Scenic/Linguistic Undecidability

Eric Gans has a “methodological” position that I would call “semantic leniency”—he’s very resistant to terminological debates, and the notion that developing greater conceptual precision (arranging words greater internal referentiality, we might say) will add much to analytical clarity. It’s a justifiable approach, especially if there’s not a strong disciplinary space around you forcing upon you questions that must be answered, then answered again, and so on—obviously, terminological disputes can descend into petty pedanticism very easily. But, still, there comes a time in the life of any theory, or discipline, or even conversation, when arriving at some kind of agreement on the right name for things becomes essential to going on. (At a certain point there’s a need to ask: what do you mean by that?) The concept of “resentment,” for example, will at some point have to be nailed down if we are to have serious discussions about it. Nailing it down might not mean a precise, “official” definition that must be referred to every time you use the word but, rather, explicitness over the range of ways it’s used.

It seems to me that naming in general needs to be taken much more seriously in GA—after all, the originary sign was the Name-of-God, and presumably how that name was used as it became part of a ritual order was pretty tightly controlled. We can assume that all names were conferred in events that involved mini mimetic crises at a lowering threshold of significance—names probably were all, originally, something like “God’s this,” “God-like,” “son of God,” “beloved by God,” etc. And naming individuals consolidated their position as protected members within a group, representing a particular initiation process, obligations, ritual suitability and so on. The question of linguistic decidability, then, is a question of what you want your discourse to do—if you want your discourse to be a sustainable, ongoing reading of the imperatives of the center you will take care in your naming—again, not necessarily in a strict definitional sense but, rather, in the sense of concern for the commemoration of whatever event, even a theoretical or disciplinary event, led to the conferring of that name/concept. Do we see ourselves a descendants of those on the originary scene, or not?

But when I ask whether you want your discourse to be a sustainable, ongoing reading of the imperatives of the center I’m referring to my own, specialized, project within GA—what I refer to as an originary grammar of the center. Here, I invest in Gans’s derivation of the successive speech forms in The Origin of Language, treating it not, as I think Gans does, as a problem that had to be solved to demonstrate the superiority of the originary hypothesis to other accounts of the human, but as a model for human orders that will displace all other accounts. (I do want to note, though, that Gans made very important uses of his “grammar” in defining metaphysics as the belief in the primacy of the declarative sentence, on the one hand, and Hebraic monotheism as a belief in the God whose name is a declarative sentence—innovations I am greatly indebted to.) So, the theoretical task I set for myself was to make it possible to describe every event and, indeed, every utterance (every “sample”), as an articulation of ostensive, imperative, interrogative and declarative modes. This task is far from complete, but I could see from the beginning that this would involve extensive redescriptions of all reported and transcribed events in a radically different form or mapping. In a fully developed form, it would rival Charles Sanders Peirce’s charting out and naming all the different permutations of iconic, indexical and symbolic signs.

This would mean a terminological revolution within GA—in particular, terms like “scene” and “event” would be rendered obsolete—these “things” would simply be articulations of the speech forms. And, indeed, we can see how an event is organized around an ostensive center, from which, or in the name of which, imperatives are issued, with questions then raised about those imperatives (all of this tacitly or explicitly), and declaratives narrowing down the possible ways of obeying those imperatives, with the confirmation of the compliance with a given imperative marking the closure of an event. This might greatly increase our resolution, so that what we would now call an event can now be seen as a confluence and overlapping of a range of ostensive-imperative-ostensive “units,” while a “scene” would be an articulation of ostensive “prompts” that might set any number of imperative sequences in motion. I think it’s worth continuing to work towards this potentially far more powerful human science, but the “problem” is that we can never completely erase the circulating names we currently use to refer to things, instigate actions, and so on. There will always be “normal” human language, even if all human language is also the residue of what was at one point specialized theoretical or ritual language—even if the theory I’m describing here were to be developed, receive institutional support, become useful and popular in various ways, even become the theory of the human, the very fact that it would be widely used would mean it would get “normalized,” blunted and made more polysemic (it would generate new slang, be used ironically, etc.). And, so, the regular language in which “scene” and “event” (and, really, all of GA’s main concepts—like “resentment” and “desire”) are embedded will continue to be the launching pad of any inquiries. I think GA is uniquely suited to maximize this productive dynamic between “wild” theoretical inquiry and everyday human situations—in fact, one way of surfacing the “ordinary” is by testing it against the never complete redescriptions enacted within a theoretical space. (Indeed, this discussion is obeying the imperative to maintain this tension as productively as possible.)

