The civilizational problem we have here, at least in the Western world (and therefore the rest of the world, which has all been at least in part modeled on Western norms) is that of the imperatives issued from the highest power center, or the central authority. There is, in any community, a central authority, the final source of imperatives; and yet those imperatives are only worthy of being followed if the central authority is in accord with the signifying center: to put I more precisely, if the imperatives issued by the central authority are the same as those issued by the signifying center. As yet, no satisfactory way of ensuring this has been proposed, let along implemented. This problem, I have suggested, dates back to the fall of sacral kingship (although I imagine I have made it clear that retaining sacral kingship, much less restoring it, cannot be considered an option), which makes it a very longstanding one. How to “legitimate” the central authority, or the sovereign (without, for now, getting into the tangled history of that concept), without creating an “imperium in imperio,” or a “realer” sovereign than the actual sovereign? This, what I have been calling, “super-sovereign,” must itself be represented—by a Church, or a parliament, a constitution, or a judiciary, or an international body...--and representation either recreates the same problem over again (what legitimates the Church or the judiciary, who interprets the constitution?) which in turn opens a kind of loophole through which power struggles can be waged. If the Church or the judiciary is to be the ultimate arbiter, then if
one wants to counter the king or president one seeks control of the Church or judiciary, or Church doctrine or legal theory, which, in turn, requires control over the universities, seminaries and law schools. Liberalism is the political theory justifying this state of affairs, which means that the purpose of liberalism is to ensure that no one ever knows who decides anything. Can there be any reason to believe that decisions will be made and implemented better this way?
The civilizational project I am proposing for the disciplines, then, is the one I suggest they have really been pursuing all along: inquiring into the meaning of imperatives issued by central authority (which are of course transmuted into other imperatives along various chains of command, and studied with regard to needed means of implementation, including the distribution of resources, the training and employment of personnel, and so on). I can make this more precise: the proper inquiry of the human sciences is the difference between the imperatives issued by central authority and the imperatives obeyed by lower authorities. Imperatives are performatives: they transform, rather than describing, reality. No imperative, however carefully and informatively formulated, however close in time and space to its implementation, can ever completely account for the conditions of implementation. So, if we assume the existence of some central authority in any community, the most minimal assumption we can make regarding what constitutes a central authority, is that imperatives coming from that authority supersede all other imperatives. Which is to say those imperatives are always to be obeyed—to do otherwise is to align oneself with another, potential, more or less imminent, central authority, even (especially, really) if one disobeys in the name of one or another super-sovereign concept (“human rights,” or whatever). To disobey is irresponsible and therefore immoral, because it resists the direct sociality of discourse. Bringing the difference between imperative issued and imperative obeyed brings questions of morality and responsibility into focus far more effectively. It is in one’s filling the imperative “gap” that one provides moral and intellectual feedback to superiors and ultimately to the central authority. A bad, or, say, “infelicitous,” imperative, is simply one that can’t be effectively fulfilled, either on its own terms or because it conflicts with some equally authoritative imperative coming from the center. Even a very good government is likely to pose such dilemmas to its people—perhaps even more so, insofar as a good government would confer more responsibilities on its people, supervise less closely, and therefore issue less specified commands. Of course, a bad government would pose these dilemmas in much direr ways. If we assume that these dilemmas, which would always be posed in unique ways, must be resolved as best as possible without ever imagining one could disobey the central authority, the field of political, moral and social inquiry becomes very rich indeed.
So, an inquiry into meaning is an inquiry into the difference between imperative issued and imperative obeyed, including how that difference is registered in the declarative order, itself taken as the study of the ostensive-imperative world: more precisely, the study of which hierarchy of imperatives will produce the greatest ostensive yield (the practices, places and things that best reveal our social being). The difference in question is a product of the element of “inappropriateness” constitutive of any imperative: again, even within the most tightly structured chain of command in the most closed environment, there will be something in any imperative that can’t be fulfilled as commanded (as imagined by the commander). As the recipient of a
command, you become a center, along with bearing and presenting the centrality of whoever has issued the command. The mistakenness of the imperatee is a breach in the order of signs (linguistic presence) which initiates the convergence of attention upon that imperatee, and depending upon the source and scope of that covering attention, upon the imperator as well. As attention converges upon you, there are two possible responses: one, you can try to deflect the attention elsewhere, which involves evacuating yourself as one receiving an imperative; two, you can convert that convergent attention into shared attention to the range of problems raised by the best implementation of the imperative (our “selves” are essentially articulations, in some proportion, of these two types of response). This conversion involves ostensive, imperative and declarative dimensions: it involves “holding” oneself a certain way—for example, not reacting symmetrically or in kind to accusations; it involves showing oneself to be following orders and issuing various imperatives (from modest requests to imperious commands) oneself; and it involves, invoking and enacting the origin of the declarative form itself, predicating some object (and individual, a situation) that could provoke violent convergence, and doing so in such a way as to make the object signify a way of refraining from such convergence. Through these pedagogical and moral practices the signifying center is brought to bear on the occupied center, and imperative gap closed.
The inquiry initiated by potential or imminent convergence toward imperative mistakenness involves an unfolding of the practice in question into its constitutive practices. This practice of inquiry has something in common, then, with any social analytics, which will, for example, in explaining a ritual, identify the “components” of that ritual (the actors, the means, the rules, the connection to other practices, etc.), with it then being possible to “break down” or abstract those components into components of their own, until we reach the terms of an anthropological ontology. What is different in anthropomorphics is that the inquiry is explicitly set on the scene of inquiry itself. The origin and essence of the declarative sentence is that it provides the capacity to represent events happening at different times and places (and different times and places than that where and when the sentence itself is uttered) in a single present. The original declarative traces the transformation of a demand into a request for information regarding the demanded object, that is, a question, which is answered with a negation (not here). An originary ontology of the declarative preserves the negative ostensive by composing the declarative world out of declaratives that both construct a chain from the ostensive-imperative articulations conditioning the possibility of this declarative order and by indicating, issuing tacit imperatives, that operate within that world. This makes the present tense predominant in anthropomorphic inquiry. What has happened in the past is available in the present because memories, records and ramifications of that past are ostensively available in the present: the possibility of a propositional order, which we owe to metaphysics, is redeemed in the possibility of always adding a new increment of ostensive inheritance that would establish a new post from which hitherto unseen or overseen or underseen memories, records and ramifications can be made present. In thusly representing the confluence of events, each one of which can be more fully represented in its mimetic structure and articulation of convergent and shared attention, the declarative order being constructed contributes to closing the imperative gap by modifying that inheritance and thereby issuing a tacit imperative to obey the order one way as opposed to another.