Semiotic Investigations: Towards an Effective Semiotics
Alec McHoul
Part Two
From Formalism and Ethnomethodology to Ethics
Chapter 14
Analytic Ethics
This investigation turns, finally, to effective semiotics itself as a social/historical practice and, in particular, it attempts to find the limits of (or the possibilities of) an ethics for semiotic analysis. So far in this book, there has been very little concern with questions of ethics. This is because effective semiotics has been grounded in the idea of providing empirical descriptions of community-based forms of semiosis. It has, precisely, refrained from generalist positions concerning such key concepts as "meaning" and "community," let alone "the good," "the right" and "the proper." However, at the end of the last chapter, a particular problem arose from the analysis of inter-communitarian communications. That is, it becomes difficult in such cases not to position oneself as analyst in relation to the radical differences which such forms of communication display. Quite clearly, in analyzing Coulter's transcript in which a mental welfare officer attempted to have a prospective patient admitted to a mental hospital against his wishes, I placed myself on the side of the patient, against the welfare officer. Bogen and Lynch, it seems, were quite right to point out that I probably would not have placed myself so easily on the side of a "'recalcitrant witness' testifying before Joint Committees of Congress concerning his role in 'U.S. covert operations.'"1 But on what grounds? - how, then, to choose between the anonymous patient and (if that's what he is, as he is for Bogen and Lynch) the infamous Oliver North?
That is, if effective semiotics is to make (or at least supply an analytic basis for) political interventions, can it afford, in Bogen and Lynch's words, to be completely "libertarian"? Would it, that is, be happy to place itself at the disposal of any forms of transgression and resistance no matter what? I think not - but I do not yet have any grounds for making the distinction. Intuitively, it seems right, good and proper to see how Coulter's patient might have used tactical forms of talk to resist incarceration; and so for me to disseminate information to others about his strategies - and it seems equally wrong, bad and improper to align myself with the resistances of such persons as Oliver North and to disseminate information about how they might manipulate the semiotics of the courtroom to good advantage. The same problems might occur on a larger political scale. Thus it seems right to me to support Jewish activists who faced (and continue to face) religious oppression from the extreme Right. Yet it seems equally wrong for the Australian, Canadian and German governments to deny the historian, David Irving, the right to enter their countries to speak against the historical basis for this oppression. And it seems equally right to support the Palestinian people in their struggles against an invading Israeli state war-machine, without condoning any and every action that might be undertaken towards that end. But where, today, are the ethical grounds on which we make such decisions? The problems of an analytic ethics, then, seem to be but a sub-version of general ethics.
If we turn to philosophical ethics today, we find a paradox or a series of them. On the one hand, Caputo reminds us of the dangers and problems surrounding so-called "postmodern" ethics. Having previously supported such a position, Caputo goes on to construct an argument against philosophical ethics altogether:
I have up to now always tried to strike a more respectable pose [than being "against ethics"]. Having consorted in the past chiefly with mystics and saints, I have always made it my business to defend ethics, a more originary ethics, an ethics of Gelassenheit and letting be, an ethics of dissemination, a veritable postmodern ethics. I have always protested that if I traffic with anarchy, it is a very responsible anarchy.2
A "responsible anarchy"? This is a paradox in itself: what may be called "postmodern ethics" continually ceases to be a positive ethics. It yo-yos out towards anarchism, letting be, so that anything goes, then pulls itself back in again as it encounters fascism, patriarchy (and a host of other insupportables), realizing that "anything goes" can also mean that "everything stays," realizing that "responsible anarchy" means conservatism, non-intervention and a politics of zero transgression. But this paradox-in-itself is only one side of a larger paradox.
If we turn to the last works of Foucault, we get an historical argument about the positioning of morality and ethics today.3 Although the first volume of the History of Sexuality is quite different from the two volumes following it, putting the three together provides a stark contrast between ancient Greek and Roman ethics and post-19th century morality. Today, and since the 19th century at least, Foucault argues, we have been in the grip of an increasing legislation of personal practice. In relation to sexuality in particular, a whole host of legal, social scientific, medical and criminological discourses have divided bodily acts into categories with values. An array of sexual and perversionary types has come into being in order to define and police our forms of conduct. This is a morality in the true sense: while at the same time, its bases are far from absolute or fixed. Instead, the forms of power are distributed and diversified; but all the more to intensify the grip of corporeal control over the minutest of practices and thoughts.
