Abstract
In this article,
certain semiotic resources, based on the idea that the syntagmatic axis tends
to draw more attention than the paradigmatic axis, are developed in order to
characterize a ‘total sky’ utopia as wedded to the acquisitive, in contrast to
an ‘infinite sky’ utopia associated with the renunciatory. One of the important
tasks of the intellectual in our times, it is argued here, is to strengthen the
resources available for peace and renunciation, rather than for war-mongering
and acquisitivism.
In his 1972 book Le
communisme utopique, Alain Touraine argues that movements for serious
change need to turn the tables on the mainstream opinion-makers who have
successfully labelled them as ‘utopian’. The countermove to make, Touraine
suggests, is to place under public scrutiny the horrifying utopias projected by
this ‘realism’ masquerading as common sense.
Making that countermove has become easier than it was when Touraine
first formulated the idea. Managerial commentators who root for the
mainstream’s ‘realism’ helpfully churn out statistical and qualitative
projections for the futures they envisage. Those of us who want the public to
resist that ‘realism’ merely need to concretely expand the official
projections, after correcting a falsehood or two. Our expansion will show what
the models mean for the majority of the mainstream’s victims. So expanded, the
official figures themselves tell the public that the great enterprise, having
ruined the ecosystem, will take very little time to destroy even the enclaves
of the privileged.
Touraine proposes that we make it explicit in our exercise that all
aspirations, including those fact-and-figure projections, amount to utopias.
That the widespread custom of treating ‘utopia’ as a dirty word is a fatal
error. That any debate at the level of visions will indeed involve pitting ‘our’
utopias against ‘their’ utopias.
Using anodyne terms like ‘model’ instead of ‘utopia’ is a pointless
evasion. An intellectual must call a spade a spade, and a dream a dream. There
is such a thing as getting your dreams right, focusing them on peace, not war;
on friendliness, not aggression. With such general ideas in mind, this article
looks at one specific toolkit for working on utopias, dreams, ideals, and
brings its semiotic tools to bear on some unresolved problems that we have all
been wrestling with.
1. The dominant syntagmatic
imagination
Minimally, we need a toolkit that enables us to target
violence and its roots in chauvinistic expansionism of all types. Expansionist
wars of aggression reflect a mind-set that we may usefully describe as syntagmatic,
contrasting it with the paradigmatic axis.
Readers keyed into semiotics and its structuralist antecedents will
recall these basic terms. A word like kin consists of three sounds
syntagmatically related to each other – k, i, n. Every whole W consists
of certain parts P1, P2, P3 etc.; those P’s
are each other’s partners, and W’s constituent; ‘partner’ and ‘constituent’ are
syntagmatic relations. Now, if you can replace one of the P’s with a Q and get
a different W, we call the P-Q relationship paradigmatic. For instance, if you
replace k with s you get sin instead of kin. Here k
is paradigmatically related to s.
That statement comes from the context of looking at that s-sound
from a distance and considering its mutual replaceability with k. But we
sometimes ask a different question. Suppose the word kin decides to
perform an annexation, to grab the s and attach it to its left, yielding
the word skin. What is the result of such expansion? The result is that s
becomes a syntagmatic partner of k within the expanded word skin.
Linguists can tell you a great deal about the partnership between the
two insiders s and k within skin; they ‘understand’
relations on the syntagmatic axis. But they have little to say about the way
the outsider s is related to the k that it can replace in the
word kin; the paradigmatic axis is ‘poorly understood’. Linguists build
‘understanding’ around structures, and therefore around syntagmatic relations
of partnership and belonging; these are the ones that drive structures. Now,
structures grow by annexing outsiders and turning them into insiders – for
instance, kin adds the external element s to expand into skin,
where the s counts as internal. Linguists think they understand such
growth (they just plug in their pep talk about structures), but they don’t
really understand what is involved in annexing and digesting an outsider;
recall that relations with outsiders – relations constituting the paradigmatic
axis – are poorly understood.
Why does linguistics pay overwhelmingly more attention to syntagmatic
than to paradigmatic phenomena? These priorities are elicited by ‘public
demand’. Ordinary citizens instinctively stick to their various partners in the
context of families, sports teams, circles of friends, political parties, and
other structures. We know how to manage relationships inside a structure on the
basis of either unilateral control or bilateral partnership understood as
mutual monitoring and control. Outside these structures, we accept the
existence of others; we even acknowledge some of them as neighbours. But we
don’t hope to understand them more than everyday coexistence requires us to. We
shift gears only when we expect to control them or be controlled by them. Then
we upgrade our understanding and prepare to move from the paradigmatic to the
syntagmatic axis.
In short, the ‘normal’ mode of thinking focuses on the syntagmatic axis,
and tolerates the paradigmatic axis. We are expected to like ‘our’ people,
syntagmatically related to us, to understand them, to empathize with them. But,
on the paradigmatic axis, vis-à-vis people outside our own structure, the
default approach is, that stuff doesn’t make any sense to us, we’re not
supposed to get mixed up with their sort, it’s up to them to keep track of who
they are and what they’re up to, we merely have to survive the fact that they
share space with us. To oversimplify, we consistently maximize
understanding and concomitant attention (and affection) on the syntagmatic axis
and minimize it on the paradigmatic axis.
