The Transdisciplinarity of the Hypothesis

No way of thinking with any chance of helping change the world could ever come from within the established disciplines. One might even say the disciplines are designed so as to prevent the emergence of such thinking and, when it does emerge, to domesticate it. An old Marxist critique of disciplines like sociology and economics was that they were invented so as to break up Marx’s totalizing and revolutionary critique into specialized studies aimed at channeling elite and ultimately mass opinion in established ways. Since Marxism maintained a real connection to political movements through WW 2, it resisted incorporation into the disciplines, but it ultimately succumbed, so we ended up with Marxist philosophy, Marxist history, Marxist literary criticism, even a bit of Marxist economics. Freud’s psychoanalysis quickly overwhelmed the medical discipline is originated in and had to invent whole new ways of thinking about art, civilization, and the origins of human order. Like Marxism, psychoanalysis worked substantial changes into the thinking of Western populations before being itself into literary and cultural criticism, with a still functioning clinical rump. (There have, of course, been numerous Marxist-psychoanalysis syntheses along the way.) Cybernetics and information theory were developed out of scientific and intelligence work done during WW 2 and it’s hard to see any of that coming out of any of the established disciplines—nor was it ever quite absorbed into them, being sustained by think tanks, the military and Western intelligence, being partly repudiated by the politicized environments in the human sciences after the 60s and partly taken up studies in cognition and computation. It’s interesting to note that the CIA took a special interest in cybernetics and somewhat allied transdisciplines like semiotics and structuralism, seeing them as a way of modernizing and “rationalizing” along American lines postwar Europe. There seems to be a dialectic that would be well worth studying between the transdisciplines and the disciplines, but the observation I want to work with here is that any mode of thinking likely to make a difference is going to be transdisciplinary, which must mean not only extending across the subject matters of all the disciplines but capable of infiltrating their separate vocabularies and assisting “insurgents” within them to transform them while maintaining its own transdisciplinary base.

I’ve previously “nominated” GA as just such a transdisciplinary discourse, what Foucault called an “initiator of discursive practices,” with a founding irreducible to and “indigestible” by its surroundings—originary thinking does not just offer another perspective but requires one to rethink entire fields from the beginning. A look at these other transdisciplines helps us to see that what GA lacks is an independent base from which it could make forays into the disciplines and broader public fields—like the revolutionary movements, clinical practice and psychoanalytic institutions, and the military-industrial complex were for these other transdisciplines. Of course, in each of those cases the discourse served a specific “clientele,” which GA can’t claim to do other than that of a new office class in formation. And all it could offer this officer class is the means of its self-formation, which is really quite enough. The qualities of originary thinking which distinguish it from other available modes of thinking available, then, must correspond to the qualities of any new officer class worth serving. These qualities would include an unapologetic awareness of the precise weight and responsibility of this class in advanced technological social orders and from this follows, for example, an ability to adapt to and use the extremely fast paced media environment without allowing one’s long term program be affected in the slightest by media fluctuations and the capacity to register the flood of grievances generated within a mass and social mediated society while converting those grievances into manageable feedback on thoroughly considered projects which are not dictated in the slightest by those grievances, however intense. I mention these qualities in particular because an officer class in formation would have to take on projects that anticipate power it does not yet have and would have to prove its worth by operating effectively within hostile media, legal and political environments—probably building businesses, a political party, institutions to protect its supporters, media platforms, perhaps even its own currency. This can only be accomplished if guided by a mode of thinking that rests upon unshakeable fundamental assumptions that can withstand all critiques, traditional, modern or postmodern; that is comprehensive and innovative, allowing for disagreements that get to essential questions while being orderly, collegial and ultimately given to productive resolution; and that arouses unending fascination with all things human. This post is a sample of GA as such a discourse.

GA has a small set of “invariants”: concepts like “center,” “origin,” “mimesis,” “scene” and “deferral,” organized around a hypothetical event founding humanity and which is then repeated, expanded and made complex is innumerable ways. We are mimetically drawn to the same central object, which is also central being; because it is central being, we are also repelled from appropriating that object or being. Being mimetically drawn to something is precise enough that we can identify it, if we learn how to look for it, in the most diverse situations—it can mean wanted to possess and consume a consumer item; it can mean wanting to exercise some kind of authority over others; it can mean public recognition. Any number of things can therefore be at the center: a desirable consumer object; a position of power, a particular kind of “spotlight.” Being repelled from appropriating the object involves the kinds of laws, norms, and rituals constitutive of a given community, all aiming at providing the appearance that the center has granted itself to whomever might acquire it: one cannot become king without an elaborate array of ceremonies, because it cannot appear as if that sacred office is seized; property laws, laws of inheritance, zoning laws, graduation ceremonies, documents affirming one’s right, and so on all ensure that desire for appropriation has been deferred and conferred in accord with the traditions and authorities of the community.

