Inscription

Eric Gans has been exploring the concept of the “sacred” in some recent Chronicles. This is obviously a welcome development and one to be followed, as it returns us to the fundamental concerns of GA, the co-constituent origin of language, the human and the sacred. But it also has me thinking of the insufficient minimality of the concept itself—it’s one of those words, like “aesthetics” and “freedom,” that took on a particular shape in the 19th and 20th centuries within the Western world and seemed obviously universally applicable—but has every social order had, not just what “we” would call the “sacred,” but an actual word for it? The same problem holds for “religion,” which seems universally applicable because, after all, it’s a university discipline, but as anyone in religious studies will tell you, if there’s any consensus in that field today it’s that there is no single phenomenon called “religion” that includes all the practices that have been traditionally studied in religion departments (let alone those that have not been studied because they didn’t seem to fit the concept). We can apply the same objection to the word “ritual,” which I’ve also relied on fairly systematically. I think ritual does get closer to something we might be able to locate in every social order, and it’s not as if I’m going to institute a self-imposed ban on its use, but I certainly couldn’t prove its universality and, anyway, we need to be able to move away from any concept that our inquiry comes to suggest might not meet the highest standards of minimality.

So, if not the “sacred,” if not “religion,” if not “ritual,” then what? We get much closer to minimality with a word like “commemoration”—every individual remembers and, more importantly, every community remembers, and the memories of every individual are simply one part of the memories of the community. “Commemoration,” moreover, reminds us that memory is not, primarily, an internal matter, but one made material through repeatable practices. The repeatable practices are the commemoration. We are always deciding what, out of the vast array of events taking place, we are going to commit to collective memory, and how (“deciding” is a poor word here—the center commands us to attend to a breach). Indeed, how we commemorate is what constitutes an “event” in the first place. I think we can assume that all humans remember and commemorate, and that public commemoration is part of the signifying world that distinguishes the human, even if Anna Wierzbicka’s primes don’t include a word for (or roughly synonymous with) “memory” or “remember.” I take this to suggest that these more general concepts are so bound up with the traditions, practices and institutions of commemoration that some communities have not abstracted a word synonymous to “memory” or “remember” from its practices of commemoration. But there is a prime word that bears on memory: “same.” What memory is, most basically, is recreating or re-enacting the same event, the event without which we would not be able to say “this is the same.” The fact that in any order people can say “this is the same” is “proof” of the universality of commemoration.

We’re thinking in terms of an event so powerful, so transformative and so constitutive that nothing could be more urgent than repeating it over an over again. An economy of commemoration is an economy of centrally directed attention. And it seems to me the distilled thesis of GA is that we humans do nothing but repeat the same originary event over and over again, in countless ways. An event is so rich, and the “scaffolding” or scenic design that has made it possible so dense, and so deeply rooted in a broader environment (itself comprised of the residue of subsidiary events), that any attempt to repeat it will be necessarily skewed and selective, focused precisely on that which will enable us to say, enabled by creations created by the event, ‘this is the same.” Over time, more and more of that scene is brought out, or thematized, or made explicit, even if the question of what was “really” in the scene and what are we attributing to it is unanswerable—and much is surely lost as well. If all of human created reality is commemoration in this sense, we can lop off what might be a lot of other superfluous concepts, and study the interplay of the various modes of commemoration very much, I think, the way in which philologists studied received texts to work their way back to partly hypothesized, partly demonstrated, source texts from which the others are variants; but, even that ultimately leads in the more hypothetical direction of positing texts and languages that had to have existed even if we will never have evidence that they did. Even genealogies of technologies will become increasingly important, as decisions regarding the various forks in the road of technological development will lead the disciplines will draw upon real and hypothetical origins of the technologies in forms of commemoration to determine which technologically constructed scene will be the “same” as the one lying at its origin.

