Abstracts
Différance in Revolutionary Representations: Hazlitt’s Activist Rhetoric and Wordsworth’s Poetic Deferral
In its polemical assertions regarding the appropriate aesthetic response to the period’s revolutionary upheaval, William Hazlitt’s 1825 portrait of William Wordsworth in The Spirit of the Age betrays proto-modern anxiety that language may be misused to impede, rather than hasten, progressive social change. Examining Hazlitt’s politically charged critique of Wordsworth’s late aesthetics, my paper argues that the play of Derrida’s différance, as interpreted by Eric Gans, functions to defer action more effectively in Wordsworth’s poetry than within Hazlitt’s criticism and latter-day reflections on the Revolution. Ultimately, Hazlitt’s activist rhetoric and Wordsworth’s poetic depictions of marginalized subjects represent distinct points upon, in Gans's phrase, “the gradient of violence,” a continuum which unites extremes of action and representation. In his portraits, Hazlitt voices distain for the Lake poet’s hollow words, deriding Wordsworth’s poem, The Excursion, as exemplary of his cowardly retreat into aristocratic values. In the poem, instead of demanding a realization of an ideal post-revolutionary order, as Hazlitt does, Wordsworth figures an interior scene of representation capable of deferring the subject’s participation in the violence accompanying revolutionary upheaval. Examined in light of Eric Gans’s elaboration of Jacques Derrida’s différance, Hazlitt’s and Wordsworth’s conflicting understandings of representation and revolution take on anthropological significance, as they illustrate the gradient of violence produced by representation’s capacity to defer conflict.
Representation and Containing Violence
Must linguistic representation necessarily do violence to its object, or is representation the deferral of violence? What is the space if any between the human use of symbolic reference and the performance of violence? What presuppositions have come into play if one suspects language as always and everywhere incipiently a cause of violence? One way into the discussion of the deferral of violence may be through an exploration of the double notion of containing violence (to hold as content, to tolerate as limited). What does Tobin Siebers mean when he claims that representation contains violence in both senses of the word? This paper will present an analysis of Gans’s “Differences” (1981) and Tobin Siebers essay “Ethics in the Age of Rousseau: From Levi-Strauss to Derrida” (1985) so as to identify any ground shared by the properly Derridean concept of différance and the concept of deferral in generative anthropology, but also (more importantly) that which separates the two. To what extent is the Derridean concept of différance bound to an impossibly ascetic attitude to linguistic performance? The goal of the essay will be to explain as clearly as possible why an anthropology founded on the mimetic theory of desire enables a faith in the referential power of language that deconstruction, with its abandonment of scenic interaction for a psychology bent on the expulsion of all “stable” subjective centers, rejects at great cost.
Towards A Redefinition of the Popular/High Art Continuum
Several of the foundational works of Generative Anthropology have narrated the emergence of the distinction between “high” and “popular” art, and theorized these categories of aesthetic experience in originary terms. The proposed paper would articulate this theorization further, emphasizing the idea of deferral as the crucial measure of an art-work’s place on what GA has already implicitly conceptualized as a continuum. It will use examples from different arts to try to demonstrate how the interval of deferral affects every dimension of the art-work, and how different modes and lengths of deferral engage with the desires and resentments of their audiences. The goal of this analysis will be to move towards a re-evaluation of the categories, including a renewed recognition of both the productive power of an art which moves the imagination more directly towards the satisfactions of the sparagmos, and the ethical value of one which defers those satisfactions in an appreciation of the sign. In the process, it would aspire to rescue this valuable distinction from the entanglements of a postmodern irony which, by refusing any qualitative differentiation at all, resentfully seeks to empty all kinds of art of their capacity for power and meaning.
Confucianism, li (礼), and the Deferral of Violence
At the heart of Confucian ethics is the virtue of li (礼), a term originally used to denote the rituals and ceremonies of the court, including the religious sacrifices through which the spirits and ancestors were appeased and propitiated. Yet in Confucian thought, li (礼) comes to have a much broader meaning, encompassing all the rituals of courteous social interaction, through which, Confucius believed, the virtuous person gives expression to the benevolent disposition known as ren (仁). “Conquer yourself and return to li (礼): that is ren (仁),” Confucius is reported to have said. “If a person could conquer himself and return to li (礼) for a single day, the world would respond to him with ren (仁)” (Analects 12.1). Described in these terms, the rituals of li (礼) seem to possess an almost magical efficacy, the ability to radically transform the very condition of human existence. Yet the efficacy of li (礼) is not, in the final analysis, the working of magic. Rather, it evinces the power of the “sign”—in this instance, the highly ritualized gestures of our most routine and commonplace social interactions—to defer violence. My paper will develop this interpretation of li (礼) in connection with Eric Gans’ theory of the sign as an instrument for deferring violence.
