In Genesis (22:1-19) we find a particularly confounding story. Abraham is told by God to sacrifice his son Isaac, the very son God promised to him. Abraham doesn’t fight the command. It’s the sort of command anyone living in the Ancient Near East at that time would have taken as normal. The gods were, apparently, always asking for sacrifices; and Abraham had not yet learned to properly distinguish between his God and the rest of the gods. His God, loving and transcendent being itself, was and is in an essentially participatory and nonrivalrous relationship with his creation. The gods, however, were and are beings; competition persists between them and the rest of the created order—including each other.
The story takes a turn for the unexpected. God intervenes just as Abraham is lifting the knife. The clear voice of an angel tells him to stop. There’s a ram caught in a bush nearby, and that will suffice. Isaac is spared. To the modern mind, robbed of its natural hierarchical-symbolic architecture and of the imaginative possibility of realms transcending the brutally obvious, a story like this can only ever be exasperating. I won’t explain all of it, but here are a few clues.
To begin with, Abraham heard the word of God as something fundamentally against the life and being of his son. Interestingly, given that his son’s name, Isaac meant/means laughter, it’s hinted that the sacrifice of Isaac means the destruction of embodied joy. Laughter is, among other things, a reminder of embodiment; and violence doesn’t like embodiment. On one interpretation, Abraham may have originally misheard God. He understood, or rather misunderstood God, as demanding this murder. But then Abraham heard God offer a different, clearer word, accompanied by two rather strikingly physical signs. If you’re going to kill something, the angel announces, slit that ram’s throat instead. It is not insignificant that man is often defined as a combination of angel and beast—a synthesis of mind and being. Somehow, in embracing and contending with both of these dimensions of our being, we are, like Isaac, saved.
I’m not here to defend the perplexities that arise out of the animal sacrifice but to simply note the striking difference between the word that negates being and the one that affirms and collaborates with it. The word that negates being is removed from being. The word that affirms being is intertwined with it—like the voice of an angel and the bleating and bodily distress of a ram. These are completely enmeshed.
Allow me to change gears.
In a parking lot outside a supermarket, as I was about to get back into my car after shopping there, a haggard-looking man recently told me how much it sucks to be poor and asked me for food. I gave him what I could—something too small to make a very big difference. While I believed him, when a sociologist tells me approximately the same thing as the poor man, speaking probably of a “lack of privilege” or something like it, I’m more skeptical. There is, it turns out, a universe of a difference between the poor man pointing out that it sucks to be poor and the professor saying that a lack of privilege is linked to poverty. The former is undeniable. It’s the blunt expression of a man who has little to his name and a story full of holes. The latter is debatable. It’s all holes and barely any story.
One of the subtler happenings in our world of pseudo-events and hyper-mediation, both in popular discussions and scholarly performances, involves the frequent, perhaps even the habitual, collapsing of the distinction between positive and dialectical terms, and the concomitant forgetting the positive. Without this distinction, all kinds of conversations can only ever end in a stalemate, a knife fight, or a journalistic hit piece. Without this distinction, we’d end up with something like a culture war. “It sucks to be poor” is a positive expression but “a lack of privilege” is dialectical.
Positive terms are signifiers that reflect actual, observable, experiential realities. They seek, in one form or another, to reveal being. Positive terms have to do with identification, naming, description, measurement, and the like. Positive terms seek to be windows, participating in the concrete materiality of perceptible reality. These signs have a referent independent of the mind, even while the mind interprets and expresses itself in relation to any concrete referent in question. Positive terms tend to be comprised of a more-or-less physicalist vocabulary since they represent the world of sensory engagements and experiences. This doesn’t mean that they are, therefore, completely neutral terms but rather that they aspire to something like impartiality. They are not egotistical.
The poor man saying poverty sucks is speaking positively of his experience, of how he has no certain way of making ends meet. Even before I enter into a discussion with him about what has contributed to his poverty, I know he’s speaking the truth. It may turn out that his poverty is owed to bad decisions on his part. It may turn out that he is poor for reasons that have nothing to do with his choices. It may turn out that he has landed up in this sorry state for any number of reasons. But you cannot argue about positive terms like his; you can only dispute them. They are either true or false; and given that they refer to the real world, you should be able to check this in one way or another.
Dialectical terms work differently, though. They take their meaning primarily from patterns of thought composed of ideas, principles, and perceptions of action. We arrive at the meaning of dialectical terms through a cognitive process; through definitions, including and excluding certain ideas, and by ordering included ideas into a chain of suggestions and implications. Because of this, dialectical terms can’t be separated from the ideological stance of the one using them. They’re connected to a way of evaluating the world. Human reason is not generally very careful, though, so dialectical terms may result from leaps in logic or various other forms of metaphorical misalignment. They may rest on psychological error, too. Even with well-conceived dialectical terms, we are no longer in the world of material beings but in the realm of the mind.