This, under the semiotic assumptions articulated here, is the syntagmatic
imagination that passes for common sense, and that movements for serious
change are up against. However, is this adversarial approach justified? Is it
reasonable to portray the syntagmatic imagination as fundamentally
violence-laden? Let us get our semiotic act together in order to be able to
bring our articulations to bear on such questions.
2. Building semiotic resources
The syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes are formal
concepts. Semiotics addresses questions that have to do with functioning in the
context of a formal architecture. While semiotic reasoning does employ
geometrical concepts like ‘syntagmatic’ and ‘paradigmatic’ in order to
characterize the architecture, the basic questions of semiotics are not formal
questions. Readers new to semiotics sometimes tend to assume that it is really
a social science. We begin, therefore, with an example due to Collett &
Marsh (1974) that brings out with some clarity the contrast between semiotic
and social-scientific modes of reasoning.
There are two ways of avoiding collision between pedestrians who are
about to walk into each other. Collett & Marsh describe one option as
‘closed pass behaviour’, where the pedestrian making the effort to avoid
collision turns away from the other person. In the other option, ‘open pass
behaviour’, the body is turned towards the second pedestrian. Collett &
Marsh have found that women tend to choose the closed pass strategy, while men
tend to prefer the open pass strategy.
It is possible of course to read their paper in terms of anthropology.
By publishing it in Semiotica, however, Collett & Marsh invite a
semiotic reading. To focus on the numbers and on worries about variably strong
instantiations of the tendency in this or that society is to look at the data
from a social-scientific perspective. That is legitimate; but even that viewpoint
will need to take a semiotic element on board. To see this more clearly,
imagine, counterfactually, that all women and men choose the closed pass
and open pass strategy respectively. Now, what significance do these
gender-associated choices carry?
If we consider the women’s choice first, we see only the anthropology,
quite naturally. But then we look at the men’s preference for the open pass
strategy, which lends itself to no obvious anthropological interpretation.
Semiotically, the men’s actions make sense if their behaviour tacitly signals
their gender identity. It is as if they are putting their chest forward in
order to say, look, we have no breasts to protect from contact with
non-intimate adults. This behaviour is not specifically taught in any
social pedagogy. Semiotics interprets such unconscious actions by investing
them with meanings associated with the architecture within which people
function.
Once we accept this semiotic construal of the choice made by men,
consistency forces us to revisit our initial, purely anthropological reading of
the women’s choice. We recast that choice also in terms of a semiotic overlay
on the nonetheless valid anthropological content.
This reasoning works with stereotypes; certainly; my point is to
introduce the reader to what semiotic reasoning looks like; an elementary
example is bound to feature stereotypes. The resources for resisting
stereotypes can only be built by first facing them as they are.
I have chosen an example of semiotic reasoning that does
not invoke the syntagmatic or the paradigmatic axis. Let me now bring the axes
into the picture by shifting to another example. Consider the way Sircar (1983)
frames the story of the impact of photography on the art of portrait painting.
Oil painters found that the best work they could do was being hailed as ‘nearly
as good as a photograph’. This challenge, Sircar argues, led to the rise of
impressionism. If you look at the reasoning with care, you find Sircar saying
that there was a syntagmatic question to address for which no viable answer was
forthcoming. As systematic methods of producing portraits, the two arts –
photography and portrait painting – could not coexist as partners. For them to
set up a syntagmatic relationship would involve one of them dominating the
space of portrait production, leaving the other as a sort of ‘province’ within
that space. It was obvious which of the two was going to win a syntagmatic
game. So the painters moved out and formed a paradigmatic equation with
photography.
In this reasoning, what becomes obvious is the
militaristic streak in the syntagmatic imagination. Sircar draws attention to
the fact that, in order to establish peaceful, neighbourly relations of the
paradigmatic kind, good intentions are not enough. You need ingenuity as well.
Creativity becomes an ally in the struggle against war-mongering, against
pointless conflict. One’s main adversary is not aggression from others, but
one’s own triumphalism. Strength comes from triumphing over this internal
adversary – controlling the desire to control others, developing one’s inner
resources.
This sounds a lot more like self-help talk than like
semiotics. When did we slide into this? What will it take to bend the sword of
the syntagmatic imagination into a ploughshare – call it a biaxial imagination,
one that gives the two axes equal attention? Can we answer this question in
terms that go beyond moralism and address semiotic issues? More generally,
surely we need to be careful about this mode of discourse, neither freewheeling
essay nor rigorously framed deployment of semiotic machinery?
