When trying to understand and empathize with past history, one of the big challenges or barriers lies in understanding the thoughts, opinions, attitudes, mindsets, intentions, etc. of earlier people and the words they use. And failing to understand the imperatives that led to past mindsets and words will undoubtedly generate some resentment on behalf the of inquirer whom, when having to reports their findings, will let their resentments seep through more or less subtly, degrading the felicity of the inquiry.
Well, what are the challenges or barriers to understanding them then? Adam Katz has in his more recent writings been focusing on the concept of “likeness”, centering around how things are like other things and everything has some extend of likeness to everything else. I want to propose that presently expected likeness to ostensibly same or similar intentions, opinions thoughts, and ultimately words, may not be “present” in past versions, particularly as you go back far back enough in time for religion to be a dominating factor.
To highlight this, Jacques Derrida’s notion of the “différance” would be pertinent place to begin. In simple terms, words and signs do not have fixed meanings and are always changing in relation to other signifiers, in a chain or web of signifiers. We can therefore deduce that in the past, words and the concepts they referred to would’ve been embedded in a different chain or web of signifiers than we would typically find them in the present, which is the beginning of an explanation for why historical researchers might experience resentment that in some way erodes the quality of the inquiry.
However, is it then possible to pinpoint to something general or repeated in these chains or webs of signifiers that’d make them different enough to be unexpectedly unalike? Structuralist philosophers that predated Jacques Derrida coined the term “binary opposition” where all words or concept has an opposite; e.g. hot/cold, up/down, light/dark, good/bad, etc. Each “unit of language” is in their view defined by what it is not, an opposition, which Derrida himself further elaborated that each word and sign contains a trace of its opposite, e.g. hot implies cold, up implies down, light implies dark, good implies bad, etc. I.e., there’s a likeness in the opposite partners that pairs them together and makes them intelligible. Gilles Deleuze would later elaborate on the notion with the “ontology of difference”, which further centers difference as how we make things intelligible from other things.
One sign to rule them all
Jacque Derrida goes on to speculate that the structuralists are not quite right in that every word has an opposite partner; he coins the term “transcendental signifier”. A transcendental signifier gestures at a (transcendental) signified that Jacque Derrida conceives as “outside” of all signifiers, but is implied by (or reflected in) all signifiers and gives them meaning. While Derrida’s goal was to disprove that such a signified (or meaning) actually exists “beyond language”, the important part is that it orders the symbolic order to itself, to its own meaning, which means that all other words or signs in the hierarchy would contain a trace, the likeness, of the transcendental signifier’s signified. Additionally, this means that the transcendental signifier has no “binary opposite”, it’s unique to its symbolic order, and as Jacque Lacan argues, only “exists” and is real insofar it’s able to provide meaning to its symbolic order efficiently.
The implication is thus the broad difference between the chains or webs of signifiers of the past, compared to the present, could be caused by a different transcendental signifier that orders the symbolic order to its likeness differently than transcendental signifier that orders the present-day symbolic order. The question then becomes, has the transcendental signifier changed? Once again Jacque Derrida, in his discussions with his rival Jacque Lacan, gives us a clue. In their discussions on the transcendental signifier they identify “God” as a signifier of an “outside” signified that orders, or at least used to order, the symbolic order. Used to, because a transcendental signifier that’s actively ordering the hierarchy is virtually undisputed, and “God” is anything but these days, however when they’re dethroned they’ll become reduced to the status of myth in the order of the new transcendental signifiers symbolic order.
Alright, so when launching a felicitous inquiry into the past one must keep in mind that a different transcendental signifier than the present one may deceptively degrade the likeness of the symbolic order within which the work or event took place, more than anticipated. Thus, making their thoughts, opinions, attitudes, mindsets, intentions, etc. more alien and require additional effort to get into, as the symbolic order helps mold how we (can) think about things, framing meaning to its likeness, therefore shaping (and delimiting) our mindset, opinions, attitudes, intentions, etc. Polish-Australian linguist Anna Wierzbicka, in her book “Imprisoned in English”, similarly explores how the domination of English leads to a narrowing of thought through suppression of linguistic diversity.
Can we then say anything about how far back one has to go before this becomes a problem? Well, that Derrida was critiquing the concept of God gives us a good indication that it had already fallen from grace as a transcendental signifier. And Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed “God is dead” in 1882, so we must go even further back. Considering how God vs. evolution has been such a hot topic over the last century or two, I think it’s safe to say that that was what usurped as transcendental signifier. Like God, evolution shares the characteristic that it’s hard to really pin down “what it is”, and it doesn’t really have any opposite. However, what’d best demonstrate its present transcendental ordering of the symbolic order would be if we can see traces of its likeness throughout it, in all the words and signs we use. And what better method than through différance!
