Returning to Zack Baker’s and my “There is No Economy But Only the Debt to the Center” is a way not only of continuing to explore the notion of originary debt but the implications of that concept for others, which might receive amplification as a result. For example, I have been positing, as the ultimate replacement for money, something like what would be “tokens” representing future pedagogical practices that would most effectively supply one’s team with the best members, increasingly projected into the future. This notion in turn suggests amplification of something I’ve said quite a few times in the context of my thinking of technology as scenic design, which is that what technology produces is, ultimately, pedagogical platforms for the further breaking down and reassembling of practices. This is perhaps convergent with Heidegger’s notion of the technological as disclosure, and perhaps also with Simondon’s and Stiegler’s understandings of technics as eliciting features of the human that had previously been merely potential or, more radically, didn’t exist. But, even further, this suggests that the ultimate project or program of the human as such is pedagogical, the ongoing “explicitation” of the tacit, the creation of scenes upon which we might show up in different ways. In this more ambitious formulation, we would have to see how all the idioms deriving from all the world’s traditions would be rendered pedagogically, since it is in the nature of pedagogy that one never clears the decks but always works with the materials provided by the “habitat,” and all the histories trailed along in them.
"it’s possible, perhaps in some historical periods even the default, for the occupant of the center to ensure his own succession in such a way as to impose a “haircut” on those managing the outside spread—the extreme difficulty of even imagining that today is an indication of its centrality to any serious political project."
Do we need to try to imagine it for just one last time? I don’t imagine it’s a problem that will continue into a post-monetary order or am i missing something? If all our debts become more directly to the centre, then is there still anything like an outside spread to be hurt (renewed?) by some kind of debt jubilee? If we get to a new order by converting our assets into data and by converting the owners of assets into ranked officers of a new order, could they be promised anything very different than "your current status and "wealth" will continue as long as you (or your deputies/successors) are competent in your role in the new order and help preserve its productivity and liquidity (or sovereignty). And we would have to imagine wealthy people accepting this because they see the present order disintegrating into a lower order lacking any guarantees for the long-term investor, even the promise of remaining at the top of a diminished whole (unlike those left to own nothing but be happy) would somehow ring untrue. Maybe that or an alternative politics (like MMT) saying that if we rediscover the power of the debt jubilee (because inflation doesn’t work for savers) we will all adjust well enough and a money-based order can then continue on somewhat as before but in the knowledge of future jubilees and, say “climate science”. No one can fly except for high status people who “have” to fly... but if you think that won’t fly then singularised succession maybe seems more viable.
"It seems to me that the earliest decision, and in my view mistake, that Gans made in turning the originary hypothesis into Generative Anthropology is already there in the original The Origin of Language: the separation between "institutional" and "linguistic" representation."
[...] We can take up that distinction [here expressed as submission to faith vs. liberal self-constitution], or speak in that idiom, if need be, and pose our problem in terms consistent with it".
Given this latter comment, I'm left wondering if there is any more to Gans' mistake than that it serves an unwillingness to anticipate or consider a post-liberal order. As you know, Gans' distinction of institutional (ethical) and aesthetic language is motivated by need to ground some kind of historical dialectic, to explain how ethical change comes about through rare moments of great aesthetic revelation. I don't think he'd quibble about the existence of aesthetic institutions, those of “art” liberated from ritual on one level at least. I'm not sure if he ever gave attention to the distinction as a phenomenon of "pre-historical" times, before sacred kings. Is his idiom simply not originary enough? a mistake in service of some fantasy of a free individual? or lacking something else, in comparison with your distinction of occupied center and signifying center, or debt enforcement and debt forgiveness (or even outside spread and outside option)? I like what you are doing in concluding with an idiom where debt enforcement is now a sign of social or team promotion. And perhaps my question just shows I'm holding onto a somewhat metaphysical desire for philosophy of history-cum-anthropological history in which case maybe mistakes would just reflect a lack of idiomatic confidence or generative commitment that replaces dialectical thinking?