It turns out to be tricky to stop semiotics from
stumbling into any of the pitfalls of unframed discourse, which is its never
quite excludable next-door neighbour; the self-help talk mode is such a
pitfall. Other than insisting on rigid frames – a useful exercise in certain
types of semiotic writing – we don’t really have resources that enable us to
avoid all contamination from open discourse. And we all know that insisting on
such frames leads to bureaucratization of inquiry and undermines the entire
basis of semiotics itself. Much of the reasoning here appeals to the reader’s
willingness to take certain analogies seriously, and turns on whether this
appeal leads to the reader’s intuitions converging with the author’s. In this
article, we are considering issues that have to do with construing,
interpreting, reading. Readers position their selves in particular stances in
order to handle the effects of the text fragments they are dealing with.
Choosing stances for one’s self raises questions of the kind that self-help
talk also addresses, in its own way. As we explore questions arising from
reading, we obviously need to touch base with Roland Barthes, whose work on the
semiotics of reading goes far beyond anyone else’s contributions. On our way
there, we need to stop, however, at Levinas and Weil.
3.
Which sky one is reaching for
If
one is going to deal with questions like how one goes about choosing to
position one’s self as one reads, it pays to consider the way the dynamics of
self and other is visualized, and in this context to invoke the terms
'totality' and 'infinity'. The take offered here is my own, but draws – in ways
that will be obvious to readers familiar with these authors – on the resonances
of these words in Levinas (1969) and on the differently configured 'gravity'/
'grace' binary in Weil (1952/2002). I must stress at the very outset that both
Levinas and Weil have architectures of their own, and that this article does
not directly use any components of those architectures; hence my decision not
to engage with their texts here, beyond noting that I am appealing to some
resonances in their work.
One sees oneself as a person of limited
powers, able to actualize only a few of one’s goals. But one nurtures
aspirations that go far beyond what one expects to be able to actualize. To
aspire is always to reach for the sky. If one does not ask which sky one is
reaching for, however, one is likely to fall into the traps that don’t look like
traps, for they are ideology-laden and disguise themselves as 'common sense'.
As one articulates the ‘which sky’
question, one observes that what passes for a sense of infinity tends to
involve fanning out skywards, horizonwards, imagining a huge crowd of people,
an immense multitude of objects. The plenitude populating such a panoramic
sky-screen constitutes what we shall here call a totality; it is
important to resist the pressure to mischaracterize it as infinity. For the way
to actually experience infinity is to gaze unguardedly at a single
person, at any arbitrary person, face to face, with vulnerable openness, with
zero aggressive intent, zero threat perception.
When we ordinarily think of the sky, we
tend to go along with the hugeness visualization that the expression ‘the sky
is the limit’ invokes, that the word ‘sky-scraper’ refers to. But that is
hardly a vision of infinity; it is a vision of the totality; it distracts us
from the realization that “we are so small between the stars, so large against
the sky”. When we look at even a single person, when we remember what it is to
look at a fellow human being, that person removes all questions of dimension
and number and power, she becomes the sky for us. She becomes the infinite
sky. When instead we choose to populate our sky with that everybody and
everything, we find ourselves under the total sky.
I would like to suggest that the total
sky is shaped by the hegemonic voice of the acquisitive, while the infinite
sky, in contrast, is shaped by the counter-voice of the renunciatory – which
must present itself in the ‘counter-voice’ mode because the acquisitive voice,
left unchallenged, always comes out hegemonic.
Given our earlier characterization of the
syntagmatic axis as aggression-laden, this reading of some themes from Levinas
and Weil helps underwrite an approach to the pursuit of peace that is ‘biaxial’;
such an approach pays scrupulously equal attention to the easier syntagmatic
axis and the more elusive paradigmatic axis. Connecting our invocation of
semiotics with our resort to Weil and Levinas involves associating the war/
peace binary with the acquisitive/ renunciatory binary. That particular move is
unlikely to prove controversial. However, many readers will ask why this
renunciation talk is less perilous than the slide into the self-help mode that
we had to be cautious about a little earlier. What, they will wonder, is the
problem with regarding the acquisitive desire as one of the cardinal and
entirely wonderful traits of the human species?
That is precisely the point of the ‘which
sky’ question. To cut to the chase, my stand is that the infinite sky gives you
access to yourself by enabling you to perceive your neighbour's desires as akin
to your own, while the total sky fails to give you this access, or to provide
any intelligible account at all of self-knowledge. To the extent that
conceptualizing the infinite sky requires the renunciatory as the foundation
for adult self-control on the conceptualizer’s part, it follows that the
conceptual foundation for democracy – understood as a comprehensive partnership
connecting all informed adult citizens willing to take full responsibility for
nurturing (or otherwise dealing with) those less informed or less adult – can
only be formulated from a renunciation-laden standpoint.
To put it in bread and butter terms,
physically-adult members of a corporate board or parliamentary committee who
base their understanding and decisions on budgets, graphs, projections and
other objects of numerical wonder are – in terms of their capacity to perceive
what ‘self’ and ‘other’ are all about – teenagers at best (an emotional age of
nine may turn out to be a reasonable average). Their antics are dangerous, and
need to be laughed out of court by the truly responsible adults, who are not
particularly numerous or well-equipped. Truly responsible adults, when they
first realize their predicament, find themselves in a hopelessly beleaguered
minority on this huge island of children, as in one of Milan Kundera’s
dystopias (1981). They have to struggle to retain their own adulthood first.