Paganism: Originary Promises and Resentful Deliveries
Paganism in various forms is today a worldwide movement—a fuzzy but broadly coherent set of behaviours and belief-patterns. Claiming ancient provenance, chief among its asserted grounds are a historical priority (the claim that transcendental faiths like Christianity and Islam appropriated and usurped prior structures and then damaged them) and also ontological priority (the idea or feeling that pagan faith is more intuitive, more correct, more appropriate for humanity than the transcendental religions). The claim of priority is structurally challenging, in that the very category of paganism (or “heathenry”) is itself derivative, and based on refuting an existing, and generally Christian, structure. Moreover, the derivations of contemporary paganism also reflect many Christian signifiers, rites, and patterns. It is certainly true that many societies called “pagan” in the past have been unaware of the appellation. These societies are only such because they were so dubbed by Christian societies. About them we have little or nothing to say since they lie outside the era whose anthropoetic dimensions we are examining.
For us, the object of inquiry is paganism in a modern sense. Paganism in this sense is a derivative cultural form, despite nearly all its originary claims. These claims are of interest, and can be scrutinised in Generative Anthropological terms. In this paper we advocate and seek not only to analyse the object of our inquiry (paganism), but to develop and enrich generative anthropology as a tool for culture-study. This paper, then, is in keeping with work that we, in early work on culture have done, and that Eric Gans has done, for instance, on tattoos and body-piercing. Like Gans, we make use of a variety of self-accounts of “pagans” to develop our argument. In doing this, we pay attention also to the work of John Milbank who has explored paganism and environmentalism, but in a preliminary way—like us, he contends that these are in many respects profoundly Christian—or as we would put it—transcendentally reactive formations.
About the presenter (Chris Fleming)
About the presenter (John O'Carroll)
Gans’s Presentation of Generative Anthropology as Science and Husserl’s Approach to Philosophy as a Rigorous Science
In this paper, I would like to explore the claim to scientificity in the theoretical model of Eric Gans’s Generative Anthropology. I will enquire into Gans’s own understanding of the role of parsimony and minimality in his formulation of the orginary scene of language as the origin of human culture. Integral to this examination of the claims to scientific rigor in Generative Anthropology, I would like to continue an enquiry, begun in my paper for the 2013 Generative Anthropology Summer Conference at UCLA (“The Platonic and Aristotelian Mimetic Paradigm in Light of Gans and Heidegger”) into the role of Girardian mimesis in the model and dynamics of the originary scene, with an emphasis on Heidegger’s interpretation of the relation between ethical and ontological reason in Aristotle’s understanding of mimesis. To Heidegger’s developing and changing attitude to the scientific understanding of reason in Aristotle, I will juxtapose his contemporaneous distancing from the phenomenology of his teacher, Edmund Husserl, whose approach to philosophy as a science and his understanding of the practice of phenomenological reduction, I will argue, provide valuable resources in evaluating the workings of Gans’s scientific claims for the foundations of Generative Anthropology.
Generative Anthropology as Grammatology
Jacques Derrida's idea of "grammatology" (De la grammatologie, 1967) designated a science that would emphatically not be "positive," or as he put it, "logocentric." Yet the morpheme "-ology" has an essence of its own, and it is curious that at the outset of his career Derrida toyed with the idea of a post-logocentric science of "writing" as the fundamental human activity, one appropriate to an era he defined prophetically as that of la fin du livre et le commencement de l'écriture [the end of the book and the beginning of writing]. Although Derrida never seriously attempted to fulfill this vague promise, a number of passages in De la grammatologie nonetheless discreetly suggest that the notion of the "trace" could become the basis of a new science, not only of the human, but of life (via the DNA “code”) and perhaps even of Being in general.
Generative Anthropology (GA) has always been aware of its debt to Derrida, in particular for his concept of différance or deferral in which he finds the essence of the (linguistic) sign. GA rejects the social-science status that many Girardians, if not René Girard himself, attribute to "mimetic theory"; to the extent that GA is a science, it is definitely a humanistic science, one that emphasizes the specificity of the sign-system of human language and culture in contrast to the world of “nature.” Notwithstanding the recent decline of the “soft” humanities in contrast with the more rigorous world of “STEM,” the human is not reducible to an object of natural science. Yet the misguided modes of resistance to scientism found in creationism and “Intelligent Design” are incapable of embodying the understanding of the human found in the religious texts that are their sources of inspiration. In contrast, Derrida’s notion of “grammatology” can be understood as a call for a “human science” that takes our human specificity as sign-users into account.
