central object itself, imbued as it was with the sacred power derived from the multiple appetites directed toward it. Understood as a form of prehuman behavior, the linguistic ges¬ ture is an apotropaic act, like a gesture of submission made to a dominant animal to avoid injury, but directed to the sacred center rather than to another cospecific. In order to speak of this event as the origin of humanity, we must introduce the "etic" category of language. This is not, however, a naive misreading of the act of one

16

INTRODUCTION

culture from the more evolved perspective of another. In the do¬ main of the human, all things are potentially words. No douht the emergence of an element of culture is more fundamental than its thematization in language; but thematization is already implicit in emergence, as the authors of etiological myths have always under¬ stood. We do not falsify human experience by supplying the words to describe what is always potentially describable. What is at stake here are the conditions of our potential dialogue with our origin. We need to be able in principle to discuss the origin of language with its originators, for if no such dialogue were possi¬ ble, we would face this origin as a natural rather than as a human phenomenon. But when we thematize language and equate the origin of the human with that of the object of this thematization, we find it difficult to speak with those whose only theme is the sacred referent. This difficulty is, not surprisingly, exemplary of many similar difficulties,- it is the point of departure for an origi¬ nary analysis of cultural difference. The easy solutions are on either side of the emic-etic dichotomy: either study the society "objectively" or seek to know it "in its own terms." Yet the crucial case of the originary scene of language shows that neither of these alternatives is satisfactory. The etic there loses the human just at the point where we need to establish it; the emic here condemns our hypothesis to inarticulateness. Human science cannot exist as a specific form of thought if such a choice is necessary. We share with the participants in the origi¬ nary event the heritage of this event itself, and this sharing insures that our description of the event as the origin of language is a sufficiently adequate intrinsic description to permit dialogue with these first humans. The etic and emic are not indeed the same, but their difference can be mediated in as much detail as we please (this process is the historical counterpart of Charles Peirce's notion of the indefinitely extensible chain of "interpretants"). The narrative of the event that we construct is far from the version of it passed down by its participants to their descendants, but it is linked to this first version by an unbroken cultural chain, just as our line of biological descent from the first speakers is a continuous genetic thread. We cannot understand the emergence of language in the origi¬ nary event if we equate the fundamental human understanding that one is using language with the thematization of "language." To

INTRODUCTION

17

be conscious of being a (human) language-speaker is not equivalent to being able to say something about language. It is this overambitious conception of human self-knowledge that generates the despairing paradoxes in which the very possibility of self-knowl¬ edge is denied. This conception would exclude the very possibility of an origin of language: consciousness of language—and therefore language itself, in the full human sense of the term—is denied to the first speakers, who would obviously have been incapable of formulating propositions concerning language. The only alterna¬ tive would be to push ferry Fodor's notion of innate ideas to its ultimate absurdity and claim that the whole of mature language, including semantics, emerged in a single instant.* But this epistemological despair may be dispensed with. The consciousness of using language, that is, arbitrary, culturally deter¬ mined signs as opposed to instinctively determined signals, is in¬ herent in their very use. The aborted gesture of appropriation can only become a gesture of designation through the interposition of a free space between the sign and its referent. This space is the anthropological correlate of Sartre's neant, just as the originary consciousness of this freedom is the model for his "prereflexive cogito.” Minimal linguistic consciousness—that is, the awareness that sign and referent are two different kinds of objects—suffices to permit us to enter into dialogue with this consciousness concern¬ ing language. This virtual dialogue with the first humans is the basis of our understanding of language as a generic human phenomenon. The originary sign, although its production is experienced as externally compelled by the sacred center, must be preserved within the memory of each of the participants. The sign can only signify in context; but the taking into memory of the context along with the sign makes the sign potentially independent of the context.! Sim¬ ilarly, the originary community to whom the sign is addressed has existed only under these specific circumstances, but it retains its virtual existence in their absence. The process of virtualization, whereby human culture is ex*See Fodor, The Language of Thought (New York: Crowell, 1975)tThis potentiality is only realized with the emergence of the declarative utterance-form, where language becomes the source of context-free models of reality. I discuss this emergence at length in The Origin of Language-, see also Chapter 4 in this volume.

l8

INTRODUCTION

tended beyond the possibilities of face-to-face contact, is inherent in the very existence of language. The minimal condition of the perpetuation of language in time—a sign used once and forgotten could scarcely be called "linguistic"—is that the members of the community recall through the sign the referent as something other than the sign. This minimal consciousness of language is all we need share with the originary community in order to guarantee the continuity of our language with theirs. Similar arguments would apply to potential dialogue concerning other originary categories such as the ethical, the sacred, or the esthetic.

The Originary Self The birth of the self within the communal context defines it against this context. Even before we can speak of the liberating force of the originary exchange economy, the individual languageuser has internalized the context of the originary event in a scene of representation, a private imaginary space independent of the com¬ munity. The contrast between the private and public scenes, be¬ tween imaginary fulfillment and real alienation from the center, gives rise to the originary resentment that is the first mode of selfconsciousness. The center, the object of a given participant's desire, is inaccessible for the very reason that it is desirable, and therefore also the object of the convergent desires of the others. Yet originary resentment does not focus on the other peripheral humans, but on the center that refuses itself to desire. The center appears to be the only independent actor in the scene; it is the locus of the divinity, which provides the model for human personhood. This model is first realized as the human self emerges in the rivalry of resent¬ ment. Hence the individual is not, as in the familiar Rousseauian scheme, prior to society, but neither does the individual emerge gradually from a primordial collective darkness. Society and the individual are coeval. The mystical vapor that surrounds Jung's theory of the collective unconscious is the result of his failure to recognize that a human community is not a mere horde but is composed of individuals. Although familiar romantic-existential modes such as alienation and "thrownness" reflect a self-consciousness inseparable from the market society within which they emerged, these modes have their

INTRODUCTION

19

roots in humanity's originary self-conception. As the originary community includes the first humans, so it alienates them by im¬ posing renunciation not merely from without but from within. To participate in the originary scene is to accept alienation from the object of one's desire as the defining moment of self-consciousness. These alienated modes of consciousness belong to a vision of the human condition, given its most articulate form by Heidegger in Being and Time, that makes "lateness" the determining factor of the human, the source of our historicity, of our particular relation to temporality and death. Lateness is but another name for origi¬ nary resentment, the point at which negativity enters human con¬ sciousness. For Heidegger, a human being conscious of death is alone with time, the bringer of death; hence Heidegger makes time the primary object of our resentment.* But the source of individu¬ ality is the communal locus of the originary event. If the human being is the animal for which death is significant, this is because human death is experienced not as the effect of the impersonal natural force of time, but as the potential result of the hostile actions of fellow humans. The romantic originary scene is that of my origin, which is necessarily later than the origin of humanity in general. By incor¬ porating and deepening the Christian intuition that each individ¬ ual experiences a personal scene of origin, the romantics took a great step forward from the ahistorical anthropologies of the En¬ lightenment. But the romantic-existentialist etiology of originary alienation ignores its necessarily collective context. On the con¬ trary, the emphasis on the modern individual's lateness and aliena¬ tion from the origin leads directly to the contemporary denial of the origin. For to speak of the origin as "forgotten" is to make it not something in which all share equally, a guarantee of our common humanity, but a privileged state from which the "late" have been excluded. The achievement of existentialist philosophy is to have traced worldly or ontic resentment back to originary resentment, but the latter is hypostatized into a cosmic relation with being and time rather than understood in its ethical context. *See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (London: SCM Press, 1962), On Time and Being (English translation of Zeit und Sein, 1962) (New York: Harper St Row, 1972), and Richard Sugarman, Rancor Against Time: The Phenomenol¬ ogy of ’“Ressentiment" (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1980).

20

INTRODUCTION

The granting of originary status to the category of lateness would appear to lead to paradoxical consequences. If lateness is funda¬ mental to the human condition, then no one can be present at the origin, and lacking such presence, we cannot speak of an originary event at all. Hence Jacques Derrida argues that the origin at which we are not present can be known only through its traces,- its status in itself need not even be discussed. By taking the romantic paradox of originary lateness to its logical conclusion, deconstruction shows itself to be the rightful heir to romantic thought, via Mallarme and Nietzsche. The aporia of originary lateness is posed in its sharpest form in the challenge of the "critique of presence." But the sharpness of this challenge only serves to demonstrate the strength of the originary hypothesis in displacing the paradox of originary lateness from anthropological discourse to the human condition, where it belongs. From the standpoint of our hypothesis, lateness is a straightforward consequence of the origmary relation¬ ship between the individual and the community. The scene is the locus of originary resentment because each self emerges into con¬ sciousness as opposed asymmetrically by the union of all the other selves. The real symmetry of this opposition of each to all is visible only from without. The individual self necessarily finds itself "late" with respect to the apparently already formed community of the others, which poses the threat of violent expulsion. There is no need to accept the reductio ad absurdum according to which originary lateness implies that the origin has always already taken place. Originary lateness is implicit in the origin of humanity, that is, of the creature that can represent its own origin. To become a (first) user of representation in a communal context, one must indeed be "late."

Originary and Esthetic History Just as there is originary lateness, so there is originary historicity. Humanity has a history from the beginning. The sign is not merely the first moment of this history; it is already an attempt at its recapitulation. The originary sign is the sign of that which permits the founding of the human community. Its absolute singularity reflects its ex¬ treme primitiveness, its maximal alienation from the understand-

INTRODUCTION

21

ing that the community is its own source. But this alienation is already a specifically human category irreducible to the animal experience of deprivation. To say that humanity is born alienated from its communal essence is to project a teleology and therefore to suggest a narrative; but this narrative is already begun by the sign itself. It is through this narrative that the empirical world, the world of human experience, is integrated into the cultural form established in the originary event. The tension between the two senses of the word "history" distinguished by Heidegger as Historie and Geschichte—a meaningful series of events and the narration that at the same time invents and discovers its meaning—is that of the dialectic between experience and culture. The experience of "raw" history is also that of the inadequacy of the old narrative, of the need not only to add to it but to revise it and ultimately to rewrite it from the beginning. The role of generative anthropology is to provide an opening through which human historical experience can enter the anthro¬ pological sphere of the originary event. We must provide not a rewriting of history itself but a basis for dialogue between the different moments of history, a dialogue mediated by our common human experience of origin. The historicity of ethical experience is from the beginning a function of the resentment it generates. An ethical system that generated no resentment would truly bring about the end of his¬ tory—whence the unconscious irony of applying this term to mod¬ ern market society, which operates by generating and plowing back into the system an ever greater volume of resentment. Yet the resentment generated by ethical systems must be deferred if these systems are to function at all. As will be discussed in Chapter 7, this deferral is the function of the esthetic. Esthetic experience reveals the points at which a given ethical system becomes vulner¬ able to the resentment that provides the central motivation for historical change. Each artwork is an experiment that tests the limits of an ethical system against our intuition of originary crisis. Our imaginary dialogue with the participants in this system is mediated by the esthetic experience through which they transcend the resentment that would otherwise imprison them within the historical limits of the system. The originary experience of the center-as-such as designated by

22

INTRODUCTION

the sign is what we call the sacred. But this is an experience of the necessary rejection of our desire, and of the resentment that is our reaction to it. It is the esthetic experience of the sign-referent relation which, by accomplishing the temporary deferral of this resentment, becomes the point of departure for the dialogue be¬ tween the originary and the historical. The center-as-such is preserved as the sacred through the attribu¬ tion to the central object of the permanence of the central locus. It is only through the historically emerging understanding of the difference between object and locus that art can become indepen¬ dent of religious ritual. At the origin, the sacred, crucial to the survival of the community, appears to include the esthetic, which founds no institutions of its own. The central object is experienced as invulnerable in its figural form; the sacred insists upon the figurality of the object because it recalls the community's depen¬ dency on the center through this object. Art's emancipation from religion attests to the feasibility of a cultural operation that can evoke the originary crisis without needing to conjure up a direct descendant of its originary solution. (Conversely, religion frees itself from dependence on the esthetic when it denies the figurality of the center.) The representations of art create a version of sacred permanence that is no longer attached to the specificity of its historical appearance. The esthetic figure, like Gilgamesh, is a former god who has lost his herb of immortality, who remains only fictionally immortal. The liberation of the esthetic from the sacred consists in the realization that immortality is not a substantial but a representational category. Ritual cultures present obstacles to understanding in the form of historically specific beliefs that cannot be shared across cultural boundaries. Esthetic history is, in contrast, the story of our libera¬ tion from the sacred, the story of the emergence of a culture with which all humanity can enter into a dialogue guaranteed by our common origin. In short, esthetic history is originary history. It is through the esthetic deferral of resentment that we are able to maintain a dialogue with the people of other historical eras. This is not to say that human history is essentially a history of art forms. Historical experience is the experience of ethical relations, and its schematization depends on the formal stability of these relations in the ethical systems that are the basis of the forms of communal

