Fragments on the notion of “everyone”
Made with Artbreeder.
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How we talk about everyone, be it directly (“i suppose everyone feels adrift in this way”) or by of implication (“no one really believes in the idea of his own death”) generally tells us more about the person talking then it does about what everyone else is “really” like. This is pretty obvious; but what’s more, it tells us more about the speaker than if he were talking about himself, insofar as it shows his (un)examined assumptions about the world, through which--not unlike how Perseus uses a mirror to navigate the Gorgon’s cave, he’s able to view his own being (or more precisely, the way he experiences his own being) under the soft lighting of “human nature,” which is surely not so personal, not so pregnant with culpability, to be sure—a fact which is the case even when he ‘knows’ not everyone really does work that way.
When he amends himself, in the course of the formulations or only afterward, when someone points out that obviously there may be, probably will be, indeed almost certainly are exceptions to his broad generalizations, the spectre of everyone remains hanging about—not exorcised, but denounced, challenged, agitated, rebuked at the level of effects without the causes of its ministrations being resolved, or even acknowledged.
The haunting precedes its own ghost.
For one does not need to remain loyal to the idea of everyone in order to have initially brought it into the picture, and formulations which denounce the notion at their very outset (“obviously not everyone feels this way, but it seems so obvious to me that…”) may fulfill the tasks demanded of the category just as well—and more covertly— then a straightforward invocation.
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In horror movies, is it not the ironic, disaffected Ouija board reading or demonic summoning, which both calls upon and insults the ceremony’s petitioned spirit, which fuels the most disturbing visitations. And often the ghost itself will maintain a kind of plausible deniability, choosing not to confront the author of its insult head on, but rather return disregard with disregard, and stalk the adrenaline marshes at the edge of avowed awareness.
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A given experience being described in the vicinity of “everyone,” therefore something outside and beyond himself, something not of him as such but in a sense external to him prior to the moment he reached for that framing, this is often how one relates to those parts which are of distinct origin from him but also not; i.e., how we relate to those attributes, desires, habits, and factions of ourselves from which we have become alienated.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps these elements only become foriegn for us when what is we describe them as things everyone goes through but which obviously everyone doesn’t go through, because while everyone may have their attributes, desires, habits, and factions which they find alien, no one else has mine, no one else experiences mine from a first person, direct and qualitative point of view. But by naming what is mine as everyone’s, I make it no one’s, because being alienated from their subject-source, my own sensations become like a stranger in a strange land, present but unacknowledged, or acknowledged but understood as present in the abstract way we understand ourselves to be human, to be part of “everyone.”
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When he consciously invoking “everyone” as a hyperbolic device, just a way of making a connection with his audience—we have this in common, because everyone has it and we each/together are subsets of everyone—when he says these things, he is lying, and it is the lie which is the point. Or perhaps “acting” is a more charitable classification--just so long as we acknowledge that central to the action is the fact of its untruthfulness.
I do not say these things because they are true, but because they are false—because they are false and, above all, because I can say such false things.
It is not true that every person uses language to relate to themselves, to understand and carve up the world and their reality within it. We know it is not true, but it is also true of enough people (or true for the relevant people, the important people) that it can be raised from merely overwhelming data to the level of a theory, to a narrative according to which we can act as if it is true, at the level not of semantic truth but political function. That is, we can make that statement into something which—transcends truth? Preconditions the production of new knowledge? Structures how and which further data can be viewed?
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Generalities are the flaw in the lens which also for the enlargement of the object in view, the means of focusing, of dividing the relevant from the ir-.
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Statements about everyone are one of the most common ways of constructing a public. And what exceptions he returns to as well tell us something interesting.
Exceptions aren’t just things we’d like to be true, of course. The effect I’m trying to have is specifically linguistic: the way i act on my listener, or rather, the way I act and the way she affirms, contradicts, alters my action such that it structures our conversation--and with it our immediate (/not so immediate) venue. Generalities make sense out of things, give us common (admittedly false) premises to reference so that neither of us will feel confused (or feel the other is confused and thereby find in ourselves a compulsion to explain) future actions, statements, etc which would otherwise have different meanings. This compulsion perhaps goes back to that Age of First Frustrations, when do to our limited grasp on the mechanics and resources of language we struggled to communicate information and effect change in our parents, and thereby lost precious control over our environment and with it any hope of attaining any number of childish aims.
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In my case, an exceptional case (which I alluded to earlier) I find myself most often invoking is the case of the feral child—the person raised with minimal interaction and care from others and who is not vested with language skills until late in life, if at all. Such a person, however, is still viewed through the lens of one possessing language (me) who at a gutteral level concieves of this person as capable of language—and therefore, by dint of an unspoken workings of natural law, bearing a peculiar right and duty to engage in language use, though it would probably be a mistake to say that these rights and duties bear much of an ethical weight, in the same way that rights and duties conferred by law, or contract, or convention, or habit, may or may not have anything to do with ethics.