My talk at our eighth annual conference in Victoria in June 2014 will explore the affinities and differences between Derrida's abortive, paradoxical attempt at a science de l'écriture and GA's own attempt at a "non-positive" or "non-natural" science of the human, and suggest that la grammatologie is, properly considered, Generative Anthropology.
Originary Iconoclasm: The Logic of the Sparagmos
Iconoclasm, the physical destruction of religious artifacts, is so much a part of the story of the European Reformation that we take it for granted, without noticing how anomalous it actually is. Christians were destroying their own religious heritage, and the rejection of Roman authority only partially explains why this hostility should be directed specifically toward Christian figures and forms. In my presentation, I will look for a fresh perspective on Reformation iconoclasm by tracing its roots on the originary scene. Through a close reading of Eric Gans on the sparagmos, I will attempt to explain why the figurality of the central object is the focus of resentment for the original humans, and what they learn through post-sparagmos reflection.
Difference and Deference: Reading Deferral in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot
Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot would seem a play about deferral if ever there was one. Two characters await a “Godot” (who will tell them where they stand) who never arrives. In fact, he never arrives twice: once in act 1, and again in act 2. If we wish to interrogate the nature of deferral in its Western setting—Plato’s system of differences or the sacrificial system it displaces—Beckett’s play would seem a viable starting point. Eric Gans and Jacques Derrida may assist our inquiry by focusing attention in this move—from the sacred to decision-making—upon Romantic conceptions of time (time equals death minus now), and Beckett’s postwar play may offer an alternative: an understanding in which death is a premise rather than a limit, a posthumous subjectivity in which my mortality ironically founds my existence and suddenly all writing is a writing of (from and about) disaster.
The Usurer and the Feast
“I will buy with you, sell with you, talke with you, walke with you, and so following: but I will not eate with you, drinke with you, nor pray with you.” Thus says Shylock when he declines Bassanio’s invitation to “dine with us” in The Merchant of Venice. As scenes of deferred violence, the feasts in early modern usury plays offer a window into changing economic practices. Who eats with whom? Who eats what? As interest-taking became socially acceptable, the stage usurer was increasingly invited to the feast instead of being excluded from it. Tracking a trajectory from The Jew of Malta, where the Jewish usurer ends up in the pot, to The Magnetic Lady, where the Christian usurer is rescued from the well so that he can rejoin the feast at his sister’s table, I argue that Bassanio’s dinner invitation and Shylock’s eventual but reluctant acceptance mark a transition in the fortunes of the stage usurer.
The Grammar of Disciplinarity
Peter Sloterdijk, in his You Must Change Your Life has proposed a reading of history as the history of disciplines—that is, the effort to transform oneself through the use of a vertical model of possibility to identify, treat, and transcend desires and resentments that keep one bound within a horizontal field. Sloterdijk’s argument integrates scenic thinking with a pragmatist anthropology, in which “ideas” and “beliefs” would be understood as prompts to and products of the disciplinary spaces in which they are embedded. It also makes possible the articulation of the loosely connected notions of “discipline”: on the one hand, a space of inquiry with distinctive objects and vocabularies; on the other hand, procedures, routines, and methods of self-control or control imposed on others, targeting habits what are taken to be symptoms of weakness or sinfulness.
This paper will pursue this question and enter this new disciplinary space in two ways. First, by engaging some leading thinkers of disciplinarity: Eric Voegelin, who in his study of Plato identified the Platonic academic as a deliberate effort to construct intellectual order in a demoralizing and disintegrative social setting; Charles Sanders Peirce, who grounded all meaning in inquiry and all inquiry in the collaborative effort to determine what will prove true “in the long run”; Leo Strauss, whose distinction between the esoteric and exoteric reading of texts concerns the attempt of philosophers to maintain spaces of transcendence in necessarily hostile environments; and Michael Polanyi, who saw disciplinarity as the way in which our necessarily partial articulations of tacit and explicit knowledge take shape through “indwelling” and thereby provides the source of authority in free societies.
Philip Rieff’s claim that any discipline (and discipleship) is grounded in some fundamental interdiction and in the boundary between that interdiction and the various remissions provides a conceptual framework for this study of disciplinarity. The question of how that ever shifting boundary can be identified, and discipline distinguished from transgression (insofar as any discipline also is from the standpoint of some previous discipline) will take us, second, to the originary hypothesis of Eric Gans. I will show that the essential structure of disciplinarity can be found in the originary scene itself, in the relation between deferral and signification; and, more precisely, in the form of the declarative sentence, with its construction of reality out of the deferral and projection of imperatives—my conclusion will be that the sentence is the constitution of a disciplinary space, and that the concept of “upclining” can ground disciplinarity in an originary grammar.