INTRODUCTION

23

organization, from the hunting party to the modern state. But individual experience of these systems is only virtually historical. The ethical order is interactive, relational; it can never be experi¬ enced as a whole. Only the paradoxical experience aroused by esthetic form makes the critical foundation of this order accessible to its individual members. In the universe of the artwork, the spectator effects the esthetic deferral of resentment by experienc¬ ing the specific content of desire as dependent on the total form; this relation of form and content is a model of that obtaining in the society as a whole. Through this experience, the individual partici¬ pant in the social order comes to grasp the immanent principle of this order as a means for regulating human interaction. At the origin, it was the making accessible of crisis to the individual that permitted the aborted gesture of appropriation to be understood as the peace-bringing sign. The first humans understood their "his¬ tory" in esthetic terms. When we understand a society through our reexperiencing of its esthetic culture, we reproduce this originary understanding. The esthetic reveals the historicity hidden within the apparent stability produced by the self-replicating logic of ethical systems. But it cannot reveal the direction this history will take. The inter¬ nal motivation for historical change is not the change itself in another form, like potential energy waiting to become kinetic. The discrepancy is not only the result of the chaotic nature of the overall ecology in which human societies and natural phenomena interact. The esthetic deferral of resentment is, in the short term, an essentially conservative operation, however revolutionary may be the aims the artist conceives for it. The renewal of the ethical requires a return to the originary quite different from the return implicit in the esthetic experience. In ethical revolutions, resent¬ ment is no longer deferred, but emerges as a renewing force that must be granted a posteriori legitimacy. Because originary historicity is mediated by the esthetic, the original telling of history takes the esthetic form of mythical narra¬ tive. History proper is born when Herodotus learns to tell about myths without himself becoming a mythical narrator. Herodotus's work is as much cultural as ethical history, but its overall move¬ ment is clear; the mythical tales are eventually focused on the event of the Persian War. A trace of this focusing movement is

24

INTRODUCTION

retained by Thucydides, who begins his own history with a brief evocation of Helen's abduction. History-telling looks through the esthetic narrative to its basis in fact. The originary intuition that leads Aristotle to find the esthetic narrative more philosophical (read "anthropological") than the historical is rejected in favor of a narrower explicative aim. Instead of explaining the creation of the world, the narrative need only explain how a particular battle was won or lost. The set speeches that fill the works of ancient histo¬ rians are wholly fictional, but they serve the understanding of historical events. No doubt these events are heirs of the originary event, but they are no longer explained through this inheritance. This great movement toward the empirical is based on the convic¬ tion that historical events too are founding events, that the signifi¬ cant is not located in a mythical past but in a historical past con¬ tiguous with the present. This liberation of history from the ritual universe coincides with the liberation of the esthetic as well. His¬ tory explores the circumstances of significant events,- art invents fictional models of significance. But the common aim of both is the fundamental anthropological aim of human self-understandmg. The Aristotelian idea that this common goal may be better served by art than by history is unacceptable to the historian concerned with the emergence of the empirical from the esthetic. It is only in our postmodern age that this idea can take on its most radical form, in which the discourse of history is itself subsumed under the rubric of esthetic narrative. This radical estheticization of discourse is a consequence of the contemporary recognition of the priority of rep¬ resentation over significance, or, in terms more familiar today, of textuality over narrativity. * With this recognition, all history becomes in principle a branch of esthetic history. Esthetic history is not a "regional" history of esthetic form, a general history of art, but an attempt to grasp the *See the discussion in Chapter 6. In the domain of historiography proper, this recognition has been accompanied by a devaluation of the event as the basis of historical narrative. "Evenemential" narrative appears naive because narra¬ tive seems incapable of expressing the metahistorical awareness that the story is not transparent to the events it recounts. But this is to throw out the eventbaby with its narrative bathwater. "Mentality" cannot be substituted for histo¬ ricity for the simple reason that all our mental experience is suffused with historicity. In contrast, esthetic history as described here is a means of grasping human historicity at its point of greatest anthropological concentration with¬ out passing through the empiricism of events.

INTRODUCTION

^5

broad categories of ethical development through their crystalliza¬ tion in a series of esthetics. These esthetics incarnate a sequence of hypotheses of origin, the overt cognitive content of which reaches its high point in the postromantic era. Their history may be understood as the rise and fall of the esthetic as an anthropological discovery procedure; the principal locus of human self-understanding passes from the ritual into the esthetic and finally from the esthetic into anthropological theory. Esthetic history tells of an increasingly faithful understand¬ ing of the structure of the originary event. Yet the event is itself reconstructed from our historical experi¬ ence. Any narrative that recounts the progressive understanding of an origin must be circular.* The coherence of the whole, its power as an anthropology, cannot be measured from a fixed vantage point outside it. We can only assess it as a heuristic: What does it permit us to discover about ourselves in history? The ultimate criterion of these discoveries is our originary intuition, the sense of rightness that is the ultimate proof of successful transhistorical dialogue. Esthetic history provides a framework for other forms of cultural history that mediate between anthropological generality and his¬ torical specificity. To give an example: the esthetic history outlined in Part II subsumes the art of the Middle Ages under the neoclassi¬ cal esthetic, in opposition to the classical esthetic of ancient pagan society. Medieval religious history does not make use of these esthetic-historical categories to describe the impregnation of tradi¬ tional society by Christian values. But these categories serve to point out a cultural and ethical continuity that is obscured by exclusive concentration on theological debate. Implicit in the lat¬ ter is that Christianity was the established cultural basis of medi¬ eval society, and that it was only in the Renaissance that this *This circularity is not adequately expressed by the concept of the "herme¬ neutic circle." The original purpose of hermeneutics is the explanation of a sacred text, one whose authority is posited outside the human realm. The rejection of this alienated mode of reading produces a modern hermeneutics that is, at its best, consciously anthropological. But because there is neither an origin nor an end to its vision of history, hermeneutics cannot justify the uniqueness of the circular movement it posits. It speaks of "the" hermeneutic circle without giving a reason why there should be one rather than many, why all texts should point to some unitary knowledge of humanity. It is for this reason that hermeneutics has been unable to defend its mastery of the logos against the inchoate anthropological intuitions of deconstruction.

26

INTRODUCTION

society rediscovered the pagan values of antiquity. Yet it would be closer to the truth to claim that the moral radically of Christianity made it incapable of serving as the genuine foundation of the medieval social order, which despite its piety retained and in some areas accentuated the sharp hierarchies of ancient society. From this perspective, the Renaissance is more Christian than the Mid¬ dle Ages because it is closer to the implementation of the reciproc¬ ity of the Gospels. The revival of classical philosophy in a Christian context, rather than constituting a return to antiquity, reveals with new clarity the separation between the new and the old eras, as the various querelles des anciens et des modernes attest. Such a hy¬ pothesis is more accessible through esthetic history than through religious history because the latter, unlike the former, cannot en¬ gage in dialogue with its domain of cultural experience in the deepest sense; that is, with religion as a distillation of ethical experience. The ultimate lesson of our originary historicity is that our ontol¬ ogy must reflect at its most fundamental level the historical speci¬ ficity of human experience; we must speak of humanity rather than of “Being," and of human language rather than of language in gen¬ eral. This imperative is a consequence of our ethical nature; it pre¬ serves us from the despairing quest for inaccessible Being and from what is even worse, the smug conviction that we have found it. It may appear arrogant to grant humanity a special place in the uni¬ verse, but this self-affirmation is in fact an act of humility. There is no general ontology of linguistically mediated self-consciousness; there is only our ontology, and until our unlikely encounter with extraterrestrial language-users, we can conceive of no other. The denial of human uniqueness, so popular today, is but an empty apotropaic gesture against hubris, the only intellectual conse¬ quence of which is to maintain the illusion that we can indeed conceive of an absolute understanding of language and being beyond the specificity of human experience. It is only superficially paradoxical that the return to the origin is the guarantee of an open rather than a closed system. The analysis of a phenomenon from the standpoint of its origin imposes the minimal constraint upon that phenomenon's subsequent evolu¬ tion. It is rather those analyses that begin "modestly" in medias res that introduce empirical elements with no thought to guaranteeing

INTRODUCTION

2-7

their transhistorical status. By forcing us to assure the minimality of our construction, originary analysis sharpens the razor we use to slice away the extraneous accretions of the empirical. Human science in the present era has so far been characterized by an unfortunate dichotomy. On the one hand, the positive social sciences generate vast quantities of ad hoc constructions, seem¬ ingly indifferent to the need for a critical anthropology that would synthesize them into a construction of greater density. On the other, the spirit of minimalist intellectual rigor, snug in the sanctu¬ ary provided for it by the humanities, spends itself in critique and refuses to attempt construction of any kind.* It is the purpose of this work to demonstrate that anthropological thought both crit¬ ical and constructive is today not only a possibility but an ethical obligation. At the outset, a scientific theory is prior to its results,- but what is sown as ontology must be reaped as methodology. The hypotheses of human science are unfalsifiable in the strict Popperian sense; they are justified by (and only by) the results they produce. The remainder of this work will attempt to satisfy the reader who is interested in learning what originary analysis can do. In keeping with the requirements of an overview of generative anthropology, and respecting the heuristic openness of the origi¬ nary hypothesis, the analyses included in the first part of this book explore fundamental cultural domains—religion, ethics, the prag¬ matic and fictional uses of language—that clearly have a place in any general conception of the human. Although a number of these analyses make allusions to historical material, their explicative models derive directly from the originary hypothesis; they are illustrative of the practice of originary analysis as described above. * A great deal of agonizing has gone on concerning the sociological correlate of this attitude. I think the answer is clear: the demise of the socialist ideal. Even today, much of the cultural critique of market society continues to take place, however implicitly, before the utopian horizon provided by "socialism." The historical evidence that this utopia is without content makes the critique all the more abstract and nihilistic. It is only once we have accepted the hard truth that there is no sociological "outside" to the market system that we can cease to yearn, in however paradoxical a form, for an outside to human culture. Only at that point will we become able to realize that there are no preset limits to the logos's self-understanding.

28

INTRODUCTION

The originary esthetics developed in the second part exemplifies the privileged status of the esthetic in the movement from the originary to the historical. The introductory chapter examines the esthetic moment of the originary event as a model for esthetic experience in general; the remaining chapters offer an outline of Western esthetic history, from the classical era to the postmodern.

PART

ONE

Originary Analysis

CHAPTER

The Anthropological Idea of God

The scandal i n h e r e n t in the idea of God is that if it did not already exist, there would be no way of inventing it. All attempts to derive the existence of God from the world of human experience, whether at its most universal (Spinoza) or at its most personal (Descartes), succeed merely in constituting a being having some of the attributes normally associated with God and then relying on our previous acquaintance with the notion to sup¬ ply the others. Whence the intuitive sureness with which the true believer Pascal rejects Descartes's and Spinoza's arguments as irrel¬ evant to the object of his faith. There are no other ideas of this sort. The True, the Good, and the Beautiful are easily understood as distillations of everyday experi¬ ence; whether or not they are useful as nouns, their value as adjec¬ tives is beyond question. But God cannot be thought of in this way, as a nominalization of "holy," "divine," or "sacred." The sacred is something quite different from God, who must be thought of as a being, even as a person. The fascination of Anselm's so-called ontological proof lies in the fact that it strikes the Achilles' heel of metaphysics just at the moment of metaphysics' greatest triumph: the passage from the conceptual to the actual. The concept of God includes existence not because the "greatest" or "most perfect" being must exist, but precisely because this concept could never have arisen if human reason had at its disposal only abstractions like "greatest" or "most perfect." The very fact that we have a

32

ORIGINARY

ANALYSIS

concept of God is proof that something beyond everyday empirical experience exists as the source of this concept. * Hence the real mystery is not ontological but epistemological. Asking about God's existence is not merely futile but naive; the first question is how we came to talk about God at all. To this question, the believer has a set of ready answers that the non¬ believer rejects. The nonbeliever can explain the existence of the idea of God only by stooping to the a posteriori constructions of positivism. Concepts are never a problem for the positivist; things alone are really important. "God" is reduced to a useful fiction that evolved when the human spirit was at a lower level of development than today. But this dismissal of the problem of God merely splits it in two: (i) Why did people believe in the existence of such a figure in the past? (2) If this belief was at one time necessary, or at any rate universal, how then have the enlightened minds of today been able to rid themselves of it? These questions take us beyond the scope of positive anthropol¬ ogy, but not of anthropology in its broadest sense. And on this terrain, perhaps surprisingly, the believer can stand as well. For if God exists before and above humanity, he has nonetheless chosen the human as the special locus of worldly revelation. The JudeoChristian tradition is particularly clear on this point, but all gods are preoccupied above all with humanity. The argument between believer and nonbeliever can be translated into a potentially fruit¬ ful dialogue between a transcendental and an immanent anthropol¬ ogyIf this optimistic conclusion appears surprising, this is because debate between believers and nonbelievers, between science and faith, has not in fact been the locus classicus of the discussion of the existence of God. This locus has rather been the terrain of metaphysics, where belief is irrelevant because God is given a merely conceptual significance. For the metaphysician, both be*In Science and Faith, I used the term "autoprobatory" to refer to the object of a revelation such as that of Moses on Mount Sinai: whether or not Moses saw a burning bush, whether or not Moses existed at all, the connection between the sentence ehyeh asher ehyeh and Hebrew monotheism must have been made by someone. Similarly, the existence of the idea of God implies the reality of an experience of God, such as is not the case for "the most perfect being." The task of anthropology is to formulate a hypothesis concerning the specific nature of this experience.

