I suggested above that the exemplary secular subject is the usurper—from everyone’s perspective, everyone else is in a position they wrongly occupy. This is a condition of universal resentment—open, seething, constant resentment directed against the false center that has allowed some other to occupy one’s own rightful position. But this is the condition of all secular thought, and without a unanimously acknowledged center, any other mode of thought would be sheer fantasy. The world of usurpers at least provides us with recognizable agents, actions, motives, struggles and causes: we can understand why one would want to usurp, why one would want to usurp a usurper, how the specificities of one’s usurpation or counter-usurpation would singularize one, how alliances, divisions of labor and various forms of cooperation can emerge among those defending their usurpations. The very fact that I have distilled secular thought to a world of usurpers even though, to my knowledge, no actual secular thinker has ever used such a description, demonstrates the generativity of secular thought. Secular thinkers have thought in terms of rulers, and various justifications for rule and obedience; about social groups in conflict, and “just” or “pragmatic” ways of resolving those conflicts; about individuals, and their “rights” which they can claim against other individuals and the state, and so on. If we say that all that can motivate all these agents is resentment, as the naturalness necessarily attributed to them is an after the fact attribution produced by the attempt to reconcile them, that reduces to a world of usurpers. At best one could achieve a stance of comic detachment—but what is that, other than a kind of shadowing of one usurper after another? And this would make mimetic theory, and originary thinking as the highest form of mimetic theory, the end of secular thought, as it brings us to the universal condition of usurpers who now, perhaps, can see why others seem them as the usurpers. The configuration of the originary scene strips bare all the “reasons” we have for our resentments to the mimetic rivalry directed toward and restrained by a center. (No doubt many of the reasons we have for our resentments are good ones—some, at least, must be better than other —but that would still leave open the question, why do we resent—as animals do not—even when we have “reasons”? Why can’t we hardly ever say anything that is not some articulation of resentment with a grudging concession to the center?) The next step, then, is to move beyond secular thought.
Doing so involves exhausting secular thought, bringing its paradoxes to their conclusion. Secular thought depends upon the liberation of the declarative order from the ostensive-imperative world. The declarative sentence produces a linguistic present that does not depend upon ostensive presence. The declarative sentence does this by projecting possible ostensive presents to which the participants in the declarative event are ready to attest. If I say that someone is “not here,” in response to a request that they be made available, my claim has meaning on the condition that the person in question has been named and noted, that my interlocutors have been made aware at however many degrees of separation of this, that there is some “somewhere else” where someone else could be attesting to the presence of this person, that there are people who could attest to the attesting, bring word of it to me, and so on. Further inquiries could be made at any point along any of these chains—if it is a fictional representation, then all these possibilities are being modeled, and maybe the very process of modeling is being modeled. So, the declarative generates rather than removes it from the ostensive-imperative world. Even supposedly meaningless (“colorless green ideas sleep furiously”) and sample (“the cat is on the mat”) sentences serve to construct a disciplinary present, in which we deliberately “subtract” meaning and context so as to direct attention to, say, the purely syntactic dimension of the sentence. But the fact that the declarative sentence generates a multitude of other possible presents, the “failure” of any of which would lead to the collapse of the present constructed by the declarative sentence producing it, represents a paradox for the sentence—whatever it asserts both is and is not—and, therefore, a crisis. There does, after all, have to be a present of the utterance, even if the sentence itself can only refer to that present by making its reliance upon the present of some “recipient” of the sentence explicit.
By “present” I mean not anything philosophical, but the present tense, which is the first and, I want to suggest, only, real tense. Other tenses are modeled on the present tense—grammatical inflections indicating tenses are ways of showing there are other present tenses that can be represented within the linguistic present of the utterance. Imagine if we spoke only in the present tense—rather than saying, for example, that “the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776,” we would have to refer to a field of presently existing documentation recording, and recording the recording, and registering the consequences currently noticeable, of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The past event would have to be nominalized into a noun-phrase, while mentioning it today would have to be formalized as mediated by a range of presently available references, evidence, and “traces” across the culture. We’d be referring, not to an event that happened and is done with, but to a field generated by and radiating from an event we know only through that field. Here, the paradox of the declarative, that it dissipates its own present in the articulation of it, would be made explicit and formalized, and in the process the grounding of the declarative order in the ostensive-imperative world would be made present.