Positive terms test dialectical terms. The trouble is, as dialectical terms ossify in the mind, they often become unconscious. We stop noticing that they need to be checked. We stop noticing that they are ideas and not things. This is what is likely to happen to the illusory sociologist I conjured earlier. He’ll say something like, “A lack of privilege, resulting from the excesses of neoliberalism, contributes to the alienation of many people.” Not one term in such a sentence is positive; all of them are dialectical—even the word people in a sentence like this is an abstraction. I’ll admit that this is probably a straw-man sentence, but I’ve read enough in popular and academic discourse to know that strawmen are often constructed with utmost seriousness.
Laughter is always under the knife of the strictly dialectical. Simulacral terms, about which I say more below, are what get the knife to do violence.
The fact that such terms are purely dialectical means that we only have recourse to argue and never dispute. There is nothing to check, no clearly positive reality by which we can determine truth or falsehood. The implicit idea of privilege, for example, is something that has to be defined, with some terms included and others excluded. Privilege functions as what Kenneth Burke calls a terministic screen—a screen of terms that selects, reflects, and deflects signs and referents. Often, dialectical terms are merely assumed without an awareness of precisely what is being selected, reflected, and deflected. But then, returning to my example above, a lack of privilege is even more dialectical; it is arrived at by depriving that original dialectical conception of privilege of certain qualities. Those other terms—neoliberalism and alienation—reflect additional perplexities, too. Finding positive terms for such things is not impossible but is often close to impossible.
This is not to say that my imaginary sociologist’s sentence is necessarily false then, but, at the same time, it is ridiculously difficult to figure out if it is true. It’s the sort of sentence that would allow a person to conclude ahead of time that he is right before cherry-picking his facts to suit his conclusion. It is potentially an example of what the philosopher Harry Frankfurt defines as bullshit, which technically refers to any statement that serves a purpose other than that of telling the truth. It says more about the speaker in the end than about the subject under discussion.
Arguably, most of our conceptions of the world are dialectical to one degree or another. Dialectical terms are heuristics and, quite frankly, we need heuristics to give us quick access to a world overloaded with difficulties. I’m not here to declare this good or bad but to note the shortcomings of defaulting to the dialectical while excluding the positive. We cannot have a debate about anyone’s conceptions of the world without trying to allocate how positive terms do or do not act as their foundation. We cannot expect to understand reality without embracing both the angelic and the animalistic.
But, as I suggested above, there is an added layer worth considering here, where dialectical terms serve a very specific and often political function, namely that of eradicating the very admissibility of positive terms. Dialectical terms can thus transform into what I’d call simulacral terms, the purpose of which is to get the sacrificial knife to do its dirty work on the real. Simulacral terms, which would include many purely materialistic or animalistic conceptions of being, seek to do little more than support their own declaration. They are tautological to a fault and cynical about the very possibility of reality. The great irony is that they will be uttered in the name of reality itself. Simulacral terms are dialectical terms that disavow positive terms.
Of course, my notion of the simulacral term is itself a dialectical one. Nevertheless, I use it here to refer to something I have positively observed on more occasions than I can even name. Here’s just one example. Not too long ago, I delivered a paper on G. K. Chesterton at an academic conference. At the end of my delivery, my paper was dismissed by a postcolonial theorist during the so-called ‘question time’ because Chesterton was, in his view, an “Imperialist.” Here was a simulacral term: a dialectical term resisting the admissibility of positive terms. I was not speaking about Imperialism at all but about Chesterton’s concerns with how health had become ideological. In actual fact, positively speaking, in his work, Chesterton is always vehemently critical of Imperialism. But, of course, the label hurled at him by that postcolonial ideologue was enough to eradicate any possibility of engaging with what I had presented. Was Chesterton living in Imperialist England? Yes. Could that really mean that, by mere association, he was an Imperialist? Obviously not. But the simulacral term is offered to prevent the asking of such a question. To ask it would be to appeal to reality, and that is a discursive faux pas in some circles. The aim, whether overtly declared or not, is to ensure that the proverbial sacrifice of Isaac takes place.
The point of simulacral terminology is not to clarify but to mystify. Its aim is mythification, not demythologization. The story of Abraham on the verge of murdering his son, on the other hand, is a story of demythologization. Through his experience, the virtual understanding of God is replaced by something more actual and more livable. Something more incarnate.
At the root of the proliferation of dialectical terms and simulacral terms is a psychological problem: a refusal to accept responsibility for thoughts. A vital dimension of genuine, critical thinking is the ability to entertain and test thoughts without necessarily accepting them. Simulacral terms defer this responsibility. The point is to accept the terms without any further questioning or inquiry. The entire point is to place reality on the sacrificial altar, murdering it for the sake of the mythic. Where the dialectical stands a chance of being persuaded, simulacral coercion resists all persuasiveness.
As someone prone to theorizing—something this very piece of writing makes evident—I admit to not minding the natural elasticity of language, and the fact that terms can be positive, dialectical, and simulacral. What I do mind very much is pretense and pretending: when one type of term is treated as if it is another type; such as when simulacral terms are treated as if they are positive terms or properly rooted and testable dialectical ones. When this happens, there can be no space for the corrective voice of divinity—a voice we desperately, desperately need.
In the end, the word that cannot take on flesh ends up murdering it.
