The Prospects of the Hypothesis

In my latest post, I focused on what might be entailed by acceptance of or resistance to the originary hypothesis; I’ll follow up on that now with the more blatantly marketing question, what can the originary hypothesis do? The answer must be something along the lines of “offer us guidance out of our current crisis” because, otherwise, why care? To offer such guidance, which is to say, to found a research program that can diagnose the current global situation and offer remedies anyone could imagine oneself contributing to, we would need the following: first of all, a set of defensible anthropological assumptions, or an answer to the question, what is the human?; a transdisciplinary approach not bound to the limited and arbitrary lenses of sociology, economics, psychology, and so on; the capacity to scale up and down as needed, that is, to analyze geo-political fractures as effectively as and consistently with individual desires; an openness to a range of different theoretical approaches that nevertheless share a similar starting point, so that increasingly large scale collaboration is possible; ways of analyzing historical transformations that lend themselves to proposing ways of intervening in those transformations.

Let’s start with the easiest hurdle, the anthropological one: for the originary hypothesis, the human is that being who is a greater danger to himself than is posed by any external danger. This follows from the mimetic constitution of the human, and I think that we might have broad agreement, at this point, across the political spectrum, that the human is the only species that could be the primary cause of its own extinction. The human is founded in a gesture of deferral, which establishes a shared and compelling center, and this very establishment ensures the continuance of the conditions requiring it as the first place—our relation to the center is both the source of rivalry and the means of controlling it. This very minimal starting point commits originary thinking to no particular set of theological or philosophical assumptions—paganism, monotheism, secularism, and all the varieties within each of these categories have all established centers under particular conditions, and we can measure them against those conditions. And by “measure them against those conditions,” I mean identify the most threatening rivalries those centers were established so as to defer, and which rivalries they instigated and in turn needed to be (not always successfully) reformed so as to address.

Originary thinking does not need to take sides in debates over idealism and materialism, realism and nominalism, and so on—philosophies can be important but come very late in the game, are ways of coming to terms with the sacred, and can themselves be seen as offering means of deferral. Nor does any of this mean that originary thinking is neutral or above the fray in social conflicts—working with the originary hypothesis might involve distancing oneself from a pressing conflict so as to think outside of its terms in an attempt to (provisionally) resolve it; but originary thinking can also lead to the conclusion that only certain changes on the ground can make a new mode of deferral possible. And, of course, originary thinkers might disagree on such things—the originary hypothesis confers no infallibility on its adherents—it just offers a better way of thinking things through, and thinking things through is best done with others. And, finally, nothing in the originary hypothesis implies that the more moral course is to keep the peace at all costs (keep your head down, go with the flow, pay the Danegold, etc.)—keep in mind that the “creation” of the human was an astonishing accomplishment, against all odds, requiring a new level of discipline, a new mode of courage  and an unprecedent type of devotion in the participants on the originary scene, which would seem to suggest that at least some of us were made for such things.

Nor does originary thinking call for any particular political content—it’s not intrinsically committed or opposed to monarchy or democracy, fascism or communism, nationalism or imperialism, ethnocentrism or ethno-pluralism, liberal democracy or authoritarian rule. Any of these forms of political commitment or governance could conceivably create the modes of deferral that would establish or preserve a community in crisis—or, at least, the originary hypothesis provides us with no way of ruling any of them out of court in advance. But originary thinking can put an extremely pointed question to any of these political tendencies: within the formalized boundaries of your community, what internal rivalries does your tendency identify and how does it propose to frame, redirect and/or resolve them without just displacing them onto another level? I emphasize internal, because it is conflicts—constitutive, inevitable conflicts—within the nation that the nationalist is most hesitant to looking into, the same kinds of conflicts within the “class” or “party” will lead the communist to avert his eyes, and advocates of “liberal democracy” and “market capitalism” have designed their ideologies so as to rest secure in the extremely implausible claim that any significant conflicts can be resolved through electoral and consumerist means as long as the totalitarian other is safely sequestered (but don’t those totalitarian desires then turn out to inhabit the liberal subject itself?). It’s likely that not all of these political tendencies will meet the test equally, and I, like anyone else, will have my own ideas about the probabilities, but they should all welcome it and be questioned along these lines; and, most important, this means that originary thinkers can in principle engage with all of these political positions and might, under specific conditions, join with pretty much any of them. At the same time, having a common theoretical currency should enable originary thinkers to share notes, so to speak, on the experiences yet to come and to synthesize some conclusions. A monarchist in one country, facing its crisis, might understand why an originary thinker in another country would be a communist, even without agreeing, and be able to communicate in ways that political polarization has tended to make impossible so far.