What does that particular example say about me?
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Feral humans, though we might stipulate that they are genetically identical to humans pre the development of language (50 thousand? 100 thousand? five hundred thousand years ago?) are made—made—a different object of analysis from said early humans. That is, the two may be intrinsically identical yet radically differentiated within the mind of the scholar contrasting them, insofar as said scholar views them as being capable (as well as entitled and obliged) RE language in different ways.
Belonging to language, such that has been naturalized--ie, has been put into reference to that broad discursive hyper-object which we invoke constantly in political and philosophical debate, always under a common, singular name, but which it would be more accurate to pluralize: to whit, to be naturalized is to be put into conversation with “a nature,” which must be produced, like all socially constructed concepts, through a dialectic of material conditions and human agency.
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What kinds of things does such a “nature” do, once it has been produced and set out into the world?
When a mother finds out her child hasn’t said their first words by the time considered typical, she doesn't just chalk this up as merely a statistical anomaly and goes about her day, she says they “should” be talking by now. When she finds out the child won’t be able to speak, she thinks that something has gone “wrong” with her child—she has this sense even if she’s read Foucualt and Deleuze and the rest, even if she knows that right and wrong are politically produced, even if she knows (especially if she knows, for isn that just one more layer of guilt) that standards about what a body can do and what it should do are always produced politically.
For while she knows they are political products, she also knows she encounters the fact of her infantś silence as a qualitative breaking down, feels the unfooting lurch as she and her baby together depart from personal, communal, institutional expectations around her. This is no mean thing. For the somatic and psychic weight of these expectations by no means just disappear when she considers the work of philosophers and analysts; for she knows this too: “knowledge itself is no cure.”
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Like my latent sense that a person “should” be able to talk, the demands placed on the aberant by an institution are not necessarily ethical demands. Rather, they reside within a different (though often overlapping) area of normativity, that which propounds on all that exists within the expectation of its “nature” and all that fails to adhere to it. It isn’t that her baby has been charged by God to be a saint and has failed. There’s a sense of separation form agency and therefore ethics (ethics as understood in the post-Kantian world, at least) that its not anyone’s fault or ethical failing (or if it is, its God’s failing, or the doctor, or herself as a mother) because it isn’t that the baby has done wrong, but rather of something wrong with it (two prepositions) or (more immediately, using only one verb): the baby is wrong, falling outside of the mold which even now surrounds them, hanging like a misfitting skin.
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Linguists traveling to the distant past to meet prelinguistic humans would probably initially struggle to view them with a stable framework. the distance of anthropology, the knowledge that they are outside the inheritance of language (the world prior to the biblical fall, poetically speaking) one is perhaps used to thinking of such homos as a different breed or species, as just another very intelligent ape. but the time travelers would, in coming face to face with such humans, have a visceral sense, despite knowledge of their transchronography, of communicability with said human, precisely by the physical scene of coming face to face with a person when one has grown up (unless raised alongside feral children and individuals who are otherwise unable to speak) associating human actions with communicability as a tautology.
So our time travelers would probably mentally jump back and forth between modes. On the one hand, they would perhaps discover within themselves that same strange horror on display in the original Planet of the Apes when other scientists, these ones traveling forward in time, not back, meet humans who cannot talk, and later still when the main character George Taylor reunites with his shipmate has been lobotomized and rendered speechless, simultaneously robbed of the kind of qualitative experience he and George once shared and of any means to express those experiences (or for that matter his new, post-lobotomy experiences, such as they are) in language. On the one hand, we might imagine that the ape Caesar in the prequel films had very different feelings towards other apes to whom he had not yet given the tools and interactions necessary to begin to talk—still made distant by their lack of language, but distant in a broachable, understandable, expectable, and above all natural manner.
For now that’s just speculation. The affective-conceptual gap between pre-linguistic human populations and those who for reasons of circumstance or internal conditions don’t or can’t talk remains. and so far as it does, the former can be said to be experienced as natural and the later as un-, even if they are in fact identical twins separated at birth, one from 500k years ago and the other brought forward to the present moment and raised according to the principles of what historians of feral children call “the forbidden experiment”--i.e., keeping a kid in a shack in the woods, sterilized of all linguistic contact but still residing in this present moment in time, in order to see what happens.
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Perhaps a large part of the unnatural human is the story we use to understand it. Perhaps what is unnatural to us is not that they can’t speak, but the cruel experimentation or accidental and all its implied past and ongoing challenges which strikes us in its alterity to our own.
