Demand and the Grammar of Desire

Desire is generally understood in distinction from need, and in that way its specifically human quality is brought out—desire implicates us in the other, which for mimetic theory means those we imitate or, more broadly, are bound to through a web of models. The originary hypothesis would place desire on the originary scene, with the accelerated rush to the center constituting the imminent mimetic crisis that calls forth the sign. Even if, strictly speaking, we can only speak of desire once the sign has been issued and participants on the scene barred from possessing the object, the overriding of appetite and therefore need precedes the sign and calls it forth. With desire comes resentment, directed toward whomever is taken to be blocking access to the object of desire. We could say that both desire and resentment are first directed toward the center, each toward a different incarnation of the center: desire for exclusive, sole, guaranteed possession of the object and whatever properties have been conferred upon it by the scene and resentment for the center that has mobilized everyone else on the scene to interpose themselves between you and the object. We could say, then, that the constitutive human reality is being oneself mobilized through desire to “reflect” and “measure” the resentment of others, while those others are doing the same for oneself. This reciprocal measuring would provide for a mapping of any scene and this mapping would be carried out in language: ultimately, the declarative sentence provides for such a mapping.

We can trace desire/resentment through the evolution of the speech forms by associating each side of the complementary pair to the demand/command poles of the imperative. I’ve argued previously for the temporal priority of “demand,” which remains closest to the “inappropriate ostensive” Gans identifies as the origin of the imperative: demanding an object be provided is prior to commanding an action on the part of the other. I don’t see how we could even posit a command prior to the emergence of the declarative sentence, as the command relies upon the possibility of a complete sentence (maybe we could see the command, more specifically, as a “deformation” of the declarative sentence). The operator of negation Gans places at the entry point of the declarative (the “negative ostensive”) is already verb-like, and would have to, as I argued in Anthropomorphics, be seen as a retrieval of the originary gesture with the then implicit command of the center now made explicit. The demand is met by the command, and this comprises the “materials” of the declarative sentence: “reality” and “truth” are what remain immune to demands but also that which provides “legitimacy” to the command—but, better than “legitimacy,” it’s better to say that reality and truth are simply the source of the command, its original issuer. To construct a declarative sentence is to present the scene in its termination of the demand. The demand, then, is really a demand for the command, insofar as a centrally sanctioned form of the satisfied demand is also protected by the command, in which one can participate in conditioning and shaping the form of satisfaction of the demands of others on the scene.

This analysis is converging a bit with Lacan, who also saw desire as result of the demand—built into it, insofar as the demand instantly expresses one’s dependence upon whoever will satisfy it—in psychoanalytic terms, the mother. And the desire produced by demand likewise finds its termination point in the Name of the Father, the issuer of commands—the rebel, for Lacan, whom we can call the issuer of incessant demands, desires a master and will find him. What we can add to this is the way demand and command, desire and resentment, are built into the sentence and the scene. If we were to map out all the various forms of imperative along the poles of demand and command, we’d have a language for examining any sentence and therefore any discourse. Petition, plea, beg, pray, insist, request, order, dictate, urge, enjoin, instruct and no doubt many others depending upon how much imperative we might find in less obviously imperative words. We will find, I think, that the closer we get to the command pole the less there is to say: demands are far more articulate. The best command is one leaving nothing more to be said: this is almost in agreement with Gans’s claim that the only authentic language of power is silence; indeed, if we suggest that the best command is one that is evident in the mere presence of he who is authorized to issue it (e.g., bow down before a king), then we approach complete agreement. But that silence accompanies all of the more verbalized commands of the enthroned, affirming their “authenticity.”

If we stay with this problem, though, we can carry over this question of the tacit imperative to the declarative as its true home. A perfectly formed declarative sentence would leave no one in any doubt regarding what was to be done upon hearing it. This is the idiom I hope to generate, one increasingly approximating performativity. It’s easy to think of examples: in the right context, mentioning that the window is open would find its “meaning” in the listener closing it. There are always those sentences that would create such a scene out of the context—the closer we get to articulating them, the more meaningful our utterances are--this is really the kind of thing that someone like Heidegger is aiming at in speaking of remembering Being. Such declaratives are converting demands into commands, and this is what makes them compelling and effective. And, as I always remind you when I speak of imperatives, imperatives don’t necessarily have expiration dates—but now I can say that this assertion is truer of commands than demands. A demand ceases with the death of the subject of desire, at the latest—it can be taken up by another, but then it will be their demand; commands, meanwhile, can maintain their power indefinitely. So, the recycling of decaying and evaporating demands into enduring commands embedded in descriptions of reality is the production of meaning. Even better: making meaning involves seeking out and sweeping up the most dispersed and evanescent demands and programming them into the most far-flung reality. To misquote Heidegger, “challenge forth” all those demands implicit in utterances, gestures, movements, configurations, etc., and solicit them as data and raw materials for commands that need never be uttered. (“Solicit” seems to be closer to the “demand” side of the continuum but not all solicitations are equal and some are more like subpoenas which are themselves essentially commands.)

To command seems to be evidence of failure in that case, and the vocation of the declarative sentence is to abolish or, better, indefinitely defer, commands in its approximation to performativity. That would be a criterion of “good writing”: it positions all of its readers within the stack, having them take on the responsibilities attendant upon their respective positions, merely by outlining all of their inchoate demands as they terminate in a commanding reality. This is another way of getting at the conversion of language into currency. A model of such an idiom is the kind of religious experience wherein proof of your conversion consequent upon a revelation is your conversion of others by transmitting to them that same revelation. Perhaps a style book or rhetoric could be written; or, more importantly, an LLM trained. The thought experiment guiding this style would be how to produce the effect of an overarching, irresistible, intricately detailed and indefinitely ramifying command with the most neutralized declarative sentences possible. What kind of understated, dispassionate sentences could align samples as if with absolute coercive force?