We'd have to revisit that grounding of the historical dialectic by explaining how ethical change comes about through rare moments of great aesthetic revelation, then--which is anyway long overdue. There's a problem with Gans's definition of the aesthetic that I've never considered and I don't recall anyone else doing so either. If the aesthetic is the oscillation between the sign and the object, once you realize you are doing that and formalize doing that it's no longer what you're doing. It's only oscillation if there's some chance of actually proceeding on to the object, or even, knowledge that you will, but in some manner yet to be determined. Once it becomes art we know that the object is off-limits; indeed, there is no object--when I look at a painting of a beautiful woman I am not restraining myself from approaching a real woman or even, unless I am a viewer too naive to understand serious art, simulating such a moment of approach and restraint on my internal scene of representation. The only art form that enables such an identification and internal simulation is realistic literature, especially the novel, and so it's no coincidence that much of mimetic theory relies upon this art form and reading previous literary works (like Homer) as if they were 19th century novels. This is why mimetic theory and GA have very little to say about how the aesthetic revelations received from such works has ethical effects--the only real revelation from which any effects are derived is still that of Jesus, and even there the institutional transformations required for the Christian revelation to "take" are completely neglected, so the only way forward any of them can imagine is just to repeat some mantra of imitating Jesus.
So, a real aesthetic effect would involve a real oscillation, which is to say some intervention in reality that exposes an institution to itself and activates some its mechanisms (its auto-immune system, so to speak) so that they show themselves "inappropriately." This is what the avant-garde has always tried to do, needless to say not uniformally successfully but GA (i.e., Gans) falls way short here as well by simply anathematizing it as mere resentment. But it's not only the avant-garde that elicits the tacit mechanisms of institutions--it's very much an everyday effect, which provides us a basis for a historical dialectic grounded in engagements with the center, with testing its imperatives in their downstream implications. My concept of originary satire tries to get at this.
Regarding the question of whether money could be abolished once and for all or would always be a lingering "threat," I would have to say the latter, insofar as we'd always be working with promises and commitments and promises and commitments can always be converted into currency insofar as they are formalized at all--only an overwhelmingly powerful and insistently enforced ethic of formulating promises precisely and following through on them consistently can defer the return of money--which, then, I suppose, is a way of saying that money takes up the slack in the system of promises with the ever-present possibility that the slack renders the promises increasingly null.
Thanks, your comment, as usual, caused me to ponder, to some extent. I am curious of course how you think we should revisit the historical dialectic. But I'll just start by saying I'm not even sure Gans thinks the aesthetic is still a driving force. His history of aesthetic-led innovation comes to an end in the mid-20th century with writers like Camus and Sartre who he sees as the last people who are both aesthetic innovators and thinkers making new anthropological discoveries. For example, he has never, I think, tried to push a claim that his interest in writing poetry is closely tied to his anthropological discoveries, or am I wrong about that? And, without discounting the power of satire, I would certainly be inclined to think that what is driving history now is some dialectic, or lack thereof (intellectual stasis leading to scientism and totalitarianism), between science and capitalism, between advances that must await the course of "leading" scientists' funerals that permit new ideas to come to the fore, and the need of capital power players to sabotage and to win income from one channel (sometime innovative, sometimes not) and not others. But do you doubt the power of the great aesthetic revelation at some point in history, even if it takes centuries to work out? For example, you, like Gans, have made mileage from the scene within a scene of Hamlet.
As for the aesthetic oscillation I take your point that something different must be going on once the relation of sign and object has been formalised. But here too, Gans already knows this on some level. He knows he does not have to use the image of a beautiful woman to daily reiterate the high cultural attitude and learn how to restrain himself. Rather the oscillation has moved on to questions of the relationship of the sign to our apprehension (biological or cultural/mimetic, or what exactly?) of beauty in lived experience. Or maybe we spend our time withdrawing and approaching the paining, trying to figure out how the work of making the painting, the brushstrokes, the shadings, the painted over and the spaces left, create a dynamic between physical object and aesthetic experience. We may become fascinated with light and water, for example, oscillate between Monet and physics (hence countless relations of signs and things) or become curious about Covid's reduction of the practise of medicine to phone appointments which, in relating signs and things, now rely less on seeing, weighing and prodding the speaking (with body language) patient, and more on algorithms, AI, and the metalanguage of medicine/literacy which interests capital/power. In music, we oscillate between sounds, pauses, and think about time or rhythm creating, restraining images/signs and desires. Etc. But in all these questions the originary oscillation is still there in some evolved form, but yes, shaping the historical dynamic in various ways I can't readily organise my mind around. Is satire, then, a way to reduce the complexity?