That every commemoration involves an inscription and thinking of the originary sign as a public commemoration (of the disaster just averted, or imagined to have been averted) qua inscription allows originary thinking to converge with the thinking of technics clustered around Bernard Stiegler. Inscription is tertiary, and therefore specifically human, retention. There’s some divergence between the two modes of thinking here. I think of Stiegler’s tertiary retention, indebted to Derrida’s concept of “arche-writing,” as literal markings—on a body, or a stone, that would “mean” something to other members of the group (“mean” in the sense that upon exposure to the mark they would act in a way they wouldn’t have otherwise and that would be “responsive” to other responses). I’ve revised this so as to claim that the originary scene involves a reciprocal inscription, as everyone is shaped by and shapes the other’s gesture and posture, and I stand by that (it’s not difficult to imagine everyone “writing” on each other on the originary scene)—but let’s set that aside for now. A literal marking on some object better fits what seems to be Stiegler’s sense of a quasi-accidental but intentional-after-the-fact emergence of signification. We could imagine, say, markings of a member of the group who has been lost during a hunt or some migration enabling others to find him, and then those markings being repeated another time so as to lead them to him. For readers familiar with GA, I don’t need to belabor the deficiencies in this “scene” (what would lead the individual explorer to “write” the signs in the same way, or his followers to read them in the same way?) but it provides us with a good look at an implicit model of language origin that might have emerged from a more intrepid Derrida. This is probably the kind of “deferral” Derrida had in mind—that the “meaning” of language is never present to the language itself but is rather taken up in various ways in the aftermath. Nothing ever means but, rather, “will have meant.”

For inscription in this model to work, at least two of the markings left behind need to have the “same” (what can be recognized by both pathmaker and pathfinders to be the same) relation to each other in the accidental as in the deliberate case. That would be the deliberate event commemorating the accidental one. (We could, of course, imagine a gradual revelation in which, “instinctively,” the pathmaker makes the markings a little more similarly related to the previous instance, while the pathfinders notice a little more similarity each time, etc.) We can now find something useful in this defective scene: that is, in fact, how inscription qua commemoration would be shaped. Our originary scene is already intentional, insofar as everyone on the scene acknowledges that all are proferring the same sign (they acknowledge they are doing so by doing so), but much of the scene would still be accidental, which is to say, not deliberately geared or staged towards maximizing reciprocal recognition of the sign. The “intentional” would gradually “colonize” or “territorialize” the “accidental.” And it would do so precisely by staging this very relation between and transition from the accidental (“chaotic”) to intentional (”ordered”). (And new “accidentalities” would be produced as a result.) And when I say that two of the markings would need to have the same relation to each other, that could also mean two “parts” or “elements” of one marking having the same relation to each other—all that matters is some iterable relational difference.

The hypothesized Derridean quasi-scene I’m positing here is helpful in reminding us (commemorating) that Derrida’s and the broader “poststructuralist” project was precisely to subtract intentionality from language. Gans has argued that implicit here is the positing of an originary violence to language itself, which would make poststructuralism almost the demonic double of GA—the very chaos from which GA needed to create order. There’s certainly a lot that’s interesting here, but even if poststructuralism needed to be corrected or countered in this way GA has been perhaps a bit heedless of the question and stakes involved here as poststructuralism had its reasons for locating a violence in fully articulate language itself. This question and these stakes are addressed, implicitly, cautiously and tentatively, but still brilliantly, in Sarah Pourciau’s The Writing of Spirit: Soul, System, and the Roots of Language Science. An inscription—a shared, iterable relation between markings—implies an intention, and one could therefore say leads us to project some form of intentionality onto an inscriber. Rather than proclaiming an intentionality behind the sign, we might want to maintain this paradox. Why? Well, every inscription is different, which means that the intention we are led to project onto the inscriber must be an intention not merely to inscribe in general, but to distinguish that inscription from all other inscriptions. And what distinguishes it from all other inscriptions must be the intention of the inscriber, but, once we say this, we must also say that the “intention” of that inscriber is itself only a “sign” of something like the “essence” of that inscriber. Pourciau shows that something like this was indeed the case with the very powerful language science developed in Germany in the early to mid-19th century, which found what were identified as the originary sound relations of the German language to be inextricably tied to the specific, historical and primeval character of the German people.

