With concepts like “nature” and “justice,” it becomes possible to model social relations on desacralized terms, in accord with the reduction of these and related concepts to their most minimal meaning in opposition to the sacred order and “arbitrary” tyranny alike. Essences can be attributed to different social groups and classes, along with deviations from those essences:
conformity with the essence equals nature, and relating to individuals, and constructing relations between groups, according to nature, is justice. “Materialism,” “the spirit of domination,” and “greed” are among the forms taken by those deviations, as power centers can be imagined and, no doubt, seen, acting at large in accord with roles they are given within markets and politics. Tyranny is the manifestation of and response to greed and the desire for domination, “passions” liberated on the post-sacral market. Greed and power hunger can be identified by those who have liberated themselves from it, by establishing justice within themselves and restoring themselves to nature. The post-priestly class of philosophers makes a bid to become a new source of power by presenting itself as in command of the concepts that make ruling “legitimate,” that is, non- tyrannical: nature and justice. The power of the philosopher, his access to the “super- sovereignty” inherent in the proper understandings of the conceptual criteria to which sovereignty must yield so as to be non-tyrannical, itself relies upon the spread of writing. Writing is also a product of divine kingship and markets, originating in the recording of transactions and eventually becoming a means of recording and reconstructing language so as to make it visible to central authority.
As I mentioned earlier, Eric Gans locates the origin of the two leading streams of Western culture, Ancient Greece and Ancient Israel, in terms of the prioritizing of the declarative sentence. In the case of the Greeks, the founding of metaphysics involves treating the declarative sentence, the proposition, as the primary linguistic form—in direct opposition to the ritual, sacrificial ostensive and the imperatives it unfolds. In the case of Israel, we have a new kind of God, who cannot be invoked imperatively—cannot be the other side of an imperative exchange —because his name is a declarative sentence. In both cases, this isolation and elevation of the declarative sentence is possible only in scribal and comparatively literate cultures. In discussing metaphysics’ hypostatization of the declarative sentence, I will draw upon David Olson’s studies of the cognitive consequences of literacy, in particular his classic _The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading_ and his recent work, _The Mind on Paper: Reading, Consciousness and Rationality_. The use of writing to represent speech, according to Olson, constitutes language as an object of inquiry: the determination of how to use marks on a surface to represent spoken words is that inquiry, constructing such things as “phonemes,” “words” and “sentences” as theoretical objects. The very possibility of asking what a word means, what it “really” means, as is usually one of the opening moves of the Platonic dialogue, presupposes that “words” have already been identified as separate from each other and given “official” meanings through the written text, just as the construction of a logic is merely an elaboration of various possibilities allowable given a grammatical structure that could only have been fixed through writing.
The speech scene is comprised of features that cannot be directly represented in writing, features involving the physical presences of the participants on the scene, such as tone, inflection, gesture and posture, the proximity of speakers to each other and so on. The writing systems we know of did not attempt to directly represent those features of the speech scene. Instead, the development of writing involved the creation of a meta-language used to represent indirectly those features of the speech scene. Olson has us imagine a written text as the reporting of a speech act. Now, in
the reporting of another’s speech act in person, the speech act can be acted out as a whole—the tone and inflections can be imitated, the postures and gestures can be acted out, and even commentary on the speech being reported can be enacted through approving or dismissive facial expressions and otherwise. Writing, then, has to supplement all the elements of this performance that it can’t directly represent. This is what the metalanguage of literacy does. To perform another’s speech act, you would only, strictly speaking, need the word “say” and perhaps one or two other words to refer to what the speaker has said. If you need to supplement that report with all the other elements of the speech scene, you need a whole phalanx of other words, words which provide information regarding those other elements: “stated,” “suggested,” “assumed,” “implied,” “considered,” “criticized,” and so on. Olson further points out that through the nominalization of these verbs we generate the material for a vast disciplinary order, in which we study “assumptions,” “statements,” “implications,” “criticism” and much more. In hypostatizing the declarative sentence, metaphysics merely treats the metalanguage of literacy as referring to an actual, if ideal, order.
The telos of writing, according to Olson’s more recent argument, is to construct a scene upon which the writer and reader both stand. Drawing upon Frances Noel-Thomas and Mark Turner’s study of what they call “classic prose” in their _Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose_ , Olson sees writing as seeking to efface itself before a simulated scene. This requires the abolition of any ostensive dimension to the written text—that is, anything that draws attention to the text as written, to the scene of writing, the scene of reading, and the scene represented in the writing as being distinct scenes that must be articulated, ultimately by the reader. It presupposes a private reader, alone with the text, in a kind of silent conversation with the author as opposed, say, to a public or group reading, or reading that serves the purpose of memorizing ritual formulas and myths. The consequence of metaphysics, then, is what Gans calls an “internal scene of representation,” where one constitutes oneself as a center of one’s own attention, as one observes oneself alone with the world of ideas made up of the metalanguage of literacy. This is one way the broaching of the sacral order plays out, as this internal scene of representation can only be represented and maintained in opposition to everything that would define the individual as something other than an internalized private order—in opposition to both any ritual order and any social claims. This is a completely anthropomorphized subject, entitled to be permitted to act in accord with spontaneously emerging and self-ordered “assumptions,” “conclusions,” “beliefs,” and so; in fact, functioning as a proxy for the post-metaphysical disciplines which deploy the metalanguage of literacy in power plays on the field of super-sovereignty.