Only after gaining some confidence can they address their recalcitrant audience
in an unpromising environment.
Is it during that initial period of
speaking to each other that such adults may find it appropriate to call
themselves public intellectuals, addressing each other in a precarious,
beleaguered space that is bound to look private to any hostile observer? Or is
it when they take on their physically adult-looking neighbours (who have yet to
come to their senses) that truly responsible adults may find the epithet public
intellectuals useful, in the context of bringing a real public space into
being, perhaps by writing fiction rather than discursive rants?
Such tactical questions need not detain
us as we go about clarifying our bearings. My ‘cutting to the chase’ was
intended only to give readers a sense of where this reasoning is going, in
order to help them to keep formulating their counter-thoughts as they read
along. Experience shows that the acquisitive language tends to come naturally
to critics of such writing; in order to meet them half-way, I shall continue to
direct my remarks to readers who view the acquisitive as the indispensable
basis for our understanding of human rights.
Indeed, many commentators hold that
the acquisitive instinct is a basic instinct. People have a right to be greedy.
Objecting to it is as absurd as objecting to eyes or ears. Renunciation is
never natural. People renounce one particular acquisitive intention only for
the sake of some other acquisitive intention. Any renouncing that does not fall
under this description is either a naive mistake or a cloak for some ulterior
design.
I am italicizing their
syntagmatically pitched formulation, which I wish to question from a biaxial
viewpoint, but I have to wait; the advocates of acquisitivism haven’t finished.
They go on to say, we are not at all preaching an ‘every man for himself and
the devil take the hindmost’ variant of unbridled possessive individualism. The
welfare state lets me pursue my self-interest as vigorously as I wish and yet
provides a perfect social safety net for my indolent or unlucky neighbours.
Thus, however I may spend my day, I sleep soundly at night, for there is no
call for me to worry about the needs of others. The welfare state looks after
us all. The model fails only when a state goes dysfunctional; modern democracy,
assisted by economists, swiftly irons out such temporary aberrations.
For argument’s sake, I shall allow
that the economists in question have proved all their theorems and can
demonstrate the perfection of models of the welfare state that envisage
acquisitivism alone. Even under that counterfactual, what this syntagmatic
sales pitch lacks is an account of my growing into full awareness of who I am,
what my responsibilities are, and what life is like for my neighbours out there
on the paradigmatic axis. Feel free to imagine the vulgar economism of first
approximation models giving way to corporate social responsibility of a credible
kind, respectful of human rights, leveraging donor preferences to promote the
growth of the key capabilities. Even in that best of all possible syntagmatic
models, the road to hell is still paved by good intentions – the road to a
vacuous inner life that undermines the ‘flourishing’ visualized by welfare
economists and their philosophical friends.
I take it as established, then, that
attaining self-awareness is a vital human need, and that the infinite sky,
under which I can truly see you, enables this need to be satisfied. In
contrast, the total sky, which presides over the philosophy of the acquisitive,
fatally ignores this need. Is the image of renunciation, however, too much of a
fringe image to bear the weight of the binary I am pursuing? Does it evoke
thoughts of extravagant personal austerity that would lead the argument astray?
I am counting on the reader’s
willingness to see that I have in mind, not a monastically attired clergyman of
any denomination, but a person who cares for others. The criterion is not
whether you meditate, whether you conduct your life in accord with specific
doctrines, whether you eschew material pleasures. What matters is: when someone
in difficulty approaches you for aid or counsel, do you lend them your ear? Do
you do this willingly, on your own, without publicity? Even this
characterization of the criterion misses part of the point. Imagine an extreme
renunciant who lends her ear willingly, etc., but ploughs a lonely furrow and
denies herself the (direct or communicative) company of other renunciants. Such
behaviour not only compromises the renunciatory enterprise by injecting an
element of inappropriate pride. It undermines it also by turning its back on
the solidarity with others that gives the enterprise a specific kind of meaning
– associated with organizational forms that characterize civil society rather
than the state. It is in the context of such associations that you learn the
art of being friends with fellow renunciants without seeking to control one
another, an indispensable strand of the art of seriously helping those who need
big time help.
Notice the interpenetration of
syntagmatic and paradigmatic considerations in this portrayal. Renunciation
involves patience, a paradigmatic virtue as it emphasizes observation rather
than control. You have to wait for normal processes to do what they can; you
have to see if they enable everybody’s needs to be met without special effort.
If you find that these processes are leaving even vital meets unsatisfied, only
then must you intervene. But as a renunciant you will remember that the point
of all such interventions is to satisfy needs, not to secure extras for your
clients at the expense of others. We root for Oliver Twist when he asks for
more because, first of all, he has been given pathologically less than he needs;
secondly, Oliver doesn’t grab, he asks; thirdly, he wouldn’t dream of depriving
neighbours. Grabbing more than you need, or helping others to do so, puts you
back under the total sky.
There is no time when it does not
matter which sky you are reaching for.