To talk about “everyone” is one of the most common ways the everyday constituent of ideology constructs the public around them. Meanwhile, talking in general, re the normative expecations it brings with it, always already implies boundaries, outsides, exclusions and bifurcations upon that public. This is true whether or not the subject in question has that trait which has just been ascribed to everyone. Thus to construct of public always an internal other (one who can’t use language and therefore can’t access the full range of possibilities latent in being a part of the public but who, like everyone, depends on social interaction and care from other humans to survive) or an external other (a pre-linguistic human who, unlike “everyone” doesn’t base his identity on language statements, ie my original example of an “everyone” statement), the public is already not uneven, divided, characterized by alterity at the level of its general structures and its micro-relations alike.
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There is no individual: there are only social relations between people, and within them.
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In the case of the external self we find an archetype highly prominent in early modern european history: the noble savage, whose wild and untamed nature (so goes the romanticized version) tells us of our potential, of what is inside us waiting to get out, or what has gone spoiled and fermented in us, never to be fully revived, letting off the rot of civilization longing for its own death (Rousseau). This subject, this archetype, tells us a great deal about the one who uses and responds to it.
Consider if he romantically ignores, dreamlike, the fact that this noble savage may be presumed to have all the advantages of discipline, specifically those forms of discipline we recognize as familiar, without having gone through any of the familiar modes of domestication and disciplining which we went through. This is an impossible, contradictory figure. He is a dreamed-for figure, that is, a figure we resent for not existing but who, if it did exist, we would probably also resent for being so perfect. The way people feel about the child-saint Leonard Stessek in DFW’s unfinished novel The Pale King. The way people would probably feel about the Euthyphrosian God, should he appear before them.
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Or maybe our man’s construction of the noble savage-exception isn’t so banally limited. Maybe he doesn’t naively long for an Adam at once Innocent/childlike/prelinguistic and Noble/mature/post-linguistic: an Adam who has his fruit of knowledge and eats it too.
Adam would not have made for a very interesting disciple, nor prophet, nor villain. Insofar as the Passion is a retelling of Genesis, it improves on the characterization immensely.
Maybe the “undisciplined”, unfamiliar, even frustrating and uncanny attributes of the feral child are romanticized without being smoothed over. Maybe the archetype allowed to have operate according to the logic of its own world. In that case, the Noble Savage-exception perhaps de-centers (perhaps superficially, perhaps authentically) the naturalness or inevitability of one’s own, post linguistic experience. But if it de-centers this self-position, it does so while simultaneously endowing it with new meanings—and, perhaps, some old ones.
All absolutist statements also mean the opposite of themselves.
The Noble Savage archetype, when understood according to its own logic, makes the person viewing the archetype into a kind of witness or disciple to the nature of the feral human, a student to his truth, a prophet who bears the sign of radical alterity but who is condemned (how sweetly condemned!) in that he is unable to delve into its depths.
As in the case of cliche annoying acid trips, de-centering occurs as a double movement. In the case of the cliche acid trip, he finds himself in a state of transcendence the very message of which is that he and everyone else are caught up in the ongoing, unspecialized, unfolding process of becoming. In other words, one abandons one center for another, with the added annoyance that this second center can’t stop talking about how its not the first center.
In short, the pride of a favorite servant, the position of a priest who delights in feeling ontologically displaced by the radical ultimacy of God but simultaneously is reorientated around that ultimacy, taking his place from his experience of displacement itself. And this relationship by no means has to involve the priest backhandedly elevating himself up just a little over everyone else after all, by means of glory reflected off god to him. hierarchy in this obvious, pompous sense needn’t come into it. all that’s being shown is that in relating himself to the non-linguistic subject in this sort of honest/realistic way, the person is calling himself into a specific epistemic position, one not necessarily aggrandizing but certainly having content.
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De-territorialization and re-territorialization are simultaneously synonyms and opposites.
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In addition to the feral child our our constitutive outside, our absolute and Constitutive Other who gives definition and limit to the “everone”; and the romanticized non-speaker (the Noble Savage-exception), in whom we see both ourselves and our negation, and of whom we might say is our “External Self,” there is also the Internal self and the Internal Other. Consider the “average” (especially the totally totally average) man, the everyday man, who becomes paradoxically strange again by means of over-confoormativity, or alternatively who is not outstanding in any way at all, not even in his being so absolutely not-outstanding.
How does one feel about the Average Man? Does he feel the Average Man is himself, or does he himself stand a little askance, a little bit external, outside the precise bounds of the Internal Self--making himself, ironically, more associated with the Internal Other than the demands of his conception of “nature” expect of him. Does he resent the over-conformer? Admire him? Imitate him, parsing his gestures so perfectly that he is an exact copy of the Average Man, except that unlike himself the Average Man’s behaviors are immediate to him, as opposed to being the copy of any particular idea of what is average? Does he envy him? Does he mobilize him (as a trope or as an actual demographic) to wage his political battles, the Average Man, the Everyday American, the standard bearer of every “everyone”? This quadrant, too, is ripe with location and velocity.