Ritual, Juridical, Disciplinary

For a while I have been working with the sequence of scenic articulation of ritual, juridical and disciplinary, and I think at this point it’s worth revisiting the tripartite division and see what can be added to (or subtracted from) it. In a very strict sense, ritual includes all or any scene: as the originary scene concludes with a ritualistic repetition, so every scene is an iteration of that originary scenic ritual. At the same time, though, all scenes can be seen as disciplinary, insofar as there is always some inquiry conducted regarding whether we can say that this is the same—even the most constrained ritual will rely upon the completion of such an inquiry.

(I once wrote an essay for Anthropoetics trying to show this and follow through on its implications, and I doubt I’d have much that I’d want to amend there.) The reduction of the social order or, let’s now say, the parahost, to this configuration is part of the attempt, like my previous post, to dispense with concepts like “society,” “community,” and “culture.” Even if it could be shown that these inherited categories still retained their descriptive and analytical usefulness it would be good to be able to step outside of them through a renewed originary inquiry that lets us get a look at the scenic origins of the taken for granted concepts themselves.

The originary scene is hypothesized to proceed from the imminence of mimetic crisis focused on a central object of newly emergent desire to the emission of the sign (the gesture of aborted appropriation, the grasping turned into a pointing), though the sparagmos (the shared, frenzied, but controlled with sign exchange, consumption of the central object), landing finally at the first ritual, with the almost human group iterating the sign by pointing to the remains of the meal (now we are fully human). This provides us with the model for all human activity, which is nothing but an iteration, including variation in accord with circumstances and eventually scaling up, off-loading and so on of the originary scene.

All that we need for language, the human and the sacred is present on the scene: distribution, disposition towards others, means of reconciliation, expression of resentment and transcendence, inscribed in a model embedded in memory. And I would add that my reading of the hypothesis is that in a real sense we are not only iterating the originary scene but are still on it, as the only way the “closure” of the scene could be confirmed is through the scene’s iteration on another scene, and so on. This means that anything you do, or refrain from doing, or feel or experience, is an iteration of the originary scene; or, to put it more precisely, modeling it on the originary scene will yield a richer, more robust and resilient understanding than otherwise.

The center of the originary scene, the slaughtered meal, gets replaced by what we could call the “impersonation” of the center, both in the sense that the center is turned into a person and in the more familiar sense of “impersonation” that this is a kind of usurpation and artificialization of the center. What I call “Center Study” takes its stand here, because there are very few modes of thinking, or practice, that don’t at some point have recourse to a fantasy of returning to the more “authentic,” pre-Big Man Revolution scene. Center Study unequivocally renounces all such fantasies and part of its discipline is detecting and exposing them wherever they recur.

This is why the juridical is foregrounded in Center Study, despite its contingent nature relative to the ritual and the disciplinary (the juridical did not exist for a long period of human history when ritual conformity was sufficient to maintain the scene and might conceivably be superseded by a more “telemetrical” order or parahost at some point)—the juridical is the mark of the Big Man Revolution. The Big Man becomes and remains the Big Man by judging disputes among his inferiors and having those judgments respected. Ritual conformity can never suffice for this and would anyway entail the subordination of the Big Man to the priest.

The juridical took a long time to extricate itself from ritual conformity (it may have first emerged among the leading males, participants in the nomos) and never completely does so, but it has its autonomy insofar as judgment is exercised with an eye to deferring the emergence or resurgence of the vendetta between the parties willingly subjecting themselves to judgment. To put it in terms of game theory, the juridical holds for as long as those subjected to it weigh adverse judgments less than the implications of resuming the vendetta, which would now have to include the justice system itself; and this, further, means all involved have reason to believe that if one’s actions are in accord with the prevailing expectations of the distribution and inviolability of properties anyone can expect a favorable judgment.

This is “justice,” itself informed by the ongoing commemoration of the originary scene which is also the originary distribution. When we speak about the “secular,” this is all we mean: the expectation of a justice carried out without (or with diminishing) reference to ritual conformity. The juridical is a carve-out (if the term could be used without cynicism, as perhaps should be allowed, I would go so far as to call it a “cut-out”) of and within the ritual, and anyone stepping into the most modern courtroom can see how much ritualism has been transferred to the juridical. (There is also a more ritualized secularism, which is devoted to detecting and opposing any tendency toward reabsorbing the juridical back into the ritual—this militant secularism will be stronger when the monarch has been displaced and politics enters the scene as the struggle against the other’s attempt to usurp the center—the boundary between a more pacific and militant secularism may not be sustainable.)