The Deferral of Tragedy in The Winter’s Tale
The distinction made by Eric Gans between classical and neo-classical aesthetics marks a shift from pagan “shame” culture to Christian “guilt” culture. In the latter case, one is no longer scandalized by one’s appearance in the center, but by one’s inability to occupy it convincingly. Concomitant with this shift in consciousness of significance is a shift in our perception of human time. As I will attempt to show in this paper, the shift from what Francois Laroque calls “sacred” time (marked by the repeatability of seasons and ritual) to one of “profane” time (in which history no longer repeats, but progresses) does more to reduce the devastating power of tragedy—not by reducing its significance, but by turning “tragedy” into a problem to be solved at some point in the future. In a word, tragedy is deferred. Looking at Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, I will show how Leontes, in choosing to suffer the way he does after the loss of Hermione and Perdita, is, in fact, taking a stance against the deferral of (his own) tragedy. That is, in order to “ennoble” and make meaningful his loss, I will show how it becomes necessary to suffer one’s tragic fate. The moral and ethical implications of such a stance will be discussed as well.
The desire for immediacy and the function of deferral: disruptive innovation, new knowledge production, & the language of technology
The human sciences have undertaken a self-transformation via the apparatus of digital technology (digital humanities, innovation labs, maker labs or spaces, media labs, etc), and this has necessitated an accompanying and contested discursive shift (not simply methodologically speaking, but at the level of signs, e.g., notions of semiotic decoding being overlayered with concepts such as hacking, reverse engineering, and so on, i.e., a different intervention at the level of code, where code is algorithmic and essentially binary in the computing sense). In this paper I will argue that one of the driving factors in this transformation is the free market economics and demands of innovation, a process which advocates immediacy and action (new processes, inventions, methods, markets, systems, technologies, etc), which obviously, at a macro level, clashes with some of the core humanistic values of iteration, return, “slow reading,” “close reading,” and layers of competing interpretive perspectives (a non-teleological accretion of knowledge). However, the products of innovation, especially disruptive innovation, are symbolic, pointing to a shared desire, becoming an expression of that desire, rather than an actual transformation of the systems and ideologies that they promised. Clearly this echoes Gans’s theory of deferral of violence, because the most obvious route to the transformation of systems and ideologies is that of direct intervention or violence.
I suggest that in the encounter with digital apparatus and the symbolic realm of disruptive innovation, the humanities once again encounters Heidegger’s understanding of aletheia (read here in relation to his technology essay), where unconcealment “is not the presentation of a finished product with a determinate significance” (Pattison, 51), but is instead a revealing of the originary sign, which technologically speaking, points to the “incompletion” or deferral literally built in to the technological “product”; this is where the shift to digital arts and humanities is also a return to techne, which for Heidegger is both “episteme” and “aletheuein” (”to disclose the truth” – Rojcewicz, 58). The overall aim of this paper is to re-think the current transition into the digital arts and humanities through Gans’s heuristic of the originary hypothesis, with emphasis on his notion that “…the truth of the sign is its designation of something worthy of being re-presented” (Signs, 52); the paper will explore the inadequacy of postmodern theories for comprehending the shift into the digital arts and humanities, suggesting that Gans’ work offers a more comprehensive framework for understanding the symbolic language of technology and what might be called “technological arts.”
Works Cited
Gans, E. (1997). Signs of Paradox: Irony, Resentment, and Other Mimetic Structures. Stanford: Stanford UP.Pattison, G. (2000). The later Heidegger. London & New York: Routledge.
Rojcewicz, R. (2006). The Gods and Technology. NY: SUNY.
Appropriating a Moment in Time: Meaning of Life as an Epiphanic Deferral in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
In my presentation, I will examine the applicability of the notion of deferral to narrativity. As the syntagmatic component of différance, deferral is associated with time, while the paradigmatically aligned difference is related to space. My contention, however, is that Derridean deferral is still, to a large degree, spatial, and therefore, his différance-based model of the sign is inadequate to explain the temporal aspects of narrativity. Generative Anthropology, on the other hand, postulates another opposition that governs the production of meaning. This opposition has to do with the scenicity of representation, manifested by the opening of a structural gap between the center and periphery, which I would like to designate as differentiation. Thus the sign can be said to be generated by three kinds of displacement: difference, deferral, and differentiation. I believe that it is the interplay between these three aspects of signification that gives rise to the temporal “feel” of narrative and is reflected in what Eric Gans identifies as the tension between textuality and narrativity.