In this case, the representation of successions of events, fully “tensed,” is mythical. Saying that something happened yesterday is mythical because it’s still happening today. To close an event in its own present is to make the center of that event a site of imperative exchange, which is to say it’s sacrificial: whoever paid for that event is whom we owe in return. We can’t pay debts to the preceding generations, but that’s because we are present with them, as they mediate for us the
imperatives we receive from the center. So, if we are Americans, the imperative transmitted by the American founders to rebel against “tyranny,” in the name of “natural rights,” is still an imperative for us to work out, even if we scrutinize the specific claims made in the Declaration and find them wanting, even if we determine the revolution was really a self-interested move by an alliance of farming, merchant and banking elites enabled by anti-monarchical elements in Great Britain, even if we conclude it was merely a convenient justification for maintaining and continuing slavery, intensifying the expropriation of the native inhabitants, and so on. The ostensives gathered in all these other references bring with them other imperatives which we can make part of the declarative order through which we resolve the imperative mistakenness conferred upon us by the existing institutional structure of the United States. We could easily say, “the United States is the real tyranny,” against which we must rebel in the name of some other configuration of “natural” or “human” rights, and so on; but the harder question is to determine where the central authority lies within the United States, as best we can approximate it, how we can identify the imperatives coming from that at least partially hypothetical central authority, how to obey those imperatives in such a way as to make that central authority more central and more authoritative, and so on. If we accept the pastness of those historical narratives, they pull us in incompatible directions, obligate us to competing imperatives; if we treat them as present in their effects, they become commentaries on the imperatives we obey now. In the end, we’d have to be able to say that the only real meaning of “rebel against tyranny in the name of natural rights” is to clarify for us a history of commands that precedes and succeeds that one. A good start on constructing a more comprehensive and consistent field of imperatives might be to note the curiosity of the framers of the Constitution modeling the office of the president on the only man they could imagine occupying it first, George Washington. Why could the construction of this new form of republic only be completed only once such a position and its occupant could be so precisely imagined? That imperative to construct a new form of post-monarchical, post-sacral, central authority can still be retrieved and obeyed: what remains is to generate the historical narratives showing how this imperative, elevated, best provides consistency to all the others.
I’m not calling for “banning” other tenses than the present (even if the proposition to do so is a very useful thought experiment) any more than I was, earlier, calling for banning the use of psychological terms like “decision.” There is a method at work here to display and displace linguistic and historical accretions and supplementations. Things do “happen,” and people do “do” things. For that matter, people “say” things, and the things they say can be “true” or “not true.” I can assert all this confidently not as a result of a line of philosophical inquiry but because Anna Wierzbicka shows that every language has these words, and I accept the unanimous verdict of humanity regarding them. “Someone can do something” according to the primes, which means all languages can account for the “possible,” which is to say another present “extractable” from the present. Of course, none of the nominalized terms we take to be virtually synonymous with the verbs (if we can say something is true, can’t we call that statement the “truth”; if we say someone can, can’t we say they are “able”?) are in the primes. These words, like the tenses, are supplementations and simulations. Again, this doesn’t make them “false”—just sites of disciplinary inquiry. Methods deriving from the primes, as I suggested above, would bring into focus the relation between saying someone “can” and someone “does,” someone “thinks” and
someone “says,” someone “feels” and someone “knows,” and so on. But most elemental might be the relation between “do” and “happen,” because any event can be represented as someone doing something or as something happening to someone, and displaying the difference between the two would make the event or “happening” fully present. It’s not as if one cancels the other: if you represent someone as having everything happen to him, you can then turn around and represent the same event as being completely of his doing, precisely by having his doing “marking” the happening.