The oscillation is between those on the periphery and the center. This means it's an engagement with power, even if its the power of an artistic or literary "establishment," which is always tied into other "establishments." Even the great novelists of the 19th century saw themselves not just as producing disinterested works of art but of remaking the possibility of the art against institutional obstacles. Shakespeare (whoever he actually was) also had his oscillations with the Crown. The "cap" Gans places on literary innovation reflects his own limitations and, I suspect, that of mimetic theory more generally, than the history of art's historical engagements. But, like I said, the realist novel does most closely approximate Gans's model because it matches the development of the "internal scene of representation" in the course of the development of consumer society. It's possible to "identify" with protaganists, and this identification can be communicated. Shakespeare's influence, I would guess, is channeled through Romanticism, which then flows into the novel. So, yes, there's something there for that historical period. But that Gans thinks there's no more historically relevant art since the period immediately after WW 2 just means that he has lost the plot, so to speak, because artworks no longer provide a clear plot. Note how alien your own description of where the oscillation may have moved on to is to anything Gans has ever said. His model provides no way of talking about, say, technological equipped performance art that displays the relations between the laboratory, everyday perception and capital. Needless to say there has always been and continues to be art illuminating the historical dialectic (if there is one, or only one) in ways that situate the "recipient" of art as some kind of "participant" vis a vis power. Of course almost all of this art is left-wing and so its desire is for a "liberatory" dialectic that ultimately references the French Revolution, but at least it's more likely to recognize the center as power. I don't think I see a historical dialectic, which presupposes some rational necessity to history--the "masses" don't really desire, even "unconsciously," to establish singularized succession in perpetuity. But whether that happens won't depend on the masses but on a new "officer class," which will engage but not rest upon any "mass." What art can probably best do today is expose all the "infelicitous" imperatives out there--all the things people desire without knowing why and without their objects of desire having any connection to anything that might happen. It wouldn't be revealing or reflecting a dialectic but, rather, exposing gaps in imperative chains that someone might come along and fill.
"it’s possible, perhaps in some historical periods even the default, for the occupant of the center to ensure his own succession in such a way as to impose a “haircut” on those managing the outside spread—the extreme difficulty of even imagining that today is an indication of its centrality to any serious political project."
Do we need to try to imagine it for just one last time? I don’t imagine it’s a problem that will continue into a post-monetary order or am i missing something? If all our debts become more directly to the centre, then is there still anything like an outside spread to be hurt (renewed?) by some kind of debt jubilee? If we get to a new order by converting our assets into data and by converting the owners of assets into ranked officers of a new order, could they be promised anything very different than "your current status and "wealth" will continue as long as you (or your deputies/successors) are competent in your role in the new order and help preserve its productivity and liquidity (or sovereignty). And we would have to imagine wealthy people accepting this because they see the present order disintegrating into a lower order lacking any guarantees for the long-term investor, even the promise of remaining at the top of a diminished whole (unlike those left to own nothing but be happy) would somehow ring untrue. Maybe that or an alternative politics (like MMT) saying that if we rediscover the power of the debt jubilee (because inflation doesn’t work for savers) we will all adjust well enough and a money-based order can then continue on somewhat as before but in the knowledge of future jubilees and, say “climate science”. No one can fly except for high status people who “have” to fly... but if you think that won’t fly then singularised succession maybe seems more viable.