What we would need is less straightforward descriptions that place readers on a scene than a pursuit of the implications of the language of doubt and hypotheticality. In this way demands are drawn out through interrogatives into sentences filled with conditionalities that position readers as inquirers and, even more, as samples of data. If your every action is testing some hypothesis in such a way as to defer any proof or falsification indefinitely you are yourself not only following the most stringent command but are modeling and communicating that command to others. This absolute command, rather than shutting down discourse and conversation, would have the effect of revivifying language, as we would all be incorporating others’ performed hypotheses into our own but revising our hypotheses correspondingly. The terms of any such hypothesis could only be firmly grounded in institutional reality and function as a way of further probing that reality, which also means that heightened conditionality not only does not paralyze us but activates even the most down to earth actions insofar as such actions provide needed material to articulate, refine and test the hypothesis. And we’d always be bringing a more local hypothesis into accord with prior ones, upon which it depends, which I have faith would ultimately have us all talking about the originary hypothesis and making it current. The more sustained and permanent our practices and institutions of deferral the more varied, refined, beautiful, ingenious and therefore pleasurable our modes of distribution and enjoyment. If you first of all want to keep the hypotheses you have initiated in motion you want to recall and mobilize the hypothesis which set it all in motion, treating the originary sign itself as the first attempt at formulating the originary hypothesis—with all other human events as subsequent approximations. Every conversation becomes both directly challenging and imposing as we elicit and test our respective hypotheses but also completely open precisely because we are commanded to formulate the hypothesis so as to sustain genuine doubt.

One might ask which demands were converted into reality-issued commands in my previous paragraph—that is, is the style here approximating the stylistic norms drawn out of the demand/command dynamic centered in the declarative sentence? Can we see the oscillation or complementarity of desire and resentment here? I see some room for improvement. Take a look at this sentence: The terms of any such hypothesis could only be firmly grounded in institutional reality and function as a way of further probing that reality. “Could only be” and “firmly grounded” seem to me insufficiently conditional and inspire unproductive resistance. It is more that the terms of any such hypothesis solicit inquiries constitutive of the practices and institutions that provoked them and in this way find and prolong their own hypotheticality; nor is “reality” quite “there” to be probed so much as it is continually renewed as an ongoing layering of hypotheses. The demand to be given reality and firm grounds is drawn out further and further until we are systematically replacing reality and firm grounds with possible ostensive-imperative-ostensive machinery that turns reality and grounds into indications continually re-patterned and hierarchized.

This talk of turning reality into a set of hypotheses drawn out of or let out of automated ostensive-imperative-ostensive circults might sound very liberal and Popperian but that’s only the case if we cut short our inquiry into what kinds of command structures and modes of authority and succession would make it possible to imagine the total hypotheticalization of the world. Implicit in the commanding sentence of our thought experiment is a community transitioning out of exchanges with each other except insofar as we are proxies for enabling exchanges with the center. We would all want the most secure, competently and transparently gathered and expertly curated data possible and in turning ourselves into sources of data in furtherance of our hypotheses we would have this in mind. Our primary ethical obligation would be to provide worthy data flows and see to their uptake and circulation. Removing the commander from the center merely means that whoever best executes linguistic performativity, which means scenic design, would effectively occupy the center—rapid turnover at the center in this case would be a sign of sturdiness, not instability. This doesn’t mean rule by “nerds,” because linguistic performativity means leading men, and men dedicated to the most rigorous testing of the more daring hypotheses. “Leadership” here means eliciting demands, even those your fellow performers don’t yet know they’re making, which is itself possible insofar as you direct your hypotheses anthropologically and convert them into an array of resentments of the center. What we have here is a tributarian order and a corresponding style.

We can get even more precise (and make progress on that handbook of style) by noting that the three “posts” in the social circuit I’ve been hypothesizing, i.e., the ritual, the juridical and the disciplinary, will provide all of our vocabulary for articulating the grammar of demand-command conversion. The most parsimonious way of speaking about ritual is in terms of entering and exiting a scene, both of which involve a gesture which is “arbitrary” and therefore requires a kind of consecration. Everything involving beginning, sustaining and concluding, which is also to say all narrative, refers us back to ritual.  If we’re talking about rights, claims, disputes, disagreements, violations, offenses, and so on, we draw upon the rich vocabulary of law, invoking, metaphorically, provisionally, often ironically, its deference to procedures, precedents, reasoning around the question of penalty, restitution and compensation. To assert, compellingly, a judgment, is to insert the blocking command here. And if we’re in the realm of hypotheses and thought experiments, where every assertion and even every fantasy can become one or another, we’re in the disciplinary, or the discourse of doubt—and here I will disagree with Peirce who dismissed Descartes’s invocation of doubt by trivializing it as make believe, insisting that we only claim to doubt the things we do doubt; Peirce may have been right about Descartes’s performance of doubt, but I am in favor (maybe Peirce really was too) of all kinds of invented, playful doubting, introducing, pataphysically, doubts, .00001% possibilities in the most unlikely places. And, finally, and most importantly, “invention” (a hoary old rhetorical concept) will often come from treating events that seem to be in one of the three spaces as if it were in another—treating scientific work as if it’s an arcane ritual, ritual as if it includes intricate questions of property right, the courtroom as a space of experimentation, and so on. This is how idioms are generated.