Now, if what you’re really committed to is an open-ended critical thinking, challenging all ideologies and developing correctives to the propaganda and mass media assaults we are constantly subject to, there are no limits to what the originary hypothesis can do for you. Everything is open to question—not just politics, but ethics, aesthetics, morality, institutional design, the meaning of life, everything. We just hold onto one constant: that humanity emerged in an event in which a mimetic crisis was deferred through the issuance of a gesture of aborted appropriation. That’s the human—if you have a better account, one that can get us from a hominid that is not yet human, but becomes human (yes, we must accept, in very broad terms, evolution, but no particular evolutionary theory), that does so with a focus on the group (which somehow must be transformed together), and along with all this accounts for language, let’s, by all means, hear it. Only a kind of extreme scientism, that must explain the emergence of the human along the exact same lines of genetic modification through selection as for every other species, would have to dig in his heels here. Otherwise, the originary hypothesis makes no claims about differences within or between groups, or their causes. By holding onto this one constant we can both ensure intellectual liberty and discipline—asking how a particular concept, artifact, act, or institution deferred a more or less imminent crisis, on a greater or lesser scale, will not by itself tell us about its truth, beauty or goodness, but the aspiration for truth, beauty and goodness are themselves forms of deferral that then generate their own criteria. So, a common line of reasoning within originary thinking would go like this: “truth,” say, might not have been what humans first needed to become human, but it might be something we need to stay human, and we can understand why and how that might be the case. We can enter any of the disciplines, taking their questions completely seriously while shaking them up but insistently hypothesizing regarding the origin of both the “object” and the inquiry into it. Originary thinking can enable the most thoroughgoing historicization and demystification of the most taken for granted concept and then return that concept to us in a way that enables us to commit to it in full knowledge of its origins and “priors”; it can help us tease out the “ideological interests” of a seemingly innocuous news item as effectively as any other mode of critique but without then leaving the question, “then what?” hanging.

So, then what? Here I need to sharpen the question originary thinking would pose to the political positions across the board. Since the fall of monarchy, all of politics, from left to right, have shared the same model of “liberation.” Working class or nationalist politics, liberal and democratic politics, all construct a relation between a political subject and some oppressive agent—the political subject is formed through the struggle against that oppressive agent. Marxism, liberalism, nationalism, antisemitism, anti-colonialism, are all identical in this regard. These are all very easily identifiable mimetic scenarios—the rival who has usurped my rightful position at the center, who continually anticipates and thwarts my desires, who saturates the space of action so that, ultimately, only the elimination of the other can enable me to arrive at my full subjecthood and achieve liberation. It’s not necessary to claim that any of these political projects deliberately falsify facts, events and intentions to say that the narrative thereby constructed is fictional. Any historical narrative is fictional, an application of existing templates to selectively framed events. Perhaps each and every one of the political programs I’ve mentioned could extract what they really want from such narratives, thereby reducing considerably the melodramatic quotient of their discourse. Again, I can’t exclude that possibility, and they would all be better for it. But this, at any rate, is probably the most challenging “demand” originary thinking about politics would make, because it requires deferring the extremely powerful (and propagandistically effective) desire to predicate one’s political aims on one’s own victimization.