In order to improve our
understanding of the difference between the acquisitive and the renunciatory,
it pays – guess why I am choosing pay, of all verbs – to deploy our
semiotic tools in order to come up with a reading of the acquisitive
imagination where it can be observed in its full glory, in the United States.
4.
Reading the American text
Under explicit colonial rule by
Britain and other imperial powers, the average southerner from Annam or Borneo
or Bengal had to deal with the herrenvölker in a Paris, a Hague or a London as
part of the overt cultural landscape of a world that accepted enslavement and
colonization as legitimate practices. Thoughtful Indians therefore came up with
explicit readings of Britain as a matter of course. The covert nature of the
American empire and India’s unfinished business with its British ex have
combined to limit the extent and intensity of Indian commentary on today’s
metropolitan herrenvolk. That intensified communication and exchange between
India and the United States should not have led Indians to articulate several
competing views of American society is a pity. The absence of any default
perspective in this domain means, however, that one is relatively free to hazard
even non-standard conjectures and expect a hearing.
Are there any immediately obvious
characteristics of American society that distinguish it from other
industrialized societies? Well, one can start by looking at the kind of sky
Americans tend to reach for. They pay a great deal of attention to the tallest,
the widest, the longest, the heaviest, or the lightest. The notion of the
skyscraper and its early implementations – later disseminated by emulators –
are of American origin. Their obsession with breaking records is well known, as
is the centrality of the expression ‘the sky is the limit’ in their discourse.
An apocryphal English father in the fifties is said to have advised his son,
about to cross the Atlantic, ‘In America, when you want to buy a small
toothpaste, ask for a large.’ The U.S. counterparts to a British ‘small’, ‘medium’
or ‘large’ toothpaste, of course, would be labelled as ‘economy’, ‘giant’,
‘super’.
How does a society focused on
breaking records detect when a record has been created or broken? Through
mechanisms that were put in place to celebrate advances in the social
technology of capitalism. Tweaking the Roman adage that justice must also be
seen to be done, competitors must be seen to be competing. The Olympics and
other arenas systematize the recording of achievements as a measure of maximal
capabilities. Interim peace only gives you opportunities to prepare for war.
Even little competitions are rehearsals for more serious drama. Competition
never pauses. The city never sleeps. The symbolism of racing past others in the
tabulation of recorded achievement falls within the constitutive settings of
industrial capitalism and is continuous with the war machine.
When semiotics is central to such an
apparatus for warfare and for its continuation by other means, semiotic methods
are needed to take one’s reading beyond this society’s self-characterization,
to the point of a rooting for peace that on the face of it is not available to
the American imagination. In the present intervention we are contrasting the
‘infinite sky’, associated with a biaxial semiotics, with what we see as the
American ‘total sky’ wedded to an overwhelmingly syntagmatic semiotics.
One element of the reading proposed
here goes back to the early decades of postcolonial American society, when its rooting
for monumental achievement was less salient that it later became. I am
referring to the period when Tocqueville wrote his classic account of democracy
in the United States. In this account he wrote: “In the United States politics
are the end and aim of education; in Europe its principal object is to fit men
for private life. The interference of the citizens in public affairs is too
rare an occurrence to be provided for beforehand. Upon casting a glance over
society in the two hemispheres, these differences are indicated even by their
external aspect. / In Europe we frequently introduce the ideas and habits of
private life into public affairs; and as we pass at once from the domestic
circle to the government of the state, we may frequently be heard to discuss
the great interests of society in the same manner in which we converse with our
friends. The Americans, on the other hand, transport the habits of public life
into their manners in private; in their country, the jury is introduced into
the games of schoolboys, and the parliamentary forms are observed in the order
of a feast” (Tocqueville 1963: I.318).
It is important to see that the
citizen’s altruistic desire to do good to her neighbours is inflected in a
distinctive way under the total sky associated with an imagination putting the
state first and visualizing civil society in terms that invoke the state. To
bring out just how this distinctive inflection works would require far more
detail than I have space for. Perhaps a cartoonish, stylized account will do.
It is as if a typical citizen in a syntagmatic society, faced with a neighbour
personally requesting her help, were to feel obliged to run through a (largely
unconscious) computation to determine what a flawless welfare state would have
adjudicated as allowable by way of justified aid to this recipient. By this I
mean not just quantitative dues, but everything that the best of all possible
human welfare indices would specify by way of tangible empowerment and capacity-building.
The point of my cartoon is that the person who is in a position to help feels
compelled to say to someone seeking her aid, ‘We will make sure you get all the
help you deserve, and I too will do my best.’
If the discourse prevalent in your
society validates your helpfulness in terms of what the institutions are supposed
to provide on macroeconomic welfarist grounds, then your personal contribution
stands undermined. The American imagination takes philanthropy out of your
personal hands to the extent that it is able to convince you that, if you are a
philanthropically minded individual, then it becomes your responsibility to
take your inclination ‘seriously’, to translate it into ‘appropriate’ and
‘systematic’ action. This confines you to the total sky – and deprives you of
access to the infinite sky – if this ‘seriousness’ compels you to place empathy,
kindness, all ‘sentiments’, on macro-economic weighing machines that compute
all outcomes with equanimity, from the noblest to the most sordid. The state,
and its extensions in society, must use weighing machines because the currency
of their dealings is heavy. The fascination with records and breaking them has
to do with the calculations of such weight.
