The Ceremony Must be Found: After Humanism Author(s): Sylvia Wynter Source: boundary 2, Vol. 12/13, Vol.

12, no. 3 - Vol. 13, no. 1, On Humanism and the University I: The Discourse of Humanism (Spring - Autumn, 1984), pp. 19-70 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/302808 Accessed: 16/05/2010 00:17
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://dv1litvip.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=duke. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Duke University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to boundary 2.

http://dv1litvip.jstor.org

The CeremonyMust Be Found: After Humanism

Sylvia Wynter
The ceremony mustbe found thatwillwed Desdemona to the huge Moor.. O, it is notenough thattheyshould meet naked,at dead of night in a small innon a darkcanal ... The ceremony mustbe found withall its symbols Traditional, ancientas the metaphorsin dreams; strangewithneverbeforeheard music,continuous untilthe torchesdeaden at the bedroomdoor. JohnPeale Bishop,"Speaking of Poetry" It would be the fact of the ceremonythat Henry would balk at: Bon knew this. It. . . would be the a ceremony enteredinto, to be sure,with a ceremony, negro,yetstilla ceremony. WilliamFaulkner, Absalom,Absalom These doctors of philosophy never concede the 19

moonto be less polishedthan a mirror; theywant it for to be moreso ifthatcan be imagined, theydeem that only perfectshapes can suit perfectbodies. of the heavenly Hence the sphericity globes mustbe absolute. Galileo, Dialogues of a royalcult (the Bakama) was The establishment None the an economicallydemandingdevelopment. be substantial.This when added to the otherritual the Bacwezi as a politicooppositions... neutralized relationreligiousforce.... The (new) fundamental Safety, ship can be reducedto: Bakama: Purity/and Culture.Bacwezi: Putrid/and Danger,Nature. A Structural PeterSchmidt,HistoricalArchaeology: Culture Approachto African As a result of rallies we got courses in 'black and 'black history'and a special black literature' adviser for black students and a black cultural center.., a rottingwhite washed house on the nether edge of campus.., reachable.., bywayof a scramble up a muddybank.... And all those new the from courses did was exemptthe departments unsettlingnecessity of alteringexisting ones, so they could go righton advertisinga course in "American Fiction" that explicitly includes "Hawthorne, Clemens,James,Wharton, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and implicitly excludes Chesnutt, and Ralph Ellison." RichardWright Hurston, 1982" "Black and American, David Bradley, I. The Studia Humanitatis: FromHeresyto Orthodoxy The crisis of irrelevance and of growing studentdefectionto the vocational areas of education is partof an overallcrisis of the of knowledge that was put in place, as episteme/organization Foucault shows, in the nineteenthcentury(Foucault, 1973). This economics and philology/Liteepisteme,based on the triad,biology, raryStudies, found what Vandamme calls-in the frame of his criterion theoryof truth-its efficiency concept of the efficiency (Vandamme,1983), in the contextof the rise and expansion of the thatofthe selfIndustrial Age. Andthe crisisof ourtimesis precisely dissolutionof this Age. Beer summed up the extentof this crisis in his Sir Stafford and Varela. Maturana introduction to a book bytheChileanbiologists, 20
less the political advantages accruing ... appear to

He argued that contemporary scholarship is trapped in its present whilea man "who can lay claim of knowledgein which, organization however to knowledgeabout some categorizedbitof the world, tiny, of thatbit,is safe for whichis greater thananyoneelse's knowledge life," and in which, while papers increase exponentially,and of the world our understanding knowledge growsby"infinitesimals," "actually recedes." And, because our world is "an interacting system"in dynamicchange,our systemof scholarship"rootedin its to the needs own sanctifiedcategories,is, in a large part,unavailing a newerand still of mankind." If,he concludes,we are to "understand world;ifwe are to educate people to livein thatworld;ifwe evolving thatbelongto a vanished are to abandon categories and institutions worldas it is well nighdesperate thatwe should .. thenknowledge mustbe rewritten."'1 The main hypothesisof the argumentis that it was such a the founding of knowledgethat constituted heresyof the rewriting seen in theirbroadersense as human originalStudia Humanitatis, knowledge of its sociohuman world, the heresy that laid the of our modern whose ordering discourses foundations rational world, were no longerto be interwoven withthe mythosand the theologos (Habermas,1979). The term"heresy" is used here in the contextin whichit is used bythe Polish philosopher, He argues thatall realms Kolakowski. a of culture,philosophy, as much as art and customs, exemplify fundamental that is new growsout antagonism,whereby everything of the permanent need to question all existingabsolutes, withevery current of thought that triesto break away from "existingfinalities coming in turnto establish otherones of its own," so that though "every rebellion is thereforemetamorphosedinto a conservative "each of these movements makes roomforthe state," nevertheless next phase where its own absolutes will,in return, be the targetof criticism.9"2 This movement can therefore be defined as a dynamic one in which the Jester's role in the pursuitof human knowledgealthe Priest'srole-transforming ternateswith heresies intoneworthointomodes of the Absolute. doxies, the contingent Hans Blumenberg illustratesthis dynamic,arguingthat the movementof secularizationthat we know as the phenomenonof withits "teachingoffice"(Heidegger,1977),the humanism, together inthecontextof thecrisisofthe Late Studia,can onlybe understood MiddleAges. Thatage was one ofthose epochs inhumanhistory that be called a "phase of objectification," a phase in whichevents might and their and of humanmotivation spin out ofthe control functioning is needed to bring purpose.Atall such times,a greatcounter-exertion these eventsback to serving the logic of humanpurposes rather than the reverse. to the pointsto the signs of this objectification, Blumenberg of late Scholastic thought withits positing of theologicalAbsolutism the Maximal God-as the AristotelianFinal Cause (Reidl/Kaspar, than the image of the Caring Father-and therefore to 1984),rather the downgradingof human existence representedas almost the 21

incidentalby-product of a God who created forthe sake of his own This was the hegemonicsystemof theology Glory. against whichthe discourse of Humanism and the institutionalized system of lay force,as the Jester, learningcame into being as a counter-exerting the"highseriousness" and theself-justifying pulling pathos(Bakhtin, 1981) of heresies staled into orthodoxAbsolutes, down to earth also makes a key comparisonbe1983). Blumenberg (Blumenberg, tweenthe phase of objectification embodiedinthetheologicalAbsolutismof the late Middle Ages and the parallel phase of our own times, one dominated by the Absolute of the Technological directedto the purposes of its own which,increasingly rationality, than by humanpurposes,determine Eventsthat goal-seekingrather are once moreout of the controlof humanmotivation (Blumenberg, 1983). Whileit is the absolutismof thistechnologicalrationality that is leavingthe humanities "naked inthe market place,"'3 thisrationality is itselfonly the culminating formor Summa of the new ordering (ordonnance)system of knowledgeinitiatedby the Studia, in the overall context of the secularization of the human Subject-one whose mode of being would be no longerguaranteedbythe "higher sanctionedmythos and theologos.Whilethis system"of the divinely first secular form of the Subject has been transumed (Bloom, 1982) into differing variants-from man defined as "natural Man," the genericpossessor of Reason, to man as definedsince the nineteenth centuryas a "natural being" on the analogy of a livingorganism of the definition of the human form (Foucault, 1973)-it is this first 1984),and its being,its related "rationalworldview" (Reidl/Kaspar, the rethat is now in crisis.As a result, bodyof knowledge, ordering of knowledge for whichStafford Beercalls, and towardswhich writing irrelevance our own growing compels us, mustnecessarilyentailthe of our presentnormative of the secular mode of defining un/writing because the latter does rather thandefinition, the Subject. Defining, our collectivesystemof not exist as a reality except byand through behaviors,systems which are themselvesorientedby the ordering modes of knowingor epistemes of each human system. And the "verified" by those epistemes are themselvesreciprocally ordering in definesas "writing" collectivesystemsof behaviorswhichDerrida intoplaythe classificatory the broadersense, that is, byour putting or systemiccode about which of Sameness and Difference, principle effects as a trans-subject'sentity, each human system-ensemble, whichall that whatMaturanaand Varela call the autopoesis through livesrealizes itsmodeof being(Maturana& Varela,1980).' Foritis our that bonds us as such a puttinginto play the classifyingprinciple mode of thatwe defineourselvesas such a normative Group-Subject itself auto-institutes the Subject,about whicheach system-ensemble into thatspecificnormative templateof identity bringing reciprocally, living being. ofour modes of Because of thedynamic reciprocalinteraction of Sameness and the de-structuring of the principle being/knowing, whichontologizesus as specificmodes ofthe I/We-inour Difference 22

case the I/We as "natural beings"-necessarily entails the deworld also of the ratiomorphic view, apparatusor rational structuring whichthe mode of the Subject or templateof humanautothrough knowsthe likethespeciatingtemplate ofall thingsliving, speciation,5 worldin relationto the telos of its realizationas a dynamicliving inthecall for Itis thisdestructuring thatis implied, a therefore, entity. thatwas thesame destructuring/restructuring of knowledge, rewriting effected by the great mutation embodied in the discourse of humanism in the practiceof the Studia. and, dynamically, For the Jester'sheresyof the Studia, as indeedof the one to whichwe are now challenged,should be seen in the widercontextof of a the evolutionof the cognitivemechanismsof living organisms, process as old as Lifeitself 1984),as wellas inthecon(Riedl/Kaspar, textof a process unique to the human.That is, it should be underthe contextofthe process of humanevolutionary stood within epistein whichthe rupture withthe higher of self-troping, mology/modes in the practiceof the Studia was a systemof the theologos implicit mechanismsthrough which each mutation at the levelofthecognitive in humanGroup-Subject knowstheworld, as do biologicalorganisms, relationto the securingof the conditionsof the realization/actualization of theirmode of being(Reidl/Kaspar, consti1984):genetically in tuted in the case of biological organisms,rhetorico-symbolically the case of humans. As Lanham points out, with the cultural revolution of the Renaissance, "rhetoricalman," who had been proscribedat the margins by the canonical dogmas of theologies, at last left the The delightsoftheoriginal humanistsin rhetoric was, theremargins. thatwentbeyondthatofa merefad.Forthehumanist fore, something had glimpsed here that,contrary to Plato, man was indeed double; thathe invented for himself a second selfand thenacted to verify this self, acting "fromrole sustaining motives in a dramatic reality" (Lanham,1976). In his analysis ofthe roleplayedbythedisciplineof rhetoric in the cultural revolution effectedby the humanists,Ernesto Grassi traces the heretical rolethattheir involvement withrhetoric, their turn to the model of Cicero and to his insistenceon the complementary nature of rhetoricand philosophy(since their common original functionconsisted in recognizingand "analysing the meaning of language in the historical process")6 played. This emphasis on rhetoric was to serve,then,likeKolakowski'sJester, as a questioning of thetemporal absolutes of medievalphilosophy, above all revaluing the historicity of the humancommunity-humanitas as contrasted to divinitas-and of the knowledgeto be gained fromstudyingthis order historicity, against its negative stigmatization bythethenruling of knowledge. "NaturalMan" and his works, as pertaining to the category of the post-AdamicFallen Flesh (only redeemable by the rebirth in Christian and brought intobeing Baptism)was thereby beingrevalued as the first secular definition of Lanham'srhetorical man,constituted no longerbythe DivineName, Christ, but bythe VerbalSymbolMan 23

1950).Since, as O.D. Creutzfeld (Whyte, pointsout, it is the mode of which functionsas the externalloop symbolic self-representation that linksup withthe neurophysiological of the brainto machinery create our "worldsof mind"or modes of consciousness, the world whichwe knowSelf/World viewsthrough and orient our behavior, the the DivineName to the VerbalSymbolMan-as in 1917, shiftfrom from Man to the VerbalSymbol,Proletarian7-was a shift to the first secular mode of humanconsciousness. as the This self-imaged, Self nowcame to function self-troping as the cause whichdetermined behavior forthe human, Final/Formal mode of genetic speciation had determined behaviorsforotherbioForthehominid-into-human, replaced psychogeny logical organisms.8 as the determinant of its cognitivemechanismsor ratiophilogeny wouldbe morphic apparatuses. Andthe relatedinheritable programs stored in the systems of figuration, encoded in the body of Therewas one thatwouldbe called "culture."9 traditions/knowledges that centralcontinuity, to whichwe have alreadyreferred: however, the cognitivemechanismsof humangroupsrespondto a law thatis must applicable to those of all biologicalorganisms.Theytherefore know the world, too, in response to the telos of securing the mode of conditions of the subject's realizing its system-specific Andthis law templateof identity. being,as imaginedin its governing one was an IronAge Bahaya, now definedthrough applies whether or the royal, ratherthan the local Bacwezi template of identity; linear Galileo's Aristotelian antagonistswho insistedon the if/then abductive inference of the founding structuralopposition (the on of the lunarrealms,the degradationof the terrestrial) perfection which the Christian medieval template had been based; or the Southern noble monarchical Subject,Othello;or the Puritan naturally man" (Foucault, 1973) that slave-owning"empirico-transcendental each act upon the And theywould therefore was Faulkner'sHenry. worldin the mode of the template'scategorical imperative, obeying the roleso as to fulfill and prescriptions, its related proscriptions sustainingmotivesof the mode of the self in a "dramaticreality." Paolo Valesio has pointedout, in the contextof his proposal thatall humanordersare matrix of a new rhetoric, for the disciplinary held together by specific macro-organizing topoi which are the necessary conditionsof our shared and common human nature(s) of the (Valesio, 1980).10And since meaningpreexistedthe utterance first word/speech,we must recognize the complex relation of hereis biologicalprocesses. The argument language to pre-linguistic is the shiftfrom that the linkof continuity/discontinuity genetic to withthe lattercarrysystemsof groupbonding, rhetorical-figurative and the inheritable the former programs loadings from ing affective to the which determined cognition/behaviors being transferred For was this it called of system religion. systems figuration governing of its which now took the place of the environment of figuration the sanction sanctionsystems,replacingitwith rewards/punishment systemsof the gods and thenof the Single God. First Whyte and later Habermas pointed to a formative 24

or evolutionary tendency process at workwhichcorrelatesthe evolution of human cognitivemechanisms withthe evolutionof human modes of co-identification, from closed aestheticorders the relatively of the particularistic Paleolithicgroups to the increasingly moreinclusive ones. Monotheism, Whiteargues, markeda highpointin the evolutionof human cognitivemechanisms. Once a Singie Divine Name had been postulated,the humancould now come to knowthe worldin relationto a single universalcorrelator; the concept of unicould then itselfcome intobeing. But because the varying versality monotheismshad come into being amongstdifferent peoples in reremainedfinally needs, theiruniversalities sponse to different particularistic. What was needed was a single definingimpersonal whichwould take the place of the DivineNames; of their principle ofthe absolutization specificconceptionsof Life/Death; apparatusof the highersanction systemof the mythos(the Logos of Paleolithic and of the theologos:thatof creedal systemsof systemsof identity) identity. What we refer to as the founding Jesterheresyof humanism and the Studia Humanitatis is sited here. For as Riedl/Kaspar point withgenetically sanctionedinheritable out,once humanshad broken and cognitivemechanisms,a riskfactorhad now entered programs the evolutionary processes of life.This was due to the factthat"our conscious cognitivepowers," because they were the most recent in a continuum of cognitiveprocesses contemposuperstructures raneous withthe emergenceof life(withhuman reason, as a lateand tested against the real world), comer,beingthe least refined the and the dysfunctionality of humanworld potentialforself-deception views could spell disaster in the context of humans' increasing overthe environment. mastery The sanction system of religion had, therefore, been isowith the hominization Itenabled morphic process ofthe humanitself. this new mode of being,the bearerof self-consciousness, to win its moreclosed to moreopen programs of co-identification and wayfrom of cognition, handingdown what it had won,as Gowlettnotes,as a human cultural heritage in the long perspective of the and idiotic as Nietzsche notes, yet conprocesses-many terrible that"morality of mores" bywhichthe humanmade himself stituting calculable-of the human's collective self-making (Gowlett,1984). The heresyof the Studia was, therefore, to lie in its breakwiththe sanctionedidentity and withits absolutized systemof divinely higher world viewsor ratiomorphic man apparatus;inits release ofrhetorical from the margins, his behaviorsby a new ordering secular orienting Logos, the NaturalLogos of Humanismwhichtook the place of the Christian Theologos. A co-Christianitywas made possible by the central of a new baptismal birthin which Christianswere Figure/Image rebornin the spirit, leavingbehindthe "naturalman" of the Flesh, itselfdegraded by the OriginalSin, inherited by all mankindfrom Adam's Fall. This bondingtopos of the medieval ChristianGroup Subject was sanctioned by "the authoritative light of the 25

suprasensory" (Heidegger, 1977). So, too, was the "inheritable of storedpre-judgments based on the interpretation of the program" Bible and on canonical dogma as well as on the overallsystemof medievalsociety. knowledgeof Christian The normative orderof knowledge,which was embodied in opposition generated theology,expressed the foundingstructural fromthe bonding topos of the order:the opposition between the categoryof the "Spirit"(the new "life" to whichone attained,pari passu, with Christian baptism) and the "Flesh" (the life of a life that was now unregenerate"natural" man before rebirth, "death"). Accordingto the inferential logic of its system of figuration-Bateson's abduction schema, Sperber's symbolicmode of a mode largely the right expressed through hemispheric knowledge, of the brain1'-the Spirit/Flesh orderof value was also functioning expressed in a parallel order of value: between theology-as knowledge of things Divine, celestial, of the category of the Spirit-and lay knowledge,the knowledgecarriedby the laity-as world whose ofthecategory Flesh,i.e.,ofthesocio-human knowledge WorksweretheWorks of naturalunregenerate then, man,knowledge, of all of the inferiority that was marginal, secondaryand partaking thingsterrestrial. For the Christianprinciple of spiritualSameness and fleshly Neolithic ordershad made Difference-in thesame wayas traditional calls the "totemicoperator"of the stable use of what Levi-Strauss of the animalspecies to at once conceptualize systemof differences (Levi-Strauss,1960) and absolutize the principleof Sameness/Difference encoded in their bonding topoi-here made use of the to at once conplanetary systemofSameness/Difference represented ceptualize and absolutize itself.12Verifiedin ChristianPtolemaic this planetary physico-ontological astronomy, grid,as a represented of the difference of substance betweenthe degraded fallencategory of material earth, change and subject to the corruptibility generation, perfect lunar world) decay (as contrasted to the incorruptible caused principleof ChristianSameness (the expressed a Divinely and of Difference of the Spirit), realmof the perfection (that realm This the Negationthatwas Natural whichmarked man,unregenerate). the as function came to then structural principle ordering opposition of the status-organizing processes of medieval societies. It deorderof value, also expressed in the reprethe Clergy/Laity termined of substance betweenNoble Blood and non-noble, sented difference of the feudalsystem; the systemof castes/orders whichunderpinned medievaltemplateof identity just as, at the same time,the Christian the Feudal mode ofthe with whichhad become fusedand interwoven conceptionof Life/Death-psychogeneticalSubject-its aristocratic the ratiomorphic apparatus of the order. lydetermined their PeterWinchpoints out that all humangroups institute whichtake social ordersabout specificconceptionsof "Life/Death" These conbehaviors. their the place of their orienting biological life, structural oppoceptionsinall humanordersare encoded infounding of ansitions,definedby Uspenskijet al, as the inclusion/exclusion 26

