Adam Katz is a prolific scholar and generative anthropologist—to many of my readers, though, he needs no introduction. In fact, about half of my subscribers came from the recommendation he has underneath his blog Center Study Center, to my website. To those who are unfamiliar with Adam, he has developed a cult yet fringe academic following. He draws in an eclectic group of people; from professors, to stuntmen, to educated laymen, to business professionals.
In this interview, I ask him some hard-hitting questions about his path to “GA”, his theory, and his thoughts on my own interpretation of him. I believe such interviews like this will be able to continue to unveil the “mystery” with which leads people so often to his work. While perhaps, you may not get typical interview questions here, to those who know of him, these questions will not just be informative but also insightful to his methodology and approach to theory and practice of language.
How did you meet Gans and what prompted you towards your development of GA?
I'm not sure when, exactly, I came across the Anthropoetics website, but it must have been around 2000. It must have been one of Gans's Chronicles from the 90s on the victimary that first attracted me, because I had been working on a very similar problem for quite a while myself, originally from a Marxist standpoint, as part of a critique of the supplantation by the identity categories of race and gender of the more fundamental category of class. I had already begun to see the victimary logic precisely because I had been arguing that Marxism did not frame the working class in victimary terms.
This turned out to be part of my path out of Marixsm and from there it was easy to find a path out of leftism altogether. I was working on Holocaust Studies during the mid to late 90s and had identified something like "Auschwitz theology," or the international legal order established by the Nuremberg Trials, as the source of victimary thinking. All this primed me to see what Gans was getting at and to see the superiority of the originary hypothesis, which immediately made intuitive sense to me and withstood any objection I could come with, to anything I had put together myself, reading through political thinkers like Strauss, Arendt and Schmitt.
My way of understanding any theory is to "maximize" it, i.e., apply it to everything and draw every possible conclusion from it I could imagine, and so I got to work on the originary hypothesis. I first submitted an essay to Anthropoetics on a novel by the Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua in 2000 (maybe early 2001)—not very substantial, but it led to a brief exchange with Gans. Then came 9/11, which seemed to call for some reordering of political thinking (although for me it involved following up on some rethinking precipitated by the Palestinian Intifada of 2000) and this led to the "Remembering Amalek" essay, published in 2005 (I can't remember what I was doing during that several period between those two essays—I don't think I published anything.) During that period I was in much closer contact with Gans as our political thinking was very convergent at the time and he was doing a lot to expand his thinking about the victimary post-9/11. I was taking in other intellectual influences at the time, like the fiction of Ronald Sukenick (maybe that was what I was writing on at the time) and a new way of thinking about pedagogy through the writing program I was working in. All these things fed into each other, tied together by the originary hypothesis.
When developing some of your ideas about language, how do you feel Wierzbicka’s natural semantic primes fit into your notion of idiom upclining? How would you say that that affected your interpretation of the Judaic covenant, as the unfurling and updating of the title-deed?
When and how I came across Wierzbicka's work is also a bit hazy to me—sometime around 2005-6, I would guess (of course it would be easier to get an estimate based on when I started talking about her, so there'd be evidence in the essays I was writing pretty regularly for Anthropoetics and the GA blog which started, I think, in 2007). But it's easier for me to situate my use of Wierzbicka in terms of my intellectual or theoretical habits, which involves looking for authoritative and definitive (but also innovative and counter-intuitive) accounts of other disciplines that I can integrate into the "main" theory, in this case, GA.
So, David Olson served that purpose in terms of the orality/literacy articulation while Wierzbicka's work was attractive to me as serving the purpose philosophy would in other theories—that of providing the meaning of words. I can't speak specifically to the notion of "upclining," because I only used that in one essay and haven't returned to it (not that I exclude the possibility of doing so), but the way the natural semantic primes provided for what seemed to me a basic "declarative" vocabulary and provided for the translation of any idiom into any other idiom thereby both confirming and superseding the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of the incommensurability of languages made it very productive for me. I always thought in terms of continuing the linguistic turn, which means thinking about everything in terms of language, so this seemed essential to me.
The connection between the language thinking—both Olson and Wierzbicka—and the Judaic covenant lies in my attempt to "operationalize" Gans' centering of the declarative sentence, both in terms of his definition of "metaphysics" and the Name-of-God in Exodus. I had a sense of an "originary grammar" long before I was able to lay it out in any detail, and it involved following up on that centering of the declarative sentence as a way of marking the passage from orality to literacy and more broadly, from a sacrificial to a post-sacrificial culture (not that oral cultures don’t speak in declaratives, of course, but that they don't separate it and turn it into an object of inquiry and way of extending presence temporally and spatially the way literacy allows for).