The infinite sky puts you in touch
with a different dimension, that of lightness, which is not an antonym of
weight; it asks different questions that are unintelligible to the state. The
gaze that seeks the infinite sky and therefore harbours lightness sees your
interlocutor in the light of mutual acknowledgement of dignity across radical
otherness. The Other whom you face is not reduced to any collection of
parameter values by a validated macro-analysis. You cannot take one look at her
predicament and immediately launch a struggle to secure her rights on
the basis of some category labels. For you are not sure that you have, or will
ever have, a full picture of her personal identity, her wants, her needs; there
is always a residue of not knowing.
I highlight the word ‘immediately’,
because it is important not to go overboard with this idea to the point of
losing sight of the fact that forging bonds of solidarity with the Other is of
course valuable. It may well be appropriate to launch a campaign on behalf of some
individual that you are dealing with. In that case you must indeed do what you evidently
should do – with or without fortification from macro-economic analysis and a
welfare state doctrine. The point I am making is that merely focusing on what
you have learnt about the Other (plus actions you undertake in order to help
her) is not enough. You must also keep in view the absolute interminability of
the labour of such learning (and of consequent actions) if your dealings with
the Other are to continue to nourish the growth of your self-awareness. For a
vivid example involving not a personal Other but a social-reality-level Other,
consider Lahiri’s (2016) tryst with Italian: the book celebrates her immersion
in the fact that she will never be a native speaker of this language that she
loves and continues to learn.
The point is not just about humility,
about knowing your limitations. It is also a matter of limits, of not rushing
into a space you have not been invited into. To reiterate the main theme of
this article – the total sky encourages you to put syntagmatic considerations
first and to offer help in a control mode (which you may have prettified into
‘mutual control’ to announce that you are not a control freak). But the
infinite sky asks you to step back and make room for paradigmatic questions,
asks you to find a way of addressing the Other with full knowledge that she is
not going to become your partner or team-mate at any level. In that spirit, you
may learn that even half-acquaintance may suffice as a basis for certain
dealings, and that this may become a matter of principle, not just of
convenience.
Under the infinite sky you learn the art
of directly acknowledging the Other as a fully present person. In contrast, the
total sky encourages you to believe that the best way to respond to a personal
request for help is to adopt the indirect, abstract approach. If you give in to
that approach, you stifle the spontaneous voice of your generosity and mumble:
‘Wait, I don’t have the expertise to evaluate this request for assistance; let
me get properly equipped experts to screen it for me and advise me whether and
how to help this person’.
There are people who have convinced
themselves that macro-economic analysis wedded to the welfare state is in
principle the only valid filter through which all proposals for aid should be
evaluated, and that in practice one has to make do with approximations to the
assessment that an ideal version of such a state would have come up with. In
their view, spontaneous generosity is merely an intuitive version of such an
approximation and has no special claim on attention; it is just one more piece
of input, which a rational person will not privilege over evaluations based on
explicit criteria. Such persons have become unable to see a person vividly as a
concrete presence: they see only a random potential client, to be screened the
way an employer screens applicants for a job. By diminishing the presence of
the Other, they diminish their own personal presence.
It is this choice – whether an unknown
person facing you is seen as a concrete presence or as a random dot on an
evaluative screen – that distinguishes life under the infinite sky from life
under the total sky.
The total sky casts you as a random donor
facing a random recipient and encourages you to route all transactions through
the system, be it the state or the market. It is certainly okay on that logic
to sometimes make a personal decision on the spur of the moment; but you must
later look back at what you have done and determine whether you have truly acted
in accord with the principles of the ideal state or the ideal market; you are
not yourself simpliciter, and the person facing you is not that person tout
court; you and your actions make sense only to the extent that you remember
at all times that you are acting on the system’s behalf; and the proper way to
look at your interlocutor is to imagine how the system would look at her.
In contrast, the infinite sky enjoins you
to respect yourself in your integrity, to acknowledge the dignity of the Other
as a presence, and to place all relations of representation – such as the idea
that you are acting on behalf of some system or collectivity – under your permanent
scrutiny. These relations are up to you; if you find it imperative to withdraw
from them at any moment, you can validly choose to walk out, and this validity
does not come from imagining that you are acting on behalf of some
counter-system or counter-collective.
The way these comments, purportedly about
the American imagination, visualize the Self facing the Other is both too
specific (tied as it is to a donor-recipient context) and too generic (implying
that it does that, for all we know, the Self is an adult upper echelon WASP
male). I do hope this characterization manages to give a reasonable initial idea
of what I have in mind. However, by way of flagging the gap between this
portrayal and the reality it points to, let me add some brief remarks about
heterogeneity.
In the days of the melting pot, portrayals
of the typical American assumed an adult upper echelon WASP male default.