Instead of getting bogged down in arguments over the real causes of events (biological, social, cultural, political, economic, historical, etc.), we would then be amplifying the present, where traces of all kinds of causes can be identified on the spreading field of the present. This implies a disciplinary space aimed at making present a pedagogy of the present. A more precise answer to the question, “what are we alienated from” is “a pedagogy of the present.” There can’t really be a more fundamental human relation than pedagogy, and firstness on the originary scene and thereafter is really a pedagogical relation; even more, a linguistic pedagogy relation. Pedagogy is fractally hierarchical: the most egalitarian group you can imagine will be broken up, in the daily and minutely interactions between its members, into pedagogical relations in which one member teaches another something else that the first may know simply because he got to that place seconds earlier. The origins of trust and faith in each other lie in such pedagogical relations: these relations are formalized by the earliest human groups as rites of initation. The most systematically and permanently hierarchical group relies equally on pedagogy—it just stretches out the pedagogical relation (what is entailed in “learning” something) over longer periods of time. “Teach” and “learn” both come from words meaning, simply, point out a way to go, on the one hand, and follow that way, on the other. Pedagogy can also, of course range from minimal to maximal (answering a question; years-long initiation), from tacit to explicit (modeling performance; providing detailed instructions), and so on. One way or another, this is all we’re ever really doing. Part of my purpose in introducing Marcel Jousse in my earlier discussion of media was to get to the point where we can think in terms of the fully “mimological” pedagogy Jousse himself calls for, in which we continually construct practices that help us see the social origins of our practices.
If this is what we’re doing all the time, how can we be alienated from it? Well, there’s doing, and there’s doing. A pedagogical relation is effective insofar as it’s embedded in some centered ordinality. A declarative order alienated from the ostensive-imperative world (that insists on having all imperatives and ostensives generated declaratively) disallows the formation of sustained embedment within centered ordinality. This is because the more independent the declarative order, the more it would have you learn from those justifying the practice rather than those performing it. The imperatives coming from the declarative order are primarily prohibitory and hortatory: from “don’t treat other members this way,” or “don’t use too much of this material” (imperatives derived from legal, political and supply-chain considerations) to “respect others in your group,” “be a team player,” “be accountable to your subordinates,” i.e., imperatives that are universally applicable and therefore universally irrelevant. Nothing like “do this, this way, now,” can ever come from the alienated declarative order—the declarative order,
in itself, is hysterically antagonistic to that kind of imperative relationship (almost any “do this, this way, now,” can be interdicted under some reading of “don’t treat others X way”). And such an imperative relationship is central to any pedagogy. Even on a more intellectual level, telling a student to “write clearly, provide reasons for your arguments, refute counter-arguments,” etc., is meaningless and even abusive, because these admonitions cannot carry with them the criteria for determining when one is actually doing things this way, or coming closer to doing things this way; only a command to imitate a model, and then look, together, at how the model has been imitated, how it can further be imitated, and what habits need to be changed so as to imitate more perfectly (and out of which arise more abstract questions like “what counts as an imitation under changed conditions”?) can enact a non-alienated pedagogy. With a model to refer to, utterances and gestures are read as forms of resentment (a desire to displace another); while a pedagogical relation to the model is read off of the resentment—the more detailed the examination of the resentment, the more intricate the pedagogical practices it discloses. The other has stolen from you, gone behind your back, taken your place when you were otherwise occupied; that other has made a demonstration regarding your dependence on your goods, your vulnerabilities, your networks of trust, your assumptions of order in the world; it may turn out in the end that stealing, double-dealing and dispossession is not exactly, or not only, what happened. At any rate, there will now be contributions to the securing of institutions of trust, verification, interdependence and ordering that you will be able to make.
Within any declarative sentence there is a hypothetical centered ordinality waiting to be enacted pedagogically. You stake your place in the expanded present of the declarative. Any past tense opens the question of the reception of that past; any future tense raises questions regarding how one imagines the doings and happenings projected being populated. The same for aspect and mood—they all construct presents in which people are doing things, seeing things, saying things to others who in are turn converted into those positioned in some relation to maybe doing things or having things happen to them. There are virtually unlimited positions open in any sentence that one might occupy. And you’re not a usurper if you’re in another’s sentence. If someone says it’s going to rain tomorrow, that someone has heard a forecast from some source that has been made available through some medium, and has some reason for trusting that source enough to let your trust in him be put to the test by providing this information—there are people, working with technology and media, at each point along the line here. If you’re not at the head of the line, you are taking orders from another and passing them on, and how and why you do that is your pedagogical accountability. If you’re being given information, you’re being asked to do something with it, to make some difference, maybe in your own practice, maybe in that of others. The information comes with an imperative embedded in it, in other words. Maybe you’re within the order that’s transmitting that information as good; maybe you’re in another order that treats that information as bad, or questionable, or as providing some meta-information about the sender —in that case, it has another imperative embedded in it. How you enact this part, obey this imperative, is your pedagogy. The centered ordinality you are most directly embedded in is, in its turn, embedded in another centered ordinality of which you are more or less directly aware, which your immediate center wants you to be more or less cognizant of. You need to refer to that higher order insofar as there are inconsistencies in the imperatives directed at you from your
immediate center. How you formulate those inconsistent imperatives into interrogatives that can then be “transposed” onto some declaratives that exhaust or “evaporate” it is also your pedagogy. Increasing pedagogical positions within centered ordinalities is the way the declarative order is disalienated. What we all really want is to know that we can do things with others in ways that, because of those ways of doing, things happen that we see happen because of the things we do.