Hebrew scripture, and then the Christian Testament, represent a different trajectory of the “promoted” declarative sentence. Metaphysics aims at abstracting declarative culture from the ostensive-imperative world as completely as possible—metaphysics never comes to an end because this abstraction can never be complete: the world can never be completely described through declarative sentences that are comprised of words that can themselves be defined in declarative sentences without ever having to come to rest upon an ostensively defined word— ultimately, a name. Scripture maintains continuity with the sacred order by treating the declarative sentence as an inquiry into the ostensive-imperative world—as I put it earlier, as an
inquiry into the discrepancies evident in imperative exchanges. It does this by singling out, in newly declarative terms, the victim produced ostensively in sacrificial orders Once we have, with a monetized, indebted, marketized, political plural world, justice systems, victims are officially recognized within those systems. Rather than relying upon mimetic contagion or the ritually prescribed selection of victims, new means must be created for determining what counts as victimization. New concepts of intentionality and consequence are constructed, ultimately out of the metalanguage of literacy. So, far, nothing in these new arrangements upsets the order of divine kingship, or the imperial order: sacrifice can continue as usual, while relatively minor disputes get settled in increasingly sophisticated ways.
But with the justice system comes the possibility of being a victim, not just of another player within the system, but of the system, and its head, and its entire conceptual order. There would be losers within the justice system who would refuse to accept their loss. Usually, these refusals would be attempts to revert to some kind of honor, or vendetta system, in which offenses are repaid in kind by those who have authority over the victim. Such futile resistance to the imperial order would be easily suppressed, but would nevertheless mark the system as productive of victims who are heroic on still recognizable terms. It thereby becomes possible to represent the refusal to accept official judgment outside of the domain and discipline of judgment itself, to some broader public or audience. In that case, one would simply be representing oneself as a victim and inviting others to see themselves as victims in “analogous” ways, while itemizing the predations of the imperial order upon one of its loyal, perhaps even privileged, subjects, who appealed to it in good faith. Such action would draw upon itself the concentrated wrath of the imperial, probably in stages, making it possible to represent the unfolding of that wrath and display it against a larger pattern of systematic dispossession, which now becomes visible in a new way by “analogy” to this “injustice.” The social death to be suffered by the victim would itself be analogized to the social death experienced, and now newly named, by the massive slave classes of the imperial order. This new kind of victim, drawing upon himself a new form of collective attention, would be or represent a new kind of divinity.
I put all this forward as a hypothesis regarding the conditions of possibility of the new way of representing the victim in Hebrew and then Christian scripture. Clearly, the “story” I have just told could approximate various skeletal narratives that would themselves represent layers of retelling and revision of some perhaps rather different sequence of events. To construct such stories that place the victim of imperial violence where the hero would have been in sacral narratives would require systematic, deliberate revisions of myth. To organize narratives around the victim of false and violent sacrally grounded imperial orders, as opposed to around the founders of such orders, or those rightly (if “tragically”) punished for violating them, would require a volume of substitutions of vocabulary and syntactical orders that could only be carried out under scribal conditions, where the declarative sentence can be isolated, and preserving the text can itself become a divine command around which gather various oral traditions. Such “scriptural” orders are intrinsically anti-imperial because they posit, precisely in order to oppose and discredit the entire imperial order, an imperial order that includes and transcends all other imperial orders: God’s empire, to which His people can be directly subject. This is why the
opening of Hebrew scripture systematically, if compactly and implicitly, revises and resets the mythological orders underpinning the surrounding empires; it is also why the law recorded in the Pentateuch, as noted by Joshua Berman in his _Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Though_ t, is egalitarian in a very thoroughgoing way in the precise sense of subordinating each Israelite directly to God, bypassing any other imperial allegiance, but in a way modeled on the covenants between vassal and imperial states. Everyone in such an order is equal in the sense that everyone must be made a site of resistance to subjugation to the sacral imperial order. The subsequent narrative of Hebrew scripture, though, represents the failure to sustain this covenantal structure, leaving us in a position consistent with the working out of metaphysics: the empire of God is reduced to the compass of the internal scene of representation, in the form of a “conscience” that also invokes a super-sovereignty by which the central authority is to be exposed, and to which it must submit—if not now, then perhaps much later. The tendency here is to pit, in a kind of absolute opposition, the center within the center against a world of tyrants.