The re-understanding of the Judaic covenant as a "land deed," drawing upon Bernard Lamborelle's hypothesis that the covenant described in Genesis was one between Abraham and an "earthly lord," i.e., an emperor, is much more recent, but thinking about language as "accounting" in an increasingly literal sense (I always want to make things as literal as possible, even if there are then occasions to "loosen up" a bit) made me receptive to this hypothesis, as did the kind of "anti-imperial imperialism" that I attributed to Judaism (and Christianity) as outlined in some detail in Anthropomorphics—I had already been thinking about the Judaic God as a King over all Kings (which is, of course, the way He is regularly described in scripture and liturgy), constructed through a kind of transcendent resentment of the empires that had repeated destroyed and exiled the Jews. So, it was not so much Wierzbicka specifically that was important here as it was the way her and Olson gave me a way of turning the declarative sentence as a way of "accounting" for history.
In your concept of Thirdness, you draw upon relationships between archives and prediction markets to generate a new central intelligence. Ultimately this creates a new kind of tribunal matrix through sustaining centeredness on the scene, without letting meaning collapse. Do you see a connection between your idea of Thirdness and what ultimately separates you from the way Gans posits the originary scene? How do you feel this influences his sense of the juridical?
In my thinking about Thirdness (your description of which I like very much) I am already pretty much out of touch with Gans—who, as far as I can see, has no sense of the juridical. I think I would still speak about the originary scene in a way that maps very closely over the way Gans would, but once we start speaking about monotheism, modernity, markets, political order, etc., there's no real dialogue any more. Beyond what I see as very simplistic and ultimately propagandistic understandings of "liberal democracy" and "market society" it doesn't seem to me that Gans has thought through the question of what counts as a political "fact," and therefore as political meaning and information, which is what the juridical is all about.
I developed the "Big Scene Imaginary" as a concept precisely in order to point to the limitations of his political thinking, which involves seeing different social groups, defined in a way convenient for a particular discussion, as if they are singular agents sitting at a table, so to speak, with the other social groups—as if, say, "Jews," "Christians," "Muslims" and "Buddhists" could be figured as people with various resentments towards each other that could presumably be mediated through negotiations, etc. I always wanted to ground thinking institutionally, by following the way the center of the originary scene was transformed historically from the animal to be consumed to the Big Man, the sacral king, the empire, etc. If there are singular agents they are heads of states and those "chartered" by heads of states, but the extent to which they are in fact singular agents is the critical question.
Given my recent article on the center of your philosophy being the notion of the inquisitor, how would you situate victimary ideology within the context of questioning the sovereign? In what ways might this have ties to the idea of cybernetics as control circuits for the sovereign?
I can't say I have processed your recent articles yet (perhaps further questions will be part of doing so) but I can say that victimary ideology really only questions the sovereign in a very "nominal" way. In fact, it very much wants to strengthen the sovereign and further centralize it, but without allowing a single "head" to settle at the top, so it can continually be solicited on one's behalf against the enemy of the day. But I don't really think the sovereign should be questioned—when it comes to the victimary I'm just opposed to fraudulent, theatrical questioning which encourages the worst uses of power—it's a matter of improving sovereign thinking and action, contributing to the central intelligence, ultimately through providing "clean" data that provides information about the operations of the institutions of deferral.
Disobedience is always possible, but is always fraudulent when done in the name of some super-sovereign "principle" (which is always some form of legal "standings" that allows a more or less literal lawsuit to be carried out against some state or other actor). Disobedience should be itself a way of providing information to the center—about, say, the impossibility of carrying out certain commands. If a head of state needs to be removed, that's ultimately—not only in "my" theory but in reality—a matter of other sovereigns making the decisions that effect such a removal. This thinking from the standpoint of the center is, politically at least, what I see as my most important contribution, because it is almost completely lost under liberalism, despite being the common sense of humanity prior to that.
If the palliative mode of language is defined as using language to evoke the memory of the use of language, so that the aesthetic of the word itself becomes the "sparagmos", how do you feel that plays into the development of supersovereignty?
As far as this question : "If the palliative mode of language is defined as using language to evoke the memory of the use of language, so that the aesthetic of the word itself becomes the "sparagmos", how do you feel that plays into the development of supersovereignty?" I may not understand you too well, but it seems to me that if language is used to evoke the memory of language, which is to say, we're referencing on each new scene the ways language has "worked" on previously scenes, then I'm not sure if I'd still want to speak of the "sparagmos." The sparagmos still involves a ritual tearing apart of a victim, and I want to keep open the possibility that we can do this, perhaps have been doing this, less and less—and the way you describe that happening is one I would work with.
So another question I would like to pose to you, as it had not occurred to me at the time, is that the advent of "memory" is very much tied to "memorial". The origins of money, as Chris Bond has been writing about, come back to sacrificial ritual. And if you study the history of the word "mint" as in the Greek myths, you can see where and you come to find that connection to money.
Hades (who we closest translate to "invisible") has an affair with the nymph of the river of "lamentations", Persephone kills her and she is made into Mint.
1) we can translate the myth as "when we make invisible grief we kill it by making mint",
2) the Greeks originally understood money in terms of sacrifice as we know in "Money and the Early Greek Mind", so the idea of "minting" an object and idea of monetary compensation comes from making amends with the invisible grief within sacrifice.