A completely “pedagogized” order, then (everything anyone does can be described as an effect of a network of pedagogical acts), abolishes secular discourse. It does so without any need for a specific sacred order, or form of transcendence. It contains the residue of secular discourse, though, which means it also retains the trace of the sacred within the significant. Once the possibility of seeing all subjects as usurpers in relation to each other (and therefore themselves) has been grasped, it can’t be forgotten: we must incorporate this basic human possibility, which has enabled us to construct the very originary scene that accounts for it, into whatever order we create as a remedy. The ever present possibility of the charge of usurper being directed at another, even in the most indirect or implicit ways; that is, the possibility of centralizing violence, is the originary event of an order immune to secular thought. The trace of the sacred in the significant is in the “leap” into a new order involved in the act of naming. The target of converging violence is named as the thing not adequately portrayed or described in the incitement directed toward it. We name in the name of the occupant of the center, the central authority, who is in fact the most likely and common target of incitement, the most vulnerable to charges of usurpation. A mature order would realize that any call for the removal of the occupant of the center must be false—that is, the occupant of the center is not the one to be removed for such and such a collection of reasons. To name is commemorate: here, we defended the center against this subversion. And when other members are violently centralized, those members and the time and place where that violent centralization was arrested and reversed, are also named, as other points where a subversion of the center, this time less direct, was averted. Naming is also the most basic pedagogical act: nothing better marks the minimal hierarchy self-evident and modeled in any pedagogical act than saying “we’ll call this ______”
Naming is the result of pedagogical practices of solicitation of the center. As usurping subjects, we want things from the center; we make demands. Everything we want is really a demand from the center. This means we all have what we could call a “central imaginary”: a proto-narrative of the center as the agent that could meet our demands. One side demands that the state protect the rights of the unborn; the other side demands it protect the rights of women to abort. What both sides agree on is that the state should be able do whatever the one making the demand would want: a state incapable of enforcing laws against abortion would also be incapable of enforcing laws allowing abortion. So, the state needs, at least to be capable. So, what makes the state capable? Or, more precisely, what interferes with its capability? If, by whatever historically evolved process a particular social order has for placing individuals in the position of sovereign, once someone is in that position, that person is unable to perform in the way mandated (the way he promised his voters, his party, or those who appointed him through whatever mechanism), then making demands of him is pointless. So, all our competing demands on the state can be deferred in the name of inquiring into what kind of state could do the kinds of things we are
asking in the way we are asking. Could a state that operates the way ours does perform in accord with the expectations implicit in the demands we make on it? (So, for example, certainly the contemporary American state could raise the minimum wage to 20$ nationwide if it set its mind to it; could it, though, hold everything else in the economy and society constant so that that raising the minimum wage would have the precise effect those demanding it want?) Such an inquiry would reveal at least some of the demands to be inoperable; even more, it might reveal that the very mechanisms by which demands are generated, circulated through the system and used as feedback by the sovereign guarantees that those demands will not be met in the “spirit” in which they are made. Just laying bare all our resentful, usurpationist demands would reveal, in increasingly rich institutional detail, that the kind of central authority that could meet our demands in a way we could recognize would also be a central authority that could and probably should ignore those demands while instituting more workable forms of feedback. Made more intelligent thereby, even the citizens of the existing social order could intimate transitions from that order by providing “audits” of institutional forms that both provoke and frustrate inoperable demands. In the end, we’d replace our demands with better ways of following commands.