Illuminating the transcendental likeness
I think there’s no better discipline to demonstrate this change than in the field of economics. Where something like physics or chemistry were born out of alchemy, economics as the ostensibly same discipline spans prior to Charles Darwin and evolution as a signified. Having originary thinking in mind, it has the additional advantage that we know precisely when it formally came into its own as a discipline. This happens in 1776 when Scottish philosopher Adam Smith published his epochal work “The Wealth of Nations”, though I want to note that even this work, where he treats economics as its own system, is itself a rejection of the contemporaneous notion that wealth and power was distributed due to God’s will, meaning that even during this period God as a transcendental signifier was waning in its effectiveness at ordering the symbolic order.
The passage that best (or most famously at least) showcases “God” as a transcendental signifier ordering the symbolic order in his work would be the notion of the “invisible hand of the market”:
The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own convenience, though the sole end which they propose from the labors of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements...They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species. When Providence divided the earth among a few lordly masters, it neither forgot nor abandoned those who seemed to have been left out in the partition.
Since then, the invisible hand became an euphemism for how supply and demand arrives at an equilibrium price. Wording it this way sounds odd in today’s ears, as if it’s a spirit ordering the economy. However, the keen reader might also notice a few other curious expressions, i.e. “When Providence divided the earth among a few lordly masters, it neither forgot nor abandoned those who seemed to have been left out in the partition” also gestures at an outside force or will dividing the land with intention, and also being able to remember those who were less fortunate.
Now that we have one sample for comparison, how might one unearth the present-day transcendental signifier in contemporary economics literature? While I think a lot of my readers will know the cliché of “growth”, I thought it might be prudent to look at data that summarized the most common words found in the literature. And what better way to present that than a word cloud?
In the word cloud above the words that indicate “evolution” as a transcendental signifier the most would be “growth”, “process”, “development”, and maybe also “phases” and “rate” somewhat. For good measure, I also asked ChatGPT to rank the 20 most common words in its economics literature database:
In addition to the previously mentioned words, “competition” also strongly implies evolution. And from my own experiences, common words like “progress”, “change”, “innovation”, “optimization”, “adapt”, etc. also have a strong trace of the evolutionary model, i.e. survival of the fittest and environmental adaptation, which characterizes the theory of evolution. And in the listed words above there’s a general lack of outside tampering, of wills balancing and distributing according to their own whims. And, specifically going back to Adam Smith’s example, supply and demand are sort of imagined more as natural phenomena which arrive at an equilibrium price as an ecological balance, under the symbolic ordering of evolution.
A gradual reordering
One thing that is curious about the concept of the “transcendental signifier”, its naming in particular, is that Jacque Derrida ultimately decided against the notion, and believed that there were only everchanging chains or webs of signifiers who’re always subject to reinterpretation. However, he chose to name the concept that gestures more toward something like “God” than “evolution”. It’s plausible that it was intentionally done to be disparaging, however his rival Jacque Lacan who ultimately decided in favor of the notion didn’t name the concept something that as strongly implies God, which is a curious series of events.
Nonetheless, it’s also clear that, even though Jacque Derrida didn’t recognize it himself, his ultimate decision in favor of a more rhizomatic conception of the symbolic order itself has a strong likeness to the notion of evolution. It’s plausible the entire “shape” the symbolic order takes, is also in the likeness of its transcendental signifier (or at least how it’s perceived, thus shaping our conception).
What this suggests though is that instead of clean break and an immediate reordering of the entire symbolic order when a new transcendental signifier usurps a previous one, the reordering (overcoding, for the Deleuze aficionados) is more gradual and the traces and likeness of the previous one will persist in the symbolic order until novelty or innovation finally reorders that “area” to the new one. It’s likely that scientific momentum we experienced during the 19th and early 20th century were due to the reframing, recontextualizing, and reimagining that “evolution” enabled across the symbolic order, unleashing a lot of potential that would’ve been difficult to conceptualize when it was “God”.
So how far back does one have to go before this becomes a problem? Well, the boring answer is that the further you go back, the more you’ll have to be aware of how the words and signs are ordered. However, I think the more activity that “area” of the symbolic order has had after evolution became dominant, the more likely it is that that area is more easily understandable from a modern perspective. Conversely, the longer an “area” has been inactive, the more likely it also is that it’s still enthused with the likeness of God; here the contentious and shunned notion of “eugenics” might make a good case study. Prohibited after WW2, eugenics as a discipline has had virtually no development or thought given to it since then, meaning that’s it’s therefore an archeological time capsule of the early 20th century. Without going too much into detail, it shares likeness with evolution in that one must iteratively steer evolution toward a societally preferrable end, however it also shares likeness to God in e.g. Nietzsche’s conception of the “Übermensch”, the later German notion of the “Herrenvolk”, or simply the idea that evolution can be commandeered at all.
