The scene on which one sees what one is simultaneously shown has been the concern of scripture: this is what is entailed in a “revelation.” One some level, we know that we ourselves don’t completely produce what we see—in some sense we are “shown” it. This raises the question of how to name the one who shows it. One the one hand, unless we are literal believers,
we know there is no one really showing it, and as social thinkers we can find some way of naming an agency that does so—“society,” “tradition,” “ideology,” and so on. This all begs the question of how any of these entities could show us anything—wouldn’t “believing” in them be just as questionable as believing in God? It is to fill this aporetic space that the human sciences rush in with all the faculties and capacities they deposit in the subject. I would have anthropomorphics fill the space with imperatives from the center and declaratives working out the performative gap of those imperatives so as to issue more precise imperatives, albeit always with a margin of mistakenness. I propose this as a theoretical language that should be more powerful than those indebted to the metalanguage of literacy. For one thing, it renders the self or subject directly and completely social and historical, rather than leaving us to figure out some way to “add” those “forces” afterward. Working imperatives through a declarative space so as to issue a more precisely targeted imperative produces an ostensive result the actor and observer can both see. That ostensive result is named, and any practice that is named is named as commanding a deferral of desire or resentment. Naming resists the erasure of the practice. Not everything that is named is “good,” but the naming always proposes a good way of seeing that thing, as source of deferral rather than incitement. This is the case even with instances of naming that we must see, from the outside, as direct incitement—even those names defer some other even more imminent violence within that group, and could only meaningfully be countered with a better name. The result of the mobilizing of the declarative order so as to examine some practice that has become a “problem” is to return to that practice (or, perhaps, one of its “descendants,” mutations, or incorporations) with a name.
All “speaking about” is naming, and all naming is the Name-of-God and enacted in the Name of God. So, every utterance is naming God in the name of God, and then we sort things out from there: how did God, or, let’s say, the center, authorize and command that affixation of its name to that form of itself? Instead of asking why someone chose or decided to do or say something, which situates the prompting of the action somewhere within the subject (which is why we then have to add the social and historical parts afterward), an anthropomorphic disciplinary space has someone named or deemed by the center to deploy the name of the center. There’s no claim to infallible knowledge of the intent of the center here—rather, this anthropomorphic idiom would be a way of initiating and sustaining collaborative inquiries into how we have come by the words we’re using as part of using them. That doesn’t mean we must all be linguists or philologists; it would just mean that our mode of interaction would presuppose that our words come to us, rather than from us. We are all of us centers, attracting convergent attention and open to shared attention; we are all of us directing attention to others and everything in the world as centers. So, on a kind of sliding scale, where is the “needle” between the drawing and directing shared rather than convergent attention in any case? A study of names, which is a naming of names (we don’t have to keep saying we are always naming but we can always remember that we are always naming), is a continual attempt to pinpoint where that needle is. The further the needle is toward the pole of shared attention, the more the name creates a space in which more naming is possible —when convergent attention, violent centralization, has not been sufficiently deferred, a narrow circle of names, applied in a closely guarded (but therefore also, eventually, haphazard, productive of anomalies) way, is insisted upon. What is the advantage, other than familiarity, of
speaking in terms of decisions, choices and capacities, subsequently to supplemented by “society” and “history,” over an idiom that has us speaking of transitions from attention to intention? In the latter case we can see the ways that just noticing some foreground against a background (to speak Gestalt) becomes a way of effecting some new relation between back and foreground—without needing to make a stop at a decision, or the will, or some cognitive capacity or moral deliberation (all of which things would be attention-intention “glides,” in which a centered ordinality is joined).
Maybe it seems like I’m insisting on a metalanguage here, and a rather artificial and awkward one at that. What would be the point of “banning” perfectly serviceable words like “decide” and ‘choose,” just because we might have some theoretical questions about the “substantives” which these verbs predicate. I’m just doing the kind of displacement work necessary when one disciplinary space enters into another—much that was taken for granted has to be explicitly revealed as anomalous. An anthropomorphic inquiry wants to settle down with all the commonly used words, most definitely including those like “decision” and “choice.” But we don’t have to keep using them exactly the same way—I haven’t signed the linguistic or cultural equivalent of a non-disclosure form. When someone does something, and claims to have made a decision, there’s no reason to deny it; what we can do, though, is try to figure out wherein, exactly, the decision lies. What is other than “decision” in an action, and where is the boundary between decision and non-decision? (Note that I am myself using terms like “try to figure out” here.) We can conduct thought experiments. Let’s try and reduce the decision “point” to an absolute minimum by introducing as many determinants and making them as determinant as we can— bring in that person’s whole history, biology, cultural position, and so on, so as come as close as we can to erasing any trace of a “decision.” If there’s something we can’t manage to erase, well, there’s your decision. Let’s move the needle in the opposite direction—let’s reconstruct that person’s entire “equipage” as completely as possible as series of decisions, introducing terms indicating alternatives, deliberation, consideration, choice and so on at each point along the way. Let’s try and get this act to be nothing but decision—what does it look like then? Where is the non-decision residue? The very fact that we can move from one pole to another in our inquiry suggests, softly commands, that it is better to be able to slide up and down the scale. And what that further means is that the purpose of doing so is to enhance the probability that the subject of our inquiry and all who might model themselves or be modeled on it will be able to do the same —that is, keep broadening the space of decision against what will also be an enlarged background of non-decision. Making more conscious, responsible, aware decisions enlarges rather than shrinking the arena within which decisions are made. So, we have no problem using the word “decision,” but we do so in order to name and thereby enact a space of deferral (to decelerate and reverse convergence upon some center), not to create some rules for the proper “scientific” or “philosophical” use of the word.
