The Contingency of the Hypothesis

I have just read A Critique of Natural Language: Human Being: The Species that Begat Itself a Future, by Willem Ernst van der Roest. I did so because the book, published in 2010, was one of a very few Girardian-inspired inquiries into human origins, and in this case language origin in particular, that takes some time to address Eric Gans’s originary hypothesis. The book ultimately fleshes out and extends Girard’s idea that the remains of the victim of the lynching caused by the mimetic crisis could be taken to be the first sign, or at least a distant ancestor of it, and if you’re interested in seeing that worked out the book is worth reading. His account is anything but minimal, as it supplies whatever “instincts” are needed to push the novel “non-instinctual attention” in the direct he needs. I found a couple of features interesting, in particular his assertion, made, as I pointed out a while back, by Eric Jacobus as well, that we need to posit the existence of weapons in order to account for the overloading of mimetic rivalry to the point where it can override the natural animal hierarchy. But van der Roast just mentions this, and it doesn’t become part of his later theorizations. And his critique of Gans is shallow and oddly condescending, based, as far as I can tell, solely upon two (#329 and #332) Chronicles of Love and Resentment published in 2006 (which van der Roest doesn’t bother to cite properly—if you didn’t know of the Chronicles already, I don’t see how you would find them from van der Roest’s reference).

Still, van der Roest does advance one critique of the originary hypothesis that I believe is correct and important, pointing to something that I have noticed myself, going back, in fact, to my first GA essay, “Remembering Amalek,” where I introduced a suggestion for reconfiguring the originary event for this very reason. It’s not only a critique that needs to be answered, but one that, when answered, leads to some important questions regarding the nature of the originary hypothesis—what kind of thing, or “artifact,” is it? Van der Roest is right to point out that any intensification of the emergent mimetic crisis that is powerful enough to override the natural animal hierarchy would also be too powerful for the shared focus on the center to be maintained. The breakdown of the animal hierarchy would mean the breakdown of the group into a general melee, with individuals fighting other individuals, smaller groups fighting other smaller groups, or groups attacking individuals, etc. But this only means that the constellation of the scene around the central object was highly unlikely, not that it was impossible. It is then our burden, as defenders of the hypothesis, to construct the unlikely conditions under which the breakdown of the animal hierarchy would sustain the orientation towards the center, at least sufficiently for the scene to take hold. Gans had very good reasons for insisting, quite a few times as I recall (even if not lately), that the originary event was unlikely, almost miraculous. We have perhaps not sufficiently considered that there is a particular logic built into the originary hypothesis, a logic of contingency rather than necessity, making it impossible for adherents to the far more popular logic of necessity to “see” the hypothesis. I am not well schooled in logic but maybe there’s a name for something that is unlikely but only needs to happen once to “take” (and maybe a lot of life is like that). I would also point out that, in this case, Gans’s own insistence, articulated most explicitly somewhere in our antisemitism book, but evident in virtually every word he writes, that the best approach to viewing historical phenomena is to treat them as if they were inevitable, is tantamount to sabotage directed at the originary hypothesis itself. Exactly the opposite is the case: faithfulness to the hypothesis calls for a logic of radical contingency, beginning with the contingency of the human being itself, and continuing with the contingency of every subsequent event.

Something on the not-yet-originary scene must reveal or present to the participants the implications of their convergence upon the central object before those implications become manifest—because, again, once those implications unfold past a certain point, there will be no scene because there will be no one positioned to see them. Gans has spoken of a kind of “fearful symmetry” being visible to members of the group, and something like that is indeed necessary—but think about the problem this raises: each member of the group must have some way of taking in the group as a whole (the “symmetry” assumes this), something we must assume has never happened before. How could the group as a whole appear in this way, over and beyond each member’s more immediate proximity to an increasingly enraged rival who would be drawing his attention in an urgent manner? We’d have to imagine a contingently arranged configuration with, say, everyone (or “enough” of the group) at an equal distance from the central object—something that adherents of the hypothesis indeed take for granted but that is by no means assured in advance; indeed, it is a configuration that is unlikely. This unlikeliness is the force behind the Girardian assertion that the originary hypothesis is another social contract theory (an assertion van der Roest repeats and emphasizes) and to which Gans’s answer is what seems to me the radically unsatisfying one of “so what if it’s a social contract theory?” (this answer is already implicit in the Chronicle van der Roest refers to (#329), and became more explicit later on—if necessary, I suppose I could find where).