Of course, this leads us to developing a way out of sacrifice, as minting is something that comes out of the guilt of sacrifice. So, the advent of memorial as a form of, perhaps, grammatical mood also translates to the advent of money. But, just as well, the birth of the monetary leaves open forever a gap between the token of grief and the grief itself because, rather than defer it, it seeks to provide a physical compensation for it.
The advent of modern victimary rhetoric seems to leverage itself in between this gap, between the grief and its token, no matter the political affiliation. How does the originary hypothesis as "tokenizing deferral" supplant this paradigm and how do you see it weave its way through your history with generative anthropology?
Money is a way out of sacrifice because it's a way out of the ritual community—even if it originates there. I think that money becomes critical to governance once the sacral kings are replaced by "tyrants," who rule without any ritual "legitimation." Then power is mediated monetarily and money becomes generalized throughout the community which then leads to philosophy challenging myth, as Seaford shows. But I wouldn't assume that we can attach a specific emotion, like "grief," to the ritual act which is, indeed, a commemoration (of course all meaning is commemoration) but we can't necessarily retroject back to that ritual of commemoration any particular feeling. People can carry out rituals without feeling anything in particular, or a range of things—emotions get attributed after the fact. If there's a consistently identifiable feeling I would say it's a feeling of being part of the community and fear of being split off from it. So, it's not like we have to find this grief that hasn't had a representation up until now. Memory gets transferred to writing, or accounting, broadly understood, but first of all in the narrow sense of keeping books once exchange is carried out through money. So I may not have a satisfactory answer to this question. (I also want to look much more into the juridical order in Ancient Greece, which I have found some material on that I haven't yet gotten around to reading.1
Perhaps, most surprisingly, to some of his readers is Adam’s unlikely poltical affiliations before getting into the breadth of GA. In this interview he aptly describes many aspects of his transition into GA and his way of making himself distinct within its field. We see how the Big Scenic Imaginary was created to separate himself from Gans and also where their politics come from a precise shared origin. Adam shows how his thinking revolves rather crucially on the effect of the declarative and the “accountability” of literacy—as it draws upon key points in his life. His story paints himself as an extremely diverse thinker, drawing upon traditions from unlikely places, which are what crucially separate himself from his peers. His distinctive style and effortless command of prose and theory is striking in his common parlance. The key to Adam’s thinking—which is as much a methodology as it is a life-style—is that you must at be both maximalistic and minimalistic in the same breath. It is to use the most minimal definitions of objects of inquiry, and then to expand them to their breaking point. Doing so allows you to find their respective weaknesses and overall strengths. To Adam, we must continue to dive and mine language so deeply so as to replace the fear of ostracization, and to use this increase of language to strengthen the center of the community. One gets the sense from Adam that language is as known and strong as it is mysteriously endless, in this regard.
Reading him in this way illuminates why so many people are drawn to his work and have stuck by him through his many years of writing and publishing. He is a master of his personal craft, who furthers the vision of the linguistic turn—perhaps endlessly. One vision that is as flexible as it is definable. The aura that some people seem to speak of Adam, as though he is a monolith, is not lost in this interview. The range of concepts and call-backs is daunting to the uninitiated. However, even still, there is enough tying it altogether, to demonstrate common themes and objects of study.
It is hard to imagine Adam beyond these lines, as someone who balances complexity and simplicity. As someone who extends grace and help to many students of both literal and figurative realities; to sharpen their focus and hone their theories. As I’ve mentioned, even here in asking these questions, he has given me more insight into my own studies and goals with my work. This is not an isolated occurrence. He has been a constant friend of mine through the years and has helped many others on their paths to academic success and scholarship. If there is anyone in this world who is deserving of renown and recognition, I can hardly imagine anyone else better suited than Adam. Hopefully, this interview, and testimonial, serve to cement his legacy as a writer and thinker, even if only in the annals of history. I can only hope, that beyond this, those who study his work may see the mind at play behind the words written and seek to emulate it, for themselves. Grace, power, simplicity, and depth of thought. In a few words. All of which we can use more of.
Beyond minor editing, Adam’s responses have been left as is.
Of course, much on this last question is only really resolved through an analysis of why I believe it so important to divide the modes of language into modes of government. The notion of the declarative as a way of creating “accountability”, and its role in the supersession of sacrificial cultures by post-sacrificial cultures, can only be found in its ability to, “turn [language] into an object of inquiry and [its] way of extending presence temporally and spatially [in] the way literacy allows for.” But, of course, this can only be explained by expanding upon the minimal constraints in which the declarative is able to be then used in predictive, hypothetical and inquisitive moods. For the declarative, at first, is only ever in response to an imperative which cannot be fulfilled. To even make it an object of inquiry, itself, implies that it has already been liberated from its ritual constraints.
In these talks, which we shared over DMs, Adam has suggested to me, interestingly enough, to look into these modes of governments as they are informed, and perhaps defined by, linguistic moods. So, of course, once I am able to complete that, we can begin to apply it more generally with the “declarative moods” we see in cultures and witness how it informs their forms of governance. We will pick up some of these “dangling inquiries” on another date.