By contrast, there was very little direct legislation in ancient Greece over sexual (and other forms of personal) comportment. At least for "free men" (as opposed to women and slaves), it would seem as if - legislatively at least - all were free to practice sexual acts as they saw fit. However, they did not "see fit" to act in just any way. A "culture" of ethics - considered as the relation which a man bore towards himself in terms of his relations with others (boys, his wife, the household and the body politic of the city itself) - grew up. Hence, free men in ancient Greece regulated their conduct in ethical ways - there is no need to give the full details here - rather than by the coercion of moral codes. Only with Christianity (which Foucault shows to have misunderstood many of the ancient teachings on chastity, virtue, and so on) did there arise an intense focus on sexual acts themselves. Only then did the catalogues of correct and incorrect behaviors come to be written as moral manuals. In this sense, according to Foucault, today we have perfectly knowable and complex forms of scientific regulation (for example, what Foucault calls the scientia sexualis), but we have lost the art of governing ourselves, an ars erotica.
If we put this into the picture which Caputo draws of philosophical ethics today - a picture which confronts the positive ethical traditions of Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and Levinas - we can begin to see the larger paradox I mentioned earlier. Everywhere there is (philosophical and pseudo-philosophical) ethics, forming mostly as an emergent pluralist-relativist "responsible anarchy," a postmodern ethics which celebrates the absence of absolutes and ethical positivities. Yet, practical or effective ethics in Foucault's sense (as a positive relation of the self to the self) is almost completely absent and has been displaced by moral legislation forming around highly diverse loci of power and resistances to power. This has led to some quite peculiar situations of which I'll mention only two.
At one stage, Foucault himself began to embrace a radically liberal ethics, arguing that all forms of criminal legislation (including laws against rape) should be abolished. According to one of his biographers, after 1982, he even entered into regular discussions with the French minister of justice, Robert Badinter, on proposals for officially reforming the Penal Code along these lines - in fact, proposals for its abolition.4 Earlier still, he had supported the Iranian revolution as a great popular uprising against the repressions of the Shah's regime - and he continued to support the Khomeini government after the revolution despite its own (arguably much more vicious) forms of oppression and genocide.5 He saw in Iran "one of the greatest populist explosions in human history."6 What these allegiances show is that an ethics which is resistive to moral legislation in all and any of its forms, an ethics based on "the will not to be governed" runs into all of the problems of what Caputo calls Gelassenheit.7 If French rapists and murdering Mullahs are included under the general umbrella of such liberal populism, again, anything goes and all sorts of barbarity remain. The return to an extreme ethics of individual liberty (which is the logical end of Foucault's investigation) is simply that: a return to an absolute ethics. But, to reiterate the paradox, in the absence of absolute canons of action, can any ethics at all (and especially, for us here, an ethics of analysis) be constructed?
My second practical instance of ethical paradoxy arises in some fields of feminism. Jane Flax puts the problem succinctly when she asks how it's possible to be both a feminist and a "postmodernist."8 To be a feminist, she argues, requires a positive ethics of opposition to patriarchal forms, in all of their diversity. It requires something essential in terms of a view of the world which stops short of laissez-faire politics. On the other hand, and as Caputo shows, what is known as "postmodernism" points in the other direction: towards "letting be," tolerance of whatever happens. So can one be a feminist and tolerate everything including patriarchal oppression? No easy solution to the paradox is available - and Flax does not offer us one. However, Rosi Braidotti argues that the feminine (as a positive destiny for women) must be essentialized, against her own better "philosophical" judgment.9 It's necessary as a purely practical and pragmatic "essence," for without it, feminism will be directionless as a political movement for social change. Hence another paradox: this version of feminism uses postmodernist ethics as a first stage to surmount patriarchal forms of normativity and then reinstalls normativity without applying the same ethical critique.
From these two brief examples, we can begin to see a forming crisis in ethics and its relation to that brand of contemporary relativism for which the term "postmodernism" is but a convenient shorthand.10 What disturbs me most about this situation is that a complete relativism appears to play into the hands of any form of social control (for example, a church, a legislature, a government or a father) which is, itself, arbitrary and relativist.
So, in extremis, absolutist ethics is nothing more than normativity in the form of political-moral legislation; but relativist ethics allows no basis for discerning good from bad conduct and so allows arbitrary and groundless punishments for whatever might, as the situation arises, come to count as a transgression. In ethics, it seems, indeterminacy is just as "bad" (or as "good") as certainty.
One possible solution to the paradoxical positions which postmodern ethics seems to entail would be to give up on "professional" ethics altogether, to argue for the complete unspeakability of ethical positivities. This was Wittgenstein's inclination:
My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk on Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.11
But again there is a paradox here: any "tendency in the human mind" which is to be so deeply respected is presumably, in itself, a good or something very close thereunto - so that even injunctions against ethics may be read as ethical precepts. By contrast with Wittgenstein then, my own urge - not only to try running against the walls but also to formalize - comes from a distrust of tight oppositions; such as those between philosophy and life (or "professional" and "private" ethics), practice and analysis, the speakable and the unspeakable and so on. And it is accompanied by the hope that, in ethics, an analytic failure (necessary failure, if Wittgenstein is to be believed) can show where some important, if unspeakable, limits and possibilities could possibly lie. Not only this: for the Wittgensteinian dissolution of ethics leaves us with no way at all of clearing up the practical ethical case in hand, the "decision" between the cases of "mental patient" and Oliver North. In this respect, it is of as little use to me as "postmodernism."