Part of the critique of the originary hypothesis here is that Gans wants or needs a “happy ending” to the originary event, and this coincides with Gans’s more general desire to highlight the peaceful, productive side of humanity at the expense of its “darker,” more violent tendencies, and so Gans supplies the participants on the originary scene with the historical resolution he attributes to them in the form of the modern “market society,” thereby introducing an anachronism into the scene. This coincides with my own conclusion, arrived at more “conclusively” recently, that Gans has channeled the originary hypothesis into Generative Anthropology, with the latter designed as the ideology of liberal democracy. So, this part of van der Roest’s critique has some resonance for me as well and needs to be addressed. (The claim that Gans’s scene downplays violence has been made before, and answered by pointing to the violence of the sparagmos Gans sees as following the emission of the sign. Van der Roest mentions this and is more dismissive than I would be, seeing it as a kind of feeble mimicry of Girard, but I’ve never quite seen the necessity for the fury of the sparagmos. Here is one of those times when it seems to me Gans relies upon a hydraulic model of human psychology, where resentments “suppressed” at one moment need to be “expressed” in equal measure the next moment. I’ve said on many occasions that it might be better to see the sparagmos as a clumsier affair, in which the members on the scene try out, practice, and modify their new “device” as they jostle with each other to get their share. That the sign that they just discovered would be immediately dropped seems odd to me [how would they retrieve it afterward?]. Rather than furious resentment directed toward the central object, why not take on (imitate) the resentment of the center by using the new sign to block “excessive” moves toward the center? In this case, as well, imitation of the center is unbroken. Maybe I’m wrong, but—here’s another question GA is designed to ignore—how do we tell what is right or wrong in analyzing the scene?)

My original formulation of “firstness,” that is, the claim that someone on the originary scene had to emit the sign first, albeit in a way that could not be recognized as such until it has circulated among the group, was very explicitly aimed at the problem posed by the assumption of the unanimity of sign issuance in Gans’s account of the scene (afterwards I realized that there were, in fact, indications of this unevenness of the scene in some of Gans’s descriptions). It would simply be too miraculous for all on the scene to simultaneously emit and recognize the sign—such “spontaneity” would indicate some pre-existing capacity to signify, something like an “instinct,” which would in turn undermine the claim that a new, “non-instinctual” feature of a new species emerges on the scene—to put it another way, it would make the originary event inevitable. This is why the “social contract” “accusation” needs to be answered—it assumes a declarative understanding (of the kind that makes it possible to “reach an agreement”) that could not have existed on the scene and can only be imagined as a spontaneous emergence of non or post-mimetic peaceful intentions. Gans’s only demonstrated interest in the concept of firstness was in idealizing modern market society and tarring its opponents with “resentment,” but there’s a much more important issue here. I happen to agree with the solution I proposed back then: we need to assume a kind of unevenness on the scene whereby some members proceed to initiate the full-scale breakdown of the scene while others hesitate and can mark this hesitation in each other precisely in distinction from that breakdown. In most cases, the breakdown would overpower the emergent restraint, which would be forgotten; all we need to imagine is one time where the hesitation is marked a bit more precisely (the gesture of hesitation turned more evidently into a gesture of deferral), spreads a little bit more quickly, and enables some on the scene to model a different kind of outcome and even restrain those who are “breaking down” the scene. And this “one time” might very well rely on a specific scenic configuration that we could only track down partially, but for that reason remains a source of ongoing reflection and inquiry, leaving a trace in all originary thinking.