whichalone humanordersare enabled to tithesis,by and through definethemselvesintobeing,each typeof culture to create its having "corresponding" typeof "chaos" which"represents" just as activea "creation" as that of the order itself (Uspenskij et al, 1978). All cults of oppositions,such as that of the Bakama/Bacwezi founding the Bahaya peoples of Iron orofthe lunar/sublunar of Age East Africa Galileo's antagonists, express the fact that human as organized ordersnotonlystruggle against theopposing"chaos," buthave need of it as well, not only destroying but also continually creatingit (Uspenskij et al, 1978). For it is the specific "type of non-culture" which enables its self-definition as that specific type of culture.3 Hence the oppositions,seen frominside culturesas culture/nature, done/undone,raw/cooked,or, as in our case, Spirit/Fleshor are oppositions throughwhich the order/chaos, Civilized/primitive, seen from a pointof viewexternal to the domainof entropy/ectropy, the cultures, are enabled to function as the order-informing systemic code or replicator unit(Dawkins,1983). have followedupon Levi-Strauss's Others,like HaydenWhite, analysis of these oppositions,which in all cases express the conPeter Schmidt,in his studyof the corpus of ception of Life/Death. whichreach back to IronAge East Africa, has shownhowthe myths of the mode of organization of a new royaldynasty overthat triumph of the local indigenouspeoples organizedabout the spirit-medium cults of the Bacwezi,the canonizersof the local templateof identity, of the only fullysucceeded when,as the narrative representations the conceptions of myths reveal, it had managed to transform withits newly created Bakama cult coming Life/Death, Order/Chaos, to signify and the Bacwezi comingto be figured as a Culture/Safety force"against whichthe royalorderneeds to "dangerous uncivilized confirm its legitimacy as the bearerof "Life" to Bacwezi "death." In the shift, the local templateof identity has been made intothe Deilos to the new Agathos of a royally mediatedidentity (Schmidt, 1978).'14 The titleof this paper,borrowed from the multi-level meanings of Bishop's finepoem, here refers to the factthatonce these structural oppositions have been put in place, theymust then function thatof the accordingto laws applicable to all humansystems,from royaldynastyof IronAge East Africato that of Christianmedieval the mode of Desire-the Europe or to that of our own. By marking desireof Lifeand ofAversion to Death-these structural oppositional codes function to orientthe parameters of motivations/behaviors of theorder. condition ofthe collectivebehaviors Theyare thusthevery whicheach humansystemrealizes itselfas such a system. through The basic law oftheir musttherefore be theinterdiction of functioning whichmight and breach anyceremony yoketheantithetical signifiers the dynamicsof order/Chaos, whichthe orderbringsitself through into livingbeing; a dynamicswhich functionslike the code of the acid forthe tick,forexample, to prepresence/absenceof butyric scribe the seeking/avoiding behavior throughwhich one realizes oneself as one or the otherform of the self-troping rhetorical human. The ceremoniestherefore cannot be foundforthe doctorsof 27

philosophyto wed the Earth to the Moon, for Othello to remain a "negro,"since the group wedded to Desdemona, forBon to marry Subjects to whichtheybelongare bondedbya systemof meaningor the meaningof semantic charter (Maranda,1980) whichdetermines on thebasis ofthese oppositions(Derrida, their 1976).Forit meaning1 is these behavior-orienting the mediation oppositionswhich, through induce stable and shared of theirconnotativesystemof good/evil, in the brain desiring/aversive endogenous waveshapes (Thatcher/John, 1977),and constitutethe morphogenetic fantasyor whichthe groupSubjects mode of the culturalimagination through are led to imaginethemselves'16as such a GroupSubject: one which, mediatedbythese structural internally oppositionsand theirrelated system,is definedby the fact that its members imagery/figuration desire (Girard, 1965) and of participatein the same mode of mimetic aversion(Fanon, 1964). ofa physico-ontological of The order/chaos principle figuration was the axiom about whichthe mode of Sameness and Difference thestatus-organizing cultural process,theaestheticand imagination, the conceptual orderingrationalworldview of ChristianMedieval as divinely caused/ordered. The was foundedand represented world, worldbelonged of NaturalManofthe humanhistorical layknowledge the orderas such an order. of "chaos" whichdefined to the category and oftheStudia lay The heresy ofthediscourseof Humanism of this principleor systemic code, by the in theirdeconstruction Studia's very systemof learning comingintobeing as an alternative was no longerthatof Christian whose referential theology. authority as Kristeller The heresywas not anti-christian pointsout. Many,like Erasmus,onlywanted to get back to a readingof the originaltext, back to the uncontaminated by some of the later interpretations, and to theoriginal Greektextsbelieved oftheearlyfather simplepiety to be able to elucidate pristinemeanings. Yet it was here that a occurredin thata reversalhad takenplace. Insteadof submutation of theology, of learningto the authority the lay activity ordinating of the lay activity to the authority was now beingsubmitted theology in the name of the accuracy of of textualand philologicalscrutiny ofthecelestial was beingsubmitted The category historical meaning. mode of of the humanista,bearers of the inferior to the activity as a new itself a mode whichhad nowbegunto constitute knowledge, ordo or studium. Even more,a new highersanction system,one based on the processes of human knowledge was here being self-correcting knowledge proposed and put in place, in the contextof a normative whose axiom, as Waterstonpoints out, had been that God had and the role of orderedthe worldaccording to certain principles, fallen man was merelyto decipher these principlesand abide by celestial ofthings butnotseek to questionand have knowledge them, which, unaided, his corrupted human knowledge could not encompass. Indeed, accordingto this axiom, fallen man could not hope to know the laws by which God had ordered his Creation.'7 could the Worksof Man as a creatureof the degraded Earth Neither 28

be of efficacy to the truetelos of the Christian, thatof the original humanistslay in theiruse of the Back-to-Rome/Greece movement in orderto revindicate this NaturalMan, using the auctoritasof their non-Christian tradition of thought and legacy of the Graeco-Roman literature to projectan alternative mode of lifeand being. And the revindication of the mode of learningof fallen NaturalMan, of his in which, of figuration, Works,was effectedby a counter-system a new of the ancients, one underwent throughthe great writings a renaissance,inwhichone nowbecame notChristian, Counter-Birth, but more humane/rational, in this central re-figuring, the shifting, in the firstformof a secular conception of Order/Chaos, bringing imagingof Life/Death. The return to the ancient models, the founding basis of the oftheterm, Studia Humanitatis, from the Studia,eventheir borrowing Romans (who had used itwiththe same valorizing was, at intention), the levelof figuration, a return so to speak, gave to thesecularwhich, as a izing European man his Scripturesand "patristic"literatures, counter-exertion whichenabled the projection of MaximalMan over of a lay against thatof the MaximalGod. Herethevery implementing the knowledge of Naturalman,and of his arts systemof knowledge, of rhetoric, as a valorizing inits literature, philosophy, profane activity own right, beforeCopernicus,a breach of the physicoconstituted, of Sameness/Difference. It was also a breach ontological principle withthe principle of DivineCausalitywhichthis latterprinciple had encoded, and by this, a rupturewith all other human cognitive mechanisms hitherto sanctioned by the "authoritative lightof the suprasensory." The wordhumanistacoined on the modelof legista (since the codes had been the first studyof law based on the revisedJustinian orderof knowledgeto begin to claim autonomy from the referential of theology)was therefore itselfthe expression of this authority hereticalviolation of the earlierorderof value,in whichknowledge of theWorks of Natural Man was, relatively, the"chaos" to unregenerate the trueknowledgeor the knowledge of the Divine. The rewriting of knowledgeof the Studia was therefore a to the order of knowledgeof the clergy,the new counter-writing that of knowledge in whose context a new template of Identity, NaturalMan, was being brought intoexistence in the new narrative of Renaissance Europe.In whatever whether representations forms, humanistor platonic,the commonthrust was directedtowardsthe valorization of the new emerging sense of self,of thatwhichdefined itselfno longeras Spiritbut as NaturalReason carefully cultivated. Hence the motif of the "dignity of Man" as a counterto the motif of fallen man;'8and the valorization by the originalhumanistsof the and of their of style,the stylebywhich practiceof rhetorics worship the new secular mode was writing itselfintobeing(Lanham,1976). WalterUllmanlinkstheoriginsof humanism and oftheStudia to the politicalhumanism ofthe MiddleAges,whichaccompaniedthe rise of a new socio-historical force,thatof the new men of the City UrbanCommercial States, inthe contextofthe beginning Revolution.
29

These new men, havingno legitimate place in the feudal Christian orderof things, to be citizenswithpoliticalrights, wanting struggled fora revaluation of NaturalMan in politicalterms.Neither noblyborn norpeasant,these freemen, without a lord, came to define themselves bythe VerbalSymbol"man"-in oppositionto "noble"-universalizas thefirst definition of ingit,inoppositionto Christian, non-religious the human that was ostensibly universally applicable. Since the Christian Wordwas interwoven or withthe Feudal category structure of NaturalMan logically system,theirvalorization representational movedoutsidetheChristian schema, bothinpoliticaland commercial as the newsociallymobileand rapidly new menalso terms, enriching the began to detach allegiance, in key aspects of theirlives, from schema (Ullman, there 1977).Inother words, ordering religio-Christian in whichan overallchallengewas being mounted was a conjuncture structural absolutizedbythe to the founding oppositionof the order, determined physicoanalogy(Bateson, 1979) of a divinely instituting insubstance between a difference of Difference, ontologicalprinciple ofthe of the earthand the crystalline the degradedmatter perfection realms. lunarand supra-lunar Hereone might speak ofthefigurative impactoftheStudia,its of Manthrough Works, schema,ofa rebirth profane counter-figurative thatofhumanreason,and of one thatspoke of a newkindoffreedom, ofall thingsincluding celestial.As its powerto gain knowledge things Hubnerpointsout,the epistemologicalbreakof Copernicuscan only ofthe newordering inthiswideremancipatory context be understood man closer to God," "whichaims at bringing discourse of humanism forwhichthe earth "Ptolemaicastronomy thus at once contradicting the place of a status corruptions," is coincidentalwith contradicting, then, an "astronomy tied to the theology of its times." That a bearerof this new discourse and its telos Copernicuswas himself a conto eliminate can be seen inthefactthatwhenfaced with having of his timeand the existing tradiction-thatbetween"the humanism astronomy"-he sought to resolve the contradictionin a way with even ifhe had to do thiswith to humanism,"'8 favorable difficulty, his resolution. new problemsarisingfrom moveAs Hans Jonas has pointedout,the reallyrevolutionary that Natureoffered mentof the Copernicanbreakwas his revelation for therepresented no empirical principle physico-ontological support and of Difference that,in fact,as Galileo's telescope was to verify theearthwas a star,and Newton'sequallyapplicable laws to confirm, the stars were earths.'9Humanismand the Studia's projectionof as Hubnernotes, NaturalMan withhis NaturalLogos was, therefore, in which"the entireworldhad begun thrust partof a comprehensive of new continents itself" to transform paripassu withthe "discovery inchanges thatshook thehitherto and new seas," whichwas to bring of society,as the secularizationof "sacred" structures entrenched the State and the printing presses and the rise of the middleclasses and privileged the "old hierarchies destroyed classes."'20 Out of this mechanismswas of the humancognitive trainof events,a mutation one in whichthe idea rose "thatthe DivineCreation, set in motion, 30

like the constructionof a great cosmic machine had to be humanreason" (Hubner, understandable 1983).Itwas byand through in the contextof this special and overall mutationof the cultural imagination of the human, that the discontinuitythat would constitute the new orderof the naturalsciences had begun,and that of Galileo's telescope had its origins. the latertechnology to bringmen nearerto Centralto the comprehensive attempt God, to breach the interdictionof ceremonies between the was to categories of the celestial and the terrestrial, Agathos/Deilos narrative be theriseofthevernacular paripassu with representations, of profane the Studia's turn to theancientmodels and itsvalorization lettersand the auctoritas of theirdeployment-theirvalorization, ofthehumanimagination visa vistheScriptures as oftheworks then, DivineRevelation. writein Latin, Even thoughthe earlyhumanistswould mainly was to contribute to the breaching the valorization of profaneletters of anotherorderof value,that betweenLatinas the language of the Churchand the vernacular. AlreadywithDante the vernacularhad been canonized poetically. But with the Renaissance, the earlier worksbegan to be drawntogether, as a mutation nowtook founding out of the religio-aesthetic of place. This was to be the shift ordering the modes ofthe humanimagination to the purely aestheticordering, with the riseto centrality narrative ofthenewprofane representations thatwe have come to call "literature"-a secular figurative order that would no longerfunction twinto the as an adjunctand contestatory theological system of figurationbut would gradually become takingits place. hegemonic, Hans Blumenberg has pointedout thatthe counter-exertion to men nearerto God had alreadybegun inthe fourteenth bring century withNicholas of Cusa, whowentas faras was possible to re-form the mode of thinking withinthe traditional its schema, to re-translate internal of the dialogue figure of the layman logic.21 His projection wiser than the theologian,withinthe antithetical concept of wise was paralleledbyongoingtransformations inthesystems ignorance, of figurationof the narrativediscourses, by the projection of carnivalesqueupside down figures. Bakhtin pointsto theexistenceinthese modes ofa dialecticof in the MiddleAges withthe coand rupture, rigidification beginning development of "forms of high literature"together with the contestationof "low folkloric and semi-folkloric forms"thattended towards satire and parody,withthe latter, the dregs of risingfrom society and givingrise to the projectionof subversive"prominent types" such as the rogue,the clown and the fool.These types,while they were to be central to the later developmentof European were also types whose "images go back even further... literature, intothe depthsof a folklore" from the represented "chaos" emerging medievalorderinstituted itselfas such an against whichthe vertical order. ForwhatHabermassees as thecoexistenceofan evolutionary process based on Piaget's analogyoftheontogenesisofthechild-in 31

whichthe human,as it moves into more widelyinclusiveaesthetic of the cognitive structures, begins to divest itselfof the centricities mechanismsof the closed aesthetic ordersof morelocal modes of being-was quite clearlyhere at workin the evolutionof precisely these aesthetic-affective orders which programthe limits of coor identification (Habermas,1979),bymeans of systemsof figuration maintaining systems. group-boundary imagery These newlyprojectedfiguresserved here as the subversive of the boundarydetonating force that began the destructuring systemas itwas imagined/experienced bythe Christianmaintaining ofthe Andtheyinitiated thattransformation medievalGroup-Subject. orderofthe imagination, system"ofthegoverning "imagery religious Work"of that replacing it at the public level withthe "figuration of the now secular imagination thatcan be describedas the ordering of "literature" function Subject" as onlyifwe describethe"imagining a function of thatordering. The psycho-aesthetic structures that sustained the ossified Christian-feudal orderof thingswas the target increasingly from the "chaos" of the margins of these parodicanti-types erupting Theirform of the Jesterheresy withtheirludic weapon of laughter. thattheyclaimedto be "other"in argues,inthe new right lay,Bakhtin and "notmakecommoncause with thefeudalworld, anysingleone of theexisting categories,"since "none ofthese categoriessuits them." the social and stance of "not understanding" Theirparodic laughter of the existingstructures, begins to make visable the logic/illogic that deformedhuman life in the decaying "vulgarconventionality" order whichcanonized its own rigidified a structure feudalstructure, in whichbothits epistemicand in the contextof a new environment The resulting and dysfunctional. aestheticorderswereanachronistic falsehood and duplicityof the governingmode of the cultural imaginationled to a situation in which real life,denied creative became "crude and bestial" (Bakhtin, 1981). directives, imaginative Againstthisfalsehoodthathad "come to saturateall humanrelationships," fabliauxand Schwanke satiricverses, parodic cycles in the such as the as new forms folktraditions, began to clear the ground, of rogues,clowns, and fools as the major novel,withthe antitypes protagonists,carryingover the original carnivalesque inversion thevertical breachedthe interdictions, principle, structuring function, discourse. the "highseriousness" of its self-justifying by parodying The theologicalabsolutismofthe Late MiddleAges,whichhad taken the "simple executivesolution"of repressing any awareness that"causes come to us from manysides" and thathumanslivein a causal world" (Riedl with Kaspar, "multi-linear, multi-reinforcing the solutionof a singleoriginal Cause, made into 1984),had opted for This led the FinalCause, ofwhichthe MaximalGod was theexemplar. which idealism extreme of to an orienting logic" "practico-theoretic world and material bothofthetemporal negatedtheexistence/validity a negationof the"spiritual," ofthecomplementary nature, along with theircausal inputs(RiedlwithKaspar, 1984).Overagainst the "overvalue of this representation" (Ricoeur,1979), the projectionof the 32

now paved the way foran inversion, for figuresof clown/rogue/Fool theworld ofthat"spatio-temporal of the novel'sappropriation world," in "NaturalMan,"the worldin which, consequent withthis mutation the figuration of Self and World,as Hubnerwrites,"Americawas being discovered,a sea routeto India opened up, new fieldsof the naturalsciences and mathematics were being established. And the new wayof seeing."'22Itwas to foran utterly way was beingprepared new way of feeling, Self and World, and a be an utterly of imagining mode of imagination that would no longerfindits referential figurative auctoritas in the great religious schemas and symbols,but in a new referential rather auctoritas,thatof the fictional figurative schemas of the phenomenonwe call "literature." poetic/dramatic Literature in its newrole/ordering and theStudia were, therefunction, whose internal fore,to be twinformsof each other,formsthrough the human,who had hitherto mediation, imaginedits mode of being schemas, would now come to through mythic/theological figurative imagineitself-and to act upon the worldin the mode of thatimagthe great poetic schemas whichrefigured and conination-through the firstformof the secularlycharteredhuman being: the figured worldof its orderof things.For it is not,as Marxthought, the Earthly thatholds the secretofthe projection ofthe HolyFamily. Itis, Family the reverse. rather, The cap and bells of Bakhtin'sparodic figureswas to transform the modes of projection/figuration of Self/Group self and, thereof the mode of Not-The-Self, Chaos to the orderof the entropic fore, the dominant model of Being. They were, then, to refigure the aesthetic order,expandingthe limitsof the boundary-maintaining systemof the We, and its new spatial extracultural space (Uspenskij et al, 1978). In this they were performing an aesthetic function to the who, in turning analogous to that of the originalhumanists, auctoritasof theirpagan legacyto legitimate the heresyof the study of profane letterswhich no longer found its sanction system in in whatthe Spanish humanist, but rather called theology, Sepuilveda, the purely"literary," were to transform the mode of functioning of humancognitive mechanism: our aesthetemes,to coin a phrase,and our epistemes. Once the authoritative of the suprasensory had been dislight as Heideggerpointsout, had to take the empty placed, something, Here the authority of Reason,23 the place of its vanished authority. Reason coded by the Natural Logos of humanismbased on the of a NaturalCausality verified of explanatory principle by the truth movedintothe place of thevanishedauthority. And empirical reality, the configuredmacro-conceptof Natural Causality now took the place of Divine Causality as the OriginalCause, the extra-human source ofthe new principle ofSameness and Difference, expressed in a new structural thatof Reason and its Lack-state. opposition, A centralrhetorical strategy (analyzed by Valesio in another contextas thatofthe topos of iconicity, a topos whichis able to yoke a member of a class with the class of classes, to configure thepartof the whole)24 now projectedthe image of the new menas the imageof 33