The Anthropological Idea of God lievers and nonbelievers lack understanding of the object of their contention. As the ens perfectissimum, or the First Mover, or the universal ground of being, God is beyond either belief or disbelief, which are thereupon shown to be merely defective modes of thought. The fact of this defectiveness need not itself be explained, for metaphysics proposes no anthropology and need not justify its own emergence. In its more sophisticated forms, metaphysics becomes wary of the term "God," whose commonality with the individual being of religious belief might appear to call for an explanation. To speak of the idea of God is in effect to display a suspect continuity, or at least a contiguity, with religious modes of thought. But not to do so is simply to imply the meaninglessness of the idea, and therefore to fall within the ranks of the nonbelievers—that is, to dissolve the synthesis that metaphysics had originally thought to effect. This has been the fate of philosophy in the post-Hegelian, and more particularly the post-Nietzschean era. But whether the place of God be filled by Being (Heidegger) or left ostentatiously vacant (Derrida), its central locus in the metaphysical edifice is something that philosophy can neither explain nor eliminate. The philosophy of Aristotle or even that of Spinoza remained unconcerned with its religious prehistory because it saw itself as presenting the ultimate logical truth concerning the primary being. Hegel's historical system, in which all past forms are included-astranscended, represents the culmination of this metaphysical opti¬ mism. Because for Hegel the subject and object of thought are coordinate manifestations of Spirit, the specific modes of these manifestations—religious, esthetic, or philosophical—require no anthropological justification. Religious intuition has been wholly absorbed into philosophy; Hegel's Weltgeist is the word made flesh, the concept incarnate in the historical individual. The ambition of Hegel's dialectic was to carry out the final triumph of metaphysics in becoming the organon of all thought, the end of humanity's historical dialogue. The most damning crit¬ icism of the Hegelian system came not from atheists such as Marx who rejected its spiritual premise, but from the believer Kierke¬ gaard, who understood that the individual's relation to God de¬ pended on a leap of faith incompatible with the final synthesis of any completed system. The mortal individual's personal mcarna-

ORIGINARY

ANALYSIS

tion of Spirit could never be rationally assimilated to Spirit-in¬ general. In the absence of a form of reflection capable of under¬ standing the World-Spirit in anthropological terms, belief in this assimilation was ultimately a historical faith like any other, to be accepted or rejected on necessarily insufficient grounds. The Hegelian synthesis, and with it the synthetic ambition of meta¬ physics in general, was shown to be premature.

A New Synthesis Metaphysics has not disappeared, although it now takes more modest or, at its most profound, more nihilistic forms. Derrida's paradoxical reading of philosophy against itself represents a Gotterdammerung from which metaphysics may never recover. Mean¬ while the positive sciences have prospered, and religious belief has shown unexpected resiliency even in intellectual circles. The idea of God has not, however, been clarified. On the contrary, the divi¬ sion between believers and nonbelievers, or in some cases between the discourses of belief and nonbelief in the same person, untem¬ pered by the metaphysical synthesis that increasingly strikes us as merely verbal, appears unbridgeable by any form of discourse. Yet a new, more stable synthesis can in fact be constructed upon the common ground that believers and nonbelievers share without recognizing it. The demise of metaphysics gives renewed relevance to the question of the existence of God, which provides the subject of a dialogue freed from Hegelian constraints. The ground of this dialogue, no longer metaphysical, is not properly theological but anthropological. The nonbeliever has no other choice than to at¬ tempt to explain religious belief in anthropological terms. For the believer, God is above anthropology; but the believer must admit that the only evidence for God's existence comes from God's reve¬ lation to humanity. Natural theology has declined along with metaphysics, on which it depends. To the extent that theology survives in the era of the human sciences, it should be called "anthropological theology." The question of God's existence comes to be put in terms of God's existence for humanity, and even of God's existence in human beings. To do this is only to remain faithful to the basis of Judeo-Christian religion, which the meta¬ physical synthesis always ignored. And to seek to define the on-

The Anthropological Idea of God

35

tological relationship between God and the human without the mediating intervention of Being, Spirit, and the like is already to have taken the essential step toward a new solution. The key to this solution is to refuse to assign ontological priority to the human or to God by refusing to assign chronological priority. For the believer, God's eternal existence precedes that of the hu¬ man. For the nonbeliever, God is merely an invention of human beings at a certain stage of their development. These two positions are apparently incompatible; but an intermediary position is con¬ ceivable. It is the hypothesis that God and the human came into existence simultaneously: that the referent of the first human thought, the first human word, possessed for the first humans the essential attributes of the entity that we now call God and was historically continuous with it. For this to be the case, there is no need to appeal to supernatural agencies. Even the claim that the ontological basis of the human is found in a being outside of human beings themselves implies neither the violation of natural pro¬ cesses nor the assumption of "another world" in which divinities subsist. The believer's ontology can be reconciled with the anthro¬ pologist's repugnance for beings that stand outside natural law. The essential point is that the link between God and the human not be severed. Whatever God's ontological status, God exists for human beings, even if this existence-for must be distinguished from a simply instrumental existence in a humanly created practical con¬ text. We have already noted the futility of defining the idea of God within any such context.

The Originary Hypothesis The idea of the simultaneous coming into existence of the human and God is anything but self-explanatory. It does, however, impose certain constraints on our imagination. Positive anthropology has generally assumed that the distinctive elements of humanity emerged gradually over a long period of time. Erect posture, tool manufacture, language, and religion are among the salient defining features of the human, and the present state of each can only be explained as the product of a long prehis¬ tory. The gradual uncovering of this prehistory, which had at every step to be defended against the dogmas of divine creation, has given

36

ORIGINARY

ANALYSIS

rise to the attitude that such dogmas have nothing whatever to teach us, and that no hypothesis of the punctual origin of humanity can be anything but one or another such dogma masquerading as science. Hypotheses of origin in a specific event are assimilated to myths of origin, of which ethnologists have collected a more than sufficient supply. If upright posture or even toolmaking were considered the essen¬ tial criterion of humanity, there would be no reason to posit a punctual origin. The criterion of language is different. Human language lacks continuity with animal communication systems. Chimpanzees make simple tools like sticks to poke into anthills, but they use nothing resembling words or even linguistic ges¬ tures.* Genetic evidence aside, the feature of language that renders a punctual origin all but certain is the universally understood significance of the conventional or arbitrary linguistic signifier within the group. Not only must linguistic signs be understood by all, but they must be understood as signs, which implies that they must be consciously produced as such, as acts intending to signify in contradistinction to acts with a practical or ludic aim. Only if such acts originate in a collective context can they possess the unambiguous significance for all members of the group that per¬ mits their subsequent reproduction by individuals. To suppose that language originated bit by bit in individual encounters and was gradually passed on to and accumulated by the collectivity requires us to assume an evolving inclination toward the use of signs that cannot itself be explained. The institution of the arbitrary signifier is hardly explained by claiming that it simply "evolved." Yet were the event postulated by the originary hypothesis the origin of language alone, its intuitive plausibility would remain in doubt.t Although language is an activity more necessarily self*The fact that chimpanzees appear to be capable of learning rudimentary versions of human language is anything but an argument against its uniqueness. On the contrary, it demonstrates that what distinguishes us from the higher apes is less the complexity of our nervous system than the problematicity of our social system. Our superiority over chimpanzees in intelligence is only relative; our possession of language and the other unique features of human culture is due to the fact that, at a certain point, quantitative differences pose problems that can only be solved by qualitative changes—what Engels called the "dialec¬ tics of nature." tin my first formulation of the hypothesis, in The Origin of Language, the minimal or "formal" representation of language had as its counterpart the

The Anthropological Idea of God

37

conscious than is toolmaking, its similarity to animal communica¬ tion systems allows the skeptic to deny that it carries with it an absolute guarantee of self-consciousness. Although it may well be granted that gradualist explanations are inadequate, this is not direct proof of the necessity for a punctual explanation. Because the nature of language itself does not make its scenic origin intuitively evident, the skeptic need not be persuaded by the originary hypoth¬ esis even in the absence of a more convincing theory. One could continue to assume that no rigorous hypothesis can be constructed at all, and content oneself with gradualistic speculations that com¬ pensate for their explanatory weakness by reference to the fossil evidence. The bones, at least, are indubitably there, however little they may have to tell us. The real question raised by the originary hypothesis is not that of human origin per se, but of origin in an event understood as such by the community experiencing it, an event that may equally well be called a scene. It is precisely in turning our attention from the origin of language in general to that of the idea—that is, the linguis¬ tic representation—of God that we find the intuitively conclusive justification for this scene that remained lacking in the case of language. Even the skeptic, for whom the necessity of the idea of God is not intuitively evident, cannot deny the need for an explana¬ tion of it; yet positive anthropology's feeble attempts to explain the origin of religious belief lack even the dubious evolutionary justifi¬ cation for gradualism that exists in the case of language. Animals possess communication systems, "languages" if one will; but no one has yet claimed to find a prehuman form of religious belief. God, however unnecessary, is at any rate a purely human preoc¬ cupation. The origin of the idea of God must be scenic because God appears to human beings as a center of attention consciously distinct from themselves. The idea of such a center could not have evolved unconsciously, for attention by definition cannot be unconscious. Attention itself is not a specifically human trait; animals attend to

maximal or "institutional" representation of ritual. More recent formulations, from The End of Culture to the present, have dealt in progressively greater detail with the articulation of the sacred and the esthetic moments together with the linguistic within the hypothetical originary event.

38

ORIGINARY

ANALYSIS

what is significant in their environment with often greater effi¬ ciency than humans do. But the idea of God cannot be derived from this kind of temporary attention; it requires a permanently subsist¬ ing center of attention. This notion supplies a minimal definition of the idea itself. An idea is what subsists in the absence of attention in the mem¬ ory, where it can be not merely recalled as experience but re¬ produced as the meaning of a sign. The idea of God differs from the metaphysical-Platonic Idea in that God cannot be constructed a posteriori by abstraction from a set of particular ideas, like redness from the designation of red things. God is rather the subsisting center of the scene of representation on which these specific ideas appear. As this center, God is no particular object of attention, but the permanent object of attention as such, however it may appear to reveal itself in a particular physical being. This revelation can only be understood, and this from the very beginning, as God's appearance rather than his subsistence in the being in question. For the idea of God is the idea of what subsists in the physical being's absence, and this supratemporal subsistence of the scenic center with respect to the temporal presence of the being that fills it is a direct consequence of the originary experience of representation. Were the idea of God merely the representation of a worldly refer¬ ent, it would be no different from any other particular content of the signifying memory. The sign can only designate what occupies the center of the scene, and the being of this center, the center-asbeing, is what we call God. If this is true for us now, it must have been true from the beginning, for there is no point at which God, however he may have been understood through the mediation of figural representations, could have been understood as less than this. This conception of God takes on substance in the worldly con¬ text within which the originary event took place. The most par¬ simonious or minimal statement of the originary hypothesis sets at the center of a collective scene an object of appetitive interest. The originary sign is produced as an aborted gesture of appropriation in a situation where the universality of appetitive interest within the group makes appropriation by any individual impossible. After the object has been divided among the members of the group in the subsequent communal feast, the association between the designat-

The Anthropological Idea of God

39

ing gesture and the object subsists within the memories of the individual participants. This marks the origin of "significant mem¬ ory" wherein are maintained not simply an image but also an associated sign. Unlike the image, the sign remains reproducible as a formal type whose specific material instances or tokens must be allowed to vary within certain limits. Let us examine more closely the relation between the sign and its originary object. The central being retains its appetitive attractive¬ ness, which is only increased by the supplement of desire that now attaches to this being as an object of representation. Each partici¬ pant imagines the prolongation of the aborted gesture into what is now not merely the appropriation of the object as an object of appetite, but the possession of the object as the occupant of the center of universal attention—that is, precisely in a role that makes it inaccessible to individual appropriation. The gesture des¬ ignates, with unavoidable ambiguity, both the center as such and the object that occupies it. This is the key to the originary constitution of the sacred. In order for the sign to subsist qua sign, it is not enough that it be remembered in association with its original object. After the com¬ munal meal is finished, there would indeed remain no object for the sign to continue to refer to. If its association with the object be rigorously maintained, the sign could never again truly be re¬ produced; to create it anew on a similar future occasion would simply be to recommence the origin of language at the beginning. Nor is it sufficient to attach the sign to a generic quality of the original central object, for example, the species of animal originally involved. For here we leave the realm of the formal and absolute for that of the merely relative—that of the "association" of Pavlovian psychology and the Skinnerian theory of language that derives from it. Because each individual member of the group will have an individual recollection of the specific appearance of the original object, the designation of the sign becomes irretrievably subjectivized: If species is involved, does it include male and female? adult and juvenile? summer or winter coats or configurations of horns? These may be said to be false problems to be resolved, as problems of linguistic reference have always been, through the collective wisdom of usage. But here "usage" itself cannot be de¬ fined independently of the context in which the sign was first used.

