The Center and the Declarative
By Adam Katz
Social thought has an obligation to maintain linguistic presence, and the way this is done is through a minimal vocabulary distinguishing one mode of thought from another, and sustained consistently so as to generate new concepts. I take Gans’s derivation of the successive speech forms to be that minimal vocabulary. Originary thinking relies upon concepts shared with other modes of thought within the human sciences, such as “desire,” “resentment,” “mimesis,” “sign,” “representation” and more. I will use these terms and many others—I won’t be generating an entirely new theoretical language, just a theoretical center organized around the speech forms and the center to which all utterances must be traced and directed: this theoretical center will control my use of all other terms. Gans, beyond his analysis through _The Origin of Language_ , uses the different speech forms to designate different cultural forms—in both _The End of Culture_ and _Originary Thinking_ , Gans speaks of “ostensive culture,” “imperative culture” and ‘declarative culture.” Moreover, Gans uses the speech forms to mark decisive shifts in high
culture: most notably, he defines “metaphysics” as the assumption that the declarative sentence is the primary speech act; and, through a reading of Moses’s encounter with God on Mt. Horeb as described in _Exodus_ , he identifies the specific innovation of Hebraic monotheism as the “discovery” of the God whose name is a declarative sentence. The burden of this book is to follow those trails and work out a social, political and cultural theory, or, as I will call it, an “anthropomorphics,” as an originary grammar of the center. So, I will show that speaking in terms of the imperatives we are conveying, or hearing, from the center, when discussing declarative sentences and discourse, will yield insights (or, ostensive regions) unavailable when following more conventional imperatives to speak about sentences and discourses in terms of meanings packaged by one mind for others according to specific explicit and tacit rules. Beyond the heuristic value of originary grammar, I will insist on taking it quite literally: there is no way we could ever be doing anything that is not following an imperative within a network of imperatives deriving from an ostensive world and explicated by declaratives. We are semiotic beings, composed of signs and signs ourselves, and the ostensive, imperative, interrogative and declarative are the most elementary signs—equivalent, in a rough way, to Charles Sanders Peirce’s icon, index and symbol. All we do is try to follow what the center is telling us to do.
To begin to give a sense of the implications of this approach, or imperative, I’m going to take some time to analyze a small part of Andrew Bartlett’s groundbreaking originary analysis of science, published in _Anthropoetics_ in 2007, “Originary Science, Originary Memory: Frankenstein and the Problem of Modern Science.” Here, Bartlett traces the origins of science to the need to find a substitute for the central object on subsequent ritual scenes. The first “knowledge,” in this case, is of the appropriateness of another object to function as the object already inscribed in the community’s memory has functioned—the question is whether the new object is “similar” or “analogous” enough to that previous object. I will not be exploring Bartlett’s argument in any detail, much less try to reproduce its full complexity; I am using it to clarify the implications of an “originary grammar of the center” precisely due to its rigorous immersion in and deployment of the conceptual terms of originary thinking:
``` One space of tension, as we have seen, is that between the originary “usurper” whose proximity to the new possibly-sacred substitute object and to the object itself risks his being victimized by the community (the usurper as metonym of the new object he introduces). The other space of tension is the yes or no of the “analogy” the members of the community may or may not be prepared to draw–relying on originary memory of the image-of-the-object as I have outlined it above–between the new and the original object. Inasmuch as originary memory reproduces a memory of the whole scene and the whole event, all forces tend toward the community’s peaceful acceptance of the new object: the usurper wishes to minimize the risk of violence to himself, and the community wishes to minimize the risk to itself. An object as close in “image” as possible to the original object must be the most appropriate object, because an object as close in “image” as possible to the original object would risk the least disassociation between originary event and ritual repetition, between the “image” in originary memory and its possible re-presentation in a new object of economic value. What I contend, however, is that the “conservative” minimalization of the difference between objects is not a guarantee of the absolute preservation of the sacrality of the original object, but rather a measure of the minimality of originary desacralization: the minimality of “originary science.” That originary science is the sign in the mode of a minimal desacralization is precisely what we should expect. The other imperative, however, is maximal exchangeability: and ```