Italso projectedthe ratiomorphic apparatusor mode man-in-general. of reason,whichfunctioned to orient theautopoesis ofthisnew mode with the of human being, as isomorphicwith reason-in-general, reason of Nature herself: nature "as life. . burstingforthwith existence" (Valesio, 1980).Itwas a reason ostensiblyattachedto the of the mercantile upperbourgeoisieand newlylandedgentry. figures of Natural of identity Infact,itwas themodeofreasonofthetemplate of the secular human,one which Man, the firstself-representation the auctoritasof the gods would absolutize itselfno longerthrough which stigmatizedany that of a Mono-Logos/Reason, but through of its reason mode of the Logos/Reasonas the Lack-state alternative of Reason-in-general. and, therefore, A shiftnow took place. Since physicalnature,knowledgeof functionin the which had been freed from serving a verifying another mode of order/chaosdynamics of the system-ensemble, would now be installedin its place. The reprehumannature, nature, of degrees of reason beordereddistribution sentationof a naturally be called a homohumangroupsenables whatmight tweendifferent as a by/nature of Sameness/Difference, figured ontologicalprinciple between groups,and could now of superiority/inferiority difference ontoofan infrasensorily as theverifying function proof tautologically caused status-organizing principle,a principle logized,25 naturally than of Noble endowmentof Reason (rather based on differential in the empiricalreality of the order. Blood) and verified dynamically was now of this reason, as reason-in-general, The figuration that effected (Foucault,1971). First, bya series of greatinternments ofthe NewWorld peoples inencomiendasystems.Herebegan thatrewhich Foucault analyzes in his enactmentof Ptolemaic astronomy of the Mad in seventeenth-century book dealing withthe internment was now to France:thatof a new orderof discourse whose function and of Sameness/Difference encode the homo-ontological principle For if,as Foucault the basic structural opposition of order/chaos. rests (as Said explains or identity argues, a society's self-imaging the "rational" whatwas not itself, from further) upon its detachment in response to the ordermustfunction discourse of every "lawfully," the structural opposystemof figuration generatedfrom governing sition of the imagingof Self and Other,to domesticate the reprealone enables the whose mode of difference sentationsof the Other, to be mode ofSameness, expressed inthebonding topos oftheorder, as a mode of conspecificsameness. In other imagined/experienced of the Other must functionin a rulewords, the representation to theexigencies to domesticateitsfiguration-Work manner governed made of discourse whichchartersthe mode of the of the ordering Self. Self/Group to reHence the humanistGin6s de Suptilvedawas the first of the function than in theologicalterms,26 enact in humanistrather of the New World and to fitthe representation Ptolemaicastronomy, was to peoples to the exigencies of a discourse whose function difon the basis of a projectedby/nature theirinternment, legitimate ferencewhichhad ordainedthattheyshould be "naturalslaves." His 34

the empiricalreality of the cultural "proofs"of this were takenfrom differences different oftwovastly modes of life, a difference whichhe definedas a hierarchy, coding his symbolicmode of logic in a series of rhetoricalantitheses. The New World peoples were homunculi (littlemen)whencomparedto the man,the magnanimous Spaniards; as womento men/children to parents/monkeys to men.The proofof this was that they lacked Lettersand written monuments to their The factthattheyoffered humansas a sacrificeto their history. gods provedthattheyLacked NaturalReason.27 Uspenskijet al pointout thatthe expansion of any sphereof cultural organizationleads to the expansion of a sphere of nonIfthe "narrow worldof Helleniccivilization" had its cororganization. respondingnarrowsphere of encircling"barbarians,"the spatial of ancientMediterranean civilization was accompaniedbythe growth of the "extracultural world."Withthe shiftof Mediterranean growth man into a planetary the Greek Barbarianswould be redimension, defined not by theirlack of the figuredas the homunculi-natives, Greek mode of order,but by theirLack-stateof the firstformof secular humanreason,projectedas isomorphic withNaturalReason: as the irrational rationalorderof the Chaos, then,to the naturally human. The internment ofthe NewWorld peoples wouldbe followed by that of the Africanlineage groups, homogenizedunder the commercialtradename of "negro."This objectification ofthehumanwas caused by the Curse justifiedat firstin religioustermsas divinely would be made to the humanist conplaced on Ham. Soon the shift determined difference of cept of NaturalCausality,of a by/nature mode of culturalreason was seen as a reason, in whichthe African in the plantationsystem as slave non-reason;and his internment as him/her labor,as beingcarriedout forthe purposeof rationalizing an inferior mode of being in need of rationalhumanbaptism. The great internments of the encomienda/plantation archiwithin the internal pelago was followedin Europe itself, logic of the same ordering thatof the Mad as theopposed icon of discourse,with that Defect of Natural Reason, which mnenomically equated the secular humanistmode of reason withreason-in-general.28 Interned with themad werealso thejobless and thepoor.The threecategories, the homunculi/native/negro, the Mad, the poor and the jobless, functionedto express what might be called a ratio-ontological to express, and empirically principleof Sameness and Difference: the rhetorical of a NaturalCausality whichdifverify macro-Figure ferentiated humangroupsalong a continuum of different degrees of a differentiation which was part of a universallaw of rationality, Naturebeyondhumancontrol.29 NaturalReason and the degrees of its possession-and this was verified by one's position in the social structure-functioned, as Noble Blood had done, as the criterion forthe status therefore, of the order.In this orderof figuration the "negro,"alstratigraphy thoughequated withthe missing linkbetween Man and Ape, was the NegativeOrderon the basis of his made, in the Linneaansystem,
35

lack of Reason. While his Lack of Reason excluded him from as the Europeancould,he was nevertheless incorhimself, governing poratedintothe same table of being,the schema ofthestructural opand of the discourses genepositionbetweenReason/Lack-of-reason its relatedClassical episteme.30 ratedfrom A mutation would occur, however, withthe transumption31 of In the principle form. ofSameness/Difference to a newbio-ontological thisnewform thatwouldunderlie theexpansionofthe Industrial Age, as the Iconofa Defectof function thefigure ofChaos wouldno longer the the riseof purely middleclass culture, NaturalReason, since with ofthe Fullnessof beingwas nowto be thatofthe Defector Lack-state now made Lack of a mode of human being, the Indo-European, withBeing humanitself. isomorphic As Mosse shows, in his bookon the Nazi holocaust and on the enablingdiscourses thatmade the holocaust possible, the Figureof the Semite and the "Negro" now in the context of this shift, as the Chaos to the new Normof the human; as the functioned negativeantitypesto the "aesthetic criteria"of the Greeks,whose classical sculpture was now made isomorphic,phylogenetically speaking, with being human. And an entire range of the based on the equation made bythe pseudoscience heroes/heroines, betweenthe Ideal externalphysiognomy and moralinof phrenology Ivanhoeto StarWars,was nowbeingput nocence and moralevil,from in place. Intheoverallrangeofthisbio-aesthetic systemoffiguration, wouldnow come to be experienced the Negro/Semite's physiognomy as equated withmoralevil (Mousse, 1978) and, therefore, lynchable,
exterminable.32

For withthe rise and expansion of the Industrial Age and the Revoofthe groupswho spearheadedthe Industrial riseto hegemony a transumption of humanism's"naturalMan" took place. The lution, new template of identitywas based on the imaginingof the on the analogy of a livingorganism.As the State Self/Group-Self became a service functionof the new regulatory activityof the on the economic life-the expressionof the conceptionof Life/Death analogy of a biological organism,impelledby the refleximpulseof hunger and of self-preservation-33-the former Reasons-of-State political Logos now gave way to a new Reasons-of-the-organicthe organoppositionsgoverned community Logos whose structural izationof knowledgein the new epistemeor ratiomorphic apparatus. mode of humanbeingwas Itwas a Logos inwhichthe Indo-European the discourse of philogistsand literary canonized through scholars, such as Schlegel and his pupilLassen,34 as theexpressionofthemost ofthatbiogeneticelan vitalthatwas the "organic"realization perfect being of its peoples. This was incarnatedin the great superior/will thatwas as unique to theirbeingas language family Aryan/Sanskrit the itselfand themfrom whichdistinguished was the epic literature At this level Semite Other.35 morerootless egoistic, non-epic-owning of Othernessthe "negro"was noteven considered,since he was not norto partakein imaginedeven to have languages worthstudying, so total was his mode of NiggerChaos. culture, 36

this topos of iconicity The social behaviorsthatwereto verify which yoked the Indo-European mode of being to human being in to theexemplary general,and the new middleclass modelof identity Normof this new "empirico-transcendental doublet,"man (Foucault, as ifa "naturalbeing"),wouldbe carried 1984)(imagined/experienced out bythe complementary non-discursive practicesof a new wave of of nativelabors in new plantationsorders(native great internments wage labor), and by the massacres of the colonial era36-leading and in the logically to their Summa in the Auchwitz/Belsen archipelagoes. Gulag/Cambodia formsof segregatingthe Ultimate Throughall this,different Chaos that was the Black-from the apartheidt of the South to the inbothNorth ofthevote,and and South,to their deprivation lynchings in an inferior confinement secondaryeducationalsphere,to the logic of the jobless/ghetto/drugs/crime/prison archipelagoesof today-ensuredthat,as Uspenskijet al note,the"activecreation"ofthetypeof modelneeds for the replication of itsown Chaos, whichthedominant system, would continue. It thus averted any effortto find the ceremonieswhichcould wed thestructural the oppositions, liberating Black from his Chaos function, since thisfunction was the keyto the of being.As Las Casas had arguedagainst dynamicsof its own order the latter'shumanisttheory that human Sepilveda-when refuting sacrificecarriedout bythe New Worldpeoples was proof of the fact oftheir Lack of NaturalReason and,therefore, thatitwas justto make waragainst themto protect the innocents whoweresacrificed and to take overtheirterritory-"to sacrificeinnocentsforthe good of the is not opposed to naturalreason, is not something commonwealth abominableand contrary to nature, in butis an error thathas itsorigin natural reason itself."37 It is an error, then, not in the subjects, but in the ratiomorphic speaking/behaving apparatus generic to the human,the cognitivemechanismthat is the "most recentsuperstructure ina continuum ofcognitive processes as old as lifeon thisplanet,"and,as such,"the least testedand refined against the real world"(Riedl/Kaspar, 1984). And it is onlywithscience, as Riedland Kaspar (quotingRomanSexl) observe,thatthereis everany true "victoryover the ratiomorphic apparatus"-such as that of Galileo's and his telescope over the abductive logic of the if/then sequence of inference dictated behind the backs of their consciousness to the Aristoteliandoctors of philosophyas the speakingsubjects of the Christian-medieval systemensemble. II. Re-enacting The NewStudies and theStudia as a Science Heresy: of HumanSystems The mainproposalhereis thatthe calls made inthe 1960s and 1970s for new areas/programsof studies, was, although nonin the contextof consciously so at the time,calls whichre-enacted ourtimesa parallelcounter-exertion, a parallelJester'sheresy to that of the Studia's. But because of our non-consciousnessof the real 37

dimensionsof whatwe wereabout,we asked at first onlyto be incorporated into the normativeorder of the present organizationof knowledgeas add-ons, so to speak. We became entrapped,as a result,in Bantustanenclaves labelled "ethnic"and "gender"and/or studies."These enclaves thenfunctioned, as David Bradley "minority from to alter alia, to exemptEnglishDepartments notes,inter having theirexistingdefinition of Americanliterature. Even more,these enclaves functioned to exempt the callers forthe new studies from us, withrespectto takingcognizance of the anomalythatconfronted a definition of American literature which lawlikelyfunctionedto exclude not only Blacks, but all the other groups whose "diverse modalitiesof protest"(Detienne,1979) in the 1960s and 1970s had fueledthe call fornew studies. Thomas Kuhnpointsout thatthe recognition of anomalies is the first step whichleads to changes in the paradigmsof the natural sciences38And inthesame context the linguistic scholarWhatmough has arguedthathumanobserversare partsofthe cosmos whichthey observe, that since all the knowledgethat orders our behavioris such knowledge musteitherbe these humanobservers, gained from This knowledge solipsisticor reducemanto a partofhis environment. not to be trustedunless the observerin his role as is, therefore, knower finds the means to convert himself into an "external observer."Amongthe means whichhe proposes is the takingof the thanthe speaking "all pervading notedin language,"rather regularity Andthese regularities subject,as the object of investigation. appear the heirarchy of language,from "all along the road through everyday and homily,poetry, chit chat throughlaw, and religions,liturgy science and philosophyto logic and mathematics."39 'literature,' to make use of he goes on, willenable the knower These regularities, to treat whathe calls themathematike techne,whichenables her/him forexample,accordingto theirgrammars languages like chemistry, as if man, i.e. the speaking/thinking/representing of regularities, thatof however: remained, subject,"did notexistat all." One problem ofthese regularities. theperception are, For,because the regularities so to speak, "builtin"to thediscourses,theusers ofthese discourses cannot normally isolate the existence of these regularities 1967). And, as Foucault remindsus, this problemis (Whatmough, "truediscourse" of maintaining applicable notonlyforthe boundary fromthe nineteenth-century the positivisminherited episteme, but also forthe eschatologyof positivism's counter-discourse, Marxism, thesame ground bothgeneratedfrom (Foucault,1973)ofa materialist of the post-atomic the condition and each dialectically metaphysics, of the of the "grammarof regularities" sovereignty dysfunctional other. The anthropologist, Legesse, has pointed to the extent to whichwe are trappedin the ordering "categories and prescriptions" thatthe liminal of ourepistemicorders.He notes,however, groupsof any order are the ones most able to "free us" fromthese presince itis theywho existentially experiencethe "injustice scriptions, of in structure" inherent ordering (Legesse, 1973),that is, in the very 38

of regularities" the orderwhichdictatesthe "grammar which through as isomorphic the systemicsubjects perceivetheirmode of reality withrealityin general. The normative categories of any order-for example the aristocratic category of European feudalism-are normative oftheirlivedexperienceis preciselybecause the structure with the representation thattheordergives itself of itself. isomorphic The liminal categorieslikethose ofthe bourgeoisieinthefeudalorder ofthings, on theotherhand,experiencea structural contradiction between their lived experience and the grammarof representations whichgeneratethe mode of reality the parameters of by prescribing that"reality"intobeing. collectivebehaviorsthat dynamically bring The liminalframeof reference, unlikethe normative, can therefore, whichperprovidewhat Uspesnkijet al call the "outerview,"from of boundaryand structurespective the grammarsof regularities discourses are perceivable, and Whatmough's "external maintaining observer'sposition"made possible. What the calls forNew Studies at first overlooked, however, was precisely the regularities whichemergedintoviewinthe wake of the "diverse modalities of protest" whose non-coordinated yet now brought intounconcealedness-not only spontaneous eruption natureof the exclusion of the diverseprothe lawlikerule-governed as group-subjects from any access to the testinggroups/categories means of representation, butalso the regularities of the exclusionof their frames of reference and historical/cultural past from the normative an exclusionso consistentas to be clearly also curriculum, This consistencywas reinforced rule-governed. bythe emergenceof the equation betweenthe group/categories excluded from the means of representation and the ratios of theirdegrees of socio-economic in the worldoutside. empowerment/disempowerment The dynamicpresenceof rule-governed correlations whichdetermined rulesof in/exclusion, was, however, onlyperceivablebythe calls forNew Studies,calls like"thediversemodalnon-orchestrated itiesof protest"inthe Greekcitystates analysed byDetienne, which, by breachingparallel dietaryand other rules, not only called the orderof the city-state intoquestion, ontologyof the religio-political but made perceivable,throughwhat they protested against, the Order/Chaos the founding oppositionalcategorieswhichunderpinned boundary/structure maintainingdynamics of the polis (Detienne, 1979). These regularities to a fundamental at pointed questionwhich, the time,remainedunasked. It had to do withthe anomalous implicationthattheyweredetermined theconbyruleswhichtranscended scious intention of the academics who enacted the decision-making of processes as to whatto in/exclude, just as the rules of inference Galileo's doctors of philosophywere dictated by the ratiomorphic of an orderof apparatus or rationalworldview based on the a priori value betweenthe imperfect terrestrial and the crystalline perfection of the lunar realm: the Order/Chaos opposition of the autopoetic ensemble. What,in this dynamicsof the Christianmedieval-system the rules which determinedthe decisioncase, then, determined
39