In this way we show any “decision” to be a result of listening to the center. What I am talking about here is not very different from and, in fact, is an extension of, those occasions where one claims to be speaking in the name of some authoritative entity, and therefore has to distinguish one’s own opinion from what one has to say in the name of that entity. So a diplomat speaks for
his country, a clergyman in the name of his church, a scholar in the name of the discipline, and teacher in the name of curriculum, a doctor as a bearer of medical expertise, and so on. In many cases, these “delegates” will have prepared scripts or language to work with and professional norms to follow, but there will always be those cases where one reaches the limits of the script, the language, the norms, and one has to decide what one’s country, school, profession, church or whatever “wants.” This, then, is the model for what we are always already doing anyway, and should therefore do more explicitly and formally. We are always already doing this anyway because there is never a single word out of our mouths that has not been “borrowed” from some “source” we take to be authoritative and are which we are therefore helping to further authorize. If any two or more people were to sit down and examine some “specimens” of their opinions on various topics, simply asking each other, non-confrontationally, in good faith and the spirit of inquiry, where all these opinions came from, down to the use of particular words, phrases and grammatical tics, we would see this very quickly. One way of thinking comes from one’s parents, another from an impressive teacher in school, another from the media sources one regularly consumes, and so on. Even if each individual could point to specific modifications in these received opinions, those modifications have sources, or the intellectual moves that allowed for those modifications (a certain way of assessing facts or logic) have them. Even the best-read and most scholarly among us would have to point to intellectual traditions and their institutional reproduction upon which we rely and which, like everyone else, we have been unable to fully “vet,” right down to the vocabulary and unknown authorities which trail off into the blur of barely recorded or unrecorded history. Everything I am saying here is both obvious, once pointed out, and indisputable, and yet when are peoples “viewpoints” discussed in this way? Again, the point is not to discredit people by showing their views are not really their own—if that’s true for all of us, including those who bring to bear the mechanisms of “discrediting,” how could it discredit anyone? The point is that we are all, always, far more “delegates” and “representatives” than we are “individuals,” and that formalizing and foregrounding this in social and institutional interactions would provide everyone with more productive ways of contributing to common endeavors. If all these inherited ways of thinking, or idioms, can be examined as ways of “suturing” sites of mistaken uptakes of imperatives from the center, we can also discover ways of improving them, which is to say, of inventing pedagogies.
The kind of inquiry I am proposing be made part of discourse generally would no doubt be vigorous and reminiscent of some early forms of desacralized discourse pioneered in ancient Greece, like “parrhesia” and satire. The minimal anthropomorphic vocabulary allows us to first of all identify any utterance as a displacement: if I say something, I make myself a center of attention rather than someone else, and I direct others’ attention to some thing in particular, rather than something else. This is true even for the most innocuous or welcome of utterances. There is always a prima facie basis, then, for asserting that utterance was aimed at that displacement, even has, as its full meaning, effecting that displacement. To point this out is to centralize the other in a potentially violent way while also, of course, leaving oneself open to the identical operation. If this is the mode of entering a discursive space everyone adopts that space will be able to endure only under the rigorously maintained conditions. Such an approach to discourse has an undeniable truth to it, while being, under most conditions, unbearably
provocative. But the truth can be isolated and the provocation made more bearable insofar as this mode of discourse can be practiced as a discovery procedure. Instead of asking people their opinions, or what they think, which will generally yield a response, even if frank and informative, that minimizes the “usurpationist” dimension of any utterance, one might begin by venturing a hypothesis regarding what they have in fact usurped. The most felicitous response would be to admit to that and/or some other usurpation, and then return the charge, hypothesizing what kind of usurpation might be effected by exposing this one. If everyone is willing to play, we would be mapping out a field of more or less uncertain power, with everyone in a position that more or less coincides with their respective delegations from the center. If we are all usurpers, even if just barely, or just maybe, the only remedy is for each to “deem” the others to belong in the positions they inhabit. So, we have a declarative unmasking (“when you say X you’re really doing Y”) followed by an ostensive “re-deeming,” in order to in-order all. If participants find some instance of usurpation more difficult to redeem than others, that could also be put on the record, also in the name of the center, for future review. What I am modeling here is not a form of government but a more sociable and responsible form of social interaction predicted upon the acceptance of centered ordinality as the originary form of power. If we begin with a secularized admission that we are all out of place, we can further posit that we all might have a place, with the evidence of our belonging in that place to be found in our respective admissions, in the practice of our reciprocal redeeming of those admissions.
Not all social spaces need to pulled up to this degree of tension—most won’t, perhaps, and models can be followed more or less distantly. But the mode of social interaction I am proposing would allow for and demand greater levels of disclosure and honesty, and more controlled and purposeful forms of disclosure and honesty, than anything allowed under liberalism, which must see the usurpationist utterance as the exception and therefore subject to severe censure— however, since no “criteria” for what counts as a real usurpation (or a justified object of resentment) or injustice can be other than arbitrary, the supposedly generous assumption that usurpers are the exception just allows the charge to be leveled at virtually anyone, depending upon the needs of a particular power center. What I am proposing is the possibility that any space can be converted into a disciplinary space in which all the participants are both the subjects and the objects of the inquiry, To assert that someone else is a usurper in his very utterance is to hypothesize a proper allocation of positions that has been disrupted, and what would count as that proper allocation can be read off of the language of “denunciation” itself. It is therefore to pose a problem: how do we identify the boundary line between usurpation and proper occupation? What implications of violent centralization can be found in the supposed usurpation, that would not be found in the proper occupation? Where in the utterance in question can we identify an opportunity for an increment of deferral that went unexploited? Hypothetical utterances that might be seen as being on one side or the other of the boundary depending upon some variable could be constructed. It is in this very process that the participants transition from being usurpers to being, by reciprocal authorization, proper occupants.