Returning then to the term "postmodernism" and its implication that it should perhaps come "after" something, Ferenc Feher asks the deceptively simple question: "After what?"12 This can be a question about intellectual chronology or it can ask what postmodernism might be after, what it might want to achieve. I assume that behind the question is a concern with the forms - or even the very possibility - of social life after the presumed deaths of God, Man, Culture, Economy, Logos and the rest. That is, for all that these and the other certitudes may have broken down, none of the writers we have looked at so far (Caputo, Foucault, Flax, Braidotti, Wittgenstein) seems to have publicly embraced a total and numbing relativism - none of them has quite given up to the void, "the swarm of particulars" as philosophers once called it. For all that they may flirt with them, radical personal~ism, let alone solipsism, are by no means popular among these thinkers. This suggests a space may be left over for some kind of positive ethical thesis, or at least an affirmation. In fact it suggests that it may be impossible to completely delete all traces of essence, center and positivity from anything which passes by the name of "ethics," including counter-ethics. But, it has to be admitted, nevertheless, that the prognosis is not good if we are expecting a postmodern ethics in the traditional sense of a didactic system of moral positivities.
Is it possible that postmodernism's ethical dilemmas stem from its unique onto-epistemological positioning as a general (rather than specifically ethical) philosophy? For postmodernism (along with post-structuralism) appears to want to avoid both objectivism and subjectivism when it comes to the questions of what objects are (ontology) and how we can know them (epistemology). On the contrary, it has a very different position on the relation between objects and concepts generally.
Let's turn, then, to the case of objectivism. An instance would be the kind of Platonic realism which we saw Penrose adopting in chapter 12 (above). If we use "x" to represent any given concept, the objectivist formula is "x = obj". Thus the mathematical concept of pi is presumed to map directly on to a really existing entity somewhere in the universe. The concept is a kind of pure crystal through which the world of material or ideal objects can be known. The knowability of objects is assured through their right and proper concepts and, in turn, the knowability of these concepts themselves is undoubtable. On the objectivist account, man simply is a concept-using being and the concepts he uses (if he uses them aright) give unmediated access to the world. If we use brackets to mark out the domain of the fully knowable, the objectivist problematic may be represented thus:
{x•=•obj}
To repeat: the concept is a kind of crystal, and knowledge (including philosophical knowledge) is akin to a kind of optics.
By contrast, the subjectivist view of the concept (for example, the position we encountered in chapter 12 as "psychological constructionism") sees it not so much as a crystal as a shuttle, as used in spinning and weaving. That is, it proposes a kind of mutual relation between the concept and its object, with these construed as opposites. Each is held to constitute the other, reflexively. However, the object-in-itself is no longer so clearly available to knowledge; for, on a subjectivist account, the world of objects is always grasped indirectly, through the mediation of subjectively-based concepts. And so only the concept, and not "the object" itself, can be fully knowable. The object comes to be referred to in terms of the "object-as-presented-to-consciousness," the "phenomenon," the "sense datum" and so on. Using the same formal conventions then, for subjectivism:
{x}•<=>•obj
These formulations, of course, are caricatures of intellectual struggles, not fixed positions or givens and, presumably, no philosopher ever held either of these positions in such simplistic forms. What I'm referring to as objectivism, then, is a striving towards, rather than the achievement of, a clear vision by which objects become absolutely transparent. As we saw in the case of Penrose, it is ultimately a faith in the existence of ideal mathematical objects, and in the idea that mathematical concepts directly represent them. By contrast, subjectivism problematizes, or tries to show the mechanics of, what it takes to be the illusory ontological transparency on which objectivism depends. But at the same time, it simply transfers positivity on to the human subject as the proper locus of knowledge. Postmodernism marks itself by a distrust in both of these faiths. Following, perhaps, Derrida's critique of the "metaphysics of presence" and his well-known "deconstruction" of binary oppositions (such as the opposition between concept and object itself), postmodernism tries to think in a way which deletes both originary objects and primordial subjects as guarantors of concepts. Instead, it asks about the conditions of possibility under which we could come to ask at all about concepts and objects. It notices that any concept's conditions of possibility must include that which it is not (so that x always depends on not-x). Additionally, if this is the case, neither a concept (x) nor its negation (not-x) can guarantee full knowability. And this will apply equally to objects. All questions of full, definite and unmediated "knowability" - whether subjectively or objectively based - would have to be canceled.