The text I will focus on is Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which both utilizes the narrative effect of deferral (as the plot comes to a resolution after a ten-year postponement) and thematizes deferral. I will specifically focus on the moment of central epiphany, when Lily Briscoe remembers a particular scene on the beach, which happened many years ago and featured late Mrs. Ramsey. Her epiphany is that the meaning of life has something to do with Mrs. Ramsey’s “making of the moment something permanent” and that when Lily “dipped into” this moment, “it stayed in the mind almost like a work of art.” I will read moments of epiphany as “textualizing” moments of deferral that capture the production of narrative meaning.
Victimary Thinking, Digital Culture and the CCTV Building
“Paradox is the privileged road to understanding the human, because paradox reveals the seam — the umbilical hole — in the hierarchy of sign and referent that is the essence of human language.” Eric Gans, Signs of Paradox
This paper charts a new sensibility by interpreting Koolhaas and the CCTV building as a text that permits the exposition of broader cultural change. I argue that originary thinking has strong application to the explanation of recent cultural emergences outlined here, and this is in part because it takes as its basic premise the privileged location of paradox as an access to the human. However, I find this relevance primarily through the capacity for originary thinking to transcend the limiting effects of generational and epochal thinking – a capacity attributable to the adoption of a definition of the human, and recognition of the central function of representation. I raise examples of the latter, interrogating the charismatic, victimary theory of Koolhaas, and investigating the function of his celebrity status in the context of his architecture, which appears to “plug in” to a sequence of victimary thinking, with startling and paradoxical results.
As a part of globalising economic trends, civic buildings are being constructed as the evidence of a city’s wealth, and it is not without its irony that these are typically edifices to the high arts. Museums, concert halls and galleries designed by famous architects are commonplace in so called world cities, and this has in turn led to the emergence of the “starchitect”. This is a portmanteau that designates the celebrity status of architects, a small number of whom are so celebrated that they have become reified as iconic representations of such globalising patterns.
This practice has promoted symbolic exchange that builds upon the foundation established through high cultural paradigms of artistic production, whilst being an extension of the globalising of capital, and the digital connectivity that comes with it. The material evidence of this admixture of exchange can be discovered in the buildings designed by starchitects. The results are, appropriately, both perverse and wonderful, and highlight a series of revealing paradoxes that demonstrate the deep contradictions victimary thinking is capable of generating.
The accessibility and the speed of digital communication, and the visual mode of its presentation are integral to these trends: growing connectivity that allows for the mobility to underpin globalising patterns in economic trade and cultural exchange. Alterations to the significance of the nation-state under such circumstances are complex matters, and difficult to précis, but what has certainly happened is a return to elements of the culture of city-state based geopolitics. The successful building of the CCTV building is a study in this intricate dance, and is wedded to Koolhaas’ radical politics, along with a broader, publicity oriented cultural logic. This generates the context for the function of celebrity, and how it is that the paradigms of high culture move with history in a fashion that continues to valorise formats of culture now understood in terms of a politics of elitism.
Deferral, Discipline, and the Esthetics of Failure
In this paper, I would like to revisit Gans’s paper “Beckett and the Problem of Modern Culture,” with a particular focus on the esthetics of failure as it pertains to the interpretation of the play Waiting for Godot. Revisiting the paper offers opportunities to re-situate the issues within the context of recent theory and, perhaps, within a slightly different (post-modern?) cultural context.
Deferring the Inevitable in Late Derrida
1. GA’s analysis of esthetic experience in terms of oscillating attention between the sign and its object provides an explanation for Derrida’s veritable mania for word play, textual self-reference, and doubling back to the problematics of beginning as essay rather than coming to any specific conclusions. This we know from his earliest writings, and it is in plentiful evidence in this last, posthumous work, La Bête et le souverain. This engages the issue of “esthetic deferral” and “the deferral of desire in literature and the arts,” as stated in the prospectus.
2. Derrida’s problematic of difference, where methodical doubt becomes interminable and deferral and undecidability reign, addresses “the relation between deferral and difference” in the prospectus: difference deliquesces, dissolves and final evaporates amid endless precautions and protocols, resulting in the kind of undifferentiation that Girard describes as apocalyptic.
“Tweaking” the Text: An Originary Analysis of CC-BY and the Scene of Undisciplined Knowledge
Coming soon.
Shared Guilt in “The Song of Roland”
René Girard in Violence and the Sacred has outlined how failure to perform a rite leads to obliteration of distinction between the pure and the impure, what he terms a sacrificial crisis. Lack of differentiation between friend and foe may cause the confusion and treason which eventually lead to military conflict. Shared guilt over unanimous violence at the attempt to appropriate a desired object is explained by mimetic rivalry between subjects with an identical object of desire. In The Song of Roland, Ganelon is married to the King’s sister, Roland’s mother. Although she is not mentioned by name in the Chanson, her quiet presence looms large in characterization and plot development.
