Bouvard on Resentment's Conceptual Instability in GA

Chronicles of Hypotheses and Practices.

I've been questioning basic GA concepts like "resentment," "desire" and "love." "Resentment" is especially problematic--I've pointed out many times that it never really crystallizes as concept in Gans's thinking. Resentment is to be suppressed, to be transcended, and it's also culturally productive. There are presumably good and bad resentments--how do we distinguish them? What's not resentment? Can there be withering, truthful and yet non-resentful criticism? To what "emotion" would we attribute that? There are more minimal ways of getting at the relation to the center referred to by "resentment."

But you mention "love" in particular. Does Gans ever say what love is beyond sharing a meal together? I've been thinking of love as the protection of the object of your desire from the potential violence of that desire. But, then, this seems to me a way of talking about "heeding the center." And, what these last couple of posts make clearer than I have before (that I remember, anyway), is that heeding the center means iterating the originary scene--producing a new ostensive sign. That's a producer's desire approach, as opposed to Gans's consumer's satisfaction version of GA--the consumer wants to be appeased and narcotized. If we can speak about heeding the center, though, do we still need "love"? We can use the word in all kinds of situations, of course, but it need not be a fundamental concept. Desire, resentment, love--they're all "feelings," so for them to be meaningful we have to assume we all "experience" them the same way, which can never be known. What are *signs* of resentment, love and desire? If we can identify those, we would find better ways of naming those signs than "resentment," "love" and "desire." We would be speaking in terms of seeing the other in obeying the command to be the same.

So, if hypothesis is to myth as practice is to ritual, and narrative is an extension of myth, what is the "analogue" of narrative along the ritual-practice continuum? A very good question, and your suggestions might be a starting point for thinking about it. I would look to the "Big Scenic" disciplines, which construct us all. Our disciplining through psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, political science, philosophy and the rest is post-ritual but pre-practice--they all involve constructing "selves" on the assumption of a center that can become divisible in some acceptable way if one approaches it in the right manner. Aren't all these disciplines really more sophisticated versions of self-help manuals, which teach you how to construct yourself advantageously on the terms of a system that can provide your share of wealth, happiness, community, justice, intelligence, etc.? Narrative is really an imaginary reconciliation of the anomalies of the disciplines.

Someone in a state of resentment, at least in the pejorative sense you give it here, would not say he is resentful, would he? (Resentment is presumably sometimes seen as justified, because someone can say, e.g., "I resent the insinuation," without marking oneself as emotionally incontinent.) In this pejorative sense, it's always the other who is resentful (the other might be me, of course, retrospectively). To be resentful, then, is to be inarticulate, silence(d), "infans." The resentful one, of course, on his own terms, is just seeking justice. There's an incommensurability here. The word is obviously both rich and conceptually problematic. If resentment is what interferes with self-reflection (an interesting definition), then that has to be shown in the particular case--shown either to the resentful one or to others. So, it's a pedagogical situation, and, maybe, an "interminable" analysis. But, then, there's something to be shown--what "proves" or demonstrates the presence of resentment; what are the signs of not being able to think seriously about resentment? There's a burden on the one making the "charge." I would say the marker is not being able to make an operationalizable request to a responsible institution or authority. If you can't do that, you're just addicted to the complaint. If that's the marker, then, we can point to that dysfunctional relation to the center without having to argue about whether the person is "really" resentful.