withintegrity scholars,working making processes bywhichindividual and according to the criteriaof objective standards, in/excluded? Whatdetermined whatshouldand should notbe defined as American Fiction,and the mode of measure of the "objective" standards of scholars? individual The questionwas notto be asked, however, until theafter side of the experienceof disillusionwhichthe callers all underwent and which David Bradleytraces in his article,"Black and Americanin 1982." For itwas to be a recognition, made byus all on theotherside of that experience, of the existence of objective limits to the of Blacks intothe normative orderof being/knowing of incorporation the presentorder,that would lead to our further of the recognition need foran epistemologicalbreak. Bradleywas one of a group of Blacks forwhomAffirmative the "inbuilt bias" of the dynamics distribution Action,by countering of the order, had worked. The interference of Affirmative Actionwith the normativefunctioning of the order with respect to the distribution-atthegroupcategory level-of unequal ratiosof access to educational empowerment, had enabled Bradley,togetherwith a to breachtherule-governed nature groupofyoungBlacks likehimself, of the proscription whichconfinedBlacks-as-a-group to a secondary relative educational orbit, to their Whitepeers-as-a-group. Bradleyat his father's to do everythe time,observing greatjoy,had determined and his own private to provehis father's hope true.His father's thing hope was thatat long last Blacks wereto be allowed to breakout of the secondaryorbitto whichtheirlives and dreams had been conand ifthishope wouldnotbe realizedintimeforhis own lifeto fined, be graced bythe change, it would in timeat least be realizedforhis son's. Bradley'sown hope had been thatonce Blacks wereincludedin vast numbers in the highest levels of highereducation, and had so workedhardand provedthemselves, theywould be so numerous, have to be no longerthe tokenexception,thattheywouldeventually ofskin."However, other thanby"the uniform bycriteria distinguished he experiencedon the campus both the overtand covertformsof thatthe whichmetthebreaching ofthe interdiction anathematization calls the black presence-as-a-group implied(since what Hofstadter of the "representational system" "America"'40is categorystructure based on the dynamics of the contradictionbetween individual These experiences slowly stripped equality and group heirarchy). change inthe ordering away the illusionof any fundamental of group The shouts of "Nigger!Nigger!"in the citadel of reason in relations. the the heartof the non-redneck campus, the phoned bombthreats, defenselessness of the Black studentsin the face of a mindfragile of hands of concernedLiberal the ineffective less hostility, wringing Whites, were paralleled by the more discreet acts of partition of whose proscription administrators, (Detienne,1979) by university starvedBlack CultureCenter,always a whitewashed the financially house to be reached bya scrambleup a muddy bank,mainly rotting always on the netheredge of campus, once again gave the ruleof the game away. governedregularity 40

admitted Blacks would be allowed on the campus as a group, to have even a culture,as long as this "culture" and its related as theextra-cultural enclave studies could be made to function space, to a White in relation, no longerto a Wasp, but now moreinclusively Euroamericanintra-cultural space; as the American,normatively to the latter'snew self-ordering. mode of Chaos imperative (The reis the non-consciousexadapted WesterncultureCore Curriculum pression of this more "democratizing"shiftfromWasp to Euro.) theorder ofvalue had been effected, Indeedonce thismarginalization withthe categoryhomeostasis returning terms, recycledin different the abuse and the bomb threatsceased. to its "built in normalcy," Order and Chaos were once more in theirrelationalinterdefining of Sameness principle places, stablyexpressingthe bio-ontological and Difference ofthe present as the rule-governed discourseof order, the physicoGalileo's doctors of philosophyfunctionedto verify on whichtheChristian ontologicalmode of Sameness and Difference medievalorderrested beforethe Studia and Copernicus,beforethe had pulled the Jester's heresy of the figuresof rogue/clown/fool, down to self-representation "high seriousness" of its self-justifying earth. Bradleynow recognizedthat he had been wrongto hope that Black lives,from his father's to his own,had to "runalong the same line.., one that rises and falls like a sine wave," one that is "a not of a mathematical relationbetweensides and graphedfunction between Blacks and American angles but of a social relationship society itself."Sometimesthe line could be "on the positiveside of the base line,"at othertimeson the negativeside. Iftheeffects were the function had always to remain the same. Thus his hope different, forthe nextgeneration of Blacks, in this case forhis younggodson, would have to be cut downto realisticsize. His hope could onlynow be that bythe timehis godson came of age, the "graphof black will once again be on the upswing,"givinghim,as Bradleyhimself had timeto gain some strength, some knowledge, some color had,"a little to hold inside himself."For thatwould/could be, "all the hope there is." Yet the beginning of hope also lay here.The recognition of the rhetoric" of the Liberal regularities pointedoutside the "functional creed to the existence of objective limitsand, therefore, of laws of of their which, beyond the conscious intentionalities functioning subjects-White or Black-determined the limits to the order's normative of those whose lives in a "free"country had incorporation to be made to serveas the "graphedfunction" of the boundary mainof Chaos, the Not-Us. tainingsystem,as its markers The Spanish historian Castro had notedtheexistence Americo of this systemicfunction of Blacks in the comparisonhe made between theirfunction and that of Jew and Moor in sixteenth-century convertedChristiansand, therefore, Spain. Although "accordingto the gospel and the sacramentsof the Church," a partof the forming and His Church," these categorieshad been "mysticalBodyof Christ as beingof unclean blood and heretical descent (i.e.,not stigmatized 41

Theirproscribedlives-they were excluded from Spanish-Christian). jobs; many were burnt at the stake by the Inquisition for as the mode of Difference from "heresy"-enabled themto function whichthe new secularizing oflimpieza, whichcame bonding principle to constitute the "boundary system"of the Statal Group maintaining Subject of monarchical Spain, could be generatedas an ontologized of Sameness. HereAm6rico Castro pointedto the regularity principle of the parallelbywhichthe subordination ofthe livesofthe categoryto their"grasped function" is repeated in the bearers of difference lives of presentday AmericanBlacks, who are todayre-enacting and "livinga drama similarto that of the Spanish moriscos and Jews," even though according to the Constitution they formpart of the American We (Americo Castro,1977) or group-Subject. did the by Onlywiththeircompletestrategicmarginalization enclave studies beginto rethink their function: to now bantustanized grasp a connectionwiththatof the LiminaloutsiderJester'srole of the originalStudia,a roleto whichtheywereheir.This became clear as theybegan to take as theirparallel objects of inquiry the representationswhichhad been made of theirgroups bythe orderof discourse of mainstream scholarship;as theybegan to findthatthese too, functionedaccording to across the board, representations, objectiverules. were the What was here revealed,when taken all together, ofthe "figuring" excludedseries,with thedisofan Other regularities to constitute themas a "humanspecies" totemic course functioning operator which paralleled that of the "animal species" totemic oftraditional Neolithic societies as wellas theplanetary grid operator of the Christianmedieval order.This discourse, then,operated to inthe function of Ptolemaicastronomy servethesame extra-cognitive MiddleAges. Itre-enacted thecelestial/terrestrial physico-ontological in new terms:this time in terms of a bioprincipleof Difference of Sameness/Difference, expressed, not in the ontological principle but in the orderof value of the Christian-medieval order, Spirit/Flesh of our own. mode of Order/Chaos rational/irrational the group-women, natives,niggers-whateverthe Whatever of the tropics-the ordering principle category-the Orient,Africa, of an ontologicalorderof the discourse was the same: the figuration and value between the groups who were markersof "rationality" Andtheanalyses which of its Lack-State. those whowerethemarkers disof these ordering had begun to perceivethe lawlikeregularities Woolf's observationof the compulsive courses went fromVirginia of insistence by "angrymale professors"on the mental inferiority CarterG. Woodson's diagnosis (1935)of the lawlike women,through inAmerican schools distorted inwhichthecurriculum manner history and the Blacks as so as to representthe Whites as everything to Aime Cesaire's Discourse on Colonialism,which again nothing, the past withwhichthe colonizersrewrote diagnosed the regularities and the colonized to show themselves as havingdone everything Said's dissection Abdel Malek's/Edward and, morerecently nothing, of Orientalism.41 What began to come clear was of the phenomenon 42

of rules of figuration, the reality of the reflex automaticfunctioning parallel to those of Galileo's doctors of philosophy,which went of the objectivelyrationalscholar, rules beyond the intentionality was thatof the ratiomorphic whichthenrevealedthatthe objectivity apparatus or cognitivemechanism of our presentorganizationof the liminal nonone bywhichwe are all, including Others, knowledge, consciouslygoverned. A parallel suspicion of something automatic functioning beyond the conscious control of the human had impelled the exchange of lettersbetween Einsteinand Freud,which was to be published underthe title, WhyWar?. In the early decades of the Einsteinhad written Freud,asking ifhis newdisciplinecould century provide some hope with respect to, and in the context of, the wars. Freudhad reaccelerationof the phenomenon of inter-human butthatas yethe of the instincts sponded thattherewas his theory had no overallanswer. Psychology as a discipline,however, was to confront the question by focussingon the connectionbetweenthe and the processes of socializationwhich of nationalism phenomenon causal factor. Andin exacerbatednationalist allegiances as a primary his History MichelFoucaultsuggestedthatwith theshift ofSexuality, from the monarchical order ofthings to thebourgeoisorderinits pure state-the transpositionfroma governing "symbolicof figurative inwhich blood" to whatmight be called a "metaphorics of naturality" the bourgeoisie comes to image its boundary-maintaining GroupSubject systemon the analogy of a living organism-the imperative oftheself-preservation ofthe"naturalcommunity" race, (nation-Volk, as a "biological" Body,had led to culture) metaphorically ontologized the accelerationof wars betweenmen who were now led to imagine as "naturalbeings."'42 forthe first timein humanhistory, themselves, RecentlyLewis Thomas,the biologist,has again focussed on the connection between nationalism-which he sees as an blindalleyfor thehumanas a species-and thethreat of evolutionary nuclear extinction. Like Einsteinearlier,Thomas has glimpsedthat hope, if it is to exist, would have to be found in a new orderof Andhe suggests thatthedisciplinesthatwereconcerned knowledge. withthe problemsof humanbehavior, unalthoughstillin a groping certainstage, are the onlyones capable of providing an answer to mankind'squest forsocial hope; that one day therewould emerge fromthese uncertainattempts,a "solid" discipline as "hard" as physics,plagued "as physicsstill is withambiguities"yetwithnew rules "and new ways of gettingthingsdone, such as forinstance warfareall at gettingrid of patrioticrhetoricand thermonuclear once."43 The proposal I am makingis that such a disciplinecan only of knowledge, as the re-enacting of emergewithan overallrewriting the originalheresyof a Studia, reinvented as a science of human the liminal ofthe"base" (Dewey,1950)new systems,from perspective definition ofthemselves Studies,whose revelatory heresylies intheir the Chaos roles in whichtheyhad been defined-Black away from from Negro, Chicano from Mexican-American, Feminists from 43

etc. Forthese have revealedtheconnectionbetweentheway Women, we identify ourselves and the way we act upon/know the world. They have made clear thatwe are governed inthewaywe know theworld by the templatesof identity or modes of self-troping speciation,about which each human system auto-institutesitself, effectingthe of stable reproduction dynamicsof an autopoetics,whose imperative has hitherto transcendedthe imperatives of the humansubjects who collectively put it intodynamicplay.The proposedscience of human decentersthe systemicsubject. Instead,ittakes systems,therefore, as the object of its inquiry the modes of symbolic self-representation (Creutzfeld, 1979), about whicheach human systemauto-institutes the modes of self-troping whichthe Subject itself, rhetoricity through actualizes its modeof beingas a living In (individual/collective) entity. addition,it takes the ratiomorphic apparatus or episteme, which exists as the enablingrationalworldviewof the self-troping mode of inthe comparative contextin whichit is beingas an object of inquiry definable as one of the cognitivemechanisms determined by the than by the phylogeny of purely "psychogeny"of the humanrather biologicalorganisms. Takingthe connectionthatThomas makes between"patriotic and "thermo-nuclear rhetoric" warfare" as a keylinkage, a science of humansystemswilltake mostcrucially as an object of its inquiry the modes of cultural imagination of human systems-Jerison's of the "imagerysystems"-together with the laws of functioning coded mode of figuration, which, with its internal rhetorically mediationof the mimesis of Desire (Girard,1965) and of Aversion (Fanon, 1967), orients the normative seeking/avoiding/knowing behaviorsof the systemicsubjects. For it is thisgoverning systemof themodeofself-definition whichintegrates figuration generatedfrom withthe neurophysiological of the brain, thatfunctions as machinery the shared integrative notonlythe mode of mechanism, determining of mind"oftheorder, consciousness or "world butserving also, at the leveloftheorder, to stabilizethe responseto the aesthetico-affective of Desire forall thatis theSelf/Order and ofAversion to target-stimuli all thatis the Chaos of the Self,the Death of its Life.It is bythereby securing shared and predictably functioning endogenous 1977), of the normative waveshapes in the brain (Thatcher/John, thatthe systemof figuration sets limits to that Subject of the order, its Self/Group-Self to the and,therefore, Subject's mode of imagining that it can have of its world. knowledge A science ofhumansystemswhich takes the laws offiguration of humansystems as its objects of inquiry must,therefore, adopt a than categorizedapproachto its subject. In orderto rather synthetic laws of functioning, it must study their rhetor-neurophysiological and the natural betweenbrain/minds, above all breachthedistinction the humansciences. Forone of its majorhypothesesis thatsystems and theirgroup-speciating of figuration essentially Figuration-Work the shared governing constitute rhetor-neurophysiological programs whichhumanGroupSubjects realize or abductionschemas through themselvesas boundary systems. maintaining 44

These governing programs-which rhetor-neurophysiological can often function as regressive defects of social fantasy 1977), as in the case of limpieza de sangre and of (Thatcher/John Aryaness, as well as of an ontologized "whiteness"-are the coded mechanisms which determinethe limitsof the figuratively as in the case systems.Theythenfunction, "boundary-maintaining" of the Americanorder,to set objective limits(such as those to and to the possible of its fiction; Bradley'shopes) to the definition Centerat the nether ofthe Black Culture edge ofthe non-proscription of configuration campus, as the physicalexpressionof the rhetorical definition of itself. the mode of chaos to the order's self-troping Hence the paradoxof the majorproposalthatwe make:thatit is the humanities whichshould be the umbrellasite forthe transliterary realization of a science of humansystems. disciplinary The archaeologist McNeill argues that the representational arts have played a centralrole in all humanorders,reachingfrom ones, and simpletribalsocieties to our morecomplexcontemporary this role has been that of explainingthe world not in terms of These but of religious schemas fromsome mythology. factuality schemas-the phenomenondefined by Bateson as the informing fantasy, byWinchas the schemas whichencode the morphogenetic order's conception of Life/Death-once in place, functionas the "independentlyreal" (Winch, 1970) for that society, orienting and the humanities behaviors.McNeillfurther argues that"literature ingeneral,"as the modern form ofthese representational arts,should be "studied objectivelyfromthe outside" just as ethnographers wouldinvestigate societies" (McNeill, "the parallelartsintribal 1981). Ifthese propositions have validity, the majorparadoxwouldseem to be thatthe literary as theywereorganizedinthe context humanities, of the nineteenth century's re-orderingof the episteme-a framein whichthey still function-were conceptual-organizational set up precisely to guardagainst anysuch heretical co-identification. It was a framethat posited the "civilized,"definedby its havinga written definedbyits Lack; human literature, against the "primitive," groups studiable fromthe externalobserver's position of Western seeable anthropologists against the West's "nativemodelof reality" the limitsof its governing by its nativesubjects within episteme as withreality itself isomorphic (and its literary (Legesse, 1974).A reality artifacts)then, withoutthe possibilityof an external observer's of the conposition,withthe latterungraspableas a unique variant tinuum of the representational arts commonto all modes of humankind. Since the 1960s,however, with the adventof structuralism and of deconstruction, studies have become the disciplinemost literary aware oftheproblem ofthe"external ofhowto find a metaobserver"; to step outside the language whichcould enable the humanobserver "normative domain" pathos" of the orderof discourse of the "figural (Norris, 1982).The dimensionsof this breakmustbe seen in the contextofthe normative orderagainstwhichittransgressed. As Foucault points out, with the mutationof the episteme in the nineteenth 45