The disciplinary is undecidably another, even more derivative carve-out/cut-out of the ritual and its scenic possibility. I seized upon Sloterdijk’s use of the term in You Must Change Your Life! at a particular point in my work on Generative Anthropology but it’s a concept I was working with in somewhat narrower terms even long before I can across GA. To dispense with a possible misreading: by “disciplinary” I never meant to refer to actually existing disciplines, academic or otherwise, even if these might be instances of the disciplinary. I simply mean creating a scene upon which it is possible to say “this is the same,” i.e., to share an ostensive against a background where it has been occluded or confined by mimetic commitments or even inadequate instruments, or instruments which have reached their limits.

This is what makes the disciplinary a retrieval of the originary scene, and why, incidentally, Center Study will always be a space for thinking, together and apart, and never devotion to a Big Man that forgets the originary distribution that made that devotion possible—and this qualified obedience to the Big Man is converted into commentary on the rituals of succession, foremost among them the juridical scenes themselves, making such rituals the ultimate destination of thinking. The insistence here would not be so much that you “must” direct your thinking to commentary on the rituals of succession as that you have always already been doing so and directing attention to that just shows you what you’ve been doing all along and helps you do it better.

When are you on a disciplinary scene and when are you on a scene that has collapsed the disciplinary into the ritual? It would be impossible to lay down criteria for answering this question, as if such criteria would not have been generated and would not be “applied” upon a scene that would have to be disciplinary itself. I would say that the maintenance of a kind of satiric scene within the scene is the best guarantee of the disciplinarity of the scene—the disciplinary scene can be dislodged or displaced and emerge strengthened in a way the ritual scene cannot (new rituals can emerge through mistakenness, but without committing that mistakenness to memory).

This would mean attending to the gestures and postures constituting the scene, and not just the object those gestures and postures indicate. There is no privileged genre for the disciplinary—I myself favor the literary over the philosophical, but disciplinary scenes can be created anywhere.

This tripartite distinction, then, suffices for discussing anything and everything human. On one level, it means we can reduce anything that happens, or any institution, to some “instantiation” of these layers, pointing out where and how the juridical superintends upon the ritual, where the ritual constrains the juridical, and where the disciplinary operates, to evoke Derrida, as both supplement and source of ritual and juridical. And you will be in the disciplinary as you conduct such an inquiry or, rather, the quality of your inquiry will depend upon how completely you have occupied a disciplinary space. But I wouldn’t want this to be a kind of static classificatory project—that’s precisely what turns the disciplines from disciplinary into bureaucratic spaces (the bureaucratic, by the way, is the preemption leading to replacement by peremptory judgments of juridical spaces—once you say, here’s how this kind of conflict would rightly or probably be decided in an actual courtroom, you can then say, let’s cut out the courtroom, abstract the rules from what we’ve come to see as a wasteful process, and just proceed right to enforcement—of course, appeals processes within bureaucracies reintroduce a degree of juridicality).

Rather, having ritual, the juridical and the disciplinary ever in mind should be endlessly generative, a source of concepts to be put to use for various purposes and various styles. You can move in and out of ritual, juridical and disciplinary idioms, within the same discourse and even the same sentence, revealing their affiliations and reenacting their disjunctions and anthropomorphic differentiations. You’ll find you’ve already been doing something like this: there’s not a single word or gesture you could imagine that hasn’t got histories taking it through all these various layers, at various moments in their historical trajectories. We’re always speaking as supplicants, petitioners, shaman, priest, prophet, creditor, debtor, prosecutor, defense attorney, defendant, plaintiff, researcher, sample, sacrifice, etc.

This tripartite division should also help us create disciplinary spaces inquiring into significant historical shifts—such shifts will be characterized by revampings of distribution and relations between center and periphery (relations between sovereignty and debt, transmission belts across layers of power, forms of currency, etc.), transformations in juridical relationship (what’s legal or illegal, who has what kind of immunity, what counts as evidence, forms of penalization, etc.) and new disciplinary spaces (objects and modes of inquiry, institutionalization of research, new forms of attention to what was previously attended from, previous areas of inquiry falling under ritual or juridical control, etc.)—along with interfaces along these areas.

As a kind of antediluvial conceptual formation in the history of my own work on the consequences of the hypotheses one can see that the technological seems excluded, but I think we might, within this disciplinary space, locate the technological in that undecidability between ritual and disciplinary—the technological, or scenic design, or the perfection of the imperative, lies in the ongoing inquiry of the scene from within the scene, that form of disciplinary activity with direct transfer to the ongoing redesign of the scene. We can then ask, what opens further or intensifies this space of undecidability, and this might direct our attention to “misfittings” in the areas of ritual, juridical or disciplinary; right now I would say when the prolonging of the imperative faces some blockage, some forms of agency not readily reducible to direct adjudication by the sovereign. In such cases, those experiencing a new freedom beyond sovereignty and sovereigns seeking to extend their sovereignty to new zones to some extent unwittingly collaborate on perfecting the imperative and designing the scene.