Talk of the Center
By Adam Katz
All of this becomes problematic once sacrifice has ended, and imperative exchange has given way to what we could call “interrogative imperativity”: rather than giving to the center what it instructs you to, and requesting that it fulfill its promises in exchange (one of your goats for another year of the river flowing within its banks), each individual, as non-sacrificable center, asks himself who he is in giving himself over to the center completely. There is no more hierarchy of beings at the center which orders an earthly hierarchy in which each will find his
place. One’s place in relation to the signifying center is fundamentally questionable, even if one’s relation to the occupied center is not—hence the discrepancy. This questionableness is what all those new disciplines are interested in, and if they start off on the margins and uninterested in power, once they come to replace the old priestly classes this changes. The ruler must himself be ruled by God’s law, and then by “Reason,” and then as a “servant of the people,” and so on—all concepts controlled by the disciplines, upon whom the king is as dependent as he previously was upon the priestly classes. (The distinction between king and priest indicates a fundamental split between occupied center and signifying center, one that even precedes sacral kingship.) Now, the government must be ruled by “political science,” “international law,” or “economics”—only concepts drawn from these and other disciplines can make rule legitimate. Even the majority, the nominal “sovereign,” must yield to these super-sovereignties, which is to say those who interpret them, who “rule” the disciplines. The disciplines can’t rule directly—the head of state in any country is still the successor, however distant of some last king who ruled over that territory, and therefore all the kings and occasional queens preceding him. But that nominal occupant of power is at the center of struggles by power centers, leveraging the results of the disciplines’ inquiries to influence as much as possible the decisions of the sovereign, which is to say, to deploy the sovereign against the enemies of the discipline in question. The discrepancy between signifying and occupied center will generate struggles over the occupancy of the center, which struggles then inform and divide the disciplines.
Just as any contemporary ruler is a distant inheritor of the earliest sacral kings, the contemporary disciplines have descended from metaphysics and scripture. They continue the same project of eliminating the discrepancy between the signifying center and the occupied center. The target of metaphysics and scripture alike was “mythology,” and this too has continued, from the Enlightenment critique of Christianity as “mythology” to Marxist critiques of “ideology” and more contemporary attempts to dismantle “whiteness.” We can think about this as a continual process of replacement and reconfiguration. Mythology explains our ritual practices as commemorating or being commanded by beings of the center. The initial move in “demythification,” then, is to replace the activities of beings of the center with those of beings of the margins. It was humans that created the myths and the rituals. How and why, though? If you are attacking some myth, or something you are going to call “myth,” it is because it supports the power of someone you would like to see have less power: your enemy or opponent. Myth supports the tyrant; demythification aids the liberation of those inhabiting some pre-political space (embodied in some internal scene of representation) that is violated by the tyrant. But each victory over myth and tyranny installs a new tyrant supported by a new mythology—that pristine pre-political space can never be actualized. Thus, with its victory, the discourse of demythification becomes, in turn, the myth to be dethroned. The weapons don’t have to change very much: much of what could be said, in attacking monarch and church in the name of the people and freedom, could be said in attacking the bourgeoisie, or the white, or the male, or the straight, claiming to represent that fictional entity “the people,” in the name of the proletariat, the colonized, the woman, the gay. The basis of the new liberating discourse is never provided, and can’t be provided: it is enough that it is other than, othered by, and opposed to, that which it exposes as “mythical.” Still, today, even the soberest, data-driven study in the most moderate
political science department of, say changes in “public opinion,” is nothing more than an attempt to demythify one belief about “the people” and replace it a new myth, that of “public opinion.” (Or one mythical form of public opinion by another.) For that matter, all public discourse in modern democracies can be reduced to each side purporting to demythify the other.
Myths are the products of sociality that can’t be recognized as such and the problem of a post- sacrificial order is not to restore sacrality but, rather, to make discourse and practice directly, explicitly and completely social. Directly, explicitly and completely social means: a defender, representative and emissary of the center, “all the way down.” Our constructions of the center reveal our constructedness by the center, which means that we are never outside of some tradition of centeredness. We are used to thinking about traditions in terms of rituals and institutions, but the deepest and most difficult to examine traditions lie in language itself. We can see how difficult from the work of the linguist Anna Wierzbicka, who has taken up the Sapir- Whorf hypothesis and, one must say, successfully resolved it. Wierzbicka has discovered a set of what she calls “Natural Semantic Primes”—that is, words, exact translations of which exist in every language. Another way of defining and testing the primes is to say they are words that can’t be paraphrased by other words, without those other words ultimately having to be paraphrased using the primes themselves. Now, the existence of words that exist in every language might seem to be the exact opposite of what Whorf (in particular) claimed, which is that every language constructs reality for its users in a distinctive way that is not translatable into other languages. But what the primes enable Wierzbicka to do is to prove Whorf’s claim regarding the relativity of language. By translating words from one language into the primes, it becomes possible to show precisely how those words are different in meaning from words that seem synonymous in other languages.