However, successive challenges from African-Americans, women, Hispanics,
indigenous peoples, non-white immigrants, queer people have hardly left this
stereotype intact. My take is that, after facing these challenges and tweaking
some parameters, the American imagination now works with a differentiated
default set of prototypical Americans. This differentiation per se, although an
improvement on the oppressive recent past, nonetheless leaves the American
imagination as committed as ever to the total sky, as chained as ever to the
syntagmatic axis.
In this Barthes-inspired reading of the
American realities, in order to avoid getting hopelessly bogged down in
exegetic issues, I am invoking the work of Roland Barthes as a whole and deliberately
eschewing reference to specific texts and passages. For instance, if pressed to
specify what it is I am offering a reading of – the American imagination, or
discourse, or social text – I will maintain that the object of inquiry here is
the American doxa in the sense that Barthes attaches to this Greek word
that used to mean ‘opinion’. But narrow exegetic issues of this kind need not
hold up the enterprise, whose relevance will be obvious to many readers.
5.
The question of friendship
Even after the minor tweaking just
carried out in connection with heterogeneity, the characterization provided
here may still strike certain readers as insensitive to the facts on the
ground. If average Americans are as incapable of registering a random person’s
concrete presence as this portrayal makes them out to be, how can they possibly
make friends with the ease that all observers acknowledge? How does one make
sense of the openness and transparency of many American friendships and yet
hold on to the claims made in this article?
My first response is to say, such
readers are missing the point about the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes:
one’s friends are in one’s corner, which puts them on the syntagmatic axis and
confirms my main point instead of weakening it. But this response is unlikely
to allay the misgivings, which rest on the widespread perception that it is
risky to base an analysis of America on Weil, Touraine, Levinas, Barthes –
risky to pay no attention to domestic commentary. In deference to this perception,
I now proceed to take on board a crucial articulation of the social phenomena
of the United States: Keyes (1976), who on the basis of innumerable personal
interviews concludes that the defining phase of an American biography is high
school. The average citizen of this unique society, Keyes shows, never quite
recovers from this experience.
A Broadway musical based on Keyes was
released in 1982, speeding up the dissemination of his main point throughout
the national public space. The point is simple enough. You may be an American
of Russian or German or Japanese or Hungarian descent. That you count as an
American is due to an authorization given to you not from the family but at
school, given by fellow teenagers over your four years of high school. This
holds not just for recent immigrants, but for all Americans: the assimilated
immigrant is, culturally speaking, the prototypical American. Your high school peer
group is your one and only culturally authorized collective high priest.
American teenagers at high school learn that they are each other’s only owners,
philosophers, guides. The fun part of this is making friends and influencing
people. The indigestible bit is the bonding disasters. There is no exit from
that fun or those disasters. The experience of high school is the American
citizen’s lifelong obsession. These are the chemicals that made her who she is.
Even Europeans – who are sometimes alleged
to be deaf to the distinctive melodies of America – agree that this chemistry
is indeed unique. Rather than cite personal conversations with assorted
Europeans, I prefer to mention Baudrillard’s (1989) characterization of
American society as the last surviving tribal society. This is of course a
flamboyant French reference to the primacy of puberty rituals. If sober
American self-portrayal and extravagant French exclamation coincide, it should
be possible to accept this account as robust and build on it.
The first thing to do as we refine the
account, surely, is to reiterate the tweaking that I closed section 4 with. The
salad bowl period marks an advance over the melting pot model of the high
school that Keyes describes. Going beyond salad bowl issues, Muslim children
have hardly had quite the same experience at high school before and after 9/11.
However, the differentiated default holds here, as it did in section 4. There
is a tendency in the United States to elide history and to put a certain
geography first when constructing stereotypes in the name of simplicity, common
sense, inclusiveness and even-handedness towards all the constituent cultures
in the American mélange. Prevalent characterizations of the high school
experience conform to this tendency, which Keyes plays into and reinforces.
I would argue that it is precisely this
elision of history that underwrites the ease with which the average American extends
commitment-free friendliness even to individuals outside the ‘team’. What high
school enables the typical citizen of that society to do is to start an
agreeable conversation with any random person she finds herself spending time
with, and to cobble together an instant temporary friendship that leaves open
all questions about the past or commitments for the future.
Now, let us contrast the total sky with
the infinite sky in the context sketched so far. For this purpose we shall
imagine an adult foreign graduate student FGS steeped in the culture of the
infinite sky, pursuing a PhD in the United States, and hoping to achieve full
mutuality of communication with her associates there. She makes friends. She
watches closely how the relationships evolve, discovers the total sky/ infinite
sky binary, and suffers. She keeps trying to convey to her new friends the idea
that, instead of worshipping monuments wholeheartedly, one can read one’s daily
life on earth as a marvellous document the way she does. But all her efforts
fail.
And yet FGS finds that she cannot give up
on her new friends. She admires the way American adults initiate and sustain
these bonds of friendship. It is impossible for her to dismiss the value of
what she sees. She concludes that the total sky does not vitiate all human
projects in that culture, and that specifically their ubiquitous friendliness
is a value worth cherishing that may yet counteract the weaknesses of their
culture.