I would guess that this more extensive reconstruction of the scene (it’s all there in “Remembering Amalek”) was of less interest to Gans (and everyone else in GA) because it introduces some inequality and even “force” onto a scene that he would like to see as a model for the consensual market he would very much like to see today, even if through the haze of the victimary, wokeness, etc. Whatever exists is inevitable, and therefore the best, so whatever exists is good—sure, some bad things might appear here and there, but we all know they’re not really real, which is to say can have their ontological insignia removed and be consigned to the dustbin of the history of resentment. But the consequences of “firstness” are significant, and, to me at least, to be embraced. Here we find a genuinely new way of thinking in a logic of contingency that we must grant pervades each successive iteration of the sign or of the originary hypothesis itself. The logic of inevitability is a sorting mechanism that renders irrelevant whatever has not led or cannot be attributed to whatever is deemed “inevitable” right now (which can’t be quite the same as what will turn out to be inevitable tomorrow—the inevitable is never what it used to be). According to Gans’s Darwinian/Hegelian logic, what is inevitable must be whatever has survived and is therefore the fittest, or best—I think we can assume that the fall of the Soviet Union was a revelatory moment for Gans, “proving” that “liberal democracy” was the best (even if only as the worst except for all the others). Once the bets on bestness are laid, then, anything that does not contribute to our affirmation of liberal democracy can be ignored—such deviations are not real, in a fundamental sense. The same logic of inevitability as bestness is found at every point in Gans’s work: only the best society is real, only the best work of art, only the most beautiful woman, only the best explanation of the bestness of these things. It’s as if there’s some unnamed competition here, only there’s no field, no other players, no score, no referee, no victory podium and no spectators. The fantasy logic here is that if everyone could be persuaded to admire the best, even if it exposed the rest as less than the best, a kind simulacrum of the originary scene might be created and we’d have a central object emerge victorious on the market (perhaps GA could then be smuggled into the center as the best explanation or at least best appreciation of the best). The actual effect is self-inoculation against inquiring into the grounds of bestness (arguing about bestness is itself not the best because a failure to spontaneously judge the bestness of the best marks one as less than the best—there’s a deeply reactionary and aristocratic politics implicit here, and it’s a shame Gans never pursued its implications because it would have been far more interesting than his feeble pleas in defense of liberal democracy). But if you want to lay all your chips down on one bet in this manner, you yourself had better be the best, and your inevitabilities a bit sturdier than “liberal democracy,” in which case you can’t withdraw from the intellectual marketplace because you find some unpleasant politics going on there (the unpleasant politics being people carping about what they should just recognize as the best or whether “bestness” is the best question after all); and entering that marketplace or field of intellectual battle would require a somewhat more robust notion of what might be best than Gans’s consumerist/connoisseurist predilections can allow for. (In this valorization of inevitable bestness, only what has been preserved and curated in stable condition as a culturally recognizable artifact can be appreciated—which means a social form like “liberal democracy” must be treated that way. We might say that GA is self-immunized against becoming, which means becoming is invisible, which is devastating for your perception, let along assessment, of anything other than traditional art objects and packaged consumer goods.) Maybe it’s not just GA—maybe mimetic theory in general is allergic to shared inquiry (as itself a kind of “best” language use the bestness of any sample of which is always deferred) because of the assumption that there’s nothing more that really needs to be known—just the work of revealing to the potentially receptive what we already know. I have wondered whether, rather than something like a modern “theory” (what I have been fantasizing GA might be), mimetic theory is more in the tradition of wisdom literature, which draws upon a pool of transmitted maxims to comment upon the follies and futilities of human life from a disenchanted perspective. Even that might be fine, because there is some talk of reviving wisdom literature around the emergence of AI, but in that case as well we’d need a renovation of wisdom literature and, like anything, it would need to be scaled up and do a bit more than point out “wisely” how people struggling with each other start to mirror each other or the ways aesthetic and consumer products reconcile us to our resentments, i.e., pacify us.

