Great post, thanks. It seems to me that GA is quite ambivalent about the possibility of a "post-sacrificial" culture, e.g. The question of whether non-sacrificial narrative is possible. Your idea of such a future relies on the recuperation of firstness in self-sacrificial projects, and i'm curious if you intuit more to the possibility of a "post-sacrificial world than that? I think my comment, on your previous post, about Freemasonry was not off the mark. The core Masonic ritual, the third, or Master Mason, degree is a Eucharistic ritual in which the initiate "dies" and is reborn as Hiram, the Master Mason of Solomon's temple who was murdered at the building site by apprentices who desired, before they were ready, to extract from him the secret word of the Master Mason (implicitly the name of God) which is now lost forever due to the murder. One is to identify with the producer who is resented for his discipline.
Yes, post-sacrificial cultural a difficult question. Self-sacrifice is an advance over other sacrifice, but I'm ambivalent about that as well--it may be that self-sacrifice is a prelude to even more terrible forms of other sacrifice. And things like the "market," "rationality," etc., only temporize with sacrifice, and perhaps make it worse in the long run as well. Gans seems to think that the market represents the transcendence of sacrifice, but I obviously reject that. I did point to something more in the post:
"in its more advanced forms, though, discipline means being able to found and adhere to disciplines, that is, constraint based forms of shared practice and inquiry. Then, discipline becomes less self-sacrificial than generative of models for living—and, therefore, for ruling and being ruled."
I'm going to start working this through that notion of language learning I developed a couple (few?) years ago and see if I can make it less "utopian." First, I need to reintroduce a concept I've mentioned mostly in passing, but is the other issue of "deferral" along with "discipline"--"deference."
I won't say much about the freemasonry reference (although I'd be happy to see more of your knowledge and thinking about it), but it does touch on another issue, also part of culture as language learning: the idiomatic character of cultural and social forms. Traditions are essentially idioms, words, phrases, grammatical constructions warped in certain ways that require some form of "initiation" to understand. That includes the traditional ways we have of understanding other traditions. If there's nothing "weird" about another culture/tradition for you, you're just reducing it to a lesser version of your own tradition. To some extent, it's a question of naming--Matt Schneider introduced the concept of "originary onomastics" a while ago (at the Ottawa conference, I think) but didn't really do much with it. It's a good idea, though.