``` the new object, to be exchangeable, must be permitted to be different, to have differential significance. Originary science pays intense, almost total respect to religious imperatives. It is no one other than the originary scientific “usurper” who asks the community to exchange this new, “real” object for the old, remembered, now less “real” object, which risks losing some of its sacred power as the necessary consequence of the differential information being created. The new object will not be the same object; therefore, it must present a minimal threat to communal solidarity. Therefore, when Gans writes of the original sign being “applied to a referent other than the original one” he includes the notion of a “diminution of intensity” in the sign itself. The scientific, I suggest, has there with that “diminution” taken a little bit away from the sacred. Nor should we be surprised that the originary meeting of the sacred and profane occurs with the usurper’s production of differential information: “This first differentiation would create a two-place hierarchy of signs constitutive of the opposition between sacred and profane representations” (79). The first “profane” representation may be considered the first “scientific” representation. ``` I want to emphasize that I have no substantive differences with this passage or, indeed, Bartlett’s entire analysis (which, indeed, will be echoed throughout). I simply want to point to a couple of instances of language indicating intentionality that will highlight a critical element of originary method I pointed to before—that in identifying a new cultural form, no semiotic resources that could only have been a product of that form can be part of the hypothesis regarding its creation. So, the “usurper” introducing the new object “risks being victimized,” and presumably is aware of, can formulate a representation of, this risk. The community, then, may or may not be prepared to draw an analogy between the original object and its replacement. Finally, and most importantly, the usurper “wishes” to minimize this risk, and the community shares this same “wish.”
Bartlett is aware that neither the usurper nor the community has the language to formulate this “wish” or this risk assessment—not too much prior to this passage he discussed the same problem, through a passage of Gans’s discussing it, that I addressed above regarding the problem of “speaking for” those on the scene. We have to assume some continuity amidst the discontinuity that enables us to hypothesize usefully—something like what Bartlett describes here must, indeed, be happening. The question is how we represent that. Bartlett here (and, really, only in these fairly unimportant instances) does so by constructing a subject and a field of subjects capable of formulating wishes and carrying out risk assessment. These are subjects, then, with an internal mental space that can subsist “horizontally,” that is, in relation to the other subjects in the field, without any reference to the center. Let’s remember the problem here: to determine whether the new object is, for the purposes of ritual, the “same” as the original object. So, we imagine the members of the group working it out, with the usurper trying to introduce an object that won’t be seen as too different, with the other members not insisting on seeing differences except for when strictly necessary (or, perhaps, refusing to acknowledge identity except for when unavoidable).
Who actually decides, though? In the end, a substitute object will be used—but who determined its acceptability? How would those on the scene represent the decision as having been made? Could any of them “take responsibility” for it, or “credit” another with having made the decision, or playing a special role in making it? If we are going to pursue these questions, we would have to attribute more and more clearly unavailable language to participants on the scene, and make
them far richer “characters” than we can imagine them being. The other way of approaching it would be to say that the center decides. In other words, the representational capacities we would have to attribute to the participants we attribute instead to the center. The center, as we can say, is nothing more than the collective or aggregate signifying capacities of the community. But this doesn’t mean those capacities could be disaggregated and redistributed to the members of the community—they are only real in their collective and aggregated form. Each member of the community only sees the other members through the center, as suspended by the center. If the object offered by the usurper does not desacralize minimally enough, it is because the center that subsists beyond any particular object, the center that calls for the object, has rejected it. The risk assessment Bartlett speaks of is a waiting to see if the center will accept the new object. How do the members know what the center has “decided”? By reading the other members as signs of the center, the vehicle through which the center conveys _its_ “wishes.” If some member were to prevent the new object from being placed at the center, he would be doing so “on assignment” from the center—at least if his initiative prevails. Attributing the decision to the center minimizes our own discontinuity with the participants on this hypothetical scene because if this counter- usurper were to provide a reason for the object’s unacceptability, this is the only reason he could give—otherwise, we’d have to imagine him representing the results of his risk-assessment and assessing that risk-assessment relative other ones represented on the scene. Does this mean that the counter-usurper has “really” decided? We might say so, even though he surely wouldn’t; but we shouldn’t either, because that would require us to posit some space of decision internal to the counter-usurper, something like a “will,” which has not been accounted for. What has been accounted for is the constitution of each member of the community as a protector of the center, and therefore as an arm of the center. As members of the community, they have no other “content.”