and the reorganization of the systemof knowledgewhose century, new function was to constitute "man" as an "empiricostudies came to play a specific transcendentaldoublet," literary in the overall schema of the new episteme (Foucault, role/function and of its conceptionof 1973). For in the new systemof figuration whichman was imaginedas a "naturalbeing"-"liteLife/Death-in index of the rature"came to functionas the transcendentalized degree of "Culture" which the biological heredityof the Group inthenew to have led itto achieve. ForCulture, Subject was imagined episteme,nowtookthe place thatReason had playedintheClassical episteme, as the index of the degree of that human being which of in the contextof the program of prejudgments "knew"Self/World of the Groupthe new rationalworldview; as the index,therefore, value,the value whichenables itto Subject's ratioof bio-ontological of less endowed human transcend the mere physical materiality GroupSubjects. was the highest maniIn this projected schema literature festation of langauge, as differing languages (e.g., Schlegel's languages versusthenon-organic "organic"and noble Indo-European and egoistic Semitic)were now the indexof the superioror inferior willthat Willor elan vitalof differing peoples, of "the fundamental keeps a wholepeople alive and gives itthepowerto speak a language was the solelyto itself"(Foucault,1973).And"Literature" belonging of this defining language,of the collectivedynamic veryincarnation as incarnatedin its poetry, drama, impulseof a people represented in a word in its "high" Culturewhichexpressed the unique fiction, of a particular self-transcendence people. as philology'ssubject, language became more and Further, more knowable;literature as the Incarnation of transcendencewas as havingno otherlaw,except thatof "affirming now represented its existence." Thus as the transcendent own precipitous expressionof of literature, as such, theGroupSelf,studiedin nationaldepartments literature became more and more impenetrable to knowledge.No to do withvalues as inthe eighteenth century longerhavinganything that of ideas (Foucault, its discourse became totallyunyokedfrom all otherforms set apartfrom 1973).Andits narrative representations, of discourse, were now to be deciphered-ratherthan cognized as within whatde Man taste and sensibility, artifacts/powerfacts-with definesas the "ethical coercion of theirnormative pathos" (Norris, 1982). is comThe humanist, Blackham,arguedthatwhileliterature of thestudy prisedofworksinwhichmanmakes an object of himself, theobjects ofthe natural these objects, unlike sciences, can be of no truthsabout since they can provide"no formulable public utility to "humanize"by their man,"that,rather, studywas insteadintended of Man in his Works."This formulation enablingthe "contemplation studies had been precisely expresses the role in which literary order ofthenineteenth-century intheknowledge "interned" episteme. thatithad of its irrelevance, Andfrom thiswouldgrowthe conviction "available to theneeds of knowledge to the kind to contribute nothing of mankind." 46

of American Here,too, can be seen the logic of the definition Fiction, since the contemplationof Man in his Works was the of the natural/national Group Subject in its works. contemplation now functionedas the transcendentexpression of the Literature system which set itself Group Subject as a boundary-maintaining apart fromthat which was Not-the-Self, demarcatingthe Group Subject from the Chaos of the merely physical animality of those-the rawto its cooked, the natureto its culture-who had not attainedto such an expressionby reason of an innately determined of difference. Thus those groups who were the biogeneticprinciple markers of its mode of Natureto its mode of Culture had, figuratively and logically, to be excluded from any such co-definition.44 Here,too, a regularity appears betweenthe exigencies of the rules of definition/exclusion and of the exigencies of the figuring of the Other(Said, 1975) in each humanorderof discourse. For ifthe of the Other exigencies of the lattermustdomesticatethe figuration to the structuring of the specific modality logic of the Order/Chaos humansystem,the exigencyof the former, thatis, to defineitselfby whatit is not,is quite clearlycarriedout bythe detachingitselffrom definition of AmericanLiterature. Hegel's "analysis" of the "negro," in his The Philosophyof World History,as "the natural man in his completelywild and untamed state," is to the point. Since "nothingharmoniouswith humanity [was] to be found in his character,"so that even if the Mohammedan had managed to bring himwithin the rangeof religion the "negro's lack of self control"made him culture,leftto himself, or culture." As we noteinthisdiscourse, "impossibleof development Lack-of-Culture has takenthe place of Lack-of-Reason as the Chaos state of the new order, as inthe royaldynasticorderof IronAge East Africain which Lack-of-the-Bakama-cult had taken the place of the earliertemplate of identity, as thenewfiguration Lack-of-the-Bacwezi, of the conception of Life/Death, the conception whose laws of Order/Chaos are universally figuration applicable to humansystems. If the Hegelian discourse functionsto fitthe Black to the of a bioontologicalprinciple of exigencies of expressingthe a priori Sameness and Difference, it is within the same governing laws of and its internal figuration logic that the Black CultureCenterwas to existon the nether as proscribed edge ofthecampus. Itfunctioned the targetstimuli of aversion, withrespectto the Euroamerican order at the centerof the campus, whichis thenenabled to function as the of desire. The relation, object stimuli duallyat empirical functioning and at valorizing levels,ifstablykeptinphase, ensuresthestable production of the same shared endogenous waveshapes, in Black studentsas wellas Whites-the same sharednormative seeking/valubehaviors.Hence the paradox that,afterthe ing,avoiding/devaluing turbulence of the 1960s and the 1970s the Black CultureCenters in theirnether-edge-of-the-campus to enable the recyclplace function rather thanracial terms) of the Order/Chaos ing(in cultural dynamics ofthesystem-ensemble. Ineffect to return it theyfunctioned/function to the in-phase coherence of a category-structure in which Black would remain to White, Afro-to Euro-,non-Western cultures to 47

as the Bacwezi to the Bakama ofthe IronAge royaldynasty. Western, Since the proscription is effected and keptin playbya governing mode of the cultural imaginationinduced by the rhetorical of its abduction schema or strategies of the Figuration-Work fantasy(Bateson, 1979), it is only the disciplineof morphogenetic role is orderedby this very literary scholarship,whose normalizing fromthe schema, that possesses the rhetoricaltechne, inherited the long practiceof heresyof the Studia as well as from founding with the figurative and fiction, notonlyto take working logicof poetry our governingmodes of figuration and their feats of "semantic butalso to re(Maranda,1980)as the objects of inquiry, engineering" veal the laws of human behavioras that behavior is ordered by schemas: the laws of human systems, projected verbal-rhetorical whose structuring Order/Chaos oppositionsare the humanversionof what Dawkins calls the universally applicable replicatorunits or function to absosystemiccodes (Dawkins,1983)45whicheverywhere lutize the modes of our always rhetorical"natures"; the natures whose bondingtopoi determine how we think about Self/World. As Norris of pointsout,this keyquestionof the metaphoricity a proposal which at once re-enactsthe heresyof the our thought, and philosophy, had been originalhumanists'equation of rhetoric raised quitesome timeago byI.A.Richards. The latter had pointed out was metaphoric, thatall thought thatan attempt shouldbe proposing made to secure a "discussable science" which could develop the of this withrespectto humanknowledge. The problem implications Norris thatRichardsoverlooked, however, argues,was thatof finding a metalanguage by whichone "could step outside the limitsof the domainand surveyits peculiarcontours"(Norris, 1982). figural Piaget pointsout thatthe child moves out of the stage of his in whichhe reduces the object to his perbody-egobound centricity betweenhow he sees ceptionof it,onlywhenhe experiencesfriction the object and how others see it. The proposal here is that the positingof an "externalobserver"withrespect to the inside of the can be effected the domain"ofeach humanorder byadopting "figural bootstrapmodel offeredby some quantum physicists.This model of thatwhichis observedfrom many envisages the bringing together different observerpositions,enablingeach to extendand to cancel out elementsof the other.In this contextit can be seen that it was the differing perspectivesof onlywhenthe observationsmade from all those who called fornew areas of Studies werebrought together, of solipsismand to thateach groupwas able to escape its own form and commonfeaturespointing to thefunctioning observeregularities of rules of discourse beyondthe conscious awareness of the discursiveSubject, rules whichwere "built in" and therefore normally invisible. observerpositions yet all These observations,from differing the normative discourse generatedfrom to a rule-governed pointing observer position of mainstreamscholarship,could now begin to to althoughlimited provideit-and in this sense, Said's Orientalism, thatwouldenable one aspect, was an Event-withthe kindof friction 48

as the it to become conscious of the relativity of its own viewpoint viewpointof the ratiomorphic apparatus of a specific templateof humanidentity. The spearheadingof this thrust towardsan externalobserver positionwill be necessarilycarriedout by those Liminalcategories who existentially experiencethe mode of Chaos to the mode of order of the governing whose willto affirmation, like systemof figuration, thatof the originalhumanists, of depends on the unwriting/rewriting the presentschema and orderof knowledge. As Dewey pointsout,the insistenceon the knowability of the celestial laws of functioning of the Divine Creation by means of "mechanical formulae" was necessarilyspearheaded by the "base" artisanswho had to do withmechanics,or bythose nottoo distantin inthe the social sphere,all of whose willto affirmation was confined social parallelismof the conceptual schema accordingto whichthe celestial creationwas unknowable humancognition. Thus by merely whileknowing the heavens bybase mechanicalformulae wouldseem sacrilegious to the normative groups of the order,it would be the "base" fellowswho would have an interestin effecting this knowability, sweeping away the orderof value betweenthe highest,the ofthemechanical "celestial," and the lowest,thesphereoftheearth, (Dewey,1950). Equally,the New Studies, stigmatizedas "subjective"-with the most stigmatizedof all sited in the Black Culturecenter-will have every interestin challenging an order of figuration which of programstheirown negation,in sweeping away the distinction within the generalquestion of the metaphoricity objective/subjective and relativity of all humanmodes of knowledge. Itwillalso have every in proposing interest thatwe come to knowthe sociohumanworld we inhabitaccording to laws of functioning made graspable froman externalobserver'sposition,itselfmade possible bythe application of "rhetorical formulae" to the regularities of representation whose of referenceis the abductive schemas or morphogenetic authority fantasythat functionto ontologize and absolutize the instituting to which,normatively, analogy-man as a naturalbeing-in relation we infer theworld accordingto theanalogy'soppositionalconception of Life/Death, and to its necessarilymaterialist metaOrder/Chaos, physics. As Deweyalso pointsout,itwas the democratizing movement of social transformation which emancipated human knowledgeof Nature from its subordinationto metaphysical purposes. This was to be the conditionof possibility forthe egalitarianmovement rise of the naturalsciences and, withthe insight from Copernicusto Galileo to Newton,forthe conclusion thattherewas no ontological orderof value betweenthe heavens and the Earth,since thereis a the "homogeneityof material processes everywhere throughout It is in this context,from the frameof reference of the Black CultureCenter-which refusesthe stigmatization of so-called "primitive"culturesas the Lack-state ofthe civilized, and sees itself as the 49
world."46

bearer, in Gowlett's terms, of the "long perspective" on the human-that a re-definition ofthe conceptoftheStudia Humanitatis is proposed, one which reenacts in different terms the founding heresyof the Studia. For it proposes the long processes of the selfof the humanand of its corpus of nar(i.e., the hominization making rative all functioning representations, accordingto equallyapplicable of Iron Age East Africato that of laws, fromthe figuration-work as the proper Hegel's philosophy) sphere of the humanitasnow conwiththe global humanrather ceived as isomorphic thanwithmerely its Indo-European expression. But since the "negro" as a categoryof the humanwas only and constitutable constituted thattransformed by the great rupture themythos and theologosintoa secular order ofthings, italso insists on the uniqueness of those narrativesdefined as "literature" narratives of preciselybecause of the new role that these ordering secular man, whose mode of being would be imperatively global, would play.Herethe viewfrom the Black Culture Centerputsthe emphasis on the new functionof literature-in a world no longer sustained by the auctoritasof the suprasensory-as itselfthe new auctoritas forthe secular modes of the culturalimagination. The absolutizationapparatus of such an imagination was no longerthe higher system of the gods, but rather the powerfulrhetorical whichimagedthe new secular strategiesof the systemsof figuration conceptions of Life/Death by which the human would now orient itself. Its mode of humanbeingwouldbe mediatednotbygods butby The viewfrom the Black Culture Centertherefore insists, metaphors. that far from"literature as it is heretically, having no function," It is as specific modes of assumed, it is we who are the function. imagining subjects of the aesthetic orders which literature's weaves in great feats of rhetorical that engineering figuration-Word we come to imagine/experience ourselves,our modes of being. Since itis inthe narrative of literature thatthe representations are to be made about truths" data exists, it is herethat"formulable as well as of humanmotivations/behaviors, the laws of functioning whichthe humanis about the modes of culturalimagination through constituted as Subject. And this leads to a new conceptual the mode of It is by takingas the object of our inquiry synthesis.47 imaginationof each order as it is constitutedby the governing systems generated fromthe bondingtopoi and imagery/figuration mechanisms their related structuraloppositions-the integrative of the brain, which, workingwith the neurological hyperneurons modes of produce the phenomenonwe know as mind or, rather, of the humancan be known. mind-that the psychogenetic reality are quite clearlyapplicable from Whilethe laws of figuration insecular societies wouldhave to a present day poem,literature myth no longer sustained bythegods. One might to playa role/function say it would have to take theirplace. For if,as Creutzfeld argues, our brains functionby and throughthe modes of symbolical selfand iftheir of worldis as real to us as is constitution representation, which thenthe mode of self-representation through physicalreality, 50

the first form of secular man auto-speciatedit/himself, as wellas the "real world" this new formconstitutes,would have now to be but in purelyaesthetic canonized, no longer in religio-aesthetic, terms. Hence, in secular society, literature as well as the arts in In place of general would come to play a ritualcanonizingfunction. the religiousschemas, whose systems of figuration would become it would generate powerfulnew imaginary increasingly privatized, schemas. And their conception of Life/Death would now orient behaviors. At the same time, their rhetorically powerfulherosaints had functioned forthe figures-in the same way as Christian suprasensorily guaranteed medieval society-would incarnate secular normativeideals/models of identitygenerated fromthe the more inclusiveorders of European emergingtopos underlying would thereby post-feudal society.These new systemsof figuration effectan ongoing evolutionary shiftat the level of the aesthetic whichwouldaccompanytheevolutionprocesses ofco-identification, aryprocesses of humanepistemology. Since these aestheticordersare coded byour narrative reprewith theshift to thesecular order, criticstook,ina sentations, literary sense, the place of the theologians in keepingthe new imaginative schemas in phase and freefrom aesthetic pollution, an ever present to today's mass pornography. Within danger fromHitler'sGermany the contextof a science of humansystems,however, critics literary would now have to function, in Paolo Valesio's terms, as rhetoricians rather than as rhetors, thanas "grammarians" diagnosticiansrather (Legesse, 1973),outside whatde Man calls the"normative pathos" of the figural domain that constituteseach order.Theywould have to find the view of the external observer, using the techne, which takes the Figurationrhetorical/neurophysiological Work of the texts, whose projected schemas functionas the auctoritasof the mode of self-imagining of the scular humansubject, as its domainof investigation. It wouldthenseek forthe regularities of practicesbywhichold templatesof identity are stabilizedand new modes of imagining are brought intobeingbythe templatesand their It rupture precipitated bygreatfeats of poetic semanticengineering. of which would,that is, seek forthe modes of imagining, knowledge would make human behaviorpredictable.For it is the mode of the of Self/Not Self thatconstitutesthe integrative imagining unthought and rhetorical structural oppositionencoded in the analogue system of the brain's righthemisphere.And it is these that orient and stabilize the mode of mimeticdesire (Girard,1966) and mimetic aversion (Fanon, 1964): at once the human form of the mechanisms of biological organisms and the seeking/avoiding dynamic expression of the conception of Life/Death, of thatis everywhere the Original Cause (Riedl/Kaspar, Agathos/Deilos, 1984) and telos-orienting purpose whichmotivatesall modes of the behaviorswe defineas "human." psychogenetic Forthefirst timeinthe history of humankinds we are nowconfronted witha commonenvironment. As a post-atomic one, it chalour presentconflictive lenges us withthe demand that we reinvent 51

modes of groupintegration. This demand impliesthatwe must now withthe related consciously alterour mode of self-troping, together desire/aversion of our ordersof discourse and orienting machinery the related semantic charter (Maranda, 1980) or rhetor-neurothat constitutesour "worldof mind."This is physiologicalprogram the price,in the face of the possibility of our extinction, of our selfrealization as a species. Thus, re-readingthe texts from the functionin the rhetorico-symbolic perspectiveof theirconfiguring constitutesforliterary criticism processes of humanauto-speciation its Copernicanepistemologicalbreak. It is this break,we propose, thatwouldenable the literary humanities to appropriate the "external observer's" multiple and polyglossic (Bakhtin, 1981) frame of theframe inserted reference, bythe"base" newstudies,as wellas by the Derridean and de Maniande-figurationism, the Girardian thesis of human desire as always mimetic,and the Fanonian concept of learnedself-aversion all these giving newturns to Levi-Strauss's (with the overallcontextof Valesio's oppositions)within founding binary matrix of a rhetorics. It is this break/turn proposed new disciplinary that would enable the literary humanitiesto re-enactthe original its contestatory within heresyof theStudia and to recapture dynamic the matrix of a science of humansystems. Such an epistemologicalbreak would call forthe kindof reof the past that readingof all texts and narrative representations the feats/strategies of poetic and semantic could isolate and identify were effected (Maranda,1980) by whichdiscontinuities engineering from one order of discourse to theother;bywhichan earlierand more particularistic conception of Life/Death and figuration of was re-figured modeof Desire/Aversion intoa newand moreinclusive order based on an "human nature," as one aesthetic-affective and its related "world of imagined mode of Sameness/Difference into mind" (Creutzfeld, transumed/sublated 1979) was configured, another. There has been no other discontinuity more dramatic and discourse that thanthe shift effected bythe figurative epoch-making theStudia,and bywhatDewey was humanism, byits teachingoffice, was simplythe This discontinuity called the "daringastronomers." to the shiftfrom the traditionally religiousconceptionof Life/Death firstformof a secular one. And the mutationat the level of the to transformation-was, most recalcitrant aesthetic-affective-the ofthe reminds as Bakhtin us, effected bythecarnivalesqueprojection whichpulled of the Clown,the Fool, the Rogue; forms parodicforms Late MiddleAges downto the highseriousness of the self-dissolving the reearth (Bakhtin,1981), clearing the space forthe retroping, of the Self/Group-Self. imagining However,afterthe medieval mode of imaginationhad been disa new space, a newordering undermined laughter, bysubversive Andthiswas to be had to be re-constituted. course and self-projection the central functionof the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century inEuropean dramaticgenre withits new range of heroes/villains, and gave expresthe structural oppositionsthatconfigured carnating 52