The postmodern radically denies any transparency of meaning whether "direct" or "reflexively constituted." By continually asking what something (concept or object) must be in relation to its negation or absence, positivity comes to be refused. Strong or definite boundaries between positivity and negativity, presence and absence, concept and object are precisely what come into question in a postmodern view.
Is this the source of postmodernism's specifically ethical dilemmas - that it cannot settle, that it must always hover or flicker between certainty and uncertainty over questions of the good, just as much as over any conceptual domain? Let us see what happens, then, in a case where a critique of binarism is motivated towards overtly ethical ends.
Above, I noted that postmodern thinking may work roughly along the lines of Derrida's "deconstruction" of the metaphysics of presence (hence its positioning outside both sheer objectivism and sheer subjectivism) as well as with his critique of the kinds of binaristic thinking which derive from that metaphysics. One ethical problem with binarism (for example, as it operates in structuralist thinking) is that it tends to equate both terms in any given opposition. They appear as merely formal-structural inversions of one another. So on a standard view, it would be the case that if something is defined as the negation of its opposite, then the inverse should also be the case. To give an example - as it happens, one upon which all computers depend: if "on" is "not off," then "off" should be "not on." Each should be definable as not being its other. But in plenty of actual cases this simply does not work. In the case of gender difference, to follow Irigaray's example, we know that while the feminine is routinely defined as the negation or absence of the masculine, the reverse does not hold.13 For the present at least, masculinity is not simply the absence of femininity: it is a primary term in a hierarchy. Its primacy, in a sense, is patriarchy.
Irigaray's question, however, is not a formal-structural one, but a qualitative and ethical one: how to think a feminine quality which is not dependent upon its definition as merely the not-masculine? But, at the same time, by recognizing that the binaries are not simply formal-structural but already contain values, and then by deciding to take action against them on the basis of a possible array of counter-values, how can the position thus taken not be an essentialist one? Again, we come across the paradoxes of post-ethics. Ultimately a postmodern onto-epistemology at the formal-structural level (and presumably its related ethics at the level of value) requires a positing of the very realm of essentials to which it is opposed and (such that it defines itself by that opposition). And this may be one reason why the idea of the post-ethical is so fraught with paradox.
Going back to Bogen and Lynch's ethical dilemma: postmodernist relativism will certainly be able to tell us that a particular binary (for example, sane/insane as general categories and regardless of local practices) involves an opposition which is far from equal. But it will not be able to easily advance a positive ethics of "support" for the side of the binary which is subordinated to its other (in this case the insane). Equally, unless it is supplemented by a positive feminist ethics, postmodern theory alone cannot produce ethical arguments for a critique of patriarchy and an affirmation of women. There is a crucial difference between identifying victims on the one hand, and making an ethical argument against their victimization on the other. Otherwise an emancipatory analysis could easily be mobilized on behalf of such figures as, say, Oliver North. But in raising the question of this choice, we return (although the distinction is problematic) from the domain of the theoretico-ethical to practical situations of personal-ethical choice.
Or using the gender example: postmodern theory alone would not be able to distinguish between two counter-archives, one enlisted on behalf of a rape victim and the other on behalf of a rapist facing the legal authorities. To this point: a postmodern ethics could not answer the question "Are there no victims of repression who simply deserve to be just that?" For this would be like asking postmodernism for an originary, definitive and fixed notion of the pure victim (the victim-in-general, perhaps). And indeed, Foucault himself has been criticized along these lines.14
But for all this I think it is possible to locate a definite theoretico-ethical affirmation in recent critical theory, or at least a struggle for one, a struggle which necessarily eschews definite ethical positivities or strict social-moral norms. Gasché argues similarly for the project he calls "deconstructive interpretation":
In Spurs, Derrida insists that deconstructive interpretation is affirmative interpretation.... The affirmative character of deconstructive interpretation, however, is not to be confused with positivity. Deconstructive interpretation is affirmative in a Nietzschean sense.... [T]his means that deconstructive interpretation affirms the play of the positive and the negative, and thus it wards off the ethical temptation to liquidate negativity and difference.15
For Gasché, the only point is to "ward off" the ethical tendencies of other theoretical positions. It is not to establish any affirmative position in his own right. And in fact, Derrida tells us why no ethical decision can ever run completely or perfectly along the lines of a moral program or, that is, run from cause to effect in an efficient and linear manner:
Above all, no completeness is possible for undecidability.... A decision can only come into being in a space that exceeds the calculable program that would destroy all responsibility by transforming it into a programmable effect of determinate causes. There can be no moral or political responsibility without this trial and this passage by way of the undecidable. Even if a decision seems to take only a second and not be preceded by any deliberation, it is structured by this experience and experiment of the undecidable.16
Staten's position is less cautious than Gasché's or Derrida's in this regard - if more alarming and fraught with risk. He argues for a general, not specifically ethical, affirmation of the accidental against the essential, indeed for a law of the possibility of accident. Accident becomes essential. But since "[a]t the end of the book I only reach the point at which one first picks up one's pen"17 - Staten does not fully explore the ethical dimensions of his affirmation of accidence. But it may be worth seeing if his argument can be taken to that point.