And replace it with what, then? With the center. Meaning what? I trust you will acknowledge that your country, county, city, district, town, workplace, even family has someone at the “head,” even if temporally, even if loosely and mostly consensually. (Can we even converse without focusing on someone, who thereby becomes the center of our deliberations, weighed down by our projections and myth-making?) Maybe you really hate that person and want to replace him (or her!). But the place would still be there—you would just put someone you prefer there. Maybe you want to replace that person with no one, imagining a free association without regulation or coercion. Now, if you imagine social interactions within this free associations taking place completely spontaneously, with all discussions initiated equally by all involved and concluded with complete agreement on all sides, then you’ve stymied me—but in that case it seems to me you’d need to posit some instinctive, even genetic, mechanism ensuring that all can be always and completely in accord—something equivalent to Chomsky’s Language Acquisition Device, but covering reasoning, morality and ethics as well. Otherwise, even in “free association,” someone takes the initiative, someone sets the tone, someone starts off in a new direction, and we can say that person, albeit momentarily, occupies the center. According to our hypothesis, humanity was created around a center—that central object all members of the group desired and that “interdicted” its own appropriation. All “legitimate” commands can be traced back to that. The first revolution in human affairs was some individual “seizing” the center—what the anthropologists call the Big Man, and from whom follow (along extremely complicated routes) all the kings and emperors and prime ministers and presidents and even “bosses.”

So, I am asking you to consider that there must always be a center, even if the forms “centering” might take are infinite. Think about anything you want done, at any level of human existence—someone has to be at the center of a chain of events and commands that would lead to the thing you want being done in a way you could recognize it as having been done. Even if what you want is distributed, decentralized, centrifugal networks comprised of unregulated exchanges of goods and information, someone sees to the spinning off of a new center and someone, eventually, will have to be central enough to fend off attempts from other nodes in the network to recentralize. Think of any agreement implicit or explicit, you operate under with another—do you not imagine an arbiter whose fair decision you count on or whose unfairness you stand ready to protest? Rather than liberation from a center that arbitrarily dominates us, what we want in that case is the firming up, or repairing, or reconstructing of a center that would ensure the commensurability between what we want to do and want done and the sorts of things this kind of center does. It’s a question of wanting to know what the other wants of you, and being able to represent in turn what is involved, as far as you can see, in you doing it. There can be lots of disagreements, and I’ve written a lot about these matters, but I will leave it here and say that discussions of how to clarify our relations to the center are going to be far more promising than discussions over how to liberate ourselves from it. Another way to think of it: whoever is at the center now will have to hand off his (or her!) centrality to another, eventually. So, how can we ensure that this hand off comes off as smoothly as possible, with capacities and obligations kept intact from one occupant of the center to another? Our political thinking would be immensely improved by translating all questions of liberation (and its attendant questions of “legitimacy,” “rights,” “representation,” and so on) into versions of this question. Politics is then a community openly thematizing, dramatizing and narrating its own continuity—which means the problem of continuity, its evitability, is firmly fixed in everyone’s mind. Again, this says nothing about traditionalism, conservatism, innovation, experimentation, or anything else—the human practices associated with all of these categories, and others, might come into play in any number of ways in this “evitabilism.” But in proposing the originary hypothesis as itself originary, as the founder of new modes of inquiry and even new worlds, what is “central” is thinking and speaking of the center. Therein may lie many rivalries, but also the means of converting them into new and better modes of social being. And in these reciprocally constitutive exchanges between center and periphery we will find not only the key to social repair but some interesting approaches to the way we enact our subjectivities through technologies and media—if humans have never discovered a way of replacing the sacred center, perhaps all these new ways of plugging us in are attempts to simulate it—attempts which become something else as we scrutinize them in these terms. At all scales across the “stack” we can design ways of demanding power do the things we are being held responsible for and disclaiming responsibility when we are disempowered in order to model the existing discrepancies between power and responsibility along with intimations of their remedies.

So, anyway, this provides a sample of the kind of discourse that might be created within a GA think tank.