To make explicit what Pourciau never does (and what she might, indeed, reject as an implication of her argument), the project, even before poststructuralism, of “structuralists” like, above all (in Pourciau’s account anyway), Roman Jakobson, was precisely to exfiltrate such an intentionality from language as inscription. Now, it doesn’t seem to me that either structuralism or post-structuralism were particularly Jewish movements—I haven’t done a survey (but I wouldn’t be surprised if someone has...), but Jakobson, Levi-Strauss and Derrida himself are the only major names that come to my mind. But “Jewish” vs. “German” is not the best way to frame this anyway. Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan has made the case that the structuralism of thinkers like Levi-Strauss and the even more displaced Jakobson was, indeed, an attempt to draw upon transnational and transdisciplinary fields like cybernetics to create a human science that would be adequate to the crisis of human civilization they considered themselves to be witnessing—and certainly a theory of language leading through Wagner and Heidegger could easily be seen as something needing to be neutralized toward this end. (Indeed, Saussure’s earlier confrontation with German language science may have also—if only Pourciau had taken an interest in such questions, which are really staring us right in the face!—been undertaken in accord with similar intuitions of the stakes, siding with the more “symbolist” French literary scene of the later 19th century against the more nationalist German science.) At any rate, in this direction lies the minimization and delaying of the intentionality informing inscription.

We’re past having to choose sides in this dispute, and therefore able to embrace the contributions made by all. These are differing modalities of inscription and therefore of deferral. There are times when we want and times when we need to maximize our pretentions of intentionality over and against accidentality, and to bring to bear on any inscription the full weight of historical affiliations, obligation, and the vivid presence of ancestors whose own inscriptions made this one possible and confer meaning upon it. And there are times when we want to trace inscriptions back to unacknowledged contributors, unconsidered events, serendipity, and so on. The same inscription can be treated one way or another. It is the disciplinary collective that will be best able to dial things up and down in this way, to propose revivifications of the ancient and archaic along with the solicitation of data from the most far-flung sources. So, I take sides with the communities of inquirers, the founders and spreaders of disciplinary spaces, that operate simultaneously by stealth (if for no other reason than the relative opacity of their vocabularies) and in the most public and exposed ways. We can all set ourselves the problem: what is to be remembered, and how? (This is the “absolutist” or “NRx” problem of “formalizing” power: what is formalized is commemorated as an inscription of deferral of some potential mimetic crisis.) We’re all samples of some cluster of commemorations that we present as worthy of commemoration, trying to dictate the terms. of that commemoration while ultimately surrendering that right to our successors (whom we also want to select). This sounds very past-oriented but it’s really the only way of thinking about the future—as the result of the means one finds with present institutions to commemorate past events, ultimately the originary event, in a way that will last and ramify.

What my hypothetical Derridean event of language origin displaced is the center, because that is what it was designed to displace (along with his poststructuralist brethren)—so, on that level, I side with Gans against what is really a fanatical ant-centerism. But as I pointed out in the opening pages of Anthropomorphics, Derrida is interesting in the explicitness and desperation with which he seeks to evade the center, only to present us with a center is that is always there because constantly replaced.  There is not a great distance, epistemologically, from continually working on deconstructing the center, on the one hand, and continually working to derive intelligence from it, on the other. Yes, the center is constant—it will always be there as long as humans are and we will always set our bearings by it; and it is constantly changing, as it must be occupied, with one occupant replacing another and even the “same” occupant not being unequivocally the same. This is the source of intelligence: the occupant of the center, and all the delegations of the center, up and down the line, selecting their successors with greater and lesser degrees of success, interference, accidentality and intentionality. When someone speaks they speak at a particular distance from and relation to the center, in ways we can trace quite literally through schooling and teachers in the widest sense. Our commemorations are therefore more or less intentionally (let them be more so, then), histories of the center, aimed at commemorating the center so as to help it, through the necessary degree of intentionality (including the intentionality it distributes all around to everyone), which we confer on it by performing the chain of command enabling each of us to become in charge of ourselves as data center, come into its own.