In my recent articles I’ve working with the assumption that human reality can be comprehended using the categories of the ritual, the juridical, and the disciplinary. I got there from the question of what we might call “admissible language use”—when can we say that something said is true, or fair, or just, or even interesting? We can only make such claims upon a scene, so the question becomes, upon what kinds of scenes are such claims made? The ritual scene needs to be there, simply because it is the first human scene, so, even if ritual is really pre-truth, pre-fair, pre-just, and so on, these concepts, which would be anachronistically applied to the ritual scene, nevertheless must derive from it. Just as the ritual scene defers violence and thereby maintains community by summoning the presence at the center, the emergence of concepts covering “right speaking” must evoke some center in the interest of sustaining institutions of deferral. Even very early humans, even if their communities are overwhelmingly ritually governed, must have concepts and practices that are proto-juridical, and we know from Anna Wierzbicka that all languages have the equivalent of the word “true,” which indicates some preliminary disciplinarity. This means that we can trace the juridical and the disciplinary back to the originary scene and subsequent ritual ones, we can see how they might have infiltrated it, and how they would have conquered swathes of communal territory from it by addressing conflicts on spatial and temporal scales beyond the capacity of ritual. And, so far, I can’t think of another human category that couldn’t be included in one or more of these three or that can be seen as equally imbricated in the ritual scene. But this means that very important social institutions and historical processes must be shown to “fit” these categories, and so I’m setting aside this article to explore a few.
War, Art, Bureaucracy and other Miscellanies
War, Art, Bureaucracy and other Miscellanies
War, Art, Bureaucracy and other Miscellanies
In my recent articles I’ve working with the assumption that human reality can be comprehended using the categories of the ritual, the juridical, and the disciplinary. I got there from the question of what we might call “admissible language use”—when can we say that something said is true, or fair, or just, or even interesting? We can only make such claims upon a scene, so the question becomes, upon what kinds of scenes are such claims made? The ritual scene needs to be there, simply because it is the first human scene, so, even if ritual is really pre-truth, pre-fair, pre-just, and so on, these concepts, which would be anachronistically applied to the ritual scene, nevertheless must derive from it. Just as the ritual scene defers violence and thereby maintains community by summoning the presence at the center, the emergence of concepts covering “right speaking” must evoke some center in the interest of sustaining institutions of deferral. Even very early humans, even if their communities are overwhelmingly ritually governed, must have concepts and practices that are proto-juridical, and we know from Anna Wierzbicka that all languages have the equivalent of the word “true,” which indicates some preliminary disciplinarity. This means that we can trace the juridical and the disciplinary back to the originary scene and subsequent ritual ones, we can see how they might have infiltrated it, and how they would have conquered swathes of communal territory from it by addressing conflicts on spatial and temporal scales beyond the capacity of ritual. And, so far, I can’t think of another human category that couldn’t be included in one or more of these three or that can be seen as equally imbricated in the ritual scene. But this means that very important social institutions and historical processes must be shown to “fit” these categories, and so I’m setting aside this article to explore a few.