The problem of determining whether the new object is, ritually, the “same,” is the problem of maintaining linguistic presence with which we are already familiar. It is the problem of determining whether the sign issued in one case is the “same” as that sign issued on a prior occasion. This problem arises already on the originary scene, where each participant must conform his gesture to that of the others, and determine whether the others are doing the same. As in Bartlett’s example, there is certainly an allowable margin of error here determined, not by some “objective” assessment in accord with an external “standard,” but by whether the sign comes with a body positioned so as to preserve or disrupt the state of suspended animation before the central object. The only way of determining sameness is by seeing whether the center is repelling the others as it is holding oneself in place—which means that the issuance of the sign is itself a following of the “rule” of the center. In each case, what we can reconstruct as a risk assessment is one member detecting a slackening in another’s adherence to the rule of the center, and subsequently stepping in, as minimally as possible, as maximally as necessary, to take up that slackening. The center has decided once the slackening has been tightened.
It is the center, first of all, that has agency—human agency will later come to be modeled on the agency of the center. The center issues signs to those on the margin, who in turn convey those signs to one another in collaborations and deliberations that produce signs issued back to the
center. To take Bartlett’s discussion in a different direction, the substitution of successive objects for the originary one transforms the ritual scene from an ostensive one, in which the deity is immediately present, to an imperative one, where the ritual aims at making the deity appear, first of all within the ritual itself but also by providing for the community. But addressing the deity imperatively must itself be done in prescribed forms—that is, pursuant to imperatives issued by the deity itself. The deity, or the center, does not always respond identically to each request made of it. Since the form of the request has been prescribed by the center, these differences must be attributed to differences in the form of the request in each case. Even if the ritual has been carried out, to all appearances, in exactly the same way, something about its performance must be different. From the standpoint of more advanced forms of culture we could say, for example, that the “intent” behind the performance was different in some way (it was only carried out “mechanically,” for example). But what we are examining now will provide us with a hypothesis regarding that very difference between performance and intent. No record could have been kept of these early rituals so, even if all a great deal of effort was invested in ensuring the conformity of all to inherited ritual forms, it would always be possible for some member to introduce some innovation as a recovery of the “same,” originally effective form. What emerges within this imperative culture is a continual attempt to reduce the difference between performance and effect.
It is in the failure of the imperative that the declarative is born. The ritual scene I am hypothesizing now presupposes the existence of fully developed, that is, declarative language. Following the assumptions laid out earlier regarding the marginal, mistaken nature of new linguistic-cultural forms, we can also assume that both the imperative and the declarative come later to the central scene of ritual. As applied to ritual, the declarative constructs scenes enacting the dialectic of imperatives to and from the center. The community oscillates between successful and unsuccessful ritual performances; the center oscillates between honoring and refusing the requests of the community. If the central being must be called to present itself on the ritual scene, it must be elsewhere and must come from elsewhere. Sometimes it comes, sometimes it doesn’t —either something prevents it from coming, or it doesn’t want to come. If something prevents it from coming, there are other beings at play—we can see the scenic construction of the center. Sometimes the central being can overcome the obstacles placed in its way; sometimes it can’t. If the central being doesn’t want to come, it may be because the community has displeased it in some way; or it may be because the central being has other priorities, problems and pleasures of its own to attend to. We can see how the kind of intentional language I wished removed from accounts of interactions between the community and the center have now entered into the discussion—the central being “wants” to come, “overcomes” obstacles, can be “displeased,” pursues its own interests and pleasures, and so on. All of this results from the “interpretation” of ritual in declarative terms; or, more precisely, the interpretation of variable results of the imperatives exchanged with the center in declarative terms. These “explanations” of the results of ritual performances are the origins of myth, as a declarative overlay on the imperative structure of ritual. While we can’t hypothesize with any great specificity, the origin of words like “want,” “wish,” “try,” “choose,” “decide,” “like” and “dislike,” that is, the whole linguistic apparatus of intentionality, is best considered as emerging to fill gaps between the obedience to
the imperatives of the center in ritual scenes and the reciprocal honoring of requests by the center. But these are gaps to be filled in describing activities at the center, and only secondarily to those on the margins. Activities between members of the community are modeled on and arranged by activities at the center, which are far richer in dramatic content and motivation than anything going on at the margin. The human is modeled on the non-human center—this is why I call the human science I am presenting here an “anthropomorphics.” Humans anthropomorphized themselves before they could carry out this operation on anything else.
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