Glorification of the nephew can be seen as a main feature of matriarchy. W.O. Farnsworth in his study Uncle and Nephew in the Old French Chansons de Geste explains how in a primitive state of civilization matrilineal descent is important in tracing heritage. Sentimental, if not legal, survival of matriarchy is not based on female supremacy as such, but rather on the fact that in very ancient times the physiological basis for paternity was relatively unknown. At the advent of civilization, an offspring was a sure possession of the woman, and, to be certain of preserving lineage, property and power were not transmitted from father to son, but from a man to his sister’s son. The looser the bond between husband and wife, the closer the tie between a wife’s brother to her as sister, and, hence, the closer a relative a maternal uncle could become to his nephew. The uncle-nephew relationship between Charlemagne and the hero leads the King to feel extreme responsibility for his safety.
Before and after the ambush at Roncevaux, the attempt to justify his nephew’s death torments Charlemagne, as is seen in Charles’s dream visions. The treason of Ganelon does not stand alone as the sole cause for the battle at Roncevaux, nor for the overall violence of war. We may include the King’s indirect neglect and Roland’s anxious desire to excel in the service of King and Country as contributing causes for constant warfare. Ganelon’s treason, Charlemagnes’s retreat to France, and Roland’s heroic death are all attempts by the three main characters in the Chanson to validate their own individual identity irrespective of such violence as their mutual relationships may bring to the social order.
Fanservice, he Glimpse and Intersubjective Communion in Doraemon
Fanservice, or the gratuitous display of pantyshots and cleavage in Japanese Anime and Manga can be looked at as an aesthetic instance of “the occasion for intersubjective communion against the social order” (Gans, 1973, p. 128). This sense of communion is made evident both within the aesthetic objects (scenes of boys and adolescents sharing in a glimpse of panties, for example) and within the reader and viewer receptions where such moments can lead to group announcements of the affect of moe (peculiar and particular shame).
Desire within Japanese Anime and Manga art works, aimed at younger audiences, such as the hugely popular Doraemon, is presented in transitional ways (this is not the case with over 18 productions). That is, there is no expectation that a glimpse of the symbol for the desired object (panties) will lead directly to actions that could consummate the desire. Resentment is mitigated by the transitional and accidental nature of the unasked for glimpse of the potentially libidinous. Nonetheless, the resentment is evident in the shared experience and in the potential for the future actualisation of intersubjective desire. All see the desire vision; none get to achieve the “central object” as other than “inaccessible referent”. Hence, in Gan’s terms the aesthetic experience “revalorizes the object’s inaccessibility as a prerequisite to its imaginary possession” (p. 117). The viewers can see these things in this way precisely because of the deferral of “the resentment of exclusion from the center” (p. 117).
Deferral, in the case of Fanservice within Japanese Anime and Manga, offers an aesthetic and therapeutic communality. Which is not to say that Fanservice is not problematic. While the individual reception of these aesthetic moments can be described as traversive, the current opposition to such moments indicates the difficulty that society at large has in accepting the sacred potential of such structured aesthetic experiences. The Otaku, or super fanboys/nerds who have become associated with moe are generally treated as outcasts and yet the aesthetic experiences that they cultivate offer illustrations of adolescent development that are profound.
References:
Gans, Eric Lawrence (1993) Originary Thinking: Elements of Generative Anthropology. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
The Project of the Plane: Narrative and the Anthropological Turn in Abstract Art
Among the most important contributions Generative Anthropology has made to the thought of Jacques Derrida has been the anthropological anchoring of différance in the originary scene. By identifying in différance the originary deferral of both the referent and the appetitive violence it provokes, Generative Anthropology freed deconstruction from the last vestiges of the metaphysical tradition and returned to the sign its properly historical motivation. In my paper I will suggest that the narrative structure of this historical motivation (that is, the narrative structure that gives pathos to Eric Gans’s assurance that deferral is “not a mere postponement”) deserves a fuller treatment, one that would involve the expansion of Generative Anthropology from a past-oriented descriptive account of the origin of human culture to a future-oriented prescriptive endorsement of liberal democracy.
I will focus on a group of artists in post-war America who, I will claim, intuited the need for something like this expansion. Having established deferral as the implicit basis of the development of the picture plane in Western art, I will argue that these artists presided over what I will call an “anthropological turn” during the mid- to late-50’s in which deferral not only became explicit but was recognized as a vital narrative resource.
Imitation and the Sublime: Oscar Wilde on Learning Outcomes Assessment
“Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught,” says Oscar Wilde’s literary alter ego, Gilbert, in “The Critic as Artist.” Wilde’s epigram suggests that the great Victorian aesthete would have taken a dim view of our era’s learning outcomes assessment movement in higher education—that is, the idea that student learning can be measured and empirically verified. Learning outcomes assessment (LOA) has reignited old quarrels about what modes of teaching and learning work best, particularly when it comes to cultivating students’ intellectual sophistication and aesthetic tastes.