Wierzbicka’s studies have, understandably, focused on English, the present-day global lingua franca. She focuses on what would seem to be some of the most “universal” and “obvious” words in English—words that not only seem to have intuitively natural meanings but are taken to provide us with a direct access to reality—like “sense,” “evidence,” and “experience” (and many others), and shows that it is precisely these words that have no equivalents in other languages. Even more, she traces these words back to their origins—in the case of the above mentioned, and some other related ones, almost completely from the philosophical works of John Locke. In effect, when we’re speaking English, and putting forth our theories of (and justifying foreign policy based on) the “rule of law,” “empiricism,” “universal rights” and “utilitarianism,” and so on, we’re effectively speaking the rather provincial dialect of Lockean. Seeing language anew through Wierzbicka, just like seeing the metalanguage of literacy through Olson, has a startling, demystifying effect that seems similar to other “demythifications.” They are different, though, because they point us back to language, and therefore to the constitutive center, rather than some presumably self-sustaining “human” margin. For the discourses of demythification, the world needs to be set “right-side up” by showing how the divine depends on the human, the ruler on the ruled, the intellectual on the material. For anthropomorphics, the problem is very different: here, the problem is to constitute our utterances on a scene, with a center. We understand that all we’re ever doing is iterating the originary scene, in increasingly complex ways because we must
incorporate anomalies and contingencies (mistakes) generated by previous scenes, and we must keep retrieving and ensuring our continuity recursively with previous scenes. It’s also helpful to keep in mind that that is all anyone is ever doing—all we can do is place ourselves on more differentiated scenes in the constitution of which we can display ever more of our contribution. The implications of Wierzbicka’s primes helps to clarify what this means. Once you have taken a word, like “experience,” or “embarrassment,” and shown that its meaning entails a particular relation between people thinking, people seeing, people knowing, people knowing that others see them, people not wanting others to see them like that, people thinking about what they feel, people wanting others to know that they feel this way, and so on, you are done. What you know is what you have always known about that word, because you have always used that word unproblematically, but what you also could never have articulated about it. The word is revealed to you as a possible articulation of practices—practices that anyone can engage in and name, but that have been articulated in a very specific way that has also prevented you from seeing other things you can now at least imagine. What seemed self-evident now places you within a tradition of centering.
Wierzbicka’s primes dismantle any assumption of the transparency of any language, including those of the human sciences, more radically than what are by now standard invocations of the (race, class, gender, sexuality...) positionality of the inquirer. If you think you can deconstruct a discourse in the human sciences because the maleness of the author, or the field, or that subset of the field, shapes the discourse in exclusionary ways, and even if you add to this the whiteness, straightness, First Worldness, etc., of the disciplinary position, you are still assuming the possibility of some unmarked, properly intersectional liberatory position at the end of the chain. With Wierzbicka’s analytics, there’s no end of the chain. Wierzbicka herself is primarily interested in preventing ethnocentrism, and, perhaps, the globally dominant Anglo ethnocentrism in particular from interfering with the possibility of communication and shared inquiry across linguistic lines. But translations into the primes can only be an after the fact practice: we couldn’t directly communicate in the primes. And this leaves unaddressed what also follows from Wierzbicka’s confirmation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: that the distinctiveness of each language is a source of discovery in its own right, and not just “noise” interfering with what might otherwise be clear communication. If we could all manage to speak in the primes as our native language, the world of thinking would be terribly impoverished as a result.