40

ORIGINARY

ANALYSIS

Use of the sign creates the scene as much as the scene provokes the sign. For it to truly become a sign, it cannot remain dependent on the public scene, yet neither can it come to designate metaphori¬ cally whatever appears to the individual sign-user to resemble in its essentials the original referent of the sign. Some subsistent sig¬ nified must be defined to which the sign as such can universally refer. This signified, conceived not as a mental construct but as a being, is what we call God. God is the central locus of the scene of representation conceived as a being. This being does not reveal itself as such; it is revealed only in the figure of whatever occupies this locus in the originary scene. God and human are born simultaneously from this scene; this is the immediate consequence of the hypothesis. The under¬ standing that the aborted gesture is a representation is inseparable from the hypostasis of the central locus of the scene of representa¬ tion into a transcendental being that the sign signifies—that is, to which it absolutely refers beyond its occasional use, including the very first one, to refer to a specific central object. The idea of God is thus revealed in the central object, and without this revelatory experience, in which each member of the community participates, there would be no sign and no language. Revelation is an epistemo¬ logically irreversible experience; it cannot be mechanically re¬ peated like a shaman's trance. Ritual repetition reproduces the interpersonal configuration of the originary scene and mimics the etiology of its socially ordering consequences, but it cannot re¬ produce the revelation itself. The positive anthropologist may be tempted to denounce this line of reasoning as metaphysical, if not theistic. But the originary hypothesis is, on the contrary, the only resolutely nonmetaphysi¬ cal theory of human origin. For metaphysics is precisely the variety of thought that takes representation, and more specifically lan¬ guage, as a reality independent of its uniquely human history, as though the phenomenon of language were self-explanatory.* The Platonic Idea of beauty or courage is presented as in no way depen*The most important consequence of this rejection of the human historicity of language is that metaphysical thought takes the declarative sentence (i.e., the proposition), as the fundamental linguistic form, rather than viewing it as the term of a generative process, as in the series ostensive -> imperative —> declara¬ tive, explored in The Origin of Language. This aspect of metaphysics will be considered more extensively in Chapter 4.

The Anthropological Idea of God

41

dent on the human language in which the words "beauty" or "cour¬ age" appear. The banal epistemology of positive science clothes metaphysics in the garb of empirical common sense. The phenom¬ enon arrives already packaged in the language used to describe it, as though such description were as much a part of nature as the phenomenon itself. "We can do no other," the adherents of this epistemology tell us; and the bracketings of "pure" phenomenol¬ ogy only accentuate this claim. But the point is not to seek the "thing in itself" beyond the phenomenon, but to explain the origin of the language without which there would be no phenomenon, pure or otherwise. The God minimally constituted by the originary hypothesis is the kernel of religious belief, but not yet the deity of any conceivable religion. What the believer believes, even if it be limited to the existence of a "Supreme Being" more or less distantly modeled on the Judeo-Christian God, is necessarily more than this formal defi¬ nition. Even a minimal description of belief requires a thematization of God as a substance other than the mere subsistence of a locus. "But," the nonbeliever will claim, "there is no need to thematize God at all. I use language like everyone else, but with no necessary intuition of its ultimate ground, the very existence of which I can perfectly well deny. And certainly I can operate in the world with¬ out any idea of God." To this objection it would be both foolhardy and offensive to reply that the nonbeliever "really" believes in God without knowing it, or even that he really believes in the scenic origin of language. Were such claims necessary to our anthropology, it could have no role to play in the enterprise of reconciliation outlined here,- it would be nothing but a doctrine of fideism. To posit the common origin of humanity and God does not entail that the idea of God subsisting in any individual mind remain an object of belief. Belief in the existence of God as a being depends on the presence of this idea, but, contrary to Anselm's argument, it is not a necessary consequence of it. We should recall that the problem that prompted this inquiry was to explain not why certain individuals believe in God, but why the idea of God exists at all. That the originary hypothesis indeed constitutes such an explanation should give pause to those whose

42

ORIGINARY

ANALYSIS

own explanations of religion carry no more conviction than those of the nineteenth century, even if some think that describing God as a projection of the superego is more scientific than attributing the idea to our faculty of awe or our fear of the powers of nature. The origin of language is the revelation of God. This implies "be¬ lief" only to the extent of the receptivity of the participants of the originary scene to this revelation. Although it is unnecessary to our argument, the received idea in this domain has been that only in the last few centuries has genuine atheism existed. This historical cliche has at least the merit of recognizing the essential lateness of unbelief. The history of civilization has been a long process of desacralization. Clearly the domain of the sacred has shrunk; whether it can ever shrink to nothingness, as the unbeliever af¬ firms, is an independent question. Doctrinal atheism in the modern sense only occurs in conjunc¬ tion with the rise of a rationalized market economy in the early modern era. But what concerns us here is a far broader notion of unbelief that is independent of any assertion of this unbelief or even of any possibility of such assertion. What is in question is the possibility of the subsistence within an individual of the scene of representation and its associated phenomena—language, desire, the esthetic, and so forth—in the absence of the idea of God. But once the scene has been established through the originary revela¬ tion, then, strictly speaking, this idea is no longer necessary for the individual, even if it may remain indispensable to the communal functioning of the scene without which the individual could not subsist. We retain the idea of God without necessarily believing in it because of the indispensable persistence of the communal ground of the scene independently of the individual members of the community. The nonbeliever may be spared the undignified examination of what one "really" believes. Once the idea of God exists, it can be forgotten; and once it has been forgotten for even an instant, human culture is already engaged in the process of secular¬ ization of which the contemporary atheist is the final product. Our hypothesis attempts to convince the latter only that because the idea of God, to which anyone is free to deny belief, is coeval with the origin of humanity, the process of this forgetting can never be concluded. Even if someday not one believer remains, the atheist

The Anthropological Idea of God

43

will remain someone who rejects belief in God, not someone for whom the very concept is empty. In seeking the historical origin of unbelief, we must eliminate a source of confusion. The unanimous participation of the originary scene is not equivalent to belief in the sense of the individual confession of faith characteristic of modern religions. Such a con¬ fession is only conceivable in a context where it may be refused; belief as modern religions conceive it is an affirmation that contra¬ dicts a potential denial. But only declarative sentences can affirm or deny. The originary ostensive sign designates the center-assignificant; it does not assert its significance. The all-or-nothing nature of the first sign reflects the fact that, in the originary event, the individual experiences the divinity of the center in a collective context. The central object is the focus of all desires; its substan¬ tiality is not a matter of belief, but of terrible reality, of life or death. However essential its appropriation by the individual in an act of faith may become, the center of the scene of representation sub¬ sists throughout history as a public reality enacted in ritual. Affir¬ mation of belief in God as a social phenomenon, that is, as an act of faith publicly declared or assumed, is a communal necessity to which the individual has no choice but to conform. The individual unbeliever, where such exists, is dependent on a social order founded on the belief of the collectivity. Only in the modern era can the latent symmetry of this situation emerge: every individual becomes an unbeliever, and only the community "believes." This symmetry is often realized today in religious (and secular) ritual; all perform with great seriousness a ceremony in whose central figure or principle none of the individual participants taken sepa¬ rately need admit to believing. But collective "belief" of this sort is not limited to ritual performance. It is the foundation of linguistic communication, as well as of all culturally influenced modes of interaction. Any use of language implies the latent or virtual presence of the communal scene between any two members of the community, the equivalent of a nonthematic faith that any two members share the same scene, that they are not merely making certain gestures and obtaining certain results, but that they are employing the same set of significations. What guarantees this faith is nothing other than

ORIGINARY

ANALYSIS

what we have described as the originary idea of God. Faith in the subsistence of the central locus of the originary scene need not be maintained as such by the individual; precisely because the com¬ munity operates around it as its center, this locus need not be thematized. That it is so thematized in ritual and its derivatives is, in the fundamental cultural context of linguistic exchange, only a second-level necessity. The primary necessity is that the central locus, whether or not hypostatized as a being by the individuals involved, be realized between them in the act of communication. God in this minimal sense is thus present in the mutual presence of any two members of the community; God's being is that of this presence itself. The difference between the God of religious belief and the God of our anthropological hypothesis is a reflection of the different his¬ torical moments of emergence of the religious and the anthropolog¬ ical hypotheses of origin. As the guardian of the traditional social order, religion hypostatizes the originary center that guarantees that order. But the progressive liberation of social exchange from the prescriptions of ritual makes the being of this center ever less figural and more virtual. This virtualization is realized in a histor¬ ical series of insights or revelations subsequent to the originary scene. The exemplary case is Moses' experience of the burning bush, where he learns the nonfigural nature of a God whose name is a sentence (ehyeh asher ehyeh) rather than a word.* It is to the revelation of the ultimate reciprocity between God and humanity within the Judeo-Christian tradition that we owe our understand¬ ing of the center of the scene of human origin as an object, not of belief, but of hypothesis. It is on this basis alone that we can arrive at the degree of self-understanding in which the reconciliation between belief and nonbelief becomes possible. *See Science and Faith, chapter 3.

CHAPTER

3

Morality and Ethics

The underlying sense of the distinction between morality and ethics is that the moral imposes an absolute and universal obligation whereas the ethical involves the weighing of historically specific principles. The guilt generated by the obliga¬ tory nature of the moral has led the British philosopher Bernard Williams to call for the abolition of morality in terms reminiscent of Saint Paul calling for the abrogation of the Law.* But what is really abolished in this kind of thinking is the anthropological basis that would allow us to understand both our sense of moral obligation and our experience of an ethical domain somehow liber¬ ated from the reign of morality. If morality is to ethics as the absolute and singular to the relative and plural, it must stand closer to our origin. Yet with the human is born not only universal obliga¬ tion but also social interaction, hence not merely the moral but the ethical as well. The originary point of articulation between moral¬ ity and ethics is the birthplace of the characteristic tension be¬ tween the communal and the social. Morality cannot be understood as a set of principles, although there are gnomic moral formulas, like the "golden rule" that Hillel called the equivalent of "the law and the prophets," or Jesus' exhor¬ tation to "love thy neighbor as thyself." What is captured by these formulas is the requirement of absolute reciprocity as a model— the fundamental model—of human interaction. Because it is fun¬ damental, the moral imperative is "categorical," of the essence of

*See Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).

46

ORIGINARY

ANALYSIS

the human independently of time or place. Kant was the first to articulate this, although he thought it a truth rather of philosophy than of anthropology. In contrast to the unity of the moral stands the diversity of the ethical, the set of norms that regulate human interaction in spe¬ cific societies. Ethnography has attempted to find order in this ethical variety. But the determination of a proper set of ethical principles depends on who—the ethnographer or the subject—is qualified to define it. As has become evident today, the neat dis¬ tinction between the "etic" and the "emic" always breaks down. It is impossible to insulate the society under study from ethnogra¬ phers' own values.* Yet there is cause for reassurance rather than despair in ethnog¬ raphers' postmodern renunciation of the hope-and-fear that the societies they study might be so different from their own that these objects of study could never be contaminated through dialogue. For the inevitability of intercultural dialogue suggests that the diver¬ sity of ethical principles springs from a ground of unity. The para¬ digm for this unity-in-diversity is the originary articulation be¬ tween morality and ethics that we seek. Although rabbinical thought had grasped the imperative simplic¬ ity of the moral, it was Christianity that discovered its radical distinction from the ethical. Christianity conceives of the ethi¬ cal—the Law of the Old Testament—as an imperfect temporal version of the moral, a historical falling away from a transcendental originary essence. Universal morality is to particular ethics as the unique kingdom of heaven is to the plurality of the kingdoms of this world. At the same time, ethical diversity, because it no longer poses a fundamental threat to morality, acquires a legitimacy it never had in civilizations where ethical otherness was a threat not merely in practice but in principle. The systematic study of so¬ cieties different from one's own has been undertaken only within the Western tradition. But this quest for diversity is also, despite itself, a reduction of diversity. The fascination with the ethnologi¬ cal Other only hastens the revelation that the Other is just more of the Same. See fames Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Har¬ vard University Press, 1988), and Francis Affergan, Critiques anthropologiques (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1991).

Morality and Ethics

47

The Moral Model The Gospels affirm with divine authority the primordial status of the moral model of communal interaction. How may we under¬ stand this model in anthropological terms? The operation of originary analysis, as defined in Chapter i, depends on the fact that any category claimed to be an anthropolog¬ ical universal, that is, a fundamental characteristic of the human, must make its appearance in the originary event and is therefore in principle equally essential to its reconstruction. Originary analysis is a thought-experiment that extends the scope of a founding thought-experiment—the originary hypothesis. It functions as a heuristic, a means for enhancing our understanding of the human by providing a fixed point of departure for the circular process by which we understand the whole in relation to the part and the part in relation to the whole. To carry out an originary analysis of morality, we must justify its necessary presence in the originary scene; that is, we must show that it is implicit in the use of language. And if we wish to gain an originary insight into the distinction between morality and ethics, we must extend our hypothesis so that not only universal morality but particular ethics, as well as the crucial articulation between them, are situated within the originary event. The singularity of the moral, as opposed to the plurality of the ethical, reflects the singularity—the unique moment—recon¬ structed by our hypothesis. Morality is the minimal ethic of the originary event, independently of any particular description of this event. Moral reciprocity is implicit in the symmetrical interaction of the participants in their originary use of language. This recon¬ struction of the moral model captures the transcendental origin attributed to it in Christian doctrine as well as its centrality in Kant's critical ethic. The categorical imperative may justifiably be said to be inherent in human reason, since it is the model of interaction implicit in the genesis of the operation—language— that uniquely characterizes human reason. That morality is not a principle but a model of human interaction is also made clear by this reconstruction. The ostensive sign of the originary users of language could only be uttered in the communal context; it could not yet be enunciated as a context-free rule associating a signifier with a signified.