Beyond evolution
Now that we’ve established how to begin to get better into the mindsets of people’s of the past, thus improving the felicity of the data we (can) bring back from historical inquiries, can we say anything about what the future might hold? I don’t know how much thought Eric Gans or Adam Katz has given in this regard, but in filling out my glossary, and now helping with the GA wiki, there’re words that are difficult to pin down and really pinpoint “what it is”. However, the one concept that’s basically always repeated in their writings, and yet hard to clearly define, is the concept of the ”Center”. Secondly, it doesn’t really seem to have a clear opposite; maybe the “periphery” in the Center-Margin-Periphery relation? But most importantly, this concept or signifier, seems to align all other signifiers in their writing; take the very first sentence from one of Adam Katz’ most recent articles:
If our starting point is the center, it would make sense to speak of the capitalist, not in liberal bottom-up terms as a agent of private initiative regulated after the fact, but more as a kind of state ordered contractor.
Here, Adam Katz reorders (overcodes) the signifier “capitalist” away from its present ordering towards the likeness of “Center”. Instead of the signifier “capitalist” taking on its more commonly understood meaning of something like “spontaneous entrepreneur of the free market”, it suddenly takes on a more corporatist meaning of something like “authorized delegate of the state”.
Could “Center” be a plausible future transcendental signifier? I obviously can’t know for certain, but if Generative Anthropology holds the kind of explanatory power we in the discipline believe it does, then I think there’s a good chance that it could replace evolution and unleash a new explosion of creative energy that’s challenging to even conceptualize presently. Additionally, it also seems to combine aspects of both God and evolution; God in that there’s a sort of hierarchy, evolution in that the hierarchy and its relations aren’t fixed but can change (I imagine signifiers closer to the Center would be more stable and less subject to exchange while those toward the periphery would be more volatile and subject to a higher degree of exchange). In turn, these shared aspects will likely mean that integrating the far past with the present will be less demanding in the (potentially) coming future symbolic order.
Like Adam Katz above, this whole article is itself reordering the signifier “transcendental signifier”, together with a whole slew of connected signifiers, away from “God“ or “evolution” toward the one of “Center”. As Katz himself tends to do, and myself being a mere heralder of the Center, I think it’d therefore be prudent to name the transcendental signifier into something that’s a bit more to the Center’s likeness. How about “Central Signifier”?
Conclusion
While I thought the understanding of the Central Signifier would be able to bring about more accurate and felicitous inquiries into the past, I now believe I’ve uncovered something much more potent than merely that. There’re essentially two modes, or models, for Generative Anthropology here to really embody itself as the “one big discipline” or “discipline of disciplines”:
It must gradually reorder all signifiers in the Center’s likeness.
It must demonstrate its own potency or effectiveness at doing so, through unleashing a “little bang” of creative and innovative energy, for the benefit of all.
Particularly when participating in the second mode, be mindful of all signifiers used and make sure to align them toward the “Center” as Central Signifier, since the signifiers used in making new “content” will be mimicked when the content is memetically spread around. Thus, the more the content, and accompanying signifiers, are spread around, the more “powerful” (or should I say “centered”) the Center becomes relative to the contemporary Central Signifier. Nevertheless, the first mode is something everyone can participate in everyday symbol exchange, and is no doubt one that can also add a lot of value, like Katz in the above example.
Post scriptum
While writing the article I came across multiple examples of sentences that could be worded differently according to whichever Central Signifier’s likeness I wanted them to reflect the most. This section I’ll demonstrate an example on how you can engage in the first mode mentioned in the conclusion too, but can be considered optional if you’re already comfortable with what’s been presented so far.
I first realized how my own use of signifiers had changed when I wrote the sentence on Gilles Deleuze’s ontology of difference. While that one obviously bear likeness to “Center”, I tried experimenting with how else I could write it:
God – Gilles Deleuze would later on be inspired to create his “ontology of difference”, which elevates difference to the ontological level as how we fundamentally make things intelligible from other things
Evolution – Gilles Deleuze would later adapt the concept further and conceive of the “ontology of difference”, which posits that the fundamental nature of intelligibility lies in how things are different from other things
Center - Gilles Deleuze would later elaborate on the notion with the “ontology of difference”, which further centers difference as how we make things intelligible from other things
What is important to note here is that despite the sentence’s adherence to different Central Signifiers, I’ve made sure the likeness in meaning has stayed as close to the same as possible across all three. And this adherence to likeness in meaning necessitates a(n) (ex)change in the signifier’s one must use to convey the same meaning, a difference of form. If one had used the same form, i.e. used the exact same sentences, under the different Central Signifiers, one would’ve arrived at a difference in meaning (however subtly).
Written by SamgyeopsalChonsa, edited by Uberover