I don’t mean to suggest Wierzbicka would deny any of this, but she doesn’t emphasize it anywhere that I am aware, and I am emphasizing it because my interests run elsewhere than Wierzbicka’s. If we are able to see languages as something like disciplinary spaces themselves, which organize reality in such a way as to bring certain things to attention, and to in effect construct those “elements” of reality by occluding other elements, we can treat the disciplinary spaces of the human sciences as idioms within a larger language, rather than as transparent metalanguages that bring us ever closer to a secular, demythified, liberated reality. The disciplines, we could say, are those spaces set up to inquire specifically into what words, sentences and discourses mean across the field of language—including within the disciplines themselves. The question, then, is how do we speak about what words mean without some kind
of metalanguage that provides the implicitly mystified terms with a demystified meaning? There would be no inquiry into meaning if meaning wasn’t called into question in some way—if there weren’t, that is, some question of how to distinguish between normal and anomalous usage. The purpose of inquiry would then be less to adjudicate the terms of usage than to identify where the boundaries between what counts as normal or anomalous usage lie in specific practices, or fields of practice. Wierzbicka’s primes would be very well suited for probing these boundary spaces, as would the kinds of tests Olson (and other cognitive scientists) devise in order to determine, for example, how a child who has learned how to read and write constructs theories of other minds differently than those who haven’t.
I argued above that the human sciences have their origins in the establishment of the primacy of the declarative sentence effected by literacy and manifested, in the West, in metaphysics and scripture (synthesized in Christianity). The metaphysical discovery is that ostensive and imperative signs can be represented in declarative terms, and that representing them in declarative terms enables the declarative to control the ostensive and imperative: or, to put it in grammatical terms, to issue imperatives and generate ostensives. If we’re talking, I can point to something—if, at some later point, that pointing needs to be represented for, say, legal purposes, my pointing to something gets redescribed in terms that would note my position, what I was likely able to see, what else was in the vicinity, and potentially much more (the state of my optic nerve, etc.) that would abstract my pointing from the ostensive situation. What I “really saw” is now better left in the hands of professionals who have categorized all the elements of “seeing something.” The same is the case for imperatives: redescribing person A commanding person B to carry out some act raises the question (to be answered in further declaratives) of who person A and B are such that A can command B, and therefore whether that command was a “real” command (whether B obeyed it or not), which is to say issued by one person who is in a position to command that other person. And what does it mean to be in a positon to command another: one has been “authorized” to do so, and authorization implies terms of authorization, themselves inscribed in declarative sentences. To some extent, at least, issuing commands places you in conflict with those who will redescribe those commands in declarative terms: at the very least, those later descriptions will subject the command to criteria and calculations that could not possibly have been present to the one issuing the command in the original situation. The reason metaphysics needs to be dismantled is that the interests of metaphysics lie in ensuring that all imperatives and ostensives are controlled and guaranteed in advance by declaratives, and this is an infiltration and subversion of the ostensive-imperative world. The declarative order in effect usurps the ostensive-imperative world by generating unacknowledged commands to those responsible for commanding. To say something like “that order would violate the protocols of this institution, which have in turn been established in accordance with domestic law passed pursuant to a particular international treaty, etc.” is to say: you cannot issue this command; and it is to say this without being able to provide an alternative command that would meet the needs of that situation. One could say that those giving the commands can be trained in accord with procedures that internalize that declarative order, but this just means having the declarative order encroach more pervasively upon the ostensive-imperative world, without there being any reason to assume that the commands subsequently issued within that institution will be more appropriate
for its purposes.
If the declarative sentence, for metaphysics, is the well-formed proposition that can be linked according to logical rules to other propositions and according to some “rules of evidence” to ostensive claims about reality (material or ideal), the declarative sentence, for scripture, is a narrative of the emergence of the individual as a center: a non-sacrificable center among other non-sacrificable centers, and therefore a center of responsibility. There is no need for the scriptural declarative to invade the ostensive-imperative world, as does the metaphysical declarative. To be told the story of a victim of centralizing violence is to be issued the imperative “don’t commit such violence,” and provided with a kind of map for how to avoid doing so; similarly, to be told the story of a saint who refrained from responding in kind to some violation and absented herself from potentially contagious desires and resentments is to be issued a command to imitate that kind of response to temptations to resentment. The problem for the scriptural declarative is that, due to its anti-imperial/meta-imperial origins, the only means it provides for distinguishing between proper and improper imperatives issued by power centers is in terms of whether those power centers defend the originating narrative of the authorizing scripture. If the power center is responsible for distinguishing between discourses issuing from, on the one hand, and deviating from, on the other hand, the authorizing narrative, rules must be constructing for establishing that distinction. The only way of establishing a body of rules is propositionally, which means that the scriptural world must rely upon the metaphysical declarative world. Once this happens, the imperatives issued by the metaphysical order will consistently override those issued within the scriptural order because the former has been set in judgment of the latter.
Talk of the Center — https://center.study/post/book-anthropomorphics-talk-of-the-center