48

ORIGINARY

ANALYSIS

But the originary exchange of signs that inaugurates the moral model is not the conclusion of the originary event. The obligation of perfect reciprocity in the act of designation is dependent on the general renunciation of appetitive satisfaction in the face of immi¬ nent conflict. This danger is so great that it must be averted at the price of deferring the material necessities of life. But deferral can¬ not be maintained indefinitely. The physical division of the central object among the participants that concludes the event also puts an end to the uncontested reign of morality. The moral model con¬ tains within itself a latent tension that will render humanity, hap¬ pily or unhappily, incapable of realizing the utopia put forth in the Gospels. The originary exchange of signs must be and yet cannot be the universal model of our behavior. For the liberation of the com¬ munity through the sign determines the liberation of the individ¬ ual from the community itself. Origin ary Ethics The ethical is always haunted by the moral, even before it can articulate its alienation from it. The ethical is "late," a falling away from originary morality. But lateness too is essential to the human; lateness too is originary. If human conduct could have remained regulated by the moral model, all conflict would have been evacu¬ ated into the realm of inarticulate animality and human interac¬ tion would have transcended itself in perfect communion. With the sphere of being thus partitioned between angels and beasts, the human and its language would be abolished ab ovo. Hence our originary analysis cannot end with the moral; it must explore the ethical as well. But if morality is one, ethics are many. This poses the problem of choosing which particular set of fundamental ethi¬ cal principles to take as the point of departure for our analysis. The most familiar brief statements of the ethical imperatives of "natural law" are the affirmation of the Declaration of Indepen¬ dence that "all men are created equal [and] endowed by their Cre¬ ator with [the] inalienable rights [of] life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," and the more succinct French revolutionary slogan "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." These statements are two hundred years old; but they remain alive in both the popular mind and the official language of the two most historically significant republics.

Morality and Ethics

49

This may be considered prima facie evidence of their correspon¬ dence with the ethical intuition current in the most advanced social form humanity has attained, democratic market society. Both statements include the notions of equality and liberty; the "pursuit of happiness" describes the positive fruits of liberty, lest we take it for the merely negative freedom from oppression. The concept of fraternity is another matter. Because fraternity deliber¬ ately conflates two necessarily separate levels of social organiza¬ tion—family and society—it cannot really be called an ethical concept. It is rather a gesture toward the communal integrity of the originary scene via the "brotherly love" of the Gospels. But such affirmations of unity reveal its absence all the more. The adoption of the fraternal ideal was the fatal error of the French revolution¬ aries, and, as we are able to see today, the fundamental political delusion of the entire modern era, for it signified the incompatibil¬ ity of revolutionary goals with civil society. If an ethical existence is dependent on my treating every man as my brother, then society as we know it is irredeemable and must be destroyed. The romantic dream of transforming society into a total fraternal community has inspired the most sinister social experiments in history, beginning with the comradely "citizenship" of the French Revolution itself. Yet this error is highly instructive. The revolution only comes to legislate fraternity, to attempt to prescribe what is plainly an ascriptive category, because it senses the latent tension between the ostensibly compatible ethical principles of liberty and equality. The revolutionary order is born in resentful violence. "Equality" is understood as the elimination of repressive social difference; "lib¬ erty" is the freedom forcibly to suppress this difference. The "fra¬ ternal" suspension of the tension between liberty and equality was dependent on the struggle against the inequities of the Old Regime; it could not provide the ethical basis for a stable society. We should prefer the better sense of the American formulation, where equal¬ ity is made the precondition of "life, liberty and the pursuit of hap¬ piness." The significance of this asymmetry will become clearer in the course of our analysis. We first observe that both equality and freedom are implicit in the moral model itself: the obligation of moral reciprocity implies a freely accepted equality with one's fellows. This implication is no illusion,- from what other source could ethical principles be de-

50

ORIGINARY

ANALYSIS

rived? Only their separation from each other, their very formula¬ tion as principles, reveals their lateness with respect to morality. The moral is constitutive in actu of the human community; the ethical principles of equality and freedom can only be applied to the behavior of individuals as a result of the successful formation of this community. The moral model reconstructs the face-to-face community of the originary event. In contrast, the principles of freedom and equality apply to the individual's interaction within the virtual community that survives the event. Originary analysis concerns not the histor¬ ical thematization or coming-to-consciousness of these principles but their emergence into nonthematic or constitutive awareness, as is notably revealed to us by the resentment aroused by their violation. We learn that we are essentially free and equal when we experience resentment at unfreedom and inequality.

Equality The moment of the originary event in which the aborted gesture of appropriation becomes a sign designating the central object estab¬ lishes the equality of all the participants. The hands reaching for the object were already, so to speak, in egalitarian revolt against dominance. Yet to attribute an egalitarian intention to the actors themselves would be to return to Freud's tendentious formulation of the originary scene in Totem and Taboo, where the powerless collectivity of sons murder the all-powerful father. What can more plausibly be hypothesized is that the participants in the originary scene of language constitute rather than thematize their equality through the symmetrical exchange of signs. The deferral of conflict through the sign confers not merely an equivalent meaning on all the gestures designating the inaccessible center, but an equal status on all the performers of these gestures, who stand on the circum¬ ference of a circle, equidistant from this center. The origin of lan¬ guage is the originary moment of human equality, just as language remains the fundamental guarantee of human equality. Aristotle's "natural slaves" were speakers of "barbarian" languages. To deny or affirm human equality is first of all to deny or affirm linguistic equality. Like the background radiation that gives astrophysicists clues to

Morality and Ethics

51

the big bang of cosmogenesis, our use of language gives us clues to the origin of human equality in a cultural "big bang." Although language may reflect social hierarchy, its fundamental operation is symmetrical: in order to understand a sign, one must in principle be capable of emitting it oneself. Social constraints aside, the least speaker of a language is capable of talking to the greatest. The interaction of any two members of a linguistic community takes for granted that they can engage in a successful exchange of signs. This equal participation in a virtual community of language-users reflects the constitution of the original human community in and through the first use of language. It is only on the basis of the nonthematic equal status conferred by the sign that the community can proceed to the "equal" division of the central object. Approximate equality in the domain of things is modeled on absolute equality in the domain of signification, where any token of the sign is the equivalent of any other.

Freedom and Originary Exchange Originary freedom, like originary equality, is accessible through the "background radiation" of linguistic usage. Language is freely emitted; that it can be coerced by threat of violence only demon¬ strates this a contrario. The utterances of language, in contrast to those of animal signal systems, are not genetically fixed; their content is chosen by the speaker. Hence in the same sense in which the emission/reception of the originary sign is the constitutive act of human equality, it is also the constitutive act of human freedom. Within the unanimous group, each individual's decision to interpret the gesture—the indi¬ vidual's own and that of the others—as a sign is an exercise of critical judgment, indeed, of esthetic judgment. This is the origi¬ nary model of Kant's judgment "without a concept." (We recall Kant's fourth definition of the beautiful as "what is recognized without a concept as the object of a necessary satisfaction."*) The gesture of appropriation has been aborted out of fear of violence; but in order for the aborted gesture to be accepted as a sign, its designation of the central referent must itself provide temporary * Kant, Critique of Judgment, Book I, section 22.

52

ORIGINARY

ANALYSIS

consolation for the nonappropriation of the center. The partici¬ pants' paradoxical oscillation between the contemplation of the object-as-mediated-by-the-sign and the contemplation of the object-in-itself defers or "drowns" their originary alienation from or, more precisely, resentment of the center. The originary esthetic judgment creates the imaginary space, the scene of representation, within which individuals interpret in terms of their own desire the signifying relation that links the periphery with the center.* But the ethical principles of freedom and equality are only im¬ plicit within the moral scene of language. The passage from the moral to the ethical that will permit the human community to survive the crisis of the originary event depends on the transition from an economy of signs to an economy of things. The division of the central object among the members of the group is the origin of the real economy, of the system of material exchange. Whether or not physical acts of exchange take place among the participants, the latter must accept their portions as equivalent. The equivalence of portions extends the equivalence of signs into the real, appetitive world, and in so doing transforms it. The establishment of formal equivalence between real objects, as opposed to signs, inaugurates the category of value. The formal equivalence of the separate individual tokens of the originary sign is at the same time invented and revealed in their symmetrical re-presentation of the center. The formalization of the sign as a "type" leaves meaningless the individual's idiosyncratic contribution to the production of each "token." The individual signifying imagination within which the free critical judgment of the sign-producer is exercised is private, cut off from the commu¬ nal exchange of signs. In the case of the portions of the central object, however, equivalence means potential interchangeability among things that are equal without being identical. Thus the culmination of the originary event may be understood as an ex¬ change: an exchange not among the individual members of the community, but between the individual participants and the com¬ munity as a whole, one that determines and guarantees the equal value of their portions. Each brings to the community the status of an equal participant * These considerations are developed more fully in Chapter 7.

Morality and Ethics

53

and receives in exchange a portion accepted as equal; for the event to be successful implies that, in thus participating in the division, the members of the group are farther from a state of critical tension than before. Material equality derives from equality of communal status; at the same time it constitutes the tangible reality of this equality, in contrast to the unequal division practiced by the preex¬ isting animal hierarchy. The conflicting interpretations of the ethi¬ cal principle of equality examined below reflect the instability of this equivalence between status equality and material equality, equality of signs and equality of things. The center is sacred, infinitely valuable (and therefore "price¬ less," in-valuable) because its inaccessibility is the guarantee of communal peace, and thereby of survival, without which assign¬ ments of value lose their meaning. But upon its division, the cen¬ tral object loses its unbreakable attachment to the center and be¬ comes in its separable parts subject to valuation. At the same time, the division of the object reveals the independence of the perma¬ nent center-as-such from its temporary material occupant; as was observed in the previous chapter, this is the source of the idea of God, as opposed to the undifferentiated concept of the sacred. The community at this moment constitutes an originary "mar¬ ket," a locus of free acceptance of equivalent value. Equality and freedom remain interdependent, because the peace that has de¬ ferred the originary crisis can only be maintained if the portions of all, like their participation in the community, are freely accepted as equal. This does not imply that all contributed to the preceding collective activity (let us say, the hunt) the same degree of physical power, skill, or risk; the opposite must certainly have been the case, since this activity took place under the reign of the animal dominance system. But the "equal participation" that makes possi¬ ble the appetitive reinforcement necessary to the survival of the nascent human community does not signify the equal contribution of all, but their equality as members of the community. The equal distribution of the object confirms the essential equality of the originary participants as first manifested in the production of the sign. Even in a later, oligarchic phase of social evolution, ritual feasts like the Homeric dais else reproduce this originary equiva¬ lence of words and things.

54

ORIGINARY

ANALYSIS

From Community to Society The originary event as described thus far remains bound to the moral model; the distribution of the object follows the same princi¬ ple of reciprocal exchange as the "distribution" of the sign. Yet whereas the exchange of signs leads to the exchange of things, the exchange of things leads outside the event altogether, from a com¬ munal to a social existence, where the latent asymmetry between freedom and equality will manifest itself. In the originary scene, the individual participant is satisfied to receive an equal portion. Whether or not this individual consumes it entirely in the communal context (presumably some of it would be saved for dependents), the portion is a piece of property that belongs to the individual alone. This possession is guaranteed by the community, and therefore dependent on it, but through this very guarantee, the possessor is rendered for a time independent of the community. Whereas the internalization of the linguistic sign liberates the individual from the collectivity only in imagination, the possession of property of value is materially and therefore ethically liberating. The sign brings about a deferral of material needs in the face of the higher urgency of preventing conflict; once this danger has been averted, the appetitive necessity that provoked the crisis in the first place reasserts itself. In contrast, the appetitive satisfac¬ tion provided by the distribution of the object abolishes the poten¬ tial cause of conflict. The contentment of all with their portions ends the crisis and dissolves the group,- the originary moral com¬ munity is no longer actual but virtual. The members are now free to return to their several occupations outside the newly defined communal sphere. The need for collective action has been deferred for a period of time greater by an order of magnitude than the deferral of appetitive satisfaction imposed by the urgency of the event. The contrast between the brief periods of heightened com¬ munal tension marked by major rituals and the extended calm of everyday interaction establishes the rhythm of social life. Just as the conversion of the central object into portions of indi¬ vidual property is the origin of the ethical idea of freedom, it is also that of the ethical idea of equality. In contrast to the formal, "moral" equality of the exchange of signs, the distribution of the

Morality and Ethics

55

object provides each individual with a tangible measure of equal status in the community. The equal possession of a valueless sign is meaningful only within the interactive context of the scene; the equal possession of a valuable object extends the individual's equal participation in the community beyond the boundaries of the scene. The exchange system established in the originary event thus generates an "outside" in which the members of the community produce and consume the objects whose values are assigned within this system. The centralization of the originary event in a fixed locus gives topographical reality to this outside. The creation of the human community on a sacred scene defines at the same time the private space of the profane nonscene in which economic and other activities take place beyond the direct control of this community. The originary distribution of appetitive satisfaction generates the freedom by which the individual becomes independent of the actual community formed in the originary event, as well as the equality that defines individual status within the virtual commu¬ nity that survives the event. Through these ethical principles, which now mediate the interactions of its participants, the com¬ munity conceives itself as a society founded on, but irreducible to, the moral entity constituted by the originary reciprocity inherent in the use of language.