sion to the firstformsof the secular conceptionof Life/Death, remodelling the post-theological logical mode of the human in its first form. Thus old interdictions imagination dynamic gave way to new. If in Golden Age Spain (sixteenth/seventeenth centuries), wherethe structural oppositionshifted-in the contextof the riseof the moreinclusiveorderwhichdisplaced thatof the medievalsystem ensemble-from Noble/Non-Noble, to Limpiolnon Spirit/Flesh Limpio and a real lifeBlack clean, of descent and Christian (Clean/not faith), Juan Latino,a slave, Humanist/poet, and Professorof Latin, figure, in a playof the same name,48 can wed his projectedas a herofigure Desdemona, with the villain figures being Jew and Moor, in the parallel case of Shakespeare's Othello the outcome is more other.Iftheceremony is found within the logicofthemetacomplexly phorics of the Spanish play, in Othello-the play whose postReformation referential lifeworld, is alreadycaughtup inthe England, dynamicof a thorough-going secularizinghistoricalprocess which willdetermine its riseto world as Spain's empire supremacy beginsto decline-the ceremony,as Bishop finelyimages, is found only clandestinely. It is then lost, and only "found" poetically with Othello's "dyingupon a kiss." For the outcome of both plays is predeterminedby the differing bonding topoi fromwhich these are generated. The metaphorics ofthefirst the specific playis generatedfrom descent/ bonding topos of conlimpieza(we-who-are-the-same-clean of the post-feudal order.Herethe Faith-nature) Spanish monarchical shiftfrom the Noble as Normto the Limpiomonarchical Subject as Norm Noble Blood to Clean Blood as the metaphysical measure (from of Being)was sociallyemancipatory for thenon-nobly-born Spaniards, vs. the Noble especially the new letrado category(Men-of-Letters who staffedthe Churchand State of the firstworld Men-of-Arms) empire;the categoryof whom,the "naturally"intelligent, naturally Juan Latino is the projection and "instrumental loyal/orthodox In Othello,the religio-secular signifier." topos of the Spanish play is the fully secular displaced-although Othellois the earlierplay49-by topos of connaturality (we-who-are-of-the-same-naturally-noblein this the first of its manyto be transumed variants. And if nature), ofthese variants, functions on theone handas Othello,inthecontext the projection of a new risingsocial force,thatof the newlylanded mercantile gentry/upper bourgeoisie-forwhomthecodes of"natural and of "naturalhonor"verified as nobility" by honorablebehavior, of birth, blood and honoras the against the moreexclusive nobility ofdescent,was emancipatory-hefunctions, on theother prerogative to lago as an other, and yetprophetic hand,in relation marginalized, projection. Inthe first Othelloincarnatestheshift projection, takingplace fromLanham's "centered Christianself" to "rhetoricalman," and from a suprasensorily ordered world to a secular self-ordering one. He therefore self-orders his behavioraccordingto the first secular selfcode, thatof Honor,soi.e.,nihilmagis honore.1Inthiscode regulating 53

orderof the he is expected, if the configured natural-metaphysical monarchicalstate is to be sustained,and Chaos not come again, to make use of his NaturalReason to orderand governbothhis houseand the passions of his lower"nature." hold,his general's command, to putintoplay Subject oftheorder Bydoingthishe acts as the Norm of Sameness thatbonds the the "natural"ratio-ontological principle thatseparates this caste from and of Difference caste of the gentry about whichthe secularizing the lowerorder.For it is this principle the earlierSpirit/Flesh new order auto-institutes itself,transuming The "tragicflaw" oppositionof the medievaltopos of co-Christianity. of Othellois that,inallowingthe passion of his "unbookish"jealousy to cloud his reason, he makes it possible for his judgment of to be manipulatedby lago. Thus, believingin the truth/non-truth and intheabductivelogicof lago's ofthehandkerchief "ocular proof" He thereby fabricated wrongly. systemof "evidence,"he infers/judges of transforms what,inthe internal logic ofthe playwas theobligation one which, intoa murder, honorto execute a wifecaught in adultry, the State's justice, "traduced"the State. transgressing Othello man of honor, As the apotheosis of the self-regulating redeems himselfat the end of the play by this time judgingtruly, sentencingand executinghimself-"that in Aleppo once, where a as the Othellomanipulatedby lago, on the otherhand,he functions the inverse of this projection.In this dimension Othello is made classes aspiring an ass" by lago, a manof the middling "egregiously the wellmobilein a worldarrangedto privilege to be professionally born Cassio or giftednobly-born strangerslike Othello,a man for the honorcode, feigning whomsuccess depends on his manipulating his wordneverhis bond-"I am notwhatI am." For byhis "honesty," animalizingof Othello-"a black ram toppinga whiteewe"-lago, with bothallies himself the caste of the noble gentry excluded from their the senatorBrabantioand the wealthy help in ensuring Rodrigo, his attemptto secure the downfallof Othello,and bonds/classes himselfwiththemon the basis of a new emergentcode, that of a This code, whichantithan "nobility." shared "naturalvalue" rather realization of the bourgeois over the cipates the full-fledged monarchicalorder, makes possible a bio-ontologicalprincipleof functionis to one whose figurative Sameness and Difference, of Noble Blood intothe "race" principle the caste principle transume a mode of shared superiority, of an innate biologicallydetermined Sameness made possible by the mode of Differenceof metaexcluded Others.As a result,while in the Spanish play, physically ofJew/Moor Other the Metaphysical JuanLatino,the herofigure, pro"clean" of the naturally as the Lack-state functions jected as villains, ofOthello, monarchical represented Subjects,thefigure Spanish-born in his animalized dimension(as contrastedwithhis apothesis and Lack is projectedas thevery as an Ideal manof honor) self-execution to the Venetians.He thus inferior of the human,as bio-ontologically prefigures, however briefly,the degrading "internments" of underUndermen, under-classes, underpeoples, under-cultures, 54
malignant . . . Turk/.. . traduc'd the state/. .. I smote him,thus."5'2 As

creeds, that will be legitimatedand determinedby the abduction schema whose instituting analogywas to be thatof the humanas a "naturalbeing" (Foucault,1973). It is in the "figuraldomain" of this mode of self/grouplSelf that the and of its mode of Sameness and Difference imagining, ceremony is still unfindable.Othello and Desdemona still meet and Black culturecenters remainproscribedby the clandestinely, laws of a Godeliantypeof internal consistencyon the nether edge of oftheselfthecampuses; proscribed the revelatory heresy along with of all modes of yetalways systemicrhetoricity defining, self-troping, humanbeing.And it is this definition, made intoa priestly Absolute, of Sameness and principle togetherwithits related bio-ontological whichtraversesits speaking/imagining Difference, subjects and predeterminesthe rule of in- and of ex-clusionthat define American fiction.It is a definition, as Bradleynoted,that,therefore, logically of exludes Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man,a novelwhose ludicmoment conversion(Girard, 1965) comes whenthe Narrator, awakeningfrom his the mimeticdesire whichhad himchasing his "natural"and/or all the interand/or his "black" identity, breaksthrough "proletarian" dictionsand eats the proscribed Southernbaked yam in the streets. He thereby re-enacts the subversive laughter of all the formsof "high that ever broughtthe priestly rogues/fools/clowns seriousness" downto earth,quipping"I Yam what I yam!" The novel hereparodically pulls downto earththecanonical modelsof Identity: the incest-dreaming Mr.Norton, the glass-eye-wearing Brother Jack, and, with them, the "true discourses" of Liberal positivismand Marxianeschatologism,laughingaway the self-justifying pathos of their twinand conjoinedheresies staled intoorthodoxy. And ittakes as the object of its irreverence the verysystem of figuration (the "innereyes withwhichthey look through theirveryphysical eyes whose rule-governed of Sameness and Difupon reality") principle ferenceexcluded it fromthe definition "AmericanFiction." In the basement underworld of the novel's counter-metaphorics, the urban of Lanham's rhetorical man,the sound of Louis Armstrong's margins that"lyricalbeam of light," and his gravelly voice ("Myonly trumpet, sin is in myskin/What did I do/Tobe so Black and blue?") re-enacts Galileo's telescope, challenging ontologies with the subversive sounds of the lumpen-poetics of the Blues. Boththe Bakama/Bacwezi and the dramatic narratives mythic plots of the two plays, Juan Latino and Othello, all too briefly truth"that all changes in discussed here, reveal the "formulable human affairs-Bateson's mutationof abduction schemas when "thought itself becomes impossible" (Bateson, 1979)-although about bya conjuncture of factors, are experiencedby always brought humans as primarily transformations of the governing systems of and of the shared systems of meaning of each order's figuration semantic charter.The antithetical whose projectionof hero-figures external intheone case, with the innate "begrimed visages" contrast, "naturallimpieza"revealedby limpio/loyal behaviors, by a "natural" "unharmed as to salutory and intheother, of intelligence doctrine,"'53 55

an innatevillainy of an lago whose exterior "fairnessof visage" contradicts his "true" nature, effects an epochal shift from the explanatoryhypothesisof Divine Causality to that of a Natural at the levelof the form, Causality,the shiftwhichheraldedthe first ofthesecular "order ofthings."''54 Itis bymeans of such transhuman, to the secularizing formationsas that from the religio-feudal monarchical effected orderof figuration bythe poetic re-engineering to that the of the two seventeenth-century European plays referred which are evolutionof more inclusivemodes of group integration, themselves linked,as Whyteand Habermas note, to increasingly advances in the thrustof generalizable concepts and evolutionary human cognitive mechanisms towards what Gellner calls "the and extra-territoriality of humancongition" 1974), (Gellner, autonomy as Habermas also notes, once put in are achieved. Nevertheless, and their related systemplace, systems of figuration/integration preserving behaviors and "worlds of mind" or codes of of imagination, can, even after theyhave lost their knowledge/modes remain as powerful environment, validityin a now transformed to the emancipationof the new humanenergies called for. barriers and made captiveby Thus we remainin our presentcrisis,enthralled the secular abductiveschema55 of the nineteenth-century epistemes, codes of Natural/Labor and the self-regulating value,thecodes which just as Othellowas replaced inthe replacedthatof "naturalhonor"56 by systemof inference engineeredby lago untilhis disenthrallment, what one critic aptly calls the exorcism of Emilia, who, dying, and releases Othello and the deconstructsthe systemof inference as in of lago. For in thatworld, the wordcraft worldof the play from was no longerguaranteedby the higher systemof the ours, "truth" suprasensory.From here on it would be up to the self-correcting mechanismsof the human. processes of the cognitive Yet in a worldin whicheven the self-correcting process of the naturalsciences findsitselfthreatened bythe increasinghegemony thephysicalprocesses ofa technosciencewhichseeks to manipulate and economic powerof of naturein orderto enhance the military is called for some human groups over others, a counter-exertion must be The Studia the that of Studia's to heresy. original parallel an able to provide as a higher orderof humanknowledge, reinvented "outer view" which takes the human ratherthan any one of its as a science of human variationsas Subject; must be re-formulated and of systems,which makes use of multipleframesof reference Valesio's proposed rhetoricaltechne-the techne, perhaps of a rhetor-neuroscience?-toattain to the position of an external domain of our order.As the figural at once insideloutside observer, mechanismit must,as we have proposed,take such a new cognitive of the calls the "long perspective" as its proper spherewhatGowlett as this is docuhominid-into-human self-making/modelling/figuring,7 in artand ways of mentedand enacted in narrative representations, of humanbehaviorswhichenable life,and in the laws of functioning the autopoesis of each mode of the human.It is only,we propose, of such a new science that Bishop's the counter-exertion through 56

ceremonies will be findable,that the hope sought by Bradley, Freud,and Lewis Thomas,willbe realizable,enablingus to Einstein, inourtraumatic which write timewith ofthecertainty with something a Francis Bacon wrotein his: And therefore these conit is fitthat I set forth jectures of mine which make hope in this matter reasonable; just as Columbus did before that whenhe wonderful voyageof his across theAtlantic, that new lands gave the reasons forhis conviction and continentsmightbe discovered besides those which were known before; which reasons though were afterwards made good byexrejected at first, perience,and were the causes and beginningsof great events." (Francis Bacon, Novum Organon, 1620) Stanford University NOTES 1
2 3 and F.J.Varela,Autopoesis See Sir Stafford Beer's Prefacein H.R. Maturana TheRealization and Cognition: of theLiving (Holland/Boston, 1980),pp. 65-66. L. Kolakowski, Marxism and Beyond(London, 1971),pp. 55-56. The phrase was used by Professor J. Lucas of the University of Christopher at an invitational seminar and education on civiclearning Missouri-Columbia, oftheteaching on November hostedbytheHoover 11th, Institution, profession, 1984.Lucas pointed thewholesalevocationalism eduout that"with ofhigher has come the loss of a constituency forLiberalStudies cation,predictably in particular. and the humanities generally Theyhave been leftnaked in the Nov.14, 1984. marketplace"See the Stanford University Campus Report, Sir Stafford Beer explains the main underlying concept of "autopoesis" put forward and Verela.Anautopoeticsystemis a homeostat, i.e.,"a byMaturana devicefor a critical variable within and in limits," holding system physiological the case of autopoetichomeostasisthe "critical variableis thesystem'sown Thus even ifevery "measurableproperty of thatorganizational organization." structure inthesystem'sprocess of continuing it changes utterly adaptation" whichis its identity. in this survives, i.e., the mode of organization Implicit is thatthe living's context is itsrealization rather thanitsmereselfimperative As Maturana he and Varelawerein preservation. pointsout inhis introduction, search ofa wordwhichcould formally define thecentral "feature oftheorganizationof the living whichis autonomy." One day whilst a literary with talking critic whodefined DonQuixote'schoice as thatbetween arms(praxis) orletters was struck oftheword (poesis),Maturana bythepower "poesis" and "invented thewordthatwe needed,autopoesis,"a wordthat"could directly mean what takes place in the dynamicsof the autonomyproperto livingsystems" and Varela,Autopoesis,p. xvii). (Maturana Theconceptofhuman is developedon thebasis ofthebiologist autospeciation mechanisms Mayr's conceptofthose "isolating bymeansofwhich potentially inter-breeding organisms separate themselves off, placing reproductive barriers betweenthemselves, withthese barriers their boundaries," defining human culturalsystems or systemsof i.e., speciatingthem.Analogously,

57

are seen as doingthesame thing human for themin figuration groups, bonding shared systems of meaning,or "imagery systems" which place interbarriers betweenthemselvesand otherhumangroups.See communicating
Mayr, Evolution and the Diversity of Life: Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA.,

1976).

is thatHumanism in itsoriginal form (Madrid, 1977),p. 79. Grassi's mainpoint has been misreadand devaluedby rationalist and Idealistthought, since the maintarget of thisoriginal humanism whichtookCicero as its guide was its attackon all forms ofabstract and aprioristic lack on their philosophy, thought, of local and temporal reference. "InWhatSense and To WhatDegreewas theRussianRevolution See G. Haupt, a Proletarian inReview, Braudel Journal oftheFerdinand of Revolution," Study Economics,HistoricalSystems and Civilizations, 111, No. 1 (1979). Haupt reveals the extentto whichthe Verbal Symbol "Proletarian," used as the themany different forceswhichmade up theRevolution, i.e., genericname for the peasants, the national minorities, and the relatively small force of industrial workers was thedecisivestrategic proper, weaponthatLeninused to the consolidation for to thedetriment of of Bolshevik organizesupport power, boththepeasants and thenationalminorities, all ofwhomlackedthepowerful as thebearers discoursebased on theconceptoftheproletariat of legitimating "Laborvalue" made intoan ontologicalprinciple. Thisconceptmade degrees of skilland educationthe new criterion of status,leadingto the hegemony of the New Class, that is of the credentialrather middle than capital-owning classes. The thrust towardspopulardemocracyof the Soviets was thereby stifled and displaced bythetotalitarian as the powerfact ofthe Party, regime middleclasses. of the credential IntheForeword differentiate their from that to their book,Riedl/Kaspar position Theirintention is to "examine the basis of of philosophicalepistemology. reason not merelyfromits internalprinciples,but froma comparative is therefore no ofall cognitive study processes." Whatthey study phylogenetic but lies outside, longeridentical"withthe subject thatgathersknowledge" natural whilst their method"remainsthatof a comparative science, avoiding whenreasonmustestablishitself thelimitations on itsown."See Riedl, arising NewYork, 1984). (Chichester,
R. with Kaspar, R. Biology of Knowledge: The Evolutionary Basis of Reason

E. Grassi. Humanismo y Marxismo: Critica de la Independizaci6n de la Ciencia

insupport thattheemergence ofmind orconHaroldMorowitz, ofhisargument inevolution, thehuman was a radicaldiscontinuity sciousness with pointsout B. new identified the that the evolutionary Lawrence Slobodkin, biologist, which as a discontinuity feature at theorigin ofreflective changedthe thought, which Itwas thisnew property rules,as thatof an "introspective self-image." in events to causes inherent made it impossibleto assign majorhistorical laws. See Morowitz, the Mind"in D. H.,"Rediscovering biologicalevolutionary
Hofstadter and C. Dennett, eds. The Mind's Eye: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul (New York, 1981).

10

Antiqua: Rhetorics as a Contemporary Theory(Bloomington, Indiana, 1980).

Sartre'sattackon Valesio developedthis pointin the course of contradicting of predictablebehaviors(i.e., "the valves commonplacesas the enforcers that of Lacan who argues that the lick!"). Valesio's point here reinforces "subject is nota 'self' whichtakes languagefrom societyas a tool since that with thesubjectalso constitutes societyorculture" generates languagewhich with other his language"in common thesubjectalwayshaving subjects."This Griceas the "coas "collaboration," definedby Collingwood is the relation and Polyani as "conviviality." (Thislatter pointis made by operative principle" The Illusionof the Individual in an article"Literary Invention: Loy D. Martin, P. See also No. 4 [Summer, Talent" in CriticalInquiry, Valesio, Nova 19801.) to make a disDaniel Sperberuses the term"symbolicmode of knowledge"

11

58

betweenthreemodes of humanknowing. The threeare the encyclotinction deals with Whilst the first factsabout pedic,the semanticand the symbolic. and the second withfactsabout categories(a foxis an animal)the the world third deals withfactsabout otherfacts,with such as, "cunning connotations like a fox."Such a termis an objectified construct, dependenton its being takenwhole,withits logic beingassociational,functioning within a system of inference shared by all the otherspeakers.This kindof logic,it is proposed to thefunctions to theright ofthe here,is related hemisphere beingattributed brain as research on thismatter Thusas M. Moskovich continues. outin points in Languagein his paper,"Stages of Processingand Hemispheric Differences the NormalSubject," in M. Studdert-Kennedy, of Language Psychobiology MA.1983),pp. 103-04: (Cambridge, the domain in which the righthemisphere's "Apart frommemory, is notthatoftraditional contributions to verbalperformance are mostevident such as the paralinguistics, syntaxand semantics,but rather phonology, emotionaltone,context, linguistic aspects of language such as intonation, and connotation-inshortthose aspects of languagethatmaybe inference, included as part of pragmatics,the discourse function of language.. Patientswithright comhemisphere damage . . . seem to have no difficulty individual do havedifficulty a sentence sentences;butthey prehending relating to a larger its emotional and drawing the context, connotation, understanding inferences from it(Wapner et al, inpress.)Without theright proper hemisphere, initsbroadestsense, seems notto procedenormaly." communication See also Daniel Sperber, trans.Morton (New York1977). Symbolism, Rethinking 12 in his explanationof the phenomenon knownas "totemism," Levi-Strauss, to do pointsout thatthe reason whynatural species are chosen has nothing with thefactoftheir to do with their being"good to eat" and everything being The proposal here is thatthe animal species gridand its 'good to think." and similarities are also chosen because theyare good systemof differences to absolutizewith, invented social divisions and statusenablingthe humanly as isomorphic withthe divisionsdeprocess to be represented organizing termined See C. Levi-Strauss, Totemism by physicalnature. (Harmondsworth, 1969). B.A. Uspenskij,V.V. Ivanov, V.N. Toporov, A.M. Pjatigorskij, Ju. M. Lotman, "Theses on the SemioticStudyof Cultures (as Appliedto Slavic Texts)"in J.

