High time for Hermes to take back hermeneutics

[Philip Swift]

In the year 415 BC, there took place one of the most infamous episodes in the history of ancient Athenian religious politics. Residents of Athens awoke one morning in the summer to discover that almost every statue of Hermes to be found across the city had been systematically vandalized in the space of a single night. Now, while historians still debate over the right way to read this riot of iconoclasm, we might read the event in the following terms: as a brutal, premeditated message sent to the God of Messages. We might say – only half-jokingly – that these ‘mutilators of Hermes’ (Hermokopidai) were hermeneutics’ first critics.

Much more recently, Hermes has taken a further hammering from people inside the academy (which was Plato’s place, originally). Critics such as Viveiros de Castro (channelling Deleuze) or Bruno Latour (trouble-making mediator of Michel Serres) have attacked the easy efficacy of hermeneutics. And already in France, post-modern, post-68 thinkers (Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard, Lyotard) had enthusiastically backed the Nietzschean programme of practising philosophy with a hammer, going out on nocturnal raids against the somnolent certainties of interpretation. Like graffiti writers who, by night, blaze trains in calculated aerosol assaults, Deleuze and Guattari went about spray-painting their own slogan: ‘Experiment, don’t signify and interpret!’ An anti-hermeneutic ethic part-inspired by ethnography; i.e., the intensive experiments in Yaqui sorcery undergone and documented by Casteneda (a trickster if ever there was one).

These attacks on hermeneutics were not directed against interpretation in general, but against a particular vision of it, a semiotics of a certain kind, complete with its own code. The code (applied in psychoanalysis and ethnography alike) issues the following command: treat everything as a code to be broken. Everything said is a cipher, a symptom of something else. One might well speak of data mining here: the goal is to go beyond the surface, dig down till you hit that hidden seam of meaning, extract it, refine the information and present it. Empirical materials are then so many surfaces to be excavated, manifest meanings to be accessed, in search of solutions found only at depth. But the conceit of the method is, of course, that the patient, the native, knows nothing of depths; she is merely (really) a cipher. Hence the all-seeing eye of exegesis, X-ray exegetic vision: I know you better than you know yourself. Witness the method at work:

A Berber: The agurram [a holy man] is selected by God.
Gellner: That’s what you say – the agurram is selected by the people, because (I know) there is not God.

A Dorze: Help me kill this dragon which has a golden heart.
Sperber: You are mistaken. There is no such dragon. What you are asserting is just a kind of pseudo-knowledge.

(Talal Asad has criticized Gellner on the first point; John Morton and Julia Tanney have attacked Sperber on the second.)

Here’s a savage comparison – but then (to paraphrase Wittgenstein on Frazer) are we not much more savage than so-called savages? During the Vietnam War, an American army major said, after a battle, ‘We had to destroy the town in order to save it’. Yes, yes, of course – crazy exaggeration. Hermeneutics is radically different in terms of its methods and effects, but the logic is the same for all that: destruction-salvation, the logic of cognitive colonialism. The strategy: evacuate the content of native assertions in order to make them make sense (Argyrou calls this the ‘salvation intent’). But this is an entirely asymmetric operation, bringing to bear disproportionate forces in order to achieve its objectives: for the price of explanation is the pacification of native discourse, flattened beneath the tank-tracks of our own common sense. As Serres implies of interpretative method, it’s pretty spooky – capable of seeing into everything (apart from itself): ‘It spies, shadows, sounds hearts and minds.’ (Does that last bit sound familiar?)

A final example, an early instance of the hermeneutic tic, the interpretative itch: scratch any social phenomenon to reveal what it really is. Shirokogoroff, that brilliant ethnographer of Tungus shamanism, said that ‘spirits are hypotheses’, models that make sense of illness and other afflictions. But this is a hypothesis too, and it works just as well the other way round. Hypotheses, that is, are our spirits. As anthropologists, we are (are we not?) bewitched by witchcraft, entranced by trance (‘I’d rather be possessed than study possessed people’ – Michel Leiris); animism animates our discussions. Perhaps then, Turner was right (Edith, this time, not Victor): spirits are spirits. And if so, rather than explain, excavate the passive terrain of native discourse, we should let ourselves be affected, allow (to paraphrase Lyotard) that other discourse to set our own in motion.

This mention of motion brings us back to Hermes, the winged divinity. Now, the god, of course, gives his name to the method, but the method itself, in its modern form, was devoted to a very different god, deployed in attempts to make sense of Scripture. Increasingly, however, hermeneutic method spread to the understanding of texts in general, so that the potential of the method was realized, said Dilthey, once exegesis was liberated from religious dogma. But if hermeneutics became demythologized, it was itself, as part of secular, scientific method, co-opted as a device for demythologization. And yet, seemingly so secular and objective, it’s been dogged by dogma to this day, for it still draws its power from secret, underground sources. Hermeneutics remains a crypto-Christian discourse.