The originary form of human interaction and engagement with the center is ritual. Again, there are, obviously, innumerable ritual forms throughout the history of humanity (and yet there are always rituals). But, for originary thinking, there is a simple, irrefutable and extraordinarily useful definition of ritual: a repetition and commemoration of the originary event itself. That there are lots of different ritual orders testifies to the various ways the originary event or, indeed, any event, can be remembered and re-enacted—in these differences we find the accretion of the specific events shaping individualized communities, which in turn testifies to the myriad ways mimetic crisis can erupt. In each ritual we can look for a kind of dialogue with the center, in which some breach of the center and its response is commemorated in such a way as to affirm the community in the face of that breach. From this way of thinking about ritual follows a way of thinking about myth, which is the narration of events within the frame of expected ritual effects. In ritual, the community engages in a kind of exchange with the center: the participants follow the commands of the center, commands involving the various preconditions of appropriation that have evolved in the course of the community’s history, and the center in turn promises the community success in its endeavors. The promises don’t always come true—since a repudiation of the center is unthinkable, stories must be created accounting for some improper compliance with ritual commands which, in being corrected and punished, “resets” the relation to the center. (I’m getting ahead of myself here, but think of how much commentary on contemporary liberal democratic societies takes exactly this form: since the democratic order itself cannot be questioned, we must construct narratives of evil agents, failures of will, incorrect interpretations of democratic “prescriptions,” etc., to account for the failures of our societies.)

For originary thinking, there are really two revolutions in human history, distinct but related. First, the occupation of the sacred center by a human being, first of all the individual referred to be anthropologists as the “Big Man.” This revolution unites distribution and political power at the center, and, as I mentioned in my previous post, initiates a line leading from the Big Man, through ancient sacral and divine kingship, through the modern day presidents and prime ministers. On the originary scene, and in the ritual orders preceding kingship, it is the Being at the center, different from if intimately connected to the community who poses an obstacle to desire: this being is resented for blocking our desire, but also loved for providing a pathway toward fulfilling it. Ritual and myth concern themselves with these lessons in deferral and acquisition: one must pay the center and show proper devotion to it, and one will be rewarded, even if not exactly in the way one anticipated. But once a human being occupies the center, the center can be (because it already has been) usurped. The community can now be ranged against the center in a way it couldn’t have been previously. One significant difference between Gansian Generative Anthropology and its Girardian predecessor in mimetic theory is that whereas Girard places the scapegoating “mechanism” at the origin of the human, Gans places it here, in the centrality of the human charged with mediating between the divine and the human. This human can be sacrificed, and so the social order becomes dominated by the terms on which the central figure will be sacrificed, which often comes to involve all kinds of “symbolic” sacrifices that leave the actual king intact. The destruction of monarchy and its replacement by democracy puts an end to that “game,” and introduces a new one whereby the sacrifice of the central being is effected and minimized through regulated legal and political processes. But it’s easy to see how much of democratic politics is organized around directing resentment to the figure at the center; we have become accustomed to see this as harmless because we trust that the rules regarding the replacement of one central figure by another will be respected; but, more recently, we have also come to notice that those rules and that trust might be quite a bit more fragile than we had realized, which will perhaps raise the problem of the central figure, whether we call this “sovereignty” or something else, to the central political problem of our time.

The other revolution is the elimination of the sacred center itself. It’s best to take “sacred” in a very specific and precise sense here: a sacred center is one to which the members of the community bring sacrifices, that is, part of the possessions the acquisition of which they owe to the central being. Under sacrificial conditions, ritual is effective, not because of any magical or supernatural effects attributed to it, but because it brings about the “miracle” of a successful distribution of the social product. Each member can be rewarded by the center in accord with his donation of the center in accord with the prescriptions laid down by the center. The word “justice” is anachronistic in describing this scenario, but it’s a good word to use because concepts like “justice” come into being precisely in order to replace the harmony attained by ritual distribution. Our thinking about politics is still dominated by imagining ourselves on a single scene, like the originary scene, in its ritual reiterations, receiving what is “due” to us due to our contribution. The destruction of the ritual scene was set in motion by the first “usurpers” of the center (this links the two revolutions), leading, for example, to the invention of money and debt as a way of providing for a mediated relationship to the ritual scene; the destruction of kingship, which was sacralized as a way of maintaining a ritualized order, means the final destruction of the ritual scene. Without the “backing” of ritual, all our concepts of “justice” and “legitimacy” are, in effect “fiat” concepts, held together by increasing desperate exercises of power, assertions of “expertise” (themselves attempts to confer a kind of ersatz sacrality on decision makers) and scapegoating of enemies accused of preventing a client group from receiving its due. Along with, indeed part of, the question of the central figure, the question of the commensurability between what we “do” and what we ‘receive” is surely the central human problem of our time—only the mode of thinking enabled by the originary hypothesis helps us to identify these problems and provides us with the means of seeking solutions or transformations that will “deactivate” what are now, in the absence of any shared ritual order, unsolveable problems.