Framed by the thoughts of Victorian educational theorists—both esoteric (Matthew Arnold) and exoteric (Oscar Wilde)—this paper will analyze the current controversy over learning outcomes assessment from the standpoint of both Girard’s mimetic theory and Gans’s Generative Anthropology. This analysis shows the surprising degree to which both the pro- and anti-LOA positions entail powerful (and largely unexamined) assumptions concerning the epistemological status of language and the ambivalent role of imitation in learning. Most important, disagreements over the need for and purpose of LOA touch on the problem of the sublime, an originary concept and ancient educational aim that still guides much contemporary pedagogical theory and practice.
Rhetoric as Equipment for Living
In our presentation we want to link the theme of the conference with the work of New Rhetoric in general and Kenneth Burke in particular. As a research group, we teach courses (in teacher education, social work, pedagogy etc.) focusing on teaching art and introducing the concept of literature as ‘equipment for living.’ We introduce and analyse narratives through the lens of rhetoric. Narratives are described as a tool for meaning making and rhetoric as a tool to study how meaning is constructed. These tools shape what it means to be human.
Our project is embedded in a series of turns which are in the air today in the human and social sciences: a narrative, cultural, anthropological, ethnographic, linguistic, rhetorical turn. We suggest rhetoric as a major perspective in the sense that all these turns focus on the importance of studying perspectives, so rhetoric is described as “a perspective on perspectives” (Burke, 1969, p. 512-513). From an anthropological perspective, this implies that “just as there is no ‘zero degree rhetoric’ in any utterance, there is no ‘zero degree rhetoric’ in any of the patterns of culture” (Strecker and Tyler, 2009, p. 1).
Burke’s study of rhetoric starts from an analysis of literature and drama to comment on society in general and the nature of language and communication in particular. He relates the analysis of literature and drama to the nature of human symbol use trying to bridge the gap between literature and life. Burke describes the analysis of literature as a form of sociological criticism because it seeks to codify the various naming strategies which have appeared in art. Literature creates ‘representative anecdotes’ which ‘equip’ us: “sizing up situations in various ways and keeping with correspondingly various attitudes” (Burke 1973, p. 304).
The metaphor of equipment inspired an ethical turn in literary theory, criticism and education. Wayne Booth (in the Burkean tradition) described all texts as essentially rhetorical acts: authors invite readers into a conversation and this interaction has ethical qualities. So literature creates “the company we keep” (Booth, 1988). The reading experience is compared with the development of a friendship. This metaphor is repeated by Martha Nussbaum (1990, p. 11), who declares novels as her best friends or as “spheres of reflection”. She stresses the potential of literature to stimulate reflection about major themes in society. This perspective can also be related to how Rorty described a shift “against theory and toward narrative” (Rorty, 1989, p. xvi), combined with the fact that the concept of ‘texts’ should be broadened to include ‘texts’ of all kinds: songs, films, videos. From a rhetorical perspective, Barry Brummett also pleaded to broaden the concept of equipment because popular culture also “can serve an audience as symbolic equipment to help them confront certain real life problems” (Brummett, 1985, p. 247). These ideas are also close to what Cultural Studies has highlighted: literature/film/tv as “public pedagogy – a visual technology that functions as a powerful teaching machine” (Giroux, 2002, p. 6).
If narratives are said to entail a specific mode of knowing, we agree with Jerome Bruner (1986: 15) that ‘works of fiction that transform narrative into an art form come closest to revealing “purely” the deep structure of the narrative mode in expression’. Bruner argues that ‘one does well to study the work of trained and gifted writers if one is to understand what it is that makes good stories powerful or compelling’ (ibid.).
The focus of our research is thus on narrative at its ‘far reach’ (ibid.), as an art form (for an extended discussion, see Rutten and Soetaert 2013). This perspective implies a defence of the role and value of narratives for critical reflection on contemporary society. In The Company We Keep, Wayne Booth (1988) argues for the importance of an ethical perspective in our engagement with literature. This plea raises questions about the possible functions of narratives in general and literature in particular. Martha Nussbaum (1995, 2010) claims that novels can be understood as metaphors that help us understand the stories of others. She argues that novels can stimulate our moral imagination and that democracy needs the humanities.