The Dissymmetry of Freedom and Equality We have seen that both freedom and equality characterize the individual liberated by the scene from the scene itself. Yet although in the originary exchange of signs equality and freedom cannot be conceived separately from the interaction that is constitutive of both, their dissymmetry as ethical principles is evident, if only from the fact that in all societies that have advanced beyond a subsistence economy, the originary equalitariamsm of the ex¬ change system has been subverted. The freedom of each no longer depends on the equality of all. The dissymmetry between freedom and equality is the funda¬ mental ethical problem. Unlike equality, freedom cannot be real¬ ized by a simple extension of the moral model, that is, of the

56

ORIGINARY

ANALYSIS

communal exchange system as inaugurated in the originary event. Freedom is also freedom from this system. Freedom and equality remain inseparable only so long as the urgency of the originary crisis makes it impossible to conceive of them as independent principles. The space of human freedom that is born with the sign depends on the abrogation of the freedom of the dominant animal to appropriate the appetitively desirable ob¬ ject, as well as of the subordinate "freedoms" of the other animals to take their share at the proper moment. Human freedom is a deferral of animal freedom that constitutes our fundamental equal¬ ity. But in the space of this deferral, human beings also become free to conceive their own unfreedom to act on their desire. Thus whereas the equality of the participants in the originary event is visible from their symmetrical position in relation to the center, their freedom of action is not. The individual's freedom within the originary community is formal, not material. It is the moral free¬ dom we associate with Kant, the freedom to obey the categorical imperative that admits of no alternative. It is, in another incarna¬ tion, the inalienable freedom, so dear to Jean-Paul Sartre, of the prisoner in the concentration camp. But it is not the freedom to do anything in the real world. The participants in the event are critically concerned with avoid¬ ing conflict. The equal production of the sign and the subsequent equal division of the central object are the necessary means to this end. The appropriative acts of the participants are deferred and, when actually performed, constrained by communal pressure. Hence, although they are the first acts of creatures freed from the dominance of instinct, they are constituted as free actions only on the participants' internal scene of representation. In contrast, the "liberty" that permits the "pursuit of happiness" is not the moral freedom that binds individuals to the community of reciprocal exchange, but their potential to act outside the communal sphere. The pioneers on the prairie are free because they are individual laws, and economies, unto themselves. The historically progressive nature of human society, as opposed to the stasis of animal societies, is a product of the freedom granted by the inside/outside structure of the originary community. When individuals conceive of potential new sources of value, their con¬ ceptions are not guaranteed confirmation in advance by the com-

Morality and Ethics

57

munity. It is the space of deferral between the exercise of freedom in the private sphere and the possibly unsuccessful attempt to establish the communal value of the product of this exercise that makes economic progress possible. The technology of early hu¬ mans may have evolved very slowly but its evolution cannot be explained away by allusion to the many millennia of its duration any better than can the emergence of language. Technological prog¬ ress is dependent on the freedom available from the outset to leave and return to the communal exchange system. But the deferral of communal evaluation inherent in the consti¬ tution of a system of exchange is, more specifically, the deferral of the ritual reenactment of the originary equal distribution. The space of freedom of the individual producer is a space within which equality has been suspended. Equality is a centripetal and freedom a centrifugal concept. Moral equality is conferred once and for all with the possession of language, but the primitive conception of ethical equality requires the perpetual reenactment in sacrificial ritual of the equal distribution of the originary event. Freedom, on the contrary, flourishes through the postponement of the return to the center. It is the free individual's independence from central control that permits this individual to formulate a strategy of re¬ turn and ultimately to prevail over the guardians of ritually guaran¬ teed equality. Yet this triumph, through deferral, of freedom over equality is itself only a deferral. The visible strength of the princi¬ ple of equality today is a sufficient sign that it was never really suppressed. Human inequality is a product of freedom from the moral config¬ uration of the originary scene, a freedom granted by the scene itself. The ethical principle of freedom impinges on the constraints of the equalitarian material economy. The End of Culture proposed a model of the "origin of inequality" inspired by Marshall Sahlins's description of the Melanesian institution of the "big-man."* In contrast to Rousseau's model of an eccentric enclosure of property ("Ceci est a moi!"), the inauguration of ethical inequality takes place not through the abandonment but through the usurpation of the ritual center.! The big-man is a superior producer in an econ*See Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1972). fThe element of truth in Rousseau's conception is clear from the preceding discussion: the individual must depart from the center to be able to be liberated

58

ORIGINARY

ANALYSIS

omy sufficiently free to permit a productive surplus. But the bigman's relative superiority can only be translated into a new, supercommunal status through his redistribution of this surplus in a communal feast. Thus he captures and turns to his own human purposes the originary source of difference: the opposition between the sacred center and the human periphery. The usurpation of the sacred center was, if physically impossi¬ ble, already imaginable in the originary event itself. Although this usurpation is the beginning of social hierarchy with all its afflic¬ tions, it is also the beginning of the breakdown of the originary absolute difference between center and periphery. The moral equal¬ ity of the participants in the originary event was only achieved at the price of the absolute alienation embodied in the sacred. The continual dissolution or deconstruction of this originary difference is the motor of ethical progress. The ethical principle of distributive equality, as personified by the guardians of the ritual order, is vulnerable to the freedom of the big-man because it depends on the absolute inequality between peripheral humanity and the sacred center. Only this inequality, consecrated by the immanent danger of conflict, can insure the homology between the economy of things and the economy of signs on which the originary principle of equality depends. But the originary separation between the exchange of signs and the ex¬ change of things makes the dissolution of the homology between signs and things inevitable. The sign that first names the sacred also begins humanity's liberation from it.

The Free Market What then may be said concerning the originary relations among equality, liberty, and the "pursuit of happiness"? Freedom is the possibility of pursuing private happiness, not permanently cut off from the social order, yet within the "outside" it determines. But the equality that is the basis for liberty in the Declaration of Inde¬ pendence, in contrast with that implied by the French revolutionfrom it. But this liberation is only realized on return to the center. This, Rousseau could not have recognized; the very conception of an originary collec¬ tive center is foreign to Enlightenment thought.

Morality and Ethics

59

ary slogan, marks a retreat from the distributive equality we have hitherto associated with the concept. The man who is "created equal" has no claim to material equality, merely to equal juridical status as a member of society. The lapidary formulation of ethical doctrine in the Declaration of Independence coincides with the rise to dominance of a social institution in which the moral or formal equality of membership in the community of exchangers of signs once again, but in a new way, becomes a model for participation in the society of exchangers of things. This institution is that of the free market; like the Declara¬ tion of Independence, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations appeared in 1776. The equality of the participants in the free market is their equal capacity to offer their goods and services at an impersonally determined market price. It is by means of the formal equality of the market that the ethical principle of equality makes its longdeferred return to the social order. This principle, in its primitive form, requires equality of mate¬ rial distribution. This is the result of its derivation from the mo¬ ment of ritual distribution, where "exchange" takes place between the individual participant and the community as a whole. But the rise of the market suggests another, more flexible derivation: not from the exchange at the center, but from the potential for ex¬ change between members of the group, based on the equal status of each within the community. With the elimination of the necessity for return to the ritual center, the principle of equality becomes reconcilable with the principle of freedom. The originary potential for one-on-one exchange is the result of the equality of the division of the central object. But once equality is no longer measured at the center, the only relevant comparison is that between the portions of the particular individuals involved in the exchange. This refor¬ mulation of the principle of equality permits a decentralized con¬ ception of the social order that maintains its unity through the virtual centrality of universally determined value, that is, through the price system. The reinterpretation of equality as virtual rather than ritually guaranteed is the ethical basis of the market system. Its emergence has been historically associated by Max Weber and others with the critique of Christian ritualism embodied in the Protestant Reformation. This new interpretation of equality is not innocent; it entails an

6o

ORIGINARY

ANALYSIS

advantage for those with stronger market positions. Thus it fur¬ nishes the basis for an ideological discourse, a discourse of power. But the older interpretation is just as much an ideological weapon for those who seek to overthrow these positions. The conflict between market liberalism and collectivism in its various forms is expressed in the opposition between the two conflicting originary analyses of the ethical concept of equality. The liberal keeps ethical equality close to its moral minimum,- the collectivist harks back to the equal distributions of tribal hunters. But in fact this latter analysis is the expression less of nostalgia for a long-vanished ethic than of the hope of realizing a moral utopia. Until very recently, it appeared possible to defend either perspec¬ tive. Advanced industrial societies appeared to have a choice be¬ tween two systems, one based on the strong interpretation of cen¬ trally allocated material equality, the other founded on the weak interpretation of equal market status that maximizes freedom rather than equality. The events that destroyed the plausibility of this symmetrical opposition came as a shock to the vast majority even of those who were convinced of the superiority of the market system. It was Christianity—specifically the ethical vision of the Gos¬ pels—that first proposed the moral model not merely as a standard for the private sphere but as the sole basis for human interaction. The Gospel ideal of a centerless moral community, presided over by a God who has renounced any further intervention in human affairs, is one of history's great ethical revolutions. It reflects the intuition that the configuration of the originary scene is solely dependent on the reciprocal human interaction on the periphery rather than subordinate to the sacred center. Christianity is the source of the Western liberation from the sacred and ultimately from Christian religion itself. But beginning with the early Christian churches, attempts to realize the moral model in real communities have been doomed to failure. Morality cannot be made into an ethic because only the power of the ritual center can maintain the homology between the economy of signs and the economy of things. As the subjects of socialism discovered, the "withering away" of state power is tanta¬ mount to the abolition of socialism itself. In effect, the liberation from the originary scene effected by Christianity is incomplete. In

Morality and Ethics

61

its concentration on the moral model, even in the decentralized form of the Gospel utopia, Christianity privileges the configura¬ tion of the originary event itself above that of the human society it founded.* This society owes its ethical existence to the freedom from the community accorded to the individual participants in the originary event. Although ritual punctually reunites the commu¬ nity as a whole, it is only through the exchange system, realized in its mature form as the free market, that the individual participates continuously in society. It no longer sounds farfetched to claim that the free market is the highest conceivable form of human social organization. This does not mean that we should simply reject the Gospel moral utopia that inspired the socialist movement. Christianity made fraternal mutual recognition a prerequisite to the universalization of moral reciprocity. Marx went a step beyond the Gospels in recognizing that the realization of this reciprocity is crucially dependent on the economic productivity of the market system. But what utopian critics of the market have always failed to recognize is that the only possible ethical equivalent of the moral utopia is the proliferation and circulation of individual distinctions that the market's eco¬ nomic productivity makes possible. Not the universal homogene¬ ity of "brothers" and "sisters," but universal differentiation is the prerequisite for a social practice founded on reciprocal recognition. The ethical realization of the moral goal of equality is not conceiv¬ able as a final state, but only as the telos of the market's everexpanding capacity to produce, distribute, and consume the differ¬ ences that are the measure of human freedom. *It would no doubt be more precise to call the Christian moral community "omnicentric" rather than decentralized; this community resembles Pascal's description of the universe "dont le centre est partout, et la circonference nulle part" ("whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is no¬ where"). Hence it might be argued that the model of Christian morality is not a simple equivalent of originary reciprocity, which was a purely peripheral ac¬ tivity around an absolutely differentiated center. But insofar as it remains a religion at all, Christianity retains the differentiated sacred center. For a Chris¬ tian, Christ cannot be a man like any other. And to attribute the survival of the sacred to an insufficiently radical "institutional Christianity" merely begs the question of why the Christian revelation has been unable to show us, beyond appeals to our intuition of the originary community, what the omnicentric society would look like, let alone how to construct it.

CHAPTER

A Generative Taxonomy of Speech-Acts

"ordinary language" is much like that of M. Jourdain's prose; one is deliciously surprised at the wealth of knowledge one possesses without having ever been aware of it. But in terms of methodological rigor, ordinary language phi¬ losophy represents a step backward from the logical positivism it has largely replaced. Philosophy's dealings with speech-acts in¬ volve the same kind of a posteriori classifications that we find in pre-Darwinian biology. J. L. Austin's discovery of performatives could no doubt only have occurred in such a framework, but one might expect his successors to be more anxious to proceed with the construction of a priori models. That they are not is one indication among many of the weariness of contemporary metaphysics. I say "metaphysics," not because language philosophers make use of metaphysical concepts like Being or the First Mover, but because their work is based on a metaphysical conception of lan¬ guage. This conception contradicts the healthy empiricism of their interest in speech-acts, that is, in real human behavior, whence their inability to go beyond the more or less cogent exploration of the surface of human reality, linguistic and otherwise. Their failure to construct the a priori edifices that had been expected of philoso¬ phers up to, say, Wittgenstein, is a further consequence of this contradiction. The

thrill

of

"Metaphysics" has become in most quarters a label for philoso¬ phy one does not like rather than a well-defined domain of specula¬ tive thought. In the broadest sense, as used in Chapter 2, meta¬ physics is the form of thought that, unlike religion or generative anthropology, denies its historical derivation from an originary

A Generative Taxonomy of Speech-Acts

63

event. But it is possible to formulate a narrower definition that retains this new anthropological content while making clearer its connection to the traditional use of the term. Far from appearing as a digression in the context of a discussion of language, this defini¬ tion is construed in terms of language. Metaphysics may be defined as thought based on the (usually tacit) principle that the declarative sentence—in philosophical terminology, the proposition—is the fundamental linguistic form. This definition bears with it implications that bring us to the more familiar connotations of the term. What theories of being, substance, and reality have in common with the philosophers' analyses of ordinary language, as well as with the fundamental principles of modern (synchronic) linguistics, is that they exclude from consideration the specifically human nature and origin of linguistic representation. A metaphysical conception of language does not imply, but is nevertheless more than simply compatible with, a metaphysical view of the universe. Categories such as "being" and "reality" attempt to substantiate human understand¬ ing of the universe in objective, nonhuman terms. The epistemol¬ ogy behind such categories is ultimately theological and revelatory (as Heidegger's "nonmetaphysical" use of them makes clear), but instead of theology's being driven back to its anthropological roots, it is evacuated by disembodying its vocabulary, leaving only these vaporous notions in its place. Modern language philosophy, with its insistence on precision and on empirical backing for its (always so tentative) conclusions, seems a far cry from such an exercise. Yet the basic nature of metaphysics is found there unchanged; language, although used exclusively by humans, is not understood as having a conjoint origin with the human or as evolving in its fundamental syntactic structures. In the best of ordinary language philosophy, that of Austin, many of the shibboleths of the analytic philosophy current in his day were questioned and even rejected. Austin cared little for propositions and truth-functions; he recognized that language is in the first place operational, that speech is primarily performative rather than constative. Nevertheless, Austin remained at the level of a curious empiricism that he himself characterized as "linguistic phenomenology." His work contains frequent references to the historical wisdom contained in the discriminations allowed by

64

ORIGINARY

ANALYSIS

ordinary language, but this wisdom is of the detail, not of the whole. Metaphysics will remain at the core of ordinary language philosophy for as long as this philosophy's pragmatic intuitions about language are not grounded in a theory of linguistic form. Such a theory must be generative, because the intuition of contem¬ porary speakers has no need for and therefore does not contain clear insights into the historical articulation of the forms they employ. In linguistic analysis, only an anthropological hypothesis can lead us from Linnaeus to Darwin.