I have drawn upon a lot of other thinkers in my attempts (as I now see them) to fork off another path starting from the hypothesis, but the only one I have found to be decisive in shaping my thinking about the scene and, also, the only philosopher, has been Peirce. With Peirce we can find a logic of contingency nestled within a broader iterative logic of complexification which seems to me consistent with a Bayesian logic, where nothing ever “is” but declaratives are uttered in a field of possible ostensives and imperatives whose likelihood is constantly shifting and we, as fields of ostensives and imperatives ourselves, shifting along with it. This would be a genuinely hypothetical and paradoxical logic, with the thinker and speaker influencing the spread of probabilities and therefore ultimately coming to do so more deliberately. There’s a place for markets here, but not as an ontology which manifests anthropological truths; rather, markets are made so as to test out more precise “bets” on various scales, and thereby elicit scenes upon which the relations between ostensives, imperative, interrogatives and declaratives can be better known, which means better practiced and enacted. “We are each and every one of us an insurance company,” as Peirce, singling out one particularly innovative and representative institution of 19^th century America, insisted. And, as Peirce also insisted, every insurance company, however well run, endowed, actuarily calculated, hedged, etc., will go broke in the long run (what we can now call the “black swan event”). But the long run need never arrive and our vocation as humans is to defer it for as long as possible. There is always the center, and the center is nothing more than the increasingly dense self and other-referentiality of all the intelligence we produce so as to further defer the long run. “Prediction” has become a kind of menacing boogeyman for GA, the harbinger of “dictatorship” and all kinds of other nasty things (but if we are to treat events as inevitable, shouldn’t they be predictable? Well, perhaps the Owl of Minerva flying at dusk it a programmatic statement rather than an observation here), but we’re always predicting and deliberately refraining from predicting out of fear of some unaccountable power is as stupid as failing to try to identify the limits of any prediction (which itself involves a kind of prediction).

But who is this “we”? It is the Big Scenic Imaginary that imagines all of humanity as an agent acting (with whom?) on a single scene. “We” certainly don’t all predict the same way (or all at one time), with equal resources and skills, or shared intentions. There is no “we,” other than when it comes to imagining disastrous consequences (if the planet really becomes unlivable, there will be a “we” that can no longer live). There are “insurance companies” at various scales, of varying efficiencies, in various relations of collaboration and antagonism (translatability and commensurability) with each other. (Insofar as the whole world becomes a single insurance company, that “we” might materialize, but it would be a highly differentiated and distributed one.) Build yourself an insurance company or refine or scale up the one you have. Make markets and make marks on markets others have made. None of this can be said within GA—I know, I’ve tried. A firstness fork off of the originary hypothesis is the only way of giving the hypothesis a fair chance (a greater likelihood of dissemination and transmission, of finding suitable carriers), a fork that takes on board the contingency of the hypothesis and simply disregards “liberal democracy” as propaganda, while paying close attention to the social orders currently labeled as such: there is no “liberal democracy,” but there are election procedures and technologies, media companies generating narratives in collaboration with intelligence and security agencies, juridical orders, bureaucracies, debt regimes, securitizations, infrastructures, data regimes, etc. All of these are “insurance companies,” indemnifications against originary debt coming due at times and in ways one is not yet ready to pay. The originary hypothesis has not been indemnified—it is unprepared even for a flawed, careless critique like van der Roest’s, much less the much more sustained questioning that would come from theorists in the tradition of critiquing all that exists or, for that matter, the tradition of anti-critique; GA purports to welcome all challenges and constantly bemoans and muses over their failure to materialize, but would in fact wither quickly under sustained examination of the doxa of GA and even some carefully applied pressure on the originary hypothesis itself. The originary hypothesis can be indemnified, and be brought into the general system of indemnification; but not by or in GA.