An onomastic pedagogy commemorates and honors sites and figures marking the arresting of violent centralization, but operates far more broadly insofar as we remember that a declarative sentence named the God who abolished sacrificial imperative exchange and that the declarative sentence can therefore be taken up as a form of naming as well. Mistakenness in the imperative chain appears; a gap is opened between an imperative issued and the one to be obeyed; linguistic presence is threatened. Only a declarative capable of generating new ostensives can resolve such a crisis, and the path to the declarative is through the interrogative. That is, first of all, a question must be formed out of the impasse of the imperative. Let’s put it bluntly: everyone was depending upon you to carry out a task within a chain of command upon which the rest of that chain depended, and you screwed up. Everyone is angry with you, and demands follow quickly: you should be replaced, you should be punished, you should be supervised more closely, you should be demoted, etc. Well, maybe any or all of that will turn out to be appropriate, but then there are other questions: how singular was this particular task? How singular did it turn out to be, compared to what might have been expected? Whose responsibility was it to vet, train, and prepare you? Who is available to replace you, and how quickly? And so on. These are all predictable, “mimable” demands and questions, and the more of them we ask the more they become pedagogical questions to be addressed within a disciplinary space formed around the “spillage” of mistakenness. For this to happen, everything in the convergence upon the mistaken individual that marks that convergence as mimetically driven must be eliminated; and the individual himself must refrain from deflecting that convergence by instigating a convergence upon someone else. “Who are you taking me to be” is the question raised by the mistaken individual; “who are we that we take you to be whatever it is we take you to be” is the one raised by those creating a shared attention to the space. Some name in the form of the declarative sentence provides the answer to these questions.
These questions are less to be asked explicitly than to be embodied in a practice: if you’re converged upon, you expose the mimetic marking in the convergence by mimicking them and
responding as if you are that one; if you are among the convergent group, you name its object or target as someone to whom something has happened as well as someone who has done something and the others in group as those doing something and not merely addressing something that has happened. In both cases, mimetic excess is subtracted from the scene and replaced by a demythification: rather than building an identity around the stigmatized, the precise causality producing the noted result is separated more and more completely from all the other functionalities and responsibilities implicit in the situation. There are always procedures and precedents in play to facilitate this process, but proceduralism is not only insufficient, but can’t even work on its own terms without placed individuals who can read the relevant procedures as imperatives bringing with them a margin of decision. The only way to be such an individual is to be prepared to present yourself as such an individual, as demonstrated in a case you are also ready to present. And the only way to ensure such individuals is through a mimological setting in which the gestures of each can be dismantled and turned into samples of practices all can inspect. There is a pedagogy of the ostensive (look not at that, but at this; not that way, but in this light); a pedagogy of the imperative (attribute everything in your act that leads to shared ostensives as following from your full faithfulness to the imperative, and the chain of imperatives it follows; attribute everything that goes array to your failure to penetrate further layers of the imperative); and a pedagogy of the declarative (bringing all the doings and happenings within the scope of a present to the extent needed to exclude from the scene elements interfering with its minimality). The more you bring into focus some local center, the more you elucidate the terms provided by the global center making that focus possible.
Every demand is to be converted into a shared command that you are all studying together but which each agent is willing to begin obeying, and in obeying modeling a form of obedience, so as to open a space for others to retroject a form of obedience further up the chain, or follow with a subordinate and subsequent obedience—all in the name of providing objects, of providing all the participants themselves as objects, of that shared study. The central authority presumed to be at the highest point in the chain of command might be imagined to be fully secure and coherent, or in total disarray, or anywhere in between—these assessments will enter into the narratives told of the specific event, and in participating in that event you are already “foreshadowing” the contours of those possible narratives. Somewhere in there or up there must be some central authority, however embattled or potential, and you assume this central authority will be enabled by the forms of centered ordinality constitutive of coherent power. Constructing those forms of centered ordinality at any rate implies a default to some proximal power center, whose imperatives you treat as wholly consistent in themselves and with whatever central authority the proximal source of power defers to—prioritizing and temporalizing those imperatives so as to ensure their consistency is what a de-secularizing pedagogy consists of. What is needed for a restoration of the unanimity in practice towards the originating center in any social order is not (declarative) doctrines or articles of faith, but the insistence that all imperatives come from that originating center, and that everyone’s contribution to filling the gap between imperatives given and imperative obeyed can reveal that to be the case. The necessary faith for social order is that all named objects give off imperatives that we share and supplement by following imperatives up the line closer to the center. The role of declaratives is to provide order to the various
imperatives: a sentence, a discourse lets us know that one is to obeyed now, another later, another would be canceled if we properly obey the previous ones, another is to look at something rather than change it, and so on: if the imperatives are articulated in this way, the declarative tells you what to expect to see.