I hope you can see the way in which fields such as anthropology, sociology, and political science can be reworked through these concepts, and, in fact, transformed into a new discipline included them all with considerable gains in consistency and explanatory power. Even a discipline like psychology, not obviously implicated here, can be productively rethought: consider how much of human behavior, emotion, cogitating, interaction, and self-representation can be discussed in terms of the problem posed to each and every one of us by a post-ritual order of presenting ourselves as a center to others. We must constantly compete with other claims to more or less arbitrary forms of centrality; we seek to make ourselves desirable in all the ways one can be desirable (as sexual partner, as collaborator, as model, etc.) while also deferring the resentments and possible violences (physical and symbolic) that endanger any center. How many of our inner dialogues and the dilemmas we encounter in our relations with others could be translated into these terms? And how much of therapy and self-help more generally can be read as attempts to simulate the work once done by ritual orders? Consider how the contemporary reduction of all human relationships to the question of “consent” can be seen as an attempt to put some order into all of the ways we seek centrality, which also means relegating others to “orbitality”—the tendency to reduce all interactions to formal, explicit rules of interaction that would demonstrate mutual consent before “qualified” third parties is a transparent parody of the kinds of elaborate ritual orders that evoke contempt and provoke ridicule on the part of the very parties drawing up these intricate little consent decrees.

But I’d like to suggest that originary thinking can enable us to rework a field of human activity seemingly quite distant from its focus on mimesis and the problematics of human order: technology. Many would certainly put the economic, political and ethical dilemmas posed by the explosion of technological development of the past couple of centuries at the center of human concerns—such existential stakes as the environment, the integrity of the human body, and the autonomy of human thinking and decision making are involved here. Here’s a preliminary approach (and one that would, as seems to be the current tendency, synthesize discourses on technology with discourses on media). Let’s return to the ritual scene. Ritual makes things happen—in that sense, we could already speak of it as a kind of technology. What it makes happen is the coordination of the community around practices of production and distribution: it is assumed that none of this could be possible without the “mechanisms” through which the aid of the center is solicited it. Ritual is a mode of governance, as becomes more explicit with the institution of kingship, where access to the decision making and distributive center is carefully controlled so as to preserve the centrality of the center. I would hypothesize that we see what we would recognize as technological development—the organization of human labor in ways that directly subordinate that labor to an always automatable individual will along with the replacement of human labor through the articulation of inter-operating parts—in proportion to the weakening of the sacred center, first of all under the ancient empires, but also in “break-off” orders resistant to empire, like ancient Athens. Technological development serves the governance of the center, whether in the form of monuments to kingship, war machinery, or the servicing of groups “orbiting” a bit more distantly and “eccentrically” relative to the center, like merchants. The trend towards exhaustive automation corresponds to the collapse of the ritual center along with sacralized governance: technology is essentially an exo-skeleton that replaces the more human scaled skeleton of ritual: it still manages our relation to the center, it still accounts for distribution and, not surprisingly, it is the source of our dominant narratives (“mythologies”), whereby we project our resentments toward the center and try to seek out the kinds of prescriptions from the center that will provide for some kind of harmonic order. To focus just on automation: every automated decision defers some (perhaps potential) rivalry over the terms on which that decision is to be made, while at the same time empowering one center over another and directing attention to the next decision node to be automated. Entailing a precise chain of consequences from the replacement of a human decision maker by an algorithm can be reduced to a technical problem; why those consequences and why that decision maker never can be—but nor can those questions be reduced to some human agent external to technology; rather, they are bound up in pedagogical relations within techno-governance. There’s really no point to trying to answer them other than in the course of seeking to enter the network of power relations wherein they will be answered.

In that case, the problem of technology is the way the problems of centrality more generally are posed today. Money, media and technology are all real, of course (money is itself media and technology), but we can learn to “read” them as signs indicating (dis)order of the center. Only a transdisciplinary approach can address this, and whether the university is fit to do so is questionable. The problem of the center is the problem of “thematizing” and “performing” social continuity, which ultimately means “staging” the succession from one central figure to the next. Only in this way can power be united with responsibility in transgenerational ways. Contemporary politics would best be seen and practiced as a global competition to see who can find the best way to create such an order. The overwhelming desire for all social participants must be that each occupant of the center (ultimately at the highest level, but all the way down the line, with the needed variations at different levels) transfers power, explicitly and openly, to his successor; which also means first of all exercising the power to be transferred. This poses tremendous problems which stretch across all the disciplines, including some that have not yet been invented. Modeling the reorganization of desires and resentments necessary to bring about this transformation in the entire sphere of human habits will be the work of a new officer class, and this class can only be guided by a theoretical model grounded in the originary hypothesis.