The Originary Speech-Act: The Ostensive According to our generative theory of linguistic origins, the origi¬ nal linguistic form is the ostensive, which names a present object. * The originary use of the ostensive takes place in a collective scene where each participant designates the central object-referent to fellow participants at the periphery. This point of departure, in contrast with that of traditional gram¬ mar, meets the criterion of parsimony. The original form of repre¬ sentation is merely supplementary to the perceived reality of the referent. Its "syntax" constructs an independent linguistic scene of maximal simplicity,- the referent is named, not as opposed to some other referent, quality, or relation, but simply as opposed to noth¬ ing. Such a language would originally possess only a single word that would mean "uniquely significant."! The most elementary function of language is to re-present the present, but this represen¬ tation at the same time creates the category of the present—that is, as present-to-me and present-to-others at the same time. The meta¬ physical category of presence, which hypostatizes that of the lin¬ guistic universe created by the declarative, is thus not primary but derivative; Derrida's critique of the category of presence attacks the hypostasis without touching its anthropological basis.! *The interested reader is referred to The Origin of Language for a full presentation of this theory. tin Chapter 2, we saw another way of understanding this word: as the name of God. !See the opening section of Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1968; in English, Of Grammatology [Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976]), and the essay on "la difference" in Derrida, Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972,- in English, Margins of Philosophy [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982)).

A Generative Taxonomy of Speech-Acts

65

The same can be said for Austin's pragmatic critique of proposi¬ tional truth. The proposition is not originary; it is a formalization of the declarative sentence-form, which is derived at two removes from the ostensive. The question of the performative nature of language can be dealt with only at the origin. What is "performed" by the ostensive is a centering of its referent that is at the same time a subsumption of it under the category of the significant center. In designating its object, the ostensive situates it on a linguistic scene, which, although it is not yet independent of the real presence of the designatum, cannot be reduced to the super¬ ficially mimetic role of a locus for "reproducing reality." For the designatum is selected out from its worldly context, where it was seen against the background of its surroundings; once it is desig¬ nated linguistically, it stands alone as solely significant. This sig¬ nificance is chosen by the speaker for an interlocutor. The pragmatics of the ostensive utterance requires that it possess a preexisting potential significance for its hearer that is in turn dependent on the existence of a virtual community of speakers that can be actualized at any moment. This virtual community extends from the originary community of language users down to our own universe.

The Indicative Ostensive The reconstituted community of the isolated speech-act need only include the speaker and a single interlocutor. But in the typical indicative use of the ostensive, it is not necessary to specify the number of possible interlocutors or the relationship that prevails among them before the act of utterance; the ostensive is character¬ ized rather by the open nature of this preliminary relationship. A typical example is the cry of "Fire!" addressed by the first observer of the phenomenon to no one in particular, which is to say, to everyone within hearing; the first hearers are expected to repeat the cry until all concerned are made aware of the danger. Under such circumstances, the significance of the designatum is considered to take precedence over all else in the situation. Hence the question as to whether such an ostensive is "performative" or "constative" is meaningless. The indicative ostensive creates a model of presentexperience-as-significant that, whether or not it suggests any spe-

66

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cific behavior to the interlocutor (as the cry of "Fire!" is likely to do), is in any case presumed to effect a transformation of the latter's awareness of immediate reality. There is no "performance" here in the sense of an irreversible transformation of the real world, but neither is there merely the acknowledgment of an already existing reality. The performance effected by the ostensive is that of propos¬ ing a model of significant experience. It goes without saying that this model, once tested against the reality experienced by the inter¬ locutor, need not continue to be accepted, but may be rejected as inappropriate—for example, if one decides that there is in fact no danger from fire at all.

The Designative Ostensive There exists, in addition to the indicative ostensive just described, a second major category of designative ostensives, within which are to be found in particular Austin's original performatives: ex¬ pressions such as "I now pronounce you man and wife," or "I hereby baptize this ship The Liberty.” We may well ask what such speech-acts have in common with the cry of "Fire!" In order to justify the inclusion within the overall category of the ostensive of two apparently so different types of speech-act—types that illustrate both sides of John Searle's word —» world / world —> word distinction*—it is necessary to examine more closely the significance relation between the indicative ostensive and its refer¬ ent. A cry such as "Fire!" does not appear to modify the world to which it refers. The fire is a fire whether or not anyone refers to it; a person who cries "Fire!" is not understood either by self or by others as "baptizing" the fire. We do not create the fire-ness of the fire by naming it, the way we do the marriedness of the couple or the Liberty-ness of the ship, although by naming it we situate it on the scene of representation and thereby make it meaningful to ourselves and others. The passage through the scene does not trans¬ form the object fire,- it leaves it be as nature while designating it in the terms of culture. In contrast, marriage and baptism transform their object because these acts are appurtenances of culture, wholly *See Searle, "A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts," in K. Gunderson, ed., Language, Mind, and Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975)-

A Generative Taxonomy of Speech-Acts

67

dependent on the scene of representation for their being as well as for their meaning. Such designative ostensives enact anew the communal accord in meaning, and without at least a vestigial communal scene they are meaningless; this accord is only implicit in the cry of "Fire!" The two varieties of ostensive—indicative and designative—are inherent in the very existence of language. For the existence of representations ("culture") is only conceivable as set off against representata ("nature") conceived as ontologically prior to them. Or, to present this argument in a less metaphysical vocabulary, language can only come into being when it becomes necessary to mitigate the intractability of reality to instinctual action. The originary scene of representation arises when reality cannot be left alone as mere perceptual presence. When this presence becomes a threat to all through the excessive appetite it arouses, it is deferred through representation, through the "aborted gesture of appropria¬ tion." Representation thus creates a set of cultural realities that contrast with natural realities. At first glance, the hypothetical originary scene would appear to create the indicative or world —» word type of ostensive, but not the designative or word —» world kind. * But this dichotomy is false. For the designation of the object of contention does not leave the object as it was previously, a mere natural reality newly named, but trans¬ figures it into a cultural object. What it was as a natural reality was something to appropriate for the satisfaction of appetite; what it is now, as a result of the act of designation, is something that the collectivity surrounding it does not dare to appropriate imme¬ diately and individually, but only after the act of its designation and then only communally. Fience the original act of ostensive designa¬ tion serves, on the one hand, as a model of the fundamental linguis¬ tic act of identifying and thus of the world —» word ostensive; but, on the other, it is also the model for the ritual act of sacralization or consecration, a model that is followed in designative speech acts such as baptism, that is, ritual name-giving. From a worldly object of appetite, the designatum is consecrated as a cultural and indeed sacred object. Although we can oppose ‘Attentive readers of Searle will note that I have turned his arrows in what seems to me the more natural direction, so that "word -» world" means that the word transforms the world rather than conforming to it.

68

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ANALYSIS

conveniently reproducible signs to inconveniently reproducible objects without introducing the "irrational" notion of the sacred, all is changed as soon as these objects themselves appear to be endowed with meaning, as soon as they are taken not as mere signs, but as the necessary conjunction of a meaning (Frege's Sinn, Saussure's signifie) with a worldly referent. To designate the central object of the originary scene is to consecrate it as the subsistent being to which the sign refers. And this act is not merely consecra¬ ting as it were by definition; it effects a radical transformation—in fact, a reversal in attitude toward the object, a passage from appetitivity to reverence. Naming this original object is truly baptiz¬ ing it in the most radical sense, for this baptism is not carried out in the name of some preexistent deity—it is the baptism of the object itself as deity, the origin of religion as well as language. But this is still, one might protest, not the equivalent of the performative that knowingly transforms the cultural status of a (married or baptized) person. True enough; but neither is it the indicative naming of the object as naturally falling under a preexis¬ tent meaning, as the present fire falls under the meaning "fire." It is neither, but both together, and the source of both as separate acts. What makes the indicative act immediately understandable to philosophers, whereas the consecrating designative retains a resi¬ due of mystery, is that the first, but not the second, function of the ostensive appears reconcilable with the metaphysical, deanthropologized version of the scene of representation that philosophy has inhabited since Plato.

The Ritual Roots of the Designative All of Austin's original performative examples have their roots in ritual, and it is an all too typical mistake of our enlightened age to suppose that, once these rituals have been appropriately secu¬ larized, we are at liberty to understand them without reference to their religious origins. Christening a ship or performing a civil marriage can only arbitrarily be looked upon as rational acts recon¬ cilable with a metaphysical view of language. It is surely conve¬ nient to have names for ships or people, or to create legal obliga¬ tions on sexual partners, but it is, or was, equally convenient to prevent bloody conflict over a tasty bison by designating it as untouchable outside the context of a communal feast.

A Generative Taxonomy of Speech-Acts

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In all these cases, "convenience" passes through sacralization, and not by mere historical accident. True, many of us do not baptize our children, and societies may well exist in which mar¬ riages are performed merely by signing a contract. But in however attenuated a form, acts of naming or of marrying are only func¬ tional because their authors can count on communal accord as to their significance and on communal acceptance of their felicity in attaining this significance. This accord is grounded in the sacred, not in the trivial sense that formulas invoking a divinity may still be pronounced in connection with them, but that they involve the community as a whole—and in cases like marriage or name-giving this means the entire human community, transcending national and cultural boundaries—in an implicit decision to consider a specific worldly being as indissolubly associated with a given sign. This is obvious in the case of names, which attach to individuals directly rather than standing for attributes of them (a name being different from an adjective); but it is equally true of marriage or of appointment to a title. The description of a couple as married does not have the same status as their description as speakers of Chi¬ nese, or Caucasian, or over five feet tall. There is no empirically given attribute of marriage that can be discovered by examining the couple together or separately; only historical evidence of the con¬ ferral of the state of marriage allows us to designate a couple as married.* Our recognition of this evidence implies an understand¬ ing of the state that is not the result of a conceptual judgment but of acquiescence in a social norm. The performative of marriage carries weight only insofar as everyone accepts that the ceremony of which it is a part transforms two separate individuals into an incarnation of the sign "man and wife."

The Imperative In our generative scheme of linguistic evolution, the imperative is derived from the ostensive as the result of the extension, at first "inappropriate," of the ostensive designation of real presence to a ‘The similarity of this language to Saul Knpke's critique of Russell's theory of names is no accident; see Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980). The excitement provoked by Kripke's work comes from his demonstration from within the camp of analytic philosophy that language must be understood historically, which is very nearly to say, anthropologically.

70

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ANALYSIS

merely imaginary presence. The word once uttered exclusively in the presence of its referent is now used in its absence, as a means of making-present.* Imperatives intend an action on the part of their addressee. This intention goes in the word -> world direction; yet its action is clearly less direct than that of the designative ostensive. "I baptize you . . ." actually effects a change in reality; an imperative merely attempts to bring about a change through the agency of another. True, the change sought by the imperative is a natural one, not a cultural one like naming or titling; but precisely for that reason, the words themselves cannot do the job. The addressee of the imperative, whether obeying it or not, must be expected to feel its force. An imperative utterance opens a period of awaiting with respect to the performance of the act that will satisfy it. This awaiting need not be temporally bounded or satisfiable in any punctual manner: negative injunctions such as "thou shalt not kill" await at every instant a nonperformance (of murder), and may thus be said to repose in a "conscience" or "superego" that monitors this awaiting. Whether or not it is obeyed in any specific instance, the imperative's very existence implies acknowledgment of the power of the originally communal scene of language over the individual members of the community. This acknowledgment im¬ plies in turn that the question of the felicity of imperatives, in contrast with that of performative ostensives, is merely peripheral. An unauthorized person saying "I now pronounce you man and wife" has accomplished nothing, but however absurd the (impera¬ tive) order I may give, I am making a legitimate use of language which, if backed up, say, by a gun in my hand, my interlocutor will probably attempt at least symbolically to satisfy. We should note that the gun would not help the unauthorized marrier in the pre¬ vious example. Even if he could somehow use it to coerce the entire community, in order to acquire the authority to use the consecra¬ ting phrase properly, he would have to exercise this coercion before he pronounces it. The explicit performative formulas that attach to the imperative form, or, more precisely, that may be classified as bearing an imper¬ ative intention or force, do not radically modify the meaning of the ‘The details of this derivation are not pertinent to the present discussion; the interested reader is referred to chapter 3 of The Origin of Language.