The major question of our research is what we might learn from ‘works of imaginative literature’ (Gibson 2007: 1), or other cultural artefacts such as films, games, cartoons and graphic novels. We also concur with Richard van Oort (2004: 622) who suggests that an anthropological perspective causes an increasing focus in literary studies on culture as an object of symbolic interpretation: ‘For who is better trained than the literary critic in the exercise of searching for symbolic significance, of reading beyond the literal surface to see the deeper, more sacred meaning beneath?’ From a rhetorical perspective, we study ‘texts’ and if the world is described as a text, then reading and studying literature (and cultural narratives in general) offers a good training in understanding different interpretations. In our paper we will discuss how we have introduced such a perspective on perspectives in different educational projects.
About the presenter (Soetaert)
About the presenter (Rutten)
Aping Mankind: Neuromania and Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Mankind
Increasingly, it is assumed that human beings are best understood in biological terms; that, notwithstanding the apparent differences between humans and their nearest animal kin, people are, at bottom, organisms; that individual persons are their brains, and that societies are best understood as collections of brains (“Neuromania”); and that we should look to evolutionary theory to understand what we are now (“Darwinitis”); that our biological roots explain our cultural leaves. I will argue that we are not just our brains; rather we belong to a community of minds that has grown up over the hundreds of thousands of years since we parted company from the other primates. The gap between our nearest animal kin and ourselves is too wide to read across from the one to the other. People are not organisms.
Reflections on the Sacred: Eric Gans and Mircea Eliade
Where Eric Gans’s hypothesis on the origin of the human constitutes a scenic event through an aborted gesture of appropriation, Mircea Eliade’s work can be seen as consecrating the applicability—even universality—of such a contention through the comparative study of archaic, classical, and world religions. By utilising Eric Gans’s “originary scene” as the central theme of this essay, I will attempt to compare the most general and explicit similarities and differences found in the works of Mircea Eliade and Eric Gans: the sacred centre, the opposition of the sacred and profane, the necessary paradox of the sign, and the perpetuation of religious ritual re-enacting the sacred event of the emergence of language and consciousness.
Love, Deferral and the Search for “Good Mimesis”
Mimesis is the indispensable starting premise of mimetic theory and generative anthropology (GA), but how well is it understood? Mimetic theory rightly emphasizes the problem of human violence, yet positing mimesis itself as inherently disordered and destructive is problematic. Thus, several Girard scholars have striven to understand “good mimesis.” However, as Rebecca Adams argues, if positive mimesis is conflated essentially with the absence of conflict, it is hard to comprehend “goodness,” mimesis, or for that matter even violence or nonviolence. In GA, such conceptual concerns may seem alien since mimesis is presumed to be morally neutral. However, the emphasis on “deferral” may introduce a similar difficulty through the back door. As with Girard, the “good” is renunciatory, and the positive good of generative creativity—including of course language and representation—is simply assumed without being articulated as such.
The Act of the Act of Killing: Violence, Film Making, and Deferral
In this paper, I will discuss the relationship between art and violence by examining Joshua Oppenheimer's documentary film The Act of Killing. I will trace both the re-enactment and recording of acts of violence, as well as the murderers’ understanding of not only mass murder, but of themselves as killers and agents of genocide. The paper explores how the artwork of a group of war criminals succeeds or fails to mediate or defer the act of killing by paradoxically referring to it.
Tragedy and the Problem of Resentment
Shakespeare’s last tragedy, Coriolanus, is unique in its representation of the central problematic of the neoclassical aesthetic. More than any other Shakespearean hero, Coriolanus exemplifies the scandalous asymmetry of the tragic scene. Both loved and hated by every single character in the play, Coriolanus elicits the paradoxical aesthetic experience of the central object in the originary scene. But while this paradox remains unthematized in classical tragedy, in Shakespearean tragedy it is explicitly identified and represented on the stage.
The difficulty this creates for tragic form is illustrated by Coriolanus’s passage from contemptuous Übermensch to resentful and impotent slave in the play’s fourth act. Then, in the fifth act, Coriolanus undergoes a moral transformation that undermines the asymmetry between center and periphery upon which tragedy depends. To develop my hypothesis, I will focus on two key scenes: (1) Coriolanus’s entry to Aufidius’s household in act 4, and (2) the “reconciliation” scene between Coriolanus and the three women in act 5. My conclusion will be that Coriolanus ambiguously straddles the line between the public scene of tragic sacrifice and the private scene of inner redemption with which Shakespeare’s last plays were concerned.
The Ethics of Poetics
Carrying further the exploration of the notion of trust, or rather, faith, implicated in the poetics of language, an inquiry is mounted into the consequences for the most appropriate ethical relationship needed for the employment of language. The impossibility of the imagined summum bonum examined in a contribution I recently made to the GASC venture is taken as the jumping-off point for the demonstration of a number of essential features which raise difficult problems for the inhabiting of socially induced identities.