FGS cannot guess along what lines the
dynamics might play out – in what way their capacity to sustain trust and
friendship might save them from the lethal consequences of living under the
total sky. However, she feels sure that what she perceives has some validity
that goes beyond her particular context as a foreigner. After all, their
society has been created from the perspective of immigrants. Surely the endemic
indirectness of the total sky and the vividness of their personal friendships
confront each other at some mysterious level? How can this confrontation not
turn the tide? That the 99% are mobilizing against the 1% – surely this process
is deriving some of its energies from the atmosphere of diffuse spontaneous
friendliness in the public space? How else can we make sense of the positive
reception of Mills (1959) in that society?
There is little doubt that American
friendliness has a paradigmatic potential that may yet enable a turnaround of
an unforeseen kind, which our FGS pins her hopes on. In this context one must,
however, recall the unbridled syntagmatic features of the American system.
These make it difficult to be optimistic in the short run. To take only one
example, means of violence are disseminated freely, thanks to the Second
Amendment to the Constitution, which states that “A well-regulated militia
being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to
keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed”. The lethal consequences of the free
availability of guns are well known. Space prevents detailed commentary here,
but obviously a country with such a constitutional provision legitimizes
aggression in the name of the right to defence. In such a society, the
syntagmatic imagination is bound to be dominant. Having said that, one must
nonetheless acknowledge that paradigmatic elements in American society require
more attention than they have received, and make it possible to hope, despite
the Second Amendment and other forms of the prevalence of syntagmatic reason in
that culture.
Specifically, where friendly relations
between humans intersect with the love of animals – not just at the ubiquitous
level of keeping pets and bonding with farm animals or horses, but also in the
context of veganism and other expressions of solidarity with animals on a
conceptual plane – the American imagination clearly reaches for the infinite
sky. People are often willing to sacrifice their own interests for the sake of
animals who cannot defend themselves. These affirmations of renunciation
provide an important counterpoint to the overwhelming acquisitive ethos of the
culture.
If it turns out to be possible to fashion
semiotic resources that enable an alignment of this capacity for renunciation
with the theory and practice of sustainability, then a full-blown alternative
utopia associated with the infinite sky can be visualized by large numbers of
people even at the exoteric level. It is at that point that those of us who
root for this utopia can begin to use a widely understood political language
for the task of unmasking and resisting the prevalent consumeristic utopia
wedded to the syntagmatic imagination. At that juncture, public intellectuals
can come into their own.
In order to get there, obviously many
workers, not only in semiotics proper, will have to contribute resources.
Manashi Dasgupta’s (2015) characterization of friendships as metaprojects
(crucibles capable of incubating projects and defined by this capability)
is one example of the type of work that is called for. Another is Ganguly’s
(1975) methodological highlighting of reasonableness over against
excessively formalized modes of rationality. The crucial struggle that
is being waged today is a struggle against semiotic militarism. The forces of
peace can triumph only by meeting this adversary on its home ground of
semiotics – and this means quietly demilitarizing that arena by bringing the
superior strength of peace and quiet into play. The challenge can of course be
met; we had better know how to meet it; the point is to understand it first.
References
Baudrillard,
Jean. 1989. America. Tr. Chris Turner. New York: Verso.
Collett,
Peter; Marsh, Peter. 1974. Patterns of public behavior: collision avoidance on
a pedestrian passing. Semiotica 12:4.281-299. Repr. in T.A. Sebeok & J. Umiker-Sebeok (eds.)
Nonverbal Communication, Interaction and Gestures. The Hague: Mouton, 1981.
199-217.
Dasgupta,
Manashi. 2015. On Love and Friendship in the Indian Context and Sigmund
Freud. Delhi: Indian Council of Philosophical Research/ DK
Printworld.
Dasgupta,
Probal. 2011. Inhabiting Human Languages: The Substantivist Visualization. Delhi:
Indian Council of Philosophical Research/ Samskriti.
Dasgupta,
Probal. 2016. The theater and
classical India: some availability issues. Philosophy East and West 66:1.60-72.
Ganguly,
Sachindra Nath. 1975. Tradition, Modernity and Development. Delhi:
Macmillan.
Keyes,
Ralph. 1976. Is there Life after High School? New York: Warner.
Kundera, Milan. 1981. The
Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Tr. Aaron Asher. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Lahiri, Jhumpa. 2016. In
Other Words. Tr. Ann Goldstein. New York: Alfred Knopf.
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality
and Infinity. Tr. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The
Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.
Sircar, Badal. 1983. Thiyetarer
bhasha. Kolkata: Opera.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. 1963. Democracy
in America. 2 vols. The Henry Reeve text, ed. by P. Bradley. New
York: Knopf.
Touraine, Alain. 1972. Le
communisme utopique: le mouvement de mai 1968. Paris: Seuil.
Weil, Simone. 1952/2002. Gravity
and Grace. Tr. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr. London/ New York:
Routledge & Kegan Paul.