Hence, my irreverent suggestion: to agitate for a more open, pagan programme; to show reverence to Hermes by giving him back the discipline that bears his name. Hermes, mediator between heaven and earth, who presides over all communicative moves, has been grounded for some time. He is a god hobbled, restricted by the original division (consecrated by Dilthey) between the human and the natural sciences, between Geist and Natur. But the functions of Hermes were always more expansive than that. A god of messages, yes, but he was also the deviser of weights and measures, author of alchemy and arithmetic. Hermes, aka Thoth, aka Mercury, was originally ‘thoroughly cosmopolitan’ (Fowden) and more than capable of bridging the divisions we take for granted.

So let’s turn the whole hermeneutic circle around, re-inscribe the circle (perhaps make it a magic one this time). For we no longer need a model of translation that reduces things to what we know already. (Serres again: ‘The messenger always brings strange news; if not, he’s nothing but a parrot.’) As currently configured, the model is oh so circular, conformist and confirmatory of our own common sense. Make no mistake, as currently conceived, the hermeneutic turn is a turn off, and the hermeneutic circle is for squares.

[Joel M. Wright]

Remember, however, that Apollo was a god of learning, medicine and healing. There's more than one anthropologist who might fit into the descriptor "Apollonian," no matter how you look at it, at any rate: repressed (humorless?), learned, interested in various forms of healing...Apollo was also the god of archery and the sun as well.

[Philip Swift]

Apollo in relation to Dionysos? As John says, Ruth Benedict's explored these contrary forces in culture. She got the idea, I believe, from Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy. But I like Joel's suggestion as one way of moving on the discussion, expanding the pantheon.

John's poem is wonderful, by the way. If we could translate it into a scientific formula then we could really bridge some divisions!

Joel's observations about hippies, as well as Keith's comment that he missed the 60s (I missed them too, for different reasons) prompted a rather off the wall thought - though actually one very much on the wall, as it turns out. During the events in Paris in May 1968, the protesters graffitied slogans all over the Sorbonne and other 'sacred' places. I offer you two examples, because I'd expect that Hermes, in his Egyptian incarnation as Thoth, god of writing, looks after 'graff' as well.

The first is famous: Dessous les pavés c’est la plage… (Underneath the paving stones is the beach...)

I love the utopian vision, but if I was being critical, I might say that our writer's concern with getting to the good stuff beyond or behind things is indicative of old school hermeneutical urges.

So, how about this: L’anarchie c’est je (Anarchy - that's I (sic)).

The graffito was found at Nanterre, and who's to say that Hermes (or was it Dionysos?) wasn't there?

[Joel M. Wright]

Yikes!

[John McCreery]

maybe we could also explore a dialectic between Apollo and Dionysius.

The return of the repressed! (See Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture.)

[Joel M. Wright]

There are a lot of young hippies up in the Boston Mountains, around and about Fayetteville, Arkansas (United States). Their parents came to the area for the back-to-nature movement in the 60's, and they settled in. The town is still one of my favorite places.

A lot of them take on a blatantly anti-establishment affect, but when you look, there's little meat to their criticisms: it mostly ends up being about pot and not working. That's an over-generalization, but I did come across it time and time again. My point is directed toward intellectual Bacchanalia: it can be good, but it can also lead to a lot of parroted, sanctimonious drivel.

I'd like to propose another dialectic, then (as I'm not entirely at odds with M's point): though I don't think it's ever been conceived in this way, maybe we could also explore a dialectic between Apollo and Dionysius.

[John McCreery]

Good points. The impulse was to add a bow to the Swift mind that started all this. Corrections gladly received. It was my own. Now it is ours.

[Keith Hart]

By adding swift to the final line you have turned a trochaic metre into something less compelling.

[Keith Hart]

Hail Hermes, Holy Trickster
God of boundaries, weights and measures
Agent of chaos, agent of order
Marker of limits, seed of conflict
Holy messenger, bringer of news
Hail Hermes, Holy Trickster
Mind in motion

If this is yours, John, congratulations. I changed one of the boundaries.

Starting out here as a receptacle for a dead project, Hermes is rapidly being promoted to God of the OAC. Mind in motion indeed.

[John McCreery]

P.S. one correction

Comment by John McCreery just now
Delete Comment Hail Hermes, Holy Trickster
God of boundaries, weights and measures
Agent of chaos, agent of order
Marker of boundaries, seed of conflict
Holy messenger, bringer of news
Hail Hermes, Holy Trickster
Swift mind in motion

[John McCreery]

Hail Hermes, Holy Trickster
God of boundaries, weights and measures
Agent of chaos, agent of order
Marker of boundaries, seed of conflict
Holy messenger, bringer of news
Hail Hermes, Holy Trickster
Mind in motion