"It seems to me that the earliest decision, and in my view mistake, that Gans made in turning the originary hypothesis into Generative Anthropology is already there in the original The Origin of Language: the separation between "institutional" and "linguistic" representation."
[...] We can take up that distinction [here expressed as submission to faith vs. liberal self-constitution], or speak in that idiom, if need be, and pose our problem in terms consistent with it".
Given this latter comment, I'm left wondering if there is any more to Gans' mistake than that it serves an unwillingness to anticipate or consider a post-liberal order. As you know, Gans' distinction of institutional (ethical) and aesthetic language is motivated by need to ground some kind of historical dialectic, to explain how ethical change comes about through rare moments of great aesthetic revelation. I don't think he'd quibble about the existence of aesthetic institutions, those of “art” liberated from ritual on one level at least. I'm not sure if he ever gave attention to the distinction as a phenomenon of "pre-historical" times, before sacred kings. Is his idiom simply not originary enough? a mistake in service of some fantasy of a free individual? or lacking something else, in comparison with your distinction of occupied center and signifying center, or debt enforcement and debt forgiveness (or even outside spread and outside option)? I like what you are doing in concluding with an idiom where debt enforcement is now a sign of social or team promotion. And perhaps my question just shows I'm holding onto a somewhat metaphysical desire for philosophy of history-cum-anthropological history in which case maybe mistakes would just reflect a lack of idiomatic confidence or generative commitment that replaces dialectical thinking?
We'd have to revisit that grounding of the historical dialectic by explaining how ethical change comes about through rare moments of great aesthetic revelation, then--which is anyway long overdue. There's a problem with Gans's definition of the aesthetic that I've never considered and I don't recall anyone else doing so either. If the aesthetic is the oscillation between the sign and the object, once you realize you are doing that and formalize doing that it's no longer what you're doing. It's only oscillation if there's some chance of actually proceeding on to the object, or even, knowledge that you will, but in some manner yet to be determined. Once it becomes art we know that the object is off-limits; indeed, there is no object--when I look at a painting of a beautiful woman I am not restraining myself from approaching a real woman or even, unless I am a viewer too naive to understand serious art, simulating such a moment of approach and restraint on my internal scene of representation. The only art form that enables such an identification and internal simulation is realistic literature, especially the novel, and so it's no coincidence that much of mimetic theory relies upon this art form and reading previous literary works (like Homer) as if they were 19th century novels. This is why mimetic theory and GA have very little to say about how the aesthetic revelations received from such works has ethical effects--the only real revelation from which any effects are derived is still that of Jesus, and even there the institutional transformations required for the Christian revelation to "take" are completely neglected, so the only way forward any of them can imagine is just to repeat some mantra of imitating Jesus.
So, a real aesthetic effect would involve a real oscillation, which is to say some intervention in reality that exposes an institution to itself and activates some its mechanisms (its auto-immune system, so to speak) so that they show themselves "inappropriately." This is what the avant-garde has always tried to do, needless to say not uniformally successfully but GA (i.e., Gans) falls way short here as well by simply anathematizing it as mere resentment. But it's not only the avant-garde that elicits the tacit mechanisms of institutions--it's very much an everyday effect, which provides us a basis for a historical dialectic grounded in engagements with the center, with testing its imperatives in their downstream implications. My concept of originary satire tries to get at this.
Regarding the question of whether money could be abolished once and for all or would always be a lingering "threat," I would have to say the latter, insofar as we'd always be working with promises and commitments and promises and commitments can always be converted into currency insofar as they are formalized at all--only an overwhelmingly powerful and insistently enforced ethic of formulating promises precisely and following through on them consistently can defer the return of money--which, then, I suppose, is a way of saying that money takes up the slack in the system of promises with the ever-present possibility that the slack renders the promises increasingly null.