A Generative Taxonomy of Speech-Acts

71

imperative as such. Much has been written about the felicity con¬ ditions for such formulas as "I order," "I request," or "I implore." Ordering, for example, is said to require a position of authority: a private cannot order a general. No doubt; but the institutionalized power that allows generals to order privates is external to the intentional form of the imperative, the awaiting of which functions in the same manner whether I give an order or beg a favor. For the imperative, although it emphasizes the asymmetrical relationship between speaker and addressee, is not dependent on any hierarchi¬ cal superiority of the former to the latter. "I humbly beseech you to pass the salt" expresses an imperative intention just as much as "I order you to pass the salt." The imperative is a function of language recognized by the community as a whole, not a means of imposing the will of superiors on inferiors. Before turning to the speech-acts that are dependent on the declara¬ tive form, we would do well to clarify a point of grammar. I have claimed the ostensive and the imperative to be utterance-forms more elementary than the declarative sentence. How then can their intentions be expressed in declaratives? How can a declara¬ tive sentence such as "I now pronounce you man and wife" func¬ tion as an ostensive, and if so, how can we justify an evolutionary scheme based on utterance-forms the observance of which is appar¬ ently only optional? The answers to these questions emerge from an understanding of the evolution of these utterance-forms. The point of a generative taxonomy of speech-acts is to offer a plausible hypothesis for their emergence from a minimally differentiated original form. Such emergence must in every case begin with an inappropriate use of a previously existing form. That the new form eventually acquires its own syntactic identity implies that the innovation had already proved functional as an intention even in the absence of an unam¬ biguous syntactic form. The evolution of form is not epiphenomenal; an enriched set of formal possibilities makes it possible for still newer forms to arise. But it is the evolution of intention that is fundamental. The fact that this evolution is mirrored in syntactic forms the existence of which demonstrates that the intention they express is basic to linguistic communication in no way implies that this intention can be expressed only by the utterance-form

72

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specific to it. The declarative fornfis capacity both to express every nuance of intention and to render most such nuances explicitly in "explicit performatives" is a sign not of its more fundamental na¬ ture than the imperative or the ostensive, but of its higher evolu¬ tionary level.

The Declarative In our generative hypothesis, the declarative originates from a negative "reply" to an imperative. If the imperative demands the presentation of an object, the replying declarative merely tells us something about it, and the first thing that would have to be predicated of an object in a universe of discourse where the impera¬ tive is the highest utterance-form would be its unavailability. Once the legitimacy of a merely verbal reply becomes accepted, an im¬ perative may deliberately request it, and become thereby an inter¬ rogative. This derivation permits us to situate in a context both historical and intentional the constative intention most directly associated with the declarative. It has always been assumed by linguists and philosophers alike that the proposition is the atomic form of discourse, and that prima facie more elementary forms like the imperative are somehow derived from it. The damage thus done to linguistics is not my burden here, but the primacy of the proposition in philosophy, which deals with substantive rather than formal matters, has had even more harmful consequences. Philosophers assume as selfevident what is at best a dubious metaphysical ontology of inten¬ tion. Thus they construct the imperative as a propositional content plus imperative intention, so that Imp (p) appears as a supplemen¬ tary construction on "p." The constative Ass (p) is no doubt another such construct, but because it adds nothing to the words of "p," which it merely asserts, it is difficult to avoid implying that it is the more fundamental of the two. The question is in fact decided in advance, since the propositional content "p" is already a declara¬ tive sentence, whether asserted or not. By conceiving the desire expressed in an imperative or frustrated in an interdiction as a proposition, the philosopher would have us desire states-of-affairs rather than objects or acts. Psychologically, this is most doubtful; but it is on weak ground even in the formal

A Generative Taxonomy of Speech-Acts

73

domain of linguistics. To illustrate this, it suffices to refer to the nominal imperative, which, as its use by small children and sur¬ geons suggests, is clearly more elementary than the verbal.* When the surgeon calls out "Scalpel!" the imperative is perfectly clear in itself, and any propositional content we might construct for it (such as "Someone bring me the scalpel") would be manifestly artificial. To claim that there is a common propositional content in (1) "Shut the door!" (addressed to John) and (2) "John shuts the door," such that (1) = Imp (John's shutting the door) and (2) = Ass (John's shutting the door) is simply to beg the question of the fundamentality of the proposition. And in terms of pragmatics, because no explanation of the genesis of the imperative form is thought to be necessary, one never learns why I should under any circumstances assume that my utterance should cause John to shut the door. For acting in response to an imperative is an altogether different thing from understanding a declarative.

Declarative Speech-Acts The apparently simplest speech act that we must associate with the declarative is the constative (or in Searle's classification, "rep¬ resentative") form. For whatever else declaratives can do, they seem above all suited for statements such as "The cat is on the mat." All rational discourse, including the present text, is depen¬ dent on constatives. We may hold in abeyance our judgment as to the primacy of this form of declarative while nevertheless considering its place in our generative scheme. For it is certainly one way of answering a pre¬ ceding imperative/interrogative. Assuming that "the cat" is not simply the formal subject but the topic of our declarative sentence, this sentence replies to a request for the cat's location that in turn *1 discuss this in some detail in The Origin of Language. At the imperative stage of language, the distinction between noun and verb is not yet given grammatical form by the subject-object polarity of the declarative sentence, so that even a verbal imperative like "dance!" would be construed as a demand for an act, not as a form of the verb "(I, you, he ...) dance." As this example suggests, the general indistinctness of nouns from verbs in English allows tbeir underly¬ ing unity to express itself. When we call a book "a good read" we are not so much creating a new "verbal noun" as taking advantage of the fact that, outside the subject-predicate nexus, a verb is really just a kind of substantive that refers to an act rather than a thing.

74

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derives from an imperative request for the cat itself. The notion of derivation used here is formal; the sentence itself is not derived, but formed afresh according to a model that we claim to be so derived. It is nonetheless possible to construct a diachronic tree of this derivation as a counterexample to those of transformational grammar, which pretend to be purely formal while in fact reflecting a metaphysical ontology of language. Our tree would look some¬ thing like this: the cat! (ostensive) —» the cat! (imperative) [ => the cat (topic) the cat? (interrogative) is on the mat (predicate) The double arrow denotes a reply by the locutee of the preced¬ ing utterance. The parallel positions of the interrogative and the imperative indicate that they stand in the same position in relation to the locutee. If the declarative arose in response to the imperative, the interrogative can only have come into being as a modification of the imperative once the declarative had already become an ac¬ ceptable reply to it. Certainly we can use "The cat is on the mat" in quite other circumstances than those included in this derivation, not least as philosophers' favorite example of a declarative sentence. In normal conversation, we often use declaratives in the absence of preceding interrogatives or imperatives, even implicit ones. But despite the relative acontextuality of the declarative, its topicality is always presupposed. The conversational use of the declarative implies that the addressee has, whether he knows it or not, a prior interest in its topic. Presented in this manner, however, this is merely an empiri¬ cal rule of speech behavior. The utility of our derivation is that it offers a rigorous deductive model in place of a loose empirical one. Constative, or "representative," speech-acts can be put in ex¬ plicit performative form by verbs such as "I (hereby) state/declare/ affirm/assert that..." but such formulations give us no new insight into the nature of the constative act and so need not detain us here. Very different is the case of the other chief declarative speech-act form, which Searle calls the "commissive." Here, instead of affirm¬ ing some state of affairs, one commits oneself to bringing about this state. Even more than the designative ostensive form that

A Generative Taxonomy of Speech-Acts

75

inspired Austin's original analysis of performatives, the promissory or commissive form is the canonical case of "doing things with words." For here, outside the rigid and often ritualized context of the designative ostensive, the speaker creates through language an obligation that did not previously exist. There is an obvious parallel, taken up by Searle and others, between the commissive and the imperative. Both forms intend to bring about a future situation: the one, by directing the other, the second, by committing the self. But this parallel is superficial; it displays the danger of a philosophical intuition based on no more than a grammar-book understanding of future time. It is no doubt possible to express the two forms quasi-symmetrically as (1) (You will) close the door! and (2) [I promise that] (I will) close the door. But not only is the second sentence more complex, as our expan¬ sion of it reveals,- it initiates a more complex interaction. The commissive speech-act has a greater claim on future action than the imperative. If my interlocutor chooses to disobey my order, I must appeal, beyond the order itself, to a hierarchical or situational principle of authority (such as a gun) to enforce it, whereas if I violate my promise, I may be accused of violating the principles of human interaction per se. This greater inclusiveness of the com¬ missive model flows from its position in our derivation. The imperative, as all languages (if not all linguists) make ob¬ vious, is a more elementary form than the declarative. In contrast, the commissive form not only typically employs a declarative but is in our scheme essentially a declarative. Promises rarely begin a dialogue. When my son promises "I will clean my room this eve¬ ning," it is most likely in response to my request to clean it right now. The more fervent the promise, as in those cases where "I promise" is actually spoken, the more likely it is that the act promised was requested at some earlier time. These observations suggest that, in our generative scheme, commissive speech-acts are, like constative declaratives, derivationally replies to impera¬ tives. Instead of locating a desired object elsewhere, the promise locates a desired act in the future. If I ask you for the cat and you can't get it for me, you may say it is on the mat. If I ask you to clean your room and you can't do it now, you may promise to do it later. Indeed, the promise is much closer than the statement to the preceding imperative. The promised act, unlike the absent thing, is presumably within my power; the commissive reply, unlike the

76

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constative, explicitly limits itself to the intentional content of the preceding imperative. This derivation of the commissive is further revealed by the fact that, although "I promise" generally refers to the delayed performance of an imperative, there are simpler ways of indicating the intention to conform to an imperative: "OK," "Cer¬ tainly," "Right away." To the extent that such expressions oblige their speaker to carry out a previously requested performance, they are in fact varieties of promises, syntactically parasitic on a preced¬ ing imperative. If this has not been noted by speech-act theorists, it is because their metaphysical presuppositions preclude under¬ standing acts of speech in a dialogic framework. A final point: rather than understanding promises as examples of the future tense, we should understand the future tense as itself generated by promises, which thematize the implicit futurity of the imperative. The English word "will" already implies this; it is the intention to perform an act that places the verb in the future tense, not its location on a "time line" that could only have been conceived as a result of this very intention. An illuminating contrast to the commissive is provided by the refusal of the imperative, which can be performed by saying "no" or, more explicitly, "I refuse." Refusal itself is not altogether a speech-act; "I hereby refuse" sounds odd. (Note that we can say "I hereby accept.") The dialogic situation cannot tolerate refusal as an admissible reply to an imperative; it therefore remains a worldly act not normally incorporated into the speech situation, which can only describe it or, in other words, affirm it. The speech situation cannot provide the locus for an act that openly rejects the awaiting set up by the previous (imperative) speech-act. The varieties of speech-acts, as this example shows, are limited not by their con¬ tent (for one can refuse, or state that one refuses) but by the posi¬ tion of their subject in the dialogue. Stating that I refuse is an appropriate means of informing the speaker of the imperative of the unfeasibility (or the "infelicity") of his order; refusing is not.

Word and World The original inspiration for Austin's theory of speech-acts was the intuition that language does not merely reflect or model reality, but acts on it. Searle's distinction between world —» word and word —»

A Generative Taxonomy of Speech-Acts

77

world speech-acts offers a clear albeit oversimplified means of clas¬ sifying speech-acts according to their passive or active relation to external reality. Our generative scheme allows us a more struc¬ tured insight into the word-world relationship. In our hypothesis, the order of linguistic evolution goes from the ostensive, which imposes on the world an order it postulates as that of the world itself, through the imperative's attempt to modify the world in our favor, to the declarative, which proposes for the world an objective model. Austin's justified distrust of the meta¬ physician's exclusive passion for the constative form should not blind us to the superiority of the declarative, whose formal (if not necessarily substantive) detachment from our desires makes it the indispensable foundation of all our higher ethical and cultural achievements. However fascinating the ways in which words act on the world, describing the world as it is requires a higher level of intellect and leads in the long run to more satisfying results than attempting to impose one's will on it. In our hypothetical originary scene, the word both designates the world as it is and transforms it from a "natural" into a "cultural" reality. The ambivalence of the word/world relation is such that the word can be said with equal justification either to confer on its referent an extraworldly sacred status or to reflect this status as revealed in the scene; this ambivalence is homologous to that between the human creation of God and God's creation of the human, as discussed in Chapter 2. The ostensives we use in ordi¬ nary speech are not ambivalent with regard to this relation, but it is a curious fact that taken together, their two varieties, indicative and designative, reconstitute this ambivalence. The ostensive can either be world —» word or word —» world, the latter being the more interesting case because it contrasts with the dominant constative form.

The Generative Classification of Speech-Acts Searle's classifications may be revised in conformity with our gen¬ erative hypothesis as follows: 1. Ostensives The indicative ostensive (ia) ("Fire!" "Man overboard!") is missing

78

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ANALYSIS

from both Searle's and Austin's classifications. In How To Do Things With Words * Austin refers in passing to "one-word" speech-acts as being of "indeterminate" force; from a generative standpoint, it is precisely this indeterminacy that makes the ostensive fundamental. Whether "Fire!" be a warning or an expression of pleasure, what is fundamental about it is that it refers to a present object. Searle's "declaratives" (ib) comprise the designative variety of the ostensive. His bilateral world