If, as Derrida argues throughout his work, originary presences (essences such as "the good," for example) never simply arrive alone but are always constituted by repetition (accident, what happens to happen), then an ethics along these lines would involve an affirmative ethic-in-struggle, with no guarantee of returning to a fixed origin, or arriving at a final destination. For example, this would mean struggling to think the necessity of, say, the masculine as the negation (or absence) of a primarily given feminine. That is, a gender politics in which men are considered (and in which we consider ourselves) as lacking a femininity and where this "femininity" is derived without reference to an originary "baseline" of the masculine. Clearly this theoretico-ethical problem is not without its relations to personal-ethical questions. We seem to have reached a point where the two domains begin to touch. It is no longer clear that there's one rule for philosophy and another for life. For example, for a man in any patriarchal society, "thinking the necessity of a lacking femininity" would be a type of persistent onto-epistemologico-ethical perversity which required, which made essential, the accidental or aleatory as it actually appears in specific ethico-political techniques, under specific conditions. For the fact that one side of a pair such as masculine/feminine comes to be negatively valued is in no sense a pure effect of philosophical speculation. It only comes about given the operation of such general ideas within specific conditions, a specific history of gender relations, particular socio-historical communities, the emergence, sedimentation and stabilization over time of particular institutions, including the apparent "naturalness" of an unequal relation, and so on.
Accordingly, we might locate a number of sites of the inessential, sites of "minority communities," sites to which the accidental is currently confined and which would be affirmed by a postmodern ethics. The list would be long but it might include: writing rather than speech; woman rather than man; sign rather than essential meaning (but also: spacing rather than sign); contamination rather than purity; margin rather than center; where each of these would require an analysis of, for example, gender politics, the politics of representation, and so on as a precondition of any affirmative (that is, tactical) ethics.18
Because this is a precondition of possible counter-ethical or post-ethical practices, rather than an end in itself, it figures as part of a strategy which is more than a mere negation or overturning. The idea of stressing the typically unstressed member of ethical-moral binaries has in view their eventual deconstruction - as a practical political and not merely "theoretical" matter.19 It acknowledges that the dominant binarism of, say, modernist thought is co-extensive with the whole ethico-political field. Binarism then comes be seen as a "crypto-grammar" whose terms must be used (initially negated) and analyzed for their intrinsic play (jeu) in Derrida's sense, their never being perfectly completable.20 Binarism will not easily disappear, leaving us with a new ethical field, as it were, overnight. Inversion, then, could not be the end but only the beginning of a counter-ethics of the post.
However - and here we hit the Wittgensteinian boundaries - the precise point or site at which a particular analyst carried out a particular critique would always be a matter of personal ethics (insofar as it involved a choice at all). It might, for example, have to do with particular community memberships and allegiances. This is the point - the point of personal and community allegiance - where ethical theory as such drops out. It is the point where formal ethical language runs up against Wittgenstein's ethical limits. And this is why Bogen and Lynch's question (Why the helpless madman and not Oliver North? - Why the rape victim and not the rapist?) can never be answered by a single and definitive ethical formula which would be somehow "built in" to semiotics to keep it ethically "pure." If I am asked why I choose the first and not the second: I cannot say. I can only say that my history and my forms of life make it quite clear to me. And I can then point back to the traditional or historical under-valuing of insane persons and rape victims as a secondary - more arguable, more discussible - support for my choice.
Nevertheless the unmasking of such under-valuings of and by metaphysical binaries has a certain value. Unmasking or "psychoanalyzing" this metaphysics would, for example, mean more than simply affirming what it negates: the possibility of the accidental. It would mean showing, by a kind of double move, that the conceptual purity of an absolute boundary between a concept (x) and its negation or absence (not-x) is itself a matter of faith. If the undervalued negative concept (impurity or contamination, say) is first reaffirmed, then the boundary between concept and object, for example, cannot be anchored either conceptually or objectively. Neither of the terms alone can secure the boundary between them. The proposition that the boundary or spacing must not allow contamination is not self-evidently true. Rather this ethical requirement of conceptual purity is itself merely one of the over-valued positivities of the metaphysics which postmodernism opposes.