13

(The Hague, 1973),p. 2. 14

Van Der Eng and Mojmar Grygar,Structure of Texts and Semiotics of Culture

Schmidt brings up herea keyquestionasked byGilsenan,as to whether myth itselfmight not be an epiphenomenon, manipulable by the "ideologues who control oral tradition" and pointsout thatthe assumption of his own studyis that"the pseudohistorical of the Bahaya are interwoven genealogical myths into the politicaland social fabricof Bahaya lifethrough time,and thata structural structure analysis will reveal unconscious representative through timewhichare tied to structural in change politicallife."See P. R. Schmidt, CT, 1978).
Historical Archaeology: A StructuralApproach in an AfricanCulture (Westport,

15

in discussingFoucault'sFolie et Deraison,theinternment oftheMad Derrida, and the CartesianCogito,pointsout thatin factthereis no real anxietyin Descartes about the "subversion of insanity" since "if discourse and philoareto . . . conform to their vocation as discourse, sophicalcommunication they mustin factand in principle, within escape madness . . . mustcarry normality themselves."Forthisis "an essential and universal from which no necessity discoursecan escape 'since' itbelongsto themeaning Indeedit of meaning." is the"destiny ofspeakingPhilosophy" to live"onlybyimprisoning madness," with "new speech liberating a previous madness whileenclosingwithin every in its present itself, existence,the madmanof the day." All systemsof finite one might thought-ofmodes ofhumanbeing, add-"can be establishedonly on the basis of the moreor less disguised internment, humiliation, fettering and mockery ofthemadmanwithin us. .. whocan onlybe thefoolof a logos,

59

whichis father, and king." See J.Derrida, and Difference trans. master, Writing A. Bass (Chicago,Ill.,1978). 16 A phraseinvented ouri.e.,"howwe havebeen led to imagine Rich, byAdreinne inan article, was a keyinfluence on thedeselves,"quotedbyElaineShowaiter of the conceptof modes of cultural velopment imagination. (New York, 1966),p. 25. See also pp. 41 to 45 wherehe discusses the transin the twelfth formation of the uniwhen,withthe establishment century a new agency,the Studiumwas now added to the two othergreat versities, and ofthe Imperium. With this,the schools agencies,thatof the Sacerdotium ina for of law and legal scholars-who werenowgivenopportunities mobility which had first to beginto gain social order grownalmost static-were the Fortheir careersmade from thetheological of knowledge. autonomy ordering
them "representatives of the constitutions of men ratherthan . . . delegates of See G.C. Waterston, Order and Counter-Order: Dualism in Western Culture

17

was to borrow his nameand find thecityof God." The humanista precedence oftheWorks thelegista his revalorization ofthestudy ofNatural for Man,from model.
See K. Hubner, Critique of Scientific Reason, trans. P.R. and H.M. Dixon Hans Jonas, Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creeds to Technological Man

18 19

(Chicago,1983),p. 112.

Prentice-Hall, 1974). (New York, See Hubner, Critique, p. 121.

20
21

wherehe Andsee especiallypp. 509-10, MA,1983),pp. 483-547. (Cambridge, Ptolemaic whilst structure ofthetraditional theoverall outthat, points keeping with God,and had schema,NicholasofCusa had replacedtheearthas center proposedthatthe earthwas "a worldbodyof the same rankas the heavenly was judgedto be heretical. bodies." This formulation
See M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin,ed.

See H. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. R.M. Wallace

22

M. Holquist(Austin, M. Holquist, trans.C. Emerson, Texas, 1981),p. 166.

Technology and other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt(New York, 1977), p. 64.

23 24

See Heidegger, Martin,The Wordof Nietzsche"in TheQuestionConcerning ofValesio. He reveals is one ofthecentral formulations The toposof iconocity in Heraclitus from in his analysisof a fragment of thisfigure the functioning with the is made the related to a specificmodeof life, which bow, synonymous made by to theformulation Thisstrategy shouldbe linked processof lifeitself. thatexists betweena and Russell withrespectto the difference Whitehead and a mere memberof the class (i.e., class of classes (i.e., "machinery") absolutizes a mode of life,a cranes, etc.). The topos of iconicity tractors, theclass of classes, humanlifein general, of theclass with member thereby of species with theconflation terms, genus,genus with enablng,in Todorov's trans.C. Porter 1982). (Ithaca,New York, Symbol,
species. See in this respect, Paolo Valesio, Nova Antique: Rhetorics as Contemporary Theory (Bloomington, Indiana, 1980); and Todorov, Theories of the

25

was difference ofthisontologized As with thesuprasensory before, knowledge thanseen by rather to be graspedbytheintellectual understanding inferential, in a parallel difference functions of a by/nature the physicaleyes. The a priori foundsthe of Sameness and Difference That is, whilethe principle manner. knownbut only abductively order,it itselfis not a fact that is empirically as the axiom whichmakes the orderof discourse of contemporary inferred societydiscursable.
See Anthony Padgen, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the

26

60

(Cambridge, England,1982), pp. 109-18. Originsof Comparative Ethnology Pagden points out that a dialogue writtenby Sepulveda-Democrates secundus sive de justis causis belli apud Indos, probablywritten about 1544-was used in thecentral betweenLas debate in 1551-1552 at Valladolid, Casas and Septlveda with overtheIndies.The respectto Spanishsovereignity latter was a monarchicalhumanist,and his dialogue put forward the thesisthattheAmerican Indianswere"barbarians," whoas such, Aristotelian were by nature slaves. In this argumentSeptlveda had moved outside could notlegitimately declarethe theologicalarguments-Christian theology Indiansto be another kindofbeing-presenting his dialogue,inas he himself the goal of the Indians"becomingmore said, "literary terms,"and putting human"rather thanmore as thecriterion for their "with Christian, beingtreated and liberty." freedom greater 27 The claim by Sepulvedathatthe customsof the new worldpeoples revealed themto be lackingin Natural the NewWorld Reason, interned peoples as the Other to the Western the Mad,as the Icon of thedefectof Logos, longbefore Natural in France-and intheCartesiandiscourse. reasonwas to be interned Herethestrategy ofIconicity also. Byconflating analysedbyValesio is at work a firstmode of secular human reason with reason-in-general, the postits modes of reason as theologicalworldstabilized itselfby representing either as the"natural reason"ofLiberalism orthe"scientific reason-in-general, truth" of Marxism-Leninism. See Pagden,The Fall of Natural Man,pp. 112-13. See Linneaus,Systema Naturae(Uppsala, 1758), p. 22, wherethe Black is ofthehuman scale as theone least able togovern himself placed at thebottom since he governs himself arbitrarily. Harold Bloom puts forward the rhetorical as the figureof transumption American answerto the "imported mode of deconstruction." He notes that ormetalepsis"is thelegitimate and traditional nameinrhetoric "transumption forwhat JohnHollandercalls the "figure of interpretative allusion."Transchains pointtoward the"diachronic inwhichthe umptive conceptof rhetoric, of one age can become the ennobledsynecdocheof another." Whilst irony chainsabound, certain "central to tradition, and transumptive linkages... vital the crossings over in and betweentraditions keep the continuity going by means of its retroping of earliertropes."See H. Bloom,The Breaking of the Vessels (Chicago,1982). G.L. Mosse's Toward the Final Solution:A History of EuropeanRacism(New traces indetailthedevelopment ofthediscoursethatwouldmake York, 1978), the Holocaust thinkable.He makes the parallel point made by CarterG. out thatthere Woodson,the Black educator,in 1933,whenthe latter pointed inAmerican wouldbe no lynching for societyifithad notbeen prepared bythe school curriculum which white Americans to see Blacksas inferior-as taught legitimately lynchable. The function played by the concept of self-preservation adapted fromthe mechanistic materialism thatinformed thenineteenth-century epistemeinthe modeofimagining/representing theSelf/Group-Self, as wellas inencoding the of Sameness/Difference that underlay the rise of principle bio-ontological Liberalism(as a transumption of the Lockean type national/corporate individual Liberalism whichhad prevailedbefore, a transumption whichactheriseand expansion ofthe"mechanizing" Industrial companied Age)has not G.E. Allenhas however yetbeen the subject of a holistictreatment. analyzed the role of mechanisticmaterialism in Darwinian its cobiology, revealing existencein Darwinian withparallelelementsfrom bothholisticand thought dialecticalmaterialism. He pointsout thatthe mechanistic outlookof Darwin involved and foremost "first his atomistic viewoftheliving which he saw world, as composed of individual each actingin its own right and forits organisms,

28

29 30

31

32

33

61

ownsurvival" with each organism as an atomizedunit ofevolution interacting with each other "throughthe process of struggle for existence and Evenmore, Allenshows howthisoutlookwas modelledon the competition." paradigmof classical nineteenth-century politicaleconomy,"a field itself dominatedby mechanisticphilosophy," and especially on its concept of a notion "division of labor, thatatomizesthetotality ofthelabourprocess into separate component parts." Central to thisphilosophy was the idea thattheorganism was impelled as wellas its need to preserve its life, as in bythe Finalcause of its "hunger" theworker was supposed to be coerced intoworking political economy bythe impulse of hunger. Here Maturana/Varela's concept of the realizationis an epistemological of all thingsliving breakwiththe axiom of imperative one which has political implications. For quite clearly, self-preservation, mechanisticmaterialism was the epistemic correlateof the template of of the Industrial of human identity Age,i.e.,thatof the middleclass modality withits emphasison theatomizedunit, individual and corporate, and identity, as the causal motorof secular human on its naturalimpulse/preference society. See G.E. Allen, "The Several Faces of Darwin; Materialismin in D.S. Bendall,ed. Nineteenth-and Evolutionary Twentieth-Century Theory," from Evolution Molecules to Atom(Cambridge, 1983). England, 34 35 A History of EuropeanRacism(NewYork, See G.L. Mosse, TheFinalSolution: 1978),pp. 40-41. at the The "strategy set" at workin the discoursetracedby Mosse functions levelof theabductionschema or systemof figuration to displace the Biblical of Genesis myth of origin and whatmight be called the figurative hegemony Hebrewand of the Jews as the bearers of this myth-and as its Chosen as theChosen People-with a newschema which"elects" the Indo-European was however to be no the Semite.The modeof knowing people byOtherizing thatofempirical, "scientific" thatof religious revelation butostensibly longer knowledge.Hence the paradox of the "blindnessand insight"that was to of the accompany the new fieldof philology, leading to the development their specific pseudoscience of eugenics whichabstracts"gene pools" from in which alone they can be "judged." Hitlerian environment interacting Andas Mosse shows, was essentially theresult ofthisdys-science. Aryanism on thisdys-science thediscoursewhich orders continues to ourday,and flows and and willonlycease whenthe espistemeis deconstructed intothe future, re-written. knowledge are geneaThe Holocaust in the heartof Europeand the Gulag Archipelago and the oftheencomienda relatedto thefirst largescale internment logically and to the massacres thataccompaniedtheir plantation, beingput in place. colonizersin 1904, The massacre of the Hererosas "natives"bythe German a one in whichout of a groupnumbering 80,000,onlysome 15,000survived, as slave labor,mustbe seen remnant thatwas thendistributed to thesettlers "massacre Archipelago" as part ofthatextra-European bywhich non-European groupswere reducedto the status of nativelabor;and whichwouldserveto whichhave marked domesticatethe humanpsycheto the largescale horrors of menwalking on the moon. ourcentury as the underside withrespectto humansacrificewere first The arguments developed in the at Apologia which Las Casas presentedat the debate, held in 1551-1552 overthe NewWorld thelegality of Spain's sovereignity Valladolid, concerning herewereto antedatebycenturies lands and peoples. Las Casas's arguments our ofall human theconceptofthe"relativity including systemsof perception even if,for withthe conceptof necessaryareas of blindness, own,"together a reason still and the of Divine Las Casas, Christian revelation provided light See Wynter, of certainty and Truth. touchstone S., "New Seville and the Conof Bartolome de las Casas," in JamaicaJournal versionExperience 17,no. 2 (May 1984),26. As Todorovalso pointsout, Las Casas's arguments-thatit was "the thanthe lack of this lightof rather of the lightof natureitself," limitations

36

37

62

Naturewhich"dictates and teaches those who do not have faith, grace or "to thefalse god whois thought to be true" doctrine" thatthey oughtto offer in the "supremely preciousthing"whichis the lifeof man,since "nothing natureis greateror morevaluable"-introduceda conceptually daringperherea kind of"religious anthroofreligion, intotheheart spectivism practicing pology" which is "the firststep towards the abandonmentof religious The Conquestof America:The Questionof discourse itself."See T. Todorov, trans.R. Howard the Other, Books, 1984). (New York, Harper 38 39 40 Tradition See T. Kuhn,The Essential Tension:Selected Studies in Scientific and Change(Chicago:Chicago Univ.Press,1977). in Languageand inOther HumanBehavior" in See JoshuaWhatmough, "Order Paul G. Kuntz, The Conceptof Order 1968),p. 328. (Seattle/London, Hofstadter asks "Whatis it liketo be China,"and answersthata country has and beliefsinthesense thatithas a representational system. Bythis thoughts he means "an active, self-updating collection of structures, organizedto mirror' as itevolves."As such "it is built on categories"and itsifts theworld data intothese categorieswithits "representations" or "symbols" incoming interacting among themselvesaccordingto theirown "internal logic." This internal as thereferential rather thantheexternal logicthenfunctions authority and thefunction ofthislogicis to createa "faithful reality, enoughmodelofthe the world works";and to keep its symbolsin phase with waythe world "they Ineffect, are supposed to be mirroring." the internal behavior logic prescribes so as to keep the worldview and its reality, in phase. See Hofstadter and TheMind'sEye:Fantasiesand Reflections on Selfand Soul (NewYork, Dennet, 1981). See EdwardSaid, Orientalism articleby 1978).He cites theearlier (New York, AbdelMalekin whichthe phenomenon was first isolatedand identified. See M. Foucault,TheOrder AnArchaeology of Things: oftheHumanSciences (New York, 1973),p. 310. See L. Thomas,"Alchemy," in Late Thoughts On Listening to Mahler'sNinth New York, (Toronto, 1984),pp. 33-34. Symphony This exclusion functioned as the "isolatingmechanism"or "remark of bein defining theboundaries ofthe"nationalliterature" defines which, longing" the boundariesof the national/natural self. The exclusionof Ellisonand the othersis a keymechanism the"genreness"ofthefigured bywhich Group-Self is putintoplay.Foras Derrida pointsout,themostgeneralconceptofthelaw of genrelinksitto genos whichcould just as well be equated withbirth, and "birth in turn with thegenerousforceofengenderment of generation-physics, in fact-as withface,familial or class, membership, classificatory genealogy or social class." The negation ofa co-definition is thereage class (generation) forepartoftheclassificatory and theexclusionis putin place by mechanism, human agents possessing the generic classificatorycompetence which definesthemas subjects.See J. Derrida, "The Law ofGenre," Critical Inquiry, 1980. Autumn, See R. Dawkins,"Universal in D.S. Bendall,ed. Evolution from Darwinism," Molecules to Men(Cambridge, London, 1983),pp. 420-23. See JohnDewey,Reconstruction of Philosophy (New York, 1950),p. 69. Theconceptofa newconceptualsynthesis ofthe is,ofcourse,a reformulation one proposed by E.O. Wilson of sociobiologyfame. Here, the disciplinary matrix of a science of humansystemsenables the insights ofsociobiology to be drawnintoa new framework, of the humanwith keepingthe continuity disbiological organisms,but only in the contextof the psychogenetic thatthehumanrepresents, rather than i.e.,his rhetorical/behavioral continuity modes of genetic speciation.