Thanks, your comment, as usual, caused me to ponder, to some extent. I am curious of course how you think we should revisit the historical dialectic. But I'll just start by saying I'm not even sure Gans thinks the aesthetic is still a driving force. His history of aesthetic-led innovation comes to an end in the mid-20th century with writers like Camus and Sartre who he sees as the last people who are both aesthetic innovators and thinkers making new anthropological discoveries. For example, he has never, I think, tried to push a claim that his interest in writing poetry is closely tied to his anthropological discoveries, or am I wrong about that? And, without discounting the power of satire, I would certainly be inclined to think that what is driving history now is some dialectic, or lack thereof (intellectual stasis leading to scientism and totalitarianism), between science and capitalism, between advances that must await the course of "leading" scientists' funerals that permit new ideas to come to the fore, and the need of capital power players to sabotage and to win income from one channel (sometime innovative, sometimes not) and not others. But do you doubt the power of the great aesthetic revelation at some point in history, even if it takes centuries to work out? For example, you, like Gans, have made mileage from the scene within a scene of Hamlet.
As for the aesthetic oscillation I take your point that something different must be going on once the relation of sign and object has been formalised. But here too, Gans already knows this on some level. He knows he does not have to use the image of a beautiful woman to daily reiterate the high cultural attitude and learn how to restrain himself. Rather the oscillation has moved on to questions of the relationship of the sign to our apprehension (biological or cultural/mimetic, or what exactly?) of beauty in lived experience. Or maybe we spend our time withdrawing and approaching the paining, trying to figure out how the work of making the painting, the brushstrokes, the shadings, the painted over and the spaces left, create a dynamic between physical object and aesthetic experience. We may become fascinated with light and water, for example, oscillate between Monet and physics (hence countless relations of signs and things) or become curious about Covid's reduction of the practise of medicine to phone appointments which, in relating signs and things, now rely less on seeing, weighing and prodding the speaking (with body language) patient, and more on algorithms, AI, and the metalanguage of medicine/literacy which interests capital/power. In music, we oscillate between sounds, pauses, and think about time or rhythm creating, restraining images/signs and desires. Etc. But in all these questions the originary oscillation is still there in some evolved form, but yes, shaping the historical dynamic in various ways I can't readily organise my mind around. Is satire, then, a way to reduce the complexity?
The oscillation is between those on the periphery and the center. This means it's an engagement with power, even if its the power of an artistic or literary "establishment," which is always tied into other "establishments." Even the great novelists of the 19th century saw themselves not just as producing disinterested works of art but of remaking the possibility of the art against institutional obstacles. Shakespeare (whoever he actually was) also had his oscillations with the Crown. The "cap" Gans places on literary innovation reflects his own limitations and, I suspect, that of mimetic theory more generally, than the history of art's historical engagements. But, like I said, the realist novel does most closely approximate Gans's model because it matches the development of the "internal scene of representation" in the course of the development of consumer society. It's possible to "identify" with protaganists, and this identification can be communicated. Shakespeare's influence, I would guess, is channeled through Romanticism, which then flows into the novel. So, yes, there's something there for that historical period. But that Gans thinks there's no more historically relevant art since the period immediately after WW 2 just means that he has lost the plot, so to speak, because artworks no longer provide a clear plot. Note how alien your own description of where the oscillation may have moved on to is to anything Gans has ever said. His model provides no way of talking about, say, technological equipped performance art that displays the relations between the laboratory, everyday perception and capital. Needless to say there has always been and continues to be art illuminating the historical dialectic (if there is one, or only one) in ways that situate the "recipient" of art as some kind of "participant" vis a vis power. Of course almost all of this art is left-wing and so its desire is for a "liberatory" dialectic that ultimately references the French Revolution, but at least it's more likely to recognize the center as power. I don't think I see a historical dialectic, which presupposes some rational necessity to history--the "masses" don't really desire, even "unconsciously," to establish singularized succession in perpetuity. But whether that happens won't depend on the masses but on a new "officer class," which will engage but not rest upon any "mass." What art can probably best do today is expose all the "infelicitous" imperatives out there--all the things people desire without knowing why and without their objects of desire having any connection to anything that might happen. It wouldn't be revealing or reflecting a dialectic but, rather, exposing gaps in imperative chains that someone might come along and fill.