Let me put this more formally. As we have seen, while objectivist metaphysics required a positive relation - {x = obj} - between a concept and its object, and while subjectivism required a relation of mutual constitutivity between them - {x} <=> obj - a critique of both finds, in both, a common formula of presence of the general form: a R b. Here: "R" is the relation which is always a difference even when expressed as "equals," or "is," or "is identical with," or "mutually constitutes." Every such realization of R requires a faith in some form of pure presence. This faith holds that: what is present (for example, an "object") is presented (for example, to consciousness) in a "medium" of presence. As such, then, both objectivism and subjectivism forget difference, the always possible non-relation (corresponding to any arbitrarily given relation) between a concept and its other.
The relation, R, always carries or allows, and sometimes even requires, permeability. The project of a post-ethics would ideally show every R to be a perforated membrane as opposed to a watertight seal. Under such a "deconstruction" (if that's what it is), R does not dissolve altogether. The relation of presence is not merely canceled. Instead it is remembered that R can do other than mark identity. For example, it can be the undecidable double of identity-difference, the "experience and experiment of the undecidable."
Between a and b, there is a situation of always possible contingency: the possibility of leakage, contamination, transfer - the threat of wholesale rupture in some cases. This always possible contingency is the nearest to an affirmative (positive?) thesis that a formal post-ethics can come. The boundary can, however, in no case whatsoever, be kept ideally intact. Even to imagine such a pure state, we need to be able to imagine its transgression. The strongest ethical positions utterly require and contain their opposites. In this sense, Staten's law of the possibility of accidence would never not be in play: there could be no pure case which was unregulated by it.
The crunch comes when we must ask whether there is anything to be said from this position with respect to ethics, with respect that is to the "regulation of conduct" as it might be put in the more traditional zones of moralism and/or the "moral sciences." Here we can begin to discern a number of possible pro-ethical "maxims" which would follow from postmodernism's paradoxical onto-epistemological positioning.
1. Within conceptual doubles, there is an emerging revaluation of the politically under-valued concept: privation, absence, contamination and so on. This is not so much in order to instigate a new positivity, but is rather a first step which shows how such oppositions are always hierarchical in terms of value even though they may appear to have equal logical or structural positions. After this first step, however, there is still work to be done. Derrida writes:
What must occur then is not merely a suppression of all hierarchy, for an an-archy only consolidates just as surely the established order of a metaphysical hierarchy; nor is it a simple change or reversal in the terms of any given hierarchy. Rather, the Umdrehung must be a transformation of the hierarchical structure itself.21
2. Even if the post-ethical is not anarchic, it takes on the style of refusal. "Athesis," as refusal, is therefore a definite strategy insofar as it is - and it must be - a material practice at all.22 A material practice with the style of refusal remains a material practice. In fact, we can discern in the post-ethical a positivity of the material in a domain traditionally reserved for intangible "principles."
3. A crucial point, as we have seen, is that the accidental-aleatory becomes positive in the sense that it becomes essentially possible. In this sense: ethics is a form of invention. It is no longer a question of pre-given and self-evident principles or formulae. It no longer conceives of freedom as the freedom to invent practice on the basis of given (uninvented) moral principles. The post-ethical points to a different state of affairs in which we must invent principles (such as Staten's essential aleatoriness?) whilst cut adrift, as it were, in the domain of practice. The "post" element of the post-ethical points to the ethical arriving after the practical. The rules are always formulated after the fact. In this sense these are not discoveries or uncoverings of "natural" facts or principles.
4. The domain of practice itself, however, is not to be thought of as without any constraint or limit. Absence of a definite, watertight, R-relation between concepts and their opposites does not mean practice is a swarm of particulars, an infinite celebration of the play of signifiers, a semiotic carnival.23 Any specific leakage across R, it is important to note, cannot be without its own history and politics, its own customs and conventions, its own techniques and practices, its own relevances to the specific communities or forms of life involved. To this extent, we must say that it is subject to a constitutive outside - which is always "there" if only because the accidental is always possible, precisely outside any definite prediction. To return to Wittgenstein: the accidental is thinkable as the "beyond-the-limit," for example, of language. This "beyond" points to at least one area of unknowable constraint, an area of possibility-conditions which are not specifiable in advance. And this is precisely why formal or professional ethical inquiry is always different from personal ethics - including the personal ethics of the analyst.
5. Lastly, then, can a post-ethics have a strategy or tactics? In Speech and Phenomena, Derrida writes of: "a strategy without finality ... blind tactics [tactique aveugle]."24 We can read this at least two ways: either as endless accidence as itself a given tactic, or as the tactic of making, enforcing aleatoriness upon the supposedly proper and precise. Either way, this can be read affirmatively.