41 42 43 44

45 46 47

63

48

de Enciso.The playwright The playJuanLatinowas written byDiego Ximenez The most died in 1634, but the play was not publisheduntilmid-century. accessible editionis that of 1951, edited by Ecuardo Julia Martinez. (See References.) is usually1603-1604. The date givenforOthello'scomposition Political who argues in ThePassions and theInterests: See A.D. Hirschmann, U.P. 1977), Princeton its Triumph forCapitalismBefore (Princeton: Arguments code of as a regulatory of profit thatthe honorcode antedatedthe pursuit humanbehavior. of the play,one in See the HispanistE. M. Wilson'sfinecomparative reading which his wide knowledgeof parallel "wife-murder" plays in the Spanish natureof the role of the GoldenAge enabled himto grasp the fundamental of Othello. code in theorganizing honor dynamics Univ. of OthellobyChristopher See theedition Press, Sydney Bentley (Sydney: 1982),p. 158. who livedin sixteenth-century JuanLatinowas a real lifefigure Granada,and a was a slave inthedual house ofSessa. He was a humanist, poet-he wrote overthe Latinepic, The Ausriad,to celebratethe Spanish-Christian victory his Islamic Turks at Lepanto-and famous professorof Latin, marrying his epitaphin Desdemona,Dona Ana de Carlobal.He is said to have written ofhisChristian-humanist to theorthodoxy Latininwhich alia, testifies he,inter Juan doctrine, i.e., Infansilaesus praeceptasalutis. See VelaurezB. Spratlin, Latino:Slave and Humanist 1938). (New York, Divine Causality as the with which a transcendent The figuration-Work, of the ChristianMedieval explanatoryhypothesisof the status-ordering transcendent be called an immanent ensemblewas replacedby whatmight with wouldbe effected thatof "Nature," beginning by projections Causality, than primarily rather those of Juan Latino and Othello-as the naturally, monarchical and normative orthodox subject,and as the naturally Christianly of these wouldbe thatof the "Noble "Noble Moor,"Othello.The latervariant since it and American to theFrench central Revolutions, Savage," a projection canonized the new code of "Natural Value" that functionsas the selfthecode that initspureform; code of Liberal democracy republican regulating of the pursuitno longerof honor,but of profit embodies the metaphysics to from Nobel prizesto sportsto warfare, (capital)as well as thatof primacy, of nuclearbombs. HaydenWhite the keepingup withthe Jones's ownership of the projectionof the Noble Savage, and has has noted the centrality in nature"of its functioning analysed what he defines as the "fetishistic He emphasizes the role whichits antithesisof thought. eighteenth-century Noble/Savage played in deconstructing an order still dominated (See References.)Bateson's concept of psychosociallyby the "gentry." at Itenables us to grasptheprinciple moregeneralizable. is however abduction interior exterior workin all variantsof these antithetical, appearance/true Thus the Nazi function. and of theirpolitico-metaphysical naturestrategies, and non-corrupt Truenon-cosmopolitan ofthe Blood-and-Soil Aryan projection urbanized inthehighly artificial urban vs. thecorrupting Jew,was meaningful it was to able and technological replacethe onlybecause societyofGermany, of the bourgeois code of "Natural Value" which system of figuration withthe new to select the global middleclasses forhegemony, functioned of the needed by the sociallymobile,educated stratum systemof figuration as a new Germanlower-middle classes, if theywere to achieve hegemony therefore stratum. superior expresseda code, thatofthe biogenetic Aryanism Value."Stalin thecode of"natural valueofAryan descent,whichreformulated of"true member oftheParty his projection with thesame strategy wouldeffect of skills, Proletarian origin" canonized by his Labor value (the criterion of of theownership value (thecriterion thanbyhis natural rather credentials) of NaturalCausality conflatedthe hypothesis He thereby property/capital).

49 50

51

52 53

54

64

withthat of a historicalCausality in whichthe destined Aryan Volk of a States Hitler-an extension ofthemanifest of Englandand theUnited destiny and of the apartheidt of South Africa-was replaced withthe destinedofwas theVanguard manifestation class, whose highest Party. Proletarian-origin Hence the logic of the "internments" of the Auchwitz-Belsen and the Gulag of the global poor in their complexes, which like the "internment" archipelagoes of shanty-townrural poverty and mass starvation-a verification ofthe to thefunctioning phenomenon byand imperative generated code of "natural as the negations value/non-value"-function whichverify the Absoluteof the biogenetically ordainedsuperior value of the TrueAryan, of and ofthehistorically "Labor"valueofthoseof ordained causality, biogenetic "true Proletarian then to incarnatethe secluar ordering origin";function of Natural/HistoricalCausality, repressing representations/figuration awareness of the rhetoricity and systemicrelativity of these figurations. 55 Bateson's concept of abductionschemas, or systems of inference as the of cultural systems, is being borne out by new definingcharacteristic in the field discoveries of artificial withrespectto the roles of intelligence, semanticnetworks, frames etc., in modelling reasoningby analogy.See The 11-17th 92-93. Economist, May,1985,pp. The proposalhereis thattheconceptsof"labor"and "capital"function dually at empirical and metaphysical levels.Atthe latter leveltheyfunction likethe honor code to regulate human behavior of both with ratios byequatingdegrees ofhuman within thenatural/material definition ofthehuman. therebeing, They forefunction to theethic,impervious, to use Wittgenstein's according phrase, to "philosophical discourse."Forthey are theparallelinhuman ofthe systems codes which enable the of all forms of the integrating dynamicautopoesis The making-conscious of the functioning of these codes will enable living. humansto determine these self-regulating thanto be determined codes rather This wouldbe the central bythem. goal of a science of humansystems. See John Gowlett. Ascentto Civilization: TheArchaeology of EarlyMan (New inspiteofhis title, makesclearthat, whathe is studying is York, 1984).Gowlett farmorecomprehensively thegreatruptures thatenabled thediscontinuity at the levelof lifeitself, of the processes of hominization bywhichthehominid transformed itself intothe human.

56

57

REFERENCES
in Nineteenth-and Allen,G.E. "The Several Faces of Darwin:Materialism TwentiethIn D.S. Bendall, ed. Evolution from Moleculesto Century Evolutionary Theory." Men.Cambridge, England:1983. Bacon, Sir Francis. NovumOrganon.Vol. IV. of Works.Ed. J. Spedding,R.L. Ellis, D.D.Heath.London:1875-79. Mikhail. TheDialogic Imagination: Bakhtin, FourEssays byM.M.Bakhtin. Austin, Texas: Univ. ofTexas Press,1981. A NecessaryUnity. New York:E.P. Dutton, 1979. Bateson,G. Mindand Nature: Introduction to Maturana H. and Verela,F. Autopoesisand Cognition: Beer,Sir Stafford. The Realization of the Living. With a prefaceto "Autopoesis"by Sir Stafford Beer.Vol.42. BostonStudies in the Philosophy ofScience. Dordrecht/London: 1980. His Love. New York:CharlesScribner & Sons, 1933. Bishop,JohnPeale. Now With H.J.Humanism. 1968. Blackham, Harmondsworth, England:PenguinBooks,Ltd.,

65

of the Vessels. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,1982. Bloom,Harold.TheBreaking Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Cambridge, MA:MITPress, 1983. David."Black and American, 1982,"Esquire,May,1982. Bradley, Bunge, Mario. Causality and ModernScience. ThirdRev. edition. New York: Dover 1979. Publications, The Turning Point.New York: Simon& Schuster,1981. Capra,Fritjof. AnIdea ofHistory: Selected Essays ofAmerico Castro.Columbus, Ohio: Castro, Americo. Ohio State Univ.Press,1977. Liebe. TheDouble-Edged Helix:Science in theReal World. NewYork, Columbia Cavalieri, U.P.,1981. 1955. Cesaire,Aime.Discoursesur le colonialisme.Paris: PresenceAfricaine,
. Discourse on Colonialism. New York: MR., 1972.

and Armageddon." Coles, Robert. "Psychology Today,May,1982. Psychology O.D. "Neurophysiological Mechanisms and Consciousness."Ciba Foundation Creutzfeld, 69 (New Series) Symposium on Brainand Mind.Amsterdam/New Symposium 1979. York:Excerpta Medica, Richard. Darwinism." In D.S. Bendall,ed. Evolution Molecules "Universal from Dawkins, to Men.Cambridge: U.P.,1983. Cambridge and Difference. of Chicago Press,1978. Derrida, Jacques. Writing Chicago: Univ. Deshusses, Jerome.The Eighth Nightof Creation:Lifeon the Edge of HumanHistory. New York: The Dial Press,1982. M. DionysiosSlain. Baltimore: JohnHopkinsPress,1979. Detienne, in Philosophy.1920. New York: MentorBooks, New Dewey, John. Reconstruction 1950. American Library, of The Univ. of Literature. Costanzo.A CriticalTheory Di Girolami, Madison,Wisconsin: WisconsinPress, 1981. Galileo. New York:Hilland Wang,1980. Drake,Stillman, et la Logiquede Paul.L'enfer des choses: ReneGirard and Dumouchel, JeanPierre Dupuy, Paris:Seuil, 1979. l'economie.Postfacede R. Girard. War?Paris:International and Freud, Albert League ofIntellectual Why Sigmund: Einstein, League of Nations,1933. Cooperation, 1972. Man. New York: Ellison,Ralph.Invisible VintageEdition, GrovePress,1967. Masks. 1964. New York: Black Skins,White Fanon,Frantz. Absalom,Absalom.New York:RandomHouse, 1936. William, Faulkner, oftheHumanSciences. NewYork: AnArchaeology ofThings: Michel.TheOrder Foucault, RandomHouse, 1973. New York:RandomHouse, of Sexuality.Vol. 1. An Introduction. SThe History 1973.

66

E. The Legitimation of Belief.London, U.P.,1974. Gellner, Cambridge, Structure. Baltimore/ Girard, Literary Rene.Deceit,Desireand theNovel:Selfand Otherin The JohnHopkinsPress,1965. London: John.Ascent to Civilization: The Archaeology of EarlyMan. New York:Alfred Gowlett, 1984. Knopf, e Marxismo: Criticade la Independizacion de la Ciencia. Grassi, Ernesto.Humanismo Madrid: Editorial; Gredos,1977. of Society.Boston:Beacon Press, Communication and the Evolution Habermas, Jurgen. 1979. 1857. of History. London, Hegel,G.W.Lectureson the Philosophy
. La raison dans I'histoire. Paris: Collection 10/18, 1974.

Martin. The QuestionConcerning and OtherEssays. New York: Heidegger, Technology Harper ColophonBooks,1977.
SPoetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1975.

and Kegan Paul, 1978. Heller, Agnes.Renaissance Man. London:Routledge A.O. The Passions and the Interests:PoliticalArguments forCapitalism Hirschman, Univ. Before Its Triumph. Princeton: Princeton Press,1977. theEssence of Mindand PatHofstadter, Douglas R. MetamagicalThemas:Questingfor tern.New York:Basic Boos, 1985. GoldenBraid.NewYork: RandomHouse, 1980. Godel,Escher,Bach: An Eternal Holzner,B. and Fisher, E. "Knowledge in Use: Considerationsin the Sociology of Vol. 1, KnowledgeApplication."Knowledge:Creation/Diffusion/Utilization. No. 2, 1979. Kurt. of Scientific Reason. Chicago:The Univ. of Chicago Press,1983. Hubner, Critique J. "Evolution of the Brain."In M.C.Wittrock, ed. TheHumanBrain.EngleJerison, Harry wood Cliffs, NewJersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc.,1977. Jonas, Han. PhilosophicalEssays: FromAncientCreed to TechnologicalMan. New Prentice Jersey: Hall, 1974. Leszek. Marxism and Beyond:On HistoricalUnderstanding and Individual Kolakowski, London:Paladin Books,1971. Responsibility. Paul Oskar. Renaissance Thought: Kristeller, The Classic, Scholastic and Humanist Strains.New York:Harper & Row,1961. Torchbooks, Harper
SRenaissance Philosophy and MedievalTradition. PA.:The Arch Latrobe, Abbey

Press.

SRenaissance Thought and its Sources. New York: ColumbiaUniv. Press,1979.

Kuhn,Thomas S. The Essential Tension:Selected Studies in ScientificTradition and The Univ. of Chicago Press,1977. Change.Chicago and London:
___. "The RelationsbetweenHistory and History of Science." In F. Gilbert and S.R.

eds. Historical Studies Today.NewYork: W.W.Norton & Co., 1972. Graubard,

of Eloquence:Literary Rhetoric in theRenaissance. New Haven Lanham,R. The Motives and London:Yale Univ. Press,1976.

67

Las Casas, Bartolome de. Aqui se contieneune disputao controversia, entreel Obispo don fray Bartholome de las Casas o Casaus y el doctorGines de Sepulveda. Seville,Spain: 1552. Juan."Epitaph"cited in B. Spratlin, JuanLatino, Slave and Humanist. NewYork: Latino, Press, 1938. Spinner Legesse, Asmarom.Gada: Three Approaches to the Study of An AfricanSociety. The Free Press,1973. New York: 1966. and Nicholson, Claude. TheSavage Mind.London: Weidenfield Levi-Strauss,
. Totemism. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.

The Self: Yours,Mine or Ours? A Dialectic View.Oslo: UniversitiesLovlie,Anne-Lise. 1982. forlaget, An Anthropological "The Dialecticof Metaphor: Maranda,Pierrre. Essay on Hermeneutics." In S.R. Suleimanand I. Crosman, eds. TheReaderin the Text:Essays on Princeton: Audienceand Interpretation. U.P.,1980. ed. ShakespeareIn a of Man." InArnold Matthews, G.M:,"Othelloand the Dignity Kettle, Essays on His Timesand His Plays. NewYork:International ChangingWorld: 1964. Publishers, H. and Varela,F. Autopoesisand Cognition: TheRealization With oftheLiving. Maturana D. Reidel Beer. Dordrecht/London: a Prefaceto "Autopoesis"by Sir Stafford 1980. Company, Publishing Harvard Univ. L. Evolution and the Diversity of Life:Selected Essays. Cambridge: Mayr, Press, 1976. eds. The and D.C. Dennett, theMind.'InD.R.Hofstadter Harold. Morowitz, "Rediscovering on Self and Soul. Mind'sEye: Fantasies and Reflections in Language in the Differences M. "Stages of Processingand Hemispheric Moskovich, ed. Psychobiology of Language. NormalSubject." In M. Studdert-Kennedy, MA:M.I.T.Press,1983. Cambridge 1978. Mosse, GeorgeL. Towardsthe Final Solution.New York:HowardFertig, Deconstruction: Norris,Christopher. Theoryand Practices. London: New Accents, 1982. Methuen, The Fall of NaturalMan: The AmericanIndian and the Originsof Pagden, Anthony. Cambridge, England:1982. Ethnology. Comparative GrossNew York: of GeneticPsychology. Problems Piaget,Jean. TheChildand Reality: man Publishers. Univ. Oxford Londonand NewYork: ofRhetoric. Press,1936. Richards, I.A.ThePhilosophy In D.M. Borchert and D. Ricouer,Paul. "Ideologyand Utopiaas CulturalImagination." Ohio: Ohio Univ. eds. Being Humanin a Technological Stewart, Age. Athens, Press,1979. withKaspar,R. Biologyof Knowledge:The Evolutionary Basis of Reason. Riedl,Rupert New York: John & Sons, 1984. Chichester, Wiley and Method. New York:Basic Books Inc.,1975. Intention Said, Edward. Beginnings:
. Orientalism New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.

68

A Structural PeterR. Historic Culture. to African InterSchmidt, Approach Archaeology: and Comparative cultural Studies. No. 3. 1978. Shakespeare,William.Othello.Sydney:The Challis Shakespeare,SydneyUniv.Press, 1982. Gerd.Logic of the Living Brain.London: JohnWileyand Sons, 1974. Sommerhof, Daniel. Rethinking New York:1977. Sperber, Symbolism. VelaurezB. JuanLatino:Slave and Humanist. New York: Spratlin, SpinnerPress,1938. R.W.and John,E. Roy.Foundationsof Cognitive Processes. Hillsdale,New Thatcher, LawrenceErlbaum Jersey: Associates, 1977. on Listening to Mahler'sNinth Toronto/ Thomas,Lewis.Late NightThoughts Symphony. New York:Banta Books,1984. Tzvetan. TheConquestofAmerica: TheQuestionoftheOther. NewYork: Todorov, Harper ColophonBooks,1984. Walter. MedievalFoundations ofRenaissance Humanism. CorUliman, Ithaca,NewYork: nell Univ. Press, 1977. Ju.M. "Thesis on B.A.,Ivanov, V.V., Uspenskij, V.N.,Pjatigorskij, Toporov, A.M.,Lotman, The SemioticStudyofCultures to Salvic texts)."InJ.Van derEng (As Applied and Mojmir eds. Structure of Textsand Semioticsof Culture. Paris: Grygar, 1973. Mouton, Rhetorics as a Contemporary Valesio,Paolo. NovaAntiqua: Indiana Theory. Bloomington: Univ.Press,1980. Fernand. A Nominalistic Vandamme, and "Register Linguistics: LanguageInterpretation its Implications forSome CentralProblemsin Gloossogenesis." In Eric de ed. Glossogenetics: The Originand Evolutionof Language. ProGrolier, on Glossogenetics. ceedingsoftheInternational Transdisciplinary Symposium London/Paris/Utrecht/New York:HarwoodAcademicPublishers, 1983. Helene. Les Philosophesde la Renaissance. Paris: Presses Universitaires Vedrine, de France,1971. G.C. Order and Counter-Order: Dualismin Western Culture. Waterston, New York:Philosophical Library, Inc.,1966. Joshua.Orderin Language and OtherHumanBehavior. In Paul G. Kuntz, Whatmough, ed. TheConceptof Order. Seattle:The Univ. of Washington Press,1968. White,HaydenV. Tropicsof Discourse: Essays in CultureCriticism. Baltimore: John HopkinsU.P.,1978. L.L. The NextDevelopment in Man. New York:NewAmerican Whyte, 1950. Library, VernG. "Womenand Blacks have BrainsToo: A Play by Diego Ximenex Williamson, de Enciso." InW. McCrary/J. eds. Studiesin Honorof Everett W.Hesse. Madrigal Nebraska:The Univ. of NebraskaPress,1981. Lincoln, Wilson,E.M. "A HispanistLooks at Othello."In Spanish and EnglishLiteratures of the 16th and 17th Centuries:Studies in Discretion,Illusion and Mutability. Univ. Cambridge, England: Press,1980. Cambridge Wilson, E.O. Sociobiology.The AbridgedEditionof Sociobiology,A New Synthesis. 1975.Cambridge, MA:Harvard Univ. Press, 1980.

69

A.M.S.Press, 1977. G. TheMiseducation of the Negro.1933.New York: Woodson,Carter A Roomof One's Own. NewYork:Harcourt, Brace and WorldInc.,1929. Woolf, Virginia. of Bartolome de Las Casas." Sylvia."NewSevilleand theConversion Wynter, Experience JamaicaJournal, Vol. 17, No. 2. (May,1984),25-32. ed. El encubierto Ximenez Encisco,Diego de. "JuanLatino."In EduardoJuliaMartinez, y "JuanLatino."Madrid: Real Academia Espanola,1951.

70