And this is where I can pick up the discussion initiated in my previous post regarding “figuring things out.” Inquiry always involves following some discourse when it starts to go off the rails until you’ve pieced together enough of its fragments to construct some new rails for a new discourse. If what the other person says makes perfect sense to you, you don’t even register it—it just confirms your own thinking and feeling on the matter, so it gives you a little cognitive “high” without being particularly memorable—at least if you more or less expect that person to make sense because you’ve always been more or less copacetic with him—someone you are usually at odds with and don’t expect to “make sense” suddenly making sense would be a sign of a discourse you’re familiar with starting to go off the rails. It’s when a discourse starts going off the rails and you need some vocabulary that can both remain within that discourse and track it from within a new discourse under construction that you start to get “theoretical.” And here is where scenic thinking is very helpful, in a very pragmatic way, because what gets revealed when things start making less sense is that what seemed like a natural set of interactions was actually scripted, and involved role-playing—if you notice the other is reading from another script, that reveals that we’ve always been reading from scripts, rehearsing, enacting, and so on. And then you can start fleshing things out with the “imagination”—who’s writing the scripts, what’s the larger “play” this “scene” is part of, how did the scene get set in just this way, how much room for improvisation might there be, and so on.

And as you run through various possible scenarios you keep naming elements of the scene that would either facilitate or prove an obstacle to the realization of that scenario, and then it’s possible to imagine further scenarios that would involve the leveraging, removing or modification of those elements of the scene (“props”). And if you keep in mind that every single element of the scene was placed there, fortified, “decorated,” implanted in the scene by someone, under conditions of some mimetic necessity, and that therefore every element of the scene be opened for discussion (by those who oppose you, at least, even if you’d like to leave a particular element of the scene intact), you can do some very good thinking this way. And this, of course, is the kind of thinking that will enable you to speak freely with others who are also situated on the same scene and engaged in the same practices. And you can do quite a bit of this kind of potentially excellent thinking without worrying too much about terminology or the “rectification of names.”

But you will start to run into problems when dealing with the formality of designations, which are deeply interlocked with “how things work.” The kind of “scenic thinking” I described above will get you to the point where you can say something like, “we should reorganize this scene in such and such a way so as to enable such and such a mode of interaction that will eliminate the kind of dysfunction that caused things to go off the rails (stop “making sense”) in the first place,” and everyone can nod their heads but then you have the question: who is this “we,” and then you start plugging in answers like “we the people,” or whatever and then your discourse goes off the rails because there is no “we” but rather legal orders that allow and prohibit certain chains of actions (consecrate, we might say) and then even if these orders get interpreted increasingly arbitrarily they still remain the reference point. (Revolutions are especially punctilious about things like appointing, pronouncing, authorizing, constituting, etc., because they have to ground their legitimacy in something emergent but unrealizable within the old order so as to capture the legitimacy of that order.)

But these legal orders name all the institutions, the mandates of those institutions, departments and divisions within institutions, operational rules for those institutions and so on. In other words, anything we could talk about is pervaded with legality, which is just the form “formalization” takes in any order not based on direct command. In that case, when a discourse goes off the rails, what is happening is a kind of slippage between orders of formalization, which can show up on the margins of a long official report or as a kind of oddity in phrasing within a particular sentence. So, scenic thinking starts to become participatory naming, or “literary.” If you take yourself to be on a scene with someone, you learn to comport yourself, to frame your performance in such a way as to elicit these slippages, even accepting that you’re allowing them to be emitted from yourself as well. It’s in proposed reformalizations within these slippages that the scene is being recomposed. As soon as someone says or does something that doesn’t follow any rule, that isn’t always already formalized, all effort goes into formalizing it—it takes on the urgency of a search and rescue mission. “Higher order” scenic thinking involves initiating and then participating in such shared efforts at reformalization, but that means following very closely what we call things and what happens once we start calling them that. And this will likely look like unintelligible chaos from the outside—it is, in fact, a kind of controlled and simulated mimetic crisis, created within the midst of and so as to fend off a more genuine one (which would involve the breakdown of formalization itself—which, even if not really possible, always tinges the edges of the imagination).

It's for engaging in this kind of participatory naming that an adoption of the idiom of originary grammar comes into play, because if you’re proposing and trying out names along with others it’s very good to point out what we must now do as a consequence of that naming (a kind of constituting), simply in order, now, to preserve the name, ensure its continuity. Questions people have can be directed back to the stream of imperatives emerging from the new system of naming—how do we do that, what other things need to be named and how, as a consequence? You can show how each question is essentially a prolongation of one or another imperative—it’s the addressee of the imperative stalled, blocked, sending out requests (imperatives) for information on how to fulfill the imperative. And each declarative sentence uttered is essentially managing all this “data” emitted by the newly named center and the centers orbiting it, as they compel us to rearrange our relations. Declaratives are themselves ultimately ostensives at a distance, naming things in their absence, mediated by some imperative relation to it—the most elemental question after naming something central is, then, what do we name this? And that? This is how scenic design proceeds—by working on the operational levels installing and articulating the scene, not performing directly on the scene itself. So, if you want your discourse to enter, infiltrate and reshape the scene, you need to be primarily concerned with formulating names that will, stick, proliferate and turn into networks. And, of course, as you work on that, you find yourself upon a scene, where you are performing in accord with a script which is always in danger of going off the rails, with others in ways that involve tacit positionings that can’t be completely redescribed in the very vocabulary you’re all attending to.