But what is this rather general affirmation in terms of Foucault's idea of ethics as a relation to oneself in relation to others? And in particular, what can it mean for the semiotic analyst's relation to him- or herself in relation to the various community-based forms of semiosis which she or he analyses? By asking these questions we begin to see the limits of the post-ethics that comes down to tactique aveugle: for such a blindness gives us no clear way to proceed in terms of deciding how effective semiotic analyses should position themselves in terms of the communities outside them which they subject to empirical analysis. Let us now, then, try to consolidate what we have learned from our excursion into the terrors of relativism and see what can be done, today, in the name of a specifically analytic ethics.
All ethical grounds (as absolute grounds) have been shattered, broken into fragmented slabs like a crazy paving. Today, that is, we have a single ethical principle: that all absolute ethics are anathema since they become normative principles. But if we start to look closely at the shattered remains of those once-firm ethical grounds, we can see that some are so precarious as to forbid all construction upon them, while others still retain sufficient solidity as to allow us at least the idea of a positive analytic ethics. All grounds are shattered - to repeat - yet some remain workable or effective nevertheless, even if there are those who would think they are vestiges of an old positivity which should be cleared away. The ethical project would then be to identify these (and their flaws) - empirically. Ethics would then be a method or calculation - one methodic practice which effective semiotics might both analyze and contribute to (as theory and practice). Ethics would then be where effective semiotics both does and describes methodic practices.
This would mean trying to find a form of empiricism which was not conservative but critical - critical by means of its intervention into the ethical. To this point, my effective semiotics has been conservative in simply attempting to describe (without judging) methodic practices. That has left it open to charges of being unable to discriminate between, to return to our paradigm case, Coulter's patient and Oliver North. So effective semiotics could take this move into criticism (into the space of the critical) as the start of "the good," its good. Then the ethical question would be: what are the objects of that criticism or critical move? Evidently, they would have to be empirical objects - so we could never know their problems in advance. Or: their problems could not be given by any general form of normativity. By "problems" we would then have to mean problem-solutions, except that, now, effective semiotics would be identifying and proposing them rather than simply describing them. And this would involve intervening into communities or forms of life - with all its attendant risks. Principally, the risk is that such a form of critique would be tendentious in Garfinkel's sense: we would not know its point of application in advance of the investigation.
In important ways, this tendentiousness would fit not only with Derrida's "experience and experiment of the undecidable" but also with Foucault's idea of the dispersal of power in contemporary society. If Foucault is right, ethics (as a counter to power) is necessarily plural. For effective semiotics, then, this would involve a calculation in two parts, with each part corresponding to the first two "levels" of semiosis. The first part would mean locating and describing the intelligibility of the good in a particular locale - it would mean asking: what counts as the good in this community? The second part of the calculation would move beyond mere intelligibility or identification and towards critique and intervention. It would ask the question of the actionability of the good. That is, it would begin to ask questions about the ways in which socio-logical problems and their solutions are formed in the community under investigation. It would ask: how is the good which this community sets as the good carried into action? Then, at both levels of semiosis (intelligibility and actionability), it would reserve the right of disagreement: the right to say that it refuses this idea of the good or that it refuses this idea of its (proper) implementation. Then effective semiotics might begin to realize its own community status - and acknowledge its specific positioning with regard to those other communities which it analyses.
This gives us a positioning for the first two semiotic levels, but what of the third: historicity? If Foucault is right and a genuine ethics of the self (in relation to itself) has been taken over, today, by a legislated and normative morality, then an analytic actionability oriented to a return to ethics (in Foucault's sense) is already an historical move. It would already be in the position of arguing for a new "art" of the self against an old science of government. It would already be arguing for (and attempting to practice) the installation of a return to self-judgment and the "will not to be governed."
There are risks involved in such a policy but the possible outcome is a return to the ethical domain, the installation of an ethics of the self over the dominance of morality (as socio-political normativity). And this may, in itself, be a form of the good - the first good of a positive ethics of analysis.
Such an ethics as a situationally located form of calculation (of the good outcome?) will always be imperfect since, as Derrida reminds us, the result of the calculation always lies in the future. It leaves itself subject to unknowabilty, to being (potentially) wrong (as Foucault was about Iran and the delegislation of rape). But, on this account, the good is to calculate despite this - risking being wrong but trying, at every step not to be.
An unethical analytics would then involve either (a) the quietism of failing to calculate at all - leaving history as it is, condoning everything or (b) the retrospectivism of adjusting one's earlier calculations so that they show themselves as having been right all along. In empirical terms, this would be the equivalent of fudging the results. Taking the risks involved in such work is a matter of courage or its lack. As with experimentation in the natural sciences, Derrida's "experience and experiment of the undecidable" means that one has to be prepared for things to turn out wrongly. These are the stakes in an empiricist ethics.
How then to choose between Coulter's patient and Oliver North? Why is it that I want to back one and not the other? When I look at the transcript of PP's attempted incarceration, I see just that - an attempted incarceration. But I see the attempt as happening against PP's own relevances and self-positioning (as a free person without obligation to the mental welfare system). This prompts me to describe the intelligibility of the situation from his point of view (a point of view which he makes clear to all those involved in the scene and to any analyst). Then I feel obliged to describe his ethno-analytic strategy: his way of finding an actionable solution to the problem which he has been put in. But I can't find any equivalents in the case of Oliver North, no matter how closely I read Bogen and Lynch's paper and no matter how much I share (as, perhaps, an ethnomethodologist) their own community relevances.25 For it seems that, in the end, the North case is not a case of inter-community dissensus. North has worked for the state - albeit via an agreement that he would (on its behalf) appear to work outside it. The appeals he makes against the judgment against him are appeals based on the fact that the state he worked for allowed him (he would say, legally) to act illegally. In whatever way one analyses this, North has already agreed to his complicity with the moral norms by which he is judged. None of this is true for PP. He has in no way registered himself as a member of any community which is in agreement with the metal health authorities. In the case of the PP transcript, we are dealing with a definite, direct and genuine case of inter-community difference. A position has to be taken. And I can see no grounds for taking the position of the mental health authorities. North is by no means a victim of such communitarian differences. He is being tried by the very system he has served and has "subscribed" to. There is no case of différend in his case - and hence no victimization.26 Ethically we have no choice but to allow others (including North) such choices: everyone has the right to do wrong and no one has the right to take that right away from them. By doing it, they choose, equally, to be judged by the value system they have chosen to be wrong within. Victims only exist when value systems arrive from other communities to insist that their (exterior) judgments should stand. Then semiotics needs to analyze and disseminate the complex means by which such victims find artful ways of refusing to be governed, legislated or judged.
Whether this type of analysis can be collected and publicized in ways which can be reused by (or mobilized on behalf of) victims of social injustice remains to be seen. In the end, they may only serve to increase the analyst's own understanding of the world and how it operates. What they might change, in this minimal respect, would be who the analyst is, in terms of his or her community positionings and socio-historical allegiances. But this, in itself, may not be the worst of outcomes. Effective semiotics would then be but one possible "art of existence" or "technique of the self," to reinvoke Foucault's terms. It would be, at minimum, one way of "knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, perceive differently than one sees."27 And although it has been much quoted elsewhere, what Foucault has to say about such a practice (which he calls "philosophy") continues to be instructive - one of the few moves towards a positive ethics arising out of poststructuralist thought:
People will say, perhaps, that these games with oneself would be better left backstage; or, at best, that they might properly be part of those preliminary exercises that are forgotten once they have served their purpose. But, then, what is philosophy today - philosophical activity, I mean - if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? In what does it consist, if not in the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known? There is always something ludicrous in philosophical discourse when it tries, from the outside, to dictate to others, to tell them where their truth is and how to find it, or when it works up a case against them in the language of naive positivity. But it is entitled to explore what might be changed, in its own thought, through the practice of a knowledge that is foreign to it. The 'essay' - which should be understood as the assay or test by which, in the game of truth, one undergoes changes, and not as the simplistic appropriation of others for the purpose of communication - is the living substance of philosophy, at least if we assume that philosophy is still what it was in times past, i.e., an "ascesis," askesis, an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought.28
Perhaps, after all, Wittgenstein found ethical propositions to be inexpressible in his day (and today) because they are currently inexpressible - but for historical reasons rather than for reasons which have to do with the essential inexpressibility of ethics. As we saw in chapter 1, historical thinking was never Wittgenstein's forte. Perhaps it is only today that the ethical cannot be spoken: because the relation to the self (le rapport à soi), insofar as it exists at all, is currently overshadowed by legal, juridical and religious forms of controlling the self - forms which are better thought of as moral codes rather than ethical principles.29
In this case, the unspeakability of the ethical today is not a fixed condition. Foucault has shown that things have been quite otherwise and, at least in principle, could be again:
We have hardly any remnant of the idea in our society, that the principle work of art which one has to take care of, the main area to which one must apply aesthetic values is one's self, one's life, one's existence.30
Perhaps, then, the ethical struggle is no more and no less for a return to ethics itself, against moral legislation. And perhaps one way of securing this struggle would be to turn from ethics as a branch of philosophy and towards ethics as an empirical, factical, actional, or effective decision. If so, ethics as (and in) effective semiotics may be a contribution to "genealogico-deconstructive research."31 It may even be the first move towards that branch of it which Derrida has tentatively named "pragrammatology."32
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This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally hosted at freotopia.org/people